The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Cathy Krusberg:

#9 horses

I firmly believe that one of the most important lessons I've learned in my life, I learned from a horse.

Our horse had an illness that required a few days of hypodermic injections into the big muscle in her neck -- something the vet entrusted us with after a demonstration. Lady was a very gentle horse but spooked easily. The first time we were going to give her an injection, my parents and I trooped into the woods to find Lady. Someone had to hold her while my father gave her the shot. He and my mother basically both milled around wondering just how much of a fuss Lady would make at the sudden jab into her neck, and what would we do about it? Lady had been placid enough when we arrived, but all the uneasiness among her humans clearly made her agitated. Maybe I just got impatient, but even though I was generally not assertive as a child, I stepped forward and grabbed Lady's halter. Lady immediately calmed, and when my father stuck a needle into her neck, she never quivered. Subsequent injections went uneventfully.

I'm not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that when you need to get things done, it doesn't matter who takes control, as long as somebody does. Maybe that it's OK to step forward and do what needs to be done. But even though I don't know what the lesson is, I feel I've learned it and it's bettered my life.

I have the dubious privilege of owning but never having read The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman, by Arthur N. Scram (per the title page) or Arthur N. Scarm (per the cover). In the following I've tried to avoid quoting material available in the link from Wesley @ 104. The first chapter sets the scene with Waldo, a werewolf, "dead on a mahogany slab in a morgue."

A mahogany slab in a morgue?

The narrator has warned us that "Everyone with the slightest knowledge of werewolves knows if you separate a werewolf from his silver bullet, he can return to life." The coroner, however, hasn't gotten the memo. Ditto, apparently, for his assistant, Ruth Anne Warren.

Coroner Sands held up the extracted bullet with an air of superiority to show his find to Ruth. It was his last air of superiority he was ever able to muster in this world.

Waldo shivered slightly, took one deep breath and then wrung the coroner's neck with one hand until Coroner Sands' tongue dropped to the dimple in his chin. It was all over in a moment even before Ruth Anne Warren could protest volubly.

Waldo snags the fleeing Ruth with "an arm like a hook at a vaudeville show." However:

Waldo had no intention of harming Ruth. She was too gorgeous for that. In one yank he pulled off her silk blouse and lace bra and left her standing defenseless against any young child who might come along who wanted his lunch.

Waldo proceeds to smoothly/forcibly remove all Ruth's other clothing, except her blue ankle socks and moccasins.

Now werewolves like beautiful nude women just as much as non-werewolves, in fact even more. Waldo proceeded to have his way with Ruth on the mahogany slab where he once lay dead.

When it was over Ruth decided werewolves weren't as bad as they are pictured. As for Waldo, he was now completely disinterested in Ruth. He took the silver bullet that once was in his heart and put it in his pocket.

Probably en route to one of those "cash for old jewelry" outfits.

Here is Waldo smooth-talking the Vampire Woman, Wandessa:

"You need my strength. It's never been done before. A vampire and a werewolf together against the world.* Do you know what we can accomplish? The evil? The hate? The destruction? We can do more in the way of annihilation than the humans themselves and that's a lot. Try it with me. Believe me it'll work."

Yeah, I think it's OK that I haven't read this one. And yeah, the punctuation is pretty much as I've reproduced it. I think this guy needs a case of commas a heap worse than Kevin Leahy does.


*Clearly someone has never read the old EC comics.

I'm terribly impressed that I've already been beaten to not only mullion but glabella. My contributions:

tang: the part of a knife blade projecting into the handle. (Actually the word can be used more broadly for part of an object projecting into another part to attach it, but the tang on a knife is most likely to be "everyday.") Definitely not just for breakfast.

pilcrow: a paragraph mark. Not to be confused with pill bug, for which people in my region (NE Georgia, USA) use the term roly-poly (n).

zest: the outermost rind of a citrus fruit. (I was very surprised, years ago, to learn that zest is a concrete noun.)

scutigera: a type of centipede. I discovered them on moving into this house 15 years ago and accidentally learned what they were called when browsing a book about "spiders and their kin." These critters look terrifying, and if killed in action, their legs will continue to move until a good bit of smashing has occurred. Now that I know they are predators, I leave them alone.

finial: a crowning ornament on a detail. The everyday version is the threaded object on the top of a lamp harp that holds the lampshade in place. I've heard of people who collect lamp finials.

dingbat: a typographical ornament. Some typographers apparently reserve the word for particular styles or applications of ornaments.

#130: bezel isn't just for jewelry; it's also the part of a watch holding the crystal in place. The back of a watch is often stamped "base metal bezel - stainless steel back."

#246 and #355: my riding instructor of many years ago distinguished between a "flake" of hay and a "pat" or "bat." The flake, IIRC, was the thinnest possible division of a square bale, often so thin it wasn't itself square. The pat or bat was a more discrete section a few inches thick.

But horse folk often don't use terms universally. I understand fights can break out over the distinction between chestnut and sorrel.

Michael Roberts @ #51 wrote:

My wife's family, bless their little souls, are Catholic and evangelical (no, not the same ones) and they've independently said that it's clearly our fault for (check all that apply)

For self-proclaimed Christians, these folks sound awfully ignorant of the Book of Job.

Not wanting to be left in the dust, Philadelphia is making up for lost time in condemning the Err lightboards that appeared in its fair city.

"We think it was a stupid, regrettable, irresponsible stunt by Turner," said Joe Grace, Mayor Street's spokesman. "We do not take kindly to it."

Grace said the city responded quickly. But it appears the devices were placed in Philadelphia and nine other cities weeks ago without causing much of a fuss until Boston law-enforcement officials spotted them Wednesday.

Anybody want to place bets on how long it will take the other eight cities to get into the act?

Jo Walton @ #39 writes: I think this is a bit like Suzette Haden Elgin's theory that everything is true of something, you just have to find out what it's true of.

What Elgin refers to as Miller's law says: "In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of." In her Livejournal entry of Sept. 5, 2006, Elgin gives the source as "Giving Away Psychology in the 80's: George Miller Interviewed by Elizabeth Hall," Psychology Today for January 1980, pp. 38-50 and 97-98; on page 46.

Broader versions of the adage may also work, of course.

Another possibility (I don't think I saw it mentioned anywhere upstream) for fixing Word formatting weirdness: "maggie" the document. Select the entire document EXCEPT the last paragraph mark (you of course have to be viewing nonprinting characters to do this), copy the selected part, paste into a new document. If the document is in sections, it may be necessary to perform this process for each section. This works because Word formatting gunk accumulates in the final paragraph mark.

The "maggie" process is so named for Maggie Secara. I doubt she invented it, but I'm told her name got attached to it on the Word-PC list.

While we're discussing the animals of New Orleans:

I haven't been able to find Web confirmation of this, but I understand that CNN did a story about the 82nd Airborne evacuating a woman and her 21 dogs; the woman had said she would evacuate only if the dogs could come too (see thread 4479.2. "I just saw it on CNN"). In contrast, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran this story: a family lost two of their three dogs because St. Bernard Parish sheriff's deputies deemed the animals too big to rescue and shot them on the spot.

Best Friends Animal Society has a number of threads about New Orleans residents forced to abandon their pets, sometimes by local authorities, sometimes because of FEMA regulations - even though animal abandonment is illegal under Louisiana law (one post cited Chapter 14, Section 102.1(A)(1)(d) of Louisiana's Revised Statutes). There is evidence that human lives have been lost because people refused to be evacuated without their dogs - back when they had the choice.

The Humane Society of Louisiana is struggling to rescue pets, but they have limited manpower. (I understand they accept volunteer help. Don't call; just show up at the Gonzales shelter, per a Sept. 9 post by petlover7777 at Best Friends.) Of course, the Humane Society is receiving the occasional bit of "assistance" from individuals like Sgt. Mike Minton of St. Bernard Parish, who shot and killed a friendly dog when it approached him because "it's more humane and that they might start eating us." (N.B.: Link is to a video clip that I have not attempted to view because I'm on a slow connection.)

I have yet to see this tied to the quote attributed to Gandhi: "One can measure the greatness of a nation and its moral progress by the way it treats its animals." But then, failure to measure up seems widespread, of late, at least among U.S. officialdom.

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