The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Pat Kight:

I almost feel bad that this is so easy for me to do, because Walmart *deserves* boycotting so much.

But I already do. I have never set foot in a Walmart, and never intend to. I find their business practices from top to bottom abhorrent, and I hate the way their new stores have driven out locally owned businesses in small towns.

And while I haven't thought of it as a boycott, you won't catch me in a store the day after Thanksgiving, unless I run completely out of cat food.

Rainy, mild, then not-so-rainy and mild, then rainy and a little chilly. In other words, utterly typical Western Oregon weather for, oh, the next 7-8 months. I quite like it; the rain was a couple of weeks late getting started, and I found myself thinking "wtf is up with all this *sunshine*?"

In honor of the inimitable Mr. Singer, I'm drinking my evening tipple from the tea bowl he gave me when we met in Baltimore a few years back. And feeling much better about joining the 60-and-over club in a few months' time...

Harissa is really easy to make at home.

I generally add potatoes to stew-like dishes well before acidic ingredients like tomatillos, since the acid can slow the dissolution of the hemicellulose in the potato cell walls and keep them from getting tender. I assume the long, slow simmering of this dish overcomes that problem.

I daresay almost everyone who reads this will recognize at least one of those (5, 8, 12, 16, 25 before flying became such a royal PITA) and say, "well, of course. But how did he know?"

It will, of course, become another FaceBook "meme." Bet on it.

Waking up one Friday morning in 1985 to the realization that even though it was payday (checks were handed out in person then) I profoundly didn't want to go to work. Going in anyway, but walking directly into my newspaper editor's office and tendering my resignation, effective immediately, with no idea what I'd do instead.

Thus it was that I spent my mid-30s-mid-40s doing just enough freelance writing to scrape by, taking whatever temporary jobs I felt even marginally qualified for and spending lots of time doing exactly what I wanted. And learned all kinds of important things about myself, including the fact that I am not a novelist (and that's OK), that I have a peculiar knack for figuring out how things work, and that I am not defined by how I pay my bills.

The checkout clerk at Safeway noticed my Obama button a couple of days ago and blurted, "Oh, I wish I could vote for Obama, but I'm afraid he'll get assassinated, so I'm voting for the other guy."

I smiled and replied, "You know, I imagine Senator Obama knows more about the risks of running and getting elected than you and I do. And if he's still willing to take that chance, then I'm willing to give it to him."

"Huh," she said. "I never thought of it that way."

Who knows, maybe I helped swing one more vote away from the other guy.

Me, I'm a little nervous, but I'm planning to put that energy to good use tomorrow; I just asked my boss for the day off so I can volunteer as a driver for those who tell the phonebankers that they haven't dropped off their ballots yet (I'm in Oregon; no actual polling places here, just drop boxes for tardy mail ballots).

Wait. Let me get this straight: Someone who shares an ideological position with those who call evolution "just a theory" and insist that there's some deistic intelligence behind biological design ... is trying to damn Obama by claiming he'll shut down research about natural selection?

I think my head just exploded.

The Internet is my cybernetic brain enhancement. I'm pushing 60, and running out of personal storage capacity; for any new chunk of information that goes in, it seems, a corresponding chunk must be dumped - and I don't seem to get to choose which one. Thanks to the Internet (and strong search-fu), I am able to at least appear to be as sharp as I ever was, and sometimes sharper.

The day Google comes up with an ap that jacks straight into our skulls, I'll be standing at the front of the line.

I had some friends over for the traditional Memorial Day weekend charring of meat yesterday, and one of them brought his laptop specifically so we could tune into NASA's live feed of the JPL control room during the landing. We were so excited we forgot all about the food and drink for a while. I love having such geeky friends almost as much as I love living in a world that contains such wonderous things to geek about.

PJ @ #18: Ann C. is Phyllis Schlafly's ideological heir(ess) and current contender for the title of America's Leading Female Impersonator.

I suspect their "quality" comments are like the ones I junk daily on the work-related blogs I administer. You get them, too, I imagine: The ones that offer such penetrating insights as "This is a very good post. Exactly what I expected to see." Attached to a URL hawking the usual spammer junk.

I'll give them this much: They are, in fact, written in English.

Make that Bruce at #15. I need new glasses.

Bruce at #14: It's not nice to gloat. As my friends elsenet reminded me after I posted this, elsenet, this morning.

Mid-50s here in Western Oregon, and spring is coming on fast ...

This is the sort of thing those of us who came of age in the '70s need to look at every now and then just to keep us from idealizing the era.

'Cause I can remember when my friends and I would have thought that was the epitome of groovy. And would have spent hours prancing around in front of mirrors trying to learn those moves.

Theresa (60): I'm going to take a leap here and assume that these are by and large the same people who aren't interested in reading about politics in the newspaper, or listening to serious political analysis on the TV or radio.

While there's some truth to this, I think a fairly significant number of smart, well-educated and politically concerned Americans remain in the dark about the entire blogging phenomenon. There are still many, many people who haven't stuck their toes in these waters.

Anecdotally, I offer my own workplace: A small research institute on one of the most wired university campuses in the United States. When I mention reading something in a blog, I still get blank stares from most of my colleagues, some of whom still don't quite know what a blog is. Many of them see their computers as mere tools for doing their jobs; some still don't own computers or have 'Net access at home. Of those who do, several do so only for the sake of their kids. The same is true for my close friends; a few are as geeky as I am, but many others - bright, engaging, politically active - are not interested in computers or the Internet. I may think that's a mistake, but who am I to tell them how to spend their time?

Me, I think blogs are a potentially powerful and democratizing tool for sharing information and building community. But I think it's a mistake to overestimate how many people are touched by them, and to dismiss those who are not as apathetic know-nothings.

Theresa writes: "Based on my own experience, I’d say the answer to Digby’s question is: yes."

Based on my own experience - 20 years as a working newspaper reporter - I'd say the answer is most definitely yes.

Why? Because for a certain number of journalists, knowing stuff they can't tell the public is fun.

When they're nobodies just getting started in the hinterlands, it makes them feel like insiders, even if the only insider scoop they have is about which city council members are screwing around on their spouses or which high school football coach has an alcohol problem.

Naive reporters stumble onto this kind of thing and want to write stories about it; their editors slap them down because they don't have sufficient evidence, and nobody wants to risk a libel suit. So instead of writing about it, they tell each other (newsrooms are awash in the dirty little secrets of the small-town power elite).

It makes them feel important, in the know, and that's a feeling that's easy to get hooked on. By the time they've moved up the food chain to become nationally prominent journalists, they can't live without it.

Reason No. 1,243 why I left the news business ...

I work at Oregon State University; this was definitely for real. In the local geekosphere, it's the coolest thing the university has done since the invention of the modern maraschino cherry.

We're so proud.

Make that " ... don't outright require." Bleah.

Knitting needles were among the items banned from US flights after 9/11 - but only briefly. These days the TSA rules recommend (but don't outright prohibit) eschewing metal needles in favor of wood or plastic.

I've always imagined the change came after hundreds of federal functionaries got calls from their furious mothers and grandmothers: "Now, just one second there, Junior - what the HELL do you mean I can't take my knitting on the plane?"

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