My own contribution comes from my grandmother: if you go under a moving train on a bridge, you can make a wish and it'll come true.

The real question is how persistent these stories are going to be. Has anyone done a follow-up to find out if these stories are still being told in Florida, or if they've spread? There's probably a PhD in it for someone who wants to compare stories from Florida, New York, LA, and Chicago....

By the way, the story of La Llorona was used by Ursula Vernon in the backstory of her Hugo-winning webcomic "Digger". Young priestess Murai was sent to investigate the stories told amongst children in a nearby coastal city, about the terrible weeping goddess the Black Mother.

Still makes the hair on the back of my neck rise "...and I shiver when the winds blow cold..."

Weeping women who foretell death are old. Very, very old.

I have no doubt that the story is true.

Vernon, and Lackey/Edghill, OTOH, drew upon the Miami specific idea. I wish I could articulate why the Vernon version was fine by me, but the fact and timing of the Lackey-Edghill one irked me enough to not buy or read the book. It was very soon after the article came out, and it looked from the blurb like it was taken from the article a bit too verbatim, but I can't really be sure. I just no I went "NO" and stuck to it.

La llorona (The Wailing Woman)
S12.6. Cruel mother refuses children food.
S142. Person thrown into the water and abandoned.
S131. Murder by drowning.
Q211.4. Murder of children punished.
Q503. Wandering after death as punishment.
E547. The dead wail.

As a matter of taste, I always found working with the Motif-Index more useful and rewarding than the Tale-Type Index.

http://xkcd.com/555/

I spent a large portion of my high school years reading pulp fiction instead of doing my homework, and chief among my diversions was Vance’s “The Eyes of the Overworld,” which I reread an absurd number of times. Not only did its darkly comic elegance of language give me a strong nudge on my way to what I would end up doing for a living, but I remember giving silent thanks to pulp fictioneers in general and Vance in particular when I took my SATs. The seemingly idle time I’d spent ingesting Vancian words like punctilio and largesse was suddenly, unexpectedly helping me get where I needed to go.

http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/inequality-moocs-and-the-predator-elite/

According to the Tuscaloosa News, last year Alabama employed 24 noncoaching individuals devoted solely to football (not including graduate assistants) and pays them a combined $1.6 million. Some handle off-field issues such as discipline, while others deal with the minutiae of down-and-distance. As recently as 2009 there was no one on Saban's staff with the title of analyst; last year there were nine.

945 is pared down to 184: Result!

One of their nominal "grievances" was not moving fast enough on MOOCs (Ms. Sullivan had in fact been working on it), but the apparent real reason was her not being submissive enough to the business types. The plotters got slapped down on the actual firing, but few of them faced actual consequences, and those due to the public backlash rather than actual sanctions. The rector who led the attempt got reappointed by the Governor.

"Strings on a Plane"

The sound quality on that really impressed me, considering that they're on a plane.

And for "homeless children", here I read, "asielzoekers" - refugees, in English, but they find little refuge here...

Crazy(and moved)soph

I've surrendered
freedoms
from the Constitution

which you
probably were
expecting
to cherish.

Don't worry
we're going to be secure
and safe
any minute now

(when I was a student, one comment that the faculty would make was that student collective memory was short. That might also be true in that society of children.)

To go downtown, you'll take the $5.00 "Train to the Plane" (well, the other way around) to Jamaica station, then switch to either the subway or the LIRR.

If things go right, it would take a bit more than 1 hour to get downtown.

If you plan ahead you could take in a couple of museums and a lunch.

Something to consider: I don't know whether the airport still has luggage lockers.

I don't think I need luggage lockers, as my carryons are lightweight and the checked bag will go straight through.

Now I'm dithering: for a couple hundred dollars more I can have my all-day layover in Amsterdam instead, and I think I remember my way from Schiphol to the Rijksmuseum . . . have to decide in a few hours though.

If you decide to go to Old Amsterdam rather than New, what day of the week would you be traveling?

This relates to both (a) how crowded the Rijksmuseum will be, and (b) whether I might be able to buy you coffee.

To get to the Rijksmuseum from Schiphol, either take the train to Amsterdam Centraal station (train station's in the airport) then a tram to the Museumplein (2 or 5) , or take the 197 bus. (Information ganked from the museum's website.) I've taken the train and the tram separately, and they're both very pleasant. I haven't taken the bus, but I've never had an unpleasant bus experience here, so I suspect it's also good.

The buses from Schiphol are quite good and get you into the heart of the city. They're probably quicker and easier than taking the train and then a tram.

It was a buffet table with plate upon plate of petits fours, ganache cake, etc. A dessert buffet. But at my family's weddings, it was always called (by the older generation; most of my younger-than-me cousins had never heard it) an Irish open bar, with the implication that the desserts were more enticing than the liquor (or that the liquor was assumed to be always available, I guess?).

That side of my family is very wrapped up in being Irish (specifically, South Side of Chicago Irish, which is basically its own cultural thing), btw, this isn't an othering term, it's an 'our folks' term. :->

Do any of you have similar family code-language? It fascinates me.

I'm off to find a bottle of single malt.

I'm not sure I can remember about student collective memory, but I notice that the same jokes (or obvious variants thereof) circulate amongst today's eight-year-olds as I remember from when I was eight. And, as I may have mentioned, or at least suggested, I was eight a looong time ago. This argues for a very robust transmission of folklore in the same age group.

As the root of "manipulate" is (human) hand, should work done with a mouse be musipulate? Muspulate?

Technically the original term extends to mechanical work, but I'm not content.

Would muspulation have to be restricted to what gets moved around in T-mazes?

Requiescat in Pace.

re student lore: Having gone through boarding school, my experience there was that we had a certain set of specialized vocabulary, mostly having to do either with locations or disciplinary infractions. (I was surprised to learn that the "grass dock" only acquired a name when it became the traditional trysting spot after the school went coed.) Lore about what people did generally didn't survive those who were there at the time.

And highly local cuisine: the last of the kohlrabi harvest is in, and the cook is contemplating a gratin in an Italian vein. The Greek-style pie was tasty but made about twelve servings and required inordinate prep work.

I remember my surprise and delight, with an aftertaste of disappointment at the loss of its "purity", when the Batman animated series had the Joker sing the children's song,

Jingle Bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
Batmobile lost a wheel
And the Joker got away

P.J. Evans @ #46, and we sang "met her at the door with a loaded .44, and she ain't my teacher no more."

Mine eyes have see the glory of the burning of the school.
We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken all the rules.
We have played a game of poker and we played a game of pool
In the basement of the burning school!

Chorus:
Glory, glory, what's it to ya?
Teacher hit me with a ruler.
I met her at the door with a loaded .44
And there ain't no school no more.

Another verse we sang (sometimes as an alternate first, sometimes in the middle):

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the Coming of the Lord
He was cruisin' down the alley in a pink and yellow Ford.
One hand was on the throttle, and the other on a bottle
Of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer!

I don't know, for instance, if it's possible to catalog all the variants of "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory…", but I saw ones here I'd heard before, and ones I hadn't.

There's also a nice little section of songs you can sing to the tunes of other songs.

I wonder if kids singing the same songs we sang would be arrested for making terrorist threats nowadays?

When children hear from their parents that firearms are not just an acceptable solution for problems with other people, but sometimes a go-to solution, you don't know how much of it they're going to internalize.

It's very likely I'll be in Europe again sometime next year, and then I will maybe even have a spot more money so I can be sure of a moment in Amsterdam, so I'll try again then. I remember I truly loved the town when I was there before.

Meanwhile, I certainly will be in Prague from June 26 till August 8, and would be happy to accompany people if they happen to be there too . . . I know my way to some cool things, though I am not an expert on the city (but my daughter-in-law and son might be called that).

Rhyme and rhythm mostly, but was there a change when the move Dirty Harry was released?

But then I tracked down the .44-40 Winchester which was the standard round for the '73 Winchester rifle, and also used in revolvers of the time. I'm pretty sure that, in the text stories, Hopalong Cassidy used a revolver chambered in the same calibre as his rifle.

So maybe that's why the teacher was shot with a forty-four.

Bad Lee Brown shot Little Sadie with a .44. John Hardy (the desperate little man) carried a .44. In some versions Frankie shot Johnnie with a .44. Those aren't necessarily rhyme-words, either: Bad Lee Brown "went back home and I went to bed / Forty-four smokin' beneath my head."

He will be missed by many people.

(One or other of the books had "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school" in it -- a variant with the tangerine rather than the .44 -- and likewise the Batman song.)

(Mind you, I'm assuming that the idea is for the title and author to be re-attached when the review is published; in this I am perhaps assuming more common sense on the part of the project designer than our esteemed particler does.)

"The sky is red and you ARE DEAD, you're out ..."

Immediately two boys protested the use of that rhyme on the grounds that "That's devil-worship!" Apparently "The sky is blue and God bless you" is the preferred method, but gray/you are gay gets used a lot as a diss.

They'd never heard of "My mother told me ..." as a counting-out rhyme, so I showed them its infinite customization (the 'grownup-approved' version when I was little ran "My mother told me that you are OUT" but we ran kind of amuck with wording).

I taught them the Miss Mary Mack hand-clapping game, too, and that reminded me of one that became popular in the mid-80s using a jingle from a McDonald's commercial that had a really, really complex hand-game that went with it. I remember the first verse as:

Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish,
Quarter pounder, french fries.
Icy coke, thick shake,
Sundaes, and apple pies.

There was a second verse (that re-used the complex hand-choreography from the first exactly), but I no longer recall it. I vaguely remember the hand-game showing up because -- rewinding. So McDonalds wrote this jingle highlighting their menu items and shot a commercial of people singing it, with the offer that if you made a video of YOU singing it (in the pre-YouTube world, you MAILED A VHS) then You Might Be In A Commercial!!! So some genius innovator (possibly in McDonalds employ; or maybe really grassroots) came up with the hand-clap game choreography, and then THAT commercial blew up all over and the dextrous girls on my playground drove themselves nuts for a week getting it JUST RIGHT ... and then lording it over everyone else while they did it fast and flawless. :->

I still remember the routine, if not the second verse.

A country as rich as ours that makes any children live like this had better hope against all hope that God really is missing and not coming back, not just the god of Abraham but any god who loves justice. Because if there is any god who loves justice, we will not escape judgment.

I'm interested in... comparative Christian theology, if that's a term. Recently someone told me that apparently not every Christian believes that God is omnipresent; I know that some don't believe that God, Son and Father are one, and some don't believe that there's a Trinity at all. The question is, where do I go to find out who believes what? Mostly I'm interested in Catholic and Orthodox theology and how they compare. Another example: I know that there's some sort of difference on the doctrine of hell (absence of God versus presence of God, the former naturally being torture, the latter being torture for evil souls -- I believe), but I don't really know where to go to find, for instance, the official Catholic teaching.

Canon? Writings by theologians? Official Vatican information? Is there some sort of newsletter? There're just so many things written about religion, and I've no idea where to start; I thought I might save myself some effort by asking here. I guess there are many that could help me.

[For the contraction "there're," but that's so rarely used in spam that I'll take it out of the filters. -- Gorxiu Diesat, Duty Gnome]

I'm sure that is one goal of the very public process of fucking various people over for making the wrong enemies in the security establishment. People were intimidated about sending money to Wikileaks back when that was possible, and were also intimidated about sending money to defense funds for various whistleblowers. This is definitely a feature, not a bug.

However, in the version that his mother and my stepmother learned, it went straight from "one fell out" to "There were nine in the bed". So sometime in the intervening generation, the extra section got added in. How? By whom? On TV? We both use the same tune for the extra section, so it can't just be from a book. I've just had a look online and found lots of examples of the short version, but also several variations on shouting and tying knots in pygamas (e.g. "and he gave a little scream and he gave a little shout", with or without "Yahoo!" appended to the end of that).

Curious.

For clapping games, there was "Oh Jolly Playmate/Oh Jolly Enemy", with what I think of as the standard Mary Mac crisscross, and one that wasn't local to me at all, but that I learned at overnight camp, which went "Do you know exactly how to eat an Oreo/Well, to do it/You unscrew it/Very fast/'Cause the kid who eats the middle of an Oreo first/Gets to save the chocolate outside for the last!" and the clapping figure involved hands held out placed together as if diving/praying, but horizontally, not vertically, and clapping above and below the midline. I never really mastered that clapping pattern, but I was fascinated because we didn't have anything like it at home.

There were also a couple of variants to "Oh, they built the ship Titanic/to sail the ocean blue", mostly involving whether you added "flush, flush" after "it was sad when the great ship went down" and whether you included the addition "Counselors and campers, little children lost their Pampers" to the final chorus.

Not really kid-lore, but a sign of kid-culture of my era: there were definite bragging rights to knowing the full album version as opposed to the shorter radio edit of "American Pie", as it was a permanent part of the summer camp song repertoire.

For other beliefs, you might search on heresies, e.g. A Short Guide to Ancient Heresies.

I have never heard 'On Top of Old Smoky' with the actual lyrics. I know it's a real song, but I don't believe it. It's 'On Top of Spaghetti' or

On top of Old Smoky
All covered with blood
I shot my poor teacher
with a forty-four (gun, mud, whatever).

Also a great many Christmas carols with violent lyrics.

I second the recommendation of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts if only because it concentrates on North Carolina and the lyrics are wrong. I'm Midwestern and we don't have all the same rhymes.

Here's how it worked:

The two communicated using Gmail, but not by sending each other letters. They had a dummy account, they both knew the username and password, they could thus log in from other locations and read the draft messages that the other had written (nothing was ever sent).

This was all fine, but who was the person with whom the General was communicating? The IPs that the unknown person was logging in from were all public places: e.g. hotels.

So the persons investigating this took the list of times and dates, and the names of the hotels, and compared that list with lists of who had been staying in those hotels on those dates.

Only one name matched. Bingo. Busted.

*I was something of an outcast in elementary school and only observed, never participated
-----------
Diatryma (75): My problem with Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts is that it doesn't include the right ending for the titular song. We always sang "That's what we had† for lunch!"; the book only lists variants of "I'm going to get a spoon!" (My mother hated that song. I think it was the implied aspersion on her cooking.)

†or "...what there is...", if it was still morning

Miss Suzie had a tugboat
The tugboat had a bell
Miss Suzie went to Heaven
And the tugboat went to
Hello operator,
Give me number 9
And if you cannot get it
I'll hit on your
Behind the 'frigerator
There was a piece of glass
Miss Suzie sat upon it
And broke her little
Ask me no more questions
I'll tell you no more lies
The boys are in the bathroom
Zipping up their
Flies are in the meadow
Birds are in the park
The boys and girls are kissing
In the D-A-R-K D-A-R-K D-A-R-K dark dark dark!

I wonder if Elliot and I know the same version of "Miss Mary Mack (Mack Mack)"?

And in "Ten in the Bed", we went straight from "one fell out" to "There were 9 in the bed". (There was 1 in the bed and the little one said "Good night!")

Area Woman's church (Episcopal/Anglo-Catholic) sends its usual contingent of clergy and lay-people to march in LA's Pride Parade. Area Woman wonders what the rules are for non-liturgical use of a thurible, and whether the assembled throngs enjoyed getting a lungful of incense.

I learned it as

Say say say playmate (or Girl Scout)
Come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three
Climb up my apple tree
Shout down my rain barrel
Slide down my cellar door
And we'll be jolly friends
Forevermore!

Say say say playmate (or Girl Scout)
I cannot play with you
My dolly's got the flu
Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo
Ain't got no rain barrel
Ain't got no cellar door
But we'll be jolly friends
Forevermore!

I remember being surprised as a kid to hear people sing it with the cellar door replaced by other things; they'd never heard of a cellar door. But my next door neighbor had one, so I knew about them (and their slide potential, if short).

Our (eggcorns may abound?) version (sung during double-dutch jumproping, not with a handgame) was:

See-See my playmate, come out and play with me.
(Something) my dollies three, climb up my apple tree.
Slide down my rainbow, into my cellar door
And we'll be jolly friends, forever more more more more more!

We also did a four-player handgame called Rockin' Robin (whose first verse and chorus were from the hit swing tune except that all the little birds lived on Damen street, not Jaybird street -- actual local street name) whose latter verses went all kinds of "Miss Suzie" not-quite-swearwords territory, and whose traditional second verse was both FULL of eggcorns (in retrospect) and had its own hand choreography sprinkled in to make it harder.

The general pattern involved hands paired for slaps with your partner (simultaneous, not alternating) and then clapping your own and going to the next partner in the pattern. We stood in a square, facing center, and the pattern went Left/Across-up/Across-down/Right (the other pair across started with Right, of course).

The second verse, as we sang it, goes:

Mama's in the kitchen, burnin' that rice (gesture of holding a bowl on one's hip and stirring)
Daddy's on the corner, shootin' them dice (craps-tossing gesture)
Brother's upstairs just raisin' his hair (fingercomb front of hair vertically as if you were picking an afro -- probably an eggcorn for 'raising hell' originally)
Sister's on the corner sellin' fruit cocktail (slap chest, crotch, butt in quick succession -- FAR dirtier in retrospect than ANY of us thought it was when we were 7!)

The 'dirtiest' verse in common use on my playground was SOOOO dirty that we sheltered Catholic-school kids actually sang it WITH BLEEPS IN IT:

Went to the kitchen to get a stick of butter
Saw James Bond sitting in the gutter.
Got a piece of glass, shoved it up his bleep
Never saw a bleeper-bleeper run so fast!

And so on. Some of them were deliberately nonsensical as well as containing random cartoonish ultraviolence or 'swears' or 'I'm going to rhyme towards a swear and not use it'.

My dad's school didn't do Miss Suzie, they did "Cocktail, gingerale" to a different tune but containing a lot of the same rhyme-pair/incidents as my school's Miss Suzie did.

One o'clock, two o'clock three o'clock rock.
Four o'clock, five o'clock six o'clock rock.
Seven o'clock eight o'clock nine o'clock rock.
Ten o'clock eleven o'clock twelve o'clock rock.
Midnight, twilight, hope we see the ghost tonight!

Clearly, this is not an ancient chant, though it could have been quite old in kid generations even before I first heard it in the '70s.

The boys and girls are kissing
In the D A R K
Dark is like a movie,
A movie's like a show.
A show is like a TV set and that is all I know know know!

Also it was usually "The boys are in the bathroom, pulling down their flies"

My school's Miss Mary Mack went (the echoes were often chorused by bystanders, if bystanders were available):

Miss Mary Mack (Mack Mack)
all dressed in black (black black)
With silver buttons (buttons buttons)
up and down her back (back back)
She asked her mother (mother mother)
for fifteen cents (cents cents)
To see the elephant (elephant elephant -- crammed in tightly with giggles)
Jump the fence (fence fence)
He jumped so high (high high)
He reached the sky (sky sky)
And he didn't come back (back back)
Till the Fourth of July (lie lie)
He's back! (waving jazz hands from all)

It was generally sung starting gradually and speeding up and up and up until someone flubbed, so actually getting to the end was exhilarating and well worth the WOOOO and celebration.

Cally @80: I remember the boo-hoo-hoo verse of Playmate, now that you mention it!

There were also several games that involved counting to successively higher numbers (+1 per iteration, etc) with a Miss Mary Mack alternating pattern except the counting at the end involved the following quick three-gesture combo: (a) Going straight across to your partner with both hands, touch/slap the BACKS of your hands together (b) Rotate wrists to immediately slap the PALMS of your hands together (c) clap own hands together. Each backs-of-hands was where the counting number was said, with the rest being just gesture. It went Versey Part/count 1/Versey part/do the pattern twice fast, counting 1 2 and so on.

The McDonalds jingle game I knew involved the praying/diving-but-horizontal hand position mentioned above, with slaps above and below and then some more complicated stuff. I wonder if the people who put the jingle to the motions were re-using from a well-known local game pattern? Also, I found a video of the ad, and another on YouTube of two girls reenacting basically the choreography I know, though I'm sure we didn't have "dish ran away with the spoon" involved.

One interesting twist here--the data is collected and stored, but the claim is that it's only looked at with a court order. (And if that's a lie, there will be no consequences at all, so you can totally trust that it's true.) The effect of this is to make sure that you can always go back in time and find out who was talking to, say, the marathon bombers or the Fort Hood mass-shooter. Alternatively, you could go back in time and find out who was talking to the reporter who just broke a big national security story, and try to find out his sources. Of course, nobody would ever use that to dig up information on that reporter to blackmail him, or to justify prosecuting him for some unrelated crime. Because that would be wrong.

Similarly, suppose that by some really unlikely chain of events, a decade from now, I am nominated to the Supreme Court. (Note: I'm not a lawyer, so this would be really surprising on all kinds of levels.) Just in case anyone should happen to need to do it, why, it will become possible to find out everyone I ever talked to in the past. Escort services? Bondage clubs? Medical marijuana clubs? All right there, ready to bring out to derail the nomination with a sympathetic leak, or to use for blackmail later. (Though a sitting supreme court justice is probably very hard to blackmail, since they are all but un-fire-able.)

There are lots of videos of teens doing various Rockin' Robins, actually (square eyes are now setting in).

This one is the hand choregraphy I know for Miss Suzie, but different words. Interestingly, the girls in the video seem to know different words from each other too (including a 'bees are in the hive' bit that they don't put the topping rhyme on).

Interesting counting-out rhyme Down By the Banks of the Hanky Panky which sounds somewhat familiar but we didn't count-out with it. Here's two girls doing what I think of as the Big Mac hand game with Down By The Banks words -- and LOTS of them. Same video continues into Miss Suzie with different choreography than I knew and a neat ending variant; then they do several more.

[The magic words "escort service" did it. -- Borulent C. Quire, Duty Gnome]

We had a "ghost in the graveyard" game too, and I've never encountered anyone else who played it! Ours was a twilight game, no flashlights. One person (the ghost) hid in the backyard. All the other kids tried to run around the house, starting from the front, and the ghost would try to catch one of them (who would then become the ghost) before they made it back to base. So mostly tag, with a bit of hide-and-seek thrown in. I don't remember the counting, and clearly our games were different (since you mention everyone hiding), but now that you mention it I do remember the "hope to see the ghost tonight" bit. (Early 1980s for me).

Also from my memory banks:
Eenie Meenie Pespideeni, ooh-bop-bopsedeeni,
Education, Liberation, I love you.
Tuti-fruiti
Down down baby
Down by the rollercoaster
Sweet Sweet honey, no place to go.
Caught you with your boyfriend - Naughty, Naughty,
Stole a piece of candy - Greedy, Greedy
Wouldn't wash the dishes - Lazy Lazy
Jumped out the window - Crazy, Crazy
Eenie Meenie Pespideeni, ooh-bop-bopsedeeni,
Education, Liberation, I love you.
Tuti-fruiti

which appears to be Yet Another Variation on hand-clapping games.

In defiance of you

[And I also note that the two comments following could act as examples for the "Why ‘Thank you!’ Is A Dirty Word" thread...]

If you wish, you may marvel at the wonder and glory that was the wedding party's arrival at the reception, complete with stormtroopers, a battery-powered R2D2 (inflated by yours truly at the last second), my ADORABLE spawn the flowergirl, and a sword-arch with lightsabers (wielded by actual military officers, who'd neglected to bring their uniforms and Real Swords to the wedding).

I'm in it too, but I am utterly incidental to the affair. Alas, no footage yet of the bride's dress in full-on Wedding Configuration (only Autobot Liz, bustle-transformed to Dance Mode), which was an intentional replica of Padme's wedding dress.

In the words of my cousin, "Best Jewish Star Trek Wedding ever."

And the (hired, awesome) stormtroopers were absolute champs at joking around to keep morale high in the hallway BEFORE we entered, as one thing and another led to stupid piddling delays, compounding. They took a break in the primp room downstairs (where Hair And Makeup had been before the ceremony) and came back up to dance at the reception (my photos) and pose gamely for pictures with lots of my relatives.

I can't swear that our Ghost in the Graveyard involved hiding; I don't really remember the rules. Perhaps Cassy will. It definitely involved the "it" chanting, while everyone scattered, though.

cyllan:

That sounds very similar to a call and response chant/song we did:

Flea. (Flea)
Flea fly. (Flea fly)
Flea fly flow. (etc.)
Vista.
Kumalada kumalada kumalada vista.
Oh, nonono, not the vista.
Eena-meeny essa-meeny, ooh-walla-walla-meeny, exa-meeny, sola-meeny, ooh-walla-wah.
Beep belly oaten-boaten bobo ba-deeten dotten shhhhh.

and its parody:

Flea.
Flea fly.
Flea fly flow.
Mosquito.
Calamine calamine calamine lotion.
Oh, no more calamine lotion.
Itchy itchy scratchy scratchy got one on my backy backy oohy oohy owie owie wish he'd go away.
Quick get the bug spray I think he's going thataway Shhhhhhhhh.

Dog
Dog cat
Dog cat mouse
Froggie!
Itsy-bitsy-teenie-weenie-little-bitty froggie
Jump, jump, jump little froggie
Eatin' all the flies and all the spiders
Ribbit ribbit ribbit ribbit ribbit ribbit CROAK

But you don't want to get me started on camp songs. I worked there for four YEARS and we sang at every meal, so I can earworm people and not be affected myself. (I generally use opera to derail earworms.) At some point, I'd like to actually transcribe as many of the particular variants as I can to put online (that would be transcribe musically.) Some, like The Cat Came Back, I've heard in quite a few different variants, both upbeat and down. Some—like the Titanic—have extra camp-specific verses. (I wonder if the one I wrote is still there? We... had some issues with boats at that camp, usually with hilarious backstories.)

Heck, I just wrote a mock-heroic ballad about a particular incident that I titled The Might Fridge Warriors of Winton. Camp songs are fun.

Done from memory. I lived in several different states and two countries during childhood. Sometimes we said "quivey". All at the same time.

Great footage of her (not so much of anyone else) in the processional-into-the-church here. The back of my husband's head is visible at the extreme left of the front row at around 1:40 (with her in his lap). I'm the bridal attendant in the tux, not that I'm unblurry enough to recognize; my baby sister the was-almost-a-marine is the redheaded second bridesmaid.

Darn; you posted Koomaladda Veesta before I could.

And "ghost in the graveyard" was, to my recollection, tag with a flashlight. You had to wait until fairly dark twilight, everyone had a flashlight; all but the ghost would hide while the ghost chanted the counting-song. There was a very rigid limit on how far away you could go; usually the "graveyard" area was two or three house's (contiguous) yards; no crossing streets allowed. The ghost would then go looking for everyone else; you were "tagged" if the ghost's flashlight beam caught you. (For the most part, as a consequence, everyone else kept their lights off until they were tagged.) At that point, we'd reset with the new ghost.

Something like that, anyway.

1, 2, buckle my shoe
3, 4 shut the door
5, 6 pick up sticks
7, 8 lay them straight
9, 10 a big fat hen
11, 12 books on shelve (yes, I know, but it's "shelve", not "shelves" or "shelf")
13, 14 maids are courting
15, 16 maids are kissing
17, 18 maids are waiting (as an adult, I wonder if they're waiting to find if they're pregnant!)
19, 20 my plate is empty; please mother give me some more
21, 22 if you love me as I love you no knife can cut our love in two. Go north, go south, go east, go west; you are the one that I love best
23, 24 last night or the night before, twentyfour robbers came to my door. I went to the door to let them in; they knocked me down with a rolling pin. I went upstairs to get my gun; you should have seen those twentyfour robbers run. They ran to the north, they ran to the south, they ran to the east, they ran to the west, they ran right over the railroad tracks, and all fell down and broke their backs.
25, 26 Mother, mother, I am sick. Send for the doctor, quick-quick-quick. Doctor, doctor, shall I die? Yes, my darling, but don't cry. How many carriages shall I have? One, two, three, four....

(and here it turns into just straight counting)

I'm moderately sure the part at 23, 24 was bowdlerdized; it was almost certainly not 24 robbers but 24 n-words orignally.

We had a counting rhyme that hasn't been mentioned here:

Bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish
How many pieces do you wish?

My mother told me to pick the very best one—and you are not it!

I wonder if the science-language of my household leaked into this? Because I learned it as "Eeny-meany deci-meany, oo-walla-walla-meany, hexa-meany, salla-meany, oo-walla-wah."

Nyaah, nyaah, your mother eats toads; may a crow find a wart on the tip of your nose;
Ding dong, the cat's in the well, so run and fetch another one.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, hold the horse till I get on;
Hold him fast and hold him sure till I get across the misty moor.
Last night and the night before, a lemon and a pickle came knocking at my door;
I went down to let them in, and they hit me with a rolling pin.
Roses are red, violets are blue, carnations are sweet and so are you,
And so are they who send you this, and when we meet we'll have a kiss.

Saw your boyfriend last night,
What's his name,
John Wayne,
How do you know,
Just so.
Peek through the window, nosy,
Get a piece of candy, stingy,
Wash those dishes, lazy,
Jump out the window like crazy,
So it's
(repeat first verse as fast as possible.)

That was a 5th grade thing. The 6th grade thing was as follows:

Bobo-ski-watten-totten,
Eh-eh, eh eh
Boom boom boom
Itty-bitty-watten-totten,
Bobo-ski-watten-totten,
Bobo-ski-watten-totten
BOOM.
(Hard hand-smack on the final BOOM.)

I have confirmed that this is a deliberate change.

This and other crock feature changes increasingly lead me to believe that Yahoo wants out of the email business, and is deliberately making the system harder and harder to use so that people will migrate away from Yahoo.

This is stupid. It will cause anger and resentment against the whole company. But stupidity doesn't really argue against it, since corporations do stupid things all the time.

I don't use Yahoo mail that much, but I was able to use my page up and page down buttons on the keyboard to scroll the inbox. I agree that their changes were a pain.

I'm very proud of myself for going to the shop not once but twice and sticking to what I wanted both times. It worked! Go me!

Well, let's see:

A sailor went to sea, sea, sea,
to see what he could see, see, see.
But all that he could see, see, see
was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea.

A sailor went to China
to see what he could China
but all that he could China
was the bottom of the deep blue China

A sailor went to see touch knee
to see what he could see touch knee
but all that he could see touch knee
was the bottom of the deep blue see touch knee.

And I think it had hand gestures, but I don't remember them.

Falling across Swee-Touch-Nee tea was strange, let me tell you.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337882/Harry-saved-gay-hate-attack-Prince-extraordinary-showdown-troops-threatened-gunner.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

I know, I know my mother
I know, I know my pa
I know, I know my sister
With the eighty-meter bra!

Throw me in the ocean,
Throw me in the sea,
Flush me down the toilet
And that's the end of me!

Someone on FB pointed out that they're going to have to do a lot of web censorship to accomplish this. Time to start making sure LGBT sites outside Russia are available in Russian.

Local woman denies kissing the ground because it is not a bus, but admits to spoiling her dogs, who were endearingly glad to see her.

"And all my luggage, including the Special Presents of Awesomeness, arrived safely," she said.

HLN: Local woman is being assiduously compliant with medical advice. Local house still has an excess of baklava. And the teakettle misses you.

(Local woman still needs more sleep.)

Tracie @113: Nice to know that Adorable Kitten has a new home.

Xopher Halftongue @199: Ugh!

Elliot Mason @49: We also had that "My eyes have seen the glory" with slightly different words, and infinite variations on the chorus from "hit her in the butt with a rotten coconut" to "met her at the bank with a Sherman army tank". Also a pretty messed-up version of "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to school we go" that ended up with teachers getting shot and other refinements.

Oh, and I just remembered:

This land's not your land,
this land is my land,
'cause I have a shotgun,
and you don't got one,
so you better get off,
or I'll blow your head off,
this land is private property!

As I was walking,
that bombed-out highway,
I saw above me,
that polluted skyway,
I saw below me,
that burned-out valley,
this land was made for you not me!

All these were from an elementary school in western Oregon in the early eighties, in case anybody's keeping track of variations.

I was at a book conference where GGGG was on display as a new book. Also attending was Toni Weisskopf. It was some personal disappointment that I didn't get her to autograph a copy or even photograph her holding one.

Teacher, won't you blow,
Teacher, won't you blow,
Teacher, won't you blow your no-o-o-se?
Teacher, won't you blow,
Teacher, won't you blow,
Teacher, won't you blow your nose?

Someone's in the bathroom with teacher,
Someone's in the bathroom, I know.
Someone's in the bathroom with teacher,
Swimming in the toilet bowl.

And singing, fee, fie fiddly-ei-o
Fee, fie fiddly-ei-o,
Swimming in the toilet bowl.

* * * * *

Comet! It makes your mouth so green
Comet! It tastes like Listerine
Comet! It makes you vomit
So get some Comet
And vomit
Today!

*I went to elementary school in Tampa in the sixties. The glory days of the cigar industry in Ybor City were past, but not forgotten. Authentic cigar boxes for our school supplies weren't uncommon.

To the tune of Pokarare Ana.
Pokarare Ana.
I had a squashed banana,
I threw it at the teacher,
She said "Come here."
"Not on your life," I said,

And at that point memory fails me.

J Homes.

Not last night but the night before
Twenty-four robbers came knocking at the door
As I went out, as they went in
And knocked me over with a rolling pin
I asked them what they wanted and this is what they said:
"Spanish lady, turn around
Spanish lady, touch the ground
Spanish lady, do the kicks
Spanish lady, do the splits"

It started off with the rope swinging side to side, and at the word "over" it changed to normal over-the-top skipping. The last four lines refer to particular actions that the skipper has to do (and there were always arguments about whether we'd done the kicks properly, or how many turns we were allowed to do the splits, which meant trapping the rope between your feet).

The other skipping rhyme I remember was a Japanese one that I never managed to learn all the words to (and Google is no help):

ichiban wa karasu ga kaa kaa
niban wa niwatori kokke-kokko
san wa sakana ga oyoideru
shi wa [something] no ojoosan

(First is the crow who goes "kaa-kaa"
Second is the chicken who goes "kokke-kokko"
Third is the fish swimming
Fourth is either a young lady or possibly a princess)

One person runs in at the beginning of each line, then at the end of the rhyme everyone runs out in turn (there are actually words for this part but I never learnt them). The Japanese girls would always make us non-Japanese girls go fourth, and they'd change the rhyme to "ojiisan" (old man / grandfather) thinking we had no idea what they meant.

Then there was the very rude version of Waltzing Matilda...

Our skipping-rope rhyme wasn't "Spanish lady" but "Teddy bear". There was also "Cinderella, dressed in yella, went downstairs to meet a fella. How many kisses did he give her? One, two, three..." However, traditional skipping rope wasn't a big game. It was much cooler to play Chinese jump rope, and that didn't have rhymes, exactly, just chanted directions. I can't remember them all, but it started with "Front, back, side-to-side."

I don't remember anything about our Chinese jumprope rules beyond that we had them. I think we didn't have a chant, we just all knew the order, and the last move was *hard.*

Jump in, jump out,
Jump side-to-side
Jump on, jump in,
Jump out.

So the feet went between the strands, outside the strands, a quick alternation of left-inside-right-outside with its converse, feet ATOP the strands (pushing them down to the ground), feet inside, feet outside.

Then we'd advance the difficulty level.

It started (level 0?) around the holders' ankles, with them standing normally, feet somewhere just short of shoulder's-width apart. I no longer remember the full order, but 'narrow' (holders' feet touching at the instep) and 'widesies' (holders standing with feet nearly as far apart as they could and still stand upright), and 'twisty' (ordinary width, but before each jump the jumper must cross the strands to make a diamond in the center, and start from inside that diamond, with the strands pushing in on their legs).

Then it started changing elevation, so you start at ankles and do all the difficulties, then move to calvsies, kneesies, thighsies, and floorsies. I think some of the kids at my school kept wanting to try waistsies, but none of us had a loop stretchy enough to handle 'jump on' at that height without knocking the holders over. :->

This morning I remembered another variant on "Glory, Glory" in which the outcome is: "Hit her on the bean/With a rotten tangerine/And now my teacher is green."

We also (and by "we" I mean the African-American girls, whose song-plays were WAY better than the white kids' and who kindly taught them to us) had Miss Minnehaha:

[kids stand in a circle, one is chosen to stand in center. Kids in circle clap and chant:]

Hey, Miss Minne-ha ha
Fly way over yonder, ha ha
With a handful of biscuit, ha ha
[beginner skips across circle and picks another child]

Hey, Miss [child's name], ha ha [....]

And Punchinella:

Oh look who's here, Punchinella for your fella,
Look who's here, Punchinella for you!
Oh what can you do, Punchinella for your fella,
What can you do, Punchinella for you?
[child in middle does a dance move]
Oh, we can do it too, Punchinella for your fella,
We can do it too, Punchinella for you
[kids in circle imitate dance move]
Oh, who do you choose, Punchinella for your fella,
Who do you choose, Punchinella for you?
[child in center picks next child, repeat]

The previous two were girls' games only. We also played Red Rover, which was for girls and boys.

We three kings of Orient are
trying to wear some cheap underwear
it's fantastic
all elastic
Ninety-nine cents a pair.

(and various other verses as people could make them up, ending in:)

We three kings of Orient are
trying to smoke a rubber cigar
It was loaded
It exploded
BANG

(a brief, significant pause, before beginning:)

Silent night, holy night...

There were five, five constipated men
In the Bible, in the Bible,
There were five, five constipated men
In the holy Books of Moses.

The first, first constipated man
He was Cain, he wasn't Abel.
The first, first constipated man
He was Cain, he wasn't Abel.

Moses, he took two tablets
Joshua, he blew the walls down*
Solomon, he sat for forty years
Balaam, he couldn't move his ass

*or Samson, he brought the house down

I've got Cain and Moses (but I've got "took the tablets" instead of "took two tablets) and Joshua, and I can't remember the fourth constipated man, but the fifth we sang was

Now the fifth, fifth, constipated man
Was Noah, was Noah
For forty days and forty nights
He passed only water.

Which I think is a beautifully written verse though (or because of the way?) it breaks the pattern of the previous ones.

The version of 5 Constipated Men I learned was
Cain, he wasn't Abel
Moses, he took the tablets
Joshua, he blew the walls down
*someone else I don't remember, but I don't think it was Balaam or Solomon*
and it ended with,

Now the fifth, fifth, constipated man was Noah,
Was Noah,
For forty days and forty nights he passed only water!

Casey B@100: For me, too, it's 'dig and delve', but also 'maids in waiting' - i.e. waiting on a lady, which I think would rule out the pregnancy interpretation. It might not work so well in a country without a nobility, though.

We grew up with this. The second speaker is in parens.

Link little fingers

Needles (Pins)
When a man marries his troubles begin (When a man dies his troubles end)
What goes up the chimney (Smoke)
What comes down the chimney (Santa Claus)
What goes up the chimney down but not down the chimney up (an umbrella)
What goes through the chimney (Casper the Friendly Ghost)
[together] BREAK [breaking linked pinkies]
and who ever touches the color blue with their pinkie finger gets to make a wish.

Obviously at least some of those questions are modern additions!

Years later, I heard a Fibber McGee and Molly episode (which I sadly forgot to mark down the year and day for). After Fibber and Gildersleeve said the same thing at the same time, there was a pause long enough to link pinkies (and since pauses were anathema on radio, it had to be deliberate), and then:

Pins (Needles)
Cotton (Thimbles)
What goes up the chimney? (Smoke)
[together] May your wish and my wish never be broke.

And just recently I heard a Cavalcade of America episode originally broadcast on October 15, 1945, called "Children, This is Your Father" about a returning war vet, in which this appeared:

Hey, what comes out of the chimney (Smoke)
[together] Your wish and my wish will never be broke
[the following was not said together, but sequentially]
(Touch green, my wish will be seen)
Touch green, my wish will be seen
(Touch red, my wish will be said)
Touch red, my wish will be said
(Touch blue, my wish will come true)
Touch blue--what the heck, my wish HAS come true!

I'm pretty sure that last bit was an interruption of the formula, though....

Pharoah, he couldn't let it go

I know someone who learned Pharoah as "His .... heart ... was hardened", sung in a way to imply it was somewhere sub-heart, in fact.

I know I've regularly sung more than 12 different verses, but I can't remember any more just now. I'm sure the internet has some. :->

Comet! It makes your teeth turn green!
Comet! It tastes like gasoline!
Comet! It makes you vomit, [rest same as yours]

...but there was a second verse:

Comet! It makes your teeth turn yellow!
Comet! It tastes like moldy Jello!
Comet! It makes etc.

We also had some version of "Miss Mary Mack", but I can't recall much of it.

And we had a number of verses of "Miss Lucy had a steamboat", similar to Cally Soukup's @78:

Miss Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell
Miss Lucy went to heaven, the steamboat went to
Hello, operator, please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me, I'll kick you in your Behind the 'frigerator, there was a piece of glass
Miss Lucy slipped and stepped on it, and it went up her
Ask me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies
The boys are in the locker room, pulling down their
Flies are in the country, the bees are in the park
The boys and girls are kissing in the D A R K dark!

I also remember something about somebody (Miss Lucy?) "... in the cow pasture, eating chocolate pies", but I can't figure out where it fit in.

My older son, currently in middle school here in Los Angeles, taught me another double-entendre verse like "Miss Lucy". I'll have to get him to refresh my memory so I can post it here. He'd never heard "Miss Lucy".

This is all reminding me of the "Concert Choir Cheer" that someone invented while I was at Vandy. It went like this:

Ma-hee, ma-hi,
Ma-hee, ma-hi, ma-ho
A roomstick, a broomstick,
A nick-nack-nanny-crack
Sol-fat merang-gee
Hobble-gobble ricka-racka
Hobble-gobble firecracker
Hobble-gobble RAzoo
Fred* blow your KAzoo
Sis boom bah
Vanderbilt Concert Choir
Rah rah rah!

The people who came up with it seemed to think it fit some pattern that everyone would know. To me it was just gibberish... but OTOH, I still remember it 35 years later, so I guess it was effective gibberish!

* Fred Ford, the choir director.

Yes, in our local dialect, the "o" in Lincoln is more of a schwa. "Link'n".

There's a place somewhere
where the ladies smoke cigars
and every puff they take
is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake dies
they put diamonds in its eyes,
when the diamonds fade,
it is 1968.

If anyone knows anything about origins I'd be delighted to be illuminated!

I learned it (sometime in the early 1970s) as:

There's a place called Mars
Where the ladies smoke cigars
And the smoke they make
Is enough to kill a snake
When the snake is dead
They put flowers on its head
When the flowers die
They count one-two-three-four-five.

Because having a less-than-a-week timeframe to gather documents and apply in person is TOTALLY something every family can do at no notice, especially in a month often filled with family weddings and trips out of town, right?

Like the one we're making, where we fly out of the country this Friday morning and return home the afternoon of the day AFTER the 'last day' of registration?

Luckily, though overworked and intimidated, my kid's future preschool teachers are also sweet and friendly, and we have (hopefully) worked out an alternative time to come in under special dispensation. Now I just need to acquire a copy of her vacc record on no notice before Friday morning, as there will be no time at all to do anything about it after we come back into town.

The more I read into the CPS central system's policies and general methods of operation, the more I sympathize with the parents who run FOR THE HILLS away from it at their very first chance to do so, if they have the means. Alas, we have not the means, so I get to dig in and Get Active and try to help make it functional from the inside out. See grindstone, apply shoulder, etc.

I've finally found a network of blogs from other CPS parents and teachers, and am utterly appalled at the difference between Facts On The Ground as experienced by people actually trying to use the system, and what gets talked about on public radio or mainstream news blogs.

The mainstream news isn't just burying the lede on current CPS flusterclucks, they're completely missing the entire point. While tossing softball sweetheart questions at the people they have up for interview.

It will take 7-10 business days to get it.

I have to have it in my hand on June 24th ... meaning John has to go into the office in the afternoon of the day we fly back into the country and pick it up from the departmental fax machine. And we're lucky we got that 'special extension' from the school, or we wouldn't have it at all in time for their 'mandatory' registration days!

HLN: Woman discovers that Icelandic fleece spins itself. Cat hair, however, does not.

Why did the cowboy get a dachshund?

Because he wanted to get a long little doggie.

I can't remember the rest of it, which is just as well.

More biblical exegesis -- New Testament constipated men -- courtesy of the Mudcat Cafe:
Peter (was like a rock; also, heaven and earth could not move him; also, he denied it three times)
Judas Iscariot (he burst asunder, Acts I:18)
Titus (his name speaks for itself)
Jesus (he cleared the temple; he rose after three days)
And of course, GOD (He sits till Judgement Day)

Apparently not constipated:
John the Baptist (he went before)
Martha (she rose up hastily)

This song seems to have become a staple on the renaissance faire circuit.

More seriously, there are some breeds that are supposed to make yarn that doesn't smell like wet dog, but I don't remember what they are and there are SO MANY sheep to try...and then there are the camelids...and then the plants. And the silkworms. I won't be bored any time soon!

On the other hand, this pet fur spinner washes it before and after spinning. I guess it's just personal preference.

Either way, a dog fur sweater need not smell like a wet dog. There are instructions on line for washing fur.

All of my dogs have had spinable coats (Pomeranian, Siberian Husky, and Corgi-Chow) but I've never managed to spin any.

I especially liked the bit where the president said he welcomed a public debate on this kind of program, given that he's had the authority to declassify enough of the program to have that discussion since he took office in 2008. Anyone want to bet he will tell Eric Holder not to prosecute Snowden, since he's just allowing us to have a public debate on these programs?

They made their initial goal in 12 hours. At this writing they're less than $2,000 away from the level at which Ursula will write and illustrate a new short story in the Digger universe, which will be included in the omnibus.

@#154: I heard "Is it water/ is it wine/ Oh my god it's Turpentine!"

Followed by:
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men see it all.

He's sure that there's a market for authentic ass-hats on the Internet.

And the boys don't care
'Cause they like to see it bare.

No wonder I (temporarily) wiped it from memory.

From the same school bus, circa 1960:

I want a man, I want a man,
I want a mansion in the sky.
I feel like hell, I feel like hell
I feel like helping some poor guy,
And when the dam, dam, dam, dam, damage is done,
I'm gonna have myself a barrel of fine,
I want a mansion in the sky.

I wanna neck, I wanna neck,
I wanna necklace made of pearls,
I wanna pet, I wanna pet,
I wanna petticoat that swirls,
And when the dam, dam, dam, dam, damage is done
I'll have my child, child, child, child, childish fun,
I want a mansion in the sky.

The way I learned the song was

Lulu had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell
Lulu went to heaven, the steamboat went to
etc.

For some reason, as a child, I connected this verse to the Little Lulu comics, especially the very unauthorized ones that went around the schoolyard.

are in the bathroom / eating all the
flies are in the kitchen / bees are in the park

& etc. I didn't hear the the zipper innuendo until much later in life. But I did get introduced to a shorter variant which ends

The boys are in the bathroom, making chocolate pies!
(And lemonade...)

The last two words sung much like the "And many more..." that sometimes gets appended to "Happy Birthday".

We used to do the McDonald's hand jive, but I suspect our choreography was much simpler than some of what's being reported here. It consisted of only four moves: the swim-style slapping hands once with right hands above left hands, then again with left hands above right, then a double hi-five, then you just clap. Repeat until out of jingle.

Here's another rhyme I remember:
Tra la la boom ti ay
My teacher passed away
We threw her in the bay
Tra la la boom ti ay

And when they fished her out
Mistook her for a trout
They could have won a prize
For her enormous size.

And
There's a place in France
Where the women do a dance
And the dance they do
Was written by a Jew
Now the Jew couldn't dance
So they kicked in the pants
And the pants he wore
Cost a dollar eighty-four
Plus Tax

Sometimes a troll appears as a piñata, but gnomes are really quite difficult to mistake for trolls.

The second line in the version I know is "Light a match and see it gleam." Otherwise the same. (New York, 1960s.)

That's the form. Following verses:

The first one's name was Abraham...
The second one's name was Isaac...
The third one's name was Jacob...
They all went down to Amster-SSSH!
I'm gonna say it anyway...
They all went down to AmsterDAM...

There may have been more verses, but that's all I can remember. The whole point of it was to be a giggly way to almost-swear. "Amster-Amster-DAM-DAM-DAM!"

I have vague memories of a men's choir singing this with lovely vocal harmonies, very solemnly and earnestly, but blowed if I can remember where.

Also, in our version of Jingle Bells, Robin ran away, and Wonder Woman lost her bosom flying TAA (Trans Australian Airlines, which doesn't exist any more)

Rainflame #182, that is amazing (and awesome). Particularly because ours was a very small school and I don't remember any students of US descent - must have been cross-pollination!

Compare and contrast with "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary", in which Binky pictures the soul as a two-lobed object, something like a thyroid (although he speaks of it as "lung-shaped"), in the center of the chest.

You'll be delighted to know that I am cynically unsurprised that someone made that particular comment.

You should not say that naughty word...
I thought I'd say it anyway...

abi 192: I'm sure I speak for everyone here when I say I'm not surprised that you expected that.

1. Even if you have the grotesquely wrong idea that every slash ("/") should be followed by a space in text (an idea you should discard), you really cannot possibly have wanted the slashes to be spaced in URLs.
2. Some ellipses ("...") should have spaces after them, while others should not. When the ellipsis is used to indicate trailing off at the end of a sentence, it should be followed by a space; when it indicates an omission or vocal hesitation in the middle of a sentence, it should not. (There are those who believe in spaces before AND after an omission-indicating ellipsis, but spacing only after is just wrong in that case.)
3. 'Martial' is a perfectly good word. It is not, however, a verb. The verb is 'marshal'. Yes, they're derived from the same root, but they're spelled differently in English.
4. Copyeditors are also versed in the subtleties of punctuation. The following two sentences do not mean the same thing:
   • I waited for the weekend when I could release my geekiness.
   • I waited for the weekend, when I could release my geekiness.

This writer was referring to his favorite SFF show coming on on the weekend (every weekend), not to eagerly awaiting EasterCon. The second sentence was required; you used the first.

5. Someday, to my regret, 'miniscule' will be a correct spelling (as all non-calligraphers forget the word 'majuscule'). That day is not yet, however, despite what Microsoft and FireFox (which as I write this has underlined the correct 'majuscule' but not the incorrect 'miniscule') believe. A real copyeditor would have caught that.


6. Different book, now: 'brusk' is not a word. It's spelled 'brusque'. (Word gets that one right; FireFox accepts both.)

My two versions of "Say, Little Playmate":
Good:
Say, say, O Playmate
Come on and play with me!
Play with my dollies three
Climb up my apple tree
Slide down my rainbow
Into my cellar door
And we'll be playmates
Forevermore

Evil:
Say, say, O Enemy
Come on and fight with me!
Play with my monsters three
Climb up my poison tree
Slide down my razor blade
Into my dungeon door
And we'll be enemies
Forevermore

Also, my version of "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" ended

..and I forgot my spoon
So I'll just use my straw
(disgusting slurping noises until everyone collapses into a fit of giggles)

I also learned some French camp songs at summer camp in France, but unfortunately don't remember them today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqgZnvfJ9Jg

The Inquisition What a Show

I’m missing how they got the General’s side of the correspondence in the first place, or did they have to search his browser history?

This is fascinating. What can Redbird do to relocalize his soul, and why is it bad that it's presently closer to his head?

Cynicism is consent.

A young journalist confronts his secret extraterrestrial heritage when Earth is invaded by members of his race. (Zna Bs Fgrry)

Isn't that a verse from Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fryer"?

.

"Climb up my apple tree
Shout down my rain barrel
Slide down my cellar door
And we'll be jolly friends
Forevermore!"

That's a regular song, copyrighted and everything. I used to have it on a little five-inch 78. H. Allen Smith interviewed the songwriter in one of his first couple books — Low Man on the Totem Pole, most likely, but maybe Life in a Putty Knife Factory. Like the Hokey Pokey, there's a possibility the writer simply appropriated an existing work (a kid verse in this case).

.

"kumalada kumalada vista.
Oh, nonono, not the vista."

This isn't too far from what I sung along with my sisters, and since I was picking it up by ear, it might be even closer to what they were singing (though they tended to scornfully correct me when they had the chance). I sang "Fleesta," for instance.

.

Fade, I was going to write about the "Silent Night" variant of We Three Kings. You've covered it pretty well, except to the extent that I heard it as a countdown. Three Kings, Two Kings, One King…

.

Heh. "Comet." I made up a metric butt load of verses to that in junior high. Same for a parody version of the McDonald's song that went to the tune of "Down By the River Side."

.

Dancing Crow, the tune to that — most canonically "There's a place in France" — is the "Hootchy Kootchy Dance" that Little Egypt canced to at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Sol Bloom claimed to have written it for the act. Despite other versions I've heard, I retain affection for the one my sister Givhan used to sing when we were in the single digits:

"There's a place in France
Where the women do the dance.
And the dance they do
Costs a dollar fifty-two."

Rainflame, you're the first one I've ever seen with a variant that similar.

*peals of laughter*

(I love that book. And the movie. Usually, movies made from books I like suck; that one didn't. :) )

Dave Harmon @212: Maybe it was syndicated? A quick Google yields this list of varying levels of quality, humor, and political correctness, which has the WoO summary in the first comment.

Paula Broadwell sent threatening emails to Jill Kelley, using a pseudonym. Kelley complained to an FBI agent about it. When he investigated, he found that whoever was sending the emails seemed to know a lot about the travel plans of generals, and dug into the forensics*, and that took him to Paula Broadwell.

Info on Wikipedia
Article on New Scientist

*It's just metadata.

Marijuana, marijuana
L S D, L S D
The C I A makes it
Richard Nixon takes it
Why can't we?
Why can't we?

The way I heard it:

Marijuana, marijuana
L S D, L S D
Rockefeller makes it
Mayor Lindsay takes it
Why can't we
Why can't we

Nelson Rockefeller was the Governor of New York, and Lindsay was mayor of New York City. Both left those offices in 1973.

We didn't play typical "tag" much either. We played ditch 'em, which was like tag, only it involved hiding and stealth -- and lots more shade and less running than straight up tag. The way it worked was everybody hid (like hide and seek) and then the person who was "it" went hunting. The person who was "it" wore an identifying baseball cap or a bandanna or sweat band (this being the 80's)or something. If they found somebody and successfully tagged them, that person had to wear the hat, became "it" and took up the search while "it" found a shady place to hide for awhile.

Marijuana, marijuana
L S D, L S D
Scientists make it
Teachers take it
Why can't we
Why can't we

Well, #215 is "Nyvra," I believe. I haven't puzzled out the others, yet.

He also recounted
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me
Guess I'll eat some worms
Big fat juicy ones
Little tiny scrawny ones
See how they wiggle and squirm
Bite their heads off, suck the juice out
Throw the skins away
Nobody knows how a man can live
On worms three times a day

The latter song has been (in various versions) illustrated by Gilbert Shelton and used to good advantage by Peni R. Griffin in her YA novel Ghost Sitter.

David Wald @142, thanks for the tip re Pitch Perfect. We now have it on reserve at the local library. Also: I don't suppose it means anything to you, but your name catches my eye because I have a brother named David Wald(en Burt).

Cally Soukup @154, when I heard it, Lincoln had been drinkin' something that was
Kind of white and
Kind of green
Lincoln, dear, that's KEROSENE!

Cassy B @156, what I heard was
There's a place on Mars
Where the women smoke cigars
And the smoke is so thick
That the men are always sick

Albatross @172, yeah, I have already seen most of those used to draw attention away from what Snowden has told us.

Magenta Griffith @179, when you refer to "very unauthorized" comics, do you mean just comics being very much unauthorized at school, or do you mean you saw Tijuana Bibles as a child?

Benajmin Wolfe @180, should an asshat be an asslike hat, or a hat for one's ass? A hat with donkey ears would run a distant third in my preferences.

Sarah @203, I intend to probe the issue of Redbird's soul, cautiously, with an effort to minimize the observer effect.

Elliott Mason @205, by George he's right, cynicism is consent.

Dave Harmon @206: It sounds like a movie summary my wife delivered, "A recovering criminal becomes a crime counselor" (Gur Funqbj). Myself, I would have called it, "Traumatized veteran finds inner peace by studying Eastern mysticism, then returns to his home town".

KipW @210, In the song "Monster in My Pants" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm6yEe439lw], that much-reworked verse was rendered as
No, they don't wear pants
On the other side of France
But they do wear a sheet
To protect them from the heat
which has the unusual plus of being factually true.

I've come to the conclusion that #216 is indecipherable because it depends on a false understanding of an aspect of the movie involved, "Onpx gb gur Shgher."

Thatcher had nothing to do with it, as I understand it.

Nope, looks like I'm wrong and PM Thatcher might indeed have had something to do with it.

"Research first, then give opinion," a lesson I seem to frequently forget.

"Neglected by his father, a young boy listens to a hallucinatory soldier, resulting in the deaths of an elderly couple and the fiery explosion of a jetliner." (Pybnx naq Qnttre)

"In this odd reimagining of Christian legend, a saintly figure with mysterious healing powers dies, rises from the dead, and, after imparting final wisdom to his disciples, ascends to heaven." (R.G.)

Another film with a hard-to-disguise title, so I'll only ROT part of it: "While a group are on a business trip, one member goes insane and kills the others one by one, until the allegedly sane member kills him, and then has a bizarre vision before returning home." (n fcnpr bqlffrl)

He seems really sincerely angry about this. Bad that it's been happening. Good that the guy at the top is making it really clear what he thinks about such behaviour.

*Which meant I didn't have to go to the actual website, thankfully.

Lila @241: Yeah, that was my reaction as well. That guy is seriously pissed off - and not afraid of speaking plainly: "if that does not suit you, then get out."

(Oh and the "AKICIML" was 'cos originally I was going to ask for pointers to what had been going on that I'd missed.)

From Hugh's sister, Lesli Daniel, I have learned that there will soon be memorial events for Hugh in Pacifica, California, in the Netherlands, in Ann Arbor, and in outer space.

One fascinating sideline in all this is the number of establishment journalists and pundits who are pre-emptively dismissive and hostile to Snowden, rather like they were/are to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. This Reason article and this Daiily Beast article are both quote and link farms for establishment media figures who have jumped in to smear Snowden for daring to let us know what was being done with our information, allegedly in our name. This is very useful for me, as a consumer of media. For example, if guys like David Brooks and Richard Cohen are going to reflexively smear people in personal terms for whistleblowing, that's helpful to know the next time I see them sneering about some protest movement or politician or something. Their team is the establishment, and they will defend their team and attack its enemies, wrong or right. Sort of like John Boehner and Diane Feinstein, who are on the same page about Snowden and his leaks.

Does anyone have experience with repairing leaking 1930s-era wall mount kitchen faucets? The plumber quoted a price of over $500, which is not chicken feed, but the faucet unquestionably needs to be fixed.

My plumbing skill level is about at "replace shower head, replace faucet aerator, tweak misbehaving toilet ballcocks and flapper valves," but I can follow diagrams. OTOH, I don't have a lot of grip/wrist strength for wrenches.

Thoughts?

The first two are a matter of disassembling the right parts and performing periodic maintenance (replacing a washer, and possibly a valve seat, in the first case, and replacing the packing around the valve shaft in the second). The third probably means you have to replace the whole thing; it would depend on how easy it is to get access to where the fixture attaches to the pipes, how nice you want it to look after you're done, and how much you want to spend on the replacement fixture.

To make clear the limits of my expertise, I've done the first a couple times, I've done the third a few times but never on wall-mount faucets, and the second I only know how to do in theory (but I don't think it's much more complicated than the first).

$500 may or may not be unreasonable for the third case. At the other extreme, I've had a plumber replace washers for free, while he was in the house after finishing a bigger job (replacing a water heater).

Could you elaborate a little more on the faucet replacement process and what it involves? The innards of faucets are a mystery to me.

This gives you everything you need to know in enough detail to decide if you want to tackle it yourself or yell for help.

You have to take the handles off to get the old faucet off - take out the screws in the handles to do this. Then you may be able to get the plates (escutcheons) off from against the wall, or at least slide them out - they hide the holes around the pipe.
There are nuts that you have to loosen to get the faucet off (they're probably either 1/2 or 3/4-inch). After those are off, you should be able to take off the faucet.
The pipes sticking out are called nipples, and they're threaded on both ends. (Hope you can use the existing nipples, because it's a pain to replace stuff that's inside the wall and not really accessible.) Put plumber's tape (teflon tape) around the threads on the nipple, and assemble according to the instructions that should come with the new faucet.

"A small terrorist cell accompanied by two mercenaries goes on a killing spree in a government installation, eventually succeeding in blowing it up."

(Fgne Jnef)

None of the faucets in the YouTube clips look much like what's in the kitchen. I even looked for laundry sinks. Either I get commercial sinks, or I get modern things that use cartridges.

I don't have the Time-Life book. I've got a couple of other ones. I was busy looking at the bits on the insides of toilet tanks (the toilet in question actually had nothing wrong with it except an extended period of disuse, & behaved itself perfectly after being flushed a few times) and then the plumber showed up before I really investigated the sink.

My dad, who is generally good with plumbing (I have seen him install new toilets, disposals, and dishwashers, as well as fixing ordinary sink-mounted faucets) says it's not one he'd want to do himself. This suggests maybe I shouldn't.

There's a diagram here, taken from a US Navy manual.

If it's leaking but otherwise working, it is fairly simple. The brass screw which holds the seat washer can be awkward. The valve seat can be re-cut if it is worn: needs the right tool. But the symptom you describe sounds more like the spindle threads, which move the stem up and down, and that means replacement.

I can't really judge what the plumber said about the cost, but it doesn't sound crazy for tap replacement on an old-style system without isolator valves. It's not so much the parts as the time it takes.

(That assumes the hot water is working elsewhere in the house and it's not something like a header tank running dry. If it;s just the one tap it's time to replace the tap.)

I had to do this a couple of years ago (On Christmas Eve!) when the mixer tap on the kitchen sink failed. With no isolator valves for the tap, it's a tedious process that involves turning off both supplies - in this case the cold feed to the house and draining the cold water header tank that feeds the hot water system.

Rickibeth: If it's a "replace the whole thing" than it depends a bit on whether you need it to look like the old one or just to work. If the later, then it may be that removing the old one and putting on a brand spanking new unit would be the easiest and cheapest option - and might be something you -could- do yourself, with the help of a DIY book or two.

But yes, if there are no cut-off valves, you're going to have to drain the system before you can do anything else. I presume you know where your mains water comes in and where to cut it off? If the kitchen (cold) tap is fed from the mains, then you should just be able to turn it off at the mains than let it drain and it shouldn't take too long. [And forgive me if I'm teaching my proverbial grandmother to suck eggs.]

The tap doesn't need to look exactly like the old one. What it needs to be is the most affordable one for the job -- because there is no way the house in question will sell as anything other than a fixer-upper. For the most part, it's structurally sound, and there's a relatively new furnace in place, and it has very good bones -- and if *I* were buying it, the original Art Deco tiling in the bathroom upstairs would be a selling point, though it has to be re-grouted/re-caulked with dispatch. But cosmetically? It's barely been touched since the 1960s, as the gold-speckled Formica in the kitchen and the grasscloth wallpaper all through the first floor can attest. And the money for a full kitchen remodel and whole-house cosmetic updating is NOT there.

So, functional repairs only, done as affordably as possible. Which, in this case, I believe means letting the plumber do it, because if I try it myself and break it in the process, that usually means paying the plumber MORE. Especially since it's one that my dad said he wouldn't try himself.

Must contact plumber & point out we don't need a stylish faucet unit, though.

In there he explains how his altruistic and pragmatic considerations go hand in hand.

And yes, we need to think about this wrt other events.

[*Minor point: Abi, in the version of the video which you link to, I think the video is a fraction of a second behind the audio and I found it distracting - the version directly at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U) and the one at BoingBoing which i linked to @239 I found better. No idea why, and it might just be my perception, but I thought I'd mention it.]

I "grew up" italizicing Latin contractions such as etc. and e.g.. Another editor claims that these days those count as loanwords and shouldn't be italicized. The example he gave was "vice versa", which I would accept as a loanword. What's best practice on this these days?

At least you probably know the difference between "i.e." and "e.g." - too many people appear not to know it at all, which I find extremely irritating.

1) The more commonly used the Latin, the more likely it is to not need italics. I might not italicize "quid pro quo" because it comes up in casual speech; I would almost certainly italicize "sensu stricto", which does not.

2) If publication is involved, there should be an agreed on style guide which will specify, or give more specific guidelines.

3) If all else fails, google and see how reasonably well-edited publications online format it. Or just use the number of results as your rule of thumb for whether or not it's common enough to not need italics anymore.

Is this really needed for the app to function, or is it something I should avoid?

Half of everyone has a reversed understanding of what they mean, so even if you use them correctly half of your audience will misunderstand.

I recommend using 'that is' and 'for example' instead.

My father never thought of things such as isolator valves. If a tap needed fixing he would look for the stopcock. We used to live in a house that didn't have such modern features. Assuming there are no problems with access, it would be worth fitting isolators as part of the work.

I've seen enough changes in the standard technology of these things that I would want to check the current options. It wouldn't astonish me if pipes sizes and threads were something to watch for.

It's also really irritating that none of the ringtones that come with the phone sound anything like a phone ringing (I mean a cellphone, not an old-fashioned bell). The ones that do all cost money. Bastards.

" ...look for the stopcock."

It's under the gas cooker (and this moose has an extended-length T-spanner to operate it without the need to move the cooker). Otherwise, it's the one in the street (which also requires an extension bar to operate it - in an emergency, cutting a slot in the end of a piece of floorboard (width reduced to go down the hole) does the job nicely). A friend has one stopcock in the street feeding four houses, but that house was built just after the European War and still has the pipework for gas lighting in the walls (Disconnected!). (I discovered the cable drum wrappers under the floor from when electric lighting was fitted in 1923 (along with all the plaster rubble and a broken hammer handle) when running telephone and network cabling.)

I tend to fit isolator valves to taps (faucets) when I need to overhaul them. (This does not mean at 1930Z on Christmas Eve!)

I admit to knowing very little about modern cellphones, especially smartphones, but you might check your manual to see if you can set your ringtone to be an mp3 file that's on your device. If you can, then it's just a matter of finding a no-strings-attached mp3 file of the phonering that you want, and loading it onto your phone simply as a file that you can find.

I say this because my old dumbphone died recently, and had an old-fashioned ring, and my new cheap dumbphone didn't come with an old-fashioned ring, so I looked up the manual, and found that I could set an mp3 file as the ringtone. Not that I've actually DONE it yet, mind you, but I apparently can.

The next issue is re-grouting the tile in the upstairs bathroom. That one, I have every confidence I can manage correctly. The issue there becomes how much a professional will charge vs. the time it will take me. Can't move in until it's done, because the cracked grout due to house settling means the shower leaks; however, moving in is not a thing with a deadline. And I know that I will both love and hate picking out all the old grout -- it's satisfyingly fiddly work, but there's SO MUCH of it. So if, for instance, the parts car in the driveway sells for roughly the cost of a pro job, it'll be worth it.

Augh, home repair.

* Except sometimes when I'm feeling especially lazy, or in fora where HTML italics don't work and I have to represent italics via *asterisks*.

I've always wanted to try an egg cream. What's the name of the deli? Thanks!

[The /product/ subdirectory in the URL made the test-slugs' eyestalks twitch. -- Maunie Speilfug, Duty Gnome]

And now, a glimpse into the activities that usually hide behind the internet's facade of crowd-sourcing:

#define meme: "protagonist of my next novel"
Related to: "name of my next band"
Form: "[cool word] [Jones|Smith] is the protagonist of my next novel."
Example: "Derecho Jones is the protagonist of my next novel."

[It was indeed the code-like sequences, which uncomfortably resembled what spammers send when they've set up their software wrong. -- Borin O'Boris, Duty Gnome]

Something that I forgot to mention is that several of the sites I checked at the time drew the line by unfamiliarity, which a couple of your comments square with. Xopher, you (unfortunately) have a point about i.e. and e.g., despite The Oatmeal's best efforts. Though, that very point makes me more inclined to italicize them when I do use them. ;-)

I guess it's time I stopped italicizing "etc.", anyhow.

[A munged link. -- Ponchetran Xix, Duty Gnome]

The air vent to the bomb shelter has definitely become a water inlet, to the point where when everyone was huddling in the basement when the tornado passed by¹, they hear a little waterfall. My thesis is that after fifty years of being buried, the thing has become rotten and is serving as a drain for rainfall along the front of the house. OK, so any ideas about plugging the leak?

¹17 miles long across Montgomery County, passed less than a quarter mile south of us. We lost a big branch from a silver maple; neighbor's pine trees landed in the middle of our boxwoods.

Check with a local contractor.

Er, well... the last time I said "Huh, I'd better regrout that", the result was stripping the wall down to the bare studs and rebuilding/replacing -- the grout had let the backing plywood behind the tiles get wet, and from wet degrade into mushy and nasty.

One thing I've absolutely learned from living in a moderately old house (not quite 120yrs yet) is that absolutely NOTHING is ever straightforward (or quick!), and the most deadly phrase is something along the lines of "Oh, that should be a quick'n'easy fix".

Hells - finding a drain valve for the tub... said tub having a drain pipe in a size that almost nobody had heard of, never mind actually -carrying-...

At any rate, as far as the shower goes, there's something to be said for plenty of plastic and tape, and dealing with the job in stages, should it turn out to be as featureful as mine was.

Dave Bell@293: recent code changes at least require 6mm concrete board backing the tile. I have had to rebuild nearly every area where water supply plumbing exists in this house for just that reason, though. Now there's double and triple redundant water exclusion, but you have to wonder at the thought process that concluded that grout on wallboard or plywood was good enough.

The house, you see, was built in 1936, and has been continuously occupied since 1969. The woman who was six when she moved in is still there, and my housemate and I are planning to move in with her. But first we have to clear out a proportion of the Stuff that's been there since 1969, so there's room in the bedrooms for our Stuff.

There are two full bathrooms in the house -- the original one upstairs, and the downstairs one that was expanded from a half bath to accommodate the current resident when her disability started interfering with stairs. (Her bedroom is the dining room.) So, in theory, we could all use that one. But it'd be a lot nicer to have a functional full rather than a half bath on the same level as the bedrooms.

At some point, we as a household want to move to another city, so the house has to be in salable condition -- but a lot of that can be done when we're all in residence. I do think that having all basic systems functional will help the house fetch a higher price even as a fixer-upper, because it'll mean the new owners can pick and choose what they want to do first, rather than be forced to do a functional repair when they're dying to make some cosmetic ones.

And, yes, I do consider a full kitchen remodel to be cosmetic when the current kitchen has an undamaged floor, working plumbing, and working appliances, even if by present-day standards it's ugly as sin. I really hope we'll be able to find a similar functional-but-ugly house when we move, as that'll drive down the price. Gold-speckled Formica counters in the kitchen? I grew up with that. 1970s avocado tile in the bathroom? Well, I grew up with tan ones, with wallpaper that had burnt orange and brown ferns on a silver foil backing -- but there's a reason all my towels are white, and a decently maintained avocado-green toilet should flush just as well as a white one. (Better, if they're allowed to keep the original instead of switching it to low-flow.) And any wallpaper that's just too horrible to live with, I can rent a steamer and paint the walls white my own self. Done it before, and I know how to spackle holes and cracks, too. I'm good at that; my uncle, the one with the construction company, taught me how to mud drywall when he was building an extension on his house.

My current housemate doesn't care about aesthetics at ALL -- she uses Rubbermaid dressers instead of wooden ones, because she likes that they're lightweight for moving. That's beyond even my theory of practicality-first - I'm not giving up my Victorian mahogany bedroom set, or my modern solid-oak rolltop with the built-in holes for computer cords. But I can tolerate a great deal in the way of fixtures. And my future housemate is accustomed to wonky aesthetics, and is practical about dealing with a limited income -- our priorities would be grab bars in the bathrooms, and a wheelchair ramp for the entrance. She doesn't use a chair now, but she did at one point before, and there's a high probability she'll need one again some time in the future, and in the meantime, a ramp would add greatly to her comfort, as it's a daily toss-up whether she's using a walker or a cane.

As long as I'm living in a house where the roof doesn't leak, the basement doesn't flood, and the heating, the plumbing, and the electricity all work -- the rest is gravy.

Tile sizes... ("Oh, I'll just grab some tiles to cope with this re-grouting thing ... plain white, shouldn't be a big deal ..." (@&$@#&($ ).

Good thing he knows how to use a tile cutter. But I think he went through most of a box to create enough unbroken ones to use!

It was a smidge expensive as a one-time buy, but I've yet to regret getting a wet tile saw. There's no way to use the standard 'score-and-snap' tile cutters with anything other than thin tile (well, barring lots and lots of patience, hope, luck and cursing). It's one of those tools that I don't use often, but are absolutely worth the storage and original price when I do need it.

Don't even get me started about the time he replaced the linoleum (well, I think it was one generation newer than true linoleum - vinyl sheeting? Whatever was common in 1961 when the house was built) kitchen floor with vinyl tile in the house I grew up in. Which was navy blue screen-printed with white pindots. And the screen had been just slightly off true.

Did I mention that my dad, although a fairly skilled amateur handyman, worked in software for a company that specialized in computer typesetting? And had developed his perception of printing and margins to a very, very small point size?

He spent HOURS arranging the tiles so that the edges would align to create the straightest possible visual margins between the tiles, rather than giving an effect of thinning and widening along their length.

My mother just wanted a finished floor (funny, that). It drove her CRAZY.

My maternal grandparents' house was built in the late 1950s. They never changed the bathrooms from their original robin's-egg-blue with starburst wallpaper and pale yellow with... I'm not sure about the wallpaper in there, but it was original. Likewise, they never did more to the kitchen than paint the cabinets (in an eye-popping yellow) and change the wallpaper every so often. I was sad when they papered over the monarch butterflies of my earliest childhood with mid-70s giant flowers in burnt orange, harvest gold, and avocado green. The coppertone wall oven was separate from the gas cooktop, which I liked even though the oven was smaller than standard. And for the longest time they had a fridge with a curved front and a lever handle.

My paternal grandparents had gorgeous black-and-white Art Deco tile in their bathroom. The house was a good bit older than that, though. It also had a toilet-without-sink just off the kitchen, which I believe had been enclosed from a bit of the back porch, and a toilet in a step-up cubby in the basement. Sometime in the 1950s or '60s, they'd redecorated the main floor with grasscloth wallpaper and a large built-in china cabinet with fold-open doors in part of the dining area. I suspect there had been some knocking out of walls.

I'm wondering if the house had been built without a bathroom and the plumbing was all a retrofit. The size and placement of the upstairs bathroom felt like it might once have been a bedroom, especially as there were only two proper-sized bedrooms upstairs and one tiny one that felt as if it might have been converted from a large linen closet, and (once their children had moved out) was used variously as a study or a dressing room). They moved in in the early 1940s, but I suspect all the plumbing retrofits were done before then.

Old houses are fascinating. If I were to live in a recently-built house, I'd feel like something was missing, despite the advantages of code compliance and all that.

Our (mine and my husband's) house was built in 1929, so has decent-sized rooms (even with all the book cases and book shelves lining many of the walls). The down side is that the walls are solid brick, so we don't have the option to put insulation inside them. The old farm house also has solid brick walls, but about twice as thick...

And I agree with you that redoing a perfectly functional kitchen just because it's unattractive is a cosmetic issue.

and @299: My partner has that kind of micrometer-calibrated visual acuity -- and no matter how many times I've tried to explain it to him, he still doesn't quite understand that I don't. This has caused Issues now and then.

I might very well have thought that the optical illusion of thinning-and-widening tiles was cool. But then, I tend to like things that mess with people's heads.

and @302: I think our house is of the same vintage as your grandparents'. It definitely has the same coppertone wall oven and separate cooktop, and a lot of real-wood paneling. The bathrooms are, unfortunately, Barbie pink (front) and institutional green (back). My partner has repainted the pink walls in the front one to plain white, which at least tones that down a bit! The shower stall in the back bath is non-functional; the old-style lead pan has rotted out, and because my partner's ex insisted on using the shower anyhow, the walls around it are badly water-damaged, which we don't have the money to have repaired or the time it would take to DIY it. So we use that shower as our fabric-storage closet, and have effectively a bath-and-a-half instead of 2 full baths. This isn't such an issue with only the 2 of us in the house.

My parents' house (built sometime in the 1930s; my family moved in in 1962) has what I call a three-quarter bath just off the kitchen: toilet and small shower but no sink*. My mother says it used to be a pantry; it was the previous owners who converted it. The back porch**, which the bathroom opens off of, has a permanently-locked door leading out into empty space†; the former stairs were removed before my family moved in.

*there's a sink right outside the bathroom door
**more of a sunroom than a porch, since it's completely enclosed but with more window than wall
†it's a one-story house, but the property slopes sharply front to back, so the back of the house is two stories tall, with a finished basement on the lower level under the back half

My former house, built 1897, had a door-leading-nowhere off the stair landing. It had very clearly gone to the kitchen (thus allowing you to bypass the entry hall), but a remodel had created cabinets in front of that door space, so the stairs were gone.

There was also an obvious cover for a stovepipe hole in a disused chimney stack in the kitchen.

I'm starting to feel that, in old houses, the original fixtures should be preserved as much as possible, including repairing rather than replacing them, only doing systems upgrades like wiring and plumbing as needed for safety. As for cosmetic features, it's all right to remove wallpaper that displeases you, and to remove wall-to-wall carpeting, but other than that, decorating changes should be made with furniture and other temporary objects.

Even if the house style is currently out of fashion, it'll probably come back, and original fixtures will seem really cool to some future occupant.

OK, I was about to download an app called "Free Ringtones for Android" when I noticed that the fine print says the app has access to do scary things like modify my contacts and write to my call log.

I'd just stay away from that sort of app entirely. Offering an entire custom app offering free, trivial things are a common way for spammers and scammers to sneak things in. For example, this app (which I've never heard of and am going only on your description) might well go and advertise itself using your name to your entire address book and recently-called list.

If you want a new ringtone, just, you know, download a sound file. Look up how to set a ringtone on your particular phone model.

It's also not a coincidence that all the included ringtones are stupid things that would never cut through music, and they charge for ones that sound like a real phone.

I'm absolutely certain that my (currently only functional) bathroom was once a bedroom -- 9'x12' wouldn't have been a vaguely reasonable size for a bathroom in a house of this age and style.

In fact, I strongly suspect that the bedroom closet (one of two total in the house) sits where the bathroom used to be -- but I haven't felt brave enough to rip things up looking for details.

Old houses are fascinating. If I were to live in a recently-built house, I'd feel like something was missing, despite the advantages of code compliance and all that.

Indeedy -- they feel weirdly sterile.

['Twas a punctuation issue. -- Bormoform Kiat, Duty Gnome]

Is it really a business-acceptable word now? Because KT, WTWCT, YKGOML, SKIA if so.

I wanted to like the movie and there are parts of it that are brilliant. On balance, the good outweighs the bad, and I'll recommend it on that basis.

The Good: It's a fresh take on the Superman mythos in the movies (the comics have visited the themes) and most of the segments on Krypton are moving. Russell Crowe does an excellent job as Jor-El.

They really get into what "strange visitor from another planet" really means. The paranoia and fear comes off right.

Henry Cavill looks great in the role. No complaints there. The Superman costume is very well done -- it's about time they lost the red underpants.

Amy Adams is a perfect Lois Lane.

And Kevin Costner and Diane Lane do a good job as Jonathan and Martha Kent.

The Bad: The endless and pointless action scenes. You could have dumped 80% of those and had a much better movie.

Gurer'f ab jnl gurl pbhyq unir qbar unys gur fghss gurl qvq jvgubhg xvyyvat zvyyvbaf bs crbcyr. Fxlfpencre gbccyvatf, tenivgl ornzf evccvat hc Zrgebcbyvf, fhcreureb naq fhcreivyynva gbffvat rnpu bgure guebhtu frireny ohvyqvatf....vg'f n tbbq guvat gurer jrera'g nal ynjlref nebhaq. Gurl jbhyq unir znqr zvaprzrng bs Fhcrf.

But there were moments that worked, and worked really well. And I'll probably see it again for those moments.

I find it helps a little to pretend that the word is instead "manatee".

^*That long abbreviation at the end which I can't make head or tail of.

After all, the correct (original) counterpart to "mentor" is "telemachos" and there's not a chance in Hell anyone would get that.

Clarion and Clarion West are doing Write-a-thons to encourage people to write while the workshops are going on, and to raise money. If you'd like encouragement to write, consider signing up. You don't have to actually raise any money for them -- but if you sign up for the Clarion West one, there are 4 donors who have pledged to donate $600 if at least 300 people sign up. They're all donating $1 per person who signs up if under 300 people do.

Deadlines for signup are this Friday. Here are the websites:

Clarion West Write-a-thon
Clarion Write-a-thon

Full disclosure: my partner Karen Anderson is the current Chair of the Clarion West board, an unpaid position. I volunteer to do massage on the participants.

Yeah, Kane. Dunno why I did that. Should be SCIA.

Ardala's gradually lost the use of all but one limb. She stopped squeaking her toys back in December, and even the wheelchair is too difficult for her. She has lost fecal and now urinary continence. Physical Therapy has improved the last year of her life, but after this last UTI issue (and her second to last leg), we have made the heart-breaking decision to let her go. Is there a way to ask a vet on the phone for a referral for a vet who can do home-euthanasia? I don't want to come in as I have neither the time or the money at this point... Is it unethical for a vet to provide that info without an office visit?

(reading this I sound like a monster, keeping a dog alive like this. Rest assured, the last few awful things have happened pretty quickly.)

No, you don't.
Everything you've posted about Ardala shows the love, concern, and informed care you've been providing.

re: vet referral
Why not just ask your vet if they provide that service (even if you're sure they don't)? If not, ask for the referral.

And <hugs>

You don't sound like a monster. You've been making the choices you've made out of love for her. No one here knows the situation the way you do, so no one's in a place to judge.

I'm sorry it's come to this. But I'm glad she'll die as she lived: loved.

I have emailed our physical therapist, but she has yet to email back. I know I should have called, but despite the fact that I think this is the best decision, I really can't actually talk about it without bursting into tears. Highly annoying. I also know that our PT grieves almost as much for clients' dogs as she does her own. Part of me is afraid she's angry with us for not doing more - but that's just my own judginess I think.

Ardala's vet has only been seeing her since November and has never known her as an active dog. We haven't had time to build up the kind of rapport that we had with the first vet (and none of the ones in between). We just stopped in on Thursday for the UTI from hell, but as it was a last-minute visit, I didn't get any face-time with her. I can't imagine that even though she only saw her for the UTI and did not do an orthopedic exam that she would be unaware of everything; we were just in last month with fecal incontinence and pain-management concerns. Maybe I'll call the office. I'm just in dread that it's going to be a "come in so we can discuss", which will make me feel guilty if I don't.

Anyway, Ardala's getting the Best Week Ever. Last night and this morning she got some of my Filet Mignon. Tonight she gets her very own chicken breast. Every night we take her around the block in the Little Red Wagon we got for her TPLO recovery, and she gets to feel the wind in her ears and smell the neighborhood smells again. On friday, we have a massage (no swimming; she hates the water) scheduled with her favorite massage therapist. And pending vet availability, we will say goodbye on Saturday. After which there will be drinking. And laundry. But probably mostly drinking.

Hugs. Sorry you have to do this.

Hardly an unusual reaction, and nothing to be ashamed of.

Have you tried searching on Google for a home-euthanasia service in your area?

My sympathies and condolences. This is never easy, and the way it's happening to you and Ardala is even harder.

And I bet your canine PT is really used to people bursting into tears around similar decisions, and I'll bet she'd feel -right?- -comradely?- about joining in with tears herself. And yes, most vet offices have had to deal with this problem before, and have ready referrals via the front desk (not even going through the doctor). Lizzy speaks truth (as she so very frequently does).

We could always use "mento".

The plural, of course, would be Mentos...

:-)

FWIW, many vets these days will actually do housecalls for euthanasia, even though they'll do them for nothing else.

For myself, I was 'happier' to have a vet I didn't expect to see again anytime soon coming to the house -- it was hard enough without dealing with somebody who might expect more than my being a curt and upset watering pot.

By 7-2 (Thomas and Alito dissenting), the Supreme Court has ruled that Arizona's "papers, please" voter registration law is illegal because it conflicts with Federal law. With any luck, this will be seen as precedent for voiding similar laws (or attempts to enact them) in a number of other states.

Wyman

*It, I would have happily killed. With my bare hands, if possible.

My father, Joseph Bell, died in hospital, on the night of the 13th/14th June. It was around midnight, and the 14th is the formal date on the paperwork, but, in essence, the nurse found him dead when she came with his medication.

He was weak, though showing slight signs of recovery from the illness which had put him in hospital. He was old, less than a fortnight short of his 93rd Birthday. My brother and I had seen him that afternoon. It was unexpected enough that the hospital didn't make one of those "come at once" telephone calls.

It's going to be a big change for me, after so many years of caring first for my mother and then for him.

I know the mettle of this blog's readers. I don't have a date set for the funeral yet, but prayers, good thoughts, or whatever else your faith prefers, might be best timed for the 24th June, his birthday.

We talk of the baby-boomers. He was part of an even bigger boom, after the First World War, which is still a record for the UK.

I read the article and noticed the two justices who disagreed on what seemed to be a very clear piece of law. I avoided the comment thread which followed; it seemed full of the usual lunacy. It used to be, in the days of printed news and on-paper letters, that the responses you saw were selected. The editors and publishers were allowing letter-writers to use a limited resource. Today, the first comment I saw was a promotion for one of those work-from-home scams.

Maybe if a few more people were checking facts, and blocking the spammers, we wouldn't have an unemployment problem. And how much money in the budgets of the new media vanishes into the deep pockets of the powerful?

Lila @326 I used telemachos some years ago when my mentor tried to call me a mentee. It didn't work out as well as I hoped.

Steve C @329 A lawyer friend of mine does actually refer to his trainees as padawan. Everyone seems to be happy with that.

People are calling it steampunk, but it isn't Victorian at all.

nerycellist, I'm sorry. You and Ardala have been through so much, and she has always sounded like an excellent, if highly opinionated dog. What you are having to plan is awful and heart-breaking, but it is not callous and cruel. That would have been abandoning her at the first sign of a problem that wasn't easily fixed, and I know you never considered that.

Thinking of you.

I'm sorry for your loss. He had a good innings, and he clearly left the world at least one interesting and worthwhile person richer than he found it. But I know that's probably scant comfort right now.

I'll keep him, and everyone who misses him (but you especially) in my prayers.

Dave Bell, my condolences...good thoughts and prayers headed your way.

nerdycellist, my sympathies.

Thinking good thoughts for all concerned in both cases.

May you find comfort.

and @360: Your last sentence has caught the crux of the problem. We don't just have regulatory capture here, we have media capture as well. Hiring someone even to delete/block the obvious spam (let alone a decent moderator) cuts into profits and therefore is a "waste of money".

Nancy, #362: Interesting. We may be seeing the development of a new genre here. Based on the cover art and the description, that book definitely evokes the steampunk feel, but it's pure fantasy rather than alternate-history.

Lizzy L @#330 (and others) – thanks for the encouragement. I called the vet’s office and it was exactly as you had said. The receptionist had two choices at the ready, and was happy to provide them. She asked after Ardala, and sympathized, and did not make me feel lousy or get the vet on the phone. It helped I think that she had Ardala’s chart in front of her. We have made an appointment for 8am on Saturday, after a nice breakfast and a long wagon ride.

A little more info on our decision is here.

Dave B: I'm sorry for your lost.

I'd buy it just for the cover, which has an actual female, standing properly, fully dressed, and who is not white!

Life imitating art, to our diminishment. The city fined the guy $15,000, sent him to prison, and removed the crosswalk.

This year, incidentally, the City of Los Angeles has begun restriping their crosswalks as zebra crossings, instead of the two-lines-across-traffic crosswalks. They're certainly easier to see.

I did notice that the guy has a Latino name. I wonder what the city's reaction would have been if a guy named Rick Smith had done the same thing.

It's the sad irony of California that those of Hispanic/Latino descent are treated as the newcomers. Not to mention the natives. Yup, we still have native tribes, something that comes as a big surprise to a lot of people in spite of the fact that we have Indian casinos all over the place. Head, meet sand.

I do understand why the city might oppose a crosswalk. We have a lot of debate about this in Portland. There are several streets outside of the city core that have multiple lanes of fast traffic, and infrequent traffic lights for pedestrians to cross safely. Of course, you're reluctant to walk two blocks to an intersection with a light, especially when you see a bus heading to the stop across the street. People naturally ask for marked crosswalks. Unfortunately, there's some evidence that they cause more injuries because the pedestrians are less paranoid. We assume that the traffic will stop, and all it takes is one oblivious driver not recognizing that the cross walk requires them to stop, and a 35 mph car is hitting a person.

The US Navy is also, as older equipment is retired, ending the use of all-upper-case in its official messages. It started over a century ago with the first teleprinters.

THE WORLD CHANGES STOP

It's years ago now, but when I first heard that not only was there such a thing as "jaywalking" in the US but that it was actually, genuinely, prosecutably illegal (in some states, I guess?), I was incredulous. It just seems so contrary to the whole freedom and independence thing that's supposed to characterise the nation.

Sources confirm that the device has been named "Idris".

Exposure to the Dutch language has produced a suggested motto for a Discworld guild of reference librarians: "Zie ook"

That is deeply and profoundly silly. They need to do an actually-guinea-pig-head-shaped helmet, though.

nerdycellist: one of the responsibilities we take on for our animal companions is making sure of the quality of their lives. Our older dog, Jemma, is almost 16 now. She's partially deaf, and has been blind for a couple of years. Now her hind legs are starting to fail, possibly due to a tumor pushing on her spinal cord. And she's becoming senile, though slowly. It's not yet time to put her down, because she is still happy about mealtimes, and wants to cuddle and be petted some of the time. But we know that she hasn't much time left, so we talked to the vet about what we can expect to see over the next few months. The vet asked us what factors we would use in making a decision, and said she approved of our criteria for the decision, then volunteered to come to our house when the time comes. It helps when the people you need for the information to make decisions like this are on yours and your dog's side.

For instance, most of the nearly 1,700 wolves surviving in the West lived in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming at the end of 2012. Those states now have recreational hunting and trapping seasons, and in the past two years, nearly 1,200 wolves have been killed. Nearly 400 more were killed for attacking livestock.

I do not understand Obama's environmental policies at all. He claims to be green and then extends more leases to oil companies. Indications are he's about to approve the Keystone pipeline, which won't do Americans any good and may do the Ogallala Aquifer under Nebraska great harm. He's done good things for alternative energy, but he's not raised his voice against fracking or mountaintop removal.

It's a puzzle.

General: Fans of the Foglios' webstrip Girl Genius may note that they appear to be picking up Chekhov's time machine, or at least poking at it.

What I like about this is that the apology is a real apology. He acknowledges harm done, accepts the blame, and publicly resolves to change his ways. I believe that in Christian terms this is called "true repentance." I applaud it, without excusing the wrong done in the past.

In fact, the only thing missing here is any statement of intention to make amends to those already harmed. Maybe that's in the full text of the apology, which is too slashdotted to read right now.

I do not understand Obama's environmental policies at all. He's done good things for alternative energy, but he's not raised his voice against fracking or mountaintop removal.

It's a puzzle.

Not if you look at Environmental Policy as separate from Energy Policy. Most people tend to lump them together. When it comes to Energy Sans Environmental, success is dependent on widespread infrastructure and inexpensive delivery of services.

In my recollection of the past, alternate energy was promoted when fossil fuel prices got expensive for the end users. Environmentalists jumped on the band wagon for Cheap Energy is Good, and added Green Energy is Good, Too because it was a two birds with one stone scenario. People could feel good about being frugal and ecologically aware at the same time.

However, young technology is not cheap, so they slowly dropped the cheap in favor of Green Energy is Good Energy. So the perception was an either/or option. Either renewable energy or gas/petroleum/coal based energy.

The real reason that cheap, clean alternate energies failed is that were no widespread, ubiquitous infrastructure elements to deliver the energy to the consumers. (And going "off the grid" had a lot of negative connotations.) So consumers were faced with Cheap/easy or Green/clean/expensive/hard to find.

By encouraging alternate fuels while allowing the expansion of more "traditional" fuels, Obama is trying to replace the either/or option with the both/and option. As in "energy is both cheap and easy and clean and green if that's what you want."

Over time, renewable and alternate energies will continue to develop infrastructure due to grass roots demands from the public consumers. So by the time "green" energy is a fully mature, ubiquitous option, "non-green" (i.e. non-renewable) energy will either be exhausted or out of social and political favor. Due to the law of supply and demand, clean/green energy will probably be cheaper in the not-too-distant future as the oil fields, coal beds and other resource providers get used up.

In short, Obama is not trying to stop the short sighted from running over the edge of the energy cliff. He is giving quiet and meaningful support to those who are very long range thinkers. (I saw an article today where the headline asked "if oil reserves are up, why aren't gas prices going down?" I didn't bother to read the article.)

Something else you might want to consider. The US military is dedicated to replacing around 50% of their fossil fuel dependent operations with clean, renewable fuels in the next decade. It's a goal they're pushing really hard to attain. The military is not doing this to be Environmentally Aware, they are doing it out of necessity for logistics and supply during times of combat and peace. But mostly during combat.

I am the leader of the FBI!

And a very good leader too!

You are law-abiding folk
And you know it is a joke
To assume I'd spy on you.

We are law-abiding folk
And we know it is a joke
To assume he'd spying do.

Though I have some UAVs
Bought before the spending freeze
That I fly from Ankara to Rome
Manned aircraft is the way
I habitually play
And I never use those drones at home.

What never?

No never!

What never?

Well hardly ever!

Hardly ever launches drones at home!
So give three cheers for that stand-up guy
The virtuous leader of the FBI!
So give three cheers for that stand-up guy
The leader of the FBI!

Including the one where they shot the wrong guy in the head and paid $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit.

I'm convinced at this point that the only way we get green energy is if it's economically a win. Otherwise, the collective action problem among countries is so brutal, and the incentives for any government to defect so strong, that I think we will in practice stick with the cheap energy that continues changing the climate. My intuition is that the best change of having this happen involves funding research into alternative energy, subsdizing adoption, investing in companies--the whole bit, but all focused on giving them a chance to get the price/convenience/erc to the point where they're competitive with fossil fuels. I wonder if the Obama administration's policy is driven by that same idea, combined with a desire to boost the economy short term. If you think that fossil fuels will win unless non-fossil-fuels get cheaper and better, there is no point in pushing back on fossil fuels till the alternatives get better--the next administration will just reverse you, and even if they don't, most of the rest of the world will go with the cheap fuel.

As an aside, we won't run out of coal anytime in the next couple centuries, and coal is the worst of the fossil fuels for CO2 emissions, so we can't assume that running out of supply will drive us to non-CO2-emitting energy sources. Not remotely in time. If we burn coal for the next couple centuries, and then shift to cleaner fuels, we will have long since done massive stuff to the climate and ocean pH, with God knows what results,

[1] Actually, I think that's just the tinnitus, which tends to get worse when I'm putting in 15-hour days at work under stressful deadlines.

Oh Noes! Does this mean I have to hang up my heliograph?

From what I hear, they've built up a year's worth of lead time, so it should remain monthly for a while even if Kurt's health takes another turn for the worse. (And now I need an atheist version of "God forbid". Any suggestions? "Touch wood" doesn't really work for me.)

(Oh, and "Astro City", two words.)

What is Astro City?

Cassy

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/14/banff-motorcyclist-pursued-by-massive-grey-wolf-along-stretch-of-b-c-highway-takes-pictures/

Mind you, this has nothing to do with the character competence in solving the mystery/adventure/what have you. This has to do with your chances to walk out of it intact at the end.

I'd argue that Number 1 would be Master Li, assuming his body count each case has remained steady since age 20 or so. There are reasons that Number 10 Ox is telling the stories, namely who else could take the pounding and live? Associates of the old man tend to die at an alarming rate: the good news is that what Simon Templer called "the Ungodly" tend to die even faster.

Number 2 would be a team since they don't work separately: the Lovely Angels. (This is a plot point in one of the movies. The head of the group hiring them says, approximately "If we do nothing everyone on the planet will die. If we hire the Dirty Pair, some may survive by accident.") Both are competent and they do solve their cases, but they are the poster girls for Collateral Damage.

Number 3 would be Nero Wolfe. I used to think The Continental Op should be in this position but while the body count is high in his stories, when it comes to deaths by association the Op has nothing on Wolfe. (At this point someone is going to bring up Red Harvest. I say Thppppth at you.)

(And while you're at it, let's skip the George RR Martin, Joss Wheadon, and Scott Lynch character jokes. Thank you.)

Number 4 would be Lovejoy from the books: the knowledge that whoever kills me in the process of getting the McGuffin will be killed by "accident" and much hand-wringing is not as much comfort as not being killed at all.

Number 5 would be Richard Wentworth, AKA The Spider. The Shadow (too many identities to list) is damn careful about those on his side, as is Richard Henry Benson (The Avenger) and Doc Savage, but The Spider is kill-crazy, and unless you're his servant or his girlfriend or the police chief that wants to put him away he's perfectly willing to ventilate anything and anybody in the pursuit of whatever dieselpunk mad scientist is at work. This is the pulp character that needed a human head to beat a villain and went looking for a jaywalker to contribute one.

Number 6 would either be Ripley or Ash. They're opposite ends of the same spectrum: both are willing to improvise as necessary, but one is smart and the other is dumb as a box of rocks. (Mr. Ripley is a different kettle of fish. Involving him is like involving 4Chan, and for similar reasons.)

Any other suggestions?

Bruce Durocher: The Doctor should probably be on that list, particularly his fourth incarnation.

Heather Rose Jones: Congrats! Out of curiosity... how close is your first glimpse to your scheduled release date? I haven't seen my cover art yet, and I'm getting predictably antsy.

My publication date is next February. I don't know what that means in the grand scheme of things. I imagine that publishers vary considerably in how things get scheduled between contract and appearance. Especially the smaller publishers.

I love the cover design (and have made it the wallpaper on my iPhone). It's a trifle more on the "romance" side of the equation than what I pictured in my head but that's probably entirely appropriate since it will be marketed much more as a romance than as a fantasy/adventure. And they took my idea of designing a concept that can carry over across the several planned books in the series with changes in focal image and color scheme. When it's more finalized I presume I'll be able to get permission to plaster it all over my social media.

My family has an "Avert!" gesture ritual: touch the end of your right thumb to your tongue, press the thumb into the palm of your left hand, and then "stamp" that palm with the side of your right fist. I suspect that it originally involved spitting into the palm, rather than transferring a small amount of saliva via the thumb. I believe my mother learned it from her father, who was born in the 1890s, and grew up, as an orphan, largely raised by his own grandparents, so it may be a 19th century thing, possibly Welsh in origin. Or not.

I'd put Modesty Blaise and Jack Reacher (who might make an interesting team) on the list of people I do want.

And as for the people I might not want, #430 ::: Jim Macdonald, are there historical examples of out-of-control law enforcement organizations being made into something safe for the general public?

It might make a difference that this is a digital-first publisher.

I'm antsy because the cover artist's usual style is very suited to paranormal and BDSM romance themes, but I don't know how well it will carry over into a historical whose nontraditional aspects aren't visible in the characters' costumes (how well are they going to DO the clothing?) and the only real cue should be the three happy people on the cover instead of two.

The local, not-terribly-good paper, The Oregonian, is firing dozens of people and cutting back on home delivery to three days a week. (But they're including the Saturday edition with the Sunday paper.)

Not having a paper to start reading in the morning, with comics and light news sections left for the evening, seems terribly wrong. I've been reading daily papers for most of the last 35 years, starting with Newsday and then the New York Times and the SF Chronicle.

There will be an online daily Oregonian, but . . . ah, fiddlesticks.

Sigh. Grump. Fssssht.

It's gotten thinner, and thinner, but at least once a week I've learned something about my town from the paper that I didn't hear on Oregon Public Broadcasting radio, or see online.
Maybe it will survive in this 3-days-a-week and online mode, but I think our community has been diminished.

One of the things I've missed from local new sources is reviews of the theater. It used to be that I'd look for information about a play, and find well-written reviews in the Oregonian and in Willamette Week. Not so much now.

A few victims knew he was on their side before their death, but he didn't lose too many clients to murder.

This is one of the more thoughtful articles I've read on ongoing surveillance policies, which ties into a lot of bigger questions about how we decide what consensus reality is and who is a nut unworthy of further attention. It strikes me that we almost always evaluate whether someone is sensible or not based on whether what they're saying agrees with consensus reality as received from respectable media and politicians and schools and such, at the time they say their piece, rather than going back later and checking to see whether they were right.

Thus, the boosters of the Iraq invasion got a big boost in respectability during the runup to the war--they were repeating the consensus picture of reality, unlike those un-American shrill moonbats who said there were no WMDs. And later, when it turned out that there really weren't any WMDs to speak of (excepting a few rusting chemical weapons shells), the Iraq war boosters didn't lose any respectability, and the antiwar moonbats didn't gain any.

Cally 447: Huh, I've seen that as divinatory: you put a substantial amount of saliva in the left palm, and pound it with the right fist; then by which way the spit flies out, you pick your direction (literal or metaphorical).

Gross, I know. And I can not remember where I've seen that. A movie? A TV show? Read it in a book and pictured it in my mind? Pretty sure I've never seen anyone do it in meat space.

Lizzy 452:Similar to what I was thinking, except I didn't think of the guy from Lymond.

Everybody dies! (except the Doctor and his companion)

The Horror of Fang Rock and Pyramids of Mars were a couple of 'good' examples of this.

It strikes me you could make a case for this being a 'Law of Time' (in some storyline other than Doctor Who, because there are too many counter-examples): Time protects itself from time travelers by killing all the witnesses.

Put in the vernacular of the 11th Doctor: "I'm the Doctor ... Run!"

Of course, it would be easier to kill all the time travelers.

Here is another, even more impressive and surprising one: http://exodusinternational.org/2013/06/i-am-sorry/

Except insofar as they tend to be difficult to kill. Though that may be a function of the fact that they're generally Protagonists.

On the other hand, V sbhaq lbhe ynathntr pbashfvat ng svefg, orpnhfr abg nyy gubfr punenpgref yvir guebhtu gur ynfg obbx va gur Oevgvfu frafr bs 'guebhtu'.

My child is asleep, and has been for over an hour DAYENU. It is notable that the taxi driver's chosen route from MDW to our house took significantly longer to drive THAN THE PLANE FLIGHT TO MDW FROM YTZ. I would've been significantly miffed if I weren't exhausted. I actually napped some in the cab.

Pluses: I saw several of Toronto's touristy joys that I've missed on previous trips (how, in the OVER 15 YEARS I've been periodically visiting, have I never managed to get to the amusements and trails on The Island before?!?); some conversation time with in-laws I enjoy spending time with; no Uncomfortableness in a familial sense.

Minuses: if organization and get-stuff-done-itude were gunpowder the entire group of 12 couldn't BLOW THEIR COLLECTIVE NOSE WITH IT. Not aided by the 5 members of the party younger than 13. Or the fact that our two-night trip to the Big Indoor Water Park involved severe gastroenteritis by most adults (not my family in any form) the night before the drive and some kind of fever-based illness for two of the kids DURING. So John and I got to be Heroes of the Revolution and take the not-our-kids who were well enough to be rarin' for waterslides, down waterslides, while their parents and grandparents variously cared for the ill, were ill themselves, or slept a lot. And that part I was actually glad to do, other than worrying about coordination and Familial Rules unknown to me whose thwarting I might inadvertently aid.

So it was, as usual for any trip involving my MiL, seven days of fun that may well require more than seven days to recover from.

At least I'm not immediately catapulting into weeks of pre-commitment, unlike all the rest of this month ... I just have a family bat mitzvah to attend tomorrow and some Undelayable Very Important Errands sprinkled through next week. Which should not be missed, esp. not on account of 'falling over recovering from my vacation'.

Sprog had fun, though she was also continually over-tired enough to be right shirty with everyone.

I keep thinking I had things to say about the Old Houses subthread (own one, grew up in one, love 'em), the Astro City adoration (Cassy B.: I own I-think-all the TPBs, which can be loaned to you for the Low Low Rental of ... helping me figure out what box they're in), and Xopher's phone woes (thankfully, many of my Android annoyances are now straightened out, due to a weekend in the company of my BiL), but I can't remember what exactly and I'm still in no way firing on all cylinders.

I'm trying to decide whether I should just go upstairs and try to fall asleep at 8:15PM, or perhaps watch a movie while waiting for post-trip laundry to cycle through the machines?

AKICIML: I did google the question "How do I tell if the cherries on my tree are ripe?", because the mature tree in our yard (which we've never seen fruit before) has bright-red nodules scattered about it. I have no idea if they're meant to mature into DARK-red nodules. They don't currently come off the tree to a judicious tug, and they're kind of squishy-soft-feeling to the touch, not firm-but-yielding-at-the-skin as About.com has led me to believe is desired. Comments welcomed, though I'm probably just going to keep waiting and tugging on them once in a while ...

I'll take your word on it: I've only seen six or so episodes before the reboot, and those had sets and effects that made Red Dwarf seem lavish. I admit to some curiosity about the Companion who beat a Dalek to death with a ball bat...

Roy G. Ovrebo: Harry Flashman tops the list for me. He'd sacrifice _anyone_ (except possibly his darling wife) to get out of whatever bind his author had put him in. And he was the sole survivor of many a battle...

A strong contender. The major difference being that, from the few Flashman books I've read, Flashman is looking for folks to screw over. I'd left him out because he's a predator. (Well, Master Li is as well, but not towards *everyone*.)

Nancy Lebovitz: I'd put Modesty Blaise and Jack Reacher (who might make an interesting team) on the list of people I do want.

Reacher is probably the only character in adventure fiction (outside of Simon Delicata) that might give Willie a problem. He's smarter that Delicata, however, so Willie's answer for that problem wouldn't really apply. Blaise is an interesting pairing: nobody (at least in Willie's estimation) can match her in defense, and I don't know if even she could match Reacher in offense. None of them are quite in the "doorperson to Hell" category, however.

Lizzy L: Miles Vorkosigan, Buffy Summers, and a gentleman from Scotland named Francis Crawford.

I thought Miles had a pretty low body count for the folks that had hired or employed him. Buffy I don't know about: I've seen about eight episodes total. I thought her group of classmates/assistants/what-have-you weren't snuffed out. Did she wipe out the Watchers or something? Francis Crawford sounds interesting from the Wikipedia entry: is he in the "Oh my god, is *he* helping us? Which way is the door?" category?

Linkmeister: Wolfe? Really? Goodwin, Panzer, Cather and Durkin lived through the last one of Stout's novels. A few victims knew he was on their side before their death, but he didn't lose too many clients to murder.

I don't want to get spoilery, (PLEASE SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH TO AVOID NERO WOLFE SPOILERS) but if you count what happened to his real and false relatives, the person Fritz made cookies for, the woman that came to the house for the orchid viewing that sounded Archie out, the woman Archie left in the office to see if Wolfe was available, the man who liked Jordan Almonds, the woman who moved the dictaphone cylinders, the woman Archie removed the hat and coat for...he's hell on the survival of clients and the close relatives of clients. (Wolfe may have bellowed "I will not have my office converted into an anteroom for the morgue!" but it happens enough to make one wonder if he has a timeshare in Cabot Cove.) Keems was a Wolfe employee at the time of his difficulties, but Orrie was not at the time of the last book.

Follow-up to Old Houses: my dad's opinion is that the shower needs no more than a new bead of caulk around the tub, and possibly repair of some hairline cracks in the grout, but the electrical system, unfortunately, is pre-Romex, and not amenable to any amateur improvement. At least there's a breaker box.

I shudder to think of what an electrician will charge. It's definitely not happening yet.

We've never had a cherry tree, but my impression of such things is that they're ripe about the time the birds eat all of them.

In anticipation of a board games night at a pie-making friend's place (which got rescheduled due to some family stuff on their part), I've picked a pint or two of cherries off my sour cherry tree. Want them? Note: I don't have a pitter; I've just stuck them in a covered bowl in the fridge.

I don't know what breed it is, but on my sour cherry tree if I pluck the lipstick-red cherries firmly, they release from their stems. If the stem comes with, it's not ripe yet.

Anyway, if you want, I can pluck some more cherries tomorrow. I've got nothing else scheduled for Sat. You'll have to tell me how to treat them and what to do with them, though.

I don't see anything in the mod queue or the spam bucket.

Whatever it was is lost.

Sorry about that.

So... someone hacked their English page and replaced it with Latin?

Google translates it as mostly spam-type gibberish. I wish I could read enough Latin to know if it actually says anything fun. Under Nouvelles, it says their site is under construction, but that's still really weird.

So odd.

B. Durbin should probably clean out their fill-in name field, because it's been saying they've been gnomed on several threads, each post *not* mentioning offerings to the gnomes.

I didn't know that (although the phrase "lorem ipsum" sounds familiar now; maybe I forgot it?); thanks.

So far we've laundered all of the toys and bedding in preparation for a donation to a rescue tomorrow, vacuumed the living room with impunity, rearranged the living room furniture so my brain doesn't keep looking for Ardala in her Ardala space, cleaned the kitchen, done our own laundry, had food brought to us by another kindly single pet-owner and had some wine. I am at a complete loss as to what to do with myself. If I had any money, I'd just drive somewhere. There are no movies out I want to see right now, and I have a great book that I think I will enjoy, but I just don't want to read. Crabby.

The closest approach of the Moon corresponding with a full moon happens about a once a year, and I hadn't planned to take any pictures this time (I've done it a couple of times before) but the evening was clear, so I grabbed camera and tripod and sallied forth.

Supermoon 2013

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sclayworth/sets/72157634276582788/

(Wikipedia on the event, for a bit more background)

On movies for distraction: Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing is now in wide release. Is it playing anywhere near you?

IMHO, it's not quite as good as the David Tennant/Catherine Tate version, but it's still highly enjoyable.

I couldn't make "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" scan to the two slow verses, though. Am I missing a neat bit of phrasing there?

It does work if you replace "lorem ipsum" with "lipsum", and that is a sufficiently standard abbreviation that I didn't feel like I was cheating.

What actually helped last night was getting the hell out of the house. We were faced with two problems: the increasingly oppressive, boredom inducing apartment, and the inoperative kitchen plumbing. Since we didn't want to make even more of a mess that couldn't be cleaned up until Monday than we had to, and because this came at the WORST time financially and we are both massively short of funds, it was decided that we would get in the car, drive nearly an hour, and partake in the comfort food of our mid-western youth; a few years ago they opened a Portillo's in Buena Park and we stop in a couple of times a year to enjoy. You know what? It helped. About $12 of food apiece and maybe $6 in gas.

Now on to church and then dropping all the good stuff off at the rescue, maybe the week's ninja budget food shopping later. That we no longer have to order our days in five hour increments is I suspect only the first of many minor culture shocks that will unravel in the next few weeks, along with being able to be in different rooms with no barky consequences. On our drive to dinner, both of us expressed concern that the dog made us more extroverted and interesting. Dealing with that aftermath is going to be tougher.

There's a jazz club in Montreal called "Upstairs". I doubt any close connection. (The club is actually in a basement, amusing me.) Anyone know of a relationship?

I quite enjoyed it. Most of the humor comes from the lines of the play, of course, but some visual humor was thrown in.

They're patiently waiting for us, as they did far too often when we got in the car (in the car!) and trucked off for unconscionable periods of time.

Someone did a paneled cartoon of a dog staring at the door, thoughts running from "he's going without me? will he be safe?" through "it's been hours! what if something's happened to him!" to "that's his step! oh, joy! oh rapture!" (G&S not in original). Then the guy leans in far enough to reach the table and explains, "forgot my keys".

You've been handling Ardala's transitions gracefully. Rearranging common pathways/hangouts is smart. A puddle of dark sweater on the floor used to almost stop my heart.

Reading about your road trip made me happy, as does the concept of them all frolicking together.

Continued warm thoughts for all who're dealing with bereavement, mentioned here or not.

There's a jazz club in Montreal called "Upstairs". I doubt any close connection. (The club is actually in a basement, amusing me.) Anyone know of a relationship?

To the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans? Not as far as I know, and it's not mentioned on their website.

Although the basement location makes me love their logo: the word "Upstairs", upside-down.

I have had the same Hotmail account since the days when they were spelling it "HoTMaiL" to remind everybody that they had the cool and froody new HTML capability.

I have been on Gmail for a while, although somebody else claimed my handle before I could get around to it. But I couldn't let my Hotmail account go, and shucking off Outlook would require deleting my Hotmail identity.

Just did.

I know it's silly, but part of me feels like I just threw my old Teddy bear in the trash.

Stephen 494: On the slow parts I divide the words. Let's use the music displayed here for reference. We're talking about parts 2 and 3.

So for a dotted half on 'Do' (measures 9 and 17) I use a half on 'Lo' with a quarter on 'rem' (and similarly with 'na' to 'ip' and 'sum' in 10 and 18). This not only uses up the necessary count of syllables, it adds motion and contributes to the waltzlike feeling of the whole (nothing is moving on that beat in the original, so in some ways it's an improvement—contrasts nicely with the quarter-half rhythm in 13 and 21, too).

I can't tell you how chuffed I am that others see the happiness in singing this version of the round!

Jenny 503: I'm getting ready to ditch Yahoo Mail (mostly because they're deliberately sucking more and more to drive away email customers). I know the feeling.

It's costing me $24 a month to keep it, too. I'm an idiot.

You mentioned in Open Thread 182 that you missed your copy of Dante's Inferno with Dore's engravings. I found my copy, and would be delighted to send it to you. It needs a good home, but not with me.

Please send your address to:
erqebfr3125@whab.pbz (rot13 for antispam)

Xopher, #483: *snerk*

nerdycellist, #486: rearranged the living room furniture so my brain doesn't keep looking for Ardala in her Ardala space

That was a smart idea. When my Genevieve died, it wasn't feasible to rearrange the bedroom, and it took months before I stopped expecting to see her on her pad at the foot of the bed. (She had been very arthritic for the last couple of years of her life, and only moved from the pad to eat, drink, and visit the litterbox.)

Also, Portillo's! I've been there a few times when visiting Chicago. It's a nice chain.

Steve C., #489: Nice! We were too busy with ApolloCon to take note of this, so I'm glad you did. Tangentially related: what do you think of the Shiny!New!Flickr site reorganization? I'm underwhelmed -- the old design felt much cleaner and more useful to me.

The new design at Flickr takes some getting used to, but I do like the 1 terabyte limit on free accounts. I won't have to renew my pro account.

I sort of feel like I want a pro-rated refund on my last renewal of my pro account, since I no longer gain anything from that status. (In principle I don't like being downgraded from "unlimited" to "one terabyte", but in practice I'm sure I'm not going to run up against that limit.) I don't like the new design at all - I can't easily see which of my photos have comments, and it looks cluttered to my eye - but I expect I'll get used to that.

If you had kangaroo sausage with figs and garam masala, what would you cook with it?

Is anything known about the transition from spines that mostly bend side to side (fish, reptiles) to spines that mostly bend forwards and backwards (mammals, though cats, dogs, and ferrets, at least, have a good bit of side bend-- on the other hand, I don't think they use it much for locomotion)?

I've gotten far enough to find out that cynodonts are the transition between reptiles and mammals, but it may be optimistic to expect much is known about their gait.

If you had kangaroo sausage with figs and garam masala, what would you cook with it?

Is anything known about the transition from spines that mostly bend side to side (fish, reptiles) to spines that mostly bend forwards and backwards (mammals, though cats, dogs, and ferrets, at least, have a good bit of side bend-- on the other hand, I don't think they use it much for locomotion)?

I've gotten far enough to find out that cynodonts are the transition between reptiles and mammals, but it may be optimistic to expect much is known about their gait.

The Mystery of the Spinning Statue

Seems like it would be easy to test hypotheses, then. Vibrate the case; does the statue spin? Is it in some way magnetized? A continuous (rather than time-lapse) camera should be able to verify it's not a practical joker opening the case (although doesn't account for, say, a practical joker with a near-invisible nylon thread or some such to spin it...

They should get a professional magician on the case. (Pun intended.)

There's a panel from an underground comic which I don't think I've ever seen in context. It's Crumb by the look of it, showing a man in a suit and tie, saying something along the lines of, "I must stay completely rigid or else all hope is lost!"

I really, really need that panel. Can anyone help identify it?

One of our apples, the Niedzwetzkyana, is making a bold and valiant effort to fruit THIS year, its first year in our soil. It fertilized 8 flowers, which swelled up, and all but one have now fallen off in storms or windy days. That one remaining is the size of a smallish supermarket plum and quite firmly attached to its stem -- it's determined, by gum.

I am very, very glad that my ex thought to pull up the Oysterband on his phone and offer it to me so I could plug in earbuds and drown her out.

I gather that the moral was supposed to be something about loyalty to family and treating people with kindness. I don't really know. I caught maybe two sentences in her last paragraph in a gap between songs.

NOT. COOL.

The fact that the statue goes only so far and then stops spinning makes me want to get a really sensitive level and check that shelf.

Statue of limitations?

<groan>

I think the goal of Obama and the DOE was to try to shift sustainable energy from a boutique toy that rich people used to show off, to something that utilities would build because it could make them money.

And that's working. I have more monologue available if desired, but basically there are three challenges in my mind- sustainable electricity, efficient large-scale storage, and transportation - and the first one is now just a matter of implementation.

That sort of thing could be influenced by very small variations in the angle of the surface it's standing on. (As Cally noted.)

If I were museum staff, I'd go lay an offering of sexual favors -- to wit, an active vibrator -- at the statue's feet. See if that gets it, as it were, cranking.

Also perhaps relevant: the "wandering rocks" of Death Valley.

http://www.flickr.com/activity

and

www.flickr.com/photos/[youridhere]/?details=1

work pretty well as bookmarks, dodging the horrible new homepage, like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnmcauley/?details=1

There ought to be a way to make a game, or a poem-like object, or something, out of them. Any suggestions?

I either get the old series of numbers that gives the new splash page, or (by using your formula with my id) Page Not Found.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnmcauley/?details=1
http://www.flickr.com/photos/caroljkimball/?details=1

Maybe try going to your photostream (the new one) and then paste ?details=1 at the end of the address in the address bar (assuming it ends in a /)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/97229956@N00/

If that's you, try adding the detail parameter there:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/97229956@N00/?details=1

If not, I have no idea what's going on.

Several decades ago now, I spent a summer answering mail for the (now defunct) National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center; most of the letters I sent back said words to the effect of "Yes, you can retrofit your home for solar energy. However, it will be very expensive."

These days, I'm seeing occasional solar panels in yards and on roofs even up here in low-average-income northern New Hampshire, and LaPerle's IGA is getting 10 percent of its power from a whole big bank of panels out behind the store. That's getting pretty darn close to mainstream.

(When the day comes that Joe or Jane Six-Pack can buy a Solar Energy Retrofit Kit from Home Depot for less than a month's wages, we'll see solar panels popping up everywhere like mushrooms.)

Affordable is relative, of course, but if you have an amenable climate, you can never plug your smartphone/tablet/etc into a wall again for about $120. Reasonably carbon-neutral, too. No idea how long they last, but the reviewer was impressed with the durability (the salesman dropped it to a concrete floor from shoulder height then stepped on it and ground it around with his foot, and it showed no damage).

However, there's no excuse for every household in Arizona or New Mexico not having solar panels. They get sun all the time, and their electrical bills are enormous. I wonder how many years it will take for that to happen.

There is enough room in the attic for some batteries. Hmmm.

Lack of funds for the upfront investment is a reasonably good reason.

P.S. Bright green car is BRIGHT GREEN!!1!

Thankfully, in our case, there is a lot of partnership and discussion going on between the city and a bunch of social organizations (churches, community centers, etc) and workplaces to figure out a way to upfront the cost and still share the responsibility throughout the aggregated userbase.

Especially when it's not at all clear that they'll be in the same house for 20 years, or even 5.

But I'm impressed that leds, in some form, are getting cheap enough to shovel out in bulk. These aren't perfect -- the color is more like a florescent than incandescent. I detect a little green that isn't really natural. But they turn on quickly, and they're bright, and they dim on ordinary dimmers. (but in a very different response curve than incandescent, and with very little color temperature shift)

Part of the problem for us is that this is an older house, built in the 1950s when things like good insulation weren't even on the radar, and we don't have enough money to retrofit. We've changed all the light bulbs to CFLs, which helps (especially since the house has a 4' overhang all around and is dark, and we have to run the lights effectively all day long). Our oven and hot water heater are gas, which helps. We're going to experiment with white roof paint when we can afford to buy some. We have functional roof vents, which at least allow some of the heat in the attic to escape. But basically, we live in a hot climate in a house not well-adapted to it.

Not only that: my brother, who lives in Phoenix, tells me that it is against the local ordinance in his housing development area to have an outside line for laundry. You must have a clothes dryer. In Phoenix!!?? Where clothes on an outside line will dry in 10 minutes in summer and fall, and 20 minutes any other season of the year! Insane.

However this seems to be the only benefit of Pro to me.
One aspect of the new setup that I find annoying is the pre-generated BBCode (which I use to embed photos in historic aviation fora) now always links to the photo in the context of your photostream, rather than the set that you have selected. I'm tending to manually add the /in/set- bit.
Compare the actual link below with what you get when you click on the share icon and 'Grab the HTML/BBCode'.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/errolgc/4354743285/in/set-72157623305632705/

I hope the competing product the company bought sucks.

I've had a Pro account pretty much since I started using Flickr; it worked better with the way I wanted to organize my pictures. And since apparently they're grandfathering in those who want to keep their Pro accounts at the old, reasonable yearly fee rather than the extortionate new one, I don't plan to change.

There are two trees on my street in flower right now, and they smell fantastic. It's a lot like lilac scent, though the season for lilacs is over now.

The one in front of my apartment is two stories tall; the other one is taller, maybe 3.5 stories? The flower is white. It's too big to be a Japanese Tree Lilac. It's deciduous. My Google-Fu is failing me. Does anyone have any idea?

It took me a while to figure out photo editing. I still upload the raw pictures and then go back and do whatever cropping or other editing is needed.

This has been bugging me for years, on and off. I remember reading a fragment of a story and wonder if anyone here can identify it?

Postapocalyptic world, cities evacuated; somehow the reason for this is that the survivors were left with a hypersensitive sense of smell. A man (community leader?) is murdered in such a way as to make it indisputable that he was one of those (scientists?) who caused the destruction in the first place: strongly scented gas is used, which he did not detect as he was secretly anosmic.

I may have some details wrong (this was a fragment, long ago, but stuck with me). Ring any bells for anybody? Or did I dream it?

Wow - that was quick; thanks!

I now realize that as well as spoiling the ending(?) for myself with my fragmentary recollection, the request at 577 is a massive spoiler for anyone who may pick up the book. Could a moderator please rot13 the offending bit?

So yesterday I took a shot at making something go viral on the Book O'Face and failed. Folks here might find it of interest:

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Friends, I have something difficult to ask of you:

Today, the Supreme Court cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act. This is only the latest in a string of terrible decisions this year. Sexual harassment is now harder to prove. Native Americans will have a harder time keeping their children from being taken from them. It's been a hard summer.

The only major case left is one we're optimistic about. And yet...

Tomorrow, or the day after, when the Supreme Court overturns DOMA (probably) and upholds Prop. 8 (almost certainly), restrain, or at least rethink, your celebrations. I believe the ordering of the release of these decisions was politically motivated in order to sow dissension and distrust among us.

It has become clear that the policy of the radical right is to subvert democracy by suppressing the vote wherever possible, especially in the south but also in the north. The judicial theft of the 2000 election was the start and the hard right's gerrymandering in the post-2010 redistricting is the middle.

The end? I have some hunches where it's going and I don't know how it will end.

But consider this: It took less than a decade for Reconstruction to be betrayed.

Now consider this: What will be the result of wild celebration the day after the Voting Rights Act has been gutted? Was this calculated by the bigots in control of the court in order to make relations between Blackw people and Queer people more fraught?

I don't know. I can't read their minds, only their actions. Regardless, letting that happen would be wrong, deeply wrong, terribly wrong.

I've heard too much of this already over the years. In Atlanta, my polling place was picketed by a Black person opposing the rights of Queer people. In Little Rock, I've had a Queer person tell me there was no reason to support the rights of Black people since they voted against Prop. 8 in California. And so it goes.

And it has to stop.

Now is the time to begin.

On the day Hardwick v. Bowers was decided, I was the lead organizer for a major demonstration taking place less than a week away, riding in a taxi to a downtown Manhattan copy shop for urgent work, when the streets were blocked by thousands of angry Queer people of all genders.

It is one of the great regrets of my life that I was grouchy about not getting my work done and did not join that righteous throng in their public rage and glory.

Not this time. Never again.

Tomorrow, I will join whatever celebration I can and I will carry a sign decrying the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. I'm not sure how to phrase it, but I'll find a way to express my joy and my anger at the same time, as one cry of justice. I must. We must. We all must. It's a time for unity.

I ask you to consider doing the same, and to share this message widely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ACDyVwnfw

P.S. I know a few of my valued friends and relatives who read this will disagree with me. I love you all no matter what. But I will delete any comment which argues or quibbles or takes away from what matters most now. This is a time for action, not argument. And I will still love you all. That's why I'm doing this.

It is true that you may have to redo a 5-year roof before putting on 25-year[1] solar panels, and that's an expense nobody's helping out with. But there are a bunch of people setting up mortgages, or loans, or leases to solve (and/or profit from) the "don't have the money now" problem.

Three companies with financing/lease programs are Real Goods Solar, Sungevity, and Solar City (from the guy who brought you the Tesla, Elon Musk) - they're not the only ones, and I don't know if they're offering good deals or just slightly-better-than-utility deals. [2]

@547: Solar panels are not necessarily expensive: batteries, on the other hand, still are. If you have a fairly reliable grid and net metering [3], I would suggest using the grid for your storage needs.

[1] As someone pointed out to me once, a 25-year warranty is not so useful if it comes from a company that's got a 20% chance of surviving the next 5 years.

[2] Apparently depending on who you get quotes from, prices can vary by a factor of three.

[3] "net metering" means they charge you for what you use minus what you give back. So if you generate 1000 kWh in a month, 700 of which you can't use at the time so you send it out over the wires, and you use 1100 kWh in a month, 300 of which you have generated yourself and 800 of which you brought in at night, your "net metering" is 100 kWh even though 1500 kWh went through the wires. It's still a good deal for the utilities, at the moment, because it saves them buying more power plants that only run on hot days. If solar becomes omnipresent they will have to change their pricing structure.

That's awesome. I actualfacts applauded when I realised what was going on.

Prop8 was dismissed for lack of standing, which I think means Judge Walker's district court ruling holds - so SSM becomes legal again in CA, but nowhere else.

There are other posts, including information on the Proposition 8 ruling (short version: the people appealing do not have the standing to do so, so shut up already; the state court's ruling stands, as I understand it). Just in case you've never visited that site during the announcement of a SCOTUS ruling, SCOTUSblog's instructions on their liveblog are clear: do not hit REFRESH, as it will update automatically.

In general, the situation is fluid with respect to all the implications, so waiting and seeing how it all plays out is advised.

Oh no! Not the Gay Apocalypse that the Guvernator warned us against when Mayor Newsom allowed SSM!!!

Federal District Court, but otherwise correct. It's probably the best outcome available, but the idea that a law designed to constrain the politicians can be over-ruled because the politicians refuse to defend it doesn't make me happy about the future of the rule of law.

Specifically Section 3 of DOMA, the portion prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriages, is dead. The portions allowing states to refuse to recognize legal marriages from other states was not at issue.

(So as a woman legally married to another woman and living in Maryland, which has marriage equality, my marriage must now be recognized by the federal government, but it doesn't have to be by, say, the state of Virginia. The federal situation for couples legally married in one state and living in a state that does not recognize it is murky.)

Rikibeth @591, full faith and credit actually refers only to judicial proceedings of other states, and there has never been a case applying it to marriages. It would require a separate Supreme Court case challenging Section 2 of DOMA for that to happen, and I don't see the Roberts court issuing a favorable ruling on that, especially given the very narrowly construed ruling on Perry.

b) The California referendum system is an abomination, and throws away the benefits of representative government.

Based on the photos I've Googled, I don't think it's crape myrtle.

@594 Anne Sheller

Maybe catalpa? Not sourwood, I think.

I snagged a small piece on my way out and took a photo and uploaded it to Flickr (may I take a moment to jump on the 'hate the new interface' bandwagon?); you can find it here: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/14147709@N07/9145787140/ (that piece is about 20cm long).

I should have said I'm in Montreal (zone 5). Oh, and the smell is much stronger at night.

Thanks for everyone's help!

That's it! Thanks so much! I was trying to use the Arbor Day site to ID it, but obviously I was answering the questions incorrectly.

I wonder if I could (or should) plant one in my mum's yard? More research - which I can do, now that I have the name. Thanks again!

I'm about to try making horchata for the first time ever. Any gnome is welcome to a glass when it's done.

Lilacs do the same thing. Why, Nature, why? Why do you hate me so much?

I haven't yet found a way to easily view (rather than edit) Collections, they don't seem to think people want to use them?
Actually, looking at my photostream, they seem to have improved it somewhat, with little cropping obvious to me - I hadn't looked at it for a little while.

Wow, I haven't read that since school! And I didn't associate the name until you reminded me.

I shall have to try dipping my petite madeleines in tisane au tilleul sometime. I don't drink it very often.

@609 Rikibeth
I'm lucky I don't seem to have any pollen based allergies, though I do have some to perfume (also to some makeup/lotion ingredients, and to some food, which is a lot easier to avoid).

I hope the anger and energy generated by last night's power play results in more than a try for another filibuster. Progressives need a plan for sustainable power. Crowds and cameras are just the beginning.

Although, for the record: Don't you think Rick Perry is looking kind of tired?

Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito Suddenly Realize They Will Be Villains In Oscar-Winning Movie One Day

WASHINGTON—Shortly after turning in dissenting opinions in landmark federal rulings today that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and conferred full federal benefits to married same-sex couples, Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John G. Roberts, and Samuel Alito reportedly realized today that they would someday be portrayed as villains in an Oscar-winning film about the fight for marriage equality.

I'm still hoping there will someday be a tragi-comic satire about the rush to war in Iraq, with Frankie Muniz as George W. Bush.

And then they kept restricting the things she was allowed to talk about, while still requiring that she "stay on topic". I thought you could talk about anything during a filibuster. Certainly Republicans have done so.

The actual closing of debate was fascinating to watch if one is a Roberts geek. Several things happened which were really terrible form; if everything else had been done properly, I think the Texas Senate would have gotten away with recording the vote (since a roll call vote to call the [unspecified, which is a serious problem!] was started well before the midnight deadline, and they could have claimed that the voting was finished and just initially recorded after the deadline, which explains the disparity in dates). That kind of machination frequently gets by. But the whole procedure was done very badly according to the rules they agreed to do things by, and that's hard to support when it's done in (very) public.

Anyway, I was impressed. Scary and gripping. I'm hoping it holds up.

Paleobiology course (Dino 101) offered at the university for credit, but also to the general public over the internet completely for free.

To quote the promotional material: "The University of Alberta is offering Dino 101, a high quality and rigorous massive open online course (MOOC) that teaches learners the scientific method through the universal appeal of dinosaurs. It is targeted for release in September 2013."

It's going to be taught by Dr. Phil Currie. This makes me really excited because I saw his application talk before he got hired, and he's not only a really engaging teacher, but really good at adjusting his talk to his audience. (in that case, not just specialists in his field, but people from the entire university)

I'd never even heard of MOOCs before I saw this. Does anyone have any experience with them?

Claire @627: MOOCs are both cool and worrisome. Cool in that they make much more widely available knowledge that was previously much harder to come by. Worrisome in that some academics fear their use as a weapon to complete the destruction of American academia. I took a couple last year, both loosely connected to Stanford (Coursera's Machine Learning class, taught by Andrew Ng, and Udacity's AI class, taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun). It was a valuable experience, I learned quite a bit, but there are definitely things you gain by sitting together in a classroom with an instructor and other students that you don't get from a MOOC.

In my view, MOOCs fall somewhere between a real class and watching one of those "great courses" DVDs.

They also produce useful inner bark fiber and really great wood for carving. After a major storm brought down some big limbs from a stand of basswood on the Iowa state campus, I spent a couple of happy hours stripping bark and making some really crude rope. I'm still wishing I'd been around when several were cut for expansion of our local library; I'd happily have paid the cutting crews for some chunks to play with. Not that any of that is relevant to whether or not you'd want one in your mother's yard.

At noon the yellow mustard's spread upon the Wonder(tm) bread;
At noon you think of Coke(tm) but take a Seven-Up(tm) instead;

At noon, slice some baloney and some cheddar cheese, a bunch:
At noon a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of lunch.

I've taken a couple: Andrew Ng's, the first time it was offered before Coursera, and one on the Scala programming language. For technical-type courses, to a large extent you get out what you're willing to put in. The schedule of lectures being released on a weekly schedule and of assignments with due dates (for both of these, coding problems that got a "grade" penalty after the deadline) helped me to actually complete the courses which I hadn't done for any of the Youtube lecture series. The discussion fora were also helpful. I'd like to do more, and had signed up for a couple before life suddenly intervened and I had way less free time than I'd expected. If you view them as a structured way to teach yourself something, rather than as something that actually should be viewed as academic credit, they're quite useful.

Then I had to explain what an "As You Know, Bob" was.

Later on, she agreed that the "By The Way, Bob," bits were pretty lame.

I recommend the series. Pete is very much a mad scientist architect who is just in love with trees. Up to and including hugging them. Literally.

I'm hoping to convey a certain level of snark in the address.

According to the Talmud (Ber. 55b), whoever is afraid of the evil eye should stick his right thumb in his left hand and his left thumb in his right hand, proclaiming: "I, so and so, son of so and so, am of the seed of Joseph, whom the evil eye may not affect."

The gesture (a "fig") – universally used to avert the evil eye by putting it to shame (this original meaning was probably unknown to sages who prescribed it) – took on a Jewish character by the pronouncement of the aggadic sentence that the descendants of Joseph are immune from the evil eye (Ber. 20a).

Interesting that it also involves the thumb in the palm of the opposite hand (in this case, both thumbs in both palms).

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

If you do business with Amazon (and there are many good reasons not to), you'd only be gambling $1.99 on my bare word that THIS BOOK IS AMAZING. And very Fluorospherian.

Definitional note: a 'Kindle serial' is a work of fiction that comes out in 'episodes' at regular intervals (both those above are aiming for 2 weeks). You pay for it once; you end up with all the content when all the content is available, automatically updated to your device. I don't know if these works will count as novels or something else when they're done.

Don't know how the proto-Hugos would have treated The Mystery of Edwin Drood, though.

It seemed cromulent to the interests of those present. :-> His life was reasonably colorful in other ways, too.

The proto-Hugos would probably just have disclaimed any interest in the problem, since as far as the published text is concerned Edwin Drood is not a work of SF.

(It would of course have been a different matter if Dickens had got around to writing the chapter wherein it is revealed that young Edwin fell victim to blue glowing alien invaders.)

Yes, we'll be there. The Rockstar Toddler will also be a bit about.

Ah, Central European cognomens. I've been reading up on Polish history and am particularly fond of Wladyslaw the Elbow-High and Boleslaw Wry-Mouth. While they're all dutifully recorded in respectable typesetting in history books, I have to wonder if anyone ever called them that to their faces.

Re: "Posthumous" as an epithet

I'm fairly certain that "posthumous" was used multiple times as a cognomen in imperial Rome, which would significantly predate Ladislaus. But as I'm at the coffee shop rather than at home, I can't check this in my onomastics library.

What you say makes sense. (especially the "you get out what you put in" - that does tend to apply to any learning experience!)

I really don't think these should replace real, in-class experience. It is different. (bleeping cost-cutting politicians!)

But yeah, as a way to learn something independently that you wouldn't normally have access to, cool. :)

The Romans didn't seem to have that many personal names, so it keeps popping up in Imperial Roamn history.

Carol Kimball is having trouble loading Making Light for several days now, and would like some help.

Her IP address is: 71.237.30.11.

She has, "Cleared my cache, removed the Nielson Hayden cookies, rebooted - nada. "

I am passing this on from Ravelry, which is working for her, and she's probably reachable here:
http://www.carolkimball.net/contact/

Thank you, O most excellent gnomes, for whatever help might be forthcoming.

What error message, if any, does she get?

-- JDM

Vote here

All the rest of the painting will be latex rather than oil. I am so glad.

It is, however, in Comcast space, so it's not it's not even vaguely surprising that they might be having routing weirdness.

Sent at 9:06 AM Today

Still getting:
Problem loading page.
The connection has timed out.
The server at nielsonhayden.com is taking too long to respond.

My cache has again been cleared, and there are no nielsonhayden (or ML) cookies in Firefox. Reboots before fresh attempts.

The last day I remember being able to visit was June 25. The site loaded slowly for several days and then wouldn’t connect. When this has happened previously, it was usually ML having deluges of spam, and things cleared up in a day or two at most.

I’ve tried on both my PC with Windows7/Firefox and my iPad with Safari, using two different internet access companies.

I’m not having this problem with any other site.

I miss Making Light! I am so grateful for our Ravelry group!

Carol

(I've never had connection problems, and I'm connecting from Comcast's network too. But I understand that Comcast's network is really a slew of local affiliates, so there's no reason for my experience to generalize to anyone who isn't a near neighbor.)

I had a problem with posting comments that went on for days.

I contacted abi, and the problem cleared up, but she wasn't sure whether one of other mods took care of it or it cleared up on its own.

Googling on making light teresa should return this place as the top hit.

We have several layers of protection here: One is Moveable Type itself, which maintains its own blacklist (and I'm not sure where that comes from). I don't know what, if anything, you see on your screen when hitting that. Beyond that, we have the Gnomes with their key-word filters; you'll get the "gnome" notice about the glass-and-steel tower if for some reason you feel the need to talk about payday loans, accident attorneys, or fruit carving. Those posts get released as soon as a mod finds them; generally within minutes-to-hours. A lot of us spend a lot of time here.

We also have a list of banned IPNs; to get on that you have to send spam. One strike and you're out. Send a spam, never even get to the moderation queue again.

I sometimes worry that I'm falsely banning some real person and potential-future active commenter who, for reasons that seem good to them, is making their first-ever post to a thread that last saw activity in 2004 with the message "Hey buddy could i distribute several paragraph of your respective report on my personal small weblog"*; a person whose family name is "Home" and whose parents (desiring to avoid gender-marking their child) named them "Work From."

Then I stop worrying and press the button anyway.

------------
* Actual filtered post from 21 minutes ago.

It's definitely the kind of show that inspires fic; not only are there emotional through-lines to explore (especially some the writers left deliberately unresolved in the original), but the world itself is so lush and full. It ranges over all of human history, and if you don't like any of the Immortals shown or name-dropped in the show, go ahead and make one up and have them encounter a canonical one!

I wanted to refresh my memory of Methos and some of the rest of it, so I've jumped in starting 2 eps from the end of season 1 (I've watched and rewatched Season 1 so often I couldn't stomach it again).

This was a foundational fandom, for me -- one of the first really big, really popular shows that I watched from the start and loved all along. And watching it again with a decade or two of breathing space makes it clear that the writers were doing a bang-up job of putting some neat story and character beats into the middle of the piece of formulaic "we have to have at least x martial-arts sequences of at least y length each" dreck that the producers thought they were paying for. :->

Plus, wow, the clothes -- dated. At least to a style-junkie like myself. The women's hair is worse. But I still OWN some of my clothes from 1992, how in the world does it look so antique to me now? The answer, of course, lies in styling and how you wear them; many of the same pieces can still be worn stylishly today, just in different combination etc.

I'm kind of enjoying it as a period drama in the 'now' parts as well as his flashbacks. :-> And trying to spot the flashback-period by the clothes and props is also cool. The entire way it's shot, background music, and some of the acting/directing choices definitely feel to me now like watching original Buck Rogers or Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie did to me when I was younger -- there must be fashions in show-making as there are in clothes, and I can spot the differences even if I can't characterise them exactly the way I can with hair and apparel.

ObFicRecc, there's a piece of Joe Dawson-meets-Stargate-SG1 fic I ran across that amazes me (prelude to same, not necessary if you like jumping in in medias res) I think it's reasonably readable even to people who know neither fandom, though obviously there's a bigger payoff if you do. Also, what were the Immortals doing during the climactic battle of The Avengers? Assuming they were in the same world? Here's one answer. In the same pair of universes, five times Methos ended up dead around Black Widow (and, eventually, around Natasha Romanov).

Gateway Time-out

The gateway did not receive a timely response from the upstream server or application.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

As I recall, I could get a preview but I couldn't get the comment to go to the site.

I don't know if you're aware that many IP addresses are only temporarily assigned. They're allocated to ISPs in large blocks, hundreds to tens of millions of addresses per block, and the ISPs can assign them temporarily or permanently to their customers' computers. So you might want to remove IP addresses from your blacklist after some period of time.

Someone could suggest to Carol that she look up "what is my ip address" on Google (via her various devices), which will display the answer above the search results. Then you could check whether those addresses are in MakingLight's blacklist.

I'll consider it if someone sends me a note with their IP address.

Maybe it was an IPN that once was used by a spammer; maybe it's an innocent person who's in a botnet. I really don't care ... I do know that I've been doing the one-strike banning since last October and it's cut down the spam-load remarkably. At that point I was spending up to eight hours a day reading spam and individually approving-or-disapproving each. Now I'm not even seeing them ... and don't consider that I'm missing much.

Clicking on Google ‘s top hit is what I’ve been doing after purging the cookies.

nielsonhayden.com is the address that top hit gives (yes, I’d made a typo transcribing it here, thanks Andrew). Still is timing out.

Working down the Google queue for variations (other threads), same deal.

Should be nielsEnhayden.com

This from Ms. Kimball:

re: Let ML know I'm blocked?
Sent at 5:18 PM Today

Please post to list:

Note from Carol:
Will someone who will not be jeopardizing their job by running this interference please take over from Nancy for us?

rot-13 pneby.xvzonyy@rneguyvax.arg

Jeremy: I sent my IP address along with the early distress messages, along with noting having done the standard housekeeping (cache, history, cookies, reboot, google site to reconnect).

Jim confirmed that this isn’t in their blocked list.

My apartment deal includes free wi-fi. When there are waves of internet upset, its security is often over-tightened (Ravelry gets knocked out early). My neighbors have kindly given me their private access to use when waiting for readjustment. Though many sites loaded slowly about a week ago, ML is the only one that I wasn’t able to get through to even using their service.

If I’m part of a group that’s been taken out, how would you know?

I am very grateful for the attention. I MISS you guys.

There may be a similar organization in Boston; Google's not turning one up, but I'm not local to know. Trulia covers the area, though, and their searcher allows input of several variables.

Is anybody else going to be at the North American Discworld Convention this weekend? If so, drop by and say hi to my partner and me in the dealer room.

Yes, but my husband just set up a really hysterical cosplay for the Rockstar Toddler (in her favorite fandom, naeless, and amusingly apropos). It would be really too bad to make her miss out...

I have a niece living in Brighton and one (equipped with husband + two terrifically cute children) out in Uxbridge, as well as a cousin who sails.

The presence of so many many many college students in the Boston area means that apartment prices run fairly high, based on family reports. There are also a lot of people who keep upstairs apartments in their houses. Good hunting!

As for finding a place to live, my husband is simply renting a room in a house for the time being. He used the list of Craig in association with the MBTA site. He had to live farther out in order to find something affordable, but he looked for places that were near convenient transit stops, so the house is a very short walk to the station and is only one line to his workplace.

A friend who's doing a post-doc at Harvard suggested Jamaica Plain and Somerville as good areas to look in, but they may not be convenient locations for you.

Good luck!

I have nothing to add to the comments above, except (a) unsurprisingly rents are higher the closer you get to a T stop. And (b) I suspect the cost of living is due to the high concentration of Google/Microsoft/etc engineers, not so much the students. (Not that this matters.)

I'm in Medford, which is next out from Somerville (in one direction) and slightly cheaper, while still being reasonably close to the T. In a few years, the T will extend out this way, and then my current apartment will become unaffordable, I expect.(*)

(* Actually I can't afford it now, but that's a long and tangential story.)

This is not a newly-released book; it has been available in e-book format for at least 5 years and probably a lot more than that.

How do I go about notifying the publisher of Unreadable Crapness in their product?

I also had the week and a half from hell at work - straight out of an old Dilbert comic. My former manager went on vacation and it turns out the director who was supposed to cover his job never actually knew what he was supposed to be covering. All of a sudden I became the expert. I belong to a Union of pink-collar workers, and my position is classified as "unskilled". He happened to find the one portion of the system I never learned and continued asking me how to use it, ignoring my pleas of ignorance, and extremely helpful pointings in the direction of the two people who could help him. Highly frustrating. Oh, yes, and being called into a meeting of managers and above as the only person who had the info they needed. I suppose I have a good case to agitate for a promotion, but I'd hate to lose my union benefits.

I felt pretty put-upon and unappreciated anyway, so I wanted to post this. Here's me, singing (and not telling you how much I screwed it up and where, because I guess you're not supposed to do that) and then getting applause for a job competently done. It made me happy, and makes me want to do it again, as opposed to my job, which does pay me, but on a minor delay. Operant conditioning works best when the reward is immediate.

I probably have that CD sitting about somewhere, but the chance to get it on Kindle and read it again right away was tempting. I probably should've passed and gone looking for my archived copy, this thing is terrible. Now up to 10 skipped/duplicated pages, and I'm only 82% of the way through the book ...

I have a copy of "On Basilisk Station" from a Baen Free CD. I don't know if it has the errors you mention, because I'd already read it in dead-tree form when I got the CD, but I'm happy to shoot you a copy. (And Baen said explicitly that it was ok to copy the content of the CD and share it, so I'm not violating copyrights....) Do you have Calibre or do you need me to translate it to MOBI format for you? (I have an epub, and I don't want to try to find the CD again.)

And shoot me your email; I'm not sure I have it. Mine is (rot13) pnffl@obbxjlezr.pbz

Jennifer Lawrence as Iselle, maybe? And who could manage Ista?

Sorry none of the solar-companies-I-know-by-name are operating there. At least you have solid incentives. 25% rebate from Illinois (minimum size 1 kW, maximum rebate $10,000), although they've spent the budget for this year already. Also the 30% Federal rebate.

So if you do get (say) a mortgage-type loan for home improvements from your local bank or credit union, and you don't mind waiting till September to apply, you're buying with 45-cent dollars. And you keep your SRECs (which may not be really sellable, currently.)

Near Springfield, IL it looks like you get about 20% capacity factor on a clean panel at a 40-degree angle; that is, a 1 kW panel, over an 8760 hour year, will generate about 1810 kW-hrs.

(sources: dsireusa.org , http://www.nrel.gov/rredc/pvwatts/)

If the official Kindle version has problems, it's worth reporting. There's Baen, but Amazon themselves have a system for reporting formatting problems for Kindle books, a link at the bottom of the book's page on their website.

U.S.P.S. photographs the outside of every piece of mail sent in the U.S. and stores that info for some unspecified amount of time in case law enforcement asks for it. No warrant required. (So they not only know what mail you're getting, but where and approximately what time it was mailed.)

Happy No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy Day.

NO TERRORISM-RELATED
MATERIAL INSIDE

I have painted myself into a corner I need to solve my way out of. I feel compelled to write a story idea in which the main character is a girl in a boarding school, but I am realizing that although I know something about boarding schools I don't know what it's like to be a girl in one. What's a guy to do? How to get into the headspace of a character who is other? How to research it?

(Admittedly none are viewpoint characters, and St. Trinian's indeed may be more apt to your purpose.)

Start with "School Story" on Wikipedia

I went to an English Grammar School which still had boarders, boys and girls, in the 1970s. By an accident of sexist bias--a boys-only school in the next town--we boys were in the minority. It wasn't really fun.

But srsly, I hope those with noise-sensitive pets find a way to get away from the din. I stick with the Emits Showers of Sparks stuff myself.

I fear for tonight's fireworks.

And in addition to the various works mentioned in the Wikipedia article that Dave Bell linked, one should surely (here, of all places) mention Among Others, by Jo Walton. (This has the advantage of dealing with a somewhat later epoch than most of the classic school stories.)

It depends on if you interest them, and which class you interest. Remember that when it came to the atomic bomb that destroyed the school it was the sixth form that seduced the technical info out but it was the fourth form that built it. I'd bet on the fourth form as both frighteningly effective and least likely to turn on you as long as they see you as a reliable source of booze and drugs.

Oh, you meant of help with references on boarding schools for girls! Different matter entirely!

I remember Enid Blyton was the most popular author of books set in female boarding schools in the U.K. for years, but I have no idea what would give the current atmosphere. I know a woman who went through "high school" in Ireland a number of years ago and who swore that the Nigel Molesworth books were the best guide available...