I couldn't believe that was how to spell restaurateur either, but after I looked it up I realised that if it was fully English it would probably be restorator. A restorator runs a restorant, where one goes to restore one's strength, since the food has restorative properties.
When I was at school my teachers had to get creative to find anything to put on my spelling lists at all. I think there was one whole year when the only word my English teacher could find to make me correct was draggled. He insisted that it wasn't a word and that I had meant bedraggled but left two letters out. If that was what I'd done, it wouldn't have been a spelling mistake.
The only thing that stopped me going and getting a book that was on display in the same classroom and locating the page from which I had picked up draggled (which I could have done in about five seconds - I have a knack for opening books at just the right page) was my awareness that I talked about that author all the time and needed to cut down.
(Actually I expect that if I said that the character who sees the draggled thing later hears another character describe it as a revenant, which is where I learned that word too, somebody here could identify the book and the thing being described.)
Brian Westley is a genius. Can I say how much I love his 1988 entry?
The Google ads aren't sure what to make of this thread. Three out of five ads are Buffy-related, but the other two are for textbooks - in one case, medical textbooks.
Clifton @ 168: my introduction to Thessaly was when she turned up in The Kindly Ones calling herself Larissa and looking for Lyta. Since she was angry with Lyta by the end, I'm still not sure what her motivation was, so I was hoping there would be some explanation earlier in the series. Did I miss something?
Stefan Jones @ 161 on A. I.: I hated the ending too, but for a different reason.
Gung jnf abg n unccl raqvat. Gur yvggyr obl tbg uvf zbgure onpx sbe bar qnl - fb jung? (Naq jul qvq vg unir gb or bayl bar qnl?) Ur'f n ebobg jub srryf yvxr n uhzna, naq ol guvf cbvag ur'f frireny gubhfnaq lrnef byq naq unf fcrag gur infg znwbevgl bs uvf rkvfgrapr va pbaqvgvbaf gung whfg qba'g dhnyvsl nf uhzna yvsr. Naq abj ur'f tbvat gb yvir sbe rire va n jbeyq jurer ur'f gur bayl uhzna yrsg. (Hayrff, jung unccrarq gb gur bgure ebobgf?) Hayrff Fcvryoret'f cbvag jnf gb fubj ubj vauhzna gur obl jnf nsgre nyy, juvpu V qvqa'g guvax vg jnf, vg jnf na hggreyl fghcvq raqvat.
V frr n pbaarpgvba gb vffhr bar bs Fnaqzna urer, ohg gurer, V gnxr vg gung qrzbafgengvat Qernz'f ynpx bs uhznavgl jnf Arvy Tnvzna'f cbvag.
Another book recommendation: the Beaver Towers series by Nigel Hinton.
SpeakerToManagers @ #114:
It also makes a difference if you see or read a series in the expected order or not. With Sandman, I started with "A Game Of You" which is somewhere in the middle of the 10 collections, but I think it burned out all my evaluation circuits, and I was hooked immediately.
Hell yes. I actually bought The Kindly Ones (volume 9) first. A few pages in I knew I had to go back and read the beginning. So the next day I bought and read the first book, but then there was that copy of The Kindly Ones sitting at home which wouldn't let me not read it. After that, I filled in the ones in between in order, rationing them out over a period of about a year. The effect was rather odd, because I thought there were things that had to happen before The Kindly Ones that never appeared (e.g. more stories about Thessaly, more stories about Rose) and as I read each book and didn't find them, I kept expecting them to be in the next one. In the end I was confident that they would all be in Worlds' End, but then Worlds' End was mostly about brand new characters. The impression I got, in the end, was that I had read only a tiny subset of the stories that were there to be told. Which was entirely in keeping with the philosophy of the series, and part of what I love about it.
Oh, something else I love, related to some of the Buffy comments, is that Dream is a complete and utter idiot, especially early in the series. The fact that, as the hero, I expected him to be entitled to my automatic approval, and the amount of suffering he causes for himself and the people who are supposedly under his protection, makes his idiocy even more stunning.
I only got into Buffy recently, when my sister gave me season 1 for my birthday and season 2 for Christmas. I'm getting near the end of season 2 now (I've just been watching the one in the hospital with the monster only children can see). I think I'll have to acquire some more soon. I keep wanting to talk about it and have had to explain to certain family members the difference between being obsessed with something because it plugs into some hole in my brain (which I am not, yet, about this, and believe me I know what it feels like) and merely liking something very very much because it's good and wanting to talk about it because I have just been watching it.
Re children's SF, I remember enjoying Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left by Robin Klein.
I got around 150 spams in the last 20 hours, and that's pretty normal. I don't think I've had this particular scam, but I had a lot last week-ish with the line "Poor you, i don't even think how much spam you are recive" (sic). There was nothing else meaningful in them, and I wondered what the point was. Who would reply? What would a reply say? Did they just want to know that my address didn't bounce? Because if so, they didn't have to send me 50 of them.
Yes, somewhat to my surprise, my first thoughts on seeing the thread being, "It's probably Anglo-Saxon" and "The first word looks like 'paradise'" which were of course both way, way off the mark.
I think I got it from the metre and the punctuation in the first line. I didn't spot the word at the end of line 4 until afterwards. Actually I wasn't quite right, because the closest thing I could remember was th smlr vrs nr th nd f th bk wth th lst thr lns n nglsh. t ls ddn't ccr t m tht t hd bn trnsltd nt nthr nvntd lngg, lthgh dd wndr wht ws th pnt f trnsltng t nt nthr rl-wrld n.
Ethan @ 385: I agree with Stefan that the 2005 season is a good place to start, plus it ought to be easy to get hold of. But it's rather different in flavour from older Who, if only because TV has evolved and the budgets got bigger.
If you want to watch the older stuff, the 1970s stories (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker) are probably your best bet. I have seen more Pertwee than Baker (due to BBC2 repeating them in the 1990s). His first story was Spearhead From Space in 1970: the first Doctor Who in colour, introducing a new companion as well as a new Doctor. So that might also be a good place to start, with comparatively little backstory to get to grips with.
Save the 80s Doctors (Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy) until you know more, and don't watch the American TV movie until you know enough to hurl abuse at it for the way it messed around with the concept. (Paul McGann's Doctor was pretty good, though.)
#375: I don't know, Individ-ewe-al. Why should people treat you like a princess for a day if you're not marking any specific occasion? The point about unbirthdays in Alice was that you could have them almost every day. But your unbirthday or unwedding is also almost everybody else's, so what makes you special? I think you'd need unusually co-operative guests for it to work.
Why not pick another special occasion in your life, like getting your first book published, or college graduation, or maybe buying your own home, and throw the once-in-a-lifetime party to celebrate that? Or if you don't plan on doing those things either or have already done them, pick a special birthday. Or (more sneakily) organise the megabash for somebody else and make sure everybody appreciates the effort you've made - it will end up being your party too.
The oddest wedding I ever went to was an Islamic ceremony organised at extremely short notice. My friends had been engaged for months and had set a date for their civil wedding the following year, but hadn't decided when the religious half was going to be. I think they literally said to each other one day, "Let's do it tomorrow." The ceremony was performed by a friend of theirs (not an imam), took place in his flat, and the guests were less than a dozen friends of whom all were Muslims except me. We sat on prayer mats in the living room, I took most of the photos, and afterwards we went to an Indian restaurant for lunch. And that was it, except that they could then move in together. For a life-changing event it all seemed to be over far too quickly.
Hello. I have a question I'm itching to know the answer to but can't find it on Google, and somebody here is bound to know. In which book (I think it's a book) does a character misunderstand "consciousness raising" as "consciousness raisins"?
I just found the entire Paul McGann movie on YouTube, in 9 segments each around 10 minutes.
I haven't seen this since its first BBC showing in 1996. It made me want to give my then-WIP's protagonist amnesia. (Poor protagonist - he's got enough else to deal with without that! Fortunately I came to my senses.)
I've changed my mind about the music; I like it better than when I commented on it upthread.
I've just been watching various downloaded clips of Doctor Who titles (mostly from TV Ark). The one that disappoints me most is the Paul McGann version. Ten years ago I thought it was wonderful - beloved theme meets orchestra at last, and it starts with the middle section for a change - but compared to Murray Gold's version it sounds like what a chat show studio orchestra might play when the Doctor came on stage to be interviewed. Utterly tame.
The BBC site used to have a clip of the Eccleston title graphics set to the original 1963 music - which I think they actually thought of using - but I can't find it any more.
I also seem to have once downloaded a clip of the opening titles of "Vengeance on Varos" (a mid-80s story) played backwards, but I have no idea why. Was there supposed to be a hidden message in it?
I wish Torchwood's theme music was anywhere near as good.
I agree that Qantas story is scandalous, but I think either that man must have been very ill before he got on the plane, or there's something wrong with the article.
It says he "had a severe attack on the plane". Flights between Auckland and Christchurch normally take 1 hour 20 minutes. Let's say he was separated from his insulin for 4 hours from baggage check-in until the flight landed (of course it could have been more if the plane was delayed, but the article doesn't mention that). An insulin injection delayed for 4 hours shouldn't put you in a coma. What you do in emergency situations where you really can't take your insulin for a few hours is avoid eating anything (I've done it when I locked myself out of the house, and my blood sugar stayed normal-ish - normal for me, that is). If he did eat on the plane, it shouldn't have caused him any serious problems until a couple of hours later.
Or do they mean he had a hypo and it was glucagon, not insulin, that they wouldn't let him take on board? It seems odd that it took him two weeks in hospital to recover, and that it got as far as needing glucagon when he evidently had some warning and could have eaten some sugar. Hospital bills only $500? Maybe it was two days, not two weeks. Either way there's something wrong.
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