I'm very fond of Bernini's sculpture of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila.

It appeals to me that such a thing can be both sexually charged and devoutly religious.

Love the idea of God pushing her buttons. She insisted the holiest nun was probably the least conspicuous one, the one just doing her duty, and the whoops! Upsydaisy, she's levitating. Supposed to have appointed nuns to kneel on her robes, but no good -- up she'd go. God as Love is one thing, but gotta love God as Tease.

The reason St. Teresa is patron of bodily ills, sick people, and general sickness is that she suffered a debilitating disease when she was twenty from which she never fully recovered.

In my peripherally Carmelite college days, I came into possession of an undocumented relic of Saint Teresa of Avila. It traveled with me for years, resting in dark boxes in several countries, until I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of its true owner.

Probably the single weirdest gift I've ever given.

Oh, dear! Gnomes have been tweeting repurposed songs about impending doom for those who do not repent. ‏@IdumeaCowper

Oh, dear. Teresa's name-saint, you say? *thinks back, with some guilt, about various rude things he might have said about the descriptions of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and that sculpture in particular, in Miss Teresa's presence*

The xkcd from Monday is still . . . evolving:

http://xkcd.com/1190/

It has been changing every hour or so. I was expecting to come in this morning and find that the waters had risen and wiped out the sand castle. Instead, it has has gotten bigger.

I hope someone saved each frame as it appeared.

Bernini was a deeply religious Catholic (active in the Counter Reformation). There isn't any joke about that sculpture that hasn't been made by equally faithful Catholics. Nor was St. Teresa herself, when describing her mystical marriage to Christ, particularly unaware of all the implications.

The romances St. Teresa and her mother were reading on the sly were probably things like Amadis of Gaul and its host of unauthorized sequels, which in modern terms would be more like being secret fans of The Lord of the Rings and its assorted heirs and successors.

As far as the Bernini statue goes, if you're trying to depict a transcendental state in three material dimensions, there are only so many analogues available to draw on, and that one is obvious.

Another famous St. T line: "There's a time for prayer, and a time for roast partridge!"

@6

Explain XKCD has been saving them as an animated gif; they're not all the way up to date yet, but I'm assuming they will keep up.

Jacque (OT 181, #911): When I was in elementary school (age about 9, at a guess), my class was taken to see a play at the local children's theatre. I had heard the title as Donkey Hoatey, so I was surprised to see the permission slip my mother signed was for something called Don Quicks-oat. My mother patiently explained.

For some reason, St Teresa has always been one of the saints I bounce off of. This inspires me to give reading her works another try. (I've long said that if I chose a Saint's name, it would be Thomas--for both the doubter and the scholar.)

Random HLN:

Area man is very amused by his 6-year-old.
"Papa, read me this story."

"It's not a hard book--I got it because you can read it to yourself."

"But it has white words on dark paper and that makes it really hard to read."

Ex ore infantium.

Don Quicks-Oat is that guy on the Quaker box, right?

For a link, I guess?

I'm passing the time listening to 168 Cowper, so, whenever you get around to me.

I did not know she is a patron saint of the sick. Good to know. She was an extraordinary person: a mystic, yes, and a theologian, but also a hard-headed and practical leader. Her letters, for those who are interested, are available (in translation) online.

X @12: ::falls over laughing:: Why, yes, now that you mention it....

Stefan Jones@6:That is an amazing xkcd. It appears that various places are keeping track. Here is a link to a site that is keeping an animated gif of the whole series of frames to date (sped up):
http://primis.org/time/output.gif

For the benefit of those of us who are too lazy to do the copy-paste: http://primis.org/time/output.gif

Steve Halter (16): Whoa! Thanks for linking to that.

...probably for excessive enthusiasm. Hi, gnomes! Want some fudge ripple ice cream?

Entre los pucheros anda el Senor. (God walks among the pots and pans).

- St. Teresa of Avila, "Book of Foundations."

Also I need to learn, someday, how to do accent marks and ~ and such online.

Who knows the journeys taken by the just
over the saddened earth to find true light
and not be blinded by the sudden sight
of the fair city rising from the dust
when once is passed the desert of distrust
and all have gone through the last sleepless night
cold, lacking comfort, knowing that the right
answer was coming? That is human trust.
Each is ambassador to the new realm
where equal rulers crudely give reply
to those who cannot truly understand
the forces that will subtly overwhelm
the ragged armies of the ancient lie
and so bring justice to the angry land.

This site also has that XKCD, with better controls: you can speed up or slow down the animation, or step through it a frame at a time.

(I wonder how long it's going to go, ultimately?)

David @22: I need to learn, someday, how to do accent marks and ~ and such online.

Your Google phrase is:

html special character codes

Wow! Until I saw the animation posted by David I did not realize that "Time" was so fine-grained. I only glanced at it every hour or so, and assumed it was maybe a couple of dozen stills, updated every hour.

David Goldfarb (24): But turn your speakers off, unless you like loud background noise. (I never did get the image, just the sound of waves crashing.)

David 22: That one would be ñ. Here's a site that may help.

@27

Odd. I don't get any sound at all, and my speakers are working fine.

David, #22: &_ntilde_; without the underscores gives you ñ. Other accent marks are made similarly, if you know what they're called, and you can check your guesses in Preview. And I see a couple of other folks have given you better resources than guessing.

Cheryl (29): Hmmmm. Looks like it needs javascript to function properly. With NoScript blocking that page, I got the sound of crashing waves and no image. Once I allowed scripts on the page, the sound stopped and the image appeared.

Fun fact: she was the patroness of my grade school (and its parish). We were a tiny school, less than 15 kids in a grade most of my childhood; there was a much bigger St. Theresa's ("of the Little Flower") on the northwest side that everyone always thought we went to if we just said St. Teresa, so we all learned to answer "St. Teresa DE AVILA" and then roll our eyes when they said, "Where?"

When I later looked up their biographies (for a project), I became fascinated, and very glad my school was named for her; I likely wouldn't have happened across her till late high school at soonest, otherwise, and having her example and life at hand was inspirational.

David @22: if you're on a Mac, in the upper right hand corner to the left of the date there's a thing that looks like a calendar with a holiday marked. It's actually a thing for keyboard and character settings. If you click it, it will give you any number of characters with accent marks to add with a click.

I find this easier to manage than remembering HTML codes. My only sorrow is that it doesn't work in Google Docs.

Howdy folks, delurking briefly because I'm looking for a story.

It was an Asterix and Obelix fan fiction set in the modern day (part of the story was set in either the White House or the Pentagon). It also made a point of not referring to either character by name (so you would be part way into the story before you realized that the main character was, in fact, Asterix). This had the unfortunate side-effect of making the story impossible to find with Google. Hence I have returned to where I think I first saw a link to it, an open thread here. If the person who posted the original link could do so again, I would very much appreciate it. Thank you.

Perhaps I accidentally wrote a word of power? Would the gnomes like a piece of fruit?

Per Rikibeth #33: if your Mac, like mine, doesn't show that icon, you can get to the special characters by clicking "help" in the Safari toolbar and typing "special characters" in the search box.

For those that are curious, this is Mr. Hoatey. (The little one. With fur.)

Stephen Maturin's godfather's great-great grandmother lived in Avila, and knew St. Teresa personally.

Quixote #34: Although I wasn't the person who posted it the first time, I think it must be this story: http://mightygodking.com/2011/05/19/menhir-dreams/.

SamChevre @ 13: Your line "But it has white words on dark paper and that makes it really hard to read." makes this vision scientist giggle. In fact, it's easier to read white on black than black on white text - and, if you build an experiment with white stimuli on a black background, you can get fun retinal afterimages too.

Ok, I suppose that last bit is only applicable to me. It is likely a major confound in my first-year project; the one that I did in rather than slog through and paperize.

It depends on the text size. And perhaps on the viewer. I was snarling about some blogger who did tiny white-on-black type and recalled how to view it bigger and that helped a lot, but I can't help wondering if light gray on black would've been easier for me. A relative's monitor displays this site in such a way that the blue type has nasty little white things in the middle that really bug me, but I don't have that problem at home.

40
Benjamin, it could be worse. I've seen stuff that was yellow text on a royal-blue background, which I find hard to read even in large text sizes. (Yellow on black is not really an improvement.)

If you like Cleolinda's "Movies in 15 Minutes", you may enjoy this summary of yesterday's SCOTUS oral arguments, done in a similar style. (Slightly NSFW due to language.)

I had a French teacher who handed out excerpts from Claire Bretecher's "La Vie Passsionnee de Therese d'Avila", a bande dessinee which was published as a book in 1980. Here's the only link I could find to the images (scroll down to 'Lire un extrait'); apologies to the gnomes if this clogs up the mechanism.
http://www.babelio.com/livres/Bretecher-La-vie-passionnee-de-Therese-dAvila/17533

The best version of unreadable text I've ever seen was a research poster - at a vision conference, no less - with isoluminant colors in the poster title. I don't think someone managed isoluminant red/green; my memory is saying purple and grey. Absolutely unreadable by *anyone* at the conference, and a poster that lives in infamy, because if anyone out there shouldn't make that mistake, a bunch of professional vision nerds shouldn't.

I've seen a site done with bright red letters on a bright blue background.

Because, you know, it's dramatic.

Fun Facts about Teresa of Avila:

- Her father was a converted Jew. Those who wrote Teresa's first biographies strenuously buried this fact and asserted that Teresa came of "the purest hidalgo blood." Her Avila contemporaries thought this coverup was hilarious. Victoria Lincoln, the modern biographer I learned all this from, dryly describes the Avila atmosphere of the time as "an ugly hotbed of religious toleration." Also St. John of the Cross's mother may have been Black.

- Teresa actually died on the very night in 1582 that Spain switched over from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, "losing" eleven days in the process. The night she died started out as October 4th, but when she died after midnight it was October 15th.

But if you're the patron saint of the sick and also of their illness, isn't that a conflict of interest?

In a departure from the usual custom, Pope Francis today washed the feet of 12 prisoners, including Muslims and 2 women, for Holy Thursday.

Usually the Pope washes 12 priests' feet. The standard rubrics for the Holy Thursday foot-washing call for "12 men" (viri), so women have been excluded from the ritual in many dioceses and parishes, including my current one. Now those of us who'd like to see this change in our parishes have a high-level precedent we can point to.

Xopher, just thinking about that one makes my head hurt (starting with eyes).
(My favorite scheme is very dark blue letters on white.)

Lila #36: Or you can open Safari's Edit menu, which is where "special characters" lives on my Mac. But maybe you need a very old version (I'm running Safari 4.1.3, and my Mac is running Tiger).

The link to Open Thread 181 at the top of this page has several repeated elements and does not work.

Fixed.

Thank you very kindly.

H.E.Wolf @ 44... I had a French teacher who handed out excerpts from Claire Bretecher's "La Vie Passsionnee de Therese d'Avila"

Claire Bretecher? That takes me back a few decades. Speaking of French artists... Did your teacher ever show you F'murr's adventures of Joan of Ark after the pyre, from which she was rescued by an alien who took her to the heavens in his spaceship shaped like Notre Dame de Paris?

Others with an interest in historical clothing might find this of interest; I find these stays perplexing. They're clearly the possession of someone with means, given the embroidery. They're minimally corded or boned, so possibly for morning wear, or made for someone slim who needed little support. However, the busk pocket suggests not-morning wear. It's the left side only lacing that's got me.

From what I understand of breastfeeding (having no personal experience), one must at least alternate if not switch during feeding. Left only makes some sense for someone who is doing some sort of right-handed labor while feeding, but 1830s is a bit late for professional, home spinning and the quality of the garment suggests a woman with access to funds.

Perhaps mastectomy?

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s always someone who hasn’t seen it — if you often find web pages that you have trouble reading, because of bad design choices by the page author, give Readable a try. It’s a bookmarklet (a bit of JavaScript you install in your browser’s bookmarks menu) that reformats the page.

It's hard to tell without a chance to actually feel the flexibility of the corset's boning, but it looks to me like a nursing mother could probably get access to either nipple once the busk was removed and the lacing was undone. Lacing tied with a bow on the left side could be easily undone in a hurry one-handed by a right-handed person, and done back up again two-handed.

Lacing on both sides would be the very devil to get done up evenly.

It's also possible that the corset could have been meant for wear on occasions formal or public enough to require a boned corset, but brief enough that only having one-sided nipple access wasn't going to be a problem.

More knowledge of 19th-century nursing practice and etiquette would probably help.

(I'm not a costume historian. On the other hand, I do have personal experience with breastfeeding.)

Other memories of the St. Teresa statue begin to surface. In the late 70's, my art history teacher seemed to interpret it as something sexual, and neither the catatonic, open-mouthed look on her face nor the written description, which sounded more like some medical emergency, matched that as far as I was concerned. It wasn't just that I was already tired of people supposedly older and wiser than me being more preoccupied with sex than I was; it didn't logically make sense and that was even worse. Then the text in my writing class interpreted a violent scene it presented as sexual, and I decided higher education wasn't for me. I had been planning to get up in class and challenge that commentary but I was sick that day. (If I hadn't had math problems, I would have just stuck with science.)
Later I read somewhere that the ivory tower goes through fads like other places do, and I don't think I'd've been any happier there in later years when it seemed everything was interpreted thru the lens of this or that power struggle, and books were full of jargon/drivel I was hard put to make sense of and I gather I am not the only one.
Yes, I had some problems then [being asexual was *not* one of them], but so did those who were supposed to be helping me learn.
And yes, later I saw once again pictures of sculptures and paintings from that era and [the stench of that early nonsense having mostly blown away] for the first time realized that the skill involved was incredible, and wonder if it will ever reappear.

Having breastfed four children: I learned early on that it was easier for me to nurse one side on one feeding and the other side for the next feeding some hours later worked well for me.

Actually though I think that lacing would give you access to both sides. I've had nursing dresses that functioned similarly. Whatever was worn over it would have needed a center opening (think of something that buttons or laces down the center front). Basically one would twist the garment to bring the center front opening over the breast. Lacing on one side would make the corset more stable either open or closed and be easier to do and undo. It is remarkably tricky to fasten something using primarily your left hand especially when juggling a baby!

I agree with Kyndra -- as that garment doesn't appear heavily boned, I suspect it could be turned back enough to allow access to both breasts.

And I second the nursing alternate sides at alternate feedings. Frequently, nursing advice will tell mothers to put a safety pin on their bra strap, and switch it after each feeding, so they can remember which side's turn it is.

Benjamin, #45: I had to look up "isoluminant" and then go find some images, but now I get the joke. And that's my new thing learned for the day, so thank you.

CZEdwards, #56: The thing I notice is that there's no way to get it on short of unlacing it almost completely and pulling it over the head. Modern corsetry has sturdy hooks up the front, so that once you get the laces in you don't have to take them out again. Also, many of the people who make corsets use 2 laces, one starting from the top and one from the bottom and meeting in the middle, so that neither one has to be loosened too far. People who are more adept than I with their hands behind their backs can put these corsets on without assistance.

Lee, I'm fairly sure that anyone who owned that corset had a ladies' maid to help her get dressed.

I can see access to either side as possible via that corset, but a bit awkward for the right, as it would effectively demand baring both. But there are plenty of cases where one might need a garment for a stretch of time that's short enough to anticipate only one feeding, depending on the age of the baby. As they get older, the feedings get bigger but further apart, then as solids come in, they get smaller and even more far apart. At 16 months, I'm only nursing JoJo about 3-4 times within a day, and often not for long at all. I could wear a corset allowing access to one side from noon to (my, not his) bedtime if I had to.

There are also different schools on how best to nurse. When JoJo was much younger, I was told by one person to nurse all one side for the next feedings for at least 6 hours then switch, and she said she got it from a class on breastfeeding. It worked for her, but was not for me.

Lee @43: Loving the m15m-style "truncated transcript." It is making me LOL. Thank you for linking.

what is the flavor of clever
so that i may endeavor wherever whenever
to unsever the surly bonds with whomsoever
i choose forever

to muse me amuse me disabuse me to transfuse me
with the ichor of the daughters of Mnemosyne?

The boss and his new henchboss are flying to the Bay Area the week of April 15 and are flying me in too. I'm a bit nervous about the whole affair. On the other hand, it gives me the chance to meet my friend Yoko again.

you know what song you can totally song to the tune of what other song? I saw her standing there and I'll see you in the spring, when the birds begin to sing, is what.

Modesto Kid @68: You may already know about these, but I'm kind of fond of Amazing Grace/The House of the Rising Sun and The Marine Corps Hymn/Ghost Riders in the Sky.

etv13 @69 on the subject of songs that should totally be sung to other tunes, the American National Anthem scans beautifully to "The Ashgrove", and it's SO much easier to sing.

You can sing any song you want
To Alice's Restaurant.

That corset looks to me as though it also fastens in the back. I agree with Debra Doyle's analysis @58.

John Mark Ockerbloom @49 - Presumably that's why our pastor washed only men's feet yesterday. Our previous pastor always had a group that included both men and women, and we're not taking the change happily.

etv13 & Cassy B., just above - Ode to Joy/My Darling Clementine.

HLN: Local woman has spent part of the day putting up pickled eggs in various colors, will have yellow sharp and hot eggs, pink sweet and sour eggs, and brown-streaked beige tea eggs ready for Easter.

etv13 @ # 69: the ending theme to "The Beverly Hillbillies" also goes quite well to "Ghost Riders in the Sky". (You have to add "Yippee-i-ay, yippie-i-o, hillbillies in the sky" to the end.)

Anne Sheller@73, etv13, Cassie, Modesto Kid et al:

You can not only interchange Ode to Joy/Clementine, you can do any combination of Ode to Joy/Clementine/Deutschland Uber Alles/and the naughty "Life Presents a Dismal Picture", or if you are feeling particularly evil, all of them or any subset in successive permutations of tune and lyrics.

Lee @43: Thank you for that link to the take on the Supremes. That was/is excellent.

Mack the Knife and Clementine is another classic. Oh, and Donne's "Death, be not proud" can be sung to the tune of Old Black Joe.

Serge Broom @ 55: Not previously known to me, but it sounds great - I'll keep an eye out. Thanks for the recommendation!

Not quite one song to the tune of another, but pretty much anything by Emily Dickinson can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas".

Mack the Knife, Clementine, the Marine Corps Hymn, and Ode to Joy can all be sung to each others' tunes, in case someone missed the linkup there. Favorite moments: syncopated "FAAAAANcy gloves though has MacHeath dear" singing MtK to OtJ's tune, and singing "Lived a miner, 49er, and his daughter...MACK THE KNIFE!"

H.E. Wolf @ 78... F'murr is from the same era as Bretecher. I remember his strip where St-Exupéry has crashed in the desert, and meets the Little Prince, whose oft-repeated request that he draw a sheep for him, ends with the increasingly irate St-Exupéry running away while throwing his shoes at the Little Prince. He also had an ongoing series about a herd of sheep, one of which thought it was Einstein, and another looking suspiciously like Jean Rostand.

Oh, and Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" can be sung to Hernando's Hideaway, and it all works except the break.

I forget who it was, some famous singer, who was supposed to sing Amazing Grace and sang the whole thing to the tune of House of the Rising Sun, apparently without noticing.

Rather than go thru the ballad meter explanation again, I'm going to let Wikipedia do it for me. Basically, any song written in ballad meter can be sung TTTO any other song written in ballad meter -- and a fair number of other things can be shoehorned into the ballad-meter scansion with a little bejiggering. It used to be a common party game among filkers to pick one ballad-meter tune and go around the circle singing other stuff to it in turn.

The title to PKD's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" can be sung to the opening bars of Greensleeves. I hear it every. freaking. time. I've never forgiven the friend who pointed that out to me.

Long-term lurker here. The corset is fascinating. The 19th century is late for me, but I've worn 16th and 17th century corsets. Never breastfed. However, its the quilting around the front opening which struck me - it suggests it was meant to be seen. Could it have been for a wetnurse in a large household? Most 19th century wealthy women hired wetnurses for their babies, who lived in for that period. If its a large household then women often slept in dormitory arrangements and would help each other get dressed. BTW, in a properly laced and fitted corset twisting inside it is impossible - in my 16th century one I can't bend - but that's boned.

Xopher@ 82: Thanks for that. I am still laughing. Clementine/Mack the Knife, new to me, is also fantastic.

Lee @ 83: That covers lots of them, but as far as I can figure tapping my fingers on my desktop, not Ghost Riders and the Marine Corps Hymn, which aren't iambic at all.

On a completely unrelated note: My 14-year-old daughter has 300 followers on tumblr. Is that something I should be concerned about?

etv13@87: Near as I can tell, Ghost Riders in the Sky is straightup iambic heptameter; the Marine Corps Hymn throws in a few anapests, mostly at the beginning of lines.

One Song To The Tune Of Another gives a useful list of examples.

The basic construction of a song mirrors almost exactly that of a spacecraft. The tune is just like the rocket motor - driving the capsule, or words, up through the stratosphere and out of the earth’s ecliptic orbit. And once free of gravitational pull the two can be separated just as the words can be removed from the song and set to a different tune. Or in the case of the capsule can dock with another space vehicle.

Personally I never see the point of space travel. Oh yes you can point to all the spin off benefits, such as non-stick digital watches and a biro that write upside down. But what is the point of that anyway? If you want to write upside down just turn the page round when you finish. Of course they have proved the moon has zero atmosphere, but Swindon has zero atmosphere, and we don’t all spend millions of dollars going there to see for ourselves.

etv13 #87: Depends what she's posting there. And if you haven't, you definitely need to talk to her about the "hate brigade" and trolls in general.

The Middle-English metrical romance King Horn can be sung to the tune of Molly Malone.

Alle beon he blithe
That to my song lythe!
A sang ich schal sing you
Of Murry the Kinge....

And you can sing Beowulf to the verse lines of "Haul on the Bowline":

Hwæt! we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
(Haul on the bowline, the bowline haul!)
þeod-cyninga þrym gefrunon
(Haul on the bowline, the bowline haul!)

Which wasn't the silliest thing I ever put my mind to, back in the day . . . that would have been trying to figure out, one rather tipsy afternoon at a grad-student cocktail party, what the Anglo-Saxon for "potato-chip" would have been if the Anglo-Saxons had had potato chips. (I suggested "beer-friend", but it was rejected on the grounds that "beer-friend" was clearly the Anglo-Saxon poetic kenning for "pretzel.")

Dave Bell @90: I think my favourite of the ones that are available on The Tube that is You is 'Whiter Shade of Pale' to the muppet theme tune. (I can't figure out a way, from this device, of putting in a link that won't get gnomed, but its worth a quick search).

I remember studying Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa in art history at the University of Washington. I was the only one in the room who did not laugh when the image lighted the screen. I wondered for a long time after what was funny about it. Sometimes I still wonder.

A friend of mine was able to fit the lyrics of "O Canada" to the Muppet Show theme, but my favourite is singing the Spiderman theme's lyrics to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" (it doesn't seem to work as well in the other direction, though.)

Debra @ 92: Pretzels? Not peanuts? But then, I don't drink beer . . . now I'm going to have "Anglo-Saxon for potato chip" niggling at me for the rest of Easter weekend. I suspect the distraction will be welcome, so thank you in advance!

I love Making Light.

Angiportus @59: Datapointing: there are in fact some people who get that look on their face in moments of sexual ecstasy. Dunno what percentage of people. (Joani Blank's "The Faces of Ecstasy" film, while not an exhaustive survey, might provide some examples of that variety of expression. Human variety is fascinating.)

The Band aren't even at this concert.

Mary Frances (96): Potatoes are sometimes known as 'earth apples', if that helps the Anglo Saxon-ing.

There's a beautiful slow air I play on the harp, solo and with an uillean piper. The first strain is Gilligan's Island, which doesn't have a second strain, so I've added the last two lines of the chorus of These Boots Are Made for Walking.

The Gilligan tune seems to be a variant of The Bonny Ship the Diamond (perhaps unwittingly), and I am not the only person to think of using both in an arrangement.

And in a ML-thread-crocheting moment, the Joani Blank video is listed in "Concerts and Music Videos" by some sellers. No word on whether it features lyrics set to other tunes, though.

Jim, #91: The tune that popped into my head reading that was Steeleye Span's "The King".

Mary Aileen @ 99... aka 'pommes de terre' in French.

There are sentences by students that cause me to tear what's left of my hair out. Then there are those that make me want to phone the Samaritans:

One infamous prisoner in particular Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who was transferred to Guantanamo bay, which is a detention camp who is known to be the mastermind behind 9/11, was said to be waterboarded one hundred and eighty-three times in 2003 according to a 2005 memo released by the justice department.

Anyone else suspect that maybe Rammstein’s “Keine Lust” is just a German translation of Pat Benatar’s “Treat Me Right”?

I am now watching Doctor Who.

Heh heh :)

I forgot to mention you have to add words to SBWOASN to make them fit:

"To watch...his woods fill, upwithsnow, OH NO."

"The dark...est evening, oftheyear, OH DEAR."

Debra Doyle, there's a snack in Hungary that I haven't seen anywhere else that is kind of like a roll made out of pretzel dough, sometimes with cheese. I was told the name translates as "beer-skate" because it helps the beer skate down more smoothly.

They're delicious. And also delightfully named.

I don't know if this has been brought to your attention already. A documentary about 3d-printed guns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DconsfGsXyA
(Can't seem to get the link-text to work.)

I have a great fondness for film scores (not just title songs), especially those that end up with you walking out of the theater singing/humming/bum-bum-BUM-bum-ing. I'm trying to put together a list of the most ear-grabbing (in a good way) for when I have a budget available to buy some, and would appreciate any suggestions of others to consider, especially since I have a bias towards swashbucklers. So far I've got this:

Shaft
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Raiders of the Lost Ark (I think it works better than Star Wars. YMMV.)
Lawrence of Arabia (My wife got me the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra version for Christmas, which is the first time the ENTIRE score has been released. It is magnificent--if you like this score, run, don't walk, to the music merchandiser of your choice.)
The Great Escape
Ghostbusters (Yes, the title song is infectious. Take a second and listen to what Bernstein was doing on the rest of the soundtrack.)
The Stunt Man (which was available on LP, and a 3K CD pressing that's so expensive as to be unavailable. I check iTunes for it monthly).
Jaws
The Triplets of Belleville A bonus! Old cheap tricks with the lyrics of the "theme song."
The Pink Panther/A Shot in the Dark (I know they're two different films scored by the same composer. I can't decide which works best.)
Gone With the Wind
The Adventures of Robin Hood
The Third Man
Wallace and Gromit theme
Batman
Scaramouche

There are also those recordings that have been so transformed by the films they appeared in that you can barely remember the original context. The two that I know of are the recording of "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn courtesy of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Quit Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb and "I Can't Stop Loving You" by Ray Charles courtesy of the Japanese animated film Metropolis for similar reasons. (I saw this with a film buff friend in the theater and our reactions when the music started "Are they going 'We'll Meet Again?' YES, THEY ARE!") I'm told there's a similar song scene in Reservoir Dogs, but I'm too chicken to rent it and find out more.

Oh, and a shout-out for the best swashbuckling music never used for a swashbuckler: the version of Strauss's Overture to Don Juan directed by Herbert von Karajan. Years and years ago Rolling Stone's record guide said something like "there are better recordings technically, but this is the one to beat" and they weren't kidding.

"One song to the tune of another" is a common round on the UK radio show I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue

There are plenty of videos on second-person-pronoun-hollow-cylinder if people are interested.

I particularly suggest Tony Hawks' rendition of Girlfriend in a Coma TTTO Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Marjorie Farrell: I remember studying Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa

I misread this as Ecstasy of St. Trinian's. I now have a sprained imagination.

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 110:
They're not exactly swashbucklers but I'm particularly fond of the scores to Conan the Barbarian and Alexander Nevsky.

I presume everyone here knows that the Blind Boys of Alabama do the House of the Rising Sun "Amazing Grace" as one of their standards? If not, you need to hunt it up on Youtube, because with their harmony it's quite the thing. (I actually prefer the original tune, but I sometimes feel odd-one-out on that. Of course, I also feel odd-one-out on not wanting excessive ornamentation and sustained notes added to the original tune...)

Weirdest Song to a Tune of another currently going on in this very house: my mom was over once after one of her first signing lessons. She'd beenasked to sign Twinkle twinkle little star (Just the first verse everybody knows), and had the words stuck in her head.

Joseph';s baby bassinet has buttons he still plays with - he can't fit it, but we've been using it to hold blankets etc so it's still in his reach. So he set off the music; Fur Elise.

And mom started singing "Twinkle twinkle twinkle little star..." to it.

Now, I have all the words to the full song memorized. I sing it a lot, as in almost daily. I also hear Fur Elise, or rather one of the two most readily available baby-furniture settings thereof, almost daily. This means I can get earwormed by the combination.

I have now figured out all the places where you need to just slip in one extra repeating word to already repetitive lines to set the whole thing to the different parts of Fur Elise. And sung it to JoJo as a lullaby a few times.

(This doesn't mean that much; with a toddler who resists naps very strongly, my list of things to sing Joseph as a lullaby is of necessity over 30 songs long - and that short because I try not to sing him too many songs where people die. Considering my love for folk ballads...)

#109 ::: KristianB

I'm reasonably sure that 3D guns aren't even an interesting topic until it's possible to print barrels, and the tech for that isn't even close.

On the other hand, printing high-capacity magazines and using a manufactured spring might be feasible, if I understand the tech correctly.

"Potato" and "pomme de terre" are just wrong. I like the original Quechua term "papa" because they deserve the credit for such a wonderful food, and it's also shorter, easier to spell, and not based on confusion with some other plant. For an Anglo Saxon term, "spud" isn't bad.

Lenora Rose, so you've switched the tune from Mozart to Beethoven. Doesn't sound so bad.

TomB, I'm reminded of when J2P2 visited Florida, and some well-meaning person held up a sign that said "Viva El Papa."

Indeed. Long may it reign.

Taking up a topic from the previous Open Thread:

My experience of Le Guin seems to be 180 degrees from most of the people who posted. I bounced hard off The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven, but I still reread The Dispossessed once a year or so. Phrases and images keep bobbing up in my mind--"a trio of mad seven-year-old carpenters" at the Anarresti version of a primary school, the lead worker at a metal shop directing her apprentices with "a splendid flow of profanity," yellow diamonds used for a mobile in the corner of a family apartment . . . I wouldn't want to live on Anarres, but it's a fascinating place to visit.

I think part of what got to me was the way that Le Guin presents each world's vision of itself and then carefully deconstructs it. Anarres is the better, finer, cleaner, saner place, but just under the surface there are the same old politics. Urras is richer, easier, in many ways kinder--you get the impression that even the poor of Urras aren't so deprived that they can get tipsy on rich food, like people do at parties on Anarres--but the rot beneath the surface becomes clear.

Always Coming Home is my absolute favorite Le Guin, though. It's a book to wander around in. If you can get the edition with the recordings of Kesh music in the back pocket, even better.

little pink beast: Thanks for the suggestions.

As a footnote, since I haven't ever seen a St. Trinian's film I went looking for the school theme. Unfortunately I kept running into the new theme from the new movies that Girls Aloud did, and it sort of sucks. After a bit of searching I found a clip with the original theme which would be fun to hear rerecorded by somebody, ideally with the unrecorded Flanders and Swann song about St. Trinian's students that was to be sung to "Two Little Maids."

I note, in case it's of interest to anyone, that you can tell the native English speakers at a Dutch Easter vigil because we're the only ones in the congregation singing along to the Hallelujah Chorus. (Happened to sit behind a set of visitors to our fair, flat land. Chatted afterward. Fellow Californians.)

Also, if you're of that persuasion, Christ is Risen, Alleluia! If not, enjoy the chocolate when you catch up with us time-zone-advantaged types.

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 110: not terribly swash-buckly either, but I really like the Moon soundtrack by Clint Mansell, and Spirited Away by Joe Hisaishi. Friday Night Lights is great too, but I like pretty much everything Explosions In The Sky do, so that would not be an unbiased opinion :)

And yes, Stuck In The Middle With You has definitely acquired a Reservoir Dogs association that it won't be losing any time soon.

Mike, #121: Seconding the recommendation for Moon -- I ran into it in a list of "The Top 100 SF Movie Soundtracks" and it sent me scurrying straight over to Amazon to order the CD. It's spooky and alien and meditative all at the same time. But I agree, not terribly swashbuckling.

Personally, I'm very fond of the LOTR soundtracks for hummable themes, but I wouldn't really call them swashbuckling music either. Some of the Branagh Henry V score might fit, though.

Caroline @85

I wasn't thinking of twisting inside the corset but rather of pulling the front opening of whatever was worn over it to give access to both sides as needed.

This last baby I wore nursing tanks for the first time and discovered that it was relatively easy to twist my center front opening garments to give access to either side without unbuttoning much or necessarily undoing both sides of the undergarment . I'm thinking this corset would function something like that...K

Xopher Halftongue @117: Although Mozart wrote a piece using that tune, he didn't compose it.

Didn't he? Huh. I thought...I was so sure I was taught he wrote that tune when he was like four.

Was this something commonly believed until recently, or is it just another bullshit story like the "Easter comes from Ishtar" thing that made the rounds this year?

Xopher: he wrote a "variations on...", which I've heard, but I don't think he wrote the original. Isn't it French?

(Wikipedia-check)

If they're to be trusted, it is in fact a French tune (Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman) from 1761.

Mike McHugh @121 -- Joe Hisaishi is my personal favorite current soundtrack composer. I have yet to hear anything by him that isn't worth listening to multiple times, even if I haven't seen the movie. All his Miyazaki scores are keepers, and his others are nice too.

"Exodus" from the film.

"He's a Pirate" from "Pirates of the Caribbean".

For hummability, the theme from "A Summer Place." For declaiming at the top of your lungs, possibly "Born Free." Swashbuckling, I dunno, unless you want to try "I Don Quixote" from "Man of La Mancha."

Goodness. I saw those movies in high school lo these many years ago.

Hey, Patrick, congratulations on your Best Editor Long Form Hugo nomination!

Likewise to your fellow nominees in that category, and to all who are enjoying the reality of being nominated this year.

Elise, #97, thanks for the explanation. Marjorie Farrell, #94, other folks' sense of humor sometimes eludes me also--even when I cognitively get the "joke". Another thing that doesn't help is when sex and violence are made to seem like the same thing.

hugo geeking moment -- how often has an author been nominated more than once in the same category, 'against themselves'?

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 110

My favorite movie soundtrack is from "Buckaroo Banzai" and is written by Michael Boddicker.

Angiportus #131: Another thing that doesn't help is when sex and violence are made to seem like the same thing.

They aren't the same, but they are deeply linked at a biological level, and that's reflected in human culture on all levels. In humans, sexuality and aggression share both cognitive, hormonal, and social "circuits" -- that is, subsections of the respective systems which get invoked for both. This is not accidental or coincidental -- looking back along the evolutionary tree, most vertebrate species have deep links between aggression and sexuality, and some of the invertebrates are worse.

Drifting a bit, the modern campaign to the effect of "rape is always a crime, no excuses or justification etc.... that's not a matter of "rooting out sexist corruption in our society". It's a social-engineering project of awesome ambition, trying to create a new social norm. (My guess is that we'll get partway there over the next couple of generations... assuming the resource collapse doesn't knock the planet back into a new feudalism.)

TomB #116: "Papa" is also used in Spanish to mean "potato". It happens, in Spanish, to also mean "pope" (except that it's a feminine noun when "potato" and a masculine noun when "pope", this caused an American entrepreneur who wanted to cash in on a papal visit some years ago considerable grief when he printed a large number of tee shirts bearing John Paul II's visage and the legend "Viva la Papa").

Which reminds me: some years back I read a sort of urban legend that alleged that the Chevy Nova was a flat bust in Latin America because "No va" translates as "doesn't function". Fragano would seem to be the authority to consult on this question.

Their Lownesses would appear to suspect that certain words for "automobile" are used with malign intent. Sirs and mesdames, it is not so, upon my honour!

For stirring theme music, one of my favorites has always been the opening music from The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr..

Brisco County Theme

You might have also heard it as some of the music played during the Olympics broadcasts in years past.

I really enjoyed that show. Like Firefly, it's another example of good shows dumped by Fox.

My favorite soundtracks are Pirates of the Caribbean (just the first one), Bionic Commando Rearmed (game soundtrack, nice and techno), and Bastion (another game soundtrack with three amazing vocal tracks). Very different genres, but all very good. I recommend checking them out.

Crossing the singing-songs-to-other-tunes thread with Abi's comment about the Hallelujah Chorus:

The SF group at my college used to go pumpkin caroling on Halloween (mostly to professors' houses).

The carols were mostly monster- and ghost-themed filks of the usual over-played-in malls Christmas fare, but one year one of the group insisted that we needed something better for one of the religion profs, and we ended up with the Halloween Chorus:

Halloween!
Halloween!
Halloween, halloween,
Hall-o-o-o-ween!
For you are going to
Give us candy.
Halloween, halloween,
Halloween, halloween!
Or we will never stop
This singing...

Dave Luckett @ 136: Debunked often enough to be usable as meta-humour. See Snopes and lots of other websites.

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 110:

Since you like "Lawrence" have you listened to any of Maurice Jarre's other scores, like "Dr. Zhivago?"

Try anything you can find composed by Bernard Hermann...the mind behind the shrieking strings of "Psycho."

James Horner's "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn" and "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock." Note -- the complete scores are available now, STII includes the "Amazing Grace" sequence which did not appear on the original LP.

Also Horner -- the "One Ring" theme from Jackson's LOtR, and "The Shire Theme" from "Fellowship."

Of Disney's Pirates, I agree on "He's a Pirate" but beg you to listen to the interweaving themes in both "Dead Man's Chest" and "At World's End." The characters all have themes: Will (French Horns), Elizabeth (violins), Sparrow (cello), and the love theme (duet for music box and organ) for Davy Jones/Tia Dalma. Zimmer takes Badelt's bombast and gives it a sea change...into something rich and strange...

John Williams -- "Hedwig's Theme" from "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Among many, many others.

Happy Easter, and happy birthday César Chavez!
From The Art of Resurrection:

The radios and newspapers began to print and broadcast news of this prophet come down from the hills above the Elqui; an uncivilized campesino, has not cut his hair for years, or his beard or his nails; doesn't even have a grade-school education and yet he can preach for hours before the rapt multitudes, the inflamed rhetoric of an illuminated mestizo, a creole prophet, a Coquimbo messiah. The crowds were shocked to hear him say that the All-powerful is not only with those who go to church, who confess and do penance; his mercy is far greater than that, my brothers, his love is greater than this world, it does not stop at the horizon, is more vast than the very mansion of heaven; he comes not looking for the good or the saintly, he comes to save the wicked and to pardon the sinner. His sacrifice on the cross was for all of us. Including you, my brother, you in the hat with the turned-up brim, making fun of the sacred word!

Mike McHugh, Lee, Dave Luckett, Linkmeister, Alex R: thanks for all the suggestions--I'll look into them! I should make it clear that I have nothing against non-swashbuckling films: after all I do have GWTW and Lawrence in there, which are hardly swashbucklers. (Although GWTW brings to mind swashbuckler political motivations in a way to give one a very unpleasant pause...)

Oh and a side, possibly troll-related question. When Searle had his 91st birthday, over 70 artists at Pixar illustrated a sketchbook for him and Cartoon Brew mentioned it and provided a link to a blog where they were all posted. Well and good! What annoys me is a comment over at CB where someone wrote "imagine if all these talented artists got to work on a traditional hand drawn 2d animated feature. judging from this work the results would be spectacular." I swear this is one of the codified troll comment patterns, but I can't remember which one it is. (It also frosts the hell out of me whenever I run into this variant, but I acknowledge that's *MY* issue...and possibly "Cecil Adams" as well, who once wrote "When we are talking about the price of mangoes in Sumatra, I am not interested in having you drag in your opinions on the temperature of spit in Wichita.") Can anyone tell me what this version is called?

I believe it's a species of concern-trolling.

Lots of Hugo-finals reading to do, I see.
While I am disappointed that "Avengers 1978" didn't make it, web-based magazine "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" did.

Steve C, shadowsong, Lori Coulson: I'll look into these as well. I'd been skipping television series themes because I once went on a road trip with someone who had grabbed several hundred off of cable broadcasts and played them to make their driving more pleasant. That many in rapid succession can wear upon the soul. (Besides, she didn't have the theme from the blink-once-and-you-missed-it "The Magician," or "Mission Impossible," or the incredibly loopy "Mr. Terrific" ("A scientist, both brave and bold..."), or...

Lori Coulson: Since you like "Lawrence" have you listened to any of Maurice Jarre's other scores, like "Dr. Zhivago?"

No, I have not--possibly because my mom loved Doctor Zhivago so I have seen it so many times on television I feel like my brain will run out my ears when I hear balalaikas--I'll have to listen to the score again. When the Prague CD came out there was a second CD with it called "The Music of Maurice Jarre – A Personal Choice,” but the budget wouldn't allow for that version. I had left out Herrmann, probably because his theme for "Twisted Nerve" gives me the crawls and my subconscious was trying to make sure I didn't hear it again.

Oh, and when looking at the blog dedicated to Searle I ran into this link to a New Yorker cartoon which will keep me grinning for days.

Clearly they didn't like something. May I recommend some nice Seattle sunshine and an oatmeal cookie from Il Fornaio?

Jim Macdonald: I believe it's a species of concern-trolling.

Fair enough--you've certainly had to deal with enough trolls to be able to identify types. I think what's annoying me here is the attempt to forcibly twist the topic: when I've seen concern trolling before it usually tags on an earlier reference. The attempt to derail out of the blue just bugs me.

Bruce E. Durocher II: It's also annoying because it rhymes with the kind of entitled fan who bitches that "Ever since (album name)," their faaaavorite band has become stupid and sold out (or whatever), and that they should go "back to making GOOD music."

Clearly, the person asserting the wish for a Pixar-helmed traditionally-animated feature prefers that to the kind of films they ARE making. But it's not the kind of film the artists themselves WANT to make, so why should they have to? Nobody is required to chain themselves to their desk and keep only making the one kind of art certain fans prefer.

Bruce E. Durocher II #148: I'd certainly accept it as an attempted derail, in the rough form of concern-trolling. With a side of dissing the accomplishment at hand. The various categories do overlap.

Lori, #142: Are you sure Horner had anything in LOTR? I thought that was entirely Howard Shore.

Bruce D., #244: I'd call that "good old days" trolling. "These people are so good, imagine if they just did it RIGHT, the way we used to!" This particular example doesn't bug me so much, but I've seen others that wanted to make me tear my hair.

Oh, and on the soundtrack issue, I can also heartily recommend the soundtracks for "Murder on the Orient Express" by Richard Rodney Bennett (very rich, lush work, highly evocative of the period) and "Death on the Nile" by Nino Rota. You occasionally hear the opening piano theme from the former in restaurant soundtracks, and it never fails to make me smile.

Personally, I'm rather fond of Danny Elfman as a composer, although I wouldn't call his work especially hummable. But you might want to check out his version of the "Mission: Impossible" theme updated for the first movie, and the "web-swinging" theme from Spider-Man is extremely memorable.

Dave Luckett #136: While "No va" mean's "Doesn't go", the story of the Chevy Nova being unmarketable in Spanish-speaking countries appears to be no more than an urban legend. There may be more to the issue of the Ford Pinto being unsaleable in Brazil, where "pinto" means "small penis". Ford had to rebrand the model as the "Corcel" (i.e., courser).

Ouch. I seem to have committed an intrusive apostrophe. I've been reading too many of the damned things.

Bruce E. Durocher II et al: To me it looks a subtle concern troll of the type "These people are wasting their [resources] on [a cause I find unworthy]. They should work on [my worthy cause] instead."

Jenny Islander @118: "If you can get the edition with the recordings of Kesh music in the back pocket, even better."

For those who can't find the cassette tape, or wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it, there now is a digital version:

http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/music-and-poetry-of-the-kesh/

Bruce, Elliott, and Roy: it's also a cross between CATFOTFIC (Complaining About The Flavor Of The Free Ice Cream) and chutneying (proposing creative projects for someone else to do).

Xopher, you've just given me a perfect definition of certain behavior that irritates me greatly: Complaining About The Flavor of the Free Ice Cream. I've been dealing with a local, lab-related version since last summer, and the label fits perfectly.

[Warning: Research Etiquette Rambling]

At least in research-land, being Chutneyed is a good thing (it's what primary investigators - the faculty members who get grants - do); I got chutneyed into a couple collaborations with a couple different friends, so I'm not objecting. That said, CATFOTFIC in research-land is bad... suffice it to say that when someone outside the lab wants us (the lab that *owns* and maintains a piece of expensive equipment) to modify our setup to accommodate their crappy code, I consider this CATFOTFIC in the extreme. Especially when we have a series of ongoing experiments running on this setup. Bonus points for non-lab-member irritating the Amazing Girlfriend on the issue. Not amused, at the moment.

[/Research Etiquette Rambling]

Roy V. Ovrebo @ #154, as when the woman poured precious ointment on Jesus' feet, and the disciples piped up "This ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor". (Matthew 26:9)

Lee -- you're right, it's Shore for LOtR -- that's what I get for trying to do things off the top of my head. Mea culpa!

Elliott Mason @132:: It's actually not that uncommon. A quick run-through turns up:

1959: C. M. Kornbluth is nominated in Best Short Story for both "The Advent on Channel 12" and "The Theory of Rocketry". (Many nominees that year; the rules were still in a state of flux.)

1967: Roger Zelazny for Novelette for "This Moment of the Storm" and "For a Breath I Tarry".

1973: Robert Silverberg for Novel (the only time someone's been nominated for two different novels) for both Dying Inside and The Book of Skulls.

1974: Michael Bishop in Novella for "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" and "The White Otters of Childhood".

1977: John Varley in Novelette for "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" and "The Phantom of Kansas".

1981: George R. R. Martin in Novella for "Nightflyers" and "One-Wing" (this latter in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, though); also Jeff Duntemann (who?) in Short Story for "Cold Hands" and "Guardian".

1988: Kim Stanley Robinson in Novella for "The Blind Geometer" and "Mother Goddess of the World".

1992: Nancy Kress in Novella for "Beggars in Spain" and "And Wild For to Hold"; also Mike Resnick in Short Story for "One Perfect Morning, With Jackals" and "Winter Solstice".

1995: Ursula K. Le Guin in Novelette for "Solitude" and "The Matter of Seggri".

1996: Ursula K. Le Guin again in Novella for "A Woman's Liberation" and "A Man of the People"; also Greg Egan in Novelette for "Luminous" and "TAP".

1999: Michael Swanwick in Short Story for "The Very Pulse of the Machine", "Radiant Doors", and "Wild Minds".

2003: Michael Swanwick again in Short Story for "'Hello', Said the Stick" and "The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport".

2005: Charles Stross in Novella for "The Concrete Jungle" and "Elector"; also Mike Resnick in Short Story for "Travels With My Cats" and "A Princess of Earth".

2008: Greg Egan in Novelette for "Dark Integers" and "Glory".

I'm putting in a nice word for Conan's soundtrack.

Lila, 159: More specifically, it was *a* disciple, the one in charge of the common purse, who wanted the ointment to be sold so that he could steal the money.

@Bruce E. Durocher II #110:

It's very simple and short, but Shirley Walker's opener for Space: Above and Beyond will pin you to your seat. She is also responsible for the awesomosity that is the music for the DC Animated Universe.

@all Tolkien geeks everywhere:

Do you remember the beginning of Ainulindale, where Tolkien describes a musical War in Heaven? Okay, now grab your LOTR soundtrack CDs or put in one of the DVDs and cue up Mordor's Theme. You hear that blatting, sour, repetitive march--dahh DAHHHH dahh da-da-dahhh, dahhh DAAAAHHHHHH da-da-dahhh? Okay, now go to the moment in ROTK when the Dark Tower is thrown down. Listen carefully. You'll only hear it once. Now reread Ainulindale.

Howard Shore was paying attention.

TexAnne, Matthew's version just says "his disciples"; John 12:4 identifies it as Judas, and goes on to identify him as the one who kept the purse and as a thief.

re soundtracks, I really really like several of the tracks from "Cowboys & Aliens" and "Iron Man".

I'll put in a vote for "Stroszek"'s soundtrack.

May I mention, here, that the handsome and witty Patrick NH has been nominated for Best Editor, Long Form?

James Horner was already mentioned, so I'll put in a word for A Beautiful Mind.

David Goldfarb @151: I'm really liking the thought that Seanan McGuire is now in a moderately- exclusive club whose other members are C. M. Kornbluth, Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Michael Bishop, John Varley, George R. R. Martin, Jeff Duntemann (brother of a very active Chicago fan), Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Mike Resnick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Swanwick, Charles Stross, and Greg Egan. Those are some good names for your name to be read next to.

Jenny Islander @ 164

I'm not musically astute enough to pick that up - just caught the edges of it after watching a couple times - but that's truly cool!

Michael Kamen did some good scoring work for "The Dead Zone" and for "X-men".

A question for mythology folks...
Was Herne the Hunter sometimes called Hern? If so, where?

Serge @173:

My first reaction was, "is old spelling ever stable enough to distinguish Herne from Hern?"

Then I looked at the Wiki page, and found that the earliest spelling with a final 'e' comes from the Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shaksper--sorry, Shakspere--whoops, I meant Shakspeare--drat, I mean Shakespeare--who doesn't even give any syllable to the final 'e' in the prosody, i.e. he makes it a monosyllable in the line of blank verse:

The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

So it was "Hern" to his ear rather than "Herne".

If it was either of those, given that the earliest printing in the First Quarto actually has "Horne" twice, both in the verse above and in Falstaff's prose echo of it.

So I guess my question would be: isn't it inevitable that Herne the Hunter would be called Hern as well, and often?

It has just occured to me that one-song-to-the-tune-of-another might be a marvellous method of creating less-recognisable filk songs. Set the lyrics to be adapted to an alternative tune, and then alter for setting and flavour.
(Yes, I know, it would be better to write my own lyrics from scratch. But I'm not very good at that, and I am quite good at spotting emotionally appropriate songs.)

My favourite song/tune combination is to sing While Shepherds Watched to the tune of Ilkley Moor, leaving in the silly bits. Thus we may be sure that there is goodwill from heaven to men without their trousers on.

Possibly a fool's errand but here I attempt to sing "Queen Jane Approximately" to the tune of "Stagger Lee"; and here I attempt to sing "Highway 61 Revisited" to the tune of "Drinkin Wine Spoh De Oh Dee".

oldster @ 174... isn't it inevitable that Herne the Hunter would be called Hern as well, and often?

As long as nobody calls him Hernee.
Otherwise people will ask where Bert is.

While folding laundry earlier today, we were regaled by a bird in the trees doing its best imitation of the song of... a car alarm.

"Cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-chirp", repeated several times at evenly spaced intervals.

That was great.

Someday I want to blast Beethoven's Fifth at a mockingbird to see if it learns it.

re wrong tunes:
You can do Yankee Doodle to the tune of Good King Wenceslas
Clementine to the tune of Mac The Knife
Night Before Christmas to the tune of On Top Of Old Smokey.

Choral Nerdery: Good King Wencelaus also fits perfectly and inappropriately to 'Estuans Interius', the shouty baritone solo from Carmina Burana

Backyard hobbit holes!
You have no idea how much I want one of these.

Clifton, #178: Many of the grackles in Houston have learned to mimic the full range of car-alarm noises, in order. You can be walking thru the parking lot at UofH and hear car alarms emanating from the trees.

In certain circles I used to move in, it was accepted that "Clementine" should always be sung to a Welsh hymn tune called (IIRC) "Cwm Rhonnda" which also had English words "Bread of Heaven".

I have also heard "The Lord is my Shepherd" sung, solo unaccompanied voice, to "House of the Rising Sun". Beautiful.

J Homes.

One of Dunsany's Jorkens stories involves a mockingbird that has learned to imitate Beethoven.

Wait, you mean the "Chevy NoVa" story is an urban legend? Goodness, I've been using that one in various classes for years--best I stop doing it, then, forthwith. Pity, it was a clever story (like many urban legends, I suppose). Ah, well, back to trying to explain why naming a car "the Edsel" didn't work . . .

Charles Stross has announced he is going into the movie business, here on his blog. He has the financing lined up.

Bummer about the Chevy NoVa being an urban legend. My old Spanish teacher told that one and he had actually lived in Mexico!

So is the one about the sexually explicit chicken tenderizer also an urban legend? Supposedly some company north of the border wanted to sell a combined seasoning/tenderizer for chicken south of the border, but they tried to use a dictionary instead of asking a fluent speaker. So "It takes a tough man to make a chicken tender" turned into "Sexually aggressive men cause chickens to feel sexual desire."

Jenny Islander@187, it's probably an urban legend, told by people who think chicken comes pre-wrapped in plastic from the supermarket, but has definitely mutated to get the version you're telling. I grew up in Delaware, somewhat north of the Delmarva Peninsula chicken-farming country, and I remember the TV commercials about "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken", with pictures of old farmer Frank Perdue, the guy who ran one of the biggest chicken factory agribusinesses.

Ex Urbe finishes up her series on Machiavelli over on her blog.

Erik Nelson @ #179, it would. There was one living outside my brother's trailer when he was in grad school that learned his favorite bit of Mozart. And when I was growing up, one of the neighborhood mockingbirds used to imitate the distinctive whistle my father used to call us home.

Duckbunny @175: That's not surprising; that tune (Cranbrook) was being used as a setting for While Shepherds Watched before Ilkley Moor had been written*. I've seen it claimed Cranbrook was written specifically to fit the carol words, but I don't think that's true.

* which doesn't mean the Ilkley Moor/While Shepherds Watched mashup isn't awesome, of course

Clifton @ 178, I've heard mockingbirds that live near my campus parking lot do that! They learned the car alarm with the four different siren/horn noises in sequence. I cracked up laughing when I realized what I was hearing.

I want to thank TNH for the Act of Hostility particle. I wonder if it's been submitted to my new favorite Tumblr (along with dog shaming - which in most cases should actually be called People Shaming) WTF Plus, which says pretty much everything that needs to be said about the plus-size clothing industry.

Some of the calls of cardinals sound rather like car alarms to start with (not the first 'phrase' on that recording, the second).

Probably for messing up my link. Alas.

Re: An Act of Hostility -- I'm less comfortable these days with shaming people for what they choose to wear than I have been in the past. A lot of the results may not be to my taste (which is frequently true with those who follow fashion rather than style). But I don't see it as hostility to make the options available. Am I better off restricting people's choices on how to dress, even if a lot of the ways they choose look odd to me?

I don't know - as a fatty who is damn tired of the disgusting, unflattering and unfashionable polyester garbage that's thrown at us year after year, I find both the particle and WTF Plus as shaming the purveyors of this crap, rather than the wearers. I hope that site in particular adds awareness - for every fat person you see who doesn't look like an utter clown, you know they have spent a million times more time and money to do it.

Also, one of the things I saw posted on the Tumblr was a link to a retailer's "Trends" section. The supposed "trends" for the straight sizes were completely different from the "trends" for the plus sizes. No, I don't want to restrict someone's sense of fashion, but it looks like the retailers are doing it for us. For those of us who are too old to be cool, they show cute A-line skirts and cotton blend form skimming tops in straight sizes, and blouson shapeless polyester crap and "pencil" skirts (they take up less fabric) that lack shaping in Plus. For Juniors - ugly stuff that's not to my taste, yet is considered trendy by the wider fashion world for straight sizes, or ugly stuff that's not to my taste, contains absolutely no natural fibers and that isn't even "fashionable" - or maybe it was in straight sizes three years ago. Where's the choice there?

Dave Bell #186: Frail Pool Productions is a great name for a rock band.

...So with Corwin being a Name on the Intert00bz, would Steven be "Daddy Brust"?

I have to disagree with the "Overtly Hostile Act" particle. Providing people with the option of wearing clothing that you personally consider unattractive isn't a hostile act, nor is someone wearing them. (Not to mention that those pants would be great for con costuming! And I see some fabulous costuming on large women.)

T-shirts for 5-year-old girls emblazoned with slogans like "I'm Hot" and "Too Sexy"? Now that's an overtly hostile act -- and one I've seen in regular mass-market stores.

Wait 'til 3-D printing really catches on. You'll see some clothing choices that will be astounding.

I'm not convinced that any of the clothing retailers actually design clothing with the vast majority of people in mind. Most men's clothing for people my age assumes that I'm hipster-thin (nope; insert one fluctuating nerd-gut here); most women's clothing, according to the Amazing Girlfriend, is exhibitionist in ways she Does Not Like. This doesn't even begin to touch the whole range in which women's shoes seem to be designed by misogynist fools. All I can say is "Thank G-D for Zappos... "

I'm waiting for the combination of full-body 3D scanners and cheap-enough robotic tailoring apparatus to completely gut the current clothing industry. Why bother buying hideous, ill-fitting, off-the-shelf garbage when you can have it tailored to your body and made as a bespoke item?

A decent chunk of this technology is available now (although it's being used in ways that may taint it for years): millimeter-wave scanners. They're merely OK for finding this we don't want on planes, but they're really good - really, disturbingly good - at making a very accurate surface map of an entire human body. So, take that output and use it as a digital tailoring dummy. I have no idea if anyone's been working on a robotic tailor, but the problem doesn't seem unsolvable, even with current-generation technology.

"Why bother buying hideous, ill-fitting, off-the-shelf garbage ...."

Hideous, ill-fitting, off-the-shelf garbage made by child labor in sweatshops.

Still, where do the creatives fit? The designers? The skilled and talented?

Benjamin Wolfe @203 and Jim Macdonald @202 -- complete agreement. It takes much more time to do style than fashion. If you have money, fashion is easy, and style is difficult. If you don't have money, fashion is very difficult, and style is just difficult. I much prefer style.

I'd say you still need skill - algorithms are useful, but are no substitute for human interaction.

The way I was looking at it, one of the root problems is "why can't I get something that makes me look good (since it isn't made / is prohibitively expensive)." I'd say my solution requires skilled and creative experts, since asking the ClothingBot to make me look good / professional / cute / formal / etc is a much harder problem than asking a human. I'd like to take the sweatshops entirely out of the equation, but still leave room for human skill, interaction and expertise. Thinking back about fourteen years; there's nothing to make a 13 year old kid feel more adult than getting fitted for his first full suit.

A friend of mine and I were wondering where Christian Grey's henchman managed to find a bra and panty set at some early hour of the morning. I suggested he had a 3D lingerie printer.

#89 Dave Bell: And speaking of "wouldn't pay money to see", Colin Sell on the piano.

Unreadable text: Most browsers have a "use my fonts and colours, even when the site says otherwise." button buried somewhere. I use it - even here, in fact; for how many others is ML written in The Prisoner's Village font?

It causes its own issues; sizing mostly, but there are places like Michael Geist's site that if you're not using his setup, the right half of his words overlap the right sidebar. But I don't remember the last time I had a "who thought this was easy to read?" moment.

Clothing: I haven't seen the particle, but at 6'0", 140#, I, too have issues. Maybe it would be better were I female (for "size N" issues at least; my tall female friends complain about finding skirts that are not either unfashionably short (knee-length on "real women", whoever they are) or floorlength, and of course the "yes, my arms are that long" issue). Probably it won't - the clothing industry is part of the "make people feel vaguely like they could do better so they buy something else hoping" game.

Fortunately for me, fashion isn't an issue; find something that looks vaguely business-appropriate and expects to be abused, and buy lots of it in various dark colours. Note that as a male, the default behaviour of clothing is "assume the user will abuse it and not know how/care to iron"; I notice that's never advertised to women.

The first person to combine a body-scanner with a 3-D printer to make custom bras is going to get very, very rich.

I'm wondering if 3D printing is the right way to go for clothing - all of the methods I've seen are variants of an incremental buildup procedure (either by depositing, the way most of the $2k and under printers do, or by bonding a media powder, the way that higher-end, higher-resolution ones do). I haven't yet seen a 3D printer that can do anything like fabric. Theoretically, it's doable with sufficiently high resolution, but it's a nasty problem.

That said, if someone wanted a bronze/steel bra, that is printable with current-generation technology. Can't imagine it'd be comfortable or sane, but it's doable.

A variant that's a business model waiting for funding would be a 3D scanner and a printer for making accurate busts of customers - and having the bras made by hand. In fact, that's someone's internet-based business model waiting to happen: customer gets scanned, company has bust on file, customer orders bras based on scanned dimensions. Iterate as needed; rescan customer if necessary.

Benjamin Wolfe @211 and sundry others.

I've done enough CGI things to have noticed that there is a difference of shape between supported and unsupported. And I have heard enough stories, ML amd elsenet, to suspect that a comfortably-supported shape would be the optimum for the process.

But how do you bootstrap things?

Jim Macdonald @202: Wait 'til 3-D printing really catches on. You'll see some clothing choices that will be astounding.

Ya mean like this?

As pointed out in the parhelia, crochet is fundamentally similar to 3D printing. Crocheted objects are built up one row at a time (as are knitted objects). Depending on the stitch and yarn, the fabric can vary considerably in properties such as weight and elasticity.

Dave Bell @212: there is a difference of shape between supported and unsupported.

For sufficiently high values of "shape," there is a difference in dimensions between supported and unsupported. And not a good one.

Lila @ 214: Huh. Not being a crocheter myself, I hadn't thought of it that way - it's entirely possible to 3D print a structure like that, it just takes sufficiently high resolution (which we can, probably, do now with what's available) and a sufficiently flexible printing medium (which, I suspect, is a harder problem). Right now, the widely available media are either, at best, semiflexible plastics or metal-bearing media for various other applications. I'd love to see a printing media that would work as a cloth analogue (the clothing in Jacque's link at 213 is cool, in a poke-your-eye-out kind of way, but appears to be a standard rigid print, which would be kind of problematic for garments of any description).

There are certainly plenty of flexible plastics out there, but how suitable they'd be for high-resolution 3D printing I can't begin to guess.

The way people are always told to figure out their bra size is a complete lie, too. You know, the typical "measure under your bust; add 4 if the number is even, add 5 if the number is odd; then measure around your bust and subtract the first number from the second" algorithm.

I recently re-measured myself according to these instructions from Venusian Glow [possible NSFW -- photos of women in their bras] and found out I'm really a much smaller band size and a much larger cup size than I'd thought. This is apparently super-common. The "measure and add 4 or 5" algorithm tends to result in a band size that's much too large, and a cup size that's much too small.

I also learned that cup size is extremely relative to band size. It actually makes no sense at all to say "I'm a DD cup" (or whatever) -- the volume contained by 32DD cups is extremely different from the volume contained by 40DD cups.

I bought some bras in the new size and oh my goodness the fit is so much ridiculously better. I had always just thought I was a weird-shaped person, because bras always rode up at the bottom or gapped at the top, straps fell down, etc., even though I was wearing the "right size" according to that "measure and add 4 or 5" algorithm. I figured my shoulders were just too narrow, my bust just wasn't rounded enough, whatever. It turns out I am not shaped strangely -- it's just that that algorithm is completely incorrect. In the new size, I can wear off-the-rack bras and have them fit properly, no custom tailoring necessary.

Annoyingly, most U.S. department and discount stores carry only a very small range of sizes, which does not include mine. However, I've found a good online retailer that carries a good range of sizes and styles, some in a decent price range -- Figleaves.com, who are actually based in the U.K., but still somehow manage to have $5 shipping to the U.S. [Also possible NSFW, for models in their underwear.]

My point is that better-fitting bras might actually exist -- it's just that most people are a completely different size than they're usually told.

Now, better-fitting women's trousers … I'm not convinced those actually exist unless you have them custom-made or tailored. The range of body shapes and sizes that women's trousers are made to fit is ridiculously narrow. (I read an interesting and depressing Slate article about the history of clothing sizes that explains. Basically, women's clothing manufacturers figure it's just too complicated to account for the full range of waist/hip ratios. It would slow down automated production too much. So they just pick one body shape and go with it.)

Benjamin Wolfe #203: In fact, this morning I just ordered $450 worth of shoes from Zappos. I am planning on returning 2 or 3 of the 4 pairs, depending on which ones fit best. They didn't have an exact match to my "Costa Rica shoes" that lasted 3 years before the elastic gave out, but I stuck with the same brand (Keen).

I don't completely get that WTFPlus tumbler, in that half the styles they were ranting about looked perfectly OK to me. I did note that the models showing those clothes ranged from scary-thin to "maybe a fashion designer considers them exceptionally large, but I sure don't".

Of course, I'm male and half-Aspie, so I'm not too clued in on style matters.

#215 ::: Jacque

I think that shows the ruff idea.

A lot of the WTF issues are related to patterns. If you were to wander into the plus sized department of JC Penneys or what have you, you'd notice there were an awful lot of animal prints. Moreso than the non-Plus size department. And while I think a bit of cheetah print can be fun, if I were to try to replenish my wardrobe after, say losing 17 lbs (as I just did) it would be very difficult to do my shopping and not spend the entire season looking like I'm cos-playing as the San Diego Wild Animal Park. (It took six stores to get 4 neutral tops and 2 neutral pants. Two of the tops are half-petroleum based.)

The other thing that's showing up on there is terrible, terrible fabrics. Poly, poly, poly. Yes, you do see petroleum based fabrics in the Misses section, but not to the extent as in the plus. Transparent items marketed as "business wear" and cheap plastic "embellishments" - again, cause the clothes to wear out before there time and are underrepresented in "regular" sizes. Don't even get me started on the "single shoulder" bullshit. How am I supposed to wear a bra under that?

But sign me up for the re-purposed millimeter wave/3D printed bra! Especially if I can get one for under $100. I'm seriously considering getting a reduction because I can't afford those damn things. If I lived in the UK, my size is common at their major department stores, and you can get a fairly cheap one in an emergency at Asda (Walmart). Yes, you get what you pay for, but sometimes you just need to replace the $95 model the underwire's exploded from on a rent week. Come to think of it, I blew out a tire a couple of months ago on a rent week. Guess which cost more (not including installation)? Major surgery as an alternative to our shitty lack of consumer choice. Hooray for capitalism!

Jim McDonald #209. As they have already done with prostheses? http://www.radiantimpressions.com/ (possibly NSFW for breast prostheses)
http://www.bespokeinnovations.com/ (leg prostheses).

And then there's the clothing item that made me certain that no jury of my peers would convict me if I had the designer in reach - I went swimsuit shopping with my teenaged daughter. No Good Came Of It.

John #39: Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for.

My partner Karen has a long diatribe on good bra fitting. It contains much of what Caroline@217 says. And yes, it's really clear that supported is very different from unsupported. Even more so if the person has been unsupported for decades and has significant sag issues. She says that one thing is good about bra sizes as they exist now: they're very consistent. If she finds a size that works, other bras in the same size generally work as well.

Since they haven't come up in the discussion so far, I'd like to recommend a few additional soundtracks:

Sneakers by James Horner (with an assist from Branford Marsalis). Quite different from his other movie work.

The Brotherhood of the Wolf, by Joseph LoDuca.

Finally, The Incredibles, by Michael Giacchino. Unlike the other two I've named, I think it's definitely a hum-able, swashbuckle-ey collection.

Agreed that we have a long way to go from millimeter scanning to making clothing and shoes by 3D printing, but I'm looking forward to getting there.

I wonder how far you could get with computer-controlled crocheting. I'm thinking very small stitches and slightly loose tension to produce reasonably flexible fabric. And adding elastic thread if you need stretch. Does this make sense?

221
The photo gallery at Bespoke Innovations includes one of the other examples of 3-D printed stuff that was in Science News - the prosthetic leg with the lace front.

Caroline @217 and anyone else looking for odd-sized bras--another retailer is Bare Necessities. They're currently running a sale on DD+ sizes with free shipping both ways.

Now if only I could convince my mother that she's been wearing the wrong size bra her whole life, rather than having her inform me that I drink too much milk and that's why my boobies are big. (I had stopped drinking milk for several years at the time of her telling me this.)

Benjamin Wolfe @206: there's nothing to make a 13 year old kid feel more adult than getting fitted for his first full suit

That wasn’t my experience. Getting schlepped to an outlet, stuffed into uncomfortable clothing I didn’t ever want to wear, and then poked and prodded by a tailor, while my grandparents cooed oh, how handsome and grown-up he looks! just underlined my lack of power.

I didn't get fitted for my first full suit until my senior year of college.

Avram @ 228: I'm not trying to suggest it's a universal experience; more that mine was made special because the tailor seemed to care that I was happy about how I looked in it. That said, the experience resulted in one of the less attractive poloroids of me in existence, so that's in the minus column.

Benjamin, #211 et al: One thing that immediately leaps to my mind about the "scan once, make to order" concept is, how do you get the customer to the scanner? That's not a part of the process that can be done online, so unless you had a chain of actual physical storefronts with a scanner in each one, you've got an access bottleneck for anyone who doesn't have money to travel.

nerdycellist, #220: Polyester is pretty much a deal-breaker for me -- but although I'm not model-slim by any means, I'm "only" about a size 18, where you can still find a lot of natural-fabric options. I won't even buy 50/50 T-shirts any more because I don't like the way they feel on my body. (For some reason, 5% spandex doesn't trigger the same response.)

Ross Dress For Less routinely has colorful caftans in "One Size" that I think runs to about 3X, and they're about $10-$12 each. Obviously not suited for business, but for casual or (in some fabrics) dressy, they work well.

I'm having vague recollections of someone, in the last few years, doing a precursor to that idea in upscale malls - essentially, it was a kiosk in the mall, not attached to a store, where you could be imaged (I'm remembering something other than millimeter-wave scanning, but no matter) and then they'd tell you what size you were at various retailers. It was a crude form of the idea, but not a bad one for all that.

My thought - if I wanted to turn this into a viable business - would be to insert it in a mall as a kiosk/mini-business; get scanned there, and get it uploaded to the manufacturer. Arguably, you probably don't want a real storefront (unless the TailorBot is pretty small). It's a thought, not a business I'm planning on starting this week.

Would the Gnomes be available to help me chew on someone who isn't happy with the flavor of the free ice cream here in lab?

Also, I have Peasch-compliant apple-plum crumble. And super-concentrated coffee.

Oh, for soundtracks, I recommend Gladiator. I'm not sure about "swashbuckling", but it sure is enjoyably bombastic.

My Amazing Girlfriend and I are fond of something that isn't (quite) a soundtrack, but it's in the same general family: Archangel, by Two Steps From Hell. We use it as either Baking Music or as Psychophysics Music (or, avoiding faceplants on the keyboard when running in each other experiments).

The San Jose Mercury News has an article on April 1 technology PR announcements.

Twitter unveiled a new plan to increase revenue from its popular micro-blogging service. From now on, the company said, the service would only be free to users as Twttr, allowing people to post as many short messages as they liked, provided they used only consonants. "For five dollars a month," the company said on its blog, "you can use our premium 'Twitter' service which also includes vowels."

Nancy @#225: I wouldn't trust a robot to crochet--it would require hitting a moving loop of thread.

Bll Stwrt, #236:

G, tht snds knd f fmlr.

Lnk t Twttr.

In other news, Fermilab has named a new Director today.

"This despite the fact that none of the members could determine with any certainty exactly what the new lab director's doctorate is in."

Benjamin Wolfe @235: If you like "Archangel" you'll also like "Invincible", by the same group, and "Illusions" by Thomas Bergersen (half of Two Steps). They have a "Halloween" album and a newer one called "SkyWorld" as well, but I don't think they're as good.

I've had a group called "Immediate Music" recommended to me, but haven't investigated them as yet.

Jim Macdonald @ 209:

Oh dear ghods yes. The sooner the better. Especially if they can make the bras available for, say, $25 or under (which is still beyond my budget) instead of the $60 I have to pay if I want one that truly fits. Obviously, I end up compromising.

Bill Higgins @ 239... what the new lab director's doctorate is *in*

"By golly, Jim, I'm beginning to think I can cure a rainy day."

Caroline @ 217:

"Slacks that fit" were the reason I started making my own clothing, as a teen. I was badly underweight until I was in my mid-30s; I'm also 5'9. So what fit around the waist and hips would be several inches too short. In the late 60s-early 70s I got around this by buying jeans from Army/Navy surplus stores - 28 waist, at least 34 long.

I've now got a different problem; am the opposite of underweight, but still tall, still not big-boned. Nothing really fits well. And making clothing is no longer inexpensive; patterns are costly, and fabric worse. (Am going to be trying to make something dressy for an event in the beginning of August, and not looking forward to trying to find the pattern and fabric I want.)

Adding to the list of favorite soundtracks:

Out of Africa. Not exactly hummable, but such lovely music.

Bill Higgins@239, Serge Broom@242: "Well...everything, really."

My mother died this afternoon. She was 98. Mom started reading science fiction when she got a copy of A Princess of Mars for her seventh birthday. Wrote a fan letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs and got a nice letter back, not a form letter. Read and reread Georgette Heyer. Her favorite author was Terry Pratchett. I don't know if she was his oldest fan, but she was certainly in the running. She had been in increasingly poor health since my father died two years ago, and wanted nothing more than to join him. She fell asleep and didn't wake up, which is how she said she wanted to go. Here she is (wearing her medals) last year at the Military Women's History Corridor at the Pentagon.

She had a good run.

Tracie, I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm glad the end was peaceful for her.

Tracie, #246: My condolences on your loss. May she be remembered well.

I am going to go out on a limb and actually recommend some music. Usually I do not since musical taste is so individual. However as adventurous soundtracks go I am going to suggest Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events with a score by Thomas Newman, particularly the piece called "Drive Away (End Title)". It has a wonderfully bouncy quality that I often put on when I am cleaning.

Second I will suggest checking out "Jefferson In Paris" by Richard Robbins. The first time I heard a piece of this score I stopped cold and could not leave my car until it had finished. That particular one was entitled "Pantograph". Somewhat similar to the music of Philip Glass, so give it a miss if you hate that sort of music in a slightly bouncier style.

I have limited myself to just three so finally I will recommend the soundtrack of a documentary. "New York", the original music was by Brian Keene and I particularly like "Hamilton's Theme". I love the original music as it often fills me with hope even though I am not a New Yorker.

@Tracie: Condolences. It sounds like your mom had a long life well lived and gracefully concluded.

It must have been fascinating for her to see SF&F evolve from the likes of Burroughs to the likes of Pratchett.

Tracie, my sympathies as well.

Tracie, I'm so sorry.

I am tall and disproportionate* and clothing never fits. There's a reasonable chance of finding sleeves long enough if I buy men's clothing, which suits me just fine for other, gender-based reasons, but then the shirts don't pull down over my hips. Trousers, well, I'm doing well if I can't fit both fists between my back and the waistband. So I pretty much buy men's there too, because it's not as if I won't need to bunch them up under a belt if I buy women's, so I may as well have something designed to be worn more than three times. With pockets.
I'm gradually getting the hang of making my own clothes, or at any rate my own LARP kit. Medieval rectangles-plus-gussets shirts also do not fit. But at least nobody really minds if I adapt them.

*In the words of my friend the professional seamstress, on measuring me for a corset recently: "My God, you have no torso."

My condolences, Tracie.

Tracie, my condolences.

Sorry, Tracie. You and she will be in my thoughts and prayers.

This offer is strictly legit! It's a local backyard business: Free Fuel!

Only appropriate, as I forgot the vinegar for the salad dressing. I'll bring it along.

[You wouldn't believe how many spam-flags that comment tripped. -- Pesquatacomi Burrel, Duty Gnome]

Condolences, Tracie. May memory be a blessing.

Tracie #246: My condolences. All I can say is that she lived a long life, and I hope that it was a full and satisfying one.

Re: Amazon announces purchase of English

I expect that a certain G. Chaucer could make a claim of a "common law trademark". I think, from what I read of the stunt that Games Workshop are pulling, that any existing user of the English language could make that claim as counter to the announcement.

I shall let somebody with more talent and knowledge write the letter, but "Whanne in aprill with his shoures soote" is a line that is crying out to be used.

Dave Bell #261: I thought, given the term "The King's/Queen's English", that a certain happy and glorious resident of central London would have been the putative vendor.

Tracie, my condolences. May her memory be for blessing.

Tracie, please accept my sympathies.

Open threadiness: for those interested in the spiritual life, Christian communities, social justice, and Alzheimer's, particularly early onset Alzheimer's, something which terrifies many of us -- I want to recommend David Hilfiker. I just discovered the man's writing. Worth looking at.

Tracie @246: My condolences on your loss.

Oldest surviving aerial photograph: taken from a hot-air balloon in 1860 over Boston. There was a Parisian balloonist taking shots in 1855, but none have survived.

... sharing a link.

Tracie - my sympathy. A lovely glimpse into your mother's life.

Tracie: my condolences. She sounds like a remarkable woman.

Condolences on your loss, Tracie. She sounds like a really wonderful person.

Tracie, my sympathies for your loss.

Tracie, my sympathies, also.

Hey, I'm still alive, and all, just... busy. Spring is always busy, of course, new calves and everything growing, that is much as it's always been. Since my children grew up and moved out and got actual jobs (and my son just bought his first car! A new one, even, although I guess that has to do with how few cars were sold in the years which would feed 2013's used car market) and my husband has become more and more broken, I've not had a lot of time for writing of any sort.

The only time I have for reading is right as I'm going to sleep, and I was puttering along fine until about a month ago I stalled out in the middle of Pratchett's Maskerade and nothing has been much good since. This has the effect of interferring with my ability to fall asleep, a bad thing all around as I have very old dogs whose bladders do no good for my ability to stay asleep.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm back to the part of my mental cycle when I should be reading poetry, and have come here to ask for recommendations for a good comprehensive general anthology, a thick chunk of a book in English which is as broad-spectrum as possible, although I'd be fine with one which ignores everything after 1930 except perhaps Ogden Nash and V. Sackville-West.

It would be perfect if such a volume was sorted by topic and pretty to see, and available at Amazon for a reasonable price, so it would not interfere with the need for a new comb for my shearing machine, nor short the budget for chicken keeping.

In exchange, I will try to get a nice thick picture post up on LJ and link to it here, so that I am not a complete suck on society (like someone who stopped by my house last winter, for the first time in the twenty-eight years I've lived here, and asked to borrow $600). Of course, if you or in or near Lacey, WA, I could always give you some fresh-laid eggs, or the fleece I need to shear off my Jacob wether. As soon as I buy the comb, and build the shearing table.

Tracie, my sympathies. Your mother sounds like a remarkable woman.

JESR: I just lost my egg connection. S/he's been going through the escaping-the-abusive-spouse transition, and no longer resides with hir hens. But I'm in Colorado...::sulk::

Classicists' AKICIML:

Today I wanted to point out that Michelle Malkin is a manipulator of stupid people. Going from 'demagogue', (lit. "leader of the people" but really meaning a manipulator), I'm pretty sure the word ends in '-gogue'. What would be Ancient Greek for people who are willfully stupid, narrow minded, and ignorant?

I've just thought of 'Boeogogue', but I'm not sure that conveys anything to modern people.

Jacque, would that I could email eggs; I have eleven hens laying about six eggs a week apiece, and even with saving the fertile Hamburg eggs to hatch that quickly becomes an embarrassment of riches. I got popular with the preschool set in my family by giving them bantam eggs for their breakfasts, though.

Tracie, condolences. Your mother's story sounds like a good one with a satisfying ending, but one deeply mourned by readers obliged to finish the last page and close the book.

Xopher, were you thinking of ochlagogue?

Tracie, I am so sorry for your loss.

Allan: good word, but not quite on the money.

JESR at 276: If you've the time and want to, I can think of several recipes that burn through eggs like it's their job.

Well, Peter S Beagle knows how to plan his own birthday party - with a showing of "The last Unicorn" at San Francisco's Castro Theater.
Of course it has to be the day after I fly home from the Bay Area.

I have just learned that the early 19th-century fashion magazine, La Belle Assemblée, has been scanned into Google Books.

I'm currently viewing the January 1809 issue, which is the one relevant to my current short story.

I'm gibbering over the table of contents.

Send help.

Xopher Halftongue @275: "Foolish" or "stupid" could be μωρος, νηπιος, αμαθης. (Also other words, the Greeks were not short of them.) "Moragogue" has the advantage of sounding like English "moron" (which is in fact from the same Greek root) and would be my choice.

Benjamin, that's a kind thought, but there's nobody here to eat goodies but me, and nobody to do chores, so I don't have time for cooking; I was making popovers for tea every day last year, but even that small piece of time was more than I've had of late.

JESR: Bartleby has a large number of free poetry anthologies. You can do a lot worse than hit the first selection they've got, The Oxford Book of English Verse; but there's enough there to keep anyone busy for a few years. And if you want to buy a print version - there's lots of good used bookstores online (try bookfinder.com which aggregates many of them).

David, 'moragogue' sounds perfect! Thank you!

Probably for an exclamation point after an expression of gratitude.

I'm sorry, JESR - I've got baking on the brain at the moment, since Passover is now over and I can bake properly again.

I am particularly interested in singing the Spiderman theme's lyrics to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne".

Xopher, David Goldfarb: less etymologically correct, probably, but my reaction was

Moragogue: speaker to mulberries

JESR @272: There's the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which is comprehensive to the point of threatening the integrity of your wrists (2,000 pages!) Might stretch the definition of "reasonable price" a little, too, but you get a lot of dactyls to the dollar.

Iain Banks says he has cancer and is not expected to live more than a year.

Tracie, my condolences. It sounds like she was a great lady!

Rikibeth @ 283... I'm gibbering over the table of contents

Is the magazine really called "L'Horrible Assemblée"?
The table of contents. The TABLE OF CONTENTS!!!

Serge @295: There are a few items in the same vein as the seven 'horrid novels' that Jane Austen mentions in Northanger Abbey! Including one with a prefacing note referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk. (BTW, if anyone knows where I can find a copy of the televised version of that featuring Paul McGann, I and my fellow admirers of him would be very grateful. Yes, we know it's terrible. Trust me, this is a group of fans willing to watch Lesbian Vampire Killers multiple times. It'll get watched.) I may have to read one or two of the Gothic stories to decide whether any of my characters are actually fans of the genre. I was entertained by The Monk, but I bounced hard off The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho -- I think I'd need a literature class to explain why people thought those had any entertainment value at all! I have no objection to trashy, but I can't manage boring.

No URLs, but plenty of italics, parentheses, an exclamation point or two, and potentially clumsy spacing. Also unflattering opinions of certain literary classics.

Would the gnomes care for some tea? I could make toast, and we have assorted kinds of jam and marmalade. Also Marmite, Nutella, and real butter.

JESR: Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney recently edited an anthology called The Rattle Bag- poems from throughout history, both originally in English and translated into English- that's been very well reviewed. It's nearly 500 pages and seems to be less than $10 used. Or seconding the suggestion of The Oxford Book of English Verse.

If you want something a bit quirkier, try one of the Poems on the Underground series (selected short poems have run in advertising space on the London Underground for about 20 years, and several anthologies have been published; as lots of different people chose them, it gives a bit less of a "review of the field" feeling.)

As women poets tend to run at about 5% of most anthologies, The Penguin Book of Women Poets might be nice to intersperse between whatever you choose.

JESR #272: There are two or three good general anthologies of poetry in English. As a number of people have mentioned Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book, I'll skip that, and go for a smaller one Palgrave's Golden Treasury which should be findable online (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19221) and for which several updated editions (with additional sections for more modern --i.e. post-Mid Vickie poetry). My own copy, edited by John Press, goes down to Stevie Smith.

I'd also recommend the book that introduced me to modern poetry more than four decades ago, The Faber Book of Modern Verse, and a very different, but still important, general collection, Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse. Some of it is not that light, some of it is seriously funny, all of it is worth reading.

Rikibeth @ #283, I know the feeling. While I was writing my Cowboys & Aliens fic for Yuletide, I discovered the online archive of the Arizona Citizen. Full scanned editions from the 1870s. Fascinating reading.

What's your name on AO3 again, Lila? I have suddenly discovered an urgent need to read Cowboys and Aliens fic.

Rikibeth, it's "hellseries". Alas, I only have two in that fandom. :-(

On a related note (to the extent that, say, Xopher's ganache and Hershey's Kisses are related), does anyone know if/when Emma Bull's Claim (the sequel to Territory) comes out?

James @293: Damn.

Somebody invent a cure for liver cancer, stat.

As a commenter says on the longer Guardian story (with comment from Ken MacLeod among others): "This is clearly a smokescreen for his acceptance into Special Circumstances." If only...

Tip-toeing around the topic du jour,

Apropos TNH's most recent particle: yes, the Black Blood of the Earth is highly recommended, but try to remember that a regular-size bottle of it contains a quantity of caffeine exceeding the LD50 dose in humans. Treat with caution.

Back to the topic du jour:

SCREAM.

(There is too much cancer about these days. Sometimes feels like it's got me surrounded, picking off everyone who means anything to me one by one. This latest: unspeakable.)

Charlie, I had a feeling that you might be getting shipments of Black Blood of the Earth - the fellow who makes it [Phil] (and his fiancé) are friends of ours. Which reminds me, I owe her a round of Birthday Baked Goodies. Do you order the Jug of Madness (4L of Black Blood), or some more reasonable quantity (since I can't imagine shipping to Scotland from CA is exactly cheap).

There's been a series of bottles in the lab fridge since last summer; it's absolutely what got the Amazing Girlfriend and I through qualifying exams last fall. For that matter, there's a strong positive correlation between my taking about 30-40cc prior to running in an experiment* and a major improvement in data quality - once we collect a little more data, it might just become standard operating procedure: only run Ben if he's had some in the last few hours.

*Experiments in our line of work are variants on the theme of: Sit in little dark room staring at a CRT (yes, we still use them - the timing is more predictable than LCDs, and we're somewhat obsessed with stimulus timing), see something and make a judgement on what you saw. Repeat several hundred (or thousand) times. If you want it to be even more fun, add in eyetracking, so you can't move.

--

Aside from that, fuck cancer. I keep finding out about authors whose work I really want to read after they've received a fatal diagnosis. Fuck.

Jen Birren @298: what kind of values of 'recent' are you using here ? I remember the Battle-Rag from the earlyish days of high school, more than two-thirds of my life ago, and I had the impression that it was an old standard even then.

It's also worth mentioning that there's a more recent (and substantially different) version of the OBEV than Quiller-Couch's edition, edited by Dame Helen Gardner. I like it better, perhaps because it's what I grew up on.

(Also, for those who want more modern things too: as well as Fragano's Faber Book of (now not quite so) Modern Verse, there's also DJEnright's Oxford Book of (not exactly ) Contemporary Verse 1945-80, which has some lovely things in it.)

Ecclesiastically inappropriate hot-cross buns?

I suspect many of us could use a look at this right about now:

Odin Eats Like a Person

(Like a Unicorn Chaser, but stickier.)

Mycroft (208) -- My son is about your size. A little taller, but not heavier. He's been a serious clotheshorse since his early teens, and his solution (for items which can acceptably be loose, like bulky sweaters) has been to buy at the top-line stores and have things tailored to fit. I'm sorry I can offer no better (nor cheaper) anecdata.

Caroline (217) -- When I was young (many many years ago), women's Levis came with three measurements: Waist, hip, and inseam. This is almost enough (if not quite) to provide a custom fit. Shoes came in combination last -- the possibility of one size for your heels and another for your toes. Since that time, women's clothing sizing has become entirely notional. You can start trying on things with a size you might kind of guess might sort of fit, and that's about it. I am puzzled, with the greater possibilities provided by computerization and a larger population to serve, as to why there is not more choice rather than less.

James @293: That makes me terribly sad. It's funny how an artist you've never met can become such an important part of your life. I'm going to miss him something awful.

*takes notes on the poetry anthology recommendations*

What would the Fluorosphere recommend to someone who's never read Banks before, but would now like to start?

A friend of mine very much wants to work out how to make something like BBoE, as he lacks the money to purchase it. It does sound vaguely terrifying.

Small bit: what does AKICIML mean?

estelendur, All Knowledge Is Contained In Making Light. A variation on the more general statement about fandom.

Many thanks to the duty gnomes!

AKİCİML: All knowledge is contained in Making Light.

JESR, would a local food bank volunteer maybe be willing to stop by regularly and take away extra eggs?

Tracie, I'm so sorry about your mom. Thank you for telling us about her. She was an awesome woman.

Oh gnoes! Gnot again!

(It was an exclamation mark after a thank you, wasn't it? Sorry.)

The hot-cross buns are all gone, but I can offer some of Teresa's rocket pesto.

Xopher, my thanks :)

The Wasp Factory was Banks' first novel if memory serves me right, and makes a reasonable introduction to his work. For the Culture series, I like The Player of Games followed by Use of Weapons. (I found Consider Phlebas a bit dull.)

estelendur at 312: Two options - one is to get in contact with Phil (the guy who makes it; his email is on the site Teresa linked to) and ask about bartering / other arrangements. He's, for instance, fond of trading art for Black Blood.

DIY options include making cold-brew coffee (I know Cory Doctorow has posted about his procedure on BoingBoing - see Cory's Cold Brew Method); I've also made a cousin of Black Blood with a whipped cream maker, finely ground coffee, cold water and one cartridge, but that's a very weird way to do it. Tasty, though. Probably the simplest way would be coarsely ground coffee + a mason jar of water + some way to filter it after the fact. Mix the coffee and the water, stick it in the fridge for 24h, filter and enjoy.

318
I'd suggest pouring the extract though a sieve lined with a coffee filter.
(Isn't that what coffee filters are for?)

For a few years, I had a "coffee toddy" kit which was basically a half-gallon jug in which cold water sat on coffee grounds for 24 hours. Then you upturned it in its white plastic tripod-ish thing and let the stuff filter out into a carafe to store in the fridge. It made a somewhat less-acidic, concentrated pre-brewed coffee. Not like BBotE, but somewhere on the spectrum at the far, far end of which is BBotE. I would mix it half-and-half with steaming milk for a cafe au lait, or perhaps 1 part toddy to 2 parts hot water for a basic cup of java.

We gave it away after a few years of me forgetting I owned it, and a few years before that of me using it but never making it through the batch before its approximate refrigerated shelf life expired. (This consideration makes me hesitate before ordering BBotE even in the smallest quantity, btw. I love coffee, but these days I love it in small batches while mainlining strong tea.)

A-ha. In fact, I appear to be talking about this. That'll teach me not to read an Open Thread carefully!

(Got there via the link to Cory's cold-brew method.)

BBotE has a 3 month refrigerated shelf life (we've had it in lab for that long, and it's fine). He'll even sell you 375ml bottles, which are pretty tame. Normal dose for the Amazing Girlfriend or myself is about 30-50ml, in about 200ml of hot water (or as a shot, but I'm the only one who does that).

(Not that I'm trying to shill for the stuff - we like it and use it, and they're friends of ours, but I'm just a coffee obsessive with no interest in BBotE aside from liking to see a friend do well. Just don't get me started on espresso.)

"Rocket pesto" sounds awesome. Yes, I know that's "rocket" as in "arugula", but it sounds so 1950s. Like something out of a souvenir cookbook from an early Worldcon.

estelendur @312: Some of Iain's work is rather grand guignol in flavour. If that doesn't appeal, you might want to start with:

Non-SF: "The Crow Road" (best opening line of any novel ever)
SF: "The Player of Games" (a solid entry-point into the Culture universe)
Experimental slipstreamy non-SF: "The Bridge", "Walking on Glass"
Political thrillers: "Complicity", "Dead Air"
Experimental SF: "Feersum Enjinn", "Use of Weapons"
Horror: "The Wasp Factory", "Song of Stone"

Thanks for all the recommendations; I'm hoping that it rains tomorrow so that I can go poking the internet and see what purchasing opportunities fall out.

Adding to Charlie's list:

Nonfiction: "Raw Spirit" (a fantastic book about Scotch whisky)

Stephan at 309

thank you. that made me laugh

praisegod barebones @307:

*checks date* Thanks, you're quite right, it came out in 1982! I think I misremembered the critical praise for Heaney's Beowulf as being for Rattlebag.

Basically it "feels" recent to me, whereas the Oxford Verse has been around since before my childhood and therefore "feels" immemorial.
Contents of Brain May Settle (Probably Out Of One Earhole.)

Ah well, since JESR was primarily interested in stuff up to the 1920s or so I don't suppose it matters in this case.

My first attention from the gnomes. Probably for being over-exclamatory.
I have some tablet from Glasgow, which tastes like fudge only sweeter, if any gnome would like a sugar rush.

HLN Bulletin: If you know anyone who has or wants to have a preschooler (aged btw 3 and 5 yrs this September) in the Chicago Public School system, THE APPLICATION PROCEDURE HAS CHANGED.

Suddenly and without notice. Even some really active parenting groups/co-ops/media sources only found out about it on the first day of in-person enrollment, which was yesterday.

There is ONE MONTH to apply, in person, for a place in this September's class, even for people who applied last October under the old procedure and THOUGHT THEY WERE DONE. All old applications have been tossed and are no longer valid, without notice.

Details (very badly explained) available at their webpage, WHICH SAID SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT LAST WEEK with no notice that the procedure was about to change.

If you know any freaking-out Chicago parents, I just did it yesterday and can talk them through it and hand-hold, my gmail address's forepart is "2ells2tees", feel free to pass my contact info on to them.

Signal-boost this if you can; it is really, really not getting out to the people that need to know it most.

Re women's clothing, following up on Older's comment at 310: as far as I can tell, there is very little consistency in sizing, fit, etc. from one brand to another. (That's one of the reasons I hesitate to purchase clothes online.) This appears to be especially true of jeans. However, I recently discovered some jeans that fit me and fit my particular notions of comfort. They are called, appropriately, Not Your Daughter's Jeans. They are ridiculously expensive new ($65 -- $130), and so I have taken to haunting the Goodwill racks (yeah, I shop at Goodwill, you got a problem with that?) and snapping up the NYDJ jeans in my sizes/fit when they appear. I sometimes have to get them hemmed, but spending $10 for a professional to hem a pair of nearly new jeans that cost $7 -- I do not sew any more -- and fit me perfectly seems like a good investment.

I am now hunting for comfortable cargo pants, which NYDJ does not make. Wish me luck.

Wow! Just wow!

A flash mob announcing the reopening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the exhibition of Rembrandt's The Night Watch.

Wow.

Every flash mob should have a chicken.
And horses.

This is beyond fabulous. Thank you, Tracie!

From the sidebar:

The octopus-like movements and appearance of both protists reminded James of the horrid Cthulhu and Cthylla, and the little protists were baptized after the two monsters. Cthulhu is often depicted as a giant, octopus-like entity with wings. Cthylla is his daughter, and has a similar appearance.

CTHULHU HAS A DAUGHTER WTF

Tracie: awesome.

JESR: If you're interested in a very *different* collection of classic poets, there's always The Stuffed Owl...

It seems so incredibly Dutch...

It's not something I can see as just happening. The whole thing, audience included, has to have been staged. Too many different camera angles for one thing.

But can you imagine that happening anywhere else?

JESR @ 276: Seconding the recommendation for the Norton Anthology of Poetry. It's really got an excellent and broad selection, from medieval to late 20th century. I've kept mine since my college freshman class, well over 30 years ago, and still go dip back into it from time to time. Most recent was to revisit Robinson Jeffers' 'Hurt Hawks', reading it to my son after we had to put our cat Newton to sleep, and that led to my cruising around in it some more for other favorite poetry.

Tracie: I will be grateful if I get a run like hers. But, yeah, the exit is always sad.

JESR @276: Jacque, would that I could email eggs

And, somehow, this seems like a problem that even the most advanced 3D printing won't solve. Woe. :-)

eleven hens laying about six eggs a week apiece

Hm. Meringue as wall insulation? Okay, maybe not.

Stefan Jones @309: Odin Eats Like a Person

Odin appears to be agreeable, though perhaps slightly puzzed as to why we're bothering with this silly spoon when the whole jar is right there.

Older @210: women's Levis came with three measurements: Waist, hip, and inseam.

This would be why, on the (vanishingly, anymore) rare occassions when I shop for jeans, I go with men's sizes. That, and the fact that I generally hate women's styles.

Tracie @333: Rembrandt's The Night Watch

Not to be confused with GRRM's Night's Watch. Ahem.

Praisegod Barebones, do I not recall that you are in the great city of Stamboul? Could you email me at fledgist at comcast dot net as there is something that I would fain enquire of you.

Lizzy @332 -

Not Your Daughter's Jeans are hit and miss for me, but that puts them about 50% ahead of almost any others. You can often find them at around $35 - $40 at Nordstrom Rack, Marshalls or TJ Maxx. I've never bought them in a non-discount store.

My current faves are Calvin Klein "Skinny" jeans, and I can tell you they are anything but skinny - they're just not billowy or drop-butted. They have just enough spandex in them (yeah, try to find plus-size jeans without spandex) to allow them to move, but not so much that they're shapeless denim-colored bin liners by the end of the day. Unfortunately I got these second hand and I have no idea who actually carries them in stores. Google is no help - it appears if they are still carried in stores, they'd prefer you not know that Calvin Klein takes money from fat people.

@Jeans sub-thread: I have been fortunate enough to discover a single style of women's dress pants that fits me, and a type of jeans that fit me, but new clothes are $toomany, and it's most likely that the dress pants are discontinued at this point. So my clothes-buying cycle operates on what I no longer have a presentable version of, and I haven't reached 'pants' yet, since they're presentable, but wearing out.

Dave Bell @338: Aren't most really good flash mobs staged in some sense, though? And then are 'flash' mobs because the general public isn't warned beforehand.

Fragano @341: Email should be hitting your Inbox about now (under my name, but with my nym in the subject line.)

Oh, dear: I unwisely wandered over to Powell's website, intending to find an economically viable volume of the Norton Anthology (which I swear is in the house somewhere, along with other works from my FIL's sermon-writing library) and wandered out with a slim volume of the essential works of Rumi, Gregory Corso's* Gasoline from Pocket Poets, a replacement for the Pocket Poets Garden Poems which I once lent out and did not get back, and a used copy of Rattle Bag with Seamus Heany listed as the sole author.

I zoomed past Spoon River Anthology which I suspect is amidst the unsorted academic slurry in my spawns' ex-bedrooms and wished once again for the five slim small red volumes (of a six volume set: the regency period was missing) which were among my grandmother's teaching library when she was sixteen and the Hanford Reach was homesteader territory with one-room schools on a widely spaced grid. She was the one who wired my brain to the love of poetry, reciting Daffodills and Kublai Khan and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Grew and all the works of her fellow Hoosier Quaker, Whittier.

Thanks for the recommendations. I suspect the Norton will go on my online wishlist. Both the offspring are employed, after all.

*I was reminded of Corso through the Ginsberg photos published last winter. I'd read a lot of his stuff in the early seventies, when I was burning through slightly more than a book a day of everything and spent much time hiding in whatever library was closest.

Lizzy, #332: Yeah, I saw those jeans in a catalog and had serious sticker-shock -- I am NOT paying over $100 for a pair of jeans, I don't care what brand name is on them! OTOH, I've discovered that Gloria Vanderbilts fit me quite well, and frankly I'd rather get my jeans from Goodwill anyhow; that way someone else has gone thru the uncomfortable phase of breaking them in.

Land's End has very consistent fit across styles. If you like the sort of stuff they carry, once you find your size, you can order with confidence, and their return policy is liberal and straightforward if you happen to miss on the first attempt.

Tracie @333: Whoah. That is a hoot!

It happens.

nerdycellist @342: Macy's carries Calvin Klein skinny jeans. You might try their online store.

Apparently it happens more than once.

[Mentioning Calvin Klein, or other designers' names, merits a second look from the gnomes. -- Borei Irisdin, Duty Gnome]

Roger Ebert has died

Between this and yesterday's news about Iain Banks, somebody needs to take Cancer out and give it a good whuppin'.

More bad news -- the American publisher of the Girl Genius novels is folding.

To quote Phil:

You see, there's the whole tedious business of disengaging ourselves from Night Shade, which has decided to sell our contract to another publisher in order to cover their debts. This other publisher, Skyhorse, is perfectly willing to buy Night Shade's assets (our contracts). However, they will rewrite them and everybody now gets paid a flat 10% of net sales.

If I understand the above, that means that the authors may get nothing from Skyhorse, as 10% net can be made to disappear with the right bookkeeping.

Phil's got more up on Facebook and Livejournal.

Tracie (333) -- That was GORGEOUS!! And I don't care how they did it, it was just wonderful! Thank you for posting the link!

Jacque (340)-- You needn't worry about accidentally getting hold of the old style women's Levis; the last time I saw a pair was in the late 1940s. I'm sure they're all gone, unless a pair survives in a trunk in someone's attic.

@349 Dave Crisp

Holy Cow. I was just reading his A Leave of Presence yesterday (which seems to be down for the moment. Probably overwhelmed). He was talking about his new website, and working with his wife Chaz. He talked about the cancer recurrence, but not like death was imminent.

Damn. I didn't always agree with him, but I always liked the way he wrote. An old man of the cinema is gone.

For a link, maybe? Would their lownesses care for some pasta with thyme frico?

Ebert -- who was once quite the SF fan -- did not let cancer taking his jaw and tongue shut him up or defeat him. He wrote passionately and fearlessly about life and death and politics.

From his essay, "I do not fear death":

“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Ebert even wrote an introduction to The Best of Xero, a quintessentialy fannish book, in part because he'd published poetry there. I like to think he would have found the conversations here congenial.

nerdycellist @342, Calvin Klein "skinny" are my jeans of choice as well, and I've had good luck finding them at Nordstrom Rack.

Tom Whitmore @357: Ebert even wrote an introduction to The Best of Xero, a quintessentialy fannish book, in part because he'd published poetry there. I like to think he would have found the conversations here congenial.

One year, I was wearing my Heisenberg t-shirt:

Heisenberg
[equation]
may have
slept here

the day I happened into one panel at the Conference on World Affairs which included Ebert. He was the only one in the room that got it.

Thank you for posting about the Nightwatch renactment, Abi!

I have shared it out on my Facebook page. It made me happy!

Jacque @359 -- that is a lovely bit, and thank you.

That awesome flash mob had to have been rehearsed with store management--chickens and horses, come on, not to mention that frame!--but watch the audience: they have no clue. Multiple people must have been stationed in the crowd to get all those shots.

Jeans sub-thread: Lee, I wish GV jeans fit me, because I really like them, but with the exception of one pair which I am slowly wearing out, no GV jeans are comfortable for me. They changed something in the cut, style, whatever.

I used to be able to buy llbean jeans, but I dropped weight and changed sizes. And I purely hate buying clothes and having to send them back. Also: Goodwill fits my budget.

Still hunting cargo pants...

IJWTS that I am a Goodwill addict even though I'm not particularly hard to fit.

I have various thrift stores to thank for my cashmere sweater, my stash of wool/alpaca blend yarn, and my all-but-complete collection of the Aubrey and Maturin series (I lack only two).

We have a local used car dealer whose sign reads "Everybody drives a used car". I feel the same way about books and clothing.

Benjamin Wolfe @319 Thanks for the recommendations; I'm now curious about cold-brew coffee, despite being distinctly unfond of the hot-brew stuff.

I've discovered that cold-brew tea is easy, reasonable-tasting, and nearly impossible to over-steep, particularly if you start with very cold water. It also doesn't take as long as cold-brew coffee seems to, possibly due to volume considerations.

Charlie Stross @325: I picked up Feersum Endjinn and Complicity from the library today; I'm a little under halfway through Feersum Endjinn and thoroughly hooked.

Lori Coulson @352: Oh no! :(

Lee @346: … the uncomfortable phase of breaking them in.
I have a pair of Levi's 501s, and it feels like I have to break them in all over again for the first hour I wear them after washing.

Tracie @333: I just got a chance to actually watch that video, and migod it's wonderful

lazy double dactyl

Narcissist punditry
Fabricates victory
Willfully, skillfully
Skifting unchecked.

Fractal iniquity
Shows its ubiquity
With all the subtlety
One would expect.

estelendur, it's pretty much impossible to overbrew cold-brew coffee; most of the compounds people don't like (e.g., acids and bitterness) aren't readily soluble at low temperatures. I don't know if I'd leave water on grounds in the fridge for a week, but 24-48hrs should be fine. If you wanted a process that was as slow as possible, use as coarse a grind as you can; the less surface area, the slower the extraction process. An added bonus with a really coarse grind is that it's pretty easy to filter, since it'll be less prone to plug up a fine filter.

1. My condolences, Tracie. She sounds as though she had a good innings, as they are wont to say across the pond. (At least, I hope I've got the phrase right...)

2. I have not yet had the opportunity to use the site (lack of funds + mostly acceptable jeans that are just starting to wear out), but Make Your Own Jeans (plus the dot com) seems to be a good thing, and moderately priced for correctly-fitted jeans (about $50 to start.)

3. In regards to bras, the best method I have for getting sized is to go to one of those little storefronts that is run by a bunch of middle-aged to elderly ladies, and have them size you. My sister-in-law took me to one of them and they did three measurements and asked one question ("Do you like underwires?") and provided me with correctly-fitted bras in five minutes. And my SiL's daughter has one of those crazy sizes (small band, big bust) that they will tailor for her, no charge, on bras that are almost right. It's worth doing.

4. Musical soundtracks and nobody has mentioned Bear McCreary? And if you can't take all the drumming, try Murray Gold's Doctor Who soundtrack stuff. Some of it is quite lyrical and I'm still a little surprised that they didn't think to use "Song of Freedom" for the Olympics.

On the Rembrandt flash-mob...

What would the Mall Ninja do?

Early Cooley III @366: Lazy nothing, that's catchy. I applaud it.

Dave Bell (369): When the actors started charging in with pikes, I was envisioning the frantic calls to the police* and hoping that they'd given the authorities an adequate heads-up.

*"The mall's being attacked by terrorists in funny clothes!!"

Stefan Jones @359 re Roger Ebert: I really like his summing up his political beliefs as "kindness".
It reminds me of a person who said, "My religion is 'Love one another' and my politics is 'Stick together'."
Also the Bill and Ted religion, whose Two Commandments are "Be excellent to each other" and "Party on, dude".
In The Christmas Mutiny, I had a character listen to Schiller's Ode to Freedom (aka Ode to Joy) and actually pay attention to the lyrics, and really think about them. She realizes just how profound the concept "All men are brothers" really is.

Dave Crisp @351, the attempt to take cancer out and give it a good whuppin' has been ongoing for some decades now. Science is still trying to locate its butt . . . .

John M Burt@ 372: Then there's Brian's religion: "You must all think for yourselves", and "Always look on the bright side of life".

Hyper-local news slash all knowledge is contained on Making Light: I got bad news about a job application. I continue to jobsearch. Before I hit my usual internet jobsites, does anyone know of an opening for someone who knows biology, writing, and some special education?

I mentioned my eternal search for employment. What's it like being a gnome?

Fade Manley @370: I called my #366 a lazy double dactyl because, unlike the pure form, it has no six-syllable word, and the first line doesn't have a nonsense phrase.

Tracie #246: My condolences, and may her memory be a blessing.

HLN: Area woman goes to DC, eats dinner with Jon Singer, and then gets sat down in front of a gamelan instrument with a hammer in her hand. WHEEEEE! Hard and fun, although my arm is kind of sore today. Singer said I did pretty well, and the director said I could come back the next time I was in town. If I ever live within reasonable range of a group, I'm joining it.

I thought some folks here might be interested in "Fight Like a Girl", a Kickstarter project to put together an anthology of short stories which "will explore the strong female protagonist in a genre where the female is typically the “damsel in distress.”"

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869717111/fight-like-a-girl-a-short-story-anthology

For some reason, every time I try to embed the URL, it disappears at preview. Does Kickstarter bug the gnomes a lot?

Fat Girl in a Strange Land is sf about fat girls and women, and a lot of it is heroic.

Dave Bell @ 369: Thank you so much for the vision of Mall Ninja confounded by the Rembrandt flash-mob!

"Kickstarter" doesn't bug the gnomes at all, but failing to put quote-marks around URLs inside of their anchor-links causes those URLs to vanish in Moveable Type.

@383 Jim Macdonald

And I redid it three times. Fie.

Procrastination is its own reward,
But deadlines take their toll; no, can't protest.
Inertia is a double edgéd sword,
And eloquence a fickle friend at best.

Nancy, #381: I notice that one of the stories in that anthology is titled "Marilee and the SOB", and I have to wonder if that's in honor of Marilee Layman.

ClF₃ness:

Derek Lowe has a video of what happens when chlorine trifluoride encounters common lab safety equipment.

I've been trying cold-brewed coffee.

It's easier at home than in Cory Doctorow's hotel room. And you don't have to worry about seeing Cory Doctorow in his pajamas. I just used my usual cafetiere with cold water, left in the fridge overnight, and, once the grounds were out of the way, heated in the microwave.

The results were quite good. If you want to try this method, you either need a microwave-safe mug or a suitable saucepan. I found that the cafetiere filter didn't catch all the coffee grounds, but they sank to the bottom of the plastic saucepan.

I wasn't brewing any of the fancy styles of coffee. That might be different.

thomas #387: Chlorine triflouride? Ye gods, that already sounds scary!

David @389: for added shits and giggles, google on FOOF, aka difluorine dioxide. Makes ClF3 seem tame.

#386 ::: Lee

I'm pretty sure that's just a coincidence of names. It's an excellent story, though.

#387 ::: thomas

Chasing through links led to a bookseller's rant against PODs of rare books.

Dave Bell at 388 I'm not sure how much of an issue this is with a normal cold-brew method, but with Black Blood of the Earth, the advice is to add hot water to the coffee, rather than heating the coffee itself. I haven't done cold brewing myself, so this may not apply at all, but if you happen to be getting more bitterness or harshness compared to the cold extract, this may be why.

I'm reminded, from the whole coffee subthread, that I should make Mad Scientist Coffee this weekend (using my tabletop vacuum siphon pot). Now that's a brewing method.

Admittedly, a brewing method for the obsessed. Who don't mind extensive cleanup and the need to fuel the thing.

Jo Walton has written a fabulous not-an-author-bio.

In hyperlocal news, I am pondering divesting myself of many books. The reason for hoarding them was "I'm going to want to re-read them, and I won't be able to find them!" I'm realizing that I don't re-read that much, and that in the age of being able to shop for books on the internet, I can find most anything. I must, of course, keep every volume of Elizabeth Peters, because those are my solace. And Jo Clayton, because they're so fun, and they haven't been brought out in ebooks, and those old paperbacks are falling apart. Oh, this isn't going to be easy.

Nancy, #391: Wow, that's a real case of Special Snowflake Syndrome. Grumping about not being able to make money on antique copies when POD reproductions are available is understandable, but also a symptom of the inability to understand that different people have different priorities; if what you want is the content of the book, its antique-rarity value* is irrelevant. But when he goes on to speculate that his personal searches for antique books are triggering floods of POD reproductions... dude, you are NOT the center of the universe!

* Yes, and many people will buy a reproduction of a piece of antique furniture rather than the real thing which not only "shows slight signs of wear" but is also 7 or 8 times the price because of its antique-rarity factor. This doesn't mean they're Philistines; it means they want a pretty table and don't care whether it's old or not.

Lee, Nancy: I wonder what he would make of my beloved paperback facsimile of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which is published by a traditional publisher rather than a print-on-demand outfit, or my overwhelming joy at finding a scanned Google Books copy of La Belle Assemblée and another one of an 1820 book called The Complete Servant?

I'd LOVE to get my hands on a copy of Ackermann's Repository. I would prefer a scanned copy or a facsimile, really, because I want to read the hell out of it, ans I would hate to damage a valuable artifact.

Books-as-artifacts are precious to me. If I had access to an artifact, I would wear gloves, and keep it away from light that might fade it, and get all sorts of shivery feelings about touching the past and who else might have touched it.

But the content of books is even more important. That 1820 book? Had a table of hackney fares from various points in London to the major theaters and entertainment venues. That is priceless to me, and if I had to track down a rare, valuable artifact to get that information, or depend on finding a scholar who had, I'd probably never get it. Instead, I'm sitting here rubbing my hands and chortling while I decide how to drop a reference into my story.

How is a POD replica different from a traditionally-published replica (like my Hannah Glasse)? And what makes it more offensive than my non-replica reprint of the anonymous Memoirs of a Sergeant written by a member of the 43rd Light Infantry during the Peninsular War? Which is also available on Google Books. The Google Books version might actually be easier to use because of the electronic bookmarks -- I'd have to festoon the paper copy with tape flags.

His argument makes very little sense to me.

Rikibeth @396: I agree. There are books that I really want to access in order to get information from them, and I'd much rather have a replica I can have on my bookshelf - or an electronic copy - that I can actually use, rather than have to go to the British Library and handle with care etc. Doesn't mean I wouldn't want to buy some of them as originals, if I could afford to, because I love old books - but that's two different aspects, two different markets.

Charlie #390: yes, but people actually use ClF₃ for stuff. In scarily large quantities. FOOF is only used for investigating the properties of FOOF (ok, or for yet-undiscovered Russian secret rocket research)

janetl @ 394

That non-bio Jo Walton wrote is wonderful; thank you for linking to it.

I'm not finding many books I'm willing to let go of, though I did a major culling when everything came out of storage in 2006 and 2/3 of it had to go back. Even with the Kindle, and with having Kindle duplicates of books I have in dead tree format.

I too must keep every volume of Elizabeth Peters. (Some had been in storage, and are now back in the apartment. Did the same with Simak. And Dana Stabenow. And C.J. Cherryh. And the hardcover six volume sets of Trollope's Barsetshire chronicles, ditto the Palliser books.)

The next time I go to the storage locker, I'm going to have to find which of the "SF/F | C" cartons has all the Jo Clayton ones, and bring them to the apartment. And it'll all be your fault. (Riiiiiiight. *grin*)

I re-read. I snag used books from Thriftbooks. The county library system has an excellent selection of SF&F, and has usually been able to add books they'd not bought, for which I've put in requests (the latest I'd asked them to acquire? Midnight Blue-Light Special, which I picked up this afternoon). Also got Look to Windward, Protector, and River of Stars this week.

("Hello. My name is Glenda, and I'm a reading addict.")

Words of power? Punctuation errors? I can offer peanut butter cookies, made from my mother's recipe, before the day's over.

Re the "Penguin trips; Fox News recreates encounter with bear" Particle... on first reading, I did not realize that these were separate and unconnected things, and thus was envisioning a news clip in which Fox News took an image of a penguin tripping over something, created an entire story around it out of whole cloth, and then broadcast it as factual, as they do with so many other things.

I'm not sure whether to be more amused or relieved about having been in error.

@janetl: It was very had to do my first library-pruning.

One of the things that made it easy was the prospect of getting money for them at Powell's. We're not talking riches, but it is an incentive. And you can picture your books carefully arranged on a Powell's shelf and purchased by someone looking just for it.

I did a second pruning before my move, and as I shelved books in my new house I found myself thinking "you know, I don't think I'll read this again" as I picked up many novels and comics.

There are annoyances. Almost new hardcovers by major authors get rejected out of hand. "He hasn't written much lately so his stuff isn't moving."

Balanced by surprises. Like the signed C.J. Cherryh ARC which netted me $5.00 or so (they'll sell it for $20 or more).

I was reminded today that one of the things I like about the Bay Area is the abundance of really amazing produce, and that it comes in earlier than my east coast upbringing says is possible. Right now, this means local, cheap (less than $2/lb) asparagus, which also means that our fridge has several pounds in it.

I've also found a fun use for it, aside from our usual roasted or lightly sauteed dishes: Israeli couscous with Meyer lemon, asparagus and tarragon. Imagine something closer to risotto than couscous, and you've about got it. It was very much what my Amazing Girlfriend wanted.

I'm hoping to get rid of the books I'm not going to read. Is it worth shipping them to Powells, or is this just something that makes sense if there's a Powells in the area?

@Nancy: I believe Powell's does to remote buy-back, but the shipping costs might not make it worthwhile except for extraordinary items.

Re. rare books, old books versus POD, one of the things I like about second hand books is their history/ origin. I've got books that started their life in libraries belonging to institutions as varied as the foreign office, an obscure college in Wales, Grimsby public libraries; books from famous old universities the length and breadth of the land and even a book on the history of alchemy from Shaker Heights public library, Ohio.
You can guess or fantasise about why they were purchased, why they were disposed of, and who might have read them and learnt or been inspired.
Sometimes you find little things inside them, used as bookmarks, from old bus tickets to a photograph. In fact many embody the changes in library cataloging and methods of lending books out, from the little cards in pockets to modern barcodes.

Sometimes they have a list of names in the front cover, as they changed owner and the new one crossed out the old and put their own in. Other ones have amusing bookplates.
One has been to Oflag IVb and back again.

I presume that people here have similar experiences?

If you have the patience for it, you can type the ISBNs of all books you want to sell to Powell's into a form on their website and it will tell you which they will buy and how much for.

It's an automated system and sometimes for more unusual books I think going in person to a knowledgeable buyer would have better results. For MMPs and the like, it works fine. Powells pays for shipping once you've accepted their offer on your books.

So Friday night we were listening to music on the radio, and Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do came up. I sang along, realizing how many of the stream-of-consciousness lyrics I still knew by heart. Then I realized what an odd song it was, really, to be a pop song. That led to thinking of another song that, similarly, is a trailing stream of poetry painting a portrait of a very particular place and its people, interrupted by choruses: Tom's Diner, by Suzanne Vega.

Then I kind of went to an academic-wondering place: are there more songs like this? All I Wanna Do was published in 1993. Tom's Diner was written in 1981 and published in 1984. That's not close enough together to really be a 'thing' or a 'style' that happened in a certain time ...

Can you kind Fluorospherians remember any other songs like this, that got popsong/radio recognition while being long nonrhyming portraits of a very specific time and some people?

Elliott

I don't suppose "Alice's Restaurant" counts?

Elliott Mason @408 -- some slightly obvious ones are "Alice's Restaurant" (which isn't even mostly sung!) and "American Pie" (which rhymes, but otherwise fits your criteria nicely). Al Stewart's "Soho (Needless to Say)" is a pretty wonderful pattersong that got some airplay (and his "Year of the Cat" got even more). Stewart's rhyming patterns and grasp of history are really complex, and I recommend him highly. I think there might actually be an interesting paper in the comparison of pattersongs with rap, if one were willing to take the flak that comes from making such a comparison.

Guthrie @406 -- Don't get me started. Oh, all right, three amusing ones: I own the dedicatee's copy of Second Stage Lensman, a copy of A Critique of the Theory of Evolution that belonged to a major evolutionist who taught at Berkeley, and a copy of The Man in the Queue by Gordon Daviot, first US edition, which has a postcard signed as by Daviot to the publisher of her first paperbacks. She's better known as Josephine Tey, and signatures of hers are remarkably difficult to find. And then there are the books inscribed to me -- lots of proofs, but also things like the limited edition of Amphigorey with an original Gorey drawing of a cat. Not likely to be in someone else's collection until I die, though. If you're near Seattle, I could show you things you might not believe. Too bad I don't still have the original ms of Aleister Crowley's The Book of the Law, though.

Clifton @ #178, et seq.:

David Attenborough presents The Splendid Lyrebird, from "The Life of Birds".

Doves on the porch rail
Nesting again for the spring
Cats watch chittering.

guthrie at 406 Oh my, yes. My entire family has a used book habit that verges on hilarious (My family's idea of a good time on the weekend is to hit used bookstores. Lots of used bookstores). Your comment reminded me of one of my great finds - I was at the Harvard Library booksale in 2007 or so, bought several boxes of books - and when I went through them in 2011 (they'd lived in my parents' attic because I was either living on campus or in Nashville; I shipped about half of them out to myself in Berkeley after starting grad school), I found that one of the volumes of Troland's Psycho-Physiology turned out to be a signed copy. Since he was Harvard faculty, my theory is that this was a personal copy that was given to their library after he passed away.

guthrie @406, all of what you describe is a delight, but when I crave the information in an old book, all of that is secondary. If the old book weren't available to me, ex-library copy or otherwise, the pleasures of a different old physical book wouldn't compensate.

In related news, it's one thing to know, from hotel brochures, that an inn you once stayed at is an old coaching inn dating back several centuries, and quite another to find it in an 1810 list of inns along major coaching routes and have an instant visual memory of it, with the eureka of "I stayed there!"

In #413, Benjamin Wolfe writes:
My entire family has a used book habit that verges on hilarious (My family's idea of a good time on the weekend is to hit used bookstores. Lots of used bookstores).

Would they be looking to adopt a son?

Nifty art project: A guy built a pinhole camera into a parcel and mailed it, getting a stop-motion view of everything that happened to it on its journey.

I think they're probably good with me and my two brothers; we've all got the family used book habit.

When my parents bought the house they live in c.1993, the primary feature was the large number of floor to ceiling bookcases. They've installed lots more in the subsequent two decades, and they're mostly (if not completely) full. I'd estimate my parents have well in excess of 10000 books in the house - and my father probably has another thousand or so across two offices.

That said, the family motto is "there's no such thing as too many books."

Benjamin Wolfe (418): That needs to be a motto? I would have said it's self-evident. Axiomatic, even.

Mary Aileen, I'd agree - up to the point where storage and accessibility becomes an issue. My girlfriend and I are nearly out of useful space for books in our current apartment. This isn't the reason we've given notice and are hunting for a new place, but it's certainly a contributing factor. I'm hoping that whatever place we find means that we can wrangle more book storage.

@416 Elliott Mason

Looking at the inside of that package, I'm kind of surprised it made it through the system without being scanned and stopped as a possible explosive device.

We have a storage locker which is home for a lot of my books, Benjamin. It's also got a lot of fanzines in it. I'm actually going through the boxes currently to try to get rid of (for example) 10 year old bills that have long since been paid.

PNH, one of our hosts, said to me recently that he's taken to thinking, around books, not "Might I have some use for this?", but "What's the worst that would happen if I let go of this and needed it sometime in the future?" We all know people who could be sources of the books we might want, with a 48-hour or so turnaround time. I'm not really able to move my thoughts in that direction yet, but it's an interesting idea.

With the fanzines, I'm discovering that even the major libraries don't actually have copies of some things I've got. That thought does not fill me with joy. While we can't all be the great archivists, it's still nice to make sure that things don't get lost.

I've started to think in somewhat the same direction as PNH; most of my nonacademic reading comes from one of two publishers (Baen and Tor, respectively), both of whom don't add DRM to their ebooks, which means that I've got some hope of reading the files once the gadget of the moment dies on me. So, since I can (and it makes sense to do so), I've taken to buying what I can digitally. The only thing that's stopping me from doing that entirely is that I've got sets of various series in progress, and I like having the physical books. I'd also like to make sure that the authors whose work I enjoy get paid maximally for it, so I've got a few authors where I buy their newest book in hardcover when released (now, if the Fluorosphere tells me that the royalty rate between first-release ebook and hardcover is functionally identical from the author's perspective, I might just switch to ebooks for that too).

There's a lot of work out there that's available from various companies' warehouses and/or online archives, but there's a certain amount of it that's on my "see it, buy it" list. In particular, books on my topic of research are very intermittently digitized (unsurprisingly, MIT press is good about it, Oxford University Press is also good about it, but only for relatively recent work). Interestingly, if I'm looking for work prior to 1920, it might well be digitized (I'm looking at you, Huey, 1908 on Reading), but the midcentury works - up through the late 1990s - are very hard to find online.

I don't think I'm giving up the joy of browsing a used bookstore anytime soon, but the combination of large used databases and a rapidly expanding ebook market is changing how I acquire books.

I admit to loving the joy of the physical book, and the amazing feeling when I find something that I didn't know existed: most recently, finding in a used bookstore a book which my grandmother inscribed to another major woman in the print business between WWI and WWII. And I'm still somewhat old-school on illustrated books, where the cheap POD versions really don't cut it at all (Kay Nielsen and Harry Clarke for drawing; Sam Haskins and Jock Sturges for photography, just as examples). And the quality of the paper does make a difference -- the original paper on the Kelmscott Chaucer is an amazing sensual experience! If I just want the text, digital is fine. But there's more to books than text.

Benjamin Wolfe (420): There's no such thing as too many books. There is, however, such a thing as not enough room to keep them all.

My father is - thirty years since they moved out of the apartment in question - fond of telling me that he and my mother used their entire second bedroom as a library, with stacks. Done in finest 1970s grad student cinderblock and board - which I wouldn't dare to do out here in the Bay Area. The blocks and boards survived until my childhood; not as book storage, but eventually repurposed into a series of outdoor forts and basement construction projects by the collective Wolfe brothers.

I can only aspire to such greatness.

Open threadiness: The worldwide petition to require all clinical trial results to be published has only about 25% more signatures than the US-only petition to build a Death Star did. If you think this is unfortunate, you can find the petition at Alltrials.net.

When I moved last year, my cousin told me I had too many books, which must be some kind of oxymoron.

I just don't have enough bookshelves.

I grew up in a house where books dominated almost every room and hallway. And it was in California, and no earthquakes actually collapsed bookshelves in that house (the Loma Prieta quake collapsed shelves in a later house I lived in). And my parents never unpacked many boxes of books from when they moved in 1959 before they died -- I have some interesting nice early paperbacks because of this.

I wonder whether there was a slight tendency towards bibliomania in our parents' generation, and how that will play out in the new digital age.

HLN: Area man comes in a close second in the Sunday Swiss Teams at the sectional bridge tournament -- in the A/X, which in Houston means a field containing multiple Grand Life Masters, some of whom have represented the USA in international competition. (One player on the team that won the event went over 10,000 masterpoints thereby, thus achieving the title of Grand Life Master.) Area man considers this his best bridge result to date.

It's not that the bookshelves themselves worry me, more that I'd rather not make brick and board ones here (it just seems like asking for trouble). It's a bit of a moot point - at the moment, we've run out of space for any more bookshelves.

Speaking for myself, I think my generation (at least, those that read for fun) is inclined toward combined biblomania and infomania*. Those of us who read for fun do it voraciously and often as a part of larger communities online (makes waving motion in the direction of Tor.com, which keeps poking me towards things I should be reading). We're also quite comfortable with digital media, and probably spent a healthy chunk of college watching or listening to things on our computers. Which means that even now, with the advent of useful streaming services for video and music, we have immense libraries of various things squirreled away on our hard drives. In some ways, this has been facilitated by the advent of really cheap storage (I'm typing this on a tower with my entire archive squatting on about half a 3TB drive), in other ways, it makes us into digital packrats. Not that I mind; it's lovely to have what I want handy in some form or other.

*Not quite the right word; an obsession with information sort of gets at this idea; it's perhaps closer to digital hoarding (think MP3s and videos).

Friends help you move. REAL friends help you move books.

AKICIML: I have a largish batch of matte black onyx bead strands in different shapes, which have faded to an unattractive ash-grey. Rubbing water over the surface rejuvenates them, but obviously will not solve the problem in the long term. Google is not helping, or else my Google-fu is not strong enough. Does anyone here know of a good way to restore the pretty matte-black finish on these beads and have it stay that way?

I grew up in a house that had more books than any other I was aware of until college. I wish I could say they introduced me to the world of literature, but I was a primarily a reader of science and science fiction . . . the former of which my father the English teacher was indifferent to, the latter of which he despised. (I take great and somewhat perverse pride in having introduced my mother to Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, and a few others.)

My parents actually sold books off of a blanket in Union Square as they were getting ready to move off of Long Island. I ended up with a box full of somewhat-valuable first editions which I got around to selling a few years back. I'd rather they be in the hands of people who really value them. It *was* neat having the 1st edition of Elmer Gantry, but a paperback copy is good enough for me. And I'll probably sell that before my next move, and go to the library if I want to read the book.

I did end up with the towering bookshelves that loomed over me as a toddler: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/8305979440/in/set-72157631814658425/

WRT bookshelves, I wonder how they will be regarded fifty to one hundred years from now? I mean, we have ten bookcases of various sizes in our house, full to overflowing, but I don't see that being that big a thing in a world of e-books.

In 1969, my family moved from the UK to Canada. We brought about 30 wooden boxes, roughly four cubic feet each. Half of them were books, this was the absolutely essential books after whittling down the collection/accumulation.

Lee @432: Under what conditions did they fade? (Left in sunlight? Washed with some kind of cleaner? Soaked in water? Put through an ultrasonic cleaner? Polished with abrasives? Other?)

Most (maybe nearly all) black onyx is dyed. If it is polished, that dyed portion of the surface can be removed. If that's what happened, what you may be seeing is the natural grey color of the agate before it was color-treated. (It sounds like the common color treatment has historically involved sugar, heat, and sulphuric acid.) Apparently soaking in water can remove the color as well.

@Steve:

I suspect we'll always have (physical) books.

But almost certainly a lot fewer of them per household.

The books we choose to keep around in physical form will be special. Art books, certain prized works of literature.

Speculating: book cases will fewer, but will be "fancy," as much for display as storage. They'll have lighting, glass doors, perhaps even climate control.

Lee, here's an article from Modern Jeweler on black onyx. The second page talks about the sugar-acid method in some detail. I couldn't recommend it trying it yourself; sounds rather risky unless you are regularly doing fun things with water and sulfuric acid and have an excellent safety record therewith.

(And here, have another article on onyx by some nice people who enjoy catching Webster's dictionary in errors, and to whom some nice person should indeed donate a copy of the OED.)

In short, I think you're stuck with grey beads, alas. Unless you want to try soaking them in ink, but I doubt that's likely to do as good a job as you want. Sounds messy, too.

(Miss Teresa likes playing with beads and interesting liquids, but she's mostly taking the color out of them rather than adding any in.)

The gnomes have a post with two URLs about color-treating chalcedony or agate to make black onyx. They can have some of this sugar, if they like; I don't recommend that they try the sulfuric acid, though.

435
In 1966 we moved, and had something like 35 orange boxes (like a small packing box, about 1.5 cubic ft) of books. My parents got rid of quite a few in 1980, when they next moved, but there were still a lot. (I miss Dante's Divine Comedy with Dore's engravings.)

Tom Whitmore@410: *startle reflex*. You turn out to be about a mile from me.

My recent emotional twinge away from bookcases lining most walls of my house is related to a couple of things:
1. Pondering moving.
2. House too small for some things we'd like to re-arrange (obviously related to #1).
3. Getting way too much information about subduction zone earthquakes, which has me eyeing things around the house that would fall on me. Remember—earthquakes don't kill you; falling debris does. Tall, sturdy oak bookcases aren't my friend. Yes, I can bolt them to the wall, but a friend's china hutch in Watsonville, California ripped the bolts out of the studs during the Loma Prieta quake. That quake was a 6.9 and lasted 10-15 seconds. A subduction earthquake is likely to last 5 minutes, and be > 7.

Once my Community Emergency Response Team training is over, and I'm not marinating in omigod-we're-all-gonna-die, these thoughts should diminish.

(The instructors aren't saying we're all gonna die. Our performance on the training exercises is!)

HelenS @441 -- want to see some books? (We could have a mini-Seattle Gathering of Light...)

elise, #436: No, they've just been sitting in a drawer for several years, marinating in my stash. What appears to have happened is that they were originally treated with some sort of volatile to bring up the color, which has since evaporated. Rubbing them with water brings them back to looking as they did when I bought them, and that does last for a while. I suppose I could use them and provide a "care card" explaining that they can be wiped with a damp cloth if they start to grey out, but I was hoping for something a little more elegant.

I'm a sucker for matte-finished stones, and have bought strands of several other types. The black onyx are the only ones which have ever done this fading-out thing. Also, I have a shit-ton of polished black onyx, and none of it has ever faded at all.

If anyone is curious, here are some catalog photos of matte black onyx beads. You can see that they have a very different finish from the usual shiny black, but still very definitely black and not ashy grey.

Possibly for including a link to a commercial website.

In regards to being bitter about the POD publishers clogging up the used book websites: I can sympathize with that, though not with dismissing people who would just like a reading copy. I've been burnt a couple of times because Amazon doesn't do a good job of tracking editions. Case and the Dreamer is both an a SFBC title and part of the the estimable North Atlantic Books series (now complete and available as ebooks) of the complete short fiction (including previously unpublished works) of Theodore Sturgeon.

I'm not up for writing the whole saga, but I would like to own the edition of Under Milkwood which is illuminated by Sheila Waters, but Amazon is absolutely not reliable about it's used listings, though they have a good return policy.

If PODs of rare books are as bad about proof-reading as the link at 391 implies, it matters, even if all you want is a reading copy.

"She forgot / so many things before she lost her mind"

Lee @440, I wonder if some kind of clearcoat would do it. The sort of thing they advertise on late-night TV to "bring back the luster of your old car". Of course, that might result in the beads being too shiny for your tastes. (Do they make matt-finish clear nailpolish...?)

Lee: If wetting the surface of the matte onyx with water darkens them sufficiently for your taste, you may be able to achieve a more (semi-)permanent effect by lightly oiling them.

Tramp the dirt down.

Stefan Jones @ # 433, I spent most of my youth looking in vain for the books whenever I visited someone else's house. (vide the remark of Charles Darwin's son George when he visited a friend's house: "Where does your father study his barnacles?")

janetl, I have one more class to go in my initial CERT training. Then next week is the Big Exercise. (Our county no longer has a CERT team; the University of Georgia's team is graciously allowing me to join them even though my only affiliation with U.Ga. is my diploma.)

We don't have earthquakes to amount to anything. Tornadoes, we got.

Margaret Thatcher has died, apparently of a stroke.

Jon Meltzer, #450: I think my Sidelight beat your link by 43 minutes.

The more links to that, the better.

Decades too late. Another perspective from the pen of Elvis Costello:

It's just a rumour that was spread around town
A telegram or a picture postcard
Within weeks they'll be reopening the shipyards
And notifying the next of kin, once again
It's all we're skilled in
We will be shipbuilding

Thatcher's legacy

BBC website, March 26, 1999:

Baroness Thatcher has visited General Pinochet at the home where he is staying under house arrest near London - and talked of the "debt" she believes the UK owes him.

The former UK prime minister met with the one-time Chilean dictator in a rare public appearance televised live from the house in Wentworth, Surrey.

General Pinochet is staying in the rented mansion during his legal battle to avoid extradition to Spain.

Lady Thatcher thanked her old friend for being an ally during the 1982 Falklands War - and for "bringing democracy to Chile".

Elvis's web site. Turn the sound on.

The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land - Margaret Thatcher, 1987

Tramp the dirt down.

Lila @ 451: Good for you! I thought this seemed like a group that might have other people doing CERT.

Our training did mention tornados, briefly. Portland has had one significant tornado, back in 1972. It killed 6 people and injured 300.

I'm guessing that your CERT training didn't do a segment on volcanic eruptions, either? The volcano inside the city limits is a very old cinder cone and unlikely to erupt, but the two about 60 miles away definitely can erupt. You'll remember Mount St. Helens' eruption in 1980. We wouldn't get lava flows here, but the ash is treacherous, and can collapse a roof.

The scary things about earthquakes are (1) there's no warning, and (2) a subduction one will do so much damage that help will be very slow to get in. Our CERT training in triage and treatment includes the unspoken thought that it could be weeks before that splinted leg gets real medical treatment. Anything life-threatening...will be more than a threat.

janetl, nope, no volcanoes here (the last volcanic activity in this part of the world was hundreds of millions of years ago--we have an old pluton nearby called Stone Mountain). We cover severe weather (tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, hurricanes), fires, active shooter events a la Virginia Tech, highway/train disasters (derailment, school bus wrecks), and light search and rescue (e.g. lost kid at the state botanical garden). We also get some mention of terrorism and CBRNE but mainly in the context of "don't go in there, you don't have the training". (There are some chemical, biological and radiological hazards on campus; the area around here has some petroleum storage and a fair amount of train traffic, sometimes carrying various chemicals.)

It's an interesting place to do CERT training, as U.Ga. has a very well-equipped police force (the U.Ga. bomb squad is actually the bomb squad for the entire region) and some pretty high-powered terrorism experts, one of whom came to talk to us. They're also really into disaster drills--they ran an active shooter drill for the FBI--and they like to use CERT team members as volunteer victims for those drills.

One of the team's specific duties is that if Athens receives evacuees from a hurricane or similar, the CERT team sets up and runs the pet shelter for the evacuees' pets, with help from the U.Ga. vet school. (Lesson learned post Katrina.)

I have no doubt that history is going to mention Margaret Thatcher, maybe for as long as Oliver Cromwell has been remembered, and with some of the same sort of intensely divided opinions. Cromwell changed his world.

Just to be different, I suppose this is good advice....

There may be trouble ahead
But while there's moonlight and music
And love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

Before the fiddlers have fled
Before they ask us to pay the bill
And while we still
Have the chance
Let's face the music and dance

Lila @461: I misread that as "search and rescue (e.g. lost kid at the satanic botanical garden)" at first. Sounds like a gaming module!

463
A garden that prominently features plants that are dangerous in one or another way?

elise: Hah! I should totally write that module. We do have a few satanic plants here (poison ivy and kudzu), but otherwise it's not a particularly satanic garden. Still, I'm sure if they can get allspice and papaya to grow in the conservatory, they could manage, say, manchineel. And they could bring back the Iron Horse, which some have found threatening, if not satanic.

Stefan et al, thank your for discussing selling books to Powell's. I'm facing the great book cull following my mother's death. There are to books in the basement rec room -- probably a complete loss due to water damage. The books in the main house -- nonfiction, sf, fantasy, mysteries, cookbooks, quilting and needlework books. Thousands. Some more cookbooks in the garage, in remarkably good condition. Then there are the two libraries in the "cabin" in the mountains (actually a 2000 sq ft house). After fillng the original library, living room, and loft office with books, my father built a 16x20 library addition. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling military history, which is going to the Army Institute of History (they are salivating). Several levels of book boxes from the main house. The remarkable thing is that my parents read almost all of these.

And all this is before I get to my own library. I think it's genetic.

We had a box turtle named Margaret Thatcher. She escaped into the lawn, never to be seen again. For all I know, she may still be trundling around Schaumburg, looking for tasty bugs to eat. She was a good deal less destructive than the other Margaret Thatcher - reptiles rarely have the opportunity for evil that heads of state do. Although who knows - perhaps given opposable thumbs and a healthy amount of Tory support, that box turtle could have also single-handedly brought down several industries, privatised previously public industries to the point of uselessness and befriended murderous dictators as well. I miss that turtle.

Word of power? Extra spaces? Careless punctuation??

I'm in a years long unoccupied house, packing stuff, so no goodies for a while. But I can make some tea.

[Word (or words) of power: "thank your for" (with typo). -- Roollertoop Bortki, Duty Gnome]

Unsurprisingly, Elvis Costello's site (www.elviscostello.com) is loading glacially, probably due to being hammered from all over the world.

Hyperlocal news... Local fan is told that local writer was offered the chance to play a Dothraki horseman on "Game of Thrones", but local writer decided that the Moroccan desert was too cold for him to go around half-naked.

janetl @394: Odd, I would have thought it much more difficult to write a bio that is chocolate....

A lesson in the importance of interCaps: The #NowThatcherIsDead hashtag on Twitter, typed all lower-case, is upsetting Cher fans.

On the old books subthread, I just ran across The Red Book by Carl Jung. Wish I had a spare $2C....

I am not in any sense celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher. It came far too late to do any good.

Jacque (359) -- Some years ago, when I had had a bad day at work (they were common then), I nevertheless arrived at home in high spirits, because I had seen not one, but two wonderful bumper stickers on the way home.

One was "Heisenberg may have slept here" (all the better for being on a moving vehicle) and the other was "Honey lovers stick together".

They are still my all-time favorites.

Jacque @473, plus another few hundred for the bag to carry it in.

Nerdycellist: I used to say to myself that the attitude of menswear stores (department stores) was that Fat Men Don't Deserve Natural Fibers. The biggest sizes Sterns used to carry were polyester, instead of the more usual cotton/poly or all-cotton shirts I want to buy.

I've been a loyal JCPenney customer for years, because their big-men's department strikes a good balance between price and quality. The other specialty fat-men's stores, such as Casual Male XL or King Size, have problems - Casual Male shirts and pants are 2-3x as expensive as JCP, while King Size mostly sells weird colors that I wouldn't want to wear. I've bought pants from them that went straight into the recycle bin. The color looks OK in the catalogue, but in real life, it looks like something worn by old men in Florida.

I was in a bit of a panic this winter, as two of my long-sleeve shirts wore through at the elbow at the same time, but JCP was having stock problems - nothing was in stock in the big men's department, because of their falling sales in general, I guess. Well, if you can't get the inventory, how do you expect to make sales? They seem to be getting more inventory now, though.

Elliot Mason @408 -- this has been niggling at me, so I was relieved when something occurred to me. Would you count REM's "Daysleeper" from 1997? There are some rhymes, but overall it has an episodic, this-is-happening-now vibe.

The News coverage about Margaret Thatcher is getting tedious. Lead story? That's OK, but it seems to be the only story, even on the continuous news channels.

And I find myself what announcements the scum have been putting out, knowing they will not be noticed.

Julie, #449: Not having any non-cooking oil ready to hand, I decided to try a very small amount of hand lotion instead (as in, put a teeny dab on my finger, rub finger and thumb together to spread it, rub beads). It worked amazingly well -- they look just like they did when I bought them -- and I suspect that something like this was the original treatment. Now I have to find some unscented hand lotion, but I know where to look for that. And it looks as though I will have to make up care cards for any piece I make using this, but that's not a huge problem.

elise, I noted in one of the pieces you linked that dyed black onyx was originally used as a substitute for jet in mourning jewelry. The matte black is even closer to jet in appearance (I have some jet beads, too), and I'm planning to use this for some steampunk-style jewelry.

Lila, #465: If you do decide to write that module, you may find BPAL's Rappaccini's Garden collection to be a useful resource. (And thank ghod for Google's ability to deduce what you meant to spell from what you actually put into the search!)

Jacque, #473: But is it the antiqueness you want, or the content? If the latter, you may well be able to find a repro copy for considerably less.

Lee: Wicked Plants was the reference I had in mind (since I have a copy right here) but that looks cool too. Thanks!

Lila, I can set you up with pretty much all the BPAL you could want, if you like. I have, um, a lot.

Jacque, I'm not sure what all the difference between the Reader's Edition of The Red Book and the $200 hardcover edition that just says "Liber Novus" on it, but there are copies of both available on eBay at the moment and at Abebooks. I take it you wanted the non-Reader's Edition one, of which the lowest at Abebooks is currently $169.99, but there's one on eBay currently at $20.50 (with $4 shipping) and 2 days, 14 hours left as I write this.

(The listing header says 2012, but it's obviously the 2009 edition, which is the facsimile edition usually selling for $200. The complete listing header is "The Red Book by C. G. Jung (2012, Hardcover) USED".)

elise, I may take you up on that in a small way. My daughter (the henna/bellydance/double bass one, not the Mars researcher or the stuntwoman) is a fan of BPAL.

Have her make a list, eh? I, erm, have a lot. Several hundred, actually. (Well, it was very comforting at a time I needed a lot of comfort.)

I was following links about The Red Book, and the reader's edition doesn't have the pictures. If you want to see a few pictures, there are a few at the publisher's preview and a few more on the page of links to a lecture series. And oh my dear God, the google images page is overwhelming.

Elise @ #485 - that sounds familiar. I had a pretty severs bout of depression which unfortunately coincided with the release of Star Wars: Episode 1. Crappy insurance made self-medicating by buying all the action figures I never got as a child slightly cheaper than seeking therapy. And then I discovered two years ago that local thrift stores were no longer taking donations of toys due to liability issues. That was rough.

Open threadiness: I have a long bus journey in early June with a layover in Memphis each way. Are there any Fluorosphereans in the vicinity who might want to stage a mini-gathering of light for a couple hours?

Open threadiness: I have a long bus journey in early June with a layover in Memphis each way. Are there any Fluorosphereans in the vicinity who might want to stage a mini-gathering of light for a couple hours?

Apologies!

elise @ #485, wow. Will do! She does henna at DragonCon and some other cons; she may well be in a position to do you a favor in return one of these days.

Some open threadiness of mine: Is there anyone here who's planning to go to this year's Farthing Party (said to be the last one) and is interested in splitting room costs? I posted to the LiveJournal community and -- as happened last year -- got no response.

I wish I could afford to give the party I planned back when Bobby Sands died. I was planning to mark out an area on the floor as Thatcher's grave, and have Irish step-dance music.

If there's ever been anyone whose headstone should be a urinal...well, Pinochet, yeah, but then Thatcher.

Byron's epitaph for Castlereagh does seem appropriate for the situation.

willfully mistranslated

Whan that Aprille with his shiny shoes,
The droghte of March hath a case of the blues,
And bathed every vichyssoise in gelid milk
Of which Vertú's jazz fusion sounds like silk;
Whan Zephirus eek! Stomp on it, quick!
Inspired hath in holy heck, the squick!
The tendre Croppies lie down evermore.
Hath the Ram's half-cousin blighted our shore
And smelly, foul, poisoned melamine
That slices at the neck with mescaline,
So priketh hem naturally with corsages,
Than long folksy goons with pilloried images,
And argle bargle dribble burble,
Fatigue does this to me sometimes....

(forgot to post this yesterday)

Japanese Dream Machine Can Visualize Your Dreams With 50 Percent Accuracy

Dream-reader, tell me a story, oh, please,
One with fifty percent truthiness, at least.
A sea shore with a nice, fresh tang to the breeze,
And haply devoid of the soul shredding Beast.

I'm going, but I'm hoping to either bring Juan or room with Jenett again; not sure yet how that's all working, what with various other travel plans.

I hope you find someone who can share with you!

Oops, left off the line that should have directed the previous comment to David Goldfarb!

Earl Cooley III at 495: That's one of the more interesting uses of fMRI decoding that I've seen in a while; the senior author on that paper (Kamitani) pioneered the method back in 2005 or so with my former boss (who I worked for when I lived in Nashville). It's a nice extension of the basic method - which lets you say, relatively accurately, which of a couple of items the subject saw. This version is doing a much more complex version with natural images, which is where that entire field has gone in the last few years, but there's a big difference between being able to say that there was information in visual cortex that was classified as "man" or "chair" or "wombat" and being able to say that, for instance, the subject dreamed about their significant other or something.

[Warning: Neuroscience/fMRI rambling - this is what I did for a living a few years back]

I should note that fMRI is immensely powerful, but it's got some pretty brutal fundamental limitations; we're never going to be able to decode exactly what you saw without much higher resolution recording methods. For that matter, fMRI is a dreadful method if you actually want to see what neurons (or even relatively small neural populations) are doing; fMRI monitors changes in blood flow with a brutal time lag (call it about 6 seconds, relative to activity - how many mental images do you have that last that long without changing?) and the resolution is rather coarse (multi-millimeter voxels, usually). While every pop science article would really love fMRI decoding to be actual mind reading, it's not happening with the techniques or apparatus available today - we just can't get data fast enough or with high enough resolution to be able to do it as well as every popular press report would have you believe.

If anyone's interested, I can go on at length and/or point people in the direction of interesting papers.

janetl: Many years ago, I saw a special on television that involved the development of the Hurriquake Nail, a fastener designed to do things like keep houses together under severe stress. The really entertaining part was seeing the device they designed to test it... a great big mechanical arm which fastened to the side of their model building, picked it up, and shook it like a dog. It was only a room or two in size but that sort of testing is pretty entertaining. You might look into such things if designing built-in shelves for your next place.

Mmm, volcano land. There's this interesting geological formation an hour or two north of Sacramento called Sutter Buttes. Sometimes they're referred to as "the smallest mountain range in the world." They're geologically distinct from all of the nearby ranges. I recently found out that they're actually the remains of one larger volcano that exploded some time in the distant past and might technically be called a caldera. From a quick glance at comparative sizes, it may be roughly the size of Mount Mazama (Crater Lake's precursor.)

Um... did somebody mention geology? No? (wanders off into rock land, muttering, "My mother is the geologist, why do I keep bringing it up?")

499
Actually, geology was mentioned over on the thread about Antwerp's bridge and its unfortunate experience with a 'splody ship.

I've never been to Sutter Buttes, but I know people who have. I gather good hiking boots are recommended.

Mmmm, geology! Things are always better with more geology.

Jon Baker - At least for informal clothing, I've found that Walmart goes a few sizes larger than most better clothing stores. If there's a Nordstrom's Rack near you, it'll often have some choices as well.
Also, I forget which con it was, but I was once at a science fiction con that was at the same convention center as an African-American church convention; their dealers' room had a lot of women's clothing in larger sizes.

On Maggie Thatcher - every man or woman's death diminishes me, but their retirement from politics is often a good thing for the world, and too bad she didn't do so sooner.

I don't begrudge her the Falkland Islands War; the Argentine military junta who'd invaded them were a nasty bunch, trying to prop up their popularity after years of the Dirty War by a quick attack against an easy target, and the Falklands residents were English, not Argentine.

I do find her continued support of Chile's General Pinochet in return for his support during that war offensive, and her support continued even after his trials for human rights abuses began, but then Ronald Reagan had warmly welcomed Argentina's General Galtieri to the US (before the Falklands War) because of his support for Reagan's offensive against the Nicaraguan contras; it was dirty generals all the way down. Galtieri was eventually accused of kidnappings and disappearances as well, but died of cancer.

Surely you mean "his support for Reagan's offensive against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas"? The Contras were Reagan's allies!

Bill Stewart @502: In every skin-pigment except the main brown one, my skin resembles fairly dark African-American skin. So I look good in a lot of the brilliant colors that African-American high-churchgoing clothes come in.

No such thing as too much geology, says the mother of the Earth & Atmospheric Sciences major.

Elliott @408: Late to the music party, but another spoken/sung example is Ridley Bent's Pastures of Heaven which includes the phrase "all I wanna do" to boot. It was a minor hit in Western Canada.
He briefly flirted with what he called "hick hop" before he moved into straight-ahead country.

Lee @480: But is it the antiqueness you want, or the content? If the latter, you may well be able to find a repro copy for considerably less.

Well, yes, of course. :-) Actually, antiqueness is really a non-issue, given that, if I understand arright, the first printing was '09.

But it does look like it has a lovely grimoire-iness (if you will) about it. And I'm a fan of art books.

But in the absence of the scratch to obtain a hard-copy, I am satisfying myself with a (probably illicit) downloaded PDF. (I did the arithmetic, and it turns out $200 is not an unreasonable price; to print it out in color at Kinko's would run about that.)

elise @483: there's one on eBay currently at $20.50 (with $4 shipping) and 2 days, 14 hours left as I write this.

One presumes this will, um, change, closer to the auction close.

Nancy Lebovitz @486: And oh my dear God, the google images page is overwhelming.

Yeah, I mean, Carl Jung as Calligrapher and Fantasy Artist? Who knew? My biggest issue with this thing is that it makes me want to do one of my own. (I've always had a niggling itch in that direction, anyway.) Like I have the time to even think about it, even.

Earl Cooley III @495: Japanese Dream Machine Can Visualize Your Dreams

Wheee! Wow. I woke up from one this morning that I would have loved to have recorded. (See also: just about any of my late-morning flying dreams. Though I'd be much more interested in one that could catch the full sensorium, including but not limited to vestibulation.)

See also: Boy, the privacy activists think they have their work cut out for them now....

Benjamin Wolfe @498: (call it about 6 seconds, relative to activity - how many mental images do you have that last that long without changing?)

I am reminded of an...hallucinatory, for lack of a better word...experience I had at Iguanacon (my first con that wasn't a Trek con). Going to bed the second or third night, after having gone through the art show, and having seen the masquerade, I'd close my eyes and get this rapid-fire slide-show of vivid, fully realized (and as far as I can tell, completely original) images, clickclickclickclick. Hundreds, I'm sure, in the time it took me to fall asleep. I only managed to capture two out of the onslaught. I've had that happen once or twice since. I suspect that I would have melted Prof Kamitani's fMRI machine into slag.

we just can't get data fast enough or with high enough resolution to be able to do it

...yet.

B. Durbin @499: Um... did somebody mention geology? No?

Nu, this is an Open Thread, yes? Can we not take geology as having been mentioned?

A geophysicist friend always whines when I ask him questions like "How does malachite form?" "I'm not a geologist!" This, despite pointing out interesting geological features while hiking, like the color striations in sandstone indicating that they were once wind-driven dunes. Hmph, say I.

WRT Margaret Thatcher, she is one of the few world leaders I've actually seen in the flesh.

A fairly detailed history of the censorship of Fahrenheit 451. I knew most of it, but not that there were years when Ballentine was only publishing the censored version.

It makes me wonder if they were also censoring less famous books, and people didn't notice.

Finished off the purple oatmeal, but there's tea cooling.

Nancy Lebovitz @508: censorship of Fahrenheit 451

::giggling helplessly:: Where's Douglas Hofstadter when you need him?

Yes, I know it's a serious, important subject.

::disolves into more giggles::

W/r/t #509 (AKICML): is it common/accepted for a publisher to alter a work after its initial publication, without notifying the author?

Is it legal?

Jacque at 508: That actually sounds like a pretty standard fMRI paradigm - Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (where we show you lots of images in rapid sequence). In fact, people have been running experiments like that since 2007 or so (I remember one from the fMRI lab I was in where we found one labmate to have a brain that was particularly responsive to cats; knowing the man, this was unsurprising).

The Daily Mail, a notoriously homophobic British newspaper, has wailed its dismay at the "vile screech of hatred" over Margaret Thatcher's death. For them, we are told on every page, she is the woman who saved Britain.

They rail against the champagne street parties, student union cheers, and internet taunts.

I read what that mighty organ writes about people like me, and people like my friends, and I see how they praise the thugs and liars who, openly and behind the scenes, are ripping apart my country. And, instead of the great todgers of Fleet Street telling me what to think, I would rather settle down, with a keg, in the company of The Company of captain Frans Banning Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch.

They were men who were willing to spend their own time and money on defending their society. They thought it mattered. Whatever the flaws there might have been in their world, they believed that there was such a thing as society.

And, one day, if you were really lucky, their embodied ghosts descended on a shopping centre in Breda. Here in England we still see, in our shopping centres and high Streets, the ghosts that Maggie Thatcher raised, and we call them beggars.

# 512 W/r/t #509 (AKICML): is it common/accepted for a publisher to alter a work after its initial publication, without notifying the author?

That would depend entirely on the contract. Some contracts are essentially "Do with me as you will."

Jacque, if you're serious about wanting a copy of The Red Book, I do suggest keeping an eye on that eBay copy, because there is in my estimation a decent chance the price won't go anywhere near the full price. It's got the wrong date listed in the item description, and unless somebody's looking closely, they might not notice exactly which edition this is. I won't be surprised if it goes for under $50. I've seen the same thing happen with mislabeled opals.

Dave Bell @514:

I have never met a Dutch person who could completely parse the sentence, "There is no such thing as society." The Dutch person who got closest to it said, "It's a wrong idea. It's a thought that will ultimately destroy us."

I'm sure there are Dutch people who agreed with Thatcher, but I've yet to meet one.

On Maggie's death, I'm told the BBC has issued a call to British citizens to help make sure all her horcruxes have been found...

--Dave, also salivating over the book-collection descriptions, also a person who has no more bookshelf room and has gone to boxes instead

Lee @480: [the once and future matte black onyx] It worked amazingly well -- they look just like they did when I bought them -- and I suspect that something like this was the original treatment.

Hurrah! I had the opposite problem a while back, when some frosted glass beads gradually shifted from velvety white to near-transparent. A tidy swipe of unscented hand sanitizer gel took the surface oils right off and re-opacified them-- luckily, these were loose; if they'd been strung on a finished piece, I would've had to generally identify the cordage as synthetic or natural, and thus whether there would've been greater damage potential from alcohol or from soap'n'water.

Meanwhile, does anyone know how to dye white howlite beads, or whether polished howlite has been surface-sealed in some way that makes it impervious to dye? Soaking polished howlite in pure isopropanol dulls the finish, but doesn't seem to make it lastingly permeable to pigments (even after heat-shocking, everything I've tried just washes right back off with plain water).