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

So much for my travelogue to Fucking Austria

Note also the sense in which 'Sloth' is Insufficient Enthusiasm.

For what it's worth-- I figured out that Snape was connected to Lily when Slughorn (Potions-master in HBP) went on about how talented Lily was in Potions-- the reason Lily did so well, presumably, was that she was getting help from Snape.

I always go to the poll-of-polls chart at "Mystery Pollster" which includes a calculated-by-a-statistician trend line.

The lawsuit story was broken by Marc Fisher, a columnist in the Post's 'Metro' section. He has a blog 'Raw Fisher' on the Post website, and a weekly online Q&A session-- it's all legit and not driven by the wingnuts. Fisher himself is fairly liberal with the occasional idiosyncratic opinion. Not sinister.

It's too bad that the 'tort reform' crowd is grinding its axe here-- but, FWIW, from what I've heard there are real problems in the local 'courthouse' DC legal scene, and this is just an example of it.

There's a point about Generals-dumping-on-Rumsfeld that I think people are missing. Military people have the chain of command imprinted on their brains-- it's a fundamental life-or-death aspect of being a soldier. So,... I'm morally certain that every General who says bad things about Rummy has the reservation in the back of his mind that Bush is the one who's really responsible.

Just to note-- if there is anyone out there who is unfamiliar with Hammett's 'Parable of the Falling Beam' that's at the top of TNH's particle list, you should go read it. Now.

I had the poster of an earlier, smaller Mersenne prime on the wall of my office. Along with a magnifying glass-- so it looked like a gray field from a normal distance and a lotta little numbers from close up through the glass. One could verify that the last digit was not 0,2,4,5,6, or 8.

I haven't gotten the posters of more recent primes-- the newer posters are significantly more expensive. Also, it dawned on me, eventually, that the binary form of the prime (a series of 28025029 ones) is more informative.

It's not verse, but if you want to learn about Al (Einstein) and Ari (Aristotle), there's

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

Hark...

Reminds me... Many years ago, when I was a grad student, there was a Christmas-time competition in the grad student dorm-- come up with a pun on the title of a Christmas carol that involves the name of a fish. The two winning entries were 'Shark, The Herald Angels Sing' and 'Little Tuna Bethlehem".

I think Coulter slipped from A-list to B-list when she accused liberals of 'treason'-- with any luck, this current business will demote her to the 'cranks and shitheads' list and we'll be spared her venom in the future.

It's many years since I was at Yale-- but memory now speaks:

A professor of English at Yale
Was fat and unnaturally pale.
He once did a pose
Without any clothes
And entitled it 'Moby: The Whale'.

With sf readers, writers, editors, etc. sitting around here, I've got a request-- to ID a novella I read many years ago, but whose author and title have hazed out in the mists of finite cerebral capacity...

-- Took place on Titan
-- Intelligent characters on Titan are prescientific, main Titan character is a female 'princess (?)'
-- Earth scientists sent a probe to Titan, problem is long time needed to send signals back and forth between Earth and Titan
-- Climax involved probe's 'self-defence' mechanism.

I suspect that this is a well-known story, and would very much like to find it and read it again.

There's a story in today's New York Times (I read the dead wood version, so no link) about what's happening with the fundamentalist Mormons. Looks like the fleeing girls were a product of a power struggle...

So, I guess this means that there's an unsatisfied market for meat porn.. Hmm.

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