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

Were the books covered in velvet the books that Elizabeth actually read? Or was the velvet library primarily for public display?

And on using human skin as a bookbinding material... There is a museum in my home town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk that contains various items related to William Corder, who was hanged for the murder of his lover in 1828. One of the exhibits is a copy of the printed account of the case, bound with Corder's skin.

Mmm, there was stuff I'd somehow managed to miss too. Like, there are people who still wear dresses?

Happy new year, y'all. Only 21 minutes to go here.

I always thought it was simple:

If you can get out of bed, it's a cold.

If you can't, it's flu.

If you made it to work, you definitely didn't have flu. (But WTF were you doing coming into work if you even thought you might have flu?)

Also, every time I go to type 'flu', I actually type 'flue' and have to delete the superfluous 'e'. Why is this?

Thanks for the link. Raphael, the extra info made it all worthwhile!

Perhaps I'll have to try mainlining coffee and alcohol tomorrow night...

I'm with LauraJMixon on the excitement vs fear - have you *seen* the polling data on RCP and fivethirtyeight? - but it's still a bit nervewracking until it's all over.

What time do the results actually start to come in? Approximate is fine and I can do the conversion to GMT, but I need to work out whether to stay up all night or get a few hours sleep before joining in the fun.

(This is the first time I've ever even contemplated staying/getting up for an American election. There are going to be huge numbers of people tuning into this worldwide...)

Oh god yeah, I'm right with you Teresa. I spent 5 days in hospital at the end of July. By day four I was going absolutely Batshit Crazy. It didn't help that I felt absolutely fine after the first day, but I had to wait for a scan to find out what the problem was. (My bad luck that it was the weekend and I wasn't an emergency case, so I had to wait till Monday. And then on Monday one of the scanners broke down. Sorry, emergency cases only. AARGGGGH.)

So, here's hoping you're out already! It will feel so sweeeeet. And like everyone says, look after yourself.

All the Buchanan arguments are domestic. If you're in the vast majority of the world that's not the USA, Bush wins hands down.

1 'Roun dis tiyem, Caesar Augustus wuz like, "I can has cenzus?"2 ('Coz while Quirinius was Teh Boz of Syria, is invisible census!)3 And all teh doodz went home for teh saying, "I is heer!"4 So Joseph went from Naz'reth to Judeeah to Bethlehemm whar David wuz bornededed, 'coz David wuz hiz graete-graete gran-daddie,5 An Mary went wif him, 'coz she was gonna be married wif him an she was preggerz.6 When wuz time for teh baybee,7 it wuz a boy, so he wuz wrapd in blanket like burrito an placd him in fud dish, cuz innkeeper wuz liek, no room here kthxbye!
8 Then there wuz sheep-doods in teh field, an they wuz watchin teh sheep in teh dark. Iz vry vry boring. srsly.9 An suddenly, visible angel! An glory! O noez!!10 But teh angel sed, "is ok, you can has gud news for all teh doodz!11 Todai in da city ov David, you can has sayvur! is Christ da Lord! w00t!12 Is sign fer u, find da baybee wrapd like brrito in a big fud dish."13 An suddenly, moar angelz! They sez, 14 "w00t to teh Ceiling Cat! An peace fer doodz he luffs! Kthxbai."

(Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

I think you'll find even more Kitchmasness here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.shipoffools.com/Gadgets/Kitschmas/index.html

Kathryn @ 38: Searching for 'pepitas' turns up some very yummy looking concoctions! Thank you!

May I call on the ML collective wisdom?

Last night I roasted a pumpkin, which will get whizzed up tonight for soup. No problem. But then there are the seeds, which I don't normally do anything with (being both British and clueless), but would like to try. I've cleaned them and let them dry. I know that Americans are the experts with these things, so do people here have some favourite recipe suggestions? I'd quite like recipes that *don't* involve using the oven (because I don't like turning the oven on to do just one thing and don't have any other oven plans for the next couple of days). And having cooked them, do people do anything with them apart from just eating them on their own as snacks? Any advice will be gratefully received!

I wonder how many of the "never read this!" recommendations are for actual factual errors, and how many are because the commenter dislikes the book's writer, or the subject matter, or the writer's take on the subject matter.

Firstly, I thought this was more a 'Don't trust this!' rather than 'Don't read this!' sort of conversation. Secondly, it isn't always simply about factual errors. In history, the primary sources provide the basic facts. But what a historian thinks they mean can turn out to be utterly wrong. For example, because there were many, many other sources that the historian didn't use, the few that s/he did use turn out to be isolated and misleading. Those facts still stand, but the interpretation the historian once drew from them becomes untenable.

This sort of links to the point about those books with a lot of ibids in the endnotes. A string of ibids is nearly always a bad thing because it means that the author is stringing together an extended discussion using just one source.* (You often find the same phenomenon in mediocre student essays.) It doesn't matter how good that source (primary or secondary) is, any substantial argument that rests on a single source is a very fragile construction. And a book constructed on a whole series of them is highly likely to be a bad book.

* Alternatively, the author and his or her editor don't understand a basic convention of academic footnoting (grouping together multiple references in one note). This is not a terrible offence, but it wouldn't fill me with huge confidence about the general academic standards of the book, somehow.

Just about any supposedly scholarly book entitled [Subject X] in Shakespeare's England should be approached with extreme caution. Completely meaningless periodisation.

GM Trevelyan, English Social History.

Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (or so I'm told by historians who should know)

Or should that be 'queuing'? Either looks very weird to me today.

FWIW, Brits would usually say 'queueing'.

This thread is, of course, the dog's bollocks.

Julia @ 35: Me too. Sigh.

(On the other hand, it's fun the way that pop culture now is continually referencing stuff from my childhood, because it's made by people my age.)

Ethan, you need the anchor tag. I'm not sure how helpful this tutorial is but if it doesn't work for you at least it'll give the key words you need for googling ('name' and 'href', basically).

gmdexter: Have you checked out the Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine)?

You see, stuff doesn't disappear from the Internet that easily. The WM isn't perfect, but it catches almost everything that's been online for more than a few months (unless access was restricted in the first place). At least, it's always worth a try. The main limitation is that there's no keyword search; you have to have a record of the URL of the site/page. (And if need be, you can always use the WM to find an old version of any sites that used to link to it and get the URL that way.)

http://www.archive.org/

And then there's Cecil Parkinson, David Mellor (eewwww), Ron Davies, Mark Oaten...

But the Currie/Major affair came out way too late to be a scandal. A lot of jaws dropped, but it was just funny. In British politics it's only a real scandal if someone resigns.

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