The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Allan Beatty:

I swear it said Dalmatians in the preview!

Eight best going rouge movies? How about:

The Devil Wears Prada
Serial Mom
101 Dalmations (with Glenn Close as Cruella Deville)
Drop Dead Gorgeous
Dolores Claiborne
First Wives Club
Ready to Wear (Prêt à Porter)
Mildred Pierce

Here's to Freeman Dyson being wrong by an order of magnitude. In his 1985 book Infinite in All Directions he wrote that perhaps in 50 years Germany could be reunited.

Various:

The "Mimeograph Revolution" index isn't ignoring our favorites. They're just documenting a different fandom from the one that many of us are familiar with. Although the term "little magazines" sounds pretty generic, it really means fanzines for poetry and short literary fiction. This is just the genre fic versus literary fic debate, writ small.

If you want a guide to our kind of mimeographed periodicals, I published Fanzine Directory for a few years in the 1970s. The 1976 edition alone listed 874 titles published that year, including a zine called Thangorodrim from some youngster named Patrick Hayden (sic).

The introduction defined fanzines as:

amateur publications dealing with science fiction, fantasy, comix, movies, wargames, and other overlapping interest areas. Fanzines are not "little magazines" in the usual sense of the term, altho the categories do overlap.

Guess I should put it up online. But in the meantime, free copies of the 1976 and 1977 editions are available while supplies last to Making Light readers who give me a snail mail address. The last part of my email address is acm.org and the first part has a period between the words in my name.

"It was a dark and stormy night." is also the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time.

Steve with a book @ 66: It's difficult to predict the near-future, but it's also getting very hard to remember the recent past accurately.... The eras pass; partial documentation remains to be looked at, but false reminiscences and parodies and speculation eventually outvote them. God alone knows what posterity will think of us.

Ob-XKCD.

Teresa @ 70: I laughed out loud at "J.E.B. Stuart and Jeb Stuart Magruder."

Bruce @ 376: I had some things to say about the lack of mathematical and physical consistency of Dunne's theories of time

Yes, I always thought that Danny Dunn and the Time Machine was completely inconsistent.

I grew up near Forts Donelson and Henry and wrote a paper about them in high school. Even to me as a teenager it was obvious that the rivers were highways.

Well, I suppose it does help to be there and be familiar with the terrain first-hand. I saw the barges carrying bulk commodities up the Tennessee River, such as potash for fertilizer.

And now it appears that an author who did not visit the area has tried to be there in spirit, because he too has delivered a bargeload of, um, fertilizer.

Xopher @ 97: Drop me a line if you like. I have some comments that would be way off the topic of this thread. My name with a period between the parts, acm.org.

I've seen some of this from a different angle when I go shopping with my boyfriend. It's fun to watch the wheels turning in the salesman's head as he tries to figure out which of the two guys is the real guy who should get the sales pitch.

(The true answer is different depending on what we are shopping for.)

This one isn't my own work, but I'm quoting from it by way of recommending a book that a few of you might like. Bilal's Bread by Sulayman X. is a novel about a gay teenage Iraqi refugee in Kansas City. Bilal is very creative, and this is part of a poem he wrote:

Eat his flesh and gnaw his bones
and leave him roasting on the stove—
smash and trash and dash and crash
and eat the meat from shin to bone—
with bellies fat and greasy lips
we'll eat his arms and bite his hips,
tear and swear and scare and dare
and chew the tasty greasy bits.

There are four more verses. I trust you can see what work he was familiar with.

Of course the right wingers are seething in outrage. And that may be a good thing if it distracts them from whatever else they would have been outraged about.

Xopher @ 60 and others: Did you notice the word "aspirational" which cropped up downthread.

Or as I said when giving relationship advice to my niece: "Boys don't do monthaversaries."

I'm sure Paypal makes very few mistakes out of the vast numbers of transactions that they process. But their policies seem determined to ensure that no mistake is small.

Thanks for the link, Xopher. I'm in the minority who can see some artistic value to it. But I would still have the same problems everyone else has thought of:

• Better things to do with $15,000,000.
• Not enough room for it.
• Have to cover it up for some visitors. Although here I'm not thinking so much of parents but of gentleman callers who might feel I was holding them up against impossible standards.

Is there a payment method for those who don't trust Paypal?

Just for a bit of variety on this thread: I'm not interested in an invitation.

Happy birthday to the Technocrat of the Breakfast Table.

And happy birthday to D. Potter, who I've never met but always heard of.

Just an aside here. I found the metaphor of forgiveness as writing off a bad debt to be helpful. In particular: if the perp is still running up charges, it's too soon to forgive.

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