Disagreement with praiser of X, with arguments that he didn't stop writing Y nearly soon enough.
abi/Fragano/...:
The oath in Scotland could adopt a mixed stance similar to that of the Edinburgh gallery I visited before Intersection, which titled some of the pieces "James VI and I", "James VII and II", and "James VIII and III"; who will notice if abi swears allegiance to "Elizabeth the First and Second"?
The captions specifically counter the statement that nobody recognizes a James III; there just hasn't been anybody since the Orange who had the gall to rule as James or Henry -- which a Germanic line of succession may have specifically disfavored as a French name. Or maybe \somebody/ in the retinue has a sense of diplomacy....
TNH wrote: Oh, and Voldemort could accomplish most of his aims just by having one of his minions sneak into Hogwarts with a Thompson submachine gun -- but then, I think the same thing about the X-Men's mansion.
It occurs to me that Voldemort so hates Muggles that he's even less capable of learning to use Muggle tech than the average wizard -- and given the way he treats his help, it's not clear anyone would be willing to admit to knowing that much about Muggle tech by suggesting it.
Linda: I severely irritated someone recently by pointing out that in Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone/Philospher's Stone the whole problem would have gone away if Harry and the others hadn't bothered to solve all those riddles to get through to where the stone was.
I'm unwilling to re-read the book, but my visual memories of the movie (which changed one of the problems but IIRC not the others) were that solving the "riddles" (is flat-out chess a riddle?) was the only way through them -- it wasn't like Ditch Day, where some "stacks" are brute-force problems and others put you on your honor to solve the puzzle as constrained ("Smoke this doobie then solve these calculus problems to find the combination to the lock.")
The Italian semiotician/writer Umberto Eco wrote an essay about the necessity of having boring segments in porno movies, between the sex scenes. Eco explained that each "boring" bit is necessary to give the voyeur a chance to relax before the next "good part". A porno movie consisting of ONLY sex scenes would be too tiresome.
This is hardly original, except in being willing to apply it to porn.
It may be a lesson all authors needs to learn. Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One tells how he finally turned his not-good-enough work (closed in into a hit based on somebody's remark that it was the noisiest play they'd seen; he dropped some of the unrelenting comedy (and spectacular -- a massive nightclub set was dumped) for some down time in the third act. The result was Once in a Lifetime, which may be terribly creaky now but was a huge hit when it opened.
TNH: I thought trading in accumulated plot coupons was how you got your denouement.
That's the nice way of putting it; considering the work to which the term is usually applied, somebody said that when the characters collect enough plot coupons they can buy their way out of the story.
You do have to look out for people doing the inexplicable "What? It snows here?" thing, though. Happens every darn year--people acting like they've never seen frozen water before, and driving like idiots in consequence.
At least you have to look out for them; in Washington DC when I was growing up they were in the majority. Granted it's a borderline city, where the coldest I remember it being when I went out to deliver the morning newspaper was 26F; but it got significant snow most winters (and a line-snapping storm every ~3), so why was it a standing joke that the USSR would attack when DC was paralyzed by half an inch of white?
Speaking of indoor survival in cold climates: It's a good idea to keep a teapot boiling all the time, to add moisture to the air. When cold air warms up, it warms up dry and dry air rips the heck out of your mucus membranes (not to mention sucking the water right out of your body through your lungs and skin).
The problem with a teapot is that it doesn't hold enough water to run all night. I've used a humidifier for >25 years, partly for my voice but mostly because I can feel better without steadily sipping water for several months straight. And Boston isn't particularly harsh; you should have heard the grumbling the year Smofcon was in Colorado Springs (~6000 feet, temperature not much below freezing but the air was almost Saharan in the rain shadow of the Rockies).
William: Modern Humanism is defined by a proponent as "a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion."
I say bullshit. It merely is a cry for human compassion.
Oh? Who died and made you the One True Definer of humanism?
And if that were the definition of humanism, it wouldn't apply to much of what has been said in this thread; you've been given plenty of practical observations that the death penalty does not work and does take innocent lives. So attempting to slam the discussion as humanist nonsense doesn't work on either your terms or ours.
NelC: Anarch's answer (bad teaching) sounds plausible, given that Japan appears still to be in denial about Korean comfort women, the rape of Nanjing, the inappropriateness of worshipping at a shrine containing the tombs of war criminals, etc. China is grossly partisan (and loses credibility given what it says about its takeover of Tibet), but the complaints reported from there and elsewhere concerning what Japanese textbooks say about that period seem to have some accuracy.
Sometimes the U.S. cheats \in/ the wargames, rather than throwing out the results it doesn't like. cf the recent Smithsonian Air & Space article by a pilot who flew a "Russian" bomber in "invasion" games some decades ago; the way he describes his orders sounds rather like the contemporary Cosby routine "Toss of a Coin" ("We get to wear anything we like and shoot from behind rocks and trees and everything, while you and your men must wear red and march in a straight line.") When his group disobeyed orders and flew as they thought invaders would (frequent course changes, low altitude) they were unstoppable, but the fighter jocks complained.
Xopher -- as a part-time employee of PedanTech I note that your example is insufficient; there was no 10 Sep not to be followed by 11 Sep. Wikipedia says that the Gregorian change that the English did not follow was decreed for 15 Oct 1582, so that's also not an instance. Neither are any of the other corrections I could find -- Sweden did it in February, Alaska in October (changing from Orthodox to Western calendar when purchased by Seward), Russia in February, .... I'd be interested to know of \any/ case that fell so precisely as to have 10 Sep but not 11.
Graydon: does this contribute to the general weal?
Even that can be bent by the crying-Baby-Jesus crowd; observe that the attacks on gay marriage concentrate the alleged destruction of the family. In my observation, \most/ morality arguments are presented with twists that claim they're practical.
J Thomas: We got laws passed that destroyed their property values and forced their children into private schools
Uh.... They \moved/ to private schools when they were told the public schools were public, rather than their exclusive property. That they still resent this does not make their resentment any less uncalled-for -- or any less of a problem for "us"
Margaret: spot on about the marketing reasons, but
men's clothes, especially good clothes and jeans, are sold to the inch.
But not necessarily enough inches specified. Men's shirts are sold by collar size (plus sleeve length for long-sleeve shirts), with the false assumption that the mfr knows the exact ratio of neck to chest. I order Land's End short-sleeve shirts with a 17 collar because nothing smaller is comfortable if I have to button the neck (which I avoid), and find the body OK; L. L. Bean's 17 collar is attached to a shirt that feels like it could fit two of me.
Lawrence: men's underwear is \not/ uniform; I found out the hard way that Hanes 40 is no larger than somebody else's 38, not to mention both fit inside 36 trousers.
xeger: As somebody that's very fond of vintage clothing, it's really funny to see today's size 2 discover that they're a 1950s size 16...
As Margaret said, only more so -- my wife has just about given up on Land's End (despite their accuracy); she's small enough that their smallest size doesn't fit her due to their size inflation.
Madeline F: The return shipping charges are a tax on females who don't want to wait around for fitting rooms at 6 items a pop.
I look on return-shipping charges as a convenience tax. A catalog fetches what I want from a monster pool, or backorders it reliably, instead of making me hope that my size is in stock; some also hem to order for free. (As above, I like collars I can breathe in, and even though I'm moderately lean my legs are so short that finding right-sized trousers is a matter of luck -- cf one of Serge's comments, I'm 10" taller than my wife but we have the same inseam.) It doesn't help that I \hate/ to shop for anything other than books -- I know what I want, I know it exists, why can't somebody just transmat it here instead of making me go through half a dozen stores?
And men with non-statistical shapes have the same problems as women; until I got very serious about exercise, I had to buy pants a waist-size large and belt them tightly, or risk splitting the back every time I sat down.
"Fashionable" colors are an issue even for men; almost nobody makes yellow Oxford shirts any more.
Victor S: You stand too straight for your shirts? What a comment on the designers' observations and/or the public's habits....
becca: we cut, and therefore sold to buyers, only in certain size combinations
Fortunately this doesn't apply to T-shirts; otherwise fannish vendors would be out of luck -- what actually sold when NESFA was doing convention T-shirts was substantially large-shifted from what the printer kept telling us was the normal mix, but said printer could at least sell us exactly what we asked for.
I don't notice anybody even talking about the problem of sets. (Maybe most people here aren't sentenced to wear suits?) The last time I bought a suit I had to buy a size large (see above about pants); the vendor got only a little more than I paid a tailor to shrink everything else to fit the rest of my frame. Then I lost enough weight to make suspenders a requirement; when I leave off the jacket to help move pieces of staging after a concert I look a bit like one of those clowns with bouncing trousers.
ajay: Crumpets are certainly not crumpet
You stick to your pleasures, and we'll stick to ours. Consider one of the "jokes" in American Pie, or whether X's hamster got all the duct tape off yet....
We have to deal with this kind of Big Lie, and on the next thread over people are wondering whether the Democrats should give Jean Schmidt her words to eat? aauugghh....
(Meanwhile, the local news is that somebody in Halifax wants the world to know he's Righteously Furious that the tree the city gives Boston each year might be referred to as a holiday tree instead of a Christmas tree. One of these years I'm going to stage a tag-team no-holds-barred wrestling match between the people who insist on sacred labels and the people who insist on barring "pagan" symbols -- cf the recent foofaraw about canceling a Halloween party at a local school rather than deal with a couple of nutjobs threatening to picket.)
Teresa: What comes after that differs, depending on whether they're officers or enlisted personnel.
That's more than interesting. Do middies and plebes never actually swear to obey the POTUS, or do they swear an oath of enlistment at matriculation? (If the latter, the officers' oath's addition of duty to the enlisteds' obedience leaves a lot of room to argue about what duty is.)
Dave L: the average federal Representative is supposed to represent almost exactly 2/3 of a million people. Usually that means enough employees whose bosses can be tapped for favorable contributions, if the rep and his staff work hard enough.
There are party operations. Here (Boston) there will be a fundraiser Friday night, in support of Tom Delay's presumed opponent 11 months from now; Murtha will headline. But that's a frontal assault on House rulership; most candidates don't get that kind of party support.
It worked out to more than two years in Europe, only without the fun of actually spending, y'know, more than two years in Europe. That's why the ARC doesn't love me any more.
Anyone who has been deferred due to too much overseas time should check the revised standards; sometime last Summer a lot of the numbers were changed, e.g. time in the UK after 1996 doesn't count against the 3-month limit (that's the one I was watching as Interaction was my 6th UK convention), time in Europe is up (5 years?), etc.
Scott H: congratulations; you've re-invented the pejorative calculus.
Kathy Li: 1985? Whippersnapper! (January 1980 (Arpanet) for me, and I expect someone here dates even further back.
I take the point about proportional representation, which is unlikely to be meaningful in a non-parliamentary system but is not automatically included in a parliamentary system. (I should have remembered that; now I'll try to remember not to argue politics late at night.)
However, I see plenty of right-wing extremism right now \despite/ the fact that it is well-represented in the Republican Party; does representation mute extremism or stoke it?
I have my doubts about proportional representation. As I've seen the system reported, each party presents an ordered slate; if it wins N seats, the top N candidates are seated. I have some dislike for a system in which faceless oligarchs select the people who are supposed to represent my support of the party's professed ideas. I would be interested to see instant-runoff, which would be a put-up-or-shut-up for the populace that doesn't currently vote; would they be satisfied if other-party candidates didn't even place (let alone win) in such a system, or would there simply be more complaints?
The point, I believe, was to instruct the reading public that unnatural lust may serve as a sort of "gateway drug" to anti-Americanism. He didn't specify whether the deviant in question, if identified, would be best served by curing them with the love of a good man or just being put down humanely.
I think that's a specific case of a more general trend in bad writing: giving the bad guys "hot" perverse sex scenes as a way of titillating the reader while confirming writer's and reader's ]normality[. Examples range from my-mind-has-mercifully-forgotten-even-the-title (an archaeological thriller in which the chief villain and villainess have it off in a sarcophagus) to the sado-masochism in Stirling's Nantucket-tossed-into-the-Bronze-Age books.
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