The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jackie L.:

My favorite typo was on the front page of the local Riverside, CA newspaper. They were doing a series on dealing with the recession (I forget just which one exactly).

The sub-headline ran: Read how Bob Smith's entire life changed for the better after he got laid.

They forgot the "off."

@Wesley #12

In one sense, the old lady from North Carolina (this is being typed by an old lady from Colorado, by the way) is correct. I think that the need to fear terrorists is, at the very least, overstated.

I am sick and tired of America looking under the bed every night for terrorists.*

The America I grew up in was the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Not the home of the wuss and the heavily wire-tapped.

Poor segue into second topic: as a physician (disclaimer: lifelong registered Democrat), I believe that health care is a right, not a privilege. I have had the incredible fun of telling people because they were poor and uninsured they had to go home and die. The majority of them would have died even with health care, but not all. And this was when I worked at a county hospital.

If Obamacare can fix that, I am all for it, whatever it takes.


*I will admit that the arrest of an alleged terrorist living about a mile and a half from my home gave me a moment's pause. Fortunately, it appears he flunked bomb making school in Pakistan. So I am not looking under my own bed for terrorists, yet.

Um, too lazy to come up with another name to use.

My dad was a drunk. He would be highly offended to be referred to as an alcoholic. He was my "good" parent.

My mother was schizophrenic. Auditory hallucinations, delusions, the whole nine yards.

When I was a child, I used to pray I'd been adopted. When I was a teen, I realized no one in or out of their right minds would give these people one much less three children to raise.

When I finally grew up (years after I should have, really), I realized something that I find wonderfully freeing.

My parents did the best they could. The very best they were capable of. Ok, their best sucked so immensely, it's hard to describe. But all I can ask of people is that they do their best. And my parents did their best, given all of their own problems.

I am grateful that my parents did their best, I have largely forgiven them for my awful childhood, I still love my dad. My mother is dead and I still miss her.

And I can appreciate all the skills I developed as a child to deal with them, skills I still need and use today in my career.

I feel at peace, most of the time.

(Years of therapy helped a lot, too.)

Thanks, Kelly @655, for elucidating for me why this bothered me so much. As a democrat (and a, well, Democrat), I don't see appealing to a lot of people as bad. The 500 number came from some scholarly type going after romance writers. His book had only sold 500 copies. He said it was because there were only 500 people in America capable of understanding him.

He also attacked SF/F and murder mysteries, thereby insulting 99% of my current reading.

(In my own defense, I did major in lit in undergrad, so I read almost all of the books you guys have mentioned at one point or another.)

Sorry again for the wrong thread. In Romanceland, we are not as organized as other people.

Uh, oh, wrong thread. Mega fail.

I have a question that has bothered me for quite awhile. And you guys are all very clever, so I am hoping for input. If dull, ignore. If inappropriate, please delete rather than disemvowel.

I don't understand why being able to create something that is wildly popular is bad or wrong. My undergrad degree is in lit, but I confess that 99 percent of my reading now is in genre fiction. (Well, pleasure reading. The tomes I read for work are beyond describing.) It seems to me that there is a certain set of skills and knowledge required to write a mega best seller. The subset of skills may be very different from the skills required to write a book so complex and convoluted that only 500 people in all of America can comprehend the meaning, but aren't they still skills?

I heard a piece on This American Life where 2 New Yorkers were putting down the song Kokomo. They said the Beach Boys knew exactly what pap would appeal to the masses and they wrote it up. The song was a mega hit. The sneer in their voice was amazing. I think they were studying music crit or something.

But why is being able to appeal to a lot of people fluff or evil or something? And why is excluding the whole vast continent of the country because of your erudition such a wondrous thing?

I think Nora Roberts (for instance) must know a lot about how to appeal to women since she's sold 150 bajillion books. Why is that immoral?

Heinlein writing all of his books, some of them still on my keeper shelf for 40 years, had to have talent to appeal to such a broad range of people. I don't get why certain people think that it's cool to sneer at genre lit.

(And if you think SF/F gets bad press, try being a romance fan.)

I see having the ability to create something that a whole bunch of people derive enjoyment from as a bonus, not a negative. Why is genre literature discussed in the same tone of voice as professional wrestling? Leftover from medieval times when the vast unwashed really were unwashed? Any thoughts?

@ Earl Cooley #92

I treated a young girl for a fractured arm. One of the jocks at Columbine had thrown her into a fountain. (I think, but am not certain, that the fountain was there to commemorate the Columbine victims.) So even at Columbine, ground zero for Colorado if you will, there has not been significant improvement in the bullying culture. The incident occurred about 4 years after Columbine and my patient's account of the attack was substantiated by a police report she brought with her (for what that's worth).

One tactic I found useful in bullying was to confront both the bully and the victim. I told the bully that if she didn't stop being so mean, she would never have any friends. I told the victim that it was her job to help the bully by telling her to stop being a jerk. Then I assigned two other girls to intervene and protect the victim. I gave the victim a safe place to go. And the bully had to confront three little girls instead of one.

'Course this may only have been effective because it occurred during my brief tenure as a Brownie Scout leader and the girls were only six.

Try having California plates during the great migration from California and returning home to Colorado on vacation. Ah, the hilarity of a Coloradan trying to push our car over the cliff and down the mountainside. Fortunately, we're native Coloradans and know how to stay on the road, but still not without entertainment value.

We stopped for lunch in a small town one time and they wouldn't even approach the booth until they saw my T-shirt about Toponas and Parschall (tiny towns in Colorado, in those days having each about 10 residents.)

And the really funny thing is the Coloradans who HATE Californians moving to Colorado are usually Californians who moved here just a few years earlier.

If this is incoherent, I apologize, having a terrible Monday at work. End of break.

@James D. Macdonald, #134.

Tancredo always won my district by a landslide. Glad to see New Hampshire has more sense than my neighbors.

That twit Tancredo used to be my representative. He has been replaced by the oh-so-creepy Coffman who tried (unsuccessfully--not the brightest Crayola around) to dis-enfranchise thousands of Coloradans once it became clear we were gonna vote for Obama.

A few of you have alluded to what I think is the truth behind Bay and Tom's indignation. They don't see Epstein's behavior as aberrant. At all. For them, this is not a problem. He did nothing wrong! They think that Epstein is entitled to punch a mere women and use the N word freely. They think it's okay. Perfectly acceptable behavior.

Having the excuse that Epstein was drunk--well, there you go. By their barometers, those of us who would judge him are morally wrong.

Racists believe in their own superiority so deeply, that they cannot imagine anyone questioning the inferiority of what they see as lesser beings.

Inigo Montoya is quoted a lot at this site--so I will refrain from doing so again. But they have no clue why anyone would object to Mr. Epstein's behavior in the first place.

The thing that bothered me the most about the movie was having an actor who could actually act playing Kirk. That's just wrong.

I had a patient come into the ER with a fractured ulna (so-called nightstick fracture). I asked him who hit him and with what. His wife, a baseball bat. But he said he deserved it, because he killed his baby. (And I'm thinking, here's my night going down the toilet. . .)

So I say, "You killed the baby." Seems he put the baby in the car seat on top of his pickup and forgot to put the baby in the truck. Then he drove away at 65 miles an hour.

He got home, his wife went to get the baby out of the truck and no baby. So he says, "Oh, God, I left the baby on the roof of the cab when I drove away." Wife grabs baseball bat out of the truck, breaks his arm.

So I ask if either of them thought about going to look for the baby. Apparently never occurred to either of them.

About 20 minutes later I get a call from the CHP that they found an uninjured abandoned baby in a car seat on the side of the highway. CHP brought the baby in, not a mark on him, skeletal survey (because of the DV against the dad) was negative for any trauma.

But I still called Child Protective Services on the family because stupidity is not a defense. Not just leaving the kid on the roof, but the baseball bat, not retracing his route to see how the baby made out, etc. . .

Which is one of the reasons why I no longer work ER.

From your mouth to ignorant parents' ears.

I took care of a non-immunized 15 year-old with tetanus. He survived after 6 months in the ICU. I remember yelling around the ER, to see if anybody had ever done an emergency tracheostomy. The kiddo's dad was a chiropractor who scorned traditional medicine.

Of course, traditional medicine wound up saving his son's life.

IMMUNIZE. Don't ever shade your eyes.

I've seen Pete in concert with Arlo Guthrie a couple of times. I suppose, though, Arlo* would have been a bit much even for Obama.

I am so happy and excited about this election.


*Even though his dad did write the song.

Kinda boring even for Princeton.

#74 Alan,

When I see the exaggerated tics and barely (or poorly, take your pick) concealed anger of someone aspiring to be the POTUS, I am very concerned. One (okay, maybe two or three) demented presidents--enough, already. You see human playfulness and I see at least a few non-functioning neural synapses.

I've been thinking the Repubs know McCain is ill and picked Palin to be the next Charlie McCarthy to perform with Cheney-Rove (thereby allowing them another 8 years as puppetmasters, just like they did with the Shrub).

Petty here, but I was listening to the debate on NPR and I wish McCain had invested in a more effective brand of denture cement. The wind whistling through what sounds to be his dentures was annoying as all h*ll.

Colorado College (in Colorado Springs) is pretty much a bastion of conservatism. IIRC, Darth Cheney's daughter was a student there. So, typically, this bureaucrat might well be shooting his own party in the foot by preventing conservative student voters from registering.

Most of the rest of the state doesn't have high expectations of Colorado Springs. Takes a lot to surprise us if it's coming out of the Springs.

One tiny omission in the McCain's medical record. The depth of his most recent melanoma makes it Stage IIb, which decreases survival to 75%. Another omission is the lack of mention of the Clark's level, which is usually more used for prognostication.

I am also concerned that misstatements reportedly made by McCain are more worrisome than simple senior moments. Sunni/Shiite, Iran/Iraq substitutions might be inattention, but thinking that Spain is in Latin America is a bit more of a concern. I wish that his medical records had included a report of an MRI of the brain* and the results of a mental status exam.

I wouldn't certify that a 72-year-old man could drive a truck safely without a short portable mental status exam. I would hope Dr. Eckerd didn't attest to Mr. McCain's medical health without evaluating his mental status.


*The lack of a brain MRI is surprising, since the brain is a site of predilection for spread of melanoma. However, I doubt that any 72 year old would have a stone cold normal MRI of the brain, so the results might have been withheld to avoid having to explain that fact.

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