I've never been to Edinburgh; that might change some day. I did once pick up an SF novel beginning there--an alternate history in which Christianity had never displaced paganism. I think it was called "The Fire-Worshippers". A glimpse inside suggested colorful pageantry and so on. Well, once I got any way into the thing, it became clear that either a knowledge of actual pagan customs or alternate-history-building was not the author's forte. Instead, he had dealt me a pile of pedophile porn. It was all fiction, but still. I wound up wishing for a bucket of brain bleach--it wasn't even plausible, let alone well-written. As thrifty as I am, I traded it in somewhere rather than corrupt an innocent landfill. But I decided to steer clear of that author henceforth. (I forgot his name.) From now on, when I see fiction that looks interesting, I'm going to do a little background research first.
On a happier note, 131 was the number of steps in a stairway in a tiny remote settlement I once lived in when young. It was a wooden stairway that went straight up a hillside, and it had these...flats on either side of the steps, inside the handrails, on which a wooden box of whatever was needed could be hauled up the hill. I don't know why they didn't put wheels on it, but at 12 I thought that was just the coolest thing ever. I was one of those more interested in things than people and that's just how it worked with me.
Now, the settlement is deserted--I am a ghost-town survivor--and I don't know how much remains of it, if the stairway is still there. I recall wondering what would become of the place in 100 years, and I never guessed its story would end in my lifetime.
I don't know if I will ever make it out there again to complete the closure. But I might see Scotland some day, and if so I will have to get out to Urquhart Castle (sp?) to see the big trebuchet that is one of the ancestors of my own.

But sometimes, of an autumn day, I would love a glimpse of pale golden sunlight on Georgian sandstone.

I love autumn sunsets when the light coming into my dining/living room is a warm gold and the room glows.

It is also St. Crispin's Day.

I've been to Edinburgh just once: happy memories, since the occasion was the wedding of my old pal Paul Barnett (who mostly writes as John Grant) to Pam Scoville. What better reason to visit and do all the touristy things? That's reasons for me, I mean: I'm too deaf for the Festival and Fringe.

Speaking of darkness, last night I went to a local fan's pre-Halloween party, where my attire had some of the ladies call me quite dapper, and later a teenage girl also at the party called us normal, compared to her more contemporary friends.

Augh. Man. I don't want to be a big worrywart bummer, here, but my 17 year old sister just sent me a Facebook message that worries me a lot and I'm flailing for information. She said that she's going to talk to a Navy recruiter this Friday because if she gets accepted she'll get $30,000 for college. No details otherwise.

Now, the huge number worries me, as does the fact that this is awfully similar to what our relatives kept telling me when I was in high school over a decade ago--going on about how 'the military will pay for college!' while carefully not saying anything about what actually BEING in the military was like or when this going to college would happen. (For the record, the decision was made for me before I was old enough to join--I told a recruiter who called me about not being run due to a congenital hip problem and he couldn't hang up on me fast enough.)

I don't live in the States now so I'm really not familiar with what kind of recruiting is going on anymore. My Google-fu isn't working so hot right now (okay, I'm kind of freaked, this is my little sister after all), and all I've been able to find is a little blurb that lets on that that $30k number is 'up to', and only with an 8 year enlistment.

Does anyone else know where I can find more information on this I can send her, so she knows for sure what kind of thing she's thinking about getting into? If she has a good idea of what she's getting into and decides to go through with it, I'm okay with it--she's smart and I trust her judgment--but I'm very worried she's been made some big promises with all of inconvienent details mysteriously left out.

Did I mention that this is my little sister? Augh. Aughaughaugh.

Forbear to throw more weight upon the ass
since longer journey we must soon begin;
the copper coin that the lone guide shall spin
no better guide through the hardest impasse
since at the end there may be but rough grass
and all our commons could turn out most thin.
Still none of that; our better hope's to win
leaving our enemies in the morass.
The hardest victory is still the first
when no experience is on our side
but suffering; so all we know is pain,
so we must say this has to be the worst,
in largest part just to protect our pride
but also to account for your huge gain.

Oddly enough Edinburgh was voted their favourite place in Britain by Observer and Guardian readers just this week:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/travel-awards-2009

I'd forgotten phone day was so long ago, I recall the campaign for it but it seemed a lot of hassle. You can still see the occaisional old number somewhere, missing its extra 0.

#3 ::: Dave Bell

It is also St. Crispin's Day.

And my (so far un-) civil partner's 26 ( the other way round)th birthday.
Happy birthday Mr T

I live in Edinburgh, have for the past 6 years now (how time passes) I really like it here. Would stay if I didn't.

Daylight savings time has just been reset so things have gotten dark. Winter is kicking in.

Having said that I had a really nice stroll around the meadows today, some wind but bright and the autumn colours are pretty on the trees.

The main blight on the city right now is the tramworks. I'm sure it'll be very nice once they're finished but in the meantime they make it harder to get around.

Renatus @ #6, I realize this is your sister, not your daughter, but this site (run by the Navy, but it's a forum for prospective sailors' mothers) might be useful: http://www.navyformoms.com/

Here's another site's page talking about cash benefits for enlistment: http://www.usmilitary.com/4456/cash-enlistment-navy-reserve-benefits/

I was in the USN Reserves for 2 years active duty a long time ago (72-74; tag end of 'Nam) stationed in Japan (if you were in the top three of your training class you got your choice of duty station at the time; I made damned sure I fit that criterion and got my choice). It was an interesting two years, and I don't have any regrets.

Linkmeister, thank you very much. I am totally failing at searching right now. Those links help.

Like I said, I'll be calm if she's making an informed decision, but... I'm scared our relatives have Fed Her A Line, because they sure as hell fed me one. In our family, if a young woman doesn't look like she's jumping right on the having kids thing, they push and push and push going into the military because it PAYS MONEY!!!, even though the number of people who have actually served amounts to, uh, one male cousin. So I don't trust their good intentions (which I'm not entirely sure are good, but that's my bitter to deal with) to have anything to do with actual reality.

Renatus -- those promises of money are just that promises. They don't always pan out. I remember many articles over the past few years about how the military can renege on them. Money for college is a major tool in recruiting, as is the promise of training in an area of the recruit's choice leading to a civilian career. That too gets forgotten by the military. here are some searches to start you off. There is the "up to $X" language. Over the past few years I remember the stories about stop-loss orders keeping people in the services so they couldn't leave for school.

I googled "us military recruiting money for college" and among the cites for US military programs there were these cites:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/22/us-military-data-min.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/14-0

This is a .pdf from objector.org (a conscientious objectors group). The flyer is a little old but I think the basic ideas are still true.

www.afsc.org/pacificsw/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/46083

This article is from 2005:

www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/0506/050607.htm

You need to be calm when you research this information and when you talk to your niece; you should also talk to her parents and find out what they think about her plan. I'm sure there's more out there on the net but you have to get the right search terms. I hope this helps.

Renatus @ 6, Peace Action's counter-recruitment materials; I'm not claiming that this is any less biased than the relatives in question, but it's at least arguing the opposite perspective.

Renatus -- just reread your post and saw it is your sister. Sorry about the mistake in caller her your niece.

Sica #10: I suspect you mean that you wouldn't stay if you didn't.

I like Edinburgh too. A much saner place than London, from my experiences. Calmer driving (although in a brief visit earlier this year i noticed rush-hour has got worse). A smaller city (London is too big for me; I grew up in Manchester). Nicer atmosphere than London. I admit I don't think I'd like the dark winters very much.

Today's WashPost has a column on how to have authors make less money.

Fragano, er.. yes, absolutely. Oops.

OK, I want to see the dissection of that column, for sure.

And I would like a nice autumn walk in Edinburgh. Perhaps next year....

I love living in Edinburgh, but if there was one thing I could change, it wouldn't be the dark winters. That's what pubs are for. No, it would be the cruel wind that blows through you rather than around you.

#18 Marilee:

Short version: publishers should stop paying advances and publish only books from celebrity authors.

This bozo has no idea how the book business works, and probably hasn't read a non-celebrity non-bestseller since college, if then.

#6 ::: Renatus

Here's a fact sheet on military recruiting, from Quaker House. Key point: recruiters lie.

This is a photo of the porch support nearest to my porch, on my neighbours side. The observant may note the lack of something common to, and desirable of, brick walls. The rest may consider themselves fortunate to be out of range of my extensive commentary about the effect said lack has had on my porch ...

That said, the setting sun on the brick work (as I dusted such mortar as remained to the ground) was quite lovely...

I have only been in Edinburgh briefly (stepped of the airport bus, to jump on a train), but should probably try to visit it at least once in the near future.

When I see 031 as an area code, I think Gothen- rather than Edin-burgh.

Renatus #6: In addition to the comments above, let me remind you that we're currently in a meat-grinder war, with few signs of ending it any time soon. And yes, our military has a history of deceptive recruiting....

And for the original post: This evening we had a gorgeous evening sky. I didn't get photos though, as I was admiring it while carrying laundry.

Immolation

This was not the sin
for which Carthage must die.
The scale is sometimes disputed
by historians; it is difficult to say
which exactly was the practice, and which
the demonization of a defeated foe.
Cartago delenda est.

Reason alone states the plausibility
of child sacrifice in an era
where the unwanted
(the extra mouths, the daughters instead of sons)
might be exposed; at the core
of the story of Abraham taking Isaac to the mountain
is the expectation that children are an expected sacrifice.
For numbers, it is impossible to know
as the infants were sacrificed in fire.
Little remains.

The rich folk of Carthage
were said to have blamed their defeat
upon the substitution of the children of the poor
for their own; Human nature is to look for the greatest gain
with the least personal inconvenience.
Even in their desperation, they did not sacrifice themselves
but their children.

Children are the gateway to fear.
One always dreads the things that might come to be:
the stranger on the road,
the inattentive driver,
the disease that a parent cannot end.
The fear that your child might be the next to be chosen
could be balanced against the feeling that the worst has fallen.
A parent could relax; no more woe.
That fatal piety echoes in our legacy of horrors; we shrink from the thought
of children in the fire.
Not that. Never that.

Never the children in their mothers' arms,
headed towards the showers.
Never the victims of chemical weapons
(looking just as our children do when asleep
but still, so still)
Never in our own communities.
Not ours, at the least,
victims of the triumph of fear over hope.

Cartago delenda est,
lest we be forced to think
that in some ways, we have progressed no further
than the sacrifice of children to the blazing fire.

I'm not sure that went where I wanted it to go. Moloch is about the most disturbing imagery I can think of and right now my brain wants to avoid it at the same time as I can't leave it alone.

Purge! Purge!

B. Durbin @28, disturbing, but good.  Yet a Roman paterfamilias could reject a baby at birth, to be exposed, & had nearly arbitrary life/death & punishment power over his household (see also Dobson @143ff (many) & James Arthur Ray @167, subject of same New Age sweat lodge post).

B. Durbin #28: Gaah! I already had some child-abuse imagery rampaging through my head, something about parents being afraid their children might grow to become better than the parents. I'm not even sure where that came from, and now it's all mixed up with your poem and sending the children off to war. (I'm guessing that last was where your poem came from.)

I think I'm gonna need to hit some of my my cuteness sites before I can get to bed. (I've got more, but I fear the Pit Of Moderation. ;-) )

Open threadery: I recently got around to watching _The September Issue_, and quite enjoyed it.

One of the things that most struck me was that Anna Wintour, who is surrounded by terrified lackeys, who is chaufered from place to place, who has assistants to attend to all of life's little details, and who has enough influence to have Manhattan moved to the far side of the moon if she so chooses - spends the whole movie drinking Starbucks coffee. Out of paper cups. With cardboard lids.

Surely this is not living the good life?

Open thready comment:

Some time ago, we discussed the weird news hole surrounding the pre-emptive arrests and general police state measures used to suppress protests at the GOP convention in St Paul, MN. There was a brief discussion of other holes in the news, places where the MSM simply didn't discuss some big event for some reason. Now, these are inherently somewhat hard to find, if you don't have some secondary source of information telling you about the event. (If it hasn't appeared in the NYT, it hasn't happened, right?) And then you've got to worry about your second source being accurate.

This Glen Greenwald Post describes an interesting example of this. There was a program run by the Pentagon to manipulate domestic media coverage of the war (and runup to the war) by basically turning retired generals into shills for the administration. As I understand the story, these retired generals had financial ties with the Pentagon that kept them on message, and went over various talking points with their handlers which they then used repeatedly, when they spoke as some network's "military analyst." If you get most of your news from the MSM networks, this probably comes as a surprise to you, because the story has apparently been almost completely avoided on those networks. Read the Greenwald post for the full details. (Among other things, he links to a couple news websites on the day the Pulitzer prizewinners were announced. The websites described several other stories, but never this story, which also won a pulitzer.)

I'm curious if anyone can think of contradictions to this? Glenn points out that the program was discussed on PBS. I don't ever recall hearing about it on NPR, but I may simply not have heard. This story was covered in the newspapers. But somehow, not on TV news.

"sending the children off to war. (I'm guessing that last was where your poem came from.)"

Actually, not in the least. I tend to come up with my poem topics in advance of the open threads. Usually I can get the concept fleshed out a bit more ahead of time; I had trouble with this one. It came more from a certain resentment of people assuming that we modern types have the moral high ground, where there's quite enough that we do that counts in the child sacrifice category (and I'm meaning that pretty literally.)

But since I think that poetry is to be set free and an interaction, I don't mind if people see something in there that I hadn't intended. In fact, it's fascinating what people can see in something. I once had a friend claim one of my poems made her think it was about lesbian sex... which was completely different than anything I'd thought it was about.

(My problem with the thing as it stands is that I feel like I pulled my punches because the topic's so hard for me to deal with as a mother. I mean, Moloch is an utterly revolting concept for me to even think about for a while, much less explore as I feel the concept deserves. Ah, well, sometimes my horror falls short.)

It's been four years since I was in Edinburgh, after the Glasgow Worldcon. A beautiful city I will someday return to. I was 16, only just beginning to realize that the play I'd read the summer before would set me on the road to I'm on now.

Iain Coleman @ 21 "the cruel wind that blows through you rather than around you."

That's called a "lazy wind."

Autumn always makes me think of Goldengrove unleaving. I love watching the colors change as the days pass. Sometimes, early in the morning, a hopeful neighbor pokes the grass under the chestnut tree, trying to find some to bring home. Other days a steady clip-clop rouses us from sleep, as riders take their horses out for a leisurely stroll around the park.

#13 ::: PurpleGirl: Thank you for the links. Don't worry about the relationship mistake, it's no big deal.

I don't think our mother is very sanguine about this at all--the time she mentioned my sister had started talking about the military, she sounded guarded and tense.

#14 ::: Abby N: Thank you as well. I'm hoping that she's willing to read info from all sides and average it out for herself. Right now I think she's dazzled by promises and not seeing the shadows.

#23 ::: lightning: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. That covers my most important concerns very succintly.

#26 ::: David Harmon: Oh, I'm laughing bitterly at that, as just before I went to bed last night my sister sent me another message stating that well, the recruiter she's been talking to has been in for 13 years and has never seen any combat!

I was worried before but that little tidbit of information made me feel distinctly unwell.

As of next April, I'll have lived in Edinburgh for 15 years. Came for a job, stayed after the company went bust.

Yes, the long winter nights can be a bit grim -- despite the temperate climate, we're fifty miles north of Moscow here -- but I've found that a high-power SAD lamp helps immensely. (The only trouble is realizing that it's SAD when I start to feel run-down -- it happens a few days earlier with each passing year.)

Other aspects of Edinburgh life can also be annoying. During the Festival and Fringe, it's impossible to get into my favourite restaurants or pubs due to the wall-to-wall tourists, and the charm of omnipresent performing arts wears off after the first decade. And it's a pain to get from Edinburgh to anywhere else (except Glasgow) -- the trains have become progressively worse, the airport is bursting at the seams, and the A1 (the main road leading south) is still single carriageway for most of the journey through the borders (so you run a constant obstacle course of trucks obeying the 40mph heavy vehicle speed limit on such roads).

But the architecture, the people, and the beer ... it's not somewhere I would leave easily.

General open-threadness: I know that the phrase is a bit cliched and overused by now, but-

The Stupid. It hurts.

Thou art as tyrannous as those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.

Edinburgh - never been there, but planning a short visit next February. Not, perhaps, an ideal time to visit, but I'm taking my daughter who is applying to University of Edinburgh and to St. Andrews, and that's the best combination of available time and available flights with frequent flyer mileage. And I figure if she's deciding on whether to go to school there, she might as well see some of the down side.

B. Durbin #34: Ah, I guess I was just drawing late-night associations there.

A couple of cute/silly things I turned up during last nights cute therapy:

Someone's tracking their hamster, also photoblogging, etc. (160+ km so far)

The Human Clock. (photostreaming)

Last visited Edinburgh in July 2007 - I was there to see the support band at Bryan Adam's concert at Murrayfield Stadium, and decided to make a long weekend of it. It's a beautiful city with (as Charlie says) some great beer. Next time I visit, I want a native guide, though. I'm sure I missed the best bits.

The weather was glorious all weekend, *except* for the duration of the concert, when it pissed down all evening. As seen in the photos of the weekend.

OtterB: by February the long nights will be slowly getting shorter -- but it can be the coldest time of year. Expect nighttime temperatures around freezing, and daytime temperatures not much higher -- unless there's one of the once-every-three-years arctic cold snaps, in which case it can get down to a wind chill of minus ten or lower.

Renatus, here's some information from the American Friends Service Committee.
http://www.afsc.org/Youth&Militarism/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/18300
It seems good at countering the misleading information often given by recruiters, and it's aimed directly at young people who are considering enlistment. You might also want to read the pages about how high schools work with military recruiters, especially in poor neighborhoods, if you want to get a sense of "what kind of recruiting is going on."

Another thought for Renatus: If your sister is actually interested in the military, rather than just being sweet-talked by a recruiter, you might try suggesting she look into ROTC programs, as that would at least guarantee she gets the college in exchange for her service. (My father did well with Navy ROTC, but that was about forty years ago, and I haven't got more recent experience with it.)

Open threadiness, with a very weird riff on the Moloch imagery:

My daughter the actor and stunt performer being set on fire.

Awesome with awesome sauce.

"It is said that upon listening to a performance of this quartet, Schubert remarked, "After this, what is left for us to write?"

As a resident of Glasgow for these past four years, I have mixed feelings about Edinburgh. It's a very pretty city, and the museums and New College Library are nice, but I could happily skip having to wade through tourists on the Royal Mile--only having never actually lived in Edinburgh, I've never quite figured out where else one is supposed to go beyond the noisy crowded parts.

Plus, it does get tiring when people come to visit and only want to spend time in The Other City.

Of course, I don't think cities are the best parts of Scotland, anyways.

The last time I was in Edinburgh, I was sitting in the gallery observing these proceedings. Truly depressing. (Erm... the things said during the proceedings, not the outcome itself.)

Have been to Edinburgh several times, all of them in the fall, and yes, I can understand why you miss it. But if I had to choose, it would be Glasgow I'd live in.

Hey everybody, be sure to check out xkcd's tribute to Geocities before it goes away!

Charlie Stross @45 Thanks. That's about what I thought for weather. Do you get opportunities to see the Northern Lights?

Edinburgh. Oh, my. First encountered very early on a September morning in 1977. Me, a 19-year-old still-jetlagged student on a week's holiday before term started in London. Totally on my own, I decided to go to Edinburgh.

I came up the steps from the train station, and was accosted by a young man going down. "Would you like this ticket?" he asked. "I have to leave now, I can't use it." Yehudi Menuhin, playing the Festival.

I walked and walked and walked. Took buses to odd corners, saw chattering schoolchildren in their uniforms. To this day, the sharp smell of coal smoke on a brisk day will take me back to that corner, on that early busy morning.

Heard somewhere that the university was renting out dormitory rooms to tourists, so I left the dingy depressing youth hostel for the clean, cheerful campus just outside of the city. They had an extensive breakfast buffet (with porridge! and Kellogg's Snack Packs with the Royal Seal). I froze marginally less there, and dried my (waist-length) hair over a light bulb. Hiking around the hills I discovered the exact same view of Edinburgh from a scene in "Chariots of Fire".

I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

Paul 130:921: Gbcure srryf erfcbafvoyr

Lrf, naq gung orvat n svefg sbe uvz, ur'f rira zber qvfbevragrq ol vg guna lbh be V jbhyq or.

David 130:924: V guvax ur whfg frag ure bhg jvgu ure onfryvar crefbanyvgl -- naq qvqa'g fgbc gb guvax nobhg jung jnf yvxryl gb unccra.

Gung'f jung V guvax gbb.

When I see ROT-13ed text, "gang aft agley" always springs to mind. ROT-13ing that doesn't reveal any super-secret messages from yonder planet or the distant future, to my disappointment.

Renatus #6:

Don't worry excessively. I loved my time in the Navy, I did get my college degree while I was there, and I can still beat Boy Scouts at one-on-one knot-tying competitions.

And if you're going to go to war, there are lots worse ways to do it than seven miles from the nearest mud and forty feet from the ice-cream freezer.

I have a friend who joined the Navy and I thought he'd be all right (seven miles etc.), except of course he wants to be a doctor, so he's going to be a medic attached to a group (squad? squadron?) of Marines. Likely to see the sandbox, barring miracles.

B. Durbin @ #28

"Little remains" totally stopped me in my tracks - like getting sucker-punched with the double meaning. Amazing.

Macdonald @ 57: More than three years since I last picked up a Patrick O'Brian and I still have the urge to finish your sentence with "...and a nine-inch plank between you and eternity." Must revisit those old friends sometime soon.

How thick is bulkhead steel these days?

Renatus:

Ask her if she's talked to any other recruiters from the other branches-- Navy and Army have the highest $$-value college programs at the moment, but they're typically tied to specific conditions of enlistment. ( I was offered $30k for college by the Navy assuming I enlisted for 8 yrs active duty right out of the gate, and qualified for training in a nuclear-related specialty. Failure to complete qualification for that rating would have denied my chance at the $30k, *plus* I would have still been stuck with the 8yr active duty obligation. )

Other branches may not have the big promises-- but they might have less high-pressure recruiters. Have her talk to a Coast Guard or Air Force recruiter, see what sort of information she gets from them.

The Air Force is riddled with crazy-ass fundamentalists these days, alas; the other branches, less so.

With certain exceptions (see medics, above), the Navy's a pretty good choice during an infantry war. Most of its inherent dangers have to do with the sorts of bad things that can happen at sea to civilian and military ships alike.

Charlie Stross @ 39: Tangentially, do you, or anyone else, have recommendations for light-therapy products? I'm seeing a lot that seem tremendously overpriced to me and googling hasn't turned up much information on judging quality. (Honestly, $200+ for an alarm clock that slowly turns up the light in the morning? I realize this takes a bit of electronics and programming, but seriously -- I can buy an iPod for less.)

I've been slowing down and sleeping too much the past couple of weeks and it finally clicked in my head -- oh -- it's October, it's gotten to the part of the year when it's still dark when I need to get up, and getting dark earlier in the evening.

What's the situation in which being on a Navy ship would become dangerous? The only things I can think of involve a showdown with either China (over Taiwan, I guess) or Russia (over I don't know what). Is there some other likely danger there? (I've heard the claim that many high value Navy ships are quite vulnerable to modern land-to-ship missiles, but I don't know whether there are a lot of countries with those that we're likely to attack, or even whether those claims are accurate. My lack of knowledge about military stuff is stunning in its depth and breadth.)

albatross (#64): There's the attack on the USS Cole, for example, though security procedures when in port are much more stringent now than they were then.

Open thready worry:

Right now, the US is the wealthiest country on Earth. We are spending huge resources on a problem that keeps vexing us: How to impose our will on hostile strangers, how to occupy their country and force a change of government on them against their will. We are developing ever better technology for this, and ever better tactics. From drones to waterboarding to surveillance, we're learning how to keep a hostile population down, and how to do it with a minimum of manpower and a minimum of risk to the people holding that population down.

One day, I expect that these lessons will come home to us. Our military no longer has much of a mission fighting to protect us from invasion. It now has a major mission occupying other countries and forcibly changing their government, rooting out resistance to our occupation, killing or imprisoning/torturing anyone who fights back, co-opting local leaders, gaining control of media coming out of those places. When those tools and techniques come home, what's it going to look like?

We're spending a lot of our wealth, right now, developing the tools that will very likely one day be used to hold us down, to impose an unwanted government on us. After another few iterations of developing those tools and tactics and techniques, they'll be very good. We will be like the American Indians when they were exposed to the whole Eurasian disease package all at once--we won't have anything like the defenses necessary to fight back or to resist those techniques. We'll find ourselves submitting, because the would-be ringleaders of any resistance keep disappearing into torture chambers, or having their houses blow up in the middle of the night.

Albatross: I'm not an expert. But among many other possibilities, there's this stuff called water which I understand ships float on only due to special properties of their shape and orientation, and this other stuff called air, and that under certain circumstances the air pushes the water around, sometimes rather spectacularly, and sometimes to the detriment even of large modern ships (and there are many ways of getting hurt short of losing the entire ship).

No doubt it looks quite picturesque skimming the crests of the 40-foot waves :-) :-) (couldn't resist tying back to your user handle, no offense intended).

albatross@64: What's the situation in which being on a Navy ship would become dangerous?

Mostly, the same situations in which being on any ship would be dangerous -- storms at sea, equipment failure and industrial accidents, piracy on the high seas, that sort of thing.

Another Navy vet piping up with advice.

Recruiters lie. Unfortunately, the system sets them up for it with quotas. Some offices are better than others. The best thing is to have your sister do her research on what the possibilities are.

Because there are some great ones. I suspect the $30,000 for college is not a signing bonus, but referring to the GI bill. The GI Bill is one of the best benefits of service, and they improved it recently (covering tuition and so forth). It can be slow to get the money, but it really helps.

Navy is the service I would recommend - but I admit my bias. We're in a ground war - so Army and Marines are in the greatest danger. Afghanistan doesn't even have a coastline, and Iraq's is pretty small (thus the whole Kuwait invasion). I haven't had good experiences with AF vets.

The other worry I would have is that the military is a different experience for women. At 15%, women are still the exception, and it colors the culture. I wish her luck, whatever she chooses.

Talking of fire, but with a happy ending...

I love emergencies where it turns out there's absolutely nothing to do. We saw a car fire start last night on the 401 coming back from Toronto. Went up like ... like a thing I have no suitable metaphor for; call it "like a sonofabitch" -- just as we were coming around the curve w/o Kingston.

Cat-my-girlfriend dropped speed, passed the mess as far over as possible, pulled over (oh f*ck oh f*ck oh f*ck watch for running pedestrians oh f*ck), and I grabbed the phone and the first aid kit (oh god oh f*ck please let me not need this not for burns burns scare me oh God is there even anything useful for this situation in here oh f*ck), headed back to the fire.

Driver had pulled over due to smoke in the dash, got out about 20 seconds before the whole thing went up. Not at all hurt, was alone in the car, had grabbed his coat (I know they tell you not to worry about grabbing anything in case of fire but this is Ontario; you grab your coat), was leaning against the first car that had stopped (the driver of that car had called it in already) and having a cigarette and a small, controlled hissy-fit.

So there wasn't damn-all to do but we couldn't get back into traffic flow (100 km/hr nominal, 120 km/hr that time of night, crappy sight lines due to the huge orange fireball and the tractor-trailers were just blowing on by in the right lane at normal speed) until the truck showed up and blocked the right lane. So we stood around for 45 minutes watching bits of the car go flying off (tires make NOISE! But windshields make one heck of a light show. Also, the passenger side hazard light kept blinking for longer than you'd expect was possible. That was amusing, in a sick sort of way) and telling new people who stopped that it was called in, nobody was hurt, you probably don't want to go any closer, and the fire extinguisher from your pickup (though bless you for carrying one and for stopping and for grabbing it) wasn't going to make a dent in that mess and besides you'll never get near the car without hurting yourself, wanna shift your car up so the firetrucks can get in and then stand here and help us watch for grass fires until we can get back on the highway?

So, volunteer firefighters are lovely people, and, amusingly, they all seem to leave their shoes behind their cars and just walk away from them - even when, in this case, they're going to be just standing around admiring the lightshow until the truck arrives.

I amused myself by dropping footwear into open trunks and truck beds while waiting for the lane to be closed. And then we got back into the traffic flow, stopped for tea to clear out our throats, and came home.

So, that turned out well.

Glancing at Teresa's new batch of Particles, I note a somewhat morbid theme....

Teresa, if you're feeling down, I hope things look up soon.

I have a female cousin in the Navy, and she's been at it for a couple of decades now, so she's probably enjoying it. :) I think your sister's best bet is to get in touch with some active members of the service who can give it to her straight.

My other Navy friend has been in the water off Iraq (I once googled him and found an article on a rescue of Iraqi fishermen) and on tsunami relief off the coast of Thailand. So one thing's for sure: you really do see the world. And yes, even from the shore if it's considered safe.

My dad was Air Force, and his take is that the Air Force and Navy tend to scoop the brightest of the bunch because they've got the most technical stuff. And then he makes jokes about the Navy's "fold-up" planes. :D

Addendum to me #71: Alternatively, if Teresa's just working up to Halloween, happy holiday!

David Harmon @ 71: I suspect our host is just kicking off Halloween week in a big way.

At least, I hope that's just what it is.

Oh, and on the male-to-female ratio, I've been in several situations with a heavily skewed gender ratio, and only one of them was poisonous. That one was directly due to the misogynistic nature of one guy who, unfortunately, was also a hard worker and very good at his tasks, hence respected. The poison was somewhat restricted but it seems to me that such things are highly situational and impossible to predict.

IOW, she could do just fine in such a gender balance, or she could get a group that's highly whacked.

I'm not convinced the Edinburgh weather is as bad these days as Charlie makes it out to be. I've found Spring starting in February for the last 3 years, i.e. 2 or 3 weeks of no frost and perhaps a few nights just to kill off early buds. You should still bring clothing for sub-zero, but the days of 2 weeks non-stop frost every morning are long gone thanks to global warming.

The Royal Botanic gardens has some stats online:
http://www.rbge.org.uk/assets/files/science/Weather/2008%20in%20perspective.pdf

Being Scotland the weather is changeable, and you can expect snow in March or April (The year I was born it snowed heavily in June, but that was before the warming took off), but you should prepare for wind and rain, a few places such as the top of Waverley steps are infamous for catching the wind.

Speaking as someone currently living in London, edinburgh is not crowded and busy at all, London is as busy as a busy Edinburgh day all the time.

"I have just remembered that I must see to my knitting. If it escapes, I'll have a devil of a time finding it again."

Sounds like a normal day in the Girl Genius's neighborhood.

Edinburgh has two of my favourite things: the David Bann vegetarian restaurant (vegetarians get to choose! Between more than two menu selections! And they're ALL good! And it's a proper grown up restaurant, with no home made rock cakes or plates of piled leaves! They serve wine, just like we were real people!!) and the Big Ideas plus size clothing shop.

Um... now that I think about it, there may be some connection..

Mark #74: Yeah, as you see I thought of that next. Sometimes I'm a little slow on the pickup....

OtterB: I've seen the Northern Lights just once in Edinburgh, during a spectacular solar storm a few years ago. Normally they don't get this far south, and if they do, it's frequently overcast, and if the sky's clear -- you're in a city, and there's a gas refinery on the north shore of the Firth that tends to light up the sky even if the street lights don't.

Caroline @63: I have a big-ass Lumie Brightspark light box (bought in John Lewis) for by-the-desk duty, and a portable rechargable LED box (same manufacturer) for travel. They work, but they're not cheap (£140 each -- I bought one in 2007 and the other last week). In general, decent SAD lamps aren't cheap -- they're very powerful daylight-spectrum lights rather than mass-produced kit. (The Brightspark is a 55 watt fluorescent tube system, to put it in perspective -- about equivalent to 300 watts of tungsten bulb.)

The Navy has had some personnel in Iraq, from what I've read. It's sent Seabees (Construction Battalion enlisted) and Civil Engineer Corps officers there to build some infrastructure. I imagine the SEALs are or were doing things in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan as well.

The lesson there is pick your career field when you enlist. I went in knowing I'd be going to Radioman school the week after I got out of boot camp. (That job is now called Information System Technician and encompasses network engineering as well as telecommunications.) If you go in wanting to be a corpsman you're likely to be in combat zones. Otherwise, not so much.

Marna, #70: So, volunteer firefighters are lovely people, and, amusingly, they all seem to leave their shoes behind their cars and just walk away from them

I am baffled by this. Barefoot in Ottawa in October? There must be something here that I'm missing.

David, #71: I suspect a Dia de los Muertos theme.

B. Durbin, #75: The military in general seems to have a significant problem with rape, and it starts early. I haven't heard many such stories coming out of the Navy specifically, so that might be another reason to consider prioritizing in that direction.

Renatus (#38, earlier) Hope & my best wishes for your sister. On your last point, I think there is a play about a recruiting sergeant. (not to mention Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment). Reminds me of an old saying "Old soldiers never die. Just young ones."
Maybe you could cite, or point her to, some of Terry Karney's posts about his problems with the GI Bill, frex, if he's OK with that. (Curses, though, I canNOT find his recent, fairly long explanation of how GI bill works and doesn't work).

Could anyone else here find that?
Open thread 130
Open thread 123

Edinburgh — definitely one of the places I want to revisit. We were there less than 24 hours (late 1990s), just skimmed the highlights; there was so much more, and what we saw was good stuff. And I long to taste haggis again. That was in June, so very long daylight.
Glasgow we didn't stop in, but did spot 'I can't believe it's not Sydney Opera House'.
Sydney, BTW is roughly 30° South. At ~30° North, there seems to be N California, just above N Florida, N Africa/Israel, Northern tip of India/Central Asia, Shanghai.

Open threadedly, re Lyke Wake Dirge: I couldn't access the last one. Was it B. Britten's version? Of the two I could listen to, I much preferred The Young Tradition.

xeger @ 24... First the sewage, now the porch? What's next?

albatross@66:

I suspect an occupied USA would be much as you describe: pockets of resistance rendered futile by our own well-honed dirty tricks being used against us. The big however here though is depending on who it is that's doing the occupying.

The occupying force would have to be big, either China, Russia or a coalition of one of the above along with the EU and Canada. If it's a coalition force of Europeans and Canadians, I suspect we'll see less use of our own nefarious torture tech but still some notable uses. If it's China all alone or some neo-Soviet style Russian force, a hell of a lot more of our shiny new torture techniques will be deployed against us.

I know this comes off as horribly racist but it's a fair assessment based on the history of these various nations. The Chinese love to oppress occupied people and the Russians have a colorful history of creative interrogation practices. Not that several European nations don't, but they've been less likely to use them in the past 60 years or so. The Russians like poisoning their own people with Polonium, just for fun and profit.

Frankly, a joint British-Canadian occupation would probably do the US some good. We'd learn how to queue correctly and it'll probably be the only we we get decent health care reform.

Keith: I was guessing those techniques might come home as a way for an unpopular government (or unpopular-in-some-regions government) to keep control of things, rather than by invasion. The scary thing about a lot of the techniques we're developing is that they hold down the hostile population with relatively small numbers of people. The implication is that someone might one day use those techniques to hold down the US, despite not having anything like a majority behind them.

Debra Doyle #68 : piracy on the high seas versus navy (French navy, as it happened, but the outcome would be much the same if they tried it on almost anybody’s navy).

Keith Kisser #86: I suspect Albatross is more worried about a coup by our own forces.

That's not quite as unthinkable as it was before ShrubCo's corruption took hold, but I'm not that paranoid. Yet.

The thing is, any outside occupiers would have to deal with vicious resistance from both the urban underclasses, and the "breadbasket" areas of the Midwest and West. The latter especially would be a problem for them, because that's a hell of a lot of thinly-inhabited territory to control.

A right-wing coup would likely have much of the breadbasket on their side, but the urban areas might be tougher for them, especially since a lot of the Armed Forces come from that underclass.

Either way, the greatest danger to an occupation might well be bankruptcy!

David Harmon #89: I suspect Albatross is more worried about a coup by our own forces. That's not quite as unthinkable as it was before ShrubCo's corruption took hold, but I'm not that paranoid. Yet.

I think we'll see right-wing coup danger grow by accretion the longer that Dominionists hold undue influence over the hearts and minds of the cadets at the various US military academies. It may take as long as a generation, but the groundwork is being laid now.

Lee #82:
Marna, #70: So, volunteer firefighters are lovely people, and, amusingly, they all seem to leave their shoes behind their cars and just walk away from them

I am baffled by this. Barefoot in Ottawa in October? There must be something here that I'm missing.

They hopped out of their shoes and into their bunker gear (the boots that already have the pants in them, jacket, and helmet. SCBA (breathing gear)* occasionally optional).

*With the packs on, firefighter do a funny dance &mspace; about every minute or so they waggle their butts so the lack-of-motion sensor doesn't trigger the loud alarm (they do get a reminder beep first).

David Harmon@89:
I suspect Albatross is more worried about a coup by our own forces. That's not quite as unthinkable as it was before ShrubCo's corruption took hold, but I'm not that paranoid. Yet.

Clearly I'm not that paranoid either. Though now that you mention a homegrown, minority party occupation, yeah. That's not gonna be fun. Especially since the direction such a thing would come from would be the crowd who fantasies about violently overthrowing the legitimate government, all under the pretense of patriotism, liberty and teabagging for all. That crew wouldn't hesitate to use our new no frills interrogation techniques and would do so gleefully in many cases.

Caroline @ 63: I have a Sunray II lightbox from these people that's made a big difference for me in the winters. They're not cheap (I got mine second-hand), but they are solidly made and put out a lot of light (10,000 lux at 14" distance). I spend 15 minutes in front of it every morning to help keep me going when it gets dark outside.

(Huh. The page says to replace the bulbs every few years to maintain the correct light output. I think I last replaced the bulbs in mine... um, never. Off to order some replacement bulbs.)

How timely. I have absolutely fallen in love with Edinburgh over the past few months, after having spent 10 days there in August for Fringe. We got to go back just 10 days ago for a follow-up gig, and we weren't even in town for 24 hours and that made me sad.

For Fringe I rented us an apartment in one of the brand-new developments right along the waterfront in Leith, and I'll never forget how awesome it was to wake up in the morning and see the Firth of Forth through the window.

I realize we totally lucked out weather-wise both times we were there, and the winter would kill me (SAD, anyone?), but still, I can't wait to go back. We're hoping to mount another Fringe show next summer.

On nice cities and things to do...

Can anyone suggest something fun to be done in New York City for Halloween that could still be arranged at this late date? I find that I don't have any plans this year, and I'm only an hour and a half away from the city, so perhaps there's some unique diversion I wouldn't have access to from farther away.

I'm a single girl in my late 20s and I live in Southwestern CT, so activities in or around there are also acceptable. I just rather assume that cooler and weirder things might be available in the city.

Keith Kisser, passim: When fascism comes, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible. We've sort of known that for a while.

I have a funny feeling that the opt-out public plan Harry Reid is now said to favor in the health care reform bill will end up drawing the map for the eventual Balkanization of the US...that the opt-out states will start wanting to see what else they can opt out of.

Won't happen. People will think twice about secession and all that, once they realize how much this'd hurt them in the wallet. That's what happened with Québec's stupid Independence obsession.

Charlie Stross @ 80 and Lexica @ 93: Thank you for the recommendations. It is actually useful information to know that yeah, they are that expensive for a reason.

Though I'm still curious about this $50 one from Target.

The SAD part of the thread:

For my entire adult life, it was a given that I'd be pretty much worthless from Halloween to Ground Hog Day. As middle age caught up with (and then lapped) me, I started trying to build daily cardio exercise into my life. I went to the gym. It was annoying, somehow, to be expending so much energy and have nothing to show for it (besides the shiny new muscles: ooh!).

As the economy collapsed last fall, I asked myself what I was going to wish I'd done, and the answer was: "Grow food." So I started retrieving my yard from the wilderness it had been allowed to become.

Worked on it for an hour a day. Continued through the winter. We're in a drought here in Northern California, and it was possible to work even through the little bit of rain that did fall. In March, I looked up and realized that for the first time in my adult life, I hadn't been depressed. Not once.

Powerful stuff, light and exercise. I am grateful that both are available to me. If I lived in one of the places where it snows, I'd have to buy a light.

Serge@97:

Won't happen. People will think twice about secession and all that, once they realize how much this'd hurt them in the wallet. That's what happened with Québec's stupid Independence obsession.

Yes, but the Quebecois never dreamed up the teabag movement. There's no real end to the lengths some of my fellow country-folk will go just to prove a point. The opt-outers aren't rational actors (they're threatening to opt out of health care!) and I suspect there's a fair to middling overlap between the opt-outers and the south-will-rise-again crowd.

Meredith #94 - I don't think I've seen anyone get rapturous about the Firth of Forth before.

albatross @ 64:

Being on a Navy ship is somewhat more dangerous than civilian life (on average), though the amount of personal danger varies quite a bit depending on your job. The flight deck of a carrier, for instance, is quite dangerous (good training and discipline reduces the danger considerably, as in any dangerous industrial environment).

A friend of mine from college was on active duty as a photographer on the Enterprise (CVN-65) off the coast of Vietnam when a bomb accidentally exploded and started a series of fires. He was assigned to photograph the flight deck fire crew that day, and got a first-hand look at what can go wrong in the worst case.

Charlie, thanks re Northern Lights. I saw them once in the 10 years I lived in the Chicago suburbs and, having Edinburgh pegged in my mind as "further north," hoped they might be more visible.

David Harmon @89 Either way, the greatest danger to an occupation might well be bankruptcy!

Tangential, but this reminded me of The Mouse that Roared. I haven't reread that for years and years. Anybody else remember it?

Caroline @ 98: I suspect it depends on just how severely you're affected by SAD. If you have trouble getting up in the dark of morning but feel somewhat better as the day wears on, a sunrise clock with a conventional light may be enough - one of those worked a treat when Rikibeth was first adapting to baker's hours. (You can even find clocks that control a wireless rheostat for your regular bedside lamp, for about what a decent conventional clock radio costs.)

OtterB (103): I loved The Mouse That Roared, although I haven't reread it in many years, either. Did you ever read the sequels? There were at least two, The Mouse on Wall Street and The Mouse on the Moon. They're good, too.

SAD stuff -- that $50 Target item isn't likely to emit a therapeutic level of light unless you get it right in your face. I've had a number of lights over the years, including a lamp intended for greenhouses. (500W, but a very efficient high-pressure sodium bulb emitting many, many lumens. Super, but looks funny in the house and people feel obliged to make marijuana-growing jokes.) For office use, I have a couple of compact floor lamps with 75W compact fluorescent fixtures. The trick with the low-power fixtures is to get them very close to you -- mine is about a foot from my face when I'm working on the computer.

And now I'm going to go out in the sun for a few minutes.

Britten's Lyke Wake Dirge.

Serge @ 85 ...
xeger @ 24... First the sewage, now the porch? What's next?

Well, see ... the porch is a direct result of the sewage (and digging)... and unfortunately my washing machine appears to have heard you asking "what next"...

Leah #95: unless you're crowd-averse, I think the best NYC Halloween thing to do would be to go to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, on 6th Avenue around 7pm (but get there much earlier to get a prime viewing spot).

guthrie #101, the sunrise each morning was beyond stunning, and it was so peaceful to watch the cruise ships come and go. Call me weird, but I loved it. :)

OtterB #103: I never read The Mouse That Roared, but I remember the movie from summer camp.

In re several people from another thread on chicken feet:

albatross @64 asked: What's the situation in which being on a Navy ship would become dangerous?

If you're actually on the ship, it's pretty good in this particular wartime.

However, there are thousands of Navy ratings DRIVING TRUCKS in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, to free up Army and Marines to carry guns and otherwise etc etc. Not to mention things like medics, computer guys, and other 'provide services to a garrison' specialties ...

My little sister is currently in her second year at Annapolis. I'm very glad that her civilian major is a double history/Arabic; she's most likely to be stationed in a communications post on a carrier doing translations all day.

My baby sister (16), a gifted trombonist, is currently being scouted by the Marines with the promise that she'll only serve in the service's premier band. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of any such promise, because they can always change her mind, hand her a rifle, and send her anywhere they want during her term of enlistment. She believes them, and is currently highly motivated to sign her life away, since she views it as a cushy way to get paid well and have free room and board for playing music professionally.

I think there were 5 Mouse books: the three mentioned, the historical Beware of the Mouse, and the energy-crisis related The Mouse that Saved the West. They did get a little formulaic by the end. Leonard Wibberley is the author.

Lee @ 52:

xkcd's Geocities tribute is spot on. That reminds me that there are a few pages I need to save before it gets turned off.

Elliott Mason @ 111 and many previous posters:

I would view any promises of never seeing any combat as suspect, especially in the light of the way recruiters have lied in recent years. However, if someone wants to go in on the understanding that it's not like a glorified summer camp and/or tech school that has some nice perks once you come out on the other side, and that there are dangers, it can be an option. Others have spoken up in the thread to give their opinion on the service they've done.

As for safety issues, a roommate I had served in the navy on a nuclear sub. It was cramped, the electrics were sometimes shockingly maintained, and there was occasional horseplay. But he came out of it with a decent set of technical skills, and the GI Bill paid for university for him, which was where I met him.

Re the particle on the ossuary near Kutna Hora:

I was there! Last January, and I have photos to prove it. I was in Prague to visit (cue jewish mother stereotype) My Son the Medical Student. It was both the only church I visited and the only out-of-town trip we took. There was enough else to do in Prague . . .

It's really, really, really creepy, especially the coats of arms and stuff. It's also confusing, because that bit of explanation that is translated is translated into Czechlish, not English. And outside, there's one of those tesselated sidewalks like I saw all over Prague (but this is of course not in Prague but an hour's bus ride away from it), but this sidewalk was graced with a jolly roger.

xerger @ 24 - you're getting that tuckpointed, yes? It's not too hard a job to do yourself if need be.

OtterB @ 103 - I watched it on reel-to-reel in the park last year. *grins* Mosquitoes and spotty sound and lemonade on a summer evening.

Bruce Cohen #102:

On a lighter note, some of the non-combat hazards of Navy life¹ are discussed at the Navy Safety Center.

¹ inter alia ;-)

sisuile @ 115 ...
xerger @ 24 - you're getting that tuckpointed, yes? It's not too hard a job to do yourself if need be.

Er... those spaces are the result of me setting up for the repointing that I'm doing ;> [0]

[0] What else would I be doing with a quantity of lime, anyways ;)

I am currently kind of down on the Navy, but only because I've been trying to apply for a civilian job with them and the website is frustrating. It's my current Worst Application Ever, even beating the two that require me to fax things because oh no, we can't possible UPLOAD them, that would be convenient.

I have not been applying myself to the job search the way I really should, but really. They needn't make it this difficult.

Lee @ 80, John @ 91:

Yep, that was it.

albatross, #64, and planes crash on carriers or go beyond into the water. My father was on Ranger off the coast of Vietnam and while he was clearly an administrative person, he was also very Christian and did the death services (wake? I've lost this word) for all the Christians who died.

And yes, I'm losing words. My brain is having problems with words, memories, and linking things. I open the wrong cabinets, go into the wrong rooms, put things in the wrong drawers. The neurologist doesn't know what's wrong yet.

Just as a clarification, my worry here isn't something in the near future. It's just that we're burning tremendous amounts of wealth and cleverness on this problem. Long after China has cut off our credit line and we've lost interest in invading and occupying random third-world countries, those tools and techniques will still exist. Nobody *has* to spend vast resources of money and genius to develop the tools for high-tech low-manpower occupations, in the same way that nobody *had* to spend vast resources building up big nuclear arsenals or advanced biological weapons programs. But having built up those tools, the tools will exist, and will be lying around, available, for whatever application comes into the minds of their holders.

And just as one day, we may all come to bitterly regret the dumping of vast wealth into developing and maintaining great arsenals of hydrogen bombs, we may also one day come to bitterly regret developing the technology for holding down hostile territory with minimal manpower and risk.

Perhaps occupations and counterinsurgency warfare will remain very difficult, despite the best technology and tactics that can be developed with our vast resources. It sure looks that way now. But if not, we, and the whole world, may regret developing that technology.

Keith Kisser @ 100... Yeah. I disagreed with the Parti Québécois on many things, but they weren't loonies. As for your fellow country-folk, they've been mine for 20 years and I've come to think of them the way I do of the SciFi Channel's movies: when you think they can't get more bizarre, they do.

xeger @ 108... unfortunately my washing machine appears to have heard you asking "what next"

That reminds me of the revived Twilight episode "Cold Reading", in which a radio serial's people realize that every time they refer to a sound effect, it becomes real - for example, a rifle literally pops up and starts firing. Thru the whole story, they keep changing the script's dangerous comments because they sure don't want a herd of elephants to run thru the studio. The show ends, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, and the announcer tells the public that next week's story is called "Invaders from Mars".

Just a side note on invading armies: I wouldn't worry about Russia; their birth rate is not only far below replacement levels, they actually have more abortions than births. Hardly an expansionist tendency.

OTOH, there was a friend of the family who pointed out twenty years ago that China's single child family, with the attendant gender selection, was a recipe for war footing. I mean, all of those young males, not a woman in sight... Thus far, the problems have all been internal (and, unfortunately, pretty bad for the women.) I always hope he was wrong and thus far haven't seen any major indications that China's getting more warlike.

Who was it that said that all wars, at the bottom, started from population pressure?

B. Durbin @ 124:

This just came up in another conversation I was having. One mitigating factor is that the one family, one child laws aren't really all that enforced (that I know of—I'm not an expert) in the more rural parts of China, and there are an awful lot of rural parts of China. I also think that the Chinese government is smart enough to fix things up before they go pear-shaped. There are still girls being born, after all, it's just that some wind up in orphanages waiting to be adopted by Westerners.

You might be remembering the observation about population pressure from Heinlein, although I'm sure other people have said it too.

Mark #96: I have a funny feeling that the opt-out public plan Harry Reid is now said to favor in the health care reform bill will end up drawing the map for the eventual Balkanization of the US...that the opt-out states will start wanting to see what else they can opt out of.

No, I don't see it as a secession threat, just as a plan for what the Red states can do to opt-out of the inconvenience of dealing with surplus living poverty-level Democrats in their jurisdictions, by gaming the system to fraudulently qualify for the opt-out rules. Opt-out equals more dead Democrats, all tidy and legal-like.

I live in a Red state, and this statesman-like compromise is probably also going to include the cynical destruction of Medicare Advantage plans.

re the Navy/College. I suspect a scam. Right now the GI bill pays 100 percent of tuition, to the most expensive state school in the state one is attending (if one does more than 36 months active duty... don't get me started on how they are screwing over the Reserve Component). It also pays a stipend for food/housing.

The average is about 1,000 a month, (with a 36 month cap. They pay only for months on was actually enrolled, full time), plus tuition,, so anyone, going into any service is going to get more than 30,000 in payments.

So the question is, does she really want to be in the Navy? Is she being offered a rating (as opposed to a Seaman Apprentice slot, which is four years of scutwork, for all but a lucky few.

If the answer to both those questions is, "yes," then it's a decent deal. If she has questions, I can answer some, and answer any number of questions about recruiters.

Guys: I understand that feelings on the issue are touchy, and the previous adminstration's actions make the problems moreso, but it's grating to see the reflexive comments, when I know most of you haven't any real experience with them.

Yes, recruiters lie. Yes, the rule are such that there are ways to lose a bonus one thinks is locked in (most of those are built around completing a school, a school which a lot of people fail out of, like say, DLI). They have tough jobs and some of them cut corners (lots of corners).

But just because some of them push the envelope doesn't mean that one should paint them as purely black-hearted. Yes, I think everyone who enlists should be doing it with eyes open, and because they want to (for whatever reason). Marna Nightingale can tell you that I am not above calling family members who are pressuring people to join up, and giving them a solid talking too (because, after all, the family members aren't going to be the ones wearing the uniform).

It really does feel that you are beating up on the services, and that's unpleasant.

I will also point out that the various front line jobs (Marine Rifleman, Corpsman, etc.) are restricted to males. Truck driving, and other support functions (which are in the combat area) of course are not, but they can't take away a trombone and hand a woman a rifle (also, the bands are vary possessive of the talent. If someone is that good, they get a lot of slack. One of the women who was in Basic when I was left Basic training, with her sergeant's stripes on her sleeve, straight to PLDC [Sergeant's School] because she was a really good clarinetist).

I have moderate to severe SAD, and much of my life from early October until mid-March is scheduled around it.

I have a dawn simulator alarm clock, which makes an enormous difference to my ability to wake up in the morning. I tend to wake naturally with the light, and almost always switch it off before the buzzer sounds. We've got one for my son as well now, and although he complains about getting up in the mornings, he is no longer in tears when he does so.

I also have a big, powerful light box (sitting beside me right now). I get up early in the morning to sit in front of it for an hour or so, then pass it to Martin (who works from home) for his working day. I need to replace the bulbs, but shipping anything from the UK to NL is hugely problematic, and I haven't looked into local sources.

I have a window seat at work, though my colleagues tend to close the blinds when it gets too bright outside (honestly, I think they're a bunch of cave dwellers!). I also have a desk lamp, which gives me light right next to my face. On very dark days, I sometimes just lean my forehead against it and bask for a moment or two.

I try to take a lunchtime walk every day, though when it's rainy I do get put off.

I cycle to and from work, which has definitely made a huge difference to my winters. That's got to be at least partly due to the exercise, because (as of the clock change this past weekend) I'm already cycling home in the dark.

And I monitor myself aggressively, and distrust any feelings of lowness or discouragement. If I'm feeling low, dragged-out, or depressed, I go sit in front of my light box. If I find myself craving carbohydrates, same thing. And if Martin walks up to me with the light box, plugs it in, switches it on, and points it at me, I take the hint.

I should abstain from alcohol and cut my caffeine levels during the winter, but I find both of those regimes too restrictive to contemplate.

I should mention that with all of the above measures, my ability to function and my mood are still perceptibly worse in the winter. It's a struggle to cope every year, and keeping a positive outlook on life in the winter is like swimming in heavy clothing. Against an undertow. With hypothermia coming on. In eel-infested waters.

xeger @117

What else would I be doing with a quantity of lime, anyways ;)

I assumed, between that and the pit, you had finally decided to deal with your enemies list once and for all. ;-P

With lime and time, xeger could make limestone.

abi @ #129, I thought it was only sharks that infested waters. Like reports that are invariably scathing.

I absolutely hate those frakking Oracle databases.

Caroline @98: The Target model manufacturers claim it produces 10,000 Lux, which is a therapeutic level. My sunrise alarm clock probably tops out at 300 Lux.

Elliott Mason @111: Someone mentioned chicken feet? Oh yum. It's one of my favorite dim sum dishes, although friends and strangers alike look askance at my plate when I have some.
People often ask what there is to eat in chicken feet, but it's got more edible parts than one would think at first glance.

abi @128: if your light box bulbs aren't available locally but are distributed in France or Belgium, shipping will probably be much simpler. I'd be happy to help navigate the French-language websites.

I wish some people would use an Oracle database rather than grafting tentacles on to already cumbersome spreadsheets.

Tim Hall @ 135... On the other hand, people don't usually generate those spreadsheets in the middle of the bleeping night.

Cooking question: colcannon and stamppot (and bubble and squeak, rumbledethumps, etc) seem to most often be made with potatoes and brassicas. Why are brassicas the most common add-in rather than carrots or spinach or something? Is it just that there's not much else you can do with leftover kale?

Serge @123 That reminds me of the revived Twilight episode "Cold Reading", in which a radio serial's people realize that every time they refer to a sound effect, it becomes real - for example, a rifle literally pops up and starts firing.

Which reminds me, in turn, of the Anthony Boucher story "We Print the Truth," where the newspaper publisher is granted a wish that his paper will always print the truth. A high-minded wish, to be sure, but like all such, with its down side. As I recall, the first problem occurs when a typo in an obituary reports a woman dying at the age of 18, instead of 81, and there's a frightening youthful corpse at the wake... I've forgotten how it ends, though I think it's with the destruction of the printing press.

And on The Mouse That Roared, I remember the book and at least one or two of the sequels but don't think I ever saw the movie. *Add to Netflix queue*

OtterB @ 138... Boucher's story sounds like it was the inspiration for the original Twlight Zone's episode where Burgess Meredith plays the Foul Deceiver who grants such a printing press to a journalist.

Terry @ 127: In almost every respect I would defer to your expertise in matters military, but I have to take one minor exception here.

I will also point out that the various front line jobs (Marine Rifleman, Corpsman, etc.) are restricted to males. Truck driving, and other support functions (which are in the combat area) of course are not, but they can't take away a trombone and hand a woman a rifle....

Technically correct, but in our current wars there is no front line. Any position in theatre has the potential to see combat. One of the challenges the VA has been having with this war that it hasn't learned how to deal with previously is support structure for a surprising number of women combat veterans who are coming home with PTSD.

Shadowsong: I think it's more a matter of what's available/going to do well in winter storage, and spinach is probably not it, while cabbage will do well in storage and many of the other greens will keep in garden except in extreme cold (and even then can survive in a coldframe).

Terry Karney @ 127... they can't take away a trombone and hand a woman a rifle

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuo-
Sos, the cream of ev'ry famous band.

Elliott Mason @111, I had a friend who was career army, as a bandsman. In addition to their musical duties, the band also functioned as a sort of catch-all pool for Weird Jobs We'll Need But Not Every Day. At one post he was cross-trained as a a firefighter; he also did Graves Registration training and at least one other thing I can't recall right now.

From what he said, once you're in the band, you're in the band, and the band keeps its people, because it's quite easy to find a truck driver, or train a truck driver, but a trombonist or clarinetist (one you'd want to listen to, and who plays well with other musicians) takes longer to produce. The various military bands tend to get used a lot for public relations; when he was stationed at Ft. Campbell, they played a lot of football halftime shows (they tended to disappoint people who though bands did things like Script Ohio as a matter of course*), and marched in a lot of little local parades. When he was stationed in Japan, the band played for a lot of (extremely important) visiting dignitaries; he did a sort of special performance with the Tokyo Symphony, accompanying a poet, and some other interesting things that (as he said) most Kentucky boys couldn't have imagined".

A band stationed at a base that mostly does training can become very bored, as, except for the July Fourth show, they tend to get stuck playing a very small selection over and over again for the ceremonies attendant upon training completion ceremonies.

A good musician gets good assignments; one who shows an aptitude for arranging will be encouraged along those lines, as will one who has composing talents. The services regard their bands as PR tools, and are not likely to use them for other things unless they either have no choice, or the bandsman in question has made themselves so annoying a discipline problem that no amount of talent on earth will make up for it.

My guess is that your baby sister would, if recruited for the band, stay with the band. She might have a lot of other things to complain about if she joined the Marine Corps, but a good brass player would be cherished carefully by the band director, as much as humanly possible.

*At one game, one of the sergeants was asked by a bystander "So all you guys do is march and play? You don't make any figures or anything?" "No, that's all, but we're also all trained to kill people." When he was at Ft. Campbell, my friend noted that there was a strong push by the band's commander to make sure they were all air-assault qualified and did well in marksmanship, as the bands tend to get mocked as too refined and artistic to be good soldiers (or marines, etc.) by people from other units.

Charlie @80 and others:

It occurs to me that one could put together a less expensive SAD light system from aquarium components.

For example, http://www.ahsupply.com sells complete kits (bulb, reflectors, wiring). You just add a wooden box. The 1 x 55 watt bright kit appears to be equivalent to Charlie's Brightspark.

fidelio @ 143... the bands tend to get mocked as too refined and artistic to be good soldiers (or marines, etc.) by people from other units.

"Fire all bassookas!"

Tangentially, do you, or anyone else, have recommendations for light-therapy products?

I've been doing reasonably well with a couple of full-spectrum fluorescents in rooms where I spend a lot of my time (including one on my desk at work), but my SAD is more of a "I tend to get down in the winter" than anything really diagnosable. It does seem that length of exposure compensates somewhat for low intensity.

Linkmeister @ 132, re: eel-infested waters, it's a Princess Bride movie reference. As it happens, abi does not get eaten by eels at this time.

OtterB @ 138, Serge @ 139 -- All of these remind me of Fredric Brown's story "The Angelic Angleworm". I see that Brown's and Boucher's stories were both published in 1943. Hmm.

abi:

How much of an impact does your latitude have on the SAD? It seems strange that you've chosen to live in Scotland and The Netherlands, where there's so much less light in the winter than (say) Southern California or Spain. But maybe this is just my making incorrect assumptions, as I don't seem to be affected by this much.

"Fire all bassookas!"
1812 overture with real cannons?

Joel Polowin @143. Haven't read the Brown story, but you've made me curious. Never saw the Twilight Zone episode either, but that doesn't surprise me since I recall seeing only one or two of the original shows and finding they were sufficiently creepy to be Not My Cuppa.

Renatus, there's a math argument to be made:

$30,000/8 years is 3750/year; if she worked a full-time job (2000 hours/year) she'd need to set aside $1.87/hour over 8 years to save the same amount of money... hard at a minimum-wage job if that's all one is qualified for, but if one lives at home it's doable...

Things that I have done since yesterday:

1. Bought an adapter from this guy to fade up my regular bedside lamp in the mornings.

2. Bought the $50 light panel from Target.

Nothing has yet arrived, of course. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

It was my doctor who said, looking at my chart, "Hm....you have come back to seek therapy in the fall three years running." "Yes," I said, "I guess I just get fed up then." "I deeply suspect it has a seasonal component if you always get fed up in the fall," she said.

This fall I thought that the med I'm on, which has been working extremely well, had suddenly started causing sleepiness as a side effect. I was ticked off, because why should it have such a delayed onset of side effects? It had been working so well! Then it occurred to me one morning: it's dark when your alarm goes off. You're naturally waking up an hour and a half later, when it's full light. The weather has been generally grey and rainy lately. Perhaps this is a clue.

OtterB #149: "Fire all bassookas!"
1812 overture with real cannons?

Telarc: "Caution! Digital Cannons"

I still love my Nightingale® 421 Series Exam Light to bits for providing excellent bright light, and fooling my brain into thinking it's daylight...

#149 OtterB, I have in fact seen that a couple of times, at the Ft. Campbell July Fourth concert, which also has a dandy fireworks show (people in that line of work are highly criticial consumers of pyrotechnic productions, which makes a challenge for the people doing the fireworks). The artillery units love it, and vie intensely over who gets to take part.

One year, the new post commander was Not Pleased to think they were doing a damn' Russian piece for the Fourth of July, and there was a scramble to come up with something suitably American in time--something that would call for the use of artillery, because it just wouldn't be the same without Really Big Guns. I think they ened up with Hewitt's Battle of Trenton, but that was 20 years ago, so I can't say for sure.

albatross @148

SAD does indeed vary in severity by latitude‡. I didn't know I had it at all when I grew up in California, though I noticed that I felt a little flatter in the winter than in the summer. By the time I realized why my life melted down every winter in Scotland, it was impractical to move back.

Unfortunately, there were other circumstances that determined whether or not we could move further south in 2007. We are not, at present, minded to live in the United States*, and the Netherlands is the southernmost European country where I could easily find and change employment. My Spanish is not of a professional level. I am innocent of both French and German, and my best Italian is about 2 millenia out of date. Martin, also, would be restricted to expat-type employment anywhere but the Netherlands. And that kind of limitation on available jobs is risky and precarious, and we are not risky and precarious people.

More exotic Anglophone locales (Australia, New Zealand) were excluded for another reason: one driver for this move was a desire that the children be truly bilingual from a very early age. It is a quirk of our linguistic dominance that that is almost impossible to achieve in an English-speaking country†.

And even a family with three US passports and four British ones has some limitations on where it can easily move. In the end, the Netherlands was the almost unavoidable choice, even if it means that I am stuck with SAD mitigation techniques for the forseeable future. It's still better for me than Scotland was.

-------

‡ Not only are the winter days longer, but the light is more direct and passes through less atmosphere, so they're brighter too. I've found a noticeable improvement by moving even a few hundred miles south, leaving aside the benefits of being able to cycle to work.

* Health insurance, employment conditions, cultural factors such as paranoid parenting...and when we left Scotland in 2007, the political situation wasn't exactly shiny either. I am, and always will be, American. But it's quite simply not the right place for me to live right now, given the choice. (And I am lucky enough to have been given that choice.)

† Apart from Canada, and that's not a drastically southward move, is it?

So was the recruiter lying lo those many years ago when the Army was trying to fill it's quota? At some point I interrupted him and pointed out you couldn't march with a cello, although the end-pin did provide certain defensive capabilities. Was I imagining cellists in uniform, playing carbon fiber instruments for the pre-inauguration festivities?

(and really, who wants to hear a string orchestra for a bit of chest-thumping inspiration?)

Re: SAD. My dad has it fairly severely. He's been able to cut down on his autumn light-box regimen since he got his boat and spends as much time outdoors fishing. In the winter he still uses it a lot. I only wish he had made this discovery when we were growing up.

I think I may have a little SAD, because despite having no car, living paycheck to paycheck and having no hopes of any kind of love life for the last 7 years, I have been distinctly not depressed while living here in L.A.

#107 I thought it might be. And now, after comparing the contrasting treatments:

If ever thou sang like Peter Pears
Ivry neet an aal
Stick thy fingers in thine ears,
An Christ tak op thy saule.

I'll get me shroud.

Mark, #140: A lot of those women are probably not having PTSD from combat -- or at least not just from combat. The DOD estimates that 1 in 3 women in the military will be raped or sexually assaulted by her fellow soldiers during her term of service, and the numbers are higher in combat zones. This article takes a look at some of the root causes, not from the usual "what women should do" victim-blaming standpoint, but from the more useful "why do these men do this?" one.

My favorite thing in the movie of THE MOUSE THAT ROARED was the sight of Peter Sellers as the Grand Duchess, a dead ringer for the Queen, driving an ancient car through the countryside whilst giving the Royal Wave to every passer-by.

nerdycellist @156--Not necessarily. When they say "Select bands only", though, I imagine they mean "A really large unit, at a post where the commander would find it useful to have things like a string quartet handy." (Many of the units listed have their own webpages, in case someone would like to kill an unspecified amount of time looking into the world of US Army, Music, produced by and for the use of.) The range is well beyond brass bands who can play "The Stars and Stripes Forever" without stumbling. The US Army Band "Pershing's Own" at Ft. Myer, frex, has a string group. The USAEUR Band has a separate chorus and a jazz band. And so on.

Lee #158:

Holy sh-t, that's frighteningly high. Another big news story that nobody ever talks about, I guess. Wow.

The twenty-year collapse of newspapers (sidebar particle)

I worked for a newspaper group until early this year, then they had a major layoff.

In a lot of UK infantry battalions, the band doubles up as the medics (which wouldn't exactly put them out of harm's way) - however, traditionally, the pipe bands of Scottish battalions are trained as infantrymen, and normally act as the HQ defence platoon. Everyone drops, everyone fights.

[Not ... able ... to resist!]

nerdycellist@156:
So was the recruiter lying lo those many years ago when the Army was trying to fill it's quota? At some point I interrupted him and pointed out you couldn't march with a cello, although the end-pin did provide certain defensive capabilities. Was I imagining cellists in uniform, playing carbon fiber instruments for the pre-inauguration festivities? (and really, who wants to hear a string orchestra for a bit of chest-thumping inspiration?)

Was the recruiter lying low
all those many years ago
when the Army was trying to fill its quota?
'Cos I shouted at him "Hell no!
I'm not marching with a cello
in Afghanistan, Iraq or South Dakota!"

He said to me "You cello-ists
can help us fight the terrorists
by playing at the pre-inauguration.
And I'll tell you to your face
that we count on all your bass
to provide a bit of martial inspiration!"

But I told him back "I warn ya,
I will move to California
and I guarantee I won't be feeling sad.
In the orchestra, you know,
we have more strings to our bow:
think about the archer that you almost had!"

[Sorry. Really!]

Earl Cooley III @ 152... "Quick! Drum up some air support!"

I'm told by my choir director (a former Marine) that every Marine is trained as a rifleman. Even he was, though his primary mission was to play in the band.

"One year, the new post commander was Not Pleased to think they were doing a damn' Russian piece for the Fourth of July"

idiot.

(wanders off and listens to a copy of Classical Music For Home Improvement)

And on the topic of music, anyone see last Friday's NUMB3RS? What the hell was that piece of music they played over Charlie's opening montage? My dad had that in his collection, but damned if I can pull enough of it out of memory to identify it.

Army bandsmen are trained as riflemen as well (I have never heard a female bandsman refer to herself as a bandswoman; bandsman appears to be a term of art), Xopher.

Back in military history, when you get to, say, the American Civil or Napoleonic Wars, the regimental band served as a headquarters company, with various duties at the regimental headquarters, and were the last-ditch defense for the regimental headquarters area; they might also serve as stretcher-bearers in pre-medic days. It was a bad fight when the colonel put the bandsmen in. Also, the band was often used as spot to stash people with no capacity for military tasks, whether they could play an instrument well or not. Cooks were often drawn from the same pool of the hapless.

A family friend is in the Army Mens' Chorus (at least, I think that's the one. It's one of the choral units at any rate.) On the weekends, he's is/has been a church choir director, has been the programmer at a startup and all that. Not the military type. It was stunning to see the pics of him with a shaved head and an M16 in basic.

He was recruited specifically for the music position. I'm pretty sure that he went in as a Sergeant.

fidelio (169): My uncle was an army cook in the Korean War. My mother thinks it's because he was hospitalized with a horrendous case of poison ivy* in basic training.

*He has the family's severe reaction to the stuff. ("We're not going to camp here, are we, Sergeant? There's poison ivy over there!" "That's 100 yards away!")

AKICIML: Can cats develop Parkinsons? I have an elderly kitty (17 years old) that has presented with a slight head tremor, and occasional weakness in his hind legs over the last few days.

His appetite is normal, there has been no change in his activity level or litter box usage, and the symptoms are not constant.

"The Bustlepunk Manifesto"

Shadowsong: I've always made colcannon with cabbage, but not leftover. I think it's because the long strips of the leaves give a pleasant binding to the potoatoes, and the flavors aren't in great counterpoint.

Then again, the only cooking the cabbage is getting is from the heat of the mashed potatoes, which wouldn't be very useful in the cooking of carrots, even shredded.

It might also be that, absent something like a madeline, shredding carrots, et al, would be a lot more work that slicing up a leafy plant.

Mark: I know there is no front line., believe me I know that (there also isn't any real rear area, but that's a different problem; more stress related than risk facotr). I also know that this is the specifc comment was, "because they can always change her mind, hand her a rifle, and send her anywhere they want during her term of enlistment. , which, while "technically true" is connotatively not the case.

When one says, "hand them a rifle and send them..." it's not the same as, "Send them to a combat zone". The rifle is the controlling image; because everyone in the Marines/Army has a rifle as part of their equipment. Emphasizing it makes the rifle the job, not an accoutrement.

The only odds (to digress), based on my personal experience, of her being in a combat zone is to be sent someplace to do a USO sort of show (of which I saw the 101st Division Band twice while I was in Iraq). For all the reasons fidelio gave, the Corps is not going to let a skilled musician go. They have a really hard time getting them, and they are really picky about whom they give those slots. I know people who didn't enlist because, while good, the weren't good enough to get into the band (one AF, two Army, one Marine).

jdparadise: The math argument isn't right. One, it's four years (with a hidden four of latent eligibility, but as she's looking at the Navy, which has been kicking people out, stop loss isn't a big risk). Two, she gets better than minimum wage for the period, (salary, food, housing, uniform allowance and special pays for things like sea duty). While on active duty she can have 3/4s of her tuition for classes paid (A lot of people, take advantage of this, Chapman University, and a couple of others cater to the services with distance learning programs. I know a few dozen people who used their time to get a bachelors, and then spent their [Montgomery] GI Bill to get a masters).

In addition she will get college credit for some of the things she learns/does in the Navy, again putting her ahead of the game when she gets to school.

Also, the money set aside (30,000) then has to be kept, against contingency. As a Vet she'd be eligible for VA healthcare (and she'd get 100 percent coverage, while in college, because it's means based). She's have income, and be able to work part-time in addition, so the day to day bills are covered, in a way the mere setting aside of 30 grand doesn't manage (esp. because the GI bill money is non-taxable).

And, the 30,000 is in addition to tuition; so add the cost of the school into the money she has to set aside; and make it a four year time frame, not an eight.

nerdycellist: If a recruiter said they wanted a cellist, odds are he was blowing smoke. There are a very few bands with strings. The odds of a seat being open are small. The Russians have some, but they draft. There is, though it's hideous, a rig for marching cello. The mind boggles.

Xopher: et alia: All servicemembers have to go to the required entry level training for their service. Bandsmen are given various odd-jobs (and the chance to go to some neat schools, because they have lots of wiggle room to let a trumpet go for three weeks to jump out of airplanes, etc.) So the Marines go to MCRD Parris Island/San Diego, the Army sends them to Jackson or Leonard Wood, etc.

Eric: Your friend didn't go in as a sergeant. Like the clarinetist of my acquaintance he went to basic as the highest enlisted rank allowed, and was promoted as soon as he left basic.

Depending on the time frame he might have been a Tech-Sergeant (pre-1957 IIRC), or a type of, Specialist. (1959-1970-something), or a sergeant (post 1970-something).

I wish that Joe Lieberman would just go ahead and finally admit that he's a Republican and be done with it.

There was also some mention of joining a chorus, which made much more sense than cello-ing my way through the armed forces. Besides the customary lack of confidence in my ability to audition in, I thought it would have been unethical for me to enlist when I had serious reservations about serving in any kind of non-musical capacity.

Candle @ 164 -

This is perhaps the best poem I've ever read about two completely disparate aspects of my life. That I can hum it also recommends it. Much better than the last poem written about me, but a future ex-boyfriend many years ago, which began with protestations of great desire and ended with the phrase "... But do I love her because she is all those things? No. She has low self-esteem, and I love her because she's easy." At a public poetry reading. Yeah, that was nice. And that it took me at least 6 months to move from boyfriend to ex-boyfriend proved his point.

Pipers and medics: hardly safe jobs in an Army.

Re: #120 -- funeral! Dexter went to a funeral in the episode I watched last night and thought "If I believed in god, if I believed in sin, this is the place I'd be sucked to hell. If I believed in hell."

Earl Cooley III @ 175: You mean all that campaigning for McCain and Coleman, refusing to investigate the Katrina debacle, fellating Glenn Beck on air, et cetera ad nauseam, wasn't specific enough for you? I have been fucking done with the Liebermouse for a long time now.

If Reid fails to strip that jackass of his committee seniority - and his gonads - then there's just no hope for party discipline ever and we might as well pack it in.

Mark, #179: Wouldn't he have to have gonads before they could be stripped?

Renatus, is there any reason for your sister to even think about going enlisted as opposed to ROTC? If her objective for joining the Navy is college as opposed to sailing/flying/trombone-playing/fighting, then it gives her control to get the college parts nailed down first thing instead of hoping that the bonus she gets when she's out will do the job. (That's separate from any opinions I have about whether or not joining a military is a good idea - as an Air Force Reserves general I used to work with said, "if you put on the uniform, you're agreeing to pick up the gun when they need it", and that's a moral choice she'll need to think about.)

I've had two friends who've been in US military bands. I used to go to a Southern Baptist church near Fort Monmouth in NJ, which had the Army Chaplain School and a bunch of electronics stuff there, so our church had a lot of Army people and we'd often have Army chaplains preaching either when we were between pastors or our pastor was on vacation. I later went to a Quaker meeting in the same area, and one of our members there was an assistant in the chaplain school who'd originally joined the Army to play sousaphone, since the number of professional sousaphone jobs outside the Army is pretty small. He was the only Quaker there; he'd found religion after he joined, and the chaplain school was the place he was most comfortable finishing his time commitment. One of the Baptists played trombone in the Army band, and said that his time in Germany, where they mostly played at officers' club bars, convinced him that he had the most useless time-wasting job in the military; I think he'd switched over to doing electronics.

We also had an Army recruiter in our Baptist church - I didn't get along with him that well, because he was the hard-driving Type A used-car-sales type, but wow I wouldn't have wanted to have his job. Apparently Army recruiters then (and according to the newspapers, still) get abused like any impossible-quota boiler-room telemarketers, browbeaten and yelled at by their bosses, and expected to do whatever it takes to meet their numbers no matter what the political and economic climate is that affects people's willingness to be recruited. That was the run-up to Gulf War I, when GHWBush was busy telling everybody that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were endangering our troops over there and that we needed to send a much bigger army to protect them, but it was after the successful Panama invasion so there was some popular support for the military.

candle @164 *applause*

Summer Storms #180: Mark, #179: Wouldn't he have to have gonads before they could be stripped?

Good point; those are already the private property of the Israel lobby.

TCM is showing The Power tonight. I haven't seen that one in a long time.

Looking at the particles and following up some links, I was surprised (or possibly terrified) to find that the friends with whom I will be spending this weekend in Paris live practically on top of the site of the Montfaucon gibbet. I wonder if I should tell them?

Shadowsong – I suppose it’s mostly a matter of what fresh vegetables are available in the winter, and having to combine ones that can be stored, like potatoes, with ones that can’t like greens. Having said that, my mother was from Dublin, and her version of colcannon consisted of potatoes and swede (rutabaga) mashed together with plenty of butter and pepper. She also cooked carrots and swede together as a vegetable side dish. Both were delicious, but I suspect that the swede was there originally to eke out the other vegetables.

#147 :::
Funny coincidence: I only just heard of The Angelic Angleworm a few hours ago - I read Brown's The Far Cry yesterday and was looking up his other works.

It's just not so that people don't use all the other veggies with potatoes as well as brassicas. What is true is that the underlying umami and bitter and sharp flavor of brassicas does taste especially good with potatoes.

Or turnips.

I don't do potatoes much anymore, which means I now have the experience to say turnips and celery root substitute quite well for potatoes in these contexts.

Sarah E @ 186 -- NESFA Press has a nice volume reprinting all of Brown's short SF, and another with all of his SF novels. (I helped with the scanning / OCR / preliminary proofreading for the short-SF book.) Some of it is a bit dated -- including, alas, "Angelic Angleworm" -- but there's a lot of good stuff there.

relating to Teresa's particles:
I've been adding names to the records at findagrave.com (from my family tree). Also adding to my file from their records, where I was missing information - it's a two-way exchange.

Lucy @ 187. My father wanted us to know what surviving poverty was when he was growing up and part of that was serving turnips at the table.

I'm okay with them raw. I like the spiciness of them. But cooked they're a nasty trick. I feel the same over rutabagas. (couple of years ago someone had an unlabeled dish at our SF club Thanksgiving dinner that looked like potatoes and stuffing. It turned out to be rutabagas and stuffing. I'm glad I only took a tablespoon or so, it was a nasty trick for me.)

Serge at #173:
Perhaps it should be called seampunk?

Anybody in Atlanta who'd be up for a Halloween get-together? I'm going to be there doing a LARP-con, but as I'm not a LARPer myself I'm free in the evenings after the dealer room closes. It seems a shame to spend Halloween night alone in a hotel room, and I'm not the bar-hopping type. I'll be in the Chamblee/Dunwoody area, if that matters (which it probably does, as spread out as Atlanta is). My access to e-mail will be spotty, so call me on my cellphone: frira bar guerr - svir avar sbhe - sbhe frira mreb avar.

Appel aux francophones, brought on by the alphabet-song discussion elsethread: has anybody heard of a French alphabet song to the tune of "Cadet Roussel"?

The Lyke Wake Dirge! I'm pretty sure I have more different versions of that than anything else in my music collection. Off the top of my head, I can think of covers by Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Mediaeval Baebes, Black Happy Day, and the Iditarod with Sharron Kraus. And there may be one or two I'm missing there.

It wasn't a tune I was familiar with prior to reading Neverwhere, but it seemed like not very long after I'd encountered it there that it was suddenly all over the place.

Erik Nelson @ 191... Oh no. Seampunk was Bruce Stippling's gang of quilters.

TexAnne @ 193... Listening to that song on YouTube sure took me back a few decades. ("A few?") OK. More than a few. I don't know of any abécédaire song to tha tune, but I could write to a friend who's likely to know.

TexAnne @193: Ciel, I've always known that one as Bali Balo; didn't know the melody came from elsewhere!

Pendrift @ 197... Oh my. I've never heard that one. A translation into French might be quite educational, especially the part about the bull's erection.

Serge @198: Ah, so they don't sing this in Québec? Bali Balo is one of the chansons paillardes that people here start singing at the top of their lungs after a few hours of merrie drinking.

The Danse Macabre particle: there was a video homage to The Graveyard Book's Macabray dance posted earlier this month.

Pendrift: duuuuuude. My education has a lacuna.

Pendrift @ 199... Somehow, most of those songs never made it in my cultural background. Maybe they weren't the thing of my area. Or maybe I was so square that I never participated in the merry drinking of other college students.

TexAnne @ 200.... I think I am going to translate that song for the benefit of all MLites.

To add a bit more to Terry Karney @#174--Also, while military pay (even with add-ons) is not great, when you compare it to what many musicians make in civilian life*, it's decent money.

However, there is that whole "being good enough to make the cut" issue.

There is also this: a bandsman is part of a military organization, and under regular military discipline. This includes all the same spit and polish (and possibly extra spit and polish, given how much bandsmen are expected to look good, for certain military definitions of good), scrubbing things with toothbrushes, regular (I think monthly, but Terry can correct me) qualifying time on the rifle range, physical exercise and strength-training, drug tests, and so on. You will be surrounded by people who are all expected to live within the same limits, many of whom will view bandsmen with a certain amount of amused contempt.

For one of my friends or family considering life as a bandsman, I'd worry more about the need to adapt and deal with that than I would the risk of combat.

*Even if you make it onto an orchestra's roster, beginning pay (and pay for more senior performers with smaller, less-famous groups) is not fantastic.

re 174: There are some strings for groups such as (I paraphrase) "the president's own string quartet"-- I know a fellow who played violin in the latter. And there are string basses in the jazz bands. But I have to agree that the number of cellists has to be pretty small.

Tex Anne @ 193: Ah, that's the name of the tune! When they were very small, my kids had a speaking clock toy that played the same three tunes over and over again, like a musical version of water torture. One was "Trois Jeunes Tambours", one was "Quand Trois Poules" (a slightly broken version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star") and one, I now discover, was "Cadet Rousselle". Also, I now realise, it's the tune my mother-in-law whistles to herself while working in the kitchen. (Of course, given that it's whistling, it could be "Bali Balo", but that would seem out of character...)

C Wingate @ 203...

Singing basses in the jazz bands?
("No, Serge. String basses in the jazz bands.")
Oh.
Nevermind.

Tangential to the military band topic: I'm not a musician, but if I were, my dream job would be the regularly-scheduled playing of the Smithsonian's historic instruments to keep them in good condition. (They have a Stradivarius quartet--until I saw them, I didn't even know he MADE any basses)!

Sarah E @ #186: Don't miss out on Brown's murder mysteries, either. Night of the Jabberwock and The Screaming Mimi are particularly good.

I'm going to be in Nashville next month for a conference, from the 7th to the 12th. Fidelio and I are planning on getting together for a meal and to hang out. Would anyone like to join us?

abi #155: It is a quirk of our linguistic dominance that that is almost impossible to achieve in an English-speaking country.

You then go on to except Canada in a footnote. Might I also suggest Belize? Although there, it isn't the English-speakers who are bilingual* but the Spanish, Maya, and Garífuna-speakers. For true multilingualism, though, nothing in my experience beats the Batavophone Caribbean. Or even places just adjacent to it. Some years ago I ran into a native of St Martin at an institution where I was working, addressed her in Dutch, was answered in Dutch, and then told that she was from the French side (i.e., Saint Martin and not Sint Maarten); her native language -- English.

*Strictly speaking, the English-speakers are bilingual between dialects of English -- standard and Creole -- and code-switching, frequently within the same conversation, is normal.

More open-threadiness about blind spots in the media:

This Naked Capitalism post from earlier in the month described how access journalism and media control techniques have affected reporting on economic issues. I've been struck, again and again, about how similar the basic pattern of the financial crisis and bailout reporting was to the Saddam-has-the-bomb/Iraq invasion reporting. In both cases, the MSM seemed to me to be functioning more like a propoganda organ for the consensus view among the powerful than as any kind of independent voice.

re life in the band: Rifle is a semi-annual qualification. That said, it's not that hard to qualify, once one has learned the knack (the requirements are a bit stiffer than they were, but the skill is one of drill).

Spit and Polish: The band has more than most, less than some. They get a second set of issue; so they can keep up (eight sets of BDUs, two sets of Class As, and usually a double rations Dress Blues [which are only issue to units for which it is an actual item of regular wear, the Old Guard of the 3ID, generals' aides, etc.).

At least one of those is kept in plastic, fresh fro the cleaners. That way, when some special gig comes up, where prep-time isn't available, they have it ready to go.

That said, the day-to-day spit and polish is actually less. Once the Chief (band are run by Warrants; even if commanded by Colonels), knows the bandsman has her shit together, then it's assumed things will be squared away when needed.

The only drawback... wall locker inspection have more things to keep in the proper places.

As to the question of ROTC/enlisted. In the band, the officer slots are really slim. That's why a clarinetist, with a Masters in Music, was becoming a sergeant (mind you, she also got Loan Repayment, and the the Montgomery GI Bill, if she wanted to go for a Ph.D, the system can be worked).

I know Renatus sister isn't looking at the band. But ROTC has a different way of providing benefit. For the first two years, there is NO payment for anything. After that, once the cadet has committed (i.e. signed a contract) they are committed. They get tuition assistance, and a stipend; if they are smart they also take an SMP (simultaneous membership program) in a local reserve/guard unit). That gets them experience, and a bit more money.

If, however, they fail out (of either ROTC, or school) they are still on the hook for the contract (which is 6 years active, not 4). They will be entitled to the Chapter 33 GI Bill (the new one) once they have done 36 months of duty (and they can excercise it sooner, if they want, but at a pro-rated value; which isn't worth it) and they are eligible for 75 percent tuition assistance in local/distance learning at colleges/universities.

But ROTC isn't the same deal. I don't know if the Chapter 33 GI Bill is available to someone who took ROTC, and got a commission.

That said, the Chapter 33 GI Bill, is not revocable. The only requirement is qualifying time on Active Duty, and at least a General Discharge (A Bad Conduct, or a Dishonorable voids everything, VA health, pensions (even medical), etc.).

Bonuses are different, they are performance dependant. They are given because the recruit is promising to fill a slot the service in question really needs filled. They are discretionary on the part of the recruiter. As a rule of thumb, looking as if one is changing one's mind is the best way to get a recruiter to kick one loose. The web is a great tool, because it can be used to let one know where bonuses are being offered, and then one can ask/demand them.

Until that right hand goes in the air, and the oath gets said, the power is all in the hands of the prospect.

Open-thready:
A funny Holmes pastiche on the theme of the famous phrase he never said: A Lame Entry

Behold: The latest socialist menace!

If they keep targeting them, I wonder what kind of hidden camera videos they'll eventually come up with.

Hey everyone I just recently learned something about spam comment attacks, having gotten 40,000 comments on a blog nobody reads anyway.

Apparently (judging by search engine queries in my access logs) what one machine does is put a random string of obscure words into a comment, and then other machines do a search for that string because it's a marker that says "here's an unsecured comment thread. let's pile on."

So that's what seems to have happened to me any how.

One good companion to the Halloween-esque links in the Particles might be a selection of ghost stories.

M. R. James is pretty much the single best ghost story writer of all time. His first three volumes of ghost stories are available on Project Gutenberg. Penguin Classics has published a two volume collection of his work which also includes A Warning to the Curious.

Ghosts and Scholars is a journal about James's writing which may or may not still be active. There's a webpage which includes quite a few articles and James-style stories by other authors, and a never-published story by James himself (which is also included in the second Penguin collection).

William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder is a steampunk ghostbuster who fights--or debunks--supernatural menaces from an electric pentacle. The link is to the Project Gutenberg edition, which includes six of the nine Carnacki stories. Of the other three, "The Hog" and "The Haunted Jarvee" are worth tracking down, but "The Find" is just a minor detective story about a forged manuscript.

Carnacki was played by Donald Pleasance--who unfortunately made only one appearance in the role--in the British anthology series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

"the MSM seemed to me to be functioning more like a propoganda organ for the consensus view among the powerful than as any kind of independent voice."

Um... yes?

I'm sorry, I've spent so many years knowing a basic truth (that the members of the MSM are, in large part, lazy) that it surprises me when anyone is surprised to find out that the media aren't, well, reporting.

You'll see it at the journalism class level. Person gets assigned story, decides how he will frame it, then goes out and gets the info he needs to write/show it. It's the same technique lazy students have been using on essays for years. It's very rare that you'll see somebody challenge their basic assumptions or work out of their comfort zone.

A good example of somebody who is actually doing reporting is Michael Totten. He's a private citizen who decided years ago, Hey, I wonder what's really going on in Iraq, got together some funds, and went over to find out. He's been over several times and the thing that impresses me with his articles is that he doesn't seem to have a frame that he's shoving his stories into; instead he seems to base each article on what he's actually seen.

Contrast that with the tale of anyone who's been featured on the news and who has said, afterwards, "But it isn't like that at all..." After a while, you just get the sense that the MSM is just a lazy bunch of folks with a worldview that they never think to challenge.*

*Anyone notice the ads for "Planet 51" lately? And notice how the astronaut is white and blond? Wanna bet they never even considered making him otherwise?

@B. Durbin #216: Anyone notice the ads for "Planet 51" lately? And notice how the astronaut is white and blond? Wanna bet they never even considered making him otherwise?

I don't think that's a good example of the blindness you are describing because the point of Planet 51 is to turn a classic "WASPy Military Poster Boy vs. the Horrible Monsters" B-movie on its head. At one point in the preview I saw, he attempts to defuse a tense situation by giving Clean-Cut Mr. Recruiting Poster Smile No. 3 and ends up traumatizing some poor alien kid for life.

Pendrift @ 134 said: Elliott Mason @111: Someone mentioned chicken feet? Oh yum. It's one of my favorite dim sum dishes, although friends and strangers alike look askance at my plate when I have some. People often ask what there is to eat in chicken feet, but it's got more edible parts than one would think at first glance.

I've been watching a lot of episodes of Iron Chef via YouTube, and compiling (for my own amusement) a list of Things I Have Learned About Japanese Culture* From Iron Chef.

One of them is that the cute-woman judges all seem to think that 'gelatin' tastes 'very healthy'. However, for American translation, I think what they call 'gelatin' can often be more accurately called 'stewed gristle'; they really liked being fed stewed duck feet in Battle Duck.

* In the related department of Things About Biology I Have Learned From Iron Chef, invertebrates have the following bodily parts (because no others are ever mentioned): 'filet' (the muscle tissue/meat), 'digestive tract,' 'roe' (all reproductive organs and products), skin, bones, brains, and liver. Vertebrates also have a bunch of other things, but molluscs and arthropods seem to be entirely composed of 'brains' and 'liver' on the inside, from the way the color commentators talk about it when the carcasses are being broken down for cooking.

Lori Coulson @ 172

Apologies, but I'm not sufficiently up-to-date with domestic cat neurology to make a sensible suggestion (I'm actually better at snow leopard neurological diseases at present).

dcb @219:
Cool, if I have problems tweaking my Mac I know where to go for help.
Oh. You meant real snow leopards.

@Paula Helm Murray #190:

Here is a recipe I've been itching to try; the problem is that it requires large, old turnips in good condition, which are almost impossible to find on my island for some reason. It's supposed to come out as a classic medieval illusion food: looks like caviar, tastes like spicy gingerbread--and it's turnips.

Baked turnip pudding. Take a turnip in good condition and cut it into thin slices. Thread them in a line so that the slices do not touch one another as they dry, and hang them in the sun or in a warm oven where bread has just been baked. They should not be watery; let them dry out well. Mash the dried slices and push the puree through a sieve. Put the turnip puree in a clay pot.

Take clear, light-colored honey [I skipped some steps because they aren't necessary with modern honey]--as much honey as you have puree. Add [the honey and] nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and saffron in such measure that no one spice dominates, nor is it overspiced. Seal the clay pot with dough, and steam it in the oven for two days and two nights. Then it will be good to eat. But if it is too liquid, add more turnip puree. It should be the texture of a lump of caviar.--From The Domostroi, Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. & transl. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy.

My notes: Russian ovens tended to be enormous, with hotter and cooler spots. You can probably get the same effect from a day in a slow cooker on Low if you are careful not to take off the lid. The turnip puree can also be gotten by rubbing fresh turnip through a sturdy sieve, soaking, then boiling, rinsing, and draining three times, rolling into pellets, and rubbing through a sieve again. Or mash or grate the fresh turnip, dry thoroughly, and soak for three days, changing the water daily. In any case, it will be somewhat bitter; the right amount of honey is supposed to remove the bitter note while preserving the good turnip taste.

Sexual Abuse By Military Recruiters

Aug 20, 2006
Sexual Abuse By Military Recruiters
More Than 100 Women Raped Or Assaulted By Recruiters In Past Year
By Amy S Clark

More of the bigoted corrupt abominable regime's effected misdeeds 2001-2008...

re 143: Script Ohio in action, for those who are curious

Lori Coulson @ 172: I do neurology, but not in cats; however, I am owned by several cats, one of whom is now more than 16 years old.

Shakiness is not common in elderly cats, although they certainly can develop neurodegenerative disease. Are there any other clinical signs to go along with this? Appetite changes, litterbox changes, skin/hair coat changes?

I thought I posted an update here a couple of days ago but it seems it didn't actually go through. No matter.

I've been peppering my sister with links so she has plenty of information at hand. She's only responded to one of my messages--with a worrying statement that if she's in for 20 years she can retire at 38, which seems to be making an awful lot of assumptions--but nothing else so far. However, my partner had an opportunity to chat with her last night over facebook (I'd already gone to bed, being as there's an 8 hour time difference between Finland and Oregon) and came away with the impression that she's done some solid research, and doesn't resent my worry and throwing information at her. Which is good.

Still, I worry that she isn't getting all the information she should--I have this Big Thing about informed consent--so I pepper with links and things people in service have told me (and thank you so much, everyone, for all of your help). I also worry that, as smart and socially well adjusted as she is (much moreso than my borderline autistic self), she's still lodged in that subconscious belief that someone who should be an authority can be trusted.

#127 ::: Terry Karney: Thank you for weighing in; I was hoping you would. I'm definitely going to relay your comments and recommend she talk to you.

But just because some of them push the envelope doesn't mean that one should paint them as purely black-hearted.

Indeed. I am suspicious of her recruiter specifically because of the rather grand statements my sister has made. OTOH, a friend of mine in the Marines told me about how he ditched his first recruiter because of much the same thing and went with his second because they answered his questions honestly. (And I told her this, of course.)

#140 ::: Mark: Yeah. After reading some of ginmar@livejournal's experiences... holy hell. I tried to emphasize to my sister that she needs to be prepared for such a possibility. And the possibility that the VA will not have her back, like Ginmar is dealing with. The world is fucking cruel to women (as I know all too personally).

And my sister neither sings nor plays an instrument, so band? Not gonna happen.

#158 ::: Lee: Another good point, and that one REALLY concerns me. Being raped by someone one knows is nothing uncommon for civilians (another one I know all too personally); it's going to be a special kind of hell when it's the people who you may have to rely on in life-or-death situations.

#181 ::: Bill Stewart: I have NO idea why she isn't considering the ROTC. I brought it up in my last message, though.

as an Air Force Reserves general I used to work with said, "if you put on the uniform, you're agreeing to pick up the gun when they need it", and that's a moral choice she'll need to think about.

Definitely. That's one of the things I and my Marines friend emphasized--be ready for the possibility you'll have to kill another human being.

Anyhow. Thank you all again for your words and links and advice. I appreciate this place SO much.

I'll post an update when I have one, although it might be awhile; between other RL stuff (like that my 79 year old granny was in the hospital for pneumonia very recently and that REALLY freaked me out), SAD, and my own up and down health I get a little forgetful...

Jenny Islander @217: I don't think that's a good example of the blindness you are describing because the point of Planet 51 is to turn a classic "WASPy Military Poster Boy vs. the Horrible Monsters" B-movie on its head. At one point in the preview I saw, he attempts to defuse a tense situation by giving Clean-Cut Mr. Recruiting Poster Smile No. 3 and ends up traumatizing some poor alien kid for life.

There's also the irony - which may or may not have been intended by the creators, but you never know - that the blond, white hero is voiced by an actor who is himself neither.

dcb@219, Pendrift@220 - On the "oh, you mean *real* snow leopards" sort of thread, my wife and I were once visiting her relatives in ~Phoenix, and her aunt asked us to fetch something from the garage, and apologized in advance for its appearance because "we have a bit of a packrat problem". Had I said that, it would have meant "we've got all kinds of junk piled in the garage", but we saw the pile of string and shiny things in the corner and realized she meant that there were actual packrats around, not just metaphorical ones.

Jenny Islander, #217, Dan Layman Kennedy, #226, I thought he looked like Buzz Lightyear.

My dad "retired" from the army nuclear program at 38, and then spent the next 20 years working in radiation safety in the civilian world. He would not have been able to live otherwise. He only stayed in for 20 years to get the guaranteed health care, and that promise was broken when they closed the nearest base to where we were living. I suppose we could have moved, but as it is, Tri-Care is his back up insurance. It's not just recruiters who exaggerate the benefits.

Open Threadiness: Rough week for Scientology. (via Skepchick.)

Ginger @ 224... I do neurology, but not in cats

This reminds me of a black cat we once had, and whose nickname was the Beast with Ten Neurons.

Anyone with a Mac: I really, REALLY need to find out how to save the sound files here before the BBC removes them--they're not on iTunes, unfortunately.

Bruce E. Durocher II: My usual add-ons don't work, but I just tried this and it does the trick. Drawbacks are that you need to turn the volume up (it basically records the sound coming from your speakers), and you need to play the full episode. It's not an ideal solution, but it'll do in a pinch.

Lee #192: Gail and I, unfortunately, can't ride to your aid, much as we'd love to.

Re shaky cats: my elderly dachshund developed similar symptoms (plus he was running into things) when we had him on oral ivermectin. Symptoms went away when we stopped the meds. Is your cat taking anything new? (NB: we also found that although a cat can't lick the flea preventative off the nape of its own neck, nothing stops them from licking it off each other. This too caused some creepy symptoms until we started separating them for several hours after treatment.)

Re: "Coffee bean to carbon atom" sidelight:

Pretty cool, but also missing a few obvious things. I mean, I can understand skipping human hairs, light waves, and DNA, due to their inconvenient shape, but... no cells from the coffee bean itself? No tardigrade, or buckyball?

Open threadiness, and counterpoint to the sidelight on the decline of newspaper circulation

Joel Achenbach, in this morning's Washington Post, on the power of narrative in an increasingly online and crosslinked world. (may require registration)

Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this. They know that the story is the original killer app.

Lots of good thoughts. I recommend highly.

In WWII, my Uncle Henry was a piper and saw combat in at least France and in India. He missed the boats at Dunkirk and turned up back in Scotland afterwards. He refused to talk about that period. He blamed his hair loss on a hot steel helmet in India - I have the same hair loss, so I doubt that.

Ginger, dcb -- Thanks, I did some digging on the Web, and it turns out that osteoarthritis in elderly cats can cause tremors -- it isn't true Parkinson's, it just looks like it.

D'Art has lost a little weight, but is still eating and using his litter box, and he sleeps alot. The tremors are not constant, and the fleeting problem with the back legs seems to be triggered by a change in the weather.

dcb, are you actually getting to work with real live snow leopards?! They are my partner's favorite big cat.

Real live snow leopard.

B Durbin #216:

In the discussion I linked to in an earlier post on this thread, we were talking specifically about blind spots--places where some big obvious event is happening, but the MSM simply don't mention it. (That discussion was triggered by the barely-reported-in-the-MSM pre-emptive arrests at the RNC in St. Paul last year.) I thought the Pulitzer-winning story on the Pentagon running a propoganda operation to slip shill "military analysts" into the network news shows was a good example: The story was apparently never mentioned on any of the commercial broadcast/cable news networks that were targeted, though I believe NPR and PBS did discuss it. The weird exclusions of coverage of the financial meltdown and ongoing recession seem similar.

In both cases, I'm not just talking about laziness, I'm talking about actively excluding certain information from the coverage, in a systematic way. Maybe this is really common, but I haven't noticed that many cases before. (If you know of more, I'd love to hear them.) I mean, I was used to exclusion of some viewpoints, but not obvious facts that pretty-much had to be intentionally excluded. I'm at something of a disadvantage noticing this, because since 9/11, I've been getting most of my news from overseas, and for the last couple years, a big fraction of my news is from overseas Spanish media. (Gracias, BBC Mundo y El Pais.)

Serge #195: Seampunk was Bruce Stippling's gang of quilters.

I would like to read a quiltpunk story by Bruce Sterling.

Earl Cooley III @ 242... Didn't he write stories with Rudy Rug-er?

In other Open Threadiness news, I'm in the middle of my first week of training in Huntsville. I haven't been able to go online as much as I might have liked, but I'm able to touch base now and then.

Alasdair Roberts' Lyke Wake Dirge. Now with more feedback!

albatross #241: Don't forget both the anti-war protests and the election protests under ShrubCo.

Apropos of nothing seen here: has anyone tried using HTML-Kit on a system running 32-bit Vista Home Basic? I could run it on my old XP laptop just fine, but that laptop is currently sitting in the repair shop with a nonfunctional motherboard, and I'm stuck using my husband's Vista laptop. I need to do a bit of work on a website I made back when my computer was working, but every time I try to start up HTML-Kit, I get error messages from Windows stating that "thus-and-such.exe has stopped working" and offering "close program: as my only option. After about five of these, the screen dims and I am asked whether or not I mean for a program to continue. Answering "Yes" does get HTML-Kit open, but with what appears to be reduced functionality. The programs that stop working appear to be some of the plugins I am used to using in HTML-Kit.

Anybody have experience with this?

albatross: The first (non-political) thing that spring to mind is the housing bubble. Waaaaay back in 2005, I was looking around at housing prices, then looking at traditional affordability standards, and thinking, "I'm missing something." A few searches turned up things like The Housing Bubble Blog, which laid out why we were in a bubble, how to tell it WAS a bubble, and so forth. (The reasons go back thirty years, actually, with every few years adding a new thing. The repeal of Sarbannes-Oxley— a law which kept traditional banks and investment banks separate— in 1996 or thereabout was the tipping point.)

At any rate, one of the continuing themes on The Housing Bubble Blog is the framing of housing stories. During the bubble, every article on housing prices would include quotes from a Realtor™ saying how housing only ever went up, "we've reached a permanently high plateau," and so forth. During the first slide, it was "Nobody saw this coming" (a blatant lie, as multiple financial experts explained in great detail what was going to happen and were scorned), and "We've reached the bottom." During the last decade, it's been "a great time to buy" (regardless of price or whatnot.)

Another thing that has been happening of late is the sob story of the person losing their home to foreclosure. The reason these are "frames" is because the reporter never seems to ask how the people involved got into the hole, when just a little digging on public records usually turns up a major refinance or a new mortgage taken out on a paid-off property. Not to take the sleazy loan sellers off the hook, but a little due diligence would be able to find the people who deserve sympathy, rather than the ones who are mentioned as driving their new cars with their new boats and "oh, why are we losing this property?"

Part of it was willful blindness, sure. But part of that is sheer laziness. As a private citizen with no more than a hunch and an internet connection, I was able to determine that the crazy-high house prices were, in fact, crazy, and would come down. With consequences. But only now are reporters seeming to wake up to the fact of the bubble and its effect on the economy.

I think the scariest part is that the timeline, recession and all, was laid out on the site back in 2006, just from a knowledge of history and human nature. Well, and ARM resets. They'll be off on that last wave because ARMs automatically adjust when the loan-to-value ratio dips below a certain point, so we won't have to wait until 2012 for the last shoe to drop. It may have dropped already.

Terry @174: It might also be that, absent something like a madeline, shredding carrots, et al, would be a lot more work that slicing up a leafy plant.

"Mandoline", surely? Though now I have a very strange image of Proust dreamily partaking of dim sum (or yum cha, depending on location), dipping a lightly crispy fried cake of shredded Chinese radishes into his tea.

General oben-thready question, mainly to people who know something about health care in the US.

From what I've heard during the reform debate, my impression is that you've got a big problem with lack of coverage for poor people, but at the same time, the "rescissions" of coverage can be disastrous for middle class people, too.

Now, what kind of confuses me is that it looks to me as if this last point might sometimes even be a problem for people who are pretty close to being upper class. The stories I've heard make it sound as if you could make, say, 800,000 dollars a year, and then you get some serious illness where the treatment is relatively expensive, you can't continue to work in your job because of the illness, your insurance company rescinds your policy, and a quick calculation shows you that your savings and dividends will be enough to pay for your treatment + basic costs of living for a few years, but after that- you don't have any clue what comes after that.

The reason why this confuses me is that my general impression about the way the world works was that people who make 800,000 dollars a years usually have ways and means to protect themselves from this kind of thing. So, is there something I'm missing? Some kind of more expensive parallel insurance system that will pay for things regular insurance companies won't pay for? Or do you really have a situation where people with incomes in the high six digits can, at any time, get into trouble because of medical costs?

B Durbin @ #248: "The repeal of Sarbannes-Oxley"

Nitpick. Not Sarbanes-Oxley. Glass-Steagall. S-O was passed in 2002 as a response to Enron and its ilk, attempting to make corporate boards and executives more accountable for the numbers their companies put out in financial statements.

Raphael @ 250: "...do you really have a situation where people with incomes in the high six digits can, at any time, get into trouble because of medical costs?"

Yes.

And not only because those are also the people overextended on their credit cards, eihter.

I know someone who had a health policy good for half a million dollars. Two months in the hospital ate that right up. I daresay the six figure income lasts a bit longer, but that's not infinite, and catastrophic illnesses do not file timetables.

The Particle on "Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders" reminds me of a book I scanned and helped prepare for Project Gutenberg some years back. It's called "Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences", and it amounts to a collection of such broadsides. Only a few illustrations, though. You can find it here, if you're interested: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13097

Pendrift: thanks--I'll try it right away!

On another front, I was trying to make a point about fashion designers that seem to hate the women they design clothes for, and as a part of the whole discussion I tried to show the person I was talking to the extremely wonderful Particle about dresses that only Audry Hepburn could wear. Unfortunately I can't remember when it was and a month-by-month of the Particles isn't showing it. Can someone head me in the right direction?

The Tay Bridge Disaster thread's been silent a couple of weeks, but the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had a few parts fall down in the wind a couple of days ago, and they still don't have it fixed. (Fortunately not a Disaster; three cars were damaged and one person non-seriously injured, but they've closed the bridge for safety until they get everything inspected and repaired, and traffic's a mess for anybody who lives near there.)

They did a bunch of work over Labor Day (which here in the US is anti-leftistly at the end of summer instead of in May) to put in a temporary side-piece so they can do major earthquake retrofit to the main span, and had to patch some parts that broke during that operation. This week there were some cables that blew down in the wind-storms, and then some of the parts they'd patched broke, dropping a few tons of material on the section below.

The broken section is between Treasure Island and Oakland - it's supposedly still possible to use the western span to reach Treasure Island. Unlike in William Gibson's bridge trilogy, squatters haven't settled on the bridge yet...

Lori Coulson @ 239: Sadly, no I'm not getting to work with real snow leopards, just read all about them and their diseases and health care and put all the information together. They are amazing - described by researchers as unaggressive - and they have fantastic scent-based systems of keeping apart from one another (so not messing up hunting) except for during the mating season. Cubs stay with their mother for ages as well, while they learn to hunt.

However, I have worked with all sorts of other species including cranes and wallabies and lemurs and 16,000 oiled penguins, so I've been lucky, really.

Lori Coulson @ 239: Oops - hit post without finishing... You can get medication for osteoarthritis in cats - not so easy as in dogs (use of NSAIDs needs to be balanced against effects on kidneys), but can be used. Makes sense that osteoarthritis might be worse in cold weather.

Paul A. @ 240: Great picture! They have amazingly long, fluffy tails.

Bill Stewart @ 255... Unlike in William Gibson's bridge trilogy, squatters haven't settled on the bridge yet...

Probably because of the Troll...

Raphael @ 250: If you are employed at a job with good benefits, you can get insurance as part of the group. If you are not employed, you have to buy insurance as an individual. If you have a history of expensive illness, no insurance company will sell you coverage. If you exhaust all of your savings, and reach the poverty line, then you qualify for government insurance coverage. You'll also qualify for government insurance if you're elderly. Some states offer policies for individuals who cannot buy private insurance, but not all do.
It's ghastly, and inhumane. At least 2 of my family members would not be able to buy insurance if they weren't employed.

I wonder how many people in the US could write a check for their health care max out of pocket expenses without going into debt. Or hell, even the deductible.

I'm a little peeved now, since my health insurance company has changed the plan we're on for next year 'to remain competitive'. They're upping the max-out of pocket, and going from 80% coverage to 70% coverage once you hit the deductible. Thankfully, it appears that there are other options, from other carriers. I wonder how long the others are going to last...

Raphael at 250 : The stories I've heard make it sound as if you could make, say, 800,000 dollars a year, and then you get some serious (illness where the treatment is relatively expensive, you can't continue to work in your job because of the illness, your insurance company rescinds your policy...

I can see a couple of possible mitagations of this worse-case scenerio. A company valuing someone that much is unlikely to fire them if they have to stop working because of illness. The company may shift them to a special lower-paid disability status (the company may have insurance coverage for such situations). The health insurance coverage under the company's group plan will remain in effect.

In the long term, if someone is disabled seriously by illness and cannot resume work they may qualify for Social Security Disability and government health coverage under Medicare.

Renatus (#225, various) — {*} <– small parcel of hope and cheer, to be opened at need. This does not sound like an easy time at all.

D. Potter (#252) Two thoughts on health insurance reform promotion:
        Looks like a good idea to publicize as many cases as possible of high-earning people who've been brought down, or their survivors near-pauperized, by illness (preferably not seen as self-inflicted, eg, drug-related). I keep hearing that lower-income USians often support policies that favour much higher-income ones, optimistically feeling they'll get up there (somehow not seeing that what they're supporting will probably make that less likely, apart from any other bad effects).
That might strike home more than the suffering of "not-us" people (battlers here, losers there).
        … Umm … Darn, should have written that down straight away. (Did I mention apart from dry mouth, pins and needles, vomiting, diarrhoea, drowsiness, and unsteady gait, the unpleasant effects of that drug include confusion?) If it comes back, I'll link to here.

Bill Stewart (#255) A Treasure Island you can walk to across a bridge? Disappointing.

abi (#155) *sadly puts away Oz immigration brochures and links featuring mucho sunshine* OTOH, NL sounds like an excellent place to study a very different social mindset

Janet K @ 261: You mentioned Social Security disability. I don't have any personal experience with it (fortunately), but I've read in The Oregonian that it's difficult to get that coverage. The average wait for a hearing is 650 days -- more than a year and a half. Many claims that are eventually approved are rejected the first time.

Sad story: Getting disability payments can be a fight to the death

dcb @ 256: However, I have worked with all sorts of other species including cranes and wallabies and lemurs and 16,000 oiled penguins, so I've been lucky, really.

Was that the incident that led to people knitting sweaters for penguins?

Denial of health insurance coverage should be criminalized as conspiracy to commit negligent homicide.

Earl, sod that, negligent homicide is too lenient by half. Recission evinces a reckless indifference to human life.

Janet @ 263: It has been my understanding that, barring something blatant like multiple amputations or paralysis, it is routine to deny all SSD claims on the first pass. You don't appeal, you don't get.

People have had insurance applications denied for conditions were successfully treated for years earlier, or for conditions they don't even have. People have had insurance denied or rescinded for conditions that can be treated for not much money, also. I've also heard of at least one case where the insurance company rescinded the policy because the doctor wrote a note on a chart and never discussed it with the patient, but the insurance company claimed the patient should have known about whatever-it-was and therefore committed fraud by not putting it on the application. All of those, and people who have their insurance rescinded or claims denied after initially being approved, because their conditions are expensive and the insurance companies don't want to cut into their profits (their CEOs might have to take cuts to their multi-million dollar paychecks, poor babies).

In other words, the insurance companies can do whatever they want. Most states are perfectly happy to allow that, too.

There would be at least two degrees of offense: a special circumstance of "depraved indifference" would, of course, properly affect sentencing guidelines. Failing to process a claim on a Friday afternoon and waiting until Monday to deal with it (causing avoidable out-of-pocket expense for the patient) wouldn't be quite as bad as blatantly denying coverage to meet a coverage denial performance benchmark.

Janet L and Mark. I was just mentioning that such a safety net theoretically exists. I too have heard how difficult it is to be approved for Social Security Disability.

Nevertheless I do know two people who have recently started receiving SSD. In both cases the initial application was approved. I think the process took about six months.

My first application to Social Security was denied and the second was approved two years later. But I did have a brand new type of renal failure, so it wasn't in the catalog. I also had a lawyer paid for by the private disability because they could pay me less if I had SS.

Linkmeister @ 251: Heh. Getting my laws screwed up. It was from memory, though, so I'm surprised I spelled it correctly.

Treasure Island is a created island, dredged up for a World's Fair. It's so called because the fill has gold in it, washed down from the Sierras. Not in any amount worth recovering, but it's there.

On health insurance in general, ours is integrated with the doctors. The doctors receive a salary, and the insurance is processed in-building. One of the "downsides" is that you can have multiple doctors for the same thing (such as pregnancy); I really don't see the issue as they keep good records, and you don't have to see somebody you don't like. The major upside is that if a doctor prescribes a treatment, it's covered. No paperwork hassles or denials of coverage after the fact.

I really don't get why this style of healthcare isn't more common. Some people really hate it, but I've been in it for most of my life and have never had an issue.

B. Durbin: The Kaiser healthcare system in Hawaii (and California, I think) works pretty much exactly like that. Some like it, some don't.

Here's your All-American safety net for the poor:

My brother-in-law, who owns a small business, broke his neck. Due to prompt and correct first aid and a halo brace, he is walking. However, as a small business owner, he quickly ran through his insurance (this was back in the days when small business owners could afford health insurance) and drained his cash reserves. So he applied for medical aid. Here's what they told him:

*Sell your business, preferably at a loss. (Okay, what they told him was, "No money until you do this," which translates to "Sell right away, which will probably involve taking a loss.")
*Ditto for your house. Where are you and your broken neck going to sleep? Not our problem.
*You may keep one car. No, not your work vehicles, with which you might generate income. Just the old truck you go to the beach with your dogs in. We don't care whether you will be able to feed the dogs.
*Prove that you have destroyed yourself economically in all possible ways. Then we will pay for the medical care necessary to help you become fit for work. If you can prove that you really have a broken neck.

So he chose to go without the aid and work out a payment plan with the hospital, which he could not meet exactly on schedule because he had drained his rainy day reserves paying the initial medical costs and then--whaddayaknow?--it rained, so now he has lousy credit. A man who has never made a frivolous financial decision in his life.

But it could have been a lot worse.

#273: At least he isn't living under fascist socialism, where he couldn't choose his doctor!

Did everyone catch the wonderful video of Senator Franken dead-pan evisceration of a Hudson Institute "expert?"

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/23/al-franken-kicks-ele.html

Stefan Jones #274: Is that really a talking point? In this age of preferred provider networks?

I just--guh. Heartburn or no heartburn, I'm going to bed.

Oh, wait, here's another. A friend of mine has been miserably ill for years in that American way where you drag yourself to work anyway because that's how you pay for the medication. One diagnosis after another proved to be incorrect. Well, she finally has what she hopes is a correct diagnosis. Good news: The list of symptoms fits her previously baffling medical issues to a tee. Bad news: The nearest treatment center is three time zones away. Worse news: She has 18 weeks to get all better. After that, her employer can legally fire her, which shifts her to COBRA coverage that her family may be able to afford for a while, but probably not. After that, she will have no health insurance. If she can get on her husband's policy, it won't cover her preexisting condition, but his premiums will go up anyway. She will not qualify for government health insurance because her husband makes too much money. She will not be able to find a private policy, anywhere. And she will be juuuuuust functional enough not to qualify for SSD.

And the nearest treatment center for her disease will still be three time zones away.

The possible steps from there to a family medical bankruptcy I leave up to the reader.

Summer Storms #247:
Apologies if it's too basic (and already attempted) but have you tried running the program in "compatibility mode"?

Right-click the program icon, click on properties.

Select the compatility tab, check the box for "run this program in compatibility mode for", and select appropriate OS version from the drop-down menu.

Click "Apply", "Ok", cross fingers and try running the program.

B. Durban at #248 "we've reached a permanently high plateau" -- as far as I can tell, this phrase means "run" - cash out and hide the cash under your mattress (or at least in guaranteed forms.) Does anyone else remember a Wired cover story "The Long Boom"? Just after that, the .dot com bubble burst.

How did bubbles come to be so frequent that they overlap? It used to be a once-a-generation or even once-a-lifetime thing. But we've had two of three at least in twenty years - can I count Bre-X as a bubble?

Arbitrary open-thread linkiness:
Interview with Meg Barker, editor of Understanding Non-Monogamies

Summer Storms @ #247:

I have nothing useful to offer, since I have had as little to do with Vista as I could contrive to arrange; I just want to say: HTML-Kit! Woo!

Raphael @250--Here's one reason even highly-paid people can go broke fast when they get sick. Drug prices in many European countries are closely controlled as the result of bargaining between the governments and Big Pharma. Here, Big Pharma does not bargain with the government--Big Pharma tells the government what we will pay and the government agrees that this is just and fair.

We have two national-level disability programs in the US: Social Security Disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits. The latter is related to the former, because they use the same medical standards, but is means-based on income and assets; SSD is based on earnings--if you are unemployed for around five years before you file the claim, your coverage is likely to have lasped, and if you are self-employed and fail to pay your Social Security taxes, which quite a few self-employed people, including our Secretary of the Treasury fail to do, you aren't covered at all, despite haveing been gainfully employed for many years. So it's possible to not be covered by the SSD program, and to have too much in assests to quailify for the SSI program.

These programs work for quite a few, but have many gaps. The biggest is that the condition has be considered either fatal, or likely to last, at a disabling level, for more than 12 months. It's remarkable how many kinds of cancer are not expected to kill you. It's also interesting that, say, a hip replacement is something you can be counted on to be all better from within 12 months in every single case, until proven otherwise.

The national medical programs are Medicare and Medicaid. Medicaid is also means-tested. Medicare, which is for retirees and the disabiled, is tied to work history, in ways similar but not identical to Social Security. There have been changes since I last checked, but if I recall correctly, receiving SSI benfits usually includes access to Medicaid benefits but not vice versa.

People who receive SSD are entitled to Medicare as well, but only after they've been disabled for a little over two years from where Social Security sets the start of their disability--which may or may not be when they really stopped work and their COBRA coverage starts up (assuming they could afford the COBRA payments). So it's possible to end up with a gap in coverage between your own insurance and Medicare--and this can be a month--or a year. Here's the website, in case you all want more information about FDR's fine socialist program*.

Different states may also have their own medical supplement programs, designed to augment or replace Medicaid (and therefore probably means-based), and some have disability programs as well.

I don't include the VA system in this, as this is a program not available to all legal residents of the US--it is its own animal, and has its own rules.

*Historical joke.

PJ #267:

The thing is, there are cases of fraud going the other way--people who get diagnosed with cancer or HIV, and then sign up for health insurance. That's a real problem, as real as the bit the other direction. (I've heard of this being a serious issue, many years ago, with HIV positive patients getting life insurance policies.)

It seems to me that there's a problem here that's a lot more general than recission. It seems like there's a huge asymmetry in legal proceedings. Large companies often seem to strategically commit fraud, knowing that the cost if they're caught is smaller than the expected benefit. Delaying actions in court can often force someone to accept a sh-tty settlement, or to give up, as with the person who dies of cancer a year and a half into their legal battle with the insurance company.

My uninformed take on this is that strategic fraud ought to have large financial consequences, and that (for example) insurance companies should be required to continue coverage until the case is resolved, assuming they've been cashing the premium checks for awhile. But getting there seems like it requires changes in the way our political system works.

@Clifton: It is Kaiser. Based out of Oakland, and I know they've got some presence in Colorado as well. I gather that the reason a lot of people don't like Kaiser is the aforementioned shuttling around and the fact that they stick to "proven" treatments, which sucks if you get something that they're still doing treatment trials for.

@Jenny: Three time zones away? I'm really hoping at this point that "Islander" refers to Hawai'i, because otherwise it seems ludicrous that treatment is only available on the far coast. And the 18 week deadline is also ludicrous. Diseases don't just disappear on command.

Keep us updated.

fidelio at 280: SSD is based on earnings--if you are unemployed for around five years before you file the claim, your coverage is likely to have lasped...

As someone who started receiving regular Social Security earlier this year, I'd like to clarify this statement: To qualify for Social Security you need 40 lifetime credits. If you work fulltime for a year and pay into the system (as required by law), you earn four credits, so it's unlikely your coverage has lapsed if you didn't work for the past five years but have a stable work history previously. (If you are young when you become disabled, the number of credits needed is decreased.)

I didn't realize there was a two-year wait for Medicare coverage after someone is approved for SSD.

Regarding Social Security Disability:

Generally, you need 40 credits, 20 of which were earned in the last 10 years ending with the year you become disabled.

Just general open-threadiness -- I just LOVE getting the dead-tree versions of things I have worked on in the mail! Today I got my copy of The Intersection of Native America and Fantasy, for which I did layout and indexing, AND the Fall 2009 issue of Mythlore, which I edit. Shiny!

Janet K @283 and Jen b @ 284--Yes. Social Security covers retirement benefits, disability benefits, and benefits for dependents of retirees and the disabled, as well as workers' widow(ers, thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg et al.) and minor children--the requirements to qualify differ between retirement benefits and disability benefits. The disability portion of the program mostly dates back to the 1960s, while the original retirement program was part of the New Deal legislation of the 1930s.

Interestingly, federal government employees qualify for Medicare, but not, generally Social Security benefits. Also, because of the retirement programs already in place in that industry by the 1930s (thank the unions!), railroad workers have a separate program from Social Security.

There was a long period before military retirees and disabled veterans were also qualified for Social Security benefits, although this has been changed.

Jen B at 284. Thanks for the link that clarifies my clarification. I missed that section.

Earning 20 credits--currently four credits are accumulated after earning around $4000 in a year--in the ten years before qualifying for SS disability would not be possible if the person didn't work for six of those years.

Raphael @250:

So, is there something I'm missing? Some kind of more expensive parallel insurance system that will pay for things regular insurance companies won't pay for?

I've been wondering about this myself. Is there some kind of super-expensive insurance that promises never to cut you off? Are there people who really are rich enough to pay for serious or long-term medical care without insurance?

Or are there just lots of people out there who believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them? Either they won't get sick or the insurance company will be on their side all the way . . . I can't imagine it personally, but there must be some explanation for why some people appear to trust the current system.

LDR @ 288 -

but there must be some explanation for why some people appear to trust the current system.

People trust the system because it is the current system. Someone did a study -- a year or so ago, a majority of the public polled said the current system needed to be fixed. A few months ago, the same question was asked, and the percentage of people who liked the current system went up -- merely because of the possibility that it might be changed.

We are not driven by logic and reason -- we are driven by emotion, and sometimes guided by logic and reason.

OK, I've been having an argument with a fatuous troll on another site (which I suppose I shouldn't name, but whatever).

Does anyone here know the reason why no element with an atomic number greater than 92 has any stable isotopes? Is it known to be impossible for, say, element 119 when it's discovered/created to have stable isotopes?

I'm arguing that a superpowerful energy-source element—one different from any yet known—could not be carried in significant quantities in the blood of an ordinary human without causing severe health problems and probably death. Thus the fact that just that happens in a particular ficton is in itself a contradiction of known science, and not merely an extension of it.

It's a pretty stupid argument, and the person I'm arguing with is an insect, so I'll probably let it drop. I'm not going to go back and tell him "Ha! You're wrong because thus-and-so!" I just want to know for my own satisfaction.

All you have to do to create stable isotopes with an atomic number greater than 92 is program quarkbots (like nanobots, but made from quarks) to cage each individual atom and artificially keep it stable for as long as necessary. Simple, right?

Xopher, I don't have an answer to your question (I was never in any danger of becoming a chemist), but I'm enormously amused that the magic number for instability is 93. Somewhere in Elysium, Saint Aleister is laughing his balls off.

Xopher @290, quantum mechanics was a long time ago and we covered nuclear physics only briefly, but here's what I can tell you:

The strong nuclear force falls off extremely rapidly with distance, so generally speaking nuclei can only get so big before they become very unstable. This is why the high transuranic elements have very short half-lives.

That said, there are good theoretical reasons to expect an "island of stability" where the actual as opposed to approximate workings of the strong nuclear force create more tightly bound nuclei. (The analogy to "filled electron shells" is usually invoked here.) Even among known elements you can see this; there are relatively stable isotopes of uranium and neptunium, for instance, while francium (with a lower atomic mass) has no isotopes with a half-life longer than a few minutes. Estimates vary by many orders of magnitude as to what half-lives in this island of stability could actually be, but from what I can tell based on some cursory searches most estimates are in the realm of minutes or hours -- so they're much more stable than the milliseconds that would be expected without this island, but not "stable" in the usual sense of the word. However some theorists have suggested that half-lives for elements in this island could be measured in thousands or millions of years. I'm not remotely qualified to evaluate those claims.

In the case of your crackpot, though, it's unclear how he expects these to be (a) naturally occurring and (b) not deadly poison -- for many heavy elements, if you ingest them the poison will kill you long before the radiation.

Xopher @ 290 -

That would depend on how significant the mass is and how it reacts chemically. A picogram probably wouldn't be much trouble. Theoretically the element could be inert and never cause any trouble.

Xopher, if I understood and remember correctly, it's because the nuclear force (which holds protons and neutrons together in spite of the like charges of the protons) operates only over very tiny distances. In a nucleus with more than 92 protons (atomic number=# of protons), the size of the nucleus is greater than the range of the nuclear force, so the protons repel each other.

(Please, more knowledgeable fluorospherians, correct me if I've misunderstood!)

I knew it was something to do with the size of the nucleus, but the details eluded me. They now make sense. Thanks everyone!

Islands of stability are hypothesized for some superheavy elements.

Islands of stability

fidelio@286

Actually, federal employees in FERS do qualify for Social Security benefits. Nearly as I can gather, workers in the older CSRS do not.

(FERS is the retirement system for federal workers who began work in January 1987 or later, as well as workers who began earlier but switched to FERS from CSRS.)

Paul A., re #278's link:

I'm curious about that interview's mention of "polyamourous comics". Really?

Who in the fluorosphere is in San Jose for the World Fantasy Con? My significant and I may still make it for the weekend*, but if not the location is also close enough for me to drop by for a soda, if a meetup were to exist outside of the badges-only-zone.

-------
* while it sold out, memberships-for-resale are popping up at random times and prices.

B. Durbin, #282, I have Kaiser Mid-Atlantic and I've had two experimental treatments (one with each renal failure) and am in another now (using cytoxan to help decrease predisone without withdrawal). I didn't notice any big deal about them, other than some paperwork to sign with the second one. I have a lot of things wrong with me and the local Kaiser specialists are in different clinics (no Kaiser hospitals here, there's enough hospitals already) but I only have to go to the next county regularly.

My Kaiser contract came today plus the formulary. I checked my meds and they're all in the formulary (the one brand name is still brand name) and I'll read the contract (223 pages) tomorrow, but I expect it to be much like this year's.

LDR, #288, I have a Medicare Advantage HMO, High Option, Plan D, and I have no lifetime limit. (Which is a good thing because Kaiser and Medicare have spent more than $2 million on me so far.) I pay a slightly higher premium for the High Option, Plan D, but because I'm so sick, it's actually cheaper in the end.

I've had the same premium from Kaiser for this plan for a number of years and it's going up $7/month next year. I suspect this comes with the most-likely insurance law change that will decrease payments to Medicare Advantage plans.

@300: I might could make a meetup too, given that all the factors intersect properly. Sunday more likely than Saturday.

Paula @190: Well, everybody doesn't like something, and things with strong flavors probably have more people who don't like them. It could be that you just don't like the basic flavor of turnips. Or maybe you never had good turnips. But I'm betting on the former (that you simply don't like Turnips).

However, turnips are not a nasty trick for me. For me, they are iffy: if they are young and nice, and if they are cooked nicely (or not cooked but prepared nicely), and if I am in the mood for them, they are delightful.

I eat them in vinegar, like Japanese cucumbers, sometimes with cucumbers, and/or radishes and/or kohlrabi and/or celery root. I cube them with celery root and sautee them with onions and garlic and chiles and herbs for potato-less home fries (better than potatoes I think). If I make tempura -- which I don't do anymore, because nobody's home for Hanukah and that's the only time of year I deep fry anything -- turnips are there. I chunk them with celery root, beets, a bit of potato, kohlrabi, carrot, and sometimes sweet potato, and coat them lightly with oil and bake them with garlic, onion, chiles and herbs. I cook them tender enough to mash and mash them with cauliflower and celery root for a thing which behaves culinarily like mashed potatoes (but isn't as stable when held in a warm place, so don't). I cook them tender enough to mash and and mash them with tender-cooked kale and gobs of salsa fresca. I grate them with carrot instead of daikon, when turnips are cheap or available and daikon isn't (after all where do turnips stop and radishes or daikon begin? I don't know). And I stew them with carrots and onions and cabbage and celery or celery root and some kind of bony meat, whatever I can find that is still cheap (a bad side effect of the foodie revolution is that shanks and tails have become gourmet food, and what's up with that?).

So I am fond of turnips, because I know some nice ways to eat them. There is also Chinese turnip cake, which is heavenly, but I don't cook it. Yet.

Lucy #302: Wow! I've just copied your turnip ideas into my Recipes folder.

I recently got a huge turnip from my Mom's farm-share (I didn't weigh it, but it was more than half the size of my head). It being far too big for one meal (in any form), I cut it up, steamed the pieces, and froze it in baggies, to occasionally be eaten as a side dish (with butter and a bit of vinegar to cut the bitterness), or tossed into other dishes.

I had thought the difference between turnips and radishes was varietal, but Wikipedia gives different genuses for them (both in the Brassica family).

I'm a little uneasy about classification of the brasicaceae. Every time I feel comfortable with it, I read something that turns my head upside down/ They're really quite mind-boggling.

I'm very happy with them generally as food, but it annoys me that they don't, as a clade, make friends with soil fungi. It seems sort of wrong that something so yummy isolates itself from the dirt community like that.

Lucy, I'm going to have a go at cooking turnips the way you suggested. I have a sneaking suspicion that my mother probably cooked the hell out of them. which can concentrate the sulphur in the cabbagy plants.

After all, I hated her brussels sprouts (little, nasty, stinky grey cabbages), but like the ones I cook...(mine are still green and a little crunchy, I like quartering them and sauteeing them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Or roasting them.

hmm, might try that with turnips.

@ B. Durbin #282: This disease is so rare that even though I am a voracious reader of "My Weird Experiences as a Doctor" memoirs, I had never heard of it. My friend lives in Alaska and she has to go to Wisconsin for treatment.

Lucy@302, Chinese turnip cakes are trivially easy if you live near a Chinese grocery store. They come pre-made, ready to fry. If it's a larger store, you can even find vegetarian ones, though most of the brands include dried shrimp. I generally make a soy/ginger/garlic sauce to put on them. I haven't tried making them from scratch; the prefab ones are pretty good, and they also have similar taro cakes.

Steve C: Also, many people have had basically good (at least acceptable) experiences with their health insurance companies, and expect that any change may be for the worse. My experiences have been pretty good, in general, through a few somewhat expensive tests and health worries for me, as well as lifelong asthma for me and one of my kids.

The one exception was AETNA through COBRA, after I was laid off from my job. They cashed six months worth of checks from me, but "accidentally" lost me in their computer. (I didn't dare stop paying premiums, since that would mean no coverage at all.) After a letter to the State Attorney General, state insurance regulator, and Dept. of Labor COBRA compliance office, they somehow miraculously found my computer records.

I assume this was an attempt to get rid of some high-cost clients who were annoyingly exempt from any kind of exclusion on previous conditions, but it's possible it was some scam or incompetence on the part of the intermediary agency that dealt with my ex-employer's insurance stuff, or some employee or department within the insurance company. Calling them and AETNA on my own certainly had no visible effect on the problem. The letter CCed to the regulators apparently reminded someone, somewhere, that the boss was watching.

Xopher @290: and the person I'm arguing with is an insect

An insect? I'm guessing that would be archy the super-roach, who gained the power of human typing after being bitten by a radioactive human being. His one weakness, as I recall, was the Shift key.

you mean archy
the vers libre bard
who listened to mehitabel the cat
singing toujours gai
well no
this guy has no class at all
compared even to ordinary roaches

xopher

Speaking of insects...

Hmm. I wasn't expecting this comment to relate to the current topic at all.

My apartment building has a fly problem at the moment. Any thoughts on keeping them out of my apartment? I've killed at least 10 flies today and I know I haven't got them all.

I'm mostly worried about my rabbits and the open litter boxes (even though I clean them out once a day, I'm afraid they'll keep attracting flies). Because of the bunnies, I'm reluctant to use poison or anything they might get into. They have the run of most of the apartment during the day.

I know we have an exterminator in once a month, so I'm hoping the building problem will be taken care of soon, but dealing with the flies in the meanwhile is becoming more and more stressful. It's also meant I've been keeping the windows closed despite the fact that this means my apartment temperature is hovering in the 80s.

#311
Sometimes they're so small they can go through screens, or any gap that might be there.
I've tried sticky traps (non-toxic), but I'm not sure that anything is really effective.

They're about 1/2" regular houseflies.

I've been using the fly swatter and finally broke out my last roll of (non-toxic) fly paper, but I'm feeling a bit defeated tonight and worried that sooner or later the rabbits are going to end up with a case of fly-strike no matter what I do.

I don't know if it would work with houseflies, but I'm dealing with fruit flies right now, and the most effective traps seem to be a glass or jar with a funnel set on top and a scrap of paper towel with some vinegar on it in the bottom. My next job is to make a draft dodger for under the door to the cubby where I keep my worm bin-- the flies came in when I brought it in for the winter and left it in the open too long. Hopefully, the worms will eat what I've given them quickly and the flies will leave.

Open-threadiness: to those attending WFC, be sure to check out artist Lisa Snellings, if you haven't already. She makes wonderful art of many kinds. It may make you happy. :)

As promised, an update:

I have no idea if my sister availed herself of any of the information I gave. At any rate, the whole thing was more of a done deal than I thought; day before yesterday she traveled across Oregon to Portland and did whatever it was that needs to be done (I honestly don't know what it entails) to enlist in the Navy. She got the job rating of AO and will ship next August, a couple of months after she graduates high school.

I support her, of course, although at the same time I'm not really sure what to feel about this. It's definitely mixed up in some feelings of isolation and outsiderness (I am definitely the neon purple sheep of my family (and thank you Lee for that terminology)).

C'est la vie. Thank you again, everyone.

*gratefully takes the little package of hope and cheer from Mez*

#314: I use cider vinegar mixed with dish detergent. Red wine works too.

Hilary Hertzoff @ 313

Bit expensive idea: UV/electrocution grid: attractor light which electrocutes the flies (as seen in butchers' shops etc.)

Cheap idea but less fly-welfare friendly*: fly strips hung from the ceiling (sticky plus toxic agent; flies get caught and then are killed by the toxin) - it's well out the way of the rabbits.

To protect the rabbits: if they are clean around their back end, and you're checking that daily, and they don't have any wounds or e.g. damp dewlaps that could attract the flies, then they are unlikely to get flystrike. However, if you are concerned, there are products designed for rabbits, such as permethrin spot-on products (but not if they are in close contact with cats). There's also cyromazine, which is an insect growth inhibitor. It doesn't repel flies but it stops larvae developing from L1 to L2.

Remember that high temperatures are stressful to rabbits - don't overheat them while trying to protect them from flies. Screens on the windows?

* I know, most people don't worry about such things but I do. If I have to kill, even an invertebrate, I want it to be a humane death.

Thanks everybody for the tips. I had one fly strip leftover from a previous invasion, which I put up last night, and I'll go out and get more today.

I have screens on the windows, but trying to figure out where the flies were getting in was part of the problem. I think I've narrowed it down to the vents in the bathroom and kitchen. Another friend suggested taping dryer sheets over the vents, so I shall see how that works.

dcb @318 Thanks for the reassurance. Searching on flies and rabbits brings up the most alarming sites and no information on what to do for a minor problem.

I've said for a while that the Democrats have a political Battered Spouse Syndrome. It seems that August Pollack agrees with me.

Hilary Hertzoff @ 319

You're right; there are a lot of sites out there and it can be difficult to know which ones are providing good information.

A good UK-based one (most of the information is universal, of course) is Rabbit Welfare Association & Fund (http://www.rabbitwelfare.co.uk/). They have a whole load of useful leaflets and advice sheets linked from Advice and resources - Information leaflets and advice. (http://www.rabbitwelfare.co.uk/resources/index.php?section=leaflets.html)

Their .pdf leaflet on flystrike is at:
http://www.rabbitwelfare.co.uk/resources/content/leaflet_pdfs/flystrike_sep_05.pdf

In the US, I think the House Rabbit Society is quite good - http://www.rabbit.org/

Have you ever seen a horse fly?

No, but I've seen a fly strip.

dcb @231 I tried www.rabbit.org first, but I couldn't find much about safe ways to keep flies from rabbit litter in all the information about how horrible fly-strike is and what to do if you see signs of it. It was very discouraging.

I went several places looking for fly strips and finally found them in the local hardware store. I also saw someone spraying the garbage bins with raid, so I'm hoping the fly problem will be under control soon.

Elliott at #111: A long-time friend of mine was recruited directly into the Marine Band as the music librarian. She never held a gun, never went to "basic training," and never even left the States--except when the band went on tour. So maybe not to worry.

OTOH, she's in Kabul, as a FSO for the State Dept....

Lori at #172: I can't say for certain, but cats *can* have "cerebral events" -- i.e., strokes. One of mine did (she was 17), one bad enough I had to let her go.

Soon Lee, #276: Just tried that; same problems, no change. Thanks, though.

#316: I support her, of course, although at the same time I'm not really sure what to feel about this.

Tell her congratulations, and be ready to send lots of letters and cookies when she's underway.

Also, pass this along from good ol' Uncle Jim: If she isn't going to the gym every day and working out, strength and endurance, now's the time to start. Every AO I've ever known was built like a refrigerator.

You might buy her a membership in a pool so she can work on her swimming. Swimming lessons too, so she'll be doing it right. She'll want to pick up Rescue Swimmer, that'll get her E4 out of A school. And she doesn't want to bilge out of A school (the usual reason for that is if she can't hack it physically; see above, going to the gym).

#327 ::: James D. Macdonald:

Tell her congratulations, and be ready to send lots of letters and cookies when she's underway.

Done (a couple of times), and will do. I bake an awesome cookie. I wonder what Finnish customs is going to think of them. *grin*

My weird feeling stems in large part that I was probably the last person in the family to know about this (bar her father, who afaik hasn't so much as called her in the past 8 years), much like I was probably the last person to know my granny was in the hospital with pneumonia. The extended family is largish, but it isn't THAT big, and my granny was integral in my upbringing!

I'd like to believe that the whole living so far away thing has something to do with it, but this sort of thing happened all of the time when I was in the same time zone only a state away, and actually easily contactable by phone.

So. *shrug* Confused and yes, a bit hurt, but doing my best to just be supportive nonetheless.

I'll happily pass on your advice, which is the best I can offer her besides my support, being as I'm unable to work and have zero cash of my own. I might be able to fly over to see her graduate, though.

Thanks.

Hilary Hertzoff @ 319 You may be able to screen the vents, if you can get the covers off. Cut screen to fit behind, then put the covers back.

Any experts on TV series Wild Wild West in these parts?

I seem to remember one episode where someone made himself bullet-proof by having metal plates grafted under his skin, with himself directing the proceeding while under self-hypnosis. I thought the gent was played by Boris Karloff. While the latter was in one episode, it's it's not the one I'm thinking of.

Does that ring a bell?

Serge: I haven't seen it but others have

Paul Duncanson @ 331... That's the one. By the way, someone should tell Wiki that Gordon's first name is Artemus, not Artemis, although that would explain the frequent cross-dressing. Anyway, I watched the Karloff episode last night, and I soon got the feeling it'd be too silly to be the one I remembered, long before I saw the dancing gorilla.

Serge @ 330, 332: The Wild Wild West did tend to swing between the ridiculous and the sublime...sometimes in the same episode. The one with Hurd Hatfield, "The Night of the Man-Eating House," was particularly creepy to my youthful imagination.

Syd @ 333...

"The Night of the Man-Eating House"? How can I resist a story with such a title?
("Not at all, we expect, Serge dear.")
Humph.

Serge, if you want not cheese but remarkable titles, stop by to see my ghost/horror story collection.

"Have you no shame, sir, plugging your own endeavour?"
"Nah."

Serge @ 334: One of the fun things for me re: that episode was when I finally realized that Dorian Gray had appeared on The Wild Wild West.

Linkmeister @ 335: That looks like a pretty creepy collection!

Linkmeister @ 355... Link rot, or coff'link rot?

Syd @ 336... Oh, right. Hurd Hatfield did appear in the show. Twice, in fact, according to imdb. Doctor Articulus? Just when one thinks that nobody could come up with names more bizarre than what the Foglio Family conjures up, one finds that WWW had already topped them, 4 decades ago.

Linkmeister, #335: It's nice to see that R. H. Malden's stories are available somewhere--I read his "Between Sunset and Moonrise" in an excellent but obscure anthology called Lost Souls edited by Jack Sullivan, and I've wanted to read more ever since.

You mention elsewhere on your blog that you had once owned and lost Edward Gorey's The Haunted Looking Glass. It's currently in print from New York Review Books Classics.

'Hurd Hatfield': for just a few seconds I read that as 'Hard Hatfield'.

It has some kind of possibility, there, as a character's name.

Wesley @ #339, Thanks. It's on my Amazon wishlist to remind me to get it when I'm flush. Now that I've found the stories online I don't feel so bereft. ;)

PJ Evans @ 340... 'Hard Hatfield'. It has some kind of possibility, there, as a character's name

Guess what the name of one of the Wild Card Aces is? And can you guess his power? Yes, Hard Hat can conjure up steel girders, and every other word he utters has four letters in it.

Q: Where can I find a regular source (for now) of instructional poetry that preaches edifying sermons based upon scripture, common sense, and in particular, the words found in the day's JUMBLE clues and solutions?

A: Sinners in the hands of an angry Jumble:
(Warning: Jumble spoiler)

"In LIMBO ’til Creation’s ebb
(Where OXIDE takes what insect leaves)
It’s KOSHER to regret the web
Of sin that EGOISM weaves.

"Pursue GOOD LOOKS in this life and be vexed –
Amass instead good graces for the next!"

Thus, on October 26, started a daily series of JUMBLE-based doctrinal verse from regular Comics Curmudgeon commenter (and sometimes guest host) "Uncle Lumpy." With technical help from others, including Yours Truly, he now conceals the solutions to the daily puzzle behind title tags for the benefit of those who wish to solve the scrambled letters.

In a better universe, there would be a single clearing house where these gems would be presented in distilled format. Still, there are worse fates than reading the Curmudgeon, which often has witty comments from a jolly crew of regular posters, including a particularly bright chap *coughcough* who calls himself "Muffaroo."

Summer Storms #326:

Pity. I've had good success in the past using the compatibility mode to convince Vista to run software from earlier versions of Windows. In your post #347, you mentioned, "thus-and-such.exe has stopped working". Is that "thus-and-such.exe" part of Html Kit? If so, have you tried changing "thus-and-such.exe" to run in compatibility mode as well?

Also, if Html Kit comes with an installer program (like 'setup.exe'), you might want to try uninstalling Html Kit and reinstalling but running the installer in compatibility mode. I've used this tactic successfully for software that explicitly says is not Vista compatible. Once installed, I then changed the properties of the executable to run under compatibility mode, and finally managed to get it to work.

Normally, I wouldn't have bothered but it was an important piece of software needed for work & the PC running the software died. The replacement PC was a Vista box. The answer to the question "Why couldn't we just get another XP box as replacement?" is "mindless bureaucracy".

Hope this helps.

Another computer-help question: I am told that there is some way to fax things over the internet, so I could send my transcripts and such without bothering the secretaries at school. I've googled without much success. I have Vista. Is there a way to do faxes like email?

Diatryma:
That used to be easier in those bygone days when everybody connected to the 'net via dial-up modem, because fax was a subset of the standard modem capabilities, and of course you had a modem. Eventually Windows got around to supporting fax via your modem as a sort of pseudo-printer device. However, that does little good for those on the 'net via Ethernet, cable, DSL, or the neighbor's or coffee-shop wifi. There are some services which let you send faxes via the 'net; however, the simplest course might be just to buy a modem for your computer.

The alternative is to walk downtown to my old office and ask the secretaries to fax whatever I need-- hard to beat that for simplicity, but it's not convenient given that I do most of my jobsearching late at night.

I know it's not the fault of the computer or anyone associated with it. It is the fault of fax itself. I rather dislike jobs that require me to fax anything.

TBills: While it possible the Corps took her in without putting her through Boot Camp (and, like Basic Training, in this context capitalising it isn't wrong, but scare quotes are. That's the name of it, just police acadamy and other such things), I find it really unlikely.

Esp. as Music Librarian is a very specific job, one which doesn't need all the other skills, and cultural behaviors which go with wearing the uniform.

The Corps, unlike the other services, requires people who join it, with prior service in some other service, to go through all of Boot Camp. The Air Force, and Navy, just accept them; and send them to A/Tech schools. The Army has an acculuration/basic skills course, but it's not basic.

The Corps, also insists all the officer specialties the other services may waive the complete OCS for (legal, nurse, various medical specialities) pass OCS. I know the Army will waive that (again, using an acculturation course) for qualified practitioners with lots of experience.

I know of a thoracic surgeon who got a wild hair to join the Army in his 40s. He was "blessed", commissioned as a colonel, sent to the course, and named the (nominal) commander of a hospital unit. For about five years he wasn't allowed to sign much of anything without someone (his XO/secretary/Sergeant Major) dating and initialing it first.

Sort of a modern day Henry Blake from M*A*S*H.

Diatryma, does your printer have fax functions? Mine does, and although I haven't quite sorted out how to use it that way, not having needed to yet, I do know that you have to plug a phone cable from the printer to a landline jack.

Soon Lee, #344: The "thus-and-such.exe" items are HTML-Kit plugins, installed to it after I installed HTML-Kit itself. I finally found the solution here, I think. Choosing "Run as Administrator" appears to clear up the problem. Odd, as the Vista account from which I am running it has Administrator privileges to begin with.

One of the annoying things about Vista is that it dropped the WinFax utility that XP had. WinFax allowed you to fax a WP doc or whatever.

I wonder if Microsoft put a fax feature back in when they developed Windows 7.

Rikibeth, there's no phone plug on the printer nor any scanning to it, so I'm guessing 'no'. It's a great little printer for what I need it for-- mostly nothing, some printing of text.

I think I'll just go on flipping off any job application that requires faxing. And then applying.

Summer Storms #350:

Glad you found a fix.

Summer Storms: Oh, that! I should have thought to mention that. That is the main annoyance with Vista. You can't even run much of Microsoft's own development software, like Visual Studio, without having to run it as administrator every time. (And you still can't, after it's been out a couple years. Pretty amazing.) If something important won't run on Vista, especially something "techie", then Run as administrator is one of the next things I try.

There are plenty of internet fax services in the wild, some of which are free for low volume traffic; if they require a pdf file, there are freeware or shareware printer drivers that create pdf files instead of sending to a printer device.

In meatspace, there are lots of small printing businesses that offer fax services. They're rarely free, though.

#324 TBills

And if she is who I think she is, she works on Worldcons....

Diatryma @345: I use eFax for that. The site will try to push you to a Plus or Pro account (with a free 30-day trial) but there's actually a free version that'll let you receive a limited number of pages per month. In all cases, you will need to pay to send a fax.

Most common file types are supported, but I've had a few glitches with PDFs. IME jpeg files work best.

re faxing: the travel company I worked with asked me to fax many, many pages of documents to them. I ended up negotiating with my recruiter to instead scan them and send them as email attachments, which cost me nothing (my printer is also a scanner) and them only the paper to print them. Plus, as they were sent via Gmail, I have backup copies of anything that gets lost.

I just came back from the bigbox hardware store. This is the first time I've had so much fun buying Christmas lights because, when I got to the selfserve checout machines, I heard the whole store's computer store was down. I find that funny? Well, it wasn't funny to see the human cashier try to remember how to fill up a receipt and be unable to figure out the tax. The funny part is that I had to calculate it for the store.

Haha! I just found some papers from my son's school (he's 10) with the sentences he's writing for grammar examples:

1. I would like to eat some brains, and I would also like spleen.

2. A zombie tried to gobble my heart but couldn't do it.

3. The zombies ate my left foot, and it hurt very badly.

He's really turning into a marvel!

[in passing]

Randall Munroe (xkcd) has invented a new literary infographic. No, really. Go and see.

What bothers me about faxing is that I don't actually have physical copies of what they want-- I have a copied-from-internet transcript for grad school and a scanned-in transcript for undergrad. Some jobs will take them via email, and they don't get the angry eyes.

I know I'm whining about a perfectly normal part of business, one that others deal with every day, but really. Faxing? Not useful in this context.

Diatryma @ 345 - I've always used faxaway.com for outgoing faxes; it works well, from anywhere, can take Word documents or PDF or HTML as its source, and is reasonably priced. The only drawback is that I believe they have a maintenance fee of $1/month. If you're not faxing relatively regularly, that might be irritating. If you do, though, it's well worth it.

I've used efax.com's free service since the 90's for incoming faxes - before they even offered outgoing, so I never started using their outgoing service, although I'm sure it's also just fine. But I don't know their payment terms; I would assume their paid service offers outgoing but I don't know what that service costs.

Back in prehistory, I interviewed with a real estate search engine startup in Bloomington, Indiana, with a real jerk whose goal was to start the "first dot-com in Indiana". What I didn't have the heart to tell him was that efax.com is based in Fort Wayne.

Randolph #361 - Munroe is a freaking genius. I think over the years to come we're really going to appreciate how true that is; he's only getting better.

That said, his LotR graphic totally omits that brief time when Sam was the Ringbearer in Mordor. It's not like Munroe to miss details like that. I hope to see a correction in v1.1 of this diagram.

Michael Roberts#364 -- mm? In the middle, right below the large word "orcs", the yellow line jumps from Frodo up to Sam briefly. I checked that last night.

From the Sidelight about the "Chat room/Forum problem": In reading the entry linked, it appears on first glance that the author conflates chat room and forum completely, when in fact they are IME quite different both in form and in function.

I love Munroe's chart. I assume he was thinking of the famous chart of Napoleon's armies, but this was really clever. We should come up with more examples. (A Fire Upon the Deep comes to mind, with up corresponding to the Transcend and down corresponding to the Depths.)

Albatross, that would be interesting!

The xkcd diagram for LOTR also follows the Peter Jackson movies rather than the books, but hey.

I managed to get my husband a shirt of this LOTR riff while they were available; apparently the availability has since been shut down.

Julie L, that's wonderful.

Serge @359: The funny part is that I had to calculate it for the store.

How much money did they end up owing you?

albatross @ 367:

It reminds me of the Napoleon graphic too. The amazing thing is just how much work he did on the LoTR, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park graphics; they look quite accurate based on my poor memory of the films. But the other two, 12 Angry Men, and Primer, aside from being beautiful examples of the two ends of the complexity spectrum, are funny as hell.

Clearly, time travel stories are going to be the most complex. Twelve Monkeys might be interesting.

Rob Rusick @ 371... How much? Well, I just sent them a memo about stern measures to be taken against young men who don't see middle-aged women.

Turnips evil. Rrrr.

Bruce Cohen (STM) @ 372 -- For example, there's the flowchart for Heinlein's "— All You Zombies —".

Joel @ 375:

Thanks very much for that link. The world-line graphs for "All You Zombies" and "By His Bootstraps" are nicely done; I'd love to use them in a class on the science fiction of time travel.

Tooling around through Wright's site I find he's as fascinated by time travel as I am, though much more fascinated by Heinlein and his views on it. I started to write an essay on the subject as a sequel to my review of Charlie Stross' "Palimpsest", but bogged down when I discovered several websites that covered what I wanted to say pretty comprehensively. I may start it up again; I had some things to say about the lack of mathematical and physical consistency of Dunne's theories of time which Wright apparently didn't know about. Also, I find it hard to take Heinlein's McGuffins so seriously that I would try to create a consistent metaphysics that includes all of them.

@374: I will resist the temptation to become the Defender of Turnips.

All's I will say is, if turnips is evil, I don't want to be good.

Bruce @ 372: A proper timeline for Primer The XKCD version isn't far off.

Julie @ 369: It does follows the movies rather than the books but the title of the piece is Movie Narrative Charts.

... so speaking of cooking, what should I do with two cabbages, and no desire to have sauerkraut for months on end?

Bruce Cohen (STM) @ 374 -- I haven't read much about attempts to formally classify various fictional forms of time travel. But while Heinlein's earlier time-travel works were pretty internally consistent, I wouldn't even try to rationalize the events of his last few novels. That wouldn't be quite as bad as trying to come up with a consistent framework for time travel in the various TV and movie Star Trek stories (not to mention the novels!), but still..!

xeger @ 379... What to do with two cabbages? If I were in a Benny Hill mood, I'd suggest making a Cabbage Engine, but I'm not so I won't.

Serge @ 381 ...
I think this babbage engine is doing a fine job of producing torment and frustration all on its own...

I had a rather absurdist time today.

My boss said that, according to our online records, I still have 20 hours of vacation to schedule this year. I went thru my own records, according to which I have only 8 such hours left. Rather than try to make the company's records fit Reality, he decided to add those extra 12 hours to my reserve.

Paul Duncanson @ 378:

My, oh my, the power of geekitude used for good!

Joel @ 380:

What really gobsmacked me was the attempt to harmonize "Elsewhen" with "Number of the Beast" and "The Cat Who Walked Through Walls". Especially since "Elsewhen" is one of my favorite Heinlein stories (and the other two aren't).

xeger: Funny you should ask! Last night, I made some not-colcannon. I caramelized some onions with salt and sriracha. Then I dumped in some sliced Jerusalem artichokes and potatoes, with a sprig or two of thyme and lots of black pepper. When they were almost sufficiently home-fries-ized, I added a smallish head of cabbage, shredded. I then added a little water, covered the skillet, and let it cook until the cabbage was done but still crisp, and the potatoes and J.a. were entirely done. It would have been good with bacon or corned beef, but I didn't have any.

If I had another cabbage, I'd make soup.

(Hm. On preview, it occurs to me that maybe I've internalized a few too many medieval cookbooks. Sorry about that.)

My not-colcannon is carmelized onions and cabbage, mashed in with potatoes and stilton. The stilton robs the dish of colcannon authenticity, but makes it much, much tastier.

Roasting thickly sliced cabbage, apples, and onions together also works. And crumbling stilton on top of that makes it even better.

All of the above are best served with a dark ale.

xeger # #379, homemade coleslaw. Julienne cabbage, carrots, scallions. Mayo and vinegar to taste.

Double-check me by looking at recipe sites. We had a houseguest who made some which was so much better than KFC's that we may never eat its version again. The difference, we thought, was that there was no sugar in the homemade version, so it was fresh-tasting, not overwhelmingly sweet.

I forgot that I'd copied our houseguest's recipe. Here it is:

Shredded cabbage.
Shredded carrot.
Chopped green onions/scallions.
Slivered almonds and pine nuts, toasted.
Sour Cream.
Mayo (mayo mayo, not Miracle Whip).

Mix 'em all together and chill.

Two cabbages will last me two weeks, living by myself these days, depending on what else I have in the kitchen. I lived on cabbage pretty much for a long time. Mostly raw. I made salad with stuff, any stuff at all, especially nuts and cheese and meat in it. if you dress it with Japanese rice vinegar, it's one thing. If you dress with with mayonaisse and apple juice it's another thing. And so on. If you shred vegetables into it, you have one thing. If you shred fruit into it it's another thing. And so on.

I also like to make a crustless quiche with interchangeable brassicas: cabbage works well in that, lightly steamed and patted dry before sticking in the casserole. And then the custard part has a fraction of a bay leaf (if you use French ones instead of wild California ones maybe you need a whole one), and some nutmeg and green onion.

Also cabbage leaves can be used instead of lettuce to wrap sandwich fillings for breadless sandwiches.

Also you can make stuffed cabbage.

Also you can shred your cabbage and float it in hot broth until it wilts.

Also you can shred your cabbage and steam it gently with fresh dill.

Any of these things can be enhanced with various forms of pepper.

#345 and all - I work for the parent company of MyFax. At www.myfax.com, there's a free small volume sending tool. And you can sign up for a 30 day free trial. It does many file formats.

Re cabbage: Save the cores and make kinpira. Kinpira is a Japanese recipe for using up veggies that would otherwise be too tough to eat. The original calls for burdock root. Google "Forgotten Vegetable Kinpira" for versions that dress up cabbage cores, celery (otherwise too boring to eat IMO), tough old carrots, and broccoli stems.

xeger@379:

Shredded cabbage and carrot with black mustard seeds, ground cumin and coriander, lime juice.

Fry the mustard seeds in some oil until they start to pop. Add the cumin and coriander and stir briefly. Add everything else and stir frantically to get it mixed. Cover and cook for a few minutes.

albatross@367
I assume he was thinking of the famous chart of Napoleon's armies.

Which goes one better by being quantitative, not just schematic. For people who don't know Minard's famous graph of troop losses in Napoleon's attack on Russia, see here, and there's a website of variations.

xeger @ 379: Simple side dish -- chop cabbage, boil, drain, then add lots of mustard, caraway and dill seeds.

If you haven't already, you must check out the Deep Fried Jello particle. Oh, my.

janetl @ 395:

The deep-fried jello recipe worries me a little—not because of the deep-frying, but because it makes my mental taste approximation skills come up blank.

I think I'll stick to looking at pictures of cute meerkats instead.

I wonder what a deep-fried salad of jello & cabbage tastes like.

Serge @ 397 -

I wonder what a deep-fried salad of jello & cabbage tastes like.

Crunchy strawberry coleslaw?

Steve C @ 398... I'm not brave enough to try and find out. You do it.

Serge @ 399 -

I'll pass. You know that old saying -- what doesn't kill you makes you nauseous.

Claude Levi-Strauss has died. (link in French)

Hi folks.. tough week here. Last week ended OK, with a 10-mile hike through fog. Then the troubles started...

1) Saturday, I upgraded my Kubuntu system to version 9.10... so far so good, but then I tried to switch it over to Ubuntu. BOOM -- unbootable. Then I made the mistake of trying to fix that in between trick-or-treaters, and managed to nuke my own home directory, and the backup I was trying to make. Since then... well, "Autopsy" indicates the directory structure is just lost -- I had partial backups (Web and E-mail), but those were two months old. I lost a fair number of passwords along with a couple of months of E-mail and other miscellany. There may be a few scraps of other stuff left, I'm still rummaging through the bit bucket. (At least my photographs are safe, though still offline.)

2) Sunday, I found out that one of my hiking buddies died. Bernie was 87 years old, but in good shape -- Friday, he'd hiked 10 miles with us. Apparently, he went to the hospital, was diagnosed with an intestinal blockage, and promptly died on the operating table.

3) A break from the downers -- my sister's birthday. I got her the new Hitch-hiker's Volume 6, plus Gaiman's biography of Adams.

4) And today, it turns out that Bernie's brothers can't get into his computer -- guess who's the local "computer guy"? So far, I'm armed with a Trinity Windows Rescue CD, and a couple of Ubuntu LiveCDs, and I'm starting to research what else I might need.

PS: I probably have the latest photos of Bernie -- I need to get my F-Spot install sorted out again.

Anyone going to watch V tonight? I've set it up to record on the DVR, and I'm a little curious.

From what I've read, this time the aliens aren't here for our water. (I don't see why not -- we have first-rate water, right?)

Re: the Deep Fried Jello - It sounds dangerous to me. Hot viscous fluid in a crispy shell? More like "Fresh in the ER" than "Fresh from the kitchen".

Larry Brennan @ 404:

I had to check that too. After you let the jello set up, you freeze it before deep-frying it. It's kind of like Baked Alaska in that regard.

Steve C @ 403:

We're recording it too. Last night we watched an hour or so of of the original miniseries and a few minutes of one episode of the series that followed. I lasted longer than Eva, but we both came to the conclusion that the miniseries was classic '80s scifi (not quite as interesting as the first season of Buck Rogers, perhaps), and that the series suffered from major suckitude. Interestingly, a lot of the same actors appeared in both, and the level of acting was far better in the miniseries (not to mention all other production values, but it must have taken real dedication to the suck to make the actors worse. And, oh, the hair!

I have no intention to watch V. I'm barely hanging on with FlashForward. I'm actually respecting Stargate: Universe, which is turning out to be a mostly-hard SF survival adventure.

What I really look forward to every week: Mad Men. And the last episode of the season is next Sunday. Damn.

Hey! I'm taking bets: Sally Draper will in a few years (series time) be hanging out in Haight-Ashbury.

TexAnne #401: He was, without doubt, the most significant anthropologist of the twentieth century.

Have just watched the first ep of V. I'm a huge fan of the original, and they've got me for at least one more ep of the new one on the basis of the quality of this first one.

Lots of quite good actors; no howlers in the writing YET. I rather like some of what they're doing with the 'aliens show up and do WE COME IN PEACE in a post-9-11 world, and yet all is not as it seems' concept. So far. :->

Not a grinning fanboy, but so far it's interesting, and I like it. Though they're very clearly fitting in visuals and structural elements intended to try to haul in the coveted 21-34 demographic ...

Oh, and Morena Baccarin (Inara) and Alan Tudyk (Wash) have large roles, which I appreciate. :->

xeger #379:
... [so speaking of cooking,] what should I do with two cabbages, and no desire to have sauerkraut for months on end?

The trebuchet is always an option for the disposal of round vegetables.

John Houghton @ 410 ... I'm still amused by recalling the lovely gentleman who wandered up to Information, and wanted to know where he should park his trebuchet... [0]

[0] My first two questions boiled down to "what size is it, and is it expected?"

In re a certain now-closed thread, and the use of loaded terms (other than the ones that caused the thread to be closed):

I think my main problem with Grayson's use of "whore" is that in my experience whores are slaves. Political "whores", on the other hand, are people who've sold out their morals by choice to the highest bidder; a far different proposition, and a horrendous mischaracterization of, and insult to, the victims of the sex trafficking industry.

Lots of quite good actors; no howlers in the writing YET.

I'm very impressed by the way Morena Baccarin is blinking. Seriously. She's blinking like a lizard. They've done a fabulous job of making her look not quite human, and the blinking completes the effect.

Open threadiness: another treasure hoard found!

Unless my records (read 'postits' on the calendar) are wrong, today is the birthday of linkmeister. It is also Paul A's. Right?

Stefan Jones @ #407: What I really look forward to every week: Mad Men.

Have you seen the Sesame Street version?

Serge: Ah, you got me. Yes, it'sss my birthday, precioussss.

On which note: Semi-random loosely-"it'sss my birthday, precioussss"-related link. At the end, there will be cake.

Paul A @ 417...

"Do it fast, Peewee, because total cosmic power is now MINE!"

Spoilery speculative first-ep-of V geekery:

V'z pnyyvat qvof ba n cerqvpgvba gung gur tvabezbhf pvgl-ubirevat fcnprfuvcf ner onfvpnyyl fgntr-znantrq Cbgrzxva ivyyntrf: gurl'er znqr gb ybbx yvxr jung uhznaf jbhyq npprcg nf pvgl-ubirevat fcnprfuvcf, naq ner abg gur npghny fuvc(f) gung jrag sebz fgne gb fgne. Zl fhccbegvat rivqrapr vf gjbsbyq. Svefg, jub chgf onfvpnyyl pvgl/fhoqvivfvbaf vafvqr n fcnprfuvc vafgrnq bs qrpxf? Jul jnfgr gur phontr yvxr gung? Tneqraf, lrf, ohg rabezbhf bcra nvefcnprf? Frpbaq, gur jvaqbjf ba gubfr guvatf ner SENXXVAT GVAL sbe n phygher gung unf gur grpuabybtl gb cynl jvgu tenivgl gur jnl gurl (pynvz gurl) pna.

Nyfb, V'z ernyyl ybbxvat sbejneq gb frrvat gur svany haznfxrq-yvmneq perngher qrfvta, orpnhfr vs gurl qb vg JRYY naq ner PBAFVFGRAG (un un un un, ohg vg pbhyq unccra), vg unf gb or fznyy/yvgur rabhtu gb svg vafvqr na beqvanel uhzna funcr jvgu 0.5-1" bs 'pybarq' uhzna syrfu fgergpurq bire vg.

V qvq ernyyl yvxr gur qvssrerag qverpgvbaf gurl qebccrq oernqpehzof sbe va gur cvybg. Jul JBHYQA'G gur SOV vanqiregragyl pbzr npebff nyvra fyrrcre pryyf naq zvfgnxr gurz sbe uhzna greebevfg pryyf? Gurl npg fvzvyneyl.

Nyfb, sbe fhcre-nqinaprq fhcre-grpu nyvraf, gur fgevxr sbepr gung uvg gur vafhetrapl zrrgvat jnf, hz, irel ybj-grpu naq rira fbzrjung vapbzcrgrag. Ab mncthaf, naq abg rabhtu znacbjre gb ernyyl cerirag rfpncrrf (rira jvgu Oynpx Dhvfyvat Thl pbzvat va). Gurl jrer erylvat ba gurve vavgvny fclobzo naq gurve vaangr culfvpny fgeratgu naq fcrrq gb jva. Cyhf, gurl erirnyrq Nyna Ghqlx'f punenpgre'f nyvraarff va gur svefg rc, juvpu V thrff gur jevgref sryg gurl unq gb -- ohg ybbxvat ng vg Jngfbavnayl vafgrnq bs va n Qblyrna jnl, gur nyvraf ernyyl fubg gurzfryirf ba gung bar, orpnhfr abj SOV-zbz XABJF ure cnegare'f qvegl. Vs ur'q orra 'xabpxrq bhg naq gvrq hc' be fbzrguvat gurl'q fgvyy unir fbzrbar ba ure gung fur unf rirel ernfba gb gehfg vzcyvpvgyl ... vafgrnq, gurl guerj njnl n ybat-grez nqinagntr gb gel gb pyrna guvatf hc dhvpxyl.

Juvpu, vs vg'f abg fybccl jevgvat, zrnaf gur nyvraf guvax gurl'er nobhg gb jva nyy ng bapr va na ninynapur, naq frr ab ernfba gb yrnir gurzfryirf ybat-grez qrrc-pbire nffrgf gb svtug na vafhetrapl.

Gurfr yvmneql thlf ner qbvat n zhpu orggre wbo guna gur 80f irefvba bs tbvat fgenvtug sbe jung jbhyq znxr crbcyr dhrfgvba gurz yrnfg naq whzc evtug ba gur 'fhcre-cbjreshy oraribyrag fhcre-grpu nyvraf jnag gb uryyyyyc hhhhhhf' onaqjntba. Naq gurer'f n erpheevat 'fryy lbhe fbhy/pbzcebzvfr lbhe cevapvcyrf gb trg nurnq' gurzr va jung gurl'er bssrevat inevbhf vaqvivqhny uhznaf.

V yvxrq gur fubhg-bhg gb gur bevtvany va gung gurl pynvz gurl'er urer sbe 'jngre naq n pbzzba zvareny,' gubhtu V jbaqre jung gurl ernyyl qb jnag ... orfvqrf fynirf, bs pbhefr. Orpnhfr jngre naq zbfg zvarenyf ner ninvynoyr ng gur gbcf bs tenivgl jryyf cerggl pbzzbayl. Ner gurl fuvcjerpxrq naq fghpx jvgu jung gurl pna trg va bhe flfgrz, naq gura tbvat gur pbybavnyvfg/fynire ebhgr? Be qvq gurl pbzr urer sebz gur ortvaavat qryvorengryl vagraqvat gb gnxr hf?

Yvxr V fnvq, V'z qrsvavgryl va vg sbe nabgure rcvfbqr ng yrnfg. :->

This just in:

Maine Voters: "We Are Assholes"

MAINE (BS) Yesterday, in a victory for assholes everywhere, the voters of Maine approved a referendum declaring Maine to have joined them.

In all but the actual words, the referendum declared "...we, the people of the State of Maine, hereby declare ourselves to be stupid, gullible, homophobic assholes. We further declare that we feel we have the absolute right to stick our noses into other people's business, and make sure their relationships fit our preconceived notions and religious preferences, rather than theirs. We utterly repudiate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, because we believe that Christian Marriage, as narrowly defined by a subset of Christians most of whom don't even live in Maine, should have a privileged place in the law of our state..."

Marc Mutty, campaign manager for Stand for Assholism Maine which favored the declaration of assholism, claimed victory at a rally in Portland just after midnight. "We've struggled, we've worked against tremendous odds, as we've all known," he said. "We prevailed because the people of Maine, the silent majority, the folks back home spoke with their vote tonight."

'The silent majority' is a Homeric phrase that refers to the dead. Typically for members of the asshole movement, Mutty ignores scientific fact, which is that the dead are no longer a majority in the world (there are more people alive today than have ever lived and died in the history of the human species). Few doubt, however, that the dead were a significant block in Mutty's electoral calculation, or he would not have credited them so prominently in his victory speech.

Anti-assholism activists are quick to point out that not everyone in Maine is actually an asshole. "There's a large voting minority of non-assholes in the state," declared one activist who declined to be identified, citing the general trend toward assholism. "And plenty of people under voting age who aren't assholes either." However, when pressed the activist conceded that Maine would be known as an asshole state going forward, and that even Mainiacs who voted against adopting the declaration of assholism will be tarred with that brush.

Maine joins 30 other states, including California, whose people have declared themselves officially to be assholes.

Mark Mutty, of "Stand for Marriage Maine," actually said the exact words I quote above, according to this. The rest, accurate as it is, is my invention.

I wish that the thread that had been closed had not been closed. I understand why it was needed, but it seems like it stifles debate.

Xopher @ 421:

Gads, Marc Mutty is a complete dolt. Way to go for claiming that a majority beating down a minority was such hard work. Maybe next he'd like to pen a paean to school bullies who beat up little kids for lunch money.

Fortunately, it was a close thing. A roughly half-and-half split does not make it quite the victory they'd like to claim, although it's still a setback.

However, in good news, it looks like Washington is going the right direction, and Kalamazoo has added GLBT people to its non-discrimination ordinance.

Wyman Cooke #422: I wish that the thread that had been closed had not been closed. I understand why it was needed, but it seems like it stifles debate.

Be advised, if it does reopen, proceed with extreme caution and delicacy; participation without an Omega-class milspec neurohazard suit will likely void certain portions of your health insurance coverage.

OK, so here's a question for the genre brain trust - I'm a pretty run-o-the-mill SF reader, don't care for fantasy all that much unless it's "hard fantasy", you know what I mean. I keep hearing mention of this genre called "romance" that apparently is more than the endless reams of drivel I'd been led to believe.

Could anybody name an author or two so I could go to the library and read something unexpectedly good?

Actually, the same might go for mystery. Now that I actually live near a library, I feel the urge to broaden my horizons a tad.

Thanks!

Michael Robets @ 425... I'd recommend this author. Be warned though that I may appear biased as I've been living with that person for more than 24 years.

As someone who grew up in Maine, I'm always pleasantly shocked when they make any progress at all on gay rights, and pretty much unsurprised when they fail.

Here is an example of the mindset: "We don't discriminate against homosexuals, we just believe that they're immoral."

LDR, yes, that would be the assholic position.

Michael Roberts @425
I've been a SFF reader since the mid-60s. I'd always disdained romance books, but sometime in the mid 80's, while in graduate school, I started reading them for stress relief and found that I really enjoyed some of them. Sturgeon's Law applies, but then so does YMMV.

What are some examples of SF and fantasy books or authors you particularly like? Might help in picking some suggestions.

Michael Robets @ 425 -- A number of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels have a significant level of romance in them. Her last series, the "Sharing Knife" tetralogy, has a fantasy setting, and the plots are partially fantasy-based, but they're intended to be largely/primarily romances. (I also found them weaker than her other novels, but your mileage may vary. They're good, but they lack the plot complexity of her previous books.)

Thanks, Serge - the library has a couple of her books. I'll try one next time I'm over. And if I don't like it, I promise to smile and stay silent.

Michael Roberts @425: My first thought was Georgette Heyer (historical romance). As for titles, Venetia, Frederica, The Talisman Ring*, The Unknown Ajax*, A Civil Contract.

I'm interested in other recommendations too. I read a lot of Mills & Boon/Silhouette/Harlequin romances growing up, as my grandmother and older sisters were fans and we had plenty of romances in the house(1). Most of my favorite contemporary romance authors(2) were so deemed based on their work from the 1940s to the mid-1990s, when I more or less stopped reading romance on a regular basis. The last time I visited my sister, I read one of the Silhouettes lying around and thought "woah, this stuff's gotten a heckuva lot more explicit than I remember!"

As for mystery, despite having read all the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, and various Enid Blyton mystery series I could get hold of as a kid, I stopped reading them in my teens. That said, I've enjoyed the few Sue Grafton novels I've read. Patricia Cornwell, not so much. Alexander McCall Smith has been recommended by several friends with similar tastes in books.

* Romance and mystery
(1) There was always some shame attached to this, because we had been informed by our high-school lit professors that romance was trash. Nonetheless, classmates seemed not to give a fig and always came over after school to borrow some. I partly credit whatever popularity I had in high school to my family's large library.
(2) This list does not include Danielle Steele. My grandmother loved her, so I tried, I really did.

Joel - sorry, I already have Bujold on my must-read-all list.

OtterB - hmm. Of the Old Guard: Heinlein, Niven, Simak, sometimes Asimov, most Burroughs. Of later people: Bujold (Vorkosigan epic, mostly), Connie Willis (To Say Nothing Of The Dog, especially), Kim Stanley Robinson, Spider Robinson come to think of it, Alastair Reynolds, MacLeod, Stross, the Foglios (they count!), Vinge to the point of paperback destruction, Neil Stephenson to the point of despair, Walter Jon Williams, Peter Hamilton of course, Scott Card sometimes, Brin usually, Jack McDevitt always.

That's probably enough to characterize my tastes. Cyberpunk and space opera, time travel, and deep characterization.

Michael Roberts @425: In re romance for SF/hard-fantasy readers ... I can highly recommend Diana Gabaldon's 'Outlander' series, although I would recommend skipping the first book entirely, or reading it after you've read book 2 (Dragonfly in Amber). The first book is more 'romancey,' the second drops you right in the midst of an ongoing plot and is, to me, more engaging.

Back-of-the-book level plot summary: There is a set of standing stones in Scotland that, on the right nights of the year, you can use to cross through time. Our Protagonist does so in the first book by accident, and then returns to her own time (sort of) on purpose; in the second book she initiates the travel herself for reasons made clear in the first chapter of the book.

Why I liked them: time travel is tough to do really well, because authors tend to import anachronistic mindsets into their periods. Gabaldon gets this one VERY RIGHT, especially in the first book, which involves the 1960s and just-pre-Culloden "Bonnie Prince Charlie" Scotland. Her 1960s protagonist, a nurse, *does not know* the things she wouldn't know yet! That's so rare to find in 'mainstream' fiction, I think. The second book is I think early 1990s jumping back to post-Culloden Scotland (the standing stone timechannel seems fixed -- if you go back, live a year, then return, a year has passed in your 'home' time as well).

I liked books 2 and 3 of this series very much, books 1 and 4 less so but still enjoyed them; the rest of the books in the series focus on characters or situations I really don't like so well, but you might.

If there were some cyber/steampunk mad genius time travel romance as a gateway drug, I'd go with that.

Pendrift, I read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden, too, as a kid. My aunt had them all, and I read everything on my grandparents' shelves. Even the Reader's Digest Sherlock Holmes. Then the public librarian got me onto SF and I was a goner, never looked back.

Aha, Elliot - time travel romance is a 50% match! I'll try that, totally.

Among the Heyer, I would include The Toll-gate and The Reluctant Widow*, The Quiet Gentleman as well as The Masqueraders and The Black Moth, which have mystery/thriller-like qualities in among the historical trappings. Romantic elements are present, but little bosom-heaving takes place, and no bodice-ripping. The male leads (and other male characters as well) are more than handsome pieces of cardboard with broad shoulders for the female lead to swoon over. When people behave stupidly, it is either because they are stupid, or very young and impulsive, and not because Heyer required idiocy to make her plots work. She also has a fine line in eccentrics and old ladies.

Most of her Regency-era and 18th-century novels are more than genre romances; they have love stories in them, but the plots are expected to do other work as well. Several are comedies of manners; The Grand Sophy and The Unknown Ajax are in that group, imo, and some are closer to romantic comedies--False Colours and Frederica, frex.

*Despite a deeply annoying and dated piece of characterization which I must, alas, consider homophobic even if it was meant as a Percy Blakeney thing.

Michael Roberts:

I would second the recommendation of Georgette Heyer, and strongly second the suggestion of A Civil Contract.

MIchael Roberts... If you want a very romantic movie, I'd recommend 2006's Casino Royale.

Oh, I should add one non-SF author I've found I absolutely love: PG Wodehouse. I'm going to try Heyer. Thanks, all!

Serge @ #415, your PostIt® records are accurate.

For years the only cultural reference I could make to my birthdate was "you know, the day before Guy Fawkes." Then came Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995.

I'd have preferred to keep the date only by the relatively-obscure Fawkes historical note.

Linkmeister @ 441... my birthdate was "you know, the day before Guy Fawkes."

You look well preserved for someone born that long ago.

Michael Roberts, you could combine mystery and romance by reading Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey books. The romance begins with Strong Poison and continues for three more books.

Serge @ #442, and even without thimerosal!

Michael Roberts @440: If you like Bujold, steampunk, hard fantasy, and PG Wodehouse, you mustmust read Stevemer and Wrede's series that starts with Sorcery and Cecelia. If you like it, it may act as a gateway drug for you into non-magickal versions of the same basic period of history. Similarly, if you like the Temeraire books (starting with His Majesty's Dragon, I think) by Naomi Novik, that might act as a gateway drug into a whole realm of Napoleonic stuff.

Oh, and if you like steampunk, Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is basically hard-fantasy alternate-world epic Napoleonic-era magickal steampunk. With airships. And seeekrit spy stuff. And worldquakes. And machine sentiences. I adore it to pieces; it's like nothing else I've read. Staggeringly original. Just wait till you see what happened to the not-British royalty under not-Cromwell in that world ... *shudder* Creepy and full of wonder.

Michael Roberts @425, I thought that "Hurricane Moon" by Alexis Glynne Latner successfully walked a fine line between science fiction and romance; I think that the author deftly managed to avoid lurching into a fuliginous abyss of overwrought romanticism. Would read again.

What about Naomi Novik's books, which mixes Hornblower stories with dragons? Any romance in those?

Wyman Cooke, #422: If that was what you consider debate, I suggest you recheck your definitions. The thread was closed precisely because it had ceased to be a debate and had turned into a flamewar and general mud-slinging match.

Michael, #425: Second Season, Prior Betrothal, and The Nabob's Widow, all by Elsie Lee. To the Heyer list I'll add The Grand Sophy, The Masqueraders, False Colours, and The Quiet Gentleman (which is also a mystery crossover). I cannot recommend The Reluctant Widow because I find its main plot uncomfortably close to being emotionally abusive -- nobody takes any of the heroine's PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE qualms about being shoved willy-nilly into a dangerous espionage plot as anything but "feminine hysterics".

I'll also second the recommendation for Hurricane Moon, but note that I found Sorcery and Cecilia so irritating that I couldn't finish it. Something about that protagonist just gets up my nose.

Long out of print, but if you can find a copy, The Interior Life by Katherine Blake.

Time and Again by Jack Finney (time-travel romance).

Mystery -- anything you can find by Jane Dentinger (a fine, though apparently defunct, series of theatrical mysteries which are still accessible to a non-theatrical person like me). Aaron Elkins' Gideon Oliver mysteries. The Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters (all of which also contain romance subplots).

Open Threadiness: If you haven't seen today's Two Lumps, by all means go take a look. Bad puns and outstanding snark FTW!

Elliott @434: . I can highly recommend Diana Gabaldon's 'Outlander' series, although I would recommend skipping the first book entirely, or reading it after you've read book 2 (Dragonfly in Amber). The first book is more 'romancey,' the second drops you right in the midst of an ongoing plot and is, to me, more engaging.

Having re-read the series over the past month, I'll second the recommendation with some additional info and caveats. One of the things I found particularly appealing about the first book was its tight first-person narrative, but this gradually disintegrates as the series continues-- each new book dilutes it down by adding another significant third-person narrator. Still, the stories and characters mostly continue to be appealing and interesting.

The seventh book in the main series just came out, and ends with a veritable mountain range of cliffhangers; there's also a tangle of inconsistent timelines in the middle that may be fixed in future editions. (Gabaldon has been collecting errata in her Compuserve forum.) A compendium reference book with character lists etc. came out after book 4, and a follow-up to that may be in the works. A graphic novel based on the series is supposed to come out sometime next year.

There's also a spin-off series of mystery novels centered on Lord John Grey, a character who first appears toward the end of Dragonfly; a novella from this spin-off series appeared in the Legends II SF/F anthology a few years ago.

Another UK metal-detector find of 4 gold torcs in Scotland - nowhere near as big as the Staffordshire find discussed here, but the piece pictured is stunning:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8342501.stm

OK, we got into Bernie's computer. Not with any of the LiveCDs or hardware we'd brought -- Marty (another of the hiking group, who'd called me in) found a box of overlooked index cards, and I was able to correctly read the password (after two other people had identically misread it). And Bernie's brothers loved the photos I brought over!

Funeral tomorrow.

OK, we got into Bernie's computer. Not with any of the LiveCDs or hardware we'd brought -- Marty (another of the hiking group, who'd called me in) found a box of overlooked index cards. Then I was able to correctly read the password, after two other people had identically misread it. So it goes.... And Bernie's brothers loved the photos I brought over!

Funeral tomorrow.

OK, we got into Bernie's computer. Not with any of the LiveCDs or hardware we'd brought -- Marty (another of the hiking group, who'd called me in) found a box of overlooked index cards. Then I was able to correctly read the password, after two other people had identically misread it. So it goes.... And Bernie's brothers loved the photos I brought over! The funeral's tomorrow.

On Heyer, it's tempting to say "any of them!" While I'm at it, I also recommend Cotillion. That said, I know The Reluctant Widow bothered me the same way it did Lee, and while I enjoyed The Grand Sophy immensely, one scene made me flinch.

A word of warning, as I have known readers to be put off by this aspect: many of the heroines are in their mid-to-late teens (women in their twenties wered held to be off the shelf) while most of the heroes are in their thirties or forties.

This romance talk reminds me of an early Judith McNaught novel, before she became a regular NYT bestselling author. Double Standards was originally published as a Harlequin Series mass-market paperback. (After the success of her first historical romance, it was reissued as a TPB and, later, as a hardback.) One of my sisters picked up a copy at a used bookstore. It subsequently made the rounds in the house, with all four sisters, one brother and my father fighting over who got to read it next. Only my mother remained impervious.

I confess, I couldn't stand The Grand Sophy. The title character annoyed me as much as that of Emma did.

Lee #448:

I may be projecting, but I have a feeling I understand some of the anger in that thread. We voted their bastards out, and our bastards in. We have a popular president with a mandate, majorities in both houses of Congress, and the Republican party visibly shrunken and in disarray. And yet, we can't seem to see any progress.

On civil liberties, foreign policy, and bailouts of big companies, the current administration seems a slightly more moderate and polished version of the last one[1]. On healthcare reform and financial reform and gay rights, we've seen relatively little actual success, and a lot of excuses and accomodation of the side that has resoundingly lost the last two nationwide elections. I suppose a lot of us would like to know what happened, and when we're going to see the benefits of all our votes and contributions and volunteer efforts[2]. And that leads naturally to both frustration and the desire to see our[3] side try something new.

[1] We're told that the torture has stopped and the secret prisons have been closed. We were told that, or variations on that, before. I wonder if it's true this time.

[2] All your volunteer efforts--I didn't volunteer for anyone.

[3] Honestly, I'm neither a Democrat, nor, in pre-9/11 terms, a liberal. (That is, back when opposition to torture wasn't a defining feature of being a liberal.)

Try Dana Stabenow's mysteries, especially her Kate Shugak series. She's also written a few science fiction novels. You might also like J. D. Robb's "in Death" series, which are romance/mystery/science fiction, and work fairly well as all three.

Re SF/romance: I am currently re-reading Ann Maxwell's _Timeshadow Rider_, an old-school space opera romance. (And the last of Maxwell's SF novels -- she did quite a number in the 70s and 80s, but then switched over to writing straight-up romance under a different name.)

I don't know if it's what you're looking for. It's emotionally and verbally florid -- a million-year-old dying civilization, psionic talents bonding across space and time but forbidden to touch, angst and more angst. Violet eyes.

However, if you read it as SF, you find that the author is writing *good* SF. Tropes like FTL travel and magical translation devices are used intelligently -- enough detail to imply a solid SF background, not so much as to turn the book into a series of tech lectures. There is a real sense of deep history. (More so if you also read the _Fire Dancer_ trilogy, which is set in the same milieu, but much much later.) It's got density.

The romance tropes are also used intelligently, for that matter. Lots of books have picked up the notion of "eternally linked soulmates". Fewer have dug into how that differs from falling in love. And the violet eyes aren't simple either.

Anyway, it's a suggestion.

This Is Just To Say

that I have googled
Williams parodies
on Making Light

just nine hits
short of three thousand
if you include this one

forgive me
they were irresistible
so terse
and so wry

Romance recommendations: I second the In Death rec, with the caveat that it took me a bit to a) get over the fact that I was reading Nora Roberts and b) find the proper dosage. Then I spent a bit more than a month reading them, jumped to her mainstream/mystery romances, then worked back until her books weren't as much fun (1990).
Historical romances: I like Loretta Chase and Julia Quinn.
I also really like Patricia Briggs. Something about her writing grabs me and pulls me in. Many of her books have romance subplots. There's also Sharon Shinn; I'd say Archangel and either Heart of Gold or Mystic and Rider for her.
I have never read a Jennifer Crusie I didn't like. Not always perfect, but Agnes and the Hitman, Welcome to Temptation, Crazy for You, Anyone but You... I've recommended all of them to different people for different reasons.
Ooh, Julia Spencer-Fleming, too.

Check out Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. If you look at their reviews by grade, you'll get a good reading list. It's what I did when I wanted different books.

Check out Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. If you look at their reviews by grade, you'll get a good reading list. It's what I did when I wanted different books.

Groan. I went to the site, clicked on "Greatest Hits", and found this. Loud guffaws ensued. Shades of Knight Moves!

@377: evil evil evil.

Nasty evil.

(Turnip trolling?)

Pendrift, #454: The older man / much younger woman issue doesn't bother me in a Regency romance the way it would in something contemporary. That was an accepted part of the Regency aristocratic culture -- men were expected to become established before looking for wives, while (as you note) women were "brought out" at 18 and expected to be married within 2 years after that. That said, a surprising number of Heyer's heroines are indeed in their middle 20s, and considered to be spinsters with no further chances at marriage.

abi, #455: I can understand that. Sophy would be a very uncomfortable friend to have IRL; her managing ways and conviction that She Knows Best would be absolutely intolerable without an author making sure it all comes out right in the end. My brain seems to interpret it as Shakespearian farce.

Today's WashPost food section has an article on how to make sauerkraut plus recipes for two sauerkraut cakes (links in the box at the left).

I recorded NCIS because I'd rather be able to back up and look at small bits of that than "V," which I watched. I think "V" will get one more watching just to make sure how awful it is.

Michael Roberts, Sandra McDonald has a milSF Romance trilogy. I liked the first book a lot and the second and third not so much. This is the link to the review of the third because it has links to the first and second.

Happy Birthdays, Linkmeister and Paul A.!

#464: By coincidence, I picked up my first-ever head of cabbage, for the specific purpose of kraut-making.

Stefan Jones @ 465... my first-ever head of cabbage, for the specific purpose of kraut-making

"Alive! It's alive!"

Quinn, Chase, and Crusie are all fun. I'd recommend starting with Heyer for the historical romances, however.

xeger #411:
In dealing with trebuchet parking, I'd also want to find out which way they are pointing. Parking them facing in is considered to be rather unneighborly.

Pendrift at 461, I am so annoyed at that. I had that book in my hand, carried it around the bookstore for a while, then put it back because the friend with me was not laughing nearly as much as I was... and not a week later, that review comes out. I still haven't gotten my own copy.

The Smart Bitches' book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, is also much to laugh about.

After some of us met in Oakland, Terrry Karney posted that I am nuch quieter in person than on the internet. That impression would have been quickly dispelled, had he been standing next to me 15 minutes ago while I was on the phone, trying to find why a check of mine was refused when I bought some office supplies. I expect that Teresa would have described my attitude nd conversational style as... ah... brisk.

In Re Sensawunda:

I recently read John C. Wright's "Null-A Continuum", which is a sequel to A. E. van Vogt's Null-A books. Wright clearly spent a lot of time studying van Vogt's style and construction; I think he's got it right most of the time.

I'm currently reading Brian Stableford's "Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity". I found this book in the library and thought, "Well, I like a lot of Stableford's work, so I guess I'll try this. If it's as goofy as the title, it might be fun." It's not as goofy as the title, in fact it's very different from what I expected, and very, very good.

Both books deal with questions of the ultimate fate of the human race, and of the universe. But they do it in very different ways. In "Null-A Continuum" Wright consciously uses van Vogt's technique of throwing in a new plot element every 800 words. Every few pages Gilbert Gosseyn gets to apply his superpowers to a new menacing and/or friendly McGuffin. The result for me is severe senseawunda overload. When I was young I read a lot of van Vogt, including the two original Null-A books, and liked it a lot. I had hoped that reading this new book would be a return to that experience, but it wasn't, partly because I'm not ten or eleven any more, and partly, I think, because that thrill I felt then is not a sensation you can have again, at least not in the same way.

Stableford's book on the other hand uses several points of view of characters from our own past who must deal with (possibly unreliable) foreknowledge of the distant future. The pov's are written in different voices (several of them the voices of well-known authors, and the writing of those is a considerable tour-de force), and the visions of the future are described in the language and concepts of late Victorian England, not those of the 21st century. The result, again for me, is that the futuristic elements are embedded like gems in a beautifully designed and executed setting, focusing the reader's attention on them even though they take up far less of the book than the far-future elements do in "Null-A Continuum".

I wouldn't have posted anything about the Null-A book if I hadn't followed it by reading the Stableford and been struck by the fact that the two books attempt some similar effects, using very different tropes and techniques. That made me think some more about the notion of "sensawunda" that we talk about. I don't think it's gone, as I've heard people say, but I do think that the way I comprehend it is different now that I'm older and now that what I (and I think many others) expect of the genre has changed.

John Houghton @ 468 ...
xeger #411:
In dealing with trebuchet parking, I'd also want to find out which way they are pointing. Parking them facing in is considered to be rather unneighborly.

At the time, I was substantially more concerned about the size of the counterweight...

xeger @ 472:
At the time, I was substantially more concerned about the size of the counterweight.

Sometimes bigger really is better.

xeger, Bruce: This is why I prefer traction trebuchets. If it's good enough for Simon de Montfort....

I'm with abi et al on The Grand Sophy. It's one of her more annoying books. (I also can't take Beauvallet.)
I'd add Faro's Daughter and False Colours to the list of 'worth reading'. The several that involve the Avon family (These Old Shades, Devil's Cub, Regency Buck and An Infamous Army) are also good, if somewhat uneven.

Lee @ #448: oooh, I loved The Interior Life. I should see if I can score a copy on abebooks.com.

Recs for mysteries: Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors is, IMO, the best mystery ever written.

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time is a very different take on the genre.

Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens is the last and best of her theatre-based mysteries. If you have any fondness for the stage, give it a try.

me at #451-453: Gaah! I know *I* didn't hit "Submit" three times!

Mods, Martin, or any other "Tech Rat": If you can't find the duplication bug, maybe it's time to just hack in a back-end filter, specifically to catch and toss messages which are identical to the last message posted by the same author?

I loathed anything labeled "Romance" until the day I had to clear out my late mother-in-law's library. She had thousands of paperbacks, neatly packed in converted Kleenex boxes, including 2 1/2 boxes of Heyer Regencies, some held together with rubber bands. I wanted to know what such a down-to-earth, witty woman saw in, you know, that, so I sat down on the porch steps to take a look . . .

Several hours later, my husband found me still sitting there, giggling.

Personally, I would start with either Frederica or Venetia. Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle is also at the top of my list.

Lila @476, Nine Tailors is an amazing piece of writing- historical epic and mystery and environmental observation equally mixed. Although it's one of her later works it's more closely tied to the effects of WW1 than any of her other books except The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

I read Georgette Heyer in high school- I read the back off These Old Shades- but I've kept reading Sayers, every couple of years.

I just made a recipe out of The Joy that turns cabbage into a luxury. You need a skillet with a lid. First bring half a pound of carrots (peeled and sliced) to a boil with a cup of water or chicken broth and a tablespoon of butter. Cover the pan, reduce to a simmer, and cook for a few minutes until the carrots are tender and sweet. Meanwhile, shred a pound of green cabbage. Put the cabbage into the pan with some fresh or dried dill weed or some dill seeds; if you like, add 2 tablespoons cream. Cover again and simmer for about 10 minutes. (The cookbook says, "until the sauce is syrupy," but the cabbage always scorches when I try that, so cook until the cabbage is just done.) Add salt and pepper to taste and serve hot.

If you make this with Matanuska carrots, it's sublime! Matanuska carrots are as crisp and sweet as apples even when they are the size that is usually used for horse fodder. Even the cores are sweet. Unfortunately, they're currently hard to find outside Alaska.

Bruce @ 376: I had some things to say about the lack of mathematical and physical consistency of Dunne's theories of time

Yes, I always thought that Danny Dunn and the Time Machine was completely inconsistent.

Lee @ 448: oh, it hadn't turned into a mudslinging match. I will grant you that it probably would have within another two hours, yes, but I was kind of enjoying the thoughts it was provoking.

Pendrift @ 461: that's the funniest thing I've read in weeks!

Sauerkraut discussion: I made some last year (well, it was Hungarian csalamádé, which is kind of kraut 2.0) and it turned out well, although Puerto Rico was a tad too hot for it to ferment comfortably (the second batch molded badly and I gave up). Now that the weather is more German up here, we're going to try again; the 2-gallon jar survived the move fine.

Actually, everything survived the move pretty well, the palm tree, the dog, the 2-gallon jar, the 2-liter graduated cylinder - everything except my wife's filing cabinet, on which I had stupidly put my toolbox. The filing cabinet is no longer very rectilinear.

All: I'm pretty sure Heyer is going to be my first romance author. Wish me luck, and thanks for all the tips; there are a lot of suggestions up there I'm pos-def going to try (yeah, I missed a couple of favorite SF authors in that list).

Michael Roberts: I second Elliott Mason on the Diana Gabaldon Outlander series. Aside from the whole time travel thing, and the main characters showing up at every important historical event, the historical setting seems really grounded to me. Strong plots and characters -- I can't put them down.

Several people have recommended Jennifer Crusie. She's incredibly funny. I didn't like Crusie's books with co-author Bob Mayer as much -- I found the violence a jarring element. I like her later books better than her early Harlequin ones. I recommend "Welcome to Temptation", and "Faking It".

Heyer is usually mentioned as the classic (and she is good), but in my opinion the original is Jane Austen. If you've somehow never actually read "Pride and Prejudice", do.

I adore Josephine Tey's books, too, aside from the occasional cold jab of prejudice. Often a problem reading books from a half century or so ago.

Serge@447: What about Naomi Novik's books, which mixes Hornblower stories with dragons? Any romance in those?

Mm, no...not so's you'd notice. The dominant relationship there is between Laurence and Temeraire, but for obvious reasons it's a deep loving friendship rather than a romance.

Michael Roberts, re mystery recommendations.

I'm quite fond of British police proceduals. My favorite series at the moment is by Peter Robinson. There's a romantic element and the series is best read in publication order so as to follow developments. (I believe all the books are in print as mass market paperbacks.)

Other authors in that genre that I read: John Harvey, Deborah Crombie (an American so be forewarned: there may be bloopers), Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, and P.D. James.

Found today on Comcast's site...

Voters rewarded candidates who focused on jobs and restrained government in Tuesday's election.

That sounds like contradictory wishes to me, but what the heck do I know?

David Goldfarb @ 484... Well, there is always the sexual practice advocated by Swanwick & Dozois in that infamous writing workshop.

The Black Moth, Heyer's first novel (begun when she was 17, to entertain an oft-ill brother, and published in 1921), is available as a free ebook here.

More reading suggestions for Michael Roberts. I also like Heyer - and didn't even count her in "romances" as I read her stuff back in high school & college and loved it then - but my husband, whose SF taste seems to overlap with yours (he reads mostly hard SF and techno/military thrillers), finds her "meh." On the other hand, to the surprise of both of us, he thoroughly enjoys Nora Roberts, especially the J. D. Robb "In Death" series but also some of her standalone contemporaries, in particular Northern Lights. He also enjoyed some of Susan Grant, e.g. The Star King, and Linnea Sinclair, The Down-home Zombie Blues. (I leave these scattered around the house like bait, and sometimes he picks them up, but he's released to the wild afterward and not harmed in the process.)

In the SF-with-romance category, unless I missed it, you didn't mention Lee & Miller's Liaden books. I'd recommend starting with either Agent of Change or Conflict of Honors; both have been reprinted in ominbi.

And there was a post on tor.com a week or two ago about steampun