The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Rymenhild:

I was thinking the same thing, Pedantka. Canned vegan chili and veggie hot dogs or sausages ought to fix the recipe, although that's probably too much processed vegetable protein and not enough actual vegetable.

Kareen and Mark went to the Orb
To learn some Betan knowledge;
"Now, this is why," Kareen declared,
"I went away to college!"

And it's...

That's interesting and possible, Stevey-Boy. I wonder what shape the baskets/chests/bags would have been. A thin flat cross would take up less space in many kinds of containers than a crumpled cross in three dimensions.

#21, 22, 23, 26: Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu ac y mae'r arglwyddes yn dod.

My favorite finds in the hoard are the bent-out-of-shape crosses. Were they intentionally bent? Why? Who wants to crumple a golden cross? Could they have been damaged in violence or hard use somehow, and then discarded respectfully in a hoard of other things? The one in the picture I've linked has a setting for a stone that is missing; when was the stone taken away? What happened to it?

That's the dazzling thing about this hoard; it gives us a chance to ask so many questions.

Bruce #112:

I was going to ask if Will Stanton was there, but then I realized it's a stupid question. If he went to the panel, he was probably in the audience. I bet he sat in the back with a bland expression on his face and didn't raise his hand once, so nobody noticed his presence.

Want to learn about your autistic children's behavioral issues? Consult Delia Sherman's Changeling.

Depressed about the loss of your ancestral traditions? Read Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga.

Eileen Joy, at the medieval studies blog In the Middle, has shared a 419 letter she received from Hæleð Wulfgar.

I am so sad to report that my liege-lord died of a terrible spear wound in a battle with some filthy, godless heathens and we have been weeping and crying over this because now there is no one to give us rings, but we also have all these silver pieces from selling fen plots and we have no more forever a great hall to put them in: cattle die and kinsmen die, thyself too soon must die [or, in your language, where is the horse and the rider, where is the horn that was blowing, they have passed like rain on the mountains, etc.]--you get the picture.

#376: Fvevhf Oynpx. I really like your take on his voice.

Attendant at a carnival game? In this all-American career, Bush could show his skill protecting himself from tossed rings, while simultaneously using his affinity with crooked systems designed to scam the populace!

I actually spoiled someone for the Anakin-is-Vader twist in 1997. She was an exchange student from Romania, and she'd only ever seen A New Hope. As we were going into a movie theatre for the reissue of Empire Strikes Back (I think), I misquoted, "Luke, I am your father" in my best James Earl Jones.

She'd had no idea, and was furious at me... but as an American child of the '80s, I'd totally forgotten that there were people in the world who didn't know Luke Skywalker's ancestry.

#16 Avedaggio: Oh, totally. Chaucer's treatment of Medea especially demonstrates that he's playing with inattentive readers. In one breath he mentions that she has to murder her children, and in the next he declares piously And trew to Iasoun was she al her lyf / And ever kepte her chast, as for his wyf. I can't take the combination seriously, anyway.

#18 Erik Nelson: It's "And I shall also" [drink deep, presumably]. Ichulle is the first person pronoun squeezed together with the verb form -- say "I shall" fast and you'll hear it.

I'm hunting for an Anglo-Latin poem I read once about an abbot and a prior getting drunk and vomiting all over their monastery garden, but I can't find it. I'm sorry, because it's a classic worth sharing.

Debcha #180 and following discussion:

I use EndNote. I saw the Zotero lawsuit well after I'd assembled my EndNote database. While I might have chosen a different bibliography program if I'd known about the Zotero issues before I chose my program, by now I'm totally reliant on EndNote and can't bear to switch.

So far I've found a few minor flaws in the programming (for instance, it sometimes modifies capitalization when capitalization should not be modified), but the small irritations are worth it. Never having to produce a bibliography from scratch again = Priceless.

P.J. Evans, regarding Arizona elections:

I have an uncle who lived for many years in Arizona (although he has now left the state for reasons too complicated to describe here). Over the years, he has sent the rest of our family plenty of pro-Republican and anti-Democratic email forwards.

Last week, my uncle sent my sister a forward that said that government -- all government, as practiced by all political parties -- is corrupt and vile. My sister forwarded it to me. I read the email and said, "John McCain is in trouble."

Could the 3 a.m. reference possibly relate to the 3 a.m. phone call? Sorry, Prime Minister Putin. Barack Obama can't pick up the phone to deal with the international crisis. He and his circle of warlocks are busy releasing curses. Then again, there's the problem of time zones. The phone call doesn't come at 3 a.m. Kenya time.

Jo Walton #30: One of my professors and I actually agreed yesterday that Barack Obama needs his own chanson de geste. He may have Saracen ancestry, but he's a true Christian ready to fight the unbeliever!

(In case the tone I'm using doesn't come through, my tongue is firmly in my cheek.)

Meteor showers:

One night in the fall of my senior year at college, my friends and I decided to stay out on a fire escape outside one of the dorms and watch for the meteor shower. I don't remember any of the meteors, actually. I do remember discussing, on that fire escape in the dark, how Isidore of Seville made a great patron saint of the Internet. I remember us all going inside at four AM or so to drink hot chocolate and tea, and I remember watching the sunrise and seeing my friends' faces all golden in the morning light.

Following on from 56 (Oxford) and all of the posts on magic moments and the sacred:

I've occasionally bored my sister, a practical businesswoman with little poetry in her soul (bless her wonderful heart), by waxing rhapsodic about archival libraries. After one of my longer monologues, my sister interrupted, "And do they have a boys' choir that starts singing every time you open a book?"

Well, several months later I was at Duke Humfrey's Library, the medieval manuscripts room at Oxford's Bodleian Library. I'd finally gotten permission to see the book I'm writing my dissertation on, but I only had two days with it, so I had to spend as much time in the library as I could over those days.

By 7:30 on the first night, I'd progressed about three quarters of the way through the manuscript. I was high on the smell of vellum and on the feeling you get when you've spent hours intensely focused on something you love passionately. At that time of night, only a few dedicated souls remain in Duke Humfrey's. Except for the rustle of the vellum and a few footfalls tapping on the floor, the silence is all-encompassing. But all at once, I thought I heard something high and clear, just at the edge of range. "I don't believe it," I said to myself. "There's the boys' choir."

I turned my eyes back to the manuscript and forgot the choir, but at nine, when I left my work for the night and walked out into the Bodleian courtyard, I could hear it again. The voices reflected, odd and faint, off the stone walls of university buildings. I couldn't tell where the music was coming from. I followed the voices in circles until I was standing outside a theatre in the Bodleian's shadow, where there seemed to be a rehearsal going on.

There I stood, on that chilly February night, in a shadowy courtyard lit by yellow lamplight. There were no other human beings in sight. The choir sang high and low, in interweaving polyphonies, and I couldn't tell what they were singing, but to this day I'm sure it was something holy. No one could sing like that without singing hallelujah.

A.J., as the people commenting after you have implied, I don't think it's about the actual text of the bill -- to which I'm sure McCain has nothing particularly useful to add, and about which he knows very little -- so much as it's about the political theater involved in the bailout vote. McCain's participation may legitimize Republican congressmen, however. Or, as John L suggested, maybe McCain is a day late and a trillion dollars short.

(Also, hi, A.J.! *waves*)

Tracey, can you manage to do all the verses in one breath? That's more athleticism than I'm capable of after four cups of wine.

Avedaggio, this is why textual criticism is fun. I'm no Bible scholar (my work tends to the medieval), but I love finding odd changes from text to text.

Once I took a class with a textual critic who was, at that time, editing the Satyricon of Petronius. He told us how he absolutely horrified the librarians at Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale by bursting out into loud laughter in the manuscripts room. Apparently, in a section where most manuscripts of the Satyricon read "with many pens" (or something like that), the BN manuscript read, "with his penis in his hands." (I wish I could remember the Latin, but I do remember that there were only one or two letters different between the one reading and the other.) The Satyricon being what it is, this was a peculiarly appropriate misreading.

As skeptical as I am about McCain's choices lately, and despite what I said above, I have to say that Hot Air quotes an interesting argument from CBS here.

The suggestion is that McCain did actually have to go back to Washington, because if he didn't, the Republicans would cut and run from the bailout plan. Their constituents hate the bailout, so the Republicans are terrified that they'll get voted out for supporting it -- but meanwhile, Paulson and Bush are telling them that they have to support the bailout or the economy will melt into a pool of smoking magma. Bush, as a lame duck with a stratospheric disapproval rating (oh, the mixed metaphors! Sorry!), can't help convince the GOP House to vote for the bailout, so McCain's the only nearly-powerful Republican leader in sight.

Even so, I have to agree with Obama that there are shiny planes that can take McCain from Washington to Mississippi long enough to attend a debate!

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