The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Cryptic Ned:

I think more movies should start with a documentary about the time and place in which the movie takes place. It made "The Agony and the Ecstasy" slightly less dreary and tiresome.

All that I wanted was some kink of constructive discussion.

If your kink is constructive discussion, a lot of sites will be pretty erotically frustrating.

"I was trying to take the high road, but now that YOU'VE made this personal, I'm allowed to argue using nothing but ad hominem attacks."

"I can see I'm not welcome here. This place is just an echo chamber."

Here is a brilliant example of the form "Person who has never seen the group before swoops in, makes a false assumption based on one data point which she should easily have seen was contradicted by hundreds of other data points, criticizes the post line-by-line using absolutely no arguments that do not depend on her initial false assumption, and then swoops out again, leaving the regulars nonplussed". The surprising part is that so much effort was put into it.

I like the "leading questions" style of argument, especially when it's written in such a patronizing way that the respondent will never respond to the first question that's supposed to be leading up to the Gotcha questions.

"I'm honestly puzzled about why you feel this way, Bob, because I've frankly never heard that opinion here. Would you support, for example, [ludicrously uncontroversial proposition]? How about [statement of Bob's position in such a way that the speaker clearly does not understand why Bob holds this position]? Finally, now that you've seen those two, would you agree with [insane ramblings]? I'd be curious to know why you think Proposition C doesn't follow from Propositions A and B. Feel free to email me privately if you're embarrassed."

Thus, I seem to hear the president saying that in order to protect freedom we must take away human rights.

When he says "freedom" what he means is "the interests of multinational corporations whose top executives donate to the Republican Party". This is also what he means by words like "democracy", "liberty", "America", "The United States", "Western civilization", "we", and "us".

It would be nice if the media would portray this as "Bush and the Republican Congress favors torture; Democrats, plus five or six Republicans, think it is unwise", rather than "Bush favors torture; Republicans in Congress think it is unwise; Democrats apparently have no opinion, because we didn't ask."

Twice I've encountered people who expressed their bewilderment as to why a fine cut of meat was called "flaming yawn". I've never seen it written down though.

Rumsfeld is the only person in what we might call Bush's 'war cabinet' with actual military experience. With whom would Chimpy replace him?

Well, a lot of people in charge of federal departments and agencies (EPA, Interior, Labor) right now were chosen because of their lifelong opposition to the goals of those agencies. Maybe the new Secretary of Defense could be Ward Churchill.

But I do know that the current situation — civil war, thousands dead, quagmire — was predictable, and predicted. And the people who were predicting it were called traitors at the time for doing so.

And they are being called traitors today for admitting that things that are happening are in fact happening.

One student turned in his first paper, whose thesis came to "Spenser was a misogynistic, backward bawsterd." Great, except Spenser wasn't, for his time. Particularly as compared to Milton, whom we hadn't even gotten to yet. The student dropped the class. What was weird to me wasn't his harsh-eyed modern stance -- it was that he had chosen this class, which was not required particularly for anything, without knowing about the basic prejudices and assumptions of the Elizabethan era or being willing to deal with the text within its context.

I don't understand why he took the class either, but I sort of sympathize with him.

To fulfill my college's history requirement, I took a class in Law and Society of Medieval Europe, which sounded like the most interesting class available. I wasn't required to take Intro To Every Historical Figure 101 because of AP scores, but still had to take something, so I thought this would be interesting.

I did all the reading, contributed to class discussion as much as anyone else, and on the series of short essays about justice which comprised most of the grades in the class I consistently got A's. By the time the final came, I had a B+ average, and the final consisted of scribbling in blue books. I knew all the background for the final, and thought I had done as well as anybody else, synthesizing the information into an essay just like those in high school, but on my report card I got a C.

This was the first and only time I actually contacted a professor to ask whether she made a mistake with my grade, and she responded with "I looked at your final again, and it got a D+. This brings you to a C for the semester."

I tried to figure out how that happened, and I just figured that there was some sort of protocol I never learned for how to write about history in academia. It continues to be a mystery. Maybe the class should have been limited to history majors.

Wait...turkeys can fly. Yes, turkeys can definitely fly. I've seen them do it.

In high school we used to play Maximum Carnage Chess. Just like regular chess except you start out with the pawns on the back row and the big pieces in the front row. You can get a tournament done much faster that way!

While it's not quite suitable for a person, I've always enjoyed the sign on the Pulaski Skyway promising "Kearney So Kearney".

There's another sign on Rt. 81, in the Endless Mountains region, that says "Lenox Lenoxville Scott" (if I remember correctly). Doesn't that sound like the perfect fop?

But my favorite exit sign is the little example of dada on 279, just north of Pittsburgh:

Cranberry
Mars

Exit 58 of the NYS Thruway is helpfully signed for the towns of "IRVING GOWANDA" , which I've always thought would make a wonderful character name.

I feel the same way about "Annville Cleona" on route 81 in Pennsylvania, which is also a high school. "Cleona Annville" might be more appropriate, actually.

There are Endless Mountains, really? I put that name in my novel-in-progress, and I wasn't knowingly naming them after anything.

There isn't an actual mountain range called that; I live in that area, and it sort of vaguely refers to Bradford, Susquehanna, Sullivan and Wyoming counties, all of which are basically covered with forests and state game lands and aren't really very mountainous. I don't think it draws any tourists, it's just the name of the reason, like any other vaguely defined region ("Wyoming Valley", "Delaware Valley", "Mahoning Valley", "Inland Empire").

Actually, it looks like each of those songs was mentioned once. Oh well, I'm an idiot.

I'm surprised none of the contrarians here has mentioned the fourth verse of "We Three Kings". I still remember it, because I had to sing it solo in a pageant:

"Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering doom
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb"

The pageant director did notice that those words weren't exactly upbeat (I think his exact words were "Hmmm, that's not very upbeat"), but he didn't want to reorganize the whole thing after choosing the soloists and starting us on the road to memorization.

I'm also surprised nobody's mentioned "Up on the housetop, reindeer pause; down comes good ol' Santa Claus". I remember being part of a group of 100 kids singing that, none of whom knew what the lyrics meant. Equal numbers of us sang "ho ho ho, who wouldn't go" and "ho ho ho, who wouldn't know". Later, though, there was a good teacher who noticed an ambiguity and offered us extra credit if we could tell him the correct spelling of "pause/paws", since it could be either. Nobody got the credit, because in the sheet music it's listed as "reindeer paus' ". As if the E would require another syllable without that apostrophe there. How stupid.

What I hate is the songs that have fictional characters in them. "Farmer Grey"? "We'll pretend that he is Farmer Brown"? The ridiculous second verse of "Jingle Bells", also involving a malapropism that not a single person in the world has ever made? (upsot)

All the children's songs involving Billy and Susie? (when was the last girl born who was named Susie?) These songs aren't taken from a narrative musical; the details are completely made up out of thin air. By cynical New York City Jews, of course, but that's irrelevant. What's relevant is...how can anyone actually want to sing these lyrics with references to things that maybe 50 people in North America have experienced, and arbitrary fictional characters who don't exist outside the song? It's a sort of abstract nostalgia.

The only time I have ever heard "Must Be Santa" was at a dance/chorus class recital involving children from 4 to 16. The 4-year-olds sang (more like yelled) "Must Be Santa", while wandering around completely unrelated to each other, and it was literally horrifying. My dad and I bolted from the auditorium and came back in 15 minutes when the children were guaranteed to be at least 7.

But what does "Make maintain AIX." mean?

Is there a list anywhere of writers' "crutch" words? For example, Garcia Marquez must use "lucid" at least 15 times per novel, and I don't think it's all the translator's fault.

I read a couple of Robert Asprin's "Myth INC" books, but as soon as I realized that there are literally ten different "said-words" on every page, I was literally unable to read them anymore. What a lot of effort (I imagine him saying "hmm...is Aahz grimacing this response? No, I think he's sighing. Or maybe he's just responding! No, too boring.") to create the appearance of pointless stupidity.

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