Yeah I was going to pull and retweet that particular quote when I saw it the other day, but when I tried the retweet on for size it didn't look quite right on its own. Part of a coordinated ensemble, I guess. But anyway, I liked it a lot and decided to hang it in my closet, on its own, in anticipation of possibly someday being able to wear it somewhere nice.

Glad to see it here.

There's a letter in the October Analog, from a guy complaining about 'light' SF - and his examples are a couple of stories from the 1970s that I remember ('Poppa Needs Shorts' and the one about Mal R Key, the cat).

(Me to him: Dude, didn't you ever figure out that SF can be funny as well as serious?)

For what it's worth, funny SF has gotten me through unhappy times. I'll read lots of things, but entertaining, relatively light SF is supportive and comforting.

Oh dear.

Yesterday I went to a reenactment event and found myself playing with a drop spindle. It felt pretty meditative so I put one on my Amazon wishlist, and I said so on my book-of-Faces page. Now a knitting friend tells me she has the wool of two sheep that she can send me to spin for her, should I so desire. Assuming it's washed (I looked it up - doesn't seem like the kind of thing that can be done in an apartment) I suppose I could do that, as long as she's in no particular hurry. How difficult is carding? Any fiber people have any words of support? I just wanted something to do with my hands or quiet the insomniac hamster wheel on those evenings when praying the Rosary just won't work.

Historically, it's been much more "for the sake of argument" fiction from the start; but that is 9 syllables rather than 4, and much harder to turn into a genre name. Marketing categories need marketable names.

nerdycellist: Carding isn't difficult, but it's tedious unless you have a drum carder (which is a pedal/motor-driven carding device).

You could wash wool in your bathtub, if you were prepared to deal with cleaning out the drain a lot. I wouldn't recommend it.

nerdycellist @4 : Carding is not that difficult. You "charge" one hand carder with a bit of wool, which looks like snagging tufts in the teeth of a larger version of a pet brush, and then you lightly pass the other carder over the first (you don't so much drag one carder's teeth through the other as you just "make them kiss") until the wool is transferred from one to the other. Repeat a couple of times. Remove wool "batt" from carder in a rolling motion. Apply to spindle.

Honestly, washing isn't that difficult either. You just do it in batches that your sink can handle, putting it in lingerie bags or kitchen sieves or whatever you've got. The important part is realizing that, having applied to your wool VERY hot water (a friend swears 140 d F is perfect) and a mild detergent (the favorite around here is Dawn, the blue stuff; NEVER Woolite), you have on hand two of the three ingredients needed for felting your wool, and you must be careful not to add the third: agitation.

So, not hard -- just a little time-consuming. But if you were worried about time-consuming, you wouldn't take up hand-spinning on a drop-spindle.

I can recommend a great book about which I'm NOT AT ALL BIASED just because it was written by the spinning teacher at the south Boulder shop where I learned to use a spinning wheel: Start Spinning by Maggie Casey. This book is like revisiting her spinning class. It takes you from the sheep to the finished knitted or woven or felted or etc. product by way of everything you could possibly need to know as a handspinner. Well, everything you need as a beginning handspinner, at least. I take it off the shelf every time I wash wool because even though I've done it a lot I want to make sure.

Sounds like you are imminently to find yourself in possession of a fiber stash. Good luck keeping it to a reasonable size!

I'm trying to find something cheap to do with my hands (shut up!) that doesn't take a whole lot of brains, so getting a drum carder is out of the question at this point. The sink/tub situation in this apartment is less than optimal, so I'll need pre-washed wool. My friend with the wool has three kids and not a lot of free time so I'm not sure she's going to be carding and spinning her fleece anytime soon. As long as she's aware that I could take forever to spin a skein of yarn, I'm game. I think I'll get the little drop spindle starter pack and look into "Start Spinning" before I have her send anything. I don't want to get too ambitious.

8
I have a drop spindle starter pack you can have. (Includes wool.)
Also good for washing woolen stuff is 'Orvus WA', available at better pet supply places - it's for washing animals. It's about as gentle as you can get, and not scented. (I wash my finished stuff with it; I got a 12-quart stock pot at Smart&Final.)

nerdycellist: I wouldn't recommend carding if you're looking for meditative hobbies - I at least, find the sound of hand cards horribly grating, and I generally end up carding my skin at some point. (YMMV, of course.) Aside from your friend's two bags full, prepared fiber is easy to find online if you don't live near a store, and satisfies the I-wanna-spin-NOW that fiber prep can delay for days. And then you can get into hand-painted roving and silk blends and OMG-it's-all-so-beautiful-and-floofy-and --

Er. 'Scuse me. Have to go pet my fiber stash now.

Thanks for the info - I'll tell her to hold off on sending me her sheep until I've a.) got a spindle and b.) have spun at least one starter kit's worth of fiber. I've poked around a couple of places and what's really great about this hobby is that a beautifully crafted spindle can be had for about $50, while a plainer one suitable for a beginner is less than $20. Well, that and being able to call myself a "spinster" in a literal as well as figurative sense.

I don't have firsthand knowledge of working with fiber or spinning, but I do know what a fiber stash that's gone way beyond the hobby stage looks like. That'd be my mother's. She got into it around the time I graduated college (so, 2007-2008) and, these days, runs her own small business (as a hobby in her off hours) selling hand-dyed yarn and fiber. Lots of hand-dyed yarn and fiber. To the point where the counter staff at the local post office know her on sight, and she brings them dozens and dozens of packages every couple of weeks in several re-purposed laundry bags.

The stash in question has taken over most of my parents' not insubstantial basement, and gets restocked regularly. The Amazing Girlfriend and I have wrangled the restocking a couple times on visits back to my folks, and there's something very satisfying about bowling a 30lb box of fiber down the basement stairs from the kitchen. So, any time I hear about fiber or yarn stashes, I have to recalibrate - I assume most stashes out there don't eat large basements.

nerdycellist--There are people out there (search terms 'fleece carding' and 'fleece processing' may help) who will wash the fleece for you, run it though serious carding equipment, and then send you back the roving. All you'd have to do is give them money, and then spin.

I dislike the “We’re supposedly a forward-looking genre, and yet” approach to criticizing stuff in the SF world.

What drives my criticism along those lines is a feeling that the bulk of the fiction I read hasn't yet caught up with the present, to say nothing of the future. The people I meet, the news I read, the problems I encounter day-to-day are all stranger and more interesting than so much of what I encounter in fiction that I sometimes despair of it.

Which is not to say that good counterfactual fiction can't be written in which society returns to some earlier state -- I've enjoyed a post-apocalypse or an alternate history or three -- but I would like them to acknowledge the changes which have taken place.

Abi and janetl, thanks for getting me out of spamspace on the previous Open Thread. *munches on the to-go order of lutefisk she brought along*

I'd had a call right after making the post and by the time I got back to the internet groove, I was Distracted By Stuff, hence my forgetting to send up a flare.

Carding, spinning and wool (oh my!)... I have a few friends who do that, and wouldn't mind trying it myself sometime.

So now nothing I post escapes moderation... sigh...

For some reason, every post I make under my normal username (SummerStorms) is going into the moderation queue.

(I knew I should've gotten the live chicken.)

Interesting interpretation of how introverts deal with life and how to deal with them. Uh, us.

http://schrojones.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Live-with-Introverts-291305760

SummerStorms --

That isn't the gnomes' doing. That's the Great Old Ones; AKA Moveable Type's antispam measures.

The posts aren't going into the moderation queue; they're going into the spam bucket. Here's the message we get when we find 'em there:

"TypePad AntiSpam -1.0 TypePad AntiSpam says spam"

I don't know what to do about that, since TypePad AntiSpam isn't under my control. I've searched the spam bucket back two days and released everything there from SummerStorms. We can experiment, but I don't know the solution right now.

-- JDM

Jim, thanks for the heads-up. That's weird, though. What I've been getting on my end is this:

Your comment is being held for review.

High in the glass-and-steel tower that is Making Light Headquarters your post is being examined under criteria both Mysterious and Arcane. Soon, if it passes High Level Review by our Gnomes, it will be released

The most common reason that a post is held is that it contained a Whole Lot of URLs. Alternatively, you may have used one or more Words of Power, and we must determine if your intentions are Good, Evil, or Amusing.

I'm attempting to post this one under my normal username to see what happens. If it gets caught in a filter again, I'll re-post under another identity.

Note: It did indeed get hung up in the filter again, which is why I'm now experimenting. This is my 6th attempt at reposting; different username and email, with no link to my LiveJournal

I'm really hoping I don't have to change identities, though, as I've used the same one here for several years (despite my dropping out for a while until recently).

Jim, thanks for the heads-up. That's weird, though. What I've been getting on my end is this:

Your comment is being held for review.

High in the glass-and-steel tower that is Making Light Headquarters your post is being examined under criteria both Mysterious and Arcane. Soon, if it passes High Level Review by our Gnomes, it will be released

The most common reason that a post is held is that it contained a Whole Lot of URLs. Alternatively, you may have used one or more Words of Power, and we must determine if your intentions are Good, Evil, or Amusing.

I'm attempting to post this one under my normal username to see what happens. If it gets caught in a filter again, I'll re-post under another identity.

Note: It did indeed get hung up in the filter again, which is why I'm now experimenting. This is my 7th attempt at reposting; with a radically different username and email address, and nothing in the URL box.

I'm really hoping I don't have to change identities, though, as I've used the same one here for several years (despite my dropping out for a while until recently).

testing something

[The last several hit the Gnomes' filters, not the Typepad filter. That's because they held Words of Power; specifically the words "your post" (which is a frequent word-group in actual spam). The ones that Typepad takes shouldn't yield the Gnome message--near as I figure they just Don't Post, with no notice to you -- or to me.

I believe that going back and Approving everything of yours in the Spam Filter told Typepad that, no kidding, this is legitimate traffic. (They have something going that draws on input across multiple blogs. Again, I'm not sure exactly what's going on there.)

So, two different problems hit you at the same time. Sorry about that. -- JDM]

Jim, I just went through 7 attempts at testing, which you will find (with explanations included) in whatever filter it is that's decided it doesn't like me. I'm about to run one more test.

Another test, this time to see whether the use of HTML formatting tags might be the culprit.

Okay, I officially have no idea what the problem is/was. At the moment I appear to be able to post normally, and as myself.

Thank you for your help, Jim. And to everyone else, thank you for your patience and the use of bandwidth.

I'm reduced to typing "owl" into images.bing.com and quietly sobbing each time I click the "next page" button.

SummerStorms: as a scientist, may I congratulate you on your use of the scientific method - varying different parameters and observing the outcome.

My own biggest in-normal-life scientific experiment I undertook several years ago to confirm that drinking coffee gives me headaches. Design: part 1, drink no coffee for three months, count number of headaches per week; part 2, drink coffee again for three months, count number of headaches. Actual: complete part 1, realise headaches have dropped from about 3-4 per week to maybe one per month, don't bother with part 2...

(Then a while back I was tired and drank coffee on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday mornings to help me stay alert. Had headaches on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. The penny dropped. No coffee on Thursday, no more headaches.)

In the interests of completeness I have to reveal that I do still get tension headaches occasionally, but we're talking a few a year, not a few a week.

For anyone who enjoys good chewy sociopolitical SF, I strongly recommend this Vorkosigan fanfic. I believe it to be AU to at least the latest couple of books. I'm also only about halfway thru it (it's novel-length), but it's giving me the sensawunda on a level that I rarely get any more, and the technobabble is both reasonably plausible and surprisingly easy to follow, despite being quite technical. There's also a strong admixture of Barrayaran history, and an ethical analysis that seems to be running in parallel with the technological stuff.

(Link goes to the chapter I'm currently reading, but you can get to the beginning easily enough via the chapter index at the top.)

SummerStorms: AIUI, the way TypePad antispam works is by applying Seth Breidbart's USENET anti-spam method to blogs: spammers are dumb or lazy and recycle their junk in multiple places. The original form was an automated check for spam on USENET: if the same (or very similar) item was posted separately to more than about 10 newsgroups,then 99.99% of the time it was spam.

The TypePad mechanism centralizes spam reports from blogs, so if the same item is flagged as spam by several blogs then it is reported as spam to any other blogs whose plugin sends a query ("is this message spam?") to the central server.

Obviously, some spammer was using "S*mm*rSt*rms" in their spam, got reported as such ... and inadvertently blacklisted you. The ML moderators marking your postings as non-spam whitelisted you back off the shity-list.

Irony: explaining how typepad anti-spam can accidentally get you tagged as spam can get you remanded in gnome custody!

j h woodyatt @ #27:

...in a good way or in a bad way?

Mary Aileen, et al., from OT184:

I think what's going on with the Zimmerman page (it's happening in my browser as well) is down to the way the embedded tweets are loaded. That happens in two stages: first, the plain text; then, if your browser supports it, all the styling and buttons and stuff are added. After step two, the tweets take up considerably more vertical real estate than after step one.

So what I think is happening is that the browser is doing the separate "jump to comment" step after the text has loaded but before the chrome is applied, and when the latter happens, the comment moves away from the position the browser had jumped to.

What Kevin said @ #14. It also bugs me when I read older SF (sometimes not that much older!) and people are flying to the stars and women are still stuck making the coffee.
W/r/t the unwieldy lengthiness of "for-the-sake-of-argument" fiction, there's always "thought-experiment" or the trusty "what-if?"

I don't mind the idea that science fiction is "forward-looking" so long as one is willing to admit that the future might include bad things as well as good ones.

I believe the short version of counter-factual is "what if?". It's just important to remember that the "what if?" just needs to be something that leads to an interesting story. The amount of science may be homeopathic.

Any thoughts about the relationship between science fiction and prediction? I realize that accurate prediction isn't the test of science fiction, though I'm still smug when an author gets something right and bemused when the whole field misses something completely. (So far as I know, no one predicted tattoos becoming stably popular.) Perhaps it's just that trying to predict has a fertile effect on the imagination.

Speaking of prediction, I'm reading Moises Naiim's The End of Power. His claim is that power is eroding in all sorts of institutions, more likely to be transitory for individuals, more subject to veto, and more likely to be challenged from non-obvious directions. He says it's not just improved communications-- that there are also more resources of all sorts more widely distributed (including more people), more mobility (both people and money), and a mindset that everyone is entitled to affect what happens.

This all seems plausible to me, with the caveat that large institutions grew in the recent past, so it's conceivable that the current weakening of barriers to entry could reverse.

In any case, I find his claims highly plausible, and definitely good enough for science fiction.

Jim @ (my) 22: I think the immortal words of Homer Simpson sum up my reaction beautifully. "D'oh!"

dcb @ 28: Thanks. The scientific method is pretty much SOP for me when faced with a puzzle to solve. Sorry to hear about your headaches, but glad to hear you found the cause and the solution. Mine's the opposite -- I get headaches if I don't have caffeine. (Yes, I'm probably addicted, but I don't focus well without it. Stupid ADD.)

Charlie Stross @ 30: Some days winning does take a little longer, doesn't it?

On (alternative, or not) terminology for SF: Hence my glee upon encountering the moniker "speculative fiction".

Long-time lurker delurking briefly to share with y'all a book that I believe is relevant to this community's interests. :-)

The other day at my library, I came across Gail Carson Levine's Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems. All the poems are based on William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say". I immediately thought of Making Light, having read many brilliant pastiches and variations on this poem here. As a bonus, many of the poems have an sfnal bent, with for example aliens or elements of retold fairy tales.

As a sample, here's the one that precedes the introduction (on page 18, which you will see is relevant):

This Is Just to Say

Instead of the beginning
I slipped
this introduction
in here

where
my editor excruciatingly loudly
screeched
it does not belong

Forgive me
I also shredded
her red pencil and stirred
the splinters into her tea

I hope you enjoy!

(I did delurk once before a few years ago for a comment or two, but have no idea any longer what name I may have used. A quick site-specific google search suggests that it wasn't this one, but I'll try to keep using it from now on--if I don't forget again before whenever the next time I delurk is. :-P)

(Aha! I have a View All By; it was this username after all.)

I am called to jury duty this Thursday. Nothing interesting ever happens on jury duty. Well, there was the time the guy (de)brained his wife with a sledgehammer because of secret messages from the Bible and he wanted us to say he was not guilty not because he could've been wrapped in aluminum foil and sent to everybody as an unwelcome and largely inedible Christmas present, but because, you know, he was only doing what Jesus told him to do. It was like an early Law & Order episode.

But, yeah, other than that, nothing interesting ever happens on jury duty.

I should be getting ready to go to the dentist for a root canal. I think I'll have another cup of coffee first...

nerdycellist @ 4 ...
Now a knitting friend tells me she has the wool of two sheep that she can send me to spin for her, should I so desire. Assuming it's washed (I looked it up - doesn't seem like the kind of thing that can be done in an apartment)

IIRC & FWIW, wet fleece *SMELLS* (and depending on whether it's been washed or not, may also outright *STINK* and be full of nasty things).

Stefan Jones #18: That cartoon shows only a small part of why introverts sometimes have problems with extroverts.
Some of us not only aren't comfortable when people "come on too strong", but we just don't usually find people basically as interesting/compelling as things or ideas or animals, and only start to like certain people after they've earned it.
I have been deeply hurt a couple of times by certain relatives treating me like some sort of diseased and defective freak; one has wised up but I'm not sure about the other (who is 99 so the problem may soon solve itself. But I haven't got a lot of relatives to spare.) As time went on I found some folks who have more of a clue, and came to realize that I really value (a few) people as well. And I'm better at coping with the loud ones and so on than when young, and I'd also like to think I've learned to become less of a bore when I get to talk about something I like. (I've got a couple dozen favorite subjects.) But I will always be an introvert, although I am not usually awkward or shy in the usual sense. Being asexual at least makes it simpler in a lot of ways. Having ADD and PTSD does not (this kind of belongs on the dysfunctional family thread.) I'd be pretty smart if I was whole.
Another problem is that some people think people like me belong on some autistic spectrum when so far as I can tell the match isn't that close. There are a lot more spectra or even color-solids out there, or something, and these aren't well known. Lumping me in with the autistics is not fair either to me or them. The whole autistic spectrum concept has become stretched so far it is becoming meaningless. Even if it wasn't, loners with unusual enthusiasms aren't fodder for someone's taxonomic mania. No one can tell my story for me.
When a couple of other people kept hitting me with that, I made very fine rubble of it with logic, only to have them start telling me I was in denial. I told at least one of them to shut it, in no uncertain terms, and that was that. It really makes me appreciate cats, and I'm not that big of an animal person either.
Diagnosing a person against their will, if that person isn't an addict, a criminal or "mentally challenged" (or whatever the current euphemism is) is at best rude, at worst deadly.
There need to be some new cartoons or books made, or something.

Paul A. @32: Aha, I think that's probably it!

B Durbin--would you be willing to email me? My username at gmail.

I'm always amused by science fiction that has AI, but the interfaces are still command lines.

What happens when you shave a guinea pig?

Handspinning Subthread: Washing a fleece can happen in your very own bathtub; I've done it. It's heavy wet humid work and how smelly it is depends on the individual fleece; ranges from 'no worse than an enormous dog' to an aroma my husband evocatively calls 'zoo poo'.

That said, if you have a carefully washed, well-sheared fleece, there's not really any need to card it if you're spindle spinning, since you can spin it 'from the lock' very nicely. You pick up small amounts of the fleece and hold them in your hand and spin from the cut end (note: not the curly end that was the tip of the hair; you want to spin from the end that was closest to the sheep).

This only works with really nice fleeces, but when it works it works like WHOA. Much faster than carding/combing/etc inbetween.

Dave harmon @45: I am reminded of the book including drawings of 'life reconstructions' from living-large-mammal bones if you use the same presumptions about body fat percentages, outside-the-skin coverings, cheeks, lips, etc that the mainstream of dinosaur art uses. I believe the term of derision for how we've gotten used to dinos looking is "shrink-wrapped dinosaurs", all bulgy muscle and melted-on skin texture.

That page includes their 'reconstructions' of baboons and swans, and a Google image search on the book title turns up more from the work, including some of their proposed, speculative, NON-shrink-wrapped dinosaurs.

For-the-sake-of-argument-fiction.

Perhaps that's why I've found myself growing annoyed as I get older with stories where the story is too obviously constructed to support the author's argument, e.g. dystopias that don't make a lot of sense when you think about them too hard.

We are not measured rightly by good chance
our hopes are limitless, but not our skin,
there are no victors ever at this dance.

They told us this was the time to advance,
that all the old faults had been cast in bin;
we are not measured rightly by good chance,

our wounds will never let us jump or prance
and when we are related we're not kin,
there are no victors ever at this dance

since it's a game whose players can enhance
their virtues best by adding to the din.
We are not measured rightly by good chance

nor yet permitted to take up a stance
above the fray; our only hope is sin.
There are no victors ever at this dance

but there are still fools who think it romance
and who believe that there's a prize to win.
We are not measured rightly by good chance
there are no victors ever at this dance.

Handspinning: (re: Elliott Mason) You can even spin "in the grease" (unwashed wool) if you so desire. How pleasant that is depends on the condition of that particular fleece and how much you like the smell and feel of lanolin. (Generally I find the smell of an unwashed fleece pleasant, but there's unwashed and then there's "covered in poo and vegetable matter and also this was on a ram, wasn't it?")

nerdycellist, this is probably filed under "too ambitious too soon," but if there is a handspinners' or handweavers' guild near you, those organizations often rent equipment inexpensively. I have a friend who rents a drum carder from the local handweavers' guild when she wants to card a whole fleece at one time, or blend it with another fiber.

I'm told that clean fleeces are less susceptible to moth invasion than unwashed fleeces are.

Re handspinning, I've found washing locks of fleece individually, flicking them open with a flick carder, and spinning directly from them with a spindle to be a small-apartment-friendly, equipment-light way to deal with smelly fleeces. This is not to say that I don't have bags of fleece waiting to be washed due to intemperance at fleece auctions, but washing a couple of ounces' worth of locks at a time and drying them on a rack on the counter is less time- and space-intensive than dealing with a lot of fleece all at once when you don't have space to spread out. I recommend asking your friend whether the fleeces have been skirted (a.k.a. had the dirtiest parts of them removed) before you volunteer to take them off her hands -- nothing worse than a garbage bag full of sheep shit in a small apartment.

Beth Smith wrote a good article for Knitty in 2008 about washing locks and spinning from them. (Note that you can buy a specialized flick carder if you want, but a wire slicker pet brush like this one works just as well.) Flicking is fairly quick and results in a smooth handful of fibre to spin, which is easier to manage than an untreated lock when you're learning. Here's the first bit of my current spinning-from-locks project if you're curious what it looks like (l-r: washed lock otherwise untouched; lock flicked open; lock having been spun, knitted, and blocked).

The above-recommended Start Spinning by Maggie Casey is great; an equally excellent spindle-specific book is Respect the Spindle by Abby Franquemont.

Angiportus, #42: Diagnosing a person against their will, if that person isn't an addict, a criminal or "mentally challenged" (or whatever the current euphemism is) is at best rude, at worst deadly.

Furthermore, useless and therefore best kept to oneself. Even in the case of addiction, you can't MAKE someone agree with whatever "diagnosis" you've developed in your own head -- and that's not even counting the instances when YOU are the one in "denial". If they're going to agree with you, they'll get there themselves sooner or later. In the meantime, you come off sounding like those creeps who ask people, "Have you heard the GOOD NEWS about Jesus Christ?"

[Sings]
Tarry wool, oh tarry wool,
Tarry wool is ill to spin.
Card it well, card it well,
Card it well ere you begin.

tykewriter @53: For extra fiber-geek bonus points, why might wool be tarry?

(answer rot13'ed for those who want to guess first)

Orpnhfr furcureqf cnvag bcra jbhaqf naq bgure fxva yrfvbaf jvgu gne gb frny gurz va n ybat-ynfgvat, snveyl-nagvfrcgvp onaqntr.

Elliott Mason @ #54, "First, recognize some words can be verbs or adjectives."

All I could think of immediately was wool lollygagging around waiting for something to happen.

Linkmeister @55: That immediately suggests carding as punishment (which, having done it, I can imagine). :-> Relatedly, (or is this verging on a Wiki-safari?) several European Christian saints were martred on wool-combs, and I can see THAT too, since I own a pair, very much smaller and tamer than the ones commonly in use for large-scale medieval textile production.

Working out some issues by reading a site, and then the links, until it's rather later than is healthy for my head. I found this link, about the importance of speaking up, which gave me encouragement, and I wanted to share.

http://makemeasammich.org/2013/06/13/their-fear-is-justified-or-why-speaking-out-in-your-community-is-important/

Crazy(and secretly hoping this link leaps to the particles section, *wan grin*)Soph

This is just to say that Pacific Rim is the best mech-vs-monster movie you're likely to see. It has a lot of stuff going on. Lots and lots better than Man of Steel in lots and lots of ways.

Worth seeing on the largest screen you can find.

Michael Weholt@39:

I'm called to Jury duty on Wednesday and can only hope something half as interesting will be on the docket. Seeing as how i live in the Portland metro area,I'm hoping for something Portland-weird. Maybe a 3 fixie pileup or a coffee fueled bird-gluing rampage.

sf is such a big spectrum. In the last few weeks, I read Machine of Death, some Bujold (The Curse of Chalion and early Vorkosigan), and Shadow of the Torturer, to name just a few.

The common thread: To explore strange new worlds, even (maybe especially) ones going by the name of Urth.

If sf were just forward looking, we could not construct glasses that peer into many dimensions, through time and space, into impossibility, out of alien eyes, reflecting back the strangeness of humanity. To our loss.

Well now I've done it. My resume has been updated and uploaded, the job applied for on the internal website. All relevant supervisors and managers have been informed. Per the one doing the hiring, no suitable resumes have come in over a month since the initial job posting. So I guess the odds are good. I'm not concerned about my ability to do the job; it combines the stuff I already do, adds a patina of authority to that AND gives me more things to learn and greater responsibility, which upon reflection, I've found I'm really craving. No, my biggest concern right now is getting them to pay me more than I'm making as a Union member, plus enough to compensate for insurance PLUS a little more for the added responsibility. Surely a woman who included Amateur Pastry Chef as one of her activities deserves the money!

Wording help: I keep trying to use the phrase 'compound interest' to talk about why it's good to start a process that will work slowly and incrementally EARLIER rather than LATER, but it's not actually compounding as money does from interest. For example, opening the house windows to let cooler outside air replace our warmer inside greenhoused air in the evenings. It's cooler at bedtime if you open the windows at the earliest possible "it is colder outside" moment than if you wait until an hour before sleeping.

But it's NOT actually a compounding process, nor is there interest involved. What can I call it instead?

Elliott Mason: That immediately suggests carding as punishment

It used to be done in prisons and workhouses, as was the vaguely related fiber task of picking oakum.

Jim Macdonald #58: Pacific Rim... Worth seeing on the largest screen you can find.

So I should just swallow the resistance I feel to seeing ANOTHER giant punch out movie? I'm being unfair in thinking it must only be (or be not much more than) that?

I've really grown to despise giant punch out movies.

I need some advice about a Situation. I will, of necessity, be rather vague about the particulars.

I have recently been re-contacted by someone I used to know some 30-odd years ago in a state that is neither where I live now nor where I used to live. The method of said contact put me very much on edge -- the guy was acting like a creepy stalker. I spoke to him once on the phone, and he was going thru the whole stalker script about how he's been looking for me for 30 years, no other woman has ever been able to get me out of his head, he's got cancer and only has 6 months to live, he really wants to see me once more before he dies, etc. etc. etc. (Yeah, right.)

He said he'd written a letter, but didn't want to send it until he knew it would reach the right person. I told him to send it. He sent two letters; one is fairly lucid, the other is 10 repetitive, handwritten pages of the script above. The letters are written on spiral-bound notebook paper, and the handwriting looks like a young teenager's. (I'm surprised he didn't dot the I's with little hearts.)

We have looked up the return address in $OTHERSTATE. It's a somewhat dilapidated trailer park. In the lucid letter, he says that he doesn't drive, and is apparently either living with his mother or she buys food and runs errands for him -- I couldn't quite tell which. He sounds... hapless, I guess is the best word. He also sounds like someone whose life sucks, and who has fastened on this brief encounter from long ago as some sort of magical talisman. Given the distance between here and $OTHERSTATE, if he doesn't drive, I'm not terribly worried about him showing up on the doorstep.

But here's the thing. I bribed him to send the letter (and to get off the phone, because he was showing no signs of wanting to stop talking anytime in the next year) by telling him that if he did, I'd send him a current picture. My idea was that I'd send an unflattering shot that displays every year and every extra pound, since he's still thinking of me the way I looked 30-odd years ago (in the hope that this would break the obsession), along with a letter firmly stating that I don't want any further contact.

Now... I'm not so sure. We have Caller ID software that records the numbers from all incoming calls, and for the first couple of days after I spoke to him he called 7 or 8 times a day. (We did not answer any of those calls.) That's been dropping since then, and for the past couple of days he hasn't called at all. I'm wondering if actually sending him the picture would start it all up again, or whether we shouldn't just block his number (letting him think I lied to him) and let the whole thing drop. The odds of us ever being in $OTHERSTATE are slim to none -- it's not a place where we do business.

There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I guess there's also the option of keeping the letter and picture in reserve against future need. What I'm really looking for here are opinions from people with professional-level knowledge of how people like this guy work. Which approach is more likely to discourage him permanently?

Elliott Mason @61 It's not an exact fit, but feedback is pretty close to what you're saying.

Lee @ 64 ...
There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I guess there's also the option of keeping the letter and picture in reserve against future need. What I'm really looking for here are opinions from people with professional-level knowledge of how people like this guy work. Which approach is more likely to discourage him permanently?

If he's giving you the heeby-jeebies already, I'd go with your gut, and cut contact completely. If you do run into the guy, be firm and polite about not wanting further contact, and either leave or otherwise make it clear that you are Quite Done Now.

It's not necessarily comfortable living with yourself, when you've said that you will do something, and you take that as a bond -- but it's likely that any sort of contact is going to be read as encouragement, no matter what the content ("Well -- she -said- that she didn't want to contact me anymore, but sent me a picture and a letter...") -- but it's even less comfortable living with the unreasonable expectations, fantasies and delusions that somebody else is projecting onto you.

Michael Weholt #63

For me to enjoy a punch-based movie, all the non-punching scenes must support the punching scenes, and vice versa. The only punching movies I've really enjoyed in recent years have been the excellent Marvel ones set in the Avengers universe.

To borrow a description from some tumblr reviews, Pacific Rim is set in a world where the only superpower that matters is the ability to open yourself up to another human being, and to cooperate with that person flawlessly. Robot fights are fueled by deep interpersonal connections. Now, the characters are broadly drawn and the plot is simplistic and there is that one moment where they do that thing that they always do in movies and they pay for it. But I liked it because it had interesting characters, comic relief that was actually amusing, beautiful images, and hope.

I went in expecting Transformers meets Hellboy 2 meets bad Evangelion Ripoff. Pacific Rim is none of those things. It's a cute fighting movie about robots powered by trust that punch godzillas. It's a movie about friendships and parents and families... both the kind you're born into and the kind you make.

And it's damn refreshing to see a movie where the most important relationship is between an adoptive parent and child.

Lee:

It's not a kindness to give this guy any encouragement, which any additional contact (much less sending a photo) certainly would.

Block his number, let him slip away.

I understand your angst of "but I promised him I'd send him a photo". That was under duress.

If he calls again from another number, a ploy I've used is to pound hard on the closest solid surface and say with mild panic, "sorry, I've got to go". Gently hang up.

nerdycellist @#8: You don't get wool from kids. Maybe you can get some cashmire instead.

Pacific Rim has resonances from Perseus to Beowulf to Prometheus. Lots of stuff going on in this one.

Carol, #68: You've slightly misinterpreted. It's not the angst of "but I promised" that's the issue here; it's evaluating the risk of being perceived as sending encouragement (or at least mixed messages) against the chance of him seeing me as a plump, middle-aged grandmother type* and going "EW!" because I'm not the pretty girl he remembers, and thus solving the problem once and for all.

* Complete with short, fluffy white hair, courtesy of the costume shop.

#67 Leah Miller & #70 Jim Macdonald

Okay, I'm in.

Jim @70: That's the fire-and-vultures Prometheus, not the "for the sake of argument, let's say that in the future we forget everything we ever knew about hazmat procedure" Prometheus?

Elliott Mason @61, I think I'd just call it getting a head start.

Lee at 64: My advice, for what it's worth, would be to refuse all further contact with this person. It sounds like he's got a particularly tenacious fixation, and the prospect of any further encouragement sets off all sorts of warning klaxons in my head. I believe it would just encourage him, and that's not something you want. I'd filter his calls and dispose of any further letters unread.

Lee, any contact is going to encourage him. You may feel that if you show him that you're not the spring chicken of his memories, he'll trudge away, discouraged, but that's not the track he's on.

If you want to take a goofed-up photo for the joy of the then-and-now contrast, go for it. For gods' sake don't send it to him.

Lee, my thoughts (I've never been that creepy, but I have in the past obsessed over a woman):

His reactions are not under your control. He might or might not die unhappy whether or not you write.

Him being in touch with you is creeping you out. That in itself is a good reason not to react, not to write, and not to send the picture. You have a lot of experience in the world, large portions of it unconscious: and the unconscious part of you is saying not to write.

Do you need permission not to send a picture? I give you that permission. And I give you permission to make taking care of yourself more important than taking care of him.

Now, go and do what feels right to you.

chaosprime @73
Fire-and-vultures Prometheus. Plus Philos, Agape and Eros.

I have never found fight scenes gorgeous, but there were bits and pieces that I thought were mind-blowingly pretty.

Lee @ 64

Do not send the photo. Do not take or return his calls. Keep his letters in case you need proof later. Document the call and the length and subject matter. People recover from cancer all the time. He may show up sooner or later.

Lee #64....

I'll bet you a donut that this person does not have cancer and does not have just six months to live. If I'm wrong about that, wait six months and the problem will have solved itself.

If I seriously planned to do someone harm the very first thing I'd want would be a recent photo of them. Don't give him one.

Log everything, but do not make/maintain contact. That feeling in your gut is a warning. Never ignore a warning.

More serendipity in bookstores than online.

Nancy Lebovitz @ #81, I defer to the experts in publishing for an opinion on whether that idea might work, but the author, Virginia Postrel, is a noted libertarian, so her "succumb to the market" approach is no surprise.

In HLN, I'm going to have a meeting on the 23rd concerning a financial services job. Wish me good luck.

Today marks the release of Tor Books's fantasy novel "Mist", by Susan Krinard, aka my wife.

Lee@#65:

My go-to source for advice on this kind of situation is Captain Awkward. On this recent post, both Captain Awkward and the commenters cover a lot of the ground of how you make your own self-care your first priority, up to and including things we'd normally not like doing:

http://captainawkward.com/2013/06/29/491-a-dream-job-is-taking-me-back-to-the-city-i-left-10-years-ago-to-escape-my-abusive-family-how-can-i-keep-myself-safe/

In a nutshell, you have every right to your own safety. You are not obligated to explain yourself to anyone violating, or trying to violate, your boundaries and/or agency.

If it quacks like a stalker (riffing off of your label "the whole stalker script"), it most likely is one.

While I appreciate your desire to fulfill a promise you made, I'd like to add a detail - people with these stalker tendencies will zero right in on empathetic, conscientious people like yourself. The very worst of them will then use that trait to tear you apart.

*deep breath* Okay, now I'm going all Gift of Fear (Gavin De Becker) on you. Forgive me, and let me try to not remember something from out of my own past that somewhat resembles this thing. I'm worried that, after the first call, you got 7 or 8 calls the next couple days. Even if only just the one day, that in itself is a very red flag.

No contact, that's how I'd go with this circumstance. The only dissuasion that will work is if he's getting NO RETURN on his efforts.

I know you'll make the choice you need for yourself, so I'll just end with please be careful.

Crazy(and really surprised at myself... you'd only asked a question, after all...)Soph

Lee, also keep in mind: it's not just you--it's your partner, his daughter, your pets, any random friends and business associates that happen to be within range. All of these could be in danger. The best thing is no contact, and keeping track of any efforts that go beyond random calls.

These could be the simple yearnings of a dying man, wanting to imagine having had another, better, happier life. They could be something a lot worse, a lot scarier, and more dangerous than that. Smart money does not bet on yellow snow being lemon-flavored.

@62, In that very specific case "Compound Interest" is exactly wrong (mathematically): instead of being exponential, the return is logarithmic. (Doing it for eight hours gets you almost nothing more than doing it for seven. Except that the coldest hour is just before the dawn. I'm overapplying heat transfer, aren't I?)

Low-throughput/high-latency, maybe?

Unrelated to any stalker info in this thread: We're having a Mad Science party on Saturday afternoon. Bringing experiments is encouraged but not required. We're in NJ, a commuter-train-trip from NYC, so I know there are Flurospherians potentially around (albeit it is short notice on a summer weekend.) Email (rot13) arohybhfzranpr@lnubb.pbz if interested.

*bangs head on desk*

So... the water to my house got shut off this morning, on what may well turn out to be one of the hottest days of the year. Have I mentioned the landlord is an idiot?

I share a two-bedroom apartment with my ex-husband on the first floor of a duplex in an inner-ring Cleveland suburb. (Gotta love that economic "recovery".) The rent is cheap, but the place isn't even worth the amount we're charged. The landlord owns some unknown number of houses in this 'burb, and when something breaks, either takes his sweet time fixing it or argues that it isn't really broken.

The house has a single water meter, serving the piping that feeds both rental units. This is SOP around here, and the vast majority of landlords include water as part of the rent.

Not this guy. He's paranoid that tenants are going to abuse the water if they're not paying for it themselves. "They'll have all their relatives over to do laundry or take showers and I'll be paying for it, or they'll leave the water running all the time and I'll get stuck with the bill," he says. (I don't even want to know what kind of people do that, but it isn't us. Hell, I don't even *have* more than a handful of relatives left to speak of, and none of them live in this state.)

So instead, he charges what he considers a lower rent, eschews leases in favor of verbal month-to-month rental agreements and then expects his tenants to split the water bill, with each unit paying a portion depending on how many people actually live there. The bill, however, goes to his father's home in the next 'burb over, and he never once has shown it to us, mentioned it to us, asked for $!amount toward it or anything, in the 10+ months we've lived here.

As it turns out, he hadn't paid the water bill in five months. I learned this when, this morning, I stepped out front to find a water department truck parked at the curb, and a guy shutting off the valve in the treelawn in front of the house. He was very apologetic and gave me a number to call. When I did, the department informed me how far in arrears the bill was, and how much would have to be paid to get the water turned back on.

I called the landlord, who at first claimed to have no knowledge of why our water should've been shut off. I recounted to him my conversation with the water department, and cited the fact that by law HE is responsible for the bill since the account is in his name as homeowner and the rental units do not have their own meters. He said, "You guys need to be paying that bill."

"How," I asked, keeping my voice as calm as possible, "are we supposed to do that when we never even see the bill? The city says they send it to an address in [redacted]."

"Oh, yeah, well I have that go to my dad's place."

"Not our problem."

He agreed to get the bill caught up and have our water turned back on today, which as of this writing it has been. I'm actually glad I was off today and could be here and on top of the issue, because otherwise tonight would've been very annoying... but dear ghods, what is up with this guy? And now he wants to put the bill in my ex's name -- for the WHOLE house -- and let us wrangle splitting it with the neighbor upstairs, whom we almost never see because she is out of town about 75% of the time. (And when she is home, half the time it sounds like she's making amateur porn upstairs, but that's a whole separate issue.)

Um, no.

Is it any wonder I want to get out of this place, this town and this whole area?

Leah Miller @ #68:

I also have been trying to figure out from the reviews I've seen whether I want to see Pacific Rim. That was very helpful. Thank you.

Age or Wizardry @ #38: Aha! I have a View All By; it was this username after all.

Not necessarily. When you click through to View All By, the username it shows is always the username that was on the comment you clicked through from. (This can have amusing results if somebody has adopted a blatantly false name for a one-off effect.) To find out what username you were using on an old comment, you have to click through from View All By to that comment.

Lee at 65: Do not send the photo. Do not communicate with this person again. Trust your gut when it tells you, as it has, that No Good Can Come of This. You are not in a relationship of any sort with this person. You are not obligated to him in any way. Whatever fantasy relationship exists in his head is a lie, and you must not feed it. Don't answer his calls. If he sends you more letters, do not respond. Forgive me if I sound harsh here, but I speak from experience. What you want is for him to recognize that you do not want any contact with him, thank you very much, go away now. ANY response from you, including a letter which says "I do not want any contact with you, go away now" will feed the fantasy relationship which is, I repeat, only in his head.

If he were a total stranger approaching you, you would have no qualms about not responding in any way. Consider: he IS a total stranger. People change immeasurably in 30 years. Whatever part of his personality allowed you to be friends or acquaintances 30 years ago may be buried so deeply that not even he knows where or what it is.

If your conscience bothers you (I am not being facetious) because you don't like to lie, or because you might be overreacting (maybe he's harmless) point out to it that you have an obligation to protect yourself and to protect the people you love, and that maybe he isn't harmless. At this point, you have no way to know.

If you are a theist, put him on your prayer list.

Anyone else having the problem that when you click a comment link on the Last 1000 list, you go first to that comment and then it leaps up to some other one several comments earlier?

Or is it Firefox doing something I never told it to?

@93: I had that happen once, and then I restarted the browser and it hasn't happened since.

Regarding Pacific Rim; basically, I went because I trusted the director. He always does something special, even when it's not what I was expecting. (see most especially Pan's Labyrinth)

And everything Leah Miller said in 68.

Most especially the sense of fun, and ... I complained heavily about Man of Steel not having any sense that the hero cared about the random mooks being mowed down? This movie made me believe they cared, and that the wanton destruction was inevitable.

...I've put my name in without the 'has been gnomed' three times, and it keeps coming back. Sorry.

*clicks 'forget personal information'*

Xopher Halftongue @ #93:

Several people reported the same behaviour late in the previous Open Thread; see #33 on this page for my best shot at an explanation.

Tom, #78: I don't need anyone's permission to not send the photo, but I thank you anyhow.

Jim, #81: See my reference to "stalker script" above. The minute he said "cancer" my skepticism went into overdrive. And I had the exact same "well, if he does, this is a problem that will solve itself in short order" reaction.

crazysoph, #86: Thank you for that link -- it was interesting reading, and reminded me a lot of the DFD threads. Believe me, I have no problem with being a "cold, selfish bitch" in this instance.

Thank you also to everyone who has responded here. On further reflection, I think I was putting too much weight into the idea that this guy would react like... well, like the average American male upon discovering that the long-ago acquaintance/classmate/flame/whatever that he's been having nostalgic fantasies about has gotten just as old and fat as he has. I am reminded, once again, that you can't apply normal values to a dysfunctional situation, and that's clearly what this is.

There is no angst in this for me. I don't owe this dude anything whatsoever, and it's not a game that I might be able to win.

Ah, thanks, Paul A.

Lee, #97

Well, you know what they say -- "The only winning move is not to play."

(Another strong vote for no more contact.)

Jim's Diffraction link to Susan Krinard's new book is borked. Leads to the ML error page.

Hyperlocal news... Local man is told by local costumer that he has monkey arms. Local man still planning to be in local costumer's worldcon masquerade.

So it turns out my kid has read an entire book today. Two, actually. Books she's never been read before, with minimal helps from me.

*happyflail*

HLN: watched "John Carter" last night on DVD. Decided reviewers were idiots in their expectations. A movie based on a book published in 1917 is not required to have 21st-century subtleties baked into it.

It was a perfectly acceptable popcorn movie (although I didn't make any, blast it. It was 9:45pm with only a half-hour to go before I thought of snacking).

Linkmeister, they improved enormously on the book.

Way late, but here's a back ref to OT184. (Now watch: somebody else will have already got there ahead of me.)

Elliott Mason @102, it's such an exciting thing to witness as a parent. Congratulations.

Dress For Success – An Analysis Of The Pacific Rim Costume Designs

Contains spoilers.

Serge at @85,

HLN: Area woman acquires copy of first "non-romance" novel by excellent romance novelist. "I've been looking forward to it since I read the short story that leads into it in an anthology a few years ago. The fact that it was written by one of my online friend's wife is only the icing on the cake."

Linkmeister @103: HLN: watched "John Carter" last night on DVD. Decided reviewers were idiots in their expectations. A movie based on a book published in 1917 is not required to have 21st-century subtleties baked into it.

My expectations were perfectly well aligned -- I expected the movie not to have any of those subtleties, so I didn't watch it.

HLN: Cleveland woman ate ice cream for dinner because it was too doggone hot to cook anything.

Serge @ 85: Consider it added to my "to acquire and read" list.

HLN: Local man notices that his office is either just inside or (apparently more likely) just outside an area where water is being cut off due to an urgent repair to a water main. This does not affect local man as much as it might since local man is about to fly out to San Diego for Comic-Con but local man does need to pay some attention to this matter.

Nancy Mittens @ 108... SummerStorms @ 110... Thanks!

Haven't commented here is quite a while but this thread was interesting. I loved the sub-thread about spinning. I recently took a workshop involving making one's own art yarn -- spinning at least 3 or more yarns into one yarn. It was fun. I have a large yarn stash that could be used for such projects.

Linkmeister: A friend and I saw John Carter. We both liked it very much. I thought the TV commercials were really bad, though. Because the commercials were bad, I wouldn't have wanted more of them. Better trailers/commercials were needed. I don't understand why they didn't include "of Mars" in the title. I recently bought it on DVD; I haven't played it yet, but I will. I've never read the Burroughs books but have general sense of them and I thought the movie was well done.

Open threadiness: The latest XKCD what if is about what would happen if you put a drain in an ocean and drastically reduced sea levels. It is most interesting, as always, but the behavior he expects from the Dutch is not at all in keeping with what Abi has lead me to expect!

HLN: Local man has spent morning watching plumbers at work on the bathroom. Results: Outlet pipe from shower to drain completely replaced, ditto toilet cistern.

The old drain pipe was metal -- had been metal; when the plumber got it out of the underfloor space into the light, it turned out to consist largely of holes held together by rust. I'm astonished there wasn't more obvious leakage than what prompted me to sic the plumber on it.

The toilet was a much simpler fix on the face of it -- a plastic doohickey in the flushing mechanism had worn out -- but the plumber's advice to the landlord was that if he replaced the doohickey it would just wear out again in a few years, being a cheaply-made doohickey known for doing that, so he was given the go-ahead to install a new cistern with a more sturdy mechanism.

janetl@ #114, The Dutch were imperialists once.

"31 photos of New York City in the summer of 69"

So, this is the part where I confess that after all this time, I'm not quite sure what to do with an open thread. Does 'open thread' mean we can just talk about whatever? That's kind of what it looks like, but things that quack aren't always ducks.

Also, FWIW, solidly with Jim Macdonald @#81, and with PNH in the OP.

MNiM... Does 'open thread' mean we can just talk about whatever?

Yup.

HLN: Local man and spouse return from eight-day trip across Canadian Rockies, part of which was by train. Verdict: Awesome squared!

Michael Weholt @64: I'm being unfair in thinking it must only be (or be not much more than) [ANOTHER giant punch out movie]?

I see nothing in the trailer to indicate otherwise. My resistance derives from my impatience with anthropoid monsters with superfluous joints and random appendages added to make them look "alien." And not particularly interesting or plausible ones, at that.

Lee @65: the guy was acting like a creepy stalker

I actually dealt with almost exactly this same scenario, though somewhat milder than your situation: guy from high school got in touch with me a few years ago. We were acquaintances back then, though he made it clear he wanted "more." I'm pretty sure I made it clear (well, as clear as I could, give that "no" was verboten vocabulary, back then) that I didn't.

When he contacted me more recently, the explicit message was that he just wanted to re-establish contact, but there was an urgency to the subtext that set off alarm bells.

After several very asymetrical exchanges (he contacting me multiple times for every response I gave), I explained that he was making me very nervous, and I preferred that he didn't contact me again.

He apologized, saying he didn't mean to make me nervous, and I haven't heard from him since.

Your guy sounds rather more desperate. In your place, I would feel no obligation to honor his desires for contact. I would tell him that my initial impulse to send him a letter and a photo has been superceded by uneasiness resulting from his approach to contacting me (listing the details you innumerate above, using neutral language).

Note in particular that "changing your mind" does not equal "having lied to him." And, in fact, telling him that his behavior caused you to change your mind would be, in my evaluation, a net favor to him. Speculating wildly for the moment, I'll wager you're not the first person to be put off by his behavior, and I'd further bet that most people aren't generous with specific feedback about how his behavior produces the responses he gets. It's not unreasonable to guess that the net result would be that he senses that people avoid him, and has no useful clue as to why. This (in my, um, experience) is kind of a nightmarish place to be.

The advantage of this approach is that if he does change his behavior so that you feel less uncomfortable dealing with him, this leaves you the option of changing your mind again, and responding to his original request.

re 103: My one real problem with JC of M was a casting issue: there were two of the males (one good guy, one villain) who were simply too similar for me to keep track of-- and it was important to distinguish them, so that every time they switched from one to the other I was at least briefly confused. Other than that I thought it was hugely entertaining, with a great visual style. My reviewer snark was against all the ones who dissed it for being derivative, when it's everything else that is derivative of it.

Jacque @ 121

These were the most un-alien looking aliens I've seen in a while. The overall look of each kaiju seemed to be a basic bipedal/humanoid patterned on wildlife. It read to my eye like a mutated human & animal hybrid built on a gigantic scale. The monster fights had a very Godzilla-like feel without resorting to stiff rubber suits - a classy homage to Japanese monsters seen during MST3K marathons.

I adored the use of phosphorescent glow to highlight kaiju details.

#123 ::: C. Wingate ::: (view all by) ::: July 17, 2013, 12:15 PM:

re 103: My one real problem with JC of M was a casting issue: there were two of the males (one good guy, one villain) who were simply too similar for me to keep track of-- and it was important to distinguish them, so that every time they switched from one to the other I was at least briefly confused

...but they wore DIFFERENT COLOR TUNICS.

I knew almost immediately who you meant. It did present a problem for me the first time through, as well.

This article describes a family of Jewish academics who were convinced to flee Nazi Germany by Albert Einstein, and the whole operation of bringing fleeing academics from Germany to Britain and the US. Very interesting on all kinds of levels.

I feel like I just don't have a good sense of the way the world must have felt between, say, 1900 and 1945, to people in central Europe. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Czechloslovakia, Russia, Poland, Belgium, The Netherlands, France--it was a completely different world. And they more-or-less threw it on an enormous fire twice in 30 years, changing the world in so many ways it's almost impossible to imagine what the world would look like if things had gone down differently.

Imagine a world where we'd somehow not gone down the path of WW1 or WW2 (which was a follow-on from WW1). Would colonialism still be going strong? Would America be the world's great power? Would the Romanov family still be in power in Russia, or perhaps in a ceremonial position with little power after some kind of reform turned it into a constitutional monarchy?

MNiM 118: To expand on Jim's response with a bit of history: IIRC, Teresa originally intituted Open Threads so that we could discuss her Particles, which didn't have their own threads. Eventually someone asked the question you just asked and Teresa enthusiastically encouraged it. They've been the source of new conversational topics ever since.

C. 123: My one real problem with JC of M was a casting issue: there were two of the males (one good guy, one villain) who were simply too similar for me to keep track of-- and it was important to distinguish them, so that every time they switched from one to the other I was at least briefly confused.

Not helped by the fact that there are also shapechangers who masquerade as one or another character at various times. BTW, the shapechangers aren't in APoM at all. He gets to Mars just by staring at it and wishing he were there (for no reason).

My reviewer snark was against all the ones who dissed it for being derivative, when it's everything else that is derivative of it.

I'd like more detail on this. There's a fair bit of the movie that isn't from the book. This is because the book is a very poorly-structured narrative; and it is derivative of some earlier stuff (like H. Rider Haggard).

C.Wingate @123: I had that problem cubed when L.A. Confidential first came out. great movie, but I didn't know any of the actors (yes, I really didn't know Kevin Spacey, Russell Crow or Guy Pearce to recognise reliably) and had to concentrate really hard to remember who was who and even then sometimes gor confused (they all had dark hair, with similar hair styles, similar clothes...).

Jacque, #122: I take your point, but (1) this is normally something that a friend of his should do (and which I have done for a couple of friends in the past) -- and I do not fall into that category; (2) see multiple above comments to the effect that ANY response is likely to cause escalation. Yes, it's a nasty catch-22 for him; however, I am under no obligation to do anything about it.

If I cared anything at all about this guy it might be different, but I don't. He's someone I knew, very briefly, a long time ago. Hell, I've had more conversation with C.J. Cherryh than I had with him.

Lee: Understood. I hadn't seen the rest of the thread when I responded (someday I'll learn...?), and I come from a place where I just don't (knock on wood) tend to attract dangerous energy. But that could be because I'm not bashful about shutting down unwanted contact, especially if it pings my creep meter.

My core point still applies: having changed your mind about sending him the letter and photo does not mean you lied to him.

Given the overwhelming consensus to avoid further contact with him, that does seem like the sensible thing to do.

dcb @128: I had that problem cubed when L.A. Confidential first came out.

I recently confirmed the magnitude of my issue with this when I realized I had confused Billy Preston with Leon Russell.

Interesting word that came across one of my mailing lists: "whataboutery".

A word turned up in my newspaper that I thought had outlived its fashionableness, even its utility: whataboutery, but it turns out to have significant currency still. It's associated particularly with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Bitter arguments by one side about terrorism were often countered, not by reasoned argument, but by accusations of similar atrocities by the other. In 2000, The Scotsman attributed the coinage to the former West Belfast MP Gerry Fitt, and gave this example: "Aye, the IRA might be bad, but what about ...". That makes clear it's "what about" turned into a noun. The Belfast Telegraph used it on 29 September: "Both sides are steeped in historical 'whataboutery' and they cannot see the historical woods for the modern trees."

We may not use the word over here, but we certainly do have the concept; it's the basis of the "But Clinton did it too!" argument.

Hyperlocal news... While waiting for his wife to be done with her gym workout, local man sees an old lady wearing a redshirt on which can be seen the visage of Montgomery Scott.

I'd have been curious to see what Jon Favreau's "John Carter of Mars" would have bene like if the studio hadn't pulled the plug on it. After they did that, he moved on to another project you may have heard of - "Iron Man".

I was terrified they'd mess up Pacific Rim, thereby convincing Hollywood forever that "giant fighting suits movies don't work".

My husband, when I started sharing Fluorospherian review feelings about Pacific Rim with him, said, "I bet it's just anchoring; when you're half-convinced something's going to be horrible it looks pretty awesome if it just fails to suck."

Let me state for the record that, in my opinion, I don't think I only liked Pacific Rim because I was pre-terrified it was going to suck. :->

Instead, I am shocked and amazed to report, in as spoiler-free a manner as I can, that I think it may have a claim to being one of the most legitimately SCIENCE-FICTION-feeling movies to come out in a very long time, in that finally someone has accurately filmed and movie-fied the kind of thing our subculture has been writing amazing short stories about for decades: a plucky group of individuals genuinely perched on the brink of the edge of their world who band together and say NO, THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN IF I CAN STOP IT. But, somehow, in the SF-short-story way, not the action-movie-cliches way (which is not to say there aren't some amazing action-movie-cliche sight gags thrown in for fun).

Also, it made me laugh hysterically in the middle of a fight scene (rot13: gur Arjgba'f Penqyr rkrphgvir gbl) that was otherwise pretty horrific and tense, without (for me) ruining the tension. Guillermo del Toro is apparently a mad genius who knows how to shoot fight scenes that use rhythm and variety to make themselves MORE intense the way some heavy-metal bands know how to use silence in the middle of crashing noise to make the noise even louder.

Also I was very sniffly from FEELS repeatedly throughout the movie, and his big butch ass-kickers are in the main also allowed to have FEELS without it making them un-manly.

I'm don't think it passes the Bechdel test. There are at least two female characters with names (Znxb naq gur Ehffvna cvybg), but I don't think they talk to each other on screen ever. If they did I bet it wouldn't've been about-a-man, though. Probably about kicking kaiju ass.

I also was pleased to not be able to spot them changing the suit size for dramatic license (like the Cloverfield monster did repeatedly). They may have done it, but if so, it wasn't totally blatant.

And several of the stellar actors in the movie were HAVING SO MUCH FUN doing their jobs I found it really fun to watch just on that scale, as well as all the others. :->

So, to sum up: not just a punching movie. Definitely not just a punching movie.

Um. Brink of the END of their world. I swear I checked for typos in preview. Multiple times ...

Nancy Lebovitz #35: Any thoughts about the relationship between science fiction and prediction?

Nobody gets the future exactly right, but it's interesting to see how much some folks do get right. I'm occasionally depressed that we're seeing so much stuff climbing out of Brunner's books, notably Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar.

The in-laws came to visit two weeks back, in order to see their grandchild who is 5 months. This was excellent for me as a stay at home dad, because these are hands-on grandparents, willing to feed bottles, change diapers and entertain the wee one for hours o end, so I basically got a week-long vacation.

My father-in-law is not a sedentary man and would disappear with the baby and a stroller for hours at a time. Normally a good thing, as they both got plenty of fresh Oregon air and exercise.

Except now my son is accustomed to 5 mile walks every day, even when it's 92 degrees outside, and since grandpa has flown back home, it's up to me to do the walking.

Which is how I've lost 5 pounds and gained a tan in the last 2 weeks.

HLN: Local woman finds stellar apartment in Boston, signs lease, gets library card, and keels over from joy. "Now I really *am* a local woman, with THREE local cons!" she said.

TexAnne, three cheers for new job, new apartment, and library card. (Clearly a woman with her priorities in order.)

Probably for too generic of congratulations to TexAnne.

TexAnne: YAY!!

HLN of my own: Local woman returns from two-day annual meeting of the National Disaster Life Support Foundation, exhausted but full of hope for the future of disaster response and the training therefor.

On the topic of SF predicting the future, here's a tweet I liked:
Kyle Marquis ‏@Moochava: Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.

Hey, wait a minute. I'm 43 and I distinctly remember a weekly dose of the Jetsons, flying cars, robot maids, and the works.

The first cyberpunk dystopia that made an impression on me was Blade Runner, when I was 12. And even that had flying cars.

Elliott Mason @135:

Jim's review was a definite hook. Your's is fuel for the fire (mixed metaphor, I'm sure).

IMAX 3D tomorrow.

Rob Rusick @145: I saw it in 2D, because (a) cheaper and (b) the 3D sometimes gives me a headache from my eyes trying to focus places they aren't 'supposed' to be looking in frame.

We went to a $5 matinee (and spent more on the concessions than the tickets), and I feel it was well worth it. Though it was kind of surprising, in the beginning: I was settling in to watch the eye candy and suchlike and suddenly WHY AM I CRYING AT AN ACTION MOVIE?

The opening/setup montage was really fun, even at theater speeds on first watch; I'm looking forward to it hitting YouTube sometime so I can go through it slower and peruse the 'footage' carefully.

Oh: and thanks to Beka, Pacific Rim was the first movie I've seen in theatres since Star Trek: The Lens Flare Frontier (note: not Into Darkness, the earlier one).

Glad to hear, TexAnne!!!

TexAnne (139): Yay!

I'm still working on all the albums for the Canada trip, but I think this picture is my favorite so far.

Bird at Lake Louise

It's a Clark's Nutcracker.

Is it HLN if someone is on the other side of the continent from her normal abode?

I am in California, packing up the last of my stuff in storage, for transport back to Albany. I was expecting to be acquired by a cat once I returned to Albany. The PowersThatBe have a sense of humor, in that it was felt that not only should I have a cat, I should have a cat-that-is-carry-on-luggage.

Merlin is a delight, a joy, and a loud-mouthed babbler. His voice is not siamese, but his constant chatter sure is. He is not shy about telling me where he is or what he needs (most times, attention).

I am concerned that my travels from California back to Albany via the airlines will be fraught with issues relating to a very upset Merlin. With this in mind, I have acquired sedatives from the vet, with the understanding that they may cause problems. Apparently, sedatives will cause a drop in blood pressure; this compounded with drop in cabin pressure may cause death. I don't intent to use the sedative unless Merlin is completely freaking out, or continually crying. Any thoughts?

I have acquired an airline-approved carry bag, and spoken to the airline about tickets. I have read that the TSA requires the pet to be taken out of the carry bag so the carry bag can be inspected. I'm not really sure I want to take Merlin out in a public area and have him go streaking off. Can I ask that everything be inspected in a small, private room? I'm flying Southwest thru LAX.

Lin, could you get an over the shoulder harness and leash for the kitty? Or rather, do you think that there's a way that you could get such a harness on the cat? That way, if the cat bolts, you might have a 6foot long handle for retrieval.

Lin Daniel @ 151:
No doubt you found both of these: TSA official page, and blog post. Neither of them mentions getting to go to a room, unfortunately. They have rooms for pat downs, so if you ask nicely they might use one.

Have you ever used a harness with Merlin? Pet stores have inexpensive harness/leash things for cats, which improve your odds of hanging onto them.

Rigid carriers typically have a separate top and bottom that bolt together. One of mine has clips that snap, instead of bolts and wingnuts, so you can take the top off very quickly and easily. I do that at the vet, because it's easier than dragging the cat out of the door of the carrier. The cat generally wants to hunker in the carrier, and get right back in it. You might be able to unsnap the top, open it slightly and put you hand on the cat, then just tilt the top for the inspector to look under it.

My cat have certainly done some commentary when they are in a carrier in the waiting room at the vet. On the other hand, in a sufficiently alarming environment, he might go into stealth mode and just hunker down and hope to avoid being noticed.

If you haven't already thought of it—I've had a cat pee or defecate in the carrier, out of fear (usually happens right away). Carrying some extra newspaper, or those pet pee pads they sell, would be good!

Lin Daniel @ 151: I flew with my cat Totoro about three years ago when I moved to Berkeley from Nashville - he's really mellow, so it was a nonevent. That said, the hairiest part was the security checkpoint - the TSA agents *did* have me remove him from the carrier, after they weren't particularly willing to inspect the two of us in a private room. I got through the checkpoint holding Totoro to my chest - hard - and drawing on three years of professional cat wrangling experience. In the absence of that (and assuming Merlin has his front claws, which courtesy of a previous owner, Totoro doesn't), I'd suggest the harness. It's a bit of an affront to Merlin's feline dignity, but it's better than chasing a deeply freaked out Merlin around LAX.

Lin Daniel @ 151: if you do decide on the harness, get one of the ones with quick-release (squeeze the sides) buckles. You do not want to be trying to undo buckles with prongs on if your cat freaks out about the harness. (Why they even sell that type I really don't know).

I suggest: 1) put the harness on a few times before you go - then feed him, so he associates the harness with good things and doesn't immediately try to get rid of it. 2) if you're not already doing so, leave the cat carrier where Merlin can go into it. Make sure it has a nice comfortable liner e.g. veterinary fleece. Put treats inside it. If you have time, put treats in, let Merlin go in to eat them, close the door and immediately open again. Next time, leave the door closed for a minute. After that, close the door, pick the carrier up, put it down, let him out. In other words, do what you can to desensitise him to the carrier and make him associate it with good things. And I realise you have a limited time to try to do this in. And I think they're CRAZY not to take a cat into a smaller room at the airport for this sort of thing!

Lin: One trick I've used with my guinea pigs is to zip the likely-to-bolt party into a lingerie bag. A laundry bag might serve for a cat.

@ Jacque #156: A drawstring laundry bag, carefully knotted so as to stop drawing past the point of danger, is indeed a good way to restrain a cat. Pop cat in, close string around neck, knot string to prevent further closure, tote cat wherever. It is easier than jamming a strong and highly disapproving cat into a carrier, and the cat burrito can be transported safely via car for short trips. HOWEVER, this is a two-person job best done in an enclosed room!

For restraining a cat at an airport, I suggest a harness.

For a complete change of subject, I'd like to leave this here:

http://www.thechapolympiad.com/

Nutshell: Good silly veddy British fun in elegant British clothing. See two cyclists joust with rolled umbrellas, thrill at the strategy of bread baseball, guffaw (genteelly) at the three-trousered race, then break for tea on the lawn. You will never see so many pairs of neatly pressed trousers on display off the set of a costume drama. And the hats!

My one quibble: Female participants should be called gels, shouldn't they--not chapettes?

Lin Daniel #151: I went through this a few years ago when I had to get my late Gremlin down from NYC to C-ville. IIRC, the point where they make you take the animal out is the metal detector, you need to carry them through. Happily, I was blessed with an extremely mellow cat. In the general case, this falls under "the TSA is dangerously insane".

Lin @151: I'd also recommend obtaining and using a hand-held feliway spray on the cat carrier's interior before traveling -- cat pheromones that make an object or area smell familiar to your pet. (I'm not sure whether the spray bottles are under 100ml, but I think they are, in which case: liquids baggy, for topping up the carrier en route.)

Charlie Stross @159: Yes, you can get a travel Feliway spray that's 20 mL.

Based on my experience using Feliway spray at home, I don't see a need to re-spray the carrier in trip that takes less than a day. You definitely don't want to spray it while you're in the plane—while it doesn't have a strong scent to humans, it has a weirdly penetrating quality.

I'm puzzling over that sedative that could be dangerous. Any chance that the concerns were with the air pressure in the hold (since animal crates may be transported there, too)? Is it OK at normal cabin pressure, but a risk if a problem causes the cabin pressure to be much lower than usual?

Thank [word of power deleted here] one and all. I thought the instructions for pets and TSA inspections were insane. I'm glad to have that confirmed. I'm not glad they're insane, but knowing they're insane prepares me. Probably for low values of prepare.

Harness is going to be a necessity and I hadn't thought of it. Words of appreciation offered again. I haven't lived with Merlin long enough to know what he'll do in completely whacked out situations. I would indeed prefer to offend his dignity than chase him thru the airport. The reminders on how to acclimate him to the carrier I knew, but hadn't remembered.

I was planning on cutting out food 12 hours before, so as to not have to deal with kitty poop in a carrier under the seat. Exchanging bedding when it's wet is easier when I have to take it out of a barely opened carrier. Wet bedding annoys a cat. Pooped on bedding humiliates them.

Merlin was also declawed by a previous owner. I'm allergic to cats and when I get scratched, I break out in hives around the scratch. I will at least be spared that annoyance for this trip.

This is Merlin.

Janetl @161: For some cats sedatives/tranquilizers act as "kitty speed" -- that is they make the cat hyper-active and hyper-vocal.

Lin Daniels: I've had a Siamese howl under my seat for the majority of a flight between Columbus, Ohio and NYC, FWIW better the cat be noisy than dead. (Thank the Powers, there was NO TSA then.) And I did use a harness on Pyewacket.

With regards to sedatives and cabin air pressure, I'm only repeating what the vet said. The cabin pressure drops enough that in combo with the blood pressure reducing effects of the sedative, could be dangerous. She also said she would flat refuse to give sedatives for a pet riding in the hold, so I'm guessing air pressure conditions are worse in the hold. (From what I've heard, everything is worse in the hold.)

On the issue of making the carrier more feline friendly, I'm stashing a pair of my dirty sox in the carrier. I've used sox with previous cats and long trips successfully, but this will be a first by air.

Lori @163
It may be worth testing the sedative before I fly, then. And yes, yowling is far better than dead. I didn't rescue this cat to kill him in transport.

On my adventures here in SoCal, I satisfied a long time wish and visited the Tehachapi Loop. The pics aren't great, and cropped badly (photoshop is at home and I am not), but still fun.

Freight train thru Tehachapi Loop

In hyperlocal news, the temperature in Edinburgh is up to 28 degrees, which is about 5 more than forecast -- an unusually large error. Celsius, not Fahrenheit. For your anywhere-else equivalent temperature discomfort scale, add ten degrees: aircon is unknown here, and buildings are designed to retain heat ruthlessly. Indeed, if it reaches 30 degrees the roads begin to melt.

(I have a portable a/c unit, but it has decided to leak condensation on the carpet, so I'm just suffering beside an open window. I think work is semi-cancelled today ...)

Charlie Stross @ 167

Acclimation is a wonderful thing; to me at this time of year, anything below 25 degrees feels cool. (For comparison, when I ride home tonight at 5, the temperature will be around 35 degrees, and it's a normal summer day; last night's low was 24 degrees.) The humidity being over 80% is annoying, though.

I have determined experimentally that, without a fan pointed directly at my substantially-unclothed skin, 84-85 degF (~29C) is where I begin to lose my higher cognitive functioning into NOBRAIN. With a fan and near-nudity, I can raise that as high as 90degF (~32.25C).

However, for sleeping, I get weird over-vivid very emotional dreams if the room gets much over 25C (77-78F).

This week in Chicago, the highs are in the mid-to-high 90sF (right now outside it is 37C) and it's not getting as low as 78F overnight. My usual method of keeping my fairly-well-insulated house livable during the day is not working, as it involves using cool outdoor night air to drop the whole house to at most 76F and then close all the windows and let it slowly coast up during the day.

I think I need to go somewhere and use their air conditioning ... Luckily, the periods in Chicago where overnight lows are too high for my method to work are relatively limited.

My ENOBRAIN flag is raised if the work environment goes over 23 Celsius (72F); ideally I need 16-17 degrees for sleep (60-62F) -- 18 (64 Fahrenheit) is too hot.

Aircon in most hotels doesn't go cold enough for me.

For those plagued by hot temperatures, The Cobber neck wrap really, really works.

This is an unpaid spontaneous endorsement by a satisfied user.

Posting to note that Jim's diffraction regarding Fukushima vegetables takes you to a page that now contains a notice that the photos of mutated fruit and veg are not, in fact, from Fukushima.

Jim Macdonald @171: And at $12 (plus $8 shipping from Oz, if you buy it direct), it's surprisingly cheaper than I thought it would be.

Jim @171: I've bought my husband (a large heat-averse person) a few different types of cooling neckwraps. Is there something that sets the Cobber apart from the others?

I'm dragging the heat-averse husband to the library to take advantage of free AC and comfy seating this afternoon. 29C plus extreme humidity is making for great unhappiness. If that fails, it'll be an extended tour of the walk-in beer cooler at the LCBO.

Jenny Islander @157: My strategy (which I would be sure to rehearse in safety at home) would be to reach into the carrier with the open end of the laundry bag, and then loop it over the cat. Pull the draw-string shut with the whole cat inside, and then take the cat out of the carrier.

But I haven't tried this on an actual, live cat, so I don't know how practical it is.

Ellen, without knowing what the others are or how they work, I can't really answer your question. The Cobber works by evaporative cooling applied directly to the large blood vessels in the neck, and, in my experience, works quite well.

Jim Macdonald @171: The Cobber neck wrap really, really works.

Looks like that works by evaporative cooling. I imagine it is somewhat less effective in environments with high humidity.

I've actually been coping remarkably well this summer. I don't have ac, but I've discovered: Sweating™!

Turns out that, at least to start, this is something I have to decide consciously to do. Furthermore, in the past it seems I've actually unconsciously resisted sweating, which may account for much of my low heat tolerance.

Who knew?

(But, again, only effective in dry climates.)

Jim - There are several brands out there which seem to do the same thing. Here's one of the brands I've purchased at a local store. I've also bought them at craft shows - all are variants on neck-wrap filled with something that retains cold water after soaking in order to promote evaporative cooling. They dry out to close to flat in between uses. I'm wondering if there's anything that differentiates them besides the appeal of the fabric, becasue if there's one that does some kind of super-cooling magic, my DH could use one this week.

What I would really like is a hat that has the poly-whatever crystals in the crown.

Unsurprisingly: ask the internet and ye shall find a cooling hat. Now to find out if I can buy one in the 'hood.

My link to an internet toy shop perhaps? I have some strawberry-lime paletas left in the freezer to share.

In Patrick's Orwell or Tolkien Sidelight, I read this paragraph:

Surveillance is typically reactive. Intelligence professionals try to anticipate and counter the actions of their opponents; this leaves them on the defensive. For all our justifiable fears of the “watchers,” the advantage is often on the side of the watched. Every act of surveillance entails a struggle over meaning, narrative, and plot, with the infiltrator often creating the story in a way that exploits the surveillance mechanism’s weaknesses. In The Lord of the Rings, determined individuals (Frodo, Gandalf) with an adequate understanding of the enemy’s blind spots are able to rebel in plain sight.

And Bujold's Borders of Infinity immediately sprang to mind.

I have a fan going, which is providing the cooling breeze needed for my brain to work in the 27 C inside my house (Kentish suburbs of London, UK) today. Outside is hotter, but at least there's a breeze today - it was totally still and airless yesterday and last night.

Congratulations, TexAnne!

Another thing that works reasonably well in hot dry climates but less so in humid ones is the swamp cooler. Houston is much too wet for one of these.

When I was in Phoenix for Fiestacon and NADWC, I noticed that a lot of restaurants have what amounts to a light-spray lawn hose mounted above their outdoor seating, which is another form of evaporative cooling -- in that climate, the tiny water droplets are vaporized before they get down to where the diners are sitting, but it makes the air in that area significantly cooler.

spagetting & spinach for lunch?

If you feel (or are) rich, you're more likely to behave like you're entitled, and generally more like a dick. It's yet another bias I need to guard against.

I'm putting in a nice word for the Frog Togs Chilly Pad-- basically a big flat flexible sponge.

Thinly disguised regular requests community and mod advice over on the DFD thread.

Here's some gummy oranges from the breakroom.

A very noticeable earthquake near Wellington, New Zealand a little more than an hour ago (0906 NZT, 2106 GMT)
http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/region/newzealand/2013p537512

Magnitude 5.7, 8km deep.
No reports of significant damage as yet.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8939106/Magnitude-5-7-earthquake-rocks-central-New-Zealand

This is well within design spec for buildings etc in the region.

Explaining polyamory via a sports metaphor.

XKCD's "Time" strip has had some interesting developments. If you haven't looked at it in a while, you might consider catching up. (I use xkcd.aubronwood.com to follow it; there are other aggregators as well.)

Argh. Weed-ID keys and apps and interfaces are failing me. We've done Univ of IL, Univ of Missouri, and UC-Davis, plus a few others.

It's an upright-habit broadleafed weed, with whorled leaves that grow in a palmate compound with A LOT of bare spindly stem in between the clusters. The leaves have branching veins. I don't know what color the flowers were; right now there are tiny (>.5cm diam) burr-like spiky spheres of immature seed held up in umbels. 2+ft high. No hairs on it anywhere, leaves or stems.

photo; seed-head closeup. Or maybe that's the flower.

THIS SHOULD NOT BE SO HARD. It's not American Ginseng which was the closest right answer out of anything I could find in any key we used ... but the fruit is very wrong (and it doesn't have ginsengy roots). We live in Chicago.

Help us, Obi-Wan Fluorosphere: you're our only hope!

While I don't know what it is, it might be helpful to describe or photograph the roots; does it have a taproot like a carrot or a dandelion, or a fuzzy cluster of roots, or rhizomes, or what?

Cally @194: Tiny little stubby cluster of rootlets mated onto the stem directly. Looking proportionally really shrimpy, compared to the weed itself.

Charlie Stross @167, to prevent a window AC unit from dripping into the house, you have to make sure that the unit is tilted at least two or three degrees toward the exterior of the house. In other words, the front (toward the inside of the house) MUST be about a centimeter, give or take, higher than the back (outside the house). The condensation will collect inside the unit and run downhill; if it's mounted correctly it'll have a near-continuous drip (in hot humid weather) out the back of the unit. The back should also extend past the outside wall by at least a little bit, so the water will drip down, or past, the outside wall rather than collecting inside the window.

If it's mounted incorrectly, you'll wreck the plaster on your wall beneath the window and get mold in your carpet.

How do I know this? Erm..., no reason... <hiding mold-killer behind back>

Elliott: I've been cursed by those in Texas, but if I ever knew the name I've forgotten it.

For offering window air-conditioner unit installation advice.

Ice cream?

#193 : Elliott Mason

Consider buckeye or horse chestnut?

Speaking as a Houstonian, there is only one god and his name is Willis Carrier.

Jim Macdonald #199: Those are both trees. This is an herbaceous weed, no sign of woodiness to the stem even on the largest (waist-high?) examples.

I'm aware those are both trees. I'm thinking of very juvenile specimens.

Is there a whole bunch of it, or just one or two?

I'm sure you've already tried it but this is the University of Wisconsin's weed identification program: http://weedid.wisc.edu/weedid.php

Jim Macdonald @202: There were about a dozen of them scattered around the weedy areas of our yard (not clumped). Didn't get 'em last year, but we're getting a lot of volunteers this year that we didn't get last year.

The buckeye flowers are definitely wrong. I can't find a clear enough picture of the right growth stage of horse chestnut to be certain, but the seedling shots I'm finding seem to show it's about as woody as a maple when it's little, which these are not -- green and supple (hollow-stemmed, a little) all the way to the ground even on the waist-high ones.

The WI weed ID tool is telling me 0 matches even with very few criteria chosen ... which is what a lot of them do. Or else they throw up things like bindweed which it is totally not.

Cassy B @196, Charlie specified that he had a portable AC unit — one of those free-standing units you can move from room to room, with a tube that fits into the window to vent the warm air — not a window-mounted one. I’ve never owned a portable AC, but I understand some of them are designed to collect condensation in a tray, and some try to pass it out with the warm air as vapor, and often they just drop it on the floor.

Avram @204, my mistake; I've never used a portable a/c unit like you describe, and I think of smallish window units as portable, so I misunderstood what he was describing.

Sorry; forgot to change my nym.

Jim Macdonald and my weed identification AKICIML: it's looking like something related to Humulus japonicus might do the trick; ours is definitely upright and not twining, but it has a lot of the same weird growth pattern spindliness.

R.I.P. Marty Gear.

Quietly, in his sleep, last night. The person from who I heard it said it was an awful jolt to run across on Facebook, so I am hoping to spare some folks here the same shock.

Re: AC units -- if you have house plants, this water they produce is very good to save for watering things as it's effectively distilled, free of nasty minerals.

The roof AC on my trailer (I live in a fifth wheel) makes about 2-3 gallons a day. I've been saving the water from my roof AC in a bucket. I'm starting seedlings for a fall garden right now, so the distilled water comes in handy. Our well water is highly mineralized and seedlings don't care for it much.

On an unrelated note -- you know you live in the wild, wild, west when security camera in your back yard catches this.

Elliott Mason @193: To my British eye and Collins Gem Guide to Wild Flowers that's looking like Creeping Cinquefoil - Potentilla reptans - although that does have long runners as well as the short stubby roots. European native, but naturalised elsewhere. The leaves are certianly appropriate for that or a related species, and the seed heads also

Hope that helps in narrowing it down.

Cassy @196: it's not a window a/c unit, it's a wheeled floor-standing one. Window a/c units would in fact be illegal where I live. I can't even fit double-glazing. (Grade A listed building in a UNESCO world heritage site. More than 10% of this entire city is Grade A listed. Stuff that's illegal includes anything that changes the exterior appearance of the building -- even TV aerials require formal planning permission, and satellite dishes are flat-out verboten.)

My problem is that the drain hose in the base of the unit has come adrift and isn't discharging into the water bucket, but into the bottom of the unit and thence to the carpet. As it runs on 240 volts a/c, I decided that sweating was preferable to electrocution. As a replacement a/c unit -- if any were available in the middle of a sudden and spectacular heat wave (complete with heat emergency that's believed to have killed up to 700 people so far) -- would cost over £500 and only lower the temperature of a single room, I'm probably not going there.

(I have seen cheap window-box a/c units on sale for $50-100 in NYC and boggled enviously. Over here they cost 5-10x as much to buy, and 2x as much to run.)

Serge Broom @#119 & Xopher Halftongue @#127 -- Thanks guys!

albatross @#126

You might try Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. It's a relatively short book, eminently readable, and addresses the implied question in your second paragraph. It will probably also give you (more) food for thought on your third.

More hyper-local irritation:

Local author irritated by foul stench when he closes his office window to keep out the excessively warm breeze.

(Turns out that the water leak from the aircon soaked into the carpet right over the area where Frigg, who died of cancer two and a half years ago, used to demonstrate her feline displeasure about the colon cancer that eventually killed her. The smell of stale cat effluent has risen from the grave to haunt me once more: it's diminishing slowly as the carpet dries out, but it will probably only go away for good if I move everything out of the office, rip out the carpet, and replace it. And as "everything" includes eighteen feet of library-grade floor-standing bookcases, a sofa, a desk, a filing cabinet, and over a thousand books, this is not a trivial fix.)

((Luckily Mafdet, our surviving feline supervisor, is as punctilious about litter-tray discipline as one can expect from a deaf, arthritic, nineteen year old.))

Charlie Stross @#214

I'm sorry to hear about your cat, and that today you're being reminded of the sad times.

Re: the carpet, if you don't mind too much how the carpet looks, you could just remove that section and replace it. (If the lack of match is aesthetically unpleasant, you could maybe stick a coffee table (or similar) over it.)

Charlie @214

it's worth checking for hire of carpet shampoo machines. I know I can hire one at my local Morrisons supermarket, and other place.

Lin Daniel @ 162 ...
I was planning on cutting out food 12 hours before, so as to not have to deal with kitty poop in a carrier under the seat. Exchanging bedding when it's wet is easier when I have to take it out of a barely opened carrier. Wet bedding annoys a cat. Pooped on bedding humiliates them.

They now sell largish sized pads for house training dogs which are essentially reworked diapers-for-the-floor, and consequently absorb much before becoming obnoxious.

That said, I've flown five of my cats (in the hold) at various times, and the airline bent over backwards to be sure they were well taken care of [0]... and the cats, sans tranquilizer, seemed to cope with the whole thing quite reasonably.

[0] One of the guys at the cargo terminal tried to talk me into letting him have the kittens ... but that just meant that he took extra care with them.

Dave Bell: One wants to be careful, especially if it takes more than a few hours for the shampooed carpet to dry. I tried that once in an apartment bedroom where the previous resident had apparently locked their dog.

The result was, um, spectacularly unsatisfactory. Couldn't use the bedroom at all until the carpet was replaced. Even with the bedroom window open and the door closed, the whole apartment was quite redolent.

Might be worth experimenting with spot-cleaning using Odormute, or one of its newer variants.

Charlie: I have silly visions of using a window-mounted AC with some sort of specially-designed external facing that would cleverly disguise it as an appropriately-period architectural element.

dcb @210 said: To my British eye and Collins Gem Guide to Wild Flowers that's looking like Creeping Cinquefoil - Potentilla reptans - although that does have long runners as well as the short stubby roots.

The seeds are much pricklier and tinier (if they're seeds; they might be green flowers) than in the botanical illustrations of Potentilla reptans I can find. Also, it's very enthusiastically upright, not creeping.

Elliot Mason @219--There's Potentilla erectans as well, which is upright.

I suppose the leaves are wrong for buckwheat. The flower/seed part sounds like a plantago variety, but the leaves and wrote for all of those are entirely different.

Jacque @216, paint the outside like a window flower box and glue on artfully arranged plastic flowers to disguise it....? <grin>

HLN: local woman looks up on morning dog walk and sees this bird. Startling. Must have wandered up from one of the swamps in the southwestern part of the state, presumably expecting the entire rest of the state to turn into a swamp (not unlikely).

Elliott Mason @219--I take that back; now that I've gone on break and looked at the pictures on my phone, the seed heads/inflorescence is very different from plumbago.

At least it's not a cannabis variety, legal or otherwise.

Lee: He will be missed.

Charlie Stross @ 214: They sell liquid "pet odor killer" products, as Jacque mentioned @ 218. I used one on a carpet after a dog had a spectacular decompression, and it did an amazing job. You have to thoroughly soak the carpet and right into the pad underneath and let it dry slowly—something about enzymatic action doing the work.

re 193: I've got this too, and it has small flowers with five tiny petals spaced radially around the center. It's obviously something in or near ''Potentilla'' (cinquefoil being the most commonly encountered weed member of the family) but none of the weed ID sites seem to be able to decode it.

Dave @216: hire of a carpet shampooing machine is definitely on the agenda, but I am not hauling one of those things up and down four flights of stairs the same day in this weather!

fidelio 223: the seed heads/inflorescence is very different from plumbago.

I thought plumbago was a kind of dark-purple back pain...

Open thready question (which could more-or-less go here or in the Snowden thread):

This story seems to be about a US citizen on US soil, who was arrested for running a website that encouraged terrorism against Americans. Now, my understanding was always that even abstract calls for violence, like Al Franken's bit on old SNL skits (he would say something like "I'd just like to go out on a limb here a bit and call for the violent overthrow of the United States Government") were protected speech. Is that no longer true?

My understanding is further that quite a few terrorism cases have sent people to prison for what I would have thought were completely legitimate things to do under the first amendment. One guy apparently is in prison now for selling satellite decoders that let people in the US receive a Hamas channel. (You know, just like in the Soviet Union, where you could get into trouble for being caught listening to the wrong foreign media.)

Several people I know (respectable middle-class people who aren't the least bit inclined toward tinfoil-hat-ism of any flavor) have commented to me that they don't feel safe making some Google queries or reading some websites. They don't want to end up on some kind of watchlist and get hassled every time they fly, or have something even worse happen to them. And they're right to worry about that. There are apparently (if you read the stories about the Marathon bombers or the wacko who shot up Ft Hood, you can see this) websites you can go look at, which will get you added to a watchlist. It would be remarkably fortunate for us if there were only one set of such websites. Far more likely, there are hundreds of different watchlists or categories to put people in. Islamist? Occupy? Antiwar? Tea Party? White Supremacist? Too suspicious of government?

And once those watchlists exist, there must be an immense temptation to use them, for all kinds of good purposes. And then marginal ones, and extending down into purposes that will seem good to the people doing them, but will sound awful to everyone else.

It isn't tinfoil hattery at all. We've entered a world where you can be put in jail, incommunicado, without charges, and without counsel, for years, on the president's say-so alone (or whoever he's delegated the authority to).

Yes, we've gotten to the situation that we used to point to in the old Soviet Union as proof that they were a tyranny.

Right now you can't cross a state border without state-issued ID except as a pedestrian, on a bicycle, or as a passenger in a private automobile.

Jim: not that I disagree with the main thrust of your comment, but I went from Atlanta to Minneapolis and back on a bus last month and nobody at any point checked my ID. I only had to show a bus reservation number, and no evidence that I was the person who made the reservation.

You can't legally cross a border without ID, Jim -- but there are a lot of people out there who are driving without a license, and I'm sure they cross. We don't have border crossings that check ID (though there are some border inspection stations, for example coming into CA from OR, for agricultural pest control).

Yes, we really are very close to the country our parents warned us about.

Jim McDonald @230:

Right now you can't cross a state border without state-issued ID except as a pedestrian, on a bicycle, or as a passenger in a private automobile.

I do so every day on the DC Metro system (from Maryland to DC, though at my previous job I went to Virginia). This doesn't invalidate your larger point, of course, but things haven't gotten quite so bad yet.

I think common commutes are a general exception. You can ride trains between NY and NJ (also buses) or CT without showing ID each day. If you drive and don't pay exorbitant tunnel fees in cash (and wait in line extra time too) your EZPass record tells where you've been when.

Of course, that only tracks people who are NOT planning terrorism.

It's all Potemkin security, as Miss Teresa pointed out years ago.

Jim @230: I feel too depressed and too old to get active in resisting this stuff. Both globally and in its local (UK/Scottish) forms.

As a certain other Scottish SF author put it last time we talked about it, "we are living in a soft totalitarian state." (And it's only soft by comparison with the likes of the GDR or USSR because the dominant ideology is shadowy and inchoate, so it's hard to directly identify and persecute those who dissent unless they stick their necks way above the parapet.)

I'll just focus on writing encouraging motivational propaganda for the eventual fight-back, and hope I live long enough to see it.

(Visiting the Estonian Writers' Union in Tallinn the other month and talking to folks who remembered the Soviet era was illuminating ... we aren't under that level of censorship, but then, the System doesn't need it: merely living in a surveillance state panopticon has a sufficiently chilling effect on most people.)

HLN: Area man on way to supermarket notes the presence of half a dozen black vultures on the roof of a half-completed house. Wonders vaguely if this is a sign of something. Is reminded of the time four decades earlier when he saw an equal number of turkey vultures perched on the bell-tower of a church.

Fragano, isn't it obvious? The Munsters are moving in.

Meanwhile, the cops are recording and storing (for years) date/time/place for millions of license plates.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/07/17/license-plate-scanners-aclu-privacy/2524939/

Xopher #237: You're right!

236
It's possible they were discussing where to go for lunch.

P J Evans @ #240, or, more ominously, on whom they planned to lunch.

P J Evans #240/Linkmeister #241: As long as I was not the object of their prandial intentions I was not too worried.

In reference to dining at LoneStarCon 3, there's an official riverwalk guide which I haven't looked at yet due to having an old computer at home.

SummerStorms@89: A lot of landlords think they can do business the way they (don't) do their personal lives; some jurisdictions have laws to make clear they can't (always), and some don't. I had a landlord once who was playing some sort of dodge that involved remailing my check from another part of the metro area to the apartment next door; one month this meant the check was cashed so late (~28th) that it was the one to trip an arithmetic error and bounce. Cost me another month's rent for a lawyer to fight the hysterical eviction attempt that followed -- not nearly as critical as losing water in a heatwave, but more agita than I wanted to deal with.

TexAnne@139: Only 3? Are you excluding Vericon as too small, or Readercon because the carless must take an inconvenient bus? (And congratulations on the library card....)

Charlie@168ff: I mostly sympathize; the BBC site had a story recently on how utterly unprepared the UK is for hot weather. OTOH, I suspect it could be worse; for the first Scottish Worldcon, our choice was to sleep with the window closed and stifle, or sleep with it open and be kept up by the luggage handling at Queen St. (right behind us). That was the year our return flight got held up because the temperature was too high to let us take off with a full load; if somebody had been thinking ahead the plane would have been underfueled and a stop in Reykjavik or Gander(?) planned, but that would have meant admitting that Plan A wasn't working.

Open Threadiness related to talk of surveillance states:

Tolkien vs. Orwell: who understood the modern surveillance state best?

And in other news: A friend just recommended Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" to my reading list.

That'll keep me busy for a while.

CHip @ 244: Yikes! That sounds... convoluted. I've had rent checks cashed that late, mind, but I don't think I've ever run into that kind of roundabout situation.

In my city, landlords can't start eviction proceedings unless the rent has been habitually late for months or unless it's more than a month past-due. There was one landlord my (now)ex and I had who repeatedly refused to fix things that were clearly code violations, and once we got fed up and requested the city do an inspection, he got dinged on 30 violations rather than the three we'd complained about. He tried to evict us in retaliation, and that's illegal as well. He shut up after our lawyer sent him a letter, but it was good enough to get us out of our lease.

SummerStorms @247: I've had rent checks cashed that late, mind, but I don't think I've ever run into that kind of roundabout situation.

My favorite variation of this was when a rent check didn't clear, I called the manager. Got some sort of redirect to a management company or something. "Oh, you didn't hear? The owner blew himself up when his basement drug lab exploded, and the manager has left the state with no forwarding address."

Got a free month's rent out of the deal.

Just discovered: in case anyone was wondering, Retronaut has a bunch of photographs of the city I grew up in from the 1970s and early 1980s, i.e. the time I was growing up there.

In case anyone is wondering why I don't live in Leeds any more, here are those photographs.

(TL:DR; File under "it's grim oop north".)

CHip, 244: I excluded Vericon because this is the first I've heard of it.

FOUR! FOUR local cons a-ha-ha-ha-haaaa!

Charlie@249, is the "Strange Girls" attraction just ... girls? I've been sitting here for two minutes reading far, far too much into that sign, I think.

Sandy: this was Englandshire in the 1970s. "Strange girls" probably meant mini-skirts and hula hoops or something.

Charlie, what amazes me about those pictures is that there is nobody in them except the named people posing for the photographer. That definitely adds to the grimness factor -- there's no life going on. Was Leeds a ghost town in the 1970s, or what?

I started reading Among Other recently. It is very good. Thanks to everyone who's discussed it here (including Patrick, in breaking his rule not to promote his own projects).

I read sci-fi in middle school and early high school, and remember liking Vonnegut and Asimov but bouncing off Heinlein. My mother seemed to think the genre as a whole was typified by the pulp covers where a man in a spacesuit defends a woman in a bikini and a fishbowl against a betentacled alien. Eventually the constant disparaging comments convinced me to drop sci-fi for horror, because she'd like it less. I'm not sure I didn't also like it less.

At any rate I suspect I'll be spending some time on this, playing catch-up....

Among Others, with an S, that is. Patrick would have caught that. ^__^

Charlie Stross #249: All I can think, seeing one photograph captioned "A dripping-refinery worker", is that he must have worked next door to a bakery.

Today is the 44th anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin's moonlanding.

I find myself intrigued but frustrated by the concept of a "dripping-refinery". A few quick searches only turn up references to that photograph.

My only guess is that a "dripping-refinery" might be a rendering plant, where fats and oils are extracted from the byproducts and waste from meat packing?

257
So it is. Happy Moon Day!

I've heard some say that 97% of scientists believe the moon landing was real and man-made. 3% believe it occurred, but that it was the result of natural, periodic processes.

Someone tweeted that this morning, can't remember who.

And, it being Moon Day, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter views Apollo 11:
http://featured-sites.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_features/Apollo%2011/feature_highlights

Those photographs of Leeds were the tail-end of pre-Thatcher Britain, and she changed things in ways which caused a boom in property speculation. Quarry Hill flats were eventually replaced by an office building for the government. Old was replaced by new. Traditional farm buildings were being replaced by corrugated-steel sheds.

That Plumbers' Merchants on Crown Street is now a Pizza Express, the architecture is still recognisable.

Some of the other locations seem to have gone. In other cases, there's enough features of the building that I think the shop on Beck Road might now be the Saki Hairdressers on the junction with Markham Street, but I am not at all sure about the old building which still exists on Lucas Court.

Google Streetview can be fascinating.

You can still see the traces of the Cinema sign on the building at the corner of Sissons Lane and Acre Road, but the roof has gone. There might be something totally different there when Google take their next look. The Photographs of September 2012 show a roof cladding which might be corrugated asbestos. It's all gone by November, and yet there was talk of using it for "leisure development".

It's surprising what you can discover with the internet.

If anyone's curious, here are the images I selected from from our Canadian Rockies trip. It's definitely one of the best vacations of my life.

Canadian Rockies trip

Xopher Halftongue @260: 3% believe it occurred, but that it was the result of natural, periodic processes.

I'm, er—huh!? (I think the joke, she is not getting it.)

#264 ::: Jacque

Replace the words "moon landing" with "climate change" and all will become clear.

Utah legislator calls for return to the 18th century.

He claims that compulsory education* is bad for families and should be abolished. Next, the abolition of child labor laws? It would seem a logical progression.

* Which, by and large, reached America in the 19th century, although parts of the Deep South didn't jump on the bus until the early 20th.

Given the topic, it was probably a Word of Power.

Steve C. @ 263: That looks fantastic. Was this a package trip with stops & tours?

An update on the earthquakes near Wellington, NZ. No need to be overly concerned about Wellington-based friends and acquaintances as yet. A 5.5 Richter Scale shake this morning (and a fresh swarm of aftershocks) has been overshadowed by a 6.5 at 1709h local (0509h GMT)

http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/region/newzealand/2013p543824

These are being reported with an intensity of 'severe', reflecting VII or more on the MM Scale _at the point of most shaking_. As they are shallow, and happening in Cook Strait SW of Wellington and ESE of the town of Blenheim in the South Island, the effects on land are _relatively_ minor, and within what the human infrastructure is expected to handle fairly well. However there are toppled power lines, halted lifts etc. Risk of landslides, fires etc.

Local media sites
www.stuff.co.nz
www.nzherald.co.nz

Jim @265: Oh dear.

::Thud::

Thank everyone for the Pacific Rim recommendations. The trailers made it look like a CGI Things Punch Each Other For Two-Point-Five Hours, but it was much better than that. Beyond the storytelling and FX, it was nice to see a variety of ages and types represented, as well as a woman who was allowed to wear clothes and not be a love interest. DO YOU HEAR ME, JJ ABRAMS?!!

nerdycellist @271: She most definitely was a love interest. What she was not was a sex object.

janetl @ #268 -

Steve C. @ 263: That looks fantastic. Was this a package trip with stops & tours?

It was a package trip, aboard the Rocky Mountaineer. The package we took was the Canadian Rockies Getaway.

If you're a scenery junkie, it's highly recommended. The RM folks handled things very nicely.

I did have to laugh when one of the tour bus drivers related the story about one British tourist he had who took detailed notes. She kept asking about various mountains the first day -- what's its name, who discovered it, how high -- and then she stopped asking questions. The driver noticed that she was entering in the same three letters in her journal. ABM, ABM, ABM.

So he asked what ABM stood for.

"Another bloody mountain," she replied.

nerdycellist @ 271... I doubt he does, what with the loud rattle of all those coins falling into his bank account.

Steve C. Lovely photos - brings back some great memories; I have photos of some of the same features - we honeymooned in the Banff/Jasper area. We have a plan to go back for our tenth wedding anniversary. I see you have a photo of a deer (you'd call it an elk; I'd call it a red deer) with a radio collar on! Can I have permission to use that? With credit, of course. Also the American crow (I'm assuming it's an American crow - the black corvid you took a picture of).

Also re. the British tourist and "ABM": *grin*. Our first day in the Rockies I found it hard not to stop as we rounded each curve in the road and were provided with another fantastic view. After that it got easier, but I was grateful for the automatic with cruise control (so I could look more and not worr about keeping an eye on the speedometer) - even if I -had- needed someone to give be a "how to drive an automatic" lesson in the car park before we drove it away.

dcb @ #275 -

Thanks - use any picture you'd like. I think those elk were on the hotel staff - perfect timing to come down around sunset.

The tour bus driver called them ravens, but I'm not up on my ornithological subtleties. :)

Steve C. @ 273: Thanks for the info.

open threadery: if you were planning to read David Rakoff's book "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish", I recommend that you go for the paper book, not the e-book. I'm a huge fan of reading on my Kobo, but in this case, the book as a object is far too lovely to forego. I checked to see who it was designed by, and—no surprise—it's Chip Kidd. I just picked it up at my local book store last night, so I haven't read it yet and can't confirm the rave reviews. The full-color illustrations are by Seth, and they are throughout the book. The cover has holes punched in it to reveal the title. Yum!

Hyperlocal news: Area woman participated in an attempt to set a new world record for Largest Tree Hug. "It was rather surreal to head into the woods of the arboretum with 950 people, and have them scatter off of the path to stand in small groups around scattered trees," she said. The count of huggers was coming up short, so organizers ran around the park, asking passersby to join in. The most novel of these were a bride and groom, in full white gown/tuxedo regalia. photo of huggers

DC-ites take note: the titan arum has started to open.

Thanks, C. Wingate, for the reminder. It tickles me that there's a live web cam focused on a plant.

Alas, the Internet will fail to transmit the promised olfactory emission. Perhaps I'll stop by on Tuesday if it's fully ripe.

Remember the big moral panic about crack babies? The linked article describes a big longitudinal study that couldn't find much or any effect of crack use by moms on babies.

It's worth remembering that there was a time when almost *everyone* was certain that crack babies were a real and horrible phenomenon. It got lots of media coverage (well, no skeptics got any, as far as I remember), everyvody was sure it was a moral crisis. I am sure I believed it too--the story was sort of plausible, crack was doing really awful things to inner cities, and all right thinking people believed that crack babies were real.

This is useful to remember, the next time everyone knows that some new threat or horror is out there, and urgently needs new laws, police powers, social movements, etc. to address it. The media are mostly not in the business of informing you, much of what everybody knows is nonsense, and you can't trust that just because everybody says it's true, there is anyone who has really tried to check it out, In the case of crack babies, there was someone checking it out, but proof could not come for many years. That didn't matter--anecdote was enough to get laws passed and kids taken away from their moms and sell papers and ads on the latest moral panic.

I just cast my vote for the Hugos.
Say, why isn't there a category for best pro zine this year?

(Open thread coffee randomness)

So, I've got a huge espresso machine that wakes up before the Amazing Girlfriend and I do each morning (it's about 90lbs of brass and copper, so getting it suitably hot takes time). After 9 months or so of this routine, I walked into our kitchen a few mornings ago in a pre-caffeine haze and realized two things. First, the machine was off (which was OK, the timer shuts it off at a reasonable hour - we'd just slept in), but rather more worryingly, I was standing in a large puddle and there was the distinct odor of Dead Electronics pervading the kitchen. Opened the thing up to find that the brain box (the electronic controller that controls the machine - boiler fill, temperature and the like) had, quite literally, fried itself. As in, melting a hole in its plastic enclosure. The good news is that the machine is still under warranty, so the retailer is sending me the part. The bad news is that until said part arrives, we're short our espresso machine.

Which is why it's nice to have several other ways of making tasty coffee in the mornings.

albatross, #280: This doesn't surprise me at all. Remember the huge flap about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome* in the early 90s? Any pregnant woman who wanted a glass of wine with her dinner was PUTTING HER BABY AT HORRIBLE RISK OMG!!!

What I think that study shows is the intersection of two large-scale social trends: (1) the obvious one, bashing the poor for the problems created by their poverty, and (2) yet another attempt to define women as walking incubators.

* FAS is a real condition, but the moral panic about it was completely over-the-top. As I understand it, FAS affects children whose mothers regularly drink to excess during very early pregnancy. Note "regularly", "to excess", and "very early" (IOW, any damage would be done well before she would be visibly pregnant). Nobody cared that pregnant women have been drinking in moderation for millennia** with no discernible ill effects on their children, because it was such a handy stick to beat women over the head with.

** The spellcheck still does not recognize the plural form "millennia". Nor, I am amused to note, does it recognize "spellcheck".

I need to ask a question, purely for my own education (and I apologize in advance and invite correction if my terminology is disrespectful): do drag queens generally regarded themselves as trans-women? (I imagine the first-cut answer is "which drag queen?") I don't know (if I know) any gay men who enjoy dressing as women, so I don't have anybody to ask directly.

Jacque: As I Understand It (IANA-DragQueen), many drag performers consider themselves to be somewhere on the transy/genderqueer spectrum. Some of them eventually come to the realization that they would be happier if they transitioned full-time (just as, closer to my own end of things, some people who've spent a decade identifying as butch lesbians come to the later realization that they are transmen). But a lot of them just enjoy it as a pastime or letting one aspect of themselves out to play -- and also enjoy presenting as male the rest of the time.

Steve C, at #273, I believe that in England there are so few mountains that a person can realistically aspire to know them all by their personal names. That said, when I first saw the Tetons, I was so impressed that I took a panoramic series of photographs as we drove past them. And I grew up around mountains.

albatross (#280)I certainly do remember "crack babies" -- we adopted one. I was determined never to mention his origin to anyone we came in contact with, because even then, I thought that the main problem with so-called "crack babies" was that their mothers weren't able to take care of them. Fortunately, this mother realized it, and gave him to us. It was a private adoption, which saved us no end of trouble and unwanted intervention. We never kept it from him, of course, but we're a family that doesn't put our business on the street, and he's one of us.

He is now grown, married, employed, a father, doing fine, as fine as any of the others.

Elliott Mason @285: Excellent answer, thank you.

Also: it occurred to me after I walked away from the keyboard that my question presumes that all drag-queens are gay men. Given the Multitude That Is Humanity, I'm willing to bet that this is not always the case.*

—

* Heh: only one counter-example being Victoria.

Providence Council names intersection after H.P. Lovecraft.

On the one hand, it's a well-deserved honor. On the other, be careful what you ask for. :-)

Probably for a suspicious link. Would Their Lownesses care for some white-chocolate M&Ms?

dcb @275: in the Rockies I found it hard not to stop as we rounded each curve in the road and were provided with another fantastic view. After that it got easier, but I was grateful for the automatic with cruise control

Friend of mine grew up in Montana, and had lived in Denver for many years. Is an unrepentant mountain junkie. At the time I knew him, he'd recently been transferred to Houston, and was suffering a chronic topological relief deficiency. On one of his visits up to Boulder, we decided to have a drive up Trailridge. As we entered the tundra, he said to me, "I'll drive, you gawk." Which was dumb, as he was the one that was jonesin'. Not one minute after he said that, he got so distracted by the view that he allowed the front corner of the van to drift too close to the sheer rock wall to the right of the road.

GRRRRRINNND....! He yanks the wheel to the left, but now the van has a decided list to the starboard, and is limping noticeably. He slowes waaay down and keeps going (as it was a very skinny, twisty, two-lane road at that point), chugging to the next turn-out. Shortly, a park vehicle magically appeares right behind us as a pace-car, keeping traffic back until we limp to safety.

Finally found a scenic overlook, pulled out of traffic, and had a brief confab with the ranger while my friend changed the tire. He took pictures of the casualty, which resembled not so much a tire as a bowl of black spagetti.

HLN: Local mosquito mistakes warmth of computer screen for good dinner candidate. LM is unable to regret confusion.

Well, since 'queen' is a term* that means "gay man," I'd say a straight man into drag should either a) get comfortable with the assumption or b) call himself by some other phrase!

*and in fact the formula '____ queen' means "gay man who's into ____ or whatever is symbolized by ____." So "greasepaint queens" are gay men who do theatre (as opposed to "theatre queens" who like to attend).

Xopher @ 291

I always figured it depended on context. If you're queening in a drag context, it refers to a certain kind of camp. If you're a [type] queen/king, then it's probably safe to assume you're LGBTX.

I do agree that anyone engaging in noticeable genderbending in this society is likely to have assumptions made about their sexual orientation.

Jacque @ #290, such heartlessness is understandable.

HLN: Local cis man, accused of being menopausal by woman friend, realizes he can't remember when he last had a period, and fears his memory is going too. Another friend suggests he talk to his gynecologist about estrogen; he remarks that taking estrogen has never worked for him (and that the same is true of cordrazine).

Steve C @ #273, is that domed car the one reserved for Gold Leaf travellers? If so, what do the Silver Leaf and Red Leaf passengers ride in?

Serge Broom @281: Possibly because the category "Best Professional Magazine" hasn't been awarded since 1972? My impression is that it was more or less replaced by "Best Professional Editor", more recently by "Best Professional Editor, Short Form".

@290, @275: On the subject of driving in mountains ...

A couple of years ago I got an invite to teach at Clarion West, so planned an elaborate west coast trip involving Seattle, then a flight to SF to meet up with Feorag, side-trips elsewhere, then a scenic sleeper train ride up to Portland in time to catch my open-jaw flight home.

Unfortunately at the time I did this, I was on a medication that was slowly chewing holes in my short-term memory. I kept forgetting things, would find myself in the kitchen or bathroom half a dozen times a day with no clear memory of why I was there, and I would actually have difficulty remembering a date when flipping tabs in my web browser between Google Calendar and an airline booking website.

Which is how I screwed up my dates thuswise:

* Keynote speech at USENIX Security in downtown San Francisco: Wednesday morning.

* Reading at Powell's City of Books in Portland, Friday evening.

* Long-haul flight home to UK from Portland, Saturday morning.

I was traveling with long-haul business-level baggage, so a domestic flight from SFO-PDX would have cost an arm and a leg (two extra checked suitcases, ten kilos more weight than the regular economy maximum). Not to worry: we'd get a sleeper compartment on the Starlight Express. Except ... memory trouble! When I finally remembered to book our train seats, it turned out that all the actual compartments had gone. We could put up with 22 hours in reclining chairs (in which I cannot sleep), or we'd have to drive.

So I finally bit the bullet on car rental in the United States. 650 miles in two days ought to be do-able quite easily, with two drivers, right? Even though one only passed her driving test 12 months earlier and hates automatic transmissions, and the other has a phobia of driving on the right hand side of the road and has peripheral retinopathy in his right eye reducing his field of vision on that side by around 50%.

Then I made a truly fatal error and posted a question about routes on my livejournal. "What's the best way to get from SF to Portland by road, given my time constraints?" I asked. "Take Highway One! It's really scenic and gorgeous!" Came the unanimous response.

The big day comes. I give my speech at USENIX, then we go up the road to collect our car from Avis. Bad news: they were out of the mid-size saloon I'd requested. "Would you like a free upgrade?" They asked. Being an idiot ignorant of the ways of American car hire companies, I said "yes".

Which is why we ended up taking a Lincoln Town Car up Highway One.

How to describe our reaction to the aforementioned vehicle ...?

I don't do automatics; I'm used to driving, on the other side of the road, what passes for a big-ass car in the UK with a manual transmission. The Town Car could have carried my Volvo 850 as a lifeboat. And the controls ... I had to go back to the office and ask if anyone could show me where they were. I recognized the steering wheel, but mistook the gearshift for the indicators (turn signals) and had no idea where the hand brake was. Then I hit the first challenge: driving through downtown San Francisco in a land yacht. After I picked up Feorag and our luggage, which clumped forlornly in one corner of the boot, I proceeded to follow the satnav directions out of town, and somehow didn't crash and burn on the way: an hour or so later, we found ourselves on Highway One.

Dear State of California, a Highway is not a strip of tarmac two car-widths wide with a dotted line down the middle, clinging to the side of a cliff, with copious numbers of inclined switchbacks and an advisory speed limit of 15 miles per hour. Claims to the contrary constitute false advertising and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Take a driver with little/no peripheral vision on the right, a vehicle nearly as broad as an eighteen-wheeler on a road so narrow that if it drives to the right of the central divider it'll scrape off its wing mirrors on the sheer cliff wall, and add hairpins? This is not funny. I think Feorag aged 10 years in as many miles. (But that was okay, because she had half an hour to do it in.)

To add to the fun and hijinks, the car's drivetrain was doing nothing to reassure me of the acceptability of automatic transmissions. Take two or three tons of steel, add a five litre V8 able to pump out about 300 horsepower -- it should behave consistently, right? But the designers had stuck a three-speed slushbox in it. So on most of the hairpins, the car laboured mightily as it wheezed uphill, slowing and slowing in second gear ... until it kicked down into first, growled mightily, and deployed all of those horses in an attempt to fling itself over the edge of the cliff.

We made about forty miles that first day, in six hours of driving. Yes, it was scenic. But I was too busy trying not to die, and Feorag was too busy alternately whimpering with fear and screaming at me not to drive too close to the cliff face or the oncoming pickup trucks straddling the centre of the road to pay much attention.

We holed up in a motel overnight, checked the satnav, and, as we recovered from the terror, agreed to switch to what looked like a bigger, faster, road: Highway 101, which would ultimately take us to the interstate.

Now, Highway 101 was a bit more like it: it was a real road, almost as wide as the A68 through the Scottish borders (a road I consider unfit for any form of transport with more than two wheels), if somewhat twistier: it actually had what looked like a cycle lane on either side of the two lanes, except that these disappeared whenever the road twisted to avoid a tree. Trees? Yep, this was redwood forest central, and some of those trees were wider than the road, which diverted to by-pass their roots.

It was a lovely morning, and I suddenly realized I was nearly out of gas. We had, it seemed, been averaging 18 miles to the gallon. So we stopped at a sleepy garage, and I filled up the tank, and got the bill, and began to laugh hysterically at how cheap it was. Back in the car: more driving, more beams of sunlight filtered through the canopy of a spectacular forest. "This is really lovely," said Feorag, "how about we stop soon and go for a walk in the woods?"

"Yes," I said, absent-mindedly keeping one eye on the pick-up truck impatiently tail-gating me as I kept to a 35mph cruise, "that'd be nice --"

Which is when the brown bear ran across the road right in front of me.

Reader, I left two sets of skid marks. The pick-up truck suddenly started to hang a long way back. And all thought of a nice walk in the woods was shelved. And I was still shaking ten minutes later when we drove through a sleepy little town and I passed a unicyclist going along the other side of the highway.

An hour or two later, by way of a rather good diner, we hit the interstate and I drove another 470 miles that afternoon and Feorag hosed me out of the driver's seat and took over for the last 200 miles to Portland the following morning. Because the map lied about the distance. And if not for that doubtless well-intentioned advice to take Highway One we might have had time to drive up to Crater Lake, or to see more of the mountains than the unwinding of the gas gauge while keeping one eye on the cruise control and another peeled for trucks wheezing their way up the hard shoulder, dammit.

But in summary, this tale has a very simple moral:

Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to take a Lincoln Town Car up Highway One through Northern California. Also, brown bears have right of way.

Their mountain highnesses have obviously taken exception to my disparagement of a twisty little bike lane in Northern California. Sigh. Would they care for some cat treats? Because I'm all out of human food ...

David Goldfarb @ 297... Right.

Have just un-gnomed Charlie's epic post. Whew.

Speaking of whom, his photos of Leeds in the 1970s bring to mind the fact that our first trip to the UK was as the 1985 TAFF delegates...to Yorcon III, that year's Eastercon, in Leeds. The place was clearly in the early stages of redevelopment, with all the benefits and ills entailed, but you could clearly see through to the dying Leeds of the 1970s.

Patrick: Yorcon III in Leeds was my first ever SF convention.

(Leeds these days is pretty much unrecognizable. But drive just twelve miles south to Dewsbury, or ten miles west to Bradford, and the dying 1970s Yorkshire gothic is still alive and kicking.)

Charlie, I've been on that road, southbound. It's not improved, even with a smaller car, when your right side is a few feet from a vertical drop to rocks with waves breaking across them.

Fort Ross was interesting, though.

re 302: Good god. Did you know (he says brightly) that RVs are embargoed from Going to the Sun Road in Glacier Park? It is even less of a "highway" than Highway One; I have to suspect that "going to the sun" has to do with reducing the orbital distance between you and are closest star. The sane way to traverse it is to park the car and take a ride on one of the "jammers": ancient bus-like vehicles which surely mark the absolute limits of what may safely be conveyed across the divide there. Driving yourself is, of course, an exercise in missing all the scenery, plus you are not guaranteed a parking space at the top. Then there was the traffic light at 6,000 elevation. We're going along, and ahead on the next loop I can see a traffic light in the middle of the road. ("Turn right, Dad," #1 son says unhelpfully.) Mind you, plowing this thing in the spring, er, early summer is such a project that they have a plowing status webpage (here's a picture of a rotary plow at work on May 21). One of the questions of the FAQ page is "How scary is it to drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road?" Ironically, Marias Pass on the south side of the park is the lowest rail pass across the divide in the US.

Linkmeister @ #296 -

That two-level domed car is for Goldleaf service. The Redleaf service is a single-level car with large windows, and the Silverleaf car is a single-level domed car.

Service levels

Charlie Stross @298: Actually, IMnsHO, Lincoln Towncars are a blight upon the ecosphere. But I'm prejudiced. (My brother visited me in Minneapolis many years ago. He was driving us to dinner. At one point he asked, "What do you think of the car?" (It was a '70-era boat.) "Too big," I said, assuming it was a rental. It was only later that it occurred to me that it was probably his car. Turns out my brother and I have very little in common.

Great story.

It's much too easy for me to imagine the clerks at the car rental, nudging each other in the ribs and having a laugh at what they plan to do to the poor, unsuspecting Brit.

Also, I have never been farther afield than Vancouver, BC, but watching British TV shows, I have to do a double-take and mental calculation every time I see someone driving a car. I imagine that, if I ever do make it to the UK, I'm going to have to hire a driver (would anyway, since I don't drive) and just cower in the back seat with a bag over my head. Driving on the left is just wrong, wrong, wrongity WRONG. Sorry to be a provincial, but it just is.

:-)

Should you come to Colorado, you definitely don't want to drive Trailridge.

For added white-knuckle value, even the four-lane interstates going through the mountains have runaway-truck traps. I've never seen one in use, but the images they invoke are...impressive.

C. Wingate @304: rotary plow

We have those, too. Except for some parts of Trailridge, the slopes adjacent to the road, um, don't.

But they can share some of my purple oatmeal for breakfast.

I wouldn't have recommended taking Highway 1 from SF to Portland anyway, particularly since you said there were time constraints. I've driven I-5 probably 30 times over that route, and there's some very nice (but not spectacular) scenery there. And it's really efficient. Save the touristry for when there's time!

For sheer mountainous beauty (and yes, I've driven the Going to the Sun Road) I've seen nothing to compare with Crow's Nest Pass on Canada Route 3, driving west-to-east, at a bit after sunrise. It was jaw-dropping -- so much so, that when I'd gotten through and Marci, the passenger and other driver, woke up, I turned around so she could see it. The drive east-to-west was only moderately nice, and she was wondering why I'd insisted she see this.

She understood when we went the other way.

Hmm. Am contemplating taking that accidental travelogue, fleshing it out, and turning it into a real blog entry on my own platform ...

Charlie, #298: Yikes. After the Reno Worldcon, I had arranged to take a scenic trip down US 1 from Monterey to LA with a friend who lives in the latter. It was... every bit as scenic as I had thought it would be, and there were several points at which I was very glad that HE was driving, and that his car was a little Honda Civic. And that's not the twistiest section of the road by any means. I would not have wanted to attempt it in my minivan! So I sympathize.

Also, I'll repeat the question you may have missed above WRT the Leeds photos: why are there never any people in them apart from the ones specifically named in the captions? Was Leeds that deserted in the 1970s?

Lee: Leeds was a city of some 600,000 people back then (closer to 700-750,000 today). So no, it's not that deserted. I suspect the photographer took those particular shots early on summer mornings -- sunrise there is before 6am on the solstice, so it'd look pretty deserted then.

AKICIML:
Could anyone direct me towards resources for publishing paperback, 275-300 page (seems to be standard for this area) non-fiction, related to a particular area of a particular sport, with a strong human interest/inspirational element, in which there would be (I think) a reasonable assumption of a few thousand people (I'm guestimating 2-15K) being interested in buying the book, were it to be written?

I've looked on my bookshelves to see which publishers publish books in the wider area (the particular sport), so I've some idea which publishers might be interested. I've seen one website which suggested you need a book proposal, which you then need to send off to agents, and another which suggested a book proposal which you then sent off to publishers directly.

Would this differ depending on the size of the publisher (i.e., would it be easier to contact a niche publisher directly, but for a publisher for which sports publishing was just one area of interest, it would require an agent)? How might this change if you knew an author (writing on a different sport) who already had a relationship with a small sports book publisher?

What's the lead-in time for this sort of thing?

Any assistance in getting started (i.e. being pointed towards appropriate, reputable resources) would be appreciated.

Lee #288: Well, that intersection looks resolutely Euclidean to me. Back when I lived in Cambridge, I said that if I even had occasion to gamemaster a trip to R'lyeh, I'd use a Boston streetmap.

I expect the kind folks here can help me out with something that's been puzzling me. Regarding the recent dust-up about J.K. Rowling being outed as Robert Galbraith, articles I'm reading state that before the reveal, the book in question had only sold 1500 copies. Quoting the BBC:

The Cuckoo's Calling - believed to be the debut novel of Galbraith - ...received good reviews when it was first published. It had sold 1,500 copies before Rowling was revealed as the author, but within hours it rose more than 5,000 places to top Amazon's sales list.

1500 copies seems ridiculously low, even for a genre novel from an 'unknown' author. I realize the book was only released at the end of April, but still! Is this actually typical?

(Because if it is, my own book sales are a hell of a lot better than I thought.)

Was that sales figure for Amazon UK?

@ Steve C #314 I don't think so; I saw that number in both US and UK articles.

L.S. Baird @315: I don't have any first-hand knowledge, but it wouldn't surprise me if the number was first published in a UK article, and then got repeated in other articles on both sides of the Atlantic, without any thought about silly details like which market(s) the number came from.

L. S. Baird @315: that's not actually bad for a British hardcover novel by a new author. The UK market is about a quarter the size of the US market; that's equivalent to a first novel shipping 6000 hardcovers, which I think I can safely say is what my debut novel sold in the USA in hardcover in 2003. (I sell more now, but for a first title from a new midlist author this isn't unusual.)

Also, it was published April 18th. So this is the sales figure for sales in its first 10 weeks? While that's the peak for sales of a new title, it still had some room for further hardcover sales. And the paperback isn't due until next February.

Jeremy Leader @ #316: I suspect you are right about the detail filtering from other articles--without being checked against international as well as domestic sales. As I recall the other article I read was on Gawker, and though I saw it there before seeing it on the BBC, I don't know which article was published first.

Charlie Stross @ #317: If it's UK numbers only, and for a hardback, that would make much more sense! But as the number was reported without further comment, it certainly stuck out as a strange thing to me. Then again, I'm probably more hung up on things like book sales numbers than the average readers of the article would be.

Thanks for your help, gents.

L. S. Baird: I suspect your average print or BBC journalist is utterly clueless about fiction print runs. Believe nothing that doesn't come from a specialist in the field.

#312 : dcb

With non-fiction selling on proposal is more common than selling with a finished manuscript.

Obtain the guidelines for all the appropriate publishers. Many non-fiction publishers have very specific formats they'll want in the finished text, and writing to order from proposal makes sense. One thing you'll probably want to put in your proposal is why you are the best person to write this book: are you already well-known in this sport by its fans?

Note books similar to yours already in the bookshops (need not be about the same sport). Find out if they were agented; if so, those are the agents to approach.

A world-wide possible audience of 2,000 strikes me as rather too small to interest most major publishers. You'll be looking at niche publishers. If, on the other hand, you have a book with broad appeal plus those 2,000, you might have a better chance. A larger publisher gets better distribution, more market penetration, and generally better sales. Larger publishers also have larger resources to take on smaller-but-worthwhile projects.

In terms of non-fiction some of the larger publishers do accept unsolicited and non-agented proposals. Their guidelines will tell you.

In general, depending on how hot the topic is, lead-time for publishing can range from speedy-indeed to glacial.

For more resources and discussion you might want to look at the Sports and Fitness and Nonfiction boards over at Absolute Write.

L.S. Baird (314), and following: A review of Cuckoo's Calling in today's Newsday contained this line:

It sold 1,500 hardcover copies in the U.K., the publisher said, and fewer in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan.

(The reviewer also implies, in a deniable fashion, that Rowling spilled the beans to raise sales for that book and for the paperback edition of The Casual Vacancy. That whole paragraph gives me the creeps.)

Hyperlocal news... Local man, while reading James SA Corey's space opera "Abaddon's Gate", finally gets to the part where his tuckarized self appears. Local man find that 'Serge' is one of the deputies for a warship's security dept. Local man expects an unpleasant demise.

Jim Macdonald @321: Thank you for that. What I meant by the 2 -15K was my guess of the immediate "I'll buy that!" practically guaranteed market for initial sales. But I really have no idea how many copies books like this sell.

More research needed - oh well; that's something I do well (but in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel, it's good to have a couple of starting points).

Charlie:

I'm afraid that is true about almost everything. Journalists are largely in the business of reporting on stuff they have only the fuzziest understanding of. To some extent, that's just the business--nobody can be an expert on everything. But a bigger problem is that most news sources don't lose any business when they get their facts wrong, or end up all writing more-or-less the same story the last guy wrote because it's easier than finding out anything new, or whatever. Nor do journalists seem to get in any trouble for those errors. (By contrast, making stuff up or plagiarizing stuff can get them fired.)

In general, if everything you know about X you learned from watching the news/reading the papers, you know a lot less about X than you think you do. (And if everything you know about X you learned from TV and movie drama, you know *less than nothing* about X, and making decisions on your unknowing ignorance is nearly certain to lead to bad places.

Charlie Stross @ 298 ...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA *SNICKER* *SNERK* *COUGH*

Oh man. I've been having one of THOSE days, to put it politely[0], and that's the first time I've cracked a smile (never mind a laugh) in days! Thank you!

[0] Yes, I know I broke the build... again... if I hadn't been up all night fixing the build (NOT my fault that time), I probably wouldn't have managed to break it...

C Wingate @ #304, the "How scary is the Going-to-the-Sun Road" question in the FAQs has this as part of its answer: ". . . thousands of vehicles have safely made the journey from one side of the park to the other."

Gives one pause, that does.

Steve C @ #305, thanks. I'd like to do that trip but the pocketbook will determine which level I should attempt.

I appear to have been gnomed for excess hilarity. Seems par for the course for the very long day I've been having (all week-or-so of it).

I'd offer the gnomes some form of penance, but it's probably safer for all concerned if I don't try to do that just now...

follow-up to my #322: If the US figures are from Nielsen BookScan, that would not include all the sales to libraries--and I know that there were quite a few.

For that matter, I think it's still true that mid-list* hardcovers sell more copies to libraries than to the general public. (Or was that just mid-list mysteries in hardcover? Now I don't remember.)

*i.e., not bestsellers or other heavily promoted titles

Linkmeister @326, that puts me in mind of the mule-trip down the Grand Canyon I took twenty years ago... (was it that long ago? Can't be!... Oh, yes. 1992) where we were blithely informed "we've never lost a tourist yet."

Which set me wondering how many guides and wranglers they'd lost. After all, they take those trails in iffy conditions to make sure they're safe for the tourists to ride....

Probably for odd parenthetical punctuation.

Okay, we ("we" = me, TNH, and Pip Macdonald) finally managed to see Pacific Rim. We don't always agree with Jim's movie tastes, but we're right there with him on this one.

As TNH said, if you can swallow the idea that it makes sense to respond to an invasion of aliens from another dimension under the sea by BUILDING GIANT ROBOTS TO PUNCH THEM, you'll find that it's the smartest, most enjoyable movie you've ever seen about giant robots punching monsters. Bonus: Some pretty good humans, too!

re 249 et seq.: The Atlantic has just started running spreads from the Documerica photo project of the 1970s, starting with NYC.

PNH @331:
sounds like Gigantor with actual production values.

Question for the hivemind.

I'm going to tag along with my sister and her family on a trip to Italy.

Our cell phones -- all pay-as-you-go "Tracfones" -- won't work there.

I'm wondering if similar phones -- buy for around $20, plus may $10 for an hour of usage -- are a Thing in Europe in general and Italy in particular.

Pacific Rim quibble: Gur zbivr jbhyq unir cnffrq gur Orpuqry grfg jvgubhg erdhvevat nal yvar punatrf, be nygrevat gur zrnavat bs nal eryngvbafuvcf, vs Obj Gvr Thl jrer cynlrq ol n jbzna vafgrnq. Nyy gur bgure frpbaq-fgevat znva punenpgref V pbhyq guvax bs, pnfgvat gurz srznyr zvtug vaqrrq unir erdhverq fbzr fpevcg punatrf urer naq gurer, be ryfr punatrq fhogrkg (juvpu V'z tbvat gb nffhzr jnf Nf Vg Jnf Ba Checbfr), ohg ur pbhyq'ir orra n fur jvgu ab ceboyrz ... naq jnfa'g.

Elliott Mason: Gung'f na ragveryl yrtvgvzngr dhvooyr. Cvgl gung jvgu nyy gur bgure guvatf vg qvq fb tenghvgbhfyl jryy, vg bayl unq bar srznyr punenpgre bs pbafrdhrapr. Nyorvg n tbbq punenpgre!

(For those not bothering to un-rot13: I'm agreeing with Elliott's quibble.)

I really thoroughly enjoyed Pacific Rim, but it is the kind of film I don't think much about afterwards.

Compare that to Cloud Atlas, which had many flaws but which I had vivid flashbacks about for weeks afterwards.

Casey #330: Well as of fall of '89 when I worked at Grand Canyon, they had never lost any passengers, guides or wranglers, but they had lost several mules over the years.

All of the trail mules start out hauling freight, and the skittish ones are sold off before they ever see the canyon, much less a passenger - but once in a great while, usually in the winter (or so I'm told) a mule would slip or get spooked and that, as they say, would be that.

I used to know the spot on the South Kaibab Trail where (at the time) the most recent mule had been lost, and that was at least ten years before I was there.

Charlie Stross: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to take a Lincoln Town Car up Highway One through Northern California.

If you ever go to Hawaii and anyone suggests you drive the Hana Highway in any car you are entitled to defenestrate them. There's an interesting video at http://roadtohana.com/. Notice that during the 6:15 the video runs you only see the road for 30 seconds or so? And that you only see cars travelling across the bridges one way at a time? And that what little you do see of the road has double yellow lines down the middle? I've never been on a highway with more beautiful scenery, but having been on both I'd take a garbage truck down Highway One before I drove "The Road to Hana" in anything larger than a subcompact.

Tom Whitmore: For sheer mountainous beauty (and yes, I've driven the Going to the Sun Road) I've seen nothing to compare with Crow's Nest Pass...

Ever been to Hana? Granted you'll see more mountains in Canada, and they're beautiful, but if you want to become more familiar than you ever intended to become with a mountain while driving on it Hana takes the cake.

In lieu of poi, I think we have some pickled herring around somewhere.

[Broken link. Fortunately, you'd left enough information for us to fix it. -- Bores Uilei, Duty Gnome]

Finally saw Pacific Rim. Enjoyed it immensely for all the reasons given in this here thread. (I am a sucker for parallel structure. Also for random appearances by Ron Perlman.) John and I did have one of those conversations on the way home that would have fooled an eavesdropper into thinking we didn't like it - we have a lot of storytelling/story-architecture-level criticism that mostly comes down to "This needed to be episodic. Like, y'know, Big Robot Anime. Too much was attempted in too short a time. Things did not Hang Together." But we criticize most closely the movies we enjoy. The higher the obvious ambition of the creators, the more poignant the missed opportunities and miscues.

Also, if anyone has a chance to see it at an Alamo Drafthouse, go go go! We went to the one in Littleton CO and knew we were in a Good Place when we walked into Theater 5 and it was showing a clip from a Voltron episode. After that, a clip from Evangelion. After that, more stuff in the genre, including this piece of benevolent and delightful WTF'ry. This place loves the movies it shows, and works to create an environment appealing to those who come to see those movies. The hour-long drive in afternoon traffic turned out to be SO WORTH IT.

Also, it's a dinner theater. Its food is quite good. Its menu includes a selection of adult milkshakes (I had the Irish Coffee milkshake). The popcorn comes with parmesan-herb seasoning. The mushroom pizza is fantastic. Etc. etc. etc.

(We were introduced to the theater when Peter Beagle's & Conlan Press's tour with the new print of the Last Unicorn film came through Colorado. That too was awesome.)

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 341: I started to drive the road to Hana, and was not enjoying myself. Headed back*, and signed up for a guided tour. We rode in a minivan driven by someone else, and enjoyed the view. Definitely the way to go!

*I don't recall how.

I've driven the Hana Highway once, and I live on Oahu, not very far from Maui. Once was enough. For those who've wondered about the Saddle Road on the Big Island, it's been resurfaced and it's now permissible to take your rental car on it. That wasn't the case for about 20 years.

I've never ridden the mules down to the river in the Grand Canyon, but I hiked down and up once when I was 18 or 19. That was an awful lot of cigarettes ago. Even though I've quit I couldn't hike that again.

Stefan Jones @335: Yes. Certainly in the UK you can buy a mobile 'phone (cellphone to you) for about £15 and Pay As You Go starts at £10. And I know my (American) niece stuck a local SIM card into her cellphone while she was in Barcelona for three months. I see no reason to suppose Italy will be any different.

There seems to be some good info @ Using Mobile Phones in Europe - so you can probably each buy a $15 or £20 unlocked 'phone in the USA (just make sure it's a quad band), take them with you and buy the SIM cards when you get to Italy - very simple.

Charlie Stross @298: Thank you for sharing that -interesting- drive with us!

Jim Macdonald @321: Just to say thank you again. For some reason I hadn't realised Absolute Write covered non-fiction...

Oh god, the Road to Hana. I don't really remember anything except getting to the end, being so thankful that we'd made it at last... and then realizing that we had to make the entire trip in reverse to get back to our hotel. I seriously contemplated swimming instead. It is not a road for the easily carsick (or even the 'carsick under the right circumstances' folk like me).

Smile Activated Gatling BB Gun. Yeah, I think I have a counterargument for the "Where's mah flying car" crowd now.

A few years ago we went up to the Palomar Observatory from Julian, California. The lady at the Tourist office gave us some directions and a blurry, much copied map. When I checked the relevant page of my Thomas Guide, it looked like the cartographer had been in the middle of a sneezing fit while drawing the road. I was pretty sure we were going to die in our little automatic transmission Honda civic. The only other people we saw on the road were on sports motorcycles of the "Crotch Rocket" variety. The observatory itself was great, but when it came time to leave, my roommate accidentally took a wrong turn - which took us down the beautiful, leisurely side of the mountain. This time we shared the road with more relaxed Harley riders.

Open threadiness: Game takes on Shakespeare

@278: Jon Singer supplies this. I haven't been able to get it to fuse, yet. Ow. And I've got a headache from trying.

#351 : Jacque

You might try moving back farther from the screen.

Jacque @351: I had trouble until I realized it's apparently an eyes-crossed stereogram (where your eyes converge in front of the image); I'm more used to the eyes-spread variety (where your eyes converge behind the image). I ended up sitting about 40 inches from my 24 inch monitor, putting my forefinger about 10 inches in front of my nose, aiming my eyes at my finger, and moving the finger back and forth until the images fused.

But 3 images for a stereogram? WTF? I've never met Jon Singer, but based on what I've heard, has he maybe built himself a third eye?

I got it to fuse by moving as close to the screen as my laptop permits, and then pulling back until there was some three dimensionality.

The first and third image are identical.

Thus, the first and second image form a cross-eyed pair; the second and third form a diverged-eye pair. Take your pick.

Charles Stross: "Which is why we ended up taking a Lincoln Town Car up Highway One."

Well, you wanted a large jet aircraft, or maybe a train with a sleeper compartment; the car company gave you something as close to a large aircraft or train as they could manage:)

Besides, Lincoln Town Cars are meant to be driven at 45 miles per hour on the highway. However, you're 25 years too young to drive one. And your vision is probably better than the average Town Car driver (a decade ago, the average age of purchasers of those was supposed to be over 60).

Open thread goodness:
Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling

That is all.

Barry @356: I will concede that if what you want to do is cruise for 500 miles a day along an interstate, a Town Car is quite a comfortable way to do it.

(But I'd still rather have done it in something closer in size to my own car, which is merely a bloated land yacht by British standards.)

Because I suck at self-promotion I'm not going to mention this.

Cassy B. @330: mule-trip down the Grand Canyon

If one wants a similar experience albeit on a much smaller scale, there's a riding stable in Eldorado Springs (coupla miles southwest of Boulder). There are places where the trail is close to vertical. But the horses have all done it a bazillion times. One can just sit back (literally—pro-tip: put all your weight in the stirrups) and enjoy the scenery.

Bruce E. Durocher II @341: Hana Highway

I wonder how it compares to the road up to Flagstaff House in Boulder? (Though most certainly longer.) The Fiske Planetarium did a bit for their Friday night show where they mounted a camera on the front of a motorcycle, and then drove down that road. Edited in a bicyclist with suitable reaction shots, and then showed it in over-crank speed, to Yes's "Close to the Edge." Wheee!!!

Jeremy Leader @353: I ended up sitting about 40 inches from my 24 inch monitor, putting my forefinger about 10 inches in front of my nose, aiming my eyes at my finger, and moving the finger back and forth until the images fused.

Ah! I'll try that.

But 3 images for a stereogram? WTF? I've never met Jon Singer, but based on what I've heard, has he maybe built himself a third eye?

Not...that I've heard. :-)

Andrew has the right of it. Here are Jon's instructions:

The two images on the left (left & center) are for crosseyed viewing, which is the more common method.

If you can tweak the size of the thing on the screen, make it small—that should facilitate matters. Once you get it to fuse, you can go back to the larger size.

Don't even mess with the two images on the right—at 17c, unless you can shrink the thing considerably or you have a stereo viewer, it will be exceedingly difficult to view in walleyed mode.

Mark D. @357: Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling

Argh. Makes me want to write fiction again. Not helpful, Mark. Not helpful.

I managed to view both stereo pairs, but the walleyed one was on the hard side.

That is a very strange stereo . . . triplet.

I was able to cross-eye fuse the middle and left image, and regular-fuse the middle and right image. Both gave a properly depthy effect.

Jim Macdonald @ 359: Thank you for that link to the review of "The Price of the Stars" Wish I could say it made me go out and buy it, but I did that a long time ago (then went out and bought all the others avaiable at the time, then looked out for more appearing). I -did- just make use of the follow-on link to "A Matter of Oaths" (Helen Wright), which I also bought and enjoyed years ago, and downloaded the e-book version she'd made available (and made a donation, 'cos I bought the book originally second hand).

Still not managing to get either side of the stereogram to work for me - oh well, I do have days like that. Try again tomorrow.

Denizens of the Open Thread:

I have a job. A real, grown-up, degree-using, career-starting job, with a good paycheque and excellent annual leave.
Expecting to rent my own flat by Christmas.

Today is a very good day.

duckbunny: Loud enthusiastic cheers!

Probably for enthusiastic cheers re duckbunny's excellent job news.

Would Their Lownesses care for some fresh cherries? Storebought, but good just the same.

This is just to say

Someone has eaten the

Chocolate Dipped Strawberries

I has left in the icebox at work

I was saving them for this evening

to eat before my class

They left the empty box in the fridge

and didn't even leave a poem

that was so cold

The comment reporting the gnoming of the previous comment has been gnomed.

Moose bites can be really nasty.

Congratulations, duckbunny. (suppressed exclamation points)

Congrats duckbunny!

Congrats Jim & Doyle!

HLN: local fanfic writer celebrates the fact that today her favorite of her own works has garnered 1337 hits.

Leet-chievement unlocked!

Duckbunny #365: That is wonderful. Congratulations!

Congratulations, duckbunny!

I just want to say, totally unconnected to anything else here: "Carlos Danger" ?!?!?!

Duckbunny:

Oh Frabjous Day!!

Patrick @ #374, good God. That's--just embarrassing.

Carlos Danger is undoubtedly Weiner's tribute to Compadre Hugo.

AKICIML:

Which is the correct form of the expression?

This: "Acme restaurants is by far in the way the most successful restaurant chain in the British Isles."

Or: "Acme restaurants is by far and away the most successful restaurant chain in the British Isles."

Soon Lee: Neither. Use "...is far and away the most..." or "...is by far the most..." but don't combine them.

'Far in the way' belongs in the Dreadful Phrases thread; it's simply a misparse of the real phrase.

What Happens When you Mix Ammonium Chromate & Mercury(II) and Set it on Fire

380
That was interesting. (We never got to play with that one in chem lab. Probably for good reasons. We did get to fill small bottles with chemically-generated oxygen and drop hot objects into them.)

I was going to mention California Highway 17 between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz (a 4-lane mountain goat track), but I have to admit the Hana Highway trumps them all. I drove it when I was about 30 in a rental car with the high beam/low beam control in an unfamiliar location. Wouldn't do it again but was glad to do it once for all the scenery and flowers and skinnydipping in clear mountain streams.

Jacque (380): Holy carp! I don't usually follow links to random videos, but I'm glad I watched that one.

Pity about the spoiler in the blurb below the video, though. ;)

Xopher @379:

Aha! That's good to know; both options were making me twitch*. It's a discussion I'm having with a workmate.

*Certain turns of phrase feel wrong despite being unable to articulate why. The language version of my lizard brain knows more than I do.

382
The fun part of Santa Cruz Highway is seeing the tire marks on the center divider - which went in, IIRC, in the mid-1970s. Before that, it was just two double-yellow stripes a few feet apart.

Duckbunny, congratulations (exclamation point)

Jacque @360; shorter would have been good. Here follows my Grand Canyon Mule Ride Story; feel free to skip the Wall of Text....

We arrive at the lodge the night before. In a moment of jocularity, I told the travel agent (remember travel agents?) that all we cared about for the room was a bed and a bathroom. This proved fortuitous; we got one of the very few rooms with its own bathroom. More on that later.

My husband spent the evening scrambling WAY too close to the edge, getting photos. I was the Voice of Caution.

Next day, we got our mules. Mine was named Cat; she was recovering from equine flu and this was her first time back on the trail. My husband's was named Madonna. We were supposed to be sequential with each other, but my husband, who had never ridden an equine, couldn't persuade Madonna to follow Cat and he ended up almost at the end of the group. (I'd had a dozen riding lessons, which proved largely useless, because I was taught to neck-rein but with mules you just haul on their mouths...) It was a lovely day. We went down about halfway, to the edge of the plateau, and then back up again. (All the way down is a two-day trip.)

My travails first: Mules are noticeably wider than horses, which means by the end of the day I was getting decidedly saddlesore. On the way back up, you stop every five or ten minutes, for five or ten minutes, to let the mules rest. While we were moving, my thighs hurt. While we were stopped, poor Cat was wheezing so hard she was actually rocking, trying to get her breath. Which was, no lie, making me seasick. (Mulesick?) I started to pray to get moving (and hurt) rather than stop (and risk hurling...)

Meanwhile, my husband, near the back of the train, was a victim of the "rubber-band" effect. Mules like to bunch up close, so when gaps form, they rush to keep up. Which means, at the back of the group, they have two speeds; practically stopped, and trotting. Fast. Sometimes skidding around the corners of the switchbacks... At every official stop, the mules turn outward towards the middle of the canyon, so they can see exactly where it is. Now, Madonna apparently was a trifle hungry. She started snacking on treetops that grew up against the canyon. When there weren't any close, she'd lee-eee-eee-an out to get it. This made my husband, understandably, very very nervous. (Especially since the riders on either side of him looked rather pale when they saw this happening.) My husband, being a non-rider, had NO idea how to stop her.

At the end of the ride (which was beautiful, and terrific, and memorable for good reasons as well as the ones outlined here, and which we will NEVER EVER DO AGAIN), I retired to the (blessedly private) bathroom for a long, long soak. I noticed that night and the next day that my previously fearless husband had suddenly decided that fifty feet back from the edge of the canyon was A Good Place To Be. (It took him several days to get over the fear of heights.)

There's a mule ride on Molokai from the top of the island down the cliffs to Kalaupapa, the place where victims of Hansen's Disease were isolated. I've never done that, though.

Jacque @380 -- is that the chemical reaction that made the firework snakes we got when I was a kid work? It sure looks like it. The ash cords are pretty fragile, but great fun to watch. And the burning of them left a black mark on concrete/brick that was pretty much impossible to wash away. The snakes came 6 or so to a package, and were black cylindrical pellets about 1cm in each direction. I'd bet they were a serious environmental hazard....

So about Jacque's kraken from 380:

What is a plausible story about why a pile of powder, when burning, would start to generate coherent strands like that? What ordered structures in the combustion are they using as scaffolding? Why is the number of them what it is, i.e. about a half-dozen, instead of only one per pile, or several thousand? How do they collect material on the bottom end of the strand, and how does it generate pressure to push the upper parts up, instead of breaking the strand apart?

That is an extraordinary phenomenon--it just seems like a surprising degree of order arising out of what could instead have been a relatively unordered process. For most combustible powders, e.g. sawdust, if you burn a heap of it nothing very exciting happens, and certainly nothing where macroscopic structures develop.

Loved the video. The kids' enthusiastic labeling of it makes me wonder what movies they've seen recently.

What Xopher Halftongue @379 said, strongly seconded.

Tom, #388: I remember those snakes! And you're right, they did look very similar to what's happening in that video.

oldster @389 -- The plausible story comes if you think about nucleation centers, similar to seed crystals in a supersaturated solution. The ash starts coming together, and that leads other ash to accrete on the end of it; the accretion pushes the ash out of the way of the reaction, and it continues along. Because it's started in one place, there's no tendency for a second one to start "near" it (and nearness should be a determinable construct, based on various chemical and physical factors). With the snakes I referred to in 388, there's a single accretion point where the ash is generated; sometimes it branches, resulting in a fork in the snake, but it usually comes back together very quickly.

Googling "safe and sane fireworks snake" leads to this page as the first link: note the comment at the end of the description "The traditional mercury salts are no longer used because of the toxicity." That's an indication that yes, this is the reaction I'm familiar with. With a single pellet, there's one nucleation center where I apply the initial flame.

A key fact (which I'm sure we noticed but is worth putting in words): the ash is solid, but much less dense than the powders that form it. This is not true of burning sawdust, for example.

Thinking just a bit further -- the size of the nucleation center is going to be the same as the diameter of the various snakes, about a centimeter (note that they all have approximately the same diameter - none are significantly larger or smaller consistently). This may be related to heat generation from the reaction -- at a specific diameter, there's exactly the range of heat that makes the chemical reaction which yields a stable ash column. This should be fairly easily measurable, and say something interesting about the reaction.

It's supported by the fact that the ash reaction doesn't happen until significantly after the burning starts. There's a temperature that has to be reached, locally, before the ash nucleation becomes sustainable. There's a nice little paper in figuring out exactly what the temperature range is, and it's probably been done. The uniform diameter (clearly within a factor of 2) of the "snakes" is a pretty amazing clue, and I can't believe someone hasn't actually examined it and determined what's going on.

Alan @382: I once worked for a company based in Santa Cruz, and had to drive Highway 17 a few times. In 1993. That's what put me off driving in the USA for 18 years.

From The Atlantic website: Stephen King on the opening sentence

PNH's sidelight on jaywalking reminded me of this comic with the Sphinx. One of my favorites.

Allan Beatty #382, Charlie Stross #397:

Ah, yes, Route 17, where freeway drivers apply their hard-won straight-line skills to getting up and down a 4-lane goat path at freeway speed. Grand Prix driving almost also ran.

I interviewed with a Santa Clara company in the early 80s whose founders all lived in Santa Cruz. The insanity carried over.

Joann @398: Highway 17 on its own isn't that bad. Reminded me of a bunch of roads I grew up rat-racing on in Yorkshire, like the A58 or A61.

The special sauce for me was trying to tackle it on the wrong side of the road in an automatic. Too many things to keep track of, simultaneously! (I do not like automatic transmissions. I especially do not like having to drive a vehicle where the nearside is the side I have limited peripheral vision on.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a banknote in possession of an empty space, must be in want of a portrait.

The Bank of England plans to put a poortrait of Jane Austen on a banknote to be released in 2017

Context for Charlie @399

For non-UK drivers, the drivers licence here distinguishes vehicles with an automatic transmission from others. If you passed the test with a stick-shift, you can drive any car. Pass with an automatic, and you can only drive with an automatic transmission.

I don't know what is going to happen when electric vehicles become dominant. There used to be, a long times ago, a category for an electric vehicle: low-speed battery-power stuff such as milk floats. They're a lot different from the new electric version of the Mercedes SL. Category H is still there in the list, but the first new driver to pass a driving test in an electric car was in October 2012: the driving school doesn't mention whether he passed for B, B auto, or H.

Anyway, driving instructors use stick-shift vehicles. We get taught to drive them (Exception: some disabled drivers). We Brits rarely encounter automatic transmissions.

Context additional to Dave Bell: Whereas in the US, in city-living people under 40, it is perfectly possible to never have encountered a manual transmission car you were expected to be able to drive. Many models of car do not COME in manual; to my knowledge, no electric or hybrid vehicle for sale in the North American car market comes with a manual (a fact that royally cheesed off my manual-loving in-laws when they decided to switch from Volvos to Priuses). Manuals, when available, always cost more at purchase. Many driving schools do not OFFER a course in manuals, on the grounds that today's 16yos are never going to see one ... which may be short-sighted, but whatever.

I did make a concerted effort to learn to use one when I learned to drive (as an adult, not that many years ago). However, various sensory-integration things meant that the amount of juggling balls I had to keep in the air just to control a car and keep it pointed in the right direction was too much to add shifting and transmission-management in for ... and the reason I was getting a license at all was because I needed to transport my grandmother to medical appointments immediately. Her car was automatic. Therefore I learned to drive THAT, and by the time her transportation was no longer an issue, we had downsized our household from two cars (her land-boat and a manual my husband drove) to one car. Of necessity, we downsized to an automatic, because I could drive it. Were I to try again to learn to drive stick, first I'd have to find someone who owns one they'd let me use periodically for learning on, and I don't think I have any local manual-trans-owning friends.

Additional to my last: the other thing the UK car market has lots of that are completely unheard of in the US market are passenger diesels. There just aren't any. Partly, perhaps, because the US supply of diesel fuel is horribly sulfurous and generally very polluting, so they don't look like an 'eco-friendly' solution at all.

It amazed me when I started watching Top Gear not only how tiny the 'big' UK cars were but how absolutely all of them seemed to come in both diesel and petrol versions.

402
Some of us learned on stick - my parents didn't like automatics. Their feeling was that if you can drive stick, you can drive anything.
I've met automatics (rental) that always seemed to be in the wrong gear, but I like the one I own now (an '02 Prius).

Elliot: I never drove an automatic until the first time I hired a car in the USA, about 12 years after I passed my driving test. Nor have I ever owned an automatic.

(My current car is a turbocharged diesel estate with a six-speed manual transmission. Looks utterly boring, but it's the fastest-accelerating thing I've ever driven.)

Over here, automatic transmissions cost extra to buy -- used to be a lot extra -- and until relatively recently they were less economical, an important point in the land of $10/gallon petrol. Modern dual-clutch/eight speed autos or continuously variable systems are an entirely different matter, of course, but the old three-speed slushbox used to return about 20% worse mileage.

(My dad used to drive automatics from the 1960s onwards, and he did about 30,000 miles a year for business, but he was exceptional: a lot of that was stop/start town driving -- he did a lot of sales visits for his family business -- so he paid the fuel premium in order to spare his left ankle.)

Elliott Mason @ 403

A quibble; while they are not common, VW diesels are still available.

We had one; awesome performance, seated 5 adults comfortably, got almost 50 mpg. My little sister wrecked it--a head-on collision with both vehicles going over 50 mph. The vehicles (it and a pickup) were totaled, but everyone walked away.

Another vehicle class that isn't available in manual transmission versions (to my annoyance) is minivans.

Elliott #403:

For values of US market that = "Made by US companies".

There are the occasional passenger diesels made elsewhere, mostly in Germany, a very few in France, on the roads here in Texas, although they seem(ed) to be most prevalent in California.

joann @407: Yes, of course. Though I would note that US companies are happy to sell small passenger diesels in the UK market, and so are companies like Toyota -- which still don't offer them for sale here. I know because people I know have walked into dealerships and attempted to order one to be told they don't exist. When the salesperson was shown photos of (in one case) the family's former UK car that is EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE TRYING TO ORDER, the salesperson was gobsmacked and said there was no entry for it in the computer, they had no idea where this bizarre thing in the picture is from but it clearly isn't a REAL Toyota ...

Um, yes. :->

And Charlie, I know: I'm pointing out that there are things that are normal and widespread in the UK that are nearly unknown in the US and vice-versa. It is very very difficult to rent a manual-transmission car in the US (impossible most places; when possible, usually a huge pickup truck).

I know quite a few USian drivers who love manuals and can get quite serious improvements in gas mileage out of them (over what an automatic can do) by driving them properly ... who are gradually being forced to convert their household autos to automatic through lack of access, or simple cost. If you can only afford to buy off the used market, for example, manuals get even harder to find than they are new.

(Nods to Dave Bell) I just read that the Bank of England is going to put Jane Austen's likeness on the 10 pound note. This is so full of win, as we say, that it got me thinking: whose likeness would I want to have on US greenbacks?

I'm tired of the usual suspects. Let's give the Founding Fathers a rest. It's a new game. Only rules: if historical person (doesn't have to be either historical or person), said person must be a) dead, and b) clearly and obviously connected to the USA. Feel free to play! Here are my suggestions:

$1 bill: Woody Guthrie
$5 bill: Sojourner Truth
$10 bill: Mark Twain
$20: Jerry Garcia
$100: Boss Tweed as drawn by Thomas Nast

To clarify, shorter myself in the past few posts: Dang, isn't it annoying when you stub your brain against massive differences in the 'of course' default value for something?

Like when we went to Edinburgh for a family wedding and I discovered that I could order a Sprite and get served lemonade? Or limonata? Or some weird sludgy citrus thing they made in the back of the restaurant? And the waiters had NO IDEA why I was upset I hadn't gotten a Sprite/7-Up/some mainstream clear, noncaffeinated soft drink in a green can? Or the fact that nearly every durn place that sold food and had seating was CLOSED between 1PM and 4:30PM except Pizza Hut? Eat lunch early or abandon all hope of calories, ye who enter here!

That was an exciting two weeks of unfamiliar food and complete spoon deficit on my part, though it also catapulted Edinburgh onto the short list of towns I could see myself cheerfully living in. And I am VERY PLEASED at the difference in default assumptions that meant I could get a baked-potato-with-stuff-in at any pub we walked into, 'of course'. Baked potatoes, mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Elliott Mason (402): Manuals, when available, always cost more at purchase.

Not always. I recently bought a 2013 Hyundai Accent; the list price for the automatic version was roughly $1,000 more than the manual version. That was also true of the Honda Fit. On the other hand, manuals would have been a lot harder to get than the automatic I wanted.

I did learn how to drive a manual, but I haven't done it in about 30 years. I'm sure I'd need practice.

So, silly question: For people who learned to drive a stick shift, is there actually some degree of difficulty in using an automatic, or is it just having to unwrap your head from worrying about a whole bunch of things you've gotten to thinking of as, pardon me, automatic and reflexive?

(Disclosure: I've almost never driven a stick except for one simulator session in high-school driver-ed, where they thought it would be cool. Oddly enough, I did reasonably well, probably because I was so busy worrying about not virtually stalling the thing that I wasn't overthinking some other stuff.)

I think light trucks (that is, what the US calls 'pick-up trucks', although some are pretty durn freakin' large) are the most common exception to the manual-costs-more rule, because the reasons people traditionally had for buying these vehicles meant that you wanted the extra functioning a manual gives you pretty badly.

Having driven a manual for fifteen years now (and yes, having learned on an automatic meant that adapting, especially in a non-flat city like Nashville was challenging [to the point of hair-tearing] at times) I find it a PITA to work with an automatic now.

Joann @413: controlling the vehicle isn't hard. What's hard is dealing with an invisible idiot who keeps changing gear on you at the wrong time!

Auto engines put out differing amounts of torque at different RPM levels. For example, my car (diesel) idles at 500rpm, pulls sluggishly but with steadily increasing force between about 700rpm and 1900rpm ... then at 2000rpm the turbo gate opens and it goes like a rocket up to redline at 4500rpm.

If I want to drive economically, on level ground, I aim to change gear to keep the engine RPM between about 1000rpm and 1800rpm. And if I want to do my best Mr Toad impression I keep the revs above 2000rpm but change up before I hit 4000rpm.

With a stick shift, this is relatively easy. With an automatic, you lose this fine-grained control over how much torque the engine produces. When you floor the throttle, the gearbox will eventually realize that you want more torque, and will kick down into a lower ratio -- but if you drive hard it will probably keep changing up prematurely. And it's always lagging behind what you want it to do.

The result is curiously distancing, between the driver and the road. I'm used to demanding more torque to drag my (front wheel drive) car out of a curve, avoiding under-steer: this is easy in a manual, but automatics are less controllable. And sometimes they get it wrong, going into kick-down dangerously if pulling uphill towards a hairpin bend.

Apparently, the Swedish Police did a test comparing manual and automatic transmissions, and found that the average Police driver could get better acceleration out of an automatic.

Driving a manual is lizard-brain stuff. You're hardly conscious of doing the gear changes. Learning to drive it is the problem.

I have driven a few vehicles with an auto or variable transmission, but most of those driving hours have been with combine harvesters. It's a whole different lizard doing the driving.

re 404: Part of the reason passenger diesels mostly died in the US, I would venture to guess, was that they were originally marketed as more economical back in the days when diesel fuel was significantly cheaper. Smokey Yunick's spirit is surely pleased that this is no longer the case (he predicted for years that diesel would eventually be more expensive), and while it may work out cheaper in the end when you do the MPG/price arithmetic, psychologically it's a harder sell when the price difference is right there on the sign.

@402 Elliott Mason
Context additional to Dave Bell: Whereas in the US, in city-living people under 40, it is perfectly possible to never have encountered a manual transmission car you were expected to be able to drive Manuals, when available, always cost more at purchase. Many driving schools do not OFFER a course in manuals, on the grounds that today's 16yos are never going to see one ... which may be short-sighted, but whatever.

Manuals are more expensive in the US? Here (Canada), they are cheaper, even though they are less common. They're even called "standard", as in, "I drive a standard". Automatic transmission is an added option you have to pay for.

Driving schools offer the option to learn on a standard, although there's no separate class for the license once you've got it. I took my lessons and got my license on an automatic and learned to drive a standard later.

Oh, and diesels are not common here, but I have run into a few (most VWs, one Merc). The main complaint I have heard is that they take so long to warm up, although maybe that's improved now?

I drive a standard because I prefer it, but on those occasions when I need to drive an automatic, I'm OK to do so. The worst thing is that I keep thwacking at the floor with my left foot, instinctively clutch-hunting.

One does sometimes run into the occasional yob who insists that "women can't drive standard". I still think they must look funny, changing gears with their testicles like that.

Cheryl (418): No, manuals are not more expensive in the US, or at least not universally. The four-door hatchbacks I researched last month were all substantially more expensive as automatics.

Cheryl @418: the first passenger vehicle I owned was a 1984 Chevy Suburban. Manual transmission. However, there was a button on the floorboard right where the clutch 'ought' to be -- took us couple of weeks (no manual) to discover it was the control for the high-beam headlights. So John spent a lot of time accidentally flashing his brights when his foot tried to clutch.

That car also had listed on labels as Premium Features of this Expensive Version that it had rear disc brakes, the towing package (which meant double the gas tank -- and at appx 11mpg when we were being careful, it NEEDED it), and an AM/FM radio. Because the cheaper versions of the same model came with AM only. Speaking of features you don't realize are a Special Feature until you suddenly don't have them ...

This is the car that, when we decided the rust spots were unacceptable, we used up my mom's supplies of old part-used paint to do a complex spongepainted faux finish on. Plus a wide racing stripe up the driver's side, because John had always wanted one. :-> I have photos somewhere, but apparently not in digital form. It was also wide enough to take a double/full mattress in the back, flat, without folding down the rear seat.

Argh. My Suburban was an automatic. This fact is kind of important to the story. However, my fingers insisted on typing the other, for reasons best known to themselves ...

Cheryl, 418: My mother switched to automatics, hm, call it 35 years ago? She still goes for the clutch before unexpected braking.

413
My car has CVS, so brain doesn't have do deal with it. It was a much easier transition than I expected. (Except for the lizard-brain kicking in every so often.)

Left foot is parking brake, and it's far enough over to the left to keep 'clutch' out of circuit. On the other hand, when I try lizard-brain reaching for the stick, I reach for the empty spot right in front of the console....

Cheryl @418: Oh, and diesels are not common here, but I have run into a few (most VWs, one Merc). The main complaint I have heard is that they take so long to warm up, although maybe that's improved now?

The first diesel I drove was a company car in 1989. It had glow plugs: you switched on the ignition then waited ten seconds for a dash light to go out before you hit the starter motor, or you'd be surrounded by blue fumes of unburned fuel (because the plugs weren't fully up to temperature).

My current car ... works just like a petrol engine, except at lower revs (and with an extra gear ratio to compensate). Turn the ignition key and it starts.

One thing I found interesting was that the motorcycle safety course I took failed me the first time. "We could pass you - barely - but we want you to take it again to really get what you need out of it. If we fail you, *we* pay the retry cost; if we pass you, *you* do." It was the right decision, by the way.

The issue? While everyone else was learning how to do 2-wheels-and-a-motor, I was learning how to use a clutch.

Mumble years on, I wonder how many more people are in my then world - never used a manual clutch.

Got a chance to drive a convertible on holiday; it had paddle-shift, auto-clutch available if desired, but not mandatory; no "real" clutch was available, even on that (which was good; I was worried that I would have to pull out my mumble-year-old knowledge on how to not stall).

@420 Elliott Mason
the first passenger vehicle I owned was a 1984 Chevy Suburban. [Automatic] transmission. However, there was a button on the floorboard right where the clutch 'ought' to be -- took us couple of weeks (no manual) to discover it was the control for the high-beam headlights. So John spent a lot of time accidentally flashing his brights when his foot tried to clutch.

My Mum's '74 Duster had that button, although I was too young to drive that car. I recall that she hated it, because she had a hard time finding it with her foot, so that by the time she managed to switch the beams on/off, it was too late. This may have been related to the fact that her left leg was severely injured in '72, and she'd had it reassembled with plates and screws and whatnot. It took a year to properly walk again, and that foot still looks funny.

Her decision to learn on an automatic (she only learned to drive after the accident) was in no small part based on the fact that she still had a cast on her left leg when she started her first lessons.

Elliott Mason: the Honda Insight used to be available as a manual (my daughter has one); the 2013 Honda CR-Z hybrid still is.

I learned to drive on a stick shift (my father insisted) and a couple of times I've been glad of it, as I had to drive someone else's car and it happened to be a manual. But I prefer an automatic, which doesn't require three feet and two hands when the traffic light turns green on a steep upgrade.

Note to the musical folk in the crowd who haven't driven a manual/standard shift -- the engine will change key when it needs for you to change gears. The friend (who was making sure I could drive their car) expressed surprise at how quickly I caught on to their vehicle's needs. When I explained, she said, "Really?!" Turns out she was tone-deaf.

With all due respect: have you ever tried to park a car with a manual transmission on a steep hill?

There are reasons why tourists planning to drive inside San Francisco (which you really don't have to do, what part of excellent public transportation system do you not understand?) are told they'd do better with an automatic transmission car, even if they're used to a manual.

Just sayin'.

Lizzy @429: here in the UK, you can't pass your driving test in a manual transmission if you can't safely do a hill start (on an inclined street) without rolling back. You've also got to be able to hold your vehicle on the clutch without stalling and move off smoothly. And do a three-point turn, and reverse around a corner. Deal with roundabouts (traffic circles). Execute a safe emergency stop. And. And.

(These are some of the reasons why US driving licenses are not considered equivalent to a UK license, and US folks moving to the UK are required to pass a driving test.)

I learned to drive (early 60s) on an automatic and taught myself to drive stick a dozen years later when I bought a new car (the cheapest available in the U.S.) that had a manual transmission. It was a little nerve-wracking for a couple of outings but I already knew how to handle a car so I could concentrate on shifting without running off the road.

The two times I rented a car in the UK I reserved an automatic. The combination of driving on the wrong side of the road and shifting with the wrong hand was just too awful to face.

After thirty years of driving stick I switched reluctantly to an automatic seven years ago. My main reason was that I wanted to share the driving on roadtrips with a couple of friends who preferred an automatic (though they could drive stick.)

@429 Lizzy L

With all due respect: have you ever tried to park a car with a manual transmission on a steep hill?

My car is a standard, and has been since '94. I live in a city that has a mountain in the middle (though I admit it's no San Francisco). So... yes?

There's definitely a trick to it, but, like any other skill, you learn it with practice. Given 20 years, I'm sure you could do it in your sleep. I'm certainly capable of keeping my car stationary on a hill without using my brake.

@424 Charlie Stross
Sorry, when I was saying "warm up", I meant to say "the engine is warm enough to provide heated air to the passenger compartment". When it's your 30th straight morning starting the car at -20C, warm air now is kind of a mantra. Not to mention that you can't go anywhere until the windows clear.

For the last few days, someone I've been following on Twitter has been posting links to anti-vaccination sites.

One had an article claiming that vaccinated kids suffered from "two to five" as many "diseases" as unvaccinated kids. Source: A study by a German homeopath. Must be true, though, because it had CHARTS!

Another link was to . . . well, the site was a sort of clearing house for natural remedy articles. Full of snake oil ads. But the article linked to was boldly titled "STATE DEPARTMENT CAUGHT IN MASSIVE HUMAN TRAFFICKING RING" or some-such. Started with a statement to the effect that our scandal plagued times surely indicate the downfall of the nation. Then the story . . . which was about *one* guy in an embassy in Gambia selling visas.

Man. If you follow the "right" people you get glimpses of this whole shithouse-rat crazy world.

I considered buying a manual recently, but I was moving to Orange County at the time, and I've been told by stalwart manual drivers that Southern California traffic is the one place they'd prefer an automatic. I've driven a manual a few times, and it would be an absolute nightmare to do so in some of the LA traffic I've encountered. Then again, I never learned well enough for it to become second nature. I've also heard that heavy, stop-and-go traffic is the one place where automatics perform better, mileage-wise, than manuals, though I don't have a cite for that.

I can provide another datapoint for pricing of automatics vs. manuals, this time on the used market. When I was shopping for used cars, I was looking for one of two things: a 90s Honda Civic, or a late model Mini Cooper. In both cases, manuals were $1000-3000 less than automatics for cars with identical features and mileage. That might just be the area... again, I was shopping around LA, where manuals might be less desirable.

@430 Charlie Stross

here in the UK, you can't pass your driving test in a manual transmission if you can't safely do a hill start (on an inclined street) without rolling back. You've also got to be able to hold your vehicle on the clutch without stalling and move off smoothly. And do a three-point turn, and reverse around a corner. Deal with roundabouts (traffic circles). Execute a safe emergency stop. And. And.

In Quebec, if you have chosen to take your mandatory driving lessons on a standard, then your test will include these things as well (except maybe roundabouts, as we don't have many). If you have chosen to take your lessons on an automatic, they leave those "specific to standard" skills off the test (at least, this was true until 1997, when mandatory lessons were abolished. When this proved to be a bad plan, they were reinstated in 2010, so it's likely many rules have changed).

@434 Leah Miller

I considered buying a manual recently, but I was moving to Orange County at the time, and I've been told by stalwart manual drivers that Southern California traffic is the one place they'd prefer an automatic. I've driven a manual a few times, and it would be an absolute nightmare to do so in some of the LA traffic I've encountered.

I can see this. Back when I was using my car to commute, I mostly didn't hit rush hour traffic due to my schedule. On those occasions when I did get stuck in stop-and-go, the toes on my left foot would go numb. It didn't happen often enough for me to change my preference, though.

I can provide another datapoint for pricing of automatics vs. manuals, this time on the used market. When I was shopping for used cars, I was looking for one of two things: a 90s Honda Civic, or a late model Mini Cooper. In both cases, manuals were $1000-3000 less than automatics for cars with identical features and mileage. That might just be the area... again, I was shopping around LA, where manuals might be less desirable.

I just did a quick check on the Mazda, Honda, and Chevrolet US websites. Manuals were cheaper on all of them.

Stefan 433: These people just infuriate me. The anti-vaccers have the blood of children on their hands. But that person sounds like a bozo in other ways too.

What has your response been? Have you responded with "this is bullshit" to any of these ridiculous tweets? (I don't always have the spoons for such a response myself, so I'm not trying to guilt-trip you for not doing it if you haven't; just curious.)

re diesels and glow plugs: There was a time (and for all I know, may still be) when Norwegian Army vehicles had a pipe sticking out the front that ran straight into the block-- for the blowtorch. Apparently sometimes glow plugs just don't cut it.

My recollection was that in the US it was generally manuals that were standard and automatics which were an added-price option. Of course, the price was never the price anyway, so that doesn't mean that people paid more or less for one or the other (except at Saturn dealers).

lizzy l @429 - I in fact have parked a car with a manual on a steep hill! I learned to drive on a stick, and living in between Seattle and Tacoma, was regularly engaged in parking the car on various levels of hills. Later I moved to northern California for college, and wound up taking the same car into San Francisco occasionally. While it is not the easiest task in the world, it's not impossible once you invest a little time in understanding where the "hold point" for your clutch is.

In general in the US these days, I have observed that a manual transmission may often be available these days only on the lowest trim level of a particular vehicle, I presume in an attempt to drive down the "as low as" price. The automatic version is usually another $1000 or more. Some of the more driver-focused high-end vehicles that used to offer a manual option now often seem to have a semi-automatic solution instead - the tiptronic or some such - that allows for manual shifting but does not use a clutch pedal.

Caution: gearhead wall-o-text follows.

SamChevre @ #407 & Elliott Mason @ 403, et al:

RE: Diesel passenger vehicles available in the USA.
VW, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche(!?! - then again, this is the smaller SUV that is basically a Touareg) all have them. Mazda6 and Chevy Cruze midsize sedans available late this year or sometime next year with diesels, too. (Note: Cruze Diesel auto-only, and you only gain 3mpg hwy compared to Eco-spec gasoline manual.) Only VW has a manual diesel, though. Choices from (sub?)compact (Beetle/Golf) through mini-SUV (Touareg - 33mpg hwy with automatic as confirmed by my Dad). Wagons available, too. Soon to be available in Jeep Grand Cherokee, and also continues to be available in fullsize 3/4+ ton domestic trucks and some vans. Dodge is reported to be offering a 3 liter V6 diesel in their half-ton late this year. Huh - looks like it is being advertised at only 25mpg, which is likely a highway figure, which is no better than their gasoline V6. Better torque figures, at least, and diesels typically do better on mpg at higher tow loads than gas engines.

Closest thing to a diesel minivan is the Sprinter van, variously available as Mercedes, Dodge or Freightliner. Up to 12 passenger seating. 20+mpg automatic. Get a used older 5-cylinder and you can top 25mpg.

RE: Minivans with manual trans in USA: Mazda5. Only one I know of, shares most of its underpinnings with the Mazda3. We have a 2007 (first generation) one, with the 4-speed auto, they are a bit small, but get good mpg compared to all the bigger ones - we get 19-25mpg depending on how much time spent idling/in traffic vs long-haul freeway. I like it, I can see over it (5'11"), and my wife loves how well it fits everywhere (parks as easily as her old '97 Nissan Altima). 6 seats (3 rows of 2) in the USA. 2013 models claim EPA 21/28mpg city/hwy for 6-speed manual and 22/28 for 5-speed auto, and they seem a bit bigger. Only available on Sport trim level now, though, but at that trim level you get 55 series tires on 16" rims vs. the 50 series rubber on 17" rims of the higher trim levels. I swapped our 17" rims for 16" ones when the original tires wore out - all the rims were bent. 50 series rubber on thin aluminum alloy rims is NOT good for potholes in a people-mover...

Wall-of-text warning...

Elliott Mason @ 403

Whereas in the US, in city-living people under 40, it is perfectly possible to never have encountered a manual transmission car you were expected to be able to drive.

Heh. I learned to drive in a VW back in '67. In '73, went to a cousin's wedding in the DC area, escorting the groom's mother (my aunt, who was blind). Cousin rented a car for me... and it was an automatic. I'd never driven one before. Getting out of the parking lot and onto the streets, following him, was... rather a white-knuckled thing. (I now have an automatic, thank ghods - between the borked left knee and right shoulder, I can just imagine trying to shift. I do miss having the manual, though, any time I'm on back roads.) (Enjoyed driving on back roads. Also, ran a few rallyes in the early '70s.) (I drove stick shifts for ... well, long enough that if I'm a bit tired, I try to downshift at stop signs and shift back into first... *wry*)

TexAnne @ 422

My mother switched to automatics, hm, call it 35 years ago? She still goes for the clutch before unexpected braking.

*splutter* She's not alone in that. Every once in a while, my left foot goes for a pedal that's not there.

Lori Coulson @ 428

Note to the musical folk in the crowd who haven't driven a manual/standard shift -- the engine will change key when it needs for you to change gears.

Yes, this, exactly.

Lizzy L @ 429

With all due respect: have you ever tried to park a car with a manual transmission on a steep hill?

There are reasons why tourists planning to drive inside San Francisco (which you really don't have to do, what part of excellent public transportation system do you not understand?) are told they'd do better with an automatic transmission car, even if they're used to a manual.

Or an older-version VW bug in Erie, in the winter, when the pavement is still rather icy. The street grid there is such that in one direction, the streets are flat; the cross streets are somewhat... vertical. There's a neat trick to balance on the clutch and brake at the same time, and do *not* tailgate, because that car with a stick shift will roll back a foot or three, no matter how competent the driver. (This was before studded tires; I suspect they'd make a huge difference.)

I, too, am a USian who loves, loves, loves her manual transmission. And I have to agree with Charlie @415 about the "invisible idiot"; I live in a town with hills, and I prefer a car that will downshift when I tell it to, thankyouverymuch, instead of shoving down on the gas and hoping the gearbox will figure out what I want.

All three of my cars have been standards, and they've all been about $500-1500 less than the equivalent automatic. And all used, as well. I didn't have any problems finding a replacement for my 1995 Neon when it was totaled in '07; Carmax had several 2005 models available in standard transmissions. IME, there are models of car that are more popular in standard transmissions here in the US, and those are the ones to look for on the used market.

Charlie at 430: I have no doubt that it is harder to get a UK license than a US license. In most places in the US, if you can parallel park, execute a three point turn, remember to use your turn indicators when you change lanes, and come to a full (not a rolling) stop at the stop sign, you'll pass your test.

I've been driving for 40 years, I am a reasonably safe driver, but I would not trust myself to drive in the UK. Too many differences.

@440 cajunfj40
RE: Minivans with manual trans in USA: Mazda5. Only one I know of, shares most of its underpinnings with the Mazda3. We have a 2007 (first generation) one, 17" rims of the higher trim levels. I swapped our 17" rims for 16" ones when the original tires wore out - all the rims were bent. 50 series rubber on thin aluminum alloy rims is NOT good for potholes in a people-mover...

My car is a 2006 Mazda5, so I'm pretty sure 2007 is not the first generation. It was marketed as specifically not a minivan - more like an "extended hatchback". They called it a MAV: Multi Access Vehicle. Driving.ca calls it a station wagon. The 5 and 3 are so close in size (length=181.5 for the 5, and 178.4 for the 3, height=64.2 for the 5, and 57.7 for the 3), I'm comfortable calling it a car (dimensions from driving.ca for the 2006 years).

I have also had no problem with my 17" rims, and it's not like Montreal has so few potholes.

Re my own 443: I've been driving for 50 years.

When did that happen...?

428
I've described it as 'driving by ear'. You really can hear when it's time to change gears.

I had fun driving my father's little Toyota pickup. It was geared way lower than my Corolla. I wasn't used to shifting into 4th gear at 30mph. (It only had 4 gears. Fifth (highway) would have helped.)

My dad (both my parents had and loved manuals when I was small) taught me when to shift gears, by the sound, when I was far too little to even see over the dash, much less reach pedals. But it was important to him that I learn how, so he talked me through his driving process and how to shift and clutch and stuff, and for a while he would let me 'shift' for him (tell him when to clutch, move the lever myself from the passenger chair) on trips where it was safe to do so.

So I instinctively know HOW and when to shift, I just have trouble (or did, when last I tried, years ago) coordinating the whole-body movements to do it fluently while also not hitting people, missing my turn, or driving off the road.

Curmudgeon moment (and believe me, I know I'm too young to get to have curmudgeon moments yet) tl;dr: this whole subthread seems to have pushed a button I get emotional about, feel free to skip my despairing moral outrage.

With the technology we have today, WHY IN EVERLOVING PROVIDENCE is 25-35mpg still considered a reasonable starting point -- or in some cases, Supreme Efficiency -- for ordinary passenger vehicles?!? Personally, I think somewhere around 30mpg should be an absolute floor, INCLUDING minivans and pickup trucks and cargo vans, with (say) modest 2-door passenger cars having to make at least 45mpg to qualify for sale.

We have the technology. We can build them. But somehow our economic system is so screwed up with its signaling that it is possible for it to be 'too expensive' to build basic reasonable fuel-efficiency standards into cars for sale in the US market. I see COMMERCIALS touting 40mpg as, the ad clearly believes, amazingly awesomely wonderful BUY ME NOW fuel-efficiency for sedans and that's just just so divorced from actual real-world technology that I have trouble believing the ad hasn't fallen in from some alternate universe next door where climate change isn't happening and we have oceans of refined, clean oil just laying about for the taking.

There are tuning aficionados out there managing to get 78mpg out of a diesel Passat (averaged over an 8,000+mi road trip, not some freak highway-only peak). That's a Passat with no hybrid features. The base model of the car that was tuned up for the trip gets 48mpg in the EPA highway benchmarks.

My 1984 Suburban, whose carburated engine was enormous and the entire car practically made out of cast iron, could get nearly 15mpg if we drove it carefully enough. There are several brand-new minivan models out there with EPA highway estimates of 12mpg. And manufacturers are selling 'hybrids' where the electric engine is used only for momentary torque boost, and the car as a whole still only gets 30mpg!?!

Jesus wept.

Probably for excessive emotional use of interrobangs. And also a link.

Elliot Mason @404: Our car is a diesel; we get about 50 mpg in town, 60 mpg out of town. It's also got such low emission levels that we gat very low annual car tax (£30 a year).

joanne @413: I drove my mother's automatic a few times in my late teens/early 20s and hated it - it never changed gear when I wanted it to. But I think I drove one maybe four or five times before we went on thet trip to the Canadian Rockies, and it had been probably 20 years since the last time I'd driven one. So I needed coaching on things like "you have to put your foot on the brake to start the car". But it's the fact that the automatic gears change some time after my ear tells me they ought to change that's really annoying. (Or - what Charlie Stross said @ 415).

Cheryl @418: But they didn't have any manuals on offer for hire cars when we wanted one. :( And modern diesels no longer take any time to warm up.

Elliott Mason @411: I had that in reverse - I had to ask for Sprite to get what I thought of as lemonade (sorry; I don't taste a difference) - fizzy and clear. And I presume you know by now that "cider" in the UK = "hard cider" in the USA. (Okay: what's the USA difference, if any, between "apple juice" and "cider"???)

Lizzy L @429: What's the problem? Seriously? I've been doing that since my second ever driving lesson from my stepmother...

Dave B., #402: That distinction makes perfect sense to me. I learned to drive on an automatic, and when I bought a stick-shift car a few years later, I had a friend who drove one come over and give me an evening's worth of lessons, first in a parking lot and then on low-traffic residential streets. And even with that, I made stupid-beginner mistakes for a few weeks, such as being unable to get the car moving because I'd accidentally gotten it into third gear rather than first!

Technically, I can still drive a stick, but it's been 20-odd years since I did so except in emergencies. And I would really prefer not to try to regain my chops in Houston traffic, so it's likely to stay that way. Automatics remove one entire category of things one has to think about in a nasty-traffic situation, of which we have many.

Mary Aileen, #412: Back when I was buying new cars, stick-shifts were always cheaper -- the automatic-transmission package, as you note, added $1,000 or more to the price. However, that was a couple of decades ago, and things might have changed in the interim.

Another issue with stick-shifts is that there's not just one standardized pattern for the gears. 4-speed and 5-speed sometimes have odd and even gears reversed (as to which is down and which is up), and sometimes R is on the left and sometimes on the right. So learning how to drive one stick-shift car doesn't guarantee that you'll have the right reflexes for a different one.

Lila, #427: *snerk* Agreed.

Generally: I express extreme respect for anyone from GB/Australia who has the balls to try to drive a car in America. I have an Aussie friend who occasionally posts time-lapse videos of road trips, and my lizard brain absolutely cannot stop freaking out at being on the wrong side of the road. If I am ever in a place that has left-side driving, I intend to rely exclusively on public transportation.

449
Apple juice, in the US, is generally sweeter than cider, and not always filtered (that is, it can be cloudy from solids in it).

@Xopher/#437:

The tweeter in question was one of a clutch of people I've gradually been un-following. I tend to follow people in bunches. "A" follows me, I check out recent tweet history and am interested enough to follow back, then person "A" responds to or retweets "B" who I then follow, etcetera.

Most people say *something* interesting now and then. And I give them a chance.

Said clutch of people . . . well, maybe I started following them because they were batting about interesting futurology stuff, or techno-civil-rights stuff. I don't remember the exact reason.

But then it became apparent that the "not satisfied with the status quo" attitude shaded into "believes crazy shit because of anti-authoritarian streak not because of any real interest in the science." So you'll get people who are worried about fracking (yea!) but also don't believe in global warming (uh . . .). And now, anti-vaccine nuttiness. So I start to unfollow.

And you know, it just isn't worth arguing with someone who believes a sufficient degree of crazy.

Cheryl @#444:
Ah, bad phrasing on my part. "First gen" to me means the first few years, before any significant changes are made to the basic structure. IE, there's little to no difference between an '06 and an '07, but a year or two later things get different, and now they have shaped sides and such. I don't recall the marketing not calling it a minivan - I just know it was the only vehicle that met most of our criteria for a new car. All the others sat too few or got horribly worse mileage or were prohibitively expensive or were too big for my wife to be comfortable in. I'm glad you've had no trouble with your rims. All 4 of ours were bent enough to show up on the balancer at ~30K miles. And with the price difference between 16" tires and 17" tires added in (Continental Extreme Contact DWS, dang fine tires, btw), it was cheaper to buy new aftermarket rims than to get my factory rims repaired.

Elliott Mason @#447:
I hear you. I want better mpg, and I know it is doable. I was quite displeased that I could not find a minivan that got 30+ mpg. You can buy one in the UK - a diesel Mazda5. Unfortunately, I'm at the mercy of all the other new car buyers out there and how they shift the vehicle market. Most new car buyers trade up every 3-5 years, so the incentive to buy expensive fuel-saving tech is not there. The ROI on a new hybrid or diesel is around 10 years at the mileage we drive per year - and there are no hybrid or diesel minivans. As for my car - '99 Chevy Prizm manual - absolutely nothing available beats it in cost per mile, except maybe a similar vintage VW diesel, but the ROI on trading up isn't there either since I do less than 10K miles/year in this car as a commuter drone.

I want a 3-wheeler tadpole electric for commuting, 40 mile dead of winter range, but it mustn't cost more than $3K or it isn't worth it making the commuter drone non-carseat-capable.

Transmissions: I learned on an automatic* and never learned "stick."

Before my move to Oregon, I started looking for driving schools that would get me up to speed on manual transmission driving. I was looking at new cars at the time and wanted the option of a sporty Civic hatchback, which only came in manual.

After my sudden relocation, I gave that up, and got another automatic.

As it happens, knowing know how to "drive a stick" would have been helpful in my upcoming trip to Italy. I won't be able to help my sister and brother-in-law with driving rental cars. Oh well.

* My first car, a 79 Accord, was a semiautomatic . . . called an "Australian shift" for some reason. It was an automatic, but with two ranges (1 and 2, 3 and 4) that you had to manually shift between. No clutch.

P J Evans @451: Thank you for the clarification (although I prefer cloudy apple juice myself).

Lee @450: I go by "as the driver, I keep myself in the centre of the road, my passenger on the kerb side of the road. That works fine until you take your own British car across to continental Europe...

Re: "there's not just one standardized pattern for the gears. 4-speed and 5-speed sometimes have odd and even gears reversed (as to which is down and which is up)" Here in the UK, I've never met a manual transmission car (stick shift) that didn't have the standard "H" with 1 and 3 up, 2 and 4 down (=/- 5th +-6th to the right), and weighted to 3 & 4 (if you go to neutral and take you hand off the gear lever (stick) for a moment, it will put itself ready to go up to 3rd, down to 4th. Of course, going from a five-gear car to one where reverse is at top right can be disconcerting. And yes, reverse can be in all sorts of places, and you may need to press down, pull up, pull on a ring around the stick etc. to go into reverse. That can be interesting...

Lee (450): the automatic-transmission package, as you note, added $1,000 or more to the price. However, that was a couple of decades ago, and things might have changed in the interim.

My point is that they *haven't* changed. I bought a new car just last month, and automatics were definitely more expensive.

dcb @449: I would have said that the two were more or less synonymous, but P J Evans @451 makes a good point.

455
What I remember (and it's more than 10 years) is that 5th was far right up, reverse was far right down, and there was a sort of 'Y' slot so that you couldn't shift between them. You had to push toward 5th when you shifted, and from out-of-gear you pulled back as well as pushed right for reverse.

Elliott @404: I'm on my 3rd diesel car in 15 years, owing to a daily round trip commute of 120km into Ottawa. The first, a 97 Passat wagon, had an unexpectedly short life, but the 2002 Jetta wagon that replaced it lasted a very respectable 500 000km. Both were manual transmissions. The Jetta's engine was still chugging along when we replaced the car last year after 10 years of honourable service,, though the electrical system was failing in many ways and there were rust issues all over.

Owing to being a very tall family, we ended up replacing the Jetta with a 2012 Passat TDI sedan, which is a diesel that is actually built in North America. I would have preferred another wagon, but we traded a back hatch for a backseat with enough legroom that I (185cm) can sit comfortably behind my 195cm tall spouse, should need arise.

We bought an automatic this time around - manual would have cost $1000 less, but it also would have been a 3-4 month wait for it to roll off the line in Tennessee. Also, having had the experience of trying to drive a manual transmission vehicle while injured and unable to fully move my left leg, it seemed prudent to have one car in the family that requires less physical dexterity. And, the sprogs are approaching the learning-to-drive age, and IME it is easier to learn on an automatic transmission. When I learned to drive (Toronto area, 25 years ago), group driving instruction was offered exclusively on automatics. I learned to shift gears courtesy of my intrepid mother taking me out to the mall parking lot in her craptastic K-car and letting me grind away.

The diesel technology has improved in leaps and bounds. Our first winter with the 97 Passat, we were aggrieved to find that once winter really hit, we had a large paperweight in our driveway until we were able to find an after-market block heater (couldn't believe that VW didn't make one!). The Jetta only required occasional nursing during the colder months, and the new Passat had no issues at all even on the coldest days last winter. My only complaint about the new chariot is for some reason the gas tank has a regular-sized intake rather than one designed to accommodate the often-wider nozzles on diesel pumps designed to prevent people from unintentionally filling their tanks with the wrong fuel.

The biggest adjustment going from manual to automatic?: learning to keep the left foot nailed firmly to the floor so as not to stand the car on its nose by unconsciously poking the brake pedal when slowing down. After a year, I think I have successfully squelched the instinct - though now I periodically stall when driving the other household vehicle (which has a standard).

Variations In the shifting patterns: while 1-5 are in the same patterns, the location of reverse was completely different between a VW gearbox and a Toyota Gearbox. On the VW, reverse was up and to the left of 1st, on the Toyota it's right of 5th and down. Helps to keep one alert ;)

dcb @449 said of my 'lemonade'/Sprite UK problem: I had that in reverse - I had to ask for Sprite to get what I thought of as lemonade (sorry; I don't taste a difference) - fizzy and clear. And I presume you know by now that "cider" in the UK = "hard cider" in the USA. (Okay: what's the USA difference, if any, between "apple juice" and "cider"???)

Around Chicago in my experience (I am not all USians, and food terminology is very regional), if you order 'lemonade' at a restaurant what you get will at least purport to be a mixture of straight lemon juice, water, and sugar (though often it's actually made from a powdered drink mix). Often somewhat cloudy. Non-fizzy. Served on ice almost exclusively. How sweet it is depends on regional and personal preferences.

If you order a Sprite, a 7-Up, or a (generic term) lemon-lime soda, you will receive something like what's in a green can marked 'Sprite' (though it tastes slightly different than the UK version of the contents of the same-appearance can, because ours is sweetened with corn syrup).

I taste a strong difference between what comes in a Sprite can and what my husband makes by squeezing lemons and mixing them with tap water and sugar (I don't like the latter at all, for one thing). It puzzles me bizarrely that apparently the general run of restaurant-going UK audience doesn't, at least to judge by how surprised the waitstaff were at MY surprise at how varied what I got when I ordered a Sprite, was. I think I came off as something between Sally Albright and a madwoman with the way I ended up interrogating them about IS IT IN A CAN, and WHAT DOES THE CAN SAY ON IT? Is it Sprite? Is it 7-Up? WITH THE BRAND NAME ON IT? No? Ok, thanks, I won't have it then ...

If you order apple juice in a restaurant (or buy something labeled that at a grocery store), it will be made of filtered apple-squeezings (possibly condensed and rewatered before it gets to you, 'from concentrate'), and often be significantly sweeter than apple-squeezings are served in the UK. It will also, unless you're at a very veganish/natural-foods kind of restaurant, be a perfectly transparent filtered liquid with no visible solids, and often fairly pale in color. If you buy a bottle called 'cider' in a grocery store around here, it will be visibly darker and often contain sludgy solids. If you buy it at a farmer's market direct from the farmers it will also be much more interesting in flavor and not as one-dimensionally sweet -- farmer's market jugged 'cider' is exactly what I got in the UK when I ordered 'apple juice' at a restaurant. Hard cider is sometimes explicitly called that in big letters, but usually you can tell it from the nonalcoholic kind in the store because hard cider comes in little brown beer bottles and nonalcoholic apple-squeezings come in big plastic juice jugs.

And then there's the difference between the contents of a plain, cheap-brand jar marked 'Peanut Butter' in the UK and the US ...

dcb, #455: IIRC, my first stick-shift car was a 4-speed with 1 and 3 down, 2 and 4 up, and R all the way to the left and down (and you had to put in some extra effort to get the stick to go over there). To this day, patterns with the odd gears on top feel strange and unintuitive to me, because of the years I spent where "shift up" meant literally UP. And R on the right is just Wrong, because to the right is where the higher gears are.

Mary Aileen, #456: Okay, something strange is going on here. Elliott says that automatics cost less, you and I (and several other people) agree that they cost more. I'm sure Elliott isn't making this up, so perhaps something is weird in Chicago?

David G., #457: Having grown up in cider-mill country, to me the difference is specifically between filtered (apple juice) and unfiltered (cider). Yes, sometimes a jar you can see thru will say "cider" on the label, but it's not.

Also, I am SO spoiled by the flavor of fresh-pressed cider that I can hardly deal with any of the commercial varieties. I can taste the Miracles of Modern Chemistry in them.

Interesting side-note: my partner is fond of (hard) cider, and the other day he handed me a Stella Artois cider to try because he thought it was non-alcoholic. I took one sip and said, "No, this has alcohol in it." It did, but only about 4%, and I think in a pinch I could have drunk it. At least it wasn't completely nasty, though it still left that weird alcohol taste in the back of my throat.

Elliot Mason, I'm curious -- what is the difference? I've never eaten peanut butter in the UK.

Elliott, #461: I am totally with you on "lemonade" and "Sprite" being two entirely different things. Lemonade is (1) not carbonated, (2) not colorless, and (3) not made with "artificial lemon-lime flavor". I wonder if the brand-name specificity of the term has gotten rubbed off in GB, similarly to the way "Coke" can refer to any flavor of soft drink in parts of the southern US.*

You should also be careful in Mexico (or when buying drinks bottled there), because they do not distinguish between lemon and lime flavors -- both are "limon".

* Most places here, if you order a Coke you'll get a cola-flavored soft drink, although it may not be the Coca-Cola brand specifically. In parts of the Deep South, you order a Coke and they ask you "What kind?" -- and by that, they mean, do you want cola or lemon-lime or Dr. Pepper or root beer or what?

Lizzy L @463: If you're familiar with US pb, ordinary UK pb is comparable to what we think of as the all-natural expensive health-food-store crunchy stuff: stick a bunch of peanuts in a pureeing machine, catch what comes out, and put it in a jar. You have to stir it before you eat it to remix in the oils. It usually has one ingredient on the label: peanuts.

If you're only familiar with UK pb, it's a little harder to describe the American version. It's more spreadable and not as stiff (think whipped butter/marg compared to ordinary), a little lighter in color, and distinctly sweeter in flavor, because it contains (in addition to peanuts) corn syrup and usually stabilizers, and sometimes additional fats. It does not separate when left on the shelf. US pb comes in 'chunky' (which has visible peanut chunks) and 'smooth' (entirely completely smooth throughout). Sometimes there is also 'extra chunky,' which has a lower proportion of smooth stuff per chunk volume.

C. Wingate: I don't know about the blowtorch, but I have stories from my dad and his trucking buddies about lighting fires under the engine block when for some reason it had stopped while they were sleeping in the back of the cab. (Yes, I was shocked that they kept the engine running all night. I was even more shocked when they told me what they had to do if they didn't.)

Something about Regina, and November, and it's not going to get up to -10 again for three months.
I'm told that's better now, too (not the weather, but the engines and the engine assistances).

461
Martinelli's cider has no sludge in it. Their sparkling cider is all over the place in December - it's fizzy and non-alcoholic, so it's work-safe. (Also it's pretty tasty.) They have other fruit juices, too.

Elliot Mason, thanks. Around my neighborhood, Trader Joe's sells the good pb for a reasonable price. I usually toggle back and forth between the TJs stuff and one of the standard brands which does not contain corn syrup. Creamy, please.

My uncle used to drive a Ford van with a diesel engine, but he put the engine in it himself.

Linkmeister at # 382, I skipped the mule ride. The souvenir shops had bumper stickers saying "I'd Rather Be Riding a Mule on Moloka'i." I looked in vain for one that said "I'd Rather Be on Moloka'i Doing Anything But Riding a Mule."

HLN: Aspiring author collects near-total refund from iUniverse. Local man's friend says the $150 they kept was a fair price for the advice on unflattering things written about people who are not all dead yet.

I read a story quite a while ago, that was written quite a while ago, about a "tech" thing that happens and everyone in the world forgets the last six months. It has nothing whatever to do with Robert Sawyer's work. I think it was a Golden Age story but I could be wrong. Anyone know what story it is? Elements I remember are that the story starts with our hero "waking up" on an airplane, that some evil scientist's mind ray caused it, and in the end it turns out he married his GF during the "blank" time.

Drop me a note at Ordover@aol.com if this rings a bell.

With regard to manual transmissions and motorcycles, knowing how to shift a car made it MUCH easier to learn how (and when!) to shift a motorcycle. (Although a few years ago, after one particularly balmy and dry summer during which my husband rode his motorcycle to work every day for two months, I reminded him the first cold and rainy September day "accelerate with your foot; clutch with your other foot, shift with your hand.")

My motocycle has four speeds. On the highway, I sometimes find myself trying to shift to a (nonexistent) fifth gear....

Still, could be worse. My husband told me his first bike (I can't remember offhand the make or model; it was a pretty generic UJM*) that had what he described as a "circular clutch"; the shift pattern for most motorcycles is "down one up four" (or three, in my case) -- press down for first gear, up (hard) for second (up lightly is neutral, which is between first and second); up again for third, up again for fourth, up again for fifth if you have it, up again for sixth if you have it. If you're out of gears, kicking it up again does nothing.

In a circular gear pattern, it goes (if memory serves) neutral, up for first, up for second, up for third, up for fourth, up for fifth, up for neutral, up for first....

You *really* didn't want to lose count of the gear you were in.

Fortunately, they stopped making transmissions like that many many years ago.

*Universal Japanese Machine -- slang for the cookie-cutter-identical 1960s Japanese-made bikes. Full disclosure; we both ride Hondas; we have nothing against Japanese bikes.

460
I've never driven a VW - my brother learned to drive on one, and so he's pretty much stayed with them (but last time he bought a car, he got a Toyota). I understand he had a hard time taking his driver's test in a VW truck: like the bus and the van, you're sitting right over the front wheels, so the turns look a lot wider from inside than they actually are.

I can drive stick in theory, but in practice, it takes me long enough to stop stalling that it's not usually worth the trouble. I do like it, though I don't do Charlie's higher-level driving. I just like shifting into third or fourth gear and how good it feels. Anything else, I'm on an automatic because I haven't found a need for the higher-level driving.

Elliott Mason, I'm with you on mileage. It is ridiculous that it hasn't changed in years. My Buick got somewhat more than 26 mpg driving back from Pittsburgh this week-- the average started at 21 and was up to 26 by the end of the round trip-- and while it's okay, I guess, for an older car that had a lot of stuff in it on the trip out, it was also okay, I guess, for the previous Buick, which was seven years older.

There should be progress in those seven years. There should be progress in the seven years since.

Driving data point:

As USA-in who learned to drive in public school, they taught most of us with automatics. There was one manual transmission car in the driver ed fleet, but since I didn't have one to practice with at home, I never asked how to try it out. It's a skill I wish I acquired, especially after car shopping, but as noted upthread, it seems fairly impractical for LA city driving.

As for the lack of improved fuel efficiency over the years, I wonder how much has to do with the size of the vehicle. When we bought our cars last year my roommate wanted the same make/model that she was trading in. Her '98 Civic coupe was was tiny compared to the 2012 she bought. One of the reasons I picked the Fit is because it drove the most like her '98 - it has a similar wheelbase and response. We had originally planned to "swap" when she needed to haul stuff, but I'm really uncomfortable with the size of that Civic, which is technically a "compact". It feels like I'm driving a boat. The increase in size was explained to me as "extra safety features". So I guess I should feel more secure. But the bulky a-pillar has obscured my vision more than once, so I am more likely to have to make use of the airbag it conceals.

476
Stick isn't actually more of a problem in traffic - I've done most of my driving in LA, so I can say that. You may be in first second or or neutral most of the time in a traffic jam, but changing gears doesn't take that long.
Stop-and-go is more of a nuisance in the Prius, because the rechargeables get a lot more use and tend to drain. I try to avoid the places where it's usually a problem.

Here in New Zealand, it is now common for automatics to have an effective manual override. Typically you move the stick (while it is in 'D') to the right (i.e. towards the driver), and it will then change gears when instructed - push forward to go up a gear, back to go down. I only rarely use this feature myself (while driving cars other than my own manual), but it is handy when doing stuff like hill driving.
I get the impression from comments from manual drivers above that this feature is not available, or not used much for whatever reason?

We had a 6-speed diesel (manual) rental in France recently, automatics being basically unavailable. It was quite a sporty Alfa, with a fairly twitchy clutch, so the fast auto-start-from-stop feature was appreciated (especially after stalling when entering the roundabout because you tried to move off in 3rd...)

Back when i was learning to drive, manual transmissions were still common enough to be "standard," with automatics being the more expensive option.I learned to drive on a Rambler with push-button(s) automatic transmission. That's them, the five buttons to the left of the steering wheel. I understand push buttons are back with some 2013 Lincolns. I also got to practice on an automatic with steering column mounted stick. Ken deMaife taught me to drive a manual, and a kindly US Army sergeant in Germany taught me to double clutch. Floor mounted automatics still get me to step on the non-existent clutch.

I never had a problem driving on the "wrong" side of the road in Ireland, but I rented an automatic. One less thing to worry about. Those roads are scary.

Maybe it was the link to the Rambler, maybe it was strange spacing or punctuation. I hope it wasn't sp*mmy vocabulary. I know it's early for breakfast, but I could make Your Lownesses some coffee, French toast and bacon.

I've had a license for more than a quarter-century, but still don't own a car. This means I almost always drive automatics.

Zipcars and rentals in the US are almost universally automatic (though "semi-automatics" that also have a clutchless shifting mode are becoming more common); the (few) times I rented a car in the UK I wasn't going to combine shifting with the side-of-road swap so I paid the significant extra charge to get an automatic there too.

I don't borrow manual-transmission cars often enough to keep my stick driving good enough to trust, especially in Boston.

There's also the little issue of how I learned to drive a stick....

The summer I was going to get my license, I was visiting my grandparents in Arizona. They had three cars between them: Grandpa's Cadillac (automatic), Grandma's Chrysler (also automatic), and one stick shift car. Since I was supposed to be learning stick, it was Hobson's choice for which car I was going to use for that part of my family driving lessons.

The third car was a Jaguar E-Type, a '67 IIRC...which made for a very exciting experience (especially on straight flat desert roads) that doesn't translate well into more boring manual transmissions like you might find in a family hatchback. :-)

On manual transmissions: Motor Trend compiled a list of manual transmission cars available in the US for 2011. There are a lot more than I thought there'd be.

Elliott Mason @461: Just to make it clear, I meant, when I was in North America for the first time, back in the late 70s, I had to order Sprite because what we call "lemonade" is clear and fizzy and Sprite was the nearest thing I could get, even if it didn't taste quite the same. We can also buy "old fashioned lemonade" which is cloudy - but still carbonated, possibly a bit less sweet, but it's much less common and won't be available in most restaurants, fast-food or otherwise. Home-made lemonade (what seems to be standard for what you get if you ask for "lemonade" in the USA) just isn't common over here.

Elliott Mason @465: Thank you for the warning regarding American PB. UK varieties do vary, but I tend to go for the "Whole Earth" stuff - although even that has a bit of palm oil and sea salt added (95% peanuts). Must look for a "100% peanuts" brand

nerdycellist @ 476: I think much of the lack of improvement in mpg in the USA is the oil lobby (sell more oil! Don't worry about it running out!)and low government regulation. Here, we have high fuel prices (as mentioned by Charlie Stross earlier) and a big push to reduce car emissions - and a major way to reduce emissions is to increase the mpg. High mpg was one of the major criteria on our list when looking for a new car three years ago (the others were: fit into the garage; be comfortable for me to drive (5 ft 2) AND for my husband (6ft 5); have reasonable boot (trunk) space - and fit our price range). We ended up with a model which had just come out, a Kia Venga 1.4 litre diesel which has some Tardis-like properties - feels really roomy inside, but still fits into our (narrow) garage. Official fuel consumption is 54.3 mpg urban, 70.6 mpg extra-urban, 62.8 mpg combined. We don't get that, but not too far off (it's sitting at 58.5 mpg at the moment, and that's been mainly light town driving). There were a couple of other possibles which got better mpg but they didn't have the head & leg room. Of course, our cars tend to be a lot smaller than American cars, which makes a difference.

We drove across country from LA to DC in a 62 Valiant with that pushbutton transmission.

My first car (Ford Falcon) had a manual transmission, 3-speed on the column. The next one was an MG, 4-speed on the floor. Then came a Triumph, also 4-speed on the floor. Then a Thunderbird automatic, a Geo automatic and now a Mini automatic. I got the latter used or I'd have hunted up a car with a stick.

I was looking at the Honda Fit last spring; while the price for one with a manual transmission was cheaper, the delay in getting one from Japan was several weeks to several months. I miss driving sticks, blast it.

Ellen @460 -- on my husband's VW (2006?) Golf, the gearbox is as you describe for the VW. But on my 1998 VW Passat, it's as you describe the Toyota. Alertness indeed!

I learned to drive a stick, at a time when the stick was on the steering wheel. Driver's ed was with automatics, though, and then our car was totaled and our next cars were automatics for years. When we came to Germany, I had a tiny bit of muscle memory for shifting gears left, but it didn't help a whole lot -- I also had to learn to use that newfangled 4-on-the-floor transmission ;-)

Still, I'm a total convert to manuals. Driving an automatic isn't a problem, exactly, but driving a manual -feels- better.

Don't forget that US mpg uses a different gallon than in the UK (where a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter), so dcb's 58.5 mpg is only 46.8 in the US.

I learned on a stick as well, though they're increasingly hard to get in the US (though still cheaper than automatics, at least on the kinds of cars we buy).

The Prius we got last year doesn't shift gears at all, once it's in motion. From what I understand, it simply varies the relative power input from the electric motor and the gasoline engine. So you're effectively always driving in high gear, but still get acceptable torque at low speeds from the electric motor. You can't burn rubber from a dead stop, but that's just fine with me.

In return, you get much better gas mileage. Although it's nearly as roomy as the Accord it replaced, it uses less than half the gas. (The regenerative braking is a big help here too.) Because of where we live, we do a lot of city driving and generally could only average about 20 mpg overall with the Honda, whereas we do better than 44 with the Prius. And that's with a lot of short trips that tend to drag the average down-- longer trips are often well over 50mpg.

This is likely to be the car our kids learn on when they reach driving age. I suspect they might find manuals even stranger than do older drivers who learned on automatics.

Niall McAuley @ 486: yes, needs converting; for 58.5 mpg (UK) I make it 48.7 mpg for US gallons (US gallon = 0.8327 UK gallons, according to a couple of conversion sites online) - with official figures then translating to 43.2 mpg urban, 58.8 mpg extra-urban, 52.3 combined. That's still a lot higher than the 26 mpg given by Diatryma @475. My stepmother's car officially averages about 80 mpg UK extra-urban (or about 67 mpg US).

My car offers me instantaneous (too distracting, I find) or average mpg on my dashboard, which I find is great encouragement to both smooth driving and keeping below the speed limit, as you get instant feedback on how your driving affects your fuel consumption.

dcb @488: I find the instantaneous MPG figure handy if I'm trying to hypermile on long-haul motorway trips with little traffic to demand my attention -- keeps me engaged with the process of driving, trains me in a good habit. But it's way too distracting if there are other vehicles about so it doesn't get used very often.

(Trick when driving through hilly/mountainous terrain: accelerate on downhill slopes, drift in neutral or maintain speed in highest gear on uphill slopes. It's not terribly workable if the uphill stretches are so long that you lose lots of speed, but for much of the UK that's not the case and you can really cut your fuel consumption by accepting some variation in speed.)

Apropos of nothing: Someone on Minecraft reddit just had an amusing misreading... perhaps it will chutney somebody.

pf-rpanderson: I think it has a more parabolic shape to the velocity.

Eternal_Density: I misread that as "parabolic sheep". As in spherical cows and parabolic sheep...

Apparently innocuous comment, but mentioned a social site.

Another significant factor in the low fuel mileage of US cars is our emissions regulations. The most efficient way to burn fuel is at high pressure, with plenty of air; however, that creates nitrogen oxides. Ozone regulation means NOx is very strictly regulated in US cars. (This is a major reason for the low numbers of diesels in the US.)

Cummins paid a huge fine in the late 1990's for designing engines that ran efficiently on the road, and less efficiently (to pass NOx rules) under test conditions.

And don't forget that nowadays many crash tests are done with an SUV-sized thing as the 'aggressor'/car-you're-not-testing ... so tiny hatchbacks have to be able to protect the passenger compartment while being hit by a high bumper with that much mass behind it.

The answer is to put fewer SUVs on the road (and make them lighter and LESS DANGEROUS TO OTHER CARS), not to turn everything on the street into low-mileage tanks to withstand impacts from them! Just because semis exist and your car might be struck by one doesn't mean every single car sold in the US should be primarily designed to survive being semi-stomped.

But "Americans don't WANT small cars," we're told again and again, by car companies that seldom put nice small cars on the market at all ... so when people fail to buy not-nice cars, it's told off as not wanting smallness. Kind of how "woman movies" don't make any money, except those recurring flukes that make millions but we can't bet on lightning striking so let's just write all the women out of the script again. Ptui.

I think the issue with manual vs. automatic transmission on US cars, or rather, cars made and sold in the US by the Big Three Detroit manufacturers, is that which one costs more depends on which one is designated as standard equipment for that model. If you look at Linkmeister's list, there's only one Buick there; the Buick LaCrosse comes with an automatic as standard equipment, per the Buick website (Buick.com, were you expecting it to be something else?).

Any type of equipment which is not standard will cost more. I suspect GM looked at the sort of people who were going to shell out the bucks for their higher-end marks and models and concluded that most likely Buick and Cadillac purchasers were going to want automatics. You'll notice that Chevrolet, the other GM mark, has several with manuals as standard, which fits the profile for people who buy Chevies--they're supposedly economical cars, or sporty cars preferred by younger drivers.

If you've checked out the rest of Linkmeister's list, you noticed that most of the other cars on it, made in the US or not, were from foreign-based manufacturers. Although there's still a wide range of cars with manual transmission available in the US, most aren't made by the traditional Detroit manufacturers, whether they were made in the US or imported.

Oh, I have no doubt that the oil lobby, and the sheer number of congress people on both sides of the aisle who make money from oil has something to do with the lack of interest these car companies have on giving us fuel efficient models. For heaven's sake, they're already making them in other markets - we're not asking for anything new! The BS about "Americans don't want smaller cars" is nonsense. America is a big place. Some areas want bigger cars. Others, like mine, are happy with tiny ones. There are SUVs all over the place here, but fewer than there were when we moved here a decade ago. And lots and lots of Smart, Mini, Versa, Fit, Accent, Fiesta and Yaris drivers - not to mention scooters and bikes.

That Kia Venga looks remarkably similar to the Fit. I agree with the Tardis properties, but I'd kill for the MPG you're getting. My car is strictly commuter for errands and the 12 mile round trip to and from work. Due to the terrain and the traffic, I average about 27 mpg. My roommate can eke out one or two MPG better since she drives more highway and it averages out. Still nothing close to the window sticker, but isn't that the origin of YMMV.

It will surprise no one here to hear that TN Coates' latest reflections on French, Frederick Douglas, and the finitude of life are fascinating.

On British sodas, Sprite and lemonade --

Can anyone tell me why most British carbonated soft drinks have both sugar and saccharine? I can taste the artificial sweetener in them, and I don't like it. The last time I was in the UK, I had a difficult time finding ones I could drink -- until I discovered that ginger ales do not have added artificial sweetener. This is a cultural difference that I just don't understand. And this is an oldish memory (more than 10 years ago) so I don't know if it's still the case.

C. Wingate, #397:

Oh, dear.

Stephen King writes:

I'll never forget the botched opening lines of A. E. Van Vogt -- a German science fiction writer, long dead, who liked to effuse a little bit.

For values of "German" including "born in Edenburg, Manitoba." (He did speak German at home as a child.)

His book Slan was actually the basis of the Alien films -- they basically stole them to do that, and ended up paying his estate some money -- but he was just a terrible, terrible writer.

Could Mr. King be thinking of "Black Destroyer" or the fix-up that incorporates it, Voyage of the Space Beagle?

Well, one doesn't read Stephen King in search of historical accuracy, I suppose. For advice on writing, sure.

I can't deny that Van Vogt was a terrible, terrible writer, but it has been estimated that he was the fifth most popular author ever to appear in Astounding, which invites consideration of why some writers can be both terrible and popular.

Perfect summary of US news media.

Yeah, Slan hasn't got a thing to do with the Aliens films, save for the fact that both stories have human beings in them.

Does anyone here know their way around Applescript and/or Automator for OS X? I get a particular email via Mail.app every day, same subject line every day, same-named file attachment every day. I'd like for that attachment to get auto-saved into the same directory every day without me having to do it manually. Preferably this would also nuke the previous day's version of that file, but that would just be an optional fine point.

You'd think this would be simple. But googling around yields a lot of scripts that don't quite do this -- either they implement much more complicated schemes involving nested folders that archive multiple file versions, or they don't work under Mountain Lion because of the sandboxing that came in with 10.8.

I know how to set up Mail.app rules, and I get that one can use rules to zero in on a particular email and then run an Applescript on it. But achieving the script itself has eluded me.

Note that I am not a programmer of any sort, just someone who can follow reasonably intricate directions and who isn't frightened by the idea of opening up the hood. Also note that I'm well aware that my life would benefit from learning some basic coding skills, so there's no need to evangelize me on that general principle, or recommend beginner's texts.