The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Debra Doyle:

TexAnne@74: Life post-hooding is absolutely worth it: you will have accomplished something very, very hard, and it will be yours forever.

I heartily concur. Sometimes I think that the single most valuable thing I learned in the course of getting my doctorate was that I was, in fact, capable of taking on a long-term project and carrying it out to completion.

(The dissertation itself took me either four years or two months to write, depending upon how you look at the process.)

Zander@4: Is this me being weird, or is it something I see that other people, better and wiser people than I, for some reason don't?

If you're weird, so am I, because your interpretation makes sense to me. It certainly strikes me as the sort of story that spending a lot of time around Percy Bysshe Shelley would drive an intelligent and perceptive young woman to write.

albatross@64: What's the situation in which being on a Navy ship would become dangerous?

Mostly, the same situations in which being on any ship would be dangerous -- storms at sea, equipment failure and industrial accidents, piracy on the high seas, that sort of thing.

The Air Force is riddled with crazy-ass fundamentalists these days, alas; the other branches, less so.

With certain exceptions (see medics, above), the Navy's a pretty good choice during an infantry war. Most of its inherent dangers have to do with the sorts of bad things that can happen at sea to civilian and military ships alike.

inge@236: They use Phonics in *English*?

It depends upon the school district, the decade, and the prevailing theory of the moment.

Primary-grades reading instruction doesn't seem at first glance like a viable, or even plausible, candidate for politicization . . . nevertheless, it is, and it has been. This, unsurprisingly, results in an all-one-way-or-the-other approach to the "whole language vs. phonics" thing, when the truth of the matter is that some kids do better with one, and some kids with the other, and a sensible teacher would use both as appropriate.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Assistant Manager had been one of the guys who couldn’t see me.

I guess it's true what they say about managers setting a place's cultural tone. If the alpha dude on the floor isn't going to acknowledge the presence of people with a XX-chromosome, none of the lesser folk will either.

It's a pervasive problem, God knows, but it sounds like you ran into a particularly pernicious case of it.

The Raven@354: and none of those central points involve spiritual practices, and only limited knowledge is required. There are huge omissions and, as you know, they were implemented in the actual conduct of the religion.

Once again, you are confusing doctrine (which the Creed encapsulates, in handy "is this orthodox Christianity yes/no?" form) with practice, which does -- and historically has -- required a good deal of education and preparation.

The Raven@339: the Nicene Creed contains no requirement for study or discipline or anything other than baptism.

You appear to be misunderstanding the purpose of the Nicene Creed completely. It is not meant to be the directions for a course of study in becoming a Christian -- there already exists, believe it or not as you will, a separate program for that. It's meant to be a summary of the core points of mainstream (at the time it was written, and to a large extent still today) Christian doctrine.

The Raven@330: It is not a coincidence: the Nicene Creed contains, among other things, a rejection of mysticism

Say what?

I just now went and looked up the Nicene Creed (in order to make certain I was remembering all of its bits correctly), and I'm entirely unclear about which of its many and various clauses could be construed in that manner.

(If you're talking about qui locutus est per Prophetas -- "who has spoken through the prophets" -- which is the only thing I can think of that comes even remotely close, that's still stretching the meaning past the point where the rubber band goes snap.)

Sean@39: The response this has gotten is absolutely terrifying. This is the single most-viewed thing I've ever posted on the web.

You're in good company. Scalzi is famous for taping bacon to his cat.

Avram@3: I'm pretty sure there are people out there who camp out at temperatures of 80°F or more, and below 50°F.

The apparatus -- based on local experience -- is reliable for the range of temperatures in which New Hampshire Girl and Boy Scouts do their camp cookery, which is to say from the mid-eighties down to freezing. While New Hampshire scouts, being a hardy lot, have been known to camp out in temperatures far lower than that, at that time of year there's usually deep snow on the ground, which renders tinfoil-box-oven cooking problematic.

Anglo-Saxon swords may not have been single-edged (I've never heard of them being described that way, anyhow), but the classic seax knives certainly were.

This is starting to read like the pizza version of the "it isn't a real bagel if it has X in it" argument.

Me, I think I'll go for "pizza with/without X counts as 'real' if it appears as one of the listed pizza offerings on a pizzeria menu otherwise dominated by the standard cheese-tomato-and-optional meat variations."

Mary Aileen@60: My personal definition of pizza includes the crust, tomato sauce, and cheese.

By that definition, white pizza isn't pizza, either.

Goob@14: A Pittsburgh classic; there are many eateries (pizza or otherwise) in the Steel City that will merrily deliver these.

And indeed, this recipe made it into our house via our elder son, who recently did a stint in Pittsburgh at Carnegie-Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.

I liked the reaction of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburne (D-South Carolina): "I was always taught that the first sign of a good education is good manners. I think that what we saw tonight was really bad manners."

(I don't think you have to speak Southern to appreciate the full glory of that one.)

My theory (I believe I've articulated it at Viable Paradise once or twice) is that what most of us are looking for in our reading is the perfect birthday present effect -- the perfect birthday present being the one where you're completely surprised by exactly what you've always wanted.

And nobody likes being told that their perfect birthday present is actually a cheap piece of Wal-Mart trash.

It's amazingly difficult to talk about the whole idea of voluntary avocational reading without the use of language which, deliberately or not, imposes rank and hierarchy upon it. We speak of "higher levels" of difficulty, and "greater" challenges; and -- in our still-puritanical society -- even words like "pleasure" and "relaxation" have a faint negative cast to them, especially when set beside words like "instruction" or "insight" or "self-improvement."

I'm willing to accept that somebody else may find enjoyable something that I do not. After all, most of the people who tried to convince me, during my school days, that organized team sports were fun, certainly appeared themselves to enjoy them. But I'm no more fond than the next person of being told, or even feeling like I'm being told, that my enjoyment of those things that I do like is in some fashion inferior to the enjoyment experienced by people who like something else.

We've found an on-line sales link for the 2009 edition. New, of course . . . not going to be many secondhand ones available this soon. Not that going secondhand is a particularly safe option, for a workbook&CD combo -- too many of the used workbooks available have answers written in, or pages missing, and most of them don't have the accompanying CD.

John L.@6: Failing that, a strong reply in the negative is called for by the students as well as their parents.

Given the nature of the school itself, the parents probably think that giving the school access to students' passwords is a fine idea. As for what the students think . . . in what high school ever, private or public, has the administration ever given a damn about that?

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