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

becca@483:

Maybe we're looking for different things in this direction, but I don't find that genre (or even specifically science fiction--romance, mystery, and westerns are also genres) writers are guaranteed to reward my trust. At any level: writers in and out of genre will drop plot threads (deliberately or not). Writers of all sorts of books will perpetrate inconsistencies at various levels, some of which matter more than others: but I still remember the novel I read a couple of decades ago in which the second part began with a large "Twelve Years Later" and a character born in part 1 was described as being ten years old--his age didn't matter, but it stuck with me. They will "resolve" the plot by someone not even hinted at wandering in five pages from the end and either Telling All or producing the magic widget that fixes things. (This is considered a worse offense in detective fiction, but it's poor writing in any genre, imho: the characters need not be aware of what's going on, but the writer has ways of foreshadowing and sketching background and should use them.)

Writers in any genre will casually defend or promote behavior I find reprenhensible. Some of the same writers will equally casually tell the world that people like me or my loved ones are the source of their problems, inherently evil, or necessarily doomed. Some of that is more deliberate than others--I'm tired of cutting stories slack for "torture works and is therefore acceptable," regardless of when written, but an awful lot of older writers were reflecting the racism, sexism, and other prejudices that were all around them. Sometimes they are better than most of what was around them, and still harmful and/or painful to read today.

Andy called me yesterday to tell me about magnetic monopoles. Someone in the Scientific American write-up says these aren't the real thing and of fundamental physics importance, though interesting for people concerned with condensed-matter physics, but it looks cool, even if it's not a ticket to Stockholm. (The paucity of hits at Google news leads me to think that people agree with him, but the article is in Science, and I'll see how much I can get out of it when the next issue arrives.)

The other thing I like about the Flushing Remonstrance is that it doesn't just say "we are following God rather than the laws of man," it says "we are exercising our rights as Dutch citizens. You are overstepping your authority here." [I'm working from memory here, and it's been a few years, so don't expect to find that word-for-word.]

The bit about Gulliver's Travels reminds me of the Christian medallions made by the Japanese government specifically so they could force people to trample them as a sign of renouncing Christianity. IIRC, a very few were not used for their intended purpose and are thus extremely rare collectibles.

Christine at 57:

"it's just that someone who never cleans their oven suddenly decideds to roast a 30 lb turkey, and is utterly amazed when the kitchen fills with smoke."

A while ago, I was wondering what to use to clean my oven, since some of the available chemicals looked pretty nasty. So I looked it up in my Consumer Reports guide How to Clean Practically Everything, where I found the following surprising advice on how to clean a gas oven: don't. Just let the oven burn whatever it is off in the course of normal cooking.

I was a little skeptical, but I figured they knew more about the subject than I did, so I followed their advice, and it's worked thus far.

We use the oven regularly, for (among other things) roast chicken, small cakes, potatoes, and squash.

Since I don't see this in the sidelights: a Deseret News article on the trial of Warren Jeffs for "rape as an accomplice" in the forced marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin.

A hint, and a question.

Rivka posted to LiveJournal a few days ago about her daughter having burned herself slightly the first time she saw an electric stove (they have gas at home), because she didn't realize that those interesting-shaped curved bits of metal were dangerously hot until she touched them. The child didn't like having her hand held under the cold water tap, but was quite happy to sit in Rivka's lap and play with a bowl of ice water, which effectively cooled her burned hand.

The question: there's a mention above about dry sand as a fire-extinguishing tool. Would basic commercial catbox sand do the job? I think what we have may be small clay pellets rather than sand, but it doesn't have any weird scent or deodorizing chemicals in it.

I think there's a Vegan-American neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Jules @ 107:

As described, he was in the process of leaving when the cops approached him.

Leaving a location you've been asked to leave is not trespassing.

If both leaving and not leaving counted equally as "trespassing," the moment someone was asked to leave a location, there would be absolutely nothing acceptable they could do, including following the instructions of the police or other authority. That would not only be illogical and immoral, it would be stupid from the viewpoint of the authorities: you don't get people to cooperate by punishing them as badly for doing what you want as for not doing what you want.

Today Blair's spokesbeing is saying that no, he didn't mean it was a disaster, he just likes to repeat what interviewers ask him. Which makes one wonder what else El-Jazeera could have gotten him to admit, if true.

A propeller beanie might be okay, but a pen is more my speed, I think. (The silhouette of a keyboard looks too much like any other random rectangle, I think.)

Maybe organ donors should have that mentioned, proudly, on their markers.

If I wanted a symbol on a grave marker, I would be happy with a double helix--not because I'm an atheist, but because it's a nice shorthand for the idea that we're a species of animal, not robots or disembodied minds, related to lots of other species.

I've got my organ donor card, and don't much care what happens to my body after the usable parts have been recycled. (If I had a house and a garden, I'd borrow Lee Hays's idea of being cremated and having the ashes scattered on his compost pile; that isn't practical in a sixth-floor Manhattan apartment.) I suspect that the main thing my survivors will want on any grave/niche marker will be my name, and maybe some quote they consider suitable. But, well, if they decide they'd like Jewish or atheist or other symbols, that's fine too: I'm not the one the marker will be for.

Serge (@74): As I understand it, Robinson wound up in Canada partly because he fell in love with the Maritimes on first visit, while working a dead-end job on Long Island (NY state), and partly because he fell in love with a Canadian.

Scraps (@66): do you have URLs for those Robinson reviews, or do I ask Velma to tuck them in her bag when she comes up here for apple cakelings?

Torture is a moral issue.

I hope nobody here thinks they can figure out, from that simple and important statement, what religion I follow, if any.

Lee at 89:

My straight party ticket* did include one Democrat who is almost certainly corrupt, though possibly not enough to be kicked out of office for. If Hevesi is re-elected NY State Comptroller, the almost certain outcome is that Elliot Spitzer gets to nominate a replacement. If the Republican is elected, not only is that a candidate from the party of torture getting the job, it's someone who probably doesn't have the experience and backbone to do a good job.

[It would be mathematically possible for Spitzer to be re-elected and for the Republican whose name I keep forgetting to be elected governor; that's extremely unlikely in reality, and leaves us no worse off than in the scenario above.]

*Not precisely a straight party ticket: there were a total of three candidates, on three different party lines, for two judgeships: one Democrat and two running on roll-your-own third parties, the "Equal Justice Party" and the "Northern Manhattan Party," neither of which had candidates for anything else. The EJ person was promoted heavily, including by someone I'm inclined to trust, so I voted for her. Not only do I not know why the Democrats only named one candidate, I don't know why any of the other more established party had no candidates for this position.

"And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for?
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the Pearly Gates.
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam."

[Country Joe and the Fish.]

That's part of it, I think: know what you're fighting for.

The moral to one of James Thurber's "Fables for Our Time" is "All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why."

Also, "No pasarán!" But there needs to be a better reason than what Simonides wrote for Leonidas's three hundred.

In case anyone else is interested, here's the red and black of the Spanish anarchist CNT/FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajdores / Federación Anarquista Ibérica, i.e. "National Workers' Union/Iberian Anarchist Federation):

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/e/es%7Dcnt36.gif

The targets of clinic bombings include doctors, nurses, and all pre-menopausal women and their close friends or relatives who might accompany them to the clinic.

That is not a small group: that's most of the population of the United States. And the goal is to scare all those people, and use fear to restrict their actions.

Randolph (at 120),

A lot more people are willing to sacrifice someone else's children than their own. There are few if any wars that don't involve someone on each side deciding to make that sacrifice, and how many believe it futile? I suspect someone could easily have sat down in, oh, 1965 and talked about the futility of the Viet Cong's sacrifice, because there was no way that they could defeat the United States.

The parallels aren't exact, but they don't need to be: they only need to be visible enough that somone can decide, in 2006, that it's worth sacrificing his own life to kill foreign soldiers, because if he and enough other people do that, the foreign armies will leave.

"Bingo" is some Scrabble players' slang for playing all seven of your tiles (which comes with a fifty-point bonus). It always sounds odd to me, and isn't in the rules as printed on my set.

Andy and I tend to just say "seven-letter words" even though many of them wind up being eight letters (one already on the board) and a few are nine or even more. (For example, an existing "re" [in the sense of the musical note] can then become "recovered."

Pandemonium is actually an sf and game store; I've not been in there since they moved to Central Square, but in the old location I think they had good stock in both areas. (I'm not a serious gamer, and was in there looking at books, but I also bought a pouch, probably intended for dice, to use for our Scrabble letters.)

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