The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Sylvia Li:

I have a brass good-luck necklace my husband's mother wore when she was a little girl. She never learned enough English nor I enough Chinese that we could have a conversation, but she always said I was her favourite daughter-in-law (I suppose because I never argued with her!).

A small green copy of "Daily Light on the Daily Path" is inscribed to my mother in March, 1933, when she was a teenager. In her grandmother's handwriting, it says, "In memory of a happy visit." When I was in grade seven, in a effort to improve my atrocious handwriting, my teacher required me to do a page of practice writing every single day. I copied texts out of this little book all year long. It didn't do much for my handwriting, I'm afraid, but it did fill my head with magnificent cadences: "O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee.---Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God.---Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness, make thy way straight before my face.---My times are in thy hands." I'm not a believer any more, but this little book is still a comfort.

Memories can be attached to the oddest things. There's a sturdy spring-loaded wooden toilet roll spindle in our bathroom now, black when it was new, but the paint has worn to show the wood underneath. The builder installed it when my parents' house was built in 1951, and it has seen uninterrupted duty ever since. It is still doing the job it was designed to do, humbly, competently, without any slippage or rattle or fuss like the cheap chrome bars sold today. It will outlast me -- and my grandchildren too, if someone doesn't carelessly throw it into a city dump.

I like all of these things because, well... I guess the common thread is: continuity.

Marilee #57: Apparently the indiscretion happened in 2006. Elizabeth Edwards has made a statement in a recommended diary on Daily Kos. People wanting to discuss the matter probably should read that first.

Scott #181: The US economy, by official figures, is growing, but slower than previously, and slower than anticipated. It's not healthy, and I'm certainly not interested in making huge frivolous purchases, but it's also not some creaking, doddering old fool that's about to pitch face-first into the grave.

The trouble with the US economy isn't its total size. As you note, that is still growing. The problem is with its internal structure. The wealth distribution mechanisms that created the American middle class have been subjected to a thousand cuts over the last thirty years, and they are now at the point of falling apart. Under the stresses that we can see coming, there are certainly going to be some catastrophic failures.

When you say it's not healthy, that's an understatement -- it is extremely sick. The metaphor can't be carried through to predict "death" mainly because economies don't die unless all the people do, and that's not going to happen. When economies change radically, though, lots of people aren't able to keep up.

Nicole #24: Like this one better than my own!

Joel #23: That just totally wins. Love it.

Okay, without reading anyone else's ideas, here's how I'd advise them to do it:

Curly McLain: Mal
Ado Annie Carnes: Kaylee
Will Parker: Simon
Aunt Eller Murphy: Zoë
Laurey Williams: Inara
Ali Hakim: Wash
Andrew Carnes: Book
Jud Fry: Jayne
Gertie Cummings: River

Some of it is typecasting (Kaylee, for instance!) and working with rather than against certain sexual tensions. But the question remains: how many of them can actually sing? And can Simon handle comedy?

Now I'm going to read what everyone else said...

What I’d really like to know is why the civilized world hasn’t stopped us. If this misbehavior of ours goes on much longer, they’re going to have to stop us for their own sake, not just out of abstract justice. Why not get started now?

I think, to a large extent, it's a question of which mouse is going to bell the cat. The US is too big, too rich, too belligerent, and far, far too well armed, for other countries to feel sanguine about "stopping" it.

That doesn't mean we wouldn't like to. It just means that no-one seems to be able to think of any practical way of doing it.

White ermine from Denmark. Gladiolus, because I just finished cutting some cream-and-orange glads to brighten the kitchen table -- and I like the name, and, oh yes, they're gorgeous.

And green-handled screwdriver.

Cabbage, corn, celery, cress, cucumber... just off the top of my head.

Psst! For those to whom this will mean something... billmon's back!

Re two spaces after a period: When I was editing a newspaper, I learned that double-spacing will create huge, ugly gaps in justified text, especially when said text is poured into narrow newspaper columns. With ragged-right it's maybe no more than a matter of taste, but fully justified? A definite typographic no-no. DO NOT WANT.

I not only had to teach myself never to do double spaces -- the first step in editing articles submitted to the paper by other contributors had to be repeatedly doing a global search and replace on double spaces until Word came up zero.

The only thing I ever used Emacs for was programming in PL/1, so jumping sentence by sentence wasn't anything I needed. But, I've got to say, depending on the use of period-space-space to find the ends of sentences sounds to me like a really frail reed. You're surely going to miss some occurrences that way. The search assumes your habit is ironclad and will remain reliable even after you have added or deleted clauses, or combined multiple sentences into one. And if someone else wrote the original text, you can't count on double spaces at all. Many people are simply inconsistent on this issue, typing one, two, three spaces or more, as the mood hits them.

Michael Roberts @117: In context, I took 'Indianan' to be an instance of synecdoche, and that 'sweet corn' means about the same in Indiana as it does in Saskatchewan -- i.e., not even slightly a generic catch-all term for grains.

Curiously enough, I just finished reading Barry Wilson's book How Jesus Became Christian, which is all about Paul, and the strange mismatch between the mystical revealed religion Paul did so much to establish, and that nice Jewish boy named Jesus.

I don't suppose it matters now, considering how much water has gone under that bridge, but Paul really invented a whole new religion which had very little to do with what Jesus had been preaching. (And Acts is not a reliable account of Paul's life, either.)

John Bunyan wrote a large number of books in prison, including The Pilgrim's Progress.

Wow. They're amazing. I was even more engaged by this one: Fly Me of the Handel

Xopher, guthrie, others: My two cents about crops and first frost. Despite a mostly Scots/Welsh set of genes, I know from nothing about Celts. But I did grow up in Western Canada where the growing season is short and frosts mean business.

So I've got to agree with Rozasharn -- the time for celebration isn't when the first frost hits, or even the first killing frost. (Depending on what kind of plants you're growing, those two dates may be weeks apart.) Rather, it's when you've at last done all you can do to gather and store your crops and preserve them for the winter. And that depends critically, not just on climate, but also on what crops you planted.

Most cereal crops will have their quality and yield reduced by an early frost, and the seeds might not germinate well the next year, but they'd still have to be harvested, so you wouldn't ever just throw your hands up and quit. Well... not if you were depending on that grain to get through the winter without starving, anyway. Even if the damage was very severe, it would still have to be cut for silage to be fed to livestock.

On the other hand, Xopher, if the cue for Samhain is "first frost + whatever time is needed after that to get snug for winter" ... and in your case you don't happen to have any crops you need to hurry to get in ... well then, the second term just reduces to zero, doesn't it?

Another bit of open-thread drift: I just found the answer to a problem that's been bothering me for months, and seeing as Word just came up, I thought I'd throw it in here... okay, mainly just because I'm feeling good about it, but also, well, someone else might be having the problem, too.

I do layout for our church's quarterly newsletter. People send me articles for it, and, here's the thing, also photographs. I have the Adobe suite, so if they send me a jpg, or really, just about any standard graphics format, I'm good to go. However, sometimes, what I get is a photo inside a Word document -- and of course it is always past the deadline when it comes in, so asking them to resend is not an option. Copying and pasting occasionally works, but all too often the picture comes out horribly, horribly posterized.

I'm not quite clear how Word manages to display perfectly good pictures and still wreck any copies, but it does.

So here's what I found out: the key is to save the Word document as an HTML file. Not Save for Web, no. Save As... and then pick the .htm file format. Magically, Word then creates a folder with all of the original images, undamaged, in jpg format!

Yay! Happy dance!

(Er. Ahem. Blush. As you were, sorry to interrupt.)

Open threadiness: Today's Astronomy Pic of the Day is really strange, to the point that if this were April 1... well. But apparently it is real. I'm tempted to call it, Kermit in Space.

Wait -- Number Ten Ox is here, after all. Everything is the same, but different. I'm loving it.

Oooh. Bridge of Birds -- without, as far as I can tell at a quick glance, Number Ten Ox! First person narrator is a young (and already outrageous) Li Kao!

The final draft was better. Splitting the roles was good. But this is a wonderful DVD extra.

(Toddles off happily to read.)

Xopher #198: Say what? Soy sauce is just a cheap knockoff of a Japanese sauce? That news will, um, come as a huge surprise to a lot of Chinese cooks, who tend to think the Japanese barely grasp the concept of what soy sauce should taste like.

So, is it dark soy sauce you're knocking, or light soy sauce?

Just wanted to say, Jon, that I truly enjoyed the fantastic image of all those dead birds festooning trees for *millions of years* -- and the birds never fell down -- and the *trees* never fell down either! -- until it was finally their time to drop to the ground and be incorporated in the geological layers.

Seriously. I will treasure it.

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