The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Zed Lopez:

At Metafilter, a Brooklynite solicited suggestions for a picket sign to mock them.

Some of them (JESUS HAD 2 DADS) were pretty funny.

Thanks for posting your sketches again, Avram. Especially nice lettering this year!

Stefan Jones @144: [Kornbluth] never, as far as I know, ever wrote a war story

I think Not This August could be reasonably counted as a war story.

David Dyer-Bennet @117: Probably best not to dig deeper, this can't go on indefinitely :-).

"Original or uncut Puppet Masters?"

"Original."

"Me too! Tunnel in the Sky or Farmer in the Sky?"

"Tunnel."

"Me too! Kettle Belly Baldwin or Kip's Dad?"

"Kip's Dad."

"Me too! Originally published ending to Podkayne of Mars or Heinlein's intended ending?"

"Original."

"DIE, HERETIC SCUM!"

I think the best Heinlein is a number of stories in The Past Through Tomorrow (but the first couple in that collection, including "The Roads Must Roll" is pretty bad.)

For novels, I'd agree with most of the specific recommendations here... The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, The Door Into Summer.

If you read Stranger in a Strange Land, get an old copy that's not the full, unexpurgated text. It reads even better if you quit halfway through... it's kind of two books in one, and the second one retroactively makes the first one worse.

Time Enough For Love is the only novel subsequent to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress that I wouldn't specifically advise against. As a novel, it's not great, but I find a couple of the self-contained novellas within it, "The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail" and "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" to rank among Heinlein's best.

At the Heinlein archives, you can buy hundreds of pages of PDFs of Heinlein's scripts and treatments for TV work. (And seemingly just about every other piece of paper to cross Heinlein's desk this side of dry cleaning receipts.)

Berkeley was a pioneer in airship disasters back in aught-8.

Totally late to this party, but I wanted to mention that there's a maybe canonical Buffyverse Austen pastiche, "Presumption" by Jane Espenson, in Tales of the Slayers.

A bookstore in San Francisco really did (allow someone to) arrange their books by color.

Theophylact @24: For a lovely defense of genre in all its forms, read Michael Chabon's essay collection

For a while, I've been cranky about Chabon implying that genre fiction was dead (i.e., saying it needed reviving), but it's probably high time I got over that.

The credits montage was one of my favorite parts. They are indeed nuts to not take advantage of publicizing it.

Ken Jennings' Tuesday Trivia (the form to subscribe is on that page) always concludes with a tough "what do these things have in common" question (designed to be Google-resistant.) I don't think I've ever gotten one...

The Berkeley campus has an Ishi Courtyard at the center of one building. And the anthropology building is Kroeber Hall.

There's a line in The Dispossessed that anticipates the title of Always Coming Home. I think it's narration by Shevek speaking of his physics professor, that he was never coming home, meaning, roughly, never at peace with himself.

Brad DeLong @29 If it does, we will repeal it [Prop 8] next year--or the year after.

And if it doesn't, I fear we'll need to re-defeat it for years to come. (On preview, I hope elfwreck's prediction @60 that the CA Supremes would overturn it proves correct if it passes.)

Lizzy @171: we gotta do something about Joe Lieberman. Any suggestions?

All I'd really like to see is for him to lose his committee chairmanship. In turn, of course, he'd no longer caucus with the Democrats (who won't need independents for a majority.*)

* knock wood

I'm a permanent absentee ballot voter, but I always cast my ballot at my polling place. Lines seemed no different from normal.

Besides the presidential election, I'm chiefly jittery over Prop 8 (which would overturn CA's gay marriages.)

When my wife and I were house-shopping five years ago, our mortgage broker more or less told us we would be idiots to get anything but an ARM. I did some research and found that Alan Greenspan recommended them, and that Paul Krugman recommended against them.

Both recommendations played a role in my decision against one.

First on the list would have to be the used recumbent bicycle I bought in '97, which has been my principal means of transportation since. Other than the frame, very, very little remains of the original bike -- the hub, rim, and most of the spokes of the rear tire, one gear shifter, the derailleurs, one or maybe two of the front cogs, the crank arms. Included when I think of my bike are the accessories that make it useful, like the heavy duty rack and panniers, the helmet-mounted halogen headlight, the case-hardened steel chain lock, the tiny, ruthlessly efficient bike pump and bike multi-tool for repairs on the go, the clothes to keep me warm and dry during a rainy Berkeley winter.

I'm about to embark on a series of courses culminating in how to make your own bike frame. Usually I just make code and prose and I'm excited about actually creating a physical object (and a useful one, even.)

I'd heard of this, and wondered about #5 (Palin is just the sort of person Oprah would normally have on her show.) Is that assertion actually defensible?

Both Electoral Vote and FiveThirtyEight are, at the moment, calling McCain winning in November. By 270-268 and 277-261.

One of the things keeping any optimism alive for me was that they've been calling for Obama consistently for months.

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