The subject of this open thread will make Doc Paisley extremely glad. He likes prime numbers, for reasons that I have not even fathomed.

What's not to like about prime numbers? They're useful for so many different things...

We're back in our prime. Too bad it's not a twin prime, though.

And I am a prime example of how accidents happen, and seatbelts are good.

My dad's car. Stopped at a light. Stalled. Just getting the engine started (so clutch in, brake off)... I see it coming.

Crunch.

I amm paying attention to the slight ache in my neck (headrest was, perhaps, a little low... but no real back and forthing). Seatbelt locked up just fine... heck, I didn't even feel it.

Rolled through the intersection, pulled in at the first safe place and a good time was had by all.

The guy who hit me was in a good mood... stuff happens. My dad wasn't bothered.... stuff happens.

The cop who showed up knew everyone but me (the guy who hit me is a bail bondsman, my dad used to be a deputy sherriff, it was war stories and the like in the parking lot).

It's been a swell capstone to an amazing month.

I've been driving for 21 years. Got my license in Oak Ridge, in August 1988. This was my first accident while behind the wheel.

Is a cuban prime one that's havanather?

Terry, I'm glad no one was hurt! And even more that it turned so pleasant. What an odd event, in the best possible way.

Terry Karney @ 4 ...
I'm glad to hear that everybody's fine! Talk about small world syndrome, though!

Terry:

Glad everyone is fine, and hope it's your only accident for the next 21 years!

A few years ago, I got rear-ended 3 times in less than 6 months, all of them stopped in perfectly legitimate and normal places: first at a stop sign waiting to turn right, then at a red light, and finally while waiting to pull out of a parking garage. Only the first (thumped by a big SUV) required serious body work; I never got the slight bumper crunch and mussed paint from the last two fixed, because I figured I'd only get rear-ended again in another few months and need to fix it again. (I felt worse for the last guy - my bumper was fine but he was driving his dad's new Prius and crunched in his fender something nasty.)

I don't know what was going on with my car-karma there.

Serge: Thank you, don't mind if I do!

I got rear-ended in my stepmother's elderly hatchback (a Datsun something-or-other) a year or so after learning to drive. No damage to either car, but I'd let the car roll right into the middle of the intersection after being bonked, and of course it had stalled when my foot slipped off the clutch...

No problem, except the car wouldn't restart. Wouldn't even turn over. Nothing of the usual things that light up on the dash lit up when you turned the key...

So I popped the hood, and the guy who'd rear-ended me and I poked around - turned out one of the battery leads had been jarred loose. It must have been on the verge of falling off all by itself, given how minor the collision was.

Not the most entertaining ten minutes I've ever spent, though, stuck in the middle of an intersection with the hood up!

Terry @ 4... Ouch.

Terry, cervical spine injuries (you probably know this) can take a while to manifest. Pay close attention and have an ice pack handy...

Glad to hear you're okay and no one else was injured.

Stuff happens, oh yes.

I'm certain that 127 being the largest integer representable in a signed (two's complement) byte has nothing to do with it being a Mersenne prime. Nit.

Terry Karney @ 4:

I'm glad that you and the other people are all right. Here's hoping for another twenty-one safe years behind the wheel and then some.

Hrm, an Open Thread just when I wanted to impose upon the Latinists of Making Light. Very convenient!

I'm involved with MITSFS, an organization I know some of you know. In a fit of something-or-other I decided that the existing MITSFS parody of MIT's seal, which converts the blacksmith and scholar into SFnal figures, needed to be turned into a proper seal in the fashion of MIT's with rings and our name and the whole nine yards. (This will decorate the electronic check-out computer -- creating it is a displacement activity, but it's got me making something that feels like progress on our conversion to an electronic check-out system. It's not quite actual progress, but it is movement, however slight, in the right direction, and more movement than the past year or so has seen!)

I got this far before running aground on the motto. What passes for MITSFS's motto[1], "We're not fans, we just read the stuff,"[2] is rather long to fit readably in the space under the two beings. A friend and fellow Society member suggested "Fanatici non sunt, lectitant" as a Latin translation -- better both because it's shorter and because the MIT motto on the seal is in Latin as well -- but suggested I run it past another Latinist for sanity before engraving it in relatively permanent form. So, Latinists of Making Light, I put to you the question -- fair translation or no? If the latter, what would you suggest?

[1] Barely beating out "OH SWEET MERCIFUL CTHULHU, MORE BOOKS? WHERE WILL WE PUT THEM?!"

[2] Somewhat anachronistic, since some number of us are fans, but it's Traditional.

Lizzy L: yes, and I am not happy with the manifestations at the scene. It ought to be a trivial thing, but...

So the next few days are one of paying attention to stain damage, etc.

I am taking NSAIDs for my Rieter's, so that may help some. On the flip side, I worry it may mask symptoms.

Not what I need to be worrying about as I move.

STRAIN damage.

Sheesh.

Keving: I think it might be lecticanti.

Terry Karney #4:
Glad it was nothing serious.

Clifton Royston #8:
I don't know what was going on with my car-karma there.

It's being chased by your dog-dogma?

>Fanatici non sunt, lectitant
You are using third-person verbs in Latin, where you have first person in English. Also, the typical modes of expression in Latin are rather different from those in English. A Latin motto might be more along the lines of Non fanatici, sed lectores, with the verb left unexpressed.

Kevin Riggle @15, it should be "lectamus" (first person plural verb), or perhaps "lectamus rebus" (we read the things). The current version is more, "the reading one" (which probably should actually be "lectans", plural "lectantes"). That's assuming my 40-year-old Latin isn't too rusty. And it shouldn't be "sunt", which is third-person plural ("they are") rather than first-person plural ("we are") -- the person is in fact important in the motto.

Icing may help even now, Terry (@#4). And if you're not terribly averse to chiropractors (and have a good one available), you might want to check in with one. I see I don't need to second what Lizzy says.

I like 'y's wording, both because it seems more idomatic to me, and particularly because it plays off the ancient bon mot by Bishop Gregory, "Non angli, sed angeli."

127 is also the IPv4 reserved class A network for node-local scope communication, i.e. the loopback network.

As someone who knows no Latin, I want to second the thought that "Non fanatici, sed lectores" just sits better in the ear and before the eye than the other versions so far brought forth.

Tom@20: Your Latin is rusty indeed if you think the accusative plural of res is rebus. Also "read" would probably be better as "lego" than "lecto" or "lectito" (both of the latter, if I'm reading Lewis and Short correctly, exist but are relatively rare and post-classical).

"Sumus" is of course better than "sunt", but I agree with y@19 that the verb "to be" can and should be left out. I do think that simply "lectores" for "we just read the stuff" is too concise. I suggest:

"Non fanatici, res legimus modo."

Terry, glad to hear the accident and its aftermath were so innocuous. I hope there are no further consequences from the strain on your spine.

I haven't put the time in to check the endings, but y @19 looks right.

Serge @5: A Cuban prime is a sandwich excellente. Yum!

I looked at that list of properties and was bothered that it didn't mention that 127 was the largest number representable in 7 bits (e.g. 8 - 1 for parity or whatever, the good old ASCII space). I'd gone all the way (or pretty close) to the Wikipedia edit screen before noticing the last sentence in the Mersenne prime paragraph, which isn't quite the same thing, but close enough and also relevant.

So I took a moment to hyperlink and pedantify it.

Tonigth on TNT, the return of Leverage...

Update: The neck is stiff, but it's strained stiff, not bruised stiff. So far, so good.

Breakfast, and the usual drugs, ought to put me into tolerable shape.

@21 Clifton Royston -- Which blessed Sellar and Yeatman in *1066 and All That* further torqued by translating it as "Not Angels but Anglicans."

Wouldn't a Cuban prime be a tabaco puro?

Terry - What rotten luck, that accident! Glad it wasn't worse and that all the persons involved were in such good moods. I hope your recovery continues uneventful. And may it be only barely worthy of the term 'recovery' due to your injury being only barely worthy of the term 'injury'. Crossed fingers, knock on wood.

I have nothing to contribute to the Latin discussion, sadly - I'll save that for Avedaggio et alia - but I do have my impending attendance at WorldCon09 to announce. Didn't someone set up an LJ for a Fluorospherical get-together? Could they be coaxed into repeating it for those of us who failed to bookmark it?

Ginger @ 27... Fragano @ 32... Or is a Cuban Prime some first-rate meat that we imMersenne rum?

Serge @34, you are giving me sandwich ideas!

Mmmm, pernil.

Nicole @33:

It's here at Making Lumiere.

In ASCII, 127 is DEL. Pretty ultimate.

Doesn't 'pernil' mean "for nothing"? So would 'non per nil, sed' mean "not for nothing, but"?*

*This is a New York expression that even I, with 27 years in Metro NYC, barely understand. Pay it no mind.

Theophylact @38:
In ASCII, 127 is DEL

...saving a good 60 off of CPC. More evidence of the efficiency of computers...

Agreeing that y's approach is better, since we slipped. YYUR.

Prime numbers are good. Prime rib is better.

Yum.

Since this is an open thread, I thought I might pose a question which I'm sure will get some interesting answers. I'm thinking of publishing science fiction in a couple of years. Not getting my book published, but publishing someones else's work. What's the worst thing I could do as a publisher (barring just publishing a book and sitting on it - these books will find their way into bookstores)and what's the best?

Rikibeth @ 35... Glad I could provide culinary inspiration. I'd like better than to have one such sandwich right now, but it's going to be hard-boiled eggs today.

Otis B. Driftwood: And eight pieces of French pasty.
Fiorello: With two hard-boiled eggs.
Otis B. Driftwood: And two hard-boiled eggs.
Harpo: Honk!
Otis B. Driftwood: Make that three hard-boiled eggs.

abi @ 37... Thanks for reminding people of the link. Kathryn was very busy with work until recently, then she got a bad cold, but the Lumière will happen. I'll be helping her, but won't be able to provide Christmas lights this year.

Thanks for posting the party link; I'd really like to make it if possible. I'm doing five (count 'em) panels on Friday, though. (I'll be on a bunch of anime, manga, and workshopping panels, if anybody's curious.)

@#43 Noelle, here's the best you can do, in terms of making yourself attractive to me as a writer and reader:

*Allow electronic submissions
*Commons everything/release works online in DRM-free formats
*Create NIN/Radiohead/Amanda Palmer-style deluxe packages for books, including Commons-licensed soundtracks, cover art, illustrations, t-shirts, author podcasts (Q&A sessions or readings), all of which could be purchased from your online store in prices scaling upward
*For every reading in a bar or adults-only location/timeslot, make sure the author does an all-ages event somewhere cheap, and tweets it with an easily-recognizable hashtag
*Release review copies of books to prominent bloggers.

I'm sure there's more, and obviously someone with more experience would be able to help you more and provide more detail, but as a consumer this is what I want, and as a writer I'd be excited if someone on my team were taking these steps.

I am EFF member #127 . . . or was back when they had membership numbers.

#29: I'm glad Leverage is back, but I'm a bit bummed . . . while it was filmed in Portland and vicinity, it is now set in Boston. Bah!

#43 Noelle: I would add a point specific to hardcopy: Don't neglect the paperback editions!

For one, they should come out reasonably soon after the hardcovers -- perhaps 6 months. (Think of the Hugo voters! ;-)) Also, they should be reasonably durable! Without looking hard, I can find paperbacks on my shelves from the early 70's, and computers or no, I have small doubt that some of the books being published now, will still be treasured possessions in 2050.

Thanks David and Madeline,

Good points on both accounts. I'm pretty keen on the production values of books. Nothing irritates me more than having a book fall apart on me, or having type on nearly see-through thin paper.

I'm only now starting to look at ebooks and such, but it makes sense that these issues would be high priority for the readers (and authors) I'm hoping for. I hadn't even thought about readings in bars versus all age environments. I'll keep it in mind.

Noelle, perhaps not the best or worst, but inner margins should be sufficiently far away from the spine that the reader doesn't have to bend the book in half to read entire sentences (this may apply more to paperback editions than hardcover).

Stefan Jones @ 47... Maybe they have Portland pretend that it is Boston because nobody would take seriously the idea that Portland could have so much exciting stuff going on. On the other hand, there is a cop show on about a woman in charge of witness protection, supposedly here in Albuquoique, but it sure doesn't look like the one where I live. (Ah, the wonders of locations pretending to be something else... I was quite amused - in fact it was the only amusing thing in it - by The Astronaut Farmer supposedly being set in Texas when the background's mountains are the ones in my backyard.)

I agree with 'Non fanatici, sed lectores'. My first instinctive reading of 'Fanatici non sunt, lectitant', before I had grasped the context, was 'Fans don't exist, they read'. (Which one can almost get to make sense - being a fan isn't just a state of being, it involves doing something, namely reading - but not the sense required.)

Stefan Jones (#47): Ah, the good old days. (EFF #14, here; of course, as a staff member at the time I had a bit of an advantage in the low number acquisition department.)

Maybe "solum lectores," to get the sense of "just" in there?

Linkmeister @ 50:

Would that inner margins were only a problem for paperbacks. Some hardbacks these days have the pages glued straight to the spine as if they were paperbacks. This is, of course, evil.

KeithS @55: some? I'd go with "most" at least where fiction is concerned.

Stefan Jones @ 47

Much rather live in Portland and pretend it was Boston than the other way around.

Serge @ 51

Oh, they want exciting? Let me check the current activity report for Mt. St. Helens ...
As for AlBQQ, it may not be accurate, but that show has had some really nice second unit shots outside the city; especially the sunsets.

Theophylact #38:

In ASCII, 127 is DEL. Pretty ultimate.

Formerly know as RUBOUT. On a TeleType, back up the paper tape, and overpunch all of the holes. ISTR when the tape was being copied, it would neither advance nor punch the tape.

Bruce Cohen @ 57... On the other hand, there are only so many plots they could have that involve Mt St-Helen going kablooee - unless they're on the Skiffy Channel. By the way, Leverage premieres tomorrow evening, not tonight. Bah!

Since some of us are talking about problems with books...
Several things I can't stand--1, when the covers and spine are so blasted stiff it hurts to hold them open for a while with these not-what-they-used-to-be hands. Ergonomics.
2, when the manufacturers deliberately make the outer edge of each page all raggedy and a different height from the rest, so it's hard to get back to the page you wanted even if you have a bookmark, and just looks unprofesssional anyway. More ergonomics.
3, when books I've treasured for eons fall apart and there doesn't look like any chance of them coming back into print, at least affordably. Some of them were obscure, but still. Is someone going to digitize "Artery of Fire", or Jack Sharkey's stories about the Addams Family? And Wagner's Kane novels, how come those were only back in print briefly and expensively? (I waited for the paperback and it never appeared.) And rustling up another copy of the originals would be no guarantee that they wouldn't be in the same sad shape.
4, whe outfits that used to make them real high-quality have started skimping. My Dover edition of Stapledon is in fine shape after 38 years because the pages were sewn in in bunches and not that bad of a grade of paper either. But I saw the same book in the store recently and it was not made that way now, and there was no more bragging on the back about it being a permanent book. Which in my opinion it ought to be. It's the double of Last & First Men and Star Maker that I am referring to. When something is just so mind-blowing that you can't put it down even when your house is being slammed by 200-mph winds-- well, I just wish Dover could hold to their old production standards.
Enough bellyaching for now, off to see if hexagonal numbers are all prime or not.

...They aren't. They aren't even what I thought they were. Aaaaaagh.

Kevin Reid #28:

What goes, "Pieces of seven! Pieces of seven!"?

A parity error.

Angiportus @ 60:

I was in the bookstore the other day (Jhegaala! Dragonbreath!) and nearly picked up The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Unfortunately, the cover was lightweight, easy-to-tear card, and the edges of the pages were all rough and unfinished. People tell me it's a great book, but I'm not going to buy it like that unless it's really, really great.

I have a couple Dover books that I bought recently. They're still made pretty well, although I haven't compared them to the old ones.

Soon Lee @ 62:

I hope you realize that people are going to be coming after you for keyboard damage. To think otherwise would be Polly-annaish of you.

The van was hit three times early on (it's 22.5 years old now) and all three damaged only the other car and were their fault. Two ran into me because they were distracted by (different) officers pulling someone over, and the other thought I was pulling into the shopping center she wanted to get out of when I was actually in the second-right lane over and was pulling into the most-right lane to turn onto a road in about two blocks.

Leverage returns and Dark Blue starts tomorrow night: Wednesday.

Angiportus: I like uncut signatures. It doesn't hinder my finding of my place, and I find it pleasant in my hands.

Soon Lee, I shared your joke with Jim. He almost dropped the plates he was carrying downstairs to the dishwasher. And said something uncomplimentary that I'll not share... because he hadn't thought of it.

Does it bother anyone else that integers have Wikipedia pages? This can't possibly end well.

Kat @ 67:

Partial script idea:

for(bignum i = 0; ; ++i)
    if(<page does not exist for i>)
        <submit skeleton Wikipedia entry>

Then we can build the integers from the naturals, the rationals from the integers, and on and on. They want to be the sum of all human knowledge, right?

#60 Angiportus

Ragged edges paper in novels, has one big plus to it--it's less conducive to producing papercuts. That can be a very LARGE plus....

I used to regard trade paperback as the bastard offspring of book formats... however, the "format I hate most of all!" award belongs to the taller versions of mass market paperbacks now.

I do not have large hands. I do not have long fingers. That format book, I detest the balance of [rather, the imbalance of...] trying to hold one of them, and trying to read--the size of the book is marginally wider, just enough to making holding the book open considerably more uncomfortable than stock MMPB--normally my thumbs are on the page edges and the surface of the pages the book is open to, while my fingers next to index fingers, are one the spine of the book. If the distance is any greater than the width of MMPB, I can't hold the book that way, it's too wide for me to have thumbs reaching the pages and have fingers tips on the spine, to hold the book open.

Add to that that there is more -torque- on that tall paperback format, and I've gotten into the state of "I would have bought the book in mass market, I wanted the book, it's a tall paperback, which costs $3.00 more list and I am not buying a book I can't hold comfortably to read!" Trade paperbacks are sufficiently wider that I can read them with thumbs holding open pages open and fingertips on the outside front and back covers. Inch taller than standard MMPB paperbacks, my fingertips are at the the corner edges of the cover and provide no -traction- etc. to hold a book open.

I HATE that format....

Kat @67: Since there is an infinite supply of integers, there's no reason for it to end at all...
which is what I think that Keith @68 is getting at, but I don't know the programming language he is using.

Kat @ 67

Does it bother anyone else that integers have Wikipedia pages?

No, it's only fair. All Wikipedia pages have (Gödel) integers.

This can't possibly end well.

It can't possibly end. Check the Wikipedia floor at the Library of Babel.

Thanks for the mention that Jhegaala is out in paperback. Added to my wish list, but I don't think it'll be long before I pick that up. Both husband and I are completely addicted.

Very cool, but this "This also means it is the largest integer that can be represented by a signed byte" is nonsense. 127 is the biggest signed number that can be represented by a single byte because it equals 2^7-1. (Primality has nothing to do with it.)

KeithS #63 & Paula Helm Murray #66:

It's an old joke told to me by a friend, I have enough from undergrad compsci to get it, & felt it only proper to inflictshare...

Magenta Griffith @ 70:

It's just a kernel of an idea in C-ish pseudocode.

For maximal fun, we could then have a Wikipedia page for each of the Church numerals.

p mac @ 73:

The "this" in that sentence refers to the fact that the number is 2^7 - 1, not that it's prime. Now, if you want to quibble you can point out that a byte is not necessarily eight bits, but that would be pedantic.

While we're talking about new stuff out, there's a fine new Dresden Codak posted at last (He had me from "Ponzi scheme musical".)

A link and a question.

Here is an awesome short story, Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs, by Leonard Richardson (a former viable paradise student).

I am now going to search out and read all of his previous work. My question- can you guys recommend any other authors who have a similar style (I'm most interested in other authors with a similar sense of humour)?

Ragged edge pages are technically called deckled edges, though they're rarely due to a true deckle.

In older books, the deckled edges were a sign that the pages had originally been uncut, and were only opened by the reader (with a paper knife). In modern commercial publications, they're an attempt to create an older, more expensive look.

Done on a hardback with a glued binding, they are a crime against nature.

That's the abi I know and love, so reticent with her opinons.

(I happen to agree with her).

Paula @ 69 -

This is my big peeve about books too. Who thought this would be a good format, and for what reasons? I also have a hard time keeping the book open and balk at paying an extra $3.00 for a mass-market book with a longer page. Luckily, none of the weird-sized mass-market books have appealed to me enough for me to balk too long. I wonder if that's just because I wasn't interested in the book in the first place, or because the sight of those deformities immediately makes me ignore the contents?

Well, I don't get a lot of paper cuts anyway, but I sympathize with other folks who have different hand problems than I do. Solutions will be a while coming.
I once had my library order something from a university library across the country. It dated back to the 40's but was in amazingly good condition. When I started in on it, what did I find but 2 pages I had to cut apart! And a little later it happened again, and there must have been a dozen times I had to do some surgery. That book was 60 years old and I was the first to read it.
And my cousins wonder why I like to carry a knife... I think I read somewhere that in the old days avid readers would have a special knife handy just for that use.
My problem with deckled edges is that they predispose you to getting this or that page when you are just looking thru it in the bookstore, or trying to remember where you were when you didn't have a bookmark handy. Also I am not overly fond of phoniness/pretension, and that's what this seems to be.

I'm sensing that people like well-made books, a rather obvious statement, but it's telling me that form is a close second to content, rather than price. (Though I don't know if I'll be able to afford sewn books.)Do most people prefer their paperbacks close to a mass-market size instead of the larger ones? I agree that it would be odd to put ragged edges on a paperback. If I wanted to make a book more intersting, or up production values, I'd use endpapers or french flaps instead. Any thoughts on those? I'll remember to keep my margins nice and wide.

Paula Helm Murray@66

It's your own fault for parroting the joke like that...

We catch the crabs at night on the black road,
just shovel them into the waiting bag
until the sweat pools and your spirits flag;

above the stars signal in arcane code
while you wipe down with an old smelly rag.
We catch the crabs at night on the black road

that leads us back to where the waters flowed
past all the places where we let hope sag,
back into swamp where memories might nag.
We catch the crabs at night on the black road.

Genre Film Trivia Question: Which film starts with a voiceover on a book being opened & its pages cut?

Deckling not too bad on single sheet, but machine-made books? Yes, reeks of faux.

Noelle @ 82:

For any satisfying product, form and function have to go together. If a book feels cheap, insubstantial, hard to read, off balance, or otherwise strange, then reading it is not the pleasure it should be.

For me, the dislike for faux-deckling is twofold. One reason is that it can make the book harder to use (see also: short card, long card, and Svengali deck). The other is that it's aiming at a sort of pretentiousness while not actually being any higher in quality. The Yiddish Policemen's Union has faux-deckled pages and a cover so soft I thought it would tear right off within a week. It also felt too light for its size. I know, books are heavy and so a lighter-weight book should be good, but it just looked and felt cheap.

I wouldn't discount price, though; I'm much more likely to buy lots of $6 books than $15 books, even though I'll wind up spending more that way. I'm willing to put up with a slight drop in quality for that, although not to the extent of making it an unpleasant book.

I very nearly did not buy Dragonbreath because it did the hardcover with pages glued straight to the spine thing, but it's by Ursula Vernon, so I had to.

Back when I worked in bookstores, books with deckled pages got lots of complaints. Many people demanded a discount because the books were clearly defective. When shown an entire display's worth of deckled inventory, I'd often get a shudder or look of disgust.

I'm personally not moved one way or another about them, but I do agree with abi that on glued books, it's a ridiculous affectation.

KeithS @ 86 - it's interesting that you should mention the weight of the book. When I have a thin book (like a collection of poetry) I put heavy weight paper in it - a 70lb laid is my normal stock. Otherwise the book weighs nothing in your hand. I can't do that for thicker books. The paper costs too much.

Noelle @ 88:

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about printing novels on 100 gsm paper or anything like that. It's just that that book felt too light for its size compared to similar books.

Really, the whole construction of that book suggested that designers were trying to make it look like a more expensive book than its cover price would suggest, but it backfired for me because it seemed cheap and insubstantial.

Heard on the radio this morning:

Reed College alumni David Eddings left a bequest of over fourteen million dollars to his alma mater.

KeithS @ 89

No worries, I never thought that. I just found it interesting that you noticed the weight. I notice it all the time, and so do people I work with, but we're book geeks. I'm also the kind of person who picks up a book and looks at who the publisher is before reading any of the back cover bits.

I'm not sure how attached I am to the MMP size -- it's certainly more compact to store, and easier to carry -- but I have so many that I triple-shelve them, so I still need fairly high shelf spacing so I can get at the back rows.(*)

Also, some of my paperbacks are simply too much book for that binding. The worst offender is obviously Robert Jordan, but a few of, e.g., Peter Hamilton's and Tad Williams' volumes also seem to be straining their bindings. Of course, illustrated books and multi-novel omnibuses need to be bigger, for pragmatic reasons!

* I have a set of adjustable steel shelves, industrial strength. I got these after my pet rabbit (now long deceased) undermined my previous wooden shelves to the point of collapse....

Hey what goes around comes around...

Both Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel are facing bankruptcy.

Here's hoping they have to sell off every station, and that Limbaugh loses his paying gig.

Lori, that's the best news I've heard all week! I hope, vainly I'm sure, that we're talking Chapter 7, rather than 11.

#93 Lori
URLs, and data about how/why they've gone bust?
(Now if only CBS would join them in collapse... extermination to hypocrisy-laden-malevolent-moralist-foaming-at-the-microphone-bigot propaganda-monger-media-monopoly entities....)

They can't turn into extipated Iglis* fast enough for me.

(Igli as in repulsive disgusting thing from Glory Road. Oscar shoved its big hairy stinky feet in its mouth....)

You may want to look out your windows later - noctilucent clouds lit up the European and North American skies yesterday evening, and a repeat is expected tonight.

Kevin Riggle @ 15:

Speaking as both someone who's a former MITSFS Skinner, now a Jesuit working at the Vatican, and the resident Latin expert for the IAU Working Group on Planetary Surface Nomenclature... actually, I don't know a whole lot of Latin myself, having not studied it since 1969, but I do have contacts who do know Latin. I passed this on to the expert I use for the IAU's trickier Latin questions, and he replied:

"The important thing here, IMO, is that we're looking for an inscription. It should be sententious, a little telegraphic. Latin is flexible with word order but needs clear syntax.

"One possibility, cleaning up your suggestion, is: Non fanatici legimus. Roughly, "Not being/as fans, we read ..." With a finite verb, this puts the emphasis on the act of reading, dramatically begging the questions, why do they read if paradoxically they are not enthusiasts? and, what do they read ("stuff")? The problem is that even for me knowing the context, I look at that and think, what are they, censors? recipients of bad news? masochistic readers?

"Another possibility: Non fanatici tantum lectores (sumus); "Not fans, so much as readers." (I'd omit the verb, "we are.") I think this puts the emphasis on the character of the subject. It doesn't make me wonder about the reading matter or any paradox of reading. I prefer this formulation, if I understand correctly your motivation of reading for the delight of it. "

I'd like to express, once again, my appreciation for the general level of discourse here. It was dramatically driven home to me how unusual it is, on another site just last night.

See, someone was saying that a certain scene in Bruno was "brilliant satire." In the scene as he described it, Bruno makes out with another man in a cage surrounded by a bunch of cage-fighting fans who were expecting a fight. (Real people, not actors playing them.) The crowd's reaction was a paroxysm (not that this lowbrow knew that word) of homophobic fury, including throwing things at the cage and calling for the death of both guys inside it.

I and another guy explained that even if Bruno himself is a satiric character, that scene is not satire, because it's the real reaction of real people, however ridiculous they may have looked. Certainly SBC likes to make fools of people, but as they're real people, their reactions are not satire. I and the other guy (we kept posting nearly simultaneously with similar content differently phrased, it was really remarkable) explained that satire involves exaggeration; I explained that if actors depicted a similar reaction to two men accidentally touching on the street, or if the response to two men kissing was to nuke the entire city, that would be satire.

His response to being told that that scene was not satire? "It is too." Later, when we explained further, "You're just being whiny and self-pitying because you don't like the movie." (This was a gay website, and both of us had earlier (but not in this part of the conversation) expressed the idea that we thought the character of Bruno was a viciously anti-gay stereotype, aimed at people who won't recognize it as a satire.)

Later he accused us of acting like third-graders, and degenerated into further insults I won't describe here. At no time did he ever address any of our actual points, offer a counterdefinition of satire that the scene would fit, or even recognize (despite being explicitly told) that we weren't saying it wasn't funny or that he was wrong to enjoy it, just that it wasn't satire. He left the conversation exactly as he entered it, inch-thick skull intact and impervious to any information he hadn't known previously. He really believed that he had proved himself right by simply saying "I'm right" over and over.

It was really appalling.

So thank you, Fluorospherans, for your ability to follow (or even just recognize) an argument, respond to its points, and disagree civilly at least most of the time. The average poster on that site would be considered an egregious troll here, and would become a piñata in short order.

#97 Guy
I didn't realize your detection and tracking system was monitoring here!

(He was another contemporary at MITSFS, so for that matter was Robert Sachs overlapping, when Seth and Stallman and CHip and I were undergraduates and members. Have I managed to weird anyone out there out enough yet?)

Paula, you have uttered the name of R*b*rt S*chs in this holy place. Spit, turn, throw salt.

The Sinclair story shows up on Google News, but there's nothing about Clear.

Here's the details on the bankruptcies -- looks like Chapter 7 may be more likely than Chapter 11, as it's possible breaking things up and selling the pieces will bring more money to the creditors.

URLs:

Sinclair Broadcasting

Clear Channel

Army looking into corpse eating robots

Honest.

Xopher, except when Sacha Bruno Cohen was in Sweeney Todd, I dislike him as much as I dislike Will Farrell. Of course, in ST he ended up in a pie...

That corpse-eating robot Terry mentions at #103? It's called the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR).

Reading that, I think it's bad naming. If the point is that it's self-sustaining, shouldn't it be Energy-Autonomous? Energetically Autonomous sounds like it's vigorously independent. I'm not sure that's what Robotic Technologies meant when they named it.

KeithS @ 86: I very nearly did not buy Dragonbreath because it did the hardcover with pages glued straight to the spine thing, but it's by Ursula Vernon, so I had to.

It makes me ridiculously happy to read that--not about the book quality, but about Ursula. I've been an Internet-friend of hers for a long time now. It's been amazing to watch her progress over the years, both in her creative works and her popularity. I don't think I'll ever stop getting a huge grin whenever I see or hear her mentioned outside of my usual circle of acquaintances!

Another comment on the level of discourse here is that the Vatican Astronomer turns up to advise on Latin tags...

Jakob @107: Ahh, but Brother Guy doesn't just read the stuff, he's a FAN. :->

(BTW, loved you on the 'surviving in a fantasy world' panel at the Denver Worldcon, Brother Guy!)

Jakob @107
But it's still a great big universe.

Terry Karney @ 103... I wonder if someone ever wrote a story about a war machine inside of which was put the brain of a zombie?

Coming soon on the Skiffy Channel... Dead Treads!

Serge:

Tread Heads

To your scattered bodies go

The Quick and the Undead

Hmmm
http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2009/07/13/daily38.html

Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 10:59am CDT
Sinclair works to sidestep bankruptcySt. Louis Business Journal - by Robert J. Terry
....
[Sinclair] also said in its July 10 8-K that a “relative lack of political advertising in 2009” will impact its business.

What, their fascist political "business associates" shut off the money spigot?!

Echoing Xopher's appreciation at the level of discourse here, and adding my admiration for the moderators.

Another site I enjoy going to for the comments nearly as much as the posts themselves has just overhauled their commenting system. There are now "tiers". They seem to have given a certain number of commentor's watered down mod priveleges; when you view the comments, the Tier 1 commentors' comments appear. To see Tier 2 comments, you have to expand the whole threads and read greyed out text. Tier 2 comments can be "elevated" by a Tier 1 commentor, but I haven't seen much of that going around.

Supposedly, this was done to improve the level of discourse - to keep out the trolls and inside joke postings - but on the few times I've been able to read all comments I have seen very little difference in either the wit or informed-ness of the Tier 2 vs. Tier 1 comments, and the only inside-joke threads are initiated and participated in by Tier 1.

To make things more complicated, the new commenting system doesn't work on many people's OS/browsers (including those of us who post at work) and much of the time, we can't even expand the comments to read all. I have given up on commenting there because what's the point of doing so when you're almost guaranteed no one will read your rant/informed opinion/bon mot? I have nearly given up reading that site as well.

I love that Making Light provides a nice combination of intelligent commentors and a moderating team who wait until you say something idiotic before smacking you, rather than assuming you're an idiot until the cool kids say otherwise.

Terry Karney @ 111... I like your titles better. By the way, sometimes I worry that if someone from the Skiffy Channel were lurking around, posts like these might give them ideas for even worse movies than they've aired so far.

Renatus @ 106:

I've been following Ursula Vernon's art and writing for a while now, and have been enjoying it. Actually, I still really need to buy the dead tree versions of Digger.

nerdycellist @ 113:

That sounds like a perfectly horrible commenting system, and one that could very easily rip a community apart.

Mary Dell @OT 126 #734*: Jacque @696: The Open Prosthetics project is something along those lines.

Yes, them!** Exactly. Like I said, some bright soul ought to be looking toward the hobbyist market. Maybe supply a little extra funding for this effort? (I know I'd pay good money for a third hand.)

* I was caught up with the Open Threads as of last Thursday. I was... <whimper>
** Ghu bless the Infinite Knowledge of the Fluorosphere

How does an artist get started doing book cover illustration work, bringing their work to the attention of publishers' art directors and so forth? I've an artist friend who is looking to try to start making some income, eventually maybe making his living, from illustration work, but isn't sure where to start it as a business.

Re the "modern business talk" sidebar item:

http://professionalsuperhero.com/
"The Adventures of Action Item"

Open Threadiness:

I don't think I've ever seen an author do this before. Warren Adler, author of 30-odd books, made a mistake in his main character's background between books two and three:

Author's Note:

The background of Fiona FitzGerald has changed radically between American Quartet, American Sextet, and subsequent novels. In Quartet and Sextet, she is the daughter of a New York cop. Subsequently in the other novels, she miraculously becomes the daughter of a deceased Senator. The author apologizes for his intervention and promises to cease making such changes in Fiona's antecedents.

That's admirable!

(#119) I suppose it's too unlikely that either the New York cop was married to the [Unknown State] Senator, or the cop became a Senator? [One notes the Capitalization of Capitol workers.]

Latin Aid Plea: In my work in an inner city community I used a motto/tag for our paperwork based on the Psalm and Wilde's poem, De profundis, always translated as 'From the depths'. It was trying to say 'From the depths of the City', but my grammatical underpinnings are quite insecure, so I wavered around De Urb[i/u]s Profundis. It'd be nice to keep using it, but I'd like to check what'd be the most correct phrase.

Mez @ #120, I can't help with the Latin. On your theory, I suspect Adler would have tried that if he hadn't sandbagged himself somehow (I haven't read either of the first two books). Maybe Fiona's NY cop-father was killed in the line of duty and thus couldn't make a career change. Dunno.

Stefan Jones @90 - I hadn't realized David Eddings had died.

While I now realize his stuff was largely Extruded Fantasy Product[1], I devoured it in high school. I was actually re-reading one of his series in first year college when an English prof started us on Joseph Campbell's Hero With The Thousand Faces - and I went through Edding's characters in my mind and matched them up, pretty nearly one-for-one, with the archetypes/stereotypes in Campbell's work...

[1] Where is "Extruded Fantasy Product" from, anyway? I recall an essay decrying so much of modern fantasy as being 'extruded until it's the right length, then hacked off and served cold' or similar, but have no recollection if it was an online essay or in a book at some point...

On the topic of poorly made books: When Matt Ruff's book "Bad Monkeys" came out, I went to a reading, and really liked the sound of the book, but couldn't bring myself to buy a copy. The initial version had pages glued to the binding, and shorter than the binding. That is to say, the cover would sit on the shelf, with the weight of the pages sagging and breaking the binding. I waited for the mass market paperback.

Mez@120: "urbis".

Wirelizard@122: From what I've read about Eddings, his use of Campbellian tropes and character types was quite deliberate, a way of manipulating his readers.

I read The Belgariad when I was in high school and loved it. I soured on Eddings during the sequel series. The climax of The Belgariad talked about a destiny for that universe; I hoped that the sequel would expand on that. Instead, we got told, "That big climax from before? Not really a climax after all, sorry. We have to do it all again" -- with the characters themselves noticing and pointing out where the author was repeating himself.

While that sequel series was coming out, Eddings started on a new series. I read the first book or two of that, and noticed that all the characters seemed similar (right down to the mute god-child) and the dialogue read identically. I concluded that Eddings had very little range as an author, and was a cynical hack to boot.

Terry Karney @ 103, Linkmeister @ 105:

ObSF: Cordwainer Smith, "Mark Elf" -- see "Menschenjäger".

(moving the Aspie talk over from OT126)

Nix @949:
I've also noticed visual abnormalities under social stress which nobody else has ever mentioned to me: my edge detector goes into overdrive, so everything seems to have more prominent edges than before.

I never described it quite like that, but that's the reason I stopped wearing glasses. The detail of the world overwhelmed me. It was like being in a supermarket at the end of a long day*, all the time. If my vision ever begins to deteriorate enough that I need them again, I'm going to have to talk to my optician about fudging my prescription.

What I find is that I go mildly deaf under stress. This is particularly a problem because my son's diction is not good; when I'm overwhelmed with detail or complexity, I am sometimes entirely unable to understand him at all.

(I tend to classify† myself as a sub-syndromal Aspie. It's great for the software testing career, less good for a lot of other aspects of my life.)

------
* I don't know what fiend from hell designed the modern supermarket, but the stacks and stacks of small busy-labeled items all! shouting! for! attention!, the bright lights, and the combination of narrow aisles and awkward carts can all be horrific when I'm tired. One of the best things about living in a small (Dutch) village is that our supermarkets are of a manageable size, though the omnipresent shelf-stockers required to keep up with turnover do get underfoot.
† knowing that the impulse to classify is itself evidence

janetl @123:
The initial version had pages glued to the binding, and shorter than the binding. That is to say, the cover would sit on the shelf, with the weight of the pages sagging and breaking the binding.

What, on the LFP? Or on the hardcover?

Hardcover books have had squares (that's what the gap between the book block and the edges of the covers are called; see this visual dictionary of book terms for an illustration) since at least the middle of the twelfth century. When the book block was more important and expensive than the binding, it was a way to keep the page edges from getting dirty. There's a fair argument that many of the structural techniques of traditional bookbinding are about giving the spine enough strength to resist the pull of gravity on the pages of the book.

After Gutenberg and his successors made book blocks cheaper to produce, no one minded so much if the pages got grubby. As a result, it didn't matter that much that the Victorian and post-Victorian innovations that made books so much more affordable also produced a progressive weakening of the spine. Unfortunately, however, the glued or perfect binding, which is the most recent* step in that progression, really is too weak for hardcover binding. Spines distort at best, and crack early at worst.

This is why I recommend LFP over hardbacks for people who want larger editions than MMP. The cover material may be weaker, but the structure is not conspiring with a force of nature to commit suicide.

If it's an LFP with squares, bring the publisher's production department to me so I can smack them alongside the head.

(Note to self: really really must move that brief history of bookbinding out of the comments to this entry and put them somewhere more coherent.)
-----
* I originally wrote "last", but I think that betrays an overly trusting faith in humanity's ability to stop innovating when the ideas turn bad.

Linkmeister, #119: Arthur Conan Doyle seems to have had trouble keeping the continuity straight in the Sherlock Holmes stories, to the point that he was sometimes unable to remember whether Watson's first name was John or (as in "The Man With the Twisted Lip") James.

Wesley @ 128... Didn't Doyke also forget to whom Watson was married? I think the opening credits of The Seven-Percent Solution had a joke about that regarding which wife Samantha Eggar played.

Serge: I thought Watson remarried after the between-seasons death of his first wife. Remarrying explains a change in wives. Nothing explains the migrating war wound.

werelizard @ 122 "Extruded Fantasy Product"

Coined by William December Starr on rasfw, back in 1999, as far as this moose can tell.

(QUOTE)
From: wdst...@crl.com (William December Starr)
Subject: Re: Series you gave up on....
Date: 1999/10/17
Message-ID: #1/1
Organization: CRL Network Services
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written

In article ,
jtma...@iglou.com (Joseph Major) said:

> How about Processed Fantasy Product? Like "processed cheese
> product" -- it has all the standard bits, but they have been
> merged into something totally lacking in individuality.

Extruded Fantasy Product. "Extruded" is one of those words
that always improves a phrase.

-- William December Starr

(/QUOTE)

3:O)>

Cadbury.

Watson's marriages: I think in canon it's reasonably clear; he married Mary Morstan; she died; some time later he married someone else, about whom we get no details.

However, while who he married is clear enough, the dates of his marriages cause a lot of problems, which has led fans to invent other marriages for him in order to make the stories consistent. So the 'which wife' thing may be not so much a direct joke on canon but a joke on fannish speculation.

Paul Duncanson @ 130... True, and Watson's marital status can easily be explained that way, but I remember that the movie's explanation was rather silly - on purpose. (Regarding oft-married characters... Not so long ago, I caught an episode of Bonanza that made me realize for the first time that the three brothers were from separate marriages. Nowadays, if the main character had had his three wives die on him, Jerry Briscoe would be knocking on his door - or maybe Brisco County Jr, considering that this was a western.)

I got an email from the local SF club last night. Some time ago, I had offered to do my steampunk-movie presentation at one of the monthly meetings, and they were interested. It'll happen on November 13th. Yes, it's a Friday, but things will probably go more smoothly than when I did the presentation at FiestaCon. The past-life therapy group had taken so long vacating the premises that, once I was all set up, my laptop booted up and the projector working, I was almost 15 minutes late. By the time I was done, way too close to the start of the next panel, its participants were well roasted by the Arizona sun.

Abi #126 and Nix @OT126#949:

Yup, both those symptoms sound like "sensory overload" -- some of your processing layers are just curling up and whimpering. I tend to lose object separation -- supermarket shelves become progressively-less-intelligible masses of color and text. I also lose both hearing (decompensation) and depth perception (not so good anyway, too much time staring at screens).

Come to think of it -- Abi, have you had a hearing test recently? These days it's pretty common for someone your age to have picked up a fair bit (10 decibels or more) of hearing damage without really noticing. Besides the obvious culprits like street noise and concerts, headphones are a major offender.

Also, I'm pretty sure that modern supermarkets are adapted (rather than designed) to overload even normal people. Stunned victims have less defense against impulse buys, tricky pricing, and suggestion in general. (And that shows up on the bottom line!)

Mez @120:

Hmm -- I've always seen "de profundis" translated as "Out of the depths" -- it's from Psalm 130, one of the "penitential" psalms.

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD.
Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.
If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?
But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities

There is a beautiful setting of this (in Latin) in the musical Man of la Mancha.

From Open Thread #126

#951 Nix

Paula@896: I see it more as failure to acknowledge female as human and a basic lack of respect

See, here you're making a basic category error. You're assuming (by implication) that people see other people as 'humans *like them*'.

My experience is that that's the way that most people view the world. Furthermore, in e.g. the USA the default assumption of person is "white [in the US Constitution as originally written, also property-owning...] male"-- even for women! That graphically hit me when I was in college, in a corridor of the then-National Magnet Laboratory, and saw someone and though, "Look, there's a woman in here!" following immediately by, "Uh, I'm a woman, too..."

While that anecdote does not support the "default is that everyone else is like me," meme, it does support the default "the standard person is a white male" meme. Or, more generally, is supports memes of the type "experiential inculcation creates automatic unexamined internalized defaults, especially unexamined default assumptions which the possessor of has little to no conscious awareness of."

Examples--at Noreascon II there was a very tall fellow who was working on the convention, the scuttlebut was that he ignored women. The reality was that he simply didn't conscious notice anyone under a certain height, and since women on the average are shorter than men, the shorter people he didn't notice, were overwhelmingly female... I had no problem getting his attention, I stuck up an arm so that he saw me, or rather, seeing my arm, then looked down to see the person to whom it belonged. It was not conscious on his part to "ignore women," it was a matter of some sort of environmental inculcation that caused him to not ordinarily look -down- when scanning for people.

There are all sorts of things like that--I call some of them "the curse of the six foot male" in which designers design for the convenience of a six foot male--this means that counters at banks, at car rental agencies, in kitchens, in bathrooms, and most other commercial and business and domestic facilities, are too high for me to deal with conveniently. I keep meaning to leave an irritated note to the local supermarket chain that I will continue demanding paper copies for signing using a credit card until and unless the electronic devices for signing with a stylus, are at the counter level and NOT at my chin level.... Stop & Shop actually has them at counter level. Most stores put them at a level convenient for a six foot male.... that sort of thing makes me extremely irritated--voting booths with the counters far too high for me, cars where the door sticking-out-tip is at my eye level, car trunks that are out of reach for me to close, car seats and dashboards etc. set so the sightlines prevent me from seeing what's outside that's less than four feet off the ground... IF designers and corporations actually really generally CONSIDERED and took into account that women (and particularly short women...)are PEOPLE, and matter, life would be a lot less annoying as regards things being out of reach for the simple reason that tall bigots (usually male ones) have no sympathy for shorter people and don't regard "convenience of shorter adults to access" as a metric worth any implementation. (Products made for children, sometimes have accommodation for shorter than six foot male height...)

This is a delicate balancing act --- you have to recognise that other people have feelings just like yours *yet* are not just like you

"You have to"??
My experience is that there is no such must condition involved. My sister likes the Muppets, I have never been a big fan of them. She regarded a Muppet University sweatshirt as an appropriate gift for me, because it was something she liked. The fact that I am not a Muppets fan and never have been one, apparently was something that either never registered on her or that was in the not-considered-outside-the-giftgiving-process data processing procedure. It was something she wanted, so she bought it to give as a gift to me.... I have seen a LOT of that, people giving gifts to people on the basis of the gift being something the giver considers highly desirable, and not ever contemplating the concept of giving a gift to a recipient based on what the recipient values, rather than what the giver values....

Yes, I agree that consideration and sympathy ought to be important etc., but the reality, as highlighted thinking about e.g. busybody evangelicals, is that the vast majority of people seem to regard what's good for them and what they find comfort and validation and reward and exultation in, as universally applicable and appropriate. Busybody evangelicals see themselves as working to bring the joy and self-actualization they feel they receive through their religion and religious practices and the presence of their religion in their daily life, to everyone else--and that because it is so encompassing in their lives, that is or shoulf be it if it isn't, true for everyone else in the universe.... and that failing to proselytize and convert, is a disservice to others....

Note, I emphatically do not agree with their attitudes and policies on such things, emphatically! I want the evangelizers to cease and desist and stop and live their lives without the incessant proselytizing activity.

(for one thing, they're not necessarily interested in the same things you are, they don't necessarily have the same knowledge base, and so on).

Few people though seem to actually act that way... one of the joys of talking with Teresa and lots of the other people here, is that she and they have the conscious realization that "different" is not -wrong- and that differences in experience, in perception, in perceptual mode, can make for wide-ranging conversation and joy in seeing different landscapes and the same landscape, from different perspectives....

For a normal person this is trivial, you probably don't even have to think about it.

Huh?!

It took me perhaps a quarter of a century to stop oscillating between the poles of 'nobody but me is really human so I can ignore them completely unless they impinge on my goals' and 'everyone is a person with the same interests as me'.

I think there are very idiosyncratic perspectives, perceptions, and analyses--when there are analyses! -- going on inside people regarding such things. I lean towards most people not doing any actual analysis/examination at a conscious level regarding such things.

Even now, figuring out *which* components of my mindstate can be mapped onto someone else, and how, requires considerable thought and can't be done in realtime.

People get trained, in various amounts by intentional training, by environmental immersion, and by conscious self-consideration and analysis, for stimulus-response....

A friend of mine is brown-skinned, and the only member of a group of friends who went up to Iceland touristing. She did not like the feeling of being stared at by children who had never seen someone with brown skin before.... She was Other to them, and someone/something to stare at, because her skin color was outside of their experience and their knowledge/training of appropriate/proper social behavior....

So it's not a failure to acknowledge female as human: it's a failure to realise that other people are like yourself yet not.

I think that there are semantics differences between what you wrote and what I wrote--that we have a certain congruence of feelings but aren't using the same words the same ways in trying to express ideas....

Another trap we fall into is to pick up techniques that we've seen normals use to

The editorial "we" is form that I tend to find immensely annoying and offputting, which gets in the way of me seeing the content for distaste of the form and the conceit present in it....

ingratiate themselves with each other, and try them ourselves. So far, so normal:

Normal? I am not and never have been normal, I've always been out somewhere on distribution curve tails, be it for height, or minority religion, or intellectual processing, or hand-eye coordination (bad...), etc. "Normal" to me is "not-who-what-I-am." Normal for me is Other, others who don't think the way I think, who don't react the way I react... therefore, the default assumption that mosst people have of dealing with the universe as if they are typical, is not an approach I really have EVER had...

but we do it in a totally tone-deaf way, applying them largely at random at first and trying to derive rules of application from the result.

I do not concur. That may be your mode, I don't see it as the slightest bit universal. Most people seem to want to decide on an approach to doing something FAST and then step through it until either the goal gets achieved or they hit a roadblock, at which time they will reconsider road, goal, and the issue that is blocking them... as opposed to the [I or E] NTP [Myers-Briggs] taking the approach of "I want to poke around and see what the options are and what the likely results are, before I commit to an approach" -- which can infuriate people in the other categories. The NTPs are about 2 percent of the population... [I fall in that area...]

Many of these techniques are apparently severely context-sensitive (which is tricky to figure out on its own: for the first few years it just seemed random what worked and what didn't),

and we

AAARRGGGGHHHHH! on the editorial "we" ... Non, non, non!

often can't determine the correct context to use them, or even what parts of human behaviour constitute the context.

e.g. RMS's odious comments

RMS has NO social graces, none, none, none.

would not have been out of place in some all-male gatherings,

What do you mean by "not [be] out of male in some all-male gatherings" -- do you mean that the comments would have been socially acceptable in absolute terms, or in relative terms?

[I didn;t follow through on the links far enough to see what he had actually said. But my assumption from having known him for going on 38 years is that his general social dysfunction rather than true misogyny applies... but then I'm fairly certain I've told him on more than one occasion words to the effect of "you have your head up your ass" in terms at least that impolite]

although not the sort I'd expect RMS to go to. God knows where he picked them up, but apparently the 'use around females will lead to offense' rule wasn't succesfully derived. I suspect I can only do it because I have a sister, so I have a mental role model based on decades of observations to run things like this past.

Not have the specific antecedent of exactly what idiocy Richard spouted, I'm not tracking the ideas intended to have been conveyed by the paragraph above.

So you see words like 'respect'

No, I don't see.

are somewhat inappropriate here. In any case, respect-as-a-fellow-human-being is a rather abstruse emotion: I can feel it but I don't always know how it's supposed to influence my behaviour.

The vocabulary is lacking, therefore....

By "respect" I mean such things as inclusion of the concept that other people -matter-, that their opinions and feelings and interests and sucy should be taken into account and not dismissed without acknowledgment that they even exist--that there should be thought and contemplation and consideration given and then whatever gets done should be done taking into account effects/outcomes/interests of other people.

There is not "woman's point of view" -- there are points of view of people, and some of the people are women....

I get very ticked off about that for reasons which include the following:
1) I am not anyone's wife, mistress, paramour, sex partner, etc. I have never had an exclusive involvement with ANYONE that was continuing and lasted more than six months. The assumption therefore that "the woman's view" involves being long-term partnered, is one that is COMPLETELY alien to MY experience and life....

2) I am not a mother, I do not and never have had children. The assumption that "the woman's view" is one concerned with children, is completely alien to my experience and life....

3) I am slightly more domestic than a cuckoo bird... the assumption that "the woman's view" is
one focused on life within a household and nuclear family or extended family, is one which is nearly completely outside my experience and life....

4) I am a technical professional. I am a military veteran. I exercised realtime command of three different on-orbit spacecraft, I wrote specifications and requirements, I write test plans and procedures, I perform testing of military equipment... one month of my life I was a salesclerk, six weeks of my life I packed plastic pots in the pink flamingo factory... other than that, I've been in the high tech world as student and professional when employed/in training, since I was 16 (worked summers as a lab technician in high school). This is NOT what the stock image of "woman's life" looks like in the western world.... nonetheless, I AM female, and either I am a monster-mutant, OR, the stock defaulit perception/identification/definition of what "woman's perspective" is, is WRONG!!!

My perception and perspective is very simple--that women are -people-, and different -people- have different environments, different training, different intrinsic physiological/psychological tendencies and attributes... someone with organically poor eyesight actually perceives the world organically differently than someone with 20/10 vision, someone with deficient color vision perceives the world differently, etc. Most of the people who have color deficient vision are male, because for a female to be color deficient requires inheriting color deficient genetics from -both- parents.... so while color blindness generally appears in males more than females, it is NOT limited to males.... the tendency is that males are more likely to be colorblind than females, yes, there is a bias there, but it is not a situation of being limited to only males...

(I tend to use the word 'respect' almost entirely to indicate that someone has done things that make me consider her better than I am in some area, and thus worth learning from.)

The word does not have the same meaning for you as for me...

Serge, 133: Lennie Briscoe. Jerry Orbach. I'm too early and undercaffeinated for the requisite sarcastic comment, so make up your own!

#133 Serge
Colonial era graveyards not infrequently have family plots that include multiple wives of one husband--out beyond Fitchburg on route 2 there's an old cemetery with one such family plot where the husband buried three wives, and the fourth buried him.... For that matter, my mother's father's mother was thrice-married--widowed, then divorced, then married for a third time.

Chris Quinones @ 138... Right after I hit the 'post' button, and before the caffeine had kicked in, I went "It's Lenny Briscoe!", but it was too late. Curses!

Nix #951/126: "For a normal person this is trivial, you probably don't even have to think about it."

My word, no, it's not. Why do you think that ethical philosophers and spiritual teachers are hammer at it so much? It's because a lot of people don't think about it, and because even people who do think about it sometimes need reminders. You seem to have gotten a clue: good for you. I wish you wouldn't go running yourself down by assuming that it's a clue that almost everyone had all along. Empathy is hard for most people. ...and then you go & spoil it by arguing over Paula's language.

#137 myself

[and a fitting number, the fine structure constant, for that post...]

See, here you're making a basic category error. You're assuming (by implication) that people see other people as 'humans *like them*'.

is a quote from Nix, it wasn't something I authored. I failed to italicize it, however....

Serge @133,

It's easy to forget just how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth were before modern^[1] medicine. The situation in Bonanza gave plot opportunities, and might have made casting easier, but it wasn't a crazy plot device.

In my more cynical moments I wonder if encouraging that forgetfulness is part of the nasty side of anti-abortion politics.

[1] A lot of things started to change in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Things are still changing.

Dave Bell @ 143... Oh, I agree that people forget that pregnancy wasn't an easy thing. It's just that it was used as a plot device by a 'modern' show that didn't usually go for realism, but did in this case for plot reasons.

By the way, did you ever see Our Town?

In my more cynical moments I wonder if encouraging that forgetfulness is part of the nasty side of anti-abortion politics.

Of course it is. And it's no more than dirty sluts deserve if they can't keep their damn legs closed! Virtuous married women sometimes sadly succumb as well, but it says right there in the Bible that painful, dangerous childbirth is all Eve's fault, so that's OK.

Gods, sometimes I hate evangelical types. It's horrible that I can spout this crap, and I've never even spent much time around the sources.

David #135 / Abi #126:

Yeah, I find a couple things that help with the irritating sensory overload phenomenon are:

a. Wearing noise-cancelling headphones. (My old pair has fallen apart, and my new sport headphones are nicely cheap and sweatproof for the gym, but not nearly as nice for turning off the outside world.)

b. Wearing sunglasses indoors.

c. Having some thread of concentration going on in my head, which kind of overrides the advertisers' attempt at a mental buffer overrun attack.

The place this bugs me the most is at the gym, where we have eighteen gazillion endlessly-flickering screens. Why in God's name can't we have one row of treadmills and elliptical trainers *not* facing the idiot boxes? (I guess I could ask; normally, I use the gym rather late in the day, so I just turn off the TV in front of me if nobody seems to be watching it.) I am usually listening to something interesting on the iPod during gym time, either something technical in English or news in Spanish, and I'd like to avoid spending 20% of my brain power on resisting the advertisers and their visual flicker-spam[1].

The combination of sunglasses and iPod with noise cancelling headphones is a huge win for me in an airplane. I can't stand those blindfold things, which leave me expecting to be kneecapped by a drink cart everytime I hear a rattle in front of me. (Also, somehow, these always seem vaguely like I'm in some kind of airline bondage scene, which might fit with the attitude of some of the flight attendants, but isn't exactly what I'm looking for.) But sunglasses let me close out enough of the world that I can rest, while still being able to open my eyes from time to time.

[1] At some point in the last few years, all intrusive advertising has fallen into the category, in my mind, of spam. Whether it's junk mail spam, e-mail spam, telephone spam, flickering intrusive loud screens spam, flyers on my car spam, it's all basically the same beast, and destroying it is a service to mankind. If all the effort used on these things were instead expended digging ditches and then filling them back up, mankind would be richer.

Randolph #141: You're griping about Nix "arguing over" Paula's language?

Paula #137: Yeah yeah, you've been plagued all your life by narcissists and fools. That's not a reason to dump your collected frustrations onto someone who's actually trying to be a better person!

Nix's "we" (which I think he picked up from my comments) refers to our respective experience and learning of spectrum folks, with himself as his natural "type specimen". It's not some sneaky attempt to rope you into his group. If you feel it is, it's sufficient to say something like "who's 'we', kemo sabe?"

By "respect" I mean such things as inclusion of the concept that other people -matter-, that their opinions and feelings and interests and such should be taken into account ...

Which is what Nix and I are trying to do -- our difficulty is figuring out what other people want (in time to do anything about it). And this isn't some abstruse idea, unknown to all but an oppressed elite, it's a basic foundation of both liberalism and humanism. I picked up this goal with mother's milk, as did a lot of other people here.

Yes, Net society has a lot of trouble defending respectful community from the abusive sorts -- but that's as much a structural problem as anything else. In real life, there's a surprising number of such groups scattered around, maintaining themselves by the tried-and-true methods of socializing newcomers -- and ostracizing those who refuse socialization. That doesn't mean all such groups are "the same tribe" -- they haven't been socialized to each other. That applies even to people or groups who think "their tribe is humanity" -- to swipe from ML's sidebar, "just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side".

So, an SF con is not one big loving community, any more than a Neo-Pagan festival, or a Rainbow Gathering. That's because these occasions are not single communities, they're barely-regulated assemblies of allied tribes. The same applies to most large online communities, and admittance to those is even less constrained, with ostracism correspondingly less effective. If you expect any such supra-tribal groupings to be "safe space", you're doomed to (more) frustration.

The word does not have the same meaning for you as for me...

Which was his point in the first place!

RMS has NO social graces, none, none, none.

Paula, I've never met you in person... but in context of your repeated rants here, I have to wonder about pots and kettles. You often come across as someone who's been hurt so often that now you just lash out randomly, without attempting specific responses -- much less trying to seek rapport with someone who hasn't shared your own experiences.

Randolph #141: After #137, you're griping about Nix "arguing over" Paula's language?

Paula #137: Yeah yeah, you've been plagued all your life by narcissists and fools. That's not a reason to dump your collected frustrations onto someone who's actually trying to be a better person!

Nix's "we" (which I think he picked up from my comments) refers to our respective experience and learning of spectrum folks, with himself as his natural "type specimen". It's not some sneaky attempt to rope you into his group. If you feel it is, it's sufficient to say something like "who's 'we', kemo sabe?"

By "respect" I mean such things as inclusion of the concept that other people -matter-, that their opinions and feelings and interests and such should be taken into account ...

Which is what Nix and I are trying to do -- our difficulty is figuring out what other people want (in time to do anything about it). And this isn't some abstruse idea, unknown to all but an oppressed elite, it's a basic foundation of both liberalism and humanism. I picked up this goal with mother's milk, as did a lot of other people here.

Yes, Net society has a lot of trouble defending respectful community from the abusive sorts -- but that's as much a structural problem as anything else. In real life, there's a surprising number of such groups scattered around, maintaining themselves by the tried-and-true methods of socializing newcomers -- and ostracizing those who refuse socialization. That doesn't mean all such groups are "the same tribe" -- they haven't been socialized to each other. That applies even to people or groups who think "their tribe is humanity" -- to swipe from ML's sidebar, "just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side".

So, an SF con is not one big loving community, any more than a Neo-Pagan festival, or a Rainbow Gathering. That's because these occasions are not single communities, they're barely-regulated assemblies of allied tribes. The same applies to most large online communities, and admittance to those is even less constrained, with ostracism correspondingly less effective. If you expect any such supra-tribal groupings to be "safe space", you're doomed to (more) frustration.

The word does not have the same meaning for you as for me...

Which was his point in the first place!

RMS has NO social graces, none, none, none.

Paula, I've never met you in person... but in context of your repeated rants here, I have to wonder about pots and kettles. You often come across as someone who's been hurt so often that now you just lash out randomly, without attempting specific responses -- much less trying to seek rapport with someone who hasn't shared all of your own experiences.

And... I just caught the double-posting bug in action!

I hit "Post", my browser went to the hourglass... and then back to normal cursor, while remaining at the preview page. My comment did not appear at the bottom, but when I tried to refresh, Firefox warned me "To display this page, Firefox must send information that will repeat any action (such as a search or order confirmation) that was performed earlier." Opening the thread in a new tab revealed the double post.

Carrie #145:

Why would the pre-modern-medicine rate of death in childbirth be something anti-brtn people would want to hide? How could that possibly be relevant to anything? The current rate of death in childbirth, that's relevant. But the rate before modern medicine? Huh? Can you imagine a single person who'd have their decision changed by such information? You might as well accuse the Army of suppressing knowledge of how many soldiers crapped themselves to death or died of relatively minor wounds becoming infected, before modern medicine. This is relevant how?

Addendum: I think I missed the hourglass the first time, which is why I hit Post a second time. In contrast, #149 went right back to the thread page, as it's supposed to.

Paula:
David, Nix and I (among others) are talking about a subset of people who have Asperger's Syndrome or other autistic spectrum disorders. As was explicitly stated, repeatedly. That's what their "we" refers to; it's a clearly defined group rather than a default assumption.

Although the majority of Aspies (etc) are male, this is not a group that is built around a "default=male" character. Most of the guys in it have trouble seeing other guys as people like them, too. Just this once, it's not about gender. It's not about having respect, it's about knowing how to convey that.

Really, your assumption that everyone has the same neural toolkit to work with is as insulting as the assumption that everyone is six feet tall, male, and white. You're doing exactly the same thing you're arguing against.

Could you please leave the prepackaged six-foot male rant at the door and listen to what is being discussed?

Why would the pre-modern-medicine rate of death in childbirth be something anti-brtn people would want to hide?

Because it gives lie to the idea that pregnancy and childbirth aren't That Big A Deal, and you can just carry the baby to term and give it up for adoption. It's not as if there used to be a saying about "one baby, one tooth"* or anything. Pregnancy is Natural! It's Good! It can't be dangerous...

Can you imagine a single person who'd have their decision changed by such information?

No, but I can say that about the vast majority of the anti-choice arguments. :)

* I.e., each pregnancy causes the loss of at least one tooth due to nutrients being diverted to the kid.

Abi @152: CS Friedman's novel This Alien Shore is incredibly relevant to this whole discussion. Without introducing spoilers, there's an entire planet in the book's multiplanet human population that is entirely non-neurotypical (by our current standards) ... in at least 50 separate ways. And yet the settlers managed to figure out a way to jigger their culture to make it work, which is awesome to watch in action.

With reference to the Sotomayer [spelling] hearings and that Repuke disrespecter of self-determination....

I am not chattel
My body is not yours.
I am not chattel
I'm not one of your whores,
I am not chattel
I'm not your womb for sperm
I am not chattel
Though you treat me like a worm.

I am not chattel,
Though you deny my rights,
I am not chattel,
Though you want me out of sight
I am not chattel
I will not bear your child,
You rape me and you beat me,
Then you claim that I'm defiled.

I am not chattel
Though you lock me in a house,
I am not chattel
I'm no submissive spouse
I am not chattel
I need a life my own
I am not chattel
I refuse your stripped-down bone!

I am not chattel
I am not your "little girl."
I am not chattel
Not a toy for you to twirl,
I am not chattel
To clean up what you mess,
I am not a household slave,
Or appliance in a dress.

I am not chattel
I do not exist to buy,
I am not chattel,
Despite each media lie,
I am not chattel
I've a mind and thoughts my own,
I am not chattel
Why won't you leave me alone.

I am not chattel,
It's my body and my life,
I am not chattel,
I won't willingly be your wife
I am not chattel
For you to buy and sell,
I am not chattel
And I hope you burn in Hell.

Dave #143: It's easy to forget just how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth were before modern[1] medicine.

It's also easy to forget just how dangerous drinking a glass of water or getting a cut on your hand was before modern medicine.

IIRC, pregnancy/childbirth is still high on the cause-of-death lists for the appropriate age range.

abi: Try searching for information on "Sensory Processing Disorder". That is not an official diagnosis or syndrome, it's a descriptive term, but I think what you wrote is a fairly precise description of it. My wife sees it a lot in the children she treats, and may have some degree of it herself; your description of supermarkets as maddeningly shouting for attention was very familiar.

abi 152: prepackaged six-foot male rant

I'm sure the scope ambiguity here is unintentional, but given how long Paula's favorite rant was this time, it's* beyond price.
___
*The scope ambiguity, NOT the rant. Oy veh.

Actually there are a couple of scope ambiguities there (anyone know where I can get prepackaged six-foot males?) but only one that I prize above rubies.

This six-foot tall (plus some change (which is remarkably close to plus ça change, which I never realized before...must think of a pun to use that...) non-neuro-normal white male just wants to second Elliott's reccy for This Alien Shore. One of my all-time favorites.

#148 David & #152 abi ;

My point about Richard M. Stallman is that in my experience he's not a misogynist, that what comes out looking like misogyny, is a consequence of a deeper and different social dysfunction issue.

I don't see all people as perceiving and sensing and analyzing etc. the same. My points there include that apparently though the majority of the population has the mindset that assumes that everyone else thinks the same way and reacts the same way and wants the same things and is made joyful, the same ways as they are. That is far from saying that everyone has that outlook... but it has in my experience seemed to be the majority outlook.

As regards the uniform density spherical purple stereotypical individual (JOKE!!! about uniform density spherical purple... see the first issue of New York Review of Science Fiction)... my point there is that for US culture the default for "person" is a six foot white male, and to go even further, one who watches sports, drinks beer, voted twice (if a voter) for that person who was in the White House 2001 - 2008, etc.

Image/model and reality are not the same thing. It's one of the marks of a good scientist to remember that--there is much to be learned about reality working with models, and much to be learned about model-making from reality... but there are also the considerations where the model "breaks down"/doesn't apply/is inadequate/etc.

Regarding male/female--I keep attempting to communicate that I regard gender as one of a myriad of characteristics in individuals. Someone's gender is not highly correlated to intrinsic ability for cognition, for making puns, for doing math, for writing, etc. It does correlate to reproductive roles of male impregnator, female impregnated gestating and later lactating--but regarding ability to do math, write poetry, write music, perform music, etc., while there may be biases as regards measuring achievement, the abilities are spread across gender boundaries, or rather, independent of them. As for measurements, there are genetic components, environmental components, training, encouragement/discouragement, access granted/not granted, interest level....

Regarding autism/Asperger's and such... each post ought to stand on its own if using "we" and define who are meant by "we" --remembering from post to post in a mult-conversation multiple day etc. forum, isn't something that I at least can do. I don't remember across days and forum changes that sort of thing--I have a hard enough time remembering where I put keys or reading glasses 30 seconds ago, even when I KNOW that there in my hand (and sometimes turn out to still be there....)

Regarding Stallman, I think at least some of it is that social interactions are an Area X of brain collection of operations and cognition and processing, and his attention/training/interest/abilities are more Area Y activities....

One of the program items at Readercon had a psychologist talking about the studies she'd done involving attitudes towards and perceptions of different fiction genres, and psychological profiles of who prefers what types of reading--with the caveat that the sample was BU sophomores taking psychology classes.

I did take notes, but when/if I find them, is another issue...

re 156: Not to mention how dangerous an abortion was.

David Harmon, #137: "You're griping about Nix 'arguing over' Paula's language?"

Most women's thinking gets so much unwarranted criticism that I assume that women who object to such criticism are probably right. If Nix is going to make his or her case, Nix is going to have to get the facts straight.

David Harmon, #137: "You're griping about Nix 'arguing over' Paula's language?"

Most women's thinking gets so much unwarranted criticism that I assume that women who object to such criticism are probably right in their objects, and right to object.

Note to self... No "Bonanza" jokes. Look into "Gunsmoke" as source for material. Stay away from "High Chaparral".

Ooops! Sorry.

When we lived in Nebraska, we'd often go picnic at Spring Ranch, a stop on the Pony Express line. About all that remained of the town was the cemetery. We made rubbings of many of the old stones, three of which were Elizabeth Taylor, James Taylor, and Tom Jones. The first two were sibs, the second a cohort, and the three of them met a sudden, sharp end being tossed off a little bridge with ropes around their necks after some missing horses showed up on their back forty.

The other notable thing was the heartbreaking clusters of children's graves. One family lost four children in the space of eleven days to what must have been scarlet fever or diphtheria, etc. That changed when vaccines came along.

One man, several wives, up to a dozen or more children was common.

Slightly different version

Also, several of us had a ghostly experience just after dusk on that cemetery road. An insubstantial whitish shape went diagonally across the road and disappeared at the top of the trees.

Charlie calmed us down and showed us what we'd seen by backing up and re-driving that stretch. The rainwater in the ruts in the road was reflecting the headlights as we went around a curve.

It wasn't hard to extrapolate a carriage lamp and a horse bolting.

There was a James Taylor with the same death date buried by the other two.

Last night coming home from the NESFA Clubhouse I got headed home the long way due to road closure for night I-93 rework, and heard abut an hour of Supreme Court nominee confirmation hearings. I started yelling at the words of certain senators.... The fact that someone being Latina might actually mean there is a different perspective and sensitivities and life experience, and perhaps that it could be relevant to being a judge and bringing that experience to the bench, seems to be something that there is a flat out denial of.

The level of hypocrisy is enormous, of those who propelled Roberts and Alito and before them Scalia and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, on the basis of them being for commercial interests and individual self-determination, and for imposition of religions they favor and against freedom of religion for those whose religions or atheism might have views regarding e.g. same gender marriage, reproductive medicine, etc. which are not congruent to the values of Roberts and Alito and Scalia and Thomas.

All those notions of "judicial activism" when it's Roberts and Scalia and Thomas and Alito who are seeking any and every opening to get abortion banned in the USA and anyone involved in providing abortions for any reason whatsoever charged with first degree murder... the hypocrisy and bias is appalling and pernicious.

The denial that experiential differences can -matter-, or -should- matter, appalls me. The nominee has lived and seen segments of American life that are opaque, or even not acknowledged to exist, much less have any legitimacy, by the Roberts & cohort. The male members of the Supreme Court have never been personally in the situation of the prospect of being pregnant, of toxemic pregnancy, of impregnation during rape, of amniocentesis showing that instead of a healthy growing fetus there is a non-viable mal-formed mass that is technically "alive" but for which even the most sophisticated medical technology at the most expense available in the world, can transform into a healthy fetus to become a healthy baby. Roberts and Scalia and Alito and Thomas, however, don[t seem to feel the slightest hesitation on imposing their religious tenets on other people, regardless of what the religions of those affected say--they;re not applying The Secular Law, they're not applying the wellbeing of the families, they're applying third party sectarian credo they subscribe to, and again, imposing it regardless of whether those imposed on subscribe to those sectarian specific rules or not.

And then the generally white male Christian Republican senators mouth off about "judicial activism" and how one should look to Law not life experience and knowledge and cognize, to judge... I have few polite words come easily to mind, to describe my feelings about the situation.

It seems to be a case of "MY values and experience are the only acceptable values and experience which apply and have worth."

abi@126, yes, large supermarkets are a vision of Hell. I think it's the combination of high crowding, fluorescent lighting, and long monocoloured aisles with massive visual detail on the 'walls' (shelves).

Unfortunately I can't use your nifty "avoid wearing glasses" trick because if I take my glasses off I can barely tell that other people have heads, let alone that they're, say, looking at me. (-9.0, -9.5, astigmatic). albatross@146's suggestion of noise-cancelling headphones is one I agree with strongly: stick the _Art of Fugue_ on there and the world goes away. :)

David@135, object separation loss sounds far more peculiar than anything I've been hit with. Of course amblyopia doesn't help here, and pretty much means I never get depth perception anyway (think 'permanent uncorrectable double vision').

Paula@137, you're misreading essentially everything I said in an apparent attempt to turn it into a personal attack on you. It isn't. David@#147 has it right, as ever: I was using 'we' as a reference to 'people on the autistic spectrum'. So therefore it's quite unsurprising that you consider that most of my comments don't apply to you. That was the point of them: I was trying to explicate differences, not point out similarities.

(Your claim that RMS has 'no social graces' particularly shows up the immense amount of structured knowledge that this requires. Of course he has some social graces. He doesn't eat people without cooking them first and he knows enough to get dressed before going out of the house. What he doesn't have is the advanced social modelling skills typical of normal humans. You might consider this pedantry but it's actually significant: without hardwired social-animal neural assistance *you would be like that too*. You could consider high-functioning autistics to be a real-world experiment to determine what humans would be like if they had to figure out all social matters via rational thought. It's humbling how bad we are at it. Hardwired neurological machinery is *much much* more efficient than conscious thought...)

Randolph@#141, arguing over Paula's language? Not intentionally. I didn't think I was arguing at all, more agreeing and saying 'hey, this is how it is for me, look, weird alien in your midst'.

My understanding is that *reasoning about empathy* is hard for most people. Actually having it seems to be largely automatic (at least within your ingroup: extending that ingroup until it encompasses everyone seems to be what some people don't bother with).

abi@#152, precisely. If anything my problem is the opposite of the typical six-foot-male problem: with an assertive sister and mother who are dramatically smarter and more competent than myself, I have a tendency to assume that all women are similarly smarter and more competent than all men (even though I know this is as fallacious as the other assumption). Combine this with shyness and I must have been thirty before I could exchange two words with a member of the opposite sex without stammering into incomprehensibility. So, no, if anything I'm a 'reformed female chauvinist pig' despite being male.

Paula #162: my point there is that for US culture the default for "person" is a six foot white male [yada yada]...

And I'm calling bullshit. Yeah, there are big stretches of insular, xenophobic whitebread around, but that's not all there is to America, not by a long shot. Let alone to the crowd you're inflicting these rants on. But to see that, you'll need to get over your own convictions about how bad things are.

Image/model and reality are not the same thing.

Indeed -- and you too need to remember that, when you want to dismiss "US culture" as monolithically intolerant, misogynist, and height-ist, much less Republican.

My point about Richard M. Stallman is that in my experience he's not a misogynist, that what comes out looking like misogyny, is a consequence of a deeper and different social dysfunction issue.

And what I and others have said repeatedly, is that RMS is not some unique flower that can only be taken as he is. Many others share similar disabilities, including myself, and I'm not giving him that pass! I've suffered enough from foot-in-mouth disease, but I learned how to apologize, and figure out later what I did wrong! If RMS can't manage that, he needs to let others do the talking for him.

I regard gender as one of a myriad of characteristics...

Too bad nobody but you is arguing about that.

each post ought to stand on its own if using "we" and define who are meant by "we"

And now you're just thrashing. We have conversations here, not publications.

And re: #170: The Rethuglicans are not about "principled" racism... the hypocrisy is all there is. They are using whatever tactics they think will "win", and if those tactics distract you from their strategies, then they've successfully taken you out of the long-term fight. And the flipside is this: The very reason why they're getting ever shriller, every crazier, ever more vicious... is because they're losing. We just need to keep up the pressure, and not let them divide us among ourselves.

Nix #171: I sometimes suspect that HFAs might represent a throwback to the social capabilities of, say, Homo erectus, but still burdened with the intellectual machinery of sapiens. (Or some of it -- there are a lot of low-IQ autistics!) As you note, there are good reasons why most humans have that social machinery operating well below conscious level.

Paula @162:
Regarding autism/Asperger's and such... each post ought to stand on its own if using "we" and define who are meant by "we" --remembering from post to post in a mult-conversation multiple day etc. forum, isn't something that I at least can do. I don't remember across days and forum changes that sort of thing

If you're going to put the time in to write that long a comment, and expect your partners in the conversation to put the time in to read it, you owe us the respect to spend enough time to reread the antecedents—which the writers cared about as much as you care about what you're writing—before answering.

As you said of others at 170:
It seems to be a case of "MY values and experience are the only acceptable values and experience which apply and have worth."

Listen, please, as well as speak.

#171 Nix

Er, few people have ever accused me of social eptitude etc., with the belief that they were being other than sarcastic and/or deprecatory at the time.... I almost made a comment about "RMS has worse social skills than I have, but that's not saying much..." but refrained from doing so. Apparently I should have gone with my instincts there and included the comment....

RMS was by Harvard-MIT standards immensely socially inept. Given the near-legendary status that MIT at least at the time occupied regarding lack of social graces

[ "MIT's mascot is the beaver. The beaver is the engineer of the animal world. The MIT person is the animal of the engineering world. The beaver is an engineers which does its best work at night. The beaver is the only animal which will chew its balls off to get out of a trap." "Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride/To show the noble villagers her fair and pure white hide, The most observant man of all/ An engineer of course/ Was the only one who noticed that Godiva rode a horse! //Venus was a statue made entirely of stone/Without a stitch of clothing she was naked as a bone/On seeing that she wore no clothes/ An Engineer discoursed/What the goddamned thing is just concrete/And should be reinforced!"...]

that's saying something.... And I think that you're being too generous, actually.

======
Regarding my own wiring.... as a small child I failed to comprehend was merit there was to
a) The Itsy Bitsy Spider song... Why were people teaching this stupid song about this stupid spider cimbing up a waterspout, getting washed down the spout, and then trying to go back up thes spout again?! What was the point, it didn't work and wasn't going to work, why not do something ELSE that might accomplish something instead? I just didn't see anything worthwhile there, and failed then, and now, to comprehend what utility or value is involved!
b) "There was an woman who swallowed a fly, I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll die..." really made no sense to me. I interpreted the song backwards in time and events apparently that everyone -else- did "she swallowed the X to catch the Y" to me denoted that she swallowed X BEFORE Y, rather than Y being in her mouth or throat and then she swallowed X to deal with the Y in her throat... plus, the whole thing was so stupid (I've never had any taste/appreciation for slapstick comedy)--why would someone go and swallow something to deal with something that was inside them being an annoyance? If there's something stuck in one's throat, why do anything to compound the problem? (Who, me, literal? Guilty....)

=====

Regarding the comment to abi from #152--this reminds me of a dog raised with cats, which regards cats at sociable creatures which it gets along with, the dog sees a stranger cat, and winds up quite unpleasantly surprised to be treated inimicably.

====
Regarding stimuation sources--I dislike having images or patterns for the backgroun on computer screen, I find them enormously distracting and annoying--despite the fact that I typically have anywhere up to 60 windows open at the same time, which is mimcry of a physical messy desk where the size and shape and locaton of paper piles has functional meaning to me....

Different people have different triggers, and I suspect that some amount of that is hardwired from conception, as opposed to trained/learned/inculcated.

Carrie:

Er, okay, but what relevance would that have to the modern brtn debate? The right to a brtn using modern medical technology is necessary/unnecessary because before modern medical technology, pregnancy was quite dangerous? I don't see why this makes any sense. As well talk about how the modern right to arm bears relates to the fraction of soldiers in wartime who used to crap themselves to death before modern medicine became available.

#174 abi

I DID read them. I didn't remember the details!
And there are reasons why I tend to quote--so that the stimulus is there in proximity to the response elicited, for reference, including for -me- to refer to. Memory idiosyncracies are one of the reasons I keep more windows open on computer screens that most people consider completely unreasoanble (I don't know if I've ever reach 100 windows open.. I regularly get to more than 60 open, though)

Are there subscribers to Realms of Fantasy around? The magazine had gone on hiatus while its new owners were preparing their first issue, which was supposed to come out on June 30. It hasn't shown up in my mailbox yet. As far as I know, they were going to honor existing subs. Well, I'll just go to a local bookstore and see if they carry it.

#178 Serge

My suggestion is to wait a bit longer for it in the mail. Warren Lapine was at Readercon and had copies of the magazine, which he was handing out.

Paula Lieberman @ 179... I should indeed have waited a bit longer. Giess what just showed up in my mailbox. Yay!

Unfortunately it seems that my theme for this week is:

"Provide meaningful [error | success] messages"[0]

Amusingly enough (to me, at least) this also seems to be somewhat apropos to the entire conversation around Aspergers and social graces.

[0] So I can figure out why, exactly, you're doing something outrageously odd...

In re Paula @162 (who said Regarding male/female--I keep attempting to communicate that I regard gender as one of a myriad of characteristics in individuals. Someone's gender is not highly correlated to intrinsic ability for cognition, for making puns, for doing math, for writing, etc. It does correlate to reproductive roles of male impregnator, female impregnated gestating and later lactating--but regarding ability to do math, write poetry, write music, perform music, etc., while there may be biases as regards measuring achievement, the abilities are spread across gender boundaries, or rather, independent of them.) ...

I don't want to hijack the thread*, and I should state up front I agree with the entire gist and thrust of her point, but it's important -- well, *I* think it is, though I'm admittedly biased -- to make a distinction not only between physiological markers (henceforth 'sex') and mental identities (henceforth 'gender'), but also between either of those and any of the behaviors/inclinations/hobbies that are stereotypically mapped solely onto one of the sexes/genders by any given culture.

Of course, the reason this is personally important to me is that I find myself with a body from column A, but an outlook and identity from column B ... and a lot of my default communication styles, preferred body language, clothing preferences, etc, also 'tend male' by the current standards of our modern American culture. This does relate back to the social-interaction-by-the-non-neurotypical topic, slightly, in that people who 'read' me as female are sometimes taken aback or offended (sometimes not even knowing why) by my outlook and conversational style, because I don't 'act right' by their subconscious assumptions.

That said, I've successfully gestated a child, and am currently breastfeeding her with the unwanted fleshbags I've not yet taken surgical steps to remove.

Not everyone has in their pants what you assume they have in their pants just from looking at them ... and not even all physically-female people can breed (nor physically-male inseminate, depending).

---
* Is it possible to hijack an open thread? Merely a rhetorical ponderment. :->

albatross, today a first-trimester brtn is MUCH safer than a nine-month pregnancy ending in childbirth. If you're only arguing that the history of their relative safety is irrelevant to the modern debate, I agree.

I saw John Leguizamo today. He was walking just behind and to the side of me as we crossed the street, and I did a double-take that was fast enough for him to notice and make eye contact with me.

Ironically, moments before I had just seen the actor from the "I'm calling in tired" beer commercial on the subway.

Conclusion: Just For Laughs Toronto is good for celebrity sightings, both major and minor.

Paula @177:
I DID read them. I didn't remember the details!

Asperger's wasn't a detail. It was the subject of the conversation among David, Nix and me.

If you can't remember what the conversation is about, take notes. (I can't remember numbers. I use a text editor to do it for me.) Do whatever you do in the rest of your life to hold a coherent correspondence. You're an intelligent and successful woman; I am confident you can follow the thread of a conversation if it matters to you.

That last bit is the kicker for me. Maybe you didn't mean to be disrespectful, but that's what came across. Your comment @137, and your subsequent reactions, read like you didn't care who we were, or what we were talking about. You just wanted to have your usual say.

This is not going to turn into an *b*rt**n thread.

Curse you, Pierre Berton! You cause discord everywhere you go!

I had a little reality check yesterday morning:

I was in the ICU waiting room (the friend I mentioned several open threads ago is STILL in the hospital, still getting sent back and forth from ICU to a regular room as complications develop/improve) along with a bunch of other people waiting to get in to see someone. The tv had on a morning talk show, and the host happened to mention Twitter in passing. The following dialogue ensued among two of the people watching the program:

FIRST PERSON: "What's Twitter?"

SECOND PERSON: "I don't know."

My reaction was about equally shared between gobsmackitude that the two had managed to miss all the hype, and a sense of relief that there were still people in the world untainted by The Evil That Is Twitter.

xeger #181: "Provide meaningful [error | success] messages"

Would that be for your programs, your co-workers, or yourself?

David Harmon @ 189 ..
Would that be for your programs, your co-workers, or yourself?

If you'll add in "other peoples programs", I'll pick (e) All of the above.

Some of the above are much easier to resolve than others.

Elliott Mason @ 182: people who 'read' me as female are sometimes taken aback or offended (sometimes not even knowing why) by my outlook and conversational style, because I don't 'act right' by their subconscious assumptions.

I dunno. We've known each other for... how long? Eight years? More? I've never noticed anything 'not right' about how you 'act'. When I first heard that you were planning to transition, I was quite startled, because most of the other people I've known who've transitioned have been pretty off-kilter, and you weren't.

Maybe I just don't tend to notice behaviour that's as subtly 'not right' as yours. That we've seen each other only at conventions may also make a difference in my failure to notice.

Joel @191: Fen in general (a) don't notice offness in the same way as mundanes do, and (b) habitually allow leeway to people who act weird even by fannish standards.

Also, by the time you met me, I'd learned to fake it pretty well -- plus, boy-geeking body language and presentation isn't very different than girl-geeking, really.

It was mostly in mundane contexts that I had problems (and mostly among women; most guys are fine with me as long as they're not actively viewing me as a Sexual Prospect), and over time I did gradually learn to 'hide'.

It's only in the past year or so that I've been learning how to UN-hide on purpose, instead of reflexively diving into 'safer' options, and where all my genuine responses have gotten squashed to by decades of overcompensation.

Also, transgender issues are a spectrum (like everything else is! Humans vary, it's *awesome*), and I'm definitely towards a less-severe or more-central position than many other transfolks I know. My gender dysphoria isn't utterly crippling, and even 'after' I probably won't come off as a Big Butch Manly Guy: more like a slightly swishy, friendly, emotionally-accessible fannish dude of the sort one runs into at cons all the time.

Of course, since I primarily choose to sleep with men, it will probably be unsurprising to mundanes if I come off as a bit swishy now and then. :->

#188 Bruce: FIRST PERSON: "What's Twitter?"

I confess that I'm not exactly sure myself.

I know that it involves text. I know that there's a character limit. I presume that it involves cell phones?

Beyond that, I have not a clue what it is, what it looks like, or if you have to buy any special equipment or pay some kind of fee.

Gaah, another Friday hike canceled, this time due to two hospitalizations. One's got a scheduled cataract operation. The other stuck a trowel into what he thought was a sinkhole... and discovered it was a ground nest of yellowjackets. (Down here, they have ground nests.) He'll be fine in a few more days, but he assures me it was No Fun At All. (The third guy can't drive that far, and I can't drive at all.)

I really should get in touch with the local hiking club (which hikes on Saturdays). I've got the flyer around someplace.... On the other hand, next Friday I'll hopefully get to meet the Aspie grandson (of the guy who got stung). He's already indirectly provided an endorsement for a local martial-arts place.

And in the meantime, I'm also looking into speech therapy....

Jim @193, Twitter is to blogging as SMS is to email. Or, putting it another way, Twitter is blogging for cellphones.

There's no fee, and no ads. (No, I don't know what their business model is.) Or rather, no banner ads; there are companies that use the Twitter service itself for advertising and marketing.

You can use a web browser to read and post to Twitter, or you can use dedicated apps for your computer, or a smartphone, or even a not-so-smartphone that has SMS capability.

Ok, two stories of amusement. Both from "Lowering the Bar"

British manufacturers offer pointless anti-stab knives

They are even uglier than I expected.

This one has to be read to be, well it's pretty amazing.

Lawyer charged with billing during sex

As I think I have mentioned before, surprisingly few jurisdictions actually have rules making it unethical for an attorney to have sex with his or her client. It is never a good idea (okay, almost never), but often is not technically a violation of ethical rules.

Billing a client for work not actually done, however, is unethical, and combining these activities by billing for time spent actually having sex with the client is definitely frowned upon. There is no question about that.

The Times Online reported last month that a woman in London had sued her barrister for allegedly billing her for time during which she had reason to know he was not giving her legal advice. Ms. Anal Sheikh, about whose name I have nothing at all to say, except that this report did not come out on April 1, and also that it seems more likely to be the name of a movie about the incident than the name of a plaintiff, sued her barrister on the grounds that he had billed her inappropriately. She had hired Marc Beaumont under an arrangement that was based on a fixed fee of 120,000 pounds, but also provided for additional hourly billing in the event of "unforeseen and urgent work." I think she concedes that he did engage in unforeseen and urgent work, but presumably argues that it has to be law-related to qualify for additional payment...

But if this is going to set a precedent for applying ethical rules to this kind of conduct, there is more that British men may need to be worried about. Rule 701 requires a barrister to act "diligently and with reasonable competence," and to refuse "any task which (i) he knows or ought to know he is not competent to handle; (ii) he does not have adequate time and opportunity to prepare for or perform; or (iii) he cannot discharge within the time requested or otherwise within a reasonable time . . . ." That just seems like too much pressure.

Also, you can follow Twitter users through their RSS feeds. I don't think you need to have a Twitter account to do this. I subscribe to the feed for AmazonMP3, which advertises special deal in the Amazon music download store. About once a month there's some album I'm interested in selling for a dollar or two, and it only takes a second to glance at the post while checking my RSS feeds (which I generally do every day).

Terry@ 196: I cannot tell you how much I wish I had saved the link to the story (with which I simultaneously horrified and convulsed a dear friend) about the legal case which established in Canadian law that it is not a defense against a charge of sexual assault that you were at the time of the offense under the impression that the victim was deceased.

I mean, I suppose I am glad to have this potential loophole dealt with, but who the Hell finds a woman in a snowbank outside a bar and a) thinks "damn, that's convenient!", and b) seriously tries that as a defence??

I remember that. It was disgusting. Not so much the act (people are sick, and twisted, and yes there are kinks that are not ok) but that a lawyer actually tried to make that work.

It happened, IIRC while I was visiting.

Actually Jim. Can I call you Jim? I thought you knew, since its biggest application is in those areas where cellphone coverage is spotty. Twitter is an implementation of TCP/IP as described by the Internet standard described in RFC1149. The messages have to be short due to the limited packet size of the transmission media. One of the challenges of Twitter is the high latency due to transmission turnaround of the router software.

Well, it's useful for defeating the "women who get raped must have been asking for it somehow" BS. Or it would be, except for the part where anymore I just can't have that argument so if I'm around it basically gets as far as "Well, you know, I don't mean to be politically correct but if you ask me, some women just kind of -" and then all of a sudden the whole debate turns into "Yargh! Ack! Crazy woman attacking me with a cricket bat, help help help ..." *horrible crunchy yet somehow wet thwacking noises* "Aaaaaaaargh!"

I'm not a big Twitter user, but I finally signed on a few weeks ago so I could tweet during a conference. (And I've just started stalking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfollowing a few folks from here.)

You can read Twitter all you want without an account. Having a Twitter account lets you post ("tweet"). You can tweet with your computer if you aren't using a cell phone (that's what I do). You can also use your Twitter account to set up a list of people whose tweets to follow on your home page.

Though I've noticed that it's not always reliable end to end. (That is, I often won't see particular individual tweets on my home page from particular people, and then suddenly see them if I ask for tweets specifically from that person.) But, per John Houghton @200, maybe it's just the pigeons getting tired.

Obviously, I meant "politically INcorrect". Yeah, I can't even type that phrase anymore, apparently.

The best thing I've seen on Twitter is this series of SFnal microfiction.

O-o-o-k. Just got this (off topic message on a Yahoo discussion list, purporting to be from an M.D. I know slightly):

'FW: Page 16 of the "Health Care for all Americans Bill"

'Call your senators and congressmen. another freedom going by the wayside.

'Well, on page 16 of the new House Health Care bill, it does the anticipated - outlaws private insurance coverage. Time to put our representatives in Washington on speed dial.'

It gives a link, to something called ibdeditorials, which I'm not inclined to follow, since the format of the message suggests it's been copied and pasted out of something he's received, and if he believes this nonsense he might click on anything.

But this notion appears to be in circulation.

#205
That's Investors Business Daily editorials. They're more conservative than the Wall Street Journal, if that's possible without being completely insane. (I don't think I'd use them even for lining birdcages.)

cmk @205, "IBDEditorials" is an organ of Investor's Business Daily, a right-wing looney publication.

#205-207, Think Progress refutes that nonsense.

Serge #187: It wasn't Pierre Berton. It was that fiery Welshman, Richard Burton.

Carol@168: and then there were the flu epidemics. After WFC 2001 some friends persuaded me to visit the biggest cemetery in Montreal. (I think she was gathering material?) Somewhere in the unsectored part (i.e., not the part where associations had huge tracts reserved for past and upcoming members) there were two adjacent blocks, each with one monument and dozens of perfect miniature stones (no visible markings). One monument said "Aveugle" and the other "Sourde", with relevant dates; my guess was that it was a childrens' shelter (for abandonees?) that had been hard hit.

JDM@126: why not? I haven't had a good Trent-style ale since Commonwealth Brewpub was driven under by a cheaper competitor.

Wesley #204: Ooh, those are funny!

Marna Nightingale @ 201:

and then all of a sudden the whole debate turns into "Yargh! Ack! Crazy woman attacking me with a cricket bat, help help help ..." *horrible crunchy yet somehow wet thwacking noises* "Aaaaaaaargh!"

That seems entirely appropriate to me...

Fragano@ 209... That'd be the actor, not the explorer, right?

Paula @137: I know you've mentioned being too short for assorted counters, checkout stands, teller booths, and so on, multiple times before.

Have you considered platform-soled boots?

Note, I'm not talking about high heels. Brands like New Rock produce boots with thick (up to six inches!) FLAT soles that don't shift your center of balance or shorten your Achilles tendon. Some of them look very impressively steampunk, too.

And they're not hard to walk in. My 13-year-old daughter has trouble with standard feminine high heels, but she has no trouble at ALL with the platform boots she spent her holiday gift money on.

If the world won't adapt to your needs, it's time to adopt assistive technology!

Nix, abi, I get some of the same supermarket overload you describe (it's one of the reasons I prefer to shop without a companion, fewer inputs) and, at least in American supermarkets, there's a tactic that promotes both serenity and healthful eating: minimize the time spent on the inside aisles. All of the fresh foods are kept on the perimeter of the store, and they're both easier on the eyes and nutritionally better. Then, if you learn where exactly your routinely-needed packaged foods are kept, you can make quick trips into the center aisles, and hyperfocus a little to get right to the ketchup or the pasta or your favorite kind of breakfast cereal, and then get the hell out of that aisle. I'm often able to skip three or four inside aisles on each trip.

#214 Rikabeth

Those things (platform shoes) were a fad among some groups when I was in college. I think there were incidents of bone breakage at heightened rates. (And working as a test engineer in the defense industry, I rather doubt that it would go over well at work).

Paula @216, the New Rock and other goth/industrial/steampunk flat platforms look more stable to me than the '70s glam-rock platforms, and I've seen lots of people wear them without trouble.

Not going over well at work, now, that's a different problem, and one I don't have suggestions for. Still, if you changed into them AFTER work, they might make the grocery store swipe-station easier.

BTW, I'm 5'4", which IIRC from meeting you at Arisia is about four to six inches taller than you? The Shaw's card-swiper is no trouble for me, nor is the one at the Broadway Foodmaster, but I concur, the counter at Enterprise Rent-A-Car is awfully high, as are most bank teller windows.

Rikibeth #215: Hmm. it occurs to me that I've been starting to do a little of that already. At least, I tend to leave my cart outside the aisle, go fetch the things I need, and bring them out to the cart. My problem with stocking up on fresh foods is that I'm erratic enough about cooking for a fair bit of produce to go to waste. And as I noted way-back-when, I won't be able to cook for hours after a supermarket trip.

Oh, another issue: by the time I reach the checkout counter, I'm generally dazed enough to be downright flaky -- I can get distracted by the outer-wall displays, and try to walk off without my groceries, without paying, or both. (Thankfully the checkout people are pretty understanding about prompting me. I suspect they see a lot of that....)

Nix, about the "object boundary" thing, I'm probably describing it poorly -- it's not that things are actually blurring(*) or distorting, but from any distance, the shelves and piles of stuff start looking like one big (still annoying) mass, instead of piles of individual objects. I can still go up to them and reach for individual items.

* Blurring comes later -- at that point, I know I'm really fried.

Brother Guy @97: Oh, bravo! That's wonderful. Non fanatici tantum lectores -- your contact does have the right of it, it's reading for the delight of it. I'll work the finished version up over the weekend and post it here when I'm satisfied with it. Thanks to everyone for the Latin advice -- I always appreciate the breadth and depth of knowledge on display here.

Avram @195: Twitter doesn't have a business model, which is part of what makes it so maddening. It's the first dot-com bubble all over again. Then again, Twitter can survive for a lot longer without a business model than Facebook can...

Soon Lee at #74 write of parity errors:

> It's an old joke told to me by a friend, I have enough from undergrad compsci to get it, & felt it only proper to inflictshare...

It gets better/worse:

First somebody pipes up to say that an off by one error is not typical of parity errors.

Then somebody else says "No, no - it was a Gray parrot".

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code)

Marna Nightingale @198, Terry Karney @199:

Nowhere in the same league, but the first time I visited Toronto, I read in the newspaper that the City Council had just outlawed 'begging with a weapon'.

I could imagine a court case that this law would have been a response to.

Steve Taylor @ 220... After that, you get cockatoos and threes and...

KeithS @75:
Hey now, some of us remember DECsystem 10 / DECsystem 20....

Lori Coulson @136:
It should be noted that that is itself a translation of ממעמקים (mi-ma`amaqim, "from the deeps" — sometimes the Latin translations are a bit odd, although this time it works (and it even has the derived meaning of "profound", although possibly only in modern Hebrew).

Serge at #222 writes:

>... After that, you get cockatoos and threes and...

Are we going to cover all of the cardinal numbers then?

Hey Serge - do you still have that photo gallery of Making Light people>

Steve Taylor @ 224... Photo gallery? What photo gallery? Oh, THAT photo gallery...

Glinda @ 212: Well, yes, but it does sort of make assembling yet more calm and reasoned arguments on the subject a bit of a waste of time, except as a means of maintaining mental suppleness.

Rob @ 221: Ah, Toronto the Good ... fortunately, to the best of my knowledge this does not apply to the gentleman at Yonge and Bloor who solicits for coin and small bills whilst playing a bagpipe. I think he used at one time to charge $2.00 to play Scotland the Brave and $5.00 to stop playing it once started.

Toronto was also, IIRC, the location of the court case which established that giving away oral sex for free with the purchase of a $50.00 condom was still soliciting within the meaning of the act.

You've heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, right? Well, here's the a trailer for the sequel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

abi # 127: I struggled to describe the first publication of "Bad Monkeys", and you replied "What, on the LFP? Or on the hardcover?"

My memory is fuzzy on this. I do remember thinking that it wasn't a "hardcover" because in my mind that doesn't just mean that the covers are hard, but also that the binding is sewn. I just recall looking at the book, and seeing something that was going to fall apart.

I think it was the species that you described back on http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008719.html as "This combination of a paperback's spine and a hardback's case is disastrous. Books with hard covers generally have squares, meaning that the covers are larger than the book block. Squares look nice, and they allow space for headbands. But they also mean that the edges of the pages of a shelved book hang suspended in the air. Gravity being what it is, the bottom fore corner of the book will slowly drop down, pulling the spine forward at the head of the book. A sewn binding has the integrity to withstand this, but a glued binding does not. Perfect bound hardbacks, given time, last less well than paperbacks, where the entire bottom edge rests on the shelf."

I waited for the paperback, and bought it.

Serge #213: Correct!

Fragano @ 229... Mind you, while only one of them was Welsh, both could have been considered fiery.

Linkmeister @ 227... coughgagsplutter! What's next? Emma and Emanations? Mansfield Park and Monsters?

What's next? Emma and Emanations? Mansfield Park and Monsters?

Well, Austen only wrote a few books, but if you branch out into other genres, you can do a lot more.

For instance, there seems to me to be a whole untapped line of affinity between classic political philosophy and horror. Just think of the titles you could do: The Prince of the Underworld, Leviathan Awakes, Two Arcane Unspeakable Treatises of Government, On the Indelible Social Convenant in Blood...

geekosaur @223:

Cool -- That translation I cited is from the King James Version, and they get rather elaborate (poetic?) in the way they extracted it from the Latin. Later English translations tend to be more blunt and lacking in flow.

Hmm, now I wonder if Latin was the language from which the KJV bunch derived their version of the Bible...off to Google...

Serge @ 231: Persuasion and Poltergeists, of course

232: I like it. Hume's "An Enquiry concerning the Merciful Inability Of the Human Mind to Fully Correlate Its Contents", perhaps. Kant's "A Critique of Pure Unreasoning Madness". Russell & Whitehead's "Principia Necronomia".

Linkmeister @208, thanks for the link--that appears, touch wood, to have ended the exchange. But people remain stranger than anybody.

ajay @235, then there's Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Zombies in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick".

Yum!

#220 Steve

Regarding the Gray parrot, parity errors, parody errors....

Hamming it up, are they?

Adam Smith's "A Theory of Horrible Centipedes"?

Serge #222: This made me think of the late Victorian newspaper which printed a question and answer column (it made up the questions as well as the answers). One week, it is said to have included the following gem: "Does Mrs Edward Langtry have any pets?" "Not now, but it is believed that she has had a cockatoo."

Let's not forget John Maynard Keynes' classic: "The General Theory of Entombment, Ingress, and Mummies".

Keynes' ideas have until recently been dismissed by many as no more than pyramid schemes. But neo-Keynesian Paul Krugman warns us that due to our incaution, "the zombie ideas have won".

Apropos of absolutely nothing: You know what I hate? Being lied to. I especially hate being lied to about the symptoms of the problem I'm trying to fix by some idiot user in a timezone 12 hours from mine, so I can't be on the phone with her. Not that that would be a good idea at this point.

I asked her several times if it was problem X that I've seen before and know the cause of, and she insisted that it was problem Y that no one has ever heard of before at all (and no, it wasn't something she could have been mistaken about; it was the difference between "it works for a while, then breaks" and "it doesn't work even at first"). Finally I got her local (for values of "local" that include entire timezones, or three) support guy involved and he asked her for her ID and password so he could try to replicate it on another machine.

Funny, at that point it not only magically became problem X, but went away entirely! This is also the same woman who filed three nearly-identical tickets in rapid succession because her problem wasn't fixed RIGHT NOW. (Oddly enough, her problem wouldn't cause any babies to die, no matter how long it went unfixed.)

Let me say that I also deeply hate The Most Important Person In The World, and I keep meeting him, her, him, her, over and over.

abi: I've got the semi-hardcover of Bad Monkeys on the shelf, I'll take a pic of it real soon now. It looks hardbound process, but the cover is probably the weight of a paperback.

(Matt Ruff is one of those authors that I have a buy on sight order in with Those Who Know Me, due to my love of his first two books and the near impossibility of ever finding copies of them, though, I have to think that S.T. George could be a really fine example of a Merry Stu)

Xopher #242: This is also the same woman who filed three nearly-identical tickets in rapid succession because her problem wasn't fixed RIGHT NOW.

Back in the day when I mentored Windows 95 tech support at Unisys, we had a "cool down" policy for stress reduction: anyone who had to take a phone support call from the NYC or New Jersey area codes earned an automatic five minute break after the call was complete. There were other exceptions, of course, but that covered most of them. Twenty-first century demographics have probably warped the locations of today's worst offenders, though.

John Mark Ockerbloom @ 232: For instance, there seems to me to be a whole untapped line of affinity between classic political philosophy and horror.

You mean Kant's stuff isn't already horror? Oh, wait, political philosophy. Never mind.

Xopher @ 242:

It's a pity this person lives halfway around the world, otherwise I'd be very tempted to introduce them to My Very Special Friend, the claw hammer.

Related: nine types of computer users, particularly the last entry.

Earl, I'm in Hoboken, NJ. Our corporate headquarters is in NYC (I can see it from my desk, which makes me an expert on...never mind). The New Yorkers and New Jerseyans aren't the nicest, but they aren't the worst, either (though maybe now that I've lived in Metro NYC for more than a quarter-century I'm just used to it).

Maybe I should propose that breaks be required for anyone who has to deal with a user in Singapore.

KeithS, I think I've seen all nine of those. Like the guy who asked us for a list of all the users in India...twice. See, he didn't keep the list we gave him the first time, and besides, people might have been hired or laid off.

That one got a real no, but only the second time. My boss made us do it the first time. She finally realized that he was going to ask for a new list every quarter, and we told him he should go through corporate governance and get a new report developed (or some other way of telling him, in polite corporate language, to fuck off and die).

A first in the wish-it-wouldn't-happen department: I just got off the phone with a charity solicitor [*] who insisted on asking me *why* I didn't give any business to charities or companies who solicited me over the phone. I replied that that was a personal decision and none of his business. After that, things went way downhill. This has got to be the first time any of them has ever given me any talkback on that point.

[*] expecting a delivery person to call to arrange a delivery time, so of course I pick up.

KeithS #245:

I'm not at all clear on where in this pantheon would fall the c. 1980 terminal user who called up the campus broken-computer shop to complain "My terminal is ignoring me." Turned out he was seeing the infamous "parity error ignored" message.

joann #248: Are you on the Do-not-call list? (Or are you outside of it's US range?)

Personally, I'd have hung up immediately at that point.

If I was really bored, I might have started onto various hostile lines, such as "Why do you think I have any obligation to give money to a stranger who calls me out of the blue?", or "what makes you think that calling a stranger and asking them for money is anything but rude and intrusive?" Not to mention the classic "and what's the full name and mail address of the company you're calling from?" or even "well, I have a few worthy causes of my own. What's your home phone number?"

But I'm rarely that bored.

David #250:

Oops. I *was* on both the national and state lists, but I moved in April, and forgot to do that bit. Unfortunately, it doesn't apply to charities.

And as noted, this was the first time my relatively polite demur has failed.

Maybe I need something like "Strange persons called at random grudgingly distributing a few coins is no basis for a system of charity" or near offer.

The subject of a Firefox Greasemonkey script which helps you keep track of what Making Light comments you've read by graying out comments which have already been opened (or at least which were visible on a comment page that you opened) came up in the Service Advisory thread. Patrick has now kindly put a link to that script in the right sidebar under the "More What" header. Do note that if Firefox crashes, or is closed and reopened, the script (not surprisingly) loses its memory, but that just means that the worst case scenario, of reentering after a Firefox crash, is no worse than the current one. All comments simply return to the unmarked case.

KeithS #245:

That list is definitely missing an item or few. In my brief stints doing tech support, the most memorable users I've run into were the technophobes, who might:

• Be unable (that is, unwilling) to read the screen, or (later) to notice modal popups.
• Push keys at random, often in response to critical error messages or confirmation dialogs.
• Reboot or power-cycle while the computer is processing their last request. ("It was hung!" -- after 10 seconds, even with an hourglass showing.)

These often showed a fair bit ofcovert (or outright) hostility toward the computer or programs, with predictable results.

More recently, I've been helping my Mom, who is pretty bright (and persistent), but oddly unable to deal with modal behavior -- for example, she keeps forgetting how to use extended selections. (Admittedly, Windows XP's interface is pretty bad, and some of her applications manage to confuse me.)

I did tech support when 286 machines were hot shit and buying a Compaq 386 was a wild extravagance.

Windows? What's that? We sold and supported stuff like dBASE III, Lotus 1-2-3, and Wordstar 4.0 running on DOS. We sold thousands and thousands of people their first hard disk drives, which I helped them low level format and partition:

"Boot to DOS.

At the A> prompt, type DEBUG and wait for a dash to appear.

Enter G=c800:5

. . ."

Um, that's all I recall. Some stuff about cylinders and interleaving followed. I could probably do it if you put a IBM PC with a Seagate 20 mb drive and a Western Digital controller in front of me.

* * *

The worst customer was a loony lady from New Orleans whose husband bought her a Compaq 386 "because she wanted to get into CAD."

She didn't know anything about computers. It was a whim sort of thing. She was getting a computer, and it had to be the absolute top of the line. The commissioned sales people saw it her way.

My fellow tech support people and I dreaded her calls. She wasn't stupid by a long shot, but she made absolutely insane demands and was verbally abusive.

Once a former support guy turned manager heard me having difficulties with her latest demand. ("How do I kick the PGA* card into EGA** emulation mode***?") He rolled his eyes and offered to take the call to show me how a pro did the job. He looked stunned after a few minutes. She'd threatened to come to Long Island and, um, neuter him.

Eventually her husband returned the system.

There were many, many other sad, stupid, sometime heartbreaking stories. Cables not connected, multiple floppies stuck in drives, monitors not turned on. Most people were really nice. I got thanked when I helped them figure things out. But the loony from New Orleans is the only customer I remember by name. Her and Bob Pickles. How can you forget a name like that? He was a nice guy as I recall.

* Thousand dollar plus high-resolution graphics card supported by a few really high end software packages.

** Several hundred dollar consumer level graphics card supported by common game / graphics software.

*** She was guessing and hoping that the PGA card had a EGA emulation mode, because the PGA card was doing her no good whatsoever. And if didn't have an emulation mode, it was our fault.

Stefan Jones @ 254, I did in-house support when we installed the first IBM PCs with hard drives. I absolutely dreaded the thought of users trying to format new floppy diskettes (the 5 1/4" size; remember those?).

"No, No! Be sure you type A when you type the word FORMAT! It should read c>: FORMAT A:"

"Now, don't hit Enter untill you're sure you've got Drive A specified. Have you got Drive A specifed after the word FORMAT?"

"Oh, hell. When did you back up your files?"

#255: I just recalled a case involving a particularly difficult to explain problem. A lady who'd purchased a PC from us couldn't get a floppy to format.

I tried everything I could think of . . . spelling, "0" instead of "O" in FORMAT, orientation (think of all the ways you can insert a 5.25" floppy wrong), etc.

I was struck with an inspiration. I had her hold the floppy and look at the little round sector alignment window while turning the disk. Instead of one little hole per rotation, she saw many. Bingo! She'd purchased a box of fixed sector floppies from the local computer store.

She was livid at me, as the available representative of the computer industry, for this cruel trick, but when I explained that I'd almost made the same mistake when I bought my first PC she felt a lot better.

joann @ 248 ...
A first in the wish-it-wouldn't-happen department: I just got off the phone with a charity solicitor [*] who insisted on asking me *why* I didn't give any business to charities or companies who solicited me over the phone.

I'm prone to replies along the lines of "I don't know who you're really calling from, and I don't want to have my identity stolen and my good name ruined ... Why are you asking me all these questions anyways!!!!"

... and following it up, if necessary, with "Why don't you give me your number, and I'll call back if I'm interested ..."

... and if necessary beyond that, "Why do you have a problem with that??? My bank doesn't have a problem with that! I knew it! You won't give me the number to call back because you're not really calling for [organization name] are you!!!"

Stefan, fortunately when users become verbally abusive, we're allowed to hang up. And report them (it's an internal support organization for a large company). So then THEY (potentially) get fired.

That woman sounds like the sort of person whose name everyone should know. Write it on bathroom walls. (Of course, since this is what, 25 years ago? you have to use a time machine, but hey.)

xeger #257:

But why waste the energy on a phone spammer? His job is to steal a little of your time and attention in an attempt to either force-feed you a (probably fraudulent) sales pitch or force-feed you a (probably fraudulent) beg-for-money pitch. His weapon is your desire to get useful phone calls, and any politeness you have that makes it difficult to hang up when someone is talking. IMO, he's lost any right to courtesy from you by trying to use it as a weapon, and the first second of your time he steals is already more time than he has coming. Let him talk to a hung-up phone, or make his pitch to the next mark.

My response to charities who call for money is along the lines of "I don't give money to charities without looking at their tax-exempt status and their financial statements." If I'm bored, I take a long time to get to this point. I do ask questions about whether they are a volunteer or an employee, who they actually work for, and percentage of money collected that actually goes to the charity. I try to verify this with the records on file in New York.
The New York State Attorney General's office tracks the mandatory registration of telephone fund raising, and does a yearly report. On average, the charity only gets about 40% of the donated money. In the worst case last year, the charity LOST MONEY because the amount raised didn't cover the costs of the professional fund-raising company. I much prefer the case where the charity got more money than was raised because the fund-raising organization didn't meet their minimum goal (someone wrote a smart contract).

Xopher #246: Maybe I should propose that breaks be required for anyone who has to deal with a user in Singapore.

Stress management is extremely important in support organizations (whether technical, product or customer); sometimes it's hard to recognize impending burnout. A generous break policy is good. An in-house chair massage station would be good too, if you can manage to convince the Great Powers that the expense will improve quality of service.

Of course, all bets are off, if you're in the kind of company where the executives wash their Maybachs with the tears of unfathomable sadness of laid-off former employees.

albatross @ #259 ...
But why waste the energy on a phone spammer? [ ... ] IMO, he's lost any right to courtesy from you by trying to use it as a weapon, and the first second of your time he steals is already more time than he has coming. Let him talk to a hung-up phone, or make his pitch to the next mark.

It's not much energy -- and when it comes down to it, I've had the dubious pleasure of taking any job that I could get... it doesn't cost me much to be polite.

That said, I rarely have to go beyond "No Thank you, I'm not interested."

joann @ 248, David @ 250: Maybe you would find it worth downloading some of the various published telemarketing call counter-script flow charts, so if it happens again and you get bored or annoyed enough, you can just start running your own call script on them. (I used to know somebody who somewhat enjoys getting telemarketing calls - he immediately starts sympathetically asking about the comfort of the phone headset they're using and segues into trying to sell them a new phone headset. They find that very confusing.)

The alarming thing about that call is that usually organizations (charity or commercial) don't allow their telemarketers to deviate from the scripts they're given. One hopes that this was a case of the particular caller being a jerk on their own initiative, rather than their organization deciding on a new policy to harass the callees who decline their kind offer to accept all the money you can give them.

As far as I'm concerned, if a telephone solicitor continues making a pitch after I say "No, thanks," they're being rude, not me, and I have no compunction about just hanging up the phone.

Clifton #263: ... segues into trying to sell them a new phone headset. They find that very confusing.

LOL!

The inimitable Neddie Jingo had an interesting saga in this vein...

First, he got a call offering him a job -- not in user-interface design (which is what he was looking for), but supposedly selling insurance. Except... once he started asking questions, the place sounded more like a pyramid scheme! He seriously considered actually going for the interview and playing with their heads, but when he actually got there... he found them too pitiable to go through with it.

I only have a cellphone, so when someone calls for a charity or politics, I tell them they're violating the law.

I had an interesting phone conversation with a support person today. She was fine, but the policy is definitely stupid. I use Peapod to bring me heavy and bulky items and the list is now about 352 items when I buy about 20 every eight weeks. Each line has the info on the item plus a space for a trash can icon so you can take the item off the list. I have trash can icons on things I buy every time, like multi-packs of toilet paper, and no trash can icons on things I haven't bought in years, like Gatorade (too much sugar).

So I asked if they could put trash can icons on all the lines and I could take the items off that I won't buy again. She told me that there's no way to do that and items will fall off the list after three years. So what about the items I use all the time that have trash can icons? It's been less than eight weeks, not three years. Oh, those are things I also sometimes buy at the store (Giant) so they keep the trash can icons forever.

Definitely stupid.

Marilee @ 266

Clearly you need to, just once, go to the store and buy each item you want to be able to delete. Drop them off at a food pantry, and (with luck) come home to a trash can icon.

Well, it MIGHT work.

Anyone know if gmail is experiencing technical difficulties? I have no new email since 9 a m.

It is possible that nobody sent me anything but I feel this is not likely since I am on a bunch of mailing lists right now.

Neither signing out-and-in nor refreshing the inbox helps.

I just checked my gmail account and it had new stuff in it. Maybe it's just you?

Oh, jeez.

Walter Cronkite is dead.

Usually when someone who had a long life and a momentousness career dies I say "sad but not sorry."

But damn. If he wasn't suffering and was of sound mind, I wish he'd have lasted five more days.

He would be the only choice to host commemorative stuff about the first Apollo landing.

My first Cronkite-as Cronkite memory: Nov. 22, 1963. Up till then he'd just been the guy who read the news in the evening.

Stefan, you're right, though. Nobody else will be able to do the landing commemorations with the sense of history he'd have had.

Xopher and others: You might be interested in Tech Support Comedy.

I just popped out to the store for some grape juice, and was treated to an amazing sunset. We had a layer of very high clouds (mammatus clouds, in fact) thinning to the west. Where I was, the sun was already below the horizon, but the cloud layer caught the light, bathing everything in a shadowless glow that started out yellow and gradually dimmed to pale orange. It was magical.

Stefan, yes to what you said at Mr. Cronkite.

For a long time after I started watching the news, Cronkite was the news.

If there something after death, I hope he gets to see the Moon and Mars, and any of our future efforts to attain humans' presence on those two planets.

Blessings.

FWIW, CNN.com has a photo of Cronkite holding an Apollo model, demonstrating the separation before landing - the command module is in one hand, and the entire landing module, still packed up, in the other.

#275: Cronkite fooling with those models was how I learned about the intricate Apollo choreography.

I have a Man in Space model kit here. Redstone, Atlas, Titan, Saturn Ib, Saturn V, the latter two with curled=up LEMs. I sprayed on the primer the other day, but lost all enthusiasm and energy when I started sanding yesterday evening. Now I think I'll keep at it.

I'm not driven desperately mad by charity calls. Or doorstopping, or street solicitation.

Possibly I am just terminally placid. Possibly they're much politer in Canada. Partly, I *hate* solicitation by mail. I'd rather take the call than toss out the flyer.

This is probably partly due to having worked (not as a fundraiser, before anyone offers to dip me in boiling oil) for enough charities and political parties to know how it all works, which is, some people will *only* give money by phone, some people will only do it by mail, some people will only do it in person, and some only online ... and to stay solvent a charity has to try it all, despite the fact that nearly everyone has one strongly preferred method of giving and one or two that they cannot stand being solicited by.

I don't even mind if they ask why I won't give by phone, as in my experience "because I do all of my giving online" gets me off their call list.

Sadly, two of the charities we support most regularly - monthly withdrawal - are two of the worst for taking one off the mailing list. I won't say which, as they both do a fantastic job of necessary work and I'm afraid I'm not willing to risk putting anybody off them.

The RNLI, on the other hand, is fantastic about taking one off - at least, about taking overseas donors off; it is possible that they are less good about UK donors. I sent them a polite email explaining that I generally gave to the Canadian Coast Guard Auxilliary and had donated to them as a one-off in gratitude for having had a friend I value pulled out of the North Sea. I got a lovely and short email back and haven't heard a word since. (I was a bit sad to do it, as if you give the RNLI money they will send you a magazine that is actually full of interesting articles about ocean rescue, not just a begging letter with staples down the spine, but at nearly 3 GBP postage a time and me never apt to donate again I didn't think it was right of me to let my entire donation be gradually eaten up by administration costs...)

Rikibeth @ 214:

Do you know whether any of those flat-but-lifting shoes come in wide widths?

I currently have sneakers, sandals that I am not looking forward to having to replace because the specific design has apparently been discontinued after 30-odd years, and some winter boots that almost fit. I do not enjoy shoe shopping.

Oh, and since this an open thread and it's just come to mind: does anyone know of a shoe store in New York City, or in Cambridge or Somerville, Mass., that carries boots in a boy's size 6.5 or so and will welcome me and let me try them on, instead of chasing me away because "that doesn't come in a women's size 8 wide." I don't need gendered shoes--these aren't for sex, they're for walking around the city in.

#278 Vicki

Try K-Mart.... they didn't bother me when I was trying boys' boots on.

Vicki: have you tried Keen's?

I have very narrow feet, and therefore wear Merrell's a lot - like, "if they ever start doing high heels I'll never need another shoemaker" levels of "a lot" , but every wide-footed shoe-loving woman I know seems to worship the Keen's. They make everything from good-enough-for-Ottawa winter boots to light hikers to kicky little dress-casual shoes, prices in the 80-110 USD range, quality very good.

http://www.keenfootwear.com/

The boots are under BLVD on the website, for some reason unclear to me.

The storefinder suggests that they are widely available in all three cities.

For winter boots Sorels are kind of the gold standard in Canada, and not unreasonably - they tend to last and last - and while the women's run average-to-wide to account for winter socks, there are many, many unisex styles, recognised as such by the company, so no Sorel dealer should give you that hassle. They apparently sold out last winter due to the impressive badness of the weather - so I was told when I triumphantly scored what seemed to be the last pair of women's 9s in Ottawa for my adopted kid - but should be reappearing fairly soon.

REI appears to carry them.

Vicki @278, try http://www.pennangalan.com, or google New Rock boots.

Those sources aren't cheap, but there are definitely wide widths available, as men wear these boots too. I know one gentleman, already moderately tall, who'll accessorize his best coat with a pair of six inch platform New Rocks on one end, and a top hat on the other -- can't possibly miss him in a crowd when he does that!

Have you tried places like REI or Eastern Mountain Sports for the boys' boots? Or are hiking boots not what you want?

Specifically, Keen's Bern Boot:

http://www.keenfootwear.com/product/fw09/shoes/women/market%20street/bern%20high%20boot

appears to have a goodish heel. Plus, phwoar. Almost makes me wish I had wide feet ... they can't be that much harder to cover than AAAA's are.

Back on the Asperger's thing, I have an online friend who teaches special needs kids diagnosed with autism. She came to visit over a weekend about a year ago, we'd not met in person before. After a bit she got to looking at me with that Professional Eye and said had I ever been tested? I said certainly not, why would I? She said I was in her opinion more higher on that ol' spectrum than not.

So when Nix posted a link to that test Nix posted a link to back some months, I lept on it like a kitten on yarn, all gung-ho, storm the torpedoes and nevermind the light cav. I'd show her, I thought, I'll whip through this thing and get my Official Certificate of Total Normality. I put my idear of there being an OCoTN in the first place in the box where I keep annoying ideas and cranked on the test.

Whereupon I scored rather higher than I thought I should. I did it wrong, I figured, or the test is one of those typically totally annoying innernets testy things where they don't account for my specialness. So I got my partner to take it. G'wan, I said, I need validation here. She did, and was somewhat nonplussed to score in the Totally Normal range.

That left Doing It Wrong. 'S okay, I do stuff wrong lots. I can deal. Maybe I overthought the whole thing. I'll give it another go, putting my idea about giving it another go being a marker of good sense in the annoying ideas box, and this time tried it without giving the questions pondering and due deliberation and so on.

That got me an even higher score. Well, I thought, this *is* disturbing. I am going to have to contact online friend and apologise for treating her questions as the ravings of someone who can't leave work at work when she goes on holiday. Which I did and she was quite nice about it.

My little brother's always been a bit off (I've never been off, except when I have), I mean smart enough and all, but he's iffy on when to stop talking and when to offer hugs, and his kids are autistic. And my family's public attitude has always been 'isolated phenomenon' and if there weren't such classifications we'd been well, singing to communicate, that's different but hey, nothing to get excited about.

My online friend asked how I felt about the test thing, and I said it was a bit upsetting but it's not like there's something *wrong* really. I'm still who I am. It's positive in that I have a category to assign to those times when I do or say stuff that weirds out everyone else in the room. I don't cope well with parties, or with new people, or with bling, but none of that is debilitating. I work from home and don't have to deal with people face-to-face much, and I live in a small community where newness is rare. I like that. I've always liked that. The world I see every day contains quite as much newness as I can appreciate, just in birdsong.

Possibly the best thing about doing so much online is that I can turn the computer off and walk away when it's all too much. Used to be when I'd messed up somehow, I knew because there was someone in front of me, going on about what feckless thing I'd done or said, at length, and preventing me from following along the text of my book. My usual coping strategy was to wait for a pause, and apologise. I'm really very sorry, I've no idea what possessed me, I'll try to do better. Now I just walk off from the computer, before I do or say/write something irredeemably witless. Mostly. This may be one of those irredeemably witless writings. I'm not sure though, so I'll post it anyway.

If it is, I'm really very sorry, I've no idea what possessed me, and I'll try to do better. Really.

pericat @ 283 ...
The phrase that comes to mind for me is "high functioning" ;) It sounds like you're sorted out well in life for handling things that you know are problematic to you -- and for arranging your life to work well with those arrangements.

xeger, that's what my online friend said. That I'd absolutely arranged my life to minimize stressful stuff and accentuate the stuff I deal with well. So I feel okay with inviting people come round, and be 99% sure I won't do or say anything out of overload that would disgrace me. Still, having someone come round for a visit and say, I know a box you'd fit in, well, that feels more than a little like waking up with a radio collar. :)

Just came back from the local SF club's monthly meeting... Dr Larry Crumpler gave a presentation about the Mars Rovers, and I was so amazed by how well lit the photos were that I had to ask if there had been some image manipulation. He said no, and that daylight on Mars is like 3pm in October. Things were a bit disorganized at first because the owner of the premises where meetings are normally held had locked himself out so we all hopped into our respective vehicles and drove across town to an Indian restaurant. Victor Milán's car died on the way. Everything eventually got cleared up. At the end, I introduced myself to a writer who seldom attends and I don't think I gave my name, but, the moment I opened my mouth, he knew who I was because he lurks around here. Must be that Christophe Lambert accent that gave me away again. And no, I had not made a single pun tonight.

Vicki @ 278: I don't need gendered shoes--these aren't for sex, they're for walking around the city in.

I've had similar conversations with shoe-store salescritters in recent months. "I've been looking at these Keds, but they've all got these weird slippery areas on the soles, and deep ridges where the soles will crack after very little use. Do you have any in a style like this but with better soles? Like they used to be two years ago?"

"But these are women's sneakers!"

"Yeah, well, they're plain white, and canvas, and they fit my feet. I don't see anything about them that makes them male or female. No dangly bits, right?"

And I just get this blank confused look from them.

pericat @ 285: that feels more than a little like waking up with a radio collar. :)

But it isn't a Cone of Shame.

Dave Bell @ 143

A lot of things started to change in the second half of the Nineteenth Century

Steampunk Torchwood: "The 19th century is when everything changes!"

Regarding the "charity phone solicition" discussion--I got 14 charity phone calls today. Five in a single hour. I would say I got just as many yesterday, only I didn't bother to count ( which is why I counted today, because I couldn't believe it).

I don't like to be rude either--mostly because it's a waste of energy--but I've gotten to the point that whey the caller says "May I speak to [insert mispronounced version of my name here]", I respond with "No, you may not," and hang up.

Does anyone have any idea why my phone number should suddenly have become so attractive to charity calls? Caller ID does help, by the way, but not enough, and I can't help but wonder what's going on.

A man without a moral code is just an appetite
King Strut was on a diet, growing luminous by eating light

amazonfail, Act II?

#291: Well, that's the end of the Kindle.

Summary: Amazon have removed ebooks from Kindles and refunded the payment for them, without any warning, and little or no explanation.

It looks as though some third-party ebook supplier loaded two books into Amazon's system for which they didn't have rights (though under Berne Convention rules they would be out of copyright). When the authorised publisher noticed, and challenged Amazon, this happened.

I can see the potential here for mistakes, but Amazon made the big mistake of not telling customers what was happening.

#293: And (you can't make this up) the books removed were "1984" and "Animal Farm".

For more, see Boing Boing.

Earl Cooley III @ 291...

"Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store."

Publishers are a rarity?

Henry Allingham, WW1 veteran, has died. Battle of Jutland, founder member of the RAF, and, almost incidentally, for a few months the World's oldest man.

A couple of stray items:

RIP Walter Cronkite.. Now journalism is dead. Favorite user comment (highlighted by the authors:) “i don’t believe walter cronkite has departed. not until I hear it from him!”

Last year's big Computerworld article on Asperger's just got re-juiced by NPR.

Favorite comments from the BB KindleFail article:

Phikus: So are we going to see Fahrenheit 451 become Kindling next?

JL Bryan: "Doublekindle": To both own an ebook, and to not own it, simultaneously.

PS: Yay, "blockquote" now spans multiple paragraphs!

The choice of books here is so perfect, I almost expect it to have been a set-up.

re 291: That's reason #2 why I'm not interested.

Charity calls: Most of ours come at dinner: 800 numbers at that hour don't get answered. Anyone who doesn't take "no" the first time gets "I'm sorry, we're not interested, goodbye," click.

re 264: For quite a while we had one of Wells Fargo's boiler room operations next door to our office. I believe it was mortgage re-fi or something like that. Anyway it was two large rooms, one completely filled with cubes, the other with a row of small offices on either side. Most of the time it would sit there, unused; there every so often there would be some signs of activity, and then one day there would be a big moving in party, and the cubes would all be filled by nice reasonably clean-cut young people who would man the place for a few months. And then another day would come and everyone would pack up and go away. This happened several times, and then a few months ago all the furniture disappeared and the space has been empty ever since.

David Harmon @ 265: The day after I updated my resume on monster.ca, I received an E-mail message from the local "Investors Group" group, inviting me to consider a change of career and become a financial planning consultant.

My instant reaction was that there was no way that I'd switch to a career involving giving people advice that I, myself, would not consider taking.

Then, out of curiosity, I did a bit of googling, followed by a close examination of what little information they made available about their organization. It appears that their system involves getting people to pay thousands of dollars for training to become independent consultants for them. These consultants are paid by commission only, and I don't see any mention that they receive any certification or qualification that's not specific to that company. The organization offers great "benefits", in that one can become part of their group insurance plan.

The website for the local group doesn't mention anything about the costs of training, nor much about the organization.

Maybe it's not really a pyramid scheme, but it sure looks like one.

The thing about all those nice online stores is that I know, experientially, that I am not good at returning things that don't fit. So I'd really rather shop in a store, where I can try things on, at least the first time.

And it's not about "do they carry them," it's about "if I tell a salesman I want the boy's 6.5, will he go get them for me?" since most shoestores don't have every size just there to try on (and I have found no satisfaction at PayLess, which does use that model). I have, in fact, been told (almost in so many words) to go away, that doesn't come in a women's size, by shoe salesmen who saw me browsing. While I don't believe most of the paeans to capitalism or the market, I'm willing to give this a try: offer the merchants the chance to make money by selling what I want to buy, despite evidence that many would rather reinforce their gender bias and/or ideas of my and their gender identity.

#290, Tim Walters: Just call me Dwight.

Vicki @302: You could always invent a fictitious preteen son with feet the same size as yours ... it works for some transfolks buying 'wrong-gender' clothes. Along with "I'm in a play," which also tends to get good responses from salesfolks.

Abi @ 126 (yes, I'm way behind!)

One thing I really appreciated about Dutch supermarkets was the extreme lack of such hyperactive craziness. In a big enough American supermarket (locally, a newer Fred Meyer), I can end up with the equivalent of con glaze wandering around trying to find something.

That said, my one exposure to Dutch supermarkets was the underground one near the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. We may go back to Amsterdam and parts surrounding during the Christmas holidays (now that the direct PDX flight to Frankfurt has been cancelled, the direct flight to Amsterdam is it from here).

Mary Frances @289 A cautionary tale. Once I got totally fed up with phone marketers mispronouncing my name (was pre-do-not-call, so there were more of them). The third person who called in about an hour saying "Is this Mrs. [mispronounced name]" got treated to a mini-rant.

It turned out to be the coach of my first grader's new soccer team.

It's never since been someone I actually wanted to talk to, but I've never since been snarky about it.

Sigh.

I've sensed I was different since day one. But it doesn't match the Aspergers description very closely. (Stuff nobody ever heard of and I can hardly describe.) But my mom thinks it fits me, just on the strength of a few Temple Grandin books. She won't leave it alone.
She says I am high-functioning, but I don't think being articulate counts when I have never managed to do well in school or get a really decent job. I go by results--whether it's enough money to secure one's future or just the peace of mind that comes from having loyal friends (do such people even exist?)
I said I didn't care how many Temple Grandin books she read, I have read just as many by H.P. Lovecraft (she isn't familiar with him so it was kind of wasted on her) and finally I had to just say we will never discuss this again.
It doesn't help when a whole string of people tell you that you are real smart and then turn around and treat you like a moron--by not listening, by saying you are in denial, by stubbornly lumping together things that ought to be kept apart, and if you do manage to get in a good point they still wiggle away, as if unwilling to admit that they are ignorant, projecting it onto you instead.
I think that the "autistic spectrum" (just 1 dimension? why not a whole color-solid??) is being used as a catch-all for a whole lot of people that aren't served that well by it. It seems like anyone who is introverted, or more interested in things/ideas than people, or with some sensory anomaly, or having any sort of social problem, is in danger of being lumped in with the autistics. This doesn't advance knowledge any, and it isn't fair to the real autistics and people with Aspergers either.
All my life I have had to defend my right to be things-and-ideas oriented, because I couldn't get good enough grades to make it pay off and so silence the people who disrespected me. Now they are telling me that maybe I do have a right to exist but only as *their* label. It really ticks me off, and some of them have learned to shut up in my presence. Final irony, though, I might have to go along with something like that officially just to get benefits for all the other problems (mostly physical) assailng me.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have squeezed the umbilical cord as soon as I had hands to squeeze with, and skipped this whole travesty of a life. I have the sort of temperament/personality that most needs to be independent, but am missing some of the mental fixings needed to secure it, plus now I have health issues. At least I am not being abused like when I was a kid, but I don't want to get old in this culture and don't know where else I can go.
I live in hope that in the future this mess will be straightened out by people who can convince the shrinkos and so on that neuro-anomalies are a lot more diverse than what the degree'd ones have come up with. But it won't happen by itself, we have to work on it--alone and together both.
(Yes, I've taken some of those online tests, and their results have varied enough to make me think all such tests are just plain crude.)
I can only add that this site is one of my lifelines.

Elliot: Thanks for the suggestions. I will use those if I need to, though I would rather find a store that wants my custom, as a woman with wide feet who is (pick one) not strongly attached to gender, or confident enough of my gender not to worry that it will be damaged by the "wrong" shoes.

Ouch, Angiportus. I can think of nothing to say, other than that I read what you wrote and send sympathy. I've been luckier being strange -- not so much financially but in finding solid friends some of whom value me just for who I am.

Angiportus #307: I think that the "autistic spectrum" (just 1 dimension? why not a whole color-solid??) is being used as a catch-all for a whole lot of people that aren't served that well by it.

Quite likely -- both the educational system and the media are prone to "everything looks like a nail" fads. That said, there are indeed edge cases, and "kinda-sorta-autistics" around. The autistic spectrum is a perfectly reasonable section on the map of human diversity, but "the map is not the terrain".

And in fact, some people have tried to sub-categorize autistics into qualitative types, but (1) we really don't have enough understanding of the details to make that work, and (2) the commonalities are generally more significant than any of the subtype distinctions that have been proposed.

Perhaps the most useful split would be between "verbal" and "non-verbal" autistics, but even that seems a bit iffy to me. There's a clear agenda for the distinction, because verbal capabilities are so important in our society, but it doesn't follow that the underlying neurological differences are equally significant.

And something culled from a comment in Cute Overload:

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ ʍoH

David Goldfarb (#124) Thank you, that eases my mind.

Lori (#136, 233) Either "from the depths of The City" or "out of the depths of The City" function fairly much the same for motto purposes. I saw the first professional Sydney staging of 'Man of La Mancha' when young and enjoyed it a lot — Dulcinea seems to have stuck best. Must burrow back into the music.

Sources for the Authorized (King James') Version: according to the W*k*p*d** page:

In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from the Textus Receptus (Received Text) series of the Greek texts. The Old Testament was translated from the Masoretic Hebrew text, while the Apocrypha were translated from the Greek Septuagint (LXX), except for 2 Esdras, which was translated from the Latin Vulgate.

While we're remembering Henry (#296) and Walter (#297), isn't it Hunter's birthday? *wanders elseweb* Ah yes: some Latin from Anita.

Angiportus (#307) I agree there's probably a lot more complex interaction and different possibilities than often allowed for. Few of us fit into any single simple box. There was at least one online test with results shown as a multidimensional plot, but I can't find its URL presently.

Meanwhile, The Ashes series continues, currently at Lords, filling otherwise-useful broadcast time. At least I don't have to worry I'm missing anything interesting if I turn off while it's on during these long cold nights.

Noelle @ way upthread - We used to play the game of identify a publisher by the cover art. This worked well all through high school: Baen was easy. Daw and Del Ray were also distinctive. Ace and Tor took a bit more work. Certain artists also worked primarily for one publisher and I could spot those spines from 5 feet back (the other spine-marked were Baen, because if the MMP had a gold spine or heraldicly correct gold letters in a serif, pretty good chances I knew who the publisher was). So, consider if you want your covers to stand out as being from your imprint or to blend in with everything else on the shelves.

Joel @ 287 - The running gag of CVG this year. After 4 days, I was tired of it...On the other hand, after 4 days, I was tired of the Con. Last year it was special. This year? not so much.

Via the Anticipation masquerade rules:
If you are fond of puns, remember that many jeux-de mots do not survive the switch from one language to another. We can suggest alternatives, but again only if we have plenty of time.

The only appropriately bilingual pun that comes to mind just now involves pre-party cleaning and preparation being done by a group of three people ... [0]

[0] ... waits for somebody to provide the 'correct' translation ... ;)

PNH @ 303: Only if you're looking for employment.

xeger @ 314... Un ménage à trois?

Serge @ 316 ... mais oui!

Angiportus @307:

I'm sorry you've found things so difficult.

As for labels, even when they're correct, sometimes they help and sometimes they hurt. I find it useful to name the thing that trips me up, and find out what other areas, as yet untested, that I might want to be careful about. But a word like "Aspie" can become a fence, discouraging one from trying things that are, in the end, worth the effort*.

But most of these things are bucket diagnoses, defined and recognized symptomatically. And because they're buckets, it's far too easy to think that they hold everything and everyone. They don't, of course, and it's worth being mindful of the people who are damaged by that.

-----
* Community moderation springs to mind in this context; can't think why...

Angiportus #307: If I had it to do all over again, I would have squeezed the umbilical cord as soon as I had hands to squeeze with, and skipped this whole travesty of a life.

I can sympathize with the feeling, as I've shared it myself at various times. (And yeah, clueless people trying to "fix you" doesn't help a whit.) There have been long periods where I cursed the quirks of my psychology that kept me from committing suicide. I still don't completely understand those, but I've come to accept them -- and the darkness has passed.

You don't say how old you are, but I found high school pretty useless, except for the few friends I made there (in the "Learning Center" for what were then called "learning-disabled" kids). College was even more frustrating, as I was starting to grasp people's expectations of me, and didn't understand why I couldn't seem to meet them. Now I'm in my early 40's, and I feel like in some ways, my life is just beginning (or at least starting over), as I've begun to understand how I relate to the society around me. I'm living on my own, but with support from nearby family members. I'm still living on disability (originally for the depression), but I'm also starting to rebuild my life and rediscover my own interests. My frequent despair has been balanced by friends(*) and family, and by my assortment of interests, (Also, moving to a more rural area has done effing wonders for my mental state!)

The thing is, you may not be on the spectrum as defined, but where your problems overlap the spectrum, so will the strategies that can help those problems. Issues that don't fit on the spectrum are likely to show up under other diagnoses -- and the people with those diganoses will have developed their own strategies for dealing with them. This sort of mix-and-match may befuddle the insurance drones and less flexible professionals, but as I said above, "the map is not the terrain". You are whatever you are, and that's what you need to deal with.

It's probably worthwhile for you to sit down with a copy of the DSM, and go down the list of symptoms, not only for the spectrum disorders (including PDD-NOS, which is the spectrum's "miscellaneous bin"), but for anything else that seems to apply. Use that to make your own list of your issues, and bring it to any shrink or other therapist you go to. (If they're not interested in the list, dump them on the spot -- any psych or neuro professional who tries to ignore a detailed written self-report is a hack or worse!)

(*) And yes, there are people who can be loyal friends to "different" people. They don't come along that often, but they are out there, sometimes even in groups (like this one, but I've seen others). Look especially in groups devoted to your own interests, and in clusters or groups of people who are likewise neurodiverse. (And even if you're not on the spectrum, you may well find you can get along with those who are.) Look also for "geek clubs" -- in my city, there's the Neon Guild, and I suspect there are similar groups in many other areas.

Vicki @ 302: Sorry, I might have been unclear: I wasn't suggesting BUYING them online, only that you might want to look at the shoes and see if they move you at all before trekking out to a store. Buying shoes online is for getting the ones you already know fit like a dream only in a different colour.

I don't know about REI myself in terms of customer service, though I have heard excellent things.

If you're by chance coming to WorldCon, I'd be delighted to meet up and go over to the Montreal Mountain Equipment Co-Op with you, because I am prepared to quite seriously bet you the price of a pair of good shoes that they will treat you not only decently but very well indeed, no matter WHAT you ask to try on. Plus the CDN dollar is kind of in the bucket again, so you'll save some money. :-/

I walked in there once with a fresh stress fracture and instructions to buy at least two pairs of (extremely specific and tedious details on what the podiatrist wanted me to buy omitted, but available on request if anyone has a fresh March Fracture), and they spent about two hours bringing me everything they had that seemed even remotely possible.

OK, this is trivial and totally random, but...

You may have seen those "freezer ziplock" bags, with white spaces printed on so you can write info on the bag. I just accidentally discovered that a dry-erase marker will take the white stuff right off the bag! That is, I reached for the wrong marker, rapidly realized my error, and wiped it off -- leaving a silhouette in the "label" space. Hmm...

(For the curious, I was freezing some extras from my latest rice-cooker experiment. Mushrooms, carrots, white onions (from Mom's farm-share, yum), tossed into the pot with the rice. This time, I also tossed in some black pepper and salt, and a packet of Sazón for color. (Yeah, I know it's got MSG too.) Came out pretty good....

Thanks for the kind words, all. I am 53, and have indeed made written self-reports, and I don't put up with a lot of nonsense from those who don't respect me. I learned that the hard way, dealing with first one therapist who kept hounding me about ancestors I didn't even remember, even after I told her how obscure the family history is to start with, and another who did nothing but parrot back to me--in all seriousness-about how much my life sucked. If it was a ploy to get me to say maybe it doesn't suck that much, it didn't work. But it didn't provide any ways out either. And then there was that Fraudian idiot--well, I made couch-stuffing out of him! But it's one thing to bring an overpresumptuous doctor up short, and another to prevail against a senseless bureaucracy such as...I'll spare you the details.
I have some more supportive people working with me now than in the past. So there might be some hope this time.
I live in Pugetropolis, and will at least investigate the suggestions in #319.

Vicki @ 308: Good luck with boys' shoes. If your journeys ever take you to Portland, Oregon, look for Jay's Wide Shoes. They don't stock anything more narrow than a C, bless them.

I am truly, truly sick of the bad faith obstructionism of the various Senators and congresscritters (Ben Nelson, I'm talking to you!) who can't see how important it is to (at least) begin to repair the damage the current pay-or-die health care system has done to the country. (Deep breath...)

Someone who shall be nameless has suggested what could be a solution. The internets, in its wonder and glory, has hackers. Haz we got hackers! These hackers could, if they were so inclined, hack into the computer systems of the insurance companies in which the medical and financial information for the above Senators and congresscritter is stored -- or, even better, the systems which store the information for their children, their grandchildren, their aging parents -- and f*** with it. Of course, all these systems have back-up systems, so the information isn't gone for good, oh, heavens no. The solution requires nothing cruel, nothing irrevocable. The solution merely attempts to give the Senators and congresscritters a taste of what it feels like to deal with an insurance company that can't find your data. Never mind that you sent it to them twice. Never mind that your kid is having what could be a life-threatening asthma attack now now now and the only thing the hospital wants to know is who is going to pay the bill and sorry, there's no record of you in our system. Imagine, if you will, the frantic phone calls from daughters and sons and aging parents to the various senators and congresscritters when their insurance goes away. Once. Twice. Next week. Next month. (But you told me you fixed that problem! What's wrong with you people!)

Of course, no one would ever actually implement this. THAT WOULD BE WRONG.

Angiportus #322: Ooh, sounds like you've had some real stinkers. Freudian theory vs. neurological issues? Ouch! Let alone Rogerian technique, which is what the "repeater" was probably trying. (I have no idea what the ancestor guy was on about.) And being 10 years older than me, you probably had even less support than I did though high school and grade school. (I envy the younger folks -- when I was in high school, even the special-ed teachers were basically guessing....)

Have you tried Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy/Training? There are a fair number of hacks in the field (the idea looks so simple ;-) ), but the good ones can be pretty helpful.

Lizzy L @ 324 ...
[much emotionalism removed, to be replaced by some of my own]

(1) Crackers, not hackers. If you want somebody to maliciously break into system, Crackers.
(2) Why yes, clearly it's a great idea to violate privacy, rights, and endanger health of -uninvolved parties- to prove a point... not to mention very likely screwing over a bunch of other people, starting with anybody that got talked into trying something that dumb, moving on to the folk responsible for the systems, through the folk that have to deal with the mess that would get created, including checking/finding backups, notifying anybody that might have been affected, going over all of the records for anybody that might have been affected, to check that the information is correct ... the money going out on notifications, the various reactions of completely uninvolved folk to discovering that somebody's idea of "getting a taste of their own medicine" has raised their insurance rates, or gotten their information leaked all over hells half acre...

Of course, no one would ever actually implement this. THAT WOULD BE WRONG.

Yes -- and I think even suggesting it is at best highly offensive and nausea inducing. It's right up there with "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Lizzy L #324, expanding on xeger: Not to mention that a goodly number of the Congressfolk are independently wealthy, and the ones who aren't probably trend to our side anyway!

Incidentally, both houses of Congress are covered under the same plan as other Federal employees, unless they decline it.

Cally, #267, if I could afford that, I might try it!

Earl Cooley III, #291, that Amazon would do that was in the fine print for the very first Kindle. I kept trying to get people to read that, but they didn't believe it would happen.

xeger, David, everyone else: it truly was a rant. I certainly don't want to do it, and I don't want anyone else to do it. It was a way of letting off steam: like watching a bloody, bang-bang movie. I apologize to all who found it offensive.

The core of the complaint remains: the people in the House and Senate are insulated from the painful inefficiencies of our health care system because they have a gold-plated version of insurance paid for by the taxpayers, plus many of them are, as was pointed out, independently wealthy. I don't know what to do about that, and it troubles me.

On Thursday, my new boss came back from vacation, effectively and truly becoming the manager. In those two days, I've received real appreciation, and more of it, than I did in the last 2 years from the bleeping blankhole he has replaced.

I wanted to give a thumbs up to MOON, an indie-theater middling-budget SF movie.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is a working stiff spaceman, the only human on a He3 mining operation on the moon. His three year contract is fortunately almost up, because he's in really sore shape. The video link to home is in "recorded message mode only" due to a bad satellite, and the only real conversations he has is with a utility robot ("GERTY," Kevin Spacey). He starts to see things . . . including when he's on the job fetching helium3 cylinders from the always-on surface scraping mining crawlers.

One such hallucination results in a near-fatal accident. One moment Sam is stuck in a depressurizing rover, the next he's on the infirmary cot being tended by GERTY.

And things get weird from there.

Savvy SF fans will probably figure it all out really quickly, but it is still really well done and worth seeing. The special effects -- "outdoor" shots of the lunar surface -- are modest but well done.

Marna and Vicki: REI has *great* customer service, IMHO. I've bought several pairs of shoes online, and several in stores from them (and lots of other stuff). Unfortunately, there is no REI in the NYC area, as far as I can tell from their website. (I have no idea where the NJ store is in relation to Brooklyn.)

What I do is have them send the shoes to the store (free shipping to their stores) try them on, and return them immediately if they don't fit. If you have to send stuff back and forth, the shipping charges would add up.

Angiportus, what you've had to deal with sounds really horrid. Just adds to the problem that there's a 'diagnosis' that's superficially close to your situation, but not actually right. I would find that incredibly frustrating.

Stefan Jones @ 331... I've been wanting to see Moon, but it never made it here. It's quite a different role for Rockwell than his playing Guy Fleegman in Galaxy Quest, I'd say, just from the coming attraction.

David Harmon #311:

*umop 3p!sdn 3dh2 o2 j3pjo u! 3po>!un p33u 2,uop noh

316, 317:
Yes, we may.

Angiportus: first, I'm with you on untrimmed pages. I've never liked them.

Second: by me, labels only matter when they affect insurance payouts, access to appropriate treatment, or how other people treat you. A diagnostic label I'm personally convinced was incorrect got me partial insurance coverage of my shrink bills for years.

Let the rest of it roll off you. People with default neurology are never going to get the descriptions right anyway.

One of the things I love best about the SF community is its take on disability: there is no normal. Everyone's a bundle of different characteristics. Steve's great at running single-track programming, can't spell to save his life, is a good guitarist and drummer, and writes swell novels. Chuch is uproariously funny, a loyal friend, profoundly deaf, and has a trick memory for Ford auto part numbers. Teresa falls down when she laughs. Patrick can read a book while improvising on the guitar. Et cetera. It's who you are.

Teresa, that was the most loving description and approval of the whole SF community that I've seen in a long time.

Thanks.

Marilee @328, I figure that Amazon has finally trundled into the same kind of vast clue-free zone that Google_(DoNoEvil)^{(ExceptInChina)} has inhabited for quite some time.

The bit about letting that particular bit of distortion roll off of me is a good one, esp. since its perpetrators seem not so preoccupied with making me "normal". I think the parrot-ers were just stumped and had no imagination or something. Right now I am mainly preoccupied with finding practical/material support.

Paula Lieberman at #238 writes:

> Regarding the Gray parrot, parity errors, parody errors....
>
> Hamming it up, are they?

I looked at that for a bit and wondered why on earth you were shifting from bird puns to pigs - and then the realisation hit me. I'll consider myself outgeeked for now.

Angiportus:
It took reading Temple Grandin to make me realize that neurotypical people are much less empathic/insightful than they feel they are. I don't *think* they're totally delusional (but then, I'm semi-neurotypical myself), but stories like yours and Grandin's support the theory that they're totally delusional.

****

The larger type/smaller type links seems to have gotten themselves reversed.

I think I'm going to have to go thru YouTube and build up a collection of those K-Y His+Hers commercials. Just when I think they can't come up with a way to show a sex ad without outright saying this ad is about sex, they... ah... top themselves. The latest is about this French-Canadian couple and, this time, the metaphor is a cruise ship's big thick chimney and its horn going BWAAAAAAPPPPPPP!

Links, Serge, links*!

-----
* I'm now deeply enough embedded in Dutch that this comment sounds vaguely sinister.

Steve Taylor #341, re: parroty parody errors...

OW! I completely missed that aspect...

Nancy Lebovitz #342: Hmm. "delusional" doesn't seem to be quite the right word, but I don't know what is. There's certainly a serious comprehension gap....

PS: For those who haven't seen it: Institute For the Study of the Neurologically Typical.

abi @ 344... Here is one. And another one. And yet another one.

Amazon censors 1984.

Not that I'm in the market for a Kindle anyway, but this is not a selling point.

abi #344: Very, ahem, dextrous of you.*

* Of: Is dat niet recht?

Serge @ 346:

And now for something completely different related, actually (particularly starting about the 40 second mark).

KeithS @ 349... Heheheh... Actually, when I originally posted that comment to Abi, I quickly found myself thinking of that skit although I don't know what Richard Nixon is doing in there. Oh. Wait. I get it.

Lizzy L @ 329 ...
xeger, David, everyone else: it truly was a rant. I certainly don't want to do it, and I don't want anyone else to do it. It was a way of letting off steam: like watching a bloody, bang-bang movie. I apologize to all who found it offensive.

Thank you! It's (obviously) rather a sore spot!

The core of the complaint remains: the people in the House and Senate are insulated from the painful inefficiencies of our health care system because they have a gold-plated version of insurance paid for by the taxpayers, plus many of them are, as was pointed out, independently wealthy. I don't know what to do about that, and it troubles me.

That's certainly fair -- and I'm not sure what to do about it either. The only thing I can think of as an idea is something like the "Can I live on $x/week" experiments that have been done -- but for medical care...

A bit late in remembering this... Three months ago was the 20th anniversary of the release of Field of Dreans.

A bit late in remembering this... Three months ago was the 20th anniversary of the release of Field of Dreans.

Dreams, NOT Dreans, whatever those are.

Some people do get totally delusional about some things, and won't let go of said delusions even if you can manage to confront them with a proof. But I don't think that is so much a consequence of being neurotypical or not, as just not having the disposition that would lead one to open one's mind and pick up the clue phone. And even smart people can have blind spots like this. And cover them up with a nauseating mass of jargon that I can still see thru right away. It's bad enough when someone not all that smart or that involved does it; it's worse when it comes from someone close to you, someone you thought was smart.
I have checked out the site mentioned by #345 and it rings true for me as well as for folks that are sure they are on that spectrum.
I've got my own @#$%^&! spectrum. Autistics and me are about as similar as a black mamba and a black jaguar. Just the latest catchall, is what it is, and it once used to mean something, it once was useful for a segment of the population.
Anyway, I just watched the K-Y ads and had a good laugh. Now whenever I hear a ship blow its horn I'm gonna snicker...

Fragano @348

No, you have it right.

Totally cool interactive website. Fun with colors. Take a break, it's Sunday.

Vicki @278: Neither is quite Cambridge or Somerville, alas -- I've not yet been brave enough to venture into Harvard Square for clothes-shopping -- but if you're willing to cross the river, I've personally had good experiences with the service at the REI in Boston, and my friends, including my trans friends, have good things to say about Fluevog's on Newbury Street. A lot of Fluevog's stuff that's not heels, ie the boots and stuff, is actually ungendered, so I'd be surprised if the staff gave you trouble. For the other, I've definitely bought things out of my age category at REIs before, though not my gender category -- I imagine it depends some on the individual salespeople you get, too.

(I've always thought that women buying mens' clothing was a fairly common thing, so I'm surprised the staff gives you trouble, but it's not something I have personal experience with, my friends are weird so my view of the world is warped, and stupidity abounds about those sorts of things. Le sigh.)

Online, I've had good luck with Vixens and Angels for New Rock boots (also ungendered) -- they were very patient with me as I ordered a size too large, returned them for a size too small, and then finally hit on the right size. (I paid for return shipping each time, but after the first order they paid to send my replacement merchandise to me. I figured that if I was going to spend $300+ on a pair of good boots, I should spend enough to get the Right Thing, dammit.)

I was also very pleased with my experience with Zappo's, where I also ordered a size too large -- their return process is even better, just print out a return label online, tape it on, and mail it back, with free shipping all ways (and free second-day for the replacement item, IIRC). These both work somewhat less well if you don't live or commute close to a UPS store or drop-off point, and even with that it usually took a week of the box sitting taped and ready to go in my front hall before I actually got it sent, but sometimes it beats the hell out of being condescended to by a bad salesperson.

An anti-recommendation for Hubba-Hubba in Central Square in Cambridge, which nominally carries New Rock and other boots -- their size and style selection is worse than spotty, and every time I visit, I get the impression that the staff don't care one way or another whether they get my business or not, certainly not to the point of (gasp!) ordering something for me.

Angiportus #355: "blind spot"! That's the term I was grasping for!

There's things people so completely can't see, that they can't imagine anything might actually be there.... Naturally, we have our own blind spots, but there's plenty of NT's around to point them out to us, sometimes quite obnoxiously. But when NT's have a common blind spot, they tend not to listen when when someone from a "minority viewpoint" points it out...

Random comment about shoe/clothing shopping: Stuff bought online from Land's End, can be returned to any Sears store, no problems.

David #359:

I think shared blindspots are related to shared models of the world. If most everyone who's thought much about the differences between people has a model with five bins, you will be crammed into one of those five bins all the time. The fact that none of the bins fits you simply doesn't matter.

Compare with the situation of bisexuals and transgendered folks w.r.t. the gay vs straight bins, or the reaction libertarians and other outliers from the traditional left/right spectrum get in a lot of discussions.

It's *hard* to make yourself remember that your map, which you've spent years learning and applying to the world and living on, is not actually the territory.

Added to this, my sense is that most people have a set of more-or-less built in models/maps from some combination of biology and culture. And many of those are very useful, but they're never the territory. Autistics[1] have poor models of other people, whereas I seem to have the standard package of guessing and caring about other peoples' mental states. And yet, that model, leading to a deep intuition about what someone else is thinking or feeling or is capable of, can and will be exploited by a skilled con man or a demogogue. There are economics/psychology experiments in which autistics do better (behave more rationally) than non-autistics, because those are places where the default installed-by-the-factory model leads people astray.

[1] Note that now I'm binning.

With regard to shoes:

No, I'm not going to Worldcon (I decided I'd rather spend my time in Montreal when my friends weren't going to be up to their ears in a Worldcon; I may regret not being there, but energy and vacation time are both finite), but I should probably try to work my schedule out in such a way as to go up to MEC on some future visit.

I am willing to cross the Charles, though the odds of actually doing so in practice aren't all that high. (I also have a pointer to a shoe store in Harvard Square, which however crowded it may be, is convenient from the viewpoint of getting from South Station to Arlington.)

Ah, yes, looking at the shoes online before trying them on does make sense.

Thanks, everyone.

Rob@221: I could imagine a court case that this law would have been a response to.

If you've got that good an imagination, try this: -"An internal British Airways memo has been distributed to all staff confirming that a pole-vaulter's pole is not acceptable carry-on baggage."- (found in the squibs section of a Sydney newspaper in 1985; I make no promises about its reliability, but the visual it invokes is priceless.)

Kevin, Guy, et al: I'm not sure about "tantum" lectores -- it doesn't seem to carry quite the contempt for fans that I heard in the original -- but in 35 years the reading of the motto may have changed. OTOH, the late great George Flynn got NESFA's packrats spot-on some years ago; someone fed up with cruft in the clubhouse declared the motto was "[Don't throw it away,] we might need that!", which he rendered as Forsan illo egebimus ("lest we have need of that", or perhaps "It is possible we will need that"). IIRC, Paula (Murray) arrived at the next Boskone with that on enough badges for all active NESFen.

Xopher: I'll trade you one of those for the induhvidual in Pune who (a) believed two processes at about the same time "happened by luck" to have the same PID -- multiple times a day, and (b) still insists (4 months later) on sending me summarized data when I have told him several times to send me raw. (I don't do TS; this was a "fellow employee" (of the offshoring variety, but that's no excuse for him), but the worst I've done to him is put "Computers don't do luck" in 16-point bold red type in an email.)

joann@248 I had someone from some marginal political party (possibly Fulani's?) call me back to complain of my rudeness after I had said "We don't accept telephone solicitations" and hung up. (An approach I developed to avoid the sort of tangle you describe.)

Blind spots...I've had some of mine pointed out not by "normals" but by some discovery I make, or something I read--online or offline.
Some of the people with the biggest, or the blindest, blind spots are the ones with too much power. Even a counselor can be harmful instead of helpful, if they don't wise up.
The woman who had the preoccupation with my ancestors was an example. She kept hounding me to do a family tree although there wasn't enough known family for a seedling, and the problems I was having were occupational ones anyway. I do have a form of ADD that doesn't respond to medicine, and she never even listened to that possibility when I brought it up (official diagnosis was later.) She had been helpful with some things early on, but then reached the end of her helpfulness and neither of us quite caught on in time to help me.
I had better luck with the Fraudian jerk many years back. That was when I was in school, and he assumed and announced some scabrous things about some creative works I did, said remarks being not only gross but implausible. I raised the roof, and the whole situation wound up in the hands of the dept. heads, because I was concerned that he would harm people more vulnerable than I was by telling them things that just weren't right. It was a bit of a teapot-tempest, I guess; he did qualify his statements as guesses but he wouldn't stop making them, and I was just lucky to be able to defend myself. Anyway, he wound up apologizing, looking like a collapsed jellyfish, and the dept. head thanked me, because she said there'd been other complaints about counselors.
I decided a while back that there's stuff out there I just don't know or even suspect anything about, and should be on the lookout for, though I'm not always successful.
Fragano and Abi, thanks for not being gauche.

Nancy Lebovitz, #342: Are the larger type / smaller type links still reversed for you? They're working for me.

(We'll be replacing that system with a more sensible one soon, anyway.)

Patrick, thanks-- the type sizes have straightened themselves out.

Angiportus #364: You are a person of rectitude.

Vicki @ 362: If you're ever going to be making it to Ottawa, do let me know ...

MEC will require you to buy a membership, just so you know, but it is $5 CDN and gives you a lifetime membership. Also, it's one share and entitles you to vote at their yearly meetings and stuff - they will mail you a ballot.

Occasionally they accidentally make too much money and send out dividend cheques. I think over the last twenty years I have turned a 400% profit on my $5.00, though what you get may be based also on lifetime spending at MEC, which topic I do not wish to think about too closely; they sort of own my Visa, especially now that they ALSO make attractive comfortable casual urban clothes.

July 20, 1969

Re: the sidebar on Frank McCourt: Also remembered at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles.

Far too early this morning, I was dreaming about encountering a not-very-pleasant apple pie at a farmer's market. I was yanked out of the doze that followed by the realization that pie crust has a lot of similarities to Damascus steel: two phases with a common element, formed as many thin layers by the manufacturing process.

I'm not sure what, if anything, to make of the idea. I've tried a couple of times to make pie crust using vegetable oil instead of solid fat, and the results have been unsatisfactory -- tough, hard, flexible, maybe a bit more like Damascus steel than I want. The insight might give me a clue about how to change my process.

And the proof of the quality of both Damascus steel and pie crust is when each winds up embedded in someone's belly.
I once dreamed I had to mend the fabric stretched tightly over the front of a speaker cabinet. For this, I had to use one of those needles that is curved into a semicircle. On waking, I realized I had never before guessed what that kind of needle was for.
I also dreamed of a special pencil sharpener just for sharpening those flat pencils you find on construction projects. It had 2 cutter wheels. I have never yet seen one in waking life, though I suppose they are out there.

Angiportus @372: My mother (the general contractor) always sharpened her flat pencils with a drywall knife -- the kind of razor-holder that a bunch of *ssh*l*s managed to get the media to repeatedly call 'boxcutters,' spreading the name around.

Elliott (@373) yup <ptui> – *taannng* whut we useta have penknives fur back in the day …

I used to work for a market research organization (if they are doing true research, and not building a list of possibles, they're under the same exemption as charities and politicals). As someone who had to be on the phones, and someone who did the coordination and analysis, and someone who heard the training more often than anyone would want (something about a 100% turnover per *month* - it's not a wonderful job, folks, and it's hard to find people that are accurate enough to do it right and willing to be paid operator wages), I have this to offer:

If you're on the phone, you are willing to be converted. It's the operator's job to figure out how. Trust me, it actually works sometimes, and when you only have to get 4 calls an hour, it's worth wrestling for a couple of minutes. For those people who know they aren't willing to be converted, remember:

The person on the other end of the phone is doing a horrible job. They are being told to push, to get that last one, and if they miss quota too often, they'll be fired. And they make as much in a day as you do in an hour or two. Don't push back, don't be obnoxious - although they should give you the client information on request (they don't, because they know that with the best will in the world, only 5% of willing contributors will bother to look up the info, and fewer yet will bother to donate).

Just say "I'm sorry, I'm not interested" - AND HANG UP. It seems impolite - in fact I see a couple of comments above that say "be rude, hang up" - but it's not. It's the best thing you can do, for you and for the operator. For them it's a volume game, and if a hard refusal is off the phone, that's two more calls he can make, and maybe one of those is the complete. For you, it is a HARD refusal, rather than a soft one ("well, I'm not interested; I would need all this information; can I call you back?") and if they need more people at the end, they go through the soft refusals first (because it's more likely to get the one or two they need).

If you are interested, be interested and polite. If you feel uncomfortable about anything, tell them "no". If you aren't interested, say "thank you, but no." and hang up before they can say anything more. If they're really obnoxious, sure, play games to screw them up, but it should never get that far; either you're interested and therefore want the push, or you're not interested and have hung up already, no?

It's that simple, and you feel better and they feel better. And that's charity in the true sense of the word.

Mycroft #375:

I suppose it must be some form of whack-a-mole, but I seem to believe that I have a divine mission to make sure that whoever it is, along with all their minions, overlords, and indirect associates, has sufficient motivation to never pollute my phone lines again.

re: NeuroTyp (NT means two other things to me). The more I read and the more I deal with my friend's autistic boyfriend, the more I believe I'm in high-functioning Aspie territory. I don't have the "drop into my own world" thing in general, but I do have the hyperfocus, and all the other triggers.

It was good to know - not because of the label, but because I can look at answers in that category, and see if they make sense or could work for me. Answers - especially clear, stepped out, testable and measurable answers - are good for people like me.

But if you're not, you're not, even if you type out that way to others. And pushing doesn't help, I know. And yeah, there's some blind spots out there with the normals (and now that someone has taught me (by putting it out there for me to read) where those blind spots are, I can see how it works and assist those who care about me to not react wrongly).

My big one is "if you don't explicitly explain, I won't get it" (oh, and "there is no such thing as a small decision. If you ask my opinion on something, it will take time. If you freak out about that, you'll make it worse, and it's Not My Fault.") I can be trained, and I can induct from knowledge. I don't pick things up from environment - especially non-verbal things.

David Harmon in the old thread 800-802 hit it perfectly for me. I don't get social interaction, especially courting interaction, and double especially the non-verbal part. What I do get came from one or two people telling me what she was feeling at time X, and me correlating that to what she looked like at time X so that the next time that happened, I'd know (of course, those are "just friends", so guess what I'm still missing). And maybe other people work the same way, so I now look for that in others. Of course, I'm trying to understand and interpret the equivalent of Dutch, so I act like most people with one, introductory, course in whatever language do when dropped into a room full; stammer along (frequently saying the wrong thing in response, of course), concentrate *hard*, and miss most of it. I'm told that there's another type that does the "stare and ignore the obvious signals" bit...

Unlike a real language, one just *can't* stop the conversation and ask "sorry, I didn't get that. Can you try it again, simpler and more slowly?" And one of the reasons one can't is that the person talking body has never had to worry about people not getting it, or about reading others', and the question will be self-defeating or not actually have an answer ("I don't know what it means, I just do it").

#375: Uh, excuse me?

If I answer the phone, it's not because I'm "willing to be converted". It's because I might be expecting a call that's of personal interest and relevance to me. Not some unwanted salesperson.

I didn't pick up the phone call telling me that my father was dead because I thought it was going to be just another telemarketing call. So don't tell me to be polite.

#366 Joann: anything you can do on the phone don't work. There is literally nothing you can say that will make the operator's day appreciably worse than the accumulated "we hate you, go away", or busy signals, or no pickups, of the other 600 calls he made today. And yesterday's 600. And apart from that, it doesn't work...

You only get the operator (and possibly the supervisor). If the operator's good (and the supervisor got the job because she's a good operator), boorish behaviour on the other end gets ignored(*), or gossiped about (some day I'll tell the "I'm watching porn" story here). If he's not good, it's one more thing that will eventually get him to leave the company/industry. But this job pays fast-food wages, and despite all the shit fast-food workers put up with, there's always more people available. Call centre work doesn't involve being burned, roasted, froze, or having no skin on one's hands from washing them so often. Also, since the client never sees the operator, people who are - odd-looking? - can get and keep this job where McDonald's won't even look at them.

The way to stop it is to talk to the charities hiring the marketers. Tell them that you would have been interested, but their method of soliciting is too invasive for you and you have chosen not to deal with anyone who does it. If enough do, they'll stop, because it will work better for them.

So, yeah, it's whack-a-mole. If you're doing it for your own sake, fine - I don't like it, and it is counterproductive if your goal is to stop them calling you, but fine. If you're trying to stop the calling (either to you or in general), my advice as a former insider, it won't happen. Just say "No thank you" and hang up.

* There are those who take it as a challenge, of course. Just put a note in the file: "call this guy, and listen to the rant. He's GOOD!" and a callback for an hour. There are also some who won't start it, but will play along. Yeah, it's probably abusive, possibly illegal, but it happens.

#378: That's not what I meant, but I can see how it can be taken that way, so let me be more clear.

If you *stay* on the phone, you're willing to be converted. That's what the training says, and it's actually right more often than you would think.

You may not believe that, but it's true. So, say "no thank you." AND HANG UP. Please note that the politeness isn't the important part here - I just believe to at least a certain extent in karma, so I default to unnecessary politeness. The hang up is the important part. It seems rude - ruder, perhaps, than being verbally obnoxious, because we've been trained to agree to an end to the conversation (note, abuse of this is a hallmark of all salespeople, on the phone or in person. They will not perform their side of ending ritual, unless there's a sale. Watch for it - they're trained to explicitly take advantage of stuff like this. It works because we "know" it, but not explicitly). But it isn't, and it works.

I'm not saying what I'm saying because it's the nicest thing you can do for the operator (it is, given that you're not going to listen to them, but that's beside the point). I'm saying it because it's the most effective way of stopping at least that campaign from affecting *you*.

In the specific case of "waiting for a bad but important phone call" (or having just got that call, and now waiting for calls from friends and relations), telling them that is also usually effective - I know I put in notes of "really, DO NOT CALL this one back, family emergency." with my hard refusal designation. But that doesn't stop the most effective method from being, as soon as you know it's a spiel, interrupt, say your piece, and "click".

Mycroft @ 377: Some of your points on body language have made me think about my fluency in that aspect of language, and how I've used it to enhance my communication as a hard-of-hearing person in a hearing world. This, in turn, leads me to think that each side has something to teach the other. I use body language quite deliberately to indicate things to people and animals, and I always pay attention to it, because I get a lot of meta-information from it. I suspect many HOH and late-deafened (LD) people would also be more aware of body language than the average hearing person.

Professional actors are another group of people who are very aware of body language, and how to modify it deliberately. That might be another avenue for non-NeuroTyp people to use for gaining experience or training in body language.

Unlike a real language, one just *can't* stop the conversation and ask "sorry, I didn't get that. Can you try it again, simpler and more slowly?" And one of the reasons one can't is that the person talking body has never had to worry about people not getting it, or about reading others', and the question will be self-defeating or not actually have an answer ("I don't know what it means, I just do it").

This is one of those things that make me think "Wow, I really have lived in the touchy-feely SF Bay Area surrounded by your-way-is-okay-it's-just-not-my-way artistic types all my life." If a friend — or even a reasonably close amiable acquaintance — said something to me like "Because of neurological issues, I have trouble reading body language. I may need to stop you during a conversation and ask what you mean by your body language. Is that okay?" my response would be yes, of course it's okay! It's as okay as when a deaf friend who lip-reads says "I didn't get the last thing you said, please repeat it" or if a friend with ADD says "Sorry, I got off track there — what was the middle part?"

That's not to say I'll always know immediately what I was trying to convey by my body language, but I'm certainly willing to try to figure it out if asked to.

The idea that people wouldn't be willing to even try that leaves me as gobsmacked as when I read a piece by somebody with prosopagnosia whose "friends" (scare-quotes deliberate) were apparently unwilling to say "Hi, it's Pat" or "Hi, it's Leslie, from chess club" when encountering the face-blind person. Wait, these people are your friends, and they'd rather make you go through this guessing game than simply identify themselves by name?

Sometimes it really feels like a matter of "some people have neurological issues, and other people are just jerks."

Re: unwanted phone calls -- I almost wish I had a handy two-year old to hand the phone to. They love to talk on the phone.

re 379: Joann: anything you can do on the phone don't work. There is literally nothing you can say that will make the operator's day appreciably worse than the accumulated "we hate you, go away", or busy signals, or no pickups, of the other 600 calls he made today.

Except for having a Lord of Hell trapped in your Ansaphone.

Angiportus, #372, curved needles are also used in upholstery, quilts, and a lot of handwork.

Those of you who were on newsgroups nine years ago probably remember when Remarq started storing our posts and doing inline linking to ads. Well, yesterday's WashPost ombudsman's column talked about when they'd put inline ads in WashPost articles. When, not if. So I sent him a scan of a column their chief tech columnist wrote about it and asked why they would be so unethical.

Marilee @ 386:

I absolutely loathe those things. They're obnoxious, they get in the way, they slow page loading down, and you have to find a safe spot out of the way to rest your cursor. They disrupt ease of reading even when you haven't triggered one of the pop-up balloons because they're often obnoxiously different from the surrounding text (e.g. double-underlined and green amid ordinary black text). They make a site's usability and overall pleasantness go way down.

I guess they're tired of people reading stuff for free online and want to steer them back to physical newspapers?

On oil pastry: I don't have a cookbook handy with the recipe, but I'm under the impression that it's best used with stuff like meat pies (or 'raised' pies), where flakiness is not essential. It's an okay pastry, but not what you'd want with fruit, for example, unless it was all you could make right then.

On telemarketers: I do as Mycroft W says: say 'No thanks', and hang the phone up - usually gently. Politeness won't hurt, anyway.

Oh yeah, just to make life really interesting, I've got shingles. On the head. (Yes, I'm using an antiviral.)

I don't recommend the experience.

The finished MITSFS seal.

I played around with scrollwork a lot but ultimately decided that cleanliness and readability were the better part of valor. Thanks to all who helped with the Latin.

CHip @363: I think both our reading of the motto has changed and fandom has changed. Very few of the people currently involved in the Society were involved in the fandom of 35 years ago (to say nothing of being alive to be involved in fandom). The modern fandom that our members partake of is its own kind of beast -- still not part of the Society's core mission, viz. the Library, and well-enough served by existing institutions that there's less pressure on us to expand to encompass them.

CHip @ #363 - Maybe Paula Lieberman? I've only been to two Boskones and they have not been that long ago (once just before the Boston Worldcon, once after). Or another Paula Murray? There is one here in KC, I actually worked with her at the ad agency.

And the comment about the vaulting pole not being suitable carry-on made me giggle.

Joel@371: contra Matt@388, last Wednesday's Globe ran a taste test in which the oil-crusted fruit pie came first. Too many links to post (5 separate recipes, plus discussion); go to boston.com, change "local search" to "site search" and look for "pie crust". (wrt tough crust: that's usually cited as involving too much water. I have minimal experience, but I do remember that after the shortening is properly mixed in, only a small amount (also well-mixed) of water is needed.)

Kevin: I don't remember any \pressure/ to be fans; it was more like "they're even geekier than we are!" (which was saying a lot, back in the days of <10% female students).

Malkin and Byrd become graffiti in Iraq

I need to slow down while reading these. Curved needles are NOT a way to get rid of telephone solicitors!

I'm with Mycroft on the phone thing. I did telephone fundraising for the UW (for pay) back when I was in college for about 9 months, and have done volunteer phonebanking for Planned Parenthood (GOTV type stuff) for the past few years.

Just say no thanks and hang up. Possibly even "Please do not call me" and hang up. It's what I do for unwanted phone calls. It's fast, it's easy, and it gets the job done. It isn't rude, but it saves everyone time.

I guess they're tired of people reading stuff for free online and want to steer them back to physical newspapers?

Well you know, they do have to pay for the reporters, the bandwidth, the IT guys, and all that somehow.

(that being said, I hate those inline ads, too)

If someone phones me and starts the conversation by lying (e.g., "I'm not trying to sell you anything"), I'm going to be rude. If that drives people away from that job, that's a good thing. If the lying is on the initiative of the caller, s/he deserves to lose the job. If it's the official policy of the organization, then it's a job that nobody should be filling.

Xopher @394: Curved needles are NOT a way to get rid of telephone solicitors!

Granted, not easily applied, but I'm sure it would discourage most of them.

"Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, mais où est la catastrophe?"
- Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, shaken out of his coma by the lies that Paris is burning and that Zola's head is - again - stuck in a bucket.

(I need this kind of silliness after spending most of the weekend on my knees, and my nose nearly to the floor, while scrubbing then re-sealing the grouting of the tiles in the kitchen and in the two bathrooms.)

I still can't quite see being rude to the poor so-and-sos who are forced to do such despicable things to earn their bread; telling them to please not call me at home, take my number out of their computer and mentioning that I am on the do-not-call list should be enough. (Politeness is indicated too for all those people stuck behind a counter who have to deal with folks like me all day, customers whose manners might be worse than mine.)
One's wrath is better aimed at the bosses of such invaders, and a system that makes such intrusions thinkable in the first place.

Paula Lieberman #238:

Only a little, a hamlet you might say, though if they keep it up and go the full Monty, it could deteriorate into spamming.

Before I explain why they should not be calling me, I try to remember to say "I know this isn't your fault." When I'm finished, I sincerely wish them a much better job, and soon.

That last one startles them. Almost all of them say "thank you" in a real human voice.

Serge #399

"Ouch your head's in a bucket
Oh Zola, oh Zola
Ouch your head's in a bucket
Will you ever learn?"

"Please fix it,
Dear Sparky, dear Sparky, dear Sparky
Please fix it,
Dear Sparky,
Please Gil rescue me!"

"Just hold still
Oh Zola, oh Zola, oh Zola
Just hold still oh Zola
And I'll extract you."

"But there's danger
Dear Sparky, dear Sparky, dear Sparky
But there's danger dear Sparky
I'm in great distress."

"I've blocked off the monsters,
Oh Zola, oh Zola,
I've blocked off the monsters
You're safe from them now!"

"But the clanks have got sharp knives
Have sharp knives, have sharp knives
But the clanks have got sharp knifes
About to cut me!"

"I've tools which will stop them
Oh Zola, oh Zola,
I've tools which will stop them
And which I've applied."

"But I'm stuck in this bucket,
Dear Sparky, dear Sparky
But I'm stuck in this bucked
And I can't get out!

"I've a big wrench!"
Said someone, said someone, said someone
"I've a big wrench!" said someone
Not Zola or Gil.

"Oh No! No!"
Said Zola, said Zola, said Zola,
"Oh No! No!" said Zola
As the someone stomped in.

'Twas a young spark, a young spark
A young spark, a young spark
'Twas a young spark, a young spark
And a very Mad Girl.

"I'll stay in the bucket,"
Said Zola, said Zola
"I'll stay in the bucket,"
"Big bad Spark Mad Girl."

"Oh goody," said the Mad Girl,
Said the Mad Girl, said the Mad Girl,
"Oh goody," said the Mad Girl,
As she glared at Gil...

Curved surgical needles (suture needles) are available in various sizes as well as cutting surfaces. Back in the old days, we had to know which kind of needle was appropriate for the task and then also select the suture material. Now, modern sutures come attached to the needle, so ordering is a matter of selecting the suture and then from a limited choice of needles.

Half-curved needles are used mainly for closing cadavers after the necropsy is finished.

Paula Lieberman @ 403... Heheheh. Well done. That Zola, always getting herself into some kind of trouble.

Cooks Illustrated says that Vodka is the key to good pastry. The alcohol doesn't develop the gluten, but does make it workable. And it all bakes off, except for the parts that are consumed by the chef.

It seems to work here.

PJ Evans 389:
"Oh yeah, just to make life really interesting, I've got shingles. On the head."

Back a few years ago, I was diagnosed with shingles of the eyesocket.

Man, I've never been so glad to have a diagnosis turn out wrong. (Never did find out why my eye was hurting so badly, but it went away after a week or so and has never come back.)

Apologies if this has come through already, but I thought it was sweet and made me lol.

eric...without going into tedious details, I owe you big time.

Paula - hilarious! Except that tune is going to be stuck between my ears for a while.

C. Wingate@393: Good lord. I am now officially completely weirded out.

Random observation #1: The lyrics appear to be one of the orally-transmitted versions from the Kingdom of Calontir, where they repeat the first verse at the end.

Random observation #2: I wrote those lyrics back in 1978 or so. If anything else I ever commit to paper/pixels/print has that much staying power, I will count myself a happy writer.

More of what editors do. Representatives of Vanity Fair's editorial, research and copy departments apply their red (and green and blue) pencils to Sarah Palin's resignation speech.

CHip @ 392: Thanks for the link to the oil-based pie crust; I'll give it a try sometime soon. Most of the fresh fruit around here is still imported, but the local stuff should be appearing soon.

Jacque @ #408, I particularly like the minesweeper, although the pooch with the scope is impressive too.

Teresa, #402, thanks for the helpful hints, I'll try to remember them next time I have to dissuade a caller.

Speaking of delightful videos, someone passed this on to my wife yesterday, and she showed it to me, and I have been sharing it with everyone since. It's the delightful and educational Tinfoil Hat Song:
http://eclectech.co.uk/mindcontrol.php

(The paranoid, such as myself, will need to enable JavaScript and Flash, which is somewhat ironic now that I think about it.)

Xopher: I'm glad (if not a wee bit puzzled) that I helped.

#416: Eclectech has all sorts of fun and rude animations.

eric - let's just say that I've never made so much as a flaky piecrust in my life (soggy yes, leathery yes, flaky no), let alone any more exotic pastry. And there have been times when I've wanted to add gluten to something but couldn't because it would immediately clump. Tests to see whether gluten flour will clump in alcohol will ensue. So will tests to see if the same applies to powdered pectin.

#419
Xopher, it looks like what you want for a flaky piecrust using vodka is about 50/50 vodka (doesn't have to be high-end) and water, not more than about a half cup all together

Xopher @ 419... Dare I ask how a leathery piecrust is made? Were I into bilingual puns, I'd say the chef doesn't know the difference entre cuire a piecrust and a piece of cuir.

Thanks, P J Evans! I won't have a chance to try this right away, but I'll let you know when I do.

Serge, you knead it like a bread dough for ten minutes. Mmm, leathery. :-P

Yowza! Hundred Years War soldiers' database online and searchable!

With a bit of help from Adrian, I have established that REI doesn't carry any shoes to fit me. We haven't ruled out EMS yet, and Marna's suggestion of MEC is still promising.

Xopher, that is the plan. Tough pie crust is good if you are making hand-held pies (empanadas, whatever), as in for an SCA event.

That's where I learned about making tough pie pastry. (haven't done this for a long while, had to grit my teeth and force myself to do it because I'm a good hand with good, flaky pie crusts.)

Paula Lieberman #403: Cute... Might be a good theme song for those fugitive broadcasters of The Weasel Queen shows!

Paula Helm Murray #425: Hmm... That's most of why I didn't like the few empanadas I've tried (from a place back in NYC). What about pie floaters?

David, for that I'd use a flaky crust, you want it to float and you need to be able to cut it up with a spoon to eat it.

(I looked it up, the illustration was a meat pie on top of a pretty yummy-looking pea soup. snif. I'd like it but I'd be the only one in my household to eat it. and sigh.)

And I learned something new, never heard pie floater use

Xopher— Alton Brown's Good Eats has shown how to make pie crust several times, once or twice with alcohol. He uses a food processor on the pulse mode.

The key seems to be adding the water via squirt bottle, so as not to add too much.

Mind you, I have never made a pie crust in my life, and given the state of this kitchen (too small and not much counter space), it will be a while before I attempt it.

The key thing that I didn't get when I was failing Pie Crust 101, lo these many years ago, was that not everything should be mixed thoroughly. It's the discontinuous nature of pie crust, pre-baking, that makes it flaky. Duh, you might say, oh yes, you might well say duh with great duhness. But I was a bread baker, and pastry was a concept I didn't grok too easily.

Now you're all making me feel bad that I didn't at least attempt to make cherry pie this weekend. The cherries were delicious, though.

Serge@405: Wait'll you see next Monday's strip. (The next two after tonight's are up early at the sneaky gate, no doubt to make sure that they go up on schedule despite convention stuff.)

Serge @421:
What a queer question.

Xopher @ 430: I took a baking class, and was flabbergasted when the chef has us wrap up what was obviously not properly mixed dough in plastic, and put it in the fridge for an hour. Accepting that it could be so ... so ... obviously Not Finished Mixing is tough*.

I still shy away from making recipes for flaky dough. Tart dough doesn't cause me as much consternation, and a crumb topping is delicious. I managed a good cherry pie last winter. I used the Cooks Illustrated recipe with Trader Joe's bottled cherries for the filling. For a crust, I used a recipe from Wayne Gisslen's "Professional Baking" for Almond Short Dough (5oz powdered almonds, 8 oz butter, 10 oz flour - oh, my!), topped with a Betty Crocker almond-crumb top. It came out yummy and elegant, and it was amusing to run the gamut from Betty Crocker through CI to a professional book. That almond short dough was wild to work with. It just fell apart, but that was OK.

The Gisslen book has the most thorough explanations I've ever read, and the recipes don't make huge quantities.

-------
*No pun intended, naturally.

David Harmon #427 & Paula Helm Murray #428:
First time I ever ate something like that was at Sydney's Harry's Cafe de Wheels. It was an experience. One I would not care to repeat.

Mycroft, #375: If you're on the phone, you are willing to be converted. It's the operator's job to figure out how.

NOT. I have a telephone number for MY convenience, not that of every loon with an agenda to push. This is why I'm on the DNC list -- and why I don't agree with all the "exemptions" from the DNC laws. I'm on that list because I don't want to hear from you either.

I will give Special Snowflake Exemptions exactly ONE chance to take "no" for an answer politely. If they don't -- or worse, if they start whining about how they are Special Snowflake Exemptions -- the next response goes straight to tactical nukes. There's a calculated reason for this; I know that a lot of telemarketers keep their own private lists of people not to call again, and I want to be on as many of those as possible. I don't give a rat's ass what they think of me afterwards, as long as they NEVER CALL ME AGAIN.

On the good side, I've recently had several Special Snowflake Exemptions respond to my, "Are you aware that this number is on the Federal Do Not Call List?" with some variation of, "I'm sorry, we'll put you on our no-call list." So (1) I'm clearly not the only one using this tactic, and (2) it does seem to be working, albeit slowly.

Also, @380: If you *stay* on the phone, you're willing to be converted.

AKA "as long as you can keep the mark talking, you haven't lost the sale." Which indicates to me that continuing to play along, for as long as it amuses me to do so, would actually be a good response, from the POV of causing maximum inconvenience to the telemarketer. Fortunately (I suppose), my patience with playing that game is very limited.

(Once, many years ago, I got suckered into a round of trying to convince a telemarketer that even though I agreed he was offering a good deal, it would not be a good deal FOR ME because I wasn't interested in his product. I simply could not understand why we kept going around and around over the same ground, and after about 5 minutes I finally got tired of trying to make him see reason and hung up. It wasn't until much later that I learned about the above "training" tactic. When honesty becomes a waste of time, that's when people resort to other things.)

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bell is in a meeting at the moment. Can he call you back?"

No, I don't think I can quite pull off the right tone and accent for that, but has anyone used such tricks, or the more devious ones?

Dave @437:
has anyone used such tricks, or the more devious ones?

"Sorry, maar mijn Nederlands is heel slecht. Kunt u later terugbellen als mijn man hier is?"

It is, admittedly, a fairly context-specific solution.

Paula Helm Murray: #428: I first learned about pie floaters from Pratchett's The Last Continent. In fact, I've never actually had one. (Indeed, I've never been to Australia.) I do make pea soup occasionally, though -- perhaps I could find some way to "fake it", say with an appropriate hor d'oeuvre (from frozen, not being a fraction of the baker of some folks here.).

Soon Lee #435: Was "Harry" one of CMOT-Dibbler's many analogues? ;-)

David Goldfarb @ 432... Where? Where is that sneaky gate, thru which I can peek at the future events in Agatha's life?

From today's installment...
"Are you going to Professor Goodwin's freestyle reanimation demonstration?

By the way, here is a photo of one of the Foglio spawns. For some reason, the setting looks very foglioesque.

Hurrah for open threadiness just when I need it.

I'm looking for a lavishly illustrated fairy tale collection for reading out loud to my 4 year old. She loves the sophisticated language and grisly details of the original tales, so there's no need to worry about whether the collection has been santized for little kids. (Though we'll be leaving The Juniper Tree and Bluebeard until she's a little older.) The key thing is the pictures.

Most of the big fairy tale collections seem to have one picture per tale. I'm hoping for about one per page--and I'd really rather have a collection than buy individual volumes. She loves big books, like the ones I read, because they're much more grown up.

Any suggestions? This (and LibraryThing) seem like the places to ask...

Teresa and Mycrofts' posts raise this really important point: The person on the other end of the phone is human, and is probably doing this lousy and intrusive job because he (or she) has very few options.

Now, the problem is that intrusive advertising is a net loss for mankind. It is a win for the advertisers (sometimes) because most of the cost of their advertising is borne by people who don't want to get the ad, but have it force-fed to them--people who have an interesting conversation interrupted to talk to some conman trying to sell them an extended warranty, people who put down the book they're reading so they can be begged for money for some fraudulent charity, people whose few daily minutes of peace and quiet are broken up, not so they can converse with someone they care about, but so a stranger can try to hit them with a sales pitch. (Note that the costs here are mostly not in dollars, but in attention.)

People who do that for a living may feel that they have little choice, like many drug dealers and prostitutes and other small-time criminals. They're human, and we need to remember that. But there's no value in forgetting that what they're doing to earn their living is fundamentally bad, destructive, wrong, evil. It's not evil like being a concentration camp guard or a slave trader or an assassin or something, but it's a lousy thing to do. When you take part in something lousy, you ought to expect to get feedback from your intended victims that doesn't let you pretend it's not a lousy thing you're doing. You've interrupted my meal with my family so you could try to sell me siding.

Now, I don't curse these folks out--as soon as I work out what kind of call it is[1], I tell them please not to call me again and I hang up on them. They've already used as much of my time as I want to give them. But I hope my tone makes it clear that I'd be about as happy to see a roach crawl across my floor as I am to talk to them. They're doing something rotten, and it ought to feel rotten.

I'll have to think about how to add Teresa's line about hoping they get a better job soon to this. But I'm not sure I'm empathetic enough to carry it off, under these circumstances. This is surely a flaw in my compassion for others, because I can usually find some kind of compassion even for people who have done much worse stuff than being phone spammers.

[1] Of course, it's never a sales call. It's an opportunity I'm being offered to get some small worthless service for free, after which I'll be expected to pay something. But nobody ever says it's a sales call, even when it's obviously a sales call. Because grifters only tell you the truth when it's to their advantage, if then.

Dave Bell @ 437 ...
"I'm sorry, Mr. Bell is in a meeting at the moment. Can he call you back?"
No, I don't think I can quite pull off the right tone and accent for that, but has anyone used such tricks, or the more devious ones?

"Oh. I'm sorry. That person doesn't exist!"

"Ah. If you're asking for that name, you clearly aren't calling for anybody here -- kindly take my number off your list, and never call again."

I've been on the receiving end of:
"Look. He's still dead. He was dead the last time you called, and the time before that."

More memorably entertaining was the time a friend's phone [male, known to be single and living alone] got answered with a particularly sultry:
"Hello... [name]'s escort service -- how can we help you today?"

Laurie Mann has announced that the Anticipation (2009 Worldcon) program guide is available as a PDF.

It's a draft, of course; the program (sorry, programme) will probably continue to squirm and change right through to the end of the con.

I took a baking class, and was flabbergasted when the chef has us wrap up what was obviously not properly mixed dough in plastic, and put it in the fridge for an hour. Accepting that it could be so ... so ... obviously Not Finished Mixing is tough*.

A tactic for good pie crust that I learned when I didn't have a pasty cutter: freeze the butter/shortening, and grate it on a cheese grater. You end up with lovely long flakes because the chunks of fat are so thin.

It had never occurred to me to try alcohol in place of some of the water, but that sounds like a plan; I wonder if Everclear or the like would work, or would the taste be overwhelming?

xeger @ 443... "Oh. I'm sorry. That person doesn't exist!"

When my wife picks up and 'they' ask for Serge Krinard, or for Surge Maalox, she says that too then she hangs up.

On piecrust, it probably helps to have watched your grandmother doing it: she'd made so many pies, she didn't need a recipe any more.

Also, as far as the crumbly-dough bit, some quick breads have you cut the shortening into the flour/spice mixture, which gives you a feel for what it's like. (Grating frozen butter: gotta try that. But not, I think, with a Microplane.)

The national "no call" list is a good solution for US folks who are tired of telemarketers.

https://www.donotcall.gov/

It doesn't keep Amvets, Purple Heart, and the Police Benevolent League from calling during dinner, but it does cut out the aluminum siding, window replacement, and magazine subscription crowd.

Sarah S. @441:

May I recommend Nathaniel Hawthorne's take on the Greek myths? It's called "Tanglewood Tales." I've seen lovely illustrated versions* of these.

Also you can sometimes find illustrated versions of Kipling's "Jungle Book" and "Puck of Pook's Hill."

I'll have to rummage around and see what else I can find. (My mother collects children's books, I'll ask her what else may be available.)

*You may have to check used book stores for them.

#448
It doesn't stop the robocalls from people trying to sell me carpet cleaning, or the recorded calls from a company looking for someone who had the phone number several years ago.

Xopher - Glad it's the vodka. I always like it when I help someone with vodka.

And, now to figure out how to make a light cake with raspberries that doesn't collapse into a heavy layer -- for the second birthday of the week is coming up.

I wonder if vodka would help.

I wonder if vodka would help.
Either it helps the cooking, or it helps the cook, but it never fails to help.

Didn't the MythBusters test various uses for vodka? One of them involved the washing of feet.

Sarah, #448: Only as long as they're calling from a U.S.-based number. I've been getting spam calls on my cellphone from numbers out of Romania (pimping cruises, mostly), and there is not a damn thing that can be done about them.

One thing I heartily recommend for anyone with a landline is to get a Telezapper. It's particularly good for getting rid of robocalls, many of which are made by the kind of machinery it targets. We still have one on our phone, and it nails at least a dozen calls a week, every one of which is a small victory over the Forces of Darkness.

David Harmon #439:

That thought did occur to me. If you examine the nutrition information provided, they state that their beef pies contain beef as opposed to containing cow...

Harry's is one of the stops frequented by the Sydney Explorer bus (a great way to explore that fair city BTW), so it appears to be an institution of some sort. For me, despite visiting during the day, it had definite overtones of the kebab or curry place that's the last stop after a night's out drinking.

A cat is attempting to adopt us.

It (still unsure of sex; I'm guessing male but neutered) started hanging around the back garden, then coming to the back door.

Martin and Fiona gave him milk, and he drank it all quickly. Then they went to the movies. When they came back, he was still there, keen and still hungry. They fed him tuna, barely able to keep ahead of his appetite. Once he was full, he got friendly. Lots of rubbing and nuzzling, looking for affection and rewarding it with purrs.

He has a neckerchief but not a collar. He's thin, and has fleas. Between that and Martin's allergies, he's certainly not coming indoors. We've put an old pillow in the shed and wedged the door to stay ajar. If he hangs around, we'll feed him.

My suspicion is that someone's vacation pet feeding arrangements fell through. Hopefully, when they're back, his regular humans will be offering a better deal and he'll go back to them.

My initial suggestion that we call him Cheezburger was rejected, so he is being called Lol.

abi @ 456... I wonder if the little guy has a chip in his neck. Or is that a North-American thing?

Serge @457:
I wonder if the little guy has a chip in his neck. Or is that a North-American thing?

I have no idea, nor any idea how to check. If we're still his sole food source at the end of the summer, we'll investigate further.

We are not adopting him. This is not a "protest too much" thing; we simply cannot do so.

abi #456: You should probably provide him with a flea collar, if only for the sake of your kids. Alternatively, ISTR that nowadays there's an oral treatment for fleas available.

David @459:
I'm reluctant to treat someone else's cat. If the fleas become a problem, I may get a collar, but even that feels a little over the line.

abi@458 -- there's always the "put him in the microwave" method of checking for a chip, but that has drawbacks....

Seriously, I don't know if individuals can check for chips, but vets have the technology (and it's always in the same place to make that easy). Is the cat neutered? We're in the process of being adopted by an unfixed male who is still very wary of being touched.

abi @ 458:

The way to check for a chip in a cat (or dog) is to take the animal to the local vet or shelter. This tends to involve capturing said animal and putting it in a carrier. It might be easier to ask around the neighborhood first.

Cat in car ain't gonna happen...allergies, remember? A catified car is as unwelcome as a catified house.

We'll keep him from starving, but if he's looking for a comfy indoor place, he's going to have to adopt another family. Whoever that is can check for chips.

As I said, I suspect that he already has pet humans, but that their vacation feeding arrangements fell through in some fashion. If that's the case, then I suspect he'll go back to the warmer welcome there when they come home.

(Or keep trying to scam us out of food too, knowing the way cats go. But I am hard hearted and can feed him dry food till he gets the idea.)

OK, now I understand het Abiveld at last. It's actually a piece of a strange parallel universe where being "hard hearted" means feeding a stranger cat *gasp* dry food. Such cruelty! Such inhumanity! Such ailurophobia!

In a universe whose laws are so odd, it's really no wonder software written in our universe doesn't work.

Maybe you can find a cardboard carrier to put it in for a trip - that would minimize the catification of the car, and be recyclable as well. (A regular cardboard box would do also.) Put a dead towel in either one.
But yes, ask around the neighborhood first. Here, my assumption would be that it was abandoned; I don't know if that's common in your area.

abi, your heart is as hard as a big blorf of whipped cream (the airy kind from a can, not the denser kind you get by just, you know, whipping cream).

You're as hard hearted as those candies with the liquid centers, and as cruel as...some very kind thing.

On pie dough, alcohol, gluten: Cooks' Illustrated did a pie crust recipe about 2 years ago (Nov/Dec 2007), using vodka for half the liquid. Gluten formation requires water, as several of you have surmised -- but you need some gluten or your crust simply falls to dust after baking. As usual when Cooks' has a good article, the discussion is worth much more than the recipe itself.

As for that recipe: the dough rolls out as easily as play-dough, but isn't tough at all. I've had flakier crusts, but this one is really hard to mess up. Just don't panic when you're working with it and it's _not right_ -- that's the effect you're using vodka to achieve.

#402 Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Before I explain why they should not be calling me, I try to remember to say "I know this isn't your fault." When I'm finished, I sincerely wish them a much better job, and soon.

That last one startles them. Almost all of them say "thank you" in a real human voice.

I once worked as a telemarketer, a few years ago (they didn't call it telemarketing, they called it "Outbound Sales"). I worked for a cable company, and I called people who were already subscribers to the company to offer them the next tier of channels free for two months. It was actually pretty popular.

Anyway, if the customer said to never call again and summarily hung up, I was unable to remove them from the calling list. This was because only the account owner was authorised to make changes on the account. That meant that I had to verify their identity with a password (which they would have previously set on their account); once verified, I could then update their status to 'Do Not Solicit'. I had to have that conversation to do it, though, so Teresa's approach would have worked. I'm sure many customers were wildly frustrated that their "Stop calling me!!!!"s did not get the result they wanted...

I hated that job; it was take it or get evicted though, after two years of joblessness, so I took it. I was able to transfer to Inbound Customer Service after 6 months, and weirdly, was abused much more frequently and vilely by those customers than I ever was on Outbound.

We all noticed a correlation: the more in-the-wrong the customer was, the more they were rude and mean. I never understood why they thought the Service Agents would be more likely to help them if they mistreated us, when the opposite is so obviously true.

Yah.. Abi "Diamond Heart" Sutherland...

This is very much how Tabitha came into our life, though no collar.

And no allergies.

As best we can figure, she was abandoned. And some furless bipeds are not of my species.

Regarding unsolicited "sales" calls, it's worth noting that a significant number of such calls are scammers.

(I looked them up at Who Called Us?)

#467
They have a lemon meringue pie in the current special issue 'American Classics' that uses the one-crust version.
If you don't want to make your own, they say (and I'll second them) that the Pillsbury ready-to-use rolled-up pie crusts are okay. What they won't say is that they can be a pain to unroll: Pillsbury doesn't slipsheet the rolls, so the dough sticks together.

Re: illustrated fairy tales

Andrew Lang's _The {Red, Blue, Yellow, Green...) Fairy Book_ series has several illustrations per story, in charming Art Nouveau style. The collections correlate roughly with cultures - Grimm, Arabian Nights, French.

abi, #475, I agree with P J Evans -- here, that cat would be abandoned. I'm not saying you should take it in or to the vet (or to a shelter, if you have those), but a cat that is really skinny probably isn't just a pet that's a little short on food.