alkali@47: I knew some of the bits of Sumner you mention; my question would be how effective he was. Kennedy made friends across the aisle; whatever the Republicans have done to this country, I suspect would have been a lot worse without Kennedy working to moderate it.
Tim: there's a difference between using vulgarities about third parties and addressing them to other participants.
Somebody on one of these threads linked to the ongoing British attempt to break the speed record for a steam-powered car. It's been broken!
David Harmon @ 692: I hadn't known that buckwheat wasn't a true grain
A few years ago, Rogue made a beer with buckwheat and described it as a fruit beer.
Terry @ 710: Dewpoint has nothing to do with how humid it it is, just when the air can't sustain the suspended water (which IIRC, is never more than 4 percent absolute, irrespective of the relative humidity).
Huh? When I was learning to fly, dewpoint was the temperature at which the air/water-vapor mixture would be at 100% relative humidity; nothing about suspension, just an absolute measure of the amount of water vapor. This is the definition Wikipedia uses, FWIW.
Mary Aileen @ 570: I think they issue a supply of exclamation points with your travel papers; it's difficult to cope without them, even if you've seen some bits before. We had seen the reason for the color name "ice blue", close up, in Norway; but there was something about waking up in the morning with the hull going "Clunk!" every now and then, or looking out your porthole to see furry sausages with eyes floating by on bits of ice, or ... well, you have the idea now.
Wingate@68: On one of my first visits to Seattle, I deliberately went a few miles out of my way so I could drive on the \other/ end of I-90. (I don't get all the way to the east end as much now that it has been extended from downtown Boston under the harbor to the airport.)
wrt US 50, were you around when they were building the second Chesapeake Bay bridge? Not as good for closeups as the second Delaware Bay bridge (I was going between DC and midstate NY a few times a year during that construction) but still enlightening.
Ken@88: flat-or-puffy sounds like bog-standard clouds, not just Atlantic. OTOH, where the North Sea and the Atlantic are close can be interesting; I remember some very strange shapes (lenticular stacked into a thunderhead, but no ridge to form them) when I drove down the A9 to Perth
janetl@670: the usage I recall from mimeography >30 years ago is "slipsheet" (especially as a verb, but also IIRC as a noun); I've read people more knowledgeable about languages than I am saying that separate words in a phrase tend to fuse in just that fashion
hapax@29: good points, but I have this vision of your grandfather hiding a book in his oboe. With a copy of Sandman that could work, but Forever Amber? (I can see both words coming from the same insufficiently-precise roots, but I've never seen the furniture spelled that way.)
Lee@58: is a vice grip something you buy at Good Vibrations? If so, I can understand tossing a cheap one; the results of a tool failure could be ... unfortunate.
Jacque@848: Sounds like Robert Half's temp group is better than their perming operation, which around Boston is sometimes called Robert One-Eighth. I hadn't thought about multiple agencies for temps, but it makes sense. This contrasts to perms, at least, when I was beating the pavement 14-15 years ago, when the general advice was \not/ to hand a resume to every agency because most of them knew most of the available posts and hirers didn't appreciate getting multiple copies of your resume.
Rob@859: 2001 is not about evolution as it was then understood; it's about the inverse of the punctuation in punctuated equilibrium, and so has little to do with breeding. (An interesting lack of parallel; the upgraded apes \might/ be enough better within their own niche (e.g., getting food and blocking predators) to improve their immediate breeding chances, but I have trouble visualizing anybody getting hot over the Starchild.)
Bruce@201 (re Seattle restaurant): If the shelves at the nearby convenience store are any guide, common Brits are nostalgic for what can be charitably called culinary horrors (mushy peas? \instant/ mushy peas?!?); a less-discreet writer would start with "SOS" and go on from there. But I haven't had much bad food in my last couple of trips; and an acquaintance who lived there in the 1970's wrote at the time that the food then was much improved from traditional, starting with the death of the "Kill it Monday, cut it up Tuesday, eat it Wednesday" philosophy. I never asked what she thought of English hotel breakfasts, which even in 1965 disappointed someone raised on tales thereof.
And you are doubly fortunate: in your wife's coworkers \and/ in not owing me a new keyboard (it's past lunch here).
Caroline@155: "Seven-Layer Bar" is another name I've heard for such concoctions, although the ones whose contents I remember used pecans rather than walnuts (which I find a little shrill). Coffee shops seem to think "Coronary Crunchy" would intimidate customers.
Cygnet@66: it may not have been a huge \profit/ stream compared to other times; any guess at how much income per table those prices would generate? Or the owner may have concluded that he didn't have enough competent managers to cover all the hours.
John@73 somehow I haven't had much bad food in London, in ~4 weeks of drop-by tourism over 30 years; possibly steering away from the pretentious places has helped. I've appreciated Time Out's frankness in reviewing theater but never seen their cheap-eats guide; I'll have to look for it if I ever get back.
hamletta@128: I've run into a number of apparent Greeks making pizza around Boston; some of it was quite good.
Houghton@93: That's \Under/dog, not \Super/dog. (I lived close by for their entire existence, and (weird connection) ran lights for a show featuring their founder.) And the \real/ Blasphemy was served on a hot-dog roll made from challah dough; when the store took off the supplier couldn't keep up.
Xopher@97: well, I \have/ eaten chicken-fried steak, and IIRC I'm a bit older than you are. OTOH, it was in Minneapolis (in a place just down the street from elise -- TNH may still remember it 12 years later), so it may have been a bit less greasy. (Or it may not; Scandinavians appreciate the supportive powers of fat.)
Lee/Earl@116/120: CFS is similar to the Chinese way of doing beef (most of which would have come from elderly and well-worked animals): dip bite-size pieces in a thin cornstarch paste before frying, so it half-fries and half-steams. (approximation; IANAC.) Lee@126 (cf fidelio@133): steak is a method of cutting, not a quality. cf "chuck steak", which is pot roast in thin pieces.
Stefan@150: that's not \quite/ Coronary Crunchies, for which you also need butterscotch chips and grated coconut (source of one of the few unsaturated vegetable fats, IIRC).
Rob@721: not a tale of huge wealth, but a large chunk of my college costs was paid from Pitney Bowes; unfortunately I never thought to ask my father whether he had gotten a tip (from a parent or alum, as he was headmaster at a school for the rich) or figured it out himself.
albatross@172 (&prev): The press may be one side of the problem, but the fact that the reactionaries make lots of ]noise[ doesn't hurt the visibility of their cause. (It \should/ hurt them, but somehow nobody reminds the press of Christ's instruction not to make a show of praying.) It's analogous to the way the political right has spent decades building the "intellectual" underpinnings to its faith (aka having a sounding-right politically-correct answer to everything, endorsed by think tanks nationwide), so that nonsense that would have had people shouting "Naked emperor!" 40-50 years ago (supply-side economics, anyone?) is now considered plausible.
Doyle@174: Episcopalians are also a small denomination; FWIW, Wikipedia says 2 million.
Serge@515: sorry, more imprecision; I come from the other corner and don't do AZ summer heat, so I won't be there. I have a vague recollection that someone was proposing an ML party at Anticipation, which I will be at, barring the usual unusual.
xeger@229: I was imprecise; what surprised me was not the persistence of MLers but the number of different stories they found; somehow I wouldn't have thought that practical chemists would need to make so many tests of how badly thioacetone reeks.
Kathryn@231: interesting.
Serge@233: that sounds plausible; normally I get to WFC on Wednesday, but I got to Tempe on Thursday due to outside entanglements.
Tim@294: the tropes Atwood was referring to are peripheral to the Wikipedia article you link, but are common to what most people point to when they say "fantasy" -- even if Atwood left out TNH's One True (fantastic) Trope. Saying that the works in which those tropes are central are called "science fantasy" is beyond intellectually sloppy.
J Austin: at least you were at home. WaMu locked the card that we specifically used for foreign trips (because they didn't charge such a ridiculous commission) halfway through our Calgary trip for WFC last fall; apparently it didn't occur to them that people travel, and that thieves usually don't charge museum&zoo admission&giftship bills. Not happiness-making. (Maybe also an indicator of the incompetence that broke them down not long after?) Fortunately, this time we were able straighten them out after an hour on the phone -- unlike the LA trip many years ago where I \could/ \not/ reach the bank because a storm had taken down the phone lines (yes, that does seem ridiculous, but 26 years ago it was less so).
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