These are very entertaining, but the source... ick. Four ads for essay mills. I'd trust it about as far as I can punt a walrus.*

*With my foot, not on a boat.

"Time and I against any two." I like it.

Interesting list, but I got distracted by the fact that the ones starting with 'The' are alphabetized in the t's. Argh!

(Sorry, knee-jerk librarian reaction.)

"The absent are always at fault."
At my last company, the joke was to blame any problems with the software on whichever developer quit most recently. Didn't matter if they'd never touched that area of the product, and we all knew perfectly well that a person sitting in the room had written it. (It wasn't done in ill will, and everyone knew it was a jest.)

Q. Pheevr @ #1

This moose has always been fond of the Ngaio Marsh version:

"I would trust him about as far as I could throw a grand piano by its stool."

<pause>

"A concert grand, I might add."

Sexual hazing leads to cancellation of school football season.

Summary: When several freshman football players in a NJ high school came forward to report being sexually assaulted by older teammates under the guise of "hazing", the superintendent of schools cancelled the entire football season.

Good news: For once, this sort of thing is being taken absolutely seriously by the authorities.

Bad news: The reaction of many of the parents of other students is... typical. Victim-bashing, minimizing of what happened ("somebody's butt was grabbed"), whining that shutting down the season isn't FAIR! The students filing the charges, and their families, are not being identified because there is reason to believe they might be attacked.

Good news: The announcement of a vigil in support of the victims and the school board's action has gotten a strong positive response, with over 500 people pledging to show up.

6
I understand that several of the students involved as hazers were arrested and charged yesterday. I'm really glad the school is taking it seriously, and really sorry that there are parents who don't get it.

No se ganó Zamora
en una hora.

Lazy person's reference back to OT 200.

If deemed to be an appropriate question by the mods, I'm curious if anybody here has opinions about the Colorado gubernatorial race? I haven't paid any attention lately, just planning to vote a straight ticket, but I'm hearing rumors that that may not be a good idea?

I'm suspicious of these Spanish proverbs. (I hope I'm not merely revealing my duncehood.) I have an M.A. in Spanish literature and worked for five years in the Hispanic section of a university library, and I've never encountered a single one of these.

9
You might check Daily Kos - they're covering the Colorado races.

HLN: Local area man wakes up early Sunday to strange dog noises. Thankfully did not have to negotiate taking-over of oncall cover, for emergency vet trip, as Local Area Dog seems to have recovered.

In case Local Area Dog decides to repeat the scare, unilateral shifting of oncall cover to secondary oncall has been agreed with secondary oncall.

If the sun went out only a Galician would have the blessed patience to relight it.

Hyper-local news: area man sits in aeron chair at desk to work (because Sunday is a workday, like any other). Area catten (a monster with the mind of a kitten in a nearly adult cat's body) discovers she can haul herself up onto aeron seat's armrest by her front claws. Cute? Well, not when said catten enjoys dining on the soft flesh on the inside of area man's forearm.

Mammalian dominance fight for ownership of desk ensues, with arched back, paw-waving, bared fangs. (No hissing or bushed-up tail, thank goodness.)

Rinse, spin, repeat every half hour until area man despairs of ever getting any work done.

Note: Going to bed with a book is no solution. Area catten has discovered how to burrow under the duvet in search of bed mice to attack.

We hit the wall, and then the world goes down
into the dark and nothing good returns
for all we’ve done; what once was gold is brown

as winter comes, like Satan into town,
all minds are numb; just as the river churns
we hit the wall, and then the world goes down.

A sad destruction, but no one will frown
believing that we get what the thief earns
for all we’ve done; what once was gold is brown.

Now skies are darker than a priestly gown
for what one makes the other overturns
we hit the wall, and then the world goes down.

So no one stands for hope or for renown
but gets instead just what the jackass earns
for all we’ve done; what once was gold is brown.

This is the truth: where hero becomes clown
you have to flee before the city burns.
We hit the wall, and then the world goes down
for all we’ve done; what once was gold is brown.

Charles Stross @14: I have found that sometimes mammalian dominance may be established for some time by scruffing the feline, seizing it firmly, and holding it like an infant. Then, slowly tilt the little monster so it is almost upside down.

The loss of dignity resulting from this typically requires a least an hour to recover from.

Needless to say, long sleeves of a durable nature and quite possibly gloves as well are in order.

Brenda Kalt @ #10: Ruth Stout quoted "Take what you want," says God; "take it, and pay for it" in one of her books as a Spanish proverb. So that one at least has been alleged for a long time. (I believe it was in "If You Would be Happy", copyright 1962.)

Fidelio: I favour grabbing said feline by the scruff of her neck and giving her lots of extremely firm strokes, much as a mother cat holds down and washes her kittens.

Menhit, alas, doesn't seem to mind being held like an infant, or upside-down.

Fragano (13/15): Check your posting name; your spam flag seems to be stuck.

I just noticed, Mary Aileen.

re prevThread.996: In one respect the supremes' decision is better this way: when they don't have to rely on a specific law it's much harder to get it overturned.

Apparently in that town football is more important than anything. Sounds familiar.

I saw a couple of seniors from the school addressing the board (or some such body) and saying they weren't going to get a chance to leave high school as champions, due to something they had no knowledge of. One of them actually choked up at the thought of this monumental loss.

Well, not entirely unsympathetic here, but it has a legitimate pedagogical value. People pay the price for the behavior of others ALL the time. More importantly, it drives home the seriousness of these things. Yeah, a bunch of freshmen being sexually assaulted IS more important than your football games, even your football career. Good lesson for them to learn.

What bothers me about this is that so far everyone's acting like it just started this year. It clearly didn't (a sophomore's mom has reported that they did it to HIM last year) and the whooping signal sure makes it sound like a long-time tradition at that school. So the boys charged with it were probably subjected to it themselves, and probably so were freshmen for years or even decades.

I live in Spain and I've heard some of these proverbs, even in everyday conversation. I also have two books of refrains -- refrains are big here -- so I might be able to find them all.

I like "A cat with gloves catches no mice." It means that if you put on airs, you'll fail at your purpose.

Oh, these are marvelous. I particularly liked "An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest."

Charlie Stross @ #14: Our cat Bill the Cat doesn't bother with getting under the covers. He just goes directly for the toes through all the covers, usually starting at about 3 am. This gets him evicted for the night, but it is not conducive to unbroken rest. There's no hope that he'll unlearn this; his former ADC thought it was cute and encouraged it.

Apparently a requirement for both governmental and university financial aid for mature students is being either an orphan or being on good enough terms with your parents that you can ask them to hand over their tax forms. You must also have parents who don't mind handing over personal financial information.

What the what. (I may have just drafted a "... what? Please advise. I can't hit "next" on the application!" e-mail to the financial aid office.)

There ARE ways to render myself an orphan, I suppose, but I'd really rather not. The fact that I quite like my folks and am opposed to murdering people aside, it seems a bit extreme for five hundred dollars of potential bursary.

Cadbury Moose @ 5:

Oh, I *love* that! (Which of her books is that in? I've got all the mysteries on a shelf about 4' from where I'm sitting, and might indulge in a reread once I finish my Deverry reread...)

#25 Theophylact does that stand for "aide-de-chat"?

"He who has no children raises them well." Oooh, burnnn!

Em, #26: Are you still living with your parents? If not, then their income shouldn't even enter into this.

Nope. I haven't lived with them since 2003. I specified this on the form. I'm looking forward to a response to my "here's the situation, please advise me on what to do here" e-mail. Sadly it's Thanksgiving, so that won't be for a couple of days. If it comes to it, I'll swing by the office on Wednesday while wearing grownup drag. ("For Hallowe'en this year, I'm going as a Responsible Adult! Behold, my shoes are difficult to run in and my lips are not their usual colour!")

Jacque @9:
Bob Beauprez would like to seize the national parks and sell them off, believes IUDs cause abortions, thinks the 47% who don't pay federal taxes are freeloading Democratic-voting bums (made this speech even before Romney, in 2010), is a global warming denier, was a fervent supporter of the Bush Imperium: an all-around reprehensible Republican. I don't care for some of Gov. Hickenlooper's positions, on fracking in particular - however I cannot think of a single reason to vote for Beauprez. I'm a yellow-dog Democrat, that means even if the Republicans ran a yellow dog, I'd still (probably) vote for the Democrat..

Em, good luck with the 'grownup drag' dressing, that was funny.. I've been faking it for decades now ;-)

That brought another Beauprez quirk to mind. He likes dressing up in military uniforms, a sort of 'veteran drag', despite being a draft-dodger. I would not have gone into the Army if I could have avoided it, so can't offer much criticism on that score: but parading around in uniforms after draft-dodging is not the act of an honest man.

DougK @32: I grew up in a yellow-dog-Democrat family, and I recall the dog in question being the Democrat. (My father used to say he only voted for a Republican once in his life: "That was for Mr. Eisenhower, and I've regretted it ever since because of Nixon.")

Doug, #32: The traditional definition of "yellow-dog Democrat" is one who would vote for the Democratic candidate even if they ran a yellow dog. I have to admit that I like the implication of your version (i.e. that a canine candidate is superior to any human the Republicans could field) rather better.

Em #31: If you haven't lived with them, and they aren't paying more than 50% of your living expenses, it should be possible to declare yourself an "independent student," no matter what your age is or your relationship with your parents. It's been a while since I reviewed this procedure, but you might ask someone in Financial Aid for the paperwork.

Frequently, the problem is that the financial aid forms are "one size fits all," for the basic applications, and you have to ask to find out what extra paperwork might be necessary--or helpful. Frankly, if you are over 21 and haven't lived with your parents until 2003, the issue shouldn't even come up--but I'm not surprised that it has.

Q. Pheevr @ #1: I'd trust it about as far as I can punt a walrus.*

*With my foot, not on a boat.

I think I'd like to punt a walrus in a boat. We could bring along a picnic lunch.

Sarah @37, oysters, perhaps?

Xopher@200.976: Slightly late, but in case this adds anything to what was said already: Buckwheat in our house is usually in the form of:

1) Whole groats (kasha), toasted in a pan and cooked in water with a little salt (often in the rice cooker, for breakfast). Often mixed with scrambled eggs in the morning.

2) Soba. (Our local Korean and Japanese markets carry fresh soba, which are very nice and cook almost instantly.)

3) Crepes. I'm not sure these are the proportions we use, but they're close:

1 1/4 c. buckwheat flour
3 eggs
1/4 c. vegetable oil
3/4 c. milk
1 1/4 c. water
1/4 tsp. salt

4) Blini. These are rich (especially if you cook them in butter, which works very well) and more of a treat, especially with smoked salmon. Our current go-to recipe is:

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 c. buckwheat flour
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
3/4 c. buttermilk
1/2 c. whole milk
1 egg
2 tbsp. melted butter

Mix dry ingredients. Whisk together wet ingredients. Mix until just combined. Cook either in tiny 1 tbsp pancakes (which is what we do) or larger 1/4 cup sizes. Either way, they freeze well.

Sarah @ #37 – That would undoubtedly be much more agreeable to the walrus. You have a just and generous mind.

Just heard (on SMOFs) that Harlan Ellison has had a stroke. He's partially paralyzed, but doing well other than that. Follow back the comments on
Harlan's website for more details than:
"SUSAN ELLISON
- Sunday, October 12 2014 14:40:3 FROM SUSAN
I will make this brief. A couple of days ago Harlan had a stroke. He's
in the hospital. His right side is paralyzed.
He's comfortable--as possible. We will keep you up-to-date with his progress.
With all kindness --Susan"

Several here will remember Harlan from Iguanacon or earlier. I wish him the best of outcomes from this.

Glinda @ #27

Death at the Dolphin I believe.

Marco in an interview with Alleyn IIRC.

(If I can pry my nose out of Ancillary Sword when I get home tonight I'll check.)

Initial post hung, and this moose cut'n'pasted the message text into a new attempt but forgot to change nym.

Grovels to their lownesses.

Doug K @32: As I say, I haven't been paying a lot of attention, but my starting assumption was that I could safely scratch any R's off my list.

And, yeah. Beauprez, yeah...no. I had him pegged as bad news a long time ago. What prompted the question is that a neighbor mentioned that Hick's record is worrying enough that the local lefty newspaper (the one with all the marijuana ads) was so disgruntled with him that they're endorsing the Green candidate.

Tom Whitmore @41: Ouch. Not a huge surprise, though. I recall he formally retired a couple of years ago, quoting ill health as the reason.

Jacque, I'm not sure that a stroke is ever not a surprise. Perhaps not a huge one, but it's like getting hit by a truck, except the truck is your own brain. More likely to happen to older people than younger (and we just won't think about the Scary Stroke Migraine, will we) but it's not like there are long-term warning signs the way there are for some chronic and escalating conditions.

45
Or as my grandmother described one of hers (a very small one), like being hit by lightning. That one hit while she was playing Scrabble with my brother.

'I'm easily amused' department:
While typing up another journal entry from 1864, I find the phrase 'bug out' in it, used in the same sense that it's used today.

Oct the 17th/64 [snipped] Hood and to Corps to have Gone to the blue Mountains of North Carilina While stewart and his Corps is reported to be Coming back by the same Way they Went up and if he is and Comes here to Rough station the 41st Wil Not be Able to scare him our With A bold front this time as We Did at Marietta but Wil have to bug out for Atlanta to slocum to save our selves

P.J. Evans #47 - so does that mean the phrase has continued in use in the same way since then, or did someone rediscover it or what?

P J Evans #46: Hmm. Had she ever actually been hit by lightning? ;-)

Is there a recognition symbol for fellow fluorosphereans? I was at a private gathering this weekend where I'm sure at one other fluorospherean was at, and I don't think we spoke a word to each other; we certainly didn't identify each other as from here.

I expect the same thing to happen next year, and I want to be prepared.

Hyperlocal news... Local man finds himself tuckerized for the 2nd *and* the 3rd time of his life, both times in Jack Campbell's space opera "Imperfect Sword". This time though, local man didn't wind up with a bullet in his head. Local man's character is still breathing. So far.

Mary Aileen @ 200::953: I think I've just had evidence of a cat holding it in for 60 hours. (Note also discussion a few OT's back about cats being water-conservative, such that they don't need to urinate nearly as often as humans.)

Another cat story: ours has just recently conceived an unnatural affection for a bag of onions -- something about the way the netting and skins crackle, maybe? Makes another door we have to secure -- and I mean secure, as this one is strong enough to pull open the magnetic catch closing the main door to the compartment holding his box. (He hates the cat flap.)

Cheryl @ 200::966: Congratulations on the new job; may you find that having one, even temporarily, makes you more plausible to other employers. I've been through 4 passes of unemployment -- never as nervewracking, but at least once I was panicked into a bad decision; having a job lets you \think/ about offers.

Tom W. @ 200::986: our male carries anything he likes to play with from room to room; we sometimes find felt mouse, bell ball, plastic spring, ... on the bed in the morning. He's not an outdoor cat, but you should hear his let-me-at-them noises when birds land on the shed-roof outside the kitchen window; is being a feral for the first 6 weeks enough to set a hunting instinct?

Xopher @ 22: From my own school experiences, I doubt these students' claim to having had no knowledge of current hazing; they may be confusing knowledge and participation.

and a question for Abi: how's the bike parking where you are? It seems that it's a major problem in Copenhagen; I remember cities in the Netherlands being as dense as Copenhagen, although the story says some Dutch cities are exemplary.

48
Heck if I know, but I'd be willing to bet that it was a phrase that people used in speech rather than in writing.

49
Not that I know of - I think that what she got was a flash of whited-out vision, before things went dim or dark. (I suspect most of hers were microstrokes in the vision area. Her vision was off-and-on for the last several years of her very long life.)

Cool beans on the Tuckerization, Serge! I've always wanted to have that happen to me. I should enter auctions on it or something.

CHip @53:

Most Dutch cities have extensive bike-parking facilities, particularly near train stations. For example, Amsterdam Centraal has multiple racks, a three-story high-rise bike park, a large section of dock behind it dedicated to the purpose, and a disused ferry repurposed into bike parking. And there are guarded bike parks, too, for those who want to pay for it.

But still the bikes would pile up to unmanageable proportions if there weren't squads of people going around with trucks, removing bikes that are not parked in the racks or in designated bike-parking areas.

And even bike racks and parking structures are cleared out annually: a notice goes on all bikes saying "if your bike is still here in two weeks we're taking it away". At the same time breakaway things like really weak zip ties are fastened through the back wheels. Then, two weeks later, they come with an angle grinder and cut the ring locks off all the bikes that haven't been moved.

Outside of the city is a vast facility holding the bikes that have been picked up. You can go there, apparently, and claim yours (though, having driven by it, I can only imagine how hard it is to find any particular needle in that haystack.) I know that rental bike companies go by every week or so for those of theirs that have been badly parked by customers. It's also a minor tourist attraction.

I suspect that a lot of people, on finding their bikes gone, don't presume they've been taken to the impound lot. Amsterdam is, after all, a major nexus of bike theft. So if they don't find it nearby (people do move badly-parked loose bikes if they need access to something the bikes are blocking), they usually reckon it's stolen and go buy another one. (Sometimes in the knowledge that the one they're buying may very well have been stolen. It's the cycle of life.)

Basically, there's a reason most people who cycle and park in central Amsterdam don't have very expensive bikes. Leaving aside the desire not to be attractive to thieves, you always know that what you don't spend on repair in a given year, you'll probably spend on replacement.

Serge #51: I am envious. That is a very cool thing to happen.

abi @ 55... Fragano @ 56... Thanks. It is a neat thing to have happen to you, especially when it's a complete surprise.

67 years ago today, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.

Buddha Buck @50: some have tried to popularize badge stickers with a light bulb icon. I could make some plastic ones with pin backs if there was enough interest (I'd ask reimbursement for postage).

58
Shouldn't there be an earth-shattering ka-BOOM with that?

Over on NPR's website, they've got an article/interview with Cary Elwes about his book on making the Princess Bride. The comments had me rolling, so I thought I'd share the geek joy. I particularly liked the pile-ons that resulted in scene-sized chunks of dialog.

#61: I'll second the recommendation.

I never understood the attraction of the book, The Princess Bride.

The movie, though, is one for the ages. A perfect storm of wonderfulness. (Stardust contender for the good natured fantasy movie title.)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/nsfw-nsfw-nsfw-we-said-nsfw#348ulav

Dinosaur/British Politician slashfic

P.J. Evans #47: might be worth submitting that to the Oxford English Disctionary: might be the earliest attested usage!

Heard in Spain:
"In Spain, even the atheists are Catholic."

(Possibly something originally said by the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno; mostly an ironic comment on the pervasiveness of Catholicisms in Spanish culture.)

Stefan Jones #62 - and I never really understood the appeal of the film or book. Sure, I enjoyed the film when I watched it, but maybe you have to see it as a teenager or something; it's not something I go around quoting or watch again and again or anything.

James Harvey @64, my copy of the OED(best birthday present ever!) has the earliest cite for "bug out" listed as 1953 --

bug, v.3 slang (chiefly U.S.).

(bʌg)

[Origin uncertain; perh. connected with bug v.1 or bug v.2]

intr. To get out; to leave quickly; to ‘scram’.

   1953 in Partridge Dict. Slang Suppl. (1961) 1304/2 If one were to ‘swan’ southward with the purpose of moving on from the enemy, the act would be called ‘bugging out’.    1959 J. Christopher Scent of White Poppies vii. 114 There was no sign of movement.‥ ‘Give it five minutes. If there's nothing showing by then, either he's bugged out or he's asleep.’    1969 Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 21 Oct. 1/7 He also said that Canada is not ‘bugging out’ of NATO.

P J Evans #47, James Harvey #64, Cassy B. #67:

Yep, the OED folks would be psyched to gain almost a century on the citation....

64/67/68
I suspect it was a phrase that people used in speech, and it's just luck that it was written down. (I wonder if it was a regional usage? The writer was a farm kid from central Illinois, just east of Decatur.)

On "bug out" -- I don't think that letter would count as a "publication" for the purposes of etymology in the OED, however -- IIRC, they cite published usages. And this wasn't published until fairly recently.

70
Typed transcription, done in the 1930s, of a journal. It was, at one time, in the oral history collection at North Texas, although it's not in their catalog now.

guthrie @ 66

I don't think it's appeal is based on youth. At least, it's not for me. I like it because it plays with all manner of fantasy and story telling tropes. Plus it hits the comedic/goofy and serious/dramatic notes dead on every time. I like the book because of the ironic humor. I love the movie because it's so un-ironic.

While I don't watch the movie annually, I do like to re-watch it on a regular basis. It's held up well over the years. Although the critics who use the Bechdel Test yardstick will wail and gnash their teeth because Buttercup is the Macguffin. True love (romantic, fraternal, and filial) is the raison d'etre for the whole work. I adore the fact that it's a romantic story for guys -- you know, with all the sports and fighting and stuff.

One can learn a lot from a Google Ngram plot, taking proper care to avoid its pitfalls. One can hunt 19th-century works for occurrences of it. Might it be possible to find examples comparable to, or even earlier than, the one cited by P. J. Evans in #47?

In a few minutes of looking, I don't find "bug out" in the "skedaddled" sense. In the "eyes bulging outward" sense, it may be found in works by Mark Twain, George Ade, and James Whitcomb Riley.

(Actually, "skedaddled" itself seems to show up abruptly in the 1860s.)

An occurrence of yet another usage appears in a note from Llewellyn Jewitt, writing in Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, Etc., Second Series, Volume Ninth, April 21, 1860, page 314.

"bug" (2nd S. ix. 261.) —In Derbyshire this word is very common, and means proud, to make much of. "He will be bug with it," means he will be proud of it, will think highly of it. In Derbyshire phraseology, "Hey is a bit bug out," or, " Ow (she) nedna be so bug," are very common forms of expression. Llewellyn Jewitt.

Cassy B @ #38: I'm down in the Outer Banks for a few days, and I had oysters on the half shell for breakfast. (Peter Singer(!) thinks they're practically vegan.

70
I'm quite sure that the OED would love your citation, if you would be willing to send it to them. Rather lengthy instructions for submitting cites can be found here.

75
It doesn't appear to meet the standards for inclusion, never having been formally published, but I sent them the full entry in the journal.

Here's a little SF in real life: Aviation Week says Lockheed Martin says they'll have a proof-of-concept prototype fusion reactor in about five years and if all goes well a working reactor in ten years.

Working fusion reactors have been "twenty years away" for my entire life. Now it's down to ten. Maybe it'll even happen....

a note from a hard-core lurker:

I had 10 minutes to prepare for a group of writing-minded (mostly) year 9s in the library yesterday, so I gathered
a) a copy of this is just to say
b) a number of parodies & pastiches from this fine website
c) paper and pens

and asked them to write some apology poems. My personal favourite (from a student who normally doesn't actually participate!) was

This is just to say
I cannot write this poem
For I have never done
Anything
To confess to

Thanks for the examples, Making Light!

P J Evans, #76: Whether the OED takes it or not, I'm quite sure that World Wide Words will be interested.

http://languagehat.com/the-history-of-font-names/

Some bits are a little off, but it's a nice flight of fancy.

Tropical Storm Ana is now headed for Hawaii, along a fairly similar track to Iselle's, and might be a hurricane by the time it gets here. Or not, or it might diverge and wander off in some other direction. We did a lot of the preparations earlier this year, though this time we are also getting set to board up the windows if it gets too close.

The main thing I want to point out here is that we have been all the way THROUGH THE ALPHABET in named storms in the Eastern Pacific, and are back to A.

Clifton, #81: Oy. That sounds like 2005 in the Gulf, when we went into Greek letters and the season didn't officially end until sometime in November.

Yesterday I was at a climate change presentation, where we heard about some of the latest on methane releases along the Siberian Arctic shelf. It's massive, over millions of square miles, and ongoing as the Arctic warms and the shallow seabed there thaws. One of the leading scientists, a Russian woman whose name I can't quite remember, estimates there could be in the range of 500-5000 billion tons of ocean floor methane in that region, and if even 1% of the smaller estimate is released, it would double the effect of all the CO2 currently added to the atmosphere.

In short, this is phenomenally bad, and of course has me thinking dark thoughts about how a massive sea floor methane clathrate release along these lines is the beginning of Barnes' Mother of Storms scenario. Unfortunately we're not going to have any uplifted hyper-intelligent cyborg asteroid travelling deus ex machina by next year to pull our nuts out of the fire.

If all of it were to be released... nobody's talking about that, but I expect we could see something on the order of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, maybe even worse. All icecaps melting, temperate forests in Antartica, oceans rising by hundreds of feet, that kind of thing.

The oceans rising hundreds of feet is one thing....

What gives me nightmares is the possibility of all the reproductive cycles getting thrown out of whack and the food web collapsing for the forseeable future (at least, forseeable for anyone we know).

Open threadiness:

Oooh, I've just seen the announcement of the Strange Horizons Bookclub, and might actually try to read the monthly book.

In other news, they are doing their annual donation drive - I quite like SH and others might like to contribute also

HLN: Area woman was out yesterday and discovered halfway across street that one stopped car was a Google camera car (it was hidden by a van in the nearer lane). Gaudy paint job, and the panoramic camera head is about a ten-inch sphere with many lenses.

PJ Evans @86, if one were to google-streetview the address of my husband's place of work, one would see a small group of people (all with faces discretely blurred) in front of the building. It's my husband and his coworkers on their way to lunch. (Even with blurred faces, anyone who has ever met my husband would recognize the beard and Aloha shirt.)

The group spotted the car driving slowly past, and realized just too late to pose that they were being immortalized for history...

87
The next step is finding out how long it takes for the pictures to go up.

87
The next step is finding out how long it takes for the pictures to go up.

Dreaded Server Error!

PJ Evans @88, according to my husband, far longer than he expected; at least six months. Maybe longer.

Somebody was at the First Saturday Arts Market handing out flyers to the artists there. This is the actual text of what they said:

"Calling all ART'S AND CRAFTER'S
The Art's and Craft's market is growing. Are you into making thing for gifts and someone always say's you can make money making this? Will it is true. You can make money selling your Art's and Craft's.
This meeting is so we all can get together and discussed what is needed and a date for the event. I am planning for in October of this year.
The meeting is free at the Oak forest Library."

(Presumably there was a date and time on it that didn't show on the photo I saw.)

I am amused because of the similarity to a vanity-publishing pitch. The fact that they were at an arts event handing out flyers to artists who are already selling their work is just icing on the cake. Also... it's a little late at this point to be scheduling an event in October! At least, if you want anyone to come to it.

Lee: I'm presuming your transcription is accurate and, if so, the syntax also bears an unhappy resemblance to a lot of spam.

90
They actually drove that street earlier this year. What they need are new aerials - the ones they're using are at least four years old, from before the busway reaching it.

PJ Evans @ 93, I assume that the lag time is similar. They still have to look for and blur anything (like people sunbathing nude on their rooftop) that might be objectionable, and they have to put all the location tags in.

In #88 P J Evans writes:

The next step is finding out how long it takes for the pictures to go up.

About eight months, in my experience.

I appear in Google Street View at several different locations.

I was quick enough to get pictures of the Google car as I was being cartographed.

I wasn't actually seeing spam in #95. Autofill prevailed, then I failed to read my own name in Preview. I apologize.

A while back, I found some cite decades earlier on a word for the OED, and sent it in as best I could. Alas, all I remember now is that I found some cite and sent it in. I suspect at the time I didn't imagine I could ever forget it, yadda yadda.

Bill Higgins @95 (et al. above) In eight or so months, if you know where to look, there will be a fading red hat over a blur standing on a street corner waiting for a bus. Apparently Google Street View cars have been busy this month. (The spherical many-windowed turret is a dead giveaway, even before the paint job.)

P J Evans @ 88: The camera car caught me parking in the middle of July this year, and by late September it was updated. (Didn't blur my face - maybe profiles don't trip the automatic process?), but part of my car's roof is quite demurely pixellated.

I was amused, one time, by seeing a streetview image where they'd blurred the face on a museum banner advertising an exhibit. If it's an automagic process, it's not quite tuned.

98
In my case, grey t-shirt, blue jeans, and a folded-up orange shopping bag. (I was collecting mail, and I knew there was a package.)

I saw one recently, too. Don't remember what I was wearing. 'Tis the season, I suppose!

Maybe this is better for the DFD threads, but I tend not to visit those. And maybe there are more intimate circles of acquaintances I should bother with this -- but A) most of those would have a guess who I'm talking abut and B) the existence of the DFD threads alone suggests there are some here who may have practical advice.

For the third, or maybe fourth, time, I've been basically on the front line of talking down depression and/or suicide for a particular friend of mine.* THIS WEEK. And the conversations between haven't exactly been sparkles of life.

Tonight she was on the brink for real.

I got a reprieve at the last moment, in a way, as someone else went to physically be with her until either her girlfriend or husband come home. But last October, the day after a conversation LESS close to the actual deed than this one, she ended up in the hospital for her depression, and I half expect her to be sent there by her doctor tomorrow.

I know her contacting anyone at all and not just going ahead is a good sign that a part of her wants help. But trust me, I am NOT exaggerating that she might have been a few unanswered messages from death. She had multiple means ready to hand.

What I want to know is, does anyone have any advice what and how to say things in these conversations? Anything more to help keep her from that brink? Any way to make it emotionally less hard on me?

Is it possible to get training without actually wanting to volunteer for a general suicide hotline?

(This is not the only suicidal and/or depressed friend I have, and not the first or only situation I've ended up involved as support for a crisis, so the training would be more generally applicable. Though she's the personally closest and the one who's come closest to actual suicide. As far as I know. Still, I know I would not be suited to doing this on a volunteer basis in spite of how it seems I end up there for confidantes.)

Private answers appreciated if nobody wants to drag the thread down: e-mail can work via lenorarose at that gmail place, or, for moderators and those who can see it, at the e-mail hidden in my name info minus the "-nospam" portion.

____________________

* Mostly via texting and facebook chat, because she generally does not want to see people until/unless forced to - and often I basically couldn't leave my son to go in person regardless - and she hates talking over phones. NOBODY will ever tell me texting is frivolous or mindless without getting a very interesting reaction - on a good day, laughing in their face. This is not a good day.

Lee #91: I was at a high end crafts fair in North Carolina where someone was doing the same thing -- handing out similar fliers (poor design, but better spelling, grammar, and punctuation) to folks already selling their stuff. Most of them not from the area. The photographer I was with was sure it was some kind of scam, but couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work.

In Lev Grossman's Magicians series,the Brakebills school is in a place that is half a season off from the rest of the world. I wonder if he got that idea from seeing a discontinuity in the Google Street View or Satellite View photocollage.

Lenora Rose, I know nothing relevant but you have my sympathy and admiration. Also, good point about texting.

Lenora Rose @103: ISTM that your biggest job is to get your friend in touch with someone who already has that training. Even suicide hotlines are meant to tide someone over until they can get real help, not to substitute for the real help.

Most of what I have for you is from Captain Awkward: http://captainawkward.com/2013/03/01/guest-post-what-to-expect-when-you-call-a-helplinehotline/ for instance-- read the comments for some chat- and email-based hotlines.

Also worth checking out for someone in your position; pick and choose what's applicable to you:
http://captainawkward.com/2014/09/25/628-how-do-i-care-for-my-suicidal-mom/
http://captainawkward.com/2014/08/12/613-how-do-i-reach-out-to-my-friends-who-have-depression/

Not from Captain Awkward: the best thing anyone ever did for me, when I was at a point where I didn't believe there was any such thing as help, was call and make me an appointment with the counselor at my university (geography forbade actually picking me up and driving me to it). Not unilaterally; the person did discuss it with me first. But once the appointment existed, I went. Doing all the research to find what's available and what insurance does or doesn't cover, and making the darn appointment, are a huge barrier for a depressed person, and those you don't need training to do for a friend.

Lenora Rose @103: The phrase that keeps jumping out at me is this: "someone else went to physically be with her until either her girlfriend or husband come home".

She's got people around her and they don't add up to a support system. She's being maintained. What ZS @ 107 says is right, especially since she's been hospitalized recently for depression.

So her doctor or her therapist may put her back in the hospital. (That sounds likely, no matter what you do.) Mentally prepare yourself for that. Sometimes this is how it goes.

PJ Evans @ #100:

Apparently, it happens a lot to statues: http://gizmodo.com/google-street-view-is-blurring-the-faces-of-ancient-god-1637791534

Lenora Rose: Best of everything to you & your friend.

Back to the original list, because I'm behind: what is "The best cook drops a whole tomato" supposed to mean?

HLN: Area man arrives in office to find new computer on desk. Is now caught up to year 2013.

Thanks for advice, both here and those who sent privately.

Update on friend: She's at the crisis centre this morning after speaking with her doctor.

I am FINE with her being in the hospital again. I've been sure this whole week that was where this was heading, and mostly a question of how soon.

She - and many depressed people IME - can be VERY GOOD at hiding the symptoms from all but a select few when she wants. I've had reason to compare her deep down texts to her public face in short order more than once.

If anything, the last time she was in the hospital, she got more visible support from friends and partners, because she was no longer able to hide how serious it was. So in that way it's a plus.

She, of course, was fretting over what this might do to her job and money (Yes, even when the health care itself is not a matter of money, the work time is.) Which doesn't exactly help.

Tracie @104: It MAY be a scam, if so, this is how it works. The mark is asked if they'd like to buy tables (or space for their set-up) at the "craft show." The grifter takes the money, and vanishes.

I suspect that if a phone number is given on the flyer, the number goes to an el-cheapo cellphone which the grifter disposes of when necessary.

Another angle is getting credit-card info from the mark, but as that leaves more of a trail, maybe not.

following on from Lori, 113: The other thing is that it could be a direct AW ripoff: the craft show exists, the room's been rented and all that (may not be paid for, of course).

It's just that the only promotion is done to vendors (who pay the grifter money), not customers (who don't). So you, and the rest of the suckers, play to Rose(*). You can't even get on the organizer's case, because the show *did* go off - but "for it to be a success, you have to market it to your customers, so they can enjoy the variety we've made available for them; and everyone else's customers get to see you. It's Networking!"

Note: sufficient cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice. The person could just be trying to set up a new craft show, goes to where she knows she can find crafters to advertise it, and is just as clueless about what else is needed for a "craft show". Same thing happens as above, but no malicious intent. *Usually*, in this case, they don't charge enough for the tables to make any grift; it's just "well, that didn't work. I wonder how <other location> does it?"

(*) A theatre story I have has one actress telling another, opening night: "we're playing to Rose."
"Rose?"
"Rose, dear. ROWS of empty SEATS!"

Lenora Rose: No answers here, but I'm relieved to hear your friend has got some help now, and agree with you that's a good outcome.

Your difficulties with her public and private face sound an awful lot like the situation we've had with our hanai daughter; we try to keep an eye on how she's doing, we ask her how she is, she's closer to us than she used to be, but she still hides it; even in the last couple years there have been two times where we heard just how depressed she was only after she'd attempted to overdose on something and failed.

Depression goes with a lot of shame.

Hyper-local news: area man realizes it's his 50th birthday, can no longer kid himself that he's still a teen-ager.

Congratulations, Charlie!

Felicitous natal anniversary, Charlie.

116
Not a teenager, but still far from old.
May you have a great year!

Jamaica is just getting around to debating the issue of marital rape. That is to say, making forcing a wife to have sex with her husband a crime. Some people have trouble with this rather simple concept.

It's not a lot easier in the US, Fragano -- my state just expunged the last vestiges of the "marital exception" in 2013.

HelenS #121: I was struck by the puerility of the argument. Particularly as the senator in question is someone I would have thought should have known better.

Happy bday, Charlie!

And contrariwise to what you say, I've got a few years up on you, and I still feel like I'm a teenager most days.

HLN: Area man in library discovers that while the SF/fantasy novels and single-author collections are in Fiction on the main floor, anthologies are shelved under Non-Fiction, on the third. "That's somewhere north of ridiculous," he said, "and slightly south of crazy."

"It's the Dewey Decimal System," commented a librarian. "All anthologies go in the Literature section."

HB Charlie, you youngster!

David Goldfarb @ 124... That sounds more like the HeweyDeweyLouie system to me.

David Goldfarb @124

Technically, all books including fiction can go in the Dewey Decimal System, except most libraries choose to pull things out because it makes more sense that way. The way Dewey handles fiction is...unhelpful in a public library setting.

My library shelves anthologies of fiction in fiction. It used to put graphic novels in non-fiction, but those now have their own shelf space. It also gave biographies their own section (shelved by the subjects' last names). These are all pretty common classification hacks.

The one remaining oddity at my library is that plays are still filed in non-fiction.

Anyway, the next time a librarian tells you that, you can say that Dewey has numbers for regular fiction too; if they file anthologies in non-fiction, that was a decision made by their library. (Changing it would require a hell of a lot of work that might not fit in the budget, however.)

Good gracious, Dewey Decimal used to have Religious Fiction filed in the religion section, not literature. I'm glad that's changed. All those "Amish" romances in 244?!

Naomi Parkhust (128): I am reminded that the name for such a massive reclassification of a topic (moving Religious Fiction from religion to literature) is one of my favorite pieces of library jargon: 'phoenix schedule'.

AKICIML, household chemistry edition: I am trying to figure out what actual things are happening in a modeling dough I have made with my kid (and therefore what adjusting various proportions might do).

It is, by volume, 1 part cornstarch, 2 parts baking soda, 2.5 parts water. Mix until dissolved. Heat low while stirring until it coheres into a dough. Let cool. Knead. Now it is modeling dough.

It's an oobleck variant, clearly (cornstarch/water polymer), though the proportions are such that it is Newtonian and not non-Newtonian. Does the huge amount of baking soda (NaHCO₃) cause a very basic environment that moderates the polymerization? Is it just an unrelated, cheap, easily available powder to eke it out and separate the starch from the water? Something else?

Inquiring parental minds want to know.

Query time!
This is from The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler:

But I mixed a tall cold one this time and sat in an easy chair with my shirt open and pecked at a magazine, reading a crazy story about a guy that had two lives and two psychiatrists, one was human and one was some kind of insect in a hive. The guy kept going from one to the other and the whole 'thing was as crazy as a crumpet, but funny in an off-beat sort of way.

Kip: I definitely know that story - both psychiatrists are trying to cure him of the crazy delusion that he is dreaming and has another life which is his real life - but I can't remember author or title. It might be by Alfred Bester or William Tenn; it's definitely a Tenn kind of story, but it's not in my Immodest Proposals anthology. It's not the (vaguely similar) Damon Knight story of the accountant who dreams of being a pirate and vice versa.

HLN: Local man is relieved to see this morning that Hurricane Ana is currently passing about 200 miles dead south of his home, and is unlikely to get much nearer unless she makes an abrupt 90-degree right turn. Looking further on the bright side, we now have everything we need to board up our windows for the next hurricane which may head our way.

Clifton, thanks! I'm glad to hear it's real. I'm hoping now someone will pipe up with exact info. That reminds me, in his essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler singled out a handful of mystery novels, none of which I have managed to stumble across, for praise.

Inquest, by Percival Wilde (he describes it as a regional mystery, and calls it "clever")

Verdict of Twelve, by Raymond Postgate ("an ironic study" … "able")

The Dagger of the Mind, by Kenneth Fearing ("savage" … "intellectual doubletalk" … "soon to be a first series Star Trek episode…") (I made one of those up)

Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper, by Donald Henderson ("tragi-comic idealization of the muderer")

Lazarus No. 7, by Richard Sale ("gay & intriguing Hollywoodian gambol")

I remember Richard Sale from one or more anthologies of hard-boiled pulp stories. The other guys, I only know from Chandler's say-so. I suppose I could search the books online.

The phrase "dagger of the mind" is from Macbeth II.1. I expect you knew that. (Maybe not the act-scene reference; I looked that up on opensourceshakespeare.org.)

Kip W #131: Clearly not a match, but the infamous L. Ron Hubbard had a novel with a similar conceit, Slaves of Sleep. The protagonist gets cursed by an ifrit with "eternal wakefullness" -- when he goes to sleep, he finds himself awake in the ifrit's own world.

Kip W @ #131:

It stuck as a bit Frederic Brown-ish, but I can't peg the story (I was probably thinking of Come and Go Mad crossed with What Mad Universe, but it's not quite the same plot as either.) Mostly I was just tickled by this glimpse of Philip Marlowe, Science Fiction Fan.

I have What Mad Universe, and still haven't read it, but I'm favorably disposed toward Brown. Maybe when I finish the novels I'm reading now, and get ahead of the curve on homework and housework and workwork.

Sarah, yes, I was pleasantly surprised by that as well. About the only other reference I halfway recall to SF in the Chandler books was somewhat dismissive. I gather he probably wouldn't have picked up a science fiction magazine, but there were science-fiction stories in the slick magazines, and for all I knew, he could have been talking about Heinlein or Vonnegut. Could be a case where he dislikes anything clearly labeled as science fiction, but if he started reading it in a respectable mag, he could get into it.

He wrote two fantasy stories that I know of, but there was a tradition of that in England, where he went to school.

The more I think about that story, the more I think based on tone that it was either William Tenn or Bob Sheckley, and I think it was a Tenn. There's something about the structure and rhythm of the story that matches with a couple of his other stories, particularly 'Brooklyn Project' (a classic) and 'It Ends with a Flicker'.

It's possible it's a story called "Will You Walk A Little Faster?" (a Lewis Carroll allusion, of course.) That appeared in the collection Wooden Star which we had when I was a kid, so I would have read it, and it was apparently first published in Marvel Tales magazine in 1951, so Chandler could have read it in the right time-frame to put it in The Long Goodbye. I can't find a synopsis or review of that title anywhere, though. If anybody has the second volume of his collected works from NESFA, it should be in there.

Victoria @ 72:

While I don't watch the movie annually, I do like to re-watch it on a regular basis. It's held up well over the years. Although the critics who use the Bechdel Test yardstick will wail and gnash their teeth because Buttercup is the Macguffin. True love (romantic, fraternal, and filial) is the raison d'etre for the whole work. I adore the fact that it's a romantic story for guys -- you know, with all the sports and fighting and stuff.

You know, there is a fascinating and profitiable conversation to be had about whether it's ideal to separate romantic stories into "for girls" and "for guys" in the first place, thereby supporting and insidiously enforcing the popular distinction between those masculine things that guys are allowed to like and those feminine things that guys are forbidden to like.

It might also be interesting to talk about this constant tendency to throw female characters' agency under the bus in order to write a story that men can relate to, and whether it might have been possible to celebrate male friendships in a movie that *also* celebrated female agency.

But it's very hard to want to engage in such a conversation when the person who started it has already rhetorically disqualified feminist critique as *overreaction* ("wail and gnash their teeth").

I mean, if you want a textbook example of preemptively ridiculing a line of argument without honestly engaging it, there you go.

There are ways to talk about art which you enjoy, while acknowledging that it's got its problematic aspects, while also treating respectfully those of your peers who find that art too problematic for them to enjoy.

This isn't one of them.

The two psychiatrists story is "A Wild Surmise" by Kuttner and Moore.

While I do love the novel The Princess Bride (and tolerate the existence of the movie), it’s certainly worth pointing out that the sexual politics therein fall pretty firmly into the Men Do Things, Women Inspire Men camp. Buttercup is the most obvious case, inspiring pretty much all of the action in the main branch of the plot; but there’s also Valerie, Miracle Max’s wife, who shames Max into helping the protagonists; and Ms Roginski, the fictional-Goldman’s grade-school teacher, who guided him through the world of adventure fiction. Even the series of events that leads to fictional-Goldman writing his “good parts version” starts off with him flirting with a starlet in Hollywood while talking to his wife on the phone.

On Twitter, Patrick just tweeted:

Velma Bowen, RIP. Ave atque vale. PS: Fuck cancer.

Well, damn.

Yes, fuck cancer.

Agreed: fuck cancer.

143/144
Sideways, with a cholla segment.

Damn.

Oh no.

143: Damn.

Death, death, and death to cancer.

Peace, peace, and perfect peace to Velma.

Very sad about Velma.

Kip W: I'm very fond of Fredric Brown's work, and recommend him with the caveat that he's very much a B-writer: almost nothing he wrote was earth-shattering. He was a very good storyteller with nice plots and an amazing sense of humor. Watch for his uses of dreams, both in SF and mystery -- he gets dreams better than just about any other writer.

I should have recognized that Kuttner and Moore story, but I didn't. They say memory's the second thing to go....
I find the movie of The Princess Bride far better than the novel. The novel is too arch for me: Goldman is continually saying "See how clever I am? See? See?" with the movement back and forth between the framing story and the real story. In the film, that's kept to a minimum. The story gets to take center stage.

I am sorry for your loss.

RIP Velma. You're gone way too soon. Damn!

She died at about 3:30 PM (PDT) yesterday. Soren was with her. Elise Matthesen got to spend some time with her just before.

We got the news, via a text from Elise, in the middle of the post-VP instructors-and-staff dinner.

Driving back to NYC today, with Steven Brust (in his car). Still can't even.

Just woke to the news. Not unexpected, but still in shock.

With a UK General Election looming, I may have done something silly.

I have joined a political party.

No, there's no maybe about it. It is silly. I have joined the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. You get a certificate of looniness and a colourful rosette. While I have no plans to stand in the election, they are happy to get volunteers.

The party conference sounds like it might be fun, too. Not like other parties.

Anyway, I figure there are worse ways to spend a tenner, though I am reluctant to recommend voting for them in the General Election. They're light relief, when all is said and done, though they seem to have more success in local government elections.

Just read the news about Velma... I still can't think or say anything about it without descending into a long string of every Anglo-Saxonism I can think of.

Crazy(Which aren't many. There are a lot of repeats)Soph

PS my deepest condolences to her family, partner Soren, and all the people whose lives were touched by hers. I treasure the moments I got with her.

Stefan Jones #143, Patrick Nielsen Hayden #152: RIP, my condolences for all our loss.

Dave Bell@154: I read Screaming Lord Sutch's autobiography two decades ago. An interesting, troubled man. A good pal of mine was a member of the fragment of the SDP that didn't merge with the Liberals; he was abashed when the Loonies beat the SDP, and killed them as a remotely serious party, at the Bootle by-election.

I have to say something about Velma, but I'm not up to the task. God damn, it's just not fair. Thinking of Soren now.

Hm. How legit is a site with a PDF of the Kuttner/Moore story? Are those still in copyright? If not, perhaps a mod will disable this link:

http://www.125books.com/inc/pt4321/pt4322/pt4323/pt4324/pt4325/data_all/books/w/w%20%20A%20Wild%20Surmise%20-%20Henry%20Kuttner%20%20%20C.%20L.%20Moore.pdf

(And if someone can point me toward a book I might purchase, I'd do that too, because Kuttner and Moore.)

re: The Princess Bride, I saw the movie first, and found the narrative intrusions a bit overdone. Then I read the book and thought the same thing, but I still enjoyed both, and found bits to criticize in both (too much Billy Crystal, which isn't something I usually say).

If I had to choose between them, I'd take the movie, just because of the great, quotable lines and scenes. "Marriage…"

"Two Handed Engine" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, where I found the psychiatrist story, is copyright 2004 by the estate. The SF Book Club had an edition back then.

And cancer got two of my best friends too, so, I join in the general fuck it.

Sympathies to Soren and to all who knew Velma.

Will you Walk a Little Faster is about nyvraf jub jnag gur Rnegu nf erny rfgngr, vagnpg rpbybtvpnyyl ohg jvgubhg gur crfxl uhznaf ba vg. Gurl jba'g npghnyyl jvcr bhg uhznaf gurzfryirf, gung jbhyq or ntnvafg gur ehyrf, ohg gurl pbafvqre gung uhznaf ner (nf n fcrpvrf) obhaq gb jvcr gurzfryirf bhg va n juvyr naljnl fb gurl znxr vg xabja gung gurl jvyy cebivqr rkgerzryl rssvpvrag jrncbaf, juvpu jvyy xvyy crbcyr jvgubhg qnzntvat gur cynarg/rpbybtl, vs nalbar nfxf sbe gurz.

It's available in the anthology Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Treasury. This was originally available in two volumes as The Future in Question and Space Mail: it's split into two halves, one being a collection of stories where the title is a question, the other being stories written in epistolary style.* It's also where I met Flowers for Algernon, Who Goes There, The Trap and many others.

*I bought it in Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford when we visited for my brother's graduation in the early 1980s. A hardback of nearly 800 pages original price as I recall £20 (totally out of my price range at that time), reduced to £3.65 due to the cover being torn. It kept me occupied for quite a few hours.

RIP Velma.

Damn. Fuck cancer.

RIP Velma.

Too many gone too soon.

Kip W @ #138:
I have What Mad Universe, and still haven't read it, but I'm favorably disposed toward Brown.

I actually prefer Brown's mystery stories (which occasionally have SF sidebars) -- they're interesting, quirky, and (to my mind) portray relationships with a fair degree of subtlety.

Dave @154: you're not the only one -- last week I joined the Scottish Green Party. (Which is not part of the UK Greens, although they're siblings within a broader umbrella group; specific policy differences include a commitment to Scottish independence which, obviously, isn't something the English Greens are terribly interested in.)

This sort of arose in the wake of the EU elections in summer -- the ballot was such a stinker that I was about to spoil it or make a protest vote, but instead decided to actually read the green platform, and discovered to my astonishment that they'd mutated over the past decade or so into the sort of center-left party that I thought had vanished from our politics. They're running neck-and-neck with UKIP for the aspiring-party-of-protest niche in Scotland, and with some actual MSPs there's the chance to do some good.

Unlike the Monster Raving Loonies I'm deadly serious about this.

Apropos cancer:

What everyone else said.

Requiem Aeternam dona eis, Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis, requiescant in pace. Amen.

Just got the news about Velma...Fuck cancer.

My condolences, to all of us, but most especially her dear ones.

Dave Bell #154: If you stand for election on the MRLP ticket, you will have to change your name to something appropriately silly. Might I suggest 'David William Donald Cameron'?

Indeed: fuck cancer!

And condolences to Soren, to Velma's family, and to all the other people who were close to her.

Well, that's interesting. I don't believe I've ever been Blood Libeled before.

Complete spoilers for this week's episode of a TV show (not an SFF one) below:

Guvf fuvgurnq Tniva Uneevf, jub vf n jevgre sbe PFV (naq unf znal bgure perqvgf), nccneragyl qrpvqrq gung gurfr qnlf ur pbhyqa'g trg njnl jvgu gur Oybbq Yvory ntnvafg Wrjf (lbh xabj, gubfr qnzarq FWJf jvyy trg ba uvf pnfr), fb ur qrpvqrq gb qverpg vg ntnvafg Jvppnaf vafgrnq. Vg'f yvxr Yvggyr Fve Uhtu, rkprcg vafgrnq bs "gur Wrj'f qnhtugre," vg'f n Jvppna zbz jub xvyyf gur xvq gb qb rivy zntvp jvgu uvf oybbq.

Rneyl ba va gur rcvfbqr, Ehffryy (trarenyyl pbafvqrerq n ovg bs n gerr-uhttre ol gur erfg) fnlf fbzr ernfbanoyl erfcrpgshy guvatf, gubhtu gur bgure punenpgre fpbssf ng uvz. Ubqtrf' jrrxyl grqvbhf nffubyrel tbrf jnl bire gur gbc va guvf rcvfbqr, naq punenpgref jub ner hfhnyyl abg nffubyrf tb shyy-ober* rkcbfrq snpvny erpghz guvf jrrx: Fgbxrf naq Fnaqref, va cnegvphyne.

Gur yvggyr ovgf gurl trg jebat rneyl ba ner gur hfhny xvaq bs guvat lbh trg sebz jevgreyl vtabenapr: lbh qba'g qb n fcryy gb onavfu fbzrbar sebz n pbira; lbh whfg gryy gurz abg gb pbzr onpx (va irel sbezny pbiraf n Jevg bs Onavfuzrag znl or vffhrq, ohg vg'f n qbphzrag, abg n fcryy, naq V'ir arire frra bar be jevggra bar). Njxjneq jura vg zrrgf ng gurve ubhfr, n ubyr va guvf jrrx'f cybg.

Ohg gura vg gheaf bhg gung n zbgure jubfr fba vf qlvat bs pnapre xvyyrq n sbbgonyy cynlre gb trg n fznyy nzbhag bs uvf oybbq sbe n urnyvat fcryy. "JUNG?!?!" V rkpynvzrq. Fur fnlf gur Obbx bs Funqbjf fnlf gur "fnpevsvprq bar" zhfg qvr sbe gur fcryy gb jbex.

Jryy, V unira'g frra rirel ObF va gur jbeyq, ohg V'z cerggl pbasvqrag gurer nera'g nal jvgu uhzna fnpevsvpr fcryyf va gurz, abg nzbat Jvppnaf. Gb dhbgr Fgneunjx, "Ab Jvgpurf gbqnl cenpgvpr nal sbez bs uhzna fnpevsvpr. Nalbar jub qbrf vf abg n Jvgpu ohg n cflpubcngu."

Fb nppbeqvat gb Tniva Shpxvat Rng-Fuvg-naq-Qvr Uneevf, Jvppnaf xvyy puvyqera (jryy, grrantref va guvf pnfr), gnxr gurve oybbq, naq hfr vg va gurve anfgl eryvtvbhf evghnyf. V guvax ur zhfg unir zvfgnxra Gur Cebgbpbyf bs gur Ryqref bs Mvba sbe n Obbx bs Funqbjf, orpnhfr gung fher fbhaqf yvxr gur Oybbq Yvory gb zr.

*FJVQG

On a lighter note, I love the fact that "WHAT?" Rot13s into "JUNG?"

Charlie Stross@167: I like the (England and Wales) Greens and might well vote for them in next year's General Election, but I'll do so with a sort of sinking feeling that one or two more General Elections down the line they'll have scraped together enough MPs to prop up one of the Big Parties in a Westminster coalition and be absolutely crucified by their members, and most of the public, for it.

On a different note: Abi put Clive James's Japanese Maple in Parhelia last month; here he is reading it.

I suspect this comic strip would be appreciated by this group of people. (I know that's pretty vague, but if I tried to describe it, it would maybe not do as much for you. No trigger warnings that I'm aware of.)

In re #12:
HLN: local area dog repeats last week's breathing scare. Local area man is currently preparing to take local area dog to the vet.

And a status update on #176:

Local Area Dog is currently staying at Local Vet, until such a time as a reason for the weirdness has been found. At that point, further decisions may have to be taken. Until then, Local Area Man hopes it was just a weird weirdness that is now All Gone.

Xopher @ #172, I would say "WTF??" but apparently that particular target is regarded as safe. Instead I say, to hell with people whose imagination is so cramped they resort to that kind of shit aimed at anyone at all.

Em @#175, not only is that awesome, it just happens that someone I know really, really needs to see it TODAY. Thank you.

Ingvar M, best wishes to Local Dog and family.

Xopher @172: Feorag followed the blood libel down the rabbit hole of history, and the earliest group she could identify at whom it was directed were ... early Christians!

Incidentally, could you let me know the name of that episode so I can keep a weather eye open for it? Here in the UK that sort of material might actually be illegal to show on broadcast/cable TV -- mention hate speech laws and blood libel and the broadcast regulator will get very cold feet.

This is the current contact information for Soren.

Mailing address:

Soren deSelby-Bowen
c/o Tom and Sally Weber
7041 14th Avenue NW
Seattle, WA 98117

Whatever people might want to send/give is fine. However, if people would like to make a donation in Velma's name, here are two that Scraps feels Velma would be happy about people donating to:

The Cancer Patient Assistance Fund at Swedish Hospital Cancer Institute
http://www.swedish.org/services/cancer-institute/how-you-can-help
https://community.swedish.org/donation/sci (direct link to donation page)
Select "Cancer Patient Assistance Fund"
If people want, at the bottom of the page is a place to indicate if a person wants their donation as a tribute (in memory of/ in honor of)

The Washington Healthcare Access Alliance
http://www.wahealthcareaccessalliance.org/
On the main page under "About" click "Need and Formation" and on the bottom of that page click the orange "Make a Donation" button.

Me @ #177:

X-Rays reveals Local Area Dog has a mass (suspected tumour) in his liver. We decided for option A (laproscopic surgery), hoping to stave option B (the final rest) off for a while more.

Charlie Stross @ #179:

Cross-correlating various public info, "Obbx bs Funqbjf" looks like a perfect match (time-wise, director/writer-wise and episode description-wise).

I'm discombobulated. The above information for Soren should have been prefaced with "This is the current contact information for Soren."

[I've added it. —Abi]

Charliet Stross @167

Well, I'll go and take another look at the Greens then. But then I'm not so much centre-left as old fashioned Liberal. Which doesn't mean I have any more truck for where the LibDems have gone in the last five years, but may mean that it's a different set of things about what they have done that pisses me off. My impression of the Greens has always been that they have a nasty authoritarian streak which can't wait to meddle in people's lives with a belief that Ends Justify Means. They certainly haven't historically had an ideology committed to the promotion of human freedom (be it freedom from oppression or poverty): that's not what They're For. They may have have changed: their commitment to localism may help them in this regard. I'll read up.

Steve with a book @174 has it tellingly accurately: all of these protest vote recipients are going to get massive backlash when they get to coalition and have to cut deals that temper their idealism. I genuinely think that the LibDems didn't have much option in 2010: There have been some illiberal other mistakes of their own making (tuition fees...), but I think they've played a crappy hand about as well as they could.

Do slush piles still exist?

I'm newly curious about the publishing process, but most of what I've read on it dates from pre-internet days, in which editors in smoke-filled rooms are faced with mountains of physically-mailed unsolicited manuscripts of generally terrible quality. If I might ask, how close does that image come to reality anymore?

James Harvey@183

Well, the English Greens must be less impressive than the Scottish Greens then: just gone and read their 2014 mini manifesto, and it isn't really a grown-up political document.

a) even on the environment doesn't seem to hang together - no to Nuclear, no to cleaner fracked gas, nothing on dirty coal stations. So presumably some windmills and insulation is going to bridge the gap?

b) doesn't address the issues beyond the environment that I'm interested in at all convincingly. The public ownership pieces I can buy into, but beyond that it's basically a giant shopping list of (entirely laudable) things to spend money on with absolutely no idea how any of it will be paid for in a country that, even with a high growth rate and spending austerity is spending £170BN more than it takes each year and has a £1.3TN national debt.

James Harvey @183... ...would like to point out that, to the best of his knowledge, Charliet Stross is in fact Charlie Stross unless there has been some unexpected change in gender identification.

abi @ 55: a high-rise bike park?!? The mind boggles -- at least until it realizes that the remote dingy cages it remembers were in 1980-1990(*); bicycle commuters in the states may have somewhat more support now. The bit about cheap, possibly pre-stolen bikes is fascinating; sounds like Amsterdam is entropizing toward the all-free-bikes scenario from Callenbach's Ecotopia. (The bikes-rentable-like-luggage-carts scenario now playing in several US cities is not a substitute.)
       (*) (In December 1990 my job moved to the high flank of a ski hill 10 miles out of town.)

Serge @ 62: Everyone's MMV; to me, most of the best parts of the movie came straight from the book. I remember someone at a taping going ooh-you-like-that-too when I was rereading the book between takes, as a refresher for the announced movie; I also know a household that was created by a full-length reading during Boston's 1978 snowfail.
      OTOH, Tom has a point; the movie could be regarded as the Good Parts Version of the book....

followup on Kip W @ 131: I recognized the description at least partly because I've read that Kuttner and Moore worked so well together that one could sit down at a typewriter the other had walked away from and pick up the story without a hitch; I thought "That must be where 'Wild Surmise' comes from!", but I have no proof and the explanation seems a little pat.
      on where Chandler would have run across the story: IIRC, Rocket to the Morgue borrows not just its cast but also the social setting (a circle of writers of popular genres) from life. Would writers have at least skimmed each other's work, out of curiosity/sociability/...?

Mycroft, #114: I love "playing to Rose" and will be adopting it into my own vocabulary. One of our friends was playing to Rose at a media-con in Biloxi over the weekend. He described it as "there are tens of people here".

Nicole, #140: Furthermore, the Bechdel test is (1) not the only measure of the quality of a movie, and (2) more useful in the aggregate than the individual case. If a dozen movies come out every week on average, that's 600-odd movies over the course of a given year. If you then note that only 10% of them pass the Bechdel test, and that 90% of those were marketed as "chick-flicks", that says something significant about both our society as a whole, and the movie-making industry which is a reflection of it. (Numbers pulled out of my ass for this example, but it wouldn't be hard to find real ones.)

Tom, #149: One of the reasons I've never seen The Princess Bride all the way thru is that I find the framing story both twee and unnecessary, and it kicks me out of the mood to watch. Has anybody ever done a "Phantom Edit" version which has just the story in it?

Framing stories are funny things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. There's at least one book that got a full-star downgrade from me on the review because of a weak and completely unnecessary framing story. Conversely, The Interior Life could be described as a fairly-standard quest tale which is vastly improved by the addition of a framing story.

Xopher, #172: Oh FFS. As I recall, this would not be the first episode of CSI to do something like that to a marginalized group. One wonders about the mindset of the producers(s).

Em, #175: Wow. Just... wow.

172
AAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH!

The amount of stupid in that story is - very, very large. Maybe a metric shitload.

Lee (188): When I reread The Interior Life, I sometimes skip the quest portions altogether and just read the framing story (including Sue's interactions with the fantasy characters).

@172: My first response was "I think you[the writer] mean Satanists,and you're wrong about them as well... wait. I don't know what you mean and neither do you."

In other news, has anyone else been having trouble with Ya*** mail? I have like sixteen years (and 10,000+ emails) of cruft in my account, so maybe the problem is me.

Em @175: Yes.

Lee @188, Mary Aileen @190: For me, what makes that book so great is the interaction between the framing story and the fantasy story.

I'm really annoyed, because I can come up with about one point in the Princess Bride [the movie] where it would make a meaningful difference if Buttercup was replaced by the Maltese Falcon. And I really like the Princess Bride. Please tell me I'm missing one.

dcb (193): The interaction between the two, yes. Neither would be as strong without the other. But of the two, I find that I prefer the frame.

Sandy B.: Which point do you see? That would help me answer.

(I get the discomfort adn likign simultaneously. Of Disney's early princess films (Pre-90s), the one I like best is Sleeping Beauty, which is the story of Prince Philip, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, and a beautiful statue.

It doesn't mean it isn't problematic, it just means you like a thing with a problematic aspect. If we could only like things that lacked that, we'd get to like very few things.)

Em 175: Yep. Just what I needed today, actually.

Lila 178: I would say "WTF??" but apparently that particular target is regarded as safe. Instead I say, to hell with people whose imagination is so cramped they resort to that kind of shit aimed at anyone at all.

Yep. And I agree.

Charlie 179: Feorag followed the blood libel down the rabbit hole of history, and the earliest group she could identify at whom it was directed were ... early Christians!

I guess that shouldn't surprise me. They accused early Christians of all manner of things.

Incidentally, could you let me know the name of that episode so I can keep a weather eye open for it?

The episode is called "Gur Obbx bs Funqbjf." No guarantee it will have the same title in the UK, of course, but probably it will.

Here in the UK that sort of material might actually be illegal to show on broadcast/cable TV -- mention hate speech laws and blood libel and the broadcast regulator will get very cold feet.

Yeah, our First Amendment has exceptions, but hate speech is not one of them. Hence eps like this, the Westboro Baptist Church (who are banned from Canada), and so on.

Ingvar 181: Yes, that's the one. I hope your dog will be OK.

Lee 188: Oh FFS. As I recall, this would not be the first episode of PFV to do something like that to a marginalized group.

I believe you're correct, though I can't call an example to mind. Their treatment of the BDSM community seemed reasonably friendly to me, IIRC (and Ynql Urngure became a fan favorite, unless I'm only speaking for myself), but I'm only marginally involved with that community and can't say for sure.

P J 189: Isn't it? Kind of stunned me.

Sandy 191: My first response was "I think you[the writer] mean Satanists,and you're wrong about them as well... wait. I don't know what you mean and neither do you."

Yeah, if they'd just called them "jvgpurf" it would be possible. But no, they use the word 'Jvppna' throughout. It's an intentional attack by someone who did research and then lied, in my opinion.

estelendur 192: Thank you! I went back and looked because you said this.

Sandy 194: Thought I'd toss off half a dozen, but you're right. There isn't a lot. I assume you mean when she pushes the Dread Pirate Roberts down the hill? I think she also clocks the ROUS as it's chewing on Westley, but I'm not completely sure.

It's not that she doesn't do anything (though she isn't exactly a woman of action); it's that nothing she does works. She jumps off the kidnappers' boat, but they reel her in; she demands pledges of Westley's safety, and gets them, but the Asshole Prince is lying; she tries to refuse to marry the AP but he just drags her in anyway.

re 188: My recollection is that in the movie the framing story simply goes away relatively early and doesn't reappear until right at the end.

re 194: Maybe I'm missing something, but until Melito-falco-philia is recognized in law, Buttercup at least has to be a human to make the plot premise work.

C., I've seen it rather recently, and the frame story pops up at intervals throughout. Remember "murdered by pirates is good"?

And I think you're joking, but in case you're not, the point is that Buttercup is an object acted upon by the other characters, and very seldom an actor in her own right.

Em, thanks very much for that.

Anyone else who didn't click through because of the vague description, let me just say it has good artwork and says something important about the power of storytelling.

Thanks to Xopher for saving me the trouble of watching that episode of CSI.

That show has really gone downhill. I used to like the "team of nerds doing forensics," but the whole "Oh, look, yet another serial killer obsessed with the current chief of the department" deal is getting tired.

In fact, I'm tired of serial killers, in pretty much every kind of show, especially ones given to muttering "We're not so different, you and I" to the protagonist.

re 199: Perhaps I am misremembering then.

What I'm saying is that even as much as she is mostly a plot token, that depends upon "mawwage" and "twoo wuff". Even if she is mostly not able to act upon them, her desires are an important force in the plot.

Mwwwahahahahahhhhhhrrnggghh.

There's a trigger for rainy-season funk that no amount of brilliant sun-spectrum light can help:

Damp socks

Coffee. Coffee and chocolate. That might help.

C. Wingate @ 198 and 202: "She does not get eaten by the shrieking eels at this time" and "What kind of a book is this??" are kind of to me key moments that MAKE the story - but if one isn't keen on the framing device, they're interruptions right in the heart of the story.

(Someone did a great youtube video alternating the frame scenes from the Princess Bride with flashes of season one of Game of Thrones... Scary how much that worked.)

Xopher @ 197 - She never fights the ROUS. I can think of a couple where she tries to have agency: jumping off the ship, pushing Westley down the hill, agreeing to go with Humperdinck if Westley is allowed to leave, the dream about being booed and her subsequent demands of Humperdinck, the moment she catches on to his tricks, and her attempt of suicide after the Mawwige. Of which, as you say, the majority are ineffective, though I'm not sure plans that fail remove agency. The one I think has the most impact on the plot is giving herself up to Humperdinck - true that Westley still gets captured and eventually killed (mostly), but it has an impact on where she ends up and how.

Huh. I always saw Princess Bride as *mainly* Buttercup's story. Partly being primed by the title, partly one young woman identifying with another.

Westley waves swords around a fair amount, but as far as I'm concerned, *he's* the one who doesn't do anything. He has no character development arc. Stuff happens, but it's just stuff.

To me, the story is about Buttercup learning to see people as people instead of as categories (generic villains in sizes large, medium, and small turn out to incude some heroes; the "muscle" is clever and kind; etc) and learning to have faith. Her actions don't drive the physical plot, but her *point of view* is where the development is.

I guess I'm a very strange person.

Every time I come back to this thread and see the "One Hundred Spanish" at the top, I'm reminded of Lorca's De Profundis. (One Hundred Years of Solitude would make sense, too, but for some reason that's not what comes to mind first.)

The comments about both Google Street View and the OED reminded me of this:

Boston-area fan Morris Keesan walks for exercise, and to keep it interesting, is currently walking the length of every street in Arlington, Mass., in alphabetical order. Along the way, he is sending corrections/updates to Google Maps.

especially ones given to muttering "We're not so different, you and I" to the protagonist.

Unless they're going to get a response along the lines of "No, I really think the thematic parallels here are tendentious at best."

HLN, Local Area Dog is out of surgery and (so far) doing well.

Stefan Jones @203

Also recommended: warm, dry socks.

Ingvar, I'm glad to hear it!

Stefan Jones@203: Somewhere we have a set of photos (taken over the course of several weeks of hiking across Spain, during which the weather got progressively wetter and colder) detailing the lengths we went to to achieve those most critical things, dry socks. At the start there are socks attached to the backs of hiking packs in the sunshine. Then on jury-rigged clotheslines indoors. Then crammed onto flat spaces near radiators. Then directly on radiators. Then, finally, from Galicia in late fall, a few where we overdid it and nearly burned through a couple of pairs. We might have saved one of those pairs as a souvenir of the trip: you do what you have to do, for dry socks.

AKICIML:
I am looking for miniature/single serving bottles of port wine in the US. All over Europe, sure, but I want them here.

We've got a number of housebound people in my congregation at the moment, and it would be nice if I, the person who preps the communion kits, didn't have to worry about spillage or contamination. Or my people trying to save communion wine in unsealed bottles that then spill in the boxes, etc.

Thoughts, oh wise ones?

Stephen Jones @203, dotless ı @212, as it happens, I'm reading the most recent Seanan McGuire "October Daye" book right now. And I just came to the line (it's stripped of context, so it's not a spoiler): "I love being the person who decides whether or not we let the potential for dry socks lead us to our certain doom."

Dry socks are important.

Cassy B @ 214... That sounds like your typical McGuire observation.

Sisuile, #213: Have you got a big-box / discount liquor store in your area, something like Frugal McDougal's or Specs? If you do, that's where I'd suggest looking first -- they often have sizes that regular liquor stores don't stock, and "airplane bottle" is likely to be one.

216
I know that BevMo (one of those big-box liquor stores) has airplane-size bottles, but I don't know if they have port in that size. Red wine, generally, yes. (I buy brandy in that size for W.H. Harrison pound cake.)

Sisule @213 -- not miniatures, but box wine, perhaps? There are ports available in 2L boxes, which transport generally much more safely than bottles, don't have the same contamination problem, and might be generally more useful. Dan Murphy's has some on their "fortified wines" page == store name without apostrophe .com.au /fortified-wines will take you directly there.

I got a question for the SF publishing insiders. I may be hopelessly behind the times, but what has happened to Baen Ebooks?

I still have my account there. With the recent report of Harlan Ellison's stroke, I thought I'd go over there and find something from Ellison. I had bought a few Ellisons some years ago from them. But all the Ellisons are gone. Both from "my ebooks" and "not my ebooks".

Apparently they were from ereads.com, which was recently bought by Open Roads books. Open Roads exists, and has the Ellison oeuvre, but they seem to have vanished from Baen except for a few sample chapters. I then looked at their "free library", which is much reduced from several years ago. Have they just collapsed since Jim died? Has the fandom made-up "war" over their authors such as Ringo and Kratman hurt them? Did their contract with ereads.com not pass over to the new owners? Are they following Amazon's example of "you don't own that"?

Vicki at 207:
When he is finished doing that, is he going to walk through a town that begins with B?

Jon @219: Baen Ebooks' FAQ says that when the rights to a book revert to the author, they have to remove that book from their site, and that you can try contacting their Technical Support for books you've purchased that you can't find.

(I found this at http://www.baenebooks.com/t-faq.aspx .)

Jon Baker @219, this sort of thing is why I was distressed to discover than when I bought my copy of Hawk from Kobo they did not give me an actual, accessible epub file that I can store on my computer.

I don't want to pirate books, upload them, sell them, or any of that sort of thing. (I want writers to be paid so they keep writing books I like.) I just want to know that when I've bought a book, it's not going to mysteriously vanish....

Cassy

Erik @220:

I don’t know, but Belmont is next to Arlington. As is Cambridge, if he's still not bored--or tired--after Belmont. (I’ve been assuming that Morris chose Arlington for this because that’s where he lives.)

@223: And then Dracut and Everett. (I am assuming he is staying within Middlesex County.)

This writer has an opinion on Buttercup too
http://www.alternet.org/5-most-pathetic-female-movie-characters

#210, 212, 214: I only tolerate wet socks when I know I'm about to go out into the cold and damp again. No sense changing when there's a dog walk coming up!

Socks and travel . . . heh! Last summer (2013) I tagged along with my sister's family on a 2 week trip around Italy. I brought a fair amount of underwear and socks, but it was HOT that summer, and I ended up changing out of sweaty socks on most afternoons and ran short. I hand-washed and dried socks on windowsills, lamp shades, and etcetera. Many times this was in rather fancy 4* hotels my sister had gotten advance deals on. I can picture the staff rolling their eyes.

One trick for starting laundry on its way to dryness: Lay it flat on a towel and roll up the towel. Wring and/or press.

Erik Nelson @ #225, I laughed until I cried at the part where she started listing things she hates.

Lila: It's a measure of how long ago that movie was made that, when I looked up a clip to confirm my interpretation of "ROUS", I shut it off about half-way through. "Buttercup! For the love of Ghu, pick up a stick and hit it!!" When she finally did pick one up, I'm not sure what the hell she was doing with it.

#219 Jon
Forever's an uncertain term, infinities have bounds
And Aleph Null and Aleph One have diff'rent fields of rule
The book downloaded yesterday today gone's off the Web
You can't recover what's been lost your rights are at an eb.

A purchase that you thought secure
To cherish and to read
The right to access lit'ry work your questing mind to feed
The magic key to DRM unlocking's broke or scourged
If even still the server's there your content has been purged.

Me @ #209:

HLN, Local Area Dog passed away during the night. Local Area man is not the happiest person on Earth right now.

Ingvar @230, condolences.

Condolences, Ingvar.

Ingvar M @230, <hugs> if welcome. I'm so sorry.

Ingvar, I'm so sorry.

Ingvar, count me in. I'm so sorry.

I'm sorry for your loss, Ingvar.

Ingvar M: :-( Too much of that going around right now.

AKICIML, UNIX Division: I encountered a weirdness with sed last night which has me completely stumped. I'm processing a text file (basically, the stdout from the ls command). The file's not all that huge: two-three thousand lines, <180 characters per line. But, on my Mac, using Terminal, when I run it through:

sed -e 's#^\(.*/\)\(.*\)#\2\1\2#'

to copy the filename to the front of the line for sorting purposes, it hangs at about line 44. If I take out that second splat, it'll run to completion. (Which is useless, because the second term is then only the first letter of the filename.)

When I copy the text file over to my Panix shell acount and perform the same operation, it works just fine.

Any clues?

Ingvar, please accept my condolences as well. :-(

Ingvar M @230: Condolences. It's never easy. Zen hug if that's acceptable: {{{{hug}}}}. Hope you can remember the happy times.

Jacque @ 237: My first thought is that you're using two different shells on the two different machines, and they're interpreting those characters differently.

I avoid cshell like the plague. I bet one of your machines is using it.

Jacque: that's weird, but as I've never done Mac/BSD, just Unix/Linux/SysV, I can't help. You might try + (one or more) where you have * (zero or more), though - assuming, of course, there *is* something guaranteed after the / .

I wonder, however, if some other solution to your problem is what you want. `sort -t/ -k1` may give you what you want (sort on everything between the first / and the second or EOL) without munging the line (and then having to remove it later). But that's assuming you are using ls and sort, and don't actually want that \2\1\2 format later.

If offline is a good idea, permission granted to abi to pass on my address to Jacque.

Jacque, John @ 237, 240:

I would suspect different seds before different shells being the problem. I'm almost certain Mac is using a BSD-derived sed, but they may be using an older version than Panix (which uses NetBSD). Certainly it forked a long time ago.

Have you looked at line 44 to see if there's anything strange about that line, specifically?

Jacque @ 237: So what does line 44 (that would be girl 22, right?) look like? Names with spaces or punctuation? Could it be that line or one next to it that's causing the problem?

Mycroft W @ 241: I tend to write Perl one-liners, and sometimes actual little scripts, to do these things. I used sed a lot pre-Perl, and awk a little, but these days, I'm likelier to use bc.

Ingvar M #230: My condolences!

John A Arkansawyer & Buddha Buck: Just remembered one filename that I discovered that has a weird character in it. So I ran a test on my Mac with those lines removed. Worked just fine. So somehow that weird character was causing the process to drop off the planet. And for whatever reason, the *NIX on Panix is happily impervious to that issue.

Different seds—yeah, that would make sense, given that my Mac is '09-vintage. (Interestingly, a text file process successfully on Panix comes back with a different weird character in that location. As far as Finder is concerned, that char is just an innocent little "x".)

Mycroft W: Non-issue now, but I am readily emailable via the address at the bottom of the web page linked to my name.

John: Sorry; crossed in the post: "bc", Gracie? Whassat?

Buddha Buck @ 242: D'oh! Yes, that's what the man pages say, at least on OS X and RedHat Linux. The Linux sed is an FSF creation, while the OS X sed goes back.

(My use of sed goes way, way back. Further back would be nice.)

But this works fine on my machine:

ls -d | sed -e 's#^\(.*/\)\(.*\)#\2\1\2#'

It gives me the base filename on the front of the fully-qualified filename. (I'd want a space, me.)

Jacque @ 246: Oh, bc is a little command-line calculator program. I'm used to it and so I use it a lot when I need to be sure my arithmetic is right. (That didn't use to be a problem.)

Buddha Buck is right @242; OSX's implementation of sed and other coreutils are less functional than Linux's. You can install the GNU versions by following the directions here.

John: Oh, trust me, there's a space. Well, tab. The copying the filename to the front of the line is only one of many permutations perpetrated. (Copying the date/time-stamp to YYMMDD-HHMMSS format, sucking the page number out of the directory name, &c &c &c.)

I can well and truly disappear into my belly-button playing with stuff like this. Basically, I'm tidying up an old directory of work files for an art project, identifying the duplicate files, and copying the whole business into a New! Improved! directory with Proper Organization. Hours of geeky fun.

Jacque @237 et seq,

Would it be by any chance that line 44 contains fewer slashes than are needed to match your expression? The combination of multiple splats and a line that does not match can drive some regexp interpreters into a frenzy of desperately trying every possible way of assigning characters to the splats in a futile attempt to find a match. Others notice the problem early, and give up.

The reason that interpreters like that still persist is that there are some (extended) regexps that only they can handle; the better behaved ones are flummoxed.

J Homes.

J Homes: No, it's a near-certainty that the Martian character is the culprit; it first appears on line 45 of the source text.

Lines that have no slashes are dealt with by running a second sed aimed at them specifically:

'/\//!s#^\([stuff]\)\(.*\)#\2\1\2'

Patrick, with regard to the Ben Bradlee Sidelight, isn't it possible he was mocking something other than sissihood? How long did it take the Times to stop sending John Rockwell to rock shows?

John & lorax:

I mentioned different versions of BSD sed because OS X is running a descendent of 4.3 BSD, and Panix is runing NetBSD. Linux, and GNU sed, never enter the picture. For that matter, neither does AT&T sed, which I'm not sure anyone is doing development with.

I don't use bc myself; I use dc for my random command-line calculator needs.

Jacque @ 237:
It looks to me like this Mac OS X sed bug is the same as your bug:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709540/sed-unable-to-execute-some-commands-on-utf-8-encoded-chars
(The URL pretty much summarizes the issue.)

Clifton: Yeah, that sounds like the issue. Of course, the other issue is trying to "knock this off quickly" an hour after I shoulda been in bed. :-)

Someone in the Christian community acknowledges the American Folk Religion currently masquerading as Christianity in much of the country. It's just a passing reference in an article that's mostly about something else, but it caught my eye.

I just read through the Kluwe rant. It is indeed spectacular, profane and funny, if not hilarious. But I'd like to push back on one thing

"#Gamergate [began when] an angry neckbeard posted demonstrably false allegations about his ex-girlfriend, claiming she slept with video game site reviewers for better scores for her games."

I read through the entire Zoe Post last night, and this description of Eron Gjoni strikes me as incredibly unfair. At this point, Quinn and Gjoni's relationship has become about as important as Gavrilo Princip's ideology, but I have a thing about hating to see people misrepresented.

Gjoni spends very little time talking about why Quinn was sleeping with the people he says she was sleeping with. His actual focus is on how she allegedly lied to him, manipulated him with impossible standards and played bizarre mind games. If he had posted a shorter version in the dysfunctional families thread here, he would have probably gotten a lot of sympathy.

When Gjoni brings up Quinn (again, allegedly) sleeping with a man who later hired her, he writes "yes, that means she was having sex with Josh Boggs right before he hired her. No, that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to risk their game’s success on an unqualified narrative designer for side benefits. Zoe is in fact a pretty solid narrative designer." His original discussion of Grayson (the Kotaku reviewer whom most of the discussion has centered on), does not mention Grayson's reviews of Quinn's games at all and Gjoni later adds an update to say "if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature." Obviously, I haven't read everything that Gjoni has written everywhere on the internet, but here he is specifically disclaiming that Quinn's alleged infidelities were for career reasons.

Moreover, Gjoni is certainly angry and has a neckbeard (or did in the images I can find), but he doesn't claim to be anti-feminist: He mentions Quinn's politics as something he found attractive, says that he played and enjoyed her games before knowing her, and here disclaims being an MRA. That isn't what I think of as "neckbeard".

Of course, Gjoni could be an absolutely amazing liar. (And he is claiming Quinn is a pretty good liar, so someone in this story is.) But the level of detail and the documentation he provides makes me think that he is who he portrays himself to be.

None of which justifies the harassment, death threats and horribleness of GamerGate. But, after a month of seeing references to an angry misogyinst jilted neckbeard, I was very surprised to track down what he actually wrote and find something so different.

Regarding journalism, I am so, so proud of the CBC today. What a fantastic job of reporting, calmly and rationally, something that is fundamentally a very scary and emotional thing. I don't know if there's a Canadian journalism award, but if there is, I really hope Peter Mansbridge wins it.

Em, #259: The contrast between the CBC report and the CNN one is disturbing. The first detail mentioned about the gunman on CNN is that he "had converted to Islam" -- which is nowhere in the CBC account, so I wonder whether there's any truth to it at all, or if it's just made up out of whole cloth to support the right-wing narrative.

Lee: He's described as "Radicalized' in the reports I've heard, which translates to "Converted to extremist radical Islam*". So it's there in the CBC reports, too, just not as prominent.

I'll see what tomorrow's reports on same sound like.

* that could be converted from another branch of Islam, not just from outside.

We're a bit out of sync, here in Europe, with events in North America, but the BBC has given the criminal's name, and I reckon it's consistent with a French-Canadian converting to Islam. The name components are mixed. But that's just guesswork.

The Earl of Yarborough converted to Islam when he married, a long time ago now, and the criminal's name also seems vaguely consistent with a marriage, so I am doubt you can read very much into it beyond the mixture.

It's just wide open at the moment. Though it is reported that the Police knew of him, his passport had been revoked, and he had a criminal record. Which means there will be people wondering whether they missed anything. And perhaps with more reason than in some other incidents.

On Klewe's excellent rant (sidebar link): I note his comment that "We're winning the culture war". As Teresa, Patrick and others here have noted (IIRC, in a disturbingly similar context) this applies just as much to SF/F.

The Earl of Yarborough converted to Islam? I'd have thought the chance of that was 1 in 1820.

From a student paper: For America to be ruled in monarchy there would be a huge problem with losing conis and receiving the truth.

I can make neither head nor tail of this.

re 259 et seq.: Meanwhile WTOP (DC news station) pushed the Ottawa attack into the sidebar in favor of yet another "someone climbed the White House fence" story. Is this the fashionable idiocy of the moment?

266
Local news takes priority.

Ingvar @ 230: I am so sorry for your loss. May your memories of your dog be a comfort to you.

Fraganao@265: Losing coins, perhaps? i.e. they would have to change the currency. Just what truth they would receive is a puzzle, though.

David H., #263: And with much the same caveat -- that, while the concepts of both SF and gaming have gone mainstream, the terms themselves are still firmly in the ghetto. As Klewe himself points out, the popular stereotype of a "gamer" remains "a white male in his teens or twenties, living with his parents, unemployed or working a McJob if out of school, with no social skills or social life outside of gaming". For SF, add in "who likes to wear SF-related costuming for inappropriate occasions". The stuff mainstream folks read isn't "science fiction", and the folks who play things like fantasy football aren't "gamers", no matter how many similarities there are. Because that's DIFFERENT.

Ingvar M@230: I'm sorry for your loss.

Stefan Jones@226: I hand-washed and dried socks on windowsills, lamp shades, and etcetera. Many times this was in rather fancy 4* hotels my sister had gotten advance deals on. I can picture the staff rolling their eyes.

Been in similar places, done similar things. There are some grand hotels in historic buildings along the Camino de Santiago, and it's not at all uncommon for pilgrims with a little extra cash or a good internet deal to stay in one of those places in the middle or at the end of the pilgrimage. (At least one of those historic buildings started out as a pilgrim hostel/hospital/hospice in the late 15th Century, making this somewhat fitting.) This means that you treking in with the dust of the road on your boots, go through your evening washing and improvised clothes-hanging routine in a luxurious room, have a very nice dinner, and hike out again the next morning heading for a bunk bed in a pilgrim hostel. I suspect the staff are used to it.

One trick for starting laundry on its way to dryness: Lay it flat on a towel and roll up the towel. Wring and/or press.

Also, if you know you're going to be doing this a lot, it helps to pack a quick-drying microfiber towel and an easily hangable clothesline. Very little packing space and weight in exchange for a lot of drying flexibility. Yes, I've thought a lot about drying socks.

Andrew M @269 (to Fragano) -- "problem with ... receiving the truth" under monarchy is that the author perceives there would be no freedom of the press under a monarchy (not necessarily a true belief) -- s/he believes that it would be difficult to find out what's really going on. And I suspect that s/he believes there would be more income inequality under a monarchy (again, not necessarily true) -- so earning money would be difficult for all but a very few people. The author seems to be conflating monarchy (a system of governance, or people-power) with concentration of wealth (a function of the economic system, mostly) and knowledge-power (not generally studied). They do all run together, but they can be considered separately.

Tom, #272: Not only that, but sie also seems not to realize that both of those things are currently happening right now, right here in America. It's very difficult to find out what's actually going on because of media capture, and it's difficult for anyone not in the top 20% of the economic pyramid to earn money because it's all being siphoned out of the economy to further enrich the 1%.

Fragano, my guess is that your student has heard (certainly not read) the words confidence or maybe conscience.

Lee #270: A good point. Thus the need for this gamer and his publishers to back his message by flexing his social status as an athlete. (In this light, the photo & caption about Vikings vs. Packers at Assassin's Creed was a masterful bit of work.)

Random bit from a friend of mine who took a CPR class lately:

EMT teaching CPR: This is how to check the airway to see if the steak is still in there.
My friend: Steak?
EMT: It's always steak.

Hyper-local news: area man admitted to hospital early this morning as scheduled, discharged from hospital mid-afternoon. Area man is now in possession of four small holes in his abdomen, both the ovaries he went in with, one fallopian tube, and a blessed absence of cyst. He described the experience as "efficient, and mercifully short - I thought I might be in for days and have to be opened up like a ceasearian" and the now-removed cyst as "2000ml, and no, that is not a typo. I knew it was big, but two litres is impressive. I'm not really sure where I was keeping it all."
Area man intends to spend the next several days on the sofa and in bed, doing very little, and has been promised Chinese takeaway for supper.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I am still at a loss. I've been able, most of the time, to work out what a student was trying to tell me. This time I've drawn a double blank.

Gonna drop this here:
The last of the monsters with iron teeth.

Found somewhere on Twitter a few days ago. Quite interesting.

DavidS @258:

I'd be a little less harsh on Gjoni if he hadn't posted it on 4chan, to be honest. Internet shitstorms are kind of their thing. If he didn't know, or acknowledge the possibility, that it was going to take fire, he's not the man I gather he is.

I do, however, loathe the term "neckbeard" with the fire of at least twenty suns. I've had friends with neckbeards who aren't mysogynist jerks or social losers; they just don't shave their necks. I'm much in favor of calling assholes assholes and leaving the fuzzy-necked non-assholes out of the picture.

duckbunny @277:

2 liters? Gracious! Get well soon! (Also, I'm so glad you got access to the appropriate medical resources. I know that was a concern before.)

abi, #280: I'm less charitable than you are. Posting any kind of complaint about a woman on 4chan, which is known to be a cesspit of violent misogyny, is -- in the most literal sense -- asking for the Internet Dogs of War to be sent howling for her blood. DavidS has fallen for the "plausible deniability" defense.

(Also? I thought it had been documented that he posted naked pictures of her.)

duckbunny: You have earned rather more than a bit of rest and some Chinese takeaway with that one. Wow. Glad it sounds like it went well.

Lee; I don't remember that bit, and there's enough vileness I'm actually hesitant to pile more on.

duckbunny (277): Swift healing!

cajunfj40 #279: I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I do agree that our culture is massively overcontrolling its children.

But on the other... that "culture of childhood" can also be downright vicious! Not to mention the exclusion, or worse, abuse, of the "different" ones.... Playing at culture is one thing, but there also need to be grownups watching to make sure the kids don't veer off into unpleasant territory (perhaps prompted by some young sociopath).

Technically, Gjoni isn’t even a neckbeard, just a regular fully-bearded person. The term “neckbeard” properly applies when a beard exists entirely, or primarily, on the neck. It was a style popular in the 19th century; Richard Wagner sported a neckbeard, as did Henry David Thoreau and Horace Greeley. It could even be found in antiquity— check out this bust of Emperor Nero.

And there's a school shooter here in WA, a freshman who (according to some reports, still rumor-level to me) shot up the school because a girl wouldn't date him.

I wonder how much the culture of entitlement, and of over-protection, contributes to that sort of mindset. And how much is just the population getting large enough so we have rare events becoming more frequent. There have been a lot of newspaper stories recently about how what we fear isn't what's likely to harm us (one of the top five fears is still "public speaking", which remains bizarre to me as a fear to rank with identity theft, terrorist action, or plague). I think this may be related to that kind of fear as well. No answers, just questions.

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/baen-inks-deal-with-amazon-makes-major-changes-to-webscriptions-and-free-library/ talks about why Baen has changed their policies.

Avram @285: That Wagner neckbeard post, while being absolutely correct about its main point, is amusingly tone-deaf about the activities of people who might nowadays be so characterized. Aside from the various usage problems pointed out in the comments, my first question was "wow, were people really still a/s/l'ing on AIM in 2007?!"

First, this is the creepiest video I have seen this year. Funny in a Twilight Zone kind of way, as good as the one with Urkel.

Okay, that was the comic relief. And now...

Tom @ 286: And there's also a report he was just last week elected Freshman Homecoming King.

David Harmon #284: I found it interesting because I had never heard much about any sort of kid's culture like that. I remember only bits and pieces of when I was young, but I do remember being able to ride/walk all over in the little woods near the house in the suburbs, and later in the city only the few blocks nearby. I do see kids getting to walk to school alone/in groups at about 5th or 6th grade, but before that it's with parents. I always lived too far away: carpool or bus.

I agree that kids need safe places and trusted adults to go to at need, but they also need more "just go outside!" and adults are too afraid to let them. Me included. Even though the crime rate is demonstrably lower than when I was a kid. Not an easy situation to figure out.

cajunfj40 @ 290: My son is too young as yet to allow out to play alone, but my impression is that at least some of the fear parents have about letting their kids just go out and play is best described as social fear - the worry other parents or peers will judge you, call you abusive, etc. Especially in the suburbs.

It might also be partly a change in where kids are growing up, a greater number in urban places. Even right now with a not-quite-three-year-old in a not entirely nice area of town, I'm more worried about *traffic* should he escape than I am of any other ill befalling him. (Next most worrisome would be the river but he rarely goes down there). We live right in the vicinity of a number of busy streets, some of them between us and his favourite destinations. When I grew up, we lived near enough to a large highway that we're pretty sure that's how we lost a cat, but that highway was off to the side of the neighbourhood, and I could bike to my farthest friends' place, or, less often, to the nearer school and playground the other way without hitting anything but a residential street. I knew how to cross streets and look for cars but there were also fewer cars to look for.

@290 and @291. There is also the fact that there are no other children out to play with. Homework, organized sports, and more distant friends also play a role in emptying the streets of fun young companions for children.

John A. Arkansawyer @289: Too much like Julie Brown's classic song "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" for my taste. n.b.: the YouTube version is not as good as the original single -- worse produced and bowdlerized to remove the menstruation reference, so I'm not linking to it -- go find the original.

Tasteless to mention it in this circumstance, I suppose, but somebody's going to make the reference.

I don't know who here reads Kevin Drum, formerly of CalPundit, Political Animal and now Mother Jones, but he had some rather devastating news about his health today. He could use some good wishes, not necessarily in his blog's comments, but just in general.

That really sucks about Kevin Drum. Aside from Calpundit, back in the early days, I remember him and I working over someone's query in Access in comments. Alas, A Blog maybe? I'm not sure.

It's a big internet. I don't know the man at all, and yet I feel I do. I admire his attitude.

And now a different, entirely selfish, question:

I think I came up with a meme. In the event that it actually takes off, I bought the .com domain name and registered the Twitter account. I've only done that once before, and did it ever fail!

Those of you following me on Twitter have probably seen what I'm talking about. In any event, if it does take off, is there a guide for squeezing the money out while having fun?

Lady Kay@ #292: There is also the fact that there are no other children out to play with.

Lately I've been thinking about the greater freedom allowed to children in the past as being the result of a consensus that children can play outdoors, resulting in safety in numbers. Anyone trying to swipe one of the neighbourhood kids is going to have trouble if they're all hanging out together -- and probably have at least one large family dog following them around.

Lady Kay: I'm lucky and there's a park not infrequented by kids right near my house (It backs right onto a couple of apartment blocks with a parental population, which helps). But point taken; I see fewer kids than you might expect some days. And not many outside it (On side streets and the like). Some of it is being a neighbourhood not quite decided on what it is or what demographic it's about (other than urban) but some is also just... kids don't go out and play. Except in the park.

Sarah #296: At least some of the change is the result of wilful manipulation: Both our leaders and our mass media have been stoking public anxiety, and trading off it, for decades. "The Latest Danger To Your Kids" is a reliable draw whether you're pushing a news show or a power grab, and an easy way to distract voters or consumers from whatever you've done to them lately.

Ta-Nehisi Coates had some insightful things to say about Ebola and politics on Twitter this morning.

I have really mixed feelings about the issue of children running around unsupervised.

I was a free-range kid, and it had a lot of value for me. Most of my outside-running-around time was solo, but some was with other kids, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

I was also a lonely misfit, and easy prey for a child molester who had horses and let a lonely, misfit 12-year-old pet and groom them.

Also, one of the things packs of children can get up to is victimizing other children.

My own kids were somewhat more closely supervised than I was, and I think it was mostly OK. They still had a lot of unstructured "kid time" when adults were not far away and easily accessed, but out of sight/earshot. (They're in their 20s and 30s now).

I'm glad I'm no longer raising kids. It was hard then; it's harder now.

David Harmon @298

While it isn't an obvious reason for the slow change, which we see in the UK too, the Rotherham case reveals sustained, organised, sexual abuse in that South Yorkshire town, against a background of what was at least official indifference, and may be something much darker.

We have had a rising level of awareness, both charity-backed efforts and politicians crying out "Think of the children!", and a big failure of the systems we would expect to deal with cases.

The more political campaigners have also been pushing "stranger danger" for a long time. The charities have recognised that this risks missing so much.

The Rotherham story is, so far, about children in care being lured, and maybe forced, into prostitution. It seems from the reports to mostly in that uncertain age between physical puberty and the legal age of consent. And it seems to have been a high-value market for the pimps to exploit, which to me is scary.

Plenty of money suggests a larger number of customers than one might expect, even if the victims are old enough to pass as of lawful age. It also suggests, as so much other organised crime does, a chance of being able to corrupt the police.

I find myself wondering if some of the paedophile scare is enhanced by the suspicion, in urban areas, that something is happening. It's not just something out of the mouths of politicians.

There are complications with the Rotherham story. The organised pimps were outsiders, from an immigrant group, but that's something that has precedents, such as the Messina Brothers.

I sometimes wonder if those in power want us to be scared, and whether there can be anything with the fear factor of the Cold War.

The rule in my family was that you were supposed to stay within earshot.

Our running-around-outside time was on the big lawn between our house and the neighbors' house - it was the biggest single piece of grass that was visible to all seven houses in the cul-de-sac; the bigger ones were in back yards. Our mothers could see us while we played stuff like red light-green light and freeze tag. Hide-and-seek was generally run off our front porch or our garage door (we had the corner house, with the biggest porch, and the lawns were large and open).

My mother kept an eye on us when we were in our back yard, through the window at the end of the kitchen (it had a louvered-aluminum sunscreen: she could see us but we couldn't see her). Other backyards, the other mothers had their own ways.

Lila, #300: Both of your negative points are well-taken. I ranged all over our neighborhood on my bike, normally by myself, sometimes on my way to or from a friend's house. There was one slightly scary incident when I encountered a couple of the class bullies, who cornered me and trash-talked me for a few minutes but then let me go; that wasn't enough to change my habits, but it did make me more wary of being in that particular block and I changed a couple of my standard bike routes. And yes, a predator with horses would have found me an easy target; fortunately, there were no options for that in my very suburban area.

Jacque @237: an important point to note is that while Apple uses GNU utils for a lot of their UNIX userland, in many cases they use out-of-date versions that they have forked and iteratively patched but which lag the current release by some years. This is because Apple are institutionally allergic to the GPL v3.0 license, and stuck on the latest release under GPL v2.0.

For consistency you might find it useful to run your sed command under perl instead, using s2p or psed -- perl at least should be reasonably consistent between linux and OSX (because the licence doesn't prevent Apple from updating it; they lag a little, but Yosemite is on perl 5.18.2), and I can confirm that Yosemite speaks psed.

Lee, I was never ganged up on per se, but my next-door neighbors (brothers) pulled a pocketknife on me and started making menacing comments about eyes. I derailed them with, "Cool knife! Where'd you get it?" and listening to them brag.

They were nasty. Animal abusers. Fortunately they didn't live next to us for long.

Dave Bell #301: Glancing at WP re the Rotherham case, that looks like a bigger failure, one which overwhelms the question of kids' independence: The government, and possibly the rule of law, failed before a major attack, in this case by the Pakistani gangs. (Note that that sort of infection/group can also be "home-grown", as with some of the US cults -- but either way, they don't get to 4 figures worth of victims without suborning at least one level of local government.) That wasn't "a problem with the kids", it was a major problem with society.

More about kid culture: Songs about hating school.

Nancy, #307: The article asks the very reasonable question of why, if these songs were so popular a couple of generations ago, were they not an incitement to real-life deadly violence in schools? And one answer that immediately presents itself is that those kids didn't hear their parents, or talking heads on the TV, discussing "Second Amendment solutions" to social and political problems. IOW, violent songs fall into the same slot as violent cartoons, obviously removed from the real world... unless they're being reinforced by the words and behavior of adults in the kids' lives.

Lee:

I'll admit, your comment has the flavor, to me, of someone blaming the latest school shooting on rap music, violent video games, or whatever other thing they dislike.

3909
I think you might possibly be missing what she's saying, which is that there are more adults, authority figures in the lives of children, talking about using violence to achieve their ends, and the children around them are picking it up as a legitimate method of handling disagreements.

Holy Hanna, duckbunny! Dude, that's a HUMUNGOUS tumor! Heal well and quickly.

I don't know why a very small proportion of students are more inclined to deadly violence than they used to be, if that's true.

The relationship between violent images and violent behavior isn't simple.

When I was a kid, I took those songs as being about anger rather than actual violence. I have no idea whether any of the students who sung them were inspired to detailed visualization.

HLN: Area sleeper has dream of going online, visiting favorite blog, and finding a new post titled simply "There!" As usual, sleeper wakes up before finding what decisive action or conclusion the post was about.

Lee #308: I'm inclined to think similarly, especially when eliminationist rhetoric is in play.

That said... I still suspect a lot of it is larger population combined with broader visibility (that is, we're hearing about most of the incidents for a large national population, not just the local ones), aggravated by more powerful weapons being available.

But that firepower aggravation is important -- glancing at the Wikipedia article on school shootings, most of the 19th-century examples struck me as "typical" murders and/or suicides that just happened to involve a schoolteacher, principal, and/or student. Most were single victims. But when it gets much easier to kill not just one person, but lots of them...?

albatross, #309: I will admit that it sounds, to me, as if your reading comprehension needs some work.

More bluntly: I trust kids, generally speaking, to be able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Of recent years, however, I've been observing more and more adults who appear to have lost that ability -- and they are real-world parts of their children's environment.

Here's a real-life example for you: a little neighbor boy playing with my friend's daughter in her front yard, both of them about 5 years old. Boy does something that causes my friend to admonish him. Boy (this is a 5-year-old boy, remember) says, "You can't tell me what to do! I'll have my daddy come over here and beat you up!"

You tell me he didn't learn that at home, and not from any cartoon or video game, either.

Abi @ 280... My wife sometimes complains about my neckbeard. I do try to shave it every couple of weeks though.

@256 &prev: ::headdesk::

::headdesk::
::headdesk::
::headdesk::

It appears that the "utf-8-encoded-char" that's choking sed was supplied by Safari.

The file in question was a .webloc file for a jpg. Safari supplies a <title> that becomes the .webloc's filename. The <title> includes the pixel dimensions of the image. So far, so good, and very handy under most circumstances. But it seems that the "x" in "NxN" is in Martian.

Whyee? (It is rare, IME, to run across such rank stupidity in Mac.)

::headdesk::
::headdesk::
::headdesk::

Are adults using the language of violence more? I'm not sure, but I do get an image of a change in the US media. The problematic local adults, like the father of that 5-year-old boy, aren't going to vanish in a puff of magic smoke. There's a behaviour chain back through the generations. But the language of violence has moved from a fictional setting, overtly not-quite-real whether its Clint Eastwood or Bugs Bunny, into the serious political discourse.

I'm picking Clint Eastwood there because of the way his career spans the range. Start with a very traditional, sanitised, TV Western. Then you get A Fistful of Dollars, and it's still obviously fiction. It still has a mythic element. The Dirty Harry movies have something of the same tradition in them, but shifted into a quasi-real contemporary world. Dirty Harry itself has strong echoes of the tradition of the Western, and a key element is the torture question, but there is a shift as that movie series progresses.

Now it's not Harry Callahan choosing violence, in a carefully contrived plot which whittles away the choices as it progresses. (How many people does he kill in that movie? Not so many.) Today, it's the serious and sober politicians choosing violence, even torture.

Dirty Harry sets up the question, but it doesn't resort to the simple answer of the happy ending. It's not a bomb, but the timer has already reached zero when a desperate Harry Callahan makes his choice.

You want another comparison? Compare that hostage, a woman buried alive and left to die, with what happens in Kill Bill 2. Live action has fallen into the unreality of the Tom & Jerry cartoon: the Bride survives the equivalent of the cartoon road-roller, pops back into a 3D shape, and asks for a drink of water.

The way violence is used has changed. It might be half-hidden, but the USA isn't just infested with the rhetoric, it is a country that is at war, which means violence is the default answer.

Jacque #317: Are they using the &times; entity? It occurs to me that it's long past time when sed should be UTF-aware anyway.

Dave Bell #318: You can also compare Dirty Harry with the movies of, say, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or Schwarzenegger.

Serge (316): I think your nym got stuck again.

Drat!

The two-psychiatrists short story is in Sheckley's "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?"

David, Jacque: I don't want to sound all evangelical or anything, but one major point in favour of doing it in psed rather than sed is that psed uses Perl regular expressions, which are UTF-aware and can cope with whacky character classes. Also, Perl regexps have a magic special sauce flag that allows you to write them with white space and comments, making them vastly easier for human beings to read and debug. (Less convenient on the command line, but you can always stick them in a script and invoke it with psed -f [scriptname] <inputfile

Sarah's been pretty much free-range, by intention. We gave her a certain territory that she could roam in, and as she got older, it got bigger. She just doesn't seem as inclined to go out as much any more. She's twelve, she plays sports, and she has homework. We've tried to avoid regimenting her life (like her friend Lulu, who's always too busy and has more or less dropped completely off the radar of possibilities), but she still has soccer after school so much of the time that she had to ask what bus to ride home the day they didn't have practice.

Once in a while she still rides her bike around the two-block area, but she doesn't go out and find kids to play with, even though we chose this neighborhood as target-rich. Some have moved away. Some, she just didn't bond with.

The guys from her old orphanage in China were really impressed that she went out and played soccer. Their daughters just wanted to stay in and watch TV all the time. (She also tried more different foods than their kids.) But somehow, attrition of friends has made the outdoors less appealing to her.

324
I think 12 to 14 years old is about when kids used to stop playing outside so much. At least, that's about when we did.

Jacque@317: "(It is rare, IME, to run across such rank stupidity in Mac.)"

It is common, on the other hand, for Apple to say "It's the future now, [...] is everywhere, get used to it." Be that UTF-8 or wifi or whatever.

(No, they're not always right, not even always aspirationally right. But UTF-8, yeah, pretty much is.)

This is off-topic, but it is an open thread...

I'd really like to kick Ross Douthat's smarmy, privileged butt. (This, upon reading his column in the NYT this morning.) He's a poor historian and a really wretched theologian.

Thank you. I needed to say that.

327
He doesn't seem to have much support from the readers. (One reader proposed that the pope issue a doctrinal statement that the pope is not infallible on doctrine.)

Euccch.

Just got past an extreme bout of "hlepiness" from a couple of friends. I was lamenting the lack of circle skirt PATTERNS available in plus size. Not instructions, which give me even more opportunities for fuck-ups, not straight-skirt or sorta a-line, or trumpet skirts. Not 4 sizes too small but maybe I can futz with it. Just a PATTERN. Already drafted by any of the pattern companies out there - just like they offer in their non-plus sizes. Both my roommate and a sewing friend online kept arguing with me, culminating in "WELL YOU'LL NEVER FIND ONE SO JUST GIVE UP!" and I'm like, well, that's why I'm pissed. I'm allowed to vent, just like you're allowed to vent that you can't give anyone money for pants that fit you in both the hip and the waist simultaneously and we all vent that there's no such thing as a bra in our size under $75.

Not looking for solutions, just looking for sympathy.

nerdycellist (329): My sympathy, both for the pattern-lack and the hlepiness of friends.

329
Having drawn patterns to get what I want, instead of what's available - sympathy. Maybe a pattern design text? I'm very partial to Mabel D Erwin. She shows you how to take a pattern and not only make it fit, but also make changes to it.

Nerdycellist #329: Simplicity 3847 goes up to size 22. My experience with patterns is that, regardless of the measurements on the size charts, they run large compared to off the rack clothing. In my case, 4 to 5 (!) sizes large. YMMV. Good luck.

Unfortunately, according to the measurements on the package, a pattern size 22 corresponds much more closely to a current 16W in ready to wear. At any rate, the largest waist measurement is about 6" short of my own.

I'm currently not interested in anything more complicated than back when I took sewing in jr. hi. I don't have the spoons to do alterations or learn how to draft patterns, or work with large sheets of butcher paper, protractors, and chalk on a string.

There are, ironically enough, some great patterns from Simplicity for attractive, flattering dresses that go up to (and beyond) my size but I think the sewing techniques required are beyond my current skill level. I thought a circle skirt would be a nice thing to get back into the swing of working with a pattern and give me something I could wear to work when I was done. It looks like I'll be doing aprons and throw pillow cases instead. OK, maybe the medieval kirtle pattern I got for xmas last year.

Butterick B5757 looks like if it isn't a circle skirt, adding one or two more gores using the existing pattern might work - it's one of their 'fast and easy' designs. Otherwise, yeah, you get to do the marker on a string bit. (I use soap. It's good for using those little wedge-shaped pieces. It will disappear faster than you think.)

That is indeed frustrating, nerdycellist. I've had to adjust patterns (in my case, down from small adult to child, and not entirely successful) and it's a PITA. If I could have found an actual pattern, the final result would have been a bit less scruffy (which worked okay for the costume, but I would have liked it to be perfect.)

Re kids playing outside, see "How to do nothing with nobody all alone by yourself" and "Where did you go?-out What did you do? -nothing"
by Robert Paul Smith, the first being about children's games and such, and the second being an essay/memoir

On the topic of parents being permissive he says something like "I don't like that. I don't want the first grownup who says 'Hey! Don't do that!' to be a cop"

But he sees today's (1950s) suburban childhoods to be tamer than his own.

Arg. Just saw one of those "things you have to explain to non-Michiganders" articles (it was worse than that, actually, but I'll explain later).

Has anyone here who lived in Michigan ever hear a native call the Lower Peninsula the "LP"? I never did, the entire time I lived there, and never have heard or seen such a reference since. The Upper Peninsula is called the UP, but the "logical" counterpart term is never used, not in my experience.

In addition to many other FAILs, the article keeps referring to visitors to Michigan as "out-of-towners." Since when is Michigan a town? Does the writer also think Africa is a country?

Xopher, #337: Nope, not me either. And WRT your final sentence, quite possibly.

Jacque @317, yeah, just looking at it in my browser’s title bar, I can see that it’s a real multiplication symbol (×) instead of an x. Someone decided to go the extra mile for typographical correctness.

Lizzy L @327:

PJ Evans is right. It's totally worth reading the comments on that article.

nerdycellist @329:

Sympathy. Lots of it.

I'm aware that my own level of sewing is sufficiently high that I sometimes forget what it is not to know things and underestimate difficulties.

Given that, I do agree with the suggestion to pick a gored elastic-waist skirt pattern and either add more gores or widen the existing ones until the waist measurement will go over your hips easily. If you pay attention to grain direction when you're cutting things out, you can get an appealing fall of fabric from a project made up of mostly straight seams. Leave the elastic casing at the waistband open on the inside and you can adjust the snugness of the elastic as you figure out what's comfortable. I've been known to wear a skirt for a whole day with a discreet safety pin adjusting the elastic before sewing it down for good.

(And you should totally give yourself permission to have visible hem stitching, too, or find some trim you like and use it to hide the line of sewing at the bottom.)

On the subject of kids and freedom: as I'm sure many people in this community know, we've tended toward the "liberty" side of the child-rearing force. (As in, I'm actually quoted in Free Range Kids on the topic of life in the Netherlands.) My kids grew up with annually increasing "boundaries" wherein they could wander unaccompanied: first our block, then our quadrant of the village, then the whole village, then the village and the nearby nature reserve. This is much easier with mobile phones and applications like "Find My Friends", which allow me to call them or come to them if I need them or they need me.

Here in the Netherlands, the expectation is that when you finish primary school, you will have to go further afield for secondary school. In our case, the village has no secondary schools, so the kids cycle in flocks to one of the two nearby cities. And the schools expect them to be capable of more than just ant-trail cycling; there are field trip days that start with the kids arriving at the local train station or the theatre in the center of the city. So the slow increase in boundary levels has been pitched at preparing them for the idea that at twelve, the boundaries have to include the next city over. They have to be ready for the traffic, the interactions, the logistics, and the responsibility.

We've been working on it. The ten year old (who skipped a grade, so will be going to middle school next autumn) came into Amsterdam on the bus to have lunch with me several times this summer. The then-twelve year old has done shopping expeditions into the nearby city on his own and with his sister. These things inspire vertigo in me, but not too much fear. That's probably denial speaking.

(Mind you, because my kids feel that they don't fit into their peer community, they haven't taken much advantage of all this freedom; they prefer to stay at home and socialize online. In which they are, to a certain extent, mirroring their parents.)

One thing I often think on: how much of the excellent and comprehensive Dutch sex education is driven by the fact that kids here have vehicles and freedom to roam from the age of about twelve?

abi #341: One thing I often think on: how much of the excellent and comprehensive Dutch sex education is driven by the fact that kids here have vehicles and freedom to roam from the age of about twelve?

I don't think that's a "driving" matter, so much as coming from a common source: Kids are expected to have more freedom, and the responsibility for themselves implied by that freedom.

The US attacks on sex education fit squarely into a long-standing pattern of desperately grasping for control over young people (and women as well). Remember, we have national-level politicians seriously arguing that if teenagers have sex, they deserve to die of cancer (or other diseases).

Andrew Plotkin@326: It is common, on the other hand, for Apple to say "It's the future now, [...] is everywhere, get used to it." Be that UTF-8 or wifi or whatever.

It's a little irksome, though, when they do that and don't make sure the tools they ship are up to the task. (Mind you, when it comes to Unicode this is hardly an Apple-specific failing.)

DavidS @ 258: is it surprising, after the amount of heat generated in Quinn's direction, that Gjoni's original text is exaggerated in people's minds and/or reports? The net is reminding me more and more of Asimov's covert rant (in the form of an idiot in the Foundation Trilogy who looks only at what current writers say) about people who don't look at primary sources. (My mother taught high-school history 1947-1967, so I learned The Word on using primary sources even though I was a science nerd by age 5.)

Lee @ 270: Half of me says that what the mainstream is reading is a pretty thin form of SF; the other half thinks of the human lead in The Silver Eggheads being tricked into reading classics by heated plot summaries even as he says ~"Don't give me any of that mainstream stuff!"

Tom W @ 286: maybe fear of public speaking shows a rare sense of balance? Statistically, people generally poll as fearing some high-attention events way out of proportion to those events' likelihood compared to more common dangers (e.g., death in a car accident, dangers to children from family members rather than strangers).

Lila @ 300 etc: AFAICT, some children will victimize other children absent massive 24/7 supervision; cf current examples such as the New Jersey hazing noted here, or She Kills Monsters (which 20-somethings tell me is accurate). Being myself childless and far from childhood, I can't even guess how much of this is individuals made vicious by their parents and how much is long-inherited culture -- and if the latter, whether it can be worked out over generations (vaguely like The Gate to Women's Country).

Dave Harmon @ 342: that was exactly my reaction; both are tools of empowerment -- which IMO much of the US is leery about because empowered kids can grow up to be citizens instead of subjects.

Wet socks are pain -- when they're the worst thing you can think about. I'm still remembering travel-camping through the wettest summer in Norway's history; when we finally got to Oslo and sun, we rented a camping space, hung up everything (think about trying to sleep in a wet tent going moldy), and stayed in a dormitory for three days while the gear dried out.

The thread on Webb was fascinating, particularly in documenting how long poorly-made choices-of-evil have been happening. I especially noted "In return, [during and after World War II] the government allowed the mob to battle the radical union organizers threatening to shut the ports with impunity." (From context, "with impunity" attaches to the Mob.) Gives a whole new slant to On The Waterfront, in both the blowback shown and the subtext, which (I read as Kazan's claim that he was right to name names to HUAC, for which he was ~ostracized by the creative part of Hollywood.

nerdycellist @329: Have you looked at Folkwear's skirt patterns? (www.folkwear.com)

They go up to 3X and have a lovely Victorian walking skirt (#209), as well as a couple of other simple skirts on their website.

I have only high school home-ec sewing skills, but I've made several things using their patterns (and I hand-sew) and found them easier to use than Simplicity.

Urgent practical rhetorical ethics question:

How effective does a figure of speech have to be for its use of a slur to be ethically acceptable?

How dire the situation?

What if it posits binary division with a parallel balancing slur on the other side of the divide?

I just made music! For some reason this webpage opens eight sample songs at once for me. If I pause about four videos I end up with a complex, but enjoyable, musical experience. ("Drone" does not play well with others IMO.)

And that is today's accidental toy.

John A Arkansawyer @346, IMO slurs, even if balanced, do not make for effective rhetoric, with the possible exception of those used ironically.

John A. Arkansawyer: Are you using one slur to point out the offensiveness of the other? That might be acceptable. ("If you get to call me a pinkskin, I get to call you a bughead.")

OtterB @ 348: I'm convinced slurs can be effective. If I weren't, I wouldn't consider using one. I'm working on one for the one percent: Porko-Americans (or is it Porco-Americans?)

What I'm going at here is where the balance zone is between the effectiveness and the ethicality. (Ethicalness? Ethicicity?) I know that zone exists but I'm trying to define it more precisely.

Carrie S. @ 349: No, this is straight-up slurring.

Are you talking fat-shaming? I'm uncomfortable with that (speaking of attempting to use shame).

Slurs for behavior, maybe. Slurs for physical appearance, uh uh.

Carol Kimball @ 351: You raise an interesting question. Let me rephrase it to address my concern spot on the nose: Is "fat cat" an acceptable way to insult the wealthy and powerful?

"Fat" carries many connotations. I almost certainly will use the phrase "fat cat" when discussing plutocracy. I almost certainly wouldn't use the word "retarded" thus.

I suspect there isn't a general rule that cranks out correct answers to my question.

John A Arkansawyer @352 I don't have a problem with "fat cat" as I think it's a pretty long used term.

My reaction to Porko-American depends on the reference. If it's tying to "pork-barrel politics" then I have no problem with it. If it's fat-shaming, then the problem is not that you're insulting the plutocracy, it's that you're implying that fat=greedy, corrupt, etc. Which makes us non-plutocrat fat people unhappy, and (a) makes your rhetoric ineffective for us and those who sympathize with us, and (b) reinforces the stereotype. Which is why I said that I don't think slurs are generally rhetorically effective.

Chip:

Children can also victimize one another, not because of bad parenting or bad society, but because for some (perhaps many) people, victimizing others is fun. Also, IMO, one reason middle schoolers can be so horrible is that they're still learning (from parents, teachers, and broader society) that their actions can really, genuinely hurt someone else, and that they're responsible for those actions.

In general, I don't think you need to posit an external cause for bullying. Bullying smaller people is probably the natural state, something people have to be taught *not* to do in much the same way we're taught not to eat with our fingers or crap on the lawn.

Oh, that's very different. "Fat Cat" as in living high on the hog, like a Thomas Nast cartoon.

There's got to be a better, lower-level term for Plutocrat* (wild hare: someone who votes for Disney cartoons?) that doesn't schlep along weight issues.

I was prepared to willfully misunderstand Porko-Americans as someone out in the barnyard attempting a hybrid, to which I was going to say it was okay with me as long as it didn't annoy the gilt. But I decided not to.

*digression #2 - last night I read Mike Brown's How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. Recommended.

Otter:

ISTM that slurs are effective when they don't trigger much sympathy from the audience. Which slurs work is a function of the audience, and whom they sympathize with, and whether there's anyone in the audience who's likely to loudly take offense to your slurs.

Dave:

If adults are using the language of violence more, it's not having an obvious effect on crime rates--rates of violent crime are lower than they've been for decades.

albatross @356
You're thinking of "effective rhetoric" as that which persuades the audience in front of the speaker, and in that respect, I fear you're correct.

I was thinking of it on a larger scale, as that which contributes to positive public discourse, perhaps adapting abi's moderator guidelines to ask whether it makes the audience smarter, wiser, or more joyful. I don't think slurs make anyone smarter or wiser, even if they're illuminating a valid point. More joyful ... I am not sure that the laughter thus generated counts as joy. I think joy requires a certain generosity of spirit that would be lacking.

And you kids get off my lawn, too.

Slurs--well-constructed slurs can be a work of art, especially in another language. My former classmate is a master of implying bestiality in Pushtun, part of why she's persona non grata in Pakistan, because she uses those talents on the military force called the ISI.

Slurs--well-constructed slurs can be a work of art, especially in another language. My former classmate is a master of implying bestiality in Pushtun, part of why she's persona non grata in Pakistan, because she uses those talents on the military force called the ISI.

Lady Kay @ 359.5 : In another context, I'm planning on deploying 'pigfucker' in a rather ornate context. I'm hoping to get LBJ-level results from it.

Lady Kay @360 well-constructed slurs can be a work of art

Okay, I loosen my stance on slurs. The ones I object to are ones that demean a group outside the current discussion by using it as a negative comparison point. I agree that well-constructed slurs that hit only the intended target can be works of art, amusing and memorable at the same time. Heck, Shakespeare was a master. Chris Kluwe's gamergate rant is an example, with the exception of "neckbeard," which I know abi objected to.

There exists a saying about "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable". If you substitute powerful for comfortable, you describe the life's work of this classmate.

Lady Kay @ 363: I think there's something fundamentally different in the ethics of punching up versus those of punching down. I suspect that is a very unAmerican belief. That's how it goes.

John:

I guess I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the same actions or rhetorical tricks are okay when used in one direction, and not okay when used in another direction, which is what I get from the "punching up/punching down" distinction. As an example, consider all the really nasty, unfair crap that's thrown at Obama, or that was thrown at Clinton, by right-wing talk radio. That was unquestionably punching up--Rush Limbaugh is definitely less powerful than Obama or Clinton. That doesn't really make me think it's okay.

albatross @ 365: I kind of agree with you.

I also kind of still agree with myself.

Some things aren't okay no matter what. You are certainly right about that. There's a limit on even what the powerless can ethically do to the powerful who oppress them.

I just think that limit is in a different place for different situations.

Have I posted this before?

Part of that is "which side are you on?". Of course I won't loan a hate group my printing press or fix their flat tire. (I still ought to pick them up when they're stuck in the desert.)

The other thing is about the relative power of (say) Clinton and Limbaugh. Clinton was president and a lot of rich people loved him and that's two good strong flavors of power. Limbaugh had a massive platform from which to speak and a lot of rich people loved him, and that's two more good strong flavors of power. They were both heavyweights; Clinton was just a bigger one.

After they grow to a certain point, all powerful people look a lot alike to me.

AKICIML, cat edition: the kitten who turned up in our woodshed this spring, and is now nearly six months old (by vet estimation) and newly spayed, is about to graduate to outdoor access. Recommendations for treats I can use to teach her to come back home when I need her to? I had in mind something I can use to rattle in a jar or can, but other suggestions are very welcome. I am only accidentally a cat person.

(We live in a very rural area, with only one near neighbor; our other cat is indoor/outdoor, and the new kitten's contribution to vermin control is greatly anticipated. Because the cats will only be outside when we're home, and will have to come indoors when we leave, I really need to be able to recall her!)

John: I got a "page not found" from your link.

I agree that power is multifaceted, and it can be hard to compare it. IMO, this makes applying the whole punching up/punching down distinction susceptible to a lot of interpretation and wiggle room. I don't really see this as a good thing.

ISTM that the powerful crapping on the powerless is worse in the sense that they're in a position to do a lot more damage and they're doing it while taking little personal risk, but that seems independent of whether the basic thing being done is okay.

Open-threadiness: Radley Balko follows up on St Louis County government funding by fines.

Funding your government by fines and court costs is inherently corrupting. It warps your court system toward raising revenue (several quotes from Balko's previous story confirm this--judges and prosecutors saying they'd love to give someone some clemency, but they were under pressure to keep the revenue coming in). It makes the relationship of normal citizens with your police way more adversarial--my assumption isn't that I'm fine interacting with the police because I've done nothing wrong, it's that the police are looking for an excuse to write me a ticket. It also uses the mechanism of police and jails as a debt-collection tool, since failing to pay your fines means you get a warrant issued and get locked up[1]. My understanding is that fines are hard to discharge in bankruptcy, too. Some people get into a horrible feedback loop where they keep getting arrested for failing to pay their previous fines, which then runs up more fines and court fees and such.

My guess is that this is happening in a lot of places other than St Louis County, and that it's going to be very hard to get rid of. But we sure need to try.

[1] Though I gather it's possible to make some kinds of payment arrangements to avoid this, if you know how and talk to the right people.

albatross, I think the punching up / punching down distinction is meaningful in situations where the less-powerful have to to shout to be heard at all. It's not then legitimate to cut off discussion because they're shouting, actually or metaphorically, even though it's true that it would be better if nobody shouted. OTOH, shouting by the powerful in the same situation is bullying and would be grounds for stopping a discussion.

John A. A. @366: your "paste" button stuttered, and doubled the url in your link. Which is probably why it's not working for some. Deleting the second copy makes it work okay.

Tom Whitmore @ 371: Thanks! Here is a new and improved this. Contains half the data but all the information!

I have fixed the link in comment 366.

I have strong feelings on this subject, but I'm also conscious that I could very easily hurt people I care about by expressing them.

I will say that I wasn't nearly as amused by Kluwe's rant as many people were, and not just because I do have a problem with terms like "neckbeard". But I am being a wet blanket.

Another bit of inherently corrupting practice is civil forfeiture.

A long time ago, this was justified as something that would only be done to really serious criminals. This story and others I've read tell a very different story. It's a revenue source. Normal people are getting mangled by this system. It's hard to imagine anyone thinking this is a good policy, but somehow, it seems to persist--I imagine because some people are doing pretty well by it, and it mostly doesn't land on powerful or well-connected people.

John:

I agree with the basic argument there--demonizing people from "the other side" is wrong. (More to the point, it's very common to demonize people who, if they're *not* somehow judged as bad people, would weaken your side's arguments. And whole classes of people--that's where "Cadillac-driving welfare queens" came from, after all.)

I found his examples interesting. In the case of Trayvon Martin's shooting, it looked to me like Zimmerman was demonized in the press far more than Martin. (It's hard to be sure, because I'm sure I don't consume a representative sample of the news.) Demonizing Zimmerman was a way of strengthening a narrative that I think a lot of people wanted to push.

In the case of Michael Brown's shooting by Darren Wilson, I've seen more demonizing of Brown and less of Wilson, but certainly some of both. Mostly, I saw demonization of Brown after the footage of the convenience store robbery came out. I also have seen a *lot* of demonization of the local government there, without a whole lot of nuance.

My impression is that most people know the conclusions they're arguing toward, and when they find that those conclusions would be weakened by a given person being sympathetic, they discover that he's actually a demon who has no right to anything but abuse. He's a thug. He's racist. He's hateful. He's ugly. He's a loser[1].

[1] It's disturbing how often, if you pay attention, you will see an implicit justification for treating someone badly because they're a loser. What right does this fat, poor, unsuccessful, dumb person have for complaining about his mistreatment--doesn't he know shits like him have it coming?

John:

I agree with the basic argument there--demonizing people from "the other side" is wrong. (More to the point, it's very common to demonize people who, if they're *not* somehow judged as bad people, would weaken your side's arguments. And whole classes of people--that's where "Cadillac-driving welfare queens" came from, after all.)

I found his examples interesting. In the case of Trayvon Martin's shooting, it looked to me like Zimmerman was demonized in the press far more than Martin. (It's hard to be sure, because I'm sure I don't consume a representative sample of the news.) Demonizing Zimmerman was a way of strengthening a narrative that I think a lot of people wanted to push.

In the case of Michael Brown's shooting by Darren Wilson, I've seen more demonizing of Brown and less of Wilson, but certainly some of both. Mostly, I saw demonization of Brown after the footage of the convenience store robbery came out. I also have seen a *lot* of demonization of the local government there, without a whole lot of nuance.

My impression is that most people know the conclusions they're arguing toward, and when they find that those conclusions would be weakened by a given person being sympathetic, they discover that he's actually a demon who has no right to anything but abuse. He's a thug. He's racist. He's hateful. He's ugly. He's a loser[1].

[1] It's disturbing how often, if you pay attention, you will see an implicit justification for treating someone badly because they're a loser. What right does this fat, poor, unsuccessful, dumb person have for complaining about his mistreatment--doesn't he know shits like him have it coming?

albatross, #365: Limbaugh also used the same level of nasty rhetoric on Sandra Fluke. Which of those two targets is better able to defend themselves? That's an important part of the "punching up/punching down" concept. I think you're cutting close to the edge of the false-equivalence fallacy here.

Re civil forfeiture, we are 100% in agreement. Whether or not it was a good idea as initially conceived I would have to go back and look up -- but as it's evolved, it is most certainly NOT.

And once again, the cure for an abuse of the poor turns out to be a more-equitable tax structure in which the rich pay their fair share, so that police departments don't need to rely on theft from citizens to make up their budgets.

re 374: I think it's more a question of they don't have to care about the damage they are doing to people's lives in their dragnet, but nonetheless it's unconscionable.

re 369: This is a problem across the country and has been for a very long time. It's heavily enabled by state governmental structures in which the counties and municipalities go unsupervised in exchange for not getting any money.

nerdycellist @ 329: It is so infuriating that sewing pattern sizes stop well before actual people sizes do. Particularly because if one wears plus sizes, one has fewer options in ready-to-wear (which is a whole nother rant), so one might want to sew in order to have better clothes to wear.

And I don't blame you on not wanting to draft your own pattern. I'm currently trying to figure out whether I can make a circle skirt using the legs of worn-out jeans, and it involves doing quite a lot of geometry to figure out, if I divide the skirt into panels equal to the number of jeans legs I have, what their dimensions would have to be and whether the jeans legs are big enough. I can't blame anyone for not wanting to do that much tinkering when you just want what should be a simple skirt.

abi @373, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts, but if it would take more spoons than you wish to expend in order to tread carefully on the topic or to moderate the ensuing discussion, then of course don't do so.

379
That's one reason why I recommended that particular book: it gives instructions - with clear drawings - for changing patterns to do things like add fullness (or take it out). It also has a section on how to tell what needs to be done from looking at how it fits. (I did a half-circle cape from her instructions, and it hung beautifully.)

Lee:

I'd say the rhetorical tactics used by Limbaugh against Flake were nasty, and would have been just as nasty if used up instead of down.

Limbaugh attacking Flake was also really despicable because of the massive difference in power--I get a megaphone to scream insults at you, nobody will hear your response.

Those seem like two entirely different things.

There are rhetorical tactics that are nasty, and you ought not to use them even when you're punching up. (Attacking Chris Christie for being fat or Sarah Palin for being a pretty airhead is not going to win lots of points from me, frex, even if the person doing the attacking is much less powerful in any way than their target.) They're wrong because they're wrong, not because of a power imbalance.

It's also nasty for powerful people to stomp on powerless people. That's not about the rhetorical tactics used, it's about the power imbalance. Limbaugh hammering on Flake for a few days on his show, even using decent tactics, would be kinda lousy. (Just not as lousy as combining it with nasty sexualized personal insults. I don't pay much attention to him these days, but as best I can tell, Limbaugh is really a pretty awful human being.)

Re Civil Forfeiture: No argument. Governments should fund themselves on taxes.

A couple of links relating to recent topics:

applying tech to farming in Tasmania

wrt Webb (a Phosphene, not a thread as I said above): recycled Nazis used to spy for the U.S. -- unclear how new this is even as proof rather than assumption, but having it pop up the day after I read Webb's story was ... interesting.

albatross @ 354: I am unconvinced that bullying is a default state that kids need to be taught out of; my gut reactions is that it would be more common if this were true -- although I admit (as noted above) to having little direct knowledge of children. I don't know the state of research on when/how children learn enough empathy to internalize "don't do X to Y because you wouldn't like it if Y did X to you".

albatross @ #369, the SPLC just won a case involving one of those debtor's-prison-style doubling-down-on-fines spirals.

A major problem with using slurs is that you're guaranteed to insult a bunch of people you weren't aiming at.

I don't follow editorial cartoons-- is the trope of rich = fat still in common use? If so, that's remarkably unfair to fat people.

albatross, that's Fluke, not Flake.

CHip #383: I am unconvinced that bullying is a default state that kids need to be taught out of

And yet, it's been happening for a very long time. You can see examples in mythology, f'rex the status of Hephaestos in Greek myth. I would say that there are a lot of approaches to society, and the world, that appear naturally among children. These can be variously reinforced or suppressed by adult leadership, but if there is no adult leadership,the results will be a mix of "luck of the draw" for the leaders among the kids, and constraints from the environment.

The environment has a lot to do with how society develops. In general, I think having not enough resources to go around makes things nastier, as does any external hazard that creates conflicts of interest. As societies get richer and more secure, they have more latitude to to collectively succor the weak, tolerate the different, and give aid to the destitute. (But they may not use it, if those in power can use that power to maintain "old ways" that maintain their own position.) That said, empathy is a human universal: there will always be some people in whom it dominates. But then, likewise for malice....

albatross, #382: There are rhetorical tactics that are nasty, and you ought not to use them even when you're punching up.

Now that I'll agree with, and your examples, and I have called out people on my own side of the argument for doing such things.* But that's significantly different from what you said @365. Satire, for example, is one of the things usually covered under the "punching up/punching down" rubric, and it sounded as though you were saying that that's wrong too.

It's also nasty for powerful people to stomp on powerless people.

Which is exactly the point of "punching up/punching down". Stuff White People Like works because it's parodying the same kind of clueless "analysis" of mainstream white culture that we've seen done about various non-white cultures, by well-off and privileged white folks, far too often. It's punching up. People of Wal-Mart (not linking, TYVM) is nasty in large part because it's punching down.

* Sub-category: trying to promote e.g. fat acceptance by engaging in thin-bashing doesn't work either.

CHip @383
Data-driven farming discussion on this Radio National (Australia) Future Tense show

BTW, the following two episodes are about 'Online Comments - a "wicked" problem'.

@382:

>Attacking Chris Christie for being fat or Sarah Palin for being a pretty airhead

I find the word "airhead" to be a very legitimate reason to attack someone who tried to get a job where she had power over thousands or millions of people. There are probably 100 million adult Americans who would do a better job of governing than she would.

I do hate to go on about her, though; I feel like I could be getting angry about something relevant and important instead.

Well, for targeting a well-crafted slur against over-rich, over-greedy people and no one else: work out from Draco-Americans?

Sandy @389:

The problem, though, isn't that Palin is pretty. We don't want ugly airheads running things either (which does happen, often with the sons of rich or powerful men). And if Palin were a smart woman with the same looks, some people would assume she was stupid, or use her looks as an easy attack if they disliked her policies. (There is *no* physical appearance that means a woman will not be criticized for her appearance.)

I'll be honest. I see Palin from outside the USA, and I am maybe seeing her looks in a different way. "Hollywood", in the wider sense, is rather different from British entertainment. Her looks don't seem to cut her off from anything. Forget for a moment that she's famous. That face wouldn't look out of place on British TV.

There are all sorts of other reasons to pick somebody else, but her looks are pretty ordinary. If she were the girl next door...

I think I'd leave town...

Sandy:

Yeah, I'm just saying that the rhetorical tricks that strike me as nasty when done down also strike me as nasty when done up. If someone unloaded on Palin for, say, getting birth control covered in the insurance she was provided as governor of Alaska in the way Fluke[1] was attacked, I'd think that was nasty.

One problem is that it's a useful (and widely used) strategy for powerful people and their defenders to try to rule all criticism out without having anyone consider the content of the criticism. So you have to actually apply some judgment, and that's hard to do when your side is fighting the other side. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin will be happy to have criticism silenced by whatever rhetorical means.

[1] Arghh!

The thing is, physical violence is wrong, period. And yet there occasions when I would resort to it.

So what I'm looking for is guidance on rhetorical violence. I accept that it is wrong; no one has to convince me about that. I'm looking to understand when to resort to it anyway.

John A Arkansawyer @394, I don't know that there are any good answers to that. My own best answer (and I admit that I've not thought this all the way through) is that it might be appropriate in some circumstances when pointing out hypocrisy, but I have a hard time thinking of any other valid uses. It shouldn't be used to "punch down", and I'm afraid that if it's used to "punch up" it'll generate more smoke than light and won't necessarily be effective.

John A Arkansawyer @394, under what situations would you resort to physical violence even though you think it's wrong? In other words, when is it the lesser of two evils? I'm guessing, when you felt it necessary for the defense of yourself or another, and no lesser response (e.g. leaving) will do. Frustration on your part, contempt for the person you are engaging with, enjoyment of the process, etc., don't justify it. Really, really don't justify it. Also, you would keep in mind that physical violence may escalate and make the original difference, whatever it was, worse instead of better. In addition, if needed at all, the level of physical violence ought to be the minimum sufficient to the need.

I'd apply the same rules to rhetorical violence. Use with reluctance, in defense, and with an eye on resolving conflict rather than "winning." I think it's harder to make a case for necessary rhetorical violence than it is to make a case for necessary physical violence; the risks to the one attacked are different.

Using rhetorical violence could be justified if someone is spreading misinformation that could be dangerous (i.e., "Hey, kids, let's drink some bleach!") or abusive, but if used in the context of a political argument, it just gives of the flavor of "someone is WRONG on the Internet".

OtterB @ 396: "I think it's harder to make a case for necessary rhetorical violence than it is to make a case for necessary physical violence; the risks to the one attacked are different."

And when slurs are involved, there's spillover onto innocent bystanders, which, if as I claim, violence per se is always wrong, is always wronger.

But we live in a Marvelman world, not the MCU.

I think it's not harder to make just the case for rhetorical violence, but to make an argument of any sort around rhetorical violence that is as sound as one around physical violence.

(I'd personally parse some forms of interpersonal verbal abuse into the physical violence bucket, but I don't think I'd do that for impersonal use of that language, and this is a side issue anyway.

John A Arkansawyer @ 398... we live in a Marvelman world

Make sure not to say 'Kimota' too loud.

albatross #369: There are several local governments in the greater Atlanta area that are guilty of using traffic fines to fund themselves. There was a story in the Sunday paper recently about that. Doraville, near which I used to live, was a major culprit. Though Lila and Mary Aileen, I'm sure, will also recall the case of Pine Lake, which became notorious back in the 90s, and which still featured on the list.

When Gail and I were looking to buy a house, Pine Lake was one place we looked. We didn't buy there (the house we looked at was not bad, but its location wasn't the best).

I'm re-reading the Baen reissues of James Schmitz's Hub stories, and for the most part they hold up amazingly well. However, "Legacy" has had a minor visit from the Suck Fairy; it uses a lot of outdated romance tropes and has a strongly-implied "forcible seduction" scene, not to mention a seriously out-of-character moment for his female protagonist to set that up. And his male protagonist is, bluntly, a pig by modern standards, even though he shows to advantage against every other man in the story. But this is the first story in 3 volumes which has made me twitch, and it's also one of his earlier works (most of the Telzey stories are from 5 to 10 years after this), and the non-romance parts of it are well up to his usual standard. So I'm inclined to let it slide and merely note that I'd want to talk with a teenage girl both before and after she read this particular tale.

Fragano: hadn't heard of Pine Lake, but Arcade, just up the road from me, has a longstanding reputation as a speed trap (investigated and cleared at least twice by the Georgia State Patrol). When I was a teenager I heard a lot of cautionary tales about Dacula.

AKICIML: I just acquired a leather-bound copy of the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary published in 1946. The leather is crumbling around the edges causing the zipper(?!) to separate from the cover.

Does anyone know if it would be safe to glue some very light leather to the edge of the endpapers and stitch the zipper back to that?

On unfair rhetorical tactics: I read Kenneth Morgan's biography of Michael Foot the other year. Foot had a pretty distinguished political and literary career up until 1980 when he took over the leadership of the Labour Party from Jim Callaghan, who had been defeated by Mrs Thatcher. Callaghan's government had had an extremely grim final six months but as a person he was pretty well-regarded. 'Avuncular' was often the word used. "Uncle Jim", "Sunny Jim". Callaghan's elderly replacement wasn't your uncle, he was the Communist granddad you never had, escaping from time to time from his old-people's home to shake his stick at his fractious party.

But, yeah, Morgan's biography pointed out that Foot was actually a year younger than Callaghan. Few know or remember this; the image enforced in large part by the political cartoons of the time has stuck. Foot is eternally a scatterbrained old man in most people's minds. The young Labour tearaway of the post-WWII years is forgotten.

re 404: I have to think that part of the reason is that Foot looked as though he were a decade older. The pictures leading the two Wikipedia bios were only taken four years apart, with a three year difference in age.

I was in Corpus Christi this last weekend playing bridge. It turns out that along the waterfront, Corpus Christi has a scale model of the solar system. The scale is 1:10,000,000,000; so the sun was a ball about 5 and a half inches in diameter, and the distance to Pluto was a bit over a third of a mile. I walked it at a leisurely pace in about ten minutes.

No calculators, now: anyone care to guess where, at that scale, you'd put your ball representing Alpha Centauri?

160,000 miles, I think. It's quite possible I've lost track of units or powers of 10.

Showing my work...

If I recall correctly (and I will look it up with a calculator later), a light second is 300,000 km, and a year is about pi*10^6 seconds, so a light year is about 3pi*10^11 km (or, given the level of precision here, about 10^12 km). So Alpha Centauri, about 4.5 ly away, is about 4.5*10^12km. At the given scale, I can knock off 10^10, so it's about 450 km.

(I checked as I said I was, but it would be spoiling to say exactly where my error was).

We're connected to the internet and we're not going to use it. Challenge accepted!

A year is pi *10^7 seconds. I half-remembered that so I checked.

8760 hours in a year, 3600 seconds in an hour. So that's about pi thousand * 10 thousand, pi times 10 million.

I thought Alpha Centauri was about 3 light years away, so I'm not going to use a presumably-more-accurate number from anywhere else in this thread.

3x10^8 m/s * pi x 10^7 s/y = 9 x 10^15 m/y . Times 3 y. So 27 x 10^15 m/ 10^10 = 27x10^5 m= 27000 km . Which is pretty close to geostationary orbit, I think. You can't walk there, but at least you can put it overhead and it'll pretty much stay there!

I don't know if Postmodern Jukebox has been making the rounds among the fluorosphere (thanks, spelling reference!) but I've been listening to some of their stuff. The lead vocal sounds a little flat to me sometimes. They have different lead singers and at least two of them do it. Is it a deliberate historical choice? Am I wrong? Or are they a little flat?

Cover of "Burn"

Cover of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun"

I was actually more curious about where people would place Alpha C. based just on gut feel.

Anyway, no correct answer yet:

Ohqqun Ohpx tbg gur yratgu bs n lrne jebat ol na beqre bs zntavghqr.

Fnaql O. znqr na bccbfvgr reebe: fur(?) unq yvtug tbvat gra gvzrf gbb snfg. (Naq qvqa'g erzrzore gur qvfgnapr gb Nycun Pragnhev, vg'f snegure.)

The real way to do this using the Internet, of course, is to Google "distance to Alpha Centauri" to get a figure in light years, and then Google "[x] light years in miles" (or "kilometers" if you swing that way) and then subtract 10 from the exponent.

Sandy, #410: The vocals on "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" don't sound flat to me; being unfamiliar with the other piece, I wouldn't be able to judge. They have dropped the performance pitch by at least half an octave, and it's not as acoustically bright as the original; could that be what you're noticing?

A Cent is...4 ly away? A quick Google says 4.37. A light year is 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. Times 4 2/5 that's 25.9 tm/41.6 tk. Divided by the scale of 1:10 billion, it's 2590 miles/4160 km.

I believe you were walking much faster than the speed of light, David. :)

Or go to Wolfram Alpha:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+alpha+centauri+*+10^-10

Okay, here goes, without looking at anyone's answers:

Alpha Centauri is a bit more than a parsec away, less than 1.5, split the difference and call it 1.25. A parsec is 2 * 10^5 AU, more or less (20265, but the guess for the distance is considerably less precise than that). An AU is 1.5 * 10^8 km.

So Alpha Centauri is 2.5 * 10^5 AU away, or 2.5 * 1.5 * 10^13 km, or about 4 * 10^13 km. Scale is 1 in 10^10, so that's 4000 km. (Sanity check; Pluto is about 40 AU from the Sun, so 40 * 1.5 * 10^8 = 6 * 10^9 km, which on this scale would then be 0.6 km away, which matches your guess of "about a third of a mile".)

And here I had assumed that "no calculators" implied "no googling" as well, or I'd have done better than a guess at the distance.

Were I to take an iron gun,
And fire it off towards the sun;
I grant ‘twould reach its mark at last,
But not till many years had passed.

But should that bullet change its force,
And to the planets take its course,
‘Twould never reach the nearest star,
Because it is so very far.

(Lewis Carroll)

(I realise that this poem is not strictly accurate.)

Andrew M @417

A quick google yields an average bullet speed of 1,700 miles per hour. (I don't know what an "iron gun" is, specifically, so I'll go with the generic answer.) Another quick google gives the distance to the sun as 92,960,000 miles. So, to two decimal places, it would take about 54682.35 hours for a bullet to reach the sun (ignoring the gravity fields of the earth, the sun, and any other intervening bodies), which is about 2278.43 days, or 6.24 years. I suppose that counts as "many years".... But assuming I didn't drop any decimal points (never a safe assumption, I'm afraid) it would only take about 1719 years for that bullet to reach Alpha Centauri (ignoring gravitational influences).

We had Postmodern Jukebox play for a dance at Worldcon in San Antonio. They're really amazing (nice people, and Scott Bradlee is an incredible perfectionist about the music).

Yeah, but if you're going to shoot the sun (with a gun, not a sextant) you've got to lead the sucker.

I know that's where I'd REALLY get it wrong.

Cassy B @418:

So, to two decimal places, it would take about 54682.35 hours for a bullet to reach the sun (ignoring the gravity fields of the earth, the sun, and any other intervening bodies), which is about 2278.43 days, or 6.24 years. I suppose that counts as "many years".... But assuming I didn't drop any decimal points (never a safe assumption, I'm afraid) it would only take about 1719 years for that bullet to reach Alpha Centauri (ignoring gravitational influences).

You've slipped up somewhere. Alpha Centauri is considerably more than 300 times farther away from the Earth than the Sun is. (More like 200,000 times farther.) So however long it takes to get to the Sun from Earth, at the same velocity it would take more than 200,000 times longer to get to Alpha Centauri.

Lorax @421, <sheepish> yes, I figured it from 24.6 billion miles, not 24.6 trillion miles. What's a factor of 1000 between friends...? <wry grin> So 1,719,000 years....

Sandy B. @410: sounds on pitch to me, but one thing they're not afraid of is dissonance. It's gone mostly out of fashion in modern pop, but older styles liked it just fine, especially the many flavors of jazz that they mostly aim at.

Carol Kimball @420: But wouldn't both the lead and the sucker melt from the sun's heat?

On a slightly more serious note, if you're starting from a stationary position relative to the sun(i.e., not in orbit around the sun), I think it wouldn't matter what direction you fired the bullet, it would probably always end up in the sun. If you start from the surface of the Earth, the bullet will always return to Earth. If you start in the same orbit as the Earth, but not near the Earth, my limited intuitions about orbital mechanics says that the bullet still won't have enough delta-V to reach the sun, but I could be wrong.

Looked at another way, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solorb.html says that an object in a 300 AU orbit (10x Neptune's orbit) will go around the sun once every 5,000 years, while traveling at the pokey pace of 1.7 km/sec, roughly the speed of a 120mm kinetic energy penetrator (an 18 inch long tungsten rod fired from a tank main gun, the fastest conventional military projectile I could find http://defense-update.com/products/digits/120ke.htm)

In other words, the velocity of a bullet is low enough compared to objects in the solar system that your starting position/velocity matter much more than your aim. It's not that much better than throwing a baseball!

Elliott, #423: One modern-pop group that's not afraid of dissonance is R.E.M. -- it's part of their signature sound.

#424 ::: Jeremy Leader

Ah, yes, gravity capture. Let's face it, with my lack of upper body strength (I throw like a girl) I'd be lucky to get a baseball out of ground effect.

Yes, I know it's different.

How about "Get a baseball higher than the Spruce Goose?"

Tim Cook has made me happy today.

Happy Thursday

Stolen from unknown source:

Gamers: "We want games to be considered Art!"

Public: "Fine, they're considered art. Now, as any piece of art is open to, let's turn a critical eye to this art and examine it's impact and depiction of issues of our society and what they are reflections of."
Gamers: "Hang on...wait, I don't like the implications of this. I want games to be considered Art, but I also want them to be immune from any serious critical social analysis like art is normally subject to."
Public: "As we can see here, the depiction of women..."

Gamers: "Shut up! Shut the fuck up, I'll fucking kill you!"

James @427:

And tomorrow it will be 24 years precisely since you came out to me.

I am still touched and grateful that you did so.

James, #427: I love the way he ends that piece.
We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.

Sandy, #428: *snerk* Too true!

A couple of correct answers, yes. From Corpus Christi, if you want to put it in a city, you'd want Port Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; or if a geographical feature will do, then Baker Lake in northern Canada (which feeds into the northwest corner of Hudson Bay).

James @427: thanks for posting the link. I'd heard he'd come out, but I hadn't seen the piece. It's a really good bit of writing, and I recommend others read it.

Video which is actually art: Design Choices in Journey.

The important stuff is in the first half hour or so-- creating a video game which leads to catharsis.

David:

The Sciencenter in my town (Ithaca, NY) has a similar planet-walk dedicated to Carl Sagan. It is at twice the scale of the one in Corpus Christi (1:5x10^9, not 1:10^10). It has 12 stations, each with a roughly 10" "solar radius" hole with a scale model of the planet in question embedded in acrylic filling the hole. The Sun is in the center of downtown Ithaca, and Pluto is at the location of the Sciencenter itself, about a mile's walk away.

The 12th station is for Alpha Centauri, and it's located at the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, Hawaii.

Buddha Buck: Nice!

abi@429

Blimey. 24 years. Blimey. I amazed you have the date by the way! :)

Another wonderful Making Light moment: I have just found your link to "Women Having a Terrible Time in Western Art History". Oh how I laughed.

James Harvey @ 437... My favorite is of the women just sitting there in a forest and one says "Worst Orgy Ever".

So I've gotten hypnotized by this song since buying the record and am now wondering whether anyone knows if this story exists about some given Constantine. The keywords would be Constantine, Satan, and cross of light. This is from one of the most intense records about war I've heard.

439
Try searching for the conversion of the emperor Constantine.

P J Evans @ 440: Ah, yes! I see what you mean. That was easier than I thought.

I was more than a little startled by the amount of what looks like hate literature that comes up with my suggested keywords, so I was sidling up to this carefully.

David Goldfarb: Port of Spain?

Well. Last Friday, it being both a comp day and my 50th birthday, the FF and I drove up to my parents' house for a lovely dinner, and cake.

I've been this old for a week, and I've noticed that I'm mixing up which cats go in which of my cat stories -- sure, switching Cinder for Salem, both of them long-haired black cats, is a reasonable error -- but now I have this urge to go out on the lawn and shake my cane. I don't even have a cane.

What next?

Ginger (443): I turned 50 last year. What next? Uhhhhhhh--I don't remember.

Ginger @ 443... Wait until you realize you're only months from turning 60.

Happy belated birthday, Ginger! I turn 59 on November 5th.

Ginger -- you still have a few years to go before being a curmudgeon will come naturally. Enjoy them (and then enjoy your curmudgeonhood!).

John A., #439: Interesting. With the new Constantine movie coming out, someone should point the filk community at that song.

Mary Aileen, #444: Well, you know the memory is the second thing to go...

443 and after
You kids get off my lawn! (Approaching 64. Will y'all still need me?)

Head's Up:

Virgin Galactic's Space Ship Two went down over the Mojave Desert. No info on the fate of the two pilots yet.

Update: One dead in Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo test crash --BBC News

I understand one of them parachuted, but is seriously injured.

So our house is ready to receive itinerant costumed treat-seeking juveniles.

It's also snowing, because this is Chicago and OF COURSE it is. We'll get to see which parents are longtime residents (who know that the street costume has to go over the coat or otherwise provide warmth and windproofness), and who didn't expect this.

I anticipate we'll get probably half or less the number of requesting parties (each containing, last year, 1-8 young sophonts plus their accompanying chaperones). Sigh.

I've hung my teal pumpkin sign, and have two bowls available: one with nonfood goodie bags, and the other an ordinary assortment of sample-size candy.

We also have three carved Festive Gourds on the stoop, and discovered an additional use for some battery-operated "tea light candle" replacements we acquired months ago for a separate purpose: they are reasonably sleet-proof, even with gusty wind. Also they don't care if we carved the face with combustion-air movement in mind.

Porch light on, cut-paper bats and pumpkin on the door, lit gourds on the steps, a teal pumpkin "We have non-food treats and candy!" sign at the foot of the steps. I'm wearing all black, except for my secondhand bowling shirt with embroidered rock-style flaaaaaaames around the bases of the sleeves and the collar-points. That's about as welcoming and festive as I can make it. :->

(I cheerfully congratulated this morning's FedEx lady on her "awesome costume," which she didn't seem to know how to take.)

Trick-or-treating started over an hour ago, in my suburban Chicago town. Apparently people find 30-mph sustained winds and 40dgF temperatures, with snow flurries, offputting.

I've not had one single trick-or-treater so far.

Chicago has no official hours; last year we had a couple just after 4 and then a busy period from 5-6:30, with individuals (and teens) still trickling past as late as 8.

This year? 5:30 and nothing yet.

First customers! Three kids, all reasonably costumed. Two took candy. One took a toy baggie. :->

None here yet (6:30 pm, mid-50s and gloomy, expected low in the mid-30s). We have a lot of small children in the neighborhood this year, but the population turns over a lot and trick-or-treating varies wildly from year to year.

Elliott Mason, my town is 4:00 to 7:00. Halfway through the Official Trick-Or-Treat Period. Nobody.

I'm gonna have Reeses Peanut Butter Cups for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.....

(Just as I was about to post this, I had four trick-or-treaters show up. They each got a HANDFUL of candy....)

Fragano Ledgister @442: Yes, Port of Spain. Blame my failing memory.

I got one group of 7-8 kids around 6:00* and another pair of kids just now. This is my first Halloween in this neighborhood, so I don't know what's normal. My old neighborhood, trick or treating usually trailed off around 8:30.

*Shortly after I got home from work. I saw several other groups in the neighborhood when I was driving home, but I guess either they didn't get this far or they were going the other way.

AKICIML Bibliotropic Ireland edition:
Along with the Book of Kells and the Library, are there other, perhaps obscure, bookish and SFFnal sites in Dublin? I'll be reading up about it on the plane, but tourist guidebooks aren't looking for the 'ohhhh, shiny!' that fans might want.

Elliott: I think that "teal pumpkin" link doesn't go where you intended (though it's an interesting read.) I've never heard of a teal pumpkin; from context, it sounds like an agreed-on sign that you have non-food treats?

We never seem to get trick-or-treaters at our door or on our block, though there are kids in our neighborhood. We've kind of given up after too many years when we ended up with a bowl full of candy to binge on.

Our son is going to be at a friend's Halloween party and sleepover tonight, so my wife and I have plans to go out for a grown-up date at a nice restaurant. (Unfortunately we both have been sleeping badly for most of this past week and both had another badly interrupted night last night for no particular reason, so we'll probably be non-Halloween type zombies and ready to fall into bed as soon as dinner is over.)

ARGH! Teal pumpkin link mis-pasted, indeed. This should be it instead.

Tested; yes, that one.

Nobody here yet at 6 PM local time; lots of groups wandering around downtown Ballard, though. The library had trick-or-treat candies at the reference desk, and I asked them whether they'd thought about giving out books instead. The two reference librarians Really Liked the idea (one said she'd thought about it) and I said I'd bring it up again in early October next year if I was still in town (we talk about moving, but it's not likely to happen that soon). Maybe I can get Nancy Pearl on board with publicizing it....

And to be appropriate, they should be really trashy quick-read stuff.

HLN: Official trick-or-treating time has expired. Local woman saw exactly five groups of kids, with a total head-count of 12.

Local women has far too much candy left over.

I've had five groups so far, totalling 17 kids, quite a few of whom chose "goody bag" over candy.

On a walk to our library late afternoon, I was shocked to see that the main hall had a couple dozen people in hazmat suits milling around. As I warily approached, thinking Uncle Jim thoughts, I saw that they had tails. And ears. They were giant Dalmatian puppies (not very many spots and those not very big, guess they didn't want to look like Holsteins) handing out treats to the kiddies, who were being strollered-in en masse. I stood down my panicked readiness to save the children.

Now it's after 8:30 here and I haven't had any more trick or treaters since my first report an hour and a half ago (#460). I'm not turning off the porch light quite yet, though.

Guess I'll have lots of candy left over; last night I was panicked that three bags might not be enough.

Trick-or-treating's done with here. Not as many as I'd expected (or prepared for). In hindsight, I could have given out more than one apiece, but yeah, had no idea how many to expect.

John A Arkansawyer #451: I note that their lead quote is a negative one from "Dr David Whitehouse", described by them as a "space scientist". They don't mention that he's probably better known as a climate-change denialist. And the one article I turned up by him on space matters was also pretty negative, focusing on what he describes as a reality show aiming to send people on a one-way trip to Mars.

This pilot is not the first person to die in a space program, and certainly won't be the last. But they took the risk in pursuit of something bigger than their individual lives. There's two clauses in "ad astra, per aspera". Yes there are difficulties, but we can get through them.

Lots of kids, prevalence of Marvel superheroes.

I was in Center City for part of the time-- lot of people trick or treating, but the costumes (in both places) seemed less elaborate than I'm used to, and it's not as though I usually see very elaborate costumes in my neighborhood.

We ended up getting maybe 10 groups of three to six kids, driven in carloads (and one trailerload, eek) by parents. Kind of assembly-line mass-production trick or treating, and I didn't recognize any of the kids or any of the parents. Whatever. Turned off the outside lights around 8:30 when the little ones petered out; I don't care for handing out candy to kids bigger than I am.

Most of the costumes were off-the-shelf Party City type things. Not much fun.

We've had maybe 6-8 groups starting at 6:45, with anywhere from 2 to 6 kids in each; that's not as many as last year, but more than we've had some years. The weather here is perfect for trick-or-treating, clear and mid-60s; we don't do Halloween decorations, but we've had the front windows open all day, and I've got my iPod boombox running the Trick-or-Treat playlist out one of them. It's been all young ones this year, nobody older than (at a guess) 10 or so, and most of them in fairly generic discount-store costumes. No superheroes, but a lot of princesses of various types.

I didn't costume this year, but I'm wearing one of my Halloween-themed T-shirts and black-cat earrings. It's nearly 9:00 and the houses across the street have turned out their porch lights, so I probably will too shortly. We'll have some leftovers, but we never buy anything to give out that we won't finish off. :-)

We had about 25-30 kids show up, some shepherded by parents. When it's clear, I set up my telescope and offer them a look at something (tonight was the first-quarter moon, the best time to observe it) and I got several oohs and ahh from kids and adulte.

Steve C., what a great idea!

David Harmon @ 470: He makes that point, though backhandedly, when he says that astronauts and pilots sign up for these risks, then wonders how many tourists are having second thoughts.

Nothing he says sounds factually offensive, yet I see what you're saying about the negative point of view. If he's a climate-change denialist, I won't strain to give him benefit of any more doubt.

HLN: We went into the local town to trick-or-treat with the kiddos. Businesses (and the library) before dinner, a neighborhood afterward. There are a couple of nieghborhoods that generally get swarmed with kids, as all the kids who live in the boonies come in to go from house to house where it doesn't require a car. We haven't had a trick-or-treater at the house in the 7 years we've lived here.

The kids had awesome homemade costumes, one was a minion, one Danny Dragonbreath, and one C3P0. I was disappointed that Danny wasn't recognized, but that might be because we've been monopolizing the library's copy of the series for a while.

Kathryn @461: Nothing specifically SFnal, but when we were in Dublin in '09, we made Geek Pilgrimage to Broom Bridge. My SO is an astrophysicist, and something something quaternions something (the physics is beyond me, but I took pictures of the SO with the plaque). We intended to get out to Dunsink Observatory, but didn't make it quite that far.

We did hire a car and make further pilgrimage to the Leviathan Telescope; Birr Castle also has a lovely small museum of other astronomy tools from eras when they were also art objects. And the visitor's center at Clonmacnoise has some good stuff about its heyday as a center of learning.

In Hoboken the kids mostly trick-or-treat the businesses on Washington Street (the main drag, as we say). I was at the vet this afternoon with my 19-year-old cat Shadow for a check-up, and saw hordes of kids coming through, mostly young, with parents in attendance. It's a good thing I wasn't playing the Elsa drinking game, because I saw four in less than an hour. Also several turtles, two cute skeletons (a boy and his younger sister, whom he was carefully watching out for), a couple of zombies, and one devastatingly cute Carmen Miranda. Among many others. I don't usually see many kids because they don't trick or treat apartment buildings around here. They do businesses in the afternoon, then Hoboken's Ragamuffin Parade, and otherwise it's all parties.

Buddha Buck @434 and previous,

We have a proposal for something like this to be done here in Wellington (New Zealand). The Wellington Astronomical Society, of which I am the Webmaster, has been asked to get involved, mainly as a provider of expertise. Under consideration.

We do not expect to see it built for a year or so yet.

J Homes

The practice of trick-or-treating has really taken off here (New Zealand) in recent years, though it's not so much "trick or treat?", but more "can we have some candy?" It's mostly good natured though not everyone deigns to participate.

Some of the more considerate will decorate e.g. their letterboxes with Halloween themed items (balloons, spiderwebs, pumpkins) to advertise their availability for trick-or-treating.

It's quite dissonant, the whole idea of celebrating Halloween as we head for the longest day of the year. (Mind you, there is also the whole Christmas in the middle of summer thing too)

My sister and I are staying in my parents' house -- which I should start thinking of as my mother's house, I suppose -- and getting ready for my father's long-delayed memorial service today. Inadvertantly doing the Day of the Dead thing on Dias De Las Meurtas, which coincidence I really like.

We're in the sticks, with the closest neighbors over a quarter mile away on unlit country road, and most of them retirees, so I suspect we'd be rather surprised and freaked by Trick or Treaters.

Lilith & I went to a Chipolte last night, after getting program books photocopied. The late dinner crowd featured a lot of older teens and twenty-somethings in costumes. Nothing terribly imaginative or custom-made, but it was still neat to see "kids" having fun.

Yeah, I totally spelled that wrong. Jet lag, yadda-yadda.

Nice piece on Dia de los Muertos, for those who haven't seen the fine cartoon:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/authors-artists-chefs-share-dia-de-los-muertos-celebrations-n238356

Zelda @478
Thanks! Looks like geekotourism at its finest- I agree about the art-component of the telescopes, astrolabes and orreries+ of those days.

We had a low turnout again this year; I'm starting to think that we don't have enough kids to sustain things, although in years past we've also had groups of immigrants (from other neighborhoods). It was rather chilly and not as pleasant as usual (last year was suboptimal too).

I spent from 5:30-8 sitting on our front steps, handing out one piece of candy to each trick-or-treater. That's how I know that there were almost 600 kiddos, because we'd counted up alleged bag contents earlier, and I closed down when I ran out.

We're Halloween Central for the whole east side--well-lit, grid of small blocks. After 6-7 Halloweens here, we've all got it down to a science. (If we were mean towards our neighbors, we wouldn't warn the newbies of what was about to descend upon them, but we seem to be a fairly nice crowd.)

Lots of decorations in the neighborhood; we wrap orange lights round the porch railing, and there's a giant lit spiderweb over the porch window. Several mid-size and smaller pumpkins on the steps.

I was very mildly channeling Scott Lynch's Sabetha, black feathered mask, gloves, and got into a lovely howling catfight with a teenaged black Catwoman.

It was Lloyd parkrun's 4th Anniversary party today. We always have a Halloween theme and as usual I was dressed as a witch. This is the first year I've run on the day; I ditched the skirt I usually wear for black full length running tights, but we're having unusually warm weather here and the academic gown I use as part of the costume was rather hot for running in. The hat had to be held on as well. It was all lots of fun: Lloyd parkrun 4th Anniversary

David Goldfarb #459:

Rum, ah callin' fo' rum!
She was made from Caroni cane,
She de bes' lady in Port o' Spain,
Sans humanité!

Someone here will surely know: Where, if any where, does they hyphen go in 'bug-fuck crazy'? Do I have that correct? Or is it just two words? Or three? And who will help me grind the grain?

John 489: I think that's correct, and so is 'bugfuck crazy'. But 'go bug fuck', with no hyphen.

Attributive uses get hyphenated or written as one word; predicative ones do not. In general.

Kathryn @461: The Chester Beatty Library is always worth a look, and it's right in Dublin Castle, so very convenient if you're already in the city centre. (One thing I haven't managed to make it to is the Revenue Musuem, which is right next door - as the link says, off-beat.) The Little Museum of Dublin gets good reviews, but it's another thing I haven't made it to...

Books-wise, I love Chapters for its secondhand section. For food, the guide books will probably steer you well, but they might not have been updated to include Forest Avenue yet.

Feel free to ping me on Twitter with questions - happy to help!

Kathryn @461: The Chester Beatty Library is always worth a look, and it's right in Dublin Castle, so very convenient if you're already in the city centre. (One thing I haven't managed to make it to is the Revenue Musuem, which is right next door - as the link says, off-beat.) The Little Museum of Dublin gets good reviews, but it's another thing I haven't made it to...

Books-wise, I love Chapters for its secondhand section. For food, the guide books will probably steer you well, but they might not have been updated to include Forest Avenue yet.

Feel free to ping me on Twitter with questions - happy to help!

Argh: the oh-no-seconds are getting smaller every day. That double post is a PEBCAK, not a server hiccup.

Argh: the oh-no-seconds are getting smaller every day. That double post was a PEBCAK, not a server hiccup.

I had a slightly strange experience on Twitter this morning. This abusive troll had realized the c-word offended one of my tweeps, and started hammering it at him in every tweet.

Yeh, he was a gater.

He kept saying that it was his culture as an Aussie and that we should respect his culture. You [c-word]s. I commented

Wow, @[name of troll] managed to insult you and all Aussies at the same time.

Pretty sure it's not Aussie culture to keep hammering on a word after being told it's offensive.

Even though the C word is not quite the instant declaration of absolute woman-hating fuckery it is in the US.

Then he accused me of saying the internet was American and that he had no right to his culture. I called him a lying sack of shit and blocked him.

So, here's my question (more of a reality check, really) for my friends in Oz, or who have lived there for a long time: uh...I'm right, right? While the c-word isn't as offensive there, it's not necessarily Aussie culture to say it as often as possible, especially after someone has told you they find it offensive? He's just a fucktroll, right?

So there I was, walking along, and a woman stops her car next to me, rolls down her window, and asks me, "Am I going the right way?"

What was I supposed to say to that? The best I could come up with was, "That depends on where you want to go."

Perhaps she thought she was on a one-way street.

I finally read Avram's particle about earlier female gamers. Mark Swanson a was a member of the MIT Strategic Games Societ, MIT student, and a member of NESFA whom I was dating in fall 1971. The "Paula" referred to in the article was probably me; I was active for a while in the Strategic Games Society, and played Dungeons and Dragons there at least one in the spring 1975 semester.

When you are trying to boil down the stew in your biggest cookpot so it leaves a little more room - to add more ingredients - and you discover it has bubbled up into the half-on lid and filled up the groove in the lid, I think it's safe to say that you got the pot a little too full.

On the bright side, I can fairly say we are going to have a shit-load of ratatouille, and it's smelling really good. (It's more or less the Vegetarian Epicure recipe, roughly tripled.)

Xopher Halftongue #495:

I don't speak for our Aussie brethren (though I know a few & visit there regularly) but whatever segment of Australia the c-word slinging Tweeter belongs to would be a tiny minority. It is most definitely not a word used in polite company. And most definitely not the cultural norm.

I was driving in Denver once, and a woman in another car kindly let me know we weren't on a one-way street. Luckily, I could do something about it.

It's hard to give a real polite and grateful wave at the same time as you're frantically backing up and changing lanes. Many people don't know this interesting fact.

Xopher@495: The C-word is used here in the UK as a general purpose insult for both men and women. Calling a man that is isn't usually a comment on his masculinity or lack thereof. On the shop floor of the factory where I work it gets tossed about as part of everyday casual banter.

A few months ago, a Vietnamese takeaway opened near where I work. They use bicycles for deliveries, and on the sides of the rear panniers in which they transport the food is the slogan: 'You Ling, We Bling'. I swear, I had been seeing these for weeks before I thought to wonder what this meant and the penny dropped. If they think this is amusing it's not my place to tell them otherwise, but wow!

Rob @503: I don't get it.

Lenore@504: You Ring, We Bring.