Surely Felix would have advanced onward and upward to heavier than air vehicles by the time he'd be old enough to own his own balloon?

Aha! All those stories we read with an even more steampunky Nineteenth Century -- as if the 'real' nineteenth century wasn't implausibly steampunk enough aready -- those are ones where the events described in 'Frederica' took place exactly as described, and allowed the now brother-in-law of the Marquis of Alverstoke to have the funding to really get going, whilst we've ended up in one of the of ones where Charis failed to enter the room at just that precise moment.

The fact that Frederica controls access to Felix is significant. He's still a child here; I thought of the scene as taking place only a year or two after the marriage. It might be overly ambitious to expect him to have his own balloon by then, but he is a mighty skilled wheedle.

He might well have moved onto heavier-than-air flight later on. The encounter with Jack and Stephen would certainly do more than give Stephen access to an ideal vehicle for the observation of both nature and the enemy. It would also put an inventor with a thirst for information into contact with an expert on streamlined design and the interaction between wind and canvas.

What if there were vast Merrivilles crossing the land in the early-to-mid 1800's, huge steam-powered airships aloft long before Count Zeppelin was out of short pants?

Abi @157-924: But this one isn't exactly subtle, long term, or avoidable.

Not long term? As noted previously, we've been fighting this one since before the (US) Civil War! Similarly, it may not be subtle, but it's certainly avoidable for most of the country -- because they don't live there!

The Mississippi problem is conflicted by both racial and regional conflicts. (Note that in Katrina, both played a huge part in turning that crisis into a disaster....) The regional conflicts especially make any such project a hostage to politics (particularly to the neocons) As for "set-asides" to prepare for the problem... the politics are worse! Any such pile of money would be an ongoing target for politicos who think the money should be going to their buddies -- and the neocons are working very hard at making America so broke that it can't afford any such "extravagance".

David Harmon @3:

We may have been fighting this since before the Civil War, but I'd be deeply surprised if the Mississippi is still meeting the Gulf at New Orleans in 2050. It was long term, but much of that long term has now expired.

I am aware of many of the human problems that complicate the hydrological one. Ranting against the latter was, for me, kind of a way of grieving over the former.

Awesome. Stop whatever you're doing and write it at once.

To the extent that Jack's career continued to track that of Lord Cochrane after his reinstatement in the Navy, he would probably have been as excited about these ideas as Stephen. Cochrane was a huge innovator and advocate of steam power and pretty much any other technology he could

(I love Frederica, but it's the only mature Heyer I've ever caught in a serious research error - the Soho foundry wasn't in Soho, London, it was in Birmingham.)

Seconding chris y! You've got oodles of spare time lying around, right, Abi?

I just read Frederica for the first time last month. No, I don't know why it took me so long either.

If anyone is interested in how Jack got invitations to the party, by the way, recall that there is one overlapping (historic) character between Post Captain and Frederica. It's someone who could arrange pretty much any invitation that she chose.

One does trust that Jack would have the delicacy not to mention to Stephen the name of the mutual acquaintance through whom he obtained an introduction. The morning-visit in question would be very interesting to write.

There are no magic secrets in the mud
beneath our feet, but worlds have passed away
while it was formed and our own great display
marks just a stage in passing drought and flood.
Each one of us from hero down to dud
knows that we have so little time to stay
and yet seems hasty to fritter our day
in silly matters that just waste our blood.
Time was we might have made some sort of stand
against the forces that push down so hard
to turn our efforts into so much smoke
but we are left with only a weak hand
remaining on what seems the final yard
and sense enough to understand the joke.

By the way, the last Babylon 5 post of Season One is up on Noise2Signal.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Richard Sharpe...

Me, I should have liked to see a cosy chat over tea between Caroline Herschel and Sophia. For that matter, I wonder what Caroline Herschel would have made of Stephen.

I thought Miss Herschel was one of Stephen's friends?

Anyway I would read this fic in a nanosecond!

David Harmon: It's long term the same way California and Japan preparing for, "The Big One" is long term. Year in, Year out, the work to deal with what will be a sudden event goes on.

When the Atchafalaya does capture the Mississippi, it will be over. It won't take days for the new river to settle down to it's bed (though it won't want to be quite as rigid as we would like it, it also won't want wander quite as much as it did before).

As we've both said, the problem is the politics of the money.

Sherwood @ #12, it was Caroline who taught Jack to grind telescope mirrors. I don't recall (from my admittedly imperfect memory of the books) her having met Stephen.

Dreamed last night of a book that was about the size of my First Folio reprint, with small type in several columns, reprinting blogs with comments. I wanted to buy one — seemed like the greatest thing since sliced bread, or Warhoon 28. No illos, though.

Since it's an open thread, and since I'm typing on my phone anyway, I would just like to throw out some sincere love for Jane Yolen's children's books. Stefan loves the Baby Bear books (helped I'm sure by the fact that I've long called him my baby bear) and regularly asks for "How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?" Since I know the author stops by occasionally, I wanted to express my heartfelt gratitude for books that are just the right length to read out loud and are fun for grown-ups too. It's a harder balancing act than I used to think.

16
I found The Emperor and the Kite at my grocery store, in their (occasional) book bin.
Seconding your recommendation.

Speaking of crossover fic...

Hyperlocal news... Man's wife, while watching 2005's "Rome", says that he looks better than Ciaran Hinds.

Well, this comes as a bit of a relief. Classical music isn't irrelevant after all. Some day maybe they'll make a movie where the hero surprises everybody at the stuffy rock institute by improvising a four-voice fugue and winning his girlfriend back from the obnoxious shredder.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of post rank, must be in want of a distraction. Lord! But what of an officer who doesn't like music or dancing? Harriet agrees we have never in our lives seen a man look so uncomfortable at a ball! Lord! But he is darling in his way and his stories are dashing. His last ship was even named after me! For that I will find a way to amuse him whether he likes it or not. Lord! Even if I must follow him around the world to do it.

(further diary pages were ruined by seawater)

Kip @ 20:
s/his girlfriend/his soul/
s/four part fugue/Paganini's Caprice #5/
and you pretty much have 1986's Crossroads. It's a dumb movie but kinda fun as I recall.

Of course nowadays the battle is increasingly whether rock is relevant in the age of rap, so you'd have to have - hmmmm - an opera singer in training who really wants to be a freestyle rapper. It's a dumb idea, but it could be good enough for Hollywood.

Just got back from "Thor", which was a hell of a lot of fun. Maybe not quite as good as "Iron Man", but damn nearly. Casting was incredibly good, Stan Lee had his usual amusing cameo, Loki stole the show. Go see it, it's fun.

Loki stole the show

Anything that's not screwed down.

I still want to read a good Jack Aubrey, Jack Sparrow, and Jack Harkness crossover....

Don Simpson #25: Me, I wonder if those folks could cope with Repairman Jack!

@Kip W. #20: As a toddler, my middle child would dance with equal abandon to "The William Tell Overture" and "Hip to be Square." My oldest was transfixed by "Fanfare for the Common Man" at about the same age and hugged the radio when it was over. My youngest would accept no comfort during his painful teething episodes except "Iron Man," the 1972 concert recording, turned up LOUD. I can't understand what makes any of these tunes less relevant to our lives than any other.

Don @25

Agreed, but the movie version could never be shown on an airplain:

"Hi Jack"
"Hi Jack"
"Hi Jack"

I don't know about good, but I once ran into a Jack Aubrey, Jack Sparrow, Jack Harkness, Horatio Hornblower, Richard Sharpe crossover.

Much hilarity was had as they tried to sort out their boots the next morning.

Speaking of even more (very short) crossover fic...

abi, #7: For the benefit of those of us who are fluent in only one side of this equation, would you mind identifying the overlapping character in question?

Lee @31:

I was referring to Lady Jersey, who was a close friend of the Marquis of Alverstoke in Frederica and had Diana Villiers as her guest in Post Captain. But on further research, I see that the timelines don't match up. Alverstoke's friend (Sally) was the daughter in law of Diana's hostess (Frances, who was mistress to the Prince Regent).

Drat. Another good crossover gone west. Unless it takes place later than I'd planned it originally.

Heresiarch #18: I saw those a week or so ago. I've since found out that that version of "The Importance of Being Earnest" - with those actors- is one of the films being shown at the Seattle International Film Festival. I'm going to try seeing it, purely because I loved those Oscar Wilde/Jersey Shore vids.

Speaking of movies,I've just come back from seeing "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which is about the discovery of the Chauvet cave art. Herzog has some silly moments, but they pale in significance: the movie gives us the only glimpse we'll ever get of the artwork, and does a damn fine job of that. I do wish there had been more cross-analysis with the Lascaux art: I thought there was a lot of stylistic similarity, which conjured speculations about traveling shaman exchanging technique tips, cave painting workshops and the like!

OK, I'm not familiar enough with EITHER side to have identified them without resorting to Google. Even with, I couldn't find out who Felix is.

abi, a quick trip through the google says that Sally was born in 1785 and died in 1867. (She married at 16, very young by our standards.)

Xopher @ 34

Felix is the scapegrace younger brother of Frederica.

Felix is the scapegrace younger brother of Frederica.

Felix the cad!

Noooo, Felix isn't a cad (though I do see what you did there)...he's 11 or so, and exceedingly interested in SCIENCE and STEAM-POWER and HOT-AIR BALLOONS.

My weekend high-tech arts & crafts project. (And the following five pictures.)

* * *

I saw Thor this afternoon too. Lots of fun. I didn't like the slick high-tech look of Asgard and its inhabitants, but I can forgive that for the action and humor.

Oh my ghod. Jack and Felix on the mechanics of flight. Nearby sheets of paper would be ruthlessly pressed into service to demonstrate various points, and Jack would call for cake to be brought.

I can't imagine Jack Aubrey, Jack Sparrow, and Jack Harkness. Jack Sparrow is a pirate, and Jack Harkness would be impossibly prejudicial to shipboard discipline.

Teresa: "I can't imagine Jack Aubrey, Jack Sparrow, and Jack Harkness. Jack Sparrow is a pirate, and Jack Harkness would be impossibly prejudicial to shipboard discipline."

But that's why it would be so much fun!

Teresa, 40: Harkness would spend all his time flirting with Aubrey, who is canonically oblivious; Sparrow would be a nuisance until Bonden made it clear that he ought to behave himself. Meanwhile Stephen is experimenting with the cursed doubloons in an attempt to make Bonaparte's life miserable.

Not really HLN:

My in-laws have just lost one of their two cats. While stopping at a motel in Birmingham, AL, my MIL was carrying Maggie between the car and the motel. A pack of dogs was barking, Maggie freaked out, wriggled out of MIL's arms, and ran into the woods. They (MIL, FIL, cousin) spent several hours searching for her, but to no avail.

They have to keep going to get to their destination on schedule, and are putting ads in the local papers in Birmingham. But honestly, we worry this may be the last they've seen of her. Maggie is skittish even around my in-laws, and strangers are Right Out.

Maggie is a Maine Coon with lovely long brown fur and a white belly. If anyone is in the Birmingham area, or knows anyone in the Birmingham area and happens to see her, you can post a message to me on whatever open thread happens to be current. Prayers, good thoughts, and positive energies for Maggie, her brother Ziggy (still safe with my in-laws, but no doubt missing his sister), and my in-laws are much appreciated.

Also, since I didn't get around to posting this on the last Open Thread...

Congratulations, TexAnne!

What about Jack Spratt?

For those of you who don't know, Mary Robinette Kowal is working on a puppet show for Renovation, but donations are needed. There are various levels of contribution, the highest of which will get you a pencil-necked weasel. Details can be found HERE.

The Soon-To-Be-Employed-On-The-Isle-Of-Long One 38: Noooo, Felix isn't a cad (though I do see what you did there)...he's 11 or so, and exceedingly interested in SCIENCE and STEAM-POWER and HOT-AIR BALLOONS.

OK, that sounds like it, by itself, would justify reading the book. What book is that, exactly? If there are several, in what book is the character introduced, and does the little punk dig the steam from the very beginning, or do I have to read a couple of books to get to those bits?

The Person Who Lives In New Jersey, Which As I Understand It Is Pretty Dang Close To Long Island, 47: It's Frederica, a Regency romance by Georgette Heyer. I will include my copy in the Giant Box o' Cranes (but only if I can avoid crushing said cranes). Or your local library probably has it; it's widely agreed to be one of Heyer's best.

Thank you, TexAnne.

On another topic: much as I like How to Train Your Dragon (and I like it a LOT), I fail to understand why the alleged Vikings (who are nothing at all like historical Vikings, of course) all have Scots accents (the adults, anyway...none of the teenagers do). Anyone know why they did that?

Xopher, if they went for Norse accents, they probably would have sounded too much like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.

Abi, I throw myself at your feet. Your snippet of crossover fic made me laugh loud enough to scare the dog.

In Disney's "Island at the Top of the World", all Vikings were played by Norwegians, who spoke only Norwegian. To tie in with the thread's steampunk posts, the French airship's captain makes comments about his mechanic's relatives that go untranslated from the French.

HLN: Only after sending a story to 8 magazines (they all take simultaneous submissions; no worries) do I realize that I have named an alien god after a brand of artificial sweetener.

JM @53: The Unspeakable Splenda? Aspartame, Gibbering Horror of a Thousand Worlds? I both wince in sympathy and sort of want to know the details.

Well, OK, but then why did they use all American accents for the teenagers? Not like Berk is an immigrant community in Illinois.

The accents make no sense. Nor does the relentlessly Celtic feel of the music. But I like both, and the overall effect is stunning.

Someone on IMDB pointed out that while Hiccup claims that it snows nine months of the year and hails the other three, neither weather condition is ever shown in the film. I pointed out that this is completely realistic for an unhappy teenager describing hir hometown, even today. "A hellhole where anyone who has a thought is run out of town," for example.

Fade Manley: Truvia, which as it turns out is stevia, and is printed in very large letters on its packaging.

But I'm sure magazine editors will be so invested in the fates of main characters Hormel, Nabisco, and Chevrolet that they won't notice my embarrassing naming gaffe.

JM @ #56, if your heroine is named Chevrolet and looks like Dinah Shore there might be a problem.

How to train your dragon: The original story is set in Scotland, it turns out. But maybe the kids grew up in Vinland or something...

I really should get around to seeing that movie. There's a local angle too for me. Apparently, the director of the film was at the Norwegian Film Festival and got some inspiration from a trip to Avaldsnes, five minutes from where I sit typing this.

Singing Wren @43:

Sympathies and good thoughts for the safe return of Maggie.

Singing Wren #43: My sympathies on your in-laws' loss! This sort of thing happens all too often.

Really, too often! Without wanting to be cold about this, can you suggest they get an effing cat carrier for the remaining cat, use it for all future travel? I wouldn't even think of hand-carrying a pet through an assortment of strange places, especially one that's known to be "skittish"!

When I came down to C-ville, the TSA insisted I take Gremlin out of her cage and hand-carry her through the metal detectors ("while maintaining control of your pet"), and I immediately declared that my personal example of "aggressive stupidity from the TSA".

David Harmon @60:

As it happens, I fully agree with you on the need for pet carriers. However, it also falls under the heading of "picking your battles". Due to other issues we're all dealing with*, I'm not at all sure it would be wise to pursue this one right now. It's more likely to increase everyone's stress without actually resolving anything in the short term.

(This is also part of the reason our own kitties never leave the house except in their carriers.)

*Related to physical illness, which I really don't want to discuss right now.

Singing Wren@ 43: My condolences -- and best wishes for a happy ending. It is so heart-wrenching to lose a cat like that. Perhaps the local cat-catcher can get Maggie back with some tuna in a Hav-a-hart trap.

Funny story from last week: Mom took her Yorkie, Isis, in to the clinic to be spayed. When she came back that evening to take Isis home, the clinic's resident cat was on the counter.

Mom leaned over to greet him, and the cat touched his nose to hers. So Mom rubbed her nose against the kitty's. The vet tech (after picking her jaw up off the floor) said, "You must have cats." Mom just laughed and said, "It's a very important greeting, but this is the first time I've had a cat that doesn't know me offer it."

Both of our Siamese love to either rub noses or headbutt the human family members.

This gets a really big Awwww from me. I hope the author can sustain it in this spirit.

Calvin's daughter (nicknamed "Bacon"?!) and Hobbes

#64: Did you see the "Don't throw away your childish things, save them for your children" comic? It might have been from the same artist.

I am pleased to report that gentlebeings in possession of an electronic device which can handle Kindle e-books* may obtain a copy of Frederica for just under US$8.00**. Just in case your local library does not have one on hand, and you can't count on your local bookseller to come through for you, either.

(Which reminds me, we need to see about getting flea-dope for our very own Baluchistan hound.)

Also, WRT #7 and #32--The Dowager Countess of Jersey (Frances) lived until 1821. I rather suspect her son and daughter-in-law† came across with small favors, such as invitations and introductions, when asked. Especially since Dr. Maturin, you know, poor Diana's widower, was a family connection‡ of sorts.

*But not the Nook. What is that all about?! You'd think it would be available for both; most of the others are.

**At AmazonUK for GB£5.69, Amazon.de (in English) for €7,98.

†Sarah Fane, (Frederica's Lady Jersey, was the heiress of the banker Robert Child, as the result of a family quarrel.

‡The Earls of Jersey were part of the Villiers family, descended from a half-brother of James I's very close friend George Villiers, raised to the nobility as Duke of Buckingham for reasons that seemed fitting to King James. Countess Sarah's husband added the surname "Child" to the "Villiers" in 1819, because when you have the good fortune to marry a bank of your very own some commemoration is called for. I'm not surprised Sarah AKA Sally was married before she was 20 (Wikipedia's dates suggest 18 or 19); she had been her late grandfather's heiress since her mother's death in 1793, when she was 8 or 9. Her father and stepmother were probably deeply relieved to get her married off. In further It's a Small World news, the eldest son of Sally Fane and the fifth earl married the daughter of Sir Robert Peel, and their son, the seventh earl, was named Victor Albert, and one does wonder who his godparents were.

Also, Countess Frances was the posthumous daughter of Philip Twysden, Anglican bishop of Raphoe, who was shot while attempting to rob a stagecoach. I am not making that up.

fidelio @66 The Earls of Jersey were part of the Villiers family

Please tell me there's an Anthony in the family tree somewhere.

Yes, I know we're off by more than a millennium. I still want there to be a connection.

fidelio, #66: If Sarah Fane hadn't been married before she was 20, she'd have been considered "on the shelf". Yes, 16 is a bit young even by Regency standards, but women in that social circle "came out" at age 18 and were expected to find husbands within the first couple of years thereafter. Note that the age of majority at that time was 21.

fidelio @66:

Note that Sally Jersey was married in Gretna Green at 19. I haven't dug into the story to find out why she resorted to a flight to the Border and marriage over the anvil. I'm sure there's yet more of a story there.

Lee @68/abi @69--it looks like she was 19 all right, but Wikipedia thinks she was married in London, in Berkeley Square, as does Genealogics, and this page, which covers descendents of the first Duke of Marlborough.

Her income, in 1808, was estimated at around GB£40,000, which works out to around GB£2.75 million in 2010 pounds. No wonder the earl added "Child" to the family name...

TexAnne 48: Turns out my friend Lenore, who lurks here and (rarely) comments, has a copy of Frederica and is willing to lend it to me. So you needn't send me yours, but thank you just the same.

Xopher: More-nearly instant gratification FTW!

Well, it would make more sense for Sally Jersey to have married in London; she built much of her public persona as a virtuous contrast to her notorious mother in law. I wonder whence the sources that claim she was married at Gretna?

While I was clicking around, I recalled a comment of Lady Jersey's that dates Frederica precisely: "The Lambs are all shattered by Lady Melbourne's death, and none of them more so than Emily."

Lady Melbourne, mother of Peniston Lamb, 1st Viscount Melbourne and Emily Lamb, Lady Cowper (among others), died in 1818. This means that the book takes place three years after Waterloo; given a couple more years for Felix to grow up, and we're well out of the frame.

I suppose we could elide the above details and transplant the book about five years earlier; very little else in it is datable (unlike, say, A Civil Campaign, which is firmly anchored in 1815).

I should have done more research. My pedant's soul writhes in shame.

Correction: A Civil Campaign is very much not anchored in 1815, at least not by any calendar we would recognize. Naturally, I meant A Civil Contract.

The similarity is not a coincidence, of course. But usually I don't get tripped up by it.

This forum seems like it might have some members who would know about this: I know vaguely about a custom in some ancient civilizations (I think including pharaonic Egypt?) that servants of a ruler and/or members of his court be interred with the ruler at the time of his death -- any idea if it's possible that this custom would have been followed in Mycenæan Greece? Thinking about a story which would include that as a plot element, trying to gauge if it would make any sense.

TexAnne: Quite. Especially since I literally cannot get to my apartment without passing hers on the stairs.

Modesto Kid #75:

If no-one with specific expertise shows up, this might be useful, from The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age (which at least sounds like a respectable source).

In case it's paywalled from where you are, the answer looks like "No". They describe burial of expensive goods, as a form of conspicuous consumption, but that's all.

Modesto Kid @75: Are we talking killing living wives, servants and court members? If so, some of the Chinese emperors are said to have done this, but to the best of my knowledge the Pharaohs didn't.

The Egyptian rulers did sometimes set up a tomb complex for their relatives who died before the Pharaoh did (See Valley of the Kings, Tomb No. 5). And sometimes, tombs were planed for the entire royal family (See Amarna, Tomb of Ankhenaten).

As for Greece, I've read that king's dogs and horses were slain at the tomb to be buried with the deceased, but not that people were...

Argh, that should be "planned" not "planed."

abi@#73--wife of the first viscount, I think you mean, although they did have a son who was named for his father. She was also Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law, a pairing that did not wear well at all, although it doesn't seem Lady Melbourne had a lot of room to find fault where issues of matrimonial fidelity were concerned.

Shame about the dates, though.

More It's a Small World news--Lady Cowper later married Lord Palmerston, after Lord Cowper finally got around to dying. (They had been holding hands under the table for close to twenty years; after he became Prime Minsiter, Palmerston pushed through the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, substantially altering divorce proceedings in the UK. Coincidence? I think not.)

That which has been seen cannot be unseen:
Bad Vestments

Oh, I bet they planed them too. At least the parts that were wood.

And the Tomb of Ankhenaten, were it not an archaeological site of great value, would strike me as a micturation target. (Whereas other Pharaohs were always called "Pharaoh," Ankhenaten was universally known as "that criminal." They had good reason for this.)

Thanks, Lori and Thomas -- back to the drooling boards...

Something that people here might like: Nicholas Tam's "Here Be Cartographers: Reading the Fantasy Map."

Xopher: Ok,I'll bite, where were the good reasons? Apart from his upsetting the religious structure; and their religious beliefs that mentioning his name could be beneficial to him in the afterlife.

He's certainly not the only pharonic presence to be "erased" and the eividence (of more purging of his name) shows that 100 years after his death he was still something of a known figure.

Moreover, his "reforms" had a really, limited affect on Egypt as a whole. So, The Great Criminal" or, "The criminal at Akhet-aten/Amara" seems to have been more a formulaic way to refer to him without naming him as it does a real distaste (something like the linguistic purges of Stalin during the Krushchevian reforms).

Yes, he did engage in some persecutions, but even at that he was backsliding by the end of his reign.

Given the, relative, dearth of records, and the gored oxen of those who did record what histories there are, I'm dubious about the justification of crediting those accounts with great veracity.

He forbade the worship of any gods but the Aten. That's enough.

Kip at #15:

Perhaps in the digital tomorrow, as we collect and collate all kinds of information, every fan can have his own Warhoon 28. But there will never be a Warhoon 28 quite like the first Warhoon 28.

JM @ 56... Phew! Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I myself was planning to write a story titled "Truvia, Maid of Mars". :-)

Serge: You know, that sounds more interesting than how I actually used the name...

Xopher: It's not clear (in fact the evidence is pretty strong) that the effect of his writ was really limited, not even running in the city he had built (where there were idols of the "old" gods in the houses of the workers making his new temples.

His later reign has evidence of that policy changing.

So I may disagree with it, but it doesn't make me think him all that horrid, not given the other things going on in the ancient world, and in the name of religion, by those who allowed for personal practice.

Hi all,

You may or may not remember my music-obsessed posts from Open Thread 156.

Anyways, I wanted to let you all know that the Free Music Archive has graciously decided to host the mp3s from "Los Pollos Estrellas," a 1998 CD EP from the drummerless avant-rock trio the Shiny Brites (voice, electric guitar, electric bass).

I have a very high regard for this very strange music (called "low-slung sneering art rock" by British music mag the Wire in 1998). The fact that I was the bassist may have something to do with this attitude. :)

Anyways, if you would like to redefine your concept of the critical term "inaccessible," I strongly suggest you hie your browser to the following URL:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Shiny_Brites

Thanks for your time,

Rob

Terry, I'll have to look into that. But they did kill him. And his nephew did hastily change his royal name from Tutankhaten to...well, you know. I think they pretty much wanted him gone right up to the point where he WAS gone.

And these were the people who had no word for "good" other than "what Pharaoh loves" and no word for evil other than "what Pharaoh hates." Not generally inclined to be rebellious, at least against Pharaoh.

Steve Martin's King Tut?
Or Victor Buono's?

There may be some good things in the "map" link, but I'm soured by the "aesthetics of fantasy" page they linked to. I was reading it going, "There's something about this that makes me want to hit the author."

It clicked when I read this:
"This model is also supported by the fact that young people will frequently buy whatever music is on the radio (rather than whatever music attracts the most critical praise) "

Oh yes. Sneering elitism and a total unfamiliarity with Sturgeon's Law.

All knowledge, etc.: A friend of mine found a cookie recipe in a 1955 book calling for "5 cents of ammonia." Google turned up an explanation that "ammonia" here refers to ammonium bicarbonate, an older sort of baking powder. But what does "5 cents" mean? I found one un-explained assertion that it equals 2 tablespoons, and one speculation that it was enough to cover a 5-cent piece.

Apparently recipes calling for "5 cents" (or 3 cents, or 10 cents -- of ammonia and oil of lemon, most commonly) date from 1900s or earlier, and seem to be USian. (They seem to have been passed down in defiance of inflation.) I can find no other data on The Google -- neither historical explanation, nor conversion to any units of mass or volume.

The curiosity! It burns! History-of-baking experts, please help?

Xopher: I don't think it looks like they killed him. The transition was strange, and sudden, but not in the sort of ways a regicide would have been. They gave him funerary rites in the old religion, which I don't think would have happened if they'd killed him, esp. not if they'd killed him from the sort of fervor that had them erasing his name for the next hundred years.

There is a fair bit of scholarly supposition the relaxing of his restrictions on the religion he was trying to supplant were because he had no sons with Neffertitti, and that Tut was his son by a concubine. There was a very short interim pharoah, name unknown. Tut changing his name was pretty much essential, and at ten years old, I don't know that he did it voluntarily.

The strongest case for his being killed, actually, was to get a young pharoah on the throne, so that the cult of Aten couldn't be solidified, and the biggest thing Ankhenaten seemed to be aiming for (but losing ground on as he failed to beget an heir) was some sort of declaration of Roman God King while living.

The resistance to him was as much because what he wanted was so at odds with what they believed. He was asking them to accpet an abstract god, one which wasn't seen to be doing anything for anyone. It wasn't (for them) believable, and that made it hard to believe in him.

But the religion they were still adhering to made out him in a place where rebellion (at least outright) wasn't all that easy. But he's not the only Egyptian figure to be lost to time because of being written out. Hatupshet got the unpersoning, and one of Khufu's line was lost just because of accident (he's the one they made the strange stories of his beaing hated, and murdered because he loathed his father and was engaged in incests the Egyptian nobility couldn't stomach; after killing his brother and I forget what all else). All that really happened was his tomb wasn't finished when he died, and the stones were almost all taken for other things and his inscriptions were lost for a really long time.

The resistance to him was as much because what he wanted was so at odds with what they believed. He was asking them to accept an abstract god, one which wasn't seen to be doing anything for anyone. It wasn't (for them) believable, and that made it hard to believe in him.

Wow. I can't believe you're defending that guy. He wasn't "asking" them to accept anything. He was denying everyone the protection of the gods they depended on. We're not talking about freedom of worship as we understand it today. They feared for their lives. The Aten wasn't a do-all monotheistic god like Yahweh or Allah. It was just the disk of the sun, that's all (and since That Criminal didn't actually deny the existence of the other gods, he was technically not a monotheist at all, but a henotheist). All the other functions of the divine world were to be ignored, and only he and his wife were allowed to worship at all.

Don't be misled by your own monotheistic (in a completely different sense) beliefs. Akhenaten wasn't some kind of enlightened reformer; he was a selfish, evil, crazy monster who almost destroyed Egypt, and the Egyptians' hatred of him was entirely justified.

Ay, the Pharaoh after Tutankhamun (who IMO most likely engineered the latter's death) was a pretty bad guy too, but at least he put Egypt back on track.

Thanks to Bill Higgins (#84) for the link to my cartography post. I was wondering why I got a traffic spike today.

Sandy M. (#94), re: the aesthetics of fantasy post that I linked to at Jonathan's old/dead site - being a big Tolkien nut, I don't completely agree with his value judgments about "fat fantasy" either, but I do think his post captures a few instructive dimensions of why the most mainstream-of-the-mainstream mega-fantasy tends towards safe, established, and present-goggled ways of seeing and telling stories. You typically see it in the prose, and what I meant to argue was that you also see it in the maps.

For instance, the maps of medieval-ish worlds I've seen don't look anything like medieval cartography, and indeed they betray late-20th- and 21st-century authorship on face. But the point is that for their target audience, it doesn't particularly matter; that's not what they want out of their maps, and that's not where they derive their sense of immersion. Rather, immersion comes from a sort of vast and literal feeling of high-definition accuracy.

I think this is often true of the use of language in fantasy novels, too (although Tolkien, for one, reads to me a lot like Walter Scott - very appropriate given his aesthetics and politics - and the care and attention he lavished on his invented languages is really beyond reproach). The fact that Big Fantasy of the Robert Jordan or George RR Martin school is communicated through conservative present-day lenses is very, very obvious once you pay attention to formal specifics, which I realize is more of a "literary" way of looking at things, for whatever that's worth. This isn't to say that this is a bad thing or has no place in literature; familiarity attracts a certain kind of reader, after all, and nowhere more than in a big fat serial.

I'm trying to chase down a bit of trivia about life in Britain in the 19th century. Specifically, how many servants might one expect to find on the grounds of a nobleman's hunting lodge when none of the gentry were there? The gamekeeper, obviously, would be a year-round resident along with his family, but who else might one expect to find? My searches give me pages about staff for hire or off-season entertainment in present-day hotels that were converted from hunting lodges--not quite what I need.

Xopher: I'm only defending him in an abstract way. You argued there was a perfectly valid value judgement in "the great criminal".

I don't think it's that cut and dried. The evidence is that his efforts were limited, even in the height of his power. All things being equal, I don't think he was all that much worse than a lot of other state leaders of religion at the time. He wasn't requiring his wives to hang themselves so he wouldn't be lonely after death, etc.

I am also not sure I believe the people who wrote the histories we have. They had an axe to grind. That there are contemporaneous idols to the gods he was trying to supplant, in his holy city, is part of the reason why. That the people, at large, were apparently still revering him 100 years, or so, later; and more purging had to take place is another part of the reason why.

I just have to look at the folks who are explaining the "causes" of The Civil War to know that all one reads isn't necessarily the truth. That's why I asked you, because what I know doesn't paint him a saint, but it doesn't raise him to the status of someone to paint as deserving of the level of condemnation you seem to have for him.

Then again, I don't think Tut was murdered, so...

Egyptologist Donald B. Redford (I got the quote from Wikipedia, so appropriate salt-grains):

Before much of the archaeological evidence from Thebes and from Tell el-Amarna became available, wishful thinking sometimes turned Akhenaten into a humane teacher of the true God, a mentor of Moses, a Christlike figure, a philosopher before his time. But these imaginary creatures are now fading away one by one as the historical reality gradually emerges. There is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible.

Xopher: (and everyone else, sort of). I'm sorry. I may be being more abrupt than I normally would be.

Not only do I feel I am behind in the preparation for my moving across the country in eight weeks, but some of the details of the closing are apparently looking to go caddywhumpus.

It's probably making me less charitable than is my normal wont.

Caroline #95.

This reports "cents-weight" as a recipe unit.

On the other hand, "enough to cover a sixpence" or "enough to cover a tanner" is a well-attested British term, supporting the surface area reading.

Xopher: I don't think Akhenaten's monotheism was anything like modern monotheism. If I had to guess, I think the cultic nature of pharoanic Egypt was feeding some minor megalomania (hence the drifting to a living god status) and the vast abstraction of his sense of deity was a gross odds with Egyptian understanding: which is why the ruling class he was dealing with was so resistant to it.

But I also think a lot of the vilification came from those who (in the wake of Tut's death) were engaging in the power politics of dynastic uncertainty) needed to have a justification for the state of unease/uncertain succession.

In short, I think it was a lot of people being people.

@ Jenny Islander: [em]Behind Closed Doors[/em] by Amanda Vickery addresses this a little, and you can make some decent inferences from it. A Townhouse had 4-7 permanent servants (butler, housekeeper/cook, housemaid and scullery maid, plus a chore boy, man of all work and additional house maid.) Those were the necessary bodies to maintain a house lacking their employers. A hunting lodge requires someone to feed everyone present, same to clothe them, someone to dust and wash, someone to organize all of the others and deal with the boss.

I can dig up the basic citations if you like.

I just finished the cartography piece and I have to say, if anyone wants to make me deliriously happy... a copy of the Russian translation of The Hobbit would do the trick.

The map is glorious, and the comments at that article make it seem better than I should have expected (one of the people points out, corectly, that works which were translated were done with as much faith as could be done; the dissection of the non-communist elements would then be done to the work as it stood).

@CZEdwards No. 105: Thanks for the title. So, inside: about half a dozen people, maybe less; outside: gamekeeper and family, assistant gamekeeper (probably), somebody to look after the hounds if there are hounds (with an assistant if there are a lot of hounds), and somebody/ies to look after the horses presuming that His Grace keeps his hunters on his hunting estate. Does that sound about right?

Hyperlocal news: woman spends just about entire night itchy due to unknown causes. Plans made to stop at store to buy more than one tube of cortisone cream for hands, feet, and various parts in between.

Seriously. I wasn't this itchy when I had fleas and was sleeping in diatomaceous earth to kill them.

Abi #74

They seem to have got her partially mixed up with her mother Sarah Anne Child, who eloped with John Fane at Gretna Green in 1782.

Even the name at the top of the page is wrong - she's either Sarah Sophia Fane, or Sarah Sophia Child-Villiers, not Sarah Sophia Child.

thomas @103, thanks for the leads!

Diatryma @108, do you think it's a histamine reaction? Might Benadryl help?

I'm wondering if Zod will run again.

Oh, wait, he is.

Steve C @ 111... How dare you compare the epitome of Kryptonian biology and intellect with that?
Kneel before Zod!

Zod @ 112 -

Come to my secret clubhouse up north. I have a surprise for you.

Terry and Xopher: What might be escaping your attention, is that all of the Pharaohs were considered to be the living image of Amun, just as the Heir (male) to the throne was Horus.

There is some evidence to suggest that the elevation of Aten worship was a political ploy by Amenhotep III to curb some of the power of the priests of Amun. Unfortunately, Amenhotep IV (Ankhenaten) "got religion" and proceeded to go off the deep end, proclaiming Thebes so tainted by Amun worship that the Aten had to have his (its?) own holy city...

The priests of Amun eventually got the military on their side, and Tut ends up on the throne. I'm convinced that Ankhenaten was murdered -- but the bigger mystery is that Nefertiti vanishes. No mummy, just inscriptions.

Jenny Islander @ 107 ...
@CZEdwards No. 105: Thanks for the title. So, inside: about half a dozen people, maybe less; outside: gamekeeper and family, assistant gamekeeper (probably), somebody to look after the hounds if there are hounds (with an assistant if there are a lot of hounds), and somebody/ies to look after the horses presuming that His Grace keeps his hunters on his hunting estate. Does that sound about right?

I'd think that much would depend on the size of the estate, location of the estate[0], how frequently it was visited, yada, yada...

In general, for the outside work, just based on the amount of work needed to care for a pack of hounds, exercise, clean and feed more than a couple of horses, and ensure that the hunting lands were being properly tended (and the local ne'er do wells kept out), I'd think there'd generally be several sorts for each position (gamekeeper + assistant, hound master + assistant, yada).

Inside, I seem to recall that some establishments took their staff with them when they travelled (eg: cook, maids...), while others maintained the same locally[1]; beyond that, I don't know how many estates would still have maintained their own farms and/or gardens.

Hm... I may actually have a useful reference for this as well -- I'll check when I go to look at the traps.

[0] I don't know if you'd have the same accumulation of hounds if you were spending your time shooting on the moor, for example.
[1] I'd suspect that location/distance would play into this as well -- it's much easier to hire-when-needed if there's a village-or-two handy.

AKICIML: If I'm moving to NY (which I am OMG eee!) then I need a GPS. Especially since the shortest route requires that I drive through New York City (OMG halp). Does anyone have any recommendations?

Also, how does NYC traffic compare to Houston or Dallas?

TexAnne (116): I like my Garmin, but it's an older model, no longer available. A few hints: "text to speech" models give you the street name you want instead of just telling you to turn right in fifty feet (or whatever)--I find that very helpful. My friends who do a lot of long-distance driving swear by the traffic reports feature, which will route you around jams when possible, but it's an added monthly fee.

Long Island, right? Where exactly?

TexAnne @ 116 ...
AKICIML: If I'm moving to NY (which I am OMG eee!) then I need a GPS. Especially since the shortest route requires that I drive through New York City (OMG halp). Does anyone have any recommendations?

Hm... I've a number of friends that quite like tomtom gear -- if you have a smartphone, that might also be an option, since many of them have some way to do GPS-ish things these days.

Mary Aileen: I dislike being specific on the Internet, but you may reach me at gknaar ng zr crevbq pbzzrepvny.

@Xeger #115: The place I'm thinking of is in Northumberland. Back in the day, it was a whopping two miles in a straight line from the nearest named group of houses, more by road (it's at the end of one). Nowadays it's next to a village put up for construction workers building a nearby dam. The place is considered isolated by UK standards even now, which makes me blink, but then, I'm from Alaska.

I was musing about who would have been living there year round when the place really was a hunting lodge. For the right sort of person, it might not be too bad.

TexAnne... If I'm moving to NY (which I am OMG eee!)

"New York, New York!"

Serge, 121: That song was indeed a formative influence.

TexAnne: You've got mail.

Nicholas Tam@98: No disrespect to your page- perhaps I should have said "I followed a link and got distracted."

Sandy B. @ 94: "Oh yes. Sneering elitism and a total unfamiliarity with Sturgeon's Law."

Yes, it's particularly precious in the second part where he explains that no, he's not criticizing fantasy fans for preferring the comfort of the same old Same Old to the daring dazzle of the challenging New (like SF fans do, of course), he's just trying to analyze why they have such common tastes ahem prefer their comfort food.

It's sad, because he did have some interesting observations about fantasy. But his analysis was larded down with so much nonsense and so many stock tropes of fantasy readers that it became increasingly difficult to find the will to sift for the nuggets.

Nicholas Tam @ 98: "For instance, the maps of medieval-ish worlds I've seen don't look anything like medieval cartography, and indeed they betray late-20th- and 21st-century authorship on face."

They don't look anything like modern cartography either--really, all those straight roads leading directly from city to city? It's like topography doesn't exist. I nonetheless find it a hard sell to argue that that's indicative of any strongly-held opinion on topography among fantasy readers. "Fah! Escarpments! Peneplains! Who needs 'em?"

"The fact that Big Fantasy of the Robert Jordan or George RR Martin school is communicated through conservative present-day lenses is very, very obvious once you pay attention to formal specifics, which I realize is more of a "literary" way of looking at things, for whatever that's worth."

I'm quite curious about what you mean by "conservative" lenses--do you mean political, social, narrative conservativeness? All or none of the above? And what elements of the "formal specifics" makes them so very, very obvious?

CaseyL @ 33: Speaking of movies,I've just come back from seeing "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which is about the discovery of the Chauvet cave art. Herzog has some silly moments, but they pale in significance: the movie gives us the only glimpse we'll ever get of the artwork, and does a damn fine job of that.

I just want to second this. I enjoy Herzog's goofiness, but it's a must-see even if you don't.

@Jenny Islander, Xeger:

I was writing late, so a few of the questions I should have asked got missed. Early, mid or late 19th? Gentry or nobility? Grouse, deer, fox or something more exotic?

I don't know of a single source to point you at. What I've put together is that by the early 19th century, most hunting lodges south of the midlands were for hunting in name only -- think modern Spring Break ski chalet without the skiing. They'd been around for centuries at that point and were basically subsidiary estates with gardens and music rooms and libraries and two hundred staff when the owner was in residence. Fox hunting is a late autumn/winter/early spring sport on crop land (or should be, since racing hunters and dogs through a field of wheat means an economic loss); a shoot (grouse, usually) is also on or near crop land -- wide sight lines and gleanings to attract birds. Still need dogs, though -- retrievers, not hounds.

Deer pretty much means Wales, Scotland or Ireland by about 1815. Too much deforestation further south. Those regions were being enclosed for parkland from about the 1770s (the south was enclosed under the Tudors, the midlands under the Stuarts). Not that there weren't people raising their own semi-domesticated herds of deer on lodges further south, but they were a minority.

No matter if the employer generally traveled with his/her/their personal servants, a skeleton staff would be on permanent duty and the outdoor staff are attached. Even if the house doesn't have plumbing that can freeze, empty houses attract both two and four legged unwanted guests and after the 1750s, furniture started becoming attached to a house rather than being part of the traveling kit. As to whether the horses and hounds are based at the lodge depends on a lot of factors, but a pack of 12 dogs takes 4 people; one stable boy can manage 2-3 horses but not train them. And also -- expect variation. Just because the $Noble of $Place did something one way doesn't mean everybody did.

I am unfortunately entirely on the wrong continent to do the deep research, which is into household records that haven't been digitally archived yet. (fingers crossed.) In addition to the Vickery mentioned above, for early 19th century, try Philip Carter's Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain 1660-1800; Alice Hillman's The Rake's Diary: The Journal of George Hilton and John Beresford's Memoirs of an Eighteenth Century Footman. The last might be public domain (1928 publication). For the later 19th century? /shrugs. I try to pretend the Victorians didn't exist.

And thanks -- I much prefer thinking about this period to the Mormon theology I'm supposed to be working on!

TexAnne, #115: We really like our Magellan for several reasons:

- Its "turn here" sound cue tends to be right on target, neither too early (when you might be confused as to where "here" is) nor too late. The sound cue also varies between "turn right", "turn left", and "straight ahead". Also, it will tell you what the next turn after the current one is if it's close, which helps keep you from getting stuck in the wrong lane.

- It has a 2-touch STFU function, for when you really don't want to be nagged by the voice and the sound-cue notes.

- The word "recalculating" is not in its vocabulary. (That drove us batshit on one trip when we'd borrowed a Garmin. Every time we pulled off the road for gas or food, "Recalculating... recalculating... recalculating...")

The downside of the Magellan, at the moment, is that they changed map providers on the latest update, and the new provider is... flaky. Routes that don't make sense. We had to go back to the previous map version, which fortunately you can DO with a Magellan. We're hoping they'll change back for the next update, but in the meantime that's a serious caveat.

The borrowed Garmin did have one feature the Magellan lacks, which we really liked: when you search for a category of something (such as a restaurant or hotel) near your current position, it shows direction as well as distance, so you can tell at a glance if Entry X is along your route or requires backtracking. But that's mostly important if you're traveling in unfamiliar territory.

AFAIK, the TomTom is the only one that gives you multiple voices to choose from (including GlaDOS and KITT). I don't know anything about its other features.

Driving to Long Island from points south:

Across Staten Island to Brooklyn and Loop Parkway?

Lee, 128: I'll keep Magellan in mind. I shall try very hard not to let the idea of KITT on my dashboard sway me.

Stefan, 129: I'd rather avoid having my first taste of NYC driving come at the end of a three-day trip.

Doonesbury had the idea of doing celebrity voices for GPS directions. I was thinking what's the worst voice they could use, and Gilbert Gottfried came to mind.

On the other one, I'd pay at least ten bucks to hear Ian McKellen intone, "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

Steve C @ 131:

TomTom also has the voice of Brian Blessed as of late last year.

#130: I don't think you have a choice. Getting to LI means crossing through The Bronx and Queens or Staten Island and Brooklyn (and then Queens) or Manhattan and Queens.

Unless you find a ferry . . .

Grouse shooting is a particular sort of shooting. Grouse depend on young heather, so they're not something you would find at, for instance, Sandringham. And a Grouse shoot in a remote place is a considerable logistic operation. You need a lot of people to drive the birds towards the guns, load the guns, and feed everyone (according to their station).

In the lowlands, the organised shoots are focused on birds such as pheasants and partridges, with various degrees of artificial raising and landscape management.

The Gamekeeper At Home looks like it might be useful for you.

Foxhunts are centralised, slightly collective. It's possible that the local senior aristocrat wouldn't be keeping the hounds on his estate. And each member of the Hunt kept their own horses. Amongst the costs they'd pay would be the horses for the hunt staff. Again, they're more lowland England, but there were packs in highland sheep-farming country, much more livestock protection by farmers than game-bird protection and showing off. D'ye ken John Peel? He ran that sort of pest control business, following the hounds on foot.

So, remote Northumberland is going to be focused on grouse shooting. But horses will be needed for transport.

Sandy B. (not M., my mistake - #124) - none taken! I thought I might chime in on it, though.

heresiarch (#125) - No, fantasy maps don't look anything like satellite GIS or elevation maps with contour lines, and the terrain tends to have an orderliness to it that wouldn't be reflective of real-world geological change, but they do embed what seem to be our high-level commonsense intuitions about what maps are and how they look. Coordinate systems, selection of detail, the overall degree of separation between paper representations and real space, and so on. What I'm saying is that those intuitions are modern and contingent, and a lot of them probably come from our early exposure to fictional maps themselves in a feedback loop of sorts.

As far as the conservatism of big fantasy goes, I'm speaking more of the aesthetic than the political, although there's a good set of arguments for the political dimension as well (and one that has gone on for years without me, I'm aware). I'm thinking of prose, dynamism of perspective, scene-setting and characterization, attentiveness to the muddiness of language, ordinariness of diction and sentence structure, conventions of plot design. That said, it's not all about form, and I would be remiss to overlook the genre's overwhelming nostalgia for past mythologies and forms of governance. But I'm primarily thinking of the writing style itself.

Obviously I realize that there's a world of difference between Jordan and GRRM in terms of what they're doing, having read them both (and liked GRRM a heck of a lot better), but the big-fantasy conversation doesn't intersect all that much with the transformation of English-language fiction over the past century or so of its history. I don't think this is controversial. It's simply the observation that mass-market genre mainstays are shy about experimentation.

Stefan Jones (133): There's the Port Jefferson ferry, but she'd have to pass NYC and come down from the north. Not recommended.

TexAnne (130): The trick is to try to time your transit across NYC for non-rush-hour. Veeeery early in the morning would be the least traffic, but somewhere between 10AM and 2PM is probably most reasonable.

TexAnne @ 140... I shall try very hard not to let the idea of KITT on my dashboard sway me

The idea that KITT's voice also is John Adams's is attractive though.

I wouldn't mind a GPS that sounds like Paul Bettany's Jarvis, or like Stephen Fry's Jeeves.

WRT Akhenaten and his family: isn't there a theory that Smenkhare, the brief interim ruler between him and Tut, was a regnal alias for Nefertiti? Still doesn't explain what happened to her in the end, though.

WRT fantasy maps: Regardless of cartographic merit, I wonder about their geological plausibility.

IIRC there was an Open Thread or Particle link a while back to Salon's interview with a Russian geologist who'd rewritten LOTR from Mordor's POV. He got into an impressive froth about the implausibility of the bunched-up mountainous terrain of Mordor-- it didn't seem to be in the middle of Middle-Earth's continental plate, and it wasn't evenly distributed all the way up along the coastal edge. I don't think there was any mention that the Middle-earth of LOTR had lost a huge chunk of landmass at the end of the Second Age.

(I always figured that Mordor's quasicircular layout had been formed by the caldera of a ginormous volcano that had blown the heck up, leaving only Mt. Doom as its active stub over the lava vent. There's no canon backstory that supports that, though.)

Heck, why stop with the landscape? What about the weather patterns and resulting agrarian economies?

(...okay I'll stop now)

Julie L. @139:

There are several theories as to Smenkhare's identity -- one, that he is Ankhenaten's son and Tut's older brother (their mother being the Mitanni princess Tadukhipa); two, that he's the younger brother of Ankhenaten; and three, that he's really Nefertiti.

We have some inscriptions that indicate that Smenkhare was wed to Meritaten, Nefertiti's oldest daughter, and they were made co-regents at that time. Both supposedly succumbed to an episode of fever (epidemic?) -- and I can't remember if their mummies have been found.

When the Egyptians decided to make someone an un-person they were pretty thorough about it.

Abi @ 73

Is there any reason they couldn't continue the connection through the daughter after the mother's unfortunate demise? Friends of the family and all that...

Terry, I'm sorry I got so worked up at you. I've belatedly realized that I wasn't so much reacting to what you said as to things very similar in form (but not content) that were said by...well, idiots...who a) regard any change from polytheism to monotheism as "progress,"* and/or b) insist on treating Akhenaten as some kind of saintly figure who tried to "rescue" Egypt from its awful, corrupt, and *gasp* Pagan ways.

Just because monotheism dominates the world** doesn't make all monotheists (or even monotheists generally) the "good guys." Fond as most of us are of The Good Guys Win, it's a literary convention, not an irresistible historical force.

I know YOU don't believe the nonsense denounced in the previous paragraphs, but I'm sure you can see why I've built up some anger over it.

*Note the assumption there that monotheism, no matter how grotesque (and Akhenaten's has been described as 'monolatry' by some) is automatically better than polytheism, no matter how enlightened (though admittedly there are better examples of enlightened polytheist societies than Pharaonic Egypt).

**Well, except that neither of the two most populous countries in the world has a monotheistic majority, and one of them has a Pagan majority.

Btw, I'm really enjoying Frederica. I missed the gym and was very, very late getting in to work (saii).

Apropos of absolutely nothing, three of the "Top Story" topics on Google News right now are
Maria Shriver, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Morganza Spillway.

Surely Morganza Spillway should be, as Edward Gorey once put it, "the heroine of a forgotten 19th-century novel," or someone equally fascinatingly obscure.

M. Organza Spillway, inventor of the fabric that bears her first name and of the peculiar surplice-like overgarment that bears her last name.

Mary Aileen #136:

Assuming with great confidence that TexAnne has experience driving Houston's 610, the Staten Island/Verrazano[*] way is doable in my admittedly limited experience. The thing to watch out for, we discovered, was not so much the other drivers, but all the miscellaneous crap in the road, some of it with very sharp edges.

[*] Did I read somewhere that bridge got renamed?

Hi all, I am hoping you won't mind taking a moment this evening or tomorrow to send some well wishes psychically my way; perhaps they will be of some value towards putting me over the top in my employment-related endeavors. Thanks much! While you're at it you are welcome to wish me a happy thirty-eleventh (or forty-oneth according to your stylistic preferences) -- tomorrow is a big day for me.

TMK: Happy Birthday and best wishes for Right Livelihood.

Best wishes all around to the Modesto Kid...

Morganza Spillway sounds a "Girl Genius" villainess who goes around in a pink submarine.

TMK, I wish you a happy birthday and a new job that's as euphoria-inducing as mine is.

joann (146): Across Staten Island is certainly the obvious way. Just don't do it on Easter evening in the middle of going-home-from-vacation-weekend traffic, like I did when I moved to Long Island. ;)

Also, the Verrazano* Bridge *sways*. Eeek!

*if the bridge was renamed, I missed it

The Modesto Kid: Thinking good thoughts in your direction.

joann, 146: My very first big-city rush hour was in San Antonio, when I'd had my learner's permit for about six months. It wasn't as bad back then, but it was plenty scary. And yeah...I've done 610 in all weathers and at all times of day. Thanks for the warning about the crap on the road!

Xopher @ 145 -

That surplice seems like a fictional item I could really use, due to the rather peculiar nature of gravity surrounding my bosom, especially when food is involved.

Alas, I don't think organza is particularly washable, or I would be sure to whip up some fancy Organza Spillways for myself and select friends, so that we could confidently eat while wearing fancy clothes.

Serge @93: Steve Martin's King Tut? 
Or Victor Buono's?
How about Billy Jones & Ernie Hare's? (More Jones and Hare here.)

Nicholas Tam @135: You know what'd be cool? A 'Tube map' of Middle Earth.

TexAnne @154: It's been over 25 years, but I remember doing 610 (and 59) in a Plymouth Arrow that often decided that moving forward was just too much work.

Kid Bitzer, where are you?

Found by way of TVTropes: an eighth Incarnations of Immortality book (Nox), available as an e-book.

Kip W @ 156:
Your wish is my command:
There And Back Again (Print).
Also available as a T-shirt.

David Harmion @ 158: The publisher has ebook and print versions for sale here.

(The site you've linked to has the whiff of bootleg to me.)

155
Nylon (or polyester) organza?
There is such stuff; I have some, left over from a spur-of-the-moment sewing project a few years back. (Black silky polyester, sandwiching the organza as the middle layer, then machine-stitching outlines and cutting away the black fabric to produce a Jolly Roger with see through skull and crossbones.)

Clifton Royston @159: Glad I didn't make the whole thing and come back here like a puppy with a stick and say "Look what -I- just made! Amn't I clever?"

For Fragano, #8, belatedly:

A field of ash was damped by dew or rain.
In birdsong dawn that Eden might create,
Three walkers left their marks. The first paced straight,
From verge to verge. He watched the vast terrain
In front. Another checked, went on again.
The last was small, with playful leaping gait
That stepped in prints ahead. To emulate
A father's strides? A child. That much is plain.

Was it a family? No one can say.
The dawn, the birdsong, even that is guessed.
The tales we humans tell! As for the rest,
Laetoli's silent. But a child at play,
Who stretched to greater strides, crouched low, uncurled,
And leapt three million years to mark the world.

Dave:
Nice!
Thanks.

@Dave Bell #134: Thanks for the link! I'm just skimming now, but it will be absorbing reading the next time I'm up with the baby. I've already come across one interesting anecdote about the effect of water-mills on the fauna of streams. At the time of writing (late 1880s), "coarse fishing" had decreased in streams in the southern English countryside. The author notes that large numbers of perch, tench, etc., used to live behind mill-dams. Then more people started sending their flour to large urban mills and converting the rural mills to housing, letting the dams go: and fish catches dropped.

IOW, rural water-mills may have been filling the niche left open when beavers were wiped out in England.

Any New York children of the sixties here?

Chuck McCann has a web chat show:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/bits-pieces1

CaseyL@33

The Herzog movie isn't "the only glimpse we'll ever get of the artwork"

Jean-Marie Chauvet published a book in 1996, "Dawn of art : the Chauvet Cave : the oldest known paintings in the world" (New York : H.N. Abrams, 1996) that has great photos.

There's also a website maintained by the French ministry of culture:
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/

That said, I loved the book and the website and can't wait to see the movie!

Re: Akhnaten -- has it actually been conclusively proved that the KV55 mummy is him? Last time I seriously looked into it, they weren't able to rule out the possibility that it was some other son of Amonhotep III and Tiye, especially since we still don't know for certain precisely how Smenkhare was related to the rest of the Armana-era royals.

(We do, however, know what he looked like -- Tut's second coffin and canopic jars were originally made for him).

re 168: If you wander through the Wikipedia pages, the identity of the KV55 mummy appears to be the only thing they are sure about, based on last year's DNA tests.

Dave Luckett #163:

That is excellent! Thank you.

I may be scarce for a while; second job's happening and I'm a lot more worn out than I expected to be due to itching. I've also warned many people that until I can sleep through the night, all communication with me is going to be itch-related.

I'll be reading at least once every few days, but posting will be infrequent.

Serge @138, you CAN get an alarm clock that wakes you gently with phrases in Stephen Fry's mellifluous voice, tailored for a male or female wakee.

Dave Luckett @163, applause

re monotheism, ObXKCD

Kip W @ 156... :-)

Janet Brennan Croft @ 172... Why am I not surprised? Meanwhile, I wonder if there is a GPS that sounds like a Dalek.

"De-vi-ate!"

@169: My reading of the Wiki pages is "probable, but not definite"

The DNA results proved that KV55 was the father of Tutankhamun and the son of Amonhotep III and Queen Tiye. I agree that makes Akhenaten the most likely candidate, but like I already said, there's the issue of Smenkhkare to consider -- it's possible he was Akhenaten's younger brother.

The other contents of KV55 aren't much help, because there was stuff in there from just about everyone who was anyone in the Amarna hierarchy, and it had been thoroughly ransacked at least twice.

Of course, IANAE.

Happy birthday to the Modesto Kid, and good wishes winging your way.

Mine is tomorrow; I'll be 58. Since I work tonight and will get up just in time to go to choir practice, my birthday dinner will be whatever looks good on the Bob Evans menu after practice tomorrow. I do have a shrimp ring and a small tub of Extreme Moose Tracks ice cream waiting for me in the freezer, and will indulge in them a day late.

Now here's a righteous head-bump.

Dreamed last night of a book that was about the size of my First Folio reprint, with small type in several columns, reprinting blogs with comments.

Original post in the middle, comments in small type round the side? This sounds very like the Talmud.

nerdycellist 155: That surplice seems like a fictional item I could really use, due to the rather peculiar nature of gravity surrounding my bosom, especially when food is involved.

As the Stainèd One, I am forced to concur.

Open Thread Venting (to be followed by sonnets, one hopes): Last night, we had a Parental Adventure with our son. In short, he was led astray by a girl, resulting in his extremely late arrival "home", during which time the police were notified and searches begun. Some of his friends were honest and helpful; others -- not so.

Can he be any more grounded than this? He might actually have to dig for a long time just to reach daylight again. He has done a lot of damage to our trust in him.

This girl's text messages to him were explicit and extremely disturbing -- although he seems to be aware of the need for proper protection, he's just not mature enough to be making this kind of decision.

As for me personally, I can barely restrain my rage against her. She's done a lot of damage to my son. Only by thinking of my FG can I relax and not scare random strangers passing by.

{{{{{{{Ginger}}}}}}}}

You have my sympathy and support. Vent as much as you need to -- sounds scary enough second hand.

In some ways having four-feets instead of children is a lot simpler -- they can be neutered!

Xopher @49: much as I like How to Train Your Dragon ... Vikings (who are nothing at all like historical Vikings, of course) all have Scots accents (the adults, anyway...none of the teenagers do). Anyone know why they did that?

Because Scots accents are really cool, and Any Excuse Is A Good Excuse? (Hey, worked for me!)

Ginger @181, sympathies - sounds extraordinarily stressful. All the best to you as you navigate the fallout from this little adventure.

Count me into the stain-attracting frontage sorority. I have one drawer of stained shirts and one of not-stained. These days I only buy black tops for work or church. I have one really, really nice dress. I wear it once a year at DH's employee Christmas party and I try to eat beforehand so I can sip something clear and make conversation over a dry bread roll.

All of this Food Attracting Pectoral Region (FAPR?) agita would be moot if some jerkwad hadn't decided that grown-ups weren't supposed to tuck napkins into their shirts. Sometimes etiquette is totally bogus.

Ginger @ 181... Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to be a Parent, then I read things like your post and I am glad to remain an Uncle. As for your offspring, I'd recommend taking away his "Atomic Robo" comic-books.

Behold the power of Light: three of the first four google hits on “Frederica, Marchioness of Alverstoke” point to Making Light.

Jenny Islander @120: Northumberland. Back in the day, it was a whopping two miles in a straight line from the nearest named group of houses, ... The place is considered isolated by UK standards even now, which makes me blink, but then, I'm from Alaska.

The American is someone who thinks a hundred years is a long time.

The European is someone who thinks a hundred miles is a long way.

TexAnne: Disclaimer: I do not drive, but I have ridden in many cars.

Another vote for across Staten Island and then through Brooklyn onto "the Island," as NYCers call Long Island. However, if you are on the North Shore, you will have to drive south to north at some point, and there are only a few places to do that.

If you are on the North Shore, you can consider the NJ-Manhattan-Queens route, aiming for the GCP (not the LIE, not not not, it is a horrendous road at any hour and is often called the World's Longest Parking Lot). If you do that, you definitely want to cross Manhattan no later than 2 PM as traffic worsens starting at 3.

Remember that most (all?) streets in Manhattan are one way, as are many in Brooklyn and Queens.

No Right Turn on Red inside the City limits, but okay on Long Island.

TMK: Happy Birthday and good wishes for employment.

Ginger: my sympathies and support. I have a 15yo and live in terror of such events.

Another AKICIML question from me:

In my other life, I am part of a group of moderators who run a number of groups on Yahoo. We are thinking of switching to the php BB system, which is very different from what we're currently using.

Does anyone have experience with php BB, pro and con, as user or moderator, they can share? I'm happy to take this off ML if people would prefer.

We have about 2000 group members. Some are very active posters and others are complete lurkers. Many have little technical knowhow. Some of our moderators have little technical knowhow, and are worried about having to update the BB software.

TIA.

#144, #150:

Old Man Rivers is tired of living^*. He had been the backbone of the town's economy for years, but folks had always assumed his inheritance would go to a local couple, Luke Pontchartrain and Bonny Carre, and things would go on much as before.

That was until out-of-town seductress Morganza Spillway turned up and started trying to charm Rivers into giving her the goods. She didn't care for the old town, and was fixing to move everything a hundred miles up the coast. Morganza also knew how much Rivers had tied up in disputes with the Army engineers, and was trying to get them to rule her way.

Up the coast, Morganza isn't any more popular. Folks there just want to be left in peace, and not be flooded with Rivers' inheritance. Straight-shooting sheriff Morgan Town is standing up to Morganza. Will Morgan and Luke and Bonny be able to fight her off, or will Rivers succumb?

--
* And feared of dying, but when has that ever made a difference?

jacque @ #189:

The European is someone who thinks a hundred miles is a long way.

I guess we're Americans. It was well worth the trip.

Ginger @181: Sympathies. Keep venting - we don't mind listening. Venting is healthy, I'm told (must do it more often myself).

jacque @ #189: The version I'm used to is 200 years/200 miles and American vs. Brit. Interesting to see a variation.

Melissa #191 - I'm a moderator on a board that uses phpBB. The actual owner is the only one who monkies about with the code, although I suspect he just uses the modules and structures which come with it. Certainly he hasn't managed to break it yet. Neither have we managed to break the rest of it. We have a couple of hundred regulars and over 2,000 members on it, down from over 7,000 a month ago, nearly 5,000 of whom were spammers.
Although I don't know if it is set up in the best way possible, the moderating capabilities are broad and fairly easy to use, with a fair number of buttons and options that are obvious when you first see them. Actually banning someone or fiddling about with privileges is a little more time consuming, but speaking as a non-computer person who has plenty of experience with computers, it all works fine.
Our membership includes technophobes to lifelong computer geeks, and about the biggest problem some people have is getting a photo the right size for their avatar. So the system seems to work well enough for everyone.
It's also in use on a forum or three more which I frequent, and I don't have any real trouble anywhere else.

Dave Bell @134: D'ye ken John Peel?

::woggle::

John Steed. Emma Peel.

</contextual malocclusion>

@196: and I went to Robert Peel.

Speechless:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/18/santorum-mccain-doesnt-understand-interrogation/

@Thomas #144

Now that's all slanderous lies. Poor Morganza is just trying to protect the town. See, upstream is Old Man River's cousin, Atchafalaya. Atchafalaya's been trying to steal away all of Old Man River's cash flow for sixty or so years now. Now, Old Man Rivers has been kind enough to spare Atchafalaya about thirty percent of his flow, by way of the Old River Control, but she keeps trying to get it all and leave Old Man River and the town with just a trickle. She nearly succeed back in '73. That's the last time Morganza stepped in, opening up to take the strain off the Old River Control, just like she's doing now. So really, Morganza is the best friend Old Man River and the people of the town have right now. Granted, there's some people none too happy with her, but that's why you should think twice before settling inside something called a spillway.

De-lurking again to say:

Fragano @8: My hat is off to you, sir. Would that I could write even half as well, or a third as aptly.

Dave Luckett @163: Your last line made my hair stand on end. Wow.

thomas @192: Still chuckling!

At the moment, they're renaming New York City bridges that hadn't already been named after people, the Triborough and the Queensborough.

The Verrazano is likely safe for a while, even though it got the name via the Verrazano Narrows. (The Outerbridge Crossing may not be, if people forget that it's named for a Mr. Outerbridge, not the "outer bridge crossing." But that's interstate, so more or different levels of bureaucracy.)

Echoing Kip W@157: does anyone know what did happen to Kid Bitzer? He stopped posting rather suddenly but in no obvious dudgeon.

"She," I think. But yes.

Thanks all for the good wishes. Happy Birthday, Anne!

about the discussion about the year-round staff of people at the hunting lodge: there needs also to be people who attend to the physical maintenance of the structural parts of the buildings and outbuildings, and gardeners, as well as foresters. An institution of that size isn't goign to rely completely on the workers of the village for all that.

HLN: Please wish me luck in evicting the unwanted tenants in my chimney, so that I can avoid a re-enactment of 'The Cask of Amontillado' while completing repairs.

Just to say: After noting that the latest "Author's Big Mistake" thread was closed to comments, I linked to it from the TV-Tropes page for Dear Negative Reader, which is a slightly more general take the same phenomenon. (The Trope Namer is Laurell K. Hamilton's example.)

199
It's also not a good idea to live on ground where the second name is 'Bypass', no matter how it might look in the dry season.

Ginger, a former coworker had something similar happen to his teenage kid - the kid had 'friends' (my quote marks) show up one day when he was home from school, and he was fed a mickey via soft drink. As far as anyone can tell, that was all that happened - but it could have been much worse. (Teenagers, especially at that age, do really stupid things, and they usually live to, well, not talk much about it to others.)

Julie L. : "WRT fantasy maps: Regardless of cartographic merit, I wonder about their geological plausibility."

There have been many times I have looked at a map and said, "Rivers converge, not diverge!" One of those maps is for Melanie Rawn's otherwise lovely Dragon Prince series. There was also a time I made a pretty version of somebody's map and had to put in all of the feeder rivers, since he was also somebody who thought that rivers split as they go along. Grrr.

In terms of roads going straight in between places, I think that's acceptable under the idea that the map is to tell you basic directions; once you get on a road, if the road is of a sufficient size, it's usually obvious that you stay on that road. And if you're going at a walking or even riding pace, it's not really important to know of the large switchbacks. I guess. I'd be inclined to put at least a little bit of curviness in the line.

I do get you on the basic geologic plausibility though. As the daughter of a paleontology major whose family would often stop to look at rocks, I have sort of a deep-seated feel for basic geology. That makes me a bit unusual; most fantasy types don't associate "world-building" with "plate tectonics."

xeger @ #206, at least in "Cask" the reward was silence. For your own sake, don't emulate "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Black Cat."

B. Durbin @ 209: "Rivers converge, not diverge!"

The Atchafalaya would beg to disagree.

O'Reilly (the publisher) is seeking a Publishing Technologies Specialist near Boston.

Dave #211: On the contrary -- the Mississippi is trying to converge into the Atchafalaya!

The Atlantic has flood photos.

Linkmeister @ 210 ...
xeger @ #206, at least in "Cask" the reward was silence. For your own sake, don't emulate "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Black Cat."

Heh. Indeed -- I'm rather hoping for silence in the end... but would prefer to not have any problematic remains :)

Is this where I should note that I have a large black cat with a white patch on his chest?

Open threadiness: Tomorrow is the last day for the book fair for Ballou High School, a school in Washington DC that serves a population that badly needs education.

"... early this year there were just over 1,150 books on the shelves at Ballou; there are over 1,200 students in the school. So there was barely one book for each student (the ALA standard is 11:1)."

The linked post at Guys Lit Wire describes the need further. It contains a link to a long wish list at Powell's. You are asked to pick a book or books off the list that haven't already been bought, purchase them, and have them shipped straight to the school librarian, whose name and address is in the post.

There are a lot of genre and non-genre books at all price points - fiction, poetry, literature, science, graphic novels, cookbooks, art books. For genre examples, last time I checked some but not all of the Naomi Novik Temeraire books had been bought, and some but not all of the requested Neil Gaiman. Plus lots of others.

I have no connection to this except I read about it at Martha Wells's LJ and think it's a cool idea. I bought several books earlier in the week and will probably break down and buy a couple more tomorrow if I see some favorites left unspoken for.

OtterB @216:
Very cool-- thanks for pointing this out.

The closure of our local Barnes&Noble last year deprived me of my usual opportunity to buy an extra copy of whatever I was getting the niece and nephews and dropping into their collection boxes. This will do nicely as a replacement.

J. Random Scribbler #200: Thanks. I have to say that Dave Luckett's sonnet blew me away.

fidelio @214: I always look at photos like that and wonder what it would cost to use houseboats as standard structures in areas prone to flooding. 'Course, one would want to strap them down for tornado season....

Jacque @219--There's a community to the northwest of Nashville (just the other side of Ashland City for those familiar with the area) right where Sycamore Creek feeds into the Cumberland. They have embraced their existence as river rats, and so many of the houses are on stilts--the space underneath is usually high enough to be a car port, even for SUVs. It's fairly easy to clear out that bottom area at need, and except in the very worst situations the actual dwelling space will stay dry. This has always seemed to me, like mounded house sites, an eminently sensible approach to life in such locations. It's going to flood, at least a little, at some point--so work with it, instead of pretending there's no way that large stream over there could never be a problem.

Didn't abi post links to pictures of some new construction in the Netherlands that could be adjusted according to changes in local water level a few years back?

Open-threadiness: A few years ago, I fired off an angry screed to somebody who had publicly announced that:

1. She was pregnant;
2. She didn't want to be;
3. She was going to have the baby anyway;
4. It would be an interesting experiment;
5. The baby would know who was boss right away and be her servant, not the other way around;
6. She (the mother) would not turn into one of those parents who were the constant targets of her scorn. (She belonged to one of those comms that calls parents moos and duhs and children crotchdroppings and goes hyperbolic if a baby is tired and fussy.)

So I fired off a detailed explanation of what being a parent of a baby is like and the possible results of "teaching" a baby who is "boss." No response. I prayed for them occasionally.

I recently stumbled across a link to her YouTube account. She's a mom. Her daughter looks like an ordinary happy little kid, she acts like a parent, and she appears to have (Hallelujah!) grown the hell up.

Happy ending.

There was some mention of the band Poi Dog Pondering here a couple threads back, which sparked an effusion of happy-puppy burbling on my part. If you are interested in even more happy burbling, I have tickets to a solo show Friday night (tomorrow) by Frank Orrall, the mainstay of the band, at the Honolulu Art Academy where Poi Dog Pondering played their very first show. It sounds like he'll be playing mostly PDP songs, with a combination of unusual acoustic instruments (guzheng?) and electronics with video accompaniment. This is going to be great. He also just mentioned on Facebook that one of my good friends was in the very first iteration of PDP, which I never knew!

HLN: first run in 13 weeks, after go-ahead from physio to do this thing. Just 20 minutes at a gentle pace, on grass, covering two miles or so. No hills, hard surfaces or fast running allowed yet. But oh, it felt great to be out there running! Now waiting to see to what extent various muscles & tendons complain about the unaccustomed exercise.

All of you should go read this immediately. No, really...just go.

HLN: While out and about today, I saw a large number of police converging on a local pharmacy. News reports say it's a robbery gone bad.

That's not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that I'm sitting in a Panera, with a wifi connection. The table next to me has one person with a computer, and another with a smartphone. The person with the laptop doesn't even appear to be looking for more info, just asking the person with the smartphone. Smartphone user is a) texting a friend, b) checking updates on Facebook, and c) looking on Google news for information. No indication of checking local news sites.

I've found the information on all 4 local TV news stations (and can tell you which one had it up first). It's not hard to find - it's the current "Breaking News" story on most of them.

Not that this will stop me from listening to hear their speculations, and any gossip.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones has died: http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/20111.html

The CDC has posted preparedness guidelines for the zombie apocalypse. It looks like good, useful advice.

TomB @ 227: That's wonderful - and they've slipped in quite a bit of useful general emergency-preparedness advice.

Re. Fantasy maps - I think it's silly to complain about improbable landscapes in a world like Middle Earth when, according to canon, it was shaped by divine intervention rather than plate tectonics. (Weather patterns though, hmm...)

What annoys me in fantasy (well, one thing that annoys me) is the "real-world parallel" nations. Tad Williams _Memory, Sorrow and Thorn_ though well-written was particularly grating, with Obvious AngloAmericans, Obvious Vikings, Obvious Celts and Obvious GraecoRomans.

re 219/220: I had the same reaction.

Bruce Cohen (StM) Re the power of light, and google-pointing Maybe

Melissa Singer @226: I'm sorry to hear that, having enjoyed Jones's work in National Lampoon and other venues over the years. I didn't even know she was sick.

PJ Evans @ 208... he was fed a mickey

Mouse? Rooney? Spillane? Mantle? Rourke?

I heartily second Skwid @ #224.

Skwid, thank you.

#223 Serge:

Finn.

The canonical Mickey Finn is chloral hydrate, but other things (including nicotine) have been used in various times and places.

Another find from TV Tropes:

Referred to in the introduction to David Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in which he calls people who are "entirely disingenuous, and really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity superior to the rest of mankind" the most irksome of all types of people. Hume goes on to state that "the only way, therefore, of converting an antagonist of this kind, is to leave him to himself. For, finding that no body keeps up the controversy with him, it is probable he will, at last, of himself, from mere weariness, come over to the side of common sense and reason."

This 18th-century quote wraps up their "Troll" page.

David Harmon @ #236, I was going to say Hume was defining the US Republican Party to a "T" until that final sentence: "it is probable he will, at last, of himself, from mere weariness, come over to the side of common sense and reason."

Nah. That'll die of unlikelihood.

Thanks all for the good wishes.

And, hm, they appear even to have the desired effect!

Roy @229: What annoys me in fantasy (well, one thing that annoys me) is the "real-world parallel" nations.

This is something that really irritates me about Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel/Naamah series. Or the first book, anyway, which was the only one I managed to finish. I keep flipping through new ones when they appear, though.

(Another reason that book annoyed me was that I kept thinking, "Richard Adams did this sort of mixture of sexual decadence and political intrigue back in the 90s with Maia." The character of Maia herself is arguably offputting to some readers, but hey, I enjoyed it.)

During our time in Virginia, there was an interval where the GOP had captured all branches of government, and there was much rubbing of hands, and Governor Macaca-to-be started making plans to wipe out the rest of the state treasury in the form of tax refunds and other giveaways.

A strange thing happened. Some of the Republicans in the legislature seemed to morph into de facto Democrats and put the brakes on the plan. It was as if the vision of seeing their rhetoric carried out sobered some of them up and caused them to act like responsible adults.

That seems like too much to hope for with the present crowd. Even too many of the Democrats, sad to say. Can't depend upon miracles.

Kip W @156: You know what'd be cool? A 'Tube map' of Middle Earth.

Clifton Royston @159: Your wish is my command:
There And Back Again (Print).
Also available as a T-shirt.

i have that print! my husband got her to redo the color scheme to be colorblind-friendly for him.

Skwid @224: Thanks for the link. Yes, that was very worth the time.

After reading of Newt Gingrich's sheep, there's only one thing to do.

That bunch of furry anarchist commandos, the Army Union Landing Force, already features a bear called Wolf, and a skunk named Alberto Gonzales. So why not a sheep? But what to call him?

Linkmeister #237, Kip W #240, oh, a fair number of Republicans have in fact revolted against the neocons, they just don't get much (any) play in the media. IIRC the first few guys (in the Shrub era) even got their initial statements on a front page, but not anymore. Of course, the hate machine promptly gets turned against the "traitors" for their next election! There's a reason why the neocons have had to purge a lot of the old-school Republicans....

Captured in the wild:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are team (THREE IN NUMBER) of troops writing from Baghdad, Iraq, we are
urgently seeking for your willingness to secure the below consignment, At
this moment, we have already ship these boxes containing US$120.5 million
in cash outside Iraq for safekeeping. After you have claimed this two
boxes, we will give you 20% out of total fund, Forward Your ACCEPTANCE,
TELEPHONE / FAX AND ADDRESS, Yours truly, Capt Jeffery Simpson and Team,
Email: captjefferysampson613@gmail.com

(email deliberately left in, in the hopes that capt. S(a/i)mpson gets an offer of his own. Many many offers of his own.)

So, is anyone but me tempted to leave a full outfit of clothing on your office chair and a sign saying, "IT CAME EARLY!" ?

@219 Jacque talks about houseboats, @220 fidelio talks abut houses on stilts

I can't remember the book or author, but I once read a short story in which the the periodic flooding of a river (possibly the Miss. or Ohio?) has become accepted by the populace and gov't, who put into place 'floating farms', sort of.

The buildings are anchored via long chains to some sort of columns which go down to the bedrock, and when the flood comes, the farmer removes the toggles to let them float at the ends of the chains... the crops are genetically engineered to withstand the flood.

I wonder if the chain-anchoring idea would really work?

Steve @ #246: A friend on Facebook suggested leaving pairs of shoes around town with bits of dry ice in them.

Clifton @ 248 -

I like that! The dry ice is a nice touch.

Cheryl @247, I read the story, and I think it was in Analog. I can't be more specific.

Open Thread assistance request.

In the course of my job I've learned how to:
-Paraphrase information which is written in technical (veterinary/medical/scientific) language, while maintaining the correct meaning.
-Bring pieces of information together coherently.
-Re-write the same piece of informative prose for different numbers of words required (1,500, 500, 250, 100...).
-Proof-read*.
-Check websites for errors*: typos; inconsistencies (e.g. CD-ROMs/CDROMs/CD ROMs, capitalisation or not); hyperlinks going to a different window when they shouldn't, or not doing so when they should; wrong page titles coming up in header tabs - that sort of thing.
-Look at and correct really simple coding errors (necessary for mental survival when working in the supposedly WYSIWYG FrontPage).

Are there proper terms to describe these skills? At some point I'll have a performance review and it would be nice to be able to describe my skills succinctly. "Editing" doesn't seem an adequate description.

[*No doubt I'll have some really obvious error in this post.]

dcb @ 251 -

Information Developer/Analyst sounds closest, though that usually applies to someone more heavily involved in programming.

However, if you're involved in finishing up and packaging something for a team's development efforts, then a Quality Assurance Analyst sounds more like it.

Changing clothes

dcb @ 251:

Technical editor doesn't quite cover all of that, but it's also a good start.

Cheryl @ 247:

That sounds like a short story by Elizabeth Moon, whose title I can't remember. Looking at her bibliography, I don't see anything that jogs my memory, sorry.

skreader@167, thanks so much for the URL for Chauvet. I saw the movie last weekend, and it's just amazing.

TexAnne, on GPSs, the big difference between brands is user interface style, and as someone who uses both vi and emacs, I can't give you good advice on that religious war; I happen to like Garmin. The other big differences are between models of the same brand - what does each extra $20 step get you? I generally prefer the wider-format to the squarer ones, and the one feature they've been adding recently that's critical for me is Bluetooth, since it means not having to use a headset in the car. Eventually you'll want to go driving around NYC yourself - my limited experience with Texas driving has been that Dallas was much easier than NYC, Houston was worse, but that was partly weather. When I was commuting out to Lawn Guyland for a project, I usually went across Staten Island and the Verazzano Narrows bridge.

Re #246, #249 et al,

Here in New Zealand, it hasn't come early, it's late.

While, naturally, none of us godless heathens would be raptured anyway, the promised earthquakes are nearly two and a half hours overdue.

J Homes @257:

Please don't take this as any kind of slight on New Zealanders, but you must understand that I am American, and do not approve of your adoption of such a perverse time zone. You (or your ancestors) made the choice to move to New Zealand, and that choice does have consequences, however much you may want to deny it. You claim that your time zone is "natural", but all I have to do is look at the sky in California and see that it's all wrong.

Really, it's not personal. I don't have anything against New Zealanders per se. Indeed, I actually have friends in New Zealand, and though I may deplore their antipodean time zones, I do nonetheless love them. I just wish that they had chosen to live by My time zones, is all, so that they might not reap the consequences of living by their perverse ones.

The bottom line is that I cannot, in good conscience, reschedule the Rapture to comply with your perverse and unnatural time zone. As I said, it really is not personal.

GOD is conducting a Babylon 5 rewatch. Who knew?

Why would Ivanova need to conduct a Babylon 5 rewatch?

There's AP article today about an offer to buy Barnes and Nobel for $1B. Apparently the motivation is acquiring the Nook e-reader. I'm not posting this to make any comment one way or the other about e-readers, but this quote from the article gobsmacked me: "You don't want the old-fashioned bookstore customer who goes in and sits and reads a book for two hours. You want people going in there who are hungry for experience," said Richard Hastings, a consumer strategist with Global Hunter Securities.

I have frequently walked out of a bookstore having spent $100 or more. And I could have sworn that I was hungry for the experience of fabulous books.

dcb @251: The tech writer/tech editor skillset aligns pretty closely with that list.

Doctor Who today is the first half of a two-parter.

Guvax nobhg Ebel gur Ebzna.

janetl @ 261:

I'm terrified of what happens if that deal goes through. This looks so much like the clueless managers who think they can manage anything by virtue of being managers discussion we had here a little while back, it's not even funny.

261/264
I'm not sure that buyout would be better than the one Burkle was proposing, in which he suggested that supermarket experience was relevant to selling books. (I'm not sure he's ever actually run a supermarket, either: he's a money guy.)

Steve C / KeithS / Persephone: Thanks for the suggestions; as usual I don't quite fit into any of the pigeonholes. My job title is Senior Veterinary Editor, and mostly that's what I do - bring information together for a large electronic library on wildlife health and management - but I've been realising that actually I do more than my job title implies. Maybe I should just expand the list of things I indicated @251 (whenever I think of something else I do) and leave it at that?

Skwid @224
Thank you for the link, that was stunning.

Is this another cultural difference? Janetl #261 quotes a comment about reading a book for 2 hours in a bookshop. Here in the UK, I can't say that i've seen or heard of it being done much at all. Maybe we have (had, the way things are going) too good a library service for people to need to read a book before buying it. Certainly merely standing reading the merchandise and dirtying it up without buying it would be frowned upon. By all means scan itto check it is what you want, but read it?

Or is the comment a gross over simplification by someone who has no idea of the book business?

Antonia T. Tiger @243:
That bunch of furry anarchist commandos, the Army Union Landing Force, already features a bear called Wolf, and a skunk named Alberto Gonzales. So why not a sheep? But what to call him?

Baaaaad to the Bone?

guthrie @261 -- reading a book for 2 hours isn't common in bookstores here, but one of the things B&N made their brand with is providing comfortable seating so people can and do read in their stores.

GOD @ #258

Your purported spokesman Camping was quite definite that our Time Zone was dictated by You. If You want him to speak for You, You should ensure that he is adequately briefed.

On the other hand, if You do not want him to speak for you, that is understandable.

J Homes.

Urbanism and prophecies of doom, via Fred Clark:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.

thomas @272 (and Mr. Clark) -- Thank you! That passage is going into my notebook.

janetl #261, KeithS #264:

I agree that this sounds like the MBA mindset, but I think it's a different failing: They think they can improve profitability by ditching all the customers who "aren't profitable enough"... as if every sale was an independent event, free of context or reputation.

Antonia, #243: Fenton!

David, #274: It's painfully obvious that none of the people quoted in that article have ever read a book for pleasure in their lives.

David Harmon @274: Reminds me of a local service bureau (they had expensive hi-res printers for film negatives and photopaper to service graphic artists) that mailed their clients a letter that if they weren't doing $200 per month they didn't want their business. This came with a sales premium sewing kit (a needle, and several colors of thread in a plastic envelope).

I took this to be a 'kiss off' to their thread-bare clients.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what the earliest version of the Harvard Rat Law appeared, and what the original wording was? Most of the versions I've found in online searches are some variant of "Under carefully controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases." Since there is no mention of rats, I suspect this is a later version...

A few days ago the Catholic Church asserted that it's current paedophile problem was a result of 1960s permissiveness - everything is the fault of those Damned Dirty Hippies, it seems. Yesterday it emerged that in the Netherlands a Dutch priest was on the board of a paedophile organisation calling for the scrapping of laws in that country that made it illegal to have sex with children, with the full knowledge of his immediate superior:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/21/dutch-catholic-priest-pedophilia-endorsement_n_865124.html

Expect an announcement soon that both were at Woodstock.

Ordinary Catholics deserve far better than the monsters currently running their church.

Bruce E. Durocher II @277: I remember reading this in an H. Allen Smith book, where I had assumed it came from somebody who'd worked with animals in Hollywood. A quick search in the house and online did little to promote this cherished old belief of mine, but here's a paragraph from PHARMACOLOGY IN OLD AND MODERN MEDICINE
By C. HEYMANS
University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium
[Annu. Rev. Pharmacol. 1967.7:1-15.
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pa.07.040167.000245 ]

"The attitude of nonconformism, which should prevail in experimental pharmacology, is permanently illustrated in one of the main rooms of our laboratory, where the young investigators also have their tea. Here a large picture is hanging on the waH, representing a funny dog looking in a very sceptical way at a syringe ready to give him an injection. Under this drawing the so genuine statement of Mark Nickerson is written: "Under the most perfect laboratory conditions and the most carefully planned and controlled experimental procedures, animals will do what they damned please!"

It's harder for me to pin Mark Nickerson down. Here's where I gave up. Several of these fellows fall in the right area and perhaps the right field. I know a fellow who'd find the answer in .07 seconds and then explain how easy it was, but I think not today.

Bruce E. Durocher II @277: Until my comment (with two! links) gets out of purgatory, I can only suggest you google
"animals will do what they" damn well please
And look at page 11 of the third result. After that, you can google
Mark Nickerson research
and you'll know as much as I do.

AKICIML: any advice for a traveler who will have a 6-hour airport layover in Amsterdam in August? For example, what are the odds of said traveler being able to buy a good book in English inside the airport? Or reasonably decent food?

For those of you who have mailed cranes to Missouri...I'm fine. But one of the hospitals took a direct hit, and the local high school has been flattened. Please keep my neighbors in your thoughts and/or prayers. It's going to take a long time to recover from this.

Good gods, TexAnne, I'm so glad you're OK. I hadn't really heard the news about Missouri. Best wishes to everyone there.

TexAnne: Glad to hear you're OK! My uncle works at that hospital, and when Mom called to tell me he was OK, I started worrying about you.

My prayers are with those in that area who were not so fortunate.

TexAnne, if that's the hospital I'm seeing pictures of (elsewhere online), I'm very very glad you weren't in the way of that one. (The radar views were more than a little impressive.)

PJ: Probably.

All: Haha, my theoretical pseudonymity is now even thinner than before, but of your kindness try not to out me?

Why? Because you're afraid they won't let you back into Green Gables?

Oops.

One *smooch* for Xopher, to be delivered in August.

Dave Bell: Yeah, my thought on Doctor Who as well. But I don't think it's supposed to be much of a mystery for anyone who's a semi-regular viewer.

Notice how TexAnne never goes anywhere near kryptonite?

Father Andrew Greeley first pointed out that most of the Catholic pedophile priests were in fact ephebophiles, then also traced the roots of the epidemic to the '60s--but not to permissiveness. He pointed to certain attempts to keep incoming seminary students on the straight and narrow by keeping them emotionally immature, dependent on approval and reliant on authority. This resulted in men who might simply have been gay doing typical early-teenage sexual exploration without reflecting that they themselves were not actually in their early teens anymore. They did not see the power differential between themselves and their adolescent love objects. The men were still criminals, but they were also damaged and in need of counseling in order to be adults.

HL(and annoyed)N: My chimney continues to growl, hrrrrrrrr and meeeeeep? This is determinedly non-optimal.

Xeger @ 291: My chimney one yowled, until the damper was opened and the neighbor's cat was removed. He was filthy and upset, but unharmed. I'm not aware of what goes growl, hrrrrr and meeeeep, but suspect that it involves at least two generations.

My chimney is no more -- demolished two weeks ago. I don't recommend this as a method of varmint removal. It's gone because it was sinking and destroying the foundation. I am now learning all about gas fireplace inserts, and firmly avoiding all thought of what it will cost to re-do the siding.

Lila #280:

any advice for a traveler who will have a 6-hour airport layover in Amsterdam in August? For example, what are the odds of said traveler being able to buy a good book in English inside the airport? Or reasonably decent food?

The Rijksmuseum has a small exhibit in the airport, which is well worth seeing.

If you go out through passport control the chances of decent food improve noticeably. Good books in English, not so much.

If it's during the day, you might have enough time to take a short train trip to somewhere more interesting. Since it is only a short time, Leiden might be convenient -- it's a very old Dutch town, with canals and architecture and gardens, slightly closer than Central Amsterdam. There are two trains per half hour, and it takes 15-20 minutes.

Central Amsterdam has more trains but they take slightly longer, and the really cool sights aren't that close to the station. The red-light district and its canals and old buildings would be possible.

B. Durbin @288

It's a plausible motive for the character. I don't think there has to be an explanation there, but it's one of those neat linking threads binding things together. Of course, we then have a really obvious suggestion at the end of the episode, which might be an explanation for what we have seen.

Or it could be a red herring of unusual size. It feels a bit early to reveal this, if it is the answer.

TexAnne: Just heard about the tornado damage on the radio this morning. Glad to hear you're okay. Thinking good thoughts for all those affected.

Lila @ 280: Six hours is enough time to go and spend four hours in Amsterdam - I know, I've done it! It's enough time to go on a canal tour, which gives a really interesting view of the city. The rail station is right in the airport and takes you to Amsterdam Centraal in about 17 minutes, and there are about six trains an hour. Then it's maybe 10 minutes walk down to where the canal tours start. The option of Leiden sounds good as well - I might try that sometime.

Schiphol airport is actually not bad, for an airport. I keep meaning to spend a bit longer in the Rijksmuseum as suggested by thomas @293. You can find books in English IARC, but not a large selection (however there is a bookstore within walking distance of Centraal with a section of second-hand SF in English at the back). (I also know how to get to a fantastic beer shop and (just round the corner from there) a supermarket selling a large selection of Pickwick teas).

dcb,Lila:

If the bookstore is the one I'm thinking of, on a canal south of Nieuwmarkt and the red-light district, with SF in the basement at the back, I definitely agree with the recommendation.

Leiden vs Amsterdam is like Cambridge vs London. Amsterdam is a great tourist destination, with hundreds of things to see; Leiden is a beautiful and historic small university town. I lived in Leiden for four months and I loved it (apart from being illiterate in the local language).

TexAnne, I too am glad you're ok and sending prayers for your neighbors.

Thanks for the Amsterdam advice, all--it's not for me but for my college-student daughter, who'll be returning from study abroad in Moscow. Of course, given her usual tendency not to sleep if there's anything more interesting to do, she may by that point just need to take a nap!

TexAnne@ 282: Wow, I'm glad you dodged the tornado, and so sorry the hospital didn't.

Thanks to everyone for the good wishes; my son is continuing to be sullen and sulky interspersed with periods of bright sunny cheerfulness. This morning we began with a dark cloudy attitude, which wasn't helped by my discovery of superficial damage to his wrists, where he's been "cutting". However, on the way to school (I drop him off as he's not allowed to go by himself while he's grounded), I fought back with a dose of "No matter how obnoxious, rude, disrespectful and nasty you get, I still love you." I think it was a palpable hit.

His medication does often change his attitude from angry and sullen to bright and cooperative, so I can only hope that he's feeling better by now. At least I did confirm that when he told his friends "I was so high my mom had to come get me" he didn't mean high as in drugs, he meant silly. He has no clue what "high" really means, only that his friends use the word.

In other news, the FG and I had a fabulous weekend. Next weekend we'll be able to get together early, because the Ex and the Son are going camping with their church friends, leaving early Friday afternoon. And the following weekend, there's another trip with the Ex taking the Son, so I am scoring triple weekends.

@247, 255: I also recall this as being an Elizabeth Moon story; the title may have been something like "Too Wet to Plow".

@247, 255, 300
Elizabeth Moon had a story entitled "Too Wet to Plow" in Analog, March '88, reprinted in the anthologies Lunar Activity and Phases. I don't remember having read it so can't confirm if it matches the original poster's story recollection.

Ginger:

You guys are in my prayers. Rapid cycling between sullen resentment and cheerfulness tracks pretty well with what I remember of being an adolescent male, along with a lot of hormone-fueled dumb decisions. (Really, at that age, once the hormones kick in, it's hard to keep the brain engaged in anything non-girl-related.)

janetl #261:

It seems like this kind of purchase is less like a normal investment and more like a long-shot gamble. There's some smallish probability that B&N will end up in possession of a big chunk of future e-book/e-reader business, which will be worth a lot more than a billion dollars. The downside is that a gamble for that purpose is likely to involve being inattentive to the rest of the business, perhaps even actively cannibalizing the rest of the business in order to maximize the chances of hitting a home run on the e-reader part of the gamble.

I remember this kind of investment happening a lot in the dot.com bubble. It usually ended badly for the invested-in company, but usually pretty well for the original owners of the company.

Open threadiness:

So, we've killed Osama Bin Laden, and we have the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the alleged 20th hijacker in custody. (We'll never take the alleged mastermind, KSM, to trial. I assume that's to avoid details of his torture coming out in court, but perhaps it is to avoid the shoddiness of the case against him, or other stuff we don't want told, coming out. The political theater we got justifying never giving him a trial was obvious bullshit, so I assume there must be some other reason.) The Taliban has been out of power in Afghanistan for almost a decade now. Our reasons for invading Afghanistan, back in 2001, were to get the bastards responsible for murdering 3000+ people in the US, and to retaliate against the Taliban for sheltering them. That's done.

So, I guess we're going to repeal the AUMF and the Patriot Act, pull out of Afghanistan, and return to something like peace with the world, albeit perhaps with somewhat more police and spy resources devoted to fighting terrorists. Right?

albatross @ 302: Rapid cycling between sullen resentment and cheerfulness tracks pretty well with what I remember of being an adolescent male, along with a lot of hormone-fueled dumb decisions. (Really, at that age, once the hormones kick in, it's hard to keep the brain engaged in anything non-girl-related.)

That is oddly comforting to know. Frustrating, yet comforting. Thanks!

OtterB @301
@247, 255, 300
Elizabeth Moon had a story entitled "Too Wet to Plow" in Analog, March '88, reprinted in the anthologies Lunar Activity and Phases.

Found the synopsis on Amazon, and that looks like the one. Thanks! I have Phases, so that would be where I read it.

Still wondering if the idea would actually work... need to pick my engineer friends brains, I think.

Ginger 299: Continued best wishes. I hope he doesn't take your statement of unconditional love as a challenge! (Unlikely, I'd think.)

albatross 302: (Really, at that age, once the hormones kick in, it's hard to keep the brain engaged in anything non-girl-related.)

That's funny, I don't remember that. :-)

The crazy mood swings, though: oh, yeah, have I been there. Those I remember with excruciating clarity.

Kip W: Thank you! I suspect you've taken it as far back as possible without getting "Cecil Adams" on the case, and I'd prefer to leave him out of it for the meantime since I've been e-mailed that a question I asked him has made the initial cut! If he ever decides to answer it, I expect I'll be insufferable for days...

TexAnne: Glad you are safe and well. Looking at the aftermath leads to a sense of unreality. My thoughts are with everyone who was affected and everyone who lost a loved one.

What I recall (about being hormonally adolescent) was that the 'girl' induced distraction was far from constant.

When it was going on, yeah, I was less than aware of other activities, but it didn't keep me from other activities in a general way.

Oh wow, man

After watching for a few seconds, move your cursor slowly back and forth across the display.

I have a comment trapped in quarantine. Let me know if it's contaminated.

Bruce E. Durocher II @308: You'll have to let us know if you become one of the Teeming ones! I see my comment graduated to the page after a short time, links and all.

The afternoon report is much brighter, with actual demonstrations of responsibility breaking out. He was supposed to have a makeup exam in math after school, only the math teacher was out sick today -- which we didn't find out until he called, after school. Well done, there. In fact, he beat the school administrator who called to let us know that same information.

On our way to his orthodontist appointment, I rewarded him with a trip to McDonalds (and then a quick swing past the house so he could brush his teeth while I let the dogs out). He's been working hard on his English project, due Friday. He just had dessert, went off to brush his teeth again, and retire for the night.

If this is what they mean by the "ups and downs of adolescence", then let me get my seat belt securely fastened. In fact, I want a five-point racer's harness for this ride. And a helmet. Oy.

TexAnn, also glad to know you are okay. One worry of the day, my brother has reported in to his daughter (they live in Grove, OK, which was in the line of fire). the other: a co-worker's step-father-in-law, was in the nursing home that was just across the road from the the hospital, is okay. His wife was able to get the news out somehow.

Seeing the news is troubling and makes me cry. I know folks who live there and Joplin was one of the travel sites of youth, being dragged along by mom and Grandma to go 'junking'. It was a beautiful midwest town and it will take a while to get back to 'normal,' for some value of that.

janetl @ 293 ...
Xeger @ 291: My chimney one yowled, until the damper was opened and the neighbor's cat was removed. He was filthy and upset, but unharmed. I'm not aware of what goes growl, hrrrrr and meeeeep, but suspect that it involves at least two generations.

Heh. I'm pretty sure that it's at least two generations; I'm hoping it's only one species...

My chimney is no more -- demolished two weeks ago. I don't recommend this as a method of varmint removal. It's gone because it was sinking and destroying the foundation. I am now learning all about gas fireplace inserts, and firmly avoiding all thought of what it will cost to re-do the siding.

Speaking of problematic chimneys, fortuitously now gone...

Open-threadiness of the past: we were talking, a couple of threads ago, about Miss Marple and her lack of love life after the purported death of her "fella" during WWI. A program I saw recently on PBS remarked tangentially that more than half the men of that generation died during the war. (I don't remember the exact percentage given, sorry.)

At any rate, such a significant reduction in the pool of available men (novels, films, and television programs to the contrary) would, it seems to me, significantly decrease the likelihood that any individual heterosexual woman would find a long-term male partner.

Just sayin'.

xeger @ 291... My chimney one yowled

"The Chimneys of R'lyeh"?

The soot. The SOOT!

Melissa, the lore of Morris dancing has it that it was originally restricted to men between 19 and 25, and that there were no such men (able-bodied enough to dance) in England after the Great War. Thus if women hadn't taken it up the Morris would have died out entirely.

This means, among other things, that people today who say that women shouldn't dance the Morris are assholes. But it's telling about the destruction of the male population at that time.

"And half the seed of Europe, one by one."

Open-thready for layout artists, web designers, and those simply in need of cute kittens of arbitrary sizes: http://placekitten.com/

You just use the URL with the dimensions, like http://placekitten.com/200/300, wherever you need a rectangular space filled with a cute kitten. (Courtesy of Sexton, god knows where he finds these things.)

Xopher @319, there's a lot of evidence that women were dancing the Morris all along (Will Kemp commented on female Morris dancers in Shakespeare's time, for example); and there's a lot of thought that the only reason women weren't part of what Sharp collected was Victorian sensibility intruding on reality, and warping it. If you'd like to be put in touch with my friend Jocelyn Reynolds who did her master's thesis on women in Morris, I can dig out her e-address for you.

Xopher @319

The UK population, which included all of Ireland at that time, was about 45,400,000. As a very rough estimate, 1 in 20 would be men in that 19-25 age range. Total WW1 casualties were 994,128, and you can add 183,000 from the Spanish Flu.

On that, it looks very close to 50% of the available male population, but the casualties were not limited to that age range. Older men did volunteer. And there were 1,663,435 wounded. Conscription laws made men from 18 to 51 liable for service, but around 40% were ruled medically unfit. Over 5 million served in the Army. Half of them were killed or wounded.

The casualty rates were highest among the subalterns... estimates for the mortality rates range from 65 to 81%. This was, at its lowest estimate, double the rate for enlisted men.

John Ellis, 'Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in WWI'

In the spirit of yowling chimneys: Go out into the garden and hear irregular splashing noises. Where??? Oops: squirrel swimming frantically round and round an open, 2 ft deep water container (with water level now down to about six inches). Grab plank of wood, dump one end in water. Smart squirrel goes straight onto offered escape route, past the giant humamns and vamooses along the fence, sopping wet. Poor squirrel.

Needless to say, we've now covered that container (which the squirrels were using as a water source, when it was fuller). I'm still trying to work out a way of making water safely available to birds and other local wildlife without making the more vulnerable to local cats.

dcb @323: Why not a small ladder into the barrel? As the water level rises, it will cover the steps, and as it drops -- they'll have a small platform to sit on as they drink, and a way to climb back out.

Reminds me of the time I found a drowned rat inside our watering can. Sure, it was a filthy rat, but that's not a death I'd wish upon even its likes.

I've been following the local news in Joplin pretty closely. I really liked the time I spent there.

This was in today's Joplin Globe.

Ginger... Here is a motivational photo about parenting you might pass on to the Son.

Terry #310:

Yeah, my memory is that I could concentrate on other stuff much of the time, but that cute girls definitely had a big impact on my ability to think about anything else. (Not that this has entirely gone away now, though it's not overwhelming the way it was when I was 15.)

I read something - I don't know if it's accurate, but it seems to explain the way I thought at the time. Without research, the claim was this:
Women's periodic mood swings are caused by elevated levels of testosterone. 50-year-old men have ten times the (elevated) level of testosterone in their system, all the time... and 15-year-olds have THIRTY times as much. It's a thing men get used to and work around, but it takes a few years.

[WebMD gives similar ratios of testosterone in the normal range; I don't know how to verify testosterone-to-sanity claims.]

Sandy, #329: There was apparently an NPR program some years back that touched on this. (I didn't hear it, but a friend did and told me about it.) The narrator was a woman who was being treated for some medical condition with testosterone, and an error at the pharmacy caused her to get a much higher dosage than was intended. She said that suddenly she was horny 24/7, and couldn't stop thinking about sex for more than a few minutes at a time, and how in the HELL did men ever get anything done at all?

To which the obvious answer is, as you mention, that they get used to it after a while. Also, anecdotal reports (my partner and a few other guys I've talked with about this) suggest that the effect is variable, with some men getting it more strongly than others.

Adolescence can indeed hit a boy like a 2x4. It's a lot like a squirting charcoal lighter on the grill. WHOOOMPH!

I certainly enjoyed the boundless energy and enthusiasm, but the emotional response to that flood of hormones could be a real pain. Wouldn't have missed it, don't want to repeat it.

@Tom Whitmore #321: One of the things I learned by joining the SCA was how much rewriting the Victorians did. Women may not have put on armor even with the relative rarity of female heavy fighters in the Society, but they ran home defense programs, picked their own husbands (sometimes forcibly), and in general did not sit around in distress waiting to be rescued. At a lower social stratum, women ran businesses; they were even hot-pounders in smithies.

They still had a raw deal in many respects, but they were considerably more free and active than the Victorians liked to think.

Am I the only one for whom the musical association of the word 'Joplin' is so strong that the pictures of the devastation are accompanied by (sad) ragtime music in my mind?

With respect to testosterone levels in juvenile primates, I can testify (sorry) that the levels are indeed scarily high. I once had to test three different monkeys (trying to diagnose one, I needed two others as "normals" for comparison). The adult male was 4,000 picograms; the healthy adolescent was 7,000 picograms, and the patient was 71 picograms. After treatment, his testosterone shot up to 14,000 picograms.

It makes a lot of sense, truly. Which is why I've told my son that although I would rather he didn't have sex now, I would rather he used protection and stopped lying, sneaking around, and being disrespectful. I'm even buying a box of condoms so he doesn't have to sneak around for those. My real problem is with her behavior, as it's way beyond his level of maturity.

Xopher, you too? (I've only an octave reach* on a piano, so Joplin's pieces are impossible for me to play.)

What I'm seeing on the news makes me queasy, for some reason the hospital bothers me most of all.

Energy and good wishes for everyone there.

*I have very small hands.

Gee, shoot people full of testosterone (when they're not used to it), make sure they're sleep deprived (high school starts too damned early, teenagers need 9-10 hours of sleep and usually can't get to sleep before 11 pm at the earliest), and treat them as adults or as children, whichever is most to their disadvantage at the moment...

...then wonder why they're fucking cranky.

I'm speaking of society here, not Ginger's parenting, with which I can can find no fault and would STFU if I could. We're terribly unjust to teenagers, and dualism is partly to blame (don't put in your quarter for that rant, please).

Lori, good to know I'm not alone. I thought the rag in my head was called "Solace," but I looked that up on YouTube and it appears to be a different one.

This is for Jo Walton, because tor.com apparently hates my Mac and won't let me log in to put it in her profile's "Shout Box" thingie:

I just introduced a friend to your Suck Fairy column, and she naturally asked (as did commenter #13 and others) the name of the Fairy's opposite number.

My first suggestion was the Awesome Elves, but then I thought maybe there is only one: Awesomestiltskin. What do you think?

Jenny Islander @ # 332, true that. Margery Kempe ran her own brewery (independent of her husband, who had his own line of work).

On the morris thing, I am told by a friend who is something of a morris obsessive that the "only men do morris" isn't even Victorian prudery -- it's partly about one person (male) trying to shove another person (female) out of the movement, and doing so by claiming that of course morris was traditionally male-only. I shall try to remember to ask her to come along and explain in more (and more accurate) detail.

Doug @338: Awesomestiltskin is fervently seconded from this corner.

Ginger @324: Yes, will try to do something like that. At least the temporary measure of covering the container prevents the next squirrel from actually drowning. For the present I am leaving a watering can full to the brim so birds etc. can sit on the rim and drink safely.

BayCon beckons... A few fluorospherians have expressed an interest in meeting so how about dinner on Friday? Let's meet in the hotel lobby between 5:30pm and 6pm then we'll decide where to go eat. Here is a photo of me.

Serge - Friday's good. (Hmmm. Even has a song about it....)

adolescence is called that because it addles your essence.

Not doing Baycon this year -- but if you're at Folklife, you might see me or Karen wandering around.

Hyper-local news: Well, that was exciting. Since my car was parked in a nice garage on campus all safe from hail, I decided to stay at the library tonight when all the other departments got sent home in advance of the severe weather. (Which NEVER used to happen, but this is the second early closure this year, the first being the February snowstorms). Anyway, word got out that not only were we a shelter, we weren't going to turn away pets. The lower two levels of the library were soon filled with entire families, dozens of dogs, cats, and even a bunny and a lizard. All was pretty calm, except for security frantically trying to get the storm chaser wannabes to come INTO THE BUILDING, DAMMIT when the sirens went off so we could get to safety too. No problems in particular here in Norman that I've heard of, but the storm that went through here had just killed several people and blown apart buildings in nearby Chickasha. Last I heard it had done some damage to Stillwater and headed on to Tulsa. I don't really like this time of year much in Oklahoma. And the house I've made an offer on doesn't even have a windowless room -- the best I can do is a tiny closet. (But as my real estate agent joked, it would actually be great if the roof blew off while it was under the current owner's insurance and I got a new roof out of it...)

Bill Stewart @ 344... See you soon. Tom Whitmore @ 346... Renovation, maybe?

There will indeed be many of us at Renovation. I'm helping in a staff position, so I don't know my schedule yet....

Tom Whitmore @ 349... The only thing on my to-do list at Renovation is to be in a friend's masquerade presentation. And having a good time. The only two things...

Xopher @ 336: Well, I am applauding your fine rant. In fact, I'm all for having later starts for our high schoolers. I cheat by giving him Benadryl to help him go to sleep earlier. He does have allergies. And nightmares.

Thanks, Ginger.

And...the rag I was thinking of WAS "Solace." I just didn't recognize it the way it was played on the first couple of YouTube videos I found.

347
I was looking at a radar view of one of them, and you could see the ring that's the tornado.

TexAnne:

Glad to hear you're OK, and sad to hear about the town and your neighbors.

Xopher:

Yes to the strong musical association, no to the ragtime; my first response to "Joplin" turns out to be Janis, not Scott. Which is interesting, because I'm pretty sure I heard more Scott than Janis when I was growing up; but Janis is more likely to appear in the things I read these days.

That "Solace" is a beautiful piece of music, anyway.

JM @341 Glad you like it! Any idea of a better place I could communicate the idea to JW?

Doug #356:

Jo's on LJ: this thread might appropriate.

Janet Brennan Croft @347: word got out that not only were we a shelter, we weren't going to turn away pets. I heartily approve! Hope the rabbit wasn't too traumatised by having all the cats and dogs around.

Thanks, Soon Lee! (#357) I had realized she was on LJ but hadn't overcome my trepidations about connecting my online activities to be able to comment there. But since it's a Q&A, that's probably my best bet, so I did.

dcb @358, I don't think I saw the couple with the rabbit again after they came in, but they had it in a carrier. I'll have to talk to the crew who's usually on duty when tornadoes come through in the evening -- I don't think we've ever had so many people or animals before. Well, we had local news wanting to interview someone right after, so the cat will be out of the bag, as it were, that we are a good place to go.

Sandy B. #329: Sometimes phrased as "women show 'PMS' when their hormone levels most resemble those of men."

A sort of disspirited bit of open-threadiness:

I was outside the country recently, at an academic conference. I was sitting at dinner with a number of people one night, including three other Americans and a number of foreigners. Everyone at the table was highly educated and very smart, probably not people that have known much want, etc., so not typical Americans. However, as best I could tell, we probably weren't especially close in terms of default US political labels. And yet, during this discussion, one thing that repeatedly came out was that all four of us Americans are *incredibly* pessimistic about the future of our country. Our decisionmaking processes seem broken[1], the ruling class has a lot more power than understanding, the powerful interests in US society can and do get their way to the cost of the whole country on a daily basis, the public is amazingly ill-informed and mostly arguing about shadows, the media are both incompetent and corrupt, etc.

Maybe we're just a gloomy lot, I don't know. But this tracked with other conversations I had with other Americans there--folks who were reflexively skeptical about any official US pronouncement, who assumed that we'd run our economy off a cliff sooner or later, etc.

But it was interesting and dismaying to see so many other smart people have reached conclusions similar to my own. I think all but one of the Americans in that dinner conversation had voted for Obama, hoping things would improve, and all of us who had so voted were seriously disappointed.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I'm pretty thoroughly anchored in place (job, kids in school, mortgage, stay-at-home wife, monolingual[2] family, the usual network of friendships and commitments that make up membership in a parish and neighborhood and school community. And yet, the direction of this country is deeply disturbing to me. It's probably not headed off the cliff tomorrow, but our long-term prospects seem very bleak to me. I don't see how we will ever reverse our moves to build a turnkey police state. I think our sociopathic[3] foreign policy will end when we run abruptly into a financial/budget crisis, and will destabilize the world horribly as we very quickly pull out of foreign countries and cut off foreign aid to places that have come to depend on it. I think the decisionmakers driving US policy are overwhelmingly involved in internal power struggles over how to divide the pie, and act with little or no long-term consideration of consequences. And I think those guys can and eventually probably will run us off a hell of a cliff[4]. Rather like corporate execs trying to max out their current stock options, with little concern for long-term risks to the company, our leaders aren't thinking about stuff like that too much.

[1] One way you can see that they're broken: straightforward administrative decisions like "we have to make sure the number of prisoners equals the number of spaces for prisoners in our jails" can't seem to be made using by the legislative or executive branches, but instead must be imposed by the courts.

[2] I'm bilingual, but the rest of my family has about enough Spanish to ask where the bathroom is or to order dinner.

[3] I'm stealing Avram's descriptor here, which seems perfect to me.

[4] The big financial company bailouts didn't sink the US economy. But it seems far less plausible to me that that risk was the main consideration of the decisionmakers, than that the main consideration was taking care of their own, ensuring that the powerful, well-connected, generous-in-campaign-contributions oligarchs would be okay despite their bad bets. These bets usually work out. But when they don't, we'll pay a heavy price. (Recall that invading Iraq was sold as an easy-in, easy-out thing. Sort of like our current glorious adventures in Libya.)

Lori Coulson @335: I'm only good for a ninth — I have to roll a tenth — but I've never noticed any tenths (or even ninths) in Joplin anyway. Lots of tenths in stride piano, but that came a little later.

Xopher @337: "Solace" is an intermezzo (some say a tango, but that's not on the music). When I think of sad-sounding Joplin, I go to "Heliotrope Bouquet," which was a collaboration with Louis Chauvin, and the only music of Chauvin's that was ever written down or preserved in any way. (If you didn't stay for the second half of "Solace," you might not recognize it, since Hamlisch used only the C and D sections of it in his once-ubiquitous arrangement for THE STING.)
@352: Ah. Never mind!

Paul A.@355: There was a time in my life when I wondered if Scott and Janis were related! And I was naive in other ways, too.

Xopher @336, agreed on all counts, but wish to note: some of said teenage people are getting shot full of estrogen and progesterone (along with a bit of testosterone) when they're not used to it, which possibly has different emotional effects, but still helps cause crankiness. (I remember being prescribed a short course of progesterone as a teenager; it made me into Raving Queen Bitch From Hell.)

(I realize this was in response to Ginger's son's behavior and attitude, hence the discussion of testosterone, but had to poke my head in to a general statement about hormones and teenage crankiness.)

Jacque @ 311: That is AWESOME.

Kip W...I had trouble moving from chord to chord at tempo in the Joplin rags. One of my college roommates could play "Solace" but threw up her hands at "Mapleleaf."

Ginger: :-)

And, meanwhile, Jacque's head has not exploded due to trying to strike a balance between (a) complying with work's mandatory, inflexible schedule (b) keeping the household running despite being weeks behind in crucial chores, due to work demands and (c) finding ways to manage care for a guinea pig who has, for unknown reasons, decided to Stop Eating. Anything.

But I definitely could do with a good cry.

Janet @347--I'm glad that went off as well as it did, considering the possibilities severe weather presents. I'm glad to see shelters opening to pets, since a lot of people will stay when they shouldn't, because they're afraid the shelter wil refuse to take them--but it certainly represents some challenges for the people running the shelter, especially when it's a new drill for everyone involved.

I am always amazed by a tornado's capacity for obliterating one spot while leaving another one close by nearly untouched.

Lori Coulson: Slow it down! Learn it slow first. Also, a lot of people want to play ragtime too fast. They did when it was written, too. It seems like almost every one of Joplin's pieces has an admonition at the outset not to play it too fast!

fidelio@368, I just wonder how the word spread that we would let pets into the library! The last instructions I got from upper administration before they scarpered was basically: "if someone is walking their dog near the library when the sirens sound, let them in." How that morphed into cats, bunnies, and lizards in carriers as well I just don't know. But no problems, and it turned out an off-duty librarian was also here directing people with pets to the tiled areas and off the carpets, so that was good.

Ah, ragtime. Excuse to plug my old dentist. Who retired. The rat. (Finally found a new dentist who's good enough to replace him.)

Oh NOES! I've offended the posting ghods! (I have a comment trapped in review.)

Kip 363: Hamlisch used only the C and D sections of it in his once-ubiquitous arrangement for THE STING.

Ah, that explains why I had to go to a YouTube video labeled with the movie poster to hear a version I recognized. I had listened to a few seconds of the other ones (even skipping ahead a couple of times) before deciding they were the wrong rag.

At any rate, it's the C and D sections that I think of when I see the tornado pictures.

Caroline 364: Quite right, and I should have said 'teenage boys'. That my observations are also applicable to teenage girls does not surprise me, but never having been one I didn't feel I should presume.

Jacque 367: Best wishes for the health of the guinea pig, and for your own (mental and physical).

fidelio 368: I am always amazed by a tornado's capacity for obliterating one spot while leaving another one close by nearly untouched.

I have been known to hypothesize that this property of tornados has contributed to the growth of religious fundamentalism in the tornado-prone bits of the US. If your house is completely unharmed while your neighbor's is reduced to toothpicks, it's easy to understand how some might see the Hand Of God™.

Janet Brennan Croft, #347: "But as my real estate agent joked, it would actually be great if the roof blew off while it was under the current owner's insurance and I got a new roof out of it..."

As a matter of fact, this is very close to what happened with the sale of our friend Anne Braude's house. (I'm the executor for Anne's estate.) Last October, a bad hailstorm hit the Phoenix area, damaging thousands of roofs and creating a bonanza for roofing companies.

The offer on Anne's house was made before the roof (and rooftop A/C unit) were replaced (Anne's home insurance was thru a company that was very good at dragging their feet and trying to lowball everything), so the buyer essentially got a free roof and A/C when the sale concluded a few weeks later.

@362: The default seems to be "medium-gloomy". I drove down to graduation[1] with my father, who passed 70 without slowing down much, and he pointed out a couple of things in passing.

Like "Until recently, there was no belief that you could GET unemployment under about five and a half percent." Nine percent is high compared to six percent, true, but not as bad as compared to four percent.

And, for that matter, the sheer amount of stuff we have these days compared to When I Was Young- cars, TV's [and other glowing boxes], phone lines- we're a considerably wealthier country. Our income hasn't gone up that much in constant dollars, but when your car can make it to 100,000 miles without major repairs [2], and without having to fiberglass huge rust holes? You can spend less on cars.

Do we have problems? Yes. Are we capable of fixing them? Also, yes.

[1] Yay! Graduated! Boo! Jobhunting full time!
[2] If something major goes wrong on a car before 100,000 miles these days, we're appalled. At least my household is.

albatross @ 362:

Yeah, some days I really feel like Eeyore. Or maybe Cassandra.

I suspect that when the Pax Americana finally breaks, it will be very much like what happened to the Soviet Union after Afghanistan: a couple of years of retreat from global concerns concomitant with a lot of puppet governments falling down and dying, and a lot of dictators taking up residence in Switzerland. Then the US will start to fall apart into balkanized regional republics, with possibly some military action around the edges. I just hope nobody reaches for the nukes.

When the dust settles a little I would expect to see a half a dozen economically-crippled fundamentalist states, a couple of viable fundamentalist states¹ and perhaps another 4 or 5 states on the coasts and the near northern midwest that are potentially viable, based primarily on trade and technology. Just how amicable the split ends up depends a lot on how close to non-viable the average region is.

I, for one, don't want to be in any of the fundamentalist regions; I'm hoping that I'm far enough from Idaho and Montana that the generally progressive leanings of urban western Oregon and Washington will allow either a Pacific Northwest State (possibly even assimilating with British Columbia) or a fusion with Northern California. Failing all that, maybe I'll emigrate to Scotland.

My guess is I've got about five years to finish the SF novel I started with that as a background, before it starts becoming a contemporary adventure story instead of SF.

1. One centered around Texas and oil money, for instance. I don't think the agricultural midwest is going to be viable in the face of climate change and loss of population.

How long before 'refugee from the former United States' becomes a label for real people?

HLN: Area man gives notice to his employer (the one that he started working for in February, the one for which he had such high hopes) that he will be leaving his job, do they want one week or two? Employer asks him to leave the building and the job immediately, and has a (relatively easy-going) thug escort him to the front desk just to be clear about it.

Well: so: area man has a 5-day weekend ahead of him and will start the new new job (for which he has such high hopes -- the one to which several Fluorospherans contributed their telepathic help last week) on Tuesday.

Sandy, #375: Except that the real unemployment rate in America is closer to 20% than 10%. There was a smoke-and-mirrors change in the way those numbers are measured back in the 80s, which had the effect of pushing about half of the unemployed OFF the official count. As I understand it, once you have run past the end of your eligibility for unemployment compensation, you are no longer considered "unemployed" for purposes of government statistics. This means that hundreds of thousands of people who are still trying to find jobs aren't counted. And this doesn't even begin to include the people who are under-employed -- who, for example, are working 2 or 3 part-time McJobs because they can't find anything in their field.

Add to this a growing trend for job listings to say things like "Must be currently employed, or unemployed for less than 3 months," and the picture gets even uglier.

Lee @ 379 -

As best as I can determine the official unemployment rate is determined by a monthly survey of 60,000 households and is not dependent on eligibility for benefits.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

Another Cassandra/Eeyore here, pretty much since the full measure of ShrubCo's evil became apparent.

Sandy B. #375: when your car can make it to 100,000 miles without major repairs

And how likely will that be when neither the federal or state government can afford to maintain the roads? I visited Costa Rica near the beginning of this year; the 3-hour drives to and from the hotel were... memorable. My 5-year-old niece considered the music from the van's radio and announced, "the car's dancing!".

Also, adding to Lee #379, the unemployment statistics also don't count people who've given up on looking for a job.

Bruce Cohen #376: Yeah. I've been thinking about the Northeastern seaboard myself. The most immediate issue will be whether they have enough farmland to support its industries, but after that comes the question of whether those industries will end up underwater. I gather that the West Coast and Texas have slightly better prospects, but I tend to agree that the Midwest is probably screwed long-term by climate change, and the Southeast may be too.

And then there's the point that both our (currently-)internal commerce, and most of our farming, are heavily dependent on oil....

Lee, Steve C.

The official unemployment rate does indeed come from the Current Population Survey. The numerator is the number of people not employed but eligible and looking for work, the denominator is those people plus the currently employed. The definition has been very stable for seventy years, and other countries have based their definitions on the CPS one. (Well-established official statistics agencies are actually pretty resistant to political meddling.) The International Labor Organization likes the CPS definition and thinks it has proven to be a reliable indicator of overall labor market conditions and has performed quite well as a business cycle indicator.

There are limitations to the unemployment rate in comparing between countries or over long periods of time, because the labor force participation rate may be very different.

In deep recessions the unemployment rate doesn't indicate the full extent of underemployment. People who have given up on finding work until conditions improve are not in the denominator. People who have taken a temporary job but are still looking for the job they want are in the denominator but not in the numerator. That's why Brad Delong blogs about the employment to population ratio, which at least picks up short-term changes in labor force participation. It's much harder to measure the McJobs problem, since you have to distinguish people who have full-time work but are really underemployed from people who just wish their jobs were better.

It's not perfect, but it is honestly and consistently measured, and no-one has proposed anything that is clearly better. The BLS does publish six other unemployment indicators in its monthly Employment Situation Report (Table A15). The highest one is U6 "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force", which is currently 15.5%, down 1% from last year.

Incidentally, the BLS has a FAQ list that contains much of this information.

#376, #381

And it looks like Mother Nature is trying to scrub parts of the U.S.A off the map -- just look at all the tornado watches and warnings today.

I just hope we don't get an early tropical storm/hurricane in the Gulf...

Xopher @373: Thank you for the good wishes.

On the other hand, it looks like this morning I may have planted the seed for the next phase of my Plans for World Domination.

My brain is back!

I think the itchiness was related to the throat. When the throat got better, so did the itch. I went through almost 24 generic Benadryl, more than three ounces of cortisone cream, some generic Zyrtec, and a looooot of ice packs.

And now I can sleep.

It's amazing how much of a difference it makes. I knew I was really sick a week ago, when I found I was acting sick-- I didn't feel any worse, but I was making tiny sad noises all the time. A day off from both jobs* was spent resting.

My second-job output doubled from last Friday to yesterday. That is healthy right there.

*how do I count as unemployed, underemployed, or misemployed? I am sort of jobsearching, paused for Clarion West, and I am seasonally employed as work becomes available... which is does, for one job, and kind of doesn't, for the other, but the second job pays much much better.

A question about webspam. Is anyone else getting webspam by way of scripts from www.ehow.com? They've been implicated by error messages in the spam afflicting the POWDER website, but when I originally tried to contact them, I couldn't find a working contact address.

I don't mean to be a chirpy bluebird here, but something I've sort-of tracked for a while:
Average credit card debt, mid-2009: $5700.
Average credit card debt, last quarter: $4,700.
Apparently there are around 270 million consumers, so American consumers have paid off (or had written off) $270 billion of high-interest debt in two years.

... it's a start.
(sources)

@Bruce Cohen #376: With the rump U.S. selling mineral rights in Alaska to whoever will give them the most money right away and no environmental oversight whatsoever. Offshore interests scooping up entire schools of fish without a Coast Guard to stop them. And those of us who can't leave or can't think of anywhere where they want to start over as refugees, left to scrape out a living among the polluted, depauperized remains.

Here's an article that needs some more signal boost, whether or not one agrees that the solution to the problem is "la revolucion binacional."

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/border.php

Diatryma:

Glad to hear you're feeling better.

You may count as "Persons employed part time for economic reasons", in which case you're part of the numerator of the U-6 unemployment indicator.

Diatryma @ 385...

Glad to hear the brain is back.
Alive... It's alive!!!

I'd consider the 80,000 (possibly more) people who showed up at Maker Faire a good sign too.

Even if an unnervingly large number of people lined up to pull rocks around.

There is a saying that has been attributed to trial lawyers, to the effect that you don't ask a question unless you know the answer -- Something that the GOP members of the Oversight Subcommittee on TARP and Financial Services that is investigating the establishment of the CFPB.

During a recent hearing of the oversight committee when they were questioning Elizabeth Warren.

From trying to claim that Warren and the CFPB had overstepped their brief by advising other entities than the Treasury department and the President. When the CFPB had already sent a latter to congress stating the extent of advising that they had done, at the direct order of the secretary of the Treasury.

Another GOP House member tried to imply that Warren had set up inflated salaries for staffers, yet those salary levels had been actually set by Congress.

There were other "misunderstandings" about the length of the appointed officials terms; about some claims that the CFPB would have exemption from oversight because they would be unique in not having to be funded by annual appropriations, yet no banking regulator is so bound; one of the members was trying to grill Warren as to why none of the complaints that the CFPB would be responsible for have been made public, when the agency is not yet accepting complaints; Even a dispute over when Ms Warren would be able to leave the hearing, which resulted in the GOP subcommittee chair calling Ms. Warren a liar about what was scheduled. Interestingly, another minority witness has blogged that he had not even been informed about changes in scheduling, but the majority witnesses had been so informed.

From where I sit, if Elizabeth Warren makes these GOP members so nervous that they feel so bound to block her appointment to this agency, with no real reason except that she might be effective, that it looks like she really is the right person to head the agency, as well as the right person to build it.

Craig R. #392: And of course, they will shortly claim that Ms. Warren set them up for humiliation, as part of her grand scheme to sabotage all oversight of the financial system... so Democrats can loot the country, of course!

Given any choice of actions, if you assume that the Republicans will choose the most destructive, least ethical, and/or downright stupid option, you will rarely be disappointed. And if you assume that they will then blame the mess on either the people they were victimizing, or the people who tried to stop them, or both, you will never be disappointed. Do not be deterred if either action requires the R's to openly contradict themselves or their stated goals, because they won't be!

David Harmon (# 393)
"And if you assume that they will then blame the mess on either the people they were victimizing..."

Funny you should mention that -- in the middle of the grilling about the fact that complaints that were not yet being received were not being made public, one of the GOP members kept trying to get Warren to say that people who were bamboozled by these complex (or downright duplicitous) financial instruments should have not needed an agency like the CFPB, and if they got bamboozled it was because they didn't educate themselves on the complexities of mortgage finance (even if they were defrauded, I guess).

Excuse me, but wasn't one of the reasons that we, as consumers, *do* hire lawyers, or electricians, or plumbers, or realtors or tax preparers, is *because* we, as consumers, recognize that we do *not* have the expertise to navigate those shark-infested waters?

And that same critter was trying to get Warren to explain why the CFPB had a directive that he couldn't parse, and she (Warren) had to point out, several times, that the text he was quoting was from the law itself, which the *Congress* had drafted, not she or anybody at the (then non-existent) CFPB.

(and the bit at the end of the hearing where the GOP chair told Warren she was making up the scheduling agreement out of whole cloth? -- It's already being compared to Joe Wilson's yelling out "Liar!") But the Chair later released a statement claiming that Warren had a perception of her being "overly entitled" because she wanted to be able to get to another meeting that had already been rescheduled (15 minutes after the end of the hearing)so that she could be at this hearing -- part of why the chair wanted were to stay was because there were two other congress-critters who hadn't had a chance to ask Warren questions , and "it would only be 10 minutes more of questions" (5 minutes each) -- except that, as the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee noted -- neither of those people were in the hearing room, and there was no way to tell just when they *would* be in the room, so there was no way they could actually say just *when* the questions would be finished.

One of the changes which the employment statistics can't reliably reflect, here in the UK, is the switch to short-term jobs. A lot of employee-protection law only kicks in after six months, and a lot of jobs now last for less than six months.

No surprise there.

But one consequence is that there can be a higher number of jobs available for the same number of man-years of available employment. Also, the way the tax system works, it struggles to keep up with the changes.

The politicians, of course, are very pleased with the high number of jobs available.

Bruce Cohen @ 376: "a couple of years of retreat from global concerns concomitant with a lot of puppet governments falling down and dying,"

You mean like in Egypt?

I don't really believe that the US will devolve into smaller countries--as in Russia, the identity and the political infrastructure are, I think, too ingrained. Instead, we'll just become an overgrown kleptocracy. Well, a more explicit kleptocracy.

Bruce Cohen @376 inter alia

I've been saying for a little while here that if you really care about the future of the US, you should be studying countries that used to be Great Powers, and trying to figure out how to be like the ones that stopped being a Great Power and became instead a really nice place to live (like the Dutch, the Swedes, the Japanese, or by and large the English, French, and Germans) instead of the ones that stopped being a Great Power and became a huge mess (like Russia, sort of*, and like interwar or cold war Germany, and Spain, and I guess you could shoehorn China in).

If I was as cool as I wish I was, I'd have a gameplan to go with the quip, but this is one occasion where I'm not really too disappointed in myself: that's kind of a big job, hey?

*Russia pretty much still is a great power, actually, but when you go from being probably the premier military force on Earth (from 1942 or 43 through somewhere around 1980) to being, you know, a seriously respectable regional power with a degree of global pull, that's pretty similar to going from great power to not-great-power.

I'm curious--why would the Midwest become less desirable because of climate change?

I've always assumed it would be the place to be--good soil, good water supply, not affected by ocean storms. So what is it I'm missing?

SamChevre #398: Short form: "continental effect". Being close to an ocean (or at least major bodies of water) moderates climactic extremes and local storms, while the middles of continents tend to get caught in positive-feedback loops. (Being in the line-of-fire for hurricanes is a different issue.)

The bigger the continent, the worse it is, so we wouldn't get hit as hard as central Asia (Mongolia and thereabouts) or central Africa... but we've already got a Tornado Alley, and that's likely to get worse.

PS: "good soil" is dated -- we already screwed that up. (q.v. Dust Bowl.) Now that's part of our petroleum dependency (fertilizers and such).

Open threadiness: I think I've missed it by a day, but still -

...RIP...
JOHN KEEL

"How do they rise up?"

SamChevre, #398: Take a look at what's happening in the Midwest right now. Snowpocalypse, leading to heavy flooding when the melt hits; extreme tornadoes; extremes of both hot and cold weather.

Now, this could just be a really bad year, the way 2005 was an awful year for hurricanes -- but it could also be a harbinger of the "new normal". Remember that more heat energy in the atmosphere translates to more extremes of weather, and (as David mentioned) the further you are from large bodies of water, the less amelioration you have -- oceans, or even big lakes, soak up a lot of heat during the summer and slowly release it again during the winter.

SamChevre @398: Here in Central Ohio we are having more snowfall/rain, more intense weather, and earlier blooming/longer bloom period in plants.

The long wet spring has meant that the corn and soybean crops have not been planted (and those who did have dry enough ground to plant have watched seedlings rot in the fields). I'm told that if the farmers can plant in the next two weeks they'll still get a decent yield, assumming that we go back to a normal weather pattern.

The winter wheat seems to be doing ok barring wind or hail damage, the strawberries aren't -- cold and wet rots or stunts them. Orchards are dicey -- we've had little to no hard freezes, but the rain may have prevented the bees from polinating the trees. And the bees are having problems too, some of it weather related as well.

One of the home gardeners down the street is frustrated because all her cold weather crops have gone nowhere... I plant mostly for blooms, and I have noticed that everything has been coming into bloom earlier since I started keeping records in 1998 (we acquired the house in December 1997).

If this is the new norm and not an aberration, the Midwest is in trouble.

On hurricanes, the last I read was that warmer sea waters in the Atlantic meant more energy to form hurricanes there, and warmer waters in the Carribean mean more energy to transfer to hurricanes as they approach the Americas. On the other hand shifts in high level atmospheric winds might cause greater wind shear and help cut down the number of hurricanes.
The problem comes with trying to get long term trend data, since decades ago some hurricanes formed in the Atlantic and were never recognised as such, but now we have satellites.

Meanwhile, to far too many people a hurricane only exists if it hits the USA. To add to the fun, getting long term trend data on damages to try and sum up potential losses due to climate change is difficult precisely because of the random nature of land fall, and the increased value of coastal properties over the last decade or two.

It's virtually impossible to tie any single weather event (or even a chain of them) to global warming. The most that can be said with any reliability is that a greater or lesser likelihood of X is possible because of a changing climate. The variability from year-to-year is significantly higher than the decade-to-decade changes evidenced from climate change.

In Re more severe weather patterns:

This change is just what is predicted by the increase in overall temp. "global warming" does *not* mean that winters will be milder or that summers will be hotter -- it means that there is more available energy dumped into the weather patterns. And that means changes in seasonal norms and more "energetic" weather -- storms will be more violent, more rain, more snow, more wind, new equilibriums being reached.

*not* that winter will magically have less snow, as some conservative pundits and cartoonists want to tout.

Open Threadiness Shameless Plug:
Wildpro, the Electronic Encyclopaedia & Library on wild animal health and management, and emerging infectious diseases, which I write/edit, is now officially Open Access worldwide. I've been working on this since 1997, and I'm quite proud of it (I'm not the only one who's been involved in writing it, and the original idea wasn't mine, but I've done more work on this than anyone else).

If anyone would like to take a look, go to the Gateway to Wildpro and click where it says "Wildpro" (or "Click here to launch"). Several of the photos on the Gateway site are mine as well (not the polar bear), and I'm rather pleased with the shelduck in flight on the page "Wildpro CD-ROMs".

Watching Black Swan. ::shudder:: There's my Dysfunctional Families post pre-written....

dcb@407: Wow! Congratulations!

Craig R:

The problem is, humans are pattern-matching machines, so it's pretty easy to convince yourself you're seeing a pattern you *expect* to see in ambiguous data.

dcb @407 -- that is fabulous! I've just passed the information on, and poked around a bit myself. Interesting and very easy to navigate.

albatross: yes, and the reason we do that is that our ancestors are all the ones who did so, while their relatives who waited for conclusive proof before reacting all perished without progeny.*

By the time we can definitely establish a pattern of increased severity in weather being traced to global warming, it will be too late to do anything to stop it, if it isn't already. I think there's enough evidence to justify acting.

If that stripy pattern turns out to be a trick of the light, and not a tiger, well, I'll feel foolish. But assuming it's a trick of the light until you can PROVE it's a tiger will get you et.

*Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.

On the other hand, a number of respectable people are saying that the Russian heatwave last year is exactly the sort of thing that was worsened by global warming and we are likely to see more of, although to some extent that does depend on how the jet stream and such shifts due to greater energy in the system. For example, we may well be getting colder winters in the UK because of more open water in the Arctic and elswhere. In the example of Russia, it was a degree warmer and several weeks long a heatwave than the previous record, which is rather what you would expect to see with global warming adding a certain intensity to what is otherwise something to be expected.

thomas @ 382:

A useful attribute of U6 is that it's essentially the measure that was used during the Great Depression, making it possible to make comparisons between that and the Current Financial Unpleasantness. I suspect that's why it's not being publicized: no one in authority wants to make those comparisons, because it would make it clear just how much they're lying about "recovery".

ETA: You have to hit "POST" in order to post a comment. This sat in a tab for most of a day because I didn't. Sorry for the staleness.

guthrie:

This is quite plausible. But I'm a lot more interested in falsifiable predictions than retrospective explanations, particularly when the amound of uncertainty surrounding the models used is quite large and given that weather is famously variable.

albatross: That would be the scientific interest, but in this case that isn't what should be driving policy. There's enough evidence that caution dictates action.

412: But since we cannot¹ act particularly fast on this, we are going to get some period of future data to test predictions out. So if/when the predictions fail to pan out, they are just going to make further action even more difficult.

¹"cannot" here being a composite of political resistance and technical advance: at the moment the technology doesn't support reductions which are big enough to do any good and which are also politically palatable.

Well, what is politically palatable may change. In fact it will have to, if our civilization is to survive.

The intractable stupidity of humans, especially when manipulated by corporations with gigantic amounts of money to spend and (by definition) no conscience or morality except "enhance shareholder value" may mean that our civilization does NOT survive.

If that's the case, the descendants of the now-living will curse our memory as they fight over the remaining bits of dry land, or as they choke on the poison gas arising from the sea (anærobic bacteria thrive once the ocean is too warm to hold enough O₂ for the ærobic ones, and emit toxic sulphur compounds as waste products on a massive scale).

"If that's the case, the descendants of the now-living will curse our memory"

Yeah, but at least they can thank us for fighting the deficit and keeping taxes down!

^
|
Joke

albatross @410: The problem is, humans are pattern-matching machines, so it's pretty easy to convince yourself you're seeing a pattern you *expect* to see in ambiguous data.

I handle a lot of phone and account numbers. It seems I see a disproportionate* number of repeating digits, like account number 004466, and suchlike.

Especially spooky with account numbers, I get a non-contiguous set of accounts, sort them numerically, and end up with sequences like:

NNN3756
NNN7656

and

NNN3636
NNN7676

I know I'm suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias, but that makes some of these only marginally less spooky.

--

*Some kind mathematician-type can now supply the actual odds of numbers with contiguous digits coming up, which will doubtless work out to be ∓chance.

I watched the Too Big to Fail HBO movie last night, and I recommend it to anyone. It's a smart, well-acted, and suspenseful movie about the 2008 financial clusterboink and how we narrowly avoided disaster.

William Hurt is superb in his role as Henry Paulson.

Sometimes you don't get a choice between good and bad. Sometimes it's between sucks really bad, and sucks a tiny bit less.

http://www.hbo.com/movies/too-big-to-fail/index.html

Too Big to Fail

heresiarch @ 396:

You mean like in Egypt?

Yep, only closer to home, like in Nicaragua, Columbia, etc. Also expect Central Asia to be almost completely destabilized as we leave Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan at a dead run^☪.

☪ Unless, of course, we've already left them to go on to other wars in the meantime.^☮

☮ I am not advocating that the US should keep troops in those countries to prevent destabilization. We've already guaranteed that destabilization; it's just being a little slowed by the presence of our troops. And the long term effect of that slowing is likely to be that when it finally happens, it will be even more severe.

Steve C @ 421:

we narrowly avoided disaster

I've got that movie queued up on my DVR; I'm going to have to watch it soon, because I'd really like to know in what way we avoided disaster when the crisis precipitated us into a slow-motion depression that's getting deeper despite all the politicians yelling "Look, over there, a recovery!".

Bruce Cohen @ 421 -

Disaster would have been a repeat of the Great Depression, only with a much faster onset. Credit would have been frozen entirely, including the day-to-day commercial paper transactions that keeps corporations going. 25% to 35% unemployment, with deficits two or three times larger than they are.

I disagree that we're in a slow-motion depression. All the indications are that we're in a slowly expanding economy, still held back by an over-valued real estate market. GDP is still rising and jobs are being added.

Xopher @ 377:

How long before 'refugee from the former United States' becomes a label for real people?

That's exactly the question I asked myself when I started thinking about that novel. I had just read some predictions by UNHCR on the number of refugees worldwide by 2010 (this was in 2007 or so), and I started wondering about the refugee situation circa 2025-2030, and how exiles from the US would handle it.

Which brings me to a question for the Fluorosphere: I'm not well-acquainted with the current political situation in southern India and Sri Lanka; can anyone tell me if there's a significant Tamil revanchist movement, possibly in exile in Tamil Nadu? I've gotten rather fond of one of minor characters in that book, who fled arrest in India after several years of smuggling arms to the successors of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) from Tamil Nadu across the Palk Strait (which for the purpose of the flashback car chase scene now has a causeway clear across it). So I'm wondering if my extrapolation of the situation, done before the defeat of the Tigers, is anywhere close to possible.

David Harmon @ 381:

The most immediate issue will be whether they have enough farmland to support its industries

The US already imports much of its food (we're still the breadbasket of the world, but only just), so I don't see that as a major obstacle to the Northeast's economic survival.

Bruce Cohen@414

A useful attribute of U6 is that it's essentially the measure that was used during the Great Depression

That's actually not true. The estimates of unemployment from the Great Depression that are generally seen are fairly comparable to what is usually quoted as the unemployment rate.

Quoting from the notes to Chapter D of "Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970" (Census Bureau, 1975) (D1-74 General Note):

"The estimates shown here, prior to 1940, were prepared on as comparable a basis as possible with the concepts used since 1940"

@423: It's easy to forget about bad the falling domino effect could have been.

My wife makes ink for, well, nearly everything that gets printed in supermarkets. [Sample conversation in our house: "Did they change the red on Coke cans?"/"GRRRRRRRR"/"Sorry I asked."]

One or two of her company's customers went bankrupt and failed to pay. If bank credit had completely frozen, MOST might have gone bankrupt and failed to pay. And then her company [owned by a Japanese company with solid financials] has layoffs because, no customers with money.

That's how it woulda played out in our household... for the first three months. After that I imagine it would have gotten considerably worse. Cause nobody's going to hire ME in the middle of the Great Recession for either my old job [embedded software for... the stuff people can't afford to buy] or the new job [green energy that's only remotely cost-effective with a 30% subsidy, for energy that people don't need because the factories are all closed.]

That's totally ignoring things like "What if your bank goes under, nobody rescues it, your credit cards all get frozen and you can't get any cash out of the ATM?" Because that's an _obvious_ bad-case scenario. So is "What if there's a run on everything and 90% of the world's wealth disappears into the bit bucket?"

Things could have certainly been a bit worse.

But I'm a lot more interested in falsifiable predictions than retrospective explanations, particularly when the amound of uncertainty surrounding the models used is quite large and given that weather is famously variable.

But we don't need either weather or climate models to show climate change: we can use the other life forms on the planet. We have been monitoring the distribution and phenology of plants and animals for a long time. Here in the UK we have data going back to the mid 16th century in the Elizabethan herbals, and C17th for insects and birds. So we know that plants are flowering earlier (average of 21 days) and that creatures are moving northwards.

Currently in the UK warm-adapted butterflies are moving north at an average rate of 20km per year, while cold-adapted mountain species are retreating up those mountains at the rate of 150m to 250m a year. In Spain some mountain butterflies have now disappeared from the Sistema Central range as they ran out of mountain to retreat up. Those butterflies were ice-age relics, left behind on the mountain tops when the glaciers retreated - which itself shows that the current climate hasn't occurred since the last ice-age (or the butterflies wouldn't have been there for us to record them). Similarly in the US, warm-adapted sub-species are meeting and cross-breeding with more northerly sub-species, resulting in the loss of differentation as they blur together: again if this had happened before there wouldn't have been the sub-species for us to see. So again an unprecedented event (in the period it takes to develop a couple of distinct sub-species at least).

In the UK we have since 1995 added a new species of dragonfly to the list every two years - prior to 1995 we added just one since the first list in 1850. And it's world wide: naturalists are finding warm-adapted species moving in and cold-adapted species moving out in every country in every continent. There simply isn't any other explanation other than climate change that can account for a sudden, massive shift in the distribution of creatures across the whole planet.

So forget arguments about hockey sticks and computer models, the natural world proves that climate change is happening and that it has not happened on this scale for at least 13,000 years.

Oh, and falsifiable predictions? That's how we found out about the Systema Central - someone predicted that climate change would force those relic populations higher up mountains, found a survey done in 1975 in Spain that showed the distribution on the slopes of their mountains and then went there and repeated the survey in 2005. And the evidence showed that all the species were now found higher up the slopes, and that six species were extinct. And showed that each species inhabited a range bounded by thermoclines for max and min temperatures, and that they still inhabited the same range of temperatures - what had changed was where on the mountains those temperatures were found. And showed for five of the six that their temperature ranges no longer existed on the mountains - neatly showing that they had run out of mountain. So, predicted, falsifiable and verified by experiment.

I got distracted by what I came in here to write about... I haven't decided where I stand on this one yet.

NJ gov. Chris Christie has just pulled NJ out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. ("The what? Who cares? ")

The RGGI is ten states from Maine to about Maryland that decided that, as states, they had the power to follow Kyoto even if the rest of the country didn't. (Massachusetts was in-again/out-again and ended up in. I think.) The point of this is that if you generate solar energy in Jersey, you can sell the "greenness" separately from the actual electricity. It's called a SREC, Solar Renewable Energy Certificate, and last month they were selling for over $600 a MW-h. Which is about five times the price of the actual electricity. You could pay off your solar panels in about three and a half years instead of twenty. The utilities paid for the SRECs and passed the cost along to the consumers, is my limited understanding.

This seemed a little too good to be true. People were putting up masses of solar panels absolutely everywhere. Bubbles are obvious in retrospect, of course.

I'm pretty sure with Christie's move, the price of an SREC has just dropped to ... zero.

And a solar panel now pays 5% (if it needs no maintenance ever) instead of 25-30%.

Now the place where I stand up and say "Wait a sec" is that, searching for details, before I found the actual article I found this: 'Vowing to be "New Jersey's #1 clean energy advocate" if elected governor...'

Bruce Cohen:
A useful attribute of U6 is that it's essentially the measure that was used during the Great Depression, making it possible to make comparisons between that and the Current Financial Unpleasantness. I suspect that's why it's not being publicized:

That would be U5 (U6 includes part-time workers as well).
U5 and U6 aren't ever particularly highly publicized -- they are in the monthly press release of the BLS, but I don't see any change in how they are handled during the Current Unpleasantness. In any case, on the issue of recovery, the unemployment rate fell about the same amount during the past year whether you use U3, U4, U5, or U6.

However you measure it, the employment situation is appalling, and improving slowly. Also, it's not as if the people arguing against more government action are saying "Why worry? It's only 10%." Instead they're invoking the invisible bond vigilantes or the deficit.

In 1940, well into the recovery of the Great Depression, when the definition of 'unemployment rate' was essentially the same as it is now, it was over 15%. And, of course, the employment to population ratio was much lower back then -- while more discouraged workers may have been counted in the labor force, many fewer women were counted.

Albatross #415 - If you mean falsifibiable predictions regarding exactly how bad heatwaves can get, or how bad the hurricane season will be, as far as I can tell we're still years away from that sort of thing.
But in order to discuss this further, you're also going to have to be more explicit with comments about models, since the professionals are well aware that climate is the average of weather. I also don't understand your problem with retrospective explanations, if they are properly grounded in the physics. It is the interplay of observational records and physical modelling which makes this sort of thing interesting but also complex.
Often the problem is simply a lack of long enough data series. Not helped by an earth observation satellite being denied funding by the US gvt, even though it would vastly improve data collection.

Andy Brazil #428 - I think Apbatross' problem is more to do with attribution of extreme events to climate change than whether or not it is actually occuring.

It is truly amazing how quickly the Republican Party has reformed itself since '08. It's almost admirable, how quickly they've redefined themselves as the party that will brook no compromise in becoming crazy fuckers out of touch with reality and refusing to live in the 21st century. That is what their base seems to want, and they seem hell bent on delivering it.

Jacque at 420:
Many account numbers have things like confirmation digits and checksums, which could affect things.

What idiot thought it was a good idea to load a brownie with 8mg of melatonin, and market them at convenience stores?

Stefan Jones #433: To (mis-)quote Laurell Hamilton before her series went from Monty Hall to Fanny Hill: "It's kind of impressive, in a psychotic sort of way".

Re that weird garment in the Particles: If that's what you put on this morning, how on earth do you use the toilet without getting naked? And how do you use a public toilet without getting something nasty on your clothes as you take them off and put them on?

It's a shame. The silhouette would be cute if it were a sleeveless top and a separate pair of leggings.

Tangent: I remember hearing about an arrangement that warehouse owners use to have in some U.S. cities, where they would have a basic apartment built into the structure and pay someone in kind, providing free rent and utilities, in return for keeping an eye on the place. Presumably their employees had another source of income, such as a retirement account, to cover groceries and so forth. Do people still do that?

437
Storage places often do something like that.

On the subject of weather: yesterday, near Chico, north of Sacramento. No serious damage, fortunately.

Spotted on FMLife.com:

Today, both of the roads leading to my small town were washed out by rising flood waters. I now live on an island in the middle of Wyoming. FML #16357497 (83)

On 05/26/2011 at 1:54pm - misc - by Anonymous - United States (Wyoming)

Well, he's doing it again. He failed to wait for me at the main office, and never came home. I drove around the school several times at the appointed hour, and never saw him.

He hasn't called, and his friends don't know where he is. His current girlfriend, when called by the police officer (using my cell phone) claimed not to know who he was or why we had her number. Her father, bewildered by the police officer calling his daughter, said there was no strange young man around.

It's after midnight. I walked him into the school this morning, around 8. He was supposed to be waiting for me after school, which lets out at 2:10, although he supposedly did his math test after school. Neither he nor his math teacher called when the test was completed, so I don't know if he actually took it today. Yesterday, he'd come home late claiming he'd taken it, but an email from her this AM indicated that had been a lie.

Well, the police are looking for him. We've done all we can do for now. If they find him, they'll call me. If we find him, we'll call them. I'll check with the school in another 6 hours, when they open up.

In the meantime, I've got a cup of tea, the cordless phone, and the laptop, plus a kitten going crazy with a random toy. Any toy at all.

Sigh.

Steve C @ 424:

GDP is still rising and jobs are being added.

GDP is not rising at anything like a healthy rate, and jobs, well the jobs that are being added aren't as good as the jobs that were lost (lower wages, less benefits, many more temp jobs, etc.), and we're still getting over 400,000 new unemployment claims every week (424,000 reported today, 10,000 more than last week).

And the economy is still contracted as result of the loss of several trillion dollars of liquidity that we pumped into the banks as a bailout, and which they are sitting on. On top of which the invisible bond vigilantes are going to be the death of our economy yet, as the Republicans and their co-dependent Democrats keep tightening the screws on the rest of us.

Not a disaster? We're working on that.

Ginger: Oh, man. Best wishes to you that this resolves in the least stressful way possible (i.e. he gets a Clue.)

General economy talk: I work at a radio station once a week and one of the programs I (re)broadcast is a money program. I don't pay too close attention—while it's not a shill program, neither am I the sort to have investable funds—but something that was said a few weeks back caught my attention: The unemployment in Washington, D.C. is around 5 and a half percent.

As the commenter said, that explains a lot of things.

This Washington Post article from 6 days ago says DC unemployment is 9.6% in the most recent figures. It's (significantly) lower in both VA and MD. DC is not a town with a lot of industries (government and tourism are the biggies).

Most of the Congresscreatures, Cabinet members and pundit classes live in the NoVa or Md. suburbs where the unemployment rate is hovering around 5% if my memory of an article I read recently is accurate.

I'd also bet there are no Mexicans or Nicaraguans hanging out at the local Home Depot looking for work in those suburbs.

Ginger: keeping fingers crossed on your behalf. (The good news is that, once everybody survives the teenage years, the teenager often becomes a wonderful, interesting, smart adult. Cling to that thought.)

Tantentially, I saw an inspired offspring-management technique on the Mall today. Ingredients: two presumably rambunctious female tweens, one (1) fancy-shiny scarf. Append one end of scarf to each tween. Voila! Mutually-leashed kids. "Because it's pretty!"

Linkmeister @445: I live in one of those suburbs, with a Home Depot not too far away, and I can see plenty of Central American men gathering, looking for day labor jobs.

Jacque and B. Durbin: Thanks. I can only hope he is somewhere relatively safe. After this, I don't know what to do.

Ginger: Hugs and good thoughts headed your way.

Ginger: best of luck in your parental travails. I hope you've told "Girl's Father" explicitly why you were calling... and I mean explicitly, to set off his parental instincts!

Any of you who are in Duluth ought to head down to the corner of 5th Ave. West and Michigan and see if the manhole lid has been stolen yet for a souvenir.

Ginger, ow. I hope he's home safe and figures it out soon. Teenage rebellion isn't nearly as easy to deal with as some people think it will be.

Ginger--I hope things are better this morning.

Linkmeister @445, I can second that, no matter what DC metro-area neighborhood you live in, there are men gathered at the local 7-11, Home Depot, etc. looking for day labor work. The people who gather at the U-Haul rental places are particularly aggressive: they cluster around your car as soon as you drive in.

Ginger, it's almost 9 a.m. EDT now, so I hope he's been found.

My (much) younger brother, L, was 13 when my parents' horrific divorce began. He went from a bright, reasonably-well-adjusted tween to a delinquent who brought knives to school and acted out* in every way possible.

At 16, he's doing quite a bit better. He has his less cooperative moments, but they're more "standard"** teenager behavior and less "disturbed youth who's threatening to hurt his mother."

He's fixed up an old car and has an annoying habit of wandering off in it without telling Mom he's going. This resulted in her getting a terrified phone call the other evening from L, who was babbling about someone shooting at him and the cops coming and that he'd be home soon.

See, his car had some sort of problem where occasionally it would just die with no warning. Being a teenage boy, he thought this was actually kind of cool, and he'd just steer it off onto the shoulder, wait 20 minutes and it would magically start again. It was also very loud, which is relevant.

That evening, he'd left to take his friend B home, and was driving along a rural road when the car died. He pulled off onto the shoulder at the intersection of the road and a dirt road leading to a house about a half mile away, just off the road, and the two of them popped the hood and bent over the engine to try to get it started again.

The next thing L heard was someone yelling. He turned around to see a middle-aged man running toward them from the house. This fine specimen of belligerent humanity, wielding a shotgun and clad in only his underwear, was bellowing something about thieves and getting off his property and calling the cops, and pointing the gun at them, despite the fact that the two were clearly on the highway easement and just trying to fix the car.

L and B panicked (not that I blame them!) and jumped back in the car, which miraculously started. L got the car back on the road as the upright gentleman shot at the car and missed.

L took B home, but apparently was forced to drive back that same way to get home. At this point it was fully dark, and he didn't see anything of our fine specimen, but after he passed that house, a sedan drove up behind him and began tailgating him, flashing its lights, and so on.

L had no idea what to do, so kept driving until he eventually found a closed, but lit, gas station, and pulled into its parking lot to let the other car go by. Instead, the car pulled in next to him and rolled down the driver's side window to reveal a middle-aged woman in the driver's seat, who stared at him with no expression. L says there was also a teenaged boy in the passenger seat with a frighteningly empty grin.

After a minute, L (who should have driven on, but was probably too terrified to move at this point) asked her what she wanted. The backseat window rolled down, to reveal the middle-aged guy with his shotgun, pointed at L.

Thankfully, L's car cooperated, and he took off for home, placing that terrified call to my poor mother, who didn't even know he was gone. On the way he realized that he didn't want to lead the crazy guy with the gun to his house, so he did some creative circling and finally lost them, then headed home.

Well, no one shoots at my mother's children, so though the local cops didn't want to take L seriously at first, she harassed them into investigating. Our fine specimen, when questioned, freely admitted to everything but the actual shooting, so there's a court date coming up.

Poor L. What a horrifying experience. Here in a few years, though, he's going to have the best. story. ever. to tell.***

The point of all this is that even though little bro has had an extremely rocky few years, he bids fair to become a completely normal, smart, interesting adult, as Jacque at 446 said. I think for a lot of us, teenager-hood is like some sort of years-long bad dream.

*I don't like that phrase, but can't think of another word for it.

**Well, as we as a society currently construct "standard teenage behavior."

***Which, in previous, makes this the Longest Comment Ever. Oops.

Er, the *** footnote should have said "in preview." That's what I get for not previewing a second time.

WisCon is this weekend. We had some desultory chat about a gathering. What about breakfast on Sunday? I'm trying not to conflict with programming, but I'm certainly open to better ideas.

We're leaving in about half an hour. I'll put a note on the bulletin board with my room number. (I'm not a WisCon member this year, so I can't attend programming, but I am staying at the hotel so I can get messages.)

Persephone: That's exceptionally bad and I hope someone gets to visit our fine penal system.

Ginger: I said once the only advice I could give a teenager that I thought they'd follow was "Don't hit yourself in the head with a hammer". I'm not any wiser now.

436-7: I know someone who used to have that type of apartment in the back of an Elks club or similar. Fell apart when she went somewhere,got someone to cover for her, and the someone turned out to be irresponsible and dumb.

Ginger: I hope he's found safe and sound. Thinking of you all.

Ta-Nehisi Coates really loves Moby Dick. I especially commend the second sentence in the fourth paragraph from the end.

re459: and the best-rated comment is inevitable yet perfect.

To soothe the still-worried: Ginger has reported elsewhere that he reappeared this morning. I'm sure she'll fill us in as time allows.

I hope Ginger can resolve the conflicting urges to hug him to death and to shake him until his teeth fall out without a) indulging either urge or b) having a cardiovascular incident.

I hope the kid is safe and well, above all.

I wish Ginger all luck and aid and bright blessings in her efforts to deal with this.

(And wouldn't it be nice if the deep need to be independent and live your own life came with or after the competence to do that same? Instead of years before?)

Ginger: The following is offered in the spirit of "Free advice is generally worth what you pay for it." Does your son have a trusted adult he feels he can talk to freely?

I think the worst thing for me when I was that age (well, and every other age that I lived with my parents) was that nobody freakin' listened to me without some kind of judgement, opinion, or penalty. Looking back, if I'd just had someone to talk to (read: rant), things would have gone a lot better.

Jacque, if you'll accept this as friendly: no matter how open and trustworthy and in-all-ways perfect a parent may be, s/he CANNOT be that trusted adult, and this is because the relationships are fundamentally incompatible.

Xopher: I had the descriptor "who is not one of his parents" in my post, then took it out. Why, you ask? Talk to the Brain. As previously noted, I only work here.

All: I was obviously wrong in my assumption about Central American men and convenience stores/Home Depots in the DC suburbs. That'll teach me to talk through my baseball cap.

459,460:

And Moby Dick also inspired the greatest literary point-mutation: "Call me, Ishmael."

Ginger via Jacque and Xopher: If there's an aunt/uncle available, that's one of their traditional roles.

Well.

It has been A Day.

First, thank you all for your supportive comments and words of wisdom. Some of those words will come in handy, and only time will tell which ones those will be.

As Clifton kindly posted, yes, he reappeared this morning, at school. Nonchalantly, as if nothing had gone wrong.

When his math teacher saw my emails, she replied at once that he had (1) taken the test yesterday afternoon (good!) and (2) just seen him at school on her way in (what??!?!?). An email to the admin resulted in a phone call from that person, indicating that they had our Errant Son in the health room, claiming that he'd passed out.

The Ex, a police officer, and I joined the school admin and the nurse. I brought his meds, and a good thing I did: he was surly and nasty, and totally unlike his normal self. The nurse said she'd seen him every morning (when he dropped off his back brace, which he is supposed to wear 22 hours a day...), and he was not acting "normal".

We called the pediatrician, and got an urgent appointment. We called the psychiatrist, with whom he was already scheduled to meet, and updated her. She requested the same things we wanted, namely a tox screen.

We took him to the peds, got very little information out of him, although his attitude gradually improved. She sent us to the lab to draw blood and urine, for which we spent the next two hours mainly waiting.

After a quick jaunt to McD's for lunch (no one had had anything to eat until well after 1 pm), we caravanned over to the psych, during which time we received an email from the school admin.

I must digress slightly here: one of his friends had lied to us during his first "disappearance" and I had been pushing him about redeeming himself. While waiting at the peds, I'd texted this young man that my son claimed to be with him when he passed out. E replied that he knew what had "really happened", so I told him to go talk to the school admin. This email was the update from that chat, and informative it was: my son has been drinking alcohol, and had passed out from overdoing it.

We notified the psych, and confronted our son. At first he gave us the same lies, but then we told him his friends had actually (finally!) come through and told the truth. He eventually admitted to having some alcohol in his soda, although he didn't know what kind. He also claimed this had been only the second time he'd had any. This all occurred at the house of a recent graduate from the same high school, so she's old enough to be legally liable.

The doc referred us to a local hospital with a program for teens with substance abuse issues, for which we will have an intake meeting some time next week (with luck). He's now officially required to have adult supervision all of the time, no excuses.

Right now, he's with my Ex, preparing to go on their camping trip, which they were supposed to leave on this afternoon. I am emptying my house of alcoholic beverages -- he hasn't gotten to the stage of stealing from me, and I intend to prevent that part. My Fabulous Girlfriend has offered to stash it all at her place, so once I finish packing tonight, it's going to her house.

I know what it's like; I abused alcohol while in vet school and came perilously close to full-blown alcoholism myself. My father's family has it, and he's battled it for years (with my mother's help). Life events conspired to change me, so I no longer have the high risk that I once did, but I do remember that little voice. I am determined to get him through this, by attacking the disease now.

His maternal grandmother, my Ex's sister, and her husband both drank too much; he died of chronic alcoholism and she still drinks too much. Her daughter, his birth mother, is a drug addict as well as an abuser of alcohol. He's a high risk patient. It does not have to end in alcoholism, if we work hard on it now.

It does mean he will have to be careful for the rest of his life. And so will I.

UGH.

Now, before my adrenaline subsides (I've been awake since 5:30 am, with 3.5 hours of sleep), I need to move this bounty out of my house, and find my way to my FG. Only then will I relax.

I'll be busy all weekend, on call as usual. I have next week to myself, and next weekend as well. I will be pampering myself just a tiny bit.

I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend.

Ginger #469: In a word: wow! That's a serious issue. I hope you can get him through this. The important thing is to get through to the underlying issues.

Ginger #469: Ouch! And my sympathies....

How much does he know about that family history? I'd suggest he get a thorough review, with emphasis on all the nasty and embarrassing incidents you can recall. And lines drawn from there to the points that he's already both lied to his family and passed out in public.

Ginger: I'm sorry it's as bad as it is. I'm VERY glad it wasn't worse. All bright blessings.

Ginger: what Xopher said. I'm glad you get a bit of a breather here. Take care of yourself, too.

Ginger: hugs and good thoughts from here. Glad he's mostly OK, glad you've got professional help, and hope you can get some rest soonest.

Ginger: Yow! I just... Yow! It sounds like you're dealing with this with both hands, and as my offspring is only nine now, I have no experience or experiences to offer. I wish I could produce an ice cream sundae or something, but my usefulness is limited in this case to wishing you well. Did I already say Yow?

My best wishes, Ginger...

I'm at BayCon. I introduced myself to GoH Mary Robinette Kowal, puppeteer and author of novel "Shades of Milk and Honey", who was on a panel with my wife. I then had dinner with a few Fluorospherians at a restaurant that serves Chinese Islamic food. I'm kind of tired right now, what with the long ride from New Mexico. At least I didn't have to worry about the Tehachapi pass being snowed in. I'll probably call it quits for today now.

Ginger -- my empathies and sympathies, to say the least!

Much love, Ginger. We're here for you, if that's any help.

Yikes, Ginger. You're all in my prayers. That's hard.

Wow, Ginger! You seem to be holding it together really well, for someone short on food and sleep. Best wishes for all of you.

Ginger: What Xopher said goes for me as well.

Ginger @469: I am very glad to hear that he re-appeared more or less in one piece, and that you now have some idea of what the problem is and help in tackling it.

Seconding what David Harmon said about the family history, not least because it may drive home the point that for him this is a genetic disorder that requires treatment, not "what everyone at school does".

Gil Scott-Heron, A Tribute

The revolution will not be televised;
Or if it is, the irrelevant punditocracy
Will blather in vain, their voices drowned
In a roiling stew of tasty sound bites.

The revolution will be tweeted, facebooked,
Blogged by citizen journalists eager to scoop
The oblivious, trundling MSM, eager to viddy well
Today's Rodney King Reenactment Society skit.

A riot by any other name bleeds just as red;
An internet kill switch won't stem the flow.
Information wants to slip the surly bonds
Of censorship, of filtering, of jamming, of untruth.

Truth will find a way to propagate, by word of mouth
If need be; the revolution doesn't need television at all.

Ginger: Thank goodness he's (relatively) all right. I'm glad you were able to find out what happened, and extend my best wishes for successful treatment.

Ginger: Whew! And wrt alcohol issues, "oh crap."

I got lucky, if you can call it that, in that all of my first-order relatives were/are alcoholics. (I suspect a sibling would claim otherwise, but I have my doubts.)

The good news derives from three factors:

1. None of the relevant family members were people I had any desire to emulate. Watching their behavior in relation to substance abuse left me with a strong desire to stay as far away from that influence as I possibly could.

2. I was a loner all through school, and the "cool kids" all seemed rather stupid and repellent to me; "peer" pressure was never an issue I had less than no desire to "join" them.

3. I am deeply and profoundly lazy. Far and away the easiest way to quit a bad habit is to never start. From very early on, alcohol was simply just not part of my consciousness or worldview.

Not sure from your annecdotes where he lands on item 1, and it sounds like he's getting bitten by item 2. I just hope you can find a way to sell him on item 3.

Good luck.

Well, the guinea pig who had stopped eating has been shown to have a Damn Good Reason; his back teeth were severely overgrown, to the point of stabbing into his cheeks. Hell, no wonder he didn't want to chew, poor baby.

He's back from the guinea pig dentist (my wonderful vet), and I love him and am relived it was something we could treat, but I'm really hoping I can spend next month's disposable income on...something other than vet bills.

They gave him The Good Drugs for his proceedure, which means that he's doing a remarkable imitation of a furry wet sock right now, and probably won't be doing much until late this evening. (Which reminds me, I probably need to go turn him over.)

Meanwhile, I'm being told emphatically that I really ought to share my nori, and am not being believed when I say that, despite being rustly-crackly, it really isn't proper guinea pig food.

Relieved. ::sigh::

Earl Cooley III:

A great tribute!

Jacque @ 486:

Congratulations on getting your guinea pig's teeth fixed, and best of luck with next month's disposable income. I can relate to that; I just got back from the vet after a final checkup to make sure that our blind Lhasa Apso's eye infection has cleared up; it has, after three office visits and much medication.

Ginger:

Wow. Teenagers certainly are exciting, aren't they? As nasty as all that was, I'm glad you found out what was going on and now have a chance to influence the situation. Better to know than not, I think. We found out only a few years ago that our older son was making nighttime runs to Seattle for liquor as a teen, when we thought he was sleeping over with his best friend. That's a 4 hour round trip at 75 mph, with Jagermeister, a really scary thought. He hasn't become an alcoholic (I don't think, though he and his wife do drink a lot, certainly as compared to us), but that may just be because he's genetically predisposed not to, not for lack of trying; there's none in either of our extended families.

The good news is that both of our sons were real problems in their teens and early 20s, and both have settled down and are even developing good relationships with us. This is not something either Eva or I expected, and I promise you it is very welcome. So it's not true that things have to go along as they started.

I got a phone call today, thankfully by my wife herself, that a addle-headed SUV driver had overlooked her and backed right into her while she was crossing the parking lot. The wheelchair is practivally destroyed, the handbike seems less affected. Heike is quite in pain and has a lot of bruises, but no concussions or fractures.
While the driver was comparatively reasonable and admitted her guilt, a few bystanders were rather nasty in their unsolicited comments - basically stating that wheelchair users should not leave the house, especially not alone. A**holes.

Jörg 489: Wow. A**holes indeed.

Makes me wish I'd been there with a 4X4 (the wood, not the car) with a nail in it. Bastards.

My Maker Faire flikr set. Many of the photos require a pair of those embarassing red/green glasses.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/sets/72157626828157286/with/5769781082/

@Jorg:

"a few bystanders were rather nasty in their unsolicited comments . . ."

I honestly thought this would be followed by something like: " . . . about how inconsiderate SUV drivers are."

SIGH. Some people.

I'm glad things weren't worse.

Jörg @ #489: please convey to your wife my wishes for a fast recovery.

I see the same phenomenon in the comments to our local paper: someone gets injured in a fashion that is clearly due to someone else's negligence--and a bunch of people pile on the hurt person.

When I was a child, I saw our dog get hit by a truck coming out of a parking lot--and then another dog jumped out of the back of the truck and started worrying the hurt dog. Situations like this tend to bring back that memory.

Back on May 13th, on open thread 157, I grumbled that Home Depot online shipped me a heavy workbench kit very poorly packaged, and UPS dumped the broken and crumpled mess in my driveway in Oregon. The saga continues. I reported the problem the evening of the 13th, and they promised to pick it up. They've promised that several times. It has now been 2 weeks, and it's still there, with the box getting soggier and more a mess every day.

They charged my credit card on May 8th, presumably when the box was put on a truck in Illinois. They say that they will refund my money 7 days after the box arrives back in Illinois. I clearly should be charging them interest! I'll never order anything from Home Depot online again.

Hm. I'd suggest a chargeback against Home Depot via your credit card company and/or calling up both UPS and Home Depot and chewing on them until you get someone sensible. Maybe both.

Thanks again for the wonderful support! Yes, he has known of the family history, and we did point it out again in the confrontation.

After I arrived at my FG's place last night, the adrenaline finally subsided and I crashed for the night.

I know we've got a lot of work to do, and we're only just heading to step one. It could have been much worse.

Ginger, I add my voice to all the others. He's alive and not hurt, and it sounds like you are dealing with this with all your considerable strength and wisdom. What Xopher said.

Benjamin Wolfe @ 495: I have started the paperwork for a chargeback, but it looks like it might take quite awhile. I'd hate to have Home Depot not pick it up, because then I have the hassle of disposing of a large, heavy item.

I have been in touch with Home Depot, repeatedly. I haven't bothered to pursue UPS. Whoever at UPS first put that box on a truck was negligent, but Home Depot has acknowledged that it was a packing problem, so that leaves UPS off of the hook financially.

janetl #498: Hmm. Perhaps you should look into the local Small Claims court. Then, the next time you talk to Home Depot, mention that you're considering suing them for disposal costs, but of course they can make that go away by arranging to pick up the package first.

janetl, 498: I think you should talk to your credit-card company--you certainly haven't gotten what you paid for.

BayCon... Day Two... Got to manipulate Mary Robinette Kowal's pencil-necked weasel and the Fuzzy she's building for John Scalzi. I also bought Lisa Goldstein's new novel "The Uncertain Places". I also met a Tiki Dalek.

My goodness, Ginger, how adventuresome! Positive but slightly incoherent thoughts at the moment. But definitely positive/supportive.

On a wholely unrelated tangent, my husband and I will be in Las Vegas mid-June, for a family reunion (How did it get so soon?). Knowing us, and knowing my family, I would be appreciative if anyone could recommend a couple quiet activities in the area that might allow us to justify escaping for a short breather or two...

Jörg Raddatz @489: stating that wheelchair users should not leave the house, especially not alone. A**holes.

—!

You know, I've had my periods of Failure of Compassion. But.

The fantasy I have is that these people promptly fall down and break something, such that they get to spend a few weeks in a wheel chair. ::steam::

And, Xopher, while I agree entirely with the sentiment, I would point out that, while you probably have the upper-body strength to manage the 4x4, a 2x4 will be ergonomically superior, and allow for a more effective back-swing. I endorse the nail, though.

I hate it when people do things that prompt this kind of reaction in me.

I'd much rather fantisize about Heike healing up unexpectedly quickly.

Jörg: You-all have doubtless already got this base covered, and no amount of preparation can make up for an oblivious opponent, but a number of my more stylish neighbors use safety flags. For the wheel chair rider who's really fashion conscious, it's mounted alongside a thirty-inch length of 6" pvc pipe which serves as a scabbard, suitable for handy tools like canes, grabby tools, broadswords.... Or perhaps 2x4s. :-)=

HLN: While fuzzy white patient has finally (if very reluctantly) regained consciousness, when offered water, he responds, "Ma, don't you know that my mouth hurts!?" When asked about his condition, he adds that he feels like warmed-over crap. With a side of day-old crap.

Ma is sympathetic, but still insists on the injestion of water. And before long, food will be added (with drugs).

KayTei:

For a half-day escape there's some very nice rocks and mountains in the Red Rock Canyon area near Las Vegas, but mid-June may not be the best time to visit them.