Apropo of Rob Cockerham, famous for "How Much is Inside":
166,500 = number of flooded buildings in New Orleans, given:
If this distribution of 111 buildings per twenty-fifth square mile is a good sample, 60 square miles will contain approximately 166,500 flooded buildings.
that is all
-r.
Apropo of nothing, I spotted this:DVDs are selling like hotcakes…and everyone’s buying (begging the question…have you ever seen a run on pancakes? Was there some Depression era shortage on pancakes of which I am not aware?).
from http://lnnline.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-movie-theater-prices-are-so-high.html
that is all
-r.
Keith Kisser,
Now that you've pointed out Keeler's writing, all I have to say is
"..."
-r.
p.s. Here's a pair of extracts for those who didn't follow the links:For he was to become now, as I was shortly to find, as coldly calculating as an adding machine sitting on the North Pole!Elsa, this day, had just completed a single leaf of those several million green leaves yet to be done, and had climbed off her stool to survey it from a distance--when her phone rang.Most alarming!
One of the things that's really nifty about this place is that people intelligent references to the ads displayed on it. It's one of the reasons why I don't adblock things on this site. I don't suppose we could have fake ads here someday, for things like the "patented velcro-waistbanded cruel-squire jacket and matching waistcoat"?
-R.
Will Entrekin,
You suggested
...a new "Macbeth"... the swordfights between Macbeth (Bale) and Macduff (Ewan) would be *awesome*. Yuen Wo Ping could choreograph them.
Has anyone done Shakespeare with Hong-Kong wire-fu?
I must know!*
-R.
_____
*Romeo Must Die doesn't count. It was aweful beyond all possible definitions of awefulness, Jet Li notwithstanding.
Also, you mentioned that:
Angelina Jolie, Monica Belluci, and Asia Argento could be the witches.
As I skimmed that, an alternative casting of Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, and Rose McGowan occured to me. But that would be a different movie. (Still better than Romeo Must Die, though.)
Bryan,
In my dream I learned that:
"he's basically a middling-level college student who didn't pick up that much in his classes, who's still trying to muddle through"
to which you replied:
...the goals that he is trying to muddle through towards are goals that most of us would define as being morally reprehensible.
How is this different from the behavior of a middling-level college student who's just trying to muddle through? [scratches head]
I'm actually serious. I was one of those*, and many of my peers were too. Isn't it the purview of college students to have bad ideas about how the world should be run, and then pursue those ideas in clumsy, hamfisted ways? Do you think it was accidental that I listened to Rush then, and thought him plausible?
-r.
*okay, I thought I was above average. Lake Woebegone effect and all.
offtopic.
I had a nightmare last night; I was having lunch with the Prez in the basement donut shop of some nameless government office building. I asked him what on earth he thought he was doing.
He explained. It turns out that he's basically a middling-level college student who didn't pick up that much in his classes, who's still trying to muddle through. "I want to talk about that Iraq thing," he said, "but we gotta get to somplace more private than this cafeteria," nodding in the direction of the men in sunglasses and black suits who were ostentatiously not watching.
I woke up knowing that this was somehow true.
-r.
Oh dear, I have goofed.
Kate, you are right both on the wedding and the bit about Galadriel. (I'd clean forgot that I was supposed to talk about her too, in my excitement to blather about Gandalf.)
-R.
Karl,
You'd asked:Weren't Gandolf and Galadriel exposed as Vanir (not sure that's right) in one of the commentaries? I have been under the impression that Gandolf was character in the Silmarillion under a different name. Basically I was under the impression that Gandolf was essentially an immortal demi-god masquerading as an old wizard.As near as I can remember, you are exactly right. Tolkein buries Galdalf's other names in a parenthetical explanation (in TT?), that he was "Olorin, in the West that was forgot". Then in the Silmarillion, there's a brief mention of an Olorin. Took me years to make the connection.
Its one of those things that really makes Sauruman's fall more sad; due to an administrative blunder*, essentially, Saurman got the leadership job, which led him into the temptation of trying to control things, and later to control people as things. But essentially those istari were sent on to do the impossible, with virtually nothing to work with, and little hope of succeeding.
That, of course, puts Gandalf's lecturing of Frodo (and the Council) in a different light: he'd had thousands of years of having to go on faith instead of works.
-R.
*there may be an object lesson here in the value of ducking leadership jobs as a way of not getting yourself led into temptation. Note it is an object lesson, not an allegory, which is what Tolkein was trying to get at by writing a history instead of an allegory.
Karl,
Eowyn did indeed end up with Faramir. Tolkien tied up a number of loose ends with that one.
-R
Xopher quoted Serge:
Did many people object to Peter Jackson bringing Aragorn and Arwen back together instead of having him marry Eowyn? It felt right to me.
You're kidding right? Somebody please tell me he's kidding!
I can neither confirm nor deny the level of kiddingness, but it is a matter of record, that in the appendices, Tolkein marries off Arwen and Aragorn.
Kind of a nice bonus, that. Jackson really didn't have to include it.*
-R
*Though the multiple endings of the third movie are a bit disconcerting, piled next to each other.
On the topic of strage, republican coincidences:
I was reading an entry over on professorbainbridge.com on the Harriet Miers thing, and I came across the most extra-ordinary postscript by a self described repulbican...p.s. who knew that bush bashing could be so cathartic?
Oh, Neil sounding like Alan Rickman, that's facinating.
I actually have envisoned him sounding that way for more than ten years.
However, I was most struck by the uncanny resemblance of this fellow to Neil in a recent, popular movie.
That's intentional, yes?
-R
Graydon, you'd said:
eating rice and beans every meal for two weeks isn't the best way to maintain psychological balance, either
I must confess, I did laugh out loud at that one. Truly, you all, are enLightened ones.
Larry, PJ, Graydon, thank you!
-R
You know, thanks to an odd confluence of fantasy lit and NPR, I'd been interested in following the avian flu story for a long time now (perhaps since 1999). Needless to say, Katrina recalibrated my sense of the likelihood of disaster.
But the fantasy part, well, thanks to an account told from the point of view of one of Barbara Hambly's heroines...
...She remembered the smell from her days with the VAD, and later, during the influenza, from the endless day of drifting in and out of delirium alone, smelling death in her parent's room next door and wondering with what strength was left to her if she, too, would die before anyone came to see how they were doing.
From Bride of the Rat God, 1994.
Larry: Tasty Bite Indian food? That sounds marvelous! I will definitely look that up. Thank you! Anyone else know of such shelf-stable food?
Point well taken. Power and water probably isn't a good assumption. (It was only a few summers ago that my part of the midwest sat in the dark for a few days. I can clearly remember the stench of every one of our neighbor's gas generators drifting over our subdivision the next morning.*)
-R
*that is to say, (almost) every one of them had a generator, and ran it, loudly, all night. There was no breeze that night.
Ah, thanks Michelle!
Yes, it seems to be a primary function of government to ignore these things.
In my groggy afternoon-nappy state, I am attempting back of the envelope calculations for the amount of dried black beans and rice* necessary for living in isolation for two weeks. any takers on that one?
-R
*you know, combined for your amino-acid needs, and whatnot. Hmm. Should I assume the presence of clean water and power...?
Michelle K,
according to what I have read and heard, the significance of the re-creation of bits of the 1918 flu virus and of genetically sequencing more bits of it*, is that they established that the most recently decoded bit of it is avian in origin. In other words, it was not a conventional (swine/human) flu virus that mutated out of hand, it was one adapted to avian immune systems that abruptly mutated in a few, key, small ways that made it deadly to humans.
You had written:
And we already know a good deal about the 1918 flu. We've had samples of it for awhile. Some from lung samples kept in parafin, others from bodies buried in the permafrost.
You are absolutely right. People have been working on this for a long time now. My limited understanding of the research is that the "new thing" is that they decoded the part of the virus that makes it "more deadly", and the hope is that with a detailed understanding of that, it may one day be possible to design a dead-virus vaccine that would be proof vs. that one charcteristic.
*yeah, technically they don't have a genome. But you know what I mean.
-R
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| 2005 | 48 |
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