The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Berni Phillips Bratman:

I've worked with those chemicals on a daily basis for over 25 years. You'd trash your bathroom if you mixed them together, but I don't know how much the damage would extend beyond that.

Sulfuric peroxide is a great way to take metal and organic contamination off silicon wafers, but it cools down and loses its effectiveness in less than half an hour. I've been in labs where people have mixed the wrong chemicals. Boom, yes, but not enough to knock out a wall.

I'd much rather see Nina Paley do Tobit. The bird crapping in the eye and the demons that attack the bridegrooms on the wedding night call for a light touch.

Oh, while we're asking for watch-overs, please watch out for my David, too. He won't be at the Worldcon but will be at the big Tolkien bash in Birmingham the following week.
-- another wife staying home

Mary Dell, re bunnies, "Bunnies aren't just cute like everyone supposes. They've got those hoppy legs and twitchy little noses."

We have mourning doves at our bird feeder. They manage to get up there like the perching birds and then look incredibly stupid, like they don't know what to do next. They can't quite peck and perch at the same time.

If you're a fan of Jewel Straite (Kaylee on Firefly), check out the DVDs of Wonderfalls, a Fox series of which only four episodes were shown on TV. She shows up on the last disc (last 5 episodes) as the bartender's cheating wife. It's quite a different character from what she plays on Firefly.

Tavella -- you may be thinking of _Shoes of the Fisherman_.

Vicki -- I don't know if anyone has declined the papacy, but I was told that the room where the newly elected Pope is first vested is referred to as "the crying room," as it all sinks in. (Hey, there goes the rest of your life as any sort of private person.)

I find your original text to be readable enough as far as text size, but the other day you have a large chunk of quotation that was considerably more difficult to read.

I'm very glad that vets are now spaying and neutering cats at a much younger age than they were 20 years ago. (The cats are younger, I mean, not the vets.)

Our little guy has a notched ear because he was a feral the Humane Society picked up and neutered and intended to release back into the wild. (Hence the notched ear, showing he'd already been fixed.) He was instead taken by a local adoption/rescue organization who adopted him out to us.

If someone wants to purge their fabric stash, there may be groups in your area who make quilts for kids who are poor or in the hospital who will gladly take your fabric. That's what I did with my stash when I decided to get rid of most of it.

Jill, that's a fun game!

Me: B.A. in music + grad work -- quit working on my master's degree when I got a good job in the semiconductor field. Actually, my music degree and the extra classes my voice teacher required (diction and such) come in very handy for my work at church.

Cool! It makes me think of West Side Story with monks!

I like chant a lot. I find it very soothing to listen to. I hope someone gets the skinny on the recording of this.

Sigh. I haven't had citrus in over 30 years. When I was in high school, my food allergies kicked in. I haven't been able to eat citrus, strawberries, or raw tomatoes since. This was particularly ironic because my parents love them and we had navel oranges, mandarine oranges, and tangerines growning in our yard (also avocado, which I didn't care for).

Okay.... I can't tell if the "website to rival the Landover Baptist Church" is serious or a spoof.

I'm posting this from my mother's account, so I hope you let this through, Teresa.

Thank you so much for posting this. I hadn't thought of knitting in so long, and it's what I need right now. I'm up at my parents', cooking for my mom and driving her to the convalescent home where my dad is recovering from an operation. My mom likes to have the TV on all the time when she's home. This grates on my nerves somewhat and it makes it hard to read, so I'm going to ask her if she has any yarn stashed away. (She's a knitter, etc., too.) I don't mind the bottom of the barrel yarns -- I'm allergic to wool so synthetic's fine by me. I could use a new scarf.

Oh, this was so nice to see before I go off to play for the Children's Liturgy, a.k.a. "The Zoo."

I've got a 4 p.m. call for the 5 p.m. Mass. I'm playing guitar with a pick-up group of whoever's free and willing to put up with the insanity of the noisiest Mass. ("Loud is good" is the motto for both the musicians and the congregation, I think.) I want to see what the kids do, so I signed up.

Re reading, yes I see pictures when I read.

When I dream, it's often a musical. My dreams often feature song and dance numbers.

I have a classmate whose last name is Ickes. Her license plate frame reads: "Yikes! It's Ickes!"

Re the four pairs of saints, I was at the LA Cathedral recently. I hadn't seen it before, so we went early to have enough time to look around and see everything. The tapestries are just gorgeous -- a wide variety of saints (identified below their images) and modern "real people" mixed in. (Especially when it's a saint associated with children. E.g., St. Elizabeth Seton, the founder of the Catholic school system in the US has a group of children around her.)

Anyway, two of the saints depicted are Perpetua and Felicity. They are African looking but lighter skinned, which probably fits in with their being from the north or the continent. I was very impressed with all the tapestries. The saints chosen are a good mix of ancient and modern, well-known and obscure.

The statue of Mary outside at the entrance, in contrast, is hideous IMHO. There are two specific problems: she looks bald until you're very close when you can see the hair is either very closely cropped or corn-rowed. She has sort of African features, which is okay -- not representative of how she probably really looked but okay. The other problem with the statue is the dress. The sleeves are about elbow-length and stand up and out in a way fabric doesn't unless it's been heavily quilted or starched or something. It's just peculiar.

Oh, and inside, lining the walls are sconces (real candles) with different fairies with enormous wings. They're probably supposed to be angels, but they look more like fairies -- especially when you're coming from a science fiction convention.

I was giggling over the caption contest. I just had received my "Nuns Having Fun" calendar for 2004. It has one of those "nuns with guns" photos (with the caption, "Pray for prey"). It also has nuns on roller skates, bowling, in bumper cars, etc.

I'd seen the 12 days of kitchmas entries on Amy Welborns's blog a few days ago. Considering how my brother has always complained about our family's always having a traditional dead fish on the tree (German blown glass, not real dead fish), the nail is mighty tempting. And I could get one of those ashtrays for my older sister.

And how would you pronounce "zie" anyway? Is it a long "I" or a long "E?" I always think of it with the long "E," then I lapse into Pepe le Pew-speak.

And then there's the "it looks funny in handwriting because I've always seen the word printed" feeling. It may be spelled correctly, but it just seems a little wrong.

Doesn't Sheri Tepper write mysteries under another name? I can't think of a less conservative writer than she. Does anyone know if her mysteries are as lefty as her SF? (Assuming that you consider radical feminism and animal rights as lefty, of course.)

Comment statistics for Berni Phillips Bratman on the Making Light blog

Total: 48 comments. View all these comments on a single page.