I might just go and see the second part of The Hobbit in the cinema, but I cannot escape the sensation that it has been horribly padded out.

Almost definitely. The first one certainly was, and regrettably so. (Radagast, sigh.)

I am reasonably certain I will see enough of The Hobbit on Tumblr to satisfy all my desire to see it. And if not there is always the wiki synopsis. Really, that is what I do to keep up with a lot of sci-fi culture these days. I want to get the jokes but the movie or show would just take too much time.

day late-breaking
nip of wind
dusk quick-falling
foliage thinned

naked branches
stripped of leaves
hanging over
hanging eaves

standing out
against the sky
tell me winter
-time is nigh

"Nothing gold can stay"?

Why, what a thing to say!
No metal is less base
nor better holds its place.
This ring upon my finger
has lingered and will linger.
In Greece, it was a stater,
a noble some years later.
The ring you wear for me
was Scythian filigree.
What laid these golden ova?
Some ancient supernova.
These rings have kept us whole
through forty winter's toll.
This sentiment is truer:
both love and gold endure.

Pendrift @4:

Oh, now, that is...wow. Yeah. That works.

oldster @5:

Now, that just makes me grin. Good one.

When it was announced The Hobbit was going to be a trilogy of movies I was sure it was going to be excessively padded. Seeing the first part, it's not so much a movie of the Hobbit as a prequel to the LotR movie trilogy using the Hobbit as most of its source material. (And prequelitis is perhaps worse than sequelitis.)
But we still have our tickets booked for part two (first showing locally is a family member's birthday).

I ended up watching the first part on DVD, with my brother, not long after my father died. And there was some pretty blatant show-off-the-3D in there, not even story-telling.

There are scenes in LotR, such as the Ring dropping, which would work well in 3D, and others (Gandalf in Bag End) which would be difficult. But, while there is a certain amount of gosh-wow-what-a-place all through, it doesn't drag down the story to a snail's pace.

The Hobbit has an excess of equivalents to the tottering stairway of Khazad Dum. And they're not as restrained.

Still, this does have Stephen Fry, and watching one in 3D in a cinema might be worth doing. Past experience suggests that PJ will get silly over the Battle of the Five Armies. Despite the Ride of the Rohirrim he still did the Elf and the Heffalump.

Dave Bell@9: the Elf and the Heffalump

...went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat...

Sorry, I think the rhythm just caught something there.

Thinking of the Hobbit films as very impressive fanvids works well for my enjoyment of the first and my anticipation of the second. It gets me past all the should-have-beens and should-have-dones.

Also, thanks to abi, Pendrift, and oldster: the verses together made a nice start to my online day.

I must go down to the Cineplex, for the Hobbit II is nigh;
And all I ask is a tall tale and a friend to see it by.
And a real kick from a dwarf's song, and a white beard shaking
on a Gray Mage with a gray face as a dark dawn's breaking.

I must go down to the Cineplex, for the call of the running joke
of a hobbit's fears and a hobbit's luck, and a ring not yet bespoke;
And all I ask is a palantir that is used for scrying,
and enough left of the Tolkein text to keep fans from crying.

I must go down to the Cineplex, to see Smeagol brought to life,
To see Jackson's way cutting plots away with CG-crafted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a hobbit lover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long film's over.

Tolkien. Tolkien. Tolkien. Tolkien. Tolkien. Tolkien. mea culpa.

As my second daughter said, "I can't wait to see the fan-edit where they cut out all the parts that weren't in the book and make one tight movie."

There is always An Unexpected Parody, which seemed a bit overdone, until I saw the movie.

Brother Guy, applause.

At first in palest green
The dawn of spring is seen
Unfurls to summer's leaf
Then autumn's golden sheaf
At turn of year the chill
And dark can sap the will
But stillness can be zen
Thus we begin again

Samuel Delany has been named one of SF's Grand Masters.

Speaking of the Hobbit... We have a sandwich place here called Baggin's. No, it's not located near a Seven Elven store.

Partway along the path that all must tread
wrong turning taken in the dusk and muck
no hope to find the proper road ahead,

so easy then to say that truth had fled
give up on life, along with all my luck,
partway along the path that all must tread.

While many voices echo, no words said
could quite convey how badly one was stuck,
no hope to find the proper road ahead

darkness around, the human world abed,
so easy then the mortal form to shuck
partway along the path that all must tread

where none could scream from simple weight of dread,
no light could come from passing car or truck
no hope to find the proper road ahead;

the only message was "you must fall dead,
the world goes on; no one will give a fuck."
Partway along the path that all must tread
no hope to find the proper road ahead.

I have no seasonal poetry to offer. I wish that I could show you all a sweatshirt I painted - the wheel of the year as a dogwood tree in each season, with the roots forming a Celtic knot in the center.

I'll go see the second part of The Hobbit in a theater if I can find it shown in 2D. 3D would likely make me dizzy. Yes, it will be padded, but I expect there will be moments that I'll love.

Brother Guy, that's brilliant!

I wish I could say that I was looking forward to The Hobbit, but I think Peter Jackson failed to get the spirit of this one exactly wrong in much the same way that he got the spirit of LotR right.

I'm hoping it won't be too bad, but I'll see it anyway. :)

Meanwhile: girlfriends who can cook. That is all.

I'm hoping it won't be too bad, but I'll see it anyway. :)

Meanwhile: girlfriends who can cook. That is all.

David Weingart @21, that's pretty much exactly what I've been saying. I think PJ is using the Hobbit to work out his frustration at never getting to make the Filmarillion (as it were).

To be fair, The Hobbit as written is unfilmable, and as a Piece Of Filmic Tolkienian Lore I have been mostly fond of this so far, but I, like Lila@14's daughter, would like to see a cut-down version that fills one movie and is Just The Story.

I wonder if people will be able to make the same joke with "Smaug" that they did with Part One - that, when Gandalf says "Run!", you know you can step away for at least 5 minutes, go to the bathroom, refill you soft-drink cup, come back and you won't have missed anything.

At least, that doesn't happen whe the Doctor says "Run!"

while i like po
etry
and adore the rhythms and meters hereinthis
thready
ness
i
(alas and alack) have
neither the mindset (right...)
nor the time
(...now)
to contribute to this
shared joy
of bringing lightness
into
the
gathering
dark

butplease
keep hanging lanterns filled with hope

andi
will
add
my
goldness
to the growing gloom
even
tu
ally

Bassoon Concerto in B Flat, K. 191. "[T]he most standard piece in the entire bassoon repertory." (No bassoon jokes, please; this is Mozart.)

While I enjoyed the LOTR movies, I've had zero desire to see the Hobbit films. Part of that was (I think) that Middle-Earth had been sufficiently explored in Peter Jackson's earlier films, and part because I never read any of the source material.

I think familiarity is an ever present issue with film franchises. How many times can you plow the same ground?

I'll go to the new Hobbit, but mostly as an animated John Howe and Alan Lee show rather than 8 chapters of the book or whatever (which would be, what, 90 minutes worth?)

The LOTR movies were an entertaining, quite passable adaptation. A sort of Comics Illustrated version of the books. Faithfulness to the books aside, a quite astonishing feat, those films.

Hobbit I made me distrust Jackson, and the trailers for Hobbit II make me wonder if I should despising him.

Really. Crude and abridged as it was, Hanna-Barbara's goofy cartoon was a better adaptation than what we've seen of Jackson's.

I might see Hobbit II at the super-bargain early bird matinee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerihew

Robert Frost
kept getting lost.
A pious poet laureate,
he blessed himself before he et.

Oldster #31:

My own effort in that vein:

Thomas Carlyle
was unspeakably vile.
He felt it was his duty
to mar with toil all beauty.

Fragano #31--

Excellent--I *do* like a good Clerihew.

Bilbo Baggins
defrauded dragons.
Tramping barefoot through a blizzard,
he had harsh words for a wizard.

"Sir Peter Robert Jackson," anyone?

Theophylact, #27: That's a lovely concerto! Having been re-reading Digger (because I just got my omnibus edition), I find myself thinking of it as the sort of music wombats would enjoy. The posting notes provide a link to an archive site with free mp3 downloads, which might interest some other folks as well.

Bringing down the tone considerably, since this has digressed into Hobbitry, Nick spent some time over the weekend wandering the house screeching,

Smaugdor was a man!
Smaugdor was a dragon man!
Or maybe he was just a dragon!

He claims he never got as far as burninating the countryside, but I'm skeptical.

WRT The Hobbit: In the trailers, I'm afraid the Dwarves always parse to me as Klingons.

I plan on waiting until all three are out on DVD, and watching them in a binge. I figure I can finish a couple of sculptures, thereby. And that way I can scan past the boring bits.

Bach's Crab Canon on a Moebius strip.

I would say something intelligent and insightful about this, but I'm still too busy squeeing.

"Sir Peter Robert Jackson"
Filming hobbits?
Forego the crack, son!

Abi -- that's been one of my favorite poems for years. Thanks for the visit.

I can't post my seasonal poem because it's too long.

Of course we'll go see the Hobbit. And complain mightily about everything wrong with it.
MKK

Stefan Jones @ 30... Wasn't it Rankin-Bass?

@Serge: YES! Rankin-Bass.

I shudder to think of what Hanna-Barbara would do to Tolkien.

Lee @34: Digger omnibus! I love omnibus editions. Time to upgrade and pass on my individual volumes to someone else who will appreciate them.

Hobbits! Meet the Hobbits!
They're a modern Middle-Earth family
From the old Town
On the green Shire
They're a page right out of Fantasy!

One of these days, I'll have to look for "Lord of the G-strings". Mike Ford had given a decent rating to its throbbit quest.

An article about the English language as it's used in Death Metal:

Normal English: “Commuting to work”

Death Metal English: “TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT”

http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2013/11/death-metal-english/

Victoria, 26: Bravo!

The first Hobbit movie was a mess of a Tolkien movie but had some terrific Tolkien scenes. I'll go see more on that basis alone.

Also, of course, I am a junkie for visual spectacle. It does not cover all sins -- but I can ignore a lot of sins for a good architecture panorama.

TexAnne @ 46

Thanks.

(and now I've got this image in my head of someone from the Black Turtleneck Society* half drunk and doing a spastic head-banger routine while shouting "free verse!" Horned hand gesture optional.)

My head is in a very strange place right now.

* something a grad student who wrote poetry called poetry readings while I was an undergrad in college.

You all will be pleased to know that I earwormed myself with #34 while inflicting it on you all.

For a Chicago winter, today's weather is rather disturbingly Pacific-Northwest-like: 50s and so humid there's a fog hanging in the air that feels like breathing in a steamy post-shower bathroom. It's about a breath from being falling fog, and I've NEVER encountered that outside the Pacific Northwest before!

(Of course I'm taking advantage of the chance to walk around outside with no coat on, I'm weirded out, not careless)

My fave this-end-of-seasons poem is Cat Faber's "Jack Frost" (which also has a tune):

I garb the mourners for summer's demise,
I am the least of the faery
I am the trickster more clever than wise;
Untutored, unfettered, unwary.
I am the leaf-painter, sometimes I deign
To make lace that will melt in the morning.
I herald a harvest of blessing and bane,
A promise I bring, and a warning--

Life is a carousel, laden with mirth;
Reach for the ring as it passes!
Harvest time's bounty turns swiftly to dearth;
Fill up your bowls and your glasses.
The leaves they are burning in colors so rare;
The wind picks the brighest for wearing,
But winter she dances with stars in her hair,
Turned-away, cold, and uncaring.

Summer was hot, it was golden and bright,
But death there can be no denying.
Make your own warmth now, and make your own light,
For the cold of the winter comes crying.
The dead who forsook us are gathering near,
As Hallow's eve opens the portal;
The wind walks beside you to breathe in your ear,
"Remember, O man, you are mortal."

It appears to not be on YouTube; as it is one of the few things I can kinda accompany myself on guitar (and the guitar bits are essential, IMHO, to the harmonic structure of the tune) I might have to video myself and post it.

me for the ee cummings,

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't:blow death to was)
-all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live

Lila @14, "the fan-edit where they cut out all the parts that weren't in the book"
what a wonderful idea - a sort of reverse director's cut. I'd buy that.

Alan @8, agreed - I became reconciled to the bombastry and gloomy prefiguring, by thinking of it as prequel to LOTR rather than The Hobbit as such. It's still mostly fun, and I loved the LOTR movies so much it's a pleasure to be back in that world. Our Scout troop is having a LOTR marathon to alleviate the depths of winter..

Elliott Mason @50: For a Chicago winter, today's weather

The weather scheduled for Chicago seems to have been delivered to Boulder, instead. We're currently at 8.8°F. Overnight low predicted to be -6°F.

Thank you.

Not.

We need a cold winter in New Jersey.

This is because the bark beetles have been migrating north and destroying the pine forests here. If it gets to -8F, they die.

That hasn't happened in NJ since 1997. Not a single night when it got to -8. To a transplanted Michigander like me, that barely qualifies as winter at all.

Xopher (54): Transplanted Atlantans like me, however, are grateful. (Long Island, New Jersey--close enough)

Is one night at -8F enough to kill the bark beetles? I could live with that.

Oldster, I admire anyone who can use supernova and stater in rhymes.

I'll be seeing Hobbit 2 regardless of reviews or trailers (none seen yet). I just hope Jackson didn't remove Beorn.

Elliot--

Ah, that's where our expected weather went.

The last few days have been clear and bright, with lows a little below freezing and highs a little above. I don't exactly like wearing long underwear, but there's something comforting about the familiar: having lived almost my entire life in the northeast, the last few days are what I expect of December, even though I know I don't live there now.

Mary Aileen 55: That was my understanding from the report I heard. But: science, journalism :: oil, water. So I'm not sure.

Vicki @57: The last few days have been clear and bright, with lows a little below freezing and highs a little above.

Oh, so you've got our weather, then. (Musta been a system crash in the routing center.)

As Memory Serves, it rarely got below 0 F on Long Island. Coldest I've ever experienced was -5 F, in the Adirondacks.

Jersey might have to put up with pine beetles. :-(

It hit -5 in Atlanta at least once while I still lived there (late '70s, I think). It doesn't normally get below the mid-20s, though, and that not for long.

Xopher: I feel for you. We've had a string of mild winters here that have failed to knock back the flea and mosquito populations. Ugggggh.

Allan Beatty @56--

Thank you! I don't write poetry, but something about Making Light occasionally makes me want to give it a try.

All that is gold does not wither:
Though Goldengrove's leaves be lost,
The force through the fuse drives them hither
From deep roots unmentioned by Frost.

(with apologies to Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and anyone who happens to read this)

Q. Pheevr: BRAVO/A!

I just realized I have a part-written song that might be apposite to this seasonality jazz. Herewith, the first verse and chorus (which is all I have).

There are songs of winter's beauty;
Jingle bells and country joys.
In the city, snow brings duty.
We get out tools instead of toys.
I go out and shovel sidewalks,
Wade to work through knee-deep slush:
No, I've never been on a snowy sleighride.
But who cares? I'm in no great rush.

Oh, city winters
When the streets are white with salt and not with snow.
Oh, city winters;
Though the wind bites deep, I know I'll never go.

That much came to me, complete with tune, fairly quickly, over a decade ago, and I still haven't managed to verse it more lengthily. Someday, perhaps. I'm kind of pleased with it, because it's still the first and only time I've managed to write a song whose syllables don't March. A. Long. A. Brup. Tly. With. Ev. Ry. Note. Of. Mel. O. Dy ... not that that feature's clear in plaintext, but whatever. :->

abi @ 0: do you know Susan Cooper's "The Shortest Day"? It's all over the net, but I just found her reading it; IMO Lurtsema's reading was better, but he was a performer and there's something special about the author reading her own work.
It has been interesting seeing the Frost and your pictures after singing a set of short Estonian poems about Fall; Torvis has some very effective settings.

David Weingert @ 21, et al: I reread The Hobbit (for the first time in ~40 years) when the first movie was coming out -- and was dismayed I hadn't remembered how silly chunks of it were, and how overly-weighty some of the prose was. I wonder whether Tolkien would actually have approved of bits of the movie -- e.g., de-tweeing the elves -- even if he probably would have detested most of it.

December 5 marks the 6th anniversary of abi becoming a moderator of this community.

Thanks, abi!

Once in a while I'll run into, online, someone who might be called a Greenhouse Dismisser. Not a denialist. They see the handwriting on the wall . . . and think it has drawn a happy face.

"Heck, I hate cold weather!" "Think about the increased growing season! There will be bumper crops in Canada!"

It is hard, really hard, to explain in face of that kind of blithe Babbitry that winters are good. Hard frosts kill off insects, churn up the soil, and put weeds in their place.

69
Also the assumption that the only physical difference between the US and Canada is climate.

Intellectual Property, Jewish Ethics, and Aaron Swartz

This connects the Jewish legends about the sins of Sodom (greed and cruelty backed up with law) with American property law.

I think there are some further connections with immigration law and the Travesty thread.

This just in about the law and sense of proportion.

Not quite as clean an example as it might be, but still....

Westralian December

The east wind springs its ambush out of plains
Where rivers withered, disappeared and died.
A scent of grit and distance still remains.
Face into it, and all your tears are dried;
(Likewise your eyeballs, sinuses and more.)
And gold? Well, out of that immensity,
From beds of streams that vanished long before
The mountains rose above the Tethys Sea,
The gold formed in some supernova's core
Flows on the wind, as dust, insidiously,
And gilds our fringe of green along the shore.

Serge @68:
December 5 marks the 6th anniversary of abi becoming a moderator of this community.

Bless my trochees and iambs, so it does. And this thread is a very good example of why I am glad of that fact.

Stefan Jones @#69
"There will be bumper crops in Canada!"

Speaking as a Canadian and the daughter of a geographer, I say to these people "nertz" and "google the phrase Canadian shield."

This review makes a plausible case for the DVD extended edition of the first Hobbit movie actually being an improvement (and admits this sounds unlikely):
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/12/the-hobbit-an-unexpected-journey-extended-edition-is-actually-better-than-the-theatrical-release.
(I've not seen the DVD version myself.)

PJ Evans @953y: "Sounds vile." Oh, thanks. I should correct one thing, though, it was apparently unflavored gelatine, not Jell-o, in the faux cheesecake I prefer to the real thing. Perhaps now it won't haunt your dreams.

Reminds me, I saw "Tammy Faye's House Party" on cable one time, and she and her hangers-on made, and enjoyed, "Mock Apple Pie," the recipe I used to see on boxes of Ritz Crackers. No apples in it, of course. To use a phrase from Marshall Efrom, "Just pie."

And may I just say, I love it when an Open Thread is so new that it loads quickly and refreshes quickly. Then one gets used to it taking longer and longer still. I guess it's true what they say, about nothing gold staying. And coming back.

77
Unflavored is better.
Actually, what you want to use jello as a flavoring for is mock divinity. It's egg whites and jello and - I'd have to check the recipe for the rest. (Sugar, probably.)

About other anniversaries... I hear that Heisenberg and Walt Disney both were born on this day in 1901.

Open threadiness: How do you weigh yourself in space?

Like this.

The Canadian prairies might (though it's definitely only might*) be one of the areas that comes out ahead in a global-warming scenario. Saskatchewan in particular has a lot of farmland south of the Shield, but a fairly short growing season. Warmer temperatures could quite likely extend the season and lead to higher yields.

Saskatchewan is also having a bit of an oil boom at the moment (as is North Dakota to its south). So I can see why their premier is pushing hard for the Keystone pipeline; it'll increase demand for their fossil fuel industry, and the results of burning the fuels might help their agricultural industry. And they're nowhere near a seacoast that would be affected by sea-level rise, and have average temperatures well below that of many other regions. (Too bad for those other regions, though....)

* The big wild card in this scenario is water, precipitation being somewhat scarce, and often erratic, in much of the province. Changing climate patterns could potentially lead to more useful water, or more droughts or flooding. It's hard to tell for sure what's going to happen with moisture systems long-term at a local level, and whether the changes would overall make crop production better or worse.

I hear that Heisenberg and Walt Disney both were born on this day in 1901.

Oh, great. Now I have no idea where Heisenberg was born.

From Twitter #NSApoetry:
This is just to say
I have incidentally eaten the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Background: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/02000924201/
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/04/nsa-has-a-massive-program-which-incidentally-collects-cell-location-data-of-millions-of-americans/

So my parents return from holiday this evening. Also their house which I am occupying has just had a flood alert for high tide tonight. After panicking, I checked the environment agency map and local geography and if correct the closest it will get is both ends of the street*, and several hours after they get back. Nevertheless I am having a ground level damage mitigation sweep and have checked my go bag. That's where the ugly pair of trousers has been hiding!

* Yes both ends, as one backs onto a drainage channel and the other onto the river. In between is higher ground fortunately.

James Moar @ 83: You made me laugh out loud, thanks!

Loving all the poetry in this thread, too.

My eye continues to heal, although still rather blurry (and will remain blurry as the macula heals). I'm back at work this week, taking the bus rather than drive. I consider myself lucky to have the option of riding a bus from home to work. The hardest part has been staying awake all day, and not just napping whenever I get sleepy.

My son's 18th birthday is this weekend, and we are having a large party with family and friends. We are all happy he has safely made it this far...

James 83: Stealing that, thanks!

... and the road has been closed to vehicles. Since the town Christmas lights are up and the Indian Takeaway is open, a friend has suggested an impromptu street party, while it's still low tide.

Ginger, congratulations to you and your son on the journey! How has he been doing lately? I assume that it has been a good sign that posts about alarums and excursions have grown less frequent in the last few years?

Ginger... Glad to hear things are improving.

Clifton @ 89: Indeed, the alarums and excursions have subsided! This time last year, he was depressed and angry (old injuries resurfacing, as they do for children of abusive environments); a change in medication and some focus in therapy have allowed him to regain his cheerfulness. He is the main force behind the party planning, in fact, although he is not yet organized enough to be handling all of the planning.

Our big battle now is to get him to understand how college will benefit him in his chosen area of interest (music production) versus a for-profit company that promises "jobs" and "networking" along with "training" that he can complete by himself at home for a lot cheaper. We think he is burning out on the academics that he doesn't like, and doesn't want to have to take in college.

James, #83: *snerk*

One of the things I love about Making Light is that people here make that kind of joke. Regularly.

Ginger, glad to hear your eye is improving. And happy birthday to your son.

Re burning out on academics he doesn't like, we had a similar issue with our daughter. Could a gap year work for him? In retrospect, we should have looked harder at one (though things have settled down for her now).

91
Possibly a bored underachiever?

I have been floating the option of a gap year, and yes, I think we all agree on his underachieving abilities, and boredom. When he likes something, he does very well at it, in sharp contrast to those things he doesn't like (or classes taught by teachers he doesn't like). He is certainly more mature this year, and more motivated, and some of his recent comments may be a sign that he needs a vacation, as do we all, this time of year.

Ginger: Sometime later this year - now would not be a good time - maybe we could arrange for your son to talk to my daughter about the business. She studied music production in college along with composition, recently got her MFA in multimedia and installation music, and is now, among other things, working audio in NYC both in theater and live music settings. (She just got a possible offer of a really neat computer programming job doing creative data visualization software, thanks in part to troubleshooting their software earlier this year as part of a theater show she was working on.)

I think it's true from what she's said that doing college classwork won't necessarily break you into the music production field - there's a big apprenticeship and "paying your dues" aspect to it - but also that most places which promise "networking" and jobs don't really have that to offer. The right college may offer a much better set of industry connections than a trade school can.

I've just heard on NPR that Nelson Mandela has died. It's a great loss to the world, but his contributions to freedom, equality, and peace will endure.

One of the true giants of the 20th century. Nelson Mandela.

It may be that all of us here have a slight, indirect, connection with Nelson Mandela on our bookshelves.

Have we all read this man's words?

Gentles all, I say ye, Nelson Mandela!

"Shine, South Africa, shine..."

Xopher Halftongue @ #58 & 54
Mary Aileen @ #55

I do not know about the pine beetles that are in New Jersey, but I have read about the Mountain Pine Beetle in Colorado because it is part of life here.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05528.html

According to the linked extension article "30 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) must be sustained for at least five days." So... a great deal colder and for a longer time would be needed to kill off our problem. Though I have read elsewhere that if the cold snap happens early in the season before the beetles can winter harden then almost moderate temperatures of -10F can kill them off.

I suspect that the beetle is probably Dendroctonus frontalis, the Southern Pine Beetle, based upon a quick googling of destructive pine beetles in NJ. More searching and I have found that they are probably extending their range northward due to climate change, but it is unclear if a cold snap would slow their advance or not. Like most animal issues the exact direction of causality is mysterious. It could be that the trees being more stressed in summer are more vulnerable rather than it being strictly an issue of cold in winter.

The passing of Madiba has me in tears. I've just read Fergal Keane's obit (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-22892784), which is good BBC journalism.

All I can think of is Ecclesiasticus 44 i-vii.

101
It's probably both stress in summer (weakening the trees) and not quite enough cold in winter (not killing off the beetles).

HLN: local woman has unpacked new computer (SQUEEE!), gotten second hard drive installed, and verified that it turns on. It's quiet.

(Gaming computer, bought through Costco. Which means window in one side panel and lights in various places on the case. Also speed and memory.)

Mishalak 101: I don't think winter temperatures in New Jersey have been below -30F for five consecutive days since the ice age, so maybe it's a different beetle, because the winters used to keep them out, and no longer do.

Fragano 102: I thought of this. He's one of the ancestors now, and I will honor him as such.

Stefan at # 69: The climate change dismissers puzzle me, because they tend to be the same people who would be alarmed at a lot of brown-skinned climate change refugees trying to move into their area from further south.

Xopher #105: That was beautiful.

#106: I don't think we're talking about people who think things through, or make connections.

Climate change refugees will get labeled as frauds and freeloaders. Drought and dying oceans will be called a natural cycle.

When the problem gets too big to ignore, they'll call for a capital gains tax cut, and allow people to use food stamps to buy fans.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

My initial reaction to the "DC Comics: Bad at Math" particle was to recall when Marvel claimed that 10% of 2,000,000 was 200, and to figure that DC couldn't be worse than that. But I think the linked comic strip makes a decent case that they are.

Xopher Halftongue @ #105

Oh it certainly is a different beetle. We have the Mountain Pine Beetle in Colorado. The Southern Pine Beetle is not, off the top of my head, found north of New Mexico.

I just was not able to find specific information about what the temperature limits of the Southern Pine Beetle are. Though one of the top results for Dendroctonus frontalis and temperature was a paper finding that in the majority of their range temperature was not a factor, but it was probably in northern areas like New Jersey.

Hi Abi - it occurs to me that you may be interested in this article on Black Pete. I wonder if you agree with the journalist's assessment of the national consensus, you being on the ground and all.

I very rarely discuss Zwarte Piet outwith Dutch contexts. There's really too much cultural baggage around it, both for the Dutch and the non-Dutch. And that baggage is profoundly different, so it's hard to say something and have it heard in the same context that it is said.

(Relatedly: my children are forbidden from being painted as Zwarte Piet. They can be Witte Piet and wear the Pietenpak, the extravagant suit, but they may not put on the paint. They're not Dutch, and in our non-Dutch home contexts, it's completely out of the question to ever have done such a thing.)

Also, it is not a discussion that one can genuinely understand without genuinely understanding both viewpoints. And getting to understand the Dutch viewpoint (by which I mean cultural-Dutch, not ethnic-Dutch; I know black Dutch people with complex views on the subject) requires a journey through what, to non-Dutch people, is quite problematic territory. I can't see any way to do this that would reward the effort enough to compensate for the risks of getting it wrong.

What I will say is that very few of the primary school children dressed in Piet suits yesterday were wearing makeup. Fewer than in previous years at the same school. But that's just an unscientific sample at one school out of four, in one village out of many, in one province out of twelve. I have no statistically significant information.

My gut feel is that Zwarte Piet will just be Piet within my lifetime. But it's not a topic that I'm prepared to discuss in this context any further than I just have.

Abi,

If the topic ever comes up with your neighbours, suggest green make-up as an alternative to black.

Oh my...

"Bohemian Rhapsody: The Star Wars Edition"

Abi@113

Abi - thank you very much for talking about it at all; that was a very considered response. I apologize for putting you on the spot and undoubtedly making you uncomfortable. You have added to my thoughts on the subject, and I'm more than happy to drop it.

Clifton @96: That sounds awesome, thank you for offering.

On Madiba's passing, I turn to Ecclesiastes 3:
3 לַכֹּ֖ל זְמָ֑ן וְעֵ֥ת לְכָל־חֵ֖פֶץ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃
2 עֵ֥ת לָלֶ֖דֶת וְעֵ֣ת לָמ֑וּת עֵ֣ת לָטַ֔עַת וְעֵ֖ת לַעֲקֹ֥ור נָטֽוּעַ׃
3 עֵ֤ת לַהֲרֹוג֙ וְעֵ֣ת לִרְפֹּ֔וא עֵ֥ת לִפְרֹ֖וץ וְעֵ֥ת לִבְנֹֽות׃
4 עֵ֤ת לִבְכֹּות֙ וְעֵ֣ת לִשְׂחֹ֔וק עֵ֥ת סְפֹ֖וד וְעֵ֥ת רְקֹֽוד׃
5 עֵ֚ת לְהַשְׁלִ֣יךְ אֲבָנִ֔ים וְעֵ֖ת כְּנֹ֣וס אֲבָנִ֑ים עֵ֣ת לַחֲבֹ֔וק וְעֵ֖ת לִרְחֹ֥ק מֵחַבֵּֽק׃
6 עֵ֤ת לְבַקֵּשׁ֙ וְעֵ֣ת לְאַבֵּ֔ד עֵ֥ת לִשְׁמֹ֖ור וְעֵ֥ת לְהַשְׁלִֽיךְ׃
7 עֵ֤ת לִקְרֹ֙ועַ֙ וְעֵ֣ת לִתְפֹּ֔ור עֵ֥ת לַחֲשֹׁ֖ות וְעֵ֥ת לְדַבֵּֽר׃
8 עֵ֤ת לֶֽאֱהֹב֙ וְעֵ֣ת לִשְׂנֹ֔א עֵ֥ת מִלְחָמָ֖ה וְעֵ֥ת שָׁלֹֽום׃

(in English:)
To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

It has been a season of loss -- my FF's mother, my old friend's father, among others -- but there will be reason to rejoice amid the sadness. Birthdays, births, and weddings go on, despite our losses.

Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest living human beings of our modern times. We were lucky to have shared this earth with him.

abi @ 113

Thank you for the example of how to say, "I can't do this helpfully here, so no."

That's a response I find very hard to make and to get right.

"Santorum is wrong to compare Obamacare to Apartheid because unlike Obamacare, many Republicans supported Apartheid."
- Frank Conniff of MST3K fame

cheyanne -- welcome, and looking forward to more of you here!

Dave @99, thank you for that link, had not known about the Robben Island bible.

I visited Robben Island as a boy in 1967, saw prisoners labouring in a quarry, Madiba most likely among them; but all I remember is a memory.
In the Orthodox church, we say of the dead, may his memory be eternal. For the troublemaker Rolihlahla Mandala this much is sure.

I remember when he wore a Springboks jersey to support the Springboks against Australia. Rugby, the White and Afrikaner game, and one of the flashpoints. He was saying, you are us, too.

May his memory shine forever.

And in news of other incomprehensible sports, Australia 9/570 declared, England in reply 8/130, Second Test, Adelaide. The world has been returned to its proper foundations.

HLN: Tomorrow I shall be a vendor at a craft faire. Outdoors. The high/low projected is 44º/28º. I have no idea where my wool socks (from when I lived in Denver) are, and my current pair* of shoes is, shall we say, inadequate.

It's going to be fun.

*Yes, pair, singular. When you have kids, your shoe size tends to change, which means all my former shoes have long gone to other homes. And I'm only slowly getting pairs... which causes problems when you realize that your current pair is completely shot and you don't have a backup.

Combining two subjects already discussed on this thread, I note that Frost's "Stopping by the Woods On a Snowy Evening" can be sung to the same tune as "Far over the Misty Mountains Cold" from the first Hobbit movie.

B. Durbin, #123: Oh, dear. Is there someone you can send to look for a pair of shoe-boots (aka winter boots with a fur lining, intended to be worn like shoes) in your current size at Goodwill and bring them to you at your booth? There is nothing more misery-making than having to sit outside for hours in the cold in inadequate clothing. Also, make sure you have a thermos full of something hot -- tea, coffee, hot cider, soup, it doesn't matter what -- and drink a cup at least once an hour.

Erik, #124: Now that's an earworm I don't mind having at all.

Arizona gets occasional outbreaks of pine beetles. Lots of trees do die, but the strongest survive, and in the end, it helps the forest. However, our forests are generally massively overgrown. For whatever that data is worth. Not sure of the situation elsewhere.

(Also, if you have a tree in your own yard that you want to protect from bark beetles, the best thing you can do is water it regularly. A healthy, well-watered pine tree can often repel beetles by producing lots of of sap.)

BTW, if you haven't got your two-foot tall Darth Vader (poised for strangling subordinates with the Force), you can now find them in the Christmas section at McGuckin Hardware.

Darth Vader lawn gnomes?

Erik Nelson @124

Hernando's Hobbit-way?

TomB @ #128

I find your b'zugda-hiara disturbing

AKICIML: my youngest daughter will be presenting a poster at the American Geophysical Union in a few days. She's an undergrad, and this is only her second professional conference, so this is a big deal to all of us.

I'd like to get her poster framed after she gets home, but it is HUGE. 42 by 64 inches. The custom frame places I've found seem to top out at 62 inches.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

(Incidentally, her research involves using infrared and visible-light images from CRISM and HiRISE to establish correlations between surface texture and mineral composition on Mars.)

B. Durbin @123, if you see this before you leave for the craft fair, try to get some chemical hand-warmers/feet warmers. They're generally available at places like K-Mart and Target and Walmart in the sporting-goods section, and they'll help. Thin little packets of chemical warmness you tuck in gloves or shoes. And my memory says they're only a buck or two (it's been a long time since I've bought them, however).

Lila @131, I went to the framing URL my husband uses for his artwork, and the maximum length+width they support is 90". So you may have to construct your own frame. Are you handy? If you go to the big-box hardware store (or lumber yard) nearest you and look at the mouldings, some of them will be appropriate as frames after staining or painting. You'll need to get them miter-cut at the store; don't forget that you (probably) only want a tiny overlap over the poster so the lengths you'll be buying will be closer to 43" and 65" or even 44" and 66" (depending on how wide the moulding you select is). If it's a big-box hardware store they should be able to cut glass or acetate to fit. Don't forget to get something for a backing-board; a frame that big needs support. (really heavy cardboard; really light plywood; stiff plastic (more acetate?)....

More general musings than specific help, I'm afraid, but it might give you a place to start.

Lila @131 addendum; On further experimentation, americanframes.com allows one dimension to be 64" for at least some of their frames (I didn't check with all), but the total length+width has to be under 90". So you could conceivably order a 64" x 8" frame and a 42" x 10" frame and end up with framing material for a 64" x 42" frame and a bonus 8" x 10" frame. But you would NOT get a backing board or glass/plastic front; you'd need to figure that out separately.

Lila @ 131: This may be a dumb question, but: Have you called around to local framing shops? (I have the impression you've been searching online.) There may be one in your area that does custom work like this.

Lila@131: I once mounted a very large poster by treating it like a mirror -- got a piece of acrylic cut to size, sandwiched the poster between it and a large piece of cardboard, and used bathroom mirror mounting hardware to attach it to the wall.

Stefan Jones @ 69 ...
"Heck, I hate cold weather!" "Think about the increased growing season! There will be bumper crops in Canada!"

Indeed -- the car makers will be delighted... (Wait, did you mean something else?)

Janet Brennan Croft, I like that idea!

John A. Arkansawyer, I have not checked with the non-chain framing places yet, but I will.

Cassy B., I'm not handy enough to build a frame, alas.

I did find these, which are plenty wide even if the thing is landscape-oriented: http://www.displays2go.com/P-5245/Retail-Hanging-Display-72?o=1-2253

Thanks for the advice, all!

Lila @ 131 ...
I'd like to get her poster framed after she gets home, but it is HUGE. 42 by 64 inches. The custom frame places I've found seem to top out at 62 inches.

When I was working as a framer (a picture framer, dammit!), we did get pieces in that were easily that size, or larger. It's absolutely possible to find a place that will do it, but also likely to be both flaming expensive and extremely heavy (between that much glass, and a frame that won't flex).

It might be worth looking into plaque mounting the poster (I haven't used the place at the link, but their site seems to show max sizes of 72x48).

I have several pieces that have been plaque mounted, and the results were (and are) good -- it's been something over a decade now, and they're still going strong.

Plaque mounting is obviously not archival in any way, and if that's a concern, you'll want to go with more traditional framing techniques.

xeger, that does look like a good option, but alas, too pricey at that size for our budget.

Lila @ 139 ...
xeger, that does look like a good option, but alas, too pricey at that size for our budget.

It may be worth looking around -- my local supermarket does the same sort of thing via their photo department for a remarkably reasonable price.

That said, might also be worth checking your local craftsy store to see if they sell frame components separately, on the build-your-own side of things.

Lila @131

Do you know somebody with a good camera? 42 x 64 is almost 2:3, the ratio of 35mm film, and if you can set it up, flat wall and camera on a tripod, you might get a good enough image to get a readable large print. Cameras are digital, but that aspect ratio is still there.

Mind you, the print will be expensive, and it will depend on text sizes, but roughly half the size is possible. And pixel resolution would be a little better than most computer monitors.

Even if you don't print it, having the digital record would be useful.

(And, so obvious that I didn't think of it at first, how was the poster printed. There must be a digital copy that the poster was made from. How would the cost of a smaller print, and framing of that, compare to the cost of framing the poster?)

Universities, at least in this country, normally do their printing in-house. If that's the case here, the university print shop should still have the original file, and they may do a student and/or staff discount. (I know this because I've been involved in the printing of academic posters before.)

My advice: talk to the nice people at the university print shop, or, if there isn't one, at whatever print shop the university uses. Even if the print shop isn't in-house, universities need so much printing doing that you're likely to get a favourable rate if you go through the university.

HLN: Local person reads paper on runes at Medieval Society Undergrad Colloquium, feels proud of self. "I have some doubts about how original the underlying idea actually is, but I came up with it out of my sources instead of taking it from someone else, so that's okay," said person, and mourned the fact that they missed the chance to submit an undergraduate abstract to the Kalamazoo medieval studies conference, because that would have been *awesome*.

Printing was done in-house. I'm sure I could get a smaller one, but I'd rather rig the actual one for hanging, since she's quite enamored of it. I think the hanging rails are the way to go, perhaps with some mylar window film or similar to give a degree of strength and protection. It's not archival, or even long-term, but she'll always have the digital version for that.

I'd suggest getting it dry-mounted (most framing shops can do this, although something the size of a conference poster might be a problem for some). It'll give the poster rigidity, but it won't be too unmanagable (but I wouldn't take it outside on a windy day).

I've printed my own conference posters for the last few years (yay for the banner printer that lives in our closet), so the only thing I'd note is that the ink+paper combination usually used for conference posters isn't particularly archival. If it's up anywhere it'll see sun, it'll probably fade in a year or two. Unless AGU requires glossy printing for posters, at which point it's probably good for decades with current ink/paper combos.

Don't know if they require it, but it is in fact glossy.

Xeger @ 136... Some people never tire of making bad pnus.

Serge Broom @147: So true! Axle anyone.

Lila at 146: Which tells me that the paper is better quality than what I usually print my conference posters on. You may not be able to get it dry-mounted at that point, but your local framing shop can advise you better than I can (having not dry-mounted anything myself since high school; I'd be a little worried that the glossy stock might melt or deform given the heat of the dry-mounting process).

As for seasonal verse, I prefer this one--linked only, because it's too long:

http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/all_hail_to_the_days.htm

The gist: "Frack, it's cold. Let's party! Party with the rich, party with the poor, party in the city, party in the country, party in the palace, party with the stranger just come in off the road, everybody party!"

And here is IMO the best performance of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXpLJIFli44

OK, people who tweet, something odd just happened to me. Second try at this; I decided it had too many identifiable details the first time.

Twitter conversation. Someone enters it to pronounce something crap. I ask why they think so; they don't respond immediately, and I refer to them and say I find their assertion that the work in question is crap baffling. They come back and say (basically) that the author had an agenda. Then they added that "once you start talking about me in 3rd person it's time to take me out of the convo."

I was kind of startled by that. I said that it was only because "@[their Twitter tag]'s" was shorter than "@[their Twitter tag], your." They reiterated wanting to be dropped from the conversation...then came in with one more response in the conversation.

I think that's a species of Flounce, and that the real issue is that the person didn't like having their assertions challenged or even questioned.

But the question is, is it actually rude to refer to someone's Twitter tag in the third person in a conversation when addressing someone else? This person is followed by several people I respect, so they're not just some kind of cranky jerk.

D. Potter@148

Although if you're not careful the joke will just fall flat.

This moose is just tyred and exhausted.

You all spoke truth today.

Ah well. I should know better than to tread on tire puns.

Xopher, that's...a tricky one. A lot of people use Twitter @names as a convenient shorthand way of referring to a person, but the way Twitter handles those, a lot of people take it as deliberately trying to bring a tweet to someone's attention. So there's a lot of fuzzy disagreement on whether a tweet saying "I know @fadeaccompli recommended this game" is just referring to me, or referring to me and also poking me to see if I want to respond, or addressing me directly.

That said, unless the person is on a private account, anything they say on Twitter isn't private, and directly referring to things other people said on Twitter--even while not responding to them personally--is pretty standard. So I am inclined to think that you did nothing wrong in discussing what they said in a perfectly public location, with their name attached, and they can be part of that conversation or not as they like. I honestly don't know what they mean about taking them out of the conversation, though; maybe they would rather not have their @name included on tweets that aren't addressed to them personally?

One of the problems of Twitter is that it's still new enough to not have a lot of established etiquette, and the limited character space makes it even easier than any other online format I've seen yet to misread tone or lose nuance. Which is a damn pity; I love its use for quick and casual drop-in/drop-out public conversations between multiple people.

Of interest to knitters and others.

D Potter @ 155... Why? I thought it was rather groovy.

#157: For a brief moment I read this as "of interest to knitters and otters."

* * *
My morning dog walk takes me down a street a few neighborhoods over. The street-side mailboxes there all have a flyer:

FOUND BUNNY.

You can see it at the link below:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ba5VmiKCAAAX-Fw.jpg

Pretty sure this has nothing to do with a found bunny. The phone number area code is for the Bay Area. I'm not going to call it except as a last resort; I picture a high pitched modulated tone coming over the line, and then everything fading to black until I wake up shuffling up the ramp of a Harvester Saucer.

Is there band or something associated with this? Didn't get any google hits.

Fade, I think this person was just in a bad mood and snarled at us undeservedly. And yeah, "take me out of the conversation" meant "stop @ing me" (so it wouldn't show up in their mentions).

Serge Broom @ 158 ...
D Potter @ 155... Why? I thought it was rather groovy.

Indeedy - pump up the volume

Huh. While searching for the link in my previous post, I found this documentary on House which is quite neat.

Stefan @159, so did I! But then, I am just back from the central California coast, where I saw sea otters :-)

Interesting that the bunny has what looks like an umbrella logo on its haunch. Perhaps the number goes to Travelers Insurance.

Or perhaps Umbrella Corporation.

Xopher, from what you've said, I can understand where the other person is coming from. It's tough to begin what you think is a conversation, albeit a slow one, and return when you can to find that the person you talked to has picked up your idea and used it to talk to someone else rather than you. Twitter doesn't make it easy to do anything if you can only check a few times a day; almost every conversation I see on Twitter ended hours before I saw it, and I've been reprimanded for adding anything. My conversations have to be slow because I can't leave Twitter running in the background at all, and I wouldn't like it if my effort to engage someone not only was ignored in terms of communicating with me but was coopted into that person talking to people who are obviously more important than I am.

I don't think that the way you acted was malicious, only that circumstances and Twitter conspired to convey that this person doesn't matter to you except as a discussion point to those who do. If that's what you meant to convey, then you're fine. If not, the extra characters of 'your' will acknowledge that the conversation includes the other person and invite further discussion.

Fanfic rec -- from 2010, a Lensman/Big Bang Theory crossover: http://archiveofourown.org/works/77581

In which Dr. Sheldon Cooper finds a ray gun-toting, scantily-clad Karen Kinnison in his room, and is distinctly unimpressed.

A tweet over at emptywheel links to this: a Chimu telephone that's about 1200 years old.

Sarah @ # 167 -

That was great - thanks for sharing.

Diatryma, from my point of view, the comment, not followed up by explanation even after a question, looked like a driveby.

I was saying that a particular movie was clearly SF. The person came into the conversation and said "No it isn't. It's luddite crap." (IMO being anti-technology doesn't mean it isn't SF, but that's a whole other conversation.) Frankly, I thought that was pretty rude to begin with, but I responded politely.

You know, the more I think about this, the less I care what that person thinks of me. Perhaps I'll block them, in fact. All their entries to the conversation were in the range from prickly/nitpicky to outright rude.

This came out of private conversation with a moderator when I needed help on the Dysfunctional Family thread. These points are appropriate to extend my gratitude here.

> A smart move has been hanging out on ML, where a significant subset understand dealing with tangled skeins of interactions. No black/white solutions, but a full spectrum (ha) of tradeoffs.

> There's constant reinforcement to prepare without obsessing. One example: Jim's med-prep posts (and abi's followup on her family fire-training - I will never approach a potentially hot door without her guiding the back of my hand to it).

> Daily, people whom I respect triage for best use of minimal spoons, not limited to dysfunctional situations.

Arrgggh . . .

A question for bakers out there.

WHERE in an oven should a thermometer hang?

Front? Back? Any particular shelf?

I'm not sure whether to trust my either my oven thermostat or my little add-on thermometer.

I burned the bottoms of a flat of cookies this afternoon.

Stefan, I'd hang the thermometer from the shelf your cookie sheet will rest on if there isn't room to sit it on top of it.

Your thermometer could have died the death, too.

Sympathies on the burned cookies. I like mine thin and well-toasted but not carbonized.

I've always hung mine from the middle of the rack that I habitually use. I never rearrange my oven trays, so I've always got a rack dead in the middle.

Part of the problem may have been that I was mixing cookie sheet types.

I put the "dark non stick" one on the bottom, thinking it would be cooler there. (The directions call for 375 F for shiny, 350 F for non-stick.) That is the one with the starting-to-burn cookies.

In general, the heating element is at the bottom of an oven -- so lower areas are (I believe, but might be wrong!) hotter. And the primary place where heat is likely to escape is at the top of the door, again making the top more likely to be (slightly) cooler.

If you can add a small fan (please, not anyone who posts here) to the oven for convection heating, the heat gets a lot more even.

Xopher, I don't deny that the comment was rude, but if I reply to something on Twitter in the morning, it's going to be six and a half hours before I can see that anyone replied at all, let alone reply myself. You obviously know this person best, including the details of your interactions, and you know what's best for your own happiness.

Harking back to the swearing subthread, my late father-in-law was a ham radio guy, one of those with the tower full of antennas in the back yard. One of his oft used swears was

3 dits 4 dits 2 dits dah

Saying that in a room full of people will find you all those who speak Morse code, because they'll be chuckling. Translation: sh*t

Well, our very much alive Aleppo Pine from Living Christmas has arrived and we have just fed it a small bag of ice. We will decorated it tomorrow. Here's hoping we can keep it alive through the holidays!

I'm a little nervous because neither of us has a good track record keeping plants alive. We've got the tree as far away from a heat register as possible and we are not keeping more than 3 weeks. I'm hoping the email reminders to water will do their part. I'd really like to stay out of the dead tree carcass industry and there's just not enough storage space in this apartment for a fake tree the other 11 months of the year.

181
You shouldn't have too much trouble. In this weather, unless your place is very warm, water about twice a week, just to keep the soil damp around the roots. (I have some oak seedlings I'm keeping an eye on.)

Stefan Jones @ 175: I rarely use two racks -- no big on baking cookies -- so I keep a pizza stone on the bottom rack. Once the oven has heated up including that extra thermal mass, I think it keeps a more even temperature.
One of these days I'll get a spiffy convection oven!

@182: Sigh. "not big on baking cookies".

So, I'm getting tsuris from my development.... Some time ago, they said "one of these months we'll redo your kitchen, including replacing the rotten floor. You'll have a week's notice."

Well, I got a flyer in my door Friday evening, ~ 4:30. They wanted me to have my kitchen cabinets cleared out by Tuesday. With an ice storm coming over the weekend (which as I write, I'm still not sure how badly it will be messing things up). Remembering that I have to get the dog to the kennel too. And the development office was closed Saturday, so I couldn't ask any questions. They are offering an apartment to stay in, which they say is done up like a hotel room, but no information about where, much less if there's wi-fi, and I'm supposed to pick up the key Monday evening. Oh yeah, the work is supposed to last until Friday.

After consulting with Mom, and considering the prospect of having my kitchen stuff piled in the living room during a potential power failure, I decided to tell them "No. This is not sufficient notice, and I am not ready." But I'm still torn and tempted to try and get everything packed up in time.... :-( Any comments?

On ovens:

"Fan-assist", as we call it, has become something of a default here in the UK in the new-oven market. The one we had in this house was a bit old when we arrived, and needed a replacement a few years ago. It was either a not-very good DIY job or a professional working dirt cheap. I won't say I matched pro-standards, but I did the job according to manufacturer's spec, with adequate ventilation and proper electrical connection¹.

Buying a new oven is not hugely expensive, but a lot of people would really struggle to raise the money.

1) UK regulations require a qualified electrician to do a permanent installation, so ovens are sold with a 13-amp plug on the power lead, which is just short of 3kW total. If your arrangements are done right, you can get at the plug/socket without trouble. There is a fuse in the plug, and so you do need to be able to get at that easily. The old oven needed the oven removing to get at the plug/socket. Half a meter of extra wire would have averted that. And the old oven was supported on a sheet of plastic-coated chipboard which totally blocked air-flow and showed signs of heat-discolouration. I re-built the support frame, but it's annoying to know how to do the wiring right, and not have the paperwork².

2) Some 40 years ago, it did need an electrician to do some basic checks. Had you used the right wire sizes? Testing for short circuits. That rig lasted 30 years. I doubt, the way the old oven was installed, that the wiring would have passed any basic check.

HLN: After high winds and floods on Thursday (no damage here) the electrical power went off about 3am Sunday. 11 hours later, the electricity company had a palletised generator running at the local transformer ("sub-station"). Nobody knows when a permanent fix will be made.

The winds messed up a lot of electrical supplies, and the tidal surge overtopped the flood defences on the Humber bank and the Trent. It was lucky I had a gadget that provides a wi-fi connection via 3G. Around here, on;y one mobile phone network gives a useful 3G connection.

The local chip-shop uses gas.

HLN: in the past three hours, I have had two calls from companies offering solar power systems which will work on north-facing roofs., with claims of heavy government subsidy which will guarantee profit.

Since the companies doing this block CLID and don't give useful contact details, it is hard to distinguish them from crooks.

I have done enough with a camera to know that there is at least a 10-fold difference in incident light levels between a north-facing and south-facing roof.

Frankly, should the government want to check on who it's handing a subsidy to, I figure I would be put in the same class as a Nigerian politicians widow, or a keeper of Romanian cattle.

Actually, Dave Bell @187, the current data says for nontropical customers west-facing is better than south-facing -- you miss some in the morning, but the sundown is apparently more intense.

HLN: Local weekend bathtime is survived. No guinea pigs were drowneded, despite strident protestations to the contrary.

Dave Harmon @184: But I'm still torn and tempted to try and get everything packed up in time.... :-( Any comments?

Were it me, I would contact them earliest possible Monday, and hold them to the week's notice. I would say, "I can have my place ready by Friday afternoon, per development's instructions dated [date]. I will contact you if I am ready sooner. If this arrangement does not work with your schedule, please contact me and we can arrange a different date." If there are textual communications, and if you still have it (this is why I keep copies of everything), I would include a copy of the development's original communication on the subject.

Dave Bell @ #185

Ah yes, the dreaded "Part P" of the Building Regulations. Considering some of the bodged work I've seen performed by "professional" electricians, it's a great pity you can no longer do a proper job of it yourself (without contracting an authorised person to inspect the completed work once finished and issue you with a compliance certificate). "It all makes work for the working man to do" as the saying goes (not to mention several layers of bureaucrats).

The really annoying part of it all is that you can take all the courses on electrical installation, pass the exams, and still not be permitted to do the work (because you're not registered), and a friend of the family who works for the power company and has all the certifications (and more) required is also prohibited from working on his own house wiring!

ObSheesh: Furrfu!

On the cooker front, you are now allowed to do your own installation, provided that you don't need to alter the fixed part of the supply wiring - so you can connect it to an existing 30A isolator but are not allowed to install the said isolator.

(It comes under section 2.8 "Non-notifiable work" in the latest regs.)

Stefan Jones, a clever idea I've seen elsewhere is to toast trayfuls of either coconut flakes or white bread crumbs (whichever you'd rather use) and use the toasting to find the hot and cool spots in your oven. I don't know if insulated pans would move the spots, or merely delay their appearance, so you might need to do it twice.

oldster, your #5 makes me very happy and I sent it to my sweetie.

Life imitates a Charlie Stross novel:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html?_r=0

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

rea:

"Okay, Johnson, so let me get this straight. You and McCormick have spent the last six months of work time playing World of Warcraft on work time?"

"No, wait, boss, I know a way we can spin this as a good thing...."

Since the ice storm fizzled, I wound up deciding to pack my kitchen stuff up today (I had Mom and a friend helping) and get the work over with. I did complain about the short notice.

Charlie Stross notes, with some displeasure, that life imitates a Charlie Stross novel:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-there-wont-be-a-third-.html

You know, it's entirely possible that Charlie gave them the idea.

Nah. NSA isn't smart enough to read Charlie Stross novels. And if they did, they'd be more likely to get it right (and, for example, realize that they had a serious humsec (if that's the right word) problem).

HLN: Local woman has mailed all the things.

All. The. Things.

re 173: Thanksgiving was made that much more interesting by the discovery that the newly purchased instant read thermometer was 30 degrees F out of calibration. Fortunately it was reading high, so we caught it without cremating the turkey.

Open-Threadiness: Random Exhibition Title Generator.

Highlights include:
- "Alchemical Ground: Constructing a Praxis of Damage" (Discworld, anyone?)
- "An Overwhelming Dissent: The Politics of Sameness" (future title of my book on counterculture)
- "Extravagant Charm: Defying the Local" (the anti-housing-cooperative exhibit?)
- "The Bureaucracies of Sustainability: A Juried Show of Too Many Dinner Parties"
- "Extravagant Rubbish: Daring to Defy the System"

So, we got everything packed up. I get to sleep tonight in my own bed, then tomorrow night I come home from work to the apartment they've set up for me (I supplied food and other supplies.) As it happens, that apartment is the one below me, opening to the opposite side of the townhouse building. (That is, I'm my own downstairs neighbor.) Good point of that, I can use my own wifi. Bad point, I get the construction noise....

I'll probably be more sporadic than usual this week, since I'll be on the iPad.

Lin Daniel #178: Way way back in my seafood-cannery days, we had an electric hoist and we used to spell out dirty words in Morse by jerking on the chain. I don't remember any of it now but it was one of the ways we kept sane.

HLN: While the craft sale was a definite fizzle, I did make enough on the fudge sales to justify the making of said fudge, and since I was already going to make that much gingerbread, and those were the only perishables, it could have been much worse.

And we do have a line on an indoor venue next year, from some folks who came by and saw us all shivering there.

Well, I am big on baking cookies, but it has never occurred to me to use two racks at once. Timing is everything if the cookies are to come out soft and chewy, and I expect baking sheets at different heights would need to be taken out at different times, which I couldn't keep track of.

Allan Beatty @203: The way we always did it when my grandmother was managing it was load Tray 1, put in oven. Load Tray 2 (and don't need to hurry about it); put in oven appx halfway through Tray 1's bake time. Load Tray 3, and by the time it's ready to go in, Tray 1 is done, so take it out and put in 3. Put cookies to cool on wire lattice racks, rinse off Tray 1 in cool sink water to get it back down from 300+degF to room temperature-ish, then load it; by the time you're done, Tray 2 can come out. Etc.

This was our Christmas-Cookie machine system (for rolled-and-decorated sugar dough), with which literal pounds of dough could be gotten through fairly expeditiously. I think one year we had something like twelve dozens of cookies on improvised cooling racks all over the kitchen by the time we were done (minus the 'broken' and 'imperfect' ones we'd eaten already, of course -- cook's portion!).

204
we used a similar system, but ISTR we only baked one sheet at a time. (While the first sheet bakes, you load the second. And so on.) Not much slower, but we generally only made five or six dozen cookies. (Chocolate-chip oatmeal, with chopped walnuts. One batch.)

My mother's system for her very big Christmas baking is to swap the cookie sheets halfway through. I think we have two in the oven, two on deck, two cooling, and sometimes two in the process of being filled. I like helping with the last batch of chocolate powdered sugar cookies and it's easy enough with two pairs of hands.

B. Durbin, #202: We went by 1st Saturday Arts Market here, and it was cold and gloomy and miserable. Probably not as cold as you were, but the artists were definitely suffering. At least it wasn't a damp cold.

I'm done with cookies for the year, but will take this into consideration in the future.

Next up: Three, maybe more, Espresso / Chocolate cheesecake / pie! Boing Boing ran a recipe a few weeks back.

I should really invest in a pizza stone.

Hyperlocal news... Local man all too briefly meets Patrick in Santa Fe during book launch of anthology "Dangerous Women".

There's an America's Test Kitchen recipe for gingersnaps that IIRC involves not only swapping the two pans, but also *turning them around*.

Now, for extra added hyperlocal color, imagine me doing all this carefully-orchestrated and totally timed stuff while reading Charlie's _Rule 34_.

My mother/grandmother always ran two pans of cookies at a time.

Halfway through, you swapped top for bottom and end for end.

Six or eight pans (three or four sets) going -
When you were waiting on what was in the oven, you cleaned up or started the next batch.

Making Light has spoiled me for interactions with ordinary people on the web.

When the evil character (Eric) Renard was assassinated on Grimm, they showed news reports and a long shot of the burning car, but didn't show the engineered "accident" or his dead body or anything. On another site, I posted this:

Yay! Renard is dead!

And by the way, he left me five million dollars, but I can only get it out of Nigeria if a BELOVED AMERICAN PARTENR will let me use his bank account to transfer it in. If you will do this IN THE NAME OF JESUS CRHIST I will love you forever and let you keep half.

No?

Well, Renard also left me this bridge in New York. Wanna buy it?

No?

Yet you believe Renard is dead. SMH.

OMG. What's your asking? Wait a minute... Is this a real bridge or just a piccy of a bridge?

The actual bridge, of course! The owners are in fiscal disarray and have to sell. Isn't it beautiful? You can charge whatever tolls you want.

Also, call this 419 number to get $millioins depostited in your acoouncts! (You do get it, right?)

this is a SCAM doont give anyone your account number

If that's the level of discourse, I think I may stop posting on that site entirely.

They have relocated us on a renovated floor at work. This floor has been "improved" (cough) on an open plan model. This means we all have squat little cubes - even the managers - no privacy, and can hear everything that's going on anywhere. They have installed a white-noise generator, but as the department nearest a conference room, the elevators and the lunch room, my little data-entry intensive team is pretty much doomed to interruption.

Mostly, I don't care - I've worked in far more public cubes and have no expectation of privacy at all. However they've installed a large TV on the wall directly behind us, complete with two mini sofas perpendicular to said TV. The volume is on at a very low level, which I can hear as a steady murmur when the rest of the office isn't screeching around like crazed gibbons. I don't understand the purpose of said TV. It's not as if anyone in this division has the time to go sit on the couches and watch it. Furthermore, the couches are perpendicular to the huge TV in a tiny space. There is a large breakroom on an adjacent floor with three TVs should anyone wish to spend their off-time with a television. There are little monitors in the elevators showing mostly truncated advertorial garbage. Each and every one of us as a smart phone or tablet that we can watch if we're not busy and want to veg in front of some random content.

When I brought the annoying murmuration of the flatscreen up to the admin team, they said to settle in for a week and then we could decide if the volume was "too much". You know what? It is too much. I know right now. I don't give a shit if it's at only 4 decibels, there is no actual reason for us to be exposed to television every damn minute of the day. I will give it a week, and then I will ask for the thing to be muted. If they refuse to do that, they can move me to a quieter corner of their brilliant open plan office.

nerdycellist 213: Perhaps this might be of help if they continue to be utterly insane.

When I have multiple cakes or trays of cookies in the oven, I use the technique that Carol describes in #211. I start cakes on the middle rack, then move them down and turn them around when more pans go in.

The burned-bottom cookies resulted after I moved a "dark" tray to the bottom rack . . . perhaps a bit too soon. I always assumed higher=hotter.

The dark bottom cookies were perfectly edible BTW. My co-workers are swinging by the cube to eat them this morning . . . no complaints.

If there are so many cookies being baked, how come none of them end up here? ;-)

Stefan, FWIW, I've never had an issue with cookies burning on the bottom since I switched to using professional-weight half-sheet pans (mine are Chicago Metallic) instead of the sort you tend to find at places like Target and the baking aisle of the grocery store. Sturdy, don't warp, have good solid rims so you can use them as jelly roll pans (my kid made a buche de Noel in them) or bake bar cookies in them. Stand up to heavy scrubbing, no worries about coatings.

Because I am lazy and don't like scrubbing pan spray residue, I also use baking parchment. It was around $40 for a box of half-sheets from a kitchen supply place, which is a fair outlay, but that represents at least five years' worth of parchment (possibly ten!) for my rate of use - and I do things like putting a sheet of parchment under the frozen French fries or the Bagel Bites, not just under cookies. And it's much better than the stuff on rolls that curls and fails to cooperate.

Yes, I know about silicone baking mats. Yes, cheaper than a box of parchment and reusable. But mine had an encounter with some metal skewers, and for most purposes other than tuile cookies, the parchment works as well or better and is amazingly convenient.

That said, the process folks have described above of swapping and rotating trays is a good one. Especially good if your oven behaves inconsistently. I really ought to calibrate my oven, as it hasn't really matched the thermostat since I replaced the heating element, and I have an in-oven thermometer to calibrate it by, but it's a nuisance-y, fiddly adjustment and I've managed to calibrate my expectations instead.

I do the two rack cookie sheet swap. I usually start the sheet on the bottom rack (the hotter one IME), then turn it end for end midway through its time and move it up top to finish, putting the next sheet on the bottom rack at the same time. The turning corrects for uneven ovens.

I would not recommend this technique for people with ADHD.

Open thready sort of question - has Girl Genius settled down to something a bit more sensible than the infinity sides all piling on top of each other it was a year or more ago? Preferably with closure of some of the thousands of dangling plot points. If it has I might read it again, otherwise, wait for another year.

I'll second the recommendation for pro-quality jellyroll pans + parchment. I bought a couple of NordicWare ones with my birthday gift certificates and I am thrilled. They were cheaper than all the fancy insulated, non-stick, whatever gimmick cookie sheets and they're much more versatile. I don't have to fuss about putting them in the dishwasher or using metal utensils on them. I still have a giant roll of parchment I purchased at Costco last year, but when I'm done with that I'll probably go with the sheets - unless I get the silicone mats for Xmas.

I have an apartment oven which is a standard size but not of the highest quality. I had to dangle the oven thermometer off the far left side of the top rack to test the pre-heating, which showed that the knob on the oven was wobbly by about -25 degrees. If I'm making two cookie sheets at a time I have to remove the thermometer before I start lest the bottom sheet knock the thermometer off the top rack. Still, switching the cookie sheets in the middle of the cooking time gives me a pretty consistent batch.

Lenore: Speaking as a person with ADHD, the secret to staying on top of the sheet pan rotation is a good timer, set to the halfway point of baking.

For most people's home kitchens, a single timer will be fine - or, if you need two, you can always make use of the stove's built-in one plus the one you probably have on your phone. When I was working in a place that had two deck ovens and an electric range with an oven in it, we had a four-track timer (one-, two-, three-, and four-beep signals) and, after some contention with the boss about how to assign timer tracks to tasks, I went across to the hardware store and bought adhesive house numbers, so the top oven was ALWAYS Timer 1, the bottom #2, the range oven #3, and timer #4 was reserved for things in the mixer or on the stove top or otherwise not-oven.

After that the only distraction that I faced from the timer was that the two-beep signal beeped in the precise cadence of the synth track on New Order's "Love Vigilantes", and I would get earwormed.

#219: There are many well-regarded webcomics I've never gotten into because of the complexity-explosion issue. Girl Genius is one of them.

* * *
I have a couple of rolls of parchment paper in the house, but didn't think to use them on Sunday. Next time . . .

One thing I love: "disposable" aluminum cookie sheets. I bought them at Dollar Tree years ago. They're smaller than the usual sheet, and are essentially made from super heavy duty aluminium foil. They have neat little circles to show you where to plop the dough. They work really well and clean up easily. I've been using and reusing the same three for about four years now. They've become warped and wrinkled enough that I could recycle them w/o guilt.

guthrie: Not exactly; in fact, it might be more like all the threads were dropped in a heap and a fresh knitting project started (which may eventually knit in all or most of those loose ends, one hopes.)

The following won't spoil too much (I hope), but I'll rot13 it anyway: Ntngun tbg chyyrq guebhtu n xvaq bs gryrcbegngvba qrivpr ol bar bs ure rarzvrf, ohg cynaarq naq rkrphgrq na rfpncr, va gur pbhefr bs juvpu fur qvfpbirerq gung frireny lrnef unq cnffrq qhevat gur vafgnag bs gryrcbegngvba. Rhebcn unf punatrq fhofgnagvnyyl qhevat gung gvzr. Fur'f fgvyy gelvat gb svther bhg whfg jung nyy unf unccrarq va gur vagrevz, jung gur fvqrf ner abj, naq juvpu fvqrf ner sevraq be sbr ng guvf cbvag.

Warm fuzzies for us today. We put up a chair on Freecycle (it's a good chair, but we have more furniture and less space than we need), and ended up also getting rid of a stack of footstools, a lamp, and an ancient laptop. They're going to someone who just got out of a toxic relationship and basically has nothing. I love Freecycle.

Sighted in Scientific American: "Not everyone who has an excessive amount of amyloid plaque develops Alzheimer's, and at the moment, there is generally no way to predict whom the unlucky ones will be." Am I wrong that that should be "who"? I mean, if I change it to first person, it becomes "I will be," not "me will be," yes? (I'm also seriously not in love with the perfect-bound spine.)

Xopher Halftongue @212: If that's the level of discourse, I think I may stop posting on that site entirely.

I'm sure your evaluation is correct, but to be fair, I've posted what I thought were fairly obvious jokes here, and had them responded to in all seriousness. Likewise, I've responded seriously to what turned out to be jokes.

nerdycellist 213: A coworker, who works in a completely different part of the floor, was up here using the scanner across the cube wall from my desk. After fiddling away for a while (chattering the whole time), she says, "I don't know why you don't have some soft music playing up here." I chimed in, "Because I would crush the device that was causing it to dust, in very short order." "Why!?" "Because some of us need to, you know, concentrate....?" Okay, I wasn't quite that snide. But, you know.

Jacque: I agree with you about who vs. whom.

And it's nice to see something positive being brought forwards for a change rather than set back: Same-sex weddings to begin in March

Jacque 225: It should be 'who'.

And yeah, but...! "If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell"? Well, OK, the site has an international membership and not everyone's first language is English, but even so.

Xopher: As it happens, there are a number of residents in Boulder County who are currently in the market for new bridges, so it's not quite as cut-and-dried as it might be (though one hopes the size and transport issues would be a clue). :-)

Jacque at 225:

I think you've got the right pronoun form, but for not exactly the right reason. The who(m) is the complement of be, not the subject, so if I change it to first person, what I get is "The unlucky ones will be we/us." The more formal register of written English would use we there, and thus who rather than whom for the corresponding interrogative or relative pronoun; less formal registers that would prefer us there don't generally use whom at all. So either way you slice it, you get who.

I like good grammar as well as the next person, primarily for aesthetics and for clarity. Whom doesn't do much for the former anymore, and it never really did anything for the latter.

I've often regarded "whom" as kind of a show-offy (showy-off?) construction. I can't hear it without thinking of this (approximate) exchange between Gilligan and Mr. Howel:

Mr. H: "[something something it was done by] whom!"

Gilligan: "Well, I don't know, I just know it wasn't meem!"

"I never would have predicted that the unlucky ones would be: them!"

I agree with Q. Pheevr's analysis, which shows why "whom" sounds wrong in all registers, but also shows why it is defensible.

Oh, dear. I just reShared something on Facebook (a collection of handshakes between contrasting world leaders*), only to discover that it was on Little Green Footballs.

Some years back (the last time I looked) LGF was the home of slavering anti-Arab racism. Has it changed? If not, I really don't want to link to it even for something good.

*Well, except the contrast between Thatcher and Mugabe wasn't all that sharp.

Thanks Clifton #223, I think I'll stay away a while longer then.

Speaking of Susan's adventures after Narnia, I have a hard time believing that this hasn't come to ML before but if it has I cannot find it:
Elegant and Fine

Xopher, the owner of Little Green Footballs has supposedly changed his slant to some extent: Why I Parted Ways with the Right. I don't know if the site still features anti-Arab bigotry, but there was a post a few days ago calling out breitbart.com commenters for racism against Martin Bashir.

Jacque & David, #225/226: I took one of those online "grammar test" things the other day; while most of the questions were dead easy, there were a few I had to think about, and one where the answer I knew they wanted just sounded wrong. It was a pick-one test, and the question was whether to use "who" or "whom" in the question "____ did you see at the store?" Other cues indicated that they were looking for "whom", so that's what I put and it was right -- but there is no way I would ever use "whom" in that position, no matter in what context of discourse. I think this represents a case where the usage is shifting, and "whom" is largely being abandoned. Other opinions?

Lee @238, I perceive "whom" as correct there, though a bit pretentious, because it could be rephrased as "you saw whom at the store?" to which the answer is "I saw her/him/them at the store."

Got a 500 Internal Server Error. Seeing if the comment posts anyway...

Whom is accusative case, not that that helps anyone who hasn't studied Latin -- it is the direct-object form of the word. Most of English's nouns don't inflect anymore, so it sounds really odd to have a word that does, but.

"Whom did you see at the store?" is a whom but a gotcha, because if you diagram the sentence (and I am very unusual in my age cohort to even know what that looks like, thanks to my sixth-grade teacher), turning it straight-wise-round actually makes it look something like, "You saw whom at the store?", which I really want to read aloud in a sort of argumentative Brooklyn accent. :->

I saw Abi's Parhelia link about Susan's further adventures just as I was posting a link to a story about the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations dragging on into the new year. One of the implications, not mentioned explicitly in the story, is that countries involved in the negotiation that still have "life+50 years" copyrights (including Canada, Japan, and New Zealand) won't have to extend them another 20 or more years just yet, as the current TPP draft would require them to do.

And that means that in those countries, works by authors who died in 1963 will go into the public domain at the end of this month. Those authors include Narnia creator C. S. Lewis.

So, for at least a little while, folks from those countries will get to play, create, and publish in Narnia however they want, in whatever medium they want, without worrying about takedowns or the limits of fair use. At least, until TPP gets ratified, when the powers that be may banish them back to our world.

I know that the Sonny Bono copyright act didn't re-copyright things that had already fallen into the public domain; is there language in the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would re-impose copyright? Because I always thought that you couldn't stuff public domain works back into the copyright bottle.

Cally Soukup @243: It was done with Sherlock Holmes (well, half of Sherlock Holmes, the later stories), in the UK, because of legislature we made them impose because of implications of Bono.

I think It's A Wonderful Life used to be out and is in again?

Elliott @244

I sit corrected. I hope they don't do the re-copyright thing again.

Followup to Cally and also to my @244: Because I was feeling very [citation needed] about that on reread, I went and found a post with good links to actual legal cases and a little more explanation of what went on. Holmes is a really good case study to look at, because of precisely when it was written and how very many derivative works have been created from it, both for profit and without, so a lot of people squawk when something changes about it.

Jacque @225, from the times I fell for a joke that was patently obvious in retrospect, I've concluded that you can, indeed, kid a kidder.

Almost Human is holding up as intelligent engaging SF series. The only thing I'm worrying about is that it's on Fox, which has a history of canceling any intelligent, engaging SF series.

Two and a half short Susan crossover fics, where she meets

the Doctor, long after.

the Goa'uld, at an unfortunate time (followup by a different author).

Allan: thank you. I am reassured.

If anyone here is interested in prompts for fanfic, here's one: Steampunk NextGen, with a clockwork Data. I'd post it on Yuletide, but I understand that if you suggest things there you also have to write, and my muse doesn't work to order like that.

Kevin Reid @249

Oh, the Narnia-Susan.

I was getting confused, and wondering what was fanfic-special about Susan meeting her grandfather.

In the Narnia books, do we ever discover who Susan's grandfather is?

Dave Bell @252,

In the Narnia books, do we ever discover who Susan's grandfather is?

If memory serves, and it's been decades since I read the books, Susan's grandfather (that the kids are sent to live with to avoid the Blitz) is the grown-up "Magician's Nephew" of the eponymous book.

I don't think the origin of the Magician (who made or found the magic rings) was ever revealed

The old man is indeed Diggory Kirke of The Magician's Nephew, but he is not the Pevensies' grandfather, just a family friend. Neither Diggory nor Polly (nor, indeed, Peter, Edmund or Lucy) is ever shown or mentioned to have any children, which makes sense because Sex Is Evil.

All right, no, that's not fair, but there's still a distinctly monastic cast to all the Friends of Narnia.

Open threadiness: family lost in Nevada found, all safe. They did the right thing--stayed together near their (overturned) vehicle, built a fire, waited for rescue.

I hear that Peter S Beagle will be taking his showing of "The Last Unicorn" to George RR Martin's Cocteau Theater in Santa Fé on January 25.

Huffington Post has begun requiring commenters to have a FaceBook account.

In other news, I have canceled the daily HuffPo newsletter that has appeared in my inbox from the first day they had one, and written them a carefully worded huffy letter.

In still other news, I have used the F word on Twitter in mentioning the event. I've tried to keep my use of the word sufficiently rare there that it might even shock somebody, but what with context and all, it's probably passed unnoticed.

Pevensies. Pensieve.
Diggory.

I suppose if I'd ever read Narnia, I'd spot other little tributes in the Harry Potter books.

me @232: The memory finally surfaced; I think it was the ghost episode. Mr. Howell wants to know who put his "polo pony" in a tree.

Elliott Mason @241: if you diagram the sentence (and I am very unusual in my age cohort to even know what that looks like, thanks to my sixth-grade teacher)

Obref: Nate Bucklin

Neither Narnia nor Susan (Wodehouse/Sayers crossover), but check out Green Ice if you have a little time – it collates two similar yet very different fictional worlds in a way that is logical and ultimately poignant. The fic was written for Yuletide 2004, so apologies if I’m coming off like someone telling you about this great new band called The Beatles.

My daughter is, unbidden, setting up what will probably be her first full-blown 'tea-party' style let's-pretend. With plates, a modeling-foam fancy cake, and a bowl of real apples. And chairs around. She got various stuffed toys out of her room to be guests, and then said in her most matter-of-fact voice (while positioning her toy dog), "And we need a puppy under the table, to clean up what gets dropped."

This may say something about my household. I am trying really hard to suppress my snerfling so it doesn't draw her attention. :->

I have just come across a truly magnificent Acknowledgements page.

My misleading-but-true statement about Narnia is "everyone from our world either renounces Narnia or dies."

Kip@258, I'll grant you Diggory, but pensieve is clearly just a pormanteau of 'pense' (to think) and 'sieve', and a play on pensive (reflecting serious deep thought), to get to "filtered serious thoughts". I doubt that Rowling had any thoughts about Pevensies >- pensive.

I know that from Goblet of Fire on, she needed an editor, but her choice of names for people and things is pretty spot-on all the way through.

Any references to Narnia can be explained by Britons of a certain age being guaranteed to have read at least "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe", and anyone even vaguely interested would have read all of them.

Oxford commas...

"World leaders at Mandela tribute, Obama-Castro handshake and same sex marriage date set..."

Soon Lee:

Thus proving the common right wing claim that Obama is in bed with Communists....

Mark Evanier would like to see a production of Damn Yankees with Christopher Walken as Mr. Applegate.

Clearly, this is the best idea anybody has ever had.

Write your congressman!

Merry Christmas...sigh.

The furnace, which is eighteen years old, is dying. It looks like we're going to be buying a new one. The low tonight is going to be 8F. I'm headed out to the hardware store for space heaters...

Lori Coulson, good luck. I discovered during a power outage that I can get a LOT of warmth from a hot water bottle tucked into the blanket I'm wrapped in, and, if you heat the water in a kettle, it'll retain useful amounts of heat past overnight and into morning.

Sarah @260: I read that, and I remember having the strong reaction that it was a reasonable Lord Peter Wimsey fanfic but that it utterly destroyed the Wodehouse elements, in much the same way that pouring cold water over a soufflé that was baking would destroy it.

Oh my.

I would just like to propose a vote of thanks to SamChevre for commenting on this thread, thereby bringing it to my attention. I think it may be the most awesome thing I have seen anywhere on the Internet all year, and, today, after yet another visit to the doctor to see how I was doing on the medication, I sorely needed it.

Poetry therapy FTW.

Mongoose @271:

If you run out of that thread, you can always go on to this one.

If we don't see you in a week, we'll send a search party...

In other squeetastic news, it was Decided (a) that Beka needs to have an adequately-armored tablet that is primarily for her use (though she will not be allowed unfettered 24/7 use of it, of course), as distinct from MY tablet, which is a lifeline, a prosthetic, and the only thing that can get me off the desktop so John can use it. :->

Initially we got a hand-me-down Kindle Fire (the not-as-new edition), and John was going to set it up so it could be regular Android -- Beka already has a bunch of games on her Google account, so limiting her to a walled garden of limited options will not be popular.

John managed to 'brick' the Kindle while trying to do this. It will not turn on. We're not sure why. For a while we were thinking of getting a broken-screen-but-otherwise-fine secondhand of similar model and performing a motherboard-ectomy and transplant, but since he's not sure why the last one bricked he's a little chary of possibly having it happen again.

So he looked around online and decided I get to have a shiny new-generation Nexus to replace my old Nexus, which will get a silicone anti-bashing case and become the kid's tablet. AND THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING. Also muppetflails.

It came today. I'm installing all my apps on it and generally basking in the newness and preciousssss and so on. Also upgrading its OS. As you do.

I can read e-books while she's having Tablet Time! I can use it without having to worry whether her silly don't-actually-turn-off apps are grinding its battery to nothingness! It has a camera on the back AND the front! And (I have not tested this yet) there's at least a possibility that its cameras aren't total steaming piles of uselessness! (seriously, the old Nexus camera took horrible pictures in any circumstance whatever. I come from a photography family, I know how to vary setups to figure out what the strengths of a crap camera are, and this thing HAD no good setup that I could find. Everything looked muddy, pixelated, weird-ass color, and blurry. Always. Wow this is a long parenthetical.) There are a variety of apps that expect that The Thing You Run Apps On will (a) have a good working camera attached and (b) always have internet at all times. (B) isn't fixing, but if (a) could be? I could actually take on-the-spot pothole pictures (etc) for making my internet requests of 311 for city repairs. It would be awesome.

Lori Coulson @ 268 ...
The furnace, which is eighteen years old, is dying. It looks like we're going to be buying a new one. The low tonight is going to be 8F. I'm headed out to the hardware store for space heaters...

Ugh, my empathies! That was me, last year.

FWIW, I was quite surprised at how well the infrared heaters did at keeping a space that was entirely too large for them tolerable.

abi @ 272: *squee*

I'm about a third of the way down that thread and have just, with a mighty effort of will, managed to tear myself away from it because I must go to bed. Will resume reading in the morning. Thank you!

Thanks for the good wishes! Space heaters acquired, house is currently maintaining a 68F temp, so we should be ok...

Installation of new furnace is Monday (if they can get it to us earlier they will) and I've applied to my credit union for financing. The CU says they'll have an answer to me in 48 hours.

So we're good for now.

I need book gift recommendations. For a 4th grader (9yr old) who is a voracious reader. He's enjoyed Terry Pratchett in the past (Wee Free Men and Bromeliad Trilogy). Also Artemis Fowl, Roald Dahl, Swallows and Amazons, HP, and many many others (though, he hasn't gotten through LOTR or Foundation). I'm not up on where YA SFF is right now, (other than knowing that Hunger Games is not really where I want to go). Long is good, at least so that it has a chance of distracting him for more than 24 hours.

So I'm wondering. Boneshaker? Leviathan?

#212 ::: Xopher Halftongue quoth
"Making Light has spoiled me for interactions with ordinary people on the web."

Well, for me, Making Light was my first experience with having conversations with other people on the web. So maybe I'm spoiled.

Eric @277: Dragonbreath! It's a whole series, tho each book is shortish by post-Harry Potter standards. Highly entertaining for readers of any age who can handle vocabulary, and snark.

Adddendum to my last: that site, for some reason, is out of date enough that it only shows 4 books in the series. There are 10 now, but I wanted to be online-retailer-agnostic. :->

eric @277: If he hasn't read them, Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, starting with So You Want to Be a Wizard.

Eric #277: possibly Westerfield? Besides his "Uglies" series, there's the Midnighters trilogy. I've been warned that the former series gets pretty dark as of the third book, and Midnighters gets a bit rough near the ending.

Eric @277: I'd highly recommend Philip Oppel's Airborn series (and his other somewhat steampunk books), Philip Reeve's various rather grim series, Mieville's Un Lun Dun, Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series of 7 -- there's a lot more out there, but those are all books that would have really floated my boat back when I was in 4th grade. That's when I was reading Freddy the Pig, E. Nesbit, Edward Eager and the like. Also from the classics: Tove Jansson's Moomin books. A lot of the classic stuff still reads well.

Eric (277): More suggestions: Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Series, Lloyd Alexander, Rosemary Sutcliff if he likes historical fiction, L.M. Boston's Green Knowe series.

eric @277: Seconding the Young Wizards recommendation. I'm also fond of:
Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede (the first of the Enchanted Forest books, about a princess who runs away to get herself a dragon)
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones (the first of the Chrestomanci books, set in an alternate England with magic, where a young orphan and his older sister who go to live with a distant relative who is a powerful magician)
Dragonsong and Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey (start of a YA Pern trilogy, about a girl who runs away from an abusive home to become a musician, with mini-dragons)
To Ride Pegasus by Anne McCaffrey (a book of short stories introducing the Talents universe, about people with paranormal abilities)
The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley (two books set 500 years apart, where the first one has a princess and a horse and magic and a dragon, and the second one has the same country being colonized by an England-analogue who considers magic to be myth)
The Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee (the start of a trilogy, about the daughter of a sorceress, who has a talent for fixing things)
A Wrinkle in Time by Ursula Le Guin (the start of a series about the Murray family that's hard to describe but hopefully you know how it goes anyway)
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (the start of The Dark is Rising Sequence, about an 11 year old boy who gets drawn into a quest that draws from ancient British myths and legends)

Dealing with Dragons will be good right now, the others might need to wait a while.

Amazon lists 12 books for 9-12 year olds that are sci-fi or fantasy and have received the Newbery award. They'd probably be another good place to start.

shadow song #285: This is certainly a simple braino on your side, but A Wrinkle in Time and sequels are by Madeleine L'Engle. L'Guin did a lot of cool books, but not those.

Trivia for some: she also wrote several mainstream novels, which is why my bookstore has AWiT in regular fiction...

David Harmon @286: dammit, i knew there was a reason that seemed subtly wrong. getting my l-space-g women writers confused.

And then I managed to misspell Le Guin's name, probably because of the same sort of mental overlap... Thus fulfilling the First Law of Corrections. :-)

And speaking of Le Guin, A Wizard Of Earthsea et seq. are classics....

Madagascar has the plague.

I can't be the only one who finds this a reversal of the natural order of things.

I'll strongly second Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" and Lloyd Alexander's "Chronicles of Prydain", as well as Dragonsong/ Dragonsinger/ Dragondrums.

I'd also recommend Tamora Pierce, particularly (given the age) the Alanna and Keladry books.

Also Kipling.

I'll second Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, which I adored at about that age, and the The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley.

I'm very torn on Anne McCaffery's work - between the ages of 10 and 17 or so, I read and collected pretty much everything she'd written until that point (which lives in my parents' basement now, occupying a rather impressive amount of shelf space), but I've been absolutely unable to read any of her work in a decade. I give it a lot of credit for getting me in to reading SF/Fantasy, but, to steal a phrase from Jo Walton, the Suck Fairy has been to town on McCaffery's work for me.

Benjamin Wolfe, I find that the Suck Fairy has waved her wand over most of McCaffrey's work for me, but that Dragonsong and Dragonsinger still hold up well. (Dragondrums was never that great, but it hasn't gotten any worse.)

A somewhat less-famous one that I liked at that age: The Broken Citadel, by Joyce Ballou Gregorian. Portal fantasy, with elements of prophecy and... no, spoilers. Also with a plot-significant ballad that I now recognize as a filk of Matty Groves, which wasn't in my knowledge base when I was a kid. And it's reasonably long. Its sequel, Castledown, is even longer - I remember this because we had a requirement that year to read 100 pages per week and do a book report, but if you read one book of 500 pages, you were off the hook for five weeks for the price of a single book report. Castledown was at least 500 pages in hardcover, and I jumped at the chance to cut down on stupid school busywork and have more time for reading the books themselves.

I didn't like it as much as the first one, though.

For a nine-year-old, a lot of YA is going to be on the high end of things. Sarah Prineas' Magic Thief books are middle-grade, Tamora Pierce stretches from middle-grade to YA, Justine Larbalestier has How to Ditch Your Fairy if he's into that. Lynne Reid Banks, all of that. Second the Wrede and the Oppel. Bruce Coville! His books are really fun to read aloud. Rick Riordan, the Warriors books, these are books I see kiddos reading a lot. Kate Milford's THE Boneshaker, not Cherie Priest's Boneshaker.

It's tough to make recommendations for this age; there's a pretty wide range of reading ability, to say nothing of the comprehension range, and, "I liked this book when I was a kid," can mean, "I read this book when I was twelve and got it when I was fourteen but I think of it as a kid's book," or, "This was inexplicably shelved in Children's." There's a lot of pre-YA-breakout 'YA' that translates to 'things Important People read in junior high or so' rather than 'books written specifically for a younger audience'.

Iowa has a pretty good Children's Book Award list and I've had good luck finding books from there.

My daughter, who is ten and a half, is reading Rick Riordan's books and is enthralled with them. I may read them myself.

For Diana Wynne Jones, in addition to the Chrestomanci books, some of the other early books are excellent, especially Power of Three and Homeward Bounders. I think the settings of Dogsbody, The Ogre Downstairs, and Archer's Goon have probably dated too much. More recently, the Howl's Moving Castle set are also good, but sillier.

If you ever see Ruth Manley's 'Plum Rain Scroll' or its sequels, grab them: it's quite similar to Lloyd Alexander's Prydain only Japanese instead of Welsh. Unfortunately, they are not only out of print, but hard to find and expensive.

Elliot Mason @273

I must remember that US phone systems are different (And, O Best Beloved, always check network coverage for your area before taking out a service contract) but many modern mobile phones can act as a mobile wi-fi hub giving a broadband connection. Whether it's strictly according to contract is another matter. (This tech is known as Mi-Fi.)

Here in the UK, the O2 network is pushing some wonderful hardware deals, but locally its coverage sucks. I have a couple of Mi-Fi units (I lost the first, bought a cheap replacement on eBay, and found the first) and I shall unlock one: they were both sold by the 3 network, which does have enough coverage for if I lose power, but it isn't the best coverage around here.

I am thinking of changing broadband supplier. The current service is getting bad. Yhe actual phoneline provides 2 megabits ADSL. Their network, some of the time, struggles to provide 100 kilobits.

Nobody here need worry: I own my own domain name, and do not depend on ISP services for anything save a small amount of web space.

Oh, and the old Nexus camera is a low-res beast provided for video phone purposes. There are apps that let you record stills and movies, but exposure control sucks. The 2013 version adds an adequate camera on the other side, comparable to a mobile phone camera.

I blew my tech budget on a proper camera.

Thirding the Young Wizards series, which IMO is superior to Harry Potter for various reasons not least of which is that they have more of a "real-world" setting. Nita and Kit have to balance their wizardly activities against maintaining "normal" young-teenage lives. I also really like the ethical structure of the wizardry system.

I heartily recommend James Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon stories, fairly recently re-released by Baen Books. In fact, pretty much anything by Schmitz holds up well.

You may also want to look at older "classic" SF that wasn't originally written for children, such as Asimov's Robot books and Clarke's short-story collections; much of it works well now for younger readers, although you do have to check to make sure the Suck Fairy hasn't been at it.

Open Thread:

I know there are some bookbinders/people interested in bookbinding here so I wanted to pop in and mention that if you have the ability to watch BBC television you may be interested in yesterday's Tudor Monastery Farm (11th December; a quick check shows it's Episode 5 of the series), which had short sections on (and a genuine recreation of) printing and binding using 15th century technology.

Actually, I can imagine the whole series would be of interest to several people here and heartily recommend it.

Take a look at The Books of Elsewhere by Jacqueline West. Book 4 was one of my recent assignments for Learning Ally, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Atmospheric narration, engaging characters, interesting magic system, extremely fun to read aloud. (Or to read silently, if you're in love with the sound of language.)

I'm currently reading The Whatnot by Stefan Bachmann, which is the sequel to The Peculiar. Steampunk! With Faeries! But it's very dark, and probably a bit gruesome for a 9-year-old.

Dave Bell @297: many modern mobile phones can act as a mobile wi-fi hub giving a broadband connection. Whether it's strictly according to contract is another matter. (This tech is known as Mi-Fi.)

Only if your phones have data plans; ours do not. Our phones make phone calls and do texts, and we pay a la carte (because we use them very little, so it adds up to about $20/1.5mo, which is far cheaper than any monthly plan on offer from any carrier in our area, with or without data).

Also, I try to leave the tablet with wi-fi off when my daughter is using it, because it both keeps her from stumbling into the play store and installing Ghu-knows-what malware-esque stupid thing masquerading as a children's game (and WOW are there A LOT of them), and also having wi-fi off makes a lot of the in-game advertisements just go invisible, which is another major plus for us. Some apps will not work without network, which is disappointing.

I wish the Nexus Android had built into it more ways of password-protecting stuff, like 'turn on wifi' and 'enter the Play store'. None of the childproofing apps I've found that do stuff like that, let her play most of her games at all (because they limit the kid to a tiny walled garden).

Rikibeth (293): I'm the other way around. I encountered Castledown first, in high school, and adored it. The Broken Citadel was a slight disappointment, probably partly because I was spoilered by reading the sequel first. The third book, whose title I'm blanking on, was definitely not as good as the first two. Your experience notwithstanding, I would hesitate to recommend these to a nine-year-old without knowing a lot more about hir reading level, though.

Diatryma (294): Excellent point! Some of the books mentioned are definitely pinging my "too old/hard for a generic nine-year-old" meter, although an accomplished and enthusiastic reader might find them just the ticket.

It is finals season, and, once more, I am learning stuff that surprises me. Here is a sample:

'Adam Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand” is a famous term used as a metaphor for the divine agency, which is sometimes thought to be behind the invisible natural events, also known as “acts of God”.'

Help!

A little more about Susan-- it's interesting to read the stories next to each other because the writers have different takes on What Lewis Got Wrong.

Do you think it's fair to say that Lewis intended Mark Studdock as a criticism of bad concepts of male grownupness?

Something I read and liked at that age is the Swallows & Amazons series by Arthur Ransome; in my childhood it was unobtanium, not in print in the US and only available to me in random selection of what UK-published editions turned up in used bookstores.

Language slightly archaic (which was not a downside for me); interesting window into a time-not-ours that was the present of the setting, between the wars in the UK. Lots of adventures, but realistically fantastic ones.

Nancy Lebovitz (304): I can't access that entry; all I get is a generic LiveJournal page.

Nancy Lebovitz (304): I can't access that entry; all I get is a generic LiveJournal page.

(Apologies if this double posts. I got an internal server error the first time, and it doesn't seem to have gone through when I checked.)

Have Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase books been mentioned yet?

Rikibeth @290: There have even been some cases of the plague in America

Ahem. :-)

For a nine year old, I like some more gentle introductions to fantasy themes, like The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Half Magic by Edward Eager, and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.

oliviacw @ 310: The Egypt Game. What a wonderful book! Note to self: Buy this for the daughter for Christmas.

Eric @277: I was reading a lot of Andre Norton's stuff at ~9-10, but I'm sure the Suck Fairy has gotten to at least some of it by now . . . It was also at about that age that I got my hands on a copy of Joan Vinge's Psion in a YA edition. And I nth the recommendation of the Robin McKinley books.

Mary Aileen @ 302: The third book was called The Great Wheel, IIRC. I think part of the reason the series didn't work so well as a series was the sudden transition from child protagonist to adult protagonist between the first and second books. That trilogy wouldn't be my first choice to recommend to a child either, although there's nothing specifically wrong with it.

Nancy, #304: That post appears to be friendslocked.

O hai. I iz back from visiting teh LOLcats.

LOL. w00t. kthx! I haz a happy nao. (Possibly a rather fragile happy, but I'll take what I can get right now.) That thread confirms my beliefs that a) LOLcats are seriously underrated; b) ML is made of the highest grade of awesome; and c) poetry is good for the soul.

As many things on this site do, it has also made me think. You see, I've written formal poetry since I was a wee mongoose cub, with the exception of a few years at school when I was told not to because it was "too difficult" (despite the fact that I'd been happily writing it, and getting good marks for it, up to that point). During this period, I had to write free verse. Now it's not that I dislike free verse on principle - indeed, some of it I like very much - but there is a very deep level on which I Just Don't Get It. So, in order to appease the powers that be at school, I wrote prose and cut it up into short lines, and for some reason I continued to get good marks for it. I felt as though I was totally cheating.

These days, and especially now after the inspiration of that thread, I would like to stretch myself a little. Right now I am looking at The Naming of Parts, which I think is a frabjous poem. (All right, it's not totally free verse; there is some very clever use of repetition, for instance. But it's close enough.) I can tell it's good. I can understand what it's saying. What I can't grok is why it is good poetry, rather than good prose-cut-up-into-short-lines. I can see that it is good poetry, but I can't analyse that in the way that I could with, say, a sonnet. And until I can wrap my mind round that, I don't think I shall be able to write free verse... well, not real free verse, anyway. Only the kind I did at school because I wasn't allowed to express myself in the way that came most naturally.

Help?

Mongoose @ 314: I haven't ever taken that poem apart, but on a very quick glance, the rhythm appears to be built largely out of contrasts between iambic and anapestic feet. I'd call it unrhymed rather than free.

Mongoose @314--

the majority of the lines seem to have five stressed syllables, which is a kind of metrical structure, though a minimal one.

As to your larger question, sc. "what makes a string of words poetry rather than prose?", I confess to having no idea how to answer it.

When I am feeling less humble, I think that there is no good way to answer it, and that those who pretend to do so are practicing intellectual scams and cons, like an adolescent's game of "what things have cooties and what things are cool." You can find agreement within a particular in-group, and indeed the agreement is part of what constitutes the in-group (we are the people who find *this* sort of thing cool). But there's really no deeper fact of the matter than "in the year 2013, in Evanston HS, cuffed trousers are considered irretrievably uncool by the following social circle." So too, in the year 1940, in the circle of Frank and Queenie Leavis, xyz was considered poetry, and other things were irretrievably gauche.

But when I am more humble, I consider that I am probably like the color-blind person in a world of colors, listening to people confidently label one thing red and another thing green, where they are attuned to some genuine distinction in the nature of things that is forever beyond my sensitivities. It's part of why I don't do poetry.

oldster, #316: Many years ago, I saw an opinion that what distinguishes free verse from prose-cut-into-chunks was that the former consists of planned departures from a metrical scheme, while the latter is random. I have no idea how true that is or isn't, but it stuck with me. (IIRC, I read it in a Mod Squad novelization, which may be one of the reasons I remember it -- it was such an odd place to find something like that.)

Lee @317--

Interesting proposal, but does that mean that for every instance of free verse, the author could specify *which* metrical scheme it was that they had departed from? "You might think my free verse was a departure from iambic pentameter, but it's not: it's actually a departure from anapests! You didn't hear any anapestic beat in my poem? Exactly--that's how wide a departure it was!"

Ulysses Grant said that he only knew two tunes: one of them was Yankee Doodle, and the other one wasn't. Not all of us are so fortunate; there are times when I hum tunelessly, without it being clear to me that I am misrepresenting some *particular* tune. I might be departing from Yankee Doodle, or from Dixie, or from Take Five.

And what sort of departures leave us with free verse? "In this piece, I started with iambic pentameter, and then departed from it to make free verse. Some critics have noted that my departure left me with lines consisting wholly of dactylic hexameters, and concluded from this that I am not writing free verse. But I am! It's a planned departure from iambic pentameter! "

Then there are the problems in the other direction. Churchill habitually fell into poulter's measures (fourteeners) in his prose: "The Stone Age may return now on the gleaming wings of science." Why prose and not poetry?

I don't know--I think I'm with Mongoose in feeling that I Just Don't Get It.

Sad Business Dept:

I just got a call from a realtor in Northern Virginia who is working for Fannie May, in regards to the effects of our late friend, Marilee Layman.

He has just come into the matter, and the apartment was foreclosed after almost a year of idleness. He called me, having found my name and number, to see if I knew what might be done about all her possessions. The place is just as she left it. Her van is parked down below. There was a note from "Rick" saying he'd shut off gas and such, but no number.

The agent, Don, doesn't like the idea of calling a trash firm to come and treat everything as junk to be harvested, and his concern touches me — particularly as I look around me — so I would very much like the word to go out to fans, perhaps especially those in the NoVa/DC area, but to anybody with an idea of how to proceed.

My own half-baked thoughts were that we might dispose in the ordinary way of clothing and impersonal items, maybe even books. Her crafts, perhaps, could be sold and the proceeds given to charity. Her van could be donated, unless someone wants to buy it for an equitable-low amount (and the money donated to charity — medical or fannish or I don't know what).

If anybody knows of a family or friend(s) who should benefit by this sad windfall, I'm open to suggestions. Am I in charge of this? I don't know. Should someone else be? I've never done this before.

I asked Don what sort of deadline we were looking at before the wheels of bureaucracy take over. He said 30 days, 45, maybe even 60 before an edict comes down and automatic procedures kick in, so that's not a lot of time.

I have a contact number for him. Should I run it here? Or would it be best for us to deal with him through a designated spokesperson? I'll hang onto the number for now.

I'm not able to access Usenet at the moment. My system stopped letting me on a few months back, and I didn't care enough to try to figure out what its problem was this time. Can someone reach Keith Lynch? He's fairly local and helped when she was in the hospital. What other DC fan or fans would be good to talk to? Who's Rick?

What next? I'm kind of lost here.

ps: Forgot to say that any mementos or keepsakes we might want to retain out of all this should perhaps be sold for a reasonable price and the money kicked into designated charity. I have this idea of charity in my head because maybe it seems a little ghoulish otherwise. I could be mistaken, of course, and will listen to cooler or less confused heads.

This can't be the first time something like this has happened. Is there a manual yet?

Kip, can I boost this to the front page?

Kip said yes by Twitter, so I've done it.

Poetry/prose There's something that some songwriters can do (Lee Gold and Seanan McGuire, in filk, for example) that both causes awe in me and drives me up a wall in envious frustration.

For a good number of their songs (almost all I've ever seen, in Lee Gold's case), if you take out all the line breaks and add reasonable punctuation, they don't look out of place -- no inside-out sentences to get the rhyming word in the end position, or forced syntax to preserve meter. It's just fluid, reasonable, conversational prose -- that ALSO rhymes and scans precisely to the tune chosen.

ARRRRRGH, I say! Admiringly. And enviously. In the "I want to hate them a little" kind of admiration.

Mongoose @ 314

If further poetry therapy is indicated, another of my all-time favorite threads may be found here.

Acquaintance with Christian hymnody helpful, but probably not necessary.

Elliott 323: I managed that with a sonnet once. I told a little story from my life at a Fanoclasts meeting, and only a couple of people in the room noticed that it was a sonnet (or, I think, a poem at all, but perhaps my memory is flattering me).

Unfortunately the poem itself has been lost. Maybe it will be found in mummy wrappings in a thousand years.

SamChevre @ 324: thank you! I'm extremely well acquainted with Christian hymnody, so I'm looking forward to that one. I shall bookmark it for next time I need my spirits lifting. Unfortunately this may turn out to be tomorrow; fortunately, it's good to know that if it does, there's immediate therapy to turn to.

Elliott @ 323, Xopher @ 325: that is exactly the reason why my mother loves Browning's My Last Duchess. It absolutely reads like natural speech.

Local cat sez "Oh, hai, some doodz in my base, paintin' my wallz. He haz a bukkit."
Me: "Stay here, get pettinz, stay away from walls and bukkit."

Local Cat, so far, is falling for it, but meanwhile I've put cardboard in front of the wet paint. It was just touching up a spot, while the painters are dealing with painting the place they had to replace the sheetrock after electricians and Plumbing Adventures ate various parts of it, but we've been herding the cats and ourselves into various rooms to deal with various things being repaired or painted. Smaller Cat is saying that she's going to hide in her base, because she ain't goin near that d00d with a bukkit, even though he's gone now.

Thanks for the recommendations. What doesn't get under the tree will probably wind up in the library request queue, perhaps with a quick skim first. (as an aside, I totally understand library privacy, but I'd really like a record of what he's been reading just to tune this sort of thing)

Dragonbreath 1& 2 is on order for 6yr old. It'll make good bedtime reading, from what I've seen in the previews. If our sides don't hurt too much. I'm sure the older one will borrow and consume it as well.

I'm bouncing between Dark is Rising, Young Wizards, and Chronicles of Prydain for the 9yr old. Kind of leaning toward the first. Early British legend sounds good.

Earthsea and Wrinkle in Time, older Asimov, a couple of Heinlein juvies, are on the shelves already, as yet unread by him. I'm going with the just laying around approach to the classic sf. It's much more effective than pushing it.

He's read a bunch of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels (at least 3 on the shelves now), but I'm not sure which others. The Moomins showed up last year (or the one before).

Swallows and Amazons (and sequels) is at risk of needing to rebought due to overuse. Several are missing covers with increasingly sketchy paperback bindings.

Last year, we gave the youngest (3 yrs) Stuck, by Olivers Jeffers. It had _everyone_ laughing by the end.

Elliott, #323: Christine Lavin does that too. I've noticed that many of her songs are basically meditations that flow perfectly as prose, but also happen to rhyme and scan.

I've managed it at least once with a sonnet, which can be read aloud in the rhythm of natural English and no one will notice that it's a sonnet unless you come down PLUNK on the line-endings.

A lot of neat particles have shown up in the last few days; the Susan who doesn't just wither and turn sour (as in a previously-referenced fiction) was especially interesting -- not absolutely convincing (I don't assume that an upper-class type with monarchical experience would understand responsibility the same way), but interesting.
      However, I have a question about what looks like Malekith's real mistake. (rot13 just in case -- I don't \think/ this is a spoiler.) Vs ur qrfgeblf gur avar jbeyqf, jurer qb \nal/ bs gur qnex ryirf yvir -- rira orsber gurl ernyvmr gurer ner ab jbzra? Unf Zneiry erjevggra gur ovgf bs Abefr zlgubf gung V fxvz sebz Jvxvcrqvn gb znxr Finegnysurvz gur cevzbeqvny punbf sebz juvpu gur bgure jbeyqf rzretrq, vafgrnq bs bar bs gubfr rzretragf? Be qvq V zvff fbzrguvat nzvq nyy gur unzzre guebjvat, funcr vyyhfvbaf, rgp.? Sbe gung znggre, qb jr xabj gung qnex ryirf ner frkhnyyl qvzbecuvp fhpu gung abar bs gur jneevbef jrer srznyr?

eric@277: has he read the 3 sequels to Wee Free Men? They just kept getting better (although the last one may be a bit much for age 9 -- depends on whether he's better socialized than I was at that age).
      I found Leviathan et al to be second-rate writing, but that may be just me -- I don't think I've thought much of any of W's prose -- and the story certainly moves along interestingly.
     Boneshaker et al might be too old.
      The Invention of Hugo Cabret didn't have all the let's-make-this-interesting-for-adults-too bits the movie put in; don't know how he'll react to limitations of print if he's seen the movie (which did have a lot of great Melies visuals).
      IME, the Suck Fairy hit Andre Norton's prose, but the stories are still good; I'm partial to Galactic Derelict (my first) and Ice Crown (may be too old).
      Vigorously Nth the recommendations for Duane; he probably won't get the moon scene in the 2nd book, but you may be able to tell him why it matters. (wrt followup -- Duane vs Cooper depends on how good he is at cultural stretch; Cooper makes no concessions even to the time she was writing in (40+ years ago), but the plotting is less frantic.
      IMO Schmitz is mostly rather retro (aka "a dirty old man"), but YMMV (and-but beware of Baen extensions -- I thought The Wizard of Karres was AWFUL).
      I think almost any Jones YA could work, except Fire and Hemlock -- that really needs a few more years (or extraordinary wisdom for that age).
      John Bellairs may suit; they have a vaguely musty feel (as if set decades before written?) but interesting plots and atmosphere (and Gorey covers...).
      He might like Russell's Wasp (talking about older not-planned-as-YA): fast-paced and irreverent, and not as political as Laumer (which I first read about the same time, but that was age 14).

And in other news: are would-be startups being played as would-be authors are? http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/12/11/rival-startup-events-reveal-split-among-tech-entrepreneurs-investors/9isoFHmgsLgNZ4mgxnxaCM/story.html

Guess who was mentionned in the editorial of the latest Locus?

Abi.

HO, Ho, ho!

An acquaintance has created a festive board game for Christmas, "Krampus Quest." 2-4 players race to collect the most naughty children.

Available as a free downloadable PDF!

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/109473/Krampus-Race

@333: In what capacity (aside from the presumed general excellentitude)?

Jacque @335:

Liza Groen Trombi (Locus Editor-in-Chief) is my best friend from high school. She mentioned that we saw each other at World Fantasy.

She didn't mention that I spent most of the con suffering from crippling social anxiety, alternately paralyzed with shyness and angry at myself for not making it work somehow. She helped me out of a couple of social holes, dropping me into very pleasant social groups, where I had a good time before subsiding back into my swamp.

It always amuses me that the two of us ended up in fandom by entirely separate paths. (We went our separate ways after high school, lost touch, and didn't meet up again until Worldcon in 1995, when we freaked Martin out by still having all the same hand gestures.)

At 12:40 UTC I shall be settling down in the local cinema to watch a certain movie in 3D.

I have mixed feelings. I didn't get to see the first part in a cinema, because of a burst of ill-health and the commitments of caring for my father, and I only watched the Blu-Ray in the aftermath of his death. It felt bloated. It was riddled with obvious show-off-the-3D sequences which hardly advanced the story.

And 3D? How will I react? Headaches? I am not as confident about driving after dark as I used to be, not since that car accident. At least I have just had my eyes checked.

I spent yesterday working up a ladder. I expect a comfortable seat at the cinema; I paid extra for that.

Fragano @303 Oh dear. No, the invisible hand is not providence.

Poetry vs Prose. This got debated briefly in my creative writing class. Our tutor waffled a little (she is a bit too nice and unwilling to declare things failures) but said that free verse retains some structure and rhythm that prose doesn't have.

Me, I don't think there's a sharp dividing line. There's rhythmic, metrical and even rhyming prose* and there's poetry with less structured elements than that. Most stuff is clearly one or the other, but the pieces in the middle depend on context, presentation and intent, and we may even disagree with the author**.

* I've suggested a couple of times to other students to try putting some line breaks in especially lyrical prose pieces.
** My work for the free verse exercise deliberately lurked in this middle zone.

Abi @ 336... There's a photo of you among the con's report.

Some here may be interested in or amused by a slice-of-life photo I shared on G+ today. I need to wear elbow-pads to sleep in because of my Mysteeerious Elbow Thing (I'm seeing a neurologist in Jan), but thy don't quite fit right, so I am engaging in a bit of modding.

Oh, Fluorospherian harmony hounds and arrangement-lovers: there's a new season of The Sing-Off on free Hulu! (Available to US viewers until Jan 23; I don't know if it works elsewhere)

This is an eliminate-one-group-per-ep competition show, but has for me two advantages: they're genuinely competing on skill in a skill I can judge (each acapella group makes their own arrangements as well as performing), and the "Draaaaahmahhhh" sections are very limited and skippable. There's a setup 'get to know the band this week' edited package before the performance, which one can skip, and after the performance the judges make for the most part really interesting, technical, and on-point commentary.

If you want just the performances, go to 'clips' on that link and you can see just the performances without anything else.

A curated menu of low-commitment tastes, for those interested:

* Vocal Rush, the only high-school group in the competition, kills the traditional spiritual Bottom of the River with maturity and amazing vibe.
* Street-Corner Renaissance, a group of exclusively older black men, reinterprets Bruno Mars' That's What Makes You Beautiful into a flawless doo-wop version.
* An episode-starting all-groups-sing mega-arrangement of a medley of "party anthems".

This season's new-thing, which I kind of like, is that the groups in each half of the show prepare an arrangement to a given 'side' of a battle song; one group from each half will be up for elimination, and sing head-to-head in competing arrangements simultaneously. Example (from second episode, so kinda spoilers if you care).

I am so, so happy to have new Sing-Off to watch. I've been mainlining it and sniffling and just immersing myself in harmonygasm. Also, this season the eps seem to be airing near-daily, which makes for less intolerable I HAVE NO NEW SINGING IN MY LIFE waits.

Re e-cigs (particle): "They just put out harmless water vapour". At least so I keep hearing. Well, no. They put out a fair amount of whatever perfumes they flavour the e-cig with, and it's enough that, at the bridge table at least, they set off my perfume allergy. That is clearly not as bad as real cigs, which I can smell (and react to) on your clothing from two tables away (especially when they have a 5 minute "smoke break" they have to run for, meaning they slam it down) or for 20 feet behind when they're wandering down the street with the lit cancer stick in their hand down by their side, but it's not "harmless".

Unfortunately (for me at least), the ACBL has taken a stand. It's "no cigs in the playing area" (not that they can find a hotel that would let people smoke anyway) moved to "no e-cigs in the playing area, either", but

players...find it difficult to cope with heavy scents of perfume and cologne...Some can become ill in the presence of such scents.
"Please...be considerate of those who are sensitive to perfumes and colognes" (my emphasis)

Oh dearie, how *nice* we have to be. I "become ill" - I get blinding headaches, and eventually will get a cough triggered by it that will lead to permanently irritated throat (which triggers coughs...) One of my partners *is losing her sight* - perfume causes blood vessels in her retina to pop. We'll hope that this quiet reminder can become a little stronger in time.

Elliott Mason@344 - I don't know how your Mysteeerious Elbow Thing works, but I've had occasional tennis elbow problems in the past (from Bad Mouse Ergonomics problems, not actual tennis) and about 5 years ago the NYTimes had an article on exercises that help, in particular the Thera-Band FlexBar, a bendy rubber bar that's able to put the right direction of twisting and stretching forces into your elbow. It was about $15 at the Big Online River website (which has pictures), and it helped a bit for that and shoulder problems.

re the e-cigarette regulation:

I suspect some of the push to regulate e-cigarettes is the years of pent-up desire to regulate normal burning cigarettes, which was successfully prevented by political pressure (lots of smoking voters plus deep-pocketed tobacco companies). This is illogical, but organizations aren't logical, even when their member humans mostly are.

If e-cigs just "put out harmless water vapour", how is it that they deliver nicotine to the users' lungs? And isn't that nicotine still present in the "harmless water vapour" that misses the users' lungs, and is inhaled by those near-by? Vapor strikes me as a somewhat inappropriate delivery mechanism for psychoactive drugs administered in public.

I still can't access my email. I thought it was my computer at first, but I've found out that there's an ongoing outage at Yahoo. Yet another reason to get rid of my Yahoo mail. Only spoons between me and that now.

More shockingly, apparently I was wrong about Yahoo trying to get out of the email business by making it less and less convenient to use. In fact the new CEO (or something) has said she wants to use improvements in email to attract new users.

They think these changes are improvements. The jawdropping cluelessness of this just stuns me. How could anyone think going from being able to have several folders/emails open at once to NOT being able to is an improvement? And that's just one of the fuck-you changes they've been making.

It's much more horrifying as incompetence than as malice.

Details: I see a screen with a bunch of text that looks linked, but the links don't go anywhere. If I scroll down I see a big bold message that says "Your screen elements are hidden from view. Press Esc or move pointer to the center of the screen to return to Mail." Needless to say, those measures are not effective.

My vexation with e-cigs is that the pre-teen kids in our area have heard the message that they're "harmless" loud and clear, and a number of them are well on their way to nicotine addictions that are going to be an absolute bear to kick later on in life. If they can.

So I hope they're keen on spending their pocket money on nicotine capsules for years to come. Which makes me look askance at the "tobacco money is driving the e-cig ban" argument, too. There's money in every nicotine delivery system, because it's an addictive drug, and addicts spend money to feed that addiction. E-cig manufacturers know this, just like cigarette manufacturers do.

I get it that existing nicotine addicts would like to not get lung cancer. But I'd rather that non-addicts don't necessarily get hooked, either. Particularly not ones too young to exercise long-term judgment.

And I'm finding the hectoring tone of e-cig supporters pretty much exactly as tiresome as they find the hectoring tone of e-cig opponents. The idea that their opponents could have valid concerns, rather than just being overly moralistic or pointlessly authoritarian, seems to be absent from most of the commentary that I run across.

I don't say this stuff out in the wilds of Twitter because I'm not prepared for the kind of ruthless, unproductive mockery that raising such concerns will bring. (And if it comes up here, I'm out of this conversation faster than you can say Zwarte Piet.)

Reaction to The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

It does seem a better movie than the first part.

While there are shots which take advantage of 3D, and a very few which very clearly have a 3D purpose, there isn't any strong dependence.

It didn't feel bloated, but it could be cut by an hour without damaging the story. If you recall how Jackson depicted Moria, just substitute a dragon for a Balrog, and some really fanciful still-working dwarven-tech furnaces which go from cold to pouring molten metal in a few minutes.

(Yes, the movie has a big cast.)

We get to see Legolas, doing all the fancy elven orc-fighting that he did in The Lord of the Rings, but it didn't feel as clear.

Most of the extra stuff is either explicitly off-stage in the book, or referenced in the LotR appendices. There is one scene which is a plausible gap-filler, part of a chain of discovery, and a character who is completely from outside of Middle-Earth.

I started to get eye-strain neck-tension after about two hours. I am not going to rush for 3D movies, though maybe a paid of clip-on 3D filters (polarised) would be worthwhile. But there are few movies which appeal to me as movies.

Bill Stewart @343: I don’t have a formal diagnosis yet, but my occupational therapist (who I was sent to with a ‘prescription’ for tennis-elbow treatment) says it’s definitely not tendonitis and he thinks probably it’s the goes-through-the-elbow-nerves having some kind of problem. The padded elbow socks help me because there are two things I do that aggravate the Thing: pressure against the ‘funny bone’ region, even very light pressure; and keeping my arms bent at an acute angle for extended periods of time. Things like putting my fist under my chin and my elbow on a table are both at once, of course. The socks (a) pad out the ow-spot and (b) remind me to straighten my arms, because keeping bent in ‘em is mildly uncomfortable for long periods.

That article talks about "breathing out clean nicotine vapour." Nicotine is not "clean" - it's one of the most toxic substances known. And possibly the most addictive; cigarettes are the only drug/delivery combination that addicts more than half of the people who try it once.

I don't want to breathe nicotine vapor, or have it accumulate in my presence. I don't necessarily think e-cigs should be banned entirely, but they should definitely be age-restricted (but maybe my perspective is colored by being in New Jersey, which age-restricts energy shots; if you do that, I can't see any excuse for letting kids buy nicotine in any form).

Dave Bell @348:

...pouring molten metal...

(Yes, the movie has a big cast.)

I see what you did there, though I'm not sure whether you intended to. And I'm straining to forge a follow-up metallurgical pun.

@351 Surely any puns would be over-wrought.

Any number are about to brazen it out.

So your movie experience wasn't unalloyed joy?

I think I just smelt a rat.

I'm sure we'll hammer out some specimens.

Are we having fun yet, ore what?

As I slave away in the word mines, I encounter nuggets of lexical pyrites that are, ahem, stunning. Here are a couple:

Augustine held a groundbreaking viewpoint because he saw God as in control but most importantly, enjoyable. He expresses that God is in existence for the benefit of humans.

It was not until he attached the 95 theses to the church door of Wittenburn that he paved his way into being a religious mogul.

abi:

I see e-cigarettes as a kind of harm-reduction policy w.r.t. smoking. I think you are running into the two problems with responding to vices with harm reduction:

a. Reducing the harm to the person involved in smoking, drug use, prostitution, underage drinking, etc., means decreasing the incentives for people to avoid doing those things.

b. Legalizing, decriminalizing, or offering help (needle exchanges, say) creates a mixed-message, which some people will take to mean "this isn't so bad, it's legal after all" instead of the more accurate "this is a bad idea, but we're tired of arresting people for it, since it doesn't really seem to help."

I don't know a good general solution to the dilemma. I usually prefer harm reduction kinds of policies, but they're not cost free. And I think it's often a little too easy to bash people who oppose them (or even have reservations) as puritans, rather than recognizing that they do have costs and maybe people just disagree about how the costs and benefits sum up.

abi:

I see e-cigarettes as a kind of harm-reduction policy w.r.t. smoking. I think you are running into the two problems with responding to vices with harm reduction:

a. Reducing the harm to the person involved in smoking, drug use, prostitution, underage drinking, etc., means decreasing the incentives for people to avoid doing those things.

b. Legalizing, decriminalizing, or offering help (needle exchanges, say) creates a mixed-message, which some people will take to mean "this isn't so bad, it's legal after all" instead of the more accurate "this is a bad idea, but we're tired of arresting people for it, since it doesn't really seem to help."

I don't know a good general solution to the dilemma. I usually prefer harm reduction kinds of policies, but they're not cost free. And I think it's often a little too easy to bash people who oppose them (or even have reservations) as puritans, rather than recognizing that they do have costs and maybe people just disagree about how the costs and benefits sum up.

abi @336: I am bemused by your reports of social anxiety. :-) On the one hand, it doesn't seem out of character for you (in a way I'm not sure I can articulate well; basically in my mental model of you, being shy is not inconsistent, if you see what I mean?). But on the other hand, you are so supremely socially "ept" in this context, that it seems oddly inconsistent. (Though I get that social eptness here is a different kettle of greeps because you have the ability to hold back and refine your message carefully and thoroughly until you're satisfied with it, before you make it public.)

And on the gripping hand, it is also often true that those who seem particularly gifted at a skill are often so because they've had to study extra hard to overcome their individual obstacles.

Anyway: It pleases me that Liza is/has been good for you. And I can make a very entertaining mental movie Martin's freak-out about your common gestures. "No, she's the clone!" :-)

albatross:

You do know that I live in the Netherlands, right? It's the country where pot is illegal, so please don't have more than five plants, and for your personal use, OK? Or just go to a brown cafe. (The term there is gedogenheid, tolerance).

I work in Amsterdam, and my lunchtime walks often take me through the red light district. I see the lingere-clad women in their narrow windows, waiting for customers, and I both know that it's better that they're there and visible and that few of them are Dutch or there entirely willingly.

(See also, bicycle helmet laws, which we've certainly touched on here on Making Light.)

So, yes. Harm reduction. I'm acquainted with it. And I'm not looking to ban e-cigarettes; I'm saying that they are not "not harming anyone", that seeking to regulate them is not "a moral absurdity", that it's neither a "micro-tyranny" nor based on the feeling that e-cigs are "cheating". In other words, I assert that people with concerns about them have a rational position, just as I respect the fact that vapers have the rational position that they'd like to manage their addiction in a fashion that doesn't destroy their entire respiratory tract and possibly kill them into the bargain.

But I'm not asserting it very loudly, because e-cig advocates have taken the position that the things I quoted above constitute acceptable discourse in a nuanced conversation. It makes a discussion about balancing the needs of addict population with the desire to keep people from joining that population except under [culturally variable conditions] very difficult. And I resent that fact, because, as I said above, there are costs to the way that this is currently being handled, and it would be nice to be able to discuss them.

And this is one of the concerns of the vapers, who feel that the regulations are being pushed in without sufficient consultation, based on inaccurate or misleading information. And I would love to talk about that. But not in this atmosphere, not in these terms.

And that pisses me off.

Jacque @361:

Your mental model of me is unsurprisingly accurate.

The exception: I can actually wing it very well in conversation; when Liza plopped me down at a table with a bunch of people (including Elizabeth Bear and Toby Buckell, both of whom I did want to meet in person), I had a delightful time. And I like to hope that the people around me did too. They certainly laughed when I joked, and spoke when I listened, you know?

What I struggled with was getting to that point. Walking into the bar full of people who already knew each other and were having a grand time without needing me there. Going into the darkened banqueting hall in my fancy scarlet dress and lace shrug, knowing I had to find a table to sit at on my own. (Again, Liza to the rescue! And now I've met Joe and Gay Haldeman.)

(Wry joke: I went to WFC only knowing three people in person. But those three people were PNH, Liza, and Charlie Stross.)

I have plans for how to handle things at the next Worldcon. Among other things, I'd like to hold the Gathering of Light early in the con, so that I have a bunch of faces to go with the names I already know.

And if it doesn't work out? Well, not everyone's a con person.

Abi @ 363... Glad that Liza was there to help ease you into those conversations. Needing such help is a situation I'm all too familiar with.

HLN: Local man notices that "swiping" the iPad home screen to the left brings up a screen with his apps. Local man feels a bit foolish for not realizing this earlier.

(iOS 7, so not completely certain this works on earlier versons.)

In regard to PNH's particle on Kim Stanley Robinson: How distressung that even The New Yorker has sucky comments.

Tech AKICIML:

OK, apparently my Yahoo problem was coincident with the global outage, not caused by it.

This morning I've discovered that I can access it via IE (ieee!) but get the same problem via Firefox.

Could Firefox be cacheing a corrupted CSS for Yahoo or something? If so, how can I fix it?

abi @ 363: ah, yes. That sets off a few pings of empathy. Cons can be quite daunting to the highly introverted.

I went to a Blake's 7 con once, and I had the good sense to go with an extroverted friend so that I would not be overwhelmed. EF is a writer, mainly of westerns, and at that point she had about ten or a dozen of them in print through some cheapskate publisher that paid her a flat rate of £100 per novel. (I think she could find a better publisher, but at least this one will now reliably pay her up front.)

At the dinner, we found ourselves sitting with one of the guests, Scott Fredericks, and this was where the flip side of going round with an extrovert demonstrated itself. EF got into enthusiastic conversation with Scott, telling him all about her books, while I could barely get a word in edgeways. I'd pretty much accepted that I was going to be playing the role of Interested Listener all evening when Scott suddenly turned to me.

"And what about you?" he asked. "What sort of thing do you write?"

I blinked. "How on earth did you know I was a writer?" I asked.

"It's your turn of phrase," he replied.

And this, my friends, is why I think Scott Fredericks is awesome.

#365 ::: Michael I, re: swiping iPad screen

That works as far back as the iPad2. I learned that trick in J. D. Biersdorfer's [iPad2] The Missing Manual - O'Reilly has a whole string of them. Invaluable resources.

Never mind my last. Apparently it was due to accessing Yahoo Mail through Yahoo Messenger (which I keep only because it lets me access YM without typing my password every time, a Bad Practice that I don't intend to continue). When I logged completely out of Yahoo, went to Mail, and logged in with my remembered-with-difficulty password, all was well.

Still leaving Yahoo, but this isn't their fault, unless you count the delay because I thought it was due to the global outage.

Today, I am a Christmas tree. Trying to keep the kid playing with me and not bugging her dad, who's trying to have a Last Productive Weekend Before We Go Out Of Town bout (and freakout).

Elliott Mason @ 371... Today, I am a Christmas tree.

Pine-ing for the fjords?

Oh, Serge, fir crying out loud -yew can be such a sap.

Don't treat Serge like he's just committed treeson! Not like he just dropped an F-baum.

And Elliott, you're a good guy. You should definitely take a bough. Some people may needle you about this, but they're homophobic bigots: making fun of your ornamentation.

AKICIML:

Discussion of dolls on the Marilee thread reminded me of this, but I didn't think it was appropriate to post there.

I don't suppose anyone could point me in the direction of some resources where I could search for someone who does antique doll repair? Is there a database of such people? I have my great aunt's doll she brought with her from Scotland, and I'd love to have her restored, but I've no idea how to find reputable places.

Searches for 'doll repair', 'doll museum', and even 'doll hospital' didn't return anything encouraging. I'm thinking of contacting the McCord Museum and asking if they can provide contacts, but I hate the phone and cold-calling is very difficult for me. Even if I pre-write a script, I won't know the right questions to ask.

Any help would be appreciated!

Hee.

Newfoundland and Labrador RCMP have enlisted the help of Elf on a Shelf for their "Don't Drink and Drive" campaign.

(I was distracted for a few minutes trying to read the names of all the books on the shelf...)

Cheryl, what sort of doll? China, celluloid, wooden?

I collect Hittys, and have a smattering of small dolls (china heads, porcelain, stuffed...), so I may be able to refer you to some of the doll lists where someone can help.

Lori, 377: Did the book get named after the dolls, or vice versa? And does anybody know whether the Suck Fairy has been at the book? (Golly I hope not. I loved it so.)

So, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The High Frame Rate thing was very cool. It made the fast action sequences smooth and visually comprehensible. I never felt that "too much to take in" feeling.

The story . . .
. . . jryy, nyzbfg nyy gur jnl guebhtu V jnf guvaxvat "Guvf vf zhpu yrff rtertvbhfyl fvyyl na nqncgngvba guna gur svefg bar." Gurer jrer fgvyy ceboyrzf. V xabj Gbyxvra uvzfrys unq abgrf ergpbaavat gur ybat jne jvgu Fnheba vagb _Gur Uboovg_, ohg gur Juvgr Pbhapvy nqq-ba fgbel jnf whfg gbb zhpu. Nmbq, Obyt, npghnyyl anvyvat qbja Fnheba nf gur Arpebznapre, gur eriratr qenzn j/ Gubeva . . . arrqyrff cnqqvat. Htu. Ohg V jnf rkcrpgvat gung, evtug?

Gura V fnj gur ynfg 20 zvahgrf. Bu, tvir zr n sernxvat oernx. Vaqhytrag ivqrb-tnzr fglyr rlr pnaql gung qvqa'g znxr nal frafr. Yhqvpebhf.

V qvq yvxr Ynxr Gbja. Gur rynobengvbaf gurer jrer unezyrff. Avpr frgf, tbbq punenpgref.

To some things up:
Peter Jackson didn't take *liberties* with The Hobbit; he got it passing-out drunk, dressed it as a clown, and photographed it in bed with a she-warg.

Stefan Jones @379 -- you are aware that that should be "to sum things up", right?

HLN: Area retiree witnesses scary unplanned physics demo, and is glad to have emerged unscathed.
Switching to 1st person--I was in the northern sector of the city, waiting at a bus stop, and saw a firetruck about to turn onto my street from a cross street some 100 feet away. It looked like it had a yellow hose trailing behind it--I didn't quite believe it, but as it started to turn I saw a good 150 feet of hose dragging, with a metal fitting on the end starting to bounce around. My scattered but better-than-some knowledge of science suggested I get behind that bus shelter right away, and I did, faster than I'd thought a person with 2 bad knees could move. As the truck completed the turn into the lane closest to me, the end of the hose whipped this way and that. It did not come near the bus shelter, but it hit the kickstand of a parked motorcycle about 80 feet farther down, causing it to fall over. Despite at least one other vehicle honking like mad, the truck went on its merry way. I don't know how far it got before the driver(s) caught on.
Another witness came over, with the owner of the motorbike, and we exchanged details. Then my bus came and I left.
Situational awareness, people.

HLN: One of my cats is wholeheartedly constipated, and is currently at the vet, where the situation is being remedied.

On the one hand, I'm rather concerned about the cat -- on the other, it's really, really hard not to make bad jokes about the situation.

#382:::xeger Is this where I should hope that everything comes out well?

Had a similar situation with my schnauzer a few years back. Pepper was repeatedly circling the coffee table and panting. She would try to settle and then get right back to her perambulations. Her stomach looked as if a small nerf basketball had settled there. Fearing bloat (highly unlikely in a schnauzer, but not 0% chance), I ran her to the emergency vet clinic. By the time the vet came to see me, she mentioned that Pepper had (quite noisily) lost quite a bit of her girth and the xrays showed only constipation. As we left, Pepper found the nearest grassy spot and left something that should come from a dog 10 times her weight. My guess is that the trip to the e-vet clinic and a walk around the perimeter may have produced the same results for far less money. Then again, I have always been grateful for the spectacular job they do under less than great circumstances.

TexAnne, the Suck Fairy has only given Hitty: Her First Hundred Years a localized swipe with her wand - do you remember the black minister? The thick, Uncle Remus dialect is kind of wince-making, but the character's still sympathetic.

However, if ordering a new copy, make sure NOT to get the abridged edition they've come up with. Original or nothing!

Rumer Godden's various doll books have also held up remarkably well. And I discovered that it's possible to buy Tottie-like "Dutch dolls" (now made in China) from RevWar re-enactor supply catalogs!

@377 Lori Coulson

Cheryl, what sort of doll? China, celluloid, wooden?

She's celluloid, I think? She looks like she could be bisque, but then she's quite light when I pick her up.

I'm afraid she's in rather sad shape. Her neck is broken and her head no longer attached (I have some of the broken pieces, as well as the detached eye assembly).

She is wearing Scottish dress: a MacDonald kilt (quite properly, though the pin is lost); a sort of onesie that makes up shirt and shorts; a black velvet Prince Charlie jacket and matching Glengarry bonnet; removable black Mary Janes and socks. Her hair is blonde, short, and rather flat, I'm afraid.

The back of her neck says "Our Pet, Germany, 210".

She came with a wee travelling trunk, which makes me think she used to have more clothes.

I've uploaded some photos, though not of good quality, I'm afraid.

I'm in Montreal, so geography will play a part in whether I can access any experts.

Thanks so much for your help!

Mongoose @368: And this, my friends, is why I think Scott Fredericks is awesome.

I think this is entirely and utterly grounds for finding Scott Fredericks to be awesome!

At the dinner, we found ourselves sitting with one of the guests, Scott Fredericks, and this was where the flip side of going round with an extrovert demonstrated itself.

Oh dear. I am reminded: Back in the olden days (when I still thought I was an introvert), I chanced to fetch up in the hotel restaurant at Sunday lunch at a MileHiCon. With me were Susan Crites and The Clone, Caro, and maybe a couple of other people. As we were getting settled, Ed Bryant came in, and was gathered into the group. We had gotten seated and were waiting for our menus when GoH William Tenn showed up. Chairs shifted, and he was given a seat. Next to Susan, as it happened.

Orders were taken, conversation proceded, food was brought, and we settled down to our lunch. Mr. Tenn, however, was having trouble getting the mustard bottle to disgorge any mustard onto his ham sandwich. Susan, who was waxing loquacious about something or other, glanced over, and without the slightest pause in her discourse, took the mustard bottle out of his hand, picked up his butter knife, and began slathering mustard on the ham of his sandwich.

Mr. Tenn was, as one might expect, somewhat taken aback. The rest of us were just kind of sitting there, not grinning, waiting to see what happened next. After a moment, Susan noticed the change in tone around the table, paused in her tale, and finally registered what her hands were doing. "Um," she said, putting the knife and bottle down very carefully, "Sorry." Turning bright red, she turned to Mr. Tenn. "I have small children you see, and whenever I see someone having trouble with their food...it's a reflex, really...." she just kind of trailed off.

Mr. Tenn retrieved his butter knife, and began adjusting the applied mustard more to his taste, maintaining what was left of his dignity. The rest of us, of course, burst out laughing.

Follow-up from previous open thread:

I found, in my freezer, a pound of cottage cheese which I had lost track of. Better than it rotting someplace, but what do do with it?

I found, in my bread machine's instruction manual, a recipe for "Cottage Cheese and Chive" bread. The 1 lb. tub had enough for two loves. I had one slice freshly baked, with butter. It was pretty good!

In tangentially related news: While digging out recently purchased bags of cream cheese, I found a bar which I had purchased last spring and which had fallen behind some condiment containers.

I peeked inside the foil wrap. It was . . . not pretty. I sealed the mess inside of a bad and tossed it. I'll toss the bag tomorrow.

Abi, albatross:

Although I think banning e-cigs is probably a mistake, I do think it's being done for public health reasons related to the ones Abi suggests, but I will go further.

A common public-health view is that the commercial tobacco industry and its marketing and influence over governments are an unnecessary evil, responsible for huge misery, and with no redeeming features. Tobacco companies are hostis humani generis, common enemies of humanity, like terrorists and the NSA. The goal is to see them wiped out, with tobacco reduced to grown-your-own or co-op farming, and the strategic question is how best to do this without too much harm to current smokers, farmers, or innocent bystanders. I'm basically of this persuasion, though I am more concerned about impact on civil liberties than the median anti-smoking advocate.

From this viewpoint e-cigarettes are tricky. On the one hand, e-cigarettes are roughly as effective as nicotine patches in getting people to quit cigarettes (though probably less effective in getting them to quit nicotine) and so should be supported. On the other hand, they are easy to market as 'safe' smoking (even though do they have real health risks) and the concept of 'safe' smoking makes it harder to get rid of unsafe smoking.

My personal view is that they should be sold the same way nicotine patches are, but I do think attempts to ban them really are motivated by long-term public health concerns.

abi #347:

My vexation with e-cigs is that the pre-teen kids in our area have heard the message that they're "harmless" loud and clear, and a number of them are well on their way to nicotine addictions that are going to be an absolute bear to kick later on in life. If they can.

Dropping in a reply before properly catching up:

abi #347: So I hope they're keen on spending their pocket money on nicotine capsules for years to come. Which makes me look askance at the "tobacco money is driving the e-cig ban" argument, too. There's money in every nicotine delivery system, because it's an addictive drug, and addicts spend money to feed that addiction.

The amount of money varies vastly. I'be gone from buying 7 packs a week (call it $55) and a big box of nicotine gum (another $55) most weeks, to one $15 e-hookah every three weeks or more (haven't had enough cycles to really stabilize it), and maybe one box of gum a month. Even assuming the same people get the money, I'm paying perhaps 10% of what I was.

Big Tobacco is looking at something that can kill it, the conversion of nicotine addiction from a sale crop to a cheap device. You'd better believe they're not going down without a fight.

Jacque @ 386: what a wonderful story! I had a much-needed laugh.

Jacque @ 386: what a wonderful story! I had a much-needed laugh.

Stefan @379

Would you mind copying your Desolation of Smaug post over to the spoiler thread? (Un-rot-13ed, of course.) That way I'll actually remember to read it once I've seen the movie; otherwise it'll be lost in the Open Thread never to be seen again.

I'm rather proud of myself for applying the willpower to not read it, though.

Jacque, that would have been MHC 10. I was there, but not in a spot to have known what was going on at the table. Su's told the story, but in less detail. Well, scratch that. I remembered less detail.

I really do miss her. I hope we can swing a meeting next time I'm in the large rectangular state.

Dave H., #389: That's interesting. We haven't had a lot of exposure to e-cigs, so at this point my primary response to them is, "Anything that stops people waving lit cigarettes over the merchandise is an improvement." (Not such an issue at cons any more, but still one at outdoor events such as Austin Celtic Fest.)

Just had an idea, wanted to toss it out before I head out to play pool:

The Wiki format would be ideal for displaying legal codes. The History list would provide a built-in framework for showing changes and significant decisions over time, with additional details provided on the Talk pages.

(Naturally, for most users the wiki would be read-only. ;-) )

Feel free to tell me where this has been done already. If it hasn't, the American Constitution would provide an ideal proof-of-concept page.

I am exceedingly dubious about the 'e-cigs are less obnoxious to those around the smoker because what is exhaled is unnoticeable' because when my sister was living with us, she would go to the (glass-enclosed) back porch to vape, and walking through it afterwards stank of clubbing. :-/ Quite possibly, e-cigs make LESS offensive output-not-into-the-vaper's-lungs than cigarettes do, but the value is nonzero by any measure.

The real experiment would be switching my heavy-smoker dad to vaping, and buying a massive thorough housecleaning for him; right now, if I or my daughter go over to his house for more than half an hour, our clothes have to be taken off and shoved in the laundry immediately upon returning to our house, and sometimes we have to hair-wash immediately, too, to avoid gassing my husband with stink. He can't even go over to Dad's house at all; his lungs start seizing up.

395
It's an idea I like, and there have been times I wished for it. ('What was the previous description of this county boundary?' is one that I've wished for 'history' on.)

Re: Hitty Her First Hundred Years

I second Rikibeth's recommendations, the abridged version is to be avoided at all costs (and the illustrations in that one DO suck). You definitely want the original.

The dolls are named for the book. They vary in materials, hand-carved wood being the most expensive. Making clothes for a six and a quarter inch doll can be challenging too.

Cheryl, that looks like a composite doll meant to be a copy of her more expensive bisque sisters. Her coloring is in very good condition, and I do think she is repairable and worth doing so.

@398 Lori Coulson

Cheryl, that looks like a composite doll meant to be a copy of her more expensive bisque sisters. Her coloring is in very good condition, and I do think she is repairable and worth doing so.

Excellent, thanks! Now all I need is to find a place that can do it.

Oh! Peter O'Toole has died.

He was my very first movie star crush - the voice, the eyes! And now he's gone, at 81.

Angiportus @ 381: have you seen Steve Martin's Roxanne? Rockies-edge volunteer firefighters instead of Gascon cadets; "Boys! ... the ladder! ... is up! ...." (gasped as he runs down the street waving his arms after the departing truck). Glad that the real-life version didn't catch you.

Cheryl @ 400... Goodbye, Mr.Chips.

Open-threadiness: this is a (public) status update from one of my friends. English is not his first language.

"This luggage reclaim is boring ! Neither the janitors do not sing Schubert nor the passengers!!!"

I am now happily imagining a world in which people spontaneously sing Schubert at luggage reclaim points. I think it would be a better world than the one we have.

Xeger at # 382: One of my cats is wholeheartedly constipated.

Wrong organ, it's the whole colon.

TrishB @ 383 ...
#382:::xeger Is this where I should hope that everything comes out well?

*snicker* Indeedy (although I'm still waiting for it ... )

Had a similar situation with my schnauzer a few years back. Pepper was repeatedly circling the coffee table and panting. She would try to settle and then get right back to her perambulations. Her stomach looked as if a small nerf basketball had settled there. Fearing bloat (highly unlikely in a schnauzer, but not 0% chance), I ran her to the emergency vet clinic. By the time the vet came to see me, she mentioned that Pepper had (quite noisily) lost quite a bit of her girth and the xrays showed only constipation. As we left, Pepper found the nearest grassy spot and left something that should come from a dog 10 times her weight. My guess is that the trip to the e-vet clinic and a walk around the perimeter may have produced the same results for far less money. Then again, I have always been grateful for the spectacular job they do under less than great circumstances.

Yikes! I'm glad that turned out well! That does remind me of various James Herriot stories, most of which could include "animals do their best to make vets seem foolish" as a punchline.

Allan Beatty @ 404 ...
Xeger at # 382: One of my cats is wholeheartedly constipated.
Wrong organ, it's the whole colon.

Would you prefer "Is demonstrating remarkable intestinal fortitutde"? ;D

I would gladly contribute e-cigs to the local post awful's package sorting dept. Mail seems to be ok, but every package delivered to my door reeks of cigarette smoke. *cough*

Kid has now been productively amused for an hour or so by the process of making Confetti Crayons: take (cheap, by preference; real Crayolas no longer melt as cleanly, though they do color better) crayons and de-wrapper, then chop coarsely. For bonus style points, sort into 6-10 color families. Then fill some mold (I got some cheapie dollar store long-ice-stick molds; you can also use hearts/stars/whatever) with a limited but varied assortment of color chips, and melt to approximately 135degF by some reasonable-to-you-method.

I tried doing it by floating the trays in baking dishes of boiling water, but there weren't enough joules in the water; now I've got the de-facto bains marie in the oven, whose lowest setting is 170; I'm letting them come up to temperature and will shut it off.

Heating too hot will lead to a layer of dense pigment on the bottom, a layer of clearish wax on top, and real crayon only in the middle.

These are going to be the classroom giftmas presents for her schoolmates this year, perhaps wrapped in a colorful ribbon in pairs.

@403: I have not (yet) sung Schubert at the luggage carousel, but I have been known to burst into excerpts of Bach and/or Handel at my workplace.

Joan Fontaine passed away.
She was 96.

Crossing threads, some would say that Elliott's kid made crayon salad.

Cheryl @ #385, those are very disturbing photos, in a "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" kind of way.

Teka Lynn @ 408:

Now I want to participate in a flashmob singing Schubert at an airport baggage claim...

@411 Linkmeister

Cheryl @ #385, those are very disturbing photos, in a "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" kind of way.

I know, eh? Especially the eyeless head... I was thinking Hannibal, but you're right, Baby Jane is a better fit.

Also, Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin left the world yesterday. A recognizable name, anyway, though not coequal. Not my best birthday ever.

Nor the worst. That would have been my tenth birthday, in 1966, when I came home from school (late, as the bus was stuck behind a house inching down the road while my large intestine sent increasingly urgent dispatches to my brain) and ran in, eager to see if any presents had arrived. Scooping up the package from my grandmother, I dashed into the bathroom just as Mom said "Walt Disney died."

Linkmeister @411: Thank you, so much, for that reminder. I had forgotten how disturbing that movie was. Even the Wikipedia synopsis was...! ::shudder:: Particularly ironic, once Mommie Dearest came out.

Kip W: Well, thanks be to all the ghods of Time and Space, Spider Robinson did not die on my birthday this year.

WTF Department: Went online to find a number for my local police. The [nameoftown]police.org website is the first find on Google, so that's good...except that the page is "Your Online Resource of [sic] Law Enforcement Career Information."

What the hell? We're not just talking career information for the local police, but information on how to become an FBI or Secret Service agent, or a U.S. Marshall as well.

Not what I was expecting. To get to the actual local police, you have to go to [nameoftown]pd.com. Right. Remember when .com actually meant it was a commercial website?

And it links to an essay mill. The text on the site appears to have been written by an untalented high school sophomore, and proofread by no one. For example, of the FBI it says "...despite the fact that the currently employee almost 35,000 people..."

I am actually fairly happy about someone who died on my birthday, albeit many years before I was actually born. To wit, Adolf Hitler.

RE: The Nelson Mandela funeral, more specifically, the photos in the news here in the USA, I found this. (Found via The Weekly Sift, Doug Muder's rather excellent news commentary site.

I learned from Dad not too long ago that I was born at exactly midnight between December 15 and 16, and Mom was given a choice as to which would be my birthday. I'm guessing she went with the 15th because that's the day she did all the work.

Jacque, it was a good day not to die.

I don't know if you've seen the Wholock video, but more importantly the vfx breakdown. Can it really be fan-made? Surely if you can do that to those you can do anything to anything!

(A little sad because I came here to mention it to Melissa Singer, but now see that she left over a year ago. Ah well, tempus fugit* I guess.)

(abi@347 sorry again for being thoughtless)

* but fruit flies like a banana

Russ @421: Occasionally YouTube gets things that are made by film students, clearly a recurring class assignment to cut a new trailer for an existing movie that gives a completely misleading idea of what the movie is about -- an alternate-reality version of that movie. The good ones I've seen are West Side Story as a zombie thriller (special effects painful; editing good) and "the feel-good hit of the summer, Kubrick's Shining!"

Eliott Mason at 407:

at my school the preferred method for melting wax for candle making was:

Electric hot plate, on an extension cord so that it's possible to pull the plug from a distance if things get out of hand.

On the burner of it, wax is melted in a can within a larger can of water, for instance a tennis ball can within a coffee can.

I am not sure how this would work for melting within a mold without mixing too much though.

Elliott Mason @ #422: and my favorite, Scary Mary.

I remember doing sand candles (from crayons) in first grade. They just did the kettle over the stove, which strikes me as a fast way to set things on fire.

425
I remember when my mother was melting wax, she put the container (usually a clean empty can) into a pan of hot water. It's safer, anyway.

Orchid Mantis: the "flower" from Hell.

Erik Nelson @423: This situation is complicated by the fact that my mold is made of plastic whose top survivable temperature was unknown to me when I started the process, but known to be 'lowish'. Boiling water was almost certainly ok. 350degF in the oven was almost certainly not.

I also own some silicone ice trays that are more ovenproof, and also metal molds that can take whatever my standard kitchen equipment can dish out.

Some methods of getting a moldful of lumps melted but not overmelted involve preheating an oven to Quite Hot and only putting them in for a few minutes; I was attempting the 'perfect poached fish' method, achieving a temperature in a water bath or air mass and leaving it there until equilibrium was reached.

Because all my apparatus have, um, largish wiggles in their dial-accuracy, results were erratic. The toaster oven has the best thermostat, so I ended up doing that for some of it ... but its small size and the fact that its heating elements are either ON or OFF led to some unauthorized schlumph in my mold material, because although the average total temperature was under 140, apparently certain areas were strongly over. (I only paid about a dollar for a set of three trays, so I'm not too upset except in my EVERYTHING IS USEFUL packrat reflexes; I was considering them largely disposable)

Also, apparently this brand of cheap crayons starts to stink up the whole kitchen well BEFORE it melts usefully, which was, um, suboptimal.

But I have an whole assortment of confetti crayon half-rods made, tied together in pairs, labeled, and baggied to go to school tomorrow so WINNNN.

I should note that as someone with a faint acquaintance with molecular gastronomy techniques and equipment (from a huge variety of cooking shows), I am tempted to observe that probably the most perfectly foolproof method of making confetti crayons is to vacuum seal your chunks into your mold and put 'em in a sous vide bag in an immersion circulator for several hours ... but that involves a more involved Someone Else's Kitchen than I have. :->

Elliott Mason at 429: As someone who actually owns and uses a circulator and vacuum sealer, you could do that. It'd be a little problematic, since you get the best heat transfer when the only thing between whatever you're heating (steak, crayons, whatever) and the water is the vacuum-sealed bag. Immersing molds in a water bath doesn't work all that well; I tried cooking creme brulee custards in mine last weekend and never got them hot enough, but I think that was mostly an issue with the ceramic ramekins I used.

Russ @421

We don't quite realise just how much can be done with even a cheap desktop computer these days. All the video clips are available in digital form and the editing and effects are mostly pretty standard. Compositing is not so usual, splitting out actor and background, but it needn't be hugely difficult.

It's impressive, and there are student discounts on the professional software, and it wouldn't surprise me if this were the work of a film student, but it doesn't need anything exotic. These days, HDTV film-making is within the reach of an amateur with a serious hobby budget. Have you seen how much a train-set or a fishing rod can cost?

A tenured professor at University of Colorado-Boulder is being forced out because her longstanding, extremely popular, extremely effective sociology course on the nature of deviance includes a lecture that has several (volunteer) TAs roleplaying as different 'status' prostitutes to demonstrate that even in particularly low-status professions, stratification exists and is perceived by participants.

Her school keeps saying (a) that in a "post-Penn-State" world, clearly this is an unacceptable thing, and (b) she should have gone to the Institutional Research Board and followed their ethics for using human subjects. Despite that it's not research and that all the 'subjects' serving as actors volunteered. :-/

We made candles once in Scouts, using milk cartons as the molds. I don't remember the melting procedure or material, but recall that each was filled with crushed ice before the wax went in, resulting in very holey candles — like cheese, but the holes weren't round, and the light did interesting things in them.

432
It sounds like it's time for a new administration, since the current one clearly doesn't have a clue.

Eliott and Lila --

I also like Ten Things I Hate About Commandments, which only falls below "Shining" in that it's obvious from the images that it's Ancient Egypt and not an American high school, whereas someone who'd never seen or heard of The Shining might well take the re-cut trailer at face value.

Lila @427: And right next door is the Mantis shrimp. "Yeah? Who you lookin' at, huh?"

Elliott Mason #432: That's horrible. It's also truly dumb.

I've finished marking papers for the semester. A few items brought themselves to my notice, and I thought I'd share them:
From David Hume’s perspective, people were out to service themselves and were only concerned with themselves.

Discipline derives from the maternal instinct provided from exterior factors in a person’s surroundings.

John Locke was a 17th century English political theorist whose theory makes America.

Plato sought to correct the mistakes of previous philosophers and believed people were to easily persuade.

Mohist, people follow Mozi’s beliefs, contend that by having a universal set of standards, it would promote the utilitarian idea and distinguish social disorder as well as a standard for people to live by.

Kant is not a fan of conducting a revolution, he feels this is contradictory to oneself, and civil disobedience is condemned.

Also, life expectancy and internal illnesses are as well past down.

Some places, even do not have lights, or the water supply is miles away due to lack of irrigation from the monetary deficiencies of their country.

Blogs are opionion of a preson and sometimes the writing it not facts.

To consolidate government, a democratic regime must be installed first and foremost.

A Neo-liberal thought of the 1980’s brought a global movement of classical liberalism which reached the depths of Latin America.

Poor votes are essential components to win campaigns in Latin America.

Taylor uses the concept of Honduras banana worker to further illustrate this point.

Causations for poor to contract representation within clientele networks are caused by: state formation and democratic suffrage, political economic theories, and fundamental ideologies, and ethno-cultural identities; and also by a need for socio-economic development.

Elliott Mason at 432: Wait, what?!? - I've dealt with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) for years, across three institutions, for a variety of different human subjects work, and any IRB I've ever heard of would look at that and say that classroom instruction wasn't their remit. This isn't an issue of consent, which is really what IRBs deal with for human subjects, or of subject safety - it's much closer to acting or theater, and that certainly doesn't require IRB approval. No professor would be asked to get IRB approval to get several actors to come in to do exactly what the article described; there might, in this age, be a request from the university administration to give students the right to skip that class if they felt they would be made uncomfortable, but it's not a human subjects issue at all.

If I was at that university, I'd be extremely reluctant to do any research (note that my research boils down to "put subjects in little dark rooms and make them bored for science" - my consent forms pretty much say that the worst possible side effect of being a participant is boredom or mild eyestrain, 'equivalent to watching TV for several hours'). Given the administration's views - their IRB might be perfectly reasonable, but when the administration wants to confuse their personal opinions with the actual laws and regulations, that's not a good place to be as an academic. If I was at that institution in any research capacity, I'd be going on the job market right quick, because the level of confusion and incompetence there is ridiculous. I wouldn't be able to trust the administration to understand the role of the IRB (or, for that matter, anything else that supports research with human subjects); given their angle on this, I don't think I'd be able to trust them to support faculty or TAs in any sort of teaching/pedagogy/grading dispute.

So... PAX (the Penny Arcade Expo gaming convention) was roundly criticized last year for compounding their history of (among other things) insulting trans people by saying on stage that they regretted apologizing for a rape joke. Since then, they've been trying to overcome their past insensitivity and create a more inclusive and welcoming environment.

They have a fairly decent harassment policy, that's a good start. Now, they have just announced the next step in becoming a more inclusive convention: all future PAX events will feature the "Roll for Diversity Hub and Lounge".

That's right. To get all those marginalized folks to feel included, PAX set up special diversity ghettos for them.

On a related note, "Roll for Diversity Hub and Lounge" sounds like it's missing a corporate sponsor's name at the beginning.

shadowsong @ 440 ...
... all future PAX events will feature the "Roll for Diversity Hub and Lounge".

So... what do you get if you roll a natural 20...

xeger @441: To mix metaphors, I believe a natural 20 means you win the "oppression bingo" game.

Jacque @ #436, thanks for that video! My taekwondo teacher (whose favorite animal is the mantis shrimp) loved it too.

(My favorite animal is the leafy sea dragon. This is probably telling.)

Fragano, your students' writing is curing my Dunning-Kruger syndrome about my GRE essay score.

shadowsong...
...
...
I got nothin'. You get that much clueless in one place, some kind of black hole phenomenon results.

It's been reported that Bitcoin is crashing, which may be an exaggeration. The price went up pretty fast, to around $1000, and it's dropped back pretty quickly to around $500.

I expect it to drop more, but it may settle at a value that still makes it useful.

And the guy who scrapped a BitCoin-loaded hard drive (there was a BBC report) may not have lost so much after all.

Maybe I should design and print off an "I owned a BitCoin" certificate, instead of sending Christmas Cards. Like some of the dodgy Victorian US share certificates, it might have collector value.

Not One Bitcoin in Tribute!

Mr Stross of this parish has a few rather pointed things to say about Bitcoins in his most recent blog entry.

Mongoose @ #445: I love the comment citing as a nickname for Bitcoin, "Dunning-Krugerrands".

I'm going to use my Bitcoins to buy Dutch tulip-bulb futures.

(I'm kidding. I have no Bitcoins.)

What to do with your fire ant colony.

Those of you who don't usually follow Ursula Vernon's LJ might enjoy her piece on Editing

Shadowsong @440. This article says:

the space is intended to achieve four things: provide a place to find out about diversity-related happenings at PAX events; educate attendees on diversity within the games industry; provide education and training on diversity issues such as maintaining inclusive spaces; and highlight diversity-related business in and around the geek community.

So I don't know. Are they hamfistedly trying to move from being a terrible example to the gaming community* to being a net gain for diversity by visibly setting aside a space for resources, training and outreach, or are they stupidly going "games here, diversity here, so you can all stop complaining"? Or something of both? I don't see it as a step backwards, but then again they would have to work really hard at being idiots to do that.

* Insert continuing argument about what that means if anything here

TNH might be interested in this from Nature News: some confirmation of the hypothesis that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disorder -- they've found the guilty T-cells.

Thomas @451

Interesting, but when TNH reported, a few years ago, on the variety of possible drugs for treatment, only one of which worked well for her, I did wonder if the narcolepsy label covered a single problem. They have a particular hormone in mind, and they might end up with something which works for a lot of people, but will TNH still fall down when she laughs?

I have seen a few similarly dramatic claims made about my medical condition. And after this long, there may be nothing left within me to "cure"

David Bell,

Actually, I really did just mean Teresa might find it interesting. The only practical implication of the research in the near future is that diagnosis might be less of a pain than she described in her case.

Gender-swapping in kidlit: Bilbo Baggins as heroine. Complete with some rather nice art of Ms Bilbo. I think this is quite wonderful, especially since it's child-led.

Bilbo is way too thin in that picture, though. She should be corpulent, at least at the beginning of the journey.

Did you know that Tolkien says (in the Appendices*) that his two main heroes were actually named Bilba and Froda, since -a was a masculine suffix in their language? He claims to have changed them so they'd sound more masculine to our ears.

Sorry, forgot the footnote.

*"The answer, my friend, is in Appendix N; the answer is in Appendix N."

Extra Credits has a great episode about Community Managers in videogames, a role that partakes somewhat of the forum-moderator skillset but also some other things.

Xopher: yes - that is also mentioned in the appendices to LotR.

LotR is the one with Appendices. Those are the ones I was referring to.

And because there's such a lot of story in the Appendices, and Peter Jackson has the rights to LotR, we won't be rid of him anytime soon. Sadly.

And Sam's real name is Bam, and the Shire is really "Suźa," and hobbits have 3' long scaly pink tails and . . . sorry, got carried away.

Bilba and Maura, if I recall correctly. "Frodo" is a semi-translation of his name, like Meriadoc/Merry for Kalimac/Kali. I don't remember if Pippin's real name was something other than "Peregrin", though.

Xopher @455 Initially I thought she was too tall, which might be why she look thin. Measuring she is about six heads high which is short but not hobbit short to my mind*.

Having said that, the no-nonsense stare looks to me as a post-adventure look, even if the clothes say 'just popping out of Bag End for a walk'.

* Correct proportions of fictional beings being generally unknowable.

I don't think 'Peregrin', which has a Latin root, can possibly have been Pippin's real name. Likewise Paladin, Gerontius and so on. I can't remember, though, if Tolkien actually gives any real Took names. (Brandybuck names are generally real, I think, except 'Meriadoc', which has been altered to preserve the pun.)

It looks like Berkeley's Dark Carnival bookstore could use more business from locals.

Well, Ardalambion claims that Pippin's actual name was Razanur Tûc, nickname "Razar", which means "small red apple". Hence Pippin/Peregrin.

NeilW @462

The Dwarves in the Hobbit movies don't really look right. Gimli in LotR worked well, and I think a Part of the difference is that we rarely see that character apart from people of normally heroic human height.

In the Hobbit movies it's mostly dwarves and the hobbit as a group. You might also be limited by shooting in 3D: can you use the same line-of-sight tricks? I don't think you get the subtle reinforcement of the size differences. And, after Fellowship, you have a mental image which helps sustain the feel when the hobbits get split from the men.

Now, as for that drawing of Bilbo, I felt the overall effect was too slightly built. We know what a pretty hobbit maiden is supposed to look like, and while Rosie Cotton might be exceptional, the film version is a starting point. With that as a guide, I do think that the head is a little small. I suppose you could class the rest as Hollywood size-selection.

When I think of the reasons for making the gender-change, I do wonder if a Rosie Cotton body shape would be better. Rosie and Sam suggest Hobbits are not thin, even if Bilbo and Frodo come across as on the slender end of the normal Hobbitish range.

There was some fairly strong feeling on the Book of Face, where I originally found the article. While everyone liked the article, a lot of people found the image decidedly failsome - not just the excessively slender build, but also the hairless legs, and the fact that (as one person pointed out) she appears to be wearing a corset.

I agree with all those points, but I must admit I still like the image, despite its flaws. Why? Because I just love the face. You would absolutely not mess with Ms Bilbo.

Patrick -- I have to disagree (with your hovertext) that the video for the Vienna Teng song in your Sidelight is "simple." It's brilliant and beautiful, and the dancing (especially the couple and ensemble work) is wondrously complex and jawdropping. Especially when it's not particularly showy, which is most of it.

Re Bitcoin:

It's worth distinguishing the ideology of Bitcoin's inventor and biggest fans from what it actually does, and distinguishing that from what the underlying protocol could do.

Bitcoin as a protocol isn't actually bound to any of the complaints that Charlie raised, except for the one about coin mining/transaction processing having a big carbon footprint. (If I were a lot smarter, I'd work out a way to do a Bitcoin-like protocol where you solved some useful problem to mine coins....)

You could run a Bitcoin-like protocol designed to keep the money supply expanding at a stable 3% forever. You could run one that was really anonymous (the current one is awful for anonymity in many ways--you basically publish a transcript of every transaction ever for the world to see), or one that would only accept transactions to/from accounts that were linkable to someone's true name. You could run one that collected taxes, for that matter. All that stuff has to do with what the people processing the payments and mining coins (you do them together, until the money supply hits its peak) agree to require or accept, and some definitions written into the code they're running.

Mongoose @467 What we really need is a whole bunch of Ms Bilbo pictures. Dozens and hundreds of them. Then we can pick the ones we like.

Bilbo in a corset? With the shire being a bit 19th century England that's not completely impossible.

Lila #443: Have you seen what the game Aquaria did with them? One of the tougher creatures in the game....

Xopher Halftongue #455, Neil W #462: I don't recall how Tolkien described them, but most depictions I've seen of them were proportionately stockier and thicker-limbed than humans -- more like human dwarves than midgets or "pygmies".

In any case, I'm fine with the gender-swapping, but that artist has simply drawn a human girl of mid-teens, dressed for an hike. I say it's Fantasy Fail.

Dave 471: In any case, I'm fine with the gender-swapping, but that artist has simply drawn a human girl of mid-teens, dressed for an hike. I say it's Fantasy Fail.

I agree. It's also reminiscent of the old "caveman" cartoons that showed caveMEN as thick and brutish with sloping brows, and caveWOMEN as looking exactly like modern women (well, stylized quite a bit, but no sloping brows or anything).

Stefan Jones #460: I thought Sam's real name (for Tolkienish values of 'real') was supposed to be 'Ban', short for 'Banazir'.

#473: I remembered it as "Bam," but it has been quite a while since I read the appendices!

albatross @ #469

Okay, we shall create a currency that can be regulated by governments, be taxed, expand at a (mostly) sensible rate, and is acquired (mostly) by solving some sort of useful problem, and is virtual... So we have now created Federal Reserve Notes without the option of turning them into a physical representation. Why?

re recent Particles:

The reconstruction of St. Nicholas is fascinating -- partly because I recently did a concert of music wrt him (including the Britten cantata) but mostly because of the much wider nose, mouth, and lips compared with the icons. Is it horribly politically incorrect to say the reconstruction looks more African? I know that "African" covers a very wide range (and am not sure I'm not being cued by the skin tone -- I wonder how the reconstructor derived that?), but it seems possible that he could have had ancestors from all over, considering that he was born at the east end of the Mediterranean at a time when that area would have seen people from many parts of the three abutting continents.
       Is the contrast stronger because most of the icons are Russian? Nicholas is also revered in Greece; do the Orthodox churches closer to his birthplace than Russia do icons, and if so are those of him more like the reconstruction? cf how Jesus would not have been the ethereal type popularized (IIRC) by Flemish Renaissance painters in something like their image (removed geographically as well as temporally).

The reflection on winter deserts was wonderful (in multiple senses of the word); I've known of Joshua trees ever since reading "And He Built a Crooked House" many decades ago, but I don't remember ever seeing a picture of one before -- let alone of a ]family group[ like that.

CHip @476: as I said on the Book of Face, the nose is the main feature which might give rise to that impression, and it's largely a guess, based on measurements of a drastically broken nasal area. It doesn't at all match the icon images, but I don't think that proves much - they're probably based on a set style. I think that race would be more reliably judged on the actual bone measurements than on a facial reconstruction based on them, which necessarily involves considerable guesswork as to the soft tissues, the skin and hair coloring, and the hairstyle, as well as the fleshiness or gauntness of a person. The bones themselves would be better than the measurements, of course. Races are a social construct, but there are still measurable differences in the average relationships between various bones. Or so I understand. They had a forensic anthropologist - why didn't anyone ask that question? Or did they, and they just didn't publish the answer?

Just to clarify, I have no particular preference as to how this comes out. I just don't like answers based on inadequate science.

The St Nicholas reconstruction was done nearly a decade ago, and the article does link to "deeper" reporting. But there's been a chain of exposure to such facial reconstructions on British TV, climaxing with Richard III. With the context of TV series such as Meet the Ancestors I might even be a little too inclined to take the reconstruction at face value.

The broken nose is a problem. So is the existence of different sets of claimed relics. The provenance is alway going to be unreliable.

Well, that was an interesting piece of spam in my inbox. The subject header was "IMPORTANT INFORMATION from TARGET", and it went on to discuss an alleged security breach that could have compromised the credit and debit card information of anyone who had made a Target purchase using their card in the past few weeks. None of the usual language cues were present; I think they must have swiped an actual "compromised data" announcement to use as boilerplate. If I weren't so fucking paranoid about stuff like this, I might have been fooled.

The giveaway? Every single link in the text pointed to something at "target.bfi0.com" on mouseover, although the link text was for legitimate government and commercial resources -- state departments that provide information about how to fight identity theft, how to check on your credit record, etc. My partner did a Whois lookup and discovered that this scammer has apparently bought an entire IP block under the name epsilon.com, and that all the contact addresses are at epsilon.com EXCEPT for the abuse-reporting address, which is at target.bfi0.com. He suggests that this means they're collecting the addresses of people with enough snap to spot the scam for selling on as malware targets. After all, if the jackals can kill the sheepdogs first, the sheep will be much easier to slaughter.

Lee: better yet, there was a real security breach at Target between Thanksgiving and early December. 40 million customers.

Merely corroborative detail intended to lend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Lee,
Everything you say is correct, BUT...

I used to work in email on the anti-spam provider side, and still keep in touch with a number of email industry players. bfi.com is a major ESP (Email Service Provider), formerly known as Bigfoot Interactive, and bought by Epsilon (the big credit dossier company, which is not a malware company but slimy in many other ways, but I digress.)

It is common for major companies to outsource their customer emails to ESPs, especially massive blasts like this one, because if you don't know the ins and outs of email - like spending your whole life on it - it's very hard to get a high proportion of it delivered to the Gmails and Yahoos of this world, let alone the zillions of other email providers. If you urgently have to send emails to 40 million people you haven't emailed before, you can't just slap up a new mail server and start blasting because you will be blocked as a spammer before you can get much out.

Then it's *also* become standard practice for the email provider to have the links in the email go through dedicated webservers on their own system - that "target.bfi.com" - so they can tell who clicked on stuff to respond to it and can provide massive reports on the "metrics" to their customer, in this case Target.

Even banks will do this. Hundreds of email and security specialists regularly tell them why it is a terrible idea to condition your customers to click on links in any random email they get, but they do it anyway because they're idiots, and because they're not the ones inconvenienced when somebody gets defrauded. (Hell, the banks can turn "Identity theft protection" into a profit center.)

Thus, even though everything about it screams "Suspicious" and "Fraud" this was almost certainly a legitimate mailing from Target, and probably does mean your name is on Target's list of the 40 million compromised accounts. Sorry.

Clifton #481:

And I can confirm that Target uses bfi as their remailer since I get tons of sales offers from them winding up in my spam bucket. (Just checked to make sure I had no little credit notices, but I was lucky--I bought the stuff I bought a week earlier.)

Stefan Jones #474: 'Bam' leads me to think of this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmSlJXICEaU

Hmmm. I bought stuff in Target last week--in the compromised period--and haven't (yet) gotten an email about it. Could I have paid cash? I almost always buy enough to use a credit card, but perhaps not this time. I'll have to check my receipts. (And now I'm trying to remember exactly what I did buy last week. Hmmm.)

I figure I'll find out if I was there in the affected period if I get a new card in the mail. My credit union finds it less troublesome to issue new cards at the first sign of an issue than to deal with the aftermath of ID theft.

Clifton, #481: When I see a link that the link text says goes to a government website* but the mouseover says goes somewhere entirely different, I no longer trust anything else in that e-mail, period. So if I really am on Target's list of the compromised accounts, what should I do beyond monitoring my band account history very closely for a while?

Also, how the hell would they have my e-mail address? I've never had a Target credit card and have never given them my e-mail. Plus, the thing addresses me as "Dear Guest" -- legit e-mails from a company with which I have an account always address me by name.

* Link says www.consumer.gov/idtheft, mouseover says target.bfi0.com/bunchaalphabetsoup. Other links in the e-mail, purportedly to experian.com, equifax.com, transunion.com, www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov, and www.oag.state.md.us, all go to the exact same bfi0.com address on mouseover. No, sorry, that's a fucking scam.

B. Durbin (485): Ironically, when I had fraudulent charges on my card last December (triggering an alert email to me on Christmas Day), they were at this Target--although I was provably 600 miles away at the time. I suspect my card number was swiped at a local restaurant a week or so earlier, but the pattern* of charges looked to me like a Target insider/employee had to be in on the scam.

*Buy $300+ worth of stuff, then immediately try to charge another $300 precisely. The latter charge triggered a scam alert and was denied on the spot.

When news of the Target security breach reached me, I briefly panicked.

I knew I'd bought some things at Target recently, but when? And what? And how did I pay?

Thank goodness for online credit card statements! Whatever I did buy there, I paid for with cash.

Lee,
I'm not arguing that it's not insanity for them to do that; it is purely madness, and hundreds of people have told them that it's weird and scammy and all around a bad thing to do. (ESPs in general and I'm sure Bigfoot in particular.) I'm just saying that's the way they do it; if you look at a lot of mass-marketing and commercial email you will find a lot of that, and even for links to sites that are totally unrelated. But really it's worse than that for some of the other use cases - what is the thought process behind Paypal, or your bank, sending out email with a link for you to click on to their login page, when anybody could send out identical mail pointing to their own page to collect your financial logins? It's insanely reckless.

The sad thing in fact is that you and your partner are in a tiny tiny minority of people who actually know enough to check that kind of thing and find it justifiably suspicious; I would like it much better if 90% of their recipients checked it and went "Like hell I'm clicking on that!" Outrage is a totally appropriate response. But evidently most people don't even notice, which has a lot to do with why so many people get scammed online....

FWIW, the news article I saw said that it's credit cards used at the registers in the stores which were compromised, not those which were used for online shopping at Target.

BTW, if you don't have an account with Target and they don't have your email address, that's yet another reason why you might be getting the email via Epsilon. Among their other diversified creepiness, Epsilon is in the "e-pending" business - matching up people's name and/or address info and/or credit card numbers with their alleged email addresses via the huge accumulated databases of personal info they've hoovered up. (Often incorrectly.) It's like the commercial version of the NSA out there, and it's really frickin' depressing to think about how prevalent this is and how few people get righteously outraged about it.

Tangentially this all reminds me I've really got to call up Wells Fargo and explain to them that my Gmail address does not belong to the person who gave it to them for his account, and that they really ought to make some effort to verify the email address for an account before they start emailing loan information and bank account information to that address. Can you say "Corporate negligence", boys and girls? I knew you could. Cf. XKCD on Reverse Identity Theft. (This process works for first name + last initial too, and I thank the Holy Claws of Klortho that Clifton is not a more common first name.)

I occasionally get email for my mother, as we have the same first initial and very very uncommon surname, but it's because she has acquaintances who assume c[lastname]@yahoo.com must be her, not because she's giving out the wrong address.

There's a woman out there with the same first and last name as mine, but her middle name is 'Anne', not 'Aileen'. My main companies-for-use-of email address is with Verizon, incorporating my initials and last name; hers is apparently the same as mine but with numbers in. I get emails intended for her on a semi-regular basis, usually from individuals but at least once it was a hotel-reservation confirmation. Depending on my mood--and how important the message looks--sometimes I'll reply pointing out that I am not her and this is not her email, please try again.

I send out between thirty and fifty emails a day on average at work, replying to people who have filled in requests for quotations either on our company website or through a third-party aggregator. ("Fill out this inquiry and we'll see all appropriate venders get it" -- that sort of thing.)

An average of three to five emails a day bounce, because the person filling out the form doesn't type in their own email address correctly. (Yes, that's about 10%.)

My favorite is the www.name@yahoo.com type, because those are easy to fix; I routinely strip out the www before sending the email and it goes just fine. But a remarkable number of people conflate their work email addy with a home email addy, so you get "first-last@workname.com" because their home addy is "first-last@gmail.com" but their work addy is "initial-last@workname.com". Those take a phone call to straighten out, if I'm lucky. Or scrolling through the company website (if they have one) trying to find any contact information at all....

That's not counting the simple typos, which if I'm lucky are obvious -- micheal for michael, .cmo for .com -- and if I'm not lucky are completely unguessable.

Why, yes, I'm venting. Can you tell....?

Neil W @ 470: I am running on minimal spoons at the moment, or else I would totally be firing up the GIMP and creating all kinds of Variations on the Theme of Ms Bilbo.

Clifton #489: I'm not arguing that it's not insanity for them to do that; it is purely madness

It's also lazy, as IIRC the company could easily give the remailing vendor a subdomain of their store domain, such as "foo.bfi.target.com". Or at least a suitably named sibling domain -- "target-email.com" at least looks better than "bfi0.com".