The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Michael:

Hee, hee.

Oh, and sorry for your loss, Xopher, and may it prove to be a blessing instead.

Michael @758 - I'm pretty sure the mandate is aimed at making sure the insurance industry has plenty of money. Because I honestly don't think that the "I'm healthy" and "haven't gotten around" groups are significantly large, whereas the "got screwed over by the insurance companies" and "am really hungry" groups easily outweigh them.

Forgive my cynicism, though; the virus attack on the weekend actually defeated me. First time ever. I wrote something like a blow-by-blow on the house blog (that seems to be where I post everything these days).

Or, in general, 11n - 1, for n > 4?

Bah. I'm going to bed. This Advil is doing nothing. I hate f***ing virus writers.

I do wonder: the American government expends a hueueueueuge amount of money "stopping" terrorists that did nothing substantial to hurt America (I regard America's actual tribulations to be anaphylactic in nature, as I've said elsewhere), but does not one damned thing to find and harshly punish virus writers. Not a red cent.

Why is that? Viruses and other malware suck a vast amount of America's resources down the drain every year and demonstrably make our quality of life far lower. Mine, anyway, today.

I have plenty of cynical answers; I'm not sure cynicism is really what I'm looking for. Are the powers that be really so divorced from modern reality? When you step back and think about it, that's more than a little scary.

Speaking of scary, the best part of my birthday weekend is that I got to ride along on my daughter's flight lesson. It was her fourth lesson; the plane was a four-seater, and she did steep banking turns, wherein one tilts the plane at a 45 degree angle and goes in a 360 degree circle. At random points in the circle, the instructor says, "Watch out, the nose is a little low" and then you can swallow your stomach as the sudden lurch reminds you what a fragile tinfoil construction is currently holding you suspended 3500 feet above the Indiana countryside.

It was marvelous. I got some good pictures of various small towns I grew up in and around. I'd never been in a small plane before; you can see all around you and forwards; you're really just hanging up there in the sky. I really and truly enjoyed it.

He put his lunch in her refrigerator.

"Oh! Hello!" she cried. "You're back!"

"Yes," he replied, "And now I'm going to wash your dishes until you finish eating!"

"Oh my goodness! Your sandwich! It's so delicious! I'm going to eat it! Mmm! Yum!!! Thanks so much!!!!!!!!!!!!"

(The frightening thing is that I have the sneaking suspicion there's still a "kinky" subtext going on down there... but maybe it's just the lack of sleep.)

---------------

I've had a lovely 24 hours; I made intimate contact with Win32.Virut.56 last night, to the tune of about 1400 executables infected on my (work!!!) machine from the time I infected it to this evening, when Dr. Web Live CD, Comodo Defender+, and Malwarebytes restored it to function. (A process still a little bit underway, but (fingers crossed) seemingly complete.)

What a wonderful birthday present that was. Yeah, 43 today, and feeling every damned minute of it at the moment.

OtterB @489 - it was actually the tor.com steampunk romance post that got me to thinking about it, but for some reason by the time the thought emerged here, I'd entirely forgotten the steampunk romance post that triggered the cascade.

So it goes.

Lee @ 448: oh, it hadn't turned into a mudslinging match. I will grant you that it probably would have within another two hours, yes, but I was kind of enjoying the thoughts it was provoking.

Pendrift @ 461: that's the funniest thing I've read in weeks!

Sauerkraut discussion: I made some last year (well, it was Hungarian csalamádé, which is kind of kraut 2.0) and it turned out well, although Puerto Rico was a tad too hot for it to ferment comfortably (the second batch molded badly and I gave up). Now that the weather is more German up here, we're going to try again; the 2-gallon jar survived the move fine.

Actually, everything survived the move pretty well, the palm tree, the dog, the 2-gallon jar, the 2-liter graduated cylinder - everything except my wife's filing cabinet, on which I had stupidly put my toolbox. The filing cabinet is no longer very rectilinear.

All: I'm pretty sure Heyer is going to be my first romance author. Wish me luck, and thanks for all the tips; there are a lot of suggestions up there I'm pos-def going to try (yeah, I missed a couple of favorite SF authors in that list).

Oh, I should add one non-SF author I've found I absolutely love: PG Wodehouse. I'm going to try Heyer. Thanks, all!

Aha, Elliot - time travel romance is a 50% match! I'll try that, totally.

If there were some cyber/steampunk mad genius time travel romance as a gateway drug, I'd go with that.

Pendrift, I read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden, too, as a kid. My aunt had them all, and I read everything on my grandparents' shelves. Even the Reader's Digest Sherlock Holmes. Then the public librarian got me onto SF and I was a goner, never looked back.

Joel - sorry, I already have Bujold on my must-read-all list.

OtterB - hmm. Of the Old Guard: Heinlein, Niven, Simak, sometimes Asimov, most Burroughs. Of later people: Bujold (Vorkosigan epic, mostly), Connie Willis (To Say Nothing Of The Dog, especially), Kim Stanley Robinson, Spider Robinson come to think of it, Alastair Reynolds, MacLeod, Stross, the Foglios (they count!), Vinge to the point of paperback destruction, Neil Stephenson to the point of despair, Walter Jon Williams, Peter Hamilton of course, Scott Card sometimes, Brin usually, Jack McDevitt always.

That's probably enough to characterize my tastes. Cyberpunk and space opera, time travel, and deep characterization.

Thanks, Serge - the library has a couple of her books. I'll try one next time I'm over. And if I don't like it, I promise to smile and stay silent.

OK, so here's a question for the genre brain trust - I'm a pretty run-o-the-mill SF reader, don't care for fantasy all that much unless it's "hard fantasy", you know what I mean. I keep hearing mention of this genre called "romance" that apparently is more than the endless reams of drivel I'd been led to believe.

Could anybody name an author or two so I could go to the library and read something unexpectedly good?

Actually, the same might go for mystery. Now that I actually live near a library, I feel the urge to broaden my horizons a tad.

Thanks!

Also, it seems to me that when somebody says "stick it where the sun don't shine," they're not necessarily envisioning actual anal engulfage in Technicolor, any more than when I call somebody a scumbag I am envisioning a used prophylactic. We have this thing in language called "figures of speech" that aren't necessarily meant to be taken in their full literal senses, but rather in a sort of poetic-license way.

Jacob Davies @ 102: "The Blue Dogs do not," perhaps - but in the defense of the Blue Dogs, they're mostly from deep-purple states (like Indiana; a Blue Dog used to "represent" me down in Bloomington) and we deep-purple states are really having a hard time grokking the need for change.

As you know, I am in favor of change. I've found that when I express the need for change, people also follow my argument and agree with it. But Congresscritters do not win by getting out in front and leading, they win by saying what people want to hear. And people still want to hear that America is great, and those liberals just want to take all your money and give it to the urban poor.

When you don't have enough money, you don't want people to take any more taxes, even if you don't have enough money in part because you have to pay too much for health care. The people around me don't care about health care - they don't have teeth anyway. (I wish I were kidding.) They'll get emergency care if absolutely necessary, but planning is not an issue, OK? Against that backdrop, keeping the gummint out of the system makes perfect sense.

This is why rhetoric, as opposed to the mythical competent people rolling up their sleeves and getting things done, will always win. My neighbors simply don't believe that there are liberals or competent people who want them to succeed. They've never seen such an animal. At least the GOP tells them they'll succeed if the government will just let them keep more of their money. They lie, of course, but they'll still win the argument.

As to the use of violent rhetoric: while James and heresiarch are sliding gently into that dark abyss of flamage we all know and love, let me say this. Jim is right. Not in wishing to perform sodomy on Anne Coulter, but in the absolute sense that the only way to counter violent rhetoric is to show that it can have no effect, or even backfire. I believe it was Al Franken who called Bill O'Reilly's bluff on that - am I right? O'Reilly had said he'd kick Al Franken's ass, and Al said, name the place and the time? And O'Reilly never mentioned it again. Jim's specific usage may be inappropriate given the audience, but I can't fault the technique in general. Heresiarch, forced sodomy is never acceptable, granted. I'm not sure that the threat of forced sodomy is so cut-and-dried. Although I could agree that it is at least of questionable taste.

Oh, that's much less interesting. Here I thought she had actually advocated the physical abuse of James D. MacDonald specifically, by name. That would have rocked.

albatross @86: I just want to say that was a pretty good comment.

Craig Ranapia @75 - yes, words do have meaning. I'm pretty sure that the meaning of Grayson's words are, in fact, congruent with reality, whereas the GOP's are not - hence the aforementioned implosion. Which is what I said in the last comment.

That said, I have to agree with your parsing of the usage of "whore" here. Like it or not, the word means both "someone who abandons morals for money" and "female sex worker". Calling a woman a whore and pretending you only meant the former gloss is disingenuous at best - even though you can in fact expect to use the term for a man in that sense. Teresa@71, I disagree with you on this one, although I see where you're coming from, because there is a gender slant on the word, even though we may decry that situation as sexist and inconsistent.

Craig @77, final paragraph: facepalm.

heresiarch @85: scumbag meant what?!? My head has officially exploded.

While I don't want to give the impression that Florida is not a very strange place, the reason Grayson was elected is that he talks well and with humor, and conservatives respect that. I think American aren't nearly as conservative as our national politics would indicate (certainly polls show this to be the case) - but the Americans I know do expect wit. If progressives would just stoop to offering more wit, this country would jettison the GOP so fast they'd have carpet burns. I don't see what's so difficult to understand about that.

Also, I really get tired of being told that intelligence and some imaginary desire for civility in our public discourse correlate. Incivility is expressive and above all else fun. I don't want to listen to grey drones in Congress, I want me some circus. If people care about their views, they should express them humorously and incisively and in a memorable way. This is how public opinion is swayed. It just is.

Grayson is exactly what this country needs.

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