The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dan Blum Now, that's definitely spam:

Janni @18: It was McKinney for the Greens in Massachusetts, too. I don't think Nader was listed at all, though I did not pay too much attention to the longish list of third-party options.

George Phillies. Duh. Although in fact his name was familiar to me from his gaming rather than his SF activities.

The name of the Boston Tea presidential candidate sounds awfully familiar, though I can't think why. Maybe it will come to me.

I didn't have to wait to vote at my precinct, but I went after I figured the morning rush would be over, and in any case our ballot was devoid of excitement except for the ballot questions - Obama, Kerry, and Tierney are certain to win, and none of the other races was even contested.

Jeff Davis @25:

Dammit, you're right. And it should have been decadent Phoenix, not corrupt. It still would work just as well - trying to fit so few data points into that kind of fine-grained pattern is a useless exercise, especially when the categories are ill-defined.

But it's really easy to read more into patterns like this than actually exist. I once saw David Hackett Fischer in a lecture sum all presidents to that time into a pattern of "Liberal" followed by "Conservative/Sleaze" followed by "Clean Conservative". But it took a little shoehorning.

Would have worked better as Dragon, corrupt Phoenix, reborn Phoenix.

Patrick, did any of the other responses work for you? If not, is there a reference somewhere to exactly what Name Mangler wants in its regexps? (As you may have gathered from the conversation there are several slightly different flavors.)

I think you want something like:

Find: \(.+\w-\)\([0-9]+\w\-\)\(.+\)
Replace: \2 \1 \3

However, this might have slight errors, since my first attempts at complex regexps generally do. There must be someone here who knows them better than I do, who will be around to correct me shortly.

Kristen @137:

Based on our experience with these proxies (done in advance when our son is visiting relatives), I suspect an e-mailed document may not be sufficient. However, I am not sure that Beth @140 is correct that the document must be signed at the hospital - what we have always done is write a letter and get it notarized. Of course this will then have to be mailed physically.

It's also entirely possible that Beth is correct - this probably varies by state and I have never done this for New York. The real question is what the hospital says they require, which I assume Velma knows.

I don't know Scraps personally but he's certainly a valuable presence online. My sympathy and good wishes to everyone involved.

Syd @384 wrote:

Who is Laura Teresa Marquez?

I'm proofing a book that includes a quotation attributed to her, but my editor hasn't been able to find any biographical or source info. My own (limited) Google-fu has turned up several quotations on various sites of a motivational/self-empowerment nature (she seems to be quite popular in that field), yet not one of them lists so much as a birth year. I even gave Wikipedia a try, just for giggles, but there's no entry for anyone by that name.

Interesting. As far as I can tell, all of these supposed quotes were originally posted by a Jim Stegall. It is clear from what he says here that he's really into pushing these quotes, and he has his own site, MetaphorSky, for quotes from Marquez and like-minded people.

To me this suggests three possibilities:

1. Marquez is a real person who has published books from which Stegall gets these quotes, but somehow there is no trace of the books online. Possible, but I expect that any sort of book - self-published, available only in the Christian bookstore network, etc. - will have some mention online.

2. Marquez is a real person whom Stegall knows. All the quotes I looked at on Gaia are sourced to "Early Morning Conversation," which could be the title of something, but which could be, y'know, an actual conversation.

3. Marquez is an invention of Stegall.

"A novel is a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it."

Randall Jarrell (I think)

JimR @ #25:

You're not dumb. A lot of people have fallen for that trick.

Sten @ #22:

Thanks for identifying the story! Now I can sleep at night.

Damn it, now I'm going nuts trying to remember this story. Nothing I have tried pans out. I think the club in question was a garden club, if that helps anyone. But I'm not sure.

Jason @ #15:

I remember that story, too. I'm certain it was from the early 1960s at the latest, probably earlier. Sadly, I can't remember the author or the title - obvious searches using Kuttner, Tenn, Sheckley, and Leiber turned up dry.

Well, then I'm confused, because I thought everyone had recommended the Moss Roberts translation, and the UC two-volume set is by him.

I found the discussion I was thinking of - it was planned as a three-volume set, but they never published the third volume.

PJ @ #98:

Be careful with that UC unabridged edition - I'm pretty sure last time it was discussed (on one of Kate Nepveu's sites) it was determined that it was actually a THREE-volume set, of which they were only selling the first two.

From a quick glance at the first pages of the Moss Roberts translation, it looks to be more readable than the Brewitt-Taylor translation.

Brewitt-Taylor went for a sort of faux-archaic feel, with stilted dialogue. (This may partly be due to the fact that he did this in the 1920s, as I recall.) While it might read better than Roberts' more prosaic translation for a bit, I found it rather wearying at length. Not to mention that his ear is not the best. Probably not everyone would find it jarring to have Cao Cao use the phrase "gang aft agley," but I do.

PJ @ #80:

My standard warning here: don't get the Brewitt-Taylor translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I haven't read the other one that is readily available, but I have to assume the translator has a better ear for English prose than Brewitt-Taylor. (About accuracy I can say nothing, as I don't read Chinese.)

The (probably) full-length translations I was looking at earlier today run four volumes each - lots of space for that many characters. (It shows up as The Water Margin or as The Three Kingdoms.)

Translations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms run to four volumes as well, but it has the structure (or lack of it) that I described. The Water Margin probably does not follow history even as closely as Romance (which is not too closely), which would help give it more structure.

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