Bendy-Bus?

And a partridge in a perdrix.

motifs and mcguffins for an urban mystery series.

From Wikipedia via Google define:

A puukko (Finnish) is a traditional Finnish or Scandinavian style woodcraft belt-knife that is a tool rather than a weapon. It is a type of hunting knife. The word is in the process of assimilation into English. (My italics)

"My application form is in, sir, and my entry fee into the language has been paid! I used dollars just as I was told!"

All love-tokens of one sort or another, in one time or place or another.

Donuts and a whodunit...

Googling "cupped coins" in bewilderment took me to a page full of pictures of interestingly mis-cast coins. I never knew there were so many ways for coinage to be produced incorrectly; the mule was especially odd. It's almost enough to make me want to get into coin-collecting myself.

If one has the 411 on "143", the meaning is clear. :-)

Debra@5 "A Girl Needs A Knife"?

Bruce at #820 on the previous Open Thread:

We must be on the same wavelength -- I just finished Zelazny's This Immortal.

It's still entertaining.

Linkmeister @ #4 quotes Wikipedia: "A puukko (Finnish) is a traditional Finnish or Scandinavian style woodcraft belt-knife that is a tool rather than a weapon."

And on the same page:

"Puukkos proved to be good close combat weapons in the Winter war and Continuation war."

Yeah. Similar (if not identical) to the Norwegian bunad knife, used with the traditional wear. Used for anything - woodwork, butchering animals, gutting fish or (stereotypically) wedding guests.

Also, this seems to me to be Big News.

Am I wrong?

Doggone it, Lizzy, you beat me to it. I came rushing over here to post the news.

I'm really glad to see OPM and HHS lose this one!

A US District Court in Boston has just ruled that part of DOMA is unconstitutional. The part in question is the part which defines marriage for federal purposes and excludes gay couples. The argument is that by changing to this system instead of the previous system (of just recognizing whatever the local state recognized), Congress had intentionally excluded gay people ... without that exclusion having any rational relation to a legitimate state objective.

In the wake of DOMA, it is only sexual orientation that differentiates a married couple entitled to federal marriage-based benefits from one not so entitled. And this court can conceive of no way in which such a difference might be relevant to the provision of the benefits at issue.

By premising eligibility for these benefits on marital status in the first instance, the federal government signals to this court that the relevant distinction to be drawn is between married individuals and unmarried individuals. To further divide the class of married individuals into those with spouses of the same sex and those with spouses of the opposite sex is to create a distinction without meaning. And where, as here, “there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged class is different, in relevant respects” from a similarly situated class, this court may conclude that it is only irrational prejudice that motivates the challenged classification. As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Full text of the opinion is available here.

damn... someone beat me to the Good News.

I hope (and I am sure the judge was careful) the decision is tight enough to not leave much wiggle room for the Supremes. If so, my guess it they will just ignore the appeal, "Cert. denied, without comment", and hope it remains confined to District.

Good luck with that.

:)

I dunno about cupped coins, but we went to the Hungarian National Museum last week where I discovered that the Hungarian language has a specific word for irregular coins that were intended to be irregular in shape (the word escapes me now, unfortunately).

I particularly like the sun and crescent moon ducats. Hungary is so cool.

Terry @15, the next step would be the Circuit Court; apparently (according to GLAD's press release here) the government could choose not to appeal -- my hope at this point is that this slides more-or-less under the radar, so that Obama can choose not to appeal it; if the papers tomorrow are full of "Activist Judge Forces Recognition of Gay Marriages" nonsense tomorrow, he'll probably feel obligated to appeal the ruling.

The opinion (linked from aphrael's post) is interesting reading -- the judge is quite sarcastic.

From the ruling, it seems the Judge didn't leave any higher court with much wiggle room. Good.

It's quite compelling reading, too, so go ahead and click the link in aphrael's post.

Yes, the circuit is the next step. I was feeling rushed, and failed to note that this is the district.

So.... if the circuit upholds the ruling, then it would require some shennanigans to get it to to the Supremes. That would be telling, because that would put Obama in a bind. To go the mattresses defending DOMA wouldn't play well with much of his progressive base.

But Mid-terms are coming and the pandering to the religious right isn't showing any signs of ending.

If it does go to the Supremes, I predict they'll uphold DOMA 5-4. DOMA needs to be repealed, since five of the "justices" on the SCOTUS are without honor or integrity.

BART Shooting Verdict came in.

Involuntary manslaughter.

Which is probably (IMO) the correct verdict.

The question now is the verdict.

Ooooooooooooooo -- a reference to Little Women (among other things).

Love, C.

I did not realize that a 13 and 14-year old can get married, in New Hampshire, with their parents' approval.

I predict junior high school smartassery to reach an all-time short-term high in the wake of this.

Involuntary Manslaughter?!?!? You think that's the right verdict? Does that mean you believe that he was reaching for his taser (I don't) and just drew the gun by mistake, and somehow couldn't tell the difference in feel between the two weapons?

Sorry. I don't think there was anything involuntary about it. I predict there will be burning in Oakland tonight.

And the BART verdict includes a gun enhancement...

That means he can't probation... he has to get at least four years.

I do, however, worry that this is grounds for appeal.

As for 143: OK, it's a song (or something). I don't get what the SONG is referring to though.

Michael Roberts @16 said: Hungary is so cool.

I was just coming to that conclusion via a different route -- by reading Leah Cutter's The Caves of Buda, for whose accuracy I cannot vouch, but whose coolness is undeniable. A mystic deer, a similarly magical and protective eagle, and demons figure largely.

Xopher, I think - speaking as a law student - it would be extraordinarily difficult to prove that he didn't think it was a mistake. You basically have to convince the jury that he's lying about what he thought, which - while doable - is hard.

(I mean: I think he's lying. But I doubt I could prove that to a jury).

That said, I still think the correct verdict would have been second degree murder.

Second degree murder on a theory of implied malice is legitimate in California if (a) the killer intentionally performed an act which he knew to be inherently dangerous to human life, and (b) he acted recklessly in so doing.

Mehserle's theory of the case - "I thought it was an accident, I thought I was drawing my taser" doesn't disprove that. Drawing a taser and shooting someone at that range is an act inherently dangerous to human life. He had to have known that. And his very theory of the case indicates that he thinks he acted recklessly.

Yeah, I don't see how, even if you believe him entirely, you get to INVOLUNTARY manslaughter.

It's time we stopped acting as if it's appropriate to use tasers as pain-compliance devices. They're too dangerous for that. They're an alternative to deadly force. He had no business using a taser on someone who was face down on the platform.

He knew or should have known that the taser was potentially deadly. That makes it at LEAST voluntary manslaughter IIUC.

We need laws specifying under what circumstances tasers may be used. As for this murdering thug, I hope they put him in general pop.

Xopher @20: True, true. This is a Supreme Court that has five votes for the notion that Congress can pass a law restricting free speech if they have a suspicion that it is in our best interest, and neither the public nor the courts have standing to second-guess the Congress. And those are the five people who claim to worship the founder's original motivations.

DOMA reform would be DOA, the only question is whether the Supremes would rule against it or just refuse it on narrow grounds and kick it back downstairs the way they did for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Xopher, yes, I do think he was reaching for his Taser.

I saw the footage, I saw the body language and I saw how far back he moved. I've also read the problems with weapon recognition, and see too many cases of better trained personnel (because BART cops don't carry TASERs as an everyday weapon), grab the wrong one when they are carrying strong side dual-carry.

Because the greatest physical failing of the taser, is one of design. Every manual for it I have seen stresses the need to make sure it is carried in such a way as to prevent exactly the sort of confusion you don't think is possible.

They are heavy, they are balanced much like a pistol, and with the almost universal adoption of polymer grip pistols by cops... it's not hard (esp. under stress) to confuse them.

But if you really think it was first degree murder (and of the options I can only see those two... he had a restrained subject; he stood up, stepped back, drew a weapon and fired), you are entitled to.

But yes, when I say, "in my opinion 'x'", I mean it.

Xopher @ 29:

As for this murdering thug, I hope they put him in general pop.

Without comment on the rest, Xopher, why are YOU supporting murder and what more or less constitutes counselling and provocation to commit same?

And, surely prisoners have *enough* problems, on average?

Terry, I think it was second, not first. Why do you rule out second?

As a matter of fact, since he deliberately shot the guy (even accepting arguendo that he thought it was with a taser) that would be voluntary, no? It's not like he was cleaning his taser and it went off.

Xopher: The problem with that line of causality is the doesn't hold that TASERs are inherently dangerous to human life.

This is wrong, but it is the present state of the law.

Since he is, as a cop, authorised to use them, I don't see how that can rise to the needed standard for voluntary manslaughter. Has he tased the guy, there is no way he sees the inside of a courtroom. Even with this case, the BART cops have had recent problems with tasers (the most recent being a BART cop using one to effect an arrest of a turnstile jumper (BART collects on exit, so the suspect was making a getaway on a surface street).

He did it because... it would make it look as if fare evasion "could be gotten away with."

Marna, I'm just angry. I know they won't put him in general pop.

Xopher @ 20: five of the "justices" on the SCOTUS are without honor or integrity.

Minor correction. Four are without honor or integrity. The fifth, I believe, is basically decent but lacks the strength of character to stand against the monstrous cohort.

It is a deep and terrible shame that the Senate has neither the votes nor the integrity to launch an investigation and subsequent impeachment proceedings against Clarence Thomas in particular, in light of the deeply disturbing politicking his wife has been diving into headfirst lately. There is almost certainly a boatload of cases that Thomas would be obligated to recuse himself from if there were any authority overseeing him.

Xopher @ 35: fair enough. I hate that trope with a blinding passion and it's way too popular, you know? And I feel like people don't hear what they're saying.

Xopher: What do you mean by "put him in general pop", because that is tantamount to a death sentence.

Or are you advocating the "prison rape" as punishment trope?

I understand you are upset, I'm upset too; because of all the things which led to this. Right now he's looking at 4-14; with no option but prison (the gun enhancement removes the option of probation, or suspended sentence), but this isn't quite like you.

(and yes, second was the charge; I think it was offered because he is a cop, and the prosecutor almost certainly knew there was no way to get a 1st degree murder charge to stick to a cop who was engaged in that sort of shooting, no matter what the nature of the facts were)

Ok, I see you and Marna have hashed it out.

FTR I do NOT advocate the "prison rape as punishment" thing that so many people like to gloat about. I think the complete lack of interest our society shows in preventing prison rape is one of the signs that we are not a civilized nation.

Xopher @ 40: I did know that. FWIW, that's sort of why I drew it to your attention.

Xopher, I know you don't, but unless someone already knows that about you, it's what it looks like.

That's part of how I know you are really upset.

I think I must walk down and watch the sea,
And hear the wind and feel the sun again,
I’ll see the surgeon, have the tests, and then
I’ll know how much of them is left to me.
When Housman went about the woodlands, he
Remarked his life had hardly room for when
The cherry blossomed. Three score years and ten
Are insufficient for a cherry-tree.

How many, then, to watch the changing sky?
How many would it be, the numbered years?
A hundred, then a thousand, soon would pass,
Millennia would flitter idly by,
Until I heard, with unbelieving ears
Gerontion yet singing in the grass.

I decided not to post this, until the tests came back. Benign enlargement of the prostate. No cancer. No treatment indicated. Look again in six months.

Next Saturday I shall cook and host a dinner party for old friends, at which I shall propose a toast: "L'chaim!"

MAZELTOV!

Dave: Yay.

re the aikido subthread: I made a mistake, misremembered. I mentioned tenchi-nage. I meant shiho-nage.

Dave at # 43: There has been a lot of good poetry posted in Making Light over the years. But for me, yours is one of the best keepers: because it's accessible without familiarity with literary conventions, and it references one of my favorites.

Oh, and congratulations on your test results.

Dave: Thank goodness. And that was beautiful.

in re the BART shooting -- I'm appalled at the way that local TV and radio appear to be desperately hoping for a riot.

Xopher: I'd have said murder as well. People give huge amounts of leeway to the police, though -- the Chronicle says this is one of only two on-duty officer manslaughter convictions, nationwide, in the last 15 years.

Terry -- does the gun charge actually preclude direct parole? The SF Chronicle's updated article was unclear on that point. (I also find it confusing that, apparently, killing someone with a gun is more than twice as bad as killing them in some other way.)

Dave @43: Hooray! And what a lovely verse with which to mark the occasion.

Victor S: Yes, the enhancement precludes a non-incarcertory sentence. The enhancement is not limited to murder. It applies to any felony in which a gun is used, it's meant to reduce the number of crimes in which a gun is used, by making them even more risky.

Terry: First degree wouldn't have made sense by any stretch. Intentional isn't the same as premeditated. If I flip out and shoot you for no real reason (which I have no trouble believing is what happened here), that's not first degree - unless I was committing some other felony at the same time.

Dave: Thanks for the good poem and the good news.

VictorS @47: "...I'm appalled at the way that local TV and radio appear to be desperately hoping for a riot."

So far they haven't got their wish. It's early, though.

Dave Luckett, #43, great news!

Dave 43: Nice verse, better news! May it be ever thus.

I'm inclined to think that there should be a presumption of premeditation when a government employee authorized to carry and use a weapon in the line of duty (police, military, etc.) uses that weapon in the line of duty.

It's their job.

It's a job that they're trained for, and it is a job that by definition demands that high-stress and potentially personally dangerous situations be reacted to in a controlled manner. If the police, the military and other security forces aren't trained to have greater self-control than the general public, we might as well just let the general public run about using violent force to attempt to enforce the law or government policy.

If a police officer uses a weapon in the line of duty, it should be premeditated. That's what they're paid and trained for.

I'm inclined to think that there should be a presumption of premeditation when a government employee authorized to carry and use a weapon in the line of duty (police, military, etc.) uses that weapon in the line of duty.

It's their job.

It's a job that they're trained for, and it is a job that by definition demands that high-stress and potentially personally dangerous situations be reacted to in a controlled manner. If the police, the military and other security forces aren't trained to have greater self-control than the general public, we might as well just let the general public run about using violent force to attempt to enforce the law or government policy.

If a police officer uses a weapon in the line of duty, it should be premeditated. That's what they're paid and trained for.

hob: There was a case, 1st degree, vehicle. The explanation of the justification? The killer aimed the car across a four lane street to hit the person.

He had, so the prosecution said (and the jury agreed) ample time to change his mind.

If Mehserle had the presence of mind to step back, release the safeties on his holster and shoot the guy... that is enough chains of interruptable behavior to justify a charge of premeditation.

I have a friend, who's son did sixteen years in Folsom for second degree. He took a pistol to a park, a gang fight broke out, and he fired a couple of shots. He didn't get voluntary manslaughter; he got second degree murder.

The prosecutor pondered 1st degree. The reason they didn't charge him with it was that everyone one agreed he hadn't aimed the gun, just fired it in the general direction.

That was California, so the same rules ought to apply here, esp. as the victim in this case was cuffed, and the cop who shot him was one of the people who restrained him. He knew he couldn't get away. The judge tossed 1st degree, but I think he was wrong.

Mind you, I don't thin it was murder. I think it was the end result of a whole lot of poor choices; and poor policies, and that Mehserle is the poor guy who ended up carrying the, almost inevitable, bag.

It was a horrible accident. But a sort of horrible accident we can't afford to ignore. That he was a cop means it had to be prosecuted. We give cops the authority to constrain us. We can't allow them the ability to take advantage of that trust, and make this sort of mistake with no repercussion.

I'm sad. Sad that it happened. Sad that there is a dead man. Sad there is a living man with a life unalterably changed. Sad that there is a crowd of anarchist idiots trashing Oakland.

Sad that the systems we use to train cops aren't better built. Sad that TASERs are built to look, and feel, like guns.

Sad that I am so upset by all of the above.

Sad that I had a spat with Xopher about this.

Sad that, honestly, I don't think any of the things I think led to this are gonna change at all.

Just fuckin' sad.

Terry @31: I've also read the problems with weapon recognition, and see too many cases of better trained personnel [...] grab the wrong one when they are carrying strong side dual-carry.

Does "strong side dual-carry" mean someone's got both weapons slung on the same hip? Because from what I've read, Mehserle wore the pistol and Taser on opposite sides.

Good to hear that, Dave! I worried and admired while reading the poem.

Xopher @26:

The song references a modern folk custom (in the sense of a custom invented by the folk).

It's about the number of letters in specific words, and started with pagers that transmitted only numbers.

Avram, yes, that's what it means. But, and this is the tricky part. BART allowed officers to carry in one of three spots. One of which was strong side.

Looking at the video, it's not clear where he was carrying, but this image makes it look as if he was either not carrying a TASER, or had it strong-sided.

More to the point, BART's policy of issuing TASERs as occasional equipment means that cops might have them some days, and not others. The policy of allowing them to arrange it in different locations makes it harder to teach the sorts of muscle memory drills which make going for a specific piece of equipment automatic.

I realise that might appear to conflict with my statements about it being a deliberate act (the Calif. Penal Code is fairly open in the definition of premeditation To prove the killing was "deliberate and premeditated," it shall not be necessary to prove the defendant maturely and meaningfully reflected upon the gravity of his or her act.: Calif. Penal Code § 189) but good training with firearms should teach the collection of the weapon to a firing position as pure habit, and the actual act of firing as very much a conscious decision.

I can say the first time I had to point a loaded weapon at someone it was informative. I was all sorts of keyed up... couldn't close the action (it was a bolt action rifle), and let it go, with the firing pin spring sending the bolt to the rear and the cartridge across the room.

Slammed the bolt home, got the rifle mounted, and all the jitters went away. I collected the slack and decided I didn't need to shoot him that very moment.

At which point we had a nice little chat, and he left.

But, since TASERs aren't lethal, cops are trained to get them out, on the target, and fired.

Much as the video shows happening.

I get that we aren't mind-readers. There's just no way to prove that the officer intended to kill Grant, and I imagine that's why they returned the verdict they did.

What's striking to me, though, is that this mind-reading thing isn't a problem if the shooter doesn't own a badge. For anyone else, the act of pointing a weapon at someone and pulling the trigger speaks for itself.

Say I get into a half-drunken argument with a friend. And in the heat of the moment I point a gun at him. He's not rattled by this. We get drunk a lot, and argue a lot, and this is hardly the first time I've pulled a gun on him. We keep arguing and...well, the gun goes off, and my friend dies.

Now, I didn't mean to shoot him. I don't know how that trigger got pulled. Maybe my hand slipped. Maybe I was just gesturing a bit too wildly and pulled it by accident. Maybe he grabbed for the gun and it went off when he struck it. I don't exactly remember. All I remember for certain is that I didn't intentionally pull that trigger. Maybe a video camera was rolling, and it shows me dropping the gun in horror right after I kill him.

Am I gonna get off with involuntary manslaughter?

I'm ready to be persuaded that I would, and I don't pretend to be an expert on the criminal justice system, but at this point I'm skeptical. My gut says that the mere fact that I was holding the gun that killed my friend means that I'm looking at murder two, or voluntary manslaughter if I'm very lucky.

I understand why it is that cops get every possible benefit of the doubt. I'm just not clear on why it should be that way.

Laertes: as described, in Calif., you get involuntary manslaughter.

For my sins, I'm busy telling people on BB that they shouldn't advocate or joke about prison rape.

Karma's a bitch, eh?

Checking in from Green River, UT. Had a wonderful time at ConChord and sightseeing around LA. Have now seen Zion Canyon and Bryce Canyon (repeats from last year); also Cedar Breaks and Capitol Reef. Next will be Arches and Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and then we'll figure out where to go from there. I have over 2 gigs of pictures already!

One of these guys said "Maybe I'm a sick fuck, but..." and went on about how he had no compassion at all for bad guys getting raped in prison.

I said a few things, ending with "And while I cannot judge whether you're a sick fuck, I must say that your POV about prison rape does match that of other sick fucks I have known."

On Prison Rape.

I don't know how prevalent it really is.

I infer a reckless attitude to the control of violent inmates, endangering staff and other prisoners. I see accounts of very extreme measures being taken in some cases: a very costly system of security for the most violent, who will likely be in prison for the rest of their lives.

In prison systems which approximate to systems of slave labour, these dangerous inmates are not likely to be a source of profit. The occurence of Prison Rape, it can be argued, is a symptom of poor management of the Prison as a business.

It does rather suggest that prisoners and ex-prisoners are an under-people. It almost seems as if the USA--large parts of it at least--has an inherent need for somebody to be the target of Jim Crow thinking. And making prisoners the target sidesteps some awkward political questions. Compare with the responses to anti-immigrant laws.

Among all the other reasons for being against prison rape, it means that rapists are getting away with it.

Terry Karney@45

Ah! That makes a lot more sense. I was wondering where you got the "joint open or closed" thing with tenchi nage, but just assumed I was (not unusually) missing something.

I think an interesting facet of aikido is that where techniques are drawn from older martial arts and modified (as most of the named techniques are), they are modified so as to cause less damage or to control the amount of damage to uke, not just for the purpose of practice but as a matter of philosophy*.

I'd argue that most if not all aikido techniques can be performed to minimise or maximise the damage to the opponent**, and also that this is something entirely different a style being described as "hard" or "soft"***.

*Disclaimer: I am not uchideschi, shihan, sensei, yudansha or even, in most cases, sempai - I am a junior practitioner. Comments about aikido as a whole are based on my own understanding and about as unauthoritative as it's possible to get. YMMV.
**I'd hesitate to call them uke if your goal is to damage them!
***Not that anyone has made that association. Just wanted to be clear.

No mystery, nor reason for the day
to start so simply since the bright alarm
brought us to wakefulness with simple charm,
while this last warden had now news to say;
but that there were some causes for delay
and none for haste. But we are past all harm
of foolish words, nor may the time disarm
our urgent thoughts. We must be on our way.
Onward to where the final tolling bell
cannot be heard, and then so far beyond
that on our senses we cannot depend.
Who will not know if any live to tell
the meaning and the substance of our bond,
or who will care that any reach the end?

Dave #43: That is good news.

My interaction with Twitter clients on my Mac has gone completely wrong, to my quite great vexation.

First TweetDeck refused to give me any tweets at all; no updates, nothing. Then I signed out, and it wouldn't let me sign back in. The login button was completely inactive.

I went and changed my password on the website, which likes me just fine.

TweetDeck still hates us, precious. So does NatsuLion. Neither will let me log in. I've fallen back to the website, rather than try client after client. But I am Vexed and Annoyed.

I knew a guy online who was a prison guard; one of the maxims they taught him is "we are not part of the punishment meted out by the courts." (From the same guy, talking about how his day went, "Four guys in black armor and we've been out-intimidated by an aerosol.")

Until a judge sentences someone to 4 years of repeated rape, it is not part of the punishment meted out by the courts.

This is a very unemotional argument, I know, but in my mind it's harder to disprove than "You're a sick fuck who wants to beat up people who can't escape" or similar.

Dave: congratulations on the good news!

aphrael: thanks for the link to the opinion. A thing of beauty.

Xopher and Terry: your ability to stay engaged and respectful in the face of rage, frustration and despair speaks well of you both, and, dare I say it, of the potential of our species.

Terry Karney - first degree murder was never on the table, and the jury didn't receive instructions on it. In California, to get first degree murder, you basically need either premeditation or to have committed the murder while committing one of several listed felonies. Otherwise, it's second degree murder.

I don't think you can prove premeditation on these facts (deciding to do it in the heat of the moment doesn't get you there), and it can't possibly be felony murder.

But second degree murder (that he chose to do an act inherently dangerous to human life, and that he did so recklessly) is doable if either (a) the jury thinks he knew it was a gun or (b) the jury thinks tasers are inherently dangerous to human life.

(Also: the fact - and I agree that this is true - that he would not be on trial if he'd tased Grant and Grant had died as a result ... is an indictment of the system.)

with respect to 63; I think that while the law would support involuntary manslaughter in Laertes' scenario, it actually depends on the race of the guy; if he's white, he gets involuntary manslaughter, but if he's not white, the prosecutor argues that drawing the gun when drunk is an act inherently dangerous to human life, etc, and he gets second degree murder.

Xopher - the problem is that for it to be voluntary manslaughter, you would have to prove that he knew or should have known that he was firing his gun. I think the prosecution tried, very hard, to prove the should have known part.

Further investigation shows that Twitter is giving "rate limit exceeded" messages to the API. They're investigating, apparently.

This doesn't explain why two clients wouldn't even log me in, but I've found one that will (Tweetie). So if they can stop pretending I'm overusing (or even using) the API, maybe I'll be able to get tweets again.

In other news, Twitter withdrawal symptoms appear to include crankiness.

aphrael: I know that the word, "premeditated" is in the statute. I also know that the actual elements which comprise it aren't defined,and the statute specifically says it need not be shown the killer gravely reflected on the act.

As I said, the only reason my friends son wasn't charged with first degree murder was that he didn't aim the gun. The prosecution said (and there is no reason to not believe them) that shooting the gun was a reckless act, likely to cause death but that aiming the gun would have, been, "deliberate and premeditated". Given the clause, " To prove the killing was "deliberate and premeditated," it shall not be necessary to prove the defendant maturely and meaningfully reflected upon the gravity of his or her act."

That, they argued, would have been enough to make it first degree. But there was enough in the way of evidence to show Edward hadn't aimed, to keep it in the realm of second.

Given the level of training to which police are required to attain, and the intervening steps between is apparent resolution to take an action; and that action being carried out, I still think that, if he started with the intent to draw his weapon, it rises to the required level of, "deliberate and premeditated" action required in the statute.

Worse, from the actual standpoint of the verdict, I think the jury, is some of the reports about what they did think are true (i.e. he did draw his weapon knowing it was his weapon, and then intentionally shot Grant with it) gave him something of a pass (mind you, this may not be all the jurors, nor an accurate reflection of what the jurors in question actually thought).

Since there is a case where 1st degree murder was found to have taken place; and the rationale for the charge was the killer; operating a vehicle, took a sudden urge to aim it at someone on the far sidewalk, and crossed a four lane street to hit the victim, which was said to be adequate time to reflect on his actions, and form the required state of "deliberate and premeditated" intent, it was first degree; and that cops are trained in the range of situations in which the use of deadly force is authorised, the victim was immobilised, and there is no level of "provocation, which can justify shooting an arrested person who poses no threat to life or limb... well as I said, I think that rises to first degree.

And I don't think there is a jury in this country which would ever return such a verdict.

Delurking to compliment Dave @43 on his good news and great sonnet. Huzzah!

Laertes@62: as described in Elsinore, it ends with everyone dead who is marked for death.

Dave #43: Hooray!

Dave @43, congrats on the good news. And very good verse.

I've been watching the whole NASA brouhaha about Bolden's statements to Al Jazeera, and it demonstrates again that the more emotional an issue, the less the intellect is engaged.

"Say I get into a half-drunken argument with a friend. And in the heat of the moment I point a gun at him. He's not rattled by this. We get drunk a lot, and argue a lot, and this is hardly the first time I've pulled a gun on him. We keep arguing and...well, the gun goes off, and my friend dies."

Say you drink, point a loaded gun at a friend, he dies. I say you're a moron.

"Say I get into a half-drunken argument with a friend. And in the heat of the moment I point a gun at him. He's not rattled by this. We get drunk a lot, and argue a lot, and this is hardly the first time I've pulled a gun on him. We keep arguing and...well, the gun goes off, and my friend dies."

Say you drink, point a loaded gun at a friend, he dies. I say you're a moron who shouldn't be allowed to live among civilized people.

#92: I'm a model rocketeer, and frequent model rocketeer discussion blogs.

The resident odious right wing blowhard crank of course had to post about the shocking Al-Jazeera / NASA thing. A virtual word for word transcription of FOX News punditry.

I replied with a link to John Stewart's takedown.

aphrael @ 75: as a point of order, 1st degree murder was on the table. The judge disallowed it on June 30th.

As I have said, I think that was in error; though I think the actual offense was involuntary manslaughter.

Toni @83: I agree entirely. And I'd be an idiot who should be convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

My question was meant to be: am I an idiot who will be convicted of a more serious offense, possibly second-degree murder, because I'm not a cop and therefore not entitled to the presumption that my version of the story, in every detail, is fact.

Mr. Karney says that I would not, and the example he cites is pretty convincing.

Toni@83: Well, yeah. Luckily the kind of RKBA gun-nut I hang around doesn't do that, or put up with it from others. I certainly wouldn't (not that it's ever come close to becoming an issue).

Laertes: The hypothetical you pose is pretty clear cut.

If, however, the circumstances changed, (say there is no footage, there are no good witnesses), then the question become malice.

On the evidence (which would be circumstantial) the prosecution would have to show malice.

But the odds of murder, not manslaughter, go up.

Terry, the DEFENSE wanted the only options to be murder one and acquittal. They were sure they could get an acquittal under those circumstances, since if there's one thing all parties are agreed on, it's that this wasn't murder one.

Even having murder one as an option would have made an outright acquittal more likely. The judge ruled on what the several options would be, and we've seen the result.

Much as I don't think it was the correct decision, it's much better than an outright acquittal. And I think a murder one conviction would have been unjust.

Hurrah Dave!

Stefan Jones #85: How thoughtful of you to answer this question: Why is a model rocket like a member of al-Qaeda?

Ose Walrus, noted filker & attorney, finds the rationale for the DOMA decision overbroad. "Under this theory, any federal rule that violates an intrinsic aspect of state sovereignty -- which is ANYTHING -- potentially violates the Tenth Amendment." (his comments turned off). It cries out for appeal.

Jon @93, there were two cases decided yesterday, though most of the coverage conflates the two. Gill v. OPM found Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional on equal protection grounds, not Tenth Amendment grounds. Massachusetts v. HHS was the 10th Amendment ruling. I would place little credence in any analysis that omits to point out this critically important detail.

My previous comment got cut off.

Not being a lawyer myself, merely a court-watcher, I suspect the reason for the different grounds is that Gill was brought by individuals, while Massachusetts was brought by the state itself, and that there were fewer grounds available to decide the second case -- it may be that 10th Amendment was the only option in the second case. It could have been possible, I suppose, for the judge to have ruled differently in the two cases (i.e. that Section 3 of DOMA violates individual rights under equal protection, but not states' rights under the 10th Amendment), but that would have made little material difference.

lorax@94-95, so was it one judge finding in both cases that had been joined together? Or was it two judges and a coincidence that the verdicts happened the same day? The newspaper report I saw said that the judge had partially overturned DOMA but was typically uninformative about what parts got overturned, what didn't, and what it means. (In any case, Yay!)

There's a debate over at Balkinization between Jack Balkin and Andrew Koppelman about whether Gill will survive. Both think that (a) the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, (b) state laws against same-sex marriage are also unconstitutional, and (c) the Supreme Court will certainly not admit the truth of (b) any time soon. They disagree whether Tauro's decision striking down DOMA might just squeak through the appeals process. (Balkin says no, Koppelman yes).

The problem is that for a politically possible decision striking down DOMA you have to thread the needle in such a way that DOMA is unconstitutional while the even more asinine state law in Virginia (say) is not.

Xopher@90, while I'd have liked to see a stronger verdict, it's tough to get any verdict at all that finds a cop guilty in a situation like this, since a large fraction of society tends to presume cops to be acting with the best of intentions and anybody labeled as a perp to be guilty and deserve what happens to them, and it only takes one juror finding "not guilty" for an acquittal. I think the judge did the right thing in giving a jury those options.

There's been a bit of discussion in the local press that the cops hadn't had much training with their Tasers, and they obviously needed a lot more.

Thank you all for the good wishes, and I'm glad that the sonnet was pleasing.

Dr Johnson's remark about concentration of the mind applies. But to be reprieved has something of the same effect, I find; and more permanently, I hope.

This just in: Al Qaeda has decided to leave the #3 position unfilled. A spokesman for the organization says they're having a tough time keeping the job filled, so now they'll let #4 and #5 handle the #3 duties between them, and see if this strategy lets them bypass what's being called the "curse of #3."

(Dave Luckett, my best wishes and thanks for the sonnet as well.)

In the spirit of Open Thread, and because I really needed this type of lighthearted pickmeup when I encountered it, check out http://producten.hema.nl/

- Dutch department store HEMA's product page. You can't order anything and it's in Dutch, but just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Worth having the sound on too.

The HEMA page is wonderfully goofy. Very tempted to inflict it on certain of my friends here...

My moped was stolen today from the house. I'm going to bed.

In other news, Roman Catholic Church goes completely insane.

Apparently ordaining women is as grave a sin as the sexual abuse of a child. Equally insane whether you think they're overvaluing* the one or undervaluing the other.
____
*for inverted values of 'valuing'

Alice, that's delightful! Thanks for that.

Xopher@104, you could also say that ordaining women has been ruled as grave a sin as pouring ceremonial wine on the ground.

Earl: wow. Those cardinals are nuts. Completely and thoroughly nuts.

DOMA violates the Equal Protection clause in the Massachusetts constitution (which is older than the USA one, though the equal protection clause I think is a much more recent amendment).

Other states might not have such equal protection clauses in their base legal documents.

The Masschusetts case thus does not generally apply to the rest of the USA.

Well, Paula, DOMA also violates the Equal Protection clause of the US Constitution, and some other provisions there. Let's see if it winds up making any difference.

#108 myself

Not all states passed ERA, and some allow gender discrimination. Some also have passed laws defining marriage as between one female and one male--which is not the case in Massachusetts. Where a state has a law defining marriage as between one man and one woman and especially allows differentiation in the treament of them, I expect that DOMA does not conflict with the laws in such states. It does conflict with the laws in Massachusetts, which does not and never has had a law specifying that marriage is between one man and one woman....

Martha Coakley took the state's anti-DOMA dispute to federal appeals court bases on state law in Masschusetts as it exists and is in effect , as opposed to states where same-gender marriage proponents are trying to in-state DOMA-compliant laws overturned. In the case of Coakley it's the Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs the US Government, not citizen of California vs both the state of Californian and the US Government....

Ostensibly the two case smell the same and have the same general goal, however, the internal guts are very different....

Xopher at 104: permit me to both agree and clarify: the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy (cardinals, Curia, etc.) has been insane for quite a while. Those of us in the pews, aka the Body of Christ, are not insane. Frustrated, fed up, grieving, aghast, angry -- but mostly sane.

Lizzy: quite. That's who I'm talking about.

#110 mysef

are trying to in-state DOMA-compliant laws overturned.

should be

are trying to get in-state DOMA-compliant laws overturned.

The arguments that Coakley used included things such as the paperwork/expense overhead to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where the Commonwealth recognizes a couple as married but the federal government doesn't--that this is a hardship particularly for the Commonwealth.... that does not apply to states which don't recognize same gender marriages as legitimate....

#111 Lizzy
Being from religious tradition where one of the jokes is if there are two Jews on a desert island there are three synagogues--one for each of them and the third which neither of them will set foot in (the reality is nowhere near so extreme, but schism out of one congregation into creating others, is something I've seen happen... and then people get annoyed with the "we spun ourselves out" congregation and quit that one, too...), I sometimes wonder that the laity don't revolt and have more splinter movements in Catholicism.... some of the Protestant denominations of Christianity are particularly congregation-independent-minded, to the degree even where some of them have left one organized branch and moved to another (e.g., the congregation former Pres. Carter belongs to changing quitting the Southern Baptist Convention and joining the UCC (can't remember what the first C stands for).

I gathered from what a priest I was acquainted with who had clerked at the Vatican said, that the politics inside there are or were much more... lively... than show to the outside world, but the idea of the level of centralized authority and control involved with the Catholic Church rather bemuses me at times. There is much beauty (including Dirac's equating of beauty and truth) in Roman Catholicism, and many centuries of devotion and good works and heritage. I'm still bemused though by the firmness of the hierarchical forms and certain obduracies and official inflexiblities and such and the decisios and actions that people accede to.... in the wake of Martin Luther some things eventually changed with the Counter-Reformation, but....

I'm an outsider. I remain grateful to Pope Benedict for his role over time in saying that I as part of a group am exempt from official targetted evangelizing by the Catholic Church. I grew up less conflicted about Catholicism and its institutions than many Roman Catholics--I was never attacked with e.g. a ruler by any nuns (something that happened a lot in the 1960s in Catholic schools apparently). A retired Monseigneur went to my father's funeral--they had been friends from childhood, and presumably attended Mass together ("Why aren't you an altarboy?" a priest has asked my father, "Because I'm Jewish!" said my father...), and my grandfather had chauffered the nun of St Charles in Woburn around in the station wagon sized for his furniture business delivering furniture to his customers (he died when I was a small child, but the first few years of my life my parents had lived near my grandparents, with the nunnery between their house and my parents' apartment--never having been subject to nuns' authority I never experienced unpleasantry from them) or otherwise abused by anyone in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and was never subject to their authority.

Bottom line, I'm an outside as regards the internal conflicts and such of Roman Catholicism, and the moral dilemmas involved where laity have so little control/input/authority regarding corruption, abuse, coverup, and remediation regarding Church officials.

In religions and denominations where congregations have organizational self-determination, the congregrations can sack the officials, can get them prosecuted directly if there are criminal issues, and look for/replace them with candidates of their own choice. But that's where congregations have that self-determination....

Alice Bentley (101): That HEMA page is great. And I love it that 'ghettoblaster' is the same in Dutch.

Yarrow--

There are plausible arguments (IANAL) that make DOMA unconstitutional without touching state laws that restrict marriage to mixed-sex couples. Basically, the tenth amendment argument that says the feds can't tell Massachusetts how to define marriage doesn't stop, say, Virginia from defining it in much narrower, bigoted ways.

This is a different argument from the equal protection one in Perry v. Schwarzenegger: if anything, it's the opposite tack, since the plaintiffs in Perry argue that California does not have the constitutional right to define marriage that narrowly.

DOMA, in my estimation fails in that it is contrary to the Full Faith & Credit clause, where contracts valid in one state have to be considered as valid in all

And , proving that not only are the Tea party batshit insane, but they also want to force charity out the window

Open threadiness---

I am in my third decade. A recent brain scan says my brain looks like someone's in their seventh decade. I am a candidate for dementia.

-----

one thing I will miss follows another
and I end up running out of fingers as i count them off---
to have thoughts transparent, to see through to the other side
to have a memory crystallize as a seed of dust in a cloud turns heavy with water,
to have love become something I can tuck into a fist, or hide under my tongue,
the nitroglycerin to quiet the unsteady heart,
to have this word catch the light, but like a piece of turned sea glass
not enough to cut, but curved into a finger of what once held wine,
a drink, another spell, in another lifetime.

It is interesting that the development of Aikido coincides historically with the postwar pacification of Japan.

ma larkey @ 119 -- being a candidate for it doesn't mean it's going to happen, necessarily. If you want not to lose those things, you might have some options (and if the dementia isn't showing up yet, it might be time to try some of them!).

According to this Mayo Clinic website post, brain scans alone can't diagnose dementia.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-edge-newspaper-2010/jul-02a.html

Brain scan

Imaging is a valuable medical tool, but we're far from Star Trek levels yet.

ma larkey @119

Being a candidate does not a diagnosis make. If you are really concerned, get a neuro-psych eval to establish your baseline. Then it can be repeated every other year or so to identify any problems.

(This from the woman just diagnosed with the familial cancer. But it was caught early and had I been more diligent, it probably could have been prevented.)

Paula: I've not looked at the text of the decision (I've got a copy, just not made the time), but the analyses I've read say the scope of the decision is broad, uses the US Constitution, not the Mass., to get to its conclusions.

#124 Terry
What I've heard from the area news is that the appeals court judge's decision applies only to Massachusetts and not any other state. If it goes to a higher level though, then the rulings would go to more general applicability.

http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=&sc3=&id=107821

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/07/09/curb_on_gay_marriage_upended/?page=2

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/24187965/detail.html

Emmet O'Brien's fault:
Buffy-James Joyce's Ulysses fanfic...
UGH!
He came up with that at CKD's birthday party here at Readercon....

Reading the decision; the equal protection clause of Massachusetts doesn't apply (and, in fact, it really was never an issue, since this was a Federal District Court, so Massachesett's laws aren't in the jurisdiction of the court).

Regrettably, for all I think it horrendous, it looks as if congress may actually has the ability to give states the right to fail to recognise other states laws, "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof."

Further, for all that I really want DOMA dead (and think the reading Congress took in effecting DOMA is overbroad, in that it what it says is Congress has the power to show how things may be proved, not that they can undo a law from one state to the other), the ability of the Feds to define how Federal benefits shall apply, seems to be a valid one), I am afraid the scope of this decision is overbroad.

Federal benefits, are just that, federal. The Feds are paying the money, the states don't really get to set the terms. The problem is the oddity which is marriage, and how it affects so many things. The Feds have been playing with it, while claiming it's a state's decision.

Which means the states get to set the terms, but if they don't toe the federal line, then the residents of such states which go their own way, may not be entitled to federal benefits.

If this decision was narrower in scope, limiting itself only to marriage then it might be defensible (given that the gov't didn't use any of the arguments of the actual law when they were defending it) but it's not limited, so it pretty much makes it impossible for the federal gov't to control those things which are in it's purview.

Which isn't sustainable. Much as I like the specific result, I don't think this is good jurisprudence.

Which sucks.

The strongest hope (and not a good one with the Supreme Court configured as it presently is, and [sadly] is likely to remain for at least the next decade) is that the decision calls DOMA into question on a much weaker standard (rational basis), than the plaintiffs appealed under (i.e. strict scrutiny).

Which means it's possible the overbroad interpretation of equal protection could be overturned, but the lower threshold be upheld.

With the present bench, however, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Paula: I think those interpretations are wrong. The decision applies to the Federal Gov't.

There is no way that couples from Mass. can be given marriage benefits while denying them to couples from Iowa, etc.

Bruce E. Durocher II, #103, Ack, Bruce, I'm so sorry!

ma larkey, #119, there's usually ways to deal with that and I hope it works out.

Does anyone, anywhere, ever wear something like this other than on the runway?

I don't understand why someone would build a costume like that. If it were green, it could be Emerald City business attire for a stage production of The Wizard of Oz, but not in that color.

Seriously, if anyone understands why those things are even designed at all, please let me know.

Wow... he looks as if he has view camera bellows on for pantaloons.

Yeah, I feel sorry for this poor model.

Viki @ 116: There are plausible arguments (IANAL) that make DOMA unconstitutional without touching state laws that restrict marriage to mixed-sex couples. Basically, the tenth amendment argument ...

What Andrew Koppelman at Balkinization says is that while the tenth amendment argument doesn't fly, there is a possibility that equal protection might. (The tenth amendment argument offends left-leaning folks because it comes very close to saying that the states can nullify federal law, and offends right-leaning folks because they hate the result in this case.)

The needle-threading problem for the equal protection argument is that if the courts admit that gender orientation is a suspect classification, then they need to apply strict scrutiny to state laws that discriminate on that basis, and thus to strike those laws down. Which isn't going to happen (yet!) So the equal protection argument has to say that there is no rational basis for the DOMA. Which there isn't, but the rational basis test is so weak that the Supreme Court can pretend, if it wants to, that Congress might rationally have passed DOMA to preserve wheat yields in Alaska.

What Koppelman hopes is that Kennedy, in particular, will pay attention to the reality that in fact Congress had no motive other hatred:

What ultimately does the work in these cases is a holistic judgment about what you think is going on in these laws. The fact that a group – and here, without going all the way to the formality of suspect classification, a court can note that gay people have been the object of hysterical antipathy, as evidenced by the wacky things that DOMA’s supporters said during the Congressional debate – has in the past been the object of unconstitutional discrimination certainly has some weight in the judgment. So does the fact that the state’s justifications fit the statute so poorly. And so does the fact that the burden imposed on that group is unprecedented.

Xopher #132: Yeah, I feel sorry for this poor model.

Everyone knows the camera puts on 10 pleats.

Xopher, 130: No, of course not. High fashion is a form of theater, closely related but not identical to the theater of the red carpet. As Teresa's pointed out, it's a language Lady Gaga speaks fluently enough to make jokes in. It's all performance art.

But TexAnne, how do these people make money? Who payes for these designs? Why would anyone buy those clothes and then not wear them?

Xopher, AIUI, they have sponsors, and I'm pretty sure they have collectors, angels, what-have-you; it's the same as modern art. It isn't to our taste, but it's a valid expression of human ingenuity.

And, Xopher, it's an outlier that is likely to move fashion in a particular direction (in this case, towards more voluminous outfits -- which may result in slightly less fat oppression, if the world of fashion shows any tendency to have a logical effect on the way people look). As an art object, it's making a statement something like "Let's go here next!" -- other people make the same statement with different outfits (rather like the steampunk-influenced fashions that made the runway this year).

Why yes, Karen is quite interested in fashion and feeds me a fair amount of information -- why do you ask?

Well, it makes sense as an art piece (or, as I said before, as a costume). I guess I was thrown by it being called "fashion" -- which I can't help thinking of as something that people (albeit only the "Beautiful People") might actually wear in public.

Thank you Marilee, Tom, Steve, throwmearope. I'm told that the scan isn't predictive in itself, but it's still puzzling. I've been tested and am keeping fingers crossed.

Xopher, that's one view of it. But all arts have their popular expressions, and fashion is no different. Lots of designers take their inspiration from what people wear on the street.

According to the most recent episode of MythBusters, in which a bridge is built out of duct tape, Jamie weighs 180 pounds, and Adam is 175. I find that hard to believe as I'm right in the middle and I look like the Scarecrow while Jamie is the Lion.

#120 Erik Nelson - Also interesting that the development of Aikido coincides with the leader of the art reaching past middle-age, when muscling through is just not going to work anymore.

(I haven't studied since 2004, but I really loved in when I was practicing.)

Ma larkey, you write poetry that I would wish to write, and can't.

Cobblers, lasts, that sort of thing.

May it be the same in your eighth decade.

all the rest of you figured out long ago what principle structures abi's list in the original post. but i haven't.

sure, i recognize meg's missing glove (pssst--john has it!) but that's about it.

now that the thread has passed its jubilee (there are more than 143 comments on it), would someone take pity on the slow-witted, and explain abi's list?

(maybe not its jubilee, i don't know. its golden thread-day? there should be *some* term for the nth post on open thread n.)

Russ@69: My sensei showed us convincing evidence that the amount of damage, if any, is a result of interaction between the aite and the tori's skill, as well as the tori's intentions, in applying the 10 basic principles, usually mostly a matter of ki-no-nagaren one the part of the aite but really dependent on the exact situation.

This can vary from shattered bones and broken necks(not shown but extrapolated) to kaishi-wasa and the tori finding himself in a bind.

kid, 145: They're all love-tokens.

the list of love tokens moves me to say--we are blessed when there is something to hold on to, a latch on a door to keep the dark out, a pin to keep a seam in place for stitching, the bead that keeps another from slipping out and rolling away, lost.

#144 Dave Luckett--your poetry has precision and discipline, while mine runs all over the place like a guest wanting all the garnishes on the plates. So, it's all good.

kid bitzer @145:

They are all the things that abi is bringing to the meetup so people will recognize her. Also,
she'll be wearing a sonnet.

The phelpsies have nicked another plot point from the wacky contingent of the Islamic extremists. American Idolatry?

Bruce at 103: that sucks! Insurance?

kid bitzer @145 -- a simple Google told me that 143 is a reference to "I love you" based on the number of letters in each word -- hence, list of love tokens as other ways of saying the same thing.

Marilee: thank you! We have the VIN, and since it needs repair we've tried to get the info out to some of the Moped groups around here, but it wasn't the way to start the weekend: I can't afford a replacement, and couldn't afford the repair work that needed to be done.

Lizzy L: no insurance because it needed repair work to get it running again (One night I came back to the parking lot at the Vashon ferry and found that someone had taken a hunting knife to the seat--which, after they couldn't kill it by stabbing it ten times, ended up with a number of scallops cut into the edge--then cut all cables and wires and followed that with removing the right chain guard and the air filter and throwing them into a deep, deep overflow drain.), and the nearest Moped repair was in Monroe, WA and we didn't have a truck to transport it. I later reached a guy that opened a moped repair shop in Seattle (which closed a few months afterward) who said he could get it running for about $400.00 in parts and new tires, which I didn't have at the time. I was saving up for it, but that does no good now. Looking at the frantic folks who spotted it in the back yard and who tried desperately to buy it off me because the frame and accessories were in perfect shape and the engine was intact I should have tried for insurance but what insurer would have been willing to take on a non-running vehicle? So, blah.

Found today on Comcast's site...

Robert Spillane, son of murdered mobster Mickey Spillane, falls from the window of his New York apartment.

Thank you, Kojak, for teaching me the word 'defenestration'.

Alice Bentley @143
the development of Aikido coincides with the leader of the art reaching past middle-age, when muscling through is just not going to work anymore.

There are many reasons that I think of aikido as a martial art for adults. But it could also be that I never studied any budo as a kid.

ma larkey @148:
we are blessed when there is something to hold on to, a latch on a door to keep the dark out, a pin to keep a seam in place for stitching, the bead that keeps another from slipping out and rolling away, lost

Yes, absolutely, exactly and precisely that.

jnh @149:
They are all the things that abi is bringing to the meetup so people will recognize her. Also, she'll be wearing a sonnet.

Yes, but they'll all be invisible.

Hmm, isn't a sonnet a form of very loosely-knitted headgear, with exactly fourteen rows? The last two of which tie the whole thing together?

Xopher, 157: You know, of course, that there are several people around here who can make one. Be afraid.

TexAnne, fortune favors the brave. I'm hoping to tempt one of them.

The first eight rows should be one color, of course, and the last six another. Or the next four, with the last two being a third color.

Or you could go by line, in which case the Italian sonnet would have a saner color mix.

I...don't have the yarn in my stash for that, but I know exactly what it should look like. (Really, really dumb, in the event.)

I could see a sonnet afghan working quite well-- 14 rows colored by rhyme scheme, each row having 10 alternating light/dark blocks to indicate syllabic stress?

Xopher, I believe I've seen a model of the hat that abi will be wearing. Very haute couture; I understand they're still tweaking the spacing.

TexAnne, do you mean you think it should look dumb, or that it's dumb not to have yarn for it on hand?

Julie, that sounds like a horror to me. Bet you can't do it and make it pretty! (I neener in your general direction.)

Debbie, I get a 404 when I click that link.

Xopher, you said Sonnet Bonnet, and the only way I can think of to do it in 14...eh, I'm going to say "ridges" is to have a rainbowy rectangle on top of the head, and a monochrome square in the back of the head. Otherwise it would be a Sonnet Beanie, see?

Yes. I was thinking of a VERY open knit, looser than the knitted "chainmail" some people were wearing a few years back. Really giant needles? Maybe I'm mixed up and that can only be done by crocheting.

Oops, sorry. Hope this works better.

Debbie: hideous! I love it. I thought that woman was completely without mammalian characteristics until I noticed that she's bending backwards and twisting her head around. Wow. They never stop abusing those poor models, do they?

Xopher @130 - I want to know if he makes accordion noises when he walks.

Kip, if only we could find video of his runway walk! What a great remix that would make. I assume you're speaking of Looney Toons popup squeezebox noises, right?

We're minutes from the end of the World Cup. I keep expecting that some player's going to crack and yell for them to shut up with the damn vuvuzelas already.

Whoops! Spain got one in. I was hoping for Netherlands, though I did root, mildly, for Spain in their game before this.

Xopher @157:

purl knit knit purl purl purl purl knit knit purl
knit purl purl knit knit knit knit purl purl knit
purl sl2 on cn f purl k2 from cn purl purl sl1 on cn b k2 p1 from cn purl
knit knit purl purl knit knit purl purl knit knit
purl purl sl2 on cn f purl k2 from cn s1 on cn b k2 p1 from cn purl purl
knit knit knit purl purl purl purl knit knit knit
purl purl purl sl2 on cn f knit knit k2 from cn purl purl purl
knit knit knit purl purl purl purl knit knit knit
purl purl s1 on cn b k2 p1 from cn sl2 on cn f purl k2 from cn purl purl
knit knit purl purl knit knit purl purl knit knit
purl sl1 on cn b k2 p1 from cn purl purl sl2 on cn f purl k2 from cn purl
knit purl purl knit knit knit knit purl purl knit
purl knit knit purl purl purl purl knit knit purl
knit purl purl knit knit knit knit purl purl knit

(Yes, I'm a sucker for chiasmus.)

Oh, dammit, abi, you've thrown rice in front of a vampire. 'Scuse me a second....

Xopher, that's exactly what I had in mind. We could fake it with a harmonica, if need be.

Well, congrats to Spain. First sporting event in decades that I particularly cared about.

abi, I can't compile or interpret that code. I suspect that I simply don't have any hardware it can run on (not to mention lacking the long pointy peripherals I'd need to execute it).

kid bitzer @145 - (maybe not its jubilee, i don't know. its golden thread-day? there should be *some* term for the nth post on open thread n.)
What comes up in my mind (when I turn it over like a fortune-telling 8-ball and see what drifts up to the surface) is 'square.' This comment squares the post. Um, so the comment itself would be the, uh… quadratic? I dunno.

A moment while I wrangle the technology....

Another moment while I whack the technology upside the head....

Kip W @176: I think I understand your 'square', but to me the nth post on open thread n suggests a diagonal (in the aggregate, anyway). No idea what to call the individual posts, though.

Okay, I think it worked. Here you go!

Just so long as whoever wears the Sonnet Bonnet doesn't get called Sinister Finnister, we won't have to worry about Frank Herbert's lawyers getting upset. (See the story "A.W.F., UnLimited"...)

Kip W @ 171:
We're minutes from the end of the World Cup

For some Dutch fans that may indeed have been the end of the world.

Abi... Say, which timezone are you in right now?

Which would I rather have? A bonnet, a sonnet, a Monet or a Manet?

TexAnne...I don't understand. Does TexAnne's pattern really make something that small? Also, there must be something I'm not getting.

Xopher: Abi's sonnet, when knit, makes the little nearly-square thing with the cabled X.

Xopher: Oh, I think I see what you were asking--ten syllables/stitches in that yarn is about 2" wide, but the cables made it draw in. 10 stitches x 14 rows = really quite eensy, yes.

Yeah. Can't wear that on your head. Or rather, you could, but only as tefillin.

I told you I liked chiasmus in my sonnets.

(Thanks, TexAnne; I wasn't sure if I'd got it quite right. I'm at my parents' house in California, and heavily jet-lagged; it's not the best time to try to pen-and-paper knit patterning.)

Ah, I get the chiasmus joke now. Duh on me!

It was a joke accessible only to knitters until someone translated it, Xopher.

Someone else will have to do an alternative version that would actually stay on a head and keep it warm. I've not done much hat knitting and don't have the patterns internalized.

With only 14 rows, I should think that would be...challenging. At best.

kid bitzer, there was no such term until this thread. But now we are in a new world.

Henceforth, the n^th comment of Open thread n is to be known as a bitzer.

me @ 182:

Google searches to infinity and beyond: I found a news photo from the End of the World Cup Game.

If one can knit with ribbon, then that would be a way to make a hat of fourteen rows.

Can one?

abi, 191: I don't know if your sonnet will make a hat. But if I can find superbulky yarn (2-3 st/in) in enough colors, I can make a hat with 14 garter ridges, with each color representing a rhyme. OTGH, that's kind of a lot of money for a joke; it can wait until I'm employed.

Kevin, one can--but it has to be fabric ribbon, not the fake stuff florists use.

A fascist octopus (see particles) would have a hard time goose-stepping.

TexAnne, would a self-striping super-bulky yarn maybe do the trick? You would probably want to break the yarn between some color changes to manipulate the colors correctly, but it might reduce the need for multiple skeins.

...except that now that I go looking on Ravelry and elsewhere, it doesn't seem to exist.

Doubled-up bulky or aran weight?

I think I'm taking this too seriously.

abi @193: I think the eponymous "bitzer" is a fine term, and kid bitzer deserves the honor.

I find myself tempted to browse back through the 142 prior bitzers (and I presume they all exist).

This seems like the sort of news snippet that the community might like: Mark Reckless, MP was Too Drunk to Vote

abi @ 193 Ah, and here I used the bitzer for this thread for an aikido note (since I hadn't even noticed what comment we were up to) when the chance was more or less even that I would use it to mention how this topic reminded me of a song I haven't heard in decades - and a paper of pins.

Xopher @130 et seq.--

Yes. It's clothing as art form--and while there were pobably several things that extreme in the show, most of it was probably closer to what actual humans will wear--possibly, as was suggested, somewhat looser fitting clothing, with pleating.

It's also advertising--it's intended to catch people's eye and stand out from all the other people presenting collections, for the most part to stores and ready-to-wear manufacturer's. Every picture or video clip that makes it into print, onto television or the internet is free advertising, and the odder stuff is what gets shown in that way. They don't expect to sell much of the extreme stuff, except to collectors--but the publicity it generates will help sell the rest of the collection. You won't see most of the rest of the clothes--the ones intended to be worn in daily life--in news photographs or on television; they won't be odd and eye-catching enough to compete for a spot on the news. I can't speak for menswear designers, but in womenswear, even the more wearable items, when displayed on the runway at the show, will share in eye-catching make-up, hairstyles, and accessories which are similar throughout the designer's show, pusing commone elements--a particular shade of lipstick and blush, lighter or heavier eye makeup, the use (or abuse) of false eyelashes, short hair, hair worh up, long flowing hair, shoes in a particular style, and so on, as the fancy takes them. These are also often too extreme to be worn in the normal course of things--but they do attract attention to the collection, and help to publicize it.

I agree about the proposed sound effects for those pants.

Also, runway models at these big shows get paid a few hundred dollars an hour to tolerate being dressed up in these flights of fancy. That tends to limit my sympathy for anyone undergoing the indignity of wearing pants like that in front of witnesses.

Thanks fidelio. That makes a lot more sense. The clothes don't—but they aren't supposed to!

kip w @176--

yes, i almost wrote "square" back in 145, but then wondered whether that should instead be the n^2 comment on the nth thread (and this one will probably get cut off before comment #20449!)

salixulon @179--

"diagonal" is nice, too.

abi @193--

squeeee!! i'm famous! i want to thank my mother and father and all the little people who worked so hard to make this possible!

seriously--that's very sweet of you. as a token of gratitude, i am going to retroactively name a whole category of monasteries and convents after you. yur welcome.

saliluxon & alice @201 & 203--how fun to be memorialized. as conan doyle said after dipping into horace, non omnis moriar ti.

alright--i must go lie down now until the giddiness passes. tomorrow i shall be more composed.

I forgot to link to this when I wrote it.

I'm coming to New York/New Jersey

I hope some number of the folks who live in that part of the world would like to pull a little Gathering of Light, so that link is for planning, etc.

Interesting site: Forgotten Bookmarks, where are pictures and descriptions/transcriptions of the things found in old books by a clerk in a rare book store.

Shopping lists, photos, cards, and some maddeningly intriguing letters.

Fashion as art is only slightly higher in my bleargh hierarchy than pretentious "installations", although I suppose if someone were willing to pay me one hundred thousand dollars for "Prank #34: Flaming Bag of Dog Poop on Dust Bowl Era Porch", I might think differently....

Terry, I'd love to finally meet you. I hope something can be worked out.

One thing about being unemployed, I have a lot of free time.

me @ 182:

Google searches to infinity and beyond: I found a news photo from the End of the World Cup Game.

Currently in an ancient motel in Chama, NM -- the room we're in is the only one which can access the wifi in the office building. I keep misreading the town's name on various business signs as "Obama" and being momentarily startled. Yesterday's car difficulty turned out to be nothing more serious than a loose clamp. It is impossible to find inexpensive hotel rooms anywhere in CO except right along the interstates.

Today was a red-letter day for me -- I got to cross something off my lifetime list! We drove past a glider port, and went back to check on the price of a ride, and it wasn't outrageous. I've been wanting to take a sailplane ride since I was about 10 years old, and now I have.

pericat @ 209: I love that missing bookmarks site!

Lee @ 213: I got to ride in a glider once, and loved it. I was surprised at how loud the wind was, and how bumpy the ride.

This has been a knitting/fiber-intense weekend for me. The usual Knitter's Breakfast, where I finished the printed portion of my embroidery bit and started in on the "When I'm Tired Of This, It's Done," portion, that was Saturday. Sunday, a friend from Breakfast had a birthday showing-- she decided that she was seventy, she wants people to see what she does. Biking and cake decorating from years ago*, knitting and embroidery and more knitting and sewing and more knitting and swatches from knitting and this Indian embroidery technique that we will make her teach us, seriously, and knitting. Monday, which is inexplicably today, is Pub Knit, which means the Drunken Scarf will get another stripe.
And even Making Light is in on it!

*In an article about her cross-country trip, there's a bit that's about, "She does not consider herself an avid cyclist. She's done RAGBRAI** nine times..." and I just laughed.
**Bike across the state of Iowa.

I agree with the premise of the fear is the enemy of justice sidelight, but there is a really big hole in the conclusion... the difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter isn't the reasonableness of the fear.

That's part of the rationale for claims of self-defense.

Voluntary manslaughter is the result of an attack on another person, which was not possessed of malice, but did have the intent to harm.

Involuntary is a negligent act, which has the potential to harm, but had not the intent.

As AACBRIML (All advice can be requested in ML):

I'm contemplating a pile of worth-little books.

They aren't worth rereading, I wouldn't let my friends read them [there's so much more good stuff out there], if non-fiction they impart outdated information, and if I made them free-for-the-taking they'd only be taken away because they feed the desire of cr@phounds.

They're the book equivalent of finding a rat caught in a live-trap: I don't want them, I don't want other people to have to deal with them, but I also don't want to just throw them out. I'm definitely, this time, not going to put off decisions about them to a future me: they're leaving the house, somehow.

What would you do?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale -- take 'em to someplace like Half Price Books (if you have one)? They (HPB) decide what to do with them after they've given you an offer, including donating books they deem un-sell-able.

Kathryn @ 217: I take books like that to Goodwill. One person's trash, etc., and while it's making someone else deal with it, I think it's their gig and they don't mind.

I did, once, recycle a book that I thought was actively harmful (it presented egregiously wrong information on an important issue). I think I did the right thing, but I'm still a little traumatized by the experience.

Antongarou@146

...damage, if any, is a result of interaction between the aite and the tori's skill, as well as the tori's intentions

Nothing there I object to. My guess is if you were to fully execute a technique with someone who couldn't follow appropriately*, you would have to be an incredibly skilled and sensitive tori not to cause serious damage.

In mixed grade practice** with strangers (seminars, summer schools etc.) I have a high regard for tori who start slow and assess uke's capabilities. White belts for all kyu grades (in most federations) helps - they could be beginners or highly experienced, all you know is that they're not yudansha - but I've seen some unfortunate confusions occur between traditions that put all women in hakima***, and those who reserve hakima for yudansha****. As in so many things, good practitioners are careful with their assumptions.

* For example, in a real attack
** I had to look that up and was interested to learn that in US English "Practice" is acceptable as noun and verb, wherease in UK English the verb is apparently "Practise". I originally had it wrong under either usage (i.e. I wrote "Practise").
*** The gi is, after all, underwear
**** Particularly confusing as, unless you look carefully, the hakima hides the belt

Publishing OT: David Lubar has more information about Barnes & Noble's deep-discount books.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @217:
They're the book equivalent of finding a rat caught in a live-trap: I don't want them, I don't want other people to have to deal with them, but I also don't want to just throw them out.

If you really, seriously think the books should be removed from circulation, tear the covers off (with hardbacks, this may require the aid of a boxcutter) and put them into the paper recycling. Unlike landfill trash, the paper at least will be able to be used.

Yes, it's libricide. I know that's going to produce a frisson of horror in every single regular reader here, and I apologize now for the emotional distress this suggestion is causing the Fluorosphere.

I have done it with some college textbooks, which were about 30 years old (really, an astronomy textbook that old is neither old enough to be of real historical interest, nor anywhere near recent enough to provide useful information). I felt as though I were putting a pet to sleep, but at least with recycling the paper gets to go on as useful material.

Fiction, with rare exceptions, I donate*, but outdated nonfiction (especially scientific) may be better off recycled. Kook "Science" nonfiction**, unless you know someone who will cherish it for the laughs it can bring, may also be better off recycled, depending on how pernicious its mistruths are. People will have to deal with it, but as fodder to be repulped rather than as a semi-sacred object, AKA Book, which must be handled respectfully no matter how useless or even actively harmful its contents may be.

*If it's in good shape, the silliest Harlequin romance can make the person who wanted just that thing happy, and should have a chance to. I will note that one of the Goodwill Stores in Nashville has an annex that sells book by weight, though, so it's not as if there's a shortage of books being donated, at least in this city.

**You know the kind of thing--its contents have sciency content, often presented with a surfeit of erors and misinterpretations. They date pretty quickly, too.

fidelio has pretty much the right of it (though having my family own a used book store for going on 39 years, I have lost all horror at disposing, completely of some books).

Fiction is what it is. Non-fiction has a self-life.

Libricide--guilty as charged, and not one of my happier duties. Dated items that contained information that was just plain wrong, and belong on the shelves of university libraries to be examined by those who have [I hope] some critical thinking. In future, if I have to do that again, I will shoot for proper recycling [or academic donation.] Less pernicious matter goes to Half Price.
I once found a Hitler Youth manual in the local university library. That's where it belongs.
The thought of harming books has disturbed me ever since I learned to read.

Another one here who likes the comparision between dispatching books and putting pets to sleep. I recently parted that way with a few remaining university texts - I graduated in 1982, and those particular editions are of no interest to anyone.

Recently adopted from the library's used book sales: Fifth edition Webster's Collegiate, 1936/1941. The Canadian version, with 1941 Canadian Census data.

I think of books containing toxic misinformation in much the same way that I would think of a cake recipe containing belladonna or arsenic. If it's in my possession, the only ethical thing to do is destroy it; passing it on, in any way whatsoever, would render me morally culpable for the damage it might do to someone else, and I have no hesitation whatsoever about recycling it. Note that this is a decision I can only make for myself, and about books that I personally own.

If I think something might be of historical or collector interest, I'll check eBay and Amazon to see if there's any demand for it. If there are copies going begging, then it's either Half Price or Goodwill.

I once put a book out for incineration - it was an edition which was so egregiously bad that the publisher sent out a recall notice. (There are at least two more editions of it, which, IMO, are not a great deal better.)
Normally I wouldn't do such a thing, but this was an exceptional case.

Back to the knitted sonnet: I wonder if it might be possible to convey the actual text by applying French knots or the like in a morse pattern?

joann, 228: French knots on your average handknitted fabric are possible but would be a giant pain to do. It would be easier to convey Morse code by means of isolated purls. (Or beads. Beads are fun.)

Which loops around to Mme Defarge and how exactly she was knitting people's names--assuming that's what she was actually doing, and Dickens wasn't just being poetic and/or metaphorical.

I have on occasion played around with the idea of a cipher made to look like knitting abbreviations.

Like, it appears, many of us, I'm bothered by the idea of deliberately destroying (or damaging) a book.

However, I recognize situations where it's necessary. This includes actively dangerous stuff (I'm more inclined to consider incorrect medical or engineering information in this category than I am dangerous philosophical opinions). That stuff should be in suitable reference collections, including personal ones, but I'd feel pretty iffy about moving it through normal cheap-or-free book channels; the people who get it might not understand what they have.

Then there are the situations where it's unavoidable -- stuff that has no visible market. Most old non-fiction (some things are old enough to have a nostalgia market again; which is an argument why you might take a flyer on saving some things that current information says should be tossed). Some old and very bad fiction. I've been known to dump this kind of thing on places which, I'm nearly sure, will have to throw it out. And I'm wasting their employees' time by doing that. On the other hand, it's getting a second opinion; it doesn't get tossed unless we both agree.

One of the cases I feel least bad about is something that's already on Project Gutenberg. The ability of people to access it depends much less on finding physical copies of those things, so whatever I do with the physical copy matters less. I still won't destroy it if I can find somebody with an interest, of course.

This is probably close to the "weird obsessions" category.

I have a cowl (Marna made it for me), which I use on the motorcycle (It keeps the wind,and the bugs, off my neck. It also reduces helmet noise).

Around the rim she put a hidden message, in Morse. It's not very efficient way of moving information in knitwork. I don't, however, doubt that a person of wit couldn't devise a cipher of some sort, using a more compact set of rules.

All a Mme. DeFarge needs is a reliable aide memoire

"Sometime in about the mid 1980s, the phone rang.

"And a voice said, we want you to go to Madagascar."

Douglas Adams on TED.com

ddb@231,

To help with the least bad feelings, I may go ahead and upload them/scan them first*-- letting the unseen library sort them out-- because taking the cover off is a necessary part of recycling, and might as well keep going.

Although cutting the spine off of a book seems like a line that can never been uncrossed. I'm not yet a patternist for books.

-------
* remembering that I have access to a decent scanner.

Damnit.

Harvey Pekar died. He'd been all beat up from multiple rounds of cancer treatment, but still, 70 is unfairly young these days, and he was still churning stuff out.

Once known for his cranky autobiographics comics, he'd lately been writing wonderful little comic profiles about other folks.

One of my occasional tasks as an undergrad working in the campus library was replacing the paperback set of laws (or regulations or whatever they were) on the shelves with newer editions. I'd take the old ones upstairs to a large machine where I'd chop the spines off before placing the pages in a recycling bin. I knew perfectly well that these were obsolete, but it still felt weird to destroy a book that way.

I have cut spines off books, to make scanning practical. I didn't have a good scanner, no stack feed and had to do each side individually, so it could have been immensely easier. Still wasn't bad.

If you're disposing of the copy, it's not on Gutenberg, and it qualifies, that's certainly a great idea.

I had to dispose of a lot of books when I was sorting through my dad's house. Boxes and boxes went to the library sale, old encyclopedias and particularly damaged books went on the fire pile. I considered it a more fitting end for a book than going out with the trash, almost like funeral pyre. Yes, it was hard to do, I don't even WRITE in books, but no one wants moldy encyclopedias from 1985. Plus, I got my Grandmother's original copy of Animal Farm from the sorting, so I consider myself repaid for the emotional trauma.

I pretty much stopped feeling bad about tossing books in my last semester of library school. The Kohler, Wisconsin public library was getting their carpet replaced, and the previous library director didn't believe in getting rid of things. Ever. Since this was a library with one full-time staff person, they begged the library school for help, so seven of us went up in a van one day and spent eleven hours going through their fiction collection.

Our guidelines were very, very broad -- if it's been checked out more than twice, or any time in the past ten years, keep it. Those that didn't meet that criteria were run by a company called Better World Books, which takes donations and resells the books and uses the funds thus generated for worldwide literacy projects. They won't take everything, though, so they've got a barcode scanner system on their website to check and see if they want it or not. If they don't think they can move it, they don't want it. We boxed up probably twenty or thirty boxes of adult and kids' fiction to send to them.

We also filled a Dumpster three-quarters full. These were, quite seriously, books that nobody wanted; books that hadn't been checked out of a tiny public library with limited selection in more than a decade. Sometimes, they really do just have to go away.

(And with all that said, I still have a couple of out-of-date archaeology textbooks taking up space on my shelf because I can't quite bring myself to just toss them. *sigh*)

I've largely gotten over my disgust with throwing out old computer texts. Java 1.0 Made EZ, The Essential Windows 3.1, Desktop Publishing with WordStar 5.0 . . . that sort of thing.

I toss these in the recycle bin w/o guilt.

More recent books might find a buyer at Goodwill, but donating the really old stuff is just postponing the inevitable. Many books donated to Goodwill eventually find their way to recycling bins or ballast holds.

This Is Just to Say

I Love Charts has charted
the plums
that were in
the anthology.

And which
you were probably
tired
of parodying.

Forgive me.
It is delicious
so sweet
and so sequential.

In the past five years I've tossed one book, and it was harboring active wood borers or some other critter. I could see the little white crawly things inside the holes they were creating. I wrapped it in a plastic bag, sealed the bag with a twist-tie and threw it into the landfill-designated trash bin, shuddering.

My mother is a librarian - she also knows from book retirement. Although this thread is interesting enough that I needed to get the quote that was in my .sigfile before I lost it:

on 'Dianetics' and 'Battlefield Earth': "Burning books is *wrong*. So we shot them instead." Apparently they do quite well as targets; whatever he was using had as much trouble getting all the way through BE as many a human reader. -- Brian Harradine, in the Monastery

I recall an issue of Science Fiction Eye which included a photo-essay review of an Orson Scott Card novel.

It showed the reviewer's pet wolf happily chewing the book to pieces.

Furniture stores frequently have old books in their room displays. Perhaps they can make a home for old volumes.

kid bitzer @207 - And now in every open thread, somewhere around the nth post, people will be posting comments that say only "Bitzer!" and "Darn it, you got in ahead of me! I was going to Bitzer!"

Stefan@240: I'm planning on recycling my dated tech literature for a workout program.

245
I remember looking at one furniture photo and recognizing the encyclopedia on the bookshelves - it was one we had when I was a kid (and, dated or not, still very useful; we donated it to a export-charity program).

P J Evans@248: Do you mean you recognized the very set you had donated, or another copy of the same edition?

kip w @246--

well, i'd be immensely flattered, of course. i've been a hissing all my life; it'll make a change to be a byword.

but i have a feeling that the next time the question comes up, things are going to get really, really gross.

Dan, it was the same encyclopedia - I don't think it had more than one edition, with yearbooks - but not the same physical set, AFAIK. ('American People's Encyclopedia', sold, I think, through Sears.)

Fron the NYT: Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich

I love this town: "We're glad that everyone is alive, despite being 'undead'.

Bruce@253 — Funny. Funnier would be sodomitic dinosaurs, but zombies are funny enough.

Silly season is upon us:

Abductees Declare War On Aliens

LONG BEACH, Calif. (Wireless Flash - FlashNews) – Alien abductees aren’t taking it lying down anymore – they’ve just declared war on extraterrestrials.

According to UFO researcher Terry Floyd Johnson, there’s been an intergalactic battle brewing between ETs and the “primitives” they abduct for the past nine months.

Johnson claims the war has intensified in recent days, especially since abductees, known as “Rowdies Rangers,” made a major move.

Johnson says that on the 4th of July, abductees banded together to destroy a bunch of top-secret bases belonging to aliens because the ETs were planning on attacking Earth first.

Mycroft W @243: I'm stealing that quote. Thank you.

I've thrown away many a (severely water or smoke damaged) book. There is a threshold for it. And, professionally, I couldn't tell you how many stripped books I've taken to the recycling center (and the occasional odd bit of printed paper I've saved from there, occasionally quite profitably).

Hi, Kathryn - Ananda Booksellers in Mountain View has plenty of Bad Science Fiction, and probably would be happy to have more. Bad or obsolete non-fiction? Probably recycle it.

Sigh - I've got a collection of a dozen years worth of Usenix conference proceedings, which aren't the kind of thing that really go bad, but realistically I'm never going to read again and probably nobody else wants, since any library that would want that kind of thing already has it. Maybe Freecycle would?

Apparently Fred Phelps and his little band of bigots have decided to picket Comic-Con.

It would be rather funny if everyone just assumed Phelps etc. were just an unusual variation on cosplaying...

Kathryn from Sunnyvale, #217, I give them to the Friends of the Library. If they don't sell, they send them for paper recycling.

I survived LibertyCon, including the terrorizing moments when a friend had a seizure. I found out I can teleport through a crowd to get ice a nurse asks for. My friend was recovered well enough to make an "I'm all right" lap through the Con two or three hours later.

apropos of the textile site posted in particles: Dr. paisley found an amazing pair of 501s at our favorite thrift shop Saturday. not only are they exactly his size (unusual because it is fairly common AND that style of jeans, most folks wear until they fall apart), BUT.

they have an amazing sort of Japanese scene embroidered onto the backside, over the pockets, etc. I'd look at them to describe them better but he's removed them to his clothes storage.

Apropos #258 -- they can't have thought this through. Where are they going to sleep? There isn't a hotel room to be had in the area, as far as I know.

In other... news? I don't know what to make of this.

Schools and drug experts are warning parents to beware of "digital drugs" that Mustang High School students blamed for their apparent intoxication.

While I can sort-of believe that you can induce altered consciousness via sounds, I can't believe even high-school principals are gullible enough to buy this story.

Wyman, #260: Is your friend's name Tom by any chance?

VictorS, what sort of crack are people smoking to produce this kind of information? One part of the article actually sounds as if the noises cause benefits to adhd kids, and so on.

Sounds like people grasping at straws to make kids 'bad' so they can be mean to them. Just saying. there are enough people out there that get off on that kind of thing.

I am not a parent but I have enough young people in my life (baby through to grownup adult) that this sort of thing sounds like bs.

and all the kids I know are, if old enough, well into online stuff. their parents make sure of the appropriateness for the access.

Re the 75 bands particle, I went through that with some of my friends from LJ (a side community adjoining my friends from Theatre CNU), and I don't know how many we got, but it was some kinda fun. I'll wager we trailed off before we got them all, though. I notice the answer gives "70" instead of 75, though at least the problem set (as opposed to the solution, which I resent being there) isn't shown too small or cut off at the edges, as was the case with some of the ones we found to work off of back then. Ah, mem-rees.

On "I-dosing", I think the Miami New Times has it right:

Can specially designed ambient music trick high-chasing teens into a drug-like zen state? Probably not.

Can this Miami Herald article trick you into think you're reading about something fascinating until you realize it's ultimately about nothing? Probably.

Paula Helm Murray -- your first sentence covers my initial reaction. An alternate hypothesis to the "any stick to beat them with" theory is that the high-schoolers brought this out as an excuse for (whatever they were caught doing), and the gullible staff bought it hook, line, and sinker. But then, my interactions with high school administrators didn't give me a lot of faith in their cognitive abilities.

At a slight tangent, I'm a little worried that perhaps the general level of techno-nous is low enough in Oklahoma that people there will believe any damn thing they hear about the internet. But I don't have a ready base of Oklahomans to query on the subject, of course.

Lee @ 263:

No, Bob. It was the first episode he had had since 1991.

re the transliterator particle: The cyrillic is defective. It has absolute values for letters, and fails to not phonemes.

America = Ameritsa

Victor s, the people in Oklahoma, for the most part, are just like people everywhere. I've got lots of friends there (mostly living in the major cities), etc

But it worries me that a school staff would be that stoopid.

Does anybody else read at Customers Suck on LJ? I'm trying to track down a post that is several years old. (IIRC, I asked this question at C_S and was told not to.) It's the one from the person who worked for either a realtor or a mortgage broker, and the incredible mess one of their customers had gotten into. She bought a nice piece of land in the country sight unseen, and upon taking possession was happily surprised to find a house on it! What a bonus! So she moved in . . . The story broke off as the actual owner of the house (on the adjoining lot) was trying to explain that she wasn't actually on her land and a legal notice to get the heck back on her own side of the property line was not harassment. Or something. Anyway, I really want to know how the whole thing ended. Anybody remember this? My Google-fu availeth naught.

terry karney @269--

yeah, i'm afraid the same is true of the greek transliterator.

it turns latin "y" into a greek gamma--some shape-similarity, but really not the same thing, esp. not in medial positions.

(then it turns greek gamma, correctly, into latin 'g', so that if you start with latin "type" and run it through and back, you end with "tgpe". it's true that the rules for transliteration differ btw ancient and modern greek, and it's true that in both periods a good transliteration scheme is *hard to implement*, but then again it's hard in the way that computers are supposed to be able to cope with. these folks need to try again.)

Xopher @130 said: Does anyone, anywhere, ever wear something like this other than on the runway?

No. But most high-end runway shows contain in their majority clothes never meant to be worn anywhere but that show (and maybe in some magazine photo-spreads).

Why? A weird combination of art and marketing.

A designer's season show (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer -- some of which are combined -- plus 'Resort' which is its own weird season for designers who wish to compete in it) has purposes, to wit:

* Get noticed. The more photos of your stuff that hit media outlets, fashion-commentary blogs, and eyeballs generally, the more widely your name and brand get known.
* Show what makes your ideas for the season different from (a) anyone else showing this year, and (b) all past collections, by you or anyone else.

The clothes that are sold, whether as one-off couture pieces to very wealthy people, or as luxury-line expensive ready-to-wear, or even translated downwards to Nordstrom or Target (depending on the designer's lines and penetration), will contain aspects of their runway show for the season.

However, the runway clothes have all the season's DNA, as it were, dialed up way past 11 so they're obvious.

I'd say that designer was 'playing with volume' and 'showcasing nonstandard silhouettes,' though to know more I'd need to see more of the show.

The jacket, in toned-down cut, will probably make it to at least the (price-wise) tops of his lines. The color palette will be all over everythign he does for that season. Possibly pleating details will show up in his menswear somewhere. And his mainstream pants will not be close-fitting, and may be stylized or boxy in cut.

Again, I'd have to see the rest of the show, but I'd bet that bellows-pleating goes all through it, as a sort of leitmotif, in both enormous (this one) and lesser expressions. It's part of 'putting on a show' -- if your clothes are too 'wearable,' the fashion press ignores you, and your brand suffers.

You have to compete effectively on the runway to get the chain buyers to place orders with you ... but the runway looks are never going to actually end up in a store. And consumers don't get turned off by their outlandishness, because what they see in stores look like clothes, not like art pieces.

This blathering brought to you from the alternate universe next door where I grew up to be a fashion designer (there's one just the other side of it where I went into architecture).

A brief addendum to my #273: Magazine photospreads come in several kinds, the most prestigious of which is 'the editorial'. A lot of ordinary folks have no idea what makes an editorial different than, say, the other spreads in the magazine (or the ads next to the spreads, or the Land's End catalog).

Editorials almost always showcase the higher-end (and much weirder) couture or runway looks, and require a model who can pull them off in ways that inspire the photographer shooting them. Editorial spreads are more about the art/experimentation side of fashion than about showing actual clothes people can or would want to wear ... but they're also very aspirational, and seek to drive fashion-conscious people's clothing-demand in overall look directions that the editor of the given magazine thinks are trend-setting.

Yes, it's all meta of meta, really, but there you are.

If you were to take a model fully kitted-out for an editorial shoot and take snapshots of her standing around waiting, she'd look outlandish, beyond the dreams of performance artists.

A couple of illustrative examples: an editorial shot of a white feathery dress; a still-very-artsy shot from a feature. The editorial is both more stylized, and contains clothes that -- if worn by anyone but a consciously posing (and 'working it'), skilled fashion model, would look as ridiculous as Mr. Concertina-Pants up above.

Jenny Islander @ 271:

I remember that story! Unfortunately, I'm not able to easily grab a link to it, nor do I recall about when it appeared (such that an archive trawl would turn it up in a reasonable amount of time). I vaguely recall that there was a subsequent post discussing how the woman and her son were continuing to raise a great fuss, and authorities had gotten involved; also, that there was increasing anger on the actual home-owner's part, as the accidental (idiot?) squatters had done things like cutting down old trees on the property they didn't own. But for actual specific resolution, I don't recall the details.

#251

PJ, thank goodness. I thought you might mean Richards Topical Encyclopedia, which, except for Vol.14, was a frightening set of books.

You'd think it was just another extreme fashion statement, but the Berlin Golden Hat is potentially a calendar as well.

There are others like it.

M Evans @ 276 -- We had a set of Richards Topical Encyclopedia when I was growing up. For children, and allowing for its being as out-of-date as any encyclopedia becomes over time, it didn't seem bad. I know that I used it as a reference for a number of school projects.

But at some point, probably when I was around 12 or 13, I decided that I was going to read it through, start to finish. (Maybe it was a boring summer?) And right at the start, in the introduction, it mentioned the mystery of how light propagated through the ether as an example of current hot research in science. And since I already knew that that was wrong (in the "decades-out-of-date theory" sense), it killed my interest in proceeding any further.

Joel@278: Our 1893 Britannica has a fascinating article on the "luminiferous ether". It's credited to a Mr. J. C. Maxwell.

(Gutenberg has been doing the famous 11th edition (published 1911, thus explaining my confusion a bit); looks like they've only issued the first 9 volumes so far though.)

278
Some of the fairy tales were a little scary. Especially with the pictures.

(Yes, it was dated; I think it was a reprint of something from around 1910. It was really good for getting you 'older than you should be' points, for knowing what antimacassars and passe-partout are.)

From the NYT: America Builds an Aristocracy or how to put your trust funds out of harm's way forever

I'm thinking, "I gotta get me some of those."

When I was a kid, we had several outdated encyclopedia sets. For doing a report on relatively stable subjects ('dogs' comes to mind) it didn't matter, and we knew enough to be careful about the others. At some point in my early teens, we accidentally acquired a facsimile of the first edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (1776? something like that). I adored the article on Elements--all four of them.

I feel it essential to point out that there is a Japanese film based loosely on "The Terminator", except it involves a washing-machine designer being sent back through time to prevent the passage of a law banning the use of real estate as collateral for commercial bank loans, in the hope that this will prevent the economic collapse of the 1990s. The designer, naturally, goes missing in the distant past of 1990 and has to be pursued by her estranged daughter in a wetsuit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fiction

It's got to be worth a try.

@Diatryma 215:

When I did RAGBRAI there were a significant amount of folks over 70, many of whom had done the ride tens of times. I remember struggling up a particularly difficult hill behind a woman with a taunting message on the back of her bike: "82 and faster than you."

Suzanne F, my boggle is not so much her age as the fact that after nine RAGBRAIs, she didn't consider herself an avid cyclist. Nor after crossing the country.

We also spent some time bullying her into teaching a class at the yarn store about a particular Indian embroidery style she learned when she was twelve or thirteen. Gorgeously complicated-looking and mostly work in the planning, not the execution.

Open-thready observation:

If your e-mail contains the word "sofisticated", you probably aren't.

Apparently, Tom's message does not count as a "spelling flame"; at least, I can't find the requisite spelling error in it :-) .

(No, quoting the word you're complaining about a misspelling of doesn't count. No, the spelling of "e-mail" is still in contention and Tom's version is therefore not wrong. No, putting the comma outside the quotes (as all sane people do) rather than inside (as American typographical standards suggest) is not a spelling error.)

286
If you have e-mail from someone named 'Brain Walker Esq', it's spam or a zombie.

I have realized, after reading some of Jim's posts, that in the two times that I've done RAGBRAI I can count at least 4 or 5 times that I had signs of heat exhaustion or other heat related issues. There were several times when I just wanted to lie somewhere for a while.

(And that's not counting the obvious sunburn as heat related)

Then again, there's the bike racing in Oregon in the rain where I (now, from a comfortable position) recognize the signs of hypothermia.

Re: The most unbelievable series on television.

Likely enough nobody posting comments ever read Letter From a Higher Critic in Analog - most easily found today in Best of... #6 but it has been done and done well before.

Interesting to notice that the debunking of Midway the Battle that Doomed Japan (Fuchida et al) has not caught up with the stories. McClusky's (? spelling I'm guessing) Turn really is a bit of historical luck there though.

Am I the only person here who considers "a postage stamp upside down on an envelope" to be signal for distress and coercion? This would be kin to flying a flag upside down.

I've put postage stamps on envelopes upside-down before, and it was pretty much a symbol of being in a hurry, or not looking, or just not caring.

Victoria@291: That's certainly what immediately occurred to me when I saw it on the list. I'm wasn't previously familiar with the other meaning.

There is a plot of land next to ours that has been vacant since we moved to Worcester (15 years).

Aboiut 5 years ago somebody decided that they would use a portion as aprking artea, and hired a contractor to come in, level off a portion and put down hot top.

Then the actual owner (the person who had been paying the taxes on the land all along) got involved and started legal action.

The woman who had the parking lot built was all ticked off. For some reason she blamed my wife and I for ratting her out. Actually, we had no idea about who owned what.

Last I heard they were still fighting it out in court.

Craig@294: People are usually mad at somebody seen as having "ratted them out", yes. That's surprising?

How many of us will be at ArmadilloCon (August 27-29, 2010, Austin, TX) this year?

287, No, putting the comma outside the quotes (as all sane people do) rather than inside (as American typographical standards suggest) is not a spelling error.

Whoever decided that you can add punctuation inside the quotes, that was not in the original quoted text, and that is MORE CORRECT than putting the punctuation outside... that person was wrong. Couldn't have been more wrong if they were upended in a vat full of toxic wrong by Captain Wrong and his Wrongbots, to steal a line.

It's interesting to note that ddb thinks me insane; esp. as I wasn't taught the rules of comma usage and quotation when I started doing journalism, but some point much earlier, (I want to say the sixth grade, with Sister Mary Ann's English lessons, wherein I was also forced to diagram sentences: it was a trifle old school, even then).

On a more general note: History of "slush pile".

Sandy B. @ 297:

The reason, as far as I understand it, is because it's prettier. I don't think correctness entered into it.

Earl #296:

Moi, as previously mentioned. I hope there are enough others to call for a gathering.

would a pile of rejected costumes be a plush pile?

Kip writes in #246:

And now in every open thread, somewhere around the nth post, people will be posting comments that say only "Bitzer!" and "Darn it, you got in ahead of me! I was going to Bitzer!"

Bitzer? I hardly know her!

Erik: Rather, a pile of costumes yet to be worn....

ddb @287 -- yes, each of the points you mentioned was a deliberate choice on my part. I prefer e-mail to email, viewing it as an odd form of abbreviation of "electronic mail" that calls for some form of punctuation (and an apostrophe doesn't cut it for that elision); and I certainly know the rules for punctuation in American usage, but agree with Sandy B. that this form makes more sense (and no, Terry, I wouldn't call you crazy for using a standard form even though it seems to me to lose a certain amount of sense). Before T drops in to comment, yes, I know there are cases that remain ambiguous and would, in the most appropriately redundant forms, require commas inside and out of the quotation marks. They're uncommon, if not rare.

In this case, it's a crotchet more than an error.

VictorS @ 262:

Every few years one doper turns to another and says, "Hey, we could really fake out all the older straight people by starting a rumor that $WEIRDNESS will get you high!", for silly and bizarre values of $WEIRDNESS. Hence smoking banana skins ("They call me Mellow Yellow"), drinking aspirin and Coke™, spinning around really fast and falling over, etc. It gives all the druggies an excuse to snicker at the naive idiots who fall for it, extra points for getting op-ed "view-with-alarm" articles written about it.

Tom: It's not that I ain't nuts, it's that I don't think those choices are the evident signs.

Heck, I have the "ise" habit.

ddb: The issues wasn't the rightness of being upset at someone who rats one out, but rather that they assumed his parents were the people who did it.

Open-threadiness + Fluorospherian meetups:

Anyone (but me) (and maybe Cally) coming to Musecon 0 in Chicago, Aug 6-8 2010?

It is a con that makes reality out of the running OVFF joke (that it's really a handicrafts con with a strong music track), and looks to be fun, as well as low-key and relaxaconish.

Maybe I've spent too much time in the Army, but the Unit Climate Survey.pdf the DoD just sent out doesn't seem horrid to me.

It has the same sense of clumsy sterility of most unit climate surveys, but I don't see that," this expensive survey stokes the fires of homophobia by its very design and will only make the Pentagon’s responsibility to subdue homophobia as part of this inevitable policy change even harder," as Alexander Nicholson, Executive Director of Servicemembers United said it does.

In the vein of the knitted sonnet and other Odd Knitting Content ... this is high-fashion odd knitting content. Also, an editorial spread.

Going WAY back to abi @535 on #142, if anyone wants a copy of my GOH speech on disobedience and eucatastrophe (or my other paper on The Devil Wears Prada) shoot me a line at jbcroft residing at ou which is an edu. Though I delved into theology I managed to avoid being lynched, and a gentleman with a large broadsword defended my honor on a point of military law. (Well, we had just returned from the traditional costume procession...) And how often do you get the Milgram experiments, Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question," and Cohen the Barbarian showing up in the same paper? Not very, I imagine.

Charlie's new book, The Fuller Memorandum, has some "Ask Dr. Mike" in it -- a program that Mike Ford used to do at Minicon.

Elliot, most of those look woven or knotted, rather than knitted, to me. Maybe something is lost in translation....

Terry@308, thanks for posting that. I've never been in the military, though I've had friends who were and have lived near military bases. I have, however, worked in a similarly large American bureaucracy - and while the details are slightly different, stylistically that survey looks pretty much like every bureaucratic corporate morale survey I've ever seen. Maybe it has a chance that there will be statistical differences in responses encouraging Don't Ask Don't Tell witch hunts, or maybe there'll be some redneck young soldiers who didn't realize DADT might end and get very upset, but it's not as bad as I'd expected from the blogosphere commentary.

Proof that my cat is a strange beast: I got a real carrier for him today (a bit less than a month from now, the two of us are flying to the Bay Area*)... he spent two minutes sniffing at the nylon, and then sauntered into it. This is the same cat who hated the freebie cardboard carrier that Nashville Humane gave me when I adopted him back in 2008. Not that I am objecting - if he likes the new carrier and is happy to just sit and chill out in it, it will make the four hour (or so) flight and attendant airport time on both ends much nicer for both of us come next month.

*On Southwest, taking advantage of a direct flight from Nashville to Oakland, where they will let me take the Great Furball onboard in a carrier for a fairly modest fee.

Herbert calls for investigation into list of 1,300 identified as illegal immigrants

"The list contains birthdates, workplaces, addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers. Names of children are included. Several pregnant women have their exact due dates listed. All the names seem to be Hispanic."

Elliot @307:
I'm planning to be there. I'd hoped to get involved with helping put on the thing, but the meetings are all during times that I work. So I'll show up with my knitting and just see what happens.

Clark Myers:
Likely enough nobody posting comments ever read 'Letter From a Higher Critic' in Analog - most easily found today in Best of... #6 but it has been done and done well before.

Funny, I was just signing in to mention that. I have only a few Analogs, SF&Fs et al. sitting around, but the issue with that story happens to be one of them. So fie! to your assumption.

Terry @308 -- I agree with you, but I'm curious as to just how anonymous that survey is. If it's not completely anonymous, I can see it having some potential fallout to the answerers. And the statistical information they ask at the end might make some survey respondents directly identifiable (I don't know about the distributions of the categories they're asking about, and I can see some combinations being unique).

On an entirely different front, James P. Hogan has apparently died suddenly at his home.

#318: Sad. I read a lot of Hogan's works in college. Can't say I've kept track of what he'd written since 1990 or so.
* * *
Hmmm. To judge from his blog, he'd been writing global warming denial stuff for a libertarian website.

Thom: They are completely anonymous. The only information it collects is battalion.

Futher, there is no real timescale; it asks if the service member has ever served with, given the way the US forces move people around, that pretty much strips it of any prosecutorial power; notwithstanding there is no way to take a single survey and track it back to any specific person, so there is no way to get testimony/evidence.

(1) Putting periods or commas outside double quotes looks like ass when typeset.

(2) If you want your punctuation to be logical, why the half measures? Use single quotes for the first level of mention and double quotes for the second. Then putting punctuation outside* is both logical and customary (albeit British).

*'...with the milk and the cat'. --Robert Bringhurst

Schools and drug experts are warning parents to beware of "digital drugs" that Mustang High School students blamed for their apparent intoxication.

It's being distributed via HyperCard by a really tall black-and-white person.

putting punctuation outside* is both logical and customary (albeit British).

I like the "albeit".

M Evans @ #276: I thought you might mean Richards Topical Encyclopedia, which, except for Vol.14, was a frightening set of books.

So, somebody's gotta ask: What was different about Vol.14?

Here's an excellent quote of the day from Paul Krugman:
"The facts really do have a well-known liberal bias".

Bruce Cohen @ 305, my mother likes to tell the story of her youngest brother, at age 12 or so, getting the banana peel idea from the Smothers Brothers. So he wrapped up a fresh banana peel in notebook paper and lit the end.

One minor kitchen fire (and all three of his siblings screaming at him to put it out) later, he gave up.

This was a lesson: do not get your drug experimentation ideas from the Smothers Brothers. It will not go well.

As for the I-dose thing, I wish I knew enough neurophysiology to comprehensively debunk the pseudoscience, and explain exactly why it doesn't work. I might email a friend of mine who works in neural electrophysiology and ask.

Benjamin Wolfe @ 314, that's great! Good luck with kitty traveling. My cats also love their nylon carriers -- they still sit in them recreationally, even after a traumatic car trip to the vet (one hates the car more, one hates the vet more). Best: when an upset cat poops or vomits in the carrier, it's easily hosed out and dries in the space of a vet visit. (The cat had to be hosed off as well, which did not help in endearing her to the vet. Poor little cat. She survived, though.)

My husband refers to the nylon carriers as cat duffel bags, and says he feels like he's taking the cat as gym equipment. Benchpressing cats: the new Pilates?

Paul A @ 324 -- Volume 14 is "Manual Arts, Games and Sports, Fairy Tales, Fables, Stories, Myths". Other than the extent to which that book might be trying to interpret/explain things in a then-modern context, it's much less dated than most of the rest.

I became somewhat radicalized on the location of punctuation relative to quotation marks when I realized that, in technical documentation, the American standard practice rendered the commands they told you to type actively wrong. These days, with far more capable printers and page layout programs, one often uses other ways to delimit commands, and one could adopt the sensible practice only in limited areas, but when I also found that the accurate way was the standard way in many parts of the world, and hence that the decision was pretty arbitrary, I saw no further reason to ever use the American traditional way.

Elliott @ 308

Sounds like Musecon would be fun, but wouldn't you know it, I'll be driving home from Colorado that weekend. Figures, doesn't it?

Have a good time, and report back!

Elliott, #307: Damn. That does sound like fun, but we're already committed to Barataria Faire in Springfield, MO that weekend.

Caroline, #326: Well, of course a FRESH banana peel wouldn't work! You had to dry them first.

ddb #328:

Seconded, for similar reasoning. And not just because of tech documentation, but because of actual coding.

Caroline @ 326 :

The cat seems to really like the carrier - I woke up this morning to find him sleeping in it, entirely happy with the world. I am very happy about this.

Benjamin Wolfe @ 332:

Beware: your cat may like it now, but as soon as he psychically detects that you actually intend to transport him somewhere, you'll never be able to get him near the thing.

Good luck, though. I hope I'm wrong.

So wait... the complaints about the use of punctuation in English are because using one standard subset of rules in that language causes problems in other subsets of the language?

Oi...

They are different languages. More, as Mr. Nicoll points out, English is a swamp of borrowings, shopliftings, and outright muggings (not to mention kludges and other Rube Goldberg solutions).

The reason I stick to the style I was taught, decades ago... It makes more sense to me. I find it visually more pleasant, and functionally useful; because it's how my brain works.

Yes, there are some strange bits of leakage (as with my preference for "ise" endings), and there are times when habits gained from Russian try to seep in, but you know what... I can code shift; hell I have to. There are a number of secondary dialects of English I speak (three or four of them being variations of Army), and I'd actually be insane if I picked one set of rules and insisted that everyone who didn't follow that subset was 1: insane, or (worse) doing it "wrong".

Because I am sort of militant about finding (for all my predjudices and preferences) that most prescriptive attempts to define english are not just pointless, but counterproductive, and insulting.

Feeling like the Reporting Angel of Death here, but I just found out about Tuli Kupferberg's death. The Fugs were definitely one of the more SF oriented bands of their time (more for Sanders than Kupferberg, but Kupferberg had his moments).

Wow, if you want to impose code standards on natural English...well, if you did that consistently you would write VERY BAD natural English!

Also, which coding language do you use as the standard? If you use C as the standard your English is going to have a lot more curly brackets in it than is usual!

For myself, I use some standards I learned when studying linguistics. If I'm citing a form, I use single quotes, and all punctuation goes outside them:

I used the word 'sesquipedalian'.

He said I was a "sesquipedalian."
Did you hear me say "sesquipedalian"?
She didn't know the word, so she said "Sesquipedalian?"

I used the word 'sesquipedalian', and she said "Sesquipedalian?"

I try to be consistent, but in the years I've been doing this I've discovered a couple of things: 1) Sometimes the distinction between citation and quotation isn't quite as clear-cut as I'd like, and 2) No matter how careful I try to be, I screw it up sometimes.

Possibly the day I knew I was a (small h) hacker:

Reading through the Jargon File, I ran into Writing Style, and I realized that all the writing quirks I had (including punctuation inside quotes only if it was part of the quote) were in there. Of course that doesn't mean that I did all of them; just that all of the choices I made were the ones in the guide. I have since adopted some of the rest in locations where I expect them to be understood (use of <sarcasm/> tags, and sed-style fixed-that-for-you corrections, for instance).

Sometimes I guess wrong - I still remember having to explain the nuances between broken and b0rken - but a lot of this kind of style issue clarifies when necessary and amuses where desired; both things I appreciate. Of course, "don't freak the mundanes" applies to this, as well; not so good at that.

Xopher #336:

More like don't put inside quotes anything which you do not wish to be quoted literally. Anything else is probably negotiable, but I can think of no programming language out of the many I've studied or used over the last forty-one years that doesn't do the wrong thing if you try to put control logic punctuation inside literal strings.

Re Musecon 0, replying to Zelda @316, Cally Soukup @329, Lee @330:

I'm giving two workshops (how to make friendship bracelets / using structured poetry to conquer writer's block), and a quickie concert.

I'd love to have lunch with any MLers present; those who can't come this year, do seriously think about next year. This year is Musecon 0 because we're sort of beta-testing it, and figuring out what works when the rubber hits the metaphorical road, and what desperately needs to be changed before Musecon 1 (which has guests and enough lead-time that more than 200 people might actually come, and therefore has smaller screwup tolerance).

One of the interesting conrunning-meta things that is coming up in planning is how to work around the general fannish assumption that one reg-fee for the con means you get into everything for free ... versus offering some workshops with fairly serious materials costs. Several methods, from dibsing workshops at time of online reg all the way to paying cash to the instructor at the door, are being hashed out and worked through; by six months before Musecon 1 we should have it fairly settled. :->

Dave @43 -- a beautiful, haunting poem; and good news. Nice combination.

joann, my point was that English punctuation is NOT control logic. The resemblance is superficial.

In my opinion it's just as wrong to use control-logic syntax in English as it is to use American-style quote placement in C.

Well, maybe not JUST AS wrong. Also wrong, albeit with much less actual consequence.

#317 - Didn't see your comment posted on either Live Journal or Boing Boing so I'm not sure you are a member of the set making comments as described?

Likely enough Redbird who did make a useful comment has read Analog. Surely many posting here have read much in the genre and as a group have read everything in English and several other languages.

And considering her comment in its context I'll stand by my observation that it's regrettable how the comments on LJ carry on the propaganda of Fuchida and Oyama in Midway the Battle that Doomed Japan and elsewhere. The notion that the Japanese defeated themselves at Midway - as described - so the American fliers who spent their lives did not truly buy a victory is pretty much debunked today.

Makes sense to me that being prescriptive globally leads inevitably to bad results locally given that for some locals there will be contradictions such that by context usage is simultaneously right and wrong.

Also makes sense to me that being prescriptive locally can be appropriate and necessary. I know off hand of only one actual true and verified example of the question of a comma in legal writing costing millions of dollars but there is at a minimum that one example (it was legislation and ambiguity was followed by a special session).

Grading exams in economics where the language approaches logic (asymptotically I suppose) and if not code is pseudo code I never hesitated to prescribe. I suspect that folks doing specifications for weapons systems like frex the anti-ballistic-laser 747 airframe got to be pretty prescriptive in their documentation.

Caroline @ 326: Benchpressing cats: the new Pilates?

Yes, but think of cats for curls instead. I used to do bicep curls with Buzz, my large DSH cat -- he made it to a high of 25 pounds before I successfully got his weight down. He was a mellow cat, so I could do the curls with no more response out of him than a chirp. I liked to think of it as his way of counting for me.

He was a good cat.

re Elliott Mason's #309 -- Is that knitting, or is it macrame'?

Which led me to wonder whatever happened to macrame'? You never seem to hear about it in crafts-related discussions anymore.

Which led me to Google the word, which led me to this 70's-era photo of a macrame' bra.

Okay, maybe there's a reason we don't hear much about macrame' anymore....

(I will not think about rope burns. I will NOT think about rope burns. I will think about elephants instead. Yes. Elephants, elephants, elephants....)

On the topic of adding punctuation inside quotes: My view on it is certainly shaped by my background as a computer programmer.

However, it also looks to me like a deliberate misattribution (bearing false witness, if you want to be biblical about it.)

Consider these two sentences:

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers," Lincoln said.
"Four score and seven years ago, our squamous fathers", Lincoln said.

In both cases there is something in the quotes that Lincoln never said.

Punctuation inside quotes is not so much a rule of punctuation as a rule of typesetting (in America). I.e. it comes from people who focus on appearance more than meaning. Mostly, it doesn't matter; fictional dialog is, well, fictional, and when quoting actual speech the punctuation is kind of made up anyway. However, in some of those other cases it's actively misleading.

Clark @ 344: then there was the million dollar comma of Rogers and Bell, which was settled by, um, using an entirely different language.

Victor Borge's Phonetic Punctuation

ddb: 1: If it doesn't matter, why do you care?

2: As Xopher points out (more clearly than I would have, for the same argument), how the various punctuations are used can/does convey actual meaning.

3: As I said (and he elaborated) code is a different dialect of english, and the rules ofr code are not the rules for English. I, for one, don't see quotation marks as defining a literal command, but rather as a way to give some relational meaning to the various clauses, coherent thoughts, etc. of a spoken language, in an indirect format, I know it can't directly map the tones, inflections and facial markers which define things.

It can't be more than an approximation; which is why being an absolute prescriptivist is pointless. The vagaries of the vaguearies are such that it will always lead to questions.

Having spent weeks going over an editorial, comma by comma, to make it as close to unambiguous as possible, I can attest, from experience, there ain't no way to make it happen.

So I shall stick to my, desperate, rear-guard action to save the adverb.

In other language news: The FCC is, for now, not allowed to fine people for "fleeting instances of profanity"

Court ends ban on fleeting profanity

@346 They yellow bottle-like garment in photo #3 is at least partly knitted - that looks like stockinette stitch in the torso. And the red garment in photos #1 and #5 appears to be reverse-stockinette (think the inside texture of a plain sock) [*]

Not sure about the blue thing.

[*] I specified plain sock because otherwise some sock knitter around here is going point out that THEY make socks with something other that reverse-stockinette on the inside, and then this will turn into a knitting thread.

I wouldn't mind macrame coming back into fashion, but I'm not going to do it. I don't need any more tie belts and hanging-basket holders right now.

Terry@351: 1. It doesn't matter in some cases. But it does in others.

2. I think that's precisely my point; that it DOES matter.

3. Code is indeed different. But technical writing is much more on the English side than the code side -- and yet frequently requires the same exactitude required in code.

Inability to achieve perfection isn't, for me, a reason to give up trying to do as well as possible, and resenting (and objecting to) established rules that make it harder.

Go courts! (still) Congress doesn't really get credit for the great things they've done in my lifetime (which probably go beyond just the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, though nothing else really comes to mind); people remember things changed by the courts. Which isn't really their job mostly (though sometimes saying that a clear law has been ignored forever and this must stop looks like a change, yet is very much the job of the courts).

ddb: It matters, sort of. Here's the thing... you like your way, and there are those who support you in it.

I find your way muddies the waters. It is more rigid, and makes it harder, for me, to pick up nuances. Which means, when you are trying to communicate with me (and, presumuably with Xopher) you are less clear, more ambiguous.

If the sorts of technical writing you do, requires that format, than it does, but that's a bit of a red herring too, because there is lots of technical writing which doesn't. Yeah, how to operate a CNC boring lathe is that picky; troubleshooting a Mark 19 feeding error isn't.

More to the point, the audience for the TM on an Mk-19 aren't likely to notice, either way; but the way they are least likely to have problems is probably the way you decry (well, no, because in the TM for the Mk-19 there isn't really going to be a need for quotation marks, since nothing is being quoted, and there isn't any software to issue commands to).

As you say, it matters in some cases, but the use of either rule, exclusively, will not fix all cases.

And it's not helpful to 1: insist it will, and 2: that those who disagree are being obtuse.

Caroline #326: The real issue with this "I-dose" nonsense isn't even the pseudoscience -- ask yourself, why the rush to ban it? It's all about control in the end... this is just a local outbreak of the usual Puritan fear that "some one, some where, is having fun".

In fact, it's certainly possible to reach altered states of consciousness from sound, also from dance, chanting, drumming, breath control, sunset clouds, and several other routes. But of course, all that's not just about the stimulus, it's a participatory thing.
--
I'm actually taking my cat to the vet Friday -- now I'm wondering if I should get one of those "cat duffels". My cat isn't too happy about her hard cage, but I hate it because it's so bulky to carry.

Earl Cooley III (# 135)

From the information contained in that list, it sounds like it was compiled either with someone with "inside access" or somebody breaking into government databases.

Precise medical information, SSANs, phone numbers, addresses, names, etc.

And I see from the letter that immigrants are allright, as long as they are "totally self-sufficient."

So I expect them to have no qualms about inviting in retired drug lords and dictators, as long as they bring things in cash. (that is, if they mean "self-sufficient" in a financial sense, otherwise the pickings are going to slim, looking for someone who can not only do all their own mining, farming and manufacturing, but can bring along the minerals, topsoil and machine tools when they come into the country -- maybe they'll have a version of the magic bag from RAH's Glory Road?)

How long before somebody copies the list and starts using it as the hunting list?

These people are making the same asinine statement as the animals who publish pictures and personal details of abortion providers or people who visit clinics, saying that *they* (clutching pearls) would *never DREAM* as anybody using violence.

And for all the fools who think is as good idea (like the whacko with the Utah Minutemen), think about it -- how would you like being the target for this -- and I guess it's A-OK to violate federal / state law on access to private government data, If Your Cause Is Just.

ANd like as not, this list was compiled by people with the same mindset of those who were fighting *not* to have their names revealed as signers to a public document (initive petition) whose sole purpose was to deprive fellow citizens of rights.

Sorry, the "135" above should be "315"

Terry@354: Well, right now we're in a situation where one can't reasonably infer much at all from where people put punctuation relative to quotes. Not even necessarily "he's English" or "he's American", since we have people using personal styles (far more than just me).

I do think that if a document says

Now type "ls -a *.cc."

Frequently, for published work instead of internal documentation, a proof-reader further down the chain will "fix" it. This is what put me on the warpath against the convention in general.

What kind of nuances do you get, usefully, out of other situations?

How about

Now type:

ls -a *.cc

This will list all files whose names end with '.cc' and include files beginning with a dot.

Code examples should NOT be part of a sentence in the documentation, for exactly this reason.

What I see a lot is:

Now type "ls -a *.cc" (without the quotes).

...because people already have trouble switching between normal reading mode and type-this-exactly mode. I don't think putting the period outside the quotes is going to help much.

Xopher's way is the clearest. If it needs to be inline, use a code font instead of quotes.

Clark: You didn't specify commenting where, so in context I thought you meant people commenting on the particle here on ML. (I don't do LJ, and I must have missed that it had hit Boing-Boing.)

Many of these graphically more complex options were not available at the time I formed these opinions.

Those graphic expedients are only necessary, though, because quoting isn't quite clear about what's actually being quoted.

Yes, at this point you actually have to tell some people not to type the quotes, which is discouraging, but so it goes.

It remains simply wrong to place within the quotes something they're not intended to type.

(This is relevant in email, which of course is sent in text mode, and in IM, and such, too. Probably more relevant than in printed manuals, since nobody does those anymore anyway, and if they do they use graphic expedients.)

ddb:

First rule of holes applies here.

Stop trying to tell the world that it's wrong and insane because it puts its punctuation somewhere that you don't like, for reasons that you yourself admit are substantially obsolete. You can be radicalized all you like, but you are not the boss of Terry, or Xopher, or anyone at all outside your own skin.

Persuade, don't dictate. Or I'll start in on split infinitives, and then you will all be sorry.

ddb: What I see is a failure on the part of code/tech writers to make a system for themselves.

Me, If I were in the shoes you describe, I'd've made a rule, e.g. When one sees, "type :: -a .cc ::," the text inside the doubled colons is what one needs to type.

That, you see, would avoid the confusions which come from using an evolved, and loosely ordered, set of guides to interpreting a spoken language, to map a machine language.

I agree that when following a rule leads to misunderstanding, one should break the rule. In ddb's situation, putting the period outside the quote is best, if better options that avoid the whole issue are not available.

I don't agree that that means the rule should be ignored in all situations. In normal typeset text, putting the period outside buys you a small island of logicality in a still-vast sea of arbitrariness, at the cost of putting potholes in the reader's road and uglifying the page. It's so not worth it.

We write mind your p's and q's because it's the least bad alternative, but that doesn't mean we should start making all our plurals with apostrophes.

Home. The road goes ever on, but it's nice to be back, too.

Elliott, #339: I know several cons which have writing workshops for which one must sign up in advance, and sometimes pay a fee. Nobody seems to complain about those, so perhaps that's a workable model for you WRT things which have significant cost-of-materials. Just make sure you make the requirements glaringly obvious on your website and all your publicity materials; this won't guarantee that someone still won't notice it, but it's good CYA.

Bruce, #346: If that's made from cotton cord, rope burns wouldn't be an issue. Sunburn, however...

And macrame jewelry is still fairly common -- you can even find kits for making it at crafts stores.

Louisana Senator David Vitter says he's backing birthers.

Louisana Senator David Vitter says he's backing birthers.

You know, if those people had lived back in the 1600s, they would have believed that the newborn James III was smuggled into the palace in a warming-pan.

Terry @308 and 320 and others re the don't ask/don't tell survey.

I knew that the survey existed but haven't been following the blogosphere on it. Wearing my social scientist hat, this does not look bad to me. It's not an obviously biased survey on the order of "How disgusting do you find the idea..." Yes, it may provide information that could be waved in support of homophobia. But that exact same information could also be used by those intending to implement a repeal of da/dt to identify potential trouble spots for education/monitoring/whatever. IMHO the back-and-forth between "Long past time" and "this will destroy the military" is going to take place (continue?) anyway, and it might as well have some basis in data. But then, I believe in data.

359
That's pretty much how the technically-inclined books do it. (Also, it's built into some word-processors.)

The birthers would have gone off the deep end over the Man in the Iron Mask, too.

Bruce Arthurs @346 asked me in re my 'making friendship bracelets' workshop: Is that knitting, or is it macramé?

Technically, it's really densely-packed uncomplicated macramé to make a strap-like fabric. Assortment of simple ones; a more complicated 22-thread-wide band similar to some of what I've done; a really cool intricate 24-thread-wide one (all picture links go to flickr).

In macramé, usually the decorativeness comes from the spacing of the knots and the complexity of the construction; in camp-style friendship bracelets, most of the decorativeness comes from using different colors of thread and carefully choosing which are the 'outsides' of the knots and which form the weft the knots are made on.

Almost any pattern intended for use with warp-faced inkle looms can be made in friendship bracelets, I just rarely choose to make them wider than ten threads because it gets exponentially fiddly to do. :-> I did once make a 50-wide out of sewing thread to make an almost-square one for a keychain-dangle. Mainly to prove I could. I don't still have either the object or a photo of it, alas.

David Harmon @355 - What about the findings that prayer and meditation cause changes to a person's mental state? Would that mean that those should be banned, too? And exercise?

(Well, naaaah, obviously, but why? Grandfather clause?)

I meant to add: I have also used thicker-than-worsted-yarn to make straps with the same technique that are long and strong enough to be used as guitar straps, and quite yummy ones, too. It's all a matter of scale.

another one from Toon River Anthology:

TRIXIE FLAGSTON

It was a static life. I went from bed to bath to floor
And was carried places, sometimes crawling,
Sitting and staring. I watched my family stay the same
For year after year, decade after decade
Stuck in infancy, unable to talk, or walk
My only friend was the dog, and after a while,
He found somewhere else to be.
Mom was the only one who ever changed. Once.
She went from staying home to showing homes,
And didn't even hire a sitter or get my siblings
To pay any attention to me. So I stewed
In my filthy diapers, which led to a rash, which led to infection
And that led to a welcome demise.
My stone is under some trees. I stare at other stones
And never see anybody, and they don't come to see me,
Not even the damn sunbeam!

See, I think that small punctuation (periods, commas) next to quote-marks look bad whatever order they come in. Back when I used to do typesetting for dead trees, I used to kern the periods and commas underneath the closing quotes. I set up kerning pairs in QuarkXPress to do this for me automatically.

If mainstream senators feel justified in going Full Stupid, I think Democrats should just go for broke.

Start making ads depicting the opposition and their followers as ignorant crackers, racist mouth breathers, gullible boob tube addicts, control-freak PTA moms, traitorous slavery apologists, and so on. Have Biden crack that Tea parties are for little girls and their imaginary friends. Broadcast a five-minute Michelle Bachmann clip show.

I think there should be a punctuation mark that indicates non-emphasis. (the opposite of an exclamation point)

Tim Walter @ 365 -- I would write "mind your 'p's and 'q's" in a plain-text-only medium, or "mind your ps and qs" when italics are available.

   Noun, subject, verb, noun, noun
   Comma, comma, noun, subject, verb, noun, noun
   Comma, comma, noun, subject, verb, noun, noun
   Punctuation’s hard to do!
-- Lynn Gold

Joel Polowin @ 379: Those are both defensible alternatives, but don't really affect my point, which is that a special case is necessary, but remains a special case.

I agree with what I think Mycroft is saying - put quotation marks around the stuff you're actually quoting.
- If there was punctuation in whatever you're quoting, such as a period or question mark at the end of a spoken sentence, then it belongs inside the quotes.
- If what you're quoting didn't have punctuation attached to it, as is typically the case for phrases, code samples, or URLs, don't move the punctuation from the end of *your* sentence into the quoted material.

I'm just sayin' here -- if you liked Phantom of the Paradise and Bubba Ho-Tep, watch for Ari Gold's Adventures of Power. Over-the-top parody/pastiche that's an air-drummer version of Rocky. Saw it tonight as part of an evening of experimental film, and laughed like crazy. Every time I thought they'd gone too far -- they went that little batshit bit farther. Do not go if you are feeling logical.

Having read a lot of technical (computer related) works where something has gone wrong between the author and the printed page, I think that the primary problem there is that the author, editor and typesetter have an insufficient agreement on what their responsibilities are. I can see very well that a typesetter coming from a different background can see fixing punctuation to be obviously their problem. Even in programming texts it should mostly be their problem, but you need to have some understanding on what constitutes an immutable block where you cannot change backticks to apostrophes or the other way around.

My point is that unless this is agreed on in advance, it is not really the participants fault if things go awry (and I've seen textbooks which are remarkably close to useless because of this kind of confusion). The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of whoever should have made sure that people working on the same thing (a textbook) see it in as a sufficiently same way.

With my descriptivist linguist hobbyist hat on I wait with excitement how the comma-quote disagreement develops. There's a lot of noise made about it lately, which is either a sign of an ongoing change or isn't. You can only tell afterwards.

Elliot Mason @#372: I had a small business in friendship bracelets when I was in middle school; I charged 25 cents per strand. At that point I only knew how to do the plain diagonal stripes.

Recently I got into a swap on a bboard I read, and made my partner one with three colors. I thought it was quite nice, even though I was late getting it to her.

For abi especially, but anyone who loves books might enjoy this column on female bookbinders by a friend of mine in the rare book trade.

On prescriptive typesetting I am reminded that when his publisher asked Newton about an error sheet for Principia Newton had moved on. He assured the publisher that his audience would make the corrections on their own - folks who couldn't got no sympathy.

For readers (or compilers) who can't be trusted to make corrections greater care and so expense is called for. North Holland and such charge a lot for a very small book carefully done. Programming is even more picky. James T. Kirk wouldn't be able to outsmart so many computers as he did if natural langauge programming had reached Next Generation levels by the Original Series.

I'm always torn to get an ARC - which I only bother with when I'm impatient to read the author or series - because I often pop out of immersion to reach for a colored pencil and then don't.

On the question of Who/WWII comments my comment was in background a comment on what I see as a disconnect between fans who read most everything and fans who watch most everything - there is of course more overlap all the time and nobody today reads literally everything even in just one language though I do wonder at the time spent watching.

On technical writing FM style - big difference between the comic book style used to go with the then newish Mattel black rifle (big smiley) and again FREX the draft material for the ABL airplane weapon systems - or you gotta know the territory to sell your intended audience.

Jerry Pournelle has long crusaded for more restrictive compilers with their associated language/syntax while folks keep popping out what start out as simple workarounds that then develop cute names and an extensive followers extending them - like the subtle chasing the obvious a never ending spiral/pendulum pick your description.

ddb - (295)

What's surprising is that she fixated on *us* has having "ratted her out."

We had no idea at all about any ownership of the lot (or, as it now turns out, her violation of zoning laws and lack of getting required permits), so the surprise is why she thinks *we* did anything, as opposed to the other 2 abutters or the people on the other side of the street.

Xopher @142/830: I'm looking for a job.

Sorry I hadn't clued in on this before. I'm wishing you great luck, and I will keep my ear to the ground. (I've also sent you a connection invite on LinkedIn.)

Also, check out Liz Ryan, a career coach with a really insightful, unique approach. She's got mountains of good advice available for free all over the place. (I'm so impressed, I've actually shelled out real money for a couple of her online courses.)

Just wanted to share a spot of great good news:

Argentina legalizes marriage equality!

Very good news indeed, Alberto -- thanks for sharing it.

abi @ 363:
I'll start in on split infinitives, and then you will all be sorry.

I'm shocked. Surely you're a signatory of the infinitive non-proliferation treaty?

Fossil of mastodon relative found while digging for a swimming pool in Brighton, TN.

This is apparently the first time evidence of this animal, called a trilophodon, has been found in the area. Also, for a rarity, a lot of the comments are rather funny.

Bruce, is that a consortium of nations who've agreed to not split infinitives?

OH NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

*boom*

Publishing: David Lubar got an answer on the discounts. According to a Penguin rep, they were from a pallet of hurt books, so not a long-term thing.

Dawno at her booth at ConChord/Westercon.

Along with the mastodon being found when digging for a swimming pool, and Merlin's tomb where they're building that shopping mall, there was just a wooden ship found when digging for the new World Trade Center site. I thought one of the articles said the ship appeared to be Dutch, but I'm not finding that now.

Quotation & punctuation:

I find myself very much in DDBs corner as regards usage* - it just makes sense to me that the thing in quotes is a literal string with punctuation belonging to the original (inferred if you're quoting actual speech). Then again I'm a British IT worker, so as a data point my biases have been covered.

Following the principle though, surely the quote's punctuation should go inside the marks and mine should go outside - "There's no such thing as different, only wrong.".

That looks awful and contributes to the world full stop shortage, but it seems to logically follow.

In a letter to a friend, how would you write:

I'm not sure how to begin - what do you think of "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..."?

?**

Anyway, those are my thoughts, and up with dissention I will not put.

* If not regarding proscription.
** Damn! Now I have a question mark for "How would you write" and nowhere to put it. I can't just leave it down there all on its own, can I?†

† I've heard that Spanish uses "open" and "close" question marks around a query - I wonder if they nest? Does leaving one open crash the whole sentence?

From a Facebook post I wrote regarding Facebook deficiencies,

Software comes in two main varieties, bad and abyssmal.... Facebook's corporate focus is on its customers, the advertisers, not on the eyeballs of the users... same as TV, the audience is a supplies-itself middleware product delivered/sold to the customers.

Russ@398: Yes, I remember experimenting with putting in both quoted and my own punctuation, as in your example, and yeah, that's not really ever going to become popular, too ugly. It is, as you say, logical.

I've heard that Spanish uses "open" and "close" question marks around a query - I wonder if they nest? Does leaving one open crash the whole sentence?

Yes, it's a known bug in the Spanish operating system. All you have to do is ask a Spanish person, for example, "¿Dónde ésta la estación de ferrocarril", missing out the "?" and their brain will blue-screen.

That's why they have daily siestas: reboot time.

Elliot @339:
Concert! Yay! (I know your face from open filks hereabouts-- if you're there I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good night. So yay concert!)

Does the lunch idea extend to lurkers? I work Saturdays, but plan to be at the con Friday, Saturday evening, and Sunday.

Zelda @402: Anyone who likes ML enough to be reading open threads deeply enough to SEE my invite counts. :-> Friday and Sunday I'll have my 17mo daughter in tow and along for meals, if that affects your willingness at all; I'll be with-kid and sans-carseat, so I'll be eating places I can get to on foot from the hotel (probably either the hotel restaurant or Outback, from a glance at Google Maps).

@104, 106, 107: I finally got around to writing an explanation of the Vatican document in question after the same story hit Boing Boing. I won't reproduce it over here, but you can follow this link to read it.

One thing I find very useful about the open/close approach to question marks in Spanish is that they don't have to bracket the entire sentence. Forex, in English:

If you're going to the store this afternoon, would you get me some milk?

Question mark applies to the whole damn thing. But in Spanish, you'd slap that first question mark right in front of "would" and thus mark off the part where the rising intonation actually starts kicking in. Somehow, my brain feels this is more "right" than the English method where the question mark applies to everything in the sentence, including the if-clause.

Oh dear. Got a comment held for review. I'm not sure why, as it contained no URLs: maybe the mysterious forces that power the blog don't like discussion of question mark placement.

Xopher @ 394:

For reasons best known to my subconscious memory access protocols, that "*boom*" reminded me of Rocky and Bullwinkle's adventure with the Hushaboom silent explosive. I then wondered if the the split infinitive would be silent. "It's the brain drain. His brain is draining."^⍾

^⍾No, that's from them movie "Help". The only connection is in my own brain.

Heh heh heh heh.

Some evil person (my sister Pat, the Mean Aunt (I am the Scary Aunt)) has sent me a vuvuzela. It greatly resembles the stadium horn I had about 45 years ago, except for being in 2 pieces so that it telescopes. I can already get at least 3 notes out of it, despite having no brass training. I have alarmed the cats, and temporarily silenced the barking dogs next door (and when they resumed, it was at a lower volume).

I am absurdly happy. I like noisy toys.

I'd like to hear the Fanfare for the Common Man done on vuvuzelas and kazoos. heh.

for abi and sonneteers--

this is old and so probably familiar, but new to me: rufus wainwright sings sonnet 29.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYd2KlRX4Vs&feature=related

i am bouleversé. it is stunningly beautiful.

he has done other sonnets, and i'm off to listen to those, too.

You know how sometimes you wonder about previous posters and what ended up happening to them? I got to wondering about a previous visitor--the conservative and conversationally tone-deaf Yaron who showed up with a group of would-be Sloane's Rangers five years ago to complain how unjust and liberal ML is and to take cheap shots at folks that work in strip clubs--and decided to exhume the links he posted. Turns out he has a company: "WikiWorks, a consulting company dedicated exclusively to MediaWiki implementation. About MediaWiki: MediaWiki is the open-source wiki application best known for powering Wikipedia."

Perfect! He's got a tie-in to Wikipedia! Clearly the universe Writes It's Own Jokes!

Fade Manly @ 405 & 406:

Your comment was held because your abbreviation of "for example" is also an abbreviation for "foreign exchange,"* which has at times been the subject of potted meat posting.

-----
* readers who are offended by this usage please substitute
     "foreign exchange",

Dyslexic Bitzer!

I assume that "frex" is a "for example" abbreviation that doesn't get caught by the filter?

OK, besides being an ObXKCD, this actually leads back to the OP for the thread: It seems the "143" for "I love you" might trace back to Mr. Rogers... see #3 at Mental Floss.

Ahah! I'll add that abbreviation to the mental file of ones to yank out of my casual writing. (I find it so useful that I sometimes have to go back and rip it out of my formal writing, which is rather more embarrassing.)

OK, on a gay site I frequent, someone exclaimed in outrage about the planned mosque "at Ground Zero" (it isn't). Some sane people tried to explain, but people from the stupid contingent (unfortunately dominant there) started saying things like "the Muslims attacked us" and crap like that. I wrote this:

I feel I should offer my perspective here.

I was working in One World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. I escaped death by my decision that morning to come in at 10 (as I had as a contractor) rather than at 8:30 (as I had since becoming an employee). I worked on a floor right in the center of the hole where the first plane went in.

300 of my coworkers died that day, including several people who were friendly to me and whom I personally liked. Because phones were down and people were marooned far from home (the trains and tunnels were shut down for security reasons), it took a long time to verify the miraculous fact: none of the people really close to me had died, none of my old friends...only my new ones.

But that wasn't what broke me, and sent me into a deepening depression I still struggle with.

The response of my fellow Americans made me ashamed. They attacked their Muslim neighbors, and their non-Muslim Arab neighbors, and their Sikh neighbors (even though no Sikh had anything to do with the attacks, the turbans were enough).

Living where I do, I know a number of Muslims. On 9/11, the owner of a Middle Eastern restaurant here in Hoboken called a bunch of men from his mosque and rushed down to Ground Zero to volunteer. When they were told the place was overflowing with volunteers (as it was), they raised money instead. That restaurant proudly displays one of the American flags flown at Ground Zero during the rescue period.

Another of my friends is an Albanian Muslim, raised right here in New Jersey. He looks, acts, sounds, and IS exactly like any other young adult from New Jersey. (The exceptions are that he didn't get drunk on his 21st birthday - or ever - and fasts during Ramadan. His favorite fast-breaking food? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich.)

Because he's white, he's often been the "surprise" Muslim in his classes, and heard people say some phenomenally stupid things about Muslims and Islam. "Wait a minute! I'm a Muslim, and I'm not like that," he often has to say, and their response is often "You're not a Muslim." He's not a brown-skinned turban-wearing psychopath, you see, so he can't be a Muslim.

Let's compare some other terrorist attacks, hmm? Tim McVeigh has already been brought up; he was a white guy from Michigan, like me. Funny, I didn't get any hate stares on the street after the OKC bombing, which at the time was the worst terrorist attack on American soil. He was a Christian, but no one says that Christian churches should not be allowed near the OKC memorial.

The terrorists who have been blowing up abortion clinics and shooting doctors are self-proclaimed Christians also, but no one throws rocks at men in reversed collars or people wearing crosses because of this, not even the family members of the people they've murdered, not even the horribly-scarred survivors of the fires they set.

But, you will say, those people aren't good Christians. They aren't good examples of Christianity. You know what? That's exactly what my Muslim friends say about Osama bin Laden and his gang of perverts. The behavior of Al Qaeda is utterly prohibited by their reading of the Qur'an...the reading they've learned in their mosques.

In my opinion this proposed mosque will be an emblem of American freedom, ESPECIALLY since it's near Ground Zero. It will help educate people about Islam, so that they will know that Osama bin Laden and his ilk are outcast heretics in Islam, and have no justification in ANY religion for their murderous behavior. There will also be a community center which will be open to everyone, not just Muslims, in a neighborhood sadly deprived of such things.

Please consider what I've said carefully, and then think about whether it changes your position. I know both 9/11 and Muslims, and I support the building of this mosque.

Well done, Xopher. I hope it makes a difference.

Well done, Xopher. If it makes even one person stop and think, that's a step in the right direction.

Xopher, that's wonderful. And it may well make a difference, as it's both simple and moving.

Kip, Mary, David: Thanks. So far it seems to have shut them up. This is not, of course, the same as convincing them, but I'll take it.

As the old folks used to say: tell the truth, and shame the Devil.

Go Xopher.

Xopher, that should be on an op-ed page, and I hope you submit it somewhere.

Xopher, I'm proud to be your friend.

Also, as a counter to anyone who brings up the canard "Muslims don't have a peaceful culture anywhere in the world," mention how one of the largest communities of Muslims in the world is right here in the USA. And guess what? They're Americans...

(We had a couple of Muslim girls in my Catholic high school, and really, the only way you could tell was by the modified uniforms. Ankle-length skirts and tartan headscarves.)

Xopher wins for clarity of statement.

Side note from another thread—

Bruce Cohen, who has lived in Davis, are you any relation to Sarah Cohen (Shakespeare On Request)?

Xopher, that's a terrific essay.

Open Threadiness: Woman accidentally confesses crime to multilingual officer.
"She didn't expect a brown guy to speak French."

Xopher @ 417:

Well said. I hope it will make a difference to someone who needs it.

Thanks, everyone. A couple of the people who were already on the right side have commented on it, and the rest appear to be continuing their conversation right around it.

So it goes, outside the fluorosphere.

Xopher, I shared your comment with my aunt, who forwarded on some poorly spelled screed against the proposed mosque. I don't know if it will register, but I wanted to thank you for giving me something so timely to use as a response, other than just deleting with a sigh.

Xopher, I shared your comment with my aunt, who forwarded on some poorly spelled screed against the proposed mosque. I don't know if it will register, but I wanted to thank you for giving me something so timely to use as a response, other than just deleting with a sigh.

Wow, that's great! I'm glad it came in handy, and I'm flattered that you found it suitable.

Xopher: I feel your pain. Everything anyone has ever said to me, when I am feeling dispirited on torture... you should read as meant for you.

Doing something, anything, to speak against injustice, is a good thing.

Doing it well, that's a great thing.

You did well.

Fight the Stupid!

Xopher, that's a great essay. I hope it makes a difference.

Xopher, beautifully done.

This essay is the kind of critical thing that stands between us and the dark.

Well said, Xopher. Unfortunately you can't hand some people a clue on a platter.

Further thanks. Anne, you're right...I really want a clue hammer and some clue nails!

Xopher: this site says Cordoba House is to be an Islamic cultural centre, and is only called a mosque by those who oppose it, but then goes on to refer to it as a mosque. Sloppy sub-editing, perhaps. And depressingly predictable comments of course.
Could you link or refer to the gay site you mention please?
And keep on turning on the light, however many trolls prefer the darkness under their bridges.

Xopher @417: That was beautiful. It will make a difference, somehow.

Xopher, would you mind if I were to repost your essay, with appropriate links and credits?

I'd just link to here, but Gee whillikers, d'you know how long this thread is...?

Very nice piece, Xopher. Adding my name to the chorus of praises.

Dr. Psycho at #442, link to Xopher's specific comment in this thread by copying the link under the date-time-stamp that appears at the top of his comment.

Wonderful essay, Xopher.

Thanks again, everyone.

tykewriter: IIRC the local news says that it will be a cultural center and community center that will include a mosque.

Dr. Psycho: By all means. Feel free. Please post the url so I can go look.

Oh, tykewriter, the site was a porn portal, but it has fora, and the thread appeared in one of them.

Xopher, good job. Keep spreading the light like that and the darkness will get pushed back out of a lot of minds.

B. Durbin @ 427:

No, I don't have any close relatives* named Sarah that I know of.⁑

* My family is part of a large cluster connected by something called the "Leshner Cousins Club" out to about 5th cousins, so distant relations are quite another story).

⁑ I may have one I don't know about, especially one who's younger than 30, since I've been largely out of touch from my extended family, which includes 30 immediate first cousins, all grandchildren of my father's mother, more than half of whom would have the name "Cohen".

For all your cat vacuuming needs.

Is it logical to feel guilty about picking up six novels at the local pre-owned bookstore at a 30% discount to the already-incredibly low price of $1 apiece? Is it even more logical to feel guilty if I note that one of those books was co-written by one of the moderators?

The place was having a sale, and I felt compelled to prowl for a while.

Linkmeister: No. Unless they were stripped copies.

Linkmeister: They had a copy of Making Book?

Hope for a Type I Diabetes cure...

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/mgh-mgh062810.php

"Mass. General Hospital, Iacocca Foundation announce completion of Phase I diabetes trial
Safety data submitted to Food and Drug Administration, Phase II plans

"Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Iacocca Foundation announce today the completion of the Phase I BCG clinical trial in type 1 diabetes, as well as the submission of all safety reports to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the MGH data safety monitoring boards. Plans for the Phase II clinical study, which will continue the investigation of bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination as a treatment for people with existing type 1 diabetes, are actively underway.

"We are making great progress and are really excited to be able to move this potential treatment to the next stage of clinical testing," says Denise Faustman, MD, PhD, director of the Immunobiology Laboratory at the MGH and an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School....."

http://www.faustmanlab.org/clinicaltrial/clinicalt_faq.html#CT6

Called on to ban racists from its ranks by the NAACP, "Tea Party Express" leader reacts by posting stunningly crass, racist screed on his blog.

Stefan, last I heard, the Tea Party actually kicked this bozo out (or more specifically, kicked his entire group out), proving that somebody there can still see how they look to the outside world. Progress of a sort?

Very open threadiness (albeit SF-ly):

I know everyone but me went to see _Inception_ this weekend, but I caught _Sorcerer's Apprentice_, and it was pretty fine stuff. Not by any means flawless, but the most solid fantasy movie I've seen in a while.

The negative slant would be "Hur hur, I see fantasy cinema has finally caught up to 1990s urban fantasy." (The Diane Duane / Mercedes Lackey sort of urban fantasy, not Laurel Hamilton.) But movies always trail the genre, right? This gets it right, and gets it visual, which is what movies should do.

Lila @ #450, no, they were all in good-to-excellent condition.

Terry @ #451, no. It was a copy of A Working of Stars, by Doyle and Macdonald.

Xopher: Thank you.

Paula at 452: I know about BCG because a friend of mine recently was treated with it (for bladder cancer), but I didn't know about this study, and I try to keep up with research about diabetes. Thank you, too.

Kip, #454: Pardon me for being less than impressed:

The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams' group when it wouldn't fire him.

Which leaves wide open the question of how many such "umbrella groups" there are, and whether they hold similar views on the racism issue, and whether or not any other such group would welcome with open arms the membership boost of gaining a major activist faction within the group, no matter how extremist their leader might be?

IOW, I'm not so sure that Williams is blustering when he says, and who do these guys think they are anyhow?

One thing that's pretty clear about the teabaggers is that even if they're all getting their funding from the same places, the movement itself is being run along lines analogous to terrorist cells -- not a big hierarchical organization, but a whole bunch of small, nominally-autonomous ones. This provides the necessary plausible deniability for the media to say, each time somebody goes a little further into batshit-crazyland than usual, that it's an "isolated incident" and doesn't represent the teabagger movement as a whole.

Lee @ 458: Regardless of how much (or little) their worldview may correlate with any particular external "objective reality", the Tea Party activists are following in a very long American tradition of protest against what they see as injustice and oppression against essential popular values. Take a really close look at both the rhetoric, and especially the values, of of other American more-or-less organized protest groups from the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, back through the Free Silver advocates and the Populists of the 1890s, to (at least) the Free-Soilers and the Know-Nothings of the antebellum era, and you can find enough similarities to make supporters of any of these groups . . . feel -- well, awkwardly uncomfortable.

More than ninety years after the end of WW2, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has opened another war cemetery in France.

I recently tracked down one of my father's schoolfriends through that site. Their searchable records had enough detail (name of parents in this case) to be sure I'd found the right entry. According to my father, he'd been shot down over Yugoslavia, and later killed by the Germans. He was flying in a photo-recce squadron, and the date of death on the Malta Memorial coincides with one of the big anti-Partisan offensives. It's tempting to construct a story from that.

At Fromelles, most of the bodies are unidentified. Oh, their families would have eventually have known they were dead, but they would have formally been "Missing". Some reburied at Fromelles have been identified by DNA testing.

Elliott @403:
Kidlet is fine with me.

Shall we say, noon on Friday in the hotel lobby? Then we can see if any other MLers can join us, and work out other details from there?

Lee @458: Okay, I'll color you unimpressed.

As I say, though, it seems to indicate that at least somebody there is aware of how they look to others, and I see no need to alter my rhetorical question, "Progress of a sort?" since I drew no conclusions from it.

It remains to be seen how it plays out. Perhaps the rank and file will deal with it as true believers often deal with inconvenient truths, by doubling down on their bellicose ignorance. If this causes them to sprout even more ridiculous racist signs and spout stupider slogans, perhaps it will be even harder for them to deny that juicy core of bigotry which underlies many, if not most, of their grievances.

Leroy, #459: And your point is...?

Yes, America has a long history of batshit-crazy extremist groups. However, I don't believe that any of them have ever tried to masquerade as being the voice of the majority (with full support from the media narrative) until now.

Also worth noting: both the Black Panthers and the Weathermen were, among other things, serving as movers of the Overton Window. By comparison with the Panthers, moderate civil-rights advocates such as MLK didn't look so radical; by comparison with the Weathermen, peaceful protest against the Vietnam War seemed much less threatening. In this context, what are the extremist teabaggers working to legitimize -- SB-1070, or worse?

Lee@463: I'd have thought that naming a group "The Moral Majority" DID constitute a claim to be the voice of the majority.

(Which lead directly to the elegant bumper sticker "The Moral Majority is Neither").

The Washington Post just pointed out a new Twitter Meme: ShakesPalin, in which one rewrites Shakespeare as Palin would have it.

"Is this a dagger? Ya know, I used a dagger just like this to dress out that moose I killed right outside my front door -- livin' in Alaska, yanno, where the oil companies just beg for help from the government, and I was happy to help them, but only because we need to protect this great country of ours from the Russians, and the terrorists who want to destroy our way of life, yanno, it's impervious that we arm our citizens and cut taxes."

Open threadiness: T's latest particle (PDF) on the Trump Parc hawks, a pair of young hawks hatched and growing up in Manhattan, is quite excellent. Something like 100 photos in a PDF, with a little text. Go look!

(I have some technical issues with the photos; see how flat most of them look? That's because the "black point" isn't set appropriately, meaning a significant chunk of the brightness range isn't being used. And a lot of them are a bit more blurred than is ideal. However, they went out and took all these photos documenting the pair of hawks being hatched and raised, and shared them with us, and it's very cool!)

I dunno, Palin's "refudiate" seems to me to be a fairly interesting neologism; used in the right context, it could be nicely nuanced. Of course, classic Bushisms set the bar pretty high.

This should appeal to all our math-and-language geeks: Fifth-Grade Math.

And do read the comments, many of which continue the theme.

Earl @ 467: Of course, if someone else had come up with "refudiate" and then defended it immediately as a neologism, that would be a horse of a different story. In this case, Palin changed her statement, substituting another incorrect or neologistic word, and then finally claimed to be like Shakespeare. In other words, she didn't defend her neologism until it was clear that she didn't know which word she meant.

I have no problems with neologisms, or even malapropisms (although I much prefer Spoonerisms). Coming from someone who repudiates the Elitist Academics as not "real Americans", this kind of behavior is just another example of her hypocrisy. If she makes up a new word, it's because she's like Shakespeare. If someone Elite makes up a new word, it's because they're not Real American.

Ginger @ 469... Palin (...) then finally claimed to be like Shakespeare

Why do I find myself thinking of Kodos the Executioner?

Interesting commentary on Republican politics from The American Spectator:

"When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well."

N.B. I don't agree with much of the rest of the article, in particular the assertion that the old "upper crust" didn't have much to do with political power. Riiiight.

ddb: The black point issue may be from other factors, since it seems this was meant to be printed, and the color space of the printer (or the calibration of the monitor used to edit the images) may not match the color space of your screen.

What pleased me was, I am always a bit hard on my hawk images, and a lot of these were no better than most of mine.

As Shakespeare said, Hang-moose, that's Latin for palin.

Zelda @461 said: Shall we say, noon on Friday in the hotel lobby? Then we can see if any other MLers can join us, and work out other details from there?

I'll be there with bells on. Probably not literal ones, but who knows?

I hereby declare☂ noon on Aug 6 in the Musecon hotel lobby in Itasca, IL a Gathering of Teeny Lurking Sparks of Light, and hope it gathers gravity. Or gravitas. Or gravy, y'know, on the lunch, which might be nice ...

☂ Declaration delivered ex cathedra from my navel, of course, and with no authority whatsoever. Your Mileage May Vary. Offer Not Valid In Some States. Shake Well Before Opening. Etc.

Is there any degree of stupidity that Sara Palin's followers wouldn't put up with? ("Heeeeee, she sure do rile up the libruls don'chee?")

C. Wingate #471: I'm reading through it, and my impression so far is that they're building the "ruling class" -- which he's explicitly stated as predominantly Democratic -- into a Perfect Cabal: no internal divisions, everyone acts in lockstep, they get everything they want, and nobody ever spills the beans. Then in page 4, the article descends into really paranoid weirdness, like one step away from Precious Bodily Fluids! Ooh, and now on the last page, I see this gem:

The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline,

Just seen via BoingBoing... I read this and thought immediately of Amazonfail Fit the Third, ebook pricing, book publishing profit margins, et cetera. Hmm:

"Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books" -- Amazon founder/CEO Jeff Bezos

Open thready munchies: Replacing 1/3 of the peanut butter in the cooks.com peanut butter cookie recipe with Nutella was not an unqualified success. The resulting dough was thinner and stickier than usual, and the chocolate hit was a weak payoff for the poorer handling quality. Increasing the flour might help.

David Harmon @ #476, I too am reading it, and it strikes me that the author is guilty of writing the same thing he accuses Tom Friedman and David Brooks: schlock sociology. It has large elements of grievance in it as well. It might resonate with readers who feel that something has gone wrong with "the system" by which we're governed, but it's analysis based on emotion not on fact.

David Harmon @ 476 -- Particularly in the context of politics, there's something about the phrase "near-European discipline" that I just can't quite parse.

Linkmeister @ 479: Schlock sociology may be too kind. There is not a single citation to a creditable source and I caught him in about a dozen items ranging from simple factual errors to barefaced lies.

Professor Emeritus, forsooth. For values of 'emeritus' approximating 'can no longer tell a hawk from a handsaw'.

Joel Polowin @ 480:

Wait, that essay said "near-European discipline"?

Excuse me.

Bwahahahahahahaha... *pants* hahahahahahahaha.

Ok, I'm better now.

Joel Polowin #480: there's something about the phrase "near-European discipline" that I just can't quite parse

It sounds like a reference to traditional fascism to me.

David, #476: Sadly, there's no provision for posting comments. I was sorely tempted to quote that sentence with a response to the effect of,

"Dear Sir: I think you should be notified that on your return through the interdimensional portal, you did not end up back in your home universe. You may wish to consult with Dr. Quinn Mallory before trying again."

Open threadiness! My daughter is engaged! I helped her acquire the essential split of champagne this morning, so not a total surprise to me. Alas, she currently lives in a state where she can't get legally married, but still -- whee! (confetti, balloons)

Janet Brennan Croft @ 485:

Congratulations!

Congratulations to you and your daughter, Janet!

Janet @485: Hooray!

They're so sweet together. My daughter said a campus tour group of high school girls was passing by at the moment of truth and was all supportive and cheering them on.

Janet Brennan Croft: Mazel Tov!

re 476: Oh yeah, the rest of it is completely cracked. I just thought that the passage I quoted was telling, assuming that it's true: the Repubs have created a anti-establishment monster that (correctly) views them as part of the political establishment and therefore increasingly rejects them.

Mazel tov, Janet!

(Is the impediment to legal union of a nature currently wending its way through the courts?)

Mark@478 -- my cookie-awareness says avoid the nutella. Uncontrolled mix of nut solids, oil, sugar, and who knows what stabilizers.

Just add cocoa powder if you're worried about keeping the consistency the same -- cocoa powder will make the dough a little drier, but not nearly as much as flour will, and you're adding flavor rather than diluting it.

I laugh in the face of consistency, so I might just throw in melted chocolate chips and see what happens. There's probably some balance of chocolate and cocoa that keeps the consistency the same.

If you want a more unusual nut flavor, go with almond butter or cashew butter. They will substitute for peanut butter pretty well. (Albeit, more like "natural style" peanut butter.) But I wouldn't *mix* those with peanut butter; peanut butter will dominate the flavor.

(Caveat: cookie-awareness has not quantified these results with controlled experiments. Venture forth and eat the failures.)

It's actually fairly easy to make a hazelnut butter if that's the flavor you want, Mark -- I did it to make a hazelnut buttercream for a chocolate hazelnut cake whose recipe is in one of the Silver Palate cookbooks. Basically, roast hazelnuts until the hulls rub off easily; rub off hulls; run through blender. Tends to be slightly dry, so adding some oil (peanut would probably be good) until the texture is right is probably a good idea. It's an amazingly tasty substance.

Janet Brennan Croft @ 485... Huzzah!

Tom Whitmore: One could use hazelnut oil.

In other news. I'm leaving Tennessee today, so I ought to be in Jersey City tomorrow.

Tonight I hope to have dinner with Jon Singer, and whomever else shows up at Mandalay, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Terry @496: I'll try to stop by -- Mandalay is just over a mile away from my house, and I have one degree of separation from Jon Singer (who doesn't?), but my son has a Scout meeting tonight, so it won't be early.

there's something about the phrase "near-European discipline" that I just can't quite parse

"Our terrifying dictatorship will rule with the humorlessness of the Irish, the efficiency of the Italians, the loyal obedience of the Czechs, the dedicated single-mindedness of the Greeks, the horrifying brutality of the Dutch and the technological supremacy of the British public transport system."

Janet Brennan Croft #485: My best wishes for your daughter.

ajay #498:

While you were joking about "the horrifying brutality of the Dutch", you might want consider than when Voltaire set his example of the horrors of slavery in Candide not in Brazil, or Jamaica, or Virginia,or in Saint Domingue but in Surinam.

Terry @496. This shy primarily-a-lurker might get up enough courage to join y'all at Mandalay. I've met Jon on a couple of occasions. Do you have a time set?

Have a good trip from Tennessee.

Thank you all for your good wishes! We live in Oklahoma, NOT an extremely friendly state for women or gays right now, though at least that brutal new abortion law is being challenged. Being the daughter of a librarian, she's been working up a complicated matrix of grad schools based on what she wants to study, where her fiancee can find work, what the climate is like, and where they can marry or have an out-of-state marriage recognized...

C. Wingate #491: I think that falls under "even a stopped clock is right twice a day". But it should be interesting to see what happens when the Repub leadership actually recognizes their mistake.

Janet Brennan Croft #485: "lives in a state where she can't get legally married" -- that gender issue?

Janet Brennan Croft @ 485, congratulations! Best wishes to your daughter in marriage, grad school, and moves -- and to you as you welcome a new family member by marriage. And my heartfelt wishes that soon, every state will recognize her marriage.

How did she stash the champagne before asking? I got away with it by proposing on Christmas Eve -- Keith saw the bottle in the fridge, but thought I had just bought the New Year's champagne early.