3 hours a day
1000 beads
4 generations of pride
0 chances of huffing things to get high
... and I am so fucking bored!
Bizarre.
A lot of the slurry on Usenet and much of the stuff our hard-hitting moderator has to disemvowel here is generated by people who haven't learned a simple lesson: I am not reading this to raise my blood pressure, damage my heart, rupture my spleen or detonate one of those dodgy looking blood-bag thingies in my brain.
I'm a volunteer. If reading this (or anything else) causes me to lose my temper or my lunch it's my own fault.
People who haven't or won't learn this get very angry, and then write a lot of choleric prose which causes those of complimentary philosophical bent to respond in quarte. No!
Parry and laugh! Touché!
We don't get much US internal politics on the news over here apart from Presidential elections, but Sky News ran a spot last night showing Gonzales at his hearings answering questions about his advocacy of torture.
Why bother saying "I don't recall writing that" when you then go on to say you agree with the conclusion? Is he trying to pretend that he is just going along with a pro-torture consensus rather than driving it?
Dick Francis was a pilot in WW II, so I'd say his piloting stories are first hand experience, and the flying business stuff is close second-hand.
I used to love Dick Francis's books, but his best were the jockey and pilot ones, things he knew from his own experience.
When he wrote about computers in Twice Shy, something I knew a bit about even in 1981, it was obviously researched but not understood. I wondered how many of the other non-jockey ones read that way to people who know a bit about wine, banking or whatever the subject is.
MD² aked above if Messrs. Strange and Norrell is a difficult read since it is so very English, and I would say not. If you can read, say, Jane Austen, you can read JS&Mr.N.
Speaking of sidelights, I'm surprised to learn that China Miéville is named China because rather than despite the fact that it is rhyming slang for "mate" [in the sense of "pal", not "sexual partner"].
Starlight 3.
No, honestly, I am. I read Senator Bilbo in bed last night.
To counter tales of expensive picture books, I must tell how I brought my kids on a trawl through Charlie Byrne's in Galway last Saturday.
Maeve got an illustrated Giselle, Ian got Room on the Broom, a picture book from the people who brought you The Gruffalo, I picked up the comprehensively illustrated and enormously data-rich The Annotated Wizard of Oz which I'll be reading to them and their little sister for years to come, and I got hardbacks of Issola and Starlight 3, in and out for €35 the lot.
I would have bought most of those full price if I had ever seen them for sale here, but for some reason I first saw them in the remainder piles.
Odd to find a TNH and a PNH edited volume on the same visit...
Mitch says (about some fantasy stories I haven't read): The Sumner novels use a standard high fantasy storyline: the callow boy who everyone picks on, who grows up to be the king, or a powerful wizard, or both.
The Kid, The Natural whose gun just leaps from his holster into his hand, is a standard character in westerns, and the hero of more than a few.
I read Louis L'amour westerns where the Kid was the hero, much picked upon until the Plot revealed his innate skills with a six-gun, before there was a "genre fantasy" sub-genre of the fantasy genre.
Jim Henry writes: "I realized that even if I agreed with Catholics more than with Protestants on most of the issues that divide us, I still could not actually be a Catholic unless I actually believe all that the Church teaches."
This is not a thought which comes naturally to people born and raised RC. If the Hierarchy are promoting some new idiocy (or, more often, some old idiocy resurrected,) we are more likely to ask "Why is the hierarchy being so wrongheaded about this stupid infallibility doctrine?".
The Hierarchy is not the Church.
Mind you, I'm not even part of the Church these days, but I remember my father (who is) following the career of Hans Kung with interest, back when I was.
Huxley coined the term "agnostic" to distinguish himself from religious people and Ivor's notion of atheists, but it's obvious reading his writings that I'd call him an atheist like myself now:
"That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. ["Agnosticism and Christianity", 1889]"
Probably a Southall fan, too.
PNH wrote:
'What I really want to know is when "Fuck you, not my problem, I've got mine, Jack" became a reasonable response to mildly-phrased criticism of left/liberal/progressive culture and behavior by people inside that culture.'
It wasn't particularly mildly phrased. You called it "one of the biggest political problems facing those of us opposed to the modern Right Wing", which makes it sound like a pretty big fucking deal.
Is there any evidence that anyone actually votes against their interests or principles because someone else on that platform is rude about religion?
It certainly doesn't seem to work that way on the right, where right-wing atheists who think the Republicans will limit government and taxation wink at their candidates pandering to the lowest common religious denominator.
Or is it only religious people who are incapable of joining a coalition where their beliefs get less than 100% respect?
Honorable discharge, honorable discharge, where have I heard that phrase before...
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/sniper021025_john.html
But that was all after the honorable discharges, right?
Well..., yes and no:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/snipersb.html
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|---|---|
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 11 |
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