re 207: I just tried that recipe (half-batch). I had to make do with canned broth, and it came out a bit too salty with the added salt in the recipe. It also came out a bit bland (or maybe too subtle) for my taste, a little too close to potato soup. OTOH the texture is superb.
re 124: I was on Keppra once, for about a week. I couldn't get up to the full dosage because it made me into a zombie. I also ended up having trouble with Dilantin, but it wasn't so abrupt. There are a bunch of different anticonvulsants so they should at least try others if there are big problems with grogginess.
It's the plowing that's the problem: Yoknapatawpha County could contain Ole Miss, but if there there was ever much interaction between SR 1401 and dead mules it was most likely at grade crossings. Maybe dead mule punk involves mechanical mules with exploded boilers.
re 189: I'm kind of dubious about dead mule punk. I suppose you could have one in the Birmingham steel mills or at Spencer Shops, but somehow the mule being hit by a truck or a train (or maybe dying of heat prostration by the blast furnaces) doesn't have the same magnolia-scented je ne sais quoi.
My lame theory is that the presence of a mule (as opposed to some other beast of burden) is some warped reference to the mythology of southern inbreeding.
re 58: What's more, Lewis recognized this himself, WRT The Pilgrim's Regress. The book now comes with a preface which in which he apologizes for one section in the middle of the book where (he says) he lost his temper. It's easy enough to recognize the passage, though ironically as has typically been the case of late, caricature was belied by reality in the latter's fulfillment rather than in the former's exaggeration. It's not as crass as Yangs and Coms, though.
re 143: Script Ohio in action, for those who are curious
re 174: There are some strings for groups such as (I paraphrase) "the president's own string quartet"-- I know a fellow who played violin in the latter. And there are string basses in the jazz bands. But I have to agree that the number of cellists has to be pretty small.
I very distinctly remember learning to read, at about age four. My parents used a whole word method that involved words written (in bright red nail polish, as it happened) on large cards. I quite clearly remember sitting at the foot of my parents' bed with my mother, reading those cards.
re 199: Another possibility is that the larger the store is, the more statistical distribution of clerks gets you. It's a lot easier for them to group in one place and ignore the rest of the store (accidentally or on purpose).
Here's my top "getting ignored" story, but it's dining rather than retail: there's a rather nice Indian restaurant near here which like most of them runs a buffet in the lunch hour. We were there on a Sunday afternoon after church, and we ordered off the menu because I wanted malai kofta and they didn't have it on the buffet that day. Well. They waited on us hand and foot while we ate, and then we didn't see them anymore. Eventually we realized that there was noboy in the restaurant except us and waiters, who were up around the corner by the entrance and the buffet. They had apparently simply forgotten that we were there. So after an indecently long interval I went up and asked them if we could please have our bill, and while I was there, I picked up one of the customer comment cards. Not long after, we received an abashed letter from the owner apologizing for our treatment and offering us a free lunch at the buffet in recompense. I was ever so delighted, when we returned to take advantage of this offer, that we were greeted by the exact same set of waiters.
However, I never set a napkin on fire to attract the waiter. That was someone else I knew.
The thing is that in that Ace or Tru-Value or other local mom-and-pop franchise or single store, Mom or Pop is out there on the sales floor; and if the store is going to survive, when some clerk is ignoring people Mom or Pop is going to lead that clerk into a back room and give them a tongue-lashing. If they don't do that, the store closes in no time. In a chain, with all the responsibility delegating, its really a crapshoot whether the local store manager is going to care enough about his/her store to be the Mom-or-Pop-style enforcer.
re 102: Well, I'm thinking of DC, where what people would have done was stay in their cars. That's what happened in the days when the machines began to age and became unreliable; I suppose that means in this area we keep our baboons in the zoo. But the point in either case is that keeping that ridership up was at the forefront the minds of those running the systems.
re 66: Paula, I actually would like the idea of self-checkout; a lot of times when I have one object it would be nice to just wave it at a machine, feed it some money, and leave. The problem I have in practice is that the only positive design consideration appears to have been "getting rid of checkers so as to save money". The other two design considerations seem to have been "cater to first-time morons" and "assume that everyone is there to shoplift." Therefore they treat you as if you have never seen a barcode scanner in your life and fight any attempts you make to proceed as if you weren't clueless. The handheld scanner paradigm might replace them were it not for the problem that you have to commit to using it when you step in the door, so it doesn't help the "hmm, line is too slow, so I'll check it myself" problem.
re 63: One of the things that's different is that, as a rule a lot of human factors work went into making the subway ticketing work well. I can tell right off the bat that this wasn't done for any of the self-checkouts I've ever tried to use.
Home Depot's business model, at least on the retail floor, long predates it: Old Washingtonians like myself will remember them from the 1960s if not earlier. A typical Hechinger store was pretty much like a typical Home Depot, except not as large. And they had most of the same problems: lackluster service, poor shelf labelling, the works. They were killed off by Home Depot because (a) HD stores were a lot bigger, and thus had more selection, (b) HD came in with a ton of money and shiny newness, whereas Hechinger, while it wasn't hurting at first, didn't have the kind of resources to make its stores as shiny, and (c) most importantly, Hechinger had already picked up the kind of rep that HD has now: lost of stuff, but understaffed and with people who didn't know what they're doing anyway. It's not hard to be invisible at these places, and being seen often doesn't help. As a rule, if I need something where I'm going to need some assistance, I save myself some aggravation and head to one of the local hardware places, where I know that as soon as I come in the door someone is going to say, "can I help you?"
Modulo the stupid sexism, this is the big box experience. I have just suddenly remembered our attempt at buying a TV at Best Buy. We had picked out a model, and we just needed to get someone to pick it off the rack for us. We couldn't find anyone. Eventually we gave up and dashed across town to Belmont TV (two locations to serve you; the other one in Glenmont is an early '60s retail time capsule), where the guy let us in at 10 minutes to closing. We'd been there before, but weren't ready to buy just then (We had to deal with some furniture issues which were a whole 'nother retail travail in themselves); but he had given us some useful advice. Seven minutes or so later, we had one we liked and were out the door.
Julia, it's amazing to me how little interest so many places have in actually selling me something. I go to the local Safeway, and they are extremely aggressive about getting people through checkout; if lines start to build up at all, they start calling in the reinforcements, and the manager himself will staff a register if need be. Contrast that with the Giant which is unfortunately the only place that works out for stopping on the way to the office: they just don't seem to get that at 8 AM my objective has to be to get in and out as fast as possible. It shouldn't be a big deal to open another register, but they are terribly sluggish about doing so. And then they have those self-checkout things (which I've seen at HD too) which are beneath loathsome: they are designed to be used only by stupid people who have never seen such a thing before, and they fight any attempt to speed them up. I categorically refuse to use them.
Lee, I haven't finished the article yet (I keep getting interrupted), but so far it tallies exactly with the thinking of the office hard cases. Thanks for finding it.
594/598: I'm having a really hard time translating the almost insane opposition to healthcare reform into "white privilege". Perhaps the similar if less intense craziness when the Clintons pushed it has been forgotten.
And the thing is, the opposition, metaphorically, is to Sweden, whose males, I am told, are mostly heterosexual and almost entirely (literally) Nordic white. There is definitely a very strong xenophobic element to the birther-etc. faction, but the foreign that they oppose is Western Europe.
One side note of the article is that, if anything, the ideological opposition to Obama is even crazier than whatever racially-motivated opposition exists. Obama is, at least, black; but he is no Swedish (much less Soviet)-style socialist.
Folks, I'm not arguing Dobson's parenting theories, pro or con. I'm not arguing ANY person's parenting theories. If you want to discuss it among yourselves, count me out.
re 426: When you that I am reading "connotationally rather than definitionally", you are correct. And in decoding a piece of political writing, that's the way to do it. Indeed, that's pretty much the point. In all the talk about memes and dog-whistles and every other kind of rhetoric, the thing they all have in common is a reliance on anything but the denotational sense of the text. Political rhetoric is routinely emotionalized to the point where we look for hidden emotional appeals when they are not apparent on the surface; analysis of Rethuglicrap rhetoric here routinely relies on that kind of analysis, and nobody thinks that there is anything wrong with that, not even I.
Meanwhile, Lee and Xopher, I see I have looked in the wrong book, and now I have read the passage in question. I think we're just going to have to differ on the monstrosity of Dobson.
re 420: Lee, I've gone back and looked at that thread, and at the reference therein. If you search on a phrase from the supposed quotation, it only hits that article and other references to it, but not on the book itself; it doesn't hit in Google Books, for example. Searching in the latter for "Sigmund" does return another reference to the dog, but not to the passage in question; I don't know whether that's because the GB version is incomplete or because the quotation is spurious. Searching the current edition doesn't find the dog at all. Of course, there is no page number or anything like that in the accusatory article, so even if I do find the correct edition (and the local libraries all only have the 1993 revised edition) it's going to take some time to find the passage. But neither my wife nor I remembers that story from reading the book. And while our memories of something we certainly haven't read in fifteen years could be faulty, it is also possible that the anecdote could have been embedded in a larger narrative about how stupid it was to get in a fight with a dachshund over sitting on the toilet. See, I don't trust the source. We can resume this when I have located the book and verified the passage. But it's not going to be pretty if I find that this story was just made up, or that it has been grossly misrepresented.
Lee, I have no desire to engage you on your authority-driven denunciation of Dobson's advice; it's not my purpose here to get into arguments about child rearing. Whether or not I agree with you that hitting a child with an object is BEATING, it seems to me that the rhetoric to which I objected is relying upon a different definition. The phrase "beating into submission" brings to my mind an image of a man standing over a cringing child and striking him over and over with a cane or baseball bat or whatever weapon. I have every confidence that I see the exact image that the writer intended, and I have every confidence that Dobson intended no such thing. I can accept your rejection of beating as you define it, and it doesn't affect my original complaint one iota. The point of that rhetoric was to tag Dobson as a monster, not as someone giving out bad and outdated advice.
re the various Dobson detractors, and particular Xopher's reply in 382: Saying "beating children is beating children" is saying that there's no difference between someone who hits their child with a hairbrush once and one who cripples or kills their child in the course of a single or series of episodes. Of course, that isn't true. Degree isn't unimportant here. The phrase "beating children into submission", at least when I read it, gives an impression of extreme acts. I'll have to dissent that Dobson intended that, even if other people used what he said as an excuse for that kind of treatment.
Likewise, there is a difference between saying that one doesn't agree with Dobson's (however limited) approval of corporal punishment and the kind of rhetoric to which I objected. The problem seems to be that merely identifying him as someone who is against the mainstream on this issue isn't strong enough language-- probably because the eschewing of CP among the populace isn't so complete as to make that identification sufficiently damning.
re 355: Lee, if you're going to announce that you aren't going to be reasoned with, I'm not going to try, one way or the other. It just saves time. Personally I don't think it's worth the effort to hate one person so energetically.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 338 |
| 2008 | 330 |
| 2007 | 338 |
| 2006 | 4 |
| 2005 | 1 |
Total: 1011 comments. View all these comments on a single page. (May take quite a while to load.)
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by C. Wingate:
Show all comments by C. Wingate.