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

"The Hoard contains approximately 5kg of gold and 1.3kg of silver, giving it a 'scrap' value of over £100,000 (by contrast the Sutton Hoo find contained 1.6kg of precious metals)."

Whoo. I say again. Whooo.

Wonderful.

Minor nitpick (a static value was changed in the code -- should probably be a declared variable):
"Once (year - year_lastelection)== 5, the prorogation subroutine executes automatically."

== 4 in Canada, as we now have semi-fixed election dates.

An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (formerly Bill C-16) received royal assent on May 3, 2007.

Bill C-16 introduced the following amendments to the Canada Elections Act:

* Subject to an earlier dissolution of Parliament, a general election must be held on the third Monday in October in the fourth calendar year following a previous general election, with the first general election to be held on Monday, October 19, 2009.

http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=loi&document=amendc16&dir=leg/fel&lang=e&textonly=false

Russ @82: Thank you for that re-parsing, as I was finding it impossible.

In my dialect

"people who read books won't care _if_ the book is well written."

Can only mean
"people who read books won't care _whether_ the book is well written"

I can only get the second reading if there's a pause before the 'if':

"people who read books won't care, _if_ the book is well written."

=

"people who read books won't care _as long as_ it's well written"

These two sentences seem to have very different structures (the scope of the if clause?).

Hobbit II: Back Again
Smeagol Strikes Back
The Dwarfs Done Gone
Hobbit II: The Wrath of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins

Correcting Keith at #70 and who beats up the Comedian -- it's actually a plot point, so don't read if you haven't read Watchmen and care how it ends.

SPOILER (rot 13)

Nqevna Irvqg (Bmlznaqvhf) jub orngf hc gur Pbzrqvna (naq gbffrf uvz bhg n jvaqbj).

Clifton @ 57 and 59: The first three books in the AEgypt series will be republished by Overlook Press.

http://theoverlookpress.blogspot.com/

Looks like The Solitudes (aka the first book, AEgypt) is out now:

http://www.overlookpress.com/author.php?author_code=820

John Crowley mentioned in his blog recently that he was copy-editing Love & Sleep for them.

The advent calendar doesn't work properly in my version of Firefox (Windows/1.5.0.8), but looks quite nice in Internet Explorer (Windows/6.0).

Hunter, that's injera (the sourdough pancake) and is the starchy staple of the Ethiopian diet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injera

Yum.

Teresa:

Word > Preferences.
Select 'Edit'.
Turn off 'When selecting, automatically select entire word.'

This is version X. I hope it's the same in version XI.

New Orleans is Sinking by the Tragically Hip

lyrics here

And of course our generous hostess already blogged about it. :)

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/000303.html

Clifton: yes, Borges.

http://www.multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html?1

When we get our massive basil yields come the late-summer/fall (it's almost all Genovese basil), it goes into pesto. It freezes well if you leave out the cheese and nuts and skimp a bit on the oil.

It's like frozen summer. The best thing on a cold winter day. But who can remember winter now?

JVP:

Thanks for clarifying. Let me rephrase slightly (and more cool-ly) and say that this kind of biographical reductionism (his parents were for x; he's against x; he must be working out something psychologically) is just the kind of fodder that a right-winger would love: it dismisses the argument (because it's 'just' a reaction against his parents) without examining it. The self-hating Jew tag is the same thing (this refers to the Faurisson incident): obviously if he 'hates' his Jewish identity (which he doesn't, btw), all his arguments are suspect.

Larry: "Just because someone is smart doesn't mean that they are either particularly stable or mature."

Of course that's true. But I was responding specifically about Chomsky, not that raving paranoid Fischer.

JVP said:
"...saying what you know will annoy people like your own parents. Friends of his late parents told me that they thought Noam's support of, say, Palestinian rights, was an attack on his parents' beliefs, for internal psychological reasons unrelated to geopolitics as such."

You're placing one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of the 20th century at the same emotional maturity level of a teenager playing satanic heavy metal in his parents' basement?

This is the worst bunch of reductionist nonsense I've heard in a long time, up there with 'Chomksy is a self-hating Jew': nonsensical and intended to dimminsh the validity of Chomsky's arguments without actually examining them.

Side notes:

Mike said:
> Eskimoes have dozens of words for "snow." To them English is > an immature language because we only need one word for
> "snow."

This is a myth about languages that has been successfully debunked by some leading linguistic lights, but that pops up with regularity because it attractively confirms certain ways we want to think.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000405.html
http://www.socc.ca/inuit.cfm
http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/miniatures/eskimo.html
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7197.ctl

And many others.

> Piers Anthony.
> No further comment.

While there used to be things I could enjoy about Xanth and Phase -- a certain playfulness, evocation of the 'the Game', etc. -- having read Pornotopia (Anthony's 'porn' 'novel'), I am now unable to read a word.

Skwid: 1) bboard being an old abbrev for computer-based bulletin board, also being a joke kinda thing like.

2) Academic publishers are different than for-profits, and this poor sod probably had no choice at all -- these are the ones that accepted his book, and getting screwed over by bad editing, bad production, and bad everything is not the same as 'don't touch my work'. I wouldn't generalize at all to trade publishers, but I still thought it was a funny story for people here.

Also, the 'tude in the article? That's just the way Geoff Pullum talks.

The perils of academic publishing -- may be of interest to denizens of this here bboard.

Language Log: Publishers are Good; Really!

Xopher, in my idiolect, the product is generically 'duct tape' -- I've never called it duck tape. Specific brands may be '3M Brand Duct Tape'[tm] or 'Duck Tape'; i.e., Henkel refers to their specific brand as Duck® Tape brand duct tape (which makes me laugh):
http://www.duckproducts.com/

Here's the real explanation:
http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/duckvsduct.html

Their conclusion is either name is appropriate (but since Duck is branded, I'd use duct!).

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