That last one was me-- I was calling about the usual thing. It looks like it's going to come up a little umami, apart from that one part which isn't what it was going to be. (With the border all thin next to the edges, and the discs spinning round and around and around.)
I've been idly wondering for over a year as to the affiliation of the woman in this gallery-- the one with bells sewn into her skin:
San Francisco Folsom Street Fair 2007
Does anyone happen to recognize her as one of the White Rats? And does the fellow holding a white rat tie into this somehow?
I can't speak to the case fatality rate of the first smallpox viruses, but the recent ones (that is, the ones during the historical period) weren't wipeouts in the populations it co-evolved with. Wikipedia's bit on prognosis from its page on smallpox:
The overall case-fatality rate for ordinary-type smallpox is about 30%, but varies by pock distribution: ordinary type-confluent is fatal about 50–75% of the time, ordinary-type semi-confluent about 25–50% of the time, in cases where the rash is discrete the case-fatality rate is less than 10%.
An example of a virus that never evolved low lethality in humans is rabies. It just sits there out there in its reservoir of bats and skunks and such, occasionally sighing wistfully over an old autographed photo of Stephen King...
Father Mulcahy, he was there
Calling Pierce's bet
Sayin’, “This ain't Christ King's timeline
But I'll win by losing yet."
An’ it’s who’ll slash ye this time
Who’ll slash ye noo?
The lass who slashed ye last, lad,
She no will slash ye noo.
I read Newsweek. I enjoy reading Newsweek. Reading Newsweek makes me a better informed and more interesting person. I read and reread each issue of Newsweek. I do not trust people who do not read Newsweek. The terrorists want to take Newsweek away from me. Reading Newsweek is better than Cats.
I can only look out the window and see a little of the state; this is just a report on local conditions. Still...
When San Francisco papers start using words like "slammed", "overwhelmed", "walloped", and "massive" in the context of rain, what that actually means is more than one and a half inches. (THE SKY IS FALLING! AND I'M WET! I'M HYSTERICAL, AND THE THE SKY IS FALLING, AND I'M WET!)
We only get twenty-odd inches of rain a year. What we call a "thunderstorm", most of the people in the rest of the country would call "partially cloudy." I live in the Mission. If you look at docpop's "Storm damage in the Mission" photoset up there, you'll notice that there aren't any photos of storm damage. There are a few shots of branches that got overstressed and broke, of course-- but note that they fell straight down. There wasn't any dramatic windstorm that tore trees asunder and hurled them around like toothpicks. What happened was wind-- as opposed to the ~360 days of breezes and zephyrs we experience during the rest of the year. Indeed, poke around the City long enough on any day, and you can find examples of branches that fell on cars from sheer ennui. (How does this come about? Because being a highly urbanized and Internetworked people of a seasonal desert, performing routine tree maintenance is as removed from our conceptual frameworks as jai alai in Brigadoon. We keep trying to heal the trees by applying Macintosh file system patches ["These are like B-trees, right?"], or sometimes just speaking to them encouragingly and hugging them.)
Hang on for a few more days, though. Once the ground dampens a bit more, Southern California's house-perched-on-edge-of-cliff-falls-into-ocean season should begin. I know you East Coast types always enjoy the footage of the bottle blondes saying, "I don't know how this could have happened!"
Holy jamoke! I just checked my newspaper! Coverage of Paris Hilton on page one has sucked all the ink off the other pages! I'm blind! I'm blind!
Ah, yes, "The aim, conscious or otherwise". Allegations of unconscious motivations: such a convenient way to accuse someone else of acting in pursuit of goals any sane person would find repugnant.
As economics professors say, you don't have to like what an understanding of the market implies, but pretending the market is not a powerful force is extremely unwise. Gossip sells; more people are interested in gossip than in nuanced analysis about world events. There is no need for anyone to have any particular goal, benevolent or malevolent, to explain why high production cost media (such as regionally-distributed television) tend to be trite and gossipy; that accursed Invisible Hand drives the more complex things with less universal appeal into cheaper media. (Traditionally newspapers. The New York Times may not be buying as many barrels of ink these days as it used to, but it's still producing text next to advertising, and people are still reading the articles.)
Noam Chomsky beats this (and similar) points to death in Manufacturing Consent. Worth reading-- because he also discusses how even the cheaper media converge towards a reality-divorced consensus, still without there being any particular malevolence at work. (I argue this is a far more worrisome thing than the masses consuming mass entertainment when they want to be entertained.)
Finally, I must admit I rather enjoyed reading the article at the World Socialist web site. With the mood set by Putin rattling a nuclear saber from Eastern Europe towards the West, it was charmingly retro to read things like "the Paris Hilton celebrity phenomenon was a product of the foul media-entertainment apparatus in the US and a generally diseased social climate." How I miss the clear-eyed ascetic Leninist earnests of my adolesence!
The word I always have the most trouble spelling is mrfliglipzikzim.
(Fortunately, it's not often I need to discuss Minnesotan winter sports.)
Pluto is not a planet-- but Yuggoth is.
In re: Terry's comments about the bear situation: pest control, or dealing with an imminent threat, is one thing. But were that the true reason, whence the motivation to bring over someone to snap a picture of man posing with ex-ursoid, and then show the photograph around?
Still, the central point about not being able to condemn without more information is a particularly good one. And truth be told, if I'd had to plug something with claws like that myself, dang straight I would have gotten a picture and bragged about it. But I'd also expect a lot of rolling eyes, with women snickering, "Pfah. Men." under their breath.
Insulting someone's masculinity without implicitly insulting gay people, eh? Should be easy enough; just attack on their missing sterotypically masculine virtues.
Example: "You limp-dicked, irrational, overemotional coward. Better hope you don't lose the job your schmoozing and ass-kissing has kept you so far, or else your family is going to starve. Better hope your friends don't abandon you-- because without their constant help, you'll be whining to strangers for handouts in a week. Better not lose the repairmen's numbers; I despair to think what would happen if you tried to fix something yourself. Better not lose your calcuator; I doubt you remember enough arithmetic to compute a tip, let alone any of the underlying mathematics. And I hope you remain uninjured-- because given your inability to withstand pain, your whimpering would be annoying."
If you leave the fish out long enough, it gets pretty fuzzy.
When I was a callow youth, even less polite and less in control of my tongue than I am now, a (non-blood) relative happened to be showing slides of his place in Alaska. He'd shot a bear that'd been hanging around his place-- and was posing beside the corpse. Small black bears are smaller than large humans.
"Cripes, _____, that bear is smaller than you are!" I said.
"Well, yeah-- but look at the claws on that thing!"
"Did he have a gun?"
(To his credit, they ate it.)
A law instructor I know spotted this in http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060807/ts_nm/iraq_mahmudiya_dc :
A fifth soldier, Sergeant Anthony Yribe, is charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement and will also appear at the hearing at a U.S. base in Baghdad.
Defense Attorney Captain Jimmie Culp was blowing chewing gum bubbles while Yribe, sitting to his left, began sucking on a red lollipop during the testimony.
Y'know, I've seen this technique in horror. When something horrendous is going on, convey your character's self-defensive schizophrenic withdrawal from reality by having him fix on a specific incongruous detail, and let its unexpected presence serve as a microcosm of the skull-bursting wrongness of the scene as a whole.
Lehrer said that satire died the day Kissinger won the Peace Prize.
Rush Limbaugh. Sildenafil citrate.
So much for horror.
It's that little kid with the cast eye and the widow's peak. When he does the "Rain, rain, go away" chant, it works.
Unfortunately, he's going to be consumed with rage and guilt over his mother's shattered vertebrae. Unless he's stopped now, he'll be in the 2012 papers as the This Little Piggy Impaler. You know what you have to do.
*twirl*
(Sorry, folks; I know there's nothing quite so ghastly as a middle-aged bald man coquettishly fishing for a compliment from his editor. Sometimes, I phone her up and say, "Does this dependent clause make me look fat?" Whatever Tor pays her, it isn't enough; if I had to deal with people like me on a regular basis, it would only be a matter of time before someone got brained with a toner cartridge.)
Ah, but that's a problem I anticipated. If marketing decides the cover needs an improbably-proportioned blonde and a dragon, those things are in the book.
In re: male authors giving their characters A-cups and the like:
I know that when I was writing up Maggie-Sue Percy, I used as many cliches as I thought I could get away with before moving above her neckline. In fact, let me check... yep, I even said her top "struggles to contain her bosom." I'm proud of that one: "bosom" is one of those words that often means the writer had to go to the thesaurus. Hence, it has a nice meta-effect: "Oh, geez, here comes the character the author is fanstasizing about schtupping." (Metaphors generally don't make literal sense, but still-- talk about a weird thing to ascribe volition of purpose to. Is her top also yelling, "Have at thee, savage breasts!"? Perhaps if it fails and tears, her knockers will spring off her chest and bound away to join the migrating herds y'all mentioned...)
Beyond that, I didn't worry about such things. (Somewhat to TNH's dismay, since she had to deal with my mulishness to get me to put in at least SOME description of the other characters.) Yes, Chloe (for example) is a pretty woman, and I think I mentioned that at some point-- but I saw no reason to take a tape measure to her and report the results. (That even though she's a figment of my imagination, she STILL would have taken my arm off if I'd tried has nothing to do with it.)
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