The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Andrew Brown:

Petronella Wyatt only has this silly name because her mother is Hungarian. No wonder she prefers to be known as Petsy; her column on the "Spectator" was known to the staff as "Pet's Corner".

While on the subject of funny names, I would just point out that no one in Britain has ever been christened "Randy California".

No -- the hamsters are our only hope against the squirrels

The BBC web science coverage is notorious for tabloid bullshit. We should all be ashamed of it in this country, and certainly not take seriously anything it reports.

Harriet, that's sweet, but I never met him, though we did sometimes correspond. In any case, I learned this evening that the piece about him was the penultimate one of those columns. They just shot the worm.

That ad is really rather glorious, but the most impressive thing is that when I watch it from a British IP address, the slogan at the end spells "colour" right.

This is just horrible. I had really hoped to meet him some time. That he wrote the entropy poem off the back of a piece of mine is something I will always be proud of. Miserable condolences to everyone who knew him.

But it doesn't scan properly if you go on: try singing

NYTBR! Gonna buy five copies for my mother

if you dont believe me.

(or maybe I'm just grumpy because I never had a freaky old lady, name of Cocaine Katie, who sewed patches on my jeans.)

(but I do have a deadline)

Works beautifully in Opera 9.01

I have (touch wood) run windows 2k without a virus scanner for five years now and never been caught out. The trick is to use a good firewall (kerio personal firewall in this case) a good spam filter, and to shun Outlook and IE even if outlook is a good pim. Common sense also helps.

It would be surprising if there were not. I would look first at Russians and Hassidim. But their children may be another story. Those Amish still speaking German ("Pennsylvania dutch") might be regarded as very long-term non-assimilated immigrants.

What's worrying people in Europe is tha tthe children of immigrants seem in some respects less assimilated than their parents. But it's a complex story. I do know there were Swedish-language newspapers in parts of the midwest up until about 1950.

Maybe the word you're looking for is not "assimilation" but "conversion" -- if America is regarded as a religion, which can be differently inculturated into differeing ethnicities, then there is a melting-pot model which is different from, and likely to be more successful than, the obvious European one.

Many Happy Returns from North Essex!

Entirely random, but someone here is bound to know: What happened to William Browning Spencer?

"Per Aspel ad astra" &emdash; I can't think of that straight. The motto of my first, good,. English school was Per ardua ad astra, a phase in which stars were large heavenly bodies, not slender bodies in the entertainment industry.

As for Granny and the plastic drainpipes -- it is so disgusting that only another obscure english pop culture reference will rescue it: it should have happened to an aging teddy boy

I don't know, about twenty five years ago, when I was first turned down for a job at the BBC world service, they told me "We don't all want to be Alistair Cooke", and now it seems to be true.

I know I ought to know this stuff, but where are the texts for these? I know the entropy sonnet, but you can't tell from the pictures what are the words to the dungeon rules or the infernokrusher thing. This complicates decision making for those of us with geeky daughters as christmas approaches.

Here's an unimproving memory. Kennedy was shot in my first term at an English prep (boarding) school. I was eight. The youngest boy in the house was seven. We slept in dormitories named after Royal Navy battleships, about eight to the room. One of us was an American child, named Richard Ashcroft. When we heard the news, we chanted, after lights out, "the president of Ashcroft is dead" until he cried. This was hugely gratifying, since no one had cried for about a month. Every little boy in the room had cried themselves to sleep for the first week or fortnight, or month after school started in September. I had taken up beating my head against the pillow until I was numb all over; apparently it's something I still do, in my sleep, when I am distressed. I cannot say how much we learnt to enjoy the spectacle of other boys in pain, and the best thing about chanting "the president of Ashcroft is dead" was that none of us could understand, really, why it upset him.

This is great. But why is it also linked from "Kansas morons" in the particles?

There will be a big piece denouncing software patents in saturday's guardian. Unfortunately they lost the distinction between copyright and patent where software is concerned -- it's the distinction between good and bad cholesterols. But I wish I had known about the flying saucer when I was writing it.

The British Museum -- but I doubt I'd ever leave the reading room. I know that's cheating. But -- really -- could there be any other choice? Everywhere else you'd just have to read what was in the gift shop.

"Live kyat impeachment bath tool" I should like to see one of those used on Mr Bush.

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