I thought the Pub Date was the day on which you were most likely to find a naive author sitting in a pub and looking dejected over the fact that his/her book hadn't yet arrived in any nearby stores.
I stumbled across the poem The Dark Huntsman by Charles Heavysege a few years ago, and ever since then I've been unable to hear or read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas without thinking of it. The full poem is a few pages long, so here's just the first three verses:
'Twas eve, and I dreamed that across the dim plain
One swept o'er the stubble,---one ploughed through the grain;
His aspect was eager, his courser was fleet,
He drove through the gloom as through air drives the sleet;
And dark was his visage, and darker it grew,
As o'er the dim landscape yet faster he flew.
I dreamed still my dream, and beheld him career,---
Fly on like the wind after Ghosts of the deer---
Fly on like the wind, or the shaft from the bow,
Or avalanche urging from regions of snow;
Or star that is shot by the Gods from its sphere;---
He bore a Winged Fate on the point of his spear;
His eyes were as coals that in frost fiercely glow,
Or diamonds of darkness;---"Dark huntsman, what, ho!"
"What, ho!" and my challenge went wild through the vale,
And long was my hollo, and loud was my hail:
"Dark huntsman, dark huntsman, what, whither away?
"Dark huntsman," I shouted, "I charge thee to stay;"
And backwards he bellowed, "I cannot obey---
A thousand ere midnight my task is to slay;
But ere comes the morrow,
With sickness and sorrow,
Shall I be swift riding again on this way."
And the huntsman laughed hollow,
As my fancy did follow
Him on his black courser that, knowing, did neigh;
My fancy did follow
Adown the dim hollow
And heard in the distance his hunger-hounds bay;
The vanishing spectre
Me left to conjecture,
As on the dark huntsman dim hurried away.
A friend directed me towards Jim Henson's Wilkins Coffee ads a few months ago, which are fairly interesting. The proto-Kermit seems to have become a bit less violent as the series went on.
Draconian border restrictions lead to cases like Michel Jalbert's, where harmless people are punished disproportionately for small mistakes. I'm more than a little baffled by the perception that my country is some sort of insidious haven for terrorists waiting to sneak over our southern border.
RE: The spam sidelight
91% seems a bit low to me.
I checked my email a few minutes ago and was surprised to find the spam trap had devoured 300 or so pieces of the stuff overnight. It usually takes two weeks to attract that many. Any idea what's up?
Some cynical part of me thinks it would be fun to pose as an interested client and ask to have your (non-existent) product advertised, thus outing anyone who recommended the phantom product as a paid shill. There'd probably be a variety of legal issues involved with that, though.
DaveL #197: I know the feeling. Occasionally I run across forms with an extra box marked "preferred name" or something of the sort, which is nice. The DMV people here were nice enough to let me leave the first name as an initial and print the second name in full.
For most of my childhood my medical records were under a different name too, since my parents changed it when I was a toddler but didn't update the medical information.
Colour variations aren't too uncommon, since the shots they use are taken from many different cameras. The discoloured area is centered on the logo, meaning that whoever took it was specifically concentrating on that area. It's a nicely-composed shot with the crop circle in the center that's been stitched in rather poorly.
Invaders from Canis Major? This could be sirius.
It isn't unblemished if you look closely, but it does look highly suspicious.
Whoops. Thanks, Xopher. Here's the link. I was forgetting to enclose the url in quotation marks.
RE: Odious Debt
Isn't odious debt an inevitable result of extremist starve-the-beast political tactics?
I was going to link to the wikipedia page about the tactic, but I don't know how links work here.
The name Airleaf seems about right for the company, given that their services seem to be about as helpful as randomly scattering manuscript pages in the wind and then hoping they land on a buyer.
#96 Thanks, Kathryn!
A friend of mine brought up the topic of free will a few days ago and I couldn't find the link. I was beginning to think I'd imagined reading the story, which would be scarier in a way.
A short while ago someone here posted a link to a short story about predestination. It was written as a warning sent back into the past, and involved a small device that gave off a signal several seconds before you pressed a button. Can someone provide a link? I keep thinking I read it on Popular Science's website, but I haven't been able to find it there and I remember the site layout being different so I may be mistaken.
Santorum is actually just testing the waters in hopes of somehow getting his LotR fanfiction published.
Any idea what's causing it? I've received more spam in the past month or so than I used to get in six.
When my father bought his house a few years ago, it was fairly clear that it hadn't been redecorated since the seventies. Almost every colour of the rainbow was present in the shag carpeting of that house, and they were all defiled by their inclusion.
With all this mis-identifying going on, this Commenter clearly and unequivocally wants to set the record straight: Congressman Tom Reynolds (R-NY) has stopped hiding behind kids. His new human shield is the First Lady.
Look at how many kids he needed to form that first human shield. I think he's figured out that since adults are larger, it takes fewer of them to form a barrier he can hide behind. During the next election, he will refer to this discovery as "increasing the efficiency of government."
Each time something like this has come up, I've thought this is where it'll end, this is something nobody with a shred of humanity left in them could support. I have been repeatedly surprised.
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|---|---|
| 2007 | 2 |
| 2006 | 23 |
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