#9 Janice in GA: Last week news was saying 1,500 pieces. A quick look around this morning seems to say that that's been scaled down a bit. The Guardian article linked above says 1,345. Not big boxes, perhaps, but a huge find.
2007, my husband and I (early twenties, healthy, one full-time student, one under-employed recent graduate with no insurance and a substantial chunk of income from a family trust fund):
Taxes: 9.3% of our gross income.
Taxes + health care: I can't find firm records of what we spent in health care costs that year, but I estimate it totaled still under 10% of all income.
I believe that may qualify as "absurdly low". Damn. This was in NH, so no sales tax, and no state income tax (but we did pay state tax on the trust income). As well, we were renting, and thus not directly paying state or local property tax.
David Harmon @ 33: Along those lines, I recall having a startlingly blunt conversation with several male friends sometime around my sophomore year of college, in which more than one confessed to finding themselves attracted to middle-schoolers well past the age when that was perceived as being pretty inappropriate, and the general consensus was that it was an artifact of having been a middle-schooler when the whole sexual-attraction thing started, and it kinda stuck. Further discussion revealed that sex-with-peers was the thing that really dislodged this. A reset, of sorts, perhaps.
My recollection is that before my local public library went to a computerized system, each book's card was stamped with the number of the person who had checked it out and the due date. This is more private than putting names in them, of course, but I suspect that I'm not the only one who checked to see if she'd read something before by looking for her card number in the checkout history.
My current public library computer system allows you to opt in to having your checkout history saved - which I do use, as I find it useful - but defaults to "Don't save anything ever." Which is clearly as it should be.
Not to mention that, IIRC, HP and the Philosophers' Stone wasn't an immediate hit - the phenomenon took some time to build. I wonder what the advance on HP7 was...
The key to being a Sox fan is loving the ride. And this is quite a ride.
Paula, Lull's in Hollis still makes unpasteurized cider. It's one of the things I miss most about having moved out. I don't know of anyplace else in that area that still makes their own; Kimball's hasn't in a few years.
Jill Smith, you grew up in Hollis? When? Do I know you? *boggles at the small-world-ness of the internet*
JvP said, "math is a Sport AND an artform."
Like dance, only different. Then again, I used to try to explain to people that I liked ballet class in the same way that I like math. I'm still surprised at the number of my friends to whom that comparison made sense.
Tim, my Metamorphoses says (at the end of the story when she's eaten the pomegranate seeds and basically been doomed and Ceres is running around wreaking havoc on the world), "Jupiter, however, intervening between his brother and sorrowing sister, divided the circling year in equal parts, and now the goddess whose divinity is shared by two kingdoms spends the same number of months with her husband and with her mother". So, six. The interesting thing is that when I was a kid I read several versions where the amount of time she must spend in the underworld is directly related to how many pomegranate seeds she ate. Here, though, she ate seven seeds but stays for six months, and that only cause Jupiter felt bad for Ceres.
Not that I know anything about the story beyond that.
JvP: Yes, it was a famous snowstorm. The Blizzard of '78 is still talked about up here. Last year was the 25th anniversary of said event, and the Boston papers ran a fair bit of coverage. (Oddly enough, that same day we were hit by the Blizzard of '03, which was almost as bad, and certainly the most snow in a storm that I can remember. It was amusing, seeing all the pics of the '78 blizzard one day, and then seing very similar pics of the new storm the next.)
Leslie, Cheney heading the VP search, and choosing himself, sounds like Disney's Aladdin, when the evil advisor offers to solve the problem of the princess not wanting to marry any of her suitors. He comes back to the sultan with the following proposal: "If the princess has not chosen a husband by the appointed time, she shall be wed to - oh my, how very interesting. To the royal vizier. Why, that's me!"
plover,
It seems quite possible to me that the equivalent of talking softly to oneself (which does not require that you be crazy) would be a sort of "toned-down" sign, with smaller gestures and so on. The correspondences between sign and spoken language are very interesting. For example, babies growing up in signing households babble in sign, with little gestures and so on. I wonder if kids who've grown up signing have better fine motor skills at the age of one or two than their hearing/speaking peers. There's an interesting research project...
Xopher, now I have to go looking this stuff up, because I know enough linguistics to mostly follow the discussion but not enough for it to really click. I need diagrams. But that's what university libraries are for. Anyway, count me as another vote in favor of the WorldCon Linguistis Lecture & Discussion Group.
Dan L-K: I played up my theatre-tech experience when I was looking for a part-time job that summer. I got the job, but I'm not sure whether my enthusiastic explanation of how, after dealing with the spoiled rotten diva of my last show, handling unhappy customers would be a piece of cake had anything to do with it.
As for useless degrees, I don't really qualify. My current project is a BA in Psych, which is one of those majors that you can relate to almost anything. Not terribly useless, but most of my friends are in CS, and they think I'm crazy. The thing about psych is that it's a generalist's degree at most schools: There are few required classes, so you have lots of room for packratting. "Ooh, dairy management, and paleontology, and urban geography... fun!"
Andrew, I definitely think you're right about it being a sign of younger inexperienced writers. Also, of kids who are writing primarily for their peer group and aren't sure what that peer group will think, and so want to avoid being downright declarative.
Jill, bsd,
I see (and use) ellipses in chatrooms a lot, both to indicate pausing/trailing off and to indicate speechlessness. I'm mostly talking to people with anime/manga backgrounds, so that may be an influence, because I certainly see exchanges like:
person1: my girlfriend just beat me with a wet trout
person2: ...
(The above is a made-up conversation, but similar in tone to many I have seen.)
I also often see ellipses used instead of periods in teenage blogs. I think that this is because ellipses lend themselves well to the free-flow train-of-thought style that is common in this circle.
My third quick thought on the matter is that really understanding how different punctuations "sound" (not just the grammatical "this is where you use commas, this is where you use semi-colons", but how they feel to the reader) requires a fair bit of literacy and experience with writing. When one is young and inexperienced in "formal" literacy, ellipses are quick, easy, and tolerable almost anywhere.
Does anybody know when the Taguba report was written? What's the lag between the army coming to these conclusions and the scandal making its way to the mainstream media? I know it's no more than a month and a half, as mid-March dates are mentioned in the report, but I was wondering if anyone had found something more specific.
novalis, David, I learned that game as "Pictionary Telephone", but the name I like best for it (from New England Young Friends) is "Spanking Yoda".
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