Oh, meat, I get to be one of the cool kids.
Four jobs you’ve had in your life: newsletter editor, web developer, waiter, marketing canvasser
Four movies you could watch over and over: Star Wars Ep. IV, Spies Like Us, Braveheart, Naked Gun
Four places you’ve lived: New York, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego
Four TV shows you love to watch: Firefly, ER, Babylon 5, DS9 [No SF bias here, no sirree!]
Four places you’ve been on vacation: Seattle, Hoh Natl. Forest, San Miguel De Allende, roadtripping-all-over
Four websites you visit daily: BBC News, Metafilter, Slashdot, Google
Four of your favorite foods: smoked king salmon, flank bacon and tomato pizza, burnt ends, pho
Four places you’d rather be: Chicago, Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Edinburgh, Australia (can't pick a city, sorry)
And an anecdote:
I moved to Kansas from Portland, where I grew up. Everybody asks me why, because in this particular burg, everone thinks of Portland as some sort of Xanadu (which, comparatively, it is - possessing most of the advantages, and lacking most of the disadvantages).
However, natives of the Great Plains get confused about West Coast weather; they figure that Oregon, being at the same latitude as Wisconsin, must have winters just as bitterly cold.
So I explain it to them. "It's not actually cold like that at all, and there's hardly any snow at all in the valleys, where most of the people live." (I usually avoid pointing out that three quarters of the state is arid; that confuses them even more.) "But," I go on, "it's like this. You know how it gets really hot and sticky here in the summers? Well, imagine the same stickiness, except when it's forty degrees out instead of ninety. That kind of cold seeps right into your bones."
I close by pointing out that I dress the same way for that weather as I do for the snow and single-digit windchill factors here, which is every inch the case (and makes me every inch the idiot, because I don't own a long coat or any trousers nade of anything besides cotton).
...And my level of comfort usually turns out to be the same, though I'll admit that it's a lot tougher to walk around when there's six inches of fresh snow on the ground.
Another anecdote:
Once I got stuck participating in a meet at a school we'd never run at before, where the grounds had no natural cover to speak of, and practically no manmade windbreaks.
In the course of the meet, the weather changed unexpectedly from mid-sxities, breezy, and sunny, to upper-forties with gusts and driving rain.
Our entire team, who'd dressed for the warmer weather, was caught unprepared, and because of the weather the race schedule had gone completely nonlinear, so no-one dared head back to the buses for shelter.
Almost twenty years later, I've yet to feel that miserable again... If I had that day to live over again, I'd've gotten myself marked down for a DNC - even if it'd resulted my being removed from the team - because the coaches were completely unresponsive to our misery.
Many things can make perfectly reasonable people into flaming idiots.
For those who may be wondering, the suicide to which Wilkerson refers is Forrestal's. The one book I've read that goes into any detail about that is McCullough's biography of Truman, in which it's strongly implied that Forrestal had a nervous breakdown that went untreated until it was too late.
Crying shame the source tape was such crap.
Charilie, the Wikipedia article devotes an entire section to your concern.
Guys, a plea for truce here -
Could we please look at the cause of the is-it-smart debate, please?
Larry Brennan put it quite well upthread:
"The direction our society is going has just about gotten me to the point that I want to go out and buy a couple of guns (one long gun of some kind and one handgun). The veneer of civilization has gotten mighty thin these days."
"(I do try to be polite. In the presence of a standup comedian, I sit down.)"
For whatever reason, those statements side-by-side made me giggle a bit.
Thank you for creating a space, however ephemeral, where it's been okay to come out and say, "people say I'm bright, and I believe them, but it doesn't matter a damn if I can't hold state, and I can't hold state unless I can get treatment for this illness I didn't bring on myself."
I've not been paying enough attention to who wrote what, so. please let the author of Chapter 7 know that his (her?) copy is deliciously bad.
I just finished dinner. That paragraph made a terrific dessert. Wow.
We-ell, I'm with Patrick on this one. I've been reading intently for almost a year and a half, and have no complaints, but as designs go, this one could certainly be better.
Getting away from the pixel-unit font-size declaration is a great start, because then IE/Windows users will be able to resize the copy. ::grin::
...And I don't know why I feel this way, but by my way of thinking average-words-per-line is more important to control than leading.
Grist for the mill?
http://www.storysouth.com/fall2004/shortshorts.html
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2005 | 7 |
| 2004 | 2 |
Total: 10 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by ben:
Show all comments by ben.