jhlipton: I missed pieces of the panel due to settling an obligation; Patrick can tell you whether your example came up while I was out. (I don't remember an instance in that book myself, but I haven't read it in a very long time.)
It sounds like Dumas was romanticizing. (Well, duh....) Would a count have the privilege of administering "justice" for any past crime, regardless of time or location? And I keep finding claims that droit du seigneur (going a few paragraphs back from your cite) was rather more fiction than fact.
One of the amusing bits of Twenty Years After is the point where Dumas admits, albeit as a way of trashing Mazarin(?), that Richelieu was at least a man of suitable scope.
Teresa: I'd love to see you using that at a World Fantasy Convention; you might actually suffocate some of the biggest pains in the business, especially if you put editors and agents in the same position.
Eric Bogle sang here last night. In addition to the obvious songs for the day, he added one item of command idiocy I hadn't heard of. I suppose it made sense not to return any of the ANZACs' 53,000 horses, on the grounds that they might transmit something they'd picked up; but where the horses in France and Belgium were given away, the ones in Palestine were killed -- in the belief that somehow the locals would be too harsh for horses that had survived three years of war. As you'd expect, he had a song about it. I've sung a Veterans' Day concert built around Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem, but hearing Bogle walk out and start "Singing the Spirit Home" without a word of introduction had at least as much impact.
Serge et al: Italy also managed to overthrow its dictator itself, was abused by the retreating Germans, and committed its worst violence out of site of Westerners (e.g., in Ethiopia).
Teresa: the summary still doesn't clear up the question others raised: how did Turkey get into this? I'd expect \somebody/ declared \something/ before Gallipoli -- after all, it wouldn't be sporting to put even colonials through that hell unofficially. Any info?
Marilee: possible reasons:
"'Seventeen!', shouted the Bug, who was usually the first with the wrong answer." (Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth)
The proof that 17 is the largest finite number, possibly out of the pejorative calculus (which also proves that Alexander the Great did not exist \and/ he had an infinite number of limbs.)
I'm partial to 137, which in addition to being the fine structure constant (? reciprocal?) was snuck into the ST:TNG pilot -- probably not because it was running around fandom at the time, but one never knows.
Xopher -- I also remember that show; saw it twice, before and after the tall blonde trapeziste recovered from a broken (? enslinged, anyway) arm. (During the recovery, she juggled one-handed; don't remember the sequence of sideshow acts well enough to recall what they did in place of her number.) The former performance was the day the props man under the stage was late with Adriana's cane; he got such an earful I thought it had been intentional.
wrt shortened Shakespeare: Wikipedia claims the 15-Minute Hamlet is an extract of Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. I saw the original tour, so memory is now time-fogged, but I remember truncations of both plays; Hamlet was performed in ~11 minutes and repeated in ~3. (Macbeth was ended or interrupted with the secret police's applause at the thane's self-coronation.)
J Thomas: not former Marines, nobody admits to being a former Marine
A counterexample -- who just snickers at the above attitude, when visitors leave hard-ass comments to "A Few Good Men and Me".
Graydon: The reason to care for the poor is that you yourself will surely be old and helpless one day.
Oh? Given law, people with money are not helpless even if unable to defend themselves physically. Could this be why the oligarchs guard their fortunes at the cost of wrecking the country?
Randolph -- what you're asking for sounds to me like a parliamentary democracy, such as most of the rest of the ]democratic[ world has; Patrick has argued that the two-party system is the natural result of the founding fathers' separated-powers design, where a PD allows many splinters to grab seats at the table. But I suspect that you'd be just as uncomfortable in a PD; the parties in such seem to me to have even narrower focuses, making it harder to find one that will have any give on the points on which you disagree with it.
Does anyone with long experience with PD have any comments? Any Commonwealthers who can comment on why/how the Commonwealth model seems to have mostly collapsed into variants of the two-party system? (Yes, I know the UK has a centrist party; when has it ever been needed to make a government?)
epacris -- Janice LJ's as "smofbabe". I went back to the relevant section (her round-the-world trip to work in India + London, and go to Eastercon, i.e. last half of March 2005); didn't find the item I referred to, but may not have gone far enough back and don't speak enough LJ to know whether it allows free-text searching.
The part of the sex panel I got to after oversleeping was good, but Patrick also gets points for answering Modesitt's panel's question of why fantasy has all this folk music and no symphonies or operas; a bard, he said, is a walking expository lump.
mythago: It is always funny to see conservatives suddenly start talking like ACLU-hugging soft-on-crime defense attorneys when one of their own is under the microscope.
Oh, you mean the way they suddenly discovered that Singapore's laws were right out of the Middle Ages when Barings went under and it looked like one of their own would have to spend time in an Oriental prison, possibly even getting corporal punishment for his offenses?
The old line was that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. But it's been a fact for decades that a [moderate/neolib/I-can't-think-of-a-suitable-expletive] is a conservative who has just discovered the law applies to him. Conservatives think they'll never have to sleep under bridges or beg for bread, and "stealing" is what somebody else does (cf Screwtape's observation that a bribe becomes a "tip" or "present"), but there are still laws to constrain the evil that they do.
Paula -- words become sets of finger-twitches when you've typed enough of them, just as they become unconscious clusters of vocal tract movements rather than separate sounds when you've spoken enough of them. (This usually happens early enough that you're not as aware of it as you are with typing.) This used to be considered desirable by the more sensible typing teachers; it wasn't as rhythmic as the old school prescribed but it was more efficient. I've noticed this (with the slips you describe) when I'm typing text, even code comments, but not when I'm typing code proper; if I were a real hacker, would constructs spring from my fingers without thought to the individual characters? (Maybe if I were younger; I've noticed my two outside right fingers doing less and less, which makes typing C very slow.)
I found many years ago that one of the best ways to make an earth-shattering kaboom doesn't require explosives at all. Just drop a pumpkin off the top of the Green Building (MIT Earth-Sci; 22? stories tall). (No, I didn't get to drop it; I was just there.) It made a much more impressive noise than the howitzers used each year for the 1812 Overture.
Harry -- I do, hence my question. Putting it more clearly: how many of the people over-influenced by facing and jacket art weren't actually browsers? First toss them from the sample since it doesn't matter what they say influences them if they're not actually being influenced, and see how that affects the fraction of buyers influenced by trivialities. But browsers aren't all equal, so ask \them/ how many books they buy in year -- some will buy only a few, some will buy many -- and calculate what fraction of the ones who buy a lot are influenced by trivialities.
What I'm getting at is the question of how many books are sold by trivialities and how many by looking at \some/ text (even if it's just the blurb or quotes on the back cover). My WAG is that books go by the 80/20 rule (i.e., 80% of books sold to 20% of buyers) or even 90/10, and that the people who buy lots of books are more attentive to content than package, which works out to more books being sold by content.
At least, that's what I'd like to think. As I said, it's all WAG -- but I take back the UUS, thinking that my long-term observation trumps his random sampling that doesn't connect to books actually sold.
And I'm sure there's some marketroid somewhere who will say that the substantial buyers would buy anyway while the packager's work picks up the marginal buyers who make the difference between 19 pounds 19 shillings sixpence and 20 pounds zero & sixpence. Grump.
Harry -- Guyot left out the most important question: "How many books a year do you buy?" Cross that his -"Are you going to browse [rather than just grab a specific book and leave]?"- and you'd get a more reliable vector on his conclusion that authors whose books aren't face-out are screwed. My UUSWAG is that he's wrong, but I'd really like to \know/ instead of guessing.
John D. Berry: Jim may have been referring to the fact that many of our generation were ~taught as children to draw trees with brown trunks (in my memory, even when given better instruction in drawing itself, e.g. draw the trunk as )( and fill in with gradually straighter lines).
I'd say the birch outside our house has a cold-white bark, nothing even vaguely creamy about it. But I remember thinking of trunks as brown even when living in a scattering of locust, which are definitely grey.
The ultimate miniature?
I've been to Madurodam as a child and adult; I don't know how it looks to modelmakers' eyes, but the sheer scope (expanded since my last visit, says the web page) is impressive.
I used to blame my parents for giving me Tom Swift Jr. for my 8th birthday instead of the Hardy Boys, but that was in the middle of the space race; I think I would have found SF regardless. I certainly was already a reader -- hardly surprising with both parents being teachers -- but having the head librarian at the county's central library as a family friend gave me an extra push. The first time I missed a ride because I had my nose in a book was no later than 2nd grade.
Josh: soldiergrrl's whining doesn't impress me; I heard much too much of the rehearsal session that was supposed to be a secret but got sent out, taped, and repeatedly broadcast. I haven't figured out whether it's nice to know I'm not paranoid or horrible to know it's true.
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