I adore Keegan, and the point about "doesn't anyone edit anymore?" cannot be made often enough ... but, all that said, I don't know that I would ever buy a Civil War history written by a non-American. Sometimes home terrain DOES matter.
Xopher, I was actually thinking it might be "go-thither." Or, perhaps "go yon."
My problem in Home Depots is getting the staff to leave me alone. They know less than I do, and even when I can't find the particular left-hand-thread five-eighths galvanized woozle I'm looking for, it has inevitably proven to waste less time searching for said woozle myself than to explain to THE STAFFER exactly what said woozle is.
But I feel for the invisible women. I've seen it happen. (Despite my username here I should clarify that I am a male, a 6'4" male with whatever the polar opposite of a come-hither expression is.)
My favorite Home Depot story is going with a very petite woman of my acquaintance who was working on a fairly complicated piece of carpentry and had very specific and detailed needs about various aspects of it. We were standing in an aisle, discussing these complexities, and the hapless employee comes up, ignores her completely, and asks me if he can help with any of it - despite the fact that he has been watching us long enough to see that she's clearly the one in charge of the decision-making. He wasn't especially abashed when I frostily indicated he was asking the wrong person, but by the time she had talked esoteric cabinetwork minutiae to him for five minutes, he was visibly red-faced - and not from anger.
The "invisible" comment was referring to the relatively late addition to the thread. I forget that on ML, comment threads have long tails. (Everywhere else I write or post, if activity doesn't happen within 24 hours of the source post, it might as well not happen.)
I learned about the history of the Drega shootings from you (and very interesting/shocking stuff it was), but I know absolutely nothing about this Wilder matter. Time to go tickle a search engine or two ....
I suspect I'm invisible here but, e'en so, a late addition for your notice: Story in 30 May issue of The Economist.
Just wanted to note, in case you hadn't seen it today, that it made the front page of the Globe as well.
The conversation wandered from there into a discussion of Twitter, poetry, the interactions of young people and lawns and whether editors ever rode unicorns.
That is a beautiful sentence.
I've never understood the appeal of zombies, vampires, OR lycanthropes. But then, I don't get Twitter either.
Lori@168: My vets here in Greater Boston say that with indoor cats the average lifespans they're seeing are 15-18 years.
The average lifespans of cats allowed to go outdoors regularly here? Three.
Anecdotal, of course, but fascinating to me.
Ours are 18 and 19 and are about as hale as one can hope for in antiquarian cats.
I'm not saying the dialogue in #89 has ever happened in our house. At least not more than once a day.
I was going to post something about getting a tetanus shot just on principle if you do renovation on a house before the Drywall Era ... but then I did a little judicious searching and realized I would have been repeating myself. Oh, well, at least I'm consistent.
Daniel Radosh shows us an interesting typo at the Huffington Post. I post it here on the off chance that any of the Making Light folks might like to rise to the occasion ....
Want some cheap fun? Ask someone from London about Burt's accent in the film. Stand well back, in case of spittle.
I don't have to. It's still pretty much all that ever comes up if you put "Dick van Dyke" accent into Google.
I gather they were considerably less enthralled with the film version of Mary Poppins over in the UK than here. Can't say I'm surprised. As an American I liked the fact that the title character was made rather more pleasant to be around in the film, but apparently her rather forbidding nature was an important part of the character to Brits.
As long as we are going there, I've heard that the main reason the Disney versions of "Winnie the Pooh" did not sell well in the UK is that the audiences there, to a man, thought Sterling Holloway's voice work was absolutely totally the wrong voice for the character. (I cannot, of course, definitively confirm this.)
I often wish I could manage to check in on interesting Making Light threads more than once a day. All the fun happens when I'm not looking. But I needed to come in, however belatedly, to say: Bruce @13, that was a most excellent rant. I'm tempted to pay you the big bucks to see the film just so I can read the screed that will emerge.
On the other hand, I note that it is possible to like a film of something while recognizing - hell, stipulating! - that it doesn't bear any resemblance to the source material. Case in point: Mary Poppins, as mentioned above. I love the film dearly, but I agree it doesn't bear any resemblance to the books, which I also love. I can contain both. (Backup example: The Shining.)
It's possible that I'll see The Spirit and like it as something that bears no resemblance to Eisner's work whatsoever (I did enjoy Sin City). But at the moment I doubt it.
I've been saying this for ages. I cry for wasted potential every time I think about this project. Please, please, everyone, do me a favor and spend the same two hours tucked in a cosy chair reading Spirit reprints instead. It will be a more rewarding use of your time.
Alas, this will be the only version of The Spirit that some people know, and that's just horrible. It's bad enough as is - many of my peers (including some comic book fans!) have never heard of it. I explain to them that there has never been anything else like it before or since, and they don't believe me. Then I show them some of the collections. Then, a few hours later when they come up for air, they believe.
Ah here we go. Orient Industries is the biggest "realistic" doll maker in Japan, I believe. Go here and click on the doll at the right end of the third row (Kirara). This page is safe for work, although you may want to wash your hands afterward. The rest of the site, not so much.
Apologies for the third comment in a row, but another thing of note - re pedophiles. I don't have links here because I am at work without my smut bookmarks, but the Japanese manufacturers who are making the equivalent of RealDolls make VERY young-looking ones. Whether that's a cultural/Western eyeballs situation (i.e. they just look young to me, as many Japanese women do) or wholly or partially intentional, I have never been able to decide.
I know at least one long-term poster to one of these doll communities who has stated outright that he has the doll (and it ain't cheap to get one of the Japanese models and ship it here) to sublimate his urges toward adolescents that would otherwise be unacceptable. I guess I'm happy that's working for him.
I can dig up some links when I get home this afternoon if you'd like to see more of what the Japanese dolls are like, although the video clip is pretty representative.
How can I preview a comment *twice* and still not notice a blatant typo, let alone a redundant "usually"? The mind is a dark forest.
You know, the nice thing about Making Light people is that usually when I'm talking about the sexdoll culture, which I've been watching semi-professionally* for years now, I'm usually the person who has to provide all the explanations and the links. You folks don't need the explanations and the thread has already covered most of the links, barring some ... um ... highly specialized fansites and Yahoo groups which you can deduce the content of for yourselves.
I interviewed the RealDoll people back when you had to know how to get to them through the Abyss Creeations web page, when they did all the PR shots of their dolls wearing sunglasses because they hadn't gotten the eyes right yet. (The eyes are still the Uncanny Valley-est part of the dolls, though much improved.) I'll say this for those folks; they have no illusions about what they do, they're very frank, and they have a strong sense of humor about their work. I guess they'd have to.
My concern about the future of anthro sex toys is the one Graydon expressed @ 15, slightly restated: What happens when these objects get better at sex than people? What happens to how people interact then? There's a rich spectrum of possible answers ranging from, "Won't make a difference, sex isn't really about orgasm but interpersonal intimacy" to a wirehead scenario where we interact with people chastely and then all go home and hump our toys.
I don't really know which end of that spectrum my money's on.
* 'semi-professionally,' meaning that once every blue moon some fool pays me good money to spout about it somewhere.
Beg pardon. al-Baghdadia is asking for his release, but the petition is apparently not their doing.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 12 |
| 2008 | 12 |
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