You can't "solve" a myth.

I'm watching the (last) season finale of Person of Interest.

How wonderfully Gibsonesque!

This is old hat by literary SF standards, but seeing it in a mainstream broadcast TV show makes me giddy.

Jack the Ripper's Identity Discovered via Forensic Evidence. Killer H.H. Holmes (2012)

British serial killer Jack the Ripper has been identified as an Essex doctor called Stephen Herbert Appleford (2012)

Authors Christer Holmgren and Edward Stow believe the most likely suspect for Jack The Ripper is Charles Cross, a cartman who claimed to have found the first victim prostitute Polly Nichols on August 31 1888. (2012)

Sounds like a tearing good yarn.

Speaking of yarns, I will have some for sale in the very near future. I've been spinning. Most of it is alpaca.

It all reminds me of when the Soviets caught and executed the serial killer of Rostov, after having gotten numerous confessions from a variety of people and driven four of them to suicide.

(My memory played me false. I thought they'd convicted and executed a couple before they got the right guy.)

Everyday racism: Are "black" names really weirder than "white" ones?
On Twitter ... I mused on this double standard with a comment and a joke. "I will take your 'questions' about 'weird' black names seriously when you make fun of Reince Priebus and Rand Paul," followed by "White people giving their kids names like Saxby Chambliss and Tagg Romney is a clear sign of cultural pathology."

I've seen some pretty strange names on white folks in my time -- and remember the huge foofaraw about Sarah Palin's kids having names like Track, Bristol, and Trig? But I've also heard a fair number of comments, ranging from amused to contemptuous, about the "weird names" that black people give their kids. Seriously, is "Trayvon" any stranger than "Trevor"?

Bearing in mind that last names are (generally) not chosen for children in the way that first names are, what are the oddest first names you've ever encountered on a white person? I'll start off with a high-school classmate named Klohn, and the child of an acquaintance who got tagged Xevious.

I recall someone online complaining about those "made-up names" and thinking "but *all* names are made up". As for weird names of white people, twenty years ago I briefly worked with a guy whose first name was 'Nimrod'.

Heck, plenty of weird white people first names just in celebrity kids. "Moon Unit Zappa". Abbie Hoffman's kid - "america".

What's weird about Nimrod? He's in the Bible, one of Noah's descendants I believe. Said to be a mighty hunter.

(I know the name because there was a colorful dude in the history of my town with that nickname. I've been in his cabin, long after he got frozen into a block of ice by accident.)

'America' isn't that strange a name. I've seen it several times, mostly in the 19th century (which was the golden age of off-the-wall names).

In general, African Americans are more likely to have unusual names because of a cultural trend the last few decades of parents wanting to give their kids unique or at least distinctive names. I remember one article a decade or two ago on testing name sorting for computers where they ended up deciding to use a book of "Top N Baby Names" plus a mailing list from the Michael Jackson Fan Club. (The article also mentioned names like Porsche and Mercedes; I've seen the former more often with white kids, and Mercedes has been a common name since well before the car.)

That's not to say there isn't #EverydayRacism involved; labeling names chosen by black people as inferior because they're chosen by black people is primarily racist, with a certain amount of get-off-my-lawnism that also gets used on people named after Britney Spears or other noise-the-kids-are-listening-to-these-days pop stars.

And yeah, Southerners are hardly in a position to point fingers, though they'd probably say that their weird names are ok because they're typically old family names, and people often go by [FirstInitial][MiddleInitial] instead of names down there anyway. My father was named Clare Augustus Stewart Jr., usually got called "CA" (it beat "Gus", which is what some of my cousins called him), didn't get called "Clare" around home because that was his father, and he also got constant gender and spelling mistakes in paperwork when he used it.

Strangest name I ever saw was years ago, in an article about a young boy who’d died — I think he was killed in a bit of street violence, but I’m not sure, it could’ve been a car crash. The poor kid’s first name, horribly, was Carrion. Though I suppose it’s possible that it was really just something that sounded like that, and the paper had gotten it wrong.

(Or maybe his parents had expected him to be wayward.)

(Sorry.)

My English teacher always swore blind she used to know someone called Percy Vere. I was never sure whether she was telling the truth or that was just one of her jokes.

Isn't Room 34 where they write the pron?

As the clipper ship carrying Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't reach the UK until tomorrow, I can only hope they bring back David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury.

Unrelatedly I wrote this:

To my dearest friend Miss Lacey Lee,
This unresolved sexual tension is killing me
We should discuss this over a cup of tea
When you’re not so busy solving mysteries
Yours, so very sincerely
Constable Jonathan Peabody

Dear Jonathan, my favourite constable,
I hope the delay in my reply is understandable
I have been investigating a body on a raft (inflatable)
Do you think a relationship of this sort is desirable?
Perhaps a quiet liaison, to our colleagues deniable
Or a wild, tawdry affair to the whole world visible?
Forgive me. This topic tends to make me irascible.
We should speak when I’ve caught this criminal so contemptible.
Detective Lacey Lee
C/O The Ivies B&B
Dunstable

Does Lacey Lee
Take anything seriously
(Except for mysteries)?

In high school, I knew a Van Iden . What always boggled me there was that he was a IVth.

My grandfather's middle name was Rankin -although family legend says that no one knew this until he died because he hated it so. And my mother's name is very clearly male (think John or Robert) because her father wanted a first birth son and was going to have one.

In high school, I knew a Van Iden . What always boggled me there was that he was a IVth.

My grandfather's middle name was Rankin -although family legend says that no one knew this until he died because he hated it so. And my mother's name is very clearly male (think John or Robert) because her father wanted a first birth son and was going to have one.

Americans all have odd names.

(Ducks and runs.)

Actually ... many years ago I knew a trainee bank manager, back in the days when bankers were people who dealt with customers face-to-face. And when she started on the floor at a large branch, as part of her orientation she (and the other new staff) were presented with a list of account holders. "Get your laughing done here and now so you can keep a straight face when you see them in your office," she was told. And apparently they were allowed half an hour for giggling and guffaws to subside.

(The only name that stuck in my head was the joint account owned by Morris and Minnie Minor. Which is probably only funny in the context of the British automobile industry from the 1960s through the 1980s when those models of car were on the road ...)

Well I have a distant relative named 'Unique'...

cyllan @17:
My grandfather's middle name was Rankin -although family legend says that no one knew this until he died because he hated it so.

Only my uncle knows what my maternal grandfather's middle name was. Not even my mother does. We all know it started with a V.

I'd have guessed Vivian, or some other name that has drifted toward the feminine over the years, except that he was known as Paul in his youth and Lynn as he got older. So whatever the issue was, it wasn't having problems with names that were increasingly used by women.

There is no documentary evidence. His birth certificate was apparently lost in a courthouse fire in Oklahoma*. Instead, he used a letter from his sister attesting to his identity. I don't recall any time that it was questioned.

-----
* Actually, we have some doubts about this, for reasons, but no one's gone back to find out for sure.

Two names I've come across in the years I've been employed, both of whom used to do a great deal of business with my company and would come into the office regularly. (This is me, working desperately to keep a straight face...)

Neither first name was odd. But in combination....

One was Jack Frost. The other fellow was (no lie) Dick Wacker. (The latter, I could never figure out. He could have gone by Richard, or Rich, easily enough. Why he wanted to be known as a wanker is beyond me...)

Both men, incidentally, were white.

Open threadiness: Didn't see this coming.. Decency crops up in surprising places, sometimes.

There's an Italian politician (or there was; don't know if he's still in the frame) whom I really grew to dislike, because he was just such a thoroughly unpleasant person. Every time anyone interviewed him, he was rude, dismissive and aggressive. What really got me was that his name was Vittorio Sgarbi. Sgarbi is the Italian word for "insults".

And in a more benign case of nominative determinism, for many years in the town where I grew up there was a shop sign reading "W Butcher, Meat Purveyor".

re 16: When my wife worked in the Philly naval yard there was a fellow name of Theophilus Luchard VII.

"Theophilus Luchard VII"

To be fair, Theophilus Luchards I through III probably wouldn't have seen it as *that* strange a name.

I knew a girl in high school called Brandy Alexander. Her brother was Ryan, called Rye, and the family had dogs named Gin and Tonic.

One sensed a theme.

I have a friend who works with large databases of names and sometimes sends me examples; it takes a lot to startle her these days. Manless Head being the most recent one.

As far as targeting-based-on-name: I agree. There's a lot, and it doesn't START with the name. Fourth-generation-recycled WASP names sound just like "stereotypical black" names. No, the other stereotype, like "Sanford Otis."

My mother knew a family named Berry who called their daughters Holly, Ivy and Myrtle.

In my father's office, there worked a man name Oliver Nickleby. He changed his name by deed poll to Nicholas Twist.

A girl I knew in high school had a name so ghastly that I'm not going to write it here, because any google search on it will go directly to her. Note for future baby namers: not all feminine versions of a grandfather's name work, especially if said grandfather's name is extremely out of date and now has "hick" connotations.

(Fortunately for her, I suppose, she was a pretty cheerleader type and very popular)

Charles Stross's comment about "Morris and Minnie Minor" reminds me that everyone in America has to be told that "Ford Prefect" was a joke.

Rural Great Plains names of my grandparents' generation certainly tend toward the odd by current standards - there was a neighbor of my grandparents who I never heard called anything but "Junior", even when he was in his eighties, and I never actually learned if that was his given name or a nickname. For that matter nobody called my grandfather by his given name of Arie; he was always "Bud".

Neither white nor black, but there's an Indian-American (that is, his parents are from India but he was born in the US) man my wife knows named Aristotle Socrates. He seems remarkably good-humored about his rather memorable name considering the amount of teasing he must have received. (His explanation of the origin of the name.)

Bill Stewart #11: Mercedes is one of the titles of the Virgin Mary (Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, Our Lady of Mercies), which is why it is a common name in the Hispanosphere since it helps distinguish among the myriad Marías. My own mother is named after a different attribute of the Virgin being María Dolores (and thus named for Our Lady of Sorrows). The car got the name from a person originally.

Mongoose #22: When I was doing my fieldwork in Surinam 21 years ago, everyone I met insisted that there was one honest politician in the country. In the end, I interviewed the other deputy from his party, a man with the quite Dutch name of Ernie Brunings. The exemplar of honesty's name, however, was one I found quite cheering: Frank Playfair.

I've seen a post by a black woman whose first name is a little-known name from the bible. She was annoyed at people who assume it's "ghetto".

Charlie Stross #18: Wot, no Morris Oxford or Austin Cambridge?

Many moons ago, when I worked for a market research firm I came across the name "Lynn Merry Christmas" which struck me as truly cruel. More recently, when I found myself working for a phone company updating its book preparatory to Y2K (I was between academic jobs at the time), I came across one Lyndon B. Johnson living quietly in South Carolina. All I could think was "poor man".

Unique names make it easier to find people I went to high school with, like Elmar Schmeisser (mentioned in the last OT) or Mansfield Ralph Cleary IV. This can either be a feature or a bug.

It's a fair cop, gov. I did mention a dead president.

There was a young black woman working at a pharmacy in Cincinnati 27 years ago whose name tag read "Deaferteria". Her coworkers called her Terry. I'm thinking uniqueness can be a burden.

Something like 50 years ago, our family dentist was Dr. Toothaker. Name as destiny. On the other hand, Dr. Lawyer up on the hill is a chiropractor.

Niall McAuley #27:

What the dickens?

For what? I ask. I have grapes. Nice grapes.

[Fragano: You have three blank spaces in a row hidden after your name in the "Commenter" block. Suggest you delete everything in that block, re-type, and save that as your auto-fill version. -- Mariosi Coegray, Duty Gnome]

Everyone knows that Jack was actually abducted by the Vorlons. Any other claims aren't canon.

We fear to echo what the sunlight speaks
in voices that cannot be raised too loud
for fear we might stand out within the crowd
or be admonished as monsters or freaks
so we are silent, do not strain our breeks
in the assurance we will not be proud
of course or carriage. Nothing is allowed
to harm the tenor of our days and weeks.
For normal passage this might be enough,
but more is needed when we have to find
the kind of courage that you only need
when life has taken all your other stuff
and you’ve been driven mad as well as blind
yet have a chance for one more human deed.

Stefan @2 -- POI became my must-see show during season 1, and only continues to get better. That second season finale was a blast.

These days, in this country at least, it's more usual for a priest to be called Father [firstname], but in the past it was always Father [lastname]. I used to know a Fr John who told me, with immense relish, about an old priest he used to know when he was younger who insisted on being known as Fr Stephen, although he wasn't exactly progressive in any other respect.

"Why was that?" I asked innocently.

Fr John grinned. "Because his surname was Christmas!"

Since we're talking about naming: for anyone who hasn't seen it, I recommend poking around on Laura Wattenberg's Baby Name Voyager and the associated name mapper. Both are really fun interactive graphics based on US Census data back to the 1880s, letting you see, to take an example from upthread, how "Vivian" shifted over that time in the US. Her blog on that site is also entertaining, looking into various aspects of how names are perceived and chosen.

(I'm amused that, in a good example of "knowing your audience", paid subscriptions for the more sophisticated searching tools on that site are available in terms of "One Trimester (3 months)", "Full Term (9 months)", and "Name Enthusiast (12 months)".)

My father has three younger sisters, named after their position in the family. So it's not google-able: famous perfume #5, the Roman numerals for 6 twice, 7a.

Also, my wife had not one, but two, female ancestors (or maybe ancestral relatives) named Buena Vista (byoona vista).

Revilo P. Oliver could hardly have been whiter.

Because of regional immigration patterns in Canada, some areas are used to certain kinds of names, others aren't. I live out in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, and when a fellow named Kos Van Wermeskerken was elected head of the school board some years back, we local reporters took it in stride – there has been a big Dutch community here since the 1950s. But it was fun to watch the TV reporters trip up when they came in from Vancouver every now and again and tried to pronounce it.

Naming someone after the position in the birth chain used to be relatively common -- source of such names as Septimus and Octavia.

Oh, and lots of unusual Bible names. I have a close friend named Carmi whose younger son is named Lael.

C. Wingate #24

She knew Teddy the Snipe? Small world, eh?

Until this thread, I'd forgotten about the stint I worked in the childrens' section of the local library. A man was signing up his kid for a library card; he signed, as parent, "R. Valentino". (This would have been in the '80s, and he was probably about forty years old at the time.) I looked at him and said, "Not Rudolph, surely?" He sighed and nodded, and I immediately felt horrible for asking. Apparently, his mother had had a crush as a teenager, and when she married a man named Valentino she couldn't resist...

Lee@903/-1: Not the UK, but the NA colony that thought the UK was OK. Doesn't change anything. Also drives me nuts that you Exceptional Americans are throwing away the potential of people like me (except you're not, because 90% of my clients are American).

In general (and therefore, less @Lee@903/-1, and getting more less every sentence), there seems to be a culture that says "I succeeded because I'm a superior being. It's clear that I'm a superior being because I'm successful." Which leads to, sometimes, "I'd be more successful (and therefore more superior) if I didn't have all these restrictions on what I could do (in general, but in particular with the non-superior beings; after all, they're inferior). From what I understand of the Objectivist philosophy, the next statement is "and it's because of the inferiors ganging up and making all these regulations to hobble superiors like me so they won't fall any further behind."

I find this heartless, and cruel, and incredibly appealing to two groups of people: the ones that are willing to feed the inferiors poisoned milk if it will make them more money, or are comfortable with an "acceptable" rate of workplace suicide; and the ones who are sure they're superior, but "are hobbled" from being successful by the same governments and societies that pull down Galt et al. I'm sure I'm missing at least something here, but I have a similar reaction to theories that would consider me being dead a correct outcome that Xopher does, so I can't see it.

Saying that (and I'm sure that there are Objectivists that think I shouldn't have been left to die in total inability, rather than lived and trained to be the productive person I am; I know there is one who is willing to consider me people *now*; who knows about *then*), I find the Kickstarter to be pure Objectivism in action: if I can get people to buy nothing so I can do what I want (and make a healthy living in the process), and "guarantee" an audience of paid players at the end (because they feel they have a stake in it), then I've succeeded, haven't I? Because, of course, I'm superior - not *to my backers*, of course <wink/>, just in general.

And who knows? Maybe enough people want this to go that crowdfunding it is the right way. It goes around the traditional restrictions put up by the movie industry to hobble the product of clearly superior people, in favour of talking to the clearly correct. After all, it worked for AFP and SJG!

Theophylact #47 Or more of a racist. Or, for that matter, more of a Pendleton (his middle name). I used to read his essays and have to say that, since he died the standard of literacy on the racist right has declined dramatically.

cyllan #16: Thus, V.I. IV? Oy.

On names: I have two, very common, Biblical given names; and a last name that evokes "are we related" whenever I run into someone else with that name (which is one of the reasons why I'm pseudonymous here; there is one of me On The Net).

Of course, growing up, boys were known by their last name...

re: Ouranosaurus: "northern" Alberta has a heavy Ukranian population (which I always thought was a Stalinistic effect; looks like the ones I'm thinking of are from 19th century famines, not 20th). "Weird" white names, at least around here, are (anglicized badly, but) just taken for granted - at least the Ukranian and anglicized German ones. Traditional southern U.S. names would feel "weird" here in the same way that Chantal Krevaziuk, say, or Chuck Kobasew (pronounced "Koba-sioux'", which drives me nuts, because I *know* it's "Ko'-ba-chev" :-)

Of course, what you Louisianans have done to our Second Official Language is astonishing. I always get in trouble because I pronounce it the way I read it - with a Parisian accent rather than a Quebecker, because of how I was taught - rather than the correct way, and it's as incomprehensible to Louisianans as modern Anglicization is. Having said *that*, I'm sure I mangle the Ukranian names (and know I mangle the Polish and Czech ones) about as badly.

We have a Mircea at work. I used to answer the general line, and we'd get "I have this email from Me--, Mr--, M--" "Mircea. I'll pass you to him". Very common (Romanian) name, it is.

"Andrea", Italian male, *always* catches me out.

I believe Mr Barebones may have something to say on this thread.

There's a religious component to names, too. My daughter attended a Catholic grade school, and at one soccer game the parents noticed that every girl on the field for our team, with the exception of one stray "Kelsey," had a name that included some form of Elizabeth, Mary, or Claire.

Re unusual names, I was charmed to find from a genealogy of my mother's family that we had an ancestor named "Obadiah" in New England in the 1700s. But I wouldn't have named a child after him.

Fragano Ledgister @35: [..] I came across one Lyndon B. Johnson living quietly in South Carolina. All I could think was "poor man".

I recall reading an account that stated the former President had been so vain that he sent a gift to the parents of any child they named after him. IIRC, the gift was a ham.

Everybody else's naming customs--like everybody else's wedding and funeral customs--are always weird.

(Listening to the people whose funeral customs call for open-casket talking about those whose customs call for closed-casket, and vice versa, can be entertaining, in a morbid sort of way. And the cake-and-punch wedding reception people versus the full-banquet-with-an-open bar people.)

I can use my full Real Name (tm) here and yet be more or less pseudonymous because there are so many people with this firstname+lastname combination. (I guess we're all named after the novel that was published when I was two)

Incidentally, the other person in my zip code with my name that I know of (people trying to reach him reached me) is African-American.

I would have expected anyone with the surname 'Soul' to avoid giving their offspring a first name beginning with 'R', yet last year I saw an inscription on a bell to 'Robert Soul'. Were his parents oblivious, or what?

The Utah Baby Namer....

"Seal Ann Rio de la Plata" as the given name.

I have a great-great-grandfather where I've found at least two versions for both first and middle names.

Genealogy can be such fun.

Rob @62:

So, you would think. My last name sounds exactly like the last part of #48's Ouranosaurus. So, when we were looking for kid names, one of the requirements was "not a plausible dinosaur name". Nothing ending in a, anything that could be singsongily added to rex. I couldn't do that to a kid.

Of course, pets are a different matter. If I ever get a large dog, I'm naming it Bronte or Tyranna.

There's cold coffee I could reheat.

I used to go to school with a guy named Hari Krishna. He got called down to the office a lot.

We also had a Ronald McDonald and James Bond.

I remember an Air Force O3 whose last name was "America," who was very happy to be promoted to O4 (for more than the usual reasons).

Lorax @31:

'Bud' must be a generational nickname, not limited by region, as my grandfather was Baltimore born and was known by that moniker. (his first name was Albert, so who knows where Bud came from).

Ginger @891/OT187: Good luck with finding homes for the new foster kitties. What happened to Marilee's cats that you were fostering (if I remember correctly)?

Cassy B #52: I used to know a Robert Louis Stevenson. His mother really liked Treasure Island. I'm not kidding.

Gno!!!!!!!!!!

[Caught by the triple-space filter again. This time between the period after Treasure Island and the I in I'm. -- Marisuo C'quomo, Duty Gnome]

Back when I was first working at DHEW Office of Audit, we were doing a birthdate match, comparing Social Security numbers and names from the food stamp printouts.

I got to see a lot of weird baby names. But the lad I felt the most sympathy for was the young man whose parents had named him "Demitresse."

I think they were trying for Demetrius, but I'm not sure.

Oh, in this morning's paper, I read that Miss Piggy has joined Kermit at the Smithsonian.

She got her own photo-shoot, and posed with Dorothy's ruby slippers. She got to wear the Hope Diamond as well...

BTW, for those in need, McGuckin's Hardware now has garden moai in stock.

Re: names

My grandfather's eldest son was called Junior by the family and his age-mates until almost his (my uncle's) death, and my cousin was nicknamed Bud.

One of his cronies was Gerlactus Bouricius, called Guy. His kids had strongly white bread names. No, not "Wonder".

I used to know (in different contexts) women named October* and December. One was white, one black.

Why are some months "normal" names--April, May, and June for females, August for males--and others weird?

*Her mother-in-law used to call her 'Tuesday'.

Re: names (Southern US edition)

Virtually every female in my Mother's lineage that I know about has two first names, and my Mother's could be (and is often written as) two separate names but is actually only one.

My late paternal Grandfather's name, after whom both my Dad and I are named (He's legally Jr, I'm III, we changed my son's middle name so he didn't have to be saddled with being IV and used his maternal Grandfather's first name instead so there was no argument from my Southern parents/relatives... Bonus is that my Brother in law is also III, and we're not sure he'll have kids, so this way the names keep going - if my son has kids) is not actually the one he was always known by. At some point, presumably before or soon after he was legally able to sign for things, he started using the name my Dad and I got. His legal name was never changed, but nobody in small-town Mississippi cared, they just called him by the name he wanted to be called. His actual first name? Crayton.

HLN: Local woman drives for 6.5 hours to attend wedding on Saturday, runs 50-mile trail race Sunday... then crashes bike and bruises/cracks ribs on end of handlebars on Wednesday. Trying to be philosophical she says "at least I'd finished the "5 x 50-milers" I'd set myself for this year before the accident."

I ran across a file once for a kid named James T. Kirk (and the people in the file room didn't get why I expressed sympathy, which boggled me). There's also a guy called James R. Kirk around, but he's probably old enough to have been named before the show.

dcb @79, ouch.

Fragano, #32: My first association to "Mercedes" is not the car, but white author Mercedes Lackey.

Tom, #36: This is the primary reason that I do not use my birth name on my Facebook account. While my first name is not unusual, my last name was rare enough that anyone you run into in this country who has it is related to me by either birth or marriage. There are a lot of people I used to know who I do not want finding me that easily.

Cassy, #52: My now-ex has a cousin whose first name is Arwen. Yes, for the obvious reason. I imagine that she got a lot more grief about it after the movies came out.

Mycroft, #56: Re Mircea, I wouldn't stumble over pronouncing it (although it's quite possible that I would mispronounce it as if it were French) -- but I would be quite grateful to you for giving me the gender cue, because that name parses to me as female.

Rob, #62: Apparently I'm oblivious too. [*]?

Mary Aileen, #77: I will not be at all surprised if we start seeing the occasional girl named October (and nicknamed Toby) in another 5 or 6 years.

"Apparently I'm oblivious too."

Doesn't have the same trouble in American English -- think A. Soul as a slightly less obvious version of the same problem.

dcb @ 70: Well, funny you should ask about Marilee's cats. Junie B is doing just fine, but Loki is dying of his cancer (which was diagnosed around the time Marilee died). I am currently attempting to reach him with a syringe full of analgesic, but he moves when I try to touch him. He'll sniff my finger, but that's about it. He is resting comfortably on an old dog bed, and shows no signs of distress, but I am hoping to move things along for him, hopefully tonight or tomorrow. He'd been fine all year; the decline occurred fairly suddenly, which is typical.

The kittens were introduced to one of my dogs this morning, and it was fascinating to see their different personalities erupting. One kitten met nose-to-nose with the dog, but the next one right along after had a little fit and scared the dog into hiding behind me. I'm waiting for the laundry to dry so I can bring up another clean bed for them, and I'll spend some time in the room to desensitize them.

OtterB @81: Yes, exactly. At least the diclofenac means the ribs (well the muscles) are no longer spasming, which makes things less uncomfortable. And I can breath okay, just not bend over, stretch te reach something etc. etc.

Ginger @84: Thanks for the update. Sympathies for Loki; hope he goes as peacefully as possible.

Lee (82): Good point. But the October I knew in library school must have been born in the 1950s.

My last name is short, easy to spell (though often misspelled anyway) and to pronounce, but uncommon enough that essentially anyone in the US who shares it is a relative or ex-relative.

Rob Hansen #62: Imagine my surprise, a bit over two decades ago, meeting the Aussie friend of a friend of mine, who had the euphonious name of Richard Head.

Count me among the clueless; why is "Robert Soul" bad?

My father has an slightly unusual first name. It's the "Mount" where George Washington lived. When he was a kid, listening to Walter Winchell on the radio, Winchell said something on the order of "There are at least 11 other people in America with the name Walter Winchell". My dad sat there thinking, "I bet there isn't another person on earth with my first and last names together".

Imagine his surprise when he met one, about 40 years ago. That one was a plumber, while my dad owned a hardware store, so their jobs were even tangentially connected.

His father was E.R. Always E.R. It wasn't until he was long dead that I found out his name was Erwin Rudolph. I suppose it's not surprising that he went by his initials, though his sister Zdenka (or possibly Zdeňka) had it far worse. "Zdenka" sounds like "stinker" to a six-year-old on the playground. She had it changed legally to "Don" when she was old enough.

Cally, it's the initial and last name. Say "R. Soul" aloud a couple of times, and you'll get it.

Think British.

Prominent Houston socialite Ima Hogg. It is apparently not really true that she had a sister named Ura.

I once encountered a Wayne County assistant prosecutor named Luke Skywalker, but he had apparently cheated by changing his name.

Mary Aileen @ 77: There's Junius as a male name, and Augusta as a female name. I wouldn't think anyone in a northern climate at least would want to name their kid after a grim winter month in which staying alive was the first priority.

As Fragano mentioned, Mercedes the car was named for a woman - Mercedes Jellinek, daughter of a board member of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft.

My last name is short, easy to spell (though often misspelled anyway) and to pronounce, but uncommon enough that essentially anyone in the US who shares it is a relative or ex-relative.

Mine, too, with the additional data point that some who have it were evidently my ancestors' slaves.

I have a plea for literary help - and where better than a Making Light open thread?

I want to buy my wife a surprise copy of a favourite book from her childhood - one whose title she no longer recalls. Since I want it to be a surprise I can't dig for more details.

What I know:
- it was a children's book
- it was about a cow who wanted to make a plum pudding
- the plums in question were damsons
- my wife is 45. The book was originally her mother's book, so certainly nothing recent.

My Google-fu has failed me utterly here.

Anyone?

One good plea for help deserves another!

A co-worker asked me if I could come up with a word other than "boastful" for public displays of one's own wonderfulness. My one good thought was "self-aggrandizing" and he'd already rejected it as too long. I'm a little stumped.

(The context? A vehicle with a sign in the window explaining that the driver had been awarded the Bronze Star.)

Ahh, I speak a very Midwest dialect of American English, so R. Soul is a mispronunciation for me, unless I think "British English". Completely different vowel sound at the beginning, and no R at all, audible or inadible.

Prideful.

Lori @73, I knew a Demetrius when I was a kid -- except I thought his name was "Jim" for years. He never acknowledged his legal name. (I don't recall how I happened to find it out.)

The "Prideful" was a suggestion to John.

Cally, I don't think the dialects that use the word that sounds like "R. Soul" pronounce the R in either word.

Okay, I need some help with an e-book issue. I just got a new smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. I wanted to buy the "Two from the Mageworlds" book that was only offered in e-format. So I went over to Madhouse Manor, which linked me to the book on Smashwords; I created a Smashwords account, bought the book, and then downloaded the Kindle version of it from my cellphone. I got a notification that the download was successful, but it's not showing up in my Kindle app, nor is it in the native e-reader that came on the phone.

I sent a query to Smashwords about this, in which I gave them all the information I just laid out here, and got back this in response:
If you have previously downloaded a sample or a previous version, please delete those versions first. Then revisit your library page, select the book you want to download. At the top right, you should see "You own it!" Click that, or scroll down, and you should see a table labeled "Available ebook reading formats." On the right, click the "Download" link for the format you want.

Do you see the problem here? I can't find the bloody file, so I can't delete it! And why didn't it download properly in the first place? (Actually, I may have an answer to that last; their FAQ describes the downloading process to a Kindle app as rather more baroque than just "click the version you want to download" and suggests that I may have to use my desktop as an intermediary.)

Not a happy camper right now. Help?

One of my uncles was only called Spud, have no idea if it was his real name, but then my father was Ralph Marion Helm (Spud was his brother).

There is a PR professional in Kansas City named Sandy Beach. One of my bosses swore to me her father named all his kids punny, but he may have been pulling my leg.

I work in a very large building and with a large number people of all races. Names are sometimes really, really weird.

Back at uni a friend tutored chemistry, and his class included both Darvas Grunden and Tvyat Quatch.

I'm guessing at the spelling here, and I never saw either of them so I can't give clues about ethnicity.

To me they sound like they wandered in from a little known Dickens novel.

Steve Taylor @94

That seems vaguely familiar. Almost certainly English. I might check with Ambleside Online. They are Charlotte Mason Homeschoolers with a great interest in good children's literature and someone there may recognize the tale. I'll tuck it into my brain and see if something rattles free...K

There's a young woman who occasionally sings the national anthem for my favourite sports team (and very, very well) named "Lovely Andalay". I always feel that that is an unfortunate name in combination.

My geographical region tends to have hyphenated names like Marie-Eve; I'm not going to type out my one classmate's name because it's probably googleable, but she had a double-barrelled first name, a double-barrelled middle name, and her parents' surnames hyphenated together (my geographical region also doesn't tend to having women taking their husband's name, if they get married at all). Forms were hell for her and her brothers.

My sister Nicola gets guff around here for having a "boy's" name; my folks had only been in Canada for three years or so after we immigrated from the UK, and had not yet made enough francophone friends to pick up on this being a potential issue.

I have a cousin in Central America named Mercedes. And another named Auxiliadora.

And once upon a time I took a check from a woman named Aida Verdi. That's the only really unusual one that I remember.

I worked for a time with a Sandra (went by Sandy) Shore. Very nice lady--I never quite reached the point where I could ask if she married into that last name or not, though.

No, it's not just black people. For every Laqueisha there's a Nevaeh. (That's a backwards spelling of Heaven ™ estate of V. C. Andrews.)

Steve Taylor @94: Have you checked Purple House Press? They have lots of old classic children's books that they got the rights to reprint. Named after Mr. Pine's Purple House (the book they founded the press to reprint!) - my husband's favourite book as a child. :)

This isn't helping with the name of the book, I know, but I thought perhaps if you browsed something might jump out at you.

Steve Taylor @94, you might also ask at the LJ community "whatwasthatbook"

Now I'm very confused.

When I saw the R. Soul, I connected it immediately to "arsehole", which is in my native dialect.

Then Cally in 96 said Ahh, I speak a very Midwest dialect of American English, so R. Soul is a mispronunciation for me,
unless I think "British English". Completely different vowel sound at the beginning, and no R at all, audible or inadible.

But that makes no sense to me, since arse is not a mispronunciation of ass, it's a different word that means the same thing.

Then Xopher in 99 said Cally, I don't think the dialects that use the word that sounds like "R. Soul" pronounce the R in either word.

Of course we pronounce the R in arse. Otherwise it would be ass. Which would still work in context, but would not be the word I wanted to say.

So, did I not get the joke? Was R. Soul not supposed to sound like arsehole?

And I'm swearing on Making Light because if I keep using euphemisms I'm just going to sink. Sorry.

One of my great-aunts was named Aurelia, shortened to Aunt Really. It's one of those times you look cockeyed at your family to see if they're pulling your leg.

Cheryl:

Well, you see, in my dialect of Midwest American English, "arsehole" simply doesn't exist as a word at all. On those rare occasions it's seen, it's as a loanword from English. All we have is "asshole", and various euphanisms. With the initial "a" sounded as in "cat".

Eric - I wish my last name sounded like saurus! I've already suggested to my wife that when/if we have a child, "Tyrranosaur" would be an excellent middle name. She begs to differ.

Another name oddity – names that change when you cross borders between countries that speak the same language. I know a fellow named Guy, a former American, who moved to (English speaking) Canada. His hame had always been pronounced as in "Go talk to that guy over there." In Canada, people assumed it was French-Canadian and called him Guy-as-in-Lafleur. He liked it and switched pronunciations.

13 Disney heroines swap clothes with their heroes.
Terrific fan-art! The full set is here.

I should mention that it's just the women dressed like their associated guys, not the other way around. Although that would have been fun too.

>> ... McGuckin's Hardware now has garden moai in stock.

This is outstanding news. My desultory search for employment has now become urgent.

How tall are the biggest ones?

In my father's family, which is not deep (for most of my life, it's been five siblings and their families plus Great-Aunt Elinor, not much of anyone else), boys go by the nickname of their middle name. Lawrence Robert becomes Bob, John William becomes Bill, and my brother was supposed to be Mike, but Mom was in the hospital for a week after having him and instead of her saying, "Hi, Mike," Dad had him and kept calling him John Michael. This has confused many people, including every single elementary-school teacher.

They got used to Mom coming in after Parent-Teacher Night and having a Talk about how his first name is John Michael. No, not John. No, not hyphenated. Yes, you will do that on the reading wall because right there's Ashley Lynn.

At graduation, both he and my father went up to the announcers and explained the first-name thing. As everyone else was read, "First, Middle, Last," with grand pauses, he was, "John Michael, Last," and my mother felt so vindicated.

Of course, his semireal middle name is Fred.

My mother's side of the family, related by marriage to the Boobs of Centre County, has an uncle, now deceased, named Rodney. Except this wasn't his name, nor his middle name, and the only people who called him Rodney were his wife's family, who had known him from childhood. We couldn't figure it out until someone mentioned it was a nickname based on a cartoon character when he was really little. It stuck and stuck hard.

I just get called Cassandra when people who don't actually know me want to be playfully intimidating.

Mary Aileen@77: "May" and "June" derive directly from names of goddesses, and a quick perusal of online etymology suggests that "April" ultimately derives from "Aphrodite". In the case of "August", I think people are being named after the man the month is named after, rather than being named after the month. Other month names are mostly just numbers.

We had a recent, high profile teen suicide of a young woman named Rehtaeh. Heather, backwards. I can't help wondering if that contributed to some of the bullying she suffered from.

We picked Stefan for our son, hoping to have something that would be reasonably unusual, but not unheard of in both the UK and the US. It seems to have worked well, except now he's in a French Immersion school, and everyone calls him StefAHN, and I'm stuck picturing the SNL Weekend Update character. That said, I talk about some of the kids he goes to school with at work, and one of the girls asked "Where does he go that all these kids have such weird names?" Just because I've mentioned Ace, Raine, Peetsie, Coco, Goldie, and Camille. All white, none of them French. Our boss named his son Ruffin, an old family name, after Edmund Ruffin the confederate general, not Kermit Ruffins, the jazz musician. This is the south. Nobody has any room to judge on a name basis. Not that racism is logical or that anyone will be convinced of the stupidity of their positions.

David G., #117: What about January? That's named after a god, but never seems to get translated into a name. IIRC, the Northern European "Jan" is cognate to John.

The preferred pronunciation of my name is something like "steffen," but I find myself telling people "steFAHN" not because I like it pronounced that way, but in the hope that they SPELL my name correctly.

More often than not I get email that begin "Dear Stephen:" Sometimes, an inch of screen space below my work email address, stefan.jones@____.___.

I'd be less picky, but there is an actual Stephan at work, and there's enough cross-over in our product duties that we get meeting invitations and phone calls meant for each other.

HLN: I might be jinxing myself by announcing this, but I think I've successfully deterred an infestation of pantry moths.

I developed a passionate hatred for these things when I was living alone for a summer at my parents' house. I didn't pay attention to the moths flitting about. It was the larva, which at first started appearing in the dish basin. I emptied and scrubbed the thing twice, and poured hot bleach water down the drain, but they kept appearing in the water.

Then I looked up. The ceiling was crawling with the things. I swept them up, for days on end. Somehow or other, in the pre-Internet age, I found a reference to them and started tossing infested items.

So, when I spotted a couple of the moths in my dining room, I went into fury mode. I discovered the source: A bag of dried date pellets in a box on a shelf. It was full of moths, trying to get out. I tossed the whole box of dried fruit, and an adjacent box of dog treats, in a trash bag and put it outside.

A number of moths escaped. I spent the last week or so swatting moths, putting out traps, and looking over every damn box and bag of food in the kitchen and pantry. Nothing else was visibly compromised, but I put all of my food boxes in sturdy bags or clear boxes . . . both to keep moths out, and to keep any hatching larva in. To top things off I deployed bay leaves, peppermint extract, and blocks of cedar.

No new moths have appeared in the traps for a couple of days.

Damn, I hate those things!

120
It's used mostly by Italians: Gennaro.

There is a candidate for mayor here in Minneapolis whose name is Captain Jack Sparrow. (He legally changed his name a couple of years ago.) There is another candidate who is Christopher Robin Zimmerman, and I think that's the name he was given at birth. Of course, the mayor's race this year is far crazier than usual, with 35 candidates, and ranked choice voting.

I used to work in an answering service (remember those?) and used to take messages from a Paige Turner and a Jingle Bell. And my nephew went to school with a girl named Jazzy.

I was just playing with the map of "buildings in the Netherlands, by age," that's in Abi's Parhelia. It's color-coded, but the user can click on a building to get the address, area, year constructed, and current use.

A lot of red-coded buildings in one area of Amsterdam are labeled as built in 1005. OK, I wondered, what happened in Amsterdam in 1005?

Nothing. Or at least, nothing on that scale: the town didn't exist then. Its namesake dam was a couple of centuries in the future.

So I followed the "report data errors" link, and have just been having fun with Google Translate to figure out how to use the form. I had to resort to Wikipedia again, to find a Dutch postcode I could give it, because it rejected my comment when I gave it my actual postcode here in the US. (There's a space for country; having pasted in the Dutch for "United States of America" didn't seem to help.)

I wonder how many non-Dutch-speaking users they hear from.

The gnomes seem to find my post tasty. Would they care for some blood orange sorbet?

I used to have to to paperwork about an "Algernon P. Quattlebaum".

Oddly, I know of two people to have those first and last names (the middle is different). They are no relation, one to the other.

My first name is Joy and my last name is of Polish extraction. While there were two other "Joy"s in my grade when we lived in Utah, and there were many other people with that Polish last name in the midwest (to the point where every now and again the pizza joint would deliver us the pie for the other ___ski in our zip code) I always assumed that the combination was fairly unique. Until a couple of years ago I googled myself and found the most prominent person with my name is a physician in Italy who runs marathons. Even if I wanted to use my True Name on the book of faces and whatnot, I couldn't, because that poacher is already there! I'm much more prolific under my 'nym on the web anyhow.

I went out with a woman named Quasar as well.

My actual name, as given, isn't, "odd", just variant. I had a teacher tell me I didn't know how to spell it.

She was awful in other ways too.

On a different topic (one near and dear to many hearts here), I was included in a post someone wrote about learning how feed the trolls until they burst

John @ 95

I usually use "smug and superior" (pronounced as a single compound word), "a bit superior," or "remarkably self-impressed."

But I'm going to put in a strong vote for "vainglorious," because that's a word that doesn't get used enough.

Gwendolyn Hoofnagle-Tmcsm

attested from sometime in the 1950s

Open Threadiness.

Some people in NZ were having fun on the Twitters (not surprising) and mentioned some of the banks. The banks joined in (say what?). BNZ (formerly Bank of New Zealand) wins at least a small internet

I come across a lot of customer names in the course of my work. Some of them are pretty funny.

But my favorite was one T. Froissart. "Any relation?" says I. "Hm?" "Oh, I was just being a smartass, there was a medieval French chronicler by that name." "Oh, okay. No, no relation... My husband's his direct descendant."

Devin @ 136: I've done something similar. There's an MP with a moderately uncommon name, and I once issued a student union card to a young man with the same surname. I asked if he was any relation, as you do, and he was. He was the MP's son.

Also, Fragano: I owe you a minor apology. I'm on some medication at the moment which is messing with my short-term memory. I saw your poem yesterday, meant to compliment you on it, and then got distracted replying to another comment and forgot all about it until I woke up this morning. So, another fine poem, and do you publish your work at all?

Xopher @ 97: I'd proposed "prideful", but that didn't have enough emphasis on the vocal part of the situation to suit my co-worker. Now that I've looked up the definition, it fits, but only if you look it up or know it well.

KayTei @ 133: Vainglorious, now. That has just the same problem as prideful, except that the word just looks and sounds the right way. I'm going to offer that and see what he says.

To Fragano's fine sonnet, #42

"Think what you like, but not too goddam loud":
I learned that principle, oh, long ago.
My father would assert it, even though
He rarely followed it. He rarely bowed
To principle, for also he avowed
That circumstances alter cases. So
Is that principle, as well? To know
No principle? Is anything allowed?

When life has taken all you have to give,
When there is nothing left, then testify
To what remains, and shout it loud, and die.
What else? And does it come to that? Why, yes.
But if it doesn't? Then speak it still, and live.
Give great for greatness, but to lesser, less.

In other news, when I was a young man teaching in a small West Australian country town, the Shire Clerk was a Mr Duck. He was in his sixties then, so born about 1920 or so. His parents, unaware of what was about to happen, had bestowed on him a great name, drawn from their Scots ancestry: "Donald".

Oh, dear, I hope Their Lownesses are not offended by the surname "Duck".

Mongoose #137: Thank you.

The answer to your question is yes. See: http://www.hammerandanvilbooks.com/#!authors/ciya

Dave Luckett #139: Back in 1678, a tropical wave brought flood rains to Jamaica and isolated the plantation of a Captain Duck. The slaves on that plantation promptly rose in revolt, killed Duck and the other whites on the plantation, and headed for the hills. This marked the start of the First Maroon War which ended in 1738 when the descendants of those slaves forced the British to treat with them and recognise their freedom. As I'm, inter alia, descended from some of the people who killed Captain Duck it is an act I happen to consider rather honourable.

Thanks Kyndra, Claire, OtterB - somehow that plum pudding will get made and the cow will be happy!

John, how about 'braggart'?

That reminds me -- I used to have a co-worker named Danny Duck. He was white, though. I suppose he got off lucky in terms of first name. He always said he felt sorry for his sister Vera, not in terms of the name itself, but because she wound up with the initials "V.D."

AKICIML: Why are people waving the Lion of Flanders in this video of the Proms?

There is an academic whose last name is Weiner-Johnson; fine names on their own, until you get caught sexting the whole world, but I can't help giggling when you hyphenate them.

Lee @ # 6: late to the party, but I went to school with Lance Justice, and local mini-celebrities include Zippy Morocco and Reign Strider (realtors) and Speedy Arnold (actor).

I'm fairly certain Zippy is a childhood nickname, and I know Speedy is, but they're the names they use professionally.

And twins get it particularly hard. In my high school class we had Neyda and Neysa (pronounced nay-dah and nee-sah), and also Wanda Sue and Rhonda Lou (they went by their first names only, not first+middle like a lot of Southern girls).

The only male twins were named Jim and John, but I've run across boys with Cute Matching Names. Local twin physicians are named Bruce and Wayne, which MIGHT be accidental.... (All examples in this and the previous comment are white, BTW.)

Xopher @ 143: An excellent noun for the subject! But I was asked for an adjective.

And am I off in my perception that a sign like I described in #95 is out of the norm? I've only known one Bronze Star recipient. I learned that he'd received that award in his obituary. That seems to me one of the few appropriate places to announce it, but it's not my culture.

SamChevre #145: On the Last Night of the Proms it has become customary to indicate patriotism, local or national, of all kinds. If you watch it, as my wife and I do, you'll see all sorts of flags including English regional flags, Old Glory, the Vatican flag (that one crops up year after year), the flag of the Bahamas, the Jamaican flag (I noticed that one this year), and a lot of others. I did notice the Vlaamse Leeuw, carried, presumably, by a Fleming.

Cheryl@110: Here's the thing. In British (or, more precisely, English) English, the function of 'r' is very often to modify a vowel. Therefore, if we modify the vowel, we think we are pronouncing the r. In standard American English, however, r is always consonantal, so from an American point of view, if you aren't sounding it as a consonant, you aren't 'pronouncing the r'. This can lead to considerable confusion.

(In Scottish English, though, the r is always sounded as a consonant, and I think Scottish speakers do sometimes say 'arse', sounding it as 'arrse'.)

The relationship escalator

On the subject of oblivious parents, I was at school with a Mike Hunt, usually introduced as Mike Hunt-with-an-H.

David Goldfarb (117): That sounds right. I do keep half-expecting to find someone named 'July', possibly pronounced like 'Julie'.

Emily H. (146): I sincerely hope that his first name is not Richard.

Andrew M. (151): Fascinating! I had no idea.

Google doodle for Sep 27. Particularly appropriate here...

There was an entire set on 10 O'Clock Live about the visit to the UK of Sen. Randy Baumgardner (spelt there, and pronounced, Bumgardner). Not so unfortunate on this side of the pond.

I wondered if I could ask for some book recs. My father is stuck at home for a couple months so he can recover from an injury, and he's going a bit stir-crazy. I thought I'd send him some new books.

He doesn't usually read outside what I think of as the guy-style action adventure genre. Clive Cussler, cold-war era spy books, Tom Clancy, Grisham. But he's run through most of the big bestsellers. He likes mysteries on TV, so I was thinking of trying him on something like that, or perhaps some non-fiction that's well written.

Cheryl @110: So, did I not get the joke? Was R. Soul not supposed to sound like arsehole?

Yes, it was. I had assumed that everyone knew we Brits say 'arsehole' rather than 'asshole', but given the degree of confusion this appears to have caused here, apparently not. Since over here we all know 'asshole' is used in the US in place of 'arsehole' this lack of reciprocal awareness is disappointing.

#157 ::: academic

He's probably already read them, but does his list include Lee Child?

wrt 157: if his reading includes Cold War settings, do you think his historical fiction parameters might stretch far enough for the Aubrey/Maturin books?

Rob: I knew that "arsehole" was something the Brits said instead of "asshole", but it's in the "translation" part of my brain as opposed to the main vocabulary part, so, lacking pointers that this was a specifically British thing, it didn't register.

Rob @158: I had assumed that everyone knew we Brits say 'arsehole' rather than 'asshole', but given the degree of confusion this appears to have caused here, apparently not.

What actually tripped me up for a while was not the R portion of R. Soul, but the H in 'arsehole'. In my dialect, such as it is, the H in that word is clearly said, which makes the overall sound quite distinct from R. Soul - and thus not inadvertantly funny. Once I figured out that R. Soul was supposed to equal arsehole, I had to do quite a bit of mental fiddling with the pronunciation to get the linkage.

@112 Cally Soukup, 151 Andrew M, 158 Rob Hansen

Thanks. Sorry about the whine; I need to sleep more.

Just one comment, actually, and it’s not about the content: please go to the trouble of using an apostrophe at the beginning of shortened words like: ’em. What you’ve got here (repeatedly) is a single open quotation mark. I expect more careful composition on Making Light!

Because it’s distracting, that’s why.

academic @ #157, seconding the Aubrey-Maturin recommendation; for nonfiction, try "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll, which is a story of computer espionage being investigated by a newly-hired astronomy professor in his spare time (for values of "spare time" that include "sleeping on the lab floor with an alarm attached to the dot matrix printer that will wake him up when Mystery Person logs on"). I couldn't put it down.

(Note that there's also a C.J. Cherryh book of the same name, which is also good, but definitely not nonfiction.)

Rob @158: I initially totally missed the pronunciation angle, and thought "What, people thought he was named Rubber Soul?" Which, being Beatles, is British at least...

academic, #157: Does he like noir mystery? If so, I recommend J.D. Rhoades.

Rob, #158: I do know that, but my brain was going at it from the wrong direction -- trying to turn "Soul, R." into something more unfortunate than "solar". Also, my dialect has the same thing with the "h" that oliviacw mentions @162.

John B., #164: The single-quote is right there on the keyboard. The "smart-quote" apostrophe takes significant finagling, unless you're using a word processor. (And while we're on the topic, do you also find the use of single-quotes in contractions distracting?)

My father-in-law used to have a friend named John Goff (not sure of the spelling). He was adamant about never wanting to be called Jack.

My first name was quite rare when I was a kid; I don't think I met another Jeremy until high school. It's become much more common in recent years.

My surname is a product of Ellis Island. My grandfather, named Ludsky (which I was told may have been a reference to Łódź), chose Leader when he arrived here from Poland, aged 13, because his uncle, who'd arrived a few years earlier, had chosen it. It used to amuse me when we'd get letters from some company offering to sell us a pamphlet on the "coat of arms and genealogy of the Leader family" (from England, apparently).

My closest Google rival is a composer who shares my last name, and has my first name as his middle name. There's also a site about the wedding of a Jeremy Leader who's not me, and on LinkedIn there are 2 others.

academic (157): If he's gone through the bestseller types, he's probably already read W.E.B. Griffin and Jack Higgins. What about Wilbur Smith?

And given that he reads John Grisham, maybe some other legal suspense: John Lescroart, Steve Martini, Lisa Scottoline, Perri O'Shaughnessy.

Other suggestions: Lisa Gardner, Lisa Jackson, William Lashner.

Rob @158:

I know the "arsehole"/"asshole" translation, but didn't know you were British, so I didn't have it in the relevant part of my brain to understand the story.

John A Arkansawyer @ 149

Yeah, that's a bit odd. I almost wonder if it was something official and the car wasn't the recipient's? If I got a major award of some kind that came with a "Here's your $AWARD" letter or the like, I'd never display it in a window but my mom would snap it up.

The only Bronze Star vet I've known was my friend Ethan's grandfather, but he was 442nd, so it's a bit different. For one thing, it ain't no secret: about a third of the 442nd did receive Bronze Stars.*

He never kept it a secret, he wasn't one to brag but he was very proud of his service and I'm sure if you'd asked about the war he'd have shown you his medals. But he sure as hell wasn't making any signs. (I could maybe just about see him posting a sign about serving in the 442nd, maybe.)

*Yes, this is basically insane.

Huh, Jim's link is to the Daily Express, whose reputation for revealing reliable solutions to mysteries is... not great. They were generating Diana Princess of Wales conspiracy headlines for years, then there was the inquest verdict and they shut up for a while, and now they've started again. A quick go on Google Images gives SHOW US DIANA'S MURDER LETTERS / DIANA KILLED BY FIAT DRIVER / DIANA BLOOD RESULTS FIDDLED / SPIES TAPED DIANA DEATH CRASH / DIANA: THE 500 HIDDEN CLUES / SAS 'ORDERED' TO KILL DIANA.

Crime writer Patricia Cornwell was convinced that 'Jack' was Walter Sickert, and went as far as taking out newspaper ads to defend her theory, which I'd forgotten about till just now.

Bruce H. @115: "garden moai" This is outstanding news. My desultory search for employment has now become urgent. How tall are the biggest ones?

Roughly knee-high. Depending on the manufacturer, though, one might be able to special order larger/smaller. I need to go pick up lab bottles tonight; I will inquire.

I'm still kicking myself for not buying one of the glow-in-the-dark-speckled glass marble (as in sphere, not stone) grounds-lights when I had the chance.

academic @157--for good non-fiction, some with the 'thriller' quality, there's John Barry, who's written about the 1927 Mississippi River flood and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic; Jeannette Keith's book about the 1878 yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, Fever Season; The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, which concerns John Snow's efforts to track a cholera outbreak to its source (before there was a clear germ theory of the disease); Richard Rhodes' books about the Manhattan Project and the H-bomb; just about anything of David Halberstam's; Hew Strachan's The First World War; Lauro Martines' April Blood (plots against the Medici!) and Fire in the City (Savonarola) (Let me note that Martines also has some more scholarly works on the Italian renaissance which are not aimed at an general reader); Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brooks; and William Shirer's Berlin Diary.

Then there are Patrick O'Brian's Aubury & Maturin books...

HLN: local woman is bemused that the canned dog food she just bought is labeled "Kosher for Passover."

I realize that there are rules about what can be stored in your house during Passover, even if you're not planning to eat it yourself, but it was my impression that keeping dogs is also frowned upon by strict keepers of the Kosher laws. How fractally wrong am I?

171
The closest I ever saw was a license-plate holder that said 442nd on it. (The driver was an elderly Asian man.)
A neighbor had a bumper-sticker on his car announcing he was a veteran of Anzio.

academic @157: guy-style action adventure genre.

Dean Ing has a lot of fun books. Somewhat Clancy-ish in tone. Solidly techno-thriller, often with some stfnal elements.

John D. Berry @164: please go to the trouble of using an apostrophe at the beginning of shortened words like: ’em. What you’ve got here (repeatedly) is a single open quotation mark. I expect more careful composition on Making Light!

Problem is: I don't find that on a standard QWERTY keyboard, so it requires special character coding. Given that it's a special character, it not uncommonly comes across in gibberish when translated through various character sets. So: no, not gonna do that.

Lila @175: keeping dogs is also frowned upon by strict keepers of the Kosher laws

Back when I got my first couple of guinea pigs in '01, an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine started fussing that he was concerned that I would get "too emotionally invested" in them, because, you know, "animals are things you eat." I don't recall having any particular reaction to his cautions beyond fish-like gawping. Why this was of such concern to him still escapes me, since he was unlikely to ever encounter them much, and besides, I'm not even Jewish. Puzzles me to this day.

Dave Luckett #139: *Applause*

I should note that I am currently teaching one Imran Khan. He has played cricket only once, he says, even though he was named for the most famous holder of the name.

On naming one's child after famous people: in England, males with the surname Smith born between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies to right-wing parents are quite often called Ian.

I think part of the R. Soul issue (which I didn't get either, because I wasn't thinking British without any context. After a minute, I got it, and then thought "I guess he's from the UK") is that NA assholes are aspirated-h's; British arseholes are unaspirated (as well as unvoiced r (which I have as well)).

Which leads to the great joke about Arsenic-containing unsaturated rings of size 5 and the many arsole-derivatives.

Ooh. I knew I had another awful name story, and I've just remembered it. This is my Most Embarrassing Moment. For background, you need to know that in many areas of the UK, "John Thomas" is a polite euphemism for part of the male anatomy, but apparently this is not the case in Liverpool.

Many years ago I went to visit a clergyman in Liverpool. It had been a long and tiring train journey, and once I finally arrived he installed me on the sofa with a cup of coffee, for which I was truly grateful. As I was sitting drinking it, one of his congregation came in. "John Thomas has just died," he announced, solemnly.

Well, you absolutely cannot laugh in circumstances like that. Whoever the late John Thomas was, it was clear from the grave tones of the conversation that he was well known and liked by both of them. Thankfully I didn't laugh, but I felt absolutely terrible for wanting to. Later, after the parishioner had gone, the minister explained that this John Thomas had been a long-standing member of his congregation, originally from Wales. He'd been christened Ogwin John Thomas, but he'd dropped the "Ogwin" as soon as he moved to Liverpool, because he didn't want everyone calling him Oggy.

Well, no, I said, understandable, you wouldn't want that, would you?

#167: That's the straight ("typewriter") apostrophe that's on the keyboard. But in this post, that's not what appeared: what appeared was a single open quote. If you turn on "smart quotes" in a word-processer or a page-layout program, it has no way of telling the difference between a single open quote and an apostrophe, and quite logically assumes it should be the former. When that's not what you mean, though, you need to insert the right character. (The easiest way to do this is to copy one from the end of a word, where the software will have made it a single end quote.)

Sure, it distracts me to see typewriter quotes and typewriter apostrophes in anything set in a real typeface. They belong in a monospace typewriter face, but are glaringly out of place in traditional proportional typeface. But at least they're consistent. (It takes a little bit of extra effort to use them right; but then, it also takes extra effort to insert an HTML code to use italics in one of these posts or replies. If it's worth saying, it's worth saying well – and that includes it's form.

I look forward to the day when we have no more legacy programs that ignore Unicode values and therefore get confused by ordinary typographic characters like accents, ligatures, and even apostrophes. We ain't in the ASCII age anymore.

(Yes, I know all this is marvelously off-topic!)

John D Berry @182: If it's worth saying, it's worth saying well – and that includes it's form.

Shouldn’t that have been an em dash, not an en dash?

John D. Berry:

I am happy that you cherish apostrophes and sorry you are distracted by substitution of single quotes.

I appreciate the posts here, and assume everyone is doing their best under whatever their circumstances.

So as not to appear curmudgeonly, I will let others point out to you that in
"If it's worth saying, it's worth saying well – and that includes it's form." your third usage should not have one of your beloved diacritical marks, even if it is an apostrophe rather than a single quote.

Beef tortilla with guacamole?

John D Berry @182 and Avram @183:
and "its form" instead of "it's form", if we're nitpicking. :)

For anyone who would like to be able to control the directionality of their quotes/apostrophes in these comments using only an ASCII keyboard, I recommend the following HTML codes:

&lsquo; will get you ‘
&rsquo; will get you ’
&ldquo; will get you “
&rdquo; will get you ”

Use these as you see fit; I offer this information merely in the hope that some may find it useful, with no implicit criticism of anyone’s punctuational preferences intended.

academic @157: The best action-adventure book I ever read is Game Wars by Marc Reisner. It's a mystery / thriller with multiple stories, each amazing. Even more amazing, they all really happened.

I picked up a copy of Bernard DeVoto's The Course of Empire at a used bookstore in Lodi. It's great. DeVoto was fascinated by exploration, appreciated vigor and initiative, and wasn't afraid to write what he really thought.

If he likes the Aubrey and Maturin books, get him a biography of Lord Cochrane. Just sayin'.

John D. Berry @182: it distracts me to see typewriter quotes and typewriter apostrophes in anything set in a real typeface

Well, you know, if you were sufficiently motivated, you could write yourself a browser with a "smart quote" function that would do all that for you, and then you would be free from all that distraction.

Avram @183: Shouldn’t that have been an em dash, not an en dash?

Ooo, snap! :-)

Apparently, there was a major black nationalist figure known as Malcolm S. This is news to me.

Fragano -- grading time already?

Fragano Ledgister @178 writes:

> I should note that I am currently teaching one Imran Khan. He has played cricket only once

Turns out there's a Christian rock singer called Steve Taylor. Every day I give thanks that he's not too well know outside those particular musical circles.

academic @157: I second the recommendations of giving Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series a try. Also The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. I'm in the process of culling my bookshelves, which brings an oldie to mind—Dick Francis. His mysteries are dashing. As to nonfiction books, I recently read Mary Roach's Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal and was both entertained and informed!

As to funny names, I once worked at a very small company with these 3 men: Wbua Qvpx, Crgre Ybiryl, naq Qvpx Pbpuena. (I've concealed their names as it would be impolite to have them easily searchable). Why he chose to use that nickname for Richard, particularly with that last name, is a mystery to me.

When I was working as a TA in college, I was grading tests with two other TAs, one from Iran and one from Brazil. They both spoke flawless English; however, they were flummoxed when they had to pronounce their students' last names. This was in the midwest, and the class was the usual mix of English, German, Czech, Polish, Spanish, French, and on down the list. Growing up in America, you're likely to have an idea of the Anglicized pronunciation of a wide variety of last names.

Mary Aileen@154: As with "August", there's the name of the man the month was named for, to wit, Julius. Not an incredibly common name, but by no means extinct.

On the "weird names of white people" thread, how about the well-known Baseball Commissioner from the mid-20th Century, Kenesaw Mountain Landis?

John D. Berry @164: ' is the character easily reachable on my keyboard, and ' is the character I'm going to use for all contractions. I'm sorry if that bothers you, but not sorry enough to go to any effort to do otherwise.

Magenta @124: As Naomi Kritzer remarked on her excellent LJ rundown of all the candidates, the funny thing is that the Pirate Party candidate is someone other than Captain Jack Sparrow.

Apropos of absolutely nothing other than "wow", I offer for your perusal this photo collection of pagan costumes of Europe, related mainly to the rituals of the "Wild Man".

They're all very primal and many stir something in me, at least, that feels-like-a-memory-but-isn't-quite, at a deep level. Some of them strike me as almost comical, while others (the ones associated with the memorylike feeling) evoked everything from "wow, impressive" to mildly apprehensive reactions.

Your mileage, as always, may vary. But if nothing else, the photography itself is exquisite.

John 149: I've definitely seen it used attributively. "To give a character braggart personality, draw him* with an exaggerated chest..." I suppose you could say braggartish or just braggy, but English is full of attributive nouns (and no, they do not thereby become adjectives), so personally I wouldn't bother.

Andrew 151: OK, to be technical, non-rhotic dialects like most of the ones spoken in England don't pronounce postvocalic 'r' as a liquid consonant, except as an automatic consonant as a juncture mark between a word ending in a vowel and a word beginning with a vowel. There are multiple "standard" American dialects, depending on who you talk to, and some of them are also non-rhotic (and use 'r' as a juncture consonant). The rhotic dialects of AE use only the glottal stop as a juncture consonant.

When we American speakers of rhotic dialects hear the lengthening of the vowel but not the liquid consonant, we call that "not pronouncing the 'r'," and in fact it is realized by a lengthening (possibly other modification, but mainly lengthening) of the preceding vowel, which isn't really quite the same thing as being pronounced as such.

John 164: There's no separate apostrophe character on my keyboard (and most I've seen); single quote and apostrophe are the same character here. Not going to go to the trouble of putting 'em in with HTML, sorry.

Ibid. 182: Ah, you meant in the OP. I didn't get that from your 164.

Carol 184: Not diacritical. Diacritics are marks that appear above or below a main character, so the accent mark over the e in Sinéad is a diacritic, but an ’ by itself is not.

*Drawing female characters with exaggerated chests doesn't tend to give them braggart personality.

REALLY subtle : Room 34 in the British Museum is themed "The Islamic World" ;-)

academic @ #157, they're mostly out of print, but libraries may still have Hammond Innes's books, which are definitely in the manly adventure category but written by a man who can write rather than just string nouns and verbs together.

Also see Desmond Bagley. His books are in the same genre but are still in print, and there must be about fifteen of them. Here's the Wikipedia article, which cites Bagley and Innes and Alistair MacLean as similar authors.

Today is September 28.
On this day 28 years ago:
(1) I bought Bradbury's story collection "A Sound of Thunder".
(2) I bought Roger Dean's book "Magnetic Storm".
(3) Sue and I moved in together.

If a word-processing system encounters an ASCII single-quote, has no way of telling the difference between a single open quote and an apostrophe, and "quite logically assumes it should be the former", I would humbly submit that calling the feature "smart quotes" is perhaps over-optimistic.

In practice, I usually encounter "smart quotes" after they've been translated from a Word document to a web page which doesn't have a representation for those glyphs in its character set and substitutes some mangled alternative, whether it's a Unicode number representation or a Macintosh escape sequence or whatever, while if the original typed single or double quotes had been left alone, they'd look just fine.

Academic@157 - You might try Mira Grant's "Feed" - if your father can get past having zombies in the novel, it's a really well-written political thriller and has two followon books. Or maybe Charlie Stross's "The Family Trade".

And yeah, another rec. for the Aubrey/Maturin novels. And if he hasn't read Le Carre's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", he should; I assume he's old enough to remember the Cold War (do spy novels even work for people under ~40?)

John D Berry @182, it’s a bit much to expect people to memorize the character codes or keyboard combos for curly quotes and the like. My fingers learned ’em back in the days when I used to sling QuarkXPress for my supper and flip through copies of U&lc for inspiration, and nowadays I type in a text editor that has a covert-to-HTML-entities command and paste into the comment field. But I don’t expect most people to jump through those hoops.

I don’t know how Jim composes his posts here; I assume there’s some automated thingamabob that smartens up the quote marks, and botches the apostrophes at the start of words.

Avram: I actually would have no trouble memorizing the character codes after a few passes; I'm just not willing to put in the time to type them. :-)

Bill Stewart @ 202

I'm 28, my first historically-fixed memory is the beginning of the first Gulf War, and I just finished Tinker, Tailor. (Well, actually, I got it in an omnibus with The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. Read 'em all straight through.)

I am a bit of an oddity, far more interested in history than most humans and with a particular interest in the Soviet Union, so I'm not sure that's as strong a proof as it might be.

Nevertheless, they certainly worked for me. I'm not sure, obviously, if I'm missing some resonance or layer of meaning, but I think they translate fairly well. (Though on second thought, perhaps I am: I am personally and historically much more sympathetic to the project of the Soviet Union than le Carre's expected audience would have been, so the absence of revulsion towards Communism on the part of many characters doesn't carry the weight of ennui that it might to those readers.)

Avram #203

I don’t know how Jim composes his posts here; I assume there’s some automated thingamabob that smartens up the quote marks, and botches the apostrophes at the start of words.

I type directly into Moveable Type's edit box. If you look at the entries in the back end you'll see that they still have the straight quotes and apostrophes that I typed, not the "smart" quotes that you see.

David Goldfarb (194): Yes, but 'Julius' is not 'July'. My question is, why no 'July' as such?

Eric #191: It's one of the penalties of continuous assessment.

Serge #200: A joyous anniversary to you both.

SummerStorms@ #196, those are magnificent and creepy. Horror-movie material, in the right (wrong?) hands. I definitely get a sense of Mana from them.

Fragano @ 209... Thanks! Provided that my office project ends early enough, we may celebrate today (instead of tomorrow) in the appropriate manner. Hugh Jackman's "Prisoners" is out.

I figured that Malcolm Tucker must have been caught saying "arsehole" on YouTube. And indeed he is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBdSA0M6vuo

But whoever transcribed it wrote "asshole", which might just be one of those things.

Apropos of nothing I went to school with a Wayne Scales.

And all of this reminds me that there was a fairly recent foofaraw about Mr & Mrs Peacock naming their son Drew.

Mycroft W @ 180: The joke is not referenced in the Wikipedia article. I blame Wikipedia.

https://twitter.com/KimKierkegaard

Kierkegaard quotes mashed up with Kim Kardashian Twitter feed. Somehow it blends strangely well.

Loki was humanely euthanized this morning. He passed on peacefully, with his sister, Junie B, in attendance. I wrapped him in an old shirt, and petted him until he was gone. He was a big, sweet cat with an incurable cancer, and he was loved by all. I hope that he finds Marilee again.

Ginger, I'm sorry for your loss.

Ginger, my condolences.

Ginger, my condolences.

My condolences, Ginger.

Ginger, #214: My condolences. I'll give our Loki an extra snuggle for you and him.

Condolences for Loki. He was lucky to have such a loving caregiver.

Ginger: sorry for your loss.

Ginger, my sympathies.

Why people should, under no circumstances, attempt to write expository prose when stoned:

Mencius and Xunzi where Confucians who had agreed with some of Confucius ideas but they also had their own ideology said but also had their own ideals. Mencius emphasized on the importance of the common of the state. Xunzi was his conception of social and political order, and ritual should be about of governing.

Jacque @204, that’s one reason I’m still a Mac user. Smart quotes, em dashes, and stuff like that are all double- or triple-buckies that don’t take any longer to type than regular straight quotes. My jaw drops when I contemplate what Windows and Linux users have to do to get at those characters.

Jim @206, so it’s Moveable Type’s automated thingamabob, and it sounds like Berry’s suggested fix (copy-and-paste from a different part of the post) won’t work.

HLN: Mr. or Ms. Red-Ribbed Flicker is pitching woo / warning off Mr. or Ms. Reflection in local window. Mr. or Ms. Reflection could not be reached for comment.

Ginger @214: Glad to know that Loki's passing wasas good as possible. Hope JunieB adapts okay.

AKICIML: Does anyone know of a widely-available font (ideally, one that comes with Macs, as that's easiest for me) that is sans-serif BUT ALSO has visibly different characters for capital I, lowercase L, and the numeral 1?

Paul Herzberg @212 wrote:

> But whoever transcribed it wrote "asshole", which might just be one of those things.

Data point: I'm an Australian an I pronounce it more like 'arsehole' (at least to the extent that the first syllable rhymes with 'lass' instead of 'pass') but I spell it as 'asshole'.

Do people in Britain actually spell it as 'arsehole'? The only time I ever seem to encounter that spelling is on the net during discussions of pronunciation and spelling of this word - which seem to happen remarkably often.

Addendum to my last: apparently Comic Sans fits my criteria, but I feel mildly dirty when I use it. :->

Steve T., #228: In my dialect, "lass" and "pass" rhyme, and both of them also rhyme with "ass".

227
Tahoma works. So does Trebuchet.
This page has a list.

@228 Steve Taylor

Data point: I'm an Australian an I pronounce it more like 'arsehole' (at least to the extent that the first syllable rhymes with 'lass' instead of 'pass') but I spell it as 'asshole'

Since 'lass' and 'pass' rhyme for me, that doesn't help. Also, 'sass', 'bass'(the fish), and 'mass'.

If you go here, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/arse, and click on the "Hear" button, you will hear the way I pronounce it.

Do people in Britain actually spell it as 'arsehole'?

Based on Archive of Our Own: yes.

Condolences for Loki, Ginger. It's always hard to lose a friend.

Steve @ 228: yes, we do. Also, in Standard British English, "lass" rhymes with "ass", but "pass" rhymes with "arse". Most northern dialects rhyme all the first three words.

Obligatory linguistic geekrocket: the northern pronunciation is the more historically conservative one. Evidence suggests that Shakespeare pronounced the A in these words more like modern northerners than modern standard-dialect-speakers. This explains how the short A got established in Standard American English, and may also explain how "ass" developed from "arse", which is certainly the earlier version (you can find it in Chaucer if you are so minded). My guess is that Americans heard British speakers pronouncing words like "pass" and "glass" with a long A because it had become established in their standard dialect, and so when they heard "arse" they assumed it must be spelt "ass" by analogy with the other words.

If anyone can confirm/correct/further elaborate, it would be interesting/useful/fun.

Thanks, everyone. After I finished taking care of Loki, I went upstairs for a kitten chaser, literally as well as figuratively. All four of them were starving, as usual, despite feedings three to four times a day (and an extra one late last night). After a quick meal, they romped around my guest room with boxes, cat toys, and me to play on. My dogs sat in the outer part of the room, my son's old bedroom (which is now the office), and watched with canine wonderment. I let them go for more than an hour and a half, until 3/4 of the kittens were beginning to want to settle down. I took them back to their kitty condo (in my son's new bedroom, the old office/guest room) and gave them fresh KMR, plus a new small box and a new blankie.

I needed that.

In between Loki and kittens, I had a chance to chat with the FF; we had a mutual session of virtual crying on shoulders, and then cheered each other up.

Mongoose@234 - Well I'm Welsh, but I use the short A pronunciation as a matter of course.
Words like 'glass' and 'bath' I pronounce as they're spelled; my English workmates would say
'glarse' and 'barth'. I say 'arse' rather than 'ass' because 'arse' is a word over here that's spelt that way.

arse gratia artis.

farce gratia fartis.

234
It probably helps if you know that the middle-American pronunciation comes from the many people from northern England who settled in Pennsylvania and went West. Southern American is from the West Country, mostly, and New England was settled mostly by East Anglians.

@196: I've been invited to participate in a Perchtenlauf in my city, so I, with no successful costuming or maskmaking experience, will have to come up with something along these lines myself before the end of the year.

Eep.

Ginger, I'm sorry. If acceptable -- hug.

Ginger, my condolences.

Steve with a book @172

They were generating Diana Princess of Wales conspiracy headlines for years, then there was the inquest verdict and they shut up for a while, and now they've started again

Indeed, when I clicked on the link, one of their three "Recommended Articles" at the end of the article was something they published last Sunday claiming she was murdered using remote-controlled brakes developed by the CIA. The assassins, of course, then nipped in and retrieved the technology before French police arrived.

The best part was that the individual that the headline credited with making this allegation actually says in the article that such a theory is ridiculous.

I got gnomed earlier when trying to share a link to

https colon slash slash [what a bird says] dot com slash KimKierkegaard

which is a very skillful mashup of quotations from Kim Kardashian and Kierkegaard.

Off the various topics... Did you know that the dog featured in "A Boy and His Dog" also was the family dog in "The Brady Bunch"?

Serge @245, I didn't know that. Did you know that the horse that became Trigger for Roy Rogers made his movie debut as Maid Marian's horse in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood?

OtterB @ 246... I didn't know that.

Steve 229: at least to the extent that the first syllable rhymes with 'lass' instead of 'pass'

Others have said everything I was going to say about '-ass' words rhyming.

Mongoose 235: In fact, the evidence suggests that British Standard and American Standard dialects weren't much different at all until after the American Revolution, and it was the British who changed. And they changed deliberately, or so I hear.

As far as the word 'ass' is concerned, my understanding is that the word 'ass' was in use as the name of an animal (and last I heard no one knew where the word 'donkey' came from), and became a euphemism for 'arse'. Once it became almost exclusively an anatomical term (the aforementioned 'donkey' having taken over as the name of the animal), eventually 'arse' became a euphemism for 'ass' in America...leaving 'arse' one of the few words to become a euphemism for itself.

@Ginger: I'm glad Loki had a good and caring home after losing Marilee.

Just wanted to say Thank You, Fluorosphere, for all the many useful clone novels, stories, movies and TV citations, not to mention Clone Fun Facts. The Fan Guest of Honor gig was fun, and I think we did well. Alas, our clone panel was up against a very, very big draw (a panel on cosplay at a largely anime convention), AND was scheduled for first thing in the morning... and so we had no audience. But the research for the panel was fun, even if the panel itself, erm, didn't quite happen.

Xopher @ 248: yes, that's pretty much what I said, except that it wasn't all the British who changed. I said that northern British dialects were historically more conservative (at any rate with respect to the pronunciation of the A in words such as the ones we're talking about; different dialects have changed in different ways).

You're correct that the standard British dialect changed deliberately (at least as far as any dialect ever does change deliberately); I don't know if you meant to imply that the aim was to become distinct from speakers of American English, but, although there was an aim, it wasn't that. The aim was to distinguish upper-class speakers from everyone else, and it came about because people were becoming more mobile. It was growing fashionable among the upper classes to spend extended periods of time in London, and also other places such as Bath, whereas previous generations of the aristocracy would have spent most of their time on their own land. Where you get large numbers of the upper classes spending a lot of time together (and ignoring everyone else as much as possible), there will be social pressure towards a distinctive form of speech as a class marker, which you don't get when they're all swanning about in their own manors or travelling around as individuals.

Of course, once that dialect was firmly established among the upper classes, it became viewed as the only "educated" way to speak, so that there was now pressure on middle-class professional people to adopt it as well. It started to be pushed in schools, and referred to as "talking properly". In the early days of the BBC, everyone on air talked with what sounds to the modern British ear like terribly exaggerated, ultra-posh accents; the only regional accents you would ever hear would be either comedy characters or those few entertainers who were popular enough to be accepted regardless of accent. (George Formby springs immediately to mind; he had a strong Lancashire accent which was very much part of his public persona.)

In the end, ironically, I suspect it was largely broadcasting which made regional accents acceptable again, but even now there are still echoes of that linguistic snobbery. The BBC still occasionally gets letters complaining that there are too many northern (or other) accents on air; I know this because I have friends who work there. I also know an extremely talented and intelligent writer who has a strong Wiltshire accent and is sometimes not taken seriously because of it.

I am, incidentally, well aware of the difference between an accent and a dialect, in case anyone is thinking of accusing me of careless usage; however, they generally do go together. (Not invariably. I know someone who is bidialectal, but doesn't lose his Yorkshire accent when speaking in standard dialect.)

Sorry. Wall of text. I'm a language nerd...

Even as I pressed send, I was thinking "Damn. Wonder how many people out there pronounce 'lass' and 'pass' with the same vowel?"

Mongoose @251

One of the stories about the use of non-standard accents on the BBC is that it started in WW2 so as to make it harder for those evil Nazis to fake BBC broadcasts. Partly, I think, it was a counter to William Joyce, "Lord Haw-Haw", and several other Nazi propaganda broadcasters who had that sort of ultra-posh accent.

Both sides put out "black" propaganda: radio stations that pretended to be somehow broadcasting within enemy territory, run by dissidents. If Sefton Delmer can be believed, we British were rather good at it.

Wilfred Pickles was one of the first BBC announcers/newsreaders with a regional accent.

I have seen videos on YouTube with subtitles for the English regional accents, claimed to be added for US broadcasts. I'm sceptical.

Dave, 253: No, subtitling non-RP accents is common over here. I've even seen Appalachian accents subtitled.

And the BBC is now reporting on the MoD setting up a cyber-warfare force. I'm wondering what the uniform will be.

This is serious, so I don't expect tinfoil hats, but look at the uniform for RAF Bandsmen. You can be a modern service, using the latest technology of the age, and tradition still won't let go.

Dave Bell@255: BBC article illustrated with unpatriotic stock photography of a German QWERTZ keyboard. (But if they're recruiting geeks they'll just switch it to Programmer Dvorak layout anyway.)

Dave Bell (253)/TexAnne (254): I took Dave to mean that he suspected that the subtitles were actually added so that other Brits could understand the regional accents in the videos, with Americans just a convenient excuse.

Elliott Mason @228: I have Terminal.app (which I still use for Usenet) set for Monaco. It's a system font that meets your criterion. It didn't when I first got a Mac, actually; I can remember when they changed the lower case l's. But it does now.

Re fonts: a web search for "programming fonts" turns up many lists, although a lot of them are focussed on monospace fonts (not necessarily what you're after).

Monospace fonts: Consolas, Inconsolata, Source Code Pro, Menlo (comes with MacOS), Monaco (what I use on my Mac), Liberation Mono

Sans-serif proportional fonts: Verdana, Source Code Sans, Junction, Tahoma.

All of those either came with my Mac (I'm pretty sure) or are open-source and can be downloaded legally.

Ginger @236: Really glad that the "kitten chaser" was available. Even when you know it's the right, indeed the necessary, decision, that end time is never easy (when I was in practice I don't think I ever put someone else's pet to sleep without shedding a tear, never mind when it was my own animals).

dcb@260: I've never -- not once -- euthanized a pet, mine or someone else's, without shedding a tear. It's part of the process for me, so I've learned not to fight it.

I'm so glad I have the kittens to focus on as well as my other three cats, one of whom is fighting cancer, and apparently succeeding (Brady has myeloma, and came very close to dying a few months ago).

I've got a short list of potential names; now I just have to match each kitten to the proper name.

Elliott Mason @228: In Futura, Lucida Grande, Optima, and Skia the lower case ‘l’ is a bit taller than the capital ‘I’. The difference is subtle. In Monaco, Tahoma and Verdana the capital ‘I’ has a different letterform (I think it's a slab serif) to distinguish it. In Monaco and Trebuchet the lower case ‘l’ has a different letterform. You didn't mention what you need the font for. Monaco was created as a programmer's font and I still like it for that purpose, but I wouldn't use it for anything else.

One problem I have had with Monaco, (at least as it was in 1985 on a Mac; they may have fixed things since) is that the zero is pixel-for-pixel exactly the same as the capital O. And that's actually an easy typo to make; they are near each other on the keyboard. I had a heckuva time wondering why my program didn't work until I figured this out, once.

TomB@262: I use Monaco for reading Usenet with, and reading Usenet in other fonts somehow doesn't really feel like Usenet.

Erik Nelson@263: I just checked, and nowadays the 0 has a slash through and the O doesn't. So quite easy to tell apart. (I suspect they did that when they put the top-and-bottom serifs on the lowercase l and the slab serifs on the capital I.)

Ginger, my sympathies on sending Loki across the Bridge.

The hardest thing I've had to do was to sing Tao home this past Spring. (Super-fast kidney failure)

You see, Tay would get out the door, and we would have to lure him back in. I found that he would return if I sang to him. So I made him his own little song, to the tune of the "Banana Boat Song."

I made sure that was the last thing Tao heard...

Mongoose #251: These days, one of the accents I hear on Radio 4 is a clearly middle-class Jamaican one, from one of the newsreaders. That would not have done in the days of my childhood.

Lord Reith must be rolling in his grave.

Fragano Ledgister @266 writes:

> These days, one of the accents I hear on Radio 4 is a clearly middle-class Jamaican one, from one of the newsreaders. That would not have done in the days of my childhood.

I didn't have much awareness of this till a few years ago, but the ABC (Australia's national broadcaster) used to transmit in an obnoxiously plummy English accent. It wasn't till the 70s that the idea of a well bred Australian actually sounding Australian became palatable.

I was too young to notice this as it happened, but it's quite bizarre to hear the accents on old newsreels.

Erik Nelson @263: Yes, I remember that. It was a relatively minor annoyance to me because I'm an accurate typist, and I avoided creating variables named “O” or "OxFFFF" or anything like that. And then I moved to the “MPW” font, an improved version of Monaco that had been created by the developer of MPW. He wasn't a font designer, but if he couldn't get the real font people to do it, he was going to do it himself. Eventually they came around and the TrueType version is a proper programmer's font with slashed zeros.

Given that our Gracious Hosts Patrick and Teresa are going to be appearing at FenCon this coming weekend, should we consider having a Gathering of Light?

Mary Aileen @257

The only regional-accent subtitles I have seen on British TV have been for comedic effect, and it's been a combination of accent and dialect with the dial turned up to 11.

But since I'm a northerner I was brought up speaking properly, while those BBC announcers were talking funny.

They're going to be moving the F-1 engine from the former Rocketdyne location to the current one, both in Canoga Park, sometime this week. They figure the actual move will only take half an hour or so - it's about three and a half miles - but it's definitely an oversized load.

Ginger, I'm sorry for your loss. Thanks for caring for Loki after Marilee passed on. (Still missing her, too.)

I worked at an answering service, too, back around '77 or '78. Long periods of boredom, punctuated by sudden overstimulation, but not a bad job.

It wasn't at the service that I got the longest name I ever delivered a message to, though. I was working in the interlibrary loan department at Rice when a book came in for a professor named Narayanaswami Darmarajan (or possibly Dharmarajan). I got the tiny thrill of impressing his secretary by pronouncing it right.

Lee @269: We should definitely consider it. My question is when, given all the concerts etc.

Ginger, my condolences. You did good giving Loki a home for his last year or so.

Ginger @215:

Condolences on Loki's passing. I hadn't realised that you had been caring for Junie & Loki. I am slow of mind.

(I miss Marilee)

iamnothing, #274: Having looked at the schedule, I suggest dinner on Saturday, meeting shortly after 6 PM when the dealer room closes. That gives us 2 hours before the Cabaret, and AFAICT our Gracious Hosts don't have anything scheduled for those hours either, so they could join us if they like.

If there are a couple of people with cars, we have a wide range of options within 15 minutes of the hotel. Walking-distance options are also available but less varied. Unfortunately, our vehicle will be in cargo mode (2 seats only), so we could take ourselves but no one else.

Lee @277: It's practically mandatory that I attend the Sassafrass concert at 6:00 pm. It's one of the reasons I'll be at FenCon instead of Necronomicon this year. Otherwise, OK. Who else here is attending?

I vaguely recall mention of a hotel shuttle for transportation within a 3-mile radius. I should verify that.

Ginger: Despite being beset by a truly unfair amount of difficulty and grief, it sounds like your family, feline & hominid alike, function very well at keeping each other going. You have my condolences, as well as my admiration.

On the strange names front, I used to work in the radiology department at a local hospital. One of the more memorable names I came across was "Lieutenant Kelly." Yes, AFAICT, the patient's given name was "Lieutenant." That was not a military rank. I'm guessing that someone's parents were a) fans of the TV show M*A*S*H, and b) not native speakers or English or otherwise unclear on the meaning of the word "Lieutenant."

I'm catching up on Making Light after a few days away, which means, among other things, that I've just read the entire subthread about single open quotation marks in one hit.

Somewhere around the sixth instance, I developed an actual twitch every time I read another person making basically the same response, with varying levels of hostility, to a suggestion John D. Berry had not actually made.

For heaven's sake, people. We're usually better at reading comprehension than this.

(Well, and that was an unproductive outburst, even if it did make me feel better. Sorry.)

It was, indeed, unproductive. The quarrel had subsided, and now you're picking the scab off. That's even less helpful than anything that was said in the original conversation.

I'm glad it made you feel better. It certainly had the opposite effect on me.

Here, have some linguistic squee. A linguist has reconstructed what he thinks Proto-Indo-European may have sounded like.

Obviously, as he says himself, this needs to be viewed with a fair amount of caution, since there isn't even 100% agreement about what Shakespeare sounded like (though we can be pretty sure we're at least very close). But I like to think that if he had a time machine, he might at least be intelligible to our remote ancestors.

abi @283 writes:

> It was, indeed, unproductive. The quarrel had subsided, and now you're picking the scab off.

Though that does make me think of the more general question of when is now on the internet. I'd hate to think that conversations are over just because I've shown up late to the party - and I usually am at least a little late simply from the timezone I live in.

(Note that I took and take no part in the earlier conversation about quotation marks - I'm just thinking idly about the nature of forums.)

I am sorry, abi. I was self-centred and thoughtless. I apologise to you (inclusive-plural-you, not just abi) who have been hurt by my actions.

I will endeavour to conduct myself better in future.

Mongoose: I'm of the opinion that, if you took someone who knew the current best-guess reconstruction cold and set hir down somewhere in the "Proto-Indo-European" sphere (whatever that means), se'd be able to talk to anyone se might happen to meet--but everyone would think, "Huh, that person must be from pretty far away." The big problem would be "What set of laryngeals is this group using?" :)

Carrie @ 287: that sounds at least plausible. And now I am thinking that if time travel is ever invented, the very first thing I would want to do would be to go back to that period, take copious language notes, and bring back a shedload of recordings taken at various locations. The idea is enough to make a mongoose bounce!

Hyperlocal news... The weekend saw the completion of local man's big work project of the year. It involved the mandatory once-a-year's switching of our processing from the main unix server and its database to the backup. Once that was done, the full daily cycle was run, after which users validated the output, and then the switch back to the main server occurred. That has been local man's responsibility since 2007, when he managed the backup's setup. This year local man once again prepared the timeline of the exercise, arranged for the resources in other departments and within our team. Things went smoothly overall, with a couple of technical hiccups, but those were resolved quickly, and finding those potential issues are why this is done once a year. The whole thing started on Friday at 7am with some prep work and ended on Saturday at 11pm. Local man slept about 4 hours out of the whole affair's 40 hours, and not all of it in one session, but he did a bangup job, if he may humbly say so.

If I had a time machine, I'd like to find out what actual baroque music sounded like. And what Mozart's music sounded like when it was wildly popular.

I also have fantasies of becoming Hitler's art agent. Would it be too cruel to tell him why after a couple of decades and his chance to become a dictator had passed?

Thanks, Paul.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 290... Ever read Norman Spinrad's "Iron Dream"?

Whitmore@49: or "Oona" -- originally Una, as in Puck of Pook's Hill; I guess the spelling drifted to match the ~classical pronunciation.

Mycroft@56 et al re mangled names: my favorites include
* "Roberts" (reportedly because an immigration official didn't like the fact that "Rogow" was pronounced "Rogoff")
* "Brill" (not the building, she told me, but pasted on a group of people (all without last names) who were being shepherded (~="fathered"?) by a Rabbi lamed-something (ben R L)
* "Mankiewiecz" pronounced "ManKeeWee"

Andrew@ 151: the post-vowel and pre-vowel "r"s are not identical in all forms of American English; in my somewhat mid-AtlanticCoast accent the pre-vowel is more forward in the mouth.

This pronunciation cue courtesy of my most recent ex-music-director, who was so down on the "American [post-vowel] 'r'" that her farewell presents included an r-extractor. Neither she nor any of my other recent conductors think much of the pre-vowel 'r' either, but the usual substitute is (1) rolled 'r' (using the tip of the tongue), or (2) 'd'. Granted that singing pronunciation varies from spoken, but the variance can be mapped....

Berry@182: how can you possibly be off-topic in an open thread? If you are, then so is most of the thread, which as of your comment was ~50% weird-or-not names and <10% who-was-Jack-the-Ripper....

Goldfarb@194: that may vary with ethnicity; the one individual Julius I know has the last name Siarra.

Fragano@224: I take it you have prior evidence that this person isn't subliterate?

Taylor@229: When USA NPR interviewed Pratchett (wrt ]euthanasia[), one of the branches (on UK vs US English) included "arse" vs "ass"; Pterry clearly pronounced them differently. This may be an outlier as he has a mild version of the consonantal-r-as-w ]lisp[.

Mongoose@251: so Lucky Jim (in which the title character shows his out-of-placeness as a grad student every time he opens his mouth) couldn't have happened pre-Regency?

Serge @289--Hyperlocal news from this location indicates that reaction here to your results combine both happiness that things went so well and the hope you got a good nap on Sunday.

Fidelio @ 294... Thanks! No nap was had on Sunday, due to non-work tasks that work had gotten in the way of, but once local man hit the sack, he slept until 7am today, which qualifies as grossly oversleeping for him.

Steve Taylor @285: when is now on the internet? I'd hate to think that conversations are over just because I've shown up late to the party

I think that is addressed by the etiquette of "read the thread through before commenting." Sort of the lexicological equivalent of fast-forward, like. :-)

But "now" is a very interesting concept, generally, in media. Whenever I'm watching a movie, for example, I'm conscious my "now," which is when I'm watching, the in-story "now," which is when it's set, and the creation "now," when it was filmed, all of which affect how I interpret the work. I really wish Netflix would put the year made in the scroll-bar next to the title, for easier reference, because I'm constantly having that question and, yes, I can pop out to the queue page, or over to IMDb or Wikipedia or whatever. But it should just be right there. IMHO. :-)

#292 ::: Serge Broom

It's been quite a while since I've read The Iron Dream. As I recall, Hitler was a pulp sf writer as a matter of chance rather than intervention.

280
I've run into people with the first names of Ensign and Major. They're long before television.

PJ Evans #298: They're outranked by an Admiral I used to know.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 297... a matter of chance rather than intervention

That's what I remember too, although in that reality he started as a pulp artist before taking up the pen.

You know that SF has become respectable when my Party sends an email the title of which refers to the Tea Party as living in a parallel universe.

Jacque @ 296

I often feel that way when I see classic films in an actual theater (I've seen Roman Holiday, The Great Escape, and To Catch a Thief this year). Often there is a weird pseudo-connection to the people who watched the movie when it was new. I often wonder if they had an inkling at the time that they were watching a movie so good that it would be considered a classic worth replaying fifty to sixty years later.

I sometimes need to work extra hard to suspend my disbelief. The tropes in these movies were fresh once, and not cliched as they are now.

PJ Evans @298:

Apparently "Major" as a name is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the last few years:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=major&ms=false&exact=true

299
Too true. There's a Commodore, also, but since the rest of his given name is Oliver Perry, I didn't think it counted.

"Mr Stark."
"Phil! Come in."
"'Phil'? Uh, his first name is 'Agent'."
- from 2012's 'The Avengers'

Quixote @302, I'm reminded of the alas-probably-not-apocryphal woman who, after seeing a performance of "Hamlet", was asked what she thought of the play.

"It was ok, I guess, but it had far too many quotes in it."

Cassy B (306): That is in fact very similar to my reaction on first reading Hamlet, in college. Most of the oft-quoted lines and speeches I knew the source already, but-- "What are all these cliches doing here?! Shakespeare's better than that! ...Oh. This is where they came from."

The gnomes are laughing at my initial reaction to Hamlet. Would they like some peppermint drops? I've already eaten my lunch.

CHip @ 293: that's correct! He could certainly have demonstrated that he wasn't local to the area, but that would have been all. The plot would have had to use something other than accent as a class marker. (If I recall correctly - and it's a while since I read it - it did use other cues, but accent was certainly the main one.)

Now I think of it, there's a very good example in Tom Jones. Mr Western is clearly a rich landowner, not titled, but certainly described as "a gentleman". He speaks in a dialect very different from his fellow gentleman, Squire Allworthy. This book was first published in 1749, just around the time that a standardised upper-class mode of speech was starting to evolve. From the way his speech is written, Mr Western comes across (and is clearly intended to come across) as uncultured and somewhat boorish, but there is no indication that there is anything at all odd or unusual about a "gentleman" speaking the way he does.

Elliott @228 : You're off the hook with Comic Sans, the number 1 has a serif and adds to the overall anathema.
Century Cothic is pretty nice, the one is a slightly different letterform from the ell; rounder than Ariel.

Cassy B. @306: woman who, after seeing a performance of "Hamlet", was asked what she thought of the play. "It was ok, I guess, but it had far too many quotes in it."

Hah! I watched the Mel Gibson one, because I found it to be the most accessible I'd run across. All the Quotes displayed in my brain with bright yellow halo-ing around the letters. Very distracting.

Fonts 1 l I O 0: Well, my machine claims ML displays in Verdana, which seems to have distinctive letterforms for the characters in question.

Cassy B. @ 306

OTOH some people utterly fail to absorb these things. Case in point, a friend was at the theater watching Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. At the climax, a teen in the row behind her exclaimed to her friend, "I... I think they're going to kill themselves!"

Of course, you need to learn these things sometimes, and as XKCD says, better to celebrate learning an awesome thing than to admonish the person for not learning it earlier.

Quixote @312,

Very true. But I have to admit I cringed a little when I attended a performance of "Sweeney Todd" and heard the people behind me, before the curtain opened, musing out loud, "It says 'the Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. Do you suppose it's a drama...?" I so very much wanted to warn them what they were in for, but restrained myself. (Later, I heard loud gasps of shock and dismay when Mrs. Lovett got the idea for a better pie filling...)

The performance was wonderful. But I sometimes think a *few* spoilers aren't necessarily a bad idea. I honestly think the little old ladies behind me nearly had a heart attack...

Since this was the topic of a Sidelight a few months ago, thought I would point out the latest news. For the Associated Press, Nicole Winfield writes:

Popes John Paul II and John XXIII will be declared saints on April 27 at a ceremony that might see two living popes honoring two dead ones.

Cassy B @313: Oh, dear Ghu. Another entry for the traveling exhibition of Cultural Literacy Fail, I guess.

Cassie B @ 313... "It says 'the Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. Do you suppose it's a drama...?"

this reminds me of the time my wife and I were waiting for del Toro's "The Orphanage" to begin when two young women sat in front of us with their very young kids. They soon realized this was not going to be about Little Orphan Annie.

Side note: We performed Sweeney Todd as the spring play in my junior year of high school (1981). I think there were probably a few shocked folks in the audience, although perhaps not quite so many as there might have been had the musical not been in very recent memory a hit on Broadway (1979) and in London (1980). The farther off the radar/out of memory a show is, the fewer people who are likely to be familiar with it.

Major Garrett is the chief White House correspondent for CBS News.

I think that this modern passion for canonizing recent popes is a bad idea.

319
I'm wondering what JPII actually did that he deserves being canonized. 'Back to the Middle Ages' isn't exactly the kind of thing that you want as your epitaph.

Do popes get cannonized during knaval battles?

SummerStorms @315, Serge Broom @316, I certainly don't wish to put myself on some Cultural Literacy Pedestal; we went to see "The 39 Steps" last year, and based soley on the director's note in the stagebill that the play was based on a Hitchcock story (which I had not seen nor heard of) I was expecting a drama, probably a gripping murder mystery.

Instead, we got a wild farce entirely performed by four players, two of whom playing dozens of roles each. It was very funny, and ENTIRELY unexpected.

When the curtain opened I thought the staging was rather spare; I figured it out a few minutes later when the Ominous Figures Lurking Under the Streetlight "forgot" to bring their streetlight onstage and had to scurry offstage for it.... (Did I mention that it was a very funny farce?)

Quixote @312; Cassy B @313:

That reminds me of my own experience reading Stanisław Lem’s Hospital of the Transfiguration. I was an undergraduate reading my way through all the Lem available in the university library; all I knew of him so far was his science fiction, and especially his funny science fiction (like the Cyberiad). So I picked up this book, knowing only that it was by Lem—the library had rebound it, so there were no back-cover blurbs or front-cover art to give me any further clues.

Well, as it turns out, it’s a realistic novel set in a mental hospital in Poland during the Second World War. With all that that entails.

As I recall, I spent about the first half of the book suspecting that the narrator’s father was going to invent a time machine. It was a rather strange reading experience. I sort of feel like everyone should do something like that at least once—plunge into a book or a play or a movie with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be about, or even what genre it’s supposed to be.

Cassy B. @322

Is that normally performed with only four actors? If not, I might have seen the same production of the 39 Steps as you did. Vertigo Theatre, Calgary?

Of course, it's a very popular play - I imagine it gets produced all the time.

And who here would even blink at being introduced to a man named "Earl"? I suspect a lot more of us would think of it as somewhat old-fashioned, and be surprised if he was 20 rather than 80, than find it incongruous for meaning.

Quixote@312; Cassy B. @313: And then there was the young couple behind us in the cinema a few weeks after Titanic came out; at a certain point in the film the young woman asked her boyfriend: "what happened?" and he replied..."they hit an iceberg."

Cassy B. @322: Oh! Since I -do- know "The 39 Stepes", that would have been even more unexpected! But if it was done well, then great.

Q. Pheevr @323: That does sound like a rather surreal experience.

Quixote @324, I have no idea if the staging I saw is the normal staging; I'd not seen it before and have not seen it since. But I was completely flummoxed and very impressed when, during a railway station scene, one man never left center stage but was in quick succession (with an instant hat change) a newpaper crier ("Extra, Extra!"), a police officer, and... um, someone else. Seamlessly and rapidly back and forth between the characters, which were all very different.

I saw it at Drury Lane Oakbrook Theatre in the Chicago suburbs.

Anybody else saw the "Wonder Woman" short film that's now out there?

Q. Pheevr @323: I sort of feel like everyone should do something like that at least once—plunge into a book or a play or a movie with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be about, or even what genre it’s supposed to be.

That's my favorite mode to go into a movie with. The second I get the idea that I might like to see something, I immediately make everybody around me STFU about it: I don't want to know any more. Adds an extra couple of dimensions to the experience when I have to spend the first part of the movie trying to suss out what kind of movie it is, while still tracking the story. (Two best examples that come to mind are the movie Seven Pounds and the Firefly series.)

Had to have a few, um, negotiations with my best movie buddy, because his approach is to go out and found out everything he possibly can before going to see it. There have been a couple of cases where he's mentioned some obscure fact about the movie, causing me to instantly decide I wanted to see it, and the he would proceed to tell me more in an effort to convince me to go. Had to shake him by the lapels a few times to l'arn him not to do that.

You know what your life is missing, and you didn't even know it was missing it?

Thug Notes

Just watch Beowulf, and then tell me I'm wrong...

Serge Broom #301: Well, Tom Tomorrow (and I suspect other cartoonists) have been riffing the "parallel universe" thing for years. (In two flavors, really, one is nominally an alien planet.)

Cassy B #306: Definitely not apocryphal -- the trope used to be "Hamlet is derivative", but TVTropes has changed a lot since I used to frequent them, and I'm not sure what they're calling it now.

Dave Harmon @ 331... True, but Tom Tomorrow isn't exactly an official voice of the Democratic Party.

Dave Harmon #331 the trope your looking for is Seinfeld is Unfunny. I'm pretty sure the trope name has never involved Hamlet, but the page quote does so maybe you were thinking of that.

Beowulf, #333: But Seinfeld was never funny. At least the Hamlet version has the advantage of being real.

I used to work with a guy whose last name was Senior. He and his father had the same first name, too, so he was [firstname] Senior, Jr. In a prior job he was a senior graphics designer, so he was [firstname] Senior, Jr., Senior Graphics Designer.

Inquisitive 280:When I was a kid there was a guy who made the local papers by naming his newborn son "Incumbent Judge [lastname]."

Mongoose 284:Yes that's interesting, maybe exciting, but...you've heard the expression 'take that with a grain of salt'? I'm not sure the ATLANTIC has enough salt to take that with. I'd want to see more details of his evidence.

Listening to it I hear an intonation pattern much like American English, and his pronunciations, to my ear, don't appear to match what I think are tone markings in the transcription.

Carrie 287: I'm of the opinion that, if you took someone who knew the current best-guess reconstruction cold and set hir down somewhere in the "Proto-Indo-European" sphere (whatever that means), se'd be able to talk to anyone se might happen to meet--but everyone would think, "Huh, that person must be from pretty far away."

Probably they'd kill ser almost right away. They were pretty warlike from all I hear.

Also, if they get the tones wrong they'd wonder "Why does this person keep talking about sheep farts?"

CHip 293: Since my surgery I am no longer physically capable of pronouncing the rolled 'r'. This isn't a huge problem, because I'm a choral singer, but it's mildly annoying.

I wish our choir director cared enough about text sounds to tell people that they have to sing non-rhotically! Or even to try to get us to sing the same vowel. Dongemmestahted.

Bill 10π: John XXIII, yeah. Best Pope EVER IMN-CO. But J2P2? Canonizing him reminds me how far the Church still needs to come, again IMN-CO.

Jacque 329: Adds an extra couple of dimensions to the experience when I have to spend the first part of the movie trying to suss out what kind of movie it is, while still tracking the story.

So much this. The opening narration of Dark City is stupidly spoileriffic for that reason; I skip over it when introducing the movie to someone new. The movie is much more fun if you think it's going to be a pynffvp abve qrgrpgvir zbivr jvgu na nzarfvn cybg. (Just in case anyone here has yet to see it.)

Also, I wish I'd gone to see The Matrix without knowing anything about it in advance.

Lee 334: I agree. Never found it funny even when it was first on. Annoying as all hell, in fact.

#329, #335: I knew a lot about Terminator 2 when I sat down to watch it for the first time. Several minutes in, I realized that the Big Thing I knew going in was fact a huge spoiler, and the "get down" moment would have been amazingly cool had I not been pre-spoiled.

Seinfeld had moments, but mostly -- no, not funny to me. I don't like humiliation humor, and that was a major part of it.

Xopher, I wasn't aware that they were reconstructing tones for PIE these days. Unless I'm meaning the same thing by "laryngeals" that you mean by "tones", which is entirely possible--I'm not up on the latest in that field by any means. :)

Laertes: It annoyed me immensely that every single trailer for T2 involved a spoiler for that surprise.

Xopher at 335: The lab the Amazing Girlfriend and I are both members of has a historical fondness for Dark City (our advisor loves it). So, for a lab movie night last fall, the lab watched it... I haven't been that actively annoyed by a movie in a long time. Thinking back on it the better part of a year later, I think most of my problem with it is a lack of explanation and context (the ending also gets me; I don't mind tragedies, but Dark City's ending is particularly bleak to me).

That said, it does have one of the great lines of recent memory: Shut it down! Shut it down forever!

Vicki #325: And who here would even blink at being introduced to a man named "Earl"?

I once worked with someone named Graf Von Lastname. His brother is Baron Von Lastname. Von is their given middle name.

There's going to be a show about how an ogre comes out of the ocean and terrorizes all the lifeguards on the beach.

It's called Beowatch.

Erik Nelson @ 341... If SyFy ever shows up a movie by that title, we know who to blame.

Carrie 338: Well, my degree is mumble years old, so I could be out of date on that. When I was in school it was believed that PIE was a tone language, and that differences in tone conditioned things like Russian o/e alternation, which became distinctive once the tones dropped out. Also, Swedish tonal accent was believed to be a remnant of PIE tone.

Benjamin 339: Fascinating. I don't see the ending as tragic at all. Ur trgf evq bs gur rivy nyvraf, naq trgf n punapr gb ohvyq n erny eryngvbafuvc jvgu gur jbzna ur ybirf, jvgu erny zrzbevrf vafgrnq bs snxr barf. It's been a while since I've seen it, so I could be misremembering.

Xopher 343 I can understand that view of it, but zl ceboyrz jvgu gur raqvat vf gung juvyr ur trgf gb perngr n arj yvsr sbe uvzfrys naq gur jbzna ur ybirf (jub qbrfa'g erzrzore uvz, fvapr ur - nf V erpnyy - vf gur bayl bar jub tbg gb xrrc uvf zrzbevrf), rirelbar va gur raivebazrag unf orra, cerfhznoyl, chyyrq njnl sebz Rnegu naq vf qbbzrq gb yvir va Qnex Pvgl jvgu ab jnl bs tbvat gehyl ubzr. Can't exactly say it's one of my favorite movies.

Huh, OK. I thought the laryngeals accounted for all of those alternations. Now I'm curious and will have to look it up.

:wanders off to look for Fortson:

For some reason, it was important to me to read Mieville's Un Lun Dun without knowing anything about it except that it was likely to be sf, and I think my intuition paid off.

And it wasn't about the thing that most people seem to think was coolest about the book (gung gur "pubfra bar" raqf hc abg pneelvat gur cybg), it was the puns and the surrealism and the rather surprising naturalistic problem.

Skwid @330

Thanks for the pointer.

and huh, i learned something new. The analysis section made Beowulf make sense (reading it on my own didn't). Haven't explored the others, but they are now on my list.

Kim chee?

Spoiler for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): Wrffr Wnzrf vf nffnffvangrq ol Eboreg Sbeq

Remember, be careful out there.

Over on the S.H.I.E.L.D. thread I had mysterious trouble posting a comment containing certain text, which has happened in the past as well, and Jim Macdonald suggested I should post the error I get, and also to take it to the nearest open thread. The error's pretty generic-Apache:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@nielsenhayden.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

It occurs only on attempted posting, not on preview. I just checked my text for funny characters and found only the “, —, and ” that I intended to post.

I've had this problem at least once before, and so far all the evidence indicates that posting specific text always fails, and slowly (it takes over a minute to return the error). The following text, if ROT13'd, will cause the error if I try to post it (at least, in that thread). If the moderators are willing, I or someone else could (try to) post a bunch of comments containing binary-search fragments of this and at least find out what the minimal problematic text is.

Nabgure gevpx haeryngrq gb rapelcgvba, juvpu zvtug or hfrshy vs lbh pna trg yvar bs fvtug ohg vg jbhyq or hafnsr gb fubj hc, vf gb cbvag n uvtuyl qverpgvbany nagraan ng gur ina. Guvf unf orra hfrq va gur erny jbeyq gb qrsrng nffhzcgvbaf bs “guvf qbrf abg arrq gb or frpher orpnhfr gur enqvb fvtanyf ner fubeg-enatr” va frireny vafgnaprf — JvSv, Oyhrgbbgu, naq ASP. Ryrpgebzntargvp jnirf qba'g unir na vaurerag “enatr”.

#306, #307.

"Full of film-music cliches" was the reaction of some people in my choir to singing Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky. And they were right, in a way.

PJ Evans @ 298: I mentioned M*A*S*H specifically because there was a character bearing the patient's name in the show. Well, mentioned in the show anyway; I don't remember Lieutenant Kelly ever actually appearing on screen.

Quixote @ #324, Cassy B. @ #327:

Yes, that's the standard staging for that particular adaptation of The 39 Steps. One actor plays the hero, one actress plays the key female roles, and two more people play everyone else.

There was a production here a while ago, but I never actually got to see it, because a few days before I was planning to go the actor playing the hero was struck down by illness, and as it was coming up to the end of the season they had to drop all the remaining performances.

(Actually, that's not quite true. They did one more performance, on what would have been closing night, where they'd reached out to the local theatrical community to pull together a show where the hero was played by a different actor in each scene. Which may have fitted in perfectly well with the rest of it, for all I know - if you've got an actor playing a dozen roles, why not also a dozen actors playing one role? - but it wasn't the experience I'd been looking forward to, so I gave it a miss.)

Erik Nelson @ #341, Serge Broom @ #342:

When Neil Gaiman was working on the script for Beowulf that was eventually filmed by Roger Zemeckis, he found that a significant proportion of people, on hearing the words "I'm writing a film based on Beowulf", automatically translated the last word into one they were more familiar with.

Which is why his short story collection Smoke and Mirrors includes a story called "Bay Wolf", in which the hero is called on to deal with a monster terrorizing beach-goers.

"Well I have a distant relative named 'Unique'..."

You're not the only one..

Re: the sidebar "Peru makes book writing into a spectator sport and invites desperate writers into combat"

There was definitely an SF short-story about that, but I don't retain the title or author. I probably read it in the early 80s or late 70s. The authors' efforts were announced like a sports event, and there was a Captain-Ersatz drink representing coffee/booze. Ends with a bit of the protag's work, a pulp involving a woman and green Venusian tentacles.

I have some more delicious linguistic goodness for you all to enjoy.

One of the things I particularly like to try to do is catch language change in the wild as it happens, which is not an easy undertaking. Today, however, I believe I have spotted an example in a Guardian headline. They've now changed the word in question to "guide", but it originally read "an explainer for non-Americans", and this word "explainer" is still in the URL. Not "explanation", but "explainer".

I've been puzzled for a while by the word "ouster", which has always seemed linguistically out of whack to me because I associate the "-er" suffix with an animate agent, not a process. But lo! It now has a sibling!

Cassie B @ 322... entirely performed by four players

That sounds like "Monty Python's Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps"

Mongoose @357 I've been puzzled for a while by the word "ouster", which has always seemed linguistically out of whack to me because I associate the "-er" suffix with an animate agent, not a process. But lo! It now has a sibling!

I've seen "decider" used similarly, not as in "one who decides," but as in "the thing that causes one to decide one way or another." I connect it with real estate - e.g. the decider on purchasing that house was the bay window looking over the yard - but I would guess it has been used otherwise as well.

I can see the Masked Writer competition happening at a con near you, quite easily.

Serge Broom @ 358; it was, rather. There was a scene where Our Hero was struggling across a windy moor... and one of the other players was walking backwards in front of him, with a large electric fan trained on Our Hero....

Forthcoming Productions:

Edward Scissorhands (in Braille)

The Sound of Music (on Aldis Lamp)[1]

Doctor Zhivago (in naval flag hoists)[2]

Cadbury.
[1] Patrons are advised that this production uses flashing lights.
[2] Due to the length of this production, overnight accomodation is available, discounts by the fortnight.

Dave Bell @361, coincidentally someone just suggested to me that at a forthcoming convention we should do an Iron Writer panel. (Iron Writer SF, Iron Writer Fantasy, Iron Writer Horror, Iron Writer Humor....). Give them a secret ingredient plot point and an hour. How to make it visual for the audience is a bit of a stickler, however....

Cassy, #363: My immediate thought would be to give them the writing hour behind the scenes, and have the actual panel be readings of what they came up with. An hour is enough time to read 3 or 4 short stories. Get audience investment by having a list of "secret ingredient" ideas for people to vote on all day Friday; announce the winning idea at the beginning of the panel, and leave time at the end for the audience to vote for their favorite.

If your con has sufficient budget and someone who's willing to do the prep-work, make up a chapbook containing all the results, which could be sold at a nominal fee on Sunday.

Speaking of Seinfeld is Unfunny: We saw the original Wicker Man this weekend, and kept having the feeling that things have changed so much in the last 40 years that we need an explanation. "It just wasn't very scary" was the conclusion.

Lee @363, that sounds like a workable idea. I'll pass it along to next year's conchair; thank you. "Iron Artist" was also suggested, (sculptor, painter, cartoonist, charcoal) but that's easier because people can SEE the art being made. Other than putting up the word processor outputs on a giant screen, writing isn't really a visual process...

On Pope John Paul II:

For me, his apologies on behalf of the church to the Anabaptists and Protestants, and to the Jews, were hugely significant and a welcome move away from the Middle Ages.

Mongoose @357, OtterB @359:

Ouster sounds weird to me, too, but explainer and decider seem like fairly standard (if not very familiar) uses of the -er suffix to create nouns denoting instruments. So we have agentive -er in teacher, writer, bricklayer, etc., and instrumental -er in washer, dryer, typewriter, turkey baster, etc., and decider and explainer seem to me like (somewhat more abstract) instances of the latter category. A decider causes a decision to happen, and an explainer is an instrument by which something is explained. Ouster seems different in that it’s an event of ousting, rather than the cause of such an event.

(The OED says ouster has the same legal Anglo-French suffix as waiver, disclaimer, misnomer, and that it’s related to the -er of dinner and supper—which I guess are also events, after all.)

Q. Pheevr @ 368: ahhh! Thank you. I hadn't thought of "waiver" and so on. That makes perfect sense.

Lee @364, my conchair thanks you for the ideas. She sounds enthusiastic in her email to me.

Aw damn. Handing out breakfast this morning, discovered that Glory had passed. Can't be sure, but I think she went while I was getting dressed. Makes me sad for being slow getting out here this morning. They will often wait for me, and then pass shortly after I discover them, laying on their side in the back of the cage.

No clue what happened. She'd said she wasn't feeling well, last coupla days, and I was just starting to think about taking her into the vet. Last night, after I'd given her crew their dinner, and while I was giving Gustav her bottle (we sit on the floor in front of the big house), Glory went dashing downstairs, and made a big show of "lying down" at me. They do this on the rare occassions when they actually want a snuggle.

I thought it was odd at the time, but didn't think more of it, especially since she was in the most inaccessible part of the cage. Well, I guess I know what that was about, now. ::sigh::

Shannon, over at Cavy Care, has commented that they're most likely to pass during spring and fall. Something about the season change is extra stessful for them during those times. I was kind of wondering if I was going to lose somebody this fall. Wouldn't have expected it to be her, though, since Glory was one of the "healthy" ones.

It's really hard not to feel like I've failed her, especially since she wasn't one of the ones who liked to cuddle, so she didn't get a lot of individual attention.

Now we're down to 11.

Jacque @ #329
I sort of feel like everyone should do something like that at least once—plunge into a book or a play or a movie with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be about, or even what genre

I’ve always wanted to show Gangs of New York to someone without telling them the title, so they can spend the first scene trying to figure out what Mad Max-type post-apocalyptic world they’ve been dropped into, before we pull back and reveal it’s New York in the 1850s.

Sandy, #365: I haven't actually seen Wicker Man, but somebody gave me a CD of the soundtrack a few years back, which was apparently ripped from TV and contained a fair amount of the dialogue as well. My conclusion was that its horror component depended heavily on the assumption that everyone in the audience would (1) be Christian and (2) have no knowledge of paganism whatsoever, so that anything presented as a pagan custom would be instantly perceived as Weird And Scary.

Cassy, #370: Glad to be of service. :-)

Jacque, #371: My condolences on your loss.

Jacque @371, Condolences

This is me, putting off going to work, because, well.

Xopher Halftongue @335: Senior, Jr.

My little old man Junior was so named because his fur was the same color as that of the family chihuahua, Peanut, so he was originally Peanut Jr. But when he came to my house, he became simply Junior. Fast forward six years, and one of his little boys comes out looking almost exactly like him, so this little boy is obviously Junior, Jr. JJ for short.

Inquisitive Raven @352: I don't remember Lieutenant Kelly ever actually appearing on screen.

Lieutenant Kelly

That isn't the impression I got from The Wicker Man at all.

I saw it back on its first US release, and didn't get the impression that it was meant to be scary; more bizarre. The policeman was made stuffy and ridiculous, the townsfolk presented as cheerful, and right.

Kevin @ 350 (and attention mods):

This could be caused by a typo in a regular expression (in the spam filters) causing the pattern-matching evaluation to "run amok" and take an infinite (or at least indefinitely long) time to complete. This problem is a known possibility when backtracking is used, and can also occur with certain regular expression engines even with apparently innocuous (but complicated) expressions.

IIRC my Apache experience, in that case the Apache subprocess handling the post will time out and you could end up seeing that error message.

If it's possible for one of the mods to pull out a list of all the anti-spam expressions used for checking posts and time them all against that text fragment, preferably from a shell on the web server, that might well nail the problem quickly. If that's not so easy, maybe try eyeballing recently added anti-spam expressions against the text to see which might be triggering, or do a binary search with them enabled/disabled to see in which case posting the text succeeds.

Jacque @ 371: so sorry to hear that.

Jacque @ 371: My condolences on your loss; our companions just never spend enough time here with us. You gave Glory the best life she wanted, and you paid attention to her needs as she explained them to you. Please don't feel guilty about not being perfect.

Actually, I feel a bit guilty myself, since Loki had an incurable cancer; but I know there was nothing anyone could do. My only other option was to treat aggressively, potentially making his life miserable, which I chose not to do. I would make the same decision knowing what I know now, because his life was pretty good right up until the end. I think Glory had a pretty good life herself, too.

Testing continues.

#350 above for what this is all about.

These posts will vanish after I've located the cause.

“range

range"

Jim: Dunno if it makes a difference, but not that your second range has a straight-close-quote, instead of curly.

Ginger @379: And it seemed to come on pretty quickly, so at least she didn't have to suffer with months of ill-health, like others I've had. For that I'm grateful.

Yeah, that treating the cancer thing. Speaking for me, personally, I'd have to be sure of a cure, or at least a significant prolongation of life, to be worth putting them through all that. It's tough. Especially when they can't tell what they want.

Silver lining: now, at least, the only bully left in that house is Kit Fox.

Jacque:

It does. range followed by a straight double-quote gets through. Range followed by a curly double quote ... doesn't.

Testing continues.

Raul Flugens, Test Gnome @387: Oh, I think they're quite fun!

Jacque @ 371: Sympathies. Somtime it can be harder when you-re -not- expecting to lose one. I'm sure you gave Glory a good life, including NOT petting her when she didn't want that. {{{{{hugs}}}}} if they're useful.

Ginger @379, Jacque @391: Mabel's cancer was uncurable (large cell lymphoma), and without any treatment she would have been gone in a week. With the modified Madison protocol, she had a really healthy-seeming six months, and a less-healthy final month that involved minimal pain. She remained very much herself up through the last week, when we realized that she really wanted to finish about 12 hours before we could have an appointment with the vet to euthanize her. She'd have a day or two of being lethargic around the chemo every week or two, but bounced back incredibly well.

It wasn't cheap. And while it was a little difficult for her, she really told us that she wanted the summer (and she got it). We'd do it again.

And if I ever get cancer, I hope I have as good a doctor as she had. I'm talking about Dr. Chelsea Tripp, at Animal Medical Center in Shoreline (just north of Seattle). She was careful, responsive, and knew how to deal with all kinds of people dealing with animal cancers. I watched her in the waiting room with many different people, and she met each one of them right where they were. She taught me a lot about dealing with serious life issues. May she have a long and influential career, and may her colleagues aspire to be like her.

Kevin Reid #350

Got it.

A right hand (close) curly quote, followed by [ENTER] causes the error.

The error is prevented if there are at least four characters (any combination of alpha-numeric, punctuation, and/or spaces) between the close-curly-quote and the carriage return. (Note: three blank spaces in a row will activate the gnomes' filters.)

There's nothing remotely like this in the gnomes' spam filters. Therefore it's off somewhere in the guts of Moveable Type.

Sandy B. #365

Speaking of Seinfeld is Unfunny:

I didn't think Seinfeld was funny on first broadcast, either.

I found Seinfeld both funny and unfunny, from episode to episode.

Jim Macdonald @388: A right hand (close) curly quote, followed by [ENTER] causes the error.

Hmm. I wonder how I got away with it at 187, then. Maybe because I was typing the html code instead of an actual close-right-double-quote?

Q. Pheevr #391

Exactly. You used HTML rather than pasting in the actual curly-right-quote character.

Oh, for the love of Pete. The PA I had my yearly checkup with (who I like, but) managed to:

1. Lose my pap test.
2. Mess up the dosage on one prescription.
3. Order the wrong kind of another prescription.

Now, I find out that

4. The "corrected reorder" of 3 that she promised apparently never happened.

You know, I'm all for being understanding about human error, but when I get caught out in an error like that, I put processes in place to keep it from happening again. Dammit.

I've think I've always seen the word explainer used like that (i.e. since I started learning English as a foreign language). Isn't it a common usage?

Roy @ 394: I can't speak for anywhere else, but not in the UK. This is the first time I've ever seen it used like that, and it seems the Guardian decided it was an awkward usage, since they subsequently changed the headline.

You know how most university-level scientific research in the United States is government funded? The ongoing shutdown means some really lovely things for those of us working in labs funded by federal agencies. It's even more fun for those of us (like the Amazing Girlfriend and myself) who have direct federal funding -some of you might remember a few years ago, the Amazing Girlfriend and myself were awarded NSF (National Science Foundation) Graduate Fellowships. You know what the really fun part of the shutdown is? NSF isn't disbursing any funds for the duration of the shutdown. Since NSF pays out our (and those of a couple hundred other graduate awardees) stipends to the University on a monthly basis, it means that we are almost certain to not get our stipends this month. I'm enraged and disgusted.

Well, I don't know how they've managed it, but NSF Fellows will actually be getting stipends - just got an email from my fellowship officer. I don't know if the university is, essentially, fronting the money or what - but I am going to get paid this month. That's a relief.

Mongoose @ 395: It's probably an Americanism then - but I can't figure out where I've picked it up. Most of the print media I've consumed over the years has been of UK origin.

Okay, need a little pick-me-up. Discovered last night that Netflix is streaming Lilo & Stitch again.

There are very few things that will make me laugh out loud, but that's one of them.

• Peanut butter sandwich day.
• "Nononoonono! You don't want that dog!"
• "Disciplining" Stitch with a squirt bottle.
• "GRRRRrrrrrr."

Scared the guinea pigs.

Benjamin, that's better than no stipend. I hope the shutdown is short.

Believe me, I agree. After looking at NSF's site, I fully expected to hear "sorry, but if NSF doesn't give us money, we can't pay you" - I was quite surprised to hear that we'll actually *get* paid.

#322, #358, #361:

Once I was trying to explain to Barry Gehm why he would enjoy Hitchcock's film of John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps.

"At one point," I explained, "the hero is handcuffed to this girl, and they are on the run in the highlands of Scotland. And the police are searching for this guy with an autogyro."

Barry raised one eyebrow.

"Any other distinguishing features?"

re: Wicker Man

I don't know what link to give you; just google "muppets wicker man" and pick what looks good to you (or check Images).

Benjamin Wolfe #396: I'm just glad my SSD payment came in before the shutdown!

The Republicans are being despicable, pulling out all stops to prevent the government from helping people. I hope they suffer deeply for it in the polls; unfortunately, it's not a Federal election year, and the mass media works hard to keep the public memory short regarding such things.

L'arnin' teh Skillz...I dunno. Guy on the right seems to...lack commitment.

re: 405

"Teaching" (as per header)? Phooey.

What I saw was a young male sheep working up his head-butting. That the bull (steer?) wasn't engaging with it didn't matter (I agree with Jacque as to his interest level).

Sexually dominant behavior develops by practicing. Our Hero hasn't quite worked out his moves, one of which should be challenging the right species.

His backing up was the cutest thing I've seen today.

To me, an "explainer" would always be a person. But then so would a trainer, which may or may not be a useful insight.

Jacque 371: I'm sorry for your loss.

Benjamin 397: Glad to hear it!

Coming in late to the "name that name" thing. I went to high school in a really mixed neighborhood. White, Hispanic, black, Polynesian, Filipino, Indian, Native American, Japanese, Chinese, assorted Europeans from west and east, an assortment of middle east names of various flavors. I think the only thing we didn't have much of was Vietnamese at a time when "the war" was winding down. After plowing thru a marvelously ethnically mixed football team list of names as they came on the field, I'm not sure if everything is strange to me or nothing is. (Why yes, I can pronounce Manumaleuna without stumbling.)

This also led to my realization some years later that the Slavs* got all the consonants while the Polynesians got all the vowels.

*I probably have the ethnicity wrong. Is there a group ethnic name for those with names with lots of consonants strung together? My dentist is a good example: Luczszak.

I'm saddened to hear of the death of Elliot Shorter, one of the 60s conrunners who helped me get into fandom way back when. People used to say that Rosie Greer looked like him. He was a larger than life character, and will be missed.

Lin @ #408 -

My father's family is of Polish extraction and my mother's is Czech (her mother) and Samoan (her father). More than once doing genealogy I have attempted to redistribute vowels and consonants.

Lin #408, I'd say Luczszak is either a Western Slavic name or it's a Slavic name that's been Hungarianized or vice-versa, because of who uses cz and sz like that. I think Poles are more likely than other people to slap the cz and sz right in a row, but the name is not at all distinctive.

I adore Czech surnames. A lot of them are completely unflattering. They translate into weird little jokey phrases or the names of agricultural implements. I've heard conflicting explanations -- either the German speaking officials of the Austro-Hungarian Empire imposed them, or the Czech speaking citizens identified themselves this way to perpetrate pranks on the officials.

On the other hand, the feminine form of the surname is the possessive adjective (as in "property of the Dvoraks"), and the law of Czech republic requires women to use the feminine form unless they have foreign names. Which led my daughter in law to change her name at marriage as an act of feminist defiance.

The president of the students' union when I was at university was called Szczerbiak. And I was the proofreader for the student newspaper.

He was so happy when I took on that role. Finally he got his name spelt right!

Stanisław I Leszczyński, King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine.

You're welcome.

Probably for using accented characters in a URL.

Home-made sausage rolls, your Lownesses?

Jacque #405, Carol Kimball #406: I beg to differ -- the adult is engaged, f'rex he's teaching the kid that you have to actually make contact, and then the other guy's supposed to go backwards. ;-) What he's not doing, is responding to it as a real dominance challenge, -- this is a play version for the benefit of the lamb.

For sheepish comment. I'll have coffee in a bit....

Ginger, how is the shutdown affecting you? I expect it must be particularly annoying.

Dave Harmon @404--Benefits, both disability and retirement, will continue to be paid. (The link is to SSA's own website, which has a shutdown page.)

Benjamin Wolfe @396--I suspect the university is fronting you all, with expectations of being reimbursed by the NSF. They may also have been given the term's payments in a lump sum at the start of the term. I know the state government here has agreed to front my agency up through October 11, and who knows what will happen at that point? They have explicitly indicated they expect to be reimbursed by the Feds when things get settled.

Most large federal agencies will have a shut-down page on their website like SSA's, so if people have questions I'd suggest checking there first.

fidelio #416: Ah, thank you. I like their dig at Congress....

Dave Harmon @419--I urge you to pass that around to anyone with questions about their benefits.

The VA's funding, unlike Social Security's, come via appropriations. Here's a a .pdf covering what to expect there.

Here's the page from the White House's website that pulls together contingency plans government-wide. Page two of this .pdf. October food stamp (SNAP) benefits should come through; the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children's) benefits program does not appear to be funded. School lunch programs should be good through October. Other food support programs are doubtful, from what I can tell.

If anyone has questions about a particular program, I urge them to check the White House page, and work from there.

Also, if you are in a position to donate to your local food bank or other anti-hunger charity, now might be a good time to do that.

I'd like to thank the gnomes for being public-spirited enough to let that post, with its links, go through. Nice to know we can count on you guys in times like these!

Cadbury Moose @362

See also IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service

Re: Government shutdown

Federal retirees' pension payments will continue.

The President signed a bill that guarantees the military will receive their pay. (Shame they didn't think keeping the VA funded should be in that legislation.)

And a rousing cheer for the folks with Honor Flight who took the veterans into the WWII memorial despite the barricades --

"I can hear the people sing..."

Lori @423:

(Shame they didn't think keeping the VA funded should be in that legislation.)

I understand the logic. There's a faction in the House that's trying to cherry-pick certain pieces of the government to re-fund, including the VA and national parks (but not, say, WIC or salaries for the 800,000 suddenly unemployed federal workers), so that they can unilaterally de-fund everything else. Yes, the VA should be funded - so should WIC and the NSF and Head Start.

Fragano @ 417: I am at work, as an excepted employee. It means I will eventually be paid, that is guaranteed, but the actual delivery of pay will be delayed.

It's very quiet here. I am updating spreadsheets.

Ta-nehisi Coates has a couple of shutdown threads open, with requests for expert observations from his commenters. Bad news about the influenza programs...

James Fallows is also on things.

Ginger #424: Gail's an excepted employee too, and she's in a similar situation with reference to being paid as the payroll staff have all been furloughed. People who go on scheduled leave, as she will next week, have been told that they they must go on furlough at the end of the leave unless the shutdown ends.

I gather that Fixed Noise is calling this a "slimdown". I have an opinion on that.

But I don't speak Gnomish, and my lunch is gone.

My question is why this won't just become a standard feature of political dysfunction in the US, like never getting a budget done on time, or having an ever-increasing number of federal judge positions open to avoid the partisan nomination battle.

Perhaps in another couple decades, this will just be what happens in early October, and federal employees will plan their vacations around it.

albatross, it WILL if the Dems (especially the President) don't stand up to it right now and have it fail to work (and hopefully hurt the people who did it in 2014, when they're all up for re-election).

That's why they can't negotiate: for the same reason you can't negotiate with terrorists. Actually, calling the Teahadists "budget terrorists" doesn't seem very wrong to me. People are going to die if this shutdown goes on too long.

427
The Senate kept asking the house to name people to a committee to reconcile the budget bills, last spring. The House never did. It's on them.

Cassy@322: sounds like a publicity failure; I know both the Hitchcock movie and the Buchan novel that provided the title and chase scene (and not much else), but knew in advance that the performance I saw was going to be ... different.

Xopher@335: said director told me when I complained offline about something that she had to pick her battles; I suspect that's true of all music directors. (We miss her, but the prospect of a full-time tenured position made even Indiana acceptable; we're hoping the campus accepts her partner.) I remember one of her predecessors moaning at us about his other gig in Dallas, where one singer told him <thick Texas accent>But if we talk like y'all want us to, none of our friends will understand us!</thick Texas accent> (He parlayed his forcefulness into choral direction at the Met, where he doesn't have to put up with anything....)

Cadbury@362: don't forget Wuthering Heights in semaphore....

Macdonald@376: Reaction to The Wicker Man may depend on where the viewer stands; I read the townsfolk as stuck in Summerisle's conjob/delusion so far they didn't blink at human sacrifice -- but (based on past comments) there's a large gap between your belief system and mine. (My having read the Cinefantastique Quarterly's discussion before reading the movie may also have had an effect, but they were mostly whinging about how hard it was to find the unaltered version.)

P J, yes, the Senate made 18 attempts to have a budget conference committee. Having the House call them after all that and say "let's talk about how we're going to fuck the country over as much as we possibly can unless you give us everything we want because Obamacare ISN'T FAIR WAAHHHHHH"—well, it's not surprising that the Senate told them where to stick it.

ALL the blame for this belongs to the GOP. Moreover, all of it belongs to the GOP in the House. Most of it belongs to the Teahadi "Suicide Caucus," but fundamentally the blame belongs to John "Crybaby" Boehner. The votes to pass a clean CR exist in the House; Boehner won't allow it to come to the floor because he's afraid of the hardcore Teahadists.

Of course, this all hurts the Democratic base more than the GOP base. The occasional exceptions like the KKK rally don't change that. Rich people aren't suffering too much from this. They will, eventually, but it may take a while.

Otherwise I'd think the Senate should take the position of "Pass a clean CR or go fuck yourselves." Not sure I don't, even so.

431
Xopher, that's how most of us feel. (The first word I think of when I see or hear GOP/Republican is seven letters beginning with A. Or eight letters, if you go with the British version.)
(I hear that there are a number of businesses in DC that are offering discounts to furloughed federal employees - but not to members of Congress.)

PJ Evans @ 432... discounts to furloughed federal employees - but not to members of Congress

"A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere, or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair. But no, You sent us Congress! Good God, Sir, was that fair?"
- John Adams to God in '1776'

"You see, we piddle, twiddle, and resolve;
Not one damn thing do we solve!
Piddle, twiddle, and resolve --
Nothing's ever solved
In foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy... Washington, DC!"

Chip @430, to be fair to Drury Lane Oakbrook, I'm a season-ticket holder, so I pay no attention to the publicity. I'm going to see the play no matter what, after all...

Lee & Serge, thanks for the reminders of 1776. Maybe I'll pull out the DVD and watch it ...

Dave Harmon @415: I beg to differ -- the adult is engaged

I actually think they're both full-grown.

What he's not doing, is responding to it as a real dominance challenge,

The bull/steer is all, "Yeah, okay, fine." ::half-hearted butt::

this is a play version for the benefit of the lamb.

It may, in fact be play, by the way the ram slows down and doesn't actually butt the bull (steer?) full force. But I think that is a full-grown ram. Or at least young-adult. What cracks me up is the ram's, "Aw, c'moooon! See? Here? I'm gonna really get you...!"

I remember the time I encountered a ram. You do not make the ram go away by pushing on his head. I didn't know you could just decline to contest, though....

albatross @427: My question is why this won't just become a standard feature of political dysfunction in the US

You mean it's not already?

Xopher Halftongue @431: Teahadi

::GRIN:: I hadn't heard that one before.

Rich people aren't suffering too much from this. They will, eventually, but it may take a while.

"Trickle-up economics?"

CR: I can't find the unpacking of the acronym...?

Here in the UK, we are getting the speeches from the Conservative Party Conference. These are not at all like the Party National Conventions in the USA, but they are a big opportunity for the political parties to lay out what they want to do.

Currently, the Conservative Party control the government. They're the right-wing party and, compared to the speeches at the Labour Party Conference, last week, you get a sense of a very different set of policies.

Amongst the policies they have announced, already on the path to actuality and brought forwards three months, is a scheme to subsidise what seem very like sub-prime mortgages. Also in the mix is the intent to reduce benefit entitlements for those under the age of 25: at best, this will force them to stay with their parents rather than re-locate to somewhere there might actually be jobs available.

It's all stick and no carrot.

As with the effects of the shutdown in the USA, it's very easy to point at the details as evidence for sociopathic behaviour patterns. They don't seem to be troubled by the reality that they are hurting people.

Xopher Halftongue #428: The problem is, it already is -- it worked against Clinton, so this is now part of the GOP's arsenal.

>Jacque @ 437... Yes, there is dysfunction, but that doesn't absolve the GOP from the current mess, which *is* entirely their fault. Yesterday, I asked elsewhere when was the last time the Democratic Party had forced a shutdown and was told we have to go back to 1987, for a one-day shutdown that was over their objection to provide financial help to Contras. By the way, when I saw that photo of Boehner with the big mallet, I thought of Thor's Hammer, which in comics and in movies, can be used only by he who is worthy of it.

Jacque @437
CR = Continuing Resolution, a bill to continue funding government at current levels until a new budget is passed.

The "clean CR" is the one that just does that, and nothing else.

Dave Harmon #439

I'd been under the impression that what happened with Clinton was that while everyone was sitting around with the government closed a young lady walked in and said, "Would you like a pizza and a blowjob?" and Bill had no more sense than to say, "Sure!"

I don't think that's the way things'll go with Obama.

Dave 440: Not really. The Republicans got the blame for that government shutdown. While Clinton may have done some of what they wanted, it cost them dearly, and no sensible Republican wants to do it again.

Otter B, both the Senate and the House HAVE passed budgets. Unfortunately, a budget on paper does not fund the Federal government.

Every year, the House is supposed to pass 13 appropriation bills based on a budget that has been passed and agreed on by both the House and the Senate. Boehner wouldn't name members to be part of a conference committee, even though the Senate made 18 different requests for him to do so.

No budget conference, no template for the appropriation bills, so the House spent their copious free time repealing Obamacare. Forty-one times...

Passing a budget, no matter which part of Congress does so, means absolutely nothing.

At this point there appear to be two parties in DC, the Sane Party and the Fucking Nuts Party. No guesses for which of them is symbolised by a very large animal.

Dave @ 439: current government policy is the reason I'm on anti-anxiety medication. It's bad enough not being able to get a job (and repeatedly told I'm "not good enough" even for minimum-wage or near-minimum-wage jobs), without being permanently made to feel I'm somehow to blame for the fact that there aren't enough jobs to go round.

At some point in the very near future I'm going to be put on one of those government slave labour schemes. You know the ones. They make you go and work for some big company that could jolly well afford to pay you a proper wage, but it doesn't, so its shareholders get the profit out of your work and you go home at the end of your working day to the same frugal meal and you still can't afford to get the boiler fixed. It ought to be illegal. I've already had enough of working for free in the hope that someone will eventually want to pay me; it doesn't work. All that happens is that people say "oh yes, very nice work, can we have some more of it free, please?"

...for ranting about the UK government. I presume there were some Words of Power in the mix.

I have some cheesecake, if that is acceptable?

I went to the Post Office just before closing today, and there was no one in line ahead of me. Usually there's about 10 people, and the clerk said that normally there's be more people, especially at the beginning of the month.

It seems plausible that people are assuming that the PO is shut down.

If anyone's been to a post office in the past couple of days, what did you see?

446
A very large animal which appears to be have late-stage rabies?

I think the implement which best characterizes the Republican Congressional delegation in recent history, in in the general category of overflowing bedpan, honeybucket, or chamberpot...

Lori Coulson @445, yes, sorry. I was thinking of a "budget" as the result of an agreement between House and Senate - which of course we never got this year - but forgetting that even that is only the prelude to the appropriations bills.

Sigh.

fidelio @ 418:

Thank you for that link.

CHip @ 431:

(He parlayed his forcefulness into choral direction at the Met, where he doesn't have to put up with anything....)

*peals of laughter*

I only comment occasionally, but I am a part of this community because I read with interest everything everyone writes, and I really appreciate the civil forum for interesting conversation.

Well, and only a few people that I know in the flesh are interested in science fiction.

I am a furloughed federal worker. The scuttlebutt is that this time we might never get paid. I hope that is false. We have had three years of a pay freeze, and then this year we had a 10% pay cut (the sequester-mandated budget cuts leading to mandatory furloughs). We don't know how long we will be without pay checks, but what I do know is that a lengthy furlough can permanently affect some of our benefits if it goes on too long.

So this past week, my week began with ending the federal fiscal year with a flurry of settlements, and i had several respondents thanking me for my help or commenting on the thoroughness of the legal documents I sent them (a lot of complements are pointless noise or attempts to curry favor but these comments were made after the deals were done so the people I just sued on behalf of the American people must have thought I was doing something right to be throwing gratuitous and completely unnecessary complements my way). in other words, i was having a good time, and doing good work to protect public health and the environment. and then a minority of disaffected Republicans in Congress decided that they would shut down government and I am now sitting on my hands, unable to do my job. It is infuriating.

We had an office-wide meeting the day before shutdown, and a question to our political appointee was "so, if I hear the news tonight that there is no deal, can I keep working up until I get the official email telling us to start shutdown procedures?" Answer was that we can't work while the shutdown continues. Well, the criminal side can (since past shutdowns have illustrated the problems with squaring fair and speedy trials with sending everyone home indefinitely).

And on grants - grant recipients can't draw down money if there is no one there to do the work. Some grant recipients can front load and carry costs, but if the shutdown lasts too long then a whole lot of state functions that have hidden federal funding may start grinding to a halt.

I'm obviously making these comments in my individual capacity.

My first federal job started with a one week course on the Anti-Deficiency Act and it isn't rocket science. When Republican leaders close down enforcement agencies and then try to look like heros by offering to fund national parks (national parks are one of the very narrowly and specifically designated corners of government allowed, under certain circumstances, to accept private donations), they are intentionally playing to the ignorance of their base. They caused this problem. They are undermining the American economy, and they are such believers in the ability of the American public to not be able to tell.

Augh. I am sorry, I don't mean to rant (although obviously I can't stop myself), but I do want to tell all of the communities to which I belong "this is affecting me personally. You know, in at least some slight way, someone who is being prevented from doing her job and not being paid"

So, you are one of my communities. I am very, very glad that the NSF grant funding is, for now, not mucking up needed pay checks @396, and that the exempted employees are at work.

I hope that the impasse gets resolved soon.

And, re the October vacation idea - our vacation time was cancelled so yes, we have time off but it isn't paid even if we scheduled to be on holiday before the crisis started.

Kim chee again? Yes, I need to go grocery shopping.

http://boingboing.net/2013/10/02/bet-you-didnt-know-that-dino.html

A topic that has been discussed here before

If they cut your pay by 10%, they should give you every other Friday off.

One thing I said makes no sense without further explanation.

My first job was in a budget department, so I was supposed to be ready to answer weird questions about funding. That is why I took a week-long course on the anti-deficiency act. Not because the law is complicated to understand on a conceptual level. The basics are really simple and easily explained: congress controls the budget, and agencies can't go out raising money or augmenting resources in new and inventive ways.

Congress - not individual congressmen, not workers volunterring to work without pay, not corporations donating funds - Congress decides what part of the federal government gets what funding. Some exceptions apply, like the special authorization from Congress that allows the national parks to partner with private funding in some circumstances. But even the details in the micro-budgeting level were an exercise in "yes, we are saying the same thing 100 different ways. Has it sunk in YET?"

Xopher, they did give us the time off, and lots of my co-workers did take it as every other Friday off. It just was an unexpected and involuntary cut in pay.

And it isn't like our work went away.

459
That's like the place I worked ran us through a basic (like an hour or two) on-line class in anti-trust law, which amounted to 'these are things you shouldn't do'. It isn't rocket science either, and it isn't about the size of the companies involved (the fictional Bad Example they were using was small business).
FERC compliance was harder to follow, and driver ed was more stressful.

O.K., the last time I had a dumb question about iTunes here it was answered in seconds so I'm hoping for another burst of satori this time. I recently updated to the new iTunes on my Mac, and if I play a podcast it plays that podcast and instantly starts the next one it can find instead of stopping the way it used to. What do I need to set for "Play this podcast and then quit?"

Mea @ 455

My sympathies. We just went through furloughs in my State, too. It hurt a lot of good people who had the misfortune not to be high-enough salaried that they could set aside significant reserves.

I hope they get their acts together soon, up there at the capitol... and I hope you and yours get through this as gently as possible.

Bruce: There might be an arrow-wrapped-into-an-oval icon somewhere that if you click it, will turn off autoplay.

But in my experience, iProducts tend to have a preset for that functionality in podcasts (not music; music is customizable) that is either OFF or ON and you can't do anything. My old iPod, it was OFF and no podcast would ever autoplay anything else; now it's ON and if there is a next podcast in the same series it always plays-next. On my mac it stops after one, but I haven't looked for the setting.

My bet (if you're doing it on a computer, not a device) is to look for the mystery-meat picture-only icon control.

Someone saw this on Twitter this morning:
"America was not shut down properly. Would you like to start America in safe mode, with free healthcare and without the guns? (Recommended)"

Kaytei, I appreciate the good thoughts.

I'm angry, but financially OK in the short term. Several of my co-workers are in much tougher spots. It is particularly stressful for folks responsible for supporting small kids, dependent spouses, and with mortgages/student loans to pay.

Dave Harmon @415, Jacque @439: No, they're definitely both juveniles, as indicated by Carol Kimball @406. I'm going on all sorts of things to state that, but it's all a matter of proportions (body proportions and size relative to each other) and muscle size/definition (or rather, lack of that) in the case of the young bullock.

And it's play - the young ram is desperate to play "head butt"; the bullock is willing to play, but the problem is that bulls/bullocks (probably a bullock, in this case, as I don't see a scrotum) don't do the head butting thing! Head pushing they're okay with.

Mongoose @448: Sympathies. Rant away!

P J Evans @ 465: Oh I like that.

I have been spending a little too much money through ebay on my late Mother's sewing machine. But it's in good working order, and I have a shirt with sleeves that are rather too long, and I am obviously a weird shape.

I am looking at a sort of cosplay project for the Worldcon, next year. I might even enter the formal competition, if things work out. Or I might never get past frightening the neighbours' kids at Halloween...

Mea: sympathies. The whole situation is ghastly.

One thing I don't understand, and have not understood for a long time, is why the Republicans are referred to as the "GOP" even by their opponents. I'm told it stands for "Grand Old Party". Why? What's grand about them?

Mongoose, 469: That's a common misconception. It really stands for "Greedy Old Pricks."

(Most Republican congressmen* are millionaires, and they're STILL GETTING PAID.)

*gendering deliberate

dcb #467: Ah, thanks. I'll defer to your knowledge, as my own experience with either species is on the level of petting zoos. Funny situation, though.

Just as I expected... I'm back from the gym and, in the changing room, I overheard two of the other regulars, who work at Sandia Lab, and guess what? They blame Obama for the govt shutdown.

Glinda @418--You're welcome. I know there are people who need and want this information, and aren't sure where to start looking. I'm not a bureaucrat, as I don't get to make the rules; I'm a civil servant. So I'm supposed to serve, don't you know. (I do specialize, so people asking for a sandwich will be directed to an establishment that serves same. Civilly. At least the first time...)

Mongoose @448--my sympathies!
and @469--it really is Grand Old Party, no matter how tempting other interpretations are right now--it refers back (like so many things in US politics) to the American Civil War--Wikipedia (usual caveats apply) has some details; you might want to take a look at the work of Thomas Nast, political cartoonist and illustrator of Santa Claus/Father Christmas. His Anti-Trust cartoons are interesting.

Mea @455--my sympathies! I'm employed in one of those state-run/federally-funded programs. The Great State of Tennessee has promised us funding through the end of next week. I am hoping to not have to look into Christmas retail employment...

I don't really know cattle, but, having been born and brought up in the English Lake District, where there are quite possibly more sheep than people (at any rate during the winter months), I'm pretty familiar with sheep.

Or, at least, I always thought I was.

My friend the Star Tenor, whom I have mentioned in earlier comments, was due to sing at the Stour Music Festival, which is in the middle of Nowhere, Kent. He is a lovely chap and also one of the cleverest people I know, but he can be just a little absent-minded, so his idea of giving directions was "The church is not in the village". This was all very well, but it didn't tell me where the church was.

I was staying in the nearest town of any size, which was about five miles away, and since it wasn't raining and taxis are expensive, I decided to walk it. Now, I was, of course, dressed for a concert. I was not over the top - I don't tend to walk round glittering like Elton John - but there were some sequins. And some little jingly things. The background was pine green, so it was perfectly tasteful, I promise.

So I got as far as the village, bumped into a couple of the locals, and asked where the church was. They didn't know. I couldn't see it from the village, so all I could really do was to keep walking. And walking. After a while, I started to worry that I might have passed it, or perhaps missed a crucial turning at the village, so I apologetically knocked on the door of an isolated house by the roadside and asked for directions. I was told to go down the path by the house and through the gate on my right, which would take me into a field, and the church was just across this field - I'd see it as I went through the gate.

I thanked the kind lady and followed these directions. Sure enough, I did end up in a field, which was full of sheep.

OK, now look at it from the sheep's point of view. You're quietly grazing, minding your own business, and all of a sudden this strange human comes through the gate and starts striding purposefully through your field, glittering, faintly jingling, and looking for all the world like an animated Christmas tree. What are you going to do?

I'll tell you what they did. They panicked. As one sheep, they fled into the furthest corner of the field. If I'd been so minded, I could probably have herded them like a collie. It was the most bizarre experience, especially since I've always been used to sheep completely ignoring me and doing their own woolly thing.

Ever since that incident, the ringtone on my mobile phone has been Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze".

...the Stour Music Festival, which is in the middle of Nowhere, Kent.

As someone who lives on the far side of Nowhere, Kent, I can assure you that in fact it is not anywhere close to the middle. After all, it's almost within walking distance of the train station at Wye*.

* "Excuse me. Can you help us? We're a bit lost."
"Where are you trying to get to?"
"Wye?"
etc. The only more confusingly named place for directions in the county is Ware.

Neil @ 477: why, or indeed Wye, didn't it occur to Star Tenor to mention that?! He sent me to Ashford, which was where I stayed.

Actually, I can probably answer my own question. I expect he had a head full of Handel at the time.

Serge:

Most people don't pay much attention to politics. It's easy to convince them (or for them to convince themselves) of all kinds of stuff that isn't true, for the same reason you could convince me of all kinds of deeply silly things about what's going on in pro football.

Now, it's clear that either side of *any* negotiation can be held responsible for an impasse, because either one *could* give in. But it's very hard for me to look at the current situation and see anything like equivalence--the Republicans in the house are pretty clearly dealing in bad faith, using the government shutdown and later the debt ceiling to wring some concessions from the Democrats.

And really, this is a minority of Republicans wringing concessions out of the Democrats and most of the Republicans. From what I've heard, if Boehner allowed a clean continuing resolution to come to a vote in the house, it would pass. He's afraid he will lose his position if he crosses the Tea Party types, and they are overwhelmingly in safe Republican districts where the only challenges they need fear are from other Republicans.

The right answer for this, ultimately, is for this strategy to *visibly* fail, for it to cost the Republicans enough in the next election or two that shutting down the government as a negotiating strategy loses every bit of its appeal. I don't know whether that will happen or not, though, and if it doesn't, we're likely to see shutdowns every year. The unthinkable, irresponsible strategy that *works* very quickly becomes just another one of those things that everyone does while agreeing that it would be a better world if nobody did.

fidelio: What if we use sudo?

Mea @455, my sympathies. My wife is also a furloughed federal worker, and while we'll be okay if the shutdown is brief (no more than a few weeks), we'll need to start making some serious cuts if it goes longer. Most people aren't expecting back pay for those affected (the "exempted" workers, who are currently working without pay, will eventually be paid.) Since we live in the DC area a large number of our friends are affected to one degree or another - the people we really feel for are the dual-fed couples who are both furloughed and suddenly have no income at all.

It infuriates me when I see the news coverage about how the shutdown is affecting "regular people" that focuses only on things like tourists trying to visit the Smithsonian, or passport applications being delayed, as though federal employees who are now struggling to pay the bills aren't "regular people".

Mongoose:
The visual of a gently tinkling Christmas tree herding sheep is stunning!

Mongoose @476, it is NOT professional to giggle at work; it is NOT professional to giggle at work; it is NOT professional... oh, hell. <giggle>

My ex has been furloughed too, so she is providing kitten "day care" as a distraction for herself and a benefit for me. As a result, we now have temporary names for the kittens: George, Charlie (as in "Chaplin"); Harry (as in "Houdini"), and Rocky (as in "Balboa").

Best Holiday Ever (and we won't see it again fr 70,000 years, due to calendrical convergences): Thanksgivukkah! Recipes and crafts within. :->

Recently seen: The Republicans are going to hold their breath until the country turns blue.

Re Gathering of Light at FenCon -- We have been unexpectedly saddled with hosting the ApolloCon room party, so I suggest shifting the venue to that location, somewhere from 9 PM onward on Saturday. As in, it's a nice opportunity to sit and hang out and chat, and my partner and I will both have to be there for most of the evening anyhow, and whoever shows up is welcome. Look for party signs to tell you which room.

467
Someone else did it as a grpahic, with the advice to 'spread it around'.

Mongoose #476: Having herded sheep, I know they're dumb (unlike goats, which are actively malicious). That was funny.

Having, when I were a lad, enjoyed the Swallows and Amazons books, I long cherished a wish to have grown up in the Lake District , Wordsworthian associations and all.

Okay, what did I do this time? Is it the lurking Trotskyism of expressing a liking for Arthur Ransome? Are their Lownesses that Stalinist?

In the middle of the Irish famine, in 1846, the Whigs finally managed to break the Corn Laws. It was far less than the least they could have done to relieve the dreadful suffering of Ireland, and they did little else. But that much they did do, over the entrenched embittered opposition of the county gentry, whose screams of outraged entitlement sound oddly familiar today.

In the tumult, with the extreme Tory rump attempting to close Parliament and go home, while the new-minted Disraeli acted as their chief thug and wattlebosher, the Duke of Wellington, a Tory, brought his faction in for repeal, saying, (and I quote) "The Queen's government must be carried on."

I would have thought that was true for the government of the United States, too. Obviously, I'm ridiculously naive.

Serge at 472: face/palm

The NYT this morning informed me that President Obama is "hugely impressed" by Pope Francis. My first thought, upon reading this, was that the American right wing will now conclude that Pope Francis is a liberal/socialist/anti-American/alien from the planet Morg -- some of which he may be -- simply and only because President Obama has pleasant things to say about him.

Oy.

albatross @ 479... you could convince me of all kinds of deeply silly things about what's going on in pro football

Same here.

Lizzy L @ 491... Isn't there a joke going around that, if Obama spoke in favor of oxygen, Republicans would immediately stop breathing?

493
Serge, there have been people suggesting (in jest, I hope) that he speak out against self-immolation.

Lee @487: I've made a note of that on my schedule.

albatross @480--excuse me while I go find a rubber band to flip at you.

I don't think sudo would work, though, as I'm not a Linux-based system.

Serge Broom @494: Nah, they'd just try to repeal the Clean Air Act.

Given that Michelle Obama's campaign to get people to drink water is currently being attacked as some sort of nefarious plot, I suspect that if her husband came out against suicide there would be people on Fixed Noise defending seppuku within hours.

Given that Michelle Obama's campaign to get people to drink water is currently being attacked as some sort of nefarious plot, I suspect that if her husband came out against suicide there would be people on Fixed Noise defending seppuku within hours.

Breaking news: Gunshots on Capitol Hill, occupants of House Office Buildings told to shelter in place.

This is, unfortunately, not a joke.

501
A Capitol police office was injured. (Note that they're working without pay.)

Lockdown at the Capitol lifted. Reports are still of one police officer injured, gunman at large. The Washington Post is liveblogging here.

Fragano @ 489: I really enjoyed those books too, though there was always a sense of my suspension of disbelief being overstretched. I mean, they were full of children who were allowed to do things. That didn't make sense to me. In my experience, children weren't allowed to do things, other than within a very limited compass. Generally speaking, if it wasn't something you normally did, it was not allowed.

In the specific case of "boating on Windermere unsupervised", that was actually sensible; it frequently was not. Windermere is a glacial ribbon lake. That is to say, it sits in a U-shaped valley carved out by a glacier. It's not only very deep, but it gets deep very quickly as you move out from the shore. Moreover, the weather is unpredictable in that area and can change on you with little or no warning. If a storm blows up, you should be able to get to shore quickly if you're in a motorboat, but if you're sailing it's another story.

OMG, lookee what I found!

Mongoose #504: All I can say to that is eek! The stories were lovely, and the setting seemed so romantic to a boy in London. Especially to one as sickly as I was.

Fragano @ 506: I know what you mean. I was a sickly child too - used to get bronchitis every winter with monotonous regularity. My respiratory system's never been the best part of me.

The area is lovely, though, and that's one of the reasons why I'm trying to relocate back to it now. (Other, far more pressing, reasons include elderly parents still living in the area, and clean air. I would prefer to take as little medication to control the asthma as I can get away with.) Did you ever get a chance to visit it when you lived in London?

As someone who has complained here and elsewhere about not enough difference between the Democrats and Republicans, I need to acknowledge that they are playing quite different parts in the current fiasco.

Ok, THIS STORY made my blood boil.

Ok, I've pissed off the gnomes. That's ok; the story I linked to pissed me off, too. Nice fresh asiago-cheese bread for the gnomes and for me, to get the bad taste out of my mouth..

They got the rocket engine moved last night, and on its base today.
http://photos.dailynews.com/2013/10/photos-saturn-v-engine-lifted-on-display/
You'll notice they partially disassembled it to move it.

All over the news is an event in NYC (video) which is being portrayed as an attack by a group of bikers on an innocent guy in an SUV.

What it looks like to me is hot pursuit following a hit-and-run with injuries, rather than Innocent Guy Attacked For No Reason.