The forest echoes when the mahoe falls
tall is the tree and strong, deep is its root,
at end of day even the staunchest bawls.

Honest men speak against all that appalls,
their work is constant though most rare its fruit;
the forest echoes when the mahoe falls,

for just one instant fools delay their brawls
and bow their heads; honour may touch the brute.
At end of day even the staunchest bawls

at loss of friend. We make our little calls,
shed our few tears and learn it's absolute;
the forest echoes when the mahoe falls.

Whether in calmness of the lecture-halls
or broadcasting to folk on their commute
at end of day even the staunchest bawls

knowing the silence that finally hauls
his voice away, we cannot refute
the forest echoes when the mahoe falls
at end of day; even the staunchest bawls.

"Your colors are Pink and Pink."

Does it involve camels?

Cammie doesn't bring much urgency to the tale of color matching: losing a tail isn't such a terrible thing when you can grow it back, so the motivation to save it isn't strong.

The WikiLeaks cables rope in the Pope.

And for a unicorn chaser, just look at this picture.

(Fuller, but still-sweet explanations from Neil and Amanda.)

Some have Christmas cloaked in festive white.
Some also have weather. We, instead,
have seasons-- "If you don't like it,
wait five weeks."

If we are lucky, trees have dropped their leaves
to cloak the ground, bare branches set
in lines against the gray
(that perpetual gray!) That's luck
for then you might not mistake the season
and have Christmas come upon you unawares.

Dry grass, wet ground, and tule fog
to cloak the creek, the vapors rising gray;
one does not walk in weather such as this
for there is nothing to see. The birds
are huddled away, the mud clings,
the fog chills.

And driving off to work, one stops to wonder
at the miles of starlings,
Swarms of thousands strong (invaders to our shores)
shimmering black against the gray,
appearing to end but continuing on,
migrating. No cardinals, no orioles,
not even vivid jays.
The birds have put on drab.

And I look through my photos once again,
searching for something that sings of Christmas,
but all is gray.

It is the season.

Subject: Fw: Amazon Banning Books - Please Help!

From Author Selena Kitt.........

Amazon has begun banning erotica books.

The first line of fire seems to be incest titles. My books, Back to the Garden, Naughty Bits and Under Mr. Nolan's Bed have been removed from the Kindle store. (The print version of Back to the Garden, published through CreateSpace, an Amazon company, has also been removed).

Jess Scott and Esmerelda Green have also had books with an incest theme recently banned from the site. All of them, incidentally, high in the
rankings and in visibility.

Amazon has also removed these books from people's Kindle archives, without warning or explanation. If you have purchased any of these
titles through Amazon Kindle, please go demand a refund. You are entitled to one.

Also, if you can spread the word, that would be helpful. I am obviously fighting this, but the more public outcry the better.

You can post on Amazon's board about it here (as long as they don't delete the thread):

http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ttp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding\
=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx2QG9BWA19KO4O&displayType=tagsDe\
tail

You can also tweet it here: #amazoncensors

Utilize whatever you can - Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Your help is much appreciated!

Jeff's Bezos direct address (head of Amazon)

Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com, Inc.
1200 12th Ave, Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98122

Executive Customer Relations:
ecr@amazon.com

and all the members on the board of directors:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govmanage

-Selena Kitt

Make that "one of my four favorite plaindromes." And don't capitalize the P. There you go.

Νιψον ανομηματα μη μοναν οψιν.

In other news, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is finally done on LibriVox! Download its chapters here: Dorian Gray.

Not a thing. There isn't, always; sometimes it's just a token to start things going.

He wears his destiny, a belt of stars;
Borgil, his cloak-clasp; Gurthang in his hand.
"The time has come for final, brutal wars,
The Enemy's defeat shall cleanse the land."

The time of Iarwain, of Ben-adar
Has passed in Arda, sadness in its wake.
The world has lost a song but gained a star;
His crown of autumn leaves no one shall take.

The Day of Doom is over now at last;
The Second Music echoes from the past.

A man a plan a canoe pasta heros rajahs a coloratura maps snipe percale
macaroni a gag a banana bag a tan a tag a banana bag again or a camel a
crepe pins Spam a rut a Rolo cash a jar sore hats a peon a canal Panama!

You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg

*However, I don't think (Harmonica solo) is actually a palindrome.

Son robos?
No. Solo son sobornos.

She really is Han's kid sister?

"A man, a plan, a casa, a bait, a lag, a malt, ... "

Your comment went into moderation because your URL was irretrievably malformed. I've released it, but I have no idea what you were linking to.

Please check links at preview.

(Note that the one you posted on the wrong thread also went into moderation, whence it will be sent to Comment Heaven to sup with the saints and sing with the angels.)

Sup with the saints and sing with the angels
I Sing the Spam Ecletic!
Bring out the paints and ring now the sleighbells
On hold is the spam kinetic!
In darkness the taints spread their poison in wells,
The results of such spam are emetic,
Distorted in faints by the myriad cells,
I Sing the Spam Eclectic!

frenetic.

Junk mailing, across the internet,
You might think it's dreadful but you ain't seen nothing yet.

...

It's spam, but not as we know it
It's spam, but not as we know it
It's spam, spam spam spam spam...
(insert chorus of Vikings from passing Monty Python skit here)

etc.

Sometimes it seems easier to write
Angry rants about lies and the folks
Who live them, rather than the sight
Of a beautiful woman, who provokes
Desire in the hardened heart, once lost
To anger and despair. Her presence evokes
New feelings of hope and renewal, crossed
With love, tempered with caution that stokes
The fire, the urgency, the rush to completion.
Our lives, in separate so long, brought together
In bright harmony, building on long abstention
Are re-aligning, through dance - and whether
This will remain true for years to come
I hold back nothing, to welcome her home.

EasyDNS gets Twitterbombed (wrongly) for doing DNS for WikiLeaks, retaliates by taking over DNS support for WikiLeaks

One thing that highlights is how nice it is to have news reports link to their source documents. When the news article I read links to the underlying polling data or interview on Youtube or scientific paper, it's stunning to me how often there are huge and important things wrong with the article. (And I assume reporters who link to the source material are more careful than those who know nobody can check up on them.) I really hope linking to the source material, as well as linking to background information and related information becomes standard practice in journalism over the next few years.

Brightness falls from the air

Would that be nomenclature used for mice or by mice?

Baltimore is a very very very cool city. And a beautiful one.

Our little trips there have been very short, but intense, and packed with experience and information gathering of all kinds, not just the sort that we get from the MD Historical Society (which museum is very worth visiting -- and the place itself, which is beautiful) and those ilks which we tend to haunt.

If I were 25 I think I'd head to Baltimore, no doubt.

Even at my age I'm real sure I could live there far more happily than most places, now that hispanic culture(s) entered the mix. The hispanics themselves who are responsible for this don't seem as happy about it as I am -- authentic old school Mexican food in restaurants owned by barely thirty year olds -- because, well, I asked. Speaking Spanish allows an older woman to ask what this woman considers very personal questions and thus hardly ever asks anyone (thus she has received a rep for being stand-offish).

They don't like it in Baltimore so much. Well, it's Baltimore. It's not home. But for their children Baltimore will be home.

And they were playing Puerto Rican Christmas music, which I know so well and love.

Yup. Baltimore and New Orleans are the places to be if you're young. (Except -- the 'white' music in B'more really really really sux.)

Love, C.

After 25 years of matrimony, man's Significant Other finally notices that he has big feet.

Heresy!

I see you've found your muse. Hang on to her; the rest of us really like getting regular poetry.

It hurts, Mommy. Please make the hurt go away.

The Poet Upbraids his Froward Villanelle

“Is it a virtue to be so composed
that order makes no difference to sense?”
The villanelle’s reply is not disclosed.

“Though fear or heartbreak be the theme proposed,
your form’s composure never once relents.
Is it a virtue to be so composed?”

“Why dwell in formal exile self-imposed?
Only connect! It makes a difference!”
The villanelle’s reply is not disclosed.

“Close-reading hounds, confounded, pensive, nosed
in vain among your lines’ composite scents:
is it a virtue to be so composed?”

“Come, erstwhile verse, chaotically transposed:
resume that order that you had: go hence!”
The villanelle’s reply is not disclosed.

“Unbraid these tresses: is there sense enclosed
within your metrical experiments?”
Is it a virtue to be so composed
the villanelle’s reply is not disclosed?

Got to be better than Taco Bell's old "Run for the Border" ads. They pulled them when it was pointed out that the mental images those surveyed came up with was getting the runs from bad Mexican food...

Nomenclature used by mice is properly termed "Micenian."

Me #13:

Maybe it was camels whose names read the same way forwards & backwards. No, that would be palindromedary. No, wait...

Never mind.

The waning of the old year,
Awaiting for the new.
Triumphs and tribulations
Of this year almost through.
My hopes for you are of the best
Your new love to endure
For next and all the coming years
Much happiness in store!

I might make cookies next weekend as a way of coming down off the high that comes from breathing chocolate chip vapors.

Jacque @ 54/56: It's how to name a mouse strain, which is of particular importance when dealing with strains that are very closely related, differing by only a gene or a single mutation in a gene. It's excrutiatingly boring minutiae and rules for applying them. How anyone could stay awake for two hours is beyond me..and my pancreas is fine, so far. It's the pancreases around us that I worry about. If there was some way to spread this affliction to you, I'd do it in a heartbeat -- this has been an incredible joy at the end of a year that started off with a devastating loss.

Constance @55: Bawlmer is a neat little city, and I appreciate it more as an adult than I ever did as a college student (Goucher). If you're interested in generating Light in Bawlmer, let me know and I'd be happy to join you, with or without my girlfriend.

Serge @ 59: Yes, and after we get through this phase, I plan to watch "Hellboy" with her -- as well as "Galaxy Quest" and many other fine movies. Right now, we keep running into technical problems that prevent us from successfully watching anything.

Bruce Cohen @ 61: I suspect my muse would like additional offerings as well. She told me to never again say that my old poetry was crap, although she still hasn't read my old stuff. I was never very good at writing sonnets, but I didn't have the right source of inspiration then.

Marilee @ 68: Thanks!

Paula Lieberman @ 74: That's lovely -- thank you!

Are those the same 'technical' problems that'd harm our pancreases?

"Wait a minute... This is supposed to contain The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm not sure I really want to watch Hawk the Slayer again."

By the way, does she know that HellBoy showed up in one of last week's experiments by the MythBusters?

Man finds that non-human gophers are quite combative.

The Governor of Florida's rejected fund for rail service? Given than unless there's a drop in the C02 and other greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere back down to at or below what it was Dec 31 1899, most of Florida appears likely to be underwater by around 2040 at high tide unless dramatic measures get taken....

(I'm trying to find the lecture given at Wood's Hole and the animations of rising sealevel that I was viewing a few days ago. The studies being reported out with result the second half of this year, are grimmer than the 2007 predictions, and grimmer than the first half of 2010 predictions, which the Congressional Reapers and other pernicious climate change deniers detracted as alarmist and abusive etc.

My recommendation--don't invest in land in Florida, don't move to the Gulf Coast, and stay the hell away from coastal Texas.... Galveston should have negative taxpayer investment. Insurance companies, given a choice, don't provide coverage in most beachfront coastal areas anymore in the USA....

I'd love to! We're thinking of spending Christmas there, as friends with house in B'more are going to be in Africa, and they offered. But things are kind of in flux at the moment due to having no car again. sigh.

However, if we can pull this off, could I meet the hands covered with kittens, please? :)

Love, C.

Ah, typing while inundated with kittens was fun. Easier when they were asleep, but alas, they woke as I typed.

Adventurous Chihuahua bolts away from my Mom while she was filling the bird feeder and goes straight into the goldfish pond.

Honey was wearing a sweater, harness and leash, so Mom was able to pull her out of the water very quickly, and said "it felt like it took forever to get her back into the house."

I took Honey into the bathroom, pulled the harness and sweater off, wrapped her in a towel, cranked up the space heater, and got her warmed up. When she stopped shivering we used warm water to get the pond scum off of her.

Outdoor temperatures were in the 2Os, with snow falling -- the pond wasn't frozen as we'd had a balmy 45F high on Saturday.

Honey seems none the worse for the experience, but Mom says she's not going to take her eyes off the little dog when she takes her into the back yard!

Another non-palindrome:

I hold back nothing, open my heart
To a renewed life, rising to the height
Of passion. Though we spend hours apart,
They pass swiftly, bringing us again alight
As we embrace. What was once filled
With pain is now transformed to joy and
Redoubled. What was unfinished is now fulfilled
As she reaches, so we walk hand-in-hand
Along the street, mindful only of each other.
So engrossed, so focused, we forget above
All the diminishments from those who would rather
We hide, and fear, and dare not show our love.
Those days are passing, like grains of sand, we know,
So we walk, arm-in-arm, still aglow.

There is a new television advertisement I really like. It's about prepared dough for potato dumplings and features a modern woman eyeing the stuff with disgust, proclaiming that her granny would have taken fresh potatoes, peeled them, grated them etc. All the time you see the old-fashioned granny while nostalgic music plays - only the come to a screeching stop when the granny asks her granddaughter if she was out of her mind. If the ready-made dough had existed in her time, she would not have had to do all that hard work. So the modern woman puts it in her shopping cart.

No, I have never tasted the stuff myself, and it might by actually vile. But just to see an advertisment that mentions the "good old times" and does not ooze fake sweetish nostalgia is really refreshing.

Cool simply as a data visualization, it's shocking when you look at it. This kid accidentally created a perfect map of the digital divide. The difference between living in the "white" areas verses the "blank" areas is stunning. The U.S. Census Bureau would KILL to create data this meaningful.

Link to note and images, I'm not sure if a Facebook account is required

Cut to his mama smiling indulgently in the kitchen as she reaches into a cabinet and pulls out a can of Blue Runner brand red beans, pre-cooked, pre-seasoned, heat and serve.

(Lacking Blue Runner at my current location and not really preferring the locally available brands, I split the kitchen-hassle difference and throw beans, ham hock, seasonings, and veggies into a crock-pot. After 6 hours of forgetting about it, dinner is served.)

dcb @ 94: Thanks! It's a lot of fun, all of a sudden.

V nz fvpx gb qrngu bs gur tbqfqnzaarq "avar-ryrira snzvyvrf."*

V flzcnguvmr jvgu gurz va gurve tevrs, V ernyyl qb. V ybfg fbzr (eryngviryl arj) sevraqf ba gung qnl zlfrys, naq zvtug unir orra gurer crefbanyyl unq pvephzfgnaprf orra irel fyvtugyl qvssrerag, nf lbh xabj Obo.

Ohg gurve tevrs qbrf abg ragvgyr gurz gb pbageby gur qrirybczrag bs ybjre Znaunggna, abj be rire, naq vg qbrf abg rkphfr gurz npgvat yvxr vqvbg ovtbgf. Fb jura V urne "avar-ryrira snzvyl zrzoref" fgvyy bowrpgvat gb gur "Tebhaq Mreb Zbfdhr," naq npgvat yvxr gurl unir fbzr xvaq bs evtug gb bowrpg&qnttre; gb vg (nf gurl qb urer), V trg znq. Yvxr guvf:

Nygubhtu gurl unira'g orra bhg qrzbafgengvat, bccbaragf bs gur cebwrpg unir orra frrguvat bire arjf gung Cnex51 unf nccyvrq sbe shaqvat sebz gur Ybjre Znaunggna Qrirybczrag Pbecbengvba, juvpu vf gnkcnlre fhccbegrq.

"Fb jr ner fhccbfrq gb fhccyl gur frrq zbarl sbe n Tebhaq Mreb zbfdhr?" fnvq Cnzryn Tryyre, n yrnqvat bccbarag bs gur zbfdhr. "Lbh pna'g znxr guvf fghss hc."

Lbhe tevrs qbrfa'g fhcrefrqr gur pbafgvghgvbany evtugf bs gur crbcyr jub jnag gb ohvyq gur Pbeqbon Pragre. Gurer'f ab ernfba vg fubhyqa'g nccyl sbe choyvp shaqvat whfg yvxr nalguvat ryfr. (Nyfb, vg'f abg ng Tebhaq Mreb naq bayl cneg bs vg vf n zbfdhr, ohg V qba'g rira pner nobhg gung nal zber. OHVYQ VG BA GUR SBBGCEVAG! Shpx gubfr fghcvq ovtbgf naljnl.)

Tryyre nyfb fnvq guvf:

"Gung lbh jbhyq xrrc [Jny-Zneg] bhg, ona gurz, naq lrg, gur irel vqrn bs n Tebhaq Mreb Zrtn Zbfdhr vf rkgbyyrq, naq gubfr jub fhssre -- abg bayl gur 9/11 snzvyvrf, ohg nyy Nzrevpnaf jub jrer nggnpxrq gung qnl, naq nyy bs Nzrevpn jnf nggnpxrq gung qnl -- ner qrevqrq, naq pnyyrq enpvfg, Vfynzbcubovp, nagv-Zhfyvz ovtbgf, orpnhfr bs gur cnva gung gurl'er fhssrevat, vg'f bhgentrbhf."

Vfynz qvq abg nggnpx hf ba 9/11. Fbzr nffubyr greebevfgf cernpuvat n qvfgbegrq irefvba bs Vfynz nggnpxrq hf ba 9/11. Naq vs lbh pna'g be jba'g qvfgvathvfu gubfr pngrtbevrf ol abj, n ovtbg lbh ner naq n ovtbg V jvyy pnyy lbh, lbhe "snzvyl zrzore" juvavat abgjvgufgnaqvat.

</rant>
___
*Abg nyy bs gurz ner npgvat yvxr guvf, bs pbhefr. Gur barf V urne nobhg ba gur arjf ner, naq gurl qba'g frrz gb zragvba gur barf yvxr guvf ynql be yvxr gurfr sbyxf. Yrg hf abg sbetrg gurz.
&qnttre;V zrna n sbezny evtug gb cerirag vg, abg n serr-fcrrpu evtug gb juvar naq faviry, juvpu bs pbhefr gurl qb unir.

Here's how I fared:

Steve is a left moderate social libertarian. Steve is also a slight non-interventionist and culturally liberal. Steve's scores (from 0 to 10):
Economic issues: +3.19 left
Social issues: +3.35 libertarian
Foreign policy: +1.29 non-interventionist
Cultural identification: +4.53 liberal

*People aren't still offended at Taft. Or Millard Fillmore. Or Taylor, for that matter.

Hell, there are still an awful lot of people who are offended by Abraham Lincoln's freeing the slaves, and no sign they'll ever get over it.

The Prince of Poesy.
The Emperor of Euphony.

Those who would like to play along at home, look at the image Nicholas linked to and try to identify by name either the community or the landmass marked by these bright globs of connectedness:

-- The one straight up from Scandinavia (note: playing around with Google Earth suggests it's not straight NORTH, due to the projection used)
-- The one just off South America's northerly western coast
-- The one south and a tiny bit east of Hawaii

Going the other way, can you find Easter Island? Suggest your own geo-puzzlers in reply comments!

I also found interesting the way the connectedness works in places like the Carribean.

The President of Prosody.

And the cast was interesting: the movie is set in Hong Kong, and most of it was Asian, including Ming Na as a "sniffer"(sort of an clairvoyant who tracks objects), whom I have had a crush on for years. But the two leading actors were Caucasian, and one of them was Dakota Fanning, playing a 12-year-old "watcher" (precognitive). And the villain was played by Djimon Hounsou who is a fabulous actor, and seemed to be having fun with the part (but what is this thing Hollywood has lately for evil black men?).

Recommended. Make lots of popcorn, it's fun, especially the final battle scene.

Let's try going the other way:

The Third Assistant Undersecretary of Triteness.

That reminds me of an interview I read with someone in the SCA who said that she was fine using a sewing machine to make her garb, because she knew that medieval women would certainly have done so had they had the chance.

(The comments to the interview were...heated. You could have cooked a potato dumpling on them. Or forged steel.)

V'z ernfbanoyl fher fur'f abg bar bs gur 9/11 snzvyl zrzoref, whfg n jneoybttre jub'f sbhaq n avpur.

Fur'f hayvxryl gb or eryngrq gb nal bs gur 9/11 ivpgvzf be fur'q unir zragvbarq vg rneyl ba.

In other news, the Humble Indie Bundle #2 charity game release is out now. In support of the EFF and Child's Play, you pay what you want, and distribute the contribution how you want.

You are most welcome.

Ooh yeah, I see that! Is that that little island where the Panzerbjørne live in the Golden Compass books?

I have no idea where she came up with that; I don't think there's ever been anything by Bester in the house.

My vote would be for Tigger, Tigger.

What strikes me about the Facebook map is how well it corresponds to the Earth at Night image. Without the lines connecting the points on the Facebook map you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference, which suggests that Facebook's reach really is staggering -- everywhere that has lights has the internet, more or less.

So which divide is bigger: the lights-and-internet vs. no-lights-or-internet divide, or the laws-don't-apply-to-me-and-I-never-have-to-deal-with-the-consequences-of-my-actions vs. everyone else?

The sun's journey away from moon's loving gaze
Leaves moon bereft, weeping, about to wither
Like the fields left unwatered, or a child without praise,
Left longing, looking for her sun aloft in the aether,
Loving and waiting for the passage of time
As it brings the sun in her slow return
Along with the fiery tendrils which climb
To embrace the moon with filaments that burn
And shine a great light upon her heart.
The hope of loving, of being loved, allows us
To endure such separations, or create art
Like poems, dances, fables --all which address
The need to embrace, to rain kindness upon
Each other -- this, for lovers, a sine qua non.

130812782.6503
523251130.6012

The results could be referring to people, or particular chess openings, or to a database reference...can anyone think of a way of extracting a 7-digit number starting with 1 from that?

Don't know about Russia, but I believe Facebook is banned in China.

At a glance, that map seems to correlate reasonably closely with population density.

Each one — I know this — is a radio station
Sending signals out through chilly air.
Every one a voice that asks "Who's there?"
Words pierce the dark in every nation.

My signal, too, flies on its way
I won't know where or if its journey ends
But hopefully its words will reach my friends
And if I'm lucky bring, to night, some day.

Signals wax and wane through winter night.
I can't see you, but I'm warmed by your light.

Here is a map showing 5000 random votes from the 2004 US elections as overlapping transparent circles. You can see the same apparent cutoff with population density.

abi: re: linkmeister's comments: it might be best for anti-search if the posts were de-digitified, as Xopher did, as well?

Xopher: Thank you. *I*, as a Canadian Westerner, can't say that - but I've been wondering the same question for a couple of years. As an equivalence, think of the way we were treating West Germans (or even the Japanese, but that was more occupier than full-on economic and political ally) in 1954. And those were the Nazis!

There's a pattern of x/(x+2) that's easily searchable, that is the common name for the original event. Because it's digits, it doesn't go away in rot-13.

Unfortunately, the results are heavily dominated by the shopping mall over the hill -- it counted "Christian Family Book Store" as my local bookstore, Chili's as a bar, the nearest shopping-mall ATM as my bank, and a park that's half a mile down a major highway. In practice, I need to go to the next shopping mall, or hop a bus to Downtown, for most of those goals.

Ooh yeah, I see that! Is that that little island where the Panzerbjørne live in the Golden Compass books?

Yeah, that's Svalbard. Norwegian territory, with a couple of Russian settlements as well.

b) There are lots of people who are continuing to do handcrafting today even though there are mass production machines. For that matter, a lot of mixes and such do not actually save that much effort.... Some things are actually faster to do manually, given the time and effort and expense of getting and setting up machines. High volume mass production, yes, machine is more economical. For one-offs, most machines aren't designed or built for "flexible manufacturing" to make each item unique in some way or other.

In the process, I found another palindromic poem of his, including the title:

Amor azul

Ramera de todo te di.
Mariposa colosal, sí,
yo de todo te di.
Poda la rosa, Venus.
El átomo, como tal
es un evasor alado.
Pide, todo te doy: isla,
sol, ocaso, pirámide.
Todo te daré: mar, luz,
aroma.

Child reports that wearing the aforesaid item to Panera Bread also works.

I guess this makes me a bomb-throwing radical leftist.

And in other news, the House appears to have passed a bill ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell; and now we get to wait for the Senate. Will the repeal get through in the lame duck session?

4 batches rocky road
3 batches mint
3 batches mocha hazelnut

In:

27 bags of semisweet chocolate chips
9 bags of milk chocolate chips
6 bags of mint chips
20 cans condensed milk
6 cans evaporated milk
5 lbs. hazelnuts
3 lbs. walnuts
1 lbs. butter
24 cups sugar
30 cups marshmallows
half a jar instant coffee
3 glugs crème de menth liquor
3 glugs coffee liquor
A half cup or so of salt.
A couple tablespoons of ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

4 yards aluminum foil
6 yards waxed paper

I took pictures of the last batch in process. I'm going to write up a Make Project with them.

A closer reading of Xopher's comment would have revealed that he does, in fact, use the number in his last paragraph. I was actually following his practice.

I deduce that he used an automatic encoder such as LeetKey. I expect most of the people reading it do so too. It's trivially easy to encode a numeric term in LeetKey in such a way that one doesn't need to decode it manually: spell the words out.

And since Frcgrzore ryrira is indeed all over the internet, I don't think that there is any need to obfuscate it.

I am being a little crisp here, which is probably unfair. It just felt like Linkmeister asked for a horse, which I gave him, and now everyone wants to know why it doesn't have wings, a horn, and fart rainbows, when all he wanted was a horse.

Well, it beats pulling the fire alarms.

Earl, #160: I'm 100% with you on that. There must be a better term for the opposite of "authoritarian".

Pluralistic? Inclusive? Cooperative? Co-prosperity? Receptive? Inclusionary

Throwaway disposable etc. consumer goods....

Given that it's Making Light, that surprises me not at all. Anyone who likes to hang out here is going to be, at minimum, aware that people are all people--and these days, that's all you need to make you a liberal.

A silver basketball? Flowerpots? Will he ever stop spray painting random items??!!?

The weather is also joining in: we have a winter weather advisory until 9 pm tonight, with up to 3" possible. Yes, my windows are coming out as fast as they can work. If you don't hear from me tonight, send the ski patrol to our last known location, please?

I'll just sit here in the dark..

I am shocked, shocked!!!

Estimates range from 2000 to 3000 people, but I'm going to sit down with a floor plan today and try to do an estimate of my own. No audible music, but lots of dancing and yelling and droning along and crowd surfing, so it sure wasn't silent. You can't get OU students together without multiple "Boomer Sooner, Texas Sucks" chants anyway. No one got hurt or broke anything. There are a couple of raw videos on YouTube, but there's supposed to be a more polished one later today. And the kid who organized it did check in with me beforehand for any last minute safety announcements and asked for a broom and a trash bag as soon as it was over, so he could sweep up all the busted balloons and Mardi Gras beads and light sticks.

Still, I hope they do it elsewhere next year. Just too crowded and not enough exits in the library. And I was worried one of the crowd surfers was going to wind up tossed behind the desk...

ISTM that a big distinguisher between political movements in the US is not authoritarianism (90%+ of the high-profile pundits are authoritarians of one stripe or another, and nearly all the powerful people are authoritarian leaders of one stripe or another[1]), but the selection of *which* authority figures are to be followed, and how strongly to follow them. Which religious leaders are to be followed, and which reviled? Which political leaders? Do we gush about what a moral, good, Christian leader Bush is? Or what a smart, 11-dimensional-chess-playing far-sighted scholar Obama is?

[1] Isn't this the defining feature of the difference between absolutely refusing to allow any consequences to befall anyone for following orders, even obviously illegal ones, and coming down like a ton of bricks on whistleblowers and unauthorized leakers, even ones whose whistleblowing did no harm and exposed fraud or criminal behavior? The consensus of the powerful and the MSM is overwhelmingly in agreement with that.

I take it you're on the west side of the region?

We're on the eastern shore, where we're not expected to get a lot of snow, but due to it being so cold for so long, the snow is expected to accumulate and thus will make roads slippery and further thus, motorists will have many accidents. At least that's what the local radio is saying.

At least the wind finally has died down.

Love, C.

The weather report says it'll be 3-6 inches through tonight.

Perhaps posted too soon. Moved out of the office to put on coat and see the streets are covered in white, with much more white pouring out of the equally white sky.

Just went to pick up the Kent County News, which publishes on Thursday. Soaked upon return. This is wet snow.

Love, c.

When last seen in June 2010, our intrepid reporter had been told by her cardiologist that her LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol, for those of you not intimately and obsessively interested in lipid panels and other fun medical stuff) needed to drop below 70. It was 78. Could be done by increasing dose of statin.

Intrepid reporter said, Give me six months to do it with diet.

Blood tests Tuesday, results Tuesday night: LDL 66. Total cholesterol 159. Not as good as it could be, but not bad. All other numbers fine. Happy Lizzy is happy.

Give me six months to do it with diet.

Whatja do? Huh? Huh? Wanna know.

Also, I'm reasonably physically active. I teach martial arts about 9 hours a week, I do yoga 3-5 hours a week, and I walk every day. The physical activity keeps my HDL high.

I pretty much don't drink alcohol. Half a beer or one glass of wine if I go to a party. That's it.

And: I cook my own food, mostly. I eat very little processed food. When I do buy processed food, I read the labels obsessively, and I know how much saturated fat and how much sodium there is in everything I buy. (I do buy some: you would find Annie's salad dressing, sweet potato snack chips, canned black beans, naan, challah, and eggplant-garlic spread from Trader Joe's in my house.) If the food has a lot of saturated fat or salt, I don't buy it. (I have high blood pressure, so I try to keep my sodium intake low.) I don't go to restaurants much, and when I do, I eat mostly the same sort of food that I would eat at home.

About 3 years ago I was able to get the total cholesterol down to 138, and the LDL to 58, but I felt deprived. I don't feel deprived now.

This is probably way more info than you needed...

I first read that as a dose of satin.

I'm delighted to hear it!

I tell you, the world is a wonderful place, having such people in it.

Other than that, it's been a quiet day at Lake Wobegon.

Given the fact that this only came to light from what we will call the Silver Basketball and Flowerpot Incident*, could the teenage boy expect parole sometime in 2012?

-----
* about which I am dying to hear more details, once you have rendered them into an Anecdote rather than Real Life†
† You have to do this, because some day said teenage boy is going to bring a partner home, and you can learn a lot about said partner by telling the tale and seeing which side they take

That being said, I'll be in the Bay Area next week. Anyone interested in a Gathering of Light next Thursday at 6pm at Oakland's Breads of India? Terry Karney has already said yes.

Violets are violet,
Roses are rose,
Oranges are orange,
As everyone knows.

Redbirds are red,
Blackbirds are black,
Bluebirds are blue,
And that's a fact.

Lilacs are lilac,
Goldenrod gold,
Lavender's lavender,
Or so I've been told.

I've still got all the safety gear from the last mad science party. Come to think of it I suspect there's still a can of coke in the pachysandra (after microwaving it for eight minutes we didn't know what to expect so there was safety gear and aggressive disposal. It was fine, it was a faraday cage, but we weren't SURE at the time.)

I had not intended to be anything but "maybe this should be done as well, if we are going to accomplish what was requested" - if it came across as a command, or even "that wasn't enough", it came across too harshly, and that is my mistake.

"Doc, note, I dissent: a fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."

(Which, for the life of me, I can't remember where I first came across), and:

"Retteb si fla h'dnoces eh! ttu: but the second half is better."

(Which, I'm more or less sure, was submitted to Stephen Fry in the days when he used to write a column in the UK Daily Telegraph. (He said his own favourite palindrome was "Satan! Oscillate my metallic sonatas!" if memory serves...))

S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S

It works all four ways on that grid.

Fixed.

The question: for what books (whether sff or otherwise), can the title and author be run together to make an unstrained, grammatically correct English sentence?

Charity fund-raiser and you piss off Simon Cowell as well: what's not to like.

For some reason, I seem to recall that I first saw it backwards. I blame Ripley.

abi @191 -- I laughed, I shared. Thank you!

Please raise a glass for me and tell Terry et al. I said hello (and, y'know, the holiday greeting du jour).

Terry Karney @ 225... Get there when you get there.

Earlier in the year I listened to the audio book version of "The Name of the Wind" (Patrick Routhfus). I totally loved it.

I am wondering whether I should recommend it to my niece, who is either 13 or 14. An avid reader who read all of Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and (sigh) the Twilight books.

I remember the book having some dark and scary parts, but don't recall anything explicit.

Any help appreciated.

More and more I am coming to agree. And it has happened because of what C. Wingate @ 169 alludes to: it's designed to put people on the "right" into the libertarian center of the chart.

I see a lot of conservatives who call themselves libertarians and sometimes even join the LP because they are disappointed that today's Republican Party has forgotten about balanced budgets. But basically they are still conservatives. They talk about small government, but they do in fact want a government big enough to invade other countries, keep guest workers out, bust up unions, outlaw brtn, wiretap and imprison dissidents without warrant or trial, and dispense favors to big business that are not available to the rest of us.

Maybe I should call myself a small-government liberal. I hope that's a label the conservatives wouldn't try to steal. And since there are too many people calling for smaller government without saying which parts they want to toss out and which to keep, here's my take. I want to get rid of the parts that the conservatives want to keep.

If the Libertarian Party is to have any purpose and meaning, it cannot be just a pale, slightly-more-tolerant version of the GOP. —David F. Nolan. Sadly, I think it was already too late when he wrote that.

The fat cop spoke in a strange tongue: "Eugnot egnarts a ni epoks poc taf eht."

I was already rather irritated by the mess I was discovering under, behind, and around the furniture next to the windows that were being replaced. That was the reason I was going to ground him for the rest of his life.

By the time he got home from school, I wasn't so mad. This isn't the first time he's spray-painted things outside the house. In fact, just recently I came home, walked in the door, and smelled paint. When I asked him, he admitted that he'd thrown a spray paint can into the yard, which had then "exploded" all over him. He'd run into the house to take a shower, but you could still see black droplets all over the retaining wall and surrounding grass. I thought he'd learned something of a lesson, but no.

His other obsession is with fire, so when I walked into the house and smelled the match smoke, I was a little worried. Then I saw the candles had just been extinguished, so I didn't go on.

Yes, I smell the air as soon as I walk in the door. Sometimes I find things that he shouldn't be doing just by sniffing the air.

Anyway, he doesn't know I wanted to ground him forever and ever. I think I'll hold that in abeyance.

The snowstorm led him to believe that school might be cancelled tomorrow, but I think it will only be a 2-hour delay. We'll see who is right!

"Igor!"

I gather the Latin isn't quite "clean", producing ambiguity to add mystical appeal.

It's far from clean. Sator is a relatively rare word, meaning "sower", or in one usage, "author". That alone gives it the labored diction that really good palindromes avoid.

But the main problem is arepo. It's entirely unknown in Latin apart from this usage. You can't derive it from any known Latin words, even if you're being loose about the form. It could be an alpha-privative Greek form from ρεπω, "to descend", but there's no form that actually fits the grammar.

There are theories that it was a name*. Like the anthropological suggestion that something was used "for ritual purposes", that means "Search me, squire; I have no idea."

I grew up knowing it as the Surfer's Palindrome, which, if you recognize the reference, should tell you rather a lot about my upbringing.

-----
* in which case, how cool is that for the guy involved?

having a name which is a 'hapax legomenon' is itself pretty cool (but also pretty unusual I would imagine) ('Child, if you have a rummy sort of name/Remember to be thankful for the same')

Lee@229: That's quite easy for me to get to, so I'll very likely make it.

Frivolous party game at Locus inspired by PNH's list.

The very first of these I ever noticed was Hello Summer, Goodbye Michael Coney, where the publisher actually used text in two colours in the title to make it read theat way, with Hello Summer, in red, and Goodbye Michael Coney in black.

...and when I googled for an image of that cover (Pan, 1978), I find this at tor.com:

The spine of my old Pan paperback reads “Hello Summer, Goodbye Michael Coney,”, written by one Jo Walton

The word "pockmarked" appears too often in a book I just finished.

I don't know, but whatever it is, add "clenched" and "mien" from the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, and "howled" from the Gap Sequence.

Still do not know why I read the latter. It was a greater literary mistake than deciding to find out whether Pride, Prejudice and Zombies made any sense by the end.

(Warning: serious time-wastage possible at that link!)

If she can handle Harry Potter, I think she'll be fine with Name. The only problem I see is that the second book isn't coming out till March, and personally I hate getting into a series that isn't finished yet. If Rothfuss writes as fast for the third book, it won't be out till sometime in late 2013...

...followed by Baby Gap then Old Navy?

A friend of mine bounced repeatedly off Perdido Street Station because of the sheer mass of excretory imagery in the prologue/introduction section. There was a specific repeated-too-often word, but I no longer remember what it was.

I was going to suggest 'pollakis legomenon' (hapax: 'once', pollakis: 'many times'; but I suspect that my intuitions of appropriateness are infected by the fact that Turkish makes no semantic distinction between 'lots' and 'too much'.¹ Which can lead to very confusing conversations with students. ('Should I put too many citations in may paper?' 'Um, what?')

Also, English desperately needs a word meaning 'thing for which there ought to be a word but isn't.

OK, off to make pizza for the esurient² masses.

1. This comment should really have gone in the last open thread, I guess.
2. Hungry, and requiring to be filled with good things.

In other news, it has been snowing lightly.

Irritating in the extreme.

I was protected from Eddings, as I recall, by the first few pages of the first book. I actually read an entire book of Thomas Covenant, so I'm much more outspoken about how awful that was.

That's a good one, I like that... [But Mark Jones? Your brain translating my location into a possible surname, perchance? :-)]

abi@245

Re. The Gap and "It was a greater literary mistake than deciding to find out whether Pride, Prejudice and Zombies made any sense by the end.

I don't remember The Gap Sequence (to the extent I remember it much at all, now, to be honest) as disfondly as you, but I have always remembered Clute's splendid comment from Interzone that the first one seemed to be "one of the worst single books ever published by a writer of interest who had not yet become senile." Ouch. (Though to be fair, if memory serves an ace rather than a double fault, he said nicer things about the later volumes...)

Syd@257

All together now: "Rat-faced little Drasnian"!

And what is wrong with "liff" for that purpose?

[Is it the fact that it's Christmas Party Season, and I now live remotely enough to have to drive to most of them, and thuslywise remain sober, that's reminded me of this? :-)]

¹ From memory, such as it is, again...

² Confluence?

ddb #258: IIRC, the Covenant series wasn't that bad technically (ignoring the obvious plot token), just depressing as hell.

It's unonomatopoeic.

I've long wanted to get a group of 100 people together and mark out a space 20 feet on a side and take photographs of crowd densities....

If you really want to shut down Wikileaks....just have Yahoo! acquire them.

I just moved to Brooklyn. Is there a good sci & fantasy book store around here? Or at least a book store with a good fantasy section? I find myself missing the selection at my old store, in Berkeley.

With Tim Powers.

She almost made it to the floor she wanted before, accidentally fueled by my rant, she embarrassedly exploded with "Why do all your protagonists get maimed in the hand?" Powers handled it well: he said he hadn't realized he was doing it until it was pointed out to him recently. My friend was tramutized, and I decided to keep an eye out as to upcoming literary events before indulging in a rant like that again.

> Found this quip on Reddit:

> If you really want to shut down Wikileaks....just have Yahoo! acquire them.

Heh. I notice that AltaVista is one of the casualties. Back in the 90s, when the URL was altavista.digital.com, the wildcard and boolean search options that it offered were a revelation. Wikipedia offers charmingly dated numbers: As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day.

Alta Vista was definitely my favorite search engine for quite a while, and the first one that I felt was generally satisfactory (not anything like perfect, you understand). Google was clearly better after about the first week, though. And has remained solidly competitive for about 3 eons in Internet years, isn't it?

Checking US Army regulations from WW2, the distance between ranks is specified at 40 inches. and in close order the interval between files is 4 inches.

These are the measurements between soldiers, and it works out as very slightly more than one square yard.

Do I have to link to the Lambeth Walk video?

I remember "my liege" from The Warrior's Apprentice, all the more so because the original Baen Books printing that I have spelled it "leige" throughout.

"Glittered" in Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron. All of the female characters wore jewelry (especially earrings), and none of them could be just wearing the jewelry, the jewelry had to be doing something, and what it was doing was glittering. I'm sure when she wrote it she never even noticed that she was overusing the phrase....

Elsewhere: I'd call a word that should (but doesn't) exist in English a lacuna, and if someone makes up a word to fill the spot, it would be a lacunism. But that's just me.

but but but... if the word doesn't exist, then it's self-referential!

It also falls squarely under "God loves fools, drunkards, and children". (Which actually has some basis in fact... relaxed muscles protect somewhat against injury from falls and collisions.)

In my own writing, I've found that I use the word "that" too frequently, and try to remember to excise it before final drafts.

Fast 'n bulbous! Also, a tin teardrop!

Sorry, no, I can't even remember now what the colors were, it's been too long. And no, I'm not going back to look.

I had a demon of an English teacher (in the good sense) who had creative writing exercises that included writing without adverbs, starting every sentence in a different way, and excising every "the" from submissions. There's no flavor in such writing but it does help to get a style together that isn't laden with over-emphasis or indirect writing. (This was also the teacher who told us to look up a word if we didn't know the meaning, and then had us look up "red." "The color of blood," FWIW.)

I did notice the hands in Powers. I even talked to Tim about it once, when I was pleasantly surprised to note a hero who didn't have an injury of some sort to the hands. Mind you, I was looking for it.

Tim has some other recurrent tropes too.

(Although there was a period in the 1990s where he wrote a couple of books in a row that ended with the protagonist getting off a boat and disappearing off into the distance.)

My first encounter with "pawky", that I recall, was this:

"You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?"

"The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as --"

"My blushes, Watson!" Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.

"I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public."

"A touch! A distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself."

I think of it as Scottish, as in:

Oh the pawky auld carle cam o'er the lea
Wi' mony guid-e'ens and guid-days tae me
Sayin', "Guid wife for your charity
Would you lodge a leal poor man?"
Laddie wi my tow-ro-ae

Dead wives?

Was there ever anything more stupid? I'm afraid to believe it's been rescinded.

Love, C.

Serge@292: I'd strongly prefer Breads of India, although my preference makes no difference unless the event gets rescheduled.

Sorry, no, it's not dead yet. The Senate has passed cloture, meaning the Republican filibuster is null and void, but they have yet to vote on the bill itself. And even when the bill is passed (ETA: they are scheduled to be voting on it as I type this) and the President has signed it (and that's not a sure thing either, considering how he's been rolling lately) DADT will still be the law of the land until 90 days have elapsed and the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have all certified repeal. In that period anyone who comes out while in service is going to get cashiered, so tell anyone you know who's thinking about it to stay in the closet until the repeal actually happens.

Update: The repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" was passed on a final vote of 65-31. There are unverified reports that John McCain's (R-AZ) legs fell off.

It now goes to the President for his signature.

Hallelujah!

Fudge making illustrated!

The DREAM Act failed to pass. :-(((

Tim Powers subthread I'm reminded of the David Lodge novel (Small World, I think), where a successful British novelist had his writing analysed by computer and it made him unable to write any more. Whenever he wrote something that fitted it with the patterns from the computer it felt predictable and boring, and when he tried to write differently it felt artificial. The centipede problem.

Some of you think we can exhale.

Which is it?

I guess this is what 'they' gave us in exchange for extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest? And that was as far as They were going to go. They did kill the DREAM initiative. Or at least that is what some people who are usually pretty knowlegable are saying. Myself, not being in their class, do not know!

But if DADT is dead, I'm more than ready to don sparklies and dance on its grave, so there.

Love, C.

Keep your weary hard workers
Keep your poor with aspirations
Keep your huddled massed yearning for freedom.
You who work and dream of a better life aren't welcome here.
You who seek refuge from religious intolerance, from discriminatio, from persecution, mostly won't get entry.
We only allow the abusive rich--
The Rupert Murdochs, the Mel Gibsons
The rich bigots secular and sectarian
The robber barons spreading lies
And actors who abuse their wives and mistresses.
And aliens on guest visas training for turning passenger planes with hapless passengers on-board into weapons of mass destruction committing mass atrocity and devastation.

A cold front moved through Portland about 6 AM this morning, with heavy rain for a half an hour or so followed by light rain for another couple of hours. At about 10 AM I drove my dogs up to the off-leash area on top of Council Crest (~1100 feet above sea level); the temperature was 39°F but there was still snow on the ground above 800 or 900 feet. The light drizzle falling then was washing the snow away, but hadn't yet finished the job.

This would only have been of interest to the dogs (who were interested in the snow, but not happy about the falling rain), except that there was a wedding scheduled at the lookout point on the top of Council Crest. Shortly after we got there the wedding party assembled under a cluster of umbrellas, and a stretch limo arrived with the bride and groom. Less than five minutes later the rain stopped and a few minutes after that the sun came out for what I hope was long enough for the wedding ceremony.

Amazingly, the limo driver even managed to park without blocking the driveway that goes around the lookout point, though he did have to move a few feet to let me get my car out when I left.

The NY Times article reporting on transplant defunding has lots of links to other articles, including things not on their site, like Jan Brewer's interview on Fox. They also have helpful little links for phrases that the reader might find unfamiliar. The link for stem cells is to their page on the embryonic stem cells controversy, rather than their perfectly good page on bone marrow transplants. Are they trying to cause trouble?

http://www.panna.org/media-center/press-release/beekeepers-ask-epa-remove-pesticide-linked-colony-collapse-disorder-citin

Beekeepers Ask EPA to Remove Pesticide Linked to Colony Collapse Disorder, Citing Leaked Agency Memo
For immediate release: December 8, 2010

Contacts:

Heather Pilatic, Pesticide Action Network
cell: 415.694.8596

Jay Feldman, Beyond Pesticides
202.543.5450, ext 15

Beekeepers Ask EPA to Remove Pesticide Linked to Colony Collapse Disorder,Citing Leaked Agency Memo
Pesticide Already Illegal in Germany, Italy & France Based on Scientific Findings

SAN FRANCISCO and WASHINGTON, D.C - Beekeepers and environmentalists today called on EPA to remove a pesticide linked to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), citing a leaked EPA memo that discloses a critically flawed scientific support study. The November 2nd memo identifies a core study underpinning the registration of the insecticide clothianidin as unsound after EPA quietly re-evaluated the pesticide just as it was getting ready to allow a further expansion of its use. Clothianidin (product name “Poncho”) has been widely used as a seed treatment on many of the country’s major crops for eight growing seasons under a “conditional registration” granted while EPA waited for Bayer Crop Science, the pesticide’s maker, to conduct a field study assessing the insecticide’s threat to bee colony health....

http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/the-great-honeybee-conspiracy/1196

The Great Honeybee Conspiracy
EPA Complicit in Colony Collapse Disorder?
By Jimmy Mengel
Thursday, December 16th, 2010

The humble honey bee is getting its fair share of buzz this year — which doesn't bode particularly well for the species, or American agriculture as a whole.

The most recent revelations involve leaked government documents, regulatory malfeasance, and scientific censorship. To mix an insect metaphor, it's quite a tangled web...

Since 2006, serious decimation of the North American bee population has taken place. Termed “colony collapse disorder,” millions of worker bees have mysteriously disappeared from their colonies, largely confounding the scientific community.
...

But a suspect has emerged as enemy number one: Bayer's pesticide clothianidin.
...

Leaked EPA documents have detailed the regulatory agency's allowance of clothianidin to maneuver its way through regulatory channels in the face of scientists' warning and flawed studies.

According to these documents provided to beekeeper Tom Theobald, the EPA was aware of the pesticide's dangers way back in 2003; but the EPA granted Bayer a "conditional" approval that allowed them to start using the pesticide

http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1779&category=Environment

Honey Bee Disappearances Not “Solved” by Virus and Fungi

© 2010 by Linda Moulton Howe

“Beekeepers there in North Dakota saw so many dead bees ... and we sent some samples into a lab in Florida and they found Imidacloprid in the honey and the bees and the wax. I mean, that pretty much nails it down.”

- Daniel F. Mayer, Ph.D., Entomologist

It applies to one and all, but is almost never enforced; mostly because it requires someone to come forward with a complaint.

But the way it's written it pretty much means any one who is not heterosexual is either abstinent, or in violation.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Arysta+Acquires+U.S.+Marketing+Rights+to+Clothianidin+Insecticide%3B...-a0125946075

Arysta Acquires U.S. Marketing Rights to Clothianidin Insecticide; Secures U.S. Registration on Turf and Ornamentals.i>

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Arysta LifeScience Corporation [has bought the rights to three poisonous soil chemicals in the past two months]

Arvesta Corporation, has entered into a license agreement granting Arvesta exclusive marketing rights in the United States and Mexico to the broad-spectrum insecticide Clothianidin for soil and [leaf application]....

Registration of Clothianidin has been secured for use of turf and ornamentals and will be sold under the trade names Arena (turf) and Celero (ornamentals). Registration is pending on apples, pears and tobacco. Clutch received registration in the Mexican market in September for use in potatoes, tobacco and ornamentals.

Apples and pear, that's right, kill all the bees that pollinate the fruit, and 1/3 of the rest of the produce in the world.... and ornamental, kill all the butterflies and other pollinating insects

...Clothianidin is a milestone addition to the company's expanding product portfolio for turf, ornamentals and specialty crops.

See them make tons of money, who cares about the extinction of beneficial insects of songbirds, bats, frogs, fish (the pesticide is highly nonselective about what it kills...)

"This is a new generation in insect control that provides broad-spectrum control in many economically significant market segments," she says. "When you include Clothianidin with our existing specialty crops products Elevate, CaptEvate and Captan [[link--group of organic sulfur compounds used as fungicides, including topical treatment of dermatophytosis. Poisoning of birds causes loss of egg production, anorexia and slow growth. ]]*, we have a portfolio of widely recognized, consistently performing products."

You, too, can have a golf course monoculture lawn, with nothing living except the damned golf green grass....

Clothianidin controls soil pests and surface feeding pests in turf (such as white grubs, chinch bug [[ link -- chinch bug, small North American bug, Blissus leucopterus, of the seed bug family. It feeds on small grains, corn, and other grasses, sucking the plant juices and doing much damage to crops, particularly in the Midwest. The adults, about 1/8 in. (3. and mole crickets),] lepidopterous [butterflies and moths] pests in turf and fruit (webworms, codling moth and leafrollers) and sucking pests (such as aphids and leafhoppers).

Bye-bye monarch butterflies, swallowtails, luna moths... I suspect the actual worst pests will adapt relatively quickly... cabbage white butterflies are a highly opportunistic imported species, and are out when other lepidoptera (except for a relatively new pest, winter moths) aren't, from early to late....

The pesticide is nicotine based--tobacco is -poisonous--and is very unselective in its lethality. And it stays in the soil not breaking down for most of two decades....

The stuff makes DDT look innocuous....

Namely,

Why do so many online Nativity scenes show the participants as children?

I was hunting for a picture(s) to transfer to a tile and paint when I realized this. The trend doesn't seem to be as strong in physical Nativity scenes. (Those trend toward European adults--a different rant.) But what are people getting out of this?

Yours rantingly.

And I still have to deal with the damn Medicare plan....

And a kid that turns from an infant to an adolescent overnight would indeed be the stuff of nightmares.

I'm making some rice with the stock now, let's see how that turns out.

FREDDY THE SNOWMAN

Freddy the Snowman
With his scarf of red and green
Didn't look too spry, but my oh my
What a stone-cold death machine!

Freddy the Snowman
Got most everyone but me
With his eyes of coal and his evil soul
On his chilly killing spree.

There must have been a curse upon
That rusty kitchen knife;
When Suzy put it in his hand,
The snowman took her life! Oh --

Freddy the Snowman
Was a child molester too,
And I heard him say, being dragged away,
"I'll be back next year for you!"

(Hackity hack hack, hackity hack hack,
Hacking hard and deep;
Stabbity stab stab, stabbity stab stab,
Kills you in your sleep!)

[ttto: Frosty the Snowman. New words ©2010 by Kip Williams]

And while I'm at it, here's my Christmas card, too. Happy happy, everybody, and to all a good open thread!

It's Monday night/Tuesday morning. If you're in the Central time zone, totality begins at 1:41 AM.

http://blogs.chron.com/observableuniverse/2010/12/brightness_falls_from_the_air.html

Jewish family decides to celebrate Christmas Day appropriately by going out to Chinese restaurant after watching day-long Dr. Who marathon on BBC America channel.

"Religion is not well served by making up lies about seasonal customs" could be shortened to "Religion is not well served by making up lies".

I think there's even a commandment about it somewhere.

At first I though you meant Knight Moves the novel by Walter Jon Williams....

I would have gotten stuff done this weekend, but life and being a good friend and human being intervened. I did find out quite a lot about myself and my psyche, but there have got to be better ways. Maybe.

More than I need, perhaps, but interesting, nonetheless.

I periodically take a stab at increasing the fruits and vegetables in my diet, but it almost never lasts for more than half a week.

I have at least gotten to the point where I don't eat beef every day, so I guess that's progress. :-\

I wonder if the stream near my office is at flood yet? One year it overflowed into the parking lot and was floating cars away.

The three of the were Justices--but the two of you, and Mr Roberts and Mr Alito, are InJustices, putting your religion ahead of the law of the land and dismissing when it's convenient to your sectarian narrow male supremacist plutocratic judging, past precedent and the words, "We the People of the United States of America...." You are NOT supposed to be the speakers for preserving and extending male privileging and protection of robber baron control over and blocking of the rest of the population from opportunity and life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and decent working conditiosn on a livable wage and repect....

Also, my dog's "holding it" and hates the rain and her raincoat so much that she'll STAND STOCK STILL IN THE RAIN FOR LIKE 5 MINUTES AT A TIME rather than moving forward and doing her damn business. I should just take my shampoo out with us when I walk her and kill two birds with one stone. I think my fingers are permanently pruned and I may be mildewing even as we speak.

I still prefer this to the f&sk!^$ snow.

Nightline and/or ABC 11 PM news, said that the average cost per year for drugs for diabetics is $13,000 and that the costs of treating diabetics is a third of US healthcare costs (consider things like dialysis, diabetic retinopathy, and other consequences/conditions which often follow as effects). Most--not all, Mike Ford was a Type I diabete from childhood--cases of diabetes, overwhelmingly, are Type II and the overwhelming share of them avoidable if on the type of diet Lizzy is on.

On the other hand, a diet of pizza (starch-only plus token enrichment wheat flour, greasy high ft cheese, tomato sauce which does contain some nutrition), soft drinks (high fructose corn syrup and nasty phosphoric acid), and candy --"corn sugar" (HFCS under a red herring relabeling) sweetener and "milkfat" -- and ice cream, and lots of red corn-fed fatty meat, etc., yield hig fat-content people who if they have any genetic susceptibility to Type II diabetes, will get it from exhaustion of the organism control system's ability to control blood sugar with the available capacity in the pancreas for regulating it.... sort of like the old mill dam versus upstream housing and commercial and industril development which took away all the vegetation and ability of the land to absorb heavy rain, paving over the gound causing additional massive runoff, and the results being floods which first stress the dam, then water pours over the top, and then breaches occur, and then the dam collapses completely.... regrow the vegetation and get rid of the pavement etc and if the water was merely flowing uncontrollably over the top of the dam, the dam will go back to "working" properly.... if the dam hasn't been compromised structurally first.

I like WEBS myself.

In the U.S., there are about 60,000 to 80,000 amputations performed each year due to diabetes (this includes toe and foot as well as leg amputations--often several sequential amputations on the same limb).

I freaking HATE diabetes. It killed my best friend at age 47.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I'm schizophrenic*,
...and so am I.

---
*Yes yes, dissociative identity disorder, but that doesn't scan right.

Wow. That's absolutely hypnotic.

I do this every year, and in my experience the key is to not simmer it.

Put it in a heavy-bottomed pot, put a heat spreader under, put it on the lowest flame possible--if it bubbles at all the heat is way too high. You want the temperature to be 140-150. Then just let it sit--it may take 36 hours, but I reduce mine until it coats a spoon thickly and then freeze it and cut it into cubes.

(I do this starting with quadruple-strength stock, and generally end up with about 2 gallons of concentrate for a cows-worth of bones.)

The notion popped into my head of subsisting on oatmeal, carrots, and spinach until Thursday, when I board a red-eye flight for visits back East.

I see lots of recipes on the web for oat cakes. One thing that isn't clear is whetehr the "oat meal" in the ingredients list is cooked oatmeal or just a heap of the raw grain. (Put another way, are oat cakes a way of disposing of leftover porridge?)

Can anyone recommend a recipe? There are so many variations, and never having tried these before I don't know how to choose. (NB: I do steel cut oats.)

Any "savory" variations on oat cakes I might eat for dinner? (Prefereably not involving the blood and kishkes of livestock.)

The recipes I see (on a quick scan) are mostly for rolled oats (aka "old-fashioned oats"), which is what I expect. If unspecified, go for that. It's possible the recipe means oats ground into flour -- you can do that by putting rolled oats in the food processor. But I wouldn't expect a disaster if you use rolled oats for oat flour, or vice versa.

(Whereas substituting oat porridge would be a disaster. Probably an amusing disaster, rather than an "...and that's how I wound up on a sinking washtub ten miles from the South Sandwich Islands" sort of disaster. *Probably*.)

Damn, we had several hours of clearing with sun yesterday which got me hoping, but it rained all morning today, and now we've got high clouds with some breaks. I just looked at the NOAA satellite pictures and they look like lots of clouds, with maybe a few breaks to the west of us. I think the weather gods are just playing with us, but I'm going to take a look outside around 9:30 or so tonight when first penumbral contact is scheduled. Luckily I can get a pretty good view of the sky at the schoolyard about 3 blocks away, assuming the weather cooperates.

So the little cute angels, named Peter, Paul, and Mary, are in training. They have a practice nativity and everything with baby lambs and a practice Jesus. Except one day, they decided they wanted to practice with the real Jesus, so they took him... and lost him. They had to swap in the practice Jesus and hope no one noticed while they tracked down the actual Son of God. Timothy helped, I think, because he was my favorite; I don't know how Baby Sister's story went beyond the commonalities.

This is why, even though I am secular, I will have a nativity once I have kids. Probably more than one.

Incidentally, the stuff didn't gel properly, but I did the best I could at skimming it, and am freezing the first pair of trays now. I'm also going to stop putting bean-broth in my stock bags, as I suspect that's causing some of the issues I've had, including excessive cloudiness.

Court rules E-mail protected by Fourth Amendment. Took them long enough!

And... I've now three times over the past week or so encountered an odd thing on my hands (possibly a bug bite) -- a small (1.5mm) but itchy blister, twice on fingers and now one on my wrist. Pressure reveals a nearly invisible welt around it, about 7mm across. (Actually, the one on my wrist seems to have swelled in the past few minutes, after some scratching, and is now pale against a larger pink area.) This doesn't seem to match up with the pictures I've seen of bed-bug bites, but I can't think what it could be, especially since I've been noticing them during the day (like, just now sitting at the computer).

(It's just that I'm reading Last Call right now, and I keep noticing more.)

✵ I just got called back by an adviser at the local senior center, I'll call her back to make an appointment tomorrow. The Medicare.gov site is amazingly frustrating for something that's not obviously broken.

Yup, sounds like what I dealt with repeatedly over about a 5 year stretch long ago (still get it occasionally but nothing like that strectch). Got bad enough at one point I saw my MD about it, he diagnosed it as dermatitis nervosa and prescribed hydrocortisone cream, which brought it under control nicely. Since then I keep a tube of OTC hydrocotisone in the medicine cabinet and can knock it down just about as fast as it appears.

*pronouns, pronouns....

Though not on the Horrible Hill, the one that scared me badly in the winter. This one's not so steep.

Stream of conscious sentences
Running on and on.
Stream of conscious sentences,
Midnight, noon, and dawn!
Stream of conscious sentences
Pour out in a rush.
Stream of conscious sentences,
My but they are lush!
Stream of conscious sentences,
Start the thought and type,
Stream of conscious sentences,
They make Cally gripe!

Or backward?

Just went outside to look for the moon...earlier tonight it was cloudy but variable; right now the clouds are sufficiently thick that I caught a glimpse of moonlight, but nothing else.

You say toMAYto, i say toMAHto
you eat poTAYto and i eat poTAHto
toMAYto, toMAHto, poTAYto, poTAHto

Seen by man's wife in the ladies's room of a gas station in Arizona's Kingman, an arrow pointing down at the water closet with the following graffiti:

Alternate Route to Narnia

The moon continues to look neat, although my fabulous girlfriend seems to have fallen asleep (at her home) -- she wanted me to call her but didn't answer her phone.

Now I'm back inside, with a cup of hot tea and a warm cat firmly ensconced upon my chest.

Serge, if it's just you and me and Terry not until later, and it's raining, and I'm trying very hard not to come down with whatever-it-is ... I'm having second thoughts.

Did *not* see the eclipse, due to today being a work day and I'm trying to get my sleep cycle straightened out anyhow. As typical lately, my dreams were pegging the wierdometer. (see "stress" above) The night before last, I dreamed I was at my aunt's house... trying to get to sleep. Last night, it was the home invasion of the (not-my-real-) neighbors. Oy gevalt.

Went down early, and though I feel fine during the day, I'm still having classic fever dreams at night, though somewhat milder than the really bad ones.

Even after I realized I was having them and consciously rejected them, they kept coming back: I was making some kind of Flash presentation, without a computer. This was varied, at first, with some kind of framing story about working at an answering service again, but it quickly segued into all Flash, all the time.

Illness sucks.

Note that the 140-150F isn't for the broth-making, just for the concentrating.

It's been years since I had meat in my house that I hadn't butchered myself, so using up bones and bits from a whole cow has been a regular winter activity. (Even when I only get a quarter, no one else wants that many bones so I usually can get all of them.)

When we put my son to bed again, he was much more disappointed at missing the total stage than he was initially at missing the whole thing. I treated that as an opportunity to talk (briefly) about emotions and expectations, and emotions getting more worked up when you're tired.

Fortunately, Benadryl before bed seems to have addressed the problem adequately.

Also missed the eclipse. Was actually awake at an opportune time, but the prospect of actually getting vertical and putting on enough clothing to fight the cold was more than I could feature. ::Sigh:: Oh well. Next time. (Ahem.)

But at least I did make it over to Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little's for Solstice comestibles. Nommy squash soup (and I'm not normally a fan of squash, but this was definitely Food), and homemade fruitcake (which actually combined nicely with the Field Roast to produce a lovely mince-like result). Plus! Low-Sodium Egg Nog, yar har.

Left earlier than I would have preferred, it being a work-night. Also, as anticipated, JJ (who'd been let out to play before I left) wanted to go in early. He's recovering from a double-mastectomy and, while he's still adamant that he be allowed out to look at his girls, he wears down more quickly than usual. (He gets his stitches out Thursday, woo hoo!)

The moon was supposed to rise fully eclipsed, which it undoubtedly did, but behind several layers of cloud.

We got our first glimpse just after third contact, with a tiny sliver of lit surface, and the rest of the moon a dull, slightly reddish grey. In the gaps in the cloud, we could watch as the lit segment expanded to become the bulk of the disc.

Herself has some photographs which she will sort through in the next few days.

J Homes.

Twenty open threads ago, I raised a concern about the way our occupation-and-terrorist-hunting tactics and equipment might one day be brought home, and used to impose an unwanted government on us, and to break up any resistance to that government using the same kind of assassination and abduction and torture as we've used overseas.

Excerpt: (But go read the article!)

The streets of Memphis are a world away from the streets of Kabul, yet these days, the same types of technologies and techniques are being used in both places to identify and collect information about suspected criminals and terrorists.

The examples go far beyond Memphis.

* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.

* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies General Atomics' Predator drones along the Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of aircraft, equipped with real-time, full-motion video cameras, that has been used in wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.

Along with the deployment of high-tech surveillance technology that looks like something out of Robocop, the article describes a whole set of "experts" who train local police departments in, more-or-less, the impending jihad and imposition of sharia law by American Muslims. (The whole story seemed to me to be about the rebirth of the Red Squad, this time with better technology.)

Happy Winter Solstice (and all other seasonal greetings as they apply)!

On the way in, there was a pair of young women who had stopped their car to stand and stare.

We kept going out to watch.

It was a good night.

Saint Thomas Aquinas once said, On the Sabbath
Try and make no noise that goes beyond your house.
Cries of passion between lovers are exempt. Beneath
A full moon in full eclipse which tends to arouse
And inflame the senses, particularly love,
I stand under the shadow that will creep and cross
The glabrous moon, shining white above,
And onto my heart those words emboss:
“Cries of passion are exempt”. Our plans
For a weekend of passion and fun, in the snow
And out of it; for walking in the forest , holding hands,
Will come to certain passionate fruition, I know.
This Sabbath commandment will be upheld with glee
Whether outdoors or under the Christmas tree.

The detritus of the years accumulated in spite

Of all efforts, as one partner abandoning

The other, left it all in her angry flight

Away. I picked up a length of finished wood

Which looked familiar but unknown

Carried it to the stairs, and stood

Saying I would toss it -- and not postpone

Decision. She looked at it and said, “We’re

Going to grow old; we’ll need it then”

Her face showed her love, deep and sincere;

Without argument I put it back again

Because I knew that she was not only right -

And it filled my heart with a love so bright

She bought yellow roses, hid them on her deck
Invited me in, gave me a hug and kisses without end,
Raining them across my face and neck
While I returned them, in great transcend
Of emotions, love and desire rising paramount
Within us, matched in fervor as in height
Culminating in our natural exeunt
And kisses that lasted throughout the night
Although we won’t go into great detail
As anyone could guess from this what happened;
This part’s an old story, a well-known tale
Across the ages, of lovers abstained
By distance and time, then released to their
Passion, leading swiftly to all things bare.

I particularly enjoy the pensive tone of the second one.

Another neighbor came over late, and he told me a swapped ingredient story that may actually be funnier than my salted eggnog one. Seems his mom was making pumpkin pie, and the recipe called for a tablespoon of paprika (interesting enough, right there); and she grabbed a jar that looked *just* like the paprika jar but turned out instead to be pure cayenne. Oops.

'Round about 1:30 those of us still sitting around the table stepped out on the balcony for a look at the eclipse. It was total. The color was like a non-opaque shadow -- like when you have different light sources at night, so that light falls across shadows without making the shadow entirely go away? Like that -- which had been tinted faintly rust.

After everyone went home I kept going out to check on its progress. I saw it as a crescent after totality, then a half, then just the last nibble on the bottom curve of the moon healing itself around... 3:30 maybe?

The Yule Log didn't last half so long. Silly thing gave up the ghost around 2. I kept burning wedges slowly until dawn, and went to bed just as John was getting up for work.

I haven't gotten anything useful done today except more clean-up. Today's for resetting the sleep/wake cycle, I guess.

Lexica: I note you're another Solstice All-Nighter observer - will we get to read about this year's excursion? The post you linked to was lovely.

Jim: Pippin's review of Inception was fun to read. She teases some things out of the movie that I hadn't noticed at all. Very cool.

He was the only one who could eat the finished product, and only in small doses. This was the same period of his life where he enjoyed snacking on dried habañero peppers as if they were almost popcorn ... or, at least, wasabi peas. Thankfully, in his middle age, he has become less insanely spice-loving, though he still likes a good hot dish. Merely humanly hot, though, rather than super-humanly. :->

Can I just say how much I enjoy seeing Ginger on Open thread 151 in the recent comments list, and knowing that there's a ray of sunshine waiting for me there?

I appreciate you sharing your happiness with us here.

The Fluorospherians have been a source of comfort and strength for me, during those especially dark days nearly a year ago. This is a small form of repayment for that support.

It's truly a silver lining; I wouldn't be writing sonnets like this if my Ex hadn't walked out, etc., etc. One of the things I've learned over this past year is that sharing makes me stronger -- something I was not ever comfortable doing when I was young and proud.

Now I have some stronger friendships online and in real life, and I am amazed by all these wonderful people around me. I knew life would get better, and it has.

When I was a senior in high school, our English teacher would dismiss class by telling us to "Go Forth and Spread Beauty and Light". I do my humble best.

A local group of people set their alarms, e-mailed, IMed, tweeted etc. Very particularly, we froze our tushes. It was very clear here.

Unexpected consequences reported by companions of the four-legged: "You're awake. I get to eat! What? No eating? What the f are you people doing? I'm going back to bed. Harrumph."

Other than the cold, teach-in re Charleston's celebration bawl of secession, in which some of us dressed in costumes: I was a Northern Abolitionist bluestocking. No photos, at least none in my possession.

We still are unclear as to plans for Christmas. We may well just cozy in here and work on the book. We will return to NYC for at least a week around New Year's, and that will be stuffed with social distractions. Which, I admit, I'm looking forward to very much because I am missing our friends very much.

Love, c.

Yeah, what abi said. For a variety of reasons, this hasn't been the most pleasant Christmas season ever for me[1], and I've really enjoyed basking in a bit of your radiated joy.

[1] These all fall into the category of annoyances, nothing serious[2].

[2] You know it's been a rotten week, when your main categories of laundry are not "whites" and "colors," but instead "kid puke" and "dog pee." Grmbl!

Teresa talked about that kind of fraud in light of the Bush administration here. I'll admit I didn't take her description nearly as seriously as I should have.

The other idea that's really critical here is "ideological capture," which I first saw here. It's implicit in the Black paper as well. The idea is that financial successful people and businesses commanded and command great respect from regulators, lawmakers, reporters, academics, etc., that they not only evolved a belief system in which they were a bunch of geniuses who deserved their place at the top of the pyramid, but also that they managed to convince much of the top tier of our society of the same thing.

I'm coming to suspect that post-9/11, the other groups that have managed regulatory capture of government and media elites are the top military leaders and intelligence/homeland security agencies. You can see the media and policymaking elites' anger at Wikileaks as a reflection of that ideological capture--the top military leaders, intelligence agencies, and top government officials got mad, and the rest of the elites said "Oh, look, we're supposed to be mad at these guys!"

The fun thing is, I got all the way through to the end of it without realizing when it was written. I thought he was working up to discussing the massive mortgage fraud, mispricing of complex derivatives, suborning of the ratings agencies, etc., all the way until I got to the end of the paper. Then I went back and saw that it was written in 2005, when the current disaster was at most a few dark clouds on the horizon.

At least ONE thing I can be proud of my country for -- the US led the effort to get sexual orientation re-included.

I've heard most of those before. I'm surprised they didn't mention this one

⌚ Working in the Language room: "Hmm, I'm hungry, isn't it noon yet? Hey, wait a minute....

Many years ago, mid-70s, there was an amazing and wonderful total eclipse of the moon visible on the West Coast. I observed it in Dolores Park in San Francisco -- this was a time when it was perfectly okay to ramble about Dolores Park in the middle of the night. We brought blankets and food, and probably some illegal substances were ingested. At the peak of the event, when the moon was a stunning blood red (or maybe not, but so it seemed) we whomped pots and pans together and yelled "Come back, Moon!" above the din.

She did.

Amusingly, I also saw one "western goods" store offering moccasins from a familiar name... a reseller who I once worked for, trying to rescue her computer from 10+ years of neglect. (It was a one-woman shop -- I heard her daughter took it over after her death.) The funny part is that she just relays her orders to other sources, and remails the products, so ordering them from the "western" site, they'd actually be passed along by at least three companies on their way to you.

⌚ This business of passing along search keywords is interesting from an informatic point of view. It's not a specific pointer, or even a full description -- it just clips out a chunk of search space from the Googleverse, but that's useful in itself. It might be a computational analogy of pointing "over there".

There's also ditching the ski crew up on the mountains and coming downhill to Boulder to visit Jacque and me. ;-)

digital nativity

(I know exactly which yarn-and-fiber shops to tempt you with. Mwahahaha.)

Similarly: hot steamy showers, and avoid breathing through your mouth outdoors wherever possible.

If you use a nebulizer, you may also get some additional relief by nebulizing sterile saline to moisten your lungs/loosen mucous.

And don't commit to charging out skiing the first day or two -- if you take it easy and don't go to an even higher altitude, your body will adjust to altitude more quickly.

It wasn't BAD- I picked it up in the middle of my sledgehammer drumroll of finals*, and it did just what I needed it to do- but it was startling.

* last Tuesday, 5 PM: Take-home final, due 10 PM Friday. Last Wednesday, 2 PM: Scheduled final. "Start when you like, takes 3.5 hours" final, available between 7 PM Wednesday and, I believe, 10 PM Thursday.

I'm sure it will be particularly fascinating when some set of investigators realize that their various plagiarists' lists of defenses have all been plagiarized too. "Oh dear - you just skipped from defense #1 to defense #3. Didn't you want to first claim that your computer crashed and converted your file of notes to plain text and lost all the references?"

Needless to add I suppose, but just in case -- this is purely personal, intimate, domestic happiness I am speaking of. Outside, all over, it is anything but happiness giving.

I am treasuring this while we are so fortunate to have it. Back to reality in May.

Love, c.

Has anyone ever successfully deprogrammed a Libertarian?

No...market forces should take care of that. :-)

...
Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day.

O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones!
What had the Caesars but their thrones?

-- W. B. Yeats, Demon and Beast

I don't know that anyone's ever been able to program one in the first place.

A Sonnet for My Friend, Kerry M

My best friend Kerry M – no, the other one
(I have two of the same name) –
Wanted a poem , so I’d begun
To explain that it was only fair game
Because Kerry M -- now, which
One do I mean? One’s short, the other’s
Not; but both are riotous and rich
In humor or humour, as well as brothers;
One claims I ignored her to read
And the other calls me a wizard;
However, I think both are agreed
That life is best lived facing outward,
Ready to meet all challenges head on
To which I can only say “Right on!”

Auckland is mysteriously sold out of whole cloves (well, the three places I tried), which required some recalculation. However, fruit bread has been made, and 'high grade' flour turns out to work just like bread flour. Olive bread with ajwain is in process.

Yeats!

Wonders appear in the season of wonders, here in Arthur's court of Camelot!

Love, c.

And there's really no reason to substitute cayenne for chili powder by accident when you can use one of them in place of the cinnamon you thought you were putting in the homemade granola.

Reminds me of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" where the net is salted with deliberately inaccurate information by activists concerned about privacy.

thomas #465:
'High grade flour' contains more gluten/protein & is what I use for breads & pizza bases. Whole cloves should be readily available from any number of Asian grocery shops - I've never had trouble finding it.

There isn't usually a cloves problem, it's just that three supermarkets happened to sell out of that, and not any other spices, and I was tired of shopping. I'm sure that if I wandered over to Mt Roskill or Sandringham I could find plenty of cloves.

Eight-year-old children publish bee study in Royal Society journal

“We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.

Altogether delightful reading. :)

OWW! However, this only drives home the utter sensibleness of my mother teaching me to use multiple senses when cooking -- I reflexively, always, sniff a spice bottle before using it. This is partly to engage my flavorbrain and judge the growing meld, but it also means I would never, ever swap chili powder for cinnamon! Some other pairs, maybe, but not that one.

Usually not cayenne (or straight-up ground ancho, or whatever) for chili powder, either, as they smell different to me.

This becomes particularly useful if one is in the habit of keeping around the ground-powder versions of, say: sage, marjoram, summer savory, rosemary ... all of which are basically the exact same grey-green powdery color, though of somewhat varying fluffy/packed densities.

Whatever the cause, she walked off with a bagel spread with Crisco. And took at least one bite.

Have you read Steven Brust's account of a similar experience.

It was sufficient to make a non-SF reader friend of mine willing to try reading Agyar.

It does however, make me wonder what proportion of whole cloves sales happen in December, for the purpose of studding Christmas hams.

Flight Itinerary

Thank you for booking a scheduled flight with Monarch. Please do not reply to this e-mail. See below for contact details.

Monarch is a ticket-less airline, so please print this page for your records.

[...]

Think before you print - do you really need to print this e-mail?

I'm just going to purchase some horticultural implements.

Man's wife says she married her mother's best son-in-law.

* Chronically loose top on a holder for sewing pins necessitates additional 20-minute meticulous search for stragglers in carpet, bedding, half of room.

* Final what-to-get-for Giftmas dilemma solved with inspired application of a mathom.

* Local beagle ENTHRALLED with the big blue paper-fabric bags that Amazon gifts-too-large-to-wrap come in: it's a cave, with CORNERS, and it's SOFT, and it's DARK! He emphatically declared it perfect and fell asleep in it.

* Leftover excessively pink yarn from Big Sekrit Giftmas Project ingeniously repurposed into a beaded 'mohair' sweater for local toddler, who won't mind the pinkness, and who will look ridonkulously adorable in it.

* Christmas comes a day early with .67 inch of rain in an otherwise droughty region. Mourning doves preening in the rain on the back fence.

* After days of parties, day trips south, cleaning, wrapping, and such, today devoted to making chutney, cookies and tiramisu.

* Yesterday, for distraction, local woman makes fudge. "I just had to," she says, blaming blog for inspiration.

Local dogs having barked far too much at the noise of leafblowers outside were put in downstairs office with the door closed. They were quite puzzled by the sounds when local woman threw empty plastic containers down the stair (so they could be filled with dog food from the large bag), and actually shut up for a short time.

It looked fine as it came out of the oven. Man debates honesty of not mentioning his inaccuracy to sister.

Man goes to Berkeley's Dark Carnival bookstore, where a discussion with the proprietor has the latter describe "Green Acres" as an exercise in surrealism cleverly disguised as a stupid TV show.

Forecast for tomorrow is roast turkey becoming turkey sandwiches, bags of frozen turkey for later meals, and quite a few pint tubs of turkey broth to be frozen. Turkey dissassembly and later broth straining will be somewhat messy. Feline residents will demand more turkey than they will get.

I'm Pagan, but raised in a Christian culture, and there's something just absolutely enchanting about singing "Silent Night" with 200 other people, each of you holding a candle in an otherwise darkened church.

This year I was wondering where the large crowd of heavily-tattooed young men was coming from. After the service I stationed myself at the baptismal font and wished "Merry Christmas!" to everyone as they went out, and shook hands with as many as I could. (No, it's not my holiday. Can't I wish people joy of their holiday?)

Later, my friend Lenore, who had helped with communion, said she figured the heavily-tattooed young men must have been Roman Catholics, because they all refused the wine. I said "Or they were in recovery, which would go with the tattoos" (because tattoos gotten while drinking don't go away when you stop). Eventually we found out where they came from: Jim McGreevey brought them from an AA group associated with Integrity!

I didn't figure out they were GAY. Well, I smiled at them and shook their hands and wished them Merry Christmas, and that's exactly how I would acted had I known, except if I'd known I would have questioned my motives in doing so. So it was a blessing.

I'm feeling really, really good right now. That hasn't happened too often lately, so whoo-hoo!

I am still wondering who thought it was a good idea to give a bell-pepper-shaped plastic container for bell peppers fresh in the refrigerator to the family member who does not ever keep bell peppers in the refrigerator (or anywhere else) because they are not food and have taste cooties.

Such is the mystery of Christmas, for us irreligious types.

Clifton: Hope you feel better soon! Holiday gatherings are pretty nasty for spreading bugs....

I especially liked the way he finished the flourishes into the air.

Thanks for the link. In case I'm not the only one here with Vimeo problems, I'll note that I can get them to run on Safari, but not firefox or IE.

#351 ::: Paula Lieberman:

For what it's worth, I've read about half of Diabetes Rising, a book by a medical journalist with Type 1, and the situation may be a lot more complicated than is commonly thought.

Both types of diabetes have been steadily rising for about a century, and no one is quite sure about what's going on. The book lists about half a dozen theories with their pluses and minuses.

I'm going to post in detail when I've read the whole book and thought about it, but meanwhile you might want to take a look at it.

Anyone have diabetes stats for Australia? I've heard they're comparable to the US, but they use sugar, not HFCS.

You might let your friend Lenore know that RCs have been receiving communion under both species (bread and wine) for decades.

Our choir rocked the house this morning with their traditional recessional: "Jesus -- What a Wonderful Child." I love that song, it makes me want to dance. Alas, dancing in church, even on Christmas morning, is definitely NOT the culture of my parish.

Had to do it all over again this morning, and will be doing so again tomorrow morning. Kind of wish I didn't need to make an appearance at a friend's dinner party. My "Socialize Like An Extrovert" tank is running on fumes right now.

In giftmas news, my mother violated my Secret Santa scheme by actually getting me a gift when she did not draw my name. I am enjoying the massage chair cover almost as much as I enjoyed watching the dog unwrap her presents.

The HTML headers for Making Light all say charset=utf-8, which is why the wonderful range of languages can work. However, some of the older pages are not UTF-8, but seem rather to be Windows-1252. For example, AS bonbons, with the Anglo-Saxon plums in icebox poem.

The "view all by" has something different wrong with it. It seems to render each byte of the original text separately. Look at Xopher's Old Church Slavonic text from Luke, where мѣсѧца comes out as мѣÑѧца. Here м are xD0, xBC, and xD0BC is UTF-8 for 'Cyrillic capital letter em"

If it matters, I'm using Chrome on a Mac, but it shouldn't matter.

• Butternut Squash and Apple Soup (based on recipe from Epicurious, extensively modified);
  
• mashed Okinawan sweet potatoes (the purple kind);
• green beans (maybe amandine, I haven't decided yet);
  
• and a baked potato for the picky one who probalby won't try most of this,

All was, however, not lost; extended family converged on one member's house, gorged on leftover turkey rewarmed and curried, plus veggies and rice, and finally got warm and full.

The WHO site gives figures by country for 2000 (with projections to 2030). That coupled with country population data gives the incidence of diabetes in 2000 of:
USA( 6.25%)
Australia (4.92%)
New Zealand (4.74%).

There are big within-country variations as well. For example, in NZ the Polynesian groups (Maori and Pasifika) have a much higher rate of diabetes than other ethnicities. African-Americans in the US have a higher rate, though not to the same extent. Since recent research (mostly carried out in European-ancestry people) has found quite a lot of genetic variants that affect both Type I and Type II diabetes risk it wouldn't be surprising if part of the differences between ethnic groups was genetic.

Native Americans and Indigenous Australians also have very high rates, though they don't affect the national averages that much, since they are very small minorities.

It would be surprising, though not impossible, for the difference between HFCS and cane sugar to matter much biologically, since cane sugar gets broken down into 50% fructose, 50% glucose before it is absorbed, and HFCS is 55% fructose, 45% glucose. It's conceivable that there could be an effect via changes in gut bacteria, though I don't think anyone has demonstrated this.

I thought the big impact of HCFS was not the specific mixture of sugars but that it was subsidized and therefore in everything. New Zealand's a better comparison for that aspect of it, since all sugar/syrup is imported.

I was recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I am taking classes to learn how to manage it. The educators say that no one knows why diabetes is on the rise: environment (plastics? pesticides?); genetics (they lean a little more toward genetics, at the moment). The first thing they told us was "no one is to blame. There is no shame in it." I'm just sorry I never learned the symptoms, or I would have gone to be tested four years ago, and might not have gotten neuropathy (maybe. Fifty percent of diabetics get neuropathy, I've read. Is it true? Shrug). Many people who end up with diabetes, we are told, have no symptoms at all. Our educators report studies that say by the year 2020, half of all adults will have diabetes.

The only disappointment was the banana butternut buttermilk bundt cake -- try saying that ten times fast -- from an untried recipe. Too dense, too moist, and considerably less flavor than I expected.

Good news was that my left shoulder has recovered sufficiently from its October surgery that I was able to make the dinner without assistance, with only a dull ache in the shoulder thereafter.

Related news: I return to work January 3rd. I'm not emotionally attached to the job or the workplace -- glad I'm missing New Years Eve, since dealing with drunks from the popular new bar at the development where I do security is a fairly regular aspect of the job even on regular weekends -- but it will be good to be getting those paychecks again.

"Good heavens," sez I to meself, "I'm in a proper brontosaurus" (that is, a guhaqre oyvmmneq).

But there were all nine kinds of pie that Harold liked best[1].

We still have some left, too. Pie for breakfast. Yum.

[1] Harold's actual pie preferences were not in fact specified in the book [2], so we went with Sienipiirakka[3], kale quiche, pizza, and six sweet pies[5]: blueberry, cranberry walnut, ginger pear[7], pecan[8], pumpkin, and sour cream apple[7].
[2] Harold and the Purple Crayon
[3] (Finnish) Mushroom Pie[4]
[4] Sundays at Moosewood
[5] Well, two of them [6] were galettes, but that's because I ran out of pie pans.
[6] The blueberry and cranberry walnut
[7] family recipe; I can post or email if anyone wants a copy
[8] The New Basics Cookbook

By the year 2020, half of all adults will have diabetes. Really?? That seems a HUGE number. Is that half of all adults in the US? The West? The world?

I feel exceptionally smug today.

A previous idiot mechanic used the wrong spark plugs on Danielle's car, and cross-threaded one of them and then torqued it in so tight the dealer mechanic couldn't get it out. When we finally got the problem diagnosed, the dealer wanted to remove the cylinder head to get the plug out and re-machine it, and quoted nearly $3000 at the typical excessive rates. Getting that done elsewhere would probably have cost $1500 or so.

I got the plug out without damaging the head using a ratchet, a penetrating oil and percussion, and patience. The cost, including replacing all the plugs: $39.

Mood: triumphant!

Growing up as the eldest with loving but dysfunctional parents (dad with severe depression, mom in the throes of DID) I've gotten really good at managing expectations with my family. After last year's typical Xmas shopping/shipping/making sure everyone's presents are equally valuable nightmare, I mentioned that we might want to do Secret Santa. The "kids" are all gainfully employed adults who can buy things they want on their own. Dad, however, has been unemployed for over a year. Everyone agreed that this would be for the best. Actually, I told them that all I really wanted was a phone call and a Holiday card.

I rigged the Secret Santa drawing so I could get my mom, and bought her two wonderful and very well-thought-out gifts in Poland on my October vacation. I gave those gifts to Dad when we flew into Chicago on the way back. He promptly told me he'd hid them in the garage and mom would never look there.

About two weeks ago I emailed my dad requesting that he wrap them in a particular way, and he said he was planning on it, and mom was really going to love Item A. Last week I got a frantic email from my SiL, who had drawn my name, telling me guiltily that my gift was going to be late, and would I forgive her. I didn't mind at all because my apartment is full, dammit, and I'm a grown up who buys what she needs and also I was mostly looking forward to my mom's reaction to her gift. About that same time, I learn that my sister and her spousal equivalent were going to fly out and my Mom was going to give her a surprise baby shower, at which point it was too late for me to purchase a gift for said sister. I called my mom and asked her to save the Polska onesie I bought for the impending offspring for the Shower. I repeat this several times. Mom tells me that she has contravened standard Secret Santa protocol and sent me a small gift.

Well, Saturday comes and I call to wish my family a Merry Christmas and to thank my parents for the delightful if unnecessary gift. No one calls me back. No one emails.

I got a call after mass this afternoon to wish me happy holidays. Mom says everyone loved the baby thing. We chat for a few minutes and I ask how she liked hers. She tells me she didn't get anything. I ask my dad what happened and he says, "Well, I didn't draw her in the Secret Santa". I remind him that it was from me and he said he'd wrap it. He tells me I never sent him anything. I bring up our conversation when I visited after Poland. I tell him we discussed this two weeks ago over email. He says he has no memory of this, but agrees to look in the garage. He comes back shortly and says he didn't find it, but the car's parked in such a way that he couldn't access half the garage. He will look harder after he moves the car - not that there is any pressing need to move the car until fishing season starts up again. He'll get to it later. Mom pretends that nothing's wrong with everyone gathering around the tree and opening presents except for her.*

Just goes to show that every time I try to lower the bar, my parents just limbo right under it. That not one of my requests was honored really irritates the crap out of me. I hate being ignored. I have to remind myself that sometimes actions that look grossly inconsiderate are actually the product of mental illness.

* she did get a stocking - Dad stuffed it. She complained to me that it was full of candy. She had a lap-band installed last spring. Thanks dad!

It seems that yesterday, I "forgot" it was the anniversary of my Dad's death. Even when my sister and stepmother called me, I was pleased that they called, but didn't remember why they both would call that day.... I scare-quote "forgot" because I'm sure the subconscious awareness contributed to my flakiness over the past few days, especially as I woke up this morning remembering it....

Oddly, I think this is a good thing... after 11 years, I'm finally recovering from him dying just as I was starting to get to know him properly. It's not that I've forgotten him -- but these days, I'm liable to think of him when I look in a mirror. (Yeah, serious resemblance. I still have my beard in about the same style, though I also keep a mustache.) But his death isn't haunting me anymore, as I'm rebuilding my own life. And in the meantime, his namesake nephew is reading the Percy Jackson books and (thanks to Yours Truly) Rick Brant, shooting off model rockets, and (this weekend) skiing with his father's family in Utah. Life moves on....

Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't bother. Thanks for reminding me why I do. :->

http://www.expatica.com/es/leisure/arts_culture/Introducing-the-Caga-Tio-_15179.html

(I am considering Googling how to install a dishwasher body valve myself. Should really have washed the dishes as we went along, but too late now.)

This is one of those facts-that-isn't, and manages to be both mostly-false and confusing.

World sugar prices (YE2008) were roughly 0.15 per pound; HFCS 0.25 per pound; US sugar prices, 0.35 per pound.*

The US sugar tariffs make HFCS cheaper than US-priced sugar, but HFCS is more expensive, not cheaper, than sugar at world prices. It's a subsidy-in-a-way to corn producers and processors, but it does NOT make sugar/HFCS cheaper to consumers.

8Rounded figures, from the USDA

I gave it the steam-roast treatment for the first hour, then cover-off normal roasting. Prick the skin all over to help with the fat removal, and rub with salt/pepper/stuff. My rub very basic: salt pepper lemon-pepper thyme.

It was really good, and now entirely gone.

Husband braves weather to shovel front walk, declares about one foot accumulation; cats have no comment.

"Shouldn't have let him stick his tongue in my ear," she said of a former boyfriend. When asked for clarification, she explained that a course of antibiotics six months ago seemed to solve the problem. "But that was clearly just temporary," she laments. "Another round of antibiotics?" she responded, when asked about her plans. "I don't know. It didn't work the first time, and I don't want to breed some horrible super-bug." She adds, "The worst part is listening to my pulse. All day."

In other medical news, aside from a spectacular scar, local guinea pig boar appears fully recovered from his double-mastectomy. "Girls!" he says, when asked about the experience. "Girls are great! More girls!"

Visibility reduced to 6 inches; window screen full of blown snow. Further weather reports based on internet rumor and innuendo. Feline population unimpressed, lounging.

I still want to know if the 10% applies to all adults in the Us, in the world -- what. One in ten is better than one in two, surely, but it's still a big number.

As the bi-polar daughter of a profoundly depressed parent, let me thank you for your consideration. The knowledge that Dad has not only chemical issues to deal with, but situational ones as well (he's been an architect for 35 years, but has only found work as a seasonal retail grunt this November) is all that kept me from just. going. off. Luckily the cell phone cut out right when I was about to freak out about not being listened to.* I was able to take a breath and calm myself before they called back. I saved my main ire for the internet.

David @ 522 - there wasn't any alcohol involved; Dad's a pretty devout, if liberal, Mormon. The only drugs involved would be whatever head meds that I'm sure he's taking as prescribed. Come to think of it, I'll bet he's on the combo of meds that he took after his mother died; he had the same flat affect when I spoke with him yesterday.

I'm thinking of trying to enlist my brother and SiL's help with the search of the garage; one of the things I got for my mom was a gorgeous carved triptych of the Nativity (her cat's methodically taken out a Wise Man, Joseph and most recently the Baby Jesus of her current Nativities) and I hate to think she won't get it until the spring thaw.

* I'm wondering if I should see a shrink about the perfectionism that leads to underachievement, and my absolute out-of-proportion reactions to not being listened to, both of which seem to have triggered in a big way this week.

I wonder if the Caganer custom is related? It's also Catalan. Besides the traditional peasant, you can buy various political figures as Caganers, including Obama. It's supposedly not meant as any kind of insult.

Brother has agreed to help search the garage, and indicates that he hopes the gifts did not get thrown out when Dad did his latest garage clean-up.

What I Learned From This Incident:

Not to expect my parents to behave as grown-ups.

(I also got an iPad [which completed my initiation into the iBorg], but let's be real about which is awesomer.)

HFCS is cheaper in the US than it naturally would be, because of corn subsidies. It's true that it still wouldn't be cheaper than sugar if it weren't for the import tariffs that raise the US price of sugar to prop up Florida sugar production.

You know, this is a True Thing. Having read Gladwell's Outliers, I am now formally attempting to put in my 10k hours on my drawing. Now pondering how to develope a support structure. (Tough, since I tend to be very much the lone wolf by nature.)

But at least I am finally of an age where I can at least admit the possibility that having more people in my life, modulo Diatryma's operator.

Bring your own air? Oh, you meant helpful hints....

There's a broader lesson, too. Age is no guarantee of maturity. Also, some people are selfish when they're young because...well, it's (sometimes) part of being young. Some are selfish because they're basically, fundamentally, deep-rootedly selfish, and they don't outgrow that.

Oh! Yes, do! ('Course, seein' as this was last week....)

But I think perhaps the next time I'm here, which will perhaps be at a warmer time of year, I'll rent a car and be independent for a while. ALL BY MYSELF YAY.

Great! Thank you!

::curtsies:: Always happy to corrupt help.

OK, heres the thing: I've been profoundly depressed (in a prior life, I founded one of the first E-mail support groups for depression). My family was remarkably supportive, and screwing up or blowing off my own gift for someone would have been eminently forgivable. But if I'd told someone else, that their gift, placed in my care, could wait 'till the season changed, they'd damn well have set my hair on fire! For that matter, sometimes "being there" for my family was the only thing that kept me going....

With that out of the way, a more medical comment: "flat affect" means your dad's meds are at best half-working. That's not going to auto-correct, so tell your Mom to get him back to the doctor for a dosage boost or other adjustment.

Just this morning was reading Gut bacteria reflect dietary differences.

So appropos of this, what the hell do we do?

Soon Lee @506 links the WHO site for diabetes per country, with populations.

I've been wondering for years whether people might need to eat insects-- we presumably did so for most of our evolutionary history.

We took her to the vet today; she's got the sneezles, a bit of conjunctivitis in one eye, and various internal and external parasites, but for a foundling she's in fairly good health and the FeLeuk/FIV test came back negative. We're treating the medical issues, because our isolation chamber is the front bathroom (aka the one with the working shower) and we'd like to be able to bring her out into the rest of the house, but not at the risk of our current cats.

We'd greatly prefer to re-home this one if possible. Sunfall is a diva who tends not to take well to other females, and three cats is enough, really. I'm willing to drive up to 6 hours to make delivery, and also to pay for having her spayed when she's old enough. Any interest?

I'm in Kansas City, MO.

If this fails, we are also seeking the local Web of cat charities because we are seeking One Good Calico gal of young years.

We weren"t totally seeking a kitten because we tend to have cats for 20 years. But we could make an exception....

Now I have the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography to read. I'm about 50 pages in, and should be done with the introduction any day now. Note to self: see about the online text and whether it can be put on my e-reader.

I haven't had kittens in the house for more than 17 years, and now I'm rediscovering why cats are better...but we are enjoying their energy and watching them amuse themselves. Even the dogs are somewhat bemused by them.

We met my friends, K __ and J__, for lunch
And they tease us successfully, making us blush
Together, which we attempt to quench,
Or blame on the fire, but soon enough we hush
Because it is all in good fun and good spirits
Between friends, and we deserve a little teasing
For all our carrying on does have its limits,
And although outside it’s bitterly freezing
The warm fire keeps us cozy without getting hot
While the conversation ebbs and flows easily around
The various topics that friends would like more than a passing shot
From the new girlfriend who does not back down
But meets their gambits head on and replies
In such a way that she makes them into allies.

Thank you for your perspective, especially regarding the "flat affect". I'll see if I can get ahold of my mom and get her to check on dad's meds/therapy. How much she is willing or able to push is questionable, but she might need to hear someone else say that Dad's behaving a little erratically.

Xopher and David H -

Thanks for calling my Dad names. I feel guilty thinking he's being a prize dupek, but I'm really relieved to hear my opinion of his bozosity confirmed by those unaffected, if that makes any sense.

Also, next year's xmas? I'm going out of town with my roommate and dog, and everyone's getting the Uncle Crapper Gift Crapping Log referred to Stefan Jones at 525.

It would be surprising, though not impossible, for the difference between HFCS and cane sugar to matter much biologically, since cane sugar gets broken down into 50% fructose, 50% glucose before it is absorbed, and HFCS is 55% fructose, 45% glucose. It's conceivable that there could be an effect via changes in gut bacteria, though I don't think anyone has demonstrated this.

The processing in the body "breaking down" "fructose" before it "gets absorbed" is a key consideration.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100322204628.htm

High Fructose Corn Syrup Linked to Liver Scarring, Research Suggests
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2010) — High fructose corn syrup, which some studies have linked to obesity, may also be harmful to the liver, according to Duke University Medical Center research.

We found that increased consumption of high fructose corn syrup was associated with scarring in the liver, or fibrosis, among patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)," said Manal Abdelmalek, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology/Hepatology at Duke University Medical Center

And Archer-Daniel Midland, looking out for its profits:

Editor's Note: In response to the above-mentioned study, the Corn Refiners Association issued a statement titled "Flaws in Duke University Statement About High Fructose Corn Syrup" (http://www.corn.org/duke-statement-flaws.html). This link is provided for information only -- no editorial endorsement is implied.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090303123802.htm

i>Missing Link Between Fructose, Insulin Resistance Found/i>
ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2009) — A new study in mice sheds light on the insulin resistance that can come from diets loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in most sodas and many other processed foods. The report in the March issue of Cell Metabolism also suggests a way to prevent those ill effects.
....
There has been a remarkable increase in consumption of high-fructose corn syrup," said Gerald Shulman of Yale University School of Medicine. "Fructose is much more readily metabolized to fat in the liver than glucose is and in the process can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease," he continued. NAFLD in turn leads to hepatic insulin resistance and type II diabetes.

This year, perhaps as the start of a new serial, he also gave me the first of Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise novels. He was worried I might already own it, which in fact I do, but my old copy has a cover I wouldn't want to be seen dead with, so I was pleased with his present anyway. I think he would have taken my word for it, but on a subsequent meeting I showed him my old copy, just to be sure, and he was suitably appalled.

There's actually a site with a Modesty Blaise Covers section, which makes it easy to realize how badly we're doing. Huh, I see that Souvenir Press did relatively recent editions that mostly use the original covers; some of those weren't there last I looked, I don't think.

But I love the books!

Slippers.
The 2nd "Quatermass" miniseries.
The biography of actor Robert Ryan.
The DVD of "Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-sec".

In fact, it was the Souvenir Press new-edition-with-original-cover that he gave me. (The copy I owned already has one of the really awful Pan covers - as opposed to one of the merely somewhat awful Pan covers.)

Like Cazaril, I wish to compose sonnets
About body parts of my beloved, but unlike his
I start by comparing her eyes to the Donets
(A river flowing through Western Ukraine, which is
Her birthplace, although now her home can be found
In Central Maryland, surrounded by hills and farms,
And small towns.) About her eyes I would expound
At length, if I but had the words to include the charms
That they hold; to describe them as dark
Is to fail at capturing the essence that shines forth
With its own charm like an up or down quark,
Along with the humor that brings great mirth
And merriment. We laugh together as I look deep
Into her eyes, and know that this one I want to keep.

Also, she wishes me to know that her river is the Prut, but I claim poetic license on that.

(I'm so happy for you both! Yay for love!)

There are various species available in multiple seasonings and confections in the sweet shop down the street.

Janet Brennan Croft @557: I don't think I could take a running-around one. I may have to start looking at ferrets.

Yeeek!! Have you spent much time with ferrets? If not, pleeeeeeze do so before taking one on. Ferrets make hyper-Touretic cats look comatose, by comparison. They're like two-year-old humans that never grow up. Ferrets are the mil-spec "running around" pet.

Janet, #557: I second what Jacque says about ferrets. They are NOT the pet you want if you need to keep it in a cage! Friends who have owned ferrets talk about "ferret-TV", meaning that they are much more lively and interesting to watch than most of what's on the tube. Check out the small rodents instead.

A Modesty trivium: the stories in PIECES OF MODESTY were originally published as separate sections in an Australian newspaper, with a little puzzle so that one could win some money. I've only ever seen one set of these, and I'm fortunate enough to own it now. I still love the stories myself, though they're a bit dated. As for movies, Serge: the 2002 MY NAME IS MODESTY is a movie I can wholeheartedly recommend to fans of MB, it being set in the Louche Gang days before she met Willie (apparently they couldn't find an appropriate person to cast for the part). But it's got the right feel and doesn't put its feet badly wrong. I need to find my copy and watch it again.

BTW, speaking of books: I stayed up late last night finishing Michael Lewis's The Big Short. OMG. Wonderful, and terrifying.

I enjoyed The Big Short, but I think in the end I prefer Liar's Poker. Much of that, I think, is because of the ages that he was when he wrote them.

Liar's Poker is a coming-of age narrative, since Lewis himself was doing just that as the events of the book took place. And in many ways, the situation that both books describe was doing the same thing: growing up, growing in complexity, becoming established.

The Big Short is more a narrative of middle adulthood, both of Lewis and of Wall Street. And though it's a true narrative (as far as I am aware), I found it a harder book to read.

Which book? Ah, the one she insists I am writing, of poetry. Besides, she was right: I am up to sonnet number 10 -- we each missed one and I found the last one, which was really the first one.

I would have written another one today, but got called into an emergency surgery, and now have to finish up the routine daily reports before I head home.

But I really like Modesty and Willy and their friends, and I don't mind the near-superhero abilities of Modesty and Willie because they make it so clear that they worked hard to learn them; they weren't just handed them.

The processing in the body "breaking down" "fructose" before it "gets absorbed" is a key consideration.

Umm. No.

There isn't any real doubt that fructose has effects which glucose doesn't have. I'm well aware of this. I see the research presented at conferences. My point is that the fructose in sucrose should have the same effect as the fructose in HFCS. The liver sees roughly equal fructose and glucose mixtures in either case, because sucrose is broken down into fructose and glucose by sucrase in the gut.

There are good reasons to think that HFCS^* is worse than ordinary pure-glucose corn syrup. What's much more dubious is that HFCS is significantly different from cane sugar. That would take a much more complicated mechanism, and a fairly implausible one.

Contrast this with lactose intolerance, where there is a difference between lactose and a glucose/galactose mixture because many adults don't produce the enzyme needed to break down lactose, but the gut bacteria do. We know this sort of thing doesn't happen with sucrose because the effects would be pretty obvious. What's just about conceivable is that something much more subtle happens that makes HFCS and sucrose different. I'm not aware of any evidence at all that this happens, but it isn't impossible.

----
^* and, to an even greater extent, agave syrup, which has rather higher fructose concentrations.

Nope, endangered species protection. Yay Russians!

Knowing there is a group set up to protect Amur tigers in Russia is a big deal. it makes me a little less afraid for their survival.

Thanks for the reference.

I bet I can name, within two guesses, the tannery where he got that goatskin. I'd give it a 75% chance that it's Harmatan in Northhamptonshire, even though I am fonder of my old local tannery, Hewit's.

Neither is in London; if the skins were flown in from there, then he must have ordered them through Shepherd's. Though if he's ordering from a reseller, why didn't he use Talas, which is American?

Which is to say, there are so few bookbinding leather suppliers anywhere that even I can name the entire supply chain of vegetable-tanned goatskins.

Well, yes, the Pan Art Department had some pretty terrible thinking going on. As I said, missing the point big-time.

The first book was a novelisation of the movie, and my recollection is that the black catsuit and the pose on that cover are pretty directly from that.

There's some commentary on the assorted movies here, with various images, and the black catsuit does appear occasionally in the comics. But it's a bit like the default image of Emma Peel, although the TV series credits make the look far more crucial.

And besides, there's always The Queen of Sin and the harem-girl episode.

Okay, then you would know what you'd be getting into. Whew!

I'm a little extra twitchy on the subject since, for a long time, a friend of mine was Colorado Ferret Rescue, and far too many of her residents were alumni of households that had no clue what they were getting themselves into.

Being properly credentialed Weasel People, then, you might enjoy this.

My brother found Mom's Xmas gift in the garage rather easily ("I just thought, where would Dad put this where Mom wouldn't see it, but where I wouldn't forget it...") and Mom called to exclaim her appreciation of said gifts - one of which is a lovely hand-carved Nativity triptych, which is neeful, as her cat has been systematically abusing members of her current Nativities.

What's going on with Dad, who worked a double-shift yesterday because he agreed to "switch shifts" with someone who didn't bother to check that day's schedule, has yet to be determined.

nerdycellist, #608: Glad you got at least that much of the mess straightened out. Also, a thought on why you might have such a strong over-reaction to "not being listened to": to be ignored is to be put into an inferior position, told that your words aren't worth consideration. This happens in a lot of contexts, but I suspect that the important one here is "parents who don't listen to children". How many times, when you were growing up, did you try to tell your parents something important and have them completely ignore every word you said -- and then blame you for "not having told them" when things went south? That sort of thing tends to leave one with very strong triggers around the behavior in question. Every time someone doesn't listen to what you're saying, it bounces you right back to that kid who knew there was going to be trouble and couldn't do anything about it.

"Yes, I did call you a weasel, but in a good way."

:-)

How many times, when you were growing up, did you try to tell your parents something important and have them completely ignore every word you said -- and then blame you for "not having told them" when things went south?

Well.

It might be a shorter list if I pointed out the few times I was listened to. (although I would have a hard time defining "important" as it applied to my life.)

I always assume I don't have anything to post on the annual Dysfunctional Families thread, but I guess I'm wrong. Glad my siblings are able to help out though. For having some semi-functional parents we seemed to grow up fairly self-sufficient.

nerdycellist: I'm glad things worked out to the extent that they are.

Obviously there are some threads, such as Why We Immunize, where doing that would be a poor idea; but by shutting down ancient Open Threads and things like outdated current-events threads, we would gradually reduce the availability of spam targets on the blog overall.

Close old threads and have an occasional catch-all "old business" thread (or simply use open threads for the purpose). If an old thread really hots up, then... perhaps it can be reopened? I don't know how that part works. If it doesn't, then make a sequel thread with an appropriate title and a note directing to the old one. I'd expect that the more threads remain open, the more work it might be to run around killing the spam, but again: What do I know? And when did I know it? Why am I holding this knife?

And while I'm suggesting things, I suggest everybody who reads this send a dollar to me, at this address...

In their place, my initial algorithm would be to close threads that fit any two of the three: Already have sequel/followup threads (including N-1 Open Threads), more than a year old, and OP detached from current events (which would buff most of Jim's "Preparedness" threads).

Then of course, I'd be prepared to make exceptions based on judgment and common sense, and/or to add followup threads as needed.

http://www.amazon.com/Rescue-Ferrets-Sea-Richard-Bach/dp/0743227506

Emma Peel wearing a cat suit: why ask why?

Emma Peel's first series had a US title sequence, all episodes, with the black catsuit. But it didn't appear in-story until the fourth. And I think it started with Cathy Gale, before that. The in-story black cat-suit was supplanted in later series, and I've seen a variety of explanations. Perhaps Diana Rigg was a bit more flexible, and seams would split. Perhaps it was the switch to colour.

I've not seen the department-store episode but the catsuit there, according to report, was part of a promotional-model outfit: Mrs. Peel was dressed to sell a sci-fi toy of some sort.

I don't think it was flexibility: Honor Blackman was flexible enough to write a book on self defense, but (as I have mentioned before) they switched to leather clothing for her (I gather the most infamous item was a dress) after she threw a stuntman in the series and the bottom spilt out of her pants. On live TV. Anyway, they kept that in mind when doing outfits for Mrs. Peel at the beginning: I suspect you're right about color being the main reason for the varied catsuits (or Emma Peelers as they were called at the time), along with stretchier fabrics to take the demands of any throws/falls/etc.

Excerpt:

The truth, however, is that everyone must favor the "redistribution of wealth" at some point. This relates directly to the issue of education: as the necessity of doing boring and dangerous work disappears--whether because we have built better machines and infrastructure, or shipped our least desirable jobs overseas--people need to be better educated so that they can apply themselves to more interesting work. Who will pay for this? There is only one group of people who can pay for anything at this point: the wealthy.

To make matters more difficult, Americans have made a religious fetish of something called "self-reliance." Most seem to think that while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these opportunities. This is, without question, a false view of the human condition. Consider the biography of any "self-made" American, from Benjamin Franklin on down, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make, and of which he was a mere beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. Consequently, no one is responsible for his intelligence, range of talents, or ability to do productive work. If you have struggled to make the most of what Nature gave you, you must still admit that Nature also gave you the ability and inclination to struggle. How much credit do I deserve for not having Down syndrome or any other disorder that would make my current work impossible? None whatsoever. And yet devotees of self-reliance rail against those who would receive entitlements of various sorts--health care, education, etc.--while feeling unselfconsciously entitled to their relative good fortune. Yes, we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can--but it seems only decent at this moment to admit how much luck is required to succeed at anything in this life. Those who have been especially lucky--the smart, well-connected, and rich--should count their blessings, and then share some of these blessings with the rest of society.

Anyway, not my decision.

If I don't have a chance to post again this weekend, I wish you all a very happy and healthy New Year!

Enjoy the weekend, and happy New Year! Do try to get some time outdoors on your winter sports weekend. It's kind of traditional.

Thanks again for the DVD of "Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-sec".
I haven't watched it yet, but will soon.

I set up its screen saver to kick in after 5 minutes of inactivity. The way to do this was pretty obvious, even for Windows 7. Or so I thought, excerpt that the screen saver isn't coming up. Any idea what step I might be missing?

Found the http://www.diabetesatlas.org site which has current diabetes data by region (and country): North America & Caribbean, Western Pacific etc.

I only do this when a thread comes to my attention due to spam; there are a lot of threads here, and checking each one (then checking it again in a week or a month, then checking again...) would be time consuming.

[Various things.... there are also considerations that when people ingest -stuff- the -stuff- is rarely pure anything.... some stuff is indigestible unaccompanied by other stuff. Some things have highly non-linear responses.... people can die from drinking too much water, eating predator liver in quantities which vitamin poisons with some vitamin or other, die from too much beta carotene (someone turned bright orange and died from being a habittal drinker of a gallon or more of carrot juice a day...)... there was a medication which a company developed that blocked allergic effects of eating up to half a peanut by people deathly allergic to peanuts (but a drug company which was funding the company which developed it, was working on its own medication, and kept the investee's newly certified drug off the market.... )
(Anyway, there can also be trace chemicals which the presence or absence of, can make a huge difference in biochemical effects... for that matter, how much study I wonder has there been done on looking at the effects of varying the ratios of fructose and glucose.... and then there is Monsanto's latest questionble living through chemistry product, Aspartame PLUS hazarous to health chemical sweetener http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/monsantos-neotame-molecule-allowed-in-usda-certified-organic-foods/

(Aspartame is wonderful [sarcasm] stuff, Ted Atwood tells me it breaks down into stuff which includes formaledhyde....]

"gut bacteria" are down in the INTESTINES, after the food's gone -through- the stomach!

Googling time
fructose stomach
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010/10/kids-with-unexplained-stomach-pain-may-have-fructose-intolerance.html

Kids with Unexplained Stomach Pain May Have Fructose Intolerance

Teen girls most effected by the digestive disorder
10/18/2010 | Sara Huffman | ConsumerAffairs.com Children with unexplained, recurring stomach pains could haven intolerance to fructose, a new study finds.

Googling on
fructose liver

...American College of Gastroenterology's (ACG) 75th Annual Scientific meeting in San Antonio, Texas, the study, "Fructose Intolerance/Malabsorption and Recurrent Abdominal Pain in Children," investigated a total of 245 patients with unexplained chronic abdominal pain (alone or associated with constipation, gas or bloating and/or diarrhea) and found 132 to have a sensitivity the monosaccharide.

The patients ranged in age from 2 to 18 years old, with a median age of 11. 150 of the 245 patients were female.

....All of the 132 patients with a positive BHT for fructose had a nutritional consult with a registered dietician and were placed on a low-fructose diet. Using a standard pain scale for children, 88 of the 132 patients (67.7 percent) reported resolution of symptoms on a low-fructose diet.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC425376/pdf/jcinvest00138-0019.pdf

As has been pointed out, the sucrose gets split in the intestine, so the stomach doesn't get exposed to fructose from that source. On the other hand, since fructose is the sugar in fruit...

What I wonder is whether the industrial food business is using far more sugar than human evolution ever had to adapt to. It's not the HFCS that's the problem, it's the excessive use of all sugars.

(loosely to a tune of a particular Jack Hardy song I can't remember then name of)

Old threads, old threads
Left open through the years
As the comments on them wax and wane.

Forgotten bites and sentiments
And the range of thoughts from wise to inane

From the dust of yesteryear's thoughts
To where are today
What next comes, who can say?

Dave, #638: I don't think there's any adjustment made for the difference in sweetness. I've had a couple of friends who were raised overseas mention that when they first came to America, everything -- most notably desserts, but other things as well -- seemed almost sickeningly sweet by comparison with what they were used to.

Nasty things about a lot of studies is that they ignore -systems--type considerations.... few things are "independent", but studies often don't even bother considering "might there be dependencies, what might they be, and how can we address studying them?"

Stupid made-up example on the spur of the moment: studying fatalities in crosswalks WITHOUT also looking at where, where, time of day and year, conditions [rain/show/clear/heavy traffic/no traffic], it is at a light, is the light -working- etc. ?

One of the most extreme cases of "average doesn't tell the story" I dealt with involved use of barcode printig.... the US Postal Service probably dwarfs every other organization in the world in using barcode.... it prints/reads billions of them per year. Putting the USPS into the data dramatically skews the average. I created some charts which showed just how far off the average without the USPS data, was from the average with the USPS data.

That sort of skewing can occur in biological systems. The human body is extremely complex and has biochemical and biomechnical and even bioelectronic operations and control systems. And the input can -overload= the control and processing systems, and there are inputs which can literally fatally poison it.... the processing can't compensate or compensate fast eough, to not die or be otherwise fatally compromised.

In autoimmune diseases, the control system and processing can't sufficiently compensate to prevent the disease or do all that well containing damage from it.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has named Richard Thompson to the 2011 Honours List as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Well done, sir, and may you and we continue to enjoy the honour and the reason for it for many years!

I'm pretty sure that's mixed up--HFCS is designedly the same sweetness as sucrose. I think the 128% is relative to regular corn syrup.

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

Another such flash mob drew so many well-intentioned people that the mall suffered structural damage.

And, everyone else, to you too.

Lee @610: broken link

Unsurprising, as that page is ancient.

Erik Nelson @621: ferret rescue?

Hm. Being rescued by any of the ferrets I knew seems a dubious proposition at best. It would seem far more likely that they'd just be saving me for later. Dessert, maybe.

HLN: Guinea pig notices heat come on, puzzled by sound and interesting-smelling breeze. Local human puzzled as to why this is worthy of note.

2010 has been kind of a weird year for me - though I'm not sure I could express just how - but I seem to be in a good frame of mind as it winds down. I wish you one and all an unambiguously positive 2011.

Good link. The comments depress me, though.

How quickly discussions of "us" turn into discussions of "them", or over-narrowings of the boundaries "us"-ness.

It amuses me that when I check the spam filters on my email, Gmail's link targetting protocols suggest a bunch of recipes for spam (including, today, spam primavera, spam imperial tortilla sandwiches,and spicy spam kabobs). Has anyone ever found a use for any of these (other than posting them on Daily Kos back in the days when this was a recommedned way of dealing with trolls over there)?

Met with an old friend in serious shape who I believe will clearly benefit from the new health insurance rules . . . but he's worried about Death Panels.

May the new year find the management of Fox News afflicted with anal boils.

Five and Under.

Kind of the next step up from a Dollar Tree.

Instead of B-movies and forgotten TV shows, the DVD section has two or three year old movies.

The game section had a few "German" board games on closeout . . . probably sold for $30 originally.

I picked up a neoprene sleeve for my no-name-brand tablet computer. $5.00.

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about black people. Outside of his family, he didn’t care about people, and Billy Graham taught him that ‘we cannot earn God’s love through good deeds’ – only through His grace, which Bush knew he had already received.

It has been 2011 for about an hour, here. Looking good so far.

Happy new year, everybody!

Happy new year to all the wonderful people of the fluorosphere!

Cough, cough.

An early and heartfelt Happy New Year to all the folks on Making Light.

(To those who can't make it, happy new year anyway!)

"It's Life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it."
- from Startrekking Across the Universe

And Annie Lennox is made an OBE (for working against HIV in Africa, not singing), and David Suchet a CBE.

Happy New Year, all! I've still got about 12 hours to go, so I'll see you in 2011 then.

...insurance, an irresistable craving for vindaloo curry, and no toilet paper within a thousand miles softer than 40 grit emery cloth.

(FX: wanders off humming "Ring of Fire" softly to himself.)

My nieces just made two pans of double-layer mint/chocolate fudge under my instruction.

And I am about to put four episodes of Doctor Who on their laptop.

[twirls moustache]

Would that I had been so corrupted by an uncle like that. (Of course, I had no uncles at all, so I'm not comparing.) Long may your moustache flourish!

Only going forward 'cause we can't find reverse.

Abi@598: "even I can name the entire supply chain of vegetable-tanned goatskins." - and dried dragon skins as well...

I think we're to bed now.

I think I found this here last year, so it feels right to link it back again.

May it be a happy, healthy and peaceful year for us all.

Someone on another website, commenting from Australia earlier in the diurnal cycle, said "It's already 2011 in the Southern Hemisphere!" *facepalm*

˙ןnɐd-

¡uɐɟǝʇs ooʇ noʎ oʇ ɹɐǝʎ ʍǝu ʎddɐɥ ˙dn ǝpıs ʇɥbıɹ ǝɥʇ ǝʇıɹʍ oʇ ɐıןɐɹʇsnɐ uı ǝןdoǝd sʍoןןɐ ʇɐɥʇ ʎboןouɥɔǝʇ ʇsɐǝן ʇɐ ɹo

He's on vacation down under . . .

Don't forget, if second-hand copies are proving difficult or expensive to get hold of, that Baen is in the middle of bringing the main sequence back into print.

Which two was it?

It doesn't make much difference to me.

Be careful when ordering any books, because many of those now being produced collect two or three of the original books together, so there's a risk of buying the books stand-alone then buying the same books again. I discovered these back when the first three novels came out (late 1980s) and then a few years ago rediscovered the expanded series.

Dcb@692: Thanks!

When she loaned them to me, my friend mentioned that the authors had made poor choices in publishers, and the books are very hard to find. I'm relieved to hear that Baen is involved now. Thet are a known quantity in publishing, and I'll be passing them along to her.

By the way, what's with ML's squeezed-up text?

NYC is still a mess of unshoveled snow and the slop that is melting under it. The car has a good parking space until Monday. We may well see in the first dayclear of the New Year as I saw the last dayclear of the old year: Got out 9 double-spaced yesterday before heading out to the traditional NY's Eve haitian vodún celebrations with dear friends. Those pages need re-writing, re-organization and re-moval of waddage, and they are calling with a very loud voice.

Love, C.

(and many more, all at least as happy)

And many more.

And many returns of the sun to your day.

Craigslist is a great service. But the people who shop on Craigslist... pretty much suck.

I've been working on our friend Anne's estate, and tried putting some of her furniture on Craigslist for sale about a month ago.

This is not cheap, flimsy, particle board stuff, but good, sturdy, solid wood furniture dating from about the 1950's. Stuff that's already served several generations, and will easily serve several generations more, and more after that, for anyone who buys them.

I priced them at what I considered outrageously low prices. What I've found is:

1) No matter how low you price something on Craigslist, people who respond to your ad want to pay less. A lot less. They don't really want to see your stuff on Craigslist; they want to see it on FreeCycle.

2) People who email about wanting to look at the stuff, when you email back, nine times out of ten will never contact you again.

3) People who actually make an appointment to see the items will, nine times out of ten, never show up.

At this point, I've decided to contact some of the local estate-auction companies. Trying to sell Anne's stuff myself is just too much hassle.

[/annoyed]

Craigslist varies a lot by area -- in Seattle, it seems to work much better than that, Bruce. Karen's had pretty much excellent experience with it.

Love, C.

* I think that's the right name - release the first chapter; once a certain amount of money has been given, release the next chapter, etc. I think they had enough to finance Fledgling by the time they had released about 12 chapters. Subscribers giving at least $25 got the promise of a signed copy of the book - although sadly my copy of Fledgling arrived with only one signature (Sharon Lee), not two.

It is so tempting to buy junk food. I bought and deliberately chopped up salad fixings so as to guilt myself into including at least that in my meal plans.

Fortunately, the thought of ramen noodles makes my stomach churn right now.

*truffle: contains Oreos, cream cheese, almond bark, and nothing else.

I provided the equivalent of that ham of yours to several people back east; I handed out gift boxes of smoked salmon to relatives.

FWIW, I settled on:

Salad

Rice, with black beans & sausage soup and an added can of black beans on the side.

Corn with chilis.

Almost everything from cans. I have lots of cans I need to work through.

It was a bariatric electric wheelchair/scooter, rated to 450 lbs. I posted the ad, hoping for $1,500 I could give to my friend's daughter. He had passed, and she was looking to liquidate the household stuff so there was less to clean out.

About that same time (but after the ad) I spoke with a co-worker, I had just started working again at the job I still have. She let me know that such things were hard to sell because medicare pays for them new but won't pay for a used one.

The guy, who apparently was using a library computer, told me he was sending the money. Nothing showed up. I wrote a couple times and his emails started getting creepy.

I'm Real Glad I didn't give anything but my email information. I finally told him I considered is emails spam. And if he contacted me further he'd be talking to the police, because he was trying to get me to give personal information after I realized he was just a creep.

How does one deprogramm FuxAddicts from their frozensolid Belief in Fux as Truth--there is a gas station which has it on and the attendants are fully vested in that mindrot bullshit believign everythign else is LYING to them. However can they be redeemed from that insanity?!

#699 etc
Happy Birthday, Patrick! [echoing all the others]

I recommend the estate-auction houses. They come and get the stuff, they are professional, yes they take a cut but it's worth it, and they send you the check within a reasonable amount of time. If you don't want to store stuff, if you really want to simply dispose of it in a respectful fashion, they are an excellent option.

Black eyed peas, cooked with a ham bone (with the difficult bits of ham left on it) which we'd stashed in the freezer this fall until we'd have time to cook beans with it, over brown-rice-medley-plus-the-last-of-the-normal-brown-rice.

Salad including The Last Of The Crumbly Stinky Party Cheese, The Last Of The Black Olives, and Sadly Not The Last Of The Innumerable Clementine Oranges. (See, before the holidays we had got a box of clementines, which we weren't eating fast enough. They went on sale after the holidays and we were given ANOTHER box. Some time this week we're having chicken-and-oranges over rice, and after that I'm at a loss. Suggestions welcome on what to do with about two dozen short-code little bitty oranges.)

And for afters, the last of the peanut butter balls, petits-fours, gingerbread cookies, and chex mix.

Urf.

Tron Legacy (the short version): Needed more light cycles.

Tron Legacy (the long version): Very pretty graphics, 3D was handled very well*. The use of actual UNIX commands (and used for the correct purpose) was an unexpected bonus. No memorable dialog, so in that it was much like the original. Any deeper meaning or social commentary you may think you see is probably there purely by accident. Needed more light cycles.**

*sayeth she who gets headaches from poorly handled 3D.

**I'm hoping they get an extended scene in the Blu-Ray release.

I disagree... there were too many fragments of social or philosophical commentary for it to be accidental. And none of them really came together to form anything. I diagnose too many script rewrites; somebody worked hard to make a great movie, and then it got diced. Probably by forcing in too many light-cycle scenes, honestly.

(I don't know that any version of it *was* a great movie. Only that I can see the symptoms that somebody tried.)

There's a bit of a spectrum on that, and it can show in SF movies, with it being so dependent on ideas. At one end, maybe movies such as Blade Runner, then The Matrix in the middle with its use of the ideas struggling against the action-movie memes, and this movie at the other end, where you can at least see that somebody tried.

Maybe it's a quirk of my thinking, but I tend to look past the spectacle and ask why, or sometimes how. It's partly why I don't watch horror movies, I'm maybe too rational. You see a clip from some Japanese movie, the sort of shock-horror which frightens politicians, and I'm thinking, "Obviously the guy's real leg is under that cloth-draped table." I don't react in the way the film-maker expects.

You think anyone is going to accept a letter of transit in Casablanca at face value, when everyone knows they've been stolen? But that's not what the story is about. Maybe I should fan-fic it with Rick as a skilled forger?

Casablanca gets away with it, partly because of the sort of men that both Rick and Captain Renault are. You watch them walking away into the fog, and you can imagine that Captain Renault has been quietly and deliberately ignoring the obvious for the whole film.

None of us here feel good, but there's a sense of relief that it's all over.

I can anticipate the sympathy from all here. And thanks.

Vera Grace Bell, neé Thompson. b. 1927-03-30 d. 2011-01-03

I/we didn't eat completely unhealthy over the holidays, it was just too much, too often. (Je ne regrette rien!)

My condolences, may all your memories of her be happy ones.

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