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

Lizzy, but there are some notable exceptions; like Margaret Roberts, the Grantham-born girl who became the most influential Methodist of the 20th Century. Though never in actual poverty, she seemed to be the sort of ladder-climber who preferred to knock out a few rungs and twist her fine leather soles on a few lower fingers once she'd got her feet well above any muck. (Bicycle metaphors are beyond me for some while yet.)
The scene with Francis Urquhart at her fictional future funeral is one of my exquisite televisual memories.

Or should that be the fictional Francis Urquhart at her future funeral? Barring something massive intervening, she'll definitely have a State Funeral sometime in the future, under her title & married name. Mumbling over memories is most of my pastime now, but that's a pleasure to look forward to.

A pertinent sidelight on the bigger story is the subject of this AAP Story Death prompts confusion on Wikipedia: The death of former Enron Corp chief Ken Lay on underscored the challenges facing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which offered a variety of causes for his death as the news was breaking ...

Happy be thee, O Canada!
<open thread>I haven't found any news about it on the International Astronomical Union site, but there's some news circulating (orbiting? rotating?) in other places about distant sol-orbiting bodies which may or may not be planets and moons.
With so much going wrong around me (& hearing about more elsewhere), sometimes it's nice to consider stuff like this that's quite outside those considerations. Not so sure about this kind of news.</open thread>

CHip and Poppy, thanks for that information. I did eventually turn up a recipe, after skimming over a whole lot of interesting stuff about the poet and, something new to me in relation to Tasso, badgers (a European version of wombats, dunno if they're in the US). Definitely a non-kosher dish, then.

But I doubt I'd be able to import it here without all sorts of special permits. It would probably send the sniffer-beagles into a complete frenzy, tho' it might completely overload their olfactory senses - possible a fining offence; some kind of assault.

Beefsteak, OTOH; now that I have a fully-working stove again, I'll be able to not just bake cakes & biscuits, and make roast dinners, but grill! So far, since I don't have refrigeration here yet, it's been limited to toasted cheese. Luckily for me, Sydney has had an early cold winter, meaning milk, butter(,) & cheese will keep a while even without setting up a Coolgardie safe arrangement, or the like.

I see no-one has yet seen fit to comment on "Tasso". I know of the poet, and the play by Goethe, but is it a vegetable, a spice, or some kind of prepared foodstuff? You can cut it into strips, is all I know.

Sigh. Off to research on internet. And they wonder why 'surfing' takes up so much time.

To repeat what I & others have remarked before & elsewhere, The First War Crime is starting the war, because all atrocities of war stem from the fact that a war was started. "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." (Nuremberg judgement - The Common Plan) This doesn't excuse the 'hands' that did the atrocities, but follows the causes back.

Sydney University has a carillon in the tower of the Main Quad, inserted in the existing tower as a memorial for WWI (potted uni history). They have fairly regular concerts, and a recital is often part of any special day there. Long years ago I went on a guided tour of the building, including it, and the 'keyboard' was not at all like the usual ones you see. From fairly fuzzy memory, it was widely spaced rounded wooden sort of paddle-things, which were hit down with the player's fists.
I believe there are a few others around Australia, but the only one I know of is in Canberra, in a tower on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. I've always imagined how lovely it would be at dusk or after, hearing the bells across the still lake waters.

Again, I believe there are a few chimes of bells in the English tradition, and a number of groups 'ringing the changes', scattered around the country. Every so often a special chime is attempted and gets in the news. One computer professional in Sydney I knew was a member of one group which came and rang the church bells at the wedding of a colleague, at St Phillip's near Wynyard, and we could see them from the body of the church. It was a lovely thing to have, and fascinating to see.

There's also a medieval concert held maybe annually in the Great Hall at Sydney Uni. The original buildings around the Quadrangle were built in mid-Victorian Gothic Revival style, so the Great Hall is appropriate environs. Everyone is encouraged to dress up and enter into the spirit of the old days (minus witch-burning, etc.). It used to be a Festival, with a number of events, but I'm not sure if that is still extant — there are very many things I have not been keeping abreast of over the last few years.

For those searching for Faren C Miller's Quicksilver Diaries (memoirs, &c.); the best source I've found so far is at:

launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/CIPOLLINA/messages/140

I'm back online - barely - but still v low on time & energy, so am leaving further investigation to an other.

Dave, do they ever have Burns' Nights without a good supply of Scotch?

Greg, you do not speak of the drink, then, but another Ol' Painless? ... <rummages further> ... Ah, good description in a review here.

For those with fast connexions,
video.google.com/videosearch?q=haka
brings up individual, street, student, TV commercial, & even scottish versions of the haka, including the footage of the new All Blacks' "official" version of the words, "Kapa O Pango" in action, rather than the "Ka Ma-te" one they'd been using, given in the originally particulated pictographic instructions.

NelC (& Teresa) Yep, I agree — tho you probably say it better than my attempt at it.

Well, I have for long thought that 'fanfic' is a new name for slight variant on an exceedingly ancient human variety of storytelling (storytelling probably being one of the earliest human characteristics, stemming from some of the markers of consciousness).
If you look at the raggeder quotation sites, retold anecdotes, urban legends and clarification sites where stories are listed, you can see some of the process which in olden days gave us mythology, folk tales & epics. Folksong & filking are quite similar processes too. It's only in the last few hundred years that commercial law & suchlike got involved.

they generally didn't start right off torturing accused witches; the "instruments" would be shown to the accused first, and their use explained, to give them a chance to confess first.

But 'witches' were only part of the population terrorized by the Church-State combination. Galileo & others 'vehemently suspected' of heresy were shown the instruments (probably not fully wiped clean from their last use) as one of the steps to encourage recantation.

States of course also used torture or its threat routinely to obtain confessions, say if they had an anonymous tip-off about someone (after all, it could just be a business rival, or other beneficiary of their misfortune, or someone with a grudge, and sometimes even a mistake), as well as to get evidence from possible co-conspirators (people close to the accused) as to any suspicious goings-on. Fortunately, a couple of hundred years of fought-over social advancement means civilized countries don't do this any more.

Re Stephen Fry - another admirer here. On a completely silly note, it was wonderful during the television coverage of the Terribly Civil Celebration of the Charles/Camilla hookup to see Fry and Atkinson being the two in traditional costume — see photo: www.20minutos.es/galeria/146/0/16. One hopes he can flick the fags before too much damage.

BTW, medical problems aren't as deeply serieaux as feared, but still are not negligible, and I'll probably be offline in hospital for some while, as well as skint.

Martyn, especially concerning your penultimate paragraph, can I refer you over to parts of the Jane Smiley's "Notes for Converts" thread, particularly also the link across to 'Bottomless Soup' in mid-2004 - www.gerrold.com/ soup/ 2004_05_16_archive.htm. I also feel strongly the way you feel, but how to get others to see it that way, if it's not obvious to them, is what pushes me towards despair & disconnection.

This story was reported today in a Sydney paper (extracts below). It may only apply to the United Kingdom; I'm not sure how similar Australian libel &/or defamation laws are, since we've diverged over the years. Certainly US libel laws are different. Has it had much publicity in the UK, the USA, or elsewhere? I thought since there's been some discussion of legal aspects of online/computer subjects here, and, over time a few trollings, discussion thereof, and reminiscences of flame-wars of old that verious denizens could

A political argument in cyberspace that descended into vicious name-calling could lead to a spate of libel actions by contributors to internet message boards. The case is one of the first of its kind between two private individuals to go to court, said lawyers.
The action was brought by Michael Keith-Smith, chairman of the Conservative Democratic Alliance, which bills itself as "the leading voice of the radical Tory right." He said he was moved to sue after a woman with whom he was debating the merits of military action in Iraq in 2003 on a Yahoo! message board began a campaign of name-calling that started by describing him as "lard brain" and culminated in accusing his wife of being a prostitute, and labelling him a "Nazi", a "racist bigot" and a "nonce"[*]. "She was very pro-Bush," he said.
He claimed to have settled with a second poster for a sum "in the region of £30,000". "They started saying I was on a sex offenders' list and that people shouldn't let me near their children".
Judge Alistair MacDuff in the High Court ordered Tracy Williams, a college lecturer, to pay £10,000 ($AU24,000**) in damages, plus Mr Keith-Smith's £7,200 costs, and told never to repeat the allegations.
Some legal experts said the case should be taken as a warning that the laws of libel applied on line just as they would if the comments were published in a leaflet or newsletter. Others said the case should trigger a wider debate about whether the libel law was best suited to deal with such cases, questioning whether they should ever reach court if a chatroom was self-moderating and had a limited circulation.

Interesting that a strong Bush supporter would be attacking someone of the "radical Tory right."
*I could understand objecting to ponce, but nonce isn't too bad AFAIK.
**Strewth, that's my annual pay! Better keep quiet about people in Britain.

It is sad, if not unexpected, that we keep discussing some things over & over:

"Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong." Naval commander Stephen Decatur, 1816.
In 1871 Carl Schurz put the concept in a slightly different light: "Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."
I've seen a comment by Mark Twain saying " 'Our Country, right or wrong,' ... Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?" (from notes for a book called "Glances at History" - see his further peroration here)

Indeed many congratulations and much felicity on your equinotical anniversary.
It's rather early on the 22nd here, but, like the saying (more or less) goes "somewhere in the world, the sun is over the yardarm", so I toast your semi-centenary across the hemiblogosphere.

Ooo! Has anyone here seen any more information about Gedo Senki, as noted on the Hayao Miyazaki website (via). Also there's an translated interview and other related stuff, mostly still in Japanese, at a fan site rose-rote.hp.infoseek.co.jp/miya/gedo. This version was mentioned briefly in comments here back in January as 'rumoured'. With luck it may eventually arrive in Australia.

Hmm. I'm reminded by some nearby comments there that I never got my timelines and other info sorted out into a comment to point out that Pre-Cambrian English would very much precede any dinosaurs or even crabs, and was unlikely to have included "RAAAAAAAAWWWR!!! (hiss)" due to its submarine nature and the style of organisms present.

Ah, yes. The problems of Knowledge and Certainty. A really important part of my beliefs, if I am permitted that word :) See The Danger of Knowing for Sure (www.ratbags.com/skepticism) Best read with a longer quote from the original "Knowledge or Certainty", episode in the 1973 BBC series The Ascent of Man (USA) at www.ronrecord.com/Quotes/bronowski.html (Also mentioned before here, and on my blog and its lj mirror.)

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