The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Naomi Kritzer:

I have to admit that there are times I have to suppress the urge to base my voting choices on who would be the most interesting. For example, I voted first thing in the morning on Election Day of 1998, for fear that late in the day I would cave to that sort of temptation and vote for Jesse Ventura.

And he was interesting. Not competent, mind you, but interesting. (For the record, I voted for the Democrat. Not that it helped -- he came in third.)

It's pretty easy to squelch this urge when the candidate most likely to be interesting is also morally reprehensible, but when I'm (say) weighing which Democratic Senate candidates is most likely to defeat Norm Coleman, it can be hard to determine the extent to which my urge to go for the interesting option fuels my fondness for Al Franken.

Teresa, have you ever seen this site? It's daft dresses with snarky commentary, and very, very funny.

A number of parenting books that promote attachment parenting cite a book called The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. I checked it out of the library to read it. She was, I guess, doing participant/observation of this particular group of Venezuelan Indians, but she didn't really know what she was doing and makes all sorts of sweeping statements and leaps to conclusions that are not even remotely justified by what she describes observing.

And yet this book is cited as GOSPEL by dozens of parenting books.

There's an interesting article in one of the local papers about witnesses who became rescuers. For those (like me) who like reading the EMS Geekery posts here, it's fascinating reading.

I had the same thought about the Evil Overlord List and the safe deposit box. Even though Harry figured it out and retrieved it, putting the Hufflepuff cup into Bellatrix's vault was the smartest thing Voldemort did in the entire series. The dumbest thing he did was to tell the Room of Requirement that he needed somewhere to hide something, instead of saying to himself, "I need a room that only someone with a Dark Mark can open....I need a room that only someone with a Dark Mark can open..."

A friend of mine noted in defense of the epilogue that it's basically a coded way to say, "and then they all went and had LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF SEX." Because you really can't just straight-out say that in children's lit.

Harry and his friends have been badly served by their magical education. They have learned a lot of tricks but they have no framework from which to innovate.

You know, I attended school in England for one year when I was 13, and maintained a long correspondence with my best friend from that year as we completed our educations. This rather aptly sums up the greatest weakness of the British style of education. We learned tricks, but no framework, in pretty much every class. It's possible that this was a deficiency in my particular school (which was deficient in everything from funding to supervision) but the impression I had was that this approach was largely the result of the high-stakes testing they did. (They had just moved from O-Levels to GCSEs the year I attended, and all the teachers were emphasizing that you couldn't completely fuck off in class now because your classwork counted for a whopping 25% of your grade, or something like that, instead of the big final test being 100%.) Since Harry Potter's educational system uses exactly the same high stakes testing (with OWLs instead of O-Levels and NEWTs instead of A-Levels) it's not surprising that his teachers focus on reproducible skills rather than theory. Except for Umbridge, of course...

"You don't know me."

My first aid courses were all a while ago. On the handful of occasions when I've been present for an emergency, here's what stuck with me:

1. YOU, GO CALL 911 NOW.
2. Airways are key.
3. Keep patient warm. (One incident involved an asthma attack in the woods on a January night in Minnesota.)
4. Keep patient calm.
5. Get the heck out of the way once the people who know what they're doing show up.

I think I've told this story on one of these threads, but I'll mention it again here: in 2001, my sister had a bad car crash on her way to work one morning. She lost control on the highway, probably due to a blown-out tire, and rolled her car. She broke her arm, her wrist, and two vertebrae in her neck -- but when her car came to a stop, she had no idea that she'd broken her neck. She tried to dig her cell phone out, and when she couldn't find it, she crawled across the passenger seat to try to get out of the car and flag someone down for help.

Several people had pulled over when they saw her go off the highway, and they came running down the embankment shouting that they'd called 911 and she shouldn't move. One brought blankets. That's all they did for her -- reassured her and kept her calm. But that was what mattered. And despite chipping C2 and shattering C7, she didn't injure the spinal cord, and she made a full recovery.

Congratulations to Teresa's mother / Linkmeister's uncle!

And yeah, I've had many reasons to reflect lately that the world is much smaller than it seems like it ought to be. None quite this mindboggling, though.

This is about what I'd expect from Entertainment Weekly.

I think we can all (or nearly all) agree that Babylon 5 damn well ought to be on that list somewhere and that they really didn't need to include Starship Troopers...but I'd be really interested in seeing what people here would have chosen for the #1 spot.

Chris @22, I also immediately thought of the Hong Kong public escalator. From what I read, they built it to solve the problem of everyone wanting to hop in a taxi to save themselves the walk uphill at the end of the day, and it's worked beautifully.

I've ridden on it. It's pretty nifty, and built in segments -- this facilitates hopping off to run your evening errands on your way home, and also means that if one segment breaks you just walk up the stairs for a short distance and then hop back on at the beginning of the next segment.

Nuala, regarding reasonable solutions for the carless -- if your child is big enough to ride facing forward (at least 1 year old and at least 20 pounds), you might consider buying one of these.

I wouldn't recommend one of these for someone with a car; a regular carseat will provide somewhat better protection, as you can get them in more snugly, and they have the extended padded shell. However, for someone who relies on public transportation and doesn't find it practical to lug around a convertible carseat (and they really are impractical to lug around), it's a pretty good solution.

My sister had an accident while on her way to work one morning; we think it was caused by a tire blowout. She was going at highway speeds when she lost control, skidded off the road, and rolled the car.

She was wearing her seatbelt. She suffered a badly broken upper arm, which I suspect was caused by the seatbelt coming across her arm instead of over her shoulder. She also fractured two cervical vertebrae (C2 and C7) but did not injure her spinal cord. She spent three months in a halo brace, and was really not a happy camper for a while, but she survived without permanent disability. Without a seatbelt, she'd have been killed.

I always buckle my seatbelt, but I also take a moment to settle it properly on my hips and shoulder and make sure it's snug. I got into the habit partly because of my sister's accident, and partly because I have two kids, and adjusting the straps of their carseat (or seatbelt, once they were in a belt-positioning booster) got me to think about how I could do this for myself, too, and protecting my children's mom was worth ten extra seconds when getting into the car.

I guess everyone has a childhood or high school explosives story. This was way before the internet, in the late sixties.

Yeah, I have several; I attended high school in the late 1980s. Some of us were dialing in to local BBS's but none of us had Internet access, and even if we had, the ability to Google up bomb-making instructions on the Web was a decade away. A teenager with a pyro streak and more intelligence than common sense will figure out a way to make things go boom.

They claimed to be affiliated with West? ::spits drink on keyboard::

Back when I worked at West as a technical writer, I got cold-called by someone who wanted to try to convince us to acquire their consumer-oriented magazine, or something along those lines. It was very odd. It's been years since I've worked at West, so I don't know exactly what they publish these days, but at the time, it was legal stuff plus a few textbooks.

The word that used to get me every time was "temperament." I've never heard anyone pronounce the 'a' -- it sounds like "temperment" to me, so that's how I spelled it. The problem is that there's an excellent parenting book that I sometimes recommend to friends called "Temperament Tools," and for the longest time I could not find it on Amazon, because I was spelling the title wrong.

My first thought on reading the Milosevic story was the same as #5 -- "huh, maybe that's not such a bad idea. You know. Just in case."

My second thought was, "And given that I've heard no grave-desecration stories from Romania, we can probably safely conclude that Nicolai and Elena CeauÅŸescu were staked through the heart shortly after being mown down by machine gun bullets, and before being interred. You know. Just in case."

Well, I didn't actually see them do it, but I did find the results of a couple of raccoons who opened a cooler left by my grandparents at a campsite one time. They opened the cooler latch to get inside and ripped open the bag of Oreos and ate all of them. They left the marshmallows.

I wish the media would stop using the Bush language ("surge") and call his proposed escalation an escalation. "Surge" summons up images of something like a tsunami -- the wave comes, then it goes, and it's over. Which is in the "yeah, right, suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure, and let me buy that bridge you're selling, too, it sounds like a great deal" category, to my mind.

Comment statistics for Naomi Kritzer on the Making Light blog

Total: 34 comments. View all these comments on a single page.