I dunno, I think a lot of Rush has some relevance to grownups: I can learn to close my eyes to anything but injustice...

I love Rush right up until the moment the singing begins. I wish I could buy a Rush instrumental album...

I'm still learning how to be an adult, and I'm over 55, but unfair acts tend to undermine my self-pretense at grownuphood.

Open threadiness: a copyeditor with Right Attitude

Skwid: Geddy Lee is certainly a member of the Man With A Sharp Stick school of singing. Or do you dislike the actual lyrics?

Terry @ 926 of #155

Bullshit. There is something that photographers have to have - I call it having the eye, to be able to make me see the beauty, the story in the picture within a single frame. Painters/graphic artists need to be able to create that same impression, but it's not bounded by the constraints of being reality outside the painting. Photography, by virtue of the medium, is.

Granted, an amateur can take several hundred pictures, and because the nature of reality is wondrous, they'll get a few decent shots. I'd say that's more a quality of the subject than the artist. People who don't understand this should try to take appealing pictures in a circumstance where the likelihood of income is dependent on those pictures. (I am not a particularly good photographer. I have learned to do decent pictures of houses. I suck at trying to photograph my own art.)

sisuile @ 6 ...
Bullshit. There is something that photographers have to have - I call it having the eye, to be able to make me see the beauty, the story in the picture within a single frame.
Granted, an amateur can take several hundred pictures, and because the nature of reality is wondrous, they'll get a few decent shots. I'd say that's more a quality of the subject than the artist. People who don't understand this should try to take appealing pictures in a circumstance where the likelihood of income is dependent on those pictures.

This sounds like an "artists are born, not made" argument to me -- and I can't agree with that.

It's certainly true that some people do have an excellent place to start from, by way of some natural talent -- but if they don't nurture, practice and learn and practice and practice some more, that's not going to get them all that far.

Similarly, somebody that may not have that natural flare can certainly get to the point of being highly skilled, through lots and lots of learning and practice.

All that said, it's often the case that people don't want to put in the obsessive amounts of time and effort required to get to the point of 'just' being good.

sisuile: I think he was lamenting the popular perception of the subject, which is that "anyone" can take the pictures if they have the tech.

Iolanthe opens tonight! I really think that people are going to enjoy it.

When Britain really ruled the waves (In good Queen Bess’s time) The House of Peers made no pretence To intellectual eminence, Or scholarship sublime; Yet Britain won her proudest bays In good Queen Bess’s glorious days! Yet Britain won her proudest bays In good Queen Bess’s glorious days!

When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well: Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George’s glorious days! Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George’s glorious days!

And while the House of Peers withholds Its legislative hand, And noble statesmen do not itch To interfere with matters which They do not understand, As bright will shine Great Britain’s rays As in King George’s glorious days! As bright will shine Great Britain’s rays As in King George’s glorious days!

Xerger @ 7 - No. Because 'the eye' is like 'the voice' in the previous open thread. Some people are born with more of it than others and are naturally better at it, but no matter what, it's a skill to be honed. It's a way of thinking and looking at things that (while possibly partially instinct) is a set of skills that can be learned like any other set of skills. It takes time and effort. I mostly have it for houses...now. Part of that was taking photography and art classes when I was younger, part of it is looking at thousands upon thousands of house pictures, and part of it is taking hundreds of pictures of actual houses. But in my world, houses are mostly looked at in pictures*, and it's part of my job to make them look at their best. I never learned the same skills on the more micro level necessary to photographing my art.

*If 90% of buyers start their home search online, and 95% of those select which homes to look at based on online listings, you can imagine the ratio of how many times a house is looked at online to how many times someone wants to see it in person. According to our metrics, the low end of the ratio is about 100:1.

Carrie S. @ 5, you got the right of it. I rather like their lyrics, actually.

Hmm...could anyone recommend any good Rush covers? That might be cool...

I have a decent, if not exceptional "eye" for photography. I've noticed that when I've had the time to shoot a lot/often, I get better pictures than when I just pick up the camera to snap things. I've also noticed that I don't take all that many cellphone photos (in circumstances where others are snapping away) because I'm never really happy with the images (shots of my daughter are exempted, though even there I am likely to shoot 5 or 6 of the "same" image and keep only 1).

A good camera makes me better, but time put in is what really makes the difference.

My grandfather had an excellent eye. Some of his pictures of NYC and of people (from the 30s through the 60s) are just amazing. After his death, one of his daughters took all his photos and stills and for several years she prepared Thanksgiving slide shows for the family's delight. She was planning to digitize the lot eventually.

I definitely think of photography as art. Like any kind of art, there's a range of quality--greeting card photos are not in the same category as, say, Ansel Adams (okay, that's an easy citation, I know, but I really do love his work) or an artist whose work I saw for the first time a couple of weeks ago, Jean Pagliuso: http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/galleries/graphics/artists/jean-pagliuso/graphics.

I think many people think of photos more in the context of school portraits or snapshots rather than as art. And many people don't realize how much it can cost to have something matted and/or framed. I do needlepoint, and there are times when the framing is more expensive than the materials used to make the thing being framed. So I expect folks undervalue the cost of the presentation when assessing the "worth" of an image they're thinking about buying.

imo, of course.

I can certainly understand telling yourself that you won a "moral victory" in order to keep from being quite so discouraged that Good lost and Evil triumphed. Isn't that what a lot of us are doing in the political arena these days?

OTOH, it's also important to remember that a "moral victory" rights no injustices and puts no food in the mouths of the poor. The rightness of your cause matters, but so do results.

Is this a good place to dance with joy over the fact that I went to the library yesterday, they had Tiassa already, and it was both not what I expected and every bit as good as I hoped?

Sqwid @#11: You might check out the more recent albums, from about Test for Echo on, maybe even Hold Your Fire--Geddy's voice has changed with age, and he doesn't shriek quite so much as he used to.

If you've got gmail, you might want to check out the link to Gmail Motion. It may not be around after today.

Abi: Bravado still resonates for me, but less for myself than for my fictional characters. The common thread in my protagonists so far, regardless of age, gender, or other personality, tends to be that they're all that sort of idealist facing those sorts of odds; even if they win, they know the cost is going to be huge.

I'd say it's because I'm barely staying above water these days, much less making any grand contribution, except that it's been that way since I was a teenager.

Skwid: I can take Geddy Lee's voice better as he's gotten older; the first albums, he's nigh unlistenable, and it's only the quality of the rest of the songwriting that makes them worth hearing. Yet, it tends to be earlier and middle-era music that shows up on the radio. You might likewise find more recent work more bearable. (I thought the same of Richard Thompson's voice early on, and I outright *like* his on the last couple of albums. I don't think *that* will ever happen with Geddy Lee.)

But you've made me think: I can't actually think of anyone who's covered a Rush song. I mean, I'm sure several newish bands have done so while playing at clubs and the like, but I can't think of recorded covers. I'll have to ask my brother. (We're both fans to some degree of the band, but he's more likely to read up on trivia and the like about music. I just listen.)

Platypus, murnival, serpentine, vortex: I got *four* sets of cranes today! If you haven't mailed yours yet, we continue to be in no hurry--I'm not done stringing, and I still have some Interesting Life Events between me and a trip to the post office.

@ #155 Combining singing and Alan Cumming in one glorious package!

Carrie S. - That is an excellent way to describe that particular kind of voice, of which I am also not so fond.

Regarding the "with the right equipment anyone can be a photographer". I think there's a second step in there, like 1.) Collect Underpants, 2.)...?... 3.) Profit! If "anyone" has the right equipment and ALSO learns technique, than "anyone" can certainly take professional-like photos.

I am a keen amateur cellist with a good ear, and a few years ago I noticed some issues in technique that weren't coming through as I had hoped so I purchased a new bow. My cello teacher and I spent nearly two hours at the luthier trying out bows. I was astonished at how much the better quality bows made my playing less work - at least on the right hand - and wound up purchasing a bow that would have been worth nearly 10x as much had the button not been replaced. (ah, musical instrument provenance, how you amuse me! And make quality equipment affordable!) I can certainly tell the difference when I switch to my old back-up, but the new bow does not, alas, cause my cello to spontaneously spout forth Elgar without a lot of work on my part. It helps my smooth out my string crossings, but it's still my own right arm and shoulder that will have to keep that prelude to Bach's 1st suite from making anyone seasick. (still working on that. this celloing takes a long time to do right.)

I promise not to spend all my time spamming Making Light with N2S links, but I wanted to mention that I've done a post on numen, faith, religion, and lack thereof in worldbuilding.

It's something that came up in the Bab 5 threads and I wanted to gnaw on the subject for a while.

Few are the leaves and buds late on these trees
that heart grows weak, and even time might ail
as weathers slowly change while the clouds sail
above our heads driven by random breeze
towards the east. Nothing that wants to please
our needy minds as this brief cold must fail,
the warmth return before our hopes turn stale,
and just in time our anger turn to ease.
But in the night some matters are too deep
for ordinary dreams, and break my rest
to let me know that there is no mistake:
relief shall not be granted by kind sleep,
the warmth of bed is not a comfy nest;
but there are worse fates than coming awake.

Skwid, #11: Well, this is a database of cover versions; unfortunately, searching on band name produces a list of songs that band has covered, not songs by them which have been covered by other groups. But you might try entering some individual Rush song titles and see what comes up.

I'm the opposite of you about this; I like Geddy Lee's voice just fine, but the lyrics make me itch now that I'm old enough to recognize Randroid bullshit when I hear it. Not to mention that Rush in general is still associated with the worst breakup I ever had, although that's not as much of a sticking point now as it was 20 years ago. :-)

Cheryl @888/155: Oh! I'd never guessed it wasn't available everywhere - you can even get diclofenac in gel form without a prescription over here now.

Terry Karney @926/155: Sympathies. I think that's a great shot - the focus on the drake so the detail of the feathers comes though is amazing. I get a lot more good shots than I used to - but only because with digital I can afford to take lots and lots of pictures. Even then, my photographs are mostly not great - there are only a handful that I can say, truly, "yes, that's a good picture", and I recognise that those are mostly by luck, not judgement, because I don't have a good enough eye for composition etc. So, anyway, I recognise good photography when I see it. I don't buy it mainly because we don't have enough room on the walls for all the pictures we've already got.

The River of Truth is clotted with lies
by demagogues, haters and fools.
The Liberty Tree is stunted 'neath skies
of menacing clouds shaped like ghouls.

It's easy to see with hindsight's regret
that trouble was coming our way.
It's harder to fix our problems, beset
as we are by our failings' decay.

Can Freedom be bought by terror-fed fear,
by trading away all our rights?
Instead let's insist that all we hold dear
is worth fighting for. Set your sights!

TexAnn @18: Great!

xeger #7, sisuile #10: Agreed, talent is at best half of great art. I'm a classic example -- I have the artist's eye (and enhanced color vision) that runs in my family, plus a drawing talent that's enhanced by my own neurology. But if I want to be even as good an artist as Mom or Grandpa☘, I'll have to put a lot more time and practice into drawing than I have been. And that includes shouldering through a lot of the discouragements that have tripped me up in the past....

And back to Terry Karney #926: Most of them don't get lots of people saying, "I could do that."

Sure about that, dude? I've (over)heard similar comments at a number of art shows, in various media. (Plus, my Mom does abstract paintings....) The woman who curled her lip at your Audubon-quality duck photo was just a standard-issue ignoramus, and there's plenty more where she came from -- enough to sneer at every field of art.

☘ Grandpa got praise for his paintings, and a few of them got displayed around town, but there was no question of him getting fame and fortune for them. Mom, likewise, has had a few shows locally, and even sold a few pieces, for prices in the low three digits. Even with my stepdad framing and matting them, that's no great profit over costs and painting time.

Velma @ 942, previous open thread:

Welcome to the Upper Left Coast! When you've gotten settled and grown to know Seattle, be sure to drop down here to Portland for a day or two to see the sights. We have excellent beer and damn fine music.

Re making a living from art:

Eva, my partner, was an art teacher with a BFA, and I come from a family of mostly business people and artists (I'm the only techie in the lot); I have an aunt who is a retired photojournalist, a cousin who is a sculptor, another cousin who was a musician (and her husband was a ceramicist), another cousin who's a film and tv director. When our younger son decided he wanted to be a fine artist, we were very careful not to dissuade him especially because we know from our friends and relations that it's possible to make a living at art, but we did try to get him to understand that one of the requirements for making a living at painting and drawing is the desire to market yourself and your work, something that neither Eva nor I were ever good at doing, which is why she stopped trying to sell her drawings, and I have remained an amateur photographer.

Eventually, our son decided to be a commercial graphic artist, probably in part because his then girlfriend, now wife, was doing that. They're both out of school and have jobs doing what they love to do, and enjoying it. I'm glad that Jeremy made the decision he did; I don't think he would have enjoyed the marketing part of selling his work, but I would have supported him and helped him get established if he had decided differently.

Persephone #949, previous OT: Are kids who want to be professional athletes discouraged in the same way as kids who want to be professional artists?

I don't think so, at least not in the USA. Cynically, I'd say that's because the upper reaches of our school system feed directly into professional sports, and thar's money in them thar field goals!

Melissa Singer @ 12:

I've been an amateur photographer for 50 years now, since I was 15, and, while I do have somewhat of an eye, I was never strongly tempted to try to make a living from it. My aunt was a photojournalist, and a friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and I've studied their work as well as other photographers such as Walker Evans and Edward Steichen. If you look at a lot of photographs you can see that there are different styles of vision, different eyes, and comparing my own to others who are well-known has made me humble about my talent. It's also made me realize that having a particular kind of eye lets me understand better the work of others with that same style; I was very surprised, but pleased, when I realized that the reason I like Cartier-Bresson's photos so much is that I see things in a way that's similar to his (but nowhere near as clearly as he did). But it's enough for me to know that I do have a vision and to enjoy the pictures I have taken that have worked well.

Open threadiness:

My friend Bill Gawne posted this on Facebook, and I thought a number of people here would enjoy it:

Take me to the arena, Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some dormice in honeycomb. I don't care if I never go home.
So let's root, root, root for the lions.
...Not the humans they maim.
Munching two, three more body parts at our Caesar's game.

Also, Kodak has a cute April Fool's Day joke up. And for font geeks, do a Google search on Helvetica or Comic Sans.

As an occasional crafter and would-be artist I run into the "You charge how much for -that-?!?" thing all the time.

As a labor-politics nerd, I also think a big part of the problem is in the general public attitudes toward labor and its price, particularly when someone else is doing the laboring, along with a general ignorance of how retail markup works.

F'rex, an oversimplification:

If I knit a dishcloth, and wish to sell it, well. In this market I'm likely to get about two dollars at a church fair or similar - that's the market rate. It's knit with cotton yarn which regularly sells around here for 1.79 per ball (2-2.5 oz) which is enough to make one dishcloth. If there's a sale, the yarn goes down to 1.25 per ball, so I might stock up, but that incurs the incremental costs of running out of places to put the yarn. There are also incremental costs over time in the purchase of knitting needles, scissors, maybe a pattern book if I'm replicating an existing design, gas to drive to the store and the craft fairs, booth fee (if there is one), and of course the big investment is my own time, of which it takes me something around three hours to knit up an average size dishcloth if it's a pattern I know well. (I used to average about one a week when my daily commute involved a 20-30 minute wait at the end of the workday.)

If I were going to make a living wage - say, 10.00 per hour - at knitting dishcloths (just for the absurdity of the proposition) the minimum cost of that dishcloth would be around $35.00 (labor, materials, and incremental cost of production). Given that average retail markup for dry goods is 40-60%, you're looking at $50-70 for a dishcloth.

The market price, around here, is about $2.00. And I've had people complain about why I charge so much, because their grammy used to sell them for a dollar. All I can do is point out that they take two dollars worth of yarn, and I'm not getting paid for the time to make them, and the customer generally shuts up and sometimes buys one.

But why should creative labor be devalued? Anyone could do it, but not everyone has time to do it, and people who don't have time (or energy, or ability, or inclination) to do it have the option to pay for someone else's time spent doing it. I suspect it has to do with bigger labor issues altogether, but that's a rant for another website.

abi @ 21... I promise not to spend all my time spamming Making Light with N2S links

You are shameless.
:-)

Thena #33: The problem here is that you're "competing" with machine-made goods. (For visual arts, that would be mass-produced posters and the like, other media left as an exercise for the reader). In this day and age, hand-knitting a dishcloth as such doesn't make economic sense, because you can get them so cheaply from the "Satanic mills". ;-) Recall that this was a major issue in India's struggle for independence, mostly because Britain (by design) had all the factories.

Worse, the cheapest factory goods undercut the long-term values which might otherwise affect a purchase -- durability♩, specific purpose, individual expression. Of course, if someone wants "a dishcloth that my friend Thena made with her own hands," that's another story -- but that's not the usual case for sales. Other exceptions would be a dishcloth "just the right size to cover the challah I bake every Friday", or one with (e.g.) Mike's Janus poem woven into it. In all those cases, you can get it... but you do need to pay extra. Where the factory dominance is drastic, so is the markup for "custom" or "quality" work.

And if The Powers That Be have decided that you and your neighbors shall have no more money than needed to buy basic necessities, or have convinced you that all your discretionary income should go to "keeping up with the Joneses"....

♩ Indeed, quality in general -- q.v. the underwear discussion from the last OT.

@35

Precisely so, which is why I don't hand-knit dishcloths for a living.

(I do insist upon selling them not lower than break-even price, though, because I have limits. The satisfaction I get out of knitting a dishcloth is why I keep doing it, but I'm not willing to pay other people to take clutter out of my house, which is the net benefit to me of selling the things.)

Also - (and why do I think of the rest of the idea immediately after posting a comment?) - it's that "cheapest common denominator" meme that iterates toward things like art photography, other arts, heck it's probably at play in the whole "my e-book should be $1.99" (or whatever) argument as well.

And of course it's fueled in part by stagnant wages, rising costs, and limited discretionary spending. I am of the opinion that it's a reinforcing cycle: wages are stagnant in part due to devaluation of labor (by management / the market) which in turn leads to workers (in their role as customers) not being able to afford discretionary products and services, which cuts profits for those entities, which leads back to stagnant wages, less spending, etc. I think it's a failure mode of a market economy, this grudging reluctance to pay anybody for anything.

And yes, cheap underwear is definitely /not/ what it used to be.

I see that Manning Marable died today.

You know what I hate?

Even more than underwear that develops more than the required number of holes far too quickly?

Gorgeous Friday afternoons that make you look forward to the weekend and then hearing that the forecast is "MORE #$^%#$%^$ RAIN."

Thena #37: Total agreement here on all points. Regarding the "market failure" aspect, I'll add that there's a deep confusion of drives (and purposes) involved: The people who control the factory (and its surrounding commerce), see the factory's purpose as "making money" instead of "making textiles".

From 155:

Lee: No. She had looked at more than the one print. She was making a statement about the idea of paying that much, at all. She wasn't really interested in buying anything, she just stopped to look because I was there.

Lori: I can well imagine. When film was my only medium I was happy if I thought there was a salable frame in a roll. As I got better I came expect 4-6 per roll worth the effort of looking at in 4x6.

in the present:

Sisuile: I can't tell if you are agreeing with me (that salable photographs are more than just "luck" and not everyone can do it), or trying to tell me (the professional photographer since about 1990) I made that argument.

xeger: I don't think the photographer as artist is born, not made, but I also know that the craft in the art is huge. That duck shot, was more than just being lucky. It was planned. I walked that pond I don't know how often, getting the sense of the wind, and the patterns of the ducks, so I could take advantage of the flyway on day when the wind was just so, and they would be coming in with those hills in the background. So yeah, I'm agreeing with you, but as B. Durbin says, the general perception of photography is the opposite.

The photographer isn't, "making" but rather, "taking". The pictures are just out there, anyone can get them. Which is true, but far wide of the mark. That's why I tell people they can use my camera. The pictures are there, just waiting to be collected.

Melissa Singer: Skill is the result of work. I don't know about the greeting card question. I've got a lot of photos which would look good as either cards, or wall art. But that's the sort of work I do To borrow your example, I am workig in the manner of Ansel Adams. I spend a lot of time looking at things and imagining what they will look like as a print. I miss the black and white I I had when I was shooting film all the time. If I had the F3 in my hand, it was color, if I had the FE2 it was black and white.

The amazing thing (it's back to practice) was that I could look at things and know which body to grab first.

dcb: Ansel Adams hated 35mm, because the rolls (24 frames) let people be lazy, and just shoot with the idea they would get a decent picture. For all his talent/skill he was blind to the virtues of practice. No... he was blind to the fact that not everyone could; nor need, do the math required to make a 4x5 (and larger) exposure.

I shot a lot of film when I was learning ("film is cheap"). I was probably shooting 2 rolls a week. 72 frames. I indulged myself and bought a number of rolls of Ilford HP5, "motordrive" which was on thinner stock and had 72 frames per roll. That let me learn to shoot action. The drake in that shot is the result of me burning about 10 rolls on the diving team at Pierce College.

Digital made me understand the reason Adams was of his mind, and the failure of his imagination. Anyone can get a digital camera, set it to jpg, and shoot more frames on that disk, in an afternoon than I was likely to shoot in a year. Which is fine, but it doesn't make you a better photographer.

It just means you have more opportunity to get it right by happenstance. Where Adams failed was in not working on how to train people to work in the new paradigm.

flickr, for all that it sometimes drives me nuts, is really good for seeing how other people "see", and there are places (hit, miss, maybe; Why?, or "Strobist" which are all about the critique and means). One can end up in a permanent workshop.

David Harmon: I've heard the comment about abstract art, but I don't think it's as pervasive. I've heard lots of dismissive comments about abstract art, but the number of times I've been at a gallery show, and heard someone say they could do as well, "if I had the equipment"... I can't count.

I've never done a show where someone didn't tell me that, usually indirectly, as that woman did, but sometimes in words plain as day.

The inaccessible opens its arms
Either my universe keeps shrinking
Or my skepticism won't stop growing
Pursuer and pursued
I flutter on the perches of a cage getting smaller and smaller
And whose door is open
Wide open

From Gyula Illyés, I believe (and a quick search seems to confirm). Sorry for the poor translation. I immediately thought of this when reading the post.

Note: if you're wondering how the planet of idiots could possibly have developed all that cool (if rather gonzo) technology, you're approaching Mom and Dad Save the World all wrong.

Addressing Abi's OP: Consider that by tradition, circumstance, and (as it turns out) neurology, a person's attitude toward risk tends to change drastically over their lifetime.

If a (single, childless) 20-year-old blows all their money on some risky project or investment, they face a personal loss, but they don't risk the welfare of their children (a.k.a. the Ultimate Bottom Line). And even on the personal level, they'll have far more energy, resilience, and above all time, to go do something else for a living.

When you're 30 or 40 and your kids need to be fed, clothed, etc., they need to be more careful, because it's not just them who might go hungry. And still later, when the kids are grown up and making their own way -- hey, that might be the time to try out a new career, or go into art, or take a flyer on that startup (with the benefit of added life experience)! Especially if the kids are doing well enough that they could potentially support you (and might have to anyway, in yet another couple of decades). Of course, older folks are also more likely to have spare money to gamble with!

A somewhat similar calculus applies to threats to life and limb, including risky hobbies such as mountaineering or parasailing, adventures abroad, careers that put you in harm's way, "standing up to the Man", and so forth. Here the older person might not have the full vigor of youth, but their life experience (and perhaps a few decades of training or working out) gives them a different sort of edge.

Terry #41: Actually, for abstract work, the comment is often "my kid could do that"! Which also reflects more on the speaker than the art, but still! Remember Jackson Pollock?

Of course, the arts and artists that most resistant to "I could do that" are those where the level of technique and skill are just so obvious, that such a claim isn't remotely credible. That would include (inter alia) closely realistic depictions, highly-finished sculptures, intricate stuff with lots of structure, or anything that presents too much numen to ignore. So then the idiots just turn to the opposite pole of that bozosphere: "Oh, well, I don't have the Talent for that, but nothing I could do about that, some people are Just Born Gifted...".

Melissa Singer #951:

For some years I have wanted to put together an anecdotal book of children's stories of divorce and custody.

Go for it! Ideally, before "your daughter's friends" and other candidate interviewees scatter to the winds.... Oh, and "never married" doesn't make you "an outsider" in this context, not if it's the kids' viewpoints you're looking for, rather than their parents'!.

Velma -- there's lots to do in Chicago, depending on your tastes & inclinations. The Art Institute is what I'd put first on the list to do. For food -- the classic local dishes are Chicago-style hot dogs, Italian Beef sandwiches, and Chicago-style pizza. All are good, particularly if you're not a nominalist with regard to pizza & hot dogs. All will let you know you've arrived in a different city. There's also a number of very good Greek restaurants in the downtown area.

If the weather is good enough and you're up to it, there's an architecture-by-boat tour down the Chicago river. The river embankments also have a number of mostly-hidden cafés which are lovely, modulo weather. We've done the cafés, and seen the architecture, but haven't done the tour.

We've also made a point of visiting the lakeshore whenever we're in town. We look out at Lake Michigan, look at one another, and say "that's _fresh_ water?" (Then we look out at what used to be Meigs Field and curse the Mayors Daley. It's a Flight Simulator thing.)

It's been a while since we crossed the country by train, but it's probably worth mentioning that the food, the experience, and the scenery were all better the farther west we were.

Your stopover in Washington will probably be too short to do much. The Postal Museum is about two blocks away if you want something to fill an hour or so. If you have more time, the rest of the Smithsonian is only a bit farther away.

terry, that photo is, IMO, worth the price. It isn't something 'anyone could take'. (For one thing, most people probably wouldn't be seeing the duck coming in for a landing. They're looking at the ducks on the water already.)

Having grown up in a family where most of the art on the walls was abstract to some degree, it also isn't something 'anyone can do', and especially not 'your kid'. You have to learn what to leave out, for one thing....

(I knit socks for my pleasure. I'll knit socks just to give to other people. Good yarn can run $20 for a hank that will make a pair; clearly it isn't an economical sound way to get cheap socks. But they're prettier and might last longer.)

David: I'd say the, "my kid could do that" folks aren't making an actual comment on the difficulty/skill of the artist, but a value judgement that it's not really art. They aren't only saying their kid could do it, but that it's something only kids should do, or that no better than that is all they can do.

VictorS: I recall the first time I saw The Ocean. It was the Pacific. I was not impressed. I was comparing it to Lake Eirie. To an eight year old it was, at best, no better; and it stank wrong.

I have since come to a better appreciation of the ocean, but that memory sticks with me.

P J Evans: It's worth more than that, really. I put it at the lowest point of return. The one at which I can say to myself I didn't give it away. If I'd been at another venue (one with overhead; where I was the cost was just my time), the price would have to be at least double, just to recover the price I had it at there.

David: I'd say the, "my kid could do that" folks aren't making an actual comment on the difficulty/skill of the artist, but a value judgement that it's not really art. They aren't only saying their kid could do it, but that it's something only kids should do, or that no better than that is all they can do.

VictorS: I recall the first time I saw The Ocean. It was the Pacific. I was not impressed. I was comparing it to Lake Eirie. To an eight year old it was, at best, no better; and it stank wrong.

I have since come to a better appreciation of the ocean, but that memory sticks with me.

P J Evans: It's worth more than that, really. I put it at the lowest point of return. The one at which I can say to myself I didn't give it away. If I'd been at another venue (one with overhead; where I was the cost was just my time), the price would have to be at least double, just to recover the price I had it at there.

Open threadiness:

I just got back from the best concert I ever attended.

It was right up there with seeing Baryshnikov dance the Nutcracker when I was 14.

If any of y'all get the chance to catch Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck and Zakir Hussein--GO.

I'd like to hear Bela Fleck play a duet with Jake Shimabukuro.

Watched the first 2 hours of "Camelot" tonight. Meh... In spite of Joseph Fiennes as Merlin and in spite of Eva Green as Morgan.

Alan Cumming...

In "X-men 2" with Famke Jansen.
In "GoldenEye" with Famke Jansen.

Of course Rush is a trio of very fine musicians but I find that their songs tent to saunter instead of rock. Admittedly I have a punk-hardcore-goth-rockabilly heart so YMMV.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Bauhaus was a very potent live band (see "Swing the Heartache: The BBC Sessons").

To be a little clearer, I actually have a punk-hardcore-goth-no wave-rockabilly-psychedelic-blues-tradfolk-avantjazz-electronic-experimental-noise heart.

Hope that helps. :)

The angel tipped his halo, wiped his sweat
(It sparkled like a thousand stars) and caught
His breath. He risked a peek, and said he thought
That this assault was beaten off. "I get
The feeling that it isn't finished yet,"
I said, and he grinned crookedly. "You ought
To see it at Samhain. We hold the fort,
But only just. This is an easy set."

"Why do they climb beyond the stars, and then
Assault the Gates?" A weary shrug. "They think
They're badass boys." He peered over the brink
And cocked his piece. "And here they come again.
Some folks do things because they can. But these,
They do it 'cause they can't. More ammo, please."

Terry #49: David: I'd say the, "my kid could do that" folks aren't making an actual comment on the difficulty/skill of the artist, but a value judgement that it's not really art.

And isn't that essentially the same as the lip-curler you mentioned? "$75... for that?" does sound like a rather thoroughgoing dismissal of your work's value. And you'll surely be aware that the dismissal of photography-as-art goes back to the beginnings of photography, long before the point-and-click era.

I'd say that the dismissals are very much in the same vein -- regardless of the justifications given, the basic point is to denigrate the art's value as deeply as they can get away with. Certainly, both give me the same strong sense of "their parents didn't raise them right". Price-points aside, that sort of thing is plain rude... which is arguably the real reason we're still kvetching about "whose art gets disrespected worse". ;-)

Rob Thornton: Have you listened to Boiled in Lead?

Rob Thornton @55/56, I was going to say "marry me!" based on your musical tastes, but now I'd include the caveat of you wearing headphones when you listen to the "experimental noise" stuff. But you can play all the live Bauhaus you want! ;-)

@59 I have not heard Boiled in Lead but I have heard of them. Please do recommend! Come to think, hasn't Brust referred to them at one point or another?

@60 No prob with the headphones Rikibeth, I listen to that stuff at work anyways because it drowns out my coworkers.:) BTW, have you heard the Gun Club?

Also, if you have a chance, download Soft Cell's "Tainted Dub/Where Did Our Love Go?" from Amazon. This tune is the B-side to the original 12-inch and it is seriously whacked-out psychedelic instrumental electrogoth.

David Harmon @58

I think there is a different timbre to the statements. I think in the case of some abstract art, the hard part's conceptual. I don't think there's much argument that, leaving aside the conceptual parts, a sufficiently patient and motivated sixth-grader with a T-square could paint a Mondrian. If it's not art, it ain't much. (It is art, of course, but some folks inevitably disagree.)

In the case of photography, the hard part is the bit you don't see. Sure, if Terry loaned me his camera, I could take the same photo. Oh, and could you tell me where to stand, too? And check my focus? And point out the duck coming in? Then just tap me on the shoulder when it's time to hit the shutter, and I should have that all sewn up!

So leaving aside the question of "is it art?" that photograph represents a serious investment of craft. It's worth paying for even if it categorically is not art. I'd pay for a really well-made bookcase or jacket, right? Maybe those things are art, but even folks who don't think so would agree that they're worth real money.

Rob @61 Let me second the recommendation for Boiled in Lead!

No, I haven't heard the Gun Club. *adds to list*

Is the "Tainted Dub/Where Did Our Love Go" version the one I already know that segues into "Where Did Our Love Go" when the radio version did not, or is it yet another thing? I have eight assorted versions of that song (and if the Gloria Jones soul original didn't make it to my current iTunes I'll have to fix that) and would be happy to add yet another.

Allow me to speak up for Full Story At Midnight, a young psychobilly/horror rock band out of Tucson. All I have at the moment are demo tracks, but I'm pretty fond of them, rough spots and all. The frontman has promised me the mp3s they recorded live from the soundboard at a show last month. They'll be touring this summer.

Okay, half a song in, and I know I LOVE the Gun Club. Thank you!

Dave: I'll grant the lip curl was in a different vein from, "I could do that", but I don't think it's quite as dismissive as, "my kid could do that."

The first is saying it's nothing close to being worth the price, the second is saying it's worth nothing.

The "I could do that" folks are in a third category. They aren't saying it's non-talent (the "my kid" category), nor that it's just not as valuable as the artist is saying it is ("for this?"), they are arguing that it's not really either.

They also fall in a wider spectrum of reaction. Some are wistful. Some are (foolishly) jealous. The thing is we have image of the artist as struggling. Not with money, but with the art.

He is sweating over the piano, to find the right notes. She is staring at the canvas, trying to make the colors work, or hewing at the marble to make a Pieta appear.

And the response not liking (or worse, understanding) the modern forms, is to belittle them. To mock the artist.

With photography we have the problem of the machine. The image of the photographer is the guy who pops shot after shot in the model shoot, or the reporter who is in the right place at the right time. In fiction the critical images is often gotten by accident, and unknown to the photographer until much later.

It's not seen as work. It's luck, or raw talent; not craft. I get it all the time, the idea that being a serious photographer is easy. That all one does is walk around and "take" pictures.

The sense that asking more than 10 bucks for an unmounted print is somehow cheating. It's not that photographers get more abuse, in some ways we get less (so long as the picture is some sort of either, "pretty", or "real" we aren't likely to get told it's pointless, stupid, or worthless), but instead we get dismissed as not really artists, because the camera does the work.

Rikibeth @63 "Tainted Dub/Where Did Our Love Go?" is the instrumental B-side to the track that you mention. It's a total freakout.

@64 Glad you like the Gun Club. :) Dare I mention the Birthday Party, Nick Cave's second band? They are one of my alltime favorite groups....

Re "My name is all day Monday"

My game is oh-so-mangled text strings and things.
Look at my words, you might be in despair.

Soft Cell's masterpiece is their Jimi Hendrix medley. For certain values of "masterpiece."

Oh, and my Boiled in Lead recommendation is Orb.

Rob @66 Downloaded and listend to Tainted Dub, and, while I enjoyed the heck out of it, I must remember not to play it for the housemate or the teenager, as their tolerance for extended noodling is very, very limited. They even balk at ten minutes' worth of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" or "This Corrosion."

Knew about the Birthday Party already, and I agree with the admiration even if I wouldn't put them favorite.

My Boiled in Lead recommendation is Antler Dance.

Tim Walters @68, that medley is... special!

And, Rob Thornton, I forgot to add -- my count of Tainted Love versions is now up to 13, and I recommend the one by Dave Phillips & The Hot Rods.

My recommendation for Eighties British arty dub is "Animal Spacier" by the Slits (the dub version of "Animal Space"). YouTube doesn't have that, but they do have Earthbeat from the same album, which is much, well, earthier--but also really good.

Dave Luckett @ 57:

Very nice!

But it reminded me of something, so now I have to ask the Group Mind about a skiffy¹ story. It was published, I think, in Fantastic Universe magazine in the mid-to-late 1950s. The main character is Lucifer (yep, the Ruler of Hell); I think it was in first person, but using the voice of one of Damon Runyon's gangster characters. IIRC, the plot involved Gabriel's trumpet being stolen, and Lucifer helping to find it; there's at least one scene in a jazz club where Gabriel hangs out (but doesn't play, because that would be the Last Set). Anyone know the title or author?

1. Every time I type that I wonder if there's some relationship between science fiction and skiffle bands.

Rob Thornton -- to add to the list, try out The Levellers (anarchist UK group similar to the Grateful Dead in that they perform a lot more than they practice -- and their sound differs widely from album to album. Their version of "Devil Went Down to Georgia" is just amazing; on the same album with their version of "Plastic Jesus"....), The Oysterband (or Oyster Band), Black 47, and (a bit farther back) Horslips. And for the silly side, 3 Mustaphas 3.... You may also find God's Little Monkeys interesting. I have no idea why I love "New Maps of Hell" (their first album) but I do. More UK anarchist music.

I'm more a fan of the older Boiled in Lead (The Old Lead CD) but "From the Ladle to the Grave" is where I started with them. I do like something with a tune, myself.

previous OT, 946 et al, on pining:

This rubs me the wrong way, and I shall de-lurk and try to tease out why, for it is one of the "know thyself" problems I have been working on lately, and also it seems like an assumption that could stand to be challenged.

It's the assumption of "pining" that bothers me, mostly. I am an asexual and aromantic person; that is, I have no practical interest in sex and I don't tend to fall in love. I do have enough of a romantic strain in me that I don't find it impossible that I ever should fall in love, but it hasn't happened yet (at twenty-six) and it hasn't seemed likely. Since I am uninterested in sex or having children and perfectly happy to have my social and emotional needs fulfilled by friends and family - and lucky enough to have friends and family who can and will support me emotionally - I don't particularly care whether or not I ever do fall in love.

But suppose it does happen. Suppose I go out tomorrow and meet a wonderful person and I fall in love with them and they fall in love with me, and we are perfectly happy together. And then suppose that person dies. I am still the kind of person for whom potential romantic partners are vanishingly rare. Perhaps I will never meet another one in my life, but I still have my friends and family and am perfectly happy with them and do not feel the lack of a romantic partner. Am I pining? I certainly don't think I would be. I would be perceived as pining,*** I'm sure, but that doesn't mean I'm wasting away, unhealthily attached to a dead person.

I know that I am an unusual case; most people do feel the need for a romantic partner. And I don't think that encouraging that sort of melodramatic pining is a good idea, because I agree that it can be unhealthy. But I've seen Marple adaptations* that do introduce her lost young man, and she never seemed to me to be pining. She remembered him fondly for a bit, and then the scene was over, and everybody moved on. I find depictions like that to be a great comfort, since it is so rare to see positive depictions of single people (single women, specifically) and I have never yet seen a wholly positive depiction of an asexual person in television or movies.**

*the series with Geraldine McEwan, for instance, I was very fond of
**I can recall one in a book - Elizabeth Bear's Grail - and there may be more, but they're still vanishingly rare
***This is the part I have the biggest problem with. I grew up in a conservative Christian town, certain there was something wrong with me, not because I wanted to have sex but because I didn't. I knew I disliked the church's opinion on premarital sex. Ideologically I ought to be having sex. But I didn't want to. So clearly I was either a prude, which I didn't want to be, or seriously broken. It took me a long time to realize that just because something is a destructive socially acceptable position for many people doesn't mean it's inherently bad.

(Alas, the one time I feel strongly enough to de-lurk, and I've gotten terribly behind in the conversation. I am loving the discussion of art and making a living on it, I just haven't had anything to contribute.)

Dave L., #57: Some folks do things because they can. But these, They do it 'cause they can't.

The whole poem is excellent, but that bit just jumped out at me. I know people like that.

Devin, #62: Because (generally speaking) I have no talent whatsoever for painting/drawing, I am inclined to view anything of that nature that I could reproduce, or produce something in the style of, as Not Art. I would never say that to the artist, of course, because that would be beyond rude, but it's how I feel. As for Jackson Pollock, he is of historical interest as the first person to do what he did, but no more than that.

Other fields of artistic endeavor don't trigger that response in the same way.

Terry, #65: ISTM that the people who feel that way have probably never done any photography themselves. Since I got my little digicam, I've become quite the shutterbug -- and if I hadn't already realized how much work there is in taking a really good picture, that would have taught me. Yeah, sometimes there's luck involved, but you have to know how to invite the luck too!

Tim, #68: Interesting. I like the style, but I'd forgotten how badly the lyrics to "Hey Joe" squick me out. One of these days I swear I'm going to start a webpage collection of pop hits in which it's assumed that a woman is the property of a man and he has every right to kill her if she's unfaithful. That's all part of the rape culture too.

Rikibeth, #70: I like SoM, but only certain songs; however, "This Corrosion" is one of my favorites. It's a terrific dance piece. If there's ever a movie made from Gaiman's Sandman, they should do the soundtrack!

Jenavira, #75: There's a huge fannish scrum over whether or not the new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes is asexual. Enough people are convinced that he is that there's an entire LJ community devoted to fanfic based on that assumption - asexy_holmes is the name of it IIRC. Sounds as if it might interest you.

AKICOML: Back in the 80s there was a one-hit-wonder group called The Innocents. I used to have their (eponymous) album on vinyl, and then later on cassette, but both seem to have disappeared from my collection. Their style was what I call "bubblegum & jangly guitars". A look thru the torrents produced references to a band from the 60s who are definitely NOT them, and a band from New Zealand who I think are a little too early still (70s rather than 80s). This is all complicated by the fact that I can't remember any of the song titles on the album, although I'm sure I'd recognize the right ones if I saw them. Does anyone else have any suggestions about where to look?

A few little tidbits on SF and music:

Here is a picture of Jimi Hendrix reading a Penguin SF anthology.

Howard Waldrop's "Flying Saucer Rock'N'Roll" is named after a nifty rockabilly tune by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men."

Here is the website for Bloodhag, a thrash metal group that "does short songs about science fiction and fantasy authors." Probably the only metal band with a song titled "Gene Wolfe" and a reading list that includes "The Female Man." They used to prominently feature a quote from a rather startled-sounding Thomas Disch.

Hyperlocal news: Area retiree finds that new library will be 1/3 smaller than present one, pitches hissy fit, and is partly mollified by library staff. They say the space sacrificed is comprised of a no-longer-needed meeting room and processing area, now that we have joined the county system, but I still feel bait-and-switched.
Citizen uproar, by many others in addition to myself, is expected to rage for a while.
Our current library is a world-unique structure set athwart a river that with recent crappy weather is running a bit high, but not like some of its past legendary performances. The half-building-half-bridge is expected to find some sort of public use in the future. Our new home will be some blocks away; I have restrained myself from suggesting that the river be re-routed to run under it.
Fond memories include finding a huge cottonwood wrapped around one of the support pillars after record flood in '90; putting my ear against an internal column and hearing the current; seeing the awed responses of citizenry around the time of the crest; counting salmon in the autumn during normal flow; seeing swimmers and inner-tube riders pass below; internal chaos after a 6.8 quake; herons, mergansers, and so on outside, and of course more literary discoveries than I can count.
Jenavira,#75--Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarrion, so far as I can recall, was asexual. I just turned old enough to qualify for the senior discount in some places and I have never been sexually or romantically interested in people, so it was an unexpected relief to find a kindred spirit.

Pardon the double dip but here goes:

Lee @76: I tried the name "The Innocents" at allmusic.com and came up with this. They are from 1982 so maybe that's what you are looking for?

Tom @74 Thanks for the recommendations. The Levellers and the Oysterband were around when I was in undergrad college radio (not surprisingly) but I never did get around to trying them out. If you like the 80s folk sort of thing, an Austin folk group of that time named Poi Dog Pondering did a great atheist anthem (of sorts) called "Bury Me Deep."

Tim @72 Looks like those tunes are only on singles and not on any compilations beyond a radio interview LP. Argh!

@ Boiled in Lead recommendations - Thank you so much. Since everybody seemed to call out different things, I will probably use Allmusic and Amazon to get more detail and figure out which one will appeal to me most. I will provide feedback in Open Thread 157. :)

Rikibeth @ 70 - Antler Dance was the tape playing in my last Honda Civic wagon at the moment when a Cadillac tried to occupy the same space as it. "Rasputin" was the song playing. I've listened to it several times since, but for some reason it makes me nervous.

My car was totalled, but I managed to make it to Winnipeg for Conadian, bruised and battered and limping, and not sure how I was going to get from Columbus to Portsmouth on my return trip.

Lee@76 - Yes indeed. I love the new Sherlock, and I think there's a good argument for him (as well as the Conan Doyle Holmes) as asexual, but he's hardly unproblematic. He self-declares as a sociopath, for one thing; also he's an asshole.

Angiportus@78 - I knew there would be something I was unfamiliar with. I enjoyed Moon's The Speed of Dark and have been meaning to read more of her one of these days; sounds like I might move it up the list.

Jenavira @ 81

I do think it's only fair to warn you that Paks is fairly brutal and involves (as I recall) more than one rape. So, definite informed decision-making territory, although I'll agree that it's a fantastically well-written book. (Just not something I can personally take more than one of every 10 years or so.)

Lee @23 (also Skwid @11): I found this, which seems to be the link you (Lee) were talking about. If you (Skwid) scroll down, you will find Rush songs covered by others.

Robert Thornton @ 79: Looks like those tunes are only on singles and not on any compilations beyond a radio interview LP. Argh!

Hm. Return of the Giant Slits was reissued on CD in 2007, and has both tracks (and is excellent all the way through IMHO). It comes with a (not particularly great) bonus disc that includes a radio interview--maybe that's the source of confusion. I guess it could be out of print already.

Since everybody seemed to call out different things, I will probably use Allmusic and Amazon to get more detail and figure out which one will appeal to me most.

I am dying of frustration, because my sole publication credit is the BiL entry in the MusicHound Guide To Folk, and I can't find it online or on my hard drive. The short version: Old Lead is the most British-folk-centric; Ladle and Orb expand into world music, and the playing (especially the drumming) goes from pretty good to outstanding; Antler Dance replaces the punk elements with metal/rawk. You won't go wrong with any of those. Songs From The Gyspy, a concept album, did not work for me. Silver, the recent reunion album, is quite good, but I wouldn't start with it. Alloy is a career overview compilation, if you want to go that route.

Jenavira: I'm going to be 52 this year. I've had a handful of relationships (sexual and not). I'm not motivated by sex, nor by visions of romantic love; when I was your age I used to lament about having to go through all the dating stuff to get to the part I liked, where we just spent a lot of time being with each other without everything having to be "special." I was happiest sitting on the couch with someone I really liked, reading and/or watching TV or whatever.

I don't consider myself completely asexual since I am fond of eyecandy of various sorts, but I am definitely of low libido.

And pretty much content to be single.

I did decide to do the motherhood thing, once I was in my 30s. Totally different kind of relationship and a totally different kind of love. The parenting thing was not, for me, connected to the partnership thing.

When I was around 40, a new dr. suggested that hormone therapy might help with the low libido thing (and potentially increase my desire for a love relationship). I wasn't interested at the time (I had a 5-year-old, after all), but I might have considered it when younger.

I'm the only one in my family like this, afaik. My offspring, who takes after me in many ways, does not in this one.

On abstract art: oh, Iowa, you tried to sell the Pollock and FAILED. The university has a donated Pollock, and twice, the idea has been put out that we should sell it for a scholarship fund or flood recovery money. The conversation gets ridiculous. A friend of mine theorizes that the people who are most in favor of selling it are those who don't see it as art at all-- it's just splatters (which it's not) and anyone could do that (which they could, but it wouldn't be this painting and it wouldn't have the fractal thing and it wouldn't be Pollock, now would it?) I confess, I am not a Pollock-getting person in the slightest, but as long as Pollock is Pollock, the painting matters.
It's now recognized as the kind of discussion that will do nothing but make people hate each other.

On "I could do that": I try not to say this, but sometimes, I could. A friend of a friend sells $50 scarves at craft fairs, and they are gorgeous... and made of novelty yarn from Hobby Lobby. That kind of thing's not cheap and it's not always easy to work with, but knitting it is easier than crocheting it and for heaven's sake, fifty dollars? Or more? Value is weird.

My problem is also that I am, in general, a messing-with person. I see some simple cross-stitch pieces and go home resolving to copy them because I can. I've done it before, with egg-shaped Santas that came out low-quality but hell, Mom displays them proudly and is impressed. With something I have actual skill at, I am much more likely to make exactly what I want, rather than the almost-right someone is selling.

It's such a weird tangle of issues, ranging from, "No, really, this is totally a thing people do so you can do it too, just try," to, "Value your labor, people," to, "Just because you can do it in general doesn't mean you can do this specific thing," and such. So I stick to very small cross-stitch pieces with dirty words on them and I give them to friends.

(this post is way more rambly than I want it to be, but my choices are say things a bit wrong and then eat or try to say things right and end up eating an hour later and one of these is not a choice right now*)

*also I am speaking in teacher

If I might be so bold as to toot my own horn: I believe some select number of you all might enjoy listening to this tape that my band has recorded. Mountain Station.

Devin #62: I don't think there's much argument that, leaving aside the conceptual parts, a sufficiently patient and motivated sixth-grader with a T-square could paint a Mondrian. If it's not art, it ain't much.

Ooh, did you pick the wrong example! ;-) The thing is, Mondrian started out as a conventional painter★, doing scenes and such like his peers. Along the way, he became interested in "visual rhythm", that is, the spacing of features within pictures (his own and others'). The abstracts he became famous for are the endpoint of that exploration, and trust me, getting the "feel" of a late Mondrian takes more than a T-square.

Pollock was another classic case: Like Mondrian, he went delving into one particular aspect of image, until he'd pulled it loose from everything else. During his lifetime, I doubt Pollock himself completely understood what he'd found, but it turns out that his work (unlike that of his contemporary imitators) has fractal dimension. This is not usual in human constructions, but is common in natural forms.

Terry Karney #65: At this point, I think we're in violent agreement. Note that "the camera does the work" (of exactly replicating the scene in view) was one of the original arguments against considering photographs as potential art. After all, how could it be art if the artist didn't have all the learning and skill needed to create that realism theirself? Art and science both, sometimes advance one funeral at a time.

★ It's worth noting that most abstract artists, and all of the "great names", started out as conventional artists, or at least were trained as such.

Tim Walters @ 84 - So that's why I've heard of Boiled in Lead. When I read The Gypsy, yon author mentioned Songs From The Gypsy in the back if I recall correctly. I just started using Rhapsody, maybe BiL are on this service. But I am looking forward to hearing them. I figure that if I like early PiL, I will *definitely* like early BiL. ;)

I, too, have some folk-rock in my checkered past.

Rob Thornton @ 89: For an early PiL fan, the best place to start listening to Boiled in Lead would be "Fück The Circus" (but it's really more like Flipper, I think). On unfindable 7" vinyl and not at all typical, though.

I should have checked first--"Fück The Circus" is included on the Alloy compilation.

Remember the discussion in early March about emergency oxygen being removed from the toilets in American planes? I believe Terry Karney brought it up here on Making Light. Here's a link about the secret directive. When it became public in March, and people objected that someone in the bathroom wouldn't be able to get to oxygen quickly, that was dismissed with talk of how rare fast decompressions are.

Well, here it is less than a month later, and a large hole causes Southwest flight to make emergency landing.

Modesto Kid @87: I got this when trying to expand demo.zip: End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.

Do you have anything that streams?

I don't understand why "I could do that" is even a bad thing. There are plenty of artists whose work is technically amazing but really terrible, and plenty of artists whose work is technically simple, flawed even, yet wonderful (both examples based on my taste, of course).

"Don't be afraid of something just because it's easy to do." --Brian Eno

Tim @ 94 -- Hm. Odd... I can link the tracks individually. And try to figure out what's going on with that.

Diatryma @ 86:

I've noticed that, at least for fiber crafts of the variety sold at craft fairs, your average customer is willing to pay more for materials than for labor, or technique. This leads to situations where Thena's dishcloths can't sell for more than $2.00, while your friend's friend can sell scarves from Hobby Lobby's novelty yarn* for $50.

I've also noticed that the actual cost of the materials doesn't matter near so much as the perceived cost. Plain cotton yarn has a low perceived cost. Anything that sparkles has a high perceived cost. Self-striping or variegated yarns are somewhere in the middle. I've looked into pricing on Etsy and at craft fairs, and come to the conclusion that if I ever try to sell any of my knitting or crochet, I need to pick something where I can use an expensive-looking yarn (preferably one not too much more expensive than a plainer yarn). Something like scarves from novelty yarns actually fits this description pretty well.

*I personally find novelty yarns (any manufacturer) easier to crochet than to knit. But this is probably because I've been crocheting for almost 20 years, and I've been knitting for less than 5. Once again, the value of practicing a skillset is illustrated.

Ok, I put a little streaming thingy at the link.(Hopefully all the links in the xspf file are correct. I'm just listening to the first song now and it is correct.)

Melissa Singer #85: I used to lament about having to go through all the dating stuff to get to the part I liked, where we just spent a lot of time being with each other without everything having to be "special."

Um. <Wanders off to consult mirror> Modulo the sex drive thing -- as I've noted elsewhere, mine is strong but frustrated, and I've decided it's an annoying distraction.

<psychogeekery>: Common misusage aside, libido isn't actually the the same as sex drive, it's much more fundamental. In the "hydraulic model" of psychology, the libido is the basic life-force, the metaphorical fountain that feeds into everything else. The confusion became common because for most people. yes the sex drive is a primary outlet for the libido, and even something of an indicator for it. But as I recall, you go out and do quite a bit of "stuff", so I'm pretty sure your libido is just fine, regardless of your absent sex drive.</psychogeekery>

Robert @79 -- already have PDP, and really like the whole album "Bury Me Deep" is on. They never got back to that level of fun (IMO).

Rob, #77: That Bloodhag site is... interesting. I wonder, is it filk when it's about the author instead of the book?

And @79: That looks like it might be them, although the song isn't one I recognize. But the period is right, and so is the sound. Now do you suppose anyone has the album and has ripped it to .mp3 format?

Kip, #83: No, that's a list of songs by other bands that Rush has covered. Skwid is interested in songs by Rush which have been covered by other bands.

Robert & Tom: Oh, a subject dear to my heart! Poi Dog Pondering was mostly the brain-child of Frank Orrall, who comes from Hawaii and had a string of great little-known bands here in the late '70s and early '80s, including the Squids and the earlier versions of Hat Makes the Man and Pagan Babies, before he headed off to Austin and slightly-less-obscurity. Very cool guy, and I love the way he looks at life.

He's still doing some version of Poi Dog Pondering along with Internet DJ casts and stuff; his current website is here: http://www.platetectonicmusic.com/

David Harmon @ 88:

I remember a book with a very large number of Mondrian's works, arranged in chronological order, showing how Broadway Boogie-Woogie and it's ilk slowly evolved from paintings of trees; the branches becoming straighter, sparser, and so on, into severe geometry and limited color. I liked the middle part of the sequence, with shallow arcs.

Back in college, mumbledy-mumble decades ago, I wrote a computer program that would construct designs of Mondrianian sensibility and print them out (as ASCII-art) on a continuous feed line-printer.

Well, I wrote a haiku earlier today in tribute to my new eBook reader, so if I can't churn out anything longer than that for today's NaPoWriMo effort within the next hour, here it is:

Microfiber cloth
Clears my finger's path to Truth.
Nook Color: sensei!

Singing Wren: completely right. Value is weird.

I think the knit vs crochet thing is a combination of factors, and I haven't actually tried to knit with eyelash anything yet. There's the stretchiness and lack thereof of novelty yarn, which would make knitting harder, but it's also much more difficult to see stitches, which makes crocheting harder. When I made the Big Bird scarf*, I couldn't see any of my crocheted stitches, so I just jabbed at appropriate intervals and tried to keep it approximately rectangular.

*a friend likes yellow. The yarn looks like someone shaved Big Bird.

I was at a craft fair yesterday and I kind of wanted to tell one woman, "No, really, we're buying this because it is cheap, but this is cheap because you apparently have no idea what you're doing." 'This' was a bracelet with Sculpey charms of breakfast food, like a tiny waffle with butter, a wee orange, and an adorable little banana. For five dollars.

And I hate that I can either buy underpriced things and feel guilty or look at properly-priced or overpriced things and never get to have them.

A thing on photography: my primary stumbling block, besides that I don't have money, is that photographs are prints. It takes an incredible amount of work to get the image, and then you can reproduce it as many times as you want. In my head, there's a painting that is expensive, then there are prints which are less expensive; with photography, the original doesn't actually exist, and I don't know how to reconcile that.

But I am not the target customer for a lot of photography.

David Harmon@88: While I completely agree with you that a sixth-grader could not do what Mondrian did, it does seem to me that the (valid) reason you give why not is neatly encapsulated in Devin's phrase "conceptual parts". Given a Mondrian to copy, I suspect a sixth-grader with a t-square could make a perfectly reasonable copy.

Lee #101: I don't own the album and I don't see it on Amazon or Rhapsody. Allmusic says that the album came out on some label named Boardwalk. I would never suggest trying a P2P solution because that would be evil and wrong (and also because I am uncertain that it would be successful). In the end, I suspect that if you really really want the album you might have to fork out big bucks to some record dealer who found it after digging through a thousand garage sales.

Tim Walters @ 84: Found Return of the Giant Slits on Amazon but it looks like an import at the moment. Most of them are going for $20-$28 but some mercenary is actually selling an import copy for $104!

Also, thanks for the BiL intro suggestion for this PiL fan. I was kidding of course but its nice to have an entry point. :)

Tim @ 95: As a Flipper fan, all I can say is "Amen, brother, amen!" However, Television is a little too complex and through-composed for me to think of it as "simple but great." To me, this is a better example. Of course, legendary music critic Lester Bangs might have nominated these guys instead. But that's pushing the boundaries....

Correction: I used the phrase "through composed" incorrectly. Please pretend that those words are not there. And so to bed....

I wonder if the "I could do that" response to painting* is connected to painting's strange economic system. A primitivist CD might annoy the listener, but it's inexpensive, and it's not likely that the artist is getting rich from it, so the mere existence of it isn't offensive to most people. On the other hand, seeing something that seems very easy to do (say, an all-white painting) in an art museum, knowing that it's valued at a gazillion dollars, is something of an affront to one's core values about reward vs. effort. Even mine, a bit--as mentioned above, I don't mind things that are easy to do, but I'm less sanguine about fetishizing the specific objects that result.

*And sculpture.

Also, on risk: when I left grad school, I had to remind myself that I am twenty-five. There is nothing I can do that will ruin my life.

I'm heading to twenty-seven now and kind of wish I'd spent the last two years miserable and saving money, but again, not a life-ruiner. Given my background, I'd have to work hard to do anything permanently damaging. I'm lucky to have that background.

There will never be a better time for some risks.

If you took a photograph of a particular style of spectacles, dropped onto a pavement, and called it "The Death of John Lennon", many people would know the cultural context. It would have a lot less meaning for those who didn't.

Similarly, a lot of classic art is full of obscure references, which the target audience of the time would have understood. But there is clearly a lot of work done to get to the end product, and the picture carries a lot of information that isn't in the context.

Jackson Pollack and Mondrian, on the other hand, produced stuff that depends very heavily on the context: such things as the sequence of development of their work. And if you tried to measure how much of the information is in the actual work, how much in context, you might find the works to be very different from more representational art.

I don't know if that's a useful distinction, but it's a way of looking at the problem which seems to explain some reactions. Without the context, is there anything for somebody to "get"?

You might be able to apply that to books, too. Is the stuff we like a bit more dependent on context? When we talk about well-done incluing, does it depend on the audience as well as the writer?

Rob Thornton @ 108: Aquarius has RotGS for $27. Not much help price-wise, but perhaps a better place to shop.

However, Television is a little too complex and through-composed for me to think of it as "simple but great."

Fair enough. How about By This River by Brian Eno? I think most people could learn to play it on the first day of piano lessons, but it's wonderful.

Dave Bell @ 112: "I don't know if that's a useful distinction, but it's a way of looking at the problem which seems to explain some reactions. Without the context, is there anything for somebody to "get"?"

Another way of saying that is, art is a conversation.

Diatryma: Prints are, sort of, the original. Back in the day, when it as chemicals and dark rooms, each print was slightly different from all the others (even when the printing data is recorded, and all the key features are replicated [same type of enlarger, same f-stop on the enlarging lens, same distance from film plane to paper, same paper type, same filter pack, same exposure time, same developer, same time in the developer; stop bath, and fixer), things won't be quite the same. Even if you do ten prints back to back they won't be quite the same.

You might not notice it from one print the next, but the tenth will be obviously (if only slightly) different. Because the chemicals will change, the enlarging light will be a slightly different temperature, the emulsion on the paper isn't, quite, perfectly the same from sheet to sheet.

Rob Thornton: I would say "From the Ladle to the Grave" or Orb are the places to start. I'm torn between them to decide which I like best. This is, in part, because I discovered them when Orb was being produced, so they played some of it in concert, but the only CD they had Was "Ladle", which (had it been vinyl, I'd have worn out).

Tim @ 113: You shop at Aquarius? I love you man! :)

That Brian Eno track is awfully nice. I tried "Here Comes The Warm Jets" many moons ago and it wasn't to my taste. But I like this quite a lot. I will put my mitts on "Before and After Science."

By the by, when it comes to the British folk-rock genre I am fond of Steeleye Span's "Please to See the King." It's got an emotional and lo-fi sonic edge that my Velvet Underground-loving heart appreciates.

Terry @ 115: Thanks. It turns out that Rhapsody has all of the BiL albums available for streaming so I have some listening to do!

Bruce@73: would that be "When Gabriel" by John Brunner, perhaps? First published in the UK magazine Science Fantasy in 1956, but it was reprinted in Fantastic Universe for April 1957. To be found in his collection OUT OF MY MIND. Good old Brunner.

Hyperlocal news... Fire in the Sandia Mountain Range, seen from man's backyard last night

Rob Thornton @ 116: "By This River" is from the second half of "Before and After Science". The first half is closer in style to "Here Come The Warm Jets", although more bouncy and less abrasive. You might also want to try "Another Green World", which is more relaxed overall.

David Goldfarb #107: Given a Mondrian to copy, I suspect a sixth-grader with a t-square could make a perfectly reasonable copy.

So could a digital camera and a large-format printer, and those wouldn't be limited to Mondrians! Your point is...? For that matter, there's any number of notable sketches that I could copy without too much practice... and in some cases, without tracing paper. That doesn't make me equal to their original creators.

The thing is, even without having an intimate familiarity with Mondrian's full canon, I can see that his works aren't just random collections of lines and rectangles. So can almost anyone else with "a fair bit" of artistic background. (Remember, I'm not an expert artist or curator, myself!) And remember again that Pollock's imitators of the time did not capture the key feature of his art.

But, on consideration, there is a fair counterweight available for such arguments. The thing is, all the arguments about context and primacy can be summed up in four words: "been there, done that".

Following in the footsteps of Mondrian, or Pollock, or Picasso, doesn't get you "artistic cred", because they broke the trail for you. Copying the masters can certainly help with your own artistic growth, but if you want to be recognized for more than wall decorations, you need to make your own path. But the original masterworks stay in the museums for the same reason that museums collect technological "firsts", or period clothes and tools -- the point of museums is exactly to present that sort of history.

Note that it's also possible to accidentally stumble across someone else's trail, and that gets a distinctive response in art: "You have rediscovered so-and-so's mid-career style. Keep going, but in your own direction." And if you think that's only a problem in visual arts, try poking through some novels from 100 years ago. (<plug>Daedalus Used Books of Charlottesville.</plug>) But somehow, putting novels in a museum doesn't have quite the same effect. ;-)

Open-threadily: a suggested addition to the blog's HTML cheatsheet:

&lt;angle brackets> = <angle brackets>

Rob Thornton @ 116: You shop at Aquarius? I love you man! :)

It's my local. And just a few blocks from Borderlands!

That Brian Eno track is awfully nice. I tried "Here Comes The Warm Jets" many moons ago and it wasn't to my taste. But I like this quite a lot. I will put my mitts on "Before and After Science."

As David Hodson noted, Another Green World is more like this overall (and is generally considered his masterpiece). The album most like that song, though, is After The Heat by Eno, Moebius, and Roedelius (the latter two of whom are playing piano and synthesizer on "By This River").

By the by, when it comes to the British folk-rock genre I am fond of Steeleye Span's "Please to See the King."

That's my favorite of theirs (and not just because, as an electric dulcimer player, I'm required to like it by federal statute). Interestingly, I ran across a fan poll of their albums once that had it dead last, after rare, pointless odds & sods records like Individually and Collectively. Sometimes I don't understand people. Anyway, you should try Ten Man Mop if you haven't already--it's quite similar, and almost as good.

And I can't believe I've gotten this far without recommending Cordelia's Dad, who are fabulous whether doing punk versions of Sacred Harp tunes or drony acoustic numbers.

There's plenty of good Steeleye with enough variation to make it seem silly to me to try to pick a "best" album. Different ones for different moods. Parts of Sails of Silver never fail to give me chills, for example -- not considered their best by very many people.

Oh, and have you heard Jah Wobble's English Roots Music? A truly amazing take on traditional British ballads. Reading this reminded me to listen to it again.

Rob, #116: My personal favorite Steeleye album is Below the Salt. That's partly because it's the first one I ever heard, and partly because it has no songs on it which I think of as clinkers (almost every other Steeleye album has at least one). I'm less happy with their more recent work, after Maddy Pryor and Tim Hart left the group, but OTOH they are still putting out new stuff, and how many other bands can say that after 30+ years?

For those of you wishing to acquire Boiled in Lead music, you might want to get it from:

http://www.omniumrecords.com/

which is run by one of the members of BiL, Drew Miller.

Also, check out their site: http://www.boiledinlead.com/

There are a few sample songs and videos there.

Disclosure - Drew is an old friend of mine.

Lee @ 125: [Below The Salt] has no songs on it which I think of as clinkers (almost every other Steeleye album has at least one).

Exactly my opinion, except that it's Please and Mop that are clinker-free ("John Barleycorn" is the track on Below The Salt that fails for me). Every album has at least one gem, though.

(Offer good for classic-era Steeleye only. Best served with Martin Carthy.)

HLN:

Local woman attempts to donate blood, but is thwarted by $IRONCOUNT = n - 1, where $IRONCOUNT >= n required for donation.

Singing Wren @128, sympathies. That happened the last 3 or 4 times I tried to donate blood, that I fell fractionally low. (My doctor said in the meantime that I'm fine.) I haven't tried for a couple of years now, which makes me feel mildly guilty.

re BiL: People might also be curious to know that Adam Stemple is Jane Yolen's son.

Tim Walters @ #127, Is John Barleycorn the same song that Traffic played on their album of that name?

Linkmeister @ 131: The lyrics are almost the same, but the tune is completely different. A teeth-grindingly perky, saccharine tune, complete with an interpolated "fa-la-la-la, it's a lovely day" chorus. It pulls up the corners of your mouth by main strength. It makes The Free Design sound like Bauhaus.

OK, I'm exaggerating juuuust a bit. If Nic Jones performed it with this tune and left out the chorus I'd probably like it. But Steeleye's version is too sweet for my taste.

Decide for yourself.

Singing Wren #128: yeah, that kinda sucks. I got turned down once for excessively low blood pressure.

Terry Karney #130: Heh, small world.

Rob: I consider Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy to be Eno's best record from that period, followed by Another Green World and Before and After Science. I like Here Come the Warm Jets OK, but in my opinion, it is nowhere near as good as the other three; the songs never quite seem to get a focus.

A sampling of one of the best (and poppier) songs from each:
'Burning Airlines Give You So Much More' (Taking Tiger Mountain)
'St. Elmo's Fire' (Another Green World)
'King's Lead Hat' (Before and After Science)

Traffic's version: perky it ain't. This is live in Cincinnati in 1970.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYiHM7kOSL0&feature=related

Hyperlocal News: Area man goes to mall with girlfriend, is reminded why malls are Serious Suck and Fail. Has awesome day anyway, but the couple vow not to try that mall again*.

*At least, not without a tank division with lots of mortar rounds. The place reminded me of Nashville way, way too much... blech.

Open-threadiness rant:

I loved Google's April Fools jokes, including the ad for an Autocompleter. That is, I loved it until I got to this line: Like, so fast that you can do 20 searches before your mom does 1?

"Your mom…" comparisons are common in high tech. I'm one of those few women who work in the software industry. The first time I heard one, I didn't particularly notice it. But as they mount up, they get very tiresome. Don't tell me they are ageist rather than sexist* -- have you ever heard a "your dad" comment like that?

Despite women making up more than half of college graduates, very few are majoring in engineering. Women who take up careers in engineering are more likely to change careers than are men. There's much debate as to the causes of this (and I'm sure there are several, compounding each other), but the constant drip, drip, drip of sexism in the high tech boy's club is definitely part of it.

</rant>

*Not that I endorse ageist jokes, either.

Singing Wren #128: I've only been turned down from donating blood for low iron count once. It was a good thing for me, because that's how I discovered I was anemic. I was 5 months into training to walk a marathon, and my supposedly safe, prescription anti-inflammatories had started my stomach bleeding. Healthy exercise, indeed!

Here's a "didactic cinquain":

Ubuntu
Open Source
VirtualBox Windows compatible
Drupal technology stack development
Enlightenment!

Singing Wren: you are probably fine. My understanding is that men have much higher hematocrits than women not because women are sick or menstruating but because men's blood changes in puberty. Unless you actually are anemic, it's only that you don't have superblood. That's why I do automated platelet donation instead-- I can have a lower hematocrit that way. Besides, I'm a platelet factory most of the time. I'm due to donate five days after my stuffy nose goes away. Must start megadosing on iron....

The only time I saw Steeleye Span was when their Horkstow Grange tour came to Brigg.

They were performing the song about 10,700 metres from the place the song is named for, and in the town where Steeleye Spand fell out with John Bowlin', on a market day.

I've done business "under the Angel", where the grain buyers and seedsmen congregated. There used to be a cattlemarket, nice and modern, where the Tesco supermarket is now.

I've seen things you wouldn't believe, C-beams glittering...

Sorry.

Lee @101: As I said, the top half of the list is "Songs covered by Rush." (Quoted material is copied and pasted from the web site.)

BUT scroll down, and you get to "Rush songs that have been covered" right there on the same page. Did you scroll down, like I said in comment #83? You go past a dozen or so "Songs covered by Rush," and then a longer list of "Rush songs that have been covered" begins.

janetl @ #138: I was 5 months into training to walk a marathon, and my supposedly safe, prescription anti-inflammatories had started my stomach bleeding. Healthy exercise, indeed!

Huh? If it was indeed the meds that caused your stomach to bleed, how was the exercise unhealthy?

One of my favorite Rush songs is Battlescar, a band duet with Max Webster. Well, technically, it's a Max Webster song played as a band duet with Rush.

janetl #137: My sympathies! Despite having a pretty good sense of where those jokes come from ("the dozens", via various 80's/90's comedians), that doesn't excuse ongoing use. And even for the joke, it would have been better if they weren't dissing a big chunk of their readers....

My mom would do better if she still had a command line! Incantations she's fine with; modal and submodal widgets, not so much. (Admittedly, Windows often makes me crazy!)

Rush covers: There's a neo-prog-rock label called Magna Carta that did a number of tribute collections of important prog-rock bands. They have three of Rush, called Working Man, Subdivisions, and New World Man. I've only heard the first, and it didn't excite me particularly-- too much prog-metal formula for me. (They also did tributes of Genesis and Yes that are quite good, if you like that kind of thing, in part because the various performers include prog-rockers of note, people like Richard Sinclair (ex-Caravan) and Mike Keneally.)

Haven't kept up with Rush themselves either. For me they peaked with Moving Pictures.

Re BiL, I like Orb a lot. I have a cheesy little folk band to whom I'm now trying to teach BiL's version of "Hard Times."

Re Mondrian, it's not just the minimalism, it's the very astute sense of proportion. Anyone who tries to say "I could do that!" in my hearing will be required to demonstrate. I can however state from experience that "Broadway Boogie Woogie" makes a singularly infuriating jigsaw puzzle.

Lila @ 143: Huh? If it was indeed the meds that caused your stomach to bleed, how was the exercise unhealthy?
Oh, I was just being a bit snarky. The only way I could do long distance training was with an anti-inflammatory to keep the pain down. I did finish that marathon, but I subsequently concluded that my body is not designed for distance travel!

Ah. I myself am, in the words of the song, built for comfort, not for speed. ;-) My workout these days is the PTA exercise plan: one rep of 50 exercises a day (as I demonstrate them to patients).

Sandra Bond @ 117:

That sounds right, thanks. My local library's catalog doesn't have any of Brunner's collections that contain that story, so I guess I'm going to have to make that trip to Powell's I've been putting off.

The first time I saw Steeleye they were touring Now We Are Six - at the time the only album of theirs I'd heard. Thomas the Rhymer was my gateway drug into folk music. It's interestng to note therefore, that on reflection, my favourite album is their first (Hark the village waits), particularly their version of Lowlands of Holland. Which is almost completely unlike most of the rest of their output. Of the later stuff, can I put a bid in for Parcel Of Rogues as clunker-free?

But the most memorable of all the times I've seen them live was without doubt the version of Long Lankin they did on the tour of Commoner's Crown: it's much more effective live than on the album - a genuinely scary song.

Oh and I'll see you a John Barleycorn and raise you a Spotted Cow for Beneath the Salt's dire song.

Another fine band is The Men They Couldn't Hang - somewhat akin to the Oysterband and the Levellers in being of a punk-folk/Pogues tradition.

janetl @ 137:

Rant received and understood. It's weird, though: I've seen exactly what you're describing in two companies and one university I've worked at, where the cultures were toxically male-oriented. But, almost every other place I worked in the 38 years I was in the high-tech industry I had colleagues who were women, and very often managers who were women (more often women than men, unless I'm counting wrong), and while there were occasional problems, that drip, drip, drip was mostly absent. It could be I've been lucky; it could be I was more selective of the places I worked than I was aware of; it could be I just wasn't seeing it if it wasn't waved in my face the way it was at those other places. It's certainly the case that many of the women I worked with were very sensitive on the subject, and had many horrible stories to tell.

Tim, #127: Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea what "When I Was on Horseback" is about? It sounds like it's referring to an actual historical event, but my Google-fu has never been strong enough to find one that fits.

Linkmeister, #131: Same song, entirely different melody. I heard Steeleye's version first, in a context which attached some good memories to it. But I can definitely see how if you heard Traffic's (musically-superior) version first, you'd find it intolerable.

janetl, #137: And the funny thing is, back when *I* was graduating from college, computer programming was one of the few fields where women were on a reasonably level playing field, because the entire career field was so new. Amazing how quickly that went away...

(And if I were making that sort of joke, it would certainly be a "your dad" one. But that's my personal history talking.)

Diatryma, #140: because men's blood changes in puberty

You got a citation for that? The explanation I've always heard is that men don't throw away significant amounts of blood every month after puberty. My personal experience bears this out -- after I got my implant and stopped having periods, I never had trouble donating blood again. This seems to me like a much more plausible explanation than "men get super-blood at puberty".

Kip, #142: I did scroll down, but apparently not far enough (either time I looked). My apologies.

Andy, #150: "Hares on the Mountain" may not be quite into clinker territory, but it's the one I didn't import from that album because I could be perfectly happy never hearing it again. OTOH, there's also "The Weaver and the Factory Maid", which is in my Best of Steeleye playlist.

Lee @152

I've always thought it was a variant of the St. James Hospital/Unfortunate Rake song, in which there's a young man who's dying of syphilis. They all seem to have similar verses describing the funeral. The page I link to says that some of the variants change the cause of death, but there's no reason it couldn't be the date of an encounter that led to his contracting the disease.

Andy Brazil @150 -- and TMTCH's single version of "Rain, Steam, and Speed" is significantly longer (and IMO better) than the album version.... A song about Isambard Brunel -- what could be more steampunk?

Michael Bloom @146 -- I didn't know Magna Carta had done that much -- I've got the CD reissue of their 1969 first album, which is sort of *meh* to me.

Lee, I'm basing it mostly from this post from Figleaf's Real Adult Sex. While the graphs are completely made up-- they're the closest thing to a hand-waved graph in the one can get on a blog, I guess-- the conclusion is a bit worrying. I mostly wanted to reassure Singing Wren that not passing the hematocrit doesn't mean she's unhealthy.

Andy Brazil @ 150: Of the later stuff, can I put a bid in for Parcel Of Rogues as clunker-free?

Not with "The Wee, Wee Man" on it, you can't. :)

For that matter, "Alison Gross" goes on longer than I want it to. Although the super-distorted guitar at the end is nice.

I wouldn't want to live without "The Weaver And The Factory Maid," though. Or "Caviar From France" (as we used to call it).

Lee @ 152: My understanding of "Horseback" is the same as Naomi Pankhurst's. "Streets of Laredo" fits in there as well (especially John Cale's version).

Tom Whitmore@154: This is not the band Magna Carta, this is an indie label from upstate NY. Their area of expertise is '70s-style progressive rock, with the arpeggiated synth parts, odd time signatures, and general orchestral demeanor typical of the breed. Of their lot, probably the best match for the fluorosphere would be a band called Tempest, who sound a lot like Jethro Tull used to (and not the band drummer Jon Hiseman put together in the '70s). Their tribute CDs were, as such things often are, an opportunity for the lesser known artists in their stable to get more exposure to an audience predisposed to appreciate them.

Ah, the '70s. I saw Steeleye Span about a dozen times back then. I liked them better before they added drums-- no complaint with Mr. Pegrum, I just thought the texture was more compelling without. I completely agree with Lee@152 about both "Weaver and the Factory Maid" (transcendently brilliant arrangement, especially the bit where the vocal and the fiddle exchange parts!) and "Hares on the Mountain" (twaddle). I pretty much stopped getting their records when they started writing their own songs, not because the songs were bad, but because the productions were so cluttered, they obscured everything I enjoyed about their performances. BiL's records sound a lot more like their live set.

Last month I got to play a lucrative GB gig, where GB stood for "green beer." I snuck in "Saucy Sailor"-- and Traffic's version of "Barleycorn"-- amidst the "Wild Rover" and "Molly Malone" type repertoire.

General open thread query:

Does anyone here have some beloved local soap-maker who sells online? (Preferably within the continental US, as soap is the sort of thing that's heavy enough shipping fees add up quickly.) It probably says something about my laziness--or aversion to driving--that when my favorite local soap-maker stopped setting up her stall in easy walking distance, and moved to a craft fair south of the river instead, I decided to go looking online instead of following...

But I want decent soap, darnit, which smells like actual herbs and fruits and things, not like a faux rendition of them. Which seems to mean handmade soap, because in my experience very expensive soap just smells more pungently of fake renditions of the scents it claims to be containing, whatever it says on the ingredient list.

I love Steeleye Span! Saw them live just once, but listened to their albums and walked around singing their songs for decades. I filked "All Around My Hat" and won a song contest in the MSU Tolkien Fellowship (in-jokes, though, so not so funny if you're not "in"). When I was in my 20s "Saucy Sailor" showed off my voice perfectly, though I put a little more dirty grind into it than Maddy did! Not sure I can do that anymore; I think I'd cough.

And of course they're the band that introduced me to "Gaudete" -- which I've since sung in a choral arrangement of the original tune (not the SS arrangement). Up there with my favorite Christmas carols!

And I knew a girl named Alison Gross in high school. She was probably one of the most beautiful young women I ever met (and a really nice person, too, a rare combination in my experience), so I used to sing "Alison Gross, she must be the loveliest witch in the North Country!"

@Fade#158:

My parents' upstate neighbors run a place called Sunfeather that is apparently a pioneering legend among boutique soap makers.

For years we had a regular supply of "trimmings" around the house. I used plenty of it. I'm allergic to certain perfumes and can testify that the soaps I tried didn't set me off. You Mileage My Vary.

http://www.sunfeather.com/

I use the Steeleye Span setting of "The False Knight and the Schoolboy" for group singing at SCA events; it may not be authentic, but it's the most singable version I know of.

On a completely different note: Say you have a humanoid species that has two functional hearts--Gallifreyan, whatever Megamind is supposed to be, whatever. What does that sound like? Lubdublubdub? LUP-dup-dup LUP-dup-dup?

Fade, #158: Try Cammie's Handmade Soaps. She's local to me, and although I'm not a big scented-soap fan myself, hers always smell nice. I take that as an indication that's she's using quality ingredients.

A member of the Dirt Band, I think it was John McEwan, had a special once on the old Nashville Network on some western songs. The version he presented of The Dying Cowboy (which was the first time I connected it in my mind with St. James Infirmary) had several touches I never heard in the nicer versions. He wanted six pretty whore-girls to carry him along, for instance, and roses thrown in either the coffin or the grave so he wouldn't stink too much. Stink notwithstanding, it was a breath of fresh air.

I'd like it to be McEwan, because I saw him on stage as an opening act for Michael Murphy (I was treated to the show as a last-minute replacement for someone who couldn't make it, that's why), and I came away with the utmost respect for him. I've recounted my memories of the show enough times, probably in this very forum, that a shepherd's crook would catch me by the neck and drag me off if I started to do it again, so I'll leave off here.

Lee @152: No sweat, but thanks for saying it.

Michael Bloom @157 -- I liked Tempest when my friend John Berger was with them. His fiddle was just what they needed. He used to play for Berkeley Morris, and I could tell you stories about his wedding (to Kalia Kliban, daughter of...). I heard them before and after he was with them (they being local) and I could tell a real difference.

Deirdre McCarthy, a lovely bodhran player, did a cassette only album with a group of others as Red Branch, and she had a truly amazing song called "To The Sea" which I still love to listen to.

Fade @158: Have you considered getting unscented soap base and melting it with the essential oils of your choice?

Or you could make your own soap from scratch with fats/oils and sodium hydroxide. The big hardware chains seem to've discontinued pure dry NaOH (formerly sold as "Red Devil" lye), but unbranded lye granules are still available on eBay (often keyworded with "soapmaking" or "biodiesel"). It's a fairly simple process, though you do have to handle NaOH with moderate respect for safety. Saponification charts are readily available online.

I used to render out kitchen fat, keep it in the freezer, and turn it into unscented soap when the fat stash reached a minimum batch size[*]-- technically, I'm still saving the fat, though due to dietary changes we haven't been generating as much of it for the past few years. Which is a good thing, since my soapmaking rate was far outstripping our normal soap usage rate. Sometime this winter, I found several pounds of forgotten soap stashed in a corner and grated it for laundry purposes.

[*: Minimum batch size is determined by the precision level of whatever scale you're using. Usually you do want a certain percentage of "overfatting" to guard against excess lye, an error margin of ~1 oz lye translates to an error margin of ~8 oz fat. I was usually starting with 4-5 lbs fat per batch.]

Diatryma @155, Lee: iron

It is true that hematocrit serum iron concentrations increase in adolescence in males and then decrease after age 60 or so, but remain more or less constant in females. I've put a graph up for iron, based on the NHANES 2007-2008 US survey of about 6500 people. The graph shows serum iron, the median and upper and lower quartiles for men and women as a function of age. I just realized I didn't label it, but it is color-coded. Hematocrit looks similar. The middle-age wiggles may be real but are more likely just an artifact of the smoothing.

I don't think this in itself contradicts the two standard explanations: women lose iron each month, and men on average eat more meat. In particular, the fact that it's true for iron as well as for hematocrit supports these arguments -- it's not that men can somehow make more or longer-lasting red blood cells, it really is that women are more likely to be constrained by iron availability.

There isn't any particular advantage to having high hematocrit or iron, as long as you aren't anemic, but you can understand the blood bank being very conservative on this issue. My mother stopped donating blood because she hovered around the lower limit and was rejected about half the time.

David Harmon @145

I think in this case "your mom" expands to "could your mom figure out this software?" rather than to a "yo momma" joke. The jokes as a genre aren't, I think, especially sexist (of course, many and perhaps most of the specific jokes are, but because they use sexist stereotypes as punchlines rather than because of the format). I think they're somewhat similar to the old-timey cliche of picket-fence-type white boys arguing over who's dad would win in a fight, or has a better job, or whatever. (And there are obvious demographic reasons why "Your daddy" jokes weren't common in the dozens.)

Janetl @137

Damn, I do that, and I never even thought about how shitty it is. Thanks for pointing it out.

Singing Wren @ 128: Sympathies. They won't let me donate because I'm a couple of pounds below the mandated minimum weight. Fit and healthy, and normal (low end) BMI, but... and I don't want to yo-yo my weight (concentrate on putting on two pounds, give blood, then concentrate on getting rid of it again so my clothes fit properly and I feel right) just to give blood. Used to be, they'd take 1/2 pints, but they don't do that anymore and haven't since just before I got old enough to try to donate.

Devin @167

Some of the older, apparently sexist. jokes may have had some purpose in dealing with widespread social awkwardness. Consider the strand of mother-in-law jokes you find in older British comedy. It flourished at a time of housing shortages after the war, when newly married couples pretty much had to live with one set of parents for a while. (And see for an example, The Glums in the radio show Take It From Here.)

The humour can seem pretty ugly, but for both sides it's possible to see the jokes as a combination of a warning and reminder that things could be far worse. The stand-up comedian saying, "Take my mother-in-law... ...Please," is expressing a thought that most of his audience would recognise. And he's talking from the inside of the situation: it's my mother-in-law.

The context has changed, but that last point is still there in modern comedy: you have the family member as the invented subject of the humour. You might, through the wonders of modern TV, have the comedian holding a conversation with himself, in the role of an exaggerated ethnic mother, and you see the exasperation, and the love.

I wonder when it will be that comedians build their humour around strange on-line relationships, in ways which aren't just mocking the idea of two geeks in basements, hunched over keyboards. Will such jokes have to be told in a virtual world, before they can be seen as about people like us?

"Take my copy of Norton AV... ...please."

A lolcat saying "On the Internet, everyone thinks you're a dog"?

Tim Walters @156

I'm happy to be in agreement about song origins!

However, I feel compelled to say that my last name is Parkhurst, like Charley Parkhurst (the stage coach driver who turned out to be a woman) instead of Pankhurst, like the famous feminists.

Drat. I realized that I should have rephrased that right after I hit post. Charley Parkhurst was raised a girl and lived an adult life as a man. I am not sure of Charley's reasons, but I should have considered that Charley might have been trans, and been more careful in my phrasing.

Devin, my particular mother is a good person for "Could your mother figure out this software?" However, if I were to have children, I would not be, since I program for a living at the moment.

I know men my mother's age who are just as unsure/uneducated/unwilling to learn as she is. How come they aren't being held up as examples of the "simple" user, but the women are?

It's sexist, pure and simple.

Wow, all this Steeleye Span talk is inspiring. I will use the power of Rhapsody to check t out.

BTW, is anyone else into the other 60s British folk, folk-y, and folk-rock types like Dolly Collins, the Young Tradition, C.O.B., or the Incredible String Band?

Devin @ 167

Nah, it's sexist because it's always your little old (female) grandmother who's used as the example of ineptitude and lack of comprehension. I've yet to hear someone say "write this like your little old grandfather is going to have to understand it." Men are assumed to age gracefully into a period of accumulated wisdom, and women are assumed to become cute and fuddled and increasingly domestic and homebound. It's not limited to this example, but this is a pretty good example of the trend.

I expect it to shift, as more women are encouraged to be intellectual and have independent careers, but right now the concept is pretty thoroughly embedded in the way I see people talking about the elderly...

Fade, 158: I'm quite fond of sheep's milk soap. Her yarn is also fantastic.

KayTei @ 175... Men are assumed to age gracefully into a period of accumulated wisdom

We are?
We do?
A period of what?

KayTei: Nah, it's sexist because it's always your little old (female) grandmother who's used as the example of ineptitude and lack of comprehension. I've yet to hear someone say "write this like your little old grandfather is going to have to understand it."

Clearly you have never done on-line support for wireless data cards, or heard the comments after a long call. The amount of men over 65 who buy their first computer and card just before climbing into a camper and without getting the store to set the combination up is staggering, and they always call from a fringe data area and don't want to understand what that means. We had a lot of comments internally about manuals needed for grandfathers...

This is going to be a nervous week... or, more likely, a nervous couple of days. Back in November, I applied for two graduate fellowships - the National Science Foundation's GRFP, and the Defense Department's NDSEG. They both say that they'll announce results in early April, and the current theory says that results will come out in the next day or so. I'm nervous as hell about this - my girlfriend [who applied for the same two fellowships] is also nervous as hell about it.

We've known that now-ish would be when they'd announce funding results for both of these, but I just found out that NSF-Fastlane [the online submission and announcement system] is going down for maintenance from 11pm-2am tonight. This is not a frequent thing - the last one I can think of was about a week before the deadline in November.

Gah. I haven't had funding applications in play since the very end of 2007 - and those were undergrad, internal-to-the-university things... very small beer in comparison to the GRFP or the NDSEG. Today and tonight are going to be a bit nerve wracking...

Various: My partner Karen's mother helped invent the database (working at the National Bureau of Standards in the 1950s) and recently installed her own DSL line; and mine was working on machine translation of language in the 1960s. So, that whole "mother as non-tech-savvy" concept seems just silly to me....

Rob Thornton -- you do know that several people on this list know Heather Wood of the Young Tradition moderately well, don't you? She used to work for Tor, among other things. And yes, I am fond of that type of music.

Rob Thornton @ 174: BTW, is anyone else into the other 60s British folk, folk-y, and folk-rock types like Dolly Collins, the Young Tradition, C.O.B., or the Incredible String Band?

Why, yes. I was raised on it, even--my family lived in England in the mid-Seventies, my dad is a folkie, and I was listening to all of those artists (except C.O.B.) as a pre-teen. Other favorites were Mr. Fox, the City Waites, Gryphon, June Tabor, Nic Jones, the Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra, and of course Fairport and their spin-offs (particularly The Compleat Dancing Master).

Naomi Parkhurst @ 171: Sorry about that! I shouldn't post in a hurry.

Serge @ 177 -

I tell my wife that men store maturity and wisdom in their bellies. That's why they keep getting bigger.

And sometimes you can hear all that maturity and wisdom gurgling.

Steve C @ 182... Now I understand why I have a flat tummy.

Hey Tim, remember Fred Wedlock?

Devin #167: Well, that's the thing -- I strongly suspect that the preexisting "yo momma" jokes fed into the stereotyped use of "your mom and computers".

Here's the thing: "Chain" jokes tend to represent widespread social anxieties. "Elephant" jokes rose out of racial anxieties (Brunvand's secretary figured that one out for him), "dead baby" jokes addressed anxieties about abortion, and so on. Indeed, there was already a chain for "supercomputers", dealing with the fear of "all-knowing and perhaps all-powerful" machines. ("Your wife is cheating on you, your car needs an oil change, and your moose is pregnant.")

But, the form and face of computers changed, and so did the social anxieties. Now computers aren't something you go to visit like an oracle -- they've invaded our lives! Everyone has to deal with them -- at their job, at the bowling alley, making reservations for a vacation♣, getting money from the bank. And they're still mysterious, even "magical", uncooperative and sometimes downright abusive. (And that's how the experts feel !!!.)

So, we started seeing new "joke chains". There was the "hapless secretary" chain, but then secretaries went out of fashion! So the collective unconscious went casting around for a new focus, and those "dozens" derived jokes were hanging around at just the right time.... Admittedly, the stereotype we're discussing isn't quite a chain joke, but even so, I think it's hooked into that same current of anxiety. Every invocation of the stereotype reassures us that even if our poor mother can't handle these newfangled computers, we're up to speed, we know the lingo, we can figure it out for her... we haven't been left behind.

♣: On my recent trip to Costa Rica, I personally got bit by a bug in American Airlines' reservation system: If, while struggling with their slow and cranky pre-registration system, you accidentally hit the Great Big Button saying "I'll have a baby with me", it's Game Over. You are no longer allowed to pre-register, and even the AA phone staff can't convince The System that really, there is no infant anywhere in your vicinity. You will have to wait in line and get your boarding pass from the agent at the airport. The airline staff know this bug all too well, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Re Steeleye Span... I went browsing youtube a couple of years ago, after they played a concert in Boston. (It was great.)

Youtube was great too. It has clips of the group from last year, and clips from the 1970s (taped from old TV shows), and the 1990s and the 1980s and the whole lot. It's just fascinating to flip around and watch them... well, living. (I'd say "ageing" but it's utterly the wrong connotation.)

Tom Whitmore @ 185: I had to google his name, but I certainly remember "The Folker." And Bernard Wrigley was a big favorite as well.

Speaking of Steeleye Span and my childhood, somewhere I have a recording of the pantomime-style Christmas special they did for BBC radio in 1975 or '76. Which sounds cool, but isn't, really--it's basically a commercial for All Around My Hat. Still, an interesting rarity.

Fade @158: Not local, but good products: Lush (http://www.lushusa.com/shop)

No animal testing, small batch production, sustainable sourcing of ingredients.

Not cheap, but very good value for money. I am devoted to the Honey I Washed the Kids soap and the Coco Lotion moisturizer; my daughter uses Big shampoo and Veganese conditioner. We've used a number of the bath bombs and other products over the years as well.

I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me to find other Steeleye Span fans in existence at ML, but of course it does, at least partly because since I've been going round for the last 10 years or so thinking that I was more or less the only one left. (I guess its possible that I'm the only East of the Bosphorus and west of the Himalayas.)

I'll add to the chorus of those who aren't too keen on their version of John Barleycorn: I find it tends to remind me of
this.¹ On the other hand I can't listen to 'Bedlam Boys' without a shiver.

(I have a slightly bad conscience about posting this link, since I guess it's a fairly 'othering 'about mental illness. But a) Music! and b), while I've got quite a lot to say about that issue, #spoonfail on that conversation right now.)

1. Also: 700 Elves? Really?

Aargh. 'It's'. #punctuationfail.

And then there's Ashley Hutchings -- I probably have one of the larger collections of his various projects around, but it's nowhere near complete.

Steeleye's 1999 CD The Journey, from a live concert featuring all the different lineups of the band (almost all that weren't "currently dead", as Heather would say), is an essential album as far as I'm concerned. Gives a good feel for the different approaches they've taken.

re: #185, Tom Whitmore

Hey Tim, remember Fred Wedlock?

His story's seldom told.

(I am no Tim.)

Fade @158: Soapmakers I'm fond of from various renfaires and fiber fests:

Seventh Sojourn
Simpler Thyme (that's just the first page of varieties)
Ivy Soapworks

I've never done business with any of them online, but I do like their products.

One for the amusement of Tor folk here. I just had email from Macmillan about new stuff at Tor.com, and clicked the included manage/unsubscribe link. This led to a helpful page saying first (copied and pasted to ensure acuracy): "There are no newsletters or alerts available for subscribtion at this time. Please try again later." And then, "Signup". And after that: "There are no newsletters or alerts available for subscribtion at this time. Please try again later."

http://us.macmillan.com/NewslettersAndAlerts.aspx?page=E&email=[address required but here removed]

PS: Another sign of the times is that "subscribtion" has some 462,000 Google hits.

Fade Manley @158 - You could check out So.A.P (South Austin People.) I am an anti-fragrance person myself, but they're well-regarded in town. And you gotta love the slogan - "Strong Enough for a Dirty Hippie, but Weak Enough for a Dirty CEO."

Hedgeprog\\\\folk: We'll give you a yard of German plywood anyway. I really should dig through the old LPs and digitize that.... (I still say "Thee's Gottin Whur Thee Casn't Backoot Hasn" is one of the odder songs nominally in English.)

Tom Whitmore @ 198: Don't forget the plectrum.

YMMV on Lush - I find their scents so strong I have to hold my breath while I pass their shop, and I'm not particularly scent-sensitive.

As far as "mom" jokes, aging, and perceived gender differences, has anyone caught those "most fascinating man in the world" beer commercials? The ones with the grandfatherly man who looks a bit like a cross between Papa Hemingway and a tanned Santa Claus, and the narrator mentioning several unlikely scenarios (which I'm guessing are cribbed from those Chuck Norris websites) while said Fascinating Man swills Dos Equis surrounded by 20-something female models... can anyone think of a female pop-culture equivalent? Like the most interesting woman with a lady who looks like Barbara Bush Sr, surrounded by Robert Pattinson lookalikes and drinking Patron, as a narrator tells the story of her unlikely derring-do. No? That's because we're stuck in the middle of a sexist culture.

nerdycellist, 200: Robert Pattinson? No thanks--give me Jason Momoa any day.

TexAnne@ 201 -

Well yes, but I was just going for the age-difference. I'm guessing the age difference between BBSr and Jason Momoa is closer than that of the Interesting Man and the models surrounding him.

But thanks for mentioning Jason Momoa! (a recent conversation with a friend this weekend debated whether there is a shirt shortage on whatever set he's working on. If so, then I support the shirt shortage.)

nerdycellist, 202: Good point. I have a hard time thinking of Pattinson as eye candy--he's far too close to my students' ages. Of course, I have the same reaction to the "Interesting" Man and those models. (This is not to say that I find all age-difference relationships horrible, just ones like Hugh Hefner's, where it's pretty clearly a power trip for the old guy.)

Tim Walters @181: Ah! To me, The Compleat Dancing Master looked like a book I bought at Boosey & Hawkes, containing all the music from all the editions of Playford's "Dancing Master" series. I liked it so much I ordered additional copies for my dad and sisters. The album looks interesting, though )quibble( with 19 or so songs, it's short about 516 of being truly complete.

Jason Momoa, yes please.

Sounds like it's time for me to seek out some Steeleye Span besides their version of "Tam Lin," which is all I know (and which figures heavily in one of my favorite daydreams, about adapting the book to film) (but what young actor has both the looks and the gravitas of Thomas Lane?).

Tim Walters @113... That Brian Eno song is fantastic. Thanks for linking!

Devin, #167: Thank you for recognizing janetl's point, instead of defending the practice (which is what a lot of guys would do). And a suggestion for an experiment: if you are in an environment where that sort of joke seems to flourish, try gender-inverting them and see what kind of reaction you get. I, for one, would be very interested in hearing the results of that.

Melissa, #190: I have a lot of friends who adore Lush, so when I've had a chance to visit one of their stores I've generally done so. The issue I have with them is that they don't offer shower gel, and I'm not a bath person, so the bath bombs are useless to me. (Also, I have yet to find one of their fragrances that I like as well as BPAL, but that's an entirely separate thing.)

TexAnne, #201: Nice! But I'll see that and raise you Isaiah Mustafa (aka the Old Spice Guy), who is not only physically hot but has one of the world's hottest voices as well. It took me a surprisingly long time to consciously notice how important voice is in my "this guy is attractive" filter.

KayTei @ 175: Sorry, while I agree that the "even your mom" comments are sexist, I do not buy that men are culturally stereotyped to "age into wisdom." Maybe two centuries back, if then.

Does the phrase "Get off my lawn, you damn kids" ring a bell? Or all the jokes around "asking for directions"? To the extent that old women are supposed to become dotty and housebound, old men are expected to become doddering, irascible old fools who can't hear and don't listen.

Melissa Singer @12: I have a decent, if not exceptional "eye" for photography. I've noticed that when I've had the time to shoot a lot/often, I get better pictures than when I just pick up the camera to snap things.

About a year ago I resolved to put in "Gladwell's 10K" on my drawing (which I figure will wind up taking me ±10 years).

For various reasons, I haven't been able to get in my daily drawing for about the last month, and boy am I feeling it.

I can still draw okay (e.g., no conspicuous decline in quality), but whereas before the break, drawing was fluid and fun, now it's arduous and difficult.

I remember this from the days when I was practicing karate. Long weekend off, and it felt like I'd lost a belt-level of skill.

Jacque, 209: "After one day without class, the dancer knows; after two days, the teacher knows; after three days, the audience knows."

AKICIML, fabric care division:

I recently purchased a linen skirt that has metallic (lurex) threads woven into the fabric (sparse metallic on outside, heavy on inside) and not only did they neglect to include a fabric care label, but no one at the catalog house seems to have any idea either, other than "dry clean only".

Trouble is, it needs ironed/pressed. Before tonight. And will continue to do so any time I wear it. So what should my ironing regime include? Is steam OK? How high should I set the iron? Iron front or reverse of fabric? Do I need a towel? (currently thin cloth cover on padded board) Anything I've forgotten/don't know about?

joann, 211: The linen can take anything you can throw at it. The lurex will probably melt. Start with a cool iron and a press cloth on a barely-damp skirt. The problem is that dry linen doesn't let go of its wrinkles, but the steam might melt the lurex.

Or you could just give up and call them "rich wrinkles." How else will people know it's real linen?

And on the mothers/women as computer users thread, there's always Eric S. Raymond's hypothetical, non-technical computer user: "Aunt Tillie". The sexism alone is one of the many reasons I don't like it.

nerdycellist and Lee, re Lush:

I'm scent-sensitive too, but don't have a problem in Lush stores, and I've been in 3 different ones in the NYC area. Bath and Body Works, otoh, destroys me every time I walk in.

I will admit that many of the Lush products I use are very lightly scented, though.

Lee, they make shower gel and other shower products, though the emotibombs don't work well unless you have a small shower.

While we're on the topic of who gets skewered as incompetent on the computer, I have to point out Tom Smith's Tech Support for Dad (this version featuring a special guest appearance by none other than Tom's dad).

Averts stereotype: (1) it's about Dad rather than Mom; (2) the verse wishing that all software writers will end up having to teach their dads about their stuff.

Neutral: it's autobiographical, with the exception of that one verse.

Reinforces stereotype: the last line brings in Mom as the punchline.

So, good -- but not as good as it might have been.

TexAnne #212:

Thanks! this is about what I thought.

There's "rich wrinkles"[*], and there's "deep creases, product has clearly been been folded to fit box". This is the latter.

[*] I do rich wrinkles really well.

joann, 216: Might hanging it up while you take an extra-hot shower help?

Clifton @ 208 - The problem with stereotypes is that they tend to have some basis in reality. So confused and housebound really does describe my female relatives over...85, and their husbands were old men who couldn't really hear and didn't particularly listen about 70 or so (the irascible part, not so much. I mostly was (am) around older men who tried hard to be good people, even though they couldn't hear, and weren't good about listening).

TexAnne @ 210 - Amen.

Joann @ 211 - TexAnne is right that hanging in the bathroom with a hot shower will probably take care of some of the wrinkles, and set up for the next step I'd recommend. While it is still damp from being in the steam bath, set your iron medium low to low, and iron carefully through a towel, using a lot of force and not a lot of heat.

TexAnne 203: I have a hard time thinking of Pattinson as eye candy--he's far too close to my students' ages.

I have a hard time thinking of Pattinson as eye candy because I just don't think he's very attractive. Taylor Lautner, who's even younger, is pure eye candy. ("Oh, you're bleeding! I'll take off my shirt with a flourish of pecs, pits, and deltoids, and use it to blot the blood instead of, say, going back 40 feet to the garage for a cloth.")

As for Jason More!More! ...well, I suspect my nickname for him has adequately conveyed my feelings, but in his case it goes sooo much deeper than eye candy. There's a kind of deep, primal attraction, not unmixed with fear, that I experience when I see him. Also, unlike the others so far mentioned, he's actually a good actor.

nerdycellist @ 202... I wonder how many shirts Clark Savage Jr wrecked thru his long career.

Jenny Islander @161: That's an interesting question. Basically, are the two hearts beating in phase?

It would depend on a few things: the natural periods of the two sino-atrial nodes; conduction properties throughout the heart; innervation and response to sympathetic or parasympathetic stimulation. Are those the same in the two hearts?

That's assuming you just have two independent human hearts. (IIRC the Doctor's heart sounds are of two hearts beating at similar speeds, out of phase, but not 180 degrees out of phase.)

This also makes me wonder how the whole circulatory system is set up. Does each heart handle one side of the body? Are there two independent and redundant circulatory systems?

And what in the heck would the Doctor's ECG look like?

Caroline @ 221... I think the 1999 movie with Paul McGann as the Doctor dealt with some of that.

I have come back to this thread, and now have something over a dozen tabs of Interesting Soaps open. ...and I'm caught up in a paralysis of indecision. Thanks to everyone who gave me these links and suggestions! Now I just need to fret over Soap Comparison Points for the next few days until I break down and order whatever has the simplest interface...

Um. Randall Munroe's latest news. Like the first guy on the forum said, this doesn't look good.

I found my Innocents tape! It just wasn't where I had thought it would be. Rob, you did indeed have the right group, although the sample on that site is not on the album I have -- I wonder where it came from? The entire story, for anyone who's interested, is here.

I'll cede the word "assumed," which I agree is more absolute than it should be. But I disagree that elder men as experts and mentors are an outdated stereotype. A stereotype with competition, sure. But I do think it's a positive stereotype that's applied a lot more broadly to men than to women, despite the fact that I think things are evening out in real life in a way that has outstripped the stereotypes.

I'm appreciative, I guess, that there are places where people pull in grandfathers as examples of nonexperts too, but I have never in my life heard anyone do that, whereas I've heard lots of LOL examples. Which argues to me that that's progress, of a sort, but I still observe that the imbalance exists generally.

This bodes ill: I haven't written today's poem yet for NaPoWriMo, and I only have about 75 minutes left until midnight local time.

Earl, haiku and limericks are both poetic forms. So is the strophe beginning "Roses are red."

Hmmm... I haven't done a Burma Shave poem in a while.

35 minutes left, no pressure, right?!

Don't surf the web
While in the nude:
Your webcam might
Betray your mood.
Burma-Shave!

A brief followup to my earlier comment in the thread: both my girlfriend and I have been awarded NSF GRFP Fellowships!

re donating blood: I gave up at the gallon mark. I, for all that I meet the minimum, don't have enough mass to donate comfortably. An hour of semi-shock, and a couple of days of no wind are the usual result of donating.

I am actually fond of John Barleycorn by Steeleye Span, and while I like their Bedlam Boys I've spent too much time singing it, in lots of rounds of pick-up street signing, that it's not quite the thing anymore.

re Lush. I like their shampoo rounds (the one's which smell like lapsang souchong) and the "Prince" shaving cream. I have to steelmyself to go in and buy it because the act of entering the store is a physical assault on my mental function. For which reason I tend to stock up (and so have more of the little tins for soap than I shall ever need).

re "The most interesting man in the world" (leaving the problems of the sexist meta-culture out of it, for the moment), what struck me about them (four years ago when they started) was the tag line, "I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis." That little twist of acknowleding the merit of other beers got my attention.

The problem of his age is that he is supposed to have done so much that he can't be younger than 40, at the very far end of believable. That's about the upper end of where we say women (as a class) are still attractive. That's a problem.

Makes ya wish Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy were still around.

Jacque: re 10,000 (or as I learned it, "the first million words are crap."), the thing about pictures is the 10,000 have to be intentional. One doesn't knock out an oil painting (or even a sketch) the way a lot of people treat photography. Even a quick drawing is someone trying to represent something.

I really need to go back to serious photography blogging.

Earl@230:

Unshaven Joe
A would be hero
On ChatRoulette
Scored a double zero
Burma Shave!

Benjamin: Hooray... Ramen for everyone.

Benjamin Wolfe: congratulations.

Congrats, Benjamin!

Benjamin Wolfe #231: Congratulations!

Congratulations, Benjamin and girlfriend!

sisuile @6, xeger @7: In re 'the eye' -- some people really, really don't and can't have it, but it's like not being able to sing: a lot more people can train it if they want to and are willing to put in the work.

There are mechanical compositional and shot-making rules that can approximate good taste until you learn what makes your personal art-brain stand up and pant hungrily: shooting 'by the book' makes acceptably good/interesting pictures, to a point.

Shooting off six billion frames for the one chance 'good' shot woooooorks, but to get more consistently able to produce what you want, you need to start having a sense, before the shot comes along, that a good shot is impending, so you can get your camera out and shoot it. That only comes with experience, AFTER you develop your personal eye.

I went through several years of trying to get more consistent about getting the results I intended out of photography, and what worked for me personally (besides blowing off hundreds of thousands of frames shooting -- my pro-photographer grandfather kept saying, "Film is cheap, shoot a lot") was looking at images, whether by me or someone else, that really struck me, and trying to see what some of them had in common with each other.

Wandering through a gallery exhibit, or a museum section, and consciously choosing to notice which images arrested me, made me stop and gaze ... works for paintings, too, since (at least for me) the part of my artbrain that has lusts doesn't care if the thing it's looking at is photorealistic or not.

Increasing your control of the technical issues of your shooting (focus, exposure, lighting, etc) can improve your shots, but I've taken several completely blurry, accidental, messed-up shots (usually when turning a camera on and not intending to shoot) whose composition and overall effect were nonetheless compelling to me -- they look kind of like abstract art, or charcoal drawings.

The next step after shooting a lot, however, has to be -- fairly quickly after you shot them -- going over your pictures and ruthlessly culling out the uninteresting/bad ones, while being mindful of what you may or may not have done differently from frame to frame. Curation is an active part of making art (different people will choose different shots to keep out of a 100-shot run), and self-criticism is the only way to consistently up your 'win' percentage.

I gave a speech once (public speaking class in college), with powerpoint, about taking the first steps to improve your photography beyond 'decent-to-bad snapshots'.

To Bruce Cohen @31: I've noticed that some other photographers/painters out there have the same eye-attractions as I do. it's interesting walking through an exhibit and going, "Bleh, ehh, pretty I guess, WOW I wish I'd shot that, pretty, pretty, HUH that's gorgeous but I'd never try to shoot that." The work of Ansel Adams, for example, I find numinously gorgeous, but I would never try to shoot like that, because his lusts are not (mostly) mine.

Carrie S. @15 said, in re Rush: You might check out the more recent albums, from about Test for Echo on, maybe even Hold Your Fire--Geddy's voice has changed with age, and he doesn't shriek quite so much as he used to.

My sister-in-law is a massive Rush fan, and has been since her turbulent pre-teen years. She has attended many live concerts, watched every video available, etc.

It is her considered (half-facetious) opinion that Geddy Lee only went through actual puberty in his 40s, because since then his voice has dropped and richened and he has ACTUAL CHEST HAIR now. Well, a bit. Before he was bald as an egg, there.

David Harmon @88: The Art Institute in Chicago has a selection of Mondrian's representational works. In particular, every time I go through I am drawn to a small (it's like 4x6, or so?) landscape with a hill, a tree (in the foreground) and a house (in the background). It's all in neon shades of yellow and pink, and it *vibrates*. I took down the title and went to the gift shop in hopes I could buy a postcard or something, but no dice, and nobody else has reproductions of it either. I iz heartbroken. All the Mondrian I can buy online is his colorblocked stuff, or his (even older) normal-colors landscapes, all of which are nice, but they're not the one I love.

------

Argh, I go away for one weekend and you guys make hundreds of posts in a new Open Thread. :-> I'm posting this and coming back to read the rest so it doesn't take up three screens when I'm done.

Earl @230, I laughed, out loud, to an empty house. Bravo!

Congratulations, Benjamin! That must be such a relief.

Hyperlocal news: Woman dreams that her latest order of stuffed-animal eyes came with an antenna for their Twitter feed. Woman concludes that she has a strange mind.

Benjamin Wolfe, congratulations.

Am I the odd one in the bunch here? I love the scent overload in Lush stores. I can't abide Yankee Candle or Bath & Body Works -- all the synthetics and petrochemicals give me an instant headache. But the Lush scents are, for the most part, plant-derived, and when I walk into a Lush store, it's like a big fluffy blanket of Pretty Smells, and it instantly lifts my mood. The only complaint I have is that the combination is so strong that it's hard to pick out individual notes, and I sometimes have a hard time deciding whether I'll like any particular product. I tend to wing it, and the only ones I leave on the shelves mention fennel prominently (licorice, yuck).

Also, very amused at Terry describing the Soak'n'Float shampoo bar as smelling like lapsang souchong, because I'd had it tagged in my head as smelling like campfire, and, as I mentioned before, lapsang souchong tastes like campfire to me. I wash with conditioner these days (and if I could afford it, it'd be Retread all the way, but it's a small fortune) but the shampoo bar I like for scent is Godiva, which is primarily jasmine.

I guess the upshot of this is, if people want Lush products but can't comfortably walk into the store, and their web ordering encounters trouble again, feel free to ask me, and I'll happily go breathe in Pretty Smells some more!

Congrats, Benjamin! That takes away a lot of worry about funding.

Congratulations, Benjamin, both for your grant and for avoiding the inevitable resentments that would have arisen had only ONE of you gotten a grant.

(I'm sure you and your girlfriend would have dealt with the resentments reasonably; it's just nicer not to have to.)

It looks like LiveJournal is effed up for the 2nd day in a row.
Different issues this time around.

HLN: woman cancels business trip for first time in 30+ year career due to what seems to be flu (despite having been vaccinated).

Oddly enough, I have been feeling for at least a month that Something Was Going to Go Wrong around this trip. Did the worry bring on the illness? I suspect not, since it's been going through the office like a reaper through grain.

Fabric update:

Ironing, low/med setting, heavy towel on top, spray towel and press down, worked partially. I still had some deepish folds, but wore it anyway. Several weeks' hanging before my fictive god-daughter's wedding will probably help considerably.

Serge #245:

FWIW, I've had similar issues today connecting to tor.com *and* this very site.

Benjamin: Congratulations to you and your brilliant grilf!

Joann: That kind of problem across multiple sites used to be indicative of a major Internet routing problem, but these days it is more often indication that a major ad site is messed up...

I think I'm going to have to change my NaPoWriMo deployment strategy to mitigate deadline pressure; I'll have several poem ideas working at once; when one looks about to pop (like an Aliens chest-burster) it gets escalated to the top of the list and deployed as that day's poem, and a fresh poem idea will take its place.

Jenny Islander @ 161: "On a completely different note: Say you have a humanoid species that has two functional hearts--Gallifreyan, whatever Megamind is supposed to be, whatever. What does that sound like? Lubdublubdub? LUP-dup-dup LUP-dup-dup?"

Auscultation requires precise positioning, so you're only going to hear the sounds of the heart that you're closest to. On the other hand, identifying a loud murmur -- which heart has it? -- would be an interesting exercise. The EKG will have a different waveform, because it's reading electrical activity, and doing so with respect to orientation of the recording electrodes (which is why the EKG looks different when you switch from I to II to III..). The change in the EKG waveforms will really depend on how the two hearts are (1) arranged and (2) synced.

Wouldn't a double heart sound like the ultrasound of twins, corrected for body size?

Rikibeth @ 252: Ultrasound is an imaging system -- it uses sound, yes, but it doesn't give you data of sounds. You can visualize each twin's heart separately on the same screen, because they're separated by space. Ultrasound is like sonar.

joann @ 247 ...
Ironing, low/med setting, heavy towel on top, spray towel and press down, worked partially. I still had some deepish folds, but wore it anyway. Several weeks' hanging before my fictive god-daughter's wedding will probably help considerably.

I'd suggest using a much lighter pressing cloth -- something in the hanky-weight range -- and starting carefully at the low end of the steam-producing settings for your iron.

Keep the iron moving fairly quickly -- pressing and holding is far more likely to cause the lurex to melt -- and experiment with moving the heat upwards.

Beyond that, I always iron linen on the wrong side, or with a pressing cloth, to avoid the dreaded shine -- and if you're worried about melting, ironing on the wrong side, even with a pressing cloth can help with that, as well.

Serge @118: Heh. shades of...

@"your mother could do it" jokes[sic]: I think of it as the I Love Lucy effect. That's not fair to Lucille Ball, but that's where I first remember seeing "girly = cute and incompetent" stuff.

There are still grandmotherly types out there who act out the old "too girly to change a tire/lightbulb/video driver" stereotype, but I think of them as my parents' generation, ie 75+. (On the other hand, I myself am starting to feel more and more Amish. I still have a landline. I don't text. In five years I might be raising barns. )

Humor tends to persist a little while past its relevance, doesn't it? I remember Benny Hill having a blackout-curtain skit -seen on American TV in the late 1970's. I don't know when it was recorded, but it was in color.

Ginger, maybe I'm thinking of the Doppler stethoscope, then. The kid is 15, it's been a long time since I was listening to a heartbeat in utero.

So the shutdown merry-go-round is still whirling. To the best of my knowledge the effects will be:

Social Security: Benefit checks are automated, and will go out.

New applications for benefits could be screwed, at worst, no applications would be taken during the shutdown, at best, you can apply but no action would be taken. Either way, there would be some delay in receiving your benefts.

And few if any staff will be available to answer the phones.

Medicare could be a problem -- my guess is that medical bills would be submitted to CMMS but not processed for payment. This will cause problems for doctors et alia because they still have bills of their own to pay.

Defense: Everything military will keep running, but the supply/pay side which is manned by civilians won't -- which will mean our troops won't get their paychecks.

National Parks will close at midnight on April 8th. The Smithsonian will also be closed. The government loses revenue every day these are closed, and it also harms local businesses that depend on the tourist traffic.

HHS -- most agencies close. (CDC, FDA, NIH...)

IRS -- I have been unable to find out what will happen here. I'm guessing you'll still have to file your tax returns by the 15th, and that they will be processed when funding resumes.

Agriculture -- food inspection will go on, county extention offices may be closed.

Education -- closed, this will probably delay some grants.

If anyone is interested, I'll report more as (if) I hear from other federal agency employees.

Is it possible for the mods to correct my fat-fingering my own name?

Lori 258: I'm guessing you'll still have to file your tax returns by the 15th

18th, this year. Holiday in DC or something.

A holiday? When the 15th is a Friday?

Oooookkkaaayy -- it's not listed on the Federal activity planner.

They can't possibly be doing it for Palm Sunday* can they?

*In the past, the IRS has extended the deadline when the 15th falls on Easter Sunday.

Lori, 261: It's Emancipation Day in DC.

Lori @258--we're sort of wondering, here at my DDS (and no doubt at all the others)--we're operating on pay from the state, which comes from money sent by the feds. Doesn't this get regularly sent out at the start of every quarter? Or do I have that wrong? Should we count on this having been sent before 4/8? last time, in the Age of Newt the Fatuous, we kept on working, because the state operated on the assumption the money would show up eventually, but we are now in the Age of Orange John, and I don't know if we can count on that.

Maybe it's time to take another look at Gramm-Rudman, which sucked but at least got those cuts applied to everything, not just a few things.

The Tea Partiers are perfectly happy to have a government shutdown. They fundamentally oppose government, and really hate poor people* and want them to die.

*And, not incidentally, people who have a serious illness—cancer, say—and no insurance.

fidelio @263:

Lord and Lady bless -- I forgot about the state agencies that get federal funding...

My best guess is that you MAY be funded until June 30, if the funds are received on a quarterly basis, because HHS usually releases those funds to each agency at the beginning of the quarter.

I doubt they'll shut you down because you're evaluating claimants for SSDI, right? I think, whatever happens, your state will get the funds (if they haven't already) because you have a contractual relationship with SSA.

I think the states' Medicaid programs and SCHIP may be in the same boat.

Lori @258: I'm sure you know about essential personnel, but I'm adding info here in case it helps anyone else. Every agency has essential personnel, both federal and contractor, who have to work no matter what. (These are also the people who must go to work when the government shuts down for bad weather or in emergencies.) If the government shuts down, these people still report to work, but won't get paid until the shutdown is over. It's not fair, but it does ensure that the government's critical missions go on.

What you'd need to do to figure out whether, say, the IRS will be processing returns, is to find out whether those positions are considered essential. (It seems the answer is no; Bloomberg says the IRS is still figuring out what to do in the event of a shutdown in the middle of filing season.)

I wrote a month ago about how a shutdown works, if anyone's interested. The article is from the contractor perspective, but if you skip down below the embedded video there's general info.

This is all at the federal level; I assume the states have equivalent essential positions, but that's not my area of expertise.

Me @266: What you'd need to do to figure out whether, say, the IRS will be processing returns, is to find out whether those positions are considered essential. (It seems the answer is no...

Er. The answer would be no to whether those are essential personnel, rather than no to processing returns. The things you see .2 seconds after hitting the Post button.

Unsurprisingly, open government initiatives such as the IT Dashboard and data.gov are suffering from the maybe-impending-shutdown and will be one of the first areas to run out of funding.

Lori--I do hope they do; experience has shown we can carry on in the hopes that the money will show up once things get sorted out, but the doctors and other healthcare providers may not be so willing to play along. We'll keep our fingers crossed that those payments have been procesed, or are being so this week.

janetl @137 said: "Your mom…" comparisons are common in high tech. I'm one of those few women who work in the software industry. The first time I heard one, I didn't particularly notice it. But as they mount up, they get very tiresome. Don't tell me they are ageist rather than sexist* -- have you ever heard a "your dad" comment like that?

A relevant post over at Sociological Images.

Lee @152 talked about men-vs-women giving blood

What my doctor told me some years ago was that, if you lose some non-horrific amount of blood, your liver doesn't have to process those dead cells, and it stimulates your system to make fresh, non-worn-out blood. Adult, menstruating women already do this, and therefore get no particular additional personal health benefit from donating regularly; post-menopausal women and men DO get a significant boost to their anti-bad-heart-attack-causing factors by donating blood on the recommended schedule, because of the aforementioned (and badly remembered by me) specific sequelae of donating.

Before a certain age, nobody's recommended to donate, because we usually don't meet the minimum body-mass requirements. I remember my high school had blood drives set up in its cafeteria several times a year (mostly for the staff/faculty and people who came in from outside), and only a very few of the largest seniors, usually the athletes, qualified to give. You had to be over 16 (for legal reasons), and over something like 120lbs. My grandmother was never eligible to donate in her life, because she was slightly built and always under the minimum weight.

The minimum weight limit is, of course, to make sure that the (fixed, standardized) volume of blood they take from you is unlikely to be over a critical percentage of your total supply at the time.

David Harmon @186 spoke about issues around making airline reservations with/sort of with an infant involved

We just got back from a weekend in Toronto so my kid could see her grandparents (and I could go to a con, woohoo!). We flew Porter, a newish airport based out of Toronto flying tiny little propeller planes. Porter is Exceedingly Civilized, and despite being priced at or below what American charges, you get free everything: free (GOOD) in-flight sandwich, the Toronto departures lounge has unregulated coffee-and-cold-drinks-and-snacks for the taking, etc etc -- PLUS they use REAL GLASSES in flight, which I haven't seen on a plane since I was six and they had real ceramic coffee cups and actual metal silverware!

That was a digression. Suffice to say, we like Porter. However. There is a massive stupid in their reservation system. We boughg the tickets in December for a flight in March/April involving my daughter, whose birthday is in February. You may opt to buy a seat or not for an 'infant' (0-2 yrs of age); you are required to buy a seat for any child 2 or older. Infant seats are priced differently than child seats. It requires you to enter name, sex, and date of birth for all passengers.

She was not yet 2, but would be by the time we flew. It refused utterly to let us buy a 'child'-priced seat for her, because it was doing date validation against current date, not date-of-flight, for age purposes. We had to call up and have the (professional, friendly, and skilled) live human being book our tickets, because the system just couldn't handle us at all.

In re Lush and smells I have a friend with a really weird allergy/sensitivity (yes, I know, technically allergies are only proteins and this isn't, but it ACTS like severe hay fever) to an entire family of aromatic chemicals, including the smells of lavender and pine. He thought it was a bunch of odd individual things until he was chatting up a chemist at a party (as you do, at fannish parties), and it came up. The chemist said things like, "Oh, and pine? And ..." and listed off several other my-friend-thought-them-unrelated smells, as my friend started to have that In The Presence Of Omniscience nervousness mentioned upthread in relation to supercomputers. The chemist grabbed a napkin and doodled a structure. "You're allergic to these," he said, with some term that starts with polycyclic. And then he listed off the ten or fifteen most commonly-encountered ones, which from the odors you wouldn't think are related, but are only a few dangly bits off of each other in chemical structure. My friend found this knowledge very useful, and has since googled a much more extensive list of things to know to avoid.

He can't even go within three doors of a Lush in a mall without needing to fall over for a while, alas.

Re scents: I'm highly sensitive (asthmatic-type reaction) to a lot of fragrances, natural* as well as artificial. I figured out a while back that edible scents (vanilla, cinnamon, citrus, apple, any food) are fine; non-edible scents are the problem. The only exception is pine (and related evergreens); it's fine, even though it's not a food.

*the gardenias on a co-worker's desk almost killed me

And gloriosky, with that, I iz caught up. Yay!

Open-Thready Footwear Question

Do any of you fine MLers (shorter than the word starting with F) wear monkey-feet shoes? That's the brand/model I have, there are others. They have toes, and are designed to act as close to being barefoot as possible, while avoiding things like glass punctures.

My pair is Quite New, and while I've geeked with local owners of similar before, I'm wondering if I have quite the right size. The common wisdom I knew before going to try them on was, "If you've never worn them before, the right size will feel too small." I'm wondering if these feel too small because they're the right size, or because I need the next size?

40s wouldn't go on -- the 'neck opening' as it were was simply too small to even make an attempt at getting my toes into the pockets. 41s is what I have, and there is a constant (not necessarily unpleasant) touch at my toe-webbings. What makes me suspicious they might be too small, though, is that there are instructions in the manual for shortening 'extra length' off the arch strap, and my arch strap doesn't even reach halfway across the shoe, while still being quite tightened. Also, if I leave the strap flapping, my heel is still snugly seated in the heelcap, which is what the strap is meant to do.

I'd try on 42s, except nobody stocks them, so I'd have to return my 41s and order them from the website to try them on, at which point if they seem too big I'd have to mail them back and re-order 41s on the second return, which just strikes me as kind of silly.

of course, I'm a customer Amazon.com thinks doesn't exist; one of their past Giftmas radio ads called me a 'laser-beamer'. I know exactly what I want, down to the precise model and size, and I never return anything. :-> Well, I've returned to Zappos, but that's because they have an explicit 'order 2-3 pair of adjacent sizes and return the one that doesn't fit' policy, so I did.

Mary Aileen: Do roses affect you? And pine nuts are edible, though they don't have a scent. I wonder if you're sensitive to the things that make plants Not Food. /talking out of hat

Persephone @266: It's probably obvious by now, but I'm "non-essential" personnel.

So are the auditors who work in the same office, we were all sent home last time. If it works out the way it did in 1995, we'll come in to work Monday morning, and be sent home immediately if there are no funds.

Why am I not surprised that the IRS doesn't know what it will do? (I'm betting most Federal agencies don't really have plans, despite what they're saying to the media.)

It must be crazy at Treasury, Defense, Commerce, DHS, Transportation, Agriculture, and Justice because they're rarely shut down -- usually their appropriation bills pass with little public notice. HHS, Education, SSA, Energy, Interior, and Labor are the ones most often subjected to the dread shutdown.

Lori, 273: DHS??? Oh good grief. *That's* going to make airports fun.

TexAnne (272): Roses--any flowers--are a problem if they have a fairly strong scent. I can usually tolerate light florals, although they're not ideal; heavy florals are Right Out.

I hadn't considered the existence of pine nuts; I wasn't thinking about the actual trees so much as pine-scented candles and cleaning products. Interesting.

Terry Karney @232: The Gladwell 10K is specifically about time spent (e.g., ten thousand hours) to achieve mastery, whatever that works out to in units-produced.

For photography, I expect it would be in the gazillions of frames shot divided by (one hopes improving over time) good/bad ratio.

Similarlywise, with drawing, I seem run between 6 to .2 drawings/hour, with a hit rate on the order of 10%.

Lori @273... What agency are you with, if you don't mind me asking?

I don't know how agencies are doing on shutdown contingency plans (poorly, I'd imagine), but a federal employees' union is suing the OMB to get what plans do exist released. The union apparently filed repeated FOIA requests and was ignored.

Lots of federal agencies are really trying these days to create continuity of operations (COOP) plans for emergencies, but I've never seen anything related to this type of shutdown, only shutdowns caused by actual emergencies such as natural disasters or explosions. If an agency has a robust set of emergency plans, it should be fairly easy to adapt its COOP plan for a shutdown.

nerdycellist #200: How about the 1337 series of comics on XKCD?

Lori:

Among other things, a government shutdown seems rather likely to kill the weak recovery in the economy. It's nuts, but that doesn't mean they won't do it.

Persephone @277...I'm in Health and Human Services, when I started working for the department, it was called Health, Education, and Welfare.

True, the emergency plans are a good base, the problem will be who and how many to leave "on duty" to handle the bare minimum that will have to be done.

I don't envy DHS -- think of how many TSA folks will be working without getting paid...and think of the resentment that is going to brew. Most of those folks have never been through a shutdown.

This one is unusual because every Executive branch agency is unfunded. Every single one.

albatross @279...I'm not sure we're in a recovery. Wall Street may be -- but Main Street? I don't see any evidence of it.

I think we're in a depression, and without a New Deal style action, i.e. putting people to work and paying them, the economy is going down the tubes (if it hasn't already).

I've been looking a real estate lately, and was shocked to find houses in my grandparents' neighborhood up for sale for half their assessed value. These properties had not been forclosed on. They're not selling, even at bargain basement prices.

#279:

"Among other things, a government shutdown seems rather likely to kill the weak recovery in the economy."

Do not dismay. The benevolent and merciful Invisible Hand will rescue those who are truly Worthy from hunger and shame.

Based on the billboards I saw driving through Oklahoma last weekend, I don't think we're in a recovery. (1/3 ads, 1/3 PSAs, 1/3 blank.)

Housing is indeed the pits, and will be for a while. But other elements of the economy -- business investment, employment, manufacturing -- are on the upswing, so it is a recovery. It's just not a very robust one. And perhaps that's good. Booming economies seem inevitably to lead to bubbles.

Lee @225: When I saw the name, I thought it would be the French group "Les Innocents," whose 1996 album "Post-Partum" I downloaded from WFMU and thoroughly enjoyed.

Speaking of WFMU, they have an interview tonight (part 1 of 2) with Robert Crumb about why old music is the only good music, and the show it's on — Antique Phonograph something — keeps a huge archive of its past shows, so if I miss it tonight (as I certainly will, having another commitment), I can go back and hear it later. And see it, as they will also post video.

David Harmon @224: [re: XKCD] Oh. Oh, shit. I saw that earlier and didn't know what… hm. Rats.

TexAnne @283: Used to look forward to the Oklahoma Panhandle part of the Colorado-to-Texas drive at holiday time because I would sometimes see a big IMPEACH EARL WARREN sign, which I thought was funny. Dad didn't see the joke — he would have agreed with the sign.

Xopher, #264: And this despite the fact that a significant percentage of their most rabid adherents are either (1) retired and on Social Security and Medicare, or (2) disabled and on SSDI/Medicaid. I suspect (or I hope) that this is going to come back and bite them on the ass.

More to the point, their avowed goal is to destroy the government. I keep thinking, "You* voted for those people KNOWING what they represented. What the HELL did you expect to happen?"

Elliott, #269: WRT parent/teenager conflict, we had surprisingly little of that from my partner's daughter. While I'm sure some of the reason is just that she was unusually level-headed for an adolescent, I am also convinced that part of it was us encouraging her to find out who she was, separate from us, rather than trying desperately to mold her into a miniature copy of us (the way my parents tried to do to me). By giving her space to find her own way (along with support where necessary, but not bailing-out from every consequence of bad judgment), we made the whole "parent/teenager conflict" paradigm look much less attractive. Also, she got relatively much more freedom than most of her peers; we were leaving her on her own to house-sit while we went to cons pretty much from the time she was in high school. She knew that freedom would go away in a hurry if she abused it -- so she never did.

* For appropriate values of "you" -- not you personally, Xopher, because you certainly did no such thing.

Elliott Mason @ #269, I'm guessing it was polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH's).

The Invisible Hand grasps; and, having looted,
Moves on: nor all thy laws undisputed
Shall lure it back to return half a halki,
Nor all thy Tears' ink-wash a contract, diluted.

Hmmm... I went to Tor.com, where Robert Reed has new story "Our Candidate". There's a button that allows me to buy it for my Nook. Except that it doesn't. The link takes me to Barnes & Noble's Nookstore, which says the story isn't available. I am confused.
("Like that's a difficult thing to do.")
I heard that.

Lila @287: I think it was a somewhat more specific term than that (he has no problem with charred/grilled foods, frex).

Tendril from upthread, last seen at Dave Bell @112, regarding Jackson Pollack and Mondrian being better appreciated in context--

Does the same go for Mark Rothko?

I'm part of the camp that doesn't understand Rothko's appeal. Granted, I've never tried to reproduce one, so I'm not sure about the technique that would go into making one of his canvases....

Kip W #285: As someone on the forum pointed out, those are plausible numbers for simple post-treatment survival of many cancers.So it's not so much "added threat" as "The Big Bad should never be 'presumed dead'."

vee @ 291: Rothko's paintings have a numinous quality that appeals to me in a very direct way; if that's not the case for you, I don't know if more context would help. I will say that reproductions don't convey much in his case, so if you haven't seen an actual canvas, that would be worth a try.

I get a similar effect from Motherwell, but not from the superficially similar Diebenkorn and Still. I'd like to know why, but I don't.

Jacque: I know the rule of 10,000 hours (it's not new to Gladwell). I was pointing out the context in which I learned it, and there is something to be said for making the measure of intellectual (vs. muscular) training to be a bit less temporally linked.

Elliot: Culing matters, though I am not as ruthless as I'd like, in part because a lot of images which are borderline to my creative aesthetic now, may not be later, and in part because of the time problem.

What I do is cull things as I am looking to edit. But I confess to having a different perspective on photographs than most.

To toot my horn and squee a bit, Marna was talking to Ctein, at Torcon, and mentioned me. His response was something on the order of, "oh yeah, he takes some good pictures." I mention it because it relates, sort of, to some of the other things which help improve one's art (no matter what it be): the feedback of other practitioners. A good photography class teaches f-stop, and lighting, and (one hopes not slavishly) the "rule of thirds" (I say not slavishly because I know people who, almost relexively, reject anything with a primary subject not on a "power point/third line", which drives me bats, but I digress), but the real strength of it is that one (in a good class; by my lights), has to show one's work, and get feedback.

That makes one actually look at how/what is working for others, and why it does/doesn't work for oneself.

flickr is a blessing, and a curse. It's a great place to get a look at other people's pictures, but it's (barring a few odd nooks and crannies) a desert for good critique. I do my best to give a good comment when I think a photo works, but most of what one gets isn't more more than, "you rock, great shot" with nothing to say why.

I will say that, when evaluating a work (no matter what it is) one should consider striking the word, "like" from the lexicon. What I like is irrelevant, mostly because it can't be argued with. What "works" is the phrase I use, and then explain what that is (be it the moody atmospherics of the light, or the clever use of an archaic grammar to cover the class-structural elements of the society in a story). Happily (and to my surprise) this is almost always met with understanding. More often than not with thanks.

When I'm next in Chicago, I'll try to find that Mondrian and take a picture for you. If I could take the sorts of photos I did to make the Magritte jokes, I can probably make a decent card for you.

Terry, 294: If I may? "Aussi n'est pas" is gibberish. "Ça non plus" means "this isn't either," which I think is what you were going for.

If this were a parliamentary democracy, Prime Minister Boehner's job would be on the line in about 6 weeks.

Kip W @ 285, I used to drive by Earl Warren Park in Castro Valley CA fairly often. It was always pleasant to see signs with his name that didn't have the word "Impeach" in them, though he'd retired around the time I was becoming aware of politics and I grew up in an area where there'd been few if any actual anti-Warren signs back when they were popular.

apropos of nothing in particular, I want a petrified bogwood sphere. WAAAAAH. they're beautiful.

Lori, I'm considered essential personnel, according to our department manager. we make sure tax money gets to the bank in my particular set of units where I work.

and someone said we'd get paid for the period we worked eventually. it's not very reassuring. On the other hand, I don't pay for a lot of gas to get to work. (it can take as long for me to walk from my parking place to my work station as it does to drive to my parking place in the garage....)

Bill Stewart @297: My middle sister is eternally grateful to Lady Bird Johnson, because we were on one of our Colorado-to-Texas drives back when she was suffering from colitis (my sister, not the First Lady), and our desperate search for a bathroom brought us to Lady Bird Johnson State Park, which had one. We still told jokes about LBJ and Mrs. LBJ, but always with the understanding that we were profoundly in her debt.

vee @291, Timothy M Walters @293, on Mark Rothko: Timothy's right, reproductions of Rothkos are utterly useless, they look like they're cut out of construction paper. In person, they ... hrm. They throb? If you're lucky enough to find a museum with several (or a theme exhibition that's careful how they're hung), and can get into a room with a few well-spread around with whitespace around them, it's a very (for me, anyway) brain-chemistry-altering situation, and I'm not sure how to explain it. If you stand there and stare for a while, kind of relaxing in a meditative sort of way, spreading yourself out mentally to just exist, they are suddenly much richer than a single color (because they're so incredibly layered and slathered in paint). If you go up close to one and inspect it, it has an amazing texture to it.

Especially the ones that are a square/rectangle of color with white canvas around it; they seem to be about to try to burst free and do ... something. Some of them give me forebodings that it would be a bad something if they got loose; some are definitely more uplifting, in a walk-into-the-TARDIS kind of way.

Simon Schama's Power of Art has an episode about him that comes close to explaining why I care, if you like documentaries.

Terry Karney @294 said: To toot my horn and squee a bit, Marna was talking to Ctein, at Torcon, and mentioned me. His response was something on the order of, "oh yeah, he takes some good pictures." I mention it because it relates, sort of, to some of the other things which help improve one's art (no matter what it be): the feedback of other practitioners.

At FKO this weekend past, I was going through some of my oldest extant curated digicam photos, because I knew there were shots in there of a fannish child who was VERY MUCH YOUNGER in 2001 than she is now, and I now know her mother much better than I did then, so I thought I'd copy out the pictures onto a thumb drive for her. It derailed (because she showed interest) into some of my other shots, including my 'artsy' ones -- self-deprecatingly named that, because back then I felt kind of weird indulging my artlusts when I didn't know quite why I was doing it (or how to do it very successfully). We didn't get much past 2003 before other events intervened, but she was vocal in her opinion that I'm good.

eeeeeeee I'm good? And that was, well, a long time ago, and I have both gotten better and learned how to use my cameras better. I'm convinced that a lot of the skill of digicam shooting is learning where your individual instrument's limits are (for a while, one of my cameras was VERY VERY BAD in low light -- orange freckles everywhere in the black bits), and making the most of its strengths. Plus developing your eye. And practice. Obviously. But learning how to really know what your camera's going to do when you point it at a given thing and snap the shutter is like nerdycellist upthread going bow-shopping, methinks.

It doesn't matter how expensive and cool your camera is, if you don't pay attention to how what-you-see differs from what-it-shot. :-> I've seen some staggeringly awesome art prints taken on cellphone cameras.

Oh, and minor point of order: Elliott. Two Ls, two Ts. Not that I've done anything with that lj yet, but I figured I should camp the name when people gave me some guff for my previous-and-current lj name having an 'a' on the end and therefore being 'obviously female'. :->

Terry, again: flickr is a blessing, and a curse. It's a great place to get a look at other people's pictures, but it's (barring a few odd nooks and crannies) a desert for good critique. I do my best to give a good comment when I think a photo works, but most of what one gets isn't more more than, "you rock, great shot" with nothing to say why.

For occasionally thoughtful criticism (and other great shots to look at), plus creativity prompts, I rather like dpchallenge.com. They post weekly (or some other timeframe) 'themes' to shoot to, which you need to shoot and upload an entry for by a certain date, then everyone who entered can vote and comment. I got some stupid you-suck-or-rock comments (and a lot of people who assumed anyone participating would OF COURSE be a Photoshop master, and that therefore some minor camera-related and no-editing-software-to-speak-of related problems with my photos were stupid carelessness or disrespect for the contest), but a lot of really thoughtful ones, too, and also through the process of voting helped work out some of what I really liked/found my eye. I used to figure if a given shot of mine averaged out at over 5 stars it was a serious winner, because compared to a lot of what was entered I would never, ever have expected to score above 8. I'm just not nearly that polished and pretty-looking.

Terry, again again: When I'm next in Chicago, I'll try to find that Mondrian and take a picture for you.

eeeee! I am broke broke broke, but would happily trade a grand amount of fannish craft barter for such a print. I don't recall if it's kept in a gallery with "NO CAMERAS" signs or not (some are, some aren't, at the AI).

Lori @ 281 - my area is at least in a recovery, including housing. While it's mostly anecdotal at this point, the office and company statistics compared to last year are astoundingly better, and that's without taking into account the inflation in home sales due to the tax credit Feb-May last year. Prices are still low, but good houses are selling - my people have been in competitive bidding situations at least four times since the first of march, and the good houses are selling within the first couple of weeks, esp. in the higher price ranges. Also, local unemployment is down, job creation up, spending up. It's pretty positive in the central midwest.

Re: impending gov. shutdown - a friend of mine is essential personnel for the national archives, however, none of their support staff are essential. Not the clerks or the file monkeys or the IT staff, and we were laughing this morning about the reaction from the IT staff to the horror of letting people use their computers unsupervised.But their essential staff are not enough to keep things running...he's not looking forwards to it,

sisuile @302: We've been househunting off and on for over a year now. About a month ago, a bunch of houses I had semi-bookmarked on Redfin suddenly sold (including the one we were THIIIIIS close to MAKING AN OFFER ON, dammit!), and simultaneously to that, my agent mentioned he suddenly had a flock of new-to-him buyers interested in actively seeing properties.

So something changed, I just don't know what. I live in Chicago, for those curious (and my agent mostly works in the Western suburbs).

I posted my Gumby poem to the wrong Open Thread. Ah, well.

Elliott: No worries. I get to spend more time at the AI. What I recall from the way it was set up the permanent exhibits allow photographs, but the temporary vary.

That's also the way most museums I'm acquainted with do it, so I might be extrapolating.

Kip @300 -- Now I am shocked at how it has never occurred to me how Lady Bird Johnson's initials are LBJ. Her husband was the last president (well, to date) not to have been in office during my lifetime.

The most obvious thing that struck me about the Carol Emshwiller particle is that the occasion coincides with Yuri's Night, and this year is the fiftieth anniversary.

Even more reason to party!

Just in case anyone is interested, the abstracts deadline for Mythcon 42 (Albuquerque, July 15-18) has been extended to May 6th. Your friendly local paper coordinator can be reached at mythlore, living at mythsoc, which happens to be an org. (And speaking of Mythlore, the spring issue is at the printer. Good stuff for Tolkien and Lewis geeks this issue, particularly those who also like Dante, and a piece on Glen GoodKnight, our late founder.)

There's a new Babylon 5 post over on N2S, if anyone's interested.

Paula Helm Murray @299...the "non-essentials" have always been paid in the past, including that 21 day furlough in 1995-1996.

It just dawned on me today that the State Department will be experiencing its first shutdown. That ought to be real interesting for the embassies.

I will have been with the government for 33 years next month, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we have had funding at the beginning of the fiscal year.

Lori Coulson @258: I wonder if a class-action lawsuit would be in order....

Terry Karney @ 305... I get to spend more time at the AI

...with HAL 9000 and Forbin's Project?

albatross @278: One should not read l337 in any of its parts at work...ow. I think I sprained something.

Timothy M Walters #293:

Not just see one in person, but really sit down and commune with it for at least 5-10 minutes. (This is why I always recommend the Rothko Chapel.) So much of what makes a Rothko a Rothko is in the sense of the artist's hand, and in the way the painting responds to light. What looks like a monochromatic field--you think, oh, wall paint, big deal--is nothing of the sort.

Yes, to all the positive commentary on Rothko's work, including the Houston chapel.

Love, C.

Morton Feldman's composition Rothko Chapel translates Rothko's art into sound very well. I recommend the New Albion recording.

TexAnne @ 283: Based on the billboards I saw driving through Oklahoma last weekend, I don't think we're in a recovery. (1/3 ads, 1/3 PSAs, 1/3 blank.)

I saw yet another one of those "Recession 101" billboards the other day. The first one I saw was two years ago. They're done up to look like a spiral-bound notebook and say helpful things like "Bill Gates started Microsoft during a recession" and "Stop worrying about the economy, you're scaring the children". There are others too, but I don't recall what they say. They don't appear to have any other identifying information, such as who's paying for them.

I hate those billboards.

Light at the end of the tunnel? House Republicans have been told to remain in DC this weekend. Congress had originally planned to recess for two weeks.

I'm now starting to see numbers -- 800,000 to be furloughed. That's 800K mortgage/rent payments, car payments, Ghu-only-knows-how-many credit card payments, plus groceries, medicine, gas, utility bills, etc. ad nauseum.

One Democratic Congressman is saying non-essentials will not get paid for furlough time. This is not going to be good for anyone, and it's damned well Congress's fault for not passing a budget.

Looks like I'll be visiting the unemployment office and filing for benefits next Monday.

Lori--I wish you the very best of luck in dealing with this, and may the time lost for everyone be as little as possible.

I remember 1995; it did not impress people as much with the Republicans' determination as Newt et. al. thought it would. I think Boehner and the rest of the leadership realize this; I don't think the new crowd does.

I agree, though, that Congress, as a group, should have got the lead out and passed the appropriations bills a good bit earlier--say, in 2010.

Thanks, fidelio -- I came within 24 hours of filing for unemployment benefits in 1995. I have some savings -- but they will only stretch so far and if we don't get paid for the time we're furloughed, I have to make it up somehow.

But I am just heartsick over those who, due to no fault of their own, are living paycheck to paycheck. That means a lot of the employees we've hired in the last year, some of them still trying to get their finances in order after being unemployed for quite awhile.

Haven't read all of the thread (to date) yet, but I have to comment on David Harmon at #88, who says: "It's worth noting that most abstract artists, and all of the "great names", started out as conventional artists, or at least were trained as such."

Many years ago I saw a short film based on Jackson Pollock's transformation (it was fictionalized, but easily recognizable) called "Bowl of Cherries". If anyone knows how to get this film in any format at all, please tell me. I've been hoping for years to show it to my husband, but we have never found it. It was one of my favorites.

@287: Glancing at Wikipedia, I'm going to guess that it's a class of complexes derived from terpenes, but without further details I can't guess anything more specific. (I am a chemist, but not *that* kind of chemist.)

Ok -- new wrinkle -- the Federal courts are going to be closed if the shutdown happens.

This is really weird, the judges' pay is funded, but the staff (clerks, court recorders, guards) isn't, so all of the courts must close too.

I'm wondering how many of the government's best and brightest will end up in the private sector, permanently. (And how intentional that is.)

David Harmon @324...anyone that can leave probably will, what I'm expecting to see is loads of retirements. I might have stayed another year, but with pay frozen it seems best to get out before they change the retirement benefits even more.

I'm planning to be gone by the end of this year, earlier if budget constraints cause my department to offer early outs.

I keep coming to things I want to comment on, and I'm so out of step! This time I want to caution people not to rely on information for the Figleaf's post linked to by Diatryma at #155.

I happen to know rather a lot about hemochromatosis. It's an interesting condition, but it is *not* a disease primarily of men. Primarily, it's men who suffer from it, but that is because women who inherit the necessary genes (it's a simple recessive) don't *suffer* as much from it, because of, yes, menses. Postmenopausally, it starts to manifest in women. As you may have guessed from this information, the usual treatment is bloodletting.

How do I know all this? I inherited the necessary genes. And had to warn all of my semi-numerous progeny about it. Their understanding varies according to how carefully they listened to the explanation.

I don't think the other information at Figleaf's place is well-founded or well-described either, and I am very much against the use of plausible but totally made-up graphs and charts in any sort of "explanation".

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

#327: This would be a good time to short-sell stock in companies that deal in overpriced gold coins, post-apocalypse seed banks, and survival back packs.

Xopher @327, thank you for sharing the good news.

Dancing in the streets, it's a new dawn, it's a new day!

HLN: Middle-aged woman has quadruple bypass surgery. She is in the second week of inpatient therapy, frustrated and depressed at the pace of her recovery. After all, they just split her sternum, pulled open her rib cage, ripped out her heart and attached a bunch of leg veins, stuffed it back in, then wired and glued her back together.

I'm also depressed that of the 65 lbs I lost in the last 2 years, I've put 32 of them back in less than 2 weeks with fluid retention, and gained 3 sizes. I'm assured by everyone that that this too will pass ... and pass ... and pass... but it meant that I had to get someone to buy me clothes for rehab because I got rid of the old ones that would have fit. And shoes. My shoe size went up 1-1/2 sizes. Sigh.

Tracie, best wishes for a quick recovery!

And the fluid retention will go away.

Interesting. Earlier today I was seeing similar stories, with no mention of his crashing ratings. I had to do a websearch to find out he was down by nigh on 1/3 of his audience.

Hang in there, Tracie, and let me know if I can do anything to help. I have a pretty flexible schedule on Wed., Fri., and weekends.

HLN: Cancer patient has two teeth pulled in preparation for the next stage of treatment. Both dollar cost and pain levels MUCH less than anticipated. Bleeding minimal. Oral surgeon the soul of compassionate consideration, in sharp contrast to the one who did patient's tongue biopsy.

Oral surgeon tells patient that alcohol-containing mouthwashes may be implicated in oral cancer. Patient thinks this would explain a lot, having used alcohol-containing mouthwashes for oral hygiene for decades.

Xopher @334: I've had to have two teeth extracted because they were rotten; my oral surgeons in both cases jokingly said they wished people would come to them to get the healthy ones out, as they were much simpler to remove and would have much faster healing afterwards. Seems it's true, as well as being blackly funny. :->

Xopher: bright blessings on that surgeon. May everyone you come in contact with through this whole process be that good.

332
There's been a movement to get advertisers to leave his show; he'd lost quite a few, because the more reputable businesses didn't want to be associated with him any more.

Elliott 335: These teeth were decayed. They had to come out because you can't have tooth decay and then have radiation in your mouth.

Lila 336: From your keyboard to the gods' monitors.

joan #314: My cousin lived across the street from the Rothko Chapel, and I visited it one time. Oh, well.

Open Thready middle-of-the-night question...

I don't read Tom Clancy, but I know some of the folks here do. How, if at all, has his writing changed since using torture went from being an automatic "this is the Bad Guy" indicator to being something that people expect and support us doing? Who would Jack Ryan torture?

@Tracie: That weight will pass. My father put on twice what you did after his valve replacement!

It took a few months but he's doing much better, starting from a much worse starting point.

Hang in there. Same to Xopher.

Spring in Buckland, taters and brew,
Horse races, games and tricks, true life.
Singing and dancing with contests, it's true!
No shadows linger, there's no strife.

Spring in Angmar, wretched with dread,
No birds sing songs of hope and life.
Whispers of prophesy best left unsaid,
Omens of burning, ice and strife.

prophe(s/c)y?

Skwid #2: I love Rush right up until the moment the singing begins. I wish I could buy a Rush instrumental album...

Here's a Rush instrumental you might like.

Lee @ 340:
Who would Jack Ryan torture?

Now that would make an excellent T-shirt.

Lee @ 286:

My paranoia has been acting up lately; I've developed a theory that the Tea Party and its backers aren't really out to destroy the government because they have plans to use it for their real goal: a massive eugenics experiment in which a large percentage of the middle and lower classes will have all access to health care and economic safety nets removed. The plan is part of a Malthusian amelioration that might be described as "slow motion genocide".

I hope I'm wrong.

Bruce, #345: But would it? The answer depends a lot on whether a gung-ho torture enthusiast (i.e. someone who would argue the "ticking time bomb" scenario seriously) would look at it and think, "He wouldn't... and he's the hero," or "He doesn't need to, [Character X] handles that," or "But that's fiction, and Real Life is Different."

Note that I put in that last bit because there must be some people, even among the torture enthusiasts, who don't think that 24 is a documentary. But I do think that for a lot of them, all they know about the subject is what they see/read in spy thrillers. We've had a few of those here, as you may recall. And I wouldn't be above turning that meme against them, but only if I thought it might work.

Lee @ #340, I think Ryan had a few opportunities when he was a CIA temp and refrained from torturing anyone. After he got to Executive level there and in the Executive Branch he wasn't in the field.

His colleague and friend John Clark, on the other hand, wouldn't have cringed had he felt it necessary.

Older, thanks for the information! I knew the graphs were iffy-- they are real-looking enough to be not really right as handwaving, but there's not much I-draw-this-graph-in-the-air one can do on the internet.

Xopher #338: Aha. Well. I had one that was bad enough they reached in for it with the pully-things and the whole top broke off. Which was what provoked the humorous statement from my dentist that he wished more people came in to have healthy teeth pulled, because it'd be easier. :-> Later in that extraction, I had a grad student working over me from one side and an undergrad assisting from the other; the grad student remarked to me on my way out that she hoped I didn't mind if she said she hated that tooth. "I didn't like it much either," I said, muffledly. Then she said, "The only good thing about it is that I got to show Glen all six tricks I know for extracting stubborn roots!" "... Glad to be educational," I said.

Elliott Mason #350: So, that day your purpose in life was to be a lesson to others? :-)

Elliott Mason @ 350 ...
... the grad student remarked to me on my way out that she hoped I didn't mind if she said she hated that tooth. "I didn't like it much either," I said, muffledly. Then she said, "The only good thing about it is that I got to show Glen all six tricks I know for extracting stubborn roots!" "... Glad to be educational," I said.

Heh. That reminds me of why it can be good and bad to have your local emergency department be part of a large teaching hospital...

I'd taken a friend to the emergency department for some sort of wretched chest/sinus/throat ailment, which turned out to be strep throat.

The doctor was exceedingly pleased that it was a classic case of strep throat, and asked if he could bring his students through to look -- and when permission was given, gave a mini-lecture, which included the memorable phrase "... and as you can see, the throat is completely covered in fuzzy white patches..."

Linkmeister @348: I think this was addressed in Sum of All Fears?

Tracie & Xopher: Healing and comfort to you both.

Ghods spare me! I just had to explain to an employee* going on leave why she cannot take her laptop with her...

IF the government shuts down all laptops and PDAs will have to be returned to the office by Monday morning. Any use after 12:01 am April 8th is subject to $1,000 fine and possible loss of job.

I guess I'd better ask the IT folks how they want the PDAs secured -- the laptops are locked to the respective desks.

*higher pay grade than mine

um, guys, it's happening again:
twitter via Hiroko Tabuchi:

M7.4 quake rocks east Japan. Tsunami alert in Miyagi, Tokyo jolted too. This aftershock bigger than '95 Kobe quake.. Checking on Fukushima.
1 hour ago

HLN: Local woman discovers a very small world, as she attends city-sponsored transportation survey thingy, gets to talking to person standing next to her while we both stare at maps, and discovers that he is the person who rented our last-house-but-one after we moved out. (We'd been there 16 years, they were from down the street while they remodeled.)

edgar lo siento @355: NPR had an interview with a woman who lives on reclaimed Tokyo Bay sludge/landfill, which apparently underwent some very serious liquefaction.

... oddly, that story seems to be an aftermath-of-March-11 one, not about a more recent quake. Hrm. Still, fascinating pictures.

That reminds me of why it can be good and bad to have your local emergency department be part of a large teaching hospital...

Similarly, the dermatologist I went to for mole patrol a few years ago is part of UPMC--that's the University of Pittsburgh, which has a great big huge giant med school. Both the guy I saw and the specialist he asked to come and give a second opinion had med students with them. I didn't mind, but it was funny; there I am, mostly naked, with people coming in and out of the room to look at my skin...

Earl 343: prophe(s/c)y?

Prophecy. With 'c' it's a noun; with 's' a verb. I stand among you and prophesy; heed my prophecy.

Also, 'prophecy' is pronounced PRAH-feh-see (or PRAH-feh-C, if you like), while 'prophesy' is PRAH-feh-sigh.

"I sigh as I prophesy; I see a prophecy."

Nice mnemonic, Lila!

Jacque @ #353, yes. I had to look up the plot summary in Wikipedia; I haven't read the book in ten years. Nice to know my memory hasn't completely failed me.

Tracie @330: Glad the surgery went well (or went, at least); sympathies for the frustrations of early-stages of convalescence.

Xopher @334: Glad you got a nice oral surgeon. I seem to have a pleasant and sympathetic new dentist - does make a difference, doesn't it?

HLN: First appointment with physio goes well. Physio writes letter and (different from last time) GP agrees x-ray would be good to confirm healed/not-yet-healed/not present metatarsal stress-fracture, considering continuing point tenderness and recurrent other painful symptoms on attempted return to running after 6 weeks of rest. Will visit x-ray dept. tomorrow.

Hyperlocal news... Man has to look at Blackberry to know which day of the week today is. Man's cubicle neighbor says he needs a vacation.

Linkmeister #348:

I recall in one of the later Jack Ryan books when he's president, he makes an offhand remark to an aide that beating answers out of people mostly just gets them to tell you what you want to hear. This was written after the torture scandal came out, I think, and I wouldn't be surprised if Clancy was putting words he'd heard from some source of his into Ryan's mouth.

re teaching hospitals: They can be really nice if one has something spectacular. I was assigned an intern when my sulfa allergy made itself manifest (thank god for military healthcare. On the private side I'd probably have died).

I was the subject of grand rounds, at least one monograph, saw something like 14 doctors from four different teams (not counting my attending, and the folks from rheumatology who came in to see how "their" patient was doing), had x-rays, a spinal tap,pulmonary biopsies/endoscopy, dermatologic biopsies, sonograms, and god knows what all else.

I found out a lot about my, general condition, from all the people I was able to ask questions, and from the questions they asked me.

I suspect, when all is said and done (to digress) the time as an interrogator let me grasp what's important in that sort of situation from the things I get asked, and then keep the person talking about that subject, in ways that inform me.

<spam>

Another new post up on N2S: De Nieuwe Batavia, about using life in the Netherlands as a way of writing about life in space.

First of another worldbuilding series, like the Allochthonia posts on expat life as a metaphor for life in alien cultures.

</spam>

Lee @ 347:

I've never been able to read Clancy; I tried and couldn't get more than 20 pages or so into any of the books. So all my knowledge of Jack Ryan is from movies, and I distinctly remember Harrison Ford putting a bullet in the kneecap of an IRA terrorist to find out where the bomb was in "Patriot Games".

OK, if Jack Ryan wasn't into torture, how about a T-shirt that reads, "Who Would Jack Bauer Torture?".

Today I realized that the definitive political slogan of our time is a simple modification of one from the mid-20^th century:

I've got mine, Jack ... and I've got yours, too.

369: Or:

"I've got mine and . . . hey, I bet the government gave you that."

I finally saw Tangled and I was pleasantly surprised. I had read reviews that referred to Rapunzel as the sidekick in a story about a guy. Actually it is about Rapunzel. It's about being raised in a toxic family situation that masquerades as a sheltering home and the perils of escape. It's about people who say they love you as they sweetly cut you down to size and the horror of discovering that someone has been battening on you for years. Oh, and about a really hot guy who needs to quit living in a fantasy world, a horse who badly needs a vacation, assorted Thud Beefchunks who dream of making beautiful art, and a little old man who wants to be Cupid. Plus the whole movie is gorgeous!

@308: Janet Brennan Croft, thank you, thank you, thank you. I had no idea mythcon was anywhere remotely nearby this year. I've been trying to get to that specific conference for something like ten years, but a couple of years ago, I just gave up, figuring that money, time, job and life were never going to align. (Blast falling out of the con/conference loop.)

I'll throw this out -- assuming no massive singularity, I will be going. I'm in Boulder County, CO, and I'll be driving. I'll have room for up to three other adults and moderate luggage or two and major or one and massive. If anyone's interested, my contact info above works and isn't a spam trap.

Healing and strength to Tracie and Xopher.

Jenny Islander @371:

I saw Tangled last weekend, and immediately thought, "well, that's this year's Dysfunctional Families Day post just about written."

Because, Mother Gothel. Jeetje. Even how she and Rapunzel say "I love you" is abusive:

MG: I love you.
R: I love you more.
MG: I love you most.

Someone writing that thing knew how these things go, knew it from the inside. That's not just warmed-over stereotypes. That's authentic experience speaking.

CZEdwards @372, that's great! There is a fair Boulder contingent of Mythies -- in fact we held it there a few years ago. You might want to throw out your carpool offer on the Mythcon page on Facebook or join the mythsoc listserv. www.mythsoc.org is our webpage.

If you've got yours, and you're not the strongest guy around, thank a government.

Well, one piece of good news, the part of HHS I work for is 80% funded from already appropriated funds so the earliest we might be furloughed is next Friday.

I'm still hoping they get their act together much sooner than April 15th.

Question for Portland, Oregon Fluorospherans: I will be in Portland for a few days later this month. It is mainly a college visit to Portland State for a daughter. Staying close to campus, planning to tour the campus and attend a session for prospective transfer students, planning on a day to get out of the city in the direction of Mount Hood and the Columbia River gorges, have an additional day in the city pretty much unscheduled and without a car. Since I have, by a combination of nature and nurture, raised a fellow bookstore junkie, a trip to Powell's is on the agenda. What else should we go see to help decide if a kid who likes both urban places and outdoor activities will be happy here? Or, what else should we go see just for the heck of it?

Also, is there fiction set in the vicinity that you would recommend? Genre of any type except horror welcome, on the light side by preference.

This furlough is so not like 1995-96 -- if there is a government shutdown, we will be working Monday through Thursday, with our furlough day being Friday.

Now we may be working without being paid until Congress finally gets funding in place, but at least we know we will be getting paid eventually.

Last time, I spent three weeks worrying while I cleaned house and baked bread. My partner told me she wished I could stay home all the time, she was making her co-workers jealous describing the baked goods that were waiting when she came home from work each night!

#378: On your day out of the city, you will want to see Multnomah Falls. Trust me.

Portland has lots of Indie movie theaters. If you need a little down-time, you can find a variety of movies at Regal Fox Tower, the Living Room Theaters (right near Powell's) and the 21st Street Theater.

The hills west of downtown have assorted good things. A Japanese garden, a forestry museum, a good zoo, and some amazing views. You can get to the heart of it by taking the Max to the Washington Park station.

Voodoo Donuts is good for a laugh.

In addition to Powell's, consider Reading Frenzy. Fanzines and alternative stuff galore.

The Saturday Market, which is also around on Sundays, is a good thing. Take the Max to the Skidmore Fountain station.

Lori, in your agency, are they calling them essential and nonessential personnel? Excepted and nonexcepted? Something else? A coworker of mine is writing a piece on the language being used around the shutdown and would love to hear what's being used at the agencies. Most of my contacts are contractors. Any answers would only be used generically, of course; he's really only interested in the specific terms being used.

Also, we just found out that my husband will indeed be affected by a shutdown, so I suddenly have a personal stake in this. The nature of the contract he's on made us think he'd be immune.

His company's letting its employees go in the hole on vacation time until they use it all up; after that, no one knows.

It looks like I'm going to be affected. We were planning on taking the kids to the Hoh River Rainforest this weekend (part of their spring break). It's a national park. Oops.

At least there's the beach. But most of it is national park too.

I think I'm going to have a very upset 4yr old call the Republican leadership and give him a piece of his voice.

Hey everyone: some of you at least may remember that I was working on an audio version of Jo Walton's Tam Lin play. I've finally got that up on its own site: Tam Lin

I encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think.

(My permission to use the copyrighted music specifies that I should mention Davey Arthur in any publicity I do; this arguably qualifies, so: the recording features music composed by Davey Arthur.)

Persephone @361...everything we're receiving from OMB and our own HQ is using "excepted/non-excepted" rather than "essential/non-essential" -- they took a lot of flack over the latter term in 1996. I am noting that the media seems to be stuck in the latter mode.

I am very, very lucky -- because OIG has oversight of Medicare and Medicaid we are being funded at 80%. Which is why we're getting the four day work week.

Sorry to hear that your husband's job is part of the collateral damage -- I hope someone kicks some sense into the Republicans soon.

Jenny @371, Abi @ 374

I walked out of that movie, saying to my best friend, "Well, your father certainly doesn't want your [much younger] siblings to see *that*."

She agreed. Then took them the next week, for the 8 yr old's b-day present.

The conversations of the adults with children as we came out of the theater were...revealing. Children will often ask the most interesting questions, and can be so fast with pattern recognition. I say kudos to Disney on this one: the girl rescues the guy, with a 'female' implement, it subtly models both healthy and emotionally abusive relationships, showing why they're abusive and making people think about some of those triggers, and does it's best to turn many stereotypes around.

A friend of mine had said she didn't want to see Coraline until I told her about the avpr-ng-svefg crefba jub fybjyl gheaf vagb na nohfvir yvgreny zbafgre, nyy gur juvyr fnlvat "V ybir lbh," naq jubfr ynfg yvarf ner n fpernzrq "Qba'g yrnir zr! Qba'g yrnir zr! V'yy qvr jvgubhg lbh!" (Spoilers, not grossness.)

Then she said "OK, I have to see this movie now."

I think that movie also shows how parents don't have to be perfect shining angels to be good loving parents.

Speaking of things Coraline--film version--my nearly 15-yo saw this in a toy store and had to have it because it resembles the "other" people in certain respects (and because this one comes with a mouse . . . ): http://tinyurl.com/6dj74sl

There's a whole line of the things. DD and I both think they're a little creepy for the target market, but commenters on Amazon don't seem to share our qualms. The one with the blue eyes is somehow weirder than the rest. The minis are not as creepy as the full-size ones; I think it's the strange joints that make the big ones so odd.

@378 Portland, portland, portland. Four and a half stars, would definitely buy again, wouldn't have left in 2005 if I could have found steady work. So, everything Stefan said at 380 plus the following:

This time of year, a visit to the Rhododendron gardens (SE 28th and Woodstock, close to the #19 Woodstock bus line) is gorgeous. Tuesdays used to be free (it's run by the Rhododendron Society and the gate fee is used for upkeep.)

Multnomah Falls is beautiful and easy to access from the freeway, but if you have time, get on the Old Columbia River Highway at Troutdale and stop at all the other waterfalls too. Latourell is still my favorite.

The Portland Museum of Art is approximately between PSU and Powell's. Just sayin'.

There are a number of neighborhoods suitable for strolling around shopping and finding a snack - NW 23d north of Burnside, SE Hawthorne between SE 20th and SE 40th more or less, the Sellwood District, other places I didn't much bother with. NW 23rd is a streetcar ride from downtown; the other two are on the east side and accessible by the #14 and .... I think #40 bus respectively. Check the Tri-Met website for current public transit info.

Oh, and there's Washington Park and the Zoo, accessible by a couple of busses and they have their own MAX station on the westside line.

Ah - teaching hospitals. My father has worked in one (neurologist) my entire life, so every check-up I had growing up seemed to involve about a dozen people, often performing the same exam over, and over, and over again.

I feel like I'm inside a bubble here -- I just found out the reason the Republicans are balking is that they put a rider on the CR that totally defunds Planned Parenthood...

I am doing a slow burn. Three out of four times when HHS has been part of a shutdown it has been because some rightwing Republican twit has their knickers in a twist over what they call "brtn funding." Conveniently ignoring the fact that Planned Parenthood has never had brtns performed at any facility they run. The PP clinics DO refer clients to physicians that may do these procedures.

The Republicans seem unaware that one of their ilk got the Hyde Amendment passed, which prevents Federal government funds being used to provide said medical procedures...

Asimov's forum taken offline.

Lori @391
Actually, some PP clinics do perform that procedure. But it's perhaps 5% of what they do. Mostly it's birth control, check-ups, STD tests and treatment. Which is also *evil* in those peoples' opinions, because it means someone, somewhere is having f/u/n sex.

Soon Lee 392: Tying into another subthread, who owns the archives?

David Harmon @394:

It would appear (from posts at sister forum Analog's) that the shutdown was in response to some troll posts; hardly seems a measured proportionate response to me.

As for ownership of the archives, I don't know. If I was inclined, I could have a go at recovering what I can from Google's caches, but I regard most such conversations as ephemera & won't be bothering. What bothers me more is the loss of community. Despite everything, there are/were a small number of active commenters whose posts I enjoyed. The vileness, since the creation of a 'Basement' section for religious/political topics was mostly compartmentalized & mostly avoidable.

IIRC, the archival method with the greatest proven longevity is still pencil on paper, which doesn't have the file transfer speeds required for today's connected world. I have yet to find an optimum solution for archiving my personal stuff.

HLN: First weekend off in over a month. Thought I might catch up with web goings-on only to find Asimov's offline & LJ having access problems due to DDOS attacks. Maybe it's a hint to go outside & get a life.

Carrie S. @ 358

I didn't mind, but it was funny; there I am, mostly naked, with people coming in and out of the room to look at my skin...

I had a similar experience once except, rather than a mole, I was being examined for potential urinary tract surgery. (Let's just say my feet were in the stirrups at the time.) I could have said no, of course, but I'm rather broadminded about participating in educational experiences.

Nothing quite like having your anatomy pointed out to a gaggle of med students with the comment, "Never seen anything like this before." (To reassure the reader, it turned out to be an exceedingly trivial issue.)

I had a series of uncomfortable treatments recently, and I found that it really helped to have an observer in the room-- student, volunteer, whatever. Not only could they get things for me or the boss medic, I had an audience.

And clearly, I have to set them at ease, make them laugh, et cetera, because it is my duty to make the world comfortable for everyone.

It may be based in issues-- okay, it's totally based in issues-- but as a coping strategy, "Make them laugh," isn't bad. It distracted me, it made me feel good about myself (because here I was, not being a useless helpless worthless person who needed or wanted anything from anyone ever) and it meant I didn't have as many awkward conversations with the medical folks.

Otterb #378, Forest Park, a genuine forest with fire lookouts and all, within the city. Also the various crests and bottoms along the east edge of the river. Especially Oaks Crest and Oaks Bottom (south of the Ross Island Bridge).

OMG! Forgot Portlandia. But of course you will see Portlandia.

My experience as a medical teaching dummy involved somewhat less exposure - I had some eye trouble in college, and Berkeley had a program where you could get a 2-hour eye exam for $5, which involved a bunch of students holding things off in my peripheral vision and charting where the edges and blind spots were and pointing flashlights in my dilated pupils. When they were done I got to stumble home wearing the clunky cardboard sunglasses they give you, which meant going by the high school having kids making Devo jokes at me.

Lori @385... Thanks! That's very helpful. Does the 80% funding mean that you'd be (assuming a lengthy shutdown, which, God forbid) working four days a week through the shutdown, or only the next four?

Husband arrived home and (gently) woke me out of a cold-induced nap to tell me his entire contract had been designated "essential," so it appears he won't be out of work after all. Unless something changes again. Fingers crossed.

The more I read about the implications of this possible shutdown, the more staggered I am. Apparently the entire DC city government will shut down, too. I'm going to a performance at the Kennedy Center this weekend and had to check to make sure the Metro was still going to run. (It is.)

Serge@245 and PNH Sidelight on LiveJournal's problems in Russia - There's now been a DDOS attack on Novaya Gazeta, a Russian independent newspaper. AP story says "The onslaught on Live Journal started with an attack on the blog of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, Kaspersky Lab analyst Maria Garnayeva said on the company's website.", and also that President Medvedev was really annoyed that LJ was down.

It's more than just PP: they seem to realise they have boxed themselves. They need to look relevant to the base, or the base will move to the teabaggers, so they are using the problems of this budget to squeeze in things which, in a normal budget wouldn't make it out of the box. So they are trying to force it into this one.

They hope (not likely) that the fact of this being last year's budget means they can hang a stoppage on the Dems, the only problem being this is their package, and they've been saying, "our way or the highway," which means they've pretty much taken possession of this.

And they can't (IMO) keep the Republican party from either fracturing, or becoming the Tea Party. What the teabaggers want is to have gov't killed (though they've not thought out what that means to them; they just figure they get to keep what they've got, and pay no taxes). That's not going to happen, not until/unless they get into power.

The rest of the base want's Teh Gay back in the closet, and women in the kitchen; where they both belong, so the men can run things. If a little bit of putting those uppity folks with darker skin back in their rightful places, well that's just a lagniappe.

Since that can't really happen (and Wisconsin gives me hope about a pushback from the Progressive/New Deal side of the Democratic base), there isn't really any way to keep them all in the same tent.

The question is, when will the Dems wake up, read the polling data, make the changes the majority want, and put the present Republican Party lunacies into perspective (thus forcing the tripartite split the Republican Party is now looking at, the NeoCons, the Tea Party, and the Fundy-Party: There is overlap in all of them, but each has a core set of ideas the others find anathema).

I am afraid they won't do it until the system is so out of balance it ends up torn apart and has to be completely rebuilt. That would be really painful.

David, #384: I think that came out very well indeed. There were a couple of blips as I was listening, but that could easily have been my computer rather than your soundtrack. Amused aside: I have most certainly danced to that melody of "Tam Lin", and I suspect I have it on multiple recordings as well.

@404

I am afraid they won't do it until the system is so out of balance it ends up torn apart and has to be completely rebuilt. That would be really painful.

Alas, the US has been running the Windows 3.1 of representative government since 1789 or so. [1] We're past due...

[1] It was state of the art when we installed it, but the newer releases have features to deal with a lot of stuff that they just didn't think of back then... and unfortunately, we've let it go so long that I'm not sure how much longer we can keep patching this thing before it just won't run at all. Assuming the hardware doesn't quit on us first...

Screw it all. Pessimistic pessimist is going to bed on the assumption that if the world ends in a hour, she won't notice.

Soon Lee at 395:
shutdown in response to trolls?
Sounds like the government.

I'm in the hospital again, but this time I have an ebook reader with decent wi-fi (a Nook Color).

Bill Stewart @ 403...

Michael Medved should have stuck with reviewing turkey movies.
("Serge, it's Medvedev, not Medved.")
Oh.
Nevermind.

Erik Nelson @407:

Don't know about that. What I do know is that the infection has spread to the Analog forum. Given the scarce resources devoted to moderating (Admin is away weekends with no cover; no members have moderation privileges), I expect that on Monday when the work week commences once more, Analog's forum like Asimov's, will be shut down permanently. Dell will have decided that it's more trouble than it's worth to keep their fora running. Until then, the multiple tbngfr images uploaded by the troll remain up.

I am both saddened & angered by this.

OtterB @ 378: The previous replies have the bookstores and other points of interest well covered (at least for a short trip). You also asked about fiction set in Portland. While there are some wonderful books set in Oregon, there aren't that many set in the city of Portland. Beverly Cleary's of course, but those are a bit young for you.

Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven" is set in a future Portland.
Chuck Palahniuk wrote "Fugitives and Refugees: A walk in Portland, Oregon". It's described as a combination memoir and travelogue. Sounds quite intriguing -- I'm going to look it up. Probably won't inspire you to have your daughter go to school here, though.
You said "no horror." Chelsea Cain writes mysteries set here. Not quite horror, but too bloody for my taste (I'm a wimp).
Sharan Newman's "The Shanghai Tunnel". Sharan lives in Portland, and is known for her novels set in the medieval period, but this book is set in Portland in 1868.
Lono Waiwaiole's Wiley mysteries are set in present day Portland. Despite his name, Lono is a Portlander. These mysteries are noir.
April Henry is local, and has written several mysteries set here.
Philip Margolin is a Portlander who writes legal thrillers. One set in Portland is "The Associates".

You did mention heading into the Columbia Gorge. Mary Freeman (a.k.a. Mary Rosenblum) wrote a series of (relatively) cozy mysteries set in a fictional town that seems intended as Hood River, which is a town in the Gorge.

Now I want to take Tom Spanbauer to task for not having set any of his wonderful books here.

OtterB: More on Portland! If you have an iPhone, download the app PDXBus. It's free, and is great for using the local Trimet mass transit. You can search for nearby stops, ask it how to get from where you are to another location, and so on. Trimet didn't write this app. They made their API accessible, and various people have written apps for it. (Smart government!) This app is the most popular, and is done for free by a local, public-spirited developer, Andrew Wallace.

Should you find Powell's full city block of bookstore confusing, you can download an app for it, too. It's called meridian, and it has info for both Powell's and the Portland Art Museum. In the museum, ask for directions to the two-story wall of 'artifacts' by glass artist William Morris.

If you pass public art that you like, download PortlandArtPDX, and you can look up info about it.

Oh, and the earlier comment about Voodoo Doughnuts being fun is an understatement. Voodoo is delicious and very, very fun.

There's a perfectly amazing garden right in downtown Portland -- Lan Su Chinese Garden. It's a bit of a hike from the PSU area, but once you're at Powell's, you're halfway there.

Merav sent this to me today, and no one else has mentioned it, so... Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring played by gravity on a "wooden staircase" in some woods of Kyushu.

Stefan Jones, Thena, older, and janetl - thanks for the Portland suggestions. Washington Park sounds like a winner. Multnomah Falls definitely goes on the agenda - nice pic, Stefan. Thena, the rhododendron garden sounds nice. janetl, special thanks for the book recommendations. It's one of my travel quirks - I like to read things set where I'm visiting. And older, I'd never heard of Portlandia. I have been enlightened. :-)

I'm taking note of the Portland suggestions as well. We're hoping to make it to the rose festival in June. Portland sounds like the sort of city we'd love to live in, so it would be a combined vacation and scouting trip.

There won't be a shutdown -- this week, at least. Congress just passed its seventh continuing resolution.

abi @374: That dynamic is why I could never quite appreciate the children's book Guess How Much I Love You. Some people find it reassuring; I saw it as creepily competitive.

The other one that freaks me out is Love You Forever. I am given to understand that children at a certain developmental stage find it deeply reassuring. I only encountered it as a young adult, and my reaction was "His MOTHER is SNEAKING IN THROUGH HIS WINDOW to sing him a lullaby WHEN HE IS A GROWNUP? Can't she let him live his own life, please?" *runs screaming in horror*

The one we liked, when my child was small, was I Love You, Stinky Face, where the child imagines all sorts of unpleasant creatures he could turn into, and the mother reassures him that she'd love him even if he were a skunk, or a terrible meat-eating dinosaur, or a swamp monster, or what have you, with details of how she'd take care of the creature's particular needs.

A friend of mine with a notably overbearing mother was freaked out pretty strongly by Rapunzel, for how true it rang.

(now wonders if this post will be held for too many links)

The thread's current discussion reminds me of the late-1990s spoof of the Barney-the-Du=inosaur song.

I hate you, you hate me,
We're a dysfunctional family,
With a M-16, And a pistol full of lead,
We just shot off Barney's head!

re: teaching hospitals. I'm usually okay with extra observers. I remember once being used as a demonstration of "textbook case of anaphylaxis" for some students. I was a little too out of it to really care.

My current mental health care is through a teaching hospital. The part that's surprised me is that none of the students accompanying the resident have been familiar with Hyperbole and a Half.

The one time where I refused to let a student observe was when I was giving birth. No. I am going to be BUSY here, and I don't KNOW you the way I know my nurse-midwives, and you can just go observe someone else, thanks. Childbirth was overwhelming enough without having a total stranger around.

Persephone:

So, we get to do this same manufactured crisis/washington monument ploy again in a few days. This is *not* a commercial for the highly functional and competent form of government enjoyed by the United States.

Rikibeth #417:

My wife had the same reaction to that one. The one I found a bit creepy was The Giving Tree. (Hey, it loves me and provides everything I need; let's chop it down and make something out of it.)

albatross @417: I loathed The Giving Tree from childhood. Every adult reading it out was presenting it as if it were this beautiful parable of unconditional love; my reaction was "He's no good for you, Tree! Throw your apples at him and make him go away!" Of course, I had a strongly negative reaction to ANYTHING that involved cutting down trees and leaving stumps from just about the same age -- Dutch Elm Disease hit in a big way when I was six, and huge, lovely trees in my town that had been there since the Revolutionary War started to sprout blazes of spray paint and then to become mere stumps. I wept for those trees. I'm tearing up now.

I later heard gossip that Shel Silverstein was kind of a terrible romantic partner, and that the story was obliquely addressing that, and it made me feel much better.

#413 ::: Terry Karney

Merav sent this to me today, and no one else has mentioned it, so... Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring played by gravity on a "wooden staircase" in some woods of Kyushu.

Stunning beautiful.

Is Abi OK? (re the Netherlands mall shooting.)

Yes, I know it's statistically unlikely that even in a small country Abi'd have been present, but even so it must be a shock to wake up and learn that kind of thing had happened in your neighborhood*. (I may be projecting here, because I was shocked to hear something like that had happened in the Netherlands.)

*I tend to think of small countries like the Netherlands as "neighborhoods" where everyone kinda sorta knows each other, even tho' the shooting was 25 miles from Amsterdam.

Re: fiction set in Portland:

If you read fanfiction at all, this one -- Graduate Vulcan for Fun and Profit -- is a rather charming tale set partly in a future Portland, written by a native of the city.

I am fine; I was power-washing the first half of the back patio all afternoon (a tremendously satisfying activity; everything was greeny-grey and is now light and clean and delightful). I only found out about the shooting when I came in and found my mother's email.

I happen to know that Alphen a/d Rijn is in the province of Zuid-Holland, because I have been helping my 10 year old study the province in topographie. And I know that a mass shooting in Dutch is called a "schietpartij", a shooting party.

Other than that, I have no local insight. It's surprising and upsetting that this should happen, and my thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected.

Re creepy children's books. I know a lot of people find it creepy, but I loved "Love You Forever." My mother died unexpectedly shortly before I knew I was expecting my first child, and so the message at the end of the book of love passing down through the generations really hit me.

I didn't like "The Giving Tree," for the reasons others have said.

I also hated "Rainbow Fish," whose message about unselfish sharing seemed to me to say "If there is anything out of the ordinary about you, it will make people jealous, and to appease them you have to give them whatever they want." Or, alternately, "People can ask for pieces of you whenever they want and you have no right to refuse." Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Debra @425 thanks for the fanfic link. I'm enjoying it.

Re the shooting: I was looking at the article on it on the Dutch English-language news site (DutchNews.nl). Their articles are generally a little sparse on details, but are written from a Dutch, as opposed to foreign, perspective.

And there was this note where the comments tend to be:

Comments have been disallowed for this article. We know from experience that some subjects generate a massive stream of comments which conflict with our guidelines for submissions and this is one of them.

Interesting and, in my view, sensible. I think there are entire newspapers who should consider the policy.

Rikibeth @417:

I have always had exactly that reaction to Guess How Much I Love You. It's not a contest. And if it were a contest, then the kid should get a chance to win.

and @419:

I was actually fine with student observers while I was giving birth. I didn't really expect to know them socially thereafter, though the all came into my field of view and introduced themselves.

Quite frankly, you could have marched a circus through that room, complete with elephants, and I would not have cared. It was a rapid, painful delivery (my daughter has a big head), and I was somewhat distracted from peripheral details like observers.

No students observed my C-section. But Martin did. He even, at the surgeon's enthusiastic suggestion, took pictures.

Earl Cooley III -- best wishes for a speedy recovery and uneventful stay! Glad you've got good reading material.

Re: teaching hospitals -- when we first moved to Germany, someone gave us a tip to try the university dental school. Since we were still apartment-hunting in a pretty large geographical area, that sounded like a good idea.

It wasn't a bad experience, but I felt like I was in an auto repair shop. All the examination chairs in one big room seemed like so many car hoists. Advanced dental students did most of the work -- professors would come by regularly and inspect, occasionally saying things like, "You missed a spot" or, "What about back there?" Forever after, I've always wondered how well my dentists would pass such an 'inspection.'

@ 429... you could have marched a circus through that room, complete with elephants

How do you know that they didn't march a circus through that room, complete with elephants?

If I ever meet your daughter, the first thing I'll say to her is "I hear you have a big head."
(Yes, I have taken lessons with Vulcan diplomats. why do you ask?)

Rikibeth #417: Guess How Much I Love You, is, I think, pointed at a particular age range, and perhaps at particular developmental issues as well.

Love You Forever is one of my family's favorites -- I think Mom accumulated 3 or 4 copies as birthday gifts over the years!

Agreed that The Giving Tree is horrific -- the ultimate codependency! That said, a good deal of Shel Silverstein's stuff is Not Suitable For Children anyhow, and I suspect this was a labeling failure.

At the bookstore, I just ran into a copy of one of the old Ant and Bee book, which are the first books I remember reading from. Glancing through it, I saw no obvious reason why it should have fallen out of fashion, as it clearly has. (I went looking when my nieces and nephews were young.)

Terry, #404: they've not thought out what that means to them; they just figure they get to keep what they've got, and pay no taxes

For values of "keep what they've got" which conveniently include all the benefits they get from a properly-functioning government. This is inherent in your comment, but I wanted to make it explicit.

A Republican schism would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. I just wish it would happen a little faster.

janetl, #412: S.M. Stirling's "Changed World" series features Portland in a major way. Not that this helps anyone wanting to read fiction set in current-day Portland, because it all happens after a supernaturally-caused apocalypse. :-) Nonetheless, I'm thoroughly hooked; the series is currently on book 7, and looks as though it will conclude in book 8, in the B5 tradition of "tell your story and then stop".

Rikibeth, #419: I got my first Norplant for free by virtue of participating in a teaching program at Vanderbilt Hospital. They were teaching local OB/GYNs how to do the procedure, under supervision. So in this case it wasn't students watching, it was the professor.

Debra, #425: OMG that is amazing. Have I mentioned that I'm a sucker for well-written back-story fic? This one just moved into a 3-way tie for my all-time favorite Trekfic. (The other two are a ClassicTrek version of Kirk's rescue from Tarsus IV and the start of his relationship with Spock, and a NewTrek story about Uhura and Gaila as first-year cadets.)

Open threadiness: The sad death of a tree has lead to the removal of (yet more) lawn, and a new big partially shaded bed to plant. I am somewhat paralyzed by options, though I know there will be at least one blue-flowered hydrangea involved. Off to the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon plant sale to look* and ask questions. 74 specialty nurseries in one place!

*Uninformed impulse buying will no doubt take place, too.

Rikibeth @417 said: The other one that freaks me out is Love You Forever. I am given to understand that children at a certain developmental stage find it deeply reassuring. I only encountered it as a young adult, and my reaction was "His MOTHER is SNEAKING IN THROUGH HIS WINDOW to sing him a lullaby WHEN HE IS A GROWNUP? Can't she let him live his own life, please?" *runs screaming in horror*

There's a song based on it that I've heard sung in filkcircles (AKICIML: author/composer cite sought?) whose chorus is, "I love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as you're living, my baby you'll be." It's less creepy in that the adult mom thing is a memory on the part of the kid ... and then the last verse is the kid coming to his elderly parent, who can no longer remember the words, and singing the same chorus to them.

I'm tearing up right now; this thing kicks me in the squids. It's lovely, in the same way that the "Cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon" etc song does. Admittedly, I prefer the Star-Wars-themed parody of that one I have ("My son trained with Ben just the other day; said, 'Thanks for the lightsaber, Ben, let's play! Can you teach me the force,' Ben said, 'We'll start today, but we've a princess to save, we should be on our way ...")

janetl @434: If you're in the market for edible-fruit-making woody plants, I highly, highly recommend Trees of Antiquity, who specialize in heirloom varieties, have very good customer service, and whose shipping/packing I have found impeccable. Plus they're not that expensive.

Elliott Mason: this thing kicks me in the squids. It's lovely, in the same way that the "Cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon" etc song does.

Yes, this! That "circle of the generations" thing is one of the primal archetypes, the themes running through the whole of human life. To cross threasd & blogs, close contact with deep archetypes can be numinous in and of itself!

It hasn't taken till Monday: both Asimov's and Analog's fora have been shut down.

Serge 418: I remember that, except that I heard the first line as "I love you, you hate me."

OtterB @427: I also love Love You Forever, probably more than Sarah did. The absurdity of the mother's devotion seemed to me to be the proof that she really meant it.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of Uncle Shelby, yet have never read The Giving Tree, so I reserve judgment there. But allow me to quote (in full, sorry) my favorite poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends:

LISTEN TO THE MUSTN'TS

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me --
Anything can happen, child
ANYTHING can be.

David Harmon @437: Not so much the circle of generations as going from the nurtured beloved infant to the wrenched caregiver who has to watch the capable, loving parent become a frail, uncertain, memoryless thing trapped in meat. But you still love them. And you have to care for them, as long as they need you ...

Kip W @440: Then again, he also wrote "The Little Blue Engine," as a clear reply to The Little Engine That Could. The first two verses pastiche/summarize the original, and then it closes with:

With a squeak and a creak and a toot and a sigh,
With an extra hope and an extra try,
He would not stop — now he neared the top —
And strong and proud he cried out loud,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”

He was almost there, when — CRASH! SMASH! BASH!
He slid down and mashed into engine hash
On the rocks below... which goes to show
If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!

In the originally-published volume (Where the Sidewalk Ends), it immediately follows a double-full-page spread of art and poem about a girl who decides she's going to eat a whale, and darnit, she does. Takes seventy-some years, but she does it because she said she would.

There's a lot of interesting intra-work conversations going on in that book. :->

Elliott @ 435
There's a song based on it that I've heard sung in filkcircles (AKICIML: author/composer cite sought?) whose chorus is, "I love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as you're living, my baby you'll be."

Had a vague recollection that the song was actually in the back of the book. Alas, I don't own the book, so in trying to find confirmation on the web, I instead ran across the author's site, which has a REALLY interesting discussion of the song, it's origins, and he's actually collecting versions of the song that people have developed based on the book! Which I thought was nifty and delightfully surprising.

Wow. 46% of Mississippi Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal. That sounds like more than half of them thought it should remain legal, but actually 14% were "not sure."

Mississippi GOP Damn.

On the topic of medical students, Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency has Playing Doctor: Robert Isenberg works part-time [as] a standardized patient, an actor who helps train medical students. Students are aware that SP's are actors, but they are not allowed to know about their actual identities. All names, and many details, have been changed to protect student privacy.

albatross @420: Agreed. I told the husband, who doesn't follow politics, that the entire sticking point this time was funding for women's health care. His incredulous reaction was something to behold.

Elliott Mason @442: Well, just because anything is possible doesn't mean it will always happen. I like the mixed messages he sends in his fake kid books the best, like "Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book" or the take-off on the Boy Scouts that he did in Playboy, back in the day.

He was also friends with Jean Shepherd, I believe, which never hurts someone in my estimation. Shep was a pretty interesting character, who revealed what he wanted to reveal and hid a lot. I read a biography of him that was somewhat revelatory. (The Old Man ran off with a secretary and never came back.)

@447: I'd be interested in a link to that biography.

I listen to old Jean Shepherd shows during my morning dog walks when NPR is doing pledge breaks. One of the shows I listened to in February inspired me to finally try building a model airplane!

Shepherd also knew Kerouac, and claims that a character in On the Road is based on him.

I always figured that Shep's father just kicked the bucket early. He's out of the picture in Shep's army stories.

OtterB, Persephone:

All the suggestions made so far are excellent; I'd strongly second the recommendation of the Japanese Garden (in the West Hills accessible from the Zoo light rail station) and the Chinese Garden (downtown). Also, probably the best view available within half an hour's drive of the city is on top of Council Crest, at about 1100 feet above the rivers, with an almost unobscured panoramic view. Depending on your available time and leg strength you can take drive, bike, or hike up to the top. On a normally clear day you can see Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Jefferson, and Mt. Rainier (peeking around from behind St. Helen's).

Elliott Mason #441: That's just one arc of the full circle, albeit an important one: that particular arc may have been a big part of what made us human. (Q.v. "grandmother hypothesis") To me, the next step onward, to the man singing to his child, is just as moving -- but that part, we do share with the beasts.

Stefan Jones @448: Here's the book: Excelsior, You Fathead! The Enigma of Jean Shepherd. Indeed a fascinating read. You can look inside the covers at that Amazon listing. I don't have the book, having checked it out of a library some time back.

Sounds like you may already know about the Shep Archives, but in case you or anyone here doesn't, they're linked at this WFMU blog post (and I went there instead of directly to the actual archives because the post also mentions a WFMU show called "Aircheck" that looks like a fine collection of random radio shows miraculously saved from floating off into space forever.

Xopher:

I saw some reference to that. It seems so incredibly out of whack with anything I've seen that it seems like it can't be right. But if it is, damn, that's mind-blowing. Like the point where you're having a conversation with a stranger, and you suddenly realize he's living in an entirely different reality than you are.

albatross, #452: You don't live in the South. I'll bet you could find 15-20% of Republicans right here in Houston who'd agree with that, and 10% of Democrats (mostly older) -- the Old South mindset tends to trump political affiliation. I've heard the damndest things from people you'd have sworn would know better. Rural Texas would be as bad as Mississippi. "Post-racial society", my fat pink ass.

Seconded. It wasn't that long ago that an Alabama high school principal told a multiracial student, "Your parents made a mistake."

albatross @452 said: Like the point where you're having a conversation with a stranger, and you suddenly realize he's living in an entirely different reality than you are.

I had one of those the other day. My sister at Annapolis was talking about how Sucker Punch looks (to her and her peer group) like kind of a fun movie. I said (a) the trailer makes it look like it's not really my cup of tea, probably, and (b) it has caused polarization in the moviecrit blogs I'm in -- some of them like it, and some hate it, or have serious problems with it because they feel it has a lot of innate, underlying antifeminist assumptions☂, and that in general I am even more likely to avoid movies that seem to be starting fandom shooting wars.

She said, "Well, but it's empowering, 'cause you can kick ass. And it's all about individualism and heroism and self-sacrifice, anyway. I don't see what that even has to do with feminism." Because, of course, self-sacrifice is the most common ROUTE to heroism for female characters in Hollywood movies. Sigh.

Note: I have not seen the movie. But from having read a whole bunch of reviews that pick fights with each other and disagree strongly, I'm guessing the moviemaker THOUGHT he was making a transgressive, GrrlPowrrrr! empowering film. Only he doesn't hide his biases as well as Stephen Moffat, methinks.

The implications of my conversation with her (which ranged wider than this; I'm paraphrasing and condensing rather a lot) involved an awful lot of Privilege Bingo coming out of her mouth in ways I didn't know how to address, and a lot of complete lack of understanding on her part of what I was even going on about in terms of disliking Hollywood's ongoing assumed misogyny. I wonder if it's some subset of her upbringing, or if a lot of her generation of current college-going women just really do not even have their consciousnesses slightly raised yet on the subject?

At least she agreed with me that the Sucker Punch trailer has a really seriously creepy pedo-feeling vibe running through it, so all is not lost.

---
☂ Innate antifeminist assumptions: everything panders to a male gaze; the protagonist can never actually fight her real oppressors, only extremely abstracted fantasy ones; fur raqf hc ybobgbzvmrq naq cebonoyl encrq rgreanyyl ol ure fgrcsngure (rot'ed for SERIOUS TRIGGERS, as well as spoilers) as her 'only' way to help her friend escape; all the violence is done salaciously; etc

452-454
Mississippi has the lowest per-capita rate of passport ownership in the country - that means that a lot of people there have never left the US at all, and probably most of them have never left the state. (And apparently they're still having trouble finding the 20th century.)

Diatryma @398: I had an audience. ... clearly, I have to set them at ease, make them laugh, et cetera, because it is my duty to make the world comfortable for everyone....It may be based in issues-- okay, it's totally based in issues-- but as a coping strategy, "Make them laugh," isn't bad. It distracted me, it made me feel good about myself ...

Hey, I regard it as my ghods-given right dammit to make the world comfortable for me. If bystanders get a giggle, too, all the better.*

But I figure, if I'm going to be "in the saddle," as it were, I'm damnwell gonna do what I need to to manage my anxiety, and that means liberal application of goofy humor.**

--

* After making a joke at my teeth-cleaning yesterday, my dentist came out and told me that it was a pleasure to have patients who didn't lose their sense of humor while at the dental office.

** And, in point of fact, if a medical provider can't muster at least a weak smile, I regard that as a failure/refusal to connect, and is a serious down-check. I don't go back to those people if I can possibly avoid it.

HLN: Despite investing in technological jimcrackery, woman completes tax returns precisely one year to the day after previous year's returns were completed. "It's like this weird law of nature," she complains.

Local guinea pigs could not be reached for comment, it being well past their bedtime.

Was curious, so popped over and watched a Sucker Punch trailer. Pretty special effects but, um, ew?

Elliot Mason @455 & Jacque @459:

Yeah... Like Jacque, I watched the trailers. And... hm. I guess it could be fairly potent satirical social commentary... but I'm pretty doubtful, given the director's past efforts. I have a nasty feeling that one will be one I should see, but not one I will at all like. Given that it's a spring action flick, I hope that means nobody expects it to do very well, and since it arrived at/around midterms, it will be mostly ignored... (I have similar feelings about tls shrggd.)

However, I nth recommend Tangled. My niece asked for it for her upcoming birthday and for the first time ever, I have zero conflict in giving it to her. Not that her mom (my sister) is manipulative, but niece's paternal grandmother is a Mother Gothel. Niece needs armor. (Now, to check that Jo Napoli is within Niece's reading ability...)

HLN: Thundersnow. Or possibly hailstorm. (I'll know when I look for dents in the car in the morning...)

In re. the Mississippi poll, the explanation is in the last paragraph of the article where it talks about it having actually been illegal until a supreme court case overturned the law. At least some of those 46% are saying what they said because they think SCOTUS shouldn't have had the power to overrule the state government on the matter, rather than making a moral comment on whether such a law should exist. They're saying, "our state made it illegal, so it should be illegal, regardless of what those meddling out-of-state lawyers think."

re 462: If I were living in Biloxi and were asked so blatantly prejudiced a question by a Yankee pollster, even my normally truthful nature would be severely tried, and I might very well tell him all about how he had interrupted my relations with my sister too.

albatross@420

Not in a few days. The key players have already reached agreement for this stage of the process (the budget from now until the end of September). The one-week continuing resolution is just to make sure there's enough time to work through the routine procedural delays.

There is still some chance of a gradual shutdown in a few more weeks over raising the debt limit and a very good chance of a shutdown over the FY2012 budget sometime in October or November.

C. Wingate #462: What's prejudiced about the question? How do you know the pollsters were 'Yankees'? It seems to me that you are awfully eager to defend bigots.

Sydney Lumet has passed away.
Time to watch "12 Angry Men" again.

A friend invited me to "Sucker Punch" and I checked out the reviews beforehand: we then went to "Rango." "Sucker Punch" cost 82 million and has taken in something north of 33 million so far, with many voicing concerns that the disjointed narrative and really sexist elements show that the director may not be the right person to do the new "Superman" movie. I was willing to give "Sucker Punch" a go despite the bad reviews but there were repeated comments about how the last 2 minutes really ruined the film, which made me curious enough that I rooted around to find out what the "gotcha" was. Uck. I have a little rule: if a film uses a plot element that was squick-free in an earlier film that used it only because it had Sean Connery as the lead, then you'd better have Sean Connery as the lead. This one has Emily Browning, so I gave it a pass.

Gosh, C. Wingate. Those darn Yankees are so bigoted, it's like they think the state used to have laws against interracial marriage or something!

Jules, #462: Which is also one of the arguments that was used to support slavery. Sorry, doesn't fly; civil rights trump "states' rights".

In fact, I'll bet if you framed a question about slavery in the same way, you'd get pretty much the same percentage of people saying it should still be legal.

Bruce Durocher @ 467... What I've read about his "Superman" has me very leery about that project, except for Viggo Mortensen playing Zod. What I hear about this other film doesn't bode well.

I can understand lashing out against a pollster who I think is looking down on me and mine. I have an irrational dislike of most of California because a friend hated Iowa so much, after all.

Sucker Punch: Figleaf again, this time linking to someone else. He does that a lot, actually, with his own sucks-for-men-too analysis.

Hyperlocal news: woman begins process of selling hair.

abi @ 374: My Nana used to do the "I love you the most" bit. However, "I love you the most" was a perfectly acceptable retort, with the back and forth going for a while, which I think is the essential difference.

re Poll questions (dons professional hat): I've not opined on it (though I have some opinions, in general) because I don't know how the questions were worded; nor presented.

The nesting/ordering of questions is more important then the questions themselves. Not in all cases, but with things as problematic (because of the broader cultural disdain) as this one, the overall context is critical to both an honest response (on the part of the subject) and of a meaningful one.

There are several questions about this specific poll which need to answered. If we assume (arguendo) the real question one of, "states' rights" we have to wonder how absolutely they take it. If they think individual rights are actually local grants (which is what saying a state is allowed to outlaw any sort of marriage it sees fit does), one wonders if they really think any part of the Constitution is binding?

The answer is, almost certainly. So thenwe want to know what parts of the Federal Gov't they see as unacceptable. That's where the broader context of the racist tendencies comes into play; because I am sure they would say the Feds are legitimate in the existence of an army/navy/etc. But what of programs like Food Stamps, Medicare, Social Security, interstate highways, the EPA?

At what point do they say, "no, this is local,"?

If that's what the pollster wanted to know, there were other ways to get the answer. On the other hand, something more topical (e.g. "Should states be allowed to 'opt out' of the healthcare reforms recently passed?") runs the risk of not finding out how severely the disconnect between local/federal writ runs, since it's not abstract.

I don't know, off the top of my head, what I would use to test that question, but (properly framed) it may be that race/civil rights are the best way to investigate that issue, because they aren't tied to (so many) topics presently masking the question (immigration, healthcare, spending in general).

It's tough thing, designing a good poll.

Diatryma@471: I can understand lashing out against a pollster who I think is looking down on me and mine.

Exactly. It's the "nobody but me is allowed to kick my dog," phenomenon in action. I may think that a goodly portion of my neighbors and relatives aren't worth the powder it would take to blow them up -- but that's for me to say, and not for somebody else to. Especially not somebody from out of town.

@abi #374: Yes, yes, yes! My kids are rewatching the borrowed DVD yet again and I still horripilate when "Mother Knows Best" begins. The lyrics, acting, animation, and direction combine to hit every--single--button. The part where, after Mother Gothel has systematically shut away all the light, and Rapunzel is anxiously lighting candles, and then "Mother" comes along behind her pinching them out? And the look on Gothel's face--! She is enjoying herself. Horrible. Horrible.

HLR*: Area woman wishes to know whose bright idea it was to set the default font size in the MS Access SQL editor to 8 points‽

*Hyper-Local Rant

I enjoyed Tangled a lot. I saw it in the theater . . . not in 3D though.

But I have little desire to see it again. This is kind of rare. I generally see Pixar films at least twice (not necessarily in the theater the second time around); I'd like to see How to Train Your Dragon again. But Tangled? Just no urge there. Not sure why.

* * *

NEW animated film worth seeing, if it is playing near you: The Illusionist. Bittersweet story about a second-rate stage magician who takes a rural chambermaid under his wing. It is based on an unproduced script found in the files of Jaques Tati.

Elliott Mason @435:

re: "Cat's in the Cradle"

When we were having a hard time choosing the music for my dad's funeral, my mum said, "Well, his favourite singer was Harry Chapin." (I would have said his favourite singer were the Rolling Stones, but I concede that she knew him better than I did.)

"Well, what was his favourite Harry Chapin song?"

"Something about 'Thousands of Pounds of Bananas'."

"'Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas'," I said, "is about a guy who's killed when a big rig wrecks on the highway." (Dad had just died in a highway accident with a big rig.)

"Bloody hell. We're not playing that."

"Well, Harry Chapin's most famous song is 'Cat's in the Cradle'."

"The one about, 'We're gonna have a good time then, son'?"

"Yeah."

"We can't play that at a funeral. We'll all just have to sit there and weep and no one will be able to say anything."

We ended up going with "Three Lions on a Shirt", the England football team anthem.

Serge @ 470: What I've read about his "Superman" has me very leery about that project, except for Viggo Mortensen playing Zod.

You should be leery of what you've read about the project. Viggo Mortensen is not playing Zod.

ianracey, #478: I'd have said that Harry Chapin's most famous song was "Taxi" -- but that's not really suitable for a funeral either. In fact, I don't think many of Chapin's songs would be; they tend to range from bittersweet to out-and-out downers. I still have trouble listening to "Mr. Tanner".

Elliott (two "t"s :>): I'd've gone with "Dance Band on the Titanic.

Then again, I want a rollicking wake, and if I die in a wreck with a big-rig, I hereby endorse the singing of 30,000 lbs of Bananas.

Jules 462: So? Just as wrong. We have a Supreme Court for a reason, and part of that reason is to prevent states from making oppressive laws.

I say they (the 46%) are a bunch of racist bigots and I say to hell with 'em.

Paul Duncanson @ 479... I had read that Viggo had been approached. That obviously fell thru. Anyway, I'm leery of Snyder's "Superman" because, if I remember correctly (and I may not), he was going to make him more macho and assertive. Goodie... More "300" crap?

ianracey@478--my father considerately not only left the name and number of the Dixieland band he wants played at his funeral, but left funds to pay for it. It is thoroughly like my father to leave directions for a last party in his honor, but at least we know exactlly what music to play.

Diatryma @ 471... I have an irrational dislike of most of California

Sorry to hear that you feel that way.

Serge: For all its failings, 300 was a very faithful adaptation of the original comic. As was Watchmen (with the obvious exception of the part of the ending that would have been laughed at if done the same as the comic). For those reasons, I am guardedly optimistic about Snyder. His Superman will probably be recognisably a Superman based on the comics. Which comics? Who knows. Superman has been through quite a few reboots and rewrites over the decades (and has often been a bit of a dick). Playing him a bit more macho than Brandon Routh's Superman (which is all I had heard they were aiming for) wouldn't be outside of the range of comics Superman by a long shot.

Michael, as an 'exempt' government employee, the whole experience is disturbing . The waste in terms of meetings telling us what is probably going to happen are probably expensive in terms of the number of employees that need to be told, etc.

I'm not going to start in about how I find the whole thing so stupid as to be beyond belief. I'm working on an essay for my daily Kos place to express that.

Michael, as an 'exempt' government employee, the whole experience is disturbing . The waste in terms of meetings telling us what is probably going to happen are probably expensive in terms of the number of employees that need to be told, etc.

I'm not going to start in about how I find the whole thing so stupid as to be beyond belief. I'm working on an essay for my daily Kos place to express that.

Paul Duncanson @ 486... I'll be quite happy to see my fears turn out to be unfounded. That being said, this year I am rather looking forward to "X-men: First Class". I'm not that invested in "Thor", but I do hope they don't screw up "Captain America".