The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by John A Arkansawyer sees spam:

Xopher @ 240: Let me note that was a Franklin County Sheriff's Department employee who did that, not a member of the Ozark city police department.

Ozark is a nice little town. What I could tell you about sheriffs of the past, though...

Let me call your attention to my held-back post #255. I would welcome advice on this subject, if you have any.

Okay. Eight? I think I can do that*:

Americathon
Eraserhead
Shame
Gimme Shelter
Being There
Stop Making Sense
Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
The Long Goodbye

*Can you find the mean-spririted typo? I thought you could.

Attention Making Light Gnomes: The post in this thread being held for review is intended to be amusing. YMMV. HTH. ESQ. B&E.

And for some actual content: How did the proofreaders correct the fnords in Illuminatus!, anyway?

So I have a question for the widely-knowledgeable people here:

Is there any strategy for trying to recover small trinkets and keepsakes lost during a burglary?

We had a highly incompetent burglar* visit us today. We had relatively good fortune**, monetarily: A creaky*** old iBook**** and some not-too-expensive jewelry is all that was taken. We also found actual physical evidence--a sock hat left behind with a lovely hair sticking out of it--so retribution may be visited by the law. But some of the jewelry was dear, particularly a little locket, probably of base metal, with a picture of the wife and her sister as little kids. That was to be a surprise gift to her mom.

So: Is there a sane, non-obsessive strategy for recovering this sort of thing?

*I mean, what sort of drug addict would go through my travel kit and not recognize meperdine? Was he used to seeing it in little plastic baggies? I think every prescription bottle in the place was disturbed, but neither that nor the hydrocodone was missing.

**And otherwise. The daughter is not too terribly freaked out over it all. Mrs. Arkansawyer had removed her wedding ring from her jewelry box, along with the charm***** bracelets I bought her and the daughter. The backup drives were still here.

***Literally. Mrs. Arkansawyer had to tear that one apart and fix it back in 2002, and the hinge never was quite right after.

****An interesting point: The investigating officer, who is also a Mac user, said he'd had fair luck recovering Macs while serving search warrants. Apparently, they're harder to fence, as they're less well-understood, and just lie around being evidence.

*****Anyone know where I might find a little charm of a burglar for Mrs. Arkansawyer's bracelet?

Rob Rusick @ 644:

Compounds coming from organisms usually have a preferred symmetry, while synthesized compounds will contain an equal mixture of 'left-handed' and 'right-handed' forms.

This was a plot-point in The Documents in the Case (by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace).

To say nothing of Spock Must Die!

Kanye interrupts himself interrupting Taylor Swift

Terry @ 743: It's very odd: I don't particularly read war stories but I love Hemingway, particularly For Whom The Bell Tolls.

It took me a while to decide exactly why Kelly's definition of "good book" rankled me so. Before I say it, let me point out there are several ways in which her definition is very reasonable: A book that meets her criterion is a book which (maybe with a very few exceptions) ought to be published, and which ought to be available libraries. It's a utilitarian definition, and in the realm of utilitarian problems, it's a very reasonable solution. That fact escaped me at first.

Now, that said, what bothers me about it is that, using that definition, someone reading two books cannot say of them, "This is a better book than that one." However, someone with a properly-designed iPhone application could scan the two books' bar codes, look at a graphical display showing each book's cover on top of its column in a histogram, and say, "This is a better book than that one." No reading, no writing, no arithmetic required. This way lies madness...or maybe John Searles.

Kelly McCullough @ 668:

Which suggests that pushing people's buttons is objectively not good.

Yes, exactly. That's why that evil, soul-damaging James Patterson book I unfortunately read is a crime against humanity.

To say nothing of The Number of the Beast.

You know, when I say, "Citizen of the Galaxy is a way better book than Rocket Ship Galileo," no one ever objects.

David Harmon @ 653: Not that SF publishing would ever succeed with books which are "basically imitative, sometimes of prior volumes by the same author." I for one am far too smart to ever fall for a trick like that.

Jinx!

Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but just before reading the original post on the other thread, I'd gone to the site of Redbook Magazine to read the third part of a condensed-and-serialized summer beach romance book that I'd read the first two parts of before the gift subscription someone gave Mrs. Arkansawyer ran out and deprived me of bathroom reading. I enjoyed it (though I wouldn't pay for a copy to keep), which is more than I can say for Jane Austen's Emma (which I did keep).

So perhaps I have low tastes, but: I just cruised through the second half of the twentieth century on this list and found a lot of really good books which were bestsellers: Sweet Thursday, On the Beach, City of Night, The Sand Pebbles, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Portnoy's Complaint, The Godfather, The Day of the Jackal, The Honorary Consul, Ragtime, Jailbird, Smiley's People, Firestarter.

Nothing wrong with those. Some of those, or other books by those authors, will be remembered as among the great books of my time. I also saw a lot of really great authors who've written better books than some not-so-good ones that made the list and some books considered classics that I don't personally care for or am not familiar with. (I was surprised that Catch-22 and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues weren't best-sellers.)

I also saw a lot of mediocre books and a fair measure of dreck. (I mean, there's a Glenn Beck book in the 2008 list. Really.)

So there's nothing wrong with writing a best-seller. There's not necessarily anything all that right about it, either.

Goddam it to hell. Jim Carroll is dead. I've always thought of him as Hawk from "Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones".

No rebuttal, abi. I think you make valid points.

No, one moment of response. Sean brought up his degree in creative writing, and Teresa called him a professional writer, well before Nick entered the thread. Given that, for Nick to bring up his degree and his publication history is not unfair.

And that's it. It is a hard conversation, and I appreciate your efforts in facilitating it.

Mike Leung @ 42 says:

when incomprehension is the foundation of an accusation of bullying

And heresiarch @ 57 replies:

Calling someone a bully because you don't understand them...

But I don't think that's what Mike is saying, or what happened in the previous thread. What happened there was the supposed bully said other posters had misinterpreted someone else's expository writing. That was the basis of the claim of bullying.

I wish I'd chimed in there and agreed, because despite the way in which the supposed bully's claim was expressed, I thought he was right on the substance. It was a narrow point, but a valid one, and I got both sides of the emotional conversation: I got why the supposed bully was frustrated that more than one person was insisting on a meaning he thought was being read into someone's words. I also got why those doing the reading into were offended by the way the claim was expressed.

Possibly a third party intervening with that sort of statement might have defused, or at least de-escalated, the situation. Possibly not.* I wish I'd tried, though. The whole thread made me a bit chicken, for reasons both public and private.

That's a hard discussion to have about an expressive activity**, because some reactions are personal and intimate. It took me a long time to learn not to take it personal when someone disagreed with a meaning I found. Sometimes I still do take it personal, because there are subjects on which meaning is personal. Anyone who tries to argue with me about what I feel when I hear or sing "This Land Is My Land" can KMA, but arguing with me about what it means is fair game.

*And now, having written this comment, repeatedly previewed it, and then re-read the stretch of that thread under discussion, I see that several people, including a moderator, did take pretty much that position, and it didn't seem to help.

**It's especially difficult when you like the people with whom you're disagreeing, which is the case here.

Does anyone know who at the NYT to tell that one of their ads is aggressively pushing me a suspect executable? Twice this morning.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @ 72: I spend time in a similar but different environment, and I'm often faced with beliefs with which I'm in serious disagreement and which I nonetheless try to respect, and it's hard to find a way to discuss them.

The best I've thought of is along the lines of, "Given what I think, I'd be wrong to believe that. But you have different life experiences, and I can't argue with what you believe." How does a response like that do?

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