"Typos are Coyote padding through the language, grinning."
— Susanna Sturgis, back in the good ol' days of Usenet
A footnote with some humor value, I think: A veteran lefty friend of ours has a lynching charge? conviction? (dunno) on his police record, for freeing a fellow demonstrator from a police car while the cops' attention was elsewhere. (And, obviously, not getting away quite fast enough himself.) Taking somebody from official custody is, technically, "lynching." You could look it up.
Gee, you think this was what Bay was talking about? Neither do I.
Lately when I see "H1N1 FLU" on the screen or page I find I'm reflexively thinking "hiney flu."
Yeah I move my lips when I read sometimes; also, when I edit.
"Eternal cycle of hamsters" -- sounds like my friend's "neverending dynasty of rats"...
Friends of ours have long had a sort of line-marriage of guinea pigs, for just that reason. Usually Boston marriages, but the current one includes a neutered male.
Since Matt the Cat moved in on us, he's learned to point prey critters rather than present their corpses to us. (We do know he flirted with our next-door neighbor by bringing her a dead mouse.) He's pointed escaped snake-chow and, rather more urgently, a dojo loach who'd managed to jump out of the aquarium. That was a couple of years ago and the loach is still with us. He points birds too. Hummingbirds seem to worry him.
#19: Teresa, ANSWER THE DAMN PHONE.
That's enough like our domestic communications to make me laugh twice.
My condolences about Hiro, and best wishes with the education of young Agnes Magness. Ow.
Chocolate Penguin caffeinated peppermints. We keep 'em in the car. Nature's Perfect Food!
Also: coconut rum is bad enough. Schnapps, well, schnapps was meant to be abused. Recently I spotted flavored bourbons: vanilla and peach. Is nothing sacred??!
Lee in #50: I'd really like is to see what Susan Boyle looks like after being given access to the same kind of celebrity primping...
Bingo. And am I the only one here who thinks she has a great face anyway?
I cut off the video when she was walking offstage, just to preserve the goosebumps I was enjoying. Her voice is better than the song. I got urged by several people to watch that for "inspiration," which is one of those things that generally put me off a bit. Not this time.
She did what yer basic pop singer stretches and heaves and eeeeemotes to do, without apparent effort. Funny: That might be why I was so surprised to see somebody say that was a "young" voice. (OK, so I'm being ageist too. I'm talking about mastery.)
marty #49: Hey, I'm 60 this year and on my third or fourth career, depending on how you count. Unfortunately it's journalism. Unfortunately my spouse is in it with me and we're watching several publications circling the drain with our finances in tow. Fortunately he has a pension so we probably won't starve. Also fortunately we aren't trying to put kids through college or anysuch with the money we have. In some ways, age frees you.
Huh. Maybe that's something else I was seeing there.
Kathryn Cramer @29: My favorite claim from a self-defense site (in 2007) was that they could teach you how to survive your own beheading.
Do they say why you'd want to?
I'm still waiting for my goons. I hope Popeye didn't discourage them.
Why can't I have some goons? I've always wanted goons. I'm an American, dangit! I have the right to bare goons!
Especially if we're going to drag the MLA into this.
Miller deserves a Gary K. Wolf Award for that. What do you mean there's no Gary K. Wolf award?!? Well there is now and I hereby award it.
Fragano Legister @ 30: "Her breasts were citrus." Limes? Ugli fruit? Lemons? Seville oranges? Bergamots?
Peau d' orange?
Ew, sorry.
Unfortunately I'm too d#mned sick to read the rest of the thread. My eternal slimy curse upon the inventor of 'Fruitless' mulberry, that indefatigable useless pollinator, and while I'm at it, on my own immune "system." When you're too sick to laugh you're too sick to live.
(No, I'm safe.)
Wyman @ 151: What I'm talking about—the alarms in my secondhand RAV4—go off when I'm still in the car.
Of course there are no foolproof technological fixes. What we're talking about here is harm reduction. Seatbelts. Drug labels. Fences. Keys.
Let's see: Our RAV4 has a sensor that tells me when there's something in the front seat that it thinks is a passenger without a seatbelt. It flashes when my purse is there, at least when purse is fully loaded. It turns on a lighted symbol on the dashboard.
It also has signals—different sounds—that tell me I've opened the driver door and left the keys in the ignition, and when I've turned the ignition off and left the lights on. I'm assuming all this was standard-issue, based on my understanding of the previous owner's character. I'm thinking that including the back seat in this system wouldn't be expensive, and that using a noise rather than a light would be fairly attention-getting. I never fail to respond when the Silver Wombat beeps at me for any reason.
This thing might not save lots of lives but I don't think it would be pricey either. As an option? OK, whatever. The tech is already there. If airbags are switchable-off, then I don't see why this wouldn't be.
BTW I'm childfree as merry Hades myself, and a cheapskate too.
While I'm telling first-person stories:
When I'd ordered the ventilator pulled and we all waited 20—30 minutes and my little sister stopped breathing and she was dead and it was really real, no more hope even when we'd had none for days, my instincts were pretty much what I had left. I used to be a nurse, and it left an indelible mark on my soul. I did not scream, curse, wreck the ICU or shed blood. I shook all over and ground my teeth so hard I broke a molar at the root.
I do not remember any pain from that breaking, but months later when the break made itself known again I remembered a faint but distinct "crack!" inside my head and knew when it had happened. My brother-out-law said to me when Jeanne died, "Ron. You're allowed to cry."
I didn't, quite, for a long time. I'm not finished yet, and that was two years and one week ago.
I do understand Ms Balfour, in that regard. I'd bet that the public, nursed on imagined theatrics and soap-opera, wouldn't understand either of us. They depend on us, though.
... a SANE nurse...
Oxymoron? Some days I've thought so.
Xopher in #5: But he sounds like the kind of jerk doctor nurses of my mother's generation complain about.
I'm wondering whether I'm old enough to be your mother. If not—well, even if I am, this isn't exactly a problem confined to the dim distant past. Alas.
I'm wondering if Tony Rowlett in #17 has done any informed speculation about what might be in a "rape kit" for care, as opposed to evidence-gathering, that would be in any way different from regular old GYN supplies.
Reflexes are good to have, but by the time one's old enough to, say, drive a car, one ought to have schooled one's reactions just a bit. Duck-and-cover is normally fine when something's coming at you fast; not so much when you're at the wheel on the freeway. Similarly when posting in public, especially to chide someone. (Daring, am I not?)
OK, I'll state my bias here: I for one am ready to join the First Church of Jim Macdonald.
I believe I hurt myself laughing at the snake-in-the-pants episode.
I was going to chime in on the parable up there, with "Whose cloth?", but albatross in #207 made the top of my head fly off and mar the ceiling with this:
... it's not like there's some shortage of land into which holes can be dug and trash buried.
Holy crap, and I thought I was cynical. I've been places and et in hotels, but I have never in my life seen a piece of land that needed filling.
Dang. Lots of unroasted protein running around in kindergartens, too.
I'll assume that was addressing "political realities" but if we're actually talking about doing good vis-a-vis our leavings, then just keeping stuff out of "landfills" is quite enough all by itself.
My teddy bear is named Ursula.
Well of course. What else would one name a teddy bear?
I grew up in a post-WW2 suburb that managed to contain all the vices I can think of that small towns are infamous for: conformity, in-group rule, advanced nosiness, homogeneity. The saving grace was that there was a fairly large space where we could run around more or less unsupervised but still in earshot of home, including a couple of big overgrown vacant lots (The Weeds) bordered by a small creek (The Crick) that was good for wading, ice-skating, minnow-catching, and generally messing about in. I retain a taste for getting away from humans when I can.
The small town I was born in, and which we visited to see relatives, was oddly more cosmopolitan. The Irish, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ukranians, even some of the Welsh there had hung on to important cultural items like cooking and holidays and language, but they mixed freely enough by then to enjoy each other. (My grandmother's getting disowned by her Irish family for marrying a Welshman had happened long enough ago to be a laughing matter.)
That went for generations, too; I was thrilled when I was maybe 13 to see that the garage band that played for the yoot' dances at the old roller rink always played a coupla polkas around intermission so the various adult chaperones and soda-sellers could come out and dance.
The thing is: "Small-town values" reads a lot like "family values." Mostly both phrases are about the things a lot of us ran away from to save our lives.
Oh man. I gotta get a slide scanner. I hope we still have the slide.
In 1980, when we first drove through Texas, we encountered a campaign poster: just a tad larger than life-size photo of a perfect stereotype of a big-bellied lawman with his thumbs in his belt, etc. Plus:
WE
GOT US
A
SHERIFF
IN
HIDALGO COUNTY.
RE-ELECT
"BRIG" MARMOLEJO
#23: The article notes that the victim is "a resident in the care of Granite State Guardianship" - an organization that cares for the mentally ill.
"Is," not "was." Severe head injuries. Ain't none of us invulnerable.
Of course, that includes those without severe apparent head injuries.
"Entirely inappropriate" is absolutely right! Nothing on this green Earth could possibly make natto appropriate.
csmccath@#18: The reason Rand's characters are instantly recognizable, aside from their poster-print two-dimensionality, is that you can tell the color of their hats by the sounds of their names. Good Guys sound like dropping the silverware; Bad Guys sound like dropping the pudding without the plate.
I read Atlas Shrugged some midcollege summer when a friend mailed it to me anonymously. Then I read a bunch more. Then I said to myself, Lord this is silly.
You'd think it would've given me some quip-ammo for arguing with the atmospheric ideology; I went to a Catholic women's college where someone in some class was actually assigning The Velveteen Rabbit and telling us we had to "stay vulnerable" of all things, as if 19- and 20-year-old Catholic women weren't vulnerable enough. I myself was a quivering mass of nerve endings most of the time.
The problem was that Randy one-liners sounded at least as silly as Folk Mass one-liners and all that earnest blood-and-daisies stuff we were getting just post-Vatican 2. Maybe it would've sounded better in Latin.
Anyway, I've always held it against Rand that someone who went on and on about EX-Cell-Ence could allow such crummy prose to be put out in public. That was the same time I tried to wade through Murray Bookchin and concluded that whole forests could be saved if he'd had a decent and authoritative editor.
Formative years indeed.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 13 |
| 2008 | 6 |
| 2007 | 11 |
| 2006 | 2 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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