The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Adrian Turtle:

Like Liza in the first comment, I'm uncomfortable with the sexism in Digby's attacks on Rothenberg. I think Grayson comes across as nasty without being sexist. He's nasty in the right direction.

Serge (4): yes, Digby is a woman. She's a progressive who objects to sexist policies when she sees them. But she's been surrounded with sexist images and rhetoric for decades...like anybody, she gets some of it on her hands. The "Lady Frothenberg" bit looks like a sexist mistake, which is a different sort of thing than a sexist character flaw.

I'm impressed that Senator Grayson is NOT using insults that inflict collateral damage. He's not saying his opponents are morally blind, or emasculated, or that they prostitute themselves to insurance companies. A lot of vivid insults draw on images of some large category of people being obviously contemptible. I approve of the way Grayson seems to be playing this fairly clean, as well as approving of the side he's taking.

Renatus, here's some information from the American Friends Service Committee.
http://www.afsc.org/Youth&Militarism/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/18300
It seems good at countering the misleading information often given by recruiters, and it's aimed directly at young people who are considering enlistment. You might also want to read the pages about how high schools work with military recruiters, especially in poor neighborhoods, if you want to get a sense of "what kind of recruiting is going on."

Zelda (38): Carrying a purse marks a woman as a customer, in most stores. Pushing a shopping cart, wearing a coat (any kind of outdoor coat, not a suit coat) or carrying a backpack or briefcase, marks a person as a customer. Taking notes on the merchandise is not typical customer behavior. Sometimes it's seen as inventory control (ie, something done by store management), and sometimes it's seen as industrial espionage, or working on writing a review. (Some stores have given me *fabulous* service when I was taking notes. Not Home Depot, though.)

Ajay (49): Wearing an employee uniform marks a person as an employee, but other kinds of business dress usually don't mark a person as NOT an employee. Sure, sales people wear the standard uniforms...but many stores have managers wear ordinary suits. (And cleaning staff or drivers might wear different outfits that are more or less standardized, but less familiar.)

Serge (51), points out that this year's IgNobel Peace Prize was for determining whether it was better to be hit over the head with a full bottle of beer or an empty one. As a Nobel Laureate, Obama will be invited to next year's IgNobel ceremonies in Cambridge. He might want to say something about his experience last summer, using beer bottles to bring peace to a deeply-fraught, conflict between Cambridge residents.

My first thought was relief that she wasn't being hired to do political commentary. I realize that, "will contribute stories about once a month on issues like education" does inevitably connect with modern politics, but it's still a plausible thing for a teacher to do. It doesn't seem like being the public face of the news (like Katie Couric or Maria Shriver), or doing extensive political commentary like Megan McCain or Liz Cheney.

K.C. Shaw (17), I don't work in the industry (nor do I aspire to) but I don't think "beginners' rates" have anything to do with the quality of the story itself. It looks more like a marketing thing. Will readers be more likely to buy the magazine because they see that author's name on the cover? Famous names, or even vaguely familiar names, can help sales, and beginners usually don't have that. (There are a few people who become famous doing other stuff, but beginner=unknown doesn't seem unreasonable as a first approximation.)

Lila (460), when I read that page of the Tattnall Journal, I noticed the happy family that little rural community paper featured on their front page for Fathers' Day. We've come so far in accepting divorce and unmarried couples that you might not have noticed it. This is clearly a conservative rural community, honoring a single father who is not even a respectable widower. It's not that family situations don't happen in rural communities, or didn't happen a generation ago...it's that the divisive idea of "traditional rural values are so different the liberal big cities on the coast" kept people from talking about them.

I don't know if you could do it with the fragile kinds of cake, but I've sent brownies via FedEx and USPS Priority Mail. It used to be kind of fun to hand over the box and have the startled clerk ask why it was warm, but I don't think it's worth it nowadays. (And letting it cool completely before wrapping will probably improve the texture, even though it means you can't ship it quite as soon.)

Comment 24 expressed concern that Tamiflu was becoming less effective. On a related note, my mother forwarded an alarming note from her community of wingnuts, warning that Tamiflu was about to become less available, so they should stockpile it. (And also buy warehouses full of star anise, in order to extract the active ingredient from which Tamiflu was originally made.) My mother intended to express concern for my health, in her way, for which I thanked her. And I decided some time ago that 1) it's better for her to connect to a community of angry, paranoid, wingnuts than for her to be angry, paranoid, and completely isolated. and 2) I can't stop her.

But about Tamiflu. How important is it, clinically? How much trouble is it worth to have the flu for 6 days instead of 7? Or to trade a lower risk of secondary infections (ear infections, pneumonia) for Tamiflu side effects (which include nausea, dizziness, and a risk of bronchitis)? It seems like something that has substantial value only in specialized situations, like for immunocompromised patients. Am I missing something?

Or is Spiny Norman talking about a problem like the first cases of MRSA in hospitals? Methicillin was not a common antibiotic; it was used for nasty bacterial infections that resisted all the usual antibiotics. It's a tool you want to have in the toolbox all the time, ready for infrequent but stunningly effective use. It's scary to have it suddenly stop working, but I'm not sure if the Tamiflu thing is "it stopped working" or "it's a different problem, where this tool never did work."

Giacomo (6), I don't think the increasing level of cowardice in the newsroom is coincidental, and I don't count it from 20 years ago. I think it started with the increased openness of the 1970s (around Watergate.) As the "raw material" for editorial judgments and polished news reports became more widely available, journalists became quicker to second-guess themselves before publication. (Or, in some cases, their editors do the second-guessing, knowing the raw material will be available, and not wanting to risk having the publication as a whole look foolish because they made an unsupportable claim.) Having that raw material so widely available is clearly good. But it tends to set up incentives for big commercial journalists to be timid. And having all the journalism done by people who don't get paid beans creates a whole different set of problems.

It looks like the author read The Song of Songs and thought the metaphors were not dramatic enough for modern tastes. Comments elsewhere mocked it for calling a romantic hero "Spikenard," but I thought that was an appropriate pointer. Fair warning, if a book is going to go off in directions like, "You are fair, my darling, ah, you are fair. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats..."

I don't see a lot of value in building alarms into cars (or retrofitting them) that are supposed to set off a loud noise when the driver turns off the car and there's a weight in the back seat. The alarm needs to be sensitive enough to respond differently to an empty carseat and a carseat with a 6-lb baby. Xopher mentioned a seatbelt alarm responding to a heavy suitcase, but a sensor designed to notice a newborn will respond to bags that adults toss in the back without thinking of them as heavy (that's not even really a malfunction, because the sensor is responding to changes in weight.) They will probably also respond to the car bouncing over bumps in the road.

You know how people respond to car alarms? How much a car alarm going off makes people more alert, and makes them run to the emergency to help their neighbors? I expect this to work the same way. "I wish they'd never invented that stupid thing. It goes off every time I drive the car, whether the baby is with me or not. Good thing Robin took her to daycare today..."

My local library used to be open Sunday afternoons during most of the school year, but they stopped doing that after the state budget cuts a few years ago. For some time, they were just had the reduced hours because of budget constraints. Now there is a big sign in the lobby looking forward about 3 months. For each week the library can afford to be open, it says the library will be open on Sunday [date], thanks to a donation from [individual, group, or "anonymous donor"] and sometimes "in honor of" or "in memory of." There are still gaps in the schedule, but it's a lot better than nothing.

Jim (61), thank you so much for bringing a first aid course to Boskone! Do you know if it will be only for adults? I'm not thinking of certification, just potentially useful knowledge for a child who has no time for scouts between karate classes and Hebrew school.

I'm a religious person, and I love the respectful way Obama acknowledges nonbelievers in so many of his speeches. I want an inclusive society, with a secular government strong enough to resist religious attempts to take it over.

During the campaign, Obama's opponents made a lot of fuss about his father's connections to Islam...but it surprised me that so little attention was paid to his mother being non-religious. Sure, she had been baptized Christian as a child, but by the time she was raising Barack, she was a freethinker teaching *about* many religions but belief in any. That's increasingly common, but there are a lot of people in the mainstream of common culture who still find it shocking. (There is an uncomfortable gap where everybody acknowledges that lapsed religious people often end up with little or no faith, but that's different from recognizing that respectable people can set out to be atheists on purpose. See also, those people who are more shocked by polyamory than adultery.)

It doesn't matter how many Making Light readers live in the mainstream of common culture. Probably a minority, in this dimension. The current statistics across the country as a whole don't even matter that much (for this end). Like the idea that Americans living in cities near the coasts are somehow wildly atypical, the cultural mainstream is not always aligned with objective reality.

Jo, I came here first (well, when I realized I wasn't going to Cambridge this morning), and followed the links to DailyKos and thence to the CBC download. I liked the John Williams arrangement of Simple Gifts, what I heard of it. My hearing of it was complicated by the church down the street, which began ringing bells in a celebratory manner at noon. They don't usually do musical peals on weekdays, but this is a special occasion. I opened the window because the pieces seemed to go together reasonably well, and because I like the idea of hearing my neighbors cheering. I usually feel closer to Arlington residents who post comments to Making Light than with those who attend that church. Today I'm inspired to feel like Yes We Can all be one community.

WereBear (25), I don't know how common that motivation is, but I know a few people who vote Republican for reasons very similar to that. As well as a handful of people recognizing a trend of escalating religious bigotry and deciding they will be better off on the side of the bigots, because it's just too dangerous to be on the side of the victims. I know one grandchild and two great-grandchildren of genocide survivors who vote Republican for those reasons. And a fair number with less intense family histories of suffering religious bigotry.

I usually prefer to walk or take public transit. The problems of the last few weeks, amusing as they are, suggest that private car ownership may be more trouble than it's worth. You see, my car was destroyed in a 3-car collision, when all 3 vehicles were parked. (At first I said my car "got run over by a snowplow," but that does not capture the flavor of the event.) I figured it out when I saw the police report, learning more slapstick details when the snowplow driver saw me in the parking lot and apologized.

A local friend (who very conveniently has a used car he is considering selling) expressed astonishment at my story. "What happened? Was the snowplow possessed by some kind of otherworldly force?" Well, yeah. The same force that moves the stars and planets in their orbits, as it happens. The parking lot is on a hill, with cars parked perpendicular to the slope. The morning of the accident, the lot was covered with ice, with light rain falling on top of it. The snowplow driver parked the snowplow, and stepped out to talk to his son (who drives another snowplow), and discuss who would go where. He sat down suddenly and unexpectedly on the ice, and watched his snowplow slide sideways down the hill. Hijinks ensued.

Linkmeister (627), although I've never been to either Hawaii or San Francisco, I'm fascinated by the idea of a bridge between them. (Perhaps "because" would be better than "although," in that sentence.) Thinking of very long bridges reminds me of conversations I used to have (more precisely, monologues I used to listen to), when I worked with a metallurgist whose expertise was more limited than he believed it to be.

This was the 1990s, and conflict in the former Yugoslavia was getting some attention in the news. The metallurgist could look at a headline on a folded newspaper and talk on the subject for 10 minutes without stopping to draw breath. It was compelling, but in a sick sort of way, because he did not use this power for good. His argument was generally that Those People deserved what they got, because they were Muslim. He had worked with them, he knew they couldn't do anything right except kill each other, they had brought him in to consult on building a bridge between Serbia and Jordan. *blink* It was a wonderful job, a splendid bridge, Those People could not have done it without him.

I went off in search of some colleagues, (and perhaps a sledgehammer, in case it might be needed for more forceful interruption), so we could come back and ask the metallurgist to tell us more about this remarkable bridge between Serbia and Jordan. Was that really where it was? It sounded much too long to build?

Yes, of course, he insisted, it was in Serbia. He had been there many times to consult. They brought him in because it was much too long for the incompetent locals to build on their own--it had been the longest bridge in the world for a while, though there were longer ones built since. So he knew better than to believe Those People in Serbia weren't all bad, or weren't all alike. He'd been there. He probably meant Syria. It doesn't change the fanatic bigotry, though I'm sure it made the bridge easier to build.

Vicki (327), "the manufacturers get a pass" for putting emblems on cars because they should be allowed to sign their work. If somebody really does not want the Chrysler name or corporate symbol on their car, I think it's really problematic for that person to be buying a Chrysler in the first place.

Problematic things *happen* of course. Back in the 1970s, I heard stories of autoworkers who bought Japanese cars because they were cheaper, and removed or concealed the makers' marks so their co-workers would not give them a hard time for being disloyal to the company. A "hard time" could be on the order of vandalizing the car or arranging for the person to be first in line for the next of many rounds of layoffs, so the incentives were pretty pressing.

I think the main problem with little aftermarket metal emblems happens with a situation like putting something that looks like a Chrysler emblem on a Toyota. (A couple of the emblems at the particle looked like the Chrysler star, from a distance.) I suspect that's the sort of thing comment 324 referred to. I don't think it's a problem with stickers, or aftermarket metal emblems that look nothing like any car emblems.

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