The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Melanie S.:

Rakusin is politely refraining from mentioning that Tower Books is the publisher of Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, the 2007 winner of a major Australian literary award.

Sorry, but--I see in the signature that that book has won the Miles Franklin literary prize, which is mentioned in the paragraph above your note. Am I missing something?

I'm going with the HP fanfic theory, too...

The funniest thing, though, is the occasional rant from the slightly out-of-touch..."Don't you people know how to spell the word 'whine'? There's no g in it!"

I think I'm glad I live in Chicago. Looking for 600 S. anything? It's just on the south side of 6th street. Northside numbers are a little harder, but only because the streets aren't numbered...it's still 8 blocks, thus 800 in street numbers, to a mile...

Thanks for the info, though, guys. It just tells me to let my dad navigate when we go to NYC. :D

Completely unrelated to just about anything, but--how does the street numbering work in NYC such that 433 is between 29th and 30th Streets? *blinks*

I don't know if this will work here, but the html for strikeout is <s> with the appropriate closing. Hmm, let's see.... ...nope, doesn't appear to work here.

I'm sort of fascinated that this post has an ad for John McCain on the sidebar.

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Patrick, thanks for posting that...I've been having a bad day, and it was nice to find Auden in my RSS feed.

Oh, and, randomly, may I suggest that in your little html table, below, you list <em> instead of <i> and <strong> instead of <b>? For quoting/typography it doesn't really matter, but when you want emphasis, some software for the blind will read em and strong differently from normal text, but not b or i.

Do not drive or operate heavy machinery.

Or, do not stop with hands or genitals.

Don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but could the Powers That Be fix the link in #15 so the text doesn't go away when I mouse over.....?

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with news media having a bit of the "inside scoop" us proles don't get to have. Some of it is gossip, not the kind of thing that needs to be or should be spread around. The problem is when, as Pat said above, journalists get hooked on the idea of having those secrets or on the idea of believing they're somehow better for knowing them. Because then, I think, they stop being able to distinguish the personal (the football coach gets drunk every weekend and hangs out, depressed, in his house--not an ideal situation, but not the business of the whole town, necessarily) and the dangerous (the football coach gets drunk and rapes cheerleaders). (And of course, the rules are a little different for politicians--I still don't think that character in every respect is a necessary thing for politics, but it has become so in this country, and politicians know that going in.)

Writerious #30--one of the articles I read said it was a "random check" for IDs, which may be one of the reasons he's claiming racial profiling.

And TomB #34, I'd say you have to look at the area around the university too. I don't know much about UCLA, but I know that I appreciate the ID requirements at the library where I'm a grad student because it's in a fairly unsafe area, even though I'd have thought the same requirement silly at my rather pastoral undergrad institution.

Albatross, you seem to think the point of outing is to get someone removed from their job, which is probably why it seems so slimy to you--which it should, if that was the point. But, to me at least, it isn't. Instead, it seems to stem from a frustration on the part of many liberals at the way conservatives ignore the fiction of the closet, the way they don't mind homosexuals as long as they stay in their place. And, as has been discussed, it's because character is a part of American politics in a way it probably shouldn't be, and silence on the part of the media with respect to sexual orientation *is* the kind of special treatment certain factions of the right always accuse us of wanting. I cannot believe that Maher thought he was jeopardizing the man's job by revealing this. Making his life more difficult, sure.

Unfortunately, having said that, I see that it was announced today that Ken Mehlman will be stepping down from his position within the next couple of months. This makes me more angry than I have felt in a long, long time--not at Bill Maher who outed him, but at the people who once again make the case that it's better to live a lie that could be exposed at any minute than to be honest. (And, again, I'll say that security of position aside, Mehlman's life is not endangered by this in the way some others' might be. I'm not saying everyone should be out, but it's certainly the preferable condition if you can, and I can't believe Mehlman couldn't.)

As many smarter people have said above: It matters that he's a politician. Character is part of politics.

While I'm a staunch believer in the fact that the plural of anecdote is not data, I will mention that every person I know who's thought of running for office in the future watches every action to make sure incriminating things can't be turned up in the future. I find it hard to believe that Ken Mehlman thought he could make it to such a position with nobody finding out. He took the job anyway, knowing the risks. It seems, in fact, that closeted politicians depend on the complicity of their peers, their friends and family, multiple journalists, etc.--that they plan on the fact that nobody will tell anyone, and so they can be gay and still have the life they want. And that's another part of this. It's not just that Mehlman is gay--it's that other people in the party knew and didn't, apparently, care all that much. Like Teresa said above, much too good for the common people indeed.

Or, Susan could say that all much more succinctly while I was typing. :)

Seth:

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you--sort of.

He's the Republican party chair--he's involved in Republican policy, social conservative policy, the kind of policy that's hurtful to many GLBTQ folk. If this were some other issue where something in his personal history could bias his opinion, but he was trying to keep it hidden, the media would be telling us right away. Only sexual orientation gets the privilege of silence on the part of the media, which furthers the idea that it's somehow shameful or dangerous (and it can be dangerous, but that's attenuated by the fact that he's, you know, the Republican Party Chair--we're not talking about a working-class guy living in the rural South or Midwest). If the politician is making policy related to queer issues, we should know if they're queer.

(At this point, I want to play devil's advocate for myself and point out that usually the things journalists reveal are bad. But if they can tell us about somebody's affair or criminal behavior, but sexual orientation is untouchable, what does that say about the relative perceived damage of, say, strangling your mistress vs. being gay?)

And this is the sort of part: I don't totally agree with the idea that we should know--bias doesn't mean the other guy's wrong, it just means you have to be a little skeptical about what he says. Also, being gay doesn't in any way give you some sort of divine right to speak for all non-heterosexual folk in your country, just like being straight doesn't preclude you from advocating GLBTQ issues. It's a bias, not the final statement on your opinions and their correctness.

But my point, I guess, is that while I think the media's current treatment of closeted homosexuals is the way we should treat *all* personal issues, it's not the way any other personal issue is treated. If we can't get the media to shut up about personal bias, then outing is a perfectly rational thing to do--the equal thing to do.

I tend to be a little unfamiliar with the field as a whole--but out of curiosity, how does the gender split of authors compare to the gender split of award nominees and the gender split of winners? Or is this a topic so old nobody wants to discuss it any more? :)

I'm trying to decide if there's irony in the notion that I'll be finishing most of my astrophysics grad school applications today. Mmmm, relativity.

But, alas, no. Your subjective and imprecise methods of time measurement do not impress me!

Not surprising that some of you are related. A mathemetician found that if you assume completely random mating (which isn't as wrong as you'd assume, it turns out, given the number of high-class by-blows and younger sons/daughters), every person in modern Europe would have all of the same ancestors around 1400. (About 75% of people alive in 1400 would be an ancestor of everybody in Europe & colonies today, and the other 25% would have no descendants.) That number's pushed back, maybe as far as the worst-case-scenario of around 1050, when you allow for subgroups within the population, but the effect is not likely to be that large.

It's still interesting to see it in practice, though, since not many people know their ancestors back far enough to be able to trace the connections that must be there.

Novalis, nope, he's certain (and right, of course).

Although I'm sure you'll all solve it right away, my favorite of the sort of logic puzzle given above has always been:

A king decides to hire the smartest man in the kingdom to he his advisor. After a series of tests, he has the prospects narrowed down to three, so he devises the following puzzle for the men to solve. (I have just realized that this is rather gender-skewed; please feel free to assume these are three women, or three Gethenians, or anything else, as you please.)

Each man is taken into a separate room and has a cross painted on his forehead. The cross may be black or white. Then the king puts the men together in a room. They are to raise their hands if they see two black crosses or a black and a white cross. There are no mirrors in the room or in the hallways leading there; the paint cannot be rubbed off on anything which the men could then see. The men are not allowed to speak to each other. The job, of course, is for each man to figure out which color cross is on his forehead.

Each of the three men have black crosses painted on their foreheads. Of course, when they get into the room, all raise their hands; after a length of time, one man smiles, leaves, and tells the king he has a black cross; he is hired. The question is, how did he figure it out?

(Interestingly, this puzzle is harder knowing the answer already, or so my informal surveys have shown. I think it has to do with the direction from which people approach the problem, eliminating or creating possibilities.)

Also, http://home.cwru.edu/~jnt5/Planarity/ is quite fun for the more spatially oriented...although it will eat your free time if you enjoy it.

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