A simple, ordinary day when nothing special happens can be a real pleasure.
I heartily concur. A long chain of them can be a drag, though.
You can get sick of even your favorite food.
Joe, if the magazine's title were "P'ub'lis'her's Weeee'kly," that would be correct usage for anyone writing about it, abomination though it is. But the actual title is not such an abomination; think of it by analogy to "Dogs Weekly" or "Houses Weekly," both nonexistent AFAIK; it's a weekly ABOUT publishers.
If not, they screwed up. But they're entitled to screw up if they want.
Claire, I used to know a woman named Stacy, and Stacy ended every phone conversation she ever had with her family and friends by saying "I love you."
I know this because she sat right across from me in the office. I believe that habit was some comfort to her near and dear when that office was smashed, burned, and crushed with her (but not me) inside; the last thing she'd said to any of them was a declaration of love.
The experience of Oklahoma City says that two years is when you start the process of "getting on with life." They say that "getting over it" never really happens.
I remember my former boss was quite unsympathetic when I was going through a bout of depression. "Do you know how many people are worse off than you?" she would ask, then tell me stories about them.
What kind of selfish, unempathic jackass would be cheered up by that?
Later, when she twisted her ankle and was on crutches for a couple of weeks, I thought (but did not say) "You know, there are people who have had their feet cut off. There, does that hurt less now?"
You didn't check the part where he disobeyed a direct order to fly a mildly dangerous mission. The part that makes him, in the eyes of many of our military, a deserter.
Alan, no, it should be "Klaatu nikto pobaradanno." But that would be a rare construction in that language; normally it would be phrased "Klaatu niktobar." Which in turn isn't something you'd say to a giant robot anyway.
Hack: a painful, wrenching cough.
Hack: a blow, as with a blade, esp. if poorly aimed.
The relationship of these two to cheapass writers (like the SF writer, here unnamed, who used roll paper in his typewriter and sent the result to his publisher in mailing tubes without reading it himself - "bad enough to write such stuff") should be obvious.
And committed a grammatical blunder in the process. The antepenultimate sentence above should read, "As someone who was raised (so to speak) by a Radical Behaviorist, I'm not putting him on MY list."
Well, there's that whole moral goodness thing...Skinner had important insights, but he started something really, really nasty.
As someone who was raised (so to speak) by a Radical Behaviorist, he's not going on MY list. To do so would only reward those bastards and reinforce their beha...aaaaarrrrgggggggh! I did it again.
Two more composers who should cause forehead smacking: Igor Stravinsky
Smack!
Puccini, shrug. I'm not a big fan. I don't think he made the difference Debussy did. I didn't look up his dates, or I might have noticed him overlapping into 20C.
Reimer, that's "Fair and Balanced (tm) view." :-)
Mozart and Bach would go on my list of "Greatest People Ever." But we were talking about 20C. I also wouldn't have left out Michelangelo or Da Vinci or Georges Seurat or Sun Tzu or K'ung Fu Ts'e or Pythagoras or...even I would get tired first. Hrair squared.
And I think you're right, it was Hopper.
The trouble with the word "great" is that it means only "supremely talented or skillful" to some, and "really Good (in a moral sense)" as well to others. Hitler was great in the first sense, particularly as regards speechmaking (and, oh, getting an entire nation to go psycho not to mention using your name as a greeting). It would be hard to find an example of a person with less moral goodness, however!
Plainly this list is talking about people we approve of, not just people whose skill we respect.
The near-total absence of serious novelists, poets, painters, sculptors, classical composers, scientists, scholars, and almost the entire non-English-speaking world
I'm provincial, too, but I thought I'd fill in a few here. Just to bring up their names, not in any way to imply that you couldn't think of them yourself.
John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, James Joyce.
Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Wilfred Owen.
Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollack.
Alexander Calder (whose work influenced your childhood whether you realize it or not), ...and then I run out of 20C sculptors. Huh. Better get meself doon ta MOMA, eh?
Here's where my provinciality shows the most: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Richard Strauss, Carl Orff (well...soft spot), Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Krzysztof Penderecki, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams.
Watson & Crick, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow, Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky (as a linguist, though even there he's kind of a jerk), Edwin Powell Hubble, Stephen Hawking.
Not quite sure what you meant by scholars, exactly.
For non-English, well, look up there under composers. I'd add Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, not to mention Albert Camus, to the writing list.
This is just a quick skim. And then there are playwrights, like Williams, O'Neill, and Miller. And actors, like Olivier and Hepburn (Kate, not Audrey). And...and from this we're supposed to pick out just twenty? I couldn't have done it at all.
If you are planning on keeping the water for a very extended period, you need to sanitize them and boil the water first. Cycling is a good idea. So is keeping a lot of ice in your freezer (which provides icemelt to drink and also keeps food from spoiling for longer).
Our water never went off during the blackout. But I live in the city, in a building that wasn't even finished when I bought the apartment I live in, so all is modern (if shabby).
And to keep WELL hydrated, the calculation I got worked out to right around a gallon a day for me (I weigh about 200). Minimum to sustain life short-term is not sufficient to maintain healthy kidneys long-term.
I love the phrase Anonymous Internet Fucktard. We should just call them AIFs. And just among us, since these folks pop in and have no idea what our traditions are (oooeee I sound oldfartish!) we can use any phrase with the same initials to indicate to each other, but not to them, that we have a suspected Anonymous Internet Fucktard on our hands.
Examples: "Hmm, looks like All Is Funny again." "That guy is presenting an Awfully Intricate Fantasy, don't you think?" "Yeah JustARegularJoe doesn't realize we're Actually Infinitely Friendly." Invent your own examples; it's a game.
OK, forget it. Just me in a slightly...in a mood of some sort.
Free-associating a little bit, it occurs to me that FS, in addition to standing for Frustrated Sigh, also stands for one more thing...hint: the first word is a present participle, and the last syllable is 'head'.
Look out, Yonmei! Dennis doesn't like it when we agree with him.
Dennis, I'm just bustin'.
I live and work in Hoboken, so I didn't have trouble getting home, thank $DEITY. I did have to listen to the party going all night in the projects, which are within earshot of my seldom-open windows.
Power came back on at ~7:20 this morning. I must have a good refrigerator; my icecubes didn't even melt. More than I can say for myself, but I made no attempt to climb into the freezer.
I dutifully went to my office building, but they were dark. They used their emergency power yesterday to get everyone out safely; I don't know if that was why there was no one there, or if the company just closed for the day (since most people who work there don't live 15 footminutes away).
Stuart, Patrick did name at least one name: Bush Senior. GHWB didn't say "only Jews and Christians," but he said "a nation under God," and most other religions don't call their deity "God." Mine doesn't, for example. Some forms of Buddhism have no deities at all.
I remember someone at the 1993 (? I may have the year wrong) Parliament of the World's Religions trying to get everyone to agree that "We all worship the same God, whatever we call Him." He even insulted some of the theists with that one.
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