The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kip W:

Show all comments by Kip W.

Posted on entry Open thread 106 ::: April 27, 2008, 05:02 PM:
I'm reminded obliquely, as usual, that in my weekly chat (hosted on meebo) I can't mention Dick Van Dyke and have it show up as anything but **** Van ****. I wonder what meebo's more sexually adventurous chat rooms look like.
Posted on entry The Rather Difficult Font Game ::: April 25, 2008, 09:55 AM:
22. I'm below average, but I did better than I expected. Near the end, there were fewer to choose from, for some reason.

ps: When I see "Moderator" and "Teresa" in close proximity, the
first thing my brain tells me is "Mother Teresa." Perhaps that should
be "Den Mother."
Posted on entry NBC News calls Penn for Hillary ::: April 23, 2008, 07:45 PM:
I hope this means Teller's going for Obama.
Posted on entry Little Brother ::: April 17, 2008, 06:15 PM:
Well, thanks, but I already have one, and I read it and liked it.

I'M BRAGGING. WOO HOO!
Posted on entry Some must employ the scythe ::: April 06, 2008, 07:35 PM:
Silly me! I spelled "Terry Jones" wrong. I'm, uh, going somewhere else for a while.
Posted on entry Some must employ the scythe ::: April 06, 2008, 07:33 PM:
...By the way, I love Silverstein, and that's always been one of my favorite poems of his.
Posted on entry Some must employ the scythe ::: April 06, 2008, 07:30 PM:
I'm so worried about what's happening today,

In the Middle east you know,

And I'm so worried about the baggage retrieval

system they've got at Heathrow.

--John Cleese (years and years ago -- I heard this in the mid 80s)
Posted on entry Pity the Times ::: April 04, 2008, 10:23 PM:
Reporters and fact checkers? Who has the money for those? Not enough
people read newspapers now, so such inessentials are tossed overboard,
along with idle fripperies like comics (smaller! make those comics
smaller and fewer!), editorials, and maybe sports will be next. (Why,
oh, why do they stop reading our newspapers?) They have to stick to the
core mission, which is receiving press releases and deciding whether to
rephrase them or print them verbatim.
Posted on entry Forty years gone ::: April 04, 2008, 11:35 AM:
What, My Lai?

Black humor aside, it hurts to look at pictures
of women trying to keep children -- children who don't look all that
different from my daughter -- from being gunned down. If only I hadn't
looked, it wouldn't have happened.

People can serve in a war without seeing every horror it has to
offer. Many who came home and tried to tell of some of what they saw
were ostracized and called liars and traitors, sometimes by others who
had been there. I don't think it's our duty to err on the side of the
assumption that we're perfect.
Posted on entry Open thread 104 ::: March 30, 2008, 09:37 PM:
Back to front: Bruce Arthurs @149: Here is my favorite teapot. (As TNH observed, they even got the leather dings. More teapots at the flickr page.)

Electroid art -- reminding me slightly of a new way of making art that I played with in the 80s, when I had all the waste toner I could collect, and a Thermofax machine. I would sprinkle the toner between two pieces of paper and run the whole thing through the Thermofax, and sometimes it would stick in interesting and somewhat fractal ways. Then I saw something shiny somewhere, as the cliche has it.

The gallery: Thanks, Serge! I feel so... so included! I look forward to seeing more faces in there when I look right after I post this.

And to Linkmeister @14, here's a kludge to use until such time as it's not needed. Just start off by clicking "next page" until you've been to all the pages, then you can use your browser's "previous page" option to scroll back through them at your leisure. Or start with the last page and... well, I leave the details to you.
Posted on entry The photograph that terrorized London ::: March 30, 2008, 09:07 PM:
This picture speaks to me. What's that, picture? I should kill who? With a what? Okay. I will. Okay. Yes, hail to the glorious revolution, picture.
Posted on entry Divided by common errors ::: March 28, 2008, 08:49 PM:
The situation described in #11 sounds like a near relative of the
hypothetical questioner (described at second hand in a recent Mark
Evanier post) who isn't so much asking a question as making a pathetic bid for attention. Now that I've read that, it'll be at least a couple of months before I do that again.
Posted on entry Open thread 104 ::: March 28, 2008, 08:46 PM:
Strange thing. I can remember a time when I was completely disgusted by pictures of animals or little children with cutesy captions stuck on them. Lot of nerve, fancying that one was reading their mind and assigning words to their already eloquent physiognomies. So now I'm 50, and I chuckle over at least 10% of LOLcats. Must be creeping senescence.

I still laugh harder at the version Kurtzman did in MAD comics, starting off with kid pictures but soon switching to photos of Mickey Rooney and some prize fighter, giving them drooling baby talk captions. (The ancestor of the Python sketch where John Cleese's mum and her friend are treating him like an infant, although he is an accountant or some such, culminating in the memorable moment when Missus N explodes. "Don't be so sentimental, Mother. People explode every day.")(In an open thread, it's downright impossible to digress. Sign me up!)
Posted on entry Divided by common errors ::: March 28, 2008, 05:26 PM:
That's the times we're living in now: "CE," or "Common Error."

We had a call from Owens-Corning about coming over and inspecting
our basement, based on a form we filled out at a home show last year.
"Well, here's our situation," I said. "We put our house up for sale,
and we're moving to New York." That took care of that. (Okay, it's
tangentially related to the window-treatment anecdote.)
Posted on entry Open thread 103 ::: March 26, 2008, 11:20 PM:
Speaking of pictures, and since this is an open thread, I have posted a clutch of photos celebrating the anniversary of the beginning of the family of Cathy and Sarah and me, five years ago this Monday past (3/24/03), which began with us holding a somewhat bemused Sarah at the Holiday Inn in Hefei. My name should link to the LJ, and the post is (at the moment) second from the top.

We celebrated with a special dinner at Taco Bell. Sarah's idea.
Posted on entry Open thread 103 ::: March 25, 2008, 01:24 PM:
The Apollo 11 diagram (particles) looks like a baseball diamond with an elder eldritch terror splatted out in the middle of it. The fact that this seems to have passed unnoticed is further proof of the conspiracy of silence that surrounds this hideous and undying threat to us all.
Posted on entry Open thread 103 ::: March 23, 2008, 11:58 AM:
Don Simpson @594 - Susan @469 linked to full sheet music for "Yama Yama Man." A cursory search didn't turn up any better source for the lyrics, though there's an interesting discussion with some of the words at Democratic Underground (it's not all politics).

Nobody's more surprised than I am that I found lyrics to "That Mysterious Rag" on the first try. I never suspected it was by Irving Berlin!
Posted on entry Open thread 103 ::: March 21, 2008, 10:43 AM:
Susan @469: Thanks! I'll download this and use it. Seems to me I've been to Levy's collection before, and was disappointed not to find "Old King Tut" (except, perhaps, for the cover). There are sources in the UK that have it as part of a collection for like nine pounds, a price that -- reckoned in US$ -- goes up even as I ponder it.

But to repeat my central point: Thanks!
Posted on entry Open thread 103 ::: March 21, 2008, 10:41 AM:
When you have a stack of 500 or so cards, you make sure they're in order and then put a diagonal stripe across the top with a Magic Marker. If you ask me, they should have had a hole that was in the same place on all the cards, so you could put a threaded rod through and screw a nut onto both ends, but they didn't ask me.

Reagan on Mount Rushmore? No, Reagan should be carved in negative on some other huge rock. That way his vacantly beaming face will follow you wherever you go. They could take all the chips, pile them at the bottom, and paint them green or gold as a monument to his deficit.
Posted on entry Going to need a bigger laser ::: March 21, 2008, 10:32 AM:
"Warm, flat Canadian Tab with a dead rat floating in it."

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