Palindromic open thread!

It's f'ing pink.

Able was I ere I bumped my elbow.

That parasol is not pink, it's *P*I*N*K*!

aibohphobia. n. a fear of palindromes

Coming soon, David Cronenberg's "Palindrones"...

A man, a plan, a canal -- Suez.

The forest echoes when the mahoe falls
tall is the tree and strong, deep is its root,
at end of day even the staunchest bawls.

Honest men speak against all that appalls,
their work is constant though most rare its fruit;
the forest echoes when the mahoe falls,

for just one instant fools delay their brawls
and bow their heads; honour may touch the brute.
At end of day even the staunchest bawls

at loss of friend. We make our little calls,
shed our few tears and learn it's absolute;
the forest echoes when the mahoe falls.

Whether in calmness of the lecture-halls
or broadcasting to folk on their commute
at end of day even the staunchest bawls

knowing the silence that finally hauls
his voice away, we cannot refute
the forest echoes when the mahoe falls
at end of day; even the staunchest bawls.

You are trapped in that bright moment when you first met Luscious.

"My colors are Blush and Bashful."

"Your colors are Pink and Pink."

Whenever I hear the word "palindrome" these days I think of a hideous colision between a Mad Max movie and the aftermath of President Sarah Palin ...

That designer needs to meet Cammie, the feisty personal color trainer.

Charlie Stross #11:

Does it involve camels?

Whenever I hear the word "palindrome" I reach for my devolver.

Ein Afrikaner mit Gazelle zagt im Regen nie.

Earl Cooley III @ 12:

Cammie doesn't bring much urgency to the tale of color matching: losing a tail isn't such a terrible thing when you can grow it back, so the motivation to save it isn't strong.

Villanelle. Fragano. Word.

Reposted from the "underground" thread:

The WikiLeaks cables rope in the Pope.

And for a unicorn chaser, just look at this picture.

(Fuller, but still-sweet explanations from Neil and Amanda.)

P.S.: The guy in the background of Neil's pic is not me, despite a striking resemblance.

@1-@19: Huh?

Brenda Kalt @20: It's an Open Thread, which means roughly "talk about anything you want to, in poetry if you are inclined." :->

Gray

Some have Christmas cloaked in festive white.
Some also have weather. We, instead,
have seasons-- "If you don't like it,
wait five weeks."

If we are lucky, trees have dropped their leaves
to cloak the ground, bare branches set
in lines against the gray
(that perpetual gray!) That's luck
for then you might not mistake the season
and have Christmas come upon you unawares.

Dry grass, wet ground, and tule fog
to cloak the creek, the vapors rising gray;
one does not walk in weather such as this
for there is nothing to see. The birds
are huddled away, the mud clings,
the fog chills.

And driving off to work, one stops to wonder
at the miles of starlings,
Swarms of thousands strong (invaders to our shores)
shimmering black against the gray,
appearing to end but continuing on,
migrating. No cardinals, no orioles,
not even vivid jays.
The birds have put on drab.

And I look through my photos once again,
searching for something that sings of Christmas,
but all is gray.

It is the season.

David Harmon @ 19... I guess I'll have to take your word for that, since there's no photo of you in "Making Light and Faces".

Pantone color #151 is somewhere between warm orange and peach, and rgb triplet 1, 5, 1 is dark bluish, so what does this video have to do with the number 151? 151 is not pink on either metric.

Amazon seems to be at it again:

Subject: Fw: Amazon Banning Books - Please Help!

From Author Selena Kitt.........

Amazon has begun banning erotica books.

The first line of fire seems to be incest titles. My books, Back to the Garden, Naughty Bits and Under Mr. Nolan's Bed have been removed from the Kindle store. (The print version of Back to the Garden, published through CreateSpace, an Amazon company, has also been removed).

Jess Scott and Esmerelda Green have also had books with an incest theme recently banned from the site. All of them, incidentally, high in the
rankings and in visibility.

Amazon has also removed these books from people's Kindle archives, without warning or explanation. If you have purchased any of these
titles through Amazon Kindle, please go demand a refund. You are entitled to one.

Also, if you can spread the word, that would be helpful. I am obviously fighting this, but the more public outcry the better.

You can post on Amazon's board about it here (as long as they don't delete the thread):

http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ttp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding\
=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx2QG9BWA19KO4O&displayType=tagsDe\
tail

You can also tweet it here: #amazoncensors

Utilize whatever you can - Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Your help is much appreciated!

Jeff's Bezos direct address (head of Amazon)

Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com, Inc.
1200 12th Ave, Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98122

Executive Customer Relations:
ecr@amazon.com

and all the members on the board of directors:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govmanage

-Selena Kitt

Serge: Sent you a pic. (finally...) Alas, it's face-on, so the resemblance isn't so obvious.

re 18: The problem being that the cable doesn't say that, though it took a lot of tedious reading to determine that. If you read the actual cable when you get to the end of it the writer is mostly positive about the Vatican response and the pope is only mentioned maybe three times, though there is a diplomatic pissing contest between the Vatican and the Irish government which is discussed early on (not especially clearly).

Fragano Ledgister @7: One of my three favorite Plaindromes. As explained in a long-ago issue (1980s?) of Games magazine, plaindromes are for people who love the tortured syntax of palindromes but can't be bothered to make the things read the same forward and backward. Other examples included:
Stella, Edna and Otis deified Satan.
Money-man I: an Adam? Not even a doom.
and of course:
Able was I ere I saw Hackensack.

Make that "one of my four favorite plaindromes." And don't capitalize the P. There you go.

There's a form of tourmaline called elbaite; the Smithsonian Natural History Museum has lots of samples. When Katie and I went there, I said, "Eti able was I ere I saw elbaite." She wasn't impressed.

Νιψον ανομηματα μη μοναν οψιν.

In other news, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is finally done on LibriVox! Download its chapters here: Dorian Gray.

David, #29: How's the Tam Lin recording coming along?

Erik Nelson @24:

Not a thing. There isn't, always; sometimes it's just a token to start things going.

Old Withy mocks the Windle-Daughter's pain
Of Orald by the Lidless Eye unmade.
A servant of the Enemy unslain?
Telumehtar Star-Sword calls for his blade.

He wears his destiny, a belt of stars;
Borgil, his cloak-clasp; Gurthang in his hand.
"The time has come for final, brutal wars,
The Enemy's defeat shall cleanse the land."

The time of Iarwain, of Ben-adar
Has passed in Arda, sadness in its wake.
The world has lost a song but gained a star;
His crown of autumn leaves no one shall take.

The Day of Doom is over now at last;
The Second Music echoes from the past.

Lee@30: There are two roles left unrecorded at the moment. One of them is Alys, a small role; I hope to get my sister to record it when I visit the Bay Area at Christmas. The other is cast, but the person who will be doing it has been busy lately. He's said he should be able to do it soon. With luck, it should be all done by sometime in January.

ms found in a bitbucket:

A man a plan a canoe pasta heros rajahs a coloratura maps snipe percale
macaroni a gag a banana bag a tan a tag a banana bag again or a camel a
crepe pins Spam a rut a Rolo cash a jar sore hats a peon a canal Panama!

David Harmon @ 26... Thanks! Your visage has now joined "Making Light and Faces. Let me know if you want the caption changed. I had also thought of making a reference to similarities to Analog's editor Stanley Schmidt.

Weird Al Yankovic wrote a song called "Bob", which is not only a style parody of Bob Dylan, but every line is a palindrome. The video parodies "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and does indeed have all the lines written out for your palindromic pleasure.*

You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg

*However, I don't think (Harmonica solo) is actually a palindrome.

Kip W. #28: Those are exceedingly witty.

When I woke this morning, fresh in my mind was a palindrome from the collection of palindromic poems by the Venezuelan poet Dario Lancini Oiradario. I no longer have my copy, after too many moves over the past three decades.

Son robos?
No. Solo son sobornos.

Singing Wren @ 36... I don't think (Harmonica solo) is actually a palindrome

She really is Han's kid sister?

If your run EasyDNS, you get Twitter-bombed by people mad at you for cutting off WikiLeaks, even though you had nothing to do with it, (that's EveryDNS, folks). So what do you do? You take over DNS service for WikiLeaks, of course.

Bach, Cantata BWV 151:"Süsser Trost, mein Jesus kömmt", for the 3rd day of Christmas.

World's Longest Palindrome Sentence?

"A man, a plan, a casa, a bait, a lag, a malt, ... "

C Wingate @40:

Your comment went into moderation because your URL was irretrievably malformed. I've released it, but I have no idea what you were linking to.

Please check links at preview.

(Note that the one you posted on the wrong thread also went into moderation, whence it will be sent to Comment Heaven to sup with the saints and sing with the angels.)

#43 abi

Sup with the saints and sing with the angels
I Sing the Spam Ecletic!
Bring out the paints and ring now the sleighbells
On hold is the spam kinetic!
In darkness the taints spread their poison in wells,
The results of such spam are emetic,
Distorted in faints by the myriad cells,
I Sing the Spam Eclectic!

frenetic.

Right, all together now, to the obvious tune...

Junk mailing, across the internet,
You might think it's dreadful but you ain't seen nothing yet.

...

It's spam, but not as we know it
It's spam, but not as we know it
It's spam, spam spam spam spam...
(insert chorus of Vikings from passing Monty Python skit here)

etc.

Not a Palindrome:

Sometimes it seems easier to write
Angry rants about lies and the folks
Who live them, rather than the sight
Of a beautiful woman, who provokes
Desire in the hardened heart, once lost
To anger and despair. Her presence evokes
New feelings of hope and renewal, crossed
With love, tempered with caution that stokes
The fire, the urgency, the rush to completion.
Our lives, in separate so long, brought together
In bright harmony, building on long abstention
Are re-aligning, through dance - and whether
This will remain true for years to come
I hold back nothing, to welcome her home.

The whole of Buffy season 3 episode "Homecoming" could have gone quite differently if only Giles had taught Buffy his skills in hot-wiring a car while under attack.

re 40/43: Hmmmm.... must have mistaken what the color-coding of links meant. Let's try that again....

EasyDNS gets Twitterbombed (wrongly) for doing DNS for WikiLeaks, retaliates by taking over DNS support for WikiLeaks

Ginger, that's lovely!

Ginger #46: Nice!!!

C Wingate #27:

One thing that highlights is how nice it is to have news reports link to their source documents. When the news article I read links to the underlying polling data or interview on Youtube or scientific paper, it's stunning to me how often there are huge and important things wrong with the article. (And I assume reporters who link to the source material are more careful than those who know nobody can check up on them.) I really hope linking to the source material, as well as linking to background information and related information becomes standard practice in journalism over the next few years.

Lee @30: That slob finally sent his lines in to David today. And there was much rejoicing, and now I can work on my card for this year.

The peak of the Geminid meteor shower is tonight, and a week from now, there's a total lunar eclipse, on the solstice no less.

Brightness falls from the air

Ginger @150/811: mouse nomenclature

Would that be nomenclature used for mice or by mice?

Not Hyperlocal, but relatively local:

Baltimore is a very very very cool city. And a beautiful one.

Our little trips there have been very short, but intense, and packed with experience and information gathering of all kinds, not just the sort that we get from the MD Historical Society (which museum is very worth visiting -- and the place itself, which is beautiful) and those ilks which we tend to haunt.

If I were 25 I think I'd head to Baltimore, no doubt.

Even at my age I'm real sure I could live there far more happily than most places, now that hispanic culture(s) entered the mix. The hispanics themselves who are responsible for this don't seem as happy about it as I am -- authentic old school Mexican food in restaurants owned by barely thirty year olds -- because, well, I asked. Speaking Spanish allows an older woman to ask what this woman considers very personal questions and thus hardly ever asks anyone (thus she has received a rep for being stand-offish).

They don't like it in Baltimore so much. Well, it's Baltimore. It's not home. But for their children Baltimore will be home.

And they were playing Puerto Rican Christmas music, which I know so well and love.

Yup. Baltimore and New Orleans are the places to be if you're young. (Except -- the 'white' music in B'more really really really sux.)

Love, C.

Ginger @150/858: I wish you all the sappiness your pancreas can tolerate. (Mope: just wish I had me some sappiness. Mope.)

Steve C. — thank you for mentioning that! My husband and I will be engaging in our annual tradition of staying up all night, and I'm very glad to know that the eclipse is something we should factor into the night's schedule.

Hyperlocal news...

After 25 years of matrimony, man's Significant Other finally notices that he has big feet.

Jacque @ 56... Rumor has it that both of them love the movie "HellBoy".

Stefan Jones @150/919: mint fudge

Heresy!

Ginger @ 46:

I see you've found your muse. Hang on to her; the rest of us really like getting regular poetry.

KFC's holiday special deal is called the Festive Feast.

It hurts, Mommy. Please make the hurt go away.

Xopher, if you get any free KFC coupons, I'd be happy to take them off your hands.

If anyone is curious about my sonnet @32, they can look up the odd words at The Encyclopedia of Arda.

Earl, I just saw it on TV. It's the name that hurts.

Xopher @ #65, if I were putting "Festive Feast" in a blog post I'd categorize it as "Department of Redundancies."

for Fragano's #8, with gratitude:

The Poet Upbraids his Froward Villanelle

“Is it a virtue to be so composed
that order makes no difference to sense?”
The villanelle’s reply is not disclosed.

“Though fear or heartbreak be the theme proposed,
your form’s composure never once relents.
Is it a virtue to be so composed?”

“Why dwell in formal exile self-imposed?
Only connect! It makes a difference!”
The villanelle’s reply is not disclosed.

“Close-reading hounds, confounded, pensive, nosed
in vain among your lines’ composite scents:
is it a virtue to be so composed?”

“Come, erstwhile verse, chaotically transposed:
resume that order that you had: go hence!”
The villanelle’s reply is not disclosed.

“Unbraid these tresses: is there sense enclosed
within your metrical experiments?”
Is it a virtue to be so composed
the villanelle’s reply is not disclosed?

Ginger, #46, Yay!

Well, Xopher @#62, the marketing monkeys at KFC were also the ones who came up with a BSG tie-in called the "Frack Pack". Somehow I don't think the brightest lights in the marketing firmament wind up working for KFC.

Tad @67: nice!

nerdycellist: the marketing monkeys at KFC were also the ones who came up with a BSG tie-in called the "Frack Pack". Somehow I don't think the brightest lights in the marketing firmament wind up working for KFC.

Got to be better than Taco Bell's old "Run for the Border" ads. They pulled them when it was pointed out that the mental images those surveyed came up with was getting the runs from bad Mexican food...

Jacque @ 54

Nomenclature used by mice is properly termed "Micenian."

HPN: Telco technician working on elsewhere street breaks phoneline & net connection. Normal service resumed after 24 hours.

Me #13:

Maybe it was camels whose names read the same way forwards & backwards. No, that would be palindromedary. No, wait...

Never mind.

#46 Ginger

The waning of the old year,
Awaiting for the new.
Triumphs and tribulations
Of this year almost through.
My hopes for you are of the best
Your new love to endure
For next and all the coming years
Much happiness in store!

I'm done with fudge making for the year. Pots and pans are clean and dried. Counter and tables scrubbed . . . they'd looked as though they'd been used for changing babies.

I might make cookies next weekend as a way of coming down off the high that comes from breathing chocolate chip vapors.

Stefan Jones @ 75: I'm only planning to make one batch of fudge this year. I'll use dark chocolate infused with hot peppers to give it zing!

Stefan 75:
Breathable Chocolate

I am typing with kittens on my hands, so please paardon my typos.

Jacque @ 54/56: It's how to name a mouse strain, which is of particular importance when dealing with strains that are very closely related, differing by only a gene or a single mutation in a gene. It's excrutiatingly boring minutiae and rules for applying them. How anyone could stay awake for two hours is beyond me..and my pancreas is fine, so far. It's the pancreases around us that I worry about. If there was some way to spread this affliction to you, I'd do it in a heartbeat -- this has been an incredible joy at the end of a year that started off with a devastating loss.

Constance @55: Bawlmer is a neat little city, and I appreciate it more as an adult than I ever did as a college student (Goucher). If you're interested in generating Light in Bawlmer, let me know and I'd be happy to join you, with or without my girlfriend.

Serge @ 59: Yes, and after we get through this phase, I plan to watch "Hellboy" with her -- as well as "Galaxy Quest" and many other fine movies. Right now, we keep running into technical problems that prevent us from successfully watching anything.

Bruce Cohen @ 61: I suspect my muse would like additional offerings as well. She told me to never again say that my old poetry was crap, although she still hasn't read my old stuff. I was never very good at writing sonnets, but I didn't have the right source of inspiration then.

Marilee @ 68: Thanks!

Paula Lieberman @ 74: That's lovely -- thank you!

Ginger @ 78... we keep running into technical problems that prevent us from successfully watching anything

Are those the same 'technical' problems that'd harm our pancreases?

Tad Brennan #67: Very nice!

Serge @ 79: Some are actual technical problems, like finding out too late that the DVD container does not actually have the disk within..and others are more "technical". Yes.

Ginger @ 81...

"Wait a minute... This is supposed to contain The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm not sure I really want to watch Hawk the Slayer again."

By the way, does she know that HellBoy showed up in one of last week's experiments by the MythBusters?

Great post at Joe Blogs about reading Harry Potter.

Hyperlocal news...

Man finds that non-human gophers are quite combative.

The human sort are far more amenable to negotiation.

Do They Know It's Christmas department--Climate Change (formerly known as Global Warming...) is hitting even more severely faster than the IPCC report of 2007 forecast as worst case scenario. The Reapers of course are denying away, assisted by a DROP in sealevel off Alaska--what seems to be happening there is a simple matter [pun unintended, but...] of Newtonian mechanics regarding gravitation attraction of mass for mass--Alaska is losing mass in the form of melting glaciers, and with less mass, attracting less mass of seawater, and so down goes the sealevel off Alaska. More southerly parts of North America, however, the sealevel is rising faster than predicted, particularly along the Gulf Coast, Florida, etc.

The Governor of Florida's rejected fund for rail service? Given than unless there's a drop in the C02 and other greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere back down to at or below what it was Dec 31 1899, most of Florida appears likely to be underwater by around 2040 at high tide unless dramatic measures get taken....

(I'm trying to find the lecture given at Wood's Hole and the animations of rising sealevel that I was viewing a few days ago. The studies being reported out with result the second half of this year, are grimmer than the 2007 predictions, and grimmer than the first half of 2010 predictions, which the Congressional Reapers and other pernicious climate change deniers detracted as alarmist and abusive etc.

My recommendation--don't invest in land in Florida, don't move to the Gulf Coast, and stay the hell away from coastal Texas.... Galveston should have negative taxpayer investment. Insurance companies, given a choice, don't provide coverage in most beachfront coastal areas anymore in the USA....

Ginger

I'd love to! We're thinking of spending Christmas there, as friends with house in B'more are going to be in Africa, and they offered. But things are kind of in flux at the moment due to having no car again. sigh.

However, if we can pull this off, could I meet the hands covered with kittens, please? :)

Love, C.

Constance @ 87: Excellent! I'm on call for the Christmas holiday, so I won't be going out of state -- B'more is close enough that I can spend time there. Let me know if I can be of assistance getting to B'more..you're just across the Bay Bridge from me, and that's a lovely drive.

Ah, typing while inundated with kittens was fun. Easier when they were asleep, but alas, they woke as I typed.

Serge @ 82: Thus one of the perils of sharing a house with a teen aged boy who also watches those movies. As for Hellboy and the Mythbusters, well -- she doesn't watch television (only Netflix and other streaming video). I believe Mythbusters are now showing up on Netflix, so I shall point her in that direction -- I think she'd enjoy them too.

Water rescue conducted in Central Ohio this past Sunday:

Adventurous Chihuahua bolts away from my Mom while she was filling the bird feeder and goes straight into the goldfish pond.

Honey was wearing a sweater, harness and leash, so Mom was able to pull her out of the water very quickly, and said "it felt like it took forever to get her back into the house."

I took Honey into the bathroom, pulled the harness and sweater off, wrapped her in a towel, cranked up the space heater, and got her warmed up. When she stopped shivering we used warm water to get the pond scum off of her.

Outdoor temperatures were in the 2Os, with snow falling -- the pond wasn't frozen as we'd had a balmy 45F high on Saturday.

Honey seems none the worse for the experience, but Mom says she's not going to take her eyes off the little dog when she takes her into the back yard!

Lori @ 90: Wow! And congratulations on your successful rescue! I hope poor Honey has learned her lesson.

Another non-palindrome:

I hold back nothing, open my heart
To a renewed life, rising to the height
Of passion. Though we spend hours apart,
They pass swiftly, bringing us again alight
As we embrace. What was once filled
With pain is now transformed to joy and
Redoubled. What was unfinished is now fulfilled
As she reaches, so we walk hand-in-hand
Along the street, mindful only of each other.
So engrossed, so focused, we forget above
All the diminishments from those who would rather
We hide, and fear, and dare not show our love.
Those days are passing, like grains of sand, we know,
So we walk, arm-in-arm, still aglow.

Ginger #91: Nice.

Open Threadery:

There is a new television advertisement I really like. It's about prepared dough for potato dumplings and features a modern woman eyeing the stuff with disgust, proclaiming that her granny would have taken fresh potatoes, peeled them, grated them etc. All the time you see the old-fashioned granny while nostalgic music plays - only the come to a screeching stop when the granny asks her granddaughter if she was out of her mind. If the ready-made dough had existed in her time, she would not have had to do all that hard work. So the modern woman puts it in her shopping cart.

No, I have never tasted the stuff myself, and it might by actually vile. But just to see an advertisment that mentions the "good old times" and does not ooze fake sweetish nostalgia is really refreshing.

Ginger @ 91. Very nice. And lovely that you're so happy (yes, your poetry is glowing).

I finally found something useful on Facebook. An intern apparently created a map based on statistical links between cities by "friendships" on the site.

Cool simply as a data visualization, it's shocking when you look at it. This kid accidentally created a perfect map of the digital divide. The difference between living in the "white" areas verses the "blank" areas is stunning. The U.S. Census Bureau would KILL to create data this meaningful.

Link to note and images, I'm not sure if a Facebook account is required

Jörg @93 - there's a TV ad sort of like that that's been running for some years now in the New Orleans area. A man is waxing nostalgic over his mama's red beans and rice, best pot of red beans and rice in town, she'd soak the beans overnight and cook them all day until they reached a consistency of perfect creaminess...

Cut to his mama smiling indulgently in the kitchen as she reaches into a cabinet and pulls out a can of Blue Runner brand red beans, pre-cooked, pre-seasoned, heat and serve.

(Lacking Blue Runner at my current location and not really preferring the locally available brands, I split the kitchen-hassle difference and throw beans, ham hock, seasonings, and veggies into a crock-pot. After 6 hours of forgetting about it, dinner is served.)

Fragano @ 92: High praise from the Vizier of Villanelles, the Sultan of Sonnets! I am honored.

dcb @ 94: Thanks! It's a lot of fun, all of a sudden.

Giner @ 97... The Maharajah of Meters?

Argh... 'Ginger', not 'Giner'...

OK, I have to say this, and I'd rather say it among friends (mostly), so I'm saying it here. But because I also don't want to be unpleasant (in phrasing, not content) to said friends, and also to avoid this page coming up in searches, I'm ROT13ing it. Decode at own risk.

V nz fvpx gb qrngu bs gur tbqfqnzaarq "avar-ryrira snzvyvrf."*

V flzcnguvmr jvgu gurz va gurve tevrs, V ernyyl qb. V ybfg fbzr (eryngviryl arj) sevraqf ba gung qnl zlfrys, naq zvtug unir orra gurer crefbanyyl unq pvephzfgnaprf orra irel fyvtugyl qvssrerag, nf lbh xabj Obo.

Ohg gurve tevrs qbrf abg ragvgyr gurz gb pbageby gur qrirybczrag bs ybjre Znaunggna, abj be rire, naq vg qbrf abg rkphfr gurz npgvat yvxr vqvbg ovtbgf. Fb jura V urne "avar-ryrira snzvyl zrzoref" fgvyy bowrpgvat gb gur "Tebhaq Mreb Zbfdhr," naq npgvat yvxr gurl unir fbzr xvaq bs evtug gb bowrpg&qnttre; gb vg (nf gurl qb urer), V trg znq. Yvxr guvf:

Nygubhtu gurl unira'g orra bhg qrzbafgengvat, bccbaragf bs gur cebwrpg unir orra frrguvat bire arjf gung Cnex51 unf nccyvrq sbe shaqvat sebz gur Ybjre Znaunggna Qrirybczrag Pbecbengvba, juvpu vf gnkcnlre fhccbegrq.

"Fb jr ner fhccbfrq gb fhccyl gur frrq zbarl sbe n Tebhaq Mreb zbfdhr?" fnvq Cnzryn Tryyre, n yrnqvat bccbarag bs gur zbfdhr. "Lbh pna'g znxr guvf fghss hc."

Lbhe tevrs qbrfa'g fhcrefrqr gur pbafgvghgvbany evtugf bs gur crbcyr jub jnag gb ohvyq gur Pbeqbon Pragre. Gurer'f ab ernfba vg fubhyqa'g nccyl sbe choyvp shaqvat whfg yvxr nalguvat ryfr. (Nyfb, vg'f abg ng Tebhaq Mreb naq bayl cneg bs vg vf n zbfdhr, ohg V qba'g rira pner nobhg gung nal zber. OHVYQ VG BA GUR SBBGCEVAG! Shpx gubfr fghcvq ovtbgf naljnl.)

Tryyre nyfb fnvq guvf:

"Gung lbh jbhyq xrrc [Jny-Zneg] bhg, ona gurz, naq lrg, gur irel vqrn bs n Tebhaq Mreb Zrtn Zbfdhr vf rkgbyyrq, naq gubfr jub fhssre -- abg bayl gur 9/11 snzvyvrf, ohg nyy Nzrevpnaf jub jrer nggnpxrq gung qnl, naq nyy bs Nzrevpn jnf nggnpxrq gung qnl -- ner qrevqrq, naq pnyyrq enpvfg, Vfynzbcubovp, nagv-Zhfyvz ovtbgf, orpnhfr bs gur cnva gung gurl'er fhssrevat, vg'f bhgentrbhf."

Vfynz qvq abg nggnpx hf ba 9/11. Fbzr nffubyr greebevfgf cernpuvat n qvfgbegrq irefvba bs Vfynz nggnpxrq hf ba 9/11. Naq vs lbh pna'g be jba'g qvfgvathvfu gubfr pngrtbevrf ol abj, n ovtbg lbh ner naq n ovtbg V jvyy pnyy lbh, lbhe "snzvyl zrzore" juvavat abgjvgufgnaqvat.

</rant>
___
*Abg nyy bs gurz ner npgvat yvxr guvf, bs pbhefr. Gur barf V urne nobhg ba gur arjf ner, naq gurl qba'g frrz gb zragvba gur barf yvxr guvf ynql be yvxr gurfr sbyxf. Yrg hf abg sbetrg gurz.
&qnttre;V zrna n sbezny evtug gb cerirag vg, abg n serr-fcrrpu evtug gb juvar naq faviry, juvpu bs pbhefr gurl qb unir.

Serge @ 98/99: The Ri of Rhymes, the Viscount of Verse!

Xopher @ 100: My sympathies -- it gets to be too much at times. Some people react badly to severe stress/distress, and other people are born that way.

Ginger, your poetry is lovely, and I am so very happy that you're happy.

Nicholas@95: that's a jaw-dropping image. As you say it's sort of what you expect but the way it pops out at you. (Also Europe and Turkey and Israel look kind of like a man sitting down.)

Ginger @ 101... The Captain of Quatrains.

Political spectrum quiz

Here's how I fared:

Steve is a left moderate social libertarian. Steve is also a slight non-interventionist and culturally liberal. Steve's scores (from 0 to 10):
Economic issues: +3.19 left
Social issues: +3.35 libertarian
Foreign policy: +1.29 non-interventionist
Cultural identification: +4.53 liberal

Xopher: That sort of brings up the question, what is the half-life of outrage? In a somewhat tangential comment, there are people who are still deeply offended at Abraham Lincoln (specifically for his suspension of habeus corpus), or Woodrow Wilson*, or FDR, or whoever... when do you just get over it, already?

*People aren't still offended at Taft. Or Millard Fillmore. Or Taylor, for that matter.

B. Durbin @ 107:

Hell, there are still an awful lot of people who are offended by Abraham Lincoln's freeing the slaves, and no sign they'll ever get over it.

Ginger @ 101:

The Prince of Poesy.
The Emperor of Euphony.

Nicholas Rogers @95: I enjoyed using the image as a geography-knowledge quiz, playing "What's at that Glob, Anyway?"

Those who would like to play along at home, look at the image Nicholas linked to and try to identify by name either the community or the landmass marked by these bright globs of connectedness:

-- The one straight up from Scandinavia (note: playing around with Google Earth suggests it's not straight NORTH, due to the projection used)
-- The one just off South America's northerly western coast
-- The one south and a tiny bit east of Hawaii

Going the other way, can you find Easter Island? Suggest your own geo-puzzlers in reply comments!

I also found interesting the way the connectedness works in places like the Carribean.

Bruce Cohen @109:

The President of Prosody.

We just watched a movie we recorded the other night, called "Push". The synopsis in the guide made it sound like the sort of movie that SyFy screws up on a regular basis: rogue psychics running from a covert government agency that wants to either enslave or kill them. Well, that's pretty close to the plot, but it was actually reasonably well done: the writers actually thought about how the powers they were describing had to work, and how the rogues could counteract them, and they had a lot of different types, with different powers, some of them neutralizing others, so there was a sense of these powers having been around for awhile, and a whole subculture having grown up around them.

And the cast was interesting: the movie is set in Hong Kong, and most of it was Asian, including Ming Na as a "sniffer"(sort of an clairvoyant who tracks objects), whom I have had a crush on for years. But the two leading actors were Caucasian, and one of them was Dakota Fanning, playing a 12-year-old "watcher" (precognitive). And the villain was played by Djimon Hounsou who is a fabulous actor, and seemed to be having fun with the part (but what is this thing Hollywood has lately for evil black men?).

Recommended. Make lots of popcorn, it's fun, especially the final battle scene.

Elliot Mason @ 111:

Let's try going the other way:

The Third Assistant Undersecretary of Triteness.

Not that that title does or could apply to Fragano, I hasten to add.

Jörg @93:

That reminds me of an interview I read with someone in the SCA who said that she was fine using a sewing machine to make her garb, because she knew that medieval women would certainly have done so had they had the chance.

(The comments to the interview were...heated. You could have cooked a potato dumpling on them. Or forged steel.)

Xopher @ #100, Cnz Tryyre vf n abgbevbhf Zhfyvz-onvgre bayl erpragyl tvira nal erpbtavgvba ol bhe znvafgernz cerff. Orsber gung fur jnf zbfgyl xabja sbe cbfgvat na nagv-Zhfyvz enag juvyr jrnevat n ovxvav va gur bprna bss gur pbnfg bs Vfenry ba n ivfvg gurer va 2006. Fur oybtf ng ure bja fvgr, pnyyrq Ngynf Fuehtf, naq vf na bowrpg bs qrevfvba ol gur yrsg fvqr bs gur oybtbfcurer. Gur zrqvn qvqa'g obgure gb purpx ure oban svqrf orsber envfvat ure gb guvf arj fgnghf bs "fcbxrfcrefba" sbe gur ungref.

V'z ernfbanoyl fher fur'f abg bar bs gur 9/11 snzvyl zrzoref, whfg n jneoybttre jub'f sbhaq n avpur.

Shegure Tryyre: ure rneyvrfg oybt cbfg vf qngrq Bpg. 2004; vg'f n enag nobhg Ubyyljbbq yvorenyf. Gur frpbaq oybt cbfg vf n ercbfgvat bs n yrggre fur jebgr gb gur rqvgbe bs gur Anffnh Urenyq ba Bpg. 28 bs gung lrne.

Fur'f hayvxryl gb or eryngrq gb nal bs gur 9/11 ivpgvzf be fur'q unir zragvbarq vg rneyl ba.

Cool, I didn't know that Push was available on DVD yet.

In other news, the Humble Indie Bundle #2 charity game release is out now. In support of the EFF and Child's Play, you pay what you want, and distribute the contribution how you want.

Maybe my posts #116-#117 should have been ROT-13d to conform to Xopher's original #100, since they were in response to him and he doesn't want what he said to be findable via search. Abi, would you mind?

Thank you, ma'am!

Linkmeister @120:

You are most welcome.

I took the political spectrum quiz, and being a European, I was expecting to be recorded as a commie hippy fag, but in fact, I am just a little bit left and a tiny bit more libertarian than the average 40-49 white American Democratic dude, and almost exactly like the average 40-49 American Green white guy.

The one straight up from Scandinavia

Ooh yeah, I see that! Is that that little island where the Panzerbjørne live in the Golden Compass books?

Hyperlocal News: This morning, woman takes callous advantage of cat's attraction to the bathroom heater, and seizes her for the purpose of cruelly squirting drugs into her ears and down her gullet, and spraying the prescribed soothing spray on the allergic skin disturbance on her side. Cat, while attempting to attain an effective escape trajectory during this shamefully intrusive process, is distinctly heard to say "No. I get out of here, me. I follow you, Vorga. I find you, Vorga. I pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy,"

I have no idea where she came up with that; I don't think there's ever been anything by Bester in the house.

That's from THE LOLS MY DESTINATION.

Steve @125: Are you sure it wasn't The DemLOLished Human?

Ginger @ #126

My vote would be for Tigger, Tigger.

"If you die, I'll bring you back."
"How... reassuring."
- another typical day in the world of the Girl Genius

Nicholas @95:

What strikes me about the Facebook map is how well it corresponds to the Earth at Night image. Without the lines connecting the points on the Facebook map you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference, which suggests that Facebook's reach really is staggering -- everywhere that has lights has the internet, more or less.

lorax: That's how it struck me too.

So which divide is bigger: the lights-and-internet vs. no-lights-or-internet divide, or the laws-don't-apply-to-me-and-I-never-have-to-deal-with-the-consequences-of-my-actions vs. everyone else?

The Facebook map looks almost exactly like the Earthlight image...except in Russia and China. There seems to be a lot less activity there.

Nancy Mittens @ 103: Thank you!

The sun's journey away from moon's loving gaze
Leaves moon bereft, weeping, about to wither
Like the fields left unwatered, or a child without praise,
Left longing, looking for her sun aloft in the aether,
Loving and waiting for the passage of time
As it brings the sun in her slow return
Along with the fiery tendrils which climb
To embrace the moon with filaments that burn
And shine a great light upon her heart.
The hope of loving, of being loved, allows us
To endure such separations, or create art
Like poems, dances, fables --all which address
The need to embrace, to rain kindness upon
Each other -- this, for lovers, a sine qua non.

Every year chessgames.com runs a holiday clue hunt. So far every clue has been solved very quickly...until now. The latest clue is this:

130812782.6503
523251130.6012

The results could be referring to people, or particular chess openings, or to a database reference...can anyone think of a way of extracting a 7-digit number starting with 1 from that?

David Goldfarb @ 131 -

Don't know about Russia, but I believe Facebook is banned in China.

Nicholas Rogers @95: This kid accidentally created a perfect map of the digital divide. The difference between living in the "white" areas verses the "blank" areas is stunning.

At a glance, that map seems to correlate reasonably closely with population density.

It's decades ago, I still recall this dream:
I'm standing at a picture window in the night
Across miles of snow, even and white
Bright pinpoints alternately fade and gleam.

Each one — I know this — is a radio station
Sending signals out through chilly air.
Every one a voice that asks "Who's there?"
Words pierce the dark in every nation.

My signal, too, flies on its way
I won't know where or if its journey ends
But hopefully its words will reach my friends
And if I'm lucky bring, to night, some day.

Signals wax and wane through winter night.
I can't see you, but I'm warmed by your light.

Jacque @ 135, yes, it's not that the US west of the Mississippi (or maybe west of I-35? it's a little hard to tell at that scale but it looks like the line pretty much goes through Dallas) is underconnected, it's just underpopulated. It's interesting to see how very sharp that line is.

Jaque, Janet Brennan Croft:

Here is a map showing 5000 random votes from the 2004 US elections as overlapping transparent circles. You can see the same apparent cutoff with population density.

David Goldfarb, Steve C.: boingBoing says Russia is a LiveJournal nation, rather than PrivacyRaperPro.

abi: re: linkmeister's comments: it might be best for anti-search if the posts were de-digitified, as Xopher did, as well?

Xopher: Thank you. *I*, as a Canadian Westerner, can't say that - but I've been wondering the same question for a couple of years. As an equivalence, think of the way we were treating West Germans (or even the Japanese, but that was more occupier than full-on economic and political ally) in 1954. And those were the Nazis!

De-digitified?

Kip W @ 136: Lovely!

abi #140:

There's a pattern of x/(x+2) that's easily searchable, that is the common name for the original event. Because it's digits, it doesn't go away in rot-13.

But, but this thread will never be in the top million hits for n/(n + 2) -- that phrase is so common it's practically a stop word.

joann @142: Demonstrating another use for algebra after high school!

Neat: Bruce Schneier's latest CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter references the plagiarism thread on Making Light, on the subject of academic plagiarism and possible countermeasures.

Maybe those concerned about searchability could start referring to the numeric value in question as 0.818181...

Yes, that's what I meant - 4/66 (ROT-5ed). Sorry to confuse - was trying to minimize the chance of being searchable myself.

Argh, sorry about the spamming, but IJWTS I really like the way "avar-ryrira" rolls off the tongue. May start using that in real life, as appropriate (usually starting about avar-avar each year).

I have a walkability score of 80, above all but 37% of Charlottesville residents.

Unfortunately, the results are heavily dominated by the shopping mall over the hill -- it counted "Christian Family Book Store" as my local bookstore, Chili's as a bar, the nearest shopping-mall ATM as my bank, and a park that's half a mile down a major highway. In practice, I need to go to the next shopping mall, or hop a bus to Downtown, for most of those goals.

The Modesto Kid @ 123:

Ooh yeah, I see that! Is that that little island where the Panzerbjørne live in the Golden Compass books?

Yeah, that's Svalbard. Norwegian territory, with a couple of Russian settlements as well.

Various:
a) I prefer to look at actual earth-imaging satellite images, which have white on black, and and much more dramatic... What they show is photon source concentrations. I first saw such things decades ago. Some Air Force bases had relatively large-sized ones.

b) There are lots of people who are continuing to do handcrafting today even though there are mass production machines. For that matter, a lot of mixes and such do not actually save that much effort.... Some things are actually faster to do manually, given the time and effort and expense of getting and setting up machines. High volume mass production, yes, machine is more economical. For one-offs, most machines aren't designed or built for "flexible manufacturing" to make each item unique in some way or other.

I'd mentioned Darío Lancini, the Venezuelan poet of palindromes the other day. I looked him up today and discovered that he'd died this June. A true loss to the world, few poets could write capícuas like his

In the process, I found another palindromic poem of his, including the title:

Amor azul

Ramera de todo te di.
Mariposa colosal, sí,
yo de todo te di.
Poda la rosa, Venus.
El átomo, como tal
es un evasor alado.
Pide, todo te doy: isla,
sol, ocaso, pirámide.
Todo te daré: mar, luz,
aroma.

Xopher, thanks for that, including the Blanche reference. ;-)

Hyperlocal news: man frustrated by North American corporations' offshore production and just-in-time inventory practices.

Hyper(bolic) local news: local woman discovers that the way to attract interest and praise for your handiwork is to have your child wear it to the craft store. (We got stopped 3 times by people asking about her hyperbolic crochet scarf.)

Child reports that wearing the aforesaid item to Panera Bread also works.

Well, we should have some excitement tonight. I'm about to head back to campus tonight, a rare event, because there's going to be a one-hour "silent rave" in the library. (What, they think librarians don't have automatic searches set up on their library's name and check Facebook compulsively? Ha!) Nearly 3000 people have RSVP'd already. In a silent rave, they are supposed to listen to a coordinated playlist on their headphones, but what do you bet someone sneaks in an amp? Anyway, check YouTube for Bizzell Library or University of Oklahoma tomorrow. (Oh, right now you can see a video from last night where Batman and Spiderman team up across comic universes to chase the Joker through the library...)

In only slightly related news, I'm delighted to discover that the ROT13 of 'rant' is 'enag'. Like email, you know? I'll be posting my enags every day now! (Not really.)

106/122
I came out 'left social libertarian':
left 6.45
libertarian 5.38
foreign policy -8.84
culture -7.81

I guess this makes me a bomb-throwing radical leftist.

It is interesting on that quiz that most people responding come out on the left....

And in other news, the House appears to have passed a bill ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell; and now we get to wait for the Senate. Will the repeal get through in the lame duck session?

I don't like that quiz's use of an authoritarian to libertarian axis because, as far as I'm concerned, the word "libertarian" is toxic, damaged goods, and not something I want to be associated with, even if they have a slightly alternate meaning in mind.

Out:

4 batches rocky road
3 batches mint
3 batches mocha hazelnut

In:

27 bags of semisweet chocolate chips
9 bags of milk chocolate chips
6 bags of mint chips
20 cans condensed milk
6 cans evaporated milk
5 lbs. hazelnuts
3 lbs. walnuts
1 lbs. butter
24 cups sugar
30 cups marshmallows
half a jar instant coffee
3 glugs crème de menth liquor
3 glugs coffee liquor
A half cup or so of salt.
A couple tablespoons of ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

4 yards aluminum foil
6 yards waxed paper

I took pictures of the last batch in process. I'm going to write up a Make Project with them.

joann, The Modesto Kid, Mycroft W:

A closer reading of Xopher's comment would have revealed that he does, in fact, use the number in his last paragraph. I was actually following his practice.

I deduce that he used an automatic encoder such as LeetKey. I expect most of the people reading it do so too. It's trivially easy to encode a numeric term in LeetKey in such a way that one doesn't need to decode it manually: spell the words out.

And since Frcgrzore ryrira is indeed all over the internet, I don't think that there is any need to obfuscate it.

I am being a little crisp here, which is probably unfair. It just felt like Linkmeister asked for a horse, which I gave him, and now everyone wants to know why it doesn't have wings, a horn, and fart rainbows, when all he wanted was a horse.

Janet Brennan Croft @156:

Well, it beats pulling the fire alarms.

Google blithely indexes ROT-13 text just as if it were any other language.

Abi @ #162, And a lovely horse it was!

Janet, #156: I know I've seen a YouTube video of this being done somewhere else -- Ohio State, perhaps -- but I'm feeling too lazy to look for it at the moment. It was interesting to watch, especially with the sound off! (The person who put up the video had added the soundtrack to which they were dancing.)

Earl, #160: I'm 100% with you on that. There must be a better term for the opposite of "authoritarian".

#166 Lee

Pluralistic? Inclusive? Cooperative? Co-prosperity? Receptive? Inclusionary

#154 Linkmeister

Throwaway disposable etc. consumer goods....

re 159: Well even I come out as a leftist authoritarian, skewed in large part by my large number of "I won't answer the question phrased that way" responses. The quiz is a libertarian trope so I suspect it's designed to put people on the "right" into the libertarian center of the chart.

Linkmeister @ #165: Was it this lovely a horse?

Dreams vs. Reality

It is interesting on that quiz that most people responding come out on the left....

Given that it's Making Light, that surprises me not at all. Anyone who likes to hang out here is going to be, at minimum, aware that people are all people--and these days, that's all you need to make you a liberal.

I first put that quiz on a board heavily dominated by conservatives. The scoring matched my impressions of them - very much right, quite a bit authoritarian.

I'm at home today, getting replacement windows in, and being appalled at the mess created by one (1) fifteen-year-old boy. Can anyone explain -- no, it will take too long. I will summarize: he's grounded for the rest of his natural life.

A silver basketball? Flowerpots? Will he ever stop spray painting random items??!!?

The weather is also joining in: we have a winter weather advisory until 9 pm tonight, with up to 3" possible. Yes, my windows are coming out as fast as they can work. If you don't hear from me tonight, send the ski patrol to our last known location, please?

I'll just sit here in the dark..

Ginger @ 174... the mess created by one (1) fifteen-year-old boy

I am shocked, shocked!!!

Serge @175: I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

175/176 - Round up the usual suspects.

Well, still trying to get my strength back from the rave. As far as I know I still have a job.

Estimates range from 2000 to 3000 people, but I'm going to sit down with a floor plan today and try to do an estimate of my own. No audible music, but lots of dancing and yelling and droning along and crowd surfing, so it sure wasn't silent. You can't get OU students together without multiple "Boomer Sooner, Texas Sucks" chants anyway. No one got hurt or broke anything. There are a couple of raw videos on YouTube, but there's supposed to be a more polished one later today. And the kid who organized it did check in with me beforehand for any last minute safety announcements and asked for a broom and a trash bag as soon as it was over, so he could sweep up all the busted balloons and Mardi Gras beads and light sticks.

Still, I hope they do it elsewhere next year. Just too crowded and not enough exits in the library. And I was worried one of the crowd surfers was going to wind up tossed behind the desk...

What is the proper opposite of authoritarian? Individualist? Nonconformist? If an authoritarian is someone who defaults to obedience to authority figures, is his opposite properly someone who has no particular obedience to people just because they're authority figures, or someone who actively does the opposite of what authority figures demand?

ISTM that a big distinguisher between political movements in the US is not authoritarianism (90%+ of the high-profile pundits are authoritarians of one stripe or another, and nearly all the powerful people are authoritarian leaders of one stripe or another[1]), but the selection of *which* authority figures are to be followed, and how strongly to follow them. Which religious leaders are to be followed, and which reviled? Which political leaders? Do we gush about what a moral, good, Christian leader Bush is? Or what a smart, 11-dimensional-chess-playing far-sighted scholar Obama is?

[1] Isn't this the defining feature of the difference between absolutely refusing to allow any consequences to befall anyone for following orders, even obviously illegal ones, and coming down like a ton of bricks on whistleblowers and unauthorized leakers, even ones whose whistleblowing did no harm and exposed fraud or criminal behavior? The consensus of the powerful and the MSM is overwhelmingly in agreement with that.

Ginger

I take it you're on the west side of the region?

We're on the eastern shore, where we're not expected to get a lot of snow, but due to it being so cold for so long, the snow is expected to accumulate and thus will make roads slippery and further thus, motorists will have many accidents. At least that's what the local radio is saying.

At least the wind finally has died down.

Love, C.

I got to work to find a "closed due to snow" sign in the window. I got the call from my boss on the way back to the bus stop. Bah, humbug!

The weather report says it'll be 3-6 inches through tonight.

Carrie S @172 -- the majority of people taking the quiz, according to their reports, not the majority of people here, come out on the left on their quiz. I'd agree with you about the self-selected nature here; I was commenting on the global distribution.

# 182

Perhaps posted too soon. Moved out of the office to put on coat and see the streets are covered in white, with much more white pouring out of the equally white sky.

Just went to pick up the Kent County News, which publishes on Thursday. Soaked upon return. This is wet snow.

Love, c.

Hyperlocal news:

When last seen in June 2010, our intrepid reporter had been told by her cardiologist that her LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol, for those of you not intimately and obsessively interested in lipid panels and other fun medical stuff) needed to drop below 70. It was 78. Could be done by increasing dose of statin.

Intrepid reporter said, Give me six months to do it with diet.

Blood tests Tuesday, results Tuesday night: LDL 66. Total cholesterol 159. Not as good as it could be, but not bad. All other numbers fine. Happy Lizzy is happy.

@184: Happy Lizzy should be very happy. My doctor told me that 50/50 is a reasonable ratio to shoot for.

Give me six months to do it with diet.

Whatja do? Huh? Huh? Wanna know.

Jacque, I really push vegetables and fruits, and while I haven't eliminated meat from my diet, I limit the frequency of chicken and fish to about twice a week, and I make sure the portions are small. I don't eat beef at all. I eat small amounts of bacon occasionally, no other pork. My usual evening meal is a huge salad. My meat meal, when I have one, or my pasta meal, is the midday meal.

Also, I'm reasonably physically active. I teach martial arts about 9 hours a week, I do yoga 3-5 hours a week, and I walk every day. The physical activity keeps my HDL high.

I pretty much don't drink alcohol. Half a beer or one glass of wine if I go to a party. That's it.

And: I cook my own food, mostly. I eat very little processed food. When I do buy processed food, I read the labels obsessively, and I know how much saturated fat and how much sodium there is in everything I buy. (I do buy some: you would find Annie's salad dressing, sweet potato snack chips, canned black beans, naan, challah, and eggplant-garlic spread from Trader Joe's in my house.) If the food has a lot of saturated fat or salt, I don't buy it. (I have high blood pressure, so I try to keep my sodium intake low.) I don't go to restaurants much, and when I do, I eat mostly the same sort of food that I would eat at home.

About 3 years ago I was able to get the total cholesterol down to 138, and the LDL to 58, but I felt deprived. I don't feel deprived now.

This is probably way more info than you needed...

re the "Weird Rose" particle: "Feed me, Seymour!"

Madeley @ #170, It was close. You'd have to ask Abi if it was as ethereal as that, though.

Lizzy L @ 184... her LDL cholesterol (...) needed to drop below 70. It was 78. Could be done by increasing dose of statin.

I first read that as a dose of satin.

Lizzy @184:

I'm delighted to hear it!

By the way, I dare anyone to watch this video and not laugh by the end of it. The gentleman in question may not be very wise in his deep-frying choices, but he certainly can laugh at himself. Contagiously.

I tell you, the world is a wonderful place, having such people in it.

Bruce, #187: Yikes. I could easily see that one on Cake Wrecks!

Thanks, abi. It's all about the illusion of control. :-)

Lizzy L @ 193... Congrats.

Abi @ 191... Holy Jumping Gnochi, Batman!

Ai-yi-yi! One of the windows being replaced had hidden major structural rot. They are putting in the new window, but now I need to dig out the business card of the master carpenter who did the renovation, and get someone to look at it ASAP.

Other than that, it's been a quiet day at Lake Wobegon.

Ginger @196:

Given the fact that this only came to light from what we will call the Silver Basketball and Flowerpot Incident*, could the teenage boy expect parole sometime in 2012?

-----
* about which I am dying to hear more details, once you have rendered them into an Anecdote rather than Real Life†
† You have to do this, because some day said teenage boy is going to bring a partner home, and you can learn a lot about said partner by telling the tale and seeing which side they take

If I ever get rich, I'll hire a personal chef.

I had the pleasure of meeting Marna Nightingale this morning. It was, as usual, quite a pleasure, but all too brief, as she was in town for barely one hour before the Greyhound took off again, bringing her closer to Canada.

That being said, I'll be in the Bay Area next week. Anyone interested in a Gathering of Light next Thursday at 6pm at Oakland's Breads of India? Terry Karney has already said yes.

re rose particle: "By growing a population of self pollinated seedlings from a prospective breeder, you discover that it has some serious genetic
flaws that disqualify it as a breeder. This would be one of those times."

Lovecraftian roses.

re 187: The minute I looked upon it I knew it had to be a Ralph Moore, who just died last year at 102 (he had retired the year before). Moore was the driving force behind all those miniature roses you see around these days, and he bred a lot of real oddities.

Inspired by an idle thought sparked by a discussion here. And it's poetry (of sorts). So I'm going to inflict it on you.

Violets are violet,
Roses are rose,
Oranges are orange,
As everyone knows.

Redbirds are red,
Blackbirds are black,
Bluebirds are blue,
And that's a fact.

Lilacs are lilac,
Goldenrod gold,
Lavender's lavender,
Or so I've been told.

Fried gnocci might show up at the next Mad Science party.

I've still got all the safety gear from the last mad science party. Come to think of it I suspect there's still a can of coke in the pachysandra (after microwaving it for eight minutes we didn't know what to expect so there was safety gear and aggressive disposal. It was fine, it was a faraday cage, but we weren't SURE at the time.)

Fried gnocchi for the win! Or at least for the winning high-jump!

abi: You are not being crisp, simply pointing out fact - and I saw that too, but only after I posted the second time. Oops.

I had not intended to be anything but "maybe this should be done as well, if we are going to accomplish what was requested" - if it came across as a command, or even "that wasn't enough", it came across too harshly, and that is my mistake.

Mary Aileen @203: Heh. Something very basic here. Extra point for using orange in a poem.

Re. Palindromes, my two favourites are:

"Doc, note, I dissent: a fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."

(Which, for the life of me, I can't remember where I first came across), and:

"Retteb si fla h'dnoces eh! ttu: but the second half is better."

(Which, I'm more or less sure, was submitted to Stephen Fry in the days when he used to write a column in the UK Daily Telegraph. (He said his own favourite palindrome was "Satan! Oscillate my metallic sonatas!" if memory serves...))

My favorite palindrome is in Latin:

S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S

It works all four ways on that grid.

re my #203: drat. That first line should be Violets are violet (as in the color).

Mary Aileen @210:

Fixed.

Frivolous party game at Locus inspired by PNH's list:

The question: for what books (whether sff or otherwise), can the title and author be run together to make an unstrained, grammatically correct English sentence?

International hyperlocal news: business traveler contracts food poisoning in either Seoul or Osaka, spends first twenty-four hours in Tokyo confined to (posh) quarters. "At least it messed up my sleep patterns enough that I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and checked out the famous Tsukiji Fish Market," he reports.

I see that Cage Against The Machine is currently in third place on Amazon UK.

Charity fund-raiser and you piss off Simon Cowell as well: what's not to like.

abi #209: Ah, a classicist! ;-) For anyone who didn't recognize it, that "magic square" is popular with ritual magicians and occultists, IIRC since at least the Middle Ages. I gather the Latin isn't quite "clean", producing ambiguity to add mystical appeal.

And of course, if you reverse the words (Rotas, Opera...), it still works.

For some reason, I seem to recall that I first saw it backwards. I blame Ripley.

Serge at 199: Can't make it; I'm teaching class. Think of me as you raise your glasses to the season.

Lizzy L, #186, renal patients have really big cholesterol when they're really sick and I just figured that being somewhat off now wasn't that big a deal. My last primary (moved to another/too-far center) told me to take Fish Oil capsules and they worked. I had the Lipid Panel Tuesday last and my current primary told me I don't have to take it again for a year. (On the other hand, the TSH taken at the same time is too low, so that gets taken in two months instead of the standard three.)

abi @ #191, that's the most contagious laugh I've heard since Laddergoat.

abi (211): Thanks!

Lizzy @184 -- wonderful news! Congratulations.

abi @191 -- I laughed, I shared. Thank you!

Abi #191: Great fun! I especially liked when he realized, "OK, this is not going to be one of my instructional videos... but I can blog it!"

I loved the gnocchi video. Took me this long to say so because I've been emailing it to everyone I know, and reposting it on other sites.

Serge @ 199: Alas, I will be unavailable that day (and week).

Please raise a glass for me and tell Terry et al. I said hello (and, y'know, the holiday greeting du jour).

I will be at the gatthering. I may be a bit late, it depends on when work lets me go.

D Potter @ 224... Drat! Well, should yours plans change, you're welcome to this Gathering of Light.

Terry Karney @ 225... Get there when you get there.

Urgent Book Advice Needed:

Earlier in the year I listened to the audio book version of "The Name of the Wind" (Patrick Routhfus). I totally loved it.

I am wondering whether I should recommend it to my niece, who is either 13 or 14. An avid reader who read all of Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and (sigh) the Twilight books.

I remember the book having some dark and scary parts, but don't recall anything explicit.

Any help appreciated.

Bittersweet's bittersweet.
Pinks are pink
Roses are rose, or that's what I think.

For people local to Houston, or within a reasonable driving range: this coming Tuesday, Dec. 21, is my partner's annual Not A Birthday Dinner Gather. This year it will be at the Jason's Deli at Shepherd and Westheimer, starting at 7:00 PM. No presents necessary, because this is Not A Birthday Party. :-) I'd appreciate a response if you can make it, so that I'll have some idea how many tables to pull together.

Earl @ 160: ...the word "libertarian" is toxic, damaged goods...

More and more I am coming to agree. And it has happened because of what C. Wingate @ 169 alludes to: it's designed to put people on the "right" into the libertarian center of the chart.

I see a lot of conservatives who call themselves libertarians and sometimes even join the LP because they are disappointed that today's Republican Party has forgotten about balanced budgets. But basically they are still conservatives. They talk about small government, but they do in fact want a government big enough to invade other countries, keep guest workers out, bust up unions, outlaw brtn, wiretap and imprison dissidents without warrant or trial, and dispense favors to big business that are not available to the rest of us.

Maybe I should call myself a small-government liberal. I hope that's a label the conservatives wouldn't try to steal. And since there are too many people calling for smaller government without saying which parts they want to toss out and which to keep, here's my take. I want to get rid of the parts that the conservatives want to keep.

If the Libertarian Party is to have any purpose and meaning, it cannot be just a pale, slightly-more-tolerant version of the GOP. —David F. Nolan. Sadly, I think it was already too late when he wrote that.

Mark Jones #208: also there's

The fat cop spoke in a strange tongue: "Eugnot egnarts a ni epoks poc taf eht."

The wedding cake rose looks like an artichoke.

Marilee at 218: If the cholesterol number was lower than you thought it would be, that's good. Glad to hear it. Hope the TSH improves.

Serge @ 199: It'll depend on just how crazy the lab is right before I leave for a vacation. As of right now, maybe.

abi @ 197: Well, er. The windows came first. I was preparing for the installation of new windows, and had taken something outside -- I forget exactly what now -- so I happened to walk over to that side of the house and glanced into the side yard. When I saw a silvery globe -- an unfamiliar globe -- I had to take a closer look, which is how I discovered the spray painted basketball. Near this was the stick, then the shoes, and the retaining wall..I didn't find the flowerpots until I reached the side door. The handle with silver fingerprints was just the cherry on top.

I was already rather irritated by the mess I was discovering under, behind, and around the furniture next to the windows that were being replaced. That was the reason I was going to ground him for the rest of his life.

By the time he got home from school, I wasn't so mad. This isn't the first time he's spray-painted things outside the house. In fact, just recently I came home, walked in the door, and smelled paint. When I asked him, he admitted that he'd thrown a spray paint can into the yard, which had then "exploded" all over him. He'd run into the house to take a shower, but you could still see black droplets all over the retaining wall and surrounding grass. I thought he'd learned something of a lesson, but no.

His other obsession is with fire, so when I walked into the house and smelled the match smoke, I was a little worried. Then I saw the candles had just been extinguished, so I didn't go on.

Yes, I smell the air as soon as I walk in the door. Sometimes I find things that he shouldn't be doing just by sniffing the air.

Anyway, he doesn't know I wanted to ground him forever and ever. I think I'll hold that in abeyance.

The snowstorm led him to believe that school might be cancelled tomorrow, but I think it will only be a 2-hour delay. We'll see who is right!

A friend just sent me this Wiley vs. Rhodes video.

Benjamin Wolfe @ 234... It'll depend on just how crazy the lab is

"Igor!"

Bring me the subjects Igor! Strap them into the eyetracker and make them saccade for the knowledge of humankind and the glory of the lab!

David @215:

I gather the Latin isn't quite "clean", producing ambiguity to add mystical appeal.

It's far from clean. Sator is a relatively rare word, meaning "sower", or in one usage, "author". That alone gives it the labored diction that really good palindromes avoid.

But the main problem is arepo. It's entirely unknown in Latin apart from this usage. You can't derive it from any known Latin words, even if you're being loose about the form. It could be an alpha-privative Greek form from ρεπω, "to descend", but there's no form that actually fits the grammar.

There are theories that it was a name*. Like the anthropological suggestion that something was used "for ritual purposes", that means "Search me, squire; I have no idea."

I grew up knowing it as the Surfer's Palindrome, which, if you recognize the reference, should tell you rather a lot about my upbringing.

-----
* in which case, how cool is that for the guy involved?

abi@239

having a name which is a 'hapax legomenon' is itself pretty cool (but also pretty unusual I would imagine) ('Child, if you have a rummy sort of name/Remember to be thankful for the same')

Serge@199: As it happens, I'll be flying in to the Bay Area that very day...getting in quite late, though (for values of late like 11 PM). Any chance of rescheduling to the next Monday, or sometime that next week?

Lee@229: That's quite easy for me to get to, so I'll very likely make it.

Soon Lee writes @ #212

Frivolous party game at Locus inspired by PNH's list.

The very first of these I ever noticed was Hello Summer, Goodbye Michael Coney, where the publisher actually used text in two colours in the title to make it read theat way, with Hello Summer, in red, and Goodbye Michael Coney in black.

...and when I googled for an image of that cover (Pan, 1978), I find this at tor.com:

The spine of my old Pan paperback reads “Hello Summer, Goodbye Michael Coney,”, written by one Jo Walton

Is there a term for a word which (instead of appearing only once) appears too frequently?

The word "pockmarked" appears too often in a book I just finished.

Periwinkles show in periwinkle,
Heliotropes are coloured heliotrope,
You're prettier than both, but this I think'll
Finish up with me hung from a rope.

Earl @243:

I don't know, but whatever it is, add "clenched" and "mien" from the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, and "howled" from the Gap Sequence.

Still do not know why I read the latter. It was a greater literary mistake than deciding to find out whether Pride, Prejudice and Zombies made any sense by the end.

I'm reading the Big Black Book of Conan Stories at the moment (on and off), and I ran into the word dais, a word I haven't met since I read the Barsoom books. And then I met it again, and again, and again...

Roses are red, violets are blue

(Warning: serious time-wastage possible at that link!)

Stefan Jones @#227, re The Name of the Wind:

If she can handle Harry Potter, I think she'll be fine with Name. The only problem I see is that the second book isn't coming out till March, and personally I hate getting into a series that isn't finished yet. If Rothfuss writes as fast for the third book, it won't be out till sometime in late 2013...

Niall (247): Nice graph! It would be even better if the colors weren't reversed.

Abi @ 245... "howled" from the Gap Sequence

...followed by Baby Gap then Old Navy?

Earl Cooley III @243 said: Is there a term for a word which (instead of appearing only once) appears too frequently?

A friend of mine bounced repeatedly off Perdido Street Station because of the sheer mass of excretory imagery in the prologue/introduction section. There was a specific repeated-too-often word, but I no longer remember what it was.

Earl Cooley III@243: It's modern, not Latin, and isn't specific to usage in one work, but..."stop word".

Earl@243, abi@245, ddb@252:

I was going to suggest 'pollakis legomenon' (hapax: 'once', pollakis: 'many times'; but I suspect that my intuitions of appropriateness are infected by the fact that Turkish makes no semantic distinction between 'lots' and 'too much'.¹ Which can lead to very confusing conversations with students. ('Should I put too many citations in may paper?' 'Um, what?')

Also, English desperately needs a word meaning 'thing for which there ought to be a word but isn't.

OK, off to make pizza for the esurient² masses.

1. This comment should really have gone in the last open thread, I guess.
2. Hungry, and requiring to be filled with good things.

HLN: Moose wins office raffle of a "Christmas hamper" and now has the problem of taking it away.
(24" diameter shallow basket stacked to about 15" high with goodies and weighing about 30 pounds.)

In other news, it has been snowing lightly.

Dammit, the pet tulum has escaped and played havoc with my parentheses, again.

So, because you never know what people here will know, what would be the approximate number of square feet taken up by your usual teen-aged person on a very crowded dance floor? Complicated by the fact that he or she may or may not be wearing a winter jacket and/or a backpack?

Earl @243, abi @245: also add to the list peculiar/peculiarly from David Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean series. Seems to show up at least once ever few pages, and sometimes more than once on a page.

Irritating in the extreme.

Syd@257: Peculiarly irritating? :-)

I was protected from Eddings, as I recall, by the first few pages of the first book. I actually read an entire book of Thomas Covenant, so I'm much more outspoken about how awful that was.

Erik Nelson @231:

That's a good one, I like that... [But Mark Jones? Your brain translating my location into a possible surname, perchance? :-)]

abi@245

Re. The Gap and "It was a greater literary mistake than deciding to find out whether Pride, Prejudice and Zombies made any sense by the end.

I don't remember The Gap Sequence (to the extent I remember it much at all, now, to be honest) as disfondly as you, but I have always remembered Clute's splendid comment from Interzone that the first one seemed to be "one of the worst single books ever published by a writer of interest who had not yet become senile." Ouch. (Though to be fair, if memory serves an ace rather than a double fault, he said nicer things about the later volumes...)

Syd@257

All together now: "Rat-faced little Drasnian"!

praisegod barebones @ #253: Also, English desperately needs a word meaning 'thing for which there ought to be a word but isn't.

And what is wrong with "liff" for that purpose?

Re. words or phrases that don't exist but should, was it Brian Aldiss that suggested Ab we tel min¹ for "the sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what it being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker."?²

[Is it the fact that it's Christmas Party Season, and I now live remotely enough to have to drive to most of them, and thuslywise remain sober, that's reminded me of this? :-)]

¹ From memory, such as it is, again...

² Confluence?

Janet Brennan Croft #256: Depends on the average number of left feet per dancer.... (More seriously, some teens will actively seek to escape crowded dance floors!)

ddb #258: IIRC, the Covenant series wasn't that bad technically (ignoring the obvious plot token), just depressing as hell.

Paul A.

It's unonomatopoeic.

Janet Brennan Croft @256 -- depends on how crowded the dance floor feels. I've estimated high-density crowds at around 3 sq ft per person -- that's a "barely able to move" density. At about a person per square yard (9 sq ft) it's dense, but not really terrible. 4 sq yards (36 sq ft) is a loose crowd, probably appropriate for fairly energetic dancing. One good way to look at this question is to look at what the density is in a hotel room set up for theater-style seating (there's going to be a number for that on a placard in the room, and the hotel will have the room dimensions available) -- that includes aisles, and enough space so that people can get out in case of fire.

I've long wanted to get a group of 100 people together and mark out a space 20 feet on a side and take photographs of crowd densities....

Found this quip on Reddit:

If you really want to shut down Wikileaks....just have Yahoo! acquire them.

Hi everybody,

I just moved to Brooklyn. Is there a good sci & fantasy book store around here? Or at least a book store with a good fantasy section? I find myself missing the selection at my old store, in Berkeley.

I did a terrible thing to a friend by accident, once. I mentioned that in all of Tim Power's books up to that time the hero ended up maimed in the hand. (I remember reading "The Stress of Her Regard" and wondering when it would happen: yep, Chapter 3.) I said it was probably because his heroes needed to run for their lives a lot and getting a maimed leg would hamper that. I apparently got both impassioned on the subject and persuasive enough that it stuck in her mind. Unfortunately, before there was time enough to forget what I'd said she went to a Worldcon and ended up in an elevator for +20 floors.

With Tim Powers.

She almost made it to the floor she wanted before, accidentally fueled by my rant, she embarrassedly exploded with "Why do all your protagonists get maimed in the hand?" Powers handled it well: he said he hadn't realized he was doing it until it was pointed out to him recently. My friend was tramutized, and I decided to keep an eye out as to upcoming literary events before indulging in a rant like that again.

Steve C.@265:

> Found this quip on Reddit:

> If you really want to shut down Wikileaks....just have Yahoo! acquire them.

Heh. I notice that AltaVista is one of the casualties. Back in the 90s, when the URL was altavista.digital.com, the wildcard and boolean search options that it offered were a revelation. Wikipedia offers charmingly dated numbers: As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day.

You know, 130GB of RAM is still nothing to be despised (500GB of disk, though, is a joke today).

Alta Vista was definitely my favorite search engine for quite a while, and the first one that I felt was generally satisfactory (not anything like perfect, you understand). Google was clearly better after about the first week, though. And has remained solidly competitive for about 3 eons in Internet years, isn't it?

Not transforming (as in "sanitizing") data entries carries considerable risk.

Tom @264.

Checking US Army regulations from WW2, the distance between ranks is specified at 40 inches. and in close order the interval between files is 4 inches.

These are the measurements between soldiers, and it works out as very slightly more than one square yard.

Do I have to link to the Lambeth Walk video?

Another Eddings tic is "sort of" thrown in more or less at random.

I remember "my liege" from The Warrior's Apprentice, all the more so because the original Baen Books printing that I have spelled it "leige" throughout.

"Glittered" in Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron. All of the female characters wore jewelry (especially earrings), and none of them could be just wearing the jewelry, the jewelry had to be doing something, and what it was doing was glittering. I'm sure when she wrote it she never even noticed that she was overusing the phrase....

re 269: There was a time when Altavista's audio search was considerably superior IMO.

Dave Bell @271 -- that interval of 4 inches between files does not include the thickness of the individual person (which is usually considerably more than 4 inches). What's the estimated thickness of the average soldier? From your 1 sq yard estimate, I'd think it's about 7 inches. (Obvious jokes may be left as an exercise for the readers....)

Thinking more on 274: for rule-of-thumb purposes, I think we're saying about the same things about density.

Words that come up too frequently: in S.M. Stirling's Changed World series, I keep tripping over "pawky". This is especially irritating because I've never heard the word elsewhere at all, and am having to guess at its meaning from context. (Best guess so far: dry and a little sarcastic, the sort of thing that Mr. Spock might say with a raised eyebrow.)

Lee, that word comes up from time to time in my mind, for no good reason, as the title of an imaginary Little Golden Book, The Pawky Little Pawnee. It can stop any time, as far as I'm concerned.

Elsewhere: I'd call a word that should (but doesn't) exist in English a lacuna, and if someone makes up a word to fill the spot, it would be a lacunism. But that's just me.

Lizzy L, #233, no, I meant that my cholesterol has been perfect for many months, and that's because of the fish oil capsules.

Paul A #260, Kip W: #277:

but but but... if the word doesn't exist, then it's self-referential!

That Drunken Serb vs. Shark Particle is more evidence that truth is stranger than fiction could ever dare to be.

Mary Aileen #280: Indeed! I especially liked "the water was not that soft."

It also falls squarely under "God loves fools, drunkards, and children". (Which actually has some basis in fact... relaxed muscles protect somewhat against injury from falls and collisions.)

Captain Beefheart, a.k.a. Don Van Vliet, died from multiple sclerosis complications, at 69. An odd musician indeed.

Captain Beefheart: The dust blows forward, and the dust blows back.

I gave up on the first of Eddings' Belgariad books about fifty pages in, after choking on one too many uses of "unfortunately" and "however".

In my own writing, I've found that I use the word "that" too frequently, and try to remember to excise it before final drafts.

Captain Beefheart:

Fast 'n bulbous! Also, a tin teardrop!

The overused word choices that bug me the most are the use of exotic color names in the Thomas Covenant books, and in some of M. John Harrison's books. OK, you want to be really specific about colors, fine, but how about using a few different ones?

Sorry, no, I can't even remember now what the colors were, it's been too long. And no, I'm not going back to look.

serge @199:
I'll probably be there, yeah.

The word that comes up often enough in my casual writing that I have to go back and edit it out is "stuff". When I see it used as often as it comes out when I write, it even grates on me!

It seems to me Wordle would be a useful tool for any writer who suspects he/she is overusing a word, or especially if he/she doesn't think that.

Ooh, I was just going to ask if there was a tool to find out which words you're using too often. Wordle would work nicely.

I had a demon of an English teacher (in the good sense) who had creative writing exercises that included writing without adverbs, starting every sentence in a different way, and excising every "the" from submissions. There's no flavor in such writing but it does help to get a style together that isn't laden with over-emphasis or indirect writing. (This was also the teacher who told us to look up a word if we didn't know the meaning, and then had us look up "red." "The color of blood," FWIW.)

I didn't notice the glittering in those books.

I did notice the hands in Powers. I even talked to Tim about it once, when I was pleasantly surprised to note a hero who didn't have an injury of some sort to the hands. Mind you, I was looking for it.

Tim has some other recurrent tropes too.

siriosa @ 287... There's a possibility that we'd meet the next street over, at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company. Would either place be ok? I'm going to hit the road soon, but I'll log in tomorrow evening - or maybe tonight if our hotel in Bakersfield has free internet access.

Another tendency Tim Powers has said he never realised he had until it was pointed out is ending his novels with the protagonist getting in or on a boat and disappearing off into the distance.

(Although there was a period in the 1990s where he wrote a couple of books in a row that ended with the protagonist getting off a boat and disappearing off into the distance.)

Lee @ #276:

My first encounter with "pawky", that I recall, was this:

"You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?"

"The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as --"

"My blushes, Watson!" Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.

"I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public."

"A touch! A distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself."

Re pawky.

I think of it as Scottish, as in:

Oh the pawky auld carle cam o'er the lea
Wi' mony guid-e'ens and guid-days tae me
Sayin', "Guid wife for your charity
Would you lodge a leal poor man?"
Laddie wi my tow-ro-ae

Terry Karney @ 291: "Tim has some other recurrent tropes too."

Dead wives?

Has this country really and finally gotten rid of DADT?

Was there ever anything more stupid? I'm afraid to believe it's been rescinded.

Love, C.

serge: I can be at pcb, but it's nowhere near as conducive to conversation. It gets quite loud.

Terry Karney@291: Well, now if you ever re-read them, you will.

Serge@292: I'd strongly prefer Breads of India, although my preference makes no difference unless the event gets rescheduled.

Constance @ 297:

Sorry, no, it's not dead yet. The Senate has passed cloture, meaning the Republican filibuster is null and void, but they have yet to vote on the bill itself. And even when the bill is passed (ETA: they are scheduled to be voting on it as I type this) and the President has signed it (and that's not a sure thing either, considering how he's been rolling lately) DADT will still be the law of the land until 90 days have elapsed and the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have all certified repeal. In that period anyone who comes out while in service is going to get cashiered, so tell anyone you know who's thinking about it to stay in the closet until the repeal actually happens.

From the Great Orange Satan:

Update: The repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" was passed on a final vote of 65-31. There are unverified reports that John McCain's (R-AZ) legs fell off.

It now goes to the President for his signature.

Hallelujah!

Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell!
Just heard via CNN, who broadcast the vote live, the Senate just voted the repeal of DADT, 65-31. It now goes to the President's desk for signing. The word is, President Obama will sign with all due pomp and ceremony, first part of next week.

Much as I'm a tentative respondent for Thursday, I'd prefer BoI, if it is quieter. Loud environments mean that I can't hear conversation at all (as I was reminded at a party last night).

Just posted to my Flickr:

Fudge making illustrated!

DADT -- gone! Well done, Senators. Given how angry and frustrated I've been with the various branches of our government lately, it's a pleasure to have something to cheer about.

The DREAM Act failed to pass. :-(((

Linkmeister #289. Wordle was useful to me in writing a book. I already knew most of the problems it pointed out, but it makes a difference to see them there in black and white (or your choice of designer colors).

Tim Powers subthread I'm reminded of the David Lodge novel (Small World, I think), where a successful British novelist had his writing analysed by computer and it made him unable to write any more. Whenever he wrote something that fitted it with the patterns from the computer it felt predictable and boring, and when he tried to write differently it felt artificial. The centipede problem.

Bruce says we can't stop holding our breath just yet about the death DADT.

Some of you think we can exhale.

Which is it?

I guess this is what 'they' gave us in exchange for extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest? And that was as far as They were going to go. They did kill the DREAM initiative. Or at least that is what some people who are usually pretty knowlegable are saying. Myself, not being in their class, do not know!

But if DADT is dead, I'm more than ready to don sparklies and dance on its grave, so there.

Love, C.

Regarding the extinguishing of the Dream Act legislation:

Keep your weary hard workers
Keep your poor with aspirations
Keep your huddled massed yearning for freedom.
You who work and dream of a better life aren't welcome here.
You who seek refuge from religious intolerance, from discriminatio, from persecution, mostly won't get entry.
We only allow the abusive rich--
The Rupert Murdochs, the Mel Gibsons
The rich bigots secular and sectarian
The robber barons spreading lies
And actors who abuse their wives and mistresses.
And aliens on guest visas training for turning passenger planes with hapless passengers on-board into weapons of mass destruction committing mass atrocity and devastation.

@285: That's right, the Mascara Snake!

Local News and Weather:

A cold front moved through Portland about 6 AM this morning, with heavy rain for a half an hour or so followed by light rain for another couple of hours. At about 10 AM I drove my dogs up to the off-leash area on top of Council Crest (~1100 feet above sea level); the temperature was 39°F but there was still snow on the ground above 800 or 900 feet. The light drizzle falling then was washing the snow away, but hadn't yet finished the job.

This would only have been of interest to the dogs (who were interested in the snow, but not happy about the falling rain), except that there was a wedding scheduled at the lookout point on the top of Council Crest. Shortly after we got there the wedding party assembled under a cluster of umbrellas, and a stretch limo arrived with the bride and groom. Less than five minutes later the rain stopped and a few minutes after that the sun came out for what I hope was long enough for the wedding ceremony.

Amazingly, the limo driver even managed to park without blocking the driveway that goes around the lookout point, though he did have to move a few feet to let me get my car out when I left.

Calligraphy without a net: Legacy of Letters

As you know, Bob, stem cell transplants for leukemia are basically the same things that used to be called bone marrow transplants. They have nothing to do with embryonic stem cells, and are not remotely controversial. Arizona governor Jan Brewer thinks that 95% of these transplants fail, but in the real world the success rate is more like 40%.

The NY Times article reporting on transplant defunding has lots of links to other articles, including things not on their site, like Jan Brewer's interview on Fox. They also have helpful little links for phrases that the reader might find unfamiliar. The link for stem cells is to their page on the embryonic stem cells controversy, rather than their perfectly good page on bone marrow transplants. Are they trying to cause trouble?

Is it just me, or has there been a lot less noise about the phony "War On Christmas" this year? Perhaps that meme has finally gotten stale.

Critical leaked memo about US agriculture: [-who- appointed the people who are running EPA at the current time, anyway?]

http://www.panna.org/media-center/press-release/beekeepers-ask-epa-remove-pesticide-linked-colony-collapse-disorder-citin

Beekeepers Ask EPA to Remove Pesticide Linked to Colony Collapse Disorder, Citing Leaked Agency Memo
For immediate release: December 8, 2010

Contacts:

Heather Pilatic, Pesticide Action Network
cell: 415.694.8596

Jay Feldman, Beyond Pesticides
202.543.5450, ext 15

Beekeepers Ask EPA to Remove Pesticide Linked to Colony Collapse Disorder,Citing Leaked Agency Memo
Pesticide Already Illegal in Germany, Italy & France Based on Scientific Findings

SAN FRANCISCO and WASHINGTON, D.C - Beekeepers and environmentalists today called on EPA to remove a pesticide linked to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), citing a leaked EPA memo that discloses a critically flawed scientific support study. The November 2nd memo identifies a core study underpinning the registration of the insecticide clothianidin as unsound after EPA quietly re-evaluated the pesticide just as it was getting ready to allow a further expansion of its use. Clothianidin (product name “Poncho”) has been widely used as a seed treatment on many of the country’s major crops for eight growing seasons under a “conditional registration” granted while EPA waited for Bayer Crop Science, the pesticide’s maker, to conduct a field study assessing the insecticide’s threat to bee colony health....

http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/the-great-honeybee-conspiracy/1196

The Great Honeybee Conspiracy
EPA Complicit in Colony Collapse Disorder?
By Jimmy Mengel
Thursday, December 16th, 2010

The humble honey bee is getting its fair share of buzz this year — which doesn't bode particularly well for the species, or American agriculture as a whole.

The most recent revelations involve leaked government documents, regulatory malfeasance, and scientific censorship. To mix an insect metaphor, it's quite a tangled web...

Since 2006, serious decimation of the North American bee population has taken place. Termed “colony collapse disorder,” millions of worker bees have mysteriously disappeared from their colonies, largely confounding the scientific community.
...

But a suspect has emerged as enemy number one: Bayer's pesticide clothianidin.
...

Leaked EPA documents have detailed the regulatory agency's allowance of clothianidin to maneuver its way through regulatory channels in the face of scientists' warning and flawed studies.

According to these documents provided to beekeeper Tom Theobald, the EPA was aware of the pesticide's dangers way back in 2003; but the EPA granted Bayer a "conditional" approval that allowed them to start using the pesticide

http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1779&category=Environment

Honey Bee Disappearances Not “Solved” by Virus and Fungi

© 2010 by Linda Moulton Howe

“Beekeepers there in North Dakota saw so many dead bees ... and we sent some samples into a lab in Florida and they found Imidacloprid in the honey and the bees and the wax. I mean, that pretty much nails it down.”

- Daniel F. Mayer, Ph.D., Entomologist

What I'd really like to see repealed is the sodomy article. In theory that could still be used by an unscrupulous commander to cashier people.

It applies to one and all, but is almost never enforced; mostly because it requires someone to come forward with a complaint.

But the way it's written it pretty much means any one who is not heterosexual is either abstinent, or in violation.

Crap...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Arysta+Acquires+U.S.+Marketing+Rights+to+Clothianidin+Insecticide%3B...-a0125946075

Arysta Acquires U.S. Marketing Rights to Clothianidin Insecticide; Secures U.S. Registration on Turf and Ornamentals.i>

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Arysta LifeScience Corporation [has bought the rights to three poisonous soil chemicals in the past two months]

Arvesta Corporation, has entered into a license agreement granting Arvesta exclusive marketing rights in the United States and Mexico to the broad-spectrum insecticide Clothianidin for soil and [leaf application]....

Registration of Clothianidin has been secured for use of turf and ornamentals and will be sold under the trade names Arena (turf) and Celero (ornamentals). Registration is pending on apples, pears and tobacco. Clutch received registration in the Mexican market in September for use in potatoes, tobacco and ornamentals.

Apples and pear, that's right, kill all the bees that pollinate the fruit, and 1/3 of the rest of the produce in the world.... and ornamental, kill all the butterflies and other pollinating insects

...Clothianidin is a milestone addition to the company's expanding product portfolio for turf, ornamentals and specialty crops.

See them make tons of money, who cares about the extinction of beneficial insects of songbirds, bats, frogs, fish (the pesticide is highly nonselective about what it kills...)

"This is a new generation in insect control that provides broad-spectrum control in many economically significant market segments," she says. "When you include Clothianidin with our existing specialty crops products Elevate, CaptEvate and Captan [[link--group of organic sulfur compounds used as fungicides, including topical treatment of dermatophytosis. Poisoning of birds causes loss of egg production, anorexia and slow growth. ]]*, we have a portfolio of widely recognized, consistently performing products."

You, too, can have a golf course monoculture lawn, with nothing living except the damned golf green grass....

Clothianidin controls soil pests and surface feeding pests in turf (such as white grubs, chinch bug [[ link -- chinch bug, small North American bug, Blissus leucopterus, of the seed bug family. It feeds on small grains, corn, and other grasses, sucking the plant juices and doing much damage to crops, particularly in the Midwest. The adults, about 1/8 in. (3. and mole crickets),] lepidopterous [butterflies and moths] pests in turf and fruit (webworms, codling moth and leafrollers) and sucking pests (such as aphids and leafhoppers).

Bye-bye monarch butterflies, swallowtails, luna moths... I suspect the actual worst pests will adapt relatively quickly... cabbage white butterflies are a highly opportunistic imported species, and are out when other lepidoptera (except for a relatively new pest, winter moths) aren't, from early to late....

The pesticide is nicotine based--tobacco is -poisonous--and is very unselective in its lethality. And it stays in the soil not breaking down for most of two decades....

The stuff makes DDT look innocuous....

I don't think I'll be relying on Gov. Jan Brewer for medical advice any time soon.

My beloved daughter, Pip, has started a blog for her movie reviews.

I hope the ship hasn't sailed on this thread, because I want to rant.

Namely,

Why do so many online Nativity scenes show the participants as children?

I was hunting for a picture(s) to transfer to a tile and paint when I realized this. The trend doesn't seem to be as strong in physical Nativity scenes. (Those trend toward European adults--a different rant.) But what are people getting out of this?

Yours rantingly.

Brenda Kait @319 -- because Nativity scenes are often done as part of grade school Christmas pageants, and lots of parents want to put pictures of their children up on the web.

I'm still surprised at the fact that Baby Sister and I both played with the two porcelain nativities our family has, and we had the same plot. Completely independent. About half the people I've told the plot to think it's hilarious, and half are mystified.

Someone should do a nativity scene featuring baby Connor. "As the child of two vampires, Connor was considered a miracle birth."

OK... I've now got six quarts of stock that I'm trying to simmer down a little more. I'm not sure this is actually a good idea, as it's pretty strong already and keeps throwing skins up to the surface, but I'd really like it to take less space in the freezer.

And I still have to deal with the damn Medicare plan....

Earl @ 322 -

And a kid that turns from an infant to an adolescent overnight would indeed be the stuff of nightmares.

David, 323: It sounds like you're halfway to demi-glace.

Dammit, I think I already burned the stock -- not much, but I can taste a distinct edge. How is it that a stock that's been at a boil for 8 hours, once strained, starts tasting burned after a bare hour of simmering?

And while I'm griping, what's with this 30 minute timeout on the Medicare site? Not to mention all the Javascript links...

I'm making some rice with the stock now, let's see how that turns out.

Knight Moves, move over. Unicorn Vengeance has taken your place at the top of my Bestest Romance Ever (Not) list.

OK, the rice seems to have come out OK. The stock's in the fridge for final cooling...

And apropos of nothing: GPS units used to track Jesus. Also Santa and the Grinch.

Here's my annual holiday special, which I seem to recall writing about fifteen years ago:

FREDDY THE SNOWMAN

Freddy the Snowman
With his scarf of red and green
Didn't look too spry, but my oh my
What a stone-cold death machine!

Freddy the Snowman
Got most everyone but me
With his eyes of coal and his evil soul
On his chilly killing spree.

There must have been a curse upon
That rusty kitchen knife;
When Suzy put it in his hand,
The snowman took her life! Oh --

Freddy the Snowman
Was a child molester too,
And I heard him say, being dragged away,
"I'll be back next year for you!"

(Hackity hack hack, hackity hack hack,
Hacking hard and deep;
Stabbity stab stab, stabbity stab stab,
Kills you in your sleep!)

[ttto: Frosty the Snowman. New words ©2010 by Kip Williams]

And while I'm at it, here's my Christmas card, too. Happy happy, everybody, and to all a good open thread!

Kip, it's gratifying to learn that Frances continued to be a cat. One shudders at possible alternatives.

Help!! Is the lunar eclipse tonight (that is, Sunday night-Monday morning), or tomorrow night (Monday night-Tuesday morning)? I've googled three separate articles and am now completely confused.

Lizzy L @ 333 -

It's Monday night/Tuesday morning. If you're in the Central time zone, totality begins at 1:41 AM.

http://blogs.chron.com/observableuniverse/2010/12/brightness_falls_from_the_air.html

Steve C. at 334: thank you.

Hyper Local News:

Jewish family decides to celebrate Christmas Day appropriately by going out to Chinese restaurant after watching day-long Dr. Who marathon on BBC America channel.

Having read the comments about "Knight Moves," I think that "Queeb" has replaced "Boof" in my list of unfortunate sound effects...

Re: Particles--

"Religion is not well served by making up lies about seasonal customs" could be shortened to "Religion is not well served by making up lies".

I think there's even a commandment about it somewhere.

#328 Pendrift

At first I though you meant Knight Moves the novel by Walter Jon Williams....

Assuming it's not raining here around midnight tomorrow, I'll have a look. Knowing me, I'll probably be up anyway - if only trying to get some work done before the holiday break.

I would have gotten stuff done this weekend, but life and being a good friend and human being intervened. I did find out quite a lot about myself and my psyche, but there have got to be better ways. Maybe.

A question for the knitters out there: which online retailer would you most like to receive a gift certificate for? (I drew my sister in this year's "Secret Santa", and she knits....)

David Goldfarb @341 Knitpicks would be my first choice. My other preferred yarn stores specialize in sock or lace weight yarns.

I. V. Stalin, stagecoach robber!

Lizzy L @186: This is probably way more info than you needed...

More than I need, perhaps, but interesting, nonetheless.

I periodically take a stab at increasing the fruits and vegetables in my diet, but it almost never lasts for more than half a week.

I have at least gotten to the point where I don't eat beef every day, so I guess that's progress. :-\

The mesquite-smoked roast beef from the deli counter at my local grocery store is really, really good.

[sigh] It rained all day, solid, yesterday. It's still dark out this morning, and still raining. I don't think the odds are good for seeing the eclipse tonight in Hawaii.

I wonder if the stream near my office is at flood yet? One year it overflowed into the parking lot and was floating cars away.

@191: Okay, okay, you got me. (Extra points as I've been being a grinch this week.)

Misters Scalia and Thomas -- please retire. Your failures to recuse yourselves from cases which you are NOT disterested parties (Mr Thomas particularly) show you to be corrupt, bigoted, partial, biased officials, whose approach to judicial "restraint" is to push -your- personal agenda on people who do not subscribe to your religion, to your outlook on life, and to YOUR positions as privileged rich protected elite wealthy men who can BUY your way out of "difficulties" and/or have rich powerful buddies shield you from lying under oath and other inconveniences.... Justices Emeriti John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor retired to pursue other endeavors, Justice David Souter resigned from the Supreme Court to return to being a federal judge in New England, citing being a Supreme Court Justice as "The world's best job in the world's worst place."

The three of the were Justices--but the two of you, and Mr Roberts and Mr Alito, are InJustices, putting your religion ahead of the law of the land and dismissing when it's convenient to your sectarian narrow male supremacist plutocratic judging, past precedent and the words, "We the People of the United States of America...." You are NOT supposed to be the speakers for preserving and extending male privileging and protection of robber baron control over and blocking of the rest of the population from opportunity and life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and decent working conditiosn on a livable wage and repect....

Griffith Observatory had a whole fancy eclipse shindig planned. My roommate - who had taken the next morning off in anticipation of being exhausted - had planned on going, but even if it's still going on, driving up the dark, winding road that leads up the hill in the rain with other Angeleno drivers who have questionable rain driving skills seems like a terrible idea.

Also, my dog's "holding it" and hates the rain and her raincoat so much that she'll STAND STOCK STILL IN THE RAIN FOR LIKE 5 MINUTES AT A TIME rather than moving forward and doing her damn business. I should just take my shampoo out with us when I walk her and kill two birds with one stone. I think my fingers are permanently pruned and I may be mildewing even as we speak.

I still prefer this to the f&sk!^$ snow.

Sorry, Paula: shortly after he was confirmed Thomas said that because he was 43 and the confirmation process had been so humiliating he'd have to make sure he stayed on the court for 43 years to teach 'em a lesson. (I always liked the journalist that asked Scalia at a social event what the difference was between his judicial philosophy and that of Thomas. "I believe in Original Intent--I am not a nut.")

# 184 - 186, #347 (and related posts) Lizzy L and Jacques

Nightline and/or ABC 11 PM news, said that the average cost per year for drugs for diabetics is $13,000 and that the costs of treating diabetics is a third of US healthcare costs (consider things like dialysis, diabetic retinopathy, and other consequences/conditions which often follow as effects). Most--not all, Mike Ford was a Type I diabete from childhood--cases of diabetes, overwhelmingly, are Type II and the overwhelming share of them avoidable if on the type of diet Lizzy is on.

On the other hand, a diet of pizza (starch-only plus token enrichment wheat flour, greasy high ft cheese, tomato sauce which does contain some nutrition), soft drinks (high fructose corn syrup and nasty phosphoric acid), and candy --"corn sugar" (HFCS under a red herring relabeling) sweetener and "milkfat" -- and ice cream, and lots of red corn-fed fatty meat, etc., yield hig fat-content people who if they have any genetic susceptibility to Type II diabetes, will get it from exhaustion of the organism control system's ability to control blood sugar with the available capacity in the pancreas for regulating it.... sort of like the old mill dam versus upstream housing and commercial and industril development which took away all the vegetation and ability of the land to absorb heavy rain, paving over the gound causing additional massive runoff, and the results being floods which first stress the dam, then water pours over the top, and then breaches occur, and then the dam collapses completely.... regrow the vegetation and get rid of the pavement etc and if the water was merely flowing uncontrollably over the top of the dam, the dam will go back to "working" properly.... if the dam hasn't been compromised structurally first.

David Goldfarb @341

I like WEBS myself.

Diabetes is also hell on wound healing, either surgical incisions or injuries. So a little more time in therapy, a little more lost productivity, if you're lucky and your disease is well managed--and the other end of the scale, $1200 per treatment in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to try to keep from having a leg amputated.

In the U.S., there are about 60,000 to 80,000 amputations performed each year due to diabetes (this includes toe and foot as well as leg amputations--often several sequential amputations on the same limb).

I freaking HATE diabetes. It killed my best friend at age 47.

Niall McAuley @247:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I'm schizophrenic*,
...and so am I.

---
*Yes yes, dissociative identity disorder, but that doesn't scan right.

#353 Lila
I hate Archer Daniel Midlands-HFCS poster company- the sugar lobby (which created the HFCS monster, by providing taxpayer money and protection of the Colorado sugar beet farmers, the southern sugar growers, and their allies to a degree where it became highly profitable for ADM to jump in with their chemical witchdoctor brew creating HFCS--again, with ADDITIONAL taxpayer subsidies, for cornfarmers....), the corporate agribusiness, the processed foods industry (no I do NOT want your damned indigestion-causing empty calorie starch and fat laden pizza!) the chemicals business with pesticides and herbicides--all driving the price of minimally treated healthy produce up (Clothandian killing off pollinating insects, for example... corn's pollinated by the wind, wheat too...), and the health epidemic their profits have created and keep spreading further.

Paula, it would be easier for me to read what you write if you broke up your ideas into more sentences and paragraphs. It's harder to parse large dense blocks of text, at least for me. Especially when it's all one sentence. As it is, I'm afraid my eyes tend to bounce off your posts.

Tim Walters @311: Calligraphy without a net: Legacy of Letters

Wow. That's absolutely hypnotic.

Lizzy L @333: In queries regarding the moon, I nearly always include "Navy" in my search string. After all, they're one of the few agencies who really truly have a Need to Know.

OK... I've now got six quarts of stock that I'm trying to simmer down a little more. I'm not sure this is actually a good idea, as it's pretty strong already and keeps throwing skins up to the surface, but I'd really like it to take less space in the freezer.

I do this every year, and in my experience the key is to not simmer it.

Put it in a heavy-bottomed pot, put a heat spreader under, put it on the lowest flame possible--if it bubbles at all the heat is way too high. You want the temperature to be 140-150. Then just let it sit--it may take 36 hours, but I reduce mine until it coats a spoon thickly and then freeze it and cut it into cubes.

(I do this starting with quadruple-strength stock, and generally end up with about 2 gallons of concentrate for a cows-worth of bones.)

Between tasting the stuff I've made as gifts and to bring to work, and eating the stuff that cow-orkers have brought in, I'm starting to feel over-sugared and over-buttered.

The notion popped into my head of subsisting on oatmeal, carrots, and spinach until Thursday, when I board a red-eye flight for visits back East.

I see lots of recipes on the web for oat cakes. One thing that isn't clear is whetehr the "oat meal" in the ingredients list is cooked oatmeal or just a heap of the raw grain. (Put another way, are oat cakes a way of disposing of leftover porridge?)

Can anyone recommend a recipe? There are so many variations, and never having tried these before I don't know how to choose. (NB: I do steel cut oats.)

Any "savory" variations on oat cakes I might eat for dinner? (Prefereably not involving the blood and kishkes of livestock.)

Diatryma @321 Now I want to know what the story was! Share?

Okay, if I have to embarrass myself with snorty laughter at my desk because of this link, then I'm taking you all with me. Pregnancy-portrait hilarity, with a side of OMG WTF.

Oatcakes are not a way of disposing of excess porridge.

The recipes I see (on a quick scan) are mostly for rolled oats (aka "old-fashioned oats"), which is what I expect. If unspecified, go for that. It's possible the recipe means oats ground into flour -- you can do that by putting rolled oats in the food processor. But I wouldn't expect a disaster if you use rolled oats for oat flour, or vice versa.

(Whereas substituting oat porridge would be a disaster. Probably an amusing disaster, rather than an "...and that's how I wound up on a sinking washtub ten miles from the South Sandwich Islands" sort of disaster. *Probably*.)

Clifton Royston @ 346:

Damn, we had several hours of clearing with sun yesterday which got me hoping, but it rained all morning today, and now we've got high clouds with some breaks. I just looked at the NOAA satellite pictures and they look like lots of clouds, with maybe a few breaks to the west of us. I think the weather gods are just playing with us, but I'm going to take a look outside around 9:30 or so tonight when first penumbral contact is scheduled. Luckily I can get a pretty good view of the sky at the schoolyard about 3 blocks away, assuming the weather cooperates.

JCarson: We had two nativity scenes, one good one with all the players, including a random shepherd I named Timothy (Baby Sister didn't) and an angel who confused me because Gabriel is the angel, and this is a woman, so Gabriel must be a female name. Right? Of course right. There's also a little-kid one, still porcelain, with two lambs, three blond cherub-style angels, and a sweet white baby Jesus (the other one's white, too, but a little less cutesy and a little more someday-I-will-be-crucified-and-that's-fine-with-me).

So the little cute angels, named Peter, Paul, and Mary, are in training. They have a practice nativity and everything with baby lambs and a practice Jesus. Except one day, they decided they wanted to practice with the real Jesus, so they took him... and lost him. They had to swap in the practice Jesus and hope no one noticed while they tracked down the actual Son of God. Timothy helped, I think, because he was my favorite; I don't know how Baby Sister's story went beyond the commonalities.

This is why, even though I am secular, I will have a nativity once I have kids. Probably more than one.

SamChevre #359: Thanks for the info... Two thoughts: 140-150°ree;F? That's even below green-tea temperature! And: A cow's worth of bones?

Incidentally, the stuff didn't gel properly, but I did the best I could at skimming it, and am freezing the first pair of trays now. I'm also going to stop putting bean-broth in my stock bags, as I suspect that's causing some of the issues I've had, including excessive cloudiness.

Some good news and a medical/maybe-insect question.

Court rules E-mail protected by Fourth Amendment. Took them long enough!

And... I've now three times over the past week or so encountered an odd thing on my hands (possibly a bug bite) -- a small (1.5mm) but itchy blister, twice on fingers and now one on my wrist. Pressure reveals a nearly invisible welt around it, about 7mm across. (Actually, the one on my wrist seems to have swelled in the past few minutes, after some scratching, and is now pale against a larger pink area.) This doesn't seem to match up with the pictures I've seen of bed-bug bites, but I can't think what it could be, especially since I've been noticing them during the day (like, just now sitting at the computer).

Tim Powers tropes: Walkers using their hands likes paddles to "swim" through the air.

(It's just that I'm reading Last Call right now, and I keep noticing more.)

David Harmon @ 367: Those sound like hives to me. I used to get just that sort of thing on my hands and wrists on a regular basis -- I'm fairly certain they were stress related (especially as I sprouted a huge, horrible patch of them right during one of the worst times of my life).

Renatus #369: Hmm. I've certainly been getting pretty (and unusually) stressed about the Medicare-plan thing✵ lately -- do stress hives have a delay of a few hours? I was getting a bit crazy about it last night and this morning, but I didn't feel this one until just lately (~ 8:00 PM).

✵ I just got called back by an adviser at the local senior center, I'll call her back to make an appointment tomorrow. The Medicare.gov site is amazingly frustrating for something that's not obviously broken.

David Harmon @ 367 & 370, Renatus @ 369:

Yup, sounds like what I dealt with repeatedly over about a 5 year stretch long ago (still get it occasionally but nothing like that strectch). Got bad enough at one point I saw my MD about it, he diagnosed it as dermatitis nervosa and prescribed hydrocortisone cream, which brought it under control nicely. Since then I keep a tube of OTC hydrocotisone in the medicine cabinet and can knock it down just about as fast as it appears.

I can at least be glad I'm only getting individual blisters -- some of the pics I was googling had people half-covered with welts!

David:
Hives are also (and I think primarily) an allergic reaction. Questions to consider for that: did you eat anything new or different shortly before you noticed them, did you brush up against some plant, etc.

Sometimes, I get a single hive. That's how I think of it, anyway: one single welt in about the same place you get your TB stick test on my right arm*. It itches, but if I leave it alone, it goes away. No clue what causes it, and it's never there when I'm at the doctor's.

*pronouns, pronouns....

Open Thready (though this looks as though this should go in one of Jim's Winter Weather posts): More Bumper Cars On Ice! In Spokane!

Though not on the Horrible Hill, the one that scared me badly in the winter. This one's not so steep.

#356 Cally

Stream of conscious sentences
Running on and on.
Stream of conscious sentences,
Midnight, noon, and dawn!
Stream of conscious sentences
Pour out in a rush.
Stream of conscious sentences,
My but they are lush!
Stream of conscious sentences,
Start the thought and type,
Stream of conscious sentences,
They make Cally gripe!

Paula, Cally's not the only one.

Terry Karney @ 315... sodomy (...) requires someone to come forward with a complaint

Or backward?

Avram@377: No, indeed.

Just went outside to look for the moon...earlier tonight it was cloudy but variable; right now the clouds are sufficiently thick that I caught a glimpse of moonlight, but nothing else.

siriosa @ 298... David Goldfarb @ 299... In that case, let's stick with the Breads for the Gathering of Light. By the way, it looks like it'll be the two of you, plus Terry Karney, who'll show up between 7pm and 8pm, and yours truly. I you want to call the whole thing off...

You say toMAYto, i say toMAHto
you eat poTAYto and i eat poTAHto
toMAYto, toMAHto, poTAYto, poTAHto

Serge: Not even me, unless we're doing it some other day than Thursday.

WPBT in Miami has a live-cam feed of the eclipse here, and only enough cloud that you occasionally see a wisp of it blow past.

Travelling news..

Seen by man's wife in the ladies's room of a gas station in Arizona's Kingman, an arrow pointing down at the water closet with the following graffiti:

Alternate Route to Narnia

Santiago, Chile has no cloud cover at all. (Note: this is a stream-sharing venture and will ask you to allow use of your bandwidth. You can say no.)

I just popped outside and could see the eclipse. I don't think I'd seen one since the age of five, so I'm glad I made a point of doing so.

I stepped out for a bit to watch the beginning of the eclipse, dressed as warmly as I could manage -- hooded bathrobe, down vest, etc. I was standing on my front steps, looking around the neighborhood, when I saw two forms come walking slowly down my road -- and then they stopped next to my car. One person then stepped around the back of my car, looked up, saw me, and scooted away; his travelling companion pretended to innocence and didn't move as fast, but they both left faster than they'd arrived.

The moon continues to look neat, although my fabulous girlfriend seems to have fallen asleep (at her home) -- she wanted me to call her but didn't answer her phone.

Now I'm back inside, with a cup of hot tea and a warm cat firmly ensconced upon my chest.

I watched the eclipse until the crick in my neck was too distracting. Moon was directly overhead, and my deck was still wet, and I'm too old to be lying down in a puddle. Was very pretty, and looked pink to me. I'm sure the official color will be bronze or some such.

Serge, if it's just you and me and Terry not until later, and it's raining, and I'm trying very hard not to come down with whatever-it-is ... I'm having second thoughts.

re 383: wrong series.

Clifton Royston #373: Not really -- didn't even hike last Friday, due to the snow. Frankly, the timing supports the stress idea.

Did *not* see the eclipse, due to today being a work day and I'm trying to get my sleep cycle straightened out anyhow. As typical lately, my dreams were pegging the wierdometer. (see "stress" above) The night before last, I dreamed I was at my aunt's house... trying to get to sleep. Last night, it was the home invasion of the (not-my-real-) neighbors. Oy gevalt.

Clouded out in Houston, dammit.

I saw the eclipse just before dawn, very nice.

No eclipse for me. I had to sleep last night.

Went down early, and though I feel fine during the day, I'm still having classic fever dreams at night, though somewhat milder than the really bad ones.

Even after I realized I was having them and consciously rejected them, they kept coming back: I was making some kind of Flash presentation, without a computer. This was varied, at first, with some kind of framing story about working at an answering service again, but it quickly segued into all Flash, all the time.

Illness sucks.

Diatryma @ 365 Cute! Reminds me of a story my Ganfer used to tell us about Peter, Magdalene and the lamb. Nativity scenes really are just very specific dolls, aren't they?

David Harmon #366:

Note that the 140-150F isn't for the broth-making, just for the concentrating.

It's been years since I had meat in my house that I hadn't butchered myself, so using up bones and bits from a whole cow has been a regular winter activity. (Even when I only get a quarter, no one else wants that many bones so I usually can get all of them.)

Much to my surprise, we did get to see some of the eclipse. About half way to totality, just after putting my son to bed, I checked and the clouds had thinned up enough to see the moon with a big bite out of it, so I got him up again. We all went out and spent a while staring at it, sharing the binoculars, and then went in and came out again to check on it periodically. The clearing lasted until just about 10 minutes before full eclipse, when there was a tiny sliver left, and then the clouds socked us in again. We didn't get to see the red/copper/whatever moonglow.

When we put my son to bed again, he was much more disappointed at missing the total stage than he was initially at missing the whole thing. I treated that as an opportunity to talk (briefly) about emotions and expectations, and emotions getting more worked up when you're tired.

Paula Lieberman @376: ::snerk!:: =)

Clifton Royston @373 & David Harmon @389: Huh. Y'all may just have solved a mystery for me as well: Itchy welty-bitey spots scattered across my upper belly and mid-back, no obvious cause. I knew I was wigged out last weekend, but jeez.

Fortunately, Benadryl before bed seems to have addressed the problem adequately.

Also missed the eclipse. Was actually awake at an opportune time, but the prospect of actually getting vertical and putting on enough clothing to fight the cold was more than I could feature. ::Sigh:: Oh well. Next time. (Ahem.)

But at least I did make it over to Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little's for Solstice comestibles. Nommy squash soup (and I'm not normally a fan of squash, but this was definitely Food), and homemade fruitcake (which actually combined nicely with the Field Roast to produce a lovely mince-like result). Plus! Low-Sodium Egg Nog, yar har.

Left earlier than I would have preferred, it being a work-night. Also, as anticipated, JJ (who'd been let out to play before I left) wanted to go in early. He's recovering from a double-mastectomy and, while he's still adamant that he be allowed out to look at his girls, he wears down more quickly than usual. (He gets his stitches out Thursday, woo hoo!)

Daily What has a nice time-lapse display of the whole eclipse. Does anyone recognize the music? It's given me an earworm of Erik Satie.

David Harmon @ 370: Unfortunately, I haven't noticed when hives appear in relation to a stressful situation -- then again, when I'm stressed out enough to break into hives, the stress is bad enough to eat at me even when I'm not currently in the stressful sitation.

Eclipse report from Wellington, New Zealand.

The moon was supposed to rise fully eclipsed, which it undoubtedly did, but behind several layers of cloud.

We got our first glimpse just after third contact, with a tiny sliver of lit surface, and the rest of the moon a dull, slightly reddish grey. In the gaps in the cloud, we could watch as the lit segment expanded to become the bulk of the disc.

Herself has some photographs which she will sort through in the next few days.

J Homes.

For the nerdy home-decorator who has everything: Star Trek doors!

As the satellite images showed, the sky over Portland was almost completely overcast last night. I went outside around first contact, 9:30 PST, and we had a complete overcast at that point, so I bagged it. Probably a good idea; I had physical therapy yesterday morning, then went shopping for needed groceries in the afternoon, and that's about as much as I can do in a day. Too bad, as I haven't stayed out for the full run of a total lunar eclipse since I was 10 or 11 (and that was in February on the east coast with snow and ice all around; I was much hardier then).

I strongly recommend this Washington Post article to everyone. This is a continuation of their "Top Secret America" series talking about the post-9/11 changes in government. It's disturbing as hell, and very important.

Twenty open threads ago, I raised a concern about the way our occupation-and-terrorist-hunting tactics and equipment might one day be brought home, and used to impose an unwanted government on us, and to break up any resistance to that government using the same kind of assassination and abduction and torture as we've used overseas.

Excerpt: (But go read the article!)

The streets of Memphis are a world away from the streets of Kabul, yet these days, the same types of technologies and techniques are being used in both places to identify and collect information about suspected criminals and terrorists.

The examples go far beyond Memphis.

* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.

* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies General Atomics' Predator drones along the Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of aircraft, equipped with real-time, full-motion video cameras, that has been used in wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.

Along with the deployment of high-tech surveillance technology that looks like something out of Robocop, the article describes a whole set of "experts" who train local police departments in, more-or-less, the impending jihad and imposition of sharia law by American Muslims. (The whole story seemed to me to be about the rebirth of the Red Squad, this time with better technology.)

I missed the eclipse due to rain and cloud cover--or, to be more accurate, due to my expectation that such would still be occluding visibility of the sky during anything like an opportune moment, and so I didn't bother to look. But I stayed up and watched most of the last lunar eclipse visible in my area, so I don't feel hugely bad about missing this one.

Happy Winter Solstice (and all other seasonal greetings as they apply)!

Just so you know: "healthy" and "cookie" should not be combined in the same phrase. Results of the attempt are rarely good.

E Palo Alto had clear skies, decent weather. We got home near totality, the moon looked as if it were wearing a yarmulke.

On the way in, there was a pair of young women who had stopped their car to stand and stare.

We kept going out to watch.

It was a good night.

The FCC caved and has betrayed net neutrality. (there may be a pop-up, sorry)

Benjamin Wolfe... siriosa... There won't be a Gathering of Light in Oakland this coming Thursday. Let's try at the end of January, hopefully on Friday, January 28.

Benjamin Wolfe... siriosa... There won't be a Gathering of Light in Oakland this coming Thursday. Let's try at the end of January, hopefully on Friday, January 28.

I've been a bit busy, so my sonnets have been piling up.

Saint Thomas Aquinas once said, On the Sabbath
Try and make no noise that goes beyond your house.
Cries of passion between lovers are exempt. Beneath
A full moon in full eclipse which tends to arouse
And inflame the senses, particularly love,
I stand under the shadow that will creep and cross
The glabrous moon, shining white above,
And onto my heart those words emboss:
“Cries of passion are exempt”. Our plans
For a weekend of passion and fun, in the snow
And out of it; for walking in the forest , holding hands,
Will come to certain passionate fruition, I know.
This Sabbath commandment will be upheld with glee
Whether outdoors or under the Christmas tree.

We were working in my house, cleaning

The detritus of the years accumulated in spite

Of all efforts, as one partner abandoning

The other, left it all in her angry flight

Away. I picked up a length of finished wood

Which looked familiar but unknown

Carried it to the stairs, and stood

Saying I would toss it -- and not postpone

Decision. She looked at it and said, “We’re

Going to grow old; we’ll need it then”

Her face showed her love, deep and sincere;

Without argument I put it back again

Because I knew that she was not only right -

And it filled my heart with a love so bright

And, er, this one which almost belongs in the Birds and Bees thread:

She bought yellow roses, hid them on her deck
Invited me in, gave me a hug and kisses without end,
Raining them across my face and neck
While I returned them, in great transcend
Of emotions, love and desire rising paramount
Within us, matched in fervor as in height
Culminating in our natural exeunt
And kisses that lasted throughout the night
Although we won’t go into great detail
As anyone could guess from this what happened;
This part’s an old story, a well-known tale
Across the ages, of lovers abstained
By distance and time, then released to their
Passion, leading swiftly to all things bare.

All three delightful!

I particularly enjoy the pensive tone of the second one.

It was good to have you over, Jacque. Glad to hear, also, that my taking extra care in differentiating white granulated substances was appreciated. (I finished off the rest of the nog this evening. The ice cream had sort of semi-refrozen in the refrigerator. After briefly whisking it all around, the result tasted like milkshake. As it ought.)

Another neighbor came over late, and he told me a swapped ingredient story that may actually be funnier than my salted eggnog one. Seems his mom was making pumpkin pie, and the recipe called for a tablespoon of paprika (interesting enough, right there); and she grabbed a jar that looked *just* like the paprika jar but turned out instead to be pure cayenne. Oops.

'Round about 1:30 those of us still sitting around the table stepped out on the balcony for a look at the eclipse. It was total. The color was like a non-opaque shadow -- like when you have different light sources at night, so that light falls across shadows without making the shadow entirely go away? Like that -- which had been tinted faintly rust.

After everyone went home I kept going out to check on its progress. I saw it as a crescent after totality, then a half, then just the last nibble on the bottom curve of the moon healing itself around... 3:30 maybe?

The Yule Log didn't last half so long. Silly thing gave up the ghost around 2. I kept burning wedges slowly until dawn, and went to bed just as John was getting up for work.

I haven't gotten anything useful done today except more clean-up. Today's for resetting the sleep/wake cycle, I guess.

Lexica: I note you're another Solstice All-Nighter observer - will we get to read about this year's excursion? The post you linked to was lovely.

Jim: Pippin's review of Inception was fun to read. She teases some things out of the movie that I hadn't noticed at all. Very cool.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @414: My (spiciness-loving) brother-in-law, when young and dumb and cooking the family dinner, famously misused pure cayenne instead of chili powder -- and because, to his mind, the rest of the family always under-spiced the chili, he added tablespoons instead of teaspoons.

He was the only one who could eat the finished product, and only in small doses. This was the same period of his life where he enjoyed snacking on dried habañero peppers as if they were almost popcorn ... or, at least, wasabi peas. Thankfully, in his middle age, he has become less insanely spice-loving, though he still likes a good hot dish. Merely humanly hot, though, rather than super-humanly. :->

Clifton @ 413: Thanks! I've been enjoying writing them, far more than I would have expected. I used to be terrible at sonnets -- I'd get halfway through and lose the rhyme or the scansion, and end in a mess.

Ginger:

Can I just say how much I enjoy seeing Ginger on Open thread 151 in the recent comments list, and knowing that there's a ray of sunshine waiting for me there?

I appreciate you sharing your happiness with us here.

Abi @ 417: Aw, shucks.

The Fluorospherians have been a source of comfort and strength for me, during those especially dark days nearly a year ago. This is a small form of repayment for that support.

It's truly a silver lining; I wouldn't be writing sonnets like this if my Ex hadn't walked out, etc., etc. One of the things I've learned over this past year is that sharing makes me stronger -- something I was not ever comfortable doing when I was young and proud.

Now I have some stronger friendships online and in real life, and I am amazed by all these wonderful people around me. I knew life would get better, and it has.

When I was a senior in high school, our English teacher would dismiss class by telling us to "Go Forth and Spread Beauty and Light". I do my humble best.

Lunar Eclipse The moon turned red over here.

A local group of people set their alarms, e-mailed, IMed, tweeted etc. Very particularly, we froze our tushes. It was very clear here.

Unexpected consequences reported by companions of the four-legged: "You're awake. I get to eat! What? No eating? What the f are you people doing? I'm going back to bed. Harrumph."

Other than the cold, teach-in re Charleston's celebration bawl of secession, in which some of us dressed in costumes: I was a Northern Abolitionist bluestocking. No photos, at least none in my possession.

We still are unclear as to plans for Christmas. We may well just cozy in here and work on the book. We will return to NYC for at least a week around New Year's, and that will be stuffed with social distractions. Which, I admit, I'm looking forward to very much because I am missing our friends very much.

Love, c.

Elliott Mason #415: That reminds me of the time when my favourite ex-wife mistook scotch bonnet peppers for bell peppers and merrily cut up one to eat with cheese on a cracker. The result was, shall we say, interesting.

Ginger:

Yeah, what abi said. For a variety of reasons, this hasn't been the most pleasant Christmas season ever for me[1], and I've really enjoyed basking in a bit of your radiated joy.

[1] These all fall into the category of annoyances, nothing serious[2].

[2] You know it's been a rotten week, when your main categories of laundry are not "whites" and "colors," but instead "kid puke" and "dog pee." Grmbl!

I was just reading this paper on control fraud by William Black. Control fraud happens when the people at the top of the organization are driving the fraud. It's related to the idea of bust-out fraud (where a criminal takes over a legit business and exploits its good reputation to rip off its creditors, suppliers, customers, and employees).

Teresa talked about that kind of fraud in light of the Bush administration here. I'll admit I didn't take her description nearly as seriously as I should have.

The other idea that's really critical here is "ideological capture," which I first saw here. It's implicit in the Black paper as well. The idea is that financial successful people and businesses commanded and command great respect from regulators, lawmakers, reporters, academics, etc., that they not only evolved a belief system in which they were a bunch of geniuses who deserved their place at the top of the pyramid, but also that they managed to convince much of the top tier of our society of the same thing.

I'm coming to suspect that post-9/11, the other groups that have managed regulatory capture of government and media elites are the top military leaders and intelligence/homeland security agencies. You can see the media and policymaking elites' anger at Wikileaks as a reflection of that ideological capture--the top military leaders, intelligence agencies, and top government officials got mad, and the rest of the elites said "Oh, look, we're supposed to be mad at these guys!"

The fun thing is, I got all the way through to the end of it without realizing when it was written. I thought he was working up to discussing the massive mortgage fraud, mispricing of complex derivatives, suborning of the ratings agencies, etc., all the way until I got to the end of the paper. Then I went back and saw that it was written in 2005, when the current disaster was at most a few dark clouds on the horizon.

(That is, I got all the way to the end of the Black paper without realizing it was published in 2005. Somehow, I missed the weirdly disjointed paragraphs in Preview.)

UN rescinds open season on gays.

At least ONE thing I can be proud of my country for -- the US led the effort to get sexual orientation re-included.

I send her Ogden Nash, unheard of in Newmarket.
She returns with poetry instead like this:
"You feel cold, so I reach for a blanket"
And what comes welling up is pure bliss.
My quotes of silly poetry, meant to cheer
Her up are met with poems that reflect
Her deepest feelings, her desire to bring us near
(or nearer at least), in a union of respect,
And adoration, of comfort and guidance,
Of feeding the hunger with food for body and soul.
Joining us like two atoms in a bond of covalence,
Spreading joy for this season of Noel,
Through poetry, silly and serious alike, we grow
Into companions; holding hands, we walk as beaux

Re: the "Useful Defenses for Plagarists"... Teresa, you're gonna get coal in your stocking if you keep laying traps like that! (Or is that what you want? :-) ) I don't know why I was surprised that was at a free-paper (and miscellaneous-scam) site....

The Christmas Story, told by children obviously having an excellent time. "Following the star", indeed.

Debbie: OMG TEH KEWT!!!

David Harmon @ 426

I've heard most of those before. I'm surprised they didn't mention this one

David Harmon #426: I note that "I turned in the wrong paper" is part of said "useful defenses". I find it less than compelling having heard it a time or two.

Sunset on Mars.

praisegod #429, Fragano #430: Oh, definitely -- that's part of why it's a trap. The whole theme of the piece could be summed up as "keep digging"!

HLN: My watch died yesterday⌚... quite a few years old, but it's still annoying, as I haven't seen many other watches depending from a clip suitable for a belt-loop. I can't wear a wristwatch -- my carpal tunnel usually doesn't bother me, but a wristband will set if off real quick, and I liked this one better than a pocketwatch with a dangly, breakable, chain.

⌚ Working in the Language room: "Hmm, I'm hungry, isn't it noon yet? Hey, wait a minute....

David Harmon @433, here are the search terms I used, which resulted in a good number of hits: hanging clip belt loop watch

The sky above my house was all clouded over, so I didn't stay up to watch the eclipse. Ah, well.

Many years ago, mid-70s, there was an amazing and wonderful total eclipse of the moon visible on the West Coast. I observed it in Dolores Park in San Francisco -- this was a time when it was perfectly okay to ramble about Dolores Park in the middle of the night. We brought blankets and food, and probably some illegal substances were ingested. At the peak of the event, when the moon was a stunning blood red (or maybe not, but so it seemed) we whomped pots and pans together and yelled "Come back, Moon!" above the din.

She did.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little, #414, back in ancient days, I'd been emancipated and become my brother's guardian. I worked at a low level job and there were times when the night or two before I got my check was a little tight. We frequently had popcorn for dinner those nights. One night, when we were using the last of the kernels, I opened the pour spout of the salt instead of the shake. My brother still reminds me that we went without dinner that night and it was all my fault.

HLN: Asthmatic woman has trouble adapting to Colorado altitude. "I'm a little worried, really. My nephews are excited about going skiing with me, but I'm having attacks at the slightest provocation." The woman added that she'd welcome any hints from the readership.

Earl #434: Cool... I hadn't gotten around to the search yet, but those keywords⌚ did indeed turn up quite a few. Poking around, I saw a number of interesting candidates, and decided to buy this one. The clip is a fairly close match to my current watch, while the glow-in-the-dark numbers are an improvement. (We'll see how the magnifier holds up, but that could be useful. Between my age and the hours at a computer screen....) I note in passing that "golf clip" seems to cover two very different styles -- this round clip, and the long carabiner clips.

Amusingly, I also saw one "western goods" store offering moccasins from a familiar name... a reseller who I once worked for, trying to rescue her computer from 10+ years of neglect. (It was a one-woman shop -- I heard her daughter took it over after her death.) The funny part is that she just relays her orders to other sources, and remails the products, so ordering them from the "western" site, they'd actually be passed along by at least three companies on their way to you.

⌚ This business of passing along search keywords is interesting from an informatic point of view. It's not a specific pointer, or even a full description -- it just clips out a chunk of search space from the Googleverse, but that's useful in itself. It might be a computational analogy of pointing "over there".

David Harmon 433: I use the Guard Dog watch on a belt clip from Duluth Trading Co. Only trouble is it keeps falling on the floor if I forget it's there when I take off my belt.

Erik #439: That's one reason I prefer the round clip that goes on a belt loop -- it stays with my pants.

TexAnne @437 - Water, water, water. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Take it slow. Rest as needed. Sunscreen is good; there's about a mile less natural sunscreen here (i.e. atmosphere).

There's also ditching the ski crew up on the mountains and coming downhill to Boulder to visit Jacque and me. ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZrf0PbAGSk&feature=player_embedded

digital nativity

Ginger, I've been there, defending a polished stick against the discard pile. I find it helps to find a present use for such things, like the polished wooden parallelepiped that I put rubber bands on. It's useful! I reach for it whenever I want a rubber band, and when I want to put one away!

Kip @ 443: It was the bannister that I'd removed years ago -- it makes the stairway too narrow. I had no argument against her simple statement, though, so it rests in the guest room for now.

Nicole, 441: That would be more of a possibility if I weren't carless. OTOH, this won't be my last visit to CO; my relatives seem to be thoroughly pleased with their life here.

TexAnne: Then I look forward to your next visit!

(I know exactly which yarn-and-fiber shops to tempt you with. Mwahahaha.)

TexAnne @437:
Seconding what Nichole said -- it gets incredibly dry up there, which makes for dry, goopy lungs to go with the shortage of air at altitude. Some suggestions:

If you can get a humidifier going indoors, especially in the bedroom, it may help. Otherwise, try comically large amounts of (non-alcoholic) fluids.

Similarly: hot steamy showers, and avoid breathing through your mouth outdoors wherever possible.

If you use a nebulizer, you may also get some additional relief by nebulizing sterile saline to moisten your lungs/loosen mucous.

And don't commit to charging out skiing the first day or two -- if you take it easy and don't go to an even higher altitude, your body will adjust to altitude more quickly.

That "defenses for plagiarists" page is interesting, although certainly not universalisable (at my alma mater, for instance, claiming that you forgot to put quote marks in would simply be a straight-up admission of plagiarism - the University of Sheffield was very hot on plagiarism, and as I recall did not distinguish between accidental and deliberate). The performative contradiction is particularly interesting - the article starts out by claiming that it is "specifically for those students who have been accused of plagiarism, but who believe that they are not guilty", but goes on to suggest various lies that might be told in one's defence, which would be of use specifically for those students who have committed plagiarism and think they might be able to get away with it. The very first piece of advice - "you must NEVER ADMIT Intentional Plagiarism" - is surely pretty redundant if aimed at innocent students.

Open thready: I just read the most Mary Sue detective novel I've ever encountered. The author is a stay-at-home mother of two, former Ivy-trained public defender, married to a successful scriptwriter, living in LA, and jewish. The protagonist is all of the above except "pregnant with her second."

It wasn't BAD- I picked it up in the middle of my sledgehammer drumroll of finals*, and it did just what I needed it to do- but it was startling.

* last Tuesday, 5 PM: Take-home final, due 10 PM Friday. Last Wednesday, 2 PM: Scheduled final. "Start when you like, takes 3.5 hours" final, available between 7 PM Wednesday and, I believe, 10 PM Thursday.

By the way, I have a new article up on my web page: "Defenses for plagiarists." I'm pretty proud of it.

Sean H @ 448: I had the impression that Teresa linked to that "Defenses" article in the same spirit of helpiness that inspired the 'Flying Moose of Nargothrond' Tolkien homework page, or her recent list of leaf pigments as including aniline and malachite.

I'm sure it will be particularly fascinating when some set of investigators realize that their various plagiarists' lists of defenses have all been plagiarized too. "Oh dear - you just skipped from defense #1 to defense #3. Didn't you want to first claim that your computer crashed and converted your file of notes to plain text and lost all the references?"

IJWTS how much I heartily approve of salting plagiarism sites with information which is not only worthless, but certain to get users caught. It's one of the more brilliant defense strategies I've encountered.

Has anyone ever successfully deprogrammed a Libertarian?

Irrelevant to anyone but me, and my husband probably -- I am absurdly happy.

Needless to add I suppose, but just in case -- this is purely personal, intimate, domestic happiness I am speaking of. Outside, all over, it is anything but happiness giving.

I am treasuring this while we are so fortunate to have it. Back to reality in May.

Love, c.

Earl @ 453 -

Has anyone ever successfully deprogrammed a Libertarian?

No...market forces should take care of that. :-)

Constance:

...
Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day.

O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones!
What had the Caesars but their thrones?

-- W. B. Yeats, Demon and Beast

Bah, blockquote formatting fail. Imagine the second and final stanza also indented, if you will. I have been remembering this ending lately when my Zen meditation goes well and I find myself suddenly, astonishingly, who I am and right here. What had the Caesars but their thrones, indeed?

How long before those plagiarism sites contain biographies of fictional characters, presented as though they were real? How many of these people would check that there really was a Duke of Stepney, a 1937 Schneider Trophy meeting, and an Albert, Duke of York, as Governor-General of Canada?

Earl #453: Alternatively, a mugger might manage to do it....

#455: No, it takes the intervention of three ghosts.

Earl @ 543:
Has anyone ever successfully deprogrammed a Libertarian?

I don't know that anyone's ever been able to program one in the first place.

Dave Bell #458: Now that you've mentioned it, probably next time Teresa gets sufficiently bored! :-)

Well, the next two sonnets I wrote I'll have to keep private, but one of my friends on Facebook requested a poem too. Here it is:

A Sonnet for My Friend, Kerry M

My best friend Kerry M – no, the other one
(I have two of the same name) –
Wanted a poem , so I’d begun
To explain that it was only fair game
Because Kerry M -- now, which
One do I mean? One’s short, the other’s
Not; but both are riotous and rich
In humor or humour, as well as brothers;
One claims I ignored her to read
And the other calls me a wizard;
However, I think both are agreed
That life is best lived facing outward,
Ready to meet all challenges head on
To which I can only say “Right on!”

Earl @ 453: Which kind of L(l)ibertarian? I hope you don't have a Randroid on your hands.

Holiday baking in a new land: Puff pastry is less happy at 25C (20C dewpoint) than at 65F (45F dewpoint), but bread dough is happier.

Auckland is mysteriously sold out of whole cloves (well, the three places I tried), which required some recalculation. However, fruit bread has been made, and 'high grade' flour turns out to work just like bread flour. Olive bread with ajwain is in process.

#456 ::: Clifton Royston

Yeats!

Wonders appear in the season of wonders, here in Arthur's court of Camelot!

Love, c.

Picture of recent weather in Netherlands from a blog that's usually about electronics.

And there's really no reason to substitute cayenne for chili powder by accident when you can use one of them in place of the cinnamon you thought you were putting in the homemade granola.

Dave Bell #458:

Reminds me of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" where the net is salted with deliberately inaccurate information by activists concerned about privacy.

thomas #465:
'High grade flour' contains more gluten/protein & is what I use for breads & pizza bases. Whole cloves should be readily available from any number of Asian grocery shops - I've never had trouble finding it.

Soon Lee:

There isn't usually a cloves problem, it's just that three supermarkets happened to sell out of that, and not any other spices, and I was tired of shopping. I'm sure that if I wandered over to Mt Roskill or Sandringham I could find plenty of cloves.

I haven't seen anyone else here cite this yet, so...

Eight-year-old children publish bee study in Royal Society journal

“We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.

Altogether delightful reading. :)

Bill Stewart 467 said: @And there's really no reason to substitute cayenne for chili powder by accident when you can use one of them in place of the cinnamon you thought you were putting in the homemade granola.

OWW! However, this only drives home the utter sensibleness of my mother teaching me to use multiple senses when cooking -- I reflexively, always, sniff a spice bottle before using it. This is partly to engage my flavorbrain and judge the growing meld, but it also means I would never, ever swap chili powder for cinnamon! Some other pairs, maybe, but not that one.

Usually not cayenne (or straight-up ground ancho, or whatever) for chili powder, either, as they smell different to me.

This becomes particularly useful if one is in the habit of keeping around the ground-powder versions of, say: sage, marjoram, summer savory, rosemary ... all of which are basically the exact same grey-green powdery color, though of somewhat varying fluffy/packed densities.

My sister once asked my mother to make her a bagel with cream cheese. She may have gestured to the bagel in the toaster and the cream cheese on the counter; accounts differ.

Whatever the cause, she walked off with a bagel spread with Crisco. And took at least one bite.

Diatryma #472:

Have you read Steven Brust's account of a similar experience.

It was sufficient to make a non-SF reader friend of mine willing to try reading Agyar.

thomas #469:

It does however, make me wonder what proportion of whole cloves sales happen in December, for the purpose of studding Christmas hams.

Things that make you go "WTF?!"... received in an email booking confirmation for flights:

Flight Itinerary

Thank you for booking a scheduled flight with Monarch. Please do not reply to this e-mail. See below for contact details.

Monarch is a ticket-less airline, so please print this page for your records.

[...]

Think before you print - do you really need to print this e-mail?

Scratching my head: Do I correctly understand that Making Light has a thread-level RSS, but not a blog-level feed?

A fruitful conversation, which I am sure will be greatly appreciated here.

I'm just going to purchase some horticultural implements.

Jaque @476: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/atom.xml is the post feed.

Hyperlocal news...

Man's wife says she married her mother's best son-in-law.

Hyperlocal news items:

* Chronically loose top on a holder for sewing pins necessitates additional 20-minute meticulous search for stragglers in carpet, bedding, half of room.

* Final what-to-get-for Giftmas dilemma solved with inspired application of a mathom.

* Local beagle ENTHRALLED with the big blue paper-fabric bags that Amazon gifts-too-large-to-wrap come in: it's a cave, with CORNERS, and it's SOFT, and it's DARK! He emphatically declared it perfect and fell asleep in it.

* Leftover excessively pink yarn from Big Sekrit Giftmas Project ingeniously repurposed into a beaded 'mohair' sweater for local toddler, who won't mind the pinkness, and who will look ridonkulously adorable in it.

Hyperlocal news:

* Christmas comes a day early with .67 inch of rain in an otherwise droughty region. Mourning doves preening in the rain on the back fence.

* After days of parties, day trips south, cleaning, wrapping, and such, today devoted to making chutney, cookies and tiramisu.

* Yesterday, for distraction, local woman makes fudge. "I just had to," she says, blaming blog for inspiration.

Hyperlocal news:

Local dogs having barked far too much at the noise of leafblowers outside were put in downstairs office with the door closed. They were quite puzzled by the sounds when local woman threw empty plastic containers down the stair (so they could be filled with dog food from the large bag), and actually shut up for a short time.

Hyperlocal news: While measuring for banana bread local man inadvertently added 1 tsp baking soda to 2 cups flour, rather than 1/2 tsp soda and 1 tsp baking powder. Man carefully fished out bulk of extra 1/2 tsp soda, crossed fingers that sister's Christmas bread isn't too off.

It looked fine as it came out of the oven. Man debates honesty of not mentioning his inaccuracy to sister.

Hyperlocal scandal sheet headlines: "The Baking Secrets Linkmeister Doesn't Want You to Know!"

Ha! Well played!

Hyperlocal news...

Man goes to Berkeley's Dark Carnival bookstore, where a discussion with the proprietor has the latter describe "Green Acres" as an exercise in surrealism cleverly disguised as a stupid TV show.