As for spam, one of the things I love about having my own domain is that I can make as many e-mail addresses as I want. And I do. Almost every single place where I have to enter an e-mail address gets an address devoted solely to it, which forwards everything to the address I check.
Leads to fun sometimes. You want my e-mail address as a part of signing up for your frequent flyer program? Hm... typing away at the computer setting one up, while on the phone, "Right, the e-mail address is United at——"
"No, no, your e-mail address."
"Right. My e-mail address is United at..."
This way, I can track where precisely spammers caught my address. And if the spam from any one source gets to be too much, I can delete the address, et voila!
Alas, though, the address at the center of my web of aliases, the address all the rest forward to, from which I send personal mail... Some spammers have ahold of that one. Woe!
I really like a phrase Graydon used in a post on November 21, 2003 09:00 PM (I liked it so much I stashed it away with attribution): "articulate people with considerable tempers."
I could see myself in a "Articulate person with considerable temper" t-shirt... It'd be fair warning...
Katie: I believe Apollo was the god of prophecy. ...Yes, it's coming back to me now. Apollo had a long history of bad relationships: he couldn't seem to fall for people who loved him back. One of these women, who had been just going with him for the prestige, decided to break it off... But before she did, she wanted to get the gift of prophecy, so she'd be set for the future. Very prettily, she asked him, and with a kiss he bestowed it. Then she started with the "It's been so wonderful, but we're just not right for each other," schpiel. Apollo, hurt and betrayed, asked for one final kiss, and he asked so plaintively she agreed... Whereupon, he spit in her opened mouth. See, he couldn't take back the gift of prophecy, once given, but he could make it so no one believed a single word she said.
That was Cassandra. She showed up later in Troy... "You're going to lose. Beware Greeks bearing gifts." "Whatever, Cassandra. Will you just shut up already? You're such a downer."
Hee.
Anyway, I don't remember any stories about Athena seeing forward into the future.
(My favorite Apollo story is the one about Sibyl, another one of the girlfriends whose eternal love he'd tried to buy with the gift of prophecy. He was quite keen on giving gifts to people he fancied... Sibyl, in her thoughtless youth, scooped up a double handful of sand once and asked that he give her as many years of life as there were grains of sand in her hands; and thoughtlessly he granted her wish. Thoughtless, of course, because she hadn't asked for youth to go with them. So she got older and older, withering away until she was just a voice in a bottle, hung up in a cave... And the little boys from the nearby village would dance around her, jeering, "Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?" and she would say only, "I want to die.")
I love Greek mythology. You probably know all those stories already... I was just telling them again because it makes me happy to do so.
Hey, so I have an unrelated question that seemed to fit here, being as it's on the theme of publishing woes, and this is an open thread...
I've got a friend who wrote a sourcebook for a RPG company. Now that they've got the book in hand, they're like, "You know our contract, giving you 15% of the gross? Make that 5% of the net--or we don't publish the book, and you've wasted 6 months for no money at all." I thought to have this sort of fun, you had to be signed with a record label...
I've never worked in a situation involving contracted work, so I don't really know what's up with this, but I figured some of you might have comments. I mean, is it common? How much has haggling helped anyone who's been confronted with this kind of thing? Do most contracts have some obligation to publish the book built in, so people don't run into this sort of trouble?
Um, Patrick, maybe we should set up some big venting fans and send someone in (tied to a winch) to rescue you from the bullshit? I think the fumes might be going to your head...
(But, yes, I'm with you on the Everything Counts.)
I'm terribly confused by shops that close at 5, too. If we (for example) garden, are we supposed to be unemployed? Does everyone else know some trick of bilocation that I missed? Is the secret to ditch work and not feel guilty, so you can browse as long as you like?
Why not open at 11AM and close at 8PM?
I like glitzy covers. Not cutouts, so much, because they compromise the integrity of the paper that makes the cover, and I worry as I read that the cover will get folded because it doesn't bend the same way all through... But gold foil is all good by me. Shiny!
For cover art, I like either realistic people who don't look like people modeling in the artist's studios who just have a spacesuit painted on them, or brightly colored vaguely abstract yet detailled things. Nicely done sci-fi settings sometimes work, too.
For Lindskold, I quite liked her wolf books, "Though Wolf's Eyes" and "Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart". Good yarns, great characters, believable world with unique touches, no requirements to swallow ridiculous plot twists.
Oo! And looking this up on Amazon, I just realized that "The Dragon of Despair" is next in that series! And it's glittery! Oh, now I'm looking forward to it... I'm your target audience, right here.
Anyone looking for bookstores in the Bay Area might be impressed at the listing at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/na-bay-s.htm. I think it was originally compiled on Usenet, but the lady who put it on the web is still adding in comments and reviews from those who browse by.
The Other Change of Hobbit is closing? Dang it! Tom, if you're inclined to posting your rant on why anywhere, I'd really like to read it.
I guess I need to go to downtown Berkeley and visit you guys some more... Damn the lack of parking, full speed ahead! :(
I'm going to miss you. Great atmosphere, reasonably-priced stuff, got in some darn neat used books, and didn't deface them with black marker or (god forbid) hole punches through the part of the cover that contains the book's original selling price... (Siderant: What is wrong with bookstore people who do that? Did something eat their brains?)
Yay! I've been rooting for Jane Lindskold ever since I figured out her connection to Roger Zelazny. And since her books are good, it's really easy to root for her. :)
John C. Bunnell, there was a tune going through my head as soon as I read your poem, and with a moment or two of thought I pinned it down as "The Housewive's Lament", which your words fit to perfectly... And the chorus almost works untouched,
"O life is a toil,
And love is a trouble,
Beauty will fade
And riches will flee,
Wages will dwindle
And prices will double
And nothing is as I
Would wish it to be."
From someone's tagline years back I picked up a quote supposedly by Isaac Asimov: "From my close observation of writers...they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review."
I think I've got the answer to the "why do they take it so personally?" bafflement, though, or at least one good answer... I imagine that everyone reads over their story and thinks, "I think this is great! People like me are going to just eat this up!" Then the rejection comes back: "There are no people like you. We're all over here, and you're all by yourself over there, where the wolves will be certain to pick you off first." It's a survival thing, hardwired into our species, and some people are just lucky enough to be able to override it better.
A lot of the thrust of this thread seems to me to be "I'm fine with this! What's the matter with *them*?" Which isn't really fair, or helpful. People feel things with different intensities, and you can't say "You shouldn't feel this way."
Which is why I look askance at the Plums rejection letter. I think a good rejection letter would try to put some boundaries on the forseen range of responses to it--try to be as clear as possible, and not cruel if the object is to be gentle. Isn't poetry, though, prized for having multiple meanings? And something as ambiguous as the plum rejection poem, headed into an environment where it is highly unlikely to be received joyfully, can't possibly be expected to result in a non-cruel outcome, right?
And as I read the plum rejection, it seems to me it's meant to be humorous... Which is terrible, in my opinion, as "humorous" in today's society is generally equated with "trivial". I would read that rejection as "We think you shouldn't sweat this rejection. It's no big deal." Which is, again, telling another person what they should be feeling... Without even having the decency of offering any evidence that that particular rejection is not worth sweating, a la "there were 217 competing bits of writing this month" or "I wish I could have published this."
Humor, as mentioned higher in the thread, is incredibly tricky; and in a "editor rejecting a manuscript" situation, it would take an incredible caliber of humor to be "laughing with you" instead of "laughing at you." (Though, somehow, "your enemies paid us to reject all of your stuff" is crazy enough that I'd love to get it.) So all-in-all, I think the plum rejection is a neat thing to consider, but in very poor taste to enact.
my site manager vastly prefers to not have pop-ups
Ah, now that's a compelling reason, and I bow before it. :) Lest I be misunderstood, I think you've done a grand job adapting to spammers while retaining your style.
But... Wasn't it already an option to read the comments in a regular browser page, just like it is now, by clicking on the post's timestamp instead of the comments link?
So by removing the popup comments, the diversity of the comment ecosystem is decreased, which is to say that I'm not terribly much for it. Like Faren Miller says, I like having the ability to make the lines of the comments break whereever I choose by resizing the comments box, up to full-page wall-to-wall commenting.
Perhaps if you went back to the old method and labelled the timestamp more obviously, like "11:24 AM : read comments" and then a separate link for "pop-up comments, 17"?
And while it is good to have it obvious what bit of text belongs to what commenter, to my taste there's too much space between each at present... I feel like I'm reading my way down the belly scales of an enormous grey and white snake. Which is actually kinda cool, but I think I'd prefer just a simple HR and no color breaks between comments... I'm still on a 15" screen, alas, and space is precious.
Lydia: You asked what plants suffer with: I'd say, their chemical subsystems. As I mentioned above, plants communicate with each other through chemical releases (~scent?). The first page I found when googling "plant communication" was this well-written column, which speaks of how within minutes of clipping a plant's leaves to simulate an insect attack, nearby plants had filled themselves with chemicals that tasted bad to insects. I think it's a fair assumption that as a reaper moves down a field, each plant cut is "screaming" chemically, and all the plants as yet uncut are in a flurry of chemical action. I suppose the question, though, is what is suffering?
As for raptors, I'm all for them, and I think every city should have them. I want a nesting pair on my roof, darnit. The biodiversity of my neighborhood is currently: 1. pigeons; 2. sparrows. We don't even have squirrels. But as if to fill a certain required mass of fauna, we've got more pigeons than I can shake a stick at.
I do remember that a while back, maybe last year, a raptor tried to take a tiny dog that was being walked in the park... I think the owner scared the bird off and the dog lived, but there were rumblings about putting an end to the city's raptor program. I don't, alas, remember the city, or how it turned out.
Claude: If it's not too much trouble, I'm curious to know what were the reasons a dead chicken wouldn't pass inspection, and what happened to the ones that didn't pass. Also, I recall from some novel or other that chickens had to be scalded to be able to get the tiny down/pinfeathers off... Is that still done, or do the rubber fingers manage it all?
spiralsands: I've been thinking this morning that, while "they were defensive, therefore..." is an atrocious argument, my comment on it above wasn't exactly a model of rhetorical grace. I apologize.
julia: They do that at Berkeley, too, putting raptor silouhettes on enormous panes of glass to keep little birds from flying into them.
Vassilissa: *Unnecessary* animal experimentation, however - like making every fifteen-year-old in school dissect a rat apiece, is plain wrong.
I don't know... If they're willing to eat meat, they should be doing so knowing that it comes from dead animals. Thus, it's useful to actually have some interaction with dead animals. Kind of a "Ones who leave Omelas" exercise.
It's also useful to get some understanding of how bodies are put together, and a video has absolutely nothing on actually observing it all with your own senses, seeing how if you poke that ligament down, that other muscle moves the leg... I'm currently thinking back to the Bio1A lab at Berkeley where just before class they gassed a bunch of rats with CO2 and each pair of us got one to dissect... I know that exploring the insides of the rat helped me get a better grasp on my own anatomy (like the abdominal cavity vs. the lung cavity) so I have a better understanding of the descriptions of accident injuries, and I feel like I have a better chance of being able to respond sensibly if I was confronted with such an injury.
One of the things that stuck with me most about that dissection was the stink of the contents of the rat's guts. Literally, it was in my nose for three days after. And now every time I hear about a bomb in Iraq or something like that, I feel that I have a slightly better idea of what it might be like to be there... Smells aren't something that can be carried on video, but they have great impact.
So... I don't really think much of mushy formaldehyde dissections, but I wouldn't necessarily say that all dissection is worthless.
spiralsands: look how defensive those people are about justifying such work.
Person A: "Did ya see how defensive Lakisha got when I was talking about how all black people are lazy thieves?"
Person B: "Just goes to show."
What does it show? I think it only shows that persons A and B are assholes.
Avram: I think the magic lies not in my freezer, but in my cooking. Or, um, "lack of magic" might be a better term, really.
Though come to think of it, I don't think I've ever forgone freezing hamburger immediately, so I can't honestly say it's the same cooked directly as thawed and then cooked. I just don't cook much hamburger... And even the things that I cook relatively often, like stew beef, if left to sit in the fridge...
Well, that's another benefit of meat over vegetables. Meat, if cooked long enough, no matter how rotten it's gotten, is still edible, and a source of nutrients. Or so said a survivalist book I read once. Thus we have Charlie Chaplin boiling his boots.
I had occasion to test this once, with stew beef left in the fridge until it had a slight irridescent greenish tinge, and a bit of an odd scent. Not the "dear god, something's rotting scent," just a "this... is not right" scent. But, I figured, the French eat slightly bad meat, right? Haut gout? If the French do it, and the survivalists do it, it can't be all bad, right?
Anyway, I'm still alive, and doing fine. The result of making that beef into stew (after long stewing... Really long) was an odd taste of the "this... is not right" variety, but nothing else bad.
I probably shouldn't have admitted all that. Upshot: freezer. Good thing. :)
CHip: I can't point to clear information about eating meat as a requirement for high-energy creatures. What I remember is reading about bats, or perhaps birds-- anyway, all creatures that fly don't have the margin to bother with leaves and vegetables. They all go for the high-energy foods: meat, seeds, fruit, nectar. I imagine that nectar is the highest-energy possible food, and polar bears would take advantage of it if they could, but there are presently size issues.
Then again, there are ducks. So much for the "birds don't eat plants" thing. Ah, well.
What stood out for me on the "Your Mommy Kills Animals" webpage was the period on a line all by itself right below the main image. "What the hell?!" I thought, "Don't these people have enough brains to know about the non-breaking space?"
As for plants, it's been shown that pine trees in a forest communicate with each other through scent... When an insect attacks and kills one, the others can tell, and start beefing up their defenses. Clearly, when a plant is cut, it changes its morphology to deal with that, grows a sort of scar-tissue to close off the wound. Do all the necessary chemicals for that come from the cells immediately around the cut? I doubt it. A plant is an organism, and as such, it would be pointless for it to not take advantage of the greater manufacturing power of all of its cells. Plants clearly have internal processes going on.
As for pain... I don't think it would offer any evolutionary advantage to a plant. It's not like the plant can do anything about it; it can't twitch or move away (except, of course, for the plants that do twich and move, like the sensitive plants or Venus Fly Traps). I don't think plants had any reason to develop the electrical systems that are the basis of the nerves of animals... I'd imagine that the point of those was speed, and that those levels of reaction speed are only valuable to the motile. But I'm loathe to claim that there could never be such a thing as a chemical mentality. As such, plants may think, and be aware of themselves as organisms, even if they don't feel pain.
I'm a bit torn on the issue of eating animals. One of the most amusing arguments I had with a vegetarian was,
Him: "Humans weren't meant to eat meat. We don't have anything about our bodies that was built for dealing with it."
Me: "What, like canine teeth?"
(Honestly, he was a nice guy who was just bad at expressing himself.)
Anyway, so our species evolved to take advantage of this excellent energy source. But should we? I mean, we get around other parts of our genetic heritage. (Or do we? Do we act much differently now than if we were stuck back out in the forests of Africa? Hm.)
I suppose I figure if the animal lives well, and is killed in a respectful manner, that's about all most of us can expect out of life anyway. And killing for fur, or bone, or art... I kinda figure that it's none of my business to say "Oh, very well, you can eat-- but I'm going to regulate what you wear!" Lives well, dies well; everything comes to an end, and it might as well be a useful end.
I eat a lot of meat for one simple reason: I can buy it at any time and stash it in the freezer and forget about it, and it will never go bad, and when I defrost it in the microwave, it will taste as good as if I'd never frozen it. I never pull a bag of grey liquid meat from the crisper. Unlike spinach. Damn its green heart!
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 20 |
| 2003 | 8 |
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