The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by David Dyer-Bennet:

Tim@34: he already had to wait 10 minutes for a train to pass, surely he's been punished enough?

A spoilerific Dr. Who thread would be great -- if you promise to stay on-topic. I can then happily skip it :-). (This probably shouldn't count as a vote, since what's needed is critical mass of people who want to participate.)

SilvieG: I'm so sorry for your loss. I've cried over pets I'd never even met, and have lost a number I knew well.

All I can say is that time will significantly dull the pain, and you will heal. This is in no way disloyal to your beloved dog (nor would it be even for a beloved child). It's simply necessary. The sharp immediate pain is simply not sustainable, and so it fades. It would be another tragedy for even the most tragic death to destroy all who loved the first victim.

romanesco is unique among brassicas in that it only tastes good roasted or broiled.

It would be easy enough to find people to tell you that, in fact, none of the brassicas taste good any way at all.

I've never heard of, let alone seen, and certainly not tasted, "romanesco", though, so I'll just leave it at that. (I rather like normal broccoli and cauliflower. The new weird variants have all been disappointing even before you considered the prices.)

Very often, big shopping malls kill off local stores because of customer preference. It's not like the customers can't get to the downtowns!

Lots of the downtown stores I remember fondly in Northfield are gone, and things like a Target and Menards have sprung up outside town, and I'm sure there's a connection. Then again, not having a Target around would be annoying; I know, I grew up there before there was one, and I didn't even know what Target was, and I still missed it.

Linkmeister@170: "She's married, so she knowingly entered into namephreak territory" sounds rather assumption-laden. I suppose one can argue that, in this society, a married woman must have considered changing her name, and thus whatever name she ends up with afterwards she can be considered to have chosen. Not sure what you actually mean, by the way -- that you know she changed her name on marriage? Or what?

The other half of Germany "proving they're not the country of yesterday", of course, is all of us accepting that our countries could have been, maybe even could BE, that country. At least, we haven't got a proven effective vaccine against xenophobia and authoritarianism that I've noticed yet.

We had a 9th grade math teacher named Kermit; this would have been the 1968-69 school year, and it seemed a very strange and old-fashioned name to us (not that it was ever used in class).

TexAnne@693: The joke, surely, is that both doors are entrances to heaven. The "right" vs. "wrong" religion distinction is a purely human imposition.

Lila@593: The difference is much smaller than you think.

Finding people and imposing help help on them is very different from making help available. Much of the difference comes from constructing a society where having needed help doesn't limit your life forever. Right now we're in fairly bad shape on that one.

Keith@106: Oh, man, computers in science fiction. Mostly SO bad.

One of the things that reads strangely, today, to me, about the Nero Wolfe books is that they don't use brand names for things widely known to have them. Their cars are mostly "Herons", and their guns include several "Marleys" but no Colts or Smith & Wesson's (or Charter Arms).

There was a Bill Cosby (I think) routine about horror movies, in which he explained what to do if you suspect you might be in a horror movie: You start chanting "fuck Pepsi Cola", because in a horror movie you can't use bad language or mention brand names. If you try and find you can't, you're screwed. I believe Steven King and company have changed all that, not necessarily for the better (I haven't read much King, but generally the brand name uses he's famous for that make some people feel at home apparently, seem gratuitous or just puzzling to me).

Charlie@91: Yeah, me too. With far less excuse than you, since I live here and even own a TV.

Bruce@573: and how many people would thus fall into the clutches of Homeland Security for being a risk to society? 100 times as many as get killed in spree shootings? 1000?

Now, if we could take OFF some of the stigma of psychological trouble, people might be able to seek help. But asking the witch doctors to identify people likely to cause trouble in the future, and protect us from them, will NOT end well.

TexAnne@537: Speak for yourself. ROT-13 is not more convenient for me; I'd much rather just have the spoilers in plain text, because I don't much care.

(I'm perfectly willing to go along with the consensus usage here, but I did want to separate myself from the "we" of your comment. I put up with it as a community norm, NOT because it's directly valuable to me.)

I learned "shank's mare" from my father, who was born in Leicester, England (but spent time in Canada, Germany, and the USA before I was born, so who knows where he got it from?). I'd never heard the "pony" variant before. And it definitely was NOT "shankses".

Terry@385: It was over 20 years ago now that I helped someone cast some .357 wadcutter bullets. His issue at the time was cost, or so he perceived it. Mine was it was a cool thing to have participated in doing.

Since then, I've known fewer and fewer people who even reload; in fact I'm part owner of a reloading setup that hasn't been out of boxes in a decade now. And components are up as bad as ammo mostly now, so it still isn't that useful. Besides I've got two calibers we don't have dies for now.

Xeger@377: our neighborhood hardware store actually has plumber's lead there; I was a bit surprised. Another kind of place to look is a store catering to shooters of old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns who want to cast their own balls, either for authenticity or fun or whatever. Or I suppose modern reloaders who want to cast their own bullets, but that's been pretty much in decline the last 20 years as jacketed bullets took over everywhere.

Mary@363: True (or so I hear; I have near-zero musical knowledge), but it's so often the first question that arises when one discusses where one's voice is in the range that I tried to short-circuit that question.

Xeger@348: Voice pitch? Hmmm, could be. I feel like mine is kind of high for a big male guy, but I don't know what my singing range is, which seems to be the usual way to identify such things.

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