I think somewhere between Paula and Alan's list we could put together the ideal list in response:
- Being There
- Dr. Strangelove
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- The Russians Are Coming!
- ...
Tim Walters: Neat! I just sent the URLs to my daughter; I think she's done some composition with Supercollider.
oh gosh, oh gosh. sending them both good white light.
Lila: Nice links; I notice the first one contains a primordial lolcat. (Eclectric Oil? Now there's an unusual portmanteau if I ever heard one.)
Angiportus @ #495: Xeger, Bruce, TexAnne et al: I'm still trying to visualize the look on the meter-person's face--and hope they will be too busy wondering what that thing is, to inflict a ticket.
It was unfortunate* that you posted this comment directly after the introduction of dragon/car slash to the thread.
In that context, it took me quite a while to recall the trebuchet parking discussion.
[*] Or a stroke of luck. So to speak.
Definitely generic comment spam.
I understand what Jo's getting at, though I'm not a writer and not sure I could put it into words if I were.
To have a different stab at it, if the world in the book isn't a real world and if the people in it aren't real people doing real things and if the story that's happening in it isn't the real story - then it turns into by-the-numbers allegory not rich metaphor. (That doesn't preclude people liking it, of course.) It has to be living and rich on its own before it can stand in for anything in the real world.
That's the thing that saves Narnia from being an unsubtle and now-forgotten allegory - C. S. Lewis couldn't help writing the characters in it as real people with their real worries and quirks, and the world of Narnia as real on its own, not just a symbol, and the stories themselves matter. That breathes life into it.
Going back to Orwell, nobody's mentioned that 1984 was specifically intended as 1948? He mentioned somewhere that he just swapped the digits of the year.
Another UK metal-detector find of 4 gold torcs in Scotland - nowhere near as big as the Staffordshire find discussed here, but the piece pictured is stunning:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8342501.stm
Seen elsewhere, in re the flu vaccine:
"It's a giant conspiracy by the medical industry to keep you alive for as long as possible so they can make money treating you. Dead people don't get sick." (Seebs)
ajay:
I had to look at it twice. In the video, they're demoing each of their 4 models, with very brief cuts in between; each one book has 2 covers, not 3 or 4, or an infinite number of covers.
The infinite number of covers will be available in their Borges model, out next year. (However, all the pages will have only a single side, making it impossible to read back-to-front or turn back to an already read page, much like life.)
Summer Storms: Oh, that! I should have thought to mention that. That is the main annoyance with Vista. You can't even run much of Microsoft's own development software, like Visual Studio, without having to run it as administrator every time. (And you still can't, after it's been out a couple years. Pretty amazing.) If something important won't run on Vista, especially something "techie", then Run as administrator is one of the next things I try.
Diatryma:
That used to be easier in those bygone days when everybody connected to the 'net via dial-up modem, because fax was a subset of the standard modem capabilities, and of course you had a modem. Eventually Windows got around to supporting fax via your modem as a sort of pseudo-printer device. However, that does little good for those on the 'net via Ethernet, cable, DSL, or the neighbor's or coffee-shop wifi. There are some services which let you send faxes via the 'net; however, the simplest course might be just to buy a modem for your computer.
The boy decided to be an alien this year; mom, with very slight assistance from me, worked out how he could turn into a four-armed orange alien. (Second long-sleeved shirt with arms and gloves stuffed with rags, and with holes cut for his arms to come out underneath.) He is thrilled and looking forward to trick-or-treating. We'll be doing the mall trick-or-treating thing because nobody ever goes around our neighborhood.
In the meantime he's offered to teach us both alien language and alien writing. He invented a Martian alphabet earlier this year; not sure if this will be the same or different.
B. Durbin: The Kaiser healthcare system in Hawaii (and California, I think) works pretty much exactly like that. Some like it, some don't.
abi: We don't say Aa, Eh, Ih, Awe and Uh. We say Ey, Ee, Eye, Owe and Ewe...
With our child, we treated that as a learning opportunity for explaining how the silent 'e' works (as in mane, time, home.) "The 'e' makes the vowel say its name."
Xeger: A fishing supply store should have lead weights; I found some there when I needed them for a project, I no longer remember what.
Open-thready:
A funny Holmes pastiche on the theme of the famous phrase he never said: A Lame Entry
Carol @ 868:
I can hear that too, but I can't place it either! Pretty sure it's not Firesign though; not sure about Congress of Wonders. Maybe Cheech & Chong?
I am not in the least surprised how many regulars here started reading early and are natural speed readers.
I was reading books by age 3; there's a picture of me at that age, sitting at a table intent on a book. (I can remember that book, too.) Fortunately my parents let me read basically anything which interested me, without trying to mandate what level was appropriate, and when I was in 5th or 6th grade they signed for me to get an adult library card at the city library. In junior high school, the school had everyone do a brief speed reading class for a couple weeks as part of English; I discovered that I was already reading a couple thousand words per minute, much faster than the top speed they claimed you could get to.
My daughter read her first words at the age of 2-something; while visiting Portland, she pointed to a sign in a restaurant where we'd never been and said "That says Exit Only". That was the only thing she could read for a while, but she still started reading fluently around 3, and by 4 or 5 she wouldn't let us read stories to her any more because it was too slow. My son is also an early reader but has been a year or two behind that, and liked being read to occasionally for longer. I think in terms of personality he isn't drawn to a challenge as much as she is.
Oh yeah, stores and invisibility:
A business needs to regularly teach and train its staff to recognize, acknowledge, and provide good service to any and every potential customer; it is not hard to do so. It is sad that that takes conscious attention, but it does. My company did that, and that's one of the reasons we were successful and outlived most of our competition. *
If a business does not train its staff that way, then it is sending a message that customers are not important and that it's not important to treat everyone equally. It will leave it up to a combination of the individuals' natural inclination and the social culture that they belong to. Since the latter is pretty toxic in many places, that's how you get things like this.
In chains or franchises, if the corporate management doesn't set and focus on the attitude to customers, the level will float up or down to the personal standards of the individual store manager. Clearly that's what's going on with Home Depot, and is why some stores - despite being understaffed - will have a reasonably good attitude from staff (like the one here and the one Matthew Brown describes above.)
As Dragoness Eclectic says, if the store manager cared, they would be counseling or firing the assistant manager and the other employees about their attitude; if the corporate management cared, they would be taking the same stance with the store management. It's clear that the Home Depot corporate management does not care, and does not grasp how that affects their bottom line. I would bet that there is currently tremendous variation in revenue between similarly situated Home Depot stores, that they don't understand it, and that if they started examining it they would find that the least profitable stores were those which treat Teresa et al. as she has described.
[*] In the computer industry, particularly technical support, the general subcultural climate is even more toxic and hostile to everyone, in that it positively encourages clever snarking on how dumb the public is. We had to really train our support staff on the attitude that everyone deserves sympathetic respect, regardless of how simple their problem may be, and keep a lookout for any rise of the "Bastard Operator from Hell" attitude, either in them or in ourselves.
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