Darkness must go down the river of night's dreaming.

Sometimes the abrupt nature of a new open thread showing up makes me feel like I wasted my time posting in the last part of the previous open thread.

Flow morphia-slow, let the sun and light come streaming into my life...into my life--

There's a light--

So this gleam of incredulous existence walks into a fathomless abyss...

A man walks into a fathomless abyss, and he asks the bartender for a gin and tonic...

Google Books are now available in 3-D. Not clear whether this is a prank, or just regular whimsy.

What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Science Fiction World topples its editor-in-chief. It's apparently not an April Fool's joke. Some of the things that the now ousted editor did sound like April Fool's jokes to me, but they came to light a while ago.

Xopher @#1: Close! Up! Now!

Earl Cooley III @2:

I read every comment on every post and delight in them (not all, but much).

And I start new Open threads before we reach the magic number so that conversations going on in the old one can continue.

6
Apparently, they're doing street-view in 3D today, also. (The kind that requires the red/blue glasses.)

Am annoyed that Chaucer seems not to be available online, but soon found my favourite bit of Heretics: "It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them."

I need your help.

There was a TV ad aired in the late 1990s the imagery of which I never forgot, but not what the ad was for.

It showed what things might look like if Rome had never fallen. There were automobiles, and skyscrapers, but some elements, including the High Official's garb, were glaringly Roman.

I’m fairly certain that it was aired before 2000’s "Gladiator" because, had the ad been contemporary to rhe movie, I’d have simply shrugged it off as trying to cash in on something else. Yes, there was Julie Taymor’s 1999 movie ”Titus”, but I discovered it after "Gladiator".

Does this sound familiar?

Did you guys go to Google.com today yet?

And no, the "Topeka" business isn't the best part. Click on Gmail. They've disemvoweled the Gmail homepage! Google's official blog "explains" the situation.

TNH for the win!

i must admit I don't get the Topeka thing, but the first thing I thought of when I saw what they'd done to Gmail was that Teresa had been by....

Falconer, the city of Topeka changed its name to Google for several weeks. It's very silly, but they did it.

Serge @ 13 -

Could it be this Computer Associates commercial?

http://www.advertisementave.com/tv/ad.asp?u_player=mediaplayer&adid=242

It just shows about 10 seconds of the ad.

CA Ad

When you stare into the abyss, the abyss charges you fifty bucks and tries to sell you a T-shirt.

Lori Coulson @3:

--over at the Frankenstein place.

There's a li-i-i-i-i-i-i-ight...

Burning in the fireplace.

And if you stare too long into the abyss of light, what light may not shine through you?

There's a light, a light -- in the darkness of everybody's nignt --

Lois Fundis @ 14: Nothing to see on the Gmail link you give (the vowels are back), but the "official blog" page is funny.

At Google.co.uk they're offering "New! Break the language barrier between species with Google Animal Translate!"

Steve C @ 17... That's the one. THANKS!!!

... over at the Frankenstein place...

How many RHPS fans does it take to change the light over at the Frankenstein place?

Google is now measuring its search times in microfortnights.

28
Jiffies, it says.

The trailer for the new series of Doctor Who is out. It does not leave me overwhelmed with breathless anticipation the way I'd hoped it would, but it does look like the new series will be very pretty.

I got shakes of a lamb's tail.

This just in from Locus: Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross to write an authorized sequel to Atlas Shrugged.

http://www.locusmag.com/2010/April1st_AtlasSequel.html

Atlas Shrugged sequel

(I saw it on the interwebs so it must be true)

anaea, #30: "All of time and space. Everything that ever happened, or ever will. Where do you want to start?"

Can you imagine a better recruiting line? I sure can't.

@28: Nanocenturies, for me.

dcb @24: I took a screenshot for posterity.

I wonder if a longtime lurker and occasional commenter may solicit your-all opinions on a somewhat unusual publishing question; I can't think of a better forum to ask this in.

I would like to publish a primer of an imaginary language. I have lots of material - detailed grammar, largeish lexicon, some texts; I'm in grad school (linguistics of course) and this is my way of procrastinating. But this genre doesn't yet exist, to my knowledge anyway, so I don't know how to go about it.

What I envision is a late-Victorian-style schoolbook of the "First Latin Book for Boys" type - written in the same dry donnish voice, with ordered lessons and exercises and increasingly complex texts. It would be as if you had stumbled upon an alternate-world version of a first-form Latin or Greek textbook from 1889. The writing system is appealing (there's a sample if you click on my name), so the book would be visually intriguing though presumably costly to produce. I think it might find an audience, but querying publishers with such a bizarre project seems unlikely to work. Any advice?

Lee #33, no I can't. But why is it yet another cute girl he's recruiting? I was really hoping the new management would mix it up a little bit and we could move away from doe-eyed fawning over the Doctor. One can be fully cognizant of the Doctor's awesomeness without pining for him. I'd like more of that.

#36 I think it might find an audience, but querying publishers with such a bizarre project seems unlikely to work. Any advice?

Query the publishers.

Rejecting your manuscript is their job, not yours.

"Blinded by the light,
revved up like a deuce,
another runner in the night
Blinded by the light..."

"There's a light in the depths
Of your darkness.
Let is shine
Oh, let it shine
Let is shine
Oh, let it shine
Let is shine
Oh, let it shine..."

Funny how well the musicians see the light. :)

I'm not expecting them to go back to actors of Jon Pertwee's age, but I wonder what's going to happen if this trend of a younger Doctor with each regeneration continues.

"This is my sonic lolly!"

Laramie Sasseville's comment at #39 reminds me of this sketch: "There's no luffa sponges, there's no ripping of douches, and whatever the hell *you* said there's none of that, alright?!"

Jim #38 - okay, but who? How to choose a publisher for a book in a nonexistent genre? I'm not sure what type of publishing house such a project would have a chance of interesting.

There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.

The light! It burns! A joke and yet a truth
I do not look too close at what I feel
Sharp-angled shadows highlight tarnished youth
I’m not as fond as I once was of real
I actively reject the evil dark
But yet retreat from incandescent glow
Too much equivocation leaves its mark
I stand irresolute, afraid to know
And yet I’m only trapped here if I choose
The ostrich’s retreat from things that are
I can reclaim myself if I refuse
The stagnant sterile dimness for the star
We only fall into the faceless night
If we hold back from the abyss of light

What a difference change at the top can make....
President Obama showed up in New England today --he is traveling into Boston from Framingham this very instant--regarding the flood damage. One the FEMA executives involved is a former "first responder" who had been in state government in Massachusetts--compare that the FEMA apparatchiks in the Katrina debacle, whose qualifications for appointment to federal posts involved their having been Republican campaign workers without first responder/emergency services experience....

There definitely are political angles involved, admittedly--the governor of Massachusetts has been under a lot of pressure and criticism recently, and the governor and the President are long time affiliates of one nother, there is a $30,000 a plate dinner in Boston tonight fundraiser--but keys points include that the FEMA appointees in the current administrations, are qualified, competent emergency managment professionals--not people appointed based on pure political favoritism--, and that FEMA involvement in disaster relief might actually involve competence rather than incompetence, cronyism, and corruptio.

Falling away
Embrace all possibilities
The door is ajar
And the light streams from inside

--from the song I'm recording tonight

"Granny had always tried to face toward the light. But the harder you stared into the brightness the harsher it burned into you until, at last, the temptation picked you up and bid you turn around to see how long, rich, strong and dark, streaming away behind you, your shadow had become." (From _Carpe Jugulum_. Granny, of course, kicks temptation's butt: "I’ve fought you every day of my life and you’ll get no victory now.")

Steve C, #40: What I've heard is that Steven Moffatt had planned to cast an older actor, but was unexpectedly impressed by Smith.

Pendrift @ 35: Thanks - I just had the same idea for the google.co.uk home page with the link to the animal translation page - but I'd closed that window and when I went on again they had already changed it (I did mananage to paste the translation page into a Word document).

@28: 0.31 centons, for me. Isn't that the time unit from BSG?

"Results 11 - 20 [...details trimmed...] (at warp 8.69)"

I got 1.63 times the velocity of an unladen swallow. How much would that be again?

If the abyss stares back at you when you stare into it, is that self-abyss?

I got femtogalactic years for the Google result time.

Results ... (at 2.20 hertz)

Random units, looks like.

Cool!

Bruce Cohen @ 53...

Why would Abi stare back at you?
("Not Abi, Serge. The abyss.")
Oh.
Nevermind.
I still think it's James Cameron's best movie, in spite of its length.

I used Google several times today before the TV news told me about Topeka.

Gabriel: maybe check with the publisher(s) of the Codex Seraphinianus?

Random, perhaps, but for the ones with actually meaningful units the conversions seem about right -- my value of 0.03 femtogalactic years works out to about 2 seconds, and 2.2 Hz works out to about half a second, both of which are pretty reasonable.

The one I had in jiffies had a number like 59.4 attached. The problem is, which jiffy are they using?

My quote file has lots of poems about light, but most of them I got from Making Light originally.

Here's one from somewhere else:

Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour those waves which somehow Might
Play out God's holy pantomime.
—Alan Turing

This is the choice: that we defy the night
for a short time and keep alive a spark,
timid perhaps, but worthy to remark;
a simple thing of note to honest sight,
rejection of the vast kingdom of blight,
a wisdom that calls on us to skylark
with laughter, to ignore the final dark,
empowering the fragile human light.
Each one is a beginning we are told,
to be recorded, and to be advised
of what's around, below, and what's above;
to find out what is clay, and what true gold,
what's best admired, and what's best despised,
the fruit of all our hope and all our love.

@36, 43--

this is probably advice unneeded and too late, gabriel, but if you are still honing the donnish tone you could hardly do better than to look at the series of primers written by joseph and elizabeth wright (old english, old high german, middle high german, gothic, and i forget what else). and i most love him for the edd, the english dialect dictionary.

they were the real deal, victorian philologists, and wright had a rather promising pupil named tolkien.

i worked with them years ago, and i think you might find some nice turns of phrase and touches of period colour in them.

Well, I lack Fragano's (Mr. Ledgister's? Apologies!) rigour and clarity, I'd like to post this anyway - on the subject of bullying:

The slap in the face
Resonates. The pain
Coruscates, No trace
Of a bruise will remain.

Nasty notes and texts
Fill up my inbox.
Caught in the vortex,
Shut the doors! Close the locks!

The pretty girls, violent,
Vitriol all over my face -
The pretty boys, silent,
Slut! Know your place.

Trapped, within the zone
Of penitence, I
stare at the wall, alone.
Then, fist aloft, "Why!"

"I shall not atone!"
Though you spit in my face
Ridicule me and condone
My torment, in grace

I walk, No, I stride!
Head aloft, I can ignore
Your sneers, I'm in my pride.
Bullies all know the score...

But for today, I rule my domain,
I am the master of my own pain.

Pride and Prejudice and All You Zombies -- "English novelist Jane Austen discovers that she is a time-travelling hermaphrodite and is both of her own parents..."

Now this is an april fool's day hit.

Short story. Guy with very popular blog and many minions posts phone number for a comment spammer selling term papers and asks commenters to call the number and bark at them.

It's not so much of a prank as revenge.

Now this is an april fool's day hit.

Short story. Guy with very popular blog and many minions posts phone number for a comment spammer selling term papers and asks commenters to call the number and bark at them.

It's not so much of a prank as revenge.

dlbowman76: Do not underestimate the quality of your own language. Fragano Ledgister's writing is a lofty goal.

(Very nice.)

Pange lingua gloriosi
Corporis mysterium,
Sanguinisque pretiosi,
quem in mundi pretium
fructus ventris generosi
Rex effudit Gentium.

Nobis datus, nobis natus
ex intacta Virgine,
et in mundo conversatus,
sparso verbi semine,
sui moras incolatus
miro clausit ordine.

In supremae nocte coenae
recumbens cum fratribus
observata lege plene
cibis in legalibus,
cibum turbae duodenae
se dat suis manibus.

Verbum caro, panem verum
verbo carnem efficit:
fitque sanguis Christi merum,
et si sensus deficit,
ad firmandum cor sincerum
sola fides sufficit.

Tantum ergo Sacramentum
veneremur cernui:
et antiquum documentum
novo cedat ritui:
praestet fides supplementum
sensuum defectui.

Genitori, Genitoque
laus et jubilatio,
salus, honor, virtus quoque
sit et benedictio:
Procedenti ab utroque
compar sit laudatio.
Amen.

Thanks, Julie L. and kid bitzer! I hadn't thought of the Codex Serafinianus. Apparently Abbeville Press, which published it in the US, aren't accepting submissions, though it looks like they do make some lovely books... And I'd heard of Wright (I think Tolkien mentions him in his letters somewhere), but have never used his primers; I'll check them out. I'm always looking for models.

B. Durbin @ 69: Just got back from that; we sang it in English, except for the last verse, which was Pange lingua. Tenebrae is pretty impressive, and must have been even more so before dimmer switches.

Joel Polowin @ 65:

And not only that, she's a True Confessions writer! "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single girl working as a secretary is in want of a good reputation."

Does anyone here know who's responsible for those awful "Recession 101" billboards? I want to visit them with my friend, the cricket bat.

Fragano at 62. Forgive me, I only just now saw it. It's gorgeous.

dlbowman76 at 64. You need to make no apology.

A Question for those in (or those who have eaten well in) Seattle: what is the name of that sushi restaurant that has been mentioned by the greater-fluorosphere as being especially tasty?

I'd noted to myself that with those recommendations heard from Fluorites, the next time I'm in Seattle I should go. NorWesCon is this weekend in Seattle. I'll be there. (and then a couple of days in BC).

The weather northwards looks to promote the great indoors (Every day is listed as "mostly cloudy, 30% chance of rain, highs in the low 50s, lows in the high 40s"), so going foodie seems reasonable.

KeithS @73, if I tell you who, that will make me an accessory before the fact. I wouldn't survive in jail for very long at all. Regardless, if I had one chance to make a big difference, it wouldn't be against them anyway.

Help! I've got a memory of a children's book, one probably on a shelf at my mom's house, that I can't call the title of. It was about a bass, who was born, lived, and died in the river. He was caught once and released as he was too small, he nearly died in one branch of the river which had no oxygen and another which was polluted. Finally, a little boy out fishing with his dad caught and ate him.

Ye gods! In the abstract that sounds like a grim tale. I loved it and carry at least two of its memes: Visceral revulsion towards pollution and the "fact" that fish don't feel pain.

My copy was a light green hardback, with reverse printing in an off-white or light yellow.

I was given it around 1964.

So: Help! I'm trying to write about it but can't get the title or the author straight.

Gabriel @#36: You want to talk to Mark Rosenfelder at Zompist.com. He has but recently started his own publishing company specifically for constructed languages and suchlike. I don't know if he'd be open to something he didn't do himself (so far he has only published his Language Construction Kit), but it's worth a shot.

And check out the bulletin board, too, under "Virtual Verduria" in the right sidebar.

#77 ::: John A Arkansawyer:

I never read the book about the bass, but that reminds me of a book I read as a child (probably early 60s) about a sequoia tree.

It starts with a giant sequoia falling, leaving space and sunlight for the seedling. That bit is still part of my thinking-- this recession is bad for a lot of people, but there's going to be room for some new enterprises which otherwise probably wouldn't have happened.

Much later, there's a fire which damages one side of the lower trunk.

I think there's eventually a hole through the tree with a road and cars going through, but I might be hallucinating that.

The end of the book is the tree being at risk of being cut down to make a sign for a hot dog stand, but is rescued by a public campaign. I think the tree ends up legally protected as a natural wonder.

I've been trying to remember how much, if any we get of the tree's point of view, but all that's clear in my mind is the sunlight on the clearing at the beginning.

Anyone else remember the book?

Another question that I haven't been able to google but is the kind of knowledge that should be contained in ML commentariat, if I didn't get the link from here in the first place:

About a year ago, there was an article somewhere by a US editor who didn't buy Harry Potter when he had the chance. This was developed in a jocular form a la "now I am living in a hut in Maine woods and work in a fish-gutting factory". If anybody remembers the particulars, I will be eternally grateful.

By the way, Happy birthday, Scraps!

Joyeux Anniversaire, Ferraille!

Nancy, #79--the book is probably "Big Tree", by someone with the last name of Buff. That's all I recall, but I read it in '66 or so.
Nice ones, Fragano and OtterB.

Has everyone else seen Dark Side of the Moon arranged for the NES?

B Durbin and D. Potter: we sang it in Latin, and I was amazed at the number of people around me who knew all the verses. I didn't.

"And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it."
First verse of the Gospel of John, translated by Richmond Lattimore.

I have always delighted in the non-agreement of the tenses in this sentence. The light is in the present, eternally, and the darkness is eternally past, which means, essentially that the darkness is not real, since the past is not real -- it does not, actually, exist.

That is our hope -- that the darkness, which we encounter daily, and know so well, and fear to be devoured by -- is, most truly, less real than the least portion of God's great creation, less real than a twig, a leaf, a stone.

"Once you were darkness; now you are light."
St. Paul

this is just to say
i have opened
the icebox
the plums were in

an abyss of light
which you were
probably saving
for revelation
shone out

Forgive me
I put in a webcam
and shut the door
to see if it became
an abyss of darkness

it was experimental
repeated
and bold

dlbowman76 #64: Well said.

Happy birthday, Scraps.

Happy birthday, Scraps! Many more.

dlbowman, #64: No apologies needed. That was... I started to say "painful to read," but that phrasing might be interpreted the wrong way... vividly evocative.

John A Arkansawyer @77

Try the Stump the Bookseller! feature at Loganberry Books.

http://loganberrybooks.com/stump.html

For $2 (applicable toward the book if they find it), your query can join hundreds of others on the site. People looking for details on a favorite children's book can post what they remember of it, and readers can respond with information that can identify the book, or at least narrow down the possibilities. The listings are sorted by theme.

I tried searching there for "pollution," but didn't see anything that fit ("bass" brought up "embassy" and "ambassador" citations, which didn't help).

I love browsing the queries. There is such passion for dimly-remembered long-lost friends, and lots of warm, kind, helpful connectedness.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ #75

I don't know about sushi restaurants, but if you get a chance you absolutely must try The Night Kitchen.

http://www.nightkitchenseattle.com

David DeLaney @ #86

Delightful!

John A. Arkansawyer (77): That isn't Jim Kjelgaard's The Spell of the White Sturgeon, is it? Wrong kind of fish, of course...

Happy birthday, Scraps!

Hurry, Scraps!

(Because after this last year, a birthday must feel something like winning a Nobel prize.)

#86:
Zool!

Do you see that Web site down the line?
The best search engine since ninety-nine?
It's the only one that works that way,
The Atchison, the Google, and the Santa Fe.

See those results risin' round the bend.
You can search for strangers; you can search for friends.
In a third of a second, any time of day,
On the Atchison, the Google, and the Santa Fe.

Oh, the other engines are mighty swell,
Bing and Alta Vista on my DSL,
But I make my searches and I make my day
With the Atchison, the Google, and the Santa Fe.

Searchin' back and forth along teh Intarwebs,
My land, you must've run about a million greps.
It's a treat to work with your brain all day
On the Atchison, the Google, and the Santa Fe.

Here she comes!
Goo--oo--oo--gle!

Q. Pheevr, :grin:

kid bitzer@63, Gabriel@70: Joseph Wright didn't learn to read until he was 15; by the age of 36 he was a Deputy Professor at Oxford. Not for the first time, I wonder where the hell the Victorians got all their energy from.

I'm fond of old-style language primers too, though I'm glad I never had to actually use any of them in cold blood (Kennedy's Latin Primer must have been quite forbidding if it was one's first contact with the language).

#77: This is probably Billy Bass by R. W. Eschmeyer (Fisherman Press, 1952).

Amazon Marketplace link (apologies for spamming Amazon, but it was not viewable in Google Books or present in Powell's or Alibris)

I know the book because my family has it; my father is an avid bass fisherman (not the obnoxious kind with fast, expensive, flat-bottomed boats and fishing tournaments, but the family kind; we learned to fish as soon as we could be trusted to sit still in a boat).

Open threadiness: My hiking has started up again! Today I went hiking with my friends in the Shenandoah mountains again, specifically near Stony Man Mountain. We hiked perhaps 8 miles with much up-and-down, which left my older companions pretty knackered. I however, find once again that I'm in far better physical shape than I deserve, given my habits....

The mountain laurel was in leaf, but not much else was (aside from the few evergreens). There was some moss though, and a handful of individual ground plants scattered along our route. There was a lot of deadwood around (both fallen and standing) presumably because of those two blizzards we had. Incidentally, we passed several surviving patches of snow! Most were in sheltered spots on the east side of the mountains, but a couple, next to parking lots, may have been the remains of very large "snowplow piles".

A great article for Disch fans and the Disch-curious: The Prescient Science Fiction of Thomas M. Disch

The "Barry Goldwater and a million penguins" link is bad.

Of possible interest to Role Playing Gamers:

Steve Jackson Games released a free PDF of "outtakes" from an earlier book of mine:

Alphabet Arcane: Lost Serifs

Yeah, it's a promotional item. But hopefully still a fun read.

Re: the Barry Goldwater Particle - It looks like the url was cut off. It leads to the "Bad News Grasshopper" page.

The Goldwater link should be to here. (I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but it's there in the html.)

Costume recall

I guess I should thank my mother for her eccentricity and pragmatism. Because when it came time for improvising costumes, she rarely agreed to play along with other parents.

I remember first grade, or was it kindergarten? For a schoolwide program to honor a principal, each class had to dance to a particular song and have uniform costumes made. My entire class was to be outfitted in large white tunics with triangular applique or silk screened kites on the front and back. Each kite was made of at least two color panels, and each section in every grade had its own color scheme. My mother, out of a sense of pragmatism, I think, refused to spend money on a costume that could only be worn once. All my other classmates paid what I assume now was a substantial fee to have white tunics made in the particular pattern for our kites--dark green and lemon yellow panels on the front and back of a plain "dress" that had sleeves to the elbows and went from neck to ankles. Yes, we looked like Klansmen with kite insignia, sans the hoods to cover our faces. I do not know whose idea it was to dress over a hundred children up this way, so they could dance to the song "Kite" in a grassy field in high sunlight during the dry season. It was hours of practice in that field called the Sunken Garden, a deep natural riverbed that had been converted into an ampitheater flanked by acacias. I loved that field, and those trees, and had not learned yet to fear dancing in public. I looked forward to swaying to C's voice, along with my classmates, because it was a chance to forget homework.

My mother refused to pay for the school costume and instead told me to tell the teacher that she would make other plans. She had a white dress made by my father's godmother who was a talented seamstress. I was measured for a dress that I would later wear to parties-- a beautiful plain one in white woven rayon with delicate lace edging the cuffs and hems. When the dress arrived, I wondered how the kite panels were going to go on such a nice dress. My other classmates had white polyester uniform tunics, and there I was in my white lace. All the kids were to wear conical cardboard hats with the kite color panels taped to them---and again, I must have missed a meeting, or my mother missed a meeting, because when the morning of the performance arrived, I had no color panels to put on my costume or my plain white hat. My mother bought acetate cellophane, the kind that was made into candy wrappers, the kind that crinkled and reflected light, and made as much noise as it did attract attention because of its sheen. She and my father cut large panels in the shape of a kite and pinned it to the dress, then they taped more panels to the hat.You have to understand, I was the kind of kid who took pride in doing all my homework myself, and even if the other kids in my class had neatly labeled notebooks and acetate covered workbooks of collated pages in crisp manila folders, with the titles written in their parents' neat adult handwriting, I had my own scrawl on the covers of my own notebooks. We are the kind of family that makes our own costumes out of foil, cardboard and tape to make crowns or swords, or cereal boxes to become puppet theaters.

That day, I stood out in that large field, in full sunlight, visible from hundreds of feet away, the nonconformist kite costume with gleaming cellophane crinkling. Every other kid was wearing the standard issue matte screened or appliqued tunic. Not only did I reflect light, the cellophane was making this conspicuous noise as I tried to move in time with the music, blushing and trying to ignore the giggling of the kids around me. It was deeply embarrassing, because in the politically arcane world of grade school kids, the biggest mistake one can make is to stand out. I had no idea of this unwritten rule until that very morning. Such as it was for a girl who would sneak Nancy Drew and Tom Swift books into her workbooks in class, so she could read chapters while her classmates filled in the blanks to use is/are or this/these in sentences in the large mimeographed pages. I often retreated to a space in my head, and so had been too busy to see how I stood out, until that morning, walking into the crowd of children finding their places in the grass.

Not only did I stand out, I was singled out, as I walked to my place in the field, getting sniggers and guffaws from dozens of kids who didn't know to pick on me before, but now would never let me forget that I was that girl who didn't wear the uniform. I was so embarrassed I didn't stand near my actual classmates, but picked a place near the rear of the yellow and green kite section, with the nearest kids complete strangers staring and sneering at my crinkly gleaming mess.

That was the longest song in the entire program when I try to think of it now. In my head, in the middle of the song, I think I flew up into the sky, away from the other children, cancelling out the heat, the blaring bass from the ancient speakers in the bandstand, coasting into the air to get away.

When is a costume not a costume? When it inadvertently tells the truth about the wearer. That day, I learned just how different I was, and how easy it was to be ostracized because of it. While my mother and I got "compliments" afterward for my "cute" shiny costume, I knew the price of standing out. The next day no one sat with me in recess and hardly noticed, I made better friends with my books. Perhaps that was inevitable for a child who preferred her imagination to the reality of being the oddball in her class. To me this is a chicken and egg thing. Did I live in my head and retreat into books before this or after? There are too many ways to spin this, but the image of the cellophane crinkling along the front of my dress, as I tried to dance through my tears, will always stay. The only thing I keep now is the sound of rustling, and the knowing that I have these words to frame that, because I had to retreat into stories to keep from falling out of the sky.

ma larky @107:

I've cleaned up your formatting.

We don't mind content composed elsewhere and pasted in, but check at preview whether it's going to be a whole screen of doublespaced lines of text, please?

Tim May @106:

Fixed it. Thanks for the pointer.

Tim May @106, unless one of my fellow bloggers repaired the link without telling me, that's the same URL I used in the first place.

TNH @110:

I fixed it. You had one too many <a href="s. The URL was there, but clicking on it led to a 404.

Thank you so much for cleaning that up for me, Abi. Am Relatively Clumsy with that.

Good lord but moving is hard. I'm in LA collecting my things and the sheer emotional energy of just (as if it were just) collecting boxes is draining enough.

But the renting of a truck has been an adventure, and some of the boxes needed sorting out, and some of the stuff needed dividing (since much of Maia's stuff is still boxed, and things like the kitchen are intermingled).

So we are behind. But it's been pretty good, all around.

(addendum: I forgot to post. More adventures. In a motel for the night, sleep, shower and then the last leg of driving in the morning. Truck is a pig, and needs new wiper blades)

Crashing Through by Robert Kurson is about Mike May, who'd been blinded by a chemical explosion when he was three. As an adult, he got a spiffy double operation to replace the stem cells needed to keep his cornea (he only had one eye) clear, and then a new cornea from a different donor.

The descriptions of what it was like to start seeing as an adult are vivid and giddy enough to go with the theme of light.

Wow, this is the best thing ever: A young sign singer (hearing guy without deaf relatives who learned sign in college) sign-sings Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" (the Portal song) with captions and subtitles (that is, the English is shown, but the actual signs he's using are also listed onscreen). Not only fun, but informative; an insight into the structure of ASL for non-signers like me. Don't miss the two uncaptioned signs at the very end.

CaptainValor, as he calls himself on YouTube, also does an ASL performance of "Re: Your Brains" — which we had a great time singing along with last night at the concert.

I've recently gotten some disturbing news about my back problems that is probably going to result in a lot of time spent on medical appointments and procedures over the next few months, and a lot less time online than I would like. I hope you don't mind my posting it here; talking about it might help me deal with the disappointment I feel in finding yet another problem with my back.

Last Monday I went into my neurologist's office for a steroid injection in my lumbar spine. This is a somewhat complicated but not at all risky procedure where an injection is made directly into the spine to reduce swelling, in the hope that the pain of compressed nerves can be alleviated. In this case, it was also intended to be diagnostic; if the pain was alleviated we'd have an indication of where the compression was occurring.

I've had this sort of injection at least 5 or 6 times over the past few years and was not expecting any difficulties, though I've never had it done at this facility before, and the protocols were a little different. The idea is that you're placed on a fluoroscope plate so the doctor can see your spine and the long needle used for the injection. You're given a local anesthetic where the the needle will be placed (one on each side of of the spine in this case), then given a dose of Verced, and then the needle is moved to the correct location and the drug is injected. They photograph the fluoroscope image so a future injection can be performed at exactly the same location.

Supposedly the local stings, but the Verced prevents the transfer of short-term memory to medium-term, so you never remember any of the procedure from shortly before the Verced dose to a few minutes after.

However, things didn't go as planned, though the Verced prevents me from remembering what did happen. Appparently, lying on my stomach in the position to get the shot resulted in enough pain that I came out of the Verced to partial consciousness, and my blood pressure crashed. They gave me the shots and got my blood pressure back up; looking over the images the doctor spotted a bulge in the disk at L3-L4, where the shots were administered. That's not something we've seen before; all the previous surgery was below that, but it's probably where the pain came from. So now there's something new that's wrong, and the likelihood is that I'll need surgery to correct it, just in time for my COBRA coverage to be running out in June.

I have an open thread question for the flurosphere.

My folks have a wireless network setup, but can't remember the WEP code, so I can't log on with my laptop while visiting. The whole thing was set up by a friend a few years ago.

Is there any way to look up the codes/settings?

The main computer for the house, through which things are run, is running Windows XP home edition.

Bruce Cohen (StM) @116:

Oh, aargh, twenty times over! I'm so sorry to hear it.

Please keep us posted as much as possible. I'll be worrying about you.

Bruce Cohen @ 116... My best wishes.

Ursula L @117, our wireless modem has the WEP code on the bottom of it. Could theirs?

Bruce Cohen @116, sympathies and good wishes headed your way.

@117: Yes. Find the wireless router's model number, Google it, and you'll likely find the address to access the router's preferences. Hopefully your parents remember the router login, which you can then use to re-set the WEP (or simply write it down). If you don't know the login, find some helpdesk info (again, based on the router's model number) and see if you can adjust the preferences via tech support chat or a phone call.

Xopher #115: There's two experiences I've had with an ASL interpreter that were a lot of fun. The first was, actually, at an Easter Vigil mass at the church I'm attending tonight. It was the reading from Exodus where the Israelites are crossing the Red Sea: "And the water was a wall to their left, and a wall to their right." The gestures were clear and evocative and perfectly comprehensible to those of us who still have hearing.

The other time was a Weird Al concert. The interpreter was having a great time.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers), #116, ack! I hope that gets better soon and there's no more damage. (Versed doesn't work for me, I always remember everything so they don't use it anymore.)

Ursula L @ 117: re: Madeline Ashby @ 122: Here is a link to a list of default passwords for a variety of routers. It may be helpful; odds are good that the default password was left on your parent's router. If not, there may be a hardware reset on the router itself that will restore default settings; then you can use the default setting.

Re: 125: The list starts out in alphabetical order, but apparently recent info has just been tacked on at the end. If you don't find your router in the logical place, give a look there.

Bruce Cohen #116: Ow Ow Ow! Best of luck in dealing with this new trial.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker To Managers) #116: I hope things improve.

The Skiffy Channel is showing Eragon. I'm not paying that much attention, as I've been finding much pleasure in eating yogurt. Still, I find myself thinking that, if a movie is ever made about Making Light, I want my part to be played by Jeremy Irons.

@129--

great. i can be played by danny devito, if he doesn't mind wearing a fat suit for the role.

in more cheerful thoughts: does anybody know where to find good recordings of the shanties sung by the swallows and amazons? i know "blow the man down", of course, but not "from ushant to scilly is thirty-five leagues", or many of the others. and the relevant wikis are letting me down, so far.

Bruce Cohen, I hope the news gets better. Prayers and good wishes.

It's crossed my mind more than once since the health care reform bill passed that many many people I know would benefit RIGHT NOW from quite a number of the provisions that in fact don't kick in until 2014. As it is, I know too damn many people who are struggling, and a few who are drowning. Four years is too long to wait.

Ouch, Bruce, Ouch! I hope the surgery goes well and your rehab is not as lengthy as projected.

I just finished Connie Willis's new book Blackout and am feeling really frustrated. It ends with a serious cliffhanger, and while the sequel All Clear is completed, it apparently won't be published till Fall. T'ain't fair, McGee!

Bruce Cohen: Ow. I'm sorry.

kid bitzer, 130: "from Ushant to Scillly" is officially entitled "Spanish Ladies." I have a pretty good CD called Roast Beef of Old England, which has many of the songs referred to in the Aubrey/Maturin novels.

Yow. Now I have 2 other people to worry about besides myself, not just 1. Bruce, I hope you get thru this all right so you can do some more of those poems I recall you did once.
I wonder if enough people got together and did just the right thing, could we hurry this reform up a little bit so folks like us could live to see what that Pluto probe sends back? Peaceful action of some sort?
Dental too. And eyes. Richest country in the world, my @$$.

Bruce, that sucks. Hope the news gets better. Can't they fast-track you given the coming end of your COBRA? (Not the insurance company, which will of course delay as long as possible, but the doctors.)

In the ML movie, as long as I'm not played by Mike Myers or Pauly Shore, I'm good. Either of those and My Curse Will Be Upon You.

Xopher: David Hewlett!

TexAnne: Ow. ROFLMAO, and zing and touché.

Bruce Cohen: I hope things get better fast..my dad has suffered a bulging disk, and I remember the pain he had.

As for an ML movie, I think I'd be best played by Lea DeLaria, except she can sing. Well, that will be the fantasy part.

As I was scrolling down, this is what I saw:

Open thread 138
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 01:39 PM * 138 comments

So here's #139.

Saw an incredibly silly and fun animated film from Belgium today, "A Town Called Panic:"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1433540/

It's stop-motion animation. The characters aren't carefully crafted models; they are crude plastic toys. Barnyard animals, people mounted on round bases so they can stand up, that sort of thing.

The three heroes -- Indian, Cowboy, and Horse -- share a house. Indian and Cowboy are chagrined to discover that it is Horse's birthday and they don't have a gift. So they go online and order bricks to build a barbecue. But instead of 50 bricks they order 50,000,000. The barbecue gets built and the party goes well, but the 49,999,950 bricks stacked up on the roof cause complications.

It's really blindingly goofy. Like a cross between Gumby and Monty Python.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @75 -- my posting karma is bad tonight, as the mention of Mashiko as the restaurant you were looking for appears to have not been sufficiently excited to have glowed into the fluorosphere.

Thank you all for your good wishes and words. I'm hoping that I can get at least part of the treatments I'll need done before my COBRA expires. Luckily, I live in Oregon, where we have a safety net program that should cover me between that and when the Health Care Reform coverage becomes available. And then it should be only a little less than a year until I'm eliglible for Medicare. I just wish it didn't feel so much like jumping from one ice floe to the next while avoiding the flood.

All seriousness aside, Serge, are you sure you wouldn't rather be played by Rafe Feines? Ooooh, gravitas! Myself, I want Ricky Jay to play me in my Aspect as Mandrake the Magician.

Xopher @115: My favorite lolcat.

Scraps: Happy belated birthday!

Bruce Cohen: Hopeful thoughts winging your way!!

Bruce: Sounds awful, remembering a friend who had a slipped disc in college. May the appropriate Power send you a speedy & complete healing.

My mother gets similar shots in her spine for sciatica, every few months.

Light theme:

According to Mudcat, UU childrens' camps add extra verses (new first lines):

"This little liberal light of mine"
"Don't you come and puff it out"

Or, from someone's UU church:

I've got the light of freedom
I've got the light of truth
I've got the light of love

Or a Chanukah lights song that my cousins like.

I am very happy to report that, thanks to VDM Publishing's BetaPublishing imprint, Amazon customers finally have a chance to buy - for a mere $46 - the soon-to-be-classic reference work Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.

According to an article on Slashdot, Amazon has been - graced with? infected by? - VDM's prodigious and growing list of titles whose content has been culled from Wikipedia by bots and is printed on demand, of which the above is but one of many, many examples.

How many examples? Well, about 10,000 added in the last month alone. Search for books edited by Lambert M. Surhone (or, as he's known on the search results page, "Lambert M. Surhone" - inverted commas fit that name like a glove) and you'll find over 18,000 titles, including Raoul Dufy: Fauvism, Le Havre, École des Beaux-Arts, Othon Friesz, Eugène Boudin, Satanic Ritual Abuse: Moral Panic, Physical abuse, Occult, Ritual, Conspiracy Theory, Controversy, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and, of course, Niki de Saint Phalle: Antonio Gaudi, Stedelijk Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Naïve Art, Papier Mâché, Jean Tinguely, Giardino dei Tarocchi, Stravinsky Fountain, Sun God. (My friend Jen, who's currently doing her dissertation on Niki de Saint Phalle, is going to be delighted that there's yet another book she has to read, though strictly speaking she doesn't.)

It's really hard to know who to root for in this contest, since thus far Amazon's response to complaints has been as automated as what people are complaining about. It's not clear to me that anyone is actually being harmed by this, but of course this is probably the thin end of a wedge.

Xopher:
Wow, this is the best thing ever: A young sign singer (hearing guy without deaf relatives who learned sign in college) sign-sings Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive"...Don't miss the two uncaptioned signs at the very end.

This is charming. As I can only go by context and guess, what ARE the two uncaptioned signs at the very end?

Bruce: as a physical therapist assistant who sees a lot of lumbar disk hernations: OW!!

Encouraging story: my husband has a herniated disk @ L4-5 that was compressing the sciatic nerve to such an extent that the pain sent him to the ER (and made his blood pressure spike to an alarming degree). He was able to get enough relief from physical therapy (over a few months) to take back-to-back 100-mile bike rides; now as long as he keeps up the exercise routine daily he is pretty much pain free. Sometimes with surgery and sometimes without, this IS a problem that can be treated very effectively, and I wish you a thorough recovery. And as much luck as possible on the insurance front, which can hurt more than the back....

@147--

someone on the youtube comments thread says the last two signs are "cake lies", but to my shame i cannot confirm or deny.

i love love love watching signers. why does it seem like this guy's face is putting out ten times the bandwidth of info that non-signers' faces do? if you were in a relationship with a signer and they went all poker-faced on you, it would be devastating, just like the silent treatment.

among screen actors, i cannot think of any face this expressive, except of course for grommet, but then that's rather the point, innit?

The brief ASL course I took a few years ago was like a summer camp-- we played telephone and matching games. I had trouble with not mouthing the words I signed, though I didn't mouth the sentence as it would have been in English. Some of the other students had trouble being not hung over, it seemed. It was a really fun class, though I remember just enough ASL to never ever try to sign anything.

In happier language news, a few friends and I got together to watch Jesus Christ Superstar last night (fourth viewing of the week for our host) and we ordered Chinese. It arrived labeled in said language, and I was able to pick out my beef with broccoli by 'rou'. I like the word quite a bit.

Gabriel Smufner @36 and @42:

The Language Creation Society has talked about doing an anthology of texts in constructed languages eventually, though I think it's lower priority than the journal and the Proceedings of the LCS book that are currently in progress. See this thread on the CONLANG mailing list from March 2009 for the discussion about it.

For models of composition, check out the many constructed language grammars and lessons online, especially the ones that feign the language is a real, obscure natural language -- I think Carsten Becker's Ayeri grammar and Dirk Elzinga's Tepa grammar might be the kind of thing you're looking for.

Judi Miller does ASL interpretation at a lot of filk concerts. Considering the nature of some of the songs, this gets... interesting. Seanan McGuire's "Black Death" and Tom Smith's "I Had a Shoggoth", ferexample. And sometimes she does this without having heard the song before.

Several videos are up on YouTube.

A Making Light movie? Dibs on Helen Mirren!!

I'd like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to play me.

If the ages were the other way round, I'd ask for Carrie Fisher.

Back before he died, Teresa always asserted a desire to be played by Walter Matthau.

Michael Praed as Terry Karney...

Dibs on this actor here. She's a lot younger and better looking than I am, but there's a distinct resemblance.

I can't think of any actresses who look like me-- I don't take in enough visual stories, I guess-- so I'd like to be played by a Muppet.

Teresa, that church door really is disturbing. (It really makes me wonder about the builders.)

Diatryma (159): Oooooh, that's a good idea. Do you have a particular one in mind?

A Making Light movie? Who wuld play me? Hmmm....

As I get older, I am starting to see somewhat of a resemblance to Ernest Borgnine.

(Considering Borgnine's photo in that link looks pretty good for a 92-year old, I guess that isn't all bad.)

(This may come out as a double-post, or not at all. Hinky stuff happens when I hit the Post button.)

Bob Rossney @ 146: the soon-to-be-classic reference work Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.

Maybe Half Man Half Biscuit should sue.

P J Evans at 160, I agree, that door is disturbing -- I found myself muttering "The better to eat you with, my dear..."

I think I'd like Conchata Ferrell to play me.

The Hugo nominees for 2010 just got announced.

Congratulations Patrick (best editor, long form) and all other nominees!

Bruce Cohen: Sympathies and good luck.

Ursula L @ 117: When we couldn't remember ours, the solution we came up with was to reset the password. However, make sure you've got a computer physically connected by cable when you do that*. Then you can reset the password on the others.

*We didn't and promtly lost the connection until we thought to make the physical link.

Mary Aileen at 161, I hope I'd rate something created specifically for me. Otherwise, Big Bird is appropriately named and colored, but the wrong sex.

I'm a little surprised to see no discussion of the new Doctor Who yet.

The new title sequence and the new TARDIS interior are interesting. I'm reserving judgment, but I think they're likely to grow on me. The new theme music is an improvement over the previous iteration, but not as good as Murray Gold's first title music, which is the only version I'd say bears comparison with Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire's 1963 original.

Matt Smith seems to be a good actor, although his performance so far is a little too reminiscent of David Tennant's. No doubt it will evolve. Karen Gillan is immediately appealing, maybe even a little too much so.

Specifics on the episode:
V pbeerpgyl thrffrq gung gur Qbpgbe'f "svir zvahgrf" jnf tbvat gb or nobhg gra lrnef (Xngvr fnvq gb zr jura vg jnf erirnyrq nf gjryir, "Bxnl, lbh jva.") obgu orpnhfr vg nyybjrq gur gbb-lbhat Nzryvn gb orpbzr gur arj pbzcnavba naq orpnhfr vg unexrq onpx gb Gur Tvey va gur Svercynpr. Arvgure Xngvr abe V jnf fhecevfrq ol gur raqvat fubg bs gur jrqqvat tbja, rvgure.

Gur Ngenkvf jrer snveyl pbby, ohg V jvfu gur rlronyy guvat unq ybbxrq n yvggyr yrff fcrpvsvpnyyl uhzna. Rira ba rnegu, rlronyyf pbzr va n ahzore bs qvssrerag inevrgvrf.

Um, perhaps I should explain -- I don't look anything like Helene Mirren. (If only...)

But I've always wanted to be drop-dead gorgeous and immensely talented, and she and I are nearly the same age. And this is a fantasy movie, right?

Ursula L @ 117: Wireless Key View is a nice little utility to keep handy if you deal with other people's wireless networks.

Odd and provocative essay on politics and cognitive style:

"Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats: New Findings on Morality, Empathy, and Sympathy".

But here’s where it gets even more interesting (for me at least). A commenter suggests that “libertarianism essentially amounts to is the political expression of autism.”

Lizzy L @ 170... Ellen Burstyn wouldn't be a shabby choice either. By the way, did you know she'd appeared in an episode of Time Tunnel?

Serge writes in #129:

Still, I find myself thinking that, if a movie is ever made about Making Light, I want my part to be played by Jeremy Irons.

I'm confused. I thought a movie about Making Light had recently been made.

Bill Higgins @ 174... There was indeed. In this case, I was thinking of ML as the setting for a fictional drama. Like Airport. Which means that we'd get George Kennedy to play the part of Jim McDonald.

Serge, Ellen Burstyn is one hell of an actress, but she's also about 15 years older than I am...

Lizzy L @ 176... But she doesn't look it.

I don't think that people who actually look like me ever get into acting as a career.

Eral Cooley III @ 178... Ever seen a picture of Rondo Hatton?

The ASL song interpretations are fantastic! I can finger spell, but that's it - I never really understood how much ASL diverges from spoken language.

(And here's CaptainValor with Owl City's Fireflies.)

The "Still Alive" link reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask: on the words "the people who are still alive", there's a key modulation at the end that I find really difficult to do when I'm singing on my own. If I'm singing along I can do it fine, but when I'm singing by myself it never sounds quite right. So for those of you out there who sing: is that a particularly difficult modulation, or is it just me?

David, 181: I don't find it difficult, but it's a fairly common cadence in pre-Classical alto lines, which is what I've sung the most.

Carol 147: As I can only go by context and guess, what ARE the two uncaptioned signs at the very end?

As kid bitzer says at 149, I can't be 100% sure, but I believe CAKE LIE is correct. It matches his expression and it makes sense—"the cake is a lie" is a traditional thing to say about Portal, since the disembodied voice who sings this song promises cake but never delivers.

kid 149: why does it seem like this guy's face is putting out ten times the bandwidth of info that non-signers' faces do?

Isn't it wonderful? He's such a good signer. And I've seen native signers talking on the subway; they're very expressive and smile all the time, in fact I noticed this before I noticed they were signing in one case—a group of teenagers both quiet and smiling is unusual enough to catch my eye!

kid bitzer @130, Here is a rather good recording and lyrics and so forth for Spanish Ladies, done by Roger McGuinn.

Stefan Jones, did I already know but forget that Julia Hendricks is your cousin?

Serge at 177: no, she certainly doesn't. Not in public, anyway...

Judi Miller's interpretation has been a real joy at the few filk conventions where I've seen her. Yes, she's putting out some approximation to the lyrics (I don't speak ASL, and she gets handed really random varieties of material in real time), but especially when she knows a piece, she puts a lot of emotional expressiveness and humor into it, and the facial expressions, posture, and sometimes dance add a lot.

The church we visited this morning was trilingual - English, ASL, and Fijian. Somebody said the pastor is much more animated when she's signing, which she usually was, and stands fairly still when she's not, and she was having to do a lot of speed matching during some parts because the Fijian language tends to need a lot more words than English to say things (but they speak fast), while ASL usually uses fewer signs (except when you need to finger-spell) and expresses more of the content through facial expressions or motion. (And to tie in to one of the other threads, she announced that everybody should stay after service, because there'd be cake... She's apparently not a gamer - there actually was cake.) The previous time we'd been there, we were puzzled that the Fijian choir sounded like South African music; turns out the choir director had gone to school there.

Open thread randomness:

I have a few fountain pens. The primary one is a Waterman Phileas with a converter; both are about four and a half years old. How long should I expect either to last? There's something going on at the pen/converter interface, has been for some time now, involving ink leaking out into the barrel and a generally bad seal between the two. I'd try my other converter, but that had its own mishap months ago and when I tried to clean it out, bad things happened-- "Grr, something is not happening, oh, there's something, I wonder if this comes apart... well, yes, if you break it."

Right now, my pens are the one disassembled in the car (no converter any more and it was too scratchy anyway-- I might drop it a few times to see if it becomes more like the pen I bought it to mimic), the leaky Waterman, and the one that came free with a bottle of ink. I am grousy because these things should last longer, darn it, and I have ink on my fingers.

Isn't there an after-market for luxury pen repairs?

Re: signing -- the signed videos are great, thanks everyone for the links. Some years ago I got interested in learning to sign, and took an adult ed course. There are two varieties of German signing, one which is akin to ASL (in that it's pure signing, but still, a different language*), and one which is easier and involves more lip reading.

Anyway, our church had a monthly service for hearing-impaired people, and I used to go. I always thought the sign for 'temptation' from the Lord's Prayer was both amusing and apt: come-hither finger gestures.

*I met a profoundly hearing-impaired guy from Poland, and asked him if understanding German signing was easy for him or not. He said there were some similarities, but that they were indeed two separate languages. Too bad -- wouldn't it be cool if signing were universal?

@184--

thanks, pericat--that's just the ticket!

and how great to have it sung in the distinctive voice of roger mcguinn--an amazons and byrds mashup. but i think he may sing "from ushant to sicily"--not a hard mistake to make.

good: now i will know how to rant and roar like a true british sailor.

Hyacinths and daffs in the flowerbed,
those eager plantings of last summer's heat,
they are the voices of our dearest dead.

We have not asked just what the blossoms said
nor listened long to the black loamy beat;
hyacinths and daffs in the flowerbed

have no regret, nor signal any dread,
their meaning is not evil, it is sweet:
they are the voices of our dearest dead

returning to us in the garden, spread
in sudden colour in the light. Complete.
Hyacinths and daffs in the flowerbed,

each shocking signal sent right to the head,
and heart that with old sorrow is replete.
These are the voices of our dearest dead

gone now, but leaving us with souls full fed
since life refuses to accept defeat.
Hyacinths and daffs in the flowerbed,
they are the voices of our dearest dead.

Debbie #190: Too bad -- wouldn't it be cool if signing were universal?

In some ways... but then real-time interpretation to/from various languages (as lauded in previous comments) would be that much harder....

Stefan Jones #172: My comments there are a little cranky, but I do get annoyed about that mistake. Autistics are certainly capable of empathizing, once they know what you're feeling!

Xopher @183:

"The cake is a lie" is a more specific reference than that. There are two disembodied presences in the game. At various points in the game you can find traces of "The Ratman," a previous resident of the Aperture Science Test Chambers(tm) who leaves directions to guide you, but also seems to have been less than stable. At a couple points in the game you can find his lairs, which contain his deranged scribblings, including the infamous phrase.

Lizzy L @ 186... Makeup does do wonders. Cinema may one day get to bypass even that. Did you see the 3rd X-men movie? There was a flashback where Xavier and Magneto meet Jean Grey when she was a child. A software was used to make Stewart and McKellen look 20 years younger. That was in 2006. Meanwhile, last week, Fringe's new season began, and the bulk of it was a flashback to not-yet crazy scientist Walter trying to save his son's alternate-universe counterpart a couple of decades before. They successfully made actor John Noble look those decades younger, using a similar process for a TV production, and if you remember the way Noble looked as Denethor in LoTR, that's no small feat.

Bruce Cohen - my sympathies and prayers are with you.

Anent a Making Light movie - I would have a very small nonspeaking role. Maybe as the gopher who carries a food tray from the Tor suite to the green room for Teresa (That was several years ago at Minicon). I am having trouble thinking of any actress resembling a fireplug with long brown hair going gray, though.

why does it seem like this guy's face is putting out ten times the bandwidth of info that non-signers' faces do?

The simple answer is, because facial expression is a "phoneme" in ASL. As I understand it, it conveys both the sort of thing speakers use tone of voice for, and also significant meaning on the level of "Is this consonant a stop or a fricative?"

"...lamenting that the old "Clash" is so much better than the new one will take us only so far. Any remake has to stand on its own merits. That said, "Clash of the Titans" still sucks..."

- Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek

I guess I'll pass.

Dear Flourosphere,

If I might impinge upon your hospitality in this open thread, I have a question that perhaps those with some insight into book publishing and distributing can help with:

I live in Japan. Japan is a far off land full of hidden assassins, mysterious beauty, giant radioactive monsters and very few English books (in my neck of the woods). I can buy English books from Amazon (boo! hiss!) or I can have them shipped from other countries for shipping that is more than the cost of the books themselves, so I'm not utterly without hope. But that is only if I want dead-tree books.

Ebooks are, as of right now, ONLY available to me through Amazon. No other source that sells ebooks (that I have found yet) will sell to someone ordering from outside the US, or paying with a non-US credit card.

Why is this? It utterly mystifies me that (for example) I can order a paper book from B&N.com and have it shipped around the world, but I can't order those zippy, shipping-less electronic signals carrying the same book.

Even MORE mystifyingly, those sources that offer free eBooks don't seem to care where I am--Baen's, Random House/Suvudu, and in the past Tor.com all seem more than happy to give away stuff all over the world...

Someone, please. Help me understand. Why can't Jimmy buy eBooks?

The part of Kip W will be played by a 40-watt light bulb.

JimR @200

I have no trouble at all ordering ebooks from fictionwise.com using a non-US credit card. Have you tried them?

Here is their geographic restrictions FAQ.

Reposting my bOINGbOING comment:

Dean Booth provides a valuable service by mirroring the New Yorker Caption Contest and letting readers submit their captions. Not only do we get to see every submission (and not just the three that the New Yorker finds worthy), but one of Dean's commenters just won the actual NYCC. If I recall correctly, they wouldn't have entered but for the encouragement they got at Dean's Comic Booth.

Dean tags his caption contests, so it's possible to go back and read the last few. I'm in there (and at the Comics Curmudgeon) as "Muffaroo." Actually, I'm "[Old Man] Muffaroo" at the CC now, because some misguided souls there think Muffaroo is a chick's name, sadly ignorant of the name's honored history.

ps: On the internet, nobody knows you're an old man, though the FBI may suspect.

JimR #200: Someone, please. Help me understand. Why can't Jimmy buy eBooks?

It's mainly because Digital Rights Manglement lawyers have no souls.

Jay Lake faces self-censorship.

kid bitzer, #191: Allow me to acquaint you with something called the "folk process". :-) Many of those old ballads have multiple slightly-different versions, because some people get the words wrong (or forget them and make up something on the fly that fits), and other people sing it the way they learned it from those people. Musicologists can spend a fair amount of time tracing back different versions of a song, looking for the original branching point.

Melodies can change too. The tune I use to sing Tom Lehrer's "Irish Ballad" is only vaguely like the one on the record, because I was trying to reconstruct it after only having heard it once. Having done so, and then hearing the original again, I decided that I like my melody better for prosodic reasons, so I still use it.

Debbie @190: wouldn't it be cool if signing were universal?

Reminds me of a report I saw a while back (the details of which elude me) about an effort to gather up a bunch of deaf kids from some disadvantaged population and l'arn 'em some sign language that the researchers had invented. Kids got off the bus, took one look at each other, and set about creating their own sign language, completely ignoring the settup the researchers had wanted to teach them. The Fluorogiest will doubtless produce the correct details shortly.

Re: the ML movie: I wanna be played by Whoopi Goldberg. She'd be a much better me than I could ever be.

Jacque @207, you mean Idioma de Signos Nicaragense, right?

Earl #209:

That story is amazing, and makes me think of the scenes in _The Mote in God's Eye_ and _The Gripping Hand_ that feature Motie mediators meeting for the first time and quickly hammering out a workable trade language. Is it weird that the whole thing has a SFnal feel to me, even though it could have happened (and surely did happen, many times, in many different places and times) ten thousand years ago?

#195 ::: Chris W.

Xopher @183:

"The cake is a lie" is a more specific reference than that. There are two disembodied presences in the game. At various points in the game you can find traces of "The Ratman," a previous resident of the Aperture Science Test Chambers(tm) who leaves directions to guide you, but also seems to have been less than stable. At a couple points in the game you can find his lairs, which contain his deranged scribblings, including the infamous phrase.

Okay, now I'm hopelessly confused (though slightly wiser, an odd combination). The song refers to a game? What's the game? What does "Aperture Science Test Chamber" refer to?

Every spring this transplanted farm girl, currently dwelling in an apartment, goes a little crazy. I get herb and vegetable seeds and peat plugs and start growing gardens bound up in pots. (This is in addition to my house plant habit.) My last apartment was kind to house plants, but not so welcoming to my favorite herbs. This apartment, however, is as close to living in a greenhouse as I'll ever get. I've taken advantage of that.

Last spring's basil is still alive. So, too, are the chives, which died back over the winter as they are supposed to. My rosemary bush (not started from seed, alas) is now putting out shoots of new growth. (I had to work hard to not turn it into a topiary project over the winter.) Cooking with fresh rosemary is a wonderful thing in the gloom of winter.

Last winter's tangerine seedling has bonsai'ed itself nicely in its temporary terrarium (a clear plastic tub cleaned and re-used after the mediocre pasta salad from the deli was gone.) The orange seedling my sister gave me is now an 18 inch tall stick decorated with leaves along the length. I must re-pot both of them along with my rosemary.

This year, I will try again with the oregano and cilantro using plants from a 2" starter pots purchased at a local nursery. I've been buying flower seeds for my window boxes. I like the thought of a meadow mix on the balcony.

As excitable as I get this time of year, these people make me look like a piker.

All I can say is "of course a water pump needs a muffler. All engines do when operated in close proximity to (lots of) people and/or in closed spaces. However, what you've built is a silencer a la Tom Clancy's Without Remorse. It makes me wonder about the R&D-I-Yer's reading habits as well as a new definition for the term "urban guerrilla."

Open thready coolness: the World Economic Forum risk map. (I found this from the New School blog.)

[reading the Wikipedia stuff on Portal and not yet feeling clued in]

Carol, anyone who plays Portal has heard the disembodied voice promising cake. Not having played it all the way through, I was not aware that "The cake is a lie!" actually appeared in the game (thanks, Chris W!).

But throughout the net, when a Portal fan sees a reference to cake, there's a good chance s/he will post "The cake is a lie!" That's where I've seen it most often.

I think if you play all the way through and win, the Portal song ("Still Alive") plays over the credits or something. I'm not sure exactly. The game creators got Jonathan Coulton to write the song, and it fits amazingly well with his usual style.

So at the end of the ASL video, CaptainValor signs CAKE LIE (since verified with a signer I know). This really proves that he's One Of Us (for certain values of 'us').

Carol Kimball @ 211/214:

Portal is a computer game that falls into the category of first-person puzzle. Except for a few parts, you don't need super-speedy twitch reflexes like you do with a lot of first-person shooters.

It features clever (and often hilarious) writing and characterization, surprising for how simple the concept of the game is. You are a test subject in an Aperture Science testing facility, where it becomes clear that their ideas of ethics and safety may be a little lacking. As you make your way through it, you discover that someone else (The Ratman) has been through before and left helpful clues and deranged scribblings, one of which is "the cake is a lie". GLaDOS, the antagonist, encourages you to complete the testing course by using the promise of cake as a reward at the end.

The song "Still Alive" is used as the end credits music in the game.

There are other things, but those seem like the relevant bits to clue you in.

Earl Cooley III @209: Heh. Yeah, that comes from the right time period, so I'll bet that's it!

(What the hell did people do before they had ML and Google?)

Jacque #217: What the hell did people do before they had ML and Google?

We had USENET and Archie.

Carol @211 and 214:

The song "Still Alive" was written by Jonathan Coulton for the game "Portal" by Valve software and is performed by Ellen McClaine (sp?) who also did the voice for the evil AI GlaDOS. Many of the lyrics of the song specifically reference the plot of the game. The lyrics may seem random, but they actually make perfect sense as a last, passive aggressive "screw you" to the player from GlaDOS.

In the game the player navigates through the Aperture Science lab with the help of a gun which creates portals in the walls of the lab's test chambers. As the game goes on GlaDOS, the AI that controls the facility progresses from passively instructing the player to wheedling the player with promises of cake to attempting to murder the player with the facility's defenses. At the same time a player who pokes around in the dark corners of the levels will begin to find traces of "the rat man," someone who was trapped in the facility and was driven mad. Among the ravings scribbled on the walls of one of the rat man's lairs is the phrase "The Cake Is A Lie" a reference to GlaDOS' promise that once the tests are complete, the player will be given cake.

As an encapsulation of the dark, absurdist humor that made Portal so compelling, this became a sort of gamer shibboleth, not unlike the role occupied by "All Your Base" for internet geekdom in the early 00's or Monty Python quotes for an earlier generation of geekdom.

Of course, having offered such an exhaustive explanation, I've completely obliterated the sly humor of the video inserting a hidden (to those of us who don't know ASL) "the cake is a lie."

Lee @ #207, "Melodies can change too"

There's a story that Bob Dylan heard Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower and liked it so much better than his own that from that point forward he performed it on stage with Hendrix's arrangement.

Earl @218: Oh yeah, USENET. How could I forget? And...Archie! OMG. Now there's a blast from the past...

Thank you! Thank you!

Wrenching myself away from needing to explain this in comparable detail to the next dozen (Portal-players or not) people I meet.

I loved the comment upthread about the ASL for "temptation" as in, lead us not.

JimR @ 200: I've had no problem (UK) buying e-books from Baen (as well as getting free ones). Sorry, can't help with the others.

Should have checked the thread again after composing a post and then leaving it on preview while going off to read other tabs.

Another fun little tidbit for anyone interested: lots of Valve's games have dev commentary. After you've beaten the game, you can play again and there are little word bubbles in the game world that activate commentary from various designers about the game.

One thing that I found interesting listening to the commentary was the extent to which the humor and writing of the game flowed directly from the needs of the game.

For example, at one point a series of puzzles required the player to carry a cube with them, so the developers needed to convey that this particular cube was important to hold on to, even though it behaved just like every other cube in the game. Once they'd solved that problem, playtesters start trying to carry the cube through the rest of the game and getting frustrated when it was too difficult.

The result was an inspired bit of cruelty where GlaDOS provides you with a "companion" cube with hearts on its sides and provides a running commentary on the cube, for instance reminding the player that the cube will never threaten to stab you because does not, in fact, speak. Then, at the end of the series of puzzles that require the cube, GlaDOS forces you to drop the cube into a fiery pit to "euthanize" it before proceeding.

So, one of the funniest and most-beloved sequences of the game grew out of the simple necessity of cluing the player in to what tools they would (and would not) need to proceed.

Oh, dear Ghu. Someone reminded me of this gem: Beet pulp safety warning (AKA the famous squirrel story).

Language funny from today's work email:

"This [order] is to replace [earlier order] where products and quantities were in error by request."

I'm having a hard time not taking the bait.

Jacque, that's right up there with the Dogs in Elk and Squirrel Cop.

JimR @200: The publishing professionals here can probably give more detail, but my understanding is that (a) some publishers may not have the right to sell all the books they publish in any arbitrary country; (b) for physical book sales, the legal country of sale is the location of the seller, while for ebook sales, the legal country of sale is the location of the buyer. For historical reasons, authors often sell the right to publish a book in a specific country or set of countries to one publisher, and the right to publish in another set of countries to another publisher. Charles Stross did a series of blog posts on publishing a few weeks ago which discussed this among other issues.

Pericat @ 226:
Ignore previous message.

@ Pericat, #202

Ahhh, thanks for that. I never made it through the purchasing process with Fictionwise because they didn't have what I was looking for, and I assumed they'd give me the same response as B&N.com, being a B&N company. Good to see I was wrong.

@ Earl Cooley III, #205

Making them different from 90% of other lawyers...
How, exactly? ;)

@Jim Henry, #228

That actually explains a lot, just knowing about the POS differences.

Chris, #219: It should be mentioned here that TomTom GPS units offer, as one of their selections for the unit's voice module, the GlaDOS voice -- done by the same artist as in the game.

Also, for the sake of completeness:

The Cake is a Lie T-shirt by jinx.com

The Cake is a Pie parody T-shirt by White Lightning Productions (we print and distribute it for them). This shirt makes use of in-game information, to wit that (1) portals can change your orientation WRT gravity, and (2) things come out of a portal at the same speed they go into it.

JimR #230: Making them different from 90% of other lawyers... How, exactly? ;)

I think you're being a tad optimistic about that 90% figure. My shortlist of non-evil lawyers consists of only four organizations (and their alumni), only one of which isn't a non-profit (Linden Lab).

Invoking the open thread:

Yesterday morning, when I was getting ready to go to church, I heard a piece on NPR. Sr. Joan Chittister and Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, two significant contemporary theologians, have co-written a book sub-titled "Alleluia for All That Is."

For the lead-in to the interview with Sr. Chittister, did NPR use probably the most instantly recognizable "Alleluia" in Western Christian music, Handel's "Alleluia Chorus?" No. Did they use any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of Alleluias from anthems, hymns or other Christian liturgical sources? No. They used the chorus of Leonard Cohen's "Halleluia," arguably a spiritual song, but not exactly one that has that joyous Easter vibe.

Interesting choice.

Teresa @ #185: I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that in the past!

JimR #230, Earl Cooley III #232:

Guys, kindly remember that a lawyer might well someday be tasked with defending your liberty, your right to stay in your home, or maybe just your property. Or, alternatively, with getting you recompense from somebody what Done You Wrong on a drastic scale.

Remember, that line from the Bard about "first, we kill all the lawyers", is from the bad guys who are trying to take over a kingdom -- they quite rightly recognize that it's the lawyers who would remember what the law is supposed to be, as opposed to what the usurpers want it to be.

As for "four organizations of non-evil lawyers": let's see: The ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, the EFF, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, a host of state Disability Law Centers, most of the Public Defender's Offices in the country... that's just off the top of my head.

Why yes, I do have lawyers in my family!
<Grumble>

It's all right, David Harmon, one of the lawyer friends of the family was a Catholic divorce lawyer, of all things, though now he's a California Superior Court judge. He's the motivating force behind my parents' church's soup kitchen, which has been a weekly presence for over a quarter-century. Nice guy.

@David Harmon, #235

I hear what you're saying, but I'm not just following the stereo-types.

This is a True Story. I was a Philosophy major in university, and I was thinking about where that would take me. Law is a major avenue for Philosophy majors and I knew more than a few people who went on to Law School from college. I talked to my favorite professor, who was at the time teaching a lot of Mill and the Philosophy of Rights and was also a professor of law (now he's a professor of Business Ethics at Loyola, apparently...Nick Capaldi, a really good thinker) about going into constitutional law and this is what he told me (it's been a few years, so I'm paraphrasing):
Jim, you seem like a nice guy. Don't go into law. If you DO go into law, become a professor. It's the only way to keep your soul. Practicing law, even constitutional law, is a very good way to compromise all of your morals and ethics.

There are certainly good lawyers, lawyers who have kept their sense of ethic and self (and certainly your family members are among them), but I don't at all believe that they are a majority.

David, #235: Also, remember that it's still the guys who want to take over the country -- the Republican kleptocracy/theocracy faction -- who are most active in pushing the "lawyers are evil" meme today, generally under the label "tort reform".

The ombudsman column in yesterday's WashPost said that because they're having so many really bad comments to articles and such, they're going to put people in tiers and only let the readers see the top tier of commenters automatically. I think this is really weird.

I think this ASL version of "My Humps" nearly equals Alanis Morissette's cover in sheer awesomeness.

Lee @ 238: Ah, yes "tort reform". Let's prevent the injured from being recompensed in the way that a jury thinks is appropriate, because it might be bad for business. Grrr.

I used to be responsible for safety testing and certification of designs at a small company. One of the things I learned was that the USA has far fewer safety regulations than most developed countries. Instead, we have lawsuits. Companies doing business in the states spend money on certifying the safety of their products to reduce their liability if someone is injured and sued. It is perfectly legal to manufacture an extension cord without getting it UL (or ce) certified. It's legal for a store to sell that extension cord to a consumer. But neither a manufacturer or store will ever do that, because they'd be hung out to dry for contributory negligence in a lawsuit.

If we want to limit tort awards, we'll soon need to add more government regulations, or just not worry about people getting injured or killed because that piece of equipment wasn't tested quite thoroughly enough.

janetl @ #241, if you think the Republican party wants to limit tort damages on behalf of bidness, you're misunderstanding the full motivation. The Rs want to limit tort damages because civil and defense lawyers get big cuts of those damages, and then they turn around and donate to the Democratic party.

Smaller damages, smaller contributions. Simple.

(Listen to a Republican when he uses the words "trial lawyer" sometime: it's all he can do to keep from spitting.)

My parents are lawyers. My father's family was mostly lawyers and judges. My pseudo-grandfather was a law professor. My godfather is a lawyer. My first two jobs were in law firms. Where do you think I get my passion for justice? It didn't grow under the bay laurel in the backyard.

Lawyers run the gamut, personally and professionally, from saint to sinner. At its best, the law is idealism turned into practical action. At the worst, it's enablement of evil. For every John Yoo there's a Barry Scheck or Peter Neufield.

I know it's easy to roll your eyes and say that all lawyers are evil, but the law is what stands between us and bloody vengeance. And the "greedy lawyer" is a handy target for misdirected anger. Rage at that, and miss the nuanced points about who really is after your money and your liberty.

SYSTAT UPTIME 9:01 unhappy READ MAKNAM
load emily_litella_racter
construct tasty_torte_reform_rant in 3, 2, 1, mark.
"Never mind"
end of line

Jacque @ 225: Thanks for that. I've seen it before, but re-reading still leaves me chuckling, which is a good start to the morning.

May I still misdirect my anger at the Republicans?

Oh, wait. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Drat.

Earl, #246: You know better than that. Reader's Digest version: the current Republican Party has NOTHING in common with the Party of Lincoln. During the period of the Civil Rights struggles, the Dixiecrats went over to the Republican side in a bloc following Strom Thurmond's infamous speech, and the GOP has never been friendly to justice since then. And you know this -- or at least you should by now, since I've seen that discussion go by on at least a dozen threads in the last couple of years.

You know how you keep grousing about "having your head handed to you" years ago after putting your foot in your mouth about something nobody but you remembers? Keep this up, and I'll really give you something to cry about.

Lee @247:

No, Earl has a good point. Categorical hatred is an easy straw man to fall into. If it's not Lincoln, how about Ted Olson, whose conservative and Republican values have led him to spearhead the lawsuit against Proposition 8 in California?

People are messy and complex. Stereotyping by labels like that denies that complexity, and (ironically) excuses evil chew'd, swallow'd and digested by averaging it out with mere tribal loyalty.

And don't threaten to give people something to cry about on Making Light, please. Particularly Earl, who worries enough, but no one needs to fear that someone is going to take after them.

(I'm being nice, but really do not make threats of this kind on Making Light. Really really. Because you are not entitled to carry them out.)

Off topic, but should I be bothered that our new neighbors's son looks like - and appears to be as old as - Harry Potter?

Further off topic... In exactly one week, my wife is having her knee-replacement replaced. Kneed I ask for good thoughts?

250: I'm sure you will manage to restrain yourself from looking at her knee post-op and asking "So, what's a joint like you doing in a nice girl like this?"

ajay @ 251... I'm stealing that one.

JimR #237: I'm not just following the stereo-types.

Are you sure about that? You're following, not your own experience, but the brief opinion of one person, whom you admire. For all you know, he got chewed up and traumatized working for the wrong law practice, but you're still willing to accept his statement as gospel, umpteen or umpty years after you heard it.

I just took a look at the latest issue of Locus, which arrived yesterday. I like the photo from Tor's 30th anniversary. I mean, it shows Teresa sitting in front of everybody, with both hands on a cane's pommel, and one could think she's a criminal mastermind about to whip a sword out of it to punish those henchpeople who displeased her.

Serge@249

I wouldn't worry about it. Hogwarts students aren't allowed to do wizardry when they're off campus.

Thanks to all for the book help! I'll check it when I'm next knowingly near my copy.

Now, another plea for "Help!": Suppose I were to get a wild hair* this weekend and use frequent flier miles to attend this.** What are my options for reasonably priced lodging within a reasonable mass transit of Manhattan? I love riding trains and people watching.

* This is not actually a strictly wild-hair question. If I do this, it'll be in conjunction with a training event. Thirty percent off the class in NYC next week, on short notice.

** Note to self: If you do, you must meet Patrick, whose taste in linkage so overlaps yours.

252: come to think of it, your wife must by definition have an absolutely pachydermic tolerance for puns.

ajay @ 257... Actually I don't pun that much in the physical world, especially when my wife is around. The blogosphere is safer.

Micahel I @ 255... That may be the case, but Alan Rickman is outside our house.

Micahel I @ 255 -- Unfortunately, "not allowed" does not equate to "does not happen". And stuff tends to happen around Harry whether he wants it or not.

There was a boy in filk fandom who looked remarkably like Daniel Radcliffe when the first Harry Potter movie came out, and there's still a strong resemblance. I gather that he tends to use that similarity for costume events.

#256 John A Arkansawyer

You need to reserve tickets to Bellona, but you surely already know that. I hope you get to spend the weekend here and see the production.

If you're thinking of staying in New Jersey, you'll want to be reasonably close to the PATH train mass transit. On Long Island, it would be the Long Island Railroad. But there are some reasonable hotels in Manhattan itself, if you don't need thousand thread sheets and 40 pillows.

Love, C.

Wow. Just saw this: Remember the Lesbian girl who wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom, and they canceled it rather than allow her to? Well, the school district apparently relented and allowed her to go to the replacement prom.

But it was a scam. The real prom was elsewhere, and the prom Constance went to had a total of seven people at it (including two special-needs students*; I'm not sure why the others were excluded).

This is the first I've heard that the students were part of the exclusion. The school district certainly had to be involved in planning the "secret" prom, but it was a fellow student that directed Constance to the fake one. It's possible that most students didn't know about the sham prom that Constance was sent to, and might be horrified at what happened; I'd encourage them to say so.

Students of Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, you need to join the 21st Century. Even the 20th would do. If you're not bigoted scumbags, you need to say so; otherwise it's reasonable to assume that you are.
____
*In the article, Constance says that the only good thing that came of the whole mess was that the special-needs students had a good time, with no one making fun of them.

Abi, #248: The line to which you objected would have been much better phrased as a simple "Stop digging." I withdraw it, and I'm sorry.

JimR @237
That makes a certain kind of reverse sense. There aren't enough decent lawyers, so whatever you do, don't become one of them. Let the creeps squeeze out the good guys.

My cousin's one of the good guys. He tells me stories about the bad ones, so I know there are some. The idea that all or most lawyers are sharks feeds into the narrative the right wing is trying to promote in order to get people to throw away one of the few weapons they have against corporations, incompetent doctors, and bad government.

Xopher: The worst part is that I have been to several proms in the last few years as a photographer and if the objection is to two girls dancing together they are hopelessly naïve. I've seen things on the dance floor that were perfectly horrendous, and my goodness, even if I objected to two girls dancing together (which would be silly, not in the least because that happens all the time at gender-imbalanced dance classes), I can guarantee that it would be far less objectionable than some of the stuff I've seen at regular proms.

Of course, I think this follows Evil Rob's dictate "The smaller the teapot, the bigger the tempest." It's a big deal to these people precisely because it's so petty. And I think part of the reason they're making such a big deal out of this poor girl and her date is because they know they're utterly powerless at anything that matters...

Jacque @ #227, hilarious!

Xopher @ # 262--arrrgh. Those jerks. BTW, anyone who hasn't clicked the links, be warned that some of the comments that follow are real winners.

ajay @251: Oh, you bad bad child. I nearly injured myself trying not to alarm my coworkers on that one.

question for other u.s. citizens who travel to europe.

have you noticed how europe has moved to credit cards with the emv chip embedded, aka 'chip and pin' cards?

and have you noticed how your u.s. issued card, without said chip, will work for some stuff but not other stuff?

and have you figured out a way to get a card that will work?

i just spoke to a handful of u.s. card-issuing banks who told me, after i explained it all to them, that they do not issue such cards. (this included amex and amex blue).

then i talked to a canadian bank which does issue them, but would not issue one to me, because i am not a canadian citizen or resident.

so: has anyone out there cracked this? how does a u.s. citizen get a european card?

Xopher @262, there's more very good discussion of the whole thing at jezebel.com. Yet another reason I'm glad my daughter was home-schooled.

This keeps on getting better. Itawamba Agricultural High School also suspended a transgender student this year, and she was eventually hounded out of town. Article from The Stranger.

Xopher, they sound like stereotypical rednecks.

(I don't like saying that; not everyone in small towns is that mean or that narrow-minded. But this group certainly is trying for the title of 'worst town in the country'.)

Let's use 'itawamba' as a slang term for "stupid, bigoted redneck."

"Did you really just use the N word? What an itawamba you are!"

B. Durbin @ 265: It's a big deal to these people precisely because it's so petty. And I think part of the reason they're making such a big deal out of this poor girl and her date is because they know they're utterly powerless at anything that matters...

I wish I could agree with you. Unfortunately, they've at least figured out how to wield some amount of power, and that's power that could (and has in other places) very well get people killed.

Excluding the gays and the special ed students tells me exactly how repugnant these people are.

It was Superintendent Teresa McNeece and Itawamba County school board attorney Michele Floyd who invited Constance to attend the fake prom.

I don't want to dilute the strength of the phrase "utterly despicable", but sheesh, it really sounds like that they're going to need a second lawsuit to make the school board realize that they've pissed off a lot of people. They should have no future in directing education policy at all. The school board can probably also be prosecuted under Mississippi's anti-hazing law.

Xopher @ 270: Unless the reporter got it wrong, I think "he" would be the appropriate pronoun here. From the article: For now Baize says he prefers to use male pronouns.

Lexica: Damn. Guess I didn't read that carefully enough. Thanks.

"be warned that some of the comments that follow are real winners."

Internet Rule #1: Do Not Read the Comments.

Not unless you want to ruin your day, at least.

A high-level GOP conservative defends Pelosi and disses Fox News.

Cracks in the facade, or rats deserting the sinking ship? And how long will it take for the teabaggers to start baying for his blood?

Maybe we can arrange a trade of GOPers-with-a-conscience for Blue Dog Democrats. heh.

Wilma Mankiller died today, of pancreatic cancer.

I just had a look at the 2° map including Sunday's big earthquake. That's a pretty impressive set of aftershocks.

Well, that was special. Yesterday afternoon we got hit by three quick power dips, after which the DSL connection stopped working, and my backup RAID mirror drive decided it needed to rebuild itself. I played around with the DSL for awhile, discovering that the modem was trying to connect every minute or so but wasn't getting any cooperation from the downstream end, so I phoned Qwest Tech Support. The computer there asked me some questions and then allowed as how it was all their fault, and they'd let me know when it was fixed.

The backup drive took about 6 hours to rebuild; Qwest didn't call me until 8 AM this morning. They never did say what had failed. Things weren't quite done even then; the DSL connection was working but the modem wasn't connecting to the ISP correctly, apparently it forgot its authorization info somewhere along the line. I keep an encrypted file with all that sort of data, so it was an easy fix.

So, a minor inconvenience, that would have been major if I hadn't been through enough of this sort of thing to know about automatic backup procedures and keeping records of authorization data. I wasn't even completely off the internet in those dark hours: I turned off WiFi connection on my iPhone and kept track of this thread via 3G data connection.

Just for grins I downloaded Google Chrome for my Mac a couple of days ago, and now I'm using it for most of my browsing; it's so much faster than Safari or FireFox that it feels like I've boosted the DSL speed by 2 or 3x. Especially nice for catching up on the 3 weeks of Girl Genius I fell behind.

Serge #258: Might it have something to do with the time of year? An objection to hot cross puns at Easter, perhaps?

My own real life punning can have quite magical effects: getting two wives to sigh at once, for example.

Neil Gaiman just linked this article about management issues at Science Fiction World, the largest science fiction magazine in China, and also the world. It reminded me a lot of half-remembered stories of shenanigans at the old American pulps, which is why I thought to post it here. Apparently some things do translate across the Pacific, or something. It also synergizes oddly with Teresa's "reviewer's stupid rant" particle, not that I disagree with what Teresa is saying. I think this is the exception that proves the rule. (And to her question, I'll reply, the cliché persists because "everybody knows" it to be true.)

Now I need to figure out how to get my local (US-based) SF library a subscription to SFW. And all the back issues. The magazine catalogers are going to just love me for dropping a magazine in a language they don't read on their laps, I bet. :-D

285 Kevin Riggle

The article is dated April 1st ....

Love, C.

Ack, I see John Chu posted the SFW link @8 already. And "I think this is the exception that proves the rule." in my post should be "I think this is the exception that proves her point." My apologies. Oh, l'espirit d'"Comment Posted" page.

They dumbed down Scrabble: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7088362.ece

Fragano @ 284... getting two wives to sigh at once

It'll be some time before my one and only heaves a thigh.

The faux-Scrabble at Facebook decided honda was an okay word. They are strangely inconsistent.

Capitalized names and words might be okay, as an agreed-upon variant. But there are so many damn stupid neologisms out there, those would turn the game into something like a spellchecker that accepts every wrong spelling it ever got.

There are some variants I'd like to try, though. Playing as if the edges (maybe the two sides, maybe all four) were contiguous and you could spell across them. Playing with all your tiles showing. Allowing tile trades. Moving or removing tiles already on the board, provided the result still spells words in all affected directions.

I wonder if it would be possible to play Bughouse Scrabble, with multiple boards, clocks, teams, and anguished cries of "Just get me a J, NOW, and we're the winners!"

282
Yes, and I think that there's going to be interesting times ahead for that part of the state. That's a fair amount of movement going on - I don't remember seeing that widespread a pattern of aftershocks with other quakes. I'm waiting for the aerial photos of whatever rupture they find - out there it should show up nicely. (I'm also waiting for the repair paperwork to start showing up at work. We have stuff out there, right up to the border north of Mexicali.)

Serge@250, Owwww! My mom's had both knees replaced in the last year, and while she's recovered very well for an 80-year-old, it's still been long and painful. Hope your wife's replacement-replacement goes well.

Also, I was expecting to see something from you about torte reform....

So, since this is an open thread, AKICITF, and thunder is rumbling and lightning flashing as I type, and this being Oklahoma one starts thinking tornadoes!!! at this time of year...

Due to my divorce I find myself without a weather radio. Before I go out and buy one, is there any reliable online product available that would send alerts to my phone or computer that would do about the same thing as a weather radio -- that is, make loud noises for whatever weather alerts I would like to stay informed about? Preferably phone, because as soon as I hit post the computers are going to sleep...

Bill Stewart @ 292... Thanks. Her new knee never felt right even though she'd gone thru all the therapy as she was supposed to. Eventually, they figured out what the problem was: the hole drilled thru the center of her tibia for the pin to fit in was at a slight angle to the axis. Not much. That's all it took. Owwww indeed.

Someone on one of the prom threads suggested that Nina Simone said it well decades ago.

Serge #289: What you want is the use of a pair of drumsticks for a rimshot.

Fragano @ 296... Because I belong with the Femoral Majority?

Bruce Cohen @283 --

Ahem.

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

And, yeah, you're copying stuff to it external to the main drive.

BUT!

A RAID that rebuilds itself for unknown causes is, for data integrity purposes, gone, finished, kaput, consumed by toe weasels, an ex-storage medium, a heap of feculating scunge. It is not to be trusted nor relied upon.

It's not a backup until it's somewhere else.

(This has been your convulsive backup rant. If the post the rant is in response to had described actual data loss, the rant would have been longer.)

Neil deGrasse Tyson makes some good points here about the value of space travel, and the importance of having a mission.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o

Tyson video

Serge #297: I see you're going on and on in that vein.

Gods! More bloody puns!

Xopher @ 301... What else did you expect in this shindig?

Serge #294: Ow... replacing human body parts is a tough business, and any slip is likely to have disproportionate effects. Best of luck to your wife!

Constance @ 286: That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. It was apparently updated later in the day: Update (2010.04.01, 21:50): Xinhua is now reporting that Li Chang has been relieved of his position, so it looks like it wasn't an April Fool's joke after all.

This is an example of why I hate April Fools' Day. Apart from not liking mean jokes — and most April Fools' jokes seem to me to be based on the themes of "if somebody wants or cares about something, make them think it's been destroyed or they're not going to get it" and its flipside, "if there's something bad somebody doesn't want, make them think it's happened" — I hate the way the phony stories get in the way of actual real news.

For example, the head of Caltrain (which provides commuter train service on the Peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose) made an announcement on the first:

Caltrain has gone broke and will likely need to wipe out half its service — including weekend, nighttime and midday trains — officials warned Thursday, bracing passengers for a major shake-up to the popular commuter line that links San Francisco to the South Bay.

“This is not an April fool’s joke,” Caltrain CEO Mike Scanlon told the agency’s board of directors.

[And my goodness, it's interesting trying to get <blockquote> to play nicely with line breaks.]

Not to cut any of the punning off at the knees or anything, BUT.

This weekend I was investigating some software I've been interested in for some time. There's two parts: a free and limited bit, and then a fullblown standalone bit that's rather pricey, and for which a 30-day trial is available. Both require filling out a simple form to obtain keys.

So I filled out the forms, and awaited the coming emails with confirmation links. Click the link to verify I'm the same person who filled out the form, is the theory, and then would follow emails with keys.

A day passed with no confirming emails in my inbox, so I shot off a note to tech support. This morning (the company is in Scotland and I am almost as far not as it is possible to be, so none of this is fast) I get a note back with a key for the trial, which is fine, but as regards the free bit, the support person wrote If you do not click [the link in the confirm email], we cannot send you a key as you will not have confirmed your email address.

That would be the same email address I used to write to support to say I did not get a confirming email. The same email address support used to send me this note. I know I haven't had all my coffee yet this morning, but isn't "absurd" the correct word here?

David Harmon @ 303... Thanks.

pericat @ 305: Yes.

Reminds me of my trying to sort out my Yahoo ID. I'm on a couple of mailing lists, but can't get at documents on the group websites, because I can't remember my password. When I called to try to change my password, I was told I had to give the password hint(s)and the answers to the hints. I said that surely, they were supposed to give me the hints (e.g. what's your father's middle name) and I was supposed to give the answers. No, I'm supposed to remember what hints I chose how ever many years ago. Went round about three times. Gave up. AARRGH

Pericat #305's letter can be explained as a boilerplate e-mail -- they guy probably has a button on his screen for "send trial key as reply", which autoburps a standard message.

DCB #307's... that sounds like someone who has forgotten what their job was supposed to be, and probably doesn't care much. Did you try asking for a supervisor?

David Harmon @ 308. Yes. Supervisor said the same thing. I tried to point out the illogicality. They were not listening / couldn't understand*. I suppose I could set up a new ID, but Yahhoo want all sorts of info about you now when you do that, so I don't really want to. I suppose I could try again and hope for a less mononic supervisor.

*Like the insurance company, after another car collided with mine coming off a roundabout (because he was trying to undertake me at the exit) who couldn't understand that when the other driver said that both (a) he hadn't been behind me; and (b) he'd seen me indicating that I was turning right (when his car was to the left of mine) he had to be lying (because it's a physical impossibility for both statements to be true).

David, I didn't quote the whole response. The support person had read my email and was addressing it, it's just that her assessment was cracked.

dcb, when I originally got a Yahoo ID there were no hints. Every couple of years I try to remember my password, for a lark. No luck so far.

Lexica @304:

This is an example of why I hate April Fools' Day. ..... I hate the way the phony stories get in the way of actual real news.

But I'm probably atypical, having memorized the episode list from the original Star Trek in my teens, and somehow having absorbed a pile of lore about the infamous history of The Last Dangerous Visions in spite of having been a baby when said anthology was originally scheduled to appear. I suppose if one didn't know all the episodes of the original Trek, the fake episode the Tor.com reviewers made up would seem no more implausible than "Spock's Brain".

#253 ::: David Harmon

{{Are you sure about that? You're following, not your own experience, but the brief opinion of one person, whom you admire. For all you know, he got chewed up and traumatized working for the wrong law practice, but you're still willing to accept his statement as gospel, umpteen or umpty years after you heard it.}}

Willing to listen to a man who has spent his life teaching about the law and about ethics? Listen to him give me advice about LAW AND ETHICS? Yes. I'm willing to listen to him, about that particular subject. If I, at 19 years old, had said, "You obviously don't know what you're talking about, because I know some lawyers that aren't like that.", would I have been right to do so? Or is it that, because of this "right wing narrative", we shouldn't look at and recognize how terrible a bad lawyer can be, and how the practice of law often strains personal beliefs and ethics, and some people don't deal well with that.

Lawyers are people, and thus imperfect--and they are put through tests that most people don't have to face. Why should it be so shocking that there is a significant failure rate?

Yes, I made an offhand sweeping generalization that you took personally, and I apologize for my unthinking words. I still believe, though, that the profession of law is one that hurts people...lawyers first.

DCB #309, pericat #310: Oy gevalt!

JimR, your comment at #312 is not a response to my comments, and especially not to the passage you quoted. Offhand, I count at least four straw-men in your little note, and frankly I'm not interested in playing with them.

pericat, #310: I deal with that by having a little Notepad file called Hints, in which for every online account I have, I list the user ID in plaintext, and then not the password itself, but something that will make me remember what it was. Setting up a new account includes updating the Hints file as the final step in the process. Periodically I copy the Hints file onto the thumb drive that I carry around with me, so that if I need to get into an account whose password I can't recall on a public computer, I can look it up.

Admittedly, this only works because my passwords are real words (or words and numbers, or words with hyphens and/or underscores) rather than random combinations, and that's not the most secure protocol. But at least I don't use the same password for everything. :-)

Lee @ 315: A common technique for memorable passwords is to use initialisms. Thus, if you can remember "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.", you can use "MniIMYkmfPtd" as a password. For best results, use a longish phrase that only you would know, and sprinkle some non-alphabetics in.

I gave in. So many passwords and i.d.s and verification questions, etc.

So I have a file of them all now, stored in various digital locations.

Every move I make involves passwords and i.d.s etc. Start teaching? You need so many more involving the institution.

Not to mention subscribing to newspapers, etc.

It's insane.

Love, C.

There are also various "password keeper" programs which can stash your passwords in an encrypted file. Some are even cross-platform compatible (Gorilla Password?).

David Harmon,

I have clearly caused you personal offense. I'm sorry. I should have chosen my words more carefully.

My response was to what I construed your argument to be, namely that my opinion was invalid because it was based on the advice of a person I admired, who himself could have had an invalid reason for his opinion. I was trying to indicate that this person had decades of experience in both aspects of the matter at hand, and thus I felt his opinion was, in fact valid...much more so than any personal experience I could have had at the time (and, indeed, to this day).

In addition, I was trying to explain that I do not, in fact, believe that all lawyers are bad people but that the practice of law can indeed strain an individual's personal convictions and thus the idea that lawyers can become bad people is not so far fetched.

Again, I apologize for my poorly chosen words and I hope that I haven't given too bad a first impression on you.

I've heard broadly good things about Password Safe.

The whole proliferation of passwords is a good example of a solution to a problem that scales badly. If you need to remember two important passwords to get through life, this is doable for most people. But if you have a password for each of a hundred different systems you deal with on at least a monthly basis, you are screwed--that's too many for almost anyone to remember. So those get stored in a browser, or emailed to yourself with an easily-searched subject line, or at best stored in an encrypted file somewhere. And yet, for authenticating yourself to a server somewhere, a password is the standard thing almost everyone uses.

Most alternatives also won't scale, alas. There's a whole area of knowledge based authentication ("what is your mother's maiden name?") that is fundamentally and unfixably flawed (it depends on the idea that the good guys can find more information on you than the bad guys, where "good guys" are a commercial service drawing on public and commercial databases that are also available to any serious attacker), and that also scales horribly in security terms. ("Welcome to our porno server. Please enter an account name and password. To protect your password, please enter your mother's maiden name, the last four digits of your SSN, and your current ZIP code.")

Other alternatives probably work just as badly. Giving me a token for every important thing I do will leave me with a pocketful of tokens. Making me memorize a set of colors/shapes with each website to resist phishing probably doesn't scale all that well. Etc.

The alternative that can work is some unified access-granting scheme, and some reasonably good ideas are circulating there. But control of that scheme could ultimately involve huge amounts of political and market power, awful opportunities for abuse and privacy violations and fraud, etc.

Stupid Diplomat Tricks

Fine. He has diplomatic immunity. But this asshole deserves to be subject to the slowest, most inept bureaucratic processing of his case that can be arranged.

And if his luggage gets broken open and returned in a plastic bag five weeks later, all the better.

My solution to the password problem is a three-tier approach. Low-level is the same one for all— this is for forum-style postings and the like, places where my ID isn't all that important. Mid-level is a particularly misspelled word combination with numbers that change from app to app— while it can be a pain, I can run through half-a-dozen variations in a minute or two if I don't remember that particular number code.

High-security, for banking and the like, is complete gibberish. But it's MY gibberish, and I know why I picked it, so I don't have too much trouble with it.

As for security questions, I like the more obscure ones, particularly the ones with misleading answers. I wish I could write my own, honestly. Though the funny one is "mother's maiden name"— it's actually quite easy for me to get that one wrong, as she was informally adopted. I can go with her birth name and be wrong or I can go with the name she was known by and be wrong...

I can't imagine coping with passwords without an application to organize and encrypt them. I use SplashID. No idea if it's the best or worst, but I haven't had any trouble. I started out using it on Windows and a Palm Pilot, and was able to migrate to a Mac and iPhone. That's also where I store my credit card number, insurance numbers, etc.

Stefan Jones #321: Fine. He has diplomatic immunity. But this asshole deserves to be subject to the slowest, most inept bureaucratic processing of his case that can be arranged.

Ok, let's say the US decided to unilaterally cancel this guy's diplomatic immunity and disappear him as an enemy combatant euphemism. Qatar could do exactly what about it? Their best option at that point would be to apologize for his actions and hope the US didn't follow up with regime change.

Things I've learned from playing an MMPORPG -- diplomacy takes careful handling, and one screw-up can ruin months or years of work. And the screw-up looks so emotionally satisfying, people don't want to stop themselves.

Messing with diplomatic immunity is very much like Charles II's stop of the exchequer -- a plan that's regularly proposed to "fix" the national debt. You get some gain now, and spend the next hundred years trying to rebuild the trust you destroyed overnight. Remember a hundred years ago? No you don't -- be very wary of sending trouble like that to your great-grandchildren.

No, Qatar is unlikely to wage devastating war on the US right now. However, there are plenty of countries who have already noticed that armed US agents accosted a diplomat from their area, for doing something that, at home, is completely normative. It makes doing the things we as a nation want to do harder if we anger or frighten other people's diplomats.

What's likely to happen is that the US will apologize for interfering with a diplomat, and Qatar will apologize on behalf of its diplomat for failing to observe the courtesy the relevant smoking laws -- while noting that he's not subject to that authority. This is a good thing; it's what keeps countries with wildly different customs from killing each other wholesale.

In private, the government of Qatar will already have raked him over the coals for being so stupid. Whether he becomes a washed-out former diplomat or a cause celebre will depend on external circumstances.

there are plenty of countries who have already noticed that armed US agents accosted a diplomat from their area, for doing something that, at home, is completely normative.

An experienced Qatari diplomat should know that it's not completely normal to smoke on board aircraft in most countries. It certainly isn't allowed on, to pick one completely at random, Qatar Airways.

Coping with passwords... The key element in my choosing one is, will I remember it easily when production-support calls me on my cell phone at 2am after a long day at the office had ended at 1am.

An additional thought on the universal "New Yorker" cartoon caption. Here's my new all-purpose entry: "It wasn't always like this." (I sent "I was not always as you see me" to bOINGbOING earlier today, but realized that the speaker varies. Sometimes it's the asshole, and sometimes it's the Christ.)*

*As in the ur-caption "Christ, what an asshole." Get it? Here, I'll start the laughter off. Ha ha!

albatross @ 320: We use Password Safe and I find it very manageable.

I use the same password for everything. Here it is: ********

I was once asked to sign a paper at work acknowledging, among other things, that it was a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley act if I had a password based on the name of a fantasy character.

Stefan Jones:

Fine. He has diplomatic immunity. But this asshole deserves to be subject to the slowest, most inept bureaucratic processing of his case that can be arranged.

That won't be necessary. Because, sooner or later, he's going to need a flight home and whatever airline he uses is going to route him through Dallas/Fort Worth about seventeen times in August. This will include Aeroflot.

Erik Nelson @331: it was a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley act if I had a password based on the name of a fantasy character.

¿Que?

I prefer the algorithmic solution to passwords. One example might be, take the domain name, run it through Rot13, then through a L33t translator. That way, I don't have to remember any passwords, I just have to remember how to generate them. A similar solution might apply for the varification questions.

It just riles me that anyone at all, even diplomats, are considered to be above the law. Smoking on a plane today could lead to honor vivisection tomorrow. Ah, well, we must be tolerant of normative behavior; after all, we don't want our diplomats to be beheaded in Qatar for committing public acts of zydeco.... Other cultures, other ways. (sigh)

Yeah, it's a real pity this guy was a diplomat whom the armed goons couldn't rough up for mouthiness, rather than, say, a Candadian SF writer, whom they could have "taught a lesson."

Open thready badness:

Let's imagine that it's mid-November 2012, and you're wondering why the Republicans have recaptured the white house, despite being apparently batshit nuts. The MSM will explain patiently that it was all because Obama was too much of a far-left socialist, because the members of that profession with three-digit IQs are mostly tools.

Here is why I probably won't be voting for Obama in 2012. There are other reasons (this is part of a pattern), but this is a good one to point to. Obama apparently believes he has the legal right, as president, to order me killed on his say so alone, if he should decide I am a terrorist and it would be inconvenient to arrest me. I'm not interested in voting for people who think they have that right.

Who said anything about roughing up?

I'd just have the guy sit in a comfortable room for as long as his fellow customers had to while waiting for their post-flight debriefing.

The total number of hours.

Tim Walters @316

Thank you for that suggestion - I'd never thought of it before. And I've actually got a phrase (other than the one you give) which I could use.

Like many people, I suspect, I have a "standard" password which I use for sites not involving money - but I try to be a bit more creative where money-related passwords are concerned.

My pet-hate at the moment is "Verified by Visa": I have two debit cards and two credit cards. I'm supposed to think up and memorise a password for each of them. So far, I think I've had to reset my password EVERY TIME I've used the stupid system.

albatross @336:

What if the Republicans field someone worse? Someone who proposes or supports not Mirandizing arrested people in case they're terrorists and have no rights? Or someone who "dares to say" that sometimes torture is right and patriotic and American?

Or will you go third-party? Will that end well?

I don't know what to do, frankly, but I haven't yet reached the point where Obama is the worst of the evils on the agenda. Even leaving aside the "message" that This Is The Last Time We Vote For Anyone Left Of Margaret Thatcher.

Disgusted? Yes. Angry? Check. Ready to leap from the frying pan into the fire? Not yet.

Erik Nelson @ 331 - Please, pretty please tell me you have a citation for that, or an idea of where to find it. I would love to be able to pass that information along to certain people...

VictorS, #325: Thank you, that's informative. I hope you're right that the Qatari government is going to rake him over the coals, since apparently they're the only ones with standing to do so.

Erik, #331: Did it say anything about using a password based on an obscure fantasy character's planet? I do that sometimes, too.

albatross, #336: The problem with your line of reasoning is that if you vote for a Republican, you will still be voting for someone who believes that. Your only hope is that the Libertarians recover from their current state of disarray enough to actually field a candidate, now that Ron Paul has defected to the Republicans.

albatross #335: Yeah, it's a real pity this guy was a diplomat whom the armed goons couldn't rough up for mouthiness, rather than, say, a Candadian SF writer, whom they could have "taught a lesson."

The "armed goons" in your inappropriate juxtaposition were highly-trained federal air marshals, not simple border guards. You can't force me to prefer either of the situations you mentioned; I refuse to choose one because of your supposed hand-wavy linkage with the other.

albatross, #336, on not voting for Obama. Even if the alternative is Sarah Palin? If she wants the Republican nomination, she'll probably get it. For myself, I do not have the heart to work for a conservative President like Obama, or a conservative-dominated party like the Democrats, but I also recognize the greater evil. I will vote for the lesser evil which can defeat it.

abi, Lee:

I'm really not sure how to deal with the very likely worse GOP candidate. (I honestly don't see any chance at all that we will get a GOP candidate in 2012 that is even as good as, say, Richard Nixon. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll get a Democratic candidate that good.)

Is there a point at which you will refuse to vote for Obama? I mean, suppose it comes out we're still using torture as a matter of policy? Or if journalists are under NSA surveillance? Or if we're continuing to run the Bush-era secret prisons and kidnapping schemes? Will it change your vote?

I knew a lot of "libertarian Republicans" back before the W administration. They talked a good game about fiscal responsibility, limited government, rule of law, and mistrust of government. But then, W got into office and 9/11 happened. And most of those guys that I knew backed W to the hilt. They were ready to justify everything from the invasion of Iraq to the torture of captives (which, simultaneously, we weren't doing and the bastards had coming for being terrorists anyway) to the medicare drug bill.

Now, this was a natural experiment. Like any experiment, it was possible to learn that we were really wrong in our understanding of the world. And I did learn that--I discovered that most of the people making small government noises meant nothing at all by it. If they'd had any of the principles they claimed, they'd have been W's harshest critics. (And some were, but not too damned many.)

What will we learn about the people who claim to care about civil liberties over the next few years, I wonder?

Well, how about if Anwar al-Awlaki threatened Jerusalem? Would it be okay for the Mossad to take him out?

albatross, #334: "Is there a point at which you will refuse to vote for Obama?"

You did not ask me, but I will answer: if there is a credible superior alternative, or there truly is little difference between the choices, and neither seems likely in 2012. In 2012, fighting for better Congresspeople, as Accountability Now is doing, seems more likely to lead to positive results. This is the interregnum: the lesser evil is very evil, and yet there are still greater evils. I hope we will not let our revulsion lead us into making choices that harm our cause.

As for abuses of executive authority under Obama, as far as I know, many are still occurring in Bagram.

albatross @344:

There's an enormous difference between voting for someone as the lesser of two evils and "backing someone to the hilt." It's perfectly possible to be a harsh critic of someone and still vote for him, if the other guy is even worse.

Seriously. What would you have us do? Vote for Palin because she's going to make it better? Support the anti-intellectual, anti-factual crowd that calls me a traitor and dehumanizes my friends and family? Not vote? Vote for a third-party candidate? Write in Saint Francis of Assisi?

I vote for the least bad bastard I can lay hands on, weighted by the likelihood that my vote won't help get the worse bastard into office. Sometimes I get to vote with a clean conscience, sometimes I have to wash my hands really thoroughly afterward.

I understand that you're angry. I'm pretty pissed off myself. But I'm also not going to lose sight of the long game, nor rage around calling everyone around me a hypocrite. Which you're pretty darned close to doing.

Steve C:

I'll admit I'm not clear on the relevance of this to the question of whether the president of the US has the legal authority to order US citizens assassinated. This is a matter of some concern for those of us who sometimes imagine that there are laws which apply even to the powerful in our country. If the president can have me or anyone else killed on his say so alone, with no trial and no appeal and no check on that power at all, what *can't* he do? Is there anything besides Obama's good judgment standing between, say, Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck and a sniper's bullet?

I'm not sure if it's okay to assassinate anyone, US citizen or not. (I am a little conflicted though. A targeted assassination is probably better than a full-scale invasion.)

If I am offered a choice between voting for Saruman and voting for Sauron, I will vote for Saruman.

I'll even manage to cheerfully put up with the Uruk-hai* who alternately call me a namby-pamby deluded far-elfist supporter and say "See, there's really no difference at all between our two candidates."

Is that a clear enough explanation for this site?

* Just in case it needs to be said, I do not put albatross in this category.

albatross, #348: Is there anything besides Obama's good judgment intelligence and sanity standing between, say, Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck and a sniper's bullet?

FTFY.

Seriously, hon, you're getting into tinfoil-hat territory here, as well as damaging your own credibility as a member of the Sane Opposition. I could hear that argument on an interview with a teabagger, if I wanted to find it. Dial back the hyperbole and the accusations a bit, eh?

albatross, I think there are conceivably circumstances where a Commander-in-Chief is not only authorized to take such an action, he is obligated to so.

The circumstances would be extremely rare and have to constitute imminent danger to American citizens, but the citizenship of the perpetrator would make zero difference. And the idea that al-Awlaki's citizenship means that the President can target someone like me, just on a whim, is absolutely ludicrous.

Lee @351:

Address the content, not the man, please. It doesn't matter whom anyone sounds like; it matters what they say. (And if albatross cares more for his credibility here "as a member of the Sane Opposition" than he does for exploring and expressing what he believes is right, then I'm a Dutchman.)

He's not in it for our esteem. Withdrawing it is not an effective threat.

And don't use pet names in arguments. It's inflammatory, darling.

Passwords I remember: Home security system, work voicemail, work logon, NHCC logon, home server logon, cell phone PIN, Nokia N800 lock code, bank PIN, personal private key passphrase, browser master password, personal password database passphrase, work private key passphrase, work password database passphrase, emergency lockbox combination, gun safe combination, Test and root password for virtual machine for Linux course I'm currently teaching. This is really more than I can remember (and I'm cheating by using one browser master password across, erm, 6 software installations). I wonder what I've forgotten? Oh, passphrase for the TrueCrypt region on my thumb drive.

I seem to still remember the combinations to the first two combination locks I ever owned, which I have not had for decades now. I want those brain cells back, damnit!

I, also, have a generic password for accounts that truly don't matter. I use randomly-generated ones from my password database package for everything else.

I'm encountering more and more places that have weird restrictive password rules, preventing me from using good passwords there. I find this very annoying.

My current password database is KeePass, because I have Windows, Windows Mobile, and Linux (Nokia N800) implementations of it.

I have a password pattern scheme that appears to slip past all the scheme-preventing software around, and which I use for a few of the medium-security passwords in the above list. It makes it possible to change it every 90 days without going insane. I am not, of course, going to reveal what mine is. If 50 people would each contribute their scheme to a trusted editor, who would then publish however many unique schemes were submitted without identifying any of the submitters, and then bleach the info out of his own brain, I'd participate.

Steve C #352:

As I understand it, this is an authorization to assassinate this guy far away from any battlefield, as we routinely do to suspected bad guys using drone-fired missiles. Not when he's getting ready to hit the big red button on the bomb, but when he's sleeping in his bed next to his wife, or walking along a street, or sitting in a cafe somewhere[1].

I don't see how it can be legal to do this. And I definitely don't see how it could be Obama's duty to do this. Can you explain that?

[1] To be clear, I get that it's sometimes perfectly legitimate for federal agents or soldiers to intentionally kill an American. For example, if the Hutarree militia guys had decided to respond to the FBI raids with a firefight, the FBI agents would have been justified in shooting back and killing them. But nothing could justify FBI agents assassinating those guys (say, planting a car bomb and blowing up the ringleaders to save the hassle of a trial).

Assassination has historically been a big deal. I think it's an informal gentleman's agreement among national leaders for mutual benefit. They all believe that, with nation-state level resources, they can be assassinated.

I seem to recall that killing Admiral Yamamoto was ordered at the Presidential level during WWII; but he was not a head of state, but a serving officer traveling on military duty in wartime, so "assassination" is not exactly the model for this. (The Presidential-level decision was I believe needed because the mission was based on decrypted Japanese communications, which we didn't want to reveal we were doing.)

ajay @326 -- Thanks for the correction.

Earl @ 334 -- Yeah, it's very annoying when diplomatic immunity is used to ignore local law -- but you've captured exactly why the system is there. "The accordion has been forbidden for hundreds of years! You must die, and your hellish instrument too!"

In general, the friction is kept down because people try to be, well, diplomatic.

The things diplomats' teenage kids get up to, of course, are an unfortunate side effect of the system. I'm sure you can all see why the kids have to have immunity, though.

I turned up a decent primer on diplomatic immunity here, if anybody is interested.

The legality of such an action may be questionable -- it would depend on how al-Awlaki is classified.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

The answer probably is yes, says Mike Newton, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. If the US could prove that Awlaki is a “direct participant” in a conflict – terrorist operations against the US, for example – then killing Awlaki would probably pass legal muster, he says.
“By making that declaration, the administration has at least admitted the possibility that the fundamental obligation of the executive to protect the American people trumps the basic right to life of that individual,” says Mr. Newton.
Since the incidents last year at Fort Hood and Detroit, Awlaki’s stature has risen within the counterterrorism community. He now represents a top leader of Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, which is emerging as a dangerous new franchise of Al Qaeda globally.
While the fact that Awlaki is an American citizen may raise legal questions about killing him, targeting him outside the US may make it more tenable, says Newton.

Lee/Steve:

I think we're just at a disagreement in assumptions here.

When the Bush administration claimed the power to have US citizens disappeared and (apparently) tortured, I worried that this was a horrifying precedent. It seemed to me that a president who could have people disappeared indefinitely might use that power, not only against genuine bad guys, but also against annoying journalists or pundits, or people who had some dirt on them, or even opposition leaders. This power seemed to me to be dangerous as hell to leave lying around.

In exactly the same way, I think the power to have US citizens assassinated is dangerous as hell.

Did Bush have his enemies disappeared? No, he didn't. He was too sane, or decent, a person to do that. Will Obama have his enemies assassinated? Probably not, because he's also probably too sane and decent.

Who will be president after Obama, do you suppose? Will every president who has this power be sane?

In my lifetime, we've had one president forced to resign (and reportedly, his top advisors were worried about what irrational stuff he might do in those last days before he decided to resign), and we've had one president serve out a couple years of his last term being, most likely, in the beginning stages of senility, with his advisors and wife ruling in his stead. We very nearly got a very old man with serious anger-control issues as the president now.

It is not unthinkable that we could give huge powers to the state, and those powers could be misused in ways that would be horrible. It's not unthinkable that a president could make disastrously bad, short-sighted decisions to try to keep power in a political crisis.

albatross, the next President might be total nutjob. He might be saint. He might believe in unicorns. Lots of things are possible, but how probable are they?

We simply don't know what the future holds, so we have to get along as best we can with probabilities. Sure, there are "black swans", those unforeseen transformative events, but can one live one's live on the basis that anything will happen?

For myself, I don't believe that Obama's "kill or capture" authorization for a terrorist is a slippery slope. I'm just not going to be looking over my shoulder for black helicopters.

As for our nation, I'm an optimist. We've seen far worse times and managed to muddle through.

In a way, we got spoiled a bit during the Clinton years. The "black swan" then was the relatively peaceful world we had, accompanied by astonishing economic growth.

Since then, we've gone back to the usual shit we have most of the time. But it's not 1968 with its assassinations and futile war. It's not 1979 with Americans held hostage. It's not 1941 with the outbreak of a massive war. It's not 1861 with the country torn to pieces.

It's just 2010, and it's the usual crap.

albatross, #359: I don't disagree with you that this is a Bad Thing to have going on. I do think that the level of hype you're putting into it is unwarranted. And I've been voting for the lesser evil for a long time now; it may be wearing, but it's still a valid approach, combined with pushing against the things I perceive as evil, to an Administration that I still think has some chance of paying attention to public opinion.

Aside: This is exactly the point we were all trying to make to the Bush-era Republicans, wasn't it -- "Do you really want a Democratic President to have those powers?" The schadenfreude of having been proven right doesn't counterbalance knowing that I don't want the President having those powers either, whether Democratic or Republican.

333 and 340 in response to my 331:

The same document also made me promise not to leak company documents, so no, I can't come up with a reference.

But I suppose it's just an instance of "don't make passwords easy to guess" and Sarbanes Oxley was invoked because this was about the principle that data security was your responsibility to others.

I was just a plain old Quark Xpress page builder, but some corporate lawyer must have needed something to do.

It was a good job, while it lasted, but sometimes things branched off into Dilbert territory.

albatross #359: with his advisors and wife ruling in his stead

Twice: there was also Woodrow Wilson after his stroke.

Having First Lady Cindy McCain in de facto charge of the country could get interesting. Better her than Palin or Bachmann.

I wish they had citations:

Tea Party Jesus

And I looked back at the head of this thread, and saw, "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light." So I think The Raven will fly away from this subject until he finds a more appropriate venue for it.

Mmmmm, flying....

JimR: Apology accepted!

I was mostly noting that no matter whose advice you were following, your original comment at #138 was still supporting a stereotype.

And here's the thing -- no matter how wise someone is, treating their words as gospel doesn't make you just as wise -- it makes you less wise than they were, when you might have the chance to outgrow your teachers.

It's not just that "anyone can be wrong" -- an even more basic issue is that any given statement came out of a particular context -- time, place, who they were talking to, where the conversation came from, and so on. Even "universal truths" can lose their footing over time and distance. How much more so, for advice given to a young student?

Consider: Did your ethics professor actually say "lawyers are doomed to evil"? I doubt it -- you describe comments much closer to "don't go there, you won't be able to take it". (Emphasis mine.) The step to "most lawyers are evil" was your own inference, led by exposure to the classic stereotype.

An obSF question: what was the short story, perhaps by PKDick, where assassinations had become part of the toolkit of regular international relationships? The protagonist is a professor, who is realizing that...gur ehyrf gung znxr vg bx gb tb nsgre tbireazrag bssvpvnyf ner whfg nf nccyvpnoyr gb havirefvgl cebsrffbef

Kathryn @ 367: I'm not sure, but it sounds like the PKD version of a story I've also read the Poul Anderson version of, in an anthology on wars, maybe read in 1980, which might have included part of Ben Bova's The Dueling Machine. Does that help? No, of course it doesn't. I don't even know the name of the Poul Anderson story. Why did I even start this comment? Who will help me grind the corn?

Stefan, #364: They do. Click on any given picture, and it'll take you to a direct quotation of the original source. For example, the first one is Rush Limbaugh -- no surprise there.

*helps John A Arkansawyer grind the corn*

I assume Jimmy cracked it first, but I really don't care.

That TeaParty Jesus site is genius! Thank you!

Kathryn: I was thinking of the same story in relation to the discussion; I think it was by Poul Anderson.

Kathryn @ 367: You may be thinking of Poul Anderson's "A Man to My Wounding". Also, if you can find a copy, read Avram Davidson's "The Unknown Law", for a particularly dry (and IMO, bleak) perspective.

Erik Nelson @ 331, 362: ...a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley act if I had a password based on the name of a fantasy character.

I have always assumed that there are an inordinate number of users with the password "mellon".

Fantasy characters would run afoul of dictionary attacks, as they're pretty common words. (or at least, they're common enough to have made it into password cracking dictionaries).

Likewise, any halfway decent dictionary attack/cracker will contain any leetspeek substitutions as well as word+digit, and patterns on the keyboard.

#363 Earl

Do you really want a overprivileged rich junkie who stole narcotics from charity organizations to be running the US Government? Jeb Bush's daughter, decades later....

Paula Lieberman #376: Do you really want a overprivileged rich junkie who stole narcotics from charity organizations to be running the US Government?

Just like I said, she'd be better than Palin or Bachmann. I'm not saying I want it to happen, just that far worse things could happen.

janetl @ 374: I'd bank on it.

Leroy F. Bervan @ 373: I think that's the Poul Anderson story I was thinking of. That he wrote it in 1959 I find a bit amazing. The story read much more recent to me.

Erik Nelson #331: How did that violate Sarbanes-Oxley?

janetl, #374: You're probably right. To me, that would feel as obvious as "sesame" -- and how much would you bet that there are a lot of folks out there using that one and feeling very clever?

abi #347:

Fair enough. I recognize that we all ultimately vote for the best available option, and it's not really fair for me to assume that doing that means discarding your beliefs.

In breaking news, Justice John Paul Stevens to retire.

Pendrift, that means the countdown has started on Beck and others characterizing the eventual nominee as a morality-impaired commie who wants to take away yer guns.

Oh, well, at least the news cycle will be focused on something other than the evil socialist health care reform package with its death panels and all.

The explanation here.

The youtube video here.

Is this a great country, or what?!

Pendrift & pericat.

This moose read 385 as a follow-on from 383, which lead to a serious WTF? moment.

3:O)>

Spring is here -- there were toads in the backyard pond last week, and as of last Saturday morning they had left endless chains of eggs looping over the waterlily baskets.

So I won't be lifting the waterlilies to divide them until the eggs hatch. They are lovely -- little black seed beads encased in crystal.

Last year's toads fled at the sound of our footsteps, while this year's toads came to the pond ledges to listen when we spoke to them. We were surprise by their boldness, and I'm wondering if our talking to the toadpoles and toadlets last year has resulted in their friendliness this Spring?

albatross @382:
I recognize that we all ultimately vote for the best available option, and it's not really fair for me to assume that doing that means discarding your beliefs.

Thank you. I appreciate that you spoke in anger, and I'm grateful that when you've cooled down you've taken account of what I said.

I'm sure that there are American* politicians somewhere that share my views, but none of them are remotely electable. Between the Overton window and many of our political and social conventions, I am resigned to voting for people simply because they grieve me marginally less than the other lot. The best comfort I can find is in keeping an eye on the long game of which choice will steer the country in the direction I want it to go.

-----
* There are Dutch politicians who share many of my views, and are still electable, but that's a whole 'nother story.

Re sidebar The most badass military unit ever consider obs sf - steampunk this example of military dress http://steampunkgear.tumblr.com/ This beautiful outfit is based on the uniform of the Zouaves,

For the real 5th New York see e.g. http://www.mctaragallery.com/art/whitaker/zouav.jpg

Badass? At the Second Battle of Bull Run, the 5th New York, along with another Zouave regiment, the 10th New York "National Zouaves", held off the flanking attack of James Longstreet's Corps for ten crucial minutes before it was overrun. The 5th New York thus suffered the highest percentage of casualties in the shortest amount of time of any unit in the Civil War (of 525 men, approximately 120 were killed and 330 were wounded in less than 10 minutes). Wikipeadia current date That's 2 short regiments against an Army Corps.

Re sidebar The most badass military unit ever consider obs sf - steampunk this example of military dress http://steampunkgear.tumblr.com/ This beautiful outfit is based on the uniform of the Zouaves,

For the real 5th New York see e.g. http://www.mctaragallery.com/art/whitaker/zouav.jpg

Badass? At the Second Battle of Bull Run, the 5th New York, along with another Zouave regiment, the 10th New York "National Zouaves", held off the flanking attack of James Longstreet's Corps for ten crucial minutes before it was overrun. The 5th New York thus suffered the highest percentage of casualties in the shortest amount of time of any unit in the Civil War (of 525 men, approximately 120 were killed and 330 were wounded in less than 10 minutes). Wikipeadia current date That's 2 short regiments against an Army Corps.

Open-thready-bit -- the Peter Beagle 52/50 project, a modern sponsored-writing idea run through the intertubes, is about to come to an end. There's still time to get the 52 poems/song lyrics that Beagle has produced (one per week for the past year), at the subscriber price. I am a subscriber, and I've found them quite interesting. I'm not making a link, but I'll tell you that the information is available at www.conlanpress.com and that I think it's an interesting model of trying to support a writer by subscription. If it weren't directly related to fantasy, I wouldn't post it here.

albatross:
What will we learn about the people who claim to care about civil liberties over the next few years, I wonder?

Probably just what we've already learned about Alan M. Dershowitz and Eric S. Raymond: that fear is the mindkiller, and no respecter of political ideology. Believe me that I've been tracking some political figures for more than 4 decades, and a fair number of them have sold or thrown their public opinions into a cocked hat for fear or advantage. Nothing new there.

I agree that giving POTUS the legal authority to have people assassinated is a bad idea. I just don't know that it's much of change, morally and ethically, from a situation where he or she can annihilate half the world in a matter of hours. And it's sure as hell not a good reason to throw our hands in and abandon a card game with the stakes as high as they are: without some resistance from US citizens the Dominationist agenda is going to become the order of the day, and I don't see how any good can possibly come from that.

Oh, well, at least the news cycle will be focused on something other than the evil socialist health care reform package with its death panels and all.

Steve C.at 384, given the legal challenges from the various state attorneys-general to the HCR law, I am sure the Republicans will be happy to link their desire to get rid of that law with the search for a new Supreme Court justice. Watch them yank the Overton window rightward yet again, by claiming that any possible candidate for SC justice who has come out in favor of the current law (or any portion of the current law), or indeed, ever spoken in favor of reforming health care at all, is "biased" and clearly a flaming Commie radical. In fact, according to Josh Marshall at TPM (you all know how to get there, so I'm not putting up a link) Senator Sessions has already started humming that particular theme.

A member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans says that Jefferson Davis led directly to the tea parties.

pericat @ 385: That is so wonderful!
I'm trying to imagine what other species, with the exception of (most) humans, would stroll along calmly behind a group of bagpipers.

#377 Earl
I'd rather see P*r*s H*lt*n. She at least was on the side of Good when is came to that war criminal Cheney....

Xopher @ Open Thread 137: I brought up your thought that the writer of Bellona had gendershifted the lead to avoid male-male eroticism on stage to someone acquainted with both writers and the play.

I am told there is still quite a bit of male-male eroticism in the play, and the gendershift had other reasons. I gather some of this gets brought out during the post-performance Q&A.

If anyone here happens to go or to have gone, I'm very curious what you thought of it.

Paula Lieberman #396: I'd rather see P*r*s H*lt*n. She at least was on the side of Good when is came to that war criminal Cheney....

She won't meet the minimum age requirement for President or Vice President until about 2016.

janetl #374:

"Mellon" didn't make the top 500 worst passwords list.

Well, they found the bodies of the missing miners in WVa. Apparently conditions were so bad down there that the rescuers walked past the bodies on the first day without seeing them.

A sad, but not surprising, end to a tragic story.

And a large number of top Polish figures, including the President, have been killed in a plane crash while travelling to a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The word 'irony' gets overused these days, but, well, Jesus...

This isn't relevant to anything at all, but I happened to be thinking last night about threads we've had here (and similar ones elsewhere) about the extent to which the easy aggregation of information in places like Google street views changes things for the subjects...

It dawned on me that we do have a clear consensus on the distinctive identity and utility of at least one kind of aggregation: the dictionary. We pretty much all agree that a dictionary does represent something more than a couple of definitions jotted down or even a stack of a few dozen flash cards for vocabulary lessons. Using a dictionary is a distinct kind of action.

The question would then be what are the distinctive properties of that aggregation and use, and how much they apply to other sorts.

@401--

horrible, and sad. we should assume it's an accident, but given the rabid virulence of some russian nationalists, and the context of the crash, my mind is not easy on the question.

Of nearly hypnotic interest is this monthly archive of cycling paths and such kept by the Warrington Bicycle Club (UK). These are the most amazingly perfunctory and ill-considered so-called accomodations imaginable. Month after month of them, with understated comments pointing out the details as if they were benefits. Full of foot-wide paths squished between pedestrians and opening car doors, fourth-dimensional hops, dead ends, and well-placed bollards, poles, and trash cans. Every one designed to fail in order to fulfill some sort of mandate the designers clearly don't give a flying fig about. It's heartwarming that someone else cares about bikes pretty much exactly as much as planners in the U.S. do.

Another Polish tragedy, and on the same site, the anniversary, of a previous tragedy and crime.

With so many of the intellectual class wiped out at one blow one fears this creates a public discourse vacuum which the jackels of far right, racist extremists will immediately rush to dominate.

A sad, sad, sad day.

Love, C.

#394 Marilee

Interesting link! Thank you.

Those are the tired, expected arguments, including that of the columnist, who performed some serious gnat straining to find for himself reasons for which the confederacy should be honored today by any right-thinking, decent U.S. citizens. I don't buy his gnats any more than I buy Davis's or the tpartiers'.

I'm reading Jefferson Davis biographies, memoirs and autobiographies currently. This is part of the background research for when we begin the real research in September for the forthcoming project that is the American slave coast, the interstate slave trade and the making of the United States (a writers in residence fellowship award at Washington College, Chestertown, MD). I gotta say, this stuff is hard going because it is so odious and wicked.

People like Jefferson Davis were determined long before Lincoln's election to have a war to expand slavery throughout, not just the continental U.S., but as their manifest destiny, the entire hemisphere. If that's not a war of southern aggression, what is? There weren't that many of them, but they were all slaveholding southern state power elite members. It was for their benefit, and theirs alone. Slaveholding leads to selfishness and solipsism, not to mention breeding irrational thinking.

Love, C.

401
That ... has to hurt, if you're Polish.
I worked with a woman who had/has a family member who escaped the Katyn massacre by jumping off the train.

Bruce Baugh@402:

One important property of the dictionary is that failed searches are relevant.

Not finding something on a set of flash cards just means it isn't there. Not finding something in even a small dictionary means that it is relatively uncommon, and not finding something in the OED is good evidence that it is unusual, recent, or wrong. Similarly, the earliest attested usage in the OED is reasonable (though not definitive) evidence that the word wasn't in common written use much before that time.

I'm not sure that this distinction applies to Google, though.

The earliest usage cited in Google could be a typo for something else entirely different.

Thomas, I'm not talking about Google desk searches; I'm thinking of periodic discussion about whether things like Google Maps' street views add up to an invasion of privacy, if so why, and if so what to do about it, and if not what to train people to wish for and expect. It's not very recent, just something I happened to be mulling over, because the idea that aggregation changes some kinds of meaning and not others fascinates me.

Bah. That's TEXT searches.

I remember, some 30 years ago, coming across a reprint collection of articles from a WW2 German propaganda magazine, which sometimes is disturbing stuff. And when you read the propaganda about the Katyn Forest discovery, and the investigation by independent experts (Swedish, I recall), and you can sort of take it as the one time the Nazis told the truth.

Except, they don't mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They didn't mention what they had done in 1939, invading Poland, and splitting it with the Soviet Union, and all that followed.

Doctor Who, the second episode...

Stephen Moffett knows how the world should be saved.

And what a phone call to end the episode on.

Dave Bell@412:

> Except, they don't mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They didn't mention what they had done in
> 1939, invading Poland, and splitting it with the Soviet Union, and all that followed.

A quondam Soviet citizen of my acquaintance got into trouble, well after WWII, for possessing Fascist literature, i.e. a book with a swastika on the front, i.e. an English-language copy of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The account of pre-1941 Nazi-Soviet diplomacy was quite an eye-opener if all you'd heard till then was the Soviet version.

Dave Bell @ #413

"And what a phone call to end the episode on"

Well, don't keep us all in suspense: Deal or No Deal?

g,d&rvvvvf

Doctor Who was Very Interesting Indeed, for reasons which it would be spoilerish to menation, and which I expect will be obvious to many Fluorites a few minutes in.

What better group to pose this question:

Are any of you familiar with the 1990 Brit television series, She Wolf of London, re-titled Love and Curses when the series moved to the U.S.? Would you recommend it to a new viewer?

Love, C.

More from our highly trained and professional Homeland Security staff here.

I feel like baking a casserole for the whole damn Polish nation.

I mean that in an entirely non-snarky manner. Goddamn.

Stefan Jones @ 419:

If you know how, bake them pierogi. That's Polish comfort food as I understand it (says the guy with 4 Ukrainian grandparents).

Bruce Baugh,

I don't think the problematic aggregation in Google Street Views is like the aggregation in a dictionary, though. A telephone directory might be a closer analogy.

Anyone in Seattle (and to the extent I care, it's people in the same city that I care about) could get a picture of my house if they wanted to. In fact, they could get a better picture than Google gives them. It would take them maybe half an hour's effort, if they have a car and a camera.

There seem to be two things that are distinctive about the difference between this and Street View. The first is that doing it manually takes a moderate amount of effort for each house; doing it by computer is either trivially easy (with Street View) or impossible (without it). The second is that if someone drives by to get a look at my house I may see them, but if they Google it I will never know.

Which one of these is more important varies with the example. For Street View I think it is the fact that the view is one-way.

For ordinary Google searches it's more the fact that a potential employer or date can casually find out the sort of private but not secret information that would have taken deliberate investigation in past years.

From what I've been hearing the Polish disaster happened in bad weather, when the pilot had been advised not to try to land, on the fourth attempt at landing.

That's kind of a hard one to engineer if one is trying to kill the passengers.

New job! I am working at a convention center, being a room monitor at an eye doctor's convention. Temporary work, with possibility of leading to more.

So far I have not broken even on the cost of the new clothes I needed to buy for the dress code.

I was listening to NPR today, and the reporter referred to this as "one of the darkest days in Polish history." My instant thought was, here is someone who knows nothing about Polish history, because, sad as this is, I doubt it makes the top 10.

Side note, my kid had to dress as Marie Curie and give an "autobiographical speech" in school this week. Of the several Mme. Curies in the class, she was the only one to use a Polish accent, and introduce herself as Maria Sklodowska. (Her paternal great-grandmother, still living, is Polish, and she just copied her speech patterns.)

abi #388:

The other side of this is that this process, which we are going through right now, is how individuals and political movements sell their souls. It's how people who really believed in fiscal conservatism found themselves arguing that "deficits don't matter" or somehow biting their tongues when some clown like Grover Norquist started talking about "starving the beast." Because, you know, those damned liberals would be even worse in power, and at least Reagan is willing to face down the Communists, and....

I think I've watched this happening here. If you go back and look at some of our old conversations w.r.t. the war on terror in the Bush years, one thing you notice is that expressions of concern like mine, or like ddb's on another thread, were common, and laughing them off was not so common. I wasn't the only one, back when it was Bush claiming the power to disappear US citizens, who found this scary and said so[0]. It's just less scary now, when the guy making scary power grabs is the one we voted for.

You talked above about the long game. By that, I think you meant the next election or two. But what I see is, whichever party is in power, the power of the president and the security apparatus of the government and the military grow. Both parties are absolutely determined that there shall be no accountability for any abuses or errors in the use of those powers, and in fact that any such abuses or errors ought not to ever be known to the public.

The current president ran on a set of war on terrorism policies that looked nothing like what he's followed. If he pays no price for that, if he still can count on those voters to vote for him to keep the Palins and Becks out of power, why would he ever do anything else? Fighting the security apparatus and the Pentagon is hard work, and you have to guess they can fight back pretty damned hard if they care to. Why should Obama or any other president piss those powerful interests off, when he can go along with their demands at no political cost to himself?

The long game you're talking about seems to me to lead someplace none of us want to go. I have no idea how to fix this--I agree that giving the current GOP a lot of power would be a genuine disaster[1]. Maybe stuff like Accountability Now can have some effect. But betraying the constitution and the whole idea of limited government needs to *cost* something, or it will just never stop being done.

[0] I did have conversations like this in 2004, where my concerns were made light of. But not by folks on the left.

[1] I think this is largely because the Republicans destroyed the moral center of their party. They had good enough party discipline that W's disastrous leadership wrecked, not just his credibility and that of his close followers, but that of most of the powerful Republicans on the national stage. Who's left who doesn't look like a complete tool?

Ooh, I'm sorry about that plane crash. Nothing could I say that hasn't been said better by others here.
I hope I am not being disrespectful when I change the subject, because I saw something this morning that disturbed me a bit. A car turned across my path and I noticed that it had one of those wide, roomy dashboards and thereon was an oval bed holding a bluecream cat, who stood up and lay down in a new position as adroitly as if she was on solid ground. Ohhh, how sweet, thought I, and then I began to realize that this was not such a great idea despite its apparent charm. One sharp swerve or screeching halt and anyone with any physics knowledge would guess that a startled cat isn't something you want flying around in a car with extra g's. Especially if I am in that car's path.
I had neither the speed to catch up with these people nor the courage to confront them, and I wonder how long before someone, and some cat, gets hurt or killed. There are enough bad things happening on the roads--in the past week, just a block from my home, 2 cars went awry and 1 hit a bus stop and hurt a teen, and another car went right into a parked trailer. (No pets were involved in these.) On my bike, I feel like a dikdik in the midst of a buffalo stampede anyway.
Armored vehicles are out of my budget, and anyway I didn't get that bike in order to not ride it. Somebody stop me before I get paranoid and curl up into a ball. I suppose I will have to check the local laws, but does anyone have experience with notifying authorities about this particular kind of unsafe driving?

Constance, #406, does that mean you'll be at Washington College? Unfortunately, that's too far for me to drive these days.

Kip was trying to find a way to link tea partiers to the KKK, and here's a tea partier doing it himself.

albatross #426: But betraying the constitution and the whole idea of limited government needs to *cost* something, or it will just never stop being done.

Of course it cost something; it costs the corporations significant bribelobbying money to make things happen to their satisfaction; certainly, it's only reasonable to expect that the cost of corporate governance would be passed on to the consumer.

I think this is largely because the Republicans destroyed the moral center of their party. (...) Who's left who doesn't look like a complete tool?

Zombie Abraham Lincoln. Dig him up, reconstitute the fleshy bits through DNA tech, load him up with kick-ass cybernetics and a Racter AI with all of his speeches and writings, and yer done. The Log Cabin Republicans would be the new center of the GOP.

I don't know how many of you have been following the story of ex-priest and serial rapist Steven Kiesle.

Kiesle was a priest at St. Joseph's, in Pinole, the parish next door to mine. Our (then) bishop, Allen Vigneron, made a public apology in 2004 for what Kiesle did to the children of that parish and of other local parishes. He eventually was convicted of criminal acts, and went to jail.

It turns out, Kiesle still lives here, in a nearby senior community. He wears an ankle monitor and is a registered sex offender. He's 63 years old. My age.

I don't understand why that fact, and the fact that he's still here, is affecting me so strongly, but it is.

Earl Cooley III @ 429: Um, er... [cracks up laughing].

(Certain assumption about current aggregation calling themselves Log Cabin Republicans may not match up well with principles of Zombie Lincoln. To be frank.)

Constance at 417

I remember watching several episodes of She Wolf of London, years ago. As I recollect, it was a little campy, sometimes predictable, and the special effects were uneven--yet I remember it fondly. Does that help?

Earl Cooley:

Do you put Log Cabin Syrup on Log Cabin Republicans?

Lizzy L, #430: "It turns out, Kiesle still lives here [...] I don't understand why that fact, and the fact that he's still here, is affecting me so strongly, but it is."

Um...how is it affecting you?

albatross @ 426:

abi must answer for herself as to what she means by "the long game", but I'd like to give you my own definition. I've been playing the game since I was 11, and walked in my first peace march / demonstration. I'm still playing, 52 years later, and I expect to play as long as I live, and pass the game on to my children.

I had hoped that at some point we would be able to convince the people of the US that it was in their own interests to make the country over into a progressive society. I no longer think that's likely to happen, though chance and the weirdness of fate may still allow it. Now I believe my obligation to a better world is to work for the US to pass the mantle of power as peacefully as possible on to whatever nation or group of nations picks it up, so that the legacy we leave behind is as progressive as possible. That may end up being a rear-guard action; if that's what can be done, then that's what I'll try to do. Ultimately it's about leaving the state of the world in the best shape you can, and hoping the next generation has better luck or better information about how to deal with the more resistant aspects of human nature.

Cadbury @ #415

The TARDIS is a phone box.

Bruce Cohen #433: Do you put Log Cabin Syrup on Log Cabin Republicans?

Although that part of my @429 was written with humorous intent, I did not intend specifically to make fun of the LCR at all.

Constance @ 406: "I'm reading Jefferson Davis biographies, memoirs and autobiographies currently."

Is there one that you would recommend to a newcomer to the subject? I've been thinking I ought to learn more about the man, for obvious reasons.

albatross @ 426: I wish I could turn your comment into a catchy slogan and post it on every billboard in the English-speaking world.

Bruce Cohen @ 435: "I had hoped that at some point we would be able to convince the people of the US that it was in their own interests to make the country over into a progressive society. I no longer think that's likely to happen, though chance and the weirdness of fate may still allow it."

I feel like I've been hearing this note of resignation from moderate leftists more and more over the past year or two. It's not just disappointment with Obama, although that's obviously an important part of it, and I don't think it's simple outrage fatigue either; it's resignation about the prospects of the progressive project in general. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just imagining it?

albatross @426:

The long game. Bruce has a piece of it there, but let me give it to you from my perspective.

Right at this point, I can't see any candidate or party who shares my beliefs. A lot of them use words I care about, but most what of seem to me to be logical means to that end are anathema to the American political discourse. I call myself a progressive because the ordinary European term for what I really am is a dirty word in American politics. There's a whole world of solutions we can't even talk about, to problems we're framing in carefully limited ways.

Fine. Words matter, but actions matter a whole heck of a lot more. Getting into the trenches defending a word with people who think that the Nazis were left-wing is a losing battle, and besides, the pig enjoys it.

What I want to do is to move the Overton window, or perhaps to widen it. I note that it has moved; I see articles in the New York Times about the working poor, and unions, and inadequate corporate oversight by toothless government agencies. People are discussing stuff that can make ordinary lives better. That matters, that's progress.

So I see one problem I can't do a thing about: politicians don't give up power easily. I had high hopes that Obama would do better, and I'm bitterly disappointed that he hasn't. But voting for another party that's no better on that and worse on other stuff is cutting my nose off to spite my face.

Are we nickel and diming our civil liberties away? We are, damn it. Do I see a way to stop it? Not at present. But if I were investing in a way to stop or reverse it, I'd put my money into broadening our political discourse. Which, at the moment, means voting as far left as is pragmatic, talking and listening an awful lot, and quietly going off and hitting my head on my desk a non-trivial amount of the time.

Juli@425:

> I was listening to NPR today, and the reporter referred to this as "one of the darkest days in Polish history." My
> instant thought was, here is someone who knows nothing about Polish history, because, sad as this is, I doubt it makes the top 10.

I think this crash is unique not so much in comparison with other events in Poland's long and gruesome history but with other things that have happened to modern Western democracies. Other countries in the last century have lost leaders in sad circumstances, but I can't think of any precedent for the loss of such a huge number of top officials of one country in peacetime.

Norman Davies on the history of Poland. There's a very useful animation near the start of how Poland's borders have moved over the centuries. (His Rising '44 is very good; I keep meaning to devour Europe: A History once I feel strong enough to pick it up).

Constance @ 417:

In a word, yes.

Some of the stories are really quite good, but there are inappropriate slapstick moments, messed-up geography and odd British stereotyping as well.

The hero is an academic and the heroine his student. Some people may be squicked by the developing romance between the two.

There is humour, sly and otherwise. There is romance, pathos, atmosphere, charm. Deaths are gruesome, at least in the British episodes.

I saw the series in its first run, obtained some really poor quality episodes via the darknets ten years ago, and am now waiting for my DVDs to arrive.

Steve@440: comparisons here are being drawn with the Staines crash in 1972. It's very hard to express "I hope this isn't as bad¹" at the same time as "this is much worse²".

¹: it's harder to chop the head off anything these days
²: there are way more people affected

The Raven at #434: to answer your question briefly: with extreme emotion. I don't want to go into detail.

Well, here's a Republican the current crowd would never be able to tolerate as the New Face of their party. Good thing he's dead and all.

No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. ... No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

[Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors "The Chance for Peace" (1953-04-16)]

What!? Support for international cooperation and understanding, rather than proclaiming America's Imperial Destiny, at the expense of Everyone Else! That will never do.

from the same speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?

[Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "The Chance for Peace" (1953-04-16)]

Spend money at home, instead of on weapons and international "adventures"? Next thing you know, he'll have a t-shirt that says something about the USAF having to hold a bakesale to buy a bomber...

Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.

[The White House Years, p. 331
Un-American? You want un-American--that sort of thing right there--it's letting the terrorists win!

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

[Farewell address, 17 January 1961]
That sounds, right there, like some kind of wimpy, touch-feely liberal-progessive nonsense that will make us vulnerable to our enemies.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

[Letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, his brother (November 8, 1954)]
Oh, I wish.

And the real reason the 21st-century GOP couldn't handle Ike? He signed into law income tax legislation in 1954, permitting a top rate of over 90%. It seems there was all this war debt and stuff to pay down.

John Rogers is right. I miss the old Republicans, and I want them back.

Completely unrelated to anything previous on the thread: I did not know until my daughter pointed me to it last night that Jonathan Coulton had written a love song from Charon to Pluto (the planetoids, not the mythological figures).

Captain Valor's done an ASL version. It made me cry.

#432 Xylo

It does help. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond!

Love, C.

Lizzy L@443:

I wish there were something I could say or do that would make it easier. Apart, of course, for the traditional and obvious, which I shall do.

#438 Jeff Davis

This isn't fast reading. The most interesting so far in the sense of patterning, if you know what I mean in this context, is the 2 volume memoir of him written by his wife, Varina Jefferson. It's not reliable factually, and has many a black hole of omission. I read those two volumes while doing all that historical research in New Orleans. The Tulane Library and other collections, naturally are very strong in these areas. I put Varina Jefferson's texts also within the pattern created by other texts of the time by other women, including Mary Boykin Chesnut (she and Varina were very close friends), and Elizabeth Keckley's very odd, fascinating little narrative, Behind the scenes; or, Thirty years a slave, and four years in the White house -- Keckley was D.C. premiere dress maker, and removed almost entirely to the Lincoln White House and became close to Mary Todd Lincoln. Varina Davis, according to Keckley, exerted strong pressure to get Keckley to move to Mississippi with them when that state seceeded -- telling her that she'd be back in the White House and D.C. within a year.

Davis's own memoir is also interesting. A recent (2000) biography, Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper, is a lot more sympathetic than seems to me, actually fair. Cooper insists upon evaluating Davis in terms of 'his times,' which means, like the apologist for honoring the Confederacy yesterday in the WaPo, essentially ignoring the tremendous evil that is slavery -- because, after all, slavery doesn't happen to the people who matter in history.

As for Mary Boykin Chesnut -- her Civil War diaries are splendid reading. She was in the center of the circles of Confederate power. Her husband served as the Chief of the Department of the Military of South Carolina and brigadier general in command of South Carolina reserve forces; and again Richmond, where her husband served as an aide to the president.

#426 albatross

Not that it is worth anything, but I was and am with you on every point, in the past and now too.

#441 mcz

Thank you too, for taking the time to post your take on She Wolf of London

#428 Marilee

Yes, we will be at Washington College, and living in a restored early 18th house, which is part of the provision of the award. Can we say 'Time Machine'? Why, yes we can!

Love, C.

#439 abi

Though this is worth no more than my agreement with Albatross, I agree with you on every point too.

What times in which we live.

But the times always are, whoever and whenever, I guess.

Love, C.

abi at 447, thank you very much.

I believe I was wrong in one thing I said in my original comment; I said Kiesle had been jailed. That was incorrect. He was convicted and given probation.

The whole story is ugly and sordid and infuriating -- and no worse than what happened to thousands of children and families around the world.

I had a vision for Easter this year. I had a vision that Benedict would declare this Good Friday a Day of Solemn Repentance for the church, and specifically, for himself and his fellow bishops. I had visions of every bishop and archbishop and cardinal in the universal church walking barefoot in solemn procession, each in his own city, all of them prostrating themselves before the altars of their cathedrals with their arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, all of them, every one throughout the world. I imagined the kind of ceremonial liturgical event that the Catholic Church is so good at. I envisioned a announcement that for a year, every bishop of the Catholic Church would set aside all pomp: the miter, the robes, all of it: they would wear simple solemn black, like any ordinary parish priest. They would move out of their mansions, give up their cars and their housekeepers and live in the poorest part of their cities, ride the bus, serve meals at soup kitchens. Benedict could have done it! I imagined -- but it didn't happen. It won't happen. Probably it can't.

Lord, have mercy.

"I miss the old Republicans, and I want them back."

I'm with Fidelio here. Partly for the reasons that Albatross spells out in #426: It's in our interest to try to keep both major parties sane, even if our sympathies are largely with the policies of one of the parties over the other.

I'd feared that Obama would continue to follow the authoritarian, extra-constitutional precedents that Bush had put in place, and to a dismaying extent he has. But I'd had some hope that one way to curb this tendency would be some reasonable opposition. A Congress with enough principled folks of the other party could act as a useful check to abuses of presidential power, and I've been ready to vote for Republicans for Congress who would do that. Even if I disagreed with a number of their specific policy goals, it could be worth it to safeguard the political health of the republic.

Unfortunately, that's *not* what we've seen with today's Republicans in Congress. Few if any are willing to condemn the common thread of presidential usurpation that Bush ramped up and that Obama has largely continued. Most still argue for expansive executive powers, or even for extending them further (e.g. the McCain-Lieberman bill on detention); their only objection is to *who* is in charge, and what particular policies they favor.

And while some R's in more progressive areas might run on a platform of "I'm not like some of those other Republicans", it's hard to believe that in the face of the party discipline I *have* seen, which almost entirely backed up Bush's authoritarianism, and had *every single Republican member of Congress*, whether "right-wing" or "moderate", vote against a health care bill that had lots of ideas taken from past conservative and Republican proposals. It's quite clear that the main reason for this wasn't the principled concern against government expansion that many claimed, (especially given the lack of concern about this in other areas), but as we've seen in a number of memos that have come out, largely intended to damage the other part politically; that is, treating perceived electoral advantage as more important than public benefit.

I'm not sure how best to get this situation to change, but I very much hope that it does.

A rather foolish question here: I'm using Firefox 3.6 on a Mac running Snow Leopard 10.6.3. Recently I ran into a strange behavior when looking at my Friends list on LiveJournal: a few earlier YouTube links on posts stick in place and replace the image that should be there. For example, an entry which is to show "Music Box with a Secret" (1976) by Valeriy Ugarov at Soyuzmultfilm actually shows "Elisabeth Hasselbeck calls out Sarah Palin" which is an improvement over the YouTube video with the animated penis drawings I was stuck with for a month, but not by much. If I actually open the full post then the YouTube link shows normally. What do I have set wrong, and how do I take care of it?

Lizzy L @450:

Yeah, I wished that they'd toss this whole "Year of the Priest" thing out the window and put in some serious repentance, too. We could pray for the victims at every single Mass in the world for a year. That would be a start, though hardly an end.

As Garry Wills says, we've forgotten that all the paintings of hell used to include popes, and for good reason.

Maybe we should start putting little tiny millstones in the collection baskets? I'm about that vexed, myself.

abi #453: Maybe we should start putting little tiny millstones in the collection baskets? I'm about that vexed, myself.

Is there someplace that actually sells such things in quantity, or where they could be ordered?

I'm not a Catholic, so I can only imagine what it must feel like to be one right now. I know it infuriates ME that the Church is still trying to protect itself at the expense of the victims. Despite their protestations to the contrary, they seem entirely unrepentant to me.

Lizzy L, #443: "[...] with extreme emotion. I don't want to go into detail."

Fair enough. Thank you for the courteous reply.

"I miss the old Republicans, and I want them back."

Isn't someone named Obama their new leader?

Croak!

David Harmon @454:
Is there someplace that actually sells such things in quantity, or where they could be ordered?

Not to the best of either my knowledge or my Googling. But plaster of Paris (add some black paint for a good stone-grey) or Portland cement is cheap.

I'd make a master millstone out of something soft and easy to carve, like a slice out of a candle, maybe an inch or an inch and a half in diameter and a quarter-inch thick. Add the scores that make it look like an authentic millstone, deep and wide enough to show with your casting material. Drill a hole in the middle, too (gently, so as not to crack the disc). It'll be useful for attaching a note, say a reference to Matthew 18:6-7, Mark 9:42, or Luke 17:2.

Then follow one of the many useful sets of instructions on how to make a plaster cast or sand cast that one finds on the internet.

Also handy for sending to your local bishop, Archbishop, or to the Vatican.

Jeff Davis @ 438:

Again, I can only speak for myself. I've been playing the game, as I said, since just after McCarthy was knocked over by the Army. In the late 50s and early 60s we all had a feeling that great forces were trying to pull the US rightward into some sort of anti-socialist fascism based on military adventurism in Asia and South America. The hopes we had then were that a new generation of politically active progressives and liberals could prevent that shift, and swing the US away from racism, classism, and the economic predation of rich on poor.

To some extent we were successful, but in the last couple of decades we've seen those same forces return, capture the language of discourse, and hoodwink the people of the US into thinking that economic and class slavery really is freedom (boot, face, eternity, if our economic masters have anything to say about it). It's this resurgence of forces that I'd hoped to see defeated decades ago that's caused the burnout of hope in current "liberal" politics. That and the fact that I could update my second sentence above simply by replacing "Asia and South America" with "Central Asia and South America".

abi @ 439:
Are we nickel and diming our civil liberties away? We are, damn it. Do I see a way to stop it? Not at present. But if I were investing in a way to stop or reverse it, I'd put my money into broadening our political discourse. Which, at the moment, means voting as far left as is pragmatic, talking and listening an awful lot, and quietly going off and hitting my head on my desk a non-trivial amount of the time.

This is a paragraph I might have written in the 1970s. That we have to do things this way still is painful, but I know how to do it. That there are still other people around who feel up to continuing in this mode is one of my few sources of optimism.

I think my favorite Pope was Kiril I.

John Mark Ockerbloom@451

I'm pretty sure I know the best way to get the situation to change. It's for the Republicans to keep losing elections until they start to want to change.

Abi #458: Um... You may be willing to make your own, but I was thinking that for the idea to catch on, people need to be able to buy packs of 10 or 20 or more (or 52 for a year's supply)!

Recent events in the Catholic church have put me in an unusually theological frame of mind for an atheist.

In that frame I feel like I should offer this little parable. I banged it out in the last hour or so, but I thought people around here might find some smidgeon of value in it:

The Parable of the Bad Shepherd

There once was a man who was very wise and good, and also very wealthy. He owned many things, and each of them was kept with the most exquisite care. Many men worked for him, and each one was amazed by the wisdom and goodness of his master.

It so happened that the man owned a flock of sheep, and hired a shepherd to guide them through the stony mountains to market. The journey was long and dangerous, at every turn there were cliffs that the sheep might slip and fall off of, or treacherous rocks ready to collapase and bury the herd in an avalanche, or ravenous wolves eager to feast upon the sheep.

One night, after battling a pack of wolves, the shepherd staggered back to the flock, nearly dead. He was all but out of food and he was not sure he could survive the night without sustenance. After much thought, he slew one of the sheep and ate its meat. And so he slept with a full belly, consoling himself that if he had not done so both he and his flock surely would have perished. He knew that his master would have done no different.

The next day he saw that one of the flock was rushing ahead of the rest. Several times it almost ran itself off of a cliff, or into a deadly crevasse. And what was worse was that the other sheep were following it. Surely this sheep was a danger to the entire flock. With great sadness, the shepherd knew what he must do. He slaughtered the errant sheep that night and dried its meat and placed it in a sack, the better to bolster his own strength for the trials ahead. He was content in the knowledge that his master would have done no different.

The sun was just rising when he saw one of the rams trying to mount one of the ewes. Horrified, he drove them apart. He knew that his master's sheep must multiply, but he said to himself that here on the mountain path was neither the time nor the place. He said to himself that surely the ewe would be unable to feed its lamb, and it would slow down the entire herd, only for the lamb and mother both to starve before reaching market. He slew the ram and ewe both, wrapping himself in the warmth of the ewe's hide and fashioning a weapon from the ram's horns to drive away the wolves. He told himself that his master would have done no different

On the last day of his journey he met a party of other shepherds, also in service to the same master. They saw the ewe's hide on his back and the ram's horn in his hand and the bag of dried meat over his shoulder. They demanded where he had got them and when he told them they demanded that he feed them from the flock. When he refused they seized the youngest and tenderest of the lambs thinking them the tastiest of the flock. They said that if the master had allowed him to eat of the flock he was a cruel and miserly master not to allow them the same, and called him a great many other names besides. At long last the shepherd allowed them to take the lambs, asking only that they carry them over the hill, away from the sight of their mothers before devouring. He consoled himself with the thought that his master's honor had been called into question, and in a question of honor his master could do no different.

That night a terrible storm blew up and the sheep fled willy nilly before it. The shepherd sought to calm them, but they seemed to flee him as though they feared him more than the storm. He shouted at them, he pleaded with them, he abjured them by the dignity and honor of his master to gather together and be silent, but still they ran. Many fell into crevasses or ran off cliffs or were eaten by wolves, and it was a sad and sorry remnant that the shepherd led into the market to meet his master.

The shepherd told his story to his master and said "The other shepherds insulted your honor and the sheep were heedless to the dignity of your name. Everything I have done, I have done for the sake of your honor and the dignity of your name."

"I am known throughout the world for both my power and my goodness," replied the master. "What do my honor and the dignity of my name have to fear from a thousand shepherds or a million sheep? Let my honor and my dignity protect themselves. The task that I set you was to protect my sheep."

This is a link I got from Making Light, but in darkness even old lights are welcome: Love wins.

It's a phrase I find echoing through my head a lot. It reminds me of MLK Jr's "long arc of history" quote, but shorter, simpler: Love wins.

It doesn't win all the time, or right away, but love wins. It does. If I have any faith, it is this: Love wins.

The world is dark, and institutions we trusted have betrayed us. They have forgotten the charge they were given, and we are left without a place to turn. So turn to this: Love wins.

heresiarch:

Thank you. It's good to be reminded of that now and again. And we had dinner tonight with our two sons and their wives. Talking to them about their work and their lives helped to restore my mood from the dismal swamp.

The stitches are out.

Well, not exactly. Instead of stitches, they use "clips" to hold you together after surgery. Which are actually staples. They were tiny little things, 34 of them.

I very carefully did not try to look at the removal process.

I am very definitely not going to get into any fannish arguments about the proper number of staples.

Dave Bell @ 466... Speaking of Staples, I have an "Easy" button. Want to borrow it?

David Harmon @462:

I posted comment 458 in great anger, and though I don't disown it, I'm not sure that it makes the world any kind of a better place.

Pursuing the matter further? Well, I am not sure that running a business making small millstones would be a good one for the soul and the joy. I know that getting money for the accoutrements of anger is, if not a prestigious line of work, at least one with a long and inglorious tradition*. But it does make me squirm to contemplate.

I mean, you can either run the business emotionally or unemotionally, right? But anger and outrage eat a person up over time. And running it without that anger? Well, it was the ability to detach one's sense of what is outrageous from an everyday job that got the Church into this mess†.

And, peripherally, I worry about the pessimism, however well-founded, of being able to pre-order a year's supply of reminders that the institution isn't doing anything about the problem.

-----
* see also: American outrage radio
† I have always been angrier at the people who dispassionately decided to cover this thing up than the sick and damaged souls who committed the original crimes.

Open-threaded first impressions - I played a little bit with an iPad Friday. It was fun - easy to use, nice feel in my hands, great display. I could picture it in my office, or resting by my chair in the living room, ready to grab at a whim.

But I put it aside, primarily because I have an iPhone already (which I enjoy), and partially because I'm waiting to see what the next version or two offers.

I do think it (and the inevitable competitors) are going to be next big thing in information grabbing, and Steve Jobs will be be able to pay for as many livers as he needs.

Here's an interesting piece on whether the iPad is a Kindle killer...and a reading killer.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/11/who-needs-catch-22-when-you-have-flight-control/

Kindle Killer

#469 Steve

There are 59 windows open on the laptop I am typing this on. That does NOT stop me from reading books.

I went to Best Buy last week and spent some time one of the demo iPad. I couln't even accurately type "This sucks dead rodents" on it.

The interface -slides- things when opening and closing apps. That drives me bonkers--one of the things I on machines I am the controlling user of, is turn that crap OFF, for sanity-saving... and machines and applications which don't even allow that, enrage me.

The user interface annoys me, generally. It's less friendly to fumble-fingering than my several year old Vista ultra mobile personal computer (Samsung Q1) which has four times as much RAM (apparently the iPad has 256 MB, no wonder it doesn't multitask...) and a 40 GB hard drive, two USB ports, touchscreen and a stylus (finger is usable, so are cheap external keyboards), WiFi, the ability to websurf to sites which employ Flash, user choie of full-up word processors (apparently the iWorks app for iPad is crippleware....).

I can also read epublications on it.

I'm not interested in a flat panel lightweight portable $500+ interactive singletasking "slick" entertainment delivey system -- HP has one of those called the "Dreamscreen" available at Best Buy for half the price of a iPoop that from the front doesn't look much different from an iPoop when turned off... it doesn't have the iPoop hype and slickness and tsunami and apps set and attention, I don't know if it websurfs (but if it does, it's not crippled by lack of Flash support I suspect). It's heavier, but it does have at least one USB port allowing e.g. direct printing from it. And it will play movies, show picture and slide shows, etc.

abi #468: I get your drift, but I'm cynical. (Also not Catholic, which is why I wouldn't sell them myself.) I suspect that the collection plate really would be the best place to get the hierarchy's attention, and the millstones would be a lot more informative than just seeing a a drop in their receipts. (As indicated by the point that even this secular Jew recognized the symbolism!)

abi @ 458: So secular a secularist am I that I had to look up the reference, and look what I found. Seems you aren't the only one.

Abi, David Harmon: millstones

I'm not sure that the collection plate is the best place for them. While I'm sure that totals get reported further up the chain -- paperwork is eternal -- the weekly collection, at least here, only supports parish activities. It pays utility bills, construction debt, and supports the parish staff. Now, in some parishes some of the parish staff might be a legitimate target, but in others they are just as upset about it as you are. In one of our Easter Triduum masses, in a homily about the difficulty of trust in the modern world, "the church hierarchy" was specifically mentioned as one of the reasons that trust is difficult.

Abi: I have always been angrier at the people who dispassionately decided to cover this thing up. Definitely. And even a cover-up could easily have been done in a less monstrous fashion. Suppose the bishops had tried to keep the issue out of the papers and the courts, but had met and apologised sincerely to the victims; ensured they had access to any necessary treatment and support, then and in the future; introduced better monitoring; and reassigned the priests in question to some remote monastery where they could spend the rest of their lives in prayer and penance, safely away from any children. That would still be an illegal cover-up. I still think it would be bad policy -- cover-ups are a moral hazard, and from a practical point of view tend to explode in your face. But I wouldn't see it as an outrage.

I thought I recalled a sub-thread where this link might have been more appropriate, but now I can't find it. So Open Thread it is:

Why liberals are right to refuse to honor the Confederacy.

There are some interesting parallels between the tactics used by the Confederacy to drum up popular support and those being used by the current Republican Party.

Thoma #473: A fair point! In such cases, the millstones needn't actually be instead of contributions. (I'm pretty sure they'd be reported upward anyway!) And as heresiarch points out, some parishes clearly "get it" already -- you'd want to target the ones that are avoiding the issue, or, especially, trying to minimize response.

heresiarch @ 472... So secular a secularist am I

..and old enough am that I remember when masses were in Latin, which is why I initially read your words as 'per omnia secula seculorum'.

Paula Lieberman @ 470: I'm still waiting for a modern device which does everything my Psion 5mx does plus is useful for reading long .pdf documents, for proper web browsing, and with USB connectivity (the things the Psion doesn't do*), while keeping to the size, weight, useable keyboard and long battery life of the Psion.

Until then, the machine I carry all the time will continue to be a Psion, taking my EEE as well for work-related travelling.

*It can go online, with a modem and an appropriate mobile 'phone, and some people have written and maintained websites from one. But I'm not claiming it's really suitable for that.

abi #468/Thomas #473:

Yeah, the cover up is the thing. In a large organization, there's no way to avoid having some level of misbehavior, ranging from minor stuff all the way up to horrible crimes. It's how you handle that misbehavior when it comes up that counts.

The Church is in the forgiveness and compassion business, or should be, and so it made sense to have a lot of concern for the pedophile priests, as well as for the victims. (We're supposed to be compassionate even to people who are despised by everyone else, even to people who hurt us and those we love.) And I can see why the Church hierarchy wanted to minimize the scandal involved, though at Thomas said, that sort of thing can blow up in your face[1] . If they'd quietly defrocked the priests involved, or moved them to some ministry where they wouldn't encounter kids[2], then the cover ups would be an embarrassment, but they'd blow over quickly enough. What the Church did instead magnified the problem--a priest would molest some kids in parish A, then get moved to parish B, then to parish C, and so on, racking up victims in each place.

The way the Church actually behaved seems to me to have been concerned with the reputation of the Church above all else, then with the well-being of the pedophile priests, and far less concerned with the well-being of either past or future victims of these guys. Afterward, the Church has seemed at least as concerned with financial consequences of the abuse scandals as with the impact on its victims or the parishioners. And that has all come out or is in the process of coming out, now. All that was whispered in the darkness will be shouted from the housetops. I don't know what will be left of the Church at the end of it.

I love my parish, in which I and my family are deeply involved. And though I converted as an adult, I think of myself as Catholic in a very fundamental way. I'm afraid of what's going to come next, and how it's going to destroy both the hierarchy and structure of the Church, and all the beautiful and good parishes and schools and other places that live inside it.

And it's worth remembering one horrible aspect of this scandal: The Church knowingly transferred pedophile priests from parish to parish, in the hopes of silencing the scandals. Parishes that other people loved and trusted as much as I love and trust mine got a new priest transferred in, and, in the feeling of safety in that community, trusted their children being there. And sometimes, that priest raped their children, and in the process destroyed their community.

When my son was going to first confession last year, some thought in the back of my head wondered whether he was safe doing it. Is that priest, the young one who likes to work with kids at the school, is he really just a priest who works well with kids? Or is he a pedophile, maybe one who's been caught multiple times and been transferred from place to place. How the hell do we maintain a community when we're looking at each other in those terms? When we suspect that the Church might send someone they knew was a danger to our kids, just to move the problem somewhere less visible? The Church authorities tell us that the scandals are over, that they're now taking pedophilia claims very seriously. But why should I believe it?

[1] For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open

[2] Isn't the Navy short on non-evangelical chaplains serving on warships? How about prison ministries?

Teresa's "Thirteen ways" Particle reminds me that in 2004 or thereabouts, there was a thread on this site consisting almost exclusively of hundreds of riffs on "This is just to say" -- am I remembering correctly? If so, how would I go about finding the link to that thread?

The Modesto Kid #479:
Well, Iduno about 2004, but Abi offered "Smulps" more recently, in 2008.

Oh -- well thanks Mr. Harmon! That is not the thread I was thinking of but it is a very pleasant one, and one that I was not familiar with.

BTW, this may be of interest to some readers here -- I recently read and translated Borges' foreword to the Spanish edition of The Martian Chronicles (1955) -- a pleasure to read and makes me want to dig out the Bradbury. My translation is here: Cronicas Marcianas

Open Thread Question -

I have a fabulous pair of 14 eye Docs bought just before they outsourced production to China. Unfortunately, they bite the hell out of the back of my ankles. Does anyone know if anything can be done to fix this? I'm considering taking them to my cobbler, but I'm not sure if part of the problem is also in the heaviness of the soles. I'd had to lose them, but if they're painful they're not a great alternative to heels with formal wear.

albatross @478:

Sigh. Yes to everything you've said.

I'm both raised in the Church and an adult convert, and I'm just coming back after a number of years away. (It's very, very complicated, but it does rather prove that I am inescapably Catholic.) This is all complicated by living in the über-Protestant land of Extreme Orangeness, not being entirely fluent in the local language, and sundry other difficulties greater and lesser.

I keep wishing for some science-fictional conclusion, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Strossian deep-history social evolution, where individual parishes discover some new model of interaction and transform into a structure that keeps their best aspects and sheds the damaged parts. But the damaged parts include stuff we can't shed and still be ourselves. And this isn't a novel.

I just keep telling myself that the Church is not the hierarchy.

abi @ 484... inescapably Catholic

:-)

Here's a picture of the millstone installed as a memorial to abuse victims in Mendham, NJ, referred to in the NYT article that heresiarch links @ #472.

Linkmeister @486:

I found that page when I was Googling around for miniature millstones. But the one they sell is not something one can use in great numbers to make a point. (I was thinking of the Rice for Peace story.)

Some time ago, I read a bit about Viable Paradise and dinosaur sodomy. (It turns out, the subject was about dinosaurs AND sodomy.) I found a poster containing the subject via an agent's blog who got it from io9.

All it lacks is the sodomy.

nerdycellist @483: How long have you had them, and how often have you worn them? The leather may need to be broken in more; I've never been the first owner of a pair of Doc Martens myself, mostly so I CAN get the made-in-UK ones, and have never had the problem of breaking them in, but I understand it can take some time. Some of my friends recommend neats'-foot oil; others suggest puddle-jumping.

Heavier socks may also improve matters -- I often sneak a short pair of crew socks over the fishnets and not visible over the tops when wearing mine with skirts.

Another thing I do is to wear Walking Company dress orthotics in them, which improves the fit and the arch support, and seems to make the ankles fit more naturally as well.

I'll admit I've never worn the 14-eye model, only 8s, 10s, and 20s, but I'd think the same general principles apply.

If none of those work for you, and your cobbler has no suggestions, I don't suppose you wear a UK 5?

No offense meant to Steve C., but that Techcrunch piece he linked to in #469 struck me as an all-too-typical example of the kind of casual assholery frequently found on tech blogs. For example:

"Let’s finally put to rest the myth that the iPad is a good way to read books--it isn’t. Without e-ink--who’d have thunk it?--your eyes get tired after a few pages. You find yourself wishing you could print out the rest of the book and read it properly, away from the screen. [...]

"The iPad is emphatically not a serious readers’ device: the only people who would genuinely consider it a Kindle killer are those for whom the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive. The people who will spout bullshit like 'I read on screen all day' when what they really mean is 'I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.' That’s reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex."

And you know, strangely enough, I am in fact a "serious reader," I'm not someone for whom "the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive," I'm not actually "spouting bullshit", and I don't "really mean" "I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work." People are different, and people's eyesights are different. Some people get eyestrain trying to read low-contrast type. Some people can't stand bright screens. Some people need crisp letterforms; some people prefer graceful antialiasing. Also? Paul Carr is a twit, as is anyone who generalizes their personal preferences in electronic devices into a set of wild claims that anyone who feels differently must be a bullshitting fraud. There's nothing lively or colorful or amusing about that kind of thing. It's just shit, in a world that already has plenty of shit.

I am in fact interested in discussing the pros and cons of various different devices and programs for reading long texts onscreen, but only in a context where everyone agrees that preferring one kind of device or program over another doesn't make you hipper, more authentic, or more ruggedly honest.

Fragano Legister:

By being a security leak for data that doesn't belong to me by having an easy-to-guess password.

How United Airlines treats disabled passengers.

This is absolutely disgusting. United was already not my airline of choice, but I think they've just dropped below even the chintzy-cheap lines.

PNH @490:

Seconded.