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

On the subject of punctuation and spacing, I can actually deal with a lack of punctuation or spacing better than "eternal elipsifiers."

On more than one board, including the occasional browse into Usenet, I have observed folks whose every sentence, nay, every clause, is followed by a series of dots, at least three but sometimes ten to fifty. It's as if they doze off on the period key during typing or something.

It makes a thread completely unreadable, and I won't even duplicate it here for the sake of your sanity, Yog.

I'm with john @ 1 regarding Mayo. Growing up, mayo was used only for tartar sauce and cole slaw, and I never cared for tartar sauce.

According to Alton, part of the purpose of the mayo is to prevent meat juices from creating a soggy bun. An alternative to that is butter (e.g. Steak and Shake, and Culver's "Butterburgers"), but growing up Jewish made that something you'd shudder about, even though we weren't keeping Kosher (I can has cheezburger too).

Lightly toasting the buns helps, as does stacking up the sandwich just before cooking.

The "mayo" thing has stuck with me pretty strongly: If a restaurant offers a burger with "chipotle sauce" I'm fine, but I can't even order it if it's called "chipotle mayo." Don't get me started on chipotle-flavoring, though: I make a sauce from a Rick Bayless recipe that one cup probably could flavor all of McDonald's chipotle use for a year.

It's just a plot to glom our abundant great lakes water.

Lightning's a bummer -- we keep finding electronic corpses from Saturday's storm: 52" TV, HD DirecTiVo, VCR (no big loss, haven't used it in a year), and doorbell transformer.

What it really boils down to is that we don't know squat about economics. So each time there's a major f-up, we make a few more rules.

OK, I lied -- the regulators pretend they don't know squat, and the market (cough) forces, bend them as far as they can. To some degree, that's a good thing, because if we can make more money out of less money, everybody wins, right? Like you said, maximize upside.

What we need is to give the regulators weapons they can wield before it gets to crisis state, and go "no" and wap the market puppies with a figurative rolled up newspaper.

But that doesn't work so well because they're not puppies. If we had tens of thousands of small investment companies, we could let one fail, mop up the mess on the floor, and train them to not do it again. What we have is a dozen ten-ton rottweilers that bury their messes in the yard. That's theoretically a good thing too -- the yard is pretty big, and a few messes for each giant dog is "managed risk."

But you think that somebody would have noticed that the rosebushes, the tomatoes, the petunias and the cherry trees all have dead gophers buried under them, and put a stop to it before the subsidence collapses the garden walk.

I know I can't do much except keep paying my mortgage (with which I am not having a problem), and doing my best to stretch metaphors.

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