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

Actually, when you wash your hands, you should be especially careful to get the webs between fingers -- not just rub the palms together.

Be really, really careful about rubbing your eyes if you haven't been able to wash your hands recently. That is a common route of bacterial entry. (Naturally, an eyelash or two always lands in my eye when I'm working in the garden.)

And don't forget to ask your doctor or nurse if THEY washed their hands before attending to you. Lots of them think they don't have time.

Scary studies have been published about the bacteria count in physicians' neckties ...

#123: As far as I'm aware, FM doesn't run any "pay-to-post advertising schemes."

Maybe not, but if you put this phrase in your comment thread, Google Ads offers up a bunch of PPP links in the sidebar.

How annoying is that?

I was going to complain about all the ads on the Internet, but most of the blogs FMP lists look like compilations of press releases for gearheads and quasi-magazine advice columns ("life hacks"? hoo boy. Silicon Valley much?).

I can see how this would be interesting in a professional sort of way, but I was actually wondering whether they were aiming at inducing the Arthur Silbers of the world to advertise on their blogs. (Thank goodness, not.)

Not a lot of them have much going on in the comments either. One of the writers actually complained of being lonely and never getting any feedback.

I can see that my idea of "conversational" marketing is not their idea.

Probably a good thing, that.

**(It was, perhaps, inevitable that my father - who was an organic chemist at Kodak, way back when - would take up either brewing or wine-making. Something about all the free carboys and other glassware he could take out of the EKSalvage system. ... )

Not to mention the "chemistry at home" aspect of it. My dad was an organic chemist for Rohm & Haas, and I remember him making apple wine from cider, and later bottling his own root beer. (Bleah. I hate root beer anyway, but root beer with yeast in it ... shudder!) I think he felt that the simple setup was in some ways more satisfying than the things he did at work.

I still have some of the things he brought home from the lab, like a mixing spatula, with one end rounded like a shoehorn, and the other an oblong, flat tab.

It's odd in retrospect that he didn't make real beer, but he passed away before home brewing really caught on. My boyfriend and I have made some really kickass stuff, though -- fond memories of Toad Spit Stout -- before I found out I was gluten intolerant and took up red wine.

My dad had some horror stories about lab incidents, like the time one of his coworkers got perchloric acid on a tissue ...

Looping back to an earlier part of the thread, thank you, thank you, Adrienne @#16, for the Arovax link.

My employer, who had installed Norton on my office system, has gone on vacation. The Norton subscription service promptly expired and, lacking her credit card, I can't renew. Lo and behold, every time I tried to launch MS Word, it would hang (didn't even show up on Task Manager as running) and I had to hold down the power button to shut off the machine.

The minute I uninstalled Norton, Word started working again.

I am ever so glad to be rid of it. There was nothing more annoying than waiting for Norton to scan a Word document I wanted to open, even if I had just closed it 5 minutes ago.

Now maybe my hair will start to grow back again!

I think the idea that “society requires extra-legal violence in order to hold together†is pretty much fundamental to the conservative outlook.

As an extension of that, the generally ingrained idea that 'soldiers preserve our freedoms by fighting wars' is really disturbing to me.

If I hear that spouted by some ignatz in a comment thread one more time, I'm gonna hurl.

Susan @138: LiteBrite game currently circulating.

[chowdah!]

Faren @ #6: I just got the same message trying another Blogger.com blog, before I came here.

Blogger (and Google) should be flogged in public for releasing a beta version for general use and then making it nigh-on impossible to provide feedback unless you cozy up to a gmail account and register for their forums. That is *not* what a beta version is for.

I registered with Blogger.com for a blog so I have an ID, and I just upgraded to Firefox 2.0, but I have continual trouble posting comments on Blogger because their comment verification graphic malfunctions. It requires multiple attempts to post the same comment. I usually contact the blog owner, because I'm not going through the registration folderol with Google/gmail/forums etc. I'm starting to just avoid Blogger.com blogs -- their new "toolset" may be wonderful for blog owners, but it's a nightmare for visitors.

I already dislike Google because it is impossible to find an e-mail contact address anywhere in the multi-level layers of their site (ever notice how their 'sponsored links' often don't match up with search terms? try to tell them that), and this is just making it worse.

/soapbox off

Well, hell's bells. If she's an editor, so am I.

I have not finished a college degree, I make $12.75 an hour, but I can cut, size, and restitch academic articles better than a lot of people who have PhDs.

I can also tell pretty closely who will and won't fare well in peer review. And, even more impressive, I've had articles published, and I live in Maine and eke out a miserable living too. In publishing, no less.

Maybe I'm in the wrong racket.

#43: Aside from the fact that "Mom" apparently has no assets, no retirement accounts and no support from her 5 children... doesn't the story say that "Dad" was a WWII vet? I'm pretty sure the dependents of a deceased veteran are entitled to some benefits on that basis ...

As Lizzy @47 mentioned, my mom is widowed and lives comfortably in senior housing on SS, and if she were getting some bennies from Dad's service in WWII I'm sure she'd mention it.

He was wounded and received a Purple Heart. At his funeral in 1980, we got a folded-up flag, and I think the VA paid for his headstone. Other than that, as far as I know, nada.

I wonder if "Mom's" day-old bread is caused by the donut hole ...?

"A determined housecat can tree a bear."

After today, this doesn't surprise me -- one of my cats went to the vet for a quick visit, no needles, no thermometers, nothing invasive, just a once-over and a prescription. Easy, until some odor in the examining room (no doubt from a previous patient) got him agitated.

A hissing, yowling, 15-pound cat with all his claws and teeth is a fearsome thing (and not at all kind to eardrums in a confined space).

A tree to climb would have been a blessing. Maybe I'll suggest it the next time I'm there ...

If He Were My Bush I’d Shave Him Off. (Dena Shunra)

Now that, I'd even wear on a t-shirt.

Seen on a magnet at Newbury Comics:

It's all fun and games until the vice president shoots someone in the face.

Four things:

1. Meyer: ... they were brutal critics of big government.

Um, no, they weren't. They want "big government" to funnel tax money to the upper levels of society, not the middle and lower levels. I recommend The Conservative Nanny State by Dean Baker, which is available free on line.

2. One of these days we’re going to think up a new word for these guys, so that we won’t have to use the “conservative†label on people who think there’s something inherently objectionable, and probably illegal, about speech acts that espouse views they don’t agree with.

Fascist? Truly an overused pejorative, but in its defined sense, "A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism," fascism is happening now through the collaboration of media and government.

3. I sat in the audience at the "Hardball" taping at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government when Matthews interviewed Howard Dean in February 2004. When Dean said big media had too much power and needed to be reined in, I knew that was it for him, and sure enough, not too much later he was out of the race thanks in no little part to the "Dean Scream." It wasn't that his politics are too radical (they aren't) -- I sincerely believe that statement was his undoing.

4. Matt Taibbi. Seymour Hersh. Howard Zinn. I don't even trust the local newscasts any more. It's so easy to see how, when some things are emphasized and others not mentioned, the news takes on a slant that reinforces the status quo.

Oops. Sorry -- that was clearly way off-topic.

Indeed. Most institutions or entities that deal directly with the public - very definitely including ISPs - have to deal with that certain challenging segment of the public, which includes not only difficult people but some who are genuinely delusional and/or psychotic.

I once phoned a corporate customer support center (Pitney Bowes) with a question about postage machine tapes and the rep got really agitated about it (I asked whether postal tapes could be cut in half for a particular model, because older models would let you do so, and the half-tapes saved money). She got so irrationally angry I wound up hanging up the call, and she called me back to continue the rant with "I don't appreciate you hanging up on me."

Me: "Oh, really? Well ... " [slam]

I wound up calling the number again and asking for her supervisor, who apologized profusely.

I am perfectly capable of being annoying to customer service people (I just hate it when some Webmaster dweeb says "you must have cookies enabled in your browser" when it's clearly not the problem), but I didn't instigate this one.

Becky's Dinah. Nothing Finah. A favorite of fishermen because it's right on the working waterfront in Portland, Maine.

Unfortunately, the Miss Portland Diner, where you could crack your kneecaps on the table scooching into a booth and then load up on coffee, kielbasa and eggs of a Sunday morning, is no longer with us.

Then there's The Full Belly Deli near the Portland-Westbrook line. Corned beef, brisket, or pastrami, latkes with apple sauce, and chicken soup made on the premises.

Alas, I can't have matzos because I have food sensitivities (shouldn't be eating the latkes either, really, but what the hell). The chicken rice soup is wonderful even if you don't have a cold.

Teresa wrote:
If I were a voter there, I'd vote for Fred Head, on the grounds that his condition might be curable.

I did read your earlier posts, so I know where this is coming from, but for some reason this strikes me funny.

"Vote Fred Head. He Can Be Cured."

I should point out that my boyfriend's father has symptoms of dementia from a head injury suffered in a car accident, and that his mom recently recovered from a stroke caused by an aneurysm, so I am well aware that brain injury is no joke. Mom recovered fully, but she has changed -- she giggles like a maniac whenever she's under stress (according to the doctors, the alternative is uncontrolled weeping, so at least it's not that).

Teresa may very well be spot on about Fred's head.

All the same, Dad gave up his driver's license voluntarily after getting horribly lost a few times (wound up hours away from home).

I'd vote for Fred, but I'd hope like hell that his doctor picked up on whatever is happening, pronto.

(Now I'm off to Smart Bitches to see if Candy has been kicking ass and taking names in her elegantly scathing fashion. It's not so much what Fred said as the reaction he was hoping to get from the audience that will be the subject of fury there, I think.)

From the department of esoterica, this late-breaking news:

All of Word's text formatting is contained in its paragraph markers.

If you "show paragraphs" you can actually copy the mark from a paragraph that is behaving nicely and paste it in front of another mark to change formatting (be sure to delete the misbehaving paragraph mark), and to carry formatting around. It's a quick and dirty way of replacing formatting if you can't figure out through the menus how to fix what is going wrong with blocks of text.

I've used WordPerfect, Word, ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, and mainframe word processing programs, and I still like WordPerfect best. I used to work for an engineering firm producing proposals for Superfund cleanups, and I could not imagine the horror of trying a Standard Form 255 in Word.

I've always liked the fact that in WordPerfect you can see, and run global search-and-replace on, all kinds of codes that come from HTML text and e-mails.

I have to produce news columns for two bimonthly journals, and bits of text come from everywhere, and I still edit them in WordPerfect (circa 2002) and save them as RTF to send on to the production team.

Martin: "To look at this in a somewhat different light, this is why I think that a Democratic win this November or even a Democratic president in 2008 is not going to solve things. The rot is too deep to cure just by changing governments. At best, a lot of people will need to be fired or arrested as well, at worst a full scale revolution is needed."

Absolutely. Nixon is 30 years gone but his evil minions, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are not only still around, they're running things. Simply kicking out Bush -- who, judging by past ventures, probably isn't even capable of coming up with the things his administration has attempted -- only addresses the surface of the problem.

I'm not sure of the solution, unless it's term limits for White House staffers, who are not elected and not directly accountable at the ballot box (when the process works, that is).

Teresa: "Republicans mysteriously believe themselves to be constantly subjected to dreadful slurs and hateful treatment, when in fact very little of that actually happens."

Interestingly, in "Spanking the Donkey," Matt Taibbi says much the same thing about right-wing Christians: they need enemies. They need something to fight against, some sort of adversity that tests faith, in order to feel "real." When there are no bogeymen to fight, they make up some, which justifies their position as "Christian soldiers" and their tactics as "self-defense."

I recommend that book, and his columns (many of which can be found online at Alternet).

The whole impetus to put Nader at the forefront of any political movement is misplaced, in my opinion. I frequent sites that would (and do) pick up on articles he writes (like commondreams.org, truthout.org, and the Progressive Populist's Web site) and he just isn't out there shaping opinion or ideology, at least not that I can see, and certainly not as visibly as someone like Al Gore.

That is the major point I make when I respond to editorials and organizations trying to promote him as a worthy candidate. Where the hell is the guy between elections? He fades into the woodwork and says nothing against Bush, but we're supposed to drop everything and give him money when the campaigns start because he's got "integrity" and he's the opposition?

If Nader really wanted to be president, and spent time on the national stage showing who he is and what he stands for consistently between elections, he might be worth voting for -- but not on the strength of a 40-year-old reputation, nor on statements made during a campaign.

The segment of the population who voted for Bush did so on the strength of things he said, not what he'd done in the past.

Why spend money on clams when rubber bands and sand mixed together taste just the same? ;-)

Give me that old time sashimi-wasabe-sake high any day.

Comment statistics for Susan on the Making Light blog

Total: 33 comments. View all these comments on a single page.