What we have made is not enough for song,
so we are told by critics of the age
who always urge the young to disengage,
and tell the old they are no longer strong;
the middle-aged must see they can't belong
and therefore are required to quit the stage.
It seems there is no text left on this page.
That can't be so. Thus the whole tale is wrong.
Where we began no hero could pretend
to claim the moment and the victor's crown.
But infant struggles of the teller's art
convert each listener into a friend,
bring each lost wanderer safe back to town,
and know the climax is there from the start.

Hadrian is my favorite emperor

Adrien was my favorite dad.
Gone for almost 17 years, but I still miss him.

Is "Osirus" a Romanized spelling of Osiris, or does someone need a coffee infusion?

My favorite emperor is Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

xebcs @3:

Someone was typing in a hurry because she had something else to do immediately afterward. Fixed.

Which emperor, was it Hadrian, had a group marriage?

I'm both resentful and relieved that the public miseducation I had didn't include World History. The resentful part is because I had no world history teaching when I was a child and that was an omission. The relief was because public education has the habits of pandering to the lowest common denominator in not only community but intellect, too. The habits of Texas and California of state-wide qualifying and ordering of textbooks, with the Christian Taliban exercising considerable influence and control over content and themes, means redaction eliminating generally content which Christian Taliban considers offensive and deserving relegation to oblivion.

I was annoyed in what today would be called middle school at the bowdlerization of Shakespeare--no "your whoreson dead body" said by the gravedigger in Hamlet in the student edition expurgated versions in the classroom I was in.... How much less would have world history been treated regarding dropping material not compliant to Christian Taliban values and attitudes of appropriate and decent and correct....

(Although, I did have some teachers who went out of their way to do things such as inform students that syphillis went from the western hemisphere to the eastern, and that the colonization by Europeans of the western hemisphere, was an abominable diaster for western hemisphere natives.)

The photograph, which I added to Abi's post about an hour after it went up, was taken in the Pantheon by me, at roughly the moment that I was one of those "dropped jaws, the O’s of mouths matching the oculus above." It now serves as the wallpaper on my iPhone...

Taking advantage of the open thread (and, although I'd love to sit down and chat about emperors, I'm running terribly behind): I recently had a panic attack for the first time. Does anyone have any advice on managing stress to keep it from happening again? Reducing stress doesn't seem to be an option at this point.

Sarah, 8: Recognizing what was happening helped me most of all. Controlling my breathing and focusing on what I was doing, not what I was feeling, also helped.

Sarah @ 8: Have you tried 10-15 minute relaxation or meditation sessions? I found these very useful when I was seriously overloading (no panic attacks, but e.g. crying or getting very angry over relatively minor problems). The trick is to do it every day even if you're feeling like you're okay and don't need that "time-out" today. I should still be doing it but I'm taking time out for running at the moment instead.

I can point you to a website with an mp3 you can download (you do have to register and they send you e-mails for a while, offering more examples, but then they stop if you don't sign up for anything further).

two little details, neither of which I can source at the moment:

Pantheon was well above streetlevel when it was built. The street has been paved, and repaved, and repaved, with stone and brick and more stone and more brick and eventually asphalt since then. Rome really was seven hills back in the day. All the millenia of building has kind of flattened them.

The other point is that enlightened as Hadrian was, he was the first emperor to institute a different legal structure for the rich than for the rest of the empire. This only got worse as the empire went on.

re the panic attack: Deep breathing. And if you're looking for a longterm solution, hatha vinyasa yoga. There's a reason breathing is part of the practice.

Sarah @ 8... If the panick is caused by something where you feel out of control, I'd suggest putting that aside if possible, and focussing on a task where you do have some control.

Sarah #8: A course in yoga may take time. You may find yourself caught by what used, quite accurately, to be called panic terror before you start one and learn the techniques.

There are two things you can do.

One is change the actions you are doing when you started to panic. Taking a different course of action, refocusing your mind on the new set of actions may help control the panic.

The other, as has been mentioned before, is to control your breathing. Slow it down. Count the number of breaths.

Sarah at 8: when I finally figured out that what I was experiencing was a panic attack, I was pretty stunned; I am used to thinking of myself as someone who copes.

Acupuncture (six treatments over six weeks) worked for me: no more panic attacks, no more insomnia. Taking a long walk (45 minutes to an hour) with my dog every day helped reduce my stress level in two ways: it increased my level of physical activity, which has always been a way I control stress, and it involved me in observing and delighting in the world.

To the extent that the emperor's relationship with Antinous was abusive because of the inherently unequality of there being only one emperor, I think it's reasonable to argue that any relationship any emperor (and not just the Roman ones) had was abusive.

There are degrees of that, I think: a same-sex relationship would have had different imbalances than a heterosexual one, obviously, and it matters whether the other person's family has influence. (There is only one emperor, but practical politics means that some people have more influence, and more ability to resist his desires, than others.)

Whether the relationship pre-dated the emperor's accession to the throne might also make a big difference (I'm thinking Alexander and Hephaiston here). And perhaps whether the emperor had been raised with the idea of being emperor: Hadrian wasn't. He succeeded Trajan, who (if I can trust wikipedia on this) was his first cousin once removed. (This was during what became known as the "five good emperors" period.) Yes, senatorial family, so born to some degree of status and privilege, but it's not like the dauphin, knowing from earliest childhood that he will become king of France.

Open thread terminology question:

If I want pants with tapering or close-fitting calves so I can tuck them into boots, what name/search term do I need? I see that "boot cut" means very wide, so I can wear them over boots; that also seems useful, but in different ways. (What I currently have are straight-legged pants that bunch up when I try to tuck them into boots.)

This is likely to be a lengthy search, because in addition to having what appears to be a non-standard difference between my hip size and waist size, I have thick, muscular calves. But knowing what the things I want are called would help some, I think.

Vicki @16 - I think what you're looking for is called a 'tapered leg.' Here's some tips... Britney's boots

Vicki @ 16, what about "skinny" or "tapered"? "Skinny jeans" (tapered, close-fitting legs) are in fashion right now. This, of course, does not guarantee that it will be easy to find ones that fit someone with a "non-standard" waist/hip ratio or calf size (and I've come to believe that "standard" fits no one), but it might mean it's possible.

Vicki @16: "Tapered legs" are probably a good search phrase to start with.

What's the nature of your "nonstandard" waist/hip ratio? For the past decade or so, the jeans shape trend has been favoring a relatively narrow-hipped style (or at least hips that aren't much wider than the waist) with a dropped waistline, often leading to "muffin top" fleshy overspillage-- a low waistline and a cropped top are a particularly risky combination. But that doesn't nec'ly mean that a different waist/hip ratio is nonstandard within most of the population, as opposed to just being poorly accommodated.

If you're looking for tapered legs *and* a relatively high, narrow waistline over a loose hip/thigh region, you may want to make a beeline for the "reverse fit" jeans style which is finally reappearing in stores after a long hiatus. These were popular during the 80s, sometimes exaggerated by "pegging" the legs (narrowing the cuffs by pleating excess width at the ankle and rolling them up to keep the pleat in place). They're often denigrated as "mom jeans", but I'm glad I can find them again after lovingly mending my old ones for years (the style went so far out of fashion that they weren't even appearing in thrift shops anymore)-- I really dislike the low-waisted flared-leg style; even with the compleletely straight-cut rectilinear jeans shape, my waist/hip ratio won't keep my shirts tucked in unless their hems are long enough to anchor underneath my butt.

@Sarah: In the short term, visualize your breathing. As you push the air from your lungs, close your eyes and imagine that you are exhaling something toxic, like cigarette smoke or car exhaust. As you pull fresh air in, imagine that it is perfectly clean and healthy, like forest air constantly scrubbed by ancient trees. Try to pull as much of the clean air in as you can as slowly as you can, and push the foul air out as completely as you can, with the strength of your diaphragm muscle. You are inhaling serenity, and exhaling panic. Do this five times. Then turn your head slowly in the four cardinal directions to stretch your neck. Repeat as necessary.

I am in the midst of editing my thesis, and have employed this little brain hack any number of times in the past week. (I have also renamed the MLA "Modern Lucifer's Attempts".) I also have sore throat, and have been chugging green tea and miso soup like a freshman pledge.

In happier news, someone made me these buttons based on one of my tweets.

A few months back I found, in a "dumpster moving sale," a matched set of folding chairs. Really nice ones, with quilted sling-seats covered with satiny black microfiber. They were clean and entirely intact, so I adopted them.

One I used as an easy chair, placed at my surround sound system sweet spot when watching stuff of import. I deployed it so this morning, to get caught up on Mad Men and Glee.

An hour or so ago it "settled" a bit at one side. I figured that one of the legs had caught on a wrinkle on my throw rug and spread out to its fully extended position.

Just a few minutes ago, when I started reading ML, it fell flat with me in it. I safely ditched my netbook and inspected the damage. The sliding plastic flanges that held the legs to a tension frame had fallen apart.

I'm amazed and disgusted that stuff that looks so nice can be built so shabbily.

On the breathing, as well as the previous useful advice, also try to inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. This controls the impulse to pant and thus make things worse.

re clothes: I have a non-standard body for adult males. I have, in many ways, a "boys" frame.

Which means shirts and pants are based on some false assumptions.

1: I will have a waist at least 28" inches around (If I am lucky, most places rarely have more than one, or two, 29" in waists. Those are barely adequate, but often the best I can do).

2: I will have a chest much larger than I do, based on neck/sleeve measurements.

Because they build boys trousers to a different ratio, the "rise" is inadequate, and I'd have to add about 2 inches to the inseam. No matter, because they don't really fit.

I tried going to chinatown, where there are a significant number of men of slighter frame. The inseams are rarely long enough, and the cut isn't flattering to my shape.

So I buy 501s, and prowl thrift stores, and look forward to someday indulgding in a bit of bespoke tailoring; when I have enough money lying spare.

Oy; William Safire just died (loathed his politics; was entertained, even when he was wrong, by his writing on language; he was one who could almost be called a grammar Nazi) and Roman Polanski got arrested in Switzerland.

I which he had never done but the writing on language.

I have no greif for his passing. I have some sympathy for his families grief, but he was a small, bitter odious man, willing to replace the national interest with party; and then to crow that he did the right thing because of it.

Even when what he did made the world less safe, and caused people who were working to make it more safe to be killed.

Terry #25:

It wasn't like he could separate the two.

I would always get sucked in to the grammar/language column, and then about three paragraphs in (if not before) have to pull myself out because the examples were always tied into some vile political agenda.

Panic attacks: allow me to third (fourth?) the suggestion of concentrating on your breathing. I'm extremely prone to them (had one on the Tube on Thursday and one when my primary server decided to stop booting at 00:30 on Saturday morning) and in both cases focusing on breathing saved me. It doesn't need to be deep: normal will do. But just concentrate on it: constant, unchanging, continuing no matter how horrible everything else may be.

(Of course if *that* isn't true you have bigger problems.)

'Osiris' is a Romanized spelling of a Hellenized pronunciation of something more like Us-Ar.

I can't get the macron over the A. I don't know what it means anyway though, so it's probably just as well.

Slowly, slowly, the people who made conservative hate "respectable" are dying off, leaving only the out-and-out loons to carry the flag. My condolences to Mr. Safire's family and friends, but his passing is a positive thing for the world as a whole.

@Sarah, surprised nobody has mentioned the #1 thing that worked for me when I started getting panic attacks: cut out the caffeine. Stop drinking coffee (or Coke or whatever) completely if you can, and no more than one a day. Instantly cut my attacks in half.

The other thing that worked for me is the beta blockers my doctor prescribed - have you spoken to your doctor?

Nothing else worked for me, except cutting down on one drug and starting on another. Deep breathing didn't do squat, and I despise meditation. Mileage varies all over the place, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a physical problem with physical solutions.

Oh, except for one other useful thing: if anyone ever tells you, mid-attack, to "calm down", "relax" or "stop worrying", explain gently but firmly (or at any rate firmly) that this advice is both perfectly useless and insultingly vapid to somebody's who's panicking. The quicker you get everyone who knows you out of that habit, the better.

Much as I deplore the act that Polanski is accused of, it seems to me that more effort and expense has been expended over the last 32 years in trying to bring him to trial than has been used in searching for Osama bin Laden. That strikes me as a serious case of bad prioritization.

Yes, I know there are different agencies involved, and that effort can't really be taken from one case and put into the other. It still feels to me as if Polanski pissed off someone powerful, and that, rather than any real need for justice, is what kept his case active.

Thanks for the link about the flu victim, it got me to take some tabs and finally use them.

<pedantic>
Re: the "Search is the drug" sidelight. Fascinating stuff, but was any else brought up short by the use of "different to"? When did this Frankensteinien construct become acceptable?
</pedantic>

Bruce Cohen (StM): Different to, is the standard British usage = US usage, Different from.

OK, I will see what I can find under "tapered." Thanks.

Since someone asked: Basically, my waist is about five inches less (in circumference) than my hips, and women's pants all seem to be built for a ten-inch difference. Ergo, if they fit my hips there's lots of extra space at the waist, or if I try to make the waist fit right, there's lots of extra space at the hips. Men's pants are better in this regard; the inseams are too long, but so are the ones on women's pants. (And "petite"s don't have a long enough rise for me.)

Terry Karney @ 23... false assumptions... I will have a waist at least 28" inches around

I take it that your waist is less than that. For me, the problem with vestimentary assumptions is with the length of arms for people with a certain chest measurement. Let's put it that way: I could have played Cornelius in Planet of the Apes - which wouldn't be so bad since it'd mean hanging out with Zira.

Serge: That is, actually, the same problem. If I get a shirt to match my arms/neck, the chest is large enough that I can set up a ridgepole and use it as a tent.

(yes I have a waist of less than 27"; recall the comment about me not being an "adult" for purposes of the danger of venemous animals)

Terry Karney @ 37... Yeah, I remember your comment about your body weight and venemous animals, but I wasn't sure of the numbers. My waist is between 32 and 33, and I weigh about 177 pounds distributed along a 72-inch-high axis. I guess that puts me in the 'adult' category - where nasty critters are concerned anyway.

I think I switched to short sleeves when I moved from Canada to California because that meant cooler clothing, but that also took care of my Cornelian dilemma.

Stefan Jones @21: I had a chair I was fond of turn on me and try to kill me. Broke apart and pitched me face forward into the corner of a substantial end table. It was like being punched in the jaw; I was lucky it didn't go for an eye.

I felt I had always treated it fairly... but some furniture is just built bad.

Bruce Cohen@33:

"different to" does seem less ubiquitous than many phrases that are supposed to Ruining The Language. Unlike singular "they" and restrictive "which" it isn't in the King James Bible, Shakespeare, or Jane Austen. It takes some care to search for, since there "it looked very different to her now" is not the same usage.

In the form you are objecting to, it was used at least once[#] by by Wilkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, Hans Christian Andersen, and Arthur Conan Doyle. So the answer to "When did this Frankensteinien construct become acceptable?" appears to be the middle of the 19th century[*].

There certainly have been changes over time -- in the 19th century "different to" was much less frequent than "indifferent to", and according to Google it is now rather more frequent.

[#]http://www.online-literature.com/advancedsearch.php
[*] Mary Shelley herself appears to be innocent.

Terry Karney @ 34: Oh, dear. Does this mean I need to go and apologise to all the (British) students I've marked down for writing style because they've used 'different to' in their papers?

(I'm trying to remember whether I've ever seen 'different to' used in an academic text, and while I can't be entirely sure that I haven't, I'm reasonably sure it would have leapt out at me and been incorporated into my mental landscape of language differences. Except that this is honestly the first time I can recall seeing that usage outside of a student essay.)

xopher @ #28: You should be able to use Unicode. The value for "lower-case a macron" is "U+0101". Convert the "0101" to from hexadecimal to decimal (that's 257) ; precede it with "&#" and follow with ";" and you get "ā" appearing in HTML.

Oh, here's Latin Capital A with macron (U+0100}: Ā.

Too bad van Vogt's printer couldn't do Unicode...

Vicki @ 35 ...
Since someone asked: Basically, my waist is about five inches less (in circumference) than my hips, and women's pants all seem to be built for a ten-inch difference. Ergo, if they fit my hips there's lots of extra space at the waist, or if I try to make the waist fit right, there's lots of extra space at the hips. Men's pants are better in this regard; the inseams are too long, but so are the ones on women's pants. (And "petite"s don't have a long enough rise for me.)

I don't have any direct experience with Zafu, but their fitting ideas apparently do work well for some folk (I believe they'll ask for an email address, but as said, haven't tried them out -- I've been fortunate enough to finally find a brand that works for me, for the most part).

Thomas, 40: Say, rather, "Hans Christian Andersen's translator."

Pedantka@41:

It's not an academic text, but there is a discussion of "different from" vs "different to" in issue 41 of Scribner's Magazine (1907), in an article on misconceptions about the differences between American and English. The author clearly implies that people thought of "different from" as an Americanism, even though he shares Bruce's attitude to it. Incidentally, this agrees with the C19th origin from my earlier searches.

"Different from " can hardly be called an Americanism, because it can be found in English writers of the highest mark at all periods. Byron, for example, uses "different from" in his letters (Prothero Ed., vol. iv, p. 422). But during the last century a fashion grew up in England of saying and writing "different to." I have met with it in many recent authors of repute, and some Americans—the few who like to ape English habits, good or bad—undertook to use it in this country with very slight success. There never was either warrant or reason for "different to" and it is clearly ungrammatical, as was strongly shown by a writer in the "Spectator" not long since in an article condemning this practice among some of his countrymen. "Different from " is not only correct, but if anyone desires authority he can find a great one in Dr. Johnson, who uses it in his letters (Hill Ed., i, p. 189). The universal American usage, I am glad to think, is again prevailing in England, where it was set aside only in obedience to some strange freak for which no cause can be alleged.

[via Google Books]

TexAnne:

Um. Yes. I had that specifically in mind when searching Homer, Dante, the Bible, etc, but my subconscious must think of Andersen as English. And I've seen the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, so I really have no excuse.

Rob Rusick @ 39... some furniture is just built bad

In Dante's Infurniture Store?

Thomas @47: Thank you. That and a brief search of my own through Google Books persuades me to withold the Red Pen of Doom, and add this one to my list of 'things North Americans ought to know about British writing.'

Hrm. I suppose I ought to start keeping that list in written form, instead of as a mental checklist. It would probably be helpful to hand it off to new teaching assistants *before* they start marking papers.

(Trivia: Brits make no distinction between 'that' and 'which'; I have had to put great effort into unlearning that rule.)

@sarah I was glad someone mentioned medication in addition to the breathing and yoga. Breathing exercises, regular aerobic exercise and yoga are amazing in helping keep panic attacks at bay now, but when I was in that deep pit of depression and the panic attacks came in waves, then medication was the only (relatively) immediate relief. Once the meds put me on the path back uphill then the alternatives kept me going upwards. Haven't had to have chemical assistance in several years now, but if I head back into 'the depths of despair' my first stop will be my psychiatrist's office, and second stop the drugstore.

Pedantka @ 50:

There's a rule about that, beyond whatever sounds more natural at the time?

I watched Flash Forward this afternoon.

Amazing. Intriguing. And . . . how do I put this? Vastly annoying, because it is tempting me to keep watching. I'm so afraid of smart continuing shows ending up as snipe hunts, like I hear Lost has become.

I also watched last week's episode of Mad Men, which is a show continuing show which I have no doubts about. The people doing that show are utterly in control. They know where the characters come from and where they are going.

KeithS@52:

restrictive "which": some people believe that 'which' can only be used non-restrictively, ie, following a comma, and that other uses should be replaced by "that".

This "rule" appears to have been introduced by Fowler, in the interests of symmetry. The use of "that" following a comma is extremely rare, so things would be tidier if "which" could only be used in situations where "that" can't be used. I was introduced to this under "strange things Americans believe about English", and it is more common in the US, but it does have disciples in the UK.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (the only major evidence-based usage book) says "You can use either which or that to introduce a restrictive clause--the grounds for your choice should be stylistic".

Us-Ār. Thank you, theophylact!

By the way, the Pharaoh of the Bible was supposedly Ramses II, known by the Pharaonic name Us-Ār-Maat-Re, or Ozymandias.

KeithS@52:

Thomas covered this beautifully. I'll only add that I learned the which/that rule from someone who used to copyedit for HarperCollins, and thus have been inclined to take it rather seriously when I'm preparing something for print in America.

Pendantka@57:

Yes, the Journal of the American Medical Association also has a "wicked which" rule.

I should point out that I don't have any objection to people saying that they personally prefer "that" in restrictive clauses, or even to organizations saying that their house style is to use "that". Those are stylistic preferences, to which people and organizations are entitled. The problem is people who say that restrictive "which" is a grammatical error and that proper writers knew to use "that" in the Good Old Days. It isn't, and they didn't.

Grabbing the opportunity for an open-thready question:

I've been re-reading a lot of Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books lately, and I'm really struck by how late in the day things happen. Nero is always having people show up at 9pm. Various characters mention going out for the evening at 8pm. There is one reference to someone dropping by for a visit at 10pm, and no one seems to find this odd.

It this a New York thing? I've lived a few places (deep South and Mid-west, mostly), and all these things seem like they should have happened a couple of hours earlier.

Is it an earlier times thing? The books I've been reading take place between the 30s and the 50s. Was there a shift sometime in the second half of the last century, and everyone started doing things earlier? (The annotated Jane Austen talks about something similar happening in the early 19th century in England, so it's possible.)

Or am I just out of the loop?

Terry, I remember my father trying to buy nice suits after he retired. (he was an airline pilot who wore uniforms for work...)

He had a hell of a time finding things that fit. He was not much taller than I am (I'm 5'4" and dad may have been about 5'8") BUT they don't make suits that appeal to older gentleman that are V-shaped as in, dad was fit and had something like a 28" waist and very big shoulders. And he also had fairly long arms and short-ish legs.

He was able to and decided to, have a couple, three suits made for him that fit correctly. But he was also able to afford it with no quibbles.

And the Pantheon. It was one of the sights of Rome that made me weep with joy at seeing it, and the sentimentality of people that still left flowers at the tomb of Titian as well as others entombed there.

The last trip to Rome was part of a college/high school trip for me and my sister that my mother engineered. We went to London, Paris, Rome and Athens. In London and Paris, we went on GrayLine tours of the city; in Rome and Athens, mom was able to afford a driver/guide and we had really personal tours.

In Rome, we figured out the construction workers, etc. thought mom and the driver were married with two daughters so we didn't get harassed. (Mom is at least part Cherokee, has long and fabulous hair, which was black-black-black until rather later in life than most women go grey.)

In Athens we also saw a lot of sights that we would have otherwise probably never seen. The cog-train up to the Acropolis was fantastic, even though it scared the sh!t out of mom. We got to walk around and look at everything. Mom was a little calmer going down on the cog-train. And we had a fantastic dinner at a little, hole-in-the-wall, where I learned that the retsina wine is just not for me.

We didn't learn until later that mom was very agorophobic and that trip was probably really very trying for her.

My table of contents is finished! I'm taking this baby to the print shop, tomorrow!

By "tomorrow," I hasten to add, I mean: "later today."

Julie Thompson, #59: I find that weird as well. I've always just assumed that Nero Wolfe is a night owl, and that in this, as in everything else, he's bulldozing the outside world into arranging itself to his convenience.

To answer Jacque's question from the previous Open Thread:

My time-knitting skills aren't very good yet, so I rely on Stumble Upon in the meantime. The toolbar button opens a timesink, though. I found all these pretty pictures and useful guides in the past 10 minutes, frinstance.

Stefan Jones @ 53, Lost ceased to be a snipe hunt last season. Once the writers were told what the timeline for the show was, they started explaining mysteries. But a lot of people had already given up, because the writers were vamping to stretch out the show. I can't blame the people who'd given up.

Madeleine Ashby, high five! Now get some rest, yes? *hovers with tea and chocolates*

xeger @ 45, I just tried Zafu (I'm pretty sure I'd used them before) and this time they just sent me to a page offering to sell me "my personal style guide" for $29.95. I couldn't find the usual teeny tiny link saying "No thanks, take me to my results" so I'm wondering if they've gone completely pay.

Re Hadrian -- just got the current issue of Smithsonian, which has a lovely article on hiking Hadrian's Wall, which is now on my List of Things To Do Someday. 84 miles coast to coast -- not awful, but a lot of it IS straight up and down...

Thomas@58--Not to even attempt to defend all writing instructors ever[1], because I have run across some who do make 'Thus it was, is, and ever shall be world without end' claims about grammar, but more often when I hear people defending hard and fast rules (that really aren't), or attempt to impose them on students myself, it's in the context of 'you cannot do this because it will make you sound uneducated and people will laugh at you. Don't give people a reason to laugh at you.'

[1]First off, I'm not even a writing instructor; I teach religious studies--but the method of assessment for students is essays, which means that either I teach them something about how to produce clear, comprehensible, academic prose[2] or they keep losing marks and I keep crying over my marking.
[2] Of course, the small details we're talking about here-- different to/different from, or that/which-- are usually the least of a student's worries.

(I cannot believe I have fallen backwards into half-defending prescriptive grammar.)

different to/different from: My (American) tenth-grade English teacher, an old-school grammar fiend, insisted that 'different from' was a barbarism and that only 'different than' was proper. I doubt she'd ever encountered 'different to'; it would probably have given her an apoplexy.

Thomas @ 54/58 and Pedantka @ 57:

Thank you. That explains why I'd never heard of that rule before, and it's not one I'm likely to pick up.

I'd also just like to say that "'wicked which' rule" is an absolutely delightful turn of phrase.

Different from is the barbarism, and different than is the way to go...

Wow.

@Caroline,

Thank you! I am just about to get myself some tea. Then a final check, then the printers'!

when I hear people defending hard and fast rules (that really aren't), or attempt to impose them on students myself, it's in the context of 'you cannot do this because it will make you sound uneducated and people will laugh at you. Don't give people a reason to laugh at you.'

Yes, this. The "no split infinitives" rule is ridiculous, and I've said so to my students, providing awkward-sounding examples from The Economist, but I've also warned them that some EU and UN competitive exam correctors will gleefully reject a paper on the basis of a single split infinitive.

Terry Karney (71): Yes, I know. You're not the first person I've run into who's had that reaction. But after thirty years, I have 'different than' too firmly ingrained to change now.

Mary Aileen: I actually use all three, but "different than is the one I have to ponder the need for most carefully.

Of course, at this moment, I can't think of a specific example.

Far, far behind, having just posted this on the previous Open Thread.

Joel Polowin, on pysanka repair:

Our kid has recently been making "stress balls" - two nested balloons filled partly with flour to knead in the hand as a relaxation aid. They're about the size and shape of a hen's egg (and could be adjusted).

If there's enough integrity in what you've got of the shell, you could funnel in something similar for support, and either leave it in place, dump it out, or replace it with, say, a 2-part resin. Fillers can expand as they set, so roll the egg around to cover almost all of the inside while the resin is still fluid but becoming thick. Test first in case it doesn't play nice with the balloon. If you're using a urea foam, undershoot.

I don't understand why it's controversial at all that Roman Polanski has been arrested. Forget who it is: a man drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty and then fled the country before he could be sentenced. Why would you not expect him to be arrested as soon as the opportunity presented itself, even if that time was three decades on?

Serge #36, Terry #37:

There are catalog sites, notably Land's End, that will at least help you solve the arm vs neck part of the problem, as they allow you to specify sleeve length separately. (You can even get a "Tall" main shirt body, useful for keeping your shirt tucked in, if that is another of your problems. Although I doubt it in Terry's case.)

Just acquired an iPhone and I don't know if I could really afford it. But being able to listen to WFMU despite firewalls is priceless.

Sarah @8: panic management...

Sux rox, eh?

Long term: make sure you're getting plenty of sleep. Eat well, especially lots of vegs, esp. dark leafy greens. Exercise.

Immediate: locate the panic in your body. (Belly? Upper back? etc.) Observe which direction it is rotating. What color is it?

Then: Make it rotate the other way. Change the color to one you like. Make it sparkley.

Juli @ #59, from Wikipedia: "In an early story, Wolfe tells a guest that luncheon is served daily at 1:00 p.m. and dinner at 8:00pm."

That suggests that Wolfe is, as usual, forcing people to conform to his schedule when holding meetings at 9:00pm or later.

Archie is a night-owl, particularly if dancing at the Flamingo is part of the evening's entertainment.

Us, 1950.

How we looked.

(Oops. Article is from 1951, but photo was taken in 1950.)

Fragano @1:

Long-delayed, a reply.

To make a thing, to bring it into being
Is intimate, like making love. The verb's
The join, for making either one disturbs
A universe where knowing comes from seeing.
I dream a thing that doesn't yet have form
Is risky as I love you. Both require
A trust that one's interior desire
Is strong enough to make the world transform.
But reformations of the universe
Alarm a fair few folk. My age is cause
To say I mustn't meddle with what was.
And thus they have a reason to reverse
That instant when I took the world apart
And re-assembled it to match my heart.

Carol at 76: Silly Putty works too. I've been using it for years to relieve stress and exercise my hands.

Abi @0: I think I like Augustus better than Hadrian, though I don't know that it's a strong preference and it may be a bias from the amount of stuff still lingering in popular culture. (One does wonder why there are lots of books, films, etc., about the Julio-Claudians and not so many about the Five Good Emperors. Are they just boring? Or was it that they were mostly running a machine that Augustus had set up...)

Bruce @31: I dont' remember the last time we invaded a country because Polanski was there...

Juli @59: And Wolfe's ability to force people to conform to his schedule is amazing, isn't it? (Particularly when you get to fairly powerful people who are used to making others conform to their schedules...)

This is specifically directed to all denizens and lurkers on Making Light who live in the SF Bay Area: Do you want a dog? I have rescued the most wonderful dog. She needs a home. She's about one year old, healthy, not neutered. Short-haired -- a deep brown color, almost black. She's had a litter. She's 51 pounds. I have gotten her her shots: rabies, parvo, distemper. She's been de-wormed and given flea meds. She has a weak left rear leg: the vet is not sure what it is or how serious -- maybe an old injury. It is not exceptionally noticeable.

I made a found dog report to the county. I have checked on Craigslist for her owners: nothing.

She is housebroken and leash trained. She does not chew furniture, books, or anything except her toys. She has a "soft" mouth. She is submissive rather than aggressive. She tolerates cats and likes other dogs, is good with kids, and behaves appropriately at the dog park with all sizes and genders of dogs. She's not at the moment spayed, but that's being rectified this coming Thursday.

Have I mentioned: she's a pit bull?

She's an absolute love: everyone who has met her has mourned the fact that they can't take her, including my vet. If you're at all interested, e-mail me. I'm willing to foster her for a while. If I can't find her a home, she goes to a no-kill shelter.

Her name's Midnight...

Juli @59--

Nero Wolfe's hours, although they run late, were not out of place for members of the leisured classes (which is how he probably preferred to think of himself) in the first half of the 20th Century. A lot of that was by adoption from the European upper classes.

If you don't have to drag yourself in to work at 8 in the morning, it's possible to reset the entire day, just because you can. This is, BTW, one of the reasons old biographers often mention, in praise of a Great Man's work ethic, the fact that he rose so early and was soon hard at work (by 7AM! Imagine the effort!) or that he got so much done before breakfast (at 9 AM! What a workhorse!)

The working classes might be dragging themselves out to catch the first rays of daylight for their labors, but the well-off could set a sweeter schedule for themselves, and did.

This is obviously just for Teresa.

SeanH@77: I'm not following the case closely, so who knows? And your real question is why other people are up in arms, and all I know about is my own relatively mild reaction to the alleged facts.

The facts I know are that he plead guilty as part of a plea bargain agreement, which the judge then reneged on. Also that the alleged victim sued him privately, reached a settlement, and is quoted as not favoring his prosecution.

Thus, to me, it seems like the legal system has had its shot, and the event should be considered over.

Of course, the things I think I know are no doubt incomplete and may be completely wrong. If so, well, then different actions are appropriate.

I've clearly been guilty of linguistic parochialism, and I apologize. Just goes to show how deeply jammed into my head those "rules" have become.

Thomas @54:
Thank you for pointing out that the "wicked which" rule isn't universally accepted. I've been beaten over the head with it all my life, since I often prefer "which" to "that" in my writing, and have often used it out of spite because I hate the rule so much.

Stefan Jones @53:
"Flashforward" has real potential, and there have been enough exceptions to the rule that a dramatic series can't carry a mystery well over many episodes that I am willing to continue to watch it and see how it works out. Exceptions include: "Dollhouse" ¹, "Life", and "Tru Calling". I'm still optimistic about "Defying Gravity"².

Incidentally, watching new shows over the last few days has renewed my belief that no one (at least in the US) can write a sitcom anymore that doesn't make me want to decorate the TV screen with my last meal. Note that comedy is still possible³, just not "situation comedy".

1. About which I will say more in another comment at a later time, under ROT13 despoilation.
2. Despite that they've consistently screwed up one major scientific point out of either laziness or a need to rely on standard dramatic conventions: the speed of light lag for communications over a 30 million km distance.
3. I especially liked Rebecca Romijn in "Eastwick". I think people forget how good a comic actor she is, just because she was a model. Especially when I compare her to Jenna Elfman, whose new show I find dreadfully unfunny.

The BBC has put a lot of classic nature TV on the web--Sir David Attenborough's favorite moments.

Terry 75: I actually use all three, but "different than" is the one I have to ponder the need for most carefully. [&pilcrow;] Of course, at this moment, I can't think of a specific example.

You can talk all you want to but it's different than it was! No it ain't, no it ain't, but you gotta know the territory!

And note that 'different from' cannot be used in that context without another word or phrase like 'how' or 'the way'. That is, when an independent clause is compared, only 'different than' may be used; if a noun phrase is compared, either is appropriate.

I speak of my own dialect. YGMV.

Bruce Cohen@91:

often prefer "which" to "that" in my writing, and have often used it out of spite because I hate the rule so much.

If someone argues that 'which' and 'that' can't be interchanged and should be separated, you could ask for reasons. After all, 'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.'

SeanH @77:

My comment was not intended as a statement that I thought Polanski shouldn't be arrested, nor even that he shouldn't be arrested 30 years later, but that a great deal of effort went into tracking him and trying to catch him over that 30 years, far more effort than has gone into many similar, or even more egregious, cases. I think there are political overtones to the arrest, and I'm curious to know what they are. I don't know that he's guilty of the crimes of which he is accused, but certainly the accusations warrant a trial to determine his guilt. It would seem that many people questioning his arrest don't think he should be tried, which I don't agree with at all.

Thomas #54/Pedantka #57: I've recently had to deal with a copy editor who had strong feelings on the subject of "that" and "which." Together with the placement of commas (or should that be "commata"?), restrictive or otherwise, about these words.

The copy editor also thought I had unnecessarily repeated a word in the name of a prominent figure in early twentieth century Jamaica, Sir George Seymour Seymour. I was determined to see no more of that sort of pedantry.

Abi #84:

It is a fact, one I cannot deny,
That better than my verse is your reply.

thomas, #95: *SPLORT!*

A request for assistance in identification of a short story, which I can remember in some detail but have been unable to pin down.

The story concerns the inhabitants of an alien planet. There is a human presence on the planet, & two notable indigenous species. One is an intelligent nonhumanoid resembling a big cat with tentacles*. The humans call them "octopussies". The other species closely resemble humans but appear to be no more intelligent than baboons. The humans call them "yahoos"**. A human couple arrive from Earth with the intention of proving the yahoos are intelligent (and therefore have human rights - they're treated as animals) by raising a pair of yahoo infants as human children.

I think it was the first story in an anthology I found in a school library in the early 90s, and probably at least a couple of decades old at that point. The anthology may also have contained Cordwainer Smith's "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal", but none of the anthologies listed as containing that at isfdb.org really look familiar. (I know I read "Suzdal" in something at about that time, though, so either I'm failing to recognize one or it's unlisted.)

* Something like van Vogt's Coeurl, I guess.
** I didn't get the reference to Gulliver's Travels when I first read this.

As I am about to start into the new book in my life, I really do want to add the note:

While I will buy every book ever written by David Weber and read them voraciously, is it now a requirement that they double as doorstops? Thank God they're on the bottom shelf or they might break the furniture. (And PNH, the repetition about the spiffy wonderfulness that is fpubbare-evttvat becomes really obvious in the audio book versions of Armageddon Reef and Schism. Not an explanation of how it's better in terms of how the physics works, just a lot of gushing about why it is better in effects. Over and over again. Probably catches my ear more because I can't unconsciously go "Oh, again?" and skim the the paragraph. Am I going to have the same problem this time?)

Off to neglect the textbooks for some light naval-sf.

Re: The Wild Sewer Pigs of Hampstead - One wonders if Neil Gaiman knew about that legend when he wrote Neverwhere.

Xopher (93&94): Huh. In other words, 'different than' is always correct, but 'different from' is only correct some of the time? (Your terminology confused me a little, although your example in 93 sounds right to me.) That makes sense; this is the same teacher that advised us to always use the serial comma, on the practical grounds that it is never wrong and the lack of it can be (as in the famous "my parents, Ayn Rand and God"). That doesn't explain her vehemence in objecting to 'different from', but it is at least consistent.

Sarah, #8: I think big protein-heavy meals helped me with panic attacks. Eggs, beans, and spinach for breakfast, in my case. I don't know if I needed protein, or iron, or if it replaced sugar and starch, or what.

Nor did it fix everything, but it did seem to help, and it was pleasant.

Bill at #82 & #83 - there were probably just as many ties in Montreal as being worn in those Worldcon photos. The difference is that in Montreal, they all belonged to David Hartwell!

#100 The story is Overproof by Johnathan (sic) Blake MacKenzie, Analog October 1965. I have the magazine right here.

I think it's collected in one of the Analog anthologies.

I just stumbled across a couple good uses of modern technology as applied to Bach.

Crab Canon, illustrated using a Möbius strip.

Applying the principle of Shepard Tones to the neverending canon.

Tim @100, sorry not to help, but I do remember that story. From the years I read my way thru' the local library, so anthologies especially are all merged into one often-anonymous storystream.

Er, didn't spot Henry @106 answering question @100. *sheepish*

On Polanski: it's probable that his lawyers caused the arrest, because they didn't think LA was serious about the matter.
Although after 30 years I'd think it was past time to end it: the victim settled with him years ago, out of court. (I'm pretty sure that the statute of limitations has also expired on this.)

Juli @59:

I think it's partly a New York thing (more to do in the evenings, transport running all night and some chance of finding, say, a diner that will sell at least a sandwich and a cup of coffee quite late), and partly a characterization thing, including an easy way to show Wolfe insisting on having his way on schedules etc. even when the clients didn't like it. Even at the time, it wasn't meant to look like business-as-usual: Wolfe's scheduling everything around meals and set times in the plant rooms is part of his eccentricity.

Re Polanski:

On the legal issue, I don't think statute of limitation applies after a conviction: Polanski pled guilty, and then jumped bail pre-sentencing when the judge changed his mind about the plea bargain. (Did he or his lawyer really think the Swiss court would grant bail at this point?)

Beyond that, I want to note somewhere (and this seems like a plausible place) the contrast between two headlines on the BBC News Web site today. One was about Poland instituting mandatory chemical castration for convicted "pedophiles," defined in this case as anyone who raped someone under the age of 15. The other was someone in the Polish government pushing for charges to be dropped against Polanski, who has been convicted of drugging and having sex with someone under the age of 15.

I realize that "Poland" is no more a monolithic entity than the United States, but I also found myself thinking "convicted pedophiles, unless they're famous" and "I wonder if the same people would be pushing for charges to be dropped if the victim had been male" and whether they're telling themselves that it wasn't really rape, because [any number of excuses to do with her behavior or his history].

Vicki, this might be wroth throwing into your thoughts:
“The district attorney’s office, in the 30 years since Mr. Polanski left the jurisdiction, has not once sought to have him extradited. If it had, there would have been a hearing regarding misconduct in this case,” wrote the attorneys, Chad Hummel, Douglas Dalton and Bart Dalton, in a July 7 filing.

It isn't like Polanski's been hiding the whole time. The DA's office hadn't bothered to do anything until now; it seems it wasn't important to them.

My gut feeling about Polanski, when hearing the news was, "Good. About time!"

I first remember hearing about Polanski's crime when I was very, very young. Maybe 8. Juuuuuust old enough to understand what rape was. When I found out that he had gotten away and was living free in Europe, I was absolutely horrified, especially since he wasn't hiding. They knew where he was and no one was going to make him come back and go to jail. Polanski kind of became my boogieman...the proof that bad people sometimes get away with things, even when everyone knows about them.

#102 heresiarch

I don't know though I'd suspect he did. But I'm sure Joan Aiken did when she wrote Midnight is a Place, which features feral pigs in the sewers under an industrial town.

KeithS, #107: That second one is COOL.

Head covering certainly isn't unique to Islam, or completely out of the norm in the US. I see the occasional headscarf in Portland, Oregon — some on women who look like their religion is probably Islam, and some on women who I would guess are Russian Old Believers. I've seen one full burqua, on a lab assistant working in a university computer center. As I child, I attended parochial schools where the nuns wore full habits with wimples and scarves, and I had to wear a hat when I attended the Catholic church. When I lived in Pennsylvania, I knew Amish women who wore small caps on their hair, and modest dresses.

The religious realm isn't the only place where attire is about gender and power, and westerners who aren't Islamic shouldn't congratulate ourselves too quickly that our culture doesn't show disparities like a burqua. I was at a theater festival in June, when the audiences are full of high school student groups, and was really struck by how they dressed. The boys wore baggy clothes that concealed their bodies and made them look bigger than they were, and wore sneakers. The girls wore skin-tight clothes, sleeveless and low cut, short shorts and miniskirts, and wore strappy sandals often with high heels. No religious oppression here, but who is unable to run, fussing with tugging clothes down (or up), shaving, painting, blow-drying? And who is the show for?

I thank heaven that this disparity does seem to be reduced somewhat after the teenage years. I watch Mad Men on TV, (wearing jeans, a comfortable shirt, and sneakers) and shudder at what my Mom had to wear.

P.J. Evans @ 113:
I'm not sure I believe that, given that news coverage has been reporting for years how Polanski has been avoiding any jurisdiction (such as the UK) from which he was likely to be extradited to the US.

I'm also not really sure why it's relevant. If the police or prosecutors got sloppy or lacksadaisical about following up on a case, after he'd been dodging extradition for some time, that means what? That the criminal gets a pass forever?

I suspect the truth is the opposite of what Polanski and his lawyers claim: if Polanski were other than a celebrity with powerful friends, he would have been in jail many years ago. He might even have been out by now.

xeger @OT#129:940 I have to admit to being utterly curious as to why

It's because of the way my week is structured: My workweek M-Th, which is when I'm on the computer most. F-Sun, much less so, so if I want to quckly pick up on where I'm at with a thread, "Was that later than last Thursday?" is faster for me to key to than "What was last Thursday's date?" (I have a bookmarking strategy for keeping track of this, but I haven't come up with a smooth transition between computers.) (I'm sure there are more elegant ways; I just haven't dug into them yet.)

Also, beyond, say, the last two weeks in time, day-of-the-week helps me coordinate events to my own life rhythm. "What was I doing when...?"

Does that answer your question?

Tangentially, I absolutely detest the way that many mail clients think that "today" or "yesterday" ... are reasonable things to put in the 'Date' column. I couldn't care less if it's "today" or "yesterday" -- I'd like to know what the date actually is...

My beloved Mac does this, and I can't figure out how to get it to default to date. Drives me nuts if I pay any attention to it at all. (Thank Ghu for Linux and ls -l.)

(or for that matter "Wednesday")

That's why I want date AND day-of-the-week. So call me greedy. :)

Don't think it's been posted before: NaNoWriMo participants who have no plot ideas yet may find this very useful.

janetl #117: I have a feeling that went into the wrong thread....

PJ @ 110: There's no statute of limitations on sentencing; Polanski pled guilty and then fled sentencing because he thought the judge would "renege". There's no evidence that the judge was indeed changing the sentence, but even if there was, it doesn't mean Polanski was right to flee. Once he pled guilty, he was required to serve whichever sentence the judge handed down, and judges do reserve the right to change or modify a plea bargain that's been worked out between the prosecutor and the defense attorneys. It happens all the time. In Polanski's case, if they felt there had been a miscarriage of justice, that would have been a case to appeal, not a case for fleeing.

I've read some of the trial transcript (where the girl testifies), and it isn't pretty. He knew he'd done wrong, and he pled guilty to a reduced charge, so there is absolutely no excuse for his behavior in fleeing and staying away for more than 30 years.

After all, if he'd stayed and completed his sentence, he'd have been totally free long ago. He prolonged this case with his unnecessary actions and refusal to take his justified punishment.

An open thread at this particular site seems like the perfect place to ask if anyone can give me a reliable bibliographical reference for the Asimov essay titled, "What Is Intelligence Anyway?" I've seen it attributed to his book _It's Been a Good Life_ but a thorough re-read of that work assures me that it's not in there.

My permissions editor is going nuts looking for this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I didn't say I believe Polanski's lawyers, except that yes, he could have been extradited before this.

I keep wondering, why now and not thirty years ago? What changed? What's their real goal? (The judge and the prosecutor and the DA involved are long gone: there's not much of a point to going after them.)

Sarah S. @ 123: Is that definitely the title? There's "Thinking About Thinking" in The Planet That Wasn't on that subject.

Joel Polowin @125: Here's the text - it's not the same essay. Floating around the internet, crediting Asimov, but with no source.

Xopher: Yes.

Mary Aileen: I would say different than is the least commonly correct.

Terry Karney (127): Then I guess I'll bug you a lot, because that's the only one I ever use. :)

This may* be abuse of an open thread, but hey, open's open, right?

I just found myself writing "there are some more pictures up on the flickr account; I know you've seen the old ones"

I use "ones" that way a lot in spoken English - referring to a number of examples of a given thing - but it always looks wrong to me written†. Is this use of "one":

i) informal usage, and therefore fine
ii) informal usage, and just plain wrong
iii) correct usage, but not the way I'm doing it
iv) correct, it just looks funny to me, or
v) correct only when capitalized, but don't mention them or they'll eat your mind?

And as a bonus for 10 - where would you normally go to resolve a grammar question? I came here because I lurk and, well, you guys are likely to know and may even be interested.

*is
†mostly it looks like it needs an apostrophe, but I think that's the Grocer in me talking

Russ, there is nothing wrong with your use of "ones," and RESIST the temptation to put a grocer's apostrophe in there! There's no need or reason for it.

P J: According to the LA DA's Office, they haven't filed for extradition because Polanski's people have been very careful to 1: not travel to anyplace where there is a standing extradition treaty (say the UK, where he'd be flagged at passport control) and 2: not to announce his plans to enter places like Switzerland where an actual application has to be filed. They have, so they say, been paying attention to him, looking for just such a chance as they got.

So Polanski's lawyers may be telling a very careful set of, accurate, facts, to hide a piece of difficult truth.

So this time he got an invite, and then showed up. Bang! they got their chance.

As to the timeline; there are two crimes. One of which he plead guilty to. That voids the statute of limitations on that one.

The other is flight, which has no such statute of limitations.

The rest, well if he'd been less wealthy fleeing would have not been an option. If, I suspect, he were less famous, the ongoing interest wouldn't exist.

I've heard, on a pretty regular basis, people bitching about him; saying someone ought to just "pull a Noriega" and kidnap him back. I've seen such things in print. I don't think more than a couple of years went by without something he does making the papers, and a big outcry about how he needs to be arrested.

Sarah S. @123

Google Books pointed me to several books that used the essay. One is The Simon & Schuster short prose reader, and it does have a copyright attribution for the essay (though you can't see what it is in the Google snippet).

Open-threadiness: I just wanted to enthuse about how my son has clicked on They Might Be Giants new album (Here Comes the Science), especially the Boing-Boing-produced video for Meet the Elements. He's home sick today and is pulling the stuff up on YouTube for repeated listening.

Also, their "The Mespotamians" is one weird-ass song. Not .. that that stands out in the overall TMBG body of work, but still...

Thomas @132

Thanks so much. I think that may well solve the problem for me!

Russ: iv.

Pendrift at #120:

This one is a favorite of mine: action film trailer generator page.

http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=actionfilm

Much related stuff on the same page.

Just received in my inbox: Senate Finance Committee nixes public option. This is not a good thing, right?

Russ, #129: You left out "standard pluralization", which is what you have there, albeit of a pronoun rather than a noun. UR DOIN IT RITE.

Michael: I really should get that. My son still loves their 'No!' album, and he loves science, so it seems like a natural combination.

Paula Helm Murray @ 60... Your dad sounds like one of the associates of Clark Savage Jr.

Pendrift at 137: don't despair. The process ain't over. The committee voted down one version of the public option (Rockefeller's), but will be voting on another (Schumer's), which might pass, though probably not. However, an amendment which adds the public option to a bill may still be brought up on the Senate floor and passed there.

The fact that four Democratic Senators voted against it is not good. It might mean that if a bill with a robust public option comes to the floor, it doesn't have 60 votes. However, one of those four, Ben Nelson, has said that he will vote for Schumer's version. Maybe the Democrats will make the Republicans actually filibuster, a la Jimmy Stewart. That would be teh awesome. Maybe Harry Reid will use the reconciliation process to pass a bill with a public option -- that only needs 51 votes. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And the beat goes on...

Pendrift @120

They've stolen my plot!

I suppose I could always bring back the fascist ninja clowns in airships.

For all the guinea pig fans in the house.

Russ #129, the answer to your bonus question is a “style guide” for the dialect of English you’re speaking and writing.

Several people here are professional writers, which I’m not, and they may have other views, but with due humility I’d say that for British English the style guide is Fowler’s Modern English Usage, ideally supplemented by the excellent The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers.  For US English it’s “Strunk & White”, that is The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White.

I would say Strunk and White is a moderately useful style guide for students, when taking classes from professors who believe in it.

Elstwise, I don't commend it.

Which edition of Fowler?

There's a strong argument that the 3rd Edition completely misses the point. It does describe modern British English, but you don't get Fowler's prose on splitting infinitives. It's not Fowler, the person, but Fowler, the brand-name.

Well, I have to admit that my Fowler is the original 1926 edition, so I’m not up to speed on the later editions.  But if not Fowler, Dave, and if not Strunk & White, Terry, then what?

John Stanning @ 147:

Why not Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage? It gets a shout-out from no less an authority than Geoff Pullum. And if the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language[*] -- and notorious loather of Strunk & White -- likes it, that's a pretty good recommendation:

MWCDEU explains what actually occurs, shows you some of the evidence, tells you what some other usage books say, and then leaves you to make your own reasoned decision. It won't tell you either that you should split infinitives, or that you shouldn't. But it will give you a number of examples of writers who do, and point out that the construction has always occurred in English literature over the last six or seven centuries, and that nearly all careful usage books today agree it is entirely grammatical, and it will then leave you to decide.

In other words it treats you like a grown-up. Strunk and White treat you like the abused 9-year-old daughter of a pair of grumpy dads ("Omit needless words, damn you! And fetch my slippers. And bring his slippers too. Now fix our supper. And don't let us hear you beginning any sentences with however"). Don't put up with the abuse.

[*] Not what you want, since it's a thousand-page compendium of modern linguistic research on the grammatical structure of English.

Open Thread Query/Alert to South Pacific-dwelling Fluorosphericals: We hear an at-least-moderately-bad tsunami has hit American Samoa, after a Richter 8+ earthquake also damaged it.

There's a tsunami warning out for other places spreading out from there. Anyone affected by this? We'll hear more news & start sending aid over the next few days.

ACookingKICIML question:

Inspired by a recent (re)viewing of the GlobeTrekker episode where Ian goes to Tunisia, I tried my hand at leb-lebi, the breakfast stew he eats while he's there. The recipes I found said to use dried chickpeas, soaked overnight, which I did. (I had canned ones, but figured they'd fall apart too much while I was getting the onions cooked.) What happened was that when I cooked it for eight hours *on high* in the crockpot, the chickpeas did not magically fall apart and/or become very squashy. They weren't rock hard, but then they hadn't been that after they'd been soaked. What was I missing/doing wrong?

What I had was very good, particularly after I poured it over baguette slices in a bowl, and added the olives, the capers and the harissa, followed by an egg, nabeyaki-udon-style, but I gather it was supposed to be a bit, well, thicker, which it would have been if the chickpeas had disintegrated properly.

Pendrift@137

Right now getting just about ANY bill out of the Finance committee is progress. The details of the bill are less important, although of course it would be preferable that the bill that passes out of Finance is as good as possible.

Something similar applies to later parts of the process. As long as the House and Senate pass bills that can be combined into a good bill, passing SOMETHING through both of them is more important than the details of either bill.

Ultimately what's important is what lands on Obama's desk, not the intermediate steps.

Jacque #143: Arrgh! An hour and a half, eaten by capybaras! ;-)

Peter Erwin@148 (and others above):

This entire discussion reminds me of a conversation amongst a group of hapless, newly-arrived international research students (myself included), all trying to figure out which of the rules of usage we had grown up with still applied in this brave new world we'd landed in. That/which came up, and we ended up fairly equally divided into those who lived and died by it and those who had never heard of such a distinction--at which point, a more senior member of staff cut in with 'Oh, don't listen to [person]--he splits his infinitives!'

Grrrrrr. I've emailed Bayh twice about a public option in the last week. His responses are pretty good, actually, but it's clear they're just pretty talk. (I also emailed him to yell at him about his little chest-beating crap about Iran, and told him to stop hanging around Joe Lieberman, who's clearly just a bad influence on him.)

Bayh is hopeless. He knows he's in for life anyway, so he might as well cash in with his Indianapolis corporate friends.

David Harmon @152: I managed to pry myself loose after only 20 minutes, but only by bookmarking the videos to watch from home where I can turn the speakers up.

I'll be fascinated to see what The Herd thinks of this.

Michael Roberts @ 154: I feel your pain. I've been letting Not My Senator Lieberman (I-Dipshitopia) have it with both barrels throughout the course of this debate, and having Chris Dodd as my Senator besides doesn't help as much as it ought.

At this point I would crawl across a field of broken glass to beg Dick Blumenthal to stop dithering and run against the Man of Lieber next go-round.

Epacris: Thanks for thinking about us Pacificans.

Hawaii was essentially unaffected, as I would have expected - a sea rise of a few inches, possibly with some strong currents. For a quick summary of effects here:
http://kgmb9.com/main/content/view/21525/245/

It looks like NZ was expecting a 1 meter surge, fortunately not coming at high tide but I haven't seen the actual reports yet.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK0909/S00511.htm

Australia should be no worse, I expect.

I haven't yet seen reports from Niue, Tonga, Fiji, or other nearer island groups which were likely to be much worse affected (strength inverse to distance.)

Pendrift @ 120 - damn, I think I would read every one of those! (The link to the automated version is especially good.)

Michael I:

A crapped-up health care "reform" that makes things worse will kill momentum for future reform far more effectively than any fight the Republicans can put up at this point. And given the number of hands in the pot, and the sheer size and complexity of the system being reformed, it's much, much easier to crap the system up than to fix it.

From the old open thread:

Carol Kimball "Wasn't that the tag from an old Warner Brothers cartoon? Daffy or Bugs bowing, arms outstretched, saying, "Salami, salami, baloney"?"

That's the American pronunciation. I was taught the French and Greek pronunciation was sal-o-MAY, and clearly so was my nurse, who had an accent I didn't recognize.

In the particle on ibuprofen: Not surprising, considering the level of damage it does to people who take it and aren't exercising.

albatross @ #159, "A crapped-up health care "reform" that makes things worse will kill momentum"

More than that, it will cost a bunch of Democrats their seats in 2010. I don't think they really understand that the 70% of us who say we want a public option are serious about it, and will be pretty angry if we don't get it.

If it doesn't get done, we angry members of the base might just stay home from the polls in November 2010.

joann @ 150--I admit to never having cooked chickpeas from scratch, but I'd like to, so I've done some puttering about online.

So far, I've found these suggestions:

1) soak the chickpeas for as much as 24 hours before cooking, putting the bowl in the fridge for longer-than-overnight soaks

2) avoid salting before or during cooking, as it toughens the skin to prevent softening (I've heard this about beans as well, but I seem to recall Cook's Illustrated testing this in the last year or so and finding salt did not cause tough skins, so...I dunno)

3) check the production date on the package, because old beans--"old" not being defined, but I'd guess more than a year or two would count--simply won't soften

4) if you live in an area with hard water, filter your water or run it though a water softener before using it to cook chickpeas

As I said, I've never used any of these methods, so I don't know if they'll work for you...but this may be a first step to a solution. Let us know how the next batch turns out!

I was on IM with a friend in Auckland over the time when the crest was supposed to hit. He said it was "no big deal," so I gather the wave lost much of its force before it hit New Zealand.

The Beeb cites about 85 deaths and shows damage in Samoa and American Samoa.

A warm thankyou to everyone who helped me out with @129

I have since found that a careful reading of the dictionary definition would have cleared that one up for me -

"22. something or someone of the kind just mentioned: The portraits are fine ones. Your teachers this semester seem to be good ones."

As a penance for insufficient rigour before asking the question, I have resolved to buy one of the style guides suggested. Of course, now I have to weigh the virtues of Fowler (original), Fowler (modern), or Merriam-Websters, each of which sound like excellent recommendations.

The relevant dialect is British English - would anyone else who has one or more of these like to chime in with an endorsement?

Linkmeister #161:

Wait a minute. Are you saying that incumbent congressmen should sometimes lose their jobs for not doing what their constituents want? What the hell are you, some kinda Islamocommunist? Has the main purpose of several iterations of campaign finance "reform" and election law tuning and redistricting been lost on you?

Incumbents can't lose their jobs for failing to represent their constituents. That would be, like, having powerful people face consequences for their actions, which is simply un-American. Such a thing might somehow cause Congress to imagine it was working for the voters instead of campaign contributors and lobbyists. That's just not acceptable.

Open threadiness; why I haven't been around at all lately:

http://wyjoe.livejournal.com/24553.html

Wyman Cooke @166: Sending truckloads of good thoughts your way, and wishing you the very very best of luck.

Wyman: Good luck good luck inspiration good luck good luck ....

Syd #162:

Suggestions sound good.

I'd soaked for about 16 hours; it appears an extra day might do the trick :-)

I was using canned vegetable stock, which has a certain amount of salt in it, and, halfway through, on the principle that if it makes onions soften faster it should do the same for beans, added a couple pinches kosher salt. Sounds like both of those were wrong. Ghu knows where I can find no-salt veggie stock, other than making it myself.

It is very difficult to check the package date on chickpeas bought in bulk, alas.

Henry Troup @ #106 (& Epacris @ #108-9):
Thank you! I'd never have recognized that title. It must have been Seven Trips Through Time and Space that I read it in (I was wrong about it being the first story).

Well, that's one more thing I can add to my list of books read.

Wyman Cooke #166: May good fortune find you.

Wyman Cooke @ 166... Best wishes!

albatross @ #165, Oh dear. Well, it's fun being an iconoclast.

I'm on record advocating redistricting commissions rather than the state incumbency protection plans racket currently in place, so I guess I'll have to live up to my words.

I had a dream last night in which I and some friends were trapped in an episode of a chaotic TV show that was kind of a cross between The Mighty Boosh and H.R. Puff'n'Stff. (Or maybe Sigmund the Sea Monster.)

It was one of those dreams where you wake up for a while, realize it is a dream, and then sink right back into it.

I'm still twitching.

Wyman Cooke @166:

You'd mentioned earlier that you were at risk. I'm so sorry that it's come to this point.

From what my parents tell me about our bad old days (I was under six, and shielded as much as they could manage), the trials of such times are that they eat away at one's sense of self-worth. We peg our value so much on our productiveness and our success, particularly in American culture. When those things are absent, even temporarily, it can be very hard to find ways to hold firm to one's sense of self-worth.

Don't give up. Don't let it get to you. We, here, see in you a value that does not depend on where you sleep or whether you have work. The good wishes on this thread are a mere token of it.

Keep us posted as you may. There's a metaphorical candle in the figurative window awaiting your return.

Stefan Jones @ 174: Much of my dreaming last night was explicitly from the ending of Clarke's Childhood's End, with me cast as the last human on Earth in the planet's last moments. Same pattern of semi-waking, identifying the story, and sinking back into it. Bleah. Why can't I do that with stories with happy endings?

Wyman, LiveJournal is blocked from work, so I don't know the details, but from reading others' posts I gather you're in a bad situation. I wish you all the best, and hope your situation will improve drastically in the very near future.

Good thoughts, Wyman. Hang in there. It's going around.

Monday night I helped move and store 12 boxes of stuff for a long-time friend who just got evicted after months of being unable to make rent. He has been so stressed out he had barely been able to make plans and pack the stuff he wanted to keep, and he had to give away many of his things or leave them behind. He's couch-surfing at a friend's now, and seems to be holding up.

We also took in his cat Soba; the poor thing has never been outside his apartment since she was a kitten, and is terrified of us, the new place, and our cats. We're keeping her in the bathroom until she gets a little more used to the place, but she spends the whole time hiding in the cat carrier or cat box and wailing and hissing at anyone who comes in. He came over last night to soothe her down a little and introduce her to the place, and with him around and holding her she was willing to settle and even let us hold and pet her for a bit, but that only lasted an hour after he left before she was back to terrified.

Clifton @178: There are anti-anxiety medications for cats. Failing that, you can also try some catnip (either fresh or dried).

Wyman @ 166: I haven't looked at LJ, but you have my best wishes as well.

Another of the formerly employed here....

The legal precedents which define corporations as persons, need exorcising....

And judges who don't understand that, deserving being made into "at will" employees subjected to separation and loss of income and all benefits.

That might effect some changes....

Stefan Jones at 174:

Did they say "See you next week!" when you woke up?

Wyman @ 166: bummer. Good thoughts from Indiana.

Open-threadiness: I have heat in the carriage house! Actually, lots of progress on the electrical front this week.

Wyman Jones, sending you all good thoughts and echoing Fragano -- may good fortune find you.

Also, what abi said.

Clifton (#178) Whenever I've moved cats or distributed kittens, they've been accompanied by, at minimum, a familiar piece of material, with their and my scent, to snuggle into. (For kittens I put a batch of teatowels into their lair well beforehand, so there'll be something comforting to tuck each into, as well as a well-used 'toy' to take as they leave.)

So, does your friend have an unwashed blanket, shirt, towel, cushion, etc, that you could borrow for burrowing purposes? Assuming that hasn't been tried.

Wyman (#166) I'll repeat the support and good wishes of others here.
So far USA seems to be harder hit than Australia in this downturn. Or people are, whether the economy is statistically worse or not. Had a disagreement lately with someone saying "all change is good". My saying is "you might be able to sift platinum out of pigshit, but that doesn't make it a gourmet meal". So I'm hoping you come out of this in a better situation, though getting through it may be swimming in swine-poo.

Ginger: Doh! We have catnip in the freezer. I'll try some on her when I get home and see if it relaxes her.

I remember you told me a while back that (uhhh.. if I say the name it'll get held for moderation) a certain long popular anti-anxiety med starting with V is not considered safe for cats. If I stop by the vet at lunchtime, is there something I should ask for to give her, or should I just tell them the problem and see what they recommend?

Pendrift et. al. re: public option

$125K raised in 24 hrs to run ads for public option in the states of those who voted against it yesterday.

Two progressive groups who launched a fundraising drive yesterday afternoon citing the defeat of both public option amendments tell me they’ve already pulled in $125,000. That’s in less than 24 hours.

The groups — the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy For America — are already running ads in the home states of Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, demanding that they support the public option. As of yesterday, the groups had already raised $90,000 for the spots.

Wyman, my best wishes as well.

OK, I know it's bragging but I have to. One of the bozos who wander through BoingBoing made the idiotic claim that the 10 Commandments are just "basic rules of life." I decided to shred them to make the point that they're specifically aimed at a community to which I do not belong and shouldn't have to to be considered American. Warning: Post contains tone and language I would never employ on Making Light...because the rules for THAT aren't universal either.

The Old Stories

1. "You will bathe every day
in milk and rose petals," she said,
"If you convince your father to marry me."
The girl complied. After all,
the woman had been nice to her before
and it would be good to have a mother again.
And for a little while, it was milk and roses,
but soon enough it became cold water
and hard bread for breakfast.
The father believed the woman when she claimed
it was because the girl was spoiled.

Blood is thicker than water.
In that, some people find
the strength to lift them higher. Some
the chains that bind.

2. Two daughters sat on the well's edge.
The favored daughter had finely carded wool,
the unlucky, dirty flax. And when the thread broke,
as the mother knew it would,
she was thrown into the well as punishment.
In the magic land at the bottom, she spoke softly
and politely, and won favors and jewels for her courtesy.
Of course, she would never have dared otherwise at home.
Some coping strategies look like good breeding.

Blood is thicker than water.
In that, some people find
the strength to lift them higher. Some
the chains that bind.

3. When he found out her lies,
he threatened her, that she might give his children back.
She brought back the son, but
when she called for the daughter, she would not come,
preferring to spend the rest of her life as a mackerel
rather than allow her stepmother to change her again.
The wisdom or folly of that course
is known only to the mackerel.

Blood is thicker than water.
In that, some people find
the strength to lift them higher. Some,
the chains that bind.

4. Some variants of the tale
have the brothers changed back
after seven years' privation by their sister.
No smiles, no laughter, no speech.
At the end, she might have forgotten how to connect.
But in the old Irish tales, the swans are only changed back
after decades or centuries,
only to die of extreme old age.
Some hate resounds through the centuries.

Blood is thicker than water
trailing slowly down the page.
In the end, the truest stories are all
about blood.

To accompany the 'Common Roman Polanski defenses, refuted' particle is the straight-to-the-point Broadsheet article Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child.

Wyman Cooke, #166, lots of good luck!

Xopher, nice shred.

For clarification, the "covet" bit isn't about wanting, it's about envy, which is pretty corrosive (see "keeping up with the Joneses.") And probably a little bit of warning about jealousy too.

And on the "keep holy the Sabbath day," I've always thought it was nice of the Jews to come up with the concept of regular days off. :)

But that's besides the point, which is that you caught someone making a silly assumption and fulfilling the old saying about it.

B., yeah, even those commandments have an upside. But even something as nasty as envy is a feeling, and telling people that feelings can be wrong is a problem for me. I see the point, I just don't agree.

Wyman Cooke:

Good luck, I'll be thinking good thoughts at you. I know a little bit of how it feels; I'm in my 10th month of unemployment after being laid off, and the only reason I'm not homeless is because I am now living by liquidating investments I was originally planning to retire on last summer. Economic recovery, yeah, right.

Wyman: Best of luck! There but for the grace of dedicated family go I.

Clifton Royston #178: I'd actually recommend valerian rather than catnip. Valerian is a sedative for cats as for humans, but for cats the scent works too. Catnip, as far as I can tell, is a feline hallucinogen, which seems Not The Thing for a scared kitty in an unfamiliar environment.

Me: My new computer > runs 15-20°C hotter when I'm playing Blob and Conquer....

Wyman Cooke @ 166:

Good luck. I hope something pans out for you.

Clifton Royston @ 178:

The trick that worked for us when one cat didn't like vet smell on the other was to rub the smells-of-vet one with a slice of lunchmeat. Rubbing your cats with meat is probably too simplistic a solution for making things easier for a frightened, newly-displaced kitty, but it may give you ideas.

Keith S @ #196, the lunchmeat remedy requires that John Scalzi's Cat & Bacon be mentioned.

Clifton @185: if you call your vet and explain the situation, she should be able to help. Some of the newer anti-anxiety meds are more specific for anxiety, and not general tranquilizers like the V kind.

Mez's suggestion is also good, and one that I've used for my sick cats as well.

[Curses, Linkmeister has preceded me. This here's a different link.]

KeithS (#196) - cats wearing meat? It's clearly a job for bacon!

B. Durbin:
All of the poems you've posted here have been extremely powerful, both content and expression, and this one is also powerful. I haven't commented on every one, but I've been stunned by every one.

Consider me a fan.

Too much of a hurry before — forgot to mention some just-broken news about a different Roman Emperor: Nero's rotating dining room uncovered.

And meanwhile after the earthquake and tsunami in Samoa and Tonga, Sumatra in Indonesia has been struck by a very nasty earthquake, leaving many dead. These on top of Typhoon Ketsana, which started off devastating parts of the Philippines before heading to the mainland and causing havoc in Vietnam and Cambodia, and is still threatening other areas. It's been an unhappy time for many over the last little while in this region of the globe.

today's Astronomy Picture: Saturn at equinox.

Things said in Scott Wegener & Brian Clevinger's Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War...

"Leg stealin' fascist jerks!"

(later)

"So you're building a big dumb bomb to show everyone who the greatest scientist blah, blah, blah."
"No, that would be the pathetic work of an egomaniac. My bomb will kill everyone in the world. I was robbed of my place in History, so Humanity will be robbed of its Future."
"I am really going to enjoy stopping you."

Mez: That is a good plan. In fact, we had brought over kitty's favorite cuddle and sleeping place, a natural sheepskin. Unfortunately, my wife appears to be even more allergic to that than to wool; she started wheezing very rapidly once I'd spread it out in the bathroom. We had to banish it from the house, which ruined the plan to have something familiar smelling.

The news media has a worse perception of Polanski than of 2001-2008 Bill of Rights and Geneva Convention mass abrogators.... Polanski's actions were not laudable in any way, shape, or form. But he didn't cause the gratuitious deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, didn't effect the destruction of thousand year old archive collections and of university libraries and governmental records and facilitate widescale looting, vandalism, wanton terrorist destruction and intimidation, looting of unguarded weapons and ammunitions dumps, sectarian violence, arson, theft, robbery, assault and battery, kidnapping, extortion, rape, and homicide by refusing to provide surveillance police patrolling in a country he had invaded and was occupying....

Where are the media reporting demands for kidnapping/extradiction of US Executive Branch 2001-2008 officials to the Hague for war crimes and Geneva Convention violations trials?

Coming this Friday night on Turner Classic Movies...

Take a walk on the wild side as we present The Shack Out On 101 (1955), a nutty B-movie that uncovers Communist infiltration that extends to short-order cook Lee Marvin!

They will pry my greasy spoon from my cold dead fingers!

Re: Catnip and stressed cats

We have given our cats catnip during moves, or major house changes, and it seems to help them a lot. The usual response is half an hour of running around batting at the air, followed by contented sleep and less stress upon waking. From the first effect, I assume that they are hallucinating, but it doesn't seem to frighten them.

Of course, your felines may vary.

Rubbing your cats with meat is probably too simplistic a solution for making things easier for a frightened, newly-displaced kitty, but it may give you ideas

I'm not sure people should be given that sort of idea.

Stressed cats? Not on Mount Olympuss...

Good Luck and best wishes, Wyman Cooke.

I sprinkled catnip on the floor for Soba kitty last night. She continued to cower back in her latest hiding place, growled and hissed, and didn't come out. My wife tried to toss some a little closer to her and got an impressive bleeding puncture on her thumb.

Later when Soba had moved to a more accessible hiding place (in between the inner and outer shower curtains) I did manage to get some to her; it did not calm her noticeably. She continued to do the same "Oh god they're coming through the walls they're all over me you're one of them get away aaaaaaaahhh" that she's been doing all along.

When I slept I dreamed that I and my wife were trying to rescue a particularly bloodthirsty vampire from an apartment tower. He wasn't cooperating well.

I'm starting to think this isn't going to work, but we'll give her a few more days and reassess.

Clifton @ 211: Soba may just need peace and quiet for about 7 days. I had one of those cats myself, and when she was Mad, she was not about to tolerate any handling by anyone. If you want to try the BT approach, just make sure she has food, water, and fresh litter in her box, and then leave her mainly alone.

Is Soba one of those cats who thinks you can't see her if you don't make eye contact? If so, you can pretend you don't see her, and she'll feel better.

The catnip will work its wonders for her, but not while you're present to remind her of why she's Mad.

The last time we moved house, I forgot about BT's needs, and boxed her last (out of the population of 6 cats at that time). She was climbing the drapes, screaming bloody murder, peeing, clawing, biting and generally carrying on to the point where my partner was totally freaked out by our normally quiet (and even "shy") cat. I was able to catch her, with only minimal bleeding on my part, and box her. Upon deboxing at the new house, she climbed into the ceiling* and stayed in hiding for at least a week, maybe longer. That was our last move, and thank goodness, because BT would have gone absolutely stark raving mad if we'd ever done that again.

*A really long story.

B Durbin: Wow.

Wyman: Best of luck. I have been out of work, and just as abi says, it was horrible. I had not realized how much my sense of myself was tied to my job before that. FWIW, it took us several years, but we recovered financially from that time (which basically ate all our savings and used up a reasonably nice inheritance that we might have otherwise spent buying a house). Without those resources, my wife would have had to drop out of grad school without her MS, and we'd have ended up living with relatives.

Ginger: Yes, that sounds exactly like her. If she thinks she is invisible, as when she was hiding in the shower, she doesn't seem to get so upset. The problem is that we need to use that bathroom and there are no unused rooms in the house to keep her in.

There is an outside storage room where she could be left alone, but I'm concerned that moving her there (and then needing to move back into the house) would add the negative effect of two more moves. We are planning to wait a week and see how she settles down.

Russ @ 164:
As a penance for insufficient rigour before asking the question, I have resolved to buy one of the style guides suggested. Of course, now I have to weigh the virtues of Fowler (original), Fowler (modern), or Merriam-Websters, each of which sound like excellent recommendations.

The relevant dialect is British English - would anyone else who has one or more of these like to chime in with an endorsement?

My impression is that you should certainly avoid the original (1926) Fowler's, except possible for entertainment value (I have never read it, but some claim that it has an idiosyncratic charm). Advice based on late 19th Century English (Fowler was born in 1858!) is not what you really want.

There's a standard "third edition" of Fowler's (edited by Robert Burchfield in 1996) which is less dogmatic and probably more useful than the 1926 original. (I don't know anything about the second book you link to; it gives the impression of being yet another modern variation on the 1926 original.)

The various Fowler's books are written from a British perspective, although the Burchfield edition -- which I actually have, but rarely look at -- includes at least some remarks on American usage. (Though a quick check on "orient/orientate" shows that it fails to tell you that "orientate" is primarily a British usage, and very rare in the US.)

As for Merriam-Webster, it's an American book (which means that, yes, you'll have things like "center" instead of "centre"), but certainly has comparative notes for American vs British usage. You can look at a scanned-in version of the 1994 edition via Google Books here. (It correctly notes the US/British split over "orient/orientate", which I think is a good sign.)

And, if it helps at all, this Language Log post has entertainingly caustic comments by Geoff Pullum on both the 1926 and Burchfield versions of Fowler's:

I'm also seeing commenters say that the book you should really have is Henry Fowler's Modern English Usage! What the hell is going on here? Fowler's book dates from 1926. It's a third of a century older than Elements; and Fowler was a marked eccentric even then. Some of his articles are very scholarly (he was a man who really did know grammatical analysis), but some are completely quixotic. Others are pages and pages of weird raving about things he just happened to have bees in his bonnet about (he prattles on for a page about "Irrelevant allusion", for example). Some of it is very interesting for a serious English language scholar. But as a guide for writers in the 21st century? A book that was clearly in preparation more than a hundred years ago, by a man born in 1858? When Harper's and American Heritage and Merriam-Webster all have much better books out? What is this epidemic of nostalgia?

and as a reply to the first comment:

I hardly know how to break it to you that I don't have a high opinion of Burchfield's work. You'll think I'm some sort of universally negative curmudgeonly usage book smiter. But here is a nice exercise. In Burchfield's rewritten entry "Preposition at end" there are two examples cited where the preposition is not stranded — which would mean it is not a preposition at all under the traditional (and wrong) analysis, but rather an adverb. Can you find those two examples?

Practically speaking, I'd guess you probably can't go too wrong with "modern" versions of Fowler (e.g., Burchfield, or the maybe the one you linked to), though the Merriam-Webster book is probably a bit better overall.

Saturn picture crashes my browser.

(and I am disappointed the Nero's Dining Room article had no picture)

Erik Nelson @ 216:
Saturn picture crashes my browser.

Probably because it's about 7200 x 3800 pixels in size!

You can try this link instead, which starts off with a smaller version of the same image.

B. Durbin #189 : Another "Wow" here...

#217
Thanks, I couldn't find the link for that one, for some reason.

Today's picture is also good: the gas pillar/jet in Carina.

Clifton @214: As long as you don't make any eye contact, and move carefully (without acting like you want to chase her), she can probably stay in that room while you use it.

I once had strangers in the house (yes! Delivering and installing a washer and dryer) and they were able to work in the very room where BT was "well-hidden" on a shelf, because they didn't look at her.

Clifton Royston @214: We recently adopted a very shy cat. While she isn't quite as neurotic as Soba - she was okay with us being in the bathroom as long as we ignored her - she does seem to have many of the same issues. She was at the shelter because she hid (and got stuck) in an air duct at her last home.

Our current setup uses boxes and storage crates to block line of sight to the utility hallway, and all her stuff including her carrier is in there. We keep the hallway light off as much as possible. With that safe place to retreat to, she's getting a lot more comfortable with us.

Another thing to try is a Feliway plug-in. While the pheromone claims they make are probably bullshit, it does contain valerian, which has a similar-but-lesser effect on cats to catnip.

Feliway is worth a try. It didn't seem to have any effect on BT and her sister, but it does seem to help Kedgie -- she doesn't overgroom herself so intensely now.

I have the TV on the jazz channel and, when they played Brubeck's "Take Five" a bit earlier, a caption informed me that he'd been in a service band under General Patton.

With all the cat talk, now you can make your own paper ceiling cat.

More cat talk: There's a new Simon's Cat video.

Pendrift @225 -

Thanks for the heads up on the Simon's Cat vid -- I love those!

It's that time of the year in Albuquerque. I overslept this morning, which means that when I took the bus to work, it was broad daulight. And there they were in the sky, some not far above houses. That reminded me of the one bright spot in my professionl life after I moved here 9 years ago, as one of them flew past my office window, on the 7th floor.

What are they?

Hot-air balloons.

I have a job. Now to see if I can get an advance against the, guaranteed to be late, GI Bill payments due me.

It was a really good interview (I am pretty good at interviews, go figure). Not just my performance, but the interview itself. For a wide spectrum, special interest retail store (Sur le Table; part time, seasonal), the questions were about as suited (and well done) as might be imagined.

The kernel was these three:

"If I gave you a $500 limit, what would you buy here?"

"Ok, from that list, if you could only take one thing, what would it be"

"If a customer was interested in buying that, how would you sell it?"

I was impressed.

The new Simon's Cat vid is something of a promo for the new Simon's Cat book, which is reasonably entertaining but doesn't have as much sporfle factor-- static drawings just don't have the elements of timing, motion, and sound effects. Some of the drawings are standalones, while others are linked together in sequence or theme; there are also certain bits that may be peculiarly Brit (hedgehogs in the garden and milk deliveries on the doorstep).

Terry Karney @ 228... I have a job.

Congratulations!

Serge: thanks. It happens to be, sort of, perfect. More the temporary aspects, while I get some of the problems related to getting an on-campus job, or something with fewer hassles of scheduling.

I'd like a better hourly wage; and without the GI Bill I couldn't afford it (it's nominally 15 hours a week, and doesn't equal 20 hours per week of federal minimum wage, so I'm not eligible for food stamps).

I am getting ready to haul myself to Oakland to get an advance against the GI Bill, so things are looking better than they were a week ago (only a week, strange).

Terry @228 - congrats. Those are good interview questions. I'm about to start trying to hire (programmers, .Net and/or SQL) again. I must cogitate.

Terry: Woooo! Congrats! Sometimes it just feels good to be working again.

Theresa,

Re: Your Particle link to John Scalzi’s blog

I notice that you still give posters no clear warning that their comments here will be published in perpetuity (or at your will) without compensation (despite the fact that you derive an income from the comments made on your blog). I also note that you maintain that you have a right to such publication that supersedes any right the authors might have to withdraw their comments by asserting their copyright.

As a peripatetic poster on your website, I am not a public person and have never sought to be one (nor have I defamed anyone), so you have no claim to a “publication in the public interest” legal exemption in continuing to publish my words, nor do you have any right to use me as an exemplar. I note that you do not mention my initial request that all of my posts be disemvoweled, as a sop to your convenience.

If you seriously wished to understand my position, you have had ample time to contact me via e-mail.

Please contact me via e-mail at the address we used for our previous correspondence when you have made a good faith effort to remove your defamatory statements about me from Mr. Scalzi’s blog.. I have altered my identity for this post only because of your “read by all” e-mail grouping scheme, combined with your eagerness to publicize this issue; I have no doubt, reading your comments on Mr. Scalzi’s blog that you are quite aware of my real identity.

To Future Posters,

Theresa’s “gracious” eagerness to air a private disagreement so publicly by defaming a poster to her site, then to brag about it, should be a serious warning. She seems to feel that the Internet is somehow special, so ordinary copyright laws do not apply. Should your interests and hers diverge, please be aware that she is more than willing to publicly attack your reputation.

Terry Karney @ 228:
Congratulations, and good luck with the GI Bill; my son managed to get through graduate school on it, but cash flow was a problem when the checks were delayed. The best strategy he found was to keep on top of them; if a check was even a day late, he'd contact the office to let them know about it. Sucks up some time, but not getting the money sucks even more.

B. Durbin:
Belated appreciation for that poem. I've been most impressed by your work here in general; that last one was especially poignant.

Oooh. /me grabs popcorn.

I'd point Deeply Offended to the archives. Lots of comments in them thar archives. A cursory review suggests that the point of typing in the little box is to publish the comment on the site. You'd have a hard time convincing a judge that's not what you expect to have happen to your comment.

Deeply Offended @ 234:

I'm curious: do you believe you own the copyright to a letter you send to a newspaper editor? If not, how is commenting on a blog different? If so, why?

Theresa’s “gracious” eagerness to air a private disagreement so publicly by defaming a poster to her site, then to brag about it, should be a serious warning. She seems to feel that the Internet is somehow special, so ordinary copyright laws do not apply. Should your interests and hers diverge, please be aware that she is more than willing to publicly attack your reputation.

Yanno, if you're going to bitch someone out on her own blog, you might at least spell her name right.

Plus? Blog. What did you think was going to happen to your comments? Once you put it on the Internet, it's out there. There is no calling it back.

Last but not least, you do realize that no one would have had any idea who Teresa was talking about, if you hadn't piped up? It could've been me, for all the rest of the Net knows. Heck, we still don't know who you are, except in the broad sense of "that person has a particular style and is female".

Deeply Offended: Huh? Derives income how? Publically defamed? Really?

If she has no standing to claim a defense, then sue. For all that I appreciate the desire to right a wrong (and am willing to entertain the idea you have been wronged making an anonymous post, in a different forum, about an unknown harm; while saying this, in some way shows the owner of this blog, to be willing to do the same (i.e. Should your interests and hers diverge, please be aware that she is more than willing to publicly attack your reputation. without any corroboration, is silly.

It can't help your case.

As to the, "specialness" of the internet. If I sent something to a newspaper, magazine, etc., there is no way to, "unpublish it."

In which case the question is more on of, why should the internet be special. This is not your place. My Lj is not your place. Scalzi's blog is not your place (Boing Boing isn't Teresa's place, she just works there. If the owners can be convinced her moderation policies are wrong, she will have to change them, or find other work; which means that, should this be a dispute about a Boing Boing issue [which, to be honest isn't clear, one way, or the other] this venue, and this jury, are not the proper court).

You publish to any of those places you have published which puts it into the public sphere. In this regard the policies here, and and Boing Boing, and Whatever, are perfectly in keeping with the world as it is.

Those who want mulligans are those who are asking the internet to be different.

I am also curious: since Scalzi has a public policy (the restating of which seems to be the genesis of this comment) that no comments will be deleted:

1: What is the point of Teresa asking to have them removed (i.e. do you think John Scalzi will make an exception to policy, and so himself a hypocrite; because you have demanded Teresa do the same)?

2: Assuming Scalzi will not remove the comment: what defines a good faith effort.

3: How does your effort here propose to further the cause of this?

Deeply Offended: My apologies, going back to re-read the Scalzi comment, I see Teresa did mention a commenter at ML. I should not have said it might be about Boing Boing.

Which, I suppose, goes to show how much the minutae of the comment Teresa made affected me. I was looking at the meta issue of, "people want to have things they said in public removed from the record." It was unkind of me to lump you in with other people who have come here to vent about things in other fora.

Insomuch as the parent events took place here, you are justified in discussing it here, and I was wrong. I am sorry.

I like the suggestion that people should get paid for commenting here. Let's see, who would get paid the most and what would it consist of?

Serge and Xopher. And they get paid in puns.

LDR: I think the theory is that page views give ad revenue, so Teresa and/or Patrick get paid for people having commented here (because the comments draw page views). Thus commenters, who create some of the draw, should be compensated.

Of course, I think we are, in personal satisfaction, but I'm impractical that way. :)

I can see incremental improvement in Soba.

For one, she's getting bolder - she no longer instantly hides, growls and hisses when she sees us, she is instead more apt to hold her position on the counter or middle of the floor while growling and hissing. This is a nuisance for working around her, but clearly means she's considerably less fearful of us than she was. She'll also quiet down and stop threatening after a bit, if we stay at a safe distance and ignore her, which she wouldn't before.

This morning after she tried to slash my foot, I tried getting down on the floor a little out of reach, so I wasn't looming so high, and "purring" and trilling at her a bit, alternating with looking away and washing my face. Who knows whether primate attempts at imitating cat communication work, but she might have been a little calmer after. Once I was ignoring her again and shaving, she darted off to another "safe" corner.

We removed the cat carrier, because it was clearly making her bonkers that she could see out of it on all sides when trying to hide in it. She has a couple boxes now though she's not taking to them as yet.

Slowly, slowly.

#243: Metric or English puns?

Carrie: I figured it was something like that. Of course, "page views" also includes people who read the page, but don't comment. So we lurkers deserve compensation too!

Seriously, the education and entertainment to be found here are payment enough. And there's plenty to go around.

Deeply Offended @234:

Until you posted, there were—to my knowledge at any rate—exactly five people on the planet who knew what Teresa was talking about. That's counting you. For everyone else, it was an untraceable event, not even worth the title of "mystery". Just one of those things that happens in the life of a website, like the time those kids used a dead comment thread to pass notes in class*.

Now, of course, it's a topic of conversation. That's unfortunate, if your goal was to vanish from the site. You have Teresa's email address if you wanted private communication with her. Having addressed the matter in public, here, though, you may get a public reply.

I'll bring the matter to her attention. She is, however, on the road at the moment, so don't expect a rapid answer by any medium.

-----
* Actually, much less notable than that; when the kids stated using foul language we traced their school with their IP address and called the office.

(forgot to add: what's the going rate for a sonnet?)

By the way, I gather the page ads are to pay the server costs. I don't think Patrick and Teresa are exactly making a fortune on Making Light so they can treat science fiction publishing as a lifestyle business.

Dheeply Ohffended: See, I think abi's too polite by half. I'm now going to try to figure out which commenter you are and tell everyone I know, so that if you comment here under that name again I'll know you're to be discounted, because anyone who thinks they can post comments on a blog and expect the blog owner to delete them on the poster's whim is seriously cracked in the head.

Which head, if you take my advice, you will boil at once.

And I'm going to save a link to your comment above to use you as an exemplar of "bozo poster" and "copyright troll."

And in case you decide to get all "deeply offended" at me, I'd just like to state that I find your comment above pretty godsdamned offensive, and I hope Teresa bans your ass when she gets back.

Could someone please revise my last post to read groans instead of puns?

thx.

(not for the first time realizing that I totally missed a 50 point answer while playing a 10 point one)

Ooo! I know! I'm going to go to BoingBoing and use Suggest A Link to suggest that they have a look at DO's comment above, and suggest the title "Bozo Copyright Troll." BB has a long-standing interest in copyright law, and people's false (and, as in this case, crazed) beliefs about it.

Gotta wait til I get home though, because for some reason the Suggest A Link page is blocked from here, even though BoingBoing in general is not.

eric, I wondered why you essentially characterized Serge and me as sharecroppers. But we don't get paid in groans either; we never hear them. Occasionally someone posts a groany response, but usually nothing.

It's a pity, because I think our pun skills have groan (pun intended) over the years.

Oh, I just chuckle every time some fool posts a diatribe on the internets based on such a foolish idea of what constitutes "defamation."

Xopher -- Good Hunting all, who head the Jungle Law!

Deeply Offended: In case you weren't aware of it, Making Light is a BLOG. That means when you comment on an article posted in that blog that comment is there forever, or as long as the blog exists on the Web, whichever comes first.

You want to discuss something with the owners of said blog Take It To Email; don't whine about it being part of the public record if you post here.

Mods, my apologies if I've overstepped the bounds, but this ... really bugged the hell out of me.

Bah, that's "heed" not "head!"

Fingers are faster than eyes this afternoon...

Widely-flaunted offendedness aside, we *do* take it for granted that copyright issues on blog comments won't be pressed. It's the same tacit assumption that goes back to Usenet, mailing lists, and zines: that submitting a message gives the receipient a license to copy, distribute, and publish it according to the accepted conventions of the forum.

(The same assumption that big companies make *non*-tacit when they say "All submissions become property of GalaxiCorp." Although of course there's room between "we own your comments" and "we have the right to display your comments".)

It may be worth adding a line to the Dire Legal Notice. Or the equivalent on boingboing. Slashdot has one, I see (in their considerably longer terms-of-service page). It's a matter that sites have to consider as they grow larger, I guess.

pnkrokhockeymom, I wish I could chuckle. It just pisses me off. People pretending to knowledge they obviously don't have...they might as well be charlatan "psychic readers."

Lori, thanks. And if you've overstepped the bounds I've left them parsecs behind, so I sure hope you haven't!

A different example, but related.

My local Paper of Record edited a sentence in my Letter to the Editor, changing its meaning to one I found deeply offensive. It would also make me look offensive to many readers.

Yes, they say at the start they may edit, mostly for length or libel. They didn't change its length, just moved words. If there is libel, they added it.

I wrote in protest. They neither printed the protest letter nor a correction. So my letter stands that way in the record. I may have mentioned it in my (vastly less prominent) blog - it was several years ago - but that's unlikely to register on anyone finding it either online or in real-paper archives.

In those circumstances, perhaps deleting, if it couldn't be corrected, might be preferable.

"Philip K. Dick wrote this letter after seeing his first glimpse of Blade Runner in a television segment."

Insightful.

I am also reminded of words Gibson's Japanese guide said to him on seeing Shibuya's nightscape, "Bladerunner town, like Neuromancer". For me, Dick, "Bladerunner" & Gibson occupy the same mental real estate.

Xopher, in truth, my chuckle is rueful, but I am only so amused because our offended friend here has clearly bitten off much more than (s)he can chew with such a limited understanding of the legal framework and such a low, low threshold for outrage and self-righteousness. (S)he's clearly underestimated our hostess.

Otherwise Offended, that's an entirely different thing. D'offended isn't complaining about someone falsifying her words; she's claiming the right to withdraw them because she doesn't like the words that appeared alongside them. Nobody altered her words or made it seem like she was saying anything other than what she actually said.

Please note that this is not the Dysfunctional Families thread. Deliberate anonymity is...problematic, particularly in this conversation, though I can understand why Deeply Offended has chosen it in this case.

Note, Otherwise Offended, that no one's words have been altered, rearranged or cut in these circumstances. I'm sorry that the newspaper treated you poorly, but the stories are not parallel. Indeed, touching someone's words is precisely what we are refusing to do.

Xopher, and any others planning to go a-hunting, remember of your charity that many people make mistakes on the internet, and consider your actions in that mindfulness. Not only would it be dreadful if you were to guess wrong (and I, in full knowledge of the situation, am virtually certain that you would), but even if you guessed right, would you want such treatment meted out to yourself as you propose?

Oh, abi, don't take me too seriously. I was mostly trying to make D'offended as angry as she made me. And I would not guess, for exactly the reasons you state. I would have to be certain before I went trumpeting the person's identity. And even then, in reality, I would hesitate, again for the reasons you state.

I expect D'offended now realizes what a bonehead move it was, posting as she did above. If not, she soon will, unless she's even more of a wacko than I think, which would be hard, since she apparently can still recognize a keyboard.

I guess I'm kind of hoping that Teresa will get mad enough to tell everyone who it is. That would be (mean, nasty) fun. <evil grin>

Xopher @ 255: "Occasionally someone posts a groany response . . . "

Which helps to Titus over, if (Gormen-) ghastly enough.

Changing tone completely -- recommendations for books and music to grieve with? I'm not looking for things to cheer me up, or self-help books about grieving, per se.

If it's any direction, 'I heard the owl call my name', and 'The Seduction of Claude Debussy: The Art of Noise' have been helpful.

*returning to the land of the living*

Hello again, luminous factors! It's probably hideously boring to unload a health update on you, but this is an open thread so I think it's probably ok. If I'm being horrid, I'm happy to be disemvoweled...I suspect I'm just dull though (probably an even worse peril to our vigilant moderators! He's not offensive...but he's bl***y boring!) At any rate -

I'm happy to report that I'm basically recovered from my biking accident. My Orthopedic surgeon in Bad Tölz was outstanding (his English wasn't half bad either, although he spent half the exam goggling at my Sony reader...) I've no broken bones, and the soft tissue damage is healing rapidly. The bike was repaired with astonishing efficiency and quality. I was boggled, delighted and absolutely converted to a new customer by the shop my mate referred me to (props Jem!)

So, I'm happy to report the dreary, unexciting news that all is well and I'm on the mend. Many thanks to the luminous support I recieved from this group, and when I have more strength, I'll be happy to wade into more contentious waters.

(I've been reading Roger Ebert's blog today, and the comments have mildly traumatized me. Perhaps I've been living in idyllic Bayern too long...)

Hooray for easy, speedy recoveries!

xeger @268: I found Fauré (Cantique de Jean Racine, for example) helpful. Sending good thoughts your way.

Vielen dank, Xopher! I've taken a lot of stick here for my insistence on helmet-wearing and proper signaling and strictly following the rules of the road (And if you're wondering -Jesus, what a geezer- I'm very slightly less than two hundred years less old than the Declaration of Independence *so there*) But I do think it saved my life in this case. When I was doing the police report, the cops were baffled that I was cogent (and vertical for that matter!)

I don't insist that other people follow my safety regimen when cycling, but I am F***ING glad that I did.

Incidentally...On my first post accident ride, i found a 5 euro note laying on the roadside. At current exchange rates, does this entitle me to approx. 2 years good luck?

XOXO.

David.

xeger, #268: I've heard a recommendation of the madrigals of John Dowling for that purpose, but cannot speak to how well it actually works from personal experience. My normal use of music along those lines is to work myself out of a bleak mood by playing high-energy techno, and I don't think that's what you want.

xeger #268: I'm fond of Don Sakers' The Leaves of October.

dbowman76: Welcome back, it's good everything came out so well!

Deeply Offended #234: <grabs popcorn>

xeger @ 268: (at the risk of outstaying my welcome) If you're seeking solace, I also suggest John Dowland (preferably played by Jordi Savall.) If you're seeking catharsis, then I suggest Alfred Schnittke (His Hiroshima symphony is all consuming and obliterating, leaving nothing but a scorched surface)

dlbowman76 @269:

So glad to hear you're doing better, have been well cared for, and that your bike is fixed. You're not going to let this incident put you off cycling, are you?

dlbowman76 @275:
at the risk of outstaying my welcome

You really must get over this notion that your welcome is conditional or limited.

xeger, 268: 90% of my collection was written before 1800, which means it's heavily weighted to Christian stuff. But that also means it's in Latin so that might be OK.

Here is some Palestrina. (You should have another tab open so you can avoid the mawkish visuals.) And here is some Victoria. (With the score! it's a singalong!) And part of a Victoria requiem.

I have more of this kind of thing, if this is the kind of thing you like.

Abi, frankly, angry wolves (With hostile intent. And with revolvers. And Anne Coulter fan club membership cards.) Have *already* failed to keep me off my bike. My mum did her best though ("Do you want your daughter to grow up an orphan???" "Oh, mum, this was genuinely a weird occurence!" Yadda, yadda, yadda)

The shop in Tölz that did my bike was mint...no, check that, they were *sterling*. They replaced the back wheel, both tubes, the derailleur, rear brake cable, and gave the bike a proper tune-up - for less than 90 euro. When I rode it home, I thought they'd swapped it out for a new bike. Next time I pop in there, I'm definitely buying cycling stuff I don't necessarily need *GRIN*

All I need now is a working digital camera and I can't wait to photoblog my commute!

Keeping the faith,
David.

dlbowman76 @ 269... Welcome back!

dbowman #269: Welcome back!!

Many thanks, Serge!

Here's a question. My wife and I have recently been rereading Kindred, and we were wondering, what would it take to begin the process of initiating a Collected Works of Octavia Butler. She was a wonderful, important writer, and there should be an edition of her collected works. Is it all a legal impossibility because she's so recently gone? (A hurdle that should be overcome, IMHO.)

Cheers,
David

Eric #243: Which they have to carry away in punnets.

Pendrift @ 271...
Thank you :)

Lee @ 273
No - I'm not in a bleak mood, for which I often employ the same remedy, and would find an easier solution.

David Harmon @ 274
Thank you -- I haven't run into that one before.

dlbowman76 @ 275
I'll look up Dowland - Hiroshima is too much.

TexAnne @ 278
Beauty is beauty, whether it's church music or no -- and the Victoria is lovely, thank you.

#262: I'm so glad that Dick got to see that segment before he died. He was obviously thoroughly and happily jazzed.

Fragano - not at all. We punt them down the road.

Xeger: Seven Teares. For your heart, that it may be filled with sadness till it overflows, and spills out unto emptiness.

Punting works much better on a river than on a road.

xeger #268: Music for grief? Babi Yar comes to mind.

Anima vagula blandula

The soul of Hadrian yet lingered on
despite the body's final dying sigh:
for years it wandered paths at Tivoli,
before retreating to the Pantheon;
it flitted east to west along the Wall,
and set out to inspect the Rhine again;
it watched the whole of Antoninus' reign,
and tried to warn young Marcus of the Fall.
But all too often, to the Nile it found
itself returning, useless as it knew
its efforts were to bring the dead to life.
"Antinous", it called, and those around
who heard it knew the name it answered to:
an emperor who loved, but not his wife.

dlbowman76 #282: Well, I've already seen collected volumes of at least two of Butlers' novel series. I suspect the issue is more about how widely scattered the rights to her shorter works are -- magazines, anthologies, 'zines, what-have-you.

Clifton @245: Yes! Progress is being made!

Xeger: Well in that case! Dowland, "Lachrymae antiquae." And Couperin's "Troisième leçon de Ténèbres." First part here. (I like the Hesperion XX version better, but the Youtube version I found is taken from Tous les matins du monde, and it's got Depardieu talking over it.)

Here's the first part of Vivaldi's Stabat mater.

I wish I could find Charpentier's "Reniement de Saint Pierre" online. The section where the choir says "flevit amare" (wept bitterly) breaks my heart every time.

David Harmon @ 291: Hi David, David here (sorry, just dying to say that) I don't just want everything in print, although that would be a good start; I want a proper critical edition of her works. I'd like chronology, biography, critical reference: all that jazz. Octavia Butler was, frankly, one of the five (or so) most important SF writers of the twentieth century.

And yes, I *am* willing to back that up :)

xeger: I second or third the Dowland recommendations, and would add Purcell's Music For The Funeral Of Queen Mary and Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.

Open-threadiness: a possible addition to the Troll Bingo card. If someone ends with this paragraph:

Just my thoughts.

...s/he probably does not have the health of the conversation in mind.

Xeger @ #268
If you want music that isn't classical, my two favorites when I'm very down are "Heroin" by Velvet Underground and "Horses" by Patti Smith. I guess they help because they remind me Things Could Be Worse. Also, "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones. And for reading, the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine.

Magenta Griffith @ 297 ...
If you're not aware, 'The Seduction of Claude Debussy: The Art of Noise' refers to Baudelaire, and is well worth a listen.

So has anyone else been following Nate Silver's (of fivethirtyeight.com) pursuit of Strategic Vision, LLC, a polling company with apparently dubious results? I ask because apparently they are not only a polling company, they're also in the literary publicity biz, which (when I saw that) made me wonder what the people here would make of them.

(Above posted before I'd glanced at the sidebars).

I'm a Centerfold!!!

Now, before you start getting any naughty ideas... When I came home tonight, there was some mail for me. One was a Godzilla Christmas ornament a friend had sent me for my birthday. The other item was the latest issue of Locus, with a report on the worldcon and, in its center section, many photos, some from the masquerade. One of them is for "Twilight of the Gods" and you might recognize the tall person next to the red-garbed Egyptian divinity as yours truly. If you squint real hard.

Tom at 300
Yours links to a thread of posts, rather than just the one - that's good, because I didn't want to spend a lot of time chasing them down.

TexAnne @ 296: I don't know if I've ever said that in a blog comment, but I've said it in conversation with sincere and benign intent, as a way of making it clear that I'm open to disagreement.

xeger @268: Suzanne Vega's self-titled debut and Bob Mould's recent effort "District Line" might suit your mood.

xeger:
I find some of Jackie Leven's songs very beautiful in dealing with grief and loss, though they may not apply directly to your grief. 'Universal Blue', 'The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ' (which is not cheap blasphemy as one might guess from the title), 'Desolation Blues' but many more also...

Some Leonard Cohen songs as well, particularly 'Closing Time'.

Tim, 303: Ah, that expands my sample size. I've only seen it online, from people who came across 100% sniffy. Perhaps I've been misreading them, though I...don't think I have been.

Amazon has settled with the student who sued it to the tune of $150000. That doesn't seem to shabby to me. Of course, since it's a settlement and not a court ruling, there's no precedent set.

dlbowman76, #275: Dowland, thank you -- xeger, that was what I was remembering and typed it wrong.

Tim, #303: One commonality among many of the Troll Bingo lines is that they can be used in a benign and non-trollworthy manner. Context and tone matter strongly, as does the reputation within the community (if any) of the person making the comment.

dlbowman76 #294: Ah. I'd say that sort of analytical edition is going to take a few more years. I'm not sure about "top five" -- there is an awful lot of competition in the Century of Science Fiction -- but she's certainly pretty high up there.

More to the point, I'd agree that her work is deep enough to actually support close literary analysis, By comparison, I doubt you'd get too far delving into (most of) Heinlein and Asimov, much less someone like Niven (at least by himself). Those guys are great at narrative, but as literature, I think of them as pretty "flat".

Lori@258: Actually it's neither "head" nor "heed", but "keep".

candle @290:

Yes. That.

To everybody, thanks for your good thoughts. I'm keeping my spirits up. I went to a job fair today and I got an interview, which not all of the people who applied recieved. I may be haunting Huntsville next week for a couple of call center jobs; my method is anything local or specific full-time jobs out of town.

Just to show that my spirits are up, here's a self[kitteh] portrait of myself:

Latin Kitteh is Latin

Wyman @ 312... I'm keeping my spirits up

Glad to hear that.

As for your link...
Goodness, that is one plump tree-inhabiting rodent!

what's the going rate for a sonnet?)
Poems in general get paid for by the foot.

The saddest song I can think of is My Mom by Chocolate Genius.

Bruce Cohen #314:

what's the going rate for a sonnet?)
Poems in general get paid for by the foot.

In Europe they are sold by the metre, of course.

abi@311: Thanks.

I'm glad you like it, because I suspect it tends more towards your account of Hadrian (as in the main post) than mine. I've tended to think of him as a vain, frivolous emperor who liked to prove his aristocratic credentials rather more than he was interested in taking seriously the government of the empire.[*] And for some reason I seem to have decided that this was A Bad Thing.[**]

But having written the poem, I sympathise a bit more with your version. Funny how that happens. I have to teach on Hadrian in a few weeks, and I'll see if I incorporate some of the lessons.

[*] Rather like the young Henry VIII, it occurs to me.
[**] Mainly class prejudice, I suspect.

John Houghton @316:
I think you meant 'Everywhere but the USA, Burma, and Libera'.

Pedantka, I think you meant Liberia.

Serge #310:

I'd say he's fairly recognizable, from other photos. Looks ready to deliver ... a serge-ical strike.

So I did, Xopher. Bit too much birthday mead on this end...

You need to moderate your mead then. Or get someone to mediate your mead, so you drink a medium amount of mead. What's the median mead?

Also, remember that one man's mead is another man's poisson.

Xopher @ 322... Don't you mean it's another man's boisson? A fish is rather hard to drink unless you have a Bass-o-matic.

Some men mistake mead for fish after too much of the former Serge. Don't get in the way of my puns, or I'll poisson you.

Serge, 323: I am stealing that right now.

Mepf.

Xopher/Pedantka: As with so many things in life, what is needed is to attain a happy meadium.

Too much of the former Serge?
Have I been alevated to sainthood?

Music for those living with grief: There's already many good recommendations. Some other short pieces, like Missing (originally, or most popularly by Anything but the Girl, covered by others), Dido's lament When I am laid in earth from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, done by very many singers, as St James Infirmary Blues has been. Between these, Siegfried's Funeral from Wagner's Götterdämmerung, Beethoven's Sonata No 8 in C minor (Op 13), surprisingly, some of Satie too, and I'll second Leonard Cohen.

In longer form, quite a bit of Philip Glass (Metamorphosis), such as from Mishima and Koyaanisqatsi, Bach's Cello Suite and Faure's Requiem. For a lushly romantic despair mood, there's Tchaikovsky's symphonies, especially 5th and Schubert's Winterreise songs.

These are thoughts without access to my CDs or the music on my last computer. Maybe I'm resistant to thinking back there at this time, my strength is focusing on surviving challenges right now. Trying Glinka (MP3) and natural ambient sounds with meditation, along with Bach, Mozart and more upbeat modern pieces.

Go Wyman! (#312) Hoping it works out.

Xopher ($324), so, is this like Python's fish-slapping dance?

Re: #321

Too much Mead? Um, I'll be leaving now...

Hop back in, Melissa!

#328
You look to be in pretty stout shape.
(Yes, I recognized you in the picture.)

PJ Evans @ 338... You were able to, in spite of the pitcher's grain? Wow.

Life isn't all skittles and beer. (Some of us really prefer chocolate instead of Skittles.)

This evening I am holding a small hope in my heart: that when the person who created the iTunes interface dies it will turn out to be whoever created the bug in Apple Mail that lost me the last year's worth of e-mail (I managed to get about 8 year's worth back through some old backups.) so two different souls aren't frying in hell. Suffice it to say that my iPod was acting funny so I did a restore and synced the iPod again. So far everything has come through correctly...except for some podcasts from the BBC that refuse to sync back into the iPod. I'm sure there's a way to do this--but I can't find it and the last hour of prodding at the program make me want to toss the iPod, the Macbook Pro, and my cookies at the wall. This is freaking insane--I think next time I'll just let the iPod keep stuttering its way into a lump of plastic and metal.

Whoever decided to leave this off the main menus...well, if they were on fire I wouldn't bring out a camel to have it piss on them to kill the flames.

Bruce at #314, Poets have been working with the metric system for ages, though it doesn't seem to matter if you want free verse.

Bruce E. Durocher II @335:

In case you haven't done this yet, have you tried disabling Sync, then dragging and dropping the podcasts to your iPod?
I've disabled sync and managed my files manually ever since iTunes pulled a similar stunt. There's also Floola but it doesn't work on the iPod Touch or the iPhone.

I'd always heard it that one man's Mede was another man's Persian.

Serge @ #323

This moose prefers his Bass hand-pulled or delivered by gravity.

(And creamflow is something that should only involve dairy products.)

Cadbury

Runnymede is neither a disease nor a drink.

Cadbury

Hey, while we're on iPod/iPhone questions...

Back when polyphonic ringtones were the New Neat Thing, and I didn't have a phone that did them, I decided I'd go for a pre-polyphonic ringtone. So I programmed in Ave Maris Stella with the little internal musical thingie. (I like the piece, it's my kinda geeky, and it had the advantage that no one else had it.)

So I ended up with a very strong "reach for the mobile" reaction when I heard that particular music. I managed to carry it through various mobiles until we moved to NL, when I ended up with a phone that didn't program and wouldn't play back a recording. (My last UK phone wouldn't take in the music file—now lost—and couldn't be programmed with an internal music maker, so I recorded the ringtone from the previous one and used that.)

Now I have an iPhone, and I never answer the damn thing. None of its available ringtones ping the "Answer the phone!" portion of my brain, which appears to be exclusively programmed for Ave Maris Stella.*

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get an instrumental recording of Ave Maris Stella onto my phone, or to record something in a piano app and use it as a ringtone? I'm not really sure how one goes about creating ringtones on the iPhone.

-----
* It could be worse. My mother had much the same problem, minus international moves, but her trigger song was the Mexican Hat Dance.

Alleviated to sainthood?

Mobile phone ringtones are the work of Santa.

(Which reminds me: I must overhaul the old GPO 782 and take it into work again: it was fun having the only phone in the office with Real Bells....)

Next project: mate the GPO 300[1] to the Fixed Cellular Terminal that (a) supports pulse dialling, and (b) will run off a 6 volt battery.
This will give me an (albeit briefcase-sized) mobile with a rotary dial and Real Bells. (Generating the proper Strowger Purr dialtone is beyond the scope of this exercise.)

Cadbury.
[1] ...because a candlestick is a bit too unwieldy (not to mention Very Expensive).

abi @341 -- I don't have any idea if this would work with an iPhone (I have an HP IPAQ), but I used Audacity to edit an mp3 file of Fleetwood Mac's "Gypsy" and grab the guitar riff at the end for a ringtone, also saved as an mp3.

abi @ 341:
This page might be helpful.

(I just tested it out on my system -- iTunes 9 on a Mac -- and it seems to work just fine, although since I don't have an iPhone [yet...] I can't personally verify that it works. But iTunes did in fact import the trimmed music clip into its Ringtones section.)

Finally got the blasted files transferred. Didn't try disabling sync: will keep that in mind for the next time this sort of thing comes up.

Cadbury Moose @ 339... This moose prefers his Bass hand-pulled or delivered by gravity

Coming soon, from Rankin-Bass!

Teresa @ 342... Yes, especially if the path to sainthood was a be-lagered one.

Abi @ 341 -

My wife and I just got iPhones, and one of the standard ringtones is an old-fashioned telephone ring. Not musical, but it sure as hell sounds like a telephone that needs answering. :-)

Abi @341: If you don't see "Convert selection to AAC" or "Create AAC version" in the advanced menu, but are offered another format, you need to change your Import Settings (in Preferences > General) to import using the AAC encoder.

Along those lines, any suggestions on how I might best record the ring of my 500-series northern telecom rotary dial phone? I'm chuffed silly that rotary dial works via my VOIP provider, and enjoy the irony of having that particular line combination enough to consider moving the ring around.

xeger: my "favorite" grieving song is "Yes it Was" by Toshi Reagon (written on the death of her father, but applicable to other cases), also covered by her mom's group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.

#349
It's pretty startling to be, for example, sitting on a train and hear that ringing-telephone sound. A lot of people seem to like it.

Another grieving song, I think (without going so far as to play the CD and be sure): Jeff Buckley, "Corpus Christi Carol".

In lieu of actual participation: a meditation upon quinces at my journal.

Yesterday was the finale of a series of weekend family events which have run in succession since the Fourth of July; I'm hoping that my ability to communicate for fun will be refreshed now that I'm past the necessity to be a good relative, which, since I'm fighting a childhood reputation of being a complete brat or screaming loonie, can be a chore.

xeger @ 351... having that particular line combination enough to consider moving the ring around

Ring around the caller?

Going back some time, there was a discussion of sieves and chinoises.
Territorial Seed (http://www.territorialseed.com/) currently has a chinois set, suitable for jelly-making, and also a book on pickles and preserves.

Unfortunately, I don't have a sound file to work with for this. I've been looking for a free (one use!) piano synthesizer thing for either my Mac or my iPhone so I can pick out the notes* and record it, but so far, no luck.

I think it's too much of a pain for the very few phone calls I get.

-----
* I have the sheet music, but it's in the original notation, so I'm going to have to sit and stew about it before I can play it on whatever keyboard system I find.

#351 xeger ...

(I have a number of vintage 2500 sets. The built-in mic of my cell phone is so horrible that the obvious technique of recording directly there has never produced anything I like. I think it cuts off too much of the low end.)

Plugging any reasonable mic into the mic input of most sound cards will get you a wav file. (Windows Audio Recorder is quite adequate.) An MP3 can be created using freeware such as "Exact Audio Copy"

Another song for grief - 'Tell it by Heart' by Jami Sieber from the Climb Against the Odds soundtrack. The entire soundtrack is good, but this particular instrumental is haunting and lovely.

abi @358: If you have Garage Band (and I'm guessing you do), use the Musical Typing function (Window > Musical Typing) - it turns your keyboard into a virtual piano. Once you've saved the file, you can use the Share menu to send it to iTunes.

Well, I don't have Garage Band (yet; Martin's birthday is coming up), but I did find the memory stick from the old phone!

That gave me the (tinny, remember it's been recorded once) ringtone file. I've dragged it through three file formats and two conversion routines, and now iTunes seems to think it's a ringtone. I'm synching the phone now.

Maybe now I'll be able to answer the two calls a month (average) that I receive!

HaHA! Victory!

It's tinny as anything, but it's my ringtone.

Thank you for the help, guys.

Cadbury Moose @ 343:

You could buy a tri-band rotary phone for only $200/£125, but that doesn't give you the satisfaction of doing it yourself. It has real bells and a dial tone, and you could probably fit quite a chunky battery in there.

abi @ 358:

If you find a recording on YouTube that you like, you can use Listen to YouTube to save an mp3, then clip out a snippet from it.

Speaking of mobile phones, I just got a new toy yesterday. If anyone has any Android apps that they think I shouldn't live without, I'm open to suggestions.

abi @ 362/363: Yay!

This ringtone talk just made me miss the one I programmed for my old (pre-Sony merger) Ericsson a1018s. I'd just started learning French; it was Piaf's Sous le ciel de Paris.

To Hubble on its final repair:

We'll go no more repairing that keen eye
that's brought us views of farthest time and space.
Remaining life will be as long as grace
allows, to seize faint light from out the sky.
New cameras gather different light on high,
reaching deeply for the smallest trace
of eldritch beauty on Existence' face.
Those pictures make imagination fly.
Later 'scopes may bring us pictures from beyond
the distances that Hubble's gaze can pierce,
recording kinds of light unseen 'til then;
better built; still from this one were spawned,
that first went forth to fill a hunger fierce,
and push our sight once more beyond our ken.

So, does anyone ever spend frivolous time on Second Life?

Bruce @367:

Lovely!

The first line echoed Byron for me:

So we'll go no more a-scrying
So deep into the night
Though the comets still are flying
And the stars are still as bright.

For the software troubles grow
And the hardware fails on test
And the current halts its flow
And gyros come to rest.

Though the sky was made for flying
And the night has more to show
Still we'll go no more a-scrying
And fall once more below.

Pendrift @ 366... Thanks for the link. It sure takes me back to the days of yore, when this was the normal fare on the radio. I wonder if I should load the soundtrack from Thunderbirds on my cell phone. That would be appropriate as my phone almost never goes off unless there's a problem at the office.

Serge #348: Stout fellow!

Faren @ #354, "Corpus Christi Carol" is indeed on "Grace," which I heard for the first time yesterday.

Fragano @ 371... That's me. Mead of stern stuff. Always going against the grain, even when there's trouble brewing.

Serge@373

They do say it's good for what ale's you. As long as you don't get too winey.

Michael I @ 374... Your words leave me feeling as if vicious dogs had malt me.

Serge @ 373: That's me. Mead of stern stuff. Always going against the grain, even when there's trouble brewing.

How can you say that? Man, you're a pilsner of the community. You're the creme and treating yourself like a humble porter.

Helles bells, shape up!

abi @ 369:

Very nice! Yeah, I was going for the resonance with Byron, but had some other things to say that didn't quite fit a pastiche of the whole poem. I'm glad I didn't, because if I had, you might not have.

My iPhone story: last week, the battery on my old Motorola flip-phone deteriorated to a critical level where it wouldn't stay charged in listen mode all day, and I found that almost nobody carries batteries any more¹. Well, I decided to replace the phone; the front LCD display is cracked anyway. So I went to the AT&T website, told it I wanted to buy a new phone, with a new contract, and checked out the nearest equivalent to what I have now: a Motorola EM-330 flip-phone. They were giving it away with a new 2 year contract. The catch was that I would have to upgrade my rate: I have the lowest possible number of minutes, and they wanted me to add $8 per month, $200 over the life of the contract. On top of all that, the battery in my iPod Touch is starting to go; replacing it will cost about $70, assuming I don't want to chance a 3rd party component and do it myself.

Well, I've planned all along to buy an iPhone sometime next year to replace both the iPod and the phone, so I thought maybe I should just do that now. I drove over to the Apple Store to ask about transferring all my music, photos, and apps from the iPod to the iPhone, and they said, "No problem". At that point, even given the extra $30 per month for the data plan, and the cost of the iPhone, I lost my saving throw versus shiny and bought the iPod.

After a couple of days of buyer's remorse, I'm really happy about it. Getting my stuff, including phone numbers of contacts, on the iPhone was a easy as they said, and I found a 3rd party cable that connects my hearing aid cables and contains a mic and answer button² And now I've got 1 gadget to carry around instead of 2, and it's got my calendar and todo app on it, as well as a voice recorder and a reasonable camera.

And I've got a dog bark ringtone that comes standard! Didn't fool my dogs though.

1. At least 3 stores told me, "It's cheaper to buy a new phone." And the online stores wanted US $30 or more for a battery, I guess because supply is so short. They were about $20 last year.
2. The button doubles as a music player control.

#368: Does anyone ever spend non-frivolous time on Second Life?

I used to think that "Who Let The Dogs Out" by the Baha Men was a fun song, but it makes a really annoying ringtone. heh.

I'm trying to figure out how to load a Robot Chicken ringtone. It may be common enough to be a cliche in the larger community, but among the people I actually hang out with, there's heavy use of what I guess could be best described as "Verizon's least annoying default ringtone."

xeger@286:

For sheer solemn beauty, Arvo Part comes to mind, especially these: Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten, Tabula Rasa, Fratres. But all of his work is lovely; here's a link to a bit of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbxnnC22gwY

I'll second the Bach Cello Suites, and Dowland's "Lachrimae".

Also, for recording that phone ringer: the mic-into-soundcard should work - with one caveat: those ringers are *loud,* with a lot of "attack" in the waveform, and often cause distortion in either the mic or the audio electronics, or both. (I've been down this path before, in my days as a theatrical sound designer). If this is a problem, distance helps - try backing the mic off to ten feet away, and/or turning the mic away from the ringer.

Bruce Cohen @ 378: I finally crumbled about 2 weeks ago, and bought an iPhone. I'm adoring it to a ridiculous degree.

Audiko lets you upload and cut ringtones from any mp3.

Today I'm pronouncing damnation upon the makers of the Saw movies, especially Saw VI (the latest in that apparently, and unfortunately, unkillable horror series). The advertising they're using is extremely unfriendly to people who don't choose to watch horror movies.

It's like having an ad for a porn movie that "only" shows the naked foreplay. I'm not quite saying it shouldn't be allowed, but I hate them for it. Maybe a warning screen should be required.

Assholes.

JESR, "Verizon's least annoying ringtone" is how I chose mine. Since it stopped ringing if it wasn't set to vibrate and ring, though, I've gotten really good at hearing the vibrations. Even as an alarm clock.

Verizon? The service is so crappy from one end of the grocery store to the other that, when on errands for my wife, I have had to say "Can you hear me now?"

Hey, does anyone remember me talking on the "Works & Days of Hands" thread about the quilt my mother made for me? I finally got around to taking some pictures of it on the bed and putting them up on Flickr. Here's a link to the set.

Apropos of another long ago open thread, someone was looking for vintage gas masks. American Science & Surplus has Russian ones, in child and adult sizes. (And many other weird and wonderful things!)

Talking of masks, we must surely bow to the genius of Dr Elena Bodnar who has invented a brassiere that converts into two face masks.  Last week she was deservedly awarded an Ig Nobel Prize.

Xopher, I can remember when naked foreplay would have been considered to be the porn movie.

I don't think the change has improved them as films.

David Goldfarb @ 388... Very nice.

John Stanning @ 390... I notice that Paul Krugman was there too. Didn't the Ig Nobels of a few years ago hadve as a guest, the Professor from Gilligan's Island? It might have been the same year that a Japanese scientist got the Prize for his research on necrophiliac ducks.

David Goldfarb @388 -- what a lovely quilt, thanks for sharing. And your choice of ML thread is appropriate, too: the pattern on one side of the quilt reminds me strongly of the coffering in the Pantheon's dome.

W00t!! NOBEL PRIZE SPOILER

"The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase" is awarded to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak (Two woman, including one Aussie, our first female laureate. Bloke is a Brit. They're all working in USA now).

Serge, it was a Dutch biologist, not Japanese (not too surprisingly – there are plenty of ducks in NL, with all those canals to swim on).  His research consisted of description of one, singular, duck which chanced to kill itself by flying into a window under his office, and of the ensuing... occurrence.  The extent of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks is, as scientists put it, not yet fully understood.

At the Ig Nobel prize awards they usually have some (real) Nobel prize winners on stage – Paul Krugman was there this year, and had a pink bra-mask put on him.

John Stanning @ 396... Right, it was a Dutch with the Duck.

Hmmm... It seems like it's been some time since I received an issue of the Annals of Improbable Research in the mail. I'd better make sure that my sub didn't run out. In the meantime I'm still getting their electronic newsletter, in a recent issue of which I found the following mention:

"The Effect of Antibiotic Drugs on the Volume and Composition of Intestinal Gas From Beans," E.L. Murphy and D.H. Calloway, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, vol. 17, no. 7, July 1972, pp. 639-42. (Thanks to Joachim Rumigny for bringing this to our attention.) The study begins:

"Healthy men were confined to a metabolic unit and fed bean meals to stimulate intestinal gas formation while under antibiotic medication."

Serge @ 313:

The link didn't go to the right picture. A better link can be found here: Latin Kitteh is Latin

Serge again: So you have problems with your Verizon phone? I hate to say it, but I'm checking out employment at one of their call centers.

Exit, stage right, persued by a bear.

Xopher @ 385, I saw the trailer for that in the theater (where, admittedly, I had gone to watch another horror movie, even if it was a horror comedy). I just want to know who keeps letting those people make those films. Surely there's a better use for the money -- kindling, for example, would at least keep someone warm.

Caroline@400

Unfortunately, moviegoers keep buying tickets for the Saw movies. Until that changes, they'll keep making more of them.

abi (#362): there's always the "Mac Box Set" which includes iLife (Garageband et al), iWork (Keynote/Pages/Numbers), and the latest Mac OS X...for about US$11 more than the OS alone would normally be. (Significantly higher this time since 10.6 is US$29, though.)

Once you have Garageband you can create a "ringtone" project which lets you select a 40 sec or less loop, then just use the "Send ringtone to iTunes" menu item.

Wyman Cooke @ 399... I hate to say it, but I'm checking out employment at one of their call centers. Exit, stage right, persued by a bear.

People used to be embarassed at admitting they worked for AOL. Is Verizon the new AOL? I'd have smashed Verizon's ohone with a sledgehammer a long time ago, but my employer is paying for the darn thing. The phone. Not the sledgehammer.

Xopher #385:

I despise the way that nice, safe TV shows and networks will sometimes have these horrible ads shoved in. I'm watching the Food Network with my kids because I don't want them or me to be force-fed from the popular culture sewer. So, I don't want to see the ads for the latest chop-em-up movie, or the latest murder the screaming victim special. I don't want to know what awful thing Tony Soprano or Jack Bauer or that thuggish cop from The Shield is going to do this week[1]. I don't really even need the stupidly gratuitous sex references and innuendo that pass for comedy in most of the low-IQ sitcom ads.

It's almost like I have this weird thought that small children ought to be able to watch child-appropriate TV shows without being force-fed sex and violence in the commercials. Or like I ought to be able to use some small subset of my 100-odd cable-provided channels to decrease my level of stress.

[1] These references are almost certainly out of date, as I don't watch much TV, and none of that kind.

I just think I shouldn't have to watch horror when I've tuned in for Stargate Universe. Or DILF movies (non-porn) on Logo (to be fair, usually Logo barely gets out of the New Amazing Abdominal Device! world*).

I'd like to take over the TVs of the people who made those movies and pop up hardcore gay porn (or straight porn if they're gay) when they're trying to watch football (or Project Runway or whatever). Or maybe the right target is the TV programming people who decide what commercials go with what programs. Either way, I hate them.
____
*Yes, it's a NAAD, NAAD, NAAD, NAAD world.

Serge #393: Yup, I was at that one! By that time, the dude looked more like the Skipper, but he was funny and good-humored about the whole thing. I remember that year the Public Safety award was split between the guy who invented a windshield-projecting TV set, and the legislator who made it street-legal in his state.

Serge #403: What's wrong with Verizon? They're not as bad as BellSouth/Cingular.

On Countdown: "Fox News is "no longer a news organization. This is a political organization"

via Orcinus.

I think this might be interesting to people here.
Warren Allen Smith, humanist-freethinker-scholar, is cleaning house and has lots of interesting memorabilia for sale, including letters from famous people etc., and a philosophy encyclopedia website he is the author of.

http://wasm.us/HShoppe.html

Sharon M @ #389

Do _NOT_ wear (or roughly handle) any gasmask manufactured prior to (approximately) 1960.

The original filter material was made from esparto grass pulp and asbestos fibre, and was invented by the Germans, reverse engineered by the British, and further refined by the USA.

After umpteen years the paper filters will undoubtedly have degraded and started shedding asbestos fibre.

The WW2 British "Civilian" and "Civilian Duty" respirator filters contain Chrysotile (white) asbestos.

The WW2 British "General Service Respriator" contains 20% Crocidolite (blue) asbestos.

The USA developed "spun glass" HEPA filters in the 1950s to remove their dependence on imported asbestos and esparto grass.

This announcement brought to you by the Elves and their Safe Tea (because Elfin Safe Tea is very important in these difficult times).

Cadbury.

#396 John

(apologies in advance to Charlie...)

At the Ig Nobel prize awards they usually have some (real) Nobel prize winners on stage – Paul Krugman was there this year, and had a pink bra-mask put on him.

Is that a step up or a step down from him sharing a stage with Charlie Stross back in August?

#234 Deeply Offended

Does Deeply Offended not quite understand
That a forum that's public that's here at hand
Is public not private in showing the posts
That people in comments leave here at the hosts.'

When posting to forums with public display,
The missive is public not hidden away
Acting like assholes in public view
There is no privacy for shielding you.

If you are not careful to watch what you say,
Away from the blogverse perhaps you stay.
For it if your did it or said it or wrote,
Demanding retraction you've missed the boat.

The timetravel needed to go to the past,
Isn't around yet and might not even last,
You wrote it, we read it and here it will stay
And even deleted there's memory play--

You wrote it, we read it, and we may recall,
Those words you wrote gone from the Cosmic All
Event deleted from here there would be
Membrance left still in the memory.

It's safer with records less like to mutate
Than human remembrance that change with the date
The memory's fallible ask in three years
And the answers are different and thoughts in arrear.

Asked, "What were you doing when Challenger died?"
The answers had changed with three years' tide!
The records showed lies if the literal's viewed,
The three-years' responses rather subdued--

The answers were reas'nable guesses to make
But many of them were just plain mistake
Recall is imperfect in most human brains
And so reconstruction get used to explain.

This get repetitous so anyway
Posting to blogs puts your words on display.
If you object to them publically read,
Then again-- you refrain from posting instead!

And this is my posting
I own copyright,
But I know I posted it
In public sight....

Fragano #407:

Telecom companies and political parties have a lot in common. Often their best possible advertising pitch is something along the lines of "we're not quite as awful as the other guys."

My experiences with Verizon were hellish. Comcast, so far, has been merely purgatorial. (Actually, our service has been fine so far, other than some trouble reaching competent people at the very beginning.)

abi re iPhone rintones: Jon Singer made a ringtone by recording my guinea pigs' dinnertime chorus using his iPhone.

(The playback was hilarious: everyone else just chimed in, but Tiny was puzzled by why all those guinea pig voices were coming from over there?)

albatross #413: That's sort of the reverse of my experience. Our experiences with Verizon have been moderately purgatorial (some dropped calls, one ghastly charge for ending service on a phone due to my mother-in-law's death, very swiftly removed when the reason was explained). On the other hand, we've had quite a bit of trouble with Comcast internet, leading to "it's Comcastic!" being used as a swear word by my wife and I.

OMG *squeeeeee!!*

Just discovered there's a Vorkosigan saga book (Diplomatic Immunity) out I haven't read yet.

(How the hell did I miss it?)

Oh, for the record, the non-Vorkosigan I read was Curse of Chalion.

I have dismally low expectations of performance for all providers of connectivity; it helps keep me from constant disappointment.

Jacque @416: That just means, lucky you, less time without a new Miles book until the next one comes out!

Open-thready underreported Olympics story, which I'll link here rather than digging into the archives to revive a more caustically appropriate thread:

Did security theatre lose the Chicago bid?

Mark, #420: Well, DUH. Which leads to the annoying realization that the very people who are cheering Chicago's loss are the ones who made it inevitable in the first place.

Is the Bible too subversively charitable for you? Do you sometimes get this creepy feeling that some of these horrible gross hippies might have a bit of a point when they say that some of their ideas are backed up by the Bible?

Well, help is on the way- soon, there'll be a more truly Christian rewrite of the Bible! Wait, what, did I say "rewrite"? Of course I meant "retranslation". But don't worry- all parts that are so feel-goody that they clearly have to be hippie inventions will be left out. And then you can call all those do-gooders blasphemous when they quote their fake Bibles at you!

Dave Bell @ 368:
So, does anyone ever spend frivolous time on Second Life?

IBM tried: they set up a developers' meeting site and a sales rep meeting place on an island that they bought there. AFAIK the developer site wasn't successful (I sure wasn't very interested, and I visit their regular developer sites periodically); Ghu alone knows what the sales rep reaction was.

Hmm, may be time for that remedial reading class: Dave Bell asked about frivolous time, and I answered as if he'd said non-frivolous. Reading comprehension, not so much.

Raphael @ 422: I read your post. Then I went to the linked site. Then I went to ***shudders*** Conservapedia and read a bit more of the article.

Let's see...according to other info on the Web, the KJV was completed in 1611, but went through the usual round of revisions and editions until a standardized text was completed in 1769. Hmmm...

One of Conservapedia's complaints about the Bibles available today is the introduction of liberal bias. It gives as an example Luke 24:34 ("Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots."), saying this verse doesn't show up in any other Gospel and claiming that some of the folks who arranged Jesus' crucifixion did so know what they were doing--thus the writer of the article judges this verse to be unfit for inclusion in a conservative Bible.

The point about the exemplar verse making a solo appearance in Luke isn't a valid argument, since it's pretty much established that Luke is just Matthew with Added Goodies, just as Matthew is itself just Mark with Added Goodies but Not as Many as Luke (or so I understand from other reading). For example, Matthew mentions John the Baptist, but I think only Luke says that John is Jesus' cousin, etc.

So I wonder...did the liberal bias creep in somewhere during the 158 years leading up to the 1769 standardized version? Or was it introduced by the translators for inclusion in the original 1611 edition?

I am, on the one hand, interested in the history of the Bible in editorial terms, and would quite enjoy reading a version based on those texts deemed most authentic by the textual critics; on the other hand, I boggle at the thought that maybe, just maybe, the author of the article thinks the concept of forgiveness is an example of liberal bias--and that s/he thinks other conservatives hold the same opinion; and on the gripping hand...great ghu, the whole idea makes my brain itch.

David Goldfarb, #388, that looks great! I like the more controlled side better, but it's so cool that it's two-sided!

And for bikers that come near DC, there's now a new Bike Center at Union Station.

So I would guess that Andrew Schlafly is not Catholic now? (His mom is, and apparently he was married in a Catholic ceremony.) His Bible project isn't the sort of thing that would ever get an imprimatur.

There have been a number of individual rewrite-the-Bible projects, including some from fairly well-known figures. See, for instance, Thomas Jefferson's version, which attempted to re-edit the Gospels into a single narrative with all the supernatural elements removed.

The Conservapedia bible project appears to be a straight (worse-possible method) transliteration of 1611 AV into modern English. Plus the opinions of the transliterator. It's a bit of a train-wreck. The AV text isn't particularly well thought of today.

The NIV is pretty much based on the opinions of textual critics. For a probably theologically conservative read, J.I. Packer was involved in one recent project - see http://www.bible-researcher.com/versbib13.html for nine 21st century editions! And that was just to 2005.

Biblegateway.com has bunches of translations; there's also about a hundred at http://www.tyndalearchive.com/Scriptures/index.htm I have recently had flirtations with both Coverdale 1540 and J.B. Phillips The New Testament in Modern English and The Word on the Street - the latter formerly known as The Street Bible.

Followup to my previous - looks like the "Holman Christian Standard Bible" is a Southern Baptist version with the same objectives as Conservapedia - http://www.bible-researcher.com/csb.html

The biggest evidence of "liberal bias" in the NIV was the preparation of the inclusive language revision of the NIV.

Okay... it's not quite dinosaurs and sodomy, but it's close, and certainly not worksafe.

JESR @418, Fragano Ledgister @ 415, et al, on the topic of cell phone service. I had Verizon for years, and my husband still has it, and we're quite happy with it. No trouble with dropped calls or poor sound quality with Verizon, or issues with billing. That's in Oregon, which might be relevant. I just switched to AT&T, but only due to the siren song of the iPhone. One of the reasons that it took so long for me to succumb to the iPhone was that I was reluctant to leave Verizon for AT&T.

albatross: We like Food Network, and Gareth (sixteen months) LOVES the splash pages to dance to. He's also fond of the Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives opening sequence. And yeah, I'd rather not see the ads for Lifestyle or stuff like that.

Noggin (Nickelodeon for pre-schoolers) has shows with no interior commercials and all of the commercials they do have are advertising their programming or Nickelodeon programming. Admittedly, many of the shows are sanitized pablum at best, but there's weird stuff like Yo Gabba Gabba. (Again, Gareth LOVES.)

It's astonishing. This SERIOUSLY NSFW sculpture by Takashi Murakami sold for 13.5 million dollars.

Serious about the NSFW part. Seriously.

Xopher, it's also kind of funny.

Xopher @ 433:

All I'm going to say is that whoever buys it will have to have a big sheet to cover it over for when their mom comes to visit.

Xopher, #433: I guess that really does prove that anime-fen will buy anything anime-related, no matter how loony and/or overpriced it is.

KeithS, #435: What makes you think his mom ever comes over to visit?

I found the following on Salon.com, regarding the Republican primary battle over one of Florida's Senate seats.

Karl Rove has chosen sides and -- quite literally -- put his money where his mouth is. Rove put his weight, and $1,000, behind Rubio

Jumping off from the music sub-thread: anyone know of a professional recording of this Kyrie by Antonio Lotti?

Interesting quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Narrative is the original CGI--it's hard to get the eyes right, to make the characters move as they though are human.

Lee #436: You're misreading Keith. He's saying that whoever buys it will have to be discreet about if if their (the purchaser's) mother visits. That is, if I were to buy it, I might want to keep it out of my nai's sight.

Keith @ 435: All I'm going to say is that whoever buys it will have to have a big sheet to cover it over for when their mom comes to visit.

That would make a stupendous MacGuffin for a French farce: "ZOMG, Mom's here and we forgot to cover that statue!!!" It's so expensive too. What if it got broken? Or it went missing, and one of the characters had to stand on the pedestal and imitate it?

Xopher #433: Okay, that's just too f--king weird for words. It sort-of heads across Obscene street and ends up so far on the other side, it's basically just weirdly funny.

And yes, many a bad sitcom episode could ensue from attempts to hide it from the mother in law, or the PTA meeting, or....

B Durbin:

Yeah, my 4 y.o. loves Yo Gabba Gabba, which is indeed both weird and oddly entertaining. And the whole family likes the Food Network, especially the 4 y.o., who currently plans to be a fireman and a chef when he grows up. (There may also be a teacher or doctor or policeman in there somewhere, depending on when you ask him. But chef and fireman are the main ones.)

OTOH, my 8 y.o. is interested in all kinds of very obnoxious stuff, of which Spongebob is the least annoying. (And the 4 y.o. loves Spongebob, too. Grmbl.)

Andy Wilton @ 441... That would make a stupendous MacGuffin for a French farce

Starring Pierre Richard, with Gérard Depardieu as the no-good older brother, Louis de Funès & Alice Sapritch as their parents, and Bourvil as the goofy uncle.

Serge @ 444: Louis de Funès would rock the reaction shots! You'd get minutes of laughs every time he saw the statue (or Pierre Richard pretending, because Depardieu's sold it to Terry-Thomas on the sly.)

Fragano Ledgister @ 440:

I don't think Lee's misreading me, I think she's just saying that the type of person who buys that sort of thing may not be the type whose parents particularly want to visit in the first place.

I do like the farce and sitcom ideas.

Oh, I definitely think it's funny! I sent pictures of it to a young (over 18) friend with a note saying "Oh look! Someone made a sculpture of you!"

This is driving me nuts. I'm at work, and it seems like a poor idea to open something labeled "SERIOUSLY NSFW," but I really want to know what the sculpture looks like.

Without even seeing it, I like the French farce / sitcom idea. Maybe the MIL gave the sculpture to them as a present - she misread the number in the catalog when she bought it - and now she expects to see her gift prominently displayed.

Xopher #433: OK, that is seriously bizarre. In a comic or even animation, it would be it would be an amusing joke. As a life-sized statue... I'm speechless.

OtterB: Vg'f na navzr thl, jvgu fcvxl oybaq unve, anxrq naq znfgheongvat juvyr fgnaqvat; ur unf whfg rwnphyngrq, naq vf fbzrubj juveyvat gur cebqhpg (bs juvpu gurer'f dhvgr n ybg) nebhaq uvf urnq yvxr n ynffb.

Vg'f yvsr-fvmr.

Spoilered, for those who'd Prefer Not To.

Obama has done a number of things that disappointed me, but this is one thing he's getting right. Summary: Obama kicks lobbyists off government policy advisory boards; lobbyists are furious. I play the world's tiniest violin for them.

albatross @ 442: I could certainly see it as an episode of 'Friends'. (With apologies for un-Americanisms...)

THE ONE WITH THE COWBOY STATUE
With a sudden influx of cash from a film role, Joey buys an unusual statue, but it creeps Chandler out.

CHANDLER: You know those paintings where the eyes seem to follow you round the room?

He persuades Monica to look after it. Later, Phoebe and Ross see it for the first time.

PHOEBE: (Smiles) Oh wow, I used to date a guy who did that!
ROSS: (Stares.) Really?
PHOEBE: Yeah. (Catches Ross's expression.) NO! He used to build sculptures of CARTOON CHARACTERS!

Later still, Rachel catches Monica with the statue and a feather duster.

MONICA: It just... doesn't feel clean in here, with him doing that.
RACHEL: (Leans nonchalantly on statue.) Sweetie, you can dust all you lke, it's always gonna be a dirty statue, you know that, right?

A loud snapping noise is heard.

MONICA: Oh my God, did you just break that? You broke that! You just broke a thirteen-and-a-half million dollar statue!
RACHEL: Oh my God! It came off in my hand!
MONICA: Right there? That's a half a million dollars you got there. (Takes a closer look.) Well, a coupla hundred grand, anyhow.

Fragano, #440: No, you misread me (or I was unclear); I can't imagine that anyone who would buy that statue would have a mother who came to visit.

And yes, farce.

janetl @ 431:

I had Verizon for a number of years, then about 4 years ago I tried to upgrade my phone, and discovered that (without mentioning it in the specs) they'd crippled several of the features I'd bought it for. I got mad, sent back the new phone, and started looking for another provider. I found a phone I wanted with the features I wanted at Cingular, which was in the process of being absorbed by AT&T, and switched to them. They've been OK, no service problems.

However Verizon sealed their fate as far as I am concerned by losing the record of my returning my old phone, and trying to bill me for it for 6 months. I finally spent 45 minutes on the phone with a senior customer service rep who actually knew how to query a database. He discovered that their records showed not only that I'd returned the phone, but that it had been sold to someone else as a refurb.

Andy Wilton @ 452:

JOEY (entering room with leering grin on his face): What was your hand doing there?

And by the way, that's a pretty big McGuffin.

Can we work it in so that the flatmate has to impersonate the statue, and somebody else has to impersonate the flatmate, in a reverse Charley's Aunt.

MiL (while blocking audience line-of-sight): Henry, it feels so real.

#435 a big sheet to cover it...

And what about the stains on the sheet?

Atomic Robo and the Yonkers devil

"You don't just walk up to a monster. There's stealth and guile and --"
"Found it."

Serge @203: Things said in Scott Wegener & Brian Clevinger's Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War...

It was one of the Free Comic Book Day's edition of one of those stories (the one you were quoting) which got me interested in the character.

Raphael #422: And to go with your new Conservative Bible, a lovely painting of Jesus delivering the US Constitution. With alt-text!

Rob Rusick @ 458... My introduction to the character was with "Atomic Robo and the Thing from Beyond Worldcon"

Did I miss a memo?

Over in the comment thread discussing Boing Boing's new redesign (general response seems to be "Not quite an EPIC FAIL, but definitely a FAIL"), somone asked why Teresa's name wasn't on the masthead.

Antinous, one of the moderators, responded that Teresa had left Boing Boing about six months ago.

Say what?

Bruce Arthurs #431: Well, below that article, theres a link to their Moderation Policy... which is 404. Clearly somebody's pretty confused!

Re the ad thread: having gone real HDTV we now have a Qubo channel, which is sort-of-kind-of halfway between Nick Jr. and PBS: e.g. they run Book of Virtues, Jacob Two-Two, the bowdlerized-for-network-TV VeggieTales, Zula Patrol, etc. So it's mostly inoffensive-to-vaguely-uplifting elementary school age stuff-- except for the commercials, which are almost exclusively UHF-ready "but that's not all!" stuff.

Bruce, Teresa stopped moderating there about that time. She left it to the Boingers to make some kind of announcement, and they never did. If that sounds like they quietly shuffled her out the door...well, it does to me too.

I never bothered reading the comments at BB. With the redesign, I think I'll stop bothering to visit at all.

Pity.

Lee #453: My apologies. I must have misread you.

Thanks for the link, Xopher. I'm in the minority who can see some artistic value to it. But I would still have the same problems everyone else has thought of:

• Better things to do with $15,000,000.
• Not enough room for it.
• Have to cover it up for some visitors. Although here I'm not thinking so much of parents but of gentleman callers who might feel I was holding them up against impossible standards.

Lee @ 451: That is a very encouraging development. I fully support limiting the power of lobbyists. (I also support the elimination of addenda to bills that have nothing to do with the bills' intent, especially as regards to financial disbursements.)

Allan Beatty @ 467... gentleman callers who might feel I was holding them up against impossible standards

It reminds me of a Fantastic Four story where Sue explains that one of the things she likes about her hubby Reed is how he stretches his... ah... intellect.

Fragano, #466: Not to worry. I did use a pronoun with no clear-cut antecedent; I meant it one way, you took it the other. That's a failure of communication on my part.

Serge, #469: *snerk*

It was 2 a.m., I had an earworm, saw the latest parlor game, eschewed my usual reluctance to join in, and somehow managed to zap the part about using setting as a theme. Oh well. So here it is in the open thread instead.

Golden firestone-eating queen
Firestone-eating queen
Golden firestone-eating queen
Firestone-eating queen

Riding on a dragon's back
Off to fight the thread
Riding on a dragon's back
Sitting at her head
Along came the wicked strands
Wicked burning rain
They fell down in lethal bands
Causing death and pain

But my golden firestone-eating queen
firestone-eating queen

Flew into the threaded sky
Swift and strong and lean
Flamed the thread and watched it die
Quickly went between

It's my golden firestone-eating queen
firestone-eating queen

David @ 459:

Not to defend McNaughton, but the painting appears to be more symbolic of his view of America. I don't think it should be given a literal meaning.

Open threadiness:

I may have some good news later on today. Fingers crossed. Hamster Prayer Wheels spinning.

B.Durbin@468: Just what the "intent" of a bill is is an interesting question, which can lead to remarkable legal expenses :-). Minnesota has such a requirement, and we've had laws invalidated due to it. And lots of laws clearly MORE diverse in content than the ones invalidated that have not been challenged.

More to the point, if one did effectively ban it, I think one would have removed one of the important tools of cooperation and compromise. The process of legislative compromise tends to work on the "you can have x if I can have y" approach, and putting x and y in the same bill is the best way to make sure you both get what you agreed to.

"FCC666"

That's the plate of a car I saw a couple of days ago.
Not sure how to interpret its message.
If there IS a message.

Serge,

I thought it meant someone loved the color shown here.

Or perhaps...

Nancy C Mittens... Jacque... I don't remember the car's color for sure, but you may be right. When I saw the plate, I first thought of the song that Eric Idle wrote when Michael Powell was in charge of the FCC, where 'FCC' was pronounced like the crude word that sounds like 'Puck'. I wasn't sure where the '666' fitted in there. I mentionned this to my wife and she thinks I'm weird. (Yes, we've been together for 24 years - does it show?)

If you know about illustrations of Martian Tripods that are now in the public domain, would you mind passing on a link to me here? I've been thinking about getting business cards made for my own personal use, and their sporting a Tripod would be neat. The illustration would have to be reproducible at about the size of a LiveJournal icon.

Fafblog is back. I mean really back.

Q: But they've been just months away from a bomb for years now. A: I know! Which means in terror years, Iran already has a bomb... in your child's precious brain! Q: But that's where she keeps her sugarplum dreams! A: That's why it's up to us to already have being stopped them!

Also, Death has a blog, and Amadis of Gaul is a blog.

I have officially hit outrage fatigue. When you read about Oklahoma passing a law to collect and publish online personal info about women who've had abortions, and your response is to shake your head and wonder what the redneck assholes* will think up next time, it's time to take a break from the news...

* Note, please that these are two different categories, they just have some overlap.

The Oklahoma legislature definitely qualifies as redneck assholes, by that fact alone. Not everyone in OK, of course. But enough. There's a state I won't be visiting any time soon.

Re: the 'interesting' statue--I saw it in person some years ago at the Portland Art Museum. I'm fairly sure they had a warning up, but it still didn't prepare one for the bewilderment of being in the same room. It's quite, er, something, up close.

There was also a female companion piece of a similar theme in the same room. Also quite... something. Adjectives fail me.

The pair are an interesting artistic commentary, at any rate.

Carrie S #481: That's, well, that's just obscene.

Open thready badness: Glenn Greenwald has a new column up, discussing the pattern of the Obama administration continuing to cover up for the crimes of the Bush administration.

Does anyone have any guesses about motives, here? I can see why Obama doesn't want to spent political capital on bringing prosecutions, but why suppress evidence and cover up for the previous administration's crimes? The best explanations I can come up with range from bad to horrifying.

There are surely other reasons, some of them may be truly disgusting, but I would not be surprised if the primary reason weren't simply that Obama's administration has been very reluctant to rip out Bush appointees on a large scale and replace them, so a lot of the status quo is the result of the same people still being on the job.

I'm extremely upset by the administration's procrastination in cleaning house at DOJ, and outright refusal to replace the finance industry apologists in Treasury.

Bruce,

Is there any evidence the Obama administration even wants to replace the finance industry apologists at Treasury?

I suspect that the administration is getting a big benefit from all that data from domestic spy operations--wiretapping, national security letters, etc.--and that the Republicans who might go down for torture or other scandals have threatened to disclose lots of details about those programs in their defense. And that's about the most positive bit of thinking I can manage on the whole thing.

This just in: Scrooge was wrong. Mr. Potter, under a pseudonym, is living in Oak Brook, IL. Where, if I read events correctly, he's going to become a "Special Friend" (in the Yakko Warner way) to the Teamsters, the American Library Association, and anyone that dislikes adults who want to make sure that 11 year olds "lose sleep." Comparisons to C. Montgomery Burns are obvious, but don't seem fair to Mr. Burns. Odd that the town is still called Oak Brook rather than Pottertown...

Coming back to this subject after rather a gap. Previously (#201).
I thought I'd posted this here, but couldn't find it when I went back to look, so here are some stories with pictures, as requested (Erik, #216, by implication), in case the people interested haven't tracked them down already.

Nero's rotating banquet hall unveiled in Rome (Yahoo, slideshow + video)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090929/ap_on_re_eu/eu_italy_nero_s_dining_room

Yahoo! links disappear relatively quickly, so here are a selection of others with pictures, videos & background information.

Nero's rotating banquet hall unveiled in Rome (NPR. pix with captions + map)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113302798

VIDEO: Emperor Nero's Rotating Dining Room Unearthed (Post Chronicle. a video report and images of the ancient dining area)

NERO`S ROTATING DINING ROOM FOUND (Italy Online in English, only 1 picture, but more history)
http://www.lifeinitaly.com/node/7955

And a typical Daily Mail treatment (their headline for the new hominid fossil discovery, Ardi is "First ape woman suggests human ancestors may have started walking in pursuit of sex"), slavering at length over Nero's reported sex-and-sadism excesses before concluding with "We can only hope that this time it is not the setting for such unbridled horrors".
Wine, women and slaughter: The truth behind Emperor Nero's pleasure palace

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1217587/Wine-women-slaughter-The-truth-Emperor-Neros-pleasure-palace.html

Also found this story about another Roman excavation, an old port near Rome with some surprising features.
Face in the sand: British team unearths Roman amphitheatre at ancient port

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1217353/Face-sand-Roman-amphitheatre-unearthed-ancient-port.html

Despite their relentless "UK! UK! UK! Oi! Oi! Oi!" (there were astronomy stories with UK links too) and tabloid sex, violence and sentiment slant, the Daily Mail at least seems to cover a fair bit of science with reasonable length and depth, by comparison with what I see in Australia (which retains the jingoism and other typical tabloid features) and the glimpses of popular press in the USA I get, anyway.

Mez (#201), Erik (#216) Coming back to Nero (the emperor, not the detective) after rather a gap, with a comment I thought I'd posted here, but couldn't find.

I think what happened was that I decided to put together the information for a post on my blog, and remembered posting that as putting it here as well.

So you should see links to some stories with pictures, if you haven't tracked them down already. Currently in moderation because of the links.

I'll play my chemobrain card here — it's getting a fair workout right now. Forgot to ask.

Clifton, it's close on a week. Hoping for some good news on Soba. The fleece failure was disappointing.

Umm. And somewhere I've got to put Good News about friend, linked to previous notes ...

Saturn at equinox:
Is the equinox of the rings a separate event from the equinox of the planet?