17, of which at least 7 were courtesy of clues in the choices
(italic, thin, etc.) And I used to work as a typesetter, too *sigh* Of
course, that was in the Stone Age when we didn't have typefaces named
Yvonne :->
John McCain, a man whose basic foreign policy position is War With Everyone, Forever
With that opinion, you'll love this political cartoon: http://cagle.com/working/080131/luckovich.gif
I blinked at "MSM" too but finally figured out from context that it probably means "mainstream media"
#138 Scott D-S: I can't see how it will be anything but beneficial for the party to keep this a race as long as possible IF they can manage to avoid providing a road map for the Republinazis to beat them in the fall.
Well, that's the danger I see. The closer the primaries are and the longer and harder the slog, the more Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are likely to campaign on negatives of the other candidates' ideas and qualifications. And the more they do that, the more they provide the eventual Republican nominee with ammunition against the eventual Democratic nominee during the actual election.
#112 Laurie D. T. Mann: But, you know how the Paul apologists are all saying "someone else wrote these essays..."
Agreed that either he did write them, in which case he's a racist and anti-Semite, or he didn't write them but allowed his name to be used without any oversight and then blamed the text on underlings, in which case I wouldn't want to put him in charge of anything important like, say, the US government!
albatross wrote: Similarly, Ron Paul has been treated abominably by a bunch of the powers that be. But you may still want to look at his stand on the issues before you vote for him!
I have, here. And if even half of these quotes reflect his views, I wouldn't vote for him for dogcatcher.
Michael Weholt (#29): Nobody can give a speech like Obama can give a speech.
Except maybe Bill :->
Regarding the more general topic of the appalling Hillary media coverage, as usual a picture is worth a thousand words, in this case, a picture by editorial cartoonist Tom Toles: http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20080109/ltt080109.gif
Actually, when I saw news coverage of this incident, I figured it would help Hillary not just because of the media overkill but because voters who think she's a robotic cold machine would see that she's an actual person with emotions who does care about the country. I haven't decided whether she's my candidate (I tend to think she's probably not cross-party electable) but there's no question that the media coverage of her campaign has been a sexist, hounding disgrace.
Uh-oh... We're staying in Boston for a few days after Smofcon and as I swore that the next time I drove in Boston I would do it with GPS, we've ordered it on the rental car. Makes me worry if the maps are going to be outdated or the signal is going to be lost in the parts of the city that I need it most! Luckily, my company's office is fairly easy to find in Burlington but that's not the part of the city that has in the past reduced me to tears. Pray for me... :->
When I first moved to Australia, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of war memorials were for WWI, and hadn't realized until then how much a nation's view of itself relates to the war with which it most identifies. In the American South, the war memorials are mostly for the Civil War. In other parts of the U.S. I think that it is WWII, not WWI, that affected the nation's psyche more.
In terms of items of the period, just this morning saw in The Register a story (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/11/great_war_diary/) about a personal diary kept by a Scots officer during his time on the Somme during WWI that is now available for download (http://www.grandfathersgreatwar.com/index.html). Excerpt:
"When I am very tired and just getting off to sleep with cold feet, in comes an orderly with a chit asking how many pairs of socks my company had a week ago; I reply 141 and a half. I then go to sleep; back comes a memo: 'please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock'. I reply 'man lost his leg'. That's how we make the Huns sit up."
Sounds fascinating.
ema #89: Thanks for the tips. I already have coping mechanisms related to recipes that don't mention sizes - I just thought I'd take the opportunity to vent about recipes that make me have to use them :->
BTW, I'm in Australia too so I'd appreciate the name of the mayonnaise! I'm using Praise, which is ok but not as good as Hellman's/Best.
Recipe sounds good but unfortunately suffers from one of my Pet Peeves: recipes that say "one can" or "one box" or (not in this recipe's particular case) "pour into a pan" and I'm left whimpering pitifully "What *size*?"
Reminds me of one of my favorite Fran Lebowitz quotes (there are too many to pick *a* favorite): "The opposite of talking is not listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."
(BTW, thanks for the link to the Fry essay.)
208 and 233, regarding why Lily married James: Even if he was a bit arrogant, he had a sense of humor, too. He also had friends very loyal to him, which speaks of other good qualities that we might not have heard about in the brief snippets about him. (Of course, I might not be the best person to postulate, being married to a fairly arrogant geek myself :-> )
Abi #160: Friends of mine who were getting married had been living separately for years so they pretty much had all the household goods they needed. When I asked the groom if there was anything he could think of that I could get them, he suggested the HP books in Hebrew, because the books they were using to learn the language were getting boring! So that was my gift :->
Mark said in #98:
Harry and his friends have been badly served by their magical education. They have learned a lot of tricks but they have no framework from which to innovate. Adult wizards of long experience somehow create useful artifacts and new spells. [snip] But Harry, Ron, and Hermione perform no magic they haven't been explicitly taught.
Remember, they haven't done their last term yet so maybe that's what you learn in year 7, which would make a lot of sense to me in terms of how their education progresses: years 1 - 6 give you your foundation and year 7 they teach you how to weave it all together and make it your own.
Just to share: best parody I've seen so far is at http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com/2007/07/potterdammerung-mega-spoilers.html
It's very cleverly written, thorough, and exposes weak points in the plot, including many that didn't strike me on first reading.
John: The darkening of Dumbledore's character was a nice touch but I didn't think it came out of as much of a leadup as the Snape "is he really evil?" question that everyone has been debating since book 1, which is why I didn't mention it specifically.
Julia: Thanks for mentioning the Molly Weasley/Bellatrix thing, which was definitely one of the better touches in the book.
Everyone: I sort of, kind of gathered that the flayed child whimpering in the corner in the final Harry/Dumbledore scene was some sort of Voldemort relict but I was absent the day they did symbolism so did anyone else get a clearer picture of what that was all about?
I thought she wimped, personally: I expected really major characters to die and although I liked Fred Weasley and Lupin is one of my personal favorites, they're not truly core characters. She even brought Hagrid back after seemingly killing him off. Not entirely sure how the whole philosophical "Harry's dead, no, wait, he isn't" reasoning is going to play with the pre-teen crowd.
The one place I thought she didn't completely wimp was in not whitewashing Snape.
As for Hermione's parents, didn't she say that she'd be able to reverse the memory wipe if they won? Not that getting them to move to Australia wasn't resourceful, mind you.
On the whole, I thought it was ok but not as clever a wrap-up as I expected.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 9 |
| 2007 | 14 |
| 2006 | 11 |
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 2 |
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