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

*joins the toast*

I remember it happening. My mom was a German teacher then and used to take a group of students to visit our partner school in Germany each year, and I think 1989 was the same year I had gotten to go there myself. With all these family and personal connections to Germany I noticed the event more than I would have otherwise.

The next time Mom came home from a trip to Germany we all sat in the living room while she passed around things she had brought home from the trip and told us about them. As the chip of the Wall came to me she was talking about some biscuits. I misunderstood what was being handed to me and almost bit the chunk of masonry thinking it was a very dry biscuit!

heresiarch @ various: Thanks for taking the time and thought to write what you have here. For the most part you're writing things I not only agree with but feel too strongly about to be able to word them clearly myself. (That said, I'll give it a try here anyway...)

James D. Macdonald @ 105 and previous: There is a streak in our culture that says male violence toward women is acceptable. It's a thing a lot of people are working to change, and it's a thing a lot of people are privileged to be able to ignore. But as long as that streak of violence is there, when I see a comment like yours at 74 I won't feel amused, I'll feel threatened. I typed a much longer explanation here which I'll instead summarize as: as long as a threat of violence has a possibility of truth, either in the speaker's mouth or in another's, I won't be able to find humor in it because I'll be too busy defending myself for the times when it's true.

I refreshed before posting this, and saw your latest comment at 109. Have you already forgotten what you wrote earlier today? "No one is talking about sodomy"? How about your own words at 74, "then shoving [the baseball bat] up her ass"? No one put those words in your mouth but you, and your apparent disingenuousness here disgusts me.

I think digby's piece missed its goal, at least for me--my overriding reaction was discomfort at how digby kept misgendering Rothenburg in a way that was clearly intended to be insulting. I don't like using gender as an insult (in any direction) and it got in the way of the points digby was trying to make.

Site note: When I posted my above comment, I got the following error page instead of coming back to the post. The comment did post, and all may be well, but it does say please contact y'all about it. (Feel free to delete this comment, of course--it doesn't add to the thread in any way that I can see, it's just the easiest way I know to contact someone who might care to see the message.)

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Diatryma @ 266, I lost a spelling bee once (a special have-your-parents-drive-you-to-another-town one at that!) because the person giving the words pronounced "vehement" as "veemit" and didn't give a definition. I gave him a funny look and pronounced the word the way he spelled it, since I'd never heard the word before... (But something did come of the trip: we stopped at a small pizza place and I ordered sauerkraut pizza out of curiosity, and discovered I liked it.)

Rikibeth @ 168, I've gone to a renaissance festival as a Scottish male (my dance group had an overabundance of female dancers at the time, and I was one of a few women who knew the dances equally well from either position and was comfortable cross-dressing). I mostly got "Oh, look at the lassie!" from tourists, despite the fact that my kilt would have been scandalously short for female garb of the time. (Doesn't everybody, or at least everybody who'd go to a renfest, know what a kilt is and who wears one?) Apparently I fail at carrying myself as a man, or something. It would be interesting to take a workshop like Elise described!

But I just noticed this is entirely off the original topic, so I'll stop there and say I'm very happy with my local Ace-affiliate. Some stuff they don't have, and I wish they had a website so I'd know what they had in stock (though they can order anything on the Ace website) but excellent people working there.

abi, what about the soprano seax?

Summer @ 16: If you can hide quiz results en masse and not just one by one, I'd love to hear how!

Soon Lee @ 14: woo! Thanks, I hadn't heard of Facebook Lite but it just might get me to start using Facebook again. (I stopped when they merged quiz results into the general stream of updates.)

Happy birthday, indeed!

KeithS @ 77, sadly I think Stewart changed definitions of "gay" in midstream here. It bugs me when people use "gay" the same way they'd use "lame." *

* Yes, I am being ironic in my choice of example.

Here's mine! Tagged, too.

Carrie S. @ 131: IANASE (I am not a safety engineer), but I think part of what helmets are supposed to do is slide unimpeded along the ground if you have a crash. If you have additional things on the helmet, they're likely to catch instead of sliding and it could lead to a neck injury (if your body is sliding more freely than the helmet). But I repeat, IANASE.

Giacomo @ 29 on managing smell: What works for me is to shower regularly (even if I'm going to be sweating again after the shower, at least it will be fresh sweat); wear different clothes for my commute than I'll wear during the day at the office, so I'm not sweating *in* my work clothes; and when I change to my work clothes, I take a damp paper towel and wash the sweat off my face and neck (this cools me down and also helps keep me from breaking out). Nobody has complained yet...

(Oh, and I sweat less overall now that I've started using a pannier mounted on my bike instead of having to carry everything in a backpack! It's great not having the backpack there to reflect my body heat back at me.)

I think some people who'd like to commute by bike have a problem with bike helmets messing up their hairstyles. Since I usually wear my hair in a braid anyway, that's not an issue for me. It's occasionally inconvenient if I had my hair up in a bun (I've got a lovely metal snood that makes it easy) and have to take it down to wear the helmet, but that's all.

Rikibeth, I've been very happy with various seats from Selle Royal. (Beware, there are other Selle brands and I'm only talking about that one.) They make ergonomically-designed gel seats and they make different versions of each seat depending on whether you want to put it on a road bike, hybrid, mountain bike, etc.

Their website is, alas, only barely informative. But I have their Respiro Moderate on my hybrid and the Respiro Athletic on my road bike, and have also liked the Lookin Athletic. (Moderate and Athletic, as well as Relaxed and Sport, refer to what sitting angle each one is designed for. That's one of the things I like about the brand.) YSBMV, of course (Your Sit Bones May Vary). And as you may know, even with a good bike seat you're likely to be sore sometimes while you're getting used to it. I've never figured out how you're supposed to be able to tell the difference between new-saddle soreness on a saddle that's right for you, and wrong-saddle soreness, but there it is.

Come to think of it, now might be a good time to share my Cautionary Tale with all who see this:

Ten years ago I lived in another town and biked almost everywhere I went. This went on for years. I enjoyed the biking. Over that time I noticed I was gradually having a harder and harder time reaching orgasm. I didn't draw any connections between the two for years, but eventually I did, and learned it wasn't just me, riding on the wrong bike seat for one's body can do things like squish the nerves that lead to the genitals. Almost all the research I've found about this is focused on men, but the same thing can happen to women.

I moved to a less bike-friendly place around then and didn't bike for years, during which time I gradually recovered my response. Now I'm biking again, and loving being back on a bike but I'm also being extremely careful about what bike seats I use. No seats made for men (cuz I'm not one), no seats that aren't ergonomically designed or that seem to be squishing me oddly, and the bike that always seemed to be suspending me in midair by my crotch got returned to the store. With these precautions, I've been fine--but it helps that I knew I had to take the precautions!

I started biking to work this spring and have been rediscovering how much fun bicycling can be. (My journal has had an enormous influx of bike-related posts.) One of the things that made it much easier for me to start was that the city buses here have bike racks on the front, capacity two, and that means that (since most of my way to work is along bus routes) if I get tired I can stop at a bus stop and bus the rest of the way. These days I usually bike the whole way, but when I was getting started it was nice to work my way up to biking more and more of the distance. I'm looking forward to discovering how late into the winter I'll keep biking--will I make it all the way through, or have to stop and start back up in the spring?

Of course, the thing that made it possible for me to start at all was that we moved to a house sixteen miles closer to my workplace. Four and a half miles is fine, but I wasn't going to even start working on a twenty-mile commute by bike.

So yes, I'm very happy about biking, and I've been noticing how bike-friendly my city is (even compared to the city just across the river) and being grateful for it.

DDB @ 55, you see that I entirely disagree with you about the suitability of potatoes as a pizza ingredient, Reinheitsgebot or no. Es gibt kein Gebot gegen Kartoffelpizza!

sisuile @ 43: Would you be willing to share the gluten-free zucchini pizza dough recipe? (I also Googled and found some, but I'd still be happy to see yours.) Regardless, thanks for mentioning the fact that such a thing exists.

And I'll have to try Town Hall sometime, I've never been there. (I'm not the no-gluten person in the family, so it would be safe for me.) Have you tried Pizza Luce's baked potato pizza? I hear they have gluten-free crusts available if you go the right day of the week.

I miss Willington Pizza's red potato pizza. Unfortunately I don't think one would still be good by the time it got to me from Connecticut.

(I see that by the end of my comment I had moved entirely off into potato-pizza land. Yum.)

That sounds remarkably similar to the tarte flambée my mother made a few months ago. Not identical, but similar. (I got to have some, and it was yummy.)

I didn't actually realize that part of Farthing was so close to historical fact. *blinks*

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