"...and I feel fine?"

I've often seen that bit about "...children no longer obey their parents and everybody wants to write a book" attributed to Cicero. I once asked on the latinstudy email list and nobody had a source for it.

(Also: Second! Again!)

There's a reason my mother the history prof rolls her eyes whenever anyone talks about the end of the world, or the degeneracy of society.

Har.

i'd be very curious to know how one said "every man wants to write a book" in the assyrian of 2800 b.c., given that, so far as i know, no books had been written at that time.
(certainly no codices. papyrus rolls? stacks of clay tablets with very long staples through the top left corner?)

what was the word used for "book" here? in what other clay tablets of 2800 b.c. does it show up, and what does it mean there?

for comparison: the epic of gilgamesh was not even composed at that time.

maybe the smithsonanian meant "2800 years ago"?

Miep Gies has died today, one month shy of her 101st birthday. It's people like her that give me confidence that no matter what evil is loose in the world the basic good in humanity will triumph.

Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil, eh, Teresa?

Yesterday, I discovered, much to my excitement, that in 1964 the BBC had aired its adaptation of Asimov's Caves of Steel, starring Peter Cushing as Lije Baley. Today, much to my disgust, I learned from Paul A that, in the 1970s, that same BBC had wiped out the tapes. Idiots, idiots, idiots...

Bartleby has a page labelling the "Assyrian tablet" quote as probably spurious, but the earliest cite they list for it is 1949; Google Books has it in a 1938 magazine that attaches it to a specific source, Dr. Frederick C. Ferry of Hamilton College.

It looks like there are at least two even earlier cites of the quote, one from a 1937 humor magazine and another from a 1928 journal that has something to do with charities, but both of those are limited to snippet views.

Yeah, I've seen it attributed to Cicero too.

And then, someone I know wrote an update:

Yes, these are terrible times that we live in

Society is going to the dogs

Children don't obey their parents

And everyone is writing blogs.

(Incidentally--with luck, I can start posting again. Law school kicks your ass in 2L year too, but your ass sort of grows a thicker skin.)

@9:

Well, Google-fu reveals that a Frederick Carlos Ferry was president of Hamilton College in the right time frame, but I haven't found anything connecting him with Assyrian writings. Mathematics, Latin, and Greek, yes, but not Assyrian.

2800 BC sounded very suspicious to me, and bartleby agrees. "Both of the above quotations would seem to be spurious."

It seems to be quoted on the web a lot. Perhaps a significant source apparently is Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), likely via here.

On the other hand, I think I can antedate bartleby's 1949 source (though it's always difficult to tell with Google Scholar if you can't get the whole article, what with the uneven quality of their metadata). There's apparently a quotation in 1931 (with the 2800 BC date and Assyrian location). But there's also a quotation of it in the Classical Weekly (from an "unfortunately [...] undocumented source") attributing it to an Egyptian priest in 4000 BC (!)—which gives rise to its own little genealogy of quotation.

I've found a 1922 quotation, only slightly at variance from the one in the post, from the Report of the State Librarian to the Governor [of Connecticut] that was published the same year. Hathi Trust has this volume fully viewable.

Both this book and another one from 1923 that quotes it don't give any more citation of the tablet other than that is "preserved in Constantinople".

Can anyone come up with an earlier quote?

Yes, but it was safer for your purse because they didn't have PA then.

And then the Sumerians elected (or something) Urukagina, who made everything better, brought down barriers, installed a whole new police system, and restored justice to all, regardless of funds and power (widows and orphans were specifically mentioned on the tablets describing this.)

Reading about it during the 2008 election cycle was quite fascinating.

In case anybody else is in a position to look up the journals, the earliest quotations in Google Scholar are (allegedly)

Evolution Up And Down (book review) in the Journal of Heredity, 1925

and

The Lawyers' Tool Chest by Fred Y. Holland, Librarian, Supreme Court Library, can't work out where, possibly secretly the same as the following hit ...

and

The Past, Present and Future of the Law Library by G S Godard, in the Law Library Journal 1931.

It seems to be quoted on the web a lot. Perhaps a significant source is Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), likely via http://www.abhota.info/end1.htm.

Aha, and George Seymour Godard was Connecticut State Librarian 1900 – 1936.

O tempura, o morels.

"Evolution Up And Down (book review) in the Journal of Heredity, 1925"

I can't see the full article from here, but this appears to be a review of two books, one of which is Marshall Dawson's _Nineteenth Century Evolution and After_ (Macmillan, 1923), which was the 1923 book I was referring to at #12. You can read the page with the quote, and the rest of the book, at Hathi Trust.

Frederick Ferry ("President of Hamilton College") was credited with getting the quote from the tablet, in the 1938 source referred to by Julie in #9. Ferry became president of Hamilton in 1917, not long before the early 1920s quotes we've found. I wonder whether this was an anecdote from a speech he made to students or faculty; it sounds like the sort of story that would be tempting to include in an address to matriculating or graduating students (and that might have then made it into a local news account), even if its provenance was dubious.

My dog turned around six times before settling into her bed.

Should I call the vet?

The earliest cite of the "Assyrian" quote I've found at this point is 1916-- Google Book has it indexed as 1914, but the printing date at the start of the document is 1916.

Janet (#17), I don't know, I think people may be more shellfish than in bygone times.

"O tempura, o morels."

And now I'm hungry.

O tempera, o murals.

Tim @15: The Lawyers' Tool Chest by Fred Y. Holland, Librarian, Supreme Court Library, can't work out where

Colorado, according to The American Organization of Law Libraries (Holland was president from 1936-1937). AddAll doesn't have any info about his book, though.

If everybody writes a book just before the end of the world, who will read them all?

http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/
weblog of strange things a man says in his sleep (as transscribed by his wife)

@17: tempura, okay, but I have never seen a morel around here. The word is that it is a boom year for chanterelles -- my most avid mushroom hunter friend is inventing new recipes for them. But I haven't even been to the chanterelle patches I used to go to with the nice fellow, since he died before the last season. This year I intend to go -- but can't find anybody who's available when I am who wants to go to Lost Camp or Grey Whale with me. And I don't go into the forest without another person, and for that purpose, a dog doesn't count.

Yeah, well, tangents are the point of an open thread, aren't they?

Erik @25: The poor guy in the bank vault in "Time Enough at Last," maybe...

#14: So then the question beomes "What's the Sumerian for 'You kids get off my lawn!'"

I wonder what they had to say about the good ol' days.

D. Potter @ 29 ...
#14: So then the question beomes "What's the Sumerian for 'You kids get off my lawn!'"

I'd have to think that a stick or a broom might well be involved...

All knowledge of internet etiquette is contained in the Fluorosphere. So let ma ask this.

Over on Something Awful, a bunch of people are playing through a Fighting Fantasy book I (and others) wrote 25 years ago. They're making comments like "Even by the standards of these books, that was an outstanding piece of dickery", which to a gamebook designer is high praise. Question is this: can I go there and make helpful interjections that set them straight about Bronze Age culture, some subtleties of which are passing them by? Would that be kind of cool, like the Mayor strolling into the library at the end of Series 3? Or helpful and constructive, like Charlie Stross on Crooked Timber? Or would it be a classic Author's Big Mistake?

Julie L @ 20: Paging up from the source you linked to, it looks like the quote you link to is a report from 1926. (This is a volume of reports to the California state board of education starting from 1914, but the volume-- or at least the scan-- includes reports from many later years as well. The title page for the report with the quote is a few dozen pages back. It's dated 1926, and cites reports and statistics from around that time.)

So it appears that the earliest quotes we have of this are still Godard's from his 1922 state librarian report, and Dawson's from his 1923 book.

It doesn't seem all that likely to me that Dawson would have picked it up from a 1922 state library report, and that report seems like an odd place for someone to simply have made up the quote. So I'm guessing there's likely to be an earlier source that both of them got the quote from. I just don't know what it is. But it may well be a non-book source (such as a newspaper or magazine) that isn't in the mass digitized-book corpuses. Or maybe it's something that is online that I just haven't found yet.

Interestingly this was found right next to another Assyrian tablet with the cryptic words:
Fck y ! Y ld bstrd!

on it.
These are believed to have some sort of mystical and/or religious significance to them.

The best genuine old lament about how rotten the times are comes from Q. Horatius Flaccus (Horace) and it's in Odes Book III, number vi.

What has destructive time not diminished?
The age of our parents, worse than that of our grandparents,
Has produced us, the worst yet,
Soon we will give way to a yet more degenerate generation.

Since that was written in about 14AD, by now we must really really suck. Eh well.

You think we missed the road when we did not
make the right turn and soon were in the corn;
a point of loss, but she was not forsworn

and got us out of there to the right spot;
no loss of time, nor yet reason for scorn.
You think we missed the road when we did not.

Our guide had things to say and just forgot
the proper way; you know her heart was torn,
but still we passed right by where she was born;
you think we missed the road when we did not.

Happy Birthday, Bill Higgings!
The Rocketeer Corps thanks you.

Pritchard's The Ancient Near East in Texts and Pictures gives this: "Every mouth is full of 'Love me!' and everything good has disappeared." (The Prophecy of Nefer-Rohu, trans. John A. Wilson; extant copies date from the 18th Dynasty)

A thrilling adventure co-starring Bill Higgins.

Serge @ 8 -

Today, much to my disgust, I learned from Paul A that, in the 1970s, that same BBC had wiped out the tapes. Idiots, idiots, idiots...

It wasn't so much stupidity as it was economics. Videotape was a more expensive commodity back then and it routinely erased and reused not only at the Beeb but at US networks as well. There's a good deal of early Johnny Carson and other shows that's gone for good.

Even today, with information storage so much cheaper, the idea that we won't ever lose anything is wrong. As long as people make decisions about what's important (and therefore worthy of being reformatted and copied into new media), we will lose information.

Serge @8 and Steve C @ 40 -

The BBC have recovered some of their early lost radio and TV material with their Archive Treasure Hunt campaign, which collects recordings made by the public. They've recovered quite a lot of stuff, but not, alas, that recording of The Caves of Steel.

I think I'll take up painting--giant copies of interference patterns.
O tempera, o moires.

Kind of along the same lines, and of particular interest/amusement to those involved in the book trade, Fresh Eyes Now has some past-predictions/observations on the publishing business.

I particularly liked this 1850's lament:

"the publishers make large fortunes and leave the authors to starve--they are, in fact, a kind of moral vampire, sucking the best blood of genius, and destroying others to support themselves."

have you tried the japanese batter-fried eels?

o tempura, o morays!

Well, that old guy was right--the end of the world was approaching. Still is.

Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige,
heah horngestreon, heresweg micel,
meodoheall monig mondreama full,
oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe.

Thing is, the music the kids liked back then really was just noise...

Steve C @ 40... I understand why they did it, but it's not information that they purposefully lost, it's stories.

AlyxL @ 41... According to the article that Paul A linked me to, fragments exist, but that's all they are. Bits. Pieces.

David 32: Leaving aside the dizzying incongruity of mentioning etiquette and Something Awful in the same context, I think it would be a minor ABM. 25 years certainly reduces the ABMness, in my opinion, but it's still inadvisable.

I doubt the subtleties of Bronze Age culture will matter to the gamers much. Remember, "The game must be fun shall be the whole of the Law." If they don't have fun playing the game, they won't care about anything else. But even if they do enjoy it, they probably won't admit it. Dissing things is always "cooler" than praising them.

If you can limit yourself to saying something like "I can't believe people are still using this book I wrote 25 years later," that might be OK. But on SA they'll probably use you as a piñata as soon as you appear.

NB: I'm not a published author, and my experience with SA is limited (to pretty negative interactions, as you may be able to tell). Take this with the appropriate-sized container of salt. I hope others more experienced with both SA and author/reader interactions will weigh in.

Teresa @ 39...

"Only they can foil my plans to steal Ohio! They must die!"

Dutch and English are not friends.

David@32: I take the opposite view from Xopher. In my experience, gamers are interested in history. If you offer historical context (as opposed to self-defense) -- and make it clear that you too were a big damn gaming nerd and fan of the game-book genre, I think it would be well-received.

(If you were not in fact a big damn gaming nerd, but just did the things for a paycheck, it might go less well.)

Caveat: my experience with gamers is not on SA. And my crowd is self-selected for interest in gaming history.

(An excellent recent article on CYOA books: http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/ . Interactive Flash presentation.)

Amusing fun author Good. Ranting foamy author Bad.

Which is kind of the same as when you're writing an actual book, isn't it?...

So, Bill Higgin, Seth Breidbart, and I all share the same birthday (I'm something like eight hours older than Seth....)

David@32: I loved the Altheus series*, so if you could point out the subtleties here, at least, it'd be most excellent. I still remember the Procrustean inn, and the light in the Colossus' eyes slowly fading as the ichor ran out his heel. Ooh, and Hephaestus' avalanche test. Dammit, it's going to take ages to get the 10-year-old me under control again.

*: For some reason, I could never find book 2 or 3, and even now, the second-hand stores have only returned book 1 to me. Note to self: add to shopping list.

I don't understand the Sumerians
Corruption is everywhere you look
I don't understand the Sumerians
Everybody wants to write a book

Paula Lieberman @ 56... So does my youngest nephew. And Rush Limbaugh. (When I told my nephew's mom, she exclaimed "Gross!")

you know, i still think that quote cannot be referring to real books.
(and shame on the smithsonian for not fact-checking its authenticity).

so my new theory is, the assyrian doesn't mean "book" as in "codex"; it means "book" as in "the spoken dialogue of a stage musical."

what the guy is really complaining about is that everybody is trying to get into mesapotamian musical theatre.

you know--"springtime for sargon", "ziggurat's follies", that sort of thing.

Serge @ 8 - they wiped a lot of stuff of far greater weight than that. Hancock (Anthony Aloysius) for instance, a lot of early Dennis Potter and his contemporaries. After all, television was worthless and ephemeral, and champagne for the DG was so expensive in those days.

John Mark Ockerbloom@33: So it appears that the earliest quotes we have of this are still Godard's from his 1922 state librarian report, and Dawson's from his 1923 book.

1922 saw the beginnings of the big joint British Museum/University of Pennsylvania excavations at Ur, so ancient Sumer might well have been in the minds of at least some of the day's more erudite coiners-of-witticisms.

Particle or Sidelight bait: Al Gore asks for font change for his "Our Choice" book, creator agrees with his suggestion. (Scientific formulas don't work well in Brioni.)

The versions I'm finding on Google Books have "latter days," by the way, not "later."

I've got my love to keep me warm.

Oh temperature! Amoré!

The scariest thing about living in any historical era is watching all of Nostradamus's prophecies coming true.

Serge:
Yuck
On the other hand, -he- is not a Making Light contributor!

The comments on the Smithsonian article include a response about the provenance of the Assyrian tablet quotation, attributing it as follows: "To answer your question, the quote from the Assyrian tablet has been published in books and articles for nearly a hundred years. Historians attribute the translation to Isabel F. Dodd, a professor of art and archeology at the American College for Girls in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the early 20th century. She came across the tablet in one of the city's museums."

@68--

strauss's reply in that comment-thread really does not betray any understanding of what it means to trace something to its source. "books", "historians", and "museums" are all fine things. but referring to them in the collective plural is not the same thing as citing a source.

it would have been better for strauss to say, "yeah, this is just a silly blog post--who knows whether the tablet is real or not."

the nat geo. usually does better. one would hate to have to demote it to "scholarly sources to avoid citing at all costs."

dunno why i said "@68"--i meant "@70".

@71 -- oh, I know, I know. But the bit about Isabel F. Dodd is new, and does suggest that Strauss has some other source in mind that MIGHT be more definitive. I've put a request for more info on the thread, but it's an old comment thread and he might never see it.

There might just possibly be something in one of these articles:

#
Archaeological News
by WN Bates - 1909 - Cited by 1
850 B.C., and although the motives are Assyrian, they seem to be the work of local artists. ... ISABEL F. DODD gives a brief account of certain antiqui- ...
www.jstor.org/stable/497027
#
Archaeological News
by JM Paton - 1907
1450 B.c. Assyrian. Over six hundred tablets and fragments of tablets, chiefly from ...... ISABEL F. DODD describes briefly the ruins of Nicaea in Bithynia ...
www.jstor.org/stable/497037

Erik, #26: My ex once woke up out of a sound sleep saying, "It's in the all-important blue pouch." We never did figure out what he'd been dreaming about!

Will, #28: Or the guy with the watch in "All the Time in the World".

kid bitzer, #46: Nice -- but could you provide a translation for the Old-English-impaired, please?

And everyone else has beaten me to all the good puns. Grumph.

While we are talking about the end of civilization --

O Tambora, o Mayon

Well, I do see an attribution to Dodds providing the "inscription" quote in an endnote of Merrill Peterson's _Starving Armenians_ (2004). But the note said she mentioned it in a letter dated March 24, 1923-- and we've already found published sources older than that. So that can't be the original. (The letter itself is in a set of papers at Harvard that doesn't seem to be online.)

I didn't find any other attributions to Dodds by historians in a quick Google search, though I might have missed something.

Dawson's 1923 book provides some potentially useful clues. He prefaces the quote by writing "The reading of what these ancient records had
to say on this point provoked only humor, a decade ago." Which implies he saw the quote sometime in the nineteen-teens, and that it may well have originally been in a humorous context that was later taken seriously.

Yale acquired a rather large Assyrian collection around 1915, which was the subject of many numerous Daily News articles. (All the ones I can find online are straight stories that don't mention the tablet like that). Yale lists a Marshall Dawson in its 1916 alumni list; state librarian Godard also took a degree from Yale in 1895.

So I wonder if some publication came up with this as a fanciful quote, a humorous anecdote based on Yale's real collection. Possible sources might include the Yale Record or the Harvard Lampoon (both campus humor magazines publishing at the time); or perhaps a Yale alumni magazine. I don't know of online archives that far back for any of those, but they strike me as possible leads, if no other sources can be found.

The _Archaeological News_ volumes mentioned upthread while I was writing this might also be worth checking out, though the snippets quoted simply confirm that Dodds was in Constantinople and was interested in local tablets.

The end of newspapers:

O Times! O Daily Mirror!

Here's a 2004 book supports Strauss's assertion about Isabel F. Dodd without adding much to our knowledge.

#73, #76--

i looked up the "archaeological news" references on jstor ("arch. news" was a column in the american journal of archaeology).

neither reference pans out--they are just brief mentions, saying that ms. dodds had been somewhere of interest or had a few items of interest in her collection. but nothing about assyrian tablets, and indeed not much more than the quotations you have already seen.

Bill Higgins: Yes, that's the book I was referring to in #76; thanks for providing the link! (I then walked down the hall from my library office to consult a print copy to get the end note.) I don't offhand know of other books that attribute the quote to Dodd.

And, on another note, happy birthday!

by the way, those of you who are googling ms. dodd's name may have been struck, as i was, by the record of her corresponding with gutzon borglum, the sculptor of mt. rushmore. she seems to have commissioned a small portrait bust from him.

#74--

sorry. here's wikipedia's translation of those lines from "the ruin":

Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls,
high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude,
many a meadhall full of festivity,
until Fate the mighty changed that.

it's just another voice from another century checking in to say that we have always thought things are getting worse.

On the ancient news of the end of the world, I always liked this exchange:

"Philip Roth: Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?...

Milan Kundera: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.

Roth: So then we have nothing to worry about.

Kundera: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it."

(Great interview in general, although note the utterly meaning-changning typo I discuss here.)

Another website (This is True) pointed me at Shorpy

"History in HD". A vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s (and maybe a few before and after that), including some spectacular Kodachrome color shots. Most of the photos come from high-resolution scans made by the Library of Congress, which are then restored and displayed on Shorpy with captions describing what you're viewing. And you can indeed view them in their high-resolution glory (and if you wish, purchase prints). You can go discover for yourself why it's called Shorpy."

Mike Ford content - a picture of Ouray from Blow-Out Canyon circa 1901 - in some timeline, anyway.

There's also WPA posters, Civil War photos, railroads, WW II, even Zeppelins and Blimps for the steampunk fans.

A major time and bandwidth sink!

you ever notice that feeling that comes over a company when it starts hiring a lot of temp employees, and the regulars find their pay frozen?

o temp aura! no more raise!

A project like Pokemon, but with real animals.

John Mark Ockerbloom @35: Oops. Thanks for the correction-- I'd noticed similar overlaps in Google Books' indexing of at least one other set of records, but this one slipped by me.

There's probably also a question of how the word "Assyrian" should be parsed in this context-- circa 2800 BC, did it discretely represent either a language or a political unit? It's not even clear to me whether the city of Assur/Ashur was founded until ~2500 bc.

bryan @35: Interestingly this was found right next to another Assyrian tablet with the cryptic words: Fck y ! Y ld bstrd!

Since a few cites identify the original quote-tablet as "Babylonian" instead, I suspect that this one was mixed in from a much later stratigraphic layer from the 6th century BC. (And written in Hebrew.)

Henry Troupe @ 84 -

I've had Shorpy linked from my blog for a while -- it's indeed a time sink.

I find myself wondering if Isabel was related to Edwin Dodd of Antonia Forest's _The Ready-Made Family_.

"For the times, they are a'changin."

Oh Mr. Tambourine Man, oh jingle-jangle morning.

This bug report thread about goat teleportation in Google Chromium has that je ne sais quoi that says "Making Light" to me. Especially now that the puns have started flying.

Michael Roberts @ 91: Thanks for that link! I enjoyed it a lot. Baa!

I happened upon this picture today, and it made think of "Making Light," too. In the very best possible way.

I wondered who'd gotten my goat since I started using chromium. I'm sure the googlebot is indexing it so that I can find it later.

So, what else is new?

As the French say, "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose".

Debbie @93. Oh, I like that. Do you know anything else about it? I was googling around a bit but can't find anything but other links to the image - no info on artist or source.

@36 Hmmm. Isn't it true then that the entirety of Ancient Hebrew is disemvoweled?

Pieces of Shit of the week:
Political class:

a) AmericanFuturesFund.com -- 3rd party special interest scum rightwing assholes group paying for lying weasel ads promoting Scott Brown for Senate

b) Scott Brown who believes in torturing people and that the United States Constitution should apply only to US citizens.... and who condemns "attack ads" by Coakley but hasn't stopped the ad above... and invokes the US National Guard, which promoted him to Lt Col.... someone whose judgment, by my lights, should have been passed over to promotion to O-3 based on his disconnection from reality....

c) The US Chamber of Commerce, with lying weasel ads promoting Brown....

As a completely separate aside, I recently came across this photo of the Flatiron Building being built, and thought our esteemed hosts (and perhaps other people) would find it interesting.

OtterB@96: There are some clues in the picture itself: the portable cassette player dates it to no earlier than the '80s (and the fact that the player is in the attic suggests that the date is later, '90s or '00s) and the bust of Homer says "OMERO"...I'm not sure of what language that is, but Italian seems most likely, with Spanish possible.

#98 myself

It's AmericanFutureFund.com not AmericanFuturesFund.com ... probably related to the so-called Swift Vets who stuck their oar in in 2005 in the Presidential election....

and yes indeed, they are!

http://iowaindependent.com/4203/secrets-of-the-american-future-fund

"Secrets of the American Future Fund
Iowa-based conservative advocacy group includes masterminds of Swift Boat and Willie Horton ads
By Jason Hancock 8/19/08 12:29 PM"

#93 He's obviously worshipping the lambent light emitting from his mountain-decked altar, observed by the bust of the bard.

Oh temple-rays, Omero.

And another one,

http://mediamattersaction.org/factcheck/201001110004

"American Future Fund Airs False Attack Ads "Against Martha Coakley
"January 11, 2010 12:11 pm ET
"misleading, out of context quote, the ad falsely claims Coakley favors increasing taxes. In reality, she said "get[ting] people back to work" would increase tax revenue and reduce the deficit."

#102--

wow--triple letter score for combining several sub-threads in one!

reminds me of the porridge potentate and the resistor network.

Open Threadness --

7.0 earthquake hits Haiti sparking tsunami watch

I am hoping the tsunami watch is overblown. Cuba is in the path, if tsunami is in the works.

But -- O our friends, our family, in Haiti.

And Cuba.

Love, C.

Constance #105: Just learned that an evacuation order has been issued for the Cuban town of Baracoa.

Okay, Fluorosphere: anybody know how to make TweetDeck play nice with Facebook?

#106 ::: Fragano Ledgister

I had heard that too.

I'm more concerned for our Haitian friends and family.

Cuba has its shit together for disasters.

Not that I don't care about the disasters, of course, or understand that a disaster is a disaster.

Love, C.

The sound of a shoe dropping...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

"A new approach to China

"1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM
"Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying
degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December...what at first appeared to be solely a security incident...was something quite different.

"....

"These attacks...combined with the attempts
...to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to [be]... no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn...we will be discussing with the Chinese government.... may...mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

"....We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

"Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer"

From the last open thread, re: regional driving behavior; in some areas, it is commonplace for drivers to jump the green. In others, it is commonplace for drivers to run the red.

Chicago's a run-the-red jurisdiction, and therefore when the light turns green there's sort of a 1-2 second pause for breath before most traffic starts going (in case some maniac is barreling through); in theory some of the intersections have double-red to avoid collisions, but if the drivers find out about it they just take advantage.

Chicago is also a region where "my turn signal is on" means "I'm coming over RIGHT NOW whether you move or not": on the highways in thickish traffic you'll be lucky if you get three blinks out of someone before they cut into your lane sharply.

We also (I must admit with shame), on the whole, ignore lights-and-sirens, or at most stop and wait at the intersection despite our green, if we see an ambulance/firetruck/etc barreling towards us.

This still, decades later, strikes me as shocking, because I spent a significant amount of my growing-up summers in Atlantic City. I don't know what happens now, but back then, if there was a firetruck heading anywhere with intent anywhere in the city, all traffic lights began blinking red, and EVERYONE just pulled over and turned off their cars until the truck was done with the streets (presumably they called it in to Main Traffic Light Control or some such). By my last summer there, there was enough vehicular traffic that they'd zoned this system, so only the areas the firetruck had to drive through were blinked. It startled the hell out of my now-husband when we were there for a family wedding and he noticed this odd, school-of-fish like en masse behavior, but that was just normal there.

I do at least TRY to pull over to the curb and clear headway for sirens, but it's nearly gotten me rearended more than once when the Important Idiot behind me or in the right lane has decided he can get one more block before he 'has to' stop for it.

martyn, #63: I've read that the "ephemeral" assumption came partially from the way the British approached TV programs as taped stage plays, instead of films as in the US--you were watching a live event, not a movie. (This is also one reason Doctor Who and similar programs could get away with such cheap special effects. As on the stage, the audience's imagination was expected to do the heavy lifting.)

I also recall reading that there were also contracts with the actors' union stipulating that any show could only be rerun once. The fear was that if the BBC could rerun programs in perpetuity they would eventually no longer need actors to make new material. I'm not sure how reliable this information is.

AKICIML, movie edition: I need a copy of the 1936 Anything Goes, which I have been able to find only on Amazon's video-on-demand thingy. Does anybody have opinions on Amazon's VOD?

In re Shorpy photos: this one includes a view of the building that today houses my obstetrician's office -- 37th floor. It's the tallest building in the shot (though no longer the tallest one within a block or two, of course).

Paula, Happy Birthday!

#86: Playing Pokemon with real animals:

Wouldn't they bite each other?

#86 ::: KeithS:

Pokemon are optimized for being interesting to children. Animals aren't.

Anathem. I has finished it.

It was good.

Guvf vf whfg gb fnl
V unir erirnyrq
gur fcbvyref
gung jrer va
lbhe zbivr

naq juvpu
lbh jrer cebonoyl fnivat
sbe gbzbeebj avtug

Sbetvir zr
gurl jrer qenzngvp
fb cbvtanag
naq harkcrpgrq

David@32: do it, we goons love that shit

Also, fuck Fighting Fantasy in the ass, and I say that with the utmost respect. Nobody will give me back the time I wasted on "Beast of Havoc" (only one I ever played): cool setting and mechanics, okay, but so cheap on the forced backtracking. The appeal of replaying an entire game from the beginning for a choice that wasn't even wrong was and is lost on me

I remember a series of books where you could lose before even starting the game, if you didn't min-max the character's stats correctly at the beginning: games for accountants? wtf?

Alan Beatty @199: yby

My father used to say that a perk of driving a big blue terrorist van was that he didn't have to look before changing lanes. Anything not large enough to be seen with peripheral vision and mirrors would move.

Tweetdeck works for me now; I no longer need assistance with it.

David @ 34: Joining in the fun at Something Awful would not be an ABM unless you go in with the attitude of the classic ABM maker toward criticism. Most of SA is a lot more civilised than its reputation suggests. With over 130,000 members you're bound to get a few idiots but on the whole, they're good people. Alas, the evil goons do lives on after them, the good is oft archived with their posts. Despite the charitable works (body armour for under-protected soldiers, Katrina aid fund raising, toys for sick children) they're best known for the pranks and awfulness.

There are neighbourhoods of SA where you don't want to wander at all, but mostly the $10 idiot tax and ever-vigilant moderators keeps the truly unpleasant goons from behaving too badly outside of those areas. If you stick to the specialist forums you will find SA's goons to mostly be quite pleasant and even educational company (I mostly spend time there in the photography forum. Mileage may vary elsewhere but moderation is usually efficient and effective.)

Who the hell is "Bill Binnie" and who the hell is "Americans for Responsible Health Care?"
[Another noxious political scare ad from an anonymous organization, this one about alleged health care, supporting Scott Brown]

Hmmm

From the IRS:

http://forms.irs.gov/politicalOrgsSearch/search/searchDrillDown.jsp?ck

Based on your Search Criteria of:
Selected Organization: 'Americans for Responsible Health Care'
...the following results have been found:
Current Organization Information
Name: Americans for Responsible Health Care
EIN: 271628685
Address: 3003 Tamiami Trail
3rd Floor
Naples, FL 34112
E-Mail: americansforRHC@gmail.com
Contact: Parker J Collier
Custodian: David Satterfield

...no forms found for specified organization

Bill Binnie is either a professional hockey player from Quebec, or a former Le Mans race winner running for US Senate in New Hampshire.

@#7
O tempura, o morels.

My Japanese mother-in-law makes Shimeji tempura that tastes EXACTLY like the fried morels my mom made when I was growing up in Kansas.

Synchronicity or something...

TNH at #41:

For years, I have intended to write up my account of the Secret Origins of the Clan Heterodyne, to which I was a witness. This is the year. Really.

I recounted the oft-told story at Windycon, incorporating Powerpoint illustrations as well as special hats. It needs to be written down.

Samurai Knitter writes a lovely blog, including regular reviews of Vogue Knitting. The most recent issue involved an editor's letter, which she also blogged about. And if you check the comments on that post, the 24th one is from that editor, flouncing about how Julie (Samurai Knitter) is all wrong and doesn't appreciate all the hard work!

Yes, ladies and gents, it's an Editor's Big Mistake...

I am deeply angry that this paragraph didn't wait for me to write it:

Davies said CBS also seriously considered another alternate-reality series called The Man In The High Castle In The Outback, in which 12 women would compete for the love of a Jewish man hiding in Australia under an assumed name because the Allies lost WWII to Nazi Germany. Ultimately, executives deemed the scenario less likely to engage the average American viewer than the post-Civil-War alternate reality.

Bill Higgins @ 127... It needs to be written down.

It does indeed, including the part about how Mechanicsburg got its name.

Last week, my interoffice mail showed up with a service-excellence nomination from one of our users (I guess my tendency not to be rude paid off) along with a $25 gift card from my department. I spent it this morning - on gas for our minivan. Somehow that feels anticlimactic.

Serge -

I got a similar reward a couple of months ago. I spent mine on underpants!

It's no million dollar bonus, but I appreciate the coins tossed in the cello case every now and again. It lets me know that my mindless data entry (and not so mindless analysis) is noted and appreciated.

I got a similar reward a couple of months ago. I spent mine on underpants!

Terrorist! Grab him!

ajay @ 133: Grab both of them -- one's got the fuel, and the other has the underpants; clearly, they're in this together!

...setting fire to ergonomic chair even as we speak.

He's going to hijack his office building and fly it into the airport!

Eh, as soon as I started feeling a burning sensation in my groin area I was tackled by the department temp. So false alarm, I guess. Except for my crotch, which is on fire.

Now, now, a total ban on underpants would mean Superman would have to just where the blue tights, which would tend to clearly outline his...

BAN THEM! NO MORE UNDERPANTS!!!

*WEAR. Argh²²

In the event of an underpant ban, Superman might want to look into a cod-piece or dance belt, assuming they did not count as undies. Otherwise I can see tights getting really uncomfortable. (hint: seams)

Paul 123: If you stick to the specialist forums you will find SA's goons to mostly be quite pleasant and even educational company.

Would it be fair to say that KJK::Hyperion at 119 is NOT typical? I'm trying to get a handle on what you mean by 'quite pleasant and even educational company'; if the tone, phrasing, and general attitude of 119 is the kind of thing that's typical in the specialist fora at SA, I (for one) would not find that at all pleasant. Could be educational/interesting, but pleasant? YMMV, I guess.

Curses, nerdycellist! We have been found out!

nerdycellist, #135: Hmph. When my nether parts set the chair on fire, it's because I've been having Happy Thoughts. Requiring accelerants seems a bit declassé.

nerdycellist, Superman wears the red underpants OVER the blue tights. I don't think he'd be any LESS comfortable without them, just more exposed.

And given Certain Things We All Know about Brandon Routh, that wouldn't be a minor problem.

Serge -

I think we were doomed from the start. Our workplaces give us just enough incentive to foment an ill-conceived guerilla action, but it ended as so many half-assed work initiatives do: on hold with India, calling in a ticket to repair scorched panties.

Paula L (#98)
Yes, I saw that TV ad with Brown saying, in as many words, that "Constitutional protections" shouldn't apply to "terrorists."

Which, considfering the subject in contention, that either he has a hand-wavey manner to tell the "guilt" of a terrorist, he is of the opinion that "if they've been arrested they must be guilty" or he doesn't think much of the express writing of the Founders (in the Declaration of Independents) or of Lincoln (in the Gettysburg Address) , when they declared "all men are created equal)

Of course, when you consider Brown's pro-business stance, and support for the GOP in general, it very well may be thathe disagres with Jefferson, as that phrase was used to refute the then-current dictum of the Divine Right of the monarchy.

it ended as so many half-assed work initiatives do: on hold with India, calling in a ticket to repair scorched panties.

nerdycellist has a very interesting (if unsafe) workplace.

nerdycellist @ 145... I can imagine the exchange that later follows between you and your boss.

"You did this after the week's agreed-upon deadline for such requests."
"I felt it was worth it to make an exception."
"If we allow exceptions, Chaos will ensue."

That by the way is a near-verbatim exchange I had last year with my former manager. No underwear were involved though.

Xopher @ 144... Up, up and in the way?

The JSTOR references above are to bibliographic surveys which, in turn, refer one to Records of the Past, Vol. VIII, pp. 93-96 and Records of the Past, Vol. V, pp. 323-331. That's the journal of the Records of the Past Exploration Society. Google Books has some volumes of that journal online, but apparently not those.

So a general knowledge question: The daughter turns seven on June 11. Wiscon is two weeks before. The young people's track is for seven-to-twelve-year-olds. What are her chances of getting in?

Here's a version of Superman that avoids the whole tights/underpants problem: Superman Off The Rack

This was one of the submissions to a re-design competition over at Project Rooftop.

nerdycellist @145:
it ended as so many half-assed work initiatives do: on hold with India, calling in a ticket to repair scorched panties.

And, presumably, the replacement of half of an ass? Are the two matters related?

Following up on Joel@133:429, I have received my "Worldmakers" book in the held mail, and the McKenna story is indeed the same story I remembered - but wow, I only remembered a very skeletal form of it! The full story is pretty good! And not nearly as close to Avatar as I had thought.

Abi @ 153... Speaking of half-asses, do you think there's Hugo potential in a story titled "Doctor Jekyll and Mister Ed"?

Serge (155): Wouldn't a half-ass be a mule, not a horse?

Bruce@152 - cool!

so nobody took me up on this one from #104?

"reminds me of the porridge potentate and the resistor network."

hmph. nothing's any good anymore.

oat emperor! ohm arrays!

Michael Roberts @ 154 -- I'm glad to hear it.

(I've been mulling over hypothetical plots for Avatar II: The Earthers Strike Back and Avatar III: Return of the Eywa.)

Mary Aileen @ 156... I refuse to let technical accuracy get in the way of a bad joke. :-)

John A Arkansawyer (#151)

From experience with conventions I've helped run, I don't think it would be an issue, especially if you e-mailed and inquired ahead of time to verify.

(I almost wrote "called" rather than "e-mailed" but this far in advance, fallible personal memory for con-runners will fall into the WRITE_ONLY error trap.)

E-mail allows for both an aide-mémoire and the ability to forward to the proper people as responsibilities ae taken up.

re 137: If that's where you're feeling a burning sensation, perhaps you should load your fire extinguisher with Cruex.

abi @ 153 -

If backfiring corporate directives are truly responsible for exploded rears, than HR would do well to hire only the demi-dupa'd and cut out the middle-man.

Omnia -

I am planning a trip to Poland in October - Mainly Gdansk, Cracow and a bit of Warsaw - with a group of 4 women, from 30 to 60-something. We'd like to avoid renting a car. Any don't miss/over-rated? (and please don't ask "why?" - this is one of my new least favorite questions in response to my trip.)

How about the one where you notice that the drone instrument in your raga performance is out of tune?

Oh tambura, oh more A's.

Is it a mark of my obsession with music that when I re-emvowelled the Hebrew Sumerian tablet, I first read "ld" as "loud"?

O tempura, O morels.

Underwear alight = burning bush?

My memories of Warsaw are over 40 years old, nerdycellist, so I doubt they'd be much help. It was a pretty city then, but still had too much of it as a memorial to WWII. This probably isn't still the case.

Why wouldn't you want to go, if you had the chance? I can't understand why people would ask why, really....

Just found this over on Daily Kos, and thought I'd pass it along here since lots of us have pets:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/13/824710/-Veterinary-Drug-Recall:-Are-We-Paying-Attention

Seems there's been a recall on a couple of anesthetics used on animals -- unfortunately while it reached the distributors it didn't reach the veterinarians, and there have been at least 5 deaths due to use of these products.

Pat Robertson says Haiti's problems are due to them making a pact with the Devil to overthrow the French:

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201001130024

Fucking asshole.

And in the light of open-threadery, a book description I came across while looking through the Science/Medicine/Nature section of a bookshop's offerings on Abebooks. Read to the end - there's a fun bit there as well:

The Sexual Conduct of Men & Women: A Minority Report.
Lockridge, Norman
Bookseller: Resource Books, LLC
(East Granby, CT, U.S.A.)

Book Description: Hogarth House, New York, 1948. Binding is Hard Cover. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: in Good dj. First Edition. First edition. Ostensibly written in response to the Kinsey report, this book is perhaps a more practical guide to the sexual relationships between men and women - not clinically so, but socially. Much of the book is devoted to what men expect of a mistress and/or a wife, including such topics as gold-digging, impetuosity, adventure, cleanliness, nudity, etc. Sections include: What a Man Expects of the Women of His Youth; What a Man Expects of a Mistress; What a Man Expects of a Wife; What a Man Expects of the Woman he works with; What a Man Expects of Woman-in-the- Flesh (i.e. in bed); with a tiny chapter on What Women Expect from Men. Sexist, but interesting reading nonetheless. Tan cloth lettered in gilt, 256 pages, errata slip laid in, printed dustjacket. Book has almost no wear, good hinges, clean pages. Owner name and address on front free endpaper. Mylar protected dustjacket is chipped here and there, some paper loss at the cover edges, some old creases - about five percent paper loss overall. Clipping with a poem entitled "Oh, God! Oh, Kinsey!" from The Lancet loosely laid in at front - we'll leave it there.

And Limbaugh claims Obama plans to use the Haitian disaster for political gain: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201001130018

I've got an idea. Why don't we shove Robertson head-first into Limbaugh's oxycontin-hole? That'll shut 'em both up, at least for a while.

Lori Coulson at 168 - thanks for that. My kitty's one vomiting fit away from needing a feeding tube so that's yet more motivation to make sure she keeps her food down.

dcb @ 170... What a Man Expects of Woman-in-the-Flesh (i.e. in bed)

I've met quite a few women in the flesh after interacting with them thru the blogosphere and it's never involved bedding. Or quilts. Or comforters.

Thank you, Lori!

Ardala is way overdue for a teeth cleaning. I will check and double check with the vet (and bring print outs!) before handing her over.

Stefan Jones @ 169. On the one hand, that is an extraordinarily racist and bizarre thing to say.

On the other, if Tim Powers told the story of that pact, I would buy it in a second.

Woman in the flesh but not in bed.

Just for classification purposes.

abi @ 176... Yum. What a dish!

abi @ 176... Oh, and could I have some Claudia Black beans with that?

nerdycellist #132: I got a similar reward a couple of months ago. I spent mine on underpants!

Poor tactics, unless you were in the throes of an underwear crisis. I once got a Christmas bonus, spent it at the specialty shop down the street, and got a dress that was, it seems, so notable and perfect that when it came time for me to leave that place, the parting gift was a gift certificate to that shop. With which I bought something even more notable.

Patrick, thanks for the particle on relativity and GPS. I noted how the engineers slowed down the clocks before launching them; that way, people who don't believe in relativity can still use the system.

Lori Coulson @ 168: thanks for that info.

Serge @ 173: Yes, but they didn't distinguish meat-space back then (or rather, they didn't have anything to distinguish it from, other than dreaming).

abi @176: I could have done without that image just before going off to bed & sleep.

Patrick: I'll second PhilPalmer @ 180: an interesting article

dcb @ 181... But they did have long-time correspondants who relied on snail mail.

Serge @ 182: Yes, I thought about that after posting.

dcb @ 183... By the way, snail mail is how I first met the woman who'd become my wife. Eventually, after some meetings in the flesh, bedding did get into the picture, and a mattress too, so maybe that book was onto some thing. At least neither she nor I had to get the flesh of our legs severely burned like Abi did in Spain. The pain in Spain...

And now I'm off to bed, with my husband. To sleep, perchance to dream...

I'll leave the punning to you!

Serge @184, I would hope that you would not be one to imply that Abi is plain!

The State Department says if you text 90999 on your phone, $10 will be put on your phone bill and the money will go directly to the Red Cross for Haiti work.

Lucy, I'll go a-hunting morels with you. I'll drop you a note on Facebook or LJ, not having a phone# for you.

#187 I would be VERY CAREFUL about that. Is there a link to news story?

PLEASE NOTE that charity scammers are already using the Haiti 'quake to drum up "donations."

Oops, shows you what I know about texting. You text the word Haiti to 90999 and get $10 put on your phone bill and the money goes directly to the Red Cross's Haitian work.

Aha, it's legitimate!

http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.94aae335470e233f6cf911df43181aa0/?vgnextoid=15c0c5a210826210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD

Thanks Marilee!

Stefan Jones, #189, the local NBC station is broadcasting it. Here, look at the 12:30 entry.

The text message option is also on the US Department of State's website.

I'm giving to Episcopal Relief and Development, as well as Médecins sans Frontières. I was not at all impressed with the Red Cross after Katrina.

Tom Whitmore @ 186...

The pain
in Spain
by plane
back to Britain.

I should stick to the pun.
Anything else is pain.

Update on the mechanics of the text messaging option for aid to Haiti here. $1.2 million raised via this route by Tuesday evening. It uses a platform called mGive; the company is waiving all its usual fees for its software.

FailBlog picks on Avatar.

I just charged a donation to Partners in Health, which is the group set up by Paul Farmer and others to provide health care to poor people in Haiti, in partnership with doctors and hospitals in the US. They've been in Haiti for years, and know the country and the people well. (Farmer and Partners in Health are the subject of Tracy Kidder's book _Mountains Beyond Mountains_).

Xopher @ 141: As I said, I tend to hang out mostly in the photography forum at SA. The goons there are all happy to share their images, their knowledge and their opinions with the aim of enjoying and improving everyone's photography. Much the same attitude prevails in the cooking forum. Opinions are expressed harshly from time to time, but the same happens everywhere - even here. Is the language or attitude at 119 any worse than we usually use here in bad reviews and discussions of Republican politics? (And, for that matter, is the comment unfair? I don't think so.)

I don't usually go near the games forum but it and its "Let's Play" subforum (the most likely venue for goons to be playing a FF book together) are freely viewable. You can check it out and decide for yourself if its tone suits you.

Paul, I think I'll pass. I think saying "Fuck X up the ass, and I mean that with the greatest respect" is pretty obnoxious. The "I mean that with the greatest respect" adds nose-thumbing to the disrespect of saying "fuck it up the ass" to diss something.

So yeah, I think the language at 119 is not the sort of thing you usually find here. And most such comments lose their vowels.

... and I wander back in, to discover that folks have been, with typically flamboyant style, not beating a dead horse, but beating off half an ass...

xeger @ 201... Wouldn't a flamboyant ass be called arson?

The article about relativity says that clocks run faster when they are farther away from the earth. Is this why financial companies are headquartered in tall buildings? So their clocks run faster and their interest compounds faster as a result?

I just sent a donation to Catholic Relief Services. According to their website, they have food and supplies such as plastic sheeting, water purification tablets, and mosquito nets pre-positioned and ready for distribution. They are also in process of purchasing supplies in the Dominican Republic to ship across the border. They've been in Haiti for years and have a solid local organization.

Here's the Catholic Relief Services website...

Serge @ 202: "Wouldn't a flamboyant ass be called arson?

Only if suspended at or above sea level . . . say, by enough retained hydrogen to maintain buoyancy, with the surplus leaking out just rapidly enough to maintain combustion in the immediate vicinity. 'Twould make a memorable channel marker in the shipping lanes . . .

actually a flamboyant arse would be an arson,
and a flaming asshole would be a rectifier.

Would that make an Indian fire-setter's yak-dung rope which he uses in terrorist actions an arson scat cord?

actually a flamboyant arse would be an arson,
and a flaming asshole would be a rectifier.

in case it helps for me to say so, I got a funky error message trying to post the above comment.

Xopher @200:
most such comments lose their vowels.

Nonsense. It's not our usual phrasing, and if KJK::Hyperion were to return I'd have a word about fitting into the local dialect a bit better. But we are not so mealy-mouthed as all that.

A comment like that aimed at a person, particularly a person in the conversation, certainly would be disemvowelled.

Are you quite OK? I've been worrying about you lately, what with the job thing and all. And this seems uncharacteristically testy.

#184 Serge

I guess you are not the romance writer in the family!

#181 dcb
Check the copyright date for "Day Million" by Fred Pohl....

#171 Summer
I was contrasting in my thoughts the Katin Charlie Foxtrot response to "the USA has dispatched an aircraft carrier to go to Haiti, and dispatched emergency services workers including healthcare personnel." After Katrina a US Navy ship which had a landing boat a couple hours on its way to New Orlean with clean water and supplies, got orders to haul itself to Biloxi or somewhere elst on the coast of Mississippi, and recalled the landing vehicle.... and then there was the Schmuck with the Photo Op, bringing in a generator to light up the scence for the photo op, and taking it away when he left. @*^$(#@34 grandstanding caracajou....

As for stinks-more-than-Limburger and Robertson, cockroaches are more respectable....

Well that was exciting.

We got a knock at the door right as we were getting ready to take the dog out for her final piddle. We didn't want to open it, because 1.) someone was mugged in front of our building last week and 2.) Our door has no peephole. Thank god we did - it was the gentleman next door, confined to a wheelchair, saying that his elderly mother had fallen and wanted help getting up. She is rather elderly and frail and the floor was hard tile - there was no way we were helping her up. I sat behind her with cushions and tried to keep her from rising while the roommate called 911 for the first time. She refused to go to the hospital, but they helped her into her bed (after ascertaining that nothing was broken) and forbade her to get up until tomorrow. We'll check on her and her son before work.

We had been expecting an ambulance, but the fellows who came were in a fire truck. If I had known there were going to be cute paramedics/firemen on tonight's agenda, I would have changed my blue-cheese dressing stained t-shirt.

OtterB at #96 wrote:

> Debbie @93. Oh, I like that. Do you know
> anything else about it? I was googling around a
> bit but can't find anything but other links to
> the image - no info on artist or source.

It's from http://forums.cgsociety.org/ where they have occasional competitions on a theme. The theme for this competition was "The Journey Begins". The artist is Daniel Lieske, who came second in the 2D category.

This thread contains not only the final image, but work in progress pictures:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=191&t=323093

The winners are at:
http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/journey_begins/

Finally, while you're there, have a look at the "Grand Space Opera" competition - I love the critter making omelettes with what appear to be eggs from the movie Aliens:

http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/grandspaceopera/

Erik Nelson #210: in case it helps for me to say so, I got a funky error message trying to post the above comment.

Speaking of which, funky error messages that ask you to report the situation to webmaster at nielsenhayden dot com should be corrected to refer to an email address which actually exists, please.

Thinking of Christmas just past.

O Tannenbaum, o mistletoe.

Mary Aileen #156:
Medically qualified North American canine meets a sterile empire builder with mental abilities. Hilarity ensues.

Serge #202:
Wouldn't that be the male offspring of a flamboyant ass?

Steve Taylor @214 Thank you very much!

Still chasing early cites of the "Assyrian" quote and have run across another possible source with particularly amazing fluorospheric properties. Google Books semi-cryptically refers to it as Roycroft (1924) by Elbert Hubbard. Unfortunately, none of this volume is actually available to verify either the quote's presence in it or the date, although some earlier volumes are viewable.

Roycroft turns out to've been a journal issued between Sept. 1917-March 1926, according to another fragmentary Google ref from Contact, a 1932 literary review edited by William Carlos Williams.

Subtitled "Successor to the Fra", Roycroft was edited by Elbert Hubbard II and issued by the Roycroft Press, which had been founded as a vanity press of sorts by Elbert Hubbard Sr.-- there's a rather caustic writeup of EH Sr.'s writing skills here, but also a gallery of Roycroft Press's beautiful binding work here. A larger Arts and Craft community eventually coalesced around the press near Buffalo NY. (Some investors are currently trying to restore what they refer to as the Roycroft Campus.)

The "Fra" precursor journal (1908-1917) had been edited by and semi-eponymous for EH Sr., who liked to call himself "Fra Elbertus". Unfortunately for himself and the long-term fortunes of the Roycroft community, "Fra Elbertus" decided in 1915 that he and his wife should go talk to Kaiser Wilhelm to help bring an end to the Great War... and sailed out on the Lusitania.

Stefan #169:

I think Pat Robertson lives on the same media strategy as the late Jerry Fallwell--every so often, in order to retain such celebrity as he's managed to acquire, he must come up with some shocking and bizarre statement for the media. This provides harmless[1] outrage fodder for the media, and keeps Robertson and company in the public eye.

[1] Harmless to the interests of the owners of the media companies, and to the politicians and lobbies that they must keep happy. Outrage over Robertson's bizarre comment is not expended on torture scandals, impunity of the powerful, counterproductive foreign policy, economic hardship, etc. See also "nappy headed ho," "Negro dialect," "God damn America," etc.

Paula Lieberman @ 212... No, but the romance writer in the family has often called me a sentimental fool.

Just a thought: Would it make sense to put the reputable URLs for donations to help the Haitians on the front page?

--John

I see by the Sidelight that Harold Ford is running for the Senate in New York State. And they're welcome to him.

abi 211: Yeah, you're right. I guess I was kind of identifying the book with its author (who is in this thread reading people's comments about his book), and feeling kind of protective. I found KJK::Hyperion's comment pretty jarring. It took me by surprise in a way that, for example, "your book sucked out loud" would not have. The hypocrisy of adding "with the greatest respect" infuriated me.

Also, I guess I'm hypersensitive about people using "fuck that in the ass" as if it were somehow worse than "fuck that." As a less-than-serious inversion experience, imagine how you'd feel if someone said "Bind X in a book!" when they clearly meant "X is useless and should be discarded." That's too bizarre to really give you a feel for it, but I trust my point has come across!

Finally, no, I'm really not OK. I'd characterize my current state as "mostly holding it together."

It turns out that you don't have to actually be a loser to feel like one. Even though all my bosses, all my coworkers, all my clients and users, and even outside vendors have made it absolutely clear that my performance has been of the highest calibre, with some expressing outrage that the company wouldn't try harder to preserve such a valuable resource, I'm still losing my job. It's a layoff, not a firing—my whole group is going, to replaced by vastly more junior people in Canada—but I was fired (and I mean FIRED fired) so many times before I went on meds for ADHD that I still feel, quite irrationally, that it's my fault.

I'm feeling kind of discouraged in other areas of my life as well, except for one: I've lost 9 pounds since Monday. That's probably mostly water, and I don't expect that pace to continue, since I'm very much in the honeymoon period for this diet/exercise program and my body is still adjusting. A low-carb diet also helps my mood somewhat, so this is a real bright spot.

So yeah, that was testy. Sorry. I'll try not to let my crankiness come through on here any more than I can help.

nerdycellist 213: If I had known there were going to be cute paramedics/firemen on tonight's agenda, I would have changed my blue-cheese dressing stained t-shirt.

I think they're used to seeing people in emergency situations. If anything they'd appreciate that your priority was your neighbor's safety rather than your appearance.

Julie L. @218: how the heck did you find that? Also—there is a Wikipedia article on the Roycroft movement which adds some info, though not relevant to Assyria.

By the way, the 2800BC date for a genuinely Assyrian inscription is certainly nonsense. In fact, I'm not sure how advanced writing was at that date, and in particular how much literary text survives from then (not much, I'll wager. If any.) However, in the early 1920's, I don't think absolute dating was very advanced, so if the text were genuine, it could be an Assyrian text from a later date, misdated at the time of translation. Also, it could be some early Akkadian text, although I still think 2800 is impossible.

Steve Taylor @214 -- thank you for the extra information! I didn't have any luck with Google myself. Very cool site.

Xopher, dear heart, please feel free to bring your troubles to the community. That's what we're here for, as much as we are for puns and poetry, fandom and politics.

Just try to bring them directly, right?

The equivalent I would use, by the way, is actually something Terry has been known to say: "the back of my hand to them." I don't know if it's intended to be a reference to striking someone, but that's the bell it rings in me. So I do know how someone could get that kind of twitch to a figure of speech. I don't need to lecture you about appropriate and inappropriate ways of dealing with that, though, because that's not really the problem. As discussed.

There's no way that it wouldn't be distressing to lose your job, even if you didn't already have emotional scar tissue in that area. I'm glad to hear you're embarking on something positive (well, negative in weight terms!) during such a tough time.

If you are of the nature for such things, have a virtual hug.

I suppose that the 'arson' would be the fundamental particle of flaming assholery.

Xopher... What Abi said.

In the 1960s there was a Dick Tracy cartoon show where each episode started with a view of a busy traffic grid seen from above, cars moving back and forth, until a police siren cut in, at which point all the cars for blocks around pulled over to the side except for the police car and the getaway car they were chasing.

At age five, that became my model of civic duty, and it still is: go about your business until an emergency arises, then co-operate. I didn't know until just now, though, until reading Elliott Mason @110, that this was the actual practice in Atlantic City.

Xopher: What abi said. Most especially including the virtual hug.

Xopher -- as Ginger said to me not that long ago, I got your back. Hang in there.

Xopher, ditto abi & Serge. My husband was laid off in April and is still job hunting (Hoping for success for you much quicker; he has constraints that amplify the difficulties of the current economic situation). This time has been less traumatic than several previous occurrences -- more "crap, not again" rather than "knocked off his foundation" -- but it's still a relentless drag on the energy. Despite having been told that it wasn't him, it was the economy, he spent several months intermittently trying to figure out what he might have done wrong. In the fall, the entire company went belly-up; it really wasn't him. (They had an excellent technical idea and great people in a start-up slammed by the economy. Sigh.)

Do unto yourself as you would do unto friends in similar situations, especially in what you say to yourself.

abi 226: Thanks.

I think, however, you didn't quite get what I meant in one part. For your example to be parallel, you'd have to think there was nothing wrong with backhanding a consenting person across the face; you'd have to know lots of people who do like being backhanded across the face; and you'd have to be far from averse to it yourself.

I think the twitch of annoyance is probably the same, and perhaps that's all you meant. But the root of it is different; that's why my example was bookbinding, something you're known to enjoy.

Serge 228: Thanks.

Xopher, I have been fired from, I think, every job I ever held (including the Navy) but two (one I quit, one I'm still at). Only recently have I started learning not to take it personally, to see that even when I was actually fired for something I was doing wrong, it wasn't a rejection of me as a person, just a management decision that they'd rather see someone else in that position.

In any culture, I think, your job is an important part of your self-image, so being without one for any reason is going to hurt.

I hope you are getting support from the people around you. I remember a character in a story whose mother blamed her for the loss of her job, even when she was laid off ("You could have made yourself too important to them to get rid of") and even when the company went bankrupt -- absurd, but plausible.

Take care, Xopher. And remember, there are a lot of people in your same situation.

Xopher, sorry to hear about the job. No way are you a loser, buddy. Not, not, not a loser, no way, not in a box, not with a fox, nope, iye, non, nyet.

Have a cookie.

Julie L @ 218 : Nice find! Don't know if it'll get us any closer to the source if it's from 1924, but there's a chance it might mention where they got the quote from.

It looks like there were a number of Roycroft-related journals. Before the Fra, Worldcat tells me there was the "Roycroft Quarterly", which started in 1896, but seems to have only run a few issues. And it looks like _The Roycrofter_ started up pretty much where _Roycroft_ left off in 1926, and ran until 1932 or thereabouts.

Folks who want a taste of Elbert Hubbard Sr.'s writing (or his ghostwriters'?) can find a selection of his books here. The press printed authors besides the Hubbards as well; I've got a listing for one of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's books of poetry that they published.

Kind thoughts from here as well, Xopher -- and I hope they're giving some job-hunting assistance to you. If it makes it any easier to take, remember that it's the whole department that's going, not just you -- a decentralized sort of rejection rather than personal.

Xopher -

I totally agree with your objections to FTITA as a violent insult. I get similarly upset when "ccksckr" and other variants are in use. I try not to spend too much time on any site that encourages (or does not admonish) commenters to use such concepts.* That pretty much limits my exposure to here, Shakesville, Slacktivist, Tor, Ask Sister Mary Martha, sometimes Jezebel and my own LJ comms. No big loss.

Good luck dealing with employment trauma. Simultaneous hits to the self-esteem and possible bank account repercussions are awful.

* I think I can trace the seeds of my expulsion from a musical ensemble to my loud defense of ccksckrs. I mentioned that those who used it as in insult should never have their ccks sckd again.

Does anyone know about charitable organizations' preferences for donations made by cheque vs. by credit card? I'm under the impression that when a donation is made by credit card, the credit card company takes its usual roughly-5% cut, but cheques require more manual processing. I don't have a strong preference for which way I donate, but the idea that MasterCard would be taking a cut of my donation for disaster relief makes me itch.

A couple of useful links on donations for Haiti:

1) An AidWatch post about choosing organizations to donate to.

2) Interaction.org's list of organizations collecting "for Haiti".

The issues mentioned in the AidWatch post are particularly interesting, especially if you keep them in mind reading the interaction.org list.

Joel@239: I used a credit card for my donation because the donation gets there faster, and with disasters like the one in Haiti, time can be critical. My credit card bank will presumably take its usual cut (around 2-3%, I think), which I'm okay with.

I've heard rumors that some electronic payment systems are waiving their usual fees for some charities giving aid to Haiti, but don't know specifics off the top of my head.

For less time-critical donations, I'd imagine checks are cheaper to handle on the receiver's end. There are no fees to deposit them, in any case; and you can use the cancelled check or the check image as a handy record of payment.

Xopher: What They Said. Also, if you need to rant in ways that you think would be less than appropriate here, my e-mail is always open to you.

I fully agree with your language issue; it's a more-explicit variant of saying "That's so GAY" as a way of expressing contempt, and deserves the same level of strenuous push-back.

Xopher: Subsitute "Ukraine" for "Canada" and I'm in your position exactly, and my emotional issues with it are similar. What I find is helping is thinking of the layoff as an opportunity; I've been at Digidesign for sixteen years, so maybe it's time for a change, and I should make the most of it.

Whether this attitude will survive the cold shower of an actual job search remains to be seen, of course.

Dr. Psycho, Lizzy, Tom, nerdycellist, Lee, Tim: thanks. It helps.

Dr. Psycho: And remember, there are a lot of people in your same situation.

Yeah, there are. That's part of the problem.

Tom: I hope they're giving some job-hunting assistance to you.

They are. And severance. Given the thing itself, they're being pretty civilized.

nerdycellist, Lee: Yes, yes! Have you noticed that men use terms describing things they want as insults for other men? That they diss the suppliers of things they want? I suppose it's the old everything-must-be-ranked thing in male culture, but I've always found it pretty stupid, especially when it surfaces in the gay community.

Xopher: What goes around comes around, so now it is my turn to wish you better luck and hope you feel better, too.

I had the same reaction to KJK::Hyperion, and for the same reasons. There's no reason at all to use that expression, and only someone who has real issues with GLBT people would even think to use it. Finally, what would be the point of indicating such extreme dislike? Once you dislike a book, why does it matter how much you dislike it? Feh.

As for my current situation, my partner has been showing signs of depression, and I firmly believe her recent bombshell has more to do with the recent loss of her mother (about 5 months ago, Mom passed; her Dad died 7 years ago this week); this is the first Christmas without her parents. Even when her Mom was in the assisted living facility, declining with dementia, it was still Christmas with Mom. I think it is no coincidence that this came up in her mind over the holidays, and then blew up in our lives.

Of course, the fact that it took me about 5 days to figure this out indicates how distracted I've been.

Ginger: Thanks. And:

I had the same reaction to KJK::Hyperion, and for the same reasons. There's no reason at all to use that expression, and only someone who has real issues with GLBT people would even think to use it. Finally, what would be the point of indicating such extreme dislike? Once you dislike a book, why does it matter how much you dislike it? Feh.

There we go. That's what I was trying to say. Thanks.

I continue to send good thoughts about your partner situation. May all be well for you, her, and all others concerned.

And yet many people in this conversation have used the less-specific "fuck" in much the same sense ("fuck this" or "fuck [insert name of person]"). Considering the history of an "active"/penetrative meaning of the verb, how is that different?

I suppose it's a word that whose meaning has drifted/been reclaimed over time to include a "passive"/"feminine"/penetrated/other activities role. Is that enough to make it more acceptable?

abi -

Good point. I think that a simple F*ck That/This has gained a generic-ness that doesn't make me twitch as much as the specificity of F* This In The [Orifice] or Ccksckr. I'm female, and I would claim to have F*'d someone (in a non-perjorative sense) even when I didn't assume the role of penetrator, violent or no.

That being said, I have often used the phrase "S*ck My D*ck", which I think is funny, as I don't have one. (on my own person) I may rethink that as well.

Xopher:

Best wishes in looking for a new job. I hope you get something, and that it's good, soon.

Ginger @ 245:

Some things are much easier to see when you're not in the middle of them. I hope you get things sorted out.

abi @ 247:

Part of the issue is that the terms you cite have lost a lot of their sexual meaning in various contexts, whereas the phrase originally used here makes it quite explicit (and is also implicitly a judgement on the particular kind of intercourse and therefore the people who engage in it). Whether the terms you cite should be seen in the same light as the other, I'm not sure.

Julie L at #218:
Here are some libraries holding a periodical called Roycroft.

A search on the string "Successor to the Fra" turned up Kim Bullock, someone with a family connection to Roycroft. A commenter on her blog, Jeanette Ahrens, quotes an article in Roycroft.

Archive.org has at least one issue of Roycroft.

(I must confess I didn't expect to find Thomas A. Edison in here:

Everything which decreases the sum total of man's sleep increases the sum total of man's capabilities. There really is no reason why men should go to bed at all, and the man of the future will spend far less time in bed than the man of the present does, just as the man of the present spends far less time in bed than the man of the past did. As a matter of fact, a very simple bit of arithmetical figuring will show that by and by humanity will have to live in double shifts, so that there may be room upon the earth for all the people.

Unless I am mistaken, the earliest known use of the "Assyrian tablet" quote remains the one you cited in #22, namely Report of the Commissioner of Industrial and Vocational Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1914. Which seems a long way from missionaries in Constantinople.

nerdycellist @ 248... I don't have one. (on my own person)

"Say, is that a rocket in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

I have tried, and failed, to eliminate such sex-negative terminology from my vocabulary. 'Fuck that' has been weakened through overuse, I think. 'Fuck that up the ass' is too specific for this to have happened, at least yet.

Bill Higgins @ 250... Everything which decreases the sum total of man's sleep increases the sum total of man's capabilities.

That Tom Edison, a regular standup comedian!

Thanks, KeithS.

KeithS @249:
Part of the issue is that the terms you cite have lost a lot of their sexual meaning in various contexts, whereas the phrase originally used here makes it quite explicit (and is also implicitly a judgement on the particular kind of intercourse and therefore the people who engage in it).

I am not convinced that it is that stark. Taking KJK::Hyperion's message in its totality (content as well as form), I can make a few reasoned guesses about age, sex, and subculture.

I'm only slightly acquainted with anyone from that set, but the dialect they speak is not...mindful, particularly in its profanity. And since my generation (and my parents') have pretty well knocked the corners off of "fuck", they've tended to reach farther for swear words. It's also a subculture that includes a lot of rap, hip-hop and related music, much of which is profane, homophobic, and violently rude. That's become part of thoughtless usage.

What I'm saying is that although he used an phrase that was offensive to his listeners, that may not have been his intent. As I say, had he returned, I'd have had a word with him about it. But I'm strenuously opposed to jumping down his throat for what I suspect is a little fault proceeding upon distemper rather than a capital crime, chew'd, swallow'd and digested.

I'm fairly sure he also disobeys his parents, though he may not yet want to write a book. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.

I have a dear friend who often uses the phrase "Calling him a ccksckr would be a slander upon the noble art of ccksckng." I must say I enjoy that.

abi 255: What I'm saying is that although he used an phrase that was offensive to his listeners, that may not have been his intent. As I say, had he returned, I'd have had a word with him about it. But I'm strenuously opposed to jumping down his throat for what I suspect is a little fault proceeding upon distemper rather than a capital crime, chew'd, swallow'd and digested.

That sounds right. Fair enough.

Jeremy 256: ...the noble art of ccksckng...I must say I enjoy that.

Not to put too fine a point on it, so do I.

Xopher, etc.: ISTR Miss Manners, on the subject of "F* that" insults, saying something like "Miss Manners would like to know why references to a presumably delightful activity are so frequently used as insults. On second thought, no, she wouldn't."

abi @ 255: "What I'm saying is that although he used an phrase that was offensive to his listeners, that may not have been his intent."

I think you're right that his usage was thoughtless and had no conscious homophobic intent. Still, I am fairly sure that any offense given was if not meant, also not regretted. Tolerance for extreme, hardcore language and the ability to produce it is a homosocial status symbol in parts of the internet, and an inability to laugh at that sort of thing is a mark of weakness.

heresiarch @259:
I am fairly sure that any offense given was if not meant, also not regretted.

I don't think we have evidence to back up that kind of assumption of ill faith. He'd need to know that there was something to regret before he either regretted it or not, and that would require more than one comment.

I find this particular assertion to be another form of crying troll and letting slip the dogs of bingo, and I will not have it. People come here from other web subcultures, and we give them the same benefit of the doubt that we ourselves would like to receive, were we to go elsewhere. I keep a wide door for both newcomers and regulars.

What Abi said.

A quotation from the front-page commonplace list seems in order--John XXIII, "See everything, overlook a great deal, improve a little.”

Xopher @ 257... Not to put too fine a point on it, so do I.

Glandstanding again?

I'm fighting off the urge to analyze my own common invitation for other drivers to go fck themselves in terms of a deep aversion to Onanism.

Apropos of something on Twitter today:

Some say the web will end in spam,
Some say in flame.
From all the different types of scam
I hold with those who favor spam.
But if another ending came,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction flame
Is also great
And ends the same.

@188 Ruth, cool, but I don't know how to find morels. Chanterelles and craterellus, yes -- even boletes, but we missed that season (It's about two weeks long around Thanksgiving).

I forget who came up with the idea, but it was posited that FU should be regarded as a form of dominance, which when fully expressed is "(I) FU", similar to one beast mounting another.

We do like our hierarchies.

Nerdycellist @213:

Most fire departments have turned or are gradually turning their forces into paramedics plus. And in 911 areas, the dispatcher informs all the closest units. When my husband had his embolism, we got a fire department paramedic engine, an ambulance, and a cop car, almost before the phone call was over(if he could have been saved, he definitely would have been: this is the advantage of the 911 general dispatch system). (I can say confidently that he would have survived if it were possible because my son was giving him CPR from the exact second he stopped breathing.)

Another advantage is that when your firefighters are also paramedics, the same crew that pulls you out of the flames or the collapsed building can start working on you immediately.

In our area, where the ambulances are operated by private, for-profit outfits, it also has the advantage of being less expensive to maintain.

Steve C. #266: Oh, totally! That is exactly why it's still considered offensive when so many other usages have been de-energized. "Suck my..." and calling someone a "c*cksucker" fit the same pattern -- effort expended notwithstanding, the "receptacle" is "bottom".

Henry Jenkins has posted the syllabus to his course at the University of Southern California, Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0.

He writes:

A key choice I faced was between a course on fan culture, which would be centrally about what fans do and think, and a course in fan studies, which would map the emergence of and influence of a new academic field focused on the study of fandom and other forms of participatory culture. On the undergraduate level, I would have taken the first approach but on the graduate level, I opted for the second -- trying to map the evolution of a field of research centered around the study of fan communities and showing how it has spoken to a broader range of debates in media and cultural studies over the past two decades. As you will see, teaching a course right now, I found it impossible to separate out the discussion of fan culture from contemporary debates about web 2.0 and so I made that problematic, contradictory, and evolving relationship a key theme for the students to investigate. Do not misunderstand me -- I am not assuming an easy match between the three terms in my title. The shifting relations between those three terms is a central concern in the class.

Yes, now you can go to grad school to learn about fandom.

Lucy @ #267 -

The integration of Fire Dept and Paramedics is good to know. I was pretty impressed with their response time, which was under 5 minutes. We are about .3 mile away from one of the stations, but even so, I wondered if the FD might have other priorities. We felt a bit silly dialing 911, but we were told it was the right thing to do. I checked in on mother and son this morning, and mother was up and about, but at least using her walker rather than her cane.

It is perhaps a sign of how "old" I'm getting that with the exception of the first guy who came in - fireman pants and clipboard - all of the responders seemed so young!

Now I am wondering why such an independent yet frail woman and her physically disabled son insist on living in an upstairs apartment. This is the first we've met the son in the 5 years we've lived there. I know the previous landlord was trying to give her an incentive to move to one of the downstairs units, but she refused. I'm constantly worried that she's going to go tumbling down the (not especially well-maintained) stairs one day, and if we hadn't been home, her son would not have been able to get help - she fell in front of the phone and he was unable to get past. I suppose it is none of my beeswax.

Open-threaded Facebook musings -- A little thread has been moving its way around, where you change your profile picture to one where you were much younger. Also, you can post the text: It's RETRO WAYBACK WEEK!!!!!! yada, yada, yada.

Anyway, I found my high school yearbook photo. And judging from what I can see of my contemporaries on FB, the 70's were not one of the prime decades for fashion OR hairstyles.

Oh, if anyone's interested, it's also at:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2701/4274449131_b190fb7a96_o.jpg

abi 260: He'd need to know that there was something to regret before he either regretted it or not, and that would require more than one comment.

Yes, or at any rate evidence that he continued reading the thread. He could have commented at SA about what stuff-shirts we are here, or about how he embarrassed himself here by making an unintentionally offensive remark. As for comments here, we have no way of knowing whether his comment would have been something like

Oh, I'm so sorry my comments were too politically incorrect for you! I thought this was a place where different opinions were welcomed, but obviously I was wrong. Since everyone here wants to censor me, I'll take my opinions to a freer environment.

I didn't mean that in an offensive way. I guess it never occurred to me that saying "f*ck X up the ass" was homophobic. To us goons it's just emphatic. I apologize to those I offended.

Serge 262: Glandstanding again?

Indeed, when the gland is standing it's ready for the noble art. However, I can testify that sometimes you can go nad waiting for it, or even just waiting til the fella shows you what he's got; waiting for skin to be revealed can be infuriating.

abi 264: That's wonderful. I know someone who's going to LOVE that.

nerdycellist @ 270: Now I am wondering why such an independent yet frail woman and her physically disabled son insist on living in an upstairs apartment.

Not wanting to admit to themselves that they're getting older/more frail? I've seen it before where it takes time to accept that things have changed.

abi @ 264: I really enjoyed that.

nerdycellist @ 270: Now I am wondering why such an independent yet frail woman and her physically disabled son insist on living in an upstairs apartment. - Maybe because they feel vulnerable, and think they would be less secure/more likely to be broken into on the ground floor? I remember people being astonished that I'd chosen a ground floor flat (apartment), back when I was a single female living alone, for that reason. I hadn't thought about it.

Steve C @ #271, I dunno. I think I'm more handsome at 17 than I've been since. (That's me on the right.)

On jobsearch: anyone who reads my Livejournal is in for a lot of jobsearch whining. I'm looking for a kibblejob now, just something to make it okay for me not to move back to my family, and for career-type jobs. I have a pretty good Spreadsheet of Doom going for job applications.

Sometimes the tough part is staying confident as I apply for job after job I'm not really qualified for. Sometimes it's telling myself that credit for things accomplished and blame for things undone* are not linked; I can say, "The reason I don't have a job yet is the economy, and when I do get a job, it will be because I am awesome," and not be lying or otherwise deserving of bad things*. Sometimes it's a spinal reflex to argue with anyone who tries to cheer me up or encourage me in any way-- "No, brain, the correct response to, 'You're a good person,' is not a numbered list of your own flaws and shortcomings and such. Stop it." Sometimes it's just that a year ago, I thought I'd be employed by now, and if I was wrong about that, I could be wrong about anything.

*that phrase could be picked apart further and I'm not thrilled with what that says about me

Which is to say, jobsearch! Unpleasant! Not your fault, not my fault, will be conquered by force of awesome!

Ooh, that could be it, dcb. The neighborhood seems to have gotten progressively cruddier in the five years we've lived there. The front windows aren't barred (barring can be somewhat decorative and is common in the area) and the sliding glass door/patio isn't especially secure - 5 ft-ish stucco wall with another three feet of wooden fence/lattice perched on it. The last ground floor neighbors installed an alarm system, but that was after the first landlord, who wasn't as incompetent as the current landlord. AFAIK, the current LL has not made any offers to relocate them downstairs. If I were him, I'd worry about liability.

It appears she fell by tripping over a small rug used to cover the space of floor where the tile and hardwood meet - with about 1/4" of toe-stubbing and tripping potential.

I mean to ask LL about the fire extinguisher, not replaced or charged since we moved in, and maybe give the neighbors the gift of one for their personal use. We will be moving as soon as tax refunds make it financially feasible for us to do so.

There's no reason at all to use that expression, and only someone who has real issues with GLBT people would even think to use it.

I guess it never occurred to me that saying "f*ck X up the ass" was homophobic.

Why must the expression have anything to do with GLBT people? Straight people can and do indulge in anal activities. Presuming that reference to anal penetration is automatically a reference to homosexuality strikes me as being a tad homophobic itself. Perhaps I am naive, but I have never assumed the expression to be about anything other than what Steve said @ 266 - dominance - with, perhaps, some added discomfort (and maybe a nod to the films of Kevin Smith).

Another reason that the frail old lady and her wheelchair-using son could be living in their upstairs apartment is that they've lived there for a long time and they won't move away from it unless and until it becomes unworkable for them. And in my estimation, one bad fall doesn't necessarily count as unworkable.

I'm not even sure I'd call it a bad fall if the paramedics let her stay home. If the fall is bad enough, they don't take no for an answer.

The time to wonder about whether a place will be good to live in when you're old and frail is when you're middle-aged and healthy: but I think that even then, the answer is generally "I have other concerns!"

KeithS, #273: Another strong possibility is that they don't have any close friends or relatives who could help them move, and not enough money to hire professional movers.

Ants, ANTS! I hate ants;
Ants in the dishwasher, ants in the sink,
Ants in the microwave (don't turn it on!)
I hate ants.

Spray them with vinegar, hit 'em with spray,
Dose them with poison— they WON'T go away.
Ants in my pantry, recyclables too...
I hate ants.

Ants in the cat food (to freezer it goes!)
Ants in the shower— why? Nobody knows.
Ants climbing over the glasses and knives...
I hate ants.

Just before breakfast, what a lovely surprise,
Ants in my cereal. THE ANTS MUST DIE!
I've called in professionals so I can prove
I HATE ANTS.

Lee @ 280:

Another good possibility.

B. Durbin @ 281:

Ah, reminds me of my dorm room in university.

Xopher @ 272... the noble art

"Is it Art?"
"I don't know if it's Art, but I know what I like."

Paul 278: Presuming that reference to anal penetration is automatically a reference to homosexuality strikes me as being a tad homophobic itself.

Oh, nonsense. This is so naive it almost seems that it must be disingenuous. Men never insult a woman by calling her a ccksckr or a pssy. (They do use the C word, interestingly, but that's different. Have you heard the word 'pussyboy'? Do you know what it means?) They insult one another by imputing homosexuality, which, yes, they see as inferior, but it's not just about hierarchy. You're one-up in the hierarchy over someone you've just beaten at tennis, but you wouldn't call him a ccksckr in that context, or say FU to him just for that.

B Durbin @ 281...

Ants?
Yes! Them!

B. Durbin: They make Combat for ants. I don't know how well it works. Maybe you've tried it, but just in case you haven't I thought I'd mention it.

I've heard that borax mixed with sugar will kill ants. Also, they dont like cinnamon, and putting a ring of powdered cinnamon around their entrance will prevent them from entering.

Xopher, I do hope you find something good relatively quickly. I've been laid off from jobs, and I know how self-crushing it can be. I repeat, there is nothing wrong with you!

Diatryma: Right on, and thanks!

Nancy 287: They don't like citrus oils either. No insect does, I'm led to understand.

And thanks.

But what about "fuck off" as opposed to "fuck you"?

Xopher @ 284: I make a practice of insulting women who love the patriarchy with words like "prick" and "dickhead". I realize I may be encouraging misandry by doing so, but I like the cognitive dissonance.

John: I like it! Note also how incongruous it feels to call a woman an asshole, though I do this every time I'm tempted to call one a btch (that one I've pretty well cleared out of my speech habits, except for humorous effect). The fact that this feels odd also speaks against Paul's argument at 278.

I have no theories about 'fuck off'.

I think "fuck off" is just a substitution for "piss off", what with the tendency to apply the f-bomb to various expressions.

I do like abso-fucking-lutely and guaran-damn-fucking-tee you.

My favorite was the one spoken by a mechanic who couldn't get a part to go where it was supposed to. Exasperated, he exclaimed, "The fucking fuck won't fuck!"

We've been battling the ants for the last month. The natural remedies would probably work better if there were one point of entry, but I'm afraid they might be living in the walls.

B., that's why I suggested Combat. It's a queen assassination.

Bill Higgins at #269
Yes, now you can go to grad school to learn about fandom.

It's actually cheaper to go to fandom to learn about fandom, and takes a little less time too.

When Pat Robertson Finally Meets God

I LOLd.

Xopher @ 284: Yes, men do insult each other by imputing homosexuality (though I have never heard the word pussyboy, I have heard similar constructions), but I never said otherwise. What I am questioning is the assumption that anal sex is exclusively a gay activity and that a reference to it automatically imputes homosexuality. I know some people who do make that assumption - mostly older people who have had little experience of GBLT people - but anal sex is not gay nor is it assumed to be so by most people I know. It is extraordinarily popular in mainstream hetero porn aimed at straight males and it's a frequent subject of educational material aimed at straight couples. It's something people do without regard to gender or orientation. The assumption that anal penetration is only something that gays do reeks of homophobia to me. Assuming that a comment is homophobic purely because it takes a negative view of anal penetration is, to my mind, silly and just plain wrong.

I didn't think KJK::Hyperion was intending anything homophobic by the original comment and still don't. I assumed it was merely a FU with an intensifer that would make the f-ing more uncomfortable for a less-willing f-ee.

As to 290, I do not find it incongruous to call a woman an arsehole if she acts like one. An arsehole is a source of shit and women can be just as full of it as men.

Maybe I overthink my insults. I prefer to focus on a person's intelligence rather than their sexuality when insulting them. I don't find anything insulting about sexuality.

Maybe you understand those things differently to me and that's OK. I'd just prefer it if you didn't get all ranty and make assumptions about my cultural assumptions while doing so.

We've been battling the ants for the last month. The natural remedies would probably work better if there were one point of entry, but I'm afraid they might be living in the walls.

Paul, are you aware who you are accusing of homophobia? Just asking...

Ignore that; I got a delayed error message.

I wonder if Pat Robertson believes his latest round of racist crap. Because if he does, he has made a remarkably neat ethical argument for Satanism:

Given: slaves trying desperately to free themselves. Stipulated: two rival supernatural entities.

Now suppose that one of the supernatural entities, of excellent reputation, ignores all the slaves' pleas for justice and assistance. Suppose further that some of the slaves, in desperation, appeal to his rival. The rival says "Yes" and helps them win their freedom.

So far, the rival looks like the good guy.

Robertson claims, further, that the first entity, rather than admitting error and providing the longed-for help, or simply walking away, held a grudge for generations and then murdered tens of thousands of people because their ancestors, in desperation, looked elsewhere for help to win their liberty.

He's claiming that Satan will help us win our freedom, and God is on the side of the slavers, so much so that he will take vengeance for generations on those who rebel.

Deluded racist, or double agent?

Vicki: Yep, and that's pretty much what a Luciferian friend of mine would say, too. I think he'd be right.

Tim @224 wrt "Roycroft": how the heck did you find that?

Google kept taunting me with the "Roycroft" cite through multiple searches, and I finally decided to try chasing it down. Whee!

Bill @250: Unless I am mistaken, the earliest known use of the "Assyrian tablet" quote remains the one you cited in #22, namely Report of the Commissioner of Industrial and Vocational Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1914. Which seems a long way from missionaries in Constantinople.

Sadly, as John Mark Ockerbloom pointed out @35, that's a misdated cite from Google-- or rather, the date refers to the beginning of a multi-year compendium, in which the specific cite belongs to 1926. Similarly, a supposed 1916 cite from the Texas State Teachers' Association seems to refer instead to the starting date of their "Texas Outlook" journal; if the quote really does belong to "volume 30", that places its publication in 1946. It also has the "4000 BC Egyptian priest" alternate attribution mentioned by Tim @12.

I'm very curious about another cite from a 1930 Pentecostal book that seems to have a strikingly different lead-in to the "Children no longer obey their parents and everyone wants to write a book" core: instead of "Bribery and corruption are common", it has something something "[...] used to be."

When I look at Pat Robertson, the somewhat uncharitable thought that comes to me is that seldom have I seen a man more deserving of a swift kick in the nads.

#284 ::: Xopher

Men never insult a woman by calling her a ccksckr or a pssy.

Never? That's news to me....

(They do use the C word, interestingly, but that's different.

Is it? Tone of voice is absent without explicit comments about the tone of voice, in printed words. Referring to people as bodyparts, or sexual acts, is not generally complimentary.

Have you heard the word 'pussyboy'? Do you know what it means?) They insult one another by imputing homosexuality, which, yes, they see as inferior, but it's not just about hierarchy. You're one-up in the hierarchy over someone you've just beaten at tennis, but you wouldn't call him a ccksckr in that context, or say FU to him just for that.

(...yeah, wrt the "Assyrian" quote again) It looks like a major propagator may've been the 50th-anniversary conference of the American Library Association in 1923-- which still doesn't address the original source, unless someone can find out whatever attribution may've preceded the quote in the "Proceedings"?

At my last job, I saw ants swarming around a crack in the floor. I pointed this out to a co-workier passing by and he said, "Aaaaack, they've followed me here!"
Commiserations, Xopher, and I hope something good turns up real quick.
Language--I can cuss the spines off a cactus, but sometimes manage to find creative substitutes. About the best I can come up with now, though, is that the people who backstabbed me out of that job were stucking fupid.
In unrelated but better news, increasing the beam ratio of my first trebuchet has increased its efficiency--same distance but with decreased weight ratio. That is, shortening the end that has the counterweight results in needing less counterweight. I'm so glad to have it back in action again. Further experiments are expected...

Summer Storms @ 298: I'm not accusing anyone of homophobia. I'm accusing several someones of accusing someone else of homophobia without any real evidence.

Maybe my wording wasn't as well chosen as it could have been. The assumption that only gay people fuck arses is ignorant to the point of strongly suggesting homophobia. It demonstrably does not reflect reality*. Therefore I do not think it is right to assume anyone referring to arse-fucking in a negative way is a homophobe. Some people just don't like anal sex because it can be uncomfortable, because the risk of injury is higher or because they're squicked by faecal thoughts. Whatever the reason, it has the reputation of being something a lot of people don't want to be on the bottom of. Add that to the dominance thing and you get fucking someone up the arse as worse than just a plain "fuck you" without any need for homophobia.

I'm not saying homophobes don't use the expression, just that using it does not automatically equal homophobia. It is true that men do insult others by suggesting homosexuality but we don't actually know that KJK::Hyperion is a man.

*Google image search for anal sex and see how many hetero couples are depicted in the results - it's a lot. I got 18/20 on the first page of results with only one gay couple (and a portait of Anne Hathaway for the 20th).

What's going on with this year's NASFIC? Their site's last update was during last year's worldcon, after they'd won the bid. Since then... There's still no way to confirm that one is a member, nor can we make hotel reservations.

Xopher, Andrew, others - thank you for advice on the ABM conundrum. My apologies for having inadvertently started the FTUTA controversy. I didn't take KJK/Hyperion's comments as aimed specifically at my book, and I think they're really a compliment to the genre - we _like_ being able to lure people in and waste their time ...

Mike@59 - thank you for having fond memories. I think the other books still float around the internet as pdfs, with our at-least-tacit blessing. The consensus on the webs seems to be that you might want to skip number 3, though I obviously disagree. The context I would have added had my hand not been persuasively stayed boils down to a couple of things, viz:-

Lots of people are noting how unfair it is that every choice you make pisses off some god or other, so that they take a long and protracted revenge. Yup - that's how it was.

Some elements in this score a resounding wft? That's because we were writing about Bronze Age Greece from a vantage point of 1980s Britain, with the Thatcher government engaged in rewriting the nation's OS. Some of the byplay has bled in from the times we were living in; we didn't anticipate (though are grateful to find) that people in far-away countries would be reading the books in 2010. We apologise for any bizarre reality distortions that result. ("We" because co-authored, not because Royal.)

And Xopher@job situation - solidarity and courage and this-too-shall-pass from this mostly-lurker, as well.

Book to be self-published if author gets 100 pledges from people to buy it:
http://cyclingedinburgh.info/2010/01/10/be-part-of-cycling-history-for-25/

(I doubt many Making Light readers want a book on the history of cycle racing 1867–1903, but I thought more would be interested in the publishing model. Similar things have been done before, I know.)

Julie L writes in #302:

I'm very curious about another cite from a 1930 Pentecostal book that seems to have a strikingly different lead-in to the "Children no longer obey their parents and everyone wants to write a book" core: instead of "Bribery and corruption are common", it has something something "[...] used to be."

Here is more of the passage from The Christ of Every Road: A Study in Pentecost by Eli Stanley Jones, obtained by a little Dead Sea Googling:

Someone has facetiously said that when Adam and Eve were going out of the garden of Eden Adam turned to Eve and said, "My dear, this is an age of transition." The oldest known bit of writing in the world is a piece of papyrus in a Constantinople Museum. On it is written : "Alas, times are not what they used to be. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone wants to write a book.

Bennett Cerf apparently quoted it a few times in his joke books, which probably helped a lot in spreading the quote around.

nerdycellist @248 said: That being said, I have often used the phrase "S*ck My D*ck", which I think is funny, as I don't have one. (on my own person) I may rethink that as well.

I've been known to use "[person/situation] can bite my pasty white ass" in similar instances; conveys the same contempt and causes (metaphorically) the contempt-ee to do something generally considered to be fairly humiliating (even by people who LIKE doing it; that's why they like it :-> ).

abi @225 said: Taking KJK::Hyperion's message in its totality (content as well as form), I can make a few reasoned guesses about age, sex, and subculture. I'm only slightly acquainted with anyone from that set, but the dialect they speak is not...mindful, particularly in its profanity.

I've been surprised to see the rise in use among teenagers I have some connection to of the phrase "Die in a fire/hole", which startles me both for being nicely graphic in a useful way, and entirely non-scatological/sexual. Shows some ingenuity on someone's part.

Steve C. @266 said : I forget who came up with the idea, but it was posited that FU should be regarded as a form of dominance, which when fully expressed is "(I) FU", similar to one beast mounting another. We do like our hierarchies.

So do dogs, and mine display quite distinct (and to me, amusing) differences in the way they use mounting on each other. My older, more hyper, crazier dog, Ajax, mounts his foster-brother Boston when he's feeling vulnerable; it appears to reassure him. He also occasionally humps to orgasm, which I've never seen Boston do. However, whenever Ajax isn't in the best wanna-play mood and Boston wants to really get him worked up for a run-and-chase, Boston grabs his hips just to piss him off and make him growl-jump at him.

Very silly, my boys. :-> Our pack is "little and broken, but still good, yes, still good."

In re embarrassingly-old pictures of ourselves, this picture of me from high school has been referred to as my "Lyle Lovett hair period," which is extra funny as at the time I had no idea who he was. My hair has a tendency, between about 2-8" in length, of going into a large-radius stiff sort of puffy afro-like helmet thing; if I put a headband on it it puffs out BEHIND the headband and we have sort of a bad-perm version of Londo Mollari. Very flattering. So this period was an attempt to NOT have totally shorn-short hair, but not have ENOUGH of the longish stuff up front to give it a chance to misbehave.

A previous attempt at the same set of problems involved a mullet ... a section at the nape of my neck left long for braiding/playing with, with the rest being shorn. Um. Yeah. It was the late 80s, that sort of thing seemed like a good idea back then? Luckily, few pictures of it survive.

#306 ::: Angiportus ...were stucking fupid.

My favorite (though seldom used) epithet is "demifuckwit". For those not competent enough to be full-fledged.

I just tried to post the following as my Facebook status:

"WTF, Facebook? You've nuked my profile pic, and keep trying to force me to choose one specific pic that I would never use. When I try to go into my Profile pic album (which you spontaneously renamed) you ask for my birthdate (which you already have) and then claim I am younger than 18 (I'm not) . THEN when I try to click the "contact us" link you so unhelpfully provide in that message, IT DOESN'T DO A GODDAMN THING."

I couldn't, but Facebook kept telling me to try in a few minutes. I kept trying, to no avail. I then tried logging out and back in, to be greeted with this: "Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologise for the inconvenience."

Yet I *am* getting FB updates on TweetDeck. I just don't know how to update FB *from* TD. And of course this has to occur when I was using FB to make some plans...

Is anybody else having FB problems?

Bill @311: Here is more of the passage from The Christ of Every Road: A Study in Pentecost by Eli Stanley Jones, obtained by a little Dead Sea Googling:

Ah yes, walking keywords up/down through a passage; I like to think of it as Google PCR. I hadn't managed to walk this one backward this time, though-- thanks!

Someone has facetiously said that when Adam and Eve were going out of the garden of Eden Adam turned to Eve and said, "My dear, this is an age of transition." The oldest known bit of writing in the world is a piece of papyrus in a Constantinople Museum. On it is written : "Alas, times are not what they used to be. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone wants to write a book.

Papyrus, eh? Another one for the "Egyptian" side. It certainly looks as if the antiquity of the quote is bogus, but I still wanna know whose fault it is....

Related to homosexual language being used as an indicator of hierarchy, male/male sexual harassment is on the rise, and it is very clearly being used as intimidation tactics from one straight man to another. I wonder how closely this ties in to most men who molest young boys self-identifying as straight?

Lee @316: It certainly contributes to the horrific stats on teenage male suicides caused by such harrassment (whether or not the harrassees are actually gay/trans is immaterial; the bullies find accusations of such to be very successful).

On an entirely separate open-threadish front, Apple has threatened legal action against a website (Gawker) that is suborning folks to reveal secrets about the new Apple Tablet. Slate has an article on it here.

Bill and Julie: Thanks for the Dead Sea Googling! The book in question has a renewed copyright, so it won't get turned on full view, but it's nice to be able to drag out the sentence.

I find these kinds of quote hunts fun myself; it's nice to play the game with other folks who are interested. (And it's nice to see that we've already pushed back the date a good 25 years from the published reference source that includes it.)

In case my Yale hypothesis has any merit, I've just put out a Twitter notice for folks in that area who like archive huntsm to see if they'd like to join in. We'll see if there are any takers.

B. Durbin @292: Besides Combat, there's a liquid called Terro that works well on ants. They gobble it up and take it home to kill the colony.

Another interesting quote variation--

"The times are decadent. There is lawlessness everywhere. Children no longer obey their parents. Every one would write a book. It is manifest that the end of the age is at hand."

-- though Google may've misdated the context again: The Methodist Review, Volume 84 doesn't seem consistent with the date 1924; frex, this bibliography has a cite for "The Methodist Review 107 (March-April 1924)".

Forget Avatar -- go see the Hubble repair mission in IMAX instead!

David #309: Lots of people are noting how unfair it is that every choice you make pisses off some god or other, so that they take a long and protracted revenge. Yup - that's how it was.

Sounds like POWDER, the roguelike I've been playing lately. You're not just dealing with monsters, you're also trying to survive the gods, as no matter which one(s) you try to follow (or just keep happy), at least two of the others will be smiting you regularly. (If anyone wants to try it, you really want to check out the Unofficial Wiki for hints....)

Apropos of... well, nothing, I guess, but this is an open thread, right?

I went to Roger Ebert's website to read a review of a movie, and found this:
A Letter to Rush Limbaugh

I don't get it. I don't know how people can be so small and hateful and mean. Is he (Limbaugh) really not sane?

Ebert's blog has a few good entries about the health care issue, also.

On the ants— apparently the key ingredient in ALL the colony-killers is boric acid, which doesn't poison them but desiccates them. The different brands just have different suspensions, so they recommend that you buy several different types. You can have up to 8-10 queens per cubic yard. Argentine ants in America are all from the same group, which is why they're so dense— they don't kill each other like the colonies in Argentina. The supercolony we live over is about 600 miles long, and unfortunately it's going to be another few decades before lack of genetic diversity is going to affect it. Ants will not cross diatomaceous earth and will avoid talcum powder after the first exploration. (We've lined the pantry with it. Why not?)

At any rate, we have done all of the things we can do on our own and now we're bringing in the big guns. Blech.

Oh, and on the thread of epithets— I work with high schoolers, and have noticed the distressing prevalence of the word "gay" to mean something disparaging, "that's so gay" being the most common use. Of course, this is at its worst in the schools that make a point of being enlightened and progressive, and it seems that they are totally unconscious to the irony (not that that's surprising when dealing with the general run of teenagers.)

Of course, I'm not in a position to say anything, but it makes me want to smack them upside the head whenever I hear it.

Otherwise, I tend to retain my curses for inanimate objects. (And just about taught the little man a new word yesterday when I found the ants in the microwave— thank goodness he can't do terminal consonants yet.)

Cheryl, that's exactly what open threads are for!

And no, unfortunately the Limbaughdenburg is cold sane. He's just unspeakably evil and incredibly greedy. When he dies I will dance a happy dance.

Does anyone understand today's xkcd? I keep looking at it and finding it incomprehensible. What were they trying to do? What are the objects in the middle? In the last panel, what are the round things being pushed along?

I think it's supposed to be a Mythbusters reference, but I can't figure out anything beyond that.

Xopher @284

I can assure you that I have been called both of those things by men, as well as a variety of other insults related to sexual practices that produce plenty of mutual delight but are, apparently, shameful to have engaged in when considered in retrospect.

Hmmm, a punditsort from less to more sane. We'd have to circumspectly avoid biasing those with whom we agree as being more sane than others. Appearances can be deceptive as well: who is more sane, Glenn Beck or Perry Logan?

Xopher -- that refers to a robot designing contest (most famous one at MIT?). The winning robot in the comic sends a telescoping arm with a lighter up to the ceiling, where it activates the sprinkler system. The water shorts out the other robots and their controls, but thanks to the built-in umbrella, the winning robot isn't affected. I think those round things are demolished competitors.

Ahhh! Thanks. See, if he'd put "Robot Warz" at the top or something, I probably could have figured that all out eventually. I just had no idea what they were all trying to do.

Xopher @ 331:

It took me a while to figure out what was going on too, and it didn't help that I first looked at it about half an hour after I should have been in bed.

Xopher @ 327 -- I had to do a bit of digging, first on the xkcd forums and then elsewhere, to figure it out. It's referring to this year's FIRST Robotics Competition.

Summer Storms @314: If you want to post to Facebook from Tweetdeck, click the Facebook box on top of the window where you type your updates/tweets to turn on the "post from Facebook" feature. You'll want to click on the Twitter box (the one displaying your Twitter username) to turn it off, if you don't want both Facebook and Twitter accounts updated with the same message.

B. Durbin #325:

Just don't do the obvious and microwave the ants. Not if you want to avoid what we're still calling "that unfortunateness with the crockpot" decades later.

Ants will turn up in the weirdest places, including a Brita pitcher we kept out on the kitchen counter.

We finally dealt with them by going to the local Self-Chem and getting some sort of bait-traps (not Combat) that they recommended for pharaoh ants (the teeny-tiny things that will go for sugar for a while, then switch to fats, and then to water--or maybe in the other direction).

Xopher @327 -- maybe they were at the World Fantasy Convention this year, where the dealer's room on the second floor got partly flooded from a leak in the pool on the third floor? (read the crawlover, or whatever that little hidden comment is called)

I've had pretty good luck with Grant's Kills Ants, plus it earworms me with John Fogerty every time.

Joel @ #333: my daughter was on her high school's FIRST Robotics Competition team last year. Their first time, and they ended up going to the World competition and making a respectable showing there. I really love the "cooperative competition" design of the thing.

#305 Julie L writes:

(...yeah, wrt the "Assyrian" quote again) It looks like a major propagator may've been the 50th-anniversary conference of the American Library Association in 1923-- which still doesn't address the original source, unless someone can find out whatever attribution may've preceded the quote in the "Proceedings"?

It doesn't enlighten. It's an essay by George S. Godard, State Librarian of Connecticut, entitled "Development of the State Library."

Multiple versions of this piece have been scanned by Google Books. Looks like George revised it at some point to insert, or remove, our quote. A version without the quote is available as full text.

Here's some context around the quotation:

Now, the very thought of the individual possession of my ideal state library, just described, is to most states unthinkable, except possibly to New York under Dr. Dewey. The area of human knowledge is unlimited and getting more so. Books! Books! Books! See how they grow. A dozen or more new ones every hour, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Good books and bad books. Large books and little books. Picture books and scrap books. Standard books and books to stand, and someone, somewhere, desiring to see, not necessarily read, each one sometime. A tablet (Assyrian, 2800 BC), preserved in Constantinople, says:

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

Think of it! From eternity to eternity is a long time, and each decade must learn and unlearn so much, but apparently print it all. It is no longer possible within any sort of reason for any one library — town, county, state, or national — to think of enveloping everything printed. The expense of purchasing, collating, cataloging, and housing is prohibitive. Therefore, is it not desirable — as has in some instances been done — that each state library select its departments or fields of work which may thus be made approximately complete, leaving the other departments of knowledge which are thus either neglected or deficient to be covered by other librar1es which may in turn be deficient or neglected in some lines covered in this?

Angiportus@306, many years ago, we were having a cricket infestation in New Jersey that summer, and not only was there constant cricket noise from outside, but there'd be occasional crickets sneaking around the screen doors, into the airlocks, and occasionally into the house, and I'd have to find the things and evict them before I went bonkers or the cats ate them. So one evening I was at work (on the fourth floor of a large glass-box building), and heard crickets - arrgh!

Eventually I tracked them down - they were part of a screen-saver on a Macintosh, which a few employees used. Computers with sound cards were relatively new in those days, and of course they only happened when the miscreant had been out of his office for a while (and IIRC, only after the Mac decided it was evening, though that may have been the wolf-howl that did that.)

B. Durbin @325 I work with high schoolers, and have noticed the distressing prevalence of the word "gay" to mean something disparaging [...] Of course, I'm not in a position to say anything, but it makes me want to smack them upside the head whenever I hear it.

What do you do, that you're not in a position to say anything? I am conflict-averse, and wary of explicitly and vigorously arguing a position which I know many of my students' parents would find contrary to the morals they are teaching their children, but I do stand on requiring respectful language in my class. I've gone as far as (eyebrows meeting hairline) "Excuse me? Did I just hear you use the word 'gay' as if it were an insult?"

The smoothest I've heard was from a fellow teacher basically playing dumb: "What did you say? I don't understand; what does that mean? Oh. If you mean 'weak,' could you say that, please?" Gets the point across that "gay" and "weak" are unrelated concepts, without sending anyone home telling their parents that Ms. T is indoctrinating them in Satanism.

I found a specific (and almost certainly bogus) cite for The Quote's archaeological origin! There's a chain of cites starting ~1949 (afaik so far) that rewords it to "Everyone wants to write a book, and children are no longer obedient to their parents", and attributes it to the "Presse Papyrus" (the correct name is "Prisse") "in the municipal museum at Istanbul".

(It's not clear to me whether the Prisse Papyrus has ever been in a museum in Istanbul. I am inclined to doubt that it contains any exact analogue to The Quote.)

*moderate dancing about* Also, a pushback cite to 1908, from The Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic:

7000 Years Ago: The "good old times" seemed as bad to the "good-old-timers" as the present times seem to the modern man, as shown by the following translation on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, Turkey:

Naram Sin, 5000 BC

We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book.

A pannier question for the cyclists of the Fluorosphere:

I recently bought a bike. It was surprisingly easy to pick up again after *mumble* years of never having ridden one.

For basic grocery and other around-town shopping, would I be better off going with a pair of basic, open-topped, grocery bag panniers, like this, or something a little more general purpose, like this or this? I'm rather enamored of the ones in the last link, but worried they might be overkill.

(And here's a plug for the Open Road Bicycle Shop in Pasadena. Excellent service, good prices.)

B. Durbin @325: Argentine ants in America are all from the same group, which is why they're so dense— they don't kill each other like the colonies in Argentina. The supercolony we live over is about 600 miles long [..]

If they learn the secret of fire, we shall have to leave Earth (a reference to Simak's City, to explain the 'joke').

I recall reading an article years ago about fire ants forming supercolonies. E.O.Wilson was quoted as saying this was the biggest advance in ant evolution in several million years.

Invoking open-threadedness. I'm in the throes of a cross-town move. It is going weirdly, when it isn't going batshit crazy. For instance, after two months of hassle, painting, packing, partially moving, respiratory infections, holidays and more hassle, yesterday my landlady called me in tears at 8 am to tell me that not only do they not have the money to replace the dog-pee saturated carpet (blacklights don't lie), they don't have the money to keep up the house payments, so their giving "my" house back to the bank, and their own house is in foreclosure. I'm now talking to their bank. The old house has sold, we have to be out by the end of the month, and the moving crew is still scheduled for this weekend. The dogs will be barracaded out of 2/3 of the house until the carpet is replaced. I actually feel more hopeful now that I'll be dealing with the bank, which presumably has enough money to replace the carpet, and should welcome reliable tenants for a few years, until the market rebounds. (If they don't, they can go back to the kind of tenants who let their 5 dogs use the carpet to relieve themselves rather than letting them out into the back yard.)

On a brighter note, while packing, I unearthed my copy of The Madhous Manor Pleyn Brown Wrapper Songbook, 2nd edition. Anyone else have a copy? Heh heh.

As I was sitting drinking beer,
Doun, hey doun, hey doun, hey doun,
I spied twa perverts sitting near,
Wi' a doun...

Invoking open-threadedness. I'm in the throes of a cross-town move. It is going weirdly, when it isn't going batshit crazy. For instance, after two months of hassle, painting, packing, partially moving, respiratory infections, holidays and more hassle, yesterday my landlady called me in tears at 8 am to tell me that not only do they not have the money to replace the dog-pee saturated carpet (blacklights don't lie), they don't have the money to keep up the house payments, so their giving "my" house back to the bank, and their own house is in foreclosure. I'm now talking to their bank. The old house has sold, we have to be out by the end of the month, and the moving crew is still scheduled for this weekend. The dogs will be barracaded out of 2/3 of the house until the carpet is replaced. I actually feel more hopeful now that I'll be dealing with the bank, which presumably has enough money to replace the carpet, and should welcome reliable tenants for a few years, until the market rebounds. (If they don't, they can go back to the kind of tenants who let their 5 dogs use the carpet to relieve themselves rather than letting them out into the back yard.)

On a brighter note, while packing, I unearthed my copy of The Madhous Manor Pleyn Brown Wrapper Songbook, 2nd edition. Anyone else have a copy? Heh heh.

As I was sitting drinking beer,
Doun, hey doun, hey doun, hey doun,
I spied twa perverts sitting near,
Wi' a doun...

Ooops.

Tracie @ 348 ...
... when you said it was going weirdly, I was thinking "the move", not "posting to making light"... ;D

xeger @349: I thought so too, but you're right. Everything is going weird. And the weird, having turned pro some time ago, are now coming out of retirement.

Julie L: Congratulations; great find! This version has different wording, but all the basic elements from the versions from 1922 onward are there. That pushes the quote back 14 years (and the purported origin back another 2200 :-)

I can push it back one more month, with some additional background. The Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic issue you cite is dated August 22, 1908. The quote also appears in the July 25, 1908 issue of The Medical Fortnightly out of St. Louis, where it's in a column of miscellany titled "Byron Robinson's Note Book".

Byron Robinson is described elsewhere in the volume as "Professor of Gynaecology and Diseases of the Abdominal Viscera, Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery." From information elswhere on the Web, it looks like he lived from 1854 to 1910.

So it looks like the quote had a previous life as medical journal filler. (There's another occurrence of the quote, in the same wording, in a 1910 druggist review.)

Regarding the Papyrus Prisse, which you note as a "citation" that shows up in later versions: there's a translation online. On a quick skim, I don't see anything that seems close to the quotation.

So I wonder if we've found the origin, or something close to the origin, in Dr. Robinson's miscellanea. Or if there are earlier versions yet to find. It's an interesting hunt in any case.

KeithS @344, what I found the most versatile back in college, and have installed on my current bike (and I havn't ridden a bike in mumblety-mumble years either) is folding metal panniers, which can easily be found on Amazon among other places. They are always there if you want them, but neatly fold away when you don't, and you don't need to worry so much about someone stealing them while you're at work or in a shop. You can stick anything from grocery bags to briefcases in 'em. They do add a bit of weight, though, and you want to install them far enough back that your heel won't hit them.

Open Threadness -- How vomitously disgusted by the bs perky news media's take on the singing that's going on in Port-au-Prince right now.

Sick almost unto death by their fuckin ignorance of what they think they are reporting on.

No wonder no one spends money on newspapers or any other reporting media these days.

Zelda @ 341: "What do you do, that you're not in a position to say anything?"

Photographer with the contracted company. As a peon, I have to play really nice with the students since a number of them are the type to complain to their parents and get policy changed* just to suit them.

On the weird side, I can physically threaten them ("I will run you down and sit on you") and nobody seems to blink. Okay, it's true that they know I'm not really going to come after them with a baseball bat if they don't stop making faces behind the photographer, but it goes over without protest while social notes go over like a lead balloon.**

*Which is why we had to photograph girls in spaghetti straps in spite of the written school policy that such garb was not allowed for the ID photos.

**I think the best trick I ever pulled was when I was about seven months pregnant with Gareth. We were taking one of those senior photos where everybody forms the year, and this one kid decided to sit outside the number. I told him he couldn't do that and he said he would if he wanted, so I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to his feet with one arm. He was so intimidated by this pregnant lady slinging him around that he meekly joined the group, never realizing two things: 1) He was one of those lanky teenagers that probably weighed 120 at best and 2) He was so startled by the movement that he put his feet under him and did most of the lift himself.

On that note, I found the best way to get obscene gestures out of the photos is to call out loudly and repeatedly that we have Photoshop and will remove any such gestures, and the hands attached, if necessary. We actually had one senior photo with no gestures whatsoever, a first in decades.

KeithS @344: I live in a rainy climate, so I've gone with the ballistic nylon waterproof variety. One of your photos showed someone putting a paper grocery bag into a pannier. I've never wanted to do that. I take the panniers into the store with me, and load the groceries into them (after paying, that is).

The downside of the clip-on variety is that you can't leave the on the bike without worrying about theft. I wasn't tempted by the metal kind because of the rain here, but also because then the weight is always on the bike.

A variety that you didn't mention is a sturdy plastic milk crate, either mounted on the rack behind the seat, or in front of the handlebars. I see a lot of those around Portland.

Keith@344: all the modern bike carrier things look far too small to me. When I was a kid we put an ordinary pair of wire baskets (very heavy wire), each of which was big enough to take a briefcase on end (which the things pictured aren't). They were thoroughly attached, so theft wasn't an issue.

I have lots of terrible memories of a front-end basket on a bicycle, since it was used daily to carry my 40+ copies of The Washington Star six blocks to my paper route. Tippy, very tippy.

My memory is that side baskets for the rear weren't big enough to hold all those copies, which is why I lived with the front one.

Janet Croft @ 352, janetl @ 355, David Dyer-Bennet @ 356, and Linkmeister @ 357:

Thank you for your opinions and experiences.

I thought about mentioning the milk crate option, but, in my mind at least, that winds up pushing the center of gravity up a bit higher than I'm comfortable with. It does have the saving grace of being cheap and being able to hold a goodly amount of stuff.

Nancy C. Mittens is in town to spend a long weekend with her brother so I took her to dinner tonight, after which we went to the local SF club's monthly meeting. She can be seen here, knitting a shawl. Or was she crochetting one? No matter what, believe it or not, the weirdo sitting next to her didn't utter a single pun or joke.

#343 and #351:

The 1908 versions of the quote cite a particular museum, the Imperial Museum in Constantinople or İmparatorluk Müzesi.

Its successor, the Istanbul (not Constantinople) Archaeology Museum, has an English-language site. Possibly the museum staff could shed light on this century-old citation. It may even be an FAQ for them...

Do we still think Isabel F. Dodd is involved?

In further news, Prof. G. T. W. Patrick, of the State University of Iowa, claims to have seen the inscription himself. ("The New Optimism," Popular Science Monthly, vol. LXXXII, no. 5, for May 1913.)

In the museum at Constantinople the writer saw an inscription upon an old stone. It was by King Naram Sin of Chaldea, 3800 years B.c., and it said,

We have fallen upon evil times
and the world has waxed very old and wicked.
Politics are very corrupt.
Children are no longer respectful to their parents.

This old and ever-recurring complaint does not depend upon any actual deterioration of the times, for the times are constantly growing better. It comes usually from older people whose outlook may be biased by subjective conditions due to decaying powers and by the tendency to regard all changes as changes for the worse, the only really good times being the bright days of our own youth. It is encouraged also by the fact that, since the springs of progress are in the human mind itself, it comes about that the present times are always below the standard set by our ideals and are regarded, therefore, as bad, being compared not really with the past, but with the ideals of our constructive imagination.

Googling on "and the world has waxed very old and wicked" is instructive. Lyndon Johnson used it in a speech in 1965.

"The sons of the people are not so righteous as their parents were" is a variant that shows up in some books on politics, the kind a presidential speechwriter might have on a shelf.

That quote is probably from some time traveler jerking us around.

I live in a very different pannier universe than American cyclists do.

For instance, I not only leave even clip-on panniers on my bike, but I leave my rain suit and seat cover in them. I probably wouldn't if I cycled into central Amsterdam every day, but around my village and into Amsterdam Noord, it's perfectly fine.

Dutch panniers come in two varieties: single ones you clip onto your bike (weakness: the clips are often plastic and therefore break. That plagued my laptop pannier and cost me an old iPod. I rigged a replacement.) or double ones that flap over the back rack (weakness: their corners bend inward and play the spokes like a marimba if the load isn't just right). The doubles are usually fastened to the back rack with straps and little metal sliding buckles that make them impossible to remove quickly.

I used to use clip-ons and carry them into the grocery store, but they tend to be boxy and bulky even when empty (among other things, this means I can't pop a kid on the back rack, because they stick out and up in a most awkward configuration). So now I tend to bring cloth bags in my double panniers. I then bring the grocery cart to the bike, put the cloth bags into the panniers, and load the groceries into them in situ. That way I can balance the load in each one to avoid the marimba effect, and carry the cloth bags into the house when I get there.

abi @ 363... I can't pop a kid on the back rack

Now, Cardinal - the rack!

The Dangers of Overclocking!

Bemused by assumptions dept.:
If a quote is old enough, it's got to be real.

Half-remembered anecdote, from a "savage" visiting the Smithsonian, and the curators taking advantage of his presence to see if they'd assembled a shrine correctly. He cracked up. "What's the stuffed rat doing in there?"

Vicki @ 300: Did I mention that your response is brilliant? Don't matter--let me say it again:

That was brilliant.

Serge @359

Albuquerque, right?

Love, C.

I have an Open Thread story-finding request, for as we all know, AKICIML! It's a longish short story or shortish novella, 1950s to early 1980s. It involved a team of five people (or possibly four) who'd been mind-linked in some way and sent to deal with a dispute between two nations on a colony planet, one of which was very Earth-centric and the other vehemently rejected anything Earthlike.

Any pointers will be much appreciated.

Constance @ 368... Yup, Albuquerque. If you include nearby Santa Fé and Los Alamos, the population probably counts more F/SF writers than you can shake a stick at. Not that I'd want to shake a stick at any of them.

abi @ 363:

Thank you. I hadn't thought about that aspect of the double ones.

For the most part, the bike is stored in a safe location, and when it's locked up because I'm in the store it's in as visible a location as I can make it.

A common pangram come to life.

re: the sidelight with R.A. Salvatore weighing in on Martha Coakley (and thank you for highlighting that, Patrick): If you're wondering where all the fuss from liberals is coming from, Coakley's campaigning in Boston and environs at least has been pretty terrible. See this ad analysis a friend of mine put together (which incidentally talks about lots of good reasons to vote against Scott Brown). I know why politicians do negative campaigning, and I'm fine with it, but in a place like Boston she should be able to combine negative, lowest-common-denominator campaigning with enough actual, factual material so as not to insult the voters' intelligence. It's not like there's any shortage of reasons to vote against Scott Brown -- photoshopping him in next to Bush isn't one of them.

Speaking of security, here's a set of detailed photos of an ATM-card skimmer found in the wild. I might catch something like this at my bank's ATM, because I use it all the time and know what it looks like. But I damn sure wouldn't catch it at the ATM in a mall! I understand they also make this kind of thing that slips over the card slot on a gas pump.

KeithS @344, 371 --

Arkel make a number of paniers designed to be detached and carried about with you in the fashion of shoulder bags.

Not cheap but you get what you pay for and then some. Even better design-wise than the MEC cycle bags which have a sort of iterating-ruthless-practicality about them.

Vicki @ 300.

Double agent. But one who's in trouble with his boss.

#370 ::: Serge

In my yoot, I was a fledging member of that community. Then I got married and moved to NYC. But the ties remain, and some of them are very strong still.

Love, C.

Constance @ 377...

I took the risk of approaching the community in mid-2008 and I've never regretted it.
Let me know if ever you come visit.

Constance @ 377...

I took the risk of approaching the community in mid-2008 and I've never regretted it.
Let me know if ever you come visit.

Bill Higgins @360: Do we still think Isabel F. Dodd is involved? In further news, Prof. G. T. W. Patrick, of the State University of Iowa, cclaims to have seen the inscription himself. ("The New Optimism," Popular Science Monthly, vol. LXXXII, no. 5, for May 1913.)

Interestingly, GTW (George Thomas White) Patrick may be wrapping the trail back toward Isabel Dodd again-- he's listed here as a donor to the American College for Girls in Istanbul for the period 1892-1893. Page 4 of that report lists Isabel Frances Dodd in the faculty as the Professor of Literature and Art.

And in yet another example of Fluorospheric overlap, GTW Patrick was apparently a pioneer in sleep deprivation studies. There's a partial biography of him here and the University of Iowa has an archive of his papers; it looks like Patrick mentions the tablet again in his autobiography?

A milestone of sorts in book marketing:
The video-game tie-in re-release of Dante's Inferno

If it actually gets a few (or a few thousand) gamers to read the Inferno and go "Whoa cool!", I'm going to call that a good thing.

(Credit to Penny Arcade & Kotaku for bringing it to my attention.)

...Whoa. GTW Patrick's sister Mary was the "founding president" of the American School for Girls in Constantinople, where Isabel F. Dodd was a faculty member. Mary Mills Patrick remained the president of the school for 35 years and wrote a history of the school, though its table of contents doesn't immediately suggest any context for mentioning The Quote.

Animated stereoviews of old Japan. Following the flickr links is pretty fascinating, too.

I will likely be in Iowa City sometime relatively soon. (Nice place, except in winter.) If there's some relatively simple task to be undertaken in the archives there, let me know and I'll try.

Debbie @383, the stereoview of geisha looking at stereoviews is satisfyingly meta...

Are there other Fluorospherians in Albuquerque in addition to Serge? I will be there in mid-February for a conference and it looks like I have some free time Saturday afternoon (13th) if anyone would like to get together!

Janet Croft @ 385... February 13? That sounds good. See you then.

Serge -- great! I'll pencil you in and be in touch when it's closer to the date. I don't know yet if I'm giving my annual talk to the University of New Mexico Hobbit Society (great group!) Thursday or Saturday night. It's usually Thursday.

Janet Croft @ 387... See you soon then. The only day that's not fee is Friday, Februart 12. That's when we're implementing a bunch of changes to our computer system. Mine are fairly simple, but I'll have to babysit the stuff put together by the newbies. Bummer too, because that's the evening the local SF club meets. :-(

#379 ::: Serge

Absolutely!

But so far no one at UNM seems interested in bringing us in to do what we do, etc. But then it is in the desert and we do tend to the culture and hsitory of the U.S. southern Atlantic coast, Africa, the Gulf and the Caribbean. But there is a strong Cuban activist community there.

It would be fun to be back.

Love, C.

Though, I just now recollect, someone at UNM named a collection of folk recordings and their translations after the Spouse.

Love, C.

Oh My Gods. Poor Charisma Carpenter. Her career is over.

Is it just me, or does the Texas political suicide particle make anyone else think of a Tim Powers novel? There's a secret reason all those politicians killed themselves, and it would be interesting to see what it was....

Xopher@391 -- what, because she's in a sciy-fiy-channyl saturday special? Many reasonable TV actors jump in there for fast gigs between real jobs.

Tom @392

Once they find the Higgs Boson, the LHC will be put to work finding the Texas political suicide particle.

Thanks for posting the link to the news of impending publication of the "fourth Titus book" by Mervyn Peake's widow.

Here's some background and commentary on that.

Andrew, I hope you're right. I like her.

I watched that thing. It was horrible. She managed to say the most awful lines just as if she were really sincere about them.

Xopher @396: That's why she's an actor.

Cadbury Moose @ 394... Once they find the Higgs Boson

I know where he is. He's in the middle of this page.
("Serge, it's the Higgs Boson, not Bosun Higgs.")
Oh.
Nevermind.

Kevin, yes, of course. But it's too bad she had to do something so schlocky. I wonder what immediate cashflow problem that solved.

Xopher @ 396

That's the mark of a professional actor/actress.

I take it you've never experienced Mike Cule doing the readings at Thog's Masterclass Live?
There are some things Moose were not meant to know, and Mike giving a straight reading
of passages from Fanthorpe (etc.) is definitely one of them.

(I had to leave the room, hold onto a marble column that supported the roof, and
wait until my ribs stopped hurting and the urge to roll on the floor went away.)

Well, she didn't have to say anything like "lithe, opaque nose," but it was pretty horrible.

Just a quick note on the Irish blasphemy Sidelight: it's not so much that it got done per se, it's that the powers-that-be decided that this was the most important thing that they could do at this particular point in time.

As the link points out, it was punted back to the legislature in 1999, and has been hanging in mid-air since then. That's 7 or 8 years of "omigod, we have more money than we know what to do with". In 2009 - a year that gave rise to two budgets, more scandals that you could shake a moderately-sized stick at, a highly-localised bank bailout, a property market collapse, soaring unemployment, etc, etc et-bloody-everything-everyone's-lived-through-except-on-a-smaller-scale-c, and blasphemy is what they think is the highest priority to deal with?

I'm local: I'm allowed scoff. "Look, over there, a heffalump!"

Xopher, #399: Maybe she's of the same mind as Christopher Lee, whose motto is, "An actor who isn't working isn't an actor." And ghod knows Lee has done some damn schlocky stuff in his time.

Lee @ 403... What was the title of that 1970s movie where he played a priest in a convent that turns out to be the secret lair of aliens planning world domination or world destruction or something of that sort?

Cheryl at 324: Is Rush Limbaugh sane? That depends what you mean by sane. I make no statement regarding his mental health. I believe he knows what he's saying. Does he believe it? Who knows? It doesn't matter. Other people will believe it because he said it.

Is he rational? Does he have or does he show sound judgment? I say, No. Does that matter? Probably not, since the folks who habitually listen to him don't either.

I need a cookie...

Thanks to everyone who chipped in with experience and suggestions on panniers. After reading them, and talking to some people offline, I decided to go with a pair of these. Should keep me set for a while.

Serge @ 404:

Christopher Lee's IMDB page is quite impressive.

KeithS, #406: Ooh, they're doing a sequel to The Wicker Man, and they've got him back! That should be interesting. I just recently bought this shirt, and can't wait for it to be warm enough for me to start wearing it at cons!

Lizzy @405:

Generalizing from Limbaugh: Treating "sane" as a yes/no question collapses multiple questions (I'm not sure how many) and oversimplifies the answers to at least some of those questions. "Does he know what he's saying?" for example can be "does he understand what the words he's using mean to most people?" and "…to his expected listener(s)?" and "Does he realize people are taking him seriously, rather than thinking he's joking and/or exaggerating for effect?" and probably a few other things. Both of those are different from "Does he believe he's telling the truth?" and "Does he care whether what he's saying is true?"

All of those are somewhat connected, and would be different from, say, "is this an appropriate scale of reaction to this event or statement?" which is something else that people might mean when they ask about someone's sanity. "Appropriate" is itself a judgment, of course: but there are times that I consider myself to be overreacting, in which case it makes sense to stop, take a deep breath, go get some protein, and then reconsider. (And someone else saying I was overreacting would be a different thing.)

All of that, I think, has to take into account that there is no ISO standard human being or set of appropriate reactions (and watch out for people who want you to believe that there is, especially if their standard is like them and not like you).

[I'm going to stop here, because otherwise it would take hour or weeks and want to be a post on my own journal, not a comment in an ML open thread.)

<voice=Monty Python falsetto> Well, I'm a simple soul: I don't understand all that. All I know is, Rush Limbaugh is a turd in humanoid form and I hope he dies in a fire.</voice>

Teresa, in your Particles you list a "Giant many-fauceted scarlet emerald".

I am crushed! How could our maven of all things grammatical and stylistic say such a thing? Please, say you were looped on cold medicine or something!

Brenda @ 410

Teresa was referring to the amazing story "The Eye of Argon", which includes just such a jewel. To read aloud from it, carefully pronouncing all the typos, is an old fannish party game. I, myself, can seldom get past the phrase "her lithe, opaque nose".

The deluge has arrived and Ardala and I are negotiating her banana ensemble. For the record, a giant golf umbrella, a leash, house-keys and a full poop bag are incompatible with a narrow walkway and stairwell. Maybe we'll try the compact umbrella tomorrow.

Unrelated, but a mere 7 months after being confirmed I find myself on the Vestry, possibly heading up the music committee. Wish me luck!

Congratulations, nerdycellist! My dad's just finishing up his second term (and is therefore ineligible for the next little bit). It ate his life, but in a good way. You'll do brilliantly, I know! And a musician heading up the music committee? Radical, but it just might work.

Re the particle about our coming rain in California: I'm a little dubious when the fellow, expert as he is, says he thinks it looks like more activity in the next 2-3 weeks "than any 2-3 week period in recent memory": how recent is recent? Because I'm thinking 1995, it rained and rained and rained -- and 1982 -- it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained.

Well, I guess it's not a drought year after all, anyways.

414
I remember the spring of 1969, when someone wrote the newspaper at UCSB wanting to know the length of a cubit (they got five different cubits, followed by 'Have fun with your ark'). It rained something like 20 inches in six weeks.
And 1998 and 2005 weren't exactly fun, either. (LA Civic Center got 36 inches in the rainy season of 2004-2005. Second wettest year on record, in a city where the records go back to the 1880s.)

nerdycellist @ 412... Best of luck!

P.J. Evans, #414: Houston got 36" of rain in 4 days during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Even for us, that's a lot; now I measure rain by what parts of the freeway system have flooded. We have not had another I-10 Regatta since Allison.

Lee, the median annual rainfall for LA is 12 inches. The mean is something like 14. There have been times when we got half of that 14 inches in one day. (Really.)
The storm drain system has trouble handling that kind of load, and the LA River ends up wild enough to scare a white-water kayaker (besides flowing at 35mph).

Lee @ 417 -

I do remember Allison. One of those storms where you look out at the frickin' 12th hour of nonstop rain, and think, oh hell, it's just going to rain for the rest of my damned life, and it keeps on coming down.

I'm loving the weird jargon in that El Niño warning. "Tremendous dynamic lift", "persistent kink", and "a strong Pineapple-type connection". I'm guessing that last refers to this.

Went to the store tonight -- stocked up on basics: bread, rice, milk, dog and cat food, toilet paper, and so on. We haven't had a really monster El Nino storm in a while.

Cally@411:

Thanks for the enlightenment. I've heard of the Eye many times, but I've never managed to listen to it.

I lived in the Peninsula south of SF in the El Nino winter of 97 / 98. The area got whacked with storm after storm, with lots of flooding in the hills. Emergency broadcast warnings were common. The winds were awesome; if I wanted to air out my hillside apartment I just opened up windows on either side and let the wind blast through. It also whipped around the eucalyptus trees outside my balcony. Lovely to watch. Glad the place was built on bedrock.

One of the odd, delayed side-effects: Lots of rain meant lots of vegetation meant lots of deer and lots of coyotes.

Stefan, they were renewing the inside of the railroad tunnel under the Santa Susana pass that winter, and between that and the rain, the commuting was interesting. (It's a 7000-foot tunnel, single track, and they had to push the new rails into it. Took nearly three weeks to get all the work done.)

I suspect that our mild, springlike January (lows in the high 40's, not all that wet) in the PNW is somehow the reaction to the cold in the UK an the rest of the US.

Avram@420: Right you are.

Lee@417: Having driven a number of those freeways in the last six months, all I can say is -- wow. (And I hope it'll be a long time before I have to deal with things like that!)

Lee @407 -- I have one in black, and scored serious nerd points when I wore it to the opening of the most recent Star Trek film.

#373 Kevin

A friend of mine, at Arisia described Brown in terms that "lying sleaze" was less negative than--without using any individual words which the FCC individually objects to.

And his ads are smarmy slime, and he himself, got print time as supposedly good-looking in the buff in Cosmopolitan (he's not what I consider good-looking, I consider his looks with his demeanor, a cross between smirking ex-President and Mitt Romney the lying two-faced hypocritical flatfish that flipped over with time and lives on the bottom....)

And he has the temerity to use attack ads using his daughter(s) with "how day anyone attack My Daddy!" -- not quite as bad as those two blonde twins who spout White Supremacist lyrics who perform as part of their family's family values of white supremacist etc., howsomever....

Talk about surface appearance sleaze and dishonorable tactics, especially with the ads from the Swift Boat types and the stinking Chamber of Commerce lying weasel ads, etc....

Brown's campaign is poisonous, at the same trying to claim high moral ground... and using his literal height, to intimidate directly and indirectly.

Weird compressed version of The Quote, from a 1913 travelogue that describes "a Chaldean inscription in black granite assigned to 3800 BC" in the "Imperial Museum" of Constantinople: "the world is very evil and even children write books!"

@eric, 425: it's not cold down the coast in California, not relatively anyway. And it hasn't been wet until now.

There was some concern about another dry year, actually, at least locally, where we get all our water locally (not from the Sierras like some people I could mention).

@Stefan, 423: What we worry about with sustained heavy rainfall is erosion (from the water coming to hard and fast to be taken up by plant roots or to percolate down to the water table) and fire (from all that greenery) followed by more erosion (from the fire burning up all that greenery so it can't hold the dirt).

An open thread request for pointers:

later this month I'll be traveling to Alpine country (and countries containing said biome).

What are good brands of shoes (or where would one look for shoes) that are 1. warm, 2. good for lots of walking (including big museums) and 3. don't look like hiking boots (are not completely informal). Note: in any truly icy or snow situations, I'll have Yaktrax along, so the shoes themselves don't have to have all-weather tread.

In warmer climes I'd wear black sneakers and be happy, but those aren't at all warm and waterproof. Rainboots and various types of apres-ski boots are warm and weatherproof, but not at all good for all-day walking. Are there brands that specialize in boots with lots of foot support inside?

I just found what may be one of the shortest 419s in my spam folder ever: "I am [..]. A dying woman who had decided to donate the sum of $10,500,000.00 to you for charity works. Please contact my lawyer through this email: [..]. His name is Mr.[..]. Sincerely, [..]"

That is all. What is the world coming to when even scammers don't take their craft seriously anymore?

(Then again, perhaps the point was simply to frame the email address?)

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 431 ...
I've had good luck with Merrills of varying sorts, including wearing a pair of their mocs through all of a snowy, slushy Ontario winter.

eric @ 425: You may be on to something; it could be a knock-on effect of the polar displacement reviewed in last week's Arctic Britain sidelight.

@434/425 (weird weather)

Q: was early 2005 a particularly cold/stormy season in the UK?

I ask because that was my last winter and spring in Oregon (I moved to Maine in May of that year) and I distinctly remember it being one of the winters when all the storm systems tracked south toward the California coast leaving the PNW with what we all called "California Winter" - clear, warm and beautiful. It was uncanny - and inconvenient because I'd pre-packed all my spring clothes ahead of the move, not anticipating it would quit raining before I left.

My favorite weather blogger (the only one I follow regularly), Jeff Masters who cofounded the "Weather Underground" weather site, notes that there was less drought than usual in the U.S. in 2009. He hasn't checked in on the California predictions here yet; his next post will be tomorrow, from the American Meteorological Society meeting.

On the mild PNW connected to cold in much of the rest of the country, I wonder if that connects to the Arctic Dipole, a pattern of pressure differences between Siberia and Canada that has developed in the last few years, with new wind patterns over the Arctic.

Brenda, Cally:

You may be interested to know that it is now possible to view, online in the comfort and safety of your own home (if "safety" is an appropriate word to attach to any exposure to this text), a facsimile of the original printing of "The Eye of Argon". Thrill at being able to see the very typos of which legend speaks in hushed voices! Not to mention... the illustrations!

Dave Langford's Eye of Argon page has the link.

Avram @ 420: That's funny, your link doesn't mention 1986, which is the closest that Sacramento has ever come to a major levee breach.

What happened is there was a Pineapple Express in mid-February, which filled up Folsom Lake. By itself, that would have been fine, but the earthen diversion dam for the Auburn Dam (which has since been shelved due to pressure-induced earthquake scenarios) decided to melt away and put all that water in the system as well.

The American River levees are designed to withstand 115,000 cubic feet per second. In February of 1986, they were sending 130,000 cfs downstream and praying.

Another indication of how bad this was is the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers. A strong flow from the American (the smaller river) can make the Sacramento run backwards above the juncture for a short period of time, usually measured in minutes.

In 1986, it ran backwards for days.

I was in third grade at the time, and I learned a lot of things, such as how "water right-of-way" can mean your drains are clear but still won't empty, and why you should never buy a house with a street drain in front in a semi-arid climate. And why it's important to look at FEMA flood maps before you buy.

Never underestimate the dangers of flooding. Just look up "Big Thompson Canyon flood" sometime.

Julie: I love what you're digging up on the quote. I'd like to see it shared, especially if you can get back to the actual Case Zero for it. It feels like you've got the makings of a book there, or at least a really interesting magazine article somewhere.

Cally@411 - Canada's entry into the all-time worst writer stakes is the Cheese Poet.

(Inspired by the comparison to my home town hero McGonagall on one of the linked pages.)

Cally @ 411 re: "lithe, opaque nose" -- There's yer problem right there; the phrase isn't supposed to have a comma.

Ho -- somewhere in my file cabinets I have my very own copy of The Eye of Argon. I have, back in the day, participated the Ritual Reading. Very fine silliness. Good times.

Re: rain in California. Yes. It is raining in the Bay Area: steady, comparatively warm rain. It's not windy at the moment. Lots of blocked drains already in my neighborhood. The house smells of wet dog, and the cat, after some time staring balefully out the window, is asleep. Oh, and my umbrella is sporting a hole and a broken rib. Time to go buy either a new umbrella -- I hate umbrellas -- or a slicker with a hood.

Julie L in #429:

That's two accounts that pin the inscription to the Imperial Museum in Constantinople.

Seems likely that the artifact was on display, dated 3800 B.C., and carrying a translation about degenerate times and disobedient children. G.T.W. Patrick visited the museum, presumably on the occasion he also visited his sister's school, and saw it for himself. The author of the 1913 travel book is familiar with it as well.

Here's an 1899 book review summarizing circa-3800-B.C. inscriptions stored in the Imperial Museum, though it has no mention of "our" inscription. The 3800 date comes from similarities between some of these inscriptions and others written during the reign of Sargon I of Akkad.

I continue to be puzzled about the reference to writing books. Surely nothing like a book had been invented yet, and literacy cannot have been widespread, so what was the translator thinking?

General question of advice from the ML brain trust: I have a daughter; she's 15. Her life goal - still - is to be an astronaut. She's taking flying lessons, and a friend of ours gave us some pointers in getting commercial rating in pace with birthdays, etc.

Also, she's utterly brilliant, academically.

But her plan at this point is to join the Air Force - they have the best planes. Also college money.

You probably know my politics, and you should also know that I'm best described as a Quaker atheist at this point in my life. I have a natural problem with an organization whose actual stated goal is to kill people by spending lots of money. (But, of course, I have the natural geek's love of an organization whose money is spent on really cool gadgets, so I'm torn.) Also, I read stories about widespread rape in the American military, and naturally this does not fill me with confidence.

On the other hand, she is an incredibly stable, focused person - where I entirely trust that my son will find out about the dangers of college the hard way, I know she won't; trouble will have to seek her out.

Some of the folks here have done military service. How worried should I be? Also, in terms of eventually getting hired to drive spacecraft, would the Air Force be any more advantageous than an aggressive pursuit of commercial flying experience? Especially given that she's female? (I don't know how relevant that is now.)

Michael Roberts, the path to astronaut used to be military test pilot in the Mercury program, and the Apollo program was still heavily military, I think. Scientists are weighted pretty equally in today's space program, so maybe she should keep flying but get advanced degrees in life sciences (if she leans toward them at all).

Possible gold mine: a book from 1908 with a fairly detailed (but not nec'ly exhaustive) description of the displays at the Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Constantinople. The pertinent section seems to start ~p132, though I don't see any specific references to The Quote.

Michael Roberts:

NASA info on astronaut selection

Bottom line, as I read it: military pilot experience seems necessary if she wants to be a pilot candidate; flight experience helpful if she wants to be a mission specialist, but it could be private experience - and for mission specialist, she should pick the science/engineering field she likes best and excel in it.

Best of luck to her.

How important is NASA going to be, though, I wonder? Note also she's got dual citizenship, so ESA is an option for her.

Cry for help from the Fluorosphere: Anybody out there have a spare invite to Google Wave they'd care to pass my way, pretty please?

Oh, and there's that slow drip from the kitchen HVAC vent. Guess I'll move the trash bin.

Infirm neighbor update: She has refused to talk to us since Thurs morning when I stopped by to check on her. She had a visitor today, and shortly thereafter a parade of people tromped up the stairs, unfolded some sort of bed/carrier and took her down. There were no sirens, but I did hear her voice, which did not sound overly distressed. I did not poke my head out the door because she's already cranky with me anyway.

Paula @428: Oh, I'm completely in agreement with you that Brown is a lying sack of shit. I just wanted to point out that Mr. Salvatore's piece didn't really address the complaints I've heard about Coakley's campaign.

I'll be voting for Coakley tomorrow if I have to shovel my way from home to the VFW to do it. The Republicans should have to run someone even a little more progressive than Generic Neoconservative Clone #592 to win in Massachusetts, and Brown is every bit Clone #592.

Michael @444,

One of my colleagues is a former astronaut-- I'll ask their take on it next time they're in the office.

An institution which now plays an interesting role in the world of space is International Space University, which has an annual nine-week summer program (which moves each year: last year's was hosted by NASA Ames in California) and masters and MBA programs in France.

#446--

Julie L., you are doing amazing work on this.

none of the discoveries so far, to my mind, makes it any more plausible that there really is or ever was a tablet (or papyrus) from 2800 b.c. that complained about everyone wanting to write books, or children writing books, or even bookies making books.

but it will be fun to trace the urban-legend to its source. and then maybe it can be added to the snopes data-base, so that outfits like smithsonian will not embarrass themselves in the future?

On the tablet from 2800BC: it might have used a term that could be translated as 'book' for some purposes. (Especially if you were translating into something like modern English, where 'tablet' and 'scroll' don't mean what they used to.)

Jacque #449: Cry for help from the Fluorosphere: Anybody out there have a spare invite to Google Wave they'd care to pass my way, pretty please?

Sent. I have 24 invites left now, by the way.

As long as people are asking for assistance from the ML brain trust:

I'm working on settling the estate of our friend Anne Braude who passed away last year. No will, so her nearest relatives are the legal heirs. I found contact info for an aunt and an uncle on her father's side, and have been working with them (they were agreeable to my being the Personal Representative for the estate).

But I also need to make at least a good-faith effort to find if there are surviving relatives on Anne's mother's side of the family, as well.

I tried sticking a toe into ancestry.com, but my search-fu there (I'm a very slow adapter/learner with new software) only went so far as to lead to the name of Anne's maternal grandfather, rather than to aunts or uncles or cousins that might still be alive.

Any advice here? There are funds available in the estate to pay for a professional search, but what's the best way to go about that without paying too much?

Thanks in advance.

Sudden thought: we have been looking at the history of The Quote in English literature.

Has it been translated into other languages as well? Does it have enduring popularity in non-English versions? Does its history go back further?

Michael Roberts #444:
Wanting to be an astronaut when you grow up.

That's like saying you want to be a star athlete. Numberswise, not everybody can. So you need a plan B. Even if you become one, you still need a plan B, because you can only be one while you are young, so you need a next thing to be later on.

And there are hundreds of professional athletes, but perhaps only ten astronauts at a time, to hazard a guess within an order of magnitude or so.

Bill, and Earl: Thank you thank you thank you!! (Wave wave! Get it?)

Not-so-sudden thought: As I have written in these environs before, I have a favorite book book about quotation-chasing.

[Robert K. Merton] wrote one of the most peculiar and wonderful books I ever read, On the Shoulders of Giants. It's a highly-digressive romp through space, time, and literature, questing for the source of Newton's aphorism.

OTSOG's page at Google Books.

Michael @ 444: Also, particularly if help with her college expenses would be useful, check with your Congresscritter's local district office (and those of both your state's U.S. Senators) for information on service academy appointment criteria and application processes. Each Senator and Member of Congress can nominate a very limited number of candidates each year, for each of four academies (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Merchant Marine). Of these, the Air Force and Navy probably offer the best career path opportunities for aerospace careers.

This approach also has the benefits (provided she qualifies) of providing a completely free college education in a technical field, guaranteed employment (at least in principle) thereafter, and, very commonly, the opportunity to acquire employer-paid graduate degrees in exactly the kinds of fields likely to be of interest to astronaut selection boards.

Bruce, have you asked that aunt and uncle who they know who might be a relative, or know of any others? That's the basic first step; Ancestry only helps once you have some names. (Speaking here as someone who does dig through it - and although the city directories and newspaper images are nice to have, the indexing of them is still crap. And my sister-in-law has at least one interesting ancestor: Russian Jew, writer, patent-medicine manufacturer, and winemaker.)

California El Nino particle: awkward the article has no date, and source not clearly marked on it.

Should I worry about people I know who have houseboats in Sausalito?

Or am I being someone who heard Chicken Little say the sky is falling?

There are astronauts who went to MIT and other schools who were in Air Force ROTC....

Even becoming a test pilot is no guarantee, I remember one fellow who was one, he had been a B-52 pilot (a plane which I never heard anyone say was high up on their choice of what they would fly if they had a choice....) and said, "I want to be an SR-71 pilot (they got astronaut wings....). How can I do that?" "Get into test pilot school and become a test pilot." So he got himself through that hoop to jump through, became a test pilot, but wound up continuing to fly "heavy" aircraft, and despite being a test pilot, didn't get to fly the SR-71, and didn't get to be an astronaut, which he also applied for....

There -is- another way to become an astronaut, or rather, a space tourist--the first space tourist was a space scientist who figured out "I am highly unlikely to get into space by being a scientist, there is way too much competition... however if I become a rich rich financier, I can BUY my way onto the space station, given the Russian economy's desperate search for income and revenue!" And so in return for him giving the Russian government $20 million, he got to be a space tourist....

Hmm, another possibility, get a job with one of the commercial companies that is going into the space tourism for profit business, or into the X Prize in space competitions....

Michael Roberts #444:

I forwarded the question to a friend who has worked for NASA and been through many of the pre-astronaut hoops. His answer echoed some of the previous comments:

The hardest question about becoming an astronaut, is trying to figure out where NASA is going to be in 15-20 years, which is what would matter to her.

NASA started out only taking only test pilots, so you had to be military at some point (Neil Armstrong was actually a civilian when he was accepted, but had been a military test pilot).
But now NASA accepts two kinds of astronauts, Pilot astronauts and Mission Specialist astronauts. The pilots are trained to fly the space shuttle and are all military test pilots. The MSs are scientists and engineers.

Personally I wasn't willing to agree to kill anyone I was told, so I never was going to join the military.

But, that is currently the only way to pilot or command a space shuttle. However note that the Space Shuttle is unlikely to be flying beyond another year or two, so the question is who is going to fly the next vehicle. But given the politics in the astronaut office it is very likely that the commanders and pilots will be military pilots. For a while MIT produced the 2nd largest number of alum astronauts after the Air Force Academy. In some cases there is also a lot of overlap (ie Buzz Aldrin was a military pilot, got his PhD in the MIT aero/astro dept and then became an astronaut).

On the other hand, I think that it is probably more likely a way to get into the astronaut program as a civilian with a relevant PhD. Then, on top of that, having a bunch of flying experience is then very helpful. I think that being a flight instructor was probably a big benefit to me in terms of how far I got.

So, my advice, to someone who really wants to become an astronaut would be to be very good at what you do, and to do something that you like so you can stick with it to the point of getting a PhD. Then, also, do a bunch of flying. Get a number of ratings so that you can standout that way. Many of the MS astronauts do fly some, before being accepted, but not that many have flown a lot.

To Michael Roberts @444, in re Air Force careers ...

Something else to keep an eye on is that, in the last 10-20 years, extremely evangelical, unseparate-church-and-state 'Christians' have taken over the Air Force academy and quite a few of the high-brass jobs further up the chain of command from there. When The Passion of the Christ came out, there was a flyer advertising it affixed beside each place-setting in the mess hall FOR WEEKS.

Your daughter may be aggressively evangelized at by classmates, superiors, teachers, and she may not be able to effectively get the power tructure of the school to stand up for her. If she's thick-skinned enough to not mind, fine, but it's still something to keep in mind.

One documentary that touches on this issue (and is very well-made) is Constantine's Sword, but there's a lot more info out there about this. It blew up in the early 2000s with a Jewish alum and father-of-students suing them, but so far as I know no serious changes to policy have been made, and Saddleback is still sending shuttle busses to the Academy three times a week to take cadets to services.

Elliott Mason @ #466, Tolerance is improving at the AFA, at least a little. When Mikey Weinstein agrees, you know there's been some effort toward climate improvement there.

One of the Academy's most vocal critics is Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), but even Weinstein seems impressed. "This is the first time we feel positive about things there," he said. Weinstein gives Gould props for the change in atmosphere.

Erik @ 455 - yes, of course. Her academic favorite is chemistry; she's doing AP Chem right now in 10th grade (also AP Calculus). And she's 15, so nothing is set in stone. I just specifically want to know whether I should be trying harder to dissuade her now, at an early stage, from joining the Air Force - or perhaps preparing her now, at an early stage, to defend herself if that's truly the best way to reach her goal.

And to be honest, 15 to 20 years out, you have to think that the game will have changed. NASA won't be the bottleneck, surely. (Sigh. And I'll have a flying car, too.)

Elliot @ 466 - that had already occurred to me. We live in Indiana at the moment (I'm from here) and she's already boggling at some of what she hears from schoolmates. But that sort of stuff has always been entertainment for her, not something that gets on her nerves. So that doesn't worry me, as long as there's no systematic harassment. From what I read, there may be some problems with isolated people in the system, but the system as a whole is a pretty well-tuned machine.

Leroy @461 - thanks! I'll certainly keep that in mind if she does stick with this plan. It's going to be another two and a half years before she even goes to college, let alone make a firm decision on ROTC or a service academy. Personally I'd much rather see her doing her undergrad at Purdue, followed by graduate work at MIT.

Thus David @465 - thanks particularly for that. I'm going to start talking more specifically about mission specialist training, and I'm going to make sure she stays on track for commercial pilot's ratings by the time she's 18. I figure commercial flying will be an excellent college job anyway - more lucrative than waiting tables, I should hope.

Re: California's El Nino event.

I took this video out my garage this afternoon. (Garage being located in Oceanside, CA, near the El Camino Real/78 interchange).

We've had worse storms here. One some years back caused a flood down the street bad enough that the water was several inches deep in the middle of the road, and the car that was parked where that minivan (in the video) is was fanning water 4 meters into the air.

That said, current forecasts suggest this storm is only just getting started. Floods like this will get worse the more saturated the ground becomes.

469
The next block down on my street gets like that after a half-inch of rain (inadequate storm drain system). Six inches deep at the curb and six feet wide is not good for travel. (There are places in the other direction that are worse.)

Michael Roberts, #444, buy her a shuttle!

Whoa, Marilee, that would go so well with my house!

Michael Roberts: I tend to be very much in favor of the Air Force as my dad was in it for pretty much his entire career (active duty until around the time I was born and then Reserves + "civilian contractor" for the rest, but he still got saluted.) His job was "Program Management Consultant," something I didn't understand for a long time, but he basically made sure that planes got fixed by pulling all the disparate groups together.

He also went to the Pentagon once a year, which I finally found out was to explain finances. He was the guy for two reasons: 1) He could make the explanation clear to people with a lot of different backgrounds and 2) He wasn't afraid to tell his superiors when they were being stupid.

On that second point, it can be a very valuable trait in the military in certain sectors, especially those that have to do with hard numbers such as engineering and finance. You have to choose your battles (the military has idiot managers just as many businesses do), but you pick the right person and it's a good thing.

As far as the military anti-female culture goes, the more technical branches often have less of a problem, especially the more technical you get. Doesn't mean you can't get a bad sector, but geeks are geeks the world over.

At any rate, if she wants to be an astronaut, in 10-15 years the answer might not be NASA. Piloting experience is likely to be important again as private space development matures. Though it's always possible her goals might change— my brother wanted to be an astronaut, then he ended up with a family and being an astronaut didn't seem as important. So he's just a rocket scientist. :D

She wants to fly, in space. But yes, she's 15. Goals change. On the other hand, she's always been a strange child. Very self-assured and, in a quiet way, implacable. It's going to be interesting seeing what she'll do now that she's becoming an adult.

I'm really and truly just trying to gauge the appropriate amount of worry on my part, and this discussion has helped immensely. At this point, no matter what her ultimate path will be, her main focus will be keeping her grades good (it's hard to improve on her current 108% in AP Chemistry, but she says she'll try) and continuing to fly.

I'm trying to be a responsible parent, you see, by imagining futures further in advance than our usual three-week horizon.

PJ Evans #462:
"Bruce, have you asked that aunt and uncle who they know who might be a relative, or know of any others? That's the basic first step; Ancestry only helps once you have some names."

Asked the aunt and uncle, no information from that side of the family. So all the information I have to go on is Anne's mother's maiden name, and date and place of birth.

Paul A. @437

Thank you! I've now had a chance to feast my eyes on the fabled illustrations! (Actually, they aren't nearly as bad as I'd imagined. Funny, that.)

Joel @441

That's what I get for quoting from memory!

Remember the best explanation of Sony engineering ever written?

Turns out it's already a household name in Japan.

Julie L. @ #429:
Weird compressed version of The Quote, from a 1913 travelogue that describes "a Chaldean inscription in black granite assigned to 3800 BC" in the "Imperial Museum" of Constantinople: "the world is very evil and even children write books!"

This might be your most interesting discovery yet, because the odd transformation suggests to me what you'd get if the traveler - clergyman wandering the Middle East and writing up columns for a magazine from memory and his casual notes - had paused in the museum, jotted down something like "world v. evil, children dis, all write books", confident that he would remember the whole thing, and then tried to reconstruct it from those notes a month later.

It suggests to me there really might have been an Ur-Quote at the museum. We now have two apparent references to forms of the quote appearing there, and other independent references to it containing plaques and tablets dated specifically 3800 BC.

*timid meep of embarrassment at being praised*

...the 1913 travelogue's description of The Quote as "an inscription in black granite" (@429), cross-referenced against the 1908 museum walkthrough (@446), strongly suggests a connection with this stone carving of Naram-Sin-- the material is variously described in places as "black granite", "basalt", or "diorite"; the artifact is variously described as a "bas-relief" and/or "stele" (the Naram-Sin stele in the Louvre is a completely different object). The only other Naram-Sin-related artifacts mentioned in the museum walkthrough are "moulds for [mass-producing clay] tablets".

The linked Hilprecht reference mentions on p88 that when the Constantinople stele was first discovered in 1892, an initial report was published in the French journal Recueil de Travaux Relatifs a la Philologie et a l'Archeologie Egyptiennes at Assyriennes, Vol XV pp 62ff, in which "various characters were not recognized at all, or were incorrectly read". Hilprecht follows up by saying that he had now published his own evaluations of the relief/inscription in The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania (Vol I, Part 2). Annoyingly, neither translation is actually reproduced in this particular article.

Hilprecht was eventually embroiled in a surprisingly public brouhaha about possible ethical shortfalls in his archeological work and resigned from the University of Pennsylvania, so it's possible that his translation (whatever it is) can't be trusted either. There seems to be an entire book about the development of Assyriological studies in the US to provide social context-- no obvious invocation of The Quote in there, though.

Julie @480

When I put "The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania" into Worldcat.org, I come up with a number of hits. The first one looks very promising. Unfortunately, none of the libraries listed as holding it in my area are particularly easy for me to get to (and I know from experience that a couple of them need special ID). Perhaps an intrepid Flourospherian can track down a copy at some university library near them?

Julie, look at the preceding page of the book you just cited for an interesting possibility as to where the "everyone wants to write a book" meme might have come from. Quoting a Sumerian inscription found on one tablet by a Turkish expedition to Abu-Habba or Sippara:

That is, "Whosoever has distinguished himself at the place of tablet-writing [that is, at the school or university of the Bablylonians] shall [literally "may"] shine as the light.

Another fruitful avenue to pursue might be contacting the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago: John P. Peters at the University of Chicago was the original head of the 1887-1888 American expedition which Hilprecht joined and was writing about in the earlier part of the article linked above. The Oriental Institute still has a massive collection of artifacts from that expedition and others; they might well have some information on The Quote.

Marilee @471 (on the availability of retired space shuttles for purchase)

Thread crossing. Is this the 21st century equivalent of a retired caboose? At millions of dollars per, I don't suppose anyone is buying a few to turn into a hotel. Perhaps they're only comfortable in zero-G.

Julie: Here's your Scheil translation of the Naram-Sin tablet, in raw OCR text:
http://www.archive.org/stream/recueildetravau05maspgoog/recueildetravau05maspgoog_djvu.txt
Search for "Naram-Sin" until you find the start of the translation.

My French is pretty crummy, but it appears to me that it says this tablet falls into the common format of "I, Naram-Sin, powerful king, beloved of Goddess X, favored of Goddess Y, have constructed a temple. Whoever breaks this tablet or destroys this statue..." That suggests that either this tablet isn't the one actually associated with the Ur-Quote, or if it is the one, that the quote may be something that somebody just made up and stuck in front of it.

While I'm at it, a National Geographic article by Isabel Dodd on Hittite ruins. She's a vivid writer; I wonder if she was a prankster.

OtterB writes in #484:

Thread crossing. Is this the 21st century equivalent of a retired caboose? At millions of dollars per, I don't suppose anyone is buying a few to turn into a hotel. Perhaps they're only comfortable in zero-G.

There's precedent. A structural-test prototype of the Soviet Buran shuttle (remember the Soviet Buran shuttle? it only flew once, unoccupied at that) wound up at Gorky amusement park. It has suffered badly from weather, but in the past year it's been under restoration.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin Dells, a spare Mir space station module was purchased for Tommy Bartlett's Robot World, a world-of-tomorrow tourist trap appendage to Tommy Bartlett's Water Show (Ride the Ducks!).

I was once given a fascinating postmodern analysis of Tommy Bartlett's Robot World, a popular-culture master's thesis, which tried to make sense of the jumbled juxtaposition of scientific and entertainment exhibits having the form, but not the spirit, of a science museum. I don't think it's online.

Paula #464:

Something about that story (the scientist who went into finance to make enough money to get to space) represents one of the things wrong with our society, somehow....

Cally @ 481, I haven't gotten involved in this discussion yet but my library has two volumes of that report. I'll pull them off the shelf and give them a skim when I get a chance.

albatross @ 487 - now that you mention it...

#486 Bill
Just think what could have been if the US Government had -sold- the surplused Saturn V rockets to Disney etc....More money in the federal government, space movies, and ???

#466 Elliott
The Evangelists and the Republican faith-partisan Initiative are highly correlated. The White House 2001-2008 had an open door for the likes of Dobbs to be an "advisor" on all sorts of things, including, I expect/suspect, influence on Executive Branch picks for promotion and assignments for various positions in the military... there were those religious partisan events in the Pentagon that were invasive of non-consenting personnel, for anther example.

With a change of administration, the top of the Executive Branch no longer is championing and partnering with aggressive sectarian proselytizing persons and organizations and causes. That is, the likes of James Dobbs don't have the influence and control they had in 2001-2008 anymore. The results include a drop in the abuses he and his buddies promote and have perpetrate inside the US Government, including the militry.

The appartchiks and judge appointe 2001-2008 and a large (majority?) appointed under the Republican majority Congress before 2001, however, I regard until proven otherwise as suspect and corrupt in terms of having neocon/proselytizer/misogynistic goals as their values and have the attitude "the Constitution is just a piece of paper" (quote attributed to the person who infested the White Houe 2001-2008), and dismiss it and the Bill of Rights, particularly the ban on state religion....

Open-threadiness: I wonder how many news stories have been released or allowed to come out in the last few days, specifically to hide in the shadow of the Haitian earthquake.

I don't see how the timing could be related to the Haitian earthquake, but this story on the alleged suicides of three US prisoners at Guantánamo should be getting more play than it is getting. (But maybe nobody cares that much--that story has always smelled wrong, and I guess it's not that politically damaging to be guilty of torturing and murdering prisoners and committing other war crimes. Not like getting a blowjob from an intern, or being gay, or something serious.)

Maybe this story fits the pattern better. But again, does anyone really care? I mean, spying on Americans without any warrant or oversight is kinda bad, like speeding or jaywalking. But it's not really important, like talking about Obama's "negro dialect" or something. Let's keep this in persective, after all.

I think the Iranian scientist was blown up before the earthquake--I can't imagine how you'd have coordinated such a bombing on the same day as a big news-eating disaster, anyway.

Is there some example of bad news being dumped right after this disaster?

More generally, has anyone studied the correlation between politically embarrassing news stories and other big news stories? (I've never been clear on whether releasing your embarrassing news right after some big disaster would work out--won't more people be watching CNN to see about the earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince and also see your scandal story?)

Wow, Julie L's been doing some great Quote-research over the long weekend!

Based on the various sources that have emerged, I suspect that the Quote does trace back to the museum in Constantinople somehow, though I'm dubious there is actually an ancient inscription that's as described, especially given the reported variations in origin and date.

GTW Patrick may have reported seeing "the inscription" in 1913, but it's not clear to me that he could read it himself, as opposed to having it "translated" for him by someone or something else. Isabel Dodd was around by then (actually, was around back to before 1908, which if I'm reading the thread correctly still remains the earliest confirmed sighting of The Quote, in somewhat different form). So perhaps it's possible she was involved somehow.

I've been on more than one campus tour where the tour guide told stories about the campus (sometimes even pointing things out) that turned out to be tall tales. I wonder if something similar was going on at the Constantinople museum.

Michael Roberts (#468)

Well, if you can find a willing auto-body shop, you could make your own flying car -- NASA will let you have a retired shuttle engine for just the cost of shipping and handling.

(Now *that's* what NASA should have done -- have the infomercial industry handle the disposal sale of th retired shuttles and artifacts...)

Michael Roberts, I hope your daughter and mine end up on a spaceship together. (Mine's 17 and wants to be a mission specialist on Mars--aiming for a dual major in geology and microbiology.)

Har, yes, perhaps I should have specified a "flying and stopping car".

Just to hijack this already-sufficiently-hijacked open thread, I note that the NYT is telling us today of Citigroup's very large loss in 2009. And I further note that part of that loss was 10 billion dollars "due to accounting associated with returning the bailout money". So, like, a penalty for early withdrawal or something.

So what I'm putting together there is that the management of Citigroup gladly incurred a 10 billion dollar loss for their company, just so they could get their bonuses that the government wanted to curtail.

Is that overly cynical?

albatross @ 491, speaking of cynical, I think you're on to something.

Michael @ 495: I'm still very uneasy about Citigroup. Their credit card division still seems to be in turmoil; not only did they have a default rate of over 10% last I checked, but they also got some attention a few months ago for imposing annoying terms on most of their *reliable* customers, including jacking rates sky-high for folks who'd always paid on time (and in many cases always in full), and in some cases adding new fees.