The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Elizabeth Coleman:

Here in the northwest corner of the Northwest, the wind is blowing red and gold leaves in swirls down the street. The sky is bright, but it's raining just enough to remind you summer's over.

@ Carrie S @ 21
And I've got an online (white, non-muslim) acquaintance who wears a hijab at work to cover up her candy pink hair. Given the choice between dye her hair a natural color or get fired, she came up with a compromise.

My co-worker just came in and related her 9-11 story. She spent it driving around the Olympic Peninsula in Robbie Knieval's van with Dan Haggerty to get bears for a photo shoot. She spent part of the day with a bear the size of a Volkswagen growling a few feet from her face and Haggerty saying, "Don't show fear!" You can't make stuff like that up.

Yeah, come to the West Coast for Thai food. In my town on Puget Sound, there's a good chance Thai restaurants outnumber Chinese. Indian's getting big, too.

Back when I was studying the Etruscans, I remember hearing that writing the alphabet on things was pretty common. I'd heard that people just thought it was neat, much as Westerners are often fascinated by foreign writing systems. I could, however, buy that it might have magical significance.

The Etruscan alphabet, by the way, is fun, since almost all the letters are simply the Latin alphabet backwards, read right to left.

At my work, when we run a particular set of foiled linen paper through the copier, it makes the doo-do-do-doo-doot! from the Austin Powers theme. Over and over and over.

That video makes me think of Bjork's "Cvalda" from Dancer in the Dark. Industrial rather than electronic, but I still love it.

Don't forget April 20--Hitler's birthday!

I got epilepsy from the fever I had during chicken pox! I don't remember the disease itself, other than the amusement of picking off the pox. (There was a really big, gross one behind my ear I could feel but not see.) But I do remember a week later, having my first seizure and freaking the crap out of my mom. A really big petit mal, though several years later I had one, lone grand mal. But grand mals are boring, my really big petit mals would get fun and hallucinogenic. Tom and Jerry were running around my house. For serious.

My grandma had polio in Kansas, and the doctor had no idea what to do about it. There was one other girl with polio at the same time, so he recommended massage therapy for her, and motionlessness for my grandma. The poor other girl was crippled, but my grandma pulled through. Her leg sometimes bothers her to this day, but I never realized how lucky she was until I was older and learned more about polio. I definitely agree with what Diatryma said about modern kids not knowing anything about polio. To me, it was just something random thing my grandma had. I didn't know she was a walking miracle.

My ex-girlfriend (aged 29?) had a smallpox vaccination scar. She was from Romania originally. It was always odd, since the only other scar I'd seen was on my dad.

Wow. I opened that up and thought, "wow! DC's brown and ugly in the winter." Then, I realized the brown was people.

So when you need a saint to conflate with your manliest of gods/orishas, who do you turn to? Sweet, virginal Santa Barbara! Because she blows stuff up. And so we get fun, gender-bending gods/orishas like Chango of the Santeria system. (Described here by a rather frantic individual.)

Having grown up in a fairly liberal, Catholic family, I'd say that Catholics tend to be Democrats because we like social programs that help the poor, helpless and downtrodden. I also like to think that because Catholicism is a world-spanning faith, we don't fall victim to the uber-patriotism that comes when your identity is subsumed in nationalism. And, we're all about science. Jesuits=latte-sipping intellectuals of Christianty!

Abortion and other moral/social issues are where they get conservative, but even then, I've heard of clergy begging their parishes not to cast their votes based solely on abortion.

>>Silly me! And here I thought that at the very least the guy who pulled the trigger had something to do with it….

Or the guy who activated the bomb. They're making a fuss over whether the bomb killed her or they bullets. Can anyone explain why they care?

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