Trackback to Open Thread 213.

The air in my area is certainly deciduous of something, as we're having a Santa Ana.

Request for help: I'm doing research for a story, and need some help from people who are knowledgeable about the US mid-west. The full drama is over here: http://megpie71.dreamwidth.org/68321.html

All help, suggestions etc will be gratefully accepted, and if people have suggestions about other places to ask for help, or resources I could use, those will be gratefully accepted too.

Thanks in advance!

Nice lighting in here.

Hey, all the sockets are three prong!

#NewOpenThread

P J Evans @ 2

I'm not sure Kansas falls down as badly as you think, or at least Lawrence doesn't. I know there have been gay clubs in the past... Also the KU football team is a joke, so if you need a place with a high quality engineering school and crap football, KU's a good model... Or Iowa City; they're pretty chill. Anyway if you want to know what life in a college town in a Midwestern American state, you can ask me whatever, with the caveat that I'm a huge nerd with the usual social limitations.

Augh that should have been #3 ::: Megpie71

Megpie71 @ 3:

So, the football thing? All six states you listed have at least one school in one of the so-called "Power 5" conferences. Specifically, the SEC, the Big 10 (which has 14 schools in it) and/or the Big 12 (which has 10). (The numbers are historical artifacts.) (Iowa has one school in the Big 12 (Iowa State) and another in the Big 10 (Iowa).)

But! Because "everyone" knows the big name schools, there are more students who want to play football at them than there are scholarships available. Your scholarship student is probably someone good enough to get a full athletic scholarship from a smaller school, or a walk-on position at a big school (no scholarship, no guaranteed playing time).

Real life precedent: Ben Rothlisberger, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, went to Miami University of Ohio, which is rather better known for its fraternities than its football teams.

Megpie, I live in Iowa City, and I think you're going to have some handwaving/mashup work to do with the variety of constraints you want. I think you can pick a major-looking city in an area you like that doesn't already have a university and drop something there. You might consider grad school as a draw, too; I knew people from further away during grad school than during undergrad.

My mother was from Kansas; I've been there.

Megpie71 #3: Late-night posting, so this may not be very coherent... I don't know much about the Midwest in particular, but what strikes me about your list of constraints is that as state-wide characteristics, they're politically inconsistent -- that is, you're mixing features from different political environments. However, that's OK, because our "states" are large, and a lot of the things you're talking about are actually implemented on lower levels -- county or city/town.

I think what you want is something similar to my current environment in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is Southern rather than Midwestern, but the city is a "blue dot in a red state" -- that is, a liberal outpost in a mostly-conservative state, perpetuated and protected by a strong university (University of Virginia) and several other colleges. While colleges and universities in the US aren't always liberal bastions, they do trend that way, and this one was founded by Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most liberal of the USA's Founding Fathers.

Thus we are indeed an at-will state, but while the state's sexual politics (and probably things like stalking laws) are iffy when not ludicrous, the city government, local police, and local culture, are extremely liberal. The county we're embedded in (Albemarle) is mostly rural-conservative, but UVA/Charlottesville's political and financial mass is such as to affect county politics as well.

As far as the sports situation, others will be far more informed than I, but I'll note that a student might well get a scholarship for one of a school's "off" sports -- that is, they're championship-level in something else, but they're still hoping to up their game in this other sport. Also, re tuition, a "state school" like UVA (as opposed to a private university like Harvard) will have drastically lower tuition for the children of state residents (that is, there needs to be some prior residency, exact rules will depend on the school's administration).

AKICIML: First use of "If it bleeds it leads!"

My own brief search says 1982 but I could swear that I heard a journalism student use it in '77,'78, or '79. She was interning at a newspaper and was horrified/bemused by their addiction to "newsworthy" stories. I think she was quoting her boss at the time. I would've thought that it goes back to the'30s and possibly even the yellow journalism era.

Meg #3. I'll put in a vote for Lawrence, KS. It is a blue dot in a red state just like Dave Harmond's. It's a city of 87,000 but 23k-ish are students at KU. It's 35 miles west of Kansas City and 25 miles east of Topeka. By a narrow vote it was named Lawrence instead of "New Boston"

Football at any of the big land grant universities is a big deal. It makes them a lot of money. Stadiums that hold 50k to 100k fans. KU's team has had its moments but the past few years have been sad. Last year they had a perfect season...yep, zero wins. So they need help.

Megpie71@3: Another terminological question plus local (national) educational organizational thing occurs to me. You say "university", but I'm not sure you actually require one. Is it important that both graduate and undergraduate degrees be offered by the institution? Because in medium-sized midwestern towns, there are a LOT more good colleges than universities, and because the cultures of the private institutions (mostly colleges) may be more conducive to what you want than the public ones (state-run schools), and because that gives you a wider range of town sizes to choose from. Also, a mostly-residential institution, as many of the colleges in those environments are, can be more effectively a bubble in social attitudes and such. (There are private universities certainly, including many of the well-known names like Harvard, Yale, Stanford; but not so much in smaller towns in the midwest.)

Megpie71 @3:

You are an Australian, planning on writing a fanfic set in the US. I appreciate your attempts to try to be accurate as far as local law and custom are, but one thing you should be aware:

US-written, US-based popular media doesn't get it right most of the time, and nobody cares. The errors tend to get missed for the needs of the story.

To take an extreme example, people love Batman, people love Superman, people love Batman and Superman crossovers. Almost nobody asks how Gotham and Metropolis, both obvious doubles of New York City, are so different from each other, or where they are. In the TV show Smallville (set in the middle of Kansas) you could see the lights of Metropolis (a port city, a minimum of 8 hours drive away) on the horizon. Few people complain about this inconsistency.

It is helpful to be internally consistent, but it looks like you have good rules for that.

Some specific details: Few university IDs list age, and few bars will accept university IDs as proof-of-age. Most require State-issued licenses or ID cards. Having your students try to use college ID to get into a bar would stand out as wrong.

To address your "easily distinguished" concern, some states (including every state you are considering) issue under-age licenses in "portrait" format, and adult licenses in a "landscape" format. It is immediately obvious, when presenting an official ID if it was issued when the holder was under-age (and all include a line like "Under 21 until 06-07-18" next to the photo with a red background to deal with the "but I'm of age now" lie).

I think that plopping a 200K-500K population-sized city in the middle of a state may be a bit much. Syracuse, NY, the 5th largest metropolitan city in New York, is between 145K-700K, depending on if you count the city proper or the metropolitan area. In most of the midwestern states you are considering, a city of 200K would be one of the top 3-4 cities in the State, if not #2. It's too big to just plot there without causing a disruption. The standard way to handle that in fiction is to ignore it, however.

But a more realistic idea would be a smaller city. My "home city" is Binghamton, NY, about 50,000 people, one major university (one of the four "University Centers" for the State University of New York system), and fits a lot of what you need. There is lots of non-university work available, it pulls people from a diverse area, it's a State school, so tuition is good for those in-state, etc. Obviously, you'd want to be in the midwest, not New York, for your other constraints, but putting in a small city with an industrial history and a university in the middle of any of those states would be easy to do. Take a look at Urbana-Champlain, IL, Emporia, KA, Columbia, MO, Kearney, NE, or Broken Arrow, OK. These are cities which range from 30k-110k people and host a public university of the sort you want.

As for the quality of the school, city size is not an issue. My current city has a population of about 30k, and sports not one, but two high-quality universities, including an Ivy League school (putting it in the same category (well, sports league) as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and academically in the same class as those, plus MIT and Berkeley).

A football (gridiron) scholarship might be difficult. While the big football scholarships tend to go to the schools famous for football, and smaller schools just don't put that much money into it. On the other hand, unless it is important that they be there for football, many schools do offer athletic scholarships for many things. Crew (rowing) is often times regarded as a relatively easy way to get into college on an athletic scholarship, simply because there's so little competition for Crew scholarships. Heck, you could even have them in school on an (association) football scholarship, and even have the school have a competitive association football team.

Buddha Buck@13: The general point that an amazing amount can be overlooked is spot-on. Also that "big" things (like plopping down a city) are often easier to overlook than small things (like details of how licenses indicate age).

My experience is that even small schools where sports aren't that important have more money in the football program than elsewhere and hence more scholarships there.

Huh; can't figure out which two of the schools in Binghamton you're thinking of. Nothing on that list trips my "in the academic class of Harvard and Yale and MIT" sensors, though. (I had friends who went to SUNY Binghamton for grad school long ago and thought there were the remnants of a good small school there more and more buried by the university, which probably isn't a good predictor of what it's like now.)

David Dyer-Bennet @14:

From the age of 10 to the age of 20 I lived in the Binghamton area. I no longer live there, but it's probably the closest to a "home town" I've got. I'm unaware of a second post-graduate degree-granting school there, other than SUNY Binghamton.

My current city (Ithaca) is about 45 away from Binghamton, and sports both Cornell University (Ivy League, many Nobel Laureates in its history) and Ithaca College (highly rated, but not in the same scale as Harvard, Yale, etc).

Boddha Buck@15: Oops, okay, that's why I couldn't make sense of it; I misunderstood it. Sorry!

Another example:
Lubbock, Texas: population about 200K, home of Texas Tech, has an airport with scheduled service
from at least three carriers. 50 miles north, Plainview, population about 25K, home of Wayland Baptist University.

Usually, if it seems real - if the characters and plot ring true, the details of the setting aren't going to matter that much. As long as you don't have icy roads in July or swimming parties in January on Lake Superior, it should be good.

All IMO, of course.

Buddha Buck, #13: When I was growing up, I was totally convinced that Gotham City was an analogue for Chicago -- and while intellectually I know now that it's supposed to be NYC, if I don't actively focus on that it's still Chicago to me. It just fits better with the "darker/grittier" aspect IMO.

Someone (possibly here) said a while back that Metropolis was NYC by day and Gotham City was NYC by night, and that also makes some sense to me.

I always thought Metropolis was NYC and Gotham was Boston.

Lee @19: Sometimes, when DC authors have felt a need to do so, they have put Gotham where Chicago is. The Chris Nolan Batman movies used Chicago as a Gotham standin. Sometimes, when DC authors have felt a need to do so, they have put Gotham roughly in northern New Jersey, around Newark.

The "NYC by night vs. NYC by day" analogy is common, and explains the feel difference well. When Paul Dini was doing the Batman and Superman animated series, he had the artists "paint" on black backgrounds for the Batman shows, and on light backgrounds for the Superman shows exactly for that dichotomy. But it doesn't help explain, in the story, the existence of the two cities.

But, as was my original point, despite the major confusion over Gotham and Metropolis, it is basically ignored.

Buddha Buck @13: I think that plopping a 200K-500K population-sized city in the middle of a state may be a bit much.

Unless you're Colorado. (Boulder: 103,166; Denver; 649,495; Colo Springs: 439,886—all 2013, so those numbers have probably gone up.) But I don't know if we qualify as "midwestern," though I think we can claim "western", and we're certainly in the middle of the country. And there are colleges and universities, both public and private, scattered all over the state. Also note that Colorado is equidistant from nearly everywhere. (Which means that decent cons are nearly always 800-1K miles away. :-\)

Megpie71 @3:

You could probably slide a fictional city in somewhere along the northern Front Range without too much fuss. (We seem determined to do that ourselves, in point of fact.) If it's near Boulder, just give it a name that starts with "L". :-)

As of Spring 2014, Colo is given a middlin' rating wrt stalking enforcement.

Colorado is, sadly, "at-will." The euphemism is "right to work."

flexible attitude toward non-heterosexual couples

Check. (Well, Boulder, anyway. Denver, too. Colo Springs, not so much.)

Gay bars: Check.

Given our concentration of tech and science, an MIT-like institution would not be beyond the pale. In fact, CU has graduated a number of astronauts (though it has a Big-8 (or whatever) football team).

WRT age/alcohol, many service providers (in Boulder, at least) card everybody, regardless of age, if alcohol is being purchased. It's less that they'll lose custom than they get their asses thrown in jail.

Just when you though the man couldn't get any more appalling: down in this story there's the tale (documented at the time but largely blown over) of Trump's treatment of his brother's family.

Jacque @22:

My point was that in most places in the midwest a 200K city would be a major city, and adding one would change the state. Colorado has the space, sure, but would a second Boulder change how the state works? I bet it would.

But a major university in a small city could easily be added just about anywhere and it would be fine. There are about 2500 public and private 4-year schools in the US, or about 50 per state. Many of these are in small cities or towns.

I recall a celebration a few years ago in one nearby town because they were getting their first stop light -- at the intersection of the main road and the entrances to the Alfred State College (on one side of the road) and the private Alfred University (on the other side of the road. Those 4-year schools are everywhere.

The five states that Megpie71 chose might make sense, but offhand I don't see why it would be limited to those. Kansas is the geographical center of the country, and all five states are within about 300 miles of Topeka, Kansas (but so is Arkansas). When I decided for my (unfinished) story to put a major university in the center of the country, I chose Indiana. Colorado would also work. But maybe there's an unstated reason why it wouldn't.

I'm reasonably sure that some of Trump's supporters aren't ignoring Trump's cruelty-- they actually like it.

I am saying it here, but Joel Polowin did a HORRIBLE THING at 1019 in the last thread AND HE KNOWS WHAT HE DID.

(specifically, made me squeak so loudly my dogs became Concerned. He worried my dogs! He's a filthy dog-worrier!)

(see you at OVFF, I hope. :-> )

I always assumed that Metropolis was Not-Chicago and Star City was Not-... something in Ohio, like Cleveland.

But apparently Metropolis is meant to be on the Atlantic seaboard. I thoguht it made sense that cornfed Smallville boys wanting to make it in The Big City would go to Not-Chicago, but.

I have always assumed that Metropolis was Chicago. Of course, I grew up near Chicago, so I suppose that colored my impression. Gotham, however, has always been New York City to me. (Which is why I was a little bemused to see the Dark Knight movies obviously set in not-Chicago, what with the El, and the (general, not specific) architecture, and the river bridges, and the checkerboard police hats, and all....)

It amazes me that DC has always assumed every one of their major, superhero-having, cities are on the East Coast except a few in California.

Megpie71 @3 taking your linked items in order

Kansas isn't as hostile to gay/bi as the media makes out -- at least not in the type of cities you want to use. We just have one very loud-mouthed objector in a small, family-based organization who gets a lot of media. Because spectacle.

As for major cities, any you create would be an aberration. Chicago is the second or third largest city in the US as a whole. We have a lot of small to mid-sized cities. However, a lot of those do base their economy on one large employer -- like a university. I work at one of those universities, so if you have any questions about how one works, feel free to ask me.

I will note that some land grant, open enrollment universities (like mine) in the mid west are cheaper to attend for the out-of-state students than if they "stayed home". (Out-of-state tuition being more expensive than in-state tuition for "state" universities.) State universities, aka: "public" universities, partially operate on a tax-revenue basis. So if you grew up in or have a full time residency in any given state, you qualify for a "discounted" tuition in that state at a public (or "state") university.

You might want to change the sport of choice. Football is a religion in this part of the US. Every mid-west state has at least one Big Name Team in a league. Football (American-style) is a thing here. Also... there's an unspoken rule of thumb regarding universities. Either they're good academically or they're good at sports. Not both. It's pretty common for a scholarly type who is good at sports to go to a bad team school on a sports scholarship for the purpose of getting an education.

The rules against drinking are handled at universities (at least my university) on an "educational awareness" basis and by issuing edicts to the Sororities/Fraternities that throw parties. (They're along the lines of "If you don't police yourselves, you won't like what happens when we do it for you.") My university, Kansas State University/Manhattan doesn't allow liquor sales on campus. Off-campus stores are required to card using a driver's license. University IDs are not used much off campus.

Buddha Buck @24: would a second Boulder change how the state works? I bet it would.

Heh. Maybe, maybe not. As I say, given the current market, we could bid fair to be trying that ourselves.

Steve C. @ 18 ...
Usually, if it seems real - if the characters and plot ring true, the details of the setting aren't going to matter that much. As long as you don't have icy roads in July or swimming parties in January on Lake Superior, it should be good.

Is it a bad sign that my first thought was "What about polar bear swims"?

Another point about big colleges/universities in small towns/cities is that it's not necessarily a static situation. Boston's surrounding area has been progressively taken over by the universities, as in they've been buying up the land in the surrounding towns and probably Boston itself.

Charlottesville used to be a small town, but several decades of growth have upgraded it to where it's now approaching small-city status (and the old-timers aren't too happy about that). We're also becoming a more national focus for food (starting with my boss's old side project, the C&O restaurant), music (led by the Dave Matthews Band), the arts (Virginia Festival of the Book, assorted studios developing), and probably next lifestyle issues, thanks to the development/sustainability conflicts all this growth has caused. In any case, there will be town/gown tensions over such things, and there may be larger political issues.

Song Titles from the Viewpoint of the Other Character

What Do You Mean (I Have to Teach My Own Boyfriend a Masterclass on the Crappy Way Women Get Socialized)

Hotline Bling (Dammit, I Thought I Blocked That Number, You Moved Away, Genius, So Quit Trying to Curate My Life)

Jolene (Has Just Discovered That Her Boyfriend Is Married)

Talk Dirty to Me (Because I'm Too Dumb to Realize that Acting Like I'm the Greatest Thing Since Dental Dams Is Just Your Job)

Jenny Islander @34: "Somebody I Used To Know" is notable in that the bridge IS from the pov of the other partner, who makes it clear that the main character IS A FUCKING ABUSIVE STALKER.

Explicit dramatic irony in the top 40, not common.

Its original-artist music video is strange and avant-garde, though it notably inspired an amazing Star Wars parody video.

But for a video of the original song that makes a short film dramatizing its lyrics, I prefer this one, deliberately made with trans and genderqueer actors and musicians in all parts, and in ASL. Many of the on-screen actors are also Deaf.

Nancy, #25: I'm reasonably sure that some most of Trump's supporters aren't ignoring Trump's cruelty -- they actually like it.

When you listen to the other things they say, it's impossible to reach any other conclusion. Most of his supporters are bullies who like him because he's a bully on a scale they can only dream of. But only against Those People, of course.

Elliott, #29: Central City is in the middle of the country; I'm not sure whether it's St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver. (It's been a long time since I read the comics, and I haven't seen the show.)

I vacillate on Gotham and Metropolis, though a good friend is adamant that Gotham is Chicago so there forever. However, I think I am the only person to see a Spider-Man movie and decide out of nowhere that yup, Spider-Man lives in Philadelphia.

David Dyer-Bennet @ 12: I had no idea there was a difference between a "college" and a "university" in the USA (see why I'm doing my research?). I mean, any Australian institution which offers tertiary bachelor level degrees automatically does graduate degrees - they're all universities these days, and have been since about the late 1980s or thereabouts. The next level down in the Australian system from degree offering institutions is "technical colleges", or TAFE, which offer trade and vocational qualifications complying with a national system of recognition for these.

Buddha Buck @ 13 - Yeah, I'd sort of guessed there wouldn't be that much commitment to accuracy in the popular media - let's face it, if the only understanding you have of Australia is from "Neighbours" or "Home and Away" plus watching "Crocodile Dundee" and the "Mad Max" movies a few times (I'm picking some of our bigger cultural exports here), you're going to be looking at a very distorted picture of the place. But the distortions in these cultural products are acceptable to Australians (because we know where they're getting it wrong, and often why) while things like, for example, the reproduction US West Frontier Town in US Frontier Land ostensibly located in the Australian Outback which cropped up in the X-men comics back in the 1980s, or the accents of the newsreaders (not to mention the characters attempting an Australian accent) in "Pacific Rim" just grated. So I'd like to avoid as many obvious blunders in the reverse direction as I can.

One such blunder which is becoming clear is me thinking a city of 200,000 to 500,000 people is "small". This is because for Australia, it is - we tend to concentrate our population a lot more than folks in the USA seem to. I suspect this is a result of environmental factors more than anything. I'm going to be scaling back my city a bit, I think - might try for something about the size of Bunbury or Kalgoorlie/Boulder (to use examples I'm familiar with - and I think of each of these as "large country towns" rather than "cities").

While the character who has the sports scholarship was originally going to be a (gridiron) football player, I'm not particularly wedded to it. Might try a different team sport instead. Probably not basketball; maybe field hockey? Do you play that over there, or is it all ice hockey? Or I can change the code - I understand the US has a growing soccer scene? (It has to be the sort of team sport that's likely to attract "Real Man" types - I have a plot thread for the third year growing out of problems attached to this team surrounding things like homophobia, rape culture etc[1]).

Thanks for the information about the IDs. How would that work for out-of-state students? Would there be an acceptance of out-of-state IDs (for example, here in Australia every state has a "proof of age" card as well as drivers licences, and a card/license from Victoria is acceptable in Western Australia, and vice versa; I think there's also a common format for ID documents across the various states here) or would someone who comes from Minnesota be required to get an Iowa proof of age card in order to be able to drink legally in Iowa? Are all forms of proof-of-age ID photo ID (they tend to be here in Australia - drivers licences have a photo on them, proof of age cards have a photo on them).

Jacque @ 22: The reason I chose the five states I did is because I have a character (the focus character for the first year or so of the story) who has left a small town in Arkansas (mountainous region) by motor bike, looking for work, and really, Nebraska is about as far as I can realistically see him going on the amount of money he would have had saved for fuel and other sundries by the time he finished high school. While I'm sure he's going to eventually see all of the continental states, money is definitely a constraint for him at present.

Basically, the way I saw things working for him was he essentially finished high school, picked up his graduation certificate/high school diploma and transcript, packed those in his duffle bag, and was out of there, and then he just aimed to get as far away from his small town as he could before the money ran out and he had to stop moving. He has the name and address of the nephew of a neighbour in his pack; this person lives in this fictional city and was willing to lend a couch to a stranger who'd been helpful to his aunt.

Victoria @ 30: Ah, I think I see another area where my Australian cultural assumptions bash into US culture and come off second best. Every university I've heard of in Australia has a tavern or pub on campus. That's because our national drinking age is 18 - and high school finishes for most people in the year they turn 17. So the next year, they go to uni, and they can drink, and one of the more popular informal subjects in Australian universities, for at least the first years, is "Tavern Studies". Whereas I think for most of the US the drinking age is 21, isn't it? So I'm going to have to get rid of the tavern I'd automatically placed on campus in the "student services" sector, by the sounds of things.

Again, this is why I'm doing my research FIRST, before I get too far into the writing.

[1] Which, come to think on it, might work better if I'm using a sport which isn't (gridiron) football anyway, because I think some of the points I want to make about these things involve masculine culture in confined groups.

Magpie71 @38: It’s worse than that.

There are some post-secondary educational institutions called “colleges” for the entire shebang. There are others called “universities”. The latter are usually more prestigious.

Inside a “university” there are often many “colleges,” which generally speaking are administrative categories or departments to group particular majors. Each will have their head and staff, and will set some policies while others are university-wide. In universities of this sort, technically the college confers the degree, but it’s a degree from the university.

We don’t “go to university” or “go to uni” colloquially here, though we can ask, “What university do you attend?” if we wish to sound snootier than “where do you go to college?” But in the general case you could say, “My niece went to college this year and her parents are redecorating the room.” Even it’s a prestigious university, you still “go to college” when you attend it. You might attend “The College of Medicine” or something if you’re talking very specifically with someone who already knows what university you attend.

It’s also “college football” for the whole league. Leagues. There are several, of varying prestige (and budget).

(Is it bad that my major Australian-culture touchstones are Australian Masterchef and Dance Academy? My daughter also likes that mermaid show)

When it comes to prestige, the only college sports that really have it are (gridiron) football and men’s basketball, and to a minor degree, baseball. Some schools also get really het up about swimming as a national competition, but it will never get TV coverage. Swimming is viewed as less manly than either football or basketball by the people who play/view those sports, but reasonably manly and athletic to those outside its demographic. Swimmers do still have that masculine, homophobic locker-room culture, perhaps especially because swimmers are treated as less manly/more likely to be “queers” or “pussies” by players of the more manly-esteemed sports.

Soccer is just getting started, but its fanbase is basically limited to people who play it, people who played it as kids, and the entire Hispanic population (plus recent European immigrants).

If you have a valid driver’s license or state ID card from any state in the Union, you are only required to get ID from the state in which you are residing after 6 months of continuous residency — unless you’re a college student, in some states. Any state’s ID will work in a bar or for any picture-ID-needed situation. In some states, underage licenses are printed portrait instead of landscape, or have a different background color in the portrait, to make it easy to tell at a glance that they’re under-21. Similarly, new-driver licenses (you get a provisional one for a couple years before you get full privileges) are visually distinctive in some states.

The rules about what has to be on licenses/state ID cards (two separate things; the second is identical to the first except you can’t drive on it) are, to a degree, federal, but the graphic design and any extra information is state-by-state. Rhode Island’s license is so incredibly difficult to read that we called it Rhode Eyestrain in a job I held that had to check IDs: tiny, tiny text in a color very similar to the background, with no color highlighting to draw the eye to a date or the name or anything. Some states, like Arizona, issue you a license at 16 and that’s your license until you have to take the eye test again at 60 — so I had some laminated-by-gluing-between-two-layers-of-plastic pieces of cardstock, falling to bits, with a picture of a teenager with horrible 70s sideburns, and a balding dude standing in front of me. Thanks, Arizona. Really useful. So it varies a lot.

Transcript: you don’t usually get one upon graduation. When you apply at a postsecondary institution (community college, two-year college, four-year college, or university) their admissions department requests a copy from your high school via fax. Most people I know have never held their high school transcript in their hands.

There are certainly bars right NEXT to college campuses in the US, and some of them are less careful about checking ID than others. The cops, of course, tend to try to keep an eye on it, but drunken student hijinks and property damage are well-known, as are drunken loud parties in the dorms (with package goods bought and brought back by someone with a legal ID — or a good fake one, which can be reasonably easy to acquire if you know someone who knows someone).

Oh, in re postsecondary education and bars:

In college towns that are small to middlin', there's often a separation between the "college bars", with largely student or college-affiliated customers, and "townie bars", which are mostly people who live in the area and are NOT affiliated with the college, and often feel resentment towards the college or its students, especially if the students are more affluent or otherwise culturally different from the surrounding population.

In towns small enough to have only one gay bar, it is mixed, and often towards the outskirts in an unobtrusive area.

38
Field hockey is mostly a women's sport in the US, for some reason. Soccer exists; so does basketball - and because basketball teams are relatively small, they're more common at smaller schools. Wayland Baptist, for example, has something of a reputation in basketball, especially the women's team (called the "Flying Queens" - they got nicknamed that because a couple of the local businessmen funded travel for the team, using their own planes).

Megpie71 @ 38:

A brief perusal of the Wikipedia page for the NCAA (the group that regulates college sports) suggests that field hockey is only sponsored in Women's athletics, but ice hockey and soccer are both sponsored as Men's sports. Rugby is possible, but less likely as there's no national championship. Since you're talking athletic scholarships, that means a Division I or II school.

Out of state students will most likely still have an id from their home state, either a driver's license or a non-driver id. It's still considered valid id, but some bartenders/bouncers/convenience store clerks will hassle people with an unfamiliar looking one. They're supposed to accept it, but some people are lazy or jerks.

A popular thing for US college students to do is go to a store just after midnight on their 21st birthday to buy beer. When my brother did this, he was turned down for having an invalid id - most drivers licenses expire on your 21st birthday and have to be renewed in the state that issued it. A passport will get you around this issue, but a lot of people in the US don't have one because you can go a long way without leaving the country.

Oh yes, one more thing about sports: football and Men's basketball are the money sports. They get the major television revenue, they get the major corporate sponsorships, and they basically fund the rest of the athletic department. And even then, probably not fully. This can and often does lead to resentment against those teams by the rest of the student athletes, who believe that the football and basketball players are getting special treatment compared to everyone else. Which they sometimes are, plus being more likely to leave for a pro career than finish their degrees.

College sports: University of Tennessee/Knoxville had a very successful and popular women's basketball team for many years under the direction of Pat Summitt. Summitt also coached at least one USA Olympic women's basketball team. But that was very much an outlier in terms of popularity and influence by comparison to the men's teams.

Also, there's some regional variation in which of football or basketball gets the heaviest emphasis. Throughout the Deep South, football is nearly a religion. In the area that the NCAA calls the Mideast (and everyone else calls the Midwest), basketball gets a lot more attention, right down to the high-school level. I remember being jolted when I moved from Detroit to Nashville and first went to look for the high-school basketball scores in the local paper; instead of the 4 or 5 pages of "everybody gets at least highlights, the top 6 or 7 matches get full write-ups, and the top 2 get that plus a photo" that I was used to, all the basketball scores were 2-inch summaries, for about half a page total.

Bars on campus: There may be a difference between public and private institutions. Vanderbilt has a student pub (beer only) in the Student Center. Rice has not just one, but two -- Willy's in the Student Center, and Valhalla in the basement of the Old Chemistry Building; the latter is specifically the grad-students' pub, but Willy's is for anyone who's legal. My partner says he's unaware of anything along those lines at University of Houston, and I don't recall seeing one in the student center at UT/K when I used to go there for contradance weekends.

Megpie71@38:

We do have some big cities, but they tend to be coastal, not in the middle. The entire population of the states you picked combined is less than the population of California, for instance. If you drop Illinois (and thus Chicago), there's 4 states with bigger populations.

Think of it this way: Kansas City (a metropolitan area split between Kansas and Missouri, right in the middle of the area you are talking about) has a population the size of Perth, but is located relative to the population centers of the US analogous to Alice Springs. The US has 30% more land area than Australia and 10 times the population. Australia has 5 cities with more than a million people, and the US has 10 (7 of which are port cities); Australia has 16 cities with more than 100,000 people, the US has over 300, spread across the country fairly evenly. With the exception of Illinois, the remaining states are all land-locked, with no deep-water access (Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma border the Mississippi, but not near a deep-water port). The cities were built around rail, cattle, and farming centers.

For your story, it probably won't matter much, but the area you are dealing with has the largest group of "dry" communities in the country. Most of northern Arkansas is dry, and much of Kansas is dry-ish. Large parts of Kansas require bars to get 30% of their revenue from food. I don't know how that affects the college bar scene, though. Liquor laws vary wildly across the US, on a state-by-state basis, so once you pick a state, it might be worth it to look to exactly alcohol is allowed to be sold.

I am uncertain how your main character would get a football scholarship (those tend to be negotiated while still in high school), but if the jock isn't your main character, then it's probably worth saying that he took a year or two between high school and college if he went the "drive a random direction" route to get out of his home town. There are some financial issues involved with going to school which may be difficult with that background as well. If you want, I'll go into more detail tomorrow.

Soccer as a professional sport is just getting started for the fourth time, or something, here in the US. But college soccer was well-established a long time before highschool soccer took off and the "soccer mom" was codified. Solidly around at a lot of schools back into at least the 1950s. My father lettered in soccer at UC Berkeley in the 1930s, and Carleton had a well-established soccer team, playing all the other schools in the conference they were in, in 1960 when we moved there. But Northfield highschool never had a soccer team while I was there (I'm sure it does now).

What's maybe getting established these days in college athletics is Ultimate Frisbee. And I'm kind of waiting to hear about someplace starting a college roller derby team.

Re Passports: I routinely see stories on Not Always Working about liquor store clerks and bar doormen in the US who do not recognize or refuse to accept US passports as ID.

@Elliott Mason no. 35: I love the way she roars "Somebody that I used to know!" right back at him.

More:

Evil Ways (That My Man Uses to Scare the Hell Outta Me; Jean, Joan, I'm Ready, Come By Tomorrow at 10, I'll Be Packed and Waiting at the Door with the Kids)

Hello, I Love You (In a Relative Way, Because at Least You Didn't Actually Follow Me Down the Street, Unlike Most Creeps)

Metropolis originally was modeled on Toronto. I like that interpretation. Toronto is a great city.

You've gotten a lot of good advice and suggestions in this thread.

A couple of points I will mention in addition to those I've seen:

- It's my perception (and this may be wrong), but in Midwestern university/college towns (and these can range in population from 10,000 to more than 100,000), you don't see the "town & gown" separations the way you do in English university cities. In many of these cities, the economy pretty much runs entirely around the university. And part of this is because, especially in state-funded universities, there is not the sense of elitism you will see at English or Ivy League (in the U.S.) universities, which are mostly on the East or West Coast. This is because people don't have to come from wealth to attend most Midwestern universities, especially the state-funded ones.

- State-funded universities are reasonably affordable (for values of what passes as "affordable" these days) to students who can document "residency". So you might consider giving your protagonist an estranged parent or step-parent or aunt/uncle with a local address whom they could use to establish residency (this is a pretty common workaround). Also, a lot of states have reciprocal agreements: for instance, the state universities in Iowa and Illinois, or Iowa and Minnesota, have reciprocal agreements which consider residents of the other states to be residents of their states for tuition purposes.
(PLEASE NOTE: my knowledge on this may not be current; you will need to do a little research on what reciprocal agreements exist.)
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/5-ways-to-cut-tuition-costs-at-out-of-state-universities/

- Both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University have strong football programs for which someone talented might reasonably qualify, and they are both well-known for certain academic specialties: U of I for Journalism/Mass Communications and Medicine (and of course the University of Iowa Writers Workshop), ISU for Engineering, Computer Science, Agriculture, and Veterinary Medicine.

- When you say, "shouldn't have a top-ranked team" -- honestly, there are many U.S. universities who have teams that vacillate from strong to not-so-strong. It's completely different from Australia, where rugby teams are all basically professional or semi-professional. Very few collegiate teams are considered perennial powerhouses, year-in and year-out (and there are hundreds of them).

- Despite being in what is considered a somewhat conservative state, both Iowa City (U of I) and Ames (ISU) have fairly strong LGBTQIA populations and cultural support. My cousin's son just graduated from ISU in engineering, and he belonged to an openly gay fraternity there. (Iowa was the 4th state to legalize same-sex marriages, in 2009.)

- If you're wanting a university city which is paranoid about legal drinking age, hoo boy, just Google "VEISHEA" (formerly ISU's annual campus celebration, rioted out of existence by alcohol-fuelled, out-of-control parties).

- Honestly, it grieves me to say this, but most U.S. states, with perhaps the exception of those on the west coast, have poor anti-stalking laws (or at least lukewarm enforcement of those laws).

I hope that you may find some of this information helpful. (I can even probably connect you with my cousin's son, if you wish to ask detailed questions about the current "state of the nation" for someone who is gay.)

Arrrgghh. The post at #50 was intended for Megpie71 at #3.

Lee, I've been pushing the idea that Trump supporters identify with Trump, but there is only one Trump. If you aren't Trump, you are dealing with Trump, and that's very different from being Trump. I don't think I've convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me.

Less seriously, I have doubts that Trump is a human being. He has mysterious powers of persuasion, and he doesn't look like a human. I suspect he's some kind of low-quality elf. Alternatively, he's a lizard who embarrasses the other lizards.

For the sports discussion:

Map of highest-paid state employees

Website for people in relationships with people with personality disorders

It looks sensible, but I wasn't sure whether this sort of non-personal thing belongs in the Dysfunctional Family thread.

Jenny Islander @ 34 ...
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window (

Not quite what Jenny Islander @ 34 was describing, but I've always been amused by the fact that, on one of Linda Ronstadt's early albums, she sings "Long Long Time" and "Different Drum" back to back - two songs that could easily be the same situation through the eyes of the two principals.

Along the lines of Gotye, how about "One Way or Another" by Blondie. It starts out very stalkery (One way, or another, I'm gonna find ya...I'm gonna win ya...I will drive past your house and if the lights are all down I'll see who's around), but later verses flip it (One way or another, I'm gonna lose ya...give you the slip...lead you to the supermarket checkout, some specials and rat food, get lost in the crowd).

Megpie71 @ 38:::
"large country towns" rather than "cities"
Hays and Fort Hays State may be of interest to you for calibrating your expectations. I don't much care for wikipedia, but it's good for general information about size and economy stuff derived from the US Census Bureau who tracks that sort of stuff.

If you want the most manly, least tolerant sport to match your criteria, stick with football. Basketball is a close second. Just send them to a smaller university with a low-ranked team. Some of universities may have "walk-on" status for athletes rather than athletic scholarships up front. A scholarship may be worked out after the fact, depending on how such things are handled in-university and in athletic organizations for the university. It's a way to disguise pay-for-play status from the collegiate athletics governing bodies.

FWIW, "non-traditional students" don't usually get athletic scholarships (those are determined by athletic scouts who follow high school sports teams for a living), they do qualify for a number of regular scholarships. A traditional student goes straight from secondary school into a college/university/community college. It sounds like your character is very much a "non-traditional student".

Megpie71 would someone who comes from Minnesota be required to get an Iowa proof of age card in order to be able to drink legally in Iowa?
Nope. The legal drinking age in the US is 21 unless otherwise noted. So your character would not be able to drink legally anywhere. However there is something called "fake IDs" created for the purpose of underage drinking. It's a college/university thing here. Any business serving alcohol is required by law to check people for legal drinking age. The government spot-checks business for compliance. Usually in the form of sting operations.

State issued IDs are good from state to state. They have all the same information on them, just in different formats. It's as close as we get to a national ID card without using our social security ID. All drivers licenses (and state-issued IDs) have the following: State where it was issued. Date of birth, height, weight, gender, home address, ID number (which is now different from the federal social security ID# -- they used to be the same ID # before identity theft became prevalent) ID issue date, ID expiration date, type of vehicle you're trained to operate, if you have vision correction and whether or not you're an organ donor. Plus photo and your signature. You're required by law to update your license every time you move your permanent residence, as well. Even if it is just across the street, let alone to a new state. College students are considered exempt since the assumption is they only live at the college 9 months out of the year. Their "permanent address" is their parent's address unless they make a concerted effort to "cut the financial strings". Or move in with a relative who is a resident in the state. Or take time off from school to establish residency before enrolling at the university/college.

What kind of work does your character do? That is also important. Some kinds of jobs are easier to get than others for someone with a mobile lifestyle.

The big thing about the college bar situation is that in the US most undergraduates can't legally drink, accounting for the underage drinking raid on student parties as a news story. Around UMCP in Maryland, for example, all the old student dives have one by one succumbed to lack of freshmen who will drink anything, anywhere.

College towns tend to be fairly tolerant about public homosexuality. College "towns" outside the east tend to be mid-sized cities.

The sports situation: in the midwest I think your best bet for a manly sport is going to be wrestling. It's very big in the area, it isn't contaminated by the pro-sports-minor-league situation, and there are generally scholarships. Plus there is definitely a gay thing going about the, uh, revealing uniforms.

Town/gown exists in places where the university isn't considered part of the city, for one or another reason. Santa Barbara and UCSB have a difficult relationship - the university and most of the student housing (the community called Isla Vista) are in the county; the professors and the employees live in Goleta or in Santa Barbara. The city would very much like the prestige of having the campus without having to have any of the students around. (It's been that way for at least 50 years.)

Megpie@38, Me@45:

School funding: This is a bit of a big thing going on the US right now. School tuitions tend to be high (University of Kansas in-state resident tuition is about US$10K/year, not counting food, housing, books, etc). As such, almost no one pays for it full up front, and almost everyone relies on some form of financial aid (as grants, loans, scholarships, etc).

The trouble I see for your character is that almost all the available financial aid is "needs-based", and that need includes an expected contribution from parents. If your character is estranged from their parents (as evidenced by, say, picking a relative several hundred miles away in a different state and driving to them upon high school graduation), they may be unwilling to fill out the forms necessary to apply for financial aid. Without the forms, no grants, no scholarships, possibly no loans, even non-needs-based aid may be unavailable.

There are a few ways to be considered "financially independent" of your parents for financial aid purposes, but they all usually involve things like military separation, death, marriage, etc. Personally, I had to take a break from school until I was 25 after my parent's inability to complete their taxes on time eliminated my financial aid opportunities.

This sort of detail might be easily glossed over, but if you are having other characters attending this school due to financial reasons, this is more of a relevant issue.

Megpie, may I suggest a couple of schools for you to research? All three are midwestern, but two are in states you haven't mentioned--but not really all that much farther than, say, U of Illinois. One is the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor; the other is the University of Wisconsin in Madison (the closer of the two to your geographic area, really). I thought of both because of your "city size" reference and the contrast between the politics of the state and the cities involved; both also have a solid academic reputation in certain fields. Both are Big 10 schools, and UMich is in particular football-crazy--people talk about "bleeding maize and blue," which are the school colors, and the college fight song has to be heard to be believed.

If you're willing to go suburban--Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL? Evanston is a suburb of Chicago, NU is also a Big 10 school (major sports conference, as some have mentioned) but a very small one; the academic standards are high enough that the university has a problem recruiting athletes in some areas. They've also got a full athletic program--football and basketball are still the "money" sports, but I can't conceive of a team sport that they don't play. How about Wrestling, if you want a low-profile "macho" sport?

Another Illinois college you might consider is Bradley University, in Peoria--which I thought of mostly due to its location. Good luck!

Megpie71 @38: The reason I chose the five states I did is because I have a character (the focus character for the first year or so of the story) who has left a small town in Arkansas (mountainous region) by motor bike, looking for work, and really, Nebraska is about as far as I can realistically see him going on the amount of money he would have had saved for fuel and other sundries by the time he finished high school. While I'm sure he's going to eventually see all of the continental states, money is definitely a constraint for him at present.

Are you using Australian or US gas prices? A quick calculation ($1.22Au/litre vs $2.19US/gal) suggests that (if my arithmetic can be trusted) Aussie gas prices are about triple the US's, which may change this characters's range...?

Whereas I think for most of the US the drinking age is 21, isn't it?

Drinking age in the US varies by state and type of alcohol.

Also, availability of alcohol does not correlate particularly well with drinking age, as fake IDs and other work-arounds are well-worn practices, particularly in US college culture. Witness the number of drunken-rape scandals coming out of US fraternities.

Elliott Mason @39: The cops, of course, tend to try to keep an eye on it

Heh. As a matter of fact, the underage son of a coworker has been working undercover with the local PD to check/enforce the carding practices of local bars.

drunken student hijinks and property damage are well-known

As well as the odd riot—in Boulder, anyway.

Buddha Buck @45: it might be worth it to look to exactly alcohol is allowed to be sold.

And when (hours/days of operation) and to whom (some variation in what proofs can be sold at what ages).

re "The Four Trumps": every now and then I wonder how people wind up grown far enough away from anything I consider decent (cf Welch to Joe McCarthy) that they would vote for Trump. Are they so desperate that they can't see through him? ("He'll appoint good advisers", says one North Caroline supporter in a BBC story, despite the fact that he seems incapable of taking advice.) Have they been deliberately groomed [sic] by Republican operatives? (I've read that the party deliberately started and got support for right-wing think tanks as far back as Goldwater's defeat, to put out rationales that would sound plausible enough to drag the electorate to the right.) He's obviously taken a page out of the Edward J. King playbook ("We put all of the hate groups in one pot and let them boil", said a campaign official after incumbent Dukakis was defeated in the 1978 MA primary), but I wonder how many people that gathers -- a small number of jackasses can make a lot of noise in this age.

Mary Aileen @ 213::911: interesting to know.

Tim Walters @ 213::916: I rcognize Anchor Liberty but not the taste, although I'm sure I tried it back when; in your view is it still what it was? There are a couple of hundred-tap bars around here so I might be able to find it. Note also that "IPA" as a name never died; the Ballantine label only died well after the surge in craft brewing.

Diatryma @ 213::931: Bolcom & Morris's album Lime Jello: An American Cabaret did a number of ~"good songs from bad shows". (These probably also show up on some of the ~dozen prior albums, but this is the one that became known in SF fandom.)

Benjamin Wolfe @ 213::993: another wedding last weekend! (We spent a chunk of Saturday at a friend's reception in CT.) Congratulations, and many years to enjoy it. We're past 22, with some hope for 50 despite my taking forever to realize it would work.

Carrie @ 20: Boston is small for Gotham, and was way too staid during the first decades of Batman.

Lee @ 36 re Elliott Mason @ 29: My recollections of childhood impressions are that Green Lantern was also in the midwest, but I couldn't swear to it -- maybe I'm confused from at least one crossover.

Dave Harmon @ 33: Another point about big colleges/universities in small towns/cities is that it's not necessarily a static situation. I'd hardly call Boston a small city (despite the above to Carrie); I think the population never got below 500,000 at its low point a few decades back. However, I was at school in western MA ~45 years ago when a newspaper pointed out that the population of UMass-Amherst had passed the population of its namesake community (both in the upper-teen thousands IIRC). Another issue to think of when dropping in a school is where it came from; like many now-gigantic state schools, the above started as an agricultural school (thinly parodied in Charlotte McLeod's Peter Shandy mysteries), which is why it was founded in a low-population area (providing practical study) that may have had time to become used to it \and/ room not to be crowded (unlike Boston schools as others have noted in this subthread).

Megpie71 @ 38:
* wrt size, note that in at least some states there is clear nomenclature distinction: a town decides major issues in a town meeting (where anyone, or a very large set of fractional-time representatives, can vote), while a city does everything through a city council (board of aldermen) but can be small -- <50,000?
* wrt one-way travel, someone with a motorbike, a bedroll, and sitzfleisch can get anywhere in the contiguous US for <$100 or less at current prices; if your TBR pile isn't big enough, look for Beagle's only nonfiction, I See by My Outfit, and think about why the character would stop sooner. (College towns all over the US tend not to be as shy of strangers as other towns.) Or don't if it doesn't need to be a plot point; someone that age and that detached can act on whim and opportunity, especially given mobility. (I assume you don't want to reproduce Route 66...)
* wrt alcohol, the drinking age was dropped to 18 in March 1973, then pushed back up by a variety of concerns (e.g., 18-year-old idiots willing to buy hooch for 12-year-old kids, drunk driving (since cars are so common in the US), etc.) with pressure from the US govt to get reluctant states (where most laws are made) in line. Someday US behavior re alcohol may be saner. (Someday winged monkeys will fly out of my ass?)

PJ Evans @ 59: what's Claremont like now for town/gown? I was admitted to Harvey Mudd in 1971, but they acknowledged on a visit that the town wasn't interest{ing,ed} and anyone without a car (to get to LA) was hosed.

Buddha Buck @ 60: speaking of Mike -- IIRC, parental unwillingness re forms was why he wound up at IU instead of MIT.

several re Mike: I spent Sunday not thinking about the anniversary, after being reminded of it the day before by my wife (who chaired AFAIK the only con he was GoH at). I remember saying as we drove away from The Dish (the one near Canberra, not the one the movie focused on) that he would have enjoyed visiting there -- and realizing it was the fourth anniversary. Time to reread again; I was defending/providing-alternates-for The Dragon Waiting on File:770 a few days ago and realized I hadn't read it in way too long.

local sighting: a squareback (not VW) with many science stickers on the back (Darwin fish, "Got Shale?", "Schists Happen", ...) and VA license plate "OROGENY". They have plenty of examples to look at....

Jacque @61:

Drinking age in the US varies by state and type of alcohol.

That hasn't been true for decades - it's been 21 everywhere since sometime in the 1980s, when the federal government threatened to use the big hammer of highway funding to force the issue. (The wikipedia page you link to confirms this, with the exception of places like Guam and Puerto Rico that are not states.)

@lorax, there is one exception to drinking age; in some states (Connecticut and Illinois are two; I don't know how common this is) that a parent or guardian can serve a minor alcohol. I think in Illinois it's limited to beer or wine, but I'm not sure. So in some cases a parent can order a beer in a bar for their 16-year-old kid, or a glass of wine to go with a restaurant meal, so long as the parent is the one to give it to the kid.

This is not applicable to Megpie71's story, however.

The Illyrian Alphabet That Wasn't: how two centuries of European printers circulated an imaginary Balkan script.
"The 'mysterious' Illyrian script, in other words, belongs somewhere between the chain of early-modern biblical typos, litanies of unfortunately transcribed script tattoos, and the comedies of errors through which Google Translate error messages and out-of-office emails end up written on signs."

IOW, a fine example of the Pastafazool Cycle in action.

763
I have no idea. The closest I ever got to the Claremont colleges, outside of maps at work, was Cal Poly Pomona.

CHip @63: I See by My Outfit is not Beagle's "only nonfiction" by any means. American Denim, The California Feeling and The Garden of Earthly Delights are all nonfiction books, and there may be others depending on how you count. Maybe you ignored them because they were illustrated fairly profusely? They all have significant text, and are fun to read. I notice that only one of those is listed in the ISFDB (California Feeling is down in the "non-genre" list at the bottom, and you may not have gotten that far -- but I don't understand why they don't have the other two).

Some state schools will offer in-state tuition, or close, to any out-of-state student with a reasonably good grade point average (GPA) and/or standardized test scores. Sample: "Arkansas State University-Jonesboro Undergraduate Out-of-State Scholarship. Undergraduate students who meet the following criteria are eligible to receive a scholarship equal to the out-of-state portion of tuition costs: (1) high school GPA of 3.000 or higher and ACT composite score of 24 or higher or comparable SAT score, (2) attendance beginning on or after August 20, 2007, (3) attend ASU-J as a full time student, and (4) a resident of any one of the 49 states in the United States other than Arkansas or resident of any U.S. territories."

Also, unlike grants and student loans, scholarships don't always require a student to fill out a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). This was referenced above - it's the form that wants not only the student's information, but their parents' as well. And unlike student loans, you don't have to pay back a scholarship. Given how rapidly the cost of even an undergraduate education has been rising, a scholarship (especially a full scholarship) can be what causes a student to pick one college or university over another. Heck, even in the mid 1990's I dropped a very good private university off my list of candidates when I learned they didn't offer academic scholarships to freshmen.

Tom Whitmore@68: "but I don't understand why they don't have the other two" -- you know what to do!

CHip @ 63: I rcognize Anchor Liberty but not the taste, although I'm sure I tried it back when; in your view is it still what it was?

As best I can tell, yes, although it's been a while since I had it on tap.

Note also that "IPA" as a name never died; the Ballantine label only died well after the surge in craft brewing.

I stand corrected!

Elliot Mason @ 39: Yeah, we have the various colleges or schools as administrative divisions within a larger university thing happening here in Australia (more likely to be "schools" than "colleges", mainly because "college" here comes tainted with the label of "college of advanced education", which were definitely lesser institutions prior to about the mid-1980s).

I'm not really requiring the sport the jock character is playing to have prestige, as such. I mean, I have two other "sports scholarship" characters, one for archery, and another for martial arts, so I figure this place has a pretty diverse range of sports represented. I'd like it to be a team-based, or strongly team-oriented sport, simply because I do want to get the whole "toxic male bonding" thing happening (the whole thing where the attitudes of your team-mates/workmates etc start to matter more than the attitudes of your friends and family, to the point of over-riding moral and ethical considerations), but if necessary I can probably dump him into a fraternity for the same sort of thing. What you're saying about swimming might work.

Thanks for the info re: the transcript. Okay, so I'm putting the high school the "white trash" character went to in the next town over from his hometown, because that way he's more likely to encounter high school admin staff who won't judge him by his hometown reputation, and won't be so surprised by a request for his transcript they'll stuff the whole mess up in shock.

Singing Wren @ 42: Thank you very much for the link to the NCAA Wikipedia page - very helpful for me! Means I'm going to have to change a scholarship for one of my jock characters from archery to rifle - nuisance, but do-able. My martial arts student was going to be one of the "comfortably well off" ones anyway - so he's going to keep up his martial arts studies at a dojo in town, and be studying sports science and sports psychology without a scholarship.

With regards to passports, I think I have a maximum of two characters who might have one - and one of those is ex-military, going through college on the GI bill after having served a term in the military.

Buddha Buck and others: I can see I've confused people. I have a collection of characters. One of these is the "white trash" guy who left his home in Arkansas for anywhere which wasn't there (and this guy is eventually going to be studying engineering). He's going to have turned 20 in the year the story starts, so he's been living and working in the state where the university is based for a couple of (rather eventful) years. Another is the jock from Minnesota who got a sports scholarship to my fictional university (currently for football, although I'm thinking of changing this to something else), who is going to be turning 18 in the year the story starts. There is a geek (mathematics/computer science) who is going to be turning 17, and another very precocious character who isn't yet 16 who are the reasons I'm chasing up alcohol rules.

The "white trash" guy is going to be the focus character for year one, the sports jock is currently planned to be the focus character for year three (year two, for the curious, has a guy who's doing arts/law as the focus).

The "white trash" guy lucked out and managed to get given a rather beat-up motorcycle by a lady back in his home town (she'd pretty much inherited it from a son who'd died in a non-vehicular accident, and had no use for it herself - she gave it to the character as payment for about two years of house repairs and four winters of wood chopping and snow shovelling, plus grocery runs and other odd jobs as required). She also gave him the name and address of a nephew of hers who was living and working in a big-ish city in a different state, as someone who might be able to help him out. So the work he's been doing in his new home state is largely courier work - first as part of an established courier firm, then as a solo operator for a small client base. He combines this with working part-time as a sort of roustabout/admin assistant/general gopher/"can you hold this for a minute" guy for a local mechanic shop (where the nephew of his helpful neighbour works).

It actually gets interesting, because he was offered a mechanic apprenticeship by the proprietor, and when he applied at the local community college for the pre-apprenticeship course, the administrator took one look at his transcript and asked why he wasn't studying engineering instead. Then she got onto the Dean of Engineering at the university, shot a copy of the transcript over to him, and started pulling strings and arranging things to get this character into the mechanical engineering courses on every scholarship they can think of (because otherwise money is a severe constraint). He has plans to continue the courier business around his studies.

I'm pretty sure he's able to establish financial independence from his family. His only real family is his mother - she thought she was in a more solid relationship with the guy who became his father than she had been (his father, on the other hand, was basically using his mother as a mobile Fleshlight) only to be dumped summarily when she became pregnant (genuine oops - failure of birth control following a bout of a stomach bug). As far as I'm aware, the guy who fathered our first year focus character doesn't even know the kid exists (and probably couldn't afford to pay child support even if he did). Anyway, she went back home to her parents (granddad died of miner's lung years before; grandma died when the kid was about eight or so) and the derision/spite of the locals. She was always bitter about the kid, because she blamed him for the end of the relationship, and they had a rather dysfunctional relationship full of resentful silences on her part and bewildered ones on his.

http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/01/29/the-fake-townhouses-hiding-mystery-underground-portals/

I seem to recall we were discussing this once.

I wonder if it is useful to distinguish between:

a. People who think Trump would be a good president.

b. People who prefer Republican appointees and to Democratic appointees, and figure that Trump means Republican appointees and thus broadly Republican policies.

c. People who want the set of ideas associated with Trump (border security/deportation, disapproval of BLM/support of the police, dislike of Muslims, etc.) to gain in status or acceptability.

(a) seems the least defensible of these to me--nothing Trump has said or done in the last couple years has suggested he'd make a good president.

(b) is presumably why most Republicans are willing to vote for him--they broadly approve of Republican policies and ideas, and figure Trump will have no choice but to appoint prominent Republicans as his advisors and cabinet secretaries and such. I can think of at least a couple people I know personally who I think are in this category.

(c) is the category I've seen the most support for, but that may simply be an artifact of what I read online and the people I know.

All this is based on knowing only a small number of people who support Trump in person, and a somewhat larger set of people I sometimes converse with online.

Megpie, some of your story ideas are making me remember the fact that the poet Jack Kerouac had a football scholarship, but had to drop out of school due to being injured and unable to play football. His dropping out of school led to the travels that provided inspiration for On The Road.

75
category (d) is people who think that having Trump as president will somehow Bring the Revolutions that they've been hoping for and we'll all have sparkly rainbow unicorns. (These tend to also be hardcore Bernie fans.)

Rewatching The Princess Bride now--my husband's choice after a hell of a long day on the job, while sick, without backup. Everybody in the room is quoting, including the six-year-old. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories about the movie: that the first time Golding saw it was the premiere and the second time was 25 years later at a special anniversary showing, at which he was absolutely gobsmacked to see a multi-generational bunch of fans packing the room, cheering, and reciting every line.

CHip @63: Green Lantern was based in Coast City, which was on the coast. (Go figure.) It was not-Los Angeles in the same way that Gotham was not-New York.

(In JLA - Avengers Kurt Busiek posited that Earth-DC was slightly larger than Earth-Marvel, to make room for the extra cities.)

I was at Iowa State during the time when the drinking age was 18. There was a bar on campus, in the student union, called The Maintenance Shop. There were many bars in Dogtown; one was named The Library. Another, Dugan's Deli, was close to my dorm. A beer and a bialy at Dugan's were frequently my Sunday supper. Alcohol was legal in the dorms.

I forget who was discussing geography above, but Kansas and Oklahoma do NOT border on the Mississippi River.

Jenny Islander@78: I suspect you mean Goldman. (Though for some reason he and Golding are especially easy to confuse - I've done it more than once myself.)

Anne Sheller @ 80:

I have been told that many college town and university districts in larger cities have a bar near the college/university called The Library. I was also told this is so students can honestly say the were at The Library when they were out drinking.

Even in the mid-late 1990's Ohio State allowed alcohol in dorms, so long as it was purchased, kept, and consumed by students who were at least 21. Most students who weren't RA's had moved into off campus housing by this point, but there was at least one senior on my brother's floor when my brother was a freshman. As you might expect, this was a rule honored more in the breach than the observance.

Mary Frances @61, as a native of the area I might have to suggest against UMich; it's a very expensive, fairly bureaucratic school, and the string-pulling Megpie @73 might work there, but is less likely to do so than at a school that is slightly less full of itself.

The financial aid office is also rather inflexible on the topic of estranged parents; I believe that in order to establish independence, you need a signed letter from the estranged parent stating that they have no intent of ever supporting you financially ever again in any way... This actually might be a difficulty with the FAFSA rather than the fin aid office as such. As stated above, the only real ways out of it are a) joining the military, b) getting married, or possibly c) having been an emancipated minor or similar legal construct that you can no longer do once you're 18. Anyway, the implications for people who, say, have never met their father, or need to never talk to their parents again for personal safety reasons, should be distressingly apparent. I have a friend who got married at age 18 or 19 in order to get aid for community college, because they need to never talk to their mother again.

83
It's like financial-aid people think everyone has a 1950 TV-type nuclear family. when that's more the exception than the rule. And wasn't all that common even 40 years ago.

lorax @64: That hasn't been true for decades

Wow. I clean missed that right-most column. Banner-blindness FTW. :-\

*nevermind* /latella

Albatross @75: I wonder how useful it would be to split the Trump-voters into categories based on the set who will vote because of Trump and the set who will vote despite Trump. The *outcome* will be the same but obviously what would make them change their mind would be very different.

And I am not sure how to classify the ones who take the position that most of what politicians do is evil and that they therefore should do as little as possible - and from there go to vote Trump because he will supposedly be opposed from both sides and unable to get any of his policies through.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley ('62-'64), all you could buy within a mile of the campus was "near-beer" (what it was near to wasn't beer). However, clustered just outside the one-mile zone were numerous 24-hour liquor stores. And they delivered.

#83 ::: estelendur

I'll add one more to the category-- a parent who is intractably uncooperative. It might be mental problems (disorganization, phobia, incapability) or it might be an refusal to help in any way.

#86 ::: Sten

At least some Trump voters hate Clinton.

I can't find the clip, but Howard Stern says that some Trump supporters believe that the government isn't working, and giving it a hard whack will help. (I heard it on NPR today.)

The only person I've lately hung out with (but again, I live in a "blue dot") who claims to intend voting for Trump, is seriously depressed and passively suicidal, with serious anger issues.

The GOP is clearly reaping the whirlwind, the question is how many of us will suffer for it.

I know a Trump voter. He's a friend. (I avoid talking politics with him.)

He's packed up the machines factory he works in and shipped them, with his job, to Mexico... TWICE. (When his job moved to Mexico the first time, he found another job... in a company that is currently moving to Mexico. He's now job-hunting again.) He blames the Clintons.

He's not a bad person. I don't agree with his decision, but I can't say that I don't understand his bitterness. He doesn't seem to be able to notice, because of his resentment, that Trump buys all his campaign swag in China...

His wife and daughter are both voting for Clinton.

People are complicated.

me @90, that should be, ...he's packed up the machines in the factory...

(And I do mean that literally. He was in charge of unhooking, disassembling, and packing the machinery.)

I just wonder when it will dawn on the gods-blasted media that some of us out here don't care about the emails.

I'm a retired Federal employee, and up until the early-adopters got into the management stream computers were more used by administration (i.e. clericals) than by the 'professional' staff. Which meant it took a while before many Federal agencies had 100% of their population using computers.

The upper echelon of the Bush Administration used a private server located in the headquarters of the RNC. I suspect that in addition to more privacy, they just didn't want to bother with the technical stuff (this tends to be the hallmark of the Republican Administrations I dealt with over the years).

Those of us who were comfortable using them usually had more than one email address, the more geeky monied sort had (gasp!) HOME computers. In the next wave of Federal nerds were the BlackBerry users...

What Clinton did was allowed for many years -- it's only under the Obama administration that they tightened up on the rules. When management didn't give a damn about computers ('those are for secretaries NOT me!') it was pretty much anything goes. Clinton's only crime, if it can even be considered one, is that she wanted to keep her personal matters private and yet wanted the convenience of using her BlackBerry.

IF security was the goal, then the bloody damn NSA is culpable, because Clinton asked up front for a secure version of the BlackBerry, and NSA said, "No." Should Clinton be elected, I hope she fires the people at NSA who behaved with such lack of foresight.

HLN: Area woman is diagnosed with shingles. When asked by her physician if she's under any stress, can merely give the doctor a look that attempts to convey "Have you seen the politics going on lately" as an answer. Area woman is grateful to her spouse for forcing her to the doctor today. The virus was caught fairly early, and hopefully the anti-virals will kick in soon. In the meantime, expect a lot of swearing.

cyllan #93,

Sympathies & hope the anti-virals get the job done. I understand shingles can be painful.

A shingles vaccine is available. It's pricey (~$200) and not 100% effective, but it's recommended for those over 60.

Lori Coulson at # 92: Clinton asked up front for a secure version of the BlackBerry, and NSA said, "No."

The way I remember reading it, Clinton is a Blackberry addict who didn't want to switch to whatever mobile phones were supported on the secure government networks. She wanted whatever solution let the POTUS use a Blackberry securely, and didn't understand why they couldn't do it for her too.

This next part is my speculation: Obama's Blackberry is not as secure as it should be, but the NSA couldn't tell him no.

Lori@92, Allan@96:

The way I heard it was that the Blackberry she was offered could not deal with getting mail from two different (personal and work) accounts, so she would either have to carry two devices, put her personal email on a government-owned server (and thus subject to FOIA requests), or put her work email on a privately-owned server.

93
Most sincere sympathy, and the antivirals will do a lot for you.
(I've had that stuff twice, once with antivirals and once without. After the second time, I got the shot - via ACA coverage - in hopes of better immune-system response if it happens again.)

95
It was about $230 last fall, and they're actually recommending it for over-50.

The one Trump supporter I know is bitter about jobs going outside the US.

estelender @ 83: Good information about UMich. I was suggesting it solely on account of the location and the sports/academic record; the only thing I know about the place, really, is about third-hand from a second cousin alumna . . . I can well believe that everything you say is true not only about UMich, but about most big state "flagship" schools (which would include UW-Madison, of course).

Theophylact wrote: "However, clustered just outside the one-mile zone were numerous 24-hour liquor stores. And they delivered."

Whiskey Gulch! Real scruffy and run down. But thriving, I imagine.

It was still around when I lived in Belmont. I was told it was situated on the one patch of down-scale East Palo Alto that was west of 101.

Last time I was down there the area was being redeveloped and cleaned up.

I understand people being bitter about jobs being offshored. What I don't understand is what people think Trump can do about it. There is no possible magic wand that anyone can wave to turn the Rust Belt back into the factory belt.

Hey, I just got a giant push update for Windows 10. It came with the usual puffery but nothing concrete about what it does. Anybody else get one, and what does it do, exactly? Are there new security holes for me to plug?

Anne Sheller, #80: I was at Iowa State during the time when the drinking age was 18. There was a bar on campus, in the student union, called The Maintenance Shop. There were many bars in Dogtown; one was named The Library. Another, Dugan's Deli, was close to my dorm. A beer and a bialy at Dugan's were frequently my Sunday supper. Alcohol was legal in the dorms.

OMG, I think you and I may be contemporaries. Cy's Roost, and The Cave Inn, which had 10c draw night and always closed down with Jimmy Buffet's "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw", and the disco place (which later burned down, dammit I can't remember the name) with the special on daiquiris of all flavors on Wednesday nights. And the dance club that I pretty much lived in for a year or two, until I got a romantic partner (and I can't remember the name of that one, either, dammit!).

And the blizzards! When the snow started to avalanche down, and we all blew off class for the afternoon and went to The Keg Shop for a keg and had a party while the campus was snowed in, and played Manfred Mann's "Stranded in Iowa".

Oh, dear. I think I'm going to pass out from an overdose of nostalgia.

Thanks to all for the good wishes. They're much appreciated.

Cassy B. @103: I suspect it's less that they are thinking that Trump can do something about the loss of jobs and more that they're just grateful to have someone they feel understands their position. (Which isn't to say that other politicians don't understand, but they aren't focused on that demographic.) Sometimes when you're buried, you don't want a solution so much as you want someone to acknowledge that your situation sucks.

cyllan, I'm just going by my soon-to-be-unemployed friend as a bellwether, here; he says "Trump will bring the jobs back!..." and he seems to believe it.

I seem to recall Trump making that promise several times on the campaign trail; never with any substantive explanations of HOW he'd bring them back, however. Other than taxes. Which Trump himself doesn't seem to think he personally needs to pay. The contradictions, they make my head hurt....

When I had shingles (not a bad case), I would apply a paste of witch hazel and fuller's earth (ask your pharmacist) to the lesions. When it had dried, I'd -- gently! -- remove it with more witch hazel. Repeat. Then my skin would be very dry, and I'd apply a zinc oxide ointment for an hour or so. Then back to the fuller's earth paste. It helped.

cyllan @ 93:

My grandfather had shingles a few years ago, and seemed to recover quite well with the treatment they gave him. Best wishes to you.

It's too late for most of us now, but there is a chickenpox vaccine these days, and it looks like having been vaccinated against chickenpox is likely to reduce the risk of shingles later in life. All I know is I'd much rather have had the vaccine than chickenpox.

Cassy B. @ 107:

When driving through the San Joaquin valley, I saw a few signs that read something like "Another farmer for Trump. Water for families and farms." All I could think was, "where did Trump even hint that he cared about you or water issues?"

109
It's the local irrigation district's astroturf group. They're against all Democrats, including the Blue Dog who's represetning a lot of them. (Apparently Congress controls rainfall now.)

Theophylact @ 95 & P J Evans @99: I got the shingles vaccine last December. My doctor recommended getting it at the pharmacy, rather than in her office, because insurance seemed to be paying better if it was at a pharmacy. I called my usual pharmacy (in the Giant Eagle grocery store), and a nearby RiteAid. My usual pharmacy was confused about whether I needed a prescription and how much it would cost.

RiteAid told me it didn't require a prescription, checked my insurance, and told me it would be covered 100% with no co-pay. I got it free at RiteAid.

This will naturally vary with the insurance company involved. I think the "requires prescription" may vary with both state and insurance plan. I'm glad I called more than one pharmacy. I did that based on a Consumer Reports article that said costs can vary significantly between different stores.

I went to a pharmacy, also; I also got a flu shot (for luck) and the tetanus/pertussis booster (my brother's youngest grandkid just turned one this summer, and I wanted to not give him anything I might be carrying).

I live in Hoboken, but was nowhere near the Hoboken Terminal when the train crash happened. Lenore is also OK.

As for other people I know in Hoboken, it's early days yet. The people on the train would have been commuters from other parts of New Jersey, but Hobokenites go into that terminal for all sorts of reasons.

Latest reports I've heard say at least 3 dead and over 100 injured.

Elliot Mason@35, Very cool video (the ASL one.) I hadn't realized how very chilling it is to deliberately not look at someone who's speaking to you in sign language.

Megpie71 @ 38, "tavern" seems to be a generic phrase for you, while for us the generic phrase is "bar" and "tavern" is only kept as part of a slightly old-fashioned name. Separated by a common language and so forth.

As far as sports, I don't know enough (localized or otherwise) to help.

113
Thanks - I was a little worried.

Jenny Islander@104: perhaps it's the same one I got about 2-3 weeks ago, and which started a long installation process when the machine was running unattended, which annoyed me. It didn't change much except to annoyingly revert some of the config changes I'd made when I finally upgraded to W10 a few months ago (Edge became the default browser again, tap touchpad to do a mouseclick was switched on again which I hate, it tried to get me to use Cortana again, boasted about a few new Windows Apps that I'll never use.) Annoying at the time but no long-term damage.

(Yes, the substring 'annoy' does get overused surprisingly much in that last post. That's Windows updates for you.)

JJ at # 105: Disco place in Ames? If this was the late 1970s, it would be Granddaddy's.

AKICOML: I once saw a book, an sf collection, called "Uranian Worlds", and thought it might refer to planets of extreme axial tilt, but it did not. Now I am curious to find stories/books that do. M.A. Foster's "Warriors of Dawn", and Poul Anderson's "Man who counts", I think the latter was, but can't recall any others--pertaining to Uranus itself [all right, there was a Weinbaum story] or others like it. [I'd go with Foster and use the term "Uranoid".] Anyone here got any leads?

Pfusand @108: I once heard dermatology summarized as: "If it's wet, make it dry. If it's dry, make it wet."

"Irrigation district's astroturf group" sounds like an oxymoron, in the sense that astroturf does not need to be irrigated.

Megpie, it occurs to me you might appreciate the movie "Breaking Away" It's a coming-of-age story of a young man living in a university town, with bicycle racing.

Xopher, good to hear you're OK.

Apropos of nothing: Swiped from a side thread on Customers Suck:

I recently purchased Frosty Paws for my dog. The directions say to put the cup in the food dish. My dog DOES NOT like that! So she does this.

in The Tick, there are official panels that decide which superheroes are assigned to which cities. The Tick gets assigned to The City.

Jacque @120: A dermatologist in training once told me that dermatology is the ideal medical specialty. Your patients never get well, they never die, and they never call you at 3AM.

Sandy B @114 - Actually, "tavern" is pretty much a university-specific usage, and it may be further localised to the various universities here in Western Australia. Everywhere else in Australia, the place which serves alcoholic drinks by the glass is called the "pub".

#122: I watched Breaking Away a few months ago, for the first time in . . . two decades?

It held up wonderfully. A forever movie.

Stefan Jones @#127

As I recall, Breaking Away is set in Bloomington, Indiana, where my wife went to grad school circa 1980. It covers a number of points relevant to Megpie71's fic in progress, including the town vs. gown situation. My wife says it wasn't quite as separated as the movie shows it. The town's major industry at that time was the RCA assembly plant making TVs.
Certainly the SCA and fanish communities included both town and gown. The university's big sport is basketball.
Now, the last time we visited Bloomington, I wound up driving out of a state park embedded in a large pack of Hell's Angels motorcycles. This may also say something about the demographics.

That Feeling Where: You know you read a piece of fiction, and love love love LOVED certain aspects of it, and you KNOW you have enough keywords that you oughtta be able to find it again, but noooooo.

And then you ask just the right person and they give you a link and YAAAAAY!

(specifically it's a fanfic involving a character learning all about ethical BDSM and how that works; email me via the gmailz at 2ells2tees if this might interest you)

Angiportus @119: Uranian Worlds is a bibliography of gay and lesbian SF, written by Lin Paleo and Eric Garber, rather than an anthology. I recommend it, though it's a bit out of date at this point.

As for extreme axial tilt novels, would you count ones where the world is half-day, half-night? This could happen if the planet revolves around the axis that's in the plane of the ecliptic. Not thinking of any offhand, but looking at Mercury-related stories might give you a couple.

Allan Beatty, #118: Disco place in Ames? If this was the late 1970s, it would be Granddaddy's.

Yegods, I'd forgotten about Grandaddy's. But that was downtown, right? I think you're right, in that I was remembering the multicolored squares of light that made up the dance floor, and it did burn down later. I think I've accidentally melded that with the place that had daiquiri specials on Wednesday nights, which was right near Campustown. Does Mondo's sound right? I don't know why, but that's what keeps poking itself into my brain.

And there was a dance bar that opened in an old warehouse near Campustown at the beginning of the 80s, painted all black inside, that played pop and rock music. I pretty much lived there for a year or two.

And the pranks... like the Engineers, sticking a huge pumpkin on top of Marston water tower.

I haven't thought about any of this in years. What a trip down Memory Lane.

AKICOML: A friend recently got a new neighbor, a 9yo black girl. My friend did a literature search, and can't find fun SF/F books with a young black female protagonist. She can find books with young black female protagonists, but they are "educational" -- about history, slavery, social justice, etc.

Does anyone know of any suitable "young adult" SF/F starring black teenage girls?

Henry Troup @ #128, Breaking Away was filmed where I live (Athens, GA). They filmed some parts in the winter and had to glue leaves on the trees. (That was before I lived here, alas, but there are still many dedicated cyclists here in spite of terrible infrastructure. 2 deaths this month alone.)

Well, that's sorted.

I have confirmed I am registered to vote in November's election, and filled out the form to request an absentee ballot. Despite any other shenanigans, Ohio at least is making the absentee ballot bit simple - you no longer need to provide a reason why you need an absentee ballot, the office of the Secretary of State mailed me the request form, and no additional paperwork unless I also go to the polls on Election Day.

Megpie71 @ #126:

Hah, had I been asked to hazard a guess, I would've guessed "pinto" (pronounced as "pint-oh"), analogous to a "bottleo".

Buddha Buck @ 132: I would recommend Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books, which have four teenage protagonists, one book from each POV. Daja is black and from a minority in the local context (it's a fantasy setting unrelated to Pierce's Tortall books), and she has a black mentor.

Hoping I put in the right email for a new computer here.

Black protags in YA (and middle grade, really) SFF: Pierce, yes. Okorafor, definitely. Farmer's Ear, Eye, and Arm might hold up. There's probably a better list somewhere but I can't find it, or much of anything with American protags rather than African or secondary-world. Larbalestier's fairy book, maybe.

Buddha Buck @132, I think of 9 as a little young for some of YA. I googled "Diverse Middle Grade science fiction and fantasy" and found a few recommended lists, some of which look good. Nothing I personally can vouch for.

"Larbalestier's fairy book" is How To Ditch Your Fairy, whose protagonist is not explicitly Black.

Larbalestier's "Liar," however, has an explicitly multiracial kid of which one of the races is Black, and her navigating the complexities of racial identity and "passing" is part of the entire thrust of the book.

It's been a while since I've read it, but Akata Witch might qualify.

Buddha Buck @ 132: HM Hoover's Away Is a Strange Place to Be is good.

There's also the Andre Norton Star Ka'at series, but it's somewhat out of date.

Buddha Buck, #132: "The True Meaning of Smekday" by Adam Rex is a fun, humorous middle grade SF novel with a black girl protagonist. My own 9yo girl really liked it.

Is this a good time or place to talk about the Best Series Hugo?

Singing Wren @134:

Ohio learned its lesson from 2004, when many polling places had people standing in line to vote for more than four hours.* After that debacle, they expanded early voting and relaxed the rules on absentee ballots.

*I was one of them, and I had to call my office and tell them I'd be late. It was the first time I'd reached my polling place in the early, early morning and found a line...

Buddha Buck:

It's not exactly YA (or high literature), but Neal Stephenson's book Reamde has a young black (North African ancestry) protagonist. It's somewhat violent, has at least some sexual content (though not much), but it's not a bad read.

On alcohol sales, if I'm not too late, there are such things as local option states (most of the South). In such states, local governments determine whether or not alcohol can be sold, and under what conditions, within limits set by state law. As a result, bootleggers flourish in the South.

This also means that there is a trifold classification of counties: dry (no legal beer, wine, or liquor sales); wet (beer, wine, and liquor legally sold); and moist (the county is dry but it contains one or more wet municipalities).

Doug @143:

Sure.

Prompted by an obnoxious meme I saw on Facebook....

It's another piece of shit from Breitbart
Another piece of lying screed
It fills the Internet with malice
And promotes more and more evil deeds

It fills up minds with horrid mistruths
Spreads memes of hatemongering disease
Engaging in a long campaign of slime
Sends rationality to flee.

It's another piece of shit from Breitbart
And I want it all to disappear please!

So I just got a popup, white letters on a black field. It reads:

Restart required
We'll restart your computer outside of active hours. Click here to change the restart schedule or restart now.

Do they realize that that reads like somebody just walking into my living room, leaning over my shoulder, and watching me type while waiting to push the button?

Jenny Islander @ 149 ...
I'm sure whomever came up with it thought it sounded friendly, rather than creepy ...

(Noting that Abi said fine @147, not that I was worried about it in an Open Thread.) Doug@143: I see that Helsinki has just announced they'll use their right to award an additional Hugo category to run a trial of this proposed (waiting for ratification and then to take effect) award.

Series are really extremely important in the field, and I've felt periodically that the Best Novel award was hijacked by a work that wasn't really the best, but in a series that people thought was the best. I think having a real award for a series will help some, and will basically be a good thing. I'm comfortable with the proposed re-eligibility rules (if a series has been a winner, it can't be nominated again. If it has been a finalist but not a winner, it can be nominated again if, since it was most recently a finalist, it has grown by at least the amount needed to qualify for this award in the first place, at least 3 volumes and 240k words).

I think we'll just have to live with series that are great, win, and then get something obnoxious or embarrassing grafted on. Won't happen that often, and the dates of things will make it clear that the obnoxious new bit wasn't what the award was given for.

Just coming here to do the equivalent of squishing my forehead forelornly on the cool surface of a refridgerator or (sturdy) windowpane.

A friend is dying; I'm too far away to do anything meaningful, for them, anyway. (She's married, to a superbly supportive partner.)

Crazy(not ready yet for a cup of tea, or even to cry, just yet...)Soph

Sympathies, crazysoph. If you're accepting internet hugs, you have mine.

JJ@ #105:

Oh, special on *daiquiris*, plural, of all flavours. I was about to ask after this "Daquiri of All Flavors." It sounded good. Or possibly scary.

Dave 123: Thanks.

crazysoph 152: Hugs if welcome.

Buddha Buck @132: Princeless. It is a comic book series and it is the best. My 10yo Black niece was super disappointed when she discovered that I'd already given her all of them and she would have to wait for the next one to be written.

Trek Against Trump.

"Star Trek has always offered a positive vision of the future, a vision of hope and optimism, and most importantly, a vision of inclusion, where people of all races are accorded equal respect and dignity, where individual beliefs and lifestyles are respected so long as they pose no threat to others. We cannot turn our backs on what is happening in the upcoming election. Never has there been a presidential candidate who stands in such complete opposition to the ideals of the Star Trek universe as Donald Trump. His election would take this country backward, perhaps disastrously. We need to elect a president who will move this country forward into the kind of future we all dream of: where personal differences are understood and accepted, where science overrules superstition, where people work together instead of against each other."

And look at that list of signatures! It reads like a Who's Who of all the series, and the movies as well.

Sympathies, crazysoph.

crazysoph @152: Ouch. :-(

I have a complaint: I have now read all the T. Kingfisher books to date, and there are not more.

It is totally UNFAIR that it takes longer to write books than to read them.

Tom Whitmore @ 68: I was thinking of straight prose -- to the extent that I was thinking.

Tim Walters @ 72: Guess I'll have to swim down to the local go-ahead-punk-count-my-taps and try it.

David Goldfarb @ 79: so much for >50-year-old memories. I suppose not-LA was a more plausible location for a test pilot.

Cassy B @. 90: I suppose I should have included PJ's type (d) -- because that's what it takes to believe that Trump is going to do anything about jobs moving away. (I can just see him tearing up GATT and walking out of the WTO -- and then being lynched when people realize how little of what they buy at Walmart, Target, ... is made in the US. Maybe they'd even get there ahead of the 1%.) re your followup, I wonder whether he's really so stupid as to believe the Laffer curve, or just latched onto it crying "Ooh! Shiny!"

P J Evans @ 110: the claims I hear amount to "The eco-nuts are blocking our water!" (\Real/ Republicans are all against eco-nuts.) IIRC, this is semi-true -- well north of you, where wild-aquacultural businesses have good reason to oppose diversion of water to land.)

crazysoph: sympathies; watching from a distance is not fun, even if you know there's local support.

HLN: today's life lesson was part 2 of "Don't trust flat-pack furniture that comes with wheels." (Each movement focuses stress on joints that really aren't designed for dynamic loads.) Fortunately I was able to spring some loose joints just enough to slip some "super glue" into them, and then apply the ratchet straps that my wife decided a few years ago would be a good thing to have around the house.

161
The current Big Water Fight is over Jerry Brown's wish to install two very large tunnels under the Delta to move water south - without all the necessary impact statements done first, and without input from the most-affected parties. What some people want to think is that most of the water will be going to cities in Southern California, but the big beneficiaries will be the irrigated farms in the southern San Joaquin valley (mostly luxury-type items like almonds - a lot are exported - and pomegranates and pistachios). The big losers will be the Delta, with all its recreation and farming, and the cities around it that use well water, because the flow will be reduced to where there's saltwater intrusion.

I don't think Jerry Brown has been closer to the Delta in the last 40 years than crossing the river to get to the airport. He got elected on his reputation, and he's doing a fine job of trashing it.

Clifton @160: I read an interview with Lois Bujold where she described how Baen bought her first three books and published them in three consecutive months, giving her early fans the entirely mistaken notion that she could write a book a month.

JJ & Allan - my ISU years were '74-'79, 4 years stretched over 5 by the engineering co-op program. I only vaguely remember Cy's Roost and the Cave Inn, didn't actually spend that much time in bars (though there was that FAC, Friday Afternoon Club, where after classes on that day we'd get moderately drunk before facing Friley food). I lived in a little shoebox dorm called Westgate, which has since been torn down. Had to walk about 1/4 mile on Iowa winter mornings for Friley food breakfasts.

Clifton @160: It is totally UNFAIR that it takes longer to write books than to read them.

Maybe if we read them all serially? Yeah, like that'll happen. :-)

CHip @161: ratchet straps

::trots off to add to McGuckins list::

I think you may just have solved several problems for me. See also: Your wife is a very smart lady.

Anne Sheller @164: Iowa winter mornings

Friend of mine reported that his first winter 8am class at Grinnell was the last time he shaved. (Well, until he had to start using a CPAP forty years later....)

151: That's about where I am, too, and I'm already a member for Helsinki (w00t! the country where I quite want to be), so I'm excited to be part of the trial run.

I hope that people don't expend too much energy talking about edge cases, and that we get a good set of nominees to choose from.

P J Evans @ 162: so a Democrat is giving the farmers someone else's water and the farmers are still voting Republican?!?

Jacque @ 161: compliment passed on. If you don't find them in major-local-hardware-store (only reference I can find), the big chains (Lowes, Home Depot, ...) will certainly have them -- probably under a different name, but a salesman should know what you're asking for.

a waking-up thought re Trump and jobs: he's an updated Lord Summerisle, promising the jobs will come back if we just burn a few people -- except that Christopher Lee at his worst was better-behaved than Trump....

I think a chap could do business with Lord Summerisle. He wouldn't welsh on his deals.

#132 Two possibilities, neither one a perfect fit:

Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older has a Puerto Rican female protagonist, but might be for slightly older audience.

Deeba Resham, the hero of MIéville's Un Lun Dun is black or brown in a lot of fanart. I don't remember what the book says, but she's more likely of South Asian than African ancestry. And, of course, a Brit.

Dave Bell @168: I think a chap could do business with Lord Summerisle. He wouldn't  welsh  renege on his deals.

...please

Buddha Buck @132

My cousin and a few friends started up an educational non-profit, called Tumblehome Learning. They have a series of books, labeled
Galactic Academy of Science. They are educational, but it's not painfully obvious. My cousin wrote the first one, The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip, and one of the protagonists is a young black girl.

Jacque #170: I think that was meant to be a joke on the character being Scottish.

[Capclave GOL?]

Checking interest in a GOL at Capclave this weekend.

Capclave is a local SF convention being held this Friday through Sunday at the Hilton Washington DC North/Gaithersburg. The hotel is on Perry Parkway, just off of I-270.

Driving directions can be found at the hotel website. Transit instructions and other information can be found at capclave.org

Any GOL would probably be either Friday or Saturday evening. Last year the GOL walked over to Yu Zhou Cafe.

The Wicker Man, made at the very start of our European Economic Community (as it then was) adventure, has a few odd Brexit resonances now. Islanders who very much Have Their Own Way Of Doing Things dealing with the outsider who comes from the mainland to interfere...

(If Trump did win, the US would take the Joke Anglosphere Nation crown that we proudly won on June 23rd, but we'd definitely win it back during the exit negotiations that'll happen in the next few years.)

Elliott Mason @26: Heh. Would've worked better with larger fonts at the end, but I can understand why the "<big>" tag isn't enabled.

I'm afraid that OVFF is extremely unlikely this year for us. There's a drastic shortage of spoons and a copious lack of free time. And sometime soon we will probably end up in court for Inge's divorce action, and it's almost certainly going to be ugly. (Perhaps I should say "uglier"; it's currently at the "no one has yet alleged abuse of the kids, but..." level. For all intents and purposes, we haven't seen the kids in a bit more than two years. "Think of the children!" indeed. We think of them often.) We don't know what the scheduling of that will be.

David 172: Still an insult to the Welsh, no matter how much english you put on it or claim that leaving it out would scotch the joke.¹

Steve 174: (If Trump did win, the US would take the Joke Anglosphere Nation crown that we proudly won on June 23rd, but we'd definitely win it back during the exit negotiations that'll happen in the next few years.)

Is the JAN what's known on this side of the pond as the World's Stupidest Nation award? Because if Trump wins I'm pretty sure we have that sewn up for four years, or until the end of the world, whichever is shorter.²

¹Yes, of course I'm kidding.
²Not kidding about this one, and I did mean shorter.

Jacxque @ #170:
Xopher @ #176:

As far as I'm aware, the phrase "Welshing on a bet" is a slur on the English Royal House, referring to "the Prince of Wales" (well, a specific one who was in the habit of not paying his lost bets) rather than to actual Welsh people. That aside, I would in general be happier if the phrase wasn't used.

Ingvar M @177: Huh. I had no idea that was a reference to a specific individual. I figured it was of a class with financial insults about Jews.

And my objection to @172 is not mitigated by the explanation, since its joke nature only works(?) if you'd read the book. Which I hadn't even know existed, prior to that comment.

In other news, I have to say, you win the prize for most-original misspelling of my name. Not, strictly speaking, a misspelling, since it's obviously a typo resulting from a finger landing between keys. But I've never gotten an actual X before! =:o) You gave me a good chuckle.

Jacque @ #178:

At least it wasn't a "w". Yeah, it's a phrase that is unproblematic only if one happens to know that tiny tidbit of English idiom history. Most don't, so I would, in general, advise not to use it.

In completely different news, about a week ago, I took part in a sportsing tournament for the first time and did not place last in the field (#6 out of 9, if memory serves me right). I've signed up for another sportsing event in December and seem to be scheduled (more or less accidentally) for yet another one sometime in October.

Xopher@176: yes, it boils down to the same thing, but thinking about this a little, I suppose I prefer the 'joke nation' formulation to the 'stupid nation' one because it feels uncharitable to call a nation stupid on the grounds of a finely-balanced national vote that only just goes the wrong way. The Brexit win was narrow and presumably a Trump win would be too. (And 'joke nation' is ultimately objective: Brexit did quite verifiably cause a hell of a lot of amusement around the world in the first few days.)

Lessons learned from 2016? Satire is very much overrated as a tool against populism; the anti-EU campaign in the UK was a source of mirth for years; the Onion and countless TV funnypeople have not stopped Trump. Against certain types of populism, satire is ultimately as ineffective as it was in the Weimar Republic's cabarets.

On the verb 'to welsh', or 'to welch': archive.org's copy of the OED merely says 'Of obscure origin'; my 3rd edition of the Shorter OED from the 80s says 'Of unkn. origin'. Given that rhymes about the alleged criminality of the Welsh were still just about current when the OED was compiled, it's interesting that the OED doesn't mention the 'obvious' etymology even to rule it out (does the current OED have any more information?)

Steve @181:

The current OED has, for the etymology:

Etymology: Origin uncertain; perhaps < Welsh adj., on account of alleged dishonesty of Welsh people (see note). Earlier currency is probably implied by welsher n.1, welshing n., and welshing adj.
Compare (from the same source as quot. 1859 at welshing adj.):
1859 Morning Chron. 5 Nov. 8/5 The phrase ‘Welshing book-maker’ seems to owe its origin to a nursery rhyme, commencing with ‘Taffy was a Welshman, [Taffy was a thief,] &c.,’ and, as we understand, means a dishonest betting man on the turf.

The referenced note says "Sometimes considered offensive in view of the conjectured connection with Welsh people."

The entry was last revised for the OED 3rd edition in 2011.

Buddha Buck@182: thanks for that—presumably the sudden availability of scanned newspapers led to this discovery. Amazing how the original OED was all done in handwriting on little scraps of paper. How anyone got any work done in the quill/dip-pen era I'll never know.

And further to ethnic slurs and the like, or not, I understand that "scotch" as used by Xopher above is cognate to "scorch" not "Scots".

J Homes.

Buddha Buck@182: Arguably, that nursery rhyme, which is one I know, could by itself make the term offensive to those with Welsh sympathies; it implies a relationship between "Welsh" and "thief" that, if you view it that way, certainly would be offensive. Regardless of the origin of any of the terms.

Foxtrot does Hamilton.

J Holmes @184 etc: That's certainly what's happened with "Scot free" - "Scot" in this case is an old Norse word for a tax or fine, but lots of people think the phrase has something to do with the 1745 Jacobite rising.

Similar issues in the US around words like "renege" and "niggling"

Dave Crisp @ #187:

Probably a cognate of the modern Swedish "skatt" (which, interestingly, means both "tax" and "treasure", so the tax department truly is the treasury department, even in name).

Once upon a time, I told my then-boss that everything was hunky dory, but he was concerned that this was a racist expression. I then asked my lesbian black co-worker about that and she laughed. My boss had gotten 'hunky' confused with 'honkie'.

I had the impression that "honkie" was derived from "hunky", which was a late-19th-century derogatory term for Hungarian (or other Eastern European) immigrants, typically miners or steelworkers. Wikipedia lists this as the first of 3 possible etymologies. But the OED suggests that "hunky dory" is based on an older positive meaning of "hunky", dating back to at least the 1860s.

My own understanding (take it with a grain of salt, what with English not being my native language) that 'honky' was a deragotary term toward all white people. For all I know, the term is now as quaint as saying 'swell'. :-)

I thought some of you might like this article about letter openers, paper knives and the differences between them.
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-mystery-of-the-phantom-page-turner/

Serge @192:

I think you have the right understanding. Being white, and surrounded by white culture, I rarely hear the word so I don't know if it's considered old-fashioned and quaint. I don't think it is.

I recall the memorable Saturday Night Live word association sketch from 1975 where Chevy Chase gave words (which became increasingly racist) to Richard Pryor to respond to. The last three word associations were "jungle bunny"/"honky", "spade"/"honky honky", and "nigger"/"dead honky".

I don't think the language in the skit has aged that much in the intervening 40 years. It's still understandable, and still as offensive.

Growing up in Western Canada, I understood Hunky to be a derogatory term for Ukrainian immigrants.

There was some drama, when I was a kid in the seventies, related to an entrepreneur self-applying the title to himself and his product, "Hunky Bill's Little Perogie Maker", which is still made and marketed under that name today. The slur has passed far enough out of common usage, that I really only explain it to people in reference to the product. As an adult, I've literally only heard it's use in that context.

Benjamin Wolfe @OT113 #993: Belated congrats for many great years together.

Tom Whitmore @OT113 #926: Absolutely, and thanks

Cat update two weeks post-op. Good news: staples out as of this evening (she only removed four herself). Behaviour getting more normal. Bad news: histo report was bile duct adenocarcinoma i.e. malignant, with a less than 20% chance of it not having spread. We will have to wait and see, and enjoy what time we have with her.

In 19th century and early 20th century US slang "bohunk" was similar derogatory slang - or perhaps sometimes admiring? - for Czech immigrants (from Bohemia, often synonymous with Czech lands as a whole.)

"Bohunk" was still in use as late as 1983; I recall seeing it in the Marvel "Hawkeye" miniseries, put in the mouth of Clint Barton himself. (The person he was referring to turned out to be Steve Rogers - Captain America; Clint hadn't recognized him.)

AKICIML: Opinions pro/con about Android Pay / Apple Pay? I was in a conversation over the weekend with a couple of people who were raving about them as being much more secure than a physical card, and I was thinking, "Yeah, right up until your phone is stolen." Am I being overly paranoid? And how useful are they, as in how many places accept them? I know that our chipreaders can both accept them, but in the last year we've had exactly 2 people ask about it, which suggests that their popularity is either low or regional.

(I have Android Pay on my smartphone, but I haven't activated it yet.)

Lee: If the phone is stolen and they don't have your access code (or fingerprint), they can't get to the pay app -- which is definitely a layer of security that cards don't have. It's like "chip and PIN" security, ne?

That said, I haven't activated Apple Pay because I'm a slow adopter of new technologies.

I think the only times I've ever heard the word "bohunk" spoken were in the movie "16 Candles".

I like Android pay. I haven't studied the security much myself, but summary articles make it sound quite good, certainly no worse than bare cards.

I haven't found very many places where it works. It does work at the grocery stores I use, so that's convenient. And I think it's ramping up fast -- places are accepting NFC payments more and more.

It's much faster than chip readers, and even than swipes, I find, which is convenient.

Fossilized ethnic slurs!

(I don't mean they're harmless today; though to go dig out every case of anything that was ever a slur and then treat them all equally and try to completely stamp them out does seem to me like it would be an overreaction.)

Lots of them I've never heard in the wild as slurs (some of them I've heard as self-description).

Even historically it gets weird. In Skylark Duquesne, published in 1965 (but part of a series started in probably 1910 though not published until somewhat later) Duquesne is interested in a woman named Stephanie de Marigny (she's a PhD physicist, working the same place he and Seaton worked). Whose nickname is "Hunky". I don't see the slightest suggestion (not even subtext) that it's somehow a demeaning nickname; it's more like a different slang usage, meaning she's beautiful and curvy rather than skinny. But with that name and background I'm pretty sure we are supposed to know she's of Hungarian ancestry (I can't find any reference in the book explicitly though). So, did Smith not think of that as possibly a demeaning term? Was he actively working against it? Or is he playing with a tension between that meaning and the other slang when applied to a character portrayed very favorably? I have no real idea what he though he was doing there!

Kurt Busiek has a bit character in the latest run of Astro City (in a story set in 1931) nicknamed Hunky. It doesn't seem to be a derogatory name, and I'm inclined to trust Kurt's research on the subject.

I have set up Apple Pay on my iPhone 6 and on my watch. The version on the phone uses the biometric security: you have to provide a fingerprint. The watch seems to be less secure, but you do still have to unlock it with a 4-digit code, and if a wrong code is entered 10 times running the watch locks.

It doesn't seem to be taken in many places, at least so far. The only place I go at all frequently that does is Walgreens. (I was once able to use it at a soda machine.) I do have to admit that I get a bit of a kick out of paying for things using a watch.

A friend of mine was, at one point, going through the ban-list of words for an online chat system related to a videogame, because users had complained that it was censoring way too much of their ordinary communications, to the point of being unusable.

He discovered a BUNCH of things in there that are fossilized slurs -- worse even than the Hasbro-era Scrabble dictionary, which took out things like "papist" and "Popery" on the grounds that they're offensive. Many he hadn't even known about, though he researched each word in the list that he didn't immediately recognize. "Eggplant," for example, while nowadays much more likely to be used in culinary contexts, was an Italian-against-Black slur in New York in the early 1900s (because of skin color).

He said it was educational.

And, of course, myriad words had been accreted onto the ban list over the years that didn't ever belong there, which he sorted. I don't remember what his "in-or-out" criteria on the fossil slurs was, though obviously anything that's even slightly hinky by modern standards stayed banned.

(Sorry, Scunthorpe and Pen Island-dot-com)

It's tough to recognize fossil slurs without reinvigorating them to some extent; when I was in high school, a friend showed me a poem from class that included several questionable words that I just didn't know were slurs. My go-to test is actually Scrabble: if a given combination of letters gets, "Huh, I guess that's a word," rather than, "Oh shit am I a bad person for playing this?" on first check, I treat it as a fossil. But I grew up sheltered and oblivious, white middle-class without much contact outside that circle, and so none of the slurs have been used against me. My sensors are not calibrated for all humans.

On cards and paying, I am so annoyed that my credit card is a chip thing now and that stores are getting the chip readers. It takes so much longer. With a swipe, I can take out the card, swipe, put it away while the computer thinks, then continue. With a chip, it's all about watching the computer think, no multitasking. Oh, technology, not being ideal for my exact purposes at all times.

206
Some of the chip-readers are much faster than others. (I was annoyed by the swiper at the grocery store Saturday: swiped debit card, keyed the PIN, did the cash-back, accepted the amount - and it claimed I'd cancelled it, so I had to do it over again.)

I was in the States in August, and it was so weird to just swipe my card in so many places. What if I'd dropped it? People could just swipe it! It was a bit like time-travel.

On the other hand, we've moved past it now to a "hold the card against the card reader" fastpay system for small transactions, which, while very fast and convenient, also gives me security willies. "Small transactions" are up to and including fifty dollars, which really isn't that small.

I gather that debit cards there are also manifestly different from ATM cards, as well, and operated by the credit card companies rather than the bank? That also seems weird. I suspect it's a question of the USA having so many banks that it's hard for them to coordinate on anything like a standardized debit system without having to go through a third party; would that be accurate?

My ATM card is also my debit card, and this is not in any way unusual as far as I can tell.

My ATM card is a debit card, and can also be used as a credit-card-with-signature. There are also debit cards which can only be used as debit/ATM cards, and credit cards which can only be used as card-with-signature. All of these types of cards are issued by the same credit-card companies; which type you get depends largely on your specific bank.

I really don't get the "but it takes so LONG!" thing. It doesn't take any longer than either having to key in your PIN or having to sign the slip/screen.

What does rather bug me is the chipreader terminals at Target specifically, which signal the end of the transaction with a loud "ENH-ENH-ENH" that my brain automatically parses as "transaction failed" -- even when it went thru just fine. They really need to have a different sound for "transaction processed".

"Hunky" from "Bohunk" from Bohemian?

My debit card is also an ATM card which can be treated as a credit card. How it's used actually determines (to some extent) my liability if it's stolen: credit cards generally have significantly more protection than debit cards.

On not understanding that something might be a slur: I was sent to the principal's office only once in high school. We were discussing Greek mythology, and I made the comment "Pandora, who was famous for her box...." The all male class erupted in laughter, and nobody would explain the joke to me -- not even the principal. They did finally realize that I had no idea why this might not have been an appropriate thing to say.

Stefan Jones @211: Bohunk from Bohemian/Hungarian, as in "What practical difference does it make?", as in "The wogs start at Calais."

My understanding is that in the US there are three different systems for processing cards -- ATM, debit, and credit -- each with their own networks, rules, and fees.

ATMs have their own networks, which is why you'll see on ATMs a bunch of ATM network logos, and you have to look for the ones on your card that match. Usually, it isn't a problem. I do have one ATM card from an online bank which uses an uncommon network. I have to look online to find what ATMs I can use (but no fees, though, which is nice).

The two big networks for credit and debit processing is Mastercard and Visa. As such, a merchant who takes Mastercard or Visa will almost always be able to take either debit or credit cards, and will have different fees depending if they run it as debit or credit. Debit cards can be run as credit, but not vice versa.

There's also different security: debit cards use PINs, credit cards don't, but what you have to use depends on which network is processing the card: If I use my chipped debit card as a debit card, it's chip-and-PIN. if I use it as a credit card, it's chip-and-sign. Before, it was swipe-and-PIN and swipe-and-sign (and it still is, in places which don't do chip yet).

It's really confusing, not integrated, and from talking with friends in the business of credit card processing, the middle layers (between the merchant and the banks) are really, really, complicated and messy.

David Levine has reported that his wife, Kate Yule, died today from the brain cancer that has been affecting her for the last two years. I expect some folks here know David and Kate, so I'm passing it along.

I wouldn't say I know them well, but I met them a few times at conventions (including at least one Farthing Party), and one time they gave me one of their zines more or less out of the blue. Thanks for passing it along, but what awful news.

*deep sigh* I'm so going to miss Kate.

Life is feeling very unfair - not a productive place to be, so I'm going to try and head that off at the pass by sharing a short Kate anecdote.

Years ago, a friend received a beautiful purple and gold thread woven textile, via an ambassador her husband worked with. The gift was for my friend something of a white elephant. However, she decided to ask me if I wanted it.

In a hot second, oh yeah! So, friend handed this textile to me.

It made a very nice wrap, the kind you decoratively tuck into your elbows and let drape behind your back. However, by the time I'd gotten to wearing it at conventions, I'd hit on a different way to wear it - pleating it then securing one end of it to my shoulder, using a penannular broach to wrap around the whole of the cloth. The weight of it generally kept it in place, and no holes needed poking into either the textile or the underlying dress.

Kate saw this at the Scottish Worldcon, and first admired my "sari" - then she took a step back, and realised her mistake. She complimented the engineering of it, saying, "You just see the shoulder bit and then the mind just deposits a sari!"

She had a wonderful mind, she did.

Crazy(*sigh* *moves forehead to next cool bit of surface on the refrigerator door*)Soph

There's a non-English-speaking character in "Chicago" (the stage version) who gets called a "damn Hunky nut" by another character.

Condolences to David and all others who are grieving the loss of Kate. May memories be blessings.

I just heard "bohunk" used as a slur in Ed Sanders's satirical 70s track, "The Iliad," (as part of a cadenza of bigoted slam names—over twenty non-endearing terms in a quarter of a minute).

Also, I thoroughly commend the Beau Hunks' album of music from Hal Roach comedies (mostly, I think, by Leroy Shield of "Our Gang" theme fame). Talk about smooth, sweet, and utterly soothing after the cares of the day. They also have a subset group that plays saxophone quartets, and I sometimes almost download one of those albums as well… it'll happen.

Dave Bell @ 168: on some deals, maybe -- but that's based on being a "gentleman". Did he actually believe the paganism he preached, or was he deliberately manipulating people he felt were beneath him? Or did he simply believe in himself above all else? (The analogies just keep piling up....)

Steve with a book @ 174: I agree with Xopher; May just doesn't have Trump's chutzpah. Now if Farage got in, you might have a chance -- and I see from this morning's news that he's back in charge of the UKIP.

guthrie @ 193: fascinating!

Elliott Mason: I guess MA supersets from Hasbro's prohibited words; the last time I filed for unemployment (entirely electronically, unlike previous cases) the system refused to accept my family name (Hitchcock) as an ID.

Diatryma @ 206: With a chip, it's all about watching the computer think, no multitasking. How so? All of the chip readers I've used beep a second or so after they're done with the card; the only multi-tasking they block is putting the card away.

various on ATM cards: I was annoyed when that "capacity" was added by my bank -- I've written "SIG INVALID" with a marker on the signature block, but I have no idea how often a there would be a person to actually spot a misused card. My most-used grocery and drugstore both have self-service checkouts. (The next-preferred of both had them, then removed them. I wonder whether the drugstore's HQ thought the nearby ]housing project[ was a risk.) And even when there's a person, the odds they'll look at the signature vary; most of the stores I go to let me swipe a card in front of a cashier without showing them the signature side.

Tom Whitmore @ 215: and the year goes on sucking. We had at least one meal with them at almost every WFC; we'll miss her.

And I can't complain it makes the year worse considering his age, but I was still surprised to read a Neville Marriner obit; I've never seen more than a couple of minutes of Amadeus, but his lead of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro is still one of my all-time favorite recordings.

One of my daughters, some years ago, was complaining vociferously about her incompetent high school health teacher, who couldn't stand anyone mentioning something she didn't know or had gotten wrong, and yet was constantly imploring students to "think outside the box." I had to explain why I was laughing so hard. Apparently box=vagina is now very elderly slang indeed.

re 214: To further confuse matters my ATM/debit card in many but not all situations presents the choice between "Mastercard debit" and " debit", including at my own bank's ATMs.

One of the things I'm grumpy at my credit union about is that they keep trying to replace my ATM cards with debit cards when the old ones expire. Really, no, I'm fine carrying around a card that can only steal $500/day rather than drain the entire account if some ATM has a skimmer on it or my wallet gets stolen. (The other is that their new online bill-pay system insists on emailing me with every transaction it's about to make, which is a hopeless security mess.)
Even with those problems, they're still better than just about every bank I've dealt with.

Bill @224:

I have a debit card I use for day-to-day transactions, a credit card I use for scheduled monthly transactions (and, formerly, for "payday loan" purposes, but my new job has reduced that need), and a backup credit card I've used less than a handful of times since I've opened the account.

Guess which card sends me a text message a day with my account balance?

My gripe with my credit union's online bill pay is that it allows me to schedule a payment for delivery on a particular date, not for withdrawal on a particular date. So if, say, Monday is Columbus Day and the banks are closed, all the payments I scheduled early next week get taken out of my account a day earlier than I had planned. And if I don't have the funds in the account a day earlier than I had planned, then I get to pay overdraft fees.

Fortunately, I get emails reminding me of upcoming payments so I have time to go in and fix it. So the zealous emailing you hate mitigates a problem I have.

My hack for that (great if you can manage it) is to have a full month's $$ in my checking account at the end of the month.

Now if I could just figure out how to manage this with vacation time....

Putting the card away is the multitasking I meant; swiping it then putting it away takes just about as much time as it takes the computer to think.

[Capclave GOL?]

Reposting just to check. (Original post at 173)

Checking interest in a GOL at Capclave this weekend.

Capclave is a local SF convention being held this Friday through Sunday at the Hilton Washington DC North/Gaithersburg. The hotel is on Perry Parkway, just off of I-270.

Driving directions can be found at the hotel website. Transit instructions and other information can be found at capclave.org

Any GOL would probably be either Friday or Saturday evening. Last year the GOL walked over to Yu Zhou Cafe.

Kip @220 -- I'm guessing the Beau Hunks named themselves in reference to Laurel and Hardy's Hal Roach comedy, "Beaux Hunks," a title which plays on the Hungarian slur but, iirc, parodies a French Foreign-Legion film called "Beau Geste."

More political verse...

Donald so vain, was that cocaine
Sniffing on the cam'ra, on TV
Bombast ahead, bombast behind
The notion that you're lying, in my mind

Your old taxes secrets you keep
You won't release them, you're a creep
Hits rat'nal people as affronting, too
At the program end we know you've lied again.

Donald so vain, was that cocaine
Sniffing on the cam'ra, on TV
Bombast ahead, bombast behind
The notion that you're lying, in my mind

Bombast ahead, HIllary in red
From the planet's well-being you'd be better off dead.
Mainstream's sleeping, Citizen's United applies
They're funding screed commercials that elections buy

Donald so vain, was that cocaine
Sniffing on the cam'ra, on TV
Bombast ahead, bombast behind
The notion that you're lying, in my mind

Lying from you is this mis'ry for me
Got two working eyes but you just won't see
Send round the bend you'll the species end
The rational scream and your smirk just gleams...

#204 Davie

EE Smith had a female character named or called Hunky de Marigny....

Paula@231: Yes, I brought that up in #203

For those who might want to know, three fairly widely-loved filkers have also died recently: Kira Heston and JoEllyn Davidoff, from the east coast, and Howie Harrison, comedian and guitarist extraordinare, whose health had prevented him from widespread convention attendance for a while.

I need to make sure to check with the Hugo in-memoriam crawl people, but they seem to be pretty good at getting to filkers on their own.

So I participate on the question-and-answer website Quora my profile there, if you are interested in my content).

Some of us in emotionally-fraught and troll-ridden topics find their moderation policies and application ... ineffective. I'm going to go with ineffective. And disappointing. It tends to lead to user attrition among those with the most skill to share, in those topics, because the barrage of abuse is soul-destroying.

In an off-site group for people trying to deal with the stress and share light, I ended up perpetrating poetry, and it occured to me that some of you fine folks would enjoy it. :->

'Pon Quora, whose curst neglect doth lead to drink
Our fifthéd and twice hundredweight disdain!
For newest depths and darker clefts remain
Twixt those who care for truth and clickbait's gain.

This was sparked by me saying that I seconded and fifthed someone's comment, then replied to myself about how my eyes wanted to read it as either something akin to "filth" or some other word being lisped. My conversational partner pointed out that "fifthéd" would be perfectly grammatical in several pre-modern Englishes, and ... well.

(my brain is whispering that I should sonnetize but I don'wanna, don'wanna ... Quatrains in iambic pentameter are totally a thing, right?)

Something up there reminds me of my recent disquiet, while spending two and a half hours at the Genius Bar, on how I was only aware of hearing them ask anybody for photo ID two times, and both times were for black customers. Was this a company policy? A store policy? They didn't ask me for one, and I felt complicit in retrospect.

Sarah E
Your speculation is on firm ground. The Hunks have recorded at least one album of music from Laurel & Hardy movies. I've grown accustomed, sometimes even a little fond, of the sound of older methods of recording, but the clarity of their recordings of the Hal Roach music is awesome, and puts it all into a new dimension for me.

Is anyone else going to Capclave in Gaithersburg this year? I'm considering coming for at least part of it--my weekends tend to be pretty busy, but some of the discussions look interesting, and I haven't actually been to a con for a couple decades now.

@236, meet @228.

Michael:

I think I can make a GOL--my wife and I are thinking about about going to at least some of the con. Would Friday or Saturday night be better? Is anyone else from ML coming?

I hope anyone on the east coast of Florida is either getting out if recommended or taking precautions. Matthew is a very dangerous storm. Be safe!

I was maybe a little naïve in high school, as exemplified by my health class project on the virtues of vegetarianism with a posterboard emblazoned with MEET YOUR MEAT – KNOW WHO YOU EAT. There was also the song we sang in choir that was some sort of paen to the 19th century homesteader lifestyle that had the phrase “… singing snatches…” It took weeks for the tenors and basses to pull themselves together enough to actually sing that one.

Albatross@238

I don't have a strong preference about which night. Saturday may be marginally more convenient.

I haven't seen any messages about anyone else from ML attending.

OT rave, retrieved from wrong thread: I don't usually buy hardcovers, especially new. But based on Hope Jahren's blog writing, I made an exception for her memoir, Lab Girl. And indeed, this book is holy-cow good. Once I've finished it, I'll almost surely be passing it on to my niece and nephews.

Loosely connected to the whole Bohunk conversation: did you know that Bohemia (which used to actually be a country) was the only country in Europe that freely welcomed the Roma, and gave them citizenship? Many were still nomadic, and as they traveled through other countries they were sometimes called Bohemians.

It is my understanding that this is how people of countercultural lifestyle began being called that: not by association with the majority culture of Bohemia, but with the Roma.

re Capclave: I can't make the con (something about having carefully designed and frantically implemented a new feature and finding out that it was designed to an utterly wrong requirement set) but I would like to get together with people if that can be arranged.

Dave Harmon @242, I highly recommend the book also. It is a love song to science, a case study of being a success while also being non-neuro-typical without the narrative being all about obstacles, and a source of lots of thought nuggets on growth and change in biology and in life.

And I didn't know she had a blog. Oh my. Resisting until I have a little more time.

I have retired my over-20-year-old cordless drill. The battery is dying, and I know it is at least that long since some of the repairs I did with it were done.

The replacement isn't new either, but I rather think it might outlast me. I suspect that, as well as the battery of the old drill, some of the mechanical parts, such as the switch, are failing. The original came with a set of drill bits, and these days such things seem to be an extra. I think I have a good deal.

For those into such geekery, the new drill is a Makita, and the same model is being sold new for about twice what I paid. But it is the previous generation. It's somewhere at the bottom end of the professional level of kit, not the latest battery tech, with the more or less standard features, able to operate as a hammer-drill into brick and concrete, as a standard drill, or as a rather heavy power screwdriver.

If you had been buying new kit, about five years ago, you would have had a choice of several different items using the same battery/charger combo. A bit like USB ports and phones, it's the sort of detail which writers didn't think about in their vision of the future. And I noticed that you could get a USB charger than attaches to the latest generation of battery. I don't think I need other cordless tools. Anyway, even with voltage conversion losses, 25 Wh available is a lot of recharges.

We can look at our phones and tablets, and forget what else good rechargable batteries can change. And don't forget the implications of a hedge-trimmer that doesn't need a trailing mains-voltage power lead.

Dave Bell@246: I just gave my two Makitas a new lease on life. These are the old 9.6v models; I've had them right about 20 years I believe. The batteries were dead (and I'd had one or two re-celled earlier). My computers run on both power and network cabling I installed using them (as does most everything else in the house, actually).

For years I've been thinking I would need a new drill if I were doing anything big because new batteries were listed at $70 each (I have 4) and a new 18v kit with a drill and an impact driver (a more useful pair than my two drills) from good brands is only $200.

But just recently I found a two-pack of batteries for my Makitas for only $35, and bought them. Not as nice as a good new kit, but something that works well enough, works now, and costs a more reasonable amount.

"Honky" is certainly a fossilised term. I haven't heard it used in years. It certainly isn't in general use now, as opposed to "whitey", which is certainly in frequent use.

@david bell:

Interesting about a USB charger adaptor for those tool batteries. Probably only something available for name-brands like Makita.

I have one cordless drill set and a multi-tool set, both no-name-brand items I got as gifts. So far they've held up for my household maintenance projects. The solo drill came with a tiny selection of bits and screw driver heads; I supplemented these with a giant collection of bits I bought at a pop-up store. Hundreds of bits and attachments. Not highest quality, but with spares of common bits. It cost about $50.

Fragano @248: Honky was already deprecated, to the point of being a joke as to how NOT offensive it was, back when Bill Cosby was doing standup.

I know quite a few white folks five or ten years younger than my forty years who've got basically no idea it's intended to mean "white people" at all, much less that it's supposed to be an insult.

The Sidelight on the side effects of canceling a Wells Fargo card is interesting, but it ignores some questions:
* Is a canceler any worse off (on the average) than those of us who never got victimized? ISTM that such a person can get some other card if their credit rating supports it AND they need to improve their statistics. Is there some penalty simply for canceling a card, in addition to the statistical effects cited?
* Just how significant are those statistical effects?
* How do the advantages of a better credit score weigh against the cost of the card? Or were the cards permanently free, rather than free for a year as many are? If the latter, I'd be tempted to leave it in play as it will cost WF some CPU cycles to be aware of, without affecting the holder.

I mostly think of the word "honky" in the context of the story premise that TV Tropes used to call "What These People Need Is A Honky" and is now just called "Mighty Whitey"*. Prime examples include Lawrence of Arabia, Last of the Mohicans, and Avatar (the one with the blue aliens, not the one with the inexplicable lack of Asian actors.)

*Obvious warning is obvious: this is a link to TV Tropes.

I have made my decision about the presidential election. I am voting for the lesser of two egos.

Stefan Jones @249

It is something fairly new, and this morning I discovered that Makita also sell a coffee machine that runs from their current batteries. I am not sure if there's a US version, because the coffee machine itself has a standard IEC connector at the Europe-wide mains voltage, and the battery attachment plugs into that. It's likely the "kettle" type rather than the plain 3-pin IEC on most desktop computers, rated at a higher temperature limit with a notch to distinguish the two female plugs.

It was labelled "espresso" but looks to be more of a drip-filter type. Or hot water if you want to use a cafetière. One of those shop-around things, but if you have the batteries anyway it looks a good deal. And not terribly badly priced for mains power use.

I wonder if there is a solar charger... Apparently not, and you would likely need a fair-sized solar panel. Best bet looks to be charging from a standard lead-acid system at 12v nominal, and not the battery you use to start up the truck to go home.

[Capclave GOL]

Let's meet in the lobby of the convention hotel (Hilton Washington DC North/Gaithersburg) at 6 pm this evening. I will have the restaurant guide with me. The guide can be found at capclave.org under the "printable material" item.

Ok, I'll see you at 6.

CHip @251:

I am uncertain of any dings to your credit score that come from cancelling a card, other than the age of the accounts and the credit utilization issues mentioned in the article.

There is some potential dings from applying to a card (they look at how recent, and how often, your credit report has been pulled for the purposes of offering you credit), so presumably when WF fraudulently opened the account in your name you got dinged then, but that ding is short-lived.

I'm wondering what benefit there is to closing the fraudulently opened account. You didn't ask for it, but you got it. Why not use it?

(There are some issues I know of: when you try to get a loan, they look at your total possible debt compared to your income. If you have $30,000 of available credit from WF that you don't know about, that might mean the difference between a bank thinking you can, or cannot, afford the mortgage you want.)

Elliott Mason #250:

I can well believe it. "Ofay", similarly, is a fossil term. I've never once heard it used.

On t'other hand, I've had an argument online with a white person who insisted that "buckra" was a pejorative term for white people. It isn't, certainly not in Patwa and other West Indian Creoles. It just means "white person". It can actually be used more broadly, as I found out 47 years ago when I was addressed in the morning "Maanin bakra maasa" by an old man on his way to his field. I found out, long after I got over the shock of being addressed as "white master", that this was a customary form of address to mulattoes but only on the first encounter in the morning. As this was recorded by Walter Jekyll at the beginning of the twentieth century, I may have been one of the last mixed-race people so addressed.

[Capclave GOL] I'll see you there as well. Look for a guy holding a red and white flashlight.

Buddha Buck:

I think the whole point of signing up customers for those accounts was that the bank made money off the fees they charged. The sequence was (as I understand it--someone please correct me):

a. Wells Fargo management realizes they can make more money if they get customers to sign up for accounts that have more fees.

b. Management creates big incentives for their employees to get more customers to sign up for those accounts (which aren't to benefit the customers, remember, but rather to bring in more account fee revenue).

c. Employees respond to these incentives by signing customers up for a bunch of accounts they didn't agree to, didn't ask for, and didn't want.

d. This goes on for years, all over the country--if this had happened in one bank branch somewhere, Wells would never have gotten hammered by the fines as they did. The fact that it went on for this long strongly suggests that the bank management either was aware of it and was turning a blind eye to it, or had extremely weak controls over what their employees were doing and really bad oversight of their customer service, because they must have been getting a lot of complaints about this over the years it was happening. (Most likely, they just apologized and removed the extra charges when someone complained and insisted, but I don't know. That's the usual pattern for this kind of fraudulent behavior.)

I doubt the fines were big enough, even though they were quite large. If the probability of the fraud actually ever getting caught is 1/100, and the company makes $100M on the fraud, then the fine needs to be more than $1M to be an actual incentive for the company not to do it. This damages Wells' reputation, but the truth is, most customers (like me) halfway expect this behavior from big companies. This is pretty-much standard practice from cable and phone companies, and I believe at least one big cable company was giving incentives like this to its low-wage call-center people as of a few years ago.

Honestly, the best deterrent would be fines large enough to put Wells Fargo entirely out of business, or actually sending some of its C-suite executives to prison. Absent that, I expect this kind of fraudulent behavior to continue. I have heard stories of people having similar problems at other banks, and it wouldn't surprise me if a similar scandal hit some other banks, because it's a pretty good way to make money as long as nobody calls you on it, and the bipartisan ruling class consensus for the last 30+ years has been that big companies (especially banks) need to be regulated with great deference and gentleness, and that things that would be illegal if done by a small mom-and-pop business turn out to be forgivable missteps, when done by big companies with lobbyists and legal departments.

Fragano:

I recall Turtledove having his black Communist revolutionaries (in his South-wins-the-Civil-War alternate history) using "buckra" as a term for whites. I didn't get a particular sense of it being a term of endearment, but then, they weren't in a situation that would have much endeared their white neighbors to them.

260
Do other businesses actually sign up customers for accounts without even asking? Because that's the impression I got, that the customers weren't even asked first: the accounts were created without their knowledge or permission.

Pejorative terms: The first time I ever heard the term "coonass" I flat-out freaked, because I know damn good and well what "coon" means; it was said by someone I'd been corresponding with in e-mail, and I dumped them so hard it left skidmarks. When I tried, hesitantly, to cross-check my reaction later, I was told by another white person that it was what white folks in Louisiana call themselves; when I asked a black co-worker, he gave it the same kind of side-eye I did. You still won't ever catch me using it, but if anyone here has better information about the term I'd be pleased to hear it.

My only experience with the word "coonass" is reading John McPhee's article "Atchafalaya" (available in the New Yorker's online archive here), where it's used several times in the introduction – in a way consistent with "what white folks in Louisiana call themselves".

It's a damn good article, by the way.

More specifically, what (some) Cajuns in Louisiana call themselves and each other. My suspicion is that many of them don't find it all pejorative when used within the group and only slightly pejorative, if at all, when used by people outside the group. And some of them find it highly amusing when non-coonasses get all shook up about it.

Lee @263 & David Goldfarb @264: My dad used that term to refer to the dent the hammer makes in the wood when you miss the nail. (Though I think he might have used the possessive, and added "hole".) It was only until years later once I got out into the world and got a little education that I was retroactively appalled.

In the years we lived in Louisiana, I remember a joke that went Q: What's the difference between a coonass and a horse's ass? A: The Sabine River (the boundary between Louisiana and Texas).

I don't remember it as coming with racial overtones, although it's certainly possible I was tone deaf.

Some boasting for an open thread:

A long time ago - after the internet but before the world wide web - I wrote myself a program which showed a Roman numeral digital clock. It looked pretty cute and I showed it to a friend, but instead of telling me how clever I was, he said “but that's not how Roman time worked”, and proceeded to explain that the Romans counted 12 hours in a day, from sunrise to sunset, so every day was a different length...

Many decades later, I've finally ticked something off my todo list: I've written a Roman digital clock which *does* keep time Roman style if you want it to. It also gives the date Roman style (so 9th October is “Ante diem Id. Vii October”, or “VII days before the ides of October”), and the help text is bilingual - English or Latin. As it says at the start of the help:

"Sequens programmatiunculum ad Horologium Romanum pertinens conscripsi ut peregrinatoribus qui ab Imperio Romano ad haec tempora iter faciunt auxilio sit. Immo vero etiam aliis lectoribus forsitan utile esse possit."

or

"Horologium Romanum - the Roman Clock app - was written as an aid to time travellers from the Roman Empire who have chosen to visit the 21st century. Even if you do not fall into that group you may still find it useful."

I hope that others in the Fluorosphere might find this as pleasantly pointless as I did. There's some more details at:

http://www.teapot7.com/roman-clock-app/

Jacque @266: I have heard those hammer dents called jackass tracks, or mule tracks in polite company.

Light was made at the Texas Renaissance Faire yesterday. That's Caroline Ring, my partner, and me. (Her husband, who was not in garb, took the picture.) We had a fun day, topped off by excellent Indian food on the way back.

Bruce H., #265: And some of them find it highly amusing when non-coonasses get all shook up about it.

Well then, I see I needn't worry about my reaction to the term. The feelings of assholes are of zero interest to me.

Steve Taylor @268: I've been waiting MM years for an app like that.

TomB @271: It has MI uses around the house.

@260: Not exactly. The idea was for these accounts to fly under the radar, and it's less likely to do this if they're accruing fees. There were some fees incurred accidentally (like overdraws due to transferring money to these accounts), but that wasn't intentional.

It worked like this: One measure Wall Street uses to evaluate a bank is "engagement": how much business their customers are doing with them. Wells did in fact have a higher than industry norm number of accounts per customer, and this would inflate their stock price.

Usually this is costly because banks normally hand out bonuses for opening lots of new accounts, but it's in their interest to ensure these are genuine, lest employees open tons of bogus accounts. They'd end up paying bonuses for no new business.

Wells, on the other hand, used the stick approach: open a certain number of accounts or lose your job. This way it didn't cost much.

I used to work at a bank (not Wells) that paid bonuses, and I assure you than any reports of "I didn't open this account" were jumped on. There were people who tried it, but got caught pretty quickly.

So the CEO of Wells may be trying to pull the Mission: Impossible defense ("The secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions."), but he had to know. Even if he didn't directly order it, the first thing to ask when your numbers are really good is to ask "How did you do it?"

Steve Taylor @272: While we're on the topic, can you explain why a T-shirt size M is smaller than L, and L is smaller than XL? It's very confusing.

TomB @ #274

Applause!

TomB @ 274 ...
Steve Taylor @272: While we're on the topic, can you explain why a T-shirt size M is smaller than L, and L is smaller than XL? It's very confusing.

It's very similar to the way that wire is sized -- the higher the number, the smaller the T-shirt ...

TomB @274: That really is one of the big questions. I wish I had some wisdom to offer...

Steve Taylor @268: I'm posting that link to the latinstudy list at quasillum.com. No doubt they'll be tickled.

David Goldfarb @278:

Thanks for that David - I've been trying to figure out where I might find people who might be amused by such oddities - apart from Making Light of course.

Magnificent Seven remake (no spoilers):

Was anyone else pleased and tickled by the Comanche warrior's name?

279
I stuck it in the "linguistics" thread at CJ Cherryh's blog.

P J Evans @281

Ta.

Was she a Latin teacher in a previous life, or am I misremembering that?

Hey, so after the latest massive download-budget-breaking push-update of Windows 10, my Dell reboots about once a day without warning me or giving me a chance to save out of whatever I'm doing. When it comes back up, everything I've been doing is lost. I looked in the Power and Updates parts of Settings and saw that it refers to this exasperating little dance as "checking for updates." However, I can't find any way to get the damn thing to warn me when it's going to pull this crap! All I can do is pick a regular time and "make sure my PC is plugged in at that time." But when this computer is on I am working on it, and when I am not working on it it is off and a rocker switch disconnects it from the Internet.

So. Does anybody know how to either get the automatic update feature to go away and quit bothering me, or warn me before it destroys the last 15 minutes of work on a document I DO NOT HAVE THE FRICKING TIME TO RECONSTRUCT?

Jenny Islander @ 283:

I saw this article in one of my feeds shortly after my brother complained about much the same thing, and passed it on to him.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3085136/windows/two-ways-to-control-or-stop-windows-10-updates.html

Not having Windows 10 myself, I can't vouch for the effectiveness of the suggestions, but they seem a plausible place to start.

I have just been rewarded for procrastination, which will no doubt lead me to procrastinate more. My car is overdue for routine service, and I'd been putting off making the appointment. I got a call Friday that the dealership now had the parts to do a recall repair that's been pending for some time, and so I can get both done at the same time. I'd be annoyed if I had dutifully and responsibly gotten the routine work done on time and now had to take the car back in.

282
You're remembering correctly. (I think she studied archaeology, also.)

With regards to etymology, though not with regards to slurs or words which might be perceived as such:

I'm taking an upper-level Old English class this year, which so far has been both far more work than I really should have taken on and a lot of fun. Today I learned the word "micelre" meaning "much/a lot/many".

I thought, "huh. Many a mickle makes a muckle." And do you know, I was right. I feel sometimes like "the understanding of the universe" is one of those puzzles with the pieces that have to slide around, and every so often one just slots right into place. Humanities and hard science are the same thing; they're just ways of sliding the puzzle pieces around to find the pattern.

Words are cool, is what I'm saying.

Em @287:

I've sometimes thought that in learning French I'm not really quite learning a foreign language at all, so strong are the links between French and English, and that I should try learning something really different like Russian or Zulu.

Eventually I came to realise though that much of the fun I have in language learning is playing 'spot the etymology', and that I'd miss out on that pleasure if I learnt a completely alien language.

Just this evening I was putting away some honey ('miel' in French) and felt a little thrill of pleasure in linking it to mellifluous - speaking in honeyed tones. (Hmm... Just wondered then about dulcet tones and 'doux' (sweet) in French)

Of course, half of my supposed etymologies could be nonsense, but let's not dwell on that and ruin the fun.

Words are indeed cool.

Steve Taylor @ #288:

And a lot of the French that English is influenced by is Norman French, which is the bastard offspring of East Norse and whatever was spoken in Normandy at the time.

I think "dulcet" is more straight from Latin's "dulcis" ("dolce" in Italian, apparently "doux" in French and the Spanish seems to be "dulce"). The Swedish is "söt", the Dutch is (IIRC) "zoet" (as opposed to salt, which would be "zout").

I guess if you're going for interesting cognates (and many a false cognate) and weird interacting etymology, you could always try one of the Nordic languages (although for Finnish, the only English cognate I can think of is "sauna").

Ingvar M @289:

Yes - must keep in mind that apparent links can just be common ancestry - Latin permeates everything. (which reminds me - I remember in - I think- Jared Diamonds _The Third Chimpanzee_ there was a bit of an attempt to cobble together some proto Indo-European based on commonalities between child languages. I don't know if linguists would take the chapter seriously or not, but it was an interesting idea that was new to me.)

As for learning something Nordic - yeah, it would be fascinating to get to know some of English's northern roots.

This is a hoot - this wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old_Norse_origin

mentions that one of the Norse words came to English via Norman French (as you mentioned) is "flaneur", which seems irredeemably French to me.

Em @287: a lot of childhood rhymes or idioms have their roots in deprecated vocabulary or grammar.

"Hickory Dickory Dock", for example, is related to a much older Anglo-Saxon counting system. A similar counting system has traditionally been used in Wales for counting sheep.

More recently, some of the grammatical differences between how American English is spoken in Ohio and Pennsylvania versus the rest of the country -- independent of accent -- is the retention of certain German grammatical forms, because of the influx of Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) immigrants in the 1800s. Even when their descendants have assimilated into the mainstream culture, language fossils remain, as when someone says "The dishes need cleaned" or "This dish needs cleaned" instead of "The dishes need to be cleaned."

Steve Taylor @290, on Latin imbuing everything: It's worse than that. We have individual English words that were:

* Borrowed directly from Latin into Anglo-Saxon or Middle English, because priests and literacy

* Borrowed from Latin to Old Norse, and thence to English and Norman French (and then reborrowed from Norman or modern French to English)

* Borrowed from Norman French directly while Norman French was actually a thing

* Borrowed from French to English during the Renaissance

*Borrowed from Latin to some other nearby language in the 1100-1500 time range, and THEN to English

* Borrowed from Latin directly to English during the Renaissance, because international exchange of scientific ideas

* Borrowed from French to English in the 1800s or later, because cultured snooty people think French sounds fancy

* Borrowed directly from Latin to English in the 1800s or later, because Latin having been the language of scientific exchange in the Renaissance means it feels all sciency by then and you kind of need to Latinize or Greekify your terms if you want to be taken seriously

... and more than that, actually. And that's still leaving out the number of LATIN words (or other languages) that come from one Indo-European root.

The hilarious part is that all those borrowings and reborrowings can end up with entirely distinct meanings, which is why the same Latin root word turns up in five or ten OED entries. This is why blood and bladder and bloom and blossom and flower and phallus and bollocks and belly and balloon and flatulence are all cognate with an ancient word for something like "swelling".

#251 ::: CHip

More detail about the effects of the unasked-for Wells Fargo accounts

It's complicated-- mostly harmless or only slightly harmful, but occasionally very destructive.

If you'd like to see a really evil bank, check out The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Steve Taylor @ 288: Russian has a surprising (if you don't know the history) amount of Greek embedded or borrowed. The Cyrillic alphabet was adapted from the Greek, for example.

Zulu, I wouldn't know, although there are words loaned to English.

Steve Taylor @288: I should try learning something really different like Russian

'Cept that if you've got Latin, you've pretty much got Russian (it's Yet Another Indo-European Language), only with a different alphabet. You want capital-D Different, go for something like Japanese and/or Chinese. (AIUI, the etymology there is in the character forms.)

HLN: Local annoying humans are being annoying. Your correspondent has a burning desire to grab them by the lapels, scream in their faces, and then beat them senseless with a rolled-up newspaper. Correspondent will probably have to be satisfied with unsubscribing from the relevant listserve.

which reminds me - I remember in - I think- Jared Diamonds _The Third Chimpanzee_ there was a bit of an attempt to cobble together some proto Indo-European based on commonalities between child languages. I don't know if linguists would take the chapter seriously or not, but it was an interesting idea that was new to me.

Linguists do not need to take Jared Diamond seriously or not, because they've done it themselves. The Wikipedia page is a quite good overview.

'Cept that if you've got Latin, you've pretty much got Russian (it's Yet Another Indo-European Language), only with a different alphabet.

As someone who's got a decent grasp of French, can puzzle out Latin, and has recently been trying to learn Russian...no. Yes, Russian is also Indo-European, but that doesn't really mean as much as you'd think. Being able to recognize ~10% of the verbs and a scattering of governmental terms isn't really very useful.

D. Potter @ 294:

Russian is Indo-European, but the branch it belongs to diverged before Latin originated. It did, however, borrow a lot of French terms about the same time English most recently did. It's still more similar to English than Chinese or Japanese, but I don't know that it's similar enough to not be hugely foreign all the same.

With Chinese, in theory the etymologies are in the characters. In practice, any of the pictorial content in the characters was lost centuries ago. And then Japanese borrowed the Chinese characters and applied them to the equivalent Japanese words, so any etymology chain there in Japanese is broken.

For a fun introduction to the writing system, I like Zompist's page about writing English like Chinese.

The easy way to tell if something's borrowed from Latin or if it's just cognate with Latin is the first letter; if it's a borrowing it'll start with P (paternal, piscine) but if it's cognate it'll start with an f (father, fish -- or, as I'm spelling it these days, fisc). Hooray for Grimm's Law.

(Sorry about the double post!)
Lowering the Bar, coincidentally topical, just made a post about legal terms in English as affected by the Norman Invasion.

#274 Tom

Steve Taylor @272: While we're on the topic, can you explain why a T-shirt size M is smaller than L, and L is smaller than XL? It's very confusing.

Maybe because they're acronyms and not dates? Please stop trying to palm off things taken fro the wrong branch of the wrong tree...

In re borrowings from French, there’s a bunch of paired English words that came into the language twice – once from Norman French and once when Calais was under English rule in the 14th-15th century (I think… don’t have to hand David Crystal’s very excellent The Story of English in 100 Words, where I learned this). “Guardian”/“warden”, “guarantee”/“warranty”, “guile”/“wile”, “garden”/“warren” etc etc. He also talks about the Normans’ doubling of legal terms mentioned @300, which IIRC was basically “we can’t be bothered to unpick centuries of precedent in two separate legal codes which have given these terms subtly different definitions so we’ll just use both”. Cracking book, highly recommended to all present.

One of my favorite French borrowings is a stealthy one: "very". (It's derived from the Norman version of "vrai", true.)

@301: Or one could just recognize the joke and laugh—or not, if one doesn't find it funny.

...or be really slow, figuring out the response....

Steve T., #288: Yes, you do have to watch out for "false friends". There's a well-known one in Spanish, embarazada. Sounds like the English word "embarrassed", but actually means "pregnant". Many a beginning Spanish student has embarrassed themselves with this one!

Nancy, #293: The only conceivable proper outcome of all this is for Wells Fargo to be completely dissolved, its upper management prosecuted and stripped of assets related to the fraud, and its existing customers given assistance in selecting and moving to another financial institution. Nuke and pave.

Law French managed to just about hang on in the English legal system into the 17th century, and resulted in daft sentences like this, which sounds exactly like a native English speaker trying to do Foreign by inserting all the translated words he knows and hoping for the best:

Richardson, ch. Just. de C. Banc al Assises at Salisbury in Summer 1631. fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony que puis son condemnation ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le Prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute & fix al Gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court.

I've found Russian fascinating to study but have never got beyond a sort-of-OK reading knowledge that disappears regularly when I stop practising. The perfective/imperfective aspect system for verbs is theoretically straightforward but it's weirdly difficult to have to remember two different verbs (which might differ by a prefix, or be of different declensions, or just be totally different) for each English equivalent. And after years of effort I never got the verbs of motion down pat.

Heinlein asserted, probably in Tramp Royale, that the Russian words for anything more complicated than hoeing cabbage were all borrowed from French.

I once saw an assertion that compared to Hopi, English and Russian look like the same language.

Bruce H.@308: Heinlein was certainly wrong about that, but the statement is sort of correct if you restrict 'Russian' to 'Russian as spoken by some aristocrats 200+ years ago'. Around 1800, there were still some aristocrats so imbued with the Frenchification of the previous century that their Russian was actually quite rudimentary: good enough for shouting at the stable-hands, but probably not for discussing anything complicated. (War and Peace starts in French and goes on macaronically for some time.)

ISTRT Natasha's Dance, by Orlando Figes, discusses this at some length.

Weirdly, when my Spanish teacher in high school did the 'embarasada' thing (and spelled it thus, too, so if it's wrong I'll have it wrong for a good long while), I saw the first three letters and thought 'embryo'. Nothing to do with much of anything, but I did like that my wrong idea was sort of right, even if it can't really show its work.

I like the way that transliterated Russian words are pronounced in my head.

Open threadiness: I don't know if there are any other LLamas in the Fluorosphere, but you may enjoy answering the questions to the recent one-day Geek Love quiz. Nonsense was a lot of fun too.

And if someone wants to give it a shot next season, I've got one invitation up for grabs.

Swedish has the interesting "same root word, via different import paths" pair of "juice" and "sky" (the latter is pronounced with the 'sj' sound, similar-ish to the "ch" in loch), both starting from the French "jus". The first is very much a liquid procured by smashing/grinding/pressing fruits/berries/vegetables to small bits and extracting the resulting liquid, the second is the juices (ahaha!) left over when frying (typically) meat.

The latter, with exactly the same pronounciation and spelling, is also another word that is a cognate to the English "sky", sometimes combined with the word "fall" to indicate a rather heavy and sudden-onset rain. Which is why I was very baffled when a Bond movie picked a Swedish word as its title.

James E, #302: Also wardrobe/garderobe, though the latter's not exactly in common use any more.

As well as the cases where *both* versions of a French word have made it into English, there's the ones where the W-version was adopted and the G-version wasn't. E.g. war/guerre, wasp/guêpe.

An analogous thing happened a bit earlier when the Saxons were fighting off/assimilating the Vikings. We have a lot of word pairs where we got one of them from A-S and the other from (closely related, but distinct) Old Norse. Some of these are readily distinguishable by spelling - "sk" is a distinctively Old Norse feature, where Anglo-Saxon derivatives would use "sh". There's shirt/skirt, and also ship/skep, for example. The latter also turns up across Yorkshire in place names - Shipley (sheep meadow) is Saxon; Skipton (sheep town) is Norse.

Diatryma @310:

> I did like that my wrong idea was sort of right

My favourite personal example of that: Andre Norton (Alice Mary Norton) was a classic case of a female writer using a male pseudonym to make herself publishable - but I was reading her as a 9 year old and I'd never encountered the name 'Andre' before.

I just assumed that was how 'Andrea' was spelt.

Steve Taylor (314): You are not alone in that. I remember one of my high school friends referring to the author as Andrea Norton. My friend is mildly dyslexic and may have just misread the name, however.

Steve Taylor @314: I never had her name confused with "Andrea", but it never occurred to me that she might be male, either. I was very amused when I heard the story that that name was adopted to look male.

HLN: My Uncle Bob has just suffered a massive stroke -- initial report was that he had died, but it turns out he is brain-dead on life support. His children are flying in tonight for the Decision. We had just seen him at our Rosh Hashana gathering, where he seemed in good spirits -- having been able to see him recently is some grace in this.

I'm sorry, Dave.

Condolences, Dave.

Dave, no words can help. But I'll offer my condolences anyway.

My sympathy, Dave.

I can attest that facility with Romance & Germanic languages is of little help learning Slavic ones. I've spent a few years desultorily picking at Czech & the only thing I can say about previous language studies is that it did help to have had experience with words that change to express case & verb aspect. Though the exact cases and verb aspects are quite different.

Very few of the Slavic root words are immediately recognizable the way the Romance & Germanic ones are. You just have to memorize a new set. Though once you get familiar-ish with a number of them, you can begin to see a faint resemblance.

On the plus side, having a tiny scanty ineffectual beginning in Czech also gives me a similar beginning in Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Sorbian, etc., since the Western & Southern Slavic languages diverged a pretty short time ago. For some reason Russian, Ukrainian, etc. are considerably less similar, though they also diverged a short time ago. To my ears & eyes anyway. Though I can always tell when any Slavic language song has apples, falcons, or evenings in it. A surprisingly large number of them do.

Condolences to Dave.

Dave H., #317: My condolences. May he be remembered well.

HLN: area man is subjected to a medical procedure that rejoices in the name "nuclear stress test". Results are now in. "The doctor told me that some damage was found," man said, "but that exposure to radioactivity has kickstarted a healing factor which erased it!"

Asked to comment, a medical technician at the clinic noted, "Area man is telling porkies. It's true his results were good, but this stuff about a 'healing factor' sounds like something out of a comic book."

Thanks for the condolences, folks.

Apropos of nothing, in the course of random browsing I've stumbled upon a rather entertaining blog, which I think will appeal to a lot of folks here: Wait, but Why. Thoughtful, well-written, somewhat techie without being hardcore about it, posts on an assortment of semi-random topics.

Dave, my condolences as well. Safe travels to all who are traveling.

So sorry to hear the news, Dave. I'm glad you got to be with him recently.

(I am reminded that I'm down to just one uncle.)

Dave, hold onto that grace. I will hold you in the Light.

Steve Taylor @288, those false cognates can be funny and/or embarrassing, all right.
I remember asking a Spanish teacher whether broma was a cognate of bromide, and she politely explained that a bromide was a joke so well-worn it was liable to put you to sleep, hence its comparison with bromine-based sleeping powders.
Speaking of which, bromides are the only example I can think of where an addictive drug was successfully removed from wide use. This was achieved not by any kind of Draconian or Orwellian laws, but by the availability of equally effective non-addictive sleep aids.

Coming in late for Buddha Buck @132, but here are a couple of possible book selections:

The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. An oldie (1967) but one of the protagonists is a black girl - around age 10 or so I think.

Almost any of the picture books by Jerdine Nolen. They are mostly for the 5-8 age range, but very well done and the images are lovely. I particularly like Raising Dragons and Irene's Wish.

Bayou Magic, by Jewell Parker Rhodes. More magical realism than straight out fantasy, but how can you go wrong with spells and mermaids?

Niobe, She is Life. A graphic novel series available on Kindle

Coming soon: Bob Dylan. In white tie and tails. In Stockholm.

Or, for those who like links to breaking news: Bob Dylan wins Nobel.

Dave, I'm sorry about the loss of your Uncle Bob. God damn strokes.

I guess I never posted anything about it, but Michael, C Wingate and I met for a nice dinner and chat at Capclave, in a very small GoL. Since C Wingate and I were both there, this pretty much counts as the ML version of a vast right wing conspiracy, but I'm afraid most of our political discussion involved lamenting the existence of Trump, so it wasn't very effective as political conspiracies go.

Dave: My condolences.

Condolences to Dave.

Dave, sorry for your loss.

It's not a conspiracy until you're being sinister. Were you being sinister? (Would you admit it even if you were?)

I'm glad the gathering happened.

These days, being Dexter has worse connotations.

Condolences, Dave.

Now, question. Does anyone else here have a problem with song lyrics that almost make sense but not quite? That was my main impression of Bob Dylan, although I must admit I haven't heard all of his stuff, but I kept wondering what in the @#$% is this guy talking about? Sort of a verbal Uncanny Valley. And the same thing runs rife with many other artists today, it seems.

Back when song words were all endless blather about love, it was/is tiresome and irrelevant to me, but at least I could sort of file it away and enjoy the music. But with the stuff I am talking about, I find myself forming the start of a picture or something and then having to abort it, again and again, and I am starting to wish there weren't any lyrics at all. It uses up too much of my mental RAM or something, and no coherent whole forms to take a hold of.

Now, some folks have told me I'm smart, and good with words--there's been enough times I've read between the lines of prose and so on and gotten a meaning out of it--but song lyrics, and some poetry, I have a problem with. I dropped out of school [eventually got a GED] party because of not having a clue what I should regurgitate about this or that pile of wordage they threw in front of me. And years later when someone tells me that some x stands for y in a poem or story, I don't always feel like believing them when I read it. I'm not one of those real literal-minded types, I don't think, but still.

Does anyone else have this problem? Is it another form of neuro-atypical-ism?

A friend of mine once said that Yes lyrics sound like they were generated by Markov chain. To a certain extent that's kind of just the nature of poetry, but yeah, I know what you mean.

Lyrics are often meant to convey a mood or impression rather than to convey information. With Dylan the impression is usually political to some extent. With Yes it is new age mysticism. Unless "There'll be no mutant enemy, we shall certify" is really an advertisement for Malware Bytes.

Dave 317: I'm sorry for your loss. May his memory be for a blessing.

Jim 303: And like all words that start out meaning that in English, it's morphed (π) into a comparative meaning "more so." 'Really' has also gone through that process, and my generation's outcry is loud against the same thing happening to 'literally'.

The tide may be destructive, but you can't hold it back.

Steve 309: My favorite story about that: A French woman visiting St. Petersburg saw an upper-class lady drop her purse. A peasant man saw it, grabbed it and ran after saying "Madame, Madam, your purse!" in Russian. She turned and thanked him profusely.

This stunned the French woman, because what he said in Russian was vash retikul, "your purse," which sounds VERY similar to French vache ridicule, "ridiculous cow"!

I collect these (I already have 'aquí es una mesa' which means "a cow eats without a knife" in Yiddish), so if you know of others (phrases or sentences, not single words, that mean one thing in one language and something unrelated in another), please let me know.

David 325: Congratulations, and please use your superpowers for good.

Allan 343: Yet sometimes he was literal (literally literal) and refreshingly direct. Here's a lyric that's been coming to mind a lot lately:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er* your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

*in my headcanon, 'dance on'.

John @ 330: I think bromide used to be slang for "cliche" in English as well, but I don't recall seeing it used recently.

Xopher @ 344: I (somewhat playfully) class French words and phrases in English as "tourists", "resident aliens", and "naturalized citizens". "Arrondisement" is a tourist; someone might use it in discussing French government, but with no pretense that it's English. "Savoir faire" is a resident alien; no one has real trouble with it, but that it's a French borrowing is obvious to all. "Very" is a prototypical naturalized citizen. I think "chauffeur" (with the stress-shift from second to first syllable) and "chaise longue"/"chase lounge" are applying for citizenship.

Sarah E @ 345: Specifically, for soothing cliches, particularly (or so my much-younger self deduced from context) those which are empty and meaningless aside from being intended to soothe.

Jim Parish #346: Heh. Google Translate turns "chaise longue" into "deck chair", but doing the individual words confirmed my suspicion that the literal meaning is just "long chair".

Sarah E & Sunflower P, the second definition in Merriam-Webster online for bromine (the first is the chemical) is:

2 a : a commonplace or tiresome person : bore
b : a commonplace or hackneyed statement or notion.

I've never heard "bromine" (almost always "an old bromine") used in the context of a person, but I have heard it used in the context of a cliche or folk saying. Almost always a debunked one. "Oh, that's just an old bromine. If you step on a crack you won't really break your mother's back."

Cassy B. (349): I think you mean 'bromide'. Bromine is something else.

Open threadiness, moderation and free speech style:

Zeynep Tufekci (a very smart sociologist who studies social media) had this wonderful comment on Twitter:

Twitter is a study in how "freedom-of-speech" on the cheap—through crappy moderation—sabotages its core function: freedom-to-assemble.

We've talked a lot here about moderation and its role in making conversations possible. This struck me as capturing something important about this.

Mary Aileen <headdesk> Yes, bromide. I looked up the right word, and wrote the wrong one.

@Dave no. 317: When it happened in my family, a lot of people seesawed between being grateful for how quick it was (she had a no-life-support order and poor quality of life) and grieving her loss. Hang in there.

Amid all the fanfare for the Nobel laureate, how about a few moments to think about our late friend Paul Williams, long-time chronicler of Dylan -- and, along the way, founder of Crawdaddy!, inventor of PKD for a mass audience with the Rolling Stone interview, and then shepherd of the collected stories of PKD & Sturgeon.

In 1966 Paul wrote:

Perhaps the favorite indoor sport in America today is discussing, worshipping, disparaging, and above all interpreting Bob Dylan . . .

Would he be surprised? I don't know, only met him once in person, but I remember his smile.

And of course this makes me think of another otaku-level Dylan aficionado, Paul’s friend David Hartwell, who would certainly have been ready to utter a substantial discourse on the subject.

Henry W.

Xopher @344: My one addition to the collection is the punchline of a joke about a man who only speaks Spanish attempting to get help finding socks in a department store in an English-speaking country: on seeing them after a long search with help from the clerk, he exclaims "Eso si que es!" (I have lost the proper accent marks), "Yes, that's what it is!", and the clerk demands to know why he hadn't just spelled it like that in the first place.

Dave Harmon @348

This may be a UK/USA difference in how "chaise longue" is used. Maybe just being nearer France has given me a mental image of an asymmetric settee/sofa rather than a simple long chair of the lounger-style. And the user tends to lay on their side rather than their back.

But the modern French usage does include deck chair styles, and they have some more-specific names to distinguish the styles.

So maybe I just live in the wrong circles to have noticed.

AKICIML: I manage the 'mailman' mailing list for a local choir. The addresses of 2 the 60 members are 'bouncing'. I've spoken to both members: one is fairly tech-savvy (ex GP) - the other said he'd have to ask his 12-yr-old grandson to check if his email address has any filters.

Both addresses are @aol. No other members have @aol accounts, and no other addresses are bouncing.

Are aol accounts more 'bouncy' than, say, gmail?

Should I draw the obvious conclusion and ask them to change their email provider?

tykewriter: I don't know anything about the current state of AOL, though I used to keep up on deliverability problems and I'm friends with the woman who was once effectively in charge of AOL mail and anti-spam.

However, I can offer some generalities from years in the ISP business and later anti-spam involvement: Mail service at very large scales is hard to maintain; it takes highly skilled staff and a significant investment. Over decades I've observed that when an ISP or service company is in decline, the quality of mail service declines more rapidly than the company as a whole. Because it's expensive and it's seldom a revenue center, it's very tempting to skimp there, or just to freeze the budget while the demands on it keep going up.

So my answer is, though I have no specific present day knowledge of the situation with AOL, it's very likely that both AOL and Yahoo, for instance, are currently more "bouncy" than GMail. You could suggest they try creating a Gmail account and see if it reliably gets through to them there.

tykewriter (357): I have heard that neither AOL nor Yahoo play well with email lists.

One thing that might help is if both people put the originating address(es) in their AOL contacts list/address book. If the list just for announcements, that may fix the problem. If there are messages to/from other members of the group, each person's address would have to go in the contacts list individually, which is a right royal pain.

Steve Taylor @ 290: that is indeed a wonderful discovery.

too many other interesting remarks to highlight, but I've forwarded the snark on Norman legal overlays to my wife, who as a Saxon SCA persona was just slightly miffed that the stairwell decorations on the Viking Star were sections of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Angiportus @ 341: there's been commentary on this (e.g., on the BBC), with various quotes suggesting that Dylan's lyrics are deliberately vague rather than multi-layered, deeply meaningful, etc. He's not the only one; I've read that Robert Hunter wrote loosely so that listeners could impose their own meanings -- see, e.g., "Uncle John's Band".

Albatross #261: (Long-delayed answer, sorry). The Dictionary of Jamaican English entry for BACKRA, BUCKRA gives the etymology as "Ibo, Efik,mbakára, white man, he who surrounds or governs." This is an entirely denotative term. Negative connotations, as in Turtledove's Southern Victory series, are situational. Buckra in the US is a Gullah word. As far as I can make out, in Gullah, as in its ancestral West Indian and West African Creoles and Pidgins, the word is purely denotative.

Dave Harmon #317: My condolences.

Jim 346: Not only amusing, but a helpful analogy! Thanks for that.

Fade 355: I love it! Thanks.

After an evening following Neil Gaiman around YouTube, I eventually wound up at Douglas Adams, and delightedly rewatched Parrots the Universe and Everything. Gaiman commented that once one has encountered Adams's viewpoint, it's really hard to see in the old way again. Among many gems, I'm particularly fond of the puddle metaphor, which comes back to me in many many contexts.

Cassy B. @ #349:

I have encountered "bromide" in the "commonplace or tiresome person" sense in exactly one context, which is the Gershwin song The Babbitt and the Bromide, introduced in the 1946 Ziegfield Follies.

(A babbitt, according to the same dictionary you consulted, is "a person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards".)

My folks used "bromide", dismissively, but I make no representation as to how common the term is..

I've seen bromide used about cliches, but not about people.

Heads-up: "Hidden Figures" moved up to Christmas release date.

This is a biopic about the black women who worked as NASA mathematicians in the early days of the space race. And with a 2016 release date, it'll be eligible for the Hugos in Helsinki. The main question is whether to nominate it under BDP Long Form or Best Related Work, but the precedent of Apollo 13 suggests the former.

Also, check out the trailer (embedded in the article). This is going to be worth watching for the snark alone!

Lee: I'm in. Whee!

tykewriter @ 357 ...

I would suggest that starting here AOL Postmaster is likely to be of general use.

At the Holiday Inn @ Fort Washington, nice place --- looks new, good art, good breakfast area. Waiting for the funeral this afternoon.

My grandfather, B.J. Babbitt, was never very happy with Lewis for that book. Though he was an engineer (with so many interests, he should have been a fan: astronomy, earth science, photography, travel), he had something of the soft appearance of the protagonist of the novel (who was almost called Gunch), and people used to speculate that the book was something to do with him.

I have all this at second hand, via Mom, since he died before I was born. I was also named after him—his nickname was Kip. (I was also named after his son, my Uncle Dick, who died in WW2. His middle name was Kipling.)

Apropos of that, there's a town called Kipling near where my sister lives up in Michigan, and I wondered if that was the place he had taught for a while, early in his career. It would have explained the nickname. Nobody else, however, believes that it was the place, so there's another lovely theory shot down by a cruel world.

Gofundme where Democrats (or anyone!) can donate to rebuild the GOP headquarters in NC that was firebombed: https://www.gofundme.com/reopen-a-nc-republican-office-2ukuprzy

So, I'm back. Funeral was at a local Reform synagogue, various family and friends telling stories about him. Unfortunately, we had to dash home afterwards due to my sisters' and the kids' various obligations at home. (Kudos to my BiL for marathon driving....) Other family members had come in and left before the funeral for similar reasons, while still others are staying with her afterwards.

Irony: One of Uncle Bob's hobbies/spare-change-jobs was acting as a "model patient" for medical students, his specialty was strokes (yes, he had had some minor strokes previously).

Thanks again for the continued condolences.

Thanks to Clifton, Mary Aileen, and xeger for your replies to my mailing list problem (357). I should have added that I can email these members directly at the addresses they have provided for the mailing list.

Other people have had the same problem with aol, Yahoo, and hotmail.

I'm about to send a test message after changing the 'not metoo' settings on the bouncing addresses. If that doesn't work I'll ask them both at rehearsal tonight if they wouldn't mind using another address for choir emails.

Nope. Still bouncy-bouncy, and not in a good way.

Plan B then.

#317 Dave
My sympathies on your loss.

#341 Angioportus

Surpassing repetitive lyrical banality with appalling bad/stupid grammar, combined with mushmouth elocution (or lack thereof) make me want to destroy audio systems to stop the propagation/promulgation and neural pain. The current example springing fastest to my mind is "Blame It on Me" but there are a lot of others...

Jenny Islander: This is referencing waaaaaay back to the last Open Thread, which I am only now reading. And the reason I'm only reading it now is because I've been very very busy.

Very very busy preparing to be in a production of The Pirates of Penzance, as it happens. Photos here.

So a couple of things:
1. A lot of people I know love the 1983 movie of Pirates a lot. And a lot of people I know hate it. I haven't seen it since sixth grade, so I'm having to work off of memory here, but some of the reasons for the hate from the latter are that Papp went and mucked about with the script (including lifting a song from a different G&S production, Ruddigore, which is one of my personal favorites), Frederic is quite a bit bland, the musicality isn't as high as my classically-trained friends would like (oh, the notes we get on proper pronunciation!), and "it's kind of boring the way they filmed it."

2. Gilbert & Sullivan musicals are often derided or mocked for having tinkly little songs. This is a misconception derived from the popular score "piano parts," which attempt to compress a whole orchestra into something marginally playable by one set of human hands. If you look up "When the Night Wind Howls" from Ruddigore or the Act I finale from Iolanthe, you'll hear some amazing orchestration. (The D'Oyly Carte Company is considered the gold standard, but if Lamplighters from the SF Bay Area has anything up, they're quite amazing too—and some of their recordings feature our director as lead tenor.)

3. *Do* go see G&S productions live if you have the opportunity. They are a lot of fun in the right hands, and they can be good even in the wrong hands. For the former, a friend of mine is directing a steampunk version of Pirates for the MIT Players soon.

@B. Durbin no. 378: Which song? There's a point where the entire crew crashes a production of another G&S piece in mid-chorus. As for the staging, it's a lot of fun IME, because it's all done in a very stagey way--like the parts in Munchkin Land in the iconic Wizard of Oz film. The songs are robust and very funny! But some bits do lag--where it's clear that the actors are trying so hard to remember all their lines that they don't have much left over for chemistry.

Watching it now is a little sad, though, because you're looking at a production from the Sexual Revolution, with men free to be awfully pretty and gay men, if not uncloseted, at least able to associate freely behind the scenes--but oh, look, there's another actor I never heard of because while I was just hearing about these new things called VHS and cable, he was dying of AIDS.

The "Matter Patter" song (and apparently the "Sorry Her Lot" from HMS Pinafore as well.) The original trio for that song is comprised of a cursed baronet, his younger brother (who held the title while the older brother was hiding under an assumed name in order to dodge the curse), and the younger brother's mad wife. Note that in Ruddigore, it's traditional for the actor playing the younger brother to be quite a bit older than the older brother, for the reason that vice ages you. When we did it in 2009, the "younger brother" was actually played by the father of the other guy.

In the "can't find it" category -- I have on tape, somewhere (no longer findable) a filk based on the movie 'War Games', starting out with:

"Greetings Professor
Indicate your access please
I've waited at the backdoor for a long time now ..."

Does anybody have enough information on this to make finding a copy a reasonable venture?

... and, predictably, now that I've posted to ask, I've promptly managed to find the information -- It's by Julia Ecklar, and called "War Games".

At least the usual effect of asking seems to stick ;D

... or then again, maybe not -- at least barring War Games, FilKONtario 9, Track 06.wmv which claims thusly (and seems to align to my fuzzy recollection), I'm finding nothing at all :(

I ended up swapped in the last minute from being Third Townsperson To The Right to being the Companion in a Doctor Who musical put on at a filk convention that had songs from a whole range of different G&S musicals ... because I could do the Matter Patter song, and the person who previously planned to do the part knew all the songs BUT that one.

(This musical.

Luckily, my backup "wear on Sunday" t-shirt said, "My parents got abducted by aliens and all I got was this stupid T-shirt", which was really appropriate for a Doctor's Companion. :->

I am about to lose my cool with someone on Daily Kos who is critising one of my favorite authors because they don't allow fanfic of their 'universe.'

I've come over here to cool down before I say something unfortunate.

Not sure how authors can stop it. Though some fandoms respect such requests out of courtesy.

Threaten to sue, and if violator continues, do so. Usually most authors issue a "cease and desist" letter, then follow up with a law suit if necessary.

Rewatching Ghostbusters. One of the funniest moments is when a white guy tells a fat woman, a black woman, an autistic woman, and a woman who endured years of therapy directed at a problem somebody else decided she had that they have no idea how unfair life can be. The bit where Kevin wanders in and takes credit and people offscreen keep throwing him metaphorical cookies is right up there too. I LOVE THIS MOVIE.

Also, this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqbT6RVRNsE

Will never get old. (Video: Holtzmann's Crowning Moment of Awesome.)

re 379/380: They even sing "though we sing this song from Ruddigore it really doesn't matter." We are after all talking about the patter song that mocks patter songs.

The Papp movie definitely leans on the "silly" side of G&S but their staging of "When the Foeman Bares the Steel" does one of the great production numbers justice.

Most of the criticisms of the Papp Pirates that I've seen aren't really about that version so much as that it became so popular that people wanted to see Pirates done that way or felt they had to do it that way. I quite enjoyed the movie version of it.

I think It Really Doesn't Matter fits into Pirates pretty well, and it didn't take much changing of the lyrics.

As for the criticisms of the Papp production, I think at least some of them should more rightly be about Pirates in general. Frederic really is rather bland, and there are portions of the score that really aren't that musically interesting because Sullivan wrote them at the last minute. I still enjoy it anyway, and will happily sing along to Pirate King in the car.

Has anyone seen The Pirate Movie? I know it was poorly received, and it's quite silly, but I enjoy it all the same--it plays around with the musical and has a lot of fun with it, and the in-jokes are amusing.

Well, as a rule the tenor hero role has the Tamino Problem in spades. He's there largely to advance the plot, not to be an interesting character. Come to think of it, G&S and Magic Flute present similar issues in terms of the singing roles, and never mind the Queen-of-the-Night/Katisha's costuming.

There may be people who haven't heard my anecdotes of being Honorable Third From Left in the 2000 CNU Mikado—oh, how I pity them!—but no time for them all now. Instead, here's the audio link to "A More Humane Mikado," for which I was tasked to write new, contemporary lyrics. At the point of interruption, the audience is laughing at every member of the cast, chorus, and orchestra checking their costumes ("Is it mine?"). The person saying, "Moshi-moshi?" is I. It was a golden moment for American Theater.

Link to MP3 at box.com. Let me know if it doesn't work. The whole story and audio are posted at the New Pals Club Web-Log (search "Mikado" there), but I can't seem to reach it at the moment. Foo.

It may be the migraine meds talking, but hear me out: Minecraft: the Motion Capture Console Edition.

You can play it in any mode. To get into your inventory or a chest or use your crafting table or forge, swipe and hold. To walk, walk in place; to run, run in place; to jump, jump in place; to swim or climb a ladder, hold your arms high; to sneak, crouch. Combat, picking flowers, and tool use are represented by punching. To gather dropped blocks, walk around a bit. To place something, grab it from inventory or on-hand and slap downward firmly.

The one item you start with in Survival mode is a bed, not a map, so you can take breaks during every night cycle. The game flashes a reminder to grab a drink and assess your level of fatigue.

There does seem to be a certain orthodox style expected of G&S productions, and that rather forgets that part of the point was to poke fun at contemporary society. A monarch with a troublesome son who keeps chasing girls: is that just The Mikado?

So... Hugh Jackman sang R&H's "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" at a Hillary fundraiser?
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/oct/18/hillary-clinton-broadway-fundraiser-hugh-jackman-julia-roberts

#332, 333, 341, 343, 354, and 360:

I offer congratulations to Bob Dylan upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize, and a wish that the next phase of his career will be less tumultuous than its beginning.

Jenny Islander #394: I know there's a Wii version, no idea how the controls work.

Jenny Islander @394: I've fantasized about something like that for my work computer, so I could get some exercise during the course of the day.

Serge Broom @396: He's been in Oklahoma! on stage before, so he already knew the song.

His reputation in Australia and here, as an actor, are rather different, because of his breakout transpondian role. :-> (Example.)

Elliott Mason @ 400... Indeed he did. We have the DVD of it. :-)

Quill @ #391:

I have seen The Pirate Movie once, when I was old enough to know what it was doing and young enough that I would have enjoyed unless it were much worse than it was. Which is to say that I enjoyed it but don't feel qualified to speak on whether it was any good.

generally:

Here's the direct link to Kip W's Mikado anecdote. Worth reading.

Buddha Buck @132: Does anyone know of any suitable "young adult" SF/F starring black teenage girls?

Dunno if this would help, but this just came across my Twitter feed:

Tanita S. Davis ‏@tanita_s_davis Writers, help, please. My YA novel has a black girl protag with albinism, and I'm looking for a beta reader. DM me and/or RT, thank you much!

Paul A.

Thanks for that! reminds me that I need to extract the video for that number and put it up somewhere. The microphone line for the video was erratic through the first part of the show, which had most of the parts I was in, but it was fine during that number. If I had to choose one or the other, I'd have chosen what I got, but… sigh, anyway. I still like our production better than most others I've seen (the exception would be the partial production seen in TOPSY TURVY—how I wish they'd done the whole thing!).

Speaking of TOPSY TURVY, our cast headed to Norfolk to see that at the Naro, and as the curtains were closing, our Ko-Ko, Fred Arsenault, stood up at the front of the balcony and shouted, "CNU is doing The Mikado! Come and see the CNU Mikado!" I was tempted to stand up after one of our performances and shout at the audience to go see TOPSY TURVY, but only Fred would have gotten the reference.

I took part in a community-theater production of The Mikado once, as part of the men's chorus. Yes, men's chorus -- I sing tenor, and they're always short of tenors. I was much younger and slimmer then, and an Ace bandage and bulky kimono covered a lot of... things.

They had a makeup artist for the principals, but those of us in the chorus were expected to do our own (using materials provided). I gave myself heavy masculine eyebrows and a Fu Manchu mustache/goatee. It was apparently quite effective; the night a couple of friends of mine came to the show, they couldn't pick me out of the rest of the chorus!

But the thing I remember most vividly from that show was our Katisha. She was a true contralto, and had been doing the rehearsals at half-voice. The night of the dress rehearsal she made her first entrance and let fly in full voice, and the rest of us just froze. She was AMAZING. I wish I could remember her name, but it's lost in the mists of time.

Physics(?) question for the assembled luminaries:

When I microwave leftovers, they get plenty hot but then cool off much more quickly than the food originally did after being cooked on the stove/in the oven. What's going on here? Is it not actually as hot as it was before? (It certainly seems/feels/tastes as hot.) Is it something about the microwaves? Or what?

Mary Aileen@406: I don't observe the same thing here.

Theories that come to mind include:

The outside isn't actually at the same temp as before

The outside is the same temp but inside is cooler

The food is dried out enough that it has less mass and hence cools faster (transfer through fixed surface area)

The escape of steam has changed the texture to allow more air circulation so it cools faster

Or, always a useful hypothesis to keep handy in investigations like this, something much more interesting that hasn't occurred to me :-) .

Note that some of these are contradictory.

Dave: belated condolences.

Harriet Tubman coming to the $20 bills! Andrew Jackson's out (good riddance), Hamilton's $10 gets saved by his musical, various other interesting figures appear on several bills' backsides.

Mary Aileen #406: Adding to DDB #407: You're likely microwaving a smaller amount of food than you originally cooked, with the usual square-cube effects. Also, probably in a thinner, less heat-retaining container.

Mary Aileen @406: Microwaves heat unevenly. If you're eating a hot spot first, it's very hot, but the temp of the object tends to average if it sits.

Dave Harmon @409: The murderous, genocidal asshole is still going to be on the back, alas.

re 406: It will depend on certain factors. Microwaves tend to deposit their energy about 1/2" in, so everything else is by conduction/convection (the latter not happening if we aren't talking a pretty thin soup). In initial baking the greater time span gives more time for conduction to work, and typically the time for most recipes represents how long it takes to get the center to the right temperature and do whatever reactions are needed. the few minutes for typical reheating just doesn't allow much time for heat movement.

Thanks for the suggestions, all.

These three--

The food is dried out enough that it has less mass and hence cools faster (transfer through fixed surface area) and

The escape of steam has changed the texture to allow more air circulation so it cools faster
and

You're likely microwaving a smaller amount of food than you originally cooked, with the usual square-cube effects. Also, probably in a thinner, less heat-retaining container.

--seem the most plausible to me.

I don't think I'm eating a hot spot first, as Elliott suggested, because the effect is remarkably consistent.

The time factor is why the reduced-power mode on a microwave is useful. The magnetron is pulsed on and off to give the 50%, or whatever is set, so there is more time for heat conduction. The hot spots don't get quite so hot, which can be a good thing, as long as the whole item gets hot enough. The conduction is part of why the instructions tell you to wait a minute or two after the microwave stops, and there's still some time needed. Also, the lower temperature differences do slow the heat flow, so I wouldn't reduce the waiting time.

It depends what you're doing, but it can give a better balance between the peak temperature near the surface and the core temperature. It is, for instance, less likely to overheat grated cheese

microwaved food cooling faster: The consensus seems to be three actual issues (as well as some confirmation bias, etc.). First, microwaves heat food unevenly so there are hot spots. Your fingers and mouth feel the temperature of the hot spots, so the food feels hot, but the hot spots soon lose their heat to the rest of the food, making the apparent temperature colder, even without losing any heat overall.
Second, unlike a regular oven, the dish/container isn't heated, so the food loses heat to the dish.
Third, you're usually microwaving a small amount of something, rather than a full pot. And small things cool off more quickly, no matter how they've been heated.

quercus (415): That all makes a lot of sense. One thing about your description puzzles me, though. To me, "hot spots" has always suggested that some mouthfuls would feel hot and some cool/cold, which has not been my experience; my first few bites are always hot. Does this Your fingers and mouth feel the temperature of the hot spots, so the food feels hot mean instead that the hot spots are very small, so that every mouthful would have both hot and cooler spots and thus the whole thing feels hot?

Mary Aileen @416:

If you take a plate and cover it with something like cheese or chocolate, something that melts at a low temperature, and turn off the spinny thing in your microwave, you will see after 30 seconds to a minute a regular pattern of melted/burnt spots in the cheese/chocolate.

These are essentially one form of "hot spot" that forms in a microwave, and is caused by the geometry of the oven and the way that the microwaves bounce around inside. The spinny thing in the microwave is designed to mitigate this issue by moving the food through these hot spots so that the energy isn't concentrated on one point in the food.

There's also a recipe out there for "Frozen Florida" -- essentially, an inside-out baked alaska. Inside a shell of frozen meringue, you put a liqueur, then microwave the sucker. The meringue stays ice-frozen, but the liqueur heats up to near boiling temps. This is the second cause of "hot spots": the meringue is mainly made of non-polar proteins, which don't absorb the microwaves and allow them to pass through without heating. The liqueur is made mostly of water and alcohol, both highly polar and highly absorbing of microwaves, so they get hot quickly. So different parts of the food are affected by microwaves differently, yielding differential heating.

Finally, the interiors of foodstuffs tend to be shielded by the exteriors, and (as Dave Bell said) mainly get heated by conduction, not microwaves. So the outer half-inch of the food gets most of the microwave heat, while the interiors take a while to heat up. Since the first part that you eat is the outside, you get hit with that heat first. It's a largish hot "spot", but it's still differential heating.

The main differences, regarding that last point, between conventional oven and microwave oven cooking is that in a conventional oven, a small amount of power is being applied over a long time, so heat has time to flow, whereas in a microwave oven, a large amount of power is being applied over a short time, so heat doesn't have time to flow. Also, in a conventional oven, the heat is only being applied to the exterior of the food, while in a microwave it's being applied to a thicker surface layer.

Buddha Buck (417): Thank you. That's very informative.

I mostly encounter the effect when reheating takeout Chinese (because it's always a huge plate of food, even as leftovers; other things that I reheat are much smaller portions and thus get eaten fast enough that they don't have time to cool much). That's a bunch of small things--grains of rice, bits of vegetables and meat--not one big mass, so there's not a lot of interior to heat up more slowly.

It sounds as if, to avoid the rapid cooling effect, I should microwave things for longer, then let them sit for a minute to equalize the heaat.

Mary @418:

Being a bunch of small, independent things, it may also be hard for conduction to work well. My advice in that case (assuming that the takeout Chinese can be eaten this way) is to nuke it for a short period, then stir it up, and repeat.

It's also one of the best ways to melt chocolate at home: put a bunch of chocolate chips in a cup or bowl, then repeat nuking for 15 seconds and stirring, until it is completely and consistently melted. Without the stirring, the uneven heating will burn parts and not melt others.

Mary Aileen @ 418:

Yes, lower power for longer, and letting stand briefly will help. Stirring aggregate items like rice will also help distribute the heat better. For items that may have dried out a little in the refrigerator, like leftover rice, I also add a splash of water before cooking.

If you're interested in cooking things in the microwave, which might also help your intuition for reheating food, you can find some microwave cookbooks from the '70s and '80s in used bookstores. I'm not entirely sure why cooking in microwave ovens never took off, but they seem to mostly be used for reheating foods and cooking frozen foods any more.

Many old microwave ovens had a stirrer mechanism inside to mitigate hotspots, and modern ones have a rotating turntable. I don't like the turntables so much, but I have to deal. That said, with no stirrer, and a disabled turntable, you can measure the speed of light using a microwave and marshmallows.

Looking at my microwave, it doesn't look hard to avoid using the turntable. There is a shaped bottom to the oven, with a supporting wheeled ring, and a central rotating cog coupled to a plate (probably silica glass).

You can get plastic plates/spacers to let you stack two plates of food for reheating.

Removed the wheeled ring and the turntable-plate, cover the cog with a spacer, and you have your non-rotating target.

Mine has a fixed heating element at the top, no sign of rotating vanes, but I suppose there's a hidden rotating vane to scatter the microwave energy, something in the wave-guide that couples the magnetron to the oven-space proper. But you could do a reversible test to see what happens.

I note that my copy of Kerbal Space Program is quite sufficient to satisfy my desire for smoke, flames, and earth-shattering kabooms. Why should I bother with a microwave oven hack?

One of the factors in cookery is the coupling between the food and the heat source. It's one of the things that makes a difference between a fan-assisted oven and others. The air isn't necessarily hotter, but without the fan there's a near-static layer of air that isn't so good a conductor. The air circulation also can reduce convection effects, though you already know it matters which shelf you put something on.

Anyway, there's McGee On Food and Cooking

Mary Aileen, #418: Or heat them for about half the time you expect it to take, then stop the oven, open the door, and stir the food to rearrange the parts that are hot and not hot yet. That works well for me with things like frozen soup, because there will be a frozen lump in the middle that I can break up with the spoon.

My sister Julie passed yesterday. The cancer won. However she was joking and pranking to the very end.

Victoria 424: I'm sorry for your loss, but glad you can take some comfort from her enjoyment of every last minute.

KeithS @420: Many old microwave ovens had a stirrer mechanism inside to mitigate hotspots

Once decided to [not] pull the leg of a coworker, who was pretty smart, but didn't have much tech education beyond high school. I said, in my best setting-up-a-joke voice, "Hey, Jay! Do you know what the paddles in the top of the microwaves are for?" "No, what." "They're to—" dramatic pause "stir the microwaves."

He took the bait. "Nah. You're kidding. C'mon. I was born in the night, but I wasn't born last night." I giggled muchly.

We've been going through a series of microwaves at work, because we keep getting old and/or cheap replacements. The last-but-one had this hot-spot that was at about ten o'clock off of the turntable axle. I'd put my cereal in, and it would bubble in that one location, which slowly moved through the cereal as the bowl turned.

Victoria: Condolences. One hopes she pranks the greeters at the Gates.

Condolences, Victoria. May her memory be a blessing.

Condolences, Victoria.

I am going to the funeral tomorrow of a friend in her mid-thirties. Cancer sucks.

It's also one of the best ways to melt chocolate at home: put a bunch of chocolate chips in a cup or bowl, then repeat nuking for 15 seconds and stirring, until it is completely and consistently melted. Without the stirring, the uneven heating will burn parts and not melt others.

I use it for making starch paste for bookbinding: tablespoon of flour, sufficient water; stir and repeat until clear.

Sorry to hear the news, Victoria. #$^#$ Cancer.

* * *

My microwave has a turntable shut-off function. It is a button; there may be hidden control settings as well.

There are some foods that I "start" in a microwave, then put in a toaster oven for a bit. For example, a frozen egg roll I cooked the other day. After cooking half the suggested microwave time (flipping as well as using the turntable) I put it in the toaster oven and used the high toaster setting. Eliminates some of the sogginess.

Buddha 419: It's also one of the best ways to melt chocolate at home: put a bunch of chocolate chips in a cup or bowl, then repeat nuking for 15 seconds and stirring, until it is completely and consistently melted. Without the stirring, the uneven heating will burn parts and not melt others.

Hmm. Only if you don't plan to let it cool back down. As described that will break the tempering of the chocolate, and it will cool down to a sticky mess. If, instead, you nuke it until the chips are just starting to melt, then stir vigorously, you'll have melted chocolate that will keep its temper and cool down to the smooth surface you know and love.

It takes practice to get this right.

Re: microwaves, I have a story. It will demonstrate that I come by my creative baking ability (see: chocolate-orange stabwound cake, in the last Open Thread) honestly.

The summer I was six and my sister was two and a half, my mother went to England by herself and left us alone with my father. This really wasn't a bad idea, despite people tutting over it; like most men, my dad was thoroughly capable of being a good parent, and indeed is the kind of dad I wish everyone got to have. My mother very carefully made two weeks' worth of casseroles, labelled them with dates, and froze them. She arrived home to find that they were all still in the freezer. Dad had decided to cook with us.

"Girls!" he said. "We should make rice krispie squares!"
"YAAAAY."
We made rice krispie squares, and lo! They looked great, because it's pretty hard to muck up rice krispie squares.
"Girls!" he said. "Do you think we should melt some chocolate to spread on top of the rice krispie squares?"

Of course we did. It is worth mentioning at this point that chocolate chips, if not stirred regularly, keep their shape when microwaved.
"Hm. A bit longer," he said. And then: "hm. A bit longer. They must be nearly done now."

Some days later, we picked my mother up at the airport, with handmade "WELCOME HOME MUMMY" signs, flowers, the whole bit. We arrived home and she walked into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Then she walked out again.
"Michael," she said, which I thought was very funny because my dad's name is Mike, not Michael (it is actually Michael. I'd just never heard anyone call him that.)
"Yes, dear?"
"That microwave is grey."
"Yes dear. You noticed that."
"Our microwave is brown with a wood-effect case*"
"It was, dear."
"Michael."
"I thought you deserved a new one, dear. As a nice surprise."
"Michael."
"Look, this one has some extra settings!"
"Michael."
"I'm so glad you're home, dear."

I was keeping very quiet, loyal and stalwart ally to my father that I was. My sister, on the other hand, was a complete traitor and piped up in delighted tones, as if it was the best thing that had happened to her in her entire life to date: "There was a FIRE!"

And that's how I learned two things: one, that even daddies can get into trouble, and two, that chocolate chips are combustible if microwaved for too long.

*Why yes, this WAS 1990.

Dave Harmon @ 317 et seq (belatedly), Victoria @ 424, OtterB @ 429 (and for that matter anyone else grieving a loved one's passing):
A thousand of bread
A thousand of beer
A thousand of every good thing
May Bob ascend. May Julie ascend. May friend-of-Otter ascend.
And may you all be comforted.

Em, that was delightful, and well told. Thank you.

Em @433: Shortly after they got a microwave -- fairly early in their history as household appliances, because my grandmother loved being on the cutting edge of elegance -- my grandfather had one of those ... encounters.

Since he was a consultant before we had words for that kind of thing, he often picked me up from school and entertained me until my mom was home and then dropped me off there (or kept me all night and I slept at their house).

It was time for afterschool snack. We had a regular "Madam/Butler" running schtick, so I would sit in their dining room with a formal place setting and a fabric napkin (they didn't use paper ones anyway), with a lofty expression and he'd bring some food in that he'd had a lot of fun crafting, visually, while still being food I ate.

So he decided that day, I should have toast-with-cheese*, a small bowl of applesauce, and a boiled egg.

So far so good.

Then he decided that warm hard-boiled eggs are far nicer than cold ones, and hey presto! We have a microwave now! They're magic and make food warm.

Still not that bad an idea, in theory. But Grandpa didn't cook, and he had only read enough of the manual to know how to make instant oatmeal without having to put on the kettle.

He gave the egg thirty seconds at a time (the smallest amount we could do; spring-loaded time dial) until the outside felt reasonably warm.

But he didn't peel it first.

.

.

The kitchen in their house was separate, with a swinging wood door (the kind that is like a pinball paddle and will stop in either position). The dining room side of the kitchen wall, which became lofty, high-ceilinged, and formal, was entirely covered by foot-square tiles of mirror.

Because I'm from the universe-next-door where vaudeville rules of physics and probability are the ones in effect, he was just processing formally through that door, with the tray held properly at chest height, in his very stuffiest English Butler character, when the egg exploded.

Yeah.

I never needed an explanation of "caught with egg on his face". Because reasons.

Also the entire wall of pristine mirrored tiles, 9 feet high and 18 feet wide, was FLOCKED with tiny white or yellow egg particles.

The entire rest of the afternoon until Grandma came back from work was consumed with him on a stepstool and me doing everything from my highest reach downwards, both of us wiping off the mass and then Windexing and buffing very carefully to its usual pristine glory.

We Never Spoke Of It Again, at least until I was in high school and forgot anything but that it was funny and she turned her stiff-lipped, eye-not-quite-glaring face (which had cowed hardened government bureaucrats and mechanics trying to treat her like an airheaded woman who didn't know about cars) upon her husband, who was doing his very best not to burst out laughing, because that would make it so much worse. :->

.

My mother, who HAD read the manual (of COURSE we told my mom -- she's the handy one in the family, and he was worried that there might be something wrong with the microwave, and now it was going to explode everything), pointed out about a week after it happened that things with an outer wrapper/layer need to have that layer pierced in several places to let the steam out.

Hard boiled eggs were stored peeled in their fridge henceforth, despite my grandmother's grumbles that they don't last as long that way. Grandpa said, completely persuasively, that it was far easier to peel them warm, and made a horrible mess at table if we had to do it there every time.

Also he aggressively forked baked potatoes before warming them. You can never be too careful.

-----

* toast-with-cheese is toasted whole-wheat bread, enough butter to make the top lovely and hot-soft without sogging out the bottom, and sliced colby sufficient to cover in a mostly single layer. Often he would cut the underlayer diagonally and the cheese layer latitudinally. I said he carefully crafted their appearances, I didn't say he wasn't a prankster. :-> Sometimes it was toast-with-two-cheeses, with cream cheese instead of butter)

Victoria, OtterB, I'm so sorry.

My early experience with microwave ovens isn't nearly as... dramatic... as Em's or Elliott Mason's. We got a microwave back in the mid-1970s (I remember I was in grade school, but not which grade). It was bleeding-edge technology at the time. It came with a very thin cookbook; there was virtually nothing else available about how-to-use-a-microwave. So my mom decided to make dinner rolls. You know, the kind that come refrigerated in a tube? She set them in the microwave and cooked them for a minute or two, then looked at them. Still white, still small. So she nuked them another minute or two. No change. After several iterations, she finally gave up in disgust and pulled them out of the microwave and prodded them with a fork or something. At which point we discovered that the rolls were white on the outside, and burned to charcoal briquettes on the inside....

I am still sad that we lost-in-a-flood the original cookbook (shipped with it, along with the manual) for my grandparents' microwave, which was a no-fooling hardcover book, about equivalent to the big end of childrens' picture books. I haven't found one on eBay for a reasonable price, and I loved paging through it regularly.

Behold the cover of the 1979 Tappan Microwave Cooking Guide. Note, if you will, that it is the "new and updated" one, meaning it's not the first edition.

Aside from the time capsule nature of the extremely in-fashion-and-luxe late-70s cookware and dishes throughout, and the brown-and-olive-and-burnt-orange color schemes, the recipes are ... of their time.

And the diagram showing exactly what's been discussed in this thread -- that microwaves heat kind of unevenly and you have to take that into account, was illustrated by a plate full of ice penguins.

I'm not kidding. Ice penguins. (Why penguins? I have no idea, ask Tappan)

That shot is also large enough to read the text beneath, but for accessibility, I shall transcribe:

This photo was taken only a few minutes after the penguins were in the microwave at High (100%). Note how the melting water has tunneled out the ice in uneven patterns. Note the penguin in the center has melted less because it was shielded by the microwaves from the surrounding mass. It is important to avoid this uneven defrosting so that's why you'll be defrosting on lower power levels. Study the next pages and the specific defrosting instructions in this cookbook's recipe instructions.

Victoria, OtterB: My condolences. May their memories be a blessing.

Also, thanks to all again for the condolences I've received.

Elliott Mason #436: Because I'm from the universe-next-door where vaudeville rules of physics and probability are the ones in effect

Heh. A lot of folks have been burned (sometimes literally :( ) by that one. Smaller "sealed envelopes" can also burst -- beans especially aren't as spectacular, but they can certainly spatter the food.

Mary Aileen #416: "Rapid cooling" would be colder on the outside. I more often run into uneven heating or "not heated through", where the first bite or few is fine, and then Ew!, a cold bite.

And thanks to searching for images to illustrate my post @439, I have now discovered copies of it in good condition on eBay for FAR less than the last time I looked. Which is weird, you'd think they'd get rarer and more expensive over time, because of attrition?

Anyway. $6 for 8"x11"x.25" of nostalgia is a pretty good deal. :->

This copy even has the dust jacket, which was removed instantly in my grandparents' house, stuck carefully between the microwave and the wall "to keep it nice", and never again put back on it.

The microwave story I heard was from a boss, who had a grandkid being helpful. Said grandkid, who was about 8 or 9 at the time of the - incident, decided to make baked potatoes. He asked how long they had to be baked for, and she said "about 40 minutes". The kid nuked the potatoes for 40 minute, and there was nothing left but powder.

Microwave story:

This was told by my friend Rob Downes, who died a few months ago. Long may it be told.

Rob's father worked in a Macy's store on Long Island in the 60s. The employee break room had a bunch of vending machines, including for wrapped sandwiches, and an early model microwave. A big industrial thing.

Some of the sandwiches, which cost $0.35, were meant to be microwaved. Buy sandwich from machine, put in microwave = hot sandwich.

Then the vending machine company decided to raise prices. To $0.37. The vending machine didn't deal with pennies. So they set it to $0.40, and . . . taped three pennies to the sandwich wrapper.

Not everyone took the pennies off before sticking the sandwich in the expensive microwave, and . . . ZZZZzzzzt.

My grandmother had a microwave oven in the '60s, before they were available as home consumer devices. It was a large, water-cooled beast that required 220 V (normal home power in the US is 120 V). She enjoyed it because it was fast, convenient, and modern, and also because she got to be all food-sciency about it. Because it was early in the history of microwave ovens, it had wire mesh on the door, but no glass. Also because it was early in the history of microwave ovens, people hadn't debugged all the recipes yet.

She tells the story of the time that she tried making hard-cooked eggs in the microwave. It said you could do them, after all, and it would certainly be more convenient than getting a pan, heating the water, and all that. Well, the eggs did what we now know eggs in the microwave do, which is explode messily all over the inside of the microwave. And, because of the construction of the door, all over the kitchen in front of the microwave, too.

Even after a lot of cleaning, cooking in it apparently smelled somewhat sulfurous for the next few weeks.

I would never do eggs in the microwave, but I will say that it's about the best way I know to do ears of sweetcorn.

Stefan Jones @443, Keith S @444: I love Making Light so much, and it's for things like this.

Elliott Mason #441: Which is weird, you'd think they'd get rarer and more expensive over time, because of attrition?

That's assuming you're seeing the whole supply, and they disappear as they get discarded or sold. In practice, what's happening is that various online resellers get them from estate sales, tag/garage sales, junk boxes, and the like (where they were previously invisible). And since demand is low, they accumulate over time in the now-visible inventories of the resellers.

A friend replaced his microwave, and decided to do an experiment with the old one. At the time he was fortunate enough to have a house with a large yard with, no kidding, a large concrete slab in the middle of it.

This was before every microwave came with a turntable, but after they all came with a glass plate in the bottom. The experiment was to find out what the glass plate was for. So he made a box of microwave brownies exactly to instructions, and put them in the microwave (on the concrete slab, with an extension cord and cutoff switch) without the glass plate.

I'm not sure how far over the listed time he ran, but he reported that the top of the brownies burst into flames while the bottom was still raw.

On the immortal G & S: How many of the Fluorospherians have seen Topsy-Turvy, a wondrous film that encapsulates an entire performance of The Mikado?

Microwave story: One of the young ladies at work decided to clean the microwave the 'easy' way. She put a container of water in it and set it for 20 MINUTES...

I don't know what the final countdown number reached was, but there was a god-almighty boom from the break room and the door flew off the microwave. Luckily, none of my office mates were IN the break room at the time. No one in the office that day ever let her live that one down.

Condolences to all those who have lost a dear one recently.

Is anyone up for a Gathering of Light either at World Fantasy or OVFF?

Xopher, the house I grew up in had just such a concrete pad in the back yard, about eight to ten feet from the back door, completely surrounded by the lawn. It was about the size of a standard sidewalk square, or maybe a little bigger (it's been over thirty years since I lived there, and memory fades). Its purpose, at least as we used it, was to provide an area on which one could safely burn autumn leaves in the fall. If it had another function I never learned it.

It was made redundant when I was a teenager when the town instituted a leaf-burning ban.

Xopher @447: After my grandparents' first microwave (the one from my story) broke the spring in the how-long dial, it became my microwave because they replaced it.

I got used to just hitting the 'power' button to microwave things, setting a separate timer or going on instinct, and then turning it off to stop it.

Many years later, we got a newer microwave. The old one then became, in crafter's term of art, "Someone Else's Microwave." There are a variety of processes that you're recommended to do in Someone Else's Microwave, either because they'll make it no longer food-safe or because you might set things on fire.

Crackling CDs, for example. Making plasmas. Setting toxic dyes in wool yarn.

I should note here that the Tappan cookbook I referenced up above had instructions for defrosting a whole, frozen chicken that involved PUTTING ALUMINUM FOIL on the tips of the wings to keep them from over-defrosting.

You heard me right.

Metal. In a microwave. On purpose.

Some time after it became Someone Else's Microwave, John got curious about its innards, so we opened it up and looked. It had a massive torus of cast iron in the top (above the cooking box). No wonder it was so frakking heavy. And durable. And could cook ridiculous shit without breaking (though fire was still an option).

When we say something is "made of cast iron" (a stomach, for example), we don't usually mean it literally. But hey.

Alas, that valiant machine met its end in our basement about six years ago, when we had three nasty floods in a row in less than two weeks and prioritized saving other, precious things over dealing with stuff we hadn't used in a while. It killed our chest freezer, too. Alas. I think we gave the corpse to the junk-metal man living next door.

Cassy, #450: Sometimes those concrete pads would have a hole in the middle, with a metal sheath inside it. That was for putting up your outdoor clothesline, which was made along the same lines as a patio umbrella and looked like a square spider-web.

I had a friend in Nashville who had one of those concrete slabs in his back yard. Then we had an ice storm, and (because he lived on a large lot with many trees) he had a superfluity of downed branches, some of them quite hefty. Rather than let them rot where they fell, he gathered them into a pile to dry and started having regular "firewood parties" for the local SF Club. People would bring the makings for s'mores, or whatever else they felt like toasting; sometimes I brought steak-onna-stick. It turned into a regular event until the store of wood ran low.

Fragano @448: I started it but found it too nonlinear and art-filmy for me to even be able to track what was happening.

One place I worked had to replace the break-area microwave. Twice. Due to someone putting their cup-o-noodles in the machine with the foil-lined lid on. (It catches fire.) The same person, both times.

Burning popcorn in the microwave is guaranteed to make your coworkers hate your guts for MONTHS until the smell dissipates.

Elliot @451:

There's nothing inherently wrong with putting metal in a microwave. It is, after all, a big metal box.

What causes problems is thin metal loops, or sharp points. The microwaves induces current loops in the metal (which counter the microwave field and make the microwaves bounce off of it). If the metal is too thin, then its resistance causes the metal to heat up disturbingly hot. If the metal has sharp points, then the voltages at those points can get high enough to cause arcing and sparks.

The idea of the aluminum foil on the tips of the chicken wings is to shield them from the microwaves (since thick aluminum foil should cause the microwaves to bounce off). Still probably not the best of ideas.

But many microwavable packaging today incorporates metals or foils for the purpose of intentionally using the effects of the metals or foils. Anything which is designed to crisp up, or brown, generally needs something that'll get controlled direct heating in specific areas, and metal foils can do that.

Speaking of CDs in the microwave...

A few years ago, I had a CD with some confidential information on it to dispose of at work. We only had shredders for paper. I went to the safety guy and asked how I should get rid of it.

The safety guy told me to snap it in half over a wastebasket.

I looked at him, somewhat incredulously, thinking of the potential for sharp mylar shards to go everywhere and that this was the safety guy. He looked at me as if I were a small child and offered to do it for me.

In retrospect, I should have gone to the admin assistants and asked them how they made confidential CDs disappear. Still, it all ended well.

I took the CD back upstairs and asked a couple of coworkers, "Have you ever seen what happens to a CD in the microwave?" "No." "It's really cool, like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

So we went off to the break room, gave the CD a good zap, watched it arc and shimmer and sparkle for a couple seconds, then pulled it back out. I still have it hanging up at my desk as art.

Fragano @ #448, me! And I enjoyed it, too.

It helped a LOT that I know the Mikado very well (having sung in the chorus of a community-theater production).

Buddha Buck @456:

What causes problems is thin metal loops, or sharp points. The microwaves induces current loops in the metal (which counter the microwave field and make the microwaves bounce off of it). If the metal is too thin, then its resistance causes the metal to heat up disturbingly hot. If the metal has sharp points, then the voltages at those points can get high enough to cause arcing and sparks.

A couple months ago, I had to melt some shea butter for my son's hair; it melts right around 100 F, so I popped it in the microwave on low power for 20 seconds, same as I would for butter-butter. We were almost out so I just put the whole tub in. I heard a little pop, didn't think much of it, and then smelled something awful. I turned back around to see a merry little flame in the microwave. It turns out that the tub of shea butter had a little metal tag, composed of narrow loops, on the bottom, on the inside covered by the oil; it sparked and caught the oil and plastic on fire. I was fast enough to prevent damage to the microwave, but the kitchen smelled awful for a couple days.

Fragano @448:
I have! More than once. There's a tedious bit at the end with the wife's lament, but the next time I get it I'll remember that's what the "skip" function can be used for.

Anyone being affected by the big DDOS attack currently swallowing Twitter, Amazon and several other websites? FaceBook appears unaffected, according to Karen (who's on FB, where I'm not).

Tom @461:

It's taking out a couple of sites which I use, including GitHub. Fortunately, I have a relatively recent copy of my work repositories, so it won't slow me down too much.

Amusingly, it apparently took out an ad network that a click-bait site was using, as I kept getting extra windows popping up saying that a third-party site was not reachable.

I think the worst of it was over by the time I was up and on the 'net this morning, but I did notice that the t.co Twitter URL shortener seemed to be completely gone from DNS.

From initial reports, this seems to be the first fully committed attack following an earlier series of measured and calibrated attacks against DNS providers to test their vulnerabilities - the thing Bruce Schneier and others were talking about a few weeks back.

I have a bad feeling that this could be the beginning of something prolonged, nasty, and much bigger, along the lines of hearing that a few shots just got fired from Fort Sumter. In just the last 10-15 years, US and global society have become so dependent on the Internet for normal functioning that I don't think we have any clear idea what would happen if the Internet were taken down for a substantial period of time. It could happen.

That lump of "cast iron" in the microwave is probably the Cavity Magnetron.

I used to get Someone Else's Microwave from Goodwill for about $10 when we had Mad Science Parties. (We only had three, and the first was by far the most impressive.) Cheaper than the food, the booze, OR the safety equipment.

I highly recommend a Mad Science party. Our rules were "You don't have to bring an experiment but it's encouraged" and "Nothing as or more dangerous than thermite." People kept showing up with things that they said weren't experiments, and we kept proving them wrong.

If you get a Goodwill microwave, make sure it works, at least a little bit, before the party. The second and third did not.

Fragano@448: I know and love Topsy-Turvy! I grew up on G&S; the first album I ever owned was...maybe Mikado? Not sure what order I was given the Big Three in. (I think mine are pre-stereo; D'Oyly Carte of course, London "FFR" recordings on LP.) And I've seen at least 6 different live performances of Mikado in addition to hearing multiple recordings endlessly.

TOPSY TURVY is an incredible movie. I only wish it included a complete performance of the Mikado. When I bought the disk, I looked closely, just in case, but apart from an additional scene or two, there was no more Mikado. I would wager that, had they done a complete performance, it would have been even better than the one we did at CNU in 2000, and that's saying a lot.

I opined at YouTube that I wish they had done a complete Mikado, and every few weeks, I get a notification that someone else has agreed with me.

For those who've seen the movie, I'll add that Gilbert did at least two shows (without Sullivan) that used the 'lozenge' plot that Sir Arthur would never consent to. The Palace of Truth features a deus ex machina that causes people to incontinently tell the truth, while they themselves believe they are telling their customary rehearsed lie. The Mountebanks has a d.e.m. which causes people to become what they are pretending to be, which produces, among other things, an actual clockwork Hamlet. I've recently learned of another, Creatures of Impulse, which I haven't read yet, but I think I was told it works by opposites (due to a gypsy's curse).

Gilbert, incidentally, wrote a short play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which is nowhere near as good as it ought to be. (I talked a little about TOPSY TURVY up at #404, too, I now see.)

Incidentally, in addition to having a flourishing stage career, George Grossmith, Jnr., recorded several 'sides' that are still available to us. This is the son of the man who originated George Wellington Wells, and Ko-Ko on the stage, as well as other Gilbertean roles, and he's portrayed in TOPSY TURVY. The father, not the son. Is that not unclear?

My favorite of his (Jnr's) recordings is Murders (1915), a century-old comedy record that's still funny to me. The theme is somewhat Gilbertean, come to think of it. Trigger warnings: murder, and mother-in-law humor. "I murdered him, that organ man. I don't think I was wrong…"

One aspect that intrigues me is how much he sounds like Hans Conried. Was Conried imitating him? Consciously? Or wee both perhaps partaking of a tradition?

I hope to figure out the accompaniment myself some day, and cultivate this number for my own purposes. (See, Senior was the Savoyard, and Junior recorded Murders…)

Well. Wikipedia quotes a Wodehouse scholar as saying that Grossmith might have been the inspiration for Bertie Wooster! The whole entry is interesting. He was also a writer and producer, up into the 20s, producing (among others) Primrose, with book by Wodehouse and a Gershwin score.

I think I'm done now.

Some woodworkers and luthiers have found techniques to use pieces of CD where one would traditionally inlay mother-of-pearl. It's beautiful.

I am relieved to learn that I am not alone in exploding eggs in the microwave.

NPR had a segment on something that I had never heard of before, due to my intense hatred of the vegetable in question:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/10/03/495975189/snap-crackle-kale-the-science-of-why-veggies-spark-in-the-microwave

See? I was right.

At school, we sometimes have occasion to peel eggs. This is tedious and difficult for the students, plus it takes a long time and we'd rather be cooking or not cooking rather than sort of cooking. One recipe recommended microwaving a hard-boiled egg for thirty seconds, letting it cool a bit, then peeling.

I have exploded one egg in my quest to confirm this, and peeled a lot of others. It is actually a lot easier.

My very good friend once set a potato on fire in the microwave.

I think this community will appreciate Grant Snider's Guide to Proofreader's Marks.

In my hard cooked egg reheated in the microwave story, the egg doesn't explode until I bite into it. I don't recall being injured, but I certainly was surprised.

Thank you for all your thoughts. The following day, my Aunt Karon died. From cancer as well.

On the one hand, two funerals in two days will suck. On the other hand, I won't need to ask for additional funeral leave at work.

Double condolences, Victoria.

This can't be an easy time. Please don't forget to take care of yourself.

My condolences on your doubled loss, Victoria. Also condolences to Otter B and Dave.

I've been quiet but hanging around. Today's HLN can now be shared: Area woman finally, after a prolonged engagement, got married this morning, to the woman of her dreams. The happy couple explained, "We decided to elope; that way, it was equally unfair to everyone, and no one would be more disappointed." We called my parents on our way to the courthouse, and returned home to flowers from them. Further details were a bit hazy, as the Real World conspired against our intrepid pair.

477
I wish you many good years together!

Almost-foolproof microwave poached eggs:
- Take a bowl with a rounded bottom, add 1/2 cup water (or 150ml if you prefer those.)
- Crack one or two eggs in it.
- Put it in the microwave with a plastic plate or paper towel over it (because this is only almost foolproof.)
- Microwave for a Your-Microwave-May-Vary amount of time, which for my microwave is 50 seconds for one egg and 80 for two.
- Remove eggs from water with a slotted spoon.

Sometime I will got to Austin for reasons that don't involve a funeral, but not this time. My aunt Margaret was 92, and had been declining health for a couple of years. Her husband Bob died a couple years ago. Two of their kids live in Austin, and she and Bob had lived in a small town an hour away for many years. They both had the last name Stewart before getting married (she was my dad's sister); I forget whether they were distant relatives or whether we couldn't find a connection, though he was second cousin to another cousin's husband.

Victoria, #475: Oh man, that sucks. Condolences, and take extra care of yourself for a while.

Ginger, #477: Congratulations! May you have many happy years together.

Victoria: Oh dear. My condolences.
Condolences also to OtterB.

And to Ginger and wife, congratulations, Mazel Tov, and may you have many more happy years together!

Bill Stewart @479

You can do this with an ordinary ceramic mug, and plastic microwave-safe mugs and bowls with vented lids are commonplace. The cheap ones depend on the plastic flexing for a hinged clip, but I have not had one of those break yet. You do need some way for the steam to escape.

They're useful to have, whether you're heating up a can of soup. or just want a safer way to carry a hot drink. There are also insulated mugs, and some of them may be microwave safe. Some are obviously not.

I have one of those infra-red thermometers, and that made it fairly easy to check the timing to heat up milk to around 75°C for mechanical frothing. I would put the container off-centre on the turntable. It's a good way of getting hot milk.

Dave Bell: "mechanical frothing" sounds like a description of a twitter-bot or other automated trolling application.

Ginger (477): Congratulations! May you have a long and happy life together.

Victoria: More condolences... it sucks when deaths team up on you.

Ginger: Congratulations!

Ginger, congratulations.

Condolences (and hugs where appropriate) to all those who have lost friends, acquaintances, and family members recently. 2016 is so fired.

Lori @ 449

That really doesn't bear thinking about: a substantial steam explosion in a small metal box as it 'bumps' and the superheated water expands to 1400 times its volume. (I may try it sometime, with an expendable microwave and suitable safety precautions.)

Ginger @ 477

Congratulations on converting your Fabulous Fiance into an even more Fabulous Wife. Best wishes for maximum happiness to both of you.

Congratulations to Ginger and spouse!

Ginger: Mazel Tov, and Bright Blessings!

In the easy-peeling category, both peaches and nectarines may be readily peeled by dropping them in boiling water for 15 seconds.

C. Wingate #491: I knew about doing tomatoes that way, but peaches and nectarines too? Hmm....

I worked it out myself from the tomato trick, back in the days when I did a lot of preserving. It will only work with pretty ripe fruit, though, and you need to watch it of the peel with just disintegrate.

B. Durbin @#380: Note that in Ruddigore, it's traditional for the actor playing the younger brother to be quite a bit older than the older brother

I've mostly seen the 1980s tv version in which Sir Despard (the older brother) was played by Vincent Price.

Kip W @ #467 Gilbert did at least two shows (without Sullivan) that used the 'lozenge' plot that Sir Arthur would never consent to.

I don't know whether Karen Blixen/Isaac Dinnesen knew of "the lozenge plot" or came up with the idea independently, but her story "The Roads Round Pisa" contains a scene in which the PoV character ** comes across a puppet show called "The Revenge of Truth" which uses the idea, and ends with one of the puppets breaking the fourth wall and declaring they they are all fiction.

** I can't call him the protagonist, or the main character, because the whole point is that he's found himself on the sidelines of some other people's highly operatic story, and is rather enjoying the escape from his own troubles. The puppet show kind of symbolizes this.

AKICIML: This one is for British solicitors or barristers or whomever is supposed to know this stuff: does anyone know if the precedent established in Saverland v. Newton still holds? (Or ever did; I'm not sure how British law works in terms of precedent setting, and this was a jury verdict followed by an opinion from the "Chairman," whatever that role might be, not a formal ruling from a judge.)

Xopher @496 My understanding - and IANAL, but do live with them - is that as a lower court ruling it would not set any sort of binding precedent, but might be cited as a persuasive authority should similar circumstances again arise.

That said: the case doesn't appear to actually have been formally reported; the account Wikipedia cites comes from the 1830's equivalent of a tabloid newspaper. I'd take its contents with a pinch of salt.

David 497: Thanks, that makes sense. I've been using it as a story to tell Trump defenders what *I* think should happen to people who behave as he does, but the most recent time I did so I joked "here's some case law for you," and I wondered later if it qualified as actual case law. Sounds like not.

Xopher @496 - Chairman of the jury, perhaps? Still, it does read more like urban legend. Snopes sits firmly on the fence for this one. Just no sufficient evidence.

Especially since they called her Miss Caroline Newton early in the account, and later said she had a husband. Strikes me as unlikely that a 19th century account wouldn't call her Mrs. Newton.

Queer Xopher Halftongue @ #496:

Looks as if BAILII does not have that case in its databases. This may or may not mean that it can be found, somewhere.

Sarah E
That sounds like a story I would wish to read. I've noted the info, and thanks. Seems to be one of Seven Gothic Tales. Who knows? Perhaps Gilbert's non-Sullivan works were part of a canon 'everybody' read, or at least knew, but I sure don't know enough about it either way.

I once considered writing an alternate version of Rex Stout's The Second Confession as told by Theodore Horstmann, Nero Wolfe's in-house orchid nurse. It would be a dozen or so pages long, dwell mostly on the incident with the orchids and broken glass, spend much of the rest whining his dislike for "that Archie Goodwin," and never really grasp that anything else was going on.

Victoria, OtterB, Bill Stewart: Far too much of that sort of thing going around lately. Witnessing.

Elliott Mason @436: microwave ... egg

Well, look at it this way: at least mirrors are easy to clean. Think of what it would have been like with, say, stucco. <g,d&r>

Actually, I'd have worried even if he had peeled it. I've heard that you have to breach the yolk membrane too. (I've generally found it sufficient to put a cover on one's chilli in the mic.* One does enjoy the sound of microdetonations, indicating that the substance is fully heated.)

* I have decided that the proper familiar term for a microwave is a "nukyulator" (unsure what the proper spelling would be). You heard it here first.

Cassy B. @438: charcoal briquettes on the inside

I first encountered nuked food back in the late '70s at a local restaurant when I ordered a chocolate chip cookie for dessert. They nuked it so it would be warm, but that was in the very early days, staff was inexperienced, and the heart of my cookie turned out to be burnt.

Some months later, a coworker had a big cookie to go with his lunch, though, "Ha! I'll microwave it so it'll be warm!" I warned him not to nuke it too long, but he did anyway. The look on his face when he bit into it and discovered the accuracy of my prediction was worth it, though.

Lori Coulson @449: Here's my introduction to the concept of superheating. Not recommended. (Interestingly, I've had a less-dramatic version of this problem heating filtered water for tea. I've taken to putting a stirrer in the cup, because without a nucleation center, even with a seasoned mug, it still wants to abruptly sneeze half of its volume all over the microwave.)

Elliott Mason @451: ObJonSinger: Bad Silly Things You Can Do in Your Microwave Oven

P J Evans @454: The same person, both times.

We had that person's brother living in an apartment building on the next block. Fire Dept. called after he decided to reheat his dinner on the stovetop. In a Tupperware.

Some while later, he decided to start his fireplace with lighter-fluid, but it went up faster than he expected, so he pulled it out of the fireplace to put it out. On the carpet. By the time the FD arrived for that one, the building was a total loss, and wound up burning (literally) to the ground. Two people died in that fire. They did finally catch up with him. I don't know if he's still in jail or not.

Clifton @463: I have a bad feeling that this could be the beginning of something prolonged, nasty, and much bigger, along the lines of hearing that a few shots just got fired from Fort Sumter.

One hopes that at the very least, them as wants "benign" backdoors to aid law enforcement, and various other in-built security holes, will maybe rethink their positions. I predict it'll take something really bad, though, to get it through their noggins that security is, you know, an actual thing. (Which reminds me, I caught an add on YouTube over the weekend with Edward Snowden, pointing out that "good-guy" access is still access, and I can't find it in it's own right. I'd like to watch it again. (And when is this guy going to get his Nobel Peace Prize?)

I don't think we have any clear idea what would happen if the Internet were taken down for a substantial period of time.

Which is kind of ironic, considering the original motive behind its development. The taken down part, not the dependence on it part.

Elliott Mason @470: Some woodworkers and luthiers have found techniques to use pieces of CD where one would traditionally inlay mother-of-pearl.

A friend of mine discovered that you can also, if you're careful, break the CD open, peel the diffraction grating off of the plastic, and use in the manner of gold leaf.

Nicole Fitzhugh @471: I've heard that bell pepper has similar issues.

Ginger @477: Yay! ::confetti:: I love the rationale for eloping.

Kip W @502: Your mention of Nero Wolfe reminds me that for a long time I've been thinking that nobody talks about Archie Goodwin as an unreliable narrator. But I think he is. And just how unreliable is he? That could make for some very interesting reinterpretations of most of the books.... (A simple example of Goodwin's unreliability: he considers Wolfe grossly overweight at 285 pounds -- and always describes that weight as "a seventh of a ton." While that's large, even in the days when Wolfe was writing it wasn't that uncommon.)