(This is clearly a lingering side effect of last month's tech crisis, of much lower importance than the other side effects; but it should be on The List. :))

I'm still trying to figure out some bits of this, but I'm sure I'll get it when I'm less completely brain-dead than I am right now.

Darn tripods!

You've already got it.

Well, I for one welcome our new Earl Cooley III overlord.

Have I mentioned that I kinda like this world?

So, to sum up, you are not a number, you are a free man?

Just what I'd expect a robot to say.

Have fun!

It seems pretty nice, though I mostly saw the inside of the conference center and some restaurants near the university. I actually rented a bike, despite not having ridden since college, and managed not to end up in a canal. But I'm flying home tomorrow.

You're in Amsterdam, right?

I have a link for you, to be filed under "The World: It's Small."

Purportedly it's an article about the JFK's assassination. Certainly the subject header says so, and its author, Greg Parker, has a website dedicated to the issue.

But I'm really not sure how this article fits in.

The reason I notice this article at all? It's about Weilbaechers - my mother's family. My cousin found via a random semi-vanity Google search (is it really a vanity search if it's not your name but your mother's maiden name?).

So, amused, I start reading... and then I'm going, "Hey! That's my grandfather! That really is!"

Although exactly what relation Dr. Maurice O. Weilbaecher (my grandfather) has to whatever case Parker's making about Joeseph O. Weilbaecher (relation unknown, at least to me) and this David Ferrie person upon which Parker seems to be casting aspersions, I do not know. It looks like he, too, just started Googling random contemporary Weilbaechers, and then trying to find out just about everything he could about them.

Not to mention there's a certain scent of Crackpot Conspiracy Theory about it all. A sort of "ooh, look, isn't this sinister too? And - ooh, look, another random fact I can make sound sinister! Oooh! Look!" Y'know. Fact finding to support the preexisting argument. Except I just am not sure what the argument is. Possibly it's connecting the assassination to research in eugenics and biological weaponry. And the Knights of Columbus. Who stand in for the Knights Templar, I'm sure. Not to mention we're playing the 6 Degrees of Separation From Jack Ruby game. Yay!

So I read along, all "What exactly is he saying about Grandpapa?", and then I get to this paragraph at the end:

A search of the web on Weilbaecher and some of the other doctors
shown above revealed a number of references to Jesuits. Another
shows the grand-daughter of Maurice got married in a Wiccan
ceremony to a grandson of one of grandpappy's partners. Yet another
shows a Dr David Weilbaecher as being involved in getting a medical
"miracle" recognised as such by the Catholic Church.

Only, who exactly is he alleging my husband's grandfather was? And what relevance does our handfasting have, again, to JFK and incidentally the price of rice in China? Dude?

I have emailed the author asking him these things, and expect no end of entertainment to follow.

Thank you, open thread; you are all powerful and full of sparkly shiny things.

I live (and am currently sitting) in a village just north of Amsterdam.

Good idea renting the bike. Dutch cities and Dutch culture are both intimately linked with biking. (I haven't fallen into a canal ever, but on one drastically homesick afternoon I did nearly crowd a friend into the river.)

Safe journey home.

I'll be at beautiful Camp Bob, until then.

Take care. I'll write if I get work.

What threw me is that it's also Open Thread One-Ten (OTOT); even though I knew that couldn't be it, my mind kept drifting to it.

On 9 November 2005 I caught a coach from Rotorua to Auckland*. Neither I nor any of the other passengers were able to convince the driver it wasn't the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

* Having just been been walking through the Land of Mordor (formerly known as Tongariro National park) I was referring to the city as "Orcland".

Although we do often list Japanese under their given rather than family name. Either they try to compensate for us or we for them or both, and we almost always seem to get it wrong.

I’m looking for a very specific kind of cookbook or cooking lesson thing. I’m not even sure if what I want would qualify as a cookbook. Here's the thing: I know how to follow a recipe, and I can cook many things perfectly well. I'm even pretty good at improvisational cooking, of the ‘put spices on meat/veggies, cook them together in a pan, eat’ variety.

What I don't know is a lot of the dead simple, 'duh' techniques, the kind that people usually say they learned from parents or other relatives, stuff you don't put in a cookbook because people just know them. This isn't to say my mother couldn't cook, it's just that when I lived with her I let her do the cooking. I paid some attention, but I was never there cooking while she watched. And some basic stuff about how to use knives or whatnot entirely escaped me, and I just pick up something sharp and try to cut things, heedless of if it's the right tool for the job.

I'm looking for a book that will go into detail on the fiddly bits, that will explain what knife and cutting board and pot to use in certain situations, and how exactly to sauté and how to slice, when to use a saucepan and when to use a skillet. I'd prefer a big shiny book, but other media (videos, etc) might be fine if they were particularly awesome.

I've thumbed through some 'beginner's cookbooks,' but they either started far too basic (this is how you preheat your oven! This is how you measure ingredients) or focused on recipes that didn’t include any advanced techniques.

At home I mostly use a Joy of Cooking and a Better Homes and Gardens, together with the internet. I'm not even sure if such a thing as I want exists. But I figured I might as well ask.

As for being an overlord, I've actually given that a fair amount of thought; I've come to the conclusion that I could only be a truly effective tyrant if the job includes perks of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. I am ready and willing to serve in that capacity, but, as you can see, I'm a bit picky about the signing conditions.

[muttering]Lucky schmuck[/muttering] I mean, Have fun! :-)

She has two excerpts up, which I thought looked like something that the literati of the phosphorosphere might enjoy.

In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, "What is the way to the land of the dead?"

Circe answers, "You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off a layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle.

"By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes."

The book itself is available as a free download (although also available for purchase in print if one so desires):

  http://the-lost-books.com/index.htm

Would Jacques Pepin's La Technique sound about right? (Fear not, it's in English.)

I find their material is more helpful than cookbooks as it starts with the very basics and takes you up to professional skills, all in one place and with one teacher. Since the basics build into the professional skills in a logical way, it's very useful. Often similar material is addressed by several people within a discussion, so if one explanation doesn't click, another may.

I would begin with the class on picking a knife I think. After you have identified a knife to work with, I'd check whether it's sharp. Then, once it's sharp, I'd start on the knife skills course. Potatoes for the win!

We will erase and then rewrite the slate
as long as you sing gravely in the choir
in tones that cheer and do not sneer or grate,
you'll find that we are conqueror and buyer
and that our hand is over you entire.
All that you have we have indeed conferred,
your very heart we know is out for hire;
we are the keepers of the truest word

We are the masters of what you call fate
and will place you into the line of fire
for our good reasons and not out of hate.
Since all you have we easily acquire,
we see you as just one suit of attire --
or just another member of the herd.
Who cares how well you play on the lyre?
We are the keepers of the truest word.

Prince, on such matters you are no denier
but keep your eye upon the noble bird,
do not with any fools seek to conspire;
we are the keepers of the truest word.

I think you might want the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

I second Alex Cohen's Fannie recommendation. I have a fondness for the edition published in 1968, but Marion Cunningham's 1994 revision is acceptable. I have both. I learned to cook working my way through the 1968 Fannie. My eight year-old self learned to cook because Grandma cooked, and she is awesome and my mother's cooking skills are seriously lacking. I was doing the household cooking by the time I was ten.

Julia Child's The Way To Cook has good information too. Arrgh. I wish I was at home, I could look through my shelves and see what looks like it would fit the bill.

Looking at that picture of my shelves, what about one of the Alton Brown books about technique for covering which pan to use, when, and why.

Xopher @26:
It's a sign! (which will make sense only to those who know some Hebrew)

"Over 225 Easy and Inexpensive Recipes"
"Guides for buying and storing meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables"
"All About Eggs"
"Timetables"
"Sample Menus"

I use it constantly for substitutions and common measurement conversions. It may or may not still be in print. It may or may not be useful to you.

In other news, another one of my notebook gags has showed up in a reputable venue. The way I had it, you can just see the tennies of the aliens, whose socks stand taller than our heads, and the humans are looking at a copy of To Serve Man and saying, "My god! It's a tennis book!" (You can see how the great Ruben Bolling handles it in this week's "Tom, the Dancing Bug.")

Leah @29,
I'm thinking a combination of 2 things could help. riffing on stuff we've said in earlier discussions on cooking (which we do a lot, and is always fun to do. Food pron!)

1. A book like Shirley Corriher's CookWise: the Secrets of cooking revealed. She goes into the useful details of how recipes work & why the ingredients used are used--their chemistry and interactions with other ingredients.

It isn't a beginner's book per se, but then you're not a beginner--you just need updates on the basics you didn't get earlier. By teaching you the Why-it-works, it saves you a bunch of trial and error.

If you cook through the book (200 recipes- all the ones I've tried so far are tasty), then by the time you're done you'll have a good working knowledge of cooking & will know how to improvise*. I like her style/methods--there's also Alton Brown's books and similar**.

2. Something like Epicurious.com's recipes and instructional vids. (the website for Bon Appetit magazine). They have 20k recipes, with user rankings and comments.

The how-to videos help.

It isn't hard to find easy recipes for a particular ingredient which other users have ranked highly. So once you've learned one custard recipe, you can search for others to play with.

-------------------
* Nothing is too complicated, and it's not encyclopedic--just enough that when you're done, you'll know why "this flour instead of that," or "are eggs necessary here," or "why do they specify 150 degrees."

** I love my Bittman "how to cook everything" & my "Joy of Cooking,' but I don't recommend those for learning. Over 600 pages = too much. Ditto McGee. Cookwise is like a refresher for what you learned (or want to have learned) at home. The big tomes are like a refresher for culinary academy.

Yes, I've noticed it too. Posted comment is noted in "Recent Comments" on the "Front Page" but doesn't appear in the actual thread.

Further, I've had trouble with the whole threadful of comments loading with OT109. My browser normally only gets up to Julie L.'s comment #898. I'm also using Firefox (ver 2.0.0.14) on WIndows XP. I wonder if it's because of the threads being so long that the browser times out, before downloading the whole thread?

Good Housekeeping has a shorter all-purpose cookbook that shows techniques as well as lots of good basic recipes.

The coolest thing I found recently (at the Pembroke sale) is a book of food science, why things work the way they do and how different materials should be treated to get the best result.

Nowadays she (or her multinational marketing conglomerate) have, naturally, a website. This includes online 'how-to's which could be handy for a quick perusal of particular problems.

Do you think this 'Non Sequitur' strip (3rd of June, another sleepy, dusty, Delta day) is a little sideways reference to NYC's recent crane collapses?

Another example is that cooking mellows the sharpness of onions and garlic. You can cook onions for a long time, and the flavor keeps getting more interesting. But garlic gets bitter when overcooked, so it should be added later than the onions. In some recipes, you want the bite of the raw onion/shallot/garlic.

One of my local Public TV stations recently showed the old Jacques Pépin series on technique. Check your local listings. He also has a DVD set, as well as the previously mentioned book.

For home-style Chinese cooking, I like "How To Cook and Eat in Chinese", by the woman who invented the term 'stir-fry'. Part 1 covers the materials, tools, preparation, and cooking techniques. Part 2 provides recipes.

2008.06.07

Aside from being logical, like the 7 June 2008 format, if you type a bunch of dates in the computer this way they can automatically be sorted. (I first discovered this when typing up a series of concert bootlegs.)

I have completely switched over to this now, even when writing checks. 95.06.07 was even easier, but 08.06.07 is problematical, so "2008" is necessary.

I have mad bread skilz, once I got the stand mixer we gave away the bread machine because I hated the bread machine loaves and when you form the bread yourself, you can do a lot of different things.

And I've practiced lots and lots. My family likes just about anything that comes out, it's hard to keep still until the bread cools enough to slice safely. well... sometimes it just gets gutted and eaten on the spot.

In academia this is dealt with by entirely capitalizing the family name, i.e. NAKAMURA Tetsuo, or WANG Xin. That way, it's clear which is which no matter how it is written. (Though I haven't yet seen a "John SMITH" anywhere, which would seem fair.)

OpenThreadiness: I vaguely remember someone mentioning a site that helps tie YouTube segments together into a single video for ease of watching, but I can't find it. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about? I found out that there's a documentary version of Guns, Germs, and Steel I want to watch.)

With regard to the remarkable Ned Sublette: I sort of worship him for his performance, alongside the fantastic Mark Manley, in Cory McAbee's The American Astronaut. You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOJ8NmGyGbk. The American Astronaut is not a movie for everyone, but those who love it really love it. Also: Ned Sublette.

A lot of episodes of Good Eats include some useful bit of technique, but it's a very random way to learn. There was an episode recently (American Slicer) that was about knives and cutting technique, and is probably worth watching.

His first cookbook (I'm Just Here For the Food) covers some of the basic stuff.

I recently encountered an interesting set of documentaries on the radio, in which a BBC investigative journalist reports on organised crime set-ups in various parts of the world (Brazil, South Africa, the Balkans, and... Canada), including interviews with some of the actual criminals.

Episodes are available on the BBC web site, beginning here.

I was just noticing that he's in the credits of some of Glenn Branca's early works. Impressive career he's had himself there.

My sister is very fond of that movie (and McAbey's work in general). I think it's a bit surreal, but interesting.

Apologies if anyone has done

this

before: I had to give it a go, regardless of whether fellow ML'ers have indeed addressed every possible parodical variant of William Carlos Williams.

Those of you who I've added in past: well, now you know it's me.

Oh, and I'm back in Portland now!

Yay!

PNH generously put the title of the remarkable Ned Sublette's latest book, The World That Made New Orleans, up in his "Particle" -- it's a link to a long interview with the equally, though younger, Jamaican writer-scholar, Garnette Cadogan, for Bomb Magzine. There are also videos of Ned performing, etc.

#73 ::: ethan :::

Ned tuned Branca's guitars (as he did Rhys Chattham's -- who will be doing a huge retro of his guitar things at Lincoln Center in August; Ned's one of the 'under conductors'). He tuned by ear, with tuning fork, and taught Branca a great deal about composition, since Branca was not, at least back then, a trained musician or composer.

That article on Bo Diddley that poured out of Ned last week, when hearing of the death of Bo Diddley, and that I mentioned on the previous Open Thread? He did place it, btw. With The Smithsonian Magazine.

Love,C.

Circe was a dungeon master?

Actually...

Welcome back. We hope you brought the sun with you; it seems to be hiding from us.

cajunfj40 @921 Stuff-onna-stick and deep-frying thereof was also discussed in Open thread 70, starting around here with coverage of the Minnesota State Fair of 2006.

Thanks Epacris, I'll have to check that out sometime.

@Epacris #983:
In other news, it appears Moon Pies are an USian equivalent of Wagon Wheels in Oz (& UK?). Here they've shrunk from about a 4" diameter to 3" or slightly less. US foods are thought to have swollen up in the same time. Any thoughts on Moon Pies? I wonder if the UK Wagon Wheels have minimized themselves similarly?

@Mary Aileen #986:

Epacris (983): Yes, Moon Pies are what I thought of when someone described Wagon Wheels. They're mainly a Southern US delicacy, and pretty big. Four inches sounds about right.

I've seen Moon Pies at many truck stops, both Northern and Southern. In my youth in the South, Moon Pies were a treat I'd go for whenever possible. I particularly liked the double-decker ones. Nowadays, it seems they've done something horrid to the recipe (or would that be formula?) and they've become rather dry and much less yummy than I remember. It's also harder to find all the variants I remember up North. There used to be single and double decker variants, Vanilla, Chocolate and later on I think Strawberry may have arrived. Up North, all I see are double-decker Vanilla and sometimes Chocolate. 4" does seem about right - and they were about that size when I was younger too, IIRC. I think they might have gotten a bit thinner, though, maybe less marshmallow-type filling? I wouldn't be surprised if they have shrunk recently, as it's been a number of months since I had one.

Never had a Wagon Wheel for comparison, sorry.

Later,
-cajun

It had been ages since I'd seen the thing, and these days I can savor it much more.

Including some stuff for a furry shared-world site.

Which led to this description of a story I was working on:

Me, I'm just writing. But it seems to involve Lady Helen, the late King of England, assorted nice Jewish boys, at least four Police officers, two American tourists, a theatrical performance, and a chorus of ricksha drivers.

Right now, it all makes perfect sense.

Said circles also prefer their dates in 6 Jun 2008 fashion.

Are you thinking of Pearl S. Buck's Oriental Cookbook? (1972/74)

re: Juli Thompson, 79,
Since we're talking about cookbooks, and someone mentioned a Chinese one, I'll take advantage of the opportunity. I once saw a book that went through the basic layout of a menu in a Chinese restaurant. It gave the characters for each dish, explained what they meant, what the cooking techniques and terms were, the history of the dishes and various types of Chinese cuisine, and tied it all in with the culture and language. It was fascinating, but I didn't have the money to buy it then, and now I can't find it, or anyone who's heard of it. It may have been British. Any ideas?

No ideas here, but that sounds friggin awesome! Please post us a followup if you find it.

Meta:
I got the long thread refresh error too. I had to clear the cache (firefox) in order to see the last dozen or so comments.

Must-read.

If that doesn't get a Hugo nomination there's going to be some really remarkable qualifying drama filling the lists

I've heard of a book that analyzes Chinese menus, but thought it was mentioned in the New Hacker's Dictionary, and a fast look doesn't turn it up.

"Good Eats" is one of my kids' favorite Food Network shows, along with "Ace of Cakes."

We shoulda done that for our pool.

What's more odd, the left and right pages seem to be switched.

Ah! Thank you for that. Triggered a nice little link-trance, that. (Among other things, the word stir-fry is attributed to the author(s).* See Language Log via Adam Sampson.

*bonus round:
“Hse” is the gender-neutral term for he/she coined by Professor Yuen Ren Chao, Dr. Chao’s husband, to make up for a third-person singular pronoun in English other than the rather formal and stiff sounding, “one.” via Tigers and StrawberriesTigers and Strawberries

Fully capitalizing the family name, whether it comes first as in Japanese or Hungarian or last as in English, French, etc., is common practice in the Esperanto community.

I have a vague story idea about a guy whose multiple online handles are connected to him, & his anonymity lost with bad real-world consequences, as a result of some researchers running a stylistic analysis tool that shows when two extensive samples of text are probably written by the same person. The above questions may or may not be relevant to the story, depending on how and whether it develops.

The idea occurred to me a while ago after I was involved in a discussion on another forum, where someone emailed me offlist pointing out that several of the other posters were the same person, and the poll I had taken was invalid because most of the votes on one side were spurious. After the fact it seemed obvious, because they all wrote in the same pedantic style, but I hadn't noticed until this friend pointed it out in offlist mail.

Of course, as I am not around at the moment, I am not in a position to comment on why you may have chosen to remove the pond and, it is fair to say, that there could be any number of reasons for doing so. Still, I feel it only my duty to warn you that if you continue along this path, the results may be dire.

You see, this is no ordinary pond. This property was acquired by the Council of Watchers in 1978 specifically for the purpose of sealing an incipient Hellmouth at this location. The pond was installed to make sure that no one would be likely to disturb the seal in the course of future years.

I cannot stress strongly enough that breaking the seal would be a very bad idea. The things which would be likely to emerge would eat your sanity, if not your brain itself. By far the safest course of action would be for you to put the pond back as you found it. If you fail to do so, I cannot answer for the consequences.

The reality was a tad anticlimactic.

Yes, smaller than sf fandom but large enough. I'd guess somewhere between 100,000 and 2 million speakers -- the higher figure is more commonly quoted but I suspect the true figure is lower.

Out of the mists of memory comes a college or university (Columbia?) that offered a language course in then-current Restaurant Chinese. As many of the local entrepreneurs of these establishments had fled China when it went Red, and the Mandarin (?) was highly stylized, ordinary Chinese/English English/Chinese dictionaries would get you nowhere.

For example: The Clouds of August
Was it a soup? A dessert? The presentation of part of a main course?

Vague recollections of Calvin Trillin mentioning it.

The first taught, and most useful phrase, was
"Please bring me what those people are having."

My answer was "If the word 'no' were written a thousand times on every subatomic particle in the universe, it could not express the noness of my no."

* I note that to saturate this system aliens would only need to send 2 UFOs at once. I note in addition that on one occasion I contended that the moon was only a mile and a half up, and then calculated what mass it would be, assuming it was made entirely of cheese; this was part of the costing for upgrading the slingshot to a rocket-harpoon. I don't think that anyone was fooled**.

** Unlike the time I explained that stealth bombers travelled faster than the speed of sound to outrun radar waves; I was told off for misusing my scientific knowledge for that one.

Oft Known, etc., #75, back home, Yay!

Jim Henry, #108, you don't need a tool -- Teresa and I used to do this all the time on rasff.

On one hand . . . a guy building a rocket! In his barn! And he's defying authority to go into space!

On the other . . . so many technical flaws that the bad paint job on the Saturn V in Apollo 13 pales in comparison.

And it turns into a relationship picture. Which rocket nerds think is icky.

Michael Swanwick's latest blog post has some nice things to say, and a story about spreading the word to a section of the population that one might not immediately think of as being part of the book's audience.

Interesting. I wonder who did it first?

Lee @ 109 I like your version better. If I found your version, I'd fill the pond back up, half out of admiration and half out of caution.

Xopher @ 115: Wheeeee! I would do that nine times.

While reading Charles DeLint's short story "Pixel Pixies," I was reminded of another short story about a man corresponding with an author friend about the author's belief that there's some kind of fairy-ish creature living in his typewriter, helping him write...and it's under attack by some other creature(s). If this sounds familiar to anyone, can you remind me of the author, title, and collection/anthology in which it appeared?

Many thanks!

Damn, you beat me to it. Multiple used copies can be found through AddAll.com at very affordable prices, though I feel compelled to say that I didn't find this book quite as useful as I might've hoped, even from the perspective of (at the time I acquired it) some minimal foreknowledge of the basic "critter" characters that tell you which animal is involved. Among other things, IIRC he failed to explain that the "meat" character (esp. when used as a radical within more complex characters) is often simplified to look like the "moon" character, which confused me no end. The format is also very dense and textbook-like; the second half of the book is a comprehensive dictionary of practically every term one might expect to see on a menu, but I suspect that its organization (radical-based character lookups may be too complex for complete neophytes, and its print too small for dim restaurant lighting.

There's also a vaguely similar book called Swallowing Clouds by A. Zee (yes, seriously) which is more rambling, conversational, and multidisciplinary-- the author hops back and forth among culinary detail, cultural history, personal anecdotes, and random linguistic quirks-- and thus (imho) far more enjoyable. Zee also supplies almost all of the Chinese words in basic handwritten form (as one would probably encounter them on a chalkboard of daily specials or a ballpoint-scrawled menu page) vs. McCawley mostly using rather small typographic fonts.

Yes, if someone is using sockpuppet handles in the same thread, and they post a fair amount of text and have a reasonably distinctive style, you don't need statistical stylistic analysis to say "all these handles are the same person". But if said handles are posting on multiple, unrelated forums... not so easy. If the same guy who was posting to the Kalusa comment forum under three or four handles were to show up, say, here at Making Light, I wouldn't be as confident about identifying him by his writing style alone as I was when I saw several posts by him under different names in the same thread about the same subject.

no words that teenagers use a lot that some people think aren't swearing but we do

Mind-reading much? How is anybody else supposed to know what specific words they're talking about? Teenagers say a lot of things.

This is in reference to the particled... er... does one give that sort of thing away? I'll shut up just in case... Please delete this comment if I have come too close to violating rr etiquette.

Will there come a day when weenies like I was in junior-high school will be able to stay hip? We may be living in that very age right now.

Thanks (and perhaps blame) to Julie L. *g*

The "copyright vs culture..." link seems to me to be a lousy exemplar of out-of-control copyright law. The theme isn't an anonymous folk melody. It's a song written by a known composer, who is still alive. I gather from the article that the copyright is still owned by the composer (not sold outright to CBC), and that it's forty years old (not a Disnified 75-to-95). Contract disputes suck. Unsettled contract disputes suck for everybody. This sucks, but what's the larger issue in re "copyright vs culture"?

Similar situations where I *do* see a larger issue:

A work whose creator can't be found.
A work whose creator has died, leaving the rights to heirs who don't care and will never do anything with it.
A work whose ownership is spread out over a lot of contributors, so that it's impossible (impracticable) to get 100% agreement on doing anything with it.
A work which was released in ignorance of the law, so that there's no clear license which captures the intent of the creator.

I'm not saying these are situations where copyright law should be changed (or ignored). Only that they are varieties of "that sucks" which invite the discussion "is that really the way we want it?" This hockey thing... I don't see it.

(ObSF: Just finished re-reading Karl Schroeder's _Permanence_, in which the Rights Economy of human space is slowly being dragged down by the weight of billions of enforceable micropayments covering every single action anyone takes..)

Anyway, I don't see that as requiring mind reading, I think it just means that "oh, c'mon, all the kids say 'sucks' nowadays" won't be accepted as an argument.

But then I live in the NYC area, where people say 'fucked up' right in business meetings and no one blinks an eye. Phone conferences with Memphis, not so much!

And I was about to say that my next task was to figure out how I could have read it in Skeleton Crew when I've never laid eyes on the book...but just checked to discover it also appeared in Secret Windows, which is right this moment sitting in a prominent place on my overstuffed bookshelves.

Thanks again, gents!

Jim Henry @ 110: A range of 1e5 - 2e6 \sounds/ high for SF fandom even if you include everyone who does something connecting to other people (i.e., beyond reading/viewing). Has anyone come up with a plausibly authoritative estimate? (I'd certainly believe over 1e5 worldwide, but I'm not sure how much over.)

The final draft was better. Splitting the roles was good. But this is a wonderful DVD extra.

(Toddles off happily to read.)

Erick was probably most prolific in his writings for Palladium Games - he wrote and/or developed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninjas & Superspies, and many other titles for them, but was probably most influential to the larger gaming community - both players and developers/writers - for his work on the Amber: Diceless Role-Playing system, which was put out by Phage Press, and was as powerful an example of how gaming could be different from then-existing tabletop games as Vampire: The Masquerade from White Wolf was in its own way.

He was also, by all accounts, a genuinely nice guy, the only bad thing about whom I've ever heard said was that he didn't publish more stuff.

He will be missed, but his influence will always be felt.

Fair sailing, and clear weather, Erick.

Also a ham, though you'll never see my callsign connected to this name. Be smart, and don't associate your callsign with any of your online usernames: it makes it trivial for mall ninjas to look up your ICBM address.

The conversation was regarding how many sensible sf fans were hams as well, and I immediately thought of ML (being a group of level headed people, with or without sf). I'm just curious.

*The amusing spam being they can give my website, reference some post I wrote on ML months ago, higher listings in search engines.

I have no idea, although the biography on the back cover of Swallowing Clouds seems distinctive enough for verification: "Born in China, reared in Brazil, and educated at Princeton and Harvard"? His previous book was evidently titled An Old's Man's Way.

I played the Amber diceless RPG over on GEnie, back in the day; it is a very clever game system.

Syd @ 127: No leads, but at the London Sci-Fi Film Festival I saw two neat little shorts, The Phonekeeper and Watching the Watchman, that used the same premise of tiny people living in machines (an alarm clock and an answering machine, respectively).

Disclaimer: I'm on the Contata concom, and we're working to replace Tom (as much as that's possible) on two weeks notice. We're also working to assist him at the con as much as possible.

Is this the summer of losing con guests just prior to the event? (If so, I'm glad it was only a quad, for Tom.)

"I'm glad it was only a quad"

Better quad than sod.

Did you switch from Turner to the Discover Channel documentary on NASA (part one) afterward? Fascinating footage from the days of my youth, and a sorta tie-in to Turner's pair of SF flicks.

(Just see what I get up to when the allergies get too bad for lengthy night-time reading! But I still wish I had had the energy to go back to Turner at 11 pm and watch Kwaidan.)

And every time the Netherlands scores a goal in the football* game currently on, my whole village erupts in cheers.

And here I am pottering about in my bindery.

ZEITGEIST FAIL, that's me.

You're making clay books?

They probably are romans à clay.

Go Oranje! At least today ;) (I'm having a blast listening to the learned football commentary from my 13-yo son.)

There goes productive work in the office tomorrow, or in the village. There aren't many people hooting and hollering in the streets, but the match has only just finished. I suspect that the mood will grow.

(Actually, "potter" is just British for "putter", but don't let the facts get in the way of a good thread!)

I think that the category you're asking for is books on cooking technique, which I sort of collect. Pepin's La Technique has been mentioned, but you probably want Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, which has both La Technique and La Methode in one volume. These cover stuff like knife cuts, trussing chickens, and so on. Ken Hom has a similar book for Chinese cooking, called Chinese Technique. Both of these can be obtained, used, very inexpensively (under five dollars delivered if you shop around). The CIA has a couple of textbooks that fall under this heading as well; if you're interested, I can provide more titles.

I also like the suggestion to look at eGullet. They have a number of worthwhile in-depth tutorials.

Finally, you should look seriously at Madeleine Kamman's The New Making of a Cook, especially if regular cookbooks seem too basic. Kamman starts with the assumption that the reader wishes to cook well and is willing to work at it. She cuts no corners and takes no prisoners -- but she covers technique, some food chemistry, food safety, and much more.

Its being obvious is why we didn't go for that pun. We do have some standards, after all.

Speak for yourself, mon ami.

Wait! Wait! Supersonic submarines ... they actually could outrun sonar, so no-one would know where they were, nope, not a trace. It should only take a little more power to go that fast underwater, right?

AFK while I get a patent, apply for government funding, and become filthy rich. Bwahahaha!

Delicious and Deadly: The Professional Chef's Guide to Neurotoxins

Knife Technique for Filets and Silent Assassination

Cooking at 500 Yards with the Barrett .50

don delny was being silly. The callsign database is an open federal record, and will include your mailing address. From that I can drop a missile on your head, or just home in on your signal.

If you haven't guessed, I have a license (General, with code), KB1IYK.

Duuuuuuuuuuuude. [ Sad shake of head ] I never would have expected this from you.

Pleh. I want a better class of crackpot. Can I return this one for a refund?

I've had a much "better class" of crackpot after me in the past, following me around on the 'net and trying to dredge up crap to post about me. (Not naming any names in case he gets a burr under his saddle to Google himself or something...) Again I say, ya don't want it, believe me, and if I'd thought about your earlier comment a little more, I would have advised you against even that much poking of kooks.

SecDef Gates appoints not-Zoomie to top Air Force post.

In the aftermath of last week's resignation of the top two positions in the USAF, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has nominated General Norton A. Schwartz, the current head of the USAF Transportation Command, as USAF Chief of Staff.

Schwartz is Transport through-and-through, and he's got a lot of Special Operations (and Joint Operations) hours under his belt as well. He's also the first non-fighter jock Chief of Staff in something like three decades, and almost the only non-fighter or bomber pilot ever to hold the post.

Furthermore, he appointed a bomber jockey, Lt. Gen William Fraser III, as vice-chief of staff, and Michael Donley who is currently the director of administration and management at the Pentagon, as Air Force secretary - and Donley is ex-Airborne (72-75), not a former Air Forcer.

Gates is basically completely bypassing the fighter mafia in the Air Force - not one of the top three positions will be an air superiority boyo, and one of them is a former ground-pounder to boot. This could be interesting developments in the Air Force - and may be a dark day for those who believe the F-22 is the be-all and end-all of Air Force budget requirements...

Rep. Kucinich is currently reading articles of impeachment against President Bush on the floor of Congress.

c-span.org is streaming his speech. At this moment there is *no* coverage anywhere else I can find online. Cnn.com, msnbc.com, npr.org are all blank on the subject. According to the friend who clued me in CNN isn't interrupting or putting a ticker on Larry king Live.

Kucinich is my new hero.

I seem to have missed it. Anyone have further details?

Bush Impeachment: Open, Live Blogging #2 by xerxes3 Mon Jun 09, 2008 at 05:32:47 PM PDT

Rep Kucinich is reading 35 Articles of Impeaching, INCLUDING ELECTION TAMPERING>

GO, GO, GO!!!

When in the course of human events....

But her post has actual useful links.

I love the Fluorosphere!

THIRTY FIVE>/b> articles of impeachment, thiry five, Rep Kucinich is reading.

Dennis Kucinich and Henry Waxman, I love you both.... and may the names of those who have interfered, blocked, colluded to block investigations, destroyed evidence, etc., over the past seven and a half years, carry forward their due culpability and infamy.

======

Still listening, and angry all over again about malfeasance after malfeasance after malfeasance....

And here he is, doing what ought to be done but what was politic not to do. Go Kucinich!

(My cynical husband is pointing out that strategically now is a "safe" time to do it. Whatever. What matters to me is, it's being done. Finally.)

--

Clifton et al - no worries, I'm not going to keep poking. I corrected him on some serious factual errors and explained a little bit about how when you stick lots of facts together under a heading the assumption is the facts are presented in order to support some argument to do with that heading, and I left it at that. Should anything go stupid, the phrase "You messin' with me? You messin' with the whole family!" comes to mind, as quite a few members of it have been laughing their asses off since my cousin found the article in the first place.

I suppose it was silly of me to post about it here at all, but coming across it left me wanting very badly to share the absurd bizarreness of it with friends. And the Making Light crew seemed the right batch of friends for this particular absurdity.

Ah, well. I expect the entertainment there is over with. More attention to spare for Kucinich and the impeachment!

However, I fear 'tis but a tale of sound and fury...

Lin D, #148, I was one when I was 13, but I'd been mostly interested in building the radio and didn't actually keep it up. My brother stayed on for a while.

Boing Boing is on the case.

On the red planet we observe the new,
the stars are brighter in that darker sky;
the camera reports another hue.

We get to see this from the forward pew,
robotic vision can tell us no lie:
The Martian sunset is a shocking blue.

This is astonishing, this polar view,
we thought a Martian heaven dark and high;
the camera reports another hue.

A vision of this sort we had been due
in tales that Ares would soon dignify;
the Martian sunset is a shocking blue.

I urge the journey of a human crew
with all the skill that knowledge can supply.
The camera reports another hue:
The Martian sunset is a shocking blue

On vulgar language: When I was at school, one guy got sent off for swearing during a rugby match. "But I only said 'bloody'" he complained, which didn't help at all. I'll note that a deaf ear was usually turned to brief involuntary exclamations at a moment of impact.

On Sockpuppets, I realise I have a larger number of internet identities than I thought. In places where I'm a real human being, I either go by my name or Neil W (these all link back to the same email and blog). In places where everyone has a nom d'internet I go with the crowd and pick a silly name. Usually it's either relevant to the forum, or it's one of november (usually book or film fansites) or monkfish (usually game sites). And in addition a friend and I have just started blogging about films under pseudonyms. Phew. Still, it's one identity per site, and in general the interests don't overlap.

* And possibly by UFO's Skydiver
** The concept is deeply flawed unless you use planes like in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Some of these are pretty cool.

My parents didn't curse much when we were kids, and my sister and I generally cursed less than most of our peers.* But she got detention one day in junior high for saying that she was "pissed off." Her reaction (and mine) was, "That's a bad word?" It is one my parents used fairly casually. I still can't see it as strong language. Super casual, yes, and vulgar rather like "screwed up" is vulgar, but I wouldn't hesitate to use it in front of a young kid and I wouldn't correct a young kid who used it. It just doesn't ping as cursing to me.

*I think. She might have been sticking to the clean language when I was around.

Something like the Harrier would work well, and that would sort of fit with general Cold War craziness of invention. VTOL does get around some of the problems, and in a slightly earlier era there were the propellor-driven tail-sitters. Gerry Anderson might have gone for super-helicopters that folded their rotors away.

Oh, I can see some quite cinematic ways of doing this.

Worth a look around.

Scott Taylor #199, what does it say about me that I clicked and immediately started looking for "V-J Day, Times Square?"

Also, very amused that the daisy-and-rifles picture was staged with Imperial Stormtroopers.

That you have good taste in historical photos? :-)

(the Lego version of V-J day is currently acting as my background on my work machine - my home laptop has Tienanmen square as the background on the internal display - the external I try to keep uncluttered, as it's my primary workspace).

Dan

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

Oh, and the reason they're doing it? Terrorists? Nope! "Eek! Kiddy porn exists! They're using this bunch of tubes! We will now solve the problem by shooting the messenger." So take care, folks, your bunch of tubes could be next.

One of the really decent Usenet outsourcing services got sold out to its competition a couple months ago, and most of the staff got the knife (including at least one guy who has put in well over a decade as one of the more effective spam fighters on Usenet.) The replacement service from their purchaser sucks. (My ISP was using them, and the drop in posts and rise in spam and propagation delay was palpable.)

There are still some personal Usenet subscription services, at least.

A Queer Dinosaur, Unusual Friends, DINOOPS!!
Dinoops is the name for unusual group of dinosaurs. They are friends of a queer individual character causing many troubles with awkward movement as tyrannosaur, but not favoring meets. Some events and troubles always happen everywhere Dinoops goes. And......a laugh follows with. A noisy, unorganized and unexpected behavior of Dinoops makes all friends happy eventually. Although sometimes very annoying....

-Barbara (fan of Korean consumer products)

I'm not stupid. I know something about the way the Internet works. I've an idea of when the bullshit starts to flow. And did I mention they lie?

So when they tell me I can get a faster service for less money (and don't mention the price for the rest of the 12-month contract, after the introductory period), I'm firm in my scepticism.

Looks like John McCain's site could use a good comment moderator. (found via Fark)

Uh....

Er... never mind.

Uh....

Er... never mind.

"Does he always wear boots when he's taking a shower?"
"They don't call him Funtime Freddy for nothing."
(from Are You Being Served?)

Where was I for this? Holy crapsicles....How is Fox News still credible for ANYONE?

Celebrate!

In thanks, here is a link. It's... the website for an independent movie entitled "Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead." It's got Shakespeare, New York City, theatre people, and vampires. There's a synopsis, but what really caught me was the trailer.

I'm so intrigued. As a friend of mine pointed out, the title is one of those "Oh my god it's so obvious and perfect, how could I not have thought of this?" transformations.

That's hilarious - I'm forwarding that on.

Was that Jonathan Pryce as the Master?

eBay currently has one lightly used VHS of "Fatal Death", but beware bidding wars. (I am not involved with either side of the auction.)

I have created Viola’s Bookshelf, a new blog dedicated to making available gender swapped versions of copyright available fiction.

I love the internet.

The problem with a submersible aircraft carrier is that (to simplify greatly) an aircraft carrier is all about control of air- and sea-space, and a submarine is all about hiding and never being seen. If your reaction to being attacked is to submerge, then any planes you've launched are left in the lurch, and any signal to them as to where and when to come and land is likely to be a signal to the enemy too.

Nevertheless, thinking about Dave Bell's note @202, I can imagine some sort of special forces submarine with a helicopter hanger appearing in an unrealistic technothriller. Or we could go full-on Dieselpunk - an entire submersible fleet, including aircraft carriers, troopships, destroyers, frigates, supply ships, minesweepers and so on, cruising the world undetected, appearing out of no where to attack then disappear back below the sea.

Since steampunk seems to have reached the mainstream, or at least the restaurant column of the LA Times (as I note here), clearly a rash of dieselpunk stuff can't be far behind.

Have you met Anyone recently? He just hasn't been the same since he lost his house . . . keeps blaming it on Clinton for some reason.

...and so could Gerry Anderson, and he wouldn't let the issue of realism stand in his way.

The Hartford, CT bomb squad blows up a chicken .

After all, this is the man who came up with the idea of a dept store delivering the Xmas toys by way of a rocket that then parachuted its load down to its destination. I won't even go into Thunderbirds's handling of radioactivity disposal.

Nobody told me about it.

For certain values of "do", that's illegal in many jurisdictions.

"I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody."

Not Me!

Won't Anyone just try
to make Everyone fly?
No, Someone fears to speak
as Something snaps its beak
and Everyone falls dead
with Something on his head.

Nobody sees the trial,
hears Anyone's denial,
sees Someone lose his head,
for Everyone is dead.
Still Something longs for meat
but No One's left to eat.

Full o' bottle blonde female boobbrains and other loud obnxious yelling mouths. The cosmetically "enhanced" appearance of the pseudogeek male boobbrains, for example, seems intended to make them parageeks--media interpretation of providing an appearance of true(male)nerds.

They're quite appalling ersatz copies....

(As for me labelling that *@#@*@$ who occupied the White House, there are magickal etc. issues involved there, regarding invocation (not wanting to invoke) and respect (lack thereof, on an enormous scale) issues regarding I do not consider the regime in power to be legitimate, I do not regard it as due anything but disrespect and excoriation. I can't think of even five things that have been effected in the past seven and a half years which I consider meritorious--the removal of the dam which had diverted the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates drying up the marshes had merit, and there have been two or MAYBE three other things that I approved of done by *#@^@#$#$ . Other than that, I have been appalled and regard the "initiatives" and appointments and agenda and actions implemented with mostly revulsion, dismay, anger, fury, objection, sometimes even near-disbelief at the level of banality, offensiveness, greed, corruption, hubris, intentional inconsiderateness, ruthlessness, incompetence, cronyism, vituperativeness, bullying, abusiveness, vanity, hypocrisy, sectarian partisanship and promotion, intolerance and bigotry, and dozens of other types of vileness, endemic in everything touched by the Executive Branch of US Government the past seven and a half years.

The short version is that I consider the current regime vile, loathsome, appalling, and an abomination, demonstrated again and again and again, and feel that the 35 articles of impeachment, are only a start of earned charges of criminality, malfeasance, misrespresentation, sacrilege, abomination, hypocrisy, and abuse.

Why haven't even the allegations of cocaine use, given words by the person occupying the office of President of the United States of America, caused an investigation?
Why is it that Newt Gingrich could get Congress to witchhunt Mr Clinton pursuing investigations to first try to find something that could be used as excuse for persecution and impeachment and spend large sums of taxpayer money while Gingrich was busily being an oathbreaker to his wedding vows (I assume that his wedding vows involved exclusivity, or certainly he was very loudmouthed about the "sanctity" of marriage....) with a woman he later married after terminating the marriage he was in; but the Democratic majority of Congress is refusing to allow impeachment articles to even be given a full hearing in Congress, or even the charges investigated without formal impeachment hearings proceeding? The charges are serious and grave ones, and they've been buried.

Talk about elephants in the livingroom, there are HERDS of them....

My initials indicate that I am in distress and need immediate assistance.

abi @164:
...whereas I was watching it.

Linkmeister @165:
Spelling, surely?

Paula Lieberman @266:
Don't get me started on Faux News.

I guess that translates to 'getting out of town before everything goes to hell'.

Ah, so you're a right winger then, eh???

Hm, my initials are
want a pilot
engines going astern
stop immediately

I wonder if the "pilot" is for seaplanes or helicopters...

Oh, damn, damn, damn. I know he was sick for quite awhile, but in the back of my mind I was expecting him to get well and start writing again. I loved his work; I still remember in detail some of his stories I read 40 years ago and more. And I'm still amazed at how he predicted the narrative effect of video games in 1961, in "Rogue Moon". We'll not see his like again.

In the mid 1950's Fred Pohl wrote a novel called "Slave Ship" depicting a near-future US that had been completely militarized (universal draft, all college students in ROTC, all manufacturing prioritized to produce war materiel) to fight a war with Vietnam (!), which has occupied most of the Eastern Hemisphere. The navy has been converted completely to submarines, mostly nuclear, including aircraft carriers. The carriers are about the size of the nuclear carrier Enterprise (CVN-65), that is to say, big.

IIRC, the planes launch and retrieve with the carrier submerged, so the carriers get to hide and the planes don't get stranded. Pohl, having done hie homework, was aware that a well-designed streamline hull can allow a sub to travel faster fully-submerged than on the surface.

I require a pilot.

I am taking on or discharging explosives.

It's Britfans returning from Balti houses, innit.

I am maneuvering with difficulty; keep clear. My vessel is stopped; making no way. I have a pilot on board.

Ouch.

Remember, Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer: he was part of everything Blair did, because he controlled the money, and so he has to be as much a liar or as much a dupe as Blair.

But he wants us to trust him.

It does look as though one reason this all takes time is the search for a nugget of incriminating gold in a huge mass of computer data. Did one proponent of the extension talk about over 30,000 CDs? Do they really have any evidence before the arrest, or are they just fishing?

But he wants us to trust him.

It's even possible that the accumulated law and custom on arrest, and detention, and formal charges, and investigation, needs to be changed in some fundamental way. When you need so much time, what would be wrong with bringing in some judicial supervision of the process? Why don't the Police want an audience?

But he wants us to trust him.

He chooses to fight terrorists by diminishing the checks and balances on the excesses of power, in ways which seem likely to provoke young muslims in Britain, who seem to be the potential terrorist. He seems to be setting up a return to the days of Breathing while Black, fuelling the very threat he claims to be defending us against.

But he wants us to trust him.

Personally, I reckon he's looking a bit tired.

No doubt this is because I'm new at this Britain thing, but how did this seem like a good idea to so many MPs? Yes, I know about the last-ditch offers to get swing votes; I mean about the rest. How could this do anything but harm Brown's already shaky reputation?

Has everyone always been this eager for a police state and I just didn't notice? (Entirely possible. I didn't care about politics till I was 15 -- that'd be 2001.)

You'll have noticed that they have denied permission for the stop the war coalition to march through London on Sunday against George Bush. So they'll march anyway, there will probably be arrests.

It's a fairly rare person who strongly opposes police state measures, when they're targeted at folks he doesn't like, and appear very unlikely to be applied to anyone he cares about. This is especially true when he's scared--a depressing number of people were sufficiently scared post 9/11 to back all kinds of un-American, nasty, scary police state measures, up to and including letting the president authorize both torture and the disappearing of US citizens off US soil on the president's say so.

The worst part is, people are really awful at assessing risk, so they often support police state measures to protect themselves from made-up fears. I don't have any proof, but I'm pretty sure we'd have done many times more good by spending 90% of the post 9/11 homeland security budget on boring stuff like low-cost screenings for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, or by spending it funding extra local police coverage in areas with a lot of street crime. (But how is some well-connected person going to get rich quick doing *that* crap?)

Foreign suspects held in Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts, the US Supreme Court has ruled. --BBC online

The concept is coming from the link under the last word of the "Bad Campaign Merchandising" particle.

Honest, that's how it came out. Seems rather recursive to me.

From a different site's explanation of the code:
You should stop, I have something important to communicate.
I am disabled, communicate with me.
The way is off my ship. You may feel your way past me. (!)

I kind of like the latter set; it has a sort of "ships that pass in the night" vibe.

My ML name spelled out:

Stop your intention.
Man overboard.
About to sail.
Pilot on board.
Altering course to starboard.
Romeo.

Hmmmm. I have been much more no-nonsense than usual on the phone today. Okay, assertive. All right, downright rude. (But only to the creditors who keep calling in an attempt to hassle someone who hasn't worked here in 5 years: who had a similar name to me. Aargh.)

Doesn't make a good sentence, unfortunately.

I'm stopped to pick up nuclear weapons from a shipwreck? Cool!

By throwing out grenades under it.

Which wouldn't be half so flabbergasting if his name weren't Orion....

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VEAGEewAdlQ
Werewolf

There was a 1970's series called Kolchack that apparently had a werewolf episode.

Serious electric guitars

"You're not a man who turns into a wolf. You're a wolf masquerading as a man!"

Heee!

Also: When toy design goes terribly, hilariously wrong.

"More Top Yahoos Heading for the Exits"

Presumably to write best-selling exposes about their time in the White House.

The article is actually about top Yahoo executives departing, presumably in advance of mongrel microsoft hordes.

It's good to know I'm not completely insane.

• AD - I am abandoning my vessel which has suffered a nuclear accident and is a possible source of
  radiation danger.
• ND - Tsunami (phenomenal wave) is expected. You should take appropriate precautions.
• OY 1 - Fairway is mined. (great for golfers)
• SN - You should stop immediately. Do not scuttle. Do not lower boats. Do not use the wireless. If
  you disobey I shall open fire on you.

Disabled;Engines Going Astern; On Fire, Keep Clear; Stop Instantly.

Most people who know me would probably say that's about right.

Drool slobber slobber drool....

Engines Going Astern, Stop Instantly, Keep Clear.

The praetorian guard is starting to select the incoming emporer. I wonder what they'll do when Obama wins.

OY 1 - Fairway is mined. (great for golfers)

Oy?

Does the number of mines armed depend on the golfer's handicap? And do we want to kill off the good players ("Harrison Bergeron rules") or the bad ones ("George Bush Rules")?

It was first broadcast in four parts, but the official video release is in three. (If I recall correctly, it was made in three parts, then the first episode was split into two for the first broadcast for scheduling reasons.)

In Beyond Genre (1972), Paul Hernadi takes on and presents for contemporary readers Ramon Fernandez's 1926 proposal to divide prose fiction into two broad tonalities or aspects. At one pole, the roman concerns itself with "the representation of events as they emerge and develop in time." Its "intuitive," "synthetic," "vital tonality evokes a 'psychogical present (which has nothing to do with the grammatical tense of a text)." This idiom, the idiom of the roman, is clearly instinct with and generates mimesis. At the other pole, the recit concerns itself with "the presentation of past events by a narrator in accordance with the principles of logic and rhetoric." Its "logical" and "analytical" tonality reports a "conceptualized temps," which has nothing to do with grammatical tense either, but which gives off a sense of distanced, disjunct pastness. This idiom, the idiom of the recit, is just as clearly instinct with and generates exemplification.

That made sense to me when I first read it, or I thought it did; I thought of Laurence Sterne, Gene Wolfe and John Crowley as authors whose works are mostly recit, as opposed to most other authors writing roman. But further reading in the same essay ("Scholia, Seasoned with Crabs, Blish Is") showed me that I probably didn't understand it as well as I thought. Because Clute goes on to identify James Blish as a primarily recit author; and I can't figure out what he has in common with the authors I thought of when reading the quoted passage, or the other authors Clute mentions later on. I wrote more about this on my weblog (linked from my name above). Does anyone else have a better idea what he means here? Has anyone read Hernadi or Fernandez?

Mined if I play through?

It's all-Tim Russert, all the time. How ever did I miss that he was the heir to Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Huntley and Brinkley, and all the rest?

I have never read this story, but now I'd kind of like to and my google-fu is not turning anything up. Does this ring a bell with any of you?

Jeff Sharlet: It's an international network of evangelical activists in government, military and business. The Family is dedicated to this idea that Christianity has gotten it all wrong for two thousand years by focusing on the poor, the suffering and the weak.

Lindsay Beyerstein: In "The Family," a lot of subjects explicitly state their admiration for Hitler and other authoritarian political figures. How much of that is admiring their style, and how much is admiring their substance?

Jeff Sharlet: I'd argue that there isn't a hell of a lot of difference. I spent a lot of time living with these guys, and I remember at one point asking them, "What's the deal with all this Hitler talk?" And they'd say, "Oh, it's not the ends, it's the means." But to most of us, the means seem pretty bad, too. The means are authoritarianism.

Lindsay Beyerstein: Is [Hillary Clinton] still getting counseling from him?

Jeff Sharlet: This was in 2005, and she refused to say anything about this. When NBC questioned her about this, her only answer was that (she's) not a member and (she) has never given Doug Coe money -- which was a strangely parsed kind of answer.

Scary stuff.

This just hasn't been a good week for our comnunity.

It seems to be mostly visual artists rather than authors who are mad about it; the bill has a provision for the Copyright Office certifying private databases of pictorial and sculptural works, but not of sonic or textual works, if I understand correctly.

The Copyright office's page on the bill

I eventually figured out who he was. We talked about roadside eateries, drive-in movies, fishing and taxidermy (much of the burden of these last two was borne by another friend who was there).

Best of luck to him. I hope to see him again.

He's at the same hospital where I received my quadruple bypass operation. They do good work there. I guess my main advice for that situation is "don't skimp on the rehab".

I'll just pith off now.

*In both senses of the word.

Apparently, we have to wait until next year to find out more.

@$^#$%^$#

So. I'm not in the mood for more heaviness, and I'm too tired to enjoy a Doctor Who so I turn off the TiFaux. I see that an episode of the digitally-enhanced Original Star Trek is showing. Hey, why not?

Only instead the channel was running an infomercial. For some kind of colonic irrigation product. I just checked back and now there's a Wealth Expert telling people they can get rich buying up foreclosed properties and renting them out.

I think Television is telling me to read something.

Someone who complains about another's complaint is only meta-carpal-ing.

Please resume punning.

That was a good thread.

your website is cited here as a good bookbinding site! (I found that page through craft: magazine's blog.)

Cool. The site is hopelessly out of date with what I've been doing lately, but I built it as I learned the basics, and as I made my own tools.

I'm glad other people find it useful.

I saw the singer again today; rode behind her for a few blocks. She sang, as usual. Modern music, this time, late 20th Century pop in English.

Not every day can be medieval.

He produced some spectacular movie magic. A real shame to leave at only age 62.

Stan Winston

This past weekend, there was a start-up media-con in Dallas which called itself FedConUSA. It imploded in fairly spectacular fashion, and there are going to be some legal issues.

There is a fan-run con in Dallas (this fall will be its 5th year) called FenCon, with an N. FenCon is not connected in any way to FedConUSA.

This is particularly important to note because, in addition to the similarity of names and location, both the coordinator of the failed FedCon and one of the Executive Committee of the successful FenCon are named Tim! You perceive the possibility of confusion between the two events. FenCon Tim has already received a few e-mails asking him why the con was being canceled.

FenCon is a terrific regional con; I've attended it every year and had a wonderful time. They don't need the grief of being confused with something that seems to have been run under very questionable circumstances. If you hear any scuttlebutt about this, please help the good guys and make sure people are aware of the difference.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Open Thread.

I'm rather fond of the baroque ones, myself.

"Morning has baroquen."

I certainly found the proposal that nerds are "hyperwhite" to be an interesting idea. I wonder what he would make of Nerdcore Hip-hop? The Nerdcore Rising movie also brought up racial issues I'd never thought of...Prince Paul commented on how difficult it would be to be a black nerd in particular; but even then the jump to "being a nerd is like being white but more so" was not explicitly raised. I find it troubling, but also hard to explicitly deny. I mean, thinking of black nerds in popular media, at least, one certainly could come away with that impression as well. Urkel is the sort of canonical example, and he was basically an old white man in a black teen's body. Hackers is one of the few representations I can think of that break that mold, but it was breaking a lot of "these people aren't cool" molds.

There's been gobs of discussion about race issues in fandom, of course, but as fandom is seen by many as a subset of nerd-dom...it's an interesting wrinkle.

Phew. I just can't imagine him in any other role.

http://web.mit.edu/tetazoo/www/faq.shtml

"Who/What/Where/Why/Where is Dwight?"

also

http://community.livejournal.com/tetazoo/profile

The fact that most of what's on those two webpages isn't likely to make much sense to most people (except the LJ one does explicity have "nerd" on it...), is a Clue that yes, indeed, there are nerds involved, and Dwight was/is something of an archetypal in some ways nerd (alas, he's fallen on hard times, I was quite shocked to find out that in the years since I'd last seen him, he'd gone blind).

There's a particularly poorly-chosen ad currently displaying in the "The last thing Iowa needs" Particle; an ad for Iowa fishing licenses showing a wide expanse of water. Oops.

(Some may prefer a cello.)

Serge @388: I totally missed him in 12 Monkeys. Now I have to put that one on my Netflix queueueue.

1) The anime/manga/manhwa/videogame juggernaut significantly complicates the whole thing by adding a heaping dose of Orientalism to the mix. See: North American nerds reclaiming "otaku". If what's-her-face were paying attention to the current state of geekdom, she'd be analysing nerdiness as hyper-Asianness.

2) Chicken-and-egg: surely perceptions of nerdiness as largely a White enterprise come from the racism endemic to nerdy industries like comics and SF? (No, I'm not calling You Personally racist. I mean that systemic racism in society as a whole is reflected in SF and comics.)

2.5) I met most of my current nerd friends in a university seminar on The Lord of the Rings, you know, that cornerstone of modern fantasy. Looking at it as a nerd: it changed my life. Looking at it as a biracial person: its racial politics make me queasy. Have not yet managed to reconcile the two perspectives.

3) I don't find that nerds-of-colour are rare, but I come from a wildly diverse city.

Not an excuse: an explanation. The racism of the time was aggressive and drenching; Tolkien did not successfully resist it, and TLOTR is soaked in it.

It froze. Whoops, seems the stuff's only 15% alcohol... schnapps, my apss! That barely qualifies as a cordial!

So, back to the whiskey for tonight... I've been finding some pretty good middle-range whiskeys this year. I'm currently sipping Lismore, a Speyside single malt Scotch.

Virginia Gentleman bourbon is also pretty good, despite its odd labeling: Distilled in Kentucky (there's also a Kentucky Gentleman brand) then "re-distilled" in Virginia.

I'm thinking about trying corn whiskey next -- it seems a couple of "legit" local brands have appeared over the past few years.

Oh my .... and he got the speckled stage, too.

Rush to wed as California legalises gay marriage

Personally, I note that the nerd stereotype does have a lot to do with Asperger's and the autistic spectrum in general. Someone already mentioned Steve Urkel (There's an Aspie fantasy for you!) but there are certainly black Aspies in reality. (No, I haven't read "Nerds...My people" yet, I'll get it from the library at some point.)

Brandon Sanderson's Well of Ascension kicks ass! The heroes are determined, smart, tricky, and creative... unfortunately for them, so are the villains. (Nobody's plans go quite as intended!) Plus there's an entirely different fight between hidden powers, going on in the background, and building to... the next volume, due in October.

But, hey!, says Joe, when I was having the real tough times, there's just one set of footprints! Like when I lost my eye! ("A glass eye costs how much? Oh, never mind, just give me a patch.") Why did you leave me alone, Jesus?

Why, my son, says JC, those were the times when you were too weary to walk, and so I carried you.

Well, persists Joe, how about where there's just one set of prints and a wavy line between them?

That's when you were too heavy to carry, my son, so I used a wheelbarrow.

Joe points again. How about here, where it's just a bunch of big dots in the sand?

Jesus explains: Pogo stick.

He does have some remaining sight AFAIK, but it's not a whole lot. One advantage of several of the Eurogames is that there's little or no text and/or minimal hidden information, making them easier for him to play (since he can ask "which piece is that?" if they're all open).

I do treasure it though. Perhaps I'm going to hell.

Say that again?

SPECIAL LIVE MUSIC SHOW FOR TWO NIGHTS ONLY!

On July 18th & 19th, PETER S. BEAGLE and PHIL SIGUNICK will be performing together in public for the first time in 44 years.

(That's right — more than four decades. Their last gig as a duo was all the way back in 1964, when they opened for Tom Paxton at a club in Berkeley, California.)

These two special shows will take place at the Red Eft Gallery in Wurtsboro, New York, just 75 miles northwest of New York City...

...and there are only 83 seats available for each night.

Tickets are $20, and with so few seats they should go fast. If you want to be there for this rare musical treat, make sure you get your reservation in ASAP by either (1) emailing contact@conlanpress.com or (2) calling us at 415-731-2267. And please make sure you tell us which night you prefer!

There will be wine and cheese and what-nots before each show, and a chance to get books signed and hang around with Peter and Phil for a good while afterward.

Fans of Peter's classic travel memoir, I SEE BY MY OUTFIT, will absolutely not want to miss this chance to be there when Phil and Peter pick up their guitars and recapture the magic that helped make their long-ago cross-country journey so extraordinary.

My 2-year contract with Sprint is expiring soon. I'm contemplating discontinuing their service and getting a pay-as-you-go kind of thing where I just buy topup cards from time to time. (I don't use my Treo 755p as a phone very much, it's mostly a PDA.) Today I had a look in my local drugstore and there seem to be a number of people providing that sort of thing. I'm curious whether people here have had any good or bad experiences with any such phone service providers that they can share with me.

(Feel free to email.)

They offer specials frequently, if you discover you need more minutes than I do (I got the phone primarily for auto emergencies, which I haven't had since I bought it [knock wood]).

They offer a reasonable variety of phones, although last I looked none included cameras, if you want that kind of bell and whistle. POTS is what they offer, really.

My wife has finally given in, and is going to switch from WordPerfect to MS Word. Unfortunately, that software doesn't appear to be sold separately, but is part of, for example, package MS Office Home and Student 2007. Since it also contains Excel, that's ok, but... There is always a but with MS. It also contains MS Mail. Assuming that the install has to be for the whole package, will the Outlook that my wife already uses for her email also be affected? (That sounds better than asking if it'll be effed up.)

Otherwise, I had the MS Office suite on my computer before this one, and you could choose not to install certain components; but that was a good 4 years ago, so caveat installor.

Librarians for Obama

There wouldn't be a copy of that online somewhere, would there? I'd love to read it.

geekosaur@412: a foreword (or possibly an afterword) where JRRT essentially says "mea culpa"
There wouldn't be a copy of that online somewhere, would there? I'd love to read it.

Yes, ditto please!

Further on nerds and hyperwhite. I think that conflating nerdiness with whiteness and with race makes my head hurt. Somehow I can't get clarity on this in my head. Somebody help!

"Acting white" is a slur specific to the African-American community for people who act nerdy in order to knuckle under to theMan. Is that a reflection of how 'white' nerds are positioned as betas to Jock-type alphas?

I'm reminded of Paul Graham's awful* essay Lies We Tell Kids, where he comes up with this dubious insight:

there are certain qualities that some groups in America consider "acting white." In fact most of them could as accurately be called "acting Japanese." There's nothing specifically white about such customs. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in cities.

*there are some deeply, subtly wrong things in that essay. Which is disappointing, because he's smart, and so I can't just dismiss the whole thing out of hand. I hate having to go back and check someone's work.

When I made the switch, I found that there was a bit of a learning curve, but I can't imagine it's any steeper than WordPerfect to Word. Basic functions are all intuitive, and more advanced users will find all kinds of support tutorials and FAQ's on the webpage.

Anyway, your wife could give it a try and always move on to Word if it's not up to snuff. Cain't hurt none to try, I reckon.

(I swear, they aren't paying me. It's just a quality software suite, and dammit, they offer a viable, free alternative to MS.)

*In which Microsoft decided to completely change all the things hundreds of thousands of users had spent millions of person-hours learning.

I put what I know (which isn't much) about that Orphan Works Act in a post here.

There was also an opinion by Dave Bell in between the original question and my response.

Up till now MS was pretty pissy about reading other formats -- i.e. files saved with the .odt extension. I understand that's due to change, but to be on the safe side, you should make sure documents are also saved as .doc or .xls (not just "in Word format") if other readers with MS-Office are going to need to read them.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "special characters", the version of OpenOffice I have does have that ability. (The instructions are in the help index under "regular expressions".)

Some of the folks involved are Baen authors, and some of the others hang out at Baen's Bar. I used to hang out there, which is how I know them. I am not affiliated with this magazine, and no one pays me to do anything for this magazine.

I like the story about pet rocks. I used to breed them, so I found it cute. ;-)

What do you call their offspring?
Kid-ney stones?

JimR 429: What the heck does 'Otaku' mean? And is the word you're referring to 'gaijin'?

(It may be buried in the manual, but they may want to make it a little easier to find.)

Charges are $.25 per minute for the first 10 minutes of the day, $.10 per minute thereafter. Text message $.10 apiece.

The only places I have lost signal was in the tunnels below our Regional Office in Chicago, and in elevators.

I suspect you're going about it the wrong way, at least the wrong way for OpenOffice.

Because OpenOffice is using an XML file representation, there isn't an actual paragraph mark in the file, as there might be with an application that doesn't have an hierarchical data representation.

So probably there's a better way to do what you're doing using the styles in the context of Open Office.

That said, both tab and end-of-paragraph are easy searches using regular expressions: \t and $ respectively. There's no magic in the paragraph markers the way there is in Word, though.

Outside Japan, the meaning of "otaku" has been stripped down to "avid fan" (usually of anime/manga), and indeed tends to be borne with pride partly engendered from even knowing the word "otaku" in the first place, though not always its entire history.

[*: at least to the extent that Japanese *has* pronouns; I've seen it argued by some linguists that the words generally labelled as such (e.g., the sundry "first-person pronouns" boku, ore, atashi, etc.) really aren't, since they can be used in ways that aren't strictly pronominal-- if a little old lady says to a small boy, "boku wa ringo daisuki ne?", the meaning is generally *not* "I love apples, right?" but rather "You love apples, right?" because of the age/gender specificity of boku.]

Oh, I like that a lot!

It turns out that if you use proper botanical form for describing plants and their habitats wikipedia will accuse you of plagiarism.

I really should stay away from the back stage area there, it's bad for my faith, hope, and charity.

See, I'm one of those people who will turn spaces into tabs, to create columns in a really big report, where there's no other way to do it (replacing commas wouldn't do it). Wholesale search-and-replace is really useful in doing something like that, if you can figure out how to tell it what you're trying to do.

If I am understanding the task correctly, you want to turn space-separated fields into columnar data?

You might want to take a look at Table->Convert->Text to Table; you have to highlight the text first. It will do tabs or single spaces as separators quite happily.

If you're actually trying to set up multi-column pages, that's relatively easy to do with page styles.

I've known a few black nerds (in the sense of people who e-mail you chemistry jokes, read SF, and get the punchline of the average XKCD strip), but they sure seemed much more rare in the CS/math classes, high-tech startup jobs, crypto conferences, etc., than whites and Asians. I wouldn't be surprised if this while pattern of interests and behaviors was just more rare among blacks--that wouldn't seem any weirder than blacks and whites having different patterns of voting, favorite television shows, naming choices for their kids, etc. OTOH, maybe there are vast reservoirs of black nerdiness to which I've simply never been introduced.

Admittedly I know quite a few nerds myself who wouldn't be caught dead watching the American dub.* God help me, sometimes I'm one of them.

_____________
*If you know what I mean, you're a nerd.**
**If you prefer the subtitles, you're super nerdy.***
***If you never relax this principle even for high-quality productions like the Studio Ghibli stuff, you're definitely an otaku.

I've got Virgin Mobile USA too (sorry, Charlie Stross) but the pricing is a touch different; mine is 18 cents/minute regardless. (Texts are still ten cents.) I've never had it drop out on me while I was actually using it, but my phone (Snapper) is all too good about chirping when it thinks it's out of range/signal--like every time I go into an elevator. VM use a cheap tier of Sprint service, and it sometimes shows; last month my mother and I got to the lodge at Natural Bridge in eastern Kentucky (mountains and no large towns), and decided to call our respective people. Her regular Sprint phone worked fine; mine refused to find any signal whatsoever.

And you ruby't in, every chance you get.

Right. I'm glad I'm not alone on that one. Have you read his other stuff? He's concerned about not being wrong about things, about not holding prejudiced beliefs that will be judged harshly by the people of the future. I also wonder what he will think of what he wrote.

OTOH, maybe there are vast reservoirs of black nerdiness to which I've simply never been introduced.
That's a really really interesting thought. Does nerdiness have color? (Or ethnicity?) I'm about as ignorant as one would expect a privileged white male to be on this.

Two other bits that play into the definition: otaku can be used as an adjective; properly speaking, anime nerds are anime otaku, railfans are densha otaku, etc etc. (I think the popular book/manga/movie series Densha Otoko is a pun on that - and is an example of the more recent positive attitude towards otaku.)

The term otaku has a really negative connotation due to a serial child molester murderer, Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was a kind of anime otaku and became seen as representative of the tribe to normal people. Incidentally, he was executed yesterday, though his crimes were committed in 1988-89.

From the above linked Telegraph article:

Police who searched Miyazaki's small flat found 5,763 videos, including violent anime manga that quickly earned him the title the "Otaku murderer". Despite mainly harmless associations with Japanese cartoons and films, the public fear of the "Otaku" cult has never really abated since Miyazaki's crimes

Is anyone cleaning these up? Should I keep reporting them?

Here's a summary from a review of one of the manga versions:

The book begins by following the nameless hero as he wanders around Tokyo, mulling over his paralyzing shyness and generally getting taken advantage of. Once that’s established, we see his brief moment of heroism, when he shakes off his inhibitions to stop a drunk from harassing a girl on the train. When the girl sends him a set of Hermes teacups as a thank-you, he dares to dream: maybe he can talk to a girl after all. Unsure what to do—he has no friends or, apparently, family—he posts his story on an online channel for “poison men,” men who have no girlfriends. The anonymous posters offer advice and moral support, and he quickly becomes a phenomenon on the message board, more addictive than any game.

who wouldn't be caught dead watching the American dub.*

i'm not much of an anime fan, but a lot of the stuff i have watched, i've watched (& preferred) subtitled. cause i figure i'm getting the original director's choice of voice actor, & reading subtitles doesn't bother me. just like i'd rather watch any foreign film subtitled rather than dubbed.

the kind of foundational (my foundations as an anime-appreciator) anime i saw this way (akira, cowboy bebop), were shown me by a boyfriend-at-the-time who also strongly preferred subtitles. & he's not an otaku by any stretch, certainly not in the horrible way you describe such northamericans above. but he does have the trait of all-around snobbism, like i have, where if you're experiencing something new you want to do it in the "most correct" & "authentic" way.

even if that makes us terrible poseurs & orientalists, i guess.

studio ghibli, yeah, that stuff i watched in english. because that's how it came out in theatres, & also because it's so popular & acclaimed, which caused so much of the best english-speaking talent to come on board with the dubbed version (like neil gaiman working on the script!), which meant that i felt i was seeing a work of art in its own right, not a work of art with other voices tacked on.

For what it's worth, the article on steampunk fashion in the NYT which I put a link up to, oh, about fifty thousand comments ago, had a picture of a black guy in some very nifty clothing.

Xopher--The other label is not "Gaijin," which is fairly bland in most instances. The one that really gets me going is "yellow fever," as in "Hey, your wife is Japanese, you got a bad case of the yellow fever." which is often linked to the kind of person Tloenista describes in 449. It's a hateful term that too many people repeat without thought.

(Also cf. the general public perception of D&D in the 1980s; I still remember Tom Hanks as the lunatic RPGer in the tv adaptation of Rona Jaffe's novel "Mazes and Monsters"-- which by coincidence was one of the few books in English that we found in our hotel when visiting Japan a few months ago.)

I do periodic sweep-ups, going through the Open Threads looking for the word "spam" and chasing it down. It's gardening-type work, quiet and meditative.

Unfortunately, right at the minute I'm under some pressure at work and trying to get three bookbinding projects out the door before I move house in 9 days. This has not given me a lot of gardening time.

I appreciate the effort, and will be going through and sweeping up in due course.

There's a lot to love about anime and manga. And it's perfectly possible to be a huge "otaku" without fetishizing or stereotyping Japan, but unfortunately it really does exist in fandom.

JimR @460: The bf and I joke about him having "yellow fever"...but in the wrong context? Yeah, offensive.

On an Open-Thready note: Commentors who were interested in the Curating conversations (a meditation in the sunlight) thread might find this an interesting development.

I'm cleaning them up.

Yes, please keep reporting them.

Faster than a spamming bullet!
Able to move a house while binding a book!

Anyway, I'm curious--do any of the more financially astute among us have some ideas about where the next year or two might take us? Is there a possibility of a major crash? Can we expect food shortages and gasoline prices to cause riots?
Or will everything just keep on trucking along?

I am not optimistic, but I am largely ignorant.

How sweet of you to dig out all those patterns! I was the one who mentioned it, but really it wasn't the pattern I couldn't find, just a particular blog post about one that suggested it was the "wrong color." I guess they thought it was a phone booth and thus should have been red.

By the way, I'm pretty sure I reported old spam in March/April that probably came back when ML went kaflooey* in May. It should be in my view-all-by.

*to use the technical term

Today one of the actual spams caught me eye. They're selling art. It's oddly charming, and even instructional:

"We offer one of pre-eminent product of we are in the form of an skin engraving made of good qualified original cow skin is in the form of puppets are called wayang. Wayang is figure doll in the theatre of drama traditional which very is popular in Indonesia especially Java and Bali islands. Wayang act usually based on story taken away from by epic Ramayana and Mahabharata. This skin engraving is in the form of a wayang figure in story Ramayana. He is Anoman, a white monkey assisting Rama to free his wife, Shinta, from bad giant king clutch so called Rahwana."

This is gonna be interesting.

I had read that essay (and several of his others on the same site) a few years ago, and just re-read it. I don't have the knowledge or experience to comment on the "acting white" issue; but as for the rest of it, it seems more true than not, except in a few places where it's derailed by an anti-religious bias. (He seems to side to some degree with the "Brights" who consider raising children in their parents' religion as a form of child abuse.) He fails to distinguish between parents actually lying about things they know the truth about, passing on (in good faith) non-facts that they believe because they trusted the people who told them, and passing on more or less non-verifiable beliefs that Mr. Graham thinks are false.

Xopher @479: Obviously you've never been on a date with one! *rimshot*

Obligatory (and NSFW) link to naughty Hokusai.

Wow. Thanks for the pointer.

There is, or was as of a couple of years ago, last time I went looking, a flourishing market in wayang puppets and videos of performances on Ebay. The more traditional puppets are made of leather or cured skin on wood skeletons, some later pieces are made of metal. Aside from tradition, the big issue with the puppets is that they have to stand up to a lot of use (and abuse), what with nightly performances that last for hours. The surface look isn't terribly important, since the audience sees only the shadows of the puppets on a screen, except when the puppeteers come out to take a bow.

If you have a chance to see a live show, take it, it's really fascinating stuff. I think there's a wayang company that started up in the DC area, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were one or two in the Netherlands. Other than that you'll likely have to go to Indonesia.

</puppet-geek-mode>

AT has been fun... I am now allowed to give IV fluids, and set catheters on army personell. It was much easier than I was afraid it would be (I am all kinds of calm with various amounts of gore... in the heat of the moment; but inflicting pain (or even discomfort) in cold blood is sort of squicky.

But it was easy, and I seem to be have talent for it (though I am a hard stick for the inexperienced... no body fat = rolling veins... I was a pincusion... with lots of actuall muscle getting stabbed).

We also saw a controlled burn, and I ended up writing some haiku.

If you want to see the thoughts I had on haiku and photography... I wrote it up

Some of the non-included efforts.

Yellow beaked magpie
on my roof
calls good morning

Good Morning
says the magpie on my rooftop

Impassively they stand
amidst the burning grass
enduring oaks

Past the ground squirrels
and the rabbits
He goes in search of coffee

"Because you got it free this evening, some of you probably may even read it. We were told by Milton Friedman there are no free lunches. To distribute books free of charge is a mistake and a devaluation of the book."

Some of us think otherwise.

If you don't use the phone much, it's worth figuring out your minimum monthly cost as well. The plan I'm on has a "$20 every 90 days" feature, so the minimum monthly cost is about $7 (and the unused minutes roll over, which is nice). If you go with automatic credit card top-up, you can drop the minimum down to $5/month ($15 per 90 days), but we use about $7 worth of minutes anyway in an average month, so we haven't bothered. It's still way better than the usual "$39.99+ plus surcharges/month" contract plan if you're an infrequent cell user.

If you want two phones, they also offered a "20c/10c plan" (10c/minute when talking to a Virgin Mobile phone, 20c when talking to another phone, so in effect you can call your partner's phone and pay 20c/min. minute total instead of 36c/min.). I'm not sure if you can still get that one, but we're tempted to go for it since we've had occasions where it'd be useful for one of us to call the other when we're both mobile. Of course, then you have to double the minimum monthly payment as well.

It stops the EFF's lawsuit simply on the president's say-so, and the judge is forbidden from ever describing the evidence that he'll be given of what, exactly, the president's say-so was.

Now I know that the Democratic party is in the minority in the House and Senate, and are at risk of losing many more seats in November, so they have no choice but to vote on this bill with less than 24 hours review. But that's fine, because the telecom lobby and the GOP got to review it, and since they're slightly less than entirely ecstatically happy with it, it must be the product of compromise. And it's not like anyone would ever want to check into these activities starting, say, next year.
Yes, I know, what the president says is legal, is legal.
Yes, I know, it is just a g-d piece of paper, and warrants are hard.

But consider calling your reps tomorrow morning anyways.

After watching this year's Hugo-nominated films, I would like to propose moritoria on the following:

--introductory voiceovers
--generic orchestral music, especially when so loud as to obscure the dialog
--sappy ballads over the closing credits, even (or perhaps especially) when by synth-pop divas from the Eighties whom I otherwise quite enjoy

Yours,
A Concerned Viewer

I should be happy. Thanks, House leadership.

Nor should it be confused with an o-taco (who sadly is missing her Naruto headband in this image).

The blackmail photos behind this bill have got to be amazing. Or is there some other explanation?

Of course, this endless increase in government power, intrusive surveillance, and national security secrecy will end, as soon as there's a Democrat in the white house. How could I ever doubt it?

A party at the National Archives, and someone got pictures of them with a live bribe or a dead constitution?

I don't know. I wish I understood. Sure, AT&T has donated some several hundred thousands, and something about how it wouldn't be seemly to take money from convicted companies, so better keep them from the possibility of being convicted.

But, darn. If the EFF's lawsuit had been stomped out 27 months ago...
If the judge hadn't said that the defendants couldn't "seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal"...
If the house & senate Dems hadn't worked to put it off last time...
If Obama hadn't said he's against immunity and lack of accountability...

I wouldn't have had this long-banked ember of hope.

Thus my returning cynicism today is far worse for having been held off for all those months. It is as bad as everything GB has ever asked for in the past, and can we stop it?

No. We. Can't.

Flat-out accusation of war crimes by a general officer of the United States military....

http://www.truthout.org/article/us-general-accuses-bush-administration-war-crimes

In 2004, Taguba released a classified report detailing abuses committed at Abu Ghraib Prison. The "Taguba Report" (executive summary) urged Pentagon officials to follow up on its findings by enforcing adherence to the Geneva Conventions in interrogations.

Taguba retired in January 2007, later alleging that Pentagon officials had ordered him to retire for being "overzealous" in his criticisms of the military....

http://brokenlives.info/?page_id=23

Preface to Broken Laws, Broken Lives
By Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.)

Maj. General Taguba led the US Army’s official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and testified before Congress on his findings in May, 2004.

This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture....

...After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account....

=========

Meanwhile, I received a Congresscritter letter with lameole excuses for stomping on any iniative for impeachment....

But since the white house could argue these actions were

designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation of a terrorist attack, against the United States" and (B) the subject of a written request or directive . . . indicating that the activity was (i) authorized by the President;...

Congress better get moving to give them immunity too, and do it in a way that outlaws any further investigations. I mean, how can the president ask people to do whatever he wants if he can't guarantee he'll protect them from all consequences.

I read Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti, and while the plot was forgettable, the premise was intriguing. I find myself drawing up approximations for fabrication of icarii wings that map closely to actual bird wings. Only, yknow, metal and hinged. (And not lighter than air.)

I expect the proportions would change with the body weight, though. (Not just the wing-to-body proportion, which of course changes even more dramatically, but the proportion within the wings too.) As you approach human weight, all the extrapolations become stupid -- there's a reason hang-gliders don't look like nylon angels.

But I enjoyed the book quite a lot, and not just for the fantasy gimmicks. The plot was in some senses predictable, but well-executed and zingy. "Weak ending" is my only real complaint -- but this is more than made up for by the characters and the quality of the background detail.

Easy: the Democrats aren't what they say they are, and they never have been. We need to stop being fooled.

It's a two-man con, and can take place online or offline. Our con men, Wednesday and Low Key, have gotten ahold of someone's misplaced chequebook. The mark is someone who's advertised something for sale -- a bike, say. Low Key contacts Mark to purchase the bike and says he'll send him a cheque. After the cheque arrives, Wednesday contacts Mark, saying that his foolish son Low Key made out the cheque for the wrong amount -- maybe he made a typo, or added a zero. Mark, of course, pays Wednesday the difference.

Locality: UK.
Victims: My boss, and apparently another person with an account at the same bank...

It sounds crazy, doesn't it? It really is an upgrade, though. We're going from a Mac G5 running an older version of OSX to a Mac Pro running the latest. Leopard is the problem - it apparently doesn't play nicely with our (Windows-based) server system. I've been told more than once that I'll see notable improvements in how well things work, in spite of the crashes. I'll be getting mine this afternoon, so we'll see soon enough.

#492, Kathryn from Sunnyvale -

I called, but my rep is a Republican, so I expect to be ignored.

Am I reading the internet correctly, that you can't export bookmarks from Safari (1.3.2) without major hoop-jumping?

*wanders off muttering*

I haven't actually tried it, but there's a File > "Export Bookmarks..." menu option. Doesn't that do what you want?

Mine doesn't have that menu option - it's an older version of Safari. I think they introduced export in Safari 2.x.

How do we insert umlauts and accents on top of letters of the alphabet?

The only name I've heard for it is "overpayment scam."

That is exactly why I've preferred Netscape/Firefox to Internet Explorer; the bookmarks are an HTML file.

I have my menus and submenus and sub²menus, but I also have a link to the 'bookmarks.html' file (described as 'Current bookmarks as HTML page'). When I have trouble remembering exactly where I squirreled away some link, I load that page and use Ctrl+F (Find) to search on some phrase I can remember.

That's what "export" does on every browser I've used. Very handy.

I have this vague idea that the bookmarks for IE are a special-case html file - if you renamed the "favorites" file to "favorites.html" it would open and run fine, but that might be my imagination.

Nope, I was imagining it. IE favorites is a folder full of internet shortcuts, and renaming it doesn't make it an html file. I think you could do a find on it almost as fast with the right shortcut, but it's a different animal altogether.

    C:\Documents and Settings\[your account]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[some gibberish string].default

In that directory you should find 'bookmarks.html'.

I've actually moved my browser and mail data to a different location, and edited the configuration file to point to it (if you type about:config in the address line of the browser, you can read this file and edit it within the browser). I set the entry 'browser.bookmarks.file' to 'C:\Browser\Bookmarks\bookmarkB.html'.

I believe the reason for doing that, was that I had once done a re-install of Netscape, and it overwrote the bookmarks file I had going. I was able to re-establish my bookmarks file from some backups... but by making my bookmark file somewhere else other than the default location, I assured that if I needed to do a re-install, my bookmarks would not get written over (I'd still need to edit the configuration file to point to where they actually were... but that would be a small problem).

If you're using a Mac (or Linux), we'll need to get help from someone else...

It's a good thing we're the Good Guys. Otherwise, abducting thousands of people to subject them to torture, and killing a hundred or so in the process (aka torturing them to death), would amount to crimes against humanity. I don't claim to be a brilliant legal mind, like John Yoo, but I'm pretty sure "I was just following orders" turns out not to absolve you of guilt in cases like this. Of course, as with the government of North Korea, being belligerent and well-armed may protect our leaders from justice. But if, ten years from now, someone spirited Don Rumsfeld off to The Hague in the middle of the night to stand trial, what moral argument would there be against it?

I hoped (hah!) for better from him.

"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do," Bond said.

I figured that by late yesterday, when he was loudly saying nothing. In retrospect I suppose the anti-immunity votes back a few months ago were to help with the primaries.

129 did vote no. I can hope that some of those were in unsafe, well-contested districts = voted on principle when it's hard to vote on principle. All the local reps (except Pelosi) voted no, but none of them are in unsafe districts.

Still, because of the EFF's lawsuit some light was shed on their activities--Klein did give his testimony, etc. Sure, Congress just outlawed windows and flashlights, but for a brief moment the vampires were visible.

Now if there were some brave soul who'd put a "hold" on the bill in the Senate...

Greenwald and friends have an ad running in the WaPo and in Hoyer's district, and expect to have more ads against some of the Blue Dogs soon.

So, if the government decides that allowing students to pray aloud in schools is against policy, or that private ownership of guns is forbidden, I suppose Bond will also agree that when the government speaks, the citizens must jump to obey. What could be more American than that?

What the f-ck happened to my country? Didn't the bad guys in the movies used to be the ones whose governments did crap like abduct and torture people, wiretap their own citizens, and massively manipulate their own media?

Hope I'm not missing the point, but could you not export your bookmarks? In both Firefox & IE, the output file is a html file containing your bookmarks. Then use the import option in your browser to get them into your new browser. I synchronise my bookmarks between home & work PCs (different PCs running different browsers) this way.

Firefox (mine's 2.0.0.14):
Bookmarks->Organise Bookmarks. Then go to File -> Export (will export your bookmarks into a html file). To import, while in the Organise Bookmarks mode, File-> Import (from file)

IE (mine's ver 7):
Go to 'Favorites' -> 'Export Favorites'(export to a file or address). Make the output filename.htm.
To import, click the 'Add to Favorites' button -> 'Import and Export' -> launches the Import/Export Wizard. Click 'Next', 'Import Favorites' 'Import from a file or address'. CLick on the browse button & locate the html file that contains the bookmarks etc...

(hm, ML doesn't like <tt>)

But if, ten years from now, someone spirited Don Rumsfeld off to The Hague in the middle of the night to stand trial, what moral argument would there be against it?

I for one, won't be inclined to look for one. Although, come to think of it, I might argue that they ought to take Cheney instead.

This isn't hope. This isn't change.

I'd assume that Obama thinks this is the best deal the Dems can get in the current situation.

And he IS in a better vantage point to assess this than most people are.

I flatly disagree with the people who say that if he took on this fight and it passed anyway, he'd look weak. No, he'd look principled. Not taking a stand against it, because he knows he's going to lose this fight? That makes him look cowardly.

In January, he said, I share your commitment to this cause, and will stand with you in the fights to come. Apparently not. I am REALLY angry.

I'm only this angry because I liked him so much.

You're not alone.
I don't want to vote third-party, because I see that as likely to get us McCain (a conclusion worth avoiding). But I'm not going to volunteer or donate money to someone who can't speak out from a position of power when it would actually do some good. Waiting until it's all over and then saying 'oh, gee, this is bad' - f* you, you had your chance.

As strange as it seems, Democrats actually have a majority in the House and the Senate. They don't need to make deals. They don't need to include telecom immunity in any bill. Pass the bill without immunity, and if the Republicans refuse it, they're the ones refusing to pass a crucial bill t' fight tha War on Terrah, not the Democrats. We don't need to compromise on this.

And, what Caroline said: compromising on this isn't good, smart politics. It's cowardice. There are fights worth fighting even when you know you're going to lose, and this is one. If he's going to step away from this, then what precisely will he fight for?

P J Evans @ 540: "I don't want to vote third-party, because I see that as likely to get us McCain (a conclusion worth avoiding). But I'm not going to volunteer or donate money to someone who can't speak out from a position of power when it would actually do some good."

I want someone to start a BlueAmerica fund called "Money I would have donated to Obama if he hadn't chickened out on FISA." Show Obama exactly what he lost by doing this.

One thing I know: every time a progressive politician compromises and progressives throw up their hands and give up, the Republicans win. Obama's let us down. Instead of giving up, let's engage in some corrective action. He invited us to join his movement. Let's show him exactly what that entails.

This video captures a lot of what I'm feeling right now.

Yep. If he's not going to be brave enough to oppose stuff like this, why the hell am I giving him my vote? The same applies to the Democrats as a whole. If I want support for a surveillance state, I can get that from the Republicans, too. Hell, I can get that by voting Libertarian or Green, and leaving the final decision of which pro-surveillance party gets elected to voters with stronger stomachs.

As far as I can tell, Obama and the Democrats' only advantage on this issue is that they're probably not quite as crazy as the Republicans. Though who knows? When Obama's in the white house, with a friendly congress but only limited political capital, he's going to have to make some hard decisions. Should we close down Guantanamo and our network of secret prisons/torture chambers[1]? What if the intelligence agencies give Obama and the Democratic leaders in congress another version of the "if you knew what we know" briefing? Why should I believe he's going to take a principled stand on those issues, once it costs him and he has to decide whether that's worth Democrats getting smeared as "soft on terrorism" in the 2010 midterm elections?

This crap probably hasn't changed my vote this fall. It's just used up a big chunk of the hope I had that maybe things were going to get better. And I was always kind of skeptical about that.

[1] I think we've been assured that torture has stopped a couple times now, and that we were closing the secret prisons. But for some reason, I remain skeptical....

My wife and I just bought a house yesterday. This is the first time we've owned a house--before, we've not lived anywhere we were sure we wanted to stay, so we rented, even though we often ended up living in rental places for many years. (The house we're renting now, we've lived in for five years, though for most of that, we couldn't afford the bubble-inflated housing prices.)

It seems strange to put something so happy in line with the dark discussions of politics right now. (But then, we're doing some of that with gay marriage discussions, too.) But then, there have been relatively few real bright spots in politics in the last seven years.

Actually, when it's dark is usually an excellent time to talk about happy things.

Congratulations!

Light is returning,
Even though this is the darkest hour;
No one can hold back the dawn.

Let's keep it burning,
Let's keep the light of hope alive:
Make safe our journey through the storm.

One planet is turning,
Circles on her path around the sun:
Earth Mother is calling her children home.

On Friday we get the keys to our third house*†. A year renting is enough to remind us why we like owning instead.

-----
* In series, not in parallel.
† Technically, the first was an apartment.

Right on.

I got like this in 2000 -- I was one of the third-party voters who got fed up with some of the anti-progressive letdowns of the Clinton years (and there were some) and decided to send a message. (I voted for the Socialist Party candidate, not Nader, but it doesn't matter -- I supported Nader in terms of campaigning.) I really thought it was a good idea at the time; I thought the Democrats would get the message, that so many people were fed up enough to vote Green, and that when Gore won he'd take that into account.

We all know what happened.

Now I'm seeing the same frustration -- I've been seeing it for a while from people who never supported Obama, and now I'm seeing it from people who did, including myself. Lots of calls to vote third-party to send a message. But I think we've already run this experiment, and it did not yield the desired results. I understand being angry, but I don't understand willingly walking back into 8 more years of Bush because maybe the Democrats will get the message to move left this time. The definition of insanity, etc.

There are two options that I see. Some political genius actually manages to mount up a viable third party and steals sufficient support from the Democrats to take over. I don't think that's bleeding likely, given the electoral system we have, and I especially don't think it's bleeding likely before November. I wish things were different and more open, but they are not.

Or, we remake the Democrats from within, pushing progressive candidates in and the DINOs out. This is the option that seems most likely to succeed, and it's the one I'm going to pursue.

It looks like you (or I) actually could start such a fundraising page. Would be nice if some of the big liberal bloggers would get on board with such a thing -- that's how it'd get enough exposure to be worthwhile.

Also, do campaigns usually answer the phone on the weekends? I've been trying to call Obama's campaign to express my displeasure and can neither get to a person nor leave a message. Should I wait until Monday morning?

(I'm going to call my senators to tell them to vote no, but since my senators are Burr and Dole, I doubt it'll do any good.)

So tell us about your new house!

all: Thanks!

It's a townhouse in a very nice neighborhood. One of the big selling points is that you almost can't drive into the parking area, for all the kids with bikes riding around. We're spending much skullsweat trying to figure out how to lay everything out, how much of our current crap we can give away or throw out (because we're crowded in a rented house of about the same size, with slightly more storage space). Today, I have to draw out scale maps of the rooms from the measurements we took yesterday, so we can start trying to arrange scaled furniture pieces and see how best to make the rooms work. And clean a bunch of stuff. And....

Anyway, this is very fun and exciting. Much better than following politics, which involves lots of stuff that's entirely outside my power. (Though a lot of the house stuff is also outside my power.)

Thanks for the offer, but it really wasn't that many, and I've saved the ones I really wanted the hard way already. It was a good excuse to clean them out, I suppose. I appreciate your help all the same. :)

#543, albatross -

Tempering the bad news with the good is a good thing. Congratulations!

Good luck with the move!

I ended up driving as my housemate held the cat wrapped up in a towel, its head wedged into her armpit where it was safe. The 24-hour vet in Berkeley said there was an open fracture in the cat's left rear leg. It stands a not insignificant chance of getting infected; the options are to amputate for $2-3,000 or try to pin it together for $3-5,000.

But my housemate is on SSDI because of the brain-burnout thing, apparently making like $10,000 a year. She could barely scrape together $300 and wasn't sure her credit card would accept a charge of $50. She couldn't even pay the $700-some fee to get the cat painkillers and antibiotics, bandage its leg, and keep it for the few hours left in the night; she had to forego X-rays to see if pinning the leg together is even an option. They accepted what she had, because this morning she could talk to her mother in Florida, who also sounds poor to me... Driving back after, she was not really keeping it together, "even if I could have saved... $3-5,000?"

So, I guess the upshot is, 1. get pet health insurance if you can afford it 2. health care costs are screwing up veterinary stuff, not just human stuff 3. do you know if there are charities that might help with this kind of thing? 4. this sucks.

The only experience I have with help for vet bills is on an individual level -- with mod approval, people will sometimes ask for help in the Livejournal kittypix community, and others will donate via PayPal. People are very generous in online cat-related communities, in my experience. If you or your friend is involved in one, maybe ask the mods if it would be okay to ask for help?

I would suggest being up front with the hospital about finances, and suggesting your housemate talk to her regular vet to see if someone can work out a sliding scale fee and a payment schedule. Hopefully you can find a vet who can work with her. (Does anyone know if there any way to work with a veterinary student hospital?)

It may not be comforting, but I think you're doing a good job of fulfilling the primary responsibility, which is trying to minimize the pain the cat is in.

It does suck.

I don't know, but I'm going to ask around (and will write/email if I do hear a proactive solution). I have faint memories of San Francisco having a clinic. Perhaps ask on Pets in Craigslist?

As to the heat--if it's 25F / 15C degrees higher than average (Pacifica should be shrouded in a gloomy fog) it's a heat wave. Same as if people in Alaska called 80 a heat wave, it's a heat wave (or if people call 30 days without rain a 'drought', it's a drought).

(San Francisco's SPCA has an interest-free loan program for emergencies, but it's only for low-income SF residents.

Also, congrats to albatross and abi, it would be neat to have a house! Someday. Hope your houses are friendly and low-maintenance.

The letter includes the 15 other recipients' email addresses of the version that got to me, and the 10 people in the previous iteration.

I'm tempted to mail all 25 of them back (from one of my pseudony yahoo accounts), and am thinking about what to say.

There is an online letter from the 'preachers wife' & church saying that they never said this. Could use that, although it isn't enough. Could link to Obama's anti-smear website, but would that help? Would "pastor's wife has important message about Obama" as the (correcting) subject line make them more likely to read it?

Could link to that Bible verse that says that saying someone isn't an xian when they are is seriously bad mojo, but would that help them, or just help me feel snarkier?

You could email back saying that the email had a computer virus, and all emails from that sender (up the chain) should be deleted unread...

(A tendon in my shoulder is acting up, and even with painkillers it's the sort of delicate agony that makes me crabby and evil.)

The Dems aren't a centralized ideological command-and-control party like the GOP. They're a coalition party. Maintaining a unified position requires negotiation among the factions.

In some ways I'm surprised they managed to delay the bill as long as they did. And a one-year delay for an administration in the second half of its second term is not entirely a trivial matter.

Not that I'm particularly pleased by the bill that passed. Aside from anything else, given Bush's obsession with telecom immunity, they might have been able to wring more concessions on other matters than they actually seem to have done.

Years ago I had been told that the old Sherwin Williams Paint logo and slogan ("We cover the earth") came about because the founders were young Communists, and the globe getting enveloped in red paint was an in-joke about the coming revolution. However (as the story went), the joke was on them because they succeeded in the paint business and became rich.

Unfortunately for that story, apparently the logo was originally designed in 1890. The logo inspires some controversy (one thing for certain; it isn't green); some entertaining* discussion of it here and here.

* In the ML manner of threads, drifts into topics such as Aleister Crowley.

It's called Down The Mysterly River by Bill Willingham.

The blurb from the site I found it on:
As odd a collection of fugitives as there ever was: A wolf who is not a wolf; a badger who is also an ex-army veteran; the brave sheriff of a lost forest realm; and a big, ugly, stinky, yellow monster. Together they're on the run from the dreaded Blue Cutters, who seem bent on their destruction. To escape the Cutters, the four friends will have to flee out of the hills and down the Mysterly River, to reach the one far away place of safety the Cutters aren't allowed to go: the castle of the Wizard Edgar.

I was hooked into this one from about the second page, when the young protagonist realizes that he not only doesn't know where he is or how he got there, he doesn't know what the date is or even the time of year. His reactions reminded me strongly of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (the novel, I mean) - he was levelheaded and thoughtful in an endearing, childish way.

The whole novel has for me the feel of an older YA story, from the era when they didn't actually use that term and kids weren't quite so protected from death and violence. Characters die or are destroyed by the Cutters, who are genuinely terrifying. All four of the main characters (only one of whom is human) have distinct viewpoints and blind spots, and even considering the scary parts, the tone of the novel really reminds me of older childrens' books I've read before.

I can't find any details about buying this novel in hardcopy - it is out of print, according to Amazon. I discovered it through wowio.com, which is an ad-supported free download site. (Mr. Willingham gets royalties for the downloads.) You can get a PDF here. You do have to register, but I haven't found the required hoop-jumping to be too onerous.

@ 542: "Yep. If he's not going to be brave enough to oppose stuff like this, why the hell am I giving him my vote? The same applies to the Democrats as a whole. If I want support for a surveillance state, I can get that from the Republicans, too. Hell, I can get that by voting Libertarian or Green, and leaving the final decision of which pro-surveillance party gets elected to voters with stronger stomachs."

That wasn't really my point. I don't think the only options here are put up with Obama's waffling on crucial issues or giving up. There's a third option: make Obama do what we want from him. Create the Democratic party we want, or create a new party that does what we want--it doesn't matter. There are options that don't involve giving up in disgust. I'm tired of conceding the fight to the Republicans everytime a progressive falls short. I'm angry and I feel betrayed, and I plan to make that anger work for me.

Caroline @ 548: "There are two options that I see. Some political genius actually manages to mount up a viable third party and steals sufficient support from the Democrats to take over. I don't think that's bleeding likely, given the electoral system we have, and I especially don't think it's bleeding likely before November. I wish things were different and more open, but they are not.

"Or, we remake the Democrats from within, pushing progressive candidates in and the DINOs out. This is the option that seems most likely to succeed, and it's the one I'm going to pursue."

I don't see any need to pick one option over the other. Let's do both, and see which one works. Let's fund a party that's more radical than the Democrats, nipping at their left flank, and let's donate money to MoveOn.org and ActBlue to take down RINOs and replace them with real progressives.

(Sometimes, when I'm feeling optimistic, I imagine an America where the Republicans have completely collapsed and the Democrats have become the right-wing party, with the Greens or Socialists on their left.)

Michael I @ 566: "The Dems aren't a centralized ideological command-and-control party like the GOP. They're a coalition party. Maintaining a unified position requires negotiation among the factions."

One problem with being a Big Tent party is that it makes it really easy for quislings and double agents to slip in undetected. The point at which maintaining your coalition requires betraying your fundamental principles, you've messed up--what are you maintaining your coalition for, anyway?

albatross, #543, congratulations! Fourth person I know who bought a house recently!

Madeline F., #558, oh, that's too bad. I don't know of any charities or I'd be applying myself. I have $10K in vet bills for Giorgio and Shiva on a credit card. Fortunately, it's only 6%APR.

This is a truly awful bill (Glenn Greenwald explains why), and the Democrats had no need to pass this bill at all so there was no need to compromise. Nancy Pelosi knows how to play this game, she played it with Social Security 'reform'.

I haven't seen anything meaningful gained from the purported compromise; the main 'advantage' that I've seen is that this bill will be labeled the exclusive authority for intelligence wiretaps. Just like FISA before it.

This bill contains de facto retroactive immunity, a provision that both Chris Dodd and Barack Obama said that they would filibuster back when they were running for the nomination. It depresses me to think that constitutional government is a fringe left constituency that only needs to be placated during primary season.

Also, Michael I writes in 536: "I'd assume that Obama thinks this is the best deal the Dems can get in the current situation."

For me, this is uncomfortably close to "I'm sure the President gets to see better intelligence than we do, and we should just trust him."

Maybe Kerry will filibuster it.... the person in his office who answered the phone said Sen Kerry is against it.

I'll believe that when he (or any other senator that talks a good line) actually does something that might stop it.

It's 11,000 words long, so it is a bit of a read. But I tried to have one thing that would tell the entire narrative around the United States involvement with Iraq that led up to the invasion.

I've been working on it for about a week now. I'm sure it's got issues with it, and typos, and maybe I even foobar some basic historical assessments.

I could use some help from anyone who knows the history of our involvement in that area, or anyone who'd be interested in giving it a read and giving me some feedback.

The first draft is currently posted here

Thanks.

See, it's actually given me a bit of hope that I hadn't had before. The reason I've been vaguely pro-Obama is that he's whipped up a whole bunch of people to care about what's going on, and I have this dare-to-dream hope that that mass of people will continue to pay attention to what's going on and what he does after he takes office (if he does), and when they inevitably don't get the progress they want, they'll be in an unprecedented situation to demand it. And until this latest FISA abomination I've seen no sign that this hope is justified, but now all of a sudden Obama's done something his supporters don't like and they're not accepting it as OK. I like that.

(I'm unrelatedly a bit tipsy right now, so if I'm not making sense, I apologize.)

R.M. Koske, @ 570,
That story looks really interesting.
Unfortunately, wowio only allows US residents to sign up. Alas.
Anyone know how I can trick them into thinking I'm over there?

Still, I had hoped that he'd at least be in office before he started disappointing us.

The expanded authority does expire in four years, so there WILL be at least one more chance to get the balance right.

There's a third option: make Obama do what we want from him. Create the Democratic party we want, or create a new party that does what we want--it doesn't matter.

I've trying to say this to people myself in a slightly different context.

Maybe Kerry will filibuster it.... the person in his office who answered the phone said Sen Kerry is against it.

Oh dear. I think I knew it was US only and forgot. I should have mentioned it.

Lifehacker has a program that might do it. (The headline says windows only, but the comments say it can work in OSX too.) I haven't tried it, obviously.

If/when you get hold of the novel, I'd love to hear what you think of it.

I want them to know what they're doing, though. I want them to understand that this is a law which says the 4th amendment doesn't apply if the president doesn't like you.

I expect Obama to understand this: he taught con law, he damned well ought to understand this. That's what has me ticked at him. I don't expect better from McCain; he doesn't have the legal background.

I'm wondering what would happen if they, all of these politicians, started getting dead silence at all their public speaking engagements. No applause, no cheers, no boos, just silence. No phone calls from the pulbic, just written communications (fax and e-mail count as written). And we start flying the Bennington flag or the 'Don't Tread on Me' flag on holidays. Or a skull-and-crossbones flag.

I don't plan to give up on voting; I don't want to vote third party because that's a losing option. I want better elected officials. If we can get there from inside, good. If we have to start a new party - and that's a bad option - then so be it.

Amen. That's why I'm ticked too; he knows better. This smacks of expediency for no apparent reason.

Of course, the reason it was resurrected still puzzles me. It was fought back hard in February, and all they had to do, I think, was extend the existing law a while. Instead, Hoyer and Rockefeller came up with this abomination, and Pelosi (who railed against it on the floor and then voted FOR it) brought it up.

Additionally I'm ticked because the members got a single lousy hour to debate it before a vote. I remember fine words after the Dems took over in 2006 about "no more legislation sent up with no time for Representatives to study it." Didn't happen. It might have made no difference, but more time would have given the citizens more opportunity to say "Hell no!" to unlawful search and seizure.

The pattern here suggests that there was something behind the scenes, encouraging a lot of Democrats to support something that they otherwise opposed. It would be interesting to know what.

The obvious guess is that some kind of very scary briefing is being provided, claiming all kinds of nearly-successful attacks stopped at the last minute. My impression is that this was done for Clipper, many years ago, and that there was pretty good evidence that the scare stories were wildly exaggerated. But it's also possible that this surveillance really has stopped devastating attacks just in time, and we've just never heard about it. (If terrorists were stopped within hours of setting off a nuke in Chigago, I'm not sure we would ever hear of it.)

Other possibilities are out there, of course. Among the ones that seem most likely to me: (These can all combine together....)

a. Lobbyists for the telecom industry have clearly been spending money, talking, making promises and threats, and calling in favors. Perhaps they've just been really effective.

b. Democrats may fear that, should a terrorist attack happen between now and the election, they will lose the election for being "soft on terror."

c. Democrats may believe they have nothing to fear from increased surveillance powers, as barring some incredible catastrophe, they're sure to have the white house and both houses of congress next year.

d. Perhaps the surveillance program that's been in place since 9/11 has successfully collected a lot of blackmail material on powerful people in congress. The white house may not have control of most or all of this.

Option (d) sounds like some sort of paranoid fantasy, but there's a fair bit of precedent for it. For example, see cointelpro , or echelon, and there's a whole lot more where that came from. This is one of the main risks in having powerful domestic surveillance--not just that the party in power will use it to cement themselves in a "permanent majority," but also that the surveillance organization will become politically impossible to challenge, because they've got the dirt on everyone.

The other thing in favor of (d) is that it economically explains why a bunch of powerful people would suddenly change their opinion on this kind of issue. (a) would also be a workable answer (the lobbyists have a lot more money to spread around, have had more time to call in favors and find people with dirt on the right folks, etc.), though.

If (d) is the explanation, we could be in for a very ugly next few years.

The basic problem from the standpoint of the Democratic congressional leadership was that:

1) The Dems didn't have enough votes to extend the current law over a presidential veto.

2) Bush was going to veto anything passed without telecom immunity.

3) The leadership apparently believed that if they did not strike some deal very soon then enough Dems would defect to allow the GOP to pass its version of the legislation anyway.

Note that in the last go-round the Democratic congressional leadership offered (expecting the offer to be refused, as indeed it was) an extension of the existing (that is, the so-called "Protect America" law) provisions basically intact. Unless I missed something, this would have essentially included all (plus a bit more) of the objectionable search and seizure provisions in the current bill.

Although it would not, of course, have included telecom immunity.

I think it's just that there's been major abuses going on for several years--possibly keyword scanning of every telephone call--, the Democratic Congressional leadership knew, and so has been complicit.

Me, I think it's time I got some e-mail encryption software. Maybe securemac.com can help.

The Democratic House leadership controls what bills come to a vote, so the only way a GOP version of the legislation would come up is if Hoyer and Pelosi let it.

Let's put it another way - the bill we are talking about is the Republican version, and you can check the roll call to see which Democrats defected to join all but four of the House Republicans.

And yes, Pelosi could simply have said "not going to bring it to the floor." Of course, then they really would have heard the "soft on terrorism" claim. I'm not sure that will still fly with the voters, though. Rove tried that in 2006 and got the Republicans a stinging defeat in both the House and Senate.

Eavesdropping is an issue, and encryption can help with that. I think there are at least two much bigger issues, though:

a. The networks of who talks to whom, and related stuff like times and dates of calls, cellphone-tracked locations, etc., probably offer at least as much information for bad purposes as what's being said. Encryption doesn't help with those, and in general, the authorities don't need warrants to get access to them.

b. Computer security is a much harder problem than encrypting and authenticating communications. We have really strong technology for encrypting and authenticating data, and it's available off the shelf. We have pretty decent technology for anonymizing communications, though the best of it is not really widely used. But we have pretty crappy technology for keeping our computers (on which we're doing all this encryption and mixing of packets/emails/whatever) from being compromised.

Everything I've heard from people who focus on computer and network security is that against a competent, resourceful attacker, even well-secured systems will usually fail. I've heard this about military systems as well as commercial ones. Securing a computer is hard, if the computer has to do anything nontrivial, and especially if you need to use a lot of off-the-shelf software to get it to do what you need.

It's apparent that the US government, and many other governments, have developed tools to attack individuals' computer systems, in order to investigate them. One reference for this is Magic Lantern.

Consider what power you'd have, if every computer running at the New York Times and Washington Post, including reporters' and editors' home machines, was reporting back to you. How useful would that be if you wanted a little lead time to call in favors and spike unfavorable stories, or to pre-empt them, or to accumulate blackmail information on important reporters or editors? What if you just wanted a little extra insight about internal political struggles, to decide which reporters would be especially willing to help you out for some leaked stories that would salvage their career?

Now, I have no idea if anyone's doing that. (And there's no reason to think only the US government would do it, or that there'd be only one entity doing it.) But that kind of surveillance would be much more powerful and devastating, in some sense, than listening in on all kinds of phone calls.

There are a lot of us here who think exactly that.

I hates them all (the "in" crowd at the White House).
(end cynicism)

Side note: Vin Scully often uses the phrase "Marching and Chowder Society" to describe fans of a particular player. I may have just found the origin of the phrase in Rick Perlstein's new book "Nixonland." From page 31, discussing the HUAC meetings in the summer of 1948:

No one who knew of this bright young Richard Nixon's capabilities and ambitions (he had formed a group to unify the freshmen Republicans, the Chowder and Marching Club) expected that upon entering Congress the previous year he would have welcomed a place on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Actually, he lobbied for it. He had ascertained a change in the cultural winds. Once the faith of boobs, Red-hunting was now the state religion. In the Hiss case, Nixon spotted the chance to engineer his investiture as its pope.

Hmm.

Cynical, me? [/s]

Bolton sez Israel will bomb Iran if Obama is elected.

It's official. Faux News is propagandizing to bomb Iran.

Love, C.

He just got a better one. The Neocube toy is absolutely not for little kids. The magnets are *very* powerful, and are the size and shape of BBs or the little silver nonpareils that are sometimes used to decorate cakes. They're so strong that a cluster of four on the desktop will influence and move another cluster of four that are several inches away, just by rotating the cluster flat on the desk and moving the poles back and forth.

They're also really really fun. You can string them into a chain that is strong enough to swing and wrap around an object without breaking. You can induce that string to spiral onto itself and form a tube, then pull on the starting ball and unspiral the chain without breaking it. Because they're spheres, you can't really tell where the poles of the magnets are except by their behavior, and there are some shapes that you can't achieve in the obvious ways. A nine-by-nine cube, for example has to be built up a certain way or the poles will fall in such a way that it won't form into a cube. It took him over three days to figure out how to make a two-by-two cube, and he's still playing and discovering new things to do with them. They're pretty darn cool.

I'm especially frustrated by things I don't understand, and that's a big part of why I'm so angry about this. I just don't get it--where is the win in voluntarily baring your throat to a wildly, massively unpopular administration, months before they lose power?

The only convincing theory I've heard is that Obama secretly wants the increased wiretapping powers and thought it beneficial to get them passed now, so he gets all the benefits without having to take the blame. That paints a picture of Obama that's so bad I'd actually rather be confused and frustrated than believe it. We'll see: if it turns out to be true, we're going to have a lot of work to do.

Congratulations on your new houses, and welcome to the ranks of house owners, albatross. Ours have been real pains at times, but we've never regretted it, except maybe right after signing the mortgage, when buyer's remorse sinks in.

One so-far-unexplained thing about Pelosi is that she and her staff were telling people she wouldn't vote for it up to the day before.

When I called her office Thursday, that's what the staffer implied to me*.

Heck, back in February her office even blogged about it.

Back in March, the House FISA vote was 213-197 for a version that didn't have immunity. Only 10 Dems voted against it, and a great many D's "delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law. What happened to those 84 who switched? (and has anyone correlated those March speeches with the vote last week?)

The Senate had always been hopeless-over half the D's voting for immunity.

--------------
* I'd say "said," but I didn't tape the call.

Another good guy gone.

I thought that was from Barnaby (Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society).

I'm half (well, maybe about 40% compared to the bombing-of-Iran scenario) expecting the Sith Lords behind all things evil to go for the trifecta: assassinate Obama, frame it as a terrorist act, and use that as an excuse to postpone elections indefinitely, extend domestic surveillance, and legitimize broad presidential powers without any oversight. Basically 9/11 done right from Darth Cheney's point of view.

But my cynicism may be unrealistically skewed by the fact that I've lived long enough to see both the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the Iraq Wars.

And I'm not sure whether to be encouraged or dismayed by the fact that the Firefox spellchecker knows about "Iraq", but not about "Tonkin".

I'm so glad I didn't have oatmeal in my mouth when I read that. I'd have sucked it into my lungs with my horrified gasp.

Crap. Dammit.

I'm glad the Mark Twain award happened when it did.

I suppose they may still do it. We lose out on seeing his take on it.

Steve Wright from when Bob Newhart won the award:
   "I heard that Mark Twain got the Bob Newhart award, and I thought, 'Is he still alive?' "

The simple explanation is that a substantial portion of the Democratics in Congress (especially those from swing or red districts/states) instinctively feel that "national security" issues are automatic winners for the GOP. This seriously weakens the bargaining leverage of the Democratic leadership in any conflict with Bush on such issues.

There are some signs that this instinctive reaction is in the process of being unlearned, but it's likely to take at least a little more time.

I think their operations are more about setting up the correct structure to take advantage of the opportunities that offer themselves, and since they always ramp up the FUD, all it will take is a jittery Iranian missile operator and they'll have their excuse.

I dug out my copy of Willie's Time and refreshed my memory of the 'Biff Burns' routine it quotes:
In the sportlight spotlight, the San Francisco Giants traded outfielder Willie Mays to the New York Mets in return for the entire New York Mets team. They also received $500,000 in cash, two eskimos and a kangaroo.

I thnk this is also where partial scores are reported: 5, 9, 17, ...

The first words I heard this morning when my alarm went off, just before hitting snooze, were "George Carlin" with one or two other words. Insufficient to give a real idea of what happened, but enough to put in a sense of "Crap, I bet he died." And, of course, that's what I learn on my way into work.

Megabummer.

Any pointers towards comics that work in a similar vein of funny, snarky, on-point boundary pushing wrt the "obscene" or "the just not talked-about"? To me, Howard Stern fills the boundary pushing bit, but I find his shtick to be more gratuitous than carefully crafted, and thus nowhere near as funny. We've got Jon Stewart for current events, but he apparently stays relatively "clean". (I don't have cable, so I don't see The Daily Show near as often as I'd like to.) Also Steve Colbert's "The Colbert Report", with similar notes.

Carlin's "The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" bit has factored into so many things... Dennis Leary has a similar caustic vein, but more as an actor than a standup.

Please, pointers to similarly mind-bending-but-in-a-good-way high-brow-"style" "low-brow" comics! I know they'll probably be NSFW, but I can send links home for later perusal.

On the Telecom Immunity thing, and associated topics:

Any good websites/blogs/etc. out there by people who have done the "pick up the whole family and move elsewhere" successfully? Particularly examples involving young children who's grandparents will be remaining in the U.S. and cannot afford long-distance travel for visits, so being able to return to the U.S. or nearby is a factor. Also sites about those sticking around and why, preferably good discussion about the definition of "nothing" in the often-disparaged "nothing to hide" message, and/or how to counter that message. As far as I can tell, I'm friggin' boring to anyone with power, as are the rest of my family, so coming up with anything other than some necessarily self-damped-to-keep-head-from-exploding fear/uncertainty/doubt/rage at imploding Civil Liberties ideals is hard. I mean, I get it that things are bad, and appear to be getting worse. Trouble is, from where I sit (and I grant that I'm rather fortunate/privileged...) things are tractable, and the energy required to change where I sit thus appears to be unreasonably high, causing the cognitive dissonance to be resolved in favor of "well, it doesn't look like it'll threaten me so I should worry less about that and try to get motivated to fix more immediate concerns, like getting back into shape." I'd rather not consider myself a coward, but justification is messy, and compromise of ideals involves lossage.

later,
-cajun

Obama is a corporatist too, as much as Clinton, though perhaps from a different direction. Murdoch's happy with him.

Love, C.

Love, C.

Sucks about George Carlin.

A reasonable compromise might be to plan out:

a. What would make you decide to relocate your family out of the country? Having a defined point at which you will declare a crisis to yourself might make it less likely that you'll keep noting the gradual increase in water temperature without hopping from the pot.

b. How would you manage that? (Planning stuff like how you'd support yourself, where you'd go, how you'd get resident status, etc.)

c. What supplies, preparation, etc., will you need to make that possible? For example, if everyone in the family doesn't have a valid passport, you're probably not going to go anywhere. If you imagine yourself going to Mexico or Chile or some such place, you might want to work on your español ahead of time.

I'll admit that I haven't done this stuff, so maybe I'm not one to talk. I probably should think this stuff through, but I kind of like where I live and work....

Albatross, #595: good summary of the broader computer security issues. Right now, however, I'm more concerned with eavesdropping. BTW, there does not appear to be any free RFC 2440 software for the Mac's mail.app; I'm now researching payware.

Linkmeister, Heresiarch, Paula L., etc: I think that the House and Senate Democratic leadership are in almost as deep as the Bushies and don't want whatever it is to come out during discovery. There need be no overt blackmail; they're almost as guilty as the administration. In terms of what to do...

I think the first priority is to find out just what the administration and Congressional leadership want hidden. I don't think this will be hard; it's probably too big of a secret to keep. Good old investigative reporting, aka humint, will probably do the job.

The second priority...I've been meaning to write an essay entitled "Four judges, or how far has the corruption spread?" pointing out that we wouldn't have four Supreme Court judges who don't uphold habeas corpus without the compliance of the Senate Democrats. When the elected officials of both major parties are corrupt, and there is no hope of forming a substantial third party (and I won't argue this point; I think a sufficient refutation is "that trick never works") what is there to do? Maybe the best thing to do is to get the word out--once we know what the word is!--, and start pressuring pols who might be willing to come clean.

Third, in the long term, electoral reform that would make successful third parties possible would be worthwhile.

There's plastic tarp in plenty and to spare
to shield us from the rain and from the spray;
it's far too hot right now to think of fear.
On this swift launch we don't long want to stay;
above the water we note the bright ray.
The boatman feels the need to be quite fast.
The sun comes out, we stop and talk and sway;
this is a true adventure at long last.

We've come so far with caution and with care,
what do we do but what we ought and may
choose from our time in the warm sun and air.
Above the shore we see each village lay
in proper place. We've come the rightful way,
the sun on the water now has a pleasant cast.
I'm here to work though, not to laugh and play.
This is a true adventure at long last

Prince as you these few chosen words must weigh
in proper balance; as you think and stare
at this small record, consider it in this way:
this is a true adventure at long last.

Seems likely. I was just about to bring up a 1947 cite (Heinlein, Rocket Ship Galileo), but the dating on Barnaby makes it seem highly probable that it was just floating round in the soup by then.

"If it's a miracle, Colour Sergeant, it's a point four-five caliber, short-chamber, boxer-primed miracle." --Lt. Chard, in Zulu

The NYT review of "Nixonland" was less than enthusiastic; I was a little surprised at some of the language in the review until I checked the byline. It was written by George Will. I'd have thought that the NYT's readers might have been better served had a review of a book assessing the red/blue split in the country and ascribing it to a leading member of the Republican party not been written by one of its noted supporters.

Hey, if I can't say this in an Open Tread, then whatinthehell is an Open Thread for?

Fair enough. FWIW, I know a bunch of the guys involved in the commercial PGP product. They know what they're doing, and they care about personal privacy. I've used their software quite a bit before, and will likely get a new copy when I get my new laptop in a few weeks.

Ideally, we'd like to find another couple to split with us; this would bring the cost per couple down to a much more reasonable $350-ish for the con. But even one other person in the room would help. It should be noted that there are very few rooms available at this point -- the Worldcon is, as they note on the website, the smallest of THREE conventions which will be in downtown Denver at around that time, and a lot of people are arriving early or leaving late in order to sightsee. This was actually our second choice of hotel; we'd intended to go for the Sheraton, which is the party hotel, but they are completely booked on a couple of the nights we need to stay.

Anyone who's interested, please drop me a line at the address linked from my name. Thanks!

I'll let you know what I think!

I recently encountered a short story in a mainstream"ish" venue. This short story was purported by the author to be a "retelling of a Japanese folk story." This is, however, not exactly true. It was written in in the 19th century as a kabuki play. It has a known author, and a traceable history. It has entered the Japanese consciousness in many, many variations; it has been filmed numerous times, and has been used as the basis for any number of other stories.

I have tried to get more information about the current author's work--but I haven't found any solid bibliographical information, so I can't actually verify if the author is giving credit to the originator or not.
Now, my question is this: Is the author (the current one, who has released the "retelling") doing anything wrong by not telling the full story of the origin? I doubt they are doing anything illegal--the story is very old, and Japanese copyright law dictates a 50 year limit. Also, like I said, this is a story that has entered Japanese society in a very fundamental way, so it does exist in a kind of folk-tale area.

I think, however, that the author is being disingenuous at best. I think it would be like me making a Japanese retelling of "The Raven" and not mentioning Poe, and that seems really improper. Just because a story was written in another language, doesn't make it fair game for claim by another.

What do you reckon?

N.B. I have been intentionally fuzzy on some of the details because I don't want to stir up too much buzz-this is a somewhat prominent author, and I want to avoid anything that smacks of unsubstantiated accusation.

It strikes me as very plausible that this could be an honest error on the part of the author. When something feels like a folk tale, especially in a foreign culture, one could easily not think of checking it. For example, the Kingston Trio recorded "Where have all the flowers gone" and labeled it a folk song, not realizing that it had been written by Pete Seeger just a few years earlier.

"Honest" doesn't mean "completely innocent" in my book -- I think that artists have an obligation to check these things. But it does mean that I think the author might respond well to a non-threatening note. Why not contact him?

I'm glad the program worked!

I finished the novel yesterday, and I'm feeling quite mixed about it. The novel was good, the ending satisfying and logical and right...but Willingham included an afterword that I wish he just *hadn't*, because he expresses political opinions I disagree with strongly.*

It's a weird feeling to really love the novel and be so annoyed with the author. I know it has happened to others here and is nothing new, but it's my first time. I was going to recommend the novel to an online acquaintance as a good one for her ESL students, and make a rec on my LJ, but I've decided not to do those things. It's frustrating because it has a feeling of cutting off my nose to spite my face. Really, I suppose I'm cutting off others' noses to spite Willingham. That feels even more petty.

Read the novel, Jim - you've already downloaded it and Willingham has his royalties. Not reading it at this point would most accomplish nothing and it *is* a good book. And I recommend you not read the afterword until, well, afterward, if at all.

*ROT-13 to keep Willingham's opinions secret so Jim can enjoy the novel - Jvyyvatunz srryf gung gur Obl Fpbhgf bs Nzrevpn ner orvat ohyyvrq ol gur vagbyrenag gb sbepr gurz vapyhqr ubzbfrkhnyf. Ur rapbhentrf gur betnavmngvba gb fgnaq ol gurve pbaivpgvbaf.

Could the scam-sniffers of Making Light tell me their impressions of http://groveofgaia.moonfruit.com/? I ask because looking through their required reading lists reveals some real doozies (The Teachings of Don Juan, frex), they refer to fees as "an exchange of energies", and the third email I got from the HPS asked me if I had a car. The flake meter hasn't quite pegged, but it edges up with every interaction I have.

Why, oh why, can't the FOSS movement pay a bit more attention to usability and publicity, grouse, grouse.

Carrie S., #647, Xopher is much better at wiccan things than I am, of course, but I skimmed the site and it looks a bit like self-aggrandizing by Annabelle.

If you need something funny, try this YouTube bit I nicked from Pat Cadigan's LJ.

As a former bass clarinetist, I empathise with the cellist in him. As someone rather fond of that piece, I laughed so hard I could hardly breathe.

Thanks for the link!

ethan... Did you ever see McDowell as Roarke in the 1990s revial of Fatnasy Island? He was great, especially when he'd say:

"Smile, every one! Smile!"

Like Linkmeister and Marilee said, there is really no way this could be a matter of ignorance...and I am flabbergasted that a professional writer would be so remiss. But maybe the honest mistake lies not in ignorance, but in delivery, as in they just didn't remember to put it in the introduction.

Maybe...

re 380: Eleanor Farjeon actually.

re 135: That's the problem I've come across trying to get music for Sviridov's hymns: the heirs are fighting, so the stuff isn't making it into (legitimate) print. Apparently within the Russian Music Mafia it is possible to get them, because some recordings are being made, but they are way too dense in texture to work out from recordings (at least by me).

re 406: snork!

re 416 et passim: You are not stuck with MS's crappy mail stuff if you install Office; it only works if you turn it on, and they won't make you turn it on. I use OpenOffice because I'm exceedingly cheap, but it is slow to start up and it does not save RTF correctly. One can find MSOffice at reasonable prices (and apparently legally) on EBay. Avoid Office 2007!

So I've been told by many. Luckily my wife wound up feeling comfortable enough with OpenOffice to make the switch. The interface is a bit different from what she was used to, but overall she enjoys OO. And we wind up not having to pay Bill Gates. Bwahahahah!!!

(I will not tell you about that issue of the Fantastic Four comic-book where monstrous Ben Grimm sent Gates a photocopy of his own rocky bottom.)

The crew in Pogo were the Okeefenokee Glee, Pilau, and Fire Society.

Exclusive on Mary Dell's blog! Teresa Nielsen Hayden is taught how to become a quark!

Is she charmed? Is she strange?

And a loud razzberry sound in the general direction of the Gates.

It's regrettable that the scientific community saw fit to rename the Truth and Beauty quarks...

I do layout for our church's quarterly newsletter. People send me articles for it, and, here's the thing, also photographs. I have the Adobe suite, so if they send me a jpg, or really, just about any standard graphics format, I'm good to go. However, sometimes, what I get is a photo inside a Word document -- and of course it is always past the deadline when it comes in, so asking them to resend is not an option. Copying and pasting occasionally works, but all too often the picture comes out horribly, horribly posterized.

I'm not quite clear how Word manages to display perfectly good pictures and still wreck any copies, but it does.

So here's what I found out: the key is to save the Word document as an HTML file. Not Save for Web, no. Save As... and then pick the .htm file format. Magically, Word then creates a folder with all of the original images, undamaged, in jpg format!

Yay! Happy dance!

(Er. Ahem. Blush. As you were, sorry to interrupt.)

Word is s PITA... can you tell that it was annoying me today?!

Yes, the questions one would have to ask now are far too personal and impolite.

What I really want is a WP program which emulates MacWrite for OS-X. And no, Text Edit ain't it.

Have you tried using "web layout"* and then further down the "view" menu also turning off "text boundaries"? The "ruler" is also in that menu, and when I turn that off I've got a pretty plain white box that might work for you. I am looking at OpenOffice version 2.1.

*Is it just me, or is that a rather counter-intuitive name for it?

I don't know if I'll ever have a use for that trick (or sadly, if I'll remember it when I need it) but I totally get the joy of finding the trick that makes whatever it is you have to do *work*. I like seeing that moment happen for other people, too, so I'm glad you shared.

The report mentions "ground-breaking" themes such as "interplanetary colonisation by humankind, sexual relations with aliens and the problems of space flight - including space shuttles, spacesuits and air locks", all of which pre-date H.G. Wells.

Tangentially to the word-processor conversation, I also wish to recommend Scrivener. I have used it to put together scientific papers, but it's really intended for writers of fiction or screenplays. It works on the "index card outline" principle -- and hooks the appropriate pieces of your draft to the cards, so that when you rearrange the cards, you automatically rearrange your draft. Mac OS X only, unfortunately.

Yeah, alas, that was kind of my reaction. Especially once I checked them out on Witchvox and noted that they claim to be "Eclectic Gardnerians".

And I missed the local ADF chapter's Solstice ritual too. Have to wait till Mabon; I'll be at Pennsic during Lughnasadh.

Xopher is much better at wiccan things than I am, of course, but I skimmed the site and it looks a bit like self-aggrandizing by Annabelle.

Indeed so.

Damn it, why are all the pagans such flakes?!

I really, really don't like the mindset that calls fees for specific initiation-into-the-tradition-type classes an "exchange of energies." Blech. I understand that running an organization takes money, but it doesn't feel seemly, if you know what I mean. It'd be more proper, the way I see it, to offer the initiatory classes entirely free, and make it clear upfront that a full member needs to contribute membership dues that reflect a fair share of the organization's operating costs, and also in that case they ought to be either registered as a non-profit and complying with all the rules about that, or, if that's prohibitively expensive, keeping complete and accurate financial records accessible to all members at the very least.

My gut says that these people aren't outright scammers, and that they're probably very well-intentioned, but they're probably REALLY REALLY flaky and bad at keeping track of money. Just a gut feeling, no direct evidence beyond reading the website.

And their symbolo shows two dinosaurs involved in an activity that's illegal in some states?

This guy goes to the doctor to get his first prostate exam. The doc puts on
his glove and sticks his fingers in to take a look. After awhile he says,

"Son, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is you don't have
prostate cancer!"

The guy says "So whats the bad news?"

Doc tells him, "You'll have to stop masturbating."

"Why?" the guy asks.

Doc says, "Because it's making me nervous!"

(drum roll)

Robert Novak, the legendary conservative columnist who has been tagged as the "Prince of Darkness," focuses his latest column on the subject of "Obamacons," conservatives who support Barack Obama. Two names stand out among those he discusses -- Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who's retiring this year, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Novak says there's no guarantee Hagel will endorse Obama, that the likelier scenario is that he simply won't support John McCain. But Novak does think that Powell will endorse Obama.

Web layout doesn't have any page enumeration information, or page breaks, and I want those.... OO isn't the first word processor I've seen that doesn't allow a page-oriented view that leaves off the margins (there was at least one crappy Amiga word processor that didn't provide a "draft" or "normal" mode as opposed to "page layout mode) but... the earliers WPs I used had modes that showed where page breaks were and didn't have page margins display, including Xerox's word processors that were dedicated, Digital Equipment DECMates (back before the IBM PC word processing market started taking off--it was before page-oriented text processing), Samna, WordPerfect, Word, and I forget what else... oh, ugh, I -would- have to suddenly think of Script on IBM mainframes, wouldn't I...., MacWrite, Word on Macintosh, WordStar (ugh ptui... never liked that program), etc.

I clicked on the link to see what it was about, and found I had signed the damned thing and there was no way to rescind the vote.

Yes, yes, I know we never click on links in spam; I made the mistake of seeing this as a message from a person (especially given her angry response to the message that this was inappropriate for the group concerned).

The following should be self-explanatory. "Kitchen Sister" is an NPR program. One of the members is on Ned's super mailing list. She asked him for a little help. If you know such a story that you think might be shared with their broadcasting audience you can contact them at the e-mail address below.

Disclaimer: The program isn't carried by our affiliate, so I've not heard it.
Many thanks!

Love, C.

> i'm forwarding this to my wife, who is the authority on the
> secret life of girls in this household. being as to how if i knew anything
> about it, it would by definition no longer be a secret . . . :-D
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kitchen Sisters"

> Do me a favor, Ned. The next Kitchen Sister series in about the secret
> life of girls around the world. Your net is so wide and deep, if you
> come across a story or somebody that resonates with that, will you give
> a little shout. Your soul and sensibility are so in line with what
> we're looking for.
>
> Many thanks,
> Davia

The consequence of this floundering about is that I've had Spike stuck in a claw-footed tub since last August, smoking cigarettes and reading Coleridge: even a vampire gets pruney after a while.

Okay, I'll admit it, I want to hear music from this band. Preferably with some sort of goth/vampire overlap.

Contact your state's Attorney General and the FBI of being defrauded on the Internet. There is a link at http://www.fbi.gov to a page to a page to report Internet crime, and being defrauded that way is fraud.... alos complain to your Congresscritters about fraud and deception.

(Fluorescent green fixed-width, or lurid yellow fixed-width? So many choices...)

I've a vague recollection of trying it, and it didn't suit my style of doing things. Currently I use Open Office.

Rikibeth 685: In my coven we never had dues. Everyone helped out with supplies from time to time, and it really doesn't take more than that.* If you're trying to run a larger organization...well, I think that's a mistake. And fees should never be charged for teaching the Craft, in my opinion. This is partly to ensure that teaching is done for and with love, of the Craft and the student, and partly as a screening process: if you can only teach for free, you're automatically more selective. Also you can't be placed under economic pressure to teach someone you really know you shouldn't.

I and all my tradition are oathbound not to take money for teaching (or for doing magic), and to bind anyone we teach to that same oath.

I question the wisdom of giving large public classes on the Craft, even for free. The essense of teaching the Craft is, to me, one-to-one or many (teachers) to few (students). Each person is different, and what may be ho-hum routine to one student may be mind-blowing to a dangerous degree to another. I've often said that the Craft can only be taught as a candle teaches another candle to burn...now it occurs to me that lighting a room full of candles all at once is risky at best!

*In later years I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to pay for most things myself. I still saw value in material contribution, however, so I assigned people to acquire certain things, making sure that I wasn't asking them for something they couldn't afford. In fact we pretty much made sure the poorer members were subsidized, even for after-circle meals, by the richer ones, and did our best to make sure they never had to notice.

Is she a top? Or a bottom?

@673: It's regrettable that the scientific community saw fit to rename the Truth and Beauty quarks...

Apparently, those after-hours parties in the particle physics lab were, uh ...

The Cunningham and Starhawk books are sound enough, but some of the others make me shake my head. And I'd have included Farrar's _What Witches Do_ in the introductory class. And the names for the levels of iniation are precious, bless her little heart.

Anyone who is really interested in a reading list, I'm betting Xopher could supply a good one or have a look at the one the Church of All Worlds uses...

Oh, man. MultiMate. Haven't thought of that in years. I don't think I've ever run across anyone who was familiar with it before (aside from my father, who taught me to use it, of course).

Don't suppose anyone remembers Math Attack, too? (I know one person in Sweden who does. Other than that.... It was my favourite computer game when I was a kid. Yes, I know I'm not normal.)

Paula's issue with always being in layout mode is my one complaint about NeoOffice. It's annoying, but not quite annoying enough to prompt me to go looking for anything better.

I use Notepad a lot for plain text - but I have a copy of Teco-C for Windows I haven't yet installed. (This is called 'living dangerously'.) I miss its capability for looped edits (do this search-and-replace three times or until you get to the end of the buffer, whichever comes first).

According to USA Today, real-life couple director Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan are teaming up to bring Red Sonja back to the big screen.

Neither of them were officially announced before. The only thing that was revealed previously was that Millennium Films had committed to reviving the Robert E. Howard-created property. David N. White was announced as the screenwriter.

Rodriguez added that the Barbarella remake he is set to direct, also with McGowan in the lead, was delayed because of the writers strike and possible actors strike.

And I find your coven's way of handling the subsidizing of less-wealthy members VERY graceful and seemly.

I've never belonged to any pagan group more organized than a student association, and so I found myself trying to draw analogies to SCA baronies and SF convention-running associations.

I was the DP manager, but I had very little sway over what my boss wanted to buy. He started using things like Managing Your Money for personal stuff; didn't go to Quicken until 20 years later.

I used to use TECO to sort flat file databases that were too large to sort using the system sort of our DEC minicomputer, with its lavish quarter-meg of main memory. It had to run overnight, but it was an outstanding workhorse back in the day.

Right?

(Makes note - Barbarella and Red Sonja double bill for movie night. That will make a great theme night, or at least great blogging material)

Bruce Cohen #711 - I understand that the abiveldt was designed to be contagious, but it failed in testing, so that functionality was turned off.

(I just got the new box for my middle computer. The power switch on the old box is going, and since I have to take everything out to get to it anyway .... It's the same kind, but a newer model: meet the new toaster, almost the same as the old toaster.)

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh....

YAY

Mary Dell, #718, Wow! Congratulations! Prepare to be awake for the next month! I love the next-to-last picture -- his little feet tilting together.

I suspect that Abney Park is a decent real-life substitute. (Note: excessive use of flash. See wikipedia for plain text description.)

#716: "The power switch on the old box is going"

Last week I got a new motherboard for a HP unit that I was using as my media server. The old case was nice and roomy and solid and looked like it had everything required for a modern motherboard. Hah! To save complexity HP had connected all the front panel controls to one long plug. The new MB required that the various switches and LEDs have its own cable and plug. Oye! But I had, ready to go to the recycler, a crappy box which I plucked from a dumpster. (It had a nice case fan.) I pulled it apart and extracted the switches and controls. Everything fit perfectly!

Then I found out that what was considered a big power supply in 2000 (250 watts) wasn't enough to get even the naked motherboard up and running.

Back to the clone supply shop . . .

So. Yeah. "Get a new box" is a good idea now and then.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!

Congratulations and good luck.

HUZZAH!!!

Beats my new house all hollow. (We have the keys now. I'm going to spend the next week painting.)

(They changed the shape of the button on the switch sometime in the past few years (from rectangular to round). I was going to put an external switch on it (spade lugs with hoods came to mind for connectors: make it easy the next time it goes bad).)

Make that three more faces, or rather four since Kouredios is with her daughter Cassie.

Megadorable.

And He Built a Crooked House