I suspect it's well under one. Hunh.

Here's a poser: it's a given that many of the most worthwhile endeavors possess a degree of difficulty.  Why then, do so many people automatically assume that if something is difficult, then it *must follow* that it is itself worthwhile?

Corollary 1: If something entirely lacks difficulty, it follows that it entirely lacks worthiness and will be suspected as base hedonism.

Corollary 2: If something is so difficult as to be practically (but not theoretically) impossible, then it is absolutely praiseworthy.

Yrs,
David

The general fallacy you're pointing to, of course, is the Law of Similarity, a basic rule of magic. Two things share a characteristic, therefore they share all characteristics. Most people recognize this as untrue when it's stated that bluntly, but (similar to "where there's smoke, there's fire") use it as a basic organizing principle -- until proven otherwise, things that are similar in some way are likely to be similar in all ways.

This has been your arrant pedantry lesson for the day.

Many thanks for your pedantry! I agree that what I've posed is indeed a fallacy. I like to think of it as the "Puts hair on your chest!" hypothesis*. What intrigues me about it is that so many people implicitly believe this and will modify their behavior based on it.

I include myself, as I struggle through "Soldier's Pay", one of the worst novels by a great novelist I've ever encountered.

I got the best birthday present ever.

B. Durbin #9: "You must login to see this page". I don't have a Facebook account, and am less than motivated to get one. Perhaps you could describe it here?

Part of this is related to the economist's: "there can't really be a $20 bill there, someone would have picked it up already"

Like the Law of Similarity, this is actually a helpful heuristic [if it really was worth doing and easy, why hasn't it been done already?] but not a reliable rule of inference.

Your logic does not appear to follow any formal system I'm familiar with. Neither of your corollaries actually follows from the original thesis.

If you start with:
If x is difficult then x is worthwhile,

that implies nothing whatsoever about what may be true of things which are not difficult. It does, however, (by Modus Tollens) imply that

If x is not worthwhile then x is not difficult

which is clearly not true, by observation.

By a second application of Modus Tollens we can conclude that the initial posit is also false.

I sometimes forget that on Making Light, unless your posts are in light verse, they are subject to peer review.

The second one is likewise apt: how do we judge the value of something we get for free?

Hm. Changing gears. I've fantasized about having a car that was mostly a vehicle to carry immensely powerful speakers, and the next time some goober comes up by me at a stoplight with his bass notes thrumming out, I'd fire up the system and blast him into the next time zone. I would be playing Anthony Newman's organ version of "Ride of the Valkyries." There may be louder recordings, but that's the one I'd like to use.

Other fantasies include having an industrial-type vacuum and going down the street collecting cigarette butts, and when I see someone throwing one out the window, putting a hose in before he shuts it and hitting REVERSE.

Ulrika @3, I've also heard "My Father's house has many Ackermansions."

B. Durbin @9 - Beautiful!

dlbowman76 (17): I understood your #5 to be pointing out others' faulty logic rather than your own conclusions.

*Re. "Solar" It's the best SF novel I've read this year, bawdy, brilliant, and hilarious - and sorry Granta editors, but if your novel relies on a not-yet existing technology to move the plot...that's SF!

I sometimes manage to hold to this, but not often. An acquaintance who manages to draw honesty from me-- I think it's because I cannot make small talk with her-- once heard me say that I was in engineering rather than English or publishing because it's harder. I didn't know that until I talked to her.

I don't put a lot of effort into cherry trees, but when they bloom, they're wonderful.

On stereo speakers for the neighbors, one summer in college the top corner room of the house I lived in was occupied by a girl who was a night owl, and who was annoyed by the squirrels living in the wall who were Cheerful Morning Rodents that would cause a racket around 5am when she'd scarcely gotten to bed. She eventually did the speaker thing at 4am for a couple of days running, which woke them up and annoyed them so they left. I don't know that they stayed away all that long, but it at least worked long enough to gloat about.

Perhaps the assumption that difficulty=worth is a useful corrective to the human tendency to avoid difficulty whenever possible.

If that's so, isn't it distressing, that it doesn't have to be true to be both good and useful?

Sincerely, Your pessimistic Pollyanna, JAA

Bill Stewart @27, we had an apartment neighbor in the last apartment we ever lived in who was through the living room wall from us. She felt obliged to have the speakers right up against that wall. I asked her once if she could just put them somewhere away from it so she could listen to them at the same volume without forcing us to listen as well, but this concept didn't seem to mean anything to her. Of course I fantasized about buying some car speakers and screwing them onto the wall, facedown, and playing "Orphans" by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks all day for a while. Fantasies are good. They can keep us from killing people.

[Difficulty=worth]
My favorite trick by Penn & Teller is the one that uses a dozen or more sleights of hand to do absolutely nothing. Teller takes a cigarette out of a pack, lights a match, puffs smoke... only it was a deck of cards, the 'cigarette' was a pencil, everything is switched for something else at least once. We see it once, not knowing what we're seeing. Then Penn narrates it for us, and everything means something it didn't mean before. It was breathtaking and, as Raymond Chandler once said, "as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency."

Add in some kind of isolation from the floor, because those subwoofers can make the building structure vibrate quite nicely, without the people on the front side actually noticing what's going on. (Hearing impairment from the volume comes to mind.)

The most impressive sound demonstration I ever attended was at the Seattle Center as part of a promotion for various high-end audio manufacturers, because Cerwin-Vega brought in a set of the 100 pound driver magnet Sensurround speakers and the soundtrack sections from Earthquake where they'd been used. This in a room of about 12x15'. Then, after shutting down about half the high frequency speakers they'd plugged into their system, they played Frankenstein by the Edgar Winter Group. I'd never experienced my chest as a sympathetic resonance chamber before...

Something like number of blog posts read over number of blog posts written.

I don't think I like the denominator here. If someone stops writing posts the index goes up, but this hardly a contribution to blogospheric interactivity.

I would say "number of blog post readings" (by people other than the author) and not try to standardize. This index can go up if more people read a given post, if they read more widely, or if more people take up reading.

Diatryma #24: I don't put a lot of effort into cherry trees, but when they bloom, they're wonderful. Applause.

N.B.: I refrained from doing reader response theory here. We could also get all late-Wittgensteinian, but man you gotta draw the line somewhere.

My fantasy along those lines is a Directional Electro-Magnetic Pulse Cannon (no larger than a bazooka).

I expect it to cost lives and become a major blow to Arizona's reputation before ultimately being struck down by the Supreme Court.

Sadly, I live in Arizona.

Sorry, Patrick.

Full text here:

http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf

There's some real gems in it.

Thomas @38: Well, because the hospital and birth certificate folk apparently can't handle ligatures (and we looked up how to do it on Winboxen), it sorts under Ae. But we're going to teach her to spell it correctly.

We picked Ælfleda as an alternate spelling of Æthelflæd (daughter of Alfred the Great, Lady of the Mercians, the first strong English queen). That way, we've got "Elfling" as a nick if we want.

Some people have asked if I'm against pink for girls. Given that Joanna looks exactly like her brother, I think people need all the cues they can get. :)

I write stuff in my head a lot. When walking the dog, usually. What I came up today, while vacuuming, is this line, totally unconnected with anything I've actually written or plan to write:

"In due course he learned how to deal with the things that came out of babies: pee, poo, puke, snot, and gurunther, a substance so foul that advance knowledge of it was kept from prospective parents by a conspiracy of grandmothers and baby book authors lest they be put off the idea and the human race die off."

And in other news, did you sell your soul to a corporation when you bought a videogame on April 1?

Congratulations! What a cutie! And what an adventure.

My daughter shares a birthday with her grandmother, and considers it specialer than special that she does.

Also, my kids looked so similar as babies that there are pictures where we have to look at external cues to figure out which is which. (There were a lot of hand-me-downs, so clothing didn't always help). They're nicely differentiated now, though.

And once again, W0000T!

I think I'd rather write fiction for folk like us.

This one.

Someone else (ie, someone who knows it) will have to discuss context, both general and as it specifically relates to *NH and the others here. My own encounters with APAs have been brief and entirely unrelated to fandom, so I can't give the subcultural background.

I have no firsthand experience with the APA culture per se, though I've had a very helpful librarian from Minnesota suggesting links to archives of various fanzines and the like to The Online Books Page. So I link to _Science Fiction Five-Yearly_ and some other well-known publications of that sort that have substantial archives freely readable online. I'd be happy to add more that meet my general listing criteria. (I'd list _Izzard_ and _Telos_ if they had substantial online issue archives, but at this point I've only found selected articles. Of course, it's up to the editors/authors/copyright holders of the publications in question to decide what they want to allow online.)

dlbowman76, on the difficulty=worth

I see several mechanisms going on here, all of which make decent heuristics, but any of which may be inapplicable in a particular case.

1. A form of operant conditioning. If you continue through something difficult, and find the learning / experience worthwhile in the end, the sense of achievement is very rewarding. It will prime you to expect rewards for continuing through difficulty. The fact that the rewards don't always manifest makes them an intermittent reinforcer, which in turn acts to strongly maintain the learned behavior. It never, however, says that any particular bout of difficulty will be rewarding in the end.

2. An application of another logical fallacy. People who are smart / competent / powerful can often do things that look difficult to others. Therefore, if I do difficult things (or appear to do them), I will appear to be smart / competent / powerful. Or, perhaps will magically become those things, not just appear them. Leads people to namedrop about authors they've never read and don't really want to. On the other hand, continuing to work through difficult things is often the best way to produce the competence you would like to have.

3. The "sunk costs" fallacy and/or cognitive dissonance. If I have expended a great deal of resources (effort, $) on something difficult: (a) I will likely be unwilling to quit without finishing, and will ignore the First Rule of Holes by sinking further time and $ into what may be a swamp in the making, because after all everyone knows that quitters never win, and (b) I will want to believe that anything that took so much effort and $ was worthwhile, and I will declare it so and hold firm to that opinion. Winners never quit. I never quit, therefore I must be a winner.

Somewhere - it might have been one of the posters at despair.com - I recall a formulation of "Winners never quit, and quitters never win, but if you never win and you never quit, you're pretty stupid." It lacks grandeur, but has a certain practicality, as a rule of thumb.

The more I think about this, the more deeply ingrained I find it. In some ways, I think it taps into our expectations for Story. The pattern goes, the hero struggles against apparently insurmountable odds, and never gives up, and wins the day. Variations tend to be unsatisfying. (The hero, with no effort, is handed everything he wants. The hero hits the first obstacle, shrugs, and gives up. The hero struggles against insurmountable odds and is crushed like a bug. The hero struggles against insurmountable odds, wins out, but gains nothing from it.) So, when we're mentally writing our own stories, we want / need / expect them to work out this way.

Angiportus #46: Blowing out a candle? Pretty impressive! BTW, infrasound can have other interesting effects, notably the "mysterious surge of fear" found in some "haunted" houses.

As a reinforcement of #3, doesn't Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers make the case that it takes about 10,000 hours to become really good at something (in addition to a good support system and being in the right place at the right time)? So you kind of think, just a little more investment of resources and all my work will suddenly tip over from expense to profit. If I give up now, I may JUST miss being Bill Gates.

There's another fairly relevant despair.com poster: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The smart left a long time ago."

Baby! It is a baby. Yay baby.

That's basically how I talk to anything that doesn't talk back. Dog! You are a dog. You are a dog with a snout. You have ears! Kitty! You are a kitty. You are a kitty with a bel-ly....

I'm starting to think this state should be demoted back to Territory -- more appropriate to what's going on, even if gunslingers now call themselves the government, police, etc. Schoolmarms really have it tough these days.

PS: If you don't live here, thank your stars that you don't have to listen to the ads touting Republican candidates for governor. Saintly John McCain, tough Buzz Whatsisname (against a background of Prescott's own Granite Dells).... Argh!

Back in high school, friends of mine joked about one family, not known to be, that had only one set of school pictures because their kids looked so much alike.

"Do you know how hard it is to do what he's doing?"
"I wish it was impossible!"

Baby kittens

We rescued a stray, and she had babies four and a half weeks later. They are ridiculously cute.

Mama thinks the best place for her kittens is the middle of my office floor. I've offered her a variety of boxes, plastic tubs, and an open closet door, and she doesn't seem to realize mama cats are supposed to hide their kittens. I've given up and simply kitten proofed the office.

What I don't get is why they don't just lease the land to a private operator who could make money off concessions and gas and stuff. I'd *like* to see a Love's there.

So there are. Even I hadn't noticed. Here are better links:

our never-finished TAFF report
http://taff.org.uk/reports/ptnh1.html

TAFF archive
http://taff.org.uk/

maintained by Dave Langford
http://ansible.co.uk

“TAFF in Thirteen Paragraphs,”
http://taff.org.uk/13paras.html

That sidelight freaked me out.

I'm not aware of all the context of the discussion here, but as a veteran of better than a dozen s-f fandom & "mundane" APAs/Amateur Press Associations, over the past 50+ years, I'd suggest that we need to keep in mind that each of them is a distinct Community, with different (sometimes extremely different) traditions, goals, identities, and personalities.

Oh, and I think the Wiki cite description is somewhat misleading -- if memory (of reading history) serves, the first U.S. one (NAPA) was also founded by teen-agers, though that is mentioned only in reference to AAPA, which was created in reaction against the original contingent which the new "young turks" considered to have become Old Fuddy-duddies. The fannish version of this would by the establishement of SAPS, vs. the long-established FAPA.

As far as I can figure out, the only unifying factor in APAs is that of establishing a system of distribution of their publications to all of the members.... possibly with a secondary aspect of "no-one is going to tell me what I can't (or must) write/publish".

My husband and I had a similar discussion with our daughter when she decided to drop one of her three AP courses at the semester break this year. That particular course was eating her lunch, and she knew it, and she wanted out, but she also felt like she should finish what she started. The discussion boiled down to, persistence is a virtue and most of the time it's what you want to practice, but it's also a virtue to know when to call it quits and how to do so gracefully, instead of waiting until something blows up in your face.

I thought about the "Tipping Point" sort of thing, too, and you're right. Nobody wants to quit just before they finally reap all the rewards. Lots of scams work on those principles, because they're powerful, and they're powerful because they're often true.

I don't recall having seen the other despair.com poster, but I am amused.

Diatryma @66, not so much that everyone wants to be an underdog, but everyone wants to be a hero, and to be a hero you have to be overcoming something. "Frontrunner wins" is a dog-bites-man scenario. "Underdog wins" is news. (And, of course, there's the Casey-at-the-Bat scenario of the frontrunner snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.)

I'd suggest that we need to keep in mind that each of them is a distinct Community, with different (sometimes extremely different) traditions, goals, identities, and personalities.

I thought I kinda did that when I said that my own (brief) encounter with APAs was outwith fandom, so I don't have the background to explain the context of Teresa's quote? Could I have been clearer somehow?

There's got to be a joke waiting to be made about your comment.

I figured that it was because of budgetary constraints. Still, I can imagine the... ah... upsurge of protest if California did the same thing, and its population basin is much bigger.

And this morning they respond and provide directions right at the top of the screen, but don't say they are speaking of FB -- they use "Network News."

I can't figure out what value there is for anyone to have people on FB know what content, chosen by the WaPo to provide, each other is looking at.

Data miners, yes, but your average FB user?

Love, C.

(BTW, anybody need a French teacher next year?)

Good news because over the last several months he's become thin, then gaunt, then Auschwitzed. For a while, I was having to take a finely minced/pureed cat food from the vet, add a litle water, put it in a syringe, and squirt it into the back of his mouth to get enough into him to keep him going.

He's started to regain some appetite the last few weeks, and I'm starting to feel some actual meat coming back on him.

I don't know if it will last. We're still not sure what the mass in his abdomen is (it's been biopsied twice, coming back both times as "not quite normal, but not quite cancerous") or whether that's going to grow or shrink or turn into a butterfly. But the growing appetite and the bit of regained weight is encouraging.

(Now if I can just get him back to using the litter box -- for a while he was too weak to climb over the edge -- instead of the floor next to it.)(Yes, I'm thinking of a shallower litter box.)

*The use of "our" is sort of by default; he was one of the "foreclosure pets" you hear about, left behind when a family on the next block lost their home, and got taken in by one of our housemates. The housemate later moved back to Kansas where her family was, with the intention of sending for Rikkus when she was in a position to have a pet again. Two years later, it doesn't look likely for that to happen, so Rikkus' food and vet care come from us.

Later tonight it's episode 2 for the USA.

Whichever you watch, have fun

Most of the highway rest areas closed due to budget cuts.

Arizona still has too much reliance on housing construction, so we got slammed in the housing bubble and recession.

There's a "temporary" sales tax increase on the ballot in a few weeks, and I am torn between voting for it to support services and voting against it in protest.

http://www.buc-ees.com/ch13video.htm

Buc-ee's

(And Beaver Nuggets are very tasty)

Remind me of this in two weeks. Monday starts a part-time job, six to ten, after school. I feel like I really need to prepare for this. It may wipe me out a lot more than expected. On the other hand, that's money.

We were on gooshy food for awhile, but now my husband has been feeding her tuna. At least she's eating that.

I'll miss the fuzzer, when it's time.

Thena @ 95: When cats give up on tuna, they're ready to move on. As long as tuna still holds delight for your Eldest One, she's got time for more pettins. Best wishes for an easy passing.

(I followed your FB link and sent you a Friend Request, but forgot to append the usual "Hallo from Making Light!" Or else it was Fragano I forgot to append the note to. Er.)

For me it was episode 1, via a friend, two nights ago. Unfortunately, my subconscious decided to spend last night dreaming about not quite seeing things out of the corner of my eye... -NOT- restful!

It might be a good idea to record it, and not watch until close to Episode 5.

It's another SM story, and he might just have written out the Standard Landing Sound Effect for the TARDIS.

That sounds patent-worthy to me.

In other words, I don't trust rest stops to be open. And certainly not in California— they do try to not shut down two in a row, but they've inevitably closed the one you were counting on and it's another 70 miles to the next stop.

My parents used to carry toilet paper and a trowel in the car. Yeah.

It is an extremely good sign that your cat is eating again; I would provide as much food as the cat is willing to consume (think feeding growing kittens) in the interests of getting the cat back to a healthy weight.

The late-lamented Great Cat Sophie *never* liked tuna, even in her primest of primes (which were pretty primo). She was wild about salmon, but not the other stuff. And our current fuzzball, Mona the Norwegian Forest Fur Factory, five years old, fat and healthy as a clam, doesn't like fish, period. Full stop. First cat I've ever had that didn't.

Congratations!

All:

Something about the discussion of rest areas being more and more often closed down, either to save money or because they're just not being maintained well enough, makes me think of the decay in the Ways in the WOT books....

Beautiful birthday present! I'm long past new kids in the family, and my kids aren't likely to make me a grandparent any time soon, so pictures like that are all I'm going to get for awhile. I'm getting really jealous of my brother-in-law, whose daughter had twin boys last year. They're almost twice as photogenic as yours.

Years ago, Sweetie preferred my grandmother's tomato sauce and spaghetti to her fried fish. I don't know that she ever ate any fish, but she certainly liked other foods.

It's funny how some cats just don't stay true to their stereotype, isn't it? Now that I think about it, the actual food all cats should be fed, at least based upon vitamins and amino acids, is mouse, not tuna.

Earl Cooley III, #47, the county around my city did that for a while, but stopped because not only did it fill the jail, they found out that a lot of Hispanics aren't illegals.

Constance, #81, I haven't heard back from Rob, but yes, if people want to be on Facebook, they can do it by themselves.

Bruce Arthurs, #85, I hope Rikkus eats more and stays alive a long time.

All this reminds me of our old dog's last years, when we had to use a ramp for him to go outside. Since his hip/back problems were concomitant with canine cognitive dysfunction, he wasn't all that successful with the ramp either. After he died, I realized just how many accommodations we'd been making for him.

Earl, it does sound like something I should patent, doesn't it?

I love kittens and this is my "no guilt" litter -- mama was too far along and too sick to even think about spaying when we got her. It's been a long time since I've had itty bitties in the house, I'm really enjoying them, and yeah, I've been doing the, "It's a kitty! It's a little kitty! It's little kitty toes!" baby talk at them ... LOL.

I'm *very* pleased by how well the kittens are doing. We only lost one, to an umbilical abscess at three days, and I would not have been surprised to lose the whole litter ... mama was eating trash and my chickens' eggs to survive and had horrible diarrhea and was extremely thin. The survivors are healthy and vigorous and at the upper end of the bell curve for kitten milestones.

Now I just need to suck it up and give them away when it's time. I *can't* afford to keep them all and take care of them right, but they're sooooo cute. :-)

Congratulations on the wonderful birthday present!

I ended up explaining a lot of it in terms of Monsters Vs. Aliens and Spirited Away, which are his two favorites.

Here's to developing the newest generation of fans!

I have seen a revenge of similar type.

I was sitting at a stop light. Driver in front of me tosses his cig butt out the window. Unfortunately, it went in the window of the car in the next lane.

The cig butt came back out, back into the originating window, followed by a significant amount of coffee, followed by the cup the coffee had been in.

Just as the light changed.

I managed to get my laughter under control enough to drive about the time he finished dealing with a lap full of (I hope) hot coffee.

In an apartment complex where you could not tell where the sound was originating, some spithead decided to play something heavy metal-ish at 8am on Saturday. All its complexities did not make it to my ears (it sounded really bangy and crashy). I had access to a very powerful sound system, and used it to its max. I played the first movement of Beethoven's 5th, just below my pain threshold (there are better things, but that's what I had). When it was done, the entire complex was silent. The really nice fallout was that the Friday and Saturday night parties were much quieter after that.

albatross @ 104: Something about the discussion of rest areas being more and more often closed down, either to save money or because they're just not being maintained well enough, makes me think of the decay in the Ways in the WOT books....

It reminds me of the general decay of things in the time of Russell Eigenblick in Little, Big. Which is pretty depressing, actually.

You were clear enough -- I just tend to re-phrase things to make sure of understanding them correctly.

And I was a bit puzzled by your "lacking background". I read the quote as indicating that APAs are a form of communication in which the absence of adequate feedback/exchange/egoboo results in entropy or fading interest.

It took me a while to figure out that, yes, APAs _could_ be soapboxes, rather than conversations, and that your experience must've been with the former.

As you've probably deduced, the s-f fandom APAs have developed this feedback into a High Art, by way of Mailing Comments (as perfected in The FAPA). Which isn't to say that they're always done well, or even at all, of course, but they're vastly better/more encouraging than the occasional postcard-response characteristic of the non-fan/mundane APAs.

B Durban: Congrats! Rather than "well done" I'll give you a hearty "well begun!"

Linkmeister @25 : Thank you for that link (I'm in trouble no-oow! she sings gleefully)

Oh, and since this thread starts with a fannish quote and there's an ad for the third in Stieg Larsson's superb Millennium triogy over in the ads, did you know that he started out in SF fandom in the 1980s? True fact. He was chairman of the Scandinavian SF Society in 1980. After it dissolved in acrimony (acrimonius feuds in Swediush fandom? - surely not!), he drifted away from fandom and got involved in anti-racist politics.

And while talking fandom, I'll insert a plug here for the section of my own website where I've been posting UK fanzines and con reports from the 1930s and 1940s which give a fascinating look into a lost world:

www.fiawol.org.uk/FanStuff

Just click on 'THEN: The Archive'

Fan Stuff

When I was small, we lived across the street and down two from the Kappa Alpha fraternity house. Parties tended to get a bit loud. My father, who just happened to be into building his own stereo equipment (this *was* the late 50s) retaliated by putting the recently-completed six-cubic-feet bass speaker in the front dormer window and playing "Night on Bald Mountain" and Katchaturian's "Sabre Dance". I'm not too clear on whether it effected any long-term improvement in the state of affairs, but it sure made him feel better.

Actually you gained some geek cred by learning several new things.

Billy Collins quotes Paul Valéry saying "Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned." (Collins uses this to introduce his own poem, "January in Paris", which humorously personifies such hapless, abandoned poems.)

As a programmer, I think this concept applies equally well to software (and, I'm sure, to many other endevors).

As a programmer, I think this concept applies equally well to software (and, I'm sure, to many other endevors).

I like to use the line I stole from somewhere: "Our programs aren't released -- they escape."

Well, kitten season is coming up at the shelter where I volunteer. If you'd like a kitten fix stop by WARL (near the intersection of Kansas Ave. and Blair Rd.) Sometimes they need a volunteer to foster a mama cat and liddle biddy kittens until the kittens are old enough to be put up for adoption.

I got my two cats there four year ago. I didn't intend to get kittens but one picked me out. They were out-of-season older kittens (3-4 months).

I know that line best from the list of Klingon programmer quotes, where it is followed by "...leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake." Very little of the software I've worked on has had that nature, thankfully. (I like the QA people!)

It seems to be a standard modus operandi in so many contexts. Unfortunately.

My own version of that — I used to use it in my .sig — is "Engineering means never having to say you're finished."

I myself have been training for a bibliophile's Marathon today: Powell's, Portland, afternoon through evening. mmmm, books.

Found a scrap I wrote from an abandoned comic which started out as a parody of Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which I oh-so-wittily called The League of Extraordinarily Pretty Greek Boys. As it was one of the only bits of the wretched thing I really liked, and I've been following the esteemed Fluorosphere for years, I figured this was the best (or even the only) place to post it.

Ganymede speaks:
The gods are dead--and we, their mortal toys
Fall back to earth: the best, by far, to live;
To learn, to seek our own fate on our feet.
And yet we stumble blindly through our lives
Searching for that our masters never gave.
Kindness or cruelty fall short--we seek redress.

"We don't do testing -- they do testing. We do the important bits, like writing!"
(soto vocce: the problems into the code?)

And I don't think you have much to worry about, since (at least in the movie of) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, there's plenty of handwavium. Some very strange time distortion, for example, that makes Ash Wednesday take place in July. I wouldn't sweat it, if I were you.

I've got pictures of my three boys, all at three months, wearing the same clothes. I can tell which is which, but it's not easy.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/04/jack-vance-the-master-of-the-dragons

We usually assume that "never" will be about six months.

J Homes.

Sometimes she sounds like a taun taun while she sleeps. I kid you not.

She does smell better, though.

[0] ... although I've recently encountered a few cases of somebody forgetting to update the manual after updating/removing the code...

"It'll be totally transparent to you."

Which is probably why, in those pre-easy-telecommuting days, I spent so many long nights of the transition period eating tuna sandwiches from Max's Diner down the street while writing COBOL program after COBOL program to clean up their feed otherwise it'd have made our system crash.

"What, never?"
"No, never!"
"What, never?"
"Hardly ever!"

Me. I've made XML CMS vendors process every available translation -- which includes an interesting range of languages; Old Irish in ogham, for instance -- of "I can eat glass" in order to test Unicode support. Sure, we're never going to ship documentation in Old Norse, or Vedic Sanskrit, but it's a great way to make sure they're really using Unicode and not committing an atrocity with code-point translation, because I can feel very confident there's no pre-existing code point translation for all of those obscure languages.

eric @ 148, tangentially from your comment: my fiancé is an identical twin. His parents can tell him and his brother apart in baby and little-kid pictures without hesitating. I unfailingly pick the wrong one. (I suppose this means I should make my decision and then say it's the other one, but I tried that once and still got it wrong.) Amazing power that parents have :)

I can tell them apart easily now -- to my eyes, they just look like particularly similar brothers, but hardly identical. Strangers still mistake them all the time, though.

They tested the effectiveness of Tin Foil Hats
Ooooh, Shiny

And the unremittingly bad vampires are a nice horrific antidote to the sparkly pretty boys.

Ah, Leonardo. There may never have been an artist of whom it was more true that his works were never completed, only abandoned. Usually because he'd transferred his interest to something newer and shinier, and despite the complaints of whoever had paid him in advance for a completed artwork.

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2010/04/life_with_an_ipad_is_it_compelling_yet_1.html

Is it compelling yet?

Some points he talks about:

He says it's a great way to read e-mail, but not write it. Also, it's a good e-book reader, even if he prefers the Kindle overall. He thinks it's splendid for looking stuff up fast.

On the minus side, he rarely takes the iPad when he's going out and about, preferring his iPhone. And the inability to display Flash content is annoying.

Brings back happy memories of announcing my own daughter's birth on ML a year ago...

Open threadiness:
I've recently discovered the joy of podcasts for my commute time:
tor.com's Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, Dan Carlin's Harcore History, Stephen Fry's Podgrams and Tony C Smith's StarShipSofa.
Do try them, they are excellent!

What do you guys think about StarShipSofa having been nominated for the Hugo for best fanzine?
What are your favorite podcasts?

The solution to that annoying little problem is Apple/Adobe slash fiction published in the Wall Street Journal. With meticulous da Vinci notebook styled illustrations.

The corporate culture differences from such a merger could be settled once and for all in the world's largest mosh pit; the toxic vibes from the conflict could theoretically be contained by a spiritually cleansing drum circle of volunteer Google employees.

I just started reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys for the first time (I found it, still in the bookstore bag, under a pile of papers in my living room), and it's already pushing all the wrong buttons for me. I'm on page 9.

Fat Charlie Nancy and his fiancée, Rosie, are discussing their wedding, which he doesn't want to invite his father to. She insists, even after he tells her a story that anyone with an ounce of humanity would realize puts the father in the dance-on-your-fucking-grave-you-piece-of-shit category, making it clear that it's one of many. She just decides that Dear Old Dad should come to the wedding:

"You'll just have to get used to the idea," said Rosie. "After all, a wedding is a marvelous opportunity for mending fences and building bridges. It's your opportunity to show him that there are no hard feelings."

This means that Fat Charlie is a loser, for the following reasons:

1. He's marrying a stupid insensitive fucktard.
2. He got engaged to Rosie without telling her about his family issues first. Not only is it wrong not to make sure someone has a pretty clear picture of all your issues before you let them agree to marry you, but in the process he might have found out that Rosie is a stupid insensitive fucktard.
3. He doesn't have the guts (at least so far) to fight Rosie on this. If there ever was a time in a relationship to have a fight, this is it. If he weren't a total wimp there are many things he could say, including but not limited to
   • "I hate my father and I don't want to get married in his presence. If he's there when they ask me if I do, I'll say 'not today' and walk out. If YOU invite him I'll find someone to marry who has a picogram of respect for my feelings!" or
   • "I don't want my wedding to be a time for mending fences and building bridges. I'd prefer that it be about celebrating our marriage, thank you very much!" or even
   • "I want my wedding to be a happy day, and it won't be if my father is there. I'm not willing to discuss this further. Please don't bring it up again."

I'm hoping this is an example of the About To Marry The Wrong Person trope. Maybe he'll grow a pair and find someone better to marry. He's not the right husband for her, either; she needs to marry someone whose worst childhood memory is that he faw dow and hurted his knee. Or maybe she'll grow some empathy in the course of the book, which is unrealistic, but it IS a fantasy novel, and magical changes can come over people in such a story.

I'm not giving up on this, of course. In part this is because I'm pathologically incapable of quitting in the middle of a novel, and in part because I fundamentally trust Neil Gaiman, even if I do think it's a pretty odd choice of his to make me wish all the characters would get run over by a bus right in the first chapter. I have confidence he'll turn it around, and even if he doesn't, I'll just think this one book sucked, not that I shouldn't read Gaiman any more. (Unfairly, if the bad (not necessarily poorly written, just bad for me) book is the first book I read by an author, they get no such consideration. Snow Crash is the only book by Neal Stephenson I ever read, and likewise Perdido Street Station permanently turned me off China Miéville.)

So I'll finish reading it. But not today. I'm too depressed to deal with it today.
____
*Even his name is a "gift" from his divine shitbag of a father.

Duncan J Macdonald @161, sadly, this seems to invalidate the timeless wisdom found in this lovely song, performed by otters. (Link goes to a tasteful and edifying audio-visual production, suitable for all ages.)

Speaking as a person who almost shares a birthday with a parent, I offer the observation that at some point the child will tire of mutual celebrations and feel that she deserves a birthday observance all to herself.

If you and she both like the same kind of cake, this problem will undoubtedly be delayed . . . .

Really, best wishes. My own offspring is about to be 14, which makes me go "how'd _that_ happen" on a regular basis.

Also, it would be nice if we could boycott the worst insurance companies, but I've never heard of that happening.

If you haven't been following the discussion of Conservatism and "epistemic closure" (aka living in the echo chamber), you're missing some fascinating stuff. Andrew Sullivan, Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowan, and Megan McArdle all have discussed this, and it's seriously worth looking at. You could do worse than to start with this Jim Manzi article.

Somewhere following all this, I saw a wonderful quote in an article by David Frum, quoting a colleague. Frum had just written an essay sort-of attacking Rush Limbaugh. His colleague said:

“You aren’t really mad at Rush Limbaugh you know...You’re not even mad at Fox News. You want to win elections, you know that the troops have to be mobilized, somebody has to get them fired up, and you don’t fire them up with Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson. You are mad at the conservative intellectual elites. They’re the ones who are supposed to uphold intellectual standards, to sift actual facts from what you call ‘pretend information’. Rush Limbaugh isn’t any worse than he was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, conservatism offered something more than Rush Limbaugh. Since then, the conservative elite has collapsed. Blame them, not talk radio.”

This really rings true for me--for all that you might reasonably disagree with their ideas and principles, 20 or 30 years ago, conservatives actually seemed to have some. Now, it's hard for me to see what they are. There will always be rabble-rousers in any movement. But where have the brains of the conservative movement gone? I keep wondering how much of this has to do with the role of think tanks, which give intellectuals jobs subject to adherence to the party line.

Unless you are a person with cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, epilepsy, etc. In order to boycott your insurer you would have to cancel your insurance.

If you do THAT, no other insurance company will cover you because you have a pre-existing condition, and the law that prohibits discriminating against that doesn't go into effect until later this year. (And the insurance companies are looking for ways to weasel out of many of the things the new law requires.)

So the only people who could boycott would be the totally healthy ones. I'm not sure there are that many folks out there willing to take the risk.

Perhaps tellingly, while I love that novel, when I reread it, I tend to skim the early bits and skip ahead to when the "good stuff" starts happening.

Some people get nasty surprises. And of course a lot of people aren't so lucky, they have severe trouble with insurance right now. This is another issue where much of the issue is how we treat the most vulnerable among us. I'm surprised that middle-class voters don't see themselves possibly falling off the insurance rosters, or aren't worried about it. That seems very short-sighted.

James 172: Thanks. I hoped so.

TMK 173: If there are no sympathetic characters in a book, it's not for me. (Note that this isn't the same as being a bad book in terms of some more abstract measure of quality.) If the protagonist is a complete putz, I don't enjoy such books. These things are why I didn't enjoy Miéville's Perdido Street Station; there's only one character who comes close to being likeable, and fur trgf zvaq-sevrq at the end of the book. Well-written; too fucking depressing.

Shorter: It's a strike against the book in terms of "Xopher likes this sort of thing" not in terms of "This book is good."

Ginger 174: Ah, there we go. Yeah, that will likely bug me too.

Fade 180: Yes, that is telling. Not really an option on a first read, though. I'm going to keep plowing ahead, but not today.

It could be that the people leaving the American conservative movement at those who can admit they are wrong.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder why some people think they currently have a "choice" of insurance companies, or that health insurance should be governed by the free market. Obviously we're not free.

ddb @181: I'm surprised that middle-class voters don't see themselves possibly falling off the insurance rosters, or aren't worried about it. That seems very short-sighted.

I have thought the same thing almost every day for the last . . . what is it? Seems like a year. Perhaps they're expecting to join the ranks of people on Medicare/Medicaid/SS disability who complain bitterly about the government wasting money on the undeserving poor.

Of course, most authors have their preferred motifs; and some of my favorites do recycle. Diana Wynne Jones, for instance . . . although I maintain that she adds original touches to each of her admittedly rather similar books.

So, what's the difference between an author who tells the same story over and over, and one who tells the same story with interesting variations?

I'm going to hazard a guess: it's the interesting variations.

I know it's all a matter of taste. But it's still a fine and fascinating distinction.

Look for insurance companies to boycott as many sick people as they can get away with; I expect there will be a surge of cynically evil rescissions before the 23 SEPT 2010 health-care reform deadline.

Most health insurance is bought through an employer during a yearly open season. There are a few out there who will go through the storm of plans to choose one that best meets their needs. But most employees, if they have a plan they are satisfied with, will not bother to check if there is something better than what they currently have. Most will only change if their current plan raises premiums.

Many think if they don't like what the plans available through their workplace they can go out and buy an individual or family plan. Since they've never had to shop for health insurance, they have no clue how expensive this choice can be.

And guess what? That so-called Health Insurance Reform Act Congress passed does nothing to control the cost of premiums or the ever-escalating costs of health care. Expanding Medicare to everyone WOULD have done that.

At this point I'm tempted to tar and feather most of our Congress (with the exception of Kucinich and Sanders). All this bill does is shovel more money to the Insurance/Medical companies. It does very little for the average voter.

(Ur'f bayl unys jung ur fubhyq or. Fvzvyneyl, uvf "bgure unys" (i>abg Ebfvr!) fgnegf bss naablvat nf uryy, ohg riraghnyyl trgf fbzr uhzvyvgl xabpxrq vagb uvz.)

LDR #187: Trust Neil Gaiman to be more complex than that! In Neverwhere, the nasty relationship is just a launchpad for the real plot. In Anansi Boys, it's more part of the plot, but it's still only one strand of the web (so to speak).

Tim Walters #189: Yeah, DWJ has a pretty good range, once you get past any one series....

http://www.empireonline.com/news/feed.asp?NID=27522

"In the immortal words of Socrates, 'I drank what?"

ddb (in the now-closed thread): Debbie's analysis of my usage of the quotation marks was correct, and your apology is accepted.

Meanwhile, I was listening to some Nina Simone, and this happened....

Blue is the color of my Drupal site
Her fonts are kerned to my delight
Semantic style and 960 guides
I love the host where she resides
Blue is the color of my Drupal site
Of my Drupal site

Oh, I love my Drupal and well she knows
Yes, I love the host on where she goes
And still I hope we'll not be spammed
When she and I are index scanned
Blue is the color of my Drupal site

I am blessed with a very poor memory for plot. I can be surprised twice by an ending in the same book, so intra-author leakage isn't really a problem for me.

The corollary is that the overall vibe/gestalt of a book [or film] is a lot more important to me than the plot, although the latter shouldn't be so inept that it breaks the spell.

Fat Charlie, on the other hand, was a pleasant guy to spend a book with.

Not for the particular article, but because the ad at the bottom of that page was for...

...a complete DVD set of the DARIA animated series!

Whoop whoop! I've been waiting years for MTV to get smart enough to put out the complete set, instead of just the two movies/specials that completed the series.

(What's DARIA? The best television series, ever, about High School life and surviving adolescence. Ever. Really.)

(And the most amazing thing is... it was a spinoff from BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD. Sometimes you have to dig thru the mud to find a diamond.)

For instance, on a show where the President was visiting their high school, the teachers had a meeting on the subject of how to keep the two idiots from ruining the occasion. Some ideas were discussed. Finally, a teacher said, "Why don't we just, you know, kill them?" Another teacher said, "That would rule." Then all the other teachers gave that smirking semi-laugh, "Huh-huh-huh," that Beavis & Butt-head do for any or no reason.

It was, I realized abruptly, a perfect illustration of how a couple of subnormal idiots bend the world around them. They had managed to drag the teachers down to their level, and none of them realized it.

After that, I watched the show with my eyes open. I tried to watch Daria.

and #185, I have both Medicare & SSA and I don't complain about the government wasting money on the poor. Heck, I'd like a National Health System. But I admit that one of the advantages of being really sick is that I have income. Not enough to have the kind of house or vacations or other things that I had before I got sick, and I have a 23.5-year-old van, but I do have income.

The WashPost asked readers to recommend books for Obama to read. The most-recommended was Atlas Shrugged, but one of the other highlights is Asimov's Foundation Series.

Thanks for the rec and the reassurance!

I liked Daria in small doses. The cynicism could get to be a bit much.

OtterB, #62: Some people take the fallacy in the other direction, to wit. since only things that are difficult are worthwhile, anything that they can do that doesn't feel difficult is ipso facto worthless, no matter how difficult anyone else might find it. I've been fighting this one in a couple of online friends for over a decade.

Cygnet, #71: *IZ DED OV KYOOT*

Janet, #88: ObSF, Spock to Kirk: "I am reminded of an ancient Vulcan aphorism about masterpieces, namely that it takes at least two entities to create one -- the first to wield the brush, and the second to hit the first over the hammer when it is long since obvious that it is time to stop."
- Diane Duane, The Empty Chair

albatross, #104 et al: There are a number of rest areas along I-10 in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama which have never been reopened since Katrina. I'm sure this is also due to budgetary considerations, as these states are generally poor. But at least in those areas you do have the option of stopping at a truckstop or convenience store instead.

Lin, #114: I am now envisioning that scene with a mental soundtrack addition of, "Get this m*f*n' cigarette out of my m*f*n' car, you m*f*er!"

Xopher, #168: Egad. That would have me in "hurl across the room with great force" mode too. Please let us know how it comes out, when you can bring yourself to go on.

Modesto Kid, #173: I can't speak for Xopher, but... first off, I find it extremely difficult to read a book that makes me want to whap the protagonist upside the head on a repeating basis. Secondly, I don't like reading books that rub up against old sore spots from my own past. Just because I lived thru it myself doesn't mean I want to watch someone else living thru it. Either of those things is a strike against the book; what else would it be?

LDR, #187: So, what's the difference between an author who tells the same story over and over, and one who tells the same story with interesting variations?

If there were a good answer for that question, there might be more Regency-romance writers of the quality of Georgette Heyer.

Also: Louis, Louis.

We'd paired it with an act's worth of opera selections, culminating with The Girls of Maxime's. Yes, we did a can-can. Yes, I was three months pregnant at the time. Thankfully, the first trimester exhaustion wore off the week before the performance. Good times, good times.

While we're cleaning up business from the closed thread, I was wrong to read you as angry when I did. I apologize for the rebuke, which was undeserved.

I always worry about job applications; it doesn't feel okay to say that I'm an above-average presenter and writer, but I really would like to be employed someday.
I settle that one by reframing it as a feminist issue rather than a personal one. Women in general don't talk themselves up. Therefore, when I take a stand on my own abilities, I am striking a blow for equality. Kind of like a woman being shamed for defending herself, but praised for defending her children.

Marilee @210 (et al.): I have both Medicare & SSA and I don't complain about the government wasting money on the poor.

Oh, I know that not everybody does it. It's just one of the more noticeable examples of hypocrisy. And of course I was thinking of the blogger who advised people to throw bricks.

Congratulations! She is a beautiful and super-healthy looking baby :D

Our daughter (Emily) was a month old yesterday and hasn't reached Joanna's birth weight yet (although she's growing fine*)!

Rob Hansen#122: After an excellent episode 1, followed by mediocre episodes 2 & 3, I think episode 4 of the new season of Doctor Who was the best of the season so far

Totally agree. I can't wait for next week's episode. So far I'm missing David Tenant a lot more than I'm missing Russell T. Davies, but it seems to be in safe hands and Matt Smith has all sorts of potential.

B. Durbin#152: Sometimes she sounds like a taun taun while she sleeps. I kid you not.

Emily squeaks like an excited hamster when she's falling asleep or waking up. My wife dreamed she was going to give birth to a cat**, but it turns out she's actually part kitten and part parrot - her favourite place to sleep is curled up on somebody's shoulder. It's not just because she's mine that I find this world-shakingly cute, I swear.

Xopher#168

I'm sorry Anansi Boys is starting as such a slog for you - it's my favourite of Neil Gaiman's solo novels. I hope you a) persevere and b) are rewarded for doing so.

...which brings me to perseverence versus perseveration and reminds me of a flash of insight that occurred when I was lucky enough to learn to glide. On a fraught run, the (very experienced RAF) pilot teaching me said words to the effect that the problem wasn't that I was slow or incapable, but that with all his experience he wouldn't be able to fly the plane the way I was trying to - in short, I was making it hard because I was doing it wrong.

What struck me was the point wasn't that I was failing because of a weakness in me, but because nobody could be expected to succeed at the task the way I had formulated it for myself. It really stayed with me as an example where working harder at the same approach was not the answer.

Further on perseveration, I have now previewed this way too many times, so I'm going to go with "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and hit post.

*5lb 14oz at birth, 7lb 9oz last week
**I am not making this up

Diatryma, #220: Given the number of people applying for jobs who are incapable of producing a literate English sentence (and they native speakers, yet!), I don't think it's out of line at all to stress your writing and presenting skills. And yes, it's a feminist issue as well.

To all: A reminder that my annual Chocolate Decadence party is this Saturday evening. Anyone who lives close enough to Houston to consider coming is welcome; e-mail stardreamer AT mindspring DOT com for details. KeithS will be here, and he's planning to make Xopher's Black Hole Brownies of Death.

So, in a splurge of creativity, I wrote my version. Furry anarchist commandoes, warrior priestesses, and a slightly bemused Canadian paratrooper being helped out by a ghost. And the occult Nazis discover why it's a bad idea to piss off Odin.

I wonder if the Ravenmaster at the Tower of London happens to have just the one eye.

Lila, #213, I remember that, and was surprised. I think they haven't done that again.

LDR, #221, he was here about a week ago for a gun festival.

Oooh, neat!

Lee @ 234:

I can always make something else. It's not as if there's a shortage of chocolate-related recipes around.

It's a negative feedback mechanism: one depressed person turns to chocolate, the supply of chocolate increases, the number of depressed people falls. Very Gaia.

sad to think about how many depressed rabbits there are every spring, though (and depressed bilbies down under).

every year before easter, all those poor bunnies, moping, pining, slowly turning to chocolate....

hang on--i'd better stop that train of thought before i go all bittersweet myself.

i think they must show them a lot of citrus snuff films--lemons being sliced in half, grapefruits eviscerated, oranges squashed--all the juicy stuff.

the oranges get so depressed that they turn to chocolate, just at the sight of all the citric slaughter. the oranges especially mind it when they show them the cans of orange concentrate.

indeed, you may depend upon it, sir: when an orange is to be squeezed in a fortnight, it minds the concentrates wonderfully.

i don't understand this comment, or the ones that succeed it (other than kip w's)--they look like references to a narrative i haven't read. but i'm going to pretend it's a compliment, and if it's a compliment from you, ajay, then i feel very pleased indeed.

The rest are largely unrelated silliness (not that that's a bad thing of course) referring to Doctor Who, which as you know Bob has a main character, a Time Lord, called the Doctor and an antagonist, also a Time Lord, called the Master. Assuming that these are, respectively, a DPhil and an MA, they imply the existence of a rather less powerful Time Lord called the Bachelor somewhere as well. And, as Carrie S points out, a Scholar and a Commoner.

There's probably a Wrangler as well. No doubt this is a Time Lord (or Lady) in particularly tight jeans.
We might even come across a Bejant (or Bezantine), a Tertian and a Magistrand, which all have a rather Whovian sound...

My additions were mere irrelevancies, designed to cloud the mind. Just a Ghostbusters reference.

This is just to say

I have moved
the donuts
that were in
my office

and which
I was probably
giving
my team first shot at

Forgive me
they were limited in quantity
so sweet
and so warm

thanks for the explanation and who-tutorial, ajay. i'm guilty of various forms of anglophilia--excessive attachment to dr. johnson, gilbert & sullivan, etc.--but somehow i have overlooked dr. who.

thanks also for the kind words. but punning proclivities seem to be very widely distributed among the participants here. i'll take your word that serge is historically egregious in this regard, but no one here seems innocent of it.

"Unfortunately, mein Fuhrer, General Steiner has already eaten the plums that were in the icebox."

-- I am shocked - shocked! - to find irrelevancies being posted here!

(A moderator: Your dinosaurs, sir.)

-- Oh, thank you.

now *that's* funny.

or, conversely:

this is just to say
i have lost the eastern front
which was in siberia....

...and a Tinker, a Tailor, a Soldier and a Spy?

(She is to feral kitties as Superman is to Lois Lane.)

No, no! They were corroborative detail, intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Sketchy Bunnies

Note that there are many, many pages; scroll down and hit "older entries."

oh my god. massively creepy, and yet safe for work--kind of like hitchcock before psycho.

gah--that makes bunnies seem worse than clowns, almost.

(Had to look the spelling up; it's not in the convenient reference list!)

We're dealing with clodhopper-rousing blowhards.

(Perhaps between great coat and monocle? No, I'll slide it in above time machine and below antique pocket-watch.)

I have microchipped
the immigrants
who were standing on
the streetcorner

and which
you were probably
saving
for low-wage jobs

Forgive me
they were perfect targets
so friendless
and so brown

Make them wash their hands before you take them home. I know what they were doing back there....

I'd like to see the law struck down sooner rather than later, and not have it spread to, say, Texas, where I have nieces and nephews whose ancestry is half Tejano (that side of their family was there well before any white people). I'd like for them to be able to keep their sunny disposition and not lose it in a series of needless encounters with authority figures.

The big question is: what's your goal? If your goal is to convince illegal immigrants to return home, the main thing to do is to make it unrewarding to hire illegal immigrants, since they overwhelmingly come here for work. Very large fines for employers, and large rewards for turning in large-scale employers of illegal immigrants, would probably suffice. But that would involve stomping on the feet of a bunch of powerful, moneyed interests. Indeed, anything that actually decreases the supply of low-wage labor offends those same people, which is why nearly all politically palatable ways to deal with illegal immigration involve cosmetic "get tough" measures that don't actually address the real problem, but that look and sound good on TV. (Remember the campaign for a wall, discussed by politicians as though it made any sense whatsoever?)

From what I've read, it's likely that decreasing the population of illegal immigrants will hurt the economy, though it may help wages for bottom-tier citizens looking for work. But the big humanitarian problem is that we've been dealing with mass immigration by quietly accepting it for so long, we have millions of people who've lived here for years, had kids, joined churches, bought property. There is no way to send most of that group of people home that isn't going to be just flat awful. Letting them stay with some kind of amnesty/path to citizenship creates big incentives for future illegal immigration. That looks to me like the real tangle.

And the biggest problem is that our political decisionmaking mechanisms (spread across government at various levels, laws, markets, and media) are broken. This is the kind of problem we can't manage to tackle very well, and so we kick it down the road and let it fester, as with the deficit, medicare funding, the drug war, financial regulation, etc.

Mama may or may not stay, it depends on what her temperament's like when she's older. Right now, she's beyond aggressive to other animals. She's fine with people. I'll find her a home if I have to. I'd like to keep her -- she reminds me a lot of a cat I had as a kid -- but not if she's going to stress out the other cats and attack the dog.

New kitten pics here at 20 days of age.

I don't have much firsthand experience of what it's like in the southwestern border states, but here in Pennsylvania, and other areas of the Northeast that have had stagnant populations, we could use some more immigrants. The southwestern states, on the other hand, have been the recipients of a lot of internal migration lately as well as immigration, and rapid population increases can put a strain on society and government.

So I wonder if anyone's seriously considered expanding legal immigration in a geographically targeted way. That is, additional immigration visas would be made available to folks who are willing to live and work in designated lower-population areas of the country (and who otherwise meet basic qualifications, including not becoming a ward of the state), while they're on the visa.

There are some practical challenges to doing this, but I'm not sure they're insurmountable; and they might help make immigration fairer while spreading out the load from crowded states to less-crowded ones. Has anyone tried it, or shown convincingly why it wouldn't work?

B-b-but that runs the risk of profiling Republicans! The combination of undeserved wealth and property, greed, venality, and other moral failings make it much more likely that Republicans would be snagged by such fines. The smoke-filled back room power they can bring to bear would make the enforcement of such fines extremely unlikely, unless they can manage to entrap a Democrat, in which case they can trumpet it to the heavens as a triumph of law and order.

Arizona, where the law comes sweepin' illegals
And where Sheriff Joe can taze you (oh!)
Then he'll crack your unresisting skulls.
Arizona, Ev'ry night they violate your rights;
Sit alone and starve in the ICE jail
Makin' sure your future really bites.

Arizona needs to worry less about illegals and more about stupid fascistic legislators and governors. And that pie-faced idiot Senator John "I'm a Maverick!/No I'm not!" McCain, of course.

I don't even know why that's been bothering me lately, but it's like an earworm, where you have one line of a song running through your head all day and can't make it stop. The solution to that (for me) is to find the song, and sing it. I'm hoping something similar will work for this quote.

Clues or directions much appreciated!

Although descenders continuing to descend while risers don't creates extra interest (have I mentioned that I read compulsively?) visually.

More worrisome is the Arizona governor's conviction that she has been personally chosen by God to do his work and will... which, as always seems to be the case, is in perfect agreement with her personal political ideology.

this will just make it *easier* to read their words.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0702sanctions02-ON.html

I've seen some speculation that the net effect of this has been to flatline the state's growth, or even put it into negative numbers (because of illegals leaving) but we I haven't seen any *well researched* data.

James D. Macdonald @291 - ɥɐɐu

(And while I was previewing, Jacque got in first.
Hey, I can type my name upside-down in ASCII:
M d!>| (Looks better in sans-serif, though.)

Looks like it may have been an episode of Buffy:

http://www.google.com/#q=%22We+don%27t+forgive+people+because%22+%2BBuffy&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0&fp=4f910945c1ee36d4

Google Search

Similarly, those Mexican drug lords are getting their guns and their money from us. The whole cross-border drug and weapons trade is driven by US demand for illegal drugs, and US supplies of guns. It's as if we were replaying the Opium Wars, only we're playing both the Chinese and the British.

Way too easy to read. Indeed, my eye was drawn to it. Is it easier to encode than a disemvowelment?

I plan to drop GoDaddy (Scottsdale, AZ) as my domain name host; I can't do it until May 3rd, because I am flat broke at the moment.

That's OK, they usually look crappy full face anyway.

It's from Buffy, season 2 episode 19 "I Only Have Eyes For You". Giles says "To forgive is an act of compassion, Buffy. It's not done because people deserve it, it's done because they need it."

I also plan to carry a copy of my birth certificate with me. (My passport, I discover, has expired.)

Rafael Sabatini was right: the world is mad.

Scott Turow and Grisham appeared at about the same time, so I mix the two up. I'm not sure any by either man really grabbed me.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers) @ 311 Glad I didn't have a mouthful of tea when I read that!

David Goldfarb @ 314: The best way to read Grisham is to listen to the abridged audio book versions while driving long solo journeys. That said, the Pelican Brief is interesting.

You may have to check Alibris, but Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Travers is a first-rate courtroom drama. It's a helluva movie too.

First we wrapped everything on it individually: pens, books, telephone components. Then we wrapped things onto the desk, wrapped the chair, wrapped his knick-knacks and wrapped them onto the shelf. On the chair, under the wrappings, is a thumbtack, point up, in its own wrapping. Last of all, we wrapped the whole kit and kaboodle in long, graceful swathes of film. It looks like Shelob's been by.

If anyone was wondering whether it's a good idea to throw a glass of water at me?

It's not.

It's not."

Excellent.

Sixty-five years ago today, in Stalag VIIA.

More about Joe.

Maybe he just said, "I'd like you to wrap things up when I'm gone."

He's in a long-running war with another colleague; they throw water, soccer balls, stress gadgets, snowballs, leaves, and imprecations at one another all the time. They put things in each other's pockets and on their chairs. They install rootkits on each other's computers that mass-email our office at odd moments. They set battery-operated booby traps.

My only involvement (picture Bambi eyes and hands folded in my lap as you read this) is that, occasionally, I will have an idea that might be of use to one or the other of them. Simply out of pure friendship, I'll suggest things that they might consider doing to one another*. Obviously, however, the choice to actually act on my offhand comments lies with the individual i question.

My next challenge, at which I have scant chance of success, alas, is to convince him that it's all the other guy's idea. I'll see how it goes. (That endeavor is made more difficult because I won't tell a direct lie while doing it.)

-----
* Example, at a restaurant.

M leaves the table to take a phone call. I point out to P that M has left his coat and wallet behind. P is uncertain what to do, but I point out that there's bread left on the table. So P puts the bread in M's wallet, then wraps a damp lettuce leaf and puts it in M's jacket pocket. "He won't find it for a couple of days, and then, hoo boy!"

Somewhat after that, P goes to the gent's. I point out to M (who has not yet opened his wallet) that P has left his coat behind. When he is looking uninspired, I offer him the spare sugar packets from my coffee, which he dampens and places in P's pocket. "Bet he won't find that for a day or two."

How the rest of us avoided injuring ourselves laughing, I'll never know.

Have fun!

To watch -- "Inherit the Wind."

I loved this recent XKCD strip. It captures some important part of how I see the world, and I had fun showing it to my older son and my wife. (I loved the fact that my older son got it.)

Did anyone else notice that the mouseover text is in verse, but squished together to look like normal sentences? It seemed a very ML-ish thing to do....

Thank you! it was driving me crazy.

Darn. Now I'll have to go watch the episode again. Oh, the pain.

And I want the mouseover text (which I had not noticed at all) printed with it.

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." Sir Arthur Eddington

On the Arizona illegal immigrant bill:

boo hoo, cry me a river. blatant disregard for equality? when people live her illegally for years, suck off the teat of the state, don't pay into the education system their kids reap the benefits of, don't pay income tax, etc....that's treating everyone equally? how come you aren't raising a huge stink about the fact that Mexico has EVEN STRICTER LAWS concerning Americans in their country without papers? nothing like some facts to deflate specious claims...

On President Obama's authorization of assassination for American citizens suspected of being terrorists:

the targeting of alleged non-terrorist criminals risks the killing of innocent people, too. ya need a better argument than than one that employs a weak filling of gaps.

Huh?

(Obviously, I'm not including the person's handle, or even which message board I read these on.)

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." Sir Arthur Eddington

The impulse to correct this* seized me, but upon investigation, the waters are muddied.

In his 1927 book Possible Worlds and Other Papers, J. B. S. Haldane wrote "Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

I cannot prove that Eddington did not say what OtterB says he said, but I have always believed that the line was Haldane's. (My belief was spurred by Sir Arthur Clarke, who quoted the aphorism incessantly.)

Googlefight tells us that, on the Web, STRANGER beats QUEERER and EDDINGTON thrashes HALDANE.

Yet a tiptoe through Google Books indicates that more authors prefer Haldane than Eddington.

*386. By which I mean, xkcd #386. At this point, one probably doesn't even need to link to it any more. As I write this, it's nearly dead even with "Nobody knows you're a dog." I predict that 386 will continue to gain mindshare. (But I might be wrong.)

That was quite moving. Coincidentally, Brother Guy is speaking at this year's Texas Star Party. I'm hoping for a chance to interview him.

http://www.texasstarparty.org/schedule.html

I saw the variations in attribution when I went googling for the source of the quote as I vaguely remembered it. I picked the one that seemed most plausible to me at a quick look but should have mentioned it in my post. Since it's easy enough to anticipate that someone here would be more deeply knowledgeable than I was...

Not just verse, but yer actual filk.

I'm not sure in present company I want to say what it's a filk of.

J Homes.

James @ 291: I like that it preserves the information, but I find it too easy to read. (When I was in Grade 2, I got into trouble when my English teacher put her notebook, with its handwritten answers, on my desk in front of me, upside-down from my point of view. She seemed more bemused than angry when she realized that I was reading it.)

I've always believed in the Haldane attribution; I first saw that in the early '60s, and I don't believe I saw it attributed to Eddington until sometime in the '80s.

If the clingfilmee comes looking for suggestions for retaliation, you might offer this one: fill the victim's cubicle with packing peanuts. They're hellaciously hard to get rid of because they pick up a static charge and cling to everything they touch, including your hands¹. On the other hand, they won't damage anything; on the contrary, they're designed not to.

The other thing that helps is if you really are in a cubicle farm, get an allen wrench and a spare section of cubicle wall and cover the doorway to his cubicle with it. That way the peanuts don't leak out the door, and there's a two-phase surprise: "My door is missing ... <climbs over wall> ... Where did all these peanuts come from?"

¹ Which is why you get a large bag of them and open the bag over the center of the office, preferably while standing on something so you don't get buried in peanuts.

I usually use a guideline that if I can see it without touching anything or moving from where I am, I'm allowed to read it. (No fair standing up and craning one's neck, crouching down to peer under something partially obscured, or walking around the other person's desk to try to change what can be seen.)

If it's something personal, like a diary, I'll say something to its owner ("you might want to put that away so nobody accidentally reads it"); if the person doesn't move or close it, I feel like the only thing I can do is remove myself from its vicinity because it's so hard to not read text that's visible. It feels like, if we're playing cards and I've asked you more than once to hold your cards closer to your chest but you keep holding them out where I can see them, how reasonable is it to expect me not to look?

I use the same standards for reading what's on coworker's computer screens, which basically amounts to the golden rule. I wouldn't be pleased if they were lurking around reading over my shoulder so I don't read over theirs. Same applies for open books/magazines, right side up, up side down or hind side to. Unless invited, I avoid looking.

I'm not sure that's true for "most" people; it seems to be a feature of hyperlexics. (And a screen-name like yours is probably another marker.... ;-) )

Lexica @352: I guess my guideline involves not invading other people's space. But really, it's not like I can stop myself from reading something legible.

Of possible interest to the fluorotariat: one does not commonly (at least I do not commonly) come across musicians quoting Chaucer in the original English.

It's not.

Good grief. I was going to ask why you wrapped his desk until I read that, and now I wonder why his lung tissue isn't under your fingernails.

abi 325: And now I see how you're the arms broker in the war. I still hope you win, though.

I've had more arduous tasks, but I can't remember them off hand. Why? Remember this?

They will walk up to their desk, pick up the box, and be the agent of their own destruction.

*I've never done this myself. I don't play practical jokes because I hate cleaning up the retaliatory jokes played on me. But, like abi, I'm an enabler.

Mary Wollstonecraft and zombies

If it's text, and it's in my field of vision, the only way I'm going to NOT read it is if there's something more interesting to read elsewhere in my field of vision.

It's less a question of ethics than of inevitability. I admit, I *stop* reading other people's stuff when I notice it's something that's none of my business, and unfortunately the only way to do that is to look at the pretty flowers on the wallpaper.

It used to bother me more. Now I've gotten good enough at keeping my mouth shut and not acting on information I'm not supposed to have.

(I've inadvertently learned about things like impending involuntary job loss and other people's grave medical issues by taking papers off a shared fax machine to look for my own stuff.)

My supervisor there collected enough grape soda cans to line a wall of his cube. He was off on some trip for a while, and we built them into a wall blocking the door of his cubicle. For a few days after he got back, he climbed over the cubicle wall rather than remove them.

A later occupant of that office had it completely filled in with cardboard boxes, again glued together with the foam spray.

(I am actually grateful for this. Practical jokes are something I have a real hard time with.)

that's r.f. jones, not r.f. nelson.

(as is the author of "Noise Level")

mea culpa...

(i've been hunting for this error on rasfwr&ff, certain i'd committed the thinko, but unable to find it...)

I think a good prank would be to take a Windows desktop and make it into the screensaver image of a Mac, or vice versa.

Particularly if it was something like this.

I still think he could do with an explanation of the difference between an embarrassing father and an emotionally abusive one, though.

I think people who keep pranking each other are idiots. If I have reason to think they're not idiots, I think they're non-idiots behaving idiotically, and therefore have considerably less excuse.

If someone pranked me in any of the ways described in this thread, I would endeavor to find the least amusing possible response. I would not retaliate, unless I could find something that a) is not funny at all and b) gets me marked DNFW in everyone's mind.

My supervisor definitely won; climbing over the wall and leaving the wall of cans in place in the door is definitely the winning move there. He seemed amused. And we all have a story that we've been telling for years (it took place somewhere between 1981-1985).

"The mental hot-foot," he calls it.

I need to reread Moore's Coyote Blue, which also features a Trickster who is even more of a jackass.

It's a boxer's job to punch people. If they punch their kids they're being abusive. Same thing.

After he got back, we went out for dinner with some other friends. He remarked that he didn't know what was going one, but he must have eaten like a pig when he was gone because he was several pounds heavier than he remembered.

I admitted my crime, and he said, "You bastard....I've been eating lettuce all day!"
All the same, he appreciated the joke.

When I left for a few days, I came back to my apartment and found he had short-sheeted my bed.

A lot of the Greek legends seemed to go the same way, really. Even if your godly parent is trying to be helpful and considerate, it's high odds that you're going to die horribly, or at least have some really unpleasant adventures on the way towards the happy ending.

There's a gray zone of "double take" activities that create confusion followed by amusement. But even those can backfire.

Coyote kills and eats other animal people, and does nastier things than that in some stories. In most stories Anansi is a thief at best. Loki is a trickster and he arranges the murder of Baldur, the beloved god of Light, not to mention bringing about the destruction of the world.

They may be superficially likable, but they're not supposed to be role models. Conversely, they're not all evil, either; depending on the character, they may end up doing good things too, intentionally or accidentally.

Coyote is a perv, but not even an interesting perv. (I mean, a school of salmon?) Just a crass jerk who manages to succeed, anyway.

Try up to $35,000.

P and M have been playing pranks on each other for three years now. P has an even longer history of doing that, right back to the now-infamous incident where he put dried horse dung inside someone's tower case (took them ages to figure out why the office started to smell over the course of the day). To the best of my knowledge, his pranks are always by mutual consent*, though he can be careless about collateral damage.

The one exception to the above rule is children. Martin and I have a long-running joke with the kids that could be considered a prank: we will occasionally switch the words "nose" and "knee" in conversation, then insist that the new configuration is correct. (If they play along, we swap back.)

Both kids are now too old for it to be a challenge, but when they were younger it was a favorite game to try to convince us that we were wrong. But if a child became distressed or bothered, of course we'd drop the game and explain. But we expose children to flavors of humor the way we expose them to flavors of food: to help them to understand their own preferences and develop their tastes.

And if a kid really couldn't take that kind of thing (my younger sister is a prime example), we would not even start.

-----
* where my role as an eminence grise counts as consent. Considering that the alternative is hypocrisy, I'll agree with him.

I agree you shouldn't start it when you're depressed, but I read the rest of it on a day when I was too depressed to get out of bed, and it actually helped.

Guess who was really running the BP show out there -- why yes, it was Halliburton.

Funny that off shore oil lease thing that POTUS decreed is now on hold.

Why in hell did he think so many of us were so goddamned agin it?

Love, c.

Aristotle believes in a monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, governments. His ideas helped shape many governments with the development of philosophers such as Confucius, Mencius, and Han Feizi. They have collaborated in their field, sharing their knowledge and skills to develop a better political order.

This is another:

Confucius was first of the physiological teachers to teach in China.

Good for mental flexibility.

And I bet the story about trying to manage the resulting society would be hilarious.

And with that, to bed, perchance to dream... (cross referencing threads).

Scan a copy of the letterhead/logo of the campus security dept. The one found on top of "beware of more instances of this recent crime" posters (mugging, bike theft, laptop theft).

Use it to make a poster noting that robots have been stealing Indian box lunches from people.

Stick on bulletin boards around campus.

Works especially well on campuses where actual robots roll around, and there's an Indian box lunch stand in the robotics building.
* * *
Or almost anything done by Rob Cockerham.

High-Profile Sculpture Replacement

I did find a discussion page at LibraryThing with some apparently knowledgeable comments.

Fade Manley #395: I'd read that fanfic too.

dcb #396: Laughter is not exactly what is elicited from me.

I've also found these, er, nuggets:

A relationship in which men are depicted as subjugating women to through terror is now created.

He sought this development fault to grow as human beings because women make of half of society if not more and they are unable to contribute. [The "he" in this statement is John Stuart Mill.]

Beauvoir attacks the male dominated society by inducing the idea that men only dominate the society due to their fear of losing everything. With power women will understand that men are not necessarily needed in the society.

Emma Goldman argues for sexual identity for woman and Beauvoir argues for general identity and for woman to be accepted into the society through all outlets.

Although today the ideas of Frantz Fanon have been occurring in society such as violence, Fanon saw violence as a cleansing force in which the United States have encountered a lot of it, although today war is not as bad as it was two years ago.

Gur ernfba jul Nanafv vf fhpu n onq sngure sbe Sng Puneyvr fcrpvsvpnyyl (nf bccbfrq gb orvat n trarenyyl onq sngure, juvpu zvtug nyfb naq frcnengryl or gur pnfr) vf orpnhfr bs jung jnf qbar gb Puneyvr jura ur jnf n puvyq. Pbafvqrevat nov'f zragvba bs gur glcrf bs wbxrf gung fbzr puvyqera jbhyqa'g yvxr ng nyy... Puneyvr cebonoyl jnf gur fbeg bs obl jub jbhyq'ir ybirq uvf sngure'f wbxrf jura ur jnf fgvyy ragveryl uvzfrys. Ohg ur jnf fcyvg ncneg, naq vg jnf cerggl boivbhfyl uvf zber zntvpny, tbq-yvxr unys gung jnf erzbirq. Guvf qvqa'g whfg punatr uvf crefbanyvgl ("whfg", V fnl!) ohg nyfb punatrq jung xvaq bs cneragvat jbhyq or nccebcevngr sbe uvz.

Vg'f cbffvoyr gung rira orsber gur fcyvg, gur wbxrf zvtug'ir orra qernqshy. Ohg pbafvqrevat uvf oebgure'f frafr bs uhzbe, V guvax vg'f zber yvxryl gung Nanafv'f fba punatrq, naq Nanafv'f cneragvat fglyr...qvqa'g. Juvpu vf fgvyy n snvyher, ohg n fbzrjung qvssrerag bar sebz gur bevtvany glcr. Vs V jnagrq gb trg nyy snajnaxl V pbhyq fcrphyngr gung fbzr bs gur cenaxf jrer na rssbeg ba gur cneg bs Puneyvr'f sngure gb gel gb vafcver gur ertebjgu bs gur zvffvat unys, ohg gung pyrneyl Qvq Abg Jbex. Vg qbrfa'g whfgvsl gur onq cneragvat, ohg vg qbrf rkcynva vg va na zber vagrerfgvat jnl.

Aaaand it's "load of dingo's kidney's" for the win. Thanks!

It seemed to me that he was taking every medieval slander at face value, and that seems to be the consensus.

At St. Trinian's School for Girls.

This is when I learned my wife-to-be had over 3,500 different fonts and is always looking for a new use for them. Ha. Ha. Effing ha.

* I notice from the foliage that it's clear this is not Colorado. Aparently this phenomenon is wider-spread than I'd thought.

1. To lower the perceived quality requirement for poetry on Making Light. People build the idea of putting sonnets on ML up and won't post stuff, and I miss our poetry slams. And, you know, there wasn't one of them that I wasn't glad to see on-site even without the excuse. The serious (in the sense of trying to be good, even if humorous) ones were better than the posters thought, generally, and the deliberately bad ones were just plain funny.

(Also, you get to be good at sonnets by writing sonnets. And you write sonnets when there's someplace to put them, often. So even if a given poster wasn't happy with the quality of their sonnet, posting it was a move toward good sonnets on Making Light. And throughout the world!)

2. I thought it might be fun.

As far as I can tell, the thread is a roaring success on both counts.

earl, i think you got the thread back on track.

Nyfb, Puneyvr fgvyy vf uvf sngure'f fba... gur guvat nobhg gevpxfgre tbqf vf gung gurl nyjnlf unir gur qhny angher bs cenaxfgre naq ivpgvz -- Nanafv, yvxr Pblbgr, snyyf nsbhy bs uvf bja wbxrf nf bsgra nf abg (yrg nybar bs uvf ivpgvz'f ergnyvngvba), ohg gung'f nyy cneg bs uvf tnzr. Gung'f gur gehr fcyvg orgjrra Puneyvr naq Fcvqre....

Not only are MIT hacks traditionally ethical (e.g. they often include directions for the maintenance staff on how to disassemble them safely), they are frequently dazzlingly creative.

My daughter reenacted 'buzzword bingo' in one of her high school classes. The teacher is still telling the story years later, and still laughing about it.

She said her postal carriers loved them.

The concept must have come from Johnnie Carson's mind-reading routine (stolen from Steve Allen) where the answer to the next question is written on the previous card. Can't remember the magician's name. He had an improbably large turban.

You'll want to investigate the books in the Legends of Caltech series.

From MIT: The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery, and Pranks at MIT

Number One Cat picked this morning to be done with the tuna and the world. Hail and farewell.

(Number Two Cat had a good sniff of the crate when I got home and has been following me around ever since. They know, somehow.)

Condolences.

I'm sorry for your loss.

A few years ago, the Staples "Easy" button on our receptionist's desk started saying "THAT... was ANNOYING." People quickly noticed the little black pushbutton and red LED that had appeared on the underside, and figured out that they could record their own messages into the thing by pressing the button and using its speaker as a microphone. I was fingered as the culprit pretty quickly -- lots of people at $WORKPLACE had the skills, but few were known to perform such hackery. Passersby left new messages or sounds on the thing frequently for quite some time.

When a couple of friends of mine moved into their new house at #46, the house's features included a separate suite in the basement which could be rented out, and a main-floor corner closet whose door had a rectangular hole (framed) at the centre of its bottom -- best guess is that some former occupant of the house had owned a cat, put the litter box in the closet, and added the hole for the cat to go through. To me, it looked like a small door frame set in the door.

When my friends went away for their honeymoon, they asked me to check on their house periodically to make sure that everything was okay. A couple of days after they got back, they noticed that that hole in the closet door had been filled in... with a small door. Complete with hinges, doorknob, key lock, slide bolt on the "inside", and an apartment number, "46D".

I was particularly happy about the implication that there must be a "46C" around somewhere.

There was a staircase with a turn in it, going round a little square pillar. Going down it one day, I realized the capital was loose. So I lifted it up, and found a small slip of paper in the hollow underneath it.

I unfolded it. It said, "Satisfied, Pandora?"

I put it back, and for all I know, it is there to this day.

Fragano Ledgister @406: Well, no, I wouldn;t find them funny if I was the one trying to grade them.

Joel Polowin @437: I love it! And I appreciate the implications with the "D".

With Dr. Martin Luther King Jr African American people were still being beaten, killed and washed away by water holes during these sit-in boy cotts and protest.

Feminist analysis is needed because females tend to get an inferior bias when trying to access goods and services in their community.

However, another point that was highly regarded in the Clinton Doctrine was the intent of the Clinton Doctrine.

I think the writer of that fragment has confused the categories of Moral Philosophy and the Justice League. If Aristotle were Superman, that would solve the transportation problem.

(Why do most of my posts here end up being about computer-related stuff?)

Thena @430: Condolences from me as well. We've lost two feline members of our household in the past year and a half, so I unfortunately know how it feels.

The offending book was The Bread Book by Debbie Boater (not to be confused with other books by that name -- I also have a much more verbose book by Betsy Oppenheer, but that's much harder to browse through, and measures flour by volume (which is less reliable) instead of weight.

Today, in similar vein, we attended a memorial service for Brian K. Betts, the principal of Shaw at Garnet-Patterson (a middle school in Washington DC); it was well-attended and my son's school chorus sang beautifully. In fact, they brought many people to tears, including my Ex, who was sitting right next to me. There were a lot of good stories about him, from colleagues, students, former students, and friends. DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee also spoke, quite movingly and without notes.

It all reinforced that he was the embodiment of the words from the Flirtations song, and I can only hope that not only will this help our son -- who seems to be doing well enough -- but also my Ex, by pointing out what a legacy he left behind, not by working hard, but by being a good friend, brother, uncle, and surrogate father.

Brian Betts was owned by three cats and a dog. All have found homes with his family.

Thena @430, I sympathize with the grief over your friend. I always hesitate to bring in another cat when I lose one, but sooner or later I always do. My present cat will get memorial pets later today.

My only involvement (picture Bambi eyes and hands folded in my lap as you read this) is that, occasionally, I will have an idea that might be of use to one or the other of them. Simply out of pure friendship, I'll suggest things that they might consider doing to one another*.

You are Bugs Bunny^† and I claim my, uh, I forget.

#453 E. Liddell:

There already exists a screen saver (for X rather than Windows or Mac, mind you) that consists of a slideshow of fatal crash screens for various operating systems.

I recall hearing a story of someone using such a screen saver (or maybe just one image) — a helpful passerby rebooted the crashed computer.

^†Link may not actually clarify reference.

I set it aside and kept it for a while, but lost track of it, as I have lost track of bits of my own life.

I was told that it had been the tradition to keep important papers, such as the mortgage documents, in this space. When the mortgage was paid off, the house owners would cap off this cubby hole with something a little more decorative to indicate they had paid for their house in full.

Thena, my condolences as well.

One day, he put a program in my autoexec file that I could only get out of by rebooting. Thus putting me back into that file. Hunted down the boot floppy, deleted the program from the autoexec file. Not difficult because I actually knew where my boot floppy was, maybe the only other person in the company who did.

Still in the position of not wanting to damage the mini-computer, I simply turned the light/dark knob down on his screen (still in the days of green screens). I heard him arrive, go into his office. Several minutes later, this normally daper man is standing in my cube, tie askew, hair standing on end, requesting pitifully that I come undo what I had done.

I went in to his office and turned the knob up. And saw all that he had done to get his computer to work again. I didn't laugh. much. He was looking for a computer program tweak, when I had done a hardware tweak.

The upshot of this was that he continued to "put things" on my computer, for my education and enjoyment, he never again messed with the operating system files.

I remember that when large complex plans are made. Sometimes it's the simple ones, "oh she'd never do something so simple" that will get the job done.

I also feel rather smug about it. hehe

It's nice to get the chance to give it a whirl when talent (or taste) is no bar. Maybe sometime I'll try one that's *not* silly...

(Alright, I confess, it's not actually a related note.)

Been there, done that, will do it again (rinse, repeat). Do NOT WANT a t-shirt for it.

A squiggle is just another pattern entity to a codebreaker. Also, too much noise added to a message would make it less useful to the authorized recipient as well. Some external method for determining what is and isn't noise is just another pattern, too.

Or are you just thinking about confounding people who are able to sight-read ROT13?

The balance for ROT13 is meant to be just a little further over from disemvowelling -- few people can sight-read it, but it's intended to be crackable by simple and widely available tools, from a 22-character UNIX command¹ to a free website, with various browser/reader commands in between. (LeetKey just fills a gap -- USENET "news readers" all have ROT13 commands built in.)

Bringing in non-ASCII characters, or even changing the encoding, breaks that balance. Suddenly, to decrypt, you need to know the entire substitution table -- and if the site is using idiosyncratic graphics as you suggest, there may be *no* way for anyone but that site to decrypt it. (What do you get if you "copy & paste" the encoded text?) You might as well use Show/Hide buttons, like the XKCD forums do.

¹ that would be "tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M" . No, I'm not counting the newline.

My choir's conductor likes to say, when we are singing in, eg, Latin: "Pretend this is a foreign language that isn't pronounced like English".

The year before that, I was in another electronics class and found that touching the heat shield of the one ungrounded soldering pen and anything grounded (like the heat shield of another) led to a mild shock. I called one of my classmates over and asked him which one felt hotter. He touched one, then the other, and I suggested touching both. Contact! So then we had to call someone else over, and someone else, until everybody in the class was watching furtively as I got the teacher that way. He muttered something about "rich kids" and went back to his office.

I am going on vacation this week, and wonder what will happen to my cubicle in the interim.

(Bubble wrap comes in red, blue, purple, and orange, as well. I am thinking about getting a roll of purple, and just leaving it in my cubicle for a week or two, to worry people.)

There's the unreliable narrator of fiction, and the transparent narrator (John McPhee, Joseph Mitchell), and I have recently run up against a third: the Mary Sue biographer.

Iris Chang (Rape of Nanking et. al.) was a complex, fascinating and driven woman, who committed suicide after stress compounded by researching war crimes and interviewing survivors (the Bataan POWs were her projected next book), hormone therapy to induce pregnancy, post-partum depression, non-stop book tours, and a genetic susceptibility. Paula Kamen's Finding Iris Chang assumes that if we find Chang interesting, we will be even more interested in Kamen and her watered-down kind-of-parallel experiences. Feh.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Pizza
The Lord of the Pizzas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Pizza
All Quiet on the Pizza Front
The Front Pizza
Mutiny on the Pizza
A Midsummer Night's Pizza
A Tale of Two Pizzas
Gone With the Pizza
The Wizard of Pizza
The Pizza of Wrath

And told them to go at it. (No purpose intended, just a lark.) The best one so far (NOT mine, though I wish I'd thought of it): The Pizza in the Piazza.

The Pizza's Guide to the Galaxy
All Pizza on the Western Front
Pizza on the Bounty
A Pizza Night's Dream
A Pizza of Two Cities
The Pizza of Oz
The Grapes of Pizza

The Pizza Rising
Five Hundred Pizzas After
Starpilot's Pizza
A Pizza Upon the Deep
A Pizza For Arbonne
To Say Nothing of the Pizza
The Pizza Business
The Greatest Pizza on Earth
In Defense of Pizza

[Xopher, how's Sebastian coming along?}

The Phantom Pizza, or, The Pizza Menace
The Attack of the Pizzas
The Revenge of the Pizza

-----
* Scottish variant: The Pizza Bridie

What you describe has an appearance-match to the dead-but-open-sourced(1) Etherpad tool(2): I'd been thinking it would have been a good webtool for writing games--sonnet sudoku, say.

(1) bought by Google to someday be integrated into Wave.
(2) My workplace was using it for true real-time multi-author writing: you could see each individual's contributions all at once (i.e. five paragraphs being started at the same time, and then one person gives up and goes to edit another person's paragraph, nibbling away like some text-editing version of Tron).

I figure it's even odds someone will correctly identify what I'm thinking of here within the hour:

Pizza: A Novel

Hm. Yes, our abi does have certain Bugs-like properties, doesn't she?

Your choice. Anchovies are extra.

Red Pizza of Darkover

And the trilogy: Red Pizza, Green Pizza, Blue Pizza

...the Philosopher's Pizza
...the Chamber of Pizzas
...the Prisoner of Pizza
...the Pizza of Fire
...the Order of the Pizza
...the Half-Blood Pizza (suitable for vampires)
...the Deathly Pizzas

(I have to make dinner, now.)

Some of you may know about Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, a set of cards intended for use in jarring stuck creative processes loose. Each card continues, well, an oblique strategy, like "Use fewer notes." and "In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly." and "How would someone else do it?" I've used these a few times myself over the years.

Well, today on Twitter, Richard Kadrey went insane, again :), and has been posting things filed as Fake Oblique Strategies. Stuff like "Once the search is in progress, something will be found, usually on your shoes." and "Don’t be afraid to whine. Friends will help by punching you until you get a better idea." and "Fill every beat with Cheez Whiz." I've been laughing rather a lot while reading.

Oblique Pizzas
Pizzaphage (Kadrey's first novel)
Pizzamancer (I seem to be on a New Ace Specials roll here)
Pizzamatrix (definitely)
Them Pizzas
"The Ugly Pizzas"
The Pizza of the Torturer; The Pizza of the Conciliator; The Pizza of the Lictor; The Pizza of the Autarch; The Pizza of the New Sun
Pizza of Warcraft
City of Pizzas
Pizzahammer Fantasy Online

(or should it be Pizzaman's Honeymoon?)

and who could forget that '60s classic that folded too soon, The Twilight Calzone?

But really, and c'mon...backyard barbecue propane tanks, strapped about with firecrackers. Am I the only one to whom this screams not only amateur, but redneck?

THANK you! Everytime I heard that song, it would catch on something in my mind, but I could never pull it out enough to identify it. Finally! Mystery solved!

(Don't those kinds of things just drive you mad?)

And the Pizza Porn series:

Deep Pizza
The Pizza and Miss Jones
Behind the Green Pizza

Xscreensaver is available for Unix and Mac, and has the BSOD screensaver.

Xopher:

David Goldfarb brought a batch of Black Hole Brownies to Chocolate Decadence. They were excellent. (I decided to make cake instead.)

* * *

Mystic Pizza

. . . what?

What a stupid entry.

According to Mr. Peabody himself in the first episode of Peabody's Improbable History, the WABAC isn't just a Time Machine--he built one of those for Sherman who didn't like it because they couldn't influence events. The WABAC does allow you to tinker, which is why the reference to it in Back to the Future is apt. Is this covered in Wikipedia? No. Will I add it in? No--I have enough problems with rule lawyers in my day job, thank you.

And, in trying to get caught up on episodes of the current incarnation, let me say that the space Titanic episode left me thinking that if the best engineer in the Federation and the computer in Red Dwarf can both pull off a stunt that the Doctor can't then the scriptwriter just wasn't trying.

this is just to say I have eaten green pizza which it was spinachy alfredoesque hot and delicious without otherwise well deserved feelings of guilt because spinach is good for you as is effectively rationalized by the heroic example of popeye the sailor man

Which gives us the choice of The Nine Pizzas.

And the ultimate question: Whose Pizza?

J Homes.

Would those be the "nine pizzas for mortal men doomed to dine"?

The Pizza-Master of Hed
Pizza of Sea and Fire
Pizza in the Wind

Nine Pizzas in Amber
The Pizzas of Avalon
Sing of the Pizza
The Pizza of Oberon
The Pizzas of Chaos

I have eaten
the pizza
that was in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
going to reheat
for lunch

Forgive me
it was delicious
so spicy
and so cold

Hedgehog @ 549: Sing of the Pizza

Someone's bound to...

Pizza 666
Doomed Pizza
Lightning Pizza
The Pizza of X
Pizza Humanity
Frozen Pizza
The Microscopic Pizza
Pizza of Doom
Pizza of the Gods
Last pizza on Earth
Pizza Mass
A thousand pizzas on
The Death Pizza
Pizza at large
Voodoo Hell Pizza

(following an incautious look at www.pizza^H^H^H^Heltorro.com)

The faces look like less-stylized Eastern Orthodox icons, and I wonder if there's a connection.

****

I've been using "Jewish Bible" and "Christian Bible" as less problematic than OT and NT. Are they as unproblematic as I hope?

****

Is there a word for the hard-to-translate words which only appear once in the bible?

Cowboy Feng's Space Pizzeria
To Eat Pizza in Hell

Buffy the Pizza Slayer

And the large gunlocker in the SUV was filled with bags of non-explosive fertilizer (according to the New York Times).

The Sign of Pizza
A Study in Pizza
Silver Pizza
The Pizza of the Baskervilles

For Us, the Pizzas
The Pizza of the Beast
Variable Pizza
Pizza in the Sky
Star Pizza
Starship Pizzas
I am torn between "Pizza in a Strange Land" and "Stranger in a Strange Pizza".

Don't forget the great political drama, Double Cheese

Were you wearing culottes? Or just a full skirt for easy biking?

Pizza
Pizza and Empire
Second helpings

The pizza upon Cannis

There will be Pizza.

The pizza from Earth
Pizza family Stone(baked)

A pizza is haunting Texas

The Pizza Hut on the Borderland

This does sound a bit like the car-bombs in London and at Glasgow Airport, in 2007.

Glaswegian comedian Frankie Boyle quipped "I just love the naivety of someone trying to bring religious war to Glasgow,"

This does sound a bit like the car-bombs in London and at Glasgow Airport, in 2007.

Glaswegian comedian Frankie Boyle quipped "I just love the naivety of someone trying to bring religious war to Glasgow,"

It's a full denim skirt, one of my favorites. It's sadly faded and ragged now, but it is actually really good for cycling in.

A Vindication of the Rights of Pizza

The World as Pizza and Representation

Two Treatises on Pizza

Pizza and Nothingness

* The Pizza Journal of Adam Ewing
* Pizzas from Zedelghem
* Half Pizzas: The first Louisa Rey Pizza Mystery
* The Ghastly Pizza of Timothy Cavendish
* A Pizza of Sonmi 451
* Sloosha's Peesa' an' Ev'rythin' After

Tripizzatary
First Pizza
Galactic Pizza
Gray Pizza
Second Stage Pizza
Children of the Pizza

Serafini:
Codex Pizzianus
Pizzapedia Picola

Also:
The Beekeeper's Pizza
A Letter of Pizza
Pizza Hall
Locked Pizzas

In any case: today is the date upon which John Brunner started the action in Stand on Zanzibar; tomorrow it's forty years since Kent State. If I had better fingers and a shorter to-do list, I would philosophize upon this concatenation of events.

And:
Shards of Pizza
Pizzayar
The Warrior's Pizza
The Pizza Game
Pizzaganda
Pizza of Athos
Borders of Pizza (or "Pizzas of Inifinity"?)
Brothers in Pizza
Mirror Pizza
A Pizza Campaign
Diplomatic Pizza

Pizza
Pizza
Pizza
Pizza
Pizza
etc.

The Pizza of Chalion
Pizza of Souls
The Hallowed Pizza

Brokedown Pizza
The Pizza Guards
Five Hundred Pizzas After (the guards were hungry)
The Viscount of Pizza (3 volumes)

Pizza
Pizza Messiah
Children of Pizza
God Emperor of Pizza
Heretics of Pizza
Chapterhouse: Pizza

There aren't any other pizzas in this style except the Pizza Encyclopedia, which they unfortunately don't make any more.

(And then the later additions to the series: Pizza'a Edge, Prelude to Pizza, etc., which tied the whole thing in to I, Pasta, The Caves of Pasta, The Naked Pasta, and all of the other pasta stories.)

The Wee Free Pizzas

When I am an Old Pizza, I Shall Wear Green

Too bad I already ran out of internets to give as prizes.

and the rest of the Biography of Calzone

The 7 Focaccia of Dr. Lao

You philo-stine.

OK, it's not a sonnet, but it's very nice poetry. Also, nice arrangement; I've had a soft spot in my heart for dulcimer music ever since listening to Richard Fariña playing an instrumental with Bruce Langhorne.

Indeed, it is a spectacular view, south over the IJ to Amsterdam. We see cruise ships go by, watch thunderstorms move up the river, and get dazzled by the sunlight on the water.

Long and drawn-out quarrels about the blinds ensue when the sun comes in the windows. I work with a bunch of vampires, I swear. But I get a day or two alone in the office, when I can just let the light stream in.

The Eye of the Pizza
The Great Pizza
The Pizza Reborn
The Pizza Rising
The Fires of Pizza
Lord of Pizza
A Crown of Pizza
The Path of Pizza
Winter's Pizza
Pizza of Twilight
Pizza of Dreams
The Gathering Pizza
Towers of Pizza
A Pizza of Light

(The last two have not finished baking.)

Today We Choose Pizzas
To Die in Pizza
Eye of Pizza
Pizza in the Sand
The Pizzas of His Face, the Calzone of His Mouth
The Last Defender of Pizza
Jack of Pizza
A Night in the Lonesome Pizza

Or maybe, just a meditation on all different kinds of heroes.

My God that's impressive

What the picture (upper right corner of the .pdf page) doesn't show is the plastic sheeting on the floor underneath, to prevent damage to the floor, and and the sand and the pennies inside the well under the water. Note that those were real bricks and real mortar between the bricks. (I was one of the people inside the dormroom waiting for his arrival, there was an early warning system in effect. The person standing behind him was Doug White, class of 1974, and later hall tutor. For that matter Rick and his wife Kathleen were the hall tutors after "Gwhite"--and Kathleen wrote a long published paper about social decision-making and criteria evolution for decision-making, based on when she and Rick announced they were leaving MIT and the hall would have to select a new hall tutor....)

Orhan Pamuk

The White Pizza
The Black Pizza
My Pizza is Red

Also: I have no pizza, and I must scream.

The House of Seven Pizzas
A Good Pizza is Hard to Find
(somebody beat me to the Pizza Also Rises)
The Old Man and the Pizza

Something Pizza This Way Comes

Another series that would get repetitive, Pizza in Death

(applause for the Modesto Kid @602)

Who can forget Anne McCaffrey's Pizza Trilogy: Pizzaflight, Pizzaquest, and The White Pizza

And then there's "The Okonomiyaki of Genji", the classic Heian saga of trolling for skank and toppings.

A Fistful of Pizza
For a Few Pizzas More
The Good, the Bad, and the Pizza

The Pizza's Regress
Letters to an American Pizza
The Screwtape Pizzas
A Pizza Observed
Surprised by Pizza
Pizza in the Dock

Then there's
Pizza in Heaven
Many Pizzas
The Place of the Calzone
The Greater Pizzas
Shadows of Pizza
Descent into Marinara
All Hallows' Pizza
The Arthurian Pizza
The Image of the Pizza
The Masques of Pizza House

Of course there are later works of equal importance in the same genre such as

On the Social Pizza

Not to mention the whole Rawlsian series:

"Pizza as Fairness"

A Theory of Pizza

"Pizza as Fairness: Pepperonical not Pineappliccal"

----------
Anne of the thousand pizzas
Suetonius: Twelve Pizzas
The 120 days of Pizza[1]
The pizza of the beast
Principia Pizzeria

[1] contains insufficient mention of dinosaurs.

More children's books:

Danny Dunn and the Pizzabaking Machine?
Pizza under the Apple Tree
Black Pizza
Giovanni Brinker, or the Silver Pizza
The Pizza Bakers and the Oregano Bush Man (that's from my mother's youth)
The Wonderful Baking of the Mushroom Pizza (for DFB)

Pizza.

Also:

The Pizza.

Five Weeks in a Pizza
A Journey to the Center of the Pizza
From the Earth to the Pizza
Twenty Thousand Pizzas Under the Sea
Around the Pizza in 80 Days
Pizza the Conqueror
Propellor Pizza
Master of the Pizza

... and how could I forget
Pizza the Damned

(my left pinkie finger is getting sore from typing "pizza")

Interview with a Pizza
The Pizza Lestat
Queen of the Pizza
The Tale of the Pizza Thief

Wrong parallel universe; in the one to which I refer, it was pizza. Recipes of three of the seven pizzas of Dr. Lao were found on a scrap of parchment at the circus site:

The Ruthless Tycoon's Deep Dish Pizza of Prosperity: California condor in pesto sauce, seasoned with sweet tears of unfathomable sadness.

The Widowed Librarian's Pan Pizza: Oysters and olives in a zesty marinara sauce.

The Self-Absorbed Matron's Pizza of Prophesy: Stale, dry, cheese pizza, sauce-less, served at room temperature.

I took a fair number of pictures, but who knows how well they'll come out -- vagaries of digital photography, and all that.

Carol 493: The last update I sent out got comments from only one person. Very NICE (and helpful) comments, but I'm afraid I found the lack of response rather discouraging. The posting on the gay site got an equally lackluster response.

Haven't written any more on it, though I did do some head-work on it today at the gym—I work on dialogue and narration while working out; sometimes bits of it come out my mouth, which must be disconcerting to anyone who hears it. Imagine that the guy next to you, after finishing a set of overhead presses with 30-pound dumbbells, just muttered "...and even if he bit her, she wouldn't bleed unless she chose to."

KeithS 541: Yay! Thanks for telling me. I love hearing that people are enjoying that recipe. And thank you David as well!

Stefan 543: On the other site, I did Pizza Pizza, but nobody got it.

Bruce 544:

Sherman: Where are we going this time, Mr. Peabody?

Mr. Peabody: Set the WABAC Machine for Palestine in 4 BCE, Sherman.

Sherman: Jesus Christ, Mr. Peabody!

Mr. Peabody: Precisely, Sherman.

abi 572: You're Minion to an awfully cute Mastermind. Too bad he's EVOLL.

TMK 602: *jaw drops*

Wow. That's great!

Chocolate Decadence was a blast -- I think it was the best one I've had since moving here, and a large part of it was the eclectic mix of friends who attended. David Goldfarb brought Xopher's brownies, and they were a tremendous hit -- we always have lots of leftovers, but the Black Hole Brownies were all eaten during the party.

Having KeithS here for the weekend was an absolute delight. We went to the stage-magic exhibit at the Museum of Natural Science, and to the Houston Fine Minerals Show (lots of pretty rocks!), and to the First Saturday Arts Market, and showed him various of our favorite hangouts around town, and introduced him to bubble tea. The above picture was taken this morning when we were just kicking back and recovering from the weekend.

*Apparently my face is more expressive than I think it is. I used to think of myself as somewhat impassive, mostly because it wasn't worth it to emote in a completely not-as-dysfunctional-as-it-sounds way; it may just have been that I was far enough away in my own little world that I wasn't really emoting in the right situations. Now people keep commenting on the faces I make, and I never realize I'm making them.

**I have done this as long as I can remember. It used to be out loud, then it became silent. "Running scenes" is the best way I've found to summarize that it's not always original or fanfic, I don't write most of it down, and I don't really try to improve most of it. It's like rereading, only in my head and I sometimes skip the first readthrough.

so fun and juicy,
which you were
probably saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
it was novel
so sweet and drunken
and cold.

The Last Temptation of Pizza

which also brings to mind the famous line from the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the pizza makers."

"...for they shall deliver into Heaven in thirty minutes or less, and it's free!"

How did I go 42 years on this planet without knowing about this?

Damn.

Are you ok? Have you lost your little oil flask?

Damn. A stupid crime, for all that it was clearly planned out. They murdered the guy, and then went all around town using his credit cards?

Evil is bad enough, but stupid evil is in some sense even more disturbing.

Halting Pizza
The Pizza Morgue

Or somewhat darker:
The Pizza you Know
Vicious Pizza
Dead Men's Pizzas
Thicker than Pizza
The Naming of the Pizzas

This essay on privacy in the socially-networked world is really interesting, and clarifies some important stuff in my mind.

One thing she didn't make as clear as it needs to be (though it was implicit in her speech): privacy is usually about privacy from someone with the power to do something bad to you. Depending on who you are, that might be your parents, your ex, your boss, your government, your insurance company, your future employers, your wife, your neighbors, etc. This leads to two tricky bits about privacy:

a. Different people have different people from whom they want privacy.

b. The same person has different people from whom he wants privacy at different times.

A lot of the social-networking panic is about (b), I think--someone who wants privacy from her parents at 17 might want privacy from her potential employers at 22, and she might very well want privacy from those employers even for the information she originally put out at age 17, when her concern was entirely about keeping her sex life private from her mom.

...For which grace she kindly did bestow
Strength on his shoulders, and did fill his knees as liberally
With swiftness, breathing in his breast the courage of a fly,
Which loves to bite so, and doth bear man's blood so much good will,
That still though beaten from a man she flies upon him still;
With such a courage Pallas filled the black parts near his heart.

This Is Just To Say
I have airlocked
the thing
that was
hidden in the icebox,

so wet and squishy,
which I was
supposedly saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
it was ugly
so dark and nasty
and fast.

<lick> *smack*

When I was in school and we had more time than money for entertainment we worked out a bunch of familiar tunes and poems which were metrically interchangeable. The above list is the subset I remember right offhand but is far, far from exhaustive...

Pull up! All pants pull up!
Search your pants, Luke. You know it's true.
Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your pants.

Since TITLE tag works not, link to list of 278 top STAR WARS lines by substitution of word 'pants' improved is leads.

David, #689: Isn't this rather early for fireflies? I tend to think of them as June-to-August critters -- in my memories, they're strongly associated with summer vacation.

Highlights:

• George Rekers, cofounder of the Family Research Council, claimed he hired the gay prostitute to carry his luggage (to be fair, I'm sure there was some bag handling involved). He admitted finding him on Rentboy.com; couldn't very well deny it, since that's the only place "Geo" advertises his services.
• The Rentboy ad isn't exactly mealy-mouthed:

  The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

• Pictures of "Geo." (Possibly NSFW depending on your workplace.)
• Rekers adopted a 16-year-old four years ago. Geo is 20. Same age as his adopted son. I wonder what he's been doing to that boy since he "adopted" him. Perhaps Rekers needs to have it explained to him that in this country even rich white bastards like him are technically not supposed to buy sex slaves, even if they call it "adopting a son."

I assume you approve, then.

For the knitters in the audience, this would make a good, and hilarious, LJ userpic. (Warning: uses naughty language.)

Ahem. See Lee @692.

'Minds me of a Minicon, eons ago. Managed to catch Houghton John in the consuite. I think it was DDB who wandered by, noted the dreamy look on John's face and the quantities of hair draped through my fingers. Pondered a moment, and said, "Ah, social grooming amongst the naked apes...."

just got back from hiking around Crabtree Falls. Gorgeous... besides the "usual" flowers (violets, asters, "buttercups", wild geraniums and pinks...) there were may-apples in bloom. Marty took us on a detour (the "path less travelled by" ;-) ) that had us crossing the stream a couple of times, not to mention climbing over fallen giants (seriously, a couple of those ex-trees looked to be three feet across).

Yesterday's WashPost Health section had their bit from Consumer Reports where they used a calculator to find out Obama's probability of a heart attack in the next 10 years. His was 7%; mine was 1%. You need your lipid panel (cholesterol) results to use the calculator.

After 20+ years of dorms and apartments, I actually have a front lawn, with meadow flowers and a holly tree in it! (Even if the maintenance folks occasionally behead both flowers and tree. :-) )

Why not happy, you ask? Because neither leaves a "Find in this page" control open on the page. When reading an ML thread, I frequently want to zip up or down to a number or word. Having the find control open all the time, in an out-of-the-way location, makes this easy. I don't use Find all the often on other sites, so I doubt that this is feature that's much requested by general users of Chrome or Safari. I am aware that I can open Find with a hot key, but I prefer to just have it open all the time. I usually want to search from the bottom of the page, so it's easy to highlight a bit of text at the bottom of the page, then type into a control at the bottom of the page, whereas Chrome and Safari put the Find box at the top of the page.

My other dislikes about Safari: can't set it to automatically open several pages in tabs on start-up, and going to a URL from your bookmarks requires two clicks instead of one.
I haven't used Chrome long enough to form any strong opinions. I saw that it did Find wrong, and left in a huff.
So, if Firefox was getting in your nose, and you were thinking of changing, you now have this Vital Information at your disposal. That is all.

OK, now that is all.

Which doesn't address any of your other issues (I mean, I swapped away from Firefox and was so glad to finally have that "find" not taking up real estate on the screen...), but that one is a non-intuitive interface problem, rather than a lost feature one.

Seriously, if you've got your receipt from Gateway, or some other "magic key" from the OS, you might be able to parlay that into a new activation, otherwise I suspect you'll be stuck for a new copy of Windows.

If you have any memories of this time, give it a watch. In addition to everything else, it's wonderful how everything is laid out in a revolving set that functions as a character in its own right. It's precision snark, smooth as clockwork. "Super Dave" fans might recognize Albert Brooks's brother (and son of Parkyakarkus), Bob Einstein, as one of the tourists. Well, two of the tourists.

I've had blossoms over the years but to date not fruit on/from the mayapple patches in my yard (planted by me years back).

Anyway, I downloaded Chrome (now that I have an Intel machine and can do so) and tried it out...and discovered that it had "correct spelling while you type" turned on, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Bye-bye, Chrome.

Tools menu
Options
Under The Hood tab
Change font and language settings
Languages tab

And look for the Check Spelling checkbox.

My experience, it's worth having Chrome available, but I am on a Windows machine.

I would seriously suggest that you try out the current Ubuntu Linux LiveCD. You can try things out without messing with your hard drives.

Whether Linux is a viable option for you depends oin what other software you might be using, but the new Lucid Lynx version doesn't need such a high geek level to install.

I run my netbook on Linux. I have Mozilla, Open Office, a video player, all the routine stuff with no problems. And WINE is pretty good at running the Windows-specific stuff.

I have a few things to check before I'd switch this Windows box to Linux, but I don't need to change. I doubt I would spend money on a new Windows version.

Go and vote.

(Maybe I should have tried to write a sonnet?)

Under "Edit" there's a "Spelling and Grammar" menu with an entry for "Check spelling as I type", but it stays grayed out; I can't change it.

The BBC even has a story claiming that USians care about the result.

The result I'm rather hoping for is a hung parliament, leading to a red-yellow coalition and Brown having to negotiate with Clegg to form a government.

I agree--but lilac and bearded iris are June too, and they're already out. Around here we had a run of gorgeous weather in mid-March that triggered everything a few weeks early.

Including the unidentifiable tree in my neighbor's yard with the nifty yellow blossoms. I have no idea what it is, but it's cool looking.

(One lemming to another: "Hey, if your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do that to? Well, why not?")

Oh, and in time for the UK election, Cameron said he's proud of what's been done here. Obviously he's not poor, or a women, or a teenager without work...

Dave Bell @ 722: WINE is pretty good at running the Windows-specific stuff. I believe I read that WINE is based on Windows 98? Seems like that would have problems with some newer Windows applications.

I think I found it by reading some other web page that mentioned it. I'd highly recommend your method, because, really, how else would you know if it doesn't tell you? GUIs are supposed to tell the user what features are there using standard representations, not hide them behind a button that doesn't work like any other button in the known universe. Ahem. Soapbox goes away now.

If you're curious about trying other browsers, you can also join the other three of us on the planet who use Opera.

Also, Wine is its own implementation of the Windows API. It runs some things very well, others not at all. It is occasionally more compatible with old versions of Windows than Windows itself is, and doesn't have much problem with modern Windows apps provided they don't try to pull a lot of stupid crap. It runs Portal and City of Heroes reasonably well, for example.

Having tried your method several times, and been singe-éd¹ thereby, I developed a new one.
"I was told this software/computer/thing does this. If it really exists, I am unable to find it."

The "if it really exists" part seems to challenge someone to answer, and I'm only making declarations of relative blindness.

¹ "singed" looks like past tense of sing, for those with a less than stellar grasp of conjugation.

Coincidentally, I'd just been thinking about "Teabonics", and the whole concept of "they care about English, but not enough to, like, actually learn to use or spell it correctly."

As long as These Kids Today are on my lawn anyway, I'd like to ask when they started saying "I have ran" and "I have drank." The other curmudgeons at my school and I have been rolling our eyes for about three months now, but it's so widespread among the students that it must have started earlier.

re Linux/etc.: This machine is needed to run WoW on, and that's pretty much a stopper there. But I'm also not really in a position, in a network with two Window 7 and another XP machine, to spend the time needed to reawaken my ancient Unix skills.

When did it become proper for newspapers to use "shined" as the past tense of "shine" for anything not involving the polishing of shoes?

They've two more diplomas to go, in steadily more street clothing and at greater length, before they Officially Can Swim here in the Netherlands. But as far as I'm concerned, they're both aqua-capable.

How this affects her status as Battery-Powered Electro Girl is as yet unclear.

What about 'slayed'? Did this come in with Buffy, or is there an earlier source for it?