The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Leroy F. Berven:

Antonia @ 122: Yep, the standard lighter has plenty of room inside for a blasting cap (sufficient by itself to remove most of the user's hand, plus major damage or worse to face), and probably enough additional explosive to bring the whole device up to grenade-equivalent. This one's a really nasty little trick, and not one to be in the same room with, if avoidable.

Jenny @ 72: And there's one which I've seen around Seattle during the past several years, for which the internal letter spacing and content on the tailgate brand have been modified to a slightly greater extent: "TONKA".

Summer Storms @ 41: Especially if they are the ones operating the vacuum cleaner.

Naaaah . . . offspring of a recent Irish revolutionary, especially if in conjunction with a Baader-Meinhof alumnae.

Mark @ 63, albatross @ 67: In the US model, at least, there has long been a distinction between generic local politics at the (e.g.) fire department level, and higher-level partisan political activities.

In the former situation, you may have two (or more) competing models of what the (ferex) local FD should be doing, or what they should be doing first, in a particular type of emergency situation. This, generally, has no particular correlation to (again, ferex) liberal-vs-conservative conceptual policy issues, but CAN have a lot of local repercussions at the "why-did-you-decide-to-let-my-place burn" technical response level. ("The wind speed and direction ensured your place was toast, as soon as the first embers hit your roof from upwind." is likely to be accepted as a valid response, whereas "Your building was a symbol of oppression for the local proletariat, and thus we were inspired to let it burn." is rather less likely to be. Also, "You were a f***ing idiot for building your place with flammable roofing, rather than with one of the fireproof options." is pretty non-partisan in nature.)

OTOH, fire department response practices don't have much to do with either the higher-level specific politics of individuals, or of the ownership of any particular company, regardless of whoever's house (or business) happened to catch on fire tonight. Such higher-level politics tend to get played out at much more exalted levels, and generally don't involve the folks who actually do the nuts-and-bolts level work, except as occasional examples (for good or bad).

Vicki @ 23: "I wonder: what would the average member of the U.S. Congress, or the British Parliament, make of letters from constituents urging them to nominate specific people for the Peace Prize?"

Given the variety (and asserted urgency) of issues upon which said Members of Congress / Parliament receive communications every business day, this would probably rank (on average) somewhere around issue #463-B. For some it would be much higher, of course, and correspondingly lower for others. But on the average, "lost in the ambient noise level" probably sums it up.

Xopher @ 255: "Occasionally someone posts a groany response . . . "

Which helps to Titus over, if (Gormen-) ghastly enough.

abi @ 73:

All of which have been subject to a lot of "fiddling around" in popular culture, the results of which are disseminated via popular broadcast media.

Which explains why we see so much seax and violins on television.

j h woodyatt @ 189: purls of wisdom.

Avram @ 89: In the late 1960s, John W. Campbell Jr. devoted at least one Analog editorial to this argument. Of course, this being JWCjr, the primary underlying purpose was probably to incite vigorous discussion [1], as distinct from being an actual personal belief that restricting the voting franchise in this way would be an optimum solution to the problems alluded to. [2]

[1] To use an extreme euphemism.
[2] Not that these are, necessarily, mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, JWCjr is no longer available for further direct comment on the topic . . .

"View all by" shows a previous post under the same name, with explicitly spammish content.

Tom Whitmore @ 126: Carefully carving off only one limb at a time, to keep the meat for each meal fresh, wouldn't necessarily (at least initially) mean a dead body . . .

Then there are the somewhat variant issues involved in, say, gnawing one's own foot off, under conditions of sufficient humger.

However, I rather doubt that either process would be within either the letter, or the spirit, of kosher (or halal) practice.

skzb @ 372: "It seems to me that the distinction between "fiction for the masses" and "literature for the elite" is a 20th century aberration."

Er . . . no. This distinction was in place by the early 19th century -- see "Dickens, Charles", et. al.. For a specific class of works which evoked considerably more emphatic distinctions, see the (primarily U.S.) "dime novels" of the latter half of that century, many (but hardly all) of which specifically celebrated the challenges and opportunities of the (American) Western frontier.

This set of distinctions however, seems to properly be a mere continuation of the literary concerns which arose no later than the early 18th century in horrified response to the genre of "novels" (see "Defoe, Daniel", et. al.) which had arisen to e/n/t/i/c/e/ corrupt the gullible public of the day . . .

Which, in turn, were not all that far removed -- either in time or in interests -- from the "groundlings" who roared their appreciation at the Globe Theatre in London, when plays written by that hack Bill Shakespeare brought in capacity audiences.

Stefan @ 310: You could look here for some "useful" guidance . . .

ajay @ 128: "Being against the Republican Party does not make one a member of "the Left" in any meaningful sense . . . "

Quite. Some of us are appalled and disgusted by what the Republican party (or at least several of its very large, high-profile constituent components) has been doing over the last decade or so, especially its enthusiastic participation in increasing Federal government deficit spending, and increasing highly intrusive types of Federal government agency involvement in the daily lives of many Americans.

Although neither "big government" nor financial indiscipline is inherently a left/right "marker" issue, the last several decades in the U.S. have seen both descriptions more commonly ascribed to participants clustered toward the "left" side of the political spectrum. So, to whatever degree this perception is either accurate or useful (a point about which a great deal of impassioned debate is probably inevitable), it is possible to vigorously criticize the Republican party for adopting positions that have been widely identified with relatively "leftist" political elements.

This, however, hardly makes John Boehner a disciple of either Saul Alinsky or Karl Marx.

Linkmeister @ 54:

Somebody must have installed a Serge protector on that line of discussion . . .

Kip @ 104: Occasionally, justice is served. I remember the time a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door of a Mormon high priest, as I was working nearby . . .

Lee @ 39: If only you could have introduced him to George Orr, or perhaps to the protagonist of Heinlein's "They" . . .

P J Evans @ 18: "Yes, I can see authors trying to get editors to change stories as the authors decide they need revising."

Or, ObCopyediting: Dhalgren.

Terry Karney @ 103, Linkmeister @ 105:

ObSF: Cordwainer Smith, "Mark Elf" -- see "Menschenjäger".

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