The Making Light indexing is going faster than I thought it would, so I've taken the indices live over at Wyrdsmiths.

They're linked in the upper right-hand corner under Writers' Resources as "A Writer's Index to Making Light" and "Making Light General Index." At this point they're both running from the beginning of Making Light through to mid 2004, but I'll continue to update until I've got them current and at some point I will probably go back and add in Elctrolite as well.

Wiki: http://www.conrunner.net/wiki/
Yahoo! newsgroup: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sdfans2007fires/

(Zak and I are not in danger. I'd like to say we are in no danger, but that's an impossible statement to make given this weather.)

...paraphrased from John McPhee's Basin and Range:

According to conventional wisdom at the end of the eighteenth century the earth was between five thousand and six thousand years old. An Irish archbishop, James Ussher (Primate of the Anglican Church!), counting generations in his favorite book, figured this out in the century before. Ussher actually dated the earth, saying that it was created in 4004 B.C. Shortly after Ussher's publication of Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Vice-Chancellor Lightfoot of Cambridge University confirmed the year, and refined the calculations and determined that the Holy Trinity had created the earth on October 26th, at 9.am.

Geologists today will give parties on the twenty-sixth of October. Some of these parties begin on the twenty-fifth and end at nine in the morning.

Heck, the general case of that is also true: 'most everything needs more cellos.

(For some reason, even the hymnbooks that include it these days don't often have the sixth verse...)

Steve C. @ 947

Damn right, "Damn Yankees"! I have a DVD that I take out every three years or so. Between Ray Walston and Gwen Verdon, I don't know which I prefer to watch*.

But that brings up another issue when talking about dancing. No question that Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly are two of the finest dancers who ever lived. But would anyone disagree with me that (and I'm just talking about males here, so I won't trip over too many things that are hard to compare) Bob Fosse deserves to be up there too?

* Actually, I do; Gwen Verdon moves much better, and besides, I'm het, what can I say?

Was it just me, or were Celtic roots especially clear in that particular tune? I was beating out the rythym on my knee, and recognized it as *very* similar to a bagpiping rythym...

Personally, I think there's too much violin in modern movies.

Kirk couldn't agree more.

Cellos, yes! I have a particular fondness for a recent album, Fire & Grace, by Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, having gotten to hear them live in CA one year either just before or after the annual string-music workshop he runs just north of the Bay Area in the Valley of the Moon. She seriously fiddles! that cello, even standing up! Yum.
Other cello fiddlers of note, without recordings, alas, are Fred Nussbaum in the Portland, OR area, and a genial fellow whose name I don't know yet who has recently moved to the Berkeley area and showed up at open band night a couple of months ago at the local English Country Dance series, much to everyone's delight.
One cello-fiddler of note with recordings: there are a few splendid albums out by Mark O'Connor (fiddle), Edgar Myers (Bass) and Yo-Yo Ma (cello) exploring American Appalachian country and bluegrass rootways -- Appalachian Journey, Appalachian Spring, and there may be another I'm forgetting just now.

O, Joy: those bigger boxes are splendid fiddles, too.

Thanks for linking this tune, Patrick. Love it!

Knitting!
Speaking of completely other forms of fiddling with one's hands, how many readers of Making Light who also knit have found themselves over at Ravelry (yet) ? This couple went and had an idea that turns out to be much like a LibraryThing for fiber arts, and did a slow rolling beta-opening this summer to (wisely) keep from breaking things as it scales up. They opened to beta testers, think they'd get maybe a hundred volunteers or so and immediately had a line packed with tens of thousands of folks! They're building a very nice database structure using Ruby on Rails, have their core structure in place, excellent beta-testy whacking goodness going on, secured some funding and purchased servers, and are rolling out the invites very quickly. There are already hundreds of affinity groups, in the way of such things, and -- well! -- come on in, the water's fine. http://ravelry.com is where to start. The wait's tremendously worthwhile (and gettin' shorter daily).

Obviously, an invading force wouldn't need them, but if you were deployed to a base in Europe, would you get stamped in and out?

Be careful what you wish for.

I've been told that Apocalyptica is only the 2nd best cello group/Metallica cover band. Not sure who #1 might be.

Now, I flew into Yokota AFB both times, so the Status of Forces Agreement might have stated that service personnel didn't have to have passports if they were flying from one AFB in Hawai'i to another one in Japan.

I think Fosse was one of the all time great showmen, but I'm not that familiar with his own dancing - I'll have to see what I can find. Certainly as a choreographer, he was tops.

Comparing Kelly and Astaire is interesting. It seemed that Astaire was the more sophisticated and urbane, while Kelly displayed a more down-to-earth style. On the whole, I like Gene Kelly more, but they both moved with a physical grace that is bestowed on very few.

If I could have for just a few hours a show-business talent or two, I'd like to dance like Gene Kelly and sing like Sinatra in the 50's.

Was the sixth verse shown in Wikipedia ever published widely in Howe's lifetime? The song's first publication, in the Feb. 1862 Atlantic, doesn't include it, and neither does the version at the start of Florence Hall Howe's 1916 book _The Story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic_.

Of course, it's not uncommon for there to be extra verses in manuscripts or in performances of songs. (Woody Guthrie created lots of verses, original and variant, for "This Land is Your Land" over his lifetime, for instance.)

#18, Ruth Temple: Teresa has been rhapsodizing about Ravelry for some months now. She just recently (finally) made it up the waiting list to get an actual account, but I don't think she's had time to do anything with it. She's described the site as "crack for knitters." It does sound brilliant.

AJ Luxton @ 32, I love Rasputina! The world needs more all-girl cello bands. If you like them you may want to check out Emilie Autumn; she's a violinist-singer-songwriter with a style she describes as "Victoriandustrial," and is sometimes accompanied by her corseted cellist Lady Joo Hee.

I know it's classical rather than modern, but my favorite cello part ever comes from the Brahms Concerto in A Minor for violin and cello. The Vivace non troppo, the third movement, is fantastic.

Rasputina is *very* fun. Been a fan of theirs for a while, now. Also: Nigel Kennedy's Hendrix interpretations. I saw him perform "Hey Joe" at a Dallas Symphony Orchestra event accompanied only by a stand-up bass...blew the house away.

Fishtank Ensemble -- Turkish March

(And shaimsans (and punk accordions)).

Zoe Keating, one of the former members, is now doing solo work using loops and improvisations; she's on one of the same looper mailing lists my brother is. It's deeply cool stuff.

Also, those of you who are banjo fans (as I have become in the last few years) ought to check out the catalogue at somedarkholler.com, making available some of the best underground/dark folk/wyrdfolk music around. It's run by Timothy Renner, himself a fine banjo player (formerly of Stone Breath and several other acts, now a founding member of Crow Tongue along with Shane Speal, the self-proclaimed King of the Cigar Box Guitar) and is probably one of the best mailorder labels on the web; they're reliably fast, the prices are more than reasonable, and they don't charge shipping.

(No commercial interest of my own in plugging this stuff, other than a deep desire to see it stick around for a while so I can keep getting my creepy folk music fix every so often.)

And then, of course, I'd call the bluff with Lorraine and Malena. Because, seriously, could Neil possibly be associated with people any cooler?

I just don't think so.

"Just Me & Eve" remains one of my favorite songs ever.

There was also a vid in the collection by Kerfuffle, an Irish group of prodigies. I hadn't heard of them, but I'll be seeking out more of their music. Don't get much Celtic accordion in these parts!

Thank you, thank you Patrick - now I have to go out and buy Crooked Still CDs. I thought I'd been Bluegrassed out at Hardly-Strictly-Bluegrass a few weeks ago. I was wrong.

Pretty amazing pedigree for this band; I'd wager there aren't many professional bluegrass musicians (or non-bluegrass - yea, I know about Brian May) with Phd.s (from MIT, no less).

I saw (new fiddler) Brittany Haas playing with Dave Grisman at a Bay Area fundraiser while she was still in high school, I think - so I'm going to have to pay attention to when they play around here. Their tour dates seem to be mostly east coast, though.

Kevin Drum says he's lived in Southern California all his life and doesn't recognize the phenomenon Didion describes.

Whether Didion or Drum is correct, her prose is gorgeous.

Fosse could do all of the things he choreographed, and for a number of years his primary dance partner was Gwen Verdon, just so you know who he could keep up with.* For images of him dancing, start here

* The only thing he couldn't do with Verdon was stay married to her; but, married or not, they were great dancing partners.

I'm quite fond of Singin' in the Rain as a musical, apart from other reasons, due to something I share with Donald O'Connor. I don't remember it being mentioned in that discussion. I once watched it (while doing other things) with the sound off. It certainly gives you a different perspective. Interesting.

"...from a 1955 movie called "My Sister Eileen," which starred Betty Garrett and Jack Lemmon. There are a few more numbers from this movie on youtube available from other users."

I've been wondering if Ravelry will inspire similar sites for other hobbies, and if so, which ones. One attractive aspect of this format is the sheer scope of the enabling possibilities, but the potential for social cross-pollination makes it just as interesting.

Michael Wood in America in the Movies has a nice (and light) discussion of the Kelly/Astaire question, where he concludes that Kelly's dancing shows more obvious effort - as if he were forcing himself to be in high spirits, where Astaire just moved like that naturally. It seemed an interesting reading. (I recommend the book, by the way - I'm afraid the link is only to purchase rather than to read it.)

Meanwhile, in 'My Stepmother is an Alien', Kim Basinger turns on a TV showing 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', and there is a quick clip of Jimmy Durante doing a routine (I think the song is 'Ever Had The Feeling That You Wanted To Go'). Has anyone seen the clip online - the Durante one, not the Basinger one - or will I have to rent the whole movie?

Interesting, the comparison between Astaire and Kelly's styles. Kelly always went for the more athletic approach. I think he was from a working-class background. Must have been fun, growing up loving dancing and being 5'7 tall...

Yep, Ravelry is totally crack for knitters. I'm signed on there as "Miss Print" which is the name I blog under.

What I like best is the ability to drool over everyone else's finished projects, and dream about making them for myself some time...

(*) says Serge, hitting the obvious on the head with a jackhammer.

Barely... my birthday is also today, but I was born so late that the conversion to GMT pushes it into tomorrow morning, thus placing me smack on the cusp of Scorpio. (Yeah, I once did my "chart".)

From this morning's Washington Post, the lead paragraph of a review by Tom Shales of the CNN documentary "Planet in Peril":

Wasn't "Planet in Peril" one of the chapter titles from the original "Flash Gordon" serial? Thus another way to define the good old days, back when perils to the planet seemed almost entirely the stuff of science fiction.

But yes, Bob Fosse was an amazing dancer as well as choreographer.

For those that care, there's a new Tracy Grammer EP due out soon, with a couple of Dave Carter songs on it.

My current obsession is L.A. Guitar Quartet. Aaron Copeland's "Hoedown" sounds pretty damn cool on four guitars.

The only thing I can imagine that the two fan groups have in common is that they both like to wear costumes. I'm just fascinated by what a potential train wreck this might be.

WarMing the Merciless?

Worse things could happen.

One of the words I got was "rugose." Got it right, too. :-)

"No! Not the Bore Worm!"

I don't know about you, but if I were in the fire zone in SoCal and I heard that Governor Schwarzenegger had called FEMA for aid, I'd be like, "You know what actually, we're good. No, it's fine, seriously. No, we'll just…dig a moat or something, really, don't get up. Please."

I loves me some Rasputina, too.

For those looking for something different in their cello-playing, might I recommend checking out Lindsay Mac. She straps on her cello like it's a guitar and strums away. She's truly something to watch (and hear).

As for singing--Frank is terrific, but I'd give a lot to be able to sing like Astaire. (Try to do "Cheek to Cheek" sometime and make it sound easy.)

(The choreographer was Hermes Pan.)

Richard Schickel said about Fred Astaire that, ""He made us feel if we could sing at all and if we could have sung to a girl, we'd probably imagine that we would sing a little like Fred Astaire."

I love that.

Hey, even if you poke randomly, the rice still trickles in. The vocabulary level is just a nice touch, I guess they're trying not to bore or intimidate people.

Diatryma @#74: Infuriating, because it and I don't agree on some things

Yeah, the "meanings" aren't always exact matches (a vole is not a field mouse!) but I haven't yet seen anything that couldn't be waved away as a "fuzzy match".

It occurs to me that all the answers seem to be the same word-type (noun, verb, adjective) as the challenge -- the way they present words in isolation, they could easily make things even tougher by offering fake-out answers of different word-types.

Shows up in Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot", too.

For the record, I usually sit at 49. I may improve on this now I've figured out that if I have a hunch and then go pick another definition for logical reasons, the hunch is the correct one.

A classier source than the Hulk. Comic-books will rot my brain. ("Will?") Shush.

that's where i knew "ecdysiast" from, too. i'm not sure if that should reasssure you or not....

Not sure that it does, but I feel slightly less alone in my rotten-brain state. Did I ever tell you where I learned to speak and write in English? Sure, there were mandatory classes in high-school, but I did most of my practice from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and reading comic-books. ("Why am I not surprised?") Behave, ethan.

Gak! You started one up in my head, but it's not the Kronos Quartet, it's Bobby McFerrin, announcing in a plummy voice that he's going to do Bach, and then diving into Purple Haze. I saw him do that live a few years back with a full symphony behind him, and now it's on full video loop in my brain.

http://www.redcross.org/news/ds/profiles/disaster_profile_CAWildfires.html

But to my mind, there are two things that made Fosse the most interesting of them all to watch. First, he was a really fabulous choreographer, in a style that speaks to me even more than Kelly's or Astaire's, though I love to watch them.

Second, Fosse was a very atypical male dancer. Watch him in a pose, or a slow move. He had as much strength and control as most male dancers*, but he had far more flexibility, as much as many female ballet dancers. When he held a pose, his line was absolutely gorgeous. It's not exactly dancing, but you can see his flexibility in "The Little Prince" where he plays a snake.

* Granted he wasn't a leaper, but that's a specialized talent.

Yes, Ravelry!

I for one think there should be more uillean pipes and low whistles - in just about everything.

Comic books, sappy romances, whatever... one of my stepbrothers was borderline LD for reading, but AD&D gave him enough motivation to push through and gain proficiency (so he could read the rulebooks). Now he's a jet-setting executive....

Same deal for cartoons, soap operas, etc. and listening proficiency. Anything goes!

I've grown accustomed to all those symbols on the car in front of me, and sometimes it's fun to puzzle new ones out. Darwin fish, Jesus fish, FSM, etc., and an unfamiliar one caught my eye today. After studying it a moment, I groused to my husband, "What the hell is that, now? The Church of the Dowsing Snowman?"

"Er...no, that's a V8."

The phrase "big girl's blouse" - sometimes "useless as a big girl's blouse" - I've always understood from context to mean very useless indeed.

But why? Why is a big girl's blouse so useless? Why would it be more useless than the blouse of a small or medium sized girl?

Bonus question: "safe as houses", meaning very safe indeed. What? Why? Investment advice that escaped into the wild?

Best use of cello in popular music: Nirvana's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" aka "In The Pines."

My brother John set out to collect every performance of that song he could find, on tape, LP, and CD. He liked the spookiness of it.

You inspired me to punch "In the Pines" into Youtube. Wow. Lots more covers John never collected. Plus a nine-minute clip that is claimed to be the only film ever shot of Leadbelly. (He's humming "ITP" under the credits, but, alas, it's not one of the three songs we see him perform.)

Words fail me. I thought they had laws, even in the USA, against crazy people owning firearms?

Bill Higgins #104: Did your brother acquire the spooky Snakefarm version? That somehow managed to be the first version I ever heard, though these days I prefer the Leadbelly.

Guns under the pillow are fine for 007, but for the average householder?

Dave, #34: Yes, it did. And now I'll have it as an earworm for the next few days.

I played cello from 4th grade thru high school. My music teacher wanted to put me on the violin, but I heard someone playing the cello just once and was hooked. I tend to prefer low voices to high ones as well -- bass/baritone is more appealing than tenor, and alto/contralto more so than soprano. The tenors get all the glory on the opera stage, but give me Samuel Ramey any day!

Anybody else planning to be at MileHiCon? If you are, come look me up at the Pegasus Publishing booth!

I'll let you google for this if you want to find the story.

Fans of cellos *and* esoteric instruments might enjoy the French SF-horror film Delicatessan, which features an extended cello-musical saw duet.

The aforementioned Decemberists also have a penchant for using unusual instruments in modern-ish music. I went to a concert of theirs in Boston with a friend who plays Irish music, and after the first number the lead singer traded his guitar for another stringed instrument, and she nudged me and said, "That's a bazuki!"

I wish the Crooked Still site had more, longer samples of their songs... I like the sound, but there's no particular song or songs that really grabs me yet.

*tries to convince himself he doesn't need more CDs right now anyway*

Not sure what that means, but I think the kid is again making fun of where I get my cinematic pleasures.

Meanwhile, last night Turner Classic Movies showed Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows. In French. With subtitles. As far as I could tell, Jeanne Moreau is in love with one of her hubby's employees. Moreau's boyfriend of course bumps off the hubby when the latter stays at the office late one Friday night. The boyfriend then gets stuck in the elevator all weekend while Moreau wonders where he is. And there's a subplot about a young couple stealing the boyfriend's car that was parked in front of the office. I think. The whole thing made me want to watch the "Fromage Grand" skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The latter was also in French with subtitles, but it had the virtue of being mercifully short. And it had Carol Cleaveland sitting in the middle of a dump with a head of lettuce in her lap.

* Including by me
** Because a girl can be manly, but girly clothes can't. That's my interpretation.

James Bond vs the Tooth Fairy in Golddenture?

'There's no such thing as a drrrragon'. (Connery as James Bond in Dr No, accent slipping.)

Bill Higgins @ 104, I once went to see a rockabilly band in Quogue. (It is an extremely long story why.) During the break, someone -- I think it was their drummer -- hopped up on stage, grabbed the huge bass, and accompanied himself solely on bass while singing that song. Later he and the band's lead singer delivered one of the most blistering renditions of "Jackson" I've ever heard. It was really fantastic.

I have recently woken up from a long dream in which there was something between a Making Light convention and Viable Paradise. Most of the dream was taken up by convention registration stuff -- people going around checking you off a list and handing you paperwork and nametags. One of the registration folk turned out to be a long-forgotten high school acquaintance, which was fun. There were going to be writing workshops, the first of which was a timed-writing on a prompt having to do with dragons, or perhaps aliens, invading.

The whole thing was being held outdoors, in a beautiful and apparently permanent sunset, but a rather desolate area. Possibly offplanet?

Finally, the registration was over and we all sat down ready to write about dragons (or perhaps aliens). And at that instant my alarm clock went off.

Bah. I want to know what you all would have written. I want to know what I would have written!

Right at toddler level. **shudder**

What, an ML con without panels about knitting? Or about poetry?

WAY off topic interruption looking for intelligence on the ground in SoCal. I'm supposed to travel to LA tomorrow morning to focus group a case. I believe we are staying at the airport, and the conference center we're using for the focus group is at the airport too.

My question is about air quality. I'm a severe asthmatic, well controlled with medication, but very sensitive to pollutants with particulate matter, like, for example, smoke. I'm trying to find out how bad the air is right now in LA near LAX.

I really just need to decide if I think it's safe for me to be there, because if I'm likely to end up in the ER I should probably duck out of this trip.

Thanks to anyone who knows.

You see, I hadn't actually pulled out the schedule to look at it yet. It was in a folder.

Aiiii! You're taking over our dreams! What next? Mind control?

Hello, my name is Greg, and it's been six weeks since I've played Civilization.

(together) Hi, Greg.

BWAHAHAHAH!!!!

At least the alarm spared you the agony of sitting thru the puntest. Wait. That last was a pun, albeit a lame one. Are you sure you're awake, and that this is Reality?

Get How We Quit the Forest. Right now. I find it exponentially better, if only because the production feels more sympathetic to their goals--but I also think the songs are better.

I also did not know there was new Rasputina. I must rush out and purchase.

Serge @ 125, I've never been sure of that, now less so than other times.

Neil Willcox @112: It's a phrase I've mostly read, and I had been assuming useless rather than not-manly. I wonder what changes if I read it that way? Thanks!

Hang drum. (youtube)

more results

Invented only a few years ago, according to the notes, and not many musical instruments can say that.

(Cue riff on which instruments can talk.)

In this state, it was at one time a crime to have a loaded weapon in a child-accessible location. I'm not sure if it still is, but that would be accessible to a two year old.

I spent all of last night watching YouTube and it's all y'all's fault! BTW, I am still in love with Bobby McFerrin collaborating with Yo Yo MA.

I wrote a letter pointing out that this is untrue (all right, I called Inhofe a liar) and got this response from a party at the paper:

"Am I to take it that this Wikipedia entry about DDT is incorrect?

'DDT was subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day in certain parts of the world and remains controversial.' "

Anyone?

That's right, his source is Wiki-bloody-pedia. And no, the source does not say there is a "world wide ban" on all uses of DDT.

Invented only a few years ago, according to the notes, and not many musical instruments can say that.

The Zeusaphone can.

If it’s less than the period of the visa, then one might elect to stay over; when you didn’t enter for purposes of tourism/business.

re the Santa Ana, Sometimes it's just as Didion explains it.
I try to get stamps when I visit, but at exit.

Linkmeister: Japan’s SOFA specifically prohibits someone from staying after. If I want to visit Japan after a mission/deployment, I have to set foot in the US. Leave/passes during deployment are different.

David Harmon: I just tested it, and wrong answers don’t earn rice.

punkrockhockeymom: Depends on where you are. Pasadena, no problem, in fact most of L.A. is pretty much alright. It smells a tad smokey, but it’s not like being next to to a fire. How long will you be in town?

Safe. Unevacuated. Go bag packed. Now. :-) You'd think I'd have paid more attention to those Making Light posts after the Cedar Fire.

AREA                    1-HR   8-HR    8-HR   24-HR  24-HR  24-HR   MAX

                        OZONE  OZONE   CO     PM10   PM2.5   NO2    AQI

                        PPM    PPM     PPM    UG/M3  UG/M3   PPM

-------------------------------------------------------------

Los Angeles County:  South Coast Air Basin

NW Coastal LA           .06    .05     1.8    145     40    .03     99

SW Coastal LA           .05    .04     1.7    145     40    .05     99

He's in big trouble now. Thank gods.

52 - ....Michael Wood in America in the Movies has a nice (and light) discussion of the Kelly/Astaire question, where he concludes that Kelly's dancing shows more obvious effort - as if he were forcing himself to be in high spirits, where Astaire just moved like that naturally.....

53 - ....Interesting, the comparison between Astaire and Kelly's styles. Kelly always went for the more athletic approach. I think he was from a working-class background. Must have been fun, growing up loving dancing and being 5'7 tall....

#72 - ... how balletic Kelly's dancing was. I used to characterize Kelly as more obviously athletic than Astaire, but now I'd add that Astaire looks more ballroom-and-tap, while to my untutored eye, Kelly took quite a few moves directly from classical dance.....

Somebody in this group IIRC suggested that Astaire danced as Astaire and Kelly danced in character - that is dancing as the role would dance in that place and time if moved to dance not as Astaire might dance a show-off set piece - something of the difference between an opera and recital. CF John Travolta dancing in character.

Assuming stalker-fellow is Mr. Newman, he doesn't sound like a fun fellow to have in your life, no.

(*) For one thing, those who do know these things might thump me on the head for thinking that I know.

It's nice when one sees signs that there is Justice in the world.

You wouldn't happen to have an alter ego named Artemus Gordon, would you?

In unrelated news, on Saturday I was at a party at the rectory of a church in Boonton (following the investiture of a new Rector). I went everywhere in that house except the garden; I stopped at the door to that mostly very attractive space, and turned back.

You see, there was a weeping angel out there. No WAY was I going near a weeping angel! LMAOAM

Don't blink.

Not long ago my wife and I watched Bogart/Bacall's Dark Passage, where Bogie plays a man wrongfully imprisoned in San Quentin who then escapes. At some point, Bacall takes him to her place. Looking at her records, he observes that she seems to like Swing music a lot. She corrects him by saying that she prefers Legitimate Swing. I googled that expression, and found a reference to it in an article about Liberty Swing, but without explaining what Legitimate Swing is. Does anybody care to light my lantern?

We can only hope is is treated to some portion of what he deserves.

#138, DDT has proven to be very useful in malaria ridden areas, but when it's sprayed up into the niches and straw roofs, etc. where the mosquitos rest during the day. Surface spraying, not wholesale spray-it-all-over-everything. It doesn't get into the environment so much.

Dancing in general: I'm not a dancer. Astaire and Kelley are comparing apples and oranges as far as I'm concerned. They're both wonderful. So is Donald O'Connor.

Looks like I'm going. I'm going, however, with a back-up presenter and my boss's awareness that we might have to hole me up in the hotel and/or put me on the next plane back. We called the hotel and they said it's not too bad. The focus group folks said it's like a "bad smog day."

We pretty much have NO IDEA how I'll be. There's a long range of conditions for me between "fabulous" on one end and "dead" on the other. But just inside the fabulous marker is the "unable to do oral presentation" marker. Turns out you need pretty much normal oxygen and respiratory effort to control pitch and rhythm in speech. We can't test the themes of the case if I'm not eloquent. But I want to give it a shot since they've decided to let me present our client's case to the mock jury. Pretty exciting stuff.

Terry, I'm in town from tomorrow afternoon until Sunday morning. We are staying at the Hilton by LAX. I'll have access to email and such.

Car tomorrow at 7:15, though, so it is now time for me to get with the sleeping. I'm not QUITE packed yet.

Thank you!!!

where Astaire just moved like that naturally.....

Naturally plus a huge amount of rehearsal. Astaire was graceful, but not so graceful that he could dance like that without days of practice, and several takes to edit together. His genius was making it look easy.

A pint, or a cuppa, is offered, regardless.

Just hit my blog and drop me a line, I'll get it.

That reminds me of how Cary Grant never won an Oscar. His problem is that he made things like comedy look so easy. Much as I loved Gregory Peck, he couldn't do comedy to save his life. I'd look at him in Stanley Donen's Arabesque and find myself thinking that his character knew he was in a comedy. Compare that to Cary Grant in Donen's Charade.

His problem is that he made things like comedy look so easy.

You'd think the members of the Academy would know better. Comedy is hard, everybody in the biz or interested in it knows that. And Cary Grant was a wizard at making it look effortless.

That's why I'm always appreciative when some dramatic actor does well in a comic role; it's a whole other set of skills, and it takes a lot more care and experience to make a given level of talent look good.

I don't think they do. We keep getting awful comedies whose very existence only makes sense if you assume that the people making them thought comedy was easy. And while the Oscars are ridiculous for a whole bunch of reasons, when was the last time a comedy won best picture?

This may have originated with George Bernard Shaw, but I first heard it attributed to Edmund Gwenn in 1985's Twilight Zone by an alien about to annihilate Earth. Besides, what do steenking aliens know?

I've always attributed that to the fact that the people who run things in Hollywood are bankers. What do they know about comedy? Or anything else that doesn't go ka-ching?

Oh, I am laughing so hard. I can't for the life of me tell if that's even meant to be funny. Either way, awesome. (And confidence-inspiring.)

"You can take our lives! But you'll never take us seriously!"

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/

Tim Lambert at Deltoid is entirely on top of the DDT story, when and where it's allowed to be used, what the problems were, why it was stopped use (it wasn't Rachel Carson, it was widespread immunity).

There is some disinformation thinktank in Washington that keeps spreading lies about all this.

DDT doesn't break down in the environment, it is still killing birds in the Arctic, and politically it doesn't decay either, it seems, but retains its fundamental toxicity.

Yes Inhofe is a liar.

"The Senator is evil!"
"He is not, from his point of view."

Not exactly he kind of wit that Errol Flynn would exchange with Basil Rathbone while they were trying to skewer each other.

Multiple takes and clever cuts for a perfect dancing performance that appears effortless - rehearsed endlessly - as opposed to the suggested Kelly notion that the character is doing the best the character can - an American athletic performance - hence the John Travolta reference to playing a character who is not so good a dancer as the best Travolta might do - or some of the folks who might have done their own singing but were covered by Marni Nixon instead. I wonder why there was a never a male cover artist at the same level - imagine Clint Eastwood bursting into Howard Keel talking to the trees.

"Do you feel lucky, trunk?"

"Do you feel yucky, Monk?"

It also helped for Marni Nixon that her voice sounds rather like what the std. actress of the period would sound like if she could sing.

A drop spindle is cheaper and more portable, but it would take stamina to finish up an entire fleece on one. I've found some pretty good deals on spinning wheels on Craigslist.

What kind of fleece did you get? I've finally finished scouring the Corriedale I got back in February, but I can only comb it when the munchkin is out of the house, so it's still pretty slow going.

Last night my 11-yo dd and I were watching Pushing Daisies. The three main characters entered an office to find a woman apparently dead at her desk. The guy-who-can-bring-people-back-from-the-dead poked her, but nothing happened. Not dead, eh? Further poking and slapping eventually woke her up. There was an exchange of dialog; in the middle of that, the woman fell asleep again.

Somewhere early in this scene, the kid turned to me and said, "Mom, that woman has narcolepsy."

I thought, "yet another cool thing my daughter learned from Teresa."

(I also thought, "that's not a very realistic portrayal of narcolepsy.")

When I was in my last year of high school, my mother would go to the tkts booth in Times Square one or two Wednesdays a month. I got out of school at noon on Wednesdays and went over to meet her. We saw every musical on Broadway and most of the comedies as well (and I went to the dramas with classmates). To give you an idea of when this was, we saw the original Chorus Line in previews.

My parents met in college while doing Arms and the Man.

This year, my daughter's 6th grade class will be working in partnership with the Encores program at City Center. Encores is doing three shows this year: Applause, Juno, and No, No, Nanette. Given the timing of the musical program at school, I think dd will be working on Juno or Nanette. It should be very interesting, whichever show it is. I'm kind of pulling for Nanette because Walter Bobbie is directing, even though Rosie O'Donnell is one of the stars.

(betcha didn't know I was a theater geek)

But I have been known to buckle my swash.

How very ... nominal ... of her.

Melissa, Girl Pirate, Scourge of the Seven Seas?

In more ways than one.

Actually, right now, this very minute, I have a cage-hilt rapier sitting on my desk, repossessed from a non-profit theater company I lent it to a few years back that is now going under (alas, alack). Luckily the prop mistress is an old friend of mine and is making sure all the weapons go back to their original owners.

Many moons ago, when Madeleine Robins and Lucie Chin and I and many of our friends studied theatrical fencing and fightcraft together, we would, each May First, put on a free show in Central Park. Over the years I played many parts, pretty much all non-speaking because with an audience of hundreds and a large, open playing area, dumbshow works better than dialog.

I was never a pirate, though I have been sailing on a lovely, old (National Historic Landmark--the first mobile landmark, lol), two-masted schooner and raised sail and hauled anchor and all that. The year we did a pirate show, I was a virginal (*cough*) maiden, but I still got to skewer people (virtually).

Goodness, New York editors are a really tough bunch to please.

ENR reports:

"Similar to the mixed company often found on a construction site, tension is mounting between federal officials and the industry’s forensic engineers looking into Minneapolis’ deadly bridge collapse. While engineers probing the Aug. 1 disaster are anxious to reveal their findings to colleagues maintaining the nation’s aging bridges, federal officials are just as eager to keep them quiet until the government releases an official report."

+more at ENR's Bridge Collapse Update Center

I think there was such a scene in Alfred the Great, with the Norsemen (led my Michael York) loudly yelling and rythmically beating on their shields to unnerve the Saxons before charging.

Yup, Free Rice is fun, even though I hover around 49 & 50 (& wonder if that's on a 100 scale). It's also fun to speculate on the people who chose the words & assigned the difficulty level to them. (I'm betting that at least several of those people are long-time SCAers and one either a marine biologist or a zoologist.)

I wonder whether the differences between Astaire and Kelly are what led to their casting, or vice versa? Astaire had a long line of upper-class parts with ballroom-dancing type scenes, which I don't recall Kelly ever doing and which would put a premium on smoothness rather than athleticism or expression.

Heinlein also had an ecdysiast (in this case professional rather than accidental) in "Gulf". Damfino which of the two I learned the word from.

Eleanor@154: You lucky !@#$%^&*!!. I heard about that just a few days ago, and have enough of a Jones jones that I'd consider flying there if I weren't so piled up. Did you also get to see The Wolves in the Walls: a Musical Pandemonium when it was in town? We drove to NYC for it; I was sitting there gaping in awe most of the time.

Bruce@186: cf Rex Harrison's autobiography, A Damned Serious Business, titled from one of the first things an acting teacher told him about comedy.

Russell@189: but there's something oddly charming about egregious non-singers Eastwood and Lee Marvin attempting those songs. I remember the billboards for this but never saw it; was it better than the spectacle of Marlon Brando trying to method-act his way through "Luck Be a Lady"?

Melissa@195: My parents met in college while doing Arms and the Man. Cool! I sneak-read that in English class due to the teacher spending IMO \way/ too much time on Yeats (considering it was a survey course from Chaucer to (at least) T. S. Eliot), persuaded the school's theater managers to do it, and played Major Petkoff. (I \think/ they were conning me when they said I should try for Bluntschli; the kid they cast later went to Juilliard, and I was already good at pompous older roles.) No carryings-on, but Raina's mother did mention Shaw had blown off her autograph request -- I hadn't looked up his dates to realize how long he lived or how early that play was. Just imagine what he'd said about Shrub if he were around now....

Well, I say that most stock market articles are speculative fiction.

Most of them sound like fantasy to me. And not the heroic kind, either.

"Watermark", surely?

He does indeed. Which makes them a tad inappropriate for an office environment. Meanwhile I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow and will be working the whole week with my teammates instead of being 1000 miles away, and I contemplated bringing my Despair.com "Mistake" mug. Then I decided that my manager might get the wrong idea.

I'm not that skinny. Meanwhile, the last time a movie character had my name was with the crazy French scientist in The Core. Before that, it was Bronson Pinchot as a hairdresser in Beverly Hills Cop... I really want to play a corse in Criminal Intent because I'd then get to meet Leslie Hendrix.

You're not onscreen long, you don't have to be particularly beautiful, yet it's an opportunity to create a character millions will see.

They have a wide range of other good thoughts too; so many it's far too hard to choose.

Not at all. They're speculative lies.

Bill @225: It is a mark of how literal my mind can sometimes be that when I read, "I have long harbored a desire to play, in a Law and Order episode, The Guy Who Finds The Body In The Teaser," I spent a moment trying to figure out what sort of kitchen appliance a Teaser might be (having mind-read "teaser" as "freezer", apparently).

That reminds me of the scene near the end of The Rocketeer, when Jennifer Connelly realizes that Timothy Dalton's Errol Flynn-like character was really a Nazi spy.

"You lied to me!"
"I didn't lie. I was... acting."

"There is no greater joy than soaring high on the wings of your dreams, except maybe the joy of watching a dreamer who has nowhere to land but in the ocean of reality. "

Trying to browse the various images on despair.com I needed to enable their javascript in the Noscript tool I use in Firefox, and found myself picking a menu option that said (in part) "temporarily allow despair". This seemed quite appropriate.

One of the more onerous tasks I've had in my years of garnering experience points in the high tech industry was tracking what industry analysts had to say about the company I worked for, and the relevance of its technology to the industry as a whole. In years of reading analysts reports from places like Gartner, I have yet to read one which showed signs that the writer had more than 10 or 15% of a clue. Of course what they lacked in understanding, they more than made up for in wild flights of imagination, or, depending on the disposition of the author, large doses of grumpy dismissal. I'm sure many of them lied to further the aims of their cronies or their own investments, but even if they hadn't lied, they would not have been able to tell the truth.

Bill @225: It is a mark of how literal my mind can sometimes be that when I read, "I have long harbored a desire to play, in a Law and Order episode, The Guy Who Finds The Body In The Teaser," I spent a moment trying to figure out what sort of kitchen appliance a Teaser might be (having mind-read "teaser" as "freezer", apparently).

The angel of my better nature urged me to write "The Guy Who Finds The Body," which of course would have sufficed. But I chose to go for the slightly grander phrase, aware that it might have been read ambiguously. Sorry.

So not your fault! I have some Asperger's tendencies and literalness is one of them. I don't always get jokes either.

Also, I just saw the Pushing Daisies episode where the dead guy was, indeed, found in the freezer, so the image and rhythm of "freezer" was still floating around in my brain.

And, finally, my brain likes to play with words. The flash that gave me "freezer" also gave me "taser" as well as made me wonder if there was some new brand of automobile or furniture I'd missed hearing about.

It was kind of fun, actually.

Bill 240: Have you ever wondered if the show's writers actually write those bits? I don't mean there's a difference in quality, but if I were in charge of that show, I would just get some good improv actors and say "OK, you're going to find a body in such-and-such location; come up with a 30-second scene between you that leads you there."

Now THAT would be FUN.

A Pythonesque take on a Law & Order or CSI show would be amusing.

"He's dead"

"No, he's not, he's just resting"

"Dead"

"Hibernating"

What I want IRL is the menu option that lets me temporarily block despair.

That aired nearly 40 years ago and we still remember the episode every time we have lamb.

Denialist Deck of Cards

Meanwhile, the last time a movie character had my name was with the crazy French scientist in The Core.

i can't remember specific examples, but people with my name in movies are usually 60-70 year old nice jewish ladies.

nevertheless i convinced myself, watching raiders of the lost ark (one of my favourite movies ever-so-coincidentally) for the first time, that the female lead was named miriam. & i don't want to hear otherwise.

No? It doesn't help? Sorry.

Hey, at least you don't have to deal with Tom Cruise having your name in the Mission Impossible movies.

And yeah, isn't The Lost & Found awesome? I like their "Bad Moon Rising" faaaaaar more than the original. As I said before, I don't want to belittle their original songs, but they really are among the very best song interpreters out there. I eagerly await the day they release a full-length album of covers.

*Maybe I should take a page from abi's book and start using nesting footnotes rather than nesting parentheticals and asides.

The allmusic review/summary of their newest album sounds spectacular too, but this is enough for the moment I think.

I don't think there's ever been a movie with a character with my name.

I don't work anymore, so I don't think the despair.com stuff is quite right. However, from my bed, I can see a stand-up card of Mary Engelbreit's Snap Out of It and that's very useful.

The same search for my name gives hundreds of results. It can be either a personal or a family name, multiplying things even more. OTOH, so many things can be used as a first/Christian/personal name in English, frex Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is named Fitzwilliam Darcy, and when I worked in medical research I knew a Macdonald Christie who's now reached professorship in rather interesting subjects.

Carrie, maybe it's my avoidance of 'celebrity culture' but when I think of shoe-based extravagance, it's always Imelda Marcos. Is there another? (BTW, The film of Stephen King's book is on TV late tonight in Sydney.)

I thought this might give folks a good chuckle, I saw the link on Jezebel:

From the BBC - Why heroines die in classic fiction.

Back a few years ago one of my friends developed scurvy*, another one pleurisy, and I had TB (latent). I used to joke that all we needed was a few other people to develop brain fever, angina, and megrims and we'd have all the major diseases from 19th century novels covered. My doctor was amused by my repeatedly calling the disease consumption, though he thought my Camille references were a bit over the top.

*She's not a picky eater, she was in Yakutsk during the end of the Soviet era and there was no produce to be had. She was eating raw garlic at one point, because it was a green and greens had not been seen for weeks.

Jonathan Coulton likes big butts too.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2007/10/25/wikiwatch-stirring-the-pot/

It's linking to a bit of an organized movement, too; for those around here who care about such things, it might be useful to join forces.

In deference to miriam's request, I am unable to explain to you that the heroine of Raiders of the Lost Ark was likewise really named Marion.

There's another one of the astroturfish things in circulation, "Dear Military Wife." Someone who I think is a military wife posted it in a newsgroup I'm in and I got ticked.... As a female military veteran, and daughter of niece of four women who served in the US military in WWII, I get pissed whenever I see one of these pieces of partisan shit that look like commercial paid schilling from that harpy Elaine Donnelly....

Warning, a lot of those things are pure unadulterated bombastic, politically motivated JINGOISM and SMARM, playing on people's emotions.
I'm a veteran, who spent 11 months at a remote site known as Thule, Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle.
I tend to get rather ANNOYED when seeing "women" depicted as all -civilian- and military as all -male-. This is NOT 1950, this is NOT 1973 when I got the litany from that jerk from Lousiana State University who was majoring in physical education and thought he was going to become an Air Force pilot, saying, "Women. They're women. Women shouldn't be pilots."

One of the people at my college dorm reunion was a Army colonel's husband, accompanying his wife who was an alumn of the dormfloor... The Colonel (that's colonel as in bird colonel, not lieutenant colonel...) said that there were two male cadets who literally quit in tears back when she was a cadet, because the two cadets had been instigators, engaged in belittling the women and the male non-white cadets in the summer training program they were all in, wound up being rated at the -bottom- of the unit, a minority cadet from the Caribbean got first, and the female cadet who today is a colonel, got rated second. (The point there, is that there is STILL a lot of prejudice around... when she went to senior officer training, there was some ill-feeling towards her ("-why is a woman taking up a position that some man should be in going through this-") until a "mustang" (officer with prior enlisted experience) with combat experience pointed out something like, "She's going to be commanding the people who develop the equipment you're going to be using out in the field. Don't you want her to know what it's like to use that equipment? And don't you want the equipment you use and that protects you, to -work-?-"

Anyway, I've seen the thing before, it was circulating around a few years ago that I recall, and it was noxious gender-biased smarm then--again, there are HUSBANDS who have wives who are out in Iraq and Afghanistan... why don't they get the same sympathy for being left minding the homefront and the kids?!

----- Original Message -----

>
> Dear Military Wife,
>
> I am an American woman that has no idea what is going on in the military
> other than what I hear on the news.

Get a CLUE then, try READING!!! There is no excuse for such IGNORANCE!
>
> I have never had to let go of someone so that they could go fight for people
> that they didn't know, people that sometimes do not appreciate or understand c
> what they are fighting for.

Once upon a time, there was a fellow living on my college dormfloor who was in Navy ROTC. His best friend in the universe, so he said, was living with a woman. The Navy cadet asked her to marry him, and she agreed, KNOWING that being a Navy wife meant things like long separations from a husband on sea duty who would be out on the ocean for months at a time.... It is a rather tacky thing, for someone to ask someone who's living with someone else to marry them, but.... Anyway, I have no idea if the marriage lasted, I suspect it did, actually. She had a quite level head on her shoulders... the person she had been living with, was a rather wild sort--not dangerous or anything, but definitely not fully civilized.

> I have never had a sleepless night of worry because of a report that another
> bomb has exploded and I still haven't heard from my husband.
>
> I have never had to wait for months on end to hold the one that I loved so.

Aaarrrggghhhh, bathos!

> I have never had to tell my children that daddy wasn't coming home tonight
> because he was so far away fighting for something that they aren't yet old
> enough to understand.

And what about Mommy being out stuck in Iraq or Afghanistan, getting sexually harassed by recivist males (see the LiveJournal of can't-think-of-her-name-now, she was in the blogging from Iraq a year or two or three ago, and got stuck in a firefight she thought she wasn't going to make it out of, as a Reservist I think on active duty in the Army....
>
> I have never had to hold my head high and suppress the tears as I hear that
> it will be at least another six months of separation before my loved one
> gets to come home.

Shrug. The military's been all volunteer for a generation now, anyone in it signed up. I think that the treatment of the people in the service stinks these days regarding too few people on active duty and abuse of the Guard and Reserve getting sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, but then I think the whole shebang that got ANYONE sent to Iraq in the first place mades a cesspool smell sweet in comparison....

> I have never had to deal with a holiday away from the one that I thought I
> would share every day of my life with.

There are lots of jobs that send people far away for weeks or months at a time. I spent a year in Greenland. Don't look for my sympathy... if you want someone at home, marry a plumber or electrician or person who works in the local area, not someone in the military or a traveling sales person....

> And I have never had to feel the panic rising in my heart at the sound of a
> ringing phone or knock at the door for fear that it is the news that
> everyone is terrified of getting.

More people get killed by drunk drivers in the USA every years than US service people have been killed in Iraq. For that matter, people die on the flight decks of aircraft carriers from mostly unavoidable accidents. Four members of the Thunderbirds died years ago when the lead plane in the formation of four jets, had a control failure. There wasn't enough time and there wasn't enough altitude between the formation and the ground, for the other pilots to survive--there was no time and no margin to eject, must less leave the formation and avoid smashing into/being smashed into the other planes.

But those are the risks involved in flying military jets. Sometimes things go wrong, and people die. Or sometimes people get STUPID, such as JFK jr, who wasn't even IN the military, got stupid, and died taking his wife and sister-in-law down into the ocean with him.... flying at night over water in clear weather's killed even highly experienced pilots with thousands of hours of flight time and commercial-instrument ratings. Kennedy did NOT have an instrument rating, and the weather was not good, and he had a broken foot. "There are old pilots, there are bold pilots, there are no old bold pilots." Sometimes stupidity is fatal, and it was fatal in his case--and he wasn't even a military pilot, flying something faster and with more things to go wrong, than a slower much lower performance private civil aircraft,that doesn't have the lag time that jet engines have between the pilot pushing the throttle in, and the plane reacting....
>
> For the reasons listed above, I can not tell you that I understand how you
> feel.

Then why bother saying the line above?

> I can not tell you that you must be strong.

Then don't.....

> I can not say that you shouldn't be angry, because you "knew what you were
> getting into when you married a military man".

What about the men who marry military women?!!! Or give up their careers to be the homebody, as the colonel's husband did?! She spent time stationed Iraq, while HE stayed in the USA minding the homefront...

> I can not say these things because I have never had to walk in your shoes.

The purported [fake, I think] author of this missive has never walked in MY shoes... I was, again, -in- the military, and among other reasons, as a FEMALE veteran am offended by this thing....

> What I can say for certain is that because of your unselfish acts of bravery

Bravery? BRAVERY?!!!

> and your husbands willingness to stand up for those who see him as "just
> another soldier" - -

What, again, about the WOMEN in the military.
I'm a veteran.
My uncle's wife is a veteran.
My mother was a veteran.
Two of her sisters were veterans.
I have NOTHING polite to say about bogus letters which seem to go far out of their way to avoid acknowledging that women are veterans. If my aunt Miryon were still alive she'd be out campaigning over it... she use to have a large button she wore that said, "Women Are Veterans Too!"

> I will never have to walk in your shoes.

Why didn't this person go into the military herself then? Oh, right, it's a piece of political propaganda, and it's a FAKE!
>
> I do understand that as a military wife you are expected to uphold a certain
> amount of control, but I never understood how you could do it, until now.

What about military husbands?! I remember how isolated some of them were, because while there were groups for military members' -wives-, often the wives' groups banned military members' husbands from joining....

> I have figured out that you are not like other women.

And what about women IN the military and female veterans, we don't exist?! [expletive deleted]

This sounds like rotgut that Elaine Donnelly peddles... she who sucks up taxpayer money to calumnify women who are in the military with reports that are full of lies and smears and bogus research....

> You are of a special breed.

.............
>
> You have a strength within you that holds life together in the darkest of
> hours, a strength of which I will never possess.

......

> The faith you have is what makes you stand out in a crowd; it makes you glow
> with emotion and swell with pride at the mention of The United States of
> America.

The faith... uh-oh, it's THEOCRACY time....
>
> You are a special lady, a wonderful partner and a glorious American.

What about the husbands of women on active duty, what, they don't exist?!

> I have more respect for your husband than I could ever tell you, but until
> recently I never thought much about those that the soldier leaves at home
> during deployment.

What about the women in the military? I don't respect anyone who writes tripe like this, I'm a veteran, and those who ignore my mother, my three blood aunts and one aunt by marriage, and the women I served with... has no respect from me.

> Until this moment I could never put into words exactly what
> America meant to me.

Bombast, bombast, bombast, for a war founded on utter LIES, full of corruption and greed, more than a tenth of the population of Iraq fled to other countries, and more than 100,000 Iraqs dead of what I can only call aggression.... I am ASHAMED to be an American, and ANGRY, angry at the waste of lives, of resources, of trust.... dead Iraqis, dead Americans, dead British, dead from all the other countries who participated in this vicious, noxious, greedy FARCE of an invasion and occupation on the basis once again, of LIES!
>
> Until this moment, I had no real reason to.... Until I heard of you.

Huh?!

> Your husband and his military family hold this nation close, safe from those
> who wish to hurt us...but you and those like you are the backbone of the
> American family.

WOMEN ARE SERVICEPEOPLE TOO!!!!
>
> You keep the wheels in motion and the hearts alive while most would just
> break completely down.

Pfeh. There wasn't anyone at home waiting for me the year I spent in Greenland.... for THAT matter, two of the people I was serving with up there, went on leave for two weeks and came back emotionally destroyed. One of them had been married for ten years, and his wife said that it had never been a real marriage... he almost drove over a cliff in his anguish. Another fellow went back on leave and came back to Greenland determined to try to get child custody of his two young daughters, away from his philandering spouse whom divorce proceeding were in progress with.....

> Military families make this nation what it is today.

Uh, the basis of the USA is the citizen, NOT a professional fulltime military. Was it Washington who pointed out that someone does NOT cease being a citizen when putting on a military uniform.... I am sitting in a house in a town from which the town militia marched in April 1775 to Concord, to fight the British Army, in the battle that was the start of the US War for Independence. They were NOT professional soldiers, they were civilian farmers and civilians of other careers, who took up arms to break free of British rule. The US military can't exist without an economy and the civilians who pay the taxes that fund the military...
>
> You give us all hope and you emit a warming light at the end of a long dark
> tunnel.

I don't agree.... military spouses have, to use a particular term, "challenges," but then so does everyone else. The spouses of the Guard and Reserve are getting particularly abused, along with their Guard and Reserve marriage partners, who got called to active duty for extended periods disrupting their civilians lives and livelihood.. the regular military don't have their lives disrupted the same way, being -in- the military and not having to deal with income crash from a civilian job to military pay, and the sudden removal from the -civilian- world into the active duty overseas world... military spouses have the support systems of continuity that Reservists and Guard members' families don't have...

> Because of you and your family...I am able to be me.

I Served My Time, I resent the whole attitude of the purported author of what looks, again, to me to be pure jingoism, that there are no WOMEN who served, and no women who are veterans....
>
> I am able to have my family.
in
I've never been married, and don;t have that validation, and get ticked off having this jingoistic junk shoved in my face. I am NOT drinking this Kool-Aid. I got enough crap of "I'm not married, I'm TDY!" [and some of them didn't even have THAT excuse.... they chased anything female when their wives weren';t around....] trying to grab my tail in my six years in the military, to have a jaundiced eye regarding the fidelity of people in the military (there were a few choice stories about women, too.... philandering isn't gender-dependent other than culturally and socially promoted as such.... that there seem to be more philandering husbands than wives for the most part is artifact of conditioning and cultural attitudes, values, and unequal treatment of philandering spouses... and it VARIES from place to place....
>
> I am able to walk free in this great land.

That's becoming more and more of a joke, tell it to the victims of "rendition"...

> Because of you and your family, I can look ahead to the future with the
> knowledge that life is going to be okay.

What, the abrogtion of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and no senior officer having had the guts to stand up in public and state that illegal orders regarding such things as torture of prisoners and contravening of the Geneva Convention have been on-going for YEARS?!!!

> Because of you and your family, I can awake to a new day, everyday.

See above.

> I realize that you are a stronger person than I will ever be because of
> these things and I just wanted to take the time today to say thank you to
> you and your family for allowing me that freedom.

I'm not. I want to know why the top military officers have not upheld their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC...

> I will never be able to repay this debt to you, as it is unmatchable.
....

> However, I hope that you know that no matter where you are...
>
> what you are doing...
>
> what has happened today...
>
> or what will happen tomorrow...
>
> Your husband will NEVER be "just another soldier" to me....

What about the WOMEN in the military? I have NO respect for this letter, and am ticked an anyone who redistributes it as other than bigoted jingoism.

> And you, dear sweet lady, will never be forgotten.

I am not a military spouse. I AM A MILITARY VETERAN!
>
> You are all in my prayer's everyday and I pray that God will bring you back
> together with your loved one safely.

Religion card...

> May God Bless You
>
Religion card.
>
> If you are a Military Spouse or know one, repost this and say THANK YOU.
> They too make daily sacrifices while their spouse serve our country.
> GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS

I wonder what the colonel's husband thinks of this....

They're both Romney fleeces, the bag in the livingroom from "Petunia reg. Romney" is 6 1/2 pounds of raw wool.... I think somewhere I have a black merino fleece which is a first shearing (from a different animal, of course! Black merinos might only transform into Romneys in fantasy stories or dreams!)

Not a pinball wizard (Real Audio)

Paul A is unable to correctly explain at 264.

Carrie 258: Well, the class did deserve it. I remember wishing I could kill people that easily. (In retrospect I'm glad I couldn't, because I absolutely would have.) Think of her as Her Who Must Not Be Messed With.

The other one's a flaming twit, I agree.

Just so you feel like you're not the only person, or a member of the only class being insulted by that piece of astroturf, consider that the wives and husbands of fire fighters and police officers also sit by the telephone knowing that "that" phone call can come at any time. Fact is, though, their partners usually come out of it better than combat soldiers if they're only wounded. Something about their employers making good on their promises of care and medical treatment and disability retirement.

Yes, Washington, one of David Hackworth's favorite sayings - it was at the top of his organization's web page for a long time: When we became soldiers, we did not cease to be citizens

The report on the Thunderbirds Diamond Crash that I saw in the end attributed the failure to FOD - object blocking the control - I did hear someone qualified to express an opinion

(T38 instructor pilot whose joy it was to take every single individual airplane and make sure that individual airplane would recover from anything he could do to it the day before a student used the vary same airplane to train for recovery)

say it was pilot error - good enough to fly in the formation but not goood enough to lead - and changed per Creech to avoid other issues.

There is typical fly talk discussion at:
rec.aviation.military Subject: Re: diamond crash

Anybody know?

Speaking of #265 - I'd like to think everybody who looks in here is continuing to follow GinMar's travail?

I just had my first two bookbinding students today! We spent the afternoon in my bindery, working through a technique that produces a light, airy book (but recognizably a book) in one sitting.

It took longer than I expected it to - at least twice as long, but it was a very pleasant time. It helped that I knew one of them (he hired me at my current job) and liked the other from her emails before we met today (the first student's girlfriend).

The whole thing was like acting, in a way - horrendous stage fright beforehand, exhaustion after, but in the middle, a real pleasure. The hours flew by.

Fantastic.

When I first started lecturing (as compared to leading discussion sections) I found that the quick way to deal with stage fright was to hum an opera overture on the way in to class. (I'd been in opera chorus for four seasons.) Traviata worked like a charm.

Forgot to say - congratulations on the lesson/students! - And yes, exhilarating when it goes well.

congratulations on the class.

The main character of Sex and the City is named Carrie Underwood. (I think Underwood; I'm sure of the Carrie.)

Xopher, yeah; if I'd had the King character's powers a number of my classmates would not have survived high school. Though I'd have been more subtle about it. Practice with tiny little things and then no one will be able to figure out how so many kids had undetected weaknesses in their brain's blood vessels...

Wasn't 'Bradshaw' a famous railway timetable in the UK? Don't know how that might relate to Underwood; maybe it's the Underworld typewriter discussion earlier.

I mean, if you can commit a crime without having to be anywhere near the scene, you maybe miss a chance to gloat, but not even CSI can find evidence that doesn't exist.

I see the Beeb has finally caught up with Making Light.

We left a day early. We worked all day, every day, well into the night, except when we had some fairly exquisite food and drink. And then some more drink.

I started feeling a bit, well, gunky after the first 15 hours. Still gunky now, but with lots of hydration it's clearing out. It was definitely not too bad, though--just a slow creep of a lung build-up,. The worst of it is my skin; it's still feeling very, very icky, even after a ton of TLC. Smoke ick. Greasy.

Serge at 171: Thanks!!!

Terry at 173: I wish I'd had time! If we would have been able to stay the extra day despite not needing to, I definitely would have. Couldn't put another night on the client, though. But I did get to see Puppy's hockey game today instead, which was also fabulous!

I don't get stage fright. Put me in a place to present, and I'll be fine.

And my thought was, "Dude, if you got scammed 37 times why in the world would I even consider taking any advice from you? You've made a career out of getting scammed."

But I clicked on the link anyway. I came to a place in what I call "I'm a scammer" format (you can recognize a scam site from across the room just from the template they use). The guy says that all the other Get Rich Quick schemes are scams, but ones he's recommending are, no kidding, not scams!

Wow. I can just see the next dude to advertise. His sell-line will be "I was scammed 38 times."

> One of the Google ads on the main page at ML right now reads, "I Was Scammed 37 Times
These Programs Are Absolute Scams I Will Show You The Ones That Work "

Reminds me of a radio program I once heard: an interview with a woman who used to work on those nasty psychic telephone hot lines, in which she detailed all of the nasty little tricks they use to trick people and screw money out of them. It was detailed and horrifically interesting, and an all round wonderful show until the very closing seconds of the interview, where she said that all of these evil scammer just made things harder for the *genuine* psychics - like her.

*sigh*

Very cool.

(Hmm, why does preview automatically insert rel="nofollow"?)

That's very nice, thanks for the link. I'm late to the Brust party, having just started reading the cycle a couple of weeks ago, annd in love with it. So far I've devoured Jhereg and Yendi, and I'm in the middle of Teckla, which IMHO is the best of the three so far. It helps that I swear he's been listening in to Eva and me talk about our marriage. And argue about it.

And another rave: Torchwood just gets better and better. I just saw last night's episode, DVR'ed for viewing after spending the morning painting the new bathrooms. It's about gur grnz erfheerpgvat Fhmvr, gur rk-grnz-zrzore jub gevrq gb xvyy Wnpx, naq qvq xvyy urefrys, va gur svefg rcvfbqr. Frrzf gung qrngu qbrfa'g nterr jvgu ure. Oh, and we get to find out that Wnpx unq n oblsevraq, juvpu ol zl gnyyl znxrf uvz bzavib.

I really have to get those Torchwood DVDs out and watch them all the way through. Jack had a bf (or maybe a casual partner) in his first-ever appearance in the Doctor Who two-parter The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances; in that show it was suggested that he would "dance" with any race that was remotely compatible, IIRC. So that makes him omni-something. Or maybe pan-something.

By the way, did you once mention VR.5 on Making Light?

Two of Brust's books are physically missing and presumed lost from my library (statewide!). The Vlad books don't seem to turn up at used bookstores, while the others do.

I'm reading a collection of 3 novels, Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla in a trade paperback I found at Powell's. Seemed like the cheapest entry into the series; even new that's $5 US per novel, with mass market editions of indidual novels running at $8 or $9 each. There were a lot of other copies of novels from the series on the shelf, both new and used. Check powells.com and see what's available online; if you can find used copies of the books you want, the shipping charges may not be too painful.

Yes, I did mention VR5. I watched it when it was first broadcast, and generally liked it quite well, though it was rough in spots and could have used a little more thought on the philosophical aspects.* Unforunately it was brosdcast here in Portland by the low-end UHF station, low-power transmission, and not enough money to rent access to the local high-tower antenna farm. So our tapes look bad most of the time, and really awful whenever a plane went overhead, or a large car went by the house. Basically unviewable after 15 years of accumulated age and oxide particle rot. And our current remodeling spree has us on bread and water for awhile, so we're being incredibly selective about buying music and video.

* One of my favorite, quite serious, titles for a technical book in the 1990s was "The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality".

(Hmm, why does preview automatically insert rel="nofollow"?)
By editorial decree, all links in comments are forced to be nofollow in order to make comment spam less useful to the spammer since it won't help their googlerank.
Close tags for unmatched tags get added at the end of the message, as well.

That seems entirely proper to me. Especially since the legit links that we put in here get promoted to Particles and Sidelights whenever Our Hosts think they're sufficiently worthwhile.

Or at least I did when it happened to me.

And btw, Earl, THAT is how ML encourages the posting of useful and/or amusing links in comment threads. The "squee" factor is considerable.

Sorry I didn't think of this before; more caffeine needed. Which books are you looking for? I can buy used books at Powell's and send them to you when I've finished reading them.

I've had my wants listed on my wishlist at BookMooch, but so far no luck there either.

Bruce Cohen @ #298: I actually stumbled upon it in 2005, and as I watched the series I realized that I'd actually seen the last five minutes of an episode nearly ten years previous. It's fairly unusual for an inconsequential thing like that to hang around in my head that long, so I dug around for more information.

I do know that thirteen episodes were produced but only ten broadcast in its original run, and that when the official VHS tapes were released, one of the episodes was not included and another turned up twice. A DVD release was announced and then cancelled, so legit versions are currently unavailable, which is most unfortunate.

The fandom was very nearly successful in its campaign for the production of a final TV special to close off the storyline. I understand that a draft script was actually written but the project was eventually stopped by Fox.

One of the things the series glossed over was ethics/morality of rooting around in/manipulating someone's subconscious without their knowledge or informed consent. Perhaps, given enough time, the writers would have eventually gotten around to it.

There is a phrase in a sound file which I think means "closed", which I heard as "Dun kitty".

Some Googling around confirms that "dùinte"; "dùin" does mean "closed, shut" - would they both be pronounced something like "dun"? If "sláinte" is pronounced "slan-tchuh", I'd sort of think that "dùinte" might be pronounced "dun-tchuh".

But my Gaelic is verging on hopeless.

And what might the word that sounds like "kitty" mean (and how ought it be more properly spelled)?

Ooh, sounds wonderful! I fell in love with a dark merino fleece at Oregon Flock & Fiber, but I can't bring anything more home; I'm out of room.

It occurred to me after I posted that you probably have a drop spindle, rather than just stockpiling fleeces to throw at the ravaging zombie hordes (although I like to think that if I were a zombie, I'd still have the good sense to stop for fleece).

Linkmeister @ 309:

I have both of those; If Bruce isn't able to find them, let me know and I can send mine off - just promise you'll send them back some day. I won't be re-reading them in a hurry.

The story itself would be easy to market, I'd think.

Maybe you're overestimating what Serge means by "LOTS of money." To me, anything with six figures is a LOT of money. I'm not sure what Serge means by it.

The Goblin Reservation would cost more, since there would be a lot more costume design involved. (Hey! We could get one of those Cavemen guys to play Oop!)

Vg'f n znyr punenpgre'f oveguqnl; sbe fbzr ernfba, ur'f abg rkcrpgvat n oveguqnl pnxr (gur crefba jub abeznyyl znxrf gurz erpragyl yrsg, znlor?). Ur'f erpragyl zrg n jbzna jub'f vagrerfgrq va uvz, nygubhtu V qba'g guvax ur ernyvmrf guvf; ur'f gbyq ure nobhg gur oveguqnl pnxrf ur yvxrf. Fur fubjf hc nf uvf eha-qbja ubhfr (genvyre?) jvgu n pnxr (gjb?). Ur'f nyernql unccl, ohg gura fur chgf bar bs gurz qbja ba gur pbssrr gnoyr, ovyybjf ure fxveg bhg oruvaq ure, naq ybjref urefrys qbja ba gur pnxr.

It's feeling like it might be My Name is Earl, but I can't figure out what episode or who either of the characters are, if so. Anyone, pretty please?

Actually I think that was on an episode of Dirt, back in March.

I've thought a few times about making an animation of "City". It would be a lot more effective than live action for the Jupiter scenes and the later Earth scenes with the animals and the ants. And if you didn't insist on Pixar-level computer animation or Henry Selick-level stop-motion, it wouldn't be terribly expensive, at least by Hollywood standards.

Then again, what about "Time is the Simplest Thing"? A lot of that could be filmed on location with Ontario standing in for Wisconsin.

¹ Should I duck now?
² Whatever happened to Jenny Agutter, anyway? Ah.

Who's got a chart for HTML sequences for daggers, double daggers, etc.? I know abi uses them here, for one.

I like &loz, created by adding loz after the &

Here's a handy reference table

I use the daggers and such a lot, but I don't use HTML entity sequences for most of that stuff, since browsers these days are all capable of handling most of the common Unicode symbols. If you have a Mac, there's a wonderful utility called the Character Palette that allows you to insert all kinds of neat characters, including full fonts for Cyrillic, several of the Japanese character sets, traditional Chinese, even Cherokee. And all the hexagrams of the i Ching. I don't think Windows has anything quite so fancy, but there is a special characters gizmo of some sort in there.

Failing that, here's Wikipedia's entity list. I don't think any of their admins have tried to delete it recently.

First of all, when I do the basic wheat bread, 500 g wheat flour, 175 grams milk, 175 grams water, 9 grams salt, 9 grams dry activated yeast, I get a pretty dense loaf of bread. I don't mind, but my wife won't eat it. So, what's the thing to change in the recipe to make it less dense? I tried doubling the yeast, but that was an extra dollar of ingredients and didn't work (may have been operator error, though, still haven't gotten the hang of all the nuances of putting things in, my digital scale is a little wonky (if I take something off the scale, and then put it back on, the scale seems to zero itself out sometimes, which means if there is flour in a measuring cup on the scale, it might zero out and I add too much flour), and I still haven't found the operating manual for my breadmaker.)

So, how to take the basic recipe and make it less dense? Put in less flour? Add more water or milk? If I double the yeast, do I have to increase anything else? If I decrease the flour, do I have to change anything else?

Secondly, is oat flour and barley flour and other flours not usable for bread? This last loaf was a two-pipe problem, (1) an attempt to try and make the bread less dense and (2) an attempt to mix in other flours with the wheat for a multi grain effect. The result was the loaf I mentioned above that was hard as a pencil eraser. I'm surprised I didn't burn out the mixing moter in the bread maker.

Anyway, I've been defeated by a simple bread recipe, and I'm tired of wasting ingredients and getting inedible results. Although I could do the Dr. Seuss thing and figure out all the ways to not make bread so that whatever is left is a way to make bread, it seems like a rather expensive and maddeningly frustrating approach.

I may have to get a book on bread. (I did order the science of cooking book. did everyone know it was out of print? ordered a used copy. still waiting for it to get here.)

In the meantime, any answers would be greatly appreciated. less dense? oat flour?

You need to get a book on breadmaking before you can do intelligent substitutions. (Or you can do it all by trial and error and make a lot of hockey-pucks in the process. BTDT.)

The short version of the key point is that you need lots of gluten to make a loaf with a nice light grain, and no other flour has as much as white bread flour. Whole wheat flour has some, but less; oat and barley have almost none. If you want to make a 100% whole wheat loaf and not have it be dense, you need to add extra concentrated gluten directly. Alternatively you can cut it with bread flour (bread flour = high gluten.) If you use flours from other grains, you need to counterbalance by using more white bread flour. You can also buy fancy gourmet high-gluten whole-wheat flour, I've never gone that route.

"These novels draw attention to the romantic possibilities of primary care settings and the apparent inevitability of uncontrolled passions in the context of emergency medicine, especially as practised on airplanes. These novels suggest that there is an urgent need to include instruction in the arts of romance in training programmes for doctors and nurses who intend working in these settings."

Yeah, I underestimated how complicated it is. "Flour, water, milk, salt, yeast" sort of lulled me into a false sense of security. I was thinking, "How difficult can five ingredients be". Apparently, pretty difficult.

you need lots of gluten to make a loaf with a nice light grain ... Whole wheat flour has some, but less; oat and barley have almost none

Ah. So adding extra yeast isn't enough if there's no gluten to begin with. Thanks for explaining that. I was starting to pull my hair out.

which means you're buying those little packets in the grocery store

Yeah, I've been looking for the large containers of yeast, but haven't figured out where my stores hide them. Apparently, I need to find out where I can buy "concentrated gluten in a box" too.

So, any good beginner-experimenter-bread-making books out there?

Yeah--there has to be gluten to make bubbles out of the gasses from the yeast. Otherwise the..what is it, CO2?...just escapes and does nothing to make the loaf light.

Did you proof your yeast, BTW? (That is, take a bit of the water and a bit of the sugar/flour, mix 'em with the yeast, wait to make sure it starts producing bubbles.) I guess that's not as useful if you're using a bread machine, but I always do it when making bread by hand.

Cucurbitophobia apparently is the fear of pumpkins.

Carved or uncarved?

"Die, squash, die!"

"Pie, squash, pie!!!"

and @346 snarf!

I'm not objecting on religious grounds, just that it always seemed to be a kids' holiday and it somehow kind of ... morphed. So what am I missing, or is there no way for me to regain that childlike sense of fun?

Yam at a loss. Maybe some pun'kin pie might help.

I'm certainly with you on preferring a fluffier loaf.

Context: Most if not all of our TexMex experiments are conducted outside the home. Although I believe strongly in the existence of "hot" as the fifth basic food group, I mostly don't seek out products designed to burn off all my interior linings. Further, I'd already just bought some (rather mild) habanero jelly, so jam-making is probably out--and I'm not a great preserve-maker in any case. (Worse, the source of these peppers had already provided us with some pickled peppers. No, his name was *not* Peter Piper.)

Help?

Halloween has been co-opted by adults as a holiday of release*, leaving very little for the kids except cheap animations on TV and admonitions about not eating the stuff they collect until it's been X-rayed. There's very little childlike fun left.

* Release from social restraints, release from the restraints of class and caste**, and release from sexual restraints.

** Yes, we have those restraints in America. You think there aren't any classes? Make a list of the restaurants in your city you would be reluctant to go into, either because you would feel insufficiently sophisticated for the ambiance, or vaguely threatened by the other patrons. /rant

Have you looked at the no-knead bread recipe that was making the rounds earlier this year? It's a different approach to a bread machine, but might well be of interest.

This link had better work. Grr. If it doesn't, search on 'bittman no knead bread nytimes.com' and the 8 Nov 2006 article is the one you're looking for.

I've been trying to get my act together to make this bread for a year, and I still haven't. Someday...

More like a holiday of transgression, at least round here. Not that that isn't the same thing :-)

Maybe I worked the entire costume thing out of my system doing opera. And if I'm going to commit a sin, I don't need a legalized occasion for it; that's the whole point about it being a sin.

(As to your rant, excluding biker bars, I can't think of anywhere at either end of that scale that I'd be reluctant to go into for the reasons stated. I tend to pick restaurants based on whether I like the food, and don't go to one of the top restaurants in town not because of the prices or the ambiance, but because it is/was a favorite haunt of the Current Pretender--which, I'll admit it, makes it a bit downscale for me. Perhaps the Secret Service would make it seem a bit threatening.)

But this, as many things, has been less innocent for my kids than it was for me.

Bob's Red Mill sells wheat gluten flour. You could mix in some to your wheat. On the other hand, I've never been able to pull off a 100% whole wheat loaf that I liked. You might start with something easier.

One that works for me is a white wheat honey wheat bread. (It's king arthur White Wheat, a 100% whole wheat out of a lighter grain). I do it about 75% wheat, 25% white bread flour.

5-5.5 c flour, 2.25 c water, 1/3 c oil, 1/3c milk powder, 1/3c honey, 1tsp yeast, 2tsp salt.

I do this with a long slow rise overnight, and mix and add ingredients slowly, so the proportions of flour and water vary by when the dough looks right. (i.e. ymmv with a bread machine)

I need to write this up well, since google isn't finding this on my site right now, and I'm getting a very reproducable product out of it.

I'd debate you on the lack of childlike fun, at least in the kids I know. We're in a semi-urban setting, of course, so it's somewhat different in that our kids don't really have a lot of opportunities to egg cars or tp people's homes (which some people seem to think is the main point of Halloween, for reasons that escape me).

But in our neighborhood, there's quite a bit of fun to be had, and the kids get pretty excited about it.

All the local elementary schools have parties. This year, our school's party included a hayride (in the schoolyard), a fortuneteller, and a haunted house (of the traditional pasta/eggs/homemade-slime/uncooked hot dog variety, with a number of 6th graders hiding in corners to jump out and scare their fellow students). The last had long lines pretty much all night through as kids went through again and again and again.

On Halloween itself, two of the area shopping strips become Trick-or-Treat strips, with kids in costume spending an hour or more popping in and out of various shops and collecting goodies. This year my daughter is old enough to do this round without a parent and is much looking forward to it.

One end of the neighborhood is private homes; many of them decorate for Halloween and trick-or-treating there in the evening is a blast. There are a couple of people who do the "fake out the kids by pretending to be a display" thing and the shrieks can be heard for blocks.

At my end of the neighborhood, it's all apartment buildings. My building is huge, about 200 apartments. Every year we have a sign-up sheet for Halloween and several mobs of kids go trooping through the various wings on Halloween night, visiting the apartments on the list. This year we have a lot of 3 and 4 year olds who will be trick-or-treating for the first time and I can't wait to see what they look like. This year I get to stay home and hand out candy, since the kid will be going around without me.

My daughter, meanwhile, who is 11, has 3 Halloween costumes this year (usually she has 2, one for the school party and one for trick-or-treating, though last year she only had one because she was so in love with the mummy outfit I made for her). She sees Halloween as an opportunity to exercise her imagination and we have often done home-made costumes. This year she will be doing a little juggling along with her trick-or-treating: performance in exchange for candy.

I agree that Halloween has become very sexualized (it was hard to find a costume for dd that wasn't revealing or stereotyped in some way) and commercialized (you can always tell the big movies of the year by what the kids show up wearing), but I see plenty of children having plenty of fun.

(I'm thinking that it would be a good idea to have a long list of Mad Science responses in case people do ask.)

{I will set the atmosphere on FIRE!!!! |
Loathsome diseases spread by FLYING MONKEYS!!! |
I'll cut out all your hearts with a spoon — it will HURT more!!!!! |
I will create a mutant slime mold that tastes delicious!!! Everyone will eat it, but once it is inside them, it will eat them!!!! All will become slime!!!!! |
etc }
BWAHAHAHAHA! (of course)

Anybody else think that's an anti-Democratic Party t-shirt? Otherwise, why a donkey? Am I crazy, or is this duhh, or something in between?

If it's duhh, I'm not sure why Teresa posted it. I guess I just don't get it, period.

Anybody else think that's an anti-Democratic Party t-shirt? Otherwise, why a donkey? Am I crazy, or is this duhh, or something in between?

If it's duhh, I'm not sure why Teresa posted it. I guess I just don't get it, period.

I've never used a bread machine. I've baked by hand a lot, though, and the best rule I've found for a nicely textured and flavored bread is "Brown Bowl, White Board." In other words, while the bread is still a batter, add only whole wheat flour; when you turn it onto the board, it should be onto white flour, and you should add only white flour from that point on. This makes a bread rich enough for whole wheat lovers, and light enough for...non-whole wheat lovers. It hangs together well, and can be used to sculpt a man with horns for your Lúnasa ritual.

Um, er. Never mind that last bit. (But the three symbolic herbs we put in for that ritual—dill, for the sweetness of youth; thyme, for length of days; and sage, for the wisdom of age—also make a very tasty bread.)

Since handmade bread varies greatly based on conditions, I never measure flour. I have no idea how this would translate into bread-machine bread.

I second others' recommendations to follow recipes at first. I'd think this was doubly true if you're using a bread machine, where you can't correct anything in the middle if the dough feels wrong.

Mmm. Now I'm going to have to bake bread for Thanksgiving. How I'll fit this in, I don't know.

Halloween for me is a busman's holiday - oh, boy, dress up in a costume, just like I do every couple of weeks! But I'm equally down on most holidays, unless they involve either chocolate or explosions.

New Year's - Romantic holiday with drinking; sort of useless to single person who doesn't generally drink.

Valentine's Day - Another useless one for single person.

Easter - Okay, I like chocolate bunnies. Really cheap ones from the supermarket. Bite their little ears off!

Fourth of July - I can has fireworks!

Thanksgiving - Eat to the point of illness while not doing any actual thanking except to mom for cooking since no one in the immediate family musters any higher than "vaguely agnostic" on the religiosity scale. Many, many dishes to wash. Have successfully reoriented this day into the Final Fall Lawnwork Holiday, on which I rake many, many leaves and then read a good book.

Christmas - Got broken when my family went post-nuclear. Home alone depressed or visiting maternal family to try to graft on holiday cheer. Last time mom visited we watched Titus Andronicus by way of fun family film viewing.

is there no way for me to regain that childlike sense of fun?

My suggestion would be to borrow a child. The sense of fun is contagious and when it becomes annoying you can return it.

Food. Titus. I like that juxtaposition.

It's my favorite Christmas movie.

In the bad old days, I'd watch it while eating tortellini al pesto to excess, and drinking an entire bottle of beaujolais nouveau. (In these happier times, I still overeat, but no longer drink the NooBoo, or myself into a stupor.) One year, I watched The Reflecting Skin, which is a great movie to watch when you're depressed, provided you really WANT to be pushed over the edge into suicide. TLIW is at least not depressing.

This is based on my experience shopping in the stores along International Blvd and in Oakland's Fruitvale district.

Borrowing a child doesn't seem to be an option; friends' children are all too old now (like seniors in high school) or too young, or in the case of one kid on my street, not even due to appear for another couple of months.

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there's a weird component of seasonal disappointment in Halloween. Winter gets Christmas, spring gets Easter, and summer gets a bunch of secular holidays, marking the beginning, middle and end. Fall gets something designed to scare everyone to death, with a candy lottery on the side. Mind you, the notion of masks and disguises is fine with me: I'm a big fan of Carnavale, the farewell to the flesh that precedes Lent. But Halloween's linking it all up with a holiday that seems most connected with things dying and then coming back to haunt you, is kind of odd.

OK, I know that the pagan calendar--and even the Christian one--celebrates the annual appearance of the liminal interface between the worlds of the living and of the not-living. I assume that the costume play, the disguises, the mischief, are a form of taking dares--if I get dressed up as somebody else, the soul-eater can't recognize me on the one night he's allowed out, and old Mr Grundy won't recognize me either when I soap his windows. It is perhaps the case that, unless you're in a state of childlike innocence, or of strong religious belief, this will somehow seem less likely or less necessary. Certainly less compelling.

Perhaps part of the problem is that, except for pagans, this is the subversive night, not the one that maintains religious tradition. One does not go to the equivalent of Christmas Eve mass then. When I was doing my research semester in Venice (one not involving Carnevale), I noticed that it was All Souls' that was taken seriously. And it seemed like an important, solemn occasion, one I could appreciate. You wanted fun and misrule, you waited another couple of weeks for St Martin's Day. The only observance of Halloween I saw was a jack-o-lantern in the window of a bar catering to Americans.

Christmas Eve - The Nutcracker (ABT version)
Christmas Day - White Christmas
Beltane - The Wicker Man
July 4th - 1776
Halloween - The Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow

Oh, and every day is Gothika's Probably On Somewhere day.

...and razzleberry dressing...

One other Christmas show I watch every year is Mark Morris's The Hard Nut. Tchaikovsky's music, but with mutant rats, a nutcracker with an Elvis hairdo, and more.

Re: seasonal disappointment- this is why you guys need something like Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes' Night. Halloween can be a bit spooky, but this time of year you really need to fight off the darkness by making, um, light.

(Of course, Brits need it especially because we don't, obviously, celebrate 4th of July. And everyone needs fireworks-safely operated!- some time!)

But what to watch on Groundhog Day? Let's think...

Alastair Sim heartily seconded. That usually gets saved for Christmas Eve.

But I'm not sure what I should watch on Groundhog Day. Any suggestions?

For a long time I didn't have a good holiday movie for Groundhog Day, but now I do.

I can recommend "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking". Processes and ingredients are clearly and thoroughly explained. I have the old edition from 1985, but there's a much newer one which has an expanded section on bread machines.

Am I the only one who actually types <v> when I'm going to ROT13 something?

The husband is Canadian, and I like spooky stuff, and it's a fun creative challenge. It's nice to celebrate something that doesn't involve heroic drinking, present obligations, or spending time with people you loathe, it's just fun. And spooky!

I think the kids best loved the chance to race around outside at night, with torches, scaring their friends. And the alien autopsy. Oh, how we laughed.

Then there is the bottomless pit of awful, tedious TV movies about Christmas released over the decades. If you want to drive the Holiday Spirit out of your heart for the year, or maybe forever, just watch a few of these. They're the video entertainment equivalent of chewing on tinfoil and smelling burned hair and listening to someone scratch a chalkboard; they won't actually kill you, but they'll make you feel really bad.

In fact, watching a few will make you feel an awful lot like the lead character in these films, who almost always has lost the Christmas spirit and gotten terrible cynical about life in general.

#371: "the Mexican movie where Santa fights one of Lucifer's sulphurous aides"

That movie ran in theaters in the States for at least a couple of Christmas seasons when I was a kid. It was heavily advertise. I remember really, really, wanting to see it.

I finally got around to it a couple of years ago, when Walgreen's was selling copies for a dollar.

Oh, Man.

In the first few minutes, we learn that Santa lives at the South Pole, and instead of elves his toys are made by happy singing children in ethnic clothing. So, Santa Land is kind of like one of those island possessions where they run sweat shops full of imported labor.

ho, Ho, HO!

I'm looking forward to handing out candy tomorrow. Our development only has 15-20 kids so I bought a box with a variety of Hershey full-size candy bars. I'm happy to make the neigbhbor kids happy, I like to admire their costumes and see them smile. A few years ago, we had two maxivans from another neighborhood come and we grownups had a very brief discussion and I went out and explained that trick-or-treating was a neighborhood thing and we would only give candy to kids from our neighborhood. They had about 20 kids -- they could have gone between their houses or just had a party.

Klingon for "You're doing it wrong!".

Heartily second the advice of Bob's Red Mill for wheat gluten -- have you got a Whole Foods or Wild Oats near you? Or even a natural-foods section in your mainstream grocery (what my vegetarian housemate cheerfully calls "the hippie ghetto")? You ought to be able to find it there.

The Laurel's Kitchen bread book is good. I'm not a bread machine user, so I can't speak to books directly for that.

Truly, one of my favorite bread books is a 1970s paperback called "Breads of the World," and it's at least half quick breads rather than yeasted, and I've gotten accustomed to tweaking bread doughs on the fly anyway, since I'm often sizing up home recipes for bakery production... I just like it for the variety of yummy things in it.

But I am not surprised that the multi-grain loaf turned into a brick. Gluten is the answer.

Hm. Egg white is also high in protein. If you want to try it again before acquiring wheat gluten, and you don't mind risking another failure -- try throwing in an egg. And let me know what happens.

This is another Julie Taymor film, and I'm a Taymor fan from way back when. It uses Beatles songs to take a story through the end of the the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s - sort of like what Twyla Tharp did with Billy Joel in "Movin' Out" on Broadway but, um, a lot better. Predictably (for Taymor), there's surrealism and puppetry - which work nicely with all the drugs - mixed in with the underlying love story of Jude and Lucy, and it hits all the late 60s cultural points like a history lesson come to life as they and their friends get swept up in the music and drugs scene in the Village, the draft, the war, the protests, and so on.

I'm young enough that I don't have my own memories of this, but aware enough for the movie to create a sense of recognition - riots in Detroit, Bono as a Merry Prankster in a psychedelic school bus, the assassination of Martin Luther King, students occupying buildings at Columbia, helicopters and ambushes in the marshy jungles (I think they digitally enhanced the whites of one soldier-character's eyes the better to radiate terror), shootings at Kent State, the "SDR" which is obviously the SDS - and to feel like a series of punches to the emotional gut. I saw it with my mother, who is old enough to have missed that whole scene (already married and raising me) but who was practically jumping out of her seat every time Taymor threw another memory-punch.

I'm not sure whether to recommend this to Beatles fans or not - either you'll admire how Taymor knit the songs and story together or you'll hate it. I suspect I will never be able to think of "Strawberry Fields" any other way again. And it would probably carry even more punch for someone more familiar with some of the music; I knew the obvious ones but quite a few were completely unfamiliar. Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite? Fabulous surrealistic drug-trip-giant-puppet-circus-hallucination scene, but the song rang no bells for me.

And, of course, as we were walking out of the theater my mother and I turned to each other and said "it's like Iraq!" except that the protesting hasn't reached the same fever pitch (was that only inspired by the draft?) I was crying at several points, partly because of the familiar anger and frustration of the students as they kept protesting and protesting and the war still went on and on.

More people should go see this movie.

Just had a moderate earthquake in the SF Bay Area, significant shaking for about 20-30 seconds, probably a nearby mag 5

In my place, some minor items fell off bookcases, but that's it. But I've been lax in my disaster preparedness. If anything, this earthquake had better get me off my lazy ass to get a go bag and some stockpiles ready.

Hope everyone else in the Bay Area is OK.

Sexualized for girls, anyway. I'm really glad my daughter's too young for this garbage. Newsweek ran an article on costumes for girls, in which they pointed out that a lot of them are just scaled-down versions of adult sexual-fantasy wear.

Boys, on the other hand, can be fully-dressed doctors, astronauts, etc. (And anything violent you can think of, of course -- it's not a total win for boys either.)

Oh, and the 300-American Revolution mashup is back.

I need to assemble a go-bag too :b though my flashlight will probably be a little PhotonLight LED of some color or other-- I have a red one attached to my keys (preserves night vision) and a borderline UV/violet one attached to my purse zipper (helps verify uranium glass while shopping).

I was in San Jose- the quake started with a bang, and felt very jagged and sharp (vs rolling).

Usually quakes in the 4-5 range start off ambiguous: "What's that noise- is someone walking on the roof?" or "Odd, I'm swaying- am I dizzy?... Oh, must be a quake." Nothing ambiguous about this one.

Last month I blogged a visit to a Halloween store. Can you spot the difference between women's costumes and men's (or plus-sized women's*) costumes? The cultural assumptions of that store were squicky**.

If I can find some hexagonal corrugated cardboard then my partner and I will go as Colony Collapse Disorder, because that's scary.

---------
* Not that the physical store had plus-sized costumes.

** and as I blogged, the squick wasn't about visible skin per se. I'd just gotten back from burning man- everything and anything, and therefore nothing, is a costume. But those store costumes? ick.

And it's been making me giggle madly while my colleagues stare blankly, so I feel compelled to share.

The Metonymy Bag

I am entirely unsurprised that political theorists who hang out *here* would get the joke! *grin*

*chortle*

As a onetime professional ontological engineer, I love it. And there are so very many follow-on lines.

That which contains me does not let me sag.
Professor's got a brand new bag.
Does this bag contain itself, Professor Russel?
Well-contained you are - Yoda

Thanks for the recommendation of "Across the Universe". I had high hopes of it based on Taymor's name and one bit of a trailer I saw, but then I started hearing negative comments that troubled me no matter how hard I ignored them. It's nice to know someone who sees things in somewhat the same way I do* thought well of it.

With luck I'll get to see it in the next week, though preparations for my son's wedding seem to be taking over everything just now.

* I can tell by the way you describe the movie and the fact that you know and like Taymor's work. And of course there are puppets!

I had been thinking of seeing it, and posted about it here a few weeks ago, not being sure if Ishould take a look. I guess I'll go see it unless it's already disappeared, to be replaced by the latest Adam Sandler opus.

About the reaction to its music... I was too much of a square teenager in the 1960s to appreciate the music of the era when the era was actually going on, but I went to college in 1973, and eventually caught up with the music. It helped that my first-ever friend was a drummer, who introduced me to the likes of Gentle Giant and King Crimson. (Hearing "In the Court of the Crimson King" early in the movie Children of Men resonated very strongly for me.)

It's a perfectly lovely Container for the Thing Contained! (Do you perchance also have a Thing Contained for the Container?)

There's something strange going on with one of my picture galleries. The thumbnail version of one photo shows a blank spot. If I click on that blank spot though, I am correctly taken to the full-sized photo. Do you know how to fix this? Another photo had the same problem and I wound up deleting it before reloading the whole thing, but I'm curious to know if there's another way, especially since the deleting/reloading takes the photo away from its current position within a gallery. There may be a way to set the order in which photos are displayed, but I haven't figured it out.

Sarah, I really like it. I'm afraid my first inclination might have been a too-cutesy "Oh, Bag It!"

Not labelled as such, but now that you mention it, I feel I must acquire one and label it forthwith!

Something I've recently seen: "I'm skeptical of skeptics of skepticism, but only because, as another strange loop, I'm fond of the infinite regress." (posted by one Ken Cope)

Seriously, I'm glad it wasn't the Hayward Fault.

* In deference to people who don't like or can't eat chocolate, we also have fruit goodies, plus an assortment of salty snacks to cleanse the palate between bouts of chocolate.

Xopher, #369: My favorite Christmas movie is Lord of the Rings. Thank you Peter Jackson, for giving me something I associate with the holiday season that doesn't make me want to hurl!

Jen, #401: I had occasion to go into the local Halloween Superstore recently, and (having heard variations on your plaint several times) I spent some time while I was there looking at the girls' and women's costumes. I am pleased to report that there was quite a wide range of selections for both, not all of which were of the sexual-fantasy type. In some cases there were multiple versions of a character, one sexualized, the other not. But if I'd been looking for a costume for myself, or my partner's daughter, and not wanting one that made the wearer look like a hooker, I'd have had at least as many different options as the other kind.

Hayward: "It's not my fault!"

Or as Lex Luthor said in 1978's Superman before dropping a nuclear bomb on California and after giving Our Hero a kryptonite necklace: "We all have our faults. Mine is in California."

Your friend's experience has been my experience of most small to moderate quakes- you know something is wrong, but you can't immediately tell what. My internal dialog is something like: "Huh? Odd. Hmmm. Oh. quake."

Last night: "Quake! F**k!" The combination of being close to it (10 miles) and on mud not bedrock makes it worse.

It was a good quake, all considering- large and jagged enough to scare folks into updating their earthquake kits. I've spent part of the morning helping my family with kit and go-bag design.

If you play with the ABAG hypothetical earthquake shake map, a 6.8 quake on Calaveras causes only moderate shaking in most of Berkeley, with stronger shaking only right by the Bay (flat and (ancient and dried) mud). In contrast, a 6.9 on the Hayward would cause violent shaking throughout Berkeley.

For once, I get to be part of the majority. And when you seem to spend your whole life swimming upstream, it's nice to fit in once in a while.

And my house would fall down. Probably.

Thanks, Xopher.

An ontological engineer designs ontologies of software objects. The object of the exercise* is to design an ontology which is complete, consistent, and useful for the application the software is to implement. An ontology can be used as a framework or high-level design with which to implement a software program.

Software objects are modular pieces of software that have attributes and actions that can be performed on them. Objects can be related by inheriting attributes and/or actions from each other, or by other relations like containment, association, ownership, etc. Often an ontology will be designed as a general solution, that can be implemented for specific requirements by specializing some of the objects, i.e., creating new objects that inherit from the old ones and change the attributes or actions to match the requirements.

Software ontologies often model real-world systems of objects. For instance, if I'm building a set of programs to automate processes in a business, part of the job of designing an ontology is finding a useful mapping between the parts of the process and the objects. I might need to model the roles of the people who take part in the process ("Responsible Manager", "Analyst", "Dispatcher"), the documents that are created and transferred as part of the process, and the state a document may be in ("Drafted", "Approved", "Pending Input").

Have I made it clear?

* Decartes made me do it.

Yep. The rest of us type <rz>.

Ontologies? Haven't Our Hosts published a few of those?
"(Ontologies. Not anthologies.")
Humph. Personally I think ontologies would be an excellent subject for an anthology.

We recently had our 1914 Edwardian retrofitted (one with a 'soft story' ground floor- the type that most needs a retrofit).

If applicable, I'd be happy to talk / email about our experiences in getting that done for a reasonable cost.

And anyways, houses are very unlikely to fall down. Get badly damaged? Possibly. If you have a place to Drop, Cover, and Hold On, so that you're protected from flying objects (and you don't try to walk, even to an internal doorway- that's outdated), then you've eliminated the single largest cause of earthquake injuries.

(Also, if you read anything or get a much-fwd'd email about a 'triangle of life'? That's a crock of dangerous and flat-out wrong advice. Even the theory behind it is inapplicable to countries with earthquake codes, and in practice his claims are just wrong.)

Are you trying to say that every time you go to the Bay Area, there's a quake?

Jen @ #440, she's already got that "no, no, don't take a picture of me now" look down pat.

She's cute as a bug, Jen.

More yeast isn’t going to do it and buy it in bulk (Red Star is quite good). Get a small jar, and put it in the fridge, put the rest in a sealed container in the freezer. Pure Gluten is easy to find, I add about a tbsp to a loaf.

On food and cooking, 2nd edition is out of print? Yikes. I’m glad I bought it when I did, but that’s amazing (given how long the 1st edition was in print).

Try Cookwise (it has lots of other useful stuff), it’s a troubleshooting manual on lots of food issues.

For bread basics, I’d recommend The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Joann: Dry them. Easy way, in a low oven for a couple of hours. Other way, tie them up with string, and leave them in a shaded nook of the kitchen (for serrano, the former is the more reliable). Then grind them as need. Otherwise, soak them in vinegar.

rikibeth: Any tips (other than the steam bath I fake with a dedicated piece of cast iron, and the high start heat) for getting better crust on my loaves in my home oven?

Re Earthquakes: I was watching something on TV the other day, about differences in geology and apparent effect of earthquakes, as well as cultural response. Apparently a 3.0 is a big deal in New York but (said in a German accent, as the seismologist was german), “In Los Angeles they just say, Oh, an earthqvake, and go back to drinking their coffee.”

We were a little bit more than five miles SW of the epicenter of the Nisqually quake, but it took my son and I a bit of time to recognize what was happening, because there had been concrete pumping going on across the road for weeks beforehand. There was a pause before I said "Oh, it's an earthquake" and then a longer pause before I said, "It's a big (6.8) earthquake."

The stupidest reaction I've witnessed to an earthquake of any size was in 1981, when the Goat Rocks quake rolled through at 5.1 or so and my upstairs neighbors ran out onto a slippery steel fire-escape over a thirty foot drop.

I sort of like 5.0-5.7 quakes in my neighborhood, they're rarely dangerous and yet big enough to make you feel you've been through something (if I lived on wet clay, I'd probably have a different opinion). My husband is less comfortable with the idea, but he was in the Silmar quake in '71, and hadn't been living in LA long enough to aclimate.

Richter 3: You mean people notice it here? It's pretty much below my threshold.

On Food and Cooking: Amazon has it in stock. (Having just had a potluck lunch, I've had more than enough food for today ....)

I was also hugely amused to discover that one of my pieces has become the de-facto standard of behavior in the community. Wish they'd taken to it earlier; I might have stayed.

But hanging out there, thinking about the way I felt when I left (best expressed by Philip Larkin in No Road), I felt a sonnet coming.

Since we declared the road betwen us closed
And let the gates be covered by the vine
That grows between the trees, and seems to twine
Around the very sunbeams, I supposed
You went on very well without me here.
I'd come through once before, and found the place
So little changed, the well-remembered space
As painful as before, and still as dear.
Today, the vines are withered in the frost,
The wall-stones slick and chilly on my hands
As, pausing at the top, I see it stands
Unchanged outside, but all its comfort lost.
And then I slide back down, for now I know
The road remains, but there's nowhere to go.

Really a cute kid. I want my grandkids to look like that (it's far too late for my kids).

Lovely, abi.

Thanks.

Everybody: I'm thinking of using some to make corn muffins, which would probably go great w/ pork chops later this week. Anybody suggest a good light, fluffy, sweet-ish recipe? (I've got original NYT, new NYT, Heritage NYT, Beard American, Fannie Farmer, and a 1975 JOC, but no clue as to how to sight-read the recipes for fluffy and sweet.)

This idea - presented intially as a hypothetical quickly mutated (via BoingBoing I think) into stories that it was really happening, but as far as I know, it was just a hypothetical at that stage.

Now, it seems, it has become a reality. See:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/31/captcha-busting_trojan/

Those look really great! Printed out. I'll use them, all right, but not this week, as macaroni and cheese is on the menu tonight.

By "corn muffins," we US types don't generally mean "we've added corn kernels to this," but rather corn flour or meal. Cornbread in a muffin format.

For some reason, probably having to do with my mother being a rotten cook at that time (she's better now) we never made our own cornbread/muffins when I was a kid, except for a mix, so I've not got a family recipe.

Ahhh! Sorry to be less helpful than I meant to be, but at least you'll have some nice cheese muffins.

I often want to try cornbread things, but am never sure what to use. Is the cornmeal sold for making polenta the same stuff used in cornbreads?

Your poor little yeasts are starving. They need some sugar. (You *can* make bread without it, but it's harder.) Try about the same volume as the salt. Also, make sure the liquid ingredients are in an acceptable temperature range (from room temperature to a little over body temperature; too cold and the yeast will be dormant, too warm and you'll kill them).

I saw it last week as an escapist treat after I was informed that I was being "impacted" by my company's latest round of layoffs. Worked pretty well, at least for a while!

[Job search leads and contacts in the Portland OR area appreciated.]

They teased me in the morning for not noticing (we had a waterbed, I was more amused that I noticed neither her arising, nor coming back to bed).

When there was a 3.6 in Watsonville (I was in Monterey) I found out about it in the afternoon. My reaction, "there was an earthquake?" Everyone else (it was a barracks, and most people were from the mid-west) was, "WHAT! Didn't you feel it?!?!!!".

Me: A 3.6, in the middle of night, miles away? Are you nuts?

What kind of work are you looking for, and what areas are you willing to commute to?

Bruce

abi, #449, wonderful visuals

I've been in two quakes -- one when we were first transferred to the Seattle area (1963, JESR) and so I was trying school again and our class was in a portable. The teacher had us get out of the portable which was good because it fell off its supports. The second one was very tiny and here, where I live two blocks from our train yard and assumed it was bad train mating until I saw the news.

We usually have 15-20 trick-or-treaters here so I bought a variety box of full-size bars. We only had 12 tonight, and not one I was expecting, so I have 18 bars left. I don't know what to do with most of them. I'm not that fond of chocolate.

It was the seismologist's thought that anyone in LA would even notice a 3!

The previous, rubber pencil eraser loaf was:

(following numbers in grams)
300 whole wheat flour
100 oat flour
100 barley flour
175 water
175 whole milk
9 salt
9 dry yeast

Tonight, I added 50 grams of pure gluten.

The loaf came out like the dense-but-edible loafs I had gotten with just pure whole wheat flour, but the top of the crust, about half an inch, was the think pencil eraser stuff.

It smelled way too good, so I et it. Tasted pretty good. Will see how good it is in the morning when it's smell isn't wafting through the house.

I think I'm close. a couple of people recommended sugar. same amount as the yeast it sounds. So, I'll add 9 grams of sugar on the next loaf and see how that goes.

(depending on if tonights loaf is edible in the morning, the next loaf may be tomorrow night, or in several days.)

Also, when I add the milk, it's right out of the fridge, so maybe that's too cold? If so, I seriously underestimated bread.

I can't seem to get the big air bubbles sort of bread, though. I might just have to buy some white bread flour and see how that cooks up.

And I bought the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. It was the cheapest of the books recommended. will have to see what it says about whole grain bread recipes.

That's the "man in the middle" attack.

Bruce Schneier explained it in his "Applied Cryptography" book many years ago. His example was with credit cards, but same concept.

My suggestions/Info dump:

Oat and barley are low in gluten, and are working against you at this point.

Sugar does help wheat breads, for flavor at least. There's a reason that honey wheat is a common version.

Bread flours are normally in the 13% protein range, AP in the 12, and Whole wheat probably around 11% or so. So your 300g of flour is probably going to have on the order of 33-39 grams of gluten -- your 50 may be a bit high. You may also want to make sure that the gluten is well hydrated before you add it to the mixture, since the kneading operation that happens before it's hydrated really doesn't help much. Also, salt tightens up the gluten, making kneading less effective.

I'd try this:

Mix 1/2 the flour, extra gluten, all the liquid + yeast and sugar enough to make a glopy mess. It's more batter than dough at this point. This should be doable by hand in the bread machine. Let this sit for 20 minutes. That should hydrate the protein in that portion of the flour, and give the yeast a chance to start on the starches in the four. Add the rest of the flour and start the bread machine cycle. If you can add salt near the end of the kneading cycle, do that, if not, add it with the second half of the flour.

I'm now thinking of running strips of grip-liner (a 1mm thick shelf-liner) along the front edges of my bookshelves. I've used it to keep kitchen items from slipping on RV shelves- if it can keep plates and glasses in place at 65mph, it ought to help keep a few more books shelved in case of quake. Or would the uneven surface cause damage to a book's edge?

That comment took about an hour to appear on the "Recent comments" sidebar and in my "View all by," but not here in OT94 itself. That one should be #470, and this metacomment #471.

That's the only large quake I know happened while I lived in southern California, though I'm sure there were any number of small ones; I was there for a year and a half, after all.

And I'll join in the praise for Jen's photo and abi's sonnet! (Jen, I expect that your adorable kid will be mortified when faced with that photo in 10 or 12 years, but quite proud of it eventually.)

Serge, do you think your friend could be to blame for the seismic action? My uncle from the South Bay told me he was *very* glad he'd decided to move some bottles of wine off a marble table top not long before the quake hit.

I've used metal shelving, with the shelves installed upside down. (This is an old technique for storing canned foods: the jars will stay on the shelf.)

Just not anywhere close to that degree.

"What did you tell me to dream?"
"I told you to dream the aliens off the Moon."
"They're off the Moon all right. They're here."

Yes. The polenta stuff is coarse grind; other recipes can use that or something a bit finer. I've never been able to find the right stuff for making zaletti, which are Venetian cookies/cakes, sort of torpedo-shaped. I love them, my husband hates them, and the local Italian bakery doesn't make them right (IMO).

Thanks, btw, for sharing. One forgets how much one has internalised things. Bread seems much simpler, to me, than it is, and I think nothing of dashing off, a loaf, forgetting how many subtle things I am doing, unawares.

About grip-liner: it's useful, but there are times it can be too sticky. We have it on an upper kitchen shelf that I can just reach stuff in, and I blame it for the demise of a champagne glass. On an ordinary shelf, touching a glass at the bottom with another glass will cause it to scoot slightly; on a lined shelf, the same glass will overbalance and fall down.

It's compressible; as long as you've not got collector's editions for which totally pristine condition is the whole game, it's probably not a problem for the edges of the books.

Personally, I'd be more inclined to just tack up strips of moulding.

When we lived in Palo Alto, we had a number of bookshelves, all of which were affixed to the walls at the top by means of L-brackets. We missed Loma Prieta by just about a year, so heaven knows what would have happened under extreme conditions, but no books went astray during several years involving the odd 6.4 (admittedly some distance away) and less.

The main criterion for being woken up by a night quake was, for me, did the windows rattle? You probably had to be in a old house for this to happen, but it was fairly effective. It was also hard to miss all the car alarms going off, or all the people out in bathrobes turning them off. (5.something in Livermore, about 30-35 miles away)

I can recommend a bathtub full of water as being a fairly delicate quake detector; it was good for sensing a 4.7 150 miles away when I was in a 4th-floor apartment in Venice. The water suddenly went slosh-slosh, several inches high, when I'd been lying perfectly still. It didn't seem quite like the usual morning episode where my downstairs neighbor ran her wash; for one thing, there was no accompanying noise. Later that day, people started sending me news reports of a quake. (I must say, when you're in the tub 4 floors up in a 500-year-old-building, your first thought is "but I *can't* get outside!")

The thick hard crust can also be due to insufficient kneading, which comes back to bread machine problems. Gluten develops- polymerizes- through proper kneading, and can either not happen if the dough isn't worked enough or, strangely enough, if it's worked too much especially in the presence of fats. Which, again, not a bread machine person, but I'm guessing that the kneading cycle of your machine is not long enough for the gluten to be fully extracted from the whole wheat flower and stretched into the nice elastic network of tangled protein chains that makes bread light.

I will write him another defend-the-Constitution fan letter and maybe send money this time.

Greg: I'd not worry about the milk, unless you are buying raw milk.

I don't think they *will* tell Joe where he can go, but it's a pleasant thought.

Just got back from a work review & my brain still hurts. Was told of a recent paper in SCIENCE that's also available from www.pollinator.org as a 330k pdf.

The article is on a metagenomic survey of hives, i.e identifying all the organisms they could detect by RNA sequence, not just bees. They found the presence of a pathogen, Israeli acute paralysis virus, was strongly correlated with hives that experienced CCD.

I saw the summary in Science News a few weeks ago. It's apparently a common disease in Australia, and the areas of the US with the worst problems were getting imported queen bees.

Greg et al. on the bread:
I'm not a baker but I do work with yeast. It's a living thing - needs to be treated with appropriate care. Dried yeast, depending on storage conditions can go off over time. If you're not getting fluffy bread, the yeast may also be a cause.

Try proofing your yeast (as suggested by Carrie @342), not to add to the bread machine but to see if the yeast is still alive. If the yeast is starting to go off, you might want to add more to the recipe. But better to buy more yeast.

Winemakers buy in fresh lots of dried wine yeasts every year & they never use last year's yeast no-matter how well stored. If you only get one chance a year to get the wine right, it's just not worth the risk.

BTW, anyone here ever try using wine yeast for breadmaking?

I'm also somehow on Bill Richardson's list.

Thankyou! I'll try making some cornbread soon, I think. Do you have a tried and true recipe I could try?

I looked up a recipe for zaletti (mmm, looks good): do you want very fine cornmeal for them? Because the recipe I saw suggests quick cooking polenta as a substitute - or does that change it altogether, and no point unless you can get fine?

My original request for light fluffy corn muffins (or cornbread) because although I've got a ton of recipes, I don't have any heuristic for how they mught turn out--nor have I tried any of them for that reason. Aside from more baking powder = lighter (I assume) I don't know the rules for that particular game.

All the zaletti I've made, including with polenta-grade meal, have been as heavy as the torpedoes they resemble. Unlike a couple of bakeries in the Lista di Spagna near the railway station ...

I'm beginning to think that corn and I are a doomed pairing. Or maybe they have different meal in Venice.

The base rules for muffins of all kinds being quickbreads are:
1)mix dry ingredients in one bowl sifted.
2)mix wet ingredients in second bowl.
3)if your fat is solid cut it into the dry.
4)well the center of dry ingredients
5)combine wet into dry rapidly and mix quickly and lightly till just combined.
Muffins get tough and heavy if you over mix. They are poofed by both the baking powder and steam.

let's see. Are you baking in pans? Freeform loaves will get better crusts, the pans shield them.

Do not use washes except for water on loaves you want crisp-crusted. The fat in egg, milk, and butter/oil washes will soften the gluten. Water toughens it. Egg white gives shiny, shattery crispness, but more from the egg white itself -- the bread under doesn't get much crisper.

Are you using a pizza stone or quarry tiles in your oven? That, again, contributes to the falling-oven effect, and, combined with steam, can enhance the results you want.

Other than that... dunno. Your steam bath goes in when you pre-heat, right? If you put it in at the same time as your bread, you'd be sacrificing some initial heat to the water, I guess, but if it's in when you pre-heat, then you're doing everything right.

Even in pasteurized milk, there's a thing(oh, lord, I am forgetting my schoolwork!) that inhibits gluten formation if you don't scald the milk. Not an enzyme. I think it's that you need to denature the milk proteins? Anyway, you can get away with using cold milk in a white bread recipe because the flour has plenty of gluten already, but you are using a recipe that's low in it, and even with your added gluten, you want to give your bread every advantage.

We did this in lab work in school and the scalded-milk bread was absolutely better. It was even superior to the bread where the milk was heated to yeast-proofing temperature first (95-110F depending on your yeast) but not scalded (heated to just-below boiling, say 205, you want bubbles but not foaming up) and then cooled to yeast-proofing temp.

Scald your milk and see what happens.

It was a little flat, but tasty, and with a nicely structured crust.

DELICIOUS pizza dough.

Stone, falling oven, freeforn loaves.

Cast Iron skillet on the floor of the oven, starting heat about 500F.

Warm water into the pan as the bread enters.

thermostat dropped 5-10 minutes in.

I get decent loaves (no complaints) but I want a thicker crust, more tooth to it.

I think I need a more "Pro" oven. Higher heat options, and a steam injector.

I think I also need to get some diastatic malt.

I've heard that some wineries have a vintage tradition of making their bread with wine yeast during the harvest period. Hence my interest is other folk's experiences.

On bread: I had been on a bread-making kick in college. Once a week I would stay up overnight to work on school projects, but start by making bread dough in the shared kitchen (working overnight meant no one was in my way, nor was I in anyone else's). Get some dough going, kneed it, and then go work on the current project while the bread sat for an hour or so. Come back, kneed it some more, get back to work and let the dough sit for another hour or so. Come back, put the dough in pans, start the baking (and go back to work). By the time everyone else was waking up, fresh bread.

I'd have to hunt to find the recipe I had been using, but after the first batches I tended to improvise. Powdered milk, brown sugar, eggs and wheat germ (along with flour and yeast) were part of the mix.

It appears that Mythbusters were filming about three miles from my house today, and it hasn't been the first time. I had the day off and could have gone out to the lake and watched -- tomorrow I have to be at work in Fresno.

Lots of variation.

The trick lies in adding sugar and nutrient in gradual amounts over the course of the fermentation, and frequent monitoring with a hygrometer to make sure you don't put so much sugar that the wine turns into a sickly sweet mess.

Hank Reinhardt's wake will be this Saturday, November 3, at 3:00 p.m. in Athens, GA.

Toni wanted to make sure those who are interested know about it.

The service will be at 3:00 p.m. at the following location:

Bernstein Funeral Home Inc
www.dignitymemorial.com
3195 Atlanta Hwy
Athens, GA30606

(706) 543-7373

Julie Wall's going to organize the speakers; .... able to bring in spears and shields to decorate it, and Hank will be able to hold a sword.

There will be a wake afterward, and Toni said we'll be catering it ourselves, so a covered dish or something to drink will be welcome.

Please let Julie know via email (jlwall@usa.net) if you want to speak or you have any questions.

Finally, the University of Georgia has a home football game that day, so hotel rooms in Athens could be scarce.

Damn them.

Thanks. Are there any particular ingredients or combinations of ingredients that give better results? (Like: buttermilk vs regular milk or other liquid, grind of cornmeal, additional white flour as in yeast bread, one fat vs another, laden swallow vs unladen?)

And to turn tourists into monsters?

(Not that anyone here except Power Twin, Sisuile, and Tracie is going to care, but trust me, it's REALLY cool.)

fx: uncomprehending stare. ??

Have you checked the cookbaooks at the Gutenberg Project: Look under Library of Congress class: home economics (LX)? They have a nice assortment of genuinely 18th and 19th century cookbooks.
(Must go home and grab those of Sir Kenelm Digby and Mrs Beeton ....)

With cooking you are making an equation of different chemistry traits of the ingredients. It's a matter of the type of end result you want. I don't mind dense so long as it is soft and cooked all the way through but some prefer foamy peaks that crumble and instant dissolve. There is a wide range for texture from bread to cake.

Milk is "heavier" than water. More fat content to the milk the denser the results but the flavour is better and even dense the extra fat makes the dough softer. But too much fat makes batter gooey paste; this would be why those horrid little fair style doughnuts are gross when they cool. The corn meal will try and soak up the water content in the batter. Finer corn meal is lighter but more surface area and soaks up more water. The more water the corn soaks up the more the starch in it wants to gel. Solid fats need good technique to distribute it evenly through the dough as the nodules of fat form little pockets in the batter. Butter is better for flavour but has traces of it's own water in it compared to lard or shortening.
Eggs are for binding things together in the absence of gluten chains, and trapping moisture but are temperature sensitive for cooking. Gluten chains are desired for bread but make anything else bricks; the more you work the batter the more gluten chains you get. Lower gluten flour can help.
The main goal of quick breads is a light hand and fast cooking. Ovens tend to be a touch hotter for them.
Overall you want a flour to water ratio of 2 to 1 for pancake batter, 3 to 1 for quick breads, dessert cakes being in between. 4 to 1 is bread dough and pastry. 1 to 1 is crepes.

He may have meant #517, and is talking about the episode in the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius, where she rebuild an espresso machine. It starts about here and works forward.

Jon Meltzer @524 (if you did mean #517 and not #519) No, I don't think I can pull that off, although the thought of the machine that makes coffee that perfect is enticing.

Serge @526. I have to side with the Baron von Wulfenbach here, and answer that there are some things perhaps even Sparks should not tamper with.

I need to go and find out what sort of sausages are best for fountain construction.

1 oz ginger root peeled and grated
1tsp cream of tarter
1 lb sugar
1 lemon rind zested and juice
1 gallon boiling water

1 oz yeast

Uh, mix well the let cool to warm and then add yeast let ferment then skim the filter then bottle then rest. We bottled it into 2L Coca Cola bottles and it self carbonated and went down like soda. We also like stronger ginger.

Greg made me see I am probably more invested in that subject than I realise (which is saying a lot, since I know I eyeballs deep in it), and my identifications make aspects of the debates more intimate than I realise, which makes it really difficult deal with.

I don't know that I am so immune from stooping to torture as the rest of you seem to be; for reason different from Ursula's I am aware of how easy it is for, "decent, honorable" people to lose their grip on what is/isn't right.

And this "debate" in the broader sense, makes it harder to for lots of people to hold to that bright clear line.

Someone said, push come to shove I would ponder how the people here would think of me, were I to cross that line. It's true. The good opinion of people I value matters enough to be a constraint. When the public sphere has made the question debateable; so that people who don't have the local levels of social pressure I do, who are being told that torture isn't just acceptable, but a moral imperative (and I still have to call that columnist a dipshhit) and don't get the same level of institutional repugnance I was given (because the boundary zone has gotten less clear; and people I know have said that, in print, they now think some of the things once anathema, might not be out of bounds. The people who are in the lower ranks now all enlisted post 9/11, at this point a number of them have done it post Iraq. A lot of the experienced sorts have gotten out. It ain't what it was) might be more easily convinced that it's not the horror it is.

So the conflicting pressures (some of which CRV was saying were exculpatory) make it easier for "decent" people to become "indecent".

So, as I said, thank you for your faith, and support.

I'd go through my cookbooks, but they're mostly in the magic boxes, and the ones that are out are, I'm sure, not useful here.
(Yes, they are maddeningly imprecise about things, aren't they? I have a recipe for frijoles that calls for a '25-cent piece' of salt pork. It was written, I think, around 1910, give or take a decade. On the other hand, I think it's possible to use those old recipes, with a little knowledge of cup and spoon sizes.)

On second thought, I do have the Kansas Home Cook Book out, and it may have something useful. I'll check when I get home.

A teeny part of my mind thought: "Don't they know that water doesn't help sooth The Burn?"

I'm a bad person.

Uh, actually barring a few exceptions, almost all commercially available wine yeasts are Saccharomyces cerevisiae as indicated by genetic typing.

SEVENTY-FIVE RECEIPTS FOR
PASTRY CAKES, AND SWEETMEATS
BY MISS LESLIE, OF PHILADELPHIA.
1832

GINGER BEER.
Put into a kettle, two ounces of powdered ginger, (or more if it is not very strong,) half an ounce of cream of tartar, two large lemons cut in slices, two pounds of broken loaf-sugar, and one gallon of soft water. Simmer them over a slow fire for half an hour. When the liquor is nearly cold, stir into it a large table-spoonful of the best yeast. After it has fermented, bottle for use.

and next A Stormtrooper rocking out to techno in Shibuya.

Followed by three Stormtroopers doing the Crab dance... poorly.

And lastly - A Stormtrooper and a Dark Lord of the Sith get down with the Four Tops.

This concludes our randomly absurdist moment on Making Light, we hope you have enjoyed the performance. Good Night, and Good Luck.

I put the salt in first, so it would be underneath the flour and away from the yeast.

2/5 of the flour was King Richard's Bread Flour.
(which says contains malted barley flour as yeast food)
1/5 was whole wheat flour
1/5 was oat flour
1/5 was barley flour

I warmed the milk, but didn't scald it, because, well, because I don't want to have to scald the milk if I can get around it.

And I added 10 grams of sugar just before I added the yeast.

I think I had visions of making some loafs for thanksgiving when I got the bread machine. Now that turkey day is getting closer, I hope I can figure out a recipe that works reliably.

The machine says it'll be done in 4.5 hours, so will report in sometime tomorrow.

Leslie, Eliza. Miss Leslie's Complete Cookery. Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches/ 51st ed. Philadelphia: HC Baird, 1871.

Her recipe for "Molasses Beer": "To six quarts of water, add two quarts of West Indian molasses; half a pint of the best brewer's yeast[*]; two tablespoonfuls of ground ginger; and one tablespoonful of cream of tartar. Stir all together. Let it stand twelve hours, and then bottle it, putting three or four raisins into wach bottle. It will be much improved by substituting the juice and grated peel of a large lemon, for one of the spoonsfuls of ginger."

[*: IIRC at the time, this would've been a foamy liquid soup of proofed yeast.]

The oldest specific gingerish beverage which Cresswell cites is "Ginger Pop", attributed to Mrs. Charles H. Gibson, Maryland 1894: "Two pounds of brown sugar, one large tablespoonful of the fibrous part of ginger, one dessertspoon cream of tarter[sic], pour on it two gallons of boiling water, when milk[-]warm stir in one pint brisk yeast; make it in the morning, bottle it at night, It will be ready for use in three days."

There's also a "Lemon Beer" from 1861 Canada, whose primary flavoring agents are 6 oz bruised ginger root, 1 oz. oil of lemon, and 6 lemons' worth of juice.

WRT bottling, I tend to use the bail-top bottles that some brands of beer are sold in, but which are also sometimes available at places like World Market/Cost Plus. You do have to lay down a supply of replacement rubber gaskets for repeated use, but it beats having to buy a bottlecapping gadget.

joann, #500, here in the south, many good cooks just use the Krusteaz mix.

Serge,, #520, tourists are frequently also monsters. They're also frequently completely ignorant of cars when they cross main roads.

Stefan Jones, #536, and there was an explosion and fire at the Domino sugar plant in Baltimore today and I was wondering if caramel was sliding into the bay.

I cannot tell you why I find this to be so wonderful, I just do.

Cooking 4 the Week

It's a "fancy cooking for busy working couples" sort of thing.

Shades of the Great Molasses Flood!

From this news story:

The complaint claims Warner Bros. and Rowling's representatives have been " rebuffed and treated rudely" in their attempts to engage in a dialogue with RDR Books.

"For example, while claiming not to have the ability or time to respond to plaintiffs' multiple 'cease and desist' letters because of a family tragedy, defendant instead was hawking foreign publishing rights to the infringing book in Germany," the lawsuit said.

BTW, it's just "Baron Wulfenbach" -- no von in there. (Curiously, there is a character in the strip with a von in his name, but he shows no signs of noble birth.)

Maybe the next loaf I try will be plain white bread. Something a bit more poofier in the crumb.

If you don't have a blowtorch (I'll admit I don't), fry the meat in a bit of very hot oil until all the sides are slightly brown (should take only a couple of minutes) instead. The recipe works with any cut of beef, with no need to adjust the time; I usually use my local supermarket's cheap top rump, which works out fine with this recipe.

Wing end? Obviously some foreign locution (or biology?) is in play here.

There is clearly a phenotypic difference between wine yeasts (which fall to the bottom of the vessel and ferment there) and beer yeasts (which float in a scum on the top of the vessel, except for S. carlsbergensis, used in lager making, which falls like wine yeast).

How do we distinguish one species of yeast from another? Should these be different species or, as they seem to be recognized at the moment, simply different strains of the same species? Where should we draw the line between these two?

I have considered moving to a commune solely for this reason.

When I was given a bread machine last year, I had to re-learn breadmaking (which I'd been doing for at least 40 years). What I knew was: liquid, fat, salt, sugar, yeast; maybe add a cup of flour and proof that if using a lot of whole grains; then add the rest of the flour, knead, let rise, punch down, put in pans, let rise again, and bake. The machine I have requires ingredients in a different order - liquid, fat, flour, salt, sugar, yeast last. (Other machines want a different order, and all seem, to me, to be very... unforgiving on quantities and order, compared to making bread by hand.)

After a couple of really hideous results, I started with basic white bread from the bread machine book, and once I got that behaving, started adapting. I've now got two favorites: one that's 1/3 whole wheat, 2/3 white flour, and another with 1 cup whole wheat, 2 of white, and one of oatmeal. I'm also sometimes letting the machine do the kneading/mixing, and taking the dough out after an hour or so, letting it rise in loaf pans, and baking it in the oven. Saves my wrists from kneading (which, dammit, I enjoy doing, but no longer can).

Someone may have already asked this, but can you search online for the manual for the particular model of machine you have? That would solve the order-of-ingredients issue, and might give you some proven recipes to start with.

Jules @560:
[Didactic]Classical taxonomy uses morphology but as more & more organisms are DNA-typed, inconsistencies turn up. How to reconcile the differences causes much argument. For example, I've worked with an isolate of S. cerevisiae which exhibits different physical characteristics depending on whether it's haploid or diploid, so looks alone aren't enough. I am biased toward DNA.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been isolated from really diverse environments ranging from alcoholic fermentations, to oak trees to clinical (eewww) situations. As a species (based on ITS sequence), it displays as much diversity within itself as you'd find between chimps & humans.

So it's not surprising that we get a large variation in phenotype. In practical terms, the baker, brewer & winemaker don't need to know if their favourite strain of yeast is a cerevisiae, bayanus, some other member of the Saccharomyces sensu stricto group, or a hybrid, as long as it makes a good bread, beer or wine.[/Didactic]

There's a good book "Fresh Bread in the Morning", by Annette Yates, with a variety of interesting recipes.

I admit mostly I use "wholemeal" setting, with 50 g wholemeal flour plus 150 g granary brown for texture/flavour, as our basic bread, but I have experimented with some others such as spelt flour, mixed seed, fruit and honey loaves.

Remembering the yeast, flour, salt and water is essential, whatever the recipe....

My google-foo is not strong enough to find a manual online anywhere. Although I did find a couple of people who posted "I have a BreadmanPlus TR-700 with no manual, anyone have one?" Unfortunately, none of them got a response.

Oh well. Keep experimenting I guess.

I've just discovered that Novacon is going on, not 20 miles from my current location, with several guests who I'd love to meet, and here I am, having missed the first two days and stuck at home tomorrow with a half-finished DIY job that'll need to be completed before Monday.

:(

My Googling produced two people who suggested (or had) contacted Salton at 1-800-233-9054 for a manual... Hope this helps.

Had a look myself. The parent company's site doesn't appear to do manuals, but http://www.megaheart.com/breadmachine_manuals.html has Breadman manuals downloadable as pdfs but alas, not for your exact model. Maybe a manual for a similar model is still useful?

Derivativity (fancy new word!) is not an indication of quality, either way, though.

Try this link. Hope this is the correct one. Though the the title page of the pdf says it's for a Breadman Plus, it doesn't have a model number listed; does contain a schematic of the machine though.

I looked at several manuals on that page. My machine is a TR700. The TR700SPR manual shows a machine that doesn't look anything like mine. Same with the model above and below it.

One thing is that while reading through the 800 model, which is, maybe, 70% similar, it says "add liquids first".

Ooops.

I've been putting the solids first, liquids second, yeast last.

Two weeks ago, I wouldn't have thought the order would make a bit of difference, but now I'm microwaving my milk, proofing my yeast, and dancing around with a dead chicken for every loaf, so, who knows.

I'll try that order on the next loaf and see what happens.

Thanks for the URL's. I may try contacting the company and see if they would send me a manual.

And I just have to say, I am sooooo glad I'm not kneading all these pencil erasers by hand.

;)

They add half as much salt as they add yeast.
I was matching the amounts.

And they add a whole lot more sugar than I tried putting in on the last loaf.

The note at the bottom says to add half a cup of pure gluten, which, again, I don't think I was putting near that much in the mix.

They use oil and milk powder. I wasn't adding oil. Just real milk.

Oy.

Of course, now I want to go and make another loaf right now, with two loafs sitting in the fridge.

sigh.

Having grooved out on & been in awe of the posters & comments as a mostly-lurker, I'm just happy I can make an occasional contribution.

Soon as I read the premise, I was thinking Gibson's meat puppets.

Greg, I looked this up before I saw Soon Lee's post, but it's a different direction, so it may help. This is the list of Breadman and as you see, the closest to your name is their Breadman Plus Brushed-C (Brushed Chromium?) TR700DL. They don't have a manual for that, but there's one for the Breadman Ultra TR700 (note, pdf). Maybe that will be close enough.

China’s military is one in and of its own. They have one of the biggest and precise armies in Europe.

Pardon me while I go off and bang my head against a wall.

But if I leave it on the counter, the dogs will eat it.

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.

;)

Yeah, OK, I should probably figure out a solution to that one. But thus far, I've got no bread of any quality to worry about ruining yet.

JESR, dogs. I've a ravenous pack of slovenly dogs who insist they are never fed enough.

Support Rudy Giuliani '08
Join Mayor Rudy Giuliani's Team Contribute Now at the Official Site

Aren't automated keyword matches wonderful things?

Or maybe that's just Ruby.

Of course the other solution to less than perfect bread is to slice it very thinly, toast it a bit, saturate it with cinnamon sugar butter, and then bake it in egg custard, but neither you nor I would benefit from that application, I'm sure. Although as things which are Very Bad For One go, it is at least wholesome and comforting.

I just checked the bread machine after it beeped. The loaf is huge. The top of the bread was nearly at the top of the pan. I don't think my best loaf got half that high up.

Reading the manual, it says the machine sits and does nothing for half an hour on the wheat cycle before it starts mixing. I don't know if that's for letting the flour soak or what, but I think the main problem was that meant on my previous eraser-loafs, my yeast was sitting in water for half an hour, not doing much.

This time, I put the water in first, oil, milk, salt, sugar, flour, gluten, and yeast on top of a dry pile of flour. And it came out awesome. It's twice as high as any loaf I ever did and way softer crumb.

Now all I have to do is figure out a dog-and-cat-safe way to store it not in the refridgerator.

Oh, and Marilee, turns out that manual is for my model.

Six bricks and I finally get a loaf to come out right. Thanks, everyone!

I've found that, with some dogs, there's nothing that won't give them gas. A certain otherwise-perfect pit I know, with seriously the cutest face that's ever existed on any creature, releases a toxic cloud reliably about once every five minutes. No matter what.

(And no, I didn't.)

Sounds like you need a bread vault.

Damn, I miss baking bread.

I was looking for the words to "The Rainbow Connection", because I'd forgotten one-and-a-half verses. I resorted to youtube. Input "rainbow connection", and you get five versions of the song, including - get this - Willie Nelson's.

Have a look. It's probably just me, but something about it moved me to tears.

At the con's end in old Saratoga,
I am finding no panels to go ta.
All the editors rush
Home to drown in their slush,
And the writers in scotches and soda.

Yesterday in B&N I saw a book related to the forthcoming film of "Beowulf" -- Neil Gaiman seems to be associated with the screenplay, along with someone else (it was just a quick glance on my way to another part of the store). Incidentally, anyone interested in Oriental monsters should check out the article on Chinese jewelry etc. in the latest Ornament magazine -- a couple of old "belt hooks" look remarkably like a cartoon dragon and Godzilla! I was also amazed to see coverage of costumes at an anime con, full-color and with a few remarkable pieces.

If I were going to do a calligraphy piece for a gift for a friend, using John M Ford's Against Entropy poem, who do I apply to for permission? Do I need to get permission? Do I pay a royalty for the use of the poem? Any advice would be much appreciated, as this would be the absolutely perfect holiday gift for my friend (who luckily more likely than not will not read this comment)

Actually, it was in the suburb of Needham, about five miles to the west.

A Fox news commentator (!) from Canada was taken to be a murder suspect because he looked nervous (and, I suppose, foreign).

Ibid, #603, I'm glad you finally got a manual!

(The artists involved: Kermit the Frog, Sarah McLachlan, Willie Nelson & Paul Williams, Dixie Chicks, and Jason Mraz.)

Another song (also covered by Willie Nelson) that tends to get me choked up is "American Tune"; either Willie's or Paul Simon's original version will do it. (I also have the Eva Cassidy version, but I prefer her "Fields of Gold".)

"Rainbow Connection" always makes me think of "A Boy and His Frog", by Tom Smith, mostly because, when he performs the song live, he often follows it with "Rainbow Connection".

This is a YouTube video of "A Boy and His Frog"; the audio is from Tom's album "Who Let Him In Here?", and was recorded live at Marcon. Tom heard about Jim's death just before the convention, wrote the song at-con, and debuted it in his concert the next day, leaving himself and most of the audience in tears.

But... there is some reprieve. Cold hastens staling by causing the starches to contact (I am glossing the details, bear with with me). If you reheat the bread (a 375 oven, or just slicing it and the toasting it) will re-gelatinise the starches, and the bread will be (mostly) what it was/should be.

TK

What is your climate like?

I've recently gone gluten free, so I'm looking at trying to bake my own bread, and I need to figure out how to keep it. I can't use my past breadkeeping habits* as a model, so I'm looking for ideas.

The gluten-free bread I've been buying comes frozen, so I keep it that way and toast it to thaw. That's also what I did with the more fragile wheat breads I used to get from the deli. It makes them crumbly and takes up a lot of space in my small freezer, so even though it works okay, I'm looking for options.

*The regular wheat bread I used to buy kept for weeks without molding, generally. I bought a bag a month ago for hubby and though it's stale, there's still no mold, possibly because we've only pulled out two slices in that time. It makes me nervous about preservatives just the same.

So that's why you're so well-bred.

Breakfast-bread fodder -- English muffins, bagels -- gets put in the fridge and toasted.

I leave "nice" bread outside the fridge. I usually finish it before it goes bad. Sometimes I'll cut a very fancy loaf in half, wrap and freeze one chunk, and leave the other have out.

But, all told, a neat trick.

I cut it first, then nuke it.
I need to find the box with the toaster, too.

Breakfast-bread fodder -- English muffins, bagels -- gets put in the fridge and toasted.
Stefan, I think that means you need a new refrigerator...

I think I'll try your wax-paper and cloth plan. I'm in Atlanta, where it is also humid, though not quite to that degree, so it might just work. I'm quite fond of the idea of being able to store my bread without tons of plastic. I'll likely produce a few eraser-like loaves of my own to experiment with. Now all that's left is to start baking.

(And then there were the lagomorphic grandparents. You know, the Yeaster Bunnies.)

"Oh, the pain, the pain..."

That's a complaint I hear all too oven.

True, no matter which way you slice it.

FTFY.

You need to experiment for your climate and bread type. Also big difference in the rate you consume the bread, a loaf a week or a loaf every other day but bread especially live yeast homemade should be allowed to breathe. Hard crust goes longer than soft crust. Dry breads like rye, wheat, oat go longer than soft breads like sweet rolls.
Use to have a kick ass buttermilk oat bread that when day old made perfect garlic bread for pasta. Tragic when a recipe that works is lost.

You are all being panned for those buns.

It had to be done. My apologies.

Xopher, #589: Must differ. We routinely put our homemade bread in the refrigerator, in a Ziploc bag, and don't see any evidence of drying out. Of course, we also go thru a loaf a week or thereabouts. But if we don't put it in the refrigerator, it gets moldy before it gets eaten; Houston molds are aggressive.

I eat a lot of toast because of mold's behavior.

On a related note - Fantasy and Science Fiction is holding a haiku contest, I think it looks like fun.

Okay, thanks!

I wanted to make scones last night. My scone recipe called for buttermilk. I went to two grocery stores and they only had 2% buttermilk. I used that last year and made the world's driest, densest brown bread - which could have been a coincidence, but I'm blaming it on the low-fat buttermilk.

I know you can add some lemon juice to sour regular old milk, but I don't really trust that when the recipe has so few ingredients. How important is the fat content in quick breads? Would I be better off using heavy cream?

(low-fat buttermilk my high-fat ass.)

So what you're saying is that my cinder-block brown bread is my fault.

That could be it. So WTF for re-branding ("2%!!") to make me think that a product has been "improved" in some way that is counter to my needs. It's why I have to convince my roommate every year that Whole Milk is now called "Vitamin D Milk", since they don't want to draw attention to the fact that there's OMG WHOLE FAT!!! OHNOES!!!! in the milk.

*sigh*

That's what I get for baking breads so infrequently.

I'll then go to work on Codex, a 2004 book by Lev Grossman, the book critic for Time magazine. I'm amused by Booklist's description: "Grossman ... adds a new twist to the emerging bibliothriller subgenre by combining rare books with computer gaming." Who knew there was such a subgenre?

I knew that the official reason for Abi's move to Holland wasn't holding water. Let's see... International Woman of Mystery and bookbinder. Yes, it all fits.

There was a small discussion here of Clifford Simak's Way Station a week or so ago, and it occurs to me that the widget in this book could be an updated version of the Talisman in Simak's book.

"Real" buttermilk, which is the cast-off whey from making butter., and "cultured" which has some bacteria added to sour it.

Now for the clever bit, because the US makes "sweet" butter, not cultured, all our buttermilk is of the latter variety.

Cultured butter is made from raw milk, and the cream is allowed to sit overnight, and starts to sour.

The remaining liquids will also ferment some.

Since we pasterise within an hour of milking, that doesn't happen and we take the milk we reconsititute after skimming the fat, add a dose of "culture" and create buttermilk.

Now, here's what you can do to get a higher fat buttermilk; use some of the "reduced" fat buttermilk and add it to a container of "whole" milk. Give it a couple of days, and your scones are golden.

If you feel adventurous (or dedicated) you can buy a pint of raw cream (here I have Strauss Valley Creamery; $7.99 per pint) let it sit out overnight, and then churn it, strain the whey and add that to your whole milk.

Since the milk has been pasteurised it will have no resident fauna and the stuff from the buttermilk will be good to go.

I do something similar when I want to make a lot of clotted cream. I buy a pint of Strauss. Let it rest in a cool (60F +/-5) overnight and then buy the amount I need for the clotted cream and inocculate it, let it rest overnight and do the clotting.

I have been amused to find myself going to Cookwise to defend something I know to be true, not because I read it there, but because it's just in my head and people don't believe me when I tell them.

So I owe you all some more thanks.

A couple of days in the refrigerator?

This has not improved the local quality of life in the month of June.

Now that they've added a traffic roundabout to the middle of Music Square, complete with a very large statue group of Very Naked People in a fountain, the RVs have even more trouble.

Actually, I'd be in favor of spiking heavy cream with buttermilk culture anyway, just because I like my scones super-rich, but then my basic scone recipe calls for 2 pounds of butter, a dozen eggs, and six cups of heavy cream, so you see where I stand.

oh. right. the rest of that formula? 16 cups all-purpose flour, 5 cups cake flour, 3 cups sugar, 1/2 cup baking powder, 2 tablespoons salt. 4 cups raisins, if you like raisins, or 4 cups other inclusions to taste. mix the dry ingredients, cut the cubed cold butter into them with the paddle blade of a standing mixer until crumbly, whisk the eggs and cream together, make a well and pour it in, turn the mixer on low until it just comes together. take out of the bowl and barely pat it into a 1" thick layer - do NOT roll. Cut, egg wash, sprinkle with sugar, bake until golden. A falling-oven technique will give a higher rise but is not necessary if you're baking a lot of different things and need to keep your oven at a constant temp. 375 is a good compromise. Dough keeps in the fridge for 2-3 days or freezes well.

This makes something like 50 scones. Depends how big you cut them, of course.

Recipe can be doubled, halved, or quartered without any weirdness happening.

Suggestions for other inclusions -- apricot-almond or dried-cherry-hazelnut; cranberry-orange (frozen sliced cranberries work, as do craisins: add orange zest and replace up to 2 cups cream with orange juice), cheddar-bacon-scallion (no, I can't really give quantities here, bacon should be fried crisp and crumbled, cheddar shredded, scallions chopped, I have never yet found an amount that was too much cheese), or what you will. If adding blueberries, stir in AFTER the dough stage or you will turn your scones entirely blue. Or, really, just put the blueberries in muffins where they belong.

I like these best without inclusions and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar on top.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/books/07cons.html?hp

Maybe we can tell them about PublishAmerica!

Can we explain 'free market capitalism' to them, also? (This really cries out for snark, you know?)

In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

It seems to me I remember a hooha over at Kos a few years ago discussing Ann Coulter's continual appearance on the NYT bestsellers list with a little bitty dagger next to the title noting something to the effect "includes book club sales."

Could Regnery possibly be (gasp!) inflating sales numbers to push its authors' books to the top of neutral bestseller lists?

Say it ain't so!

I am definitely keeping your scone instructions - we keep finding recipes that produce something like 6 scones. Feh.

This year we'll be trying scone and gingerbread recipes until we find our platonic ideal. I'm torn between whether to test each recipe exactly as written the first time, or whether I should use the helpful hints. On the one hand, I hate to waste my time making something disappointing, but on the other hand, I won't know if it's the recipe's fault or my own.

I'll have to check the recipe again when I get home. The first we're trying is from a 2 Fat Ladies cookbook since we've had good luck with previous recipes of theirs. I know it calls for self-rising flour and no other raising agents. After that we're trying one from Mark Bittman, which calls for heavy cream and at least one raising agent. We'll be adulterating all of them with cinnamon and bits of pecans.

I should also probably warn you that if you want to make the 50-scone quantity in a standing mixer, you'd better have a 20-quart machine on hand. That's way too much dough for a 5-quart KitchenAid.

Also, if you are using a recipe that gets its leavening from baking soda plus an acid (like buttermilk), IGNORE what I said about the dough keeping in the fridge or freezer. That reaction takes place as soon as the soda hits the liquid, and those scones should be cut and put in the oven very quickly. Baking powder is labeled "double-acting" for a reason: one chemical reaction happens right away, but the other is triggered by heat, and so baking powder doughs and batters are pretty stable under refrigeration and will still rise when they hit the oven. I make a week's worth of sour cream coffee cake batter at a time and keep it in a tub in my fridge at work. It bakes off beautifully every day, and keeping a film of plastic wrap over the surface of the dough keeps it from discoloring.

I'm talking shop again.

Food and cooking is one of the few topics I'm not scared to babble about among you fine folks.

About bread molding. The trend for grocery stores to stock breads more home made looking by covering the crust in well grit is an issue. All that extra flour, seeds, rough grains on the outside of the crust grows mold faster. Like topsoil for the little spores. Why yes I have seen it grow before my eyes. It also dirties up your toaster faster, fire hazard. Why yes I killed a toaster this way.

A moment of silence for my DeLonghi convection toaster oven.

Purchased around 1998, put in the dumpster 2007.

It still worked, but barely. I had to dial up the setting to "Dark" to get a moderately toasted slice. The heating elements were warped; the setting dial had been replaced with a piece of chopstick. The whole interior was plated with salmon oil spatters.

In its place, a Black and Decker that someone had left out by the dumpsters. Perfectly clean and functional and apparently barely used . . . just unwanted. No convection setting, no no-stick broiling pan, but it toasts toast in about half the time.

Moment of remembrance over. DING!

Here's another recipe I use all the time: mock shortbread. This is enough to fill one half-sheet pan:

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup confectioner's sugar
1 pound butter, melted

Sift the flour and confectioner's sugar together, pour the melted butter over them, and stir until you get a uniform dough. Press into a greased, parchment-lined half-sheet pan.

This is not meant to be eaten on its own: what it is is a super base for bar cookies of all sorts. I use it for lemon squares, chocolate macaroon bars, pecan bars, and, most recently, apple crunch tart. For most applications, I parbake it for 12 minutes at 350, apply whatever topping, and put it back to finish baking. However, that 12-at-350 is in a commercial convection oven. For a conventional oven, my original recipe for lemon squares said 22 minutes at 375, then 28 minutes once the lemon filling is on. I didn't bother parbaking for the apple tart. I just stuck it in for 40 minutes, and figured that long enough to cook the raw apples was also enough to bake the short dough, and it was.

This latest innovation came about because I had to make apple crunch tart for 170, and after peeling and slicing twenty quarts of apples, I was having no truck with rolling out pie dough and putting it in sheet pans (we haven't got small tart pans at work), so I decided I'd use the same thing that worked well for bar cookies.

Although I made extra (standard procedure), there were no leftovers at all. So I have to conclude it worked.

Using a toaster really is better than the oven's broiler.

Regardless, rikibeth is right, never roll.

For homesized recipes, I'd recommend not using a mixer, but rather doing it by hand. I tend to cut the butter in with knives, as though I were making short crust, or biscuits.

You're right, though, it's very like biscuits.

If I have to cut butter in by hand, I tend to use a fork. Unless I'm doing 18th-century re-enactment stuff, in which case, I just use my fingers. I never got the hang of the two-knives trick.

I can crack and separate eggs one-handed, though!

You know, a cheap bastard like me would have spliced a new plug onto the stump and gotten another toaster out of it.

Since a toaster is a high-draw item you'd probably need to tin the splices with solder, and because it's a kitchen appliance you'd want to put a shrink-wrap sleeve over the join.

And you can make a whole lot in practically no time.

And it doesn't seem to care how much you work it. It maintains its texture no matter what.

Real shortbread is a thing of beauty. But it can be finicky.

The mock shortbread is pretty well foolproof and well suited for the demands of a commercial kitchen. :)

Real shortbread is a pastry. For many pastry is a blessing or a curse. I think pastry is genetic and like many recessive traits skips generations; but I'm not bitter.

I actually had to teach myself to crack eggs with two hands, when started to separate them. I'd done it with one for so long that I was smashing the shells.

Is there any way to distinguish "cheap but reasonable cookware" from "cheap stamped metal from China"? Or should I just assume that anything fairly cheap will be the latter, and prone to rusting?

If you wipe them with an acid, and then use a light coat of oil, they will be less prone to rust.

Coat them, lightly, in oil, put them in a 375F oven for a while, and then be gentle with them.

Line them with parchment, when you use them, and never use soap.

So cut a lemon, rub the cut face across the pan and you should get a similar effect.

I have never yet found an amount that was too much cheese

Ah, a kindred soul.

-Gay people work exclusively in restaurants, and are weird.
-Jews are secretive and weird.
-Foreigners are batshit insane and sacrifice chickens twice hourly.
-The four types of women are the intimidated victim, the evil abuser, the police officer/legal-type heroine, and dead.
-The death penalty is TOTALLY THE COOLEST, and all of New York City demands it weekly.
-Prison rape is the most hilarious kind of justice.
-If you're a detective, you can essentially wear your pajamas to work every day.

-The cops always get the right person, even when they don't, because the wrong person is guilty of something.

-Only criminals ask to have a lawyer present and are familiar with basic civil liberties.

-Police brutality is justified, because cops never make mistakes, and the bad guys need roughed up.

-Cases make it through the criminal justice system speedily, without people changing jobs, haircuts, or displaying any evidence that a period of time of usually 4-18 months from crime to arrest to indictment to trial to decision has passed. Justice is only swift on TV and in the movies.

I was in Nashville just a few weeks ago, but didn't have occasion to drive thru that area. Perhaps I'll put it on the list for next time, just to see what's up.

Serge, #712: As a mild counter to that, I finally managed to watch the taped Halloween episode of Bones tonight, and Brennan was dressed as Wonder Woman. And ye ghods, her resemblance to Lynda Carter was absolutely uncanny! OTOH, I had to take issue with Cam's description of Catwoman as a "superhero"; Catwoman was/is a supervillain, and the cause of much angst for Batman; theirs was a classic love/hate relationship.

And I am SO in love with Zack! Watching him doing the probability calculations in his head and narrowing down the field of candidate sites for the victim's location absolutely sent shivers down my spine. Intelligence really is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

And I obviously need to go to bed now, having caught two embarrassing typos in preview.

Treat yourself to listening to Richard Thompson's "The Hots for the Smarts". Or, if you don't have the audio, here are the lyrics.

I could see this as a graduate thesis: something that could be researched and presented and filed away to satisfy the occasional future desire for information.

("Hey, would Rhett Butler have used a toothpick?")

Heck, even obsessive self-publication at Lulu.

("Let me check Google... There's a book on the history of toothpicks.")

But how many people are going to buy a conventionally printed work? I suppose that the target is university libraries.

("Is it in the library catalogue?")

And how do such libraries decide what to buy?

("Nope, they don't have a School of Dentistry.")

My favorite guilty pleasure is "House MD". Doctors! When presented with a patient suffering from either radiation poisoning or a mysterious pathogen, be sure to enter the room without gown, mask or gloves, don't bring a Geiger counter, and sit by the patient's bedside for hours, stealing food off his plate.

Shall we cast aspersions (and iron) upon your shameless and ruthless (and stainless) person?

Another view of Musica.

*No, it didn't improve traffic at that intersection, especially for the tourists in RVs.

(Hmmmmm... must urge wife to make lemon bars.)

My mom's old cookie sheets (I think she still has some of them) were simply heavy aluminum (about 1/32") with one end bent up to give you a place to grip. My big ring pan is aluminum too. I'd hate to have to replace it; big ones seem to have become rare and a lot of them aren't sectional. Come to think of it, I think that the ring part of my springform is aluminum.

Likewise their corn muffins.

I have a reliable small scale cheese scone recipe.

2c flour
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp dry mustard
30g unsalted butter
1/4c fine grated parmesan
3/4c fine grated cheddar
1c milk

Still trying to figure out if I want to try Scottish Baps. Yay or nay from those that have eaten them?

Good one! I like the implied Lexan™-Lexapro™ parallel.

For cutting in shortening/butter, I use one of those pastry gadgets (I've suddenly blanked on the name, forget my own next) with a bunch of tines connected at both ends to a handle. Got mine from Williams-Sonoma, and also use it for making guacamole.

I was looking up the care and feeding of cookies in Corriher's Cookwise the other night, as spouse was having a baking fit, and came across the following gem about baking sheets:

My personal favorites are simply 3/32 inch thick pieces of aluminum from a sheet metal company. I go through the company's bin of scrap pieces, pick out the sizes I need, and have the company smooth the edges for me. These extraordinarily heavy sheets distribute the heat evenly and bake cookies beautifully.

My own personal cookie sheet is one of those air-cushioned aluminum things. Works great.

I have a couple of bought (Ekco) cookie sheets that are fairly good (outside of one of them having pizza fairly permanently baked on). My brother made a cookie sheet in his junior-high metal shop class that did very well, too.

I'm very much in favor of people using the tools that work for them. Someday, if I'm posting-while-drinking, you may get me to tell the Story of the Juiced Limes, which involves the only time I ever walked out of a kitchen job with no notice.

* * *
AND SO IT BEGINS . . .

A friend forwarded me an email from a Concerned Parent:

"THE GOLDEN COMPASS, a new movie targeted at children, will be released December 7, 2007. This movie is based on a the first book of a trilogy by atheist Philip Pullman. In the final book a boy and girl kill God so they can do as they please.

Pullman left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview that "My books are about killing God."

The movie is a watered down version of the first book and is designed to be very attractive in the hope unsuspecting parents will take their children to see the the movie and that the children will want the books for Christmas.

The movie has a well known cast, including Nicole Kidman, Kevin Bacon, and Sam Elliott. It will probably be advertised extensively, so it is crucial that we get the word out to warn parents to avoid this movie."

And, um, you know, unlike the ludicrous heeby jeebies about Harry Potter teaching satanism, they're pretty much right!

(Only the kids don't actually kill God; ur whfg xvaq bs qevsgf gb cvrprf va n fgebat jvaq nsgre gur xvqf erfphr uvz sebz sylvat zbafgref. And they certainly don't "do as they please.")

Can I whine now about the general crappiness of kitchen tools these days? Especially anything involving plastic. Spatulas-- they are all either hard but curl up and die in the dishwasher, or they are these blunt instrument silicone things that don't work. And then we have that nasty Chinese melamine crap that cracks open in in the dishwasher and are absurdly large and crude. And why in the world does anyone make a turner blade out of something that melts?

Paging Dr. Watson and The Giant Rat of Sumatra, "a story for which the world is not yet prepared."

I'm sorry, but I've been frustrated about that untold story for 40+ years; I'll be darned if I let you get away with doing the same! Fess up!

Claim: The 2007 film The Golden Compass is based on a series of books with anti-religious themes.

Status: True

I've never read the series, but I recall when the third one came out that there was a decided sense of betrayal among a lot of readers, and a lot of people who thought that it was extremely ham-handed.

I admit to handwashing all my tools. Nor do I put the Revereware in the dishwasher. Partly because I'm scared it'll all melt, but also because I actually find 5-10 minutes of dishes to be therapeutic first thing after breakfast. (Gotta wash out my coffee mug, gotta clean whatever outstanding cat food bowls may exist, why not do a few other things and get my hands warmed up?)

Amen! I want a garlic press like the one that my mom bought for 75 cents when she was first married. It, mirabile dictu, actually presses garlic...unlike the 5 presses I've owned since having my own kitchen.

One can, however, still buy the Feemster's Famous Slicer, thank goodness, though I gather there are some suspicions that they've changed the blade on it.

Unless pecans or cinnamon have some strange scone-ruining properties, we should be just fine.

Oh and another thing I've learned from L&O - lady prosecutors are always hot 20-somethings. But that's generally true of all tv - lady-whatevers are always hot 20-somethings. I do like the L&O CIs with Vincent D'onfrio.

* one of the problems of living in a two-person household is that while one can make a full batch of chocolate chip cookies, scones, flourless chocolate cake, bagna cauda, etc, two people will never finish the whole thing. Therefore our respective workplaces are the recipients of our forays into baking.

I was disappointed with The Amber Spyglass because I thought Pullman bottled it. The kids don't kill God, they don't even kill a god: they accidentally kill a senile old angel and help defeat a jumped-up human who's actually in charge.

Also: if you throw napalm on them, angels catch fire and die? WTF?