So, here seems to be the right place to ask a question that has niggled at the back of my head for years:
If clocks (i.e. with faces, counting 12 hours) were invented in the northern hemisphere, where storms tend to spin from right-to-left (i.e., counter-clockwise), why do clocks go from left-to-right (i.e. clockwise)? Whose silly plan was that??
Also, why righty-tighty lefty-loosey, that is, counter-clock as the loosening action?
And what would a clockface invented in the southern hemisphere have looked like?
My previous neighbor, known in the neighborhood as Creepy Basement Bob, was a man in his sixties, overweight, with rather the penchant for barbecue. I woke up one Saturday morning to the sound of EMTs loading him onto a stretcher in our back yard.
It turned out not to be a heart attack, or anything cardiac at all, but serious acid reflux, from barbecue. Still, the EMTs picked him up and took him off to the hospital, because you don't pooh-pooh chest pains.
You yell at Creepy Basement Bob for eating barbecue because he knows better, but you take his chest pains seriously every time.
How glad am I that computers resurrected the legitimacy of the word "queue" in the US? Very. Somehow telling line-cutting hooligans to "mind the queue" just sounds more imposing.
(Don't have anything to say about first-time novelists, except that every novelist has been one, at least once.)
Historical borders in Eastern Europe can get pretty weird to someone raised on modern maps. I still haven't quite got over "wait, Lithuania had a Black Sea coastline?"
My ignorant Merrykin self did not think serously about this issue until last Christmas's rerun of The Sound of Music. I was suddenly like, Waitaminnit, Captain von Trapp is a Navy man? What does he do, canoe down the rivers of land-locked Austria??
There was recourse to historical atlases before anyone remembered the Austro-Hungarian empire, which did, indeed, have enough coastline to warrant a Navy.
The trouble with having all the DAR-type reseach done (by a great-grandfather) for my family is that it brings to light all of the unpleasant stories as well as the funny ones. One branch of the family lived in Maryland for a long, long time, before decamping suddenly to Brazil in the 1860s, and then returned to Maryland in the early 1890s. Officially? Missionaries. Unofficially, in some really obvious ways? Couldn't bear the idea of Maryland being a free state, and moved to the last country in the New World to outlaw slavery (which Brazil did in 1888).
History can be a real charmer, sometimes.
Out of curiosity, how many Americans cannot, with enough genealogy, trace at least one ancestral line back to an early boat?
Quite a few, probably, at least till recently. If your kin always married within ethnic group, and your particular ethnic group didn't really begin to arrive till 1900, you come up bupkis on the Distinguished Puritan Ancestors scale.
Those who do have ancestors who go back any distance into the early 1800s can probably do the tracing, because early records are pretty good in New England -- births and marriages in church records, contracts, and probates. (I don't know as much about Virginia records.)
...oh. Not THAT Samuel Fuller, the glorious pulp-movie director.
I recently had in my hands a self-published (and sent to members of the generation above mine) genealogy of the Spurr family, late of Nova Scotia. They were originally some other last name I am forgetting, and were originally obstreperous Jesus freaks of ye olde Mass Bay Colony.
At familial orders, I donated this extremely obscure, 3-volume book to the Massachusetts Historical and Genealogical Society. They took it gladly and told me, "We already have one copy as reference, so this can be the circulating copy!"
Are the Spurr family, late of Nova Scotia, really that interesting, that people curl up with them at home??
englysshe
Best spelling-variant evar!
Now we know where the impulse for creatively-spelled personal names comes from.
LED Multi-tool (which is I believe the same one that veejane alludes to, since IIRC I gave it to her.)
You are right! And a wunnerful tool it is. (I keep it on my set of spare keys.) I also have a set of tools that is the size of a deck of playing cards -- allen wrenches, tiny spanners, a couple of tiny screwdrivers -- but that is full of parts easy to lose, so it stays at home. When the Liliputians invade, they'll invade me first.
I had no idea that smoke detectors could be wired to the house's electricity -- I thought all of them ran on batteries. Clearly, I have always lived in really old houses.
I am like Jo inasmuch as I carry a number of "emergency" items with me all the time -- just ordinary oh-this-might-be-useful thinking. (I won the Instant Mom Award when I was 22 for having safety pins on me at a graduation where none of the hoods would stay properly on their own.) This includes a all-kind-of-tool doohickey that includes a tiny flashlight, pliers, and screwdriver heads.
My one concession to serious justified-paranoia is knowing three different ways to get out of my work building if the elevators aren't working. At (regular) fire drills, we're only ever directed to one exit, and I feel safer knowing where the other stairwells are.
Paula, it's traditional that all catchers run as if the wind were blowing against them.
Traditional, but no longer 100% true. Varitek, the Sox's key catcher, is 2nd or 3rd on the team in stolen bases this year. Of course, he's also atypical inasmuch as he's 32 and still in his prime as a catcher; most catchers' knees fall apart at right about that age.
A slow left-fielder? Bad news.
This would be Manny Ramirez. And, yeah, sometimes it is extremely bad news, but most teams seem to put their worst fielder (best hitter) into left, and not just ones with funny-shaped, foreshortened left fields like Boston.
Re ways to get to first base without a base hit: There are seven of them: Walk, Hit by pitch, Dropped third strike [passed ball], Catcher's interference, Fielder's choice, Error, As a pinch runner (this last one's a bit of a cheat, in that it's not the same guy)
Er, make that 8. The official 7th way to get on first base is to actually, you know, get a base hit.
baseball has embedded narrative, just like poker.
Which is why we bleed from our foreheads thinking about it so hard.
How The Game Actually Works.
It's like cricket, only simpler (except for the rules, which are intricately exact and almost never get invoked, except during this series which sported a balk and a runner called out for interference).
Nine guys on a side. Pitcher, catcher, three guys at numbered bases, shortstop as a literal stopgap measure in between 2nd and 3rd. Outfield, 3 guys standing out in a field.
Nine other guys, coming up to bat at whatever the pitcher can throw. Hit the ball, pray nobody catches it, beat out attempts to tag you with the ball or "force" you out at a base (1, 2 or 3), and finally cross home to score a run. You get up to 3 strikes (pitches thrown correctly) and 4 balls (pitches thrown crappily) every time you're at bat. 4 balls gets you walked to 1st base; 3 strikes makes you out. 3 outs makes the teams switch sides.
Each team getting 3 outs is an inning. 9 innings makes a game, unless it's a tie, because except for certain All-Star games baseball never ends in a tie.
It's a game of statistical likelihoods (will he hit? Will it go far? Will someone drop the ball he should have caught?) and daily, gruelling play. It's a breezy summer afternoon and long calm moments of waiting before the ball arcs high, lost in the crowd or the sky, disappearing into someone's glove in the outfield.
As you can probably guess, I'm a recent convert to the religion of baseball and the Holy Order of Red Sox Nation.
The joke about the Self Made Man myth is that in its gospel text, all Gatsby's money and aspirations (a) don't get him into East Egg and (b) result in his pointless death.
The joke about Enron is that the company didn't need to commit massive fraud; it would have gone down in flames eventually from its totally illogical management structure, in which people would go off and start on a new idea without ever proposing it up the chain of management. Each individual exec had his own little stable of worker bees and his own pet projects, kept secret so as to claim all the fame when they should be completed, and so many of those projects were duplications of effort or downright useless.
The joke about the government is, if you have good enough press, neither of the above jokes matters.
Whatever Mr. Rice's ideas about the career of novel-writing, I'm not much of a fan of his copy-writing skills. I'm not sure the author is allowed to say "It's a fascinating read" unless he is quoting someone else (double points for a misquote out of context).
I wonder if he has submitted portions of this work to agents/publishers and been rejected already? He doesn't mention it if so, and I hope he doesn't think that leaping straight to the "don't pay me, I'll pay you" option is the way it works.
I remain shocked and amazed that natural fibers have been ceded entirely to the democratic party (or even to its extreme left wing). Being a democrat, I am secure in the knowledge that I may continue to wear silk, cotton, linen and wool to my heart's content.
Imagine the dismay of republicans everywhere on hearing that, henceforth, they may only wear rayon and polyester. I don't actually think it is possible to get a $1000 suit in polyester, but here is to the addled right-wing lobbyist who tries.
Hey. Khaki is white, for people who don't like to blind other people with their legs. Also, it's for when I want to wear a black shirt without being all-black-clothes-alla-time.
I don't wear khaki above my waist, because I am not in the Army.
My, Chandler seems to be a popular target for Tolkienizing. I can only guess it's his affection for entertaining similes.
I can't place #6, but #7 is the opening paragraph from The Big Sleep.
Of course, she also loves The Day My Butt Went Psycho, but I do not take that as a reflection on Ms. Rowling.
Let it never be said that toilet humor is exhausted in this world. Nor, for that matter, that some adult will take umbrage at things that no more than nominally destroy the universe while making a child happy.
A large number of extremely vocal librarians absolutely loathed the Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey, when they first came out. And then, not a year later, the name-generator from the third book was circulating among my friends, and we all loved it. (We are all, legally at least, grownups.)
Harold Bloom comes out as "Cheeseball Toilettushie", so perhaps he is just bitter.
"I never dreamt it was a problem."
Perhaps this fellow comes from Harry Potter fandom?
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