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

A state religion, be it Islam, Jewish, christian or atheist, is too effective a tool for government manipulation of the population

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

The Anglican Church's primary raison d'etre, post-Elizabethan-settlement was to provide a state religion so all-inclusive that people would stop killing each other over it, no matter who got access to the throne in future: so the Church's rituals are something like Protestantism in Catholic clothes, or perhaps vice versa. (In the early days there was also a desire to have everyone in England be members of the same Church, but after Cromwell it became plain that this was impractical.)

For a long time dangerously nutty fringe groups like, um, Catholics and Jews were officially discriminated against, but that stopped some time back, probably because it seemed un-Anglican to hold such strong opinions. The Church now is so ecumenical that they don't seem to mind if, e.g. some of their priests consider themselves to be Jewish.

Instrument of state oppression? The Anglican Church? Don't make me laugh. (Its predecessors, now, oh boy yes. But it's a *reaction* to state oppression, or more specifically people of faith X saying 'finally one of our lot is on the throne' and setting out to massacre everyone who doesn't believe as they do.)

Fragano, et al: the most extreme anti-immigrant (and anti-Semite) I've ever met was a well-off Jewish immigrant to England (immigrated from Germany in the 1980s). 'Raise the drawbridge' describes people like that permanently. They don't really hate and fear group X: they hate and fear *competition from people like themselves*.

Andrew Plotkin @#92, you are me, except that instead of merely not sorting my books I keep track of them in a Tellico database, and one of the things I track is current bookshelf location, updating it when I take books off the shelves or put them back on.

(I suspect this wouldn't work if Tellico wasn't a few keystrokes away at all times.)

Charlie@#104, personally I was surprised by that. Apparently Cheney only has a little Dark Lord in him, just enough to cripple him when his power is gone (and presumably destroy his Undisclosed Location, surrounded by a very small square mountain range.)

Inge@#81, my recollection of the lost paper is that it's not *severity* that's aggravated by being premature, it's *frequency*. Everything else I've read says that when you're adult, you should get one to three colds a year: the six to twelve frequency is supposed to be children only.

Except it isn't.

My employer moans, but what can I do? Not use the train? Good luck getting into work that way... I actually had to explain to one boss the germ theory of disease and that if you came in with an infectious disease you'd give it to everyone else, and, yes, colds *were* infectious diseases. God knows what he thought caused them: miasmas perhaps.


(Three-week-long colds seems horrendous, though. I'm luckier: I catch a lot but I kill them as fast as everyone else, one to three days and it's gone.)

Paula:

The medicine comes in a capsule, the capsule has fur little tablets in it

You win the typo of the month, no, year award. I have mad visions now of fur-covered tablets for mammals, scaly ones for reptiles, feathered for birds...

Lee, Jim et al, thanks for the advice. The water trick is one I keep learning about and keep forgetting... and, no, using defrosting water for cooking strikes me as unutterably disgusting.

Regarding the heat-stable toxin stuff, that's interesting: I guess they're non-protein-based, whatever they are.

Zack: you store these things in an alembic made of frozen Universal Solvent, of course. (Downside: Universal Solvent freezes at -1K.)

In a work environment you’ll find information on every substance in the place in the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets) that are stored at some known and accessible location (e.g. by the front door, in the custodian’s office, in the supervisor’s desk).

It is to laugh. In the UK at least this is only true if you happen to work in a biomedical facility (e.g. when I was working at the NIBSC fifteen years ago even the laser printers had an MSDS for toner stuck to them). Elsewhere? I found to my surprise that the City firm where I'm now working had MSDSes... once. After much research I found from a retired ex-colleague that they were last seen two takeovers ago in a storage facility in Birmingham, since sold off by our ex-owners.

I would be staggered if anywhere that didn't regularly deal with hazardous substances as a matter of course had such things anywhere accessible.

Please don’t leave the chicken lying out on the kitchen counter at room temperature for a couple of hours.

OK, so how else do you defrost the bloody things? (Well, you can leave them in the fridge for about four days, if you have four days...)

Light off for me too, thanks to really nasty cold with high fever. I was hoping for some nice gharstley hallucinations, in keeping with the spirit of the season, but I didn't even get those. What a con.

Still, Guy Fawkes with giant bonfire and fireworks coming. That's the *real* occasion in darkest rural England. Halloween is slightly suspicious and foreign and might even be Catholic.

David@#108, it is *possible* that some of the R-won elections in the last thirty years were legitimate wins.

I mean perhaps the US is really a country of democratic socialists on a par with, say, Finland, and every election has been stolen, but if it is you do a *damn* good job of hiding it. (Also, this hypothesis requires a degree of competence from Republicans which strikes me as unlikely.)

Even in the text Teresa quotes there are glaring contradictions to add to the nuttery. e.g. even given the truth of all the other madness in there, why on earth would Obama need to contact someone else (someone unrelated and not in a relevant job, but with skin of the right colour, gasp) for permission to contact his *own cousin*? They can't even remember their lies from one para to the next.

abi@#125, oh, he's a sock puppet/morpher? No mercy then.

Michael@#129, upper management aren't going to get 70 billion in bonuses on their own. They didn't get that much even whe the going was good. (They got way too much for any sane man to be other than sickened by, but we're still talking low billions in any given year when summed across all of upper management in all the major investment banks. Not 70 billion.)

(Yes, I am in the biz. No, I have never had a bonus of any kind. They don't give bonuses to the geeks who write the backend software. Alas.)

Oops, are real names necessary here? (Sorry, I've been using this pseudonym for so long it feels like my real name to me now.)

(Ski mask? What ski mask? Oh, *that* ski mask. It's, er, a fashion accessory. I think it's very fetching, also it covers my facial deformity.)

Can I celebrate Dysfunctional Families Day *and* my mother's birthday at the same time? It seems like the requirements might conflict.

I lived with a narcissist for five years, and, yes, the Palin stuff pretty much screams 'narcissist': a total inability to differentiate between personal and professional is a good danger sign. It's no surprise you're comparing her with Glory: Glory's behaviour was profoundly narcissistic too. (It's slightly harder to spot when the narcissist is smart, but only slightly.)

Another voice in the chorus (did Greek choruses have 200 members? no?): get well soon, you are just not allowed to die.

(Losing John M. Ford was bad enough: no more ML-regular wordsmiths are permitted to die this decade.)

Oop, sorry for the multipost: the first got me told that the post hadn't gone through because I'd posted too much recently, but obviously it did go through after all. (A couple of comments in several hours doesn't seem like a lot to me: has something gone skewy?)

John Mark Ockerbloom@242, do you have a link to that LA Times review? I'm always on the lookout for excellent pannings, and reviews of Hubbard books seem like a good source. (This thread has provided several good pannings already.)

(Google doesn't find it, presumably thanks to the awesome powers of the clams' lawyers.)

John Mark Ockerbloom@242, do you have a link to that LA Times review? I'm always on the lookout for excellent pannings, and reviews of Hubbard books seem like a good source. (This thread has provided several good pannings already.)

(Google doesn't find it, presumably thanks to the awesome powers of the clams' lawyers.)

I read _Habitation One_ when I was about fifteen and found nothing whatsoever odd or unpleasant about it. Ten years later, after reading Langford's panning, I went back and reread it, and what do you know? It was a horrendous tasteless blundering mess, just as he said.

This radical difference cannot be explained by a change in me (if anything I was more squeamish when I was fifteen than I am now). So it must be the book. The cause is clear: at some point in that ten-year gap, someone broke into my house and swapped my copy of _Habitation One_ for the nasty one.

I suspect a literary critic ninja in Langford's pay, or perhaps a werewolf/vampire hybrid on the hunt for good books and with a large stock of dreck to get rid of.

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