Curiously (and I'd love to know the reason why), when Jamaica had its phone system taken over by the Continental Telephone Company in the 1960s, they introduced a standard emergency number: 119. Why they made it the inverse of 911 I do not know. I heard rumours when I arrived on the island that the company had associations with certain ethnically-connected, ahem, social associations in the US. But rumours should not be given credence, should they?

According to Wikipedia, the first organized municipal fire brigade was established in Edinburgh in 1824.

Dare I ask what if anything Conservapedia has to say about that very subject?

Serge #2: For maximum annoyance to Herr Direktor Schlafly, his pet project is best referred to as Conservapaedia, or even better Conservapædia.

I still have my DocWagon card just in case they really open franchises someday.

Two getting-out-of-the-way-of-ambulance stories:

1) Walking through downtown Baltimore, I hear sirens. An ambulance is working its way down a busy street, with a few drivers making half-hearted attempts to clear a path. I am irritated at the lack of effort. "Wow," says my friend visiting from Brooklyn, "cars are actually getting out of its way."

2) I'm taking I-95 into the city; the very long exit ramp is a two-lane parking lot, the product of having the Inner Harbor and the baseball stadium both at the end of it. An ambulance comes up behind us, because the same exit is for Shock Trauma. No way, I'm thinking. But...everybody -- and I mean everybody -- in the right lane pulls over so they're half on the right shoulder and half in the right lane. I was in the left lane, and we all pull over so we're half in the right lane and half in the left lane. The ambulance comes by half on the left shoulder and half in the left lane, and makes slow but steady progress all the way down. I am amazed at seeing well over a hundred cars participate in this effort to get someone to the hospital. I don't know that I'll ever see its like again.

I'm glad that here in Australia, people generally do make an effort to get out of the way of emergency vehicles - at least in Melbourne and Canberra, where I've lived for extended enough periods to notice the pattern.

And if you are ever in the land of Oz and need help, our emergency services number is 000.

Since it came up in the intro:

EMTs, etc. ARE wonderful people. My husband recently had to call 911 on my behalf. (My communication ability at the time pretty much consisted of HrghAARRGH!) They were at my house in 5 minutes-and this was at around 4AM!

So thank you, you wonderful people.

In the DC suburbs, most cars move quickly right and let emergency vehicles go by -- we always have a few [censored] schmucks who then tailgate the ambulance/fire truck to get ahead of traffic.

As a former firefighter (in my misspent yout', as we say), and daughter of still-active firefighters, I salute all emergency workers around the world. Thanks to your hard work, dedication, and tendency to run towards problems, thousands of lives are saved everyday. I raise my bottle of Hook & Ladder beer to you!

Two people have told me that you can tell which kind of Dutch emergency vehicle is sounding its siren by counting the notes.

2 notes = brand·weer (fire brigade)
3 notes = po·li·tie
4 notes = am·bu·lan·tie

I have since seen a police car singing the fire engine song, but it's a nice piece of urban myth.

Been waiting for a new Open Thread to post this:

Fixing the world on $2/day.

"There's this belief that in order to stop poverty, we have to find ways to get people to stop being farmers," she says. "What we need to do is find ways to stop them from being poor farmers."

In Britain, 911 will also connect you to the emergency services. When I was a child, that would take you to recorded cricket scores, but apparently that was confusing for American tourists.

Melissa Mead @ 7... My communication ability at the time pretty much consisted of HrghAARRGH!

Isn't HrghAARRGH where the Holy Grail is supposed to be kept?

Serge @ 12: I thought that was the CamAARRGH...

arwel #13: Wild horses must have dragged that one out of you.

Abi posted: 112 is the Europe-wide emergency telephone number

And, if anybody isn't aware of it - 112 (and 911 actually) can be keyed in on any mobile phone without opening the keypad lock. And you can call it even if you can't connect to "your" network - and even if you don't have a SIM card in at all. (I presume the phone will have to search up a network though).

This means that if you really need to you can borrow a phone, any phone, even though you don't know the user interface for that particular type, punch in 112, and reach emergency services.

(Of course, this also means your phone may call 112 by being jostled in your pocket, but that's just a minor downside.)

Don't post here much, but I'm in full agreement that Jim rocks. :)

In late May my wife was thrown from a horse into a steel fence. Even though this was way out in the boonies, the local ambulance service was there in just a few minutes. Since her injury didn't seem life-threatening at first, the EMTs just C-spined and backboarded her as a precaution and drove off at normal highway speed with me following in the car; halfway to the hospital they suddenly flipped on the siren and sped up to 80mph. That was a scary moment, but I was glad to see other cars actually getting out of the way. Out here in Oregon, people are usually pretty good about that.

Once I got to the hospital (not being willing to drive 80 on an unfamiliar road and possibly make the ambulance come back for a second trip) I discovered that she had a broken pelvis, and that her blood pressure had suddenly taken a sharp drop halfway to the hospital.

Those EMTs saved my wife's life, so I raise a glass to them and all emergency workers everywhere. May you always have what you need to do your jobs, and the respect you deserve!

Re: #12
And now I can't remember how to get there! Darn painkillers. ;)

In the early 90's I was working on a movie in Duluth, MN, so I had a cell phone with a Duluth Area Code. We did the last week of the movie in Northern Maine and there was no reason to change phones.

One night, very late, I stopped for gas at a convenience store on a lonely highway. I pumped my gas and then went inside to pay. There was nobody in the store and one of the aisles had a bunch of merchandise on the floor. I thought something might be up, so I left money on the counter, went outside and dialed 911 on my cell. I couldn't figure out why the 911 operator couldn't figure out where this convenience store was, when finally I realized I was talking to Duluth 911. (Apparently at the time, you were connected by the area code of the phone, not by proximity to a cell tower.)

When we realized what was going on, she put me on hold and then connected me to a Maine State Trooper Barracks. I still have no idea what had actually happened though.

arwel @ 13... I thought that was the CamAARRGH...

I must heard of the place from someone who speaks with a French accent.
Quick! Fetchez la vache!

If you are in the US* and have a cellphone, it's good to program in the local fire and police numbers--emergency and nonemergency--for the cities in which you spend the most time.

Because sometimes cellphone 911 can have a wait time, and if you know you specifically need a particular department (you see a crime in progress, say), you can call them directly.

---------
* or other places where this could be relevant

In reference to the 100 niche search engines particle, here's one that's not on the list: ohnorobot searches transcribed web comics. It's what xkcd uses for its search feature.

Agatha Heterodyne and the Voice of the Castle has finally gotten from the distributor's shipping dock to at least one of the distributees.

There's the bell ringing system that reaches back some centuries in Europe.

Those bell towers were not only to call the community to worship in the local church / cathedral.

Bell ringing, which has been preserved, at least in England, was also signals. Those seemingly funny names given to different rhythms, came from somewhere. Sme of them meant fire disaster! Some signaled flood disaster imminent. And so on.

The church itself was the central gathering place for safety and from which to make sorties to rescue, from which planning to mitigate and so on.

There's a marvelous faded BBC Peter Wimsey from the early 70's that makes this all clear too.

As well as Robin McKinnley, who does do bell ringing these days, and blogs about it.

Love, C.

+++It’s also appropriate to remind everyone reading this that the emergency number, and the services it reaches, are there for a reason. Call them at need, and let the vehicles by if someone else has done so.+++

Just in the last couple of days there's been a bit of a media flap in Australia about "triple-0 taxis". Apparently pensioners, who don't get billed for their ambulance rides, are calling in with chest pains and so forth, riding the ambulance in to the hospital, then telling the paramedics they feel much better now and popping out the door to get their groceries at the shopping district just over the road from the hospital.

I know I should Disapprove of this (assuming it's a genuine problem and not just one or two incidents combined with a slow day at Murdoch Towers), but I couldn't help just a little chuckle when I read the story.

Yay! New Open Thread!

I've had a couple ambulance rides in my time. It's not just the competence of the crews I'm grateful for, but above and beyond that, emergency workers are so calming. One can believe they could fix anything, including the godawful mess I've apparently made of my person, just from the way they move and talk.

Constance @ 24:

Oh yes, The Nine Tailors. I love that book; haven't actually seen the video version though.

Constance@24: I haven't seen the 70's version, but I recall a later version (late 1980's?) which got real bellringers for the necessary scenes.

Debbie #959 in the previous OT:
People seem to be comforted by labels, including diagnoses.

At least part of being comforted is being able to name the enemy. Identifying the problem (provided it is a correct diagnosis) is the first step toward a remedy. There are few things worse than being unwell, yet all the tests keep coming back negative.

abi: Congratulations!

Dave Bell: My sympathies & best wishes on sorting out your mother's medical problems.

Joel Polowin @ 23... I received my copy two weeks ago. And I long ago acquired my very own Trilobite Pin.

Of course, then there's the fake paramedic who got caught working in our town last month.

OK, so I'm having an IM conversation with a friend, and he's watching The Tudors on TV and enjoying it (yeah, I know, I told him so). He sez

i love how the cardinal is so ruthless

Cardinals always are.

That's why they wear red...so the blood of their victims won't show.

And red hats so you can't see where their brains have been taken out and replaced with eldritch creatures of no earthly origin.

And one—only one!—of them wears white. This is because his brain has been removed and NOT replaced. No, for he walks and talks by the power of the Elder Gods themselves, and only Great Cthulhu knows his mind—for it is Cthulhu's own mind! Scream in horror, puny humans! Cthulhu fhtagn!

The dear wife just gave me a Delany moment:

So she's over there scorching her lap working on a massive tome, and she said to me, "I'm beginning to covet that thing we gave mom for her birthday this weekend" (a laptop pad with a built-in fan).

So I say, "Why covet? You've got the keys to their house."

"And I know the security code," she added.

Then I frowned. "You know, it'd cost more to drive there to steal it than it would--"

"--to go buy one," she finished.

"That's kind of sad," I said. "It's like the ending to 'Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones."

Oh, it's a laugh a minute at our house!

deathbird at #6 writes:

> And if you are ever in the land of Oz and need help, our emergency services number is 000.

And threadpropriately enough, 112 will get you emergency services on a mobile, regardless of whether the phone has run out of credit or is SIM locked etc.

Xopher @ 32... Cardinals (...) wicked bad guys

Xopher @ 32, there's a very simple explanation for watching "The Tudors" and enjoying it, and it can be summed up thusly:

Jonathan Rhys Meyers with his shirt off.

sadly, the rest of it got on my nerves enough that I didn't finish watching what was available on DVD from Netflix.

Did anyone else take a couple minutes to realize Rikibeth wasn't talking about the guy from Indiana Jones, LotR, etc? I'm sitting there thinking "I know it takes all types, but seriously, him? With his shirt off??"

Where I live, everyone always pulls over for the ambulance. It's the people who don't pull over for funeral processions that irriate me.

Rikibeth, wouldn't you be better served by watching Certain Scenes from Velvet Goldmine and Match Point?

Jeffrey Smith @ 5

I was in your #2 scenario a few weeks ago. Sitting on the onramp to eastbound 26 in Hillsboro, OR, with the ramp signals on (some days, possibly those whose dates divided by φ are mutually prime with the Euler number of Chtulhu's N-dimensional non-convex hull, which is to say, might as well be random, the ramp signals stay on much later, and I get caught in the ramp on the way home from work). The ramp is about 40 vehicles long, and was packed clear out onto the approach from the road that crosses the freeway just behind the ramp.

I was in the righthand lane about a third of the way in, when I heard a siren and looked in my mirror to see an ambulance trying to get onto the freeway. Everybody in the right lane pulled into the right shoulder and those in the left lane pulled onto the left shoulder, and the ambulance moved down the center of the ramp at about 5 mph average, with the cars behind it pulling back into the lanes neatly and without anyone trying to bump up a spot or two. Looked just like a zipper in operation.

I had an ambulance behind me a few weeks ago. It was two lanes on our side and people were dividing left and right onto shoulders. I was in the left lane and could just pull ahead into a left-turn lane, except the motorcyclist behind me buzzed to my immediate left (car in front of us) and I was stuck further out into the lane than I'd planned or liked. The ambulance blew their horn (maybe because they were passing through an intersection), but I kept thinking "they can't see the motorcycle!"

I haven't had to call the ambulance here in a few years now (used to be once a year, on average), but they usually came with two ambulances and I'd tell them, "I'm large, but I'm not divisible!"

Joel Polowin, #23, what, did they tell us this was out and my ad-blind eyes missed it? Spending more money, I am.

Serge, #30, I have Krosp and chibi Agatha pins, but I like the look of the winged trilobite.

I just got a copy of The Ghost Map from the library, and as Jim Macdonald said in his review at that link, it's fascinating. It makes me want to go find Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography on my shelves to see what he said about the epidemic.

Soon Lee @29 -- oh, absolutely! I've just been involved in cases where there was a lot of pressure to attach a label, which ended up getting in the way of the process of finding useful interventions. And especially in behavioral areas, there are no cut and dried solutions attached to diagnoses.

I've only once needed the ambulance called on my behalf (I was four, it involved about two litres of boiling ater and a spillage, 'nuff said) but have called emergency numbers on the behalf of others a few times.

Once was a car that flipped over the nose end.

Once was a man, sleeping on the street, with his trousers pulled down, in -15°C. The kind people at the emergency services assured me that an ambulance had been dispatched some 10 minutes ago and should be there momentarily (no, there was no ambulance centre any where near, it truly was far from anything else, as it were) and while I was on the phone to them, could I check that he was breathing. He was.

Once I called because I was having water coming down from upstairs and my neighbour was not responding to knocks nor (indeed) had any lights lit. The kind firemen arrived and turned the feed to their washing machine off.

And once, memorably, a sauna burned down, on New Year's Eve. When the fire brigade arrived, the caleld around to other nearby services, because the building was past saving, it was surprisingly quiet for NYE and they wanted all the other firefighters to come out and play.

Good news and bad news.

My mother is OK at the hospital, not wonderful but no need for panic. We'll have more info in a couple of hours, after the Consultant (=senior doctor) has seen her.

Bad news: I'm thinking of buying a ukulele.

46: I can't help feeling those might be connected. "You're buying a ukulele? Aaarrgh..."(collapses on floor)

9 Two people have told me that you can tell which kind of Dutch emergency vehicle is sounding its siren by counting the notes.

Can't look it up at the moment, but it's on YouTube: the English comedian Bill Bailey improvising a French folk song from the four-tone siren of French ambulances...

ajay @47

It could be worse, maybe modern jazz?

Dave Bell - best wishes for your mother, but I'm now imagining you sitting in a hospital waiting room, playing this song.

Lance Weber @ 37... I never thought of the wrong Rhys shirtless. Until now. Thanks a lot.

Marilee @ 42... Didn't the the winged trilobite first show up in the 'imaginary' tale about the Weasel Queen?

#47:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PRyvsRAo8T8

Dave Bell--

You do know that Jeeves left Bertie for a while when Bertie became smitten by the dulcet tones of the banjolele...

and Xopher, @32.

All cardinals *are* evil.

I wish I could find on YouTube that Monty Python skit where Michael Palin is Cardinal Richelieu who participates in a talent show by singing one of Mireille Matthieu's hits.

Whee!

#32 and #33 are wonderful. Thanks for sharing them, I needed a lift.

#46, Dave Bell -

If a ukulele is the bad news, then I'm quite pleased.* My best wishes for continuing good news about your mother.

*I've never seen a ukulele in person. That might be influencing my reaction.

Sarah S @ 53

Are you an anti-ordinal bigot as well?

Serge @ 51: I gather that adding wings to one's coat of arms / sigil may be an indication that one has joined the "Baron's Peace". I've seen some references to this floating around, but I don't know if it's canonical.

Serge:

"And did you persecute the Hugenots?"
"I did that small thing..."

wintermute @11: Not just American tourists, also this expat German, who, under the 'fluence of the movies, wasn't sure about the British emergency number until she read abi's fine thread opener just now.

112 used to be reserved for fire brigade emergency calls, back at home. Wikipedia says it still is. And at the same time the Eurpean emergency number for EVERYTING. Is that odd? Won't that be confusing?

Bruce Cohen @56

I'd second that assumption, but first I must go forth and take the fifth.

The most interesting thing about 112 is that it's the opening of the Fibonacci series.

Pete Darby @ 58... "I have no enemies but the enemies of France."

James 61: The most interesting thing about 112 is that it's the opening of the Fibonacci series.

It's a sequence, actually, but who's counting?

*flees, pelted by rotten fruit*

Xopher @63

Since it's the Fibonacci series, shouldn't you be getting pelted with pinecones instead?

#61, Jim MacDonald.
Yes, that's what I was thinking. For some reason, I often incorporate elements of the Fibonacci sequence in my passwords.
It's been stuck in my mind since I was a little tyke watching Square One on PBS on the tiny black-and-white in my room after school.
To Cogitate and To Serve!

Open threadiness:

About 15 years ago I read a story in OMNI. The premise was, past-life regression was possible and reasonably easy, and one of the manifestations of this was in acting: if you wanted to play Juliet, one of your past lives had to have lived in Renaissance Italy. Macbeth required a past life in ancient Scotland. Etc.

So they want to do a play about Joan of Arc, and there's a famous actress whose past life was a French peasant during the Hundred Years' War slated to play the lead--until a girl shows up who was Joan of Arc. So they cast her instead, and change all sorts of things about the play, essentially rewriting it wholesale, based on how she says things happened. And she sucks, because whether she was Joan or not, she can't act.

I remember neither the name nor the author of the story, but I'd like to read it again.

Anyone?

Bill Bailey claims that French ambulances are actually playing a tune but everyone thinks it just a four note figure because of the speed of the vehicle. His performance of the full version (with lyrics) is on youtube.

38: It's the people who don't pull over for funeral processions that irriate me.

Well, it's not like he's going to get any less dead...

Sarah S @ #64, how about pineapples?

Sarah S @ #64, how about pineapples?

Ken #67:

The Doppler effect should cause the 4-note sequence to change for different observers, too. It will be shifted up or down when it's moving toward/away, and will give more interesting variations when it passes you going fast. (And the speed will matter, too, for how much the tone changes.)

I wonder if you could make an interesting tune just from limited number of tones (sirens, horns, etc.) plus plausible-speed Doppler effect sounds....

Fragano #1:

Wikipedia lists 119 as being common in Asia, as well as Jamaica.

It also gives an explanation for why New Zealand had 111 instead of 999 as its emergency number, having to do with their phones reversing the numbering of the rotary pulse dials, so that 9 gave one pulse, and 1 gave 9 pulses. Apparently, by defining their emergency number as 111, they could use the British equipment designed for intercepting 999 calls and routing them to the emergency operator.

I wonder if the same thing might have happened in Jamaica and Asia, with reusing equipment designed for 911 in the US. Do you remember anything about rotary/pulse dial phones from Jamaica?

Carries S. @ 66:

"With the Original Cast" by Nancy Kress, I think it is.

I did a ride-along with a Berkeley cop a while ago. I asked him about people getting out of the way of emergency vehicles. My perspective, as a pedestrian, bicyclist, and driver here was that people were pretty good about it. His perspective (as someone for whom it was a routine workday event) was that people were terrible.

I'd like to echo Kathryn from Sunnyvale's advice for cellphone users in the U.S.: look up the emergency services direct-dial phone numbers for the municipalities you frequent and program them in your cellphone. I have 'em all prefixed 911 so they're together at the top of the list. Otherwise, in most places, you'll be waiting to get to the top of the state police's 911 queue and then talking to someone who doesn't know the names of local roads. (A friend noted that anyone looking in my cellphone would conclude I'm a narc, but I can live with that.)

Carrie S. at 66:

I remember the story, but no more detail than you've given. Interesting premise.

Fragano Ledgister #3: I am all for annoying Herr Direktor, but was not aware how the diphthong/ligature works to that effect; does he find them isufficiently all-American, or what?

I find it utterly cool that successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence can be used to convert miles into kilometers. (The ratio of miles to kilometers being very close to the Golden Mean.)

Carrie S. @ 66: About 15 years ago I read a story in OMNI. The premise was, past-life regression was possible...

I'm pretty sure this is With the Original Cast by Nancy Kress.

Or, what James Moar @ 73 said. Doh.

albatross #72: They were bog-standard rotary-dial phones as far as I can recall. You may well be right. I've no idea. It could be that Continental had a deal on cheap equipment.

Jamaica, along with most other Caribbean countries is integrated into the Bell system now.

Jan Vanĕk, Jr #76: Conservapædia considers British usages and orthography un-American, therefore using them is one way of winding Mr Schlafly up.

Apparently, the use of International English spelling on Wikipedia was a sign of anti-American bias.

re: Marilee @ #42 and Serge @ #30

I received my winged trilobite pin yesterday (and my copy of Voice of the Castle, too). The pin is very nice, you should get one! Haven't read VotC yet, but I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Lila @70

A pineapple?! Where?

Oh, phew. Thought my number was up on that one!

For the benefit of those who expressed an interest in the "That voice in your head? It's not me. -God" T-shirt: it's in print. We'll have it on the tables this weekend at Conestoga, and at Denvention.

Serge @ 50 I'm reminded of the much younger friend who professed herself bewildered by my drooling over Sean Bean. Not only did she think he was unattractive, but he wasn't funny either. After some time, it emerged that she thought I meant Mr Bean. Now I am haunted by images of Rowan Atkinson as Boromir.

Also, on the subject of emergency calls for non-emergencies, this story came out as part of a UK campaign to prevent them. The tone of the responding policeman's voice is completely indescribable.

73, 78: Thanks! I think that's it.

Hey Kids! Build Your Own Ukelele! Amuse your friends! Confound your enemies! Earn big $ putting on shows for your neighbors!

AlyxL @ 85: Blackadder: The Lord of the Whinge. Rowan Atkinson as Frodo, Tony Robinson as Samwise, Hugh Laurie as Aragorn...

Hugh Laurie would be better as Gandalf.

Though it's possible I'm projection from House here.

Miranda Richardson as Galadriel?

Baldrick as Sam.

Steven Fry as Gandalf.

AlyxL @ 85... Confusing Sean Bean with Mr.Bean? Ouch. Could have been worse. She could have thought you were refering to Orson Bean.

Er, projecting from House.

Also, clearly Gabrielle Glaister must play Eowyn.

But who should Stephen Fry play?

Lord of the Whinge. YESYESYESYESYESYES!!!! Especially Tony Robinson/Baldrick and Miranda Richardson/Galadriel.

I am eternally grateful that Rowan Atkinson* wasn't cast as Voldemort.

*AlyxL @85, I feel your pain.

albatross #71: I wonder if you could make an interesting tune just from limited number of tones (sirens, horns, etc.) plus plausible-speed Doppler effect sounds....

I've actually been working on something quite like that for a few days now. I haven't gotten the technique down yet, and I don't know if it'll go anywhere, but I really like the idea.

I also would really like to record people driving by me listening to various different kinds of music really loud and make something out of that, but I don't know how feasible that idea is, particularly with my very limited recording capabilities.

I once wrote (for electronic values of the term) a piece which used only four notes (counting all octaves of e.g. A as one "note" for this purpose). It was minimalist, of course, but it did have a section at the end with a charming lumbering kind of quality. I called that part "March of the Dinosaurs."

Unfortunately, like many of my early pieces it exists only in the proprietary format of a software system that is now obsolete (wouldn't run on a modern computer OS even if I could get a copy) and unsupported. That is, it's lost forever.

Growing up in Germany I was taught that 110 was the number for the police and 112 the number for the fire fighters (and also ambulances), but each could also dispatch the other, which I'd always found rather messy, having always been a geek. Wikipedia tells me that nowadays 112 is for all these things, but apparently 110 still works for the old folks who hate progress and/or Italian mathematicians.

#26 Glinda #28 Chip

Part of what makes these these very early 70's Wimseys so interesting is that every scene pulsates with historical local color that mostly disappeared during the late 70's and the Thatcher and post-Thatcher eras.

One senses that outside of London there was less change from the between wars era until the middle 70's, than in many places. But after that, the acceleration kicked in, throttle wide-open and hasn't stopped, there or anywhere else, for that matter.

So the historic, local detail wasn't so much consciously chosen, as it was what it was, and that was what was available. This section of BBC was still very young, and didn't have the budgets that it achieved for its classics and drama series that it achieved in its funding heydays -- the Campion series for instance, cost an average of 1.5 million per episode. It's hard to see anything more lavish than a Campion series. You do see all that budget spent onscreen.

From what I understand budgets have been cut now, considerably.

Love, C.

albatross @ 72.

It also gives an explanation for why New Zealand had 111 instead of 999 as its emergency number, having to do with their phones reversing the numbering of the rotary pulse dials, so that 9 gave one pulse, and 1 gave 9 pulses. Apparently, by defining their emergency number as 111, they could use the British equipment designed for intercepting 999 calls and routing them to the emergency operator.

The part about the reversed dial is true.
We were told that the point of using 999 in Britain and 111 here was that having a lot of pulses in the digits reduced the risk that equipment glitches or flashhook jiggles could generate a spurious call (possibly without the "caller" being aware of it) which could tie up a line and an operator, and possibly have emergency services sent to investigate.

JHomes

Stefan @87,

Interesting. Especially the manuals.

Yeah, I think I could assemble a ukulele kit.

I'm pretty sure I've said this on a previous thread, but 999 and 112 work in the USA, and 911 works in the UK and the rest of Europe, 999 works in Europe - most modern systems have the several most common emergency numbers set up to work, so that the confused tourist/visitor can still reach the emergency services if needed, even if they can't remember what country they are in...

Debbie #94: There is a certain faction that would like Rowan Williamson cast as Voldemort.

On the BBC tonight, John Barrowman explored the science around being gay.

The evidence for gayness being something you're born with is very strong.

But there doesn't seem to be any single cause. Nobody has found a gene, not are there any clear signs of a single factor of the enviroment in the womb.

I anticipate the usual suspects to shortly begin frothing at the mouth.

Random open thread reference (from Emergent Chaos):

FISA Overview posted on Daily Kos.

I've read through it briefly, but not in as much detail as it deserves.

Dave 103: I certainly hope no one finds a way to test for it in utero. Watch right-wing loonies become pro-choice (at least for themselves).

Worse: sometimes keeping the secret is the only protection gay kids have. They don't come out until they're free of their psycho-loonie parentals. Imagine if the parents knew from day one?

I need to stop thinking about this. It's so horrible that it's literally making me sick.

Click here to feel old.

WRT testing for sexual orientation - I think this century will see choosing that as just one of an array of choices for an unborn child. Along with potential intelligence, musculature, hair color, texture, etc., personality traits will also make it into the menu. To be sure, genes aren't destiny, but once the tools become available, would-be parents are going to use them.

It's going to be an interesting 100 years or so.

Dave Bell #46: Glad to hear about your mom doing better, and my condolences about getting a ukulele.

and #103:

ISTR that there was pretty good evidence from twin studies that at least male homosexuality had a noticeable genetic component. (It's a lot easier to see evidence of that than to figure out the mechanism!)

Of course, the only way to approach questions like that is to separate any moral or political questions from the empirical ones. People who want to justify treating gays badly will find support for doing so in any set of facts or theories. (There's no question that being black is genetic, and no question that conversion to a new religion is voluntary. But there are plenty of people willing to hate you for either or both of these.) Similarly, the moral status of homosexuality tells you nothing about whether it's partly or wholly genetic.

albatross @ 71

Well, there's the opening sequence of 'St Louis Blues', which is clearly Dopplering train horns.

xopher@96: Westminster Quarters?

(Also, while we're momentarily clanged by the subject of handbells, listen to Fantasy on Hyfrydol for a 'wow' moment.)

Had quite a celebration with other people from my agency and others earlier this week. They finally caught Radovan Karadzic. For those who may not remember, he was the president of the Bosnian Serbs and one of the prime movers of some of the worst war crimes since WWII. Now all we need to do is catch Ratko Mladic...

Oooh! Shiny!!

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/07/remember_the_good_old_days.php
http://pwnie-awards.org/2008/
http://www.ybo-interactive.com/blog/2008/03/30/wordpress-vulnerability/

Completely, Totally, 100%, Hypothetical Moral Dilemma

One's friends find a stray cat. Friends talk one into taking stray cat home as friends have dog that would pulverize cat. All no kill shelters in one's area are full. One has cat vaccinated and neutered. One's friends do not put up found cat postings they promised to. One becomes very stressed out sharing one's small apartment with another living being. None of one's acquaintances wish for a kitty. Would I one be a horrible human being if one "accidentally" left one's door open? The door a certain stray cat keeps trying to escape through? The door said cat has been meowing at for the past 5 minutes?

#113, could one put up found cat postings? Has one checked lost cat postings? (My boyfriend brought a cat home once that turned out to be owned by the guy a few houses down, and we had no idea until we saw the lost cat poster, at which point we promptly returned the cat.)

Is the cat likely to be hurt or killed if one lets it outside? Any large busy roads, coyotes, et cetera?

It was found about 4 blocks away. The friends who found it were supposed to put up posters over a week ago (I don't have a printer). Found out today they didn't put them up because they didn't want to deal with an owner who might be mad their pet got neutered. Sigh. I told them to put up the posters and contact me. I posted Found ads on Craigslist today and looked at the Lost ads. No luck so far. He had no collar, wasn't micro chipped, and wasn't fixed, so I think he may just be one of the many outdoor strays around here who are in fairly good shape due to food being left out for them, but not actually "owned". 25 mph streets with 35 mph close by, no known coyotes. But there will of course be other cats, dogs in yards, etc. And he is still meowing at the door. Of course, the neutering doesn't actually happen until tomorrow, so he ain't getting out today, no way, no how.

Given a choice between letting the kitten go free and going to a *non*-no-kill shelter, do the latter.

Loose kittens can get hit by cars, or preyed on by dogs or coyotes. Turning a kitten loose is *illegal*.

Better to risk a painless death than getting torn up or flattened.

Stefan at 116:

The local Humane Society actually runs a Trap Neuter Release program, so I'm not sure that he might not actually end up back outdoors anyway if I took him in. As well, I grew up around Outdoor Only cats. It is very hard for me to wrap my mind around putting down a perfectly healthy cat.

I'm not really planning on opening the door and letting whatever happens, happen. I'm just not sure I would be able to convince myself to run after him if he manages to get past me and make a run for it.

Jen B., I also grew up with semi-outdoor cats, so leaving the door open seems perfectly reasonable to me. After all, the cat is free to come back?

We feel terrible keeping our cat indoors, mostly because we live in an apartment building and we don't trust the other humans to treat him with respect. He in particular is so much more alive when he's outside, meeting other cats, chasing things! Not having to deal with fleas as much is small compensation.

I gather though that the indoor/outdoor cat debate is common flamewar fuel. I guess it's just safe and pampered life vs. being locked away inside palace walls: two ways of looking at the same situation.

Ralph Giles,

I just thought to myself, "Self... Google". Right away I found a messageboard about how many people in the community I currently live in have outdoor cats and it is practically unheard of for neighbors to call the Humane Society for pickups. I think all the healthy looking "strays" I've been seeing are actually pets. (This kitty was found in a nearby neighborhood across a four lane road that does not have the same visible presence of happy cats.) I think I'll just have him microchipped so if I ever do lose my patience and not run after him he can be scanned and returned if he doesn't come back for food on his own. I'm just going to have to keep fostering him until I find someone. Or until I run away myself.

As for the outdoor/indoor flamewar, I keep having it with myself. "He wants out, I should let him out." "No! There are pterodactyls out there!" "He sounds so sad, though. And he just pooped on the floor." "The pterodactyls have machine guns!"

My take on the subject is that it depends on the cat. We once ended up with a cat who *needed* to be outdoors— his original owner lived on a busy street. And of the cats I own now, one is clearly an indoor-only type. The other gets leash time and usually lasts only a few minutes. Both love balcony time, though.

The only argument for me is statistical: cats with regular access to the outdoors don't live as long as indoor cats.

I worried too much about my indoor/outdoor cat when she stayed out all night, so when I grew up and moved away, and got cats of my own, they all grew up indoors. For me, the equation boils down to "I'd rather pick up poop I'd rather not worry all night long". Instead of bad dreams, my sleep is disturbed by cats wanting attention, or kicking me. Or, rarely, sleeping next to my face and passing gas.

re 110: I was going to link to a really cool video of that, but it's been taken down. Darn.

Put up signs. Somewhere out there, someone wants a cat. Maybe even that one.

We have kept indoor-only cats for 20 years... Back in '91 while living in a mostly rural area, we trapped a cat that was outside in -25F weather. He didn't like being turned into an indoor cat, but thrived overall with our other seven kittehs. Six months later we found the owner (he found us). We gave him the now-neutered cat back with his promise not to let him back out.

He was outside our window the next night.

We didn't trap him again. Within weeks he disappeared, and we assumed he was hit by a car. I've always felt a little bad I didn't carry thru on my threat to the owner to trap him a second time and keep him.

Any cats we ever adopt will be indoors only. Nuff said...

#96 - Xopher - We have friends with friends that have preserved damn near every computer ever produced. They even have access to some old IBM and Control Data mainframes from the early '70's... What format do you need? I'll do some checking for you...

Serge, #51, I don't remember. But I like winged pins. (Not angels!)

Zed Lopez, #74, I live in a small city just outside an urban area and have never had trouble getting either the emergency or non-emergency operators on the first ring. However, they insist on addresses, which can be difficult. I had a situation where firefighters missed the place because they had an address instead of a description. I was at a Pizza Hut in a shopping center (only Pizza Hut in town) and an elderly woman became unconscious. I called 911 and checked her breathing and pulse -- they were both light and thready, but okay -- and told 911 that we were at the Pizza Hut in Wellington Station. The operator insisted on an address, which I got from a waitress standing fearfully by. So in a couple of minutes, the ambulance passes directly next to the Pizza Hut and goes out of the shopping center. I called 911 back (same operator, we are a small city) and told her that the ambulance had just gone by, to tell them to turn the corner and come back in the next entrance, which they did. As soon as they're in, the elderly woman became conscious and refused to go to the ER. I asked one of the guys why they missed it the first time through and he said "You should have just said it was the Pizza Hut" and I explained that I had. Hmph.

Dawno, #82, I ordered my winged trilobite last night, along with Voice of the Castle.

Lee, #84, do you have one that has:

O
MG
WTF
etc.

centered? I know someone who wants one.

Jen B. outdoor cats can learn to be indoor cats. Shiva insisted on moving in with us and then was surprised he wasn't going outside anymore. He's mostly gotten over it. What's the problem sharing with the cat? He hasn't learned to use the litterbox? He likes to sleep places you don't want him to? He walks on shelves and makes things fall? We can probably give you ideas on making that easier.

Hey all you p-r-o-fessionals out there... Eddie is totally confused by his search on the intrawebs and looking for one clear site that can explain copyright law to a noob writing a non-commercial, non-fiction work (new version of old role-playing game) that wants to quote other rule books that are 10 to 25 years out-of-print... Any suggestions? Danke!

Jen B., kittens often have accidents anyway, but the chance of poop on the floor will be reduced if you clean the litterbox every time he uses it. Some cats, especially if they've been outdoor cats, are too fastidious to use a dirty litterbox.

That's what I had to do to persuade my formerly-outdoor kitty to use a litterbox. Since I'm not home all the time, it works out to two litterboxes for the one cat, and I clean both of them once a day.

Good luck finding the owner.

Heh. Top 10 most scientifically inacurate movies, ever.

They really didn't like "day after tomorrow": "This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery."

Edward, #125, in Virginia, stealing a cat is a felony, which is why although I was the one who made friends with Smudge* (who Animal Control couldn't catch), he had to go through the shelter before I could keep him. His people had scared him to pieces -- he'd never been vaccinated or neutered, he had cigarette scars on him, and he continued to be afraid of everybody but me. He turned out to have a heart murmur and the veterinary cardiologist told me he wouldn't have lasted to the end of the year outdoors. He was with us for three years, on daily atenolol, which was longer than otherwise. Like all my long-gone cats, I miss him.

*I named him for the mark on his nose, which turned out to be a rare infection. It eventually went away.

Ed: explain copyright law to a noob writing a non-commercial, non-fiction work (new version of old role-playing game) that wants to quote other rule books that are 10 to 25 years out-of-print

How long it's been out of print doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not copyright has expired and the work has entered the public domain. The only point where it is "out of print" will matter is if it's so out of print that not even the publisher has the rights to it anymore to bother filing a lawsuit if they feel like you've infringed their copyright.

If the work is still in copyright (and I'd guess it is, given terms last over six hundred years*) then the only way you can quote from it is if you can use it in a way that qualifies as "Fair Use".

Unfortunately, I've yet to find a good website that gives a good rundown on fair use. Part of the problem is that you can't really define fair use in a purely objective way. You can't say "cut and paste 100 words or fewer is OK, 101 words or more is not OK".

If you can, you'll be better off taking the idea within the rule book that you like, boiling it down into some general principle or general rule, and then re-animating it using your own words, your own expression.

They can't copyright the ideas, they can only copyright the expression. Just don't hone too close to all the ideas, or they still might decide they can sue.

If you can't do that, and you really need to quote the book, then you'll just have to start reading up on Fair Use.

(*) give or take

All but one of my cats (over the last thirty-five years I have lived with nine cats) have been indoor-outdoor cats, including the ones I have now. Two of those nine were killed by cars, which is one of the things that can happen to cats who like to cross streets. :-(

One was attacked by a pit bull. He survived and is still with me. He's a ginger short-hair, neutered male, nine years old, he weighs eighteen pounds, he's polydactylic, and yes, he still goes out the cat door whenever he wants to, though not as frequently as he used to... The one who was an indoor cat was semi-feral, blind and mildly retarded. He didn't particularly want to go outside.

Edward Oleander @128:
Normally I just direct people to EFF's FAQ on IP for Bloggers, particularly the fair use section.

In your case however, it's important to know that games have some very interesting copyright limitations so you may actually need some real legal advice from an attorney with experience in these specifics.

This is actually pretty timely since I expect we'll be learning a lot more about copyright for games as Hasbro continues to throw it's weight around and cases like Scrabulous and 4th Edition D&D third party publishers start to land in court.

------
U.S. Copyright
The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.

Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.

Some material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game, or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container, may be registrable.

#128 Edward Oleander: How about going to rpg.net and posting a thread titled "[Creeks and Crawdads] Trying to find Martin Costa"? Fill in the blank with the appropriate title and author, of course. RPGing is a pretty small hobby, and there are lots of connections to anyone... Then you email the dude and ask him who has the rights, and ask the rightsholder.

I mention Costa because I was playing in a Creeks and Crawdads (pub. 1986) zombie game at a Bay Area gaming convention in 2007, I think, and it was pretty full with 8 players or so, when two normal-looking guys show up and ask the GM, "Hey, do you think we could get in?" and he's like, "I dunno, it's pretty full," and the shorter of the guys says, "The thing is, though, I wrote the game..." Much glee. Costa: "I always wanted to do that!"

Jen: As for the outdoor/indoor flamewar, I keep having it with myself.

It's hard. On the farm, all cats were barn cats. But sometimes we'd go into the barn and one cat would stop showing up. If you do let them out, you should make sure they are vaccinated against feline leukemia. Stray cats might have it, and it'll wipe out an entire barn full of cats like nothing.

All our cats are indoor cats. We have one that is a fricken houdini and has gotten out twice. Both times, he came back after a week, screaming his head off, skinny as a rail.

The neighbor has an outdoor cat. let it out for years. Just didn't come home one night.

"The pterodactyls have machine guns!"

And they're synchronized to fire between the propeller blades, which is the freaky part.

Oh, you mentioned Craig's list. I haven't looked for a while, but they used to have a warning about giving pets away for free. People will pick them up, sometimes bring their kid along to look more legit, and then sell the animal to some testing facility or whatever. So, something to be aware of.

A long while ago, had a couple of rabbits that needed homes, and we found a 4H club (?) that had one-a-month meetings for rabbit owning 4H members. No, we weren't 4h members, but we called the organizer, asked if we could bring them up and find someoen to adopt, they said sure. we drove an hour and a half, spent a couple hours, and after the meeting, found two families, one for each rabbit. And the kids weren't so young that we had to worry about them dropping the rabbits or whatever.

Having the animal right there in the flesh can sometimes get people to adopt more than some text ad with a still photo on craigs list.

Greg #130:

Surely, these are high-profile movies with specific bits (many, sometimes) of bad science. Most SF or SF-ish movies have science that's pure BS, much worse than Jurassic Park's one big (unlikely) premise. I thought their complaint about The Matrix was fair (and it hit you across the face when the scene happened in the movie--a sort of incongruous "WTF?" moment), but only if you didn't assume (as I ultimately did) that *everything* was happening inside the simulation, including the "real world" scenes with silly physics and Agent Smith and all that.

My wife and I were talking the other day about what movies are pretty good depictions of science--both being reasonably accurate about known science, and also getting the sense of how science and technology work right.

The best example we could come up with was _Apollo 13_. It's been a long time since I saw it, but I think _2001_ would also fit pretty well. I thought the movie _Contact_ did a reasonable job, though with an SFish premise and some random odd stuff in there, but again, it's been several years since I've watched it, so maybe I'm forgetting all kinds of goof-ups.

albatross: Surely, these are high-profile movies with...

Yeah, I think they're actually the worst science of all "mainstream" or "popular" movies, not of all movies ever.

their complaint about The Matrix was fair

So, the idea I came up with, was that the Matrix was actually something the humans enforced on themselves to keep the species alive after the atmosphere was set on fire and all other life on the planet died.

And then something went wrong with the programming. Maybe the machines had to be sentient, and decided they didn't want to wake the humans up.

Or maybe some people woke up, thought the machines were the enemy, attacked the machines, and the machine artificial intelligence had programming directives like "keep humans alive", but couldnt' deal with humans from zion killing humans in the matrix. and so went all Hal-2000 on them.

The whole "electricity from your brain to power the machines" thing didn't make sense. But "keep you in the matrix to keep the human species alive until we can clean the atmosphere enough that you can come back and live in the real world", that, at least, had some sort of logical basis to it.

Just throw in some bad programming, mutually exclusive directives, to explain the agents, and there you go.

It's official: the new X-Files movie would have been an OK episode, or if it had been less than six years since the last we saw of the show would have been a fairly decent movie addition. As it is, it was kind of sad. I saw it at a free sneak preview and enjoyed myself OK, but if I had paid, I would have felt cheated slightly.

Amanda Peet and Xzibit were the stupidest pair of FBI special agents ever portrayed in fiction.

94: Rik Mayall (Flasheart) as Strider. "It's... me! Hurrah!" And, therefore, Adrian Edmondson as Saruman: "Gandalf... responsible for the deaths of some of my finest (and blondest) Uruks."

Serge@51: The first place we see a winged trilobite is through a time window.

Joel Polowin@57: We haven't had a fully canonical explanation for the wings. We've seen versions of the House Sturmvoraus sigil with and without it, and Phil Foglio has said that the version without is the older one. I happen to think that Sturmvoraus added the wings when they became Wulfenbach vassals; but we don't know for certain.

Picked up my copy of Voice of the Castle today. I note with some displeasure that they didn't fix the inconsistent spelling of Carson von Mekkhan/Mekken's name; I note with some amusement that this time out, they haven't committed themselves to a title for the next volume.

David Goldfarb @ 141... Thanks for the reminder. I wonder if this means that there really is a Weasel Queen whose minions are 7-foot-tall flesh-eating rabbits.

ethan @ 139... Bummer.

We can't have Jennifer Saunders as Galadriel? Oh, all right then.

We've always had indoor cats, but only one was a fanatic about it - she'd occasionally wander outside, look really confused about the great big room with the blue ceiling and really bright light, and hightail it back inside.

And it's not like movies are really accurate about anything, not just sci/tech. What was the movie that had the guy jumping out of a White House window into an alley? And all those girls who suddenly realize that their best friend is really a better match for them than the bad-boy types they've been dating all this time? (Or all the stalkers who just know that she's the right girl for them, if only they don't give up until she comes to her senses?)

Serge @ 142

I wonder if this means that there really is a Weasel Queen whose minions are 7-foot-tall flesh-eating rabbits.

Do you mean, that she exists as a real part of graphic story made up by an inventive artist? I'd say she and her minions are at least as real as the Easter Bunny, and possibly as real as the Tooth Fairy. And they could probably have lunch with Travis McGee (and stick him for the bill).

Marilee: The problem with the cat is that he is in my apartment. I am very, very, very uncomfortable with sharing my living space. He's really well behaved. But he exists.

Rozasharn: He's only pooped on the floor once: while I was cleaning the litter box. That's a good idea for the 2nd box. I just have no idea where to put it. I suppose I could just switch them out.

I'm fairly doubtful about finding the owner (if there ever was a proper owner). All the shelters around here are full from people abandoning their pets after foreclosures. When I went to drop the cat off today for his neutering it turned out almost everyone there was like me: didn't want a pet, was looking for someone to take it, but there just aren't any takers right now. One woman had a cat in to get spayed whose kittens she'd had fixed the week before. That cat showed up with its identification: and she still has to keep it because the owners purposely abandoned her after losing their home. For the past few month the local shelters have also been dealing with a case of animal hoarding. Hopefully the friends who were supposed to print up the Found Cat notices 11 days ago finally did so after my angry phone call last night. (I have no printer and they live in the neighborhood he was found. And were the ones who called me to take him.)

Greg: I listed the cats on Craigslist as "Found" rather than as "Free". I left off some distinguishing features so only the real owner should be able to convince me. But thanks for the warning, I hadn't thought of animal testing. ::shudder::

A pterodactyl with propellers? Preposterous! Who ever heard of such a... oh.

Thanks for the input everyone. I think I'm going to try him out as indoor/outdoor. Maybe if I have my space totally to myself for part of the time, I won't be so stressed out sharing it the rest of the time.

Greg @ 136: Testing facilities cannot use animals without pedigrees, or a clear history of production. It is against the law. USDA-certified dealers may sell animals to testing facilities, but those animals are tracked from the day they are born, and are produced by those specific programs for research.

Secondly, testing facilities do not want animals of random origin. It introduces too much variability into the research. Research animals come from fairly homogenous background.

Finally, the vast majority of research (98-99% of all animals) is still done with mice and rats, with zebrafish a growing part of this sector. The remaining 1-2% includes all other species used in research (rabbits, other rodents, dogs, cats, cows, goats, pigs, ferrets, other fish species, and monkeys).

Despite the tendency of animal rights groups to focus on Fido and Fluffy, the research that we do does not depend on stolen pets. One thing to think about: the research which benefits humans also benefits animals. Today we give dogs and cats the same heart medicines, perform kidney transplants, treat cats and dogs for cancer, do orthopedic surgeries, replace cataractous lenses, test vaccines, and more.

Jefferson, our oldest cat, sometimes wanders outside, but, once he realizes what he's done, he cowers by the door in terror waiting for us to realize where the idiot has gone. Agatha, our youngest cat, actively tries to escape. Last time she did, I chased her all over the backyard and was able to catch her only because she got distracted by birds. ("Shiny!") Her being imprisoned has led her to sink into a depression. Literally.

Serge @ 148: None of my cats have fallen into any sort of depression, but when someone escapes outside, they definitely show signs of agoraphobia ("there's nothing up there!"). Luckily for me, they all run right back inside where it's safe.

I've found that the best way to catch a cat is to not chase her, which is counter-intuitive at the moment of escape. I used to catch my indoor/outdoor cat by digging random holes in the front yard until she showed up to see what I was doing. I even caught a horse with this technique, although not in the front yard.

Ginger: My parent's cats have always been 100% outdoor cats. Only once has one of them gone into the house. She ran all the way around the first floor and right back out the door, looking as though she'd just been to the Most Terrifying Place Ever. "It is all closed in! There's no sky! Humans are crazy!"

Ginger @ 149... You caught a horse by digging a hole?

"Flicka! What are you doing down there?"

As for not chasing cats... That's what I wound up doing a few weeks ago when Agatha ran out at 4am. Darkness and the backyard's many bushes made searching for her a futile task. I did try to find her. I wound up turning on the porch light. Two hours later, with dawn peeking, I couldn't stand it and walked all the way to the top of the backyard. No Agatha. Of course, when I came back down, she was waiting for me on the back porch. After a bit of her half-heartedly running away, I finally was able to get her back in.

Agatha, Cat Genius indeed.

A pterodactyl with two bodies conjoined to one pair of wings is a double-dactyl. A pterodactyl with multiple conjoined bodies is a polydactyl.

A gryphon with multiple heads that can detach in mid-flight is a MIRV gryphon.

Greg London @136:
"The pterodactyls have machine guns!"
And they're synchronized to fire between the propeller blades, which is the freaky part.

Funny you should say that, because the pterodactyls-with-machine-guns that immediately popped into my head... well, let's just say that synchronization wasn't actually an issue for them. (And I hate to come off like some kind of petty chauvinist, but nobody designs weird aircraft quite like the British do*.)

*Okay, did. (sighs nostalgically...)

Serge @ 151

Considering how many humans I've known to keep digging when they find themselves in a hole, it's not surprising a horse would do it.

Serge @ 151: Not quite: I pretended to dig a hole. The horse stopped running around the large paddock and sauntered over to see what I was doing, so I turned my back to him. He came closer. I moved away. He came even closer, and I put his lead rope on, then gave him the sweet feed I'd been hiding. Just like catching a cat*. Actually, that same cat used to get out of the basement and disappear into the house. The way to catch her was to close the doors and leave my bedroom door just slightly ajar. Within five minutes she'd push her way through rather triumphantly.

Jen B @ 150: I'm sure that cat had a severe bout of claustrophobia. I've seen that happen with cats that pushed through a cat door and then realized that the Wrong Human was looking at them. It ran frantically through the basement, but there's only one door. Rather than chase the cat, I opened the door and stepped away from the house. A few seconds later the feline missile could be seen exiting and departing at high speed.

*For values of cat that include "calm" and "smart". The freaked out fraidy-cats have to be caught by other means, which usually results in someone** bleeding all over the draperies, while someone else (coughfelinecough) pees all over those same draperies. No names will be mentioned, to spare the dignity of the (BT) cat that might have been involved.

**That would usually refer to me, since I am the default "catcher of animals and animal-related things".

Edward Oleander @ 128 -- here are a few sites I point people to for copyright. For whether something is likely to be under copyright or not, try the American Library Association's "Digital Copyright Slider" at http://librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/. For Fair Use, I find the University of Minnesota Copyright Decision Map helpful: http://www.lib.umn.edu/copyright/map.phtml. A good place to pose questions is the ALA's Copyright Advisory Network: http://www.librarycopyright.net/. We handle all sorts of copyright questions, not just the library-related ones.

Ginger @ 155... Ye shall be known henceforth as the catcher of animals and animal-related things.

Does that mean Ginger can get the cat toys out from under my fridge?

Bruce Cohen @ 154... Considering how many humans I've known to keep digging when they find themselves in a hole, it's not surprising a horse would do it.

...especially if Mister Ed notices that Flicka is down there.

Spam from 78.186.252.241

Not that I can read it.

Hello all! I've moved and so far I've discovered only one broken thing. (Of course, I can't unpack the most fragile gewgaws until I've figured out where to put them. So you may be hearing howls of desolation when I get there.) My house is nice and big, but the storage space is laid out very oddly and will require some fiddling to get everything put away properly. I'll be back as soon as I may--I miss you all terribly!

#152

I'd like to request a defenestration, please.
Those are truly - something or other.

Ginger, welcome to the club. I'm catcher of animals in my house. Including squirrels (have-a-hart trap) and the limo service that requires.

But thank someone it has not occurred to the latest batches of cats to climb the curtains.

On catching escapee cats:

Some years ago, I accidentally trained my cats to go sit on the hearth and wait while I prepared their dinner. I wanted them out from under my ankles, so I started pointing/herding/tossing them (as the case warranted) in the direction of the hearth, where their dishes of food would be brought to them. Eventually I saw the potential here and started introducing the command words "Sit" and "Stay."

Some time after this process was firmly entrenched, I had to take the Null-bit to the vet. Null is the one who's agoraphobic - on the drive from Oregon to Colorado, I'd take both cats out on a leash at gas stops; Uno* would calmly take care of business on the grass, but Null would howl desperately, climb up my leg, and crawl inside my jacket. His head got kind of stuck halfway down the sleeve. It was pathetic. Attempts to train him further in the mystery of leash, harness, and going walkies result in so much vocal panic on his part that the neighbors ask me if I'm trying to kill him.

So, I park the car, gather up Null-kitty in my arms, and attempt to convey him inside the four walls where he's safe. Null goes into full-bore crazy mode. "I just survived the vet! They poked and prodded me and I only just escaped with my life! AND NOW SOMEONE HAS REMOVED THE CEILING! HELP! I MIGHT FALL INTO THE SUN!" He squirms out of my arms and makes a break for it down the block

(Note to self: carrier and/or leash-and-harness next time.)

So I ran after him down the block to the next building over. He headed around a corner. I caught up while he was deciding what to do next. I yelled, "Null, sit!"

Whaddaya know. He sat.

Of course, he stood up again immediately, but that moment of habitual obedience gave me the time I needed to get within grabbing range.

Sometimes friends or family come over and they are darn-near offended at the whole "OK kids, go wait for dinner" routine. "You've trained them! You're treating them like dogs!" Oh horrors. I respond by telling them this anecdote. Generally they concede that a trained Null-bit, however dog-like, is better than an escaped Null getting squashed by a car or machine-gunned by pterodactyls.

*Yes, they're binary. This is what happens when geek marries geek and the geeks adopt kittens.

Nicole @ 165... I accidentally trained my cats to go sit on the hearth and wait while I prepared their dinner

Cue to Cat Stevens's Teaser and the Fire Cat...

TexAnne @ 162... Did Hugh Jackman and the videotape of paberback hero survive?

Welcome back!

#165, Nicole -

I like that story! And I think any cries of "you've trained them!" from me would be astonishment, not censure.

I do think that accidental training is the easiest kind to give a cat, unfortunately. We accidentally trained the cat not to jump on the bed once. We did this by not being in our established places when he jumped up. He landed on my legs and I yelped in startlement, so he sensibly ran away and thereafter avoided the bed. We mostly managed to re-train him that the bed was okay, but he's far less available for bedtime cuddles than he used to be, and really only jumps up if he's called now.

TexAnne! Welcome back, however sporadic it is.

Re: animals in holes, or not

John McPhee writes of a guy who catches cattle by lying down in the field and extending one leg straight up. The cows, overcome by curiosity, amble over.

Friends have a cat who dashes madly outside at any opportunity. She then becomes confused, falls over, and rolls gently side to side until they come scoop her up.

#152 ::: Erik Nelson
..some of the best wordplay recently, and the competition is stiff

TexAnne - welcome back! Been doing any knitting in your copious spare time?

The World's Biggest Sock is in Denver. Unfortunately, it's just an attempt at a Guinness listing. OTOH, how cool that the conditioned response is now, wow, I'll go do that, what is our effort benefiting?

While I was off at college, my mother accidentally trained one of our indoor/outdoor cats to scratch the carpet when he wanted out. Then, of course, she complained that he'd started scratching the carpet all the time....*sigh*

Once I was taking care of him again, it was easy to get him un-trained; partly this is because he actually listened to me when I told him "No!", but mostly it's because I paid attention when he asked to go out in less obtrusive ways, and opened the door like a good pet human.

This same cat was effectively raised by one of our indoor cats, even though they're not related, and after a while any time she succeeded in sneaking out of the house he'd go keep an eye on her until we could get her back in--even if he'd just come inside himself.

Can anyone point me to the Particle leading to the sinful apple dumplings made with crescent rolls and Mountain Dew? I just poked around for about 10 minutes with google site searches and paging back through the Particle archives searching for appl and then sin. I probably missed running the correct find on the correct month page.

Carol @ #169, Tony Hillerman had a cattle rustler in one of his books who used a similar technique.

My friend Tom, who is both an animal control officer and a dog rescuer, catches runaway dogs by sitting down on the curb with his back to the dog and eating pork rinds.

Welcome back, TexAnne!

#171

Madeline

They're at Pioneer Woman Cooks:

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2008/02/apple_dumplings/

(I also like her chicken spaghetti and her mystery rolls.)

ethan@ 39, "Match Point" is on the Netflix queueueue, and while "Velvet Goldmine" gets watched Rather Frequently around here, the trouble is that THE ENDING IS ALWAYS THE SAME.

And Hollywood had better get around to making the Swordspoint movie PRONTO. JRM has already aged out of the Alec role, and won't be suited for Michael Godwin much longer either, and what if Bob Anderson DIES before he can do the fight choreography?

R.M. @ 158: As it so happens, I do have some surplused* laparoscopic instruments that come in handy for that sort of thing, but most of the time I just move the fridge out, sweep up the dust, hair, and collected toys, and push the fridge back.

Nicole @ 165: Well-done! I've trained all my cats to stay away from the front door when I'm coming through -- that way I avoid anyone making a mad dash for outside. However, Kedgie and I have trained each other regarding the proper dispensing of milk for her.

Eric @ 152: I'm afraid you've committed syndactyly.

*Back in my younger days, we ran workshops for the Urologists (continuing education) and they use their instruments for one procedure only, so I collected the discarded clean instruments and play- er, practiced with them.

Serge @ 157: Thank yew, thank yew verra much.

Paula Helm Murray @ 164: Well, I should explain that the drapery-climbing occurred under special circumstances, namely she was the last cat to be boxed for transport to the new house. My mistake. She was totally freaked out by all the cat-catching and -boxing, and wanted No Part Of It. My partner had never seen a cat freak out, and was nearly freaking out herself. While I bled, I calmly requested that she open the cat carrier so I could put the bundle of shrieking peeing pooping kicking and biting cat fur in. Need I mention that the cat was mad at me for weeks after?

Ginger @ 176... My partner had never seen a cat freak out

She should watch the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, specifically near the end, when the volcano lair of evil Blofeld is under attack by the good guys. His cat is definitely freaking out, and trying to escape from his clutches, even if it means clawing all flesh away from actor Donald Pleasance.

On a political openthready note, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake got a few seconds of an interview on NPR's Morning Edition this morning, talking about Blue America and the left/right coalition that's going after senators who supported the new FISA bill. Appropriately enough, the coalition is called "Strange Bedfellows". Kinky.

I tried to leash train both our cats, and had actually gotten some headway (mostly by carrying the cat some distance from home and walking them back.) Then one day I had the tortie (Nimuë, known as Mui) on a leash when somebody turned on a hissing, spitting hose.

Suddenly I was at one end of a bouncing, spitting, whirl of action.

I caught her— she bit me, and she has never harmed be before or since— and hid under a parked car. The leash was still trailing out, so Evil Rob (who had seen the whole incident, laughing hysterically) went inside, got a leather coat, and extracted her. He had to hold her for a good half hour before she'd allow us to peel her off the jacket.

She's not much cottoned to the outside since, and that includes three moves through seven states— Western states, to boot.

I still wish somebody'd been videotaping.

The ukulele is red.

Hi TexAnne!

Welcome back. We saved you a seat by the fire.

Right now she'd probably prefer a seat by the air conditioner.

As for FISA, I think many people are just suffering from outrage fatigue over the issue. Still, there's hope for August 8th.

Jen B. @146: )All the shelters around here are full from people abandoning their pets after foreclosures.

There was a segment on NPR about that trend a week or two ago... as difficult as that situation is, it beats some of the alternatives.

Some people think that instead of leaving their pets at a shelter to risk euthanization, the animals would be better off being a.) "liberated" into a nearby park, wildlife area, or just general neighborhood; or b.) left inside the house in hopes that the familiar surroundings might comfort them somehow.

Even the likely outcomes of "liberation" (death by car, starvation, exposure or predator) seem relatively merciful to being oublietted inside an empty house. The animal control expert being interviewed said that in the latter case, usually by the time the pets were found, they were either so frantic that their behavior had become unadoptable (claustrophobia/abandonment issues, ingrained habit of digging/scratching at the doors and windows in an attempt to get out), or they had starved to death (often with futile scraps of carpet, wallboard etc. left in their stomachs because they'd had nothing else to eat).

Constance #98- the impression I get, from not watching TV and reading newspapers and stuff, is that the BBC has been sliced, diced, managed, mismanaged, consultanted and sold off so much that morale is almost non-existent and budgets don't exist anymore for proper programs.

Regarding places changing through the decades, i recall towns in the Scottish and english borders which in the 80's still looked 30 or 40 years behind the times. They'll be completely changed now, of course, but back in the 80's the 70's had still to reach them.

A while ago I was driving along a road in edinburgh, when an ambulance came up behind me, but the car behind me just didn't seem to notice this large white thing with flashing blue lights and siren behind it for several seconds. I (of course) had noticed it earlier, but the driver behind me seemed like a rabbit in headlights, and didn't move for ages.

Edinburgh also has a moderately good municipal fire service museum, with pumps and tenders going back a century. I visited it in doors open day, they have some steam powered ones, up to a Land rover fire engine. It was interesting examining the old ladders made out of thick wooden laminates. They were in use up to the 70's or so, then they repleaced them with the Aluminium ones. But the basic pump tender design seems not to have changed since the 70's or so.

Auto review of the year:
BMW X6: About as useful as a laminated pizza
Put down your drink before you read it!

Open threadery:

For those who want their classic science fiction combined with classical music there's this event on Sunday morning (note to Lee, it involves David Tennant).

So if I were to mention that I found this site about driving an Airstream trailer from Cape Town to Cairo in the company of a bunch of other crazy people, and accidentally showed it to my family, and they all started planning how we were going to manage it -- would everybody here think that was a stupid thing to do, a cool thing to do, or both?

Because I think, whether it's cool or stupid, it's looking like we might actually do it.

The Wall Street Journal was certainly due for a fall after being purchased by Rupert Murdoch. But I never imagined they'd sink this low:

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

By ANDREW KLAVAN

July 25, 2008; Page A15

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"fortitude and moral courage", forsooth! Me think me wound up in Bizarro World.

No, wait. It's only another Murdoch yellow rag.

*sigh*

I've been really enjoying getting to read about everyone's adventures with cats. There's a parrot in the corner who wants to know why I keep laughing.

I have two cats, myself, both of them feral kitties that I taught to live indoors. Maggie, my little dilute tortie, got outside once, by accident. Of course, she immediately decided that she liked the free life much better, and to cat hell with what I wanted for her.

I, missing her terribly, removed entirely the screen from the window she'd squirmed her way out, and proceeded to spend every spare moment for two weeks camped by that window, feeding endless plates of sardines and tuna to the feral colony and every stray for several blocks in any direction. Sardines have a very penetrating scent, and will attract cats from quite a ways away, as well as imparting a delectable aroma to ones apartment.

Eventually, Maggie came to investigate. It took a combination of sardines, her favorite wet food, and a string dangled through the window for her to play with to get her to agree to come up onto the windowsill. She sniffed my hand, and the light of recognition dawned in her eyes. "Oh, you're the mommy human with the clever paws. Right."

And then she walked in, over the table by the window and rubbed her face on mine.

I closed the window, and to welcome her home, gave her a bath.

She's never left since, and those few trips outdoors, she's always come back when called. Seems she likes endless food, clean water, and all the scratches she can get. And really, who can blame her?

*Yes, I've taught both my kitties to come when called, and to take baths without ripping me to shreds. I can also trim their claws with no fuss. Both born feral, grew up feral, but now they live with me. It's a little known fact that I speak cat.

Bruce @ #189, Roy Edroso is all over that. Be sure to click the "brighter bulbs" link, too; it takes you to World-O'-Crap, which has even more calumny to heap on that mess.

Our two kitties (adopted at nine weeks old from a shelter) are indoor cats. That way I don't have to lie awake at night worrying whether they've been run over (their mother was), and (as a good conservationist) I don't feel guilty about havoc being wreaked on the local wildlife.

They do get to go out in the garden on harnesses, to graze.

Nicole @ 165 Well done. I've been working on training our cats to come when called ("Treat!") since the thread which discussed catching your cat in the "get-out-the-house-NOW" emergency situation.

#188, Michael Roberts -

Possibly both, but definitely cool. I'm sure that for good or ill, it will be unforgettable.

Erm, #193 is supposed to sound more positive than it does. I'm too brainfogged to be original so I'll just be cliched. It sounds like the adventure of a lifetime.

Michael Roberts @ 188: should be a blast!

Julie L @ 184: People actually abandoned their pets inside a shut-up house? What do they imagine they're doing, aside from racking up their coals in hell?

On cats, indoor/outdoor: some friends of ours harness-trained their two Burmese cats, then to give them outdoor time would leash (long retractable leashes) them to gallon milk jugs partially filled with sand in their back yard. The cats could haul the jug anchors about easily enough, but were prevented from running off entirely. So far as I know, it hasn't hurt them at all.

Michael @ 188: You say crazy like it's a bad thing ;) Of course, my dad drove from Peking to Paris last summer, so I may not be entirely objective on such road trips.

Re: Kitties!

Our kitties' mom is my sister-in-law's cat. She started feeding a local stray, and when she realized it was pregnant, she figured she'd better make the adoption official for the sake of the kittens. We ended up with Linus and Lucy, and SIL kept momma cat. The other two kittens were supposed to be adopted by other friends, but when said friends couldn't follow through, they went to the local no-kill shelter as soon as they had space.

P J Evans @ #186:

"Looks like a fish. Moves like a fish. Steers like a cow."

Jen @ 119:

Annie (my current rescue-kitty) went from nearly 10 years as indoor-outdoor to the last two years as indoor only. She's not always OK with that, but: there are coyotes here, and people lose cats to them. Wish she'd understand when I *tell* her that, though. *wry*

So, exactly 336 hours from now the Making Light Party at Denvention will be ongoing*, having started about 332 or so hours from now.

We will will have dinosaurs: perhaps even shiny dinosaurs. We will have numinous luminous Fluorospherians. Eating light? Certainly. Eating chocolate? of course. Special appearance by Abi, through the magic of nets.

If you're going to Denvention and think you might be dropping by that Friday evening, please leave a note here on Serge's LJ (you can comment w/out a LJ account), so that neither too much or too little mammoth is ordered. You can also email me directly.

Details:
# Friday the 8th,
# Starting about 9:30pm--but the real-true start will be when the masquerade is done: many MLers will be in the audience or on stage (and that's a priority and a must-see, especially if you haven't been to a Worldcon masquerade before),

# ending when it ends--maybe a bit earlier than that, we'll see.

# in the party hotel, #7 on the map. That's 3 1/2 blocks from the C.C.= where the Masquerade will be held--in a 5000 seat auditorium--so everyone can go and see the Masquerade.

# Room number to be announced / LJ'd / twittered / IM'd / posted here Wednesday, after arrival in Denver.

While it isn't a closed party, it won't be openly promoted on-site. Cryptically promoted--yes. Lightbulbs are a clue. Also, there'll be note for "Making Light" on the people-note-connections board thingy.

More information to come.

Special request from me for anyone driving to Denver from the SFBA--if you have a little extra cargo space, I've got some party supplies that would be better driven than flown if possible (new baggage limits and all that).

-------------
* maybe winding down a bit exactly then from now.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale (#119): Perhaps the message should be on the voodoo message board (assuming there is one) under "Flor O. Spherian"?

Aside: Font lovers (which I suspect most Fluorospherians are) will probably enjoy this video (SFW, has audio, put down your drinks first).

Julie L@ 184: Evil Rob sayeth, and I quote: "People suck."

Go hug your pets.

THANX YOO, Greg, Lance, Madeline and Janet!!!

I kan now has bettr cluze thn mai randahm intranets poking hads prohduces! Blessings of Ceiling Cat upon thees!!!

AD&D shall live again!

pericat @195, B. Durbin @201, or anyone else who can bear it: the "Fresh Air" segment about "foreclosure pets" is archived here.

And while I was Googling around for that, I also found an even worse news story from New Jersey about when foreclosure happens to someone who was already an animal hoarder.

Cat stories:

All our cats are indoors only. The most recent adoptee, Rikkus, was, we think, one of the "foreclosure cats" mentioned uptopic. He'd been seen around the neighborhood for several years, occasionally harassing our neighbor Anne's cats thru the glass patio door. Earlier this year, it was noticed that his coat was getting matted and he was losing weight. Apparently, his owners left him behind when they moved, and he wasn't that successful at the feral life. (He had a microchip, it turned out, but it was from the shelter in Seattle where he'd been adopted ten years ago, and the owner listed in their records was out of date.) So he ended up being assimilated ("Resistance is futile!") into our household.

There was also the case of Jack-A-Dandy, the kitten born to Cassie (the "rescue cat" before Rikkus, another apparent case of an unwanted cat simply being dumped on the street), who was also the World's Cutest One-Eyed Kitten. Adopted him out to an acquaintance, things went well for several months, then he dashed out an open door, across the yard and into the street, where he was -- literally -- blindsided by a car.

(That sounds sad, and it was, but it turned out to be a good thing for Jack-A-Dandy. Several months afterward, the boyfriend of the acquaintance who'd adopted Jack broke up with her and moved out. This precipitated a psychotic breakdown in the acquaintance, and to punish the boyfriend for breaking up with her... she murdered the other half-dozen cats they'd had together. I don't want to share any of the details I learned about what happened to the cats, but it wasn't painless and it wasn't quick; I still get a sick feeling in my stomach thinking about it. It's just... someone seems and acts normal, and suddenly... you find there's a monster inside that person, capable of hideous, depraved cruelty. So, Jack-A-Dandy was actually the lucky one of the cats, to die as quickly and relatively painlessly as he did.)(Yes, the acquaintance was arrested. I didn't follow the case after that, so I don't know whether she ended up in prison or in a mental hospital.)

Linkmeister #191: Thanks. It's good to see folks who can write better than me going at it.

On a related topic, though, here's a wonderful video in which folks are asked to say whether various quotes are by Batman (Adam West version) or Bush (via). I'm particularly fond of the guy with the magazines.

Re the original post, Japan had city neighborhood fire brigades as early as the mid 1600s. Dense cities built mostly of wood, paper, and straw, you figure it out.

re: #187

Oh, I wish that was in the US! It sounds fantastic!

Melissa Mead #207: Thanks to the magic of the Internet it will available to you on the BBC iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search/radio/?q=Proms for seven days after the broadcast on BBC Radio 3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/.

I hope that this doesn't get anywhere. But if it does, I might ask all Americans I know to wright in, say, John Larroquette on their ballots.

#209
If he actually chose Veneman (or any other more-conservative-than-him person, even a Democrat) for VP, there are a lot of people who would vote third-party or stay home. Anyone who thinks it wouldn't hurt is not well-connected with the party base.

PJ @ 210, See, I think that's a problem for both parties. They each think of their bases as sure things. I'm sure there's internal discussion when moves like this are considered, and somebody pipes up with the following: "Who else are they gonna vote for?"

I'm sure that's largely an assumption with merit; after all, I'm not gonna vote for John McCain no matter how reprehensible Obama's actions become. But I might stay home on Election Day, or just not select a candidate in the Presidential race that day. They really should have that in the back of their minds.

Re: #208
Thanks!

While dropping off a sack of dog crap this afternoon, I spotted this by the dumpsters:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/braille_pile2.JPG

There were three more stacks half as high as those.

Turned out to be braille books. Dozens of them.

Only, really lame braille books; reams and reams and reams of Jehova's Witnesses literature:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/braille_pile3.JPG

Christopher, #200, and the hero is the font I have as default online!

Baby moose in sprinkler!

I really like Digby's posts. Sometimes she makes litle mistakes. Sometimes I make little mistakes.

In her post about the Obama campaign being rogered by the Pentagon, in re his trip/non-trip to Landstsuhl, she said it was an AF Base. So I decided to make a clarifying point (it's an army hospital, it was the third stop in my trip back to the States in 2003).

That too was a mistake, the commenter, Skeptic... not nice.

In fact, one of the most egregious examples of the right-wing stereotype of the troop-hating lefty.

I think I'm going to go have a drink now.

Linkmeister, I think Obama's (better) people know that. That's one reason I think this is being floated by people outside the campaign.
However, I wouldn't bet that there aren't some people inside the campaign who think that 'bipartisanship' and 'healing the country' are more important than actually winning. (There's screaming over at Daily Kos, for example, that Veneman is a bad idea.)

Aww, Terry, dammit. I'm sorry that happened to you.

Watch the baby moose video.

Long-distance hugs for you if you want them.

Well, I have the cherry cordials' shells made, the brandied cherries in, and the brandy-thinned fondant (with invertase) poured. Now it remains to be seen whether I thinned the fondant so much that I can't pour chocolate on top of it, in which case I have to start all over.

That would suck.

OTOH, I've realized that the party isn't until Friday, so the invertase has until then to work its magic. So I have a little time to fix screwups.

Terry Karney @ 215... All of what RM Koske said @ 217. And hopefully this will cheer you up a bit.

To all who are sending me best wishes and hugs...

Yes it sucks (I recall from the last time a commenter at Digby caused me to complain, and your support means a lot; even when I'm not; exactly, petitioning for it), but one does get used to it; mostly.

But as I tried to say there (and no, for my mental health I have no intention to go back), it's stupid. I don't care how much one might think that sort of thing, it's very bad tactics.

When it pisses someone like me (who is on that idjit's side) to the point I won't read what he has to say, it's shooting yourself in the head; jus to prove a point.

Serge @151:
"What's that, Lassie? Flicka fell into the well?"
(I blame too many battered/deep-fried beet slices, and the time.)

Terry, "Skeptic" strikes me as more incoherently angry than anything else. I'm sorry you got attacked. Not fair. He's also a living example of why to deal with your own anger, before criticizing anyone else's.

On the subject I was came here to mention, Castle Island Company (which I think is mostly Ed Grenaa) has an amazing page on rapid prototyping and computer controlled fabrication. Anyone interested in this subject who hasn't seen it, check it out.

geekosaur @ 121...

That reminds me of the cartoon that showed someone stuck to a train track, and the big-choo-choo is getting closer, and the person tells Lassie to get help and she does - on a therapist's couch.

Speaking of kitties... Here is a photo of mine. Notice the photo's title.

Greg @ 130:

In their discussion of Jurassic Park, there's this little gem:
"The problem is that it would be almost impossible to clone the dinosaurs based on DNA pulled from the guts of a 25 million-year-old mosquito."

Yes, indeed. Especially given that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.

(Now, my impression is that Crichton actually did get the dating of his amber correct -- though Spielberg moved the amber mine scene to the Dominican Republic, where the oldest amber is post-dinosaur -- but there are any number of other problems. Like, why fill in the "missing" dinosaur DNA with frog DNA? Heck, human DNA would be a closer match. But then you've have to have a story about human-dinosaur hybrids... which might be kind of cool in a completely silly way...)

I am pleased to see that they included The Core, which Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics called "the worst physics movie we've ever viewed."

Peter #225:

Yeah, I thought Jurassic Park took their one SFish premise (which may very well be as impossible as sentient computers, which is to say, nobody knows how to do it now, but there's not any known physical law forbidding it, as with (say) FTL travel) and then mostly tried to play by the rules of known reality after that.

This seems very different from those blow up the asteroid one day from Earth, thus saving mankind movies, which themselves were at least somewhat less nutty than the more common sprinkling of technobabble onto implausibilities or deus-ex-machina new tech invented on the spot to resolve the Star Trek episode's problem, and then forgotten forever more.

Constance @ 98: The Campion series must have been during a momentary bulge, or maybe Auntie were willing to spend more money on historicals; the TV versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) and Neverwhere (1996) were both painfully cheap. There's a certain irony in the Beeb dropping a lot of money on Campion after cheaping it on Wimsey; Campion is commonly considered to have begun as a parody of Wimsey.

Dave Bell @ 180: So long as you stay on \your/ side of the pond....

guthrie@185 (& prev) re unchanging towns: our 1995 guidebook pointed to a trail of interesting sites south of Oban; the iron smelter (built because shipping ore from the lake district made sense before coal became major) was interesting to us geeks, but we were both floored by a tiny community in which people had lived in ~medieval conditions (e.g., animals in the other half of a house) until 1964.

Bruce A @ 189: Being a Murdoch rag, they left out lines like -"[I won't kill the Joker because] I don't want to become that which I hate."- (Hardly surprising; asking even the pre-Murdoch WSJ to have a conscience was a little like asking a T rex to consider vegetarianism.)

PJ Evans @ #186: "This thing feels like a neutron star with a steering wheel." Ouch.

Bruce @ #205, that's hysterical, especially as I found myself going, "It must be Batman; it's too coherent for Bush."

Terry: Skeptic has a screw loose. Eventually his/her head will fall off. Until then the less attention paid, the better. Thank you for your service, your compassion, your commitment to justice, and your civility.

#225 ::: Peter Erwin
[...] I am pleased to see that they included The Core, which Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics called "the worst physics movie we've ever viewed."

(paragraph 10]:
Keyes ends up sulking in a bar with his friend Serge.

Understandable that one seeking comfort would head for a bar and hang out with Serge. But, Serge, what's in it for you? Was it worth it?

CHip@227: The Campion series must have been during a momentary bulge, or maybe Auntie were willing to spend more money on historicals; the TV versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) and Neverwhere (1996) were both painfully cheap.

Note that both of these programs were produced to be shown on BBC2, which traditionally has lower budget, less mass-market-appealing shows than the primary BBC1 channel.

I can't find any reference to whether Campion was a BBC1 or 2 production, but I seem to recall it was first shown on BBC1 (as an early-evening Saturday program, IIRC -- that is, the slot that traditionally attracts the biggest budget).

CHip @ 227... Neverwhere's low budget is what I liked about it. It allowed the viewer to see Gaiman's imagination, without dazzle getting in the way. But YMMV.

A reminder that the third season of Eureka begins this coming Tuesday night. Yay!

CHip, #227: I've read that initially British broadcasters saw TV shows as similar to taped stage plays, where by contrast American studios saw them as little films. Which at least partly explains the staginess of a lot of old-school BBC programming. (Through the 1960s, some programs were taped as though they were being broadcast live, simply because the videotape they used was such a pain in the neck to edit.) It also may explain something about the BBC's view of television as an inherently ephemeral medium, which (combined with a lack of archive space) led to their junking lots of archived programs they thought no one would ever want to see again.

On the commentary track on the Neverwhere DVD, Gaiman says the original plan was to give the series a film-look treatment to make it look slicker. (This is how the new Doctor Who is done, although they don't give it the imitation film grain sometimes used with this process in the past. The result is something that looks interestingly like a cross between video and film. You can see what the raw video looks like on the deleted scenes in the third season box set, which apparently were never treated.)

Kitty stories:

Several years ago, when I was in my first apartment as a grown-up, and had recently acquired a stray kitten as a roommate, I returned home from my long day at work (I taught at a boarding school and teachers stayed late one day a week for residential duty) to find a note on my dining room table from the police. It seems my apartment building neighbors had made a noise complaint that day...odd, since it was just me and Mica (kitten), and I had been at work for 14 hours.

I called the police station and while I was on hold I wandered the small apartment to see if anything was amiss. My TV and stereo were both unplugged. When I got through, I was told that my TV had been blasting, and I hadn't responded to knocks, so the manager had let the police in and they had unplugged. I explained that I had been at work all day, and there was no explanation other than that perhaps my kitten had stepped on the remote controls.

Epilogue: The next day Mica had been scheduled to be altered, so I was going in to work late. It was about 8 am, and there was a pounding on my door. Two officers were there, and with the immediate attitude like I was a hardened criminal that had pulled over a fast one by blasting my TV and not even being present. I explained my theory re: kitten, and apologized, and promised I would keep the remote controls in a drawer from now on. They left with a "See that you do," and a suspicious look.

Mica also had a tendency to dip the underside of his rather furry, longhaired tail in a lit candle on the dining room table. I'm lucky I never got the fire department called on me because of him either.

We lost Mica to feline leukemia (probably latent, since he was never an outdoor cat after I adopted him) 5 years ago, and our second-eldest cat has never been the same since.

kouredios @ 212... Yesterday, I found that the many Skeptical Inquirer issues that'd normally reside on the top shelf by my laptop were now on my laptop, along with a few issues of the Annals of Improbable Research. I suspect Agatha the Cat Genius although I can't prove it.

Wesley 233: Except sometimes the actors were still stage acting on US TV. Look at The Honeymooners for as long as you can stand it; they project like they're on stage.

Serge @235: She's likely trying to send you a message--that she's in a general state of dubiety, sounds like.

kouredios @ #237, "in a general state of dubiety"

This would be different from a cat's normal attitude? Every one I've ever lived with was a skeptic to its core.

Linkmeister @238: True enough. For some reason, though, Agatha seems to want Serge to be certain about her skepticism. Heh.

kouredios... Or maybe Agatha was trying to unlock my laptop without a password, but all she achieved was to put it to sleep. As for myself, I came out of sleep at 3:50am today and Agatha made sure that I'd stay that way.

Chip #227- I think you mean Bonawe, which is to the East of Oban ( I only visited it for the first time last year, in the rain). Lovely basic simple technology, yet still the ultimate result of several hundred years of fiddling about with things.

But that people were still living like that in 1964 is a surprise- I thought it had died out by WW2.

This week's New York Times Magazine has a short interview with Doris Lessing, which includes this interchange:

Interviewer: For the last two decades, most of your fiction has veered toward science fiction, which has disappointed literary critics like Harold Bloom.

Lessing: I can’t be bothered with Bloom. A lot of people think some of my best writing is in science fiction, and they are just as significant as bloody Bloom.

I am ever-so-slowly catching up. Sorta. Anyway--thank you for the good wishes, everyone! I'm not settled at all, but I can see it on the horizon. Argh, the books, they multiplied in the movers' van!

And abi, 9: it's true (or was true) in France, too. You get police/fire sirens that go, "Tiens bon, tiens bon" (hang on, hang on) and ambulances that go, "T'es foutu! T'es foutu!" (you're fucked up! you're fucked up!). I think these days they're switching to American sirens, which is hideously disappointing.

I realized I've kinda dropped out of sight here for a while. If anyone cares, I'm just having a mix of realtime interrupts (like fixing Mom's computer -- eventually had to order a WinXP CD and reinstall) and discovering Crossfire, which I'm finding quite addictive.

Jamaica, and other anglophone West Indian territories, got their telephone service from Cable & Wireless (still do, in many cases) via a cable from Halifax, Nova Scotia, integrated in the eastern Canadian system, up to some point in the 1960s when the North American Numbering Plan was introduced. (You want end of the empire?) Because of the integration with Canada, the Caribbean networks had to be numbered in the same namespace (telephone numbers had routing content at the time).

Xopher @ 236

Look at The Honeymooners for as long as you can stand it

Oh, man, some one else who doesn't think that show is the pinnacle of Western Civilization! I've always hated the dialog and the scripts in general; they were clearly written by middle class fratboys who thought working class people were some sort of pond scum. Aside from the fact that the single most common theme in the show was a celebration of spousal abuse.

In fact, the only good thing about it was that it gave Art Carney's career a leg up. Would have been nice if it had done the same for Audrey Meadows.

Bruce Cohen @ 246... I grew up on Father Knows Best and on The Donna Reed Show. It's no wonder I was a confused child.

Bruce 246: I can see both sides of the spousal abuse issue. On the one side, Ralph does make it a casual threat in virtually every episode. On the other, Alice never (in any of the episodes I've ever seen) shows any fear of Ralph at all. She gets angry and yells at him, but when he prophesies a lunar future for her she never, ever takes him the least bit seriously. She just looks at him with eyes full of "yeah, right."

And as far as I know (though of course I haven't watched the entire canon, since I find it insulting, degrading, and tedious, not to mention being a kind of comedy (embarrassment comedy) that I detest) he never so much as lifted a hand to her in credible threat, let alone laid one on her in anger. Similarly, Archie Bunker never laid a hand on Edith (though she slapped him one time), though in that case you'd have to call his behavior toward her verbally abusive IF not for the fact that it never affected her in any way.

It's too late to remind those in the EDTzone, but the season premiere of "Mad Men" is tonight.

It also looks like they're repeating the run of "Breaking Bad" starting tonight.

Denvention... looks highly unlikely that I will be there. There are two releases, one of them a major upgrade (the other a specific version for a specific customer) due out from work in mid to late August, and I'm one of the verification testers....

Labor Day Weekend is a MUCH better time for Worldcons, for me....

Wow, Terry, I just saw your comment at Digby's and -- while it was a great comment, as always -- expecting Skeptic not to be a jerk was probably pretty naive. Skeptic seems to have been in full rant; nothing would have blunted that, especially not a cogent post with an actual alternative view. (Actually, I could only get as far as "poor, poor, poor Terry" and blaming you for Iraqi WMDs before closing the window. Ugh.)

Digby's comment section is pretty out of control, if you ask me. Manageably small, but not what it used to be when I still read her comments -- way way way more heat than light, if that one's any indication.

Her posts, of course, are reliably and regularly wonderful.

**Help Dealing with Approaching Senility:**

So I was reading Lois McMaster Bujold's account of her struggle trying to write a book that was *both* full fantasy and full romance. She was describing how in her latest supernovel she was attempting to do three things.

(1) To do a "new world" rather than an "old world" fantasy:

>: TSK began as a project to give myself pleasure in writing again at a time when I felt very dry.... I was doing several literary experiments at once.... [First,] playing with landscapes and social-scapes that were distinctly New World, not recycled European medievaloid...

(2) To do an anti-Manichean fantasy:

>[T]o see what would happen if I gave my characters a real grown-up problem to grapple with, one that defied easy, cathartic solutions like cutting off some bad guy’s head or toppling the Dark Tower du Jour...

(3) But most of all to do a fantasy that was also a romance, or perhaps a romance that was also a fantasy:

>But foremost I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel... after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?...

And it did not work:

>[W]ow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought.... The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important.... [I]t has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important” enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres.... [A]ttempts to make the tale about something, anything else – artistic endeavor, for instance – are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.) I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset)...

And that made me think that I wanted to reread something Teresa Nielsen Hayden had written about the role of cliche in genre fiction--something about how you turn it upside down and all of a sudden you are no longer falling victim to cliche but instead simply punching the time clock, and it's just the semi-obligatory scene set at Almack's that belongs in a regency romance...

But I cannot find this anywhere here, or elsewhere on the internet, no matter how I cast my google net.

Did I imagine this? Did I dream this? Does anybody else remember seeing this?

And after I find this I am going to go reread Hilzoy's famous and unfortunate:

female : romance :: male : *Hustler* centerfold

(If only she'd said "male: Botticelli's 'Nascita di Venere'" instead!...

Paula Lieberman @ 250... I hope you'll make it to Denver. It's really annoying when work gets in the way. I was looking forward to attending a local con called Bubonicon. Of course, can you guess which weekend my manager chose for me to oversee our backup server's exercise?

Brad DeLong @ 252... I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel...

I must tell my wife about your post because writing fantasy novels where romance is the central plot is what she does for a living.

Brad DeLong @ #252, where did you read that? Got link?

Oh drat, Stefan Jones @ 249, I meant to make a post on my own blog mentioning that repeats of BREAKING BAD were starting tonight.

(Funniest series ever made about terminal cancer and drug dealing.) (And it has characters faced with horrifying moral choices, too.)

@255: http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2008/04/sharing-knife-passage-by-lois-mcmaster.html

Gracias, Professor.

Would someone mind explaining today's xkcd strip to me?

Serge @259 - here's what I read in it: The guy in the hat meets a guy in TWO hats. And the sheer awesome power of two hats pushes away the guy in one hat.

(This is my take on it, based on a friend who has a large collection of hats)

I don't think the guy in the hat is being pushed back; I think he's backing away.

Also, the defining characteristic of the guy with two hats may not be "awesomeness", Neil's friend notwithstanding. The guy in the hat is a recurring character at XKCD, and has been generally established as a person you don't want to mess with. My take is that the strip shows the guy in the hat seeing the guy with two hats, and realising that here is somebody who is to him as he is to nearly everybody else.

I took it as "overwhelmed, backing away slowly, can't even come up with a comment" rather than a literal "pushed away".

Neil, Paul, Joel... Thanks. I wasn't too far off the mark then.

not to mention being a kind of comedy (embarrassment comedy) that I detest

So glad I'm not the only one. I do not get the popularity of embarrassment comedy.

playing with landscapes and social-scapes that were distinctly New World, not recycled European medievaloid...

I was just rereading the first two books of that series, and found myself noting precisely that quality--alligators and skunks and raccoons rather than foxes and wolves and badgers, and the Lakewalkers sound distinctly Native American in color and build. Very New World, I thought.

This is totally off-topic... ah. Good. Open Thread.

I just read on TPM that Monica Goodling (ex-Justice Department) used to ask prospective lawyers who wanted to work in the Justice Department the following question: "What is it about George Bush that makes you want to serve him?"

Evidently this woman could not distinguish George Bush from Jesus Christ. IANAL, so I don't know if her questions broke the law, and I'm willing to bet real money that even if they did, she'll never do time. But we are allowed to hoot loudly and point, right? *Hoots, points, considers throwing feces, decides not to...*

Michael Roberts: Oof. I'm sorry you read any of that, I didn't (not past what I saw when I posted). I have no naïvté about people like Skeptic: nor yet, sadly, about Digby's comment threads.

The last time I leaned on ML for support in this sort of situation was for a different poster in one of her comment threads. In some ways I think made my comment here because of the long discussion of moderation in the Yog's laws post (and it might have been better made in that thread).

People like Skeptic exist, and short of abusing myself by going in and waging war (which war, no matter the outcome, I will lose, because the close association with that sort of directed hatred is bad for the soul, or I will quit the field and the spewer of said toxic sludge will claim the victory of holding the field) there is nothing I can about them.

So Skeptic wasn't my target, and I did a drive-by; knowing full well I would be the target of more self serving "wit" and pointless objectifying libels.

I am amused, but not surprised, to find out that is exactly what came to pass.

re Monica Goodling: I didn't get the Jesus Christ reference. It sounded to me like a question about fealty.

What bothers me is that she was asking lawyers for the DoJ, to serve the man, not the law; nor The Nation, but George Bush.

Creepier, IMO, because that way lies autocracy.

#265
She can't be fired, unfortunately, but she can lose her license to practice law. However, it also looks like she was violating at least one law that may still apply, even though she has left the Justice Dept.

A non-toxic local blog posted excerpts from the Republican Rules of Order (or would that be Rule of Order? As opposed to Rule of Law, that is). I decided to apply for a job. Wish me luck!

Another slight delurk, in blind faith that by doing so I won't infect y'all with whatever low-grade infectious prevision of Hell it is that I've caught this time:

Eureka's US season premiere is tomorrow night at what I've begun to think of as "eight o'clock, nine for those of us unfortunate enough to live outside of the Central Time Zone."

For this, and for the realization that the Summer of Stupid is nearly half-way over, I give appropriate thanks.

JESR @ 270... I know where I'm going to be tomorrow night. By the way, did you catch their ad made to be like a musical, with Deputy Jo and others doing kicks in a chorus line?

Serge, said musical amuse bouche has been one of the few-and-far-between moments of relief from sheer ickiness this past week. That and the live action version of the xkcd reworking of the Discovery Channel boom di yada ad, and the hummingbirds visiting Crocosmia "Lucifer" outside the patio slider.

Terry at 267, I heard that overtone too, but "serve him" is a locution which I associate with Christian evangelicals and/or fundamentalists. If she had said "serve in his administration" that would have been entirely unremarkable.

Sensitive, me? Why do you ask?

JESR @ 272... To hopefully further alleviate the ickiness, I have right here an entry in my blog that provides links to the Discovery ad, to xkcd's strip, to the latter's musical version. And to a Doctor Who spoof of the Discovery ad.

Apparently the guy who shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee yesterday was angry at liberals.

Because he couldn't get a job and his food stamp allowance was cut back.

Terry @266 -- I haven't read Digby's comments for maybe a year or two, ever since she first attracted the attention of trolls. I just can't read it -- my blood pressure won't allow me.

Skeptic (by my reading on that thread) isn't a troll, just a habitual flamer with a really poisonous attitude, ready to take on the world, starting with anybody foolish enough to post there. Your post was gasoline on the fire, I figure -- but I'm really not kidding that after reading Skeptic's previous rantage, then your post, I literally just read ten words into Skeptic's immediate response and then closed the window. Because life is too short. Others had already been trying to engage; Skeptic was having none of it, and I can read those signs a mile off (just as long as I'm not the one involved -- and if I'd read further, I would have been involved.)

You were smart to leave it. And it was good of you to make the points you did. Don't feel bad about it.

On the other point -- is there really a difference between Jesus Christ and fealty? Isn't the entire point of the Christian establishment the undershoring of European-style authority? (In the same way that the Koran talks about being the slave of God, I suppose, the Bible talks about the King of Kings.) Damned recidivist nonsense (by which I don't mean Christianity, I mean this nyeh-kultoorny confusion of Christianity with the American state). I think it's time to secede.

Lizzy L @273:

Goodling is the twit who testified before Congress that she "swore an oath to President Bush..."

The oath she's talking about has nothing to do with Dubya, it similar to the one the Prez swears on Inauguration Day, and the oath refers to the Constitution.

Every Federal employee takes it when they're hired.

Christ. My dad lives in Oak Ridge, and he used to spend time at that Church. No one he knows well was in the list of casualties.

What a mess.

Serge #253:

I had something like that start to rear its ugly head a few years back, and pointed out to the proposer that ArmadilloCon was my one annual spree, already paid, and I'd be quite willing to do whatever it was anytime but that. Accommodations were made, and everyone was happy.

My former mother-in-law attends that church. I attended the opening of a photography exhibit there. I know several people who attend, including a friend and an art professor, a specialist in academic hoaxes, I once interviewed.

I'm going to have to attend some services there. Someone like that gunman doesn't get to win.

Nicole@#165: I've always wanted to get a Corgie and name it "Null." I've never found anyone else who thought that was a particularly good idea, sadly.

joann @ 279... The worst such case of bad-timing I ever had was in September 2000, when they rescheduled a big computer simulation to happen on the very weekend when my wife and I were getting ready to move to another state. Oh, and it was my birthday too. Bleh.

Stefan at 275, because liberals are running the country and have been for the last seven and a half years... Lori at 277, I'd forgotten that, but yes, of course. That twit.

Skwid: either I'm missing a joke or you just like Corgies.

*googles "null corgi"*

*clicks on the did-you-mean*

OK, I now know THAT it's a joke, but I still can't figure out what a corgi is. Core graphical interface maybe?

It's only punny in German.

Ein is made of win, but I still don't get the joke. (Null is less than one?)

Skwid @ 285... It's only punny in German.

Hulk smash punny human.

Some people can't even jump it right. Warning: don't read this with liquid in your mouth. When you get to the paragraph beginning "Alas..." you will expel it.

Some amusement may be had with this Cadbury chocolate advert that's made Phil Collins cool (again).

Serge #259: Would someone mind explaining today's xkcd strip to me?

The ohnorobot.com transcription reads:

{{The Black Hat Man is Walking}}
{{The Black Hat Man stops in front of another Man with two Black Hats.}}
{{After two panels, The Original Black Hat Man steps backward, shuddering slightly.}}

Those of you who haven't seen it yet might be interested in Orson Scott Card's latest screed about homosexuality:

http://mormontimes.com/ME_blogs.php?id=1586

I haven't read most of the books he's written in the past 15 years because I refuse to give money to someone whose views I find so detestable. And, no, I've never accepted religion as excusing these sorts of views and I never will. Why more people don't treat him as a pariah remains a mystery to me.

Rob @ #291, In that Card article I particularly admire this bit of erudition: "In another column I will talk seriously and candidly about the state of scientific research on the causes of homosexuality, and the reasons why homosexuality persists..."

If I could get up the energy I'd be tempted to mail him substituting "heterosexuality" for each instance of "homosexuality" and ask for elaboration. Do you suppose his neck would bulge?

Marilee, #127: No, that one is from Offworld Designs, and can be ordered from their website. I nearly fell over laughing the first time I saw it, and bought it immediately!

B. Durbin, #179: That reminds me of the story of Hei Yu -- another one of those "Well, it's funny now" situations.

Fragano, #187: The thought is appreciated, but we were on the road over the weekend. OTOH, after Worldcon I might be able to get my partner to find it on the torrents...

Xopher, #248: I have the same mixed reaction to Andy Capp. Yes, in many ways it's a depiction of an unhealthy relationship; no, I don't see it as celebrating spouse abuse because it's bloody damn clear that Flo not only holds her own, but wins about half the time (probably because she does hard manual labor and is in much better physical condition than he is). I end up thinking of it in much the same way that I think of my parents' marriage: it's not a way that I would ever want to live, but it does seem to make them happy.

Carrie, #264: Count me for three. I know a lot of other people who feel that way as well -- mostly people who were walking targets in junior high and/or high school. In my case, it's partly that and partly that I don't like assholes and therefore also don't like watching (or reading about) them as main characters with whom I'm supposed to sympathize. I can deal with an asshole main character if I'm not being asked to sympathize with him, but writers who can pull that off successfully are very rare.

Open Thread glee: One of my partner's T-shirt designs is mentioned in Pharyngula!

Paul A @261 - Maybe awesome is the wrong word. My friend who likes hats is a lawyer, and some time ago I wrote a spoof memo, which I claimed was from him:

I note that in court, 9 times out of 10 the best dressed lawyer wins. Starting today I will be wearing a 4-piece suit.

The 4th piece is a hat.

This amused him immensely.

Lee #293: It's available on the BBC web site until Saturday.

Regarding embarrassment humor: After thought, reading and discussion, I've come to the conclusion that there are at least three different processes in the brain that all trigger the same reward mechanism. (Steven Pinker touches on all of them in How the Mind Works, but it seems to me that he fails to distinguish them adequately.)

The same comedian, the same joke or sketch, can appeal to all three mechanisms, separately or together, in different proportions...and in fact usually do. And people are wired to respond to them in different ways.

I wonder if brain imaging studies have been done on the topic? If I'm right about this, there ought to be detectable differences in brain activity between someone laughing at "The Three Stooges" and someone laughing at "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" or Steven Wright.

Any one else seen this? I received two emails (same time and date) with subject National Do Not Call Registry - Your Registration Is Confirmed. Inside:

Your phone number with the last four digits 3848 was most recently registered in the National Do Not Call Registry on January 23, 2006. Most telemarketers will be required to stop calling you 31 days from your registration date.

Visit https://www.donotcall.gov to do any of these things:
-- to renew your registration
-- to file a complaint

Print this email and keep it for your records.

Please do not reply to this message as it is from an unattended mailbox. Any replies to this email will not be responded to or forwarded. This service is used for outgoing emails only and cannot respond to inquiries.

The other one is identical, except it says Your phone number with the last four digits 7099.

Neither match my phone number, and I did not register with the National Do Not Call Registry. The sender is Verify@DonotCall.gov. It came to me on my gmail account.

If it is an evil plot, I can't see what purpose is served registering me on phone numbers I don't have. It is also not encouraging that it claims I registered more than two years ago, and they're only just now getting around to the confirmation.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is online for free again -- albeit with "limited commercial interruption" -- at Hulu. There's a choice of watching the original three episodes or one full-length version.

It does work for international viewers.

#293, Lee -

Is embarrassment comedy usually humor where you're supposed to sympathize with assholes? The only embarrassment humor I can think of right now is Fraser, where his assholishness is certainly arguable, though I never felt like he was one to an unsympathetic degree. (That show was frustrating - I could sometimes watch it, and loved it when I did, but most of the time I found it agonizing.) I can't call any other embarrassment comedies to mind at the moment.

Or did I misunderstand your point?

#298, Carol Witt -

Squee!

Em. Ahem. I mean, "Hey, great that it is continuing to be a commercial success." Yeah. That.

Rob Hansen #291: Holy crap, I think he's actually advocating revolution because the government doesn't force everyone to fit his model of male-female relationships.

I always thought embarassment humor was the kind where you're laughing uncomfortably because the character (lead or otherwise) is being portrayed so horribly, or is having something so awful happen to them, that you're embarassed for them.

I don't like it. And I kind of don't trust people who do, but I am a delicate flower about that sort of thing. ("Funny Video" shows? Ugh. DO NOT WANT.)

TexAnne@286: Oh, so you're one of those people...

Rob@297: You are being spammed and/or (probably) phished. Your concern is exactly the response they wish to engender, followed by some other action. Is there no other e-mail or URL in the spam? Does the URL you have here actually point via HTML to a different website in the e-mail you received (you can tell by hovering your cursor over the link, don't click on it, though...)?

The date is the most obvious indicator that this is not a legitimate e-mail from donotcall, though...why would they be mailing you about a number registered over two years ago?

re 297: Acto the FTC page, if the notices were truly sent from the donotcall site, you don't need to do anything if the phone numbers given aren't yours.

#302
Right click and hit 'properties': it should give you the URL in a form you can copy and paste.

I'll bet that the DNC registry has a page for reporting phishing (the IRS does); you want the hidden URL and the header information when you forward the spam.

Earl Cooley @ 290... Humph. You didn't explain that strip. You described its elements. (Yes, I am a computer programmer. Why do you ask?)

Orson....

At the risk of offense to some, in so many ways he sounds like pretty much all the Mormons I've ever known on homosexuality.

They are swell people, and I love several of them dearly, and they are completely daft on the subject (some to the point I have a hard time reconciling my continued affection to their stated beliefs).

I particularly like the part where he says we need to have society make sure wives are seen as property, to the man can feel comfy in the kids being his, and goes on to say the insitution is in deadly peril from, "A vast number of unmarried men and women [who] have such contempt for marriage that they share bed and home without asking for any formal recognition by society.

In an era when birth control and abortion make childbearing completely optional, the number of out-of-wedlock births shows the contempt that many women have for marriage.

Yet most of these single mothers still demand that the man they chose not to marry before having sex with him provide financial support for them and their children -- while denying the man any of the rights and protections of marriage.

God forbid the man should actually have to support his kid; just because the bitch wouldn't grant him the "rights" of marriage.

But the opening points out, in part, why Orson want's to make "Marriage" his "Peculiar Institution": he doesn't believe in minority rights.

These judges are making new law without any democratic process; in fact, their decisions are striking down laws enacted by majority vote.

Well, fuck 'im. He is probably still pissed at laws allowing people to kill Mormons, well if he really believes a bigger group of people making a law give it weight, and makes it something the courts can't address, he's got no right to pissed.

Shooting Mormons was legal, and therefore unassailable. Suck it up and accept your proper place in the world.

Serge #305: Humph. You didn't explain that strip. You described its elements. (Yes, I am a computer programmer. Why do you ask?)

I have committed acts of computer programming myself, from time to time. Just think of it as an art interpretation exercise, now that you know that the Black Hat Man is backing away and shuddering. Motivations. Why would he do that? Does he think that his hat might end up in the stranger's hat collection, making the newcomer Three Black Hat Man and leaving him desolate as No Black Hat Man?

Or, you can take the technical support path to enlightenment and either read the xkcd forum thread on that topic, or, in existential desperation, attempt to contact Randall Munroe and ask "Why? why??"

Earl Cooley III @ 307... ask "Why? why??"

That way lies madness.

306: I found this part especially funny:

Marriage is older than government. Its meaning is universal: It is the permanent or semipermanent bond between a man and a woman, establishing responsibilities between the couple and any children that ensue....Wives need to have the whole society agree that when they marry, their husband is off limits to all other females. All of his protection and earning power will be devoted to her and her children, and will not be divided with other women and their children...Marriage, to be worth preserving, needs to mean not just something, but everything. Faithful sexual monogamy, persistence until death, male protection and providence for wife and children, female loyalty to children and husband, and parental discretion in child-rearing.

Sorry, is that a defence of monogamous marriage as an eternal, universal and unchangeable state, written by a Mormon? Oh, boy.

#309, ajay

I'm not gonna go read the thing, but what strikes me from this quote is that he says it is "permanent or semipermanent," but it should persist until death.

Zombies and vampires don't have to be faithful to their spouses, I suppose?

R.M.Koske @ 310... Zombie unions fall apart too easily. Vampires have no stake in making things last.

Rob Hansen #291: Holy crap, I think he's actually advocating revolution because the government doesn't force everyone to fit his model of male-female relationships

Yep, that's how I read it, too. Incidentally, this piece has also been noticed by the gay press:

AfterElton.com

#311, Serge -

Vampires have no stake in making things last.

Once a vampire stays out past dawn, the marriage is over anyway.

I've had to call an ambulance for myself I don't know how many times, several times for severe haemoptysis, & once for a severe nosebleed that led to a minor car accident (that one was a few days after I'd gotten out of the hospital after sinus surgery). And several times I've called 911 for somebody else. One evening during DragonCon a few years ago I was walking back to my car and saw a man passed out on the floor of the parking deck; probably just drunk, but I thought it safest to call someone. Another time I saw a car pulled over on the shoulder of I-85 with its hazard lights on and pulled over to see if I could help; there was an Asian couple in the front seats and a small child in the back. The woman was crying hysterically; when I asked if they needed me to call 911 for them (cell phones weren't ubiquitous at the time), she said yes, & the man said no; I walked back to my car, called 911, & waited till cops showed up before I drove off. Another time I pulled over on Ga. 316 where there was a car with copious amounts of smoke coming from under its hood, and several people standing around talking frantically about what to do about it, in Spanish; I loaned them my cellphone, and I'm not sure who they called, but cops showed up a few minutes later to help.

I think the first time I ever had occasion to call 911 was when my grandfather died. I was pretty sure he was already dead, & the paramedics confirmed it at a glance when they showed up.

The times I've ridden in an ambulance, I think they only needed the siren once or twice; on most of those occasions the traffic was light.

Sadly it's been noticed. I don't know how much Orson's columns are read, but it will just serve to bolster his credibility.

After all, he's not a homophobe, he just thinks it's a moral imperative to oppress them (and anyone who doesn't think as he thinks on male/female relations).

He's not scared of them... he just hates them; not the same at all.

Terry Karney @ 315...

"Have you ever tried... not being a mutant?"

Open Threadiness (Linkmeister, read this!) -

Uncle Ted (Senator Stevens, R AK) has been indicted.

1)We thought it would be after the election

2)We thought Don Young would be first, as all things considered, he's a bigger slimeball.

I've said it before, I'm not the biggest Uncle Ted fan, but in a state that votes R consistently, he's a pro-choice, pro-public broadcasting guy. Great Invisible Pink Unicorn please let this help Begich get elected.

It would be nice if OC wrote a screed about evils of old guys marrying several or many underage girls and getting them pregnant. That's all part of his religion too, though -- cough cough cough -- no longer 'officially' sanctioned.

I've scratched my several heads over this many a time and I still cannot find any relationship between same sex relationships, with or without children, and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, er, whichever empire of your choice.

Love, C.

Serge: can't help it... I's a mutant to the bone.

More to the point, Card says homosexuality is genetic (though he seems to see it as a defect) and that's immaterial... because it offends his sense of order.

But he thinks the Sith are the good guys, so...

R.M. Koske, #299: I was thinking more about humiliation comedy, which I guess is a subset of embarrassment comedy. When the target is being specifically set up for humiliation and the audience is supposed to laugh, then yes, you're being asked to sympathize with assholes. I can't comment about Frasier because I never watched it.

Gilbert and Sullivan, or Shakespeare's comedies, might be more like what was being referred to as embarrassment comedy. I can deal with those.

Aaah! Like Fear Factor or whatever. No, I can't take those at all.

I think I might be able to watch some of a more Candid Camera type of program. I seem to recall an episode of that show where a vending machine started to talk to someone. This was of course before technology made such things normal. I can't remember if there claimed to be a person trapped in the machine or something else, but I tended to feel that the humor was less in embarrassing the person than in the fact that people (humanity) are just funny. I only remember the one skit, so I don't know whether I could take that show as a whole or not. I kind of doubt it, and I certainly wouldn't expect to like any kind of remake.

The difference for me is in whether the setup is innately intended to encourage someone to make a fool of themselves. Somehow I can see coming out of a surprise encounter with a talking vending machine with dignity, where I can't see a dignified response to being set up to be scared silly.

Earthquake, in Pasadena. Long... 15 seconds or more. Moderate here. No idea about damage at point of greatest force.

Was any of the implicit/explicit pro-polygamy stuff in the Old Testament revoked or made obsolete by anything in the New Testament? I'm often amused/bemused by the people who demand a return to what they refer to as "traditional marriage", usually while metaphorically pointing to a Bible.

In the open-threadedness spirit, here's a house listing I found on Reddit:

http://www.redfin.com/WA/Shoreline/17247-11th-Ave-NE-98155/home/87419

Check out the seventh photo. Woof!

House for sale

Terry @322:
Beeb says 5.8, 32 miles in an unstated direction from LA, city shaken but not stirred. No reported casualties.

Take care and watch out for aftershocks.

#324, Steve C. -

He's big, but he's a sweetie! Wouldn't hurt a fly, really. He's especially fond of the dog-phobic.

I'm on the 7th floor of a 33 story office building near Universal Studios (the park and studio), and we felt it. There was some rolling and shaking, but I determined that ducking my crappy-cube-wall-attached desk would probably not protect me. Nothing fell out of the the cabinets, but you could hear a low rumble. Hoping Hollywood didn't get shaken any harder, or if so, that my dog was not sleeping near my bookcase.

Beats the crap out of having to dig the car out of snow banks every year.

Just as point of clarification. My comment about killing Mormons is in relation to Missouri having had an order of extermination against Mormons.

It's one of the things the LDS like to point out to show how persecuted they are.

The details are a trifle less clear than it looks on it's face; but that's not quite relevant to the issues here.

1838: The Mormons are settled in Missouri, this leads to various hostilities (and at least one schism in the Church).

The hostilities end up in armed conflict (The Mormon War in Missouri). One of the things which happens is an Edict of Extermination, which made it legal to kill, or drive out, Mormons.

It's probable it was never meant to be a blanket condemnation, but the order stayed on the books in Missouri until 1976.

So, by assent (even if passive) of the majority, being Mormon in Missouri was; even if honored in the breach, a potenitally capital offense.

5.8, a couple-three miles southwest of Chino Hills.
Was really fun in a highrise in downtown LA (I want instant-acting Dramamine), but nothing seems to have cracked or fallen down. All the real shaking seems have been in La Puente and Walnut to Corona, judging by the maps so far. (We're inside the 0.1g ground motion contour; those areas are over 0.2g).

My former boss lives in Chino Hills.

#324: Shouldn't he be red?

Clifton @330:
Shouldn't he be red?

I think so, but my kids actually watched the TV series.

Follow up: According to CalTech/USGS (whom, per my comments at Lj I scooped), it was 5.8, Chino Hills (29 miles ESE of downtown). About 15 seconds, in two obvious waves.

Nothing here "walked". It seems to have been what I think of a "rolling" instead of "bouncing" quake.

Cell service dropped for about 20 minutes, and the CalTech server was hard to get into... I presume because of so many people trying to get on to see what happened.

USGS is giving a moment magnitude of 5.4, depth 14km. Moderate size. They use moment magnitude for comparing earthquakes to each other; it makes comparing deep and shallow earthquakes easier.

Joel @323 While there are some sects that read the New Testament as compatible with polygamy (such as the LDS church once did, and some more obscure groups do today), most see the teachings of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament ruling out polygamy.

For example, Jesus takes a harder line on divorce in the Gospels than the Jewish law did, going so far as to describe marrying another after a divorce (with some possible limited exceptions) as committing adultery. But if that's adultery, the reasoning goes, so would marrying someone else *without* getting divorced first.

The Epistles also have a few passages indicating the wrongness of particular cases of polygamy. Romans 7:3 says that a woman marrying another man while her husband lives commits adultery, and passages in Timothy and Titus cite being a "husband of one wife" as one of the ways a church leader should be "above reproach".

Several parts of the New Testament also link marriage theologically to the union of Christ and the Church, which many interpret to mean that the union between husband and wife, like that between Christ and church, should be exclusive.

Clifton @ 330: Yes. Yes, he should -- but we'll allow for color variation in "golden retrievers*" and call him a big dog.

*Who can range from reddish-gold to bright blond in color. Our previous dog was a yellow lab x golden retriever mix, and he was of the reddish-gold variety (until he grew old, and became a greyish-yellow-reddish).

Tania @ #317, Thanks! Josh Marshall at TPM is all over it, as you can imagine.

I was reading a Dodgers blog's comments when the earthquake happened. Blasé doesn't cover it.

"Hey. An earthquake."

Going back to my fears of gluten in tea bags, someone on a gluten board pointed out something I wish I'd thought of: a water-soluble glue is not suitable for closing tea bags, because they'd open again in hot water. (The poster even calls it an urban legend.)

Whew.

R.M. Koske: oops, I meant to point that out when you broght it up.

Sola's former SO is celiac, so lots of these things are stuff we've dealt with (he's really sensitive, so what chickens eat matters to him. I have my doubts that gluten from cattle feed gets into milk, but given the nature of avian systems, it can contaminate eggs).

ajay 309: Actually Mormons believe in a special kind of marriage (done only in the temple and not revealed to gentiles) that lasts beyond death and is eternal. Remember that they discarded polygamy (except for fringie nutbars) a long time back, so they don't have to reconcile that. I'm not sure whether there was ever a time when you could have an eternal marriage of many wives to one husband.

Xopher -

The mormons have practiced eternal polygamy since they existed. The process is this: a mormon couple is found worthy enough for a temple marriage, which involves "being sealed" to your spouse. This ceremony supposedly enables the couple to remain married through Time and All Eternity(tm). It is also the only way a woman can be connected to the Priesthood, a pre-requisite to entrance into the Celestial Kingdom. Often when a wife dies, or is divorced, her husband can be married and then sealed to another woman. The same is not true of women; if your husband dies and you are still sealed to him, you may not be sealed to another man. I was taught (my tenure as a mormon lasted from birth to about 1992)that there would of course be polygamy in heaven. To make it more palatable to the young women in my day, they used the logic that women are far more righteous than men, so God created plural (spiritual) marriage. (that God was somehow unable to just let women hold the priesthood was probably only considered by future apostates like myself.) Also, that while we may find it kind of weird right now, when we got to heaven, all would be revealed, and we'd be cool with it.

I understand that they're not terribly keen on teaching these tenets anymore, but like every other offensively wacky doctrine (white and delightsome!) they just stop talking about it, first to outsiders, then to members, until people forget.

Speaking of cats, a friend of mine has a labor dispute with his.

#338, Terry -

He has to worry about the chicken feed? That's gotta be *hard*.

A lot of stuff wasn't on my radar until recently because I wasn't sensitive to it until January of this year. (Envelope glue and cross-contact in fried foods, for example.) Now I'm slowly finding new things that bother me and knocking them out one at a time. I'd prefer to be getting less sensitive, not more, but I'm still very fortunate.

#339, Xopher -
Oh, so "til death" is the semipermanent version. Wow.

skwid @ 285

That pun would be difficult to grasp even in German: The language has very complicated declension rules and "Ein" will not readily be understood as "one": Even if "one house" is "ein Haus", the numeral alone is "Eins" (especially when contrasted with zero; ones and zeroes is "Einsen und Nullen")

But OTOH, "Ein" is common for the "on" position of any electrical switch. The direct contrast, off, would be Aus. Which, incidentally, is something dogs are often used to hearing, since a sharp "Aus!" is a common way of telling a dog to stop its current activity.

Sorry for the Besserwisserei. A term, BTW, that would deserve a reputation as "a concept only the Germans have a term for" even more than Schadenfreude.

R.M. Koske: Chickens oviducts are the same as their cloaca, so glutenous feed might contaminate the eggs.

As I said, I don't think gluten can get into milk, but he does. Chickens are easy. You can keep a couple, and feed them greens and non-gluten feeds (corn, rape, millet, sunflower seeds, etc.). A good feedstore will have bulk seed, or make a mix to order.

For milk... well his family kept goats, but mostly he doesn't use it, because he can't be sure it's been fed nothing but grass.

Sorry, that was clumsy. Chickens' oviducts share the cloaca for laying eggs, the commonality of passage allows for contamination.

Jörg 343: Vielen Dank für das Wort! (I hope I did that right. My German's pathetic.) I was in need of some unholy delight today!

EXTRA!! SENILITY CONFIRMED!!

Memo to self: not everything written by Teresa Nielsen Hayden can be found by typing a few words that appear in the piece and "site:nielsenhayden.com" into the Google search box...

Such a restriction misses, among other things, Subterranean #4: Special SF Cliche Issue Edited by John Scalzi.

Here is what I was looking for:

"In short stories, the cliché is the story itself: Adam
and Eve crash their spaceship on a planet that turns out
to be Earth. A deal with the Devil goes wrong. Humans
use wacky behavior to thwart a hugely powerful alien
invasion. A trinket purchased at an odd little curio shop
has unexpected powers. The ultimate supercomputer
decides it’s God. A guy gets his heart broken when it
turns out that the beautiful vampire/alien/robot/
virtual/clone/elf woman was only pretending to love
him. And so forth and so on: a score of stories that get
retold far oftener than anyone wants to hear them....

"This is not to say that there’s nothing to choose
between a well-made plot and a botch.... Plots are
important... what gives the
reader an incentive to read all of the pages in order. But
while an original plot is a wonderful thing, in a lot of
cases it’s not strictly necessary.

"Storytelling is an assertion of causality: This is how
the world works. You have to strip a narrative down
almost to the bare bones for its greatest pleasure to con-
sist of seeing how the story comes out. That’s the terri-
tory of jokes, fairy tales, and short stories.

"In longer works, the greater pleasure is seeing how
the book makes its way from here to there, from its
interesting beginning to its satisfactory if perhaps unsur-
prising end. You already know the detective is going to
figure out which guest at the cocktail party murdered
Edna Furbelow in the linen closet of her sumptuous Park
Avenue apartment. The bickering couple forced to keep
company with each other while having some mild
adventures will infallibly fall in love no later than the
second-to-last chapter. And the earnest young person
born under mysterious signs and portents will inherit the
Charm Bracelet of Doom, defeat the Dark One, and
bring peace and plenty to The Land—five or six books
from now.

"Clichés are only clichés if they bother us. When
we’re expecting something new and interesting in the
way of a narrative mechanism, but instead get the same
old same old, it feels like a cliché. If a novel employs a
narrative maneuver that’s just as well-used, but we aren’t
expecting novelty—hey looka, it’s yet another Regency
Romance that has a scene set at Almack’s—then it’s
not a problem. A book that starts from a bog-standard
plot but uses it with inventiveness and grace will read
fairly well—which means the bog-standard plot doesn’t
bother us, and therefore isn’t really a cliché.

"What does bother us are worn-out devices for setting
things up or moving the story along. Mark Twain nailed
James Fenimore Cooper for his habitual use of them....

"One twig is a fine device. A twig or two per book is
excusable if there’s enough other stuff happening; even
a battered old prop can look okay if it goes past you fast
enough. Too many twigs become irritating, and are there-
fore a cliché..."

TexAnne @346
No, actually it is flawless.

Brad DeLong @ 347... the earnest young person born under mysterious signs and portents will inherit the Charm Bracelet of Doom, defeat the Dark One, and bring peace and plenty to The Land

Conan the Barbarian will be back in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Ernest".

"By Crom, Lady Windemere, a man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

Everybody now, clap your hands, clap your hands: earthquake vagina

As far as polygamy goes, I think Twain had it right about a man not being able to serve two mistresses.

However, there is an Old Testament tradition that deserves a resurgence: handmaidens. I think I've almost sold my wife on the idea, too. The last time we talked about it she said: "So, those Friday nights when you stumble in at 4am from gaming, I could make my handmaiden put up with the aftermath of you drinking beer and eating junk food for the last 12 hours?"

John A Arkansawyer @ 351

"So, did the earth move for you?"

Lee, #293, thanks! I passed that on.

Brad, #347:
"Oh, spare me your stories of Adam and Eve who ascend from the shelter to breed;
And boring old stories of war and its glories are stories I'd rather not read.
Robotic rebels, and vampires with AIDS, and spirits who never can rest;
Deals with the Devil -- I'd make one myself to get this stuff off of my desk!"

(I think this is by Joe Haldeman, though the only person I've ever heard singing it is Juanita Coulson. I have no idea of the title, and some of the lyrics are folk-process because my mind had blank spots.)

Serge @ 259 et. al.
In reference to the XKCD strip in question, am I the only one who thought "Ah, fear of a black hat is automatically trumped by fear of two black hats!"?
the film in question.
Though I may be utterly wrong...

Open threadiness:

Folks have been asking where they might find their jetpacks? Maybe right here.

I think Mr. Two Black Hats is a potentially dangerous hat predator who wears his trophies.

Open thread recommendation: deranged Italian music film from the 70s. (N.B.: contains breasts)

Cat Meadors @ 301: You're not alone. There are some ostensibly harmless traits in a person that will make me, at the very least, ill at ease around them when they're evincing them (and at worst will make me not trust them with my unprotected psyche), and one of those is enjoying others' discomfort overmuch. Which is what embarrassment and humiliation humor invite audiences to do. A skilled writer can make me enjoy watching the bad guy get his comeuppance, but it's got to be more than just "This guy's bad! So he deserves it! Enjoy his suffering!"

You can imagine how I resisted Heinlein's character's epiphany of "Oh, I get it! Humor is other people's pain!"

I also got tagged as "having no sense of humor" growing up, because I didn't laugh at things like... oh, the story of my aunt as a little girl running to open the farmyard gate for the car to pass through, and panicking at being unable to get down because it swung out over a deep mud puddle, and all the adults present laughing too hard to help her at first. The mental picture of that last bit made me cry my eyes out. I was 11 and in the hospital when my grandmother told me this story. She thought to distract me from my sorry surroundings, and I think my reaction struck her as ungrateful. At the very least it tried her patience. "I could understand you crying because you're in the hospital," she told me, "but, look, no one got hurt, and the story is funny! You're supposed to laugh, not cry!"

Recently, a friend introduced me to Scrubs, which, depending on how much the episode relies on embarrassment and humiliation humor, I either enjoy or watch with deep discomfort. Right now, the episodes airing on Comedy Central are getting uncomfortable for me. It doesn't help that this friend shortly afterward introduced me to DVDs of House, which I like very much, but is an entirely different mood of hospital drama. Watching House makes me subsequently less inclined to laugh at doctors acting like Seinfeld characters while on the job.

Null says hi, and glad y'all enjoyed the story. Actually, what he says is, "Huh?" because he has relentlessly lived down to his name, or else because my husband was exceedingly astute in naming him. Among the incidents that show off his stunning capacity for intellect are the night he fell off the TV in his sleep, the various times when he forgets to put his tongue back, the evening he begged for and ate chili cashews until he barfed, and the day he chased his tail and caught it and ran screaming from the room because SOMETHING BIT HIM!

Hmm. That would be me enjoying his discomfort. I'm not sure how to reconcile that with the above examination of my inability to appreciate embarrassment humor. I guess it's different when the embarrassee is a cat? Maybe because I'm not sure he actually feels embarrassment? (Oh, I know that most cats can, but trust me, Null is not the sort to sit there all dignified and go "I meant to do that." We think he's missing his sense of dignity altogether. We think he may actually be a puppy with retractable claws.)

Ted Stevens indicted for massive corruption...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/29/AR2008072901416.html?hpid=topnews

And, in line with my Don't Trust Those Aircrew Blighters Further Than You Can Throw Them thesis, I note that he was awarded the DFC for flying transport aircraft over the Hump in the Second World War. Another one for the list...

JimR @ 356... It appears, from the first answers to my question, that it was a case of hat envy. Or does xkcd like hip hop?

I have trouble watching humiliation comedy, too. In fact, I'm uncomfortable watching any character being humiliated in anything. If I'm watching a movie and it looks like a character is about to make an ass of him/herself, I hit fast forward.

The odd thing is that there are exceptions. Peanuts, for example, is funny, even though the strip is one long series of disappointments for Charlie Brown, and (although I don't remember where to find the quote) Charles Schulz once said he believed humor stems from pain. The difference may be empathy; Peanuts doesn't encourage readers to just laugh at Charlie Brown, but to look at the world through a Charlie Brownish lens.

On a different note, it may be that one of the reasons I find Homer Simpson to be one of the funniest characters ever is that, like Nicole LeBoeuf-Little's cat, he's too serenely, obliviously dense to feel anything but shallow and transitory embarrassment.

Nicole @ 360 - my cat once chased her tail so hard that she fell over dizzy. (You could almost see the cartoon bluebirds circling her head - it was fantastic.) She used to wrestle with it all the time, but biting it would just make her angrier, so she'd bite harder until one of us broke up the fight. And this is our smart cat.

(She's also the one we thought was a great mouser, until we realized that it was the little one that actually caught the mice - she'd just jump her and swipe the mouse at the last moment, bearing it to my husband with dearest affection.)

Humiliation comedy: I wouldn't watch the first season of The Office, because all the clips made it look like exactly the sort of show I hate. (I really didn't want to cringe at Michael Scott for half an hour a week.) Turns out I was wrong on that one, but it is a fine line.

I'm trying to sort out the laughing at silly cats thing. I think it also has to do with what humiliation's all about - it's a social thing. If you pick your nose and nobody sees, it's not embarassing. If you pick your nose in your car, and I'm sitting next to you at the stoplight, I'll feel embarassed for you (and want to honk and hold up my "YOUR CAR DOES NOT MAKE YOU INVISIBLE" sign, but that's just me.) We don't get embarassed for entities that don't feel embarassed. And I think that has something to do with adults laughing at kids - we don't think they "should" feel a certain way (like in danger when swung out over a big puddle), so we don't see the harm in laughing at the situation. Of course, kids feel what they feel, and it's not the same when you're the one who's stuck.

I try really hard not to do that, and not to let other people do it to my kid (you'd be amazed at how far some adults will go in teasing a child, or at least I was), but now I wonder if I'm doing her a disservice; I always protected her from scary movies, and now that she's old enough to watch them, she's hypersensitive to the eensiest slightly-spooky thing*. Am I working on making her a social neurotic now? On the other hand, the kid has no social fears, so even if I am screwing up, it's probably not in a way that's actually going to make a difference. (She got on stage the other day! And sang a song! In front of a whole restaurant full of people! I practically hyperventillated with stage terror for her, but that's ok because I was just in the audience so she couldn't see.)

*For any other parents who've done the same thing - The Muppet Movie has no scary parts.** Work up from there.

**You may have to explain what a "movie theater" is, though.

Feline demands...

Cat Meadors @ 364... I think that has something to do with adults laughing at kids

I've been told by my sisters-in-law and by others that I'm good with kids. That may be because, while I'm not a kid anymore(1), I remember quite well what it's like to be one. Last year, when I went to the Bay Area, I met my 6-year-old nephew. He was happy to see me(2), but, when I told him that our youngest dog liked to eat shoes, it became obvious that he thought I was making fun of him because dogs can't eat shoes - can they? He was taking me literally. I knelt before him and explained that I had meant that my dog liked to chew on shoes, and I told him that I'd never ever make fun of him.

(1) Really, I'm not.
(2) How many adults would have been willing to pick him up and carry him around so that he could pretend he was Superman flying?

Wesley (363): I have trouble watching humiliation comedy, too. In fact, I'm uncomfortable watching any character being humiliated in anything.

Oh, me, too!

Cat Meadors (364): Social embarrassment. Yes, exactly. It makes my skin crawl to watch, whether it's supposed to be humor or not.

Wesley #363:

My contrast point for this is MASH's use of Frank Burns vs Charles Winchester. Humiliating Frank was an every-episode affair, and most of his characterization went into making him unlikeable enough that the audience would enjoy seeing him mistreated. Winchester was sometimes bested by Hawkeye and BJ, but never stopped *knowing* he was superior, and so the back and forth with them had a completely different tone. More like banter between equals with a bit of bite to it, less like the popular kids in high school picking on the unpopular kids while being too important to the football team to be called on it.

R.M.Koske @ 310: I think his main point is that marriage is for mummies.

albatross @ 368... the popular kids in high school picking on the unpopular kids

"It's okay, who would want to make a total stranger look like a fool?"
- Clark Kent to Lois Lane in 1978's Superman

Add me to the list of those who find fictional embarrassment too painful to watch. This shuts me out of most sitcoms. Even watching Malvolio get his richly deserved comeuppance in Twelfth Night hurts.

(And the "Hi, Zuko here..." speech in Avatar makes me cringe, though it is both funny and appropriate.)

I wonder if social isolation/awkwardness has anything to do with this trait? The only context in which I feel like "one of us" is my own family, and only to a limited extent there.

Tangent: I think "Cringeworthy" would be a great name for a fictional butler.

Wow, thank you everyone! I've been called humorless and a stick-in-the-mud and worse for not liking embarrassment/humiliation comedy. (Recently someone told me I had no "connection to human beings" because I hadn't seen City Slickers, which I thought was rather extreme.)

Now I know that a whole lot of people I like and respect feel the same way. I no longer will entertain the notion that it might really be something wrong with ME!

And that bit of Stranger in a Strange Land is what got me started thinking about humor being based on others' pain. I distinguish between Wit (which tends toward wordplay and incongruity) and Yuks (which is composed of making fun of stupid or foolish people, or of smearing unpleasant substances on them etc.).

Like the Wit. Hate the Yuks.

Xopher @ 372... I wonder if it makes me unconnected to humankind for never having watched Seinfeld, except for the bits that were forced upon me during the holidays because my in-laws HAD to have the TV on to that show?

Open Thread Rant:

We have spent two weeks since our move trying to get phone service at our new house. Each time I call the next person on the list to be cajoled, begged, bribed, or threatened (if only this would work) into doing their job, I spend about an hour navigating voice mail, sitting on hold, getting randomly disconnected, talking to the wrong person who offers to send me to the right person, listening to repetitive elevator music while waiting for someone to answer the phone, etc., before being screwed around with for a couple hours, promised a solution real-soon-now, and finally being informed that somehow, they just can't help.

We finally gave up on our old phone company (who couldn't transfer service to the new house, because it had FIOS but not copper to it) and the Verizon clownshow (who promised us service last Friday, but then did nothing, and after much tech support wait time, informed my wife that they had no record of our existence). We're trying to set up service through Comcast[1], which did eventually show up and get our cable and internet working a few days after we moved in. I am told, now, that it will likely be at least another two weeks or so before we're able to get phone service at our new house, due to the difficulties of transferring our phone number. (I can call the company that has our old number, I can call the company that we're trying to get to provide service, but somehow, them talking to one another is simply too difficult.)

Now, I understand that in, say, Afghanistan, it is expected to take a month to get local phone service. Seeing as it's a war zone and dirt poor besides, this isn't a huge shock. But why in God's name does it take a month to get phone service in the middle of endless, heavily-wired suburban sprawl? If we didn't have cellphones, we'd be completely screwed right now. We have (cable-based) high speed internet, for God's sake. Just not phone service. That would be Too Hard.

I am tempted by the idea that I should just get a 4-phone cellphone plan, put two of the phones strategically inside the house, and be done with it. But this is, of course, a bluff. Because God knows I wouldn't dare monkey with the one part of our communications with the outside world that currently *works*.

Perhaps in six months, the Albanian Telephone Directorate will send word by messenger that soon, a wire will be stretched to our house, and a few months later, a mostly-sober technician will be by to hook up the phone. But I won't bet on it.

[1] Just as an aside, when your customer service is so lousy that the local cable monopoly looks good by comparison, this might be a hint that you aren't doing a great job. Is there something about providing telephone service that imposes a mix of rude incompetence and love of impassible voice-mail menus on the providers?

Serge (373): I'll see your No Seinfeld and raise you No Friends (except once when I was visiting friends (heh) who insisted on watching it).

Mary Aileen @ 375... Oh, I was quite happy being without Friends. There must be something inhuman about us.

Serge #373:

Yeah, I can't stand Seinfeld, and can just barely stomach Friends. I don't think worse of people who like them, but they're Not My Cup of Tea.

Life's too short to spend it on art of any kind that you don't like, whether unfunny comedies, Important Books that you find boring and pretentious, art that's too abstract to understand, music that doesn't sound good to your ear, etc. Ten lifetimes wouldn't be enough to listen to all the good music, read all the good books and stories, study all the interesting stuff, spend serious time paying attention to all the good art, etc.

albatross @ 377... Hear, hear!

Seinfeld left me with my usual reaction to any kind of drama or fiction without any characters I could sympathize with even slightly...or even characters I didn't want to shove under a bus. I felt the same way about Perdido Street Station. I was repelled, which is not a way of being entertained, not for me.

Friends is just patently ridiculous. Those apartments don't exist in NYC, for one thing, or if they do people who work in coffee shops can't afford them. They don't dress, talk, or act like New Yorkers. All of them need therapy but none of them get it (not that I've ever heard).

And all of the characters are embarrassed, all the time, for absolutely no reason.

Mind you, IANAFF, and have only seen a couple of eps by force. Me no likey.

Is there something about providing telephone service that imposes a mix of rude incompetence and love of impassible voice-mail menus on the providers?

"We don't care. We don't have to. (snort) We're the Phone Company!" -- Lily Tomlin

Jörg@343, thanks, that's good info. The idea, though, is that "Ein" in Cowboy Bebop is some sort of biological data storage device. If the zeroes in binary code would be referred to in German as "Aus," then that would clearly be a better choice...my knowledge of German is extremely limited.

Serge@366, I find it depressing that your second footnote isn't inverted in meaning. Why *wouldn't* they, aside from physical inability?

As far as Friends and Seinfeld go, I find the former completely unrewarding to the point of incomprehension of its appeal, and the latter mostly boring. Seinfeld has its merits, they're just too few and far between to make watching it worth the effort.

albatross, you might get some sympathetic reinforcement from Chad's Verizon Saga.

I've had pretty much flawless service from them, but I'm beginning to think I got lucky.

Albatross, have you met GetHuman?

(I believe it was here that I learned about it, a couple of years ago. Really helpful when you're trying to get past the unhelpful phone menus.)

I've never seen Seinfeld, Friends, The Office, or The Honeymooners. I have seen M.A.S.H., though.

albatross @ 377: Life's too short to spend it on art of any kind that you don't like

I prefer Theodore Sturgeon's maxim: "I'll try anything twice, to see if I can acquire the taste." I don't take "anything" literally (I doubt he did either), but I can definitely state that my life would be poorer if I filled it with only those things that I liked the first time.

albatross @374:

I share your pain. It's a global phenomenon, sadly.

When we moved to the Netherlands, we found that all of the cable and telephone companies had toll-free phone numbers that could not be reached from outside the country. We only got to speak to anyone because one of the ISP's (with a non toll-free number) was owned by KPN, the major phone company, and the guy at the ISP did an internal call transfer.

Moving to the new house meant that we could at least make the phone calls. Sadly, that just exposed the next layer of incompetence, which has included shipping the set top box to the new house a month before our move-in date, giving us the wrong cable package, and switching off the wrong cable package for several days till they could connect us to the right one.

Useless.

Xopher, #372: No, it's nothing wrong with you. I submit that it's a symptom of something badly broken in our society as a whole, and that it's part of the suite of attitudes that make bullying a socially-acceptable behavior.

albatross, #374: Do any of your local media outlets have an ombudsman program? (The one in Nashville was run by Channel 2 and called "2 On Your Side".) This is exactly the sort of thing they love to get their teeth into, because it makes them look good at the expense of a competitor.

And @ #377: I'm condensing that last paragraph down into a button format!

Skwid @ 381... On the other hand, that makes me stand out as a cool uncle. Even my less-than-2-year-old nephew likes me. It must mean something that he kept bringing books for me to read to him, with him sitting in my lap of course.

Seinfeld used to give me nightmares - the real, wake-up-screaming kind. It was bizarre. My tinfoil hat theory is that Seinfeld was actually an experiment in mass mind control and my brainwaves were just tuned incorrectly to be affected by it. (It would explain why it was so popular...)

But really, I just asked my husband to stop watching it. He asked me to give up scratch-offs. It was a fair trade.

Albatross @374 - I gave up Verizon in favor of Comcast too, and boy, that's saying something. (I don't even have cable!) But it is very much like the difference between getting hit in the head with a hammer once and getting hit in the head with a hammer twice. Good luck.

377/386: My shorthand for albatross's last paragraph is "Life's too short to read bad* books**."

*where "bad" = "I don't enjoy it"
**applies to all artforms

Lee @ 386

I submit that it's a symptom of something badly broken in our society as a whole, and that it's part of the suite of attitudes that make bullying a socially-acceptable behavior.

Heated agreement. Not that it's anything new; one (maybe the most important) reason why I react so badly to humiliation and embarrassment humor is that I was badly bullied as a young child, and that was a while ago. Still, I think it's worse now in schools.

Shorter (buttonworthy) albatross: "So much good art, so little time."

Cat:

How old is your daughter? We're raising our son with much the same parenting style, and at 6 he's suddenly starting to branch out into trying more movies and being less timorous.

There was a long period a couple years back where he wouldn't even watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos he hadn't seen before, because of a part in one where the train went around a curve too fast and the passengers were thrown off into bushes and trees. That was terrifying at the time, and for a long while he refused to watch anything he hadn't already seen. Now he's become a bit more adventurous in his choices.

Skwid @ 381
It is at least possible. I dimly remember that the whole binary system in electric/electronic devices was explained in basic school as the two possible states of "on" or "off", Ein or Aus.

Mary Aileen @ 389:

But "bad" != "I don't enjoy it." If I saw your slogan on a button, I'd assume the wearer was exhorting me to drop the pulp and pick up the classics--probably not what you intend.

I've been trying to figure out what bugs me about albatross' credo. Here's the best explanation I've come up with:

I tried to read Ulysses twice, and failed both times. Now it could be that Ulysses is a load of dingo's kidneys, that the people who claim to love it and celebrate it every Bloomsday are just pretending, that Joyce's having written some of the best short stories in the English language is just coincidence, etc. Or it could be that I just haven't learned how to read Ulysses yet. The latter strikes me as far more likely.

Under the "life's too short" program, I would just shrug and move on. But I think it might be worth the effort to learn how to read Ulysses. It might not, and it might not even be possible for me--but how will I ever know if I don't try?

Obviously, it's a question of triage--there are a vast number of books I haven't learned how to like, so I need to make some sort of guess as to which ones would repay the effort, which may very well be wrong and lead to wasted time. But the alternative would be to stick to stuff that I already know how to read, which, for whatever reason, wouldn't satisfy me.

albatross #374:

Have you considered going cell-only, or do you use the phone company for your net access?

Tim Walters (393): Your reading of my slogan *is* the most obvious one. Which is why I felt the need to footnote it. Nevertheless, it's how I phrase my willingness to put down a book I'm not enjoying. For button purposes, I like Bruce Cohen's rephrasing at 390.

I found some Seinfeld episodes to be very well written, although I do have the same problem that several others have already mentioned, that is, that the characters are all so unlikeable. I had a bit of a soft spot for Kramer, but as a friend of mine said, he is after all already at the stage were you should be offered some kind of special care...

One problem I have with some forms of comedy that I sometimes feel sorry for the more embarrassing characters. As a child, I often got sad watching Fawlty Towers. Of course, as an adult I see that a lot of Basil's troubles are of his own making (maybe it was a childish sympathy with being unable to command indifferent surroundings, I don't know). It is the same thing with Mr Bean and the boss in (the British original, I haven't seen the American show) The Office, I know that they somtimes have it coming, but I still feel a bit sorry for them.

But maybe I'm in a small minority here. And this does not mean that I can't see how spot on for example the Office often is.

Tim Walters: It may not be binary. They may love Ulysses (or Farewell to Arms, or any other book people acclaim).

It may be, for you, it sucks. There is no way for you to learn how to read it; because the things which make it great don't work for you.

Or, to reach back to the classics, Gustibus non est disputandum, as the French would say, Chacun a son goût.

In plain English, One man's meat is another man's poison.

Terry @ 397: Sure, that's why I said "it might not even be possible for me." My point is that there's insufficient evidence for that conclusion. It took me three tries to read Gravity's Rainbow, but the third time I couldn't put it down.

Mary Aileen @ 395: For button purposes, I like Bruce Cohen's rephrasing at 390.

I don't see it as being any different from yours.

One could say "don't read it if you don't enjoy it."

This may be one of the Top Ten stories to ever appear in The Onion:

Al Gore Places Infant Son in Rocket to Escape Dying Planet

Terry Karney @ 397... Another translation would be 'Des goûts et des couleurs on ne discute pas', which means 'Tastes and colors are not to be discussed'.

My version is "life's too short for bad beer." Or "cheese," when speaking to teetotallers.

The most useful phrase I've heard recently is, "It does not speak to my condition." Which acknowledges the facts that (primo) your condition is not the same as mine, and (secundo) mine will change.

TexAnne @ 401... Life is too short for any cheese?

I watched Seinfeld faithfully during its initial run and enjoyed most of the episodes. The reruns get tiresome with repeated viewing, but there are occasional great episodes.

One show that I enjoyed during its initial run but that I can hardly stand now is "Everybody Loves Raymond." Not because it is bad, but because it can get painfully real. There's one episode where a half-ass contractor friend of Raymond's totally botches up buying a replacement kitchen range. It closely echoed something that happened to my parents, involving a kitchen floor and a guy who hung out at the local bar.

Serge, 402: No, bad cheese. (Bad cheese, no biscuit. Uh, cracker. Oh, never mind.)

TexAnne @ 404... Heheheh.

Serge @400 Another translation would be 'Des goûts et des couleurs on ne discute pas', which means 'Tastes and colors are not to be discussed'.

I don't know - some good beer, some good cheese, a few friends, a discussion on tastes and colours - sounds like a pretty good evening. You may disagree of course :)

FWI (and we know just how debased our U.S. currency is) here's what I think about books like Ulysses:

I really and honestly think they are brilliant and wonderful works, by just about any criteria I come up with.

I also don't much care to read them, silently, to myself, by myself.

These are the kinds of works that blossom in reading aloud, serially, among friends. I've participated in repeated readings of Ulysses and quite a few other Great Works this way, including Renaissance plays, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and so on.

Reading with a friend or several, taking your time, laughing, discussing. about what you're reading, especially works like this which are so very oral and aural in their delights, is pleasure not like any other.

These works are composed as 'social' works in the first place -- meant for rooms of people, to be recited or performed. Joyce composed Ulysses over many years, bringing in just about everyone who happened to get within his considerable orbit, in one way or another. He certainly read it to people over and over during the process.

And that kind of pleasure too, isn't for every one.

Love, C.

#407, Constance -

What a lovely idea. I tend to think that, like hosting a gaming night,* it's a lovely idea that I'll never implement, but it is a really lovely idea all the same. Maybe I'll surprise myself one day.

*I'm too passive (or something) to host get-togethers where we do anything other than sit and eat and talk. And I rarely host those.

Neil Willcox @ 406... True, but there are some subjects where disagreement may cause the death of friendships. As for beer, I could tell the difference between a lager and a root beer, but that's about it.

texanne,

The most useful phrase I've heard recently is, "It does not speak to my condition."

when i'm forced to explain why, for example, i am not into a new band that my husband's into, i say "it says nothing to me about my life," as in the smiths song.* i like it because it is both self-mocking & kind of deeply true. but it probably wouldn't be appropriate to say to people who don't know me well enough.

*i actually don't know whether the song is smiths or morrissey. cause they say only a bit to me about my life.

Tim @ 384: I'll try something twice if I was just unimpressed the first time. If I disliked it, I'm less likely to--how unlikely depends both on how strong the dislike was, and on how varied the "something" is. For example, I tried risotto once, and didn't care for it at all. Several years later, I tried it somewhere different, and this I liked. I may well try risotto at a third or fourth place, after the second experience. Had two completely unconnected restaurants, both otherwise good, produced risotto I disliked, I probably wouldn't have tried a third.

Tim, #393: Reframing your argument in a different medium: I don't like alcohol. There are a lot of people who do like alcohol, and who spend a great deal of time discussing the finer points of different types of alcohol, and as far as I'm concerned it's all horse piss. Now, it could be that (as I have all too often been told) I just don't know how to drink alcohol, or haven't tried the right alcohol, and that by putting in a lot of time and effort, I might learn to enjoy alcohol too. And if I did that, then I'd understand what all those other people are talking about, and that would surely be a positive thing.

BUT... to me, the potential benefit I might get from that understanding is simply not worth the unpleasantness involved in reaching it. Same/same with art (literary or otherwise); some of it is worth spending the effort to learn to appreciate, and some isn't. And the issue of which art is worth the effort and which not is entirely subjective. I won't tell you that you shouldn't bother to continue trying to read Ulysses, but you don't get to tell me that I'm doing something wrong by putting it aside and moving on either.

Just one post tonight and no reading -- I had a busy few days and napped too late to stay online and not stay up all night. I'll catch up tomorrow.

I finished the necklace for the first donor from the Live Long and Marry fannish movement on LJ. I wish I'd thought to make that for myself!

Unexpected:

The teenage foster kid just referred to us, albeit obliquely, as parents. (She described to her new ringtone of Beethoven's Fifth, for when we call, as "the parent tone".)

Whoah. Would never have thought that would happen.

Constance #407: These are the kinds of works that blossom in reading aloud, serially, among friends.

The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis

(for varying values of "blossom")

It's been very illuminating reading all the discussion about the lack of enjoyment to be had from humiliation humour. I thought for years there was something wrong with me because that kind of thing just leaves me cold, even shuddering a bit. Like Bruce Cohen, above, I suffered terrible bullying as a kid, and I find now, in my mid-40s, I'm very sensitive to anything that reminds me of it, even a little. The "Funniest Video" type shows just make me wince and feel terrible for the poor bastards shown having some awful thing happen to them. Even with all the added sound-effects and "wacky" music cues, it's still not funny, not even a bit.

Re Seinfeld and Friends: I have watched lots of both these shows, and found I preferred Seinfeld, even though that show is about these awful people. It came as quite a shock to me when I first realised that not only were they unlikable, but that they were *meant* to be unlikable. (Unlike Friends, where clearly the viewer was supposed to love all of them.) That struck me as shocking at the time.

Or maybe I just need to get out more. :)

Clifton @ #414, that's kind of, well, nice.

Tim Walters #384 (and #393): As usual, I agree--there are many things I disliked the first time that I ended up liking on the second try--or third, or fourth... Still, no matter how many times I try, no one will ever convince me that Blade fracking Runner is worth watching. Yeesh.

Re: Seinfeld, I love it, almost unreasonably. And I can't explain why, but one feature of a lot of stories I truly love is a complete lack of any character I can identify with or even like. That's one of the reasons I love film noir so much (that, and because it's so darned pretty).

miriam #410: It's The Smiths. "Panic". The Smiths say an awful lot to me about my life, mostly because they're mopey AND hilarious.

Lee @ 412: And the issue of which art is worth the effort and which not is entirely subjective.

Taste is entirely subjective, certainly. But if someone reads, say, Byzantium Endures and doesn't get that Pyat is an unreliable narrator, then they're reading it wrong, which means that working on that would have some non-subjective benefit.

That doesn't make what you're saying wrong, because how much our hypothetical reader should care that they're reading it wrong is again subjective. I could be a better table-tennis player if I did some drills, but since I just play in the office for fun, I don't bother. There's nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with reading just for fun in a similar way (or saving one's rigorous effort for an entirely different reading project). It's all good.

I won't tell you that you shouldn't bother to continue trying to read Ulysses, but you don't get to tell me that I'm doing something wrong by putting it aside and moving on either.

I don't think I said anything like that. If so, I certainly didn't mean to.

Constance @ 407: It never occurred to me that difficult material would benefit from being read aloud, but now that you mention it it seems obvious. Thanks for the clue!

I've done group Snark readings, but nothing more substantial.

To something much earlier said
Way back in the past that I read
I am trying to link…
Or perhaps, do you think,
This ought to be on t’other thread?

Down in North Somerset way
They all know what makes a man gay.
For cider on beer
Do make ’un quite queer.
John Barrowman, what do you say?

Or,

In West Country folklore it’s clear
That cider on beer makes you queer.
But my taste for male pork, sir,
Was formed in South Yorkshire.
John Barrowman? Really, my dear!

ethan @ 418: As usual, I agree--there are many things I disliked the first time that I ended up liking on the second try--or third, or fourth...

Seafood and beer were the big ones for me--I disliked both (to the point of disgust in the former case) until well into adulthood, but in both cases ended up in situations where (a) I wanted to like it enough to keep trying it, (b) found an example mild enough to sneak by my aversion, and (c) was able to move on to the less mild forms from that starting point.

Again, I'm not saying this is what people should do. Just mentioning what worked for me.

Xopher@372: Your "wit" and "yuks" are two of the three kinds of humor that I think are different brain mechanisms. The third is "togetherness" -- i.e., "I'm part of the in-group!" This is what drives references and in-jokes. If you can come up with a one-syllable tag for that, I'd be obliged to you.

Taste is entirely subjective, certainly. But if someone reads, say, Byzantium Endures and doesn't get that Pyat is an unreliable narrator, then they're reading it wrong, which means that working on that would have some non-subjective benefit.

Really? Why are they wrong? Why isn't it possible to read Pyat as a truth telling narrator from (say) another world?

#414, Clifton -

Congratulations. That says most excellent things about you.

#424, Keir -

I'm not familiar with the work in question, but wouldn't a truth-telling narrator who doesn't understand what is going on be unreliable?

I've started taking all narrators as unreliable until proved otherwise. This has nothing at all to do with the fact that my favorite writers are Brust and E. Bear.

David@423, how about "Heh?"

Clifton 414: Congratulations! That's great. And that particular choice shows that she has wit as well. Also, I agree with R.M. at 425 that it says good things about you.

Earl 415: I'd say more "bloom" as in 'offshore algae bloom kills thousands of fish'.

ethan 418: Wow. Opposite kinds of tastes here. Love Blade Runner, which strikes me as an SF film noir...have you ever seen it as originally released, with the voiceover narration? I liked that better, actually (though I know the hardcore BR fans will come for me with pitchforks and torches for saying so).

Tangent: I wish I'd first seen Dark City a. without the opening narration and b. expecting a film noir. It would have been a much better movie that way.

Tykewriter 421: Probably belongs in the Amphibrach thread, but me likey! (I can has John Barrowman? I can has just taste?)

David 423: I'd call that a subtype of wit. Sometimes it's used for group identity confirmation, and sometimes to find members of your same group. If I say "I have come to wound the autumnal city" and someone on the plane next Tuesday says "Aha!" I know I've found another fan. If I sing "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" to the tune of "Dona Nobis Pacem" and someone joins right in before I even get to 'dolor', I know that they're familiar with both the round AND publishing (or computer interface design).

But perhaps I'm classifying it as wit because it's one of my favorite kinds of humor. I don't think so, though: it depends on the listeners' knowledge as well as the speaker's, is frequently based on wordplay, and usually flies right past those who don't get it, rather than just making them think "what a jerk"—all of which are characteristics of wit. Sexual innuendo is another kind of wit; crude sexual jokes go under yuks.

OTOH, if your buddy Jake is called "Pantless" because of the time back in college that he lost his pants and had to walk home from the gravel pit with his jacket pulled WAY DOWN, that's yuks, even though it's in-group humor. I guess I think in-group humor cuts across my categories but can be classified into them; the "togetherness" label sounds good, but ISTM that it covers different things that are wit or yuks, rather than being different from either.

Re: Dark City. I walked in on my friends watching Dark City about 5 minutes into the film and was told nothing more then "We're watching Dark City. You'll probably like it." I think that was the best possible way to see that film.

Several old, rude dribblings starting here.

Serge @ 429 -
ethan 418: Wow. Opposite kinds of tastes here. Love Blade Runner, which strikes me as an SF film noir...have you ever seen it as originally released, with the voiceover narration? I liked that better, actually (though I know the hardcore BR fans will come for me with pitchforks and torches for saying so).

Not this hardcore Blade Runner fan...

I wish I could see the original Dark City again, the choppy and dreamlike version. It was a much better movie than the "director's cut", which is the only version I can find these days. (Also, Han shot first, and you kids need to get offa my lawn.)

Tim, #419: No, you didn't; apparently my brain skated over the last paragraph of your post when I read it the first time. Sorry for the misplaced testiness -- we actually seem to be in violent agreement. :-)

And @ #422: That's more or less how I developed a taste for salsa and other spicy foods. The salsa that I was first able to eat successfully... well, now I could probably drink it by the glassful!

Amusements in overlap.

This piece at BB Law Prof and Lawyer Agree (which says something I've been saying for more than 20 years [and when did that become something which related to things I did as an adult?]) was sent to me by my father.

For some reason, I'd never have expected him to know from BB; thought it falls in the sort of thing he'd like.

Constance/R.M. Koske: We used to have "reading and eating" parties. They are great fun. I recall wandering the shelves at one (they travelled) and pulling down a book of poems; from which I read, comically, "The Raven."

I don't know what came over me, but the room was in stitches, which was the idea. We did pieces of plays, and snippets of who can recall what.

There was a chunk of time (they were living in Los Angeles) that Emma Bull and Will Shetterly had a regular one of these.

They are great fun.

Keir @ 424: Really? Why are they wrong? Why isn't it possible to read Pyat as a truth telling narrator from (say) another world?

Specifically, because he says he's from our world. So he can't be both of those things.

Generally, and more importantly: because it would make the book completely pointless and silly. For any book there's an infinite number of undisprovable readings, but just as with theories of the world, undisprovability is not enough. What's wanted is insight and understanding, and if one's reading keeps making one pile rationalizations on top rather than resolving things that were previously unclear, it's not a very good reading (unless, of course, the book is hopelessly muddled).

I guess I should add a caveat that one's goal needn't be understanding the work. If it's more fun for a reader to make up weird theories, they should follow their bliss.

It may just be the soda I'm drinking*, but this:

from which I read, comically, "The Raven."

makes me feel quite fond of you right now, Terry.

*Caffeine affects my brand of mild depression and relieves it, so I'm most likely to love humanity and particular examples of it when I'm well-caffeinated.

Xopher #429: The fact that Blade Runner is an SF noir is one of the reasons that it actually made me angry when I saw it--I didn't just dislike it, I got personally mad at it because I should have loved it. Instead I found it bland, and I also don't really believe that the concepts people claim are in it are actually in it.

But I know I'm in the vast (vast, vast, vast) minority here, and I'm sure there's something I'm missing. Maybe I should try again. I haven't seen the version with the voiceover, and now I'm thinking I should try that one, because I often do prefer things die-hard fans dislike.

Oh, and when I'm in the mood to overlook its cheesier elements, I love Dark City. I haven't seen the director's cut, but if, like TexAnne says at #433, it removes some of the choppiness and dreamlike quality, then I don't want to see it.

ethan, in that case, you must stay FAR away from the director's cut. They explain why the city is where it is, and the beach...well, just trust me, the new version is neither choppy, nor dreamlike, nor good.

ethan... I find myself prefering Blade Runner with the voiceover. But I prefer the ending of the director's cut.

This has started popping up on my friendslist: Transcriptase, the new online publication formed as a response to the William Sanders debacle.

Jen 442: What a clever name! I like that a lot.

TexAnne #440: Eeeewwwwww!

Lee @ 434: Sorry for the misplaced testiness

No worries.

I'm in between on Blade Runner--I enjoy it in many ways, but it has some pretty serious flaws. The main problem for me is that the androids are superhuman. Not only does this make it hard to believe you need an empathy test to detect them, but it's wrong thematically--the whole point is or should be the indistinguishability of the natural and the artificial.

I feel like Blade Runner takes Dick's ideas, picks them up, says "ooh, shiny," and puts them down again, without really engaging with them.

I also don't like the way it occasionally uses vintage clothing and sets to say OMGZ WE ARE SO NOIR NOW. And I could definitely live without the gratuitous face-slapping.

Dark City I really like, and it validated one of my movie-finding techniques: "Not only does Mick LaSalle not like it, but he says the plot is incoherent! It must be awesome!" I haven't seen the director's cut, and it sounds like I shouldn't.

ethan,

I often do prefer things die-hard fans dislike.

oh, yeah? then i am less afraid to tell you, die-hard fan of the smiths that you are, what i hear when i hear "panic". (that looks like a place to hear the song, but i am almost as scared of internet music as i am of internet video, so i didn't check. if not, it should be pretty easy to find with the group & song title.)

Tim Walters @ 445... Not only does Mick LaSalle not like it, but he says the plot is incoherent! It must be awesome!"

Lasalle is the critic who said ofX-men 2:
"This movie celebrates the death of humanity."

I hope for his sake that he never gets a visit from a master of magnetism who likes wearing dorky helmets.

Idle observation, eminently suitable for an open thread:

Popcorn can, in my experience, be classed into two basic morphologies. Some are nearly perfect spheroids, while others have little bits trailing down, encasing the shell of the original kernel. I tend to think of the first ones as "brains" and the second ones as "jellyfish". Jellyfish are by far the more common.

So at the cinema tonight (Amsterdam Arena, Indiana Jones and the the Legend of the Crystal Skull), I looked into my bucket of popcorn and saw almost all brains. And I can't figure out why. Possible answers, as discussed with the Hub:

• A difference in materials, such as a slightly different breed of corn, with kernel coatings that are a tiny bit less rigid, and thus don't stick down when the kernel is popped.


• A different popping process: hot air popping rather than oil and a hot pan, perhaps, though this supposes that all the popcorn I have eaten in the UK and the US is done differently than what I had tonight


• Some post-popping effect, such as the agitation of a bag of pre-popped corn causing the brains and jellyfish to separate into vertical layers. The presumption then is that I just happened to get a box from the brain layer

Or am I just hopelessly weird for imposing a taxonomy on popcorn?

abi #448:

Weird, yes. Hopelessly so, not at all!

I've never seen Dark City, so I shall need to check it out. I do think Blade Runner is a perfect SF film. Or just a perfect film. Or plainly to my taste?

As for reading aloud in company, back in the days when things were far more relaxed in our part of town we used to do a seasonal celebration reading of Sir Gawain at the Ear Inn that week between Christmas and New Year's. The group read alternately in Middle English and Tolkien's translation. There were musicians. Parts were sung. It was a popular seasonal event. Of course most of the attendees were colleague-friends who lived locally, just as we did, and the bar-restaurant's staff and owners, who were also living there and friends and colleagues. It was fun, it was musical, it was seasonal.

Then everything got more rich and hectic and the artists moved away and even the Ear Inn sold itself to more upscale owners and all that stopped.

Vaquero and I have read Sir Gawain to each other though, some years, at Christmas time. It's a magical experience. If you're in the mood for that. Not every year is like that. The holidays in foreign cities are marvelous, as are those with friends.

Love, C.

Abi, I read about popcorn in When Do Fish Sleep?, by David Feldman. As best I remember, the round, compact version is usually called mushroom popcorn. The tentacly version is butterfly popcorn. Different breeds of popcorn tend to produce one or the other type, so it's easy to select kernels for their popped shape.

People generally prefer eating butterfly popcorn. Retailers of already-popped corn generally prefer to sell mushroom popcorn, because it doesn't break to small pathetic bits by the time the customer is ready to eat. So popcorn kernels for home popping are generally butterfly, but mail-order popcorn assortments are generally mushroom. Apparently movie popcorn is mushroom too.

abi 448: I think it's a case of the "big pieces come to the top" effect. If you agitate a container with nonfrictionless sides, the larger pieces tend to end up on the top, even if they're heavier than the smaller pieces. This is partly because when you shake a container of objects, random-sized holes open up between them, and the smaller ones have a better chance of falling into a hole (on the way down) than the larger ones.

I understand that the friction on the sides of the container is relevant too, but I never understood how. Something to do with turning things over IIRC.

The popcorn jellyfish may not have a larger actual volume than the brains, but they have bits sticking out that make them effectively larger in terms of falling into a hole. And popcorn in a movie theatre IS agitated, for a related reason: the unpopped kernels, which few customers want, fall to the bottom of the warmer and through the grate into a catch tray. That same agitation lets more brains end up on the bottom.

There's also the fact that any hybrids (part brain, part jellyfish) can have their protrusions broken off in the agitation process, and become brains; but brains cannot become jellyfish. Thus the longer the popcorn has been sitting there, the higher the proportion of brains will be found in an average serving.

451 Rozasharn: Or that. Yeah. LOLAM.

But when I worked in a movie theatre back in the 70s, we definitely had a preponderance of butterfly popcorn...fewer kernels per bucket means higher profits, measured against the wastage caused when bits break pathetically...I dunno.

miriam #446: Don't worry, I love the Puppini Sisters. They do a mean "Wuthering Heights", too. Have you ever heard of The Apple Sisters? They're an awesome sketch comedy trio whose conceit is that they're a Andrews Sisters-style singing group with a radio show in the '40s. But that doesn't even begin to describe them. I saw them at the last SketchFest NYC (which I was able to attend through the gracious intervention of a benefactor), and I was leaning forward, sitting on the edge of my seat, the whole time they were performing. Even when there was a slow moment, they were a joy to watch because they were so full of creative energy. Brilliant.

abi #448: I don't know, but you did just make me want popcorn, real bad.

ethan,

oh, good! yeah, i really love the whole album, except for "jeepers creepers" (& the thing that offends me is that awe-inspiring eyes would be described as "little." it's a love song to a beady-eyed sweetheart?) & "i will survive" which does not, cough, take the cake.

their other album is half covers & half their own stuff, & is, sadly, about half-good (in my opinion). although i never thought i could love "crazy in love" like i do now.

they got me thinking that i really should try to get some andrews sisters albums (it doesn't hurt that i am a jew booster). & i will look out for tha apple sisters now, thanks!

abi @ 448, I read this sentence Some post-popping effect, such as the agitation of a bag of pre-popped corn causing the brains and jellyfish to separate into vertical layers. before I read any of the rest of your post, and boggled at the mental image. Popcorn with what and what?

Then I read the beginning.

Sometimes my habit of non-sequential reading gets me in trouble. I only ever notice that I'm doing it when things like this happen.

(I agree with Xopher's assessment.)

#448, abi -

Weird, but in the way we like. I think most of the fluorosphere has probably participated in, if not initiated, a similar conversation.

#453 - Xopher -

You are not alone, sir. I had a post all set with much the same theory and just happened to check for new posts on preview. (My explanation for why she doesn't see the effect at home is that there is less stirring of popcorn at home. You make it, dispense it all into bowls immediately and then eat.)

And now for something completely different:

I am now officially annoyed that Hugo Awards. The Best Professional Editor (Long Form) category should be set up like the Artist category and require the nominees to have a couple books they edited listed by their names. Because I suspect that the vast majority of voters have no clue who edited most books in a given year.

For example; I'm fairly knowledgable about SF. And I can't figure out what books Beth Meachem edited last year. I *deliberately went looking* online and I can't find out.

I know PNH edited the Scalzi and Hartwell edited ROLLBACK, but that's only because those two novels were nominated for BEST NOVEL so I went to Amazon and looked at the copyright page.

But if a voter wants to make an informed decision how is he or she supposed to do so? So far I know exactly one book edited by two of the people nominated. I had hoped that Patrick edited AXIS as that would have made things easy, but it looks as though Teresa edited that one. (I'd vote for you if I could, Teresa!).

[/rant]

At the. I am now officially annoyed at the Hugo Awards. Oh well.

Random musical moment -

My husband found a musician on YouTube who is pretty cool with an amazing instrument.

He calls himself That 1 Guy, and he has a homebrew electronic instrument that lets him be a one-man band.

I'm terrible at describing musical genres, but his background includes progressive jazz, and his piece called "Butt Machine" has a bit of a rap sound. I love the red-haired dancer in the video. (Warning, I do not hear lyrics clearly without a great deal of effort. There's nothing obviously offensive in this one, but I can't say it is 100% clean.) One of the YouTube videos also includes some very nice string playing that segues into what I'd call funk.

He's interesting to watch because he uses (apparently) on-the fly sampling and multiple percussionist's foot-pedals to control his "Magic Pipe" instrument, which looks a bit like the pre-rinse faucets in a commercial kitchen.

There's lots more on YouTube, but here's one last live recording that I liked, too.

Hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

For the allergic hamster lover:

Japanese Robotic Hamster

I mean, wow! The name says it all: it's Japanese, it's robotic, and it's a hamster!!!!

Cat Meadors @364:

I found a certain scene near the end of _The Muppet Movie_ *extremely* scary when I was about eight or nine. My recollection is vague, but I think there was some kind of helmet thingy that fried people's brains...?

Tim Walters @393:

Sometimes when I bounce off a book I'll just put it in the trade-in box to take to the used bookstore. Other times -- if a book has been strongly enough recommended, or if I feel like maybe I'm just not in the right frame to appreciate it -- I'll put it back on the shelf and give it another try a year or more later. Right now both _Ulysses_ and _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_ are waiting for another try (it would be my third or fourth attempt at the latter; I love the prologue and enjoy the first couple of chapters, then there's a long passage in the middle that I can't get through, or couldn't the last couple of times I read it). That's proven a good strategy in the past; among the books I've bounced off of the first time and enjoyed greatly when I tried them again a long while later are _The Lord of the Rings_ and _The Worm Ouroboros_.

David Bilek @459:

You can use the SF Editors wiki to look up editors and what books they've edited. For instance, here are books edited by PNH, 2006 to 2009.

Warning: a little more poking around revealed that the SF editors wiki page for TNH has been a steady target of wikispam for several days. If you look at the recent changes log all the changes in the last three days are spam on the Teresa Nielsen Hayden page, except for the edit I just made reverting to the last good version. But as persistent as this spammer (or more probably spam script) is, I don't expect my fix to last for long.

I'm not sure what the point of such a spam script is, since it keeps writing over the results of its previous attacks with a completely different advertisement every few hours.

I didn't find the brain-frying helmet so scary, but the part where Kermit makes his impassioned speech and then Doc Hopper says "Shoot him?"

I was ten, I think. I guess scary hits on different levels then.

Don@461, I want!

a) I would not feel totally guilty if my hunter-kitty got at it (which she might not, if it does not demonstrate much independent motion) ; b) no cage/cleaning, etc.

i wish they'd make a robo-budgie, though (for most of the same reasons). I would so love to have another bird but cannot afford one big enough to scare the cats. Plus a parrot would outlive me.

Waaaaa I was in Preview and hit an unknown button and my post disappeared. I'll put in what I remember without comment numbers:

Clifton, that's great that she called you parents!

abi, it's the type of popcorn. I buy mine here and currently have Savannah Gold and Red River Valley. I'll try a couple more types next time.

And when a zoo had a cat-2 hurricane approaching, they herded the flamingos into the mens room for safety.

R.M. 458: Maybe, but the last time I disagreed with Rozasharn it turned out she knew what she was talking about, whereas I was talking through my ass. So I'm a little hesitant to get all categorical!

anyone want to see my best birthday present this year? (caution: contains cartoons.*)

*say that five times fast.**
**when i was little, i thought "five times" was a measurement of the speed you were supposed to say it, i.e. five times faster than "fast."

Jim, #462: I do that too, sometimes. If I can't quite decide whether I like a book or not, or if it's by an author I usually like but this one seems disappointing, I've learned that putting it aside for a while (at least 6 months, generally more) and then reading it again will clarify my opinion. Sometimes I find that I like the book better the second time through; other times it crystallizes my decision to put it into the cull pile. I think John Barnes is the only author about whom I've had both reactions (about different books, of course).

Psst! For those to whom this will mean something... billmon's back!

abi @ 448

mmmmmmm ... brains

miriam: I was going through the slideshow going "Wow, what a great present, and look at all these comic greats" and then OMG! You have a page from my friend Deb! (Deb Aoki) Small small world.

Tim Walters @ 445

I feel like Blade Runner takes Dick's ideas, picks them up, says "ooh, shiny," and puts them down again, without really engaging with them.

It's not that it doesn't engage them, it's that they don't appear at all. Blade Runner has almost nothing to do with Philip K. Dick, and in fact, the themes about androids versus humans are exactly reversed from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Dick uses the androids as symbols of everything artificial and unhuman in the world he describes; Ridley Scott talks (very eloquently, in the climactic scene on the roof between Deckard and Roy, I think) about humans' inhumanity to everything non-human, in the form of the Replicants.

As for the ending, it's not so much that I don't like the voiceover (I don't; it's a cheat) as that the first time I saw the movie, in the original cut, I heard Gaff's last line, "You don't know how long she'll live; no one does!" followed by a hard cut to black, and, before the voiceover started I said to myself, "Holy crap, self, that was a great ending." But the voiceover undoes that.

And re Dark City: sounds like I don't want to see the director's cut either. I like the movie as I first saw it, and like the DVD I have: it's pace and mood exactly match its tone and lighting and editing; in fact the only thing I'd like to change, is Kieffer Sutherland's performance, which is downright embarrassing. But I still get goosebumps remembering that line, "Shut it down! Shut it all down!"

clifton,

You have a page from my friend Deb! (Deb Aoki) Small small world.

small world indeed. even smaller archipelago, i guess. we've been fans of deb's since she had the booth opposite us at stumptown (portland) comics fest two years ago.

Clifton @ 414

Hey, congratulations! I think that proves that you guys have done a good job fostering her. I hope it's just the first such sign.

Is it creepy that when I'm lost in thought (happens a lot) lately, I notice that I'm muttering "et lux perpetua luceat eis" under my breath, over and over?

Well, it's creeping me out, and I wish I would quit it.

Xopher @476:
Depends. Singing or speaking? If singing, what arrangement?

Way cool, miriam.

Jim Henry @462, David Bilek @459: unfortunately, there's not really any useful information about Beth Meacham on there. I'm not sure, but I'd guess at least one of her recent projects was Mike Brotherton's latest novel -- I know she edited his first, at least.

Bruce: actually the line's better than you remember it - "It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?"
Unless they changed it for the director's cut?

Xopher @ 476... It's like that 1970s song "Can't get it out of my head", but in Latin?

Xopher, 476: If you think it's creepy, then it's creepy. OTOH there are worse things for your subconscious to be doing than asking the Light to shine upon others, after all.