The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lawrence Watt Evans:

You know, the absolute worst case of female invisibility I've ever seen was back in 1983, which my wife was pregnant with our first kid. We went to talk to an obstetrician. A female obstetrician.

She insisted on talking to me. Hey, I wasn't the one with the baby! I kept telling her to talk to Julie, and she kept talking to me.

We walked out and found an old-fashioned male obstetrician who looked like Marcus Welby and ignored me, talking only to Julie. We liked him. He delivered both our kids.

#22: If you have Lowe's available where you are, they often offer free delivery, and I have never had a serious problem with their customer service. (There have been one or two occasions when it took saying, "Excuse me," to get attention.)

We have a really excellent hardware store near here where I don't think anyone's invisible -- Strosnider's, in downtown Silver Spring -- but they're smaller, so there's stuff they don't carry, so sometimes you need the big box places.

I don't like Home Depot. I was a stockholder for awhile, and sold it because I realized I just didn't want to own even a ridiculously small part of the company.

I can usually get help there -- not always -- but I'm a six-foot able-bodied male.

Frankly, I just don't like the feel of the place. I much prefer Lowe's. One of the few drawbacks of our new house is that there's a Home Depot nearby, but no Lowe's.

Serge@111: Actually, sometimes Lewis Padgett was Kuttner, sometimes he was Moore, and sometimes he was both. Sort of a Schroedinger's author, though since Moore's death no one can open the box.

That "Law of Attraction" stuff -- that brings cargo cults to mind. People seeing others getting rich, and latching onto the wrong part of the process that made them rich -- not "have a brilliant marketable idea," but "be iconoclastic and think positively" -- is cargo-cult thinking.

Machfrieden, surely, not Friedenfabrikant?

In the Washington area the map books are published by a company called ADC. They're good.

Huh. The Washington area transit folks are apparently willing to make information available; I don't know about specific cellphone aps, since I don't use 'em, but they definitely have "next bus" data out there.

There's a trip planner on the WMATA website that includes not just the Metrorail and Metrobus systems, but the adjuncts like Montgomery County's Ride-On buses.

I'm surprised New York's being perverse on this.

A little quick check shows that number as a landline in the Clearwater area, but I'd need to pay the reverse-directory folks to get more details than that.

Telemarketers for Reader's Digest or the like almost always show up on sites complaining about them; this one doesn't. It does show up on a list of "suspicious" numbers.

Interesting.

You know, the sort of attitudes cited in #7 aren't limited to technical fields. When I was editing Newer York, I wound up with twenty-five stories -- three by husband-and-wife teams, eight by women, and fourteen by men.

Of the seventy-three stories I rejected, five were by women and sixty-eight were by men.

I'd like to say all the utter crap came from men, but two of the five rejected stories by women well and truly sucked. Still, in general, it seemed as if males were willing to take a chance with anything, while females only sent stuff when they thought they had something really good.

Ah, I'd forgotten about her intention to join the Sisters of Mercy. (Oh, dear -- now I have Andrew Eldritch muttering in my head.)

Was Drusilla definitely Catholic? I thought she was high-church Anglican.

19th-century Anglicans might name their kids anything.

Jocelyn, Evelyn, Ashley

Hang on, let me get this straight -- would-be writers are upset because agents told them what they were doing wrong?

I specify "would-be writers" because I can't imagine any actual professional writer getting upset about this.

Wow. I mean... wow. I knew a lot of would-be writers are hypersensitive and, well, kinda dumb, but this really takes it to a new level.

What A.J. Luxton, Scott, and Shawna said -- you think not sending these agents more crap is a punishment?

That first grave marker fuddled me for a moment -- I knew a Mary Tillotson, and she lived into her eighties. Obviously not the same one.

When I was two my mother and I both had chicken pox. We both almost died. My three older siblings (one of whom had brought it home from school) had no problems with it.

My kids caught chicken pox in the early 1990s, when the vaccine existed but wasn't yet available in the U.S. Like my siblings, they had no problems, barely felt sick. Strange disease, that one.

I had measles when I was eight; the MMR vaccine wasn't available yet. I had rubella when I was nine, and really enjoyed it -- a week off from school just in case any of the teachers were pregnant, but I felt fine despite the spots. At the time, incidentally, everyone still called it German measles, and the fact that my Dad knew it was properly called "rubella" was attributed to him being a college professor who knew lots of useless stuff.

I kept waiting to complete the trifecta, but never got mumps.

As for polio, I'm of the first post-polio generation, but there was a kid in our neighborhood, my age, who had somehow missed the vaccine and became the last polio victim in our town, or several of the surrounding towns. All the adults were so constantly sorry for him that it was really uncomfortable. The other kids didn't like him much, as anyone who didn't treat him like a little prince would get hit with a crutch. Hit hard. As in, at least one girl needed stitches. Dale, though, was never blamed for hitting other kids; he would always deny it if no adult saw it, and claim it was an accident if it was seen, or that the other kids were teasing him. The adults would all yell at us for teasing the poor cripple -- but none of us did tease Dale, ever, because why would you tease a kid who effectively has permission to whack you over the head with a club? We weren't that dumb.

Dale probably gave me a very distorted view of polio sufferers.

I went to vote here in suburban Maryland around 11:00, and despite warnings of high turn-out I was still startled by the line. It only took about forty minutes' wait, but the previous record midday wait in the twenty-two years I've lived and voted here was eight minutes.

My wife won't get to vote until she gets home from work, and she's had waits up to an hour in previous years, so I'm dreading what she'll face.

Andy Brazil, #6: I think it's by Ron Goulart.

Historical note: XLibris did not start out as a vanity press, and was not one at the time William Sanders sold them (not paid them to publish, but sold them) a novel.

William Sanders does not go by "Bill." He doesn't mind "Will," but "Bill" really grates. (And he prefers "William," which is why I've been using it.)

I'm the same way about "Larry," and I suspect Patrick might similarly balk at "Pat."

Thank you, Xopher.

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