Re: musicians playing old material
I just returned from a They Might Be Giants concert where, in stark contrast to Joni Mitchell, they played their 1990 album "Flood" in its entirety. In order. Plus about 10 other songs from more recent albums, before and after. It was glorious. That album was the soundtrack of my junior year in high school, but I hadn't heard it in full since I lost my original cassette about 10 years ago. Still, all of the songs came back to me immediately.
TMBG encourage sing-a-longs and audience participation, so maybe that's why they don't mind playing the classics (they've played "Birdhouse in Your Soul" every time I've seen them). But my favorite part of going to a live show is hearing new versions of songs that I loved on the albums - for instance, tonight the Giants added an extra verse to "Particle Man" and an extended guitar solo to "Istanbul". That will probably never show up on a record - it's something that can only happen live, and it helps keep things fresh for the audience and the artist.
My second day at college, I spotted a cute boy in the cafeteria and decided to introduce myself. Nothing happened with him, but the guy he was sitting next to became my best friend for the next 5 years.
For Christmas, my new best friend gives me a copy of "Understanding Comics." That leads me to Scott McCloud's website, which introduces me to the 24-hour-comic, which leads to me drawing a 24-hour-comic, which makes me realize that I want to make comics professionally.
Which leads to me being very poor.
(But happy, mostly, and a whole new set of friends)
"Your love for me is not debatable.
Your sexual appetite's insatiable.
You never ever make me wait-able,
Delectable, inflatable you!"
from Tim Minchin's Inflatable You.
I heard an interview with David Levy back when his book came out, and for a guy who'd written an entire book about sex with robots, he didn't seem to have thought much about its implications. Every exchange went something like this:
Q: In the future, could I get a robot that looks like my ex-girlfriend? Could pedophiles get sexbots that look like children? How about furries - could they get Thundercat-shaped 'bots?
A: Huh, I never thought of that.
While I was reading this thread, a man outside my apartment began screaming for the police, saying something about a gun. I've called 911, but I don't want to step outside until the cops arrive.
And the inverse of SeanH's n1:
o1: Trashy novels that you enjoy, but keep out of sight so visitors to your home do not learn of your fondness for vampire lesbians.
Teresa just posted a lengthy moderation policy over at BoingBoing, and the following comment made me laugh out loud:
"Longest post ever! Teresa Nielsen Hayden, is this really necessary? ... Me thinks you should just get your own website."
Xopher, I had the same reaction to Torchwood, and stopped watching halfway through the first season.
But I was lured back for Season Two, which I think has improved
immensely. It's not all happy endings, but there's more of a sense of
humor, and when people die it has some meaning behind it, not just the
universe being nasty. And episode 2, with James Marsters (Spike!) as
Jack's old partner (in every sense of the word) is just a fun show,
filled with sex, murder, and rollicking good times.
Kip W.: Come to think of it, though, I can only imagine what all the other Yama Yamas in the show are. And what the plot is, if there is one.
According to a June 16, 1908 review in the New York Times (PDF), it is a "merry and tuneful summer show" about three men who coincidentally look exactly alike (though one only does so because he is wearing a false mustache, in an attempt to evade an arranged marriage). The second man is engaged to a "laughing damsel," while the third is married to a "tearful woman" - presumably these are the "boo hoo tee hee" girls, respectively. Many cases of mistaken identity and wacky hijinks ensue.
I've got no idea who the Yama Yama girls are, though.
mayakda @ 145 Thank you for your reply. Do you have the text of the SC stump speech or a link to it?
Sorry about the delay - here is a link to the speech I found (a day later in New Hampshire, I believe) that uses the same phrasing (search for “JOINED IN PROGRESS†to skip CNN blather).
It's much more difficult than I thought to find the complete text of candidates' stump speeches. Chris Weigent of Huffington Post ran a few back in November, but apparently he's been the only journalist to even ask for a transcript. Here's the full text of another speech from November:
Barack Obama speech.
Mayakada: And I certainly can't vote for someone who says of himself:
“At some point in the evening, a light is going to shine down and you will have an epiphany and you’ll say, ‘I have to vote for Barack.’â€
This didn't look right to me, so I did a little digging. It was part of his stump speech, and it's missing the vital context of the preceding sentence:
"So I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak that by the time this is over, a light will shine down from somewhere..."
It seems clear that this language about lights from heaven and epiphanies is just humorous exaggeration. A paragraph later he asks for a show of hands from undecided voters, and tells them "We have you now in our sights. We are coming after you, and coming after you hard." No one would assume that he literally had guns trained on the audience, so why do they think he's literal about having a supernatural epiphany?
The rest of the speech is more toned-down, about how he hopes to "make a persuasive case" and ends with the fairly humble note: "But you know what? If you're not voting for me, vote for somebody."
It seems to me that the reason people emphasize Barack's charisma is because it's one of the few points that really distinguishes him from Sen. Clinton. They're both smart, competent, organized, and have good policy positions. If you start with the premise that they're both pretty good (as have most discussion I've heard), then of course Obama supporters are going to emphasize his charisma, just as Clinton supporters emphasize her experience.
Linkmeister @ 256... millions of disappointed Obama-supporters stay home on November 4
Serge: I doubt that Democrats and/or liberals would be that stupid.
No, but Obama is getting a lot of support from self-identified independents. They're the ones who might stay home.
I would have to see the site before proclaiming the pedestrian an idiot.
The article notes that the victim is "a resident in the care of Granite State Guardianship" - an organization that cares for the mentally ill.
I’ll be happy with either candidate, and I was still making up my mind on my way to the voting booth this morning. But distilled into its simplest form, what made up my mind is this:
I want Obama so he can lead and inspire a new direction for the country.
I want Hillary so she can fight the GOP tooth and nail.
And I think Hillary can lead that fight just as well – if not better - from the U.S. Senate, ideally as the Senate Majority Leader. She’ll have subpoenas and investigations and the legislative maneuvering she’s so good at.
Obama’s inspiring rhetoric won’t even be heard if he doesn’t have the bully pulpit to speak from - he’d just be another Senator
"It has no L."
h...i..j...k..._ ..m....n
No "L."
Oh, goddammit.
Well played, Mr. Macdonald. Well played.
Ginger @ 191: I was born in 1964 ... and I have a very clear memory of the Stonewall Riots.
Can you expand on that? I'd love to hear about the press coverage it got at the time.
In this thread, I've counted at least three different versions of how Winston Churchill prepared martinis, none of them the story I heard (that he would pour the gin, glance at a bottle of vermouth on the other side of the room, and stir).
So I wonder: are all these stories apocryphal? Is one accurate, and the rest false? Or did he do something different every time?
My drink of choice is the Sidecar - last popular in 1950 or so. Every bar has the ingredients - but few know how to make it.
#143: Fool on the Hill is about Cornell University; and, unless one went there, one misses a fair amount of the in-jokes.
I probably did miss some of the jokes, but Fool on the Hill was my Very Favorite Book for many years - so much that I went on a pilgrimage to Cornell so I could see all the sites described in it. I even broke into the Risley Dining Hall through an unlocked window so I could see the spot where the Messenger attacks S.T. George.
It's very exciting for me to see this discussion - I read Fool on the Hill in 1989, and this is the first time I've heard anyone else mention the book.
WWWWolf says: The biggest threat to it is that people don't always realise it's an encyclopaedia, with all that it entails - one of them being that it can't be all-inclusive.
Why not?
That's an honest question - I've never understood why Wikipedia has notability criteria at all. Isn't the advantage of an online resource that it doesn't have size restrictions? I doubt they're going to run out of server space any time soon.
If someone bothers to create an entry on something, that seems like proof that at least one person considers it notable. What's the advantage to deleting it?
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