Hooray for the successful fundraiser.
Serge: the US beer scene has changed dramatically since the advent of the microbrew, in the nineties.
One of the Bridgeport brewery guys did a really convivial demo in the grocery store, replete with bits of history about the company: they were apparently responsible for the legal case that launched the first permitted Oregon microbrewery, and many followed thereafter...
Heresiarch @ 660: Trouble is, the psychological outcome of jailing someone isn't a certain thing, either. It seems like a much clearer-cut punishment because the physical aspects are controlled, but there are a lot of different things that can happen to someone in that situation psychologically.
Punishment is a very weird thing. Are we punishing someone for the greater good, or are we doing it from a sense of retribution? Let's take a couple of prospective outcomes -- (a) the offender reforms totally; (b) the offender becomes utterly miserable and jumps off a cliff.
Both could occur as the result of punishment situations coming into contact with someone's pre-existing mindset. Which outcome is more what we are 'looking for'?
Madeleine F, above: Yes -- the tiniest things can alter a drink. That's why bartending is an art. Motion and order can affect the end result, as well as content.
Alton Brown's bartending episode had a great bit about chemistry and why shaken and stirred are different.
Namely, shaking your drink with ice kills some of the volatiles. If you like the volatiles, you want it stirred; if you don't, you want it shaken. This alters the character of vermouth considerably, among other things.
Susan: best wishes to you.
On sadness and crying: I have this abandoned kitten here, as I mentioned in the Thanksgiving thread. It doesn't have very good chances. (China is not very kitten-friendly.) I spent a morning of teaching getting more and more frantic over what I was going to do if I couldn't find a caregiver and its mother didn't come back. This culminated in having to cut my lunch short because, when I visualized myself taking it to a vet to be put down and holding and speaking to it during, I started crying hysterically into my soup. I'm pretty sure if I thought about that again I'd start bawling again, no saving throw.
This is why I am waking up in the middle of the night to dropper egg yolk + yogurt down a kitten.
Weirdly, the idea that it might die *anyway* isn't nearly as troubling. I'm scared for it, but not that scared; if it dies, it dies. The part that tied me up in knots was the idea that it might die without knowing I cared for it. Now it knows, and I'm doing what I can.
Degrees of separation: I don't know any movie actors, really. I am, however, three degrees from the late J. Robert Oppenheimer by two separate chains. My father knew Feynman. A friend of mine had a mother who knew Oppenheimer.
I tried Lagavulin once at a con party and am sad to say it did not take. I took an experimental sip, spluttered, got the world's most absurd facial expression, and said "(beat) It tastes like bandages!"
I do like scotch; just not the peaty kind.
My standard, though, is a gin & tonic. Tanqueray is all right for home drinking. I have never had the misfortune of encountering a bartender who thought Sprite was okay, but I can't imagine encountering one in Portland -- bartenders tend to know their stuff, as it's a very competitive industry there. Even in a hole-in-the-wall they'll generally have some quality stuff.
As for beer, Dogfish Head makes some mighty good stuff. Midas Touch is my favorite of theirs. On the hoppier side, Lagunitas -- of California -- has some great seasonal selections all of which are named by in-joke. I think the current one is Kill Ugly Radio, a Frank Zappa commemorative.
In my current location the alcohol selection is wine (mostly red), beer (mostly light lager), brandy, and baijiu (its own thing entirely.)
mds, above: Oh, dear. I'm going to have to fic that.
Lindra @ 346, I started on Usenet as a minor (and thank the Gods I did; if there's a reason I can count exactly zero suicide attempts/ideations in my own history, it's growing up late enough to get on the Internet as a teen) and so I'm shall we say very sensitive to attempts to restrict minors from communicating with older adults as they will.* Attempts which have only gotten worse over time, as the recent Livejournal debacle shows.
To my knowledge Making Light has none of these barriers in place, which is in keeping with its tendency to exemplify All That Was Good About Usenet. I've seen young teens come out as writers on this blog and be encouraged by the blessed folk here.
*As opposed to the other way around. I'm perfectly willing to say there should be restrictions preventing adults from, say, willfully misleading minors.
Oh, and from here, I've met Bruce Cohen, plus a couple of occasionals. I've met quite a number more of my Livejournal friends; a few years ago, I went on a roadtrip to visit about twenty of them.
Who says there are no charges? Harrassment. The emotional distress one. And if the anti-paedophile laws can't be interpreted to prevent adults from pretending to be children to take advantage of those children non-sexually, they need some rewriting, because it's the same situation.
Teresa @ 48: that so many people were in on the creation of "Josh," but not one of them stopped to think that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
It's almost always easier to send a room full of people to war than it is to send one or two. There's this saying -- about boys at a certain age, girls at a different age, but I think it applies to people in general whenever stirring up violence or discord -- that the group IQ is the lowest IQ in the group divided by the number of members...
But also there are other factors at play: people who do things like this frequently tend to have narcissistic personality disorder, for instance.
When I was about seven years old, I was kicked out of my Campfire troop for being weird. (That was pretty much the official reason: "you're weird and no one likes you.") Now, mind you, this was true -- I was weird and probably quite obnoxious, and no one liked me -- but then the troop leader handled this by writing a huge multi-page letter to my mother with this gigantic screed about how awful every member of my family was. It even contained nasty insults slung at my older brother -- who was generally quite mild-mannered, and whom she'd met maybe once.
My mother went on the warpath for a while and complained to everyone about it, but I privately thought good riddance once I realized this person was... not firing in all cylinders. And that lesson stuck with me -- if, in the sendoff, they give you a hundred reasons to not want to be there any longer, be grateful for the sendoff, even if it's a rude one. I feel lucky that I wasn't targeted more severely, looking back. I've had this happen as a child and very occasionally as an adult, and I know a lot of my social avoidance is aimed at preventing that kind of thing from ever, ever happening.
I don't know there's a moral to the story. I guess I just wanted to reconfirm that predatory adults are not just found in their underpants, so to speak.
Dawno, Terry Karney: Tor/Privoxy/Vidalia Bundle (a Mozilla add-on) slowly gets around the Great Firewall here; I don't know if it would also work elsewhere, but maybe give it a go?
Discordianism is hardly spurned! My sister runs discordian.com and Kallisticon, a small but dedicated associated yearly conference. She also holds one of a few different public Discordian rituals at Pantheacon.
The FSM's noodly appendage has no hold on me merely because Eris got there first. I have done religious mosaic in her honor and keep it on my altar. I wanted her image to look somewhere between a medieval saint and a pulp novel cover, so I picked this (the woman in the middle) for an image source to copy.
I speculate Ron Paul's candidacy is going to be good for everyone: it'll divvy up the Republicans into nice, easily defeatable camps. That's about the extent of his influence, I think. I hope.
Matt Jarpe @ 59: I call myself an evolutionary anarchist.
"Are we there yet?"
"No."
"Are we there yet now?"
Tom Scudder @ 65: ...say that again with a womb.
What amazes me is that the comments on the video are filled with dickering over which side was cooler.
The way the US abuses their military right now also makes me incredibly angry. War is not a game of Risk, Eddie Izzard aside. Some days I want to whistle and stare past humanity in the I-don't-know-this-person sort of way.
At least Teresa knows her Chumbawamba. And is a Time Lord.
Can we have a Making Light colony ship?
Earlier people were mentioning Stockholm Syndrome, and I do think a case could be made for a variant -- not towards V, initially, but towards the source of the notes; and that transfers to V, later.
But overall the torture sequence in the movie strikes me as an example of something that works in dream logic but not in plot logic. It has an emotional resonance that occurs in the space between the story and the viewer, but it is not a realistic occurrence. It is, as Greg says, very much like radioactive spider or... well, one of my dear partners owns an antique from the turn of the century, an electric comb. Why you'd wish a comb to be electric? Uncertain... but presumably it's a baldness cure, courtesy of the magic of electricity.
I do not think it is war porn, though, for one reason: the 'radioactive spider' in this sentence is not the physical torture so much as the oubliette, and the notes. There's a strong resonance for lots of people in the concept of having your universe dwindle to a single dark room and a single point of light in it. Initiation. Knowing your purpose. People tell stories about things like this a lot.
The framing was problematic, but the sequence still worked for me for the dream-logic reason.
It's the same sort of thing as 'before I kill you, Mr. Bond', or 'left you for dead' sequences in various media -- it might make more sense for the villain to just ax the protagonist (hence the 'evil overlord list') and make absolutely no sense to do otherwise, but somewhere in our hindbrains we're addicted to the idea of a protagonist who is defeated at first, then wins later.
I presume this is related to how humans learn. In a combat situation, it's ridiculous, but since we spend our days learning and attempting less flubbable tasks and we tell stories in terms of combat, heroes and villains, winning and losing, something of our daily experience is transferred to the narrative.
C. Wingate, above: Of course, intestinal gas is caused by eating things your digestive tract doesn't handle very well, to which the above thing about grain vs. grass is highly relevant.
Methinks Steve C. (@ 134) hasn't been exposed to the wonder of certain fanfics.
(They involve bad latin versions of Viagra.)
...But I agree it hasn't got much bearing on the story; not because of his age, but because he's the schoolmaster and the protagonist is a kid, making Dumbledore Harry's sexual equivalent of, gosh, I donno, how did you feel about your aged school principal when you were a teenager?
P.J. Evans: Yeah, pretty much.
I'd love to vote with my feet, but Britain and the EU just aren't very open to immigration.
Fragano @ 16: But that brings us back to the question she asked, which is the least answerable point and probably the most important.
What do we do?
Our free speech has been carefully redirected into a 'free speech zone', physically and aetherically -- a cordoned-off area where people wave signs, out of range of the management's delicate feelings.
Blogs are part of the free speech zone.
What can we do that doesn't stay behind the velvet rope?
I don't think we've "seen how third parties work out" any more than we've "seen how Communism works out": I think we've seen a number of failed attempts.
But we do derive information from the failures: namely, it's not possible to get to a more-than-two-party system from a two-party system in the ways we've tried recently.
It might work better if, for example, one or the other party disbanded and folded itself into a couple of different factions.
Cello, cello.... Any Rasputina fans about? They're a rather peculiar cello trio with a bit of a steampunk aesthetic. Heretical of me, but I like their cover of "Wish You Were Here" even better than the original. (Don't get me wrong: Pink Floyd's managed a number of unmatchable songs. I simply thought that was one of them until I heard the Rasputina version in a cafe.)
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