Brunner's The Stone That Never Came Down, although not a tour de force like Stand on Zanzibar, has some more pessimistic and accurate predictions about the growing role of fundamentalism in public life.
Mary Eileen @505, It should be said that the results for that study do not record how many people considered a unicyclist in a clown suit a normal rather than an unusual event on the Western campus.
Joseph M. @509, I concur with the Hillerman recommendation; the Mystery productions (with Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn and Adam Beach as Jimmie Chee) of those books are not as good as the print version but better by far than most of the Cadfael TV stuff, which depends a lot on Monty Python for the physicalities of the historic period. I have my favorites among both series, but both benefit from being read in order written, I think.
Lila @476, Nine Tailors is an amazing piece of writing- historical epic and mystery and environmental observation equally mixed. Although it's one of her later works it's more closely tied to the effects of WW1 than any of her other books except The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.
I read Georgette Heyer in high school- I read the back off These Old Shades- but I've kept reading Sayers, every couple of years.
There are a whole bunch of reasons why people need not take advice from people who believe that compliance under the implicit threat of pain is the same thing as actual understanding and competance.
I taught my kids and my dogs not to go into the road the same way: I took them down to the edge of the road when I knew big trucks would be going by and let them hear the noise and see the speed and feel the rush of air; the dogs I just held and let them experience it, but the kids were told "You are small and soft and slow and breakable but vehicles are big and hard and fast and much stronger than you are."
And then I taught them how to cross the road safely, never entering the road if there was oncoming traffic that would cross my path behind me before I was all the way to safety, talking the kids through steps and teaching them how to see cars which were accelerating and therefore a danger. I've never lost a dog to the road, and my kids started taking public transportation alone when they were quite young.
Nancy Lebovitz makes a generalization about "Native American" religion at 146 and by doing so participates in the same error that underlies the hucksterism under discussion. There is no such thing as "Native American" anything. There are traditional beliefs special to diverse cultural groups, some fraction of which have aspects of ancestor worship, which have persisted more or less in their original form into the post-contact world. There are modern synthetic religions like the Native American Church and the Indian Shaker Church which combine spiritual beleifs and practices from multiple sources. There are ad hoc Pentecostal movements which combine Christian belief and traditional practice in a fluid mix, and there are mainstream Christian missions which try to reach Native groups by (sometimes mindfully and respectfully and sometimes not) using Native language and concepts in talking about Christianity.
And then there's woo: taking a grab bag of Don Juan and Black Elk and mixing well with Tim Leary and every purveyor of religious/spiritual shenanagins ever. Some of it's merely a way to separate the rubes from their money but then there's practitioners who are working out the ultimate evil: the human drive for complete life-and-death power over other humans. One does not need any other demon.
Stefan Jones: Rebekahs aren't Masonic, they're IOOF; Eastern Star are the female branch of the Masons. (Mom was a Rebekah).
Thanks for putting this together, Teresa. I've been watching a different flavor of this brand of crazy up in my childhood neighborhood in Yelm, where all Hollywood has wandered through the Ramtha School of Enlightenment over the last couple of decades.
I dunno, we stopped going to our Episcopal Church for a while, but that was because the new Music Director had an unholy fondness for the loud pedal for such a small building.
I hear he's gone on to play to a much larger room (and I mean that nonmetaphorically).
I have dismally low expectations of performance for all providers of connectivity; it helps keep me from constant disappointment.
I'm trying to figure out how to load a Robot Chicken ringtone. It may be common enough to be a cliche in the larger community, but among the people I actually hang out with, there's heavy use of what I guess could be best described as "Verizon's least annoying default ringtone."
In lieu of actual participation: a meditation upon quinces at my journal.
Yesterday was the finale of a series of weekend family events which have run in succession since the Fourth of July; I'm hoping that my ability to communicate for fun will be refreshed now that I'm past the necessity to be a good relative, which, since I'm fighting a childhood reputation of being a complete brat or screaming loonie, can be a chore.
Xopher @59, I am grateful every day that I waited until my late fifties to start reading Pratchett, since there are so very many new books to read without all that obnoxious fumbling around to find something that I like.
On to the general comment: more than once, as a small-town girl, I've seen abusive preachers and priests bring the whole town to misery with apocalyptic preachings, child abuse (and justifying such abuse from the pulpit), and financial exploitation up to and including outright theft. It's a drawback of modern transportation and communication technology that Phelps has been able to take his act international, but the basic strategy and tactics have been played out over and over in tents and clapboard churches.
That Fred Phelps is also a lawyer and (as Teresa properly observes) an adrenalin fueled rage-addict makes this some kind of perfect storm of bad behavior. Westboro Baptist can make people unhappy at vulnerable points of their lives and derive money by evil means border to border, coast to coast and, electronically, over 360 degrees of latitude. It does focus the mind, though: after awhile unlikely people come to the realization that public preaching of hatred is not a Christian virtue when WBC shows up at funerals they're attending.
John Arkansawyer @81, I've been short on words recently, but reading assiduously. I think the big problem in the original thread was that the narrow slice of argumentation upon which the (arguable) bully was correct was, by the time he made it, a small part of the ongoing discussion. More importantly, the way he chose to discuss that matter was at odds with the existing tone and purpose of the discussion. He is not a habitual commentor here, and his behaviour upset the culture of the place.
My private definition of bullying, online, includes making oneself the focus of a thread which was originally not about one. Contradicting others who are carrying on a conversation, not lurking long enough to understand the culture of the place and demanding that culture be changed to fit one's own preferred debating style, not lurking long enough to realize you've drawn negative attention from a mod, indicate, to me, the contempt for individuals qua individuals which is a hallmark of bullying behavior.
*puts on geology nerd hat*
(This is from memory and may include small errors).
Volcanoes are classified by their class of lava, which varies from Mafic to Sialic- the first are high in Magnesium and Iron, strangely enough, and the lava is fluid and the eruptions are non-explosive (think Kilauea) and the resultant rocks are black in color and highly reactive. Sialic, AKA Rhyolitic lavas are high in Silicon and Aluminum, and the eruptions that occur are very explosive: Vesuvius, Yellowstone the explosions producing either aerisolized cloud of molten rock or pyroclastic flow (particulates composed of molten and near molten rock, forming tephra and pumice when cooled).
The thing is, most volcanoes, especially continental/subduction zone ones, are an intergrade: my lady goddess The Mountain (Rainier, Tahoma) Fuji, Redoubt... St. Helens. The magma pools they draw on vary in chemical composition, and they can produce small melts of Mafic lava, or more energetic ash-cloud explosions and lahars, both of which are mostly fueled by hot gasses of surface origin and not melted rock. There are also limited pyroclstic flows, but temperatures are usually too low for Herculaeum-style disasters. Then there's the main mountain-building activity: dome building, where thick dioritic lavas are extruded.
*sigh* It's wonderful to contemplate, the chemical and physical machine that drives volcanoes, but I'm pretty sure that whoever made Dante's Peak didn't spend much time thinking about it, being more interested in people running and shouting and dying, pointlessly or heroically.
Jules at 406, "insulin resistance" is generally assumed to be a symptom of Type 2 diabetes; my life experience suggests it's a primary and lifelong cause of that disorder. The current medical mindset is heavily invested in describing Type 2 as a punishment for being fat and lazy, rather than the end-state of a disorder which causes the body to store fat at lower caloric intake and experience extreme fatigue at lower activity levels than is typical of the population as a whole.
(Cranky. It's been a bad summer in many ways).
Serge, it's been a tough year for roses; winter went far into spring, with some measurable snowfall every month until April and hard freezes well into May. Then there was no rainfall at all for two and a half months, and a record string of +90F days, including 104F two days in a row. Flowers opened and faded while I huddled inside with the fans roaring, and when I did go outside with camera in hand it was to figure out more about which buttons did what.
As for "stempunk:" my yard decor includes a two-foot box end wrench, several large gears, a 1920s vintage road grader blade, and chunks of a cast-iron cook-stove which disintegrated after a chimney fire (not so much acquired as uncovered, with the stove bits eroding out of my driveway). Oh, and the metal parts of half a buggy, hanging up on one of my outbuildings; the other half was sticking out of the blackberries and went in a WW2 scrap drive. A next-door relative is growing one of my climbing roses up over an abandoned Pinto, the title for which we've been unable to clear so it could be legally hauled away.
About Kalaloch:
I always thought it was "Claylock" when I was little; it was a mythical place for most of my beach-going life, because it was so many hours beyond Oyehut and Moclips, our usual goals. The same boyfriend who thought heading out into the Olympic Mountains on old logging roads (in a 1962 Chevy step bed with a broken gas gauge) was the epitome of fun thought going to Kalaloch on a February weekend a very good idea (he was right).
It's a good thing that the water there is so cold, and it's so far from everywhere, because otherwise that gorgeous seven mile stretch of roadside beaches from South Beach to Ruby Beach would be less wonderfully empty. The Olympic National Park beaches only accessible by hikers are even more spectacular, of course (I'm most fond of Cape Alava) but they are, well, only accessibly by hiking, and I don't think my utterly screwed-up knees are going to make the two miles and change, most of it on bouncy board walks, out to Cape Alava from Lake Ozette again.
Stefan Jones, having been in Forks when it was at the bottom of its economic arc, I find the Twilight stuff amusing; unfortunately I fear it will peter out as thoroughly as the lumber industry did, and leave the place back in the slough of despond.
I'm et up with envy at your travels to the Peninsula; we used to stay in Amanda Park and travel out to Kalaloch every year at this time, but trying to organize a trip involving three adults with conflicting work schedules is a trick. The last time we made it, there was what was left of a juvenile finback whale being scavenged on the beach; the extra imput to thefood chain meant that there was more of everything from sandfleas to bears fora mile along the beach south of Kalaloch lodge.
Back when I was young and unencumbered I dated a guy whose idea of a good time was to drive up to the crumbling ends of old logging roads and car camp. I've seen huge herds of elk running across a clear cut section (square mile), silent except for the clicking of foot tendons over bone, and awakened after sleeping in a doorless pick-up canopy to find cougar prints in the dust on the roof.
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