The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jeffrey Smith:

One of my favorite signs was in a church parking lot a few blocks from my house, where there were markers for reserved spaces. Some were reserved with names, some with titles, and one with a title that the sign-maker thought was a name:

"Pastor Al Counselor"

Things that struck me as I thought about my answers to the list:

"Four jobs" is the same as "every job." (Soda jerk, three weeks; letter carrier, three months; bookstore employee (eventually assistant manager), four years; college lab technician, 33 years.)

"Four places you've lived" would have to be four addresses in Baltimore. I think I've lived in nine (ten if you count that one house changed addresses while we lived there). For the past 32, I've been living at the address on my birth certificate.

Glad to see some love for Junkyard Wars. Are they still making those? (Not that it really matters; I've got dozens on tape that I haven't watched yet. Friends tease me that I probably haven't finished Hill Street Blues yet, but I have, I have finished Hill Street Blues. I've even finished Homicide. But not Northern Exposure, or Deep Space Nine...)

Keith,

Xopher wasn't saying that he "can tell the difference between a human and a monster, simply by eyeballing a shopping list of their most heinous mistakes." He was saying that we're all human, including those of us who are murderers, even those who are so extreme that they could be called monsters. Your interpretation of what he was saying goes off in the wrong direction from there.

Remember the protests about the US issuing a stamp celebrating the Muslim Eid holidays? "They don't even believe in Christ and they're getting their own Christmas stamp?"

Add "and they're discontinuing our Christmas stamps" to that and we can watch a lot of heads explode.

I love the DC stamps. Marvel will get their sheet in 2007. (But I'm a DC guy; I'll actually spend the $7.80 to keep a sheet.)

Serge --

If you want the original, it was the cover for the October 1953 Astounding, available on the Visco site.

The Queen version is available at various places, I think.

Queen

News of the World

I hate it that (at least in some places) "supercede" seems to have superseded "supersede" while I wasn't paying attention.
Dave

Damn! It's a word I rarely use, and now I know why.

(Wait. My dictionary lists "supercede" as a variant of "supersede." Now I don't feel quite so bad -- just lucky.)

Isn't gantlet just a different spelling of gauntlet? Did it supercede gauntlet while I wasn't paying attention?

FEMA was actually an effective organization under Clinton.

Try it this way:

Even someone who loves the father is appalled by the son.

Have any of you got any idea what the market for old SF magazines is like? Have they all rotted away? I think it would be cool to have some of that stuff for the library.

Scott, some of it is very pricey and some of it is cheap. You can often buy fair-sized lots of old sf magazines on eBay for not too much; it depends on the number of people looking at any given time. I've bought a dozen issues for under $10 at some times, and similar lots for $30-40 at others. Specific issues with stories by collectible authors can be hard to come by.

Marilee--
I wasn't disagreeing.

(There wasn't enough hot water for just about everybody and I think since we'll be back there next year, they should negotiate a lower rate with the hotel.)

We checked out at the front desk to tell the hotel that the toilet handle in our room needed some repair, and mentioned that we had had no hot water -- and they comped us one night.

Actually, I can never remember which side is supposed to be red, and which blue.

Red = Republican

I don't know whether Herbert would have been familiar with Cordwainer Smith.

Oh, surely he had to have been. Smith was published in the sf magazines regularly from the mid-fifties on. He didn't make the Hugo ballot much if at all, but he was regularly anthologized. (The first thing I read by him was "Drunkboat" in a Judith Merril Year's Best.)

Karl--

According to the Sony website, Mirrormask will open in Boise on November 18, at Flicks.

Of course, according to the same website, it was supposed to open at the Charles here in Baltimore this wekend, but it didn't.

I rarely go the movies, but I was planning to go to this one. On well. I did go see Serenity last weekend -- it was probably my first theater-visit of 2005. (I was expecting to see another episode of the tv show, and was pleasantly surprised to see a very good sf movie.)

I don't know anything specifically about the Red Sonja movie, but the rights to Howard's characters were divided among different heirs, and I believe the movies came at a pretty contentious time. There has been some consolidation and/or peace-making more recently, but even now the Conan and Red Sonja comic books are published by different companies.

That's lovely, pericat. I read it three times in a row because every time I finished it I wanted to go back to the beginning. Good job.

Interesting to see a thread in which almost every book mentioned is one I have sampled but not read. Once when I had half an hour to kill and Lord Foul's Bane was the closest book at hand, I read the beginning and was totally drawn into it; but I never set aside the time to read the trilogy.

Back when I first read Tolkien and some of the other fantasy writers that were coming back into print, I didn't read Gormenghast because of what I was told was a dense writing style. After watching the British tv adaptation, I pulled the book(s) out to look up a few things and found it surprisingly readable. Again, no plans to read it anytime soon, but now I wouldn't mind the attempt.

And hrc mentions Anne Perry -- I presume her not-well-received fantasies. The mysteries are (I've heard) much better. I've read a short story or two by her, and the beginning of The Face of a Stranger just because my wife liked that one so much; I would like to read that some day.

But I don't seem to read much any more. Maybe because I'm typing away here at two in the morning when I could be reading Mervyn Peake or John M. Ford?

OG--

All I've seen is this article, in which one mortician mentions being turned away because he wasn't FEMA-certified. I haven't seen anything about groups being denied access -- but if they aren't FEMA-certified I guess they would be.

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