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

Zelda @232

Thanks for the recommendation - not too late: Christmas is, after all, just around the corner.

The Quaker Reader is a little hard to get hold of here (in the UK), but it looks like I can get a good used copy shipped from the US fairly cheaply. I'll bear it in mind!

Oops. That should, of course, read "18th Century".

In the end I went with "Bury the Chains" - not specifically about Quakers, but it seems nine of the twelve foudning members of the 19th century Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade were of that persuasion*, and book appears on Quaker reading lists.

*As, I discovered in passing, are Judi Dench and Piers Anthony.

Hi;

You guys are generally very good for book recommendations and it's an open thread, so...

A friend has recently started attending Quaker meetings (she's nominally Catholic)and has a birthday next week. I'd like to get her something useful/interesting on Quaker thought or history - either from within the faith or from a comparative, academic point of view. Does anything spring immediately to mind?

Unrelatedly, I loved Waters of Mars for the two main reasons:

i) The bitter-sweetness of this being the first new David Tenant Doctor in such a long while, but also marking the beginning of the end.

ii) The emphasis on the side of the Doctor - the arrogant alien who considers (sorry, *knows*) himself to be superior to the surrounding humans - that was intended right from the start. Reportedly, William Hartnell did it very well.

...also it was a pretty good Dr. Who story; plenty of running in corridors and spooky monster bits. I thought the prefiguring of the next episodes was a little anvilicious though.

I was going to try to start something new, but the beginning of the sequel to the NaNo I wrote last year (which has now been waiting for me to edit it for...oh yes, that would be one year) keeps popping up in my head.

So I guess I'll do that.

415 words, but I sit down to start properly tonight.

A warm thankyou to everyone who helped me out with @129

I have since found that a careful reading of the dictionary definition would have cleared that one up for me -

"22. something or someone of the kind just mentioned: The portraits are fine ones. Your teachers this semester seem to be good ones."

As a penance for insufficient rigour before asking the question, I have resolved to buy one of the style guides suggested. Of course, now I have to weigh the virtues of Fowler (original), Fowler (modern), or Merriam-Websters, each of which sound like excellent recommendations.

The relevant dialect is British English - would anyone else who has one or more of these like to chime in with an endorsement?

This may* be abuse of an open thread, but hey, open's open, right?

I just found myself writing "there are some more pictures up on the flickr account; I know you've seen the old ones"

I use "ones" that way a lot in spoken English - referring to a number of examples of a given thing - but it always looks wrong to me written†. Is this use of "one":

i) informal usage, and therefore fine
ii) informal usage, and just plain wrong
iii) correct usage, but not the way I'm doing it
iv) correct, it just looks funny to me, or
v) correct only when capitalized, but don't mention them or they'll eat your mind?

And as a bonus for 10 - where would you normally go to resolve a grammar question? I came here because I lurk and, well, you guys are likely to know and may even be interested.

*is
†mostly it looks like it needs an apostrophe, but I think that's the Grocer in me talking

Hi Abi

UK based full time employment, with less than half of my income in the top tax bracket:

(a) 32%
(b) 32%

I pay £8 a month for a daily medication (statins for cholesterol). It's worth noting that that's a token cost - whatever the medication (assuming it's NICE approved) that cost would be the same.

VAT here is 17.5% (was briefly dropped to 15% but returning soon); this is the equivalent of sales tax but is not applied to all items.

Property tax here is "stamp duty", and is 1% (3% if over 250k, 4% if over 500k) of the purchase price.

Thanks Debbie@223; I'll head over there.

Also to Xopher@205, I'd just like to add an "awwwwww..."

:D

Apropos of nothing...

Over the weekend, my fiancee Katy and I went to see the vicar who's going to marry us. He's technically retired (being in his ninetys) but has agreed to do the ceremony as he's known Katy all her life. He's reasonably compus mentis, but (from my brief experience) notably eccentric.

One of the first things he said to us was "Katy - you know about dancing. I have been listening to 16th/17th century music recently, but it doesn't make sense if I don't know how it's suppposed to be danced to. Can you recommend a book?"

Now, Katy did indeed take ballet and modern dance in her teens, but it didn't adequately prepare here for this particular nonegenarian request. I'm about to dive into amazon and see what I can find, but it occurred me that if there's an online community where I might be able to get a first hand recommendation for a text that covers 16th and/or 17th Century formal dance, then this is it.

So...I'm afraid that's as much information as I was given. Any takers?

Daniel Klein@16 (and @19!)

If it makes you feel any better, I did the exact same thing.

At slightly less velocity, it sounds like, as I avoided the concussion and walked myself to hospital, but I needed 3-4 stitches in my scalp.

And felt like a total buffoon.

Congratulations, America. I knew you had it in you!

On beautiful smiles, and Richmond park:

I lived in Richmond (London) about five years ago, and I remember walking down the street with a friend on a gorgeous summer day. A small group of youths passed us in the other direction, and a girl with them gave me this amazing, sunny smile.

Naturally, I smiled back and as they went by I heard her cried out to her friends "I got one!".

They had been walking along, smiling at everyone, and waiting to see who would smile back. I thought it was a beautiful game, and was glad I had.

Lee@127

Thanks! I didn't know about that. One small thing though - the syntax actually seems to be "define: $WORD".

If you leave out the colon, you just get a standard search (which will probably include a dictionary definition, but I don't think that's what you meant).

Ce'ine;

If your web browser is firefox, there's a really useful plug in here:

"https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4037"

That will let you highlight a word, right click and get a dictionary definition. Of course, sometimes the folks here at ML are a mite cleverer than the dictionary, but generally it's very helpful.

Also - and I hope you won't take this amiss - I found what you have to say interesting enough to make the effort to read it, but I'm with buffysquirrel on the paragraph breaks: More space makes long text much more legible.

I'm not a frequent enough poster to in any way speak for the community, but let me say "welcome" all the same!

Marilee @104

I actually rather liked it (and keep coming back to the series), which brings me to:

α) Books of great weight and import which you feel you should read, genuinely want to read, and know you will benefit from having read
β) The short, punchy, trashy and exciting books that skip to the head of the queue and stop you reading &alpha (and which feel like sneaking chocolate when you're supposed to be eating sensibly)
γ) The subset of α) which you've carried around with you for so long that, if only reading could be accomplished by osmosis, you would've finished last year.

Caroline@5

This is way tangential so feel free to ignore me, but I'm reminded of a recent Guardian story -

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2288192,00.html

The fact that a spent conviction should be held against you for the rest of your life seems wrong to me, but I'm willing to accept the situation described in the Guardian article is nuanced.

Terry@110 on the "if"

Ignosces tibi ;)

I thought twice about posting that in case it was just me (and possibly simple pedantry), so I'm glad it helped out a couple of people.

Oh, that's just for the Asus. Ok then :)

Although I'd still like to win an Asus :(

P.S. I remember a while back someone complained that email addresses
got harvested for spam from here a lot (not by our hosts, by bots) and
was advised to put in a human readable version, e.g. with "at". I tried
that but the comment wouldn't post without a valid address...is that
new?

"Open to legal residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 or older"

Wait...what? Why? Waaaaah!

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