Maybe it's just the mood I'm in today, but reading that translation made me tear up. God. How I wish I'd had something like that to read when I was a kid.

Dear God, it's nice to have an occasional dispatch from the civilized world.

It's probably worth mentioning that the Dutch teenage pregnancy rate is about a tenth of the American.

Also, note that the differences they list between fictional and real sex include the illusion that people have it all the time, that they go straight from eye contact to bed, that attraction is based on certain specific appearances, and that people are all physically flawless. I also learned that shoppen is the Dutch word for "to Photoshop".

I'm with Lila on this.

I'll add, as an aside, that this improved my day (which started with, "Ah, crap. The espresso machine lost its mind* again and dumped a couple liters of water in the kitchen." Given that yesterday finished off with a dentist visit and being given a 60% chance of needing a root canal [I find out tomorrow afternoon, when Exploratory Drilling happens], I'm kind of grumpy.

* Literally. It's a temperature-controlled beast and it melted it's brain box. Again. And now I'm not under warranty, although my reseller is going to bat for me. For what this thing cost (don't ask - really), it should not be doing this.

Yes, Western civilization certainly would be a good idea (pace Gandhi). Nice to see this as a stepping stone on the way there.

So wonderful. It makes me want to tear up too.

Abi @3: I also learned that shoppen is the Dutch word for "to Photoshop".

Here in the US, we’ve got the slang term “shoop”. As a verb, it means to modify an image with software; as a noun, an image so modified. (Example: “It’s a shoop — I can tell by the pixels.”)

† alas, I gather from my ground-level reports that this is not quite as rare a thing as the pamphlet says

Probably not. But it IS being pointed out, to every young person in the country, that the people who react badly are in the wrong.

I shared this with my roommate. We are both happy and encouraged that it exists somewhere, and we wish it existed here.

I had already been daydreaming about emigrating to the Netherlands before my baby is born.

Spare million dollars?

Well-translated editions of that, surreptitiously handed out in sixth grade classrooms across the country.

After a few thousand are burned in front of local news cameras by bug-eyed-with-outrage parents and pastors, the kids will start distributing and reading them out of sheer defiance.

* * *

Anyone have experience with rice cookers and brown rice?

I'm not sure what ratio of water to rice is desireable. Or even if my rice cooker is calibrated to handle brown rice.

Stefan: roughly 2:1; 2 cups water to 1 cup brown rice, about 40 minutes, and no calibration is normally required. I believe rice cookers are normally designed to shut off once all the liquid water has been absorbed by the grain, at which point the pot's temperature starts rising above the boiling point. I usually add an extra 1/4 cup water "for the pot" but have no idea how essential that is.

When you're in a hurry, "hapa rice" made with 1:1 brown and white rice, cooks almost as fast as white rice and is tastier. I use 1.5:1 water:rice for that, i.e. 3 c water (+ 1/4 c) to 1 cup brown and 1 cup white.

Mmmm, rice.

I don't use a rice cooker, but do something similar on the stovetop -- 4 cups water to 2-1/3 cup brown rice. The stovetop method uses a large pan, and involves heating the rice by frying it in a little bit of oil (under a tablespoon, enough to coat the bottom of the pan well when heated) until it smells nice (stirring the whole time) then adding boiling water and immediately reducing the heat. Cover. Leave it untouched on a very low flame for 45 min, then turn it off -- and leave it alone for another 45 min before fluffing it.

Produced several meals (for two people) worth of very tasty rice.

Fade, I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes. Also -- longing for a time machine, so I can take this pamphlet (in English) back to Lizzy L and her friends in 1959.

Yes, it gets better. But there are plenty of places in the US today where this pamphlet would be read with horror.

Does the pamphlet make it explicit that it's okay to not be attracted to anyone?

Because figuring out asexuality is a thing is something I did only in my mid-thirties, and I'd prefer that the next generation had an easier time of it.

neotoma: You're not the only one wondering that (and I'm not even ace myself).

Wow, that is fabulous. I'm going to copy that text against future need. Would you mind very much posting a full translation of the "sex and the media" part as well?

Avram, #7: That term must be regional, because I've never encountered it until now.

Meanwhile in HFN* the car thermometer read -2 F when I left the house this morning, and around 3 in the afternoon I get a call from my wife. We are watching over a friend's house while he is away, and she has discovered that there are apparently frozen pipes. Worse, there is also apparently no heat. So I leave work early and head down, where we discover that the circa 1990 electronic and programmable thermostat doesn't work at all, not just that it needs new batteries. However, we have a solution: our heat and AC have separate thermostats, and the AC one is a very basic model which looks as though it should work fine as a temporary replacement. And it does, except for the next problem: it's going to take hours to re-warm the house, and we can't stay around that long. So tomorrow morning as soon as I put #3 on the school bus, I'm going to be heading down with my laptop and try to do some office work in a frigid house while I wait for the water to either (a) flow normally, or (b) start dripping in the walls, in the latter case sending me belting downstairs and hope that the water cutoffs are where I think they are. What fun.

*Highly Frozen News

C Wingate, YIKES!!!! One of my terrors. I have a 1912 house, we had the furnace go mostly down in the coldest part of the winter several years ago. We have circulated water radiators -- freezing would be a total disaster. I was unemployed at the time, my mom helped us out with the money to replace the boiler.

On the up side, it cut our bills to about 1/3. On the down side, our basement gets cold enough now that the trap in the washing machine freezes when it gets as cold as it has lately.

Lee @17, I can attest to having encountered 'shoop' entirely through internet channels, several years ago. But, indeed, these channels* were in a region of the internet which one would be quite justified in avoiding altogether; so though it seems to have leaked out here and there, perhaps it is still a regionalism. :)

*4chan/b/, a Famously Horrible messageboard

Once again, I am pleasantly amazed by the Dutch; that matter-of-fact approach to sexuality is so helpful even if it doesn't cover all the possibilities, because it prepares the children for life as adults without a load of guilt or shame, without using language that creates "others", and allows for a basic understanding of anatomy. Brava!

Using the last of my use-or-lose vacation time this week, so I am lucky to avoid the Deep Freeze (although I did step outside with the dogs this morning, just to be perverse). I've also been scheduled for my cataract surgery, which will be next Monday. The FG will transport me to and from, after which I fully expect to (a) email the family and (b) fall asleep, just like my mother did. The cataract, being traumatically-induced, has progressed rather startlingly. My son, naturally, thought it was "Cool", but I am ready to get rid of this ASAP. Give me the topical anesthetic, and I'll do it myself.

In the meantime, I've been catching up on everything from Classic Who to Orange is the New Black; starting to learn some coding from Code Academy; cleaning and rearranging Stuff in the house, and making a List of Things To Do for the handyman. Which reminds me, I must put that drawer on the list.

abi, I think that the consensus seems to be that we would dearly love a translation or PDF with translation to pass around. "Oh, you have a girl entering puberty? Here's a great pamphlet that a friend of mine found!" followed by a URL. *bats eyes* *knows that if you're too busy, this is not a mandate*

After all, we all know that once it's on the Internet, it's forever.

HLN: Local woman just had a phone call polling on car buying. Hung up at question on importance of GPS and connectivity, as machine refused to recognize answer, even though it was a valid option. (Note that poll did not include 'Hell no' as a choice.)

OP: I called John in from the other room to read it for himself. When he was done, we looked at each other and said, more or less simultaneously and almost word for word, "This is a thing. That exists. Right now. Wow."

Stefan Jones @11: Even more doable than a spare three million, what this requires is a printer-enabled grass roots movement. And it wouldn't take one copy per child per school. Get it into a few hands and the students will pass them around.

The FAA rules on Things Dropped From Planes, if I recall correctly from the last time I studied the FAR/AIM (one of these days I'll get back to it) are pretty much "nothing that could conceivably cause damage or injury." My first pilot instructor and I would brainstorm what sort of fun things might be legal to drop from a Cessna 172. (We regretfully concluded that dropping water balloons on the house of That One Guy, the one who lived on the downwind leg of the pattern and called up all infuriated any time a plane drifted a hair north of Jay Road, "I don't want a plane dropping on MY house!", was probably out.) Anyway, leafletting from prop planes is a fine, time-honored tradition.

The pamphlet doesn't address asexuality, which is a notable gap. (It also doesn't touch on poly.) I looked on the "butterflies in your tummy" page, where I did find a very good step by step explanation of French kissing. I can check "do you know what you want?" when I get home this evening (busy life).

I need to look at the copyright information (if any) before I go posting pages and pages of it online, even in translation. But it occurs to me that if the world needs a good, sex-positive puberty PDF, it's perfectly feasible to write one. My main point in this entry is kids are being taught this kind of thing right now.

(Also, don't mistake the Netherlands for kid paradise. This week, Alex has had his pencil case stolen for the third time, and he's been being cyberstalked by a classmate. We are in the early stages of raising a stink with the school about it. We may be doing well about sexuality, but bullying remains a problem.)

As a single man, I wouldn't touch the idea of distributing this with the proverbial bargepole. Every so often, I come across something that, while describing something abusive to women, seems to class men as the enemy.

All men.

I know we're better than that here. I think we know here that some of the abuse patterns are similar for low-status men and for women. My memories of my schooldays are fading, and I cannot discount the possibility that a woman with power can be as bad as a man.

Abi isn't being that stupid, she knows the pamphlet is for the daughters of the Netherlands. Any scheme to do what this is doing has to provide for the sons too, and I think we're all confident the Dutch are doing that, just on lack-of-craziness grounds.

Is there some better label than "patriarchy"? One which encompasses the abuse of mostly male power, and that fear of the loas of an illusion of power?

Some of the abusers on Twitter seem to deny that they as easily target men as women. Some are hiding behind masks, depending on a virtual reputation, based on "I am right" and attacking all who challenge that.

Call it "bullying". Is it really any different to what some of us saw in our schooldays?

There's a connection, at least. The victim, it has been said, sees the actions of the bully as a desirable tactic. "I will," they say, "Make sure my children are strong enough not to be bullied." It becomes all about the action, and nothing about the reasons. Real whatevers fight and win. They don't compromise. They don't accept that they might be wrong.

Is sociopathy the hidden principle of the education systems of the English-speaking world?

And is Buffy's Principal Snyder that principle made demonic flesh?

(You think I could miss out that line?)

Dave Bell @26:

I must confess that I am entirely at a loss where you see anything in the excerpt from that pamphlet that indicates that it describes men as the enemy. Please believe me that none of it does.

Boys get a different pamphlet, about the changes to their bodies, with quotes and pictures by and about boys rather than girls. I don't recall it clearly from three years ago, but I think it also had a page about homosexuality.

Is there some better label than "patriarchy"? One which encompasses the abuse of mostly male power, and that fear of the loas of an illusion of power?

Try looking up the word "kyriarchy", which is a term for the hierarchical structure of society in the abstract.

One thing, though:

Some of the abusers on Twitter seem to deny that they as easily target men as women

That could be because many of the abusers on Twitter don't "as easily target men as women." It really is not balanced or even-handed. Women really do get an enormously greater amount of truly vile and hateful treatment, including but not limited to explicitly gendered hateful treatment, for saying exactly the same things as men in the public forum. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a study that shows that bots with female names get 25 times more abusive messages than bots with masculine names.

Please don't posit an equivalency. It really isn't there.

This is not to say that all men do this, or that all the people who do this are men. But it's not an even, balanced situation. It's just not, and I can barely convey how depressing and exhausting it is to have to explain that fact over and over again.

Shorter me: where are you getting this? It's not based on anything I wrote, and it's not based on the genuine reality of the internet. What's up?

As usual when the Lower 48 is being walloped by the Polar Express (Polar Vortex? Was it renamed this year, or are they different things?), we're having springlike temperatures on the Gulf Coast of Alaska. I saw a mosquito the other day, and new clover is coming up.

However, the coldest day of the year is usually in the first half of February and the first stirrings of spring are in April, so we have some time left to go.

Usual drismal winter weather here in Pugetropolis. For once I count my blessings.
I too wish the educational mat'l you describe had included asexuality, both not having feelings at all and not having them for people.
Also various trans issues. When the body doesn't match the soul.
And your body belongs to YOU.
Still, a good start.
And good response, Abi, to #26.

So do the Dutch call French kissing "French kissing"?

Or is this another "vice Anglais" situation where every nation attributes it to an unloved neighbor?

("No, thank you, I would *not* like a Flemish kiss. I'm just recovering from a nasty Qatar myself.")

Angiportus @29:

Transgender issues have been addressed in school, in a clear and understanding way (basically, sometimes people's bodies don't match the gender their brains have, and so sometimes people change their bodies to match.) I'd expect that a trans* kid would get a more individualized treatment rather than a standard brochure.

And "your body is your own" is in "Do you know what you want?" There's a bit about a kid who doesn't want her parents to kiss her on the lips any more, and how they don't because she asked them not to. It's not just sexual consent.

oldster @30:

I was translating. They call it tongue kissing (tongkussen).

Also, the school just emailed us to say they'd told the whole class that stealing other people's possessions was against the school rules, and that if Alex's pencil case wasn't returned by the end of the day, the kids in question were going to find themselves in very hot water indeed.

The pencil case was returned, and the kids who took it are, from what I can gather, properly scared now.

I have to say, I'm grateful for the prompt and effective action.

I once asked my French friend (born in Vietnam when it still was part of France's empire, but I digress) what French-kissing was, and she couldn't tell me. A kiss is just a kiss? (Cue in 'Casablanca')

As for 'patriarchy' as it is currently used... It is my theory that Rankin-Bass's "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" celebrates a post-patriarchy world. After all, each and every authority figure in it is male and a jerk who demands that you conform. All except for Yukon Cornelius.

Dave Bell wrote: that fear of the loas of an illusion of power?

I know this is probably a typo for "loss", but I love the image. The Loa of Illusion of Power is probably a fairly substantial one these days, with all the people sacrificing to it/her/him.

Serge wrote: each and every authority figure in it is male and a jerk who demands that you conform

The Boy and I spend a lot of time mocking Santa every year. I think my favorite (for certain values of "favorite") moment is when the elves are showing Santa their song and he sits there fidgiting and sighing because Heaven forbid he listen respectfully to this special thing his employees practiced for him. Makes me want to do a Rocky callback.

Abi @31--

So they blame it on the Tong people? Oh great--way to start a new Tong war.

re 19: Fortunately it's forced air. After about 45 minutes we're up to 35 F.

Hi Abi, did you refer to one of the Rutgers WPF booklets? I don't see an English version online, though they do sell an English board game on girl empowerment. They do have English publications, though these seem to be aimed more at older girls and boys (16-18).

My wife and I had good experiences with the predecessor of Rutgers WPF, the Rutgers Stichting. Given their work, you might not be surprised to hear that in 2002 the Christian / right-wing government stopped subsidising them. I'm glad to hear that they have found other ways to remain active.

Auke @37:

Yes! That's them! (And this is why I'm not going to reproduce or translate them in their entirety. They're copyrighted material.)

Carrie S @ 34... And the elf overseer, instead of realizing that the boss is an ungrateful creep with no taste in music, and seeing his position in the power structure threatened, instead turns on those below him.

Every time I watch Rudolph, I get more upset about what a bigot Santa is. And is the future dentist named Herbie or Hermie? I could never be sure.

Hermie.

Santa's a bigot and the rot goes down through the command structure. And the only reason any of them get over it is because Rudolph ends up being useful to them.

I vastly prefer the Grinch. To the point that last year I wrote fanfic of it. :)

About Hermie... It might amuse you to watch Edward Norton's "The Incredible Hulk". There's a scene where Banner comes home, and finds refuge in the dinner of an old man. That old man was played by Paul Soles, who had done the voice of Hermie. (And of the Hulk and of Banner in the Sixties cartoon.)

I think Scarleteen has been mentioned in Making Light comments before, but it deserves re-mention for inclusive, non-judgemental information about sexual and reproductive health for people of all genders and orientations. It's aimed at teens, but I found it in my twenties and still found it incredibly valuable.

Scarleteen is everything I didn't know I needed to know when I was a teenager. I want to go back to my Catholic high school and put stickers with their URL all over the place.

Sundre @43

I'm in my 50s, and I'm finding it helpful. It's filling in some of the blank spots everybody thinks every body knows. Thank you.

28
I think they're calling it a vortex because it curled around to the south and west.

Sundre and Lin, Scarleteen is a wonderful resource, and Heather Corinna and everyone there are doing excellent work. They're always grateful for donations that can keep them going, so since you've mentioned them and reminded me, I am going to go make one. "Help keep the best sex ed online free and also fabulous," as they say.

(Heather's also a brilliant photographer. She once did a photoessay of me called "Elise and Her Crows," inspired by Patrick's remark that he admired the crow's feet by my eyes. In addition to being an excellent artist, she's the hardest working sex educator I've ever met, and I've met some pretty dedicated ones. We're lucky to have her.)

I am delighted to see that the Dutch are still essentially enlightened.

I am also delighted having seen the final resting place of Emperor Norton I and the Widow Norton (and having learned of the existence of the Widow Norton). Most intriguing. Yep, another long-distance work trip in progress.

My main point in this entry is kids are being taught this kind of thing right now.

*beams* Yeah! And thank you for posting it, it made me sit around and grin for eons, relative time.

I passed the game link to my sisters, whose daughters are at or approaching that age.

I wonder what the one for boys is like. This is the kind of information that I would have loved to have had when I was the relevant age, back in the late 1960s. Of course, we have passed a whole lot of water since then.

I'd migrate to the Netherlands except that I think that in the municipality where I'd be happiest, Kralendijk, they're a lot more strait-laced than in Amsterdam.

Deep in the forest withies climb each tree,
birds cry our presence, we are monsters here;
beneath our feet the little creatures flee.

In each small clearing there's not much to see
the light of morning seems harsh and austere;
deep in the forest withies climb each tree,

wild pines in the high branches in the lee
of the bright breezes which bring so much cheer,
beneath our feet the little creatures flee

much further in avoiding the decree
of the hard fate that they all seem to fear
deep in the forest. Withies climb each tree,

commensal vision where we might agree
on how life comes both to survive and share
beneath our feet. The little creatures flee

while we explain how these things come to be
in dappled light, within this pleasant air
deep in the forest withies climb each tree;
beneath our feet the little creatures flee.

Dave B., #26: Like abi, I am at a loss to see where your rant here connects to the excerpt she quoted. Could you perhaps be a little more explicit about what it was that you found triggering?

There are people now who are saying that "teaching children how to deal with bullying" doesn't address the problem, any more than "teaching women how to avoid rape" addresses that problem. (I see the two as being closely connected -- threats of rape are often part of bullying directed at women, and bullying of both men and women can include rape, cf. Abu Ghraib. Both are about hurting someone else because you can.)

elise @46: Heather's also a brilliant photographer. She once did a photoessay of me called "Elise and Her Crows," inspired by Patrick's remark that he admired the crow's feet by my eyes.

URL, s'il vous plait? I'm a fan of a good set of crow's feet.

There's a sex-ed programme on Dutch public television called Dr Corrie which is aimed at fifth and sixth graders. (It's part of something called School TV which is made specifically for watching in school.)

I only found out about it because a bunch of Catholics got upset about it and started a campaign/website called Stop Dokter Corrie. Ironically one of the episodes they are against is it seems the one that says "it is important to start kissing only when you are ready for it. Don't do it because somebody else wants you to. There is no right or wrong age to start kissing."

abi, this is wonderful! I almost wish it weren't the next Open Thread, so the conversation could be more focused, but I'm so glad to read this (increasingly grim news from Russia has been getting me down).

I wonder if the boys' version is exactly parallel. I'd think that...well, don't boys usually reach puberty a bit later than girls? So maybe how you talk to them about it might be a little different (ten-year-olds are a bit different from thirteen-year-olds, or whatever the ages are now)?

Just curious.

Dave Bell, I read your comment with a jaw that just kept dropping. I can't imagine what on Earth you're talking about.

Jenny Islander @ 28... PJ Evans @ 45... You've seen the poster for "Sharknado vs Polar Vortex"?

Xopher @56

I checked the pdf available at the link Auke posted in 37, it seems the texts for boys and girls are parallel for most parts. This version seems to be intended to get to children almost before they'd really need it.

Branko, #54: Oh, I can tell you why that upsets them. It's saying that people should be able to decide for themselves when it's okay to start kissing. Implicit in the "don't do it just because someone else wants you to" is also "don't not do it just because someone else says you shouldn't". To the objectors, it should have said, "wait until your parents or the Church tell you it's okay".

Joris, #57: Which is as it should be. If you wait until they need it, it's too late.

neotoma @ 15: you speak for me also.

abi @ 31: I'm heartened that you got such a positive response from the school. It's an uphill struggle if the school isn't fully committed to prevention of bullying.

Fragano @ 51: that's superb.

HLN: local herpestid has been reading Virginia Woolf for the first time (yay for free e-books on the brand new reader which was a Christmas present!) and now feels a little dizzy. "It was rather like being inside a kaleidoscope," they told HLN. Some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read, but very disorientating."

When asked if they planned to read any more Woolf in the future, local herpestid replied, "More than likely. But right now I'm just going to read some Sherlock Holmes stories to get my feet back on the ground."

Fragano Ledgister @51, applause!

In case any Sherlock fans didn't know, according to BBC America's Tumblr, Sherlock returns to PBS (not BBC America as some people have been saying) on January 19 at 10 PM.

abi 31: I'm so glad the school behaved appropriately. And that word is chosen with care, because that particular solution wouldn't work everywhere. The kids there clearly believe that being civilized is good and that being in trouble is bad, which speaks well for the school and the Netherlands.

Rats. Just got over my most recent "wanna be Canadian" spell, and now I'm having a "wanna be Dutch" spell. I will just say "Geert Wilders" a few times and no doubt it will pass. But even WITH the PVV...sheesh.

Joris 57: Lee 58 speaks wisdom here. My point was that "just before they need it" is, from what I know, a bit later for boys than for girls. Though certainly in my life...well, some things started up before I actually reached puberty. But I had older boys in my life who...well. Not going to talk about that here.

Mongoose 59: It's an uphill struggle if the school isn't fully committed to prevention of bullying.

And most schools aren't. In fact, in some cases the school uses bullying to maintain the hierarchy that keeps the teachers and administrators in control. (This has been discussed here before, but I'm not sure when or in what thread.)

Mongoose & Cassy B: Thank you!

So four hours into thaw out, and everything is going again except an upstairs tub with a really weird faucet, and the hot side of the basement laundry tub, which is so dead I suspect it is cut out. Suddenly from upstairs there is the sound of a sudden flow of water. Unfortunately it is not from the faucet, but from in the walls. I rush downstairs and cut the house water, then my son lays towels on the first floor while I set out a couple of coolers downstairs to catch the dripping. Fortunately the plumber was able to come and fix things, and the water damage seems to be extremely minimal. PVC pipes, BTW, do not fail at all gracefully. They shatter lengthwise into shards.

C. Wingate, #63: That is very true, and is also why (after a brief experimental period) the SCA banned the use of PVC pipe as a base for fighting weapons. When a PVC-based sword breaks, the tip flies off in a random direction, and may have a sharp point sticking out of the broken section; that could really hurt someone if it landed wrong. Rattan, when it breaks, tends to bend rather than snap; not all of the material breaks at once, and what's left holds the tip in place.

So, I had a look at the pdf files, both the girl one and the boy one. They are indeed very similar. (The boy one has just as much pink and purple as the girl one, which is kind of nice to see—it shows that the colours are an aesthetic choice rather than a gendered one.)

One thing that bugs me a little bit is that even a couple of the quotations are nearly identical, although they're attributed to different people. "Mijn buurmannen zijn homo. Ze hebben en dochtertje. Leuk, toch?" says Sophie (11), in the meisje version. And "Mijn buurmannen zijn homo. Ze hebben nu ook en dochtertje. Leuk toch!" says Marc (10), in the jongen version. This seems like the sort of thing that could diminish the pamphlets’ credibility unnecessarily if a meisje and a jongen happen to compare notes. But that's a minor quibble.

Ok, Abi, that's just cool.

HLN: Area woman receives call from home warranty company. "We're sorry, Miz. Your cooktop is too old to get replacement parts. Instead, you have a budget of $2k for purchase & installation of a new cooktop." Area woman heard squeeing about the only good thing to happen today.

In other news, local realtor highly recommends home warranties to clients and acquaintances with yet more added personal testimony. "So, my stove stopped working three days before Christmas during the first of four holiday dinners," she began...

hyper-temporal unlocal news: if you're in Canada or the northern US and you've got clear skies tonight-the-8th/9th, you might see auroras. A mass-o-sun arrives around 3am EST on the 9th.

To check without going outside, look at the Auroral Oval picture on Spaceweather (map with auroral overlay on the left-side column [It also has a map for Europe.]). Yellow/Red over your location is good.

I wish there'd been a pamphlet like that around when I went to a "health ed" class in 5th grade, around about 1985. All the boys were kicked out of the room (AFAIK they didn't get any education) for an hour, and they explained basic human biology -- periods, puberty, and pregnancy. The school nurse took one hour, gave us all a sample pack of sanitary napkins, and called it done. They didn't mention AIDs until one of the kids brought it up and it was quickly glossed over as something we didn't need to worry about if we weren't having sex and nobody bled on us ...

(Given some of the girls in my class were teenage refugees who were years behind the other kids educationally, and that this was a rough inner city school, "too young to have sex" was probably a false assumption.)

I actually pretty much knew the facts of life by then anyway -- my grandmother made sure I knew what I needed to. (Though, some of Gramma's information was outdated by virtue of her being born in 1916. I was at my grandmother's house for the summer when I was thirteen and I told her I needed sanitary napkins within the next week. I was very confused when she asked me if I needed a belt for them too ...)

In other news, I woke at 3 AM yesterday to no heat in my travel trailer. This being the Arizona high country, heat is actually necessary -- by the time it was dawn, the cats' water bowl had a film of ice on it and my electric mattress pad, several blankets, and three cats under the covers with me were definitely not keeping up with the cold. I am glad that the pipes didn't freeze!

After a few choice swear words from my father, and a few equally choice words from me, and much concern over the possibility of Yet Another Bill (the 35 year old septic tank is also dying) we discovered that this particular travel trailer (A) a panel of house-hold type breakers and (B) a HIDDEN panel of automotive fuses next to the breaker box. Counter-intuitively, the furnace has a 15 amp AUTOMOTIVE fuse, not a breaker.

We replaced the fuse.

Hallelujah. Let there be heat.

So far it hasn't blown a fuse again. The power was flickering that night due to high winds, so I'm hoping that was what caused the fuse to fry. We so can't afford another bill.

When I was in fifth grade (I think), one day all us boys were taken out to play some goddamned sport while the girls got to watch a movie!

I was outraged. My family didn't go to the movies often, we had no TV at home, and this was 1969 (or '70), so there was no internet, no source of video entertainment. How unfair to deprive us of this while providing it to the girls! I said so to the teacher, and some of the other boys agreed. Much discussion ensued.

"It was on menstruation," she finally cried, expecting that to end the conversation right there.

I was embarrassed to tears at that point, not that I knew exactly what menstruation was, just that it was one of those words people whispered. But I was not about to back down, so I said I'd still like to see the movie, because shouldn't I also know what was going on with the girls?

Eventually they gave in and the girls got sent out to play a game (yuck) and we watched the movie. I can't remember what the other boys' reactions were, but I was glad to understand something I hadn't known about before. I think the teacher actually wound up being pleased that we took an interest, but...well, it was 1969 (or '70), and my memory is spotty.

You know, that "more knowledge please" attitude is something I got from my dad. Had lots of problems, he and I, but he deserves credit for that. Much credit.

Jacque @53: The full set is on Heather's subscription site, femmerotic, I believe, but here are a few public (and therefore at least marginally SFW* depending on your workplace) links:

Start here, and hit the arrow to the right to page through the nine photos in that clump.

She did this glorious thing which I use as a userpic in a bunch of places. The leaf shadows are from a long bolt of lace.

*Heather does a lot of nudes. She's really, really good at it. We met when she asked for volunteers who were not young/thin/conventionally-pretty, and became fast friends. I miss her like mad since she moved away, and need to get out to her city again.

I've got a post in "Internal Server Error" limbo, I wonder if another post will shake it loose?

Just so this isn't totally vacuous, I'll talk about something very odd that happened to me last Saturday: I woke up and there was a patch of numbness on the side of my right thumb. It didn't seriously affect my manual dexterity, and over the last half week sensation has been slowly returning to it -- it's almost but not quite back to normal by now. But I've never had anything like that happen before. If it weren't getting better I'd be seeing my doctor.

Hm, and the post shows up in "last 1000 comments" but not in the thread itself. ("Dreadful Phrases".)

George RR Martin's Cocteau Theater in Santa Fé is showing all of "Game of Thrones" every Monday for free. It's my understanding that the small theater was packed and had to turn away many people.

At least, the behaviour he's describing reminds me very much of what used to happen when the gnomes took an interest in a message.

(Looking at it in David's view-all-by, I'm inclined to suspect Punctuation.)

elise, those are lovely! I have long admired that lace-shadows icon.

David Goldfarb: I am not even Dr. Google, but some of that relates to how my Weird Elbow Thing (whose neurology appointment has been, because of the cold emergency and knock-on emergency/missed appointments effects, postponed till I know-not-when) first presented.

Because of that, I can say that one thing that CAN cause symptoms like yours is irritation/pinching (we know not which in my case yet -- I'm going to see a neurologist) of the nerves that go down through the elbow towards your hands. There are two, one on either side of the bony protuberance in your elbow; they're what you whack in 'funny-bone' situations. One handles the inner half (your thumb, index finger, and middle finger) the other handles the outer half (pinky, ring finger, middle finger).

Yes, the halves overlap, adding up to more than five fingers total capacity. See also 'non-designed architecture'. :->

Ways to narrow down whether it's elbows for you too: If you bend your arms tightly and put your elbows on a surface and your hands under your chin and lean like that, does it start feeling funny or painful after a while? The two things that trigger for me are pressure on the 'funny-bone' region just above my elbow point or keeping them bent at less than 90deg.

In both cases, my hands start to go pins-and-needles; if I keep annoying it they go number and/or hurt. The last time I had this, during gestation, something ELSE happened that I thought was unrelated but my doc said I should mention to the specialist: I had an issue where I'd go to pick up something incidental (glass of water was the classic), think I had a firm grip, and have it go cascading to the floor.

This has trained me to pick things up with a finger under their bottoms and now I no longer know if I have lack of grip strength/lack of ability to sense not gripping enough. :->

Part of the differential diagnosis between elbow-nerves and tendonitis (for pain; numbness is more likely nerve-related) includes standing one cubit from a wall and pushing on it with your elbows in a right-angle configuration; if it's the tendons that'll hurt like a bugbear.

Going into some detail because there might be general interest, and also because of the history of listing symptoms on ML and having someone else go, "Ohhhhh, wait, I should talk to my doctor about that too, now that you mention it."

... postponedc. My appointment has been postponed. (eyes my fingers and internal spellcheck module sidelong)

Elise @ #70

met when she asked for volunteers who were not young/thin/conventionally-pretty

Sort-of related: the forum I frequent over on Ravelry sometimes has pin-up threads. Thing is, most of the men I find attractive are not conventionally handsome (I have a thing for character actors), and while the forum is pretty broadminded, I don’t want to do the equivalent of throwing a bucket of cold water over anyone who doesn’t share my tastes. OTOH, starting a “not-conventionally-handsome” thread seems potentially problematic, in several ways that I will leave to the readers imaginations. Even if “Strange Attractors” would be a cute subject heading. So basically I’m asking for advice here before I ask over there.

Actually, David's comment was not gnomed, and its disposition was not the product of any faults of its form or content.

What happened is a product of the particular failure modes of Movable Type's comment-publication process. Basically, posting something to MT is a two-step process. First, the content is saved to the database, and then the pages are rebuilt as static files for serving through the tubes. (Contrast this to WordPress, which serves dynamically-created pages.)

What happened was that the second step, the page build process, failed partway through. So the recent posts list and David's (view all by) pages were built, but O Tragedy! the blog entry page was not, because crash.

To shake one of those loose, you need to post another comment on the same thread. That'll trigger a rebuild of the last n thousand comment lists, your (view all by), and the blog entry page itself.

I know we're seeing a Whole Lotta Errors these days. This is a conversation that has to happen with People Not Me, which requires PNM to have time to tackle it.

I can, however, assure everyone that the backup process is working.

#78 ::: Sarah
I'll bet Rav would be okay with it. And if not, so what? They don't seem to have mounted a Death Squad.

FWIW, Steve Buscemi would top my list.

Love the photos of you et. al., Elise.

elise @ 70

What a gorgeous, lovely set of pictures. They're absolutely beautiful!

@ elise

I should probably go on to note that I'm married and plan to stay that way, so you needn't worry that I'm going to get all stalker-ish or anything. I simply felt moved to compliment the artist and her model.

Sarah -
Which forum, please? You can PM me on Rav - carolkimball.

I don't usually go for the conventionally handsome. [Magazine]'s list of the hottest normally has my picks somewhere between 10 and 20, if listed at all. It was with much pleasure, and a smidge of concern over my preferences becoming more conventional, when Hugh Jackman* was voted hottest man of the year some years back. Since then, my preferences have gone back to the previous positions in the list.

*I'm a sucker for a great smile, and Hugh Jackman has a spectacular smile. He smiles with his whole face.

Cygnet @68: I was very confused when she asked me if I needed a belt for them too ...)

Oh ghods, now there's a memory. I still have the scar on my tailbone from that first one....

Xopher Halftongue @69: "It was on menstruation,"

Go, young Xopher! I mind the time I had to explain female bidness to an adult boyfriend.... See also: most of the men I know will, like, run from the room when the topic comes up.

On the other hand, it provided a nice trump card when the guys in electronics school were trying to gross out me and my one female classmate. I finally got tired of it. "You want gross," I thinks to myself, "I'll give you gross." I swear, the ringleader turned so bright red I though he was going to have an aneurysm. Never gave us any crap again.

elise @70: Ah yes! Very good! Interesting: you bear more than a passing resemblance to my best friend in high school.

On the topic of great crow's feet, I'm inordinately please with this picture of a coworker. Entirely by accident, I discovered a trick: I initially traced the outlines of the image onto the paper with my empty ballpoint pen (retained for the purpose). Turns out that drawing obliquely over the tracks, they form very precise highlights, which would be impossible to do otherwise.

Elliott Mason @76: Because of that, I can say that one thing that CAN cause symptoms like yours is irritation/pinching (we know not which in my case yet -- I'm going to see a neurologist) of the nerves that go down through the elbow towards your hands.

That can even result from pinching/irritation in one's neck. I have to remember to press my shoulders down when I'm riding my bike, otherwise several fingers go numb.

Carol Kimball @80: Willem Dafoe would be top of my list. Unfortunately, he's an example of "you shouldn't meet your heroes."

Lin Daniel @84: Hugh Jackman +1

Ewen McGregor is another one. That guy is having way too much fun, living his life.

For classic crow's feet, I always think of Brendan Coyle of Downton Abbey fame. They're not even really "crow's feet" in the classical sense, but they totally work for me.

See also: David Tennant. (& BTW, I really hope he and Matt Smith find more excuses to work together. They're chemistry is just magic.)

David Goldfarb @ 71, augmenting the advice from Elliott @ 76 et al.

There's a lot of mileage on the nerves to the fingers that can be affected to produce tingling/numbness. And the number of different nerves involved can make the patterns of what's affected rather strange. It starts where the nerves come off the spine (right where the neck turns into the back)where any sort of pinching or tension can have effects farther on. Then the nerves travel through your shoulder blade area, which is also a favorite spot for muscle tension to pinch them. Then, as noted, going around the elbow joint and through the wrist are additional pinch-points. A good orthopedist can help sort out the possible sources.

I had a severe problem a decade ago where I'd managed to pinch the C7 spinal nerve on my right side which resulted in burning pain across my shoulder and down the back of my arm and almost complete numbness in two of my fingers. (And then the idiot doctor at the emergency room -- I was away from home at the time -- insisted it must be a sports-related shoulder injury despite my vehement insistence that I knew what I'd been doing with my body and I knew when the symptoms had started and nothing he was saying made any logical sense.)

More transiently -- as mentioned elsewhere above -- bicycling can give me much more transient numbness in specific fingers due to shoulder positioning relative to the nerve pathways.

At the moment, I'm dealing with some nearly-chronic finger numbness that comes and goes relative to shoulder/neck tension due to work stress. Fortunately none of my problem seem to come from tendon or wrist issues.

My advice (IANAMD) is that if it comes and goes very regularly or if it sticks around for 24 hours at a time, consult with an orthopedist of that is logistically possible for you. At the very least, you can get advice on stretches/exercises and which interim anti-inflammatory/analgesics might be appropriate.

Chiming in on the chorus of "it could be coming from your neck". In my work as a physical therapist assistant, I've run across a good many patients whose finger/hand symptoms, initially misdiagnosed as either carpal tunnel (nerve compression at the wrist) or cubital tunnel (nerve compression at the elbow) turned out to be caused by nerve compression at the neck. If that's what your problem turns out to be, it is absolutely treatable with physical therapy, in a "fix it and make sure it doesn't come back" sense (may require ongoing adherence to home exercises).

(whoops, hit "post" too soon!)

Jacque @ #85, that portrait is lovely!

85
I had muscles in my neck that were so tense that I was losing feeling in the hand at the other end of that arm. (Fortunately, I've managed to avoid that kind of tension since then.)

I get a sharp needlelike pain in my right elbow when my neck needs a chiro adjustment. I see a chiropractor regularly as I have a pinched nerve in the middle of my back and a touch of scoliosis from a childhhod injury. If you don't like the results you get from an orthopedist, consider a chiropractor.

 
Heather Rose Jones @86
I spent more than 5 hours in excruciating pain because the ER doctor kept trying to prove I had appendicitis. Because 17 year olds don't have kidney stones. One of the advantages of being older is that I can look an ER or urgent care doctor in the eye and ask, "how long have you known me?" Pause while he, and it has always been a 'he' who pulls this, searches for an answer. I say, "I've known me for [current age] years, and have been dealing with this issue for quite a lot of them." Most of the time it works.

Jacque @85:
Wow, that's stunning.

HLN, Bullying Edition:
Further details emerge.

The leerjaarcoördinator (head teacher for the students in that grade) told the class that there had been thefts from one of the student, and that one of them had taken place in the boy's locker room at gym (this is true). He didn't mention what was stolen, or from whom, or that it was also bullying.

He said that he was going to give the miscreant a chance to confess to him, that day only, privately in his office. Otherwise all the boys of the class were going to be kept after school on Friday. And when the thief was discovered, the punishment for theft would be applied.

Unsurprisingly, the kid confessed. I thought at first that he'd also returned the pencil case, but that's not so (I suspect it went into a trash can.) So I've just compiled a list of everything that was in the two pencil cases, the one stolen in December and the one taken Monday. And the kid is going to have to pay, as well as writing an apology to Alex.

Will he try something else? I don't know—but I know that the school now knows that bullying is going on, and whom to watch for it. The manner and speed of their reaction encourages me that they'll take it seriously.

Lila @87: turned out to be caused by nerve compression at the neck. If that's what your problem turns out to be, it is absolutely treatable with physical therapy

Although mileage varies wildly. I finally fired the PT my doctor sent me to for the inflamed nerve root in my neck. Not only did his ministrations not help (and he only got around to actually doing anything on my fifth visit—!?), but his "diagnostics" re-injured me. Every. Single. Time. After five iterationss, I eventually caught a clue and quit going. What finally turned the trick was a combination of osteopathy and Pilates. (Which additionally fixed alignment issues all the way down to my feet.)

& @88 & abi: Thank you! (The party in question just walked past my desk. :-> ) That thing he did dangling his glasses was completely unconscious on his part. It wasn't until I was choosing the pose and noticed how well it worked.

One of the biggest challenges, I find, when getting images of people, is to get them to not pose.

abi @91: Yay, school! At the very least, the bully can't fall back on "the consent of silence," which is definitely not nothing.

abi: Is it known if the thief is the same party as the cyberstalker?

Jacque @93:
It is not known to me. Which is fine, as long as the authorities have all the information and act on it all. And they have, this far, earned my trust.

Jacque @92: in portraiture my dream goal is to depict someone as they look TO me, which usually means a) lively and b) not their "you're taking my picture..." face.

As I Recall, circa 1975:

In fifth grade, the girls of all the classes went to a special assembly. There were rumors of a film. I forget what us boys did.

In sixth grade boys had an assembly; the various classes gathered in one room and watched a rather clunky and earnest film strip with leaden narration and bland schematic diagrams of Parts. The gym teacher and my teacher had a short Q&A afterwards. I remember them awkwardly introducing the notion of Gross-Out Function Parity: Sure, girls have periods, but boys get nocturnal emissions.

* * *
For the curious, an assortment of What's Going On Down There films of various vintages are available on archive.org.

If Alex's experience is anything to go by, next year Fiona gets the Super Embarrassing Lesson. The whole class, together, learns how to put a condom on a model penis. Said model penis is passed around so that everyone gets a chance to do it.

Not gender-split. Not a banana or a cucumber. Everyone together, condoms, model penis. They do it toward the end of the school year, and I gather it's pretty embarrassing.

But, as I said to Alex after he did it, it does mean that when you have to do it for real, it won't be your first time.

Well, of course Fiona may never have to do it for real. Then again, Alex may not either, depending on many factors.

Probability, of course, is quite otherwise. Not disputing that the SEL is a good idea.

Of course, condoms may be obsolete if the right nanotech comes along, but that's less likely to happen in the next few years.

The strong statistical probability is that Alex will do it for real at some point. Fiona, less so, but it's still a greater-than even possibility. So I reckon the lesson is, well, prophylactic.

That's what I meant to say. But I didn't come up with the pun. Alas for me that I didn't conceive of it first.

Since Dave Bell isn't responding, I'm going to hazard a guess that his comment didn't have anything to do with the contents of the pamphlet, but with Stefan's comment @11. Specifically, I'm going to guess that Stefan's comment prompted a strong feeling that in most English-speaking countries, including the US, it would be very risky for a man of any age to give out pamphlets related to sex to an audience including teen or preteen girls, and riskier yet to talk with one about the topic.

If that's what he was thinking, I'd actually agree with that - I commented on a recent thread that it feels risky to me to just chat with kids in general without some strong social excuse - though I think it has little to do with feminism or "men are the enemy".

It has much more to do IMHO with 1) some justified worry about pedophiles, 2) a whole lot more overblown paranoia about "OMG pedophiles are everywhere, save the children!", 3) a societal fear, due to religious and authoritarian reasons, of children being better-informed on sexual topics, and 4) a deathly fear of learning that some children may have sexual feelings or ideas of their own, to the point that the topic can't easily or safely be discussed openly by anyone.

P.S. That only addresses the first part, of course. I have no idea what the part about bullying was supposed to relate to, although it seemed clear it was triggered in some way.

Elliott Mason @95: in portraiture my dream goal is to depict someone as they look TO me, which usually means a) lively and b) not their "you're taking my picture..." face.

Yes, exactly!

abi @97: Not gender-split. Not a banana or a cucumber. Everyone together, condoms, model penis.

I 'member when my sex ed came around ('69), it was co-ed, and we got all the anatomical diagrams, and descriptions of the various cycles and physiological responses and stuff. What they didn't cover, however, was how the sperm got from the man to the woman. This was left as an exercise for the student. I was not quite smart enough to make the deductive leap.

(The gap was finally filled by a classmate, during a conversation over the back fence. "OMG, he puts what where!?")

& @99: So I reckon the lesson is, well, prophylactic.

Friend of mine was in a punk rock band, back in the late '70s, named The Prophylactics. When they performed, they taped condoms all over their instruments and equipment. I asked if this meant they were a rubber band. My only answer was a very dirty look.

Carol Kimball @ #83
Sarah -
Which forum, please?

LSG (the Bang thread or Team I'll-be-in-my-bunk)

Thing is, if people are curating a collection of images that they personally find attractive, it's quite a different thing from public appearance-shaming; and there's no arguing with taste, which is why fanfic archives tend to have a lot of searchable tags so that users can find their kinks and avoid their squicks. Within a fairly broad forum, however, I'm not sure how to avoid (a) spoiling the fun of people who don't want to ogle Steve Buscemi; (b) fragment into a thousand super-detailed pin-up threads, or (c) draw a line between "conventionally" and "unconventionally" attractive, which might open a can of worms.

Xopher @ 100, I see what you did there, but I refuse to egg you on.

Cassy, I'd hate to think that Abi was a bad seed; I certainly hope this doesn't spawn a series of puns!

Sarah, please start a topic called "Strange Attractors"!!!

In the meantime, I'll check out ... erm, the obvious.

It's fertile territory for humor. Though I'm not foreskin anyone to participate.

(Sorry. No, really, very sorry. But not sorry enough not to make the pun.)

Anybody game for bun mots?

Jacque @103: There's overlap for you. Richard Moorman (we called him Richard then; well, I called him Richard-o) said in his D'APAzine something about the Prophylactics, and I made the same joke.

Hm.

To Absent Friends.

abi has no one to blame but herself. The seminal post was hers. It's a good rule: don't put your punsters to the teste unless you want them to rise to the occasion. I mean, I'm sure she saw that coming.

Not that that is in any way a cliticism. I like chains as much as anyone!

I always find these rude pun threads funny, but the idea of joining in is kind of embarrassing. Even though they make me laugh, I'm too cowardly to write anything with such a dirty double meaning.

Guys, I really love your spunk.

But how many of us will come together for a Gathering of Light at the Worldcon[SM]? It could make a vas deferens to the event.

http://observationdeck.io9.com/amazon-now-at-war-with-dinosaur-erotica-implication-1494585695

A topic of interest to these threads.

HLN: Local woman discovers chocolate in her pocket. "Hah!" she is heard to exclaim, "And it's the good kind, too!"

Kip W @110: Richard Moorman ... To Absent Friends.

::raises glass::

Jacque @85: That's a really good drawing.

The Simpsons tribute to Hayao Miyazaki:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R94Q6NhuS3A

Sweet.

David: Thank you!

Our Bosnian cleaning guy just came in. I've recently inculcated him into the practice of Knock Knock jokes. Tonight, he presented me with this one:

Him: "Knock knock."

Me: "Who's there?"

Him: "Doctor."

:-)

Jacque@119

The First Knock-Knock Joke. The Knock-Knock Joke that must never be answered. Hidden in plain sight.

:-)

Niall 112: Guys, I really love your spunk.

Hah! You had me going. But watch out, some scumbag could wander in at any point.

I know the penis mightier than the sword, but that was pretty limp.

OK, Strange Attractor thread launched with publicity still from Ruggles of Red Gap (SFW, unless your workplace has something against 1930s screwball comedy, carousel animals, or Charles Laughton.)

There's a vas deferens between a dirty pun and a clean one. At least that's what I've found.

Jacque #85: Oh, that is very nice. Sounds like a useful drawing trick, too.

Dave: Thank you! Yeah, that is a good trick. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to do it deliberately.

@Distal Neurology: ... or the kind of tingling you get in your hands as you walk the three blocks home with 60 lbs of groceries hanging from your backpack. Nice to know I can do it, but...Uff-da!

Elliott Mason @76: I tried the experiment for two minutes, and didn't notice anything happening.

A possibly-related data point is that on Friday and that same Saturday I was having some discomfort in my lower back, which normally isn't a problem area for me. (Despite having spent two decades in a job which involved schlepping around cases of paper every day. A big thank-you to Tom Whitmore, who when I was first starting gave me valuable tips on proper lifting technique.)

Because this is the right place to ask: Would anyone like to volunteer to be a go-to person for the occasional transliteration/identification of small amounts of text in (a) Cyrillic (probably Russian) or (b) Hebrew characters, from tombstones? A heavy week would probably be 10-15 stones, and mostly I care about the names and dates (plus if it says 'beloved sister,' 'my maiden name was,' etc), so not paragraphs of text.

I mean, I could stick the images in a publically-shared dropbox folder and let everyone play, but that seems kind of spammy of the community. :->

Context in case needed: I photograph, index, and input-to-Find-A-Grave a couple of small, oldish ethnic cemeteries near me. One is Jewish and has some seriously nonzero occurrences of the two scripts listed above, neither of which I have much of any idea how to pronounce. At least the Czech tombstones, somebody's made a convenient lookup table of the sorts of things most likely to occur, and I can use that pretty well.

If you're interested in learning how to do what I do, only on cemeteries near YOU, toss me an email: I'm 2ells2tees on that google place's mail servers, and I love enthusing about my crowdsourced history [obsession] hobby.

Elliott Mason @128: that google place's mail servers is, alas, ambiguous, as they operate multiple domains for the purpose. These days they only let your register for new addresses in gmail.com, but previously they have also used googlemail.com.

Jules @129: I see I was too elliptical. I'm at gmail.com with no frills. :->

I don't recall if I put this here before, but Elliott Mason's post reminds me of this grave in a Jewish cemetery in West Springfield, MA. I was photographing stones, and became interested in the inset photo portrait on the stone. It made me a little sad that this person's face (a young man or boy, I was guessing) had lost so much of its substance.

In my experience with toner and photocopiers, the part that flakes off the most is usually the solid black areas, so I put in a little time one day restoring it with that in mind. The results surprised me a bit. As you can probably tell, my guess was wrong.

Did I put this up here before? I seem to recall that someone translated some or all of the inscription, but I didn't carry that over into my flickr page — rather slack of me, or maybe I didn't feel like I had the right to make a name public under the circumstances.

Maybe it was on LiveJournal. That sounds kind of right.

Pain in the arms and hands is tricky. Two coworkers had elbow pain and went to the same physiatrist. One was diagnosed with weak muscles on one side of her back causing a nerve thingy, the other with a damaged tendon in his arm. Both got different PT, and got better. One had previously been diagnosed by her general practitioner as "tennis elbow" and given an arm strap for it—which did not help.

I have brachial neuritis, which is an inflammation of the nerves in my shoulder. In my case, it's secondary to dystonia causing edema of the muscles. For me, it's chronic (which is unusual), but it is very much aggravated by certain activities and motions. For most people, it's a once-in-a-lifetime type thing that can happen for no apparent reason, or it can be caused by a mass or injury.

For me, it started with an acute, and very painful, flare caused by physical therapy to try to loosen my muscles up. Painful as in "way more painful than kidney stones" -- which I happened to get at the same time, lucky me.

The symptoms are pretty similar to a pinched cervical nerve, but the outcome can be a lot more devastating. I got very lucky -- my right arm isn't "quite right" after two years but it's usable.

It's something worth asking the doctor about if you're having symptoms. I very nearly had neck surgery but the surgeon was good enough to catch my problem was in my shoulder, not my neck, when he was screening me for surgery.

Notably, when I went to the ER for the kidney stones and told them that my shoulder hurt even worse than the stones, they diagnosed me with a pinched nerve.

(Google the usual reliable sources for more information on brachial neuritis.)

Oh, and the ER made me wait 8 hours before seeing me. Apparently, they thought I was drug seeking. They got much nicer to me when the CT scan showed multiple kidney stones ... and were shocked when I turned down morphine because by that time it was 1 AM and I had an appointment with the spinal surgeon at 8 AM the next morning that I had to drive myself to! They were absolutely useless when it came to the pain in my shoulder and arm, however, and I quickly determined that I was going to get no treatment from them for the "pinched nerve."

(I knew from past experience that toradol works better on kidney stones than opiates anyway, and without the unpleasant side effects. I also knew from past experience just how unpleasant renal colic can get, and how much better the right meds can make it.)

Fragano Ledgister @ 124

That joke left me prostate, though I didn't do more than glans at it.

HLN: I was going to do some sort of clever set-up first but ...

Daughter of Mystery is officially released! I don't have a hard-copy in my hot little hands yet. (If I post a picture on facebook of me holding my book would that be a "shelfie"?)

Remember, local peeps: I'll be holding a release party on February 9 at the Other Change of Hobbit, so if you can stand to wait that long, contact them to reserve a copy.

Let's not go half-cocked.

very old spam (or rather, rudeness)

The followup is pretty entertaining, though.

Followup to my #137: Looks like those bits may be being left on purpose, because otherwise the later comments don't make sense.

Serge, been watching "Live and Let Die" lately?

Got no spurt of creativity, punwise. It may have been here that I saw the Midwest Teen Sex Show . If not: pretty good sexual resource.

Are postings to the punfest suppose to be a circumcise, or are there no hard and fast rules?

I wonder if the puns have reached their climax yet? (This post to see if I can break a post out of 404-jail.)

...and it did! Post was merely hiding, not caught in a sextangle.

Lori Coulson @ 139... The scene where Yaphet Kotto is testing Jane Seymour's prophetic abilities while threatening to shorten Roger Moore's digit?

Heather Rose Jones @135, congratulations!

Heather Rose Jones @ 135... Felicitations!

Pun threads condominate the territory, all right. It's getting downright seedy around here. I prepuce a toast to all those doing such a bang-up job.

Serge, I think it's Bond's last line in the scene before that one, but I have a weird memory for scraps of screenplay and music...

HLN: area man and family are spending the night in a hotel, as most belongings have been loaded on a moving truck. Children demand yogurt and waffles for breakfast.

Random open-threadiness: an interesting article on being female on the internet, from Megan McArdle. Point I found most enlightening:

What I’m saying is that I think all people are unfairly hard on women and minorities on the other side than they are on opponents who are men....we have an unconscious and unfair double standard. Sometimes it manifests itself in sheer crazy. More often it manifests in dismissing women on the grounds that they couldn’t possibly have anything to add to the conversation.
...I frequently see lists of “writers I like” or “bloggers I like” or what have you, and there’s usually a spot for “Folks on the other side who I enjoy.”...
And in the decade-plus I’ve been writing on the Internet, I have almost never seen a woman in those slots.....I think the same holds true for minority writers, though I am less sure of that.
...we know how to use the delete button. But we don’t have a button for the people who automatically delete us from the list of grown-ups who should be taken seriously.

Coming a little late to David Goldfarb's hand numbness -- and just wanting to say that other people have said everything I'd say. It's most likely nerve stuff, and it can be happening pretty much anywhere between the brain and the hand; many, if not most, GPs don't have a lot of training about such nerve issues; and talking to someone you trust who does have such training (PT, massage therapist, chiropractor, osteopath or the like) if it happens more than occasionally is a really good idea. If it's mild and transient -- there are bigger things to worry about in the world.

SamChevre @ #149, McCardle's adding her thoughts to Amanda Hess's long essay at Pacific Standard, which is well worth reading. McCardle linked to it but didn't quote directly. That's a shame; there's plenty to quote.

SamChevre @ #149, McCardle's adding her thoughts to Amanda Hess's long essay at Pacific Standard, which is well worth reading. McCardle linked to it but didn't quote directly. That's a shame; there's plenty to quote.

Huh. Internal server error alarm, so I reposted. Oh well.

SamChevre @ 149: May your move go as just as smoothly and low stress as it is possible for a move to go. May Massachusetts be a delight to explore.

The treatment of women on the internet *is* a real problem.

I'd rather hear about it from Amanda Hess, though.

Megan McArdle, a.k.a. "Jane Galt," the fact-free glibertarian, has proven time and time again throughout her hackish career that no one should take her seriously. Entirely without regard to her gender; she has earned her reputation by being a glibertarian who at the same time always repeats the official RIght-Wing Wurlitzer nonsense of the moment.

Not to mention her classic suggestion of 2003 that people demonstrating against the Iraq War should be beaten with 2x4s.

I am sorry that she has received gender-based abuse. No one deserves abuse for those reasons.

Post lost in the Erroriverse. I'll just say that it's ALSO not OK to fat-shame Chris Christie (and yes, I hate him as much as anyone).

Trying again, since it didn't get popped out:

As I've said before, if you say that Margaret Thatcher was a fascist,* that's not misogynist.

If you say that Margaret Thatcher was a fascist b***h, that's misogynist. And it's not OK, no matter how much righteous hatred for Margaret Thatcher may fill your soul.†

There actually is a certain type of female troll who will call you a misogynist for any criticism of a woman (especially if you criticize them, of course). These people are assholes. Pay them no mind.

*You may or may not be correct or justified in saying so; that's not the point.
†Plenty filled mine while she was alive, believe me. I hate her less now that she's dead (saving my energy).

I got it from Kurt Busiek's Facebook Wall / Tumblr...this picture might be a shoop but even if it is, it's darn funny.

Okay, a little bit more research reveals that it is in fact faked. Still funny, though.

I had a professor at Berkeley whose name was George Sensabaugh -- excellent teacher, and if you get a chance to tae a class from him do so. He put up outside his door a lot of labels where his name was misspelled. He labeled the one which had him as "George Sensabagel" with the word "Sensahumor." That's one of the reasons I remember him!

Xopher @157, agree as far as it goes that it's not misogynist to disagree with a woman, even to disagree vehmently or rudely. But, to follow your line of argument, if you only call out fascist women and fascist men always get a pass, then there starts to be a misogynist pattern even if your words are never gender-based.

This is, of course, the general and not the personal "you." And it's often hard to see at the individual level.

OtterB @161--

I completely agree: we can discriminate through our silences, as well as through our use of words.

If I never said rude things about male right-wing hacks who pretend to be daring unconventional libertarians but happen to parrot whatever Rove and the Koch Brothers are pushing that day, then my complaints about McArdle would be de facto discriminatory, even if couched in non-discriminatory language.

So let me take this opportunity to say that Glenn Reynolds, just for starters, has *also* proven throughout his hackish career that no one should take him seriously. And David Brooks is just a small variation on the same theme--another puppet of the Republican propaganda machine who pretends to be a voice of sobriety and independence. Like McArdle, they too deserve to be abused on the internet, not for their gender but for their viciousness and for the damage that they do.

It is important to be an equal-opportunity despiser of all of one's enemies.

oldster @162, not intending to imply that was what you are doing, just to Xopher's point at what misogyny was and wasn't. You were responding to a particular point about a particular statement by a particular happened-to-be-female person. In that context it doesn't make sense to go off-topic to equally problematic statements by male persons. I was thinking more about overall patterns.

OtterB @163--
No problem, I was not feeling targeted by you. I just welcomed the opportunity to spread the opprobrium more evenly.

("Opprobrium," said Sir Francis Bacon, "is like muck: not good except it be spread.")

I'm decluttering, and came across my old 35mm camera with its small assortment of lenses and gadgets. Is anyone still taking pictures with film?

Turns out that one of my Facebook friends is still using film, so the camera and extra lenses is going to a good home.

>> Is anyone still taking pictures with film?

Posted just today at MetaFilter:

http://www.metafilter.com/135531/They-still-shoot-film-dont-they

I went to see "Her." (Not to be confused with "She.")

Another SF movie from the modern crop of film makers who can make SF that isn't "movie" SF.

Liked it overall. A tiny bit long. An interesting mix of pathos, humor, and discomfort.

* * *
Small nit:

Theodore is established in the first scene as a professional letter writer; he works for "Beautiful Handwritten Letters.com"

About 2/3rds of the way through . . .

. . . "Fnznagun" pbzcvyrf n yvfg bs Gurbqber'f orfg yrggref naq *fraqf gurz gb n choyvfure.*

Guvf fgevxrf zr nf:

N) N ivbyngvba bs ohfvarff rguvpf. Rira vs gur pbzcnal qbrfa'g unir nal evtugf gb gur yrggref, gurl qb unir na boyvtngvba naq qhgl gb xrrc gurz frpher naq cevingr. Gurbqber fubhyq chg uvf sbbg qbja naq jvguqenja gur obbx.

O) N ivbyngvba bs gur _fhccbfrq_ jevgref' naq erpvcvragf' cevinpl. Gurer pbhyq or n ybg bs guvatf va gubfr yrggref gung jbhyq or rzoneenffvat.

Home sick, surfing Web. Thing I learned today that I would be better off not knowing: There are multiple artists who were inspired by My Neighbor Totoro, a movie about two little girls who move into the country and their nearest neighbor, a kindly, generous person who happens to be a forest spirit--inspired by the fresh greenery, the cuteness, and the simple story of children's heartbreaks and hopes to make art in which Totoro and his kind are eldritch horrors who enjoy terrorizing children and devouring humankind.

What is even the point?

Jenny Islander@169 -- One of the bases of creativity is to look at things a little differently. I'm a big Totoro fan -- and it's still interesting to think about what would have been involved if the Totoro spirits were actually "evil" under standard interpretations. It's not entirely inconsistent with the film -- the fact that adults can't see or connect with the spirits is moderately telling (and look at how the older girl almost doesn't get to join in when they're riding the wind). The film is complex enough to allow difficult interpretations.

Lovecraft has a lot to answer for.

Jenny Islander @169: Um, the darker strands of Totoro-adjacent stuff I've run into are often inspired by two real-world Japan things: Totoro was initially theatrically released as a double-feature with Grave of the Fireflies, which is, um ... not light-hearted.

Secondly, there is some speculation that Totoro might be at least partly inspired by a case where two little girls wandered into the woods and died -- in that reading, all of the Totoro movie is experienced after death by the protagonists.

The darker side of spirits can be found a plenty in Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.

I'd leave Totoro alone.

re 169: Ironically, we just watched Rise of the Guardians this evening over dinner.

Janetl, you can also get adaptors to use old manual focus lenses on modern digital SLR cameras. eBay sellers have them available for most any camera combination. Some of the older lenses had really nice optics. The lenses will remain manual focus/manual aperture but that's not necessarily always a drawback.

(I wish someone would come up with a way to retrofit vintage cameras with modern digital innards. I really loved my old Minolta SRTs from the 1960's, but digital is so much easier and cheaper in so many ways. I just miss the hand feel of a heavy chunk of metal with big sturdy knobs and dials on it.)

I love the hand feel of my metal-body manual pentax. I don't so much love the weight of the camera bag with five lenses and a flash. And the complete and utter lack of water resistance. (My P&S digital is adventure-proof. Can't take it scuba diving but that's probably about it.)

I spent a bit too much time browsing the film link and further links instead of writing as I had intended. I want so much to try out some of the multi-exposure techniques described, but... weather. Well, and city light pollution, if the weather improves, but that can be used as an interesting light source too.

I can't find the vaccination thread. (Or a search field. Hidden in plain site?)

So:

11-year-old girl dies from flu after parents refuse to have her vaccinated

An 11-year-old Tennessee girl died earlier this week of complications from the flu just three days after contracting the potentially deadly virus.

The death of Savannah Hyden is just the latest in a growing number of flu-related deaths that has health officials worried.

Hyden died about 5 p.m. Wednesday at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital near Vanderbilt University near Nashvilled. According to her parents, the girl had not been given a flu vaccine this year.

...
Hayden's parents say they declined to get their daughter vaccinated because they were worried about the potential side effects sometimes caused by the vaccine.

'You only think [vaccines] for the weak and the elderly — those that don’t have the immunity to fight it off,' Fiser said. 'You would never imagine that a healthy child really would need the flu shot at all.'

Hayden, the girl's parents admit, did not have health insurance.

Deeper darker Totoro? I would rather stick with the interpretation that moving to an unfamiliar place can be scary, but most strangers are really kind and well-intentioned; that children's ability to imagine whole worlds is important to their well-being; that even when Mom and Dad are very busy and/or sick, they will still do their best to look after you (assuming that they are not mired in dysfunction); that ordinary, unspectacular, unmonetized places are important and should be cared for--which AFAIK was the stated point of making this movie.

janra @ 175: I have periodic bouts of longing for a digital SLR and the control of interchangeable lenses, but if I lift one, I retreat quickly to my Nikon Coolpix. A great camera that I'm not willing to carry with me won't take many pictures!

176
In the flu epidemic of 1918, it was mostly the young and healthy who died.

For the integration of the two ideas, Jenny Islander, I'd suggest watching Spirited Away again (I'm assuming you've seen it). Almost everything in it seems dark when first encountered, or at some point in dealing with it; and in the end, each of those darknesses has its own positive side.

Looking at the spirits in Totoro as ambiguous -- not necessarily good, as they seem to the children, but more complex -- is a useful idea, to me. I like the complexity of the world (just finished rewatching both Spirited Away and the Doctor Who episode "The Christmas Invasion" -- neither one has a simple version of "good" involved).

Mileage varies. I think it's useful to demonstrate that.

Camera sub-thread: just bought a Nikon FinePix S8200 because it has a decent zoom (x40)*, a viewfinder as well as a screen** AND it works off AA batteries***. Anyone used one of these?

Now just have to hope it actually does what I want it to do (take pictures of animals, mostly in zoos, and take pictures of runners, mostly as they are approaching at reasonable speed), and that I can learn to adjust it to what settings I need, quickly.

[My lovely Kodak with x10 zoom is eight years old, the shutter button is getting hard to press, it only takes a picture about every 7 seconds, and it is not very good on overcast days, so I decided I needed a new one - but I'm not ready to go up to SLR and mess with learning to use it properly and carrying lenses around and everything)

* For when the animal I'm trying to photograph is at the far side of its enclosure.
** For when I'm in bright light and can't really see the screen, and sometimes I just find it easier to focus on what I want with a viewfinder

***I have loads of rechargeable AAs and in a pinch can buy some non-rechargeables pretty much anywhere. With camera-specific rechargeable I would have to buy a couple of spares to allow for taking 1,000+ shots in a day at a zoo.

#179 P J Evans
In the flu epidemic of 1918, it was mostly the young and healthy who died.

Weren't a lot of the 1918 'flu victims killed by their own immune response? In that case, it would make sense that those with the strongest systems were the worst hit.

Internal Server Error, or you'd get to hear me complain about my insurance not covering a pneumonia shot.

That one didn't make it onto the comment database at all, I'm afraid.

@dcb: I have a Nikon FinePix S8000fd, bought for the zoom, quality optics, and use of AA batteries. A great camera, but a little bulky for carrying around.

I now treat it as my "studio" camera; I bought a A/C power pack for use around the house.

oldster:

Megan McArdle's posts don't teach me anything as often as they should, but there's a lot more to her writing than reading off the Koch Bros script. There are times she seems to be reaching to find some justification for her team's positions (to the extent beltway moderate libertarians are a team), but she also does sometimes have something interesting to say. I find myself really feeling like I got something from a post of hers about as often as I do from a post of TaNehisi Coates'. (She writes about stuff I'm generally more interested in, but TNC is a better writer, so it kinda balances out.)

There's a danger here: when someone disagrees with you on a lot of issues, or opposes your team, it's easy to find reasons why they're worthless and can be ignored. But that's kind-of a fancy way of blinding yourself. If you don't read and hear stuff that offends and upsets you sometimes, you are probably not learning much.

And I rather suspect there's also a danger in McArdle's position in the world. She would do better to spend less mental energy keeping inside the lines of what her team considers acceptable, and more energy independently thinking stuff through, with the insights that her finance and economics background give her. But then she might fall out with her team.

Hey, British people (and people with access to British TV)! Do we need/want a Sherlock spoilers thread?

I have one or two thoughts on Sherlock. For a start there should have been more snogging.

I've put up a spoiler thread. Let's keep all the show references there.

OtterB 161: But, to follow your line of argument, if you only call out fascist women and fascist men always get a pass, then there starts to be a misogynist pattern even if your words are never gender-based.

I agree entirely with you and oldster here. I was speaking about particular remarks, rather than about the total context of remarks...which if that's what I always did would miss a lot of the structures of oppression!

Stefan 176: The anti-vaxxers claim another innocent life. Stochastic manslaughter.

P J 179: Same with hantavirus. The reason in that case is that the disease response is what kills; it's a cascade of something or other, basically amounting to the body being so desperate to get rid of the virus that it floods the lungs with liquid.

Annnd now I see that Sarah says the same thing about the 1918 flu. So yeah. Not sure how that interacts with vaccination.

abi 187, 189: Thank you!We Sherlock fans without access to British TV appreciate it.

Xopher @ 190: I believe that the term you're looking for is "cytokine storm."

As for how such a thing would interact with vaccines; since the entire point of a vaccine is to kick off a low level immune response so your immune system learns to recognize the infectious agent, things shouldn't get bad enough to generate such a response from the vaccine (especially with a killed infectious agent or a recombinant vaccine).

Assuming that the vaccine took, subsequent exposure to the infectious agent should trigger a targeted response that takes place early enough that a cytokine storm never has a chance to happen. I suspect that a big piece of the problem with a cytokine storm is that it's not a targeted response; it's more "Kill it, kill it, kill it with fire and never mind the collateral damage."

Elliott Mason: With the caveat that I last took Russian in 1986, I might be able to help you with the Cyrillic. You'll have to find someone else for Hebrew. Of course people with more recent experience with Cyrillic should get priority over me, and please keep in mind that Russian has dropped some letters over the centuries (at least one in the last century) which other Cyrillic using languages, e.g. Ukrainian, may not have. I can be reached at rhoadan at the same email provider that you use.

Inquisitive 191: That's it! Thank you.

I knew 'tetryon cascade' wasn't right, but it was blocking me from remembering 'cytokine storm'.

And your explanation makes tons of sense too. Thank you.

Also, I missed Elliott's request. Elliott, I can also transliterate Cyrillic. Translating Russian is another story. I can read some Old Cyrillic and am aware of some variations (like Ukranian, which has some extra letters that aren't in Russian). I can even dig out my books on Glagolytic, but I suspect the graves you're working on aren't that old!

Well, I know month names come up regularly; is that "too much Russian" for you, Xopher? If not, email me via gmail at my nom-de-net there, 2ells2tees, and I'll give you a photo to try. :->

PK Evans @ 179: for some unrecalled reason, I once spent some time wandering around a huge Montreal cemetery. The saddest sight was a separated area with many close-packed tiny stones, which I guessed (from "Sourd" and "Aveugle" (and maybe dates?) on two steles) were for handicapped children who had died when the flu burned through their shelter.

For some reason, both of my children have been extra-clingy of late. Which means I'm spending a lot of time buried under kids* or having them say, "I need you, Mommy."

Daddy is being left out in the cold. And Mommy is getting a little wild-eyed.

*"Ow ow get off my hair," kind of buried.

Local-to-Minneapolis news:

Ericka Johnson, local fan and big-hearted woman, passed away yesterday evening. She was a good one. She dealt with medical stuff and disability with fortitude and grace and honesty, and her spirit shone through. She was generous and kind and perceptive.

She is missed by her partner Peter and by pretty much anybody who ever met her.

BBC reports India's last polio case was three years ago. Yes, there are places where irresponsible idiots aren't vaccinating their kids, or where evil thugs are attacking vaccination programs for political reasons, but there's also been real success. And if India can do it, there's hope for getting their neighbors and near-neighbors in Pakistan and Afghanistan to do it as well.

Bill Stewart @ 197: I'd throttle back on the "evil thugs" description. After the fake vaccination campaign used to locate Osama bin Laden, they have some justification even though that doesn't seem to be the reason they claim they're doing it. That was one of the Obama administration's dumber moves.

Two questions that I'd like feedback on from an intelligent and thoughtful group.

First: Does the idea that prisons want to discourage people from visiting need defending? To me it's obviously true, and it's obvious why (an array of semi-legitimate and deeply non-legitimate reasons), but I'm wondering if other people find this as obvious as I do (a friend I was talking to yesterday did not).

Second: Having had a blog post trigger a lengthy but off-topic reminiscence, and posting it as a comment before realizing it was inappropriate, does it make me a bad person that I then referred to this lapse as "going Postal"? (If you don't know why it might, never mind.)

So, can anyone point me to an intelligent and thoughtful group I could ask? JUST KIDDING, I mean you.

Bill Stewart #197, Inquisitive Raven #198: I'd say that the CIA use of vaccination programs for their operations in Pakistan falls under "evil thugs are attacking vaccination programs for political reasons".

Xopher @199 Does the idea that prisons want to discourage people from visiting need defending?

"Defending" seems strong, but if you asked if it needed supporting, I'd say it would for me as someone who doesn't know much about the subject. In particular, I would expect that some policies to deal with genuine security concerns (perhaps the semi-legitimate reasons you mention?) will have a side effect of discouraging visiting, and thus would like some evidence that matters go beyond that to a direct intent to deter visiting.

Shaking loose a response to Xopher from an Internal Server Error, I hope.

Xopher, I think the answer to "Does X make me a bad person?" is, for most values of X likely to be engaged in by a person capable of asking such a question, going to be "No."

(I personally don't use the phrase "going Postal" at all, for reasons of my own discomfort, which are multiple and various and have nothing to do with whether anyone else should use it.)

Nicole, in this case the capital P is important. It's a joke on the old phrase and a reference to a specific person. I might have said "I went v. Postal." The v. standing for VERY of course!

Xopher Halftongue @199: Whether you're a bad person depends on how much name-dropping you did in the comment.

OtterB @201

"Supporting," and also perhaps "unpacking."

At the very, very legit end, prisons should* protect prisoners from unwanted visitors and keep visitors from bringing in contraband.

Both of those things do, to some degree, discourage visitors. If I have to get on your visitor list before I can drop by, that's a reasonable precaution and not a huge roadblock, but if I don't know I'll be in town until the day before my visit, it might stop me. If I have to be searched before I can visit you, maybe I'll do my filial duty by visiting Grandma at the hospital instead of Grandad in the state pen.

Somewhere in the middle, a lot of prisons limit visiting hours. I think that's mostly a budget and staffing issue: somebody has to check those visitors in, supervise the visits, check the visitors out, etc. That costs money, so the prison balances their budget and staffing against the prisoners' visitation rights.

At the far end, maybe the prison really doesn't want any visitors ever, even if it doesn't cost them anything or expose anyone to any risks.

Which are you talking about, Xopher?

My personal suspicion is that probably most prison administrations do want visitors, in the abstract. In a perfect world, they'd love inmates to get regular visits from supportive families and friends. They probably do take some steps to make that easy, as long as those steps are cheap, safe, and easy. On the other hand, they pay much more attention and put much more effort into preventing "problem" visits and punishing "problem" prisoners, and if the measures they take happen to make it harder for your grandma to visit you, Model Inmate #277, well, that's just too bad.

*I mean, y'know, I ain't exactly happy that prisons exist. But for the sake of argument, if they do exist, they should do this stuff.

re 199: Visiting those in prison is numbered among the acts in Matthew 25 which distinguishes the sheep from the goats, so as far as Christians are concerned the discouragement of this act is (at least to the degree that this passage is taken strongly) something to be objected to.

Xander@199

So are you suggesting that you might have been Missing some Manners?

Stefan, #176: For future reference, the title of the thread you were seeking is "Why We Immunize".

Xopher, #199: Re "going Postal", the pun would get a *snerk* out of me, but I wouldn't use the phrase myself. IMO it falls into the category of "funny enough not to be offensive, but a bit tasteless to re-post". Note that this line will fall in different places for different people.

Dave H., #200: Agreed.

C. Wingate, #207: Good point. I would also wonder how much of said discouragement stems from a desire to conceal abuse from outside witnesses.

David 205: No namedropping at all.

I'm glad you, for one, see the joke.

Devin 206: You're talking about an ideal prison. I'm talking about prisons who can't withstand widespread knowledge of conditions inside them, because if too many people know about them, they'll have to clean up their act, and that will cost money, and for the for-profit ones, bite into their bottom line. Of course, the visits themselves cost money, as you point out.

My friend was getting ready to visit a prison, and had to fill out a form, which had a section on the top for her to fill out, and a "for prison use only" section at the bottom.

Would you turn that over? I bet most people wouldn't.

On the BACK were two sections of information, and between them a line for her signature. The form wasn't valid without the signature, of course, and they designed the form to make it as easy as possible to miss it. She found it only because she reasoned that there had to be a signature line somewhere. Not everyone would figure that out.

I think the form was designed that way on purpose to make it harder to visit.

C. 207: JUST SO. I've often said that if everyone who claims the label "Christian" visited someone in prison once a year, prison reform would be inevitable. And if all the Christians in the US decided that no one should go unvisited, it would happen in a matter of months.

I'm not a Christian, but if the church where I sing had a Visiting Ministry, I would participate.

Michael 208: I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm not getting the joke here. Is it a Buffy reference?

Lee 209: Thank you. That's exactly what I was looking for. And I agree about the desire to conceal abuse.

Bill and Raven:

Letter to Obama about the polio vaccine ruse. Killing Bin Laden was a huge deal politically, but probably had little real effect on terrorism. If it interferes with eradication of polio, that will be a humanitarian disaster.

Xopher@210 in re Michael@208: I suspect a play on Miss Manners and Emily Post.

That reminds me of a trivia question I find mildly amusing: Miss Manners' family name is of course Manners. In one column, she reveals her given name. What is it?

Uh . . . where is Making Light's search function?

It may be hidden in plain sight. Or on a secondary page. In either case, I cannot find it.

There's no link to it readily accessible. However, you can reach it easily enough: if you ask your browser to go to "http://nielsenhayden.com/xxx" (where xxx is any page not actually existing -- it could be "foo", it could be "search", it could be "WingedVictoryOfSamothrace", it could even actually be "xxx") it will take you to the "404 Not Found" page...which, amazingly enough, has the search function on it.

I also find that typing into Google "site:nielsenhayden.com" and then a search string, is useful.

Thanks David. I could have sworn there was a search field at one time.

* * *
The Cartoon Network show "Steven Universe" it totally adorable. Goofy kid inherits magic gemstone from his late mystic-warrior mom; is teamed up with her team mates to defend the world.

David Goldfarb @215, I believe she claimed her given name was "Miss".

Oops, I meant @213.

Stefan@216: Yes, there was. It got lost at some point.

jonesnori@217: Very good! It's improper, after all, for a person to claim a title for themself. Therefore "Miss" must not in fact be a title.

David 212: That makes sense, except for the Xander part. Can't make sense of that.

Oh, that. My guess is that it was just a braino.

Xopher@220

#208 was intended to be cascading off of your quip in #199 "does it make me a bad person that I then referred to this lapse as "going Postal"?".

(And yes, David Goldfarb correctly caught that "Missing ... Manners" was a reference to Miss Manners.)

Avram@#7Here in the US, we’ve got the slang term “shoop”. As a verb, it means to modify an image with software; as a noun, an image so modified.

The impression I got from Salt N Pepa was that "to shoop" meant something very, very different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vaN01VLYSQ

(Possibly NSFW for sexually explicit lyrics and lots of sexualized images of hot dudes.)

(I was actually concerned about the appropriateness of posting this comment and link until I read the pun subthread.)

David 205: ....I'm glad you, for one, see the joke.

What I hear when you say that: "I'm glad you, for one, see the joke, unlike everyone else who made the mistake of answering my question in good faith!"

You know, Xopher, that I am not comfortable with a given phrase regardless of context is not the same as "not seeing the joke." It is not the case that if I had "seen the joke" I would have been fine with the phrase. It may simply be the case that your sense of humor and mine vary sufficiently from each other that I don't find the joke funny.

I very specifically did not go into why I'm uncomfortable with the phrase even when it's used as a joke in reference to specific things ... because I absolutely do not want to come across as arguing that my comfort levels are "right" and yours are "wrong".

But it sure sounds like you were looking for ONE SPECIFIC SORT OF ANSWER and everything else is to be discarded as "not seeing the joke."

I feel like the victim of an underhanded "gotcha." It's a rotten way to feel. But I suppose it was my mistake to be drawn in, even with the good intent of reassuring a friend that it would take a hell of a lot for me to think of him as a bad person.

I still don't think of you as a bad person. But this has been an unpleasant interaction for me and it will take some time to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.

/hurt

No, no! Nicole, not what I meant at all! I'm so sorry that my bad phrasing could be read that way, and for the hurt that I caused by writing it badly.

I would never intentionally hurt you or belittle what you have to say, and I'm deeply sorry that I did, in this case, cause hurt and feelings of belittlement.

No, I wasn't sure that anyone had noted the reference to a specific commenter who used to comment here until he was banned, and who still comments elseweb in much the same way. David 205 was the first time I was sure anyone had caught that, as opposed to the reference to the seeming rash of workplace shootings some years ago in the Post Office.

I'm sorry that I failed to communicate that and wound up hurting you. The fact that I didn't intend it doesn't lessen the hurt, I realize, so I can just say that I'm sorry.

And I'm equally sorry to anyone else who feels the same way and didn't say so. It's not what I meant.

Looks like I blew it again. Dammit.

Xopher@225

Didn't register until now who the "Post" of the original message was really a reference to.

(And yes, I had assumed it was a pun on Emily Post.)

@pnh Your latest sidelight, that story about toast, is so much more. Amazing is too humble a term, but I can't pick the right superlative. Thank you, very much, for that link.

Seriously, all y'all go read that.

Worth the tears at work, that is.

And abi, your "cold fact" Parhelia: A much needed reminder that stopping to help people is *really damned important*. Especially when it's cold out.

I need to restock my in-vehicle calorie kit. (have blanket, shovel, sweatshirt - I'm in an urban area) At a minimum, the munchies help keep the low blood sugar ogre away. In extremis, they could save a life.

Xopher, #225: I certainly did not get that joke. I took it as a reference to the Post Office, which falls into the zone of "black humor that I can snicker about but wouldn't be comfortable repeating". And now I do get the joke you meant, but it took Michael's comment for me to make that connection.

Patrick's "story about toast": There's A lot I could say about cognitive outsourcing and the nature of culture spread. But I think the most basic thing I see there is, "sometimes it's the cracked ones who let the light into the world".

ISWYD there, Dave H, and so did all the Beautiful Losers.

Whoa - Chi-Fi just chose to delay their convention a year rather than give in to a hotel's discomfort with the conference's anti-harassment policy. That's quite a stand!

It appears I should not have made that joke. The reference did not come across, and there was no way to it without going through the Post Office reference, which makes people I don't want to make uncomfortable uncomfortable.

And then on top of that I hurt Nicole, which is the last thing I want to do.

FAIL.

This is strange. I just got my new voter registration card in the mail (they renew on a 2-year cycle in Texas), and I happened to notice that my gender was given as M. So I got out my old card, and lo and behold it's wrong on that one too. Apparently it's been wrong ever since I registered to vote here (which would be 15 years, give-or-take) and neither I nor any of the election officials who have looked at my card* ever noticed until now.

Needless to say, I am not allowing this state of affairs to stand. Texas is one of the states which have been scrambling desperately to suppress as many votes as they can, especially for women, and I no longer dare assume that future election officials will be as unobservant as the ones up to now seem to have been. There is a space on the back of the card to note errors and return it to the registrar's office for correction and reissue, and that will be happening tomorrow.

* I have voted in 4 presidential elections and their associated primaries, was a precinct caucus member for the 2008 election, and also voted in a number of local and state elections. It's not as though nobody ever had the chance to catch it.

Hey, does anybody else sometimes get those ads about one special food you can eat in order to lose weight FOREVAH, but the picture looks like some horrific object you would never in a million years want to eat--raw tripe, or a sea squirt, or some bizarre berry bulging with clear slime? Anybody know what those objects actually are? I'm not sure that some of them aren't plastic. Or even which are meant to be plants and which animals.

Jenny Islander, I get those ads with great frequency. I've just checked and the images aren't garcinia cambogia or dragonfruit - I'm going to try a TinEye reverse image search to see if I can sort out what the Alien Substances are.

AKICIML, but this one may be really out there.

I've got three or four 19th century (guess) oil paintings that lived in my parents' house as "the ancestors". I have no idea who they are. These paintings have been through some serious weathering -- a fire generating smoke damage in 1968, parents who smoked regularly, lots of chipping to the frames. They're seriously beaten.

I'm wondering if there's a conservation program out there that wants paintings in this sort of shape in order to train conservators. Someone in Seattle would be best -- Portland apparently has a program at the U of O, but I don't know anyone involved.

There's a minuscule chance that one of the paintings would turn out to be by (e.g.) Whistler or someone similar, and if that happens and it's a million dollar piece -- I'd want a reasonable percentage. At the $1K level - not worried.

Does anyone know of such a program? Simple Googling didn't give me useful results. If you find something useful by Googling, can you include your search string so I can look at it?

Email addresses for folks who would know about such programs are also appreciated, particularly if I can use your name as a contact.

Thanks for any help.

Interesting - while image searching on "garcinia cambogia" leads mostly to pictures of a fruit that looks like a small green pumpkin on the outside and citrusy-yellow on the inside, clicking an ad illustrated with a very spiky yellow fruit with a green pulpy interior containing suspended seeds that look like pumpkin seeds leads to a testimonial for garcinia cambogia, and other ads for the same product are illustrated with that round purply-red fruit with the white segments in the interior.

The things that look like salmon roe except pale pink and the things that look like tripe haven't cycled up yet. I have an odd feeling they'll promote the same snake oil.

TinEye wasn't able to tell me what the spiky yellow or purply-red things were. I'm going to keep trying. I'm really curious.

Further update: the purply-red thing with the white segments inside is a mangosteen, which is a different Garcinia species.

I haven’t seen the ad, but the spiky yellow fruit sounds like it could be Cucumis metuliferus, also known as the kiwano or horned melon. I bought and ate one once, just because I saw it for sale at a gourmet grocery near work, and hey, it’s not every day you see a piece of fruit that looks like a prop from a science fiction movie. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t terribly exciting either.

The Wikipedia article suggest adding a bit of salt or sugar, which I might try if I’m ever in a position to eat one again.

Mangosteen, on the other hand, is delicious.

Xopher Halftongue @233: That kind of thing is one of the reasons why I don't comment very often; it's too easy to say something the wrong way.

Avram: yup, that's the spiky one, all right.

Annoyingly enough, clicking on one weight loss ad seems to have modified the algorithm or something for whatever mechanical conspiracy is delivering my ads: now I'm getting ads for everything BUT weight loss. The mysterious pale pink jelly bubbles have failed to put in an appearance at all.

However, searching on "fruit pink bubbles" led me to the Australian Finger Lime, which comes in several colors, including both green and pink. One of the descriptions of the pulp is "citrus caviar". It's definitely the weird-pink-bubbles photo.

As far as I can tell, it has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss. It just LOOKS cool, I guess.

Passing on some kudos to the entire Making Light crew.

Fred Clark over at Slacktivist (www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist) has recently started "Blog of the Day" postings.

Making Light is today's "Blog of the Day".

Two quotes from the posting:

"Making Light has got one of the best comment sections on the Internet. I go there and lurk, mostly, like I’m a busboy at the Algonquin."

"All of which is to say that I have no idea what they might write about next. But I’m looking forward to finding out, and you should join me."

Go over and read the whole column for more well-deserved praise.

Tom Whitmore #231: ISWYD there, Dave H, and so did all the Beautiful Losers.

Hmm?? I wasn't sure what you were talking about, so I googled. Book, Album/Song, Film?

The Bob Seger song is what the phrase evokes to me, I should probably check out the book. (The film looks suspiciously BTDT.)

My original comment was something I picked up as the tagline from a midnight movie, but that can't be its origin.

I've just read a piece on the Atlantic web site that intrigued me. Since the 1940s, it appears that the rate of death from lightning strikes in the US has dropped dramatically. This appears to be the result of increased urbanisation, but the relationship is not altogether clear. I lived in a very rural area for several years and didn't get blasted, though I've observed enough blasted trees to take the phenomenon seriously. When you've used a young ebony tree for firewood because it was killed by a lightning strike you have a very different attitude to being outdoors in a thunderstorm, including not taking shelter under trees.

Dave Harmon @245, "There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in" is from Leonard Cohen's Anthem.

Elliott: I can help you sort out the Hebrew, and if it's too much for me I can forward it on to a good friend to help sort it out (she's in the middle of a divorce and in need of some distraction anyway, honestly. And she loves history and genealogy and cemeteries, so it'd be right up her alley.)

Xopher: Yes, yes, yes, about prisons not wanting visitors. I concur that modern USian prisons need secrecy to hide their terrible human rights abuses, and discourage visitation for precisely that reason. I have a dear friend who was in one for several years, and he tells stories that will curl your hair. The most hair-curling part, too, is how clear it is from the telling that they were not extraordinary occurrences.

(One of the least hair-curling of those stories: in at least one prison he was in (he got moved around quite a bit for Reasons), they assigned him to the kitchen. Which put him in position to observe that the prisoners were regularly being fed oatmeal for breakfast -- out of bags of oats clearly labelled "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION".)

The key to writerly success: use fewer verbs, adverbs, and foreign words. Dommage!

Fragano @249
oh. Literature .
Testing against books that time has filtered seems a bit circular? Self-fulfilling? "Hi! We've written software that proves successful books are successful."
Let them filter the Tor slush pile with it.

And on a totally separate note, my new tablet suggested 'crogglement' when typing the above. I don't know if it learned that from me, or the geeks who programmed the thing are awesome .

Dave Harmon -- Pendrift's got 90% of the answer -- the last 10% is that Cohen's first novel was entitled "Beautiful Losers." Which Pendrift probably also got, but didn't make explicit.

Now if I'd really wanted to obscure that reference, I would have said "Katherine Tekakwitha" instead of "Beautiful Losers" -- she's the protagonist of the novel (as I recall, working from memory rather than actually doing research to make sure I'm right, which probably puts me in the category of someone who's wrong on the internet).

Which leads to a copyediting point -- should "internet" be capitalized, as a proper noun, at this point? Some house styles say it should, and I'm leaning towards saying it shouldn't. I expect several different opinions from this crowd.

Tom, one might suspect this to be your favorite game!
(And Beautiful Losers is his second book.)

Huh, I didn't know Leonard Cohen had ever written a novel. Judging by the journal excerpts he once published in a magazine of Buddhism, it would be worth reading - they were very funny in a drily self-deprecating way. (Some of it specifically to those who meditate: "I lit a stick of incense, folded my legs into the lotus position, and for the next 45 minutes thought about how much I hated one of my ex-wives." Others just funny: "The beach was full of beautiful women who I desired very uniformly at a very low level of intensity.")

Jenny Islander @ 235, Rikibeth @ 238 et al.
re: magical weight-loss objects

Every time I see the image of the capsule spilling pinkish roe-like stuff, I imagine to myself that it's the egg-case of a parasitic worm and that cures me of any sort of further curiosity. (All the weight-loss claims would align perfectly in that scenario.)

Jenny Islander (235): The ones I get mostly seem to be depicting raw eggs. And, yeah, if you tried to make me eat raw eggs, I'd lose weight all right--because I'd throw up everything I'd eaten in the last month.

Disgusting weight loss images may be a filter. Those who click thru anyway may be the truly desperate or gullible, and therefore can ba sold anything with the right key words attached.

Heather Rose Jones @255:

I read something once - probably apocryphal - about a marvelously successful weight loss camp and clinic sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Their patients all lost weight very consistently, even though the regimen was pretty much standard except for the capsules containing their secret weight loss formula which they had to take at the beginning of their stay and again at the end of the stay.

You guessed it, the first contained a tapeworm, and the final one a vermicide. Probably apocryphal, but it makes a good story.

(Apologies to those grossed out - it's been on my mind as we recently adopted a dog, and sure enough....)

I am currently sitting in the Jury Assembly Room, which is much less Austen-ian than one might hope, waiting to see if I'm going on a panel. We have been admonished not to discuss any court case on social media, so the tweety thing and book of faces have been blocked (so has fandomwank, probably because it's on a social media type platform, not because LA county has anything in particular against fandom). I am hovering between hoping I get on a jury because I think I would be good at it and I'm kind of a square about my Civic Duty, etc, and hoping I don't because my huge, multi-national corporate owners only pay for one day of jury duty. At least, that's what's in the union contract; if I were a regular employee, it would be unlimited.

Tom Whitmore #252: So it's just an intersection at Leonard Cohen, eh? I'm less curious about the book now that I finished reading the WP article on it; introducing postmodernism to Canada is all very well, but I probably don't have the patience for it these days.

Heather Rose Jones #255: There are rumors of such a thing.

Fragano, #249: To me, that article sounds as though the "key to writing success" is to write at about the 6th-grade level. I'd also like to see further tests of the predictive ability of this algorithm, preferably with just-published books where there's no established sales record to expect to find. IOW, not impressed.

Lin, #257: That's a very good point. We already know that text spammers deliberately use poor English as a filter to catch only the most gullible marks.

Lee #261: I've a feeling that it is more a case of econometricians reinventing the wheel. Certainly, good writing is clear writing. We should also remember that there's a whole scene in Shakespeare (in Henry V in French, ending with a dirty joke. One that's still dirty after four centuries. So much for avoiding foreign words.

Pendrift, you're right -- being wrong on the internet is apparently one of my favorite games. Or perhaps favourite -- everyone's a Canadian, eh?

Marriage equality battle comes to Texas.

Since the well-merited demise of DOMA, lawsuits have been filed in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio asking for Texas' "one man, one woman" constitutional amendment to be struck down. I wish them luck.

Sumana Harihareswara @ 232, before the internet lands on Starwood Corporation's collective head, I should mention that at least three of Chicago's conventions (Windycon, Capricon, and Duckon) have been held in Starwood (Westin) hotels for years with no problems or issues with Westin or Starwood that I'm aware of.... and I know the hotel liaison for one of those conventions.

What we have here are charges by one person (the convention chair) of one other person (the hotel representative) of verbal misconduct; nothing in writing, apparently.

And I should further note that although Chi-Fi claimed to expect 1500 fans, neither I nor any of a dozen-or-so other Chicago-area convention-goers that I polled on the subject last night and this morning have ever even heard of Chi-Fi, nor do we know who anyone on the convention committee is. Other than the con chair, James Dobbs, whose name sounds vaguely familiar, but whom I do not know personally. (This is especially interesting, because I know some SMOFs, and if they don't know who is on the concom...)

This doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it does go to credibility.

I'm not saying this incident happened. I'm not saying this incident didn't happened. I'm saying, let's not drop the internet on anyone's head until we're reasonably sure what happened.

Michael I @244:

Now I'm squeeing. Fred Clark is one of the voices of sanity on the internet. I admire him tremendously. How fantastic that he likes this blog!

But I do wish his commentariat would worry a little less about joining in here. We don't bite (unless asked to)!

266
Could we promise them fluffy iguana cookies?

P J Evans @267, what kind of cookies do fluffy iguanas like?

ML eez zee blogue du jour.

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Ones with lots of greens?(Damfino.)

#266, abi:

You may not bite, but it is still more than a little intimidating sometimes. Especially when poetry starts happening.

I just went over there and made encouraging comments to a couple of people who were talking about their hesitation.

I think this blog operates on the Delany Smartness principle: everyone is treated as if they know something the hosts and other commenters don't, but would like to (i.e. they're treated as if they're "smart"). If someone acts like a jerk (and keeps it up), they're smashed pitilessly and banned...but not without regret for whatever it was they'd've had to contribute had they been able to be polite.

I'm kind of a loudmouth, but I'm not JUST a loudmouth, and I do try to take my lumps when I'm wrong or behave badly, rather then stomp off in a huff, convinced I'm Always Right. If I can comment on Making Light, so can any number of other people currently lurking because they don't think their ideas are original enough, or their writing good enough.

In the "WTF Hollywood?" dept...

They're working on a romantic adaptation of... drumroll... "1984"

Xopher @ 272... convinced I'm Always Right

I thought *I* was always right.

Three rights make a left...?

Only when the two of you agree with me.

(avoids contributing to the impression that this is some sort of elite place that isn't welcoming, after snotty elitist reference-dropping earlier...)

Waving at the Slackivist folks. Y'all come on in!

Abi @ 266

As I mentioned over at Slacktivist, I often find that I'll think of something to contribute, then find someone has beaten me to it. So I do comment, just not terribly often.

The vibe I get here is that of a fairly well-run con-suite at an SF convention. Conversation is weird and dynamic the way I like it, but also allows for people to jump into a circle of strangers and start conversing. The latter part always feels rude to me and makes me anxious enough that I don't do it personally. I know it's not rude in the context of an SF convention - in fact, it's often encouraged - but I can't shake that internal programming. Even when it's on-line and not "real life" - I'm still me regardless of the setting.

That's not to say I wouldn't do it with people I know. It's just that here on ML, I haven't broken through that line from "stranger" to "people I know".

This is just me inching closer to that point.

Serge didn't mention the most ridiculous thing about the 1984 adaptation. It stars Kristin Stewart.

I'm on record as saying I'll watch Nicholas Hoult do anything (I watched Jack the Giant Slayer, FFS). I now have to amend that to almost anything. I will not watch a romantic adaptation of 1984 no matter who stars. And I won't watch any wooden object, including but not limited to Kristin Stewart, pose through a romantic movie, displaying an entire range of emotions from A to B.

I'm suspicious that this is a hoax.

And now I have some asshole who claims to be in Lagos bragging on my Twitter mentions about how much he hates "gayism" and how much he loves his guns. So far I'm making fun of him, but I'm getting ready to block him before I tell him just what to do with his gun.

Xopher @ 280... Oh, her...

As for this possiby being a hoax...
http://celebrity.yahoo.com/news/kristen-stewart-star-romantic-adaptation-quot-1984-quot-004000170-us-weekly.html

I'm still waiting for "Brave New World - The Musical".

For those concerned about how one "breaks into" a community such as our present venue, I will note that the first post of this extremely shy and reticent contributor was technical information on the average pore size of commercial coffee filters. So you never know...

Tom Whitmore @252, Clifton @254, Dave Harmon @260: When I tried reading both books some fifteen years ago, I found Favourite Game easier to start than Beautiful Losers, structurally and stylistically. Not that it mattered, because I bounced off them in the first twenty pages. It might be time to give them another shot. But I revisit his poetry collections regularly.

Lee @261 said:To me, that article sounds as though the "key to writing success" is to write at about the 6th-grade level.
I wonder what the authors of the piece make of the staggering success of Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books, which I'm pretty sure have a more-than-5th-grade reading level and were mostly devoured by 2nd graders. :->

Cassy B. @265: You know me, and I knew about it (I was just closeted, apparently). Several other people I think you know who are my Facebook friends have also friended them. You might know James Dobbs if you saw his face; he attends local conventions and cosplays. Mostly he doesn't do sercon panels or gaming, so you might not travel in the same circles as him. Other people on the concom include some past heads of departments or longtime department seconds at the local Big Three general cons, plus people who have reasonably extensive conrunning experience via the organization of Anime Central etc (local geekstuff that isn't Big Three cons). The guy who most often does their Facebook posts runs a NW-side regular games night thing. And possibly other stuff, but that's how I know his name/face.

It kind of explicitly didn't include the kind of people that regularly get onto concoms and are well-known to the regular concommers of the Big Three, because it was being run by people who felt (or so the few I've spoken to said) they had TRIED to get onto the concoms of the big three and were, as it were, not permitted to do so. Sometimes because all the jobs were already taken by known-responsible people and there weren't any openings for new blood.

All the ones I know of personally are my age (37) or significantly younger, as were most of the potential attendees with whom I am personally familiar. The Facebook group's general membership includes a lot of faces in the icons that I'm used to seeing at local conventions, but again, mostly not people who felt their fannish needs were being met by current Big Three convention programming choices; the other main constituency excited about it was fans who really, really don't want to have to drive to a convention hotel, because they live in the city proper and don't/can't/don't like to drive, especially not out to the suburbs just to park all weekend.

It was going to be an amazingly interesting experiment, one that I hoped would succeed; I still do, sort of. I'm not sure how many paid pre-reges they had, but it was a distinctly nonzero number just among people I know to go out on dinner runs with (slightly better than nodding, but sometimes I don't know their mundane names? That kind of acquaintance). I think Chicago fandom can easily sustain four major conventions a year, especially if the new one gets more of the have-a-family, live-in-the-city-proper fans back into regular conventioneering.

Elliott @285, thanks for the update; this is mostly information I haven't heard. That's the problem with getting one's facts from fannish subgroups; they can be incredibly clannish, so it's easy not to get the full story.

Which may also explain why I hadn't heard of this convention at all before the whole thing blew up.

Elliott @285, thanks for the update; this is mostly information I haven't heard. That's the problem with getting one's facts from fannish subgroups; they can be incredibly clannish, so it's easy not to get the full story.

Which may also explain why I hadn't heard of this convention at all before the whole thing blew up.

No spam upthread; just a sticky nym. I thought I'd caught it before it posted, but no luck; just a double post...

Sorry, gnomes.

Elliot @ 285
I wonder what the authors of the piece make of the staggering success of Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books, which I'm pretty sure have a more-than-5th-grade reading level and were mostly devoured by 2nd graders. :->

Make that 2nd graders through high school students -- they had a big fandom among my daughter's friends in high school, including juniors -- through 50-somethings -- I thought they were great! (I forget what age my son was when he started them, but 2nd grade might well be about right.)

289
My mother seemed to like them, judging by the number that were on her shelves when she died, and she was well over 80.

Pendrift @284 -- I think he makes a much better poet than a novelist, as well -- they may not be worth you revisiting them. As a poet/lyricist -- there aren't many who can touch him.

Jon Bing has died, age 69. Law professor (among other things), science fiction author - and fan. His cooperation with Tor Åge Bringsværd pretty much brought science fiction to Norway.

I didn't know him personally but the Bing/Bringsværd kids' series about starship Alexandria was some of the first SF I read. There's probably a generation of Norwegian fans who shared that experience.

RIP mr. Bing, those shoulders must be getting weary from all us dwarfs standing on them.

I rarely goad anti-gays by quoting the Bible at them, but today I did. Gave him the David and Jonathan thing, then told him that he was trying to cast the first stone with a beam in his eye, so no wonder his aim was terrible.

What blows my mind is the people who say "Gays are bad because Leviticus" while cheerfully eating shellfish and pork, wearing clothes of mixed fibers, and getting tattoos.

Welcome, Slactivist folks! We promise not to kill any of you with sheep!

I left this over at Slacktivist, but I think their comments system swallowed it.

Yeah, it can be intimidating. But they're actually pretty friendly.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homepage

One's bashful reticence can last for years
the fear that they're too clever, quick and bright.
Oh, it's a thing: there's no use making light
of humble lurker's apprehensive fears.
They published him; she's famous ILR;
they all met at that con, that house, that night.
For outsiders it's anxious-making, light
as it may seem to those who know them well.
Those artful comments--you'd think they rehearse
the witty banter, it all sounds so tight.
They cook, write novels, sometimes making light
and breezy, easy, lapidary verse.
A stranger there myself, I say: "jump in!"
You've only fears to lose, and friends to win.

In case anyone was wondering, I've had my cataract surgery done, although just before the surgery a bit of cataract popped out into the posterior chamber (aka the vitreous), and will need to be removed. I've been bouncing between the cataract guy and the retinal for months now, sigh. Oh well, at least the new lens is Much Better than the old one, and once the last remnants of the old lens are vacuumed up, I will be almost back to normal vision. The retina is clearly healing, in the meantime.

Good to hear that, Ginger.

Ginger, I'm glad. Good wishes.

Tom Whitmore @252: A tale of St. Kateri (Catherine) Tekakwitha's life in the seventeenth century is definitely a major element of Beautiful Losers, but the modern nameless narrator is the protagonist. (I read it a few years back. There are reasons that songs by writers-of-depressing-but-gorgeous-songs don't usually last more than four or five minutes, is what I have to say about that.)

Cheers for healing progress, Ginger, and best wishes for more.

Yay, Ginger!

Good-oh Ginger!

My mother was very pleased with her procedures.

Oldster, I like that.

Ginger, on your cataract surgery, my father might still have a bit of old lens in one of his eyes. He noticed it and experimented a bit to see what various angles would do (he's that kind of guy and it's not the first time something weird has happened with his vision).

Ginger: Yay for healing and better vision!

So: I get lots of junk mail from charities. I only make contributions in late fall, so most of the envelopes and papers go straight to recycling.

Wrinkle: A small but significant fraction of the return envelopes come with stamps!

Sometimes the return envelope will be suitable for reuse. I cover the bar codes and address with white labels and just use them.

Sometimes there will be a business reply envelope with a few stamps added. Often just a few cents!

Are there any techniques for safely peeling adhesive stamps from paper? I hate to throw good stamps out, but they're building up.

HLN: Back on the island after a long 24 hours over on the other side. HLWife is now a US Citizen, having endured the large unwieldy bureaucracy that is USCIS. Apparently, at this stage in the game, they're a lot more polite and competently doing their job than at the green card meetings 10+ years ago. I don't know if it's that naturalization is less contentious than the green card hearings, or that the department is better. They have tremendous power, and the people who have it seem to be using it reasonably responsibly. FWIW, the Passports at the State Department seem to be similar. A long form, money, a bunch of time, and at the end, a document pops out.

While sitting in the audience at the ceremony, I was struck by the difference between what was shown on screen and talked about and what's happening with certain TLAs. A recurring theme was freedom, yet... I guess I'm free to have my metadata recorded.

The whole process is interesting, especially the 100 facts that they deem important enough to cover in the civics test part of the application. I had to be careful when assisting the learning that I didn't interject current answers that weren't 'correct', e.g: What is the Rule of Law? A good idea. and What keeps one branch of government from getting to powerful? Apparently nothing.

Congrats Ginger! Glad your eye is recovering.

And congrats also to Eric and now HL wife. When my former colleague Yuka went through naturalization, it seemed she ended up knowing a lot more civics than most American citizens.

oldster @296: Very nice.

@Lin Daniel no. 257: Like the spam about the Nigerian prince being deliberately badly written, to filter out people who might discern the scam?

Makes sense. I can't imagine eating that thing that I can't tell whether it's a plastic object that goes into the body, a swollen item that came out of a body, a sea creature, or some type of bladder kelp, unless I were in utter despair.

Stefan Jones @306: When I collected used stamps as a kid I used to soak them to get them off the envelopes. I can't recall now whether I used water or alcohol, but a Google search turns up multiple references to soaking in water, so it was probably that. The adhesive gets dissolved in the process, so you'll some sort of glue to attach them to a new envelope.

http://stamps.org/Soaking-Stamps

Well, I sure did a wonderful job of proofreading that. Time for bed, I think...

Ginger: best wishes for your continued recovery and recovered vision!

Bravo, Ginger!

Carrie S. #294: What blows my mind is the people who say "Gays are bad because Leviticus" while cheerfully eating shellfish and pork, wearing clothes of mixed fibers, and getting tattoos.

And doubly so if said people are Christians rather than Orthodox Jews... AIUI, Jesus explicitly released his followers from the Levitical rules!

Ginger #297: Yay!

Stefan Jones #306: Mind the denominations, and watch out for infra-red routing codes on the envelopes.

eric #307: Congratulations and Felicitations!
(And to Clifton, converting to Judaism works the same way -- you need to learn "ALL the rules", which most born-and-raised Jews won't have.)

25 years ago this morning...

Sue and I undertook the long drive from Toronto, leaving Canada to move to Sue's native California. A ride during which we came across very diverse landscapes, some of which I thought of as Mars in the early days of terraforming, driving thru Salt Lake City but never seeing it because the whole area was under a blanket of icy mist, seeing a road sign that pointed toward Deeth Starr Valley, and, five days after the trip's beginning, approaching the Bay Area while, thru fortuitous timing, our tape deck was playing "Startrekking Across the Universe".

Congratulations, Ginger! One of these days, in another decade or so, I'll be in the same situation.

311
Steaming works (a temperature-controlled pot or burner is very helpful), and leaves some of the adhesive. Note that the stamps will still need to be glued a bit, because they'll curl.

It appears that ML's css has gone walkies? It comes up for me with very minimal formatting, and no inline formatting. Or is the skin a javascript thing? (We had a javascript patch go through this week.) (Site response is also verrry slooowww...)

What is everybody else seeing?

I'm getting a slow connection, and I had one page load without CSS, but now I'm getting all the bells and whistles back.

Carrie S. @294, Dave Harmon @315: Be aware of the guy who tattooed the anti-gay Leviticus verse onto his arm, and somehow did not disappear in a puff of logic:

http://imgur.com/bH5yE

Has anyone else noticed that the latest spam fad is variations on court summonses? I've been seeing tons of these in my online Known Spam folder (the stuff Earthlink filters for me automatically), and a few have slipped thru to my inbox.

Jon/PJ Evans/et al.: Aren't most of those old methods for getting stamps off via steaming, soaking, etc. based on the old-style water-based gummy adhesive? Do they still work with the modern-style sticker-backed stamps, which is all I see these days?

Lee: Yeah, I've been getting a lot of those "court summons" spams lately. I think most of them have malware embedded in the email - a zip file or doc file attachment which I'm not about to try to open - so I assume they're from a worm or botnet. (See also: things that I wouldn't have imagined saying outside a SF novel 20 years ago.)

Ginger @297: Great to hear about the ocular progress - hope things continue to improve.

oldster @296: Enjoyed that.

Oldster @296: Well done!

Dave Harmon @315: Jesus did not release his followers from Levitical teachings. He did say loving God and your neighbor were the most important laws, which meant that sometimes Levitical laws could be broken for a greater purpose, such as healing even on the Sabbath. I understand that most modern Jews would agree.

Gentile followers, however, were released from doing full conversions to Judaism, not by Jesus, but by the apostles after Jesus' death. Paul was the chief supporter of this change, and he got his way in the end.

RE Clifton's question: Yes, I'm dealing with modern-day "peel and stick" stamps.

Thanks for all the responses.

If you don't mind the stamps possibly looking funny afterwards, you can use a product like Goo Gone to de-stickify the adhesive.

Eric (#307) I think the immigration people *must* be nicer and more competent now than they were 10 or so years ago. Our three from Ethiopia, who were supposed to get a free pass to citizenship, since we had adopted them, met with so many stallings and delays and incorrect instructions that by the time we reached the end of the process, only one of them was under 16 and eligible for citizenship through adoption.

But a few months ago, we heard from the girls that they had both completed the citizenship process, and one of them had been jumped from the middle to the end by an interviewer who asked how it was that they hadn't been made citizens automatically when they arrived. She attempted to explain, but of course none of us actually understand why, and the lady she was talking to said, "Well, this is terrible! I'm just going to approve you, and never mind all those fees."

So, after all those years, and all that obstruction, they are now citizens. We actually wrote to our congresspersons about it back then, and among the replies was one that particularly stands out: The congressperson's assistant told us it couldn't be done because (somethingorother), and as proof, sent us a page of high-lighted regulations on which the high-lighted portion clearly said that it *should* be done.

Stefan @306, rather than removing the stamps from the envelope, would just cutting them out still attached to the paper behind them, and then gluing them onto the new envelope for re-use, be a possibility? Most of the suggested methods for removing stamp from envelope sound like they'd render the adhesive unusable anyway.

#295 Cally Soukup
Welcome, Slactivist folks! We promise not to kill any of you with sheep!

Awwww! Why did you promise that? I was totally looking forward to adding "killed a slactivist with a sheep" to my exotic deaths bingo card. All the other unseelie are way ahead of me! Jenny Greenteeth disemboweled a boing-boing commenter with a unicorn.

re 315/326: If you take the Acts as an authority, the relevant text is the council in chapter 15, in which Peter (having had the vision of the sheet and visited Cornelius a chapter or so earlier) was the one pushing this. Even so it does seem there was quite a bit of tension over this through the apostolic period.

me @319: Okay, the skin did eventually load. Just seems to have come in last. How weird.

Jacque at half a Beast

Possibly Idumea was standing on one end of it or Rael had nailed it to the floor as a warning to spammers?

The Professor, aka Russell Johnson, has passed away.

*Sigh*

My office no longer has a receptionist. "We're saving the stockholders money by making everybody else's job harder!"

Serge @ #335 - Now Ginger and Mary Ann are the only ones left.

nerdycellist: the union got worse benefits than regular employees? Do enLighten us -- on this and on your jury service if there was anything interesting. (I've been summoned ~7 times to ~6 different buildings due to political distributions and the Massachusetts 1-day/trial system; completely dismissed several times, challenged out twice, served once -- and then lotteried off for deliberations when nobody on the deliberately-oversize jury had to disappear.)

Elliot Mason @ 285: the last time I heard some people claiming they weren't being allowed on the concom, they were wankers. (That was a long time ago, when there were far fewer concoms to try to get onto.) It will be interesting to see how competent the Chi-Fi people turn out to be if they can come to an agreement with a hotel.

CHip @338: That's a question I'm interested to see the answer for, too. :->

Mishalak @331

I didn't promise that we wouldn't kill them with goats, giraffes, or other ruminants, now, did I?

Cassy B. and Elliott Mason, thanks for the additional information about Chi-Fi! I shall wait and see.

Surreal Fashion from Miss Aniela [via Metafilter and Popurls.] They have somewhat the air of Magritte paintings, but are original photos, heavily processed and collaged.

A few examples which struck me:
The Fisherman's Daughter
Away with the Canaries
... but just walk through them all....

#340 : Cally Soukup
I didn't promise that we wouldn't kill them with goats, giraffes, or other ruminants, now, did I?

That... is a very good point. Not quite the pure joy of getting a Slacktivist with a sheep once they left the safety of their website but still fun. I call moose.

Also, is it wrong that I now have a mental picture of you as Mad Madam Mim?

Well, my many fine qualities of generally not being a big ol' racist and understanding English pretty well make me an ideal juror, so I won't be able to discuss it until Tuesday at the earliest, possibly Wednesday.

As far as my union getting fewer days than non-union folks, my guess is that it's specifically my union that didn't bother to negotiate that one. I bet the more powerful unions, like the Teamsters, have a better Jury Duty payment system. I'm pretty cranky about it (I personally think all employers should be required to cover at least five days per year, but we seem to have moved into a world where requiring employers to not be a bunch of dickbags just means they stamp their feet and hire only "contractors".) but not enough to make a stink. After all, I do have sick/personal time. More concerning to me is the disposition of my boss, who at one point wrote a co-worker up for mistakes she made and complained that she just didn't catch on fast enough after all the time she took off for her radiation treatment to treat her thyroid cancer. Or last month, when a co-worker stated she was going to have to be in late one day because her husband was having surgery - and the boss responded not with "Gosh, I hope he's OK," but "well who's going to take care of [task A] when you're out?!!" For as much as pro-corporate toadies bitch about how hard it is to fire a lazy union employee, I'd like to force them to work under my gormless sexist boss, who's been under HR investigation for at least two years while no fewer than three competent union people have been sort of squooshed out of a job. The aforementioned cancer survivor decided it wasn't worth her sanity and eventually took a payout and moved to Minnesota.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I'll be working half days for the remainder of the trial just so my boss doesn't find an excuse to make things so miserable that I leave.

nerdycellist, surely the city/state pays something too? I seem to remember I was paid $30/day twenty years ago when I served on a jury. Plus free passes on the parking tickets my car accrued in city lots while I was sequestered in the courtroom or jury room.

Stefan Jones@336, sigh, some pointy-haired boss probably got credit for saving money, and won't get blame for that customer who comes over for a meeting and can't find the person they're meeting with.

Many years ago, when phone answering systems were a new shiny high-tech toy, the people who set up the office space we moved into decided that engineers could have them, and managers who didn't have secretaries to answer their phones could have them, but the clerk who handled the stockroom, loading dock, mailroom, and many other functions in the building was just a peon who didn't rate such a perk. It would have been a much more efficient use of my time if they'd given him the answering service instead of me, and multiply that by the hundred or so other engineers in the building; I don't remember if we ever got that past the bureaucracy.

Mishalak @ #343 wrote: I call moose.

You rang?

Anyway, I'm more of an ungulate than a ruminant, so am probably no use for the purpose intended. (Unless you want me to feed them cocoa-dusted truffles and double chocolate stout until they explode? (That could be rather messy and would almost certainly upset the gnomes.))

John Dobson has died at the age of 98.

Inventor of the Dobsonian Mount for telescopes; popularizer of astronomy; and author of one of my favorite quotations, directed to his telescope-mirror-grinding class: "Now the very worst state you can end up in at the end of this class is the state of not having a telescope; and that's the state you're in now!"

HLN: Local homeowner and hobbyist cook utterly delighted to cross an item off his bucket list: he is now the proud possessor of a bright-red KitchenAid stand mixer. "It seems a silly thing to be so happy about, but I've wanted one of these for AGES," Mr. Mason said. "Our old mixer was really underpowered and starting to smell like burnt wiring every time we used it."

Suggestions are solicited as to how best to inaugurate its service. Readers may address him via classified box #MIXERYAY at this paper. Current contenders include kneading yeast bread, creaming butter/sugar together for cookies to amuse his child, and whipping egg whites into a fluffy meringue just to prove he can, although he has no particular use for them after whipped.

The state pays $15 per day for jury duty (excluding the first day of selection), plus 34 cents a mile one way. Parking is free.

Elliott @ 349; Buckeyes. Peanut butter and butter and sugar, blended, cooled, and dipped into melted chocolate. Easy enough the child can help roll the balls and dip them, and robust enough to break a hand mixer...

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/buckeyes-i/

For those of you who follow and enjoy the writing of Seanan McGuire, the author recently announced that she just made the transition too full-time writer. Yes, she had a day-time job besides her writing, the massive output of which she apparently had managed by skipping on that thing called 'sleep'. Why is she now finally making the jump? Because of the Affordable Care Act. The country will be a better place because of the ACA and of its storytellers.

Serge Broom @352, so glad to hear that; I really like Seanan. She's a charming, funny, super-bright woman. (And she'll be at Windycon in Chicago this November....)

In re Seanan: that's amazing! I know the plan for quitting the day job used to be "when we sell the option for Deadline to Hollywood."

Elliott Mason @ 349: I remember the first time I used my KitchenAid mixed. More power!

Recipe that really benefits: Flourless chocolate torte. You whip whole eggs to the "ribbon stage", then gently whisk into melted chocolate and butter (there's some sugar and boiling water here & there). Because of the fat in the egg yolks, those eggs take a long time to whip up like egg whites. The resulting dessert is glorious.

Cassy B. #151

Can you believe I only got round to encountering buckeyes at a Christmas party this year? Truly delightful objects ...

Elliott Mason #349:

One thing you can do with meringue stuff is to make meringue kisses: drop spoonfuls on baking sheet and put in a *very* slow oven for many hours. If you make large enough flat patties when you do this, you can then fill them, oreo-style, with either whipped cream or pastry cream (both of which should give the new Red Shiny an additional workout).

me #356:

Make that Cassy B at #351. (I blame cedar pollen for inflaming my eyes.)

Piggybacking on joann #357: Meringue kisses are lovely with the addition of chocolate chips and/or a drop of peppermint extract and possibly a drop of food coloring. I was taught to make them by preheating the oven, turning it off just before the pans go in, and leaving them in the oven overnight (with a "Do not open until morning" note taped to the oven door for passersby).

A note about the Sherlock spoiler thread: I strongly recommend not reading it until you've seen all three of the new episodes. From the very beginning, people talk about the interactions of things revealed in all three eps. Including surprises you may not want to know about early.

AKICIML: At my last visit, my doctor prescribed me physical therapy and medication for my borked knee, and also wrote a prescription for an MRI (because she wants to know just what's going on in the soft-tissue injury).

How does one fill a prescription for an MRI?? Walgreens doesn't stock them, and my usual go-to for odd businesses (ask google maps for ____ near my house) doesn't seem to be turning anything up. All I get is scamlicious-looking sites offering to help me comparison-shop for a provider, and I don't know which are actual scams and which are consumerishly useful.

I have fairly good insurance, so I'm not worried I'll be $6000 out of pocket suddenly, but it's something I've never once had to have done. Every other major diagnostic test, the doctor (a different doctor, back then, from the one I have now) scheduled me an appt at the lab/hospital they used and I just had to turn up for it on time.

Elliott Mason @361, there's actually a place advertising MRIs just down the street from where I live.

Googling (no quotes) "MRI Services Chicago" got quite a large number of hits, many from very reputable hospitals. I'd suggest calling a convenient hospital near you and asking how one schedules an appointment...

The science of earworms.

Gets a little too far into philosophy for my taste toward the end, but the first part is interesting.

I almost always have an earworm running if I'm not actively listening to something else. Right now it's the Clam Chowder version of "Away Rio", which I haven't heard or thought about in quite a long time, so I have no idea why my brain decided to serve it up today. What's your earworm?

@Elliot: Ask your insurer. They probably have a list of in-network imaging places.

Of course, you could go to Costco for your MRI. The price is right, but you need to get two of them.

Apparently, I'm a Scary Person. Those of you who've met me in real life can laugh now. The rest of you ... I'm a middle aged, average height, slightly plump, hunch-backed woman with thick glasses and a wardrobe consisting of brightly colored t-shirts and jeans. Maybe the hunchback did it, I don't know.

Despite living in the middle of nowhere, we do get the occasional "luxury" car down our road. There's tons of vacation homes around here plus a huge compound owned by a family of 1%ers. There's also some church camps and retreats nearby. Basically, you never know what you'll see on the road -- everything from old farm pickups with a couple dogs in the back, to the latest in luxury.

Anyway, I rounded a blind corner on the road ... and there's a mid-2000's Bentley with its blinkers on in the road, and a very, very, flat and well shredded tire. If I had to guess, they slid into the bar ditch and the tire had a rude encounter with a sharp rock. The Bentley had luggage and groceries piled up in the back seat, so I'm guessing they headed to or from one of the vacation homes.

Beside the Bentley were two young women. They were well dressed, wearing heels and expensive clothes. They looked to be late teens or early 20's. One had her cell phone up in the air, obviously trying to get a signal. Unfortunately, there's no cell signal in that area -- they were down in a hollow.

I decided I would stop and help them move the car to a safer location (not on a blind corner) and then change the tire, since they weren't going to be able to call AAA where they were at. I've changed my share of tires and had jeans on. They definitely weren't dressed for it -- they had on tights and skirts and expensive sweaters. Changing a tire is not really a big deal for me. (I'm not sure where the spare is on a Bentley, but I assumed I could figure it out, y'know?)

Plus, they were in a really bad spot -- it's a nasty blind corner, and I've seen wrecks there before. If nothing else, I wanted to try to get them to move (flat tire or no) a few hundred yards down the road.

So, I pulled up and got out. They took one look at me and dove for cover in the car. The one on the driver's side cracked the window an inch and stammered out that she had help coming because she'd just called her "auto club." There was total and complete fear in their eyes, which was the last reaction I'd expected.

Ah, well. Rejection sucks.

I suggested they needed to move the car, slowly and carefully, up the road to a straight and wide stretch that was around the corner so that they didn't get creamed by someone whipping around that corner. Then I told them that if their "help" didn't show up, there was a bar about a mile up the road that had a phone -- and that the fire department was next door and the fire fighters might be willing to help her change the tire too.

I then asked if they wanted me to call anyone and got a firm, "No! You can go now!" In a panicky voice. Oookay. I went on my way. I called 911 anyway when I reached an area with cell coverage, and let them know the girls were broken down at XYZ milepost on ABC road, and someone might want to check on them.

Then I reminded myself that I'm very glad to live in this part of the world, where everybody helps everybody else and an offer of assistance is NOT seen as threatening, for the most part. They were staring at me with wide-eyed honest-to-God fear.

They were gone when I drove by there four hours later. I'll have to ask the staff at the bar if the girls walked to the bar. (The cops can take hours to show up, particularly for a non-emergency.) Given where they broke down, and given the local culture, they probably had offers of assistance from the majority of locals that passed.

I sure hope they didn't have a heart attack if one of our local "old timers" or working cowboys stopped to try to help them. If they think *I'm* scary, they should wait until they meet some of the other locals.

Stefan Jones @364: I have no idea why that didn't occur to me, but it didn't. Of course my insurance's find-a-doc section had a subsection (not seen before, because not needed) for medical imaging providers! I found one reasonably convenient and now have an appointment.

It's probably generational that I still view the upcoming Deep Tissue Medical Scan With Intense Magnetism as completely an sfnal moment of awesome, right? See where your body's gone wrong with the POWER OF PHYSICS! So Asimovian.

Of course, I knew I was living in a more medically-utopian future than I thought I was when my childhood friend splintered several vertebrae in a skiing accident and was walking again a few days later, and cleared for bumper cars and diving within three years.

Cally @360:

I've updated the post to say it's for all three episodes.

@Elliot:

MRIs are generally considered uncomfortable and (if you are claustrophobic) scary.

I got mine because the orthopedist suspected a bulging disc as the cause of sciatic pain.

I was in really bad shape at the time. I had trouble sleeping, and could hardly drive. The technician offered me a lumbar support pillow while I was in the tube . . . and damned if I wasn't more comfortable than I'd been in weeks.

Yes, it was a bulging disc. Stretches have all but banished the pain.

Stefan Jones: I'm not worried about the test, it's probably exactly the sort of thing I don't mind doing. I've heard they can pipe you audio from a source you choose? If they can, I'm totes going to listen to my podcasts while I'm in there and be happy as a lying-flat clam. :->

Well, I got my Covered California card before the New Year, and I've used it to go to the doctor, to get blood tests, and to buy medicine.
The doctor gave me some lovely physical therapy referrals (but he poo-poohed my suggestion that he prescribe "regular physical therapy visits for the rest of my life"). However, nobody knows which physical therapists are in the network. Especially not the physical therapists. And since my old place seems to have gone out of business, I'm dealing with strangers.

Also, the "find a provider" page on the website produces a random collection of names with phone numbers where the people who answer the phones have never heard of them.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll end up with a physical therapist eventually. And everything else I've done under Covered California so far has worked without a jolt.

Cygnet -
Good for you for your Samaritan efforts, even though the direct one was so flatly refused.

Those pore lil' delicate flaurs. Sounds like they've never had to notice what most of humanity looks like (i.e. not perfectly trim, tanned & buffed).

I hesitated to enter the discussion of how to re-use stamps, but I think I had better tell you all that for decades now, the Post Office has considered a stamp "used" as soon as it is applied to a surface other than the backing it comes on. And they strongly disapprove of re-using stamps. So anything you do needs to be undetectable. Or at least, barely noticeable. However, they're not gonna arrest you if you try it (as one of my more paranoid friends supposed). They will just return it for good postage.

To achieve low detectability, I would suggest a solvent such as goo-gone or goof-off, but cut out the piece of paper with the stamp on and apply the solvent to the back of the paper rather than to the front of the stamp.

#372: I've been using "fully stamped" envelopes for years with no problems.

I probably shouldn't stress over the 5 cents in stamps inexplicably stuck to a USO return envelope . . . but I do. My inner cheapskate would never let me sleep if I threw them out.

Cygnet, #365: I can think of several scenarios which might explain this. In no particular order:

1) They've both had "don't trust strangers" pounded into them all their lives, possibly with a side of "I've got money, and you could be kidnapped by someone who wants to hurt me".

2) OMG, I don't want Daddy to find out I slid into the ditch! And if the locals know, they might gossip!

3) They were supposed to be somewhere else, or there's a relationship there which is being kept hidden, or possibly both.

IOW, it's possible that their fear was not of you specifically, but of something connected with their situation that you represented.

Cygnet #365: My goodness! Suppose you had looked like me? Some people are trapped by their stereotypes.

So I have a KitchenAid. And a kid who is addicted to cooking how-to shows on YouTube (usually the ones that show how to do decorative stuff with sweets).

Thus, the first thing we have made with the KitchenAid is Rainbow Cake -- a simple white cake batter split five ways, with four getting Wilton's coloring in them, plopped in the cake pan bullseye style.

It's in the oven. It ought to taste ok by her lights, no matter what else; and ideally, when we cut it, it'll be zebra-style wiggly stripes in rainbow.

Pix when done. I might need to repeat last night's "mega-hot bath with a mixed drink and movies" to recover, but the kid's amused and standing in the kitchen cooking has helped my knee feel a little better.

Fandom Petition for people with no background in social justice to stop teaching it

Carol, if they chose to walk to the bar (which also has an attached diner, but is small enough that the bartender usually does double duty as a waitress), they'd have found a lot more of us imperfect country people.

Let's just say a lot of local characters hang out there. It's a typical small town bar and diner -- people go there to hang out with their buddies, shoot pool, watch the TV, and just hang out. It's very safe and friendly, and people look out for each other. However, it's definitely not a fancy place. Probably the most upscale thing they do is host a biker rally a few times a year.

And who knows -- maybe they climbed up to the top of a hill (in high heels?) and did call AAA, and they were just waiting for a tow truck.

Have I ever told the story here of telling someone that yes, Leonard Cohen wrote novels? I like them a lot, myself, and can see why some folks wouldn't. If I do tell the story, keep that in mind and don't be offended.

Looping all the way around to the original post, I teach this through my church. I've only taught the 4-6 classes, but I plan to train for all of them. It's so rewarding.

We had an email thread among one of our committees recently and the cost of the training came up. There was, as is common whenever money is spent anywhere, grousing about how much it cost, and whether we couldn't use that money for other things, and did we really have enough kids to make it worthwhile, and should we even bother with teaching the young adult and adult courses. I'm sure you've all been there.

I must have grown a great deal in the last couple of years, because I didn't send any snotty emails back. I only wrote one and deleted it without regret. Instead, I said this is exactly the sort of question we'd talk about in the other class/discussion group I'm teaching, about current issues in our religion. I tried this last year and it failed, I think because I was ambitiously trying to use books. This time, it'll be articles from our quarterly magazine.

The article for Sunday? This. Note the third to last paragraph. That's my dream. We'll see how it goes.

374, Lee -- all of the above occurred to me, though I suspect it was probably option one given the degree of real fear.

Elliott @366: When you've had your MRI, come tell us whether you're one of the people who can hear the marimba music when they tune the thing, OK?

I've had so many of them that I had my first one back when they still called it NMRI. (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging -- yeah, they changed that name pretty fast.)

One of them, it was high summer in Minneapolis, and somehow a mosquito got into the room, and then into the tube with me. They were doing my head for some reason (probably the time I lost peripheral vision for a while), and it was particularly hard to hold still because the mosquito landed on my face and walked up and down for the whole half-hour-to-forty-minutes a scan used to take. And it never bit me the whole time. But the anticipation was overwhelming. It was funny after I got out, but not until then.

Raaaaainbow Caaaaake (et seq; for more photos click through the set).

Dye added to this basic recipe, though I'm not sure I recommend it. It was very simple to make, but I agree with the enthusiastic first comment's factuality but not its enthusiasm: they said "It tastes just like a sugar cookie." And so it does, which is weird, because it's cake. :-> Would probably taste good with additional flavorant besides just vanilla extract. It WAS very simple to make, so I might do it again (barring any other simple-but-tastier recipe being available). I might also try slipping some cream cheese into it, that'd be interesting.

I made my first batch of onion marmalade.

Oh, man . . . many onions will die in my kitchen.

Oh, yes indeed.

@Stefan Jones: In my life, I've had one root canal (and may it be the only one.) It cured my back pain.

Well, really, it was three hours slightly head-down in a perfectly ergonomic chair that did that. When I get back pain, it tends to be of the "squished in the wrong direction" variety, so inversion and stretching was exactly what I needed and had found hard to get.

Janetl: Do you have a recipe for that flourless chocolate torte? I'd like to see if I can make that safe for partner's pancreas, which spends much of its time threatening to strike. He misses chocolate almost as much as I miss playing with food.

Cygnet: huh. Well... okay then. And people wonder why some people so fear the idea of class war... Good on you for stopping. I do hope they made it where they were headed, and that the next samaritan wasn't driving a flying saucer. Because that wouldn't be a good impression to make on the theoretical interstellar neighbors.

Though... the heels aren't necessarily a limiting factor. My mother lives in heels; she even wears high wedge heeled sneakers. And she's a construction project manager who spends a lot of time on site. I think the only thing she doesn't do in heels is sleep and swim. She has high-heeled flip-flops.

Elliott Mason: The cake looks lovely. I've made that cake; it was my tried'n'true base for experiments because it always rises and it's forgiving. Cinnamon (or pie spice blend) in the 1/4 tsp range helps. So does lemon zest. So does changing the sugar -- half brown is very nice. So does switching out the milk for either buttermilk or half sour cream/yogurt and half liquid milk. And if you've got a tall sided dish (think soufflé dish) or a springform...

Slice 6-ish tart apples, toss with half-a-lemon juice and cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice as for your version of pie -- but no sugar. Grease the tall dish and lay in a pretty pattern (or just dump if presentation doesn't matter) a layer of slices. Sprinkle just a little brown sugar over the first layer (1 tablespoon? you're going for a caramelized base) and splash around about 1 tablespoon of melted butter, then top with some of the batter, some more apples, some more batter, ending with batter. You can get layer-y, or not. Bake per recipe times about 1.5 (I bake at altitude), until top of cake is firm to touch and pick removes clean. Let cool in place, then upside down it. (Or be impatient and scoop.) Some people add raisins and/or nuts into their apple cakes. (Some people are also prone to litter or text at the opera. I am sure they have their reasons, and I shall not judge.)

As written, it's a fine base for a good filling or foil, but yes, it needs help for complexity. Also, when poured over a thick base of frozen tart cherries, it was a stellar cobbler-y thing. (I really miss baking. And I want cake now.)

Would you like a KA pasta attachment? I can't use mine anymore and it should do more than collect dust. If so, permission is granted for access to my email address.

Stefan Jones: onion marmalade. Ooo. I wonder if I can reduce-sub a different sweet. I've got palm, honey and maple. Because that sounds like it would be brilliant over zucchini ribbons with shredded chicken. (Must make other half slice many onions. They don't affect him.)

CZEdwards@385

sleep and swim

"Now introducing our new line of high-heeled flippers."

:-)

CZEdwards @385: Funnily enough, a friend of mine just offered to trade her meatgrinder attachment (which she doesn't use and I expressed an interest in) for a pasta attachment, should I find one when out thrifting. So although I don't have a personal ambition to pasta-make, I can offer to find it a very loving home? :->

Elliott Mason (382): That link took me to a Flickr sign-in page. (I don't have an account there.)

Mary Aileen:
Try reloading the page. I think it's Flickr's version of a combined login/and ad for Flickr; I got that when I first went to the Surreal Fashion page. When I reloaded it went away and I got to the right page, and I didn't get it on following the Rainbow cake link.

Clifton (389): Thanks. When I went back to the page it loaded fine.

Elliott, that cake is stunning.

Akifiml:
Vocabulariy help requested: my internal dictionary is down. Does English have a word for "take less time [to do]" equivalent to dematerialize (takes less material [to make]) or demonetize? 'Efficient' or 'streamline' don't explicitly have a timey-wimey root word.

If this word doesn't exist, what would it be: dechronitize? Detempus? Do any romance languages have this word?

Elliott Mason: done. I'm a huge fan of our meat grinder attachment, and as long as the pasta attachment is seeing occasional sunlight, all is good. Rot13'ed Pbafgnaprrqjneqf at the gee male. I probably won't get it out until mid February at this rate, but I don't mind being prodded.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @391: "hasten"? I have to say "dematerialize" does not mean, to me, "takes less material [to make]) but "separates into its consituent atoms (or possibly smaller particles than that)" - the New Oxford Dictionary of English agrees with me.

Kathryn #391 - shorten?
And what dcb said.

CZEdwards @385: Some people add raisins and/or nuts into their apple cakes. (Some people are also prone to litter or text at the opera. I am sure they have their reasons, and I shall not judge.)
Hee! Texting at the opera seems like a near-apotheosis of many things one might say about class and privilege and technology and "omg descent of society!!!" But as you say, they have their reasons.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @391, huh. I haven't the faintest idea. 'Dechronitize' is promising, though. It sounds like it wants to be a word. :)

The word that comes to mind for "uses less material in" is "lightweight"; as in "they've lightweighted these plastic bags to the point that the corners of a cereal box will poke holes in them".

For time, I'd probably just say "speeds up".

I'd say "speeds up" too. I must admit, however, that the verb 'briefen' did pop into my benighted brain. "Weighing instead of measuring by volume briefens my baking process enormously."

AKICIML: Hey guys, can anyone point me to an image on der T00bz of a paint-spattered object in the foreground and the spatter (with void) in the background? I'm working on a merit badge for the DFD thread, but having trouble getting the image to snap into focus in my brain, and my Google-fu is failing me.

My first draft is here, but something about the shadow/paint blowback isn't working, and I don't have enough brain to figure out what it is.

397
Xopher, that's a very useful verb you have there. I like it!

Kathryn: try "accelerate" as transitive verb - for example, "accelerates software development", or "accelerates the paint drying". I think there's a decent history of that as a standard usage, e.g. plastic hardeners referred to as accelerants.

Kathryn: cost-engineer (also value-engineer), perhaps? Possibly also "productionize".

My family had an Electrolux vacuum from the 1940s, a low-slung model that looked a bit like a diesel locomotive on sled-runners. Near the switch was a dial to adjust the speed, and instead of saying "fast" and "slow", it said "hasten" and "retard".

Amazing how archaic that sounds now--a bit like the accents in movies of that era.

CZEdwards @385:
Janetl: Do you have a recipe for that flourless chocolate torte? I'd like to see if I can make that safe for partner's pancreas, which spends much of its time threatening to strike. He misses chocolate almost as much as I miss playing with food.

Flourless chocolate torte is a baked custard, not a cake. I learned this recipe in a class at a culinary school. (It was a weekend class, for amateurs.) I looked for torte recipes online, and none of the ones I found had the same procedure, so I don't know if their results would be as tasty, so I'm transcribing it here. Rikibeth or Benjamin Wolfe can doubtless correct and improve this.

I was taught to coat it with ganache. Because it's a custard, it's best baked in a water bath. I was taught not to use springform pans because they leak (though of course you can use aluminum foil to mitigate that). I like the drama of using a regular pan, and turning a torte or cheesecake out of it with extreme violence.

Making the torte
You'll want a large whisk, and a large rubber scraper/spatula.

9"x3" pan -- if the eggs are well whipped, a 2" tall pan may not be big enough.
This recipe will also make two 7"x2" pans very nicely. That's more practical, really, as a 9" chocolate torte is a whole lotta rich eating. You can freeze it after it's coated with ganache, so you can have one small one, and then the second one several weeks later.

Butter the pan and line the bottom and sides with parchment, and butter that.

Preheat oven to 350 F. You'll also need baking sheet with a tall rim, or a large roasting pan, for the water bath.

12 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
5 ounces water
1 Tablespoon dark rum
6 oz sugar
9 oz soft butter (room temperature) cut into chunks
6 eggs
3 oz sugar

Put the chopped chocolate in a large bowl, shaped suitably for whisking

Bring water and 6 oz of sugar to a boil.

Pour the boiling water over the chocolate, and stir & swipe with the spatula and whisk until it's melted smoothly. Stir in the butter, and get it well combined, too.

Meanwhile, set the 6 eggs to beating in a stand mixer. After a bit, add the 3 oz of sugar. Beat until the volume has increased substantially -- to the 'ribbon stage'. You can't get whole eggs to stiff peaks like you can egg white, but when you take the beaters or rubber spatula and drop some egg back into the mixture, it should look like a ribbon and hold its shape on the surface.

Fold the eggs into the chocolate. In a perfect world you'd just fold it all together, but you'll have to use the whisk, too, to get it combined smoothly.

Pour into the pan, put it in the larger container in the oven and add water for the water bath. Bake at 350 for about an hour. You'll want an internal temperature of about 160. Should just be a little jiggly in the middle.

Let it cool slowly to room temperature.

Cover tightly, and freeze for at least 2 hours before coating with ganache.

When you're ready to coat it with ganache, you get the thrill of turning it out of the pan! Make the ganache, and set it to cool. Have a 9" round ready to put the torte on (it's not sturdy enough to work with unless it's on a round). Put out a sturdy wooden cutting board, and turn on a burner. Slightly warm the bottom of the pan, then slam it upside-down on the cutting board to drop the torte out of the pan. Peel off the parchment, turn it onto the 9" round, and put it onto a wire rack.

Pour the ganache over the torte.

You can slice it now, or when you serve it. I have 10" knife for cake slicing. I put it in a pitcher of hot water, dry it with a paper towel, then slice through once. Draw the knife out, scrape the chocolatey goodness onto a saucer, rinse it off, heat it, and repeat. That will give you a torte that looks pretty but is neatly sliced and ready to serve. And you get to snack on the chocolate you've saved on the saucer.

Store in the fridge until shortly before serving.

Ganache
Any ganache recipe should be fine, but I always use this one from the same class.

12 oz cream
12 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
4 oz soft butter

Bring cream to a boil, pour over chocolate and stir until melted. Stir in butter.
This is enough to coat the torte with a whole lot left over. You should probably cut this recipe down, but since I'm usually only making the torte as part of a dessert buffet extravaganza, I use the extra to frost another cake, or roll into truffles.

Linkmeister @ 345: states vary. In MA, corporations are expected to cover 3 days of service (I'm forget whether that's a law or just an assumption), after which the state pays something so low (IIRC) that many companies just say "sign the check over to us and we'll keep paying your regular salary" on the grounds that jury service doesn't hit that often.

Elliott @ 349: bread is good; my spouse and I go through ~1.5 loaves a week. OTOH, there's this gingersnap recipe that killed the old mixer; said spouse now does batches that can be frozen in sections. PS: the cake is impressive.

Lee @ 363: the refrain of "One Toke over the Line"; damfino why.

Here are two 7" tortes, just out of the oven.

Here's a 9" one, decorated with white chocolate swirled into the ganache to make a suitable Halloween spiderweb.

re 391: Well, there's "abbreviate" though it tends more to implying "cut short due to incompletion" than "finish more quickly." But then, there is also "expedite".

janetl @405: Congratulations, you have caused my husband to add 'dark rum' to our grocery list for tomorrow. :->

It's a good idea to let ganache cool by itself (I pour it into a flat pan and cover it with plastic wrap and leave it strictly alone) in between the mixing-up and the spreading-around. This is because the things that keep it emulsified when it's hot are different from the things that do so when it's cool, and there's a gap in the middle-temperature range where agitation could cause it to break.

Depends on many factors. May not happen. So sayeth my CIA candy book.

JanetL: Thank you for the recipe. I *think* I can alter it to appease the sugar-hating demon who now reigns over our kitchen. I'll figure it out, probably later rather than sooner. Between small amounts of crushed palm sugar and a couple of sugar alcohols that play well with heat, it might be doable. I may have to skip the ganache, though, to keep it balanced. Which is simply tragic.

Jacque: There is a scene in the movie, 10 Things I Hate About You where the Katrina analogue protagonist and the Petruchio analogue protagonist play a form of paintball that more closely resembles a water balloon fight. They get quite spattered, and stills from that might work. (It's not on Netflix streaming, but it's worth the two hours and hitting Video Station if you can bear modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare as a high school farce. And I think it does a decent job of handling the Problem of Katrina.)

Alternately, a google image search on the holiday Holi or "festival of colours" might be useful. (A festival that Boulder would find entertaining, I think...)

Elliott Mason @382: Rainbow Cake is awesome!

From boardgamegeek.com, I got linked to an interesting Doctor Who-related video.

We all know that Ron Grainer composed the opening theme music; fewer people may have heard the name Delia Derbyshire, who while working for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used pure tone generators and sound effects to create the actual recordings that played over the opening credits for 17 years. (I say recordings because there were some changes made about three years in, to my mind improvements.)

I hadn't previously heard of an album called "The Exciting Television Music of Ron Grainer". It turns out that there is one, and that on it Ron Grainer did his own version of the Doctor Who theme. And you can hear it by going to YouTube (perhaps via this handy link).

Spoiler alert:

It's awful. It's practically disco -- you might as well just play "Apache" over the opening credits and have done. Ugggh.

The thing about the Derbyshire version that nobody seems to get is that it has its own uncompromising beat that does not condescend to be danceable. Every single person who has ever done another version of the theme has given it a dance beat, and to my mind ruined it. So now it seems that Ron Grainer himself understood the theme worse than anybody.

(The one exception is the first version of the theme used in the new series. Based on a version that I've heard that wasn't used, though, Murray Gold wanted to. I speculate that Russell Davies asked him to make it sound more like the classic Derbyshire theme...and as Gold tweaked the theme over the next few years it did move away from that.)

On ganache: I can testify to the success of Xopher's approach. Om nom.

On 10 Things I Hate About You: it's one of the very few DVDs that survived the Great Moving Purge. Best high-school AU ever.

On the smallness of the world, or maybe just Boston: I'm not at Arisia, having forgotten to register, but I did have dinner with Doyle and Macdonald last night. At the T stop afterwards, there was a small group of people who were obviously congoers. I smiled, trying hard not to look like a mundane, and then I squinted at two of them and said, "...um, excuse me, are you my downstairs neighbors?" AND THEY WERE.

TexAnne (412): Are you planning to go to Boskone? How about anyone else? I'll be there, with my artwork; it will be my first Boskone since 1990 or 1991, when it was in exile in Springfield.

Mary Aileen @ 413... in exile in Springfield

Is that like being sent to Coventry?

Serge @414:

If it's in Springfield, I think it has rather more yellow people sayig "D'oh!" and rather few bicycles than Coventry.

Mary Aileen @413: I plan to go, if I can book a flight.

abi @ 415... GI Joe's Cobra lives in Springfield. Probably next door to Homer.

Sumana Harihareswara @232, Elliott Mason @235:

There's a detailed article on Amazing Stories regarding the Chi-Fi situation.

David Goldfarb @ 411: That's so horrible that it makes the Welsh Orchestra that plays the NuWho theme sound good. In case you couldn't tell, I don't like how the theme's been rescored for the new show. I think it got worse when Moffat took over from Davies, too.

David G., #411: Good heavens. I thought for a minute that I was listening to the theme from Magnum, P.I. or The A-Team. Or maybe the Dr. Who theme done Hooked on Classics-style, but that doesn't explain the heavy brass. Here, have an antidote (which I imagine you and most people here are probably already familiar with) -- a mashup/dance mix that actually works.

Inquisitive Raven, #419: I rather like the new theme. But then, I also really like the updated Mission:Impossible theme from the first movie, so you are at liberty to consider my tastes suspect. :-)

...no, the sugar for the tea does not go in the boiling noodle water...

Back from Arisia. It was great. Looking forward to Boskone.

If anybody here waved at me and I smiled blankly -- or missed it entirely -- I apologize. That happens a lot.

421
And the boiling water for the tea shouldn't go on the cold cereal. (I've done that. At least once.)

And the milk for the tea doesn't go in the electric kettle .

And ground coffee beans do not go in the water reservoir.

(Very close call.)

OJ on the cereal doesn't work either...

At least when I find myself putting the cereal box away in the fridge I can stop and go, "Wait, I bet I know where I put the milk ..." early in the process. Instead of the next morning.

And the orange juice does not go in the coffee mug ... especially not after you've already put the cream and sugar in it.

Laundry does not go in the dishwasher*, or vice versa.

*Freshly dyed silk and wool do sometimes go in the dishwasher to steam-set, but then the dishwasher will be otherwise empty and the fabric will be wrapped in parchment paper. Dishes do not go in the washing machine.

re: "[x] does not go in [y]"

I've been doing so much Rong.

Boiling water does not go in the tea caddy (unless you want tea that you can stand a crowbar upright in).

Nor does it go in the sugar bowl (though this moose no longer puts sugar in tea, and only a small amount in coffee).

dcb: OJ on the cereal doesn't work either...

Actually that one's not bad IMO, especially with a whole-grain or granola type cereal. I used to do that on purpose occasionally. I concede however that it could be pretty astonishing if it weren't what you intended.

Re Teresa's particle: needs bigger teeth.
"I'll tell you where I keep the gun, Sam, but you need to be sitting down first."

Clifton - which particle? Unpack your comment a bit, please?

[x] does not go in [y]

:laughing uncontrollably, because yeah, those are familiar:

Carol: That probably did need a little more explication. Both ricotta gnocchi and blue-footed boobies are probably better without Big Sharp Teeth.

The "guess the date on this art" link, however, goes to some church carvings which look exactly like gur punenpgref Fnz naq Znk sebz gur phyg pbzvp Fnz naq Znk: Serrynapr Cbyvpr, juvpu nyfb unq n pynffvp YhpnfNegf pbzchgre nqiragher tnzr onfrq ba gurz. (Ol gur jnl, vg'f Znk gur ohaal, abg gur qbt, jub unf Tvnag Funec Grrgu.)

P.S. for those having trouble getting Teresa's floating title text to ROT-13 it, it reads: "Xvycrpx Puhepu, Naab Qbzvav Ryrira-sbegl. Znlor vg'f n fvtany sebz n ybfg gvzr geniryyre gung ur'f fghpx va gur Gjrysgu Praghel naq jnagf gb or erfphrq."

Clifton: thanks.

My immediate association with the carved stone art was Nick Parks, though not quite.

I didn't have the history of Sam/Max though recognized them on Google Images.

I'm relieved that the boobies won't be showing up with Big Sharp Teeth any time soon.

Clifton: thanks.

My immediate association with the carved stone art was Nick Parks, though not quite.

I didn't have the history of Sam/Max though recognized them on Google Images.

I'm relieved that the boobies won't be showing up with Big Sharp Teeth any time soon.

Got the "cannot post, 404 Error" and upon backing/filling double-posted.

How embarrassing.

I think I've caught myself doing most of the "X does not go in Y" items, usually before actually doing them. I do remember one bleary morning putting whole coffee beans in a coffee filter and staring at it for a minute, knowing something was wrong with the picture.

On a completely different topic, it looks like there's an interesting story unfolding here (starting here, from a box of old letters at a flea market). I'm curious to see where it goes.

The breakfast dishes do not go in the refrigerator. The milk does not go in the sink.

Reversing these, however, may be acceptable.

The garbage bag does not go on the shelf. The toaster does not go out to the garage.

427
I remember finding the cereal box in the fridge, but I don't remember putting it in there. The milk was in the fridge, though.

427
I remember finding the cereal box in the fridge, but I don't remember putting it in there. The milk was in the fridge, though.

the internal-server-error (plus 404). Last time I hit the back button and reposted, but it only went through once. This time it went twice.

David Goldfarb @410: We all know that Ron Grainer composed the opening theme music; fewer people may have heard the name Delia Derbyshire

Really? I've known her name for decades and she's revered by many as the mother of electronic music. Ron Grainer himself wanted to give her co-writing credit in the Who credits but the Beeb refused. But then she never has been given the credit she deserved by them. It's why she quit in disgust in the 1970s and turned her back on music for the next two decades. Electronic music fans sought her out in the late-1990s and convinced her to start recording again. Sadly, she died in the early 2000s. The largest body of her work still exists in the vaults of the BBC, who have shown no interest in letting it see the light of day. There's a petition to get them to move on this, but who knows if it will get anywhere. Seriously, hers is a fascinating story. You should do some googling.

I only noticed the milk/breakfast dishes thing because the milk was in the sink.

Clifton @ 433: "Where'd you get the gun, John?" (The linked video should be silent, shouldn't it?)

I knew when the carvings were made as soon as I saw them, but I have an advantage: I'm a medievalist! Those Romanesque eyes are unmistakable.

OK, MLK day AKICIML query:

Any churchgoing people know of a hymn about MLK other than "Blessèd Martin"? I am so sick of that hymn! Its lyrics are clumsy, its tune is lackluster, and...well, the harmonies I've heard for it are boring in the extreme.

OTOH we clearly need to sing a hymn for MLK on the Sunday closest to MLK day. I just wish we had a better one.

We have been getting a spate of calls (8 so far today!) from someone whose caller ID information comes up as "Unknown name, Unknown number". Our system is set up to automatically reject unidentified calls (because most of them are spam), but occasionally VOIP calls hit the same trigger. If this is you or someone you know... send us an e-mail.

Xopher, 451: Modern hymns are all like that, AFAICT. Better to use a nonspecific martyrdom one (if there are any, I don't know), or possibly an Easter/funeral one. Or maybe write another verse to "I sing a song."

The Episcopal Church doesn't formally proclaim saints, but he's treated as a holy person to be revered (the most they ever do). Our former pastor, with all his flaws, has a better hymn than Martin of Selma (with all his)!

That hymn, though, is based on his ideas, not about him. Since he's not dead and so on.

Xopher @ 451: We sang one--okay, a song, if not a hymn-yesterday called Dream A Dream. I don't have the score any more, and I couldn't find it online. My Bing-fu isn't strong enough to get information via such a common phrase.

Depending on how adventurous your music director and your choir are, you're better off using secular music.

TexAnne: boy, are they. I made my sister laugh by saying that everything John Rutter writes sounds like a bank commercial, but she didn't deny it was true. (Also I will never forget his rhyming "over" with "Jehovah" in his translation of "Va Pensiero".)

John A., 455: Searching on "Dream a Dream lyrics" produces this, this, this, and this. (I find that adding "lyrics" to your search terms helps immensely if what you're hunting is a song.) I don't know if any of them would be suitable, but that last one sounds quite promising.

also @449, thank you for the earworm. :-)

Xopher, back in high school, the choir sang for an MLK Day breakfast. We did "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" because, we were told, it was the great man's favorite.

My glasses do not go in the cup that holds my toothbrush. I will require help in finding them (because, severely myopic) if I do this.

"Precious Lord" is a profoundly moving hymn, particularly given the circumstances of its composition. (It's an expression of hope and trust during deep grief.) One could do a lot worse than anything by Thomas A. Dorsey.

Xopher: another recommendation for Precious Lord. There are lots of arrangements. Not only did MLK reportedly like it, but it has the line "I have dreamed a great dream"

AKICML:

Ursula LeGuin's "The ones who walk away from Omelas" has the line
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

I recognise 'the banality of evil'. Is 'the terrible boredom of pain' also a well-known reference?

Lila, 456: Oh goody, now I'm earwormed with the Iron Chef guy--"the [unusual ingredient] battle is OVAH!"

It is perhaps bedtime in HLN-land.

thomas @462 -- not that I can find easily.

That Doctor Who theme is so epically awful that it is glorious in that Star Wars Disco kind of way. Shared.

Catholicism has its awful hymns too (some of which have been borrowed from the Protestants, but we have plenty of horrible songwriters on our own.) I have a particular loathing for Rain Down by Jaime Cortez. "Rain down, rain down, rain down your love on your people." Maybe if it were performed at a children's mass.

This may be the coolest Sailormoon redesign I have ever seen.

http://jadenite.tumblr.com/tagged/redesign

Often the redesigned senshi are either Angsty McDarkglare or Sexy McHotpants. But this redesign captures the spirit of the originals: they're pretty, they're here to kick your butt, and they look like they stepped out of a romantic space opera.

And Chibi Moon is the cutest she's ever been.

B. Durbin @ 465: My mother, who was a devout Catholic and subject to a teensy bit of unchristian competitiveness, was known to sigh and say "The protestants have all the good hymns."

@Xopher no. 451: Dr. King inspired a triple-decker's worth of spirituals, gospel, R&B, etc. Not knowing whether you have the instruments to carry the more rockin' tunes, may I suggest "Up to the Mountain" by Patty Griffin?

Thanks everyone for the hymn/song suggestions. I'll look into some of them and see what works.

The water for diluting the freshly-brewed batch of tea does not go into the waiting cup with the ice. (Fortunately, that's an easy fix.)

Grabbing the scrub brush to stir the cocoa....

It usually happens when I'm extremely tired. Once I went into the kitchen with a cloth napkin and an empty bowl, dumped the cloth napkin into the trash, and opened the door to the basement to fire the bowl down into the laundry pile at the base of the stairs. I just barely stopped myself!

Also, part of my "idiosyncratic drug reactions" is that the recommended dose of acetaminophen will make me so confused that I seem drunk, and it's usually category slippage such as the above. When I forgot which side of the road I was supposed to be on (look, the left lane just felt right, okay?), with kids in the car no less, I arranged to stay home whenever my headaches got bad enough to need painkillers.

Lila, ...everything John Rutter writes sounds like a bank commercial...

I am SO going to steal that ♪. Thank you.

♪(But not without attribution.)

Rutter swings back and forth between some pretty challenging and modern music (which I generally like) and what I took to calling "BBC music". Unfortunately most of the former is too big and too difficult to be sung in the typical parish church, or for that matter in a service at all. I remember the first time I heard the Gloria and being blown away by the second movement, only to have the last movement start and think, "crap, it's that perky-perky stuff again."

re 467: I can get as snarky as anyone would like on the subject of Cath-Pop and the St. Louis J Boys, but on the other hand in the trad-liturgy groups I hang around at the edges of the Catholics tend to take this attitude that actual hymn signing is an unwanted and dangerous impurity. Considering the excesses of ceremonial which they hold as the standard to be approached if not met (with a huge array of nearly supernumerary servers and minor clergy) this strikes me as a questionable attitude. But I have also had a suspicion for a very long time that they only trust words and are afraid of the way music skips over all that and heads straight in to the heart.

Jenny Islander #472: You probably should check again if any other OTC painkiller could do (have you tried naproxen, the new guy on the block?). Acetaminophen has other issues, and that confusion could lead to dangerous multi-dosing.

Not really a household thing, but at the bookstores in the alphabetized sections, I regularly see where customers have put books "back" at about the right horizontal position, but one shelf below where they should be. I didn't understand that until one day I was really tired, and caught myself doing it! (That is mostly the customers, I have to be really tired to muff shelving.)

Tom Whitmore: Thanks. So if it's a reference it must be a very obscure one.

tykewriter @ #473, you're welcome!

I forgot to mention that my sister is a choir director. Atlanta area Fluorospherians might enjoy her concerts.

So today I start my first course of steroids☀ ever, following the fairly complicated algorithm printed on the back of the bubble pack for how to take 6 pills the first day and taper down to 1 pill the last day.

Downside: I have to actually eat meal-sized meals at regular intervals (because the pills are taken "before breakfast," "before lunch," "after dinner," and "at bedtime"), which apparently I mostly don't do -- this discovered by missing my breakfast pill yesterday and then thinking about it at each I-would-be-taking-a-pill-now-if-I'd-started-today interval.

Anecdotes about Steroid Courses You Have Known are solicited, if you feel like sharing. I know looooong courses of steroids are awful (Kathleen Sloan pronounced Carla Ulbrich's song Prednisone "the most medically-accurate song I've ever heard," which isn't promising), but this is just a quickie dosepak.

Amusingly, I'm not going to be able to spot mild versions of most of the side effects on the box, because I'm on Day 1 of my menstrual cycle, too. Lower-intestine output density changes? Yeah, right; that happens anyway. Likewise appetite issues and nausea. :->

☀ Methylprednisolone, if it matters.

Elliott, I haven't taken the dose pack myself, but many of my patients have gotten good short-term results. (I work in a PT clinic, so my main reference for steroid dose packs is "last week patient was in too much pain to exercise, this week we've made good progress because pain levels are much lower.")

Elliott, I had that dose pack last fall for an asthma/incipient pneumonia problem. I had no adverse side effects. Actually, I had a general sense of physical well being.

Lila: That's why I got prescribed it (and an anti-inflammatory); my first PT appt is tomorrow. MRI on Friday. I'd have started taking it sooner except for cock-ups around the prescription and getting it filled.

Elliott Mason (478): I hope you have better reactions to prednisone than my family does. Prednisone, even at dose-pack level, makes me crazy: jumpy, unable to sleep*, and emotional volatile†. It also makes my heart race. My mother has similar physical reactions, although she's been able to take the very low doses she needs for her current medical condition.

*and so wired that I don't feel it until I'm off the prednisone, whereupon I crash
†both mood swings and hair-trigger emotional responses.

Lee @ 457: And none of those four are the one we sang. As I said, the commonness of the phrase makes it hard to search for.

I, too, thought of Precious Lord. It's a lovely song. It's not specific to King, and that's what I think was being sought.

Elliott Mason @478: I was on prednisone for a couple of years. Chipmunk cheeks. Weight gain (30lbs). Buffalo hump. General sense of well-being and feeling better and stronger than I ever had. Until I didn't: Crippling anxiety disorder. Depression. Nb: use extreme caution if you're doing Chinese herbs, too. Turns out licorice has many prednisone-like effects, and the two combined served to jack my blood pressure unpleasantly. Also can interact unpleasantly with some SSRIs.

Related [x] into [y], prep category:
Do not set day's clean clothes on toilet until lid is closed.

Fail narrowly averted.

Lila @477:

Thank you! I've been looking for a chorus or singing outlet in the Atlanta area for a while now. Email away!

Interesting how many [x]/[y] things seem to be breakfast-related. (Or early-morning generally.) Hypothesis: many could be avoided if caffeine were already ingested?

TexAnne #450:

It's enough to make an art historian run into the woods while tearing her hair.

#487 ::: joann
File that under "need coffee to make coffee"...

cajunfj40 #489:

Indeed. I tried a fancy K-cup-like thing on the theory that it would automate a bunch of stuff. Turned out it had its own failure modes, not x into y, but equally damaging: run out of water in the tank, put the pod in backwards, choose the wrong amount (think about overflowing an espresso cup). All solvable with the amount of attention that I can only pay after I have already mainlined the espresso. Short of an AI to make my coffee I don't know how to solve the conundrum.

As for my favorite x into y, try "the spoons do not go into the garbage can in the pullout right next to the dishwasher", and "the clear flour canister does not go in the fridge as if it were milk". (Oddly enough, has nothing to do with caffeination levels, and at least I've never tried to put the milk in with the flour.)

490
I do keep flour in the fridge - it minimizes the number of unwanted ingredients. (Two-pound bag. It's not a lot of space.)

#490 ::: joann re: milk in fridge

I keep white sugar in a used distilled water jug. At one point it had gravitated to the back of the counter behind other clutter. A visitor became increasingly antsy and finally pointed out that my milk was probably past its expiration date (the content level was visibly at an angle).

Since then, I've kept my backup sugar out of sight.

#490 ::: joann

Can you get a coffee maker with a timer on it? Set up the pot the night before and program it to start brewing about 15 minutes before you get up/need that first cup.

Joann:

If you leave the Keurig turned on overnight. and fill the tank with water and position the pod in the holder without closing it, you should be able to get coffee by closing the lid and pushing one button, which you can probably do even before drinking any coffee.

Pretty and amazing, but mostly pretty amazing. Videos of birds in flight where the flight path is tracked.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/01/amazing-video-clips-visually-isolate-the-flight-paths-of-birds/

Our parish has often sung "Lift Every Voice and Sing" around Martin Luther King day. It's also relevant, though it was written before King was born.

It is a more difficult song than "Precious Lord" (which we've also done), since the melody ranges almost as widely as the Star Spangled Banner. In the _Lead Me, Guide Me_ hymnal, it goes up to an F; it's often good to transpose it down for congregational singing if you can easily manage that.

You might also find the contents of _Lead Me, Guide Me_ worth looking through for more ideas. It's promoted as containing "the full breadth of African American church music that is suitable for Catholic worship...", and I suspect that many of the songs would also be suitable for Episcopalian worship. You can see what songs are included on the publisher's information page.

(I haven't used this edition myself, but our parish uses an earlier edition as a supplementary hymnal. The "Indexes" link on that page gives you a PDF that will tell you all the songs that are included, indexed by topic, scripture passage, metrical structure, and other criteria.)

@495: D'ya suppose they ever crash into each other? "Dammit, George, I was aiming for that branch!" "Well, ya shoulda signaled!"

Mary Aileen: my mother and grandmother have extreme side effects from basically every opiate, right down to dental anesthetics. A family trait I am pleased NOT to have inherited along with the ones I don't mind getting... They hallucinate and become combative.

John A., #483: Yeah, the other problem is that there are a couple of popular songs with that phrase (the one from Les Miz tops the list), which sort of overwhelm the chances of finding less-common ones because they'll be down around page 11 in a Google search.

Xopher, have you considered soliciting a MLK tribute song from the filk community? We do write about social/historical issues -- the legacies of Tom Lehrer and Stan Rogers are important elements of filk.

joann, #490: That sounds like a "shift the thinking stuff to the night before" problem to me. Would a machine with a timer be useful for you, that you could set up in the evening to have your coffee ready when you get up?

(Being a severe Night Person myself, I find that it's much better for me to go to bed a bit later with the things I need to think about already done than to trust I'll have enough functional brain cells to do them right in the morning.)

re which comes first, the coffee or the need for coffee in order to make the coffee:

It's actually a Nespresso, so that the only timer I could use is an outboard one. This would likely interfere with any other uses, and take up significant space around the outlet, which is right behind a rather portly toaster oven. Night Before Setup also relies on my being downstairs after supper, which is less likely than not. What I've ended up doing is remembering to keep an eye on the water level when I'm doing counter cleanup after breakfast. As to the other stuff, each falls in the not-so-often category; after all, I *do* manage to bathe and put my contacts in before approaching the kitchen, so I'm not totally sleepwalking ...

Spouse did have a coffee maker with a timer, but a) brewed coffee, not espresso, and b) not used anymore because of design failure

(Side rant: why does every timer have a different interface, with all instructions printed in 2-pt type, none of them at all intuitive, all relying on markings on the device plastic that are even less legible?)

My former online community had the concept of the Coffee Paradox, which is the fact that it is possible to get into such a state of coffee deprivation that one cannot make coffee.

It has happened to me. More than once.

#500 ::: joann
...markings on the device plastic that are even less legible?

Which is why all my black buttons/dials on black backgrounds have circles around key buttons or lines of whiteout at specific settings.

My microwave has raised dots on strategic numbers on its flat-glass front. It's easy to slide my finger to punch a less common time without having to put on a light.

The mattress tag police evidently consider these alterations outside their purview. I don't care what I've done to the resale value - and c'mon, the 80's CRT I watch VHS tapes on?

One for the atheists secularists. I posted this elsenet before Christmas, but I thought it might be appreciated here

Today we have War against Christmas. Last month
we had compulsory insurance, and next year
we will probably have martial law. But today
Today we have War against Christmas
"Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion¹",
but today we have War against Christmas

This is the White House Christmas Tree. And this
is the National Christmas Tree, whose use you will see
when you're watching the Pageant of Peace. And this is the Muslim Usurper,
which in your case you have not got. "The Court asserted pointedly:
We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being²"
which in our case we have not got

This is the creche, which is always displayed
With a facile nod to tradition. And please do not let me
See anyone label it Christian. You can call it tradition
If you have any right to be here. "Presidential Proclamations and messages
have also issued to commemorate Jewish Heritage Week³"
which no-one would label as Christian

And this, you can see, is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to get on TV, as you see. They run frantically
backwards and forwards, they call this spreading the news.
"Endorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders⁴";
we call this spreading the news.

We call this spreading the news: it is just our tradition,
if you have any right to be here: like the creche and the tree
and the cards, and the "secular legislative purpose⁵"
Which in their case they have not got: and the peace and goodwill
and the crowds running backwards and forwards
For today we have War against Christmas

1. If you have to ask...
2. Lynch v Donelly, Burger J for the court
3. loc cit
4. Lynch v Donnelly, O'Connor J concurring
5. Lemon v Kurtzman, Burger J for the court.

Victoria @495: Oh, WOW! Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

Today it is 5degF outdoors, and so our house was incredibly dry indoors despite that we have lovely radiators and not horrible moisture-sucking ductwork central heating (no insult to your heating method if you like it; purely idiosyncratic opinionating on my part).

So I am spending a bit of time this afternoon "making noodles badly" -- boiling a pot of water for a significant amount of time on the stove to get water vapor into the air. And then eventually I'll top it up and make noodles. :->

We have purpose-built humidifiers, which might do the job with fewer energy inputs, but all of them have fossilized crud on their filters, alas.

Elliott Mason @505: Since I live in the UK, humidifiers are not something we have or ever need. Could have done with dehumidifiers, however, back in my flat where I used to mop about a mug full of water off each of the large* windowsills every morning through the winter until I got double glazing - with trickle vents.

* About 4 ft by 2ft 6, sticking out of the room - great for housing plants, including my "Triffid" rubber plant.