The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kevin Riggle:

Mortimer @60: Using "Uncle Tom" wasn't a literary reference per se. The name began as one, clearly, but it has taken on a life of its own outside Harriet Beecher Stowe's work, and a much less pleasant life at that.

A little like saying "But his choice, basically, is whether he’s going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Judas in the pay of the giant corporations" and claiming no disrespect was intended -- it was a literary reference. (Or, speaking of a Jewish person -- Lieberman, say -- to compare em to Shylock. Substitute names and marginalized groups ad nauseum.) However apt it may be, it's still rather offensive to allude to age-old stereotypes, and, in this case, to apparently consider Obama living up to that stereotype as a possible outcome of his presidency.

It is almost certain that Obama will disappoint many of his supporters in the coming years, for many reasons. Obama said so himself in his acceptance speech last night. (There's a reason I have this bumper sticker up on my wall.) But to phrase that sentiment the way Nader did was tactless at best -- not a hanging offense, but it does nothing to improve my opinion of the man.

Lee @52, re: American beer's %ABV, that's not true so far as I know. In fact, at the local Real Ale expo, the American beers were more alcoholic (4-5%) than the European beers (3% or under). Of course, that was all American craft brewers, but I'm pretty sure that even the mass-market American beers clock in at 4-5% too. And it's definitely not uncommon to find American craft beers close to wine in alcohol content (8-10% ABV) -- the Midas Touch beer, just for example. I think most of the stigma associated with mass-market American beer comes from how they don't taste like much of anything, not their alcohol content or lack thereof. :-)

Argh. This is a conversation going fun places, and I want to respond to a bunch of stuff, but I need to be up for work tomorrow and I've already been up too late on Making Light once this week. /But/, a few quick observations before I crash:

- I vaguely thought it was here, but I could be wrong, where someone said something like, "I have lots of argumentative friends, and at some point I got tired of defending things I liked, and defending myself for liking those things." I think that applies here. It's good not too get so wrapped up in our superiority that we diminish someone else's simple enjoyment, whatever they're enjoying and whoever they are. (I have lots of argumentative friends. Figuring out how to divert conversations, and trying not to drag down others' pleasures, is something I'm working on.)
- This, I think, is one of the reasons classical music has a bad rep -- the "It's Good For You" crowd have gotten ahold of it, as have the high-culture snobs. Screw that. Culture is supposed to be FUN, dammit!
- Classical music, performed well, can be wonderful. A concert hall is not necessarily the best place to enjoy it, though -- I too find that, in a concert hall, my attention tends to wander. First, I think that's okay -- I don't know as single-minded attention is really necessary for appreciation. Sometimes when I can dip in and out of a piece while I'm working and discover it, often over years, I enjoy it more.
- Jazz and pop and classical all use notes and rhythms, but they use them very differently -- I'm not sure I'd call them even different dialects of the same language. The "grammar" -- the structure -- of a jazz or pop song is significantly different from that of a jazz song, both in how individual phrases are put together and in how the whole piece is put together. I'm not hugely educated on this, but I've played a bit of all of those, and they require surprisingly divergent skillsets both to perform and to appreciate. I'm still not there with, say hip-hop, but I'd like to find some stuff that speaks to me. (Some of the new stuff by the Ting Tings, a British band ("Shut Up and Let Me Go," "That's Not My Name"), feels influenced by hip-hop to me, and I like it. Maybe it'll be my gateway drug. :-)
- White folk music -- when I'm in the right mood and it's performed the right way (which may just be me on a harmonica in my room), "Shanendoah" can make me cry. Some of that's situational and associational, but there's power in the music itself too. (I don't think you were saying there wasn't any; I grew up with it, and I've got a soft spot in my heart for it.)
- It's hard to make music as exceedingly good as some of the pro stuff, but it's actually fairly easy to make stuff that's okay and have fun, and I'm sad that that's fallen out of fashion. (Ditto homebrew beer.) You don't have to participate in the creation of music to appreciate it by any means (and too many people have probably been turned off by being forced to take lessons), but creating music is fun and gives you a different kind of appreciation.

Anyhow, I should crash now.

Life's short -- have fun, wherever you find it. :-)

("When you meet with the AP? Don't sell the homeworld.")

Oops, we cross-posted.

Robert Cox @166: Interesting. Was the Media Bloggers Association involved with retaining Greg Herbert et al to work on the case? If so, how?

Well, Ron Coleman exists and claims to be involved with the MBA, so that part checks out.

Also, Mr. Coleman? You may want to find a different phrase -- the original "j'accuse crowd" was right in the end.

And Mr. Cox? Paragraph breaks, man!

The earlier DMCA takedown notices against the Drudge Retort are immaterial to the case at hand, a red herring, since they were resolved to all parties' satisfaction. Why do you bring those up?

If you think the AP "over-reached" in this latest case, why do you need to negotiate with them to set guidelines for the use of their material? It seems to me that the Drudge Retort learned its lesson the first time around. The system works (except that the AP sent spurious takedown requests this time, which they shouldn't have). Why try to "fix" it?

According to Mr. Cadenhead's site, the AP hasn't dropped the takedown notices yet, but they're "rethinking their policies." Hopefully that doesn't mean pointing bloggers to iCopyright -- the article says, "'We are not trying to sue bloggers,' Mr. Kennedy said. 'That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music,'" so maybe the AP gets it. Time will tell. Anyway, Mr. Cox, if the AP does drop those takedown notices soon, and you had a hand in that, good on you.

I thought the tinyurl in 143 used to point to this post on Words In Edgewise giving us the "backstory" on the case, but even after I add the vowels back it doesn't anymore. Ah well. The "backstory" is kind of confused and doesn't shed a whole lot of light.

I don't understand how the AP sending a DMCA takedown notice to the Drudge Retort for, among other things, a post quoting 18 words from an AP story, and the AP offering the iCopyright service which claims to allow users to buy the web use rights for quotations of similar length, are unrelated issues. Sure, the AP maybe hasn't drawn the connection explicitly, but the implicit connection is there. If they don't intend iCopyright to apply to bloggers, they should bloody well say so, and they should drop the DMCA takedown notices against Mr. Cadenhead.

Mr. Cadenhead, if it were me, I'd go to the EFF now, before Mr. Cox makes a mess of your good name. Mr. Cox claims to have 14 anonymous cases settled by an anonymous "large law firm"; the EFF has many cases won publically. I know who I'd want at my back when I went up against a company much larger than me. You've got what seems on the face of it like a very reasonable fair use case on your hands, which should be eminently winnable if it goes to a court. I wouldn't let Mr. Cox settle for anything less than the AP dropping all charges against you. (I am not a lawyer; I can neither practice nor preside; your mileage may vary; warranty void where prohibited by law.)

If Mr. Cox's intentions are truly honorable, he really needs to get his own act together before trying to help others out. Fixing the links on his own site should be a higher priority than slagging off other bloggers on his blog for saying mean things about him.

Most of the time the legal threat evaporates when the plaintiff discovers that no only does the blogger have representation but that he has a large law firm defending him.

Which law firm?

Diatryma @45: It is amazing how many opinions people have abuout sandbags and how well we work together in spite of the guy next to us being WRONG.

That right there is one of the things I love about Iowa. :-)

So here's my contribution to the playlist -- "Iowa Stubborn" from Meredith Wilson's The Music Man. Specifically...

"And we're so by God stubborn
We could stand touchin' noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye-to-eye.
...
You ought to give Iowa a try!"

My folks are in the northwest corner of the state and on relatively high ground and so sitting okay, thank God, though the rivers in the area still have flood warnings out on them and the fields are flooded, just nothing's to the point of evacuation. My uncle's farm is just outside the flood zone right now, though, but if (when) they get more rain, I expect it will flood there too. I trust them to keep an eye on it and get out when they need to. ::sigh:: It really is '93 all over again.

Thank you so much to the people actually out there helping out -- I wish I could do something more concrete than send money and virtual good wishes. I'm glad I don't live in Iowa any more, but I still care about it, goddammit, and I don't want to see it all get swept away by the floodwaters.

Dammit, Teresa, I was eating.

Not that any power in the 'Verse, even the fearsome power of the Mall Ninja, could have prevented me from finishing, given how hungry I was, but that really needed a warning tag or three.

Apropos of bad trigger discipline, I once sat in on a trial where the defendant was accused of stealing a bag full of guns from a friend during a drunken party. Among the evidence presented was a photo of the accuser and sole witness to the crime, a Mall Ninja-type, drunk off his ass at the party in question, holding an AK-47 in one hand, pointed up in the air, and a Glock in the other, loaded and with the safety off, pointed at his own head. As the clerk of court put it to me during a recess, "one twitch and this is an entirely different case." Needless to say, the defendant was found not guilty.

I have a hard time understanding what would posess someone to behave that recklessly.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @78: But Iranians and Iranian-Americans? The hardliners in the US have to be actively avoiding I&I-A's to have not been seeing that this rhetoric doesn't make any sense...

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but -- that population is not at all evenly distributed. For comparison purposes, I'd met exactly one Jew before I escaped the Midwest and went to college, and there are five million Jews in the US. I wasn't actively avoiding them -- they just didn't live near me. I'm still not sure I know any Iranian-Americans, though I probably do. I can totally see how McCain's base, the people who think bombing Iran is a good idea, live in places such that there aren't any Iranians around who could smack them with a clue-bat.

(Really this goes for most minority groups -- non-white people, gay people, non-Christians, science fiction fans. They more or less didn't exist, or weren't at all evident, where I grew up. Frankly I like where I am now a lot better.)

Benedict Leigh @83: Catharsis is a good word for that "incredibly depressed in a good way" feeling.

Joel @135: A friend of mine briefly thought that the Open Source Boob Project was a parody making fun of Richard Stallman's infamous treatment of women. (The oft-quoted pickup line: "Hi, I wrote Emacs. Can I touch your breasts?") But then it would have been the Free Boob Project.

WOOHOO!

Rachel @13: I suspect Charlie would have just downloaded his consciousness into several separate human-equivalent AIs and staffed the board that way. ;-)

24. Like so many people, largely from knowing a few fonts, a number
of terms, and guessing based on names. (Over the summer, I should play
with the local letterpress again. I seem to have fallen in love with
Garamond accidentally.)

I'm fairly close to the end of the ARC I borrowed from a friend. I have another friend who has casted Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon as a primer for young geeks. Little Brother, then, is a post-9/11 Crypotonomicon. (And it saddens me that we need to make that distinction, but the world is what it is.) Stephenson's book is pretty clearly about the 90's, and Doctorow's book is pretty clearly about the current decade, and, unfortunately, probably the decade to come. I'm scared for the end, though -- I can't see any "happily ever after" in this book. Which is good from a storytelling standpoint and probably an ideological standpoint, but damned if I don't like Marcus and Ange and want things to turn out okay for them.

Patrick @141, Cory @elsewhere: Any particular Jane Jacobs you would recommend? As a former sorta-rural boy, cities fascinate me.

Serge @826: Teva sells sandal-like footwear which seem to be exercise shoes minus parts of the uppers.

Ralph Giles @410: I have better luck with `export TERM=xterm' when
I'm using remote Linux machines from my Mac (it's actually in my
.bashrc), though (of course) it means I don't get some color, eg. with
ls. YMMV.

(Some people get sloppy with grammar or spelling when they're tired.
I get sloppy with parentheticals. Sigh. Bed now, more talk in the
morning.)

Sajia Kabir @516: I'm a big fan of the big red Betty Crocker cookbook as a good general-purpose cookbook. (Lots of good Midwestern comfort food. :-) The latest one is quite modern in its approach to recipes and very practical -- uses canned stuff where appropriate, etc. It's got a lot of staple recipes that I refer to a lot -- pancakes, muffins, bread, different fish preparations, that kind of thing. It's got a vegetarian selection, though I haven't investigated that much. If you're a reasonably accomplished cook already, it may be too basic, though.

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