First?

I'm feeling much more spirited today. Rays of the supermoon maybe. Off to The Avengers!

Huh? What? Trail mix isn't particularly good tasting?

That stuff is like crack to me.

Not good for you, check. But if you're actually hiking, really strenuously marching along, it may be just what you need. Carbs and sugar and a bit of salt.

As a snack food, it isn't great.

The same goes for "spots drinks." For some reason Gatorade and the like would fly off the shelves of the cafeteria free-drinks fridge at work. This, in an air-conditioned office full of developers, QA folk, and technical writers.

Ah, the Avengers. We will be getting that from our local public library when we get to the top of the waiting list. That will probably be some time in 2013, judging by how long it took us to see Thor (and we're still waiting on Green Lantern).

Stefan Jones: "Spots drinks"? You mean like Orbitz?

http://www.lanceandeskimo.com/chefelf/bev_orbitz.shtml

As for the Avengers, at least we can watch the Premakes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fCTokuOU_E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0jBF912xYY

My church isawesome!

Included with the bulletin this morning was a petition and fund-raising flyer standing with American nuns with a (currently not working) link to the National Catholic Reporter's online petition. Bonus: ncronline.org's site links to change.org's petition (presumably if one is uncomfortable with a religious website), which under Why People Are Signing begins with a stringent statement from an archbishop.

I cannot imagine this happening at either of my mother's churches, but I'll soon find out.

The change.org petition URL: http://www.change.org/petitions/support-the-sisters .

I must not be getting enough sleep.

I'm not a huge fan of trail mix, but that's because it's all mixed together. I have recently (like in the last few years) started enjoying Chex mix, though I feel very mature eating even the weird chexes* I don't like.

*The Hy-Vee brand of Chex is called Crispy Hexagons. It is worth buying for that alone.

Some of the trail mixes are heavy on candy, and so really not good for you. (I was making my own for snacks, using mixed nuts and assorted dried fruits.)

Gorp-Metal - A short-lived sub-genre of Progressive Rock originating in Cardiff in about 2009. At the genre's peak a concert in Wath-upon-Dearn in South Yorkshire was announced from the stage as "An evening of Gorp-metal".

I have recently been accused of being the originator of the term, an accusation which I strenuously deny.

I don't know about it being "bad" for you. High-calorie, yes. But on those "Oops, I forgot to eat!" days, a life-saver. Also better, in my experience, for perking one up during those "When is lunch?" or "It's 4:45 and the prof has just asked if we can stay late!" moments than carbs or caffeine alone. The protein and fat from the nuts and seeds can keep you going longer and more evenly than a straight sugar rush. There's a reason it's called "student mix" in Europe.

(And what was it about my post that tripped the spam filter?)

[A comma with no space after it before the next word. Check your URL. -- Publius Perseflage, Duty Gnome]

Being denizen of no place ready set
within the bounds of the sublunar realm
is nowise daunting, the facts overwhelm
only the weaker minds; instead each debt
incurred in course of duty or regret
is paid in full by shade of oak or elm
in memory of the old man with cracked helm
by one who can't resist that final bet.
Each night is sacrificed so that my rest
becomes a loss that's added to the pile,
just one more line that goes into the jest,
another little twist. Those are in style.
The truth is always harder than the lie,
that's what they tell us; then they say goodbye.

Aha. URL Borken, which explains it.

Back In The Day, what is now called "trail mix" was commonly known hereabouts as "gorp."

Huh. A quick Google informs me that this term is actually an acronym for "Good Old Raisins and Peanuts." Who knew? And here I thought it was just a clever random neologism.

Or the old RuneQuest monster which I once described as "a baby Shoggoth".

[Check your URL in the "Don't Make Me Type This Again" section. -- Adros Pettifog, Duty Gnome]

Gorp? Gorp? That is...completely new to me.

Madeline Ashby @ 10: Oh, those "I forgot to eat," and those "Some donkey forgot to tell me I wasn't going to get a chance to eat," moments!

I wish I'd known about Student Mix when I was a student. Or when I was employed at Chaos Central Polyversity*, even more so. That sort of stuff works far better for me loose than in the compact sticky bar form, which fifteen years after a certain lean period I can still hardly bear to contemplate.

Though my favourite portable cereal leans towards the other side again: the compact, dense, fruit-lush style of flapjack...

*Chaos Central Multiversity, on the other paw, would have been interesting.

Aha! The perfect topic to ask this question.

Lo, many moons ago (waaaaay too many...) I was introduced to gorp, and it was an acronym. The O was oatmeal! R was for raisins! And P, of course, was Peanuts.

Damn me if I can remember the G...

Anyone?

I used to have scroggin quite often while tramping, I don't remember thinking that it didn't taste good! I ahve seen it in supermarkets, we used to make it ourselves.

Granola? We certainly used to make it with granola back in college.

(I always had to be careful with gorp, because the combination of raisins and chocolate makes me feel like hurling.)

Ah yes, scroggin. I almost never eat it unless on a tramp, when (high calorie) energy dense* foods are desirable.

*We went through a phase of trying to work out what the food with the highest kJ/100g was by reading labels of items on supermarket shelves** but in the end decided that it was probably a bit excessive taking blocks of butter as tramping food.

**We could have googled it, but running around the supermarket going, "What about this?" was way was more fun.

16
Acronym for 'good old raisins and peanuts' is what I heard.

@Gray Woodland: The only sticky bar I've really enjoyed was the Greens Plus Chocolate Energy Bar. Dark chocolate outside, soft green mass of phytonutrients inside. Like a Mounds, but green. But that was seven years ago, and the formula has since changed. I don't know if they're still good, and I can't find them in Canada anyway to check.

I doubt any of these things would be good for me, but it's worth mentioning Kendal Mint Cake.

"Gorp" is also said to stand for "Gobs Of Raw Protein."

I think we have folk-etymology* at work.

*Not to be confused with folk-entomology, or "What's that bug?"

Nor to be confused with folk-aetiology for that matter

@Dave Bell: Probably good for social cohesion on long-haul hiking and mountaineering trips: it's a high-protein confection that also freshens one's breath.

Trail mix on the trail is wonderful. The problem is when you're home from the hiking/the camping/the salamander-stalking/the death-defying mountaineering and you've still got three or four pounds of the not-very-appetizing-any-more stuff left (because you made way too much of it) ...

*The Hy-Vee brand of Chex is called Crispy Hexagons. It is worth buying for that alone.

Had Edwin A. Abbott managed to parlay Flatland into a multi-volume fantasy series, I reckon A. Square Meets the Crispy Hexagons of Flatland would have been volume eight or nine.

My favorite gorp mixture (for myself) involved dried cranberries, cashews, and white chocolate chips -- my coworkers thought I was insane.

(I've not made it in ages. I wonder how dried blueberries or cherries would work. Yes, expensive, but tastier, I'd bet.)

Of potential interest to Their Lowlinesses.

Velma, that mix sounds fabulous to me! It's like taking the standard recipe and kicking each ingredient up a notch.

Hi all.

I'm wondering whether I can pick the collected brain of Making Light on the subject of bookmark sorting, storage and retrieval tools. I've recently had to replace my computer (losing between 6 - 8 years worth of bookmarks in the process) and as a result, I'm recreating things, but I want to organise them from the get-go.

I've put up a post over on Dreamwidth about what I'm looking for (essentially, I'm using the Firefox all-in-one sidebar as a bookmarking platform, and I'm not wanting to spend huge amounts of time either organising or duplicating bookmarks elsewhere). But I'd appreciate any input people can give me on the subject.

I've thought of making pemmican with unspiced beef jerky, dates, cashews, and cocoa butter, but never actually tried it.

I haven't made GORP in at least a decade, but I was fond of a great (and slightly lethal) mix of dried cranberries, hazelnuts and dark chocolate.

For a period during Beka's toddlerdom -- after she was interested in regular solid-food snacking -- there were a list of reasonably shelf-stable snacky foods she would eat ... some of, at any given moment. And other things on the list she would utterly reject in any given snacking instance (but love later).

When I noticed I was packing four or five little Rubbermaid containers, one for each item, to take on train/car journeys for kid provision, I decided to try making a 'trail mix' of them -- it worked pretty well. She'd pick out whichever subset of the mix she was willing to eat just then and leave the rest (or hand them to me), and I only had to pack one seal-box.

Ingredients included at various times: Cheerios, bran flakes, raisins, quartered dried figs, quartered dried apricots, sunflower seeds, small chips of beef jerky.

She went through a period where all she was willing to eat for days on end were sunflower seeds and figs, which worried me until I read the 'nutrition facts' on the package and marveled. :->

HLN: Local woman is Chutneyed† by Jack Campbell's new Lost Fleet novel. "They meet homicidal aliens who look like slightly bovine teddy bears," she explains, "and now I want to make a teddy bear-cow."

*sigh*

†see footnote here

A hiking friend told me that "gorp" stood for Godawful raisins and peanuts. He dropped the "o" or maybe exchanged the "o" with an "a". He used chex cereal, raisins and peanuts. Maybe he used oats but I don't remember.

Ah, gorp. An unfortunately deadly snack in the most common incarnation (peanuts, dammit!) -- and worse yet, one guaranteed to smear contagion around every surface and through the air.

Did someone say homicidal teddy bears?

Heh heh heh, Mary Aileen!

D. Potter at #5: that is awesome! Checking out the link in 5...4...3...2

I signed the petition and am e-mailing the link to friends.

@21: Long ago, I read an autobiographical story about a trek to the South Pole via dogsled. By the end of it, all the humans were burning so many calories that they were consuming sticks of butter as snacks.

We picked up our entry packet for the Art Car Parade today. We're entry #15! Given that the first dozen or so entries are reserved for various Indignitaries, there's a good chance that we might be the first open entry in the parade. Houston locals are cordially invited to come down and see us -- Saturday, May 12, parade officially starts at 1:00 but you're free to wander up and down the staging area looking at the cars close-up for a couple of hours beforehand. More information here. We'll be on the tie-dye-covered tandem bike, and our entry name is "Dyeing 2 Ride Again".

Xopher (40): It's a curse, I tell you!

::shakes head sadly::

I wonder if, like Gorp, Chex is also an acronym, or partially so:

Crispy Hexagons = C. Hex

Bruce H. @33: I've contemplated making really-and-for-truly pemmican since buffalo is available at the health-food stores, and choke cherries can be picked locally at the correct time of year.

Elliott Mason @35: There was a study done eons ago on spontaneous child nutrition. Basically they took a preschool class, and just laid out a buffet of every imaginable food, available for grazing at all times, and then just stood back and watched what the toddlers picked. It would change from day to day, might include a week binge on, say, cucumbers, or might feature, maybe, bananas and beef liver. But sure enough the aggregate total would shake out to a balance diet. Throwing refined sugar into the mix would, of course, blow the whole thing out of the water. But it seems that naive childhood appetite is pretty good and regulating diet and nutrition.

Unfortnately, can't think up what would be adequately targeted Google phrases, and I remember hearing about this back in the '60s or '70s.

Also -- here, have some morris dancers (from last Tuesday).

Chex aren't hexagons, though. Too bad, as that's a great idea.

Sarah@48, is your link borked or eaten by gnomes? I can't get either Firefox nor IE8 to acknowledge it, though they've shown it in a different color.

At least around here, our two local Morris sides danced and then the sun came up, so it must have worked.

Sarah, was the link about Morris Dancers either of these:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/05/01/minnesota-sounds-and-voices-morris-dancers/

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/05/01/minnesota-in-photos-morris-dancing/

Moveable Type deletes the links when certain kinds of malformed URLs are present. Most commonly this happens when someone forgets to put in the quote marks. What happens then is the gnomes take the post away (for having a malformed URL). If the post was by someone they know, they release the post but alas! the URL itself is gone to where even a gnome can't find it.

Aw, thanks for those links, Magenta. Brings back memories. It's been too many years since I went down to the park to watch them dance the day in.

For those not familiar with the Minnesota Morris teams pictured, the men of the MTM (Minnesota Traditional Morris) are kitted out with their green baldric and the yellow badge in the center that led to their nickname. The yellow badge has a frame of green laurel leaves around a dancing moose. The MTM are known far and wide as men of moose laurels. Seriously -- check their website.

(Hey, we're talking about a team who improvised a dance called the Bloodington Beaver, which was danced in the Bloodington style to the "Leave It To Beaver" theme song. They made it up during a party in my apartment. A lease-breaking party, but that's a story for another time. Fun bunch, though.)

Gorp not good-tasting? You're obviously doing it wrong. My preferred mix involves mixed nuts (sans peanuts), assorted dried fruits (including, but not limited to, raisins and cranberries), a relatively small quantity of M&Ms (sufficient to average around 1 per handful), and whatever cereal is available for filler.

*Like several others here, I mostly eat it on the trail, on hikes of several hours duration and a few thousand feet elevation change. For this purpose, it's the perfect food.

Diatryma@7 Alas, the Hy-Vee Crispy Hexagons are not a Chex analog, but rather a Crispix analog. I, too, find them very tasty for making snack mixes. The Chex analog is called something else, but I am too lazy to run the ten minutes to Hy-Vee this minute to remember just what. It's time to go to bed, rather than the grocery store.

elise:

Why is it that all the fun stories I hear about lease-breaking parties and rent parties come from Minnesota? I've been to such parties in New York, but somehow they never become the stuff of legend.

For my own part, I don't like any kind of nuts. (Unlike xeger, I won't go into anaphylactic shock or anything, I just don't like them.) It's a texture issue for things like almonds where I like the flavor; but walnuts and peanuts are very popular, and I dislike walnuts and hate peanuts. So most gorp is pretty well out.

My preferred mix is almonds, good quality semisweet chocolate chips, and either raisins or dried cranberries. When I trained to walk a marathon, I ran into issues with nausea using this snack when walking longer distances. GU was too ghastly (sucking sugary slime out of a pouch?!) and I settled on Sharkies. I recall one of the coaches saying that nobody gets sick on Sharkies. They are non-tasty gummy bear sorts of things which are fortified with electrolytes. Remembering Sharkies is so not making me nostalgic for my days of getting up at 5am on Saturdays to train!

I mentioned getting up at 5am on Saturdays to exercise, which no doubt triggered shock and disbelief.

LMM #43:
Very sensible if you're wanting to get the most calories for least weight.

ISTR Peter Hillary (Edmund's son) who attempted to get to the South Pole following Scott's expedition talking about taking foods with just that in mind: "...high-calorie cereals and meat swimming in olive oil and butter."

Dave Bell @24: Kendal Mint Cake is still my energy source of choice for longish distance running (up to marathon). For longer distances (ultra), and for 20+ mile runs in training, I alternate with malt loaf or fig rolls or flapjack. The gel manufacturing companies despair!

Madelaine Ashby @27: No protein involved in Kendal Mint Cake - pure sugar and peppermint oil.

And for anyone not getting to the Lakes sufficiently regularly to keep stocked up on the minty nectar, Lakeland (the kitchen store) have started selling it - in their shops and by mail order. Unfortunately at present only in a mixed box of one brown bar, one white, but I can hope they will offer two brown bars shortly - and at least it meant I didn't risk running out of the stuff on my recent (cold, wet and windy - had to be Manchester) marathon. [Which I completed in the respectable time of 3.47].

Might try a trail mix during the summer - will probably need more variety on my 50-miler in August.

I've just been gnomed. I think that's my first time. And I've no idea what for.

Adros Pettifog, Duty Gnome #16

Hmm. Defaulted to the wrong value *after* I'd posted once with the correct URL. May be a strange browser-caching issue, or an obscure bug in the code.

Why am I testing on a bank holiday?

My morris link was to my flickr set; let me try a link to one of the individual photos, maybe that'll work (also, flickr was being generally uncooperative last night).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22411134@N08/6985937564/in/set-72157629576512872/

*sigh* Borked, but cutting-and-pasting it into the bar works. I give up.

Jacque @ 47:

Maybe that study would be mentioned somewhere in web resources on "intuitive eating," an approach towards adult nutrition that runs along those lines -- learn to listen to your body, because it will ask for what it needs. Try the keywords "intuitive eating" in combination with "children," "study," etc.?

I try to listen to my body. Sometimes it requires a slightly longer-term integration of data. I have symptoms of reactive hypoglycemia, which means if I don't eat for more than 4 hours, my body starts yelling for ALL THE SUGAR AND STARCH. My body is still asking for exactly what it needs -- my blood sugar is low and needs to be raised. But if I follow that boom-bust sugar cycle I'll feel bad long term. What I really need to do is eat to avoid that situation -- and I'm learning to recognize how I feel after eating a meal of protein, fat, and fiber-rich carbs vs. a meal of refined starches and sugar.

Sarah @65:

The format for URLs is given above the comment box, just north of the spelling reference.

To turn your photo URL into a live link, type this:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22411134@N08/6985937564/in/set-72157629576512872/">Here</a> is a picture from my photoset of the Toronto Morris dancers.

What you get when you do that is:
Here is a picture from my photoset of the Toronto Morris dancers.

You can check the color of the link at preview stage. If it looks like this:
Here is a picture from my photoset of the Toronto Morris dancers
...then recheck your syntax.

65 & 67: And for them as wants a little technological assistance, here's my handy-dandy linkmaker:

http://jacquemarshall.net/linker/index.html

(Note that I haven't gotten around to making it smart enough to clip out the slash escapes from apostrophes and the like. Will do that Some Day Real Soon Now.)

Something has just crystallized for me: I realized that whenever I encounter janetl's posts, I picture her as the protagonist of Tam Lin, having taken Thomas's last name at marriage.

Velma @30: Delicious combination! I basically only buy cashews as a present for my father, but if I made more money, yum. My current favorite gorp-adjacent accidentally-ruin-your-dinner snack is granola-ish bars made with oats, peanut butter, honey, and molasses, to which I add dried cranberries, walnuts, unsweetened coconut, and chocolate chips.

HLN: Local woman becomes aware of novel-in-progress's similarity in premise to not only a Stephen King novel but a currently popular YA series and regards her 300 very slowly written pages with queasiness.

JM #69 Good luck with the HLN. May your queasiness subside and / or require minimal tweaking.

My version of HLN is that I just sent off a story with a bold new idea, and now I'm worrying that somebody published the same bold new idea in the past 6 months without my noticing.

Que sera, sera.

Oddly enough, gorp in my family is totally different thing: ground beef, alphabet soup, tomato soup, spice to suit, serve on toast.

Trail mix is fun, though, but I too used it more for those "0800 class, 0900 class, 1000 class, 1100 class, 1200 class, 1300 class, lab from 1400-1700" days. (Tuesday and Thursday, that semester, was pretty light, though).

David Goldfarb @57 - I have always been told that peanuts are not nuts (that is, not tree nuts, which are what we usually mean by the term). Peanuts are legumes.

None of which, of course, changes your opinion of them. >:-)

(Myself, I loathe tree nuts - texture issue, I think - and adore peanuts.)

Bruce @56: I dunno, maybe it's "Minnesota, land of 10,000 anecdotes"?

Mine are tame. You should hear the ones about the Bozo Bus Building, which was before my time.

dcb, #62: I'm not a gnome, but I will guess that "energy source" might be a Phrase of Power, based on the spam I get. (This is also a test; if this comment is held, I was right.)

...aaand my guess was apparently wrong. Good to know.

Even at my most energetic hiking stage of life, I never really used trail mix of any sort. The small pieces tend to go flying everywhere as I try to eat, and I have never been keen on leaving a food trail leading right up to my camp.

Trail mix also seems optimized for walking and eating, while I tend to prefer to sit down when eating. Maybe I'm the least graceful human on the planet, but walking and eating invariably results in food all over me and occasionally results in me choking on the small pieces of food I manage to get in my mouth. Sometimes at lunch I will go sit in the park near my office and watch people walk and eat (hot dogs! pretzels! burritos!) and marvel at how they don't choke to death. It's like watching a ballet that only I can appreciate.

Mycroft W @ 70 : That reminds me of a certain semester in undergrad (where I was taking all of my classes on tuesday and thursday to have a couple full days in my research lab on monday and wednesday)... and of my first semester in grad school. Now that I'm a second year, life is somewhat saner in that regard.

I just spent my last afternoon in Poland at the Wedel Chocolate Lounge. O!M!G!

Lee @74:

It's "marathon", actually. I'm not sure of the history of its inclusion. Amusing guesses welcome, probably not actually using the word.

(I'll have to fish this comment out of moderation. But it's always a pleasure having a cup of tea with the gnomes. They see so much of the darker side of the internet, and yet they are kindly.)

Dear Gnomes, Please enjoy the chocolate I bought for you.

The gnomes served me chocolate. Thank you, Tracie!

@dcb: You're right. When I read "high energy," at the wiki, I immediately thought "high protein."

Also, if someone could teleport some GORP to my place right now, that would be great. Why I let the granola be put away on such a high shelf is beyond me.

If I thought I could get away with it I would plant a Hazelnut "tree"[1] in my yard. I adore them more than all other nuts except possibly macadamias. But I like all nuts and nut like seeds. MMmmm, soy nuts. And they go so well with a homebrew. But I think I shall be content with my apple trees as from what I have read they take less water. And in the fall I intend to order some really fresh chestnuts from an outfit I found in Kansas, no more frequently moldy or dry pathetic things from the megamart! Funny though, I seem to love all those things from the songs and most people I have met say they hated roasted chestnuts when they tried them. Ditto christmas pud. And I think I shall make some sugar plums for memorial day. Perfect desert as it is ground up nuts and dried fruit, two of my favorite things. Plus gluten free for my friends who cannot enjoy pie.

[1] Hazelnuts or filberts are actually just very large bushes that can be trimmed into a tree like shape. There are quite a lot of these sorts of "trees" out there. Tree lilacs being one of the worst offenders. Bah. That's no tree!

Just gonna note this without comment, since the topic has been discussed here at length: if all the male avengers posed like the female one.

Well, actually I will comment: I'd've read a lot more comics growing up if poses like that were common with male superheroes. Which probably explains part of why they do it with the female ones.

Sad.

Xopher @83:
In the interest of credit to the artist (since that site doesn't seem to give any attribution), here's a link to what appears to be the original. The artist in question has a couple others in the same vein.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I went on a youth-group trip to Colorado, where we did some hiking in the mountains. The guides fed us something they called HB Bread, or Hudson Bay Bread, which was really a kind of dense granola brownie. THIS looks like a reasonable approximation of what it was, though I seem to remember some dried fruit in it, too.

It was intensely sweet, even for teenagers. The best way to eat it was covered in a quarter inch of peanut butter, which cut the sweetness somewhat.

But I'm sure it was a great energy food...

Tracie @#77 -

I am jealous. I brought home some canisters of the drinking chocolate to make at home. It wasn't the same. I'll be visiting Poland again next year with my parents and Wedel is definitely on the itinerary. We'll go to the one in Cracow, since the "Oh no - I really shouldn't..." food in Warsaw will be the paczki at A. Blikles.

Mishalak@82: And in the fall I intend to order some really fresh chestnuts...

I'm definitely tired today: I managed to misapply the general context twice in reading that one sentence. First, after the mention of trees I thought you were going to order chestnut trees; and then, given all the mentions of hiking, I jumped straight to remembering how fallen chestnuts turn into ball bearings for hikers on the trail.

Roasted chestnuts can be really good, but my experience is that roasted nuts sold from streetcarts, at least in New York, are all smell and no flavor, which could turn anyone off of them.

The first time I saw the word "Gorp" was in Peanuts. (CAUTION: PEANUTS MAY CONTAIN GORP)

There's a trail mix bar at Wegman's. One could include or leave out whatever works. And pay for the privilege, of course.

Dad used to make trail mix with mostly peanuts, raisins, and some chocolate chips. Last time I visited him, he was making granola — and dang, it was really good. I wonder if he ever makes bannock these days. He worked on his recipe for years, and had gotten pretty good with it. He also spent a long time working up a dry mix he could take camping and make hush puppies over the fire.

And on another topic, there's a new chocolate place in town. I must go see if they have anything like the rich, somewhat dark hot chocolate we drank in Italy. It was like slightly runny pudding. (Okay; really runny.) I did get a block of semi-sweet from Trader Joe's once, and tried my hand at it. I melted it down. Not having a double boiler, I put it in a metal measuring cup and floated it in the hot water in a pot on the stove. It was okay, but not what I was aiming at. (Note to self: Remember how fast those boutique places come and go in Pittsford. Go soon.)

The following comment-spam posts received within the past 24 hours are the reason for the gnoming of "marathon":

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Dont run a marathon without the proper training. Unlike many activities, training for a marathon is serious business. Fail to train properly, and you not only risk failing to complete the race, you also risk seriously injuring yourself.

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Thank you for your article on running. I am struggling with the whole aspect of running races. I have done many over the years, and I am not a fast runner. Last year I found myself training and not enjoying any of my running, and it led me to a half-marathon melt down and hamstring injury. I have since started over in my running, and I appreciate the idea that we dont have to enter races to enjoy what running brings to each of us. Thank you for that validation. The line between running for fun and running races because you feel you have to is very thin for me, and your article helped me take a huge step in my thinking!

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thought the process of registering for the Boston Marathon could definitely be improved. But I dont have any suggestions. I ran into trouble when they said my credit card could not be verified? So I had to re-enter a different card numberbut when it was all said and done, they actually did charge the first credit card. So now I have to inform them of this and hope when I actually get the charge officially run threw the system that I only got charged once instead of twice. What a pain! Because of this it took me longer to fill out the registration.

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Open reg from oct to dec. Charge a $10 processing fee and let in the best 26,385 runners weighed by sex and age as seen in the big races of that year. So if 40% of the people that finish marathons in a year are women, then 40% of boston should be women. If 10% of the people that finish marathons are age 40 to 44, then 10% of boston should be 40 to 44. Note: I think finishing a Marathon means running it so all times greater than 5 hours should not be considered in the weighting. This means each year the qualifying time will be different but then the boston would represent the best. Oh and charity should be allowed in but those runners should have the class to say if they did or did not qualify when they tell people that they run boston.

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I just did the Providence marathon in VFF Sprints yesterday. Absolutely loved it and feet felt great. Cant wait for the next one.

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Someone ran the Toronto Marathon in under 2 hours? I think you are lying! And why dont you beat that?

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Thank you for your article on running. I am struggling with the whole aspect of running races. I have done many over the years, and I am not a fast runner. Last year I found myself training and not enjoying any of my running, and it led me to a half-marathon melt down and hamstring injury. I have since started over in my running, and I appreciate the idea that we dont have to enter races to enjoy what running brings to each of us. Thank you for that validation. The line between running for fun and running races because you feel you have to is very thin for me, and your article helped me take a huge step in my thinking!

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I am so excited to get the updates and tips on how to train! This will be my first marathon and I am a little nervous but will be so excited when I finish it! Will you be sending out the tips to your email list as well so I dont miss any of them?

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Brad,Marvin Scaff recommended the post to me and you are dead on. I am running for Mayor of Tampa and constantly have to remind people that are ability to create a new and different path for this City is a marathon not a sprint. Thanks for the intellectual and real world backup.

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Hi I completed the seabank marathon this year for my first time EVER! I was really pleased with my time which was 7 hourse and 41 minutes. so not too long really. Hope to do it again next year, well done to everyone who completed it.

In contrast, in the same period there were only two legitimate posts that used the word "marathon," they were the first to use it in months (if not years), and both were released pretty promptly.

Kip @ #90 -

Your pudding-like Italian hot chocolate sounds similar to Wedel's drinking chocolate. If the canister I brought home is as close to the lounge's recipe as the server promised, it has to be melted with dairy product rather than water. The canister indicates a combination of whole milk and heavy cream that the fluorosphere informs me is roughly related to Half-and-Half.

And the answer is: The word "marathon" has been used in 126 legitimate posts since ML began, included this post, my last, and abi's above.

We had as many spams using it in a typical week as we get legitimate uses in a typical year.

like Chris, I find GORP quite delicious, when made with expensive ingredients.. in all cases the chocolate chips should be M&M's or Smarties since they don't melt. When impecunious I'll still eat raisins peanuts and M&Ms, but the upmarket mixes are much preferred. Maybe one reason I love the stuff is it evokes memories of mountaineering days, which are few and far anymore. These days my kids stripmine the gorp for the M&Ms so I usually end up getting just remnants.

Megpie71, on bookmarks: currently I have over a gig of Firefox bookmarks, many of which are defunct. Once Firefox came out with decent bookmark search and sync, I put the 'organize bookmarks' project onto the large and growing heap of 'things to do, for which life is too short'. Even dimly-remembered marks can be found in an instant or so, and the sync preserves everything in that much-feted cloud.

That's bizarre, Jim. I wouldn't have thought !Thermopylae would be so common in spam.

Jim, all my friends seem to be training to run a 42.2K race this year (or at least a 21.1K race), and it is refreshing to see how infrequently such things are discussed here. If I never hear another person talk about a m*r*th*n again it will be too soon.

If for some reason !Thermopylae has become wildly popular and commonly discussed, that would explain why it's been showing up in spam so much recently.

They're showing up at the rate of one or two every 200 spams.

Xopher & Eric: Here's another one from the same artist on that theme. Note what he says about it.

I bought a terrific print of his at Anime Boston. It's a 3-way crossover between Sherlock, Dr. Who, and Bill & Ted, and I nearly fell over laughing when I spotted it.

HLN: We are very pleased to welcome a son, Jacob, born this morning. He and mama are both well.

Lee@98: This one? It's certainly making me grin.

SamChevre @ 99 : Congratulations!

Kip W @ 90 - the instructions i most often hear, in regards to melting chocolate over the stove, say not to let the hot water touch the container you're melting the chocolate in - it should only be hot because of the steam. So maybe that was why your improvised double boiler didn't work so well.

But if you're making hot chocolate from solid chocolate, why not melt it in some milk? Heat the milk up, drop your chocolate in, let the chocolate melt slowly. That doesn't need a double boiler, as the milk will insulate the chocolate. Use more solid chocolate, if you want a thicker end result.

JM @ 69: Something has just crystallized for me: I realized that whenever I encounter janetl's posts, I picture her as the protagonist of Tam Lin, having taken Thomas's last name at marriage. - Dash it! I am discovered!

SamChevre @ 99: Wonderful!

Kip W @ 90: emilly @ 102's advice sounds good. Chocolate also melts quite nicely in the microwave. Chop into smallish bits (doesn't need to be as small as choc chips, but don't do a solid bar). Put it in a glass bowl, heat for 30 seconds or minute, stir with a spatula, and zap it some more as seems needed.

HLN: It is warm and sunny in Portland! Area woman sat on the front porch, in short sleeves, and was perfectly comfortable. She admired the crisp edge on the front lawn, achieved with considerable effort on Sunday afternoon, and savored it knowing that such a thing was unlikely to be seen again for many months to come.

Sarah @ 64: Thanks for the wonderful photo set! I missed the last Toronto ale and will probably miss this year's, so appreciated the glimpses of familiar faces. Hadn't seen the molly (?) dancers before (with the very bright colors and face paint). Did they dance to voice(s) or instrument(s)?

nerdycellist @92: (You know who else is a nerdy cellist? Agent Phil Coulson, in the Avengers movie. Just passing that along. Anyway.) Aha! I did use milk when making my experimental hot chocolate, but I didn't happen to have any cream. If I'd given it a thought, I could have gone to the truly convenient neighborhood convenience store for some. Heh. It was 1/2% milk. Note to self…

emilly @102: Further refinements noted. I'm stunned that the hot water shouldn't touch the container — why is life so complicated? — but cheered at the notion of melting it in the milk. I'm thinking I might hit the chocolate store tomorrow.

janetl @103: The scary thing about all this is that I may end up knowing too much. Specifically, finding out just how much fat was in that heavenly chocolate I drank in Firenze and being afraid to order it again.

Who am I kidding? I'd order it again.

Mishalak @ 83 ...
[1] Hazelnuts or filberts are actually just very large bushes that can be trimmed into a tree like shape. There are quite a lot of these sorts of "trees" out there. Tree lilacs being one of the worst offenders. Bah. That's no tree!

Bah. Anything that can work up having trunks in the 8-12" diameter (or larger) range is something I'm willing to consider to be a tree (and I've also climbed both hazelnut and lilac trees).

As far as "large bushes" go, that's all about how they're pruned -- if they're a large bush, the same needs to be said for most Japanese maples.

Congratulations, Sam!

I recall Graydon's old chocolate recipe, which involved melting chocolate in cream with some sugar. It takes a while to get really smooth, as you want to raise the temperature slowly, but you can certainly drink it... as long as it's still hot... and you should probably stick to small cups.

Sam @99:

Congratulations!

I suspect this counts as offsetting some of the bad luck you've been having...?

SamChevre @ 99:

Congratulations! May you all have many happy years of family togetherness.

I wasn't actually gnomed @ 103 -- just forgot to edit my name. Sorry!

abi @ 79; Jim @ 91 & 93: Fascinating. I woud never have guessed that was being used as spam. So, can I safely refer to "26.2-mile races"? Also, is "ultr*" subject to the same problem? (Guess I'm about to find out). Yes, there are more and more of us running 26.2-mile races (and longer, which is what I'm now training for)

Mishalak: We have hazel as part of our native-species hedge (which I planted after we chopped down the Leylandii and now getting sufficiently bushy to be useful to birds. Doubt we'll get any hazelnuts from it as I suspect the squirrels will beat us to every single one, unless I get some tough weldmesh and put it around each individual nut while they're growing.

Kip W "and make hush puppies over the fire" Okay, what are "hush puppies" in this context? I only know them as a brand of shoes.

Sam: Congratulations!

Sam @ 99: Congratulations!

dcb @112

Hushpuppies are deep-fried blobs of cornmeal batter, usually served with fried fish or fried shrimp.

Mary Aileen @ 172-902 inspired me to have a look and see if any of Walter Scott's other titles were susceptible to being made less intense, but I ran aground on "Waverley", which sounds like it already has.

Paul A. @ 115: Good point. The best I can offer is Pilfer Pinkie.

Mycroft @71, in my Girl Scout days, a variant on that was "campfire stew". Hamburger plus whatever canned soups the girls brought (vegetable, alphabet, etc.)

SamChevre @99, congratulations.

SamChevre #99: A thousand felicitations. May his life be long and happy.

(Moving this to the topic where it belongs.)

Intuitive eating... can anyone identify the science fiction novel where this was a theme? It came out circa 1968, probably by a British author. Colonists on a new planet had to let themselves go into a trance and let their subconscious selves and archetypes tell them which plants in the new world were good to eat. Everyone had visions from the mythologies of their respective ancestors. Growing up in lily-white* South Dakota, this was my first exposure to people with names like Parvati, or to many of the mythological traditions in the book.

* Away from the reservations, that is.

SamChevre @ #99, add mine to the pile of congratulations, and also a wish for adequate sleep over the next few months!

dcb @ #112, what GlendaP said, plus that they're called that because they were allegedly flung to the hounds to get them to be quiet.

Soon Lee #21: Alas, food's energy density is limited by the fact that the carbohydrate types have a more-or less constant energy density (per weight): Sugar, starch, and protein all run 4.3 calories per gram, while fat doubles that at 8.6. Also, none of these is terribly compressible beyond a certain point.

SamChevre #99: Congratulations!

Rest in peace, Maurice Sendak. At least he got to be on Stephen Colbert before the end -- or, rather, at least we got to SEE him be on Stephen Colbert. :-> I will always love the story of the mural he put on the wall on Park Avenue. And as a parent, my favorite line from the New York Times obit is definitely this one: "oundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children."

SamChevre (99): Congratulations!

Susie @ 104:

That was 'Wolf at the Door.' I believe only one of them was a man in drag. They were described as "the newest group;" I'm not expert enough to recognize any of their dances, though they seemed simpler than some of the others. (The most complex being those of the Toronto Women's Sword, to whom my stills don't really do justice.)

Cally @ 87 -- Hudson's Bay Bread sounds a little like parkin but with no flour at all.

Congatulations, Sam and Mom!

Elliot Mason @ 122:

I was bemused by the Times obit calling him "a shtetl Blake", though it does have a ring to it. The most interesting interview with him I can remember was one (on 60 Minutes IIRC) made when he was working on the sets for a production of the "The Magic Flute". He persistently refused to accept praise for the work, saying that it was the result of his responding to Mozart's genius.

If, as seems unlikely, the staff of The Night Kitchen restaurant hasn't thought of it, I suggest they hold a wake for him there. I would try to be there; I don't travel much anymore, but it's only 150 miles form home for me.

dcb, #112: The best hush puppies also have chopped onions in them.

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is extremely special to me.

Every child should have it, but especially rambunctious kids who need to be reassured that their mothers will still love them, even when they are very bad.

xeger @ 106 ...
Seriously, I agree, but ever since I was little I have had an inferiority complex about many of the trees of my native pine savanna. I was always disappointed by their height and the lack of the inky darkness described by Tolkien et al. in fantasy. For example Acer glabrum var. glabrum, the native maple, allegedly can reach ten meters but I never saw one much exceeding four.

DCB @ 112 ...
I also worry somewhat about the squirrels. However I intend to try two methods of dealing with them in my garden. First, the motion activated sprinkler. Second, trapping and taking them on a little trip to the eastern plains of Colorado. Theoretically they could survive on the treeless plains so it is not technically murder. Should I have an evil laugh?

For me, it was not only Where the Wild Things Are but also In the Night Kitchen and Chicken Soup with Rice. Especially the last, which I read many times to my children.

I think I was old enough that I didn't get "Where the Wild Things Are" at the picture book age; I think I came to it as a teenager with a part time job in the library.

From early on, I remember his pictures from "A Hole is to Dig," which was a favorite of my grandmother's.

When I was 15 or so, we went to visit some friends out of town. They had lived in China for a time, and the plan was to make steamed pork buns. We made scores of them, but then, there were 11 people to feed: two couples, three teenagers, three toddlers and a baby.

And there was a serious shrinkage problem: newly steamed buns got pilfered almost as fast as they were set out to cool. All this took place in the soundscape of "Graceland". Indeed, I can't hear Paul Simon singing she comes back to tell me she's gone... without a brief flash of the memory of ducking into the closet with the Venetian-blind doors, juggling a too-warm bun from hand to hand as he elaborated: As if I didn't know that. As if I didn't know my own bed.

Why am I telling this story? To what is this relevant?

Over dinner (and don't ask me how we had any appetite left, after that long day of forming, steaming and stealing), I boasted that I could recite Where the Wild Things Are word for word.

Inevitably, since two of the toddlers lived there, there was a copy of the book about. I still remember sitting at the table, telling the story, while our hosts sat across from me with the book in their hands, checking me.

I think the prize was a steamed pork bun.

And it was still hot.

@99: Congratulations!

meta amusement. The recent comments list shows:

albatross on Stand Your Ground
albatross on Grilled Pizza

Which led me to wonder for a moment why albatross was standing on the pizza.

Where the Feral Things Might Be

"Feral" is less intense than "wild", right?

At least, when I'm standing my ground on the grilled pizza, I don't have to eat GORP.

Congratulations, SamChevre, Jacob, and Mommy!

SamChevre: Bright Blessings for the health of mother and child, and for the sanity of the parents going forward. May Jacob's life be long and happy, and may he bring happiness to others.

Also, I hope that despite his name he never has to wrestle all night with a dislocated hip.

Patrick's sidelight on the NYPD reminded me that a far too common occurrence in police repression of public protests includes the removal or covering of police identification.

I was wondering if it would be possible to make such removal or hiding a criminal offense. (An exception for undercover officers, of course, duh, though I would NOT want such an exception for detectives and supervisors whose "uniform" is a suit and tie.)

Essentially, if you have the power to detain, imprison, or use deadly force against members of the public, the public should have the right to know your name and/or badge number.

At the least, it would be interesting to see the arguments against such a law. (I note that it's already "policy" to require such ID in many police departments, but frequently unenforced and only subject to administrative discipline.)

I make such a suggestion, of course, only because I am a pinko-liberal-socialist-commie-Muslim-atheist-treasonous-traitor. Why else?

Bruce Arthurs @140:
I was wondering if it would be possible to make such removal or hiding a criminal offense.

The challenge is in enforcing that. Who's going to arrest them?

My suggestion would be that if your identification is not visible, you're not a cop. Any arrests you make are false imprisonment; any physical actions you participate in are common assault. Pursuit through the civil or criminal courts, post-facto, permissible.

I know, I know, see my own objections. But a girl can dream.

Sam @ 99 and Mama: congratulations!! Welcome and blessings, Jacob!

Congratulations and felicitations Sam and Mom, and welcome, Jacob!

Bruce/abi:

The Agitator keeps running pictures of riot police and SWAT teams with ski-masks on.

Here is one example, though to be fair, the police are dealing with very dangerous suspected prostitutes at a massage parlor, and so probably must fear reprisals. (I wonder if the cops were worried some of the women would recognize them as regular customers.)

Here's another one, where the drug squad brought a tank and wore masks on a marijuana raid. I gather they found a smallish amount.

Here there are masked SWAT cops, regular police looking like policemen, and a bunch of guys in riot gear who look like someone watched Star Wars too many times at an impressionable age.

If you saw these images in a movie, you would know exactly what they meant.

Also worth looking up is the Fresh Air interview with Sendak. He was despairing and bitter at the time, but sill wonderful to listen to.

* * *

I've got lines from the "Really Rosie" cartoon running through my head.

There really was a Rosie in Sendak's childhood. He tracked her down after a lot of effort. I recall he described her as a dowdy housewife, and she did not remember Sendak or her childhood thespian streak. How sad, to have grown up so thoroughly.

abi @133, I like that. The last line caught me by surprise, and is poignant.

Carrie S @136 Where the Feral Things Might Be "Feral" is less intense than "wild", right?

I don't think of feral as less intense. The Not Perfectly Behaved Things, maybe.

Mishalak at #83, I concur with Xeger (#106) that there's not much difference between a large shrub and a tree. I have noticed that many plants that humans like to cultivate, or anyway host in their yards, really want to be thickets, and to this end will send up numerous shoots from their roots. This includes plums as well as filberts (around here, it's common to call the cultivated kind filberts and the wild kind hazelnuts, but they are the same thing really).

I wonder have you tried just planting a handful of nuts, to see if they will grow? We have a lot of rain here, but also some very prolonged dry spells, and our filberts seem to grow very well without additional water. All of the seeds are fertile as far as I know. There are commercial crosses, but they will all sprout. To set fruit, they prefer to have a nearby mate of a different variety (you can tell by comparing the nuts), and they are wind pollinated. They have the cutest teeny tiny scarlet female flowers in January or so.

Sam@99

Congratulations to all three of you!

For those of you looking for an even more portable fruit-and-nut snack, may I present gotgamssam, or walnuts wrapped in persimmons: http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/gotgamssam

Also, for those planting nut trees, I recommend a black walnut. They grow tall and fast, and provide excellent shade.

Welcome to the world, Jacob!

Madeline @149

Just as long as you note that black walnut husks are very, very, very staining.

Hmm. Stainful? Stainiferous? My vocabulary has failed me, alas. Staineriffic! Stainitudinous! <retreats in confusion>

@151: Color-fast.

The New Yorker has briefly undone the paywall for this lovely Art Spiegelman / Maurice Sendak collaboration from 1993. It's an interview in comic-strip form, and includes one of my favorite Sendak comments:

"People say, 'Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!' As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth! I say, 'You are in touch, lady--you're mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you're selfish… That is your childhood self!"

And to SamChevre, mom, and Jacob of course!

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

abi @ 133:

And it was still hot.

Black walnuts have many excellent qualities, but they will also kill nearby plants. See for example http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/fruits/blkwalnt.htm

Thank you all for all the good wishes!

Just to note--it wasn't so much that the last couple weeks were bad as that they were tiring. Expecting a new baby real soon now? A good but tiring thing. Having done analysis of sufficient importance that it's going up to the CEO? A good but high-stress and time-consuming thing. Having your two-year-old get a significant cut from a toy parking garage? And be more upset about getting woken up than about the cut? Not good, exactly, but in the long term will provide more amusement than trouble.

I just don't want to confuse my situation--tiring, but greatly blessed--with something really hard.

And open-threadiness/AKICIML: the "Body Worlds" exhibition by Gunther van Hagens will be at the local science museum this summer. Should I take my 4-year-old daughter, who wants to be "a doctor that works on arms and legs" and is entirely fascinated by skeletons and bones?

1) She has stuck to this for over a year, and fairly actively pursued it--as in, any bone in a piece of meat she want to know what it is, and what sort of joints it fits, and what the corresponding bones on her are.

Hyper-Local News - novice quilting project meets with approval of cats.

I appreciate the Super-Mario-on-a-medieval-manuscript sidebar item.

Other video games that would go well with medieval manuscripts?

Qbert.
Joust (the one with the guys with lances on flapping birds that stood on clouds.)

Cally, #151: I think this case calls for a rework: "Black walnut hulls stain like whoa." :-)

People who work with period dyeing techniques love black walnut hulls; they make one of the darkest (and yes, very color-fast!) brown/black shades available.

SamChevre, #157: Best thoughts to you, your wife, and children. And yes, I think you should take your daughter to that exhibit. If she's that interested in the subject, she's unlikely to become bored.

You can also start reading to her out of forensic mysteries as soon as she's old enough to deal with adult-level vocabulary. I recommend books by Aaron Elkins, which generally don't have anything really gruesome or otherwise problematic in them. The first few of Sharyn McCrumb's Elizabeth Macpherson humorous mysteries are also pretty good.

Along the lines of Chutneying ... John is reading the Princess Bride (30th Anniversary Edition) to our daughter a chapter at a time, and he didn't know the (Doylean side of the) story of how the existing chapter of Buttercup's Baby came to be.

Short version: he buried a 'mail me an SASE' joke in a nested footnote and got far more response than he expected. This is very similar to what happened to Phil Foglio in the comedy-porn comic book XXXenophile -- his April 1 cover claiming there was going to be a XXXenophile collectible card game got so many people to mail him checks that he made it happen.

Is there a term for this? Authors/creators making a passing joke that is then caused, by overwhelming consumer/fan demand, to actually exist? I don't count things like bringing Sherlock Holmes back from Reichenbach because that feels like a different thing entirely (more akin to what Mass Effect fans are trying to do over the ending of that saga; call it a Fanon Retcon Demand?).

When was the first one people know of?

Nancy Lebovitz at Avengers.94: Yes, it was Bedlam Planet. Thanks!

... for the first time ever. The URL was properly formed, so I assume it must have been extra tasty.

Sir Walter Scott claimed, in a footnote to Ivanhoe:

[Plot twist redacted] has been much criticised, as too violent a breach of probability, even for a work of such fantastic character. It was a tour de force, to which the author was compelled to have recourse, by the vehement entreaties of his friend and printer, who was inconsolable on [event that Scott was forced to retcon].

Elliott Mason @161: Another amusing one from the SF world is Gene Wolfe's book The Castle of the Otter, which was a title printed by Locus when one of the people there mis-heard the title Citadel of the Autarch, the fourth volume of The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe was so taken by it that he put together a batch of related material and a small press (Mark Zeising) published it.

Elliot Mason @ 161:

The earliest one I know about is the November, 1949 issue of Astounding. A year before a reader sent a prank letter to the magazine with a review of the stories in that issue written just as if the issue had already been printed. The editor, John Campbell, went along with the joke by publishing the letter in the November, 1948 issue, and then get the writers listed in the letter to write the stories it described. He did so, and they were published in the Nov. '49 issue just as the letter said. One of the stories was the first part of a two-part serialization of Heinlein's short novel "Gulf". There were also stories by Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, A. E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and the astronomer R. S. Richardson. See the Wikipedia article on Astounding for more information.

There was also a "Get Off the Unicorn" which came about when someone in a catalog of forthcoming books (by McCaffrey?) misspelled "Get Of The Unicorn" and the author liked it better than the planned title.

Gorp in Nepal -- at least, locally-made stuff -- is a mixture of peanuts, fried ginger, dried hot peppers, puffed rice and roasted soybeans. I'm not sure how nutritious it is, but a few peppers and strips of ginger will make you forget you were hungry in the first place.

Kip W@90, Emily@102 - My hot chocolate recipe is a variant on that. Put a layer of chocolate chips in the bottom of the 2-cup pyrex measuring cup (so that's 2-3 tablespoons), cover with water, nuke for 30 seconds, which gets them almost melted. Stir into a mush, add a cup of milk, stir again, and nuke until almost boiling (about 1:45 in my microwave.) I suppose it would work ok with more chocolate or less milk.

Come on, ladies and gents!
MK Hobson's Kickstarter Project for novel "The Warlock's Curse" has only a few days left to reach its goal.
Go and help!
Click HERE.

Stuck in Gnomansland.

SamChevre @157: my 4-year-old daughter, who wants to be "a doctor that works on arms and legs" and is entirely fascinated by skeletons and bones

Visible Body
Google Body
Gray's Anatomy

Plus: my mom got one of these when I was little, and I spent endless hours taking it apart and putting it back together.

Fun spam subject heading I just received: sin up today!

Serge Broom @ 170: I loved the first two books in M.K. Hobson's series (The Native Star, The Hidden Goddess), so I've supported that Kickstarter for the concluding book, too. It's sad that the publisher didn't pick up the third book. The strong characters, cool alternative-history worldbuilding, suspense -- tasty, tasty stuff. I love me a good female hero, I do.

Not exactly gorp or trail mix, but I sometimes buy snack packets of pecans, walnuts, and raisins and eating them on the subway home from the gym. (These and a dozen or more other small bags of nuts, fruit, etc. are available at subway newsstands, among other places.) Last week, I bought and ate one on the way home after a round of clothing shopping. Successful shopping, but I hadn't had enough lunch beforehand.

I'm sure I could get a better price by mixing my own, but sometimes it is worth paying for convenience. And the actual tradeoff isn't between the pre-mixed bag of nuts and raisins and mixing my own. It's between that bag, or stopping off for hot chocolate (tasty but not cheap), or just being hungry until I get home. Except on the days I'm in the mood for a banana: street-corner fruit stands are a wonderful thing.

Regarding gorp and similar food products: It made a big difference to my life when my sweetie figured out that I had trouble maintaining my blood sugar.

When I am in grocery stores, I have been known to pause to gaze fondly upon food items which I bought on earlier sugar-crisis occasions in order to bolster myself: bottled orange juice, M&Ms, little tubes of salted peanuts hanging by the checkstand.

Lifesavers. No, I don't think Life Savers ever played that role, come to think . . . .

Jacque @172 and SamChevre @157: We had a "learnin' about bodies" kid, too. He was so ecstatic when we gave him a Visible Woman kit for his third birthday.

Kathe recommends teaching her the word "orthopedist".

I've been getting a bit tired of raisins as one of the few practical small snacks for current weight-loss efforts, so I had a small fit at the store last night. Result: personalized gorp consisting of dried cherries, dried blueberries, and honey-roasted pecans. Total crack-y goodness. I looked round for unsweetened large-cut coconut to add in but found none.

Since I'm not on Twitter, I'll respond to one of TNH's tweets here.

I can raise one eyebrow, and it's not genetic for me; I have distinct memories of teaching myself to do it. I would look in a mirror and raise both eyebrows while holding one down with a finger. Eventually I managed to work out which muscles to use and which not, to raise just one.

(And before you ask: yes, it was totally inspired by the way Spock and McCoy would constantly go around raising one eyebrow at each other.)

Re the eyebrow: me too! I didn't use my fingers; I started by frowning my eyebrows down, then sort of trying to pull them up and down at the same time, until I figured out how to lower one eyebrow. That gave me some asymmetry to practice with. I think the whole learning process took about a year (of very sporadic effort).

I, too, was entirely imitating Kelley and Nimoy.

A friend used to admire my skill at doing this. She made this point more than once. Eventually I pointed out that she had been admiring my skill for longer than it took me to learn it.

John and I can both loop our tongues (make a tight u or o with the tip); neither of us can cloverleaf or any of the other fun things. However, Beka and I can both (or, rather, she did when she was an infant; right now she can't do it on purpose) turn our tongues over 180deg along the axis going from my chin to my throat -- a barrel-roll, as it were. John can't, and can't even figure out how to start addressing those muscles.

John and I can both Spock on either side; so can Beka. She also instantly winked with each eye, correctly, upon being introduced to the concept of a wink (at about 2.5yo), which I found mindblowingly precocious, as I remember teaching myself to wink without closing the other eye (spending hours in front of a mirror).

Here, you hardworking gentles, have some delicious Banana Whatnots; tasty AND good for you (7 cookies is one whole banana and 1/3 of a cup of oatmeal!).

I thought this would be the better thread in which to say so, but I realised I had to say something while reading the Breaking Rings post and comments.

I love the names of the duty gnomes!

{tips virtual hat to the gnomes, and walks off with a happy smile on face}

David Goldfarb@179: yeah, me too. Unfortunately I learned how to raise the "wrong" eyebrow due to doing it in the mirror, and then somehow found the other eyebrow unteachable.

Jo, the gnomes have been making me happy too!

HLN: area woman told her Classical Tradition class to "write whatever you want for 8-12 pages" and they did; risky, off-beat, personal, lovely essays. One of my favorites? 'The Homeric Hero as Paradigm for the Klingon Warrior Ethos (though ST itself leaves me cold).

It seems to me that our tradition of the warrior (from whence comes the Klingon) is more derived from Rome and Rome's ideas of Stoicism than from Homer. If you actually read Homer it can sometimes be quite shocking how far the Homeric hero is from our ideas of a warrior, mainly in how they express strong emotion. They weep, they tear their hair, in really extreme cases they even fall down and roll around in the dirt. (For some reason we see a lot more of them expressing anger or sorrow than joy, though I think Odysseus returned to Ithaca does kiss the ground.) None of this tight-lipped stone face stuff.

Elliott Mason @161:
Is there a term for this? Authors/creators making a passing joke that is then caused, by overwhelming consumer/fan demand, to actually exist?

There may be a more specific term, but it sounds like a variety of defictionalization. (TVTropes link omitted, look it up yourself if you want.)

So if I have a monstrous headcold for which I am taking Afrin at night, I should also continue to take Zyrtec, since the allergy stuff works best when taken consistently over time?

I usually know this stuff but this cold has made me stupider than usual. (than colds usually do)

SamChevre: Slightly belated but heartfelt congratulations on Jacob's birth!

Melissa Singer @ 188: Is Afrin just a decongestant? While Zyrtec is just an antihistimine? That could work. The thing to watch out for are over-the-counter products with a bunch of different ingredients, so you end up doubling-up. The most dangerous is getting too much Tylenol (Acetaminophen).

Janetl: even at this dumb, I wouldn't mess up the Tylenol thing. Not actually taking any just now. (and I track it on my cellphone, as noted elsewhen on ML)

But I think you're right about the decongestant/antihistamine thing . . . now that I am breathing better (thanks to the Afrin), I have a little more brainpower.

Elliott Mason @161: I think there is a name for that, yes, but I can't remember what it is. Drat. I just read it in connection with MSPaint Adventures, I think.

dido @185: The Homeric Hero as Paradigm for the Klingon Warrior Ethos

For the five million and ninth time, I so wish Mike was here. I would love to see what he had to say about that -- and he'd have something to say, for sure.

Re eyebrows, there is a very funny passage in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting in which Renton becomes neurotically obsessed with the fact Sick Boy can raise one eyebrow, in the classic Sean Connery/James Bond gesture, and he can't despite hours of practice, and it starts to embody his ambivalence towards SB. In fact, he convinces himself that SB has carefully trained himself to do it and that this exemplifies his artificial and shallow character.

And then he slopes off to get high, or is he targeted in some kind of violent assault? It'll be one or the other.

I think I can raise one eyebrow, but to be perfectly honest, it's hard to tell. I'm blonde and I wear glasses. Years ago, I realized that my functional eyebrows have lenses in them.

I learned to raise one eyebrow while trying to teach myself to wink with the other eye.

Long ago, I had an acquaintance who could do the wave with his brows.

"We can get back to hating each other AFTER we save the world from total time implosion, okay?"

So says Atomic Robo to Doctor Dinosaur after something goes very wrong at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, in a one-shot story published as part of May 5's Free Comic Day. Yes, I got extra copies for faraway friends.

There seems to be some considerable variation in the interactions between the frontalis, corrugator, and procerus muscles. Your basic "Spocking" involves the frontalis, plus the ability to, as David Goldfarb points out, activate only one side. For extra emphasis, one needs to add in the opposite corrugator muscle. (One of my clubmates in my high school Star Trek club could get as far as the unilateral frontalis activation, but left out the corrugator, so she tended to look kind of asleep.) Additionally, one needs to be able to do all this while maintaining regular eye-contact. It's a complicated business.

Here's a nice virtual face to play with, except that it doesn't seem to allow unilateral expression.

The expression that continues to elude me utterly is where one activates only the corrugator, and basically folds the proximal ends of one's eyebrows upward. Some people can almost make it a right angle. I've got those muscles—I can feel them, right there. But I can't get more than delicate dimples above my eyebrows. It's a puzzlement.
/facial anatomy geekery

...and now my forehead is all cramped up...

AKICIML, Equine Health Division: So, is this little guy underweight? Or is he just oversupplied with skin? (He's the cover model for this publication.)

Jacque @ 199

Looks like a typical light-boned foal to me. If she were a draft breed I'd say "a bit skinny"

HLN: headcold has manifested a fever, unpleasantly. And a crown has fallen out of my mouth, also unpleasantly, especially since I will not be able to go to the dentist, or even make an appointment, until my fever is gone. Luckily the tooth has been root-canaled, so it's dead, but it's a big tooth and in the middle of one side of my upper jaw (the side I usually chew on, natch).

Mother's Day will probably be kind of miserable as a result.

Unless your dentist says not to, you can put the crown back in place using toothpaste as a temporary "glue."

I hate crowns...

And now, for your reading pleasure, the incomparable Charles P. Pierce:

Romney is essentially an entitled fopdoodle who divides the world into two classes, Himself and The Help, and who is running for president because his golden life has taught him the essential lesson that there is nothing in the world he can't charm and/or money-whip into his pocket if he really, really wants it.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-bully-8732543#ixzz1uUbNPUoD

It's very late, but I'm signal-boosting anyway. Extra Call tomorrow AM, in NYC, via the "you should be reading him if you aren't already" Ta-Nehisi Coates.

So I pre-ordered a certain novel published by Orbit from Barnes & Noble. It officially comes out on May 22nd. I received my copy on May 9th.

If you go to B&N.com, they will offer to let you pre-order the ebook, but are perfectly happy to sell you and ship you the book -- which has STILL not officially come out yet on any other website, or on the publisher's list.

How can I most productively complain to B&N about this screwup on their part?

Elliott Mason: That's not a screw-up. Most books do not have a "hard" on-sale date--a date before which no books may be sold/shipped. Some do, particularly huge things like Harry Potter titles--and if stores or other merchants violate the on-sale date, they generally have to pay penalties (or worse). But the vast majorities of books can be shelved and sold whenever the merchant wants . . . and hardcovers are printed, bound, and shipped several weeks ahead of on-sale date to ensure that copies can go on sale in all parts of the US at the same time.

So it's not at all unusual, or even problematic, for B&N to have, and ship to you, a copy of a book 2 or 3 weeks in advance of on-sale date.

ebooks, however, go "live" when a publisher says so. For an ebook, all on-sale dates are "hard" on-sale dates--fixed to a specific day/date. Until the publisher's software says so, the ebook doesn't exist, even if the files are all converted and set up and sitting there, ready to go.

Melissa Singer @206: I understand (from hearing about a previous such thing), however, that the author does not get any credit in 'first week sales' for anything shipped this early, which affects the author's ability to get the publisher to buy future volumes.

So it's assholeish. Not to mention it makes legions of fanboys upset that the ebook is 'delayed'. Amazon is honoring the publisher's desired launch date ... but B&N isn't.

Elliott: as far as "credit," that depends on the publisher's sales reporting software (and the intelligence of the people reading the numbers).

Melissa Singer: it doesn't count for the New York Times Bestseller List, for sure. But I've been told that in some cases pre-orders as a class don't count for that, so (chalking it up, in Moviebob's words, to "Publishing ... Is ... Weeeeeird!")

I remember teaching myself to do the eyebrow, with some initial help from fingers, though in my case it was Horace Rumpole and not Spock whom I was trying to be.

Likewise, I taught myself the Vulcan salute (that was Spock), and to wink with either eye (I don't now recall what brought that on).

I'm kind of gobsmacked at the moment. Samuel R. Delany just answered, on Facebook, a long-running question of mine about him. I'm...wow. I certainly didn't expect that. Wow.

Paul A @ 210... it was Horace Rumpole and not Spock

Leo McKern as a Vulcan?

Open threadiness: This slide presentation (PDF) seems to me to do a nice job covering the European debt crisis at a high level.

Further proving that everything is connected, Benedict Cumberbatch played young Rumpole in a recent production for BBC Radio 4.

I can't raise one eyebrow. I can't whistle, either. (Or roll my R's).

I do remember teaching myself to do the Vulcan salute as a child. I could only get one pair of fingers to stay together -- either index and middle, or ring and pinky. The other pair would always spread apart.

So I scotch-taped each pair of fingers together. I didn't think that would actually teach me how to do it; I just wanted to pretend I could do it, and see what it looked and felt like.

But after I took the tape off, I could do it for real. The tape must have helped me isolate control of the right muscles.

I wish I'd figured out something like that for the muscles involved in eyebrow-raising, whistling, and R-rolling. I wonder if my brain's still plastic enough to acquire those fine motor skills at nearly 30.

John A Arkansawyer @ 211... Congratulations! I think Carrie Vaughn felt the same way when Kurt Busiek posted a comment on her blog after he read her comics-homage novel "After the Golden Age".

#211 ::: John A Arkansawyer:

If you don't mind, what did you ask Delany, and what was his answer?

I clicked on the link to the article on visualizing English word origins (etymology being a fascination for me) and upon viewing the second example, I simply ROFLed.

I'm color deficient, mainly in the pink-orange range, and the author chose to use various shades of pink with orange for highlighting text. As a result, I cannot tell which is red next to orange and which is pink next to orange -- or red. Some of what I know must be orange looks pink. The pink occasionally looks red. The red looks brighter than most pinks, but identical to the orange; and the light oranges look paler than the pale oranges.

I lost track of the words as I tried to ascertain which color I was looking at. I'll have to go back to this page with the FG and see how it looks on her computer.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 217: I'd wondered for a long time whether he knew Jim Carroll. He said they were very slightly acquainted. That answered (I think!) the question under my question, whether he'd had Jim Carroll in mind when he wrote Hawk the Singer in "Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones". I suppose the answer is no. If I'd known I'd get an answer, I might've asked directly.

Caroline, #215: I can't do the Spock eyebrow either, or roll an R. I can't whistle "normally" or produce a tune, but I can make the whistling note of surprise (or a wolf-whistle) by inhaling.

What I can do: curl my tongue into a U-shape; wink with either eye independently; make the Spock salute with either hand -- although I never mastered the further trick of alternating that with a W-shape (middle & ring fingers together, index and pinkie separated); I can get either hand into that configuration, but the "alternating" part defeats me. The Spock salute, however, feels perfectly natural on either side.

For those who want them, pics linked in my name.

SamChevre @221:

Baby! Adorable!

Lee@220 reminds me of a completely useless little trick that I practiced when I was young: I'd put one hand into the Vulcan salute, and the other into the W-shape...then I'd move each hand back and forth between the one configuration and the other. Without a lot of practice, it's very hard to keep the hands in opposite configurations, and not fall into making them be the same.

The Delany question I've wondered about is what cultural fugue might be.

Question for the commentariat: my buddy Brian mentioned to me last night that he's been tasked with coming up with an archiving scheme for assembling all of his organizations photos (plus attendant metadata and, potentially, other associated docs such as Powerpoint presentation, web info, &c) into a single resource. I was thinking Aperture, as mentioned by Caroline @172/469 might be a place to start.

For a full-on, institution-wide archive/access resource, I'm wondering if Drupal might be the way to go? (This institution already runs their web resources off Drupal.) (My experience is in Sharepoint, which I gather is a parallel animal.)

Anybody have any thoughts/strong opinions?

Bruce, 127: If you mean the Night Kitchen in Seattle, it has closed. And I never even got to eat there. :-(

TexAnne @ 226:

Crap! I never got to eat there either, and I only live 100 miles away. Is MadGastronomer staying in the business?

Serge @212:

McKern had a hand gesture that even Spock might have had trouble with; check out the High Priest's mudra in Help. I've been trying to do that for almost 50 years now, and I just can't keep the ring figure stuck straight out from the palm while simultaneously keeping my middle finger straight at right angles to it.

Bruce, 227: I hope so, but I doubt it will be soon.

SamChevre @ 221 - what adorable chubby-wubby babyness!

And in more news from Arizona: a high school baseball team forfeits its championship match because they wouldn't play against a team with a girl on it. Ew. Cooties.

Forefront of the 18th century, they are.

These are our current 3 rescue kittens. We really need to re-home these babies -- we've got enough cats as is. We're guessing them at about 9 weeks right now, still young enough to bond with a forever owner. We will transport up to 4 hours' drive, and pay for neutering when they're old enough. Please pass the word to anyone who might be interested in one or more of them.

Bruce Cohen @ 227... I'll have to check that McKern gesture next time "Help!" is on. My favorite line is when the scientist says "With this ring, I could - dare I say it? - rule the world!" I can see that the Beatles's version of "LoTR" would have raised a few eyebrows.

By the way, is it true that Spock's Live Long & Prosper is a Jewish sign?

Yes, it's the sign made by the kohanim during the Priestly Blessing.

Swooping by for one of my periodic visits. Sharing.

Chocolate Weapons

Thought of Teresa immediately.

Lee, re: kittens: Where do you live?

Carrie, #236: I'm in Houston. A 4-hour driving radius covers most of eastern Texas and a chunk of southern Louisiana -- and I'd be willing to go up to 7 or 8 hours for a promise of overnight crash space so that I wouldn't have a grueling day-trip.

Geekosaur @231Forefront of the 18th century, they are.

Circa 1745

"The greatest cricket match that was played in this part of England was on Friday, the 26th of last month, on Gosden Common, near Guildford, between eleven maids of Bramley and eleven maids of Hambledon, all dressed in white. The Bramley maids had blue ribbons and the Hambledon maids red ribbons on their heads. The Bramley girls got 119 notches and the Hambledon girls 127. There was of bothe sexes the greatest number that ever was seen on such an occasion. The girls bowled, batted, ran and catches as well as most men could do in that game."

Tome @ #230: "Sports build character." And character is like luck: there are two kinds.

I'd much rather have the Central Washington team as my neighbors, colleagues, elected officials etc. than the Our Lady of Sorrows team (ironic name, much?).

More belated congratulations to Sam Chevre and family.

Lee: Sadly, I think it's more than 8 hours from Houston to Pittsburgh. :(

Your kittens are, as is traditional for kittens, epically cute.

Thanks very much to the ML denizens who helped me get the assorted aggressive ad programs off my computer.

Apropos of nothing--I once stumbled across a blog that featured awesomely tacky real estate listings in NYC. There was a prewar overlooking Central Park that was decorated entirely in Ugly Bachelor, with knotty pine paneling and a portrait of a dog in a business suit over the fireplace; another place that looked like a little girl's dress-up box had exploded; and so forth. The piece de resistance IMO was an apartment that was completely black--black marble floors, black marble countertops, black marble clear up the walls IIRC with black-painted ceilings, even a black fridge. The ad said that it was "for the ladies."

Has anybody seen this blog? My searches keep turning up anti-development groups and episodes of Ugly Betty.

Awww, yay, Sam! He already looks opinionated! Adorable!

The first successful kidney transplant from a deceased donor was half a century ago this year.

Hope (Eerie).

Brains grow old and hands grow cold
And death we never can doubt
Time's cold wind, wailing down the past
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out

But the Igors have landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

We know well what Life can tell:
Reuse, replenish, reclaim
And today our fragile blood and flesh
Can play its part in a grander mesh
And serve another's aim.

For the Igors have landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

From all who died out of history's tide
The best we cherish and hold
We see the light through borrowed eyes
Our hearts can strive for another's prize
And race as their dreams unfold.

For the Igors have landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

(Hope Eyrie by Leslie Fish, copyright Random Factors. Igors by Pratchett).

This wasn't planned, particularly, but I've been earwormed by the chorus for days, so I gave up and started writing.

Thomas @244: When I stick that in my filkbook, under what name shall I credit it? :-> You can email me at 2ells2tees via that g-mail place if you'd rather not post it here.

Open thready:
When walking near a Dutch restaurant, I saw a handwritten sign advertising "Aspergeroomsoep" - cream of asparagus soup.

But due to bad kerning, it really looked like "Asperger oom soep" - Asperger uncle soup. Cognitive dissonance ensued.

Elliott Mason: it's Thomas Lumley

Lee @237 - I've signal boosted your kittens on FB as I have a fair number of people in the region. Paws crossed!

Sam: Congratulations!

Thomas: that is very nice.

Thomas @244: Applaudable! Do you do Usenet? I think rec.music.filk would enjoy that one.

Kip W.

I never really started Usenet -- I read a bit of comp.lang.c, but that was when it was dying. I hadn't realized for a long time that chunks of Usenet were still alive and well.

I should investigate.

Dropped in here for no particular reason:

The teen informed me earlier today that Fifty Shades of Gray started life as Twilight fanfic.

Jacque @225: I have strong anti-Drupal opinions! Most of the syllabus approaches for the course I teach encourage their instructors to use Blackboard for their course websites, but mine requires that we use Drupal, and it is a royal pain -- slow, ugly, hard to navigate, unintuitive, requiring several extra clicks for most commands. The messaging and calendar functions simply Do Not Work. When Drupal users complain of their woes to Blackboard users, the Blackboard users look horrified.

Caveat: It's possible that my department has happened to buy/license/set up the site in a way that doesn't make full use of Drupal's capabilities. I've heard that Drupal's website has more attractive templates than the ones available to us.

I don't have a better option to offer for your purposes, so I guess I'm just doomsaying. Sorry!

Jenny Islander @ 242:

All black, eh? About 10 years before we bought our house the previous owners remodeled the kitchen, and they put in black composite counters and black sinks. I hates them so, precious! You can't tell whether they're clean by eye, so when I clean (the sinks especially) I have to braille every square inch of the surface to make sure I've got all the grease and food particles. I sure would hate to have to live in an all black apartment, though I suppose anyone who can afford that apartment in Manhattan doesn't do their own cleaning.

Melissa @252

That origin seemed to get mentioned pretty often, here in the UK. Were the clever fellows of the book business trying to sneer?

One of my all-time favorite book series started as a Star Trek fic with the serial numbers filed off, so I have no beef with fanfic going pro. I don't have a problem with somebody writing fanfic for a fandom I personally find shallow, problematic, and sloppily written, because a good writer can make a good story out of any canon you could name. But 50 Shades of Grey is fanfic of Twilight that commits some of the same errors as Twilight, such as a seriously life-altering condition being good when it's time for the hero to be sexy and bad when it's time for the hero to be sad.

Jenny Islander #242: I dunno if this was your original blog, but there is Lovely Listing.

JM @ 253 ...
Caveat: It's possible that my department has happened to buy/license/set up the site in a way that doesn't make full use of Drupal's capabilities. I've heard that Drupal's website has more attractive templates than the ones available to us.

Heh. I'm used to hearing no end of miseries about Blackboard, with Drupal being considered reasonable. I suspect much depends on what you're trying to do with either, and how they've been set up.

Completely different open-threadiness:

Jeff Peachey (a book conservator) has written a decidedly entertaining paper Conservation of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation: results of a survey and treatments (pdf) detailing his trials and tribulations in trying to 'conserve' the "... bent, torn, sometimes wet and in one case burned to a crisp ..." journal of his trade.

It's well worth the read :)

Melissa Singer @252, in re Fifty Shades of Grey starting out as Twilight fanfic:

Yes, and Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor was originally Spock/Klingon fanfic, I am reliably informed (before she rubbed off all the serial numbers and invented her own planets and made Spock a girl). :->

Jenny Islander @242 Was it Lovely Listing? They're not what they once were, since ICanHazCheezburger took them over, but they're still kind of interesting.

No sneering here--I've read a lot of fanfic and stuff that started as fanfic, and published some.

However, while the work's origin may have been mentioned a lot in the UK, it wasn't mentioned here, at least not in anything I read. So I wasn't aware of it, and figured other people might not be as well.

AnotherQuietOne, #248: Thanks!

Melissa, #252: And this priceless bit showed up in the "FanficRants" community on LJ recently:

Fanfic author... I don't even know... I just...

You wrote an AU version of _Twilight_ that's based on _50 Shades of Grey_. Isn't that sort of like dividing by zero?

Bruce C., #254: I'd take your black sinks and counters over the pure-white ones in my old condo. If they were not absolutely pristine and spotless the entire kitchen looked grody. I want something that can have a few dust flecks on it without looking like I haven't cleaned in 6 months.

I'm too not-awake-yet to figure out why.

Holy crap, we made the Chronicle! (I think that's a direct link, but if not, we're picture #3.)

No, not Lovely Listing. It had a definite NYC focus.

Re Jim's Diffraction link on the Harvard Book Store success story. I'm very pleased to see that. I have fond memories of browsing through that store back in the early 1970's. At the time, Eva and I lived in Brighton. We had a regular walk we took on the weekends from our apartment east on Western Ave. to the Harvard Street bridge, across into Cambridge, then up to Mass Ave., stopping in the Harvard Book Store to browse for an hour or so, then back down Putnam to Western Ave and straight across the river and back to Brighton. It was a brisk walk that kept us in good shape and kept up our book supply.

Dell had a media event in Copenhagen and booked a comic known for his anti-woman rants:

The moderator of the day is introduced. Mads Christensen. I slowly realize; THAT Mads Christensen. A media personality known (among many other charming traits) for his very conservative and critical approach to women in the work place.

So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room.

Here's Dell's response after the blog post circulated on twitter:

At 5.26 pm Dell wrote. ”@christianevejlo we are sorry if some were offended. Dell works for women in corporate life.

How is it that media flacks don't grasp that "sorry if some were offended" is not actually an apology?

Here's the full post: DRESSCODE- BLUE TIE AND MALE

Well, janetl, that IS the company that was shocked! shocked! to learn that the stoner they hired to advertise their product was...a stoner.

Open thready doggerel.

Evening With Friends

you'll start with champagne,
and you'll laugh

then you'll have a margarita,
and you'll tell stories,
maybe even some true ones

but you'll end with Campari and cold coffee,
their bitterness paling
in the company
of your withered dreams

take an aspirin before bed;
it makes the morning easier
when you wake up alone

or don't

it's not like it matters

RE: Teresa's particle on the American Bishops.
First they went after nuns, now they're going after Girl Scouts. Who's next? We discussed this over lunch, and were stumped. The best guess was kittens.

My sympathy to the people in the pews.

The correction to Jane Espenson's biography that I mentioned here has been accepted by IMDB, but for reasons of their own they've demoted it to "Trivia," deleting her entire biography.

Strange are the ways of IMDB.

janetl @ 270: Marys.

ObOpenThread: xkcd # 1052 is only about a week old at this point. ...there are already at least fifteen different videos on youtube of one person or another singing it.

As I noted somewhere else, it memes when it's meme-engine time.

--Dave

janetl @ 270:

First they came for the nuns, and I did not speak out, for I was not a nun.

Then they came for the Girl Scouts, and I did speak out, for I was not a Girl Scout.

Then they came for the kittens, and the mother cat clawed the crap out of them, and that's the last we've seen of them.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers) @ #274:

Hah!

Well, life got interesting here last week. Mom's Yorkie, Isis, had to have emergency eye surgery ($2K+) and we almost lost her to the anesthetic.*

We're not sure who took a chunk out of Isis' cornea, and she was so good at hiding the problem that it was infected before we realized she was in trouble. We took her to her regular vet, who sent us on to the specialists at MedVet.

Surgery went fine, but they had trouble getting her to wake up. So she wound up spending the night under the supervision of the ER vet, who called at 10pm to let us know she was awake, and trying to walk around, and what a sweet dog she is...

She was released at noon the next day, and the tech told us the ER vet kissed Isis before he left for the day. I think she made a conquest.

So now she's getting eye drops and lubricant gel every four hours, as well as pain meds and antibiotics a couple of times a day.

And Mom has eye surgery on a malfunctioning tear duct next week. The icing on the cake was finding out my dentist hadn't received the check I sent paying off my outstanding balance on that account.

One piece of good news -- OPM has finalized my annuity, so I'll be getting a catch-up check and receive the full annuity payment each month beginning in June. Hurrah!

*They had to use a paralytic -- propofol.

Lori: Ouch! My sympathies to everyone.

Jacque @199 : S/he looks pretty normal to me; all of our foals have looked seriously ribby for the first few weeks, much like Spots there, despite eating almost non-stop.

I'm glad Isis made it through -- and I'm not surprised that the vet took a shine to her. We often do fall for our patients. You might consider sending them a photograph of Isis once she's healed.

(Pedantic note: Propofol isn't a paralytic; it's referred to as "Milk of Anesthesia" for its appearance, but it's just an anesthetic. It can cause apnea (lack of breathing) during induction, but it sounds more like she was slow to wake, which is more typical of older animals that have been given barbiturates. )

Thanks, Ginger -- when they x-rayed Isis (when she wouldn't rouse) there was fluid in her lungs, we were told that "may be a reaction" to the drugs. She's not a young dog, she's at least 7 years old (she's a rescue so we don't have a firm birthdate).

Once they got her awake and moving, the next x-ray showed that the lungs had cleared. By morning blood pressure was normal, and she was eager for breakfast.

She is the sweetest little dog, and we were tickled by how smitten the ER vet sounded when he called. I do plan on sending them a picture and a thank you note -- after her hair grows back! She looks a little rakish with one half of her face shaved.

I'm so glad there are two of us to do the medicating. Mom holds Isis, and I try to get the drops into her eye. When it comes to putting the gel on, I feel like I'm trying to ice a moving cake...

I really am impressed with MedVet, and I gave the receptionist info on another charity that helps people with vet bills.

I propose that we add Undead Press to the list of trashy unethical publishers, and "you should be grateful, not complaining" to whatever list now contains "But honestly, Monica..."

And the name Anthony Giangregorio should be on a list too.

Open-threadiness: a friend linked this comic-strip summary of Nicolas Tesla (who's up there with Pascal and Cantor in my "awesome geeks pantheon").

Random thought: An 'irrigator' irrigates. Shouldn't that mean that an 'alligator' alligates?

What would 'alligating' be?

Mar Aileen @284.

Using more garlic/leeks/shallots than the recipe calls for?

J Homes.

Mary Aileen, and if you get alligated, you might need to be docted.

My father used to quote an interchange that went something like:

"He alleges that..."

"You mean he's an allegator?"

It sounds like Pogo but I don't know.

Lee @264: You made the print edition, even! I just got around to looking at the Sunday paper, and the photo you linked to was on the front page of section B.

Got back from a five week holiday yesterday which involved two weddings - a friend's I was a bridesmaid at and my brother's (both lovely).

Went to work, didn't even get a hello from my manager. A couple of comments from co-workers, "Oh, you've been away? For how long? Five weeks? I kind of noticed you weren't here a couple of weeks ago." I feel so loved *rolls eyes*

Now I need to clean up the mess my new very-un-computer-savvy housemate made of my computer.

I'm glad I was able to keep up with Making Light while away, though you are all still much too scary to post much ;)

"Alligator" was originally an Arabic term for one who follows Ali a bit too closely.

(ps: There was a fake news item in an early season of Saturday Night Live where some public figure was made to say, "I not only deny the allegation, I deny the alligator." As the figure was not white, there was a slight Amos & Andy feel to the jest.)

Kip W.@290

The line "I deny the allegation and defy the alligator!" has been attributed to a lot of people; I first heard it sometime in the 1960s, so it goes back aways. I've seen "I deny the allegation and deny the allegator" attributed to the Amos 'n Andy radio show, which would mean it goes back to at least the mid 1950s, and possible as far back as the late 1920s.

Kip W, #290: As Al- is the prefix, the root word would be ligator, which I take to mean "one who ties knots" (specifically ligatures).

Those clawed paws must be very nimble, and the ligatures would come in handy for holding captured prey beneath the water's surface....

Not to be confused with Al-litigator (despite the amazing resemblance).

After seeing American soldiers doing baton-twirling routines with antique rifles I find I just have to link to the drill display of the Queens Colour Squadron, RAF.

This year is, incidentally, the centenary of the Royal Flying Corps. In 1914 the naval element of the RFC split off as the Royal Naval Air Service, and in 1918 they recombined to form the Royal Air Force.

My sister was watching Henri last night, and I laughed my head off, then realized it was wonderfully Fluorospherian. Therefore, I am linking.

What is it? It's a cute internet cat video ... with a voiceover as if the cat's internal monologue was a nihilistic Left Bank intellectual. (Paw the Deux) Subtitled in English for Anglophone enjoyment, of course. :->

And if you can make it to "The whipped cream in the bathroom is not whipped cream" and not giggle, there is no hope for you.

Also, Henri tweets (but of course).

Recent examples as of this post:

- When I'm outside, I always eat grass, though it makes me sick every time. Just like you with vodka.

- I shudder to think what might happen to this house if I didn't lie in this sunbeam all day. The sacrifices I make...

- The kitchen is the cook. The scissors are the barber. The hairball is the cat.

Hyperlocal news... The local SF club's latest meeting involved the showing of "Damnation Alley", which man had not seen since its 1977 release. Best scene was Jan Michael Vincent and Dominique Sanda being chased by rubber-eating cockroaches in Salt Like City.

Bruce Cohen @291: The line "I deny the allegation and defy the alligator!" has been attributed to a lot of people; I first heard it sometime in the 1960s, so it goes back aways. I've seen "I deny the allegation and deny the allegator" attributed to the Amos 'n Andy radio show, which would mean it goes back to at least the mid 1950s, and possible as far back as the late 1920s.

1860: "I denies the allegation and I scorns the alligator."

These alligations are a croc!

Mary Aileen #284: I knew an old-time lefty in New York who used to quote a politician of the 1930s (I wish I could remember who) who said "I reject the allegations and the alligator who made them".

Serge Broom #296 "Salt Like City". I presume that's the home of the Crystal Cathedral.

Damnation Alley? I have vague memories of George Peppard in an Amazing Tanklike Vehicle.

Fragano @ 300... Probably, but the film didn't have the budget for even a miniature Crystal Cathedral. As they kept moving east toward Albany, they were able to afford only 3 guntoting sore-covered bozos.

Niall Mcauley @ 301... That's the one. Amazingly, the one black guy in the team wasn't the first person to get killed. He was the *second* person to be done in, by the abovementionned cockroaches, which had a taste for human flesh, not just rubber.

HLN: Local woman prepares Coke float. Vanilla ice cream and Coca-Cola have not been in the house at the same time in years (maybe ten). Mmmmmmmmm-mmmmmmmmm.

Today while giving Jemma, our Lasa Apso, her pills I fumbled the vial and spilled them on the floor; unlike with all other pills she decided she likes the taste of them and gobbled as many as she could get to before I got onto the floor, pushed her away, and swept them all up. I think she got 3 or 4 of them, possibly more. Since this was Rimadyl, an NSAID, I immediately called our vet and asked if I should bring her in, didn't spend the time looking up dosages myself (she's a small dog, about 10 kg, so it doesn't take much to make a toxic dose of most things). The vet told me to bring her in immediately; I did, and they took her in at once and induced vomiting and put her on an IV to flush as much out of her system as possible.

She's doing OK at this point, but the plan is to keep her on the IV drip for the rest of the day, leave the catheter in so I can pick her up this evening then bring her back tomorrow for some more. That way we can give her about the same treatment as if she stayed overnight, but she gets to be comfortable at home (and also the vet isn't set up for overnight stays, so she'd have to be moved to an emergency clinic and then moved back, more movement than I'd be happy with unless we were more concerned about the size of the dose). As far as we can tell she got a marginal dose that wouldn't have been at the toxic level except that she's 12, and the guideline is to lower the dosage level for older or infirm dogs.

I'm grateful that we have a good vet, who's become somewhat of a friend, and his office is about a 2 minute drive or a 10 minute walk. And I'm glad I didn't wait around to see if she developed symptoms, but called up right away.

My last post, which didn't have any URLs at all, has been gnomed. I suspect it was because I named a medication, though I wasn't aware it was one taken by humans. If the gnome on duty wishes to discuss the problem, I'd be pleased to take tea on the lawn by the gnomen.

[We get tons of spam advertising Rimadyl. Usually combined with "dog arthritis." -- Polycarp Teromin, Duty Gnome]

Julie L at 297: Is Q. K. Philander Doestick the author's real name?

Bruce Cohen at 306, glad no harm was done. My 9 yr old, 60 lb dog takes chewable Rimadyl, and you have just described one of my nightmares -- though I suspect a stern "Leave it!" would make my dog back up in a hurry. He's good about that.

And I have also been gnomed, for an obvious fault. Polycarp T., my apologies. I should have been more careful.

Erik @307: The book's title page identifies the author as Mortimer Thomson.

My aunt & uncle host jazz concerts in their living room:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3HLlsMTeOk&feature=plcp

I haven't been to one in years -- they're down in the Bay Area -- but I often leave baskets of fancy food for them to leave out at the next concert, because this kind of thing strikes me as civilization at its best.

Stefan, #311: Not my most-preferred style of music, but I absolutely agree with you about this sort of thing being a hallmark of civilization.

LN: Dad was apparently on TV news in the Upper Peninsula today (an Escanaba station), celebrating his 87th birthday by playing piano for the mostly younger folks at a retirement home.

I talked to him on the phone for a half hour or so today, and he heard about five minutes of it.

Coincidentally, a Pogo quote by Albert Alligator came up in our household yesterday: "I never been to alligator school, but I alley-gates good."

"Pay the Alligator": lyrics and performance.

Well, if you're interested in gatoring, here's a bit of history....

Elliot Mason, Henri's ennui est magnifique!

Lizzy L @ 308:

Jemma doesn't accept "drop it" or "leave it" as valid commands, or anything else that would prevent her from eating something she thinks might taste good. She's a rescue; we got her at 9 and by that time she was chronically overweight (riding the line of obese even though the shelter had her on a diet). We got her back to a reasonable weight and got her to enjoy exercise, but at the cost of having her constantly looking for food: she'lll eat a scrap of paper or a tissue, and she gobbles her meals as if she's been fasting for a week.

She's home now, and sleeping comfortably. I suspect that she wasn't best pleased about having to puke up her breakfast, though the tech told me that she enjoyed eating the activated charcoal ("She eats with her whole face" was how he put it). She was wildly excited when I picked her up from the vet; she came out dancing around even before I called her name (she's blind, and her sense of smell is not really keen, so she probably didn't know I was there until I said her name).

Tomorrow the vet will run a minimal blood panel to see if there was any effect on her kidneys; our best guess right now is that the dose was small enough, and we got it out of her fast enough that the probability of damage is low.

Bruce Cohen @ 318: Well done on the quick action. As I struggle to get my cat's daily pill down him, I shall remember that easy pill ingestion isn't necessarily a Good Thing.

"Epic tea Time with Alan Rickman"

Tamlyn @289: I'm glad I was able to keep up with Making Light while away, though you are all still much too scary to post much ;)

BOO!!

Did I make ya jump?

I am rolling my terrible eyes and gnashing my terrible teeth over here.

Wild rumpus is scheduled for 19:00 EST. Be there or TNH will stare into all your eyes without blinking once. And then you will be seriously fucked.

(meow)

abi: Be where? Be here? If not, where's there?

Be in RumpusSpace!

Which is everywhere, if you're doing it right, and nowhere to be found if you're not.

One of the pieces of Surprise Landscaping that came with our new house (no sign of it in February, and then suddenly: Plants! this spring) is a stand of peonies at the back corner of the house.

They've been enthusiastically coming up and budding (ants and all). It became clear a few days ago that they weren't white, because the sepals parted far enough to show pinkish petals beneath, but they were still tight-fisted spheres.

Yesterday, they were still tight-closed.

Today, we buried my grandmother. I came back from an exhausting end to several days of Family Stuff, parked in the garage, and as I walked through the yard, I saw:

Peonies.

Drifts of blowsy full-spread VERY VERY PINK, precisely the color my grandmother liked best in flowers.

They smell like her, too; strongly floral, slightly baby-powdery, but nowhere near the cloyingness of gardenia.

I have vases, somewhere in boxes. I can't find any of them just now. I took a leftover, washed Super Huge Bathtub-o-Soda cup from Wendy's, filled the bottom with rocks, and cut a handful of peonies to bring inside.

Hi, Grandma. I miss you already.

Elliott #326:

Your first link is munged with a bunch of neilsenhayden stuff at the front.

@322: Well? Well!? ::taps foot::

I think I'll just sit down over here and not make much noise. I like it quiet.

In my fair city, the Wild Rumpus is our Halloween parade.

::tap tap tap:: ::looks at clock:: ::tap tap tap::

Rumpus?

Elliott Mason @326: Drifts of blowsy full-spread VERY VERY PINK, precisely the color my grandmother liked best in flowers. ... They smell like her, too

Going out in style, wot?

Rump
Rump
Rumple-ti-tump!

I heard that the cool kids are having their Wild Rumpus up at the country club.

I gotta go...! Don't let anything cool happen until I get back.

(I actually grew up in a town where a significant number of the kids in school were from families who belonged to country clubs. In my neighborhood, the only way you got into a country club was as a waitress or golf caddy.)

Just to let everyone know, my wife, Paula Helm Murray (aka Dragonet), is currently recuperating from surgery to clean out a massive infection in her left foot. She's going to be in the hospital for a while, until they determine that everything is ok. She does have her laptop and the Intartubes to keep her from going stir crazy. Good thoughts, etc., will be gratefully appreciated.

Hopes & Wishes for a quick recovery, Paula!

"Country club." What a strange concept . . . it seems utterly alien to where I'm at. I'm pretty well off; my co-workers are pretty well off. I know some of them play golf. But paying to belong to a cliquish place with a pool and a riding table and a ballroom?

I'm having this seriously weird feeling here, like I have false memories of growing up in a Jack Vance novel, or a sit-com.

random AKICIML question:
are there programs or methods to display a set of Windows windows rotated at angles other than the usual 0/90/180?

Paula: feel better! I've only had small, minor infections. Ones needing surgery—ow!

Good wishes from here!

Elliott Mason: my condolences on your loss.

Paula Helm Murray: feel better!

Dr Paisley: thanks for stopping by to let us know about Paula.

Serge Broom @320: video is marked "private"

:-(

Rumpus Rumpus Rumpus!

<hugs> to El if you want them, and best of fast and complete healing to Paula.

Elliott 326: Sorry for your loss, but glad you got the peonies.

Dr. Paisley 338: Good thoughts coming her way, Doc!

I had my wild rumpus on a bike. Finished my conference, took one of the bikes from the rack in front of my hotel, and hightailed it through Boulder, up along a stream flowing through a rocky canyon, and further up some of the hillside roads to the west. Then I got to zoom down a windy mountain road back into town.

And tomorrow I step into an airplane and head for home, where I hope to find supper waiting for me.

Serge Broom @320 and Mellisa Singer @345:
The video in Serge's link appears to have been marked private some time today (worked this morning, doesn't now). It was the video from here set to appropriately dramatic music, though I can't remember the musical credit.

Paula! Feel better better better soonest. I send you shiny thoughts of goodness.

Elliott, that's really cool about the peonies blooming. A grand fanfare for your grandmother. May memory be a blessing.

NNNNARRRRRGH IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN AAAAAAGH.

I had a time of peace after I used MalwareBytes. But yesterday it began once more. This time it's more sophisticated. For example, if I Google "llamar conjugation," the link I click won't take me to the site it says it goes to, but instead to a site that promises the cheapest rates for calls to Cuba. The sites I get appear to be legit, in the sense that they appear to be well made and probably belong to the companies whose names are on them and AFAICT these companies do sell the products they purport to sell. So at least I'm not getting any crappy, amateurish "search" pages that recycle the same seven or eight links. (Drywall? Seriously?)

So.

1. What does the Fluorosphere suggest as the next step, since MalwareBytes keeps telling me that nothing is wrong?

2. Do people who pay to get onto this "service" really believe that anybody is going to go, "Hey, I was looking for a casserole recipe, but I can't find it because every link goes to this women's clothing catalog site--oh well, might as well buy a hat?"

Jenny:

I would make sure Malwarebytes, and all of your other security programs, are up to date. If you CAN'T update them, something has dug itself really deep.

You might consider totally removing your browser. Uninstall it, and any helper programs. Remove all cookies. Empty out the browser cache ("temporary internet files").

Scan for troubles, then reinstall the browser.

I'm sending positive vibrations through the aether for Paula. I've had infections that had to be removed surgically; I sympathize most deeply.

Eric @ 349... Melissa Singer @ 345... That was strange. The video had shown up on FB and on G+ in the morning. Glad there's another place where Rickman's Tea Time can be enjoyed.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 341... Can't help with that. Sorry. By the way, did you ever receive my email about this year's Hugo Ceremonies?

She hasn't been around here much these days, but I saw on Facebook that Miriam Libicki, who was busy with her comic-book "Jobnik", recently completely another project - the birth of a cute little girl.

I've sorted out the first link Elliott @326. Needed an http:// before the www.

My condolences, Elliott -- she was clearly a wonderful woman. I hope the peonies, and the magic of their appearance, ease your grief somewhat. If you need to talk further about your loss, you know that we're here for you, right?

Dr. Paisley @338:

Tell Paula we're thinking of her. Or, if she's reading this, Hi Paula! We're thinking of you!

I hope that the foot heals quickly and painlessly.

Jacque @331:

I wasn't rumpusing on Making Light, because I did not happen, at that point, to be online. We all rumpus where we are.

Don't ask where I was. I'm still cleaning up.

I'll schedule the next one to be when I'm at the keyboard. Which means it's gonna be early for Americans, which means weekend. Saturday, 3pm Eastern Time?

Dr.Paisley... Pass my good wishes on to Paula, and that I'm looking forward to seeing her at the worldcon.

Elliott Mason... My condolences.

Best wishes for swift healing, Paula.

Elliott Mason, sorry about your grandmother, but how wonderful with the peonies.

I couldn't rumpus yesterday, but I shall make up for it this weekend at my very first fiber festival. (!) I'm going to be a booth babe (!!) for the Tsarina of Tsocks, (aka half of the people who wrote _Lobscouse and Spotted Dog_). (!!!)

#351 ::: Jenny Islander

Check to see that something bad isn't sending you to a proxy server.

See: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Change-proxy-settings-in-Internet-Explorer

I don't know that I'm ready to talk about my past week, much (possibly over on the DFD thread, eventually), but the Peony Incident just struck me as so overwhelmingly Fluorospherian I had to share. :->

In the odd-coincidences front, my grandmother died the Friday before Mother's Day (which was the 11th this year). Her husband died the 12th of May ten years ago; her mother died the Monday after Mother's Day (I misremember the precise date) in 1992.

It's sort of a rough holiday for us, historically. Considering my Dad was born on Thanksgiving (well, the year he was born; his mother -- an obstetrician, mind! -- stayed home with contractions for quite a while thinking they were gas pains from feasting) and my Mom was born on Christmas ... my stepmom's birthday is Veteran's Day. Makes remembering easier. :->

Elliot Mason @ 365 ...
My empathies :(

TexAnne @ 363... I'm going to be a booth babe

Pictures!

Elliot, my sympathies -- my mother's relatives had the habit of taking their final departure in July. In Virginia, this usually means sweltering heat for the funeral. Wonderful about the peonies, though.

I love the tree peonies, but they are hellishly expensive if you buy named varieties. There is one I covet that sells for $$$ a plant, so it is highly unlikely I'll be willing to plunk down that much money for one.

Paula -- healing energy headed your way if that be your will. Dr. Paisley, thank you for the head's up.

Isis is doing well and is not amused by the plastic ruff she's wearing. The rest of the canine crew have finally adjusted to it -- it spooked them a little when she first got home.

Lori Coulson @368: The day of the wake was 85degF out (and we were inside in the funeral home's air conditioning for 7 straight hours). The burial, however, was down to 69degF and streaming warm sunlight -- perfect for the graveside service, because it wasn't uncomfortable to stand there being sunned on (the cool breeze), nor did anyone need bulky coats on top of their good clothes.

I don't know that I'll ever buy a peony plant, but the house did come with these, and I kind of like them. I don't think I'll take them out (though I might donate one or two to individuals wanting to add one to their yard; it's a fairly dense stand).

This year is sort of a moratorium on landscape additions; we need to get the front bushes completely removed by professionals (they're far too close to the porch-base wall, and the raised bed they're in is causing water infiltration), which means the entire front yard will be a dug-up wasteland until that's done. Plus, everything is so in-flux in terms of what we want to get done on the house with deadlines that things like making the backyard more how I'd design it is definitely a 'care about it next spring' problem.

My favorite nurseries mostly take orders in the winter for spring digging, too, so it's rather late to get plants from them. I do know I'm going to buy several fruit trees from Trees of Antiquity for next season, and at least a flat of columbines from Possibility Place (and possibly something like wild ginger for front-yard ground cover).

John just reminded me that I intended to make a home-improvement (and garden porn) blog about this house; I'm starting to actually feel the urge. I do have a bunch of photos queued up that could go in posts in it. I'll have to pick a good name, though. :->

OpenThreadiness -- see some of you at the Nebulas?

I've been lurking the last few years, life has been weird, but I'm turning to the people who I know can help!

My friend Jay is deployed in Afghanistan, he's trying to remember a book. I'm pretty sure I've read this one, but I don't recall the title or author either. Since we're all usually pretty good at this sort of thing (this is our preferred genre), I thought I'd pop back up. Thanks!

Jay says: There is a novel, I suspect written in 1985-1990, possibly as late as 1992, by an author I can't remember with a title I can't remember.

The cover of the trade paperback was mostly orange, with a spacecraft over a flat landscape with three or four small suns in the background.

The plot: Humans living on a mostly agricultural planet are snapped up in a nighttime raid by aliens. They're confused, and families are split up in the chaos. They wake up on alien transports, which bring them to a pocket universe created by a different group of aliens than the ones that abducted them. Once in the pocket universe, most of the humans are trained as soldiers to fight a war against a computer intelligence that is trying to eliminate the aliens who created it. They are trained by the same leonid aliens who abducted them. The leonids were originally meant to be the army, but it turns out they were terrible at being soldiers, but very good at training soldiers. So the original aliens resort to abducting human populations to serve in the army, since humans tend to make good soldiers. They have done this multiple times. Two of the humans abducted in the beginning of the book somehow land apart from the others, behind the computer lines, and start to search for their friends. The end of the book has the two "lost" humans figuring out much of the history of the pocket universe, and identifying where the other humans are. It's a cliff hanger, implying a second volume.

So -- what's the name of the book, and does Amazon have it?

Tania @371, I've referred your question to a newsgroup (rec.arts.sf.written) that has been known to strip a query down to mere footnotes in minutes. Though last time I did this for someone, I got zero responses, so you never know.

Thanks Kip. I've not been on any rec.arts.sf.* in, well... at least 10 years. Dammit. I miss those days. :)

TexAnne @363 - there might be an amusing reaction if you tell her that Gannet says hello. :D

Naomi, 374: I'll do that! Heh.

Tania, I got a response!

"Christopher Rowley's Golden Sunlands?" asks James N., and provides this image link.

(I don't know if that means it's on Amazon or not, but I figured answer the first part first.)

Tanya@371, if one side are leonid, could they be Kzinti? The story you're describing doesn't look like a match for the Wikipedia summaries of the Man-Kzin Wars (which were mainly written by people other than Niven himself), but it could be something in that space.

On Wildly Rumpusing - My plans for the weekend are to go to Maker Faire on Saturday, and then drive up to northern California to watch the annular eclipse later afternoon Sunday.

Mariah Bear infographic on how a book is born.

Tania @371, though not all the details match, this also sounds vaguely like McCaffrey's Freedom's Landing.

Tania@371;

I don't actually know the answer to your question, but David Drake has written books with humans abducted by aliens to serve in their military.

Bill Stewart @379

Me too! A FoaF who keeps very good track of all things weather suggests that Shasta will be clear, Redding partially cloudy, and Tahoe-Reno partially cloudy. These forecasts can change: I'll check for new ones tonight.

Oh, rasf*. Those were the days.

semi-wild Rumpusing: teen and I will attempt Ninth Avenue Food Festival one day this weekend, possibly on top of shopping for a party dress for her (Sweet Sixteen season has begun).

"Oh, rasf*" sounds like one of Yosemite Sam's favorite cuss words.

Have people heard that writer Anne Crispin has been fighting cancer?

Jim @385: Yeah, it rather does sound like Snazzum, doesn't it?

I first heard of nattering and grommishing through fandom, so it's weirdly appropriate.

A Funny Thing Happened in the Food Line... except that it wasn't funny, it was disturbing. I dropped by one of the local grocery stores yesterday to buy some veggies. As I lined up at the cashier, I glanced, as one does, at the piled up food items presented by the customer ahead of me. There must have been 25 items, and there was not a single item of fresh or healthy food in the batch. Every. Single. Thing. was boxed, wrapped, pre-cooked, heat-n-serve, loaded with sugar, bad fats, preservatives, and salt, there were no vegetables, not even canned vegetables. The only meat was processed ham. Lots of snacks and candy, sugar drinks, but no, this wasn't party shopping, it was obviously what this person eats all the time.

It frightened me.

#389: I've seen that too. Plenty of times.

Not three hours ago the guy ahead of me bought:

Block of cheese. Package of sliced deli meat. Tortillas. 2 lb. package of sandwich cookies.

This particular manifestation of "convenience" is slowly killing us.

Where I am would be on the track of the annular eclipse...except that it will rotate around behind the earth before the annular phase begins. The sun will set while partially eclipsed. Where I'd have to go to see annular is sufficiently far away to make it not worth it. (For total I'd do it.)

HLN: Area woman's daughter, with some technical advice but very little actual assistance, completes her first skirt.

(The tweet says she was "mildly pleased", but actually she went outside so that she could jump up and down and shriek with excitement.)

Area woman had been deeply dubious of the fabric choice in the store, but is now prepared to eat her words. It looks adorable.

Bill Stewart @ #379: Mariah Bear infographic on how a book is born.

Heh. I like how
(a) there are several paths that result in somebody quitting the publishing industry and taking up an alternative lifestyle;
(b) each of these paths leads back into the main infographic, as the somebody decides to write a book about their experiences...

Melissa Singer @ #345, Serge Broom @ #354:

I got there shortly before the Youtube version went private, and there was a notice explaining that it would be disappearing soon because the person who uploaded it wasn't the copyright holder, and the person who was had politely asked them to desist.

Paul A @ 394... It certainly made many a Rickman admirer happy.

abi @ 392... Bravo!

According to today's "Two minute hate"[1], the Japanese have a word for hlep: arigata-meiwaku: "An act someone does for you that you didn't want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favour. Then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end you had to express thanks."

Eep!

[1] The "Metro" free newspaper[2] in the UK, produced by the publishers of the "Daily Mail" (a.k.a the Daily Heil or the Daily Hate), it only takes two minutes to read from cover to cover if you skip the advertisements that fund it.
[2] Also referred to as: "yesterday's news today".

Stefan Jones, Lizzy L, while I certainly do have moments of judging others (Roommate Daniel bought frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a case of small bottles of water a week... and his OKCupid profile said he loved to cook) that sounds a lot like either my normal grocery trip (add milk and bread to the first) or a grocery trip where I've decided to be extravagant (the second). I don't have the resources, time, or daring to experiment with cooking right now, so my grocery trips are pretty appalling. It's cans and box food for dinner, chocolate milk and peanut butter and jelly for everything else.

This doesn't stop frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from being a bad decision at every possible juncture, but the block of cheese, deli meat, and tortillas, that's all actual food. Add a can of refried beans and that's my extravagant food, which would feed me every night for a school week and leave me feeling very proud of myself for making something with ingredients.

Re: groceries.

I am a great fan of frozen vegetables when time and energy are scarce. Dump in bowl, microwave 2 minutes, add butter and salt, microwave 2 more minutes: eat. (Of course, this is from the guy whose kindergartener likes broccoli[1]

The one that makes me go "grrr, people are strange" is the "natural foods" aisle at my local Kroger. It's an entire aisle of frozen processed food, meeting various dietary criteria[2], but the only thing in the aisle that's in my category of "food" is eggs and some milk products.

1) My wife's hair is reddish-brown; the answer on the paper is of very unclear derivation.
2) It would be very helpful for someone who needed to avoid gluten.

Lizzy @ 389, Stefan @ 390:

Just last Sunday, a friend wondered out loud what other supermarket shoppers think of her in the summer, when she buys all her produce at the farmer's market (her grocery cart thus giving a very distorted picture of her diet).

Diatryma, I would have been happy to see peanut butter, jelly, tortillas, a block of cheese, a can of beans, milk, or bread in the pile. Those are perfectly acceptable foods. None of them were in the pile. Also, we are not talking about poverty driven food choices here: I was at the Grocery Outlet, where the veggies and even the fresh chicken are CHEAP, cheaper than Doritos and M & Ms. I know because I'm poor and that's where I often shop. I was not looking at this person's food choices and thinking, Bad Person! I was looking at them and thinking, Diabetes! Heart attack!

Belated good wishes to Paula.

My grocery shopping is always deceptive. Whenever I go to the supermarket, whatever else I'm picking up, I always have several clamshells of mixed salad greens and usually a bag of mini-carrots. My rabbits eat most of both.

Speaking of which:

HLN: Area bun's bladder stones have returned, but they don't seem to be growing so vet and bunny mum have decided to put off another surgery for now but are keeping an eye on the situation. Area bun declined to comment on this development, being too busy hopping around and devouring any greens that come her way, but she certainly shows no other signs of being unwell.

Not to say that a cart full of processed food does NOT equal diabetes/hypertension/heart attack, but it could also indicate multiple kids at home, multiple jobs, no time to cook. My appalling foodstuff to Real Food ratio is about 50/50, and I have no kids. I do have lots of obligations, and what winds up being a 15 min lunch break three days a week. The "real" food is bought at farmer's markets and whole foods - because nothing is worse than mediocre vegetables. The regular grocery store is where I stock up on processed nonsense, because while I enjoy cooking, I don't always have the time to do so. As a fat woman, I am always aware that my grocery cart is being judged. As a 40-year-old, I've ceased caring.

Lizzy and Stefan: As Susie @400 noted, it's possible that person bought all their produce at the farmer's market, or earlier in the week. Or a number of other factors could be in play that you, not knowing their lives, can't guess.

Also, I wonder whether "obviously what this person eats all the time" is code for "this person was fat."

Around here, the other thing that a cart full of what Lizzy L describes could indicate is that we just did our Real Shopping at Central Market, where we got the meat, the fish, the fresh veggies, the fresh fruit, the imported cheese ... the stuff we pick up at the regular grocery is what we haven't found first at CM. A normal Tuesday night's regular grocery haul might include canned tomatoes, canned broth, cans of V-8, hot sauce, some jack cheese, individual packets of nuts and raisins for lunch snacks, shampoo and cat food. If you were to assume that that was our complete regular diet, you'd be way wrong.

CDS and the debt crisis in one cartoon

Lizzy:

Personally, I find that when I have some time to plan and think through food, and when I expect either me or my wife to have time to cook, my grocery cart looks okay--a mix of convenience foods and real foods. (I'm a big fan of frozen cook-in-the-bag microwave veggies and box mixes of salad greens, since it means that even on a night when I have no time to plan anything and the dinner is something thrown together, I can easily add a vegetable.)

But when things are really chaotic, I end up buying a lot of convenience food, since it's a way to make sure that everyone will eat even when we have events every night of the week. Lunchables, frozen lasagna, microwaveable mac and cheese packets for the kids, cans of soup, hot dogs, deli meat--all those have the property that even if you get home at 7 and the kids are hungry and the homework still needs to be done, you can make sure everyone gets something to eat. (Ideally, you can use the aforementioned frozen microwave veggies to get something with some nutritional value in alongside the grilled cheese and canned soup.)

When I was younger and single, I had almost no idea how to cook. *All* my home-cooked food came from a box or a can and was made in a factory, excepting only hamburger. Over time, I learned to do better, but it still requires planning and time and attention, which is often in short supply in our busy house.

If there are two or three things I can suggest to get a little ways out of that trap, they're:

a. Get a cookbook of easy recipies--I think we have a Betty Crocker "Good and Easy" book. This is a nice source of basic how-tos for someone who has no idea how to make something that doesn't come with instructions.

b. Get a rice cooker with a vegetable steamer basket on top. This means that the starch and vegetable of a real meal is always about 30-35 minutes away. (The veggies can be fresh or frozen, though it works better to rinse them off for a couple minutes if they're frozen.)

c. Start accumulating a few things you know how to make. Pasta is easy, using jarred sauces. Similarly, there are easy recipes to make pork chops and chicken in the oven with almost no work or attention. Over time (from my experience) you can end up with enough things you know how to cook that hot dogs or boxed mac and cheese are things you use on unusually chaotic nights, but at first, it's fine to alternate--one night you make something real, the next it's mac and cheese from a box plus frozen veggies, the night after that, it's something more-or-less real like hamburger plus rice and veggies from the rice cooker.

d. I found having a few tools really helpful: A steamer basket, a minimal set of pots and pans, a quick read meat thermometer (I have little intuition for when something is done even now), a spaghetti strainer, a rice cooker, etc.

This is all from the perspective of someone who's not much of a cook and has limited talent in that direction. A good cook can do a lot better, but if you're in the trap of mostly eating from boxes and cans, these are steps that helped me get out of that trap.

Just an aside to the above: When I had no idea to cook, do you know why I always bought box mixes rather than ingredients? Not because of convenience--I had enough time to cook. Not because of cost--the box mixes were more expensive per serving.

I bought box mixes because they came with directions. I have no idea whether other people are like that, but for me, that was the selling point--I knew I could make them because while I knew nothing of how to cook, I knew how to read.

Re: groceries

I think I get what Lizzy is driving at, though. I too do my shopping in more than one place--fruits and veg and quiche and goat cheese and bread and a few other baked goods at the Greenmarket (in various combinations depending on the season).

Once every couple of months I go to the larger of the local supermarkets and stock up on paper goods, pasta, tuna fish, cookies, cleaning products, frozen veggies, pasta sauce, and other things of that nature, including some speciality foods (like Annie Chun's Soup Bowls and certain varieties of veggie burgers and refrigerated pasta) that the smaller supermarket doesn't stock.

Once a week I go to the smaller local supermarket to fill in, replacing milk/juice/butter/eggs/cheese, buying whatever I feel like cooking that night and don't already have at home, and buying deli meat/cheese for lunch for work.

I buy fish at the big supermarket (fresh fish concession within the store) and meat and sometimes fish at the smaller supermarket.

So sometimes my load of shopping looks very odd indeed--last weekend I bought ground turkey, 4 sticks of butter, a quart of orange juice, a package of frozen peas, two rolls of toilet paper, half a pound of sliced low-salt ham, and half a pound of sliced muenster cheese.

I buy frozen stuff and boxed stuff and jarred stuff, but very little canned stuff (other than mushrooms and beets) and almost no prepared stuff.

I suspect that's what caught Lizzy's attention--the amount of prepared stuff, which tends to be higher in salt and higher in fat and higher in chemicals.

I agree that prepared stuff tends to often correlate with small children at home and/or multiple jobs; I bought more prepared foods when my daughter was younger because it was harder to get a meal on the table in a respectable amount of time. Then I taught myself a few tricks and my daughter learned more patience, and now we have fresh-prepared meals, or at least microwave-reheated meals that I cooked earlier, at least 5 days/week.

I also think that many people really do not know how to cook; I've run into a lot of people who, like me, were never taught to cook by their parents or in school. So prepared food is easier for them than learning about cooking or ingredients.

And I don't think Lizzy's remark was code for "this person is fat;" I'm fat, and I eat a pretty "natural" diet. And my daughter has whipcord-thin friends who eat nothing but junk.

I'm reminded of the friend who bought a big hunting knife for his brother as a birthday present. While he was at the big box store to get it, he picked up a few other things that he needed. Looking down at his selection when he got to the cashier, he realized that did not look good: knife, duct tape, ...

nerdycellist, #404: As a fat woman, I am always aware that my grocery cart is being judged. As a 40-year-old, I've ceased caring.

I think you've just summed up this entire subthread in two sentences. Bravo!

abi 392: Adorable doesn't begin to cover it! I almost squealed myself, it looks so cute.

I actually took a picture of a typical dinner last month:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/6946301942/in/photostream

Preceded by a green salad, not shown, eaten while the vegetables were finishing steaming. (Eaten from the same bowl as the steamed vegetables, in fact.) The salad and vegetables are on the menu five days a week.

The main course is almost always something I cooked a huge batch of in advance and either froze in portions (old cottage cheese containers) or am ladeling out of the pot through the week: Pasta, some kind of rice dish, stew or soup. Sometimes I'll cook rice and half a package each of two prepared Indian entrees.

Tomorrow morning I start a new batch of beef stew. It's short on starchy vegetables; it is meant to be served over polenta, which I'll make a batch of tomorrow evening.

* * *
Sunday breakfast:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/5932118909/in/set-72157629899209303

I go for an extra dog-walk on Sundays to earn that . . .

Xopher @ 413... When I met Abi two long years ago, I think she said something about her daughter liking "Girl Genius" especially for the costumes.

nerdycellist at 404, yes, I know that the person in my story might be dealing with multiple kids, multiple jobs, no time to cook, etc. As I thought I said, my reaction was one of fear and concern for the person.

However, you and others (Persephone, joann) make a great point that this person may be choosing to buy veggies, fruit, and other, more healthy stuff in a different place. I should not assume that what I saw purchased the day I was in line was indeed all that person was eating, -- and I was assuming that. Thank you all for pointing this out to me.

I spent 11 years as the caregiver of a diabetic parent. I've had one heart attack. I try to eat smart and safe. I don't count calories, but there are foods I choose not to eat. I can't afford to eat as healthily as I would like. My friends would probably say I'm obsessive, maybe borderline fanatic, though only for myself; I don't march around telling other people what to eat, even when I want to.

Let me move temporarily from the particular to the general. I think agribusiness is killing us, literally. I think the stuff we eat interacts with our individual genetics and we get diabetes and heart disease: I don't think this is even controversial.

I think a lot of people (for many reasons) choose convenience foods over real foods, and are harming themselves and their families by doing so. I don't WANT my friends and neighbors to get sick. My assumptions about my neighbor in the store may indeed have been incorrect. The point remains, processed food, imitation food, food which is mostly sugar, preservatives, and gluten, is unhealthy. I am not saying my neighbor is a Bad Person for eating all that crap -- I was not a Bad Person for the years I lived on egg noodles, oreos, and Top Ramen. I was ignorant, and I paid for that ignorance by developing coronary artery disease.

One way to create conditions under which this could change is to go after the corporations: find a way to influence Kraft and General Mills. The best way to influence them is to hurt their profits, and one way to do this -- perhaps the only way -- is by getting individual people to stop buying cheap, unhealthy products. But people will only do this if they believe -- really, truly believe -- that these products are bad for them.

If people don't believe this, there's no reason at all for them not to buy and eat cheap unhealthy crap. And so -- back to the particular -- I am frightened for my neighbor ahead of me on the food line.

Melissa Singer @410, of course there are fat people who eat very healthily (there are fat vegans) and thin people who eat nothing but junk food. In general, fat people eat more or less the same amount and quality of food as thin people. But the assumption that fat people eat unhealthily is widespread in U.S. culture, so an assumption that a particular person eats junk food all the time, based on seeing one shopping trip, is going to happen to fat people a lot more often.

In re kids, crafts, and adora-bubble-ness, I made this. Sweater and model. :-> It's like pulling teeth to get her into my handknits lately, so I was pleased to get her to pose so I could upload a proper 'finished' picture to the ravelry project.

Hilary Hertzoff @403 - I have no idea if anything in my case is similar enough to yours, but I (not a rabbit) had a kidney (not bladder) stone a year for a while, until my sister told me that Adele Davis recommended magnesium, as it would allow my body to (if my memory's good here) precipitate the minerals as it went along instead of collecting them all just upstream of the Very Narrow Place that Hurts. In the twenty years since then, I haven't had a stone.

Elliott Mason @418: Aww!

Lizzy L @416: Thank you for that. Making Light regulars are unlikely to indulge in thoughtless stereotyping, and I appreciate your willingness to reconsider that assumption.

abi, #392: I would also have been deeply dubious about that fabric! But in combination with the T-shirt, it makes a pulled-together and stylish outfit. Did she already have the shirt when she picked out the fabric, or was it bought with the finished product in mind? Either way, I applaud her taste.

Elliott, #418: That's pretty -- and I'm not normally all that fond of sweaters. Thank you for including both links, because Ravelry wants me to have an account before I can see anything there.

Elliott Mason @418, adorable. And the sweater is cute too.

Lee @421:

She's had the T-shirt for almost a year -- she's going to outgrow it soon. That will be a sad day, unless I rescue the design for an appliqué for a jean jacket or something.

She's a fan of a YouTube game vlogger called CupQuake. She's a young woman who plays games and makes videos about them. She also kind of natters on about art, and her engagement, and life in general. Since (for obvious reasons) Fiona is not allowed headphones when viewing YouTube, I've got a reasonable idea of CupQuake's character and values. And I wholly approve of her -- she talks about things like practicing to become a better artist, and the importance of communication and compromise in relationships.

So if Fiona wants to wear cupcakes around, I am doubly OK with that.

Elliott Mason @418:

What a lovely sweater, and what a charming model wearing it!

Lee @421: I only included the rav link for people who already have accounts and want to geek out about what pattern I used, etc. :->

For the record, it's an Elizabeth Zimmerman 'Cousin Nalgar' sweater, with a knit/purl texture pattern of Charlie-Brown-esque zigzags, the stripe width being determined by three digits of the Fibonacci sequence, until I got to the yoke, which is paired up/down triangles of solid knit and purl.

Lizzy -

I am 100% with you on the perniciousness of agribusiness in the US. My roommate is allergic to corn, which means very little of our food is actually bought at the mainstream grocery stores. Just trying to avoid HFCS, Dextrose, Maltodextrin and Modified Food Starch means more cooking for us, less "junky" pseudofood for dinner. I would dare anyone to try and find a coupon in their Sunday Circular for a food item that does not contain corn (Fruity Pebbles. Some varieties of Orowheat bread. That's pretty much it...). These national brands are all pretty much controlled by maybe two or three parent companies who evidently do nothing but harvest corn.

At the last appointment I had with Incompetent Endocrinologist, he took me off both Metformin and Blood Pressure meds, (funny thing - when they got rid of the automatic BP Terror Machine and used a regular old Sphignomonometer with a properly sized cuff, I actually have borderline low BP! Imagine that!) and continued with the thyroid replacement I will be on for the rest of my life due to Cushings. Modifying my diet in minor ways helped with the blood sugar and cholesterol, but I am still Morbidly Obese. My body got fat and wants to stay fat. I will continue taking care of it, but I will still be the fat person at the grocery store who sometimes has a bunch of Instant Lunches that I can keep in the freezer in perpetuity because they're on sale this week, or a pint of Ben & Jerry's in my cart because even a fat lady gets to eat ice cream every now and then. And you can't tell how healthy a person is by looking at them.

Persephone @417: If it had been my mother who was surveying the shopping, the statement would indeed have been code for "that person is fat." And anyone who knows my mother would have understood that from the anecdote.

But Lizzy didn't say anything about the person's weight.

I felt that you assumed a subtext that was not present, and I thought that did a disservice to Lizzy.

Hence my post.

I've seen quite a few Kickstarter Projects come my way, not just for books but also for a puppet show.
I must say that Marc Scott Zicree's idea of funding an SF movie thru Kickstarter was especially intriguing.
Of course I made a contribution.

Details can be found HERE.

Also totally agree about agribusiness. Which is one of the reasons I try to buy local, including supermarket stuff (like organic milk from upstate NY).

Some people only seem to have half a handle on the problem. Like they'll buy something organic, but organic from 3,000 miles away is still not a terrific purchase.

nerdycellist, believe me, I know that you can't tell how healthy a person is by looking at them. I am a lean, non-smoking, very active martial arts instructor who 6 years ago had a heart attack. Even in the hospital, flat in bed, drugged, waiting for the f**king blood clot to dissolve, people kept telling me how healthy I looked!

Ah, Modified Food Starch, how I hate thee...

Every time something new and interesting shows up at the grocery store, you turn up on the list of ingredients. I've gotten to the point I ignore the food ads on tv, because I know I won't be able to eat the stuff.

I'm overweight, I'm trying to remedy that by getting more exercise...and will be getting a ski machine next month. It's the only indoor exercise equipment I actually like using.

But having to read the labels to avoid MSG, we discovered that too many products (green beans!) had added sugar, and when we tried to cut down on sodium as well, ai yi yi.

We've recently discovered we love homemade pizza. I do the dough, Mom makes the sauce, and she and Jan choose the toppings. I may be biased, but it's better than any we can buy.

I agree about agribusiness, but I have to not think about it most of the time. My threshold for 'I just won't eat then' is really low and I am a picky eater with a lot of coping strategies-- right now, I'm alternating real food with not real food, which means I eat a can of soup with Club crackers one night and a couple onion bagels with fake butter the next. When I buy food, it's either food that keeps forever or food I know I'm going to eat in the next week or so. Anything outside that feels high-risk.

Sugar in green beans? WTF.

I recently found some green beans at the Farmer's Market that were exactly as I remembered the ones from my childhood garden, down to the slight fuzziness. In attempting to steam in them in the microwave I believe I may have slightly undercooked them, which was a great idea; when mom used to have me pick and clean the green beans, she'd have to account for about 20% shrinkage because I'd eat them right off the vine.

I have found that the antipathy I developed towards fruits and vegetables throughout my teens and twenties was due to mediocre frozen and suburban grocery chain stuff. Moving out to CA and actually eating what was seasonal has been a revelation. I still can't stand cruciferous veggies, and peaches and apricots still activate my gag reflex (thanks, Auntie L for that formative childhood experience) but I am grateful for the return to the fat, misshapen tasty carrots of my youth, as well as all manner of new-to-me foods. (Mangoes are MADE OF CANDY everyone!!!!) I just wish I were a little better at preparing veggies.

Tangentially, it occurs to me that some of this is seasonal. My supermarket purchases include a lot more fresh vegetables in February or even May than in August—because in August I can get all sorts of good vegetables from the farmers' market, and may not go to the supermarket produce aisle for anything except the occasional lemon or lime. In February what I get there is bread and fish and apples. (They had even sold all the cauliflower by then; I wound up buying frozen.) This May, the farmers have been bringing some early lettuces and radishes: but if I want a cucumber or bell pepper or most other fresh vegetables, it's the supermarket. (By the end of winter, the supermarket is better even for root vegetables.)

A hypothetical person evaluating my supermarket shopping basket would think I ate more fruit and vegetables in winter than in summer; the reality is the other way around.

Nerdycellist @433. Roasting cruciferous veggies at high-heat in the oven may open whole new horizons for you. Clean, chop into smaller pieces (florets, slices, sections depending on which member of the cabbage family you're dismembering), toss with oil and salt to taste, roast at 450 or higher til the edges are brown. Result is nutty, not cabbagy, and some squabbling over who gets seconds of the Brussels sprouts in my household. As always, YMMV.

Kip W @419 Bunnies have a very different metabolism than humans so magnesium isn't likely to help. The stones are mostly calcuim (which their bodies don't process very well). Pepper's currently on a daily dose of potassium citrate (same principle, different chemical reaction) but it's mostly to prevent more calcium from building up - it's unlikely the stone will get smaller. If things stay the way they are, we'll eventually arrange to remove the stones surgically, but for now we want to make sure they aren't growing.

Elliott Mason (118) I haven't seen anything that cute since my first family of kids was young. My first mother-in-law was a terrible sour old creature who couldn't say a nice thing if her life depended on it. But she knitted wonderful sweaters and things for the kids, and she sewed lovely dresses for me (I still wore dresses then), with the excuse that she had made them for herself and somehow, they just didn't fit. As if. (She: 5'5", 140 lb, I: 5'10", 120 lb)

Poor old woman. I don't know what had happened to her that this was the only way she could express her love. She would have died ill and alone if my ex-husband's current wife (a wonderful person) had not invited her into their home and cared for her (he wouldn't).

I hadn't thought about her in years, but seeing that darling sweater brought it all back.

HLN: Today being Bike To Work Day, area woman rode her bike to work, on her day off. Which, as it turned out, was a good thing, as our intrepid bikist left a little later than ideal, got lost in a neighborhood (luckily not too far off the beaten path), had to detour in a roundabout way to get back on the track, rode slowly (too many dratted hills! who put all those hills there?), and eventually arrived at work. On the way back, she successfully navigated the trail, stopped at this guy's hot dog stand, albeit the new one, given by Discovery Channel; had a half-smoke and a soda while sitting on a bench outside the building, and rode for home.

"I was on my way back when I realized that I had an organic reason for doing so poorly on the hills: I'd forgotten about donating Double Red Cells about two months ago, and I was told it takes four months to recover -- so I'm probably still anemic! No wonder I kept running out of energy!" said the area woman as she walked up the last and most awful hill near home.

Upon her arrival, she said, she parked her bike, removed her helmet, turned on the ceiling fan, sat down on the couch, and took a lovely nap with her delighted cats.

Later in the day, she entertained a visit from the Ex, who had stopped by to "clean off" the furniture that will be officially moved on the morrow. She is now awaiting the arrival of her Fabulous Girlfriend, after which they shall partake of curried chicken and a Venezuelan chicken stew.

Bill @ 378

In what unjust universe does Maker Faire overlap Pin-a-Go-Go?

(Though as to Rumpusing, ours will probably be deferred to Sunday afternoon, when the games are slightly fewer but the crowds and noise are slightly less.)

HLN: Area retiree slices up bell peppers, dips in secret sauce* and roasts them on flat pan at 350; unbelievable deliciousness ensues.
Low temps were used because of uncertainty about what nonstick coating of pan could take. Lining pans with foil at higher temps resulted in pinholes in the foil and possible aluminum infusion into the food. (Label on new pans did not say what the max temp tolerance for that coating should be.)
Retiree had already tried this with green beans, after learning it from parent; expects to try it with cruciferous vegs soon per Ellen, #435.
* soy sauce, with some Worcestershire, red wine and olive oil

Further HLN: Area retiree secures 7% increase in range for #1 trebuchet by bending tip of release prong; is still trying to figure out all the theory. #1 treb is now throwing at 54 times length of arm at 100:1 mass ratio, which is moving up on reasonably decent, I guess.
Jenny Islander, #351: "llamar conjugation"--How do you conjugate llamas?
Or do I really want to know?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale@382 - Thanks! We're staying in Dunsmuir, so Shasta and Redding are both options (though Shasta tends to have mountains in the way), and Burney looks like another good possibility (east of Redding on 299.)

KayTei - There are an amazing number of competing activities this weekend. Pin-a-Go-Go looks like fun. The USGS is having its triennial open house (even though a lot of its target audience may be eclipse-watching.) One local town is having their annual art show in the park and pet parade.

Cauliflower and broccoli florets, raw, are improved by being dipped in something like plain yogurt or sour cream seasoned with curry powder (about a teaspoon per 6-ounce carton). Let the dip mellow for an hour or so in the fridge before using. (Cherry tomatoes go well with curry dip, too. I might try it with carrots.)

Bill @ 442

I suppose it was eventually inevitable.

But I admit everything snuck up on me this year...

Astronomical Fidget Ring on BoingBoing - Gorgeous object with a rotating band made of meteorite iron and gemstones representing 9 planets. (The price is also astronomical, but it's nice to look at. BB article points to more details over at The Mary Sue.)

My best to Paula: infections and the aftereffects are nasty stuff. Nothing like a visit with a surgeon and being told "Well, Bruce, I guarantee that I got it all cut out but with the drugs you're on I have no idea when it will heal. I can promise you that I'll supply you with a supply of Schedule 3 narcotics to take before you visit the bathroom until you can use the toilet without screaming."

That reminds me--have I mentioned how MUCH the last two years have SUCKED? I'm been 60% ectoplasm so many times that I keep expecting Helen Duncan to show up.

On another topic: has anyone here read both Performing Flea by P.G. Wodehouse and the revision Author! Author! by P.G. Wodehouse? If you have, which one is the one to get?

The Evening's Work:

Study of Slow Cooker and Rocket

The stew smells odd. I don't have a fine touch when it comes to spices, and wine was the cheapest I could find that didn't have a screw top. (And I had to use a corkscrew on a Swiss Army Knife . . . I don't drink, so . . .) Hopefully it will taste OK.

The rocket is a vintage Aerobee.

Huh. I had to type my personal info in the little boxes. Second time in two days that's happened.

Anyway. Have we heard anything recently from Syd?

Mr. Snarly has been struggling with an upper-respiratory infection. The other two both had it and have thrown it off, but he's the smallest and least-thriving of the three, so today we took him to the vet. $200 later he's had antibiotics and eye-drops and de-worming, and been tested and found negative for FIV. And boy howdy, did he live up to his name! They had to use heavy gloves to hold him, and he screamed like someone was trying to neuter him without anesthetic.

We're hoping that maybe part of the reason he's antisocial is that he just hasn't been feeling good, and if we get this knocked down he'll be friendlier. But if not, I'm afraid he's going to end up being neutered and released back into the feral colony.

The other two are now perfectly friendly and adoptable, and they romp. They're kittens. It's what they do.

Bill Stewart @445
Oh, wow. Want, although not for $4k.

@442
We're likely to be in the same area, there is a chance of light clouds, but those could make viewing better.

All - via boingboing, this site illustrates what the eclipse tomorrow will look like for various states. If you're in TX (and NM to some extent), you can get a sunset annular eclipse, which means a ring of fire sets on the horizon (That's the only safe direct-view of a non-total eclipse). If you're in driving distance of Lubbock or nearby, please consider driving to a stunning sunset.
http://shadowandsubstance.com/

Re Avram's Phosphene on the combined Latin/Cyrillic font... is there anyone else apart from me who gets very very annoyed at the use of mock-Cyrillic on book covers, with Я used as a 'Russianish' substitute for R, etc.? Or am I just being an asshole when I get haughty and pedantic about this? The text used for the title of Jed Mercurio's 'Ascent' here actually transliterates as DSCEIT, or possibly even DSSEIT. Is it just me? Tell me whether it's just me. Grr.

(I know there are rules to the design of covers and that these things aren't just thrown together randomly but... hey, the designers are tripping my flinch reaction here.)

A comment of mine has been Gnomed, either because I used a Cyrillic character in it, or because I used a slightly naughty word in reference to myself, or possibly for both reasons, or neither.

[URL format for the book link, I'm afraid. — Auricula Meretricula, acting duty Gnome over Kabouterdag weekend.]

On the eclipse -
this map shows the northern and southern boundaries of the Annular (ring) part of this eclipse. Being right inside the edge of the boundaries means you could get nifty visuals like Bailey's beads, although just for seconds.

Oh, rats, once again I get about 85% totality for a solar eclipse. I haven't been in the path of a totality in more than 50 years (although that time I had a small reflecting telescope with a smoked glass filter, so I got a pretty good view).

Leather purchased! For those who don't recall, this is to repair the bag I made last year, which has worn through in several places. My original plan was to hit a thrift store for an ugly jacket, but that involves shopping, whereas going up to the elk ranch folks at the farmer's market just means digging through a pile of scraps and trying to match the color. Near-perfect match achieved, three dollars paid, and hopefully I won't bungle this too badly. I do wish there were more tips on sewing leather to fabric. Like what kind of stitch is strongest, handsewingwise. I'd use my machine, but it's not in tune right now.

Steve with a book, it's not just you. And I can't even read Russian; I can only decode Cyrillic because of its similarity to the Greek alphabet. OTOH, my pedantic-o-meter is usually set on about 6.5. (4 is knowing what a dangling participle is, and caring. 8 is getting pissed off when people mix Latin and Greek in genus and/or species names.)

Linkmeister @449, I've been wondering about Syd too.

Steve with a book @452: Definitely not just you. I'm sure it would be even worse for me if I'd ever actually studied a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet.

Bruce@455
August. 2017 has a 100% total eclipse (tomorrow is 95% partial). Crosses the whole US. Just remember to oppose any Worldcon bids outside of North America that year to avoid a schedule clash. It is the most SFnal thing on Earth.

Tangential to the audio/video taping of cops discussion: something I've wondered about for a while is why court reporters still have jobs in the days of cheap video cameras which can record everything which occurs in a courtroom.

Lee @ 450: The other two are now perfectly friendly and adoptable, and they romp. They're kittens. It's what they do.

I like the way kittens are not - quite - subject to gravity.

Thank you, mod-gnome, for so quickly releasing my comment and introducing me to the word Kabouter.

Lila@457, David Goldfarb@459: thinking about it a bit more, I suspect that my reaction to this has something to do with the lack of respect non-Latin scripts get, even from those who should know better. I only dabble in languages and get a lot out of reading stuff by actual academic linguists. They will stoutly, and quite rightly, defend languages against accusations of lack of expressive power or ugliness or grammatical overcomplication, but when it comes to the script they're written in, they can be surprisingly dismissive. It surprises me that top-class experts in Chinese can seem to be a bit embarrassed about the characters, and (apparently) sort of wish that they'd go away. If the survival of a language for thousands of years is something to celebrate, the same should go for the writing system. These things matter to people.

Steve with a book @ 452

I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, but I am continually annoyed by people who use a Greek-alphabet majuscule sigma as an "E"; it's an "S", you ignorami.

Steve with a book @452: Since taking a 'geography of the former Soviet Union' class (which involved touching upon Cyrillic pronunciation briefly), my husband has unilaterally changed how our family pronounces "Toys R Us" -- it's now Toys Ya Us. If that's how they're going to spell it, we might as well pronounce it that way. :->

nerdycellist: When I was a kid, I wondered why popular culture said that kids hated vegetables, because vegetables were Awesome. When I grew up and moved out of California, I discovered what many kids were exposed to. Oh.

On that note, the hierarchy of vegetables goes like this: Fresh is better than frozen (by an almost invisible margin if you're going to cook them), which is much better than canned. One of the things our kids love is peas and corn, dumped into a bowl and nuked to thaw. And around here, they are not in season at the same time*, so it's a frozen-only dish.

*I have a friend up in Portland who has posted a picture of her pea plants. In Sacramento, those got pulled up at the end of April, and lettuces are a winter crop only. So I didn't know that most people considered lettuce an essential part of salad until I was an adult, because salad came from the garden, not from the store, and lettuce just didn't happen.

SamChevre @464: Said with all love ... I'm pretty sure ignoramus is fourth declension, so the plural is ignoramus, often spelt with a bar over the U and pronounced 'ig-no-rah-MOOOSE' with emphasis.

Having hunted around in my favorite unicode resource for the u-with-bar-over character and not found it, I am reminded of the various Bohemian tombstones I've been transcribing, and how Czech apparently has a whole different relationship with diacritical-enhanced letters than any other language I've previously tried to decode!

Kip @419, I would be exceedingly wary of recommending magnesium for any non-human animal with bladder stones based on experience with humans -- my cat had an extremely frightening bout of urinary blockage due to struvite crysals earlier this year and is now on a veterinarian-prescribed low-magnesium diet as a result. Cats aren't rabbits, either, but this experience so wildly divergent with your human one is enough for me to say that cross-species medical advice probably isn't a great idea.

466
We grew bush beans, tomatoes, and bush zucchini in the summer, and had a well-shaded spot where the lettuce would grow into April or May (we grew leaf lettuce, which can be used when it's very small, so it can be grown for that even longer). Also fruit - I've been spoiled for peaches and apricots since I was a kid. Peas and corn - frozen is good enough, if you don't have the space or the weather for them.

Bruce Cohen @465, last time there was a total eclipse (that I can recall being there for), I was working in the physics department at University of Houston, where there was an observatory on the top floor, mostly unused because of air quality. I wanted to see how big an image the large scope could put onto a piece of cardboard, and several of us went up with some professors to give it a shot. Results were good, though not stunning. It was certainly worth doing.

lorax @468, I mentioned my experience (and included at least two caveats) with the expectation that if the suggestion was taken at all, it would be to discuss it with the vet. It still does not seem to me that I was pushing for any hasty action.

Jo won!

Wonderful all around.

Elliott Mason @467: Actually "ignoramus" is not a Latin noun at all, of any declension. It's the first person plural (present active indicative) of the verb "ignoro". The usage as a noun dates from the seventeenth century. I see nothing particularly wrong with pluralizing it according to the second-declension rule, although the English "ignoramuses" might be a little better.

[Delayed comment posting, I typed the comments up two days ago, and am finally pasting them in now....]

#296 Serge

There are really good reasons why Damnation Alley the film get little viewing. Mentioning the film caused Roger Zelazny to shudder....

#338 Dr Paisley

If the hospital stay is boring
Things may be going well.
Stuck for some days in the while away
Being watched for what who can tell,
The place is full of doctors
And nurses leaving pills,
And hospital bed as a place of dread
Doesn't have a lot of frills.
Here's hoping that that boring,
Is the boring of good kind
And the stay soon ends and the body mends
And that all will end up fine.

Elliot Mason @ 467:

Is this: ū the character you're looking for? It's listed as "Latin Small Letter U with Macron", and the code is U+016B HTML Entity &#363; as shown here.

Elliott Mason @465, Christine has long had a habit of pronouncing the middle of "Toys Я Us" as "ya".

My last post is being held by the gnomes, possibly because I used an uncommon Unicode character and a literalized string that normally denotes an HTML Entity. If you like, I could post my rant about the tribulations of quotation and literalizing in text manipulation and representation, with special venom for PL/SQL. Thank you for your support.

[It was held because the format of the URL you used. Not that that rant is unwelcome or uninteresting, but in this context, it does not address the problem at hand. — Auricula Meritricula, duty gnome pro tem]

Kip W @470,
May I ask if you're sure it was a total eclipse you saw -- big black hole in the sky where the sun should be, stars visible in an opal-purple sky, etc? I don't recall Houston being in the path of totality for any recent eclipses, and the description sounds partial not total.

That said, partial eclipses are nifty, and annular doubly so. Total, though, like 2017 will bring - that's just pure numinous beauty.

Paula Lieberman @ 473... Yes. Zelazny had seen one version of the script that he thought was quite good and faithful to the original, but wasn't aware of the 'improved' script that what was later used until he saw the final results. It's my understanding that his reaction involved more than shuddering. Speaking of Hollywood... It's been quite neat to follow Melinda Snodgrass's comments about her "Wild Cards" movie, and a reminder that it's not always a process that turns into a horror story.

@Linkmeister no. 461: IME it's so disturbing wrinkles in the tidy progression of the court mechanism can be ironed nice and flat.

Reality: I have jury duty. Hubby is out of town. That's OK because I can grab a relative or at last resort pop the kids into day care. I have to call the court after 3:30 p.m. every day to see if I have to go in the next day. The place closes at 4:30. That's OK because there's a number to call if something comes up.

So at 4:20 p.m. the day before I have jury duty, one of my kids suddenly spikes a fever and projectile vomits all over her legally mandated car seat and a good portion of the car.

Obviously my first order of business is to get my screaming puking child out of the car, away from my other two children's legally mandated car seats and the back of my neck. Luckily we are already parked. I get her calmed down enough so that she won't drown out any phone calls, then call the court. Busy, busy, busy . . . closed. Okay, I call the trouble number.

There is no answering machine at the trouble number. Click.

Check my ethics here: Handing my violently ill child over to a day care full of other people's children is not okay, yes? And handing her over to a relative who has her own very important things she cannot be too sick to miss is also not okay, check?

The court opens at 8 a.m. so I camp out on the main line starting at 7:45, get somebody at 8:05, she does not identify herself, I explain that I have a severely contagiously ill child, she tells me to wait for a summons. Seriously? Yes, seriously, she repeats this, wait for the summons.

So I do.

At the hearing, I am told that the clerk failing to identify herself was my fault, that since I was not willing to expose family members or day care workers or young children to my vomiting feverish child I should have brought her to the cout with me on the day I was supposed to serve (in a building with recirculated air and several hundred people, some of whom were old and frail), that my not knowing that the clerk was full of baloney was my fault, and that there being no answering machine at the number I was supposed to call after hours was not the court's problem. (That last part was not verbatim; he just blew through his mustache.)

Adjusted reality, per the paper the court reporter typed up for me to sign: I had made the whole thing up but the court reporter was too polite to say so in those exact words. The judge said that he was willing to "let it slide" this time.

I signed it and went home. Problem solved.

AFAIK the after-hours you-must-call-this phone still has no answering machine.

For those of you who didn't know, the electronic packet containing the final Hugo nominated tales is now available.
The committee has been having troubles with sending the emal notifications.
Use the PIN you were provided in earlier communications.

Oh, forgot: In the adjusted reality, my "excuse" was that "I had not arranged for child care."

The part about my child being hot to the touch, vomiting profusely, and contagious was not in the two lines on the paper.

Yeah.

#481 Jenny

That's when it's time to contact you state representative and if there still be such a thing your local muckracking TV new director.... And your the Board of Health, too, for that matter, they ought not to want a projectile vomiting infectious child in the court building!

Jenny @481: That's because in the kyriarchy's view, parenthood is an inconvenience that can always be handled by Other People (one's wife, for example -- wait, you don't have one? And you call yourself a citizen!).

There are a lot of situations where perfectly ordinary decent-parent behavior can get one fired or otherwise penalized over "putting your kids before (insert here thing that is obviously FAR more important".

Be it noted that Steve with a book @ 463's link includes a truly excellent Katalog of kabouter.

Auricula Meretricula: is kabouterdag celebrated in different places on different days? Or are you on duty especially early?

And are your political sympatthies in line with the kabouterbeweging?

Jenny Islander @ 479, 481: Aargh.

Linkmeister @ 461: Presumably, its quite important that court reports should be searchable.

OT: Does anyone know why the SFWA's website would be inaccessible from Turkey?

Jenny, #481: Unfortunately, what you're up against here is that the judge hears that kind of story a dozen times a week from people who are making it up, and he can't read your mind. In the absence of checkable documentation (the name of the person you spoke to, a doctor's note about your child's illness), this is what he's going to assume. No, that's not how it should work, but in the presence of a cultural meme that says "anything goes to get out of jury duty" it's what we're all stuck with. "I'll let it slide this time" is code for "I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because you don't have a previous record of pulling shit to get out of jury duty."

The bit about the after-hours trouble number not working, however, is something which should be pursued -- if not by you, then by an ombudsman or media outlet. If they're giving out that number for the purpose of reporting last-minute issues, that IS their problem to fix.

Diatryma @ 456 ...
I do wish there were more tips on sewing leather to fabric. Like what kind of stitch is strongest, handsewingwise. I'd use my machine, but it's not in tune right now.

Backstitch :)

It is always fascinating to see how badly Safari iPad handles pictures on Making Light. John Kessel must be very uncomfortable with that More What growing out of his chest...

With regards to vegetables, I've always loved them. Except for peas and lima beans. My poor paternal grandmother, not seeing my brother and I grow up, due to divorce and related situations, served peas for dinner. My brother and I both looked at them with trepidation. How to be polite while eating something that makes one throw up? We erred on the side of saying "I don't like this." My grandmother asked, "what do you like?" Carrots, corn, squash, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower.... Poor lady had never run across kids who liked *real* vegetables.

Diatryma @456--Saddle-stitching is good for leather--it does take two needles, but the stitches lock together and make a good, durable join. I think it would work for a leather-to-fabric assembly as well, although you might want to look into a lighter thread--upholstery weight, perhaps--than is used in leather-to-leather work.

Lin, have you ever eaten new peas right out of the pod, uncooked? Vegetable heaven.

praisegod barebones @ #484, you know, somehow I hadn't thought of that material as a primary source document, but of course it would be.

Ah well, I've only been in court once or twice in my life (once for a week or so of jury duty -- Jenny Islander, your story is horrendous. I agree that the non-message-taking phone number is a problem that the judiciary system needs to fix pronto).

Melissa, I eat snow peas with enthusiasm, and in recent years, I've eaten fresh, just harvested peas and found them quite tasty. I don't know what it is about canned peas (tolerable in stews or casseroles) or frozen peas (vile!), but I just don't like them.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @477:
It would have been around 1983-4, if that's any help. Perhaps it wasn't total, but it was major. I don't recall stars, but then I wasn't outside.

This is a test post from my new iPad 2.

Lin--

I find frozen peas a reasonable substitute for fresh. Canned peas are an entirely different thing. (I liked canned peas when I was a child, and had never had fresh; I don't like them now, but I don't think it's just that I've had the real thing. Tastes change.)

I wish to register a complaint.

The movie slated in Jim's diffraction, Battleship, is indeed very, very bad.

However, it is not, as stated repeatedly in the linked review, worse than the Transformers movies. In fact, it is very like a Transformers movie with all the jive-talking, racist, Megane Fox's leg humping sexist robots removed, which is a slight improvement.

After the hero's character was introduced in the first 20 minutes, I was hoping the actual aliens from Alien would show up and kill everyone.

But that's a mild reaction compared to Transformers Part Deux, where I hoped time travelling aliens would show up and kill Michael Bay at birth, leaving me to watch Brad Bird's Transformers movie.

I saw Battleship.

Don't judge me.

"How bad can it suck?" I asked myself. I mean, a movie shot on-board USS Missouri. If nothing else I can just look at the pretty, pretty ship.

"How bad can it suck?" was a question that the movie-makers wasted no time in trying to answer. We start off with a meet-cute that was cut from Failure to Launch for being too unbelievable, one that left the lingering question, "How does someone with a felony conviction go on to become a Naval officer? How'd he get the security clearance to be a TAO?"

Even by the standards of the Transformers films this is a bad movie. I could feel my IQ lowering with every minute I spent in the theater.

If you find that you have to see this, I'd recommend taking along earplugs. The dialog is worse than anything you could imagine, so just imagining what they're saying would be an improvement. The protagonist is an arrogant prick; I can't believe that none of the characters slapped his face off because I sure wanted to.

For all the time that's given to Liam Neeson in the trailers, he essentially has a walk-on. For all that the film is called Battleship, most of it (the parts that don't look like they're out-takes from a particularly insipid romantic comedy) are set on a destroyer. A destroyer that they badly mishandle.

If you look at that destroyer, you'll see that most of the time it's showing the ball-diamond-ball dayshapes, which mean "I am constrained in my ability to maneuver" (probably because they have a camera barge alongside). That mostly sums this thing up: Even the ships are unable to act. For all that we see of the crews of these ships, they each seem to have about three people on board. Then they shuttle those three people from one ship to another.

In order to get into this film your disbelief doesn't need to be suspended. It needs to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Cliches that were rejected by 2012 for being too cheesy are brought out front and center here; witness the alien spacecraft constructed of elements that aren't on the Periodic Table. And the space aliens! Although they are explicitly supposed to come from a planet that's nearly identical to earth (and have no trouble breathing our air, etc.) they are unable to handle the brightness of our sun and so must wear dark glasses! Take off those glasses and they're nearly helpless. (No, I am not making this up.)

When finally, finally, they get underway on Missouri (in the last twenty minutes of this film), they completely misuse her. Our heros are standing on the most awesome stand-off weapons system in the world ... so they close to within a thousand yards of their opponent before doing anything.

A battleship has a crew of about five thousand people, and they all have jobs. Nevertheless our guys manage to sail her and fight her with a scant dozen people (presumably there are no other ships, and no personnel, in port that weekend). For reasons that escape me, a ship that's explicitly a static display vessel has live warshot ammo on board. Of special note is the scene where our band of heroes struggle to carry a sixteen-inch shell on their shoulders the length of the ship, all while the rail for the chain hoist designed to lift and move those shells is clearly visible in frame.

Given that this is a movie based on one word, "Battleship" (the name of a Hasbro game), the film makers could have done anything. Gone in any direction. Gotten creative. But noooooo.....

Stay away. Far away. Not even popcorn will save this movie.

With regard to Battleship, it's only fair to supporting actors Rihana and Gregory D. Gadson to observe that both of them gave their work in the film far more than the script deserved.

(I was, possibly, a tiny bit more entertained by the movie than Macdonald was, perhaps because I went into it with, if possible, even less in the way of expectations.)

498
I will make sure I don't see it.
Meanwhile, today they were supposed to start moving Iowa from Richmond to San Pedro, where she'll become a museum. (You can see her in Richmond in some of the Google aerials. In some others, she's still in the mothball fleet in Suisun Bay, with a towboat pushing her sideways. Those gun turrets are awesome!)

Debra Doyle @499: My favorite reviewer noted that Rihanna showed signs of being able to believably act a character ... if only they'd given her one. Perhaps she'll get another chance in a different movie.

On Rihanna's performance, I will just say well done.

Her character did not have to take off her clothes for no good reason (so, not at all). She was not held hostage because she's a girl and the important characters are not. Nobody referred to her race or sex before or after large aliens kicked the shit out of her.

(Movie still really, really sucks but...)

Kudos.

Jim, #498: I had been under the impression that the movie was intended to be a live-action version of the board game. From your description, it sounds as though that would have been a better movie!

Jim Macdopnald @ 498... must wear dark glasses! Take off those glasses and...

...Carrie Fisher lowers her gun and goes "Oh Jake..."?

Lee @503: By all reports, this screenplay was making the rounds for a while before the Hasbro title tie-in got attached to it -- which got it greenlit almost instantly, because the studios are all about making things with instant title-recognition lately, even if their actual connection to the original property is paper thin.

Sounds as if they should have made Hungry, Hungry Hippos instead. It could hardly have been worse.

"Hungry Hungry Hippos: You Are the Marble"

Yep, that sounds like a much better movie. Hippos, but with extendable necks, so that they can snap out and grab people from ambush thirty feet away. Then they get into the New York City sewers, and from there into the ground floors of buildings. A scene with Wall Street full of suits fleeing'n'screaming while varicolored hippo heads snap out of the bank entrances, picking them off one by one... in 3-D, of course... what's not to love?

You're friendly astronomical correspondent took some images of the eclipse from the Houston area.

Red sky at sunset:

Eclipse at sunset

More pics:

Eclipse pics

508
I watched for some time with a pinhole viewer. Here in Los Angeles, we got a much thinner crescent (something like 75% of total).

And ... I have now seen American Warships (original title American Battleship) on Syfy.

And I know why Universal is suing: Despite being a four-weeks-script-to-screen cheapie from the folks who brought us Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus it's a better movie.

Here's my eclipse set from halfway up the state of California, so call it about 90% totality. The best view, actually, was the pinhole crescents in the thousands from the trees, projected on the house.

Afterwards, I saw a large gathering of the neighbors out in front. "Watching the eclipse?" Well, that's where they started... but then they started watching the nesting Swainson's hawks. CUTENESS!

Re: eclipse tourism ... the next big one I'm anywhere near, 21 Aug 2017, happens to fall on the day before my husband's 43rd birthday. Do I smell a family vacation?!? :->

Two spots nearish Chicago, under the middle of the eclipse track, that would justify a long weekend of OSSIM ending with eclipse: Mammoth Cave in KY and Cahokia Mounds in IL just outside St. Louis.

What other visitable spots near the track can you guys spot?

(there are several things that claim to be zoomable Google Maps things, but none of them zoom in much; this site seems to have some good closeup static maps of various parts of the track)

Robin Gibb, of the Bee Gees, has died.

I was in the wrong area for the eclipse this time around, but I really highly recommend getting to see one. I drove about 600 miles and it was seriously worth it the one time I did -- and I got to see a phenomenon that made huge sense but I hadn't seen anyone talk about.

We were in a river valley. As the terminator went along the valley, a very thin wall of fog was visible right at it, moving along with it -- not enough to obscure anything, just enough to be visible. Lovely phenomenon. And totality looks like nothing else (the movie Dragonslayer actually got the feeling of eclipse light right, if you can see it in a theater).