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

Happy birthday!

Neato! To steal a cliche: Two great tastes that taste great together!

If I can make one small suggestion that might not matter to anyone but me (at which point please ignore me):

You may want to widen the central column, wherein the actual entries are located. When it was just Patrick on Electrolite this format didn't matter much, but Teresa's posts tend to be a little longer, which makes for more scrolling down.

Of course, my browser doesn't sit at the full width of my screen, so maybe I am the only one who might be bothered by this.

In answering as myself I got William Gibson, but my answers to the first two were "God" and "Genetics and Biology" respectively, so I can only assume that my later answers are skewed very heavily towards him.

(I just checked and I still get Gibson if I change Genetics and Biology to my second choice of Sociology and Anthropology. How odd...)

(Also, for the record, my later answers were:
I'm a total internationalist
I try to practice common courtesy
I probably offend a lot more people
When you get onto a subject that I care about
It's a nice scam
Al
God gave us two ears
I'm all about questions
and
Hell it's practically brimming full)

"maybe I should start them with 'now everyone please sit down.'"

Tom, I think this was the first thing I ever learned about Teresa. Someone (can't remember who) told me "If you're going to tell her a joke, suggest she sit down first."

Teresa - Good luck with the new neurologist!

Well, to be fair, most sects of Buddhism -do- have a "go with what works" approach built right into their belief structure. It's called "upaya" (in Sanskrit) and most commonly gets translated into English as "skillful means." It means that, limited by the bounds of compassion, you can use whatever means are going to be most effective to help any given person reach enlightenment. This explicitly includes, in at least two texts (Lotus Sutra and Queen Sri Mala's True Lion's Roar), lying.

Which doesn't make Buddhism not a religion. It doesn't (generally, leaving aside some sects) have a God, but it has a fairly specific (though ever-changing) view of what enlightenment/salvation/soteriology is and the practice, whatever it is, is geared towards helping you hit that mark. That's religion enough in my book.

Heh. Thanks for the jokes. I'd heard Bill's before (usually as a follow up to the "make me one with everything" riff), but Sarah's was new to me. Funny either way.

Faren, not sure what sort of history you're looking for, or how detailed but Buddhism does have a lot of schools of thought that disagree with each other (Pure Land Buddhism versus, say, either of the Zen schools is a sort of "saved by faith alone versus good works" split. Sort of. And that's just within Japan).

Buddhism has been used, as Epacris says, as an excuse to... erm... smack down the non-believers. This was in the early days of Buddhism coming to Japan, when it was trying to establish a place for itself over and above the not-actually-organized indigenous religion. The doctrinal conflicts in China are, quite literally, the subject of legend. And martial arts movies. I'm pretty sure there were some early conflicts with the Therevada and Mahayana traditions in India, but I can't speak with authority there.

The worst is probably the accusation, in the past decade or so, that Japanese Buddhism has justified the oppression of minorities and propogated a sense of Japanese superiority. I'm not sure I agree, but the details of the debate are probably getting a bit off-topic, so I'll just cut off.

Ah, yeah. I should've said "aside from the one pretty much everyone's likely to have heard before."

I just found this one, which had me laughing a lot:

Q: What do you call a schizophrenic Zen Buddhist?
A: A man who is at two with the universe.

I'm also a fan of the hypothetical conversation between Descartes and the Buddha:

Descarte said "I think, therefore I am."
The Buddha replied "Think again."

Rivka: I'm not UU, myself, but the evangelist joke had me -howling-.

Meanwhile, I try to find some Buddhism jokes that are worth sharing...

Thanks, Metal. Must've kept scrolling right by that one. Yes, that is indeed a very retouched picture. Very, very retouched.

I can't find Miss Robinson's picture on the Author House page. Am I missing a link or did someone out there remove it before I woke up this morning? Perhaps in response to comments here?

I beg everyone's pardon for my pithiness, but after reading the letters from PA that Teresa linked to, I can't avoid saying this:

PublishAmerica really isn't living in the reality-based community, is it?

Andrew: Rock odyssey was very much what I was thinking when I first read it. The fact that I'm a big fan of The Doors sort of clinched it in my mind.

Hhm. Last time Saints came up in discussion (or, at least, the time you linked to above, Teresa), there was some small discussion about Angels and Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels. I've had that book for years and found it tremendously delightful.

So, question then: can anyone recommend a similarly delightful book about Saints? Not so much a collection of all of their vitae (as entertaining as those often are), nor an internet site, but a book with a few paragraphs about each one and their associations and notes for where their vitae might appear?

If so, that would be something I'd love to own.

Also, on a Saint-related note, are folks around here aware of the campaign to establish a Patron Saint of Handgunners? I stumbled across it the other day while researching something else.

Come to think of it, given current (and past) linguistic discussions, this one might be worth looking at, too:

http://www.vidlit.com/yidlit/yidlit.html

I realize that this is fairly off-topic, and therefore apologize, but this is an open thread and I thought some folks here might get a kick out of this:

http://www.vidlit.com/agent/agent.html

Sorry, David. I've brought it up a few times on here before, but never in an Open Thread "hey everyone look at this wonderfully cool thing" sort of way.

Jo: I know your swimming/flying experience very well. My childhood swimming was seasonal (I'd swim for hours and hours every day in the summer and then not at all otherwise) and I spent much of my Septembers having feelings like yours.

I'm still fairly sensitive to ocean currents - if I spend much of a day in or on or near the ocean, say at the boardwalk, I'll feel like the current's moving me back and forth for about three days after.

Never heard any voices or any such things as folks have been describing, though, nor have I ever thought I was an animal, person of another gender, alien, etc. trapped in my own body. I think my only odd experience of the sort is the definable pressure I feel around electronic devices that've been left on for too long. I'd rather assumed everyone felt this, but too many of my friends have looked at me strangely for me to cling to that. I guess I'm just sensitive to static buildup or whatever.

Oh, and Jonathan? Your most recent comment is a small treasure to me. Thank you!

Remarkably, I just got this very same phone call myself, from (presumably) the very same National Grants Association, though the gentleman I spoke to was named Charles.

I hurried him off the phone because the Gilmore Girls was on, though. Wish I'd had more time for fun...

Which is fairly interesting to me, Michelle. Putin is, of course, not even close to being a reformer. It's a pity, as a reformer is something Russia could really use right now, but Putin's not leaving office any time soon, so there you have it.

It's just that... well, I can't really think of a single thing Putin has to gain by Bush being in office. But then, I've had a similar attitude to Mr. Vos Post's, recently, so...

Congratulations, Jo! Haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but it's been sitting on my shelf, eyeing me, for a while now. It'll happen soon, I hope.

Let me see...

I have far too big a list of sites that I visit every day and wish some of them would stop being so interesting, or would at least post less frequently, so that I could cut down. That said, the one I'm sure to never, ever miss is Rebecca Sean Borgstrom's Hitherby Dragons. It's a trip and a half of short fiction.

As for Mt. St. Helen's, I absolutely love the immanent eruption. As someone newly transported to Seattle from New York, I'm taking the opportunity to enjoy having a nearby site of natural disasters. I'd always felt so left out, previously. No hurricanes for us, oh no. No earthquakes, tsumani or tornados. New York is, of course, a helluva town, but our excitement and danger was always of the man-made variety. It's nice that I'm in a place where nature can try her hand.

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