The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Del Cotter:

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Posted on entry Massive Anglo-Saxon hoard found ::: September 30, 2009, 12:28 PM:
Giacomo, I believe landowners being offered a piece of the action, even after the material has been legally found to be treasure, is a recent legislative innovation in Britain.

Before that, archaeologists complained about just such a perverse incentive to fence the stuff stealthily. They had to watch as trinkets were advertised on ebay, having lost all their context, which is painful for an archaeologist.
Posted on entry The Club Is All Their Law, To Keep All Men in Awe ::: August 31, 2009, 12:26 PM:
In related news, this year's MacTaggart lecture, part of the Edinburgh TV Festival, criticised the BBC, "describing the corporation's size and ambitions as "chilling" and accusing it of mounting a "land grab" in a beleaguered media market."

The speaker was James Murdoch, son and heir of Rupert Murdoch, whose fortune Forbes.com describes as "inherited and growing" and estimates at $9 billion.
Posted on entry Panels and parlor games ::: August 18, 2009, 06:45 AM:
Fax Paladin @88: so that was the death panel I've been hearing about?
Posted on entry The secret fighting style of ACORN ::: April 12, 2009, 08:12 AM:
The Chicago Manual of Style: they stet one of yours, you hyphenate one of theirs.
Posted on entry Watch Now! ::: March 16, 2009, 08:21 AM:
ajay, have you seen rorschachsdiary.livejournal.com?
Posted on entry Bank of America: utter slime ::: February 07, 2009, 07:46 AM:
Mashell, if people are to be raised to honor their families' obligations to corporations, then corporations must be raised to honor their obligations to people's families. If that is a compact that has broken over the years, I do not believe it was people who broke it.
Posted on entry The true history of the Bush years ::: January 19, 2009, 10:32 AM:
Just when you thought he had absolutely nothing in common with Gregor Vorbarra...

You mean apart from being the autocratic heir of a family of bloodthirsty lunatics?
Posted on entry Electoral history, pattern-making, and meaning ::: October 25, 2008, 06:05 PM:
They were landslides in terms of the electoral vote, but the electoral college had a large amplifying effect in those elections. GWB's two squeakers are unusual in the modern era in being close both popularly and collegiately. Usually the EC ensures a comfortable majority even if the popular vote is less than 50%. See this bar chart for details.
Posted on entry McCain: pass it on ::: October 09, 2008, 08:03 AM:
Every president elected for many years has either a double letter in his name, or a double initial, like Ronald Reagan. The Bushes seem to be the exception, but I wonder if that's because they were not legitimately elected.

They both have a Double U in their initials :-)
Posted on entry Open thread 111 ::: July 02, 2008, 07:56 AM:
I haven't read it, but Michael Wood's The Story of India is the companion book to last year's BBC2 series marking the 60th anniversary of India's independence, which I did see. Amazon.com doesn't have any customer reviews, but amazon.co.uk does.
Posted on entry Could lead to goose-stepping ::: April 21, 2008, 11:49 AM:
#413 Tea is the heart of a heartless world.

That's "poppy tea", not "proper tea".

Meanwhile, the person looking for cherry tea should know that cherry tea begins at home.
Posted on entry Top Al Qaeda Leader Killed (again) ::: February 01, 2008, 05:22 AM:
"Top Al Qaeda Leader Killed" quasi-scans, with some effort, to the William Tell Overture. Just saying.

Also "Will Ye No Come Back Again?", and "Camptown Ladies". I got my money on the Baghdad Mayor, somebody bet on the Bey.
Posted on entry Remembering the Great War, 2007 ::: November 12, 2007, 02:59 PM:
Last night ITV showed My Boy Jack, a two hour film about Rudyard Kipling and the son he helped to join up in the Great War, under 18 and with bad eyesight, and who was killed in his first battle.

David Haig (A for Andromeda, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Two Weeks Notice) plays Kipling; Kim Cattrall (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Sex and the City) plays his wife Carrie; Daniel Radcliffe (the Harry Potter films) plays their son Jack; and Carey Mulligan (Dr Who "Blink") plays his sister "Bird".

ITV have made the whole thing available as a download for the next four weeks or so, if the web site can be convinced your computer is good enough for it.
Posted on entry The war on photography ::: November 09, 2007, 07:43 PM:
For Noreascon in 2004 I was staying in the Boston Marriott Copley Place, and, toward the end of my stay, on my way back to my room on one of the higher floors, I thought me to take a picture of the Charles River below from the elevator lobby. And it was in this quiet lobby, far above the busier parts of the hotel, with no-one else around, that a large security guard appeared from nowhere to tell me forcefully that there was to be no taking photographs from that spot. I argued a bit, but he was big and getting meaner about it, so I gave up, went to my room and took the picture from there. Not as good an angle but it was basically the same "offence", only from my room they couldn't see me doing it.

Leaving aside how bizarre the actual offence was, the really crazy features of the incident, to me, were:

* this was a private security guard, not any law enforcement officer

* there was nobody around. Had he just let me take the photos, not only would no authority figure have discovered and punished me after the fact, no authority figure could possibly have discovered and punished *him* after the fact. He was enthusiastically and aggressively enforcing dumb rules on the customer without any prospect of praise for doing it, or punishment for failing to.

Plus, like I said, disgruntled customer goes to his room and does it anyway. So, Boston Marriott Copley Place. Charming institution. I like Boston a lot, so I was sorry to see it embarrass itself as a city so badly with the "Great LED Panic" a little later.
Posted on entry The optimates, not as quick as they think ::: October 19, 2007, 11:49 AM:
Someone in the audience then objected that we'd been talking about things where blogging had achieved something, and why *shouldn't* other people get in on this. He made it sound as if we were trying to keep it to ourselves.

It's cargo cult thinking. I read a blog article the other day about how healthier, wealthier, happier cities had higher populations, and the blogger said city planners could use this to plan for more population and so improve their city's productivity. That's just post hoc ergo propter hoc, without even the excuse of the "post hoc" part.
Posted on entry Open thread 91 ::: September 13, 2007, 08:59 AM:
Our equivalent of 9/11 isn't 11/11, it's 11/5. Four centuries after that religious fanatic conspiracy to blow up a public building was foiled, we still remember, remember the fifth of November. We stopped torturing again (after we started again after stopping the first time), and the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed after only two and a half centuries and a Gordon Riot or two, but America has a long way to go if it wants to match us for long memories. The year 2401 at least.
Posted on entry The book with everything ::: September 10, 2007, 06:29 AM:
What about the Penicillin Award, for the book that's got everything?
Posted on entry Peppers and Raclette ::: July 18, 2007, 12:09 PM:
Don't Americans have pickles and/or relish in their cheeseburgers, albeit with ground beef in between? It's the same thing going on, all around the world.

Two things I like to do with cheese sandwiches: pickled onions cut into slices with Cheddar, and mango chutney with Stilton.

Dave: I've never experienced actual English Food prejudice from real French people, only from North Americans and Australians.
Posted on entry By the pricking of my thumbs ::: June 05, 2007, 09:43 AM:
But... but he's always had a soft spot for dinosaurs, apes, and circus freaks!
Posted on entry Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 05, 2007, 08:17 AM:
Diatryma @ #366
Thank you, I'm glad you were amused even without guessing the original. Since to my surprise no-one has yet, I must rely on something other than recognition for the lols.

I can't believe I forgot to include "I are serious cat" among the classic macros. I would certainly have found a way to fit it in if I had.

I wanted to do something different, so I avoided leet expressions or generic lolkitty grammar as much as possible, except where they turn up in actual known classic owl, cat, elephant seal, or Sparta macros. I tried to make each line a whole number of known macros (with nouns etc. swapped as required, natch), or each macro a whole number of lines.

Once again, glad you got a laugh out of recognising the sequence; as a matter of curiosity, did anyone get a sense of what the original source poem was about, even without recognising it?

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