The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Martin:

Here's a press conference with Stevens and Berdovsky. They talk about hair.

My first reaction on hearing this terrible news was "break out the champagne!" Second reaction: "but then we won't be able to hold it in long enough for us to urinate on his grave. What a dilemma!"

Doesn't really matter whether or not they're combatants. That's just splitting hairs. The UN Declaration of Human Rights is still in effect, and takes precedence over anything. Torture is not now, nor will it ever be, legal. Any violation of the physical and mental integrity of others, unless in battlefield situations or self-defense, is strictly and completely unambigously forbidden.

Graydon: thanks, your reply made a lot of sense. So the problem with strategic bombing of industry is that the industry is much more capable of distributing than we generally think it is. The hammer-and-beehive problem. Thanks for clearing that up.

Thanks for the replies. Interesting.

I wholeheartedly agree with your assesment about war in Iran. Best case scenario: it hardens relations between the "west" and the "moslem world" (not to mention the fact that the two are by now completely intertwined, and thus we have trouble at our doorstep, in our living room and everywhere else). Worst case scenario: oh. My God.

But I had a question: you said bombing campaigns do not slow down industrial production. Is that really true? It seems intuitively and historically not to be the case: stuff is destroyed, production slows down. My understanding of the WWII bombing campaign on Germany was that it did slow down production. Am I wrong, and if so, why?

Oh, hey, did you hear about the latest sex aid that's gotten so popular in Wales?

Velcro gloves.

Shout-out from the Norwegian readership: How amusing to see Lille Lørdag here. I'm so sorry people the world over can't see the brilliantness of these comedians in Norwegian. They're brilliant. They're brilliantly brilliant. I would describe this as one of their mediocre jokes. It's not just hysterically funny, they have a sort of zen approach to humour (it mostly revolves around seeing how far you can take a joke until it stops being funny, and then taking it so far beyond that it becomes all pomo and beyond-funny funny again) which comes very close to being art. The voice of a generation in Norway (and they're off-pitch and all)!

The Glaswegian poet/prosac Tom Leonard has a really good prose/poem thing. It's called 100 Differences between Poetry and Prose. A quote:

you don’t get prose in anapaestic dimeters
nobody publishes their first slim volume of prose
aristotle never wrote The Proses

if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose
poets are the unacknowledged thingwaybobs

Pardon my lurking. I keep thinking of Louis Armstrong's Basin Street Blues, since New Orleans was well on its way to actually becoming a basin.

And also, Here Comes the Flood by Gabriel, in this absolutely gorgeous live clip which I was listening to just minutes before I heard of Katrina.

Basin Street Blues:

(this is copied from one of those big, faceless lyric sites, so pardon the punctuation)

Won’t you come along with me
Down that mississippi
We’ll take a boat to the land of dreams
Come along with me on, down to new orleans

Now the band’s there to greet us
Old friends will meet us
Where all them folks goin to the st. louis cemetary meet
Heaven on earth.... they call it basin street

I’m tellin’ ya, basin street...... is the street
Where all them characters from the first street they meet
New orleans..... land of dreams
You’ll never miss them rice and beans
Way down south in new orleans

They’ll be huggin’.... and a kissin’
That’s what I been missin’
And all that music....lord, if you just listen’
New orleans....i got them basin street blues

Now ain’t you glad you went with me
On down that mississippi
We took a boat to the land of dreams
Heaven on earth...they call it basin street

Why, thank you!

Here's another one, by the same fellow:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a

No! I'm sorry. I can't do it! Some sentences should never be written, let alone contemplated.

riverrun, past Adam's testicle, from swerve of arse to bend of knee, brings us by a commodius vicus of bloodcirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs, where it's mayt lone lay in barrons field.

For those of you asking about a good book on modes etc: A good introduction to modes, scales, chords and other musical theory is A Jazz Improvisation Primer by Marc Sabatella, which is online here in its entirety, which is also a good place to start if one wants to get in on improvisation theory. It's also free, which is good.

those tariffs are designed to prop up the dying but politically powerful American textile industry.

You sure they're not dyeing?

I'm so honoured. This is so unexpected... I haven't even prepared a speech, but I'd like to thank the academy and... well, anyway, you may leave out the lutefisk.

I may live in Norway, but lutefisk to me is an abomination in the eye of God. The fact that lutefisk is still eaten is a certain sign of the impending decline and fall of western civilization.

What's a Rasff award again?

As an inhabitant of Bergen, Norway, the centre of black metal in Norway, I must say I resent the idea that Norway is a completely humorless society. It's not. Norway is not a dull society. Many, many Norwegians have senses of humor. I live in Bergen, and I like to think I have a sense of humor and even though I am, strictly speaking, Danish, I can assure you, having lived here fifteen years, that I have heard Norwegian people tell jokes on several occasions. They are not a humorless people.

A Norwegian joke:
Q: Does it rain all the time in Bergen?
A: I don't know. I've only lived here fifteen years.

See?

Black metal is actually still pretty big here. Dimmu Borgir, a sorta-black-metal band, will be on national tv tonight on this clean-cut, friendly, chatty sort of talkshow.

Oh, mr. Gaiman: I did in fact meet you while you were in Bergen the last time. You might remember me: I was the one in black at the signing.

Comment statistics for Martin on the Making Light blog

Total: 17 comments. View all these comments on a single page.