The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jonathan Cohen:

In January, 2005, I was present at a memorial service for Jacques Derrida, following his death several months before. There were twenty people in the audience.

For me, deconstruction was a wonderful intellectual adventure -- Plato's Pharmacy opened my eyes to a whole new way of reading. But it quickly became ossified, turning into yet another academic movement with spectacular claims and the desire to outdo all those preceding. And then the movement, in turn, passed, leaving the field to the New Historicists and then to the theoreticians of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. It's twenty years later, and the movement is gone; only the texts are left behind, if anyone cares to read them.

"Deconstruction" is no longer a bogeyman; it is, in fact, a dead horse, flayed until it has become unrecognizable.

I hated the film, for reasons well enumerated by earlier commentators. In this version, Vulcan logic was an afterthought, an inconvenience which never got in the way of emotional scenery-chewing.

One question, though: why exile Kirk to Delta Vega? If the Enterprise can have a water-filled Habitrail (tm), why not a brig?

Another thing no one has mentioned: the music. When I heard those first few chords, I thought, "Batman ripoff." Basil Poledouris, the late composer of the music for RoboCop, couldn't have written such a heavy-handed score if he'd tried. And the closing TOS theme? Completely over-orchestrated.

I made the recipe last night -- due to the lack of exact quantities, it was my interpretation -- and it was just wonderful. The ingredients were expensive ("good" olive oil in my neck of the woods is pricey, as are good sausages) but well worth it. I have enough for the entire week.

Hooray, and more recipes, please.

I don't have the gift to be able to compose my own self-defining roundel, but I've always liked John Hollander's from Rhyme's Reason.

The roundel ends as it begins; we take
The first words from the first line, where it bends
Easily, and with the refrain we make
The roundel ends.

--But not just yet; its rhyming still extends
Through six new lines before they come awake
Again, those last few words, those sleeping friends

We started out with and will not forsake;
What though the weary journey's way one wends,
When it is finally time to take a break
The roundel ends.

I use EndNote instead of Zotero for the same reason I use Word instead of OpenOffice, and with the same mixed feelings. Featuritis, especially when not thought through, is in some ways bad, but there are simply too many features in EndNote which are not in the open-source product. The import and export filters are comprehensive, the reference types and fields are customizable, and Cite While You Write is indispensable. Of course, there are numerous weird things wrong with the product; some of the connection files don't connect, duplicate checking is highly fallible and none too smart, and the capitalization rules are inflexible, despite a term list. (Try French entries in Chicago "A" style to see what I mean.) But I couldn't do without it.

I have grave fears that Prop. 8 will pass. I've been working the polls for No on 8 at a graduate student polling place at a major California university, and 3 out of 5 students, queried outside the hundred-foot limit before they voted, were voting "Yes." It blows my mind. How could there be so many conservative graduate students? If the university is supposed to be an outpost of progressive values, how much worse things must be in the surrounding communities! I'd like to be proven wrong, big time, but this is pretty scary.

I think there will be plenty of humor inherent in an Obama administration. Obama's focus and discipline can be taken to humorous extremes, Biden's foot-in-mouth disease will be an obvious target, and I'm sure there will be plenty of colorful characters who will emerge as bit players. After all, even Jimmy Carter had Billy Carter to contend with.

Here's hoping the Obama administration materializes; humor can wait until then.

#30: was that Parker Baratta?

Carol @ #55: The limerick is unlikely, because the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is for, er, organ.

Now if the Good Doctor had considered a cello or violin for the ultimate line, he would have had something.

Serge @ 13 -- that's sax and violins.

Snape Jewish! The person I always wondered about was Anthony Goldstein, whose name popped up in lists of young wizards whenever Rowling felt like showing that they were a diverse lot. He was such a cipher, living in name alone; I am curious whether any Jewish mysticism would have entered into his wizarding.

I found myself dissatisfied by Falwell's death. So many of his moral peers are still alive and doing such harm that the loss of his life hardly seems something of substance. When his ideology is dead, or at least pushed back into the crevices of our world, then perhaps I will feel that something good has happened.

I tried to write the most inefficient Perl script that would do the job, and wound up with something that used Text::Balanced to find the asterisks and Win32::OLE to turn the text into a Word document with italics. Windows automation is just ugly.

Whoops... that should be "Gender Genie." The "Genre Genie" would tell me that my non-fiction articles are in fact slashfic.

Every published piece I've written has come out "female" by Genre Genie standards. This software is as non-predictive as an OKCupid quiz with five questions.

If I were back in graduate school, I would now have people trying to explain to me how I and my writing are "feminized." Feh.

The way in which I first learned about Coös County was fom Robert Frost's poem, The Witch of Coös. Unfortunately, the name isn't in the verse, so we don't know how Frost would have pronounced it.

Warning: contains language.

Do not touch the third rail.

Kernel panic: you should not be seeing this message.

Useless use of void in a void context.

I've been unemployed for about three years. Manic depression makes it close to impossible for me to hold on to a day job, but if I'm functional enough to write this, I'm certainly not disabled. My wife and parents support me, but they're stretched to the limit, and we have no savings. When my wife retires on the small amount set out for her by her pension plan, we are going to have to go live in a trailer in Hemet and eat cat food. (Hemet, for those readers not in California, is the armpit of the state, rivaled only by Winchester.) The question is: will we be able to get Fancy Feast, or will we have to settle for 9-Lives? (That was a joke.)
The sum of money mentioned in the original post gives me the willies. I can see how it would seem normal to people who had it, but to me it seems like the arithmetical sublime. We have a lot less, and I suppose in some sense that seems unjust, but it seems more distant to me. We have our fate, ending in Hemet, and the rich people have theirs, ending in the Hamptons. Both classes of people eat and sleep and go to the bathroom, and manage to do it on the money they have. No one's going to step in and save us with great wealth, and no one is going to rescue them from what they perceive as privation. Inequity all around, I'd say; not really irony as much as a difference in expectations.

I don't think anyone has asked this question yet, but has anyone thought of putting pressure on / giving aid to other countries, e.g., Mexico, to make their citizens' lives sufficiently tolerable that the citizens don't feel that migration is their best and only strategy? Admittedly, this country's treatment of its own poor is getting worse and worse, but if America is going to spend billions of dollars duplicating the Great Wall of China, it might behoove its legislators to see if there isn't a better use for the money.

Does anyone remember lavarand, an attempt to generate truly random numbers by taking CCD images of three or four lava lamps? I believe it was cooked up by some engineers at SGI (RIP) in the mid-90's.

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