The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dave Langford:

#5: (Now, what happened to my copy of Ngaio Marsh's Death of a Fool?)

A favourite here. That's the US title, by the way: the British edition is called Off with his Head. Oops, was that a spoiler?

Now it's morning. Hazel and I couldn't bring ourselves to stay awake for the big moment, either. What wimps we are. Good wishes to all.

Back when Harold Wilson was the British prime minister, Private Eye used to publish ghastly travesties of the poetry his wife Mary notoriously wrote. Forty years ago, from memory, it went like this:

The New Year dawns; the gurgling babe
Is ushered in with bells.
The old man with his astrolabe
Now hears his tolling knells.
So welcome nineteen sixty-nine
Through gales and blasts of fate:
We know that thanks to Providence Divine
It cannot be as bad as nineteen sixty-eight.

(Resident poets may update this as they will.)

The thought of appropriate punishment for naughtiness directed at a head of state led me to check what happened to the man who in 1982 penetrated into Queen Elizabeth's very bedchamber.

Not a lot, apparently. "Michael Fagan was not charged for trespassing in the Queen's bedroom since it was then a civil offence and proceedings would have compromised the Queen's position as head of state."

What an enormous relief. I had a lot of nagging doubt, but am delighted that Patrick and the optimists were right after all.

My brother lives in Chicago and my UK brother-in-law in Florida, so it's good news for my family too. For the world ... that goes without saying.

Possibly tangential: I liked Mark Steel's op-ed in the UK Independent today.

Oh gosh. So much can happen while we're entertaining my aged mother on one of her rare visits to Reading. General echoing of what everybody says about Getting Well Soon.

What I first saw was a truncated subject line on a mailing list: "Theresa Nielsen Hayden suffers (minor) hear", and it took a moment to realize how this had to continue. As a deafish fan I've been suffering from minor hear all my life.

#72: Robert Sheckley, Mindswap (1966), final paragraphs. Paraphrase rather than direct quote ("He lay beneath Stanhope's familiar green sky ... did not the giant oak trees still migrate each year to the south?").

#2: Gee, I knew reading Kent and Forester would come in handy some day.

Kipling too..

"An' Mac'll take her in ballast -- an' she trims best by the head. . . .
Down by the head an' sinkin', her fires are drawn and cold,
And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty hold --"

This posting gave me a terrific spasm of guilt and fear until I realized that, had I committed the Unforgivable Transgression and forgotten Mothering Sunday, my mother would have been on the phone and doing the Voice at me some hours ago.

Here in the UK (and Ireland too) the magic day is three weeks before Easter. And, back then, I didn't forget. Phew.

#203 Charlie on strikethrough: ML supports the "strike" tag though not the equivalent (on many platforms) "s" tag.

I'm having a bit of trouble with Patrick O'Brien, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I've started the first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series about three times and I can't quite get into it.

O'Brian -- he used that spelling to distance himself from his brother Flann.

As I remember, I found the stories OK (speaking as a long-time Hornblower fan) but not terribly special until book three, HMS Surprise -- which had me fully hooked for the rest of the sequence.

#35 Does anyone have any idea what sort of beastie this is?

It looks like a "red spider", which isn't a spider but a mite. "they were so tiny they looked like freckles..." sounds about right. When we're in North Wales in warm weather, huge numbers can usually be seen random-walking over white walls and window-sills (and other surfaces, but they show up best on white). As described here (scroll down for photo).

Welcome back! That was an amazingly swift recovery. I wish I'd been able to unearth something useful from my not all that large Firefox cache. The realization that Oh My God MAKING LIGHT Is Down was oddly disturbing, and I clearly wasn't the only one to wonder if, perhaps, Barbara Bauer had ...

May your nerves now have time to become unjangled.

Excellent stuff, indeed. I haven't bought The Observer since
its witch-hunt (years ago now) against my then UK ISP for publishing
child pornography -- that is, not censoring its Usenet feed -- so
thanks very much for allowing a view of the uncensored version here.

Can I just say: fuck The Times for this so very timely story.

#21 -- PayPal fees: personally I was happy to pay a bit more for
general convenience (not to mention avoiding the possibility of getting
on a junk mail list), and just increased my intended donation to allow for PayPal's cut.

#2: The "Alzheimers Donation Jar"
button at www.matchitforpratchett.org accepts US dollar contributions
via PayPal, which seems more convenient than entering all one's address
and credit card details at the Alzheimer's Research Trust site. You may
need to scroll down a bit to see it.

Charlie Stross #139: Yes, that is my name in the credits to the Fiend Folio, thanks to my earlier professionally published work -- in White Dwarf, circa 1980 or 1981.)

Ha, I was in White Dwarf #2 in 1977!

386b: Gur Znovabtvba (Sbhegu Oenapu).

#534 advice to me: Leet Key lets you bind a keystroke combination to rot13.

Thanks: that's very useful.

Comment statistics for Dave Langford on the Making Light blog

Total: 152 comments. View all these comments on a single page.