First?

The Korean scientist who got in hot water for false human cloning & stem cell claims, but successfully cloned an Afghan hound, now claims to have cloned a bunch of coyotes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15340240

I have decided that I am deferring National Boss's Day until tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my Boss's birthday and I fully intend to pamper him.

If anyone here feels they know me well enough to do so, I'd appreciate it if you'd drop over to this Boing Boing thread and say that, whether I'm right or wrong on the issue at hand (and feel free to disagree with me if you feel I'm wrong), I'm not concern trolling against the Occupy Wall Street movement?

It's not quite as bad as being called a provocateur, but it's close and I don't like it.

And in other news, that Elf seems to have forgiven me.

Obsessive compulsive . . . me?

(Slow day at work.)

re 4: I have to say that it doesn't register on me that way, but then it could very well be that I'm just historically naive.

Stephan@6
No. If you were truly OCD, those M&Ms would line up precisely, and be sorted by number of candies in each color. That's way too random.

Except for the blue and brown columns, they are lined up in order of the number of each color. I got lazy and didn't want to swap those two columns.

Lazy, as in, really wanting to tabulate the results so I could start eating them. (Starting with the excess ones, then working my way through the rows.)

Has anyone here read Sanderson's Mistborn series? I'm about 100 pages into the first one and I'm a little aggravated... (rot13 for 100 pages worth of spoilers)

V gubhtug gur obbx tbg bss gb n avpr fgneg - xrcg zr vagrerfgrq, V yvxrq gur znva punenpgre... ohg ng guvf cbvag, V'z fgnegvat gb guvax gung gurer'f bayl bar srznyr punenpgre. Fher gurer jrer fbzr ynqvrf zragvbarq ng gur ortvaavat - bar bs gurz hfrq nf n ovg bs Cybg Qrivpr gb trg gur znva punenpgre gb gnxr iratrnapr (ng yrnfg fur jnf bayl xvqanccrq gb or encrq, naq unqa'g orra encrq lrg ng gur gvzr bs gur iratrnapr), ohg abj ur'f tbar vagb fbeg bs gur frrql haqreoryyl bs gur pvgl naq tngurerq gbtrgure n tebhc bs Avpxanzrf jvgu bar punenpgre genvg ncvrpr gb chyy bss fbzr fbeg bs cbyvgvpnyyl zbgvingrq urvfg naq bayl bar bs gurfr punenpgref vf srznyr.

Ng fbzr cbvag vg'f zragvbarq gur rirel jbzna va gur haqre-tebhaql-guvrirf-thvyq yvxr fbpvny pnfgr vf n juber, ohg ab zragvba bs jul guvf vf. Bu, jnvg, V'ir whfg eha vagb fbzr jbzra npgvat nf pbbxf. Ab anzrf, ab yvarf bs pbhefr. Unf Fnaqrefba cbfvgrq n snagnfl havirefr va juvpu ab jbzra unir nalguvat gb pbagevohgr bgure guna srrqvat naq jubevat? Pna pbbxf naq juberf abg unir bgure nggevohgrf gung zvtug znxr gurz urycshy va na haqretebhaq urvfg/eribyhgvba fbeg bs jnl? Vf gurer n fubegntr bs punenpgre genvgf fb frirer gur bayl crefba jub pna unir zber guna bar vf Bhe Ureb?

I'm frustrated, because this has been recommended in a lot of places and I thought this was going to be kind of a fun pop-corn book, but I'm just kind of annoyed right now. If you've read the books, and they get better - or some sort of world-building occurs so we find out what exactly happened gb 50% bs gur cbchyngvba gung gurl ner ercerfragrq ol n Gbxra jvgu Bar Punenpgre Genvg let me know and I'll tough it out. Otherwise it's going in the DNF pile and I'll move on to something less cranky-making.

Charlie @3:

Happy birthday!

Jack O'Lantern!

The gnomes have apparently decided they don't like me linking to my blog? Is all I can figure from the most recent two of my posts that linked to my blog being corralled.

nerdycellist @10
Donate it.

I found them fascinating, the magic system intriguing. The ending? Too abrupt. But yeah, your perceptions, while stronger than my perceptions of them, are valid.

The Modesto Kid @13:

Yes, sadly, your blog uses a URL syntax that is also common among spammer URLs. I shall ponder this issue and see if I can figure something out, but this particular filter traps more spam than ham.

Thanks, LinD -

Unfortunately I cannot donate it as it's on my nook. I'm keeping it for my roommate to read since she has fewer issues with this sort of thing than I do. Like I said, I was enjoying it until I saw that particular pattern which is my own particular Thing. I can't say it's badly written or crappy, but I think maybe I'll move on to something else because right now it's making me grind my teeth.

Hopefully my roommate will find it entertaining. At any rate, I only paid $2.99 for it so it's not too much of a loss.

Oh -- interesting. Let me know (here or by e-mail) what the offensive syntax is, I can probably change it without much hassle. (My php is mostly held together with scotch tape and safety pins -- any time I have wanted to modify the parameters I have just thrown another couple lines of code in.)

Open Threadiness:
I don't know if these are real responses or created to be silly, but they're hilarious:

Shit That Siri Says

The Modesto Kid @17:

You have mail.

Thanks for the info, abi. Here is a test link to a Moomins post from this weekend, just to see if it will work.

Woo-hoo!

Stefan Jones @ 2... No roadrunners?

John Arkansawyer #4:

I don't care if the octopus has horns. I can wait to see whether there's clear evidence of anti-Semitism.

I do care that the octopus has a tentacle wrapped around a little symbol of government, as though government weren't part of the problem.

Anyway, thanks for linking to the thread-- I appreciated the title pun, some of the humor, and finding out that it's oc-to-PO-dees rather than oc-to-PODES.

nerdycellist @10: What you complain about in the first paragraph is exactly what I've heard complained about from other people on that series, and is why I've not bothered to pick it up despite other recommendations. Life is too short--and my list of books too long--to bother reading even Otherwise Excellent Books that happen to fail in that particular manner.

John A Arkansawyer @4, what makes you think Frank W was talking about you in particular? At the point where he posted his comment, the commenter who'd talked the most about the octopus being antisemitic was someone going by the name Abdul Alhazred. (Probably a pseudonym, but if it's not, then he's an authority on both Semitic languages and giant demonic cephalopods!)

Nancy Lebovitz @23, did you catch that the cartoon is from 1912? And was aimed at the Aldrich–Vreeland Act (which eventually led to the Federal Reserve)?

nerdycellist #10: Yeah -- the girl is in fact the main protagonist (though there's a couple of POV switches in later books). Other female characters are mostly foils for her, or background.

The one-trait-each gang is explicitly linked to the magic system -- each of the Misting types have a stereotypical personality. (The ones who survive do get a little more background over time.)

Open threadiness: this account of the 1952 Harrow & Wealdstone rail disaster is probably right up the alley of a few people here, combining as it does high drama, shocking tragedy, unsolved mysteries, a fascinating snippet of social history and a bit about combat medicine, triage and the development of emergency response plans.

Jacque @ 164/930 (Prickly pear recipes)

Sadly, I've never cooked with them. But if you are cooking the pads you want to google on 'nopales' as they are considered a regional delicacy in some parts of Mexico / SW US. As for the fruits, I've heard of jam and compote.

Note to self, acquire a couple of pads of the prickly-pear that grows in Minnesota and stick them out on the back rock slope where nothing else grows, and see if they will grow in Maine.

David Harmon @27

I guess my underlying issue is the whole Snow White & The 7 Dwarfs one. I don't require a female protag, but I'm tired of seeing fantasy universes where everyone from a character with only two lines up to the major supporting ones are all male. Anyone with agency or a personality is a dude, except for the one Special Snowflake woman who is the Exception and not like those other women. I'm finding this as frustrating as some of the aspects of the reboot of BSG, which was so promising and awesome and then profoundly thoughtlessly sexist a few times. (every. single. one. of the female cylons before the big "secret cylon" reveal in the final season was a SEXAYY SEXAY woman using her womanliness to seduce. the couple of men were - uh, not SEXAY. Every woman who had sex was pretty much punished for it, etc.)

I think I will just move on to something new, but I wish I could find reviews that, while not specifically feminist, could warn me of potential gender issues before I buy a book - and I'm not saying my issues should be everyone's issues. Good lord, I also have a problem with babies and stupid misunderstandings showing up in my light somewhat romantic reading (had to shelve the Parasol Protectorate books I was enjoying for that one) so I know I'm a bit sensitive on random issues. Plenty of books are good, well-written and well-reviewed that may as well be brussel sprouts to me. Anyone know if I'll have a problem with Boneshaker?

HLN: Local woman idly noticed for a couple of weeks that when she flushed one toilet, the other toilet got air bubbles coming up. "Huh, weird," thought local woman, but puts it down to Weird Toilet Behavior.

Then, suddenly, local washing machine drains and drain water wells up through local bathtub drain, leaving denim debris in tub. "This is worrying," thinks local woman.

Then local washing machine drains again, and everything flushed down local toilet in the meantime wells up into both local bathtubs.

Local woman buys latex gloves and bleach, and is thankful for strong stomach while cleaning.

Local plumber runs camera down line and discovers that local tree has put down lots and lots of roots into drain line, filling it with a large woody hairball. Roots are chopped out of pipe with large, noisy machine. Local cats flee in terror and hide under couch until Terrifying Roaring Floor-Vibrating Monster is gone.

Local woman is a few hundred dollars poorer, but now has operational plumbing.

The plumber wants to dig up and replace the entire line between house and street. Because the utility boxes live in our front yard, this will require hand-digging a trench and very carefully avoiding all the wires, and will cost $lots.

Because the line is operational, and replacement is only to make it more resistant to root invasion, I am planning to use foaming root killer to keep things under control until we can save up $lots.

Trees. I love them, but their roots are becoming the bane of my homeownerly existence. I can't plant a garden in the bed by the front walkway because of tree roots (not only can I not dig into the soil, but also everything I plant there dies immediately -- I suspect the roots are sucking up all the nutrition). And now they are blocking up my plumbing.

Need either trees with well-behaved roots, or some kind of magical tree-root-blocking material. Since neither of these things exist, I will just have to make do.

Across the street from me is a big discount grocery. Very few sales, ads, promotions and the like, but low prices on most stuff every day.

They cater to folks who need bargains, every day.

I sometimes find odd stuff there that you don't see at Albertson's or Safeway. Like:

Cake frosting mix. Pour in two tablespoons of boiling water and beat like crazy. Actually not bad.

Spaghetti sauce mix. Combine water, oil, tomato paste, and the contents of the packet, and boil. I tried this last night, and it's really strange. The result is close to, but not quite as bad as, the red slime that passes for sauce in canned spaghetti products ala Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. I tossed in a can of diced tomatoes and some mushrooms to make it non-retchworthy.

Whole Canned Chicken. A big can with a cooked chicken inside. I'm too frightened to get that one.

Caroline @31
My plumber offered to "sleeve" the drain, far less expensive than digging up and replacing. Ask your plumber, ask your friends' plumbers about that one.

My sympathies, Caroline!

The same thing happened about 6 months after my parents moved into our house in the chicagoland area. (we like to believe it was dirt backed up in the bathtub. yes. that was a much nicer thing to imagine in the tub) I believe the trench was dug with a small backhoe. The main pipe was replaced with something less made of clay and the plumber named the thirsty weeping willows as the culprits. Within the next 5 years, you could see the same tell-tale scars on all the front yards in that subdivision. There may have been a few before they bought their home, but I guess they didn't notice at the time.

Between that and the load-bearing fireplace that cracked when a fire was lit, I'm betting they regretted not moving into the slightly newer side of the subdivision.

I've joined Google+. Anyone here is welcome to come find* me there (although I'd appreciate a note about who you are if it's not obvious). Still figuring out what the heck I'm doing.

I had to upgrade my browser before it would work, but I've been meaning to do that anyway.

*friend? encircle?

Stefan Jones @32:
Huh. The first two are somewhat obsolescent these days, but both are readily available in supermarkets around here (the spaghetti sauce mix is kept with the gravy mixes in the spice section, instead of with the canned/jarred sauces). Whole canned chickens I don't recall seeing before, though.

Nancy @ 23: On reflection, I still dislike the conspiracist implications of octopus imagery in general, but my objection is limited to this specific and unfortunate example, and I rather admire the "Octopi Wall Street" slogan.

When I was tagging sea turtles on the Georgia coast in the late 1970s, we had whole canned chickens. They were edible, indeed reasonably good as an ingredient in chicken stew. Of course, we were DAMN HUNGRY TEENAGERS, so they probably seemed tastier than they were.

Come to think of it, I've never seen canned whole chicken before or since. I'd forgotten about it until this thread.

Caroline @31, re: "Need either trees with well-behaved roots, or some kind of magical tree-root-blocking material. Since neither of these things exist, I will just have to make do," we had that problem once, and the plumber DID recommend something. I forget the name, but it came from the hardware store, near the Drano. Something like Root-X.

It helped, but it wasn't perfect. Eventually we dug up the intruding bush.

Our cats took a while to recover from the intrusion of the Big Noisy Machine into their domain.

Avram, I did know that it was an old cartoon.

I didn't read carefully, but assumed the discussion was about bringing back some old cartoons with evil financial octopuses to apply to the current situation.

Cold front coming through seems to be driving the cat nuts. Esme's got the evening crazies something fierce. She's usually a sedate grownup and now she's knocking everything off the worktable and leaping up on the desk to look out the window. Guess I better go play with her... (It was a lovely wild evening for a walk and a bit of outdoor meditation. Very much Lolly Willowes weather, I'd say.)

Charlie #3 Happy birthday!

You learn the shadows do not hide all lies
nor is the truth what's gleaming in the sun,
for far too frequently the tale's not done
when light has faded from all noonday skies
or wisdom woken in the youngest eyes.
No not at all; yet for each honour won
by those whose struggle is the daily run
through the hot lands there are no final ties.
Instead we face a constant horrid stream
of angry platitudes regarding fate
and what it means when we give up the fight
for who we are and what we dare to dream
in these dread times. There can be no debate
since there's one chance to leap into the light.

29
Prickly-pear fruit is tasty as fruit. Sweet, with crunchy seeds. (Also see, in your grocery's exotic-produce section, 'dragon fruit', which is from a different species of cactus.)

31/39
They sell copper sulfate for doing in tree-roots in drain pipes. I can't say it's very effective, but it might help. (We had an elm behind the house and a magnolia in front. Both trees really really like drainpipes. Unfortunately the drainpipes don't like them.)

Nopales/prickly pear pads:

Wear gloves when harvesting and cleaning. I always bought them from the local Mexican supermercado, already de-spined, so I have no further advice to offer on that front.

The only things I've made with them are tacos and scrambled eggs (Mexican street tacos, on soft corn tortillas, not USAn crunchy yellow shells).

Cut the pads into pieces about 1 cm big. Roast in a dry cast-iron skillet until they get brown spots; the idea here is to avoid the okra-like ooze that they can produce when cooked wet. If you don't mind that ooze you can skip this step. Saute with onions, tomatoes, garlic, and fresh hot chiles of your choice. When they're done either serve on warmed corn tortillas with queso fresco, cilantro, and lime juice or dump in some beaten eggs and scramble.

I've seen recipes for nopales salad but haven't made it myself.

As for the fruits (tuna in Spanish -- frighten your friends by offering them a "tuna smoothie!"), I've made jelly and syrup with them. The jelly was probably more trouble than it was worth; it didn't have much taste other than sweet. The syrup made tasty if alarmingly pink margaritas.

Nerdycellist @ 10

I got through the first book just fine, with only mild aggravation at the gendering and the use of the main character as the tool-for-teaching-the-reader-about-life. About an hour or so into the second (I got the audiobooks from the library), I had to stop because she was about to be so monumentally stupid. It's a lot harder to skim with an audio book.

I actually liked his Warbreaker, even though one of the major end plot points/deus ex machina became obvious about a third of the way through. That might have been narrator's emphasis, though.

Can't give you much insight on Boneshaker, I couldn't get past the first couple chapters. Not my taste.

If you're looking for epic fantasy with strong females, might I suggest Sharon Shinn's Twelve Houses series? They're light, they've got joy and romance, and strong women who are three dimensional.

HLN: Woman has now (mostly) moved into the house with the turret (TURRET!!), as signified by the unpacking of the paperbacks. Cats are happy - they enjoy taunting the neighbor's dog from the safety of their cat tree on the porch.

Re: tree roots - you may see if your municipality or sewer company has a sewer lateral line program. It often will help to offset some of the costs associated with replacing the lateral. (I have a large excel spreadsheet on the company server that tells me what each municipality will cover. Mine only covers the portion in the easement. The next one over does a 70/30 split with the homeowner, until the program funds run out. There's another one that does $700 towards replacement. Another covers cleanout-to-main. It's *always* worth looking in to.)

This is also where the realtor strongly suggests spending the funds to have your sewer lateral inspected prior to purchasing a home, esp. if the line is more than 30 yrs old. Some of the early plastic lines are breaking as well. If the owner says it has been replaced, that is often a permit-required repair and the city or county will have records of when the permit was pulled. (I call city records about every other week about permits. At this point, Paula just sighs when she hears my voice.) It can become a negotiating point, and worth knowing in any case.

Oh, and Avram: Thanks.

What the heck? Its your birthday Charlie? Happy birthday then!
And what the heck is it with the statistical clumping of folks I know and like in October birthdays?

Charlie @3: Many happy returns! Don't eat too much cake.

Charlie Stross @3: I did a cartoon once about "Pamper Your Boss Day." It might seem a bit mysterious to those who don't know that Pampers are an American brand of disposable diapers.

John A. Arkansawyer: I can't comment at BoingBoing, once again. It seems to be offering me the chance to comment there if I'll set my cookies to accept all cookies everywhere. Trying to set individual exceptions doesn't work. Sorry.

sisuile @ #47, any writer who thinks of theme songs for her characters catches my attention.

nerdycellist, #30: Can't help you with SF/F, but if you also like mysteries, there's a website called Reviewing the Evidence, for which a friend of mine used to write reviews (alas, not any more -- her life got too busy to keep it up). One of the things she would specifically note in her reviews was gender issues -- not as "this is a horrible book because of X", but as "if X bothers you, be aware that this book has it". Search for reviews by Linnea Dodson.

Sewerage: My parents' place has been backing up more and more regularly—about once ever three months or so—and my mom was expressing severe frustration with this. So I said, "Isn't the plumbing original to the house?" Yeah, so? "Plumbing isn't supposed to last that long." (House was built in 1957.) Nice new sewer line put in a couple of months back—apparently, the only thing keeping them from planning to do this was the mistaken idea that a sewer line was supposed to last longer than SIXTY YEARS.

Cactus fruit: My mom gave me a Peruvian Apple the other day. Tasted a bit like kiwi, actually. I didn't find out until the next visit that she was getting them off the cactus in front. Cereus cacti have beautiful flowers and now we know the fruit are tasty too.

Oh, and today is also the 22nd anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, aka "The Battle of the Bay: The Bay Strikes Back." My sister spent the quake at her new job—at the end of Pier 39. Whee.

re 31: We just went through the same thing, at a higher plane. In our case the problem is that the two upstairs bathrooms are identical except that one is turned 180 degrees from the other, so that all the drains come together in pairs into one big drain pipe. Things tend to get caught there. We've had the plumbers up on the roof augering the thing out twice in the last month. Unfortunately there's even less we can do about it without redoing the plumbing, except keep #3 from flushing problematic objects (note that a disposable applesauce cup is exactly the right size to plug a low-flow toilet).

Not only do I like an author who gives her characters theme songs, I'm particularly amused that she used a song by Def Leppard off a Monster Ballads collection (I have one of those in my CD file of shame). Will have to check her out.

I'll also be checking out the mystery blog. I do occasionally read mysteries and will be much more likely to do so when I can get some good recommendations to help hone my preferences.

nerdycellist: had to shelve the Parasol Protectorate books

Ah, the Parasol Protectorate. Not as bad an example as the Anita Blake books, but annoying enough for me to give up on 'em.

re 28: The situation is in some respects very similar to the MARC/Capitol Limited accident at Georgetown Junction, less than a 1/4 mile from my office (if it had happened about 20 minutes earlier, I probably would have been trackside). The circumstances were a bit different due to the profoundly different way that Brits and Americans handle dispatching and signalling. The mainline west out of DC is split by the metro for something like ten miles; the junction is the first crossover after that and used to have a track that went around the west side of town into Georgetown, but that was long gone at that point. What happened was that a freight got delayed and caught up in the evening rush, and was stopped on the right (WB) track at the junction. The Capitol was crossing over through the junction from the left track. Unfortunately a MARC train was headed EB on the same track; it had a yellow signal indicating that the train had to stop at the junction, but this signal was before the last station stop; apparently the engineer forgot about it and headed south at full speed. Of course when he got there it was too late to stop; the Amtrak engineer saw him coming and sped up in a futile attempt to get his train through. The MARC train was running cab car first and struck the second Amtrak locomotive, which fell over and caught fire, in turn roasting the control cab on MARC train. The crew from the MARC train were killed in the impact; eight other people, all Job Corps kids, died in the fire because the doors on the car jammed and passengers were unable to escape. A whole slew of safety regs came out of this accident, including beefing up cab cars, emergency exit mods, and the NORAC "D" that you see on a bunch of signals now. Interestingly, I found an article describing how this accident led to local emergency response improvements.

Open threadiness, since I know there's quite a few LGBTQ etc. folks who lurk in this part of the fluorosphere:

On Tuesday, October 11, which was National Coming Out Day, I officially changed my Facebook profile and status to reflect my desire to no longer hide my gayness from 75 percent of the people who know me. The other 25 percent consists of people I met last year during my freshman year of college.

Big Sister saw the message, let me know that she has absolutely no problem with it, and worked with me to decide on a good time to come out to my Mom. I've been hiding myself from my family for the last five or so years, so it's all about to come to an end. Just to be make sure my schoolwork isn't negatively affected by the potential fallout, we decided to put off having The Talk with Mom until after I'm done with finals, which are the first full week in December. And Big Sister will be there in the room with me so that I don't fall apart trying to tell Mom what's up.

Seven or eight more weeks until I'm out and proud to *everyone* in my life, not just my school friends and the cool people I've met online.

Alan Yee @61. Speaking as a Mom, glad that you are both looking forward to living open, and very glad that you are looking at your studies and long-term goals. Go, you!

Alan Yee @61:

I second everything that Laura Runkle @62 says.

If you need us at your back, drop a line in whatever Open Thread is current and we'll run a cheering section. Then tell us how it went.

Even us straights care.

(Also, kudos to Big Sister.)

Stefan Jones @ 32:

Whole Canned Chicken

During my freshman year at college, my mother decided I was in need of sustenance, and shipped me an electric hot plate and a large box of various foodstuffs, including a whole canned chicken. I finally threw a party for my friends one evening and we ate most of the food (although I was the only one interested in the anchovies). The chicken turned out to be edible.

Alan Yee @ 61:

Congratulations on coming out! Good on you for being proud of who you are.

Alan Yee @61: congratulations, good luck, and enjoy being out!

Frankly, it was getting pretty tiring trying to remember who I told in person, who I didn't tell, who's okay with gay people, and who's not. And lying is very stressful for me, especially since people with Asperger's tend to be very honest people, sometimes to a fault. I finally told myself, fuck it, if you don't like me being me, you don't have to pretend to be my friend. I'm not exactly going to announce my preference for people of the male persuasion to every person I ever encounter, but I'm not going to hide it any longer.

I've actually been pretty comfortable about it for a while now; I've been a member of my university's queer/allies group since I started college last year. The main problem has mainly been figuring out how to tell the family and making it known to people I don't see on a regular basis (i.e. high school and college friends that I don't see often or at all any more).

My parents are/were going to find out one way or another. I'd rather them find out directly from me and not in an embarrassing, undignified way. They aren't the type of parents who would kick their kid out of the house for being gay, but they aren't the kind who will immediately jump for joy at the news, either. I suspect there will be some denial on their part and confusion, but they'll probably come around eventually. Big Sister has assured me that she and my brother-in-law are both there if I need them and that their place will always be a safe place for me. Have I mentioned that my Big Sister is the best Big Sister anyone could hope for?

Happy Birthday for today, Charlie. Many happy returns and best wishes.

Alan Yee: Happy coming out day, and I congratulate you on your excellent taste in sisters.

Sewer lines thread: raises hand to say that terracotta tile sewer lines can last almost 100 years. The iron pipe under the house actually gave out before the tiles in the yard. Might have lasted longer if it had been installed sloping downward towards the street, instead of flat. Everyone join in now: "They don't build them like they used to".

Portrayals of women in fiction: Here's some good ones: "Motel Art Improvement Service", by Jason Little. It's a graphic novel with art that pops. The heroine is nerdy, fashion-challenged and pear-shaped -- and she's athletic, and finds love (or at least sex) and adventure! The story is highly original and funny.

I may be the last person to find out about Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan" trilogy. I read them last week, with great enjoyment. Go Deryn!

Alan Yee... You have a fabulous Big Sister.

Alan Yee #61 congratulations on coming out. I can still remember the first time (34 years ago) when a friend came out to me as gay. It was a bloody courageous thing to do back in the 70s, in a society as homophobic as Jamaica's was and is.

Your sister is a wonderful person.

Charlie: Happy Birthday!

Alan Yee: Congratulations on your public unveiling, and best of luck with the family reveal. You and your Big Sister rock!

On the 13th, my daughter participated in "The Names That Hurt," a play about insulting language, hate speech, and bullying. A number of the monologues and little scenes were about being gay (others dealt with racial of ethnic issues).

At the end of the evening, audience members were asked to share their own experiences with being labeled, teased, or bullied. Toward the end of the session, a 16-yo stood up and said, very simply, "I'm a Jew, a white girl, and a lesbian." The whole room cheered. I was so proud of her! (I suspect it was the first time she's made quite such a public declaration, though she's been out to friends and family since middle school. [I've known her since she was 9.])

(The other striking comment was from an older black woman who talked about how she used to call her lightest-skinned granddaughters--both are teenagers, so this is pretty recent--her "white girls." This was intended as praise, not denigration. She stopped doing it when her son asked her to and then educated her about light-skin/dark-skin social issues in the African-American community.)

It was an interesting evening.

Charlie #3: happy birthday!

nerdycellist #30: yeah, I have to admit the Mistborn series fits squarely into that. It even gets worse at the climax: Jura ure uhfonaq qvrf, fur svtugf gur Ovt Onq gb zhghny naavuvyngvba. Lrc, gur erny ureb jnf fbzrbar ryfr.

Alan Yee #61: Congratulations!

Alan Yee @67:
I'm not exactly going to announce my preference for people of the male persuasion to every person I ever encounter...

It is my dream to live in a world where you can be your true self, and be accepted for it, without having to do so. Just like I can with the same preference right now.

Failing that, I want it for my children.

On Boneshaker: I read it some time ago, but I can remember at least two women, and while the female protagonist's life is defined to some extent by her men-- father, husband, son-- she's also part of the definition, and she's kind of awesome. I haven't read the others in the series yet.

#76--On Boneshaker--I can think of three women, one of which is the protagonist; the other two are supporting characters, of a fine and colorful variety. None of them are there to be beautiful, wanton, and stupid. Neither are most of them men--there's a teenage boy providing what lack of good sense the plot may require, but for a teenage boy with Concerns, he's not unreasonably foolish.

Given the (reasonably-based) gender skew where the main action takes place, as well as the size of the cast of significant speaking characters, the number of women didn't seem oddly mall.

Alan Yee @61--Go, you! And congratulations on having an excellent specimen of Big Sister in your life.

Alan: Good luck.

abi: Amen.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Strauss.

Alan: congratulations and good luck!

My kid came out to me at, oh, 12, I think, by asking, "Mom, what would you say if I had a ($SAME-SEX partner)?"

I said, "I'd want to meet them and make sure they were a nice person."

People have, from time to time, praised me extravagantly for this response. This embarrasses and saddens me, because I fervently wish it were so normal that it was unremarkable.

May it go as calmly for you as it did for my kid.

sisuile, #48: You have a turret! I'm envious!

Alan, #61: Go you! May it be as drama-free as you hope.

Sisuile, a turret is a great thing; but I hope you do not plan to install any machine-guns.

Alan @ 61 - You have great courage.

Modesto Kid @ 82 - No, no machine guns. But we've already put together plans to do quick-exchanges of the attic windows for arrow slits.

Re: sewers, pt 2 - The City of St. Louis is being sued by the EPA about our combined storm-and-sewage system. Something about the parts of it that are still wood (pre-1870), and the fact that it wasn't designed for non-permeable pavement, so may, on occasion, overflow the holding reservoirs during sustained heavy rain, dumping raw sewage into the Mississippi. Oops. OTOH, those wood parts still carry water and "stuff" pretty well, without the spectacular collapsing that clay or iron does. Again, chorus of "they don't build them like they used to."

I think that kerfuffle at Boing Boing affected me more deeply than I realized. Last night, I dreamed that I worked for the CIA.

Started on Boneshaker and am enjoying it so far (only about 25 pages in so it's mostly down to whether I feel the author has described the surroundings well enough for me to immerse myself in them). From reviews I read last night, it's a love it or hate it book. We'll see.

Also, janetl @69 - glad to see that Leviathan is not Problematic; this is one that I downloaded when I maybe had a little too much wine and it was late and we had invited a librarian to our party. I think he might have mentioned something about airships and exploding bats? Or was that another one that I downloaded on his recommendation? I don't know. I was quite possibly slightly tipsy. These are some of the hazards of having access to an eReader, wine and literate librarian friends. (I am a fortunate primate indeed!)

Mary Aileen @ #35:

I've been saying "circled", but I have no idea if there is an official term and "circled" does sound a bit as if it involves wagons, trails and things scary.

Oh, also, you should have a notification saying I've circled you. I'd be the "Ingvar" with a silly grin and a bow-tie. Bow-ties are cool.

nerdycellist and janetl: My 15-yo was upset at some of the animal engineering in Leviathan but read it anyway. To me, that indicates that it probably passes the female smell-test, because she tends to outright reject anything that doesn't have enough/good female characters. She was very excited at NYCC to see the big poster for the new Uglies graphic novel.

John A. Arkansawyer, one time in the 80s, I dreamed that Cathy and I were working for James Watt at the Department of the Interior. I was just aware enough to wonder why.

(responding to OT 164 at the end)

Try looking for /"prickly pear" recipes/ on your favorite search engine.

Why are Israelis called "Sabras"? Sabra is the prickly pear cactus, so Israelis are abrasive on the outside, but sweet on the inside.

Ingvar M (86): Saw you there and circled you back. I'm still feeling my way around Google+, but so far it seems pretty good.

I haven't read the third book of the Leviathan series yet, but I'm deeply pleased with how it's handling sex and gender issues. The world it takes place in is deeply sexist (unlike, say, his Uglies series), and some characters don't particularly care, and some characters are deeply upset at the unfairness of it--but there is always the sense that the author is perfectly aware of how unfair it is. And there are some truly marvelous interactions between two female characters in the second book, with excellent and unexpected payoff.

Alan Yee, you are awesome, and so are your sister and her spouse. (My fingers keep wanting to type something else in place of "spouse". So far they have entered spuse, spse, and spuose. I have no idea why.)

HLN: Some of the folks here know that among my various professions, I teach martial arts. I am proud to announce that this month my dojo is celebrating its 20th year, and I am celebrating 40 years training in and teaching my art. This weekend my dojo hosts a seminar: 3 guest teachers, a big party, food, training, training, training.

I hope that the Norns allow me to get to 50 years.

Lizzy L@92: congratulations indeed, that is quite an achievement!

I wish my kid had stuck with her martial arts training, but her teacher was no longer teaching locally and she didn't want to commute to the Upper West Side, where the main dojo was (90 minutes each way at the best of times), which I could totally understand. She didn't want to change schools because almost all the other programs nearby were of the "the whole class moves on together" variety, which doesn't really work.

I loved her sensei; she made me wish _I_ could take classes, which is really saying something. I bet you're a fantastic teacher.

Open threadiness:

Do you ever wonder why US politics looks like it does? This article describes the system of essentially having congressmen "buy" important positions (subcommittee chair, for example) by the amount they donate. The Republicans under Newt Gingrich pioneered this system, and the Democrats have embraced it fully by now. The path to power in Congress is explicitly based on how much money you raise--as in, there's a written price list. If you don't raise a lot of money, you simply won't get into a position of much importance.

It's very common to think in terms of personalities and personal attributes when you think of politicians. That's natural. But the personalities and personal attributes we see are mostly spin and bullshit, professionally produced images, planted stories, and journalists running with the common narrative because it's easier than thinking. (How often was John McCain described as a maverick outsider, despite decades in the Senate and a voting record that was overwhelmingly keeping to the party line? Once that kind of narrative is established, it's almost impossible to change.)

We try to understand politics that way because we're story-telling creatures at heart, and it makes a good story--the witless heir to the throne stumbles along, manipulated by his wicked elder advisor, or the authentic woman of the people is suppressed by the corrupt, jealous elites whose pretentions she challenges, or ....

But those stories don't have much predictive power. That's why political pundits have awful track records of predicting anything--their job is to be entertaining storytellers, but the stories they make up don't have to be true, just fun to listen to and consistent.

If you really want to understand political decisions, it's much better to understand the system surrounding the politicians.

What incentives face Barrack Obama or Stenny Hoyer or John Boehner or Mitt Romney? What do they worry about? What must they do to get and keep power? Whom do they see as threats to their power?

What filters are in place that they had to get past, in order to be where they are now? What personal traits, expressed beliefs, true beliefs, work habits, etc., would have kept them from getting near the top of the pyramid in terms of power? What friends did they have to keep, and what friends could they not afford? How about enemies?

Who and what controls the flow of information to them about various issues? How do the choose their advisors, and how do they check to see if their advisors are telling them the truth? Who gets to talk to the president or congressional leader or presidential candidate? What happens when those people say stuff that the VP, chief of staff, or president him self don't want to hear? Who can veto some of his advisors?

Those questions are rarely asked in surface-level political coverage. But articles like this one help answer those questions, or at least start answering them.

I enjoyed Boneshaker but wouldn't say I loved it. The background was a bit too contrived for my taste.

Good and memorable characters, though.

John:

The other night, I had a (fever-inspired) very complicated weird dream in which my wife appeared as a teenager, I appeared as both my teenaged self and my current self, and the villain we had to overcome was Dick Cheney. (WTF, subconscious?)

Alan Yee @67:
I'm not exactly going to announce my preference for people of the male persuasion to every person I ever encounter...

I don't wear a post-it note on my forehead that says "het", so I don't see why you should have to wear one that says "gay". Congrats on coming out!

My nephew came out to us earlier this year. My mother's first reaction was, "Oh, no!" When asked why oh no, she said, she wanted him to have children. Once informed that lots of gay people have children, she was happy again. She's in her 70's, was raised by a racist, homophobe mother, and managed to not be either. For the rest of us, it was no issue at all.

#61/67 ::: Alan Yee: Blessings on your coming out. This Christian believes God created a wonderful diversity of people, and wishes us all to live lives filled with love and respect for each other, while doing our bit to make the world a better place. May your life be filled with love and laughter.

nerdycellist @ 34: Sadly, I could not pretend it was dirt in the bathtubs. I won't draw you a picture.

I'm very, very glad that for whatever reason, my squick response isn't triggered as long as I have gloves.

Melissa Mead @ 39: This evening I am acquiring Roebic Foaming Root Killer. The internet seems to think it is more effective than the non-foaming copper-sulfate kind. It makes sense -- the non-foaming kind can only reach as high as the water level in the pipe, so it may not reach roots that are coming in the top of the pipe. But the foam will expand to fill the pipe, reaching all the roots.

sisuile @ 48: I had never heard of having the lateral line inspected when I bought this house. I wasn't even aware it was an issue. You can be sure I will have that inspection done the next time I buy a house, and will be asking how old the pipes are.

And yeah, I'd really like to have the replacement done before selling this house. The quoted amount, while more than I have available right now, is a feasible savings goal for the near term. (Although I worry that buyers, like the past me, won't be aware of it and therefore won't see the value in having it already done.)

Thank you for the suggestion to check with the city -- I will definitely be doing that!

CHANGE OF TOPIC

Alan @ 61: Hooray! Happy coming out! *confetti, streamers, popping bottles of champagne or sparkling cider according to your preference*

I'm so glad this stage of the process went well for you. And I'm so glad your sister will be there to back you up when you come out to your parents. (Fingers crossed that your parents react positively.)

As long as we're talking about weird dreams... Last night, apparently I was on the tail end of a chain letter. I got several envelopes from someone saying that I had to add to the enclosed pile of documents, and forward on to something before bad thing happened. (details hazy).

What I had to add was a hand sketched picture of a Hugo award, in its current environment.

Strange.

Unnerving dream from last night:

My dog, after years of trying, manages to grab a (tree*) squirrel as it scampered around the base of a tree. I am both horrified and glad for her . . . she tries so hard to get those buggers, but who wants to see a furry critter dismembered?

Kira sets the squirrel up between her front paws and prepares to nip off its head, the way a kid might do in a chocolate Easter bunny.

And then she lets the squirrel go, unsure as how to exactly proceed.

Whew.

I hope the real thing, should it transpire, ends that way.

* (Kira caught a ground squirrel once. Not. Pretty. That wasn't enough for her. Predators . . .)

I would really appreciate some feedback from all you wonderful folks out there. We're in the run up to everyone's favorite time of year, benefits open enrollment, and my company is doing something that I think is more than mildly hinky. They're partnering up with a "wellness specialist" called RedBrick Health, and tying premium discounts to taking a "Health Assessment" (which, conveniently, will not be available until after open enrollment ends).

What makes me uncomfortable is the fact that neither my employer nor this wellness program are HIPPA-covered entities; in fact, the wellness program seems to have been designed explicitly to avoid being HIPPA-covered. RedBrick's privacy policy says that they can get medical information from me (which is reasonable, as I could control what data they have access to); from my employer, directly or indirectly; from my insurer (medical claims data), and from my medical providers.

They also claim the right to share that data with "partners who assist them in providing services" and/or "in the event that we or substantially all of our assets are acquired by one or more third parties as a result of an acquisition, merger, sale, reorganization, consolidation or liquidation, in which case Personal Information may be one of the transferred assets..."

So I'm wondering if I'm being too paranoid, or if this has the possibility to be an unsupervised, unwarranted corporate intrusion into my medical history.

Alan Yee @61: I salute your courage and integrity, sir, and wish you all the best from your choice.

Lizzy L @92: Congratulations!

A question for the pet folks -

In the course of her traditional Shoving My Head In The Underbrush and Sniffing, Ardala managed to Hoover up some kind of godknowswhat on her Sunday morning walk. She proceeded to sneeze. And sneeze. And paw at her snout. And sneeze some more. She was fine for a bit, and then did the sneezing again, adding a delightful amount of snottiness and a bit of backwards sneezing to her repertoire. The roommate kept an eye on her when I was out that afternoon and said there had been some more sneezing/honking/pawing fits, but her research indicated that as long as there was no swelling or breathing problems, she would probably sneeze the item out on her own.

On Monday, there were a couple of sneezing attacks but no pawing and we were debating whether to take her to the eVet or wait until our regular vet was open and leave work early today to bring her there. However, last night and this morning there has been only one sneeze, and that one a dainty, non-honking, non-snotty sneeze much like those brought on by her burrowing enthusiastically in her bedding with her face. (who can truly know the mind of a dog?). So, if she continues not explosively sneezing, should I assume she's sneezed whatever it is out? Or has the thing lodged itself further into her face and is waiting to silently kill her (OMG FOXTAIL?!) ? If the latter, could we wait until Saturday so we didn't have to take time off work, or is this completely emergent right now and I'm a terrible Servant Monkey for even considering my own needs above hers? Any advice welcome!

i
Your bag of fruit is but a pile of pits,
My feast of joy is but a pang of guilt
My still small voice is in a plague of fits,
The sweet blue juice pooled on the plate is spilled
My snack is past, and to the trash heap comes,
And now you know that I have et your plums.

ii
Waste not your time, nor hunt in vain pursuit
Peruse, instead, this humble witness mute,
That I, regardless of your own intents
Did raid the fridge for sweet and purple fruit.

O Thou, who sought, both cleverly and wise,
To save your plums and hide them from my eyes—
Know that I—I did consume them all—
And taste them still, as I apologize.

iii
Little boy hides in the pantry alone.
Fingers and mouth of a purple-y tone.
Hush! Hush! Don't flap your gums!
Christopher Robin is eating your plums.

iv
Blah blah blah plums, blah blah fridge,
Blah blah blah blah sweet blah cold.

102 Jennifer Baughman: one thing I'd be concerned about, and check the TOS in, over and above your paranoia:

is this "wellness specialist" entitled to pass information they recieve *back* to your employer? Say, information your employer isn't entitled to require from you, or allowed to use in continuance of employment decisions (but of course, they wouldn't?)

Having said that, and ramping down my paranoia somewhat, that sounds like regular "we need this to work" and "in case we are sold/go bankrupt, our new owners would find us rather useless if we can no longer use this information to do our job" boilerplate.

That doesn't mean, of course, that it isn't a way to un-HIPAA your information (because you've given permission to break the lock, at least from the insurance companies) for global dispersal.

Also, what partners? And what restrictions on the use of that information do they put on those partners?

Note: as a Canadian, HIPAA-compliance is only something my company's products aim to ensure for our clients, to aid audit.

Dammit! "Spilt," not "spilled."

I blame my editor.

Charlie, #3, I am glad that you have (are?) a boss worth pampering. I myself have never encountered one I really wanted to honor with a day not even chosen by me.
I find the whole concept/meme of "days" for subsets of people rather offputting, and wonder if anyone else here feels the same.
First off, it is another opportunity for people to sell us something--cards and so on--that we got on fine without up till now.
Second off, it seems to me that if someone is worth honoring they are worth honoring all year long. This includes veterans, and dead veterans.
Days when we are ordered to honor someone, however deserving, make it easier to ignore and overuse them all the rest of the year.
Third off, I just don't like being pressured.
I guess it started way way back when, when I noticed all the hoo-ha over Mother's Day and Father's Day and said how come there isn't a children's day, and got that stupid, meaningless retort that every day is children's day--sure, every day to get treated like subhumans, molested, uprooted, slapped around and otherwise left in the lurch. See the Dysfunctional Family thread.
But there's more to it than that. Perhaps it was the faint flavor of crap that hung around everything the teachers told us about whatever holiday they used to break their own monotony.
All right, that taint filled the whole school, all the time. But even so, there's one final problem, and that's if you set out a day for every group of people that needs a little more appreciation, you'd run out of days in the year right quick.
I don't claim to have any answers, just a need to voice this nagging unease.
It doesn't apply to Coming Out Day. Congratulations, all.

And, belatedly, Happy Birthday, Charlie. Many happy returns (and many happy sequels, too).

Jennifer Baughman@102: Of course this is a corporate intrusion into your medical history and personal habits. Even if RedBrick's current management doesn't want to use your data for Evil, they're trying to get it out from under privacy protections. Once that information is out, it is OUT.

Happy Birthday Charlie!

Alan: Congrats on taking this step (won't it be nice when it's not a step people have to take, specifically). Glad you've got such a nice Big Sister and I hope all goes well when you tell your mother.

nerdycellist @ 104: Watchful waiting is acceptable. You don't mention any bleeding or continuing signs of pain or distress.

I'd watch for more sneeze attacks; also for discharges, particularly purulent and odoriferous kinds, and swellings of the face. If none of these occur, the likelihood of any foreign body in the sinuses goes down. You can always have your pup checked by the regular vet at your convenience.

Kip W @ 105: I believe you have won today's Internets. Congratulations!

Alan Yee: Also congratulations! (I've been out for nearly 30 years, and it generally gets easier..)

Openthreadedness: Last night at the Indian supermarket I saw, in the religious goods section, an icon of ... I don't know who. Not one of the familiar Hindu goddesses, but strangely familiar nonetheless. She was standing in a crocodile, wearing a veil/mantle of blue with gold stars, some roses adorning her. In one hand she held a trident, in the other a lotus (I think). (Only two arms. ) A spikey gold halo radiated from her head, and the background was rainbow colors radiating from her. I this the Virgin of Guadalupe on holiday in India?

For those of you on google+, I just opened an account, and may have "circled" some of you. (With twirling, of course.)

Nancy @ #114, I've encircled you. (Which sounds like I'm a Kiowa war party or its target, a Conestoga wagon, but nonetheless . . .)

On the topic of awesome female protagonists - and apropos to the birthday wishes in the thread - I highly recommend Charlie Stross's Merchant Princes series. Miriam's past as an investigative reporter makes her well-suited (and rather prone to) the kinds of political-intrigue conflicts she finds herself in the middle of, and the collection of allies she builds includes several other women of similarly strong agency.

Tracie at 113, the Goddess Ganga, who is incarnate as the River Ganges, is often depicted as riding on a crocodile.

I recently met some Awesome Female Protagonists in Jane Lindskold's Thirteen Orphans series. Primary and backup POV are both female, respectively a college and a senior-citizen, both decent personalities.

Bingo! Akhilandeshvari, tthe Always-Broken Goddess. Hmmmm ... that's interesting.

Apparently my google-fu is stronger tonight.

Here is another picture of her, looking somewhat more like La Virgen.

Well, my google-fu may be good, but my HTML is pretty puny tonight. Anyway, the links work.

Applause for Chidioc Tichbourne's plums.

I thought this would be the best video I would see today. That was earlier, before I was at work late and left my truck keys in the office and had to walk all the way back from the parking deck to get them. I'm still driving my dad's old '93 Dodge Dakota that someone vandalized this summer, and it died right in the middle of 12th and University. The only thing I could think of was that I'd run out of gas, and as I ran over to the Shell station on the corner, I twisted my ankle big time and skinned up my knee. I'm sitting here in a certain amount of pain and I'm out of Rocky Road ice cream. Not a very good day, is it?

And then I opened up this video and my day improved radically. This Unitarian Universalist minister, the Reverend Marian Stewart, does us proud, especially when she says, "We are asking for more than they can possibly imagine!" Maybe it'll make your day, too.

On the subject of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series --

nerdycellist @ 85: glad to see that Leviathan is not Problematic; this is one that I downloaded when I maybe had a little too much wine and it was late and we had invited a librarian to our party. Why is it that stories involving librarians always have a bacchanal quality?

Melissa Singer @ 87: My 15-yo was upset at some of the animal engineering in Leviathan but read it anyway. To me, that indicates that it probably passes the female smell-test, because she tends to outright reject anything that doesn't have enough/good female characters.
It's perfectly reasonable to be upset by some of the animal engineering. I think Westerfeld intends the Darwinian and Clanker technologies and societies to have both positive and negative qualities. The books also show war and combat as negative, rather than as exciting.

In celebration of successfully installing a virtual machine with a version of Firefox that's able to run Leetkey again (which I mainly use for rot13):

1'm 1n y0ur fr1d63, 3471n6 y0ur p|um5!

(And yes, Kip's were way way better :-)

#4 John

The current Capitol One ad series with the loudmouthed jackass Jewish caricature character I find extremely offensive....

Regarding octopus, 1912 was just shy of a century ago. Use of an octopus to denote something with tentacles stuck in everything, was not anything I had any awareness of as being symbolically antisemitic.... and especially the term "Kochtopus" refers to a pair of men who are spreaders of evangelizing narrow-minded bigot Kheristianity who probably claim to be Christian.

Generally and vernacularly I have never heard/seen until today that I can recall, any identifying of the vernacular "octopus" denoting tentacles glomming in and grabbing and cramming in everywhere, to slurs on Jews... as opposed to "octopus" for a person who puts their hands all over other people without permission without regards to race, creed, color, or national origin of the person playing "octopus."

#8 LinD
When I was a child I did just that with M&Ms, and disliked the oranged and yellow ones because I disliked the colors. I was really unhappy with they discontinued the tan ones and kept the yellow ones....

#28 James
Thank you for the link.

#29 Thena
There is a native prickly pear in Massachusetts. The one in my yard's been stpreading. It has short very fine spines. My aunt hand had one with 7" long vicious needles, but the Cape Cod weather with some nasty storms eventually caused its demise... '

#30 nerdy
Roland Green's Starcruiser Shenandoah books (there are six of them, but one of them Amazon didn;t seem to realize belonged to the series... the last couple the publisher hid that...) , if you like military SF, do not have sex stereotyping in them. They've got an ensemble of characters, with Captain Rose Liddell tapped to be the new captain for Shenandoah, commissioned years before but never actually having seen service time, with Adm. Sho Kuwahara aboard as commander of a small constellation of ships, Vice Admiral Diana Longman (minor character, with the nickname "The Golden Vanity" but no, she is not seducing anyone...) shows up as senior commander in space, and her nephew, Lt Charlie Longman, isn't happy to be in an area where one of the numerous admirals who are his relatives, is the senior commander. He's bunked in a coed wardroom with Brigette Tachin, a young officer, another male officer whose name I can;t think of but he's got a few more years and experience on him, and Elaine Zhena, a mustang whose two main interests in life are going on attack runs in one of the attack craft carried by Shenandoah, and recreational sex (done offduty and NOT for career enhancement/blackmail/leverage otherwise/etc.) There's also Candice Shores, a young Army officer, and other characters... command ranks gender mostly isn't an issue. The Weapons Officer in charge of what the contemporary euphemism for is "weapons of mass destruction" is a motherly-seeming older woman, for example. The Army has a higher ratio of men than women, but there's Candice Shores, and a female sharpshooter, and others even in the Army.

Regarding the coed wardroom, there was a line about roommates, "Some chose roommates of the interesting sex, some of the uninteresting sex. Those who had neither preference nor manners, got sent to the Army." There are also homosexual characters, some with major ensemble roles (for that matter, one of the characters mentioned above is bi) and in pairbonded relationships... The books came out in the 1980s.

#31 Caroline
What about trees with long taproots, such as walnut trees?

#100 ::: eric

Sometimes fast reading will substitute for a dream-- I saw that as being about being personally added to a chain letter, being put into an envelope to be passed along to the next recipient.

Which leads to the notion of sentient spam....

#118 ::: David Harmon

Can you say a bit more about how Thirteen Orphans is going? I liked the first book, and then the second book started with the dullest action sequence in the world (in my very strongly felt opinion) and I never got past it.

Thirteen Orphans did a thing I particularly dislike, taking people out of their own context and sending them to another, presumably more interesting, one. It's on my list of things no book was ever improved by. Lindskold seems to start her series with the characters near home, then the next book is them going somewhere else, then the next is them going somewhere drastically else, and I don't always agree that there's no plot available back where they were. Other people like seeing more of the world and the way she puts it together, and I'm just not one of them.

On the topic of odd dreams: I have a recurring dream where I'm moving into a new house, all clean and empty, and I open a door and find a whole other house hidden inside (it's bigger on the inside, obviously) that shows signs of having been just recently abandoned. Last time there was a bowl of eggshells on the kitchen counter, and an elevator decorated with a picture of Amelia Earhart.

#126: Accelerando contains at least one instance of sentient spam.

(xkcd proposes sentient spambots.)

Perhaps the sentient spam would be a good thing.

Paula: I didn't see the octopus as antisemitic in isolation, either. The horns suggested the Devil, not Jews. Now if the octopus had had a big schnoz, that would have been different. Of course, the textual context makes it clear that the image is antisemitic.

But then, the one story I know about Jews & horns, is about my HS vice principal, whose father was a Conservative rabbi in central Pennsylvania. One day in the 1940s he was giving a speech to a mixed audience, and called for questions. First question: "Jew, where are your horns?" So the horns thing was still current 60+ years ago. A long time ago.

ObSF: The closest to an antisemitic stereotype in Star Trek was, imho, the Ferengi. Short, obsessed with observing the rules, money-driven, and with big ears in lieu of big noses. Oh, and they keep their women down.

Jon Baker @130: Alas, the horns thing is still current. Within the past 10 years a man I know had a girlfriend's parent repeatedly tousle his curls/feel his head over the course of several visits to the girlfriend's home. Later, the girlfriend shame-facedly admitted that the parent had been "looking for horns or the scars where they'd been removed."

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the discussion about Herman Cain's 999 plan is the way it will increase government spending.

The Consumer Price Index includes sales tax in its computation. Implementing a 9% nationwide sales tax would mean that SS checks (and other payments) would increase by roughly that amount (depends on the weighting) plus the regular inflation rate.

And if Congress tried to monkey with the computation to exclude that 9%...well, retired people don't have anything to do on election day but vote.

In any event, the 999 plan is a non-starter for many reasons, not least of which is all the special interests that profit from the current tax setup.

Simplicity is appealing until it collides with the reality that a nation and its politics is not actually, you know, simple.

#130 ::: Jon Baker:

Keeping their women down? I thought the stereotype is that Jewish women are infuriatingly but uselessly dominant.

Do you think short ugly merchant is part of the anti-Semitic memeplex?

From a different angle, I didn't realize Lord Gro (from The Worm Ourboros is at least a physical match for anti-Semitic stereotypes until I read a book about medieval anti-Semitism. I'm fairly sure that the average non-Jewish reader wouldn't know it either.

I doubt it's useful to assume that all the old stereotypes are still in play. It's messy because what's going on is inside people's heads and it can be hard to be sure about what they're thinking.

Jon Baker@130

Huh. I always thought the Ferengi were supposed to be a thinly disguised stereotype of the Japanese. But I guess I wasn't really aware of anti-semitism as a concept when ST:TNG was first broadcast in the UK.

Jon, #130: I have a Jewish friend who was taunted with the "horns" thing in middle school. She's a full generation younger than me, so it was still current among young people as recently as 20-25 years ago.

Steve, #132: I think Herman Cain is dreaming. At the end of the day, being black is the one exception to IOKIYAR.

Steve C. @132: In any event, the 999 plan is a non-starter for many reasons [..]

To me it brings to mind an SNL parody of "The Omen" where John Belushi played Damien.

Surely, The Number of The Beast is even more evil when it is inverted ;)

(Yes, it needed that wink).

How can the "Jews have horns" thing still be alive? Thanks to the miracle of the internet, approximately seventy-nine percent of the world's population has seen Ron Jeremy naked. That should have put paid to it right then and there.

Melissa Singer @ 131... looking for horns or the scars where they'd been removed

HellBoy limited himself to filing them down.

Jews With Horns.

I have that album. It's cool.

Stefan Jones @6: Obsessive compulsive . . . me?

But, some of them are M-side down. And the Ms are not aligned.

Stefan Jones @32: Whole Canned Chicken. A big can with a cooked chicken inside.

OMG. I'd totally forgotten about those. My mother used to get those, and make chicken-and-dumplings with them.

Speaking of retch-worthiness. ::gloRK::

To this day, I can't stand wet bread in any form.

I'm too frightened to get that one.

Very wise.

What about cuckolds having horns -- how recently was that meme current?

(Is the term "cuckold" even still in use anywhere? I only know it from reading.)

The Modesto Kid @ 144: Google "cuckold" with safe search off. Go on. I dare you.

It gets better.

This morning, on my way to work, two late-teen girls got on the bus, sat together, and held hands the whole time.

It does get better.

You never seem to see "wittol" these days, though.

(The term 'wittol' would be more appropriate for the way they're using 'cuckold,' by the way. I think of the latter as meaning one who doesn't know what's going on. In the course of verifying all this, I've also run into 'cuckquean,' which seems to have its place in internet smut as well.)

Janet Brennan Croft @ 128: I have that house dream too, except that it's not about moving into a new house. I always dream that I open a door in a house I've lived in for years, and discover a whole huge suite of beautiful rooms with all kinds of luxury items. I always think "This was here all along?!"

Inversely, I also dream that I walk down the street or look out the window, and discover that my house is just blocks from a really bad neighborhood, the kind that's basically a war zone, and I had somehow never had any idea. In this dream I always think "I've got to get out of here. But who's going to buy this place with a neighborhood like that? I'm trapped here!"

When I was having really bad anxiety symptoms, I would often dream of being in a house where the front door kept falling off its hinges, or the doorknob and deadbolt kept falling out. In these dreams there was always a murderer approaching the house. I was frantically trying to secure the front door before he got there and killed me, but it kept falling apart.

Lately I've been having dreams that a road or a huge shopping center or industrial complex is being built literally in my parents' backyard, like inches from their house. I'm upset but completely helpless; it's a fait accompli.

House dreams are interesting. In mine, the house tends to be a fairly obvious metaphor for the self.

Nancy Lebovitz #126: It's up to three books; the last of them resolves the original problem, but IMHO does have sufficient trailing hooks, that she could continue the series if she wants. And no, not everyone survives to the end, not even of book 2....

"World's dullest action scene" <snorfle>, but that's actually pretty brief, and it does set up a lot of stuff for that book and the next. Besides kicking the Orphans into action (so much for careful planning and reconnoitering), it gives them information, a little extra muscle for later, and a number of handicaps for the meantime....

Diatryma #127: Well, that's the "outward bound" half of the "arrivals" theme, and it's characteristic of this story type: liminal character(s) find problem extending between this world/land and another, so they need to venture into the other world(s) to fix it. However, if the series does continue, I'd expect a bit more "home action" as Brenda deals with her other heritage, and the surviving Orphans start dealing with loose ends, including fallout from the trilogy climax. (Cynfgvp Fhetrel sbe Sylvat Pynj?)

HLN: Area woman does the second half of her Emergency Response Officer training, learning firefighting and evacuation.

This meant training with a CO₂ extinguisher and a fire hose, putting out a flaming cooking pan with a fire blanket, and smothering the flames on an ignited dummy (all tremendously enjoyable). It also involved participating in an office-clearing drill twice: once as a searcher, once as an ordinary person needing to be found and removed from the building. Area woman slightly smug that she was the only one not found by the search team (hiding under a desk).

Area woman also pleased to have purchased a CO₂ fire extinguisher for her home, as well as another fire blanket (the training company sells them at cost). Is now considering smoke detectors for the main bedrooms (there's already one per floor in the common spaces) and just one more fire blanket (one for each floor of the house).

Area woman did not like the training videos very much.

Random thought while contemplating the sickly-sweetness of a granola bar I was eating: How did the sickle come to be perceived as the epitome of sweetness?

According to the newsletter of the Annals of Improbable Research, quite a few of this year's Ig Nobel winners are from the Netherlands.

Serge Broom @153:

This weekend I think I made someone's week by saying "Thank you for that lucid description description of signal transduction in cardiovascular muscle, but to ask an unrelated question, aren't you the Dr. So-and-So who plays accordion for the Ig Nobel prize ceremony?" When, in the resulting conversation he learned that both me and my better half knew our Tom Lehrer, I think it made his month.

On the personal-privacy front: Europe vs. Facebook: It's on!

>Jews With Horns @ 139, 140

Come to think of it, Dad was a Jew with horns. About half a dozen by time he retired, 22 years ago. 2 Bb trumpets, a cornet, C and D trumpets, an A piccolo trumpet. No rotary-valve trumpets, though, as he stopped playing in symphony orchestras before that particular revival started.

You can see a picture of him with his primary Bb horn here, c. 1975, bottom row center (Syd Baker). Also his 1970s jacket. I think he still had it in the closet when he died. Who knows? Loud plaids could have come back into style.

Nancy @ 133: Keeping the women down. Well, if you hang out with Orthodox Feminists and their "supporters" (fifth column, e.g. Conservative rabbis who already have egalitarianism), you get the impression that the Orthodox have been keeping women down, not letting them have their God-given rights in synagogue.

Caroline @ 149: I just had that first dream of yours a couple of weeks ago. I was in my uncle's room at my grandparents' apartment, looking in the closet, and there was a door that lead to a few steps down to a big electronics lab, filled with pre-1950 (when he moved out for college and forever) equipment. Brick walls, benches, shelves, meters, bins of parts, papers, etc.

Bits of reality underlying the dream: yes, there was a semi-hidden door in that closet, but it led to a small bookshelf area. Uncle Dick was into electronics (he was mainly a philosophy prof), and in fact had an electronics lab in his basement, where he designed and built obscure types of audio equipment.

Angiportus @108: If a Day doesn't involve time off from work and/or Food, I don't need to hear about it. I especially don't need to hear about it if I'm supposed to go out and Buy Stuff. Hmph.

By contrast, I entirely approve of National Ice Cream Day, as this has resulted, more than once, in free! ice cream! And what's not to like about that?

A little appalled that my closest B&N - by no means a small store, and perched in the middle of a tourist/local attraction - has neither of the books I'm looking for in stock: a hotly anticipated urban fantasy frontlist HC title that streeted yesterday, or a fairly well regarded midlist horror/fantasy debut. Every other store within a 10 mile radius has them, but not the three floor monstrosity within a 10 minute bus ride.

Do they even sell books anymore? Whose fault is this? Supply chain? The buyers? Is the customer base entirely stereotypically airheaded l.a. jackwagons and gormless slack-jawed tourists who come to gape at that one guy they saw on the tee-vee once, and so don't encourage the buyers to, I don't know ACTUALLY KEEP BOOKS IN STOCK AND ORDER NEW ONES?

As with most things involving books I'm taking this rather personally, but man, if this had happened when I was buying the eReader, I probably would have gone with a Kindle.

Chris W @ 154: Cool!

The aforementioned Uncle Dick (in the post queued for moderation; to some extent this is a test to see if his nickname is a "Word of Power") was at Harvard with Lehrer (diff. departments) for a year, and subsequently bought all his records, so we grew up with Lehrer songs. I think my brother took them off to college, where they got badly warped in storage.

Jon Baker

His nickname is not a Word of Power. Your link formation, on the other hand, is sweet and tasty to the gnomes.

Check at preview! Dilute! Dilute! Okay!

nerdycellist @157: I live about a 10 minute walk from one of only 3 B&Ns in Queens--a good-sized, 2-storey store--and work about 5 minutes from a _huge_ B&N in Union Square. I routinely have to ask them to order specific titles for me, as all too often neither store has the book I'm looking for on the shelf. The Manhattan store has a tiny romance section. The Queens store has a tiny SF/F section. Are the populations they serve that different?

However, in my experience, the store is perfectly happy to order a title for you and you don't have to pay for it unless you decide you want it (and you can look at it and decline to purchase). Though that means two trips to the story and you still have to cope with that moment of sharp disappointment.

I've even had B&N store personnel go into the back room to hunt down books for me that "should" have been on the shelf but weren't.

Borders personnel were never that nice to me. The only trouble I've ever had at a B&N was from a hipster-looking fellow working the Nook counter in Union Square who obviously assessed me as "old and therefore technically illiterate" and whose primary response to my questions about the device (when my mother was thinking of buying one) were, basically, "she should come to us for tech support." Whereas the older guy at the Forest Hills B&N answered tons of questions (and eventually sold me the Color Nook I now own).

All that said, I hate that moment when you get to the shelf and the book you want Is Not There! Aaaaaaaa!

(now, if I really want it and I have my Nook with me and it's not a graphic novel, I buy it electronically)

[OIC. Resubmitting. Tnx. JJB.]

>Jews With Horns @ 139, 140

Come to think of it, Dad was a Jew with horns. About half a dozen by time he retired, 22 years ago. 2 Bb trumpets, a cornet, C and D trumpets, an A piccolo trumpet. No rotary-valve trumpets, though, as he stopped playing in symphony orchestras before that particular revival started.

You can see a picture of him with his primary Bb horn here, c. 1975, bottom row center (Syd Baker). Also his 1970s jacket. I think he still had it in the closet when he died. Who knows? Loud plaids could have come back into style.

Nancy @ 133: Keeping the women down. Well, if you hang out with Orthodox Feminists and their "supporters" (fifth column, e.g. Conservative rabbis who already have egalitarianism), you get the impression that the Orthodox have been keeping women down, not letting them have their God-given rights in synagogue.

Caroline @ 149: I just had that first dream of yours a couple of weeks ago. I was in my uncle's room at my grandparents' apartment, looking in the closet, and there was a door that lead to a few steps down to a big electronics lab, filled with pre-1950 (when he moved out for college and forever) equipment. Brick walls, benches, shelves, meters, bins of parts, papers, etc.

Bits of reality underlying the dream: yes, there was a semi-hidden door in that closet, but it led to a small bookshelf area. Uncle Dick was into electronics (he was mainly a philosophy prof), and in fact had an electronics lab in his basement, where he designed and built obscure types of audio equipment.

Charlie, Happy Birthday!

Alan 61: Congratulations! Also, what Laura and abi said. And everyone else.

Lizzy 92: Congratulations, and may it be so.

Kip 105: Magnificent! Thanks for that.

Nancy 133: Do you think short ugly merchant is part of the anti-Semitic memeplex?

Absolutely. One word: Rumplestiltskin.

Actually someone had to tell me Rumplestiltskin was an anti-Semitic story; I'm ashamed I didn't figure it out for myself. The ugly dwarf with a) the long unpronounceable name and b) the talent for making money seemingly out of nothing, who c) makes a business deal that's considered unfair by the no-longer-as-desperate partner, and d) wants to take your child for some unspecified but no doubt nefarious purpose...well, it stinks of (premodern European) anti-Semitism fairly intensely.

John 137: On the contrary, Ron Jeremy is always depicted as horny.

TMK 143: The late Alexei Kondratiev taught me that Cernunnos (a Celtic Horned God) has horns only when he's in our world, and he only comes to our world when he's been murdered in the Otherworld by his wife's lover: thus a cuckold, and hence the traditional horn idea for cuckolds generally. So he taught; but I think there's room for ovogallic uncertainty there.

Ibid., 152: I assume you're kidding.

Serge 153: I always thought Ig was Alfred's good-for-nothing younger brother.

Melissa Singer -

These two books were actually of interest to my roommate - well, both of us, but the money would be coming out of her pocket and she would get to read them first, so therefore they couldn't just be downloaded. I checked online and was so shocked that both of those titles were out of stock in the one store I also called them, assuming maybe there was a computer error. They confirmed that those books weren't in store, although they claimed their shipment of "Aloha From Hell" had just not arrived yet (but all the other stores were fine? I can't remember the last time I saw a book with a street date NOT delivered weeks ahead of the date with crazy warning stickers about the consequences of putting the book out early) and offered to order. But then, why have a brick & mortar if not to offer instant gratification? As long as I have to wait until the weekend to get a book, I may as well use that as an excuse to make a field trip to the new Redondo Beach Mysterious Galaxy.

I've worked B&N in both NYC and the far suburbs of Milwaukee and I generally know how things work. I know the name-tag on the floor has no control over anything and to be honest, they've been nothing but nice and polite to me. But I also know that the buyers often tweak their stock to reflect their customers, which is why for instance my UWS B&N carried a huge psychiatry section rather than just the self-help and pop psych that my Milwaukee store did. That's why I'm equally frustrated with the store for not deeming frontlist genre stuff important and also, I'm frustrated with this city and its shallow bullshit culture dragging all my favorite institutions down to its level.

TMK, #152: I think you're being confused by "false friends" here. Rather than being related to sickles, "sickly-sweet" is related to sickness; it sounds to me like an elision from "sickeningly sweet".

I said hello to The Wonderful World Of Concussion yesterday afternoon, spending an evening in the ER.

When I slipped on the wet floor ("Incontinent Dog" will be the name of my next rock band*), I at first thought I'd only landed on my butt, which hurt a lot. But my head felt like it should be puffy and swollen on the left side, only it wasn't; but it felt like it was. And the lights seemed bright, a lot brighter than normal. And my thinking was foggy and slow.

All that (wrong signals from the nervous system, overly bright lights, half-speed thinking) made me think (slowly) that I might have hit my head in the fall too. But I didn't remember hitting my head, which was yet another reason to worry.

So I had one of our housemates drive me over to the Mayo Hospital ER. (We have another hospital and ER less than a mile from our house, but my primary doctor is with Mayo, plus Mayo's ER has a lot less traffic and can usually get you in and out in a few hours, whereas the closer hospital usually has a minimum wait time of about eight hours. The ten-mile difference is worth it.)

While waiting for examination and a cat scan, it was interesting to see how my mind was working. Idle thoughts, "daydreaming", were much more like actual night dreams, going off in odd little unexpected directions. The name "Esme Savage" popped into my mind at one point, for absolutely unknown reasons; it'd be a good character name for a story, though, so I might use it someday.

Cat scan came out okay, so I got diagnosed with a mild concussion and basically told to take it easy for a few days. Called off from work, slept quite a bit last night. Doing better today.

*(I'm growing increasingly frustrated by our dog's bladder problems, which have been going on for months and have had only temporary abatements with antibiotics and other medications. The latest round of antibiotics seemed to be helping again, but in the last few days... twice more just today. I'm about ready to scream. At the veterinarian, not the dog.)

Xopher @ 163... The late Alexei Kondratiev

Did he live in Queens?

Bruce Arthurs @ 166... Ouch.

Bruce, I hope you're going to be okay. And best hopes/wishes for your puppy dog, too.

I've been reluctant to click on the "Prairie Dogs, Roomba, Bossa Nova" Particle because I'm afraid it will turn out not to be some sort of ultra-awesome funny-animals-and-robots musical version of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." And I like the version in my head better.

Bruce 166: What Serge said. Owwies.

Serge 167: I think so, yes. Did you know him? He spoke at least a smattering of 42 languages, and was fluent in (IIRC) 14 of them, including all six major Celtic languages (Gaelics of Scotland, Ireland, and Man; Cornish (!), Welsh, and Breton). He was an enormous resource on Celtic and Slavic mythology and history.

When he died, it was like losing the library of Alexandria.

Bruce Arthurs #166: Ow. Wishing you a quick and straightforward recovery from your fall. Alas, I haven't a clue about canine bladder problems.

Andrew @170 -- the video in question was funny, even hilarious; but I am prepared to endorse your idea as way, way better.

HLN: Local man went on impromptu Occupy Little Rock march with sixty of his new best friends and had a wonderful time.

Bruce Arthurs: Ouch! Hope you and doggie feel better. Perhaps a different vet, with a different approach?

nerdycellist: that kind of store-manager control grows increasingly rare, alas. Your annoyance is generally understandable on all fronts.

#163 ::: Xopher HalfTongue:

That's the kind of thing I mean. If even Jewish people have to be told that Rumplestiltskin has a basis in anti-Semitism, then it seems to be it isn't contributing to current anti-Semitism. Or do you think it's rumbling along in the subconsciouses of non-Jews?

I don't think I'd have figured it out even if I'd been told that a well-known fairy tale has anti-Semitic roots.

This being said, it's different from a lot of standard fairy tales in that many of them have a message of generosity to strangers-- the youngest child succeeds because they're generous to the people and animals they meet on the road, and the older siblings weren't, but iirc, there's no generosity in Rumplestiltskin.

Actually, it's a little like Hansel and Gretel-- the main characters are made vulnerable to the monster by lack of loyalty from their own people people.

In any case, I've taken it that Bernie Madoff has proven that Americans generally aren't primed for serious anti-Semitism.

#166 ::: Bruce Arthurs:

Best wishes for you and your dog.

Xopher @ 163: Horny, yes, but only one horn (I note he blew his own), and not where racist folklore traditionally places them. Thus do I refute enthalpy. Or maybe I thus demonstrate it. Hm. I'll have to give that some thought.

Nancy 176: I don't think it contributes to current anti-Semitism. I just think it had its ORIGINS in (medieval/"Renaissance") anti-Semitism. I don't think most modern anti-Semites (at least in the West) believe in the blood libel, which is what makes the Queen the heroine of the story.

And you're right. There's really no virtue of any kind in that story. There's a liar, a total nutbar, a desperate woman, and an exploiter. I guess the least horrible person would be the girl whose father bragged she could spin straw into gold, and though she cheats the evil Jew character, it's to save the life of her son (by the nutbar who locked her up in the first place). So she's forced by circumstances to compromise her integrity to save the life of her child.

None of which excuses the anti-Semitism, medieval though it is.

Bruce Arthurs @166: Glad it was a mild concussion, and that you got the advice to take it easy for a few days.

It irritates me that popular culture treats concussion as a trivial thing — people are routinely clobbered into unconsciousness and are none the worse for it half an hour later. In the movie "Tangled" (the jumping off point for a recent thread), one of the characters is knocked unconscious with a frying pan several times in a row. In various action dramas, the hard right to the jaw is the hero's equivalent of 'phasers on stun'.

Impressionable people might get the impression this was appropriate behavior.

Xopher @ 163:

well, it stinks of (premodern European) anti-Semitism fairly intensely.

Would that those myths had died out as early as that phrase implies. The story about baby-snatching and -eating was current in Austria and Germany in the last years of the 19th Century and possibly even later in Poland from what I've heard.

And there's still a general attitude that Jews are always (perhaps secretly) rich. My wife's closest friend, a Christian, who has known us for more than 25 years, was very surprised 10 years ago when we had money troubles because I was out of work for a year and a half. She had just automatically assumed that we must be independently wealthy, being Jews.

Question for the Fluorosphere: Who can turn the world on with her smile? I'm pretty sure it's the same person who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile, but I can't remember who it is.

I'm joking. A little on the loopy side after too little sleep, which isn't uncommon for me, but what IS rare is that I'm enjoying the hell out of it this time. Still, it's clearly time for bed.

Because I like Swinburne, so sue me.

From too much love of stonefruit,
From greed and plain deceit,
I took – ‘twas not my own fruit –
But oh! so cold and sweet,
My gluttony enslaving
My will, for I was craving
The plums that you were saving
To be a special treat.

There's a short story collection by Vivian Vande Velde called The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, in which every story is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, shuffling around the roles of hero and villain and trying out different answers to the many puzzling questions the story presents (What possessed her father to boast to the king like that? What did Rumpelstiltskin want the baby for, anyway?). There's at least two stories where Rumpelstiltskin is trying to rescue the baby from an obviously useless parent, and one where Rumpelstiltskin winds up rescuing the king from the miller's daughter.

When the subject of anti-Semitic stereotypes in fiction comes up, I always think of Rudyard Kipling's "The Treasure and the Law". It has a Jewish protagonist, unusually for the time, and seems to be an attempt to work against the stereotype of the Jew with an uncanny affinity with gold, pulling the secret strings of the world for sinister ends -- but the way Kipling does this is by presenting a protagonist who is a Jew with an uncanny affinity with gold, pulling the secret strings of the world for noble ends. It's nice that he tried, but there's still considerable room for improvement.

Xopher @ 171... He spoke at least a smattering of 42 languages, and was fluent in (IIRC) 14 of them, including all six major Celtic languages (Gaelics of Scotland, Ireland, and Man; Cornish (!), Welsh, and Breton). He was an enormous resource on Celtic and Slavic mythology and history.

Yup. That sounds like Aliocha Kondratiev. When I visited New York City in the early 1980s, I'd stay with his family. How did he pass away? I lost touch with the Kondratiev Gang, even though I have fond memories of those visits, especially the time in 1983 when I walked around Greenwich Village with his sister Kira and some of her friends, and Kira appreciated it when one of my puns sent her stalker scurrying away.

Serge Broom @185: [..] Kira appreciated it when one of my puns sent her stalker scurrying away.

I always appreciated you have a talent, but I never realized it was a superpower!

Rob Rusick @ 186... With great power comes great responsibility. What actually happened is that the stalker was a neighbor a few bricks short of a full load who had a thing for her and who followed us from a distance. He eventually got the message that his presence wasn't requested, at which point he approached Kira.

HIM: "As far as I'm concerned, you can go back to Alaska and turn into an iceberg!"
ME: "Would you prefer an ugly berg."
HIM: "Huh?"
HER: (very grateful smile in my direction)

Open threadiness: today's Greenwald column makes this as an aside, but it's worth repeating:

Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts

We've quietly swallowed one extraordinary claim of executive power after another, and one nasty foreign policy action (bombings, invasions, alliances with brutal dictators, assassinations, etc.) after another. We hardly even notice, and each president who does these things can count on most of the respectable media in the US backing them up, even to the point of ignoring or distorting critics. He can also count on his party base, and the support of increasingly powerful intelligence services and the military, and all their supporters.

The result is that we all get used to it. What policies or ideas sound crazy to us mostly depends on what we are used to hearing--and among the powerful in the US, routinely killing foreigners is universally accepted policy, and people arguing against it get painted as extremists (know-nothing isolationists or America-hating dirty hippies, depending on which image will work better to discredit them.)

HLN: One of my co-workers found a dog on her stoop last night. She already has a dog and suspects the new dog is expecting (which may be why it was abandoned). She's trying to find a home for it or a rescue organization.

She says, "She's medium sized, light brown, maybe a pitt-mix mutt, and looks like she's actually about to have puppies. She's really sweet, but we already have a dog and can't afford to take care of another one (plus puppies). If anyone may be interested in taking her in, or knows of someone else who might want to, or knows of a good organization that might take her and help please let me know."

She's in NYC, but I'm not sure which borough.

Under normal circumstances, I can take medieval antisemitism in stride, merely rolling my eyes at the Prioress' Tale and so on.

Then I see, on television, a group of modern fundamentalist Christians attending a staged Passion Play, and I remember my classes that mentioned Obergammerau and what happened every year after the staging, and I think of Nehemiah Scudder and how Heinlein's fiction looks uncomfortably like prophecy, and I start to fucking PANIC.

This is not a nice feeling.

Xopher @163, you knew Alexei?? Small world! For the past two years I've chaired the committee for the Alexei Kondratiev Award for Best Student Paper at Mythcon. He was a lovely, lovely man. There was a group in New York working to get his papers together -- I don't know what happened, they may have run out of steam, but I'd hate to see his papers and library dispersed if there was some way to get them donated to a library somewhere.

I got to the root of the whole Rumplestiltsthing back in 1971, with the discovery and publication of the ur-version of the epic, Rumplestiltstein.

(I think I even ran it here at least once, so this time I'm just linking.)

And Serge @185, you too? I believe it was heart failure. Very unexpected.

Dave Luckett, extra points for avoiding the obvious, and nicely done!

I confess to being prejudiced against Swinburne, because he wrote something tarty about poor Oscar when he passed on, prompting me to pencil a notation in the margin of the book to the effect that, if there's a Hell for pigs, then swine burn too.

Suzette Haden Elgin is disabled and not expected to return to writing or blogging.

Her husband says: "She has some health issues and has Alzheimer's. Combined they deprive her of lucidity a great deal of the time and reduce her ability to process or cope."

While not completely unexpected (she's elderly and has had some major stresses in her life in the last couple of years), this is still very sad news.

Melissa Singer, Lila, Lee @OT 164 729-31.

Many thanks for the suggestions about black rice! Eventually Mme Barebones ended up making it into a pilav (roasted the grains in oil, and then boiled) which was pretty good. Unfortunately, the supermarket I bought it in has decided to stop stocking it.

Incidentally, a quick look through my View All By reveals that previous food-stuffs I've posted about on Making Light include cuttlefish in ink, beef in black beer (aka beef schadenfreude) and purple carrots. In the interests of establishing that famille Barebones doesn't subsist entirely on foodstuffs from the 'black and purple' food group I should probably mention that the black rice got served with
this.

Rikibeth @ 190 ::: "This is not a nice feeling."

On the plus side, you might observe that Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum— true believers all, and the closest thing to national-level politicians that dominionist Christians have currently got these days— are widely regarded in the U.S. political press as the American equivalent of British monster raving loonies.

The dominionists are constitutionally just not really capable of managing the process that would be required for them to acquire the power necessary to make your fears into reality. They're legitimate fears, yes, and I know they're real. I don't mean to dismiss them. I have the same fears too, because in addition to being anti-semitic, they also don't have very savory views of my religious affinity group, either. I sympathize, I really do.

But "PANIC" may not really be warranted until they level up their game somewhat.

Chris W. @ 154: Signaling in cardiovascular muscle, eh? I might need to meet this fellow in a professional capacity, as I'm working on modeling the effects of adrenergic stimulation on ventricular cells, which involves quite the signaling process.

(I do also know my Tom Lehrer, so perhaps the meeting would go well.)

I'm really sorry to hear about Suzette Haden Elgin. She was one of my favorite writers when I was growing up. We worked on one book together, later.

HLN: Seattle man is pleased to note that his mass is now consistently below 100kg (down from 110), and expects it to be 95 at the highest by the new year.

rob rusick @179: the cartoon "archer" actually makes a big deal of this. in at least one episode, the characters all sympathize with a guy who's been knocked out - "oh wow, that is SUPER bad for you" - and who has to see a neurologist because of it

xopher halftongue @181: not an answer, but your phrasing reminds me of "middleman", an awesome one-season tv show in a very comic book style. (middleman was a tv script first, then a comic book, then an actual show.)
the main character would have similar "stump the band" conversations with a friend on her way to her apartment.

#158 nerdy

The local B&N has been getting multiple copies of books in -weeks- after the release date (the specific example of Cast in Ruin, by Michelle Sagara--no copies for a month, then seven or eight of them a month AFTER publication?? ....)

Meanwhile, on display in on the first floor in the New Books section near the up escalator, is a plethora of books by one of the Fux slime... grrrrr.....

The store expanded its teen paranormal section to half the size of the adult romance section, which is about half the size of the adult SF/F including media tie-in books, section, some weeks back. The romance section is half the size it was a couple years ago, the SFF section is probably about the same size as it was. Teen paranormal didn't its own space until earlier this year when all sorts of things moved around.

I was in the store Tuesday and the notation on the computer display for the new Laura Anne Gilman book was "check with bookseller" or some such, it was not showing as in inventory in the store.

#166 Bruce
Have you considered crating the dog?

#176 Nancy
Some of Madoff's most prominent victims were Jewish charities and Jews.

Xopher: Mary Tyler Moore? That's a line from the opening theme from at least season two (I found a Youtube video of it). I would bet a fair bit of money that it has been two decades at least since the last time I saw that opening, and yet I remembered this. The human brain is just flipping weird.

# 197 j h

Consider Sens Paul and DeMint's most recent legislative initiatives, which include:

from e.g.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r112:1:./temp/~r112auIkfD:e38355:

and

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r112:1:./temp/~r112auIkfD:e49172:

SA 773. Mr. DeMINT submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by

[Page: S6611] GPO's PDF

him to the bill H.R. 2112, making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

SEC. __. REPEAL OF THE DODD-FRANK WALL STREET REFORM AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Public Law 111-203) is repealed, and the provisions of law amended by such Act are revived or restored as if such Act had not been enacted.

SA 768. Mr. DeMINT submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 2112, making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

Sec. __. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for mifepristone, commonly known as RU-486.

SA 774. Mr. DeMINT (for himself and Mr. Vitter) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 2112, making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

SEC. __. OPPOSITION TO FUNDING BY THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND FOR THE EUROPEAN FINANCIAL STABILITY FACILITY.

The United States Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund shall use the voice and vote of the United States to oppose--

(1) the use of any funds that include any contributions from the United States to the Fund for the European Financial Stability Facility;

(2) any additional funding provided by the Fund for any program related to the Facility; and

(3) any increase in the authority of the Fund that may be used to provide support for the Facility or any such program.

SA 777. Mr. PAUL (for himself and Mr. DeMint) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 2112, making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

Sec. __. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to implement the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (Public Law 111-353) (or any amendment made by such Act).

SA 778. Mr. PAUL (for himself and Mr. DeMint) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed to amendment SA 738 proposed by Mr. Inouye to the bill H.R. 2112, making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

On page 83, between lines 20 and 21, insert the following:

Sec. X. None of the funds made available by this Act to the Food and Drug Administration may be used for the purchase of weapons or ammunition to be used in enforcement activities, including raids.

====
Those are samples of a few of the riders DeMint and Paul and their ilk are attempting to "amend" the bill with, many of them completely UNrelated to the contents of the body of the bill itself, they are trying to stuff it full of their mean-spirited, narrow-minding, misogynistic, "Gospel so cold it would freeze up the joy in your heart" intolerant bigoted ideology....

DeMint went above the radar yesterday when the interpretation of one of his amendments--the RU-486 one of the ones I read looks the most likely--is that it would ban telemedicine advising women about abortions.... which confused me until I ran across

Separate Internet, Video-Conferencing, and Phone Systems for Abortion?
By
Blog for Choice
on June 17, 2011 9:25 AM |
....
The U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment on June 16 that could make it impossible for a woman to even talk with her doctor about medical abortion over the Internet and through videoconferencing.

Who's behind this terrible idea? Anti-choice Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). Rep. King has been quite active this year, attacking women's rights at every turn. This is just the latest in his War on Women

The link from that article, describes how women in rural areas are getting RU-486 prescribed and its application overseen by an MD, using video connections over the Internet, meaning that they don't have to travel hundreds of miles taking hours or days and income they might not have to spare, to get to a clinic where there are trained MD able and willing to oversee them taking RU-486 to comply with the ever-more-draconian laws in the USA....

paula:

Were these intended as poison pills to keep the bill from passing?

Bruce Cohen #180: There was a celebrated case in late nineteenth century Hungary that could have occurred in late thirteenth century Hungary.

Paula #204: Why on earth do Paul and DeMint want to sink the euro?

nerdycellist @164: Nothing to add, just admiring this finely crafted rant. Especially the last paragraph.

Fragano:

"So, what would be the craziest, most irresponsible thing we could do right now?"

Non nobis, sic semper, Allahu akbar.

shadowsong 201: I was joking about this.

I'm picking my cat up from LaGuardia at 10:00 Saturday morning. (pause for cheers) How early do I have to set off, in order to miss traffic? *Is* there traffic from the Port Jefferson end of things at that hour on a Saturday? Once I get the cat, I don't care; I just really, really don't want to be late meeting him, since his soon-to-be-former person is on a tight schedule.

@TexAnne:

I used to go to SUSB; things were pretty dead out there on Saturday mornings. Especially before the mall and such open. There will be some traffic on the LIE and Northern State in Nassau and Queens of course, but we're not talking rush hour by any means.

As for actual travel time, I honestly no longer remember.

are widely regarded in the U.S. political press as the American equivalent of British monster raving loonies.

I wish we had the monster raving loonies. They have some basic honesty that's missing in the Republican party.

eric @214 / jh woodyatt @197 Honestly, I think the political press is using the GOP Monster Raving Loonies + Pizza Dude as a foil to make Perry look moderate and Romney look presidential.

Rejoice, O Fluorospheric Mods! Your worries are over!

Well, well, well... The musical "Les Misérables" is being turned into a movie, with Russell Crowe as Javert and... here's the part that might interest TexAnne... Jean Valjean will be played by Hugh Jackman. Maybe the latter will take off his shirt when he climbs the barricades.

Serge Broom @267: Jean Valjean will be played by Hugh Jackman. Maybe the latter will take off his shirt when he climbs the barricades.

*drools*

Further open threadiness: Today, October 20th, was Spirit Day a.k.a. Wear Purple Day, to raise awareness of anti-queer bullying and honor the memories of young people who have committed suicide over the years because of anti-queer bullying. I didn't wear purple today because the purple shirt I bought for Spirit Day last year mysteriously disappeared after I brought all my stuff home for the summer. Nonetheless, it is an issue that cuts very close to home for me. I've never had to experience anti-queer bullying directed at me personally, but there was a point where I was afraid I might attempt suicide during my freshman year of high school. The full details are under friends-lock on my LJ--it was by far the darkest time of my life, so dark that I usually don't talk about it now that I am a much happier person these days.

And though I still have five more hours to go in my time zone, I'll announce it now so I don't have to post again: Tomorrow, October 21, is my twentieth birthday. I will officially no longer be a teenager. This is frightening because I was barely a teenager (thirteen) when I first stumbled upon Making Light. Have I really been reading ML for six years? Doesn't seem like it.

Er, make that @217.

W/R/T antisemitic stereotypes, there's at least one local loon here who believes "the Rothschilds have all the money and are secretly controlling everything." This would not be all that worrisome except that said loon is married to a major philanthropic donor.

I can see how the Ferengi could be read as antisemitic stereotypes, but the thing that strikes me about them is that "ferengi" is Hindi for "European", something that gave me the same delighted shock when I learned it as that "smeagol" means "loophole" in Swedish.

Wait, what happened to Suzette Haden Elgin?

Alan @218 Happy Birthday 5 hours early. I didn't know about Spirit Day until I saw a post about it this morning. I was thinking that I didn't own any purple shirts until I remembered that I bought one two weeks ago, and it was CLEAN!

Not sure anyone noticed, and didn't see too much (non University of Washington) purple today, but then again, I didn't really go anywhere either.

Happy Birthday (tomorrow) Alan!

Larry @222: I probably would have gone to UW if the sheer size wasn't so overwhelming. I go to CWU (Central Washington University, for those not in the know), which has a very well-respected accounting program. CWU has a fairly large queer population (larger than you would think for a university with 10,000 students), but it's an otherwise very conservative area outside of the university. And it's so much smaller and isolated from other cities/towns that it's been frustrating trying to meet other available queer guys. My friends have ended up deciding to go through the friends-of-friends route to help me find potential dates since I really don't know many queer males. Dating prospects will be so much better once I get my B.S. in accounting and move back to the west side.

Nancy, I'm wondering that myself. I'm kind of worried. At least I know they had moved from the rural house to a town apartment near where they used to live.

#205 & 207 albatross and Fragano

DeMint & Paul & others [Bachman is another, Sessions... the neurons are retrieving some additional names now ] nowwhose names are not firing neural retrieval quickly for their names, but various of them have gotten very non-postive mentioning on Making LIght, make nutbar conspiracy subscribers look like credible proponents of rational theory.

They're not trying to poison-pill the legislation, they're doing their version of maneuvers analogous to financial earmarks--only instead of studding the bill with handouts of money to their pet projects for their districts, they're studding the bill with prohbitions and blockages and gag orders and repeals of any and all prior legislation they object to....

It gets scarier, a bunch of Democrats are in seats for which the elections are in November 2012. The Repukes elected last year have five more years before elections, and those elected three years ago, three years. The frothing-at-the-mouth inflexible intolerants highjacked the House of Representative last election (the fellow who was screaming at the President at the State of the Union message was about as respectful as a rabid weasel, or maybe I'm insulting rabid weasels.

These are people who make look dogmatically flexible and open-minded the infamous Congresscritter whose line during the hearings for the impeachment of Richard Milhous Nixon was "Don't confuse me with the facts" when he was explaining how it didn't matter what may have actually happened, he was not going to cast a vote condemning Nixon and vote towards removing Nixon from office....

They sort of remind me someone who failed to get promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, which is all but automatic. He was firmly convinced that the Sino-Soviet split was a propaganda ploy aimed at the United States...

Any theories about why anti-Semitism has been so much less intense in America than it was in Europe?

#227 Nancy
The history of it here is much more recent --European antisemitism did not exist in the Americas before the arrival of European anti-semites, and when the Europeans did arrive, they had other concerns as primary considerations... for that matter:
a) the Dutch colonists who colonized New York, had a higher degree of religious tolerance than most of the rest of Europe, and there was a substantial Jewish community in the Netherlands mostly emigrated from the Iberian Pennisula following the choice of expulsion, conversion, or death offerred by first Spain and then Portugal (although Portugal was even nastier than Spain regarding options--it was more convert or die there with a lot less opportunity apparently to emigrate. There were a lot of short-term conversions, then decamping and reverting to Judaism, that occurred....
b) I picked up a book about Jewish pirates of the Caribbean. They had what one might regard as a mad-on regarding Spain and Portugal for reasons implicit in a) above, and becoming pirates in the Caribbean and privateers working out of places like Port Royal, allowed them some retribution....
c) While Massachusett Bay Colony was a religiously intolerant place, Roger Williams and his followers rebelled against the Massachusetts leadership and founded Rhode Island. Ironically, the religious tolerance written into the charter, came out of not the desire for religious tolerance in the abstract, but the desire for those who were following the tenets of Protestantism preached by Roger Williams, to be Christians out of not legal mandate and enforcement of state religion, but rather, of the conscious choice--and only a state where there was religious tolerance, would people be free to consciously choose Protestant Christianity.

That's not to say that there haven't been virulent anti-semites in the USA -- Prescott Bush was a Nazi collaborator but his buddies kept the full extent of his treason--and that it was treason--secret for something like 50 or more years--the was a lawsuit which the damned Supreme Court was it, threw out claiming the statute of limitations had run out. The lawsuit was filed when the proof came out, until then there was no actual proof of what had long been suspected.... (I think I or someone else wrote that up on Making Light months or years ago).

Jews were banned from all sorts of clubs and institutions, Harvard has a quota of how many Jews it allowed well into the 20th century, Grosse Point, Michigan in the 1960s was off-limits to Jews, the US Army and then Air Force also were averse to promoting Jews to general officer rank even in the 1950s and 1960s.... (the father of a cousin's wife had that particular glass ceiling applied).

There -were- I think lynchings....

One of the things I noticed, in a program on genealogy, was that the Jews were organised. They helped each other. And they also kept detailed records, not just births, marriages, and deaths, but how each synagogue was helping Jews in trouble.

The Jews passing through England, from Europe to America, knew where to go when they arrived.

Maybe the difference is that things are better-documented, but I can see how that could both feed anti-semitic myths, and avert them. They were a different sort of immigrant community in how they slotted in to American society.

#229 [myself]

Since the USA and the other countries in the western hemisphere are much newer societies with newer traditions and cultural memes than European societies (eastern hemisphere diseases having wiped out most of the societies and people who were here before the European colonizers arrived, from the infectious disease carriers who were on-board Columbus' ships)

(note that dear darling Messrs. Paul and DeMint want to apparently defund all actions regarding inspection and quarantine of materials suspect for harboring pests, being imported.... one of the effects of the creation of the DHS and the hysteria about immigrants, terrorist fantasy scenarios taking primacy for funding and attention, is that the inspections for incoming pests and invasives species be they animal, vegetable, fungus, bacteria, virus, or whatever, dropped down to where the Asian longhorn beetle devastated the trees of Worcester Massachusetts and are threatening the hardwood forests of the northeast--the quarantine of wood in Worcester and tree inspection and felling of infected trees and disposal of them failed to be sufficiently effective measures to prevent the things from spreading, and where other pests have gotten into the USA --due to lack of inspection and clueful inspectors being used as inspectors instead of shunted into stupid DHS hysteria alleged terrorist tail-chasings....)

the institutionalized anti-Semitism of Europe didn't have the root-depth of the situation in Europe--there were embedded cultural stereotypes being applied from generation to generation with the same reinforcement of "see that stream, that was where a Jew sold a horse to your great-grandfather that turned lame two days later!" or "the Jewish tax collectors 200 years ago came into this very house and...." etc. New places mean some degree of new tradition and new adaption and changes in thinking.

Also, there were a lot of Jewish peddlers who brough much-needed goods our around the frontier particularly, if one is dependent upon a merchant for needles, nails, etc., antagonizing the merchant is a bad idea!

Perhaps additional factors were that with more -space- and without long-institutionalizd ghettos and without again reinforced long histories of real or perceived ancestral grudges with the very geography being reminders and reinforcement, those encouraged thinking differently and being less mindlessly repeating word and actions (actions being intolerance and abusiveness). The mobility level was a lot higher, and it wasn;t the same people all spouting and spreading and reinforcing the same posion to the same degree....

The Modesto Kid @216 Alas, that that one isn't true.

Alan Yee: Happy Birthday!

Paula Lieberman @ 228: The most notorious lynching of a Jew was the case of Leo Frank. It's a sad story in more ways than one.

In Lisa Goldstein's alternate Elizabethan tale "Paradise Is A Walled Garden", a young Englishwoman who travels to the Moorish Empire runs into a Jewish scientist and realizes there are no Jews in England.

Paula Lieberman #226: Some of that stuff is way past irrational. Permanent economic crisis? Class war of a kind this country hasn't seen since the Gilded Age (or possibly ever)? These people make Coughlin look sane.

I think it's a mistake to underestimate US anti-semitism; certainly, when my grandfather was a boy in NYC in the 1920's, it was significantly hostile to Jews. Jews couldn't live in Bronxville; he was routinely roughed up by "Christian" children; he was once tied into a wagon and rolled down a hill into an intersection.

My great-grandfather, his father-in-law, a well-respected and successful businessman, I asked him to describe once. "He was a good man. A good Christian man. A good, praying, church-going, Baptist man. And he hated Jews." Somehow, I'm not surprised that my grandparents left NYC right after they married and never went back.

Paula Lieberman #228: There were lynchings of Jews in the US. The most famous case happened about 15 miles from where I'm sitting, the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta in 1915.

By the way, this is why I take such a hard line on anti-Semitic imagery in popular movements. That I don't care for my causes to be smeared with false but plausible accusations of bigotry is the least of it. There's history of good causes gone bad in America when economic issues are turned into ethnic conflicts. Above, I referred to the corruption of the Populist movement. Consider the East St. Louis Riot as another example.

Dear Sirs:

Swarthy people with scary-sounding names and religions should be obliged to change to nice American names and religions and get their skin lightened. Hey presto: no more terrorism! Just isolated incidents.

Yours,

re: #201 ::: shadowsong

Which reminds me -- Thank You to whoever it was in whichever thread it was that mentioned Middleman favourably enough that I have acquired, watched, and enjoyed said program, and expect to repeat the latter two actions many times.

Nancy, #221 & Paula, #225: You appear to be responding to Melissa's response to my comment here.

Semi-local news: Seems last year's Murakami balloons were well-received, because Macy's is adding a Tim Burton balloon to the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/tim_burton_float_macys_thanksgiving_/#

Melissa Singer @242 It took me a moment to realize you meant Takashi Murakami. I spent a good minute or two imagining what a Haruki Murakami balloon would look like.

HLN: Local woman and husband leave for work in the morning, discover very sweet and affectionate orange cat outside apartment door. As devoted cat people, woman and husband spare time to offer cat scritches. Woman and husband presume cat is indoor/outdoor cat, until cat follows woman and husband into parking lot and emits heartbreaking wail. Woman and husband further espy food and water bowls near carport, and conclude that cat is lost or abandoned (suspect abandoned). Woman and husband share glances, husband beats woman to question, "So, do you want a new cat?"

Local woman is now concerned because she and husband didn't have time to isolate new cat; time was something of an issue. Woman hopes that apartment is still intact when she and husband return tonight.

Alan Yee:

Happy birthday, by the way, in the midst of all of these interesting and powerful developments. And many happy returns of the day!

Larry Brennan @ 243... There is also Jimmy T. Murakami, who directed 1980's "Battle Beyond The Stars".

And Les Murakami, longtime coach of the U of Hawai'i baseball team for whom the on-campus stadium is named.

HLN, Household Hints Dept.: Local woman discovers the absolute utility and goodness of kitty litter in dealing with fried chicken livers falling onto her new mesh and suede shoe. Says local woman, "shoe is as good as new!"

HLN: driving down street, local woman finds small Chihuahua walking down the middle of the road on three legs. Upon opening car door, dog runs over and jumps in. Trip to vet says she's unchipped, but signs are going up in the next hour, hopefully to find her family. She's a brave, sweet dog, 2/3rds the size of woman's cats - thankfully, potential new home has already been arranged.

Update to my #166, about getting a concussion in a fall: I was pretty much recovered by the next day, so I went back to work that night. I did have one strange after-effect: the Men's Room at work smelled like French Toast.

I would certainly not call this a bad thing, but it sure was a weird thing.

HLN: Woman reports that a grand piano has moved in next door. No people, just a grand piano.

The old neighbors moved out on Tuesday and had said that closing was Wednesday. On Wednesday afternoon, a piano moving truck pulled up. A grand piano was visible afterward in the picture-windowed front room, until a sheet was tacked up (presumably until a more elegant window treatment can be arranged). The piano was heard, briefly, while a van was parked in the driveway (tuner, maybe?)

Since then, no people have been observed in or around the house. Perhaps fortunately, the piano has not been heard either.

OtterB, that sounds like it belongs in the story thread! I imagine a story where the narrator is at first just bemused, and assumes that the people will be moving in shortly...but then they don't, and s/he becomes increasingly nervous as odd sounds issue from the otherwise empty apartment.

If it's a horror story, the piano is haunted by the serial killer pianist who used to own it.

If it's a paranormal romance, the piano is haunted by the romantically handsome pianist who pined away for his lady love or something.

If it's a psychological thriller, the narrator is actually slowly losing hir mind OR there's actually a human living there, but hiding.

If it's a spy story, the piano has vital secrets concealed inside it, but in such a way that wrecking the piano will destroy the secrets too.

OtterB @ #251, now there's a contest to be had.

"What piano piece should be heard emanating from that ghostly instrument?"

"Fur Elise?" "Colour My World?"

"Do you hear what I hear?"

John Cage's 4'33".

Time's New Roman

Linkmeister @253 As long as it's not "It's a Small World After All"

Xopher et al, it does seem like some kind of story. If there's something nefarious going on, my dog is probably at risk, since he's guaranteed to bark at any spy or eldritch creature trying to sneak into the house.

Perhaps it's a sapient piano. But how does it manage to get things done for it? And what does a piano want? That led to a plot line that came sufficiently alive for me that I may try to write it.

230
The eastern-European (not sure where he's from) Jewish immigrant in my sister-in-law's family tree, who's listed on the passenger list as a 'shopman', and turns up in California ten years later as a merchant, and later, roughly simultaneously, as a doctor, a manufacturer and distributor of patent medicines, and a winemaker (he got some prizes for it - back around 1900). He was a major factor in one congregation in Stockton changing from Orthodox to Reform, during the late 19th century. And he wrote at least two tracts, one on herbal medicines and one on 'Poland and Palestine'.

"what does a piano want?"

Either love or a major part in a heroic quest. Unless it's an old piano, in which case it wants a seat on the porch, in the sun, with a pitcher of tea on the stand.

Pianist envy?

On the subject of the generally milder treatment of Jews in America:

Bear with me, please. I find this disturbing, for reasons that will become clearer.

When I was a small child, we lived for a while in a common-wall duplex house. In the other side lived an elderly Hungarian couple, Mr and Mrs Boros. It was 1956, the Melbourne Olympic Games, the infamous water-polo match between Hungary and the USSR, and the Hungarian uprising. My father got to talking with Mr Boros about it.

Years later, my father told me about that conversation, which had been several hours long, over beers. Mr Boros had a fascinating life history. Briefly, he had joined the Austro-Hungarian Army as a boy soldier at the age of twelve, in 1908. He had fought through WWI, and had miraculously survived, had stayed in the Army during the period of Hungarian independence, and then fought as a senior warrant officer through WW2 on the Eastern front, and again had survived, escaping to the West in 1945. He had finally been accepted as a refugee and spent his last years in peace, in Australia.

I have the very strong feeling that if his background had been investigated with rigour, he would not have been admitted as a refugee, for he had probably committed atrocities. Why do I think this?

Mr Boros said that he had joined the army because he was the only son. That would mean that his family's total debt to the moneylender - who was, of course, Jewish - would fall on him. There was no prospect of ever paying that debt back. It had already been paid three or more times over. Any small farmer was in the same situation. It meant permanent poverty and effective serfdom, and that had been so for generations - centuries.

The army was the only way out. Jews were restrained from pursuing soldiers. But of course the conditions were very harsh, and the hitch was for - get this - twenty-five years. He would never see home or family again.

Mr Boros served willingly under German command in WW2. He said, however, that he disagreed with Hitler on the treatment of the Jews. Hitler had made serious errors there. He hadn't killed all of them.

Now, here's the thing. I look at Mr Boros, and I see myself. The monster looks back at me, and I suddenly realise that I'm staring into a mirror.

If I were to write a novelised treatment of his life, how would I treat my protagonist? I won't, though. There is no way that it wouldn't be understood as a defence of something vile beyond words, and I have no wish to offend people whom I esteem.

But here is one reason for the milder treatment of Jews in America. The United States wasn't being run by the Austrian Habsburgs. This, in my opinion, is no small point in its favour.

Paul A @ 184:

Kipling's feelings about Jews are made quite plain in "The Light That Failed", in which the protagonist's Jewish mistress is shown to be not at all a nice person primarily because she's Jewish. Not as bad as a person of really dark color, perhaps, but still one of the dusky tribe. <spit to get the taste out of my mouth/>

Paula Leiberman @ 230:

My own theory is that the lack of traditional ghettos (the kind with walls) in America made a large difference to the way Jews were treated even when antisemitism was at its peak here. Large concentrations of Jews in specific parts of a city made a tempting target for pogroms and a constant reminder of that target. Similarly, blacks in America were concentrated in specific parts of any town, and there were far more "race riots" and mass lynchings against blacks than against most other groups who were less concentrated.

Possibly of interest: pictures I took in Bodie a couple of weeks ago. Bodie was once the third largest town in California, with 10,000 residents, but is now deserted, and preserved by the state park service in a state of "arrested decay." It's very beautiful in its way.

Bruce @ #262, no walls, maybe, but even a Gentile like myself knows some of the history of New York City's Lower East Side in the 20th century. Maybe I got it from reading Irving Howe and Leo Rosten, but it stuck.

My mom has this pair of Victorian (seeming) asparagus tongs.

OhNoSecond: these pairs would be more accurate.

Could we not go for "The International Day for the Eradication of Bosses" and have done?

MikeB @ 267: Management have deemed it is not appropriate to pursue this project at this time.

Well, there's a sense in which I'm for the eradication of 'bosses', since I've got somewhat unorthodox views about what sorts of division of labour are desirable and possible for human beings.

If, on the other hand, you're in favour of the actual eradication of persons occupying managerial roles than a) you'd probably better run that suggestion past the moderators (especially the one that has recently started working in a managerial role) and b) I believe that that's been tried in one or two places. Didn't work out too well, I believe.

While we're on the subject of children's songs regarding the consumption of useful numbers*: 7 8 9.

(Though I prefer the alphabet song from that album.)

----
* Two songs. It's a GENRE.

Well, there's a sense in which I'm for the eradication of 'bosses', since I've got somewhat unorthodox views about what sorts of division of labour are desirable and possible for human beings.

If, on the other hand, you're in favour of the actual eradication of persons occupying managerial roles than a) you'd probably better run that suggestion past the moderators (especially the one that has recently started working in a managerial role) and b) I believe that that's been tried in one or two places. Didn't work out too well, I gather.

OK, it seems that I am again writing Dictionary of the Khazars as a post on Making Light. Sorry about that.

I am not in favor of the eradication of bosses. Not that I dislike bossless games like Sim City and Minecraft*, but in a game with levels and collecting items and all that, one needs some kind of a climax.

----
* Well, if you play people's pre-made worlds, you can have bosses, but in the standard mode, there aren't any.

HLN: local woman, riding train at ungodly hour into New York City with FG, realizes Amtrak has free wi-fi, accesses internets instead of napping. FG, wiped out by trauma of getting to train station on time (had to detour around major accident, arrived with minutes to spare), is sleeping on her first American train ride.

Some bosses are quite decorative.

My sister is visiting Perth at the moment, and so I have her car. I missed driving. Lots. I didn't realise how much (I haven't had a car since I moved to Melbourne and after my first attempt driving ended badly I haven't driven other people's cars much). While I could use the car when Cerise isn't, she mostly is for work, and when we go places she normally drives.
I'm happy using public transport for work/school, but today I didn't have to fret about how to get to dinner to meet friends (and home again, which is the problematic part) and was able to get to St Kilda at 9.30 without getting up at 6.30. It was lovely. And I just like driving. I like accelerating and I liked having to park on the top level of the carpark because I got to go round and round and up.

Hopefully, this reminder will help my saving efforts for a car next year, rather than impulsively buying stuff.

Ginger @ 274... How dare the two of you act like a married couple? And in public too!

Abi @ 273... I'd rather not associate bosses with climaxes.

Managers we can keep. Bosses, on the other hand, I would favor eradicating. (I have a would-be boss, and I have a real manager. The difference is noticeable.)

Bruce Cohen @262: I can see similar attitudes in the Father Brown stories, where they're really shocking in the context of the gentle, wise title character. One of them has a villain who is an educated negro, and Father Brown assures us that putting a veneer of civilization over that sort is a terribly bad thing. When I want to think charitably of Chesterton, I tell myself "It's not racism... just xenophobia." It took a special sort of person to perceive the water they were swimming in, and a better one to rise above it.

abi @270: When I was in sixth grade, I was into codes and ciphers, thanks to a book I got through the book club. Much of what I played with was pretty simple substitution ciphers, and solving them required counting forward or back a certain number of letters. One day Mom told me that knowing the alphabet backwards would make part of that job easier, and she taught me to sing Z, Y, X to the traditional "Twinkle, Twinkle" tune.

Many years after that, inspired by the Sesame Street song where Big Bird thinks the alphabet is a word and pronounces it as one, I came up with a word for the backwards alphabet as well, and taught it to myself. I impressed a couple of little kids with it just last week.

Kip W @280: Alvin's Secret Code by Clifford B. Hicks

Kip W #280: I read the Father Brown stories when I was 13. I was really upset by that.

Is Firefox 3.6.12 unstable? I upgraded to that a few days ago because Google+ didn't work with the older version I was using. It's now crashed four times and counting.

Or should I be blaming the new RAM I installed last night? All four crashes were since then.

I'm not fond of the current version of Firefox, but I'll upgrade again if it's more stable.

I admit I didn't notice that in the Father Brown stories.

For practical purposes, I'm not sure what the difference is between racism and xenophobia. I think another motivation in Chesterton's case was that he was very fond of his cleverness, and that made wide generalizations attractive for him.

The break point for me was an obscure non-fiction book of his (sorry, title forgotten) in which he suggested that Jews were actually an agricultural people (this actually was mildly clever, since I think the common wisdom at the time was that Jews were urban), too weird to be assimilated (I think there was something about wearing brightly colored dress coats(?) and top hats at Margate), and should be relocated. This shocked me so much that I didn't read anything of his for a decade or two-- and I'd been a fan, that's why I was reading his obscure stuff.

If anyone can think of what book it might have been, that would be good. I'd like to check on whether I read the passage accurately.

"tiNB -- the link on the word "Nativities" in the Poodles etc. Particle is broken.

Kip W @280: There's a Playfair cipher in Have His Carcase.

Dave Bell #286

For added realism, the cipher, which would be very secure without computer assistance if used correctly, is cracked because of the combination of easily-guessed headers and a weak key.

Regarding the particle on headline writing, my local paper, the Athens Banner-Herald, did indeed have their day made:
"Man in Gumby costume tries to rob 7-Eleven; he could end up in the pokey."

Colson Whitehead rejects idea of genre vs. literary fiction in interview about his new zombie-themed novel.

Mary Aileen #283:

Test the RAM, definitely. I assume you're on an MS-DOS machine. You should be able to do a complete RAM check from the pre-boot set-up menu.

Firefox version: I think 3.6.2 can be a bit hinky due to memory leaks. I recently upgraded Mom's Vista laptop to Firefox 4, and it's working better. I also advised her to reboot once a week or so, which I do myself on both Windows and OSX.

I'm currently on my Mac, which is at Firefox 6.0.2 (I have auto-update on). My MS-DOS laptop (an Acer Aspire netbook running XP) is at... (slight delay while I plug it in and boot up) ...Firefox 4.0.1, and no problems.

Just wanted to say that Teresa's Particle on Halloween costumes is absolutely fascinating.

Off to catch up on the various threads now...

Patrick Connors (290): Thanks. I'll definitely check the RAM.

The problem could have been my Flash player. When I upgraded Firefox, it advised that I update Flash to the current version, too. I didn't then, but I have now. We'll see if that helps.

Nancy @284: The break point for me was an obscure non-fiction book of [GJ Chesterton] (sorry, title forgotten) in which he suggested that Jews were actually an agricultural people (this actually was mildly clever, since I think the common wisdom at the time was that Jews were urban), too weird to be assimilated (I think there was something about wearing brightly colored dress coats(?) and top hats at Margate), and should be relocated.

Based on a quick poke at Google Books, you may be remembering the chapter "The Problem of Zionism" in his book The New Jerusalem.

Me (292): Okay, the RAM looks all right, as best I can tell. If Firefox keeps crashing despite the updated Flash player, I'll go ahead and download the current version.

So far, so good...

Jennifer Baughman @ 244: So was the sweet orange kitteh sweet to your abode while you were gone?

sisuile @ 249: Any luck on find the chihuahua's rightful people?

OtterB @ 251: Try calling song requests to the piano. If it plays the song you asked for, get in touch with the Magic Castle in Hollywood and tell them you know where Invisible Irma went!

Mary Aileen @294: I've noticed a rising curve in my Firefox upgrades (7.01 currently).

I doubt it heralds the technological Singularity — but I wonder where the marketing Singularity will lead.

Eric @ 214 :: " They have some basic honesty that's missing in the Republican party."

I think that may be an unwarranted assumption that they must be lying, that they can't possibly be that stupid. From my perspective, it isn't really honesty that's missing from the GOP these days, but something more fundamental: an appreciation of the value to be found in truthful propositions and an effective methodology for identifying them.

On pianos - if it's a grand piano, it probably cost enough that the person who bought it is actually good at playing it. Used upright pianos, on the other hand, have apparently become quite cheap now that electronic pianos have gotten good and cheap enough to be serious competition (and take up a lot less space and are easy to move.) Also, while grand and baby grand pianos are designed to disassemble in ways that make them easier to move than you'd expect, professional piano movers are still wizards who can move things in ways that mere mortals can't. Many years ago, we inherited a very used baby grand from a friend who had to move out of her house (we were an exception to my assertion about grand pianos being owned by excellent players), and the next time we moved we found that for local moves, piano movers are sometimes cheaper than conventional movers as well as being wizards.

On Firefox - you will be much happier upgrading to the newest version you can. I'm running this on a Linux virtual machine on top of VMware Player, and it's still much better than the 3.x version that my corporate IT department supports running natively on Windows.

Thomas @287

And two very smart people working on it, with the help of the author. But words such as "Warsaw" were big clues.

#293 ::: Julie L.:

Thanks, that's it, and a bit less extreme than I remembered (I thought he'd said that *all* Jews should be relocated to be farmers), but only a bit.

He really wasn't seeing individuals at all.

It looks like my breakpoint wasn't insults, and it wasn't exclusion (he's got a bit somewhere about eating breakfast on the roof, but Jews wouldn't like it (for a reason I can't remember)-- however, as it happens, I would especially like to eat breakfast on a roof), but advocating outrageous policy was too much.

Dave Bell@299: I did always wonder how he concluded that it was a Playfair cipher. That was an awfully important bit of information, leapt to without sufficient ground that I recall.

HLN: Woman has cat! "I was worried that he wouldn't like it here, but late last night I was purred at and required to administer skritches. I guess I forgot that cats can recognize a carefully-trained servant," she said. The woman added that her new cat comes to her from a knitter/spinner, does not damage yarn, and is known to be an absolute sweetheart.

Purrfect, TexAnne!

Nancy Lebovitz @ 300... He really wasn't seeing individuals

We should introduce him to Liev Schreiber.
:-)

Three cheers for new cat! May he be a comfort and a consolation, and help keep any eye on stressed students who need a bit more than kind words and cookies!

HLN: Local woman's Firefox crashed *again* this morning. Woman very frustrated, vows to download and install new version at earliest possible moment. "Many thanks to all who chimed in with advice," she said, then added, "AARRGGGHH!!!"

syd @ 295 - none. And i've got found dog reports in all the appropriate places. It looks like she whelped recently (vet says 4-8 weeks), so i doubt I will find her owner. OTOH, it looks like I've found her a good home.

Xopher @ #252

If it's a Goon Show, the piano has CD plates attached.

It looks like she whelped recently, so i doubt I will find her owner

This bit of causality saddens me.

HLN: Local man has birthday dinner at excellent Chinese restaurant with parents and sister en famille. This was followed by repairing to sister's house for cake and cards. Kids are adorable as always (one made a pop-up card with a giraffe!), and present is in transit -- family is pooling on an iPad!

OK, now I really have to get syncing and wireless working on my Ubuntu box. I've got iTunes 10 running, but slower than s**t, and apparently it's supposed to auto-sync when I connect the cable, but it's doing no such thing....

The saga continues...

Firefox 7.0.1 downloaded and installed. It crashed on the second page I tried to open (Facebook).

Eep?

HLN: Local woman and spouse awakened at oh-dark-fifteen by rooster. Investigation reveals that rooster is in side yard, and that since fence is over six feet high and does not contain big-enough holes, either he was placed there by enemy action, or he fell out of the sky. "This is a very dense New Urbanist area, so we have no idea where he came from," says woman. "We've posted to the community bboard; if no one claims him* by late this afternoon, he will become a free-range rooster, since Animal Control have expressed a complete lack of interest." An Animal Control spokesman, when pressed for comment, said, "We don't do avians, and we don't know who does."

* A somewhat fraught concept, as chickens are not on the list of permitted pets, as per the HOA, and the city has said in the past that they should be considerably further from neighbors than it is possible to get here.

Joann @312, a six foot fence is something even a wing-clipped rooster could jump over, no problem. He could have been dumped on the road and come into your yard by way of bouncing and flapping from ground to garbage can to shrub, or flapped himself through several yards until he found yours hospitably free of pets or other chicken-hostile entities.

There's quite possibly more than one of your neighbors with a discreet little egg operation going on. If they've had their "90% pullets guaranteed" order from a hatchery come up on the wrong side of the margin of error then they have a security problem. Hens can be kept quiet, close neighbors easily won over with a dozen extra-good eggs every once in a while, but roosters are roosters and unlikely to stay quiet. The metaphorical qualities assigned to them are there for a reason. I have three cockerels in their full strutting and crowing maturity, and know this anew every morning.

A friend of mine on a chicken posting-board had someone dump three full-grown peafowl next to her husband's deer stand last week. Chicken feed just went up three dollars a bag, craigslist is full of people wanting to "rehome" pet roosters, and driving up and kicking unwanted animals out of the car is one of those American traditions farmers especially could live without.

Which reminds me, I will have nine or ten young Easter Egger chickens to find homes for after the first of the year; that the cockerels' homes might be someone's freezer is something I'm fine with, being an actual farmer and all.

313
Another example of cute-until-they-grow-up, I see. (Who would buy peafowl when young, without knowing what they'll be as adults?)

David Goldfarb @301

We know, from what Wimsey says when he sees the ciphertext, that he was using a German alias during the war, for some purpose, and that was how he came to know the guy who knew how to break Playfair.

Now, there's several possible clues. First, the marked words in the dictionary, all long words with no repeated letters. Now, it's a mistake to think that a keyword has no repeated letters, because you can strike out the repeats, but it is a clue nevertheless. But there is a whole set of ciphering methods which use keywords, not just Playfair. (Chapter XXV)

Then we see the ciphertext at the start of Chapter XXVI. We still don't know why he plumped for Playfair, except that he is familiar with it. But the ciphertext contains a lot of I and only one J, and that's a common mistake in using Playfair. If it were a some other keyword cipher, J would have to represent a quite uncommon letter, and that letter would have to be some way from the end of the alphabet, or close to the beginning as part of the keyword.

Another feature of Playfair is that it breaks up double letters if they form a letter pair. It has to for the cipher to work. Well, there is a BFFY, twice, and, once you discount the punctuation, an SS, an MM, and a CC. How many double-letter pairs are there in English? And if Wimsey is thinking Playfair, he will have split the message into digraphs, and all those double-letters will split. Well, they take an hour before Wimsey explains Playfair. Yes, the marked dictionary brought it to mind, but that's plenty of time to do a basic frequency analysis, and find a rather flat distribution.

And, as Wimsey says, it's a cipher that an amateur might have come across, which is simple to use. And that makes it a good bet. So he decides to have a go, when his acquaintance in the Foreign Office isn't available.

And you'll note that Harriet Vane is the one who spots "Warsaw" as a potential plaintext.

PJ, these were adults. Who would dump adults knowing that you can sell them on craigslist within twelve hours for $200 each?

JESR @316 -- you're assuming they knew that about Craigslist.

I wouldn't have. I might have looked on Craigslist to see what they're going for, but I wouldn't have had any prior idea of the price.

Nancy Lebovitz@300: It's unfair to judge a writer by his posthumous cheerleaders, but one thing that I find striking is that Chesterton's fans, en masse and organized, can manage to be off-putting in a way that few other literary fandoms manage. Read this, for example, and watch for when your jaw drops.

Blogger sucks big time. When Google first took them over, I tried to access my blog and couldn't, and there was no information about why.

I just tried again, hoping they'd fixed it. They haven't, but now they'll take all kinds of information from you, try to make you tie everything you do together, then tell you they're not going to let you have access to your old blog.

I can't access it, update it, or delete it. I fucking hate those people.

Hoom. My favorite Chesterton is the one in Sandman. All the good bits, none of the ickiness.

Re. peafowl. Of course, over here, you'd advertise them in Cage & Aviary Birds.

JESR, I assumed they were dumping adult birds. (Thanks, I've met peafowl. Why anyone would think they would be any good as pets is beyond me. Burglar alarms, maybe.)

Friends of mine, down in rural Maury County, found feral peafowl in the woods when they first moved down there several years ago; these have since fallen prey to the coyotes that moved into the area a couple of years later. You could sometimes see a flash of blue-green feathers in the woods when you drove by.

Xopher... Janet Brennan Croft... While going thru 3 decades's worth of photos this weekend, I found one from 1982 of Alexei Kondratiev with Judith Merril and CJ Cherryh.

Anyone here who uses Yahoo Bookmarks? When I logged on today, I found that all my bookmarks were arranged in apparently random order. (By date or alphabetically are supposed to be the available choices.)

I wonder if this has to do with the recent behind-the-scenes revamp of Yahoo Bookmarks? (Which left users unable to add new bookmarks for nearly four months, up until a few days ago.) (And who at Yahoo thought that was a reasonable way to handle a revamp?)

Gah!

Updating Firefox didn't help. Windows blue-screened a little while ago. The error report afterward said a) looks like the RAM, but also b) the BIOS is old.

While I was investigating updating the BIOS, Firefox crashed so many times in succession that I shut down and reinstalled the old RAM.

Back to square one, $45 poorer*, with a version of Firefox I don't really like. Not happy.

Think I should update the BIOS anyway?

*I haven't checked yet if I can return the new RAM.

PJ Evans- I guess my confusion was because I've never thought of baby peafowl as "cute" although I'm averse to cute, in general, and much prefer the adult stages of most animals, even sheep.

I'd like to keep peafowl, I have sufficient room and it would be a way of drowing out the boom cars, but the fences they require are discouraging.

Tom Whitmore, I suppose that the ways in which Craigslist has pervaded small farm product sales in this country is something which is not widely known; I'd never looked at the place until I started buying chickens, but my brother-in-law sells hay, feeders, and locker beef through that means. If I wasn't in the middle of a documentary project on my chicks I would probably have been to turn all of them in one sale as soon as they'd hatched.

Knowing the going price is another thing; I suspect that pricing of everything on Craigslist is on what I've heard called the "big enough fool" basis, or there wouldn't be listings for substantially identical chicken coops at prices ranging from $159 to $1500.

JESR, that would be the greater fool theory, which holds there's always an idiot even more dumb than the holder of a bad investment who's willing to buy it.

At some point I have to convert this fake rosary on my desk into a real one. "How do you know it's fake?" Well, for one thing, it's got the wrong number of beads.

I found it a couple of years ago and only noticed it was fake when I cleared it off my dresser last week. Oops. Bad Catholic.

Mary Aileen @ 326 -- Any reputable vendor should take back bad ram. (Though, if it's 3 megs of hot ram for a hosaka, you may be on your own with nasty people after you).

It's common enough that it's the first thing I suspect if a computer's gone wonky. (though, not always, I just traced one wonky computer to a bad hard drive, the first time I've had a drive fail in a non catastrophic manner).

The surefire test is memtestx86, let it run for a day or so. It's one of the boot options on ubuntu cds now, and I think it's included in one of the mac hardware test disks. I wouldn't be surprised if it's buried in windows somewhere too. (and of course, it's downloadable on it's own)

b. durbin @ 329: how many beads, in what pattern? It may not be wrong, it may just not be 'standard Catholic' (and oh boy are there a lot of 'standard' patterns for rosaries).

I'd like to keep peafowl, I have sufficient room and it would be a way of drowing out the boom cars, but the fences they require are discouraging.

Pea Foul? Fences? They have a disdain for fencing, and can fly quite well if they are sufficiently motivated. The neighbor has pea foul, (and chickens, and ducks, and a whippet, and used to have guinea foul, but "they make too much noise". oh. dear. ) Quite often there are peafowl on the roof of his coop, occasionally in the trees, and once on our house. They don't even seem to be bothered with the predators around here, though the chicks are probably pretty good snacks for the wildlife. There are several colonies of feral peafowl on the island, either escaped or the humans got fed up.

The chicks are even kind of cute, and kind of quiet. That ends though. They get to be beautiful birds, but with loud voices and sensitive minds. Once I was cutting trees, and the sound track was something like "Roar. crrrrack. WHUMP. Help Help Help!" Every Single Time. I could hear it through the hearing protectors.

The Gumby particle made me sporfle:

Surveillance video showed the costumed man walking into the store with his arm raised above his head. He then walked to the register, leaned over the counter and told the clerk, “This is a robbery,” police said.

The 7-Eleven employee thought it was a prank, police said.

Gumby insisted he was serious and told the clerk he had a gun. He then tried to reach into his pocket, but after fumbling for a moment only managed to drop 26 cents on the counter.

The accomplice — not dressed as a cartoon character — had already gone outside and was honking the horn of a minivan...

Pure comedy.

eric @ 332: Why, yes. Peafowl do fly quite well. There were several in the trees on the grounds of the Maryhill Museum when I visited, and one of them shat on me from above. Charming birds!

eric @332: If you wing-clip them (cut the primary feathers on one wing only*), it stops them really flying, but they can still jump upwards quite well, so you'd need substantial fences, but it could be done.

We used to keep peafowl (and many other species). Back when we had a dozen or so adult peafowl, they used to go for a walk each day, up the road a way, then work their way back home throught all the gardens. Mostly people didn't mind (we had one complaint about damaged flowers, over a period of several years), but once a neighbour came to ask for them to be moved - his sister was visiting and she was terrified of birds. Well, I went along and shooed them all into the next garden nearer to us (about all I could do) - except the peahen sitting on the roof; I couldn't do much about her.

Yes, they were noisy** but so were several of the other animals we had. Looking back it's really lucky that most of the neighbours liked being able to look over/through the fences and see various unusual animals. And (in my opinion) the various calls were more pleasant than the sound of lorries braking on the main road, or the background noise from the constant whizz of traffic on the motorway.

* Clarification provided for those who don't know the term.
**I actually like the noise they make. So sue me.

Steve with a book @318, C.S. Lewis's posthumous admirers and apologists, particularly the American ones, can be just as bad. Between the hagiography and the evangelical hijacking of his Anglicanism, it can get pretty difficult to take.

eric (330): Thanks. They'll definitely take it back, although there will be a restocking fee if it's not actually bad, just wrong. I'll try the memtest.

Happy Birthday, Ginger!!!

Happy Birthday, Ginger!

Also, on peafowl, the Bronx Zoo had a peahen go wandering not that long ago; she spent a couple of days "on the run" before being captured and returned to the zoo. Newspaper accounts almost universally referred to her as a "female peacock." The peafowl at the Bronx Zoo wander all over the place with impunity; this one decided to try the outside world for a while and was apparently none the worse for wear (roosted on a windowledge the first night, in full view).

#262 ::: Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers):

On the other hand, America presumably could have had ghettos, but didn't. I don't know if this was enlightenment thinking or something else.

Here's why I asked about the change between Europe and America in regards to Jews, and why I probably seem weirdly mellow about current American anti-Semitism.

Part of this is that I'm trying to manage depression, and I spent a lot of years obsessing about how the Holocaust proves your government can kill you at any time. Later I added that Rwanda proves that your neighbors can also kill you at any time.

Eventually, I realized that I was just knocking myself down-- it wasn't as though I was doing anything which might make me safer. Later than that, I realized I could outsource hypervigiliance. If things really were getting bad, there are any number of people who'd tell me. I didn't have to keep reminding myself of the possibility.

I do know that murderous anti-Semitism exists in the US, and you don't have to go back to Leo Frank to find it. These are attacks extreme enough that it's just chance that Jews weren't killed.

Without trying very hard, I found about synagogue arsons, though murder came later, and it wasn't of Jews.

Guard killed at Holocaust Museum-- he wasn't Jewish, but I think this could be reasonably described as an attempt to kill Jews.

Seventy bullets fired into a Jewish community center, five people wounded.

My mother was bullied by Irish kids for being Jewish in Philadelphia. One of her college professors deliberately scheduled a test on Yom Kippor. When we moved from one suburb to another near Wilmington, DE, one that we looked at was "restricted"-- no Jews allowed, and the one we did move into had only recently started allowing Jews. This was the early 60s.

And yet, I've only personally run into overt anti-Semitism a few times, and all of them mild. (Details available if anyone cares.) Of course, there might be people covertly avoiding me because I'm Jewish, but I really think it would make me crazy to worry about it.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the only reason it's interesting-- maybe even fascinating-- that Rumplestiltskin has anti-Semitic roots is the implication that modern Christians are less trustworthy than they look.

It seems indecent to me to encourage myself to believe that a significant proportion of the Christians (for these purposes, I'm treating being Christian as an ethnicity/religion) I live with and who haven't mistreated me for being Jewish have a dangerous amount of anti-Semitism in their subconsciouses when I have no evidence that it's true.

In particular, I think that a lot of history really gets forgotten. There may be a little emotional shading from it, but that doesn't mean it's strongly in play.

So, how did America become so much less anti-Semitic than Europe? Less crowding, so that Christians felt less zero-sum about things? Christians becoming better at business so that they didn't feel as overwhelmed? Enlightenment ideals? An effort at good will?

I think there's the more recent shock at the Holocaust, but America was less anti-Semitic than Europe before that.

The reason why I think this is important is that the decline of anti-Semitism from Europe to the US is the most striking example of a prejudice getting substantially faded out that I can think of (there may have been plenty more-- let me know), and there might be something which can be duplicated to fade out other prejudices.

#304 ::: Serge Broom:

I don't know enough about Liev Schreiber to get the joke.

#318 ::: Steve with a book:

Maybe I've gotten jaded, but that didn't shock me. I was expecting a bad imitation of Chesterton's prose and a strong defense of his prejudices (we haven't gotten started on his anti-Muslim and anti-Asian stuff) rather than moderately life-wrecking advice, no worse than would be seen in a lot of other places, and possibly consistent with what Chesterton said.

Anyone remember whether Chesterton pushed people to have children?

By contrast with Creativity, a atheist closed-system anti-Semitic metaphysical group which has a branch in Philadelphia, an ordinary fool doesn't look like much.

When poking about searching on Chesterton and anti-Semitism, I found claims that he came out against Hitler's anti-Semitism, but I haven't found the original text. I did find this(p.279), in which Chesterton bashes the early Nazis (Chesterton died in 1936, and never saw the worst) for absurd and dangerous flattery of Germans. I wish more people, especially Germans, had listened.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 340... Well, he's 6'3.5", for one thing. :-)

The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657: http://www.nyym.org/flushing/remons.html

Widely considered one of the forerunners to the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution and one of the earliest written documents supporting religious freedom in the US.

Peter Stuyvesant was not a supporter of religious freedom (and didn't like Jews much), but he was beaten back on several occasions, by the Remonstrance and by the directors of the Dutch West India Company, who forced him to allow Jews from Brazil to settle in New Amsterdam (joining Jews who were already there and had come from Holland).

TexAnne @302: Yay, cat!

Has his name become apparent yet?

I'd never have figured out that the rooster was a prank had not the perpetrator(s) decided to add complications involving a fake reward flyer. Evidence pointing to our next-door neighbors' teenage son is indirect but weirdly compelling.

Is this the place where I'm supposed to deposit the horribly disturbing hamster gifs?

Well, alrighty, then!

Eek!

Sweet WTF Jeebus, what's the story behind THAT?

Nancy Lebovitz@340: James Nicoll has talked about how religious conflicts among Irish immigrants to Canada stopped being cause for violence. (He too would like to know why.) That strikes me as similar in a way to the fading of anti-Semitism.

I would also strongly suggest memtest86 on any issue like what you have. Also, having a copy of it on a CD is a good idea in general; the first thing my work does, my small-business-IT-management company owner does, and I do (steal from the best, I always say) with new memory, is install it and memtest86 at *least* overnight, preferably 24 hours.

Two reasons: First, it finds flaky memory.
Second, it kicks the memory so hard that if it is on the top of the bathtub curve, it causes it to fail immediately rather than flake out two or three months in.

Wow. I'm really upset right now. I'm shaking a little bit. Here's the message I sent to NPR about a segment on Fresh Air:

I just ran to the radio to turn it off, because Terry Gross just announced she was going to play a scene from Boardwalk Empire where someone (a Jew) is drowned, essentially for repeatedly refusing baptism. She said the character "ends up" drowning him, which makes it sound like they're going to pretend it was an accident (though she also established the strong enmity between these two characters).

If I want to listen to an anti-Semitic torture-murder (and that's what it is, no matter what kind of religious trappings they cloak it in), I'll actually watch the horrific series, or maybe a movie about the Holocaust, where the anti-Semitic torture-murders are conducted by people not much worse (if any worse at all) than these supposed "baptisers." Don't need to hear it on the radio, thank you.

I avoid shows like that one because they give me nightmares. I HAD thought I could listen to Fresh Air without that particular risk. Clearly I was incorrect.

And Terry Gross didn't even say "warning, folks, this is graphic" or anything. Maybe it wasn't, but I wasn't about to take the risk. She really has no judgment at all.

Nancy Lebovitz@340: I've never seen a decent explanation for Chesterton's anti-Semitism; it's as though he really can't stop himself when he gets going on the subject. There's a vague sort of notion that he got his attitudes off Hilaire Belloc, who was worse; and there's an interesting bit in AN Wilson's biography of Belloc where he suggests that Belloc's hatred was fired by the bad treatment he received when he served in the French army with what some of his fellow soldiers took to be a Jewish name.

France surely has something to do with it: more than once, Chesterton makes the point of how the French see Jews so much more clearly; that is, in a bad light. Here, for example, and in the discussion about the Dreyfus case here. A few biographies seem to have come out recently; I don't know if they shed any light on all this rather winceworthy stuff.

Xopher @ 350 - I've had to send NPR nastygrams a couple of times in the last 6 months, as they start discussing *widely triggery subjects* with no warning. Forex: Whoever thought it was ok to discuss experiences of childhood abuse at 8:30 on a Saturday morning (or 6:30 or whenever one's local station got around to that point of Weekend Edition) needs some sensitivity training. It did not make a good start to the weekend. Yours sounds like more of the same lack of judgement.

Stefan #347:

I, for one, suspect - and hope - that video is a clever fake, but I can't watch it enough times to prove it to myself.

Brr!!!

Steve wab: Is that why Belloc helped the Nazis find the Ark of the Covenant? Oh, wait, that was this guy.

Xopher HalfTongue@355: ha, I'd forgotten about him!

'The Ark of the Covenant' brings to my mind an image not from the Indy film but from a comic strip version of Old Testament stories that I read in a hand-me-down annual as a young lad. 2 Samuel 6: Uzzah touches the Ark and is struck down and David interprets it as a sign of God's displeasure. A quick Google tells me the strip must have been Frank Bellamy's David The Shepherd King, first published in The Eagle, 1958–9.

Sympathies on the radio experience; radio is the most intimate of media and it's nasty when it injects something like that right into your brain.

Anybody remembers when the MythBusters built their own Ark of the Covenant and zapped Adam with it? He was not amused.

Stefan Jones #347: On the surface of it, yon hamster got handed a toy "eyeball" for a payload.

What makes me suspicious is the center-symmetry of the spit, along with lack of bulging cheeks. Even if their bottom palate can stretch that much, I'd expect it to bulge far enough to impede climbing!

A much nicer link: Randall's geeky love letter.

Serge, I just watched that one a couple nights ago. It's a terrible trick, but hilarious because of Kari's beaming, "Do you feel God?"

#351 ::: Steve with a book:

That's interesting. I'd never thought of Chesterton's anti-Semitism as requiring an explanation. I assumed it was in the air, and it never occurred to him to question it. Since it was in his mind, and he wrote about what he thought, he wrote anti-Semitic things. Does anyone know if he was typical of his era? Less or more anti-Semitic?

As for the hamster, I've see a video of the same hamster, but it's giving a great big yawn as it climbs. In a way, the ribbed inside of the hamster's upper jaw is more disturbing than the unlikely to be true excellent CGI of the glass eyeball.

AKICML: Is there a simple, single-word term for the concept of "things you can give away but still have undiminished in your possession" like ideas (as opposed to "things which are lost when you give them away", which is most tangible items)?

I keep thinking that a word for this should be in my top vocabulary, but I'm not seeing it. Thanks to Charles Cameron for putting the question into my head.

Nancy Lebovitz@351: there was anti-Semitism around in his time, sure; it was there at all levels of society, and at the higher levels of society there was a genteel version where some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jewish but they don't get let into the nice clubs or smart regiments. However. Chesterton is polemical about everything, but on the subject of Judaism he's polemically nasty in quite an individual way. The theme is usually: They are among us and you might think they're the same as us, but they're foreigners in disguise, pretending to be natives of this country while actually owing loyalty only to their own tribe. There's something obsessive and buttonholing: he's grabbing your lapel and yelling about the aliens in our midst that only he can recognise. He seems to be to be completely off his head when he's in this sort of rage; it's a sort of kink, and I wonder what caused it.

Although GKC only converted in the twenties he'd been more Catholic than the Pope since about 1908. One of the traditional complaints about Catholics in non-Catholic countries was that they were agents of a foreign power, expatriates: perhaps he felt a desperate need to point out another race as being bigger exemplars of this sin.

There's a to-the-modern-reader-almost-unreadably-racist Father Brown story called The God Of The Gongs which also turns on GKC's horror of disguises and Aliens Among Us; he's scratching a very personal itch in public.

Tom Whitmore @ 360, in my writings, I tend to use the word incorporeal for that purpose. It tickles me that this shares a root with incorporated, which is spelled almost the same but has an entirely different meaning.

Worth noting (for me, at least, this helped it make sense) on the racism evident in Chesterton (and Kipling, and Wilson, and many others) is that good scientific late Victorian thinking thought of racial characteristics somewhat like we think of sexual orientation--as only harmfully mutable.

j h woodyatt -- "incorporeal" doesn't quite work since there's a clearly corporeal thought-item that has the same property, namely the Philosopher's Stone.

Unfortunately (for those of us who like real life to be deeply unsettling) the hamster gif seems to be a photoshop of this video. Which is not to say of course that hamsters aren't constantly regurgitating glass eyes when we're not looking.

I've been away, in the sense of "my hard drive seems to have melted down, my computer's in the shop, and now my daughter is letting me use her laptop." Naturally, a conversation was just getting started that I've missed, in large part. Let's see if I can catch up.

Earl Cooley III @281: No, it was Codes and Secret Writing, which I still have. I did pick up Alvin's Secret Code recently, thinking Sarah might be interested in it.

Bill Stewart @298: I've had a grand piano for just over two weeks now. A team of three brought it in, but it still seemed advisable for me to lend a hand on the stairs, and they didn't say not to.

Tom Whitmore @360: a simple, single-word term for the concept of "things you can give away but still have undiminished in your possession"a simple, single-word term for the concept of "things you can give away but still have undiminished in your possession"
"Downloads!"

(yeah, but think about it)

Anyway, I'm hoping I'll have more time to be around here now. I think I've finally kicked RASFF, cough cough.

Kip W: Maybe "uploads" would work better. A download is something you can receive without diminishing the giver's possession.

"Downloads" are how they (mp3s or ideas) come into most people's possession.

I agree that at the time they are handed off, they become "uploads," but I think that cutting it that fine at this point will lose you a lot of people who would have understood the analogy.

Tom, I was going to say "intangible" until you mentioned the Philosopher's Stone; presumably another, but actually existing, example of the sort of thing you are talking about would be a candle-flame, which is certainly tangible but you can give away without having it leave your possession?

I don't know that there is a word that would encompass stories but not books, software but not hardware, and flame but not water; if you come up with one I'd like to know it as well.

lorax -- lovely example! I'll pass that back to Charles.

And isn't it interesting that there isn't an obvious word that has leaped out already for a concept that most of us intuitively recognize? I'm glad I'm not just getting senile and not remembering it!

Serge @338; Melissa Singer @339: Thank you!

What, no respect for Herpes? It's the Gift that Keeps on Giving! (tm)

---------------------
Herpes(TM) is a trademark, and the "If It Moves, We Fucked It(R)" logotype is a Registered Trademark of Miracle of Life GalactiCorp.

LUNA ARCADE • GAZA GLASSLANDS SPACEPORT • THE SHOPS ON MIZAR 5

lorax / Tom: Going back, there's Heraclitus' "fire".

In the beginning: Logos.

Information, Instructions, HowTo, Pattern. Angel, Demon, Spirit, Morphic Resonance. Law, Rules, Ruleset, Procedure, Protocol. Ritual. Method. Meme. Sequence. Code. Message. Scheme. Rules. Signal. The Signal That Stoppeth Not. Language. Formula. Recipe. Algorithm. Ehm, Form. YHVH. IAMTHATIAM, IMPOPEYERTHESAILORMAN. Ishmael.

(I always liked Gregory Bateson's definition of information or signal as "a difference that makes a difference" in one of the essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, although he may have been quoting Shannon or ehm, that catastrophe guy, or that other one.)

UploadFormat332HopeThisWorksReapersApproach

ShitFuckUploadFormat333LastShotBeforeThGAAARHHHKKK NO CARRIER

...it's lacking a certain Unf, y'know? That je-ne-sais-quoi.

RUNME.BAT. Incantation. Spell. You May Already Be a Millionaire! (see below for official Pandora's Box sweepstakes rules. No purchase necessary. By decoding the enclosed message, cryptanalyst agrees to waive all rights.)

blondejokes.txt"); DROP TABLE sys_log;
...

ForWizardsOnly.SPL
:OnOpen {if this.parent.wizardgrade == wg_apprentice { ((this.parent) as host).possess;
...

Neal Stephenson proposed a new mysterious post-nanotech-tech called the Seed in Diamond Age. Seed.

Seed. final answer.

@312, @313

Coincidentally, my own HLN is that I gave my wife two hens for her birthday on Saturday. We are first time livestock owners with little pet experience, so it's all quite exciting.

Molly (Black Orpington) and Betty (Buff Orpington) seem to be getting on well now, after Betty spent Sunday establishing she was going to be top of the (rather literal) pecking order. They seem to like their Omlet Eglu(tm)*, but so far have shown an unfortunate tendency to roost in the nest box rather than the, er, roost. Still, hoping for eggs by Christmas.

We're still working out what treats they like :D

*The management would like to point out that other brands are available

cliff @373:

I can see that a word-count limitation is not going to be enough to keep you from falling into your more distracting habits of conversation. So from this point forward, I'm simply going to unpublish your more far-out comments.

Please endeavor to remain on-point. If I find myself spending too much of my time cleaning up your digressions, the next step will be to unpublish everything you say by default and only release comments when they're relevant and useful.

Discussion of how to keep writing interesting.

Here's a question I've got, since I don't expect everyone to read a long article and all the comments-- what's good redundancy? I have a feeling I'm too apt to just say things once, and some repetition with variation might be a good idea.

Here's one for all posters here: Definition: microsecodn

(Thanks to my husband for sending me this!)

Xopher HalfTongue @252: And it's a story written by me, the piano is in witness protection. It abides quietly for a time, and then disappears as mysteriously as it came. The sheet music is the window treatment of choice, because that was all that was available. The piano's means of getting it onto the window is left as an exercise for the reader.

Drat. OtterB got there first.

Tim Walters @263: Love the textures.

A week from not, it will be November. Halloween with be over with, and we Brits will be gearing up for the entertainments surrounding Guy Fawkes, who some say was the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.

And some of us will be ignoring this blog as we struggle to get started with NaNoWriMo, that annual challenge to produce 50,000 words in 30 days. At least they don't have to be good words.

If you can manage to tell a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, you'll be doing more than most schoolteachers expect. And you will at least get some idea of how to organise your life to find time to write. That's an essential skill for anyone who wants to take writing seriously.

Meanwhile, sketching an idea...

The three Tellurians recoiled in horror from the creatures that had captured them, seeing a crude caricature of themselves in the stance, and the erect symmetry, but with a total lack of discernible expression. These strange creatures were smooth-skinned, lacking even the patterned scales of a Venusian, and wore scanty harnesses of some metallic mesh that hid nothing of importance. They were obviously male, and well-muscled, but there was nothing else in their favour. They had no tails, no muzzle, save for a vestigial lump in the middle of a flat face. Did they even have ears? There were curious flaps of skin on the sides of their heads, but nothing moved. Such was the horror, but Cleopatra took note that they had no claws, and were as vulnerable to a well-placed kick as any Tellurian, and she took slight comfort from that.

Yet their captors were just as horrified by what they saw, with equally grotesque and inexpressive faces, crazily-patterned fur disarrayed by the rigours of the journey and, yes, the savage natural weapons of the beast.

Syd @ #295: Sweet orange kitteh was not welcomed with open arms by the other two cats (expected) and escaped by popping the screen off a third-floor window (unexpected). We encountered her again the next morning, friendly and sweet as could be, but decided not to repeat the experiment unless it looks like she's losing weight or otherwise not being cared for. The cats currently resident, Bubastis and Circe, approve of this. :D

TexAnne @ #302: Congrats! IMHO, cats make life better.

HLN: Local woman has been looking for a copy of "The Dragon Waiting" at a reasonable price off and on for over a year now. Woman starts cleaning and reorganizing bookshelves, discovers copy hiding in the bottom back of a stack of paperbacks. Local woman unsure whether to be annoyed or pleased, settles on pleased, and re-reads it during day off due to stomach bug.

Jacque @379. Not exactly. Witness protection hadn't occurred to me. But of course, nobody is going to think about what the piano might be overhearing.

sisule: I know it's "fake" as opposed to just different because the beads are all the same, strung with no gaps. The 80s fad of wearing a rosary like a necklace has shown up a bit around here, so I should have realized that. Oh, and the Y-junction bead is a heart.

They're nice beads, though. I just have to take some of them off and put a few distinguishing beads at the appropriate points. I'm just glad I noticed, because I *had* contemplated giving it as a First Communion gift and that would have been Very Bad Catholic.

In regards to Rumplestiltskin, I would never have thought about it being anti-Semitic, probably because I didn't grow up with those views (what with, you know, actually knowing Jewish kids and all.) As for the name, I'm half Polish, so I wouldn't have noticed. :D

all answers delayed by beautiful weather and subsequent grand festival of catching up on laundry

332, eric, I'm quite aware of the rocket like ability of peafowl to jump and fly, which is why I said the fences are discouraging: they take the kind of bird-netting more usually applied to keeping golf balls inside driving ranges. I've actually known several private keepers of the things, and they all had 8-10 foot tall double-walled (two layers of heavy-duty 1"X 1 1/2" cage wire) runs with plastic-covered woven wire tops. I also had an encounter with a free-roaming flock of peafowl, four males and six feemales, as they wandered through Olympia one full mooned beautiful May evening, as beautiful and surreal as only Puget Sound spring can be, and saw one of the peacocks flat-foot jump onto the roof of a three-story apartment building.

Russ, congratulation on your sane-persons level of poultry having. Some advice: remember chickens need a little extra light to lay in the short days of the year, so if you're in the northern hemisphere you'll want to give them some light; solar-powered yard lights are a popular item in the online poultry community.

And: don't let anyone loan you an incubator and fertile eggs. Stay firm against the whiles of roosters, who are amazingly beautiful. And stay out of feed stores in baby-chick season.

Oh: and away from craigslist. You can get anything on craigslist.

And of course I saw the double strike on "feemale" just after I hit post. Life is so unfair.

JESR @ #385: Those wishing not to become owners of Too Many Poultry should also avoid the writings of Bailey White, and the Murray McMurray Hatchery Catalog, which makes me long for exotic chickens the way some women long for fur coats (the fur looks better on the original owner, and the chickens are definitely better off belonging to someone besides me).

Lila, I'm in worse shape: I'm hanging out with a set of people who are poultry enablers. I have five Blue-Laced Red Wyandottes, and four Silver Spangled Hamburgs, all of which were pointed out as available as soon as I expressed interest in the breeds, a habitually broody Black Austalorp I got for free, and fourteen not quite two-week-old Easter Eggers* I hatched from free eggs in borrowed incubators.

It's called chicken math, and it's dangerous.

Proof in my LJ posts tagged "chickens"

*Murray McMurray calls these "Araucanas/ Americanas" which they are not, and people who raise the real things are emphatic and forceful in explaining why they're not.

B. Durbin @ 384 - well, it certainly sounds like a non-R.C. rosary, at any rate. The only variations that I know without gauds (the big/different beads) are the 119 bead and the 150 bead (benedictine). In any case, have fun! (also, being someone who makes a lot of rosaries, have you considered giving a non-standard pattern? The Michaeline pattern is one I send with those being deployed, or who are warriors in any other sense. The Raphaelite pattern is one I make for those who heal or need healing or sailor-types (traveling and waters also being under that patronage). And though I hate having to do it, I've made several 4 decade sets for the dead and the mourning in the past couple of years. Yay for Approved Variations.)

385
I've seen a peacock on top of a telephone pole. I doubt he climbed up there. (Trees and roofs, oh yeah. Those are easy targets, even with that tail trailing.)

B. Durbin, if the string has 108 beads it's Buddhist. Islam also makes use of prayer beads. They come in a set of 99 beads (for the 99 names of God) or a smaller set of 33 beads. Of course, if your beads have a cross, they are meant for Christians.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 340: I think that the prevalence of anti-Semitism in the US varies by locality, more than anything else. I grew up in California, where people were mean to me for being weird and nerdy but never for being Jewish, and I have somewhat of a stereotypically Jewish appearance and temperament as an adult, which also, I feel, sets me apart a bit from the WASP-backgroundy people around me but I never have gotten any kind of vocally anti-Semitic flack for it.

Contrast this to the experience of a friend of mine, who grew up in Nebraska and literally had to deal with Nazi sympathizers running the neighborhood. In general this kind of negative experience seems more common in the Midwest, though I haven't done any kind of survey.

On a whole, I'll say that the American relative lack of anti-Semitism pertains to generational localized racism and how it's always, always worse than "imported" racism.

Like: I have a white Jewish friend of the curly-haired phenotype who was quietly, thoroughly given the run-around when he tried to get an apartment in Beijing... until they figured out he wasn't Uighur.

Like: anecdotes I've heard from African-Americans in Britain report generally favorable treatment compared to how it is in the US... whereas a very Irish-looking American guy I knew was once turned away at the border.

There's a hundred-something-year rule, I think, whereby the longer ethnic factions have coexisted with each other unhappily, the harder it is to root it out. And Europe's anti-Semitism is deep-rooted and long-standing, whereas the US has only got it as an import. Another factor may be population size and historical population size.

...I just found a Wikipedia article with a rather sobering table in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jewish_population_comparisons#1900_compared_to_2005

Tells me what I was looking for (the statistic of how many Jews lived in Europe historically, both as population percentage and as raw numbers) and also just... wow. The sheer number of Jews in Austria, Hungary & Poland at the turn of the century and the sheer number of Jews NOT there now. Which is some the Holocaust and some migration and... I just...

...there's some rather oft-repeated bit about Japan's national psyche being permanently altered by the Hiroshima bombing, a kind of cultural post-traumatic stress disorder.

I never really thought much of the fact that I spend many spare cognitive cycles making contingency plans for sudden homelessness, despite growing up in a rich-ish family of pale skin color, until the point where I met other ethnically Jewish people who do the same thing. Until I was emailing back and forth with my father and he told me about how, in the community where he grew up just post-Holocaust, nobody talked about it; an older boy once furtively showed him a photograph of concentration camp victims from some clipping or other.

It's weird knowing that; that I grew up whole but learned to move as if I have scars where none exist on my own skin. Disquieting.

Peacocks and peahens... Circa 1995, when we were living in the Bay Area, one day our suburb was treated to the sight of a peacock regally strolling on the sidewalk with his peahens.

According to Locus's report about the Reno worldcon, next year's affair, Chicon 7, will be August 30 through September 30. Yes, you read that right.

Serge @ 394 -

I guess that's because it's the last one ever, what with the world ending in 2012.

B. Durbin, if the string has 108 beads it's Buddhist.

Or Hindu, especially if the beads are all the same (no separators). But it has a Y-junction; do Buddhist malas have one of those? The Hindu ones don't, so maybe I'm just wrong.

76 beads on the loop; six between the junction and the cross. Faceted black beads. I'm going to do the standard changes to five decades, though I hadn't heard about the four decade version.

And what does a piano want?

A starring part in the performance of a piano concerto?

To be the reincarnation of Liszt's piano?

To play stride in the parlor of a house of ill-repute?

To be Victor Borge's straight-piano?

I happen to have just recently read Rocket to the Morgue, which interested me because of its portrayals à clef of science fiction writers of the early Forties. It's part of a series about a detective who's a Catholic nun, and the plot peripherally involves a rosary with seven decades. This is called out in the book itself as greatly non-standard (apparently it had something to do with the Stations of the Cross -- I myself am not familiar with all of how rosaries are used and didn't grasp the details).

This? (The Franciscan Crown)

David Goldfarb @ #399, thank you for mentioning that book. It led me to learn something I'd never known.

I'd always thought that Anthony Boucher (the author, although he used a pseudonym) was a good mystery reviewer and occasional novelist. I had no idea he had any connection to sf, much less that he was one of the founding editors of F&SF.

Huh.

This ate my morning. Jer. = Jeremias, a Moralist; Cle. = Cleïs, a Mistress.

Jer. Fair is the face and dark is the heart.
Beauty and grace end with seeming and skin -
Worm and corruption hold revels within.
Fair is the face, ah, but dark is the heart!

Cle. Fair is the face, aye, and dark is the heart.
Charms are our banners in daylight unfurled.
Hearts are the horrors we hide from the world -
Facing it graciously is our kind art.

Jer. Black is the death when white is the urn.
Flies buzz when hypocrites speak the world fair.
Ghosts fester foul as they fear the free air -
Black is the soul, Cleïs: white is the urn!

Cle. Black is our marrow - to light we must turn.
Artful decay brings red wine and rich food,
Fairer for sharing than raw tripes and blood.
Black are our souls, but how brightly they burn!

Jer. Foul is the heart though fair is the face.
Venus' eyes hide the charnel of Mars.
When he breaks through, who'll compare you to stars?
Fair make your heart, ere it shows in your face!

Cle. Foolish is heart that's unfriend to its face.
Brave is the heart that will fight from its hell.
Inwards must find what is fair from their shell:
Learning life's kindness is all our hearts' grace.

Jer. Dark is the heart caught deep in the clay.
Cle. Deck it with flowers, and dance in the day!
Jer. Fair is the face, but the spirit is sin.
Cle. Let it look out, while the stars soak our skin
By the banks of the wide Milky Way...
A Whisper. - Come in -

This is picture of a Franciscan Crown, with 76 beads in the main part and five extras. I would never dream of suggesting there are anything unpleasant like rivalries among the various orders of Roman Catholic clergy, and so noting the Franciscans perhaps saw a way to annoy the Dominicans, while being high-minded and all is a temptation I shall pass by.

The Anglicans and their ilk (and, occasionally, other mainline Protestants) have picked up the idea of the rosary, now that the Reformation is a thing of the past and they can admit to a tad of mysticism (and, for some denominations, ritual) without causing hysteria*.

I have never seen a Buddhist mala that had a Y-junction; most of the ones I've seen are either the short form or the 108-bead variety, split up into four groups of 27 beads, with tassels and other add-ons variable. Interestingly, the Manchus used a necklace derived from the mala as an item of court regalia.

The various Eastern Orthodox churches have their own tradition, which appears to be considerably older than the RC rosary, and uses a different prayer; it's a rope, traditionally of black wool with special knots tied in it (there are directions out there on the internets, some with videos, for those who'd like to tie their own, or are particularly interested in knots); there are different lengths for different purposes, including a short one with 33 beads that masquerades as a wristlet.

*A Baptist acquaintance of my aunt's down in Mississippi admitted to some concern about the introduction of an Advent wreath ceremony into her church's Sunday services in December about 10 years ago: "I don't know, Sarah, I know you Methodists to do that sort of thing, but we're Baptists!" She also had some reservations about the regular recitation of the Creed in services; it seemed like such a Papist thing to do.

While following up a few ideas for NaNoWriMo, I discovered that Traci Lords had played Dejah Thoris in a movie called Princess of Mars.

Traci Lords?

Well, there's a trailer on You Tube, and she doesn't look bad.

I suspect they're looking over the links, and may have become sidetracked by Emperor Yongzheng's chao zhu.

Gray @402, Lovely!

Gray Woodland #402: Wow... a little scary in how dark you paint your Moralist, but certainly pointed.

Antonia T. Tiger #404: Oh yeah, after she grew up, she made a decent attempt at breaking into mainstream movies, though AFAIK she hasn't got past B-flicks.

Steve C @ 395... Party like it's 1999!

David, #407: I thought the Moralist rang very true. But then, I've recently been reading Sex With Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Rivalry, and Revenge and seeing rather a lot of those attitudes historically deployed. It's an interesting book; the author has gone thru a lot of historical and biographical sources, pulled out the bits specifically relating to (mostly European) royal mistresses from the Middle Ages forward, and organized them into a useful overview. I think even Serious Medievalists might enjoy reading it.

Yep, sounds like a Franciscan Crown.

The Michaeline version is 9 sets of 3 with gauds between. The Raphaelite version is like the Franciscan - it's 7 decades, but with gauds. There's a 3 decade version (of resurrection), and the paternoster (one decade, two gauds and a terminus, linear), and the Anglican version with 4 sets of 7, with gauds and three to the terminus.

In a box somewhere (my life, it is still in boxes) is my research about rosaries, prayer beads, and "approved" patterns for various religions, sects, etc. As an initial resource, I suggest Paternoster Row. She has done a lot of really good, solid research on Catholic and Christian prayer beads.

HLN: local authorities fail to call a snow day, despite 8" inches of snow. When reached for comment, local woman says, "Feh."

Steve C. @395: I guess that's because it's the last one ever, what with the world ending in 2012.

I was soooo disappointed that they didn't manage to pull off the End-of-the-Worldcon in the Yucatan for 2012.

I'm sorry I never got any photos of the Nativity I saw on a trip back to Fort Collins in... uh... 90s or 00s, I guess. It was very much out there, involving vacuum cleaner hoses seemingly frozen in flight, and other semi-abstract conceptual weirdity. It was in the yard of a photo studio. I can't find anything of it online. Maybe my sister took pictures of it.

Bruce Cohen @398: And what does a piano want?

Actually, it's a very sad story. The piano secretly always dreamed of being a computer. Its saddest day was when the tuner finally told it, in no uncertain terms, that this would never happen. "I'm sorry. Your shape is all wrong, and you just don't have it in you."

Lee #409: In my more cynical moments, I might agree -- certainly, there is that nasty taint of death-worship that infects Christianity. But that's certainly not the whole of Christianity, or even of the moralist urge within it. (Nor is Christianity the only place such sentiments have popped up!)

These days, someone who was quite that blatant about their thanatophilia might well get diagnosed with depression....

While Wiccans today often use a mala when praying to Hindu gods (especially Ganesh-ji), there's a traditional (by which I mean it might be 50 years old or might be 1000, depending on who's lying about what) tool for repeated visualizations (not so much prayers) called a Witch's Ladder.

It consists of a length of string with thirteen knots in it. This is consistent with the "Old Craft Laws" idea that everything has to be either innocuous or disposable; a Witch's Ladder can be tossed in the fire if you're about to be caught with it, and isn't all that incriminating to begin with (unlike the wax pentacle).

I used one for my success visualization prior to my first attempt at Drawing Down.

I think it makes a fair amount of sense that the number of beads tend to be inversely proportional to the length of the activity counted on each bead. The Franciscan Crown is a very long total, much longer than anything I've done on a mala, even though the mala has a lot more beads. Most of what I've done on a mala has been one repetition of "OM GANESHA YA NAMA" on each bead.

I did once do a whole mala of something like "Thank you for holding your hand as a shield over me and mine" (probably there was a formal address to the God at the beginning of that, but I don't remember what words I used) in September 2001, once I found out that while many of my coworkers, including several I had quite liked, had been killed in 9/11, all the ones I was really close to (and worked with at several previous jobs) were safe, and so were all my close friends.

I've seen Buddhist malas with all kinds of slide counters meant for counting how many times around the 108 beads you're going. I'm not sure how they're used, though I wouldn't be surprised if a whole round of the mala takes hours and hours.

@416 Xopher HalfTongue
I've seen Buddhist malas with all kinds of slide counters meant for counting how many times around the 108 beads you're going. I'm not sure how they're used, though I wouldn't be surprised if a whole round of the mala takes hours and hours.

That might be what I saw a woman on the Metro doing, then. She was using a round length of beads (rather pretty, jade looking) that had tassels every so often, and a long-ish bit that hung off with movable beads; every time she reached that bit, she would pull a bead down, abacus-like. I figured she was counting off some kind of prayers, but it seemed rude to interrupt to ask what. It had nowhere near 108 beads. Seemed more in the neighbourhood of 30 or so.

Re: Rumpelstiltskin as anti-Semetic

I'm pondering this reading of the motifs. I confess I always connected Mr. Stiltskin with the gold-loving dwarfs of German/Norse mythology. (Who were also prone to getting tangled up in unfortunate contracts, bad deals, and reneged promises.) And I was always too distracted by the lovely metaphor of "spinning straw into gold" for linen processing to do much other analysis.

Tom #360:

In economics, the term used for that kind of thing is non-rivalrous. That's any good where your using it doesn't diminish the amount or value left for me.

Xopher and Cheryl: Buddhist malas come in several lenghts -- 27 beads*, usually worn around the wrist; 54 beads, and 108 beads. All have an anchor 3-hole bead known as the 'guru' bead, which often has a tassle or fancy knot emerging from the bottom-most hole.

Often the practitioner will be assigned a number of mantras to be chanted by their teacher, especially after they have received an empowerment. The 2 long counting tassels help to keep track -- there are 10 counting beads on each.

I count the hundreds on the tassel with the bell and the 1000s with the tassel with the dorje. When I have counted 10,000 I move the wheel of dharma marker up one bead on the mala. When the wheel reaches the guru bead again I will have done 108,000 recitations of the Chenrezig mantra (Om Mani Padme Hum).

I have several malas -- one for Chenrezig, one for Tara, one for Medicine Buddha, and so on. I also note in my organizer my current totals so that if something should happen to the mala I'll still know how many recitations I've accomplished.

You can also get little markers to show where you had to stop when you're doing recitations while travelling.

*You will sometimes see these sold as "power bracelets..."

Almost forgot -- I use the tassel that hangs from the guru bead as a reminder to dedicate the merit of my recitations to the benefit of all sentient beings when I end the practice.

O assembled Flourospheroids: what can you tell me about Theodore Beale?

Earl @400:

Good reference. Nutbar site, though.

(How do I know? It has 2800 words on how women should still cover their heads, with amazing footwork to explain how Vatican 2 didn't really change things. It has a "Posture and Gesture" page listing the times to bow and kneel and so forth, detailed enough to explain that you genuflect on your left knee when meeting your local bishop. Meanwhile, both Creeds are tucked away on a mathom-house of prayers, and the kneeling it suggests for the Incarnation* is not included on the "Posture and Gesture" page.

I recall someone saying that where your treasure is, there is your heart. I say, where your words are, there is your attention. Veils and hierarchy get more energy than creeds? Nutbar.)

-----
* Everyone I've met who does anything bows at the waist for that bit.

C Wingate @422:

Speaking of nutbars! There are many tales to tell, usually under his nom de net, Vox Day. (Better yet, Google around a bit using that term; if we discuss him too much he might show up.)

Can I ask why you want to know?

Interesting open-threadiness: Felix Salmon's comment on being part of the 99%, despite having an incredibly rich and wonderful life.

And one more: Baseline Scenario links to this very nice chart from the New York Times visualy demonstrating one part of the unfolding European debt crisis.

Lori, thank you! Very informative, and you've also answered a question that has been much on my mind...you don't do the whole mala in one session (not the full 108,000 reps, anyway). That's really very useful to know.

Charlie, what abi said. VD is something you want to avoid (less punny now than when I was young). Advocated positions include solving the illegal immigration problem by mass deportation, which doesn't sound completely nutbar by today's standards (cf. Michelle Bachman) until you get to the part where he points out that after all it was done successfully in Germany in the 30s and 40s...and to my reading he thinks that's an example to emulate.

re 423: I notice that three Anglican hymns snuck into their page of "traditional Catholic hymns", particularly seeing that one of them is back-translated into Latin from the English and one of the others has a snippet of an Orthodox hymn hidden in it.

re 424: He has come up on the Wikipedia fringe theory noticeboard, and his article seems to be largely self-authored.

You're welcome, Xopher -- it takes me about 3 minutes to do 108 repetitions of Chenreizig's mantra, a little longer for Tara's (more syllables).

A few years ago, the entire sangha (world wide) was trying to accumulate a million mantras for one of our teachers -- so we were sending in totals every week, and managed to reach the mark just before their birthday.

C Wingate @429:

Both of those phenomena fit my understanding of his character as expressed on the internet. incidentally, a site search on his name here on Making Light is not unhelpful; it yields this compendium of links,as well as at least one more recent popcorn-and-lawn-chairs observation of his performance on Charlie Stross' blog.

Re. #422, I'm pretty sure the entity in question was regularly mocked on Pharyngula a few years ago; treated similarly on the AtBC forum, and turned up somewhere else talking about global warming and got their arse handed to them.
From what I remember they are far right Christian, for the opression of women etc, pretend to libertarianism but have trouble with the letting others do what they want bit and generally aren't worth knowing.
Oh, and they have a big flaming sword according to one photo...

By Tara's mantra do you mean OM TARE TU TARE TURE SVAHA (or SOHA)? The one I call the White Tara Chant? Or am I confused?

Genuflect when I meet the bishop???

Not bloody likely.

I manage to remain civil. That's about all he can expect.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers) @ #262:

That is unpleasant, certainly. I don't think, though, that it's quite fair to Kipling to let "The Light That Failed" stand as his last word on the subject, any more than it would be fair to Dickens to stop at Fagin; people do change over the course of their lifetimes, and Kipling still had most of his life ahead of him when he wrote "The Light That Failed". ("The Treasure and the Law" was many years later, and Kadmiel is not his last Jewish character either.)

abi @ #270:

I once read a short story about why 7 8 9, which was beautiful and haunting, and I thought it was on Hitherby Dragons but I've never been able to find it again.

Xopher@433 Tara's mantra

Or possibly it's "The inward eye, the sightless sea. Ayala flows through the river in me."

Although that's probably a different Tara...

And it's not precisely a mantra...

:-)

#395, #412:

Next year's Swancon is calling itself Doomcon, and has a focus on floods, asteroid strikes, zombies, Windows Vista, and other world-ending calamities.

The official slogan is "The apocalypse: it's just a big con."

Swan song for the world?

I admit it. I'm a materialist, gadget-loving gearhead. Sue me.

I still want a Real Light Cycle

Michael I @ 437... Tara King?

To judge from the pilot, Once Upon a Time is bland and joyless and utterly predictable. It reminds me of those tedious holiday TV movies in which adult characters encounter Santa Claus (e.g., as a future father-in-law).

The worst thing about it: Its version of the fantastic and fairy tales is lowest-common-denominator Disney tapioca.

My standards for what qualifies as strange and wonderful is much higher.

Stefan: I do the cast bios for my local theatrical group. For this spring's production of Iolanthe, I asked the cast what their favorite fairy tales were.

Almost everybody cited Disney. A couple of people cited Into the Woods at least, but almost everybody said "thus-and-so because of the songs or the specific Disney-invented character."

To someone who loves the source materials and the vast cross-cultural interaction of the original not for kids fare, this was pretty heart-rending.

@B Durbin:

Ugh, that's sad.

Tangentially:

My sister, who has not had much time for reading for years due to a hectic career schedule, is studying toward a Masters in library science. She's taking a course on childrens' lit right now, and is reveling in wonderful stuff, new and old.

Last week she listened to Gaiman reading The Graveyard Book and Coraline, and was blown away.

I think today's young'uns have a better chance of tapping into far better and a more fantastic grade of the fantastic than my generation did.

LIzzy @434:

Just be sure you remain civil with your left knee, not your right.

Wait, that didn't come out very well, did it?

Paul A.@436: It is Hitherby Dragons. To wit, Six's Story, and it is indeed a beautiful and haunting thing. I wanted to read it for the traditional Sunday-morning "Joy of Reading" at this year's Farthing Party, but when I tried it out it ran to fifteen minutes, which was far too long for a one-hour panel. Alas.

(I read Writing Real Life Person Slash about the Pope Day instead. It went over quite well.)

David @446 - Arg, I had JUST spent a few minutes finding that for Paul, only to fall victim to end-of-the-thread syndrome. (Though searching through various posts on Hitherby Dragons seems to always be its own reward, so hey!)

--Dave

JESR @386: see link @377 - for which you just provided an excellent example.

Serge@441

Tara Maclay from Buffy. The line is from a ritual chant in the episode "Who Are You".

@108:
But every day is Bosses' Day.

David, thank you very much.

(Both Davids. Even if only one of you got to present the answer, I appreciate that you both made the effort.)

"MythBusters - The Early Years"

What does a piano want? The first seventeen people you ask will assert with perfect confidence that it wants to be played. Enlightened, liberal-thinking people who would never presume to enforce their will on other human beings -- or even (sometimes to the detriment of housekeeping) on the furred and feathered creatures with whom they share their lives -- will none the less assure you that this entity of wood and strings desires nothing more greatly than to have its very being and essence bent to the will of alien creatures, to be a conduit for the voices they hear in their heads.

What does a piano want? Don't ask a piano. They are moody and doleful and have abandoned hope that any one will listen. Ask a harp -- those high-strung cousins have no compunction about giving you a piece of their minds. They know what pianos want: to listen through the depths of endless space and hear the thousand-layered music of the spheres. To pulse as one with all eternity and shiver invisibly as when a dewdrop falls from the spiders web. To sway in sinuous arcs that bring in harmony all light and time. To throb as one with all that they perceive and give it back to the universe, altered yet the same.

What does a piano want? To be in tune.

What does a piano want?
The keys to success?

#360 Tom
Replication, perhaps?

Heather @ 453 - have I mentioned lately that I admire you?

Occasional lurker here, hoping to take advantage of the accumulated knowledge about publishing.

I've been teaching a calculus course out of Hughes-Hallet's textbook, published by John Wiley and Sons. I've collected a small list of typos in the text. Who is the right person to send them to? The book has been through 5 editions, so it seems likely it will be reprinted again and (perhaps I am naive here) the typos might be fixed.

Open threadiness of possible interest to several here. Giles Fraser, Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London, has resigned over plans to evict Occupy LSX protesters from Cathedral grounds, saying he could not support the possibility of "violence in the name of the church". Full article in the Guardian.

Xopher -- yes OM TARE TUTARE TURE SOHA -- which is Green Tara's mantra.

White Tara's mantra is:

oṃ tāre tutāre ture mama āyuḥ puṇya jñāna pu ṣṭiṃ kuru svāhā

I'm not sure how many Taras there are -- in addition to Green and White, there is also a Red Tara -- I'm guessing her activity relates to what my teachers would call "wrathful practice."

@453: From my long experience with pianos, I must conclude that a piano really wants to be out of tune. If you stop forcing it back in tune, it will invariably get worse and worse sounding.

Kip@460

Isn't that like saying that human beings want to die ... because if you leave them alone, inevitably they will? Is not a piano entitled to want something at odds with entropy?

abi @ 445:

"First you fall down on your knees,
fiddle with your rosaries.
Bow your head with great respect,
then genuflect - genuflect."

Bruce @462

Yes, but how? Are you bowing, fiddling and genuflecting correctly? Nutbar websites want to know.

The current discussion reminds me of the photo Brother Guy showed us, of the Pope bowing to take a close look at his ring. The latter sees plenty of Cardinal rings, but not many MIT ones.

Paul A.@451: No great effort on my part. Since I remembered the story's title, all I had to do was go to the site and type it into the search bar. Hey, presto. If anything, I appreciate the opportunity to mention Hitherby in general (of which I am a huge fan) and that story in particular to the people here.

(Of course, it was Making Light that led me to Hitherby in the first place, some years ago when Teresa blogged about the story "Night of the Antinomian".)

A couple of Open Threads ago, there was some discussion of eReaders and criteria for picking the you want.

I thought some here might be interested in Kobo's latest offering, the Vox (there's a review at the link).

It integrates Kobo's Reading Life program, which "tells you how many hours you've spent reading, how many pages you read per session, hours per book, times of day you read and more besides." It can also integrate Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I just wondered if anyone here has had a look at it? I probably won't be getting it - the one I have now, the Wireless, isn't even a year old, even if I could afford it.

I'm a little disappointed in the supported file formats. The model before the Vox, the Touch, supported EPUB, PDF & MOBI for books, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for images, TXT, HTML and RTF for text, and even CBZ and CBR for comics. The Vox has added formats for video and audio, but taken away everything but ePub for the written word. I really don't think I like that.

FaultyMemory @ 458

May God reveal His mercy and grace to the brethren of the Church of England. That's...going to cause waves. Probably needed shaking up of some attitudes and certainties, but it's not going to be a fun time.

Heather Rose Jones @461: I'm using all three names because I don't know where the join is. Anyway, it's a thing I pondered before posting, but darn, it's like pianos work at going out of tune. You can touch them up daily, and fuss over them, and make the environment optimal for them, but they find ways around my best efforts.

I do expect to have an easier time with the grand piano. It's like they're made to be tuned, unlike its small upright predecessor (I hate to use that word — it's not deceased!) that waits until I put a mute on a string and then swallows it with hilarious consequences!

Kip W #468: Another reason to use full names for reference, is that someone else with the same first name may join the conversation. This becomes rather more important when there are, say, three or four Davids hanging about. ;-)

Pianos--in Gelett Burgess' "Lively City O'Ligg", a piano falls in love with a windmill, and after suitable fictional tribulations they get together, their children being a portative organ and an Eolian harp.

Heather Rose Jones @453, applause.

I've enjoyed the other speculations about pianos too.

IRL, a moving van (local mover, not long haul) arrived a couple of days ago and Stuff was unloaded, but once the movers left, no people are in evidence. Perhaps the piano was lonely and ordered in lounge furniture in anticipation of becoming more popular. Or an array of chairs and music stands and a conductor's podium. (It's a large front room the piano is in, but it's not that large.)

Which reminds me of the house we liked, but didn't buy, that was a fairly normal older colonial ... except for the short hall attaching it to a large addition with windows on 3 sides, which had been used by a previous owner for organ recitals. We called it the Grand Ballroom. Our kids being the age they were at the time, we contemplated filling it with gym mats and nothing else.

I digress, but that's what open threads are for.

David Harmon @469: The post number helps disambiguate as well. (I was responding to someone who called me by first name, and the explanation was partly to say why I hadn't answered in kind.)

Kip@468:

Those consequences being that you take the bottom panel off the piano and retrieve your mute?

I have an old Harrington upright. I think it predates the Great Depression. Last time I had it tuned, the tuner said he couldn't bring it up to A440; it was made for a lower pitch. I mostly play unaccompanied, so it's not an issue, but it's interesting how much the standard tuning pitch has moved over the last few centuries. I'm informed that some orchestras now tune to A446 or even A448; compared Mozart's and Handel's tuning forks (A421 and A422.5 respectively) that effectively transposes entire symphonies up half a step.

Snow!!!! ....

Meanwhile... Nightline had a clip of Barbara Walter reporting on having interviewed Madoff at the prison he has a century plus sentence in. She said he seem content there, he said he's free from the fear he lived with for 20 years of being discovered. He feels he deserves to be in jail and punished for having defrauded people of billions of dollars...

Meanwhile, there are tens, probably hundreds of thousnds of people gratitously dead because of the two people who headed up US Government in 2001-2008, millions displaced (a large percentage of the population that was in Iraq before 2002) and defrauded the US taxpayers of trillions of dollars. They are not in jail, they are not facing sentenced longer than the maximum current human life span....

I am NOT saying Madoff should be free, he's one of the biggest thieves alive... but the people who presided over the non-enforcing non-regulating (deregulated in effect, realy) regulatory agencies during 2001 - 2008 (the ends of absolute Republican control of Congress ended the absolute anti-regulatory stance of the US Government's Legislative Branch and squelched some of the "initiative" of the Executive Blanchers...) belong in jail and stripped of their perks etc. even more than Madoff does... he didn't write the orders which authorized torture and torturing people to death, and the launch of a gratuitous invasion and atrocity-ridden and needlessly lethal and deadly and irreplaceable antiquities and records and other properties-destroying occupation, in violation of the provisons of the Geneva Convention regarding protection of civilians, property, and the common cultural heritage of humankind...

Madoff was a thief and a shyster; the Executive Branch 2001-2008 President and Vice President and their cronies, are war criminals responsible for more death and misery and economic collapse than a lot of dictators.

Kip @ 468

To satisfy curiosity, it's "Heather" or "Heather Rose Jones" but never "Heather Rose" and absolutely not "Heather-Rose". At some point in my life I decided that I wanted to use all three parts when doing creative endeavors. (At work I'm just plain "Heather Jones".) But "hey you" also works.

Paula Lieberman, above: The obvious pun somehow didn't occur to me until now (apologies if others have made it here before) but - some people just have greatly portentous names, because he sure madoff with a lot of money. Heh, huh, huh. I feel sure I missed that round of jokes somewhere and am that person who gets it hours later.

But yes, there are worse. On the other hand people tend to do evil not in proportion to their inherent state of moral decay but in proportion to the power they have to use it.

FaultyMemory @ #473:

We did a production earlier this year of one of the modern reincarnations of The Beggar's Opera. One of the musicians had a copy of the songs from the original, in an edition with a foreword that discussed the practical issues arising from how the tuning baseline has drifted in the centuries since it was first produced. If memory serves the whole thing is now a key or two higher, effectively, than originally intended. (And boy, weren't some of the singers feeling it on the high notes. I don't think the musical director read the foreword.)

Crossing the history of anti-Semitism with Dysfunctional Family Day, I wonder if one of the reasons people hated the idea that Jews had loyalties and support outside the government is that it undercut the fantasy that the government was entitled to total loyalty no matter what it did.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 478... And that expection of total loyalty to the government comes from the same people who decry the guvmint as the Ennemy when a Democrat is in charge, right?

re 431: Thanks for the pointer. I think I will let braver folks than I handle this one.

FaultyMemory @473: It took months for the mute to finally appear at the bottom of the piano, and in the course of reaching for it from above, I managed to bend a little stiff wire that sticks off the back of one of the jacks, and that'll finally get fixed when we get the piano tuned prior to selling it. If it had dropped right down, I'd have had it in five minutes.

Heather @475: Thanks! If I say "hey you," lots of people turn, but nobody answers.

BIG NEWS!!! "Wild Cards" is heading to he big screenm, and Melinda Snodgrass is writing the script. WOOT!!!

Well, the initial Dog-Snorted-Something problem seems to have worked itself out, but I do believe I'll be bringing Ardala to the vet this weekend in hopes of solving a new mystery that has presented itself in the last week.

Ardala's normal routine is to get up roughly 10 minutes before the alarm, get whatever servant monkey she can based on who's left their door open, cuddle, eat breakfast, go on leisurely, I Sniff Everything walk which is never long enough, go home, nap during the day, greet servant monkeys happily after work, eat, go on longer, slow, sniffy walk, hang out, sleep.

Her new routine seems to be - get up at 4am, whine, wander around distractedly until someone gets up to feed her, refuse kibble in bowl, fidget, whine, refuse kibble on plate, wander, refuse kibble in snack dish soaked in chicken broth, fidget, eat mushy kibble one at a time hand fed by frustrated servant monkey, fidget, whine, finish half the mushy kibble, go outside at a fast trot we haven't seen for 3 years, continue energetically running around the house.

When we come home, it's celebratory zoomies for at least 15 minutes (again, not her normal curmudgeonly pace), energetic digging in bedding (OK, so that's normal) and a repeat of the morning's food-refusal performance. Her evening walk is uncharacteristically purposeful, done at a fast trot and business complete, she trots back to the house. I have also noticed her drinking water a lot less messily than usual. I think it might be a tooth pain issue, which would explain her food refusal, but wouldn't explain her newfound energy. She seems to be in pretty good spirits, so long as someone's paying attention to her. In fact, I'm kind of wondering what to tell the vet - "Dog acting weird. Not pigging out, is happy and energetic."

Oh, who the hell knows why this dog does anything. I guess that's why we pay the vets the big bucks.

Kibble in a snack dish soaked in chicken broth sounds pretty good right now; I guess I shouldn't have skipped breakfast today. heh.

nerdycellist #483: She seems to be in pretty good spirits, so long as someone's paying attention to her.

That seems worrisome to me -- I suspect something is in fact paining her, but not so badly (yet) that she can't be comforted by her people.

David Harmon -

That's what we were thinking, actually, since dogs don't show pain the same way humans do. She's got a 9:30 appointment for tomorrow morning at any rate. We're feeding her enough tasty, soft food that she should at least be able to avoid her acid reflux/bilious vomiting issues while we try and figure out what's wrong with her. I hope they can fix it and I hope whatever it is is entirely coincidental with her high energy. It's been kind of fun to have her running around like a puppy again.

Entirely frivolous comment warning:

Is anyone else disgruntled that Maximus the Military Horse in Disney's Tangleddoesn't even get mentioned in the cast and voices of the characters on IMDB? I mean, really! Without Maximus, Eugene would be on the gibbit and Rapunzel would be who knows where under the duress of the eviLe Mother Gothel, even now!

The Who did the What, now?

Ad for gun training bars Muslims and Obama voters

I guess I should be happy the gov't is investigating?

Cheryl @488 -- now there's someone who knows how to use the media to get attention! While I don't agree with him on any level, I admire his SEO savvy. He'll be well known for a couple of months, at least, which is a lot better than Andy Warhol's 15 minutes.

This is the most reassuring part:

It seems unlikely that Keller will back down, though. "I'm not going to do it," he told the local news. "I will give up my license to teach before I will teach them," he said, referring to Obama voters and Muslims.

Xopher... giving up his license

Keller will be back in "License Revoked"!

#479 ::: Serge Broom :

This pattern was long in place before anyone had heard of America, let alone current American politics. Also, the Tea Party et al. doesn't seem to be especially anti-Semitic. Their xenophobia seems to mostly be spent on Hispanics.

The gun ad guy is using his xenophobia points on Muslims.

Nosferatu Barada Nikto!

Nancy Lebovitz @ 492... Oh, I know that. The teabaggers may be predominently against Hispanics, but that's because the latter are the current poster people for those furriners who are stealing our jobs. I myself am a furriner and, by simply living in America, I probably stole someone else's job. But I digress. The bottom line though is that not very deep down they all are authoritarians, unless the authority is a Democrat and I don't think we tend much toward authorianism.

by simply living in America, I probably stole someone else's job

That... was YOU??

I have a very bad feeling about the kitty who should have come home a couple of hours ago. We lost her littermate 6 months back. Tonight, it's dark and rainy, and she'd normally be curled up by the fire.

I have no idea how I'm going to deal with my kids when the turn into teenagers who miss curfew.

Kip W @ 495... You can have it back. Right now I feel like Mister Scott stuck inside the Seaview. :-)

#493 Kip
OUCH!!!

#497 Serge
Are there exploding consoles all around you??! (The one actual real world console failure that happened in the Tactical Operation Room (TOR) at Thule Greenland on a shift I was on, was completely unspectacular--no sparks, no flames, no fireworks, no noise.... the radar display went blank, was all that happened, the operator reported "Console Number Four [or whichever number it was] Failure no [something or other]" I hit the squawk box button to CSMR [pronounced "siz-mar" where the contractors who did the radar site systems operations and maintenance were] and repeated, "Console Number Four failure no [something or other]", the contractors took over watching the video for that console on the backup system in their part of the facility, and a couple technicians came in and started tearing the console apart to troubleshoot it. Again, it was totally unspectacular, and it was an automatic response from the operator and from me... console failures being standard items in Performance Exercises, and life in the TOR being so utterly boring that the crews -asked- for an exercise every shift to cut the tedium....

Kitty is back, and she is soooooo grounded. At least as long as we can convince the 2yr old to not open the door for her.