No. Sorry. I'm going to be totally useless at this game. I never "got" elves. Read plenty about them in a variety of mythos, mind you. But, like zombies, vampires and star athletes, their appeal escapes me.

BTW, this is not a frivolous question....

Gnomes are gnomic.

Druids are hallowed. Everywhere they go, people shout "Hallow!" at them.

[Cleaned up at poster's request -- Abi]

(And they are too French -- from right there in the Parisian suburbs!)

I have arms, and thumbs, I can upend them and have my hands on their throat while growling in their ear before they really know what's happening.

I will second (at least) clicker training. I've used it on horses, cats, dogs and people. I've seen it done to fish and chickens. Things you would not expect to trainable, are.

Things you didn't know you were training can be hard to untrain.

"Don't Shoot The Dog" is a very good place to start.

Elves are trainable. They can ride trains.

Pixies are happy. They are pixilated.
Pixies are flighty. They fly around a lot.
Pixies are trainable. They usually go by coach.
Pixies have fortitude. They're especially good at building round towers.
Pixies are determined. No superimposed quantum states for them.

Snap! Great minds.

Kobolds are horrendous. They rend hoes.

Witches are wicked. They conduct liquids.

✡ Yes, I know there's only one. That makes it the topmost^♂, right?

♂ Have you heard about the third moon of Mars that was just discovered? Because it's in such a low orbit, it's been named Bottomos. rimshot!

@56, Keith Kisser: elves are recursive, they refer to them elves. (Elveselves and so on.)

Elves are appalling... I might be adopted.

The gimmick was both more interesting, and more believable, than that of The Adjustment Bureau. Also, I liked the romance in Source Code better.

Anyone for a Gathering of Light at Wiscon in Madison, WI, the weekend of May 26-30?

When we were gearing up for childbirth, we found out our insurance wouldn't cover a warm tub for pain relief (an 'aquadural'), though our hospital had them. I called up to ask how much it'd cost -- if low hundreds, we were willing to pay out of pocket for the improvement in quality of experience.

I spent twenty minutes on the phone being bounced around, and nobody could give me a price quote. "It depends who your insurance is," said they. "Doesn't matter, they won't pay for it," said I, at which point they got more confused and transferred me. Literally nobody in their billing department was willing to quote me even a ballpark figure.

In the end, we had to go with conventional, drug-based pain management, because we couldn't find out if it was going to be $300 or $6000 to pay the hospital to roll in, fill up, run, empty, and clean the tub that would help me avoid an epidural.

Thanks for that link. It's an excellent explanation.

That’s why a voucher program for Medicare, which will shift an increasing share of those inevitable costs onto the elderly themselves, can fairly be categorized as a 100 percent estate tax or death tax. People under 55 need to know that if the plan crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan were passed, most of them will never have a cent to leave to their children. It will all go to the health care industry to support the American way of dying.

If someone(s) bring(s) a laptop, we could also do another virtual gathering...?

My neighbor was pondering what term should apply to her girlfriend's mother. Since same-sex marriage is not yet legal in Colorado, I offered "mother-out-law." She got a toothy grin; evidently her relationship with the woman is, shall we say, non-optimal.

Wow. 30 years less three months to the day. Um...?

Dear Ghu. Well, I don't suppose there's any way they couldn't make a Media Spectacle out of it. At least Buckingham Palace seems to be trying to get out ahead of the media curve, this time.

(Back during the last one, when everybody was calling it a "fairy-tale wedding," I remember thinking, "don't fairy tales traditionally come with poison apples?" Gulp.)

10am Zulu. Well, actually, that might be reasonable to stay up for....

Erik Nelson @1: They create awe, in the older senses of the word.

"For a number of years audiophiles have reported improvements in performance after demagnetizing CDs and DVDs. Improved clarity and resolution of fine detail, cleaner top-end and a more developed soundstage are common enhancements. Videophiles offer similar reports of improvement related to picture fidelity, color saturation and detail."

What is it that prevents these people from understanding the most basic principle behind digital media? Why can they not grasp that what they are reporting is actually physically impossible?

Because they're Adiophools.

Next question please.

Cadbury, annoyed that some very useful valves/tubes are prized by said audiophools and hence now cost an arm and both legs,

There was a running joke in the late 1800s: "How do you tell a cave from a mine?" "A cave's a hole in a cliff. A mine's a hole with a Cornishman in the bottom of it."

I leave out fighting and drinking as potentially prejudicial; besides, I know not the Cornishmen's repute in those fields. Now, Cornish COOKERY I've heard of ... and some of it does rival the reputation of Dwarven Battle-Breads. Some of it's really tasty, too.

Apologies - can the moderators please remove that post?

... not to mention that, if the magnetism /did/ change the bits being read, the error-correction mechanism would /change them back/, or, if it couldn't, produce a replay glitch ...

Dwarves couldn't be stereotypically Welsh without singing (and I'm not counting the ones about gold or the hi-ho thing.) One of the pleasures of growing up Methodist was having Welsh church music as well as English, though it had all acquired English lyrics by that century.

Why am I even talking about this? Don't know.

HLN: I just galloped outside to chase a squirrel out of the sweetgum tree in my front yard: he was panicking the Mama Hummingbird sitting on her nest, and all the other birds were screaming like crazy. I clapped and yelled at him, and he scooted out of the tree and ran to another yard! I don't know if the squirrel would have disturbed the nest but I figure better not risk it. So far the predator birds (jays, crows) are leaving Mama and baby alone. This is the first year I've had a hummingbird nesting in the tree, and I really want her to survive, and stay.

Happy Easter, all!

I've disemvoweled it; we don't tend to delete. But I've also pointed out that you requested it, for which you get credit and honor.

People say thoughtless things. People who apologize for them are much rarer.

Elves in Tolkien are very tall, powerful physically and mentally, ageless, and aloof toward mortals with rare exceptions. Elves in Tolkien fanfic tend to be small, delicate, clingy, fearful, and sexually receptive toward mortals who are taller than they are. Tolkien fanfic is fond of Elven sex slaves, Legolas being Aragorn's pregnant concubine, and weepy love triangles.

Any idea why?

Tinkerbell was satiated, she was all petered out.

Some unsettling content may have occurred during 'shipping?

My wife and I both use 'Outlaws' for the paternal grandparents of my wife's son from a previous, non-married, relationship. It fits their eccentric personalities quite well.

Who gave us pasties* (not to be confused with pasties**). <lick> *smack* (Though probably too heavy on the lard for my tastes these days.*

--

* The kind you eat.
** The kind you wear***
*** Though I think I've heard of ones you can wear and then eat. But those are still the second kind, not the first.
**** Is it shameful to revel in my privilege and enjoy eating the crust rim, too?

::shudder:: I still quail when I hear that term. I've told this story here before,* but I, and my whole electronics class, were permanently traumatized when our instructor** threw a circuit diagram for a Wheatstone at us (with a resistor in place of the central galvometer and a battery in place of the capacitor)**** and told us to solve for the voltages of each of the reisistors. And forbade us to look it up in the book.

And gave us the whole weekend to stew over it.

--

* but why not milk it for more sympathy?
** who, it should be noted, was otherwise an excellent instructor***
*** who also happened to be going crazy at the time due to home pressures
**** I may be misremembering the particulars of the circuit; this was thirty-mumble years ago.

It's a rather unpleasantly common result of some deeply seated cultural stuff. The thought process (usually unconscious, I think) goes something like this:

1) Elves are attractive. Just look at Legolas in that movie! They're clean and refined and elegant and pretty.

2) Wait, everyone knows that being clean and elegant and pretty and refined are feminine traits. Real Men are dirty and uncouth and have unshaven strong jaws. Probably dark hair, too. All that long blond hair is girly.

3) Oh, wait, I can work with this. I'll just load the elves up on other feminine traits! Women are clingy and delicate and helpless, right? Shorter than men, too. So elves must be like that. Then it all makes sense!

This is pretty damn common in fanfic, especially fanfic written by teenager girls. Finding a male character attractive, but said male character not fitting standard Hollywood tropes for Real Manly Men, tends to result in them being written with a giant dose of either Manley or Girly standard cultural markers on top, to "correct" the ambiguity. Or, in a pairing written between two men, both at once in opposite directions! Which is how you end up with a weepy delicate Legolas being paired up with an abusive, controlling Aragon, or what not. Then everyone fits the culturally approved message of the two roles in a relationship, and can live happily ever after!

This is, of course, a simplification of a fairly complex overlapping set of cultural assumptions and fiction tropes and fanfic tropes in general. But it's pretty damn common that when women write male romantic pairings in fanfic, whoever is judged "prettier" will suddenly end up being written as delicate, shorter, weepier, and overall helpless, regardless of their original fictional representation.

Could the effect be because magnetic patterns in the media are causing misreads by the laser?

Admittedly, when I sat for my class-1 FCC license CDs had not yet been developed.....

(Qualifier: there's probably some energy level at which this stops being true. However, your CD collection does not recapitulate the symmetry-breaking phase of the Big Bang.)

No.

There are magneto-optical effects, but not remotely of that magnitude without special materials. Also, reducing read errors doesn't have the described effect. Increased color saturation?! More developed soundstage?!.

Commemorating a historically undistiguished failure on the other side of the world as your national military holiday has advantages. You can celebrate the virtues of the soldier and remember the heroism of the dead without forgetting that all this courage and sacrifice is so often completely wasted.

Magnets don't bend light, but they do affect the reflection of laser beams from surfaces, hence magneto-optical disk drives. You don't need to go all the way to unification of forces, since light and magnetism are already both electromagnetic phenomena.

You still need a whole lot more magnetism than even an audiophile could imagine being trapped in a CD.

It'd be a fascinating study, if it weren't so damn frustrating and unsatisfying. (It seems that the dynamic I'm trying to explore crashes into some very deep-seated limitations in my own imagination.) This is (one of many) reasons why I've bagged the idea of trying to write for publication for this lifetime.

It's an interesting contemplation inside my own skull, but I can't imagine anybody else being interested in reading it, nevermind my being utterly mortified at the idea of sharing it.

Interestingly, I suspect this is not unrelated to my increasing inability to get my Mary Sue to even run, as a result of getting older and farther away from her archetype.

(Unrelated: I have your two last emails sitting in my inbox. I want to give them properly thoughtful responses, but it's probably going to be until at least the middle of May before I can climb back onto the planet and give them the necessary time and attention.)

Per the bumper sticker:
"If marriage is illegal, only outlaws will have inlaws."

thomas @ 118:

Magnetic fields can affect the polarization of laser beams; but if a beam isn't polarized (typical of laser diodes, as in CD players, IIRC), there's no effect.

In any case, the effects of magnetic fields on light are analog (often vector) changes (unless we're talking about quantum effects with single photons, which we aren't by a large number of orders of magnitude), when there's one at all. Those just are not going to do anything to a digital signal but, if it's strong enough, add errors to be extracted by the signal processing circuitry in the CD player.

There are just so many reasons why this idea is pure quill BS.

It's decades on. No one alive can say
My name or what I looked like on that day.

-----
Been scanning old photos.

And I'm stealing that 'exotic' line. Hee.

*and I did not call them on it, to my shame

(Romantic fantasy vampires, I suppose, are at least dangerous.)

Yup. And then, of course, "The Christmas Show" made me burst into tears.

I vaguely remember that EC also featured a youthful Morgan Freeman.

Wasn't that Marvel's retcon for how Northstar wasn't really gay after all? He was just part Elven? (Always made me wish I could co-opt the term, like "Well, yes, I'm interested in men, but I prefer to be called "part Elven" rather than "gay." Sadly, I'm not only too straight but also much too Dwarven (beard, solid build, affinity for basements and axes, etc), so I don't think it'd really work.)

But I don't think it's accidental that "fairy" is still another word for gays, variably reclaimed. The archetype here is "Passion Outside the Rules [of our mortal world]", which was anciently associated with magic*, and thereby with various "fair folk".

* Often as an "plot device" -- Tristan & Isolde is a notable example, but the Midsummer's Night Dream turns the device to comedy and the joke, for once, on the faeries.

And David Harmon, that sounds like quite a story.

*e.g. subtitles say something like, "We'll get you, you sons of bitches!" as the character says "Tú eres cabrón." He says that a lot; possibly the only insult the actor could remember from high school Spanish.

Depends on the elf.

You're unlikely to get away with merely apologizing, no matter how profusely. I suggest appropriate gifts.

But it focused almost exclusively on the idea that with the hygiene expected in a quasi-medieval setting, just walking around among humans would be nausea-inducing for the Little Folk and that was the in-story reason they hid from humans. I think there was a Ranger with well-worn buckskin trousers it was absolutely impossible for the hobbit to stand downwind of.

Does that mean "cyanotic" = "has blue-green ears"?
"Quick, Bones, Mr. Spock is cyanotic!"

There are three different issues here that surround computer security and smartphones:

a. The manufacturer of the phone may have an interest in violating your privacy, for reasons of improving advertising revenue, improving service quality, keeping on the good side of spy agencies and/or regulators, etc.

b. The app writers may have such an interest, for similar reasons. They have less power (though I don't believe Apple does any kind of serious checking of apps for embedded malware before putting them on the app store--someone please correct me if I'm wrong), but also will suffer fewer consequences if caught.

c. The normal operations of a smartphone, along with the inevitability of bugs and security flaws in software, make a smartphone likely to be a privacy/security threat even when the OS and app vendors are behaving well.

In this case, we have the question about whether we're dealing with (a) or (c). Either one is a problem, though obviously (a) weighs a lot more heavily on whether or not I'm interested in switching over to an Android phone or something.

And hanging over all this, we face a situation analogous to the situation faced by characters in _A Fire Upon the Deep_ living in the high beyond/low transcend. More powerful computers, and trusting them more and putting them closer to the decision points, means you win in all kinds of competitions. Smartphones are a wonderful tool--they're life-changing technology for me and my wife, among many others. And yet, to get those benefits, we end up with this horrible set of security problems. My phone has email, browsing history, location information, calendar, pictures, music collection, podcasts, and e-books, all right there. It travels around in my pocket all the time; it's sitting there able to turn on the microphone and/or camera (if it gets out of the pocket) during private conversations, intimate moments with my wife, internal meetings at work, time I spend playing with my kids. When not in my pocket, it's often sitting on a countertop in the bathroom, or on a bookshelf or table, in the middle of our house.

These phones aren't all that hard to compromise--harder than generic computers, mostly, but certainly not immune to attack. App vendors or Apple could even have put in backdoors for the feds--it's not like they'd need to worry about being sued or criminally charged for such things, after all. They're so damned useful, so nice to have, and yet they offer the potential for someone to put you under a level of surveillance that the Stasi couldn't afford for any but the most serious suspected threats.

This BBC article and this NPR article describe recent information about Guantanamo inmates. The BBC story has a somewhat more skeptical tone w.r.t. the US government's actions, but the NPR story is more in depth. The information comes from leaked documents which BBC attributes to Wikileaks, but which NPR says were leaked by someone else to the NYT and shared with them. (I wonder if this is a dodge to avoid having to admit having too much to do with Wikileaks, in case they end up being officially labeled as some kind of terrorist group or something.)

The BBC article claims that the US kept an Al Jazeera cameraman in custody for several years to extract information about the news network from him. This is consistent with other stuff I've read and heard, but I have no idea if it's true, and they didn't seem to link to information that made it any clearer.

Letting this stuff happen in a dark corner, out of anyone's sight, has been a disaster all around. This disclosure is good, but what would be a lot better would be if the Obama adminstration would open up the books on the whole thing. I don't expect he will do that, but he could and should.

PS: I've been glamoured by a woman who I later concluded probably had faery (most likely selkie) blood. Still at least half my own fault, but that didn't help much when I was trying to get her out of my head.

If she left her sealskin coat in your closet and you moved it to storage, give it back!

While demagnetization will not significantly affect the media or the playback, there is no known phenomenon too insignificant to affect human observers. Just about anything can elicit a placebo-like consequence.

Jacque, truly stunning.

Would you email me privately, please? I'd be happy to figure some kind of trade that involves whatever bags you want to design (I've been doing various custom heavy-duty bags, tents, etc. for years, including a library tote for myself with expandable gussets that held everything, but I couldn't lift it) in return for something like this art work.

Long chance that things might happen this fast: I'll be in Boulder tomorrow and free after 3:00.

Amazon's $23,698,655.93 book or, the results of third-party unstable algorithmic pricing.

Carol Kimball @149: It's great to see Su again. It's been way too long. It's even been too long since I played fake Scrabble online with her.

Serge @134: That family is really quite unconscionably talented. Various of Joss's projects have Whedons infesting multiple departments. In addition to writing, most notably music comes up in the credits frequently.

The Modesto Kid @151: beautiful! And the title is delightful.

Hee, thanks! My sound-bite description when I don't have something to point at is, "think of a dream-catcher on acid." :-)

Debbie @152: that is stunning! Could you call it free-form weaving? Frameless weaving?

::preen:: Thank you! Hm. Turns out, it does actually need a frame to come out flat, though. Or a form. (I have a pair of slippers I made with this stuff.) "Loomless weaving," perhaps?

I really need to get a proper demo and diagram up; it's not even exactly weaving, in the strictest sense. Basically, I'm sewing the next warp row onto the edge of the fabric at the last—(Hm*)—warp row. You see it in basket weaving a lot. Oh, here we go. I'll have to look up the term for that technique.

Kip W @153: This thread's almost Bitzered.

Speaking of whom, I don't recall seeing him(?) around in a while. Do we know that he's okay?

--

*Just occurred to me that one could do seamless joins by branding off orthogonally to the starting plane of the fabric... hm...

I got 11 out of 11.

Oh, well.

Ghu Speaks, yes. I can imagine it. Makes my back ache just to think about it.

@158: A picture here, one which of course fails to capture the bit I found most interesting.

I'll bet she's doing something akin to Navajo rug technique, though using a horizontal loom with healds.

Debbie @157: The piece also reminds me of hardanger/openwork embroidery, but the whole thing definitely also looks woven.

I've done stuff that's definitely reminiscent of openwork embroidery. In fact, I've got some catchers in mind that have some of the same spirit. Also, lacework is not dissimilar to what I'm doing.

B. Durbin @160: That's something fabulous.

Thank you! :-)

vee @164: That's incredibly silly.

I would guess (without a clearer view of things and with fairly rudimentary weaving knowledge--I've read more than I've done), that she's doing what's called pick up weaving; it allows for more complicated patterns than just what's available using the loom's harnesses.

The technique makes some amazing work possible (and is internationally used)--you can see just a few of the sort of possible designs on the CTTC's website. (They're an organization dedicated to preserving indigenous textile techniques in their part of the Andes). And here's an amazing piece from Pitumarca, in Peru. (Note: this was all done on a backstrap loom, without the pedals and such--in fact, I don't think the discontinuous warp would be possible on a more modern loom.)

I've just tracked down and read the white paper referenced in that article, and it looks like the practice has nothing to do with reading the data. The theory seems to be that the spinning magnetic field of the disc induces electric currents in the speaker cables, which if true could affect sound quality.

It sounds as if she is brocading, a technique that uses a supplementary weft thread or threads (usually a metallic or contrasting color), and produces an embroidery-like effect.

I stopped reading George R. R. Martin because, while he's an excellent writer and his stories are of high quality, he depresses the hell out of me. I probably shouldn't be watching this but...Lena Headey! Sean Bean! Even Jason Momoa!

Sigh.

[A] No, this really didn't appear to be going anywhere at all, and

[B] I would sooner read a collaboration between Mike Resnick and Kevin J. Anderson than trudge through another thousand meandering pages of random nastiness.

Or is it worse, because fairies might exist and be doing it just to mess with us, while there's no effing way that it's because of magnets?

Maybe that number is one too many.

10 out of 11 on the news quiz (I thought the government spent more on debt interest than on Medicare) although one or two of the ones I got right were educated guesses.

Xopher: You're supposed to think of Ned Stark as at least "harsh but fair". And do you hate his wife Catelyn? She's going to be a pretty major character.

But yeah, a lot of the story is going to involve some pretty awful people doing much better than in a just world they would. If that's going to be a big problem, you might do better not to watch.

David, yeah, like that slimy little Prince. I'd like to yrnir uvz oyvaq, qrns, naq pevccyrq ba uvf zbgure'f qbbefgrc naq yrg URE qrpvqr gb xvyy uvz be pner sbe uvz. (Don't ROT13 if you're squeamish or don't want to see my vicious side.)

Why is it that actors I like wind up playing characters I hate? Lena Headey was soooooo good as Sarah Connor. She's playing the Queen just as well, but it's a Queen who deserves to end her life on a spike in the sun.

On Cersei - jubn jung'f hc jvgu gur qrnq onol fgbel? "Ybbxrq whfg yvxr uvf sngure?" Zrguvaxf gung vs gung onol rkvfgrq, vg jnf abg na vyyarff gung xvyyrq uvz. Fubj-Prefrv vf sne zber pbyq naq pbagebyyrq guna va gur obbx: fur'f na vpr dhrra, juvpu vf V srry sne yrff vagrerfgvat naq zber pyvpurq guna obbx-Prefrv'f jvyqsver crefbanyvgl.

Tyrion's just lovely though.

Yes, I've seen one-man-must-weep-and-cling on my ventures into slash fiction, down to making the weepy one much shorter and slighter than he is in canon. It happens in het fanfic and fanart too. One of my old favorite couples is exactly the same height at the eyebrows--this is anime, so there is hair to consider--but fanart that is otherwise well done usually shows her as a little slip of a thing in his burly embrace.

Back to LOTR fanfic: Assumptions about gender roles explain some weird stuff going on outside the Legolass genre as well. Imagine Arwen running away from grandma Galadriel, who just can't understand why she won't sit and sew a seam in ladylike fashion, you'll get your dresses dirty, darling! In this day and age (you young 'uns get off my lawn), five minutes would turn up a complete canon background for Galadriel. But so many fanfic writers don't bother to look. Female grandparents are ALWAYS overprotective and timid, full stop.

The only bit I disagree with is your word total. Ned Stark does terrible things because of his honour and duty. Tyrion is an asshole because the world treats him badly. And of course "Gur guvatf V qb sbe ybir".

They all have the possibility of redemption. Most of them have the capacity to be monsters. Which will it be? Tune in next week to find out!

heresiarch @188 - Cersei appears differently as the books go on. Vavgvnyyl fur frrzf yvxr n pbyq, fzneg, ehguyrff cybggre. Jura jr raq hc va ure urnq vg gheaf bhg fur'f vzchyfvir, fubegfvtugrq, qevira ol cnffvba. Cnegyl guvf vf gur pbagenfg orgjrra gur snpr fur fubjf gb gur jbeyq naq ure vagreany fgngr, naq cnegyl vg'f ure fgrccvat bhg sebz oruvaq Eboreg (naq nyy gur bgure zra va ure yvsr).

Tyrion is too good looking, but then again television is all about putting good looking people up on screen.

If mysterious strangers start talking to you listen carefully. Any instructions should be followed to the letter.

Ask around to see if anyone has encountered this problem before. Try to determine if they have a favourite place/trinket/food/drink/activity/song or if anyone knows their name.

Make sure to leave behind everything you know in case this turns out to be something someone else has to solve.

Am not watching GoT, nor have I read it, having been warned that it is "horribly depressing". Yesterday was the anniversary of my friends' murder (thanks, newspapers etc. for being sure that didn't slip by me), so my serotonin level is low enough as it is.

I can't say for the TV series, but in the books, yes.

There are very different kinds of "act badly" (cruel, self-centered, crazy, dutiful) but it's very like the 1400-1650 European history that I know well--there aren't really any good guys in power.

[0] The review/overview at this link is utterly useless -- either of the other two gives a much better flavour.

Ah, that explains it. I made the same mistake as you, and I thought the breakdown was identifying a wrong answer, not providing me with the correct answer (and I also slid by on a couple of educated guesses).

No -- there are three good characters, all of whom have the deck stacked against them:

Jon Snow, Arya, and Bran

The main thing that has kept me reading is to find out what happens to them. That, and cheering every time a character I despise gets what they deserve...

Love, C.

I lost interest in the series with the endless volume of 4, in which people run around madly all over the place, but nothing happens to advance anything. Plus, that thing of at least 3 more volumes to come after that? Gigantic, humongous, endless, vast poundage of three more volumes after that? Series fatigue. That we were still where we were at the end of 4, this reader didn't care anymore about Winter, particularly as we have our own Winter of Climate Changes -- cultural, economic, political and environmental, upon us.

Love, c.

In related news, the woman said that she had just run out of printer ink. She was not pleased.

heresiarch, I agree with you about the Queen's qrnq onol. V guvax fur xvyyrq uvz jura fur ernyvmrq ur jnf gur Xvat'f, naq gung gur Cevapr'f sngure vf nyfb uvf hapyr. Gur cerggl bar, abg gur fzneg bar. These are guesses, since I haven't read the books.

David, you said But yeah, a lot of the story is going to involve some pretty awful people doing much better than in a just world they would. If that's going to be a big problem, you might do better not to watch.

I've been thinking about that. If I want to see awful people doing well because the world sucks, I can turn on the news. And while the good guys may triumph ultimately, it seems like it will take too long for me (right now, in my current state of mental and physical health).

So I think I'd better not. Maybe in a couple years, when I'm healthy, employed, and in a secure long-term relationship with the man of my dreams, I'll rent it.

She's a total inversion of all the noble behaviour she claims to hold dear. Ptui!

As I've lost interest in the book series, and I already know what happens up to what is written, the television series seems kind of, well, pointless.

Also, on the screen the world looks so ashy and dull, not the vivid color palette I saw in my mind's eye while reading.

Love, c.

As for that pawky princeling and his murderous, incestuous family -- "someday my prince will come" indeed -- the little twit can't recognize a monster even when she's sitting next to it.

Both Sansa and Catelyn are real prizes...

Game of Thrones Summary:

The Hufflepuffs somehow managed to overthrow the Slytherin king and send his family into exile. But, because, like all Hufflepuffs, they are useless they want Gryffindor's best fighter to help them defend the kingdom.

At the same time the Slytherin prince in exile wants his kingdom back, so he's whoring out his sister to Death Eaters in exchange for the use of their sex crazed muggle army.

Meanwhile, because of adultery, there is some chance that the Hufflepuff king's children may really be Ravenclaws, and the Ravenclaw who is cuckolding the king is willing to kill anyone to keep it a secret.

Episode Two:

1. The Slytherin princess likes it on top and has strong lesbian tendencies that the writers are sure to exploit in future episodes.

2. The Hufflepuff King continues to prove he's a Hufflepuff by his sheer uselessness.

3. Meanwhile his sons continue to prove that they are really Ravenclaws that the Sorting Hat was probably fairly tempted to put in Slytherin. I suspect some sort of affirmative action thing that year at Hogwarts.

4. The mudblood is going to become some sort of warrior/priest. He wants to know about his mother but nobody has the heart to tell him she was a muggle.

5. Poor Harry is going to be a cripple. Hopefully he'll keep his mouth shut about the Hufflepuff queen really being a slutty Ravenclaw, but I doubt it.

6. The kingdom's entire defense strategy is based on praying that their enemies never figure out how to make boats. This is why the Gryffindor warrior should have become king back in the day instead of the Hufflepuff King.

7. I like Ginny Weasley's new sword.

8. Too bad her sister has the hots for the Ravenclaw Malfoy.

9. We didn't get to see much of the Slytherin Malfoy. My guess is that in addition to being willing to whore out his sister, he's probably brought along plans about how to make boats. We did learn that he's sort of a libertarian who thinks people should be able to defend their homes from poachers using deadly force if needed.

10. This country's high priesthood is filled with sex offenders. It's too close to Easter to make the obvious joke.

Love, C.

This is the person, folks, who went to a MileHiCon masquerade in a gold bikini and gentian violet dog medicine.

Knowing in advance that it would take two weeks to come off. "It was real easy to get a seat on the cross-town bus for a while there."

One of my all-time favorite people.

That photo captures her personality perfectly.

Catelyn should know better. She is old enough to see what the consequences of her actions could lead up to. I wanted to like her when I read the books, but her treatment of Jon was so ridiculous that I couldn't quite get over it. And frankly, she's about 50% responsible for raising her daughter to be a useless pawn - and Cat herself knows all about the reality of it.

I'd have to say that Xopher's decision to give the series a pass is a good one though. At least with the books I could keep reading and see some of the consequences of the actions. The payoff for some of the bad/good behavior seems like it's going to take a looooong time if it's only coming once a week.

It might make good television, though, and I'll probably check it out when it comes to Netflix.

Catelyn's treatment of Jon was what turned me against her. You'd think she'd be able to figure out who Jon's real parents are...

*Blame the governess?

This is also one of the reasons I was not much interested in watching the new Tron movie. In the original movie, the main character is an average guy. In the bus-stop ads and billboards for the new movie we get a bunch that have a strong action woman, and one where strong action woman is suddenly leaning up submissively against big, tall, manly man hero guy. I'm not even going to ask why strong action woman's bodysuit is slit to show skin at the shoulders, since I think she's supposed to be a computer program and all.

And on a different topic, amusing product reviews of a rather overpriced HDMI cable.

Ah, your use of the plural...I think I just did, too. My guess is only a guess, but it's a spoiler if it's right, so I'll ROT13 it: uvf zbgure vf gur jbzna gur Xvat ybirq naq jub gur gne tbelf xvyyrq, naq uvf sngure vf gur Xvat: ur'f gur evtugshy urve gb gur guebar, zbq uvf orvat n onfgneq naq jungrire.

Guvf vf zl thrff, abg pnaaba, ohg Wba'f zbgure vf Ylnaan Fgnex, Arq'f fvfgre naq gur sngure vf gur Eunrtne Gnetnelra.

I am sure the King in Game of Thrones has bastards...but I don't think you'll find any in Stark's domain.

Unbind the lock of time

A couple open threads ago, we were talking photography. I have a hard time selling jewelry online, because no, really, I can't take pictures of it. A friend and photographer got these for me. I really, really need to make some time to figure out the new camera and update my website before the show.

*HLN: Woman ignores grandmother's terminal aggressive cancer by loosing herself in crafts and urban fantasy. This is good, as she has her first local show in two years in three weeks, hopefully not to be preempted by funeral.

That's pretty freakin' cute.

KeithS @218: I would say that her costume is the most authentic thing, since she's a female computer game character.

Mmm, yes, but fb sne gurl'ir erzbirq rira gur uvagf bs jvyqarff gung fur rkuvovgrq rneyl va gur obbx. Va gur obbx, fur tbnqf Eboreg vagb xvyyvat Ynql ol vafhygvat uvf znaubbq, naq fur jnf boivbhfyl bhg sbe oybbq naq iratrnapr ntnvafg ure fba'f nggnpxref (jungrire gur ernyvgl). Va gur fubj, fur frrzf nyzbfg pyvavpny jura fur'f qvfphffvat vg. Fur nyfb tbnqf Eboreg vagb fgevxvat ure snveyl rneyl ba, naq tybngf nobhg znxvat uvz ybfr pbageby--vg'f uneq gb vzntvar fubj-Prefrv qbvat gung.

Xopher @ 204: "The older sister, whatever her name is, is a scumbag though. She should have spoken up against the Prince's lies."

Yes, but something the show doesn't communicate as well as the book is how utterly brainwashed Sansa is by Disney-esque princess stories--it's literally unimaginable for her that a prince NOT be noble and kind and good. Her arc is having that fantasy beaten out of her.

Almost all of the characters make massive mistakes at some point or another. Game of Thrones, to a fair extent, is about what happens after.

nerdycellist @ 214: "I wanted to like her when I read the books, but her treatment of Jon was so ridiculous that I couldn't quite get over it."

I feel she's been less sympathetic in the show than she was in the book. It's that seen-from-her-own-eyes effect: from her perspective, Jon's existence is a constant reminder that Ned betrayed her, and that he keeps Jon around and treats him as a son a constant insult. It's hard to communicate that without an internal monologue.

David Goldfarb @ 222: I'm pretty sure it was added for the show.

...mother-in-lieu?

--Dave

--Dave

No, No, No!

Serge asked for hobbit/dwarf fanfic. That OMWH song is ELF/dwarf fanfic.

A COMPLETELY different thing. :-)

book series upon which the television series is based is not finished

I really don't see the problem. There are already four books released and the fifth comes out in July.

If HBO does one book a season, that means they already have enough material to last through the 2015 season. They'll worry about getting more material in a few years. IF the show is still going and IF Martin hasn't already finished more novels in the series.

Inavgl pna svaq frperg cnffntrf va nyzbfg nal ybpngvba, yrnqvat gb nyzbfg nal bgure ybpngvba veeryrinag bs qvfgnapr. Gurl nyy ybbx pbzcyrgryl "angheny", be ng yrnfg nf vs gurl'ir orra gurer sbe ntrf, ohg vg'f cbffvoyr fur'f perngvat gurz ba gur syl - vg'f qryvorengryl yrsg hapyrne jung'f fur qbvat.

As to photography, the search string "photographing sculpture" turns up some good tips.

Don't know how my hallucination capture photos measure up (comments from photographers here who actually know what they're doing (unlike myself) deeply appreciated) but they're as good as they are (as not bad as they aren't?) as a result of two main tips: non-distracting background, and noticeable shadows.

Why yes. My problem is not your problem, but that doesn't change that I do have a problem with it! :) It was interesting to learn I did have a problem with it because I didn't have one -- until I did.

It's part of the same problem that has made me consistently lose interest in fantasy series with too long, too many volumes for quite some time now. Instead of a rhythmic fictional progression, to me they seem to become plodly and thudly and I just -- quit, for loss of interest. It's like guests who way overstay their time. You want to get on with your life, go to bed, walk the cat, but they just stay and stay and stay.

Love, C.

No idea if this is helpful to anybody.

I use my heavy-duty wire cutters and clip the backs to be flush, then use my file to take the edges off where I trimmed. This is the one reason there are safety glasses on my worktable, because little metal flying bits are not good (It's all fun and games until someone looses an eye). I tend to leave some of the cog/shaft on the front so that it looks right, while trimming back most of the "this will draw blood when I hug you" bits.

I have lots of watch faces coming to me in the next couple of days. I hope to actually *use* that etsy account again.

To be fair, last month I parsed the license plate PUG PRSN to mean "Pug Prison". I thought I was better at re-emvowelling than that.

I do not. I don't want one, I don't need one, and I kind of think they're silly.

After all, territorially marking your vehicle is what bumper stickers are for.

Decoding vanity plates is a routine game for auto passengers.

Tom, #252: It's a white VW Rabbit, of course!

An "N" would work too, but wouldn't be as snicker-worthy. Of course, one could just draw them on with a marker, I suppose, but that's not as satisfying to my est'etical sensibilities.

WRT the "Civil War was not a tragedy" Sidelight, I wonder what would have happened if Appomattox Day had been made a national holiday at the end of the war, the way we did later for Veterans' Day. Would it have made any difference in the number of people who are still fighting that damn war 150 years later?

We were very close once. It's hard for me to imagine a world that doesn't have her in it. [Insert many rude words here.]

Have I mentioned that I totally ♥ the "Game of Thrones" theme music? I don't think it's available for purchase on iTunes, but if it were I'd buy it in a second.

That, and some test shots. Jewelry almost always looks better in situ.

So you might find what you're looking for on The Drop, or not. Often when a soundtrack uses Eno's music, it's not exclusive, but taken from one of his albums. Apollo is his original soundtrack for For All Mankind, though, and is sublime (as is the film).

Great series. Really makes me glad I didn't leap into buying a house when I moved up here.

When I buy a car at the end of the year I am considering vanity plates, but just so I can remember my license number easily. I'll try and get something nerdy, unambiguous and not related to any bodily organs.

Similarly, shooting the object near a big blank white-painted wall in a brightly-sunlit room (but not directly in a puddle of sun) will help spread the photons around pleasingly. Good for photographing faces, too -- cuddle up near the wall (though not near enough to be in the picture, unless that's what you're going for) and it acts like a bounce umbrella.

Hatcher? Garr?

There are many vanity plates in town, mostly black-and-gold with pro-Hawkeye slogans. It's a little creepy, but some are funny.

The main thing to watch out for is keeping the colour temperature of your lighting consistent. Modern fluorescent bulbs can vary as much as the difference between daylight and old-fashioned tungsten bulbs.

This, incidentally. is why you can get blue-tinted tungsten bulbs for "crafting" (that's the word I see in the adverts). It corrects the redness of the hot filament to match, more-or-less, daylight.

Modern digital cameras can do better correction for fluorescent lighting than film ever could. And modern fluorescent bulbs are better than the earlier lighting (which tended to look green on film). But what looks good to our eyes can still be recorded differently by the camera.

If you want to get technical...

I need the name of a neighbourhood in Chicago, not too far from downtown, that would have been decidedly working-class in 1945.

As for Sansa, let's not forget that Joffrey is her future husband and future king. Obviously she ought to tell the truth. But if it's framed as choosing who to get in trouble between her aggravating younger sister and her handsome prince on their first date her choice becomes clear...

(Sansa is the head cheerleader, Joffrey is the star quarterback. Of course she gets him out of trouble!)

Oh, crap. Well, now maybe I have to watch it. ::sigh:: The reviews here are not promising. Well, at least I can defer the decision until it shows up on Netflix.

Actually, useful to me, as I have other sculptures I want to put up on my website. So: thank you!

#156 et seq.: Kesi "carved silk" tapestry weave, probably? I was just there at the same museum last fall, though most of my pix didn't come out.

Wow, way to make me like them even less. At least in the real world we can hope that they wrap a convertible around a tree and put themselves out of our misery. And remember their lies got the butcher's boy killed. Even if they weren't otherwise scumbags, that would do it.

To be fair, she's probably saving her actual life by lying, since she's just seen evidence that the Prince is willing to kill just to avoid embarrassment. He, on the other hand, needs to die as soon as the Lords of Karma can arrange it...

...but of course the plot requires that he live. Yeah, not watching this series. Way good, but too icky for me.

Joffrey, however, is irredeemable. Lbh pna sybng nebhaq gur jro ybbxvat sbe obbx fcbvyref vs lbh'er vagrerfgrq va gur qrrcyl fngvfslvat gnyr bs uvf qrzvfr. Be whfg gb svaq nyy gur tvsf crbcyr unir znqr bs Glevba fynccvat Wbsserl va gur frpbaq rcvfbqr. V nyfb sbhaq gubfr pngunegvp.

As I said earlier, watching some of these folks reap what they've sewn is one of my satisfactions with the series. That, and rooting for my favorite characters, of which there are too few.

Note -- there were other characters I was prepared to pull for until they proved to be not quite what I'd expected...but I am looking forward to the arrival of Winter.

I'm presuming you mean a residential neighborhood. What ethnic background do you want? Nowadays it's more mixed (which is hilarious to say, because we're still in the top-ten most segregated cities in the US), but certainly in 1945, ethnicities and races tended to very solidly clump, within their class/monetary clumps.

Also, how far is 'not too far'?

Explanation: I have been in Chicago only once. The reference is more-or-less a throwaway remark, and unimportant, but I want to get it right, and I can find no demographic map of Chicago that answers the question.

Worksafe, but may very well make you cry.

Irredeemable, maybe, but not inexplicable. (Not that you said otherwise: I'm just musing.) When you learn about the family situation he was raised in, it's very easy to understand why he came out the way he did. That's one of the things I like about ASOIAF: there are very few randomly evil people. Almost everyone is bad in specific ways for specific reasons--even the ones we're sympathetic with.

Stay tuned.

That said, it's worth it for those who have the lenses to pull it off. Getting the level of close up in those photos takes a dedicated macro lens/camera with a very good macro function.

So it's an inexpensive add-on to some non-trivial (if not actually bank-breaking) equipment.

Macro/close up work is one of the few areas in which equipment really does make a difference. That said, if you have a Nikon, (I am not sure about Canon, they have a different philosophy about lens compatibility), one can get extension tubes/macro converters and convert a normal lens to a much shorter one. That can be as little as 50 bucks.

Jacque: I'd look at taking larger shots, so the entire context of the piece is visible, then do detail work. more sidelight might help but the first thing I would do is get the subject further from the wall, so the shadow isn't visible. That's where bouncing/filtering the light helps.

Also remember the important distance is the light/subject distance, not the subject camera distance.

A long extension does affect the exposure.

An alternative is to mount an extra magnifying lens on the front of the camera lens, trivial when there is a filter mount.

For close-up photography, tripods and long exposures are a very common combination. In the old days, photographers used a cable release so that they didn't nudge the camera when they were using a tripod. These days, use the self-timer, intended to let you dash around to get into the camera's view. It gives time for the vibrations to die down.

Also, Persephone, how bright are the lightbulbs in your lamps? I'd go as bright as you can -- 100W bulbs would not be overkill, if you have lamps that can handle them.

You can also use a light tent outside in bright sunlight, to take advantage of the brightness without getting the harsh shadows. This is probably the cheapest way to do it!

This. (Though "Bonzai!" expresses the sentiment nicely as well. And I've, well, kind of fallen in love with the words "tenacious craziness" since Kathryn posted them here.)

One could write and produce a movie in which all the dialog was gibberish, nonsense syllables, but with the actors being instructed as to the meaning of the lines, and count on the camerawork, soundtrack, tones of voice, etc. to communicate the movie's story. Sort of asemic writing for the big screen... Anyone know of such a production?

Though I have not seen it myself, I understand that Caveman, starring Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid, and Shelley Long, fits this description.

I know of no movie that has done this (although there may well be at least one), however the various versions of the computer game The Sims do this with their Simlish language. I think they've even gone so far as to have some pop groups record their hits as Simlish.

Sometimes living in Boulder (and working on the Mall) is very cool.

Although I don't have pictures, you can also make a reasonably sized collapsable light tent using a walker, a board across the side rails, a white/light sheet, and the exceedingly common clip-on work lights (used both to provide light and hold the sheet on.

If this is the film I'm thinking of:

I saw this with my sisters, mother, and some friends when it first came out. The theater passed out cards with a simple glossary of the cave peoples' language! I recall that the sheet had a picture of the hero battling a pterodactyl.

Re light: Lots is better, esp. for smaller/less discriminating cameras. Photography is all about controlling the light. I have a cable release. the self-timer is able to do that, but really, if you have an SLR, the dampers, and the shortness of most exposures is going to be enough to cover what little "mirror slap" is running about.

If you don't have an SLR, then it's not an issue at all.

They are hot, for one, and a fair bit of light is required. The human eye is a lot more sensitive than the camera, so it takes a fair bit more light than we tend to think to get a reasonably lit object, and reasonable short shutter speed.

If you need Depth of Field, the requirements for light go way up. I've got more than a few photos which took 8-30 seconds to collect the needed light, and that was outdoors, with the sun above the horizon.

This Washington Times article discusses above-ground private companies that develop malware for sale to governments, specifically (in this case) a company that appears to have sold some targeted malware to the Egyptian security services.

This same industry is surely selling our government tools to use on us--legally, in full view. They are also surely selling tools to private companies to use on us, or at least on annoying people who cause them trouble, as with the plan exposed in the HB Gary emails.

This is one more area where the global war on terror is coming home to be used on Americans. (Indeed, the push for more surveillance powers long predates 9/11.)

Things that turn up on flickr

Number 23, Alice Marie Martin, is my mother. She missed the cut by some small number, and the STS increased the number of winners by enough, the next year, that's she'd have made the cut.

Which, while it sucks for her, I'd probably not be here if she'd won, so...

Cool! Thanks for all the leads -- the Stoppard piece in particular sounds like just what I'm looking for.

Banzai

Oops, right, of course.

Flying car!

Not entirely what you're looking for, but have you ever watched any silent movie? Admittedly they usually have music and captions.

Also I'll repeat One Million Years BC. For a while I have tried to get friends together to watch a double bill of this film and 10,000 BC. Clearly one fim should be 100 times better (or longer) than the other, but which way round?

http://www.dovelewis.org/pdf/news-releases/april_30_blood_donors_superheroes.pdf

Dang. My dog will have donated 36 units by the time she retires in June, but she'll still not have beaten the record.

I'm reading a book about the growth of slums right now. At this rate, I'm thinking Neuromancer takes place in about 2047.

Apparently there is a short story about a movie theater that plays movies that were never made. I've been tasked with finding it but I never read it. Anyone know what that might be?

I was also going to list some caveman movies, but I see others have already done so. For a while, lack of language was as much a requirement of the genre as the dinosaur fight, the two clans (one blonde and one brunette), and the big volcanic eruption at the end.

Some recent cavemen films are instead having the cavemen speak modern English, often in the weird combination of American idioms with British accents. I think this is just part of a general trend, though, which is affecting all period costume pieces. After all, when you think Italian Renaissance or French age of chivalry or Greek myth, the first thing that comes to mind is "yo, dude" in BBC Received Pronunciation, right?

[to] Kathryn from Sunnyvale @289, there's the 3 Mustaphas 3 slogan: "Forward in all directions!"

In "Texas Across the River", the cavalry officer raises his gauntleted hand and shouts "H'rohr HAHR", which means, gallop forward, wheel right, wheel left, full stop, etc.

Carol Kimball @330: My family loved that line, though we pronounced it a little differently (perhaps the effect of hearing it through a three-inch TV speaker, and black & white at that). I was thinking about that movie the other day; the scene where Dean Martin tells Joey Bishop (playing a Native American) to suck the rattlesnake poison out of somebody's bite. "Yechh." says Bishop. "...Could get very sick."

More often, we used gibberish in other games, like Die (the traditional end game.) Each person, selected through stuttering on a story, was selected to die by some suggestion. I actually got applauded once in one of those games for appropriate use of a dimmer switch*.

I highly recommend improv training when it's done right (IOW, not for the funny but for the structure.) Best life skills course I've ever had, even though it wasn't intended to be.

*It's immensely frustrating to be in charge of the lights and to realize that all of the spots are packed away and you have two dimmer switches—audience and stage. I'd been looking for a chance to do something cool all evening and we finally got to Die... and somebody got Death By Nuclear Device.

Sometimes timing is everything. :)

A friend of mine is an MFA scriptwriting student at whichever Ohio it is in Athens. They write weekly plays. Her suggestion for one week's theme was that it be entirely gibberish or otherwise unintelligible language-- you can have Spanish or Chinese or whatever, but it can't be comprehensible either.

I also wrote a story once that featured cows. All the dialogue was 'moo'.

I second Diatryma's request for elaboration. That sounds both amusing and fascinating.

Diatryma @ 335:

Now I'm thinking of the Diablo 2 Secret Cow Level. Imagine herds of homicidal, Gary-Larsonesque cows with halberds, all saying "moo", often in a deadpan voice.

Ken @ 329 and Magenta Griffith @ 336:

I only know of Incubus by reputation and having read a summary. Would you say it's a good bad movie, or a bad bad movie?

The last few paragraphs make clear the movie theater was either demolished, or burned down - yet our protagonist is in the theater, contentedly watching yet another movie.

Title and author of this story I have yet to recall.

TNH @327 and subsequent: I think I have read this story too, but I also recall similar ones using a bookstore and a video rental store (the latter was an alternate-universe thing) and I may be confusing it. Not that it's any help for you since I'm lousy at remembering titles and authors.

I have read the video store alternate-universe one. That was in either Asimov's or F&SF, probably Asimov's, between August 2006 and 2009. Unless my memory of reading it in the Little Slanty Apartment is totally off, which it may be.

Opera's weird enough, being in foreign languages, but when it's one that nobody knows, it's practically a surreal experience. And yet I can still remember the words for the peasant's dance twenty-five years later, and at the time, all the emotional nuances got conveyed just fine.

I'm amused to find this being discussed here, since until recently, googling 'Making Light' would - for me at least - bring up instructions for making an inexpensive light tent. I feel this phenomenon deserves a name...

Xopher @ 301: I'm afraid that after trying - and failing - to read And Chaos Died I gave up on Russ entirely. (I was young; there were so many books to read.) Clearly a mistake, which I'll need to start rectifying. (But a pity I didn't do so when the royalties would have made a difference to her).

I don't know if this will quite work for kids. But it works for me.

So that made me smile.

May they be very happy together. William and Kate, I mean.

Irene Gallo's asked for a story identification:
Apparently there is a short story about a movie theater that plays movies that were never made. I've been tasked with finding it but I never read it. Anyone know what that might be?
Any ideas? I know the theme, but not the specific story.

Unfortunately, it is a story that was never written, in a collction that was never published, by authors that never existed.

The movie theater story sounds Bradburyish, doesn't it?

jnh: Win.

Attention Baltimoreans!

Ned Sublette + Madison Smartt Bell, Sunday night (May Day! May Day!) at 7 pm, Cyclops Books + Music, 30 West North Ave. at Maryland (next to
Windup Space and catty-corner from Joe2.)

I will be reading from "The Year Before the Flood" and singing songs from the forthcoming album "Kiss You Down South."

Love, C.

Side-thought: I wonder of anyone's tried to dream-journey to Lucien's library?

I've never been to Europe in early June (all my last visits have included 5pm sunsets).

Last time we were there, we drove everywhere.

Why?

Spoilers, sweetie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9POYDoHXUX0

I wouldn't mind hearing an entire conversation, or even an entire film, written in Yoko Cant.

Especially if it were a new episode of "Cowboy Bebop"....

This song is only part in Kanno's made-up language, but is also wonderful.

I think the alternate-universe video rental store was by Connie Willis (or possibly Nancy Kress) but I haven't been able to find where I read it.

In similar wise, I am the fifth of four brothers. Between my brother Dennis and myself was another pregnancy, who would have been named Douglas if there hadn't been a miscarriage at six months.

After my own birth, my parents decided having four children was enough, and Dad got a vasectomy. So if Douglas had lived, that vasectomy would have taken place earlier, and -I- wouldn't have been born.

(I heard about Douglas as a small kid, probably about six years old. One thing my other said was, "I carried him for six months." My little-kid mind took this sentence and ran for the goalposts in a completely different stadium. For years, I had the firm belief that the state of Ohio had some bizarre law that mothers of dead babies had to carry the bodies around in jars of formaldehyde for six months afterward.)

I wish I could remember some of the examples that go the other way. They were movies I wanted to see!

Ah. Found it. It's Tim Pratt's "Impossible Dreams". It was in Asimov's July 2006, but I read it in his collection "Hart and Boot and Other Stories".

Re-reading it, I can see why it reminded me of Connie Willis. I had assumed it was an old story that I'd read while packing up books to move to NZ.

I don't think this is the one TNH was looking for, though.

Now I know what I was edging towards - in The Great Dictator Chaplin uses some relevant German, some irrelevant German, some (I think) Yiddish, and the odd piece of german-sounding nonsense to parody Hitler in some scenes. Again not quite what you're asking for. Sorry.

Incidentally, I have found that when I remember improv scenes, it's sometimes difficult to remember that it's done with no props and no costumes. Your memory tends to fill in those details, like the notebook a police officer holds, or a clown's red nose.

Oh! Right -- I guess scat is similar to what I'm thinking about. That brings in lots of candidates. Thanks for the info about Sigur Ros and Magma; I like Christian Vander's statement that he invented Kobaïan because "French was just not expressive enough" to communicate his meanings.

Anyone in the intersection of those three sets might be interested in the Cardiacs tribute/benefit show I'm playing in next Sunday (May 8).

I'm not enough of an expert to talk about the difference in quality of light between old fluorescents, new fluorescents, incandescents, and daylight- and how that will affect direct vision vs. film vs. electronics- but there is a difference and I hope someone else can explain it.

Those issues are aggravated by the point that most fluorescent lights have dubious spectra -- instead of a continuous range of frequencies like natural light or incandescents, their light is concentrated at particular wavelengths, and the builders of the lights have a limited choice of which wavelengths. (The early fluorescent lights didn't even suit human vision, and their improvement has been slow.) Getting those lights to give the same colors to both human and camera vision can be a trial of patience!

How different it might have been for him. Instead, he was a local music teacher, church organist, dinner theater pianist, and live accompanist to the annual Larimer County Rodeo, among other things, supporting a family on what a musician could earn (and what a hunter could pack to the truck), and beloved in his community in a sort of George Bailey way. I'm glad he chose as he did, but I still have to think: man! Casadesus!

In particular, even good fluorescent lights tend to have sharp peaks in purple and green, and then a smoother spectrum in yellow-orange-red. If you're looking at colors in the green to purple half of the spectrum, there may be very little light at some frequencies.
'White' LEDs are better, but they still have a dip between green and blue, and a high peak in blue.

For some purposes you just can't beat light-emitting resistors.

God.

DAMN.

wow.

Say more about this, please. In particular, say more about the structure part, with examples, if you can.

Best life skills course I've ever had, even though it wasn't intended to be.

Hear hear! One of the three most useful (set of classes) I had in high school* was my acting and theatre classes. Actually set me on my journey to becoming a functional human being, and laid a lot of the groundwork for my later NLP training, which has been invaluable in figuring out how to function in society.

--

* The other two being typing** and Latin.
** Though that was technically junior high.

But it's not about Omelas.

I know! Isn't it just...well...Sorkin?

Just about everyone who comes over for movies has to watch the first two episodes.

I credit auditioning for the musical in high school with quite a lot. Not because the musical was life-changing, but because after it was done, the director said I should look into speech team and that was that: speech team. It makes such a huge difference. I can present like nobody's business, at least compared to most of my peers. Speech class should be required (along with so many others that aren't-- we need another entire school day for all the things we want kids to learn) at least once in junior high or high school.

cng ng cngevpxpbaabef qbg pbz

Osama bin Laden shot and killed, body in American custody.

Please, please, please, let this be used as an excuse to wrap up our involvement Afghanistan, quickly.

To give an example, one of the things that we were taught is never to block a suggestion or say "no" to a question. No matter how crazy the idea is, you run with it, because shutting someone down is bad for morale AND for the scene. One example of a teaching game is "Yes, And" where one player says "Yes, and..." to every idea the other person suggests, where "and..." is an expansion of the idea.

Another teaching thing is to learn that you have to stay within the confines of the game and not break the rules just for the sake of being funny, because that's degrading in the long run.

I think part of the reason I've seen the contrast so much is that there was one time when our improv group invited another school over for a special show, and in the first game, they broke the cardinal rules left and right. And that scene felt a little mean. Some people find that funny, but it's a lot more fun, IMO, if everybody's supporting one another and building funny scenes together. And if one person is grandstanding at the expense of another, that other person isn't going to find it quite so fun anymore. And that's how you end up with no talent pool.

And when you spent the time to cultivate the "lesser" talents, they might become more confident. And confidence can lead to greater talents.

Incidentally, I was never cast in a single show in three and a half years. I'm just not quite as funny as some of the other people. But I had a GOOD time in practices. (We did a soap opera one year to start off practices. Kept it going for several months.)

In addition to used copies of three movies I've been looking for, I found a copy of John M. Ford's How Much For Just the Planet?, which I'd been looking for for years.

And, ahem, um, found a great jacket by the dumpsters. Insulated hood. Detachable liner. Zippered pockets. In great shape. After a wash in color safe bleach it spent the day drying in the sunlight.

Once, while on a dungeon campaign playing a Chaotic Good half-orc cleric, my character ran into battle screaming, "Whatever!"

Reporters are speculating that celebrations may start up in other U.S. cities. No hard news of this yet.

DC is turning into a real flash crowd, spilling across Pennsylvania Avenue.

C-SPAN 1 has jacked into the Al-Jazeera English feed.
(Oops, that has ended, for now.)

Apparently President Obama's announcement interrupted Donald Trump's show Celebrity Apprentice.

I strongly suspect that Sorkin writes an awful lot of his dialog by jotting down those arguments one has in one's head in the course of making a decision or choosing a position, and then just assigning sides to his characters.

But that's a lot like saying that Mozart just writes music by stringing together some pretty notes.

Yeah, it's a little ghoulish to celebrate the death of someone. OTOH, this is a war (or something) that doesn't actually have nice clean victories other than when someone's captured or killed. Most of the time, it's more like "well, they seem to be a lot less effective since we made it harder for them to get donations and killed a couple of their key organizers, but it's hard to be sure that's not a statistical blip."

I hope we can use this as an event that lets us wrap up the military side of this war, which we can't really afford, and which is arguably doing as much harm as good at this point. With US troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ultimately, Libya and Yemen, other than maybe a few special forces types and FBI liasons to foreign police forces to deal with continuing to track terrorists that threaten the US, it seems to me that we'll be safer from terrorist threat, while also being less likely to help terrorists recruit from people who don't like us occupying their soil and killing their fellow citizens.

The governor of Illinois requested that the Army Corps of Engineers open the levees on the Mississippi in southern Misouri, below Birds Point, where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi, in hopes of relieving the pressure on the levees on the Ohio (they have at least one enormous sand boil, with others forming). The state of Missouri, not anxious to see over 100K acres of good farmland flooded, went to court to stop this; the Eighth District Court of Appeals told them to shut up and cope on Sunday; Missouri has appealed to the Supreme Court. Missouri politicians have, as usual, covered themselves with tackiness in the matter. (Not because they are trying to protect the state's economic interests, but because of the way they are conducting themselves while they go about this.)

Yesterday, at seven in the evening, the river level at Cairo was at 60.2 feet (flood stage is 40.0); it's not expected to crest until Wednesday, somewhere around 61.5 feet; it will exceed all previous recorded floods at that point on the Ohio, including 1927, 1937, and 1993. The river wall in downtown Cairo is 64 feet high.* Not that things look so great in the rest of the area, either. The Ohio at Paducah (flood stage 39.0 feet) is at 52.4 feet, and is expected to go to at least 54 feet, and will (it is hoped) crest and begin to drop on Wednesday. Officials in the greater Memphis area are evacuating low-lying areas.

Of course, more rain is predicted for the area through Tuesday at least.

The weather patterns for the last part of 2010 and so far for 2011 are very similar to those in 1992-1993.

View of the Ohio toward Cairo, taken from Wickliffe, Kentucky. More from youtube.

*The structural inegrity of all river control structures should always be considered unknown; generally, the way you find out the levee has weakened is when it fails.

In a year or so, they'll remind the party faithful that it was Bush, after all, who smoked out Osama Bin Laden, and that Obama merely killed Usama, his inneffective half-brother.

It sounds now as if they plan to blow the levees when* the water reaches 61 feet at Cairo; there have already been some problems with levees on the Mississippi north of there, so this should ease that as well as the levels on the Ohio.

More photos at the Army Corps of Engineers website. The Mississippi has topped a private levee in Tennessee, near Dyersburg--there are photos of that in with the Cairo sand boils and the levee slides.

*I would say "if" but let's not fool ourselves.

On the other, this does not excuse the dog-whistle nature of the original comment. "Cairo. I've been there, trust me. Cairo. Have you been there? OK, then you know what I'm saying then." As noted in the article, Cairo is 2/3 black and desperately poor; there's no way to see that comment as anything but "those people don't matter, let the river take care of them" with a side of racism.

TexAnne, #409: They're boat anchors. We had the entire run of B5 on VHS, and wanted to get rid of them once we got it on DVD, and nobody would take the tapes even on Freecycle. If you don't like the idea of throwing them out yourself, donate them to Goodwill and let them do it.

Terry @403: Agreed. This isn't a football victory hooray for our side, kind of thing.

Jacque @401: I was cheered to read that he was finally gone, but cheering the death of even someone as evil as he does have a bitter moral taste.

But then I have a hard time understanding why it's unseemly to rejoice at the death of enemies, especially people like bin Laden, who was the mortal enemy of every decent human being on the planet.

Re: bin Laden: My initial sense of relief that he's gone has evolved to wondering what happens now. Does this damage al Qaeda? Does it mean anything will change with the wars, or have they simply taken on a life of their own? Does this change the political situation in the Middle East? I just have a big question mark right now.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I know that this is personal for you in a way that it can never be for me, and I in no way mean to say that the way you feel is wrong. Frankly, I don't think you're wrong.

That said, when I heard about this last night, the comments I heard from people were things like "rot in hell", "they should let us all piss on his corpse", and the like. I'm glad he's gone. I wish we could have captured him and put him on trial, but discussion in the other thread shows why that couldn't have happened in this case. But to see a room full of people maliciously, gleefully happy that he was dead seems, well, ghoulish. So I'm conflicted.

At any rate, now that we've killed our bogeyman, I can hope that we'll get out of the Middle East and stop all our police-state shenanigans. Bets anyone?

Your life was much more directly impacted by his actions than mine, and I certainly am not trying to tell you that your feelings and reactions (what ever they are) are not valid and right for you.

He is gone and we are not, and that is certainly the better outcome. If he were to have continued alive and free (to whatever degree of freedom he had) it would definitely have been a far worse thing.

Ta-ta, Former High School Crush! I am sad to have those memories of you doing shirtless sit-ups in the choir room before Spring Musical rehearsal so sullied by your wingnuttitude!

nerdycellist, #425: Sympathies. It's never fun to discover that someone you used to know has become someone you don't want to know.

Coincidentally this was the same parking lot next to where I was waiting for a bus one Tuesday morning, and a construction crew was playing the Howard Stern show with the news about the WTC.

Also, if you are at a stoplight and your car starts moving forward just a bit and you brake more and it stops, that is your brakes failing and you should maybe get them fixed. And put the car in park at stoplights until you do. Because no one needs my yesterday.

So you think

a) celebrating the deaths of 3000 innocent people

and

b) celebrating the death of someone (one!!!) who masterminded the deaths of more than 3000 innocent people and had every intention of masterminding, inspiring, and funding more slaughters of innocent people as long as he could possibly survive to keep doing so

are directly comparable, or even relevantly similar?

I don't. I think the similarity is superficial at best. I think OBL's death was a victory for everyone who never wants to have to watch a father tell his 3-year-old son that Mommy's never coming home again (a scene from a particularly heartbreaking post-9/11 documentary). I don't think celebrating is one bit out of line.

I agree with the guy on the radio who responded to a woman (sister of a 9/11 victim) who reminded us of the passage in Exodus where God silences the angels who are singing His praises after Pharaoh's army perished in the Red Sea: "Maybe angels shouldn't do it," he said, "but I think it's OK for us humans."

That said, having calmed down some from last night's euphoria, I've realized I no longer care whether OBL is burning in hell or not. He's no longer troubling OUR unhappy world; that's enough.

It did David Sirota as well.

Because they were so well-disposed towards us before.

I'm not Lee, but I don't see why this is an either-or choice.

I don't regret that he's dead. It seems like justice was done. He's dead, and those of us who are reading this are not (though too many others are), and as with any case of self-defense, this is far preferable to the alternative. But I'm with Jacque@401 that the glee saddens me a little. I've been sitting here trying to articulate why and have not succeeded.

I'm upset because people actually seem to think this changes something.

As I said on FB last night, I'll save my dancing in the street for when we cut our military spending in half, bring our troops home, and stop thinking that killing individual lunatics will change anything.

Metropolis and Old Shawneetown, and other Ohio river towns in Illinois and Kentucky, are undergoing voluntary evacuations, as are parts of Memphis. When I checked RiverGages yesterday, flooding on the Mississippi had reached St. Francisville, LA; now the river at is at flood stage.

All sources suggest this could be worse than the 1993 floods. Some say it could be worse than 1927.

"How high's the water, Mama?" has turned into a round inside my head.

At work, I'm about a mile due east of the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy. The rivers here are way up -- not out of their banks yet, but really angry looking.

They've had to let water out of one of the dams north of us in the last week. It's worrisome.

I was doing the same thing: I was happy when I heard he was dead, and I don't feel guilty about that, so why don't I like it that people are dancing in the streets?

Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that in my case it was the same sort of reaction that makes bioethicist nut Leon Kass think that eating ice-cream in public is wrong and `offends those who know eating in public is offensive.' That is, I think it's tacky, but that's a fact about my cultural prejudices rather than a moral principle.

This analysis doesn't necessarily apply to anyone else, of course.

He said this at the same time that he was defending the idea that visceral distaste at was a reliable foundation for ethical decisions even if it couldn't be supported from basic principles: the "wisdom of repugnance".

To a very limited extent this is sensible -- we get moral principles from realising that some things are just wrong (whether you believe this is by reason unaided, from cultural influences, or by direct revelation), but the ice-cream quote makes it clear that he wants to take it a lot further than normal people would.

Gary Larson's version...

I cuss
You cuss
We cuss
For asparagus.

Serge, Proud Lurker, Diatryma, Thomas, Xopher -- thanks for the suggestions on that story Irene Gallo's looking for. I've posted the info in the forums at Tor.com, and hope to hear back soon about whether there's a match.

I was mixing it up in Boing Boing's thread about the death of Osama bin Laden. I should have been over here instead, but there wasn't nearly as much to argue with.

He reads my Twitter at times, doesn't he? I RT'd something from Tobias Buckell that discusses it. Maybe that.

So HIS viscera are reliable ethical guides, but nobody else's are.

My friend posted on her Facebook wall about OBL, ending with "And may God have mercy on his soul" (intending to evoke what the judge says in a Victorian melodrama after sentencing someone to death, but also meaning it; she's kindhearted that way). This guy named Kevin McHugh, who'd been a friend up until that night, proceeded to flame her.

All night, and into the next day. I stopped by her house yesterday evening and she was still in tears about it.

So today Kevin McHugh posted on HIS Facebook wall, denouncing people who refuse to gloat and celebrate OBL's death, and calling them all sorts of names. She replied to Kevin McHugh saying "think about who you're attacking here. Save your bile for people who deserve it." Kevin McHugh then wrote her a private message, saying that she had no right to talk to him that way (!), and telling her not to contact him again. He then blocked her.

I think it's OK to celebrate, but I certainly respect those who don't. I do not respect the Kevin McHughs of the world.

I can celebrate that the world is rid of the evil bin Laden chose to embody, and feel relief we have been spared the evil he would almost certainly have done, yet I cannot help but mourn that the possibility of his goodness is now entirely annihilated. His legacy is now defined--and isn't it a thing worthy of sorrow?

Every time you think you know about something, more to know turns up.

(I lived for almost 20 years in southeast Louisiana - the time it took me to read the article was greatly extended by jumping every few paragraphs to Google Maps to get a look at what this place or that is up to these days. Most of them, sadly, are up to their knees in Gulf of Mexico. It's one of those places where there's a lot less there there than I remember -- and my father, who grew up on Bayou Lafourche, would tell us the same thing. Someday Baton Rouge will either be high and dry, or ocean front property. Possibly both.)

I squick
You squick
We all squick
For ice Quik!

Is or was there anything like that in London or another major city in the UK? A large churchyard, an urban racetrack . . . ? It does need to be at least several hectares in size.

Slight correction: the "War on Terror" should have been a police problem, it has been a military disaster.

That said, my own feelings about the killing of bin Laden are somewhat ambivalent: I'm glad he's been taken out of the picture and can no longer help plan and execute terrorist attacks on anyone, but I would have preferred that he be taken alive, tried, and put in prison for a very long natural life, so that he would not be a martyr, and so that he could be seen for a long time as an example of "Ur doing it most Wrong!"

There's another side to the issue that hasn't been mentioned much that I've seen, on the internet or anywhere else. The EU, for instance, has a law against targeted assassination of a head-of-state, and someone in the EU government (didn't catch who) gave a statement that they are glad bin Laden is out of operation, but they disapprove of the killing of bin Laden because it violated that law and the prohibition against capital punishment as well. I happen to believe that it's perfectly moral to attempt to kill a head-of-state (Moammar Gadhafi comes to mind as an example) if the alternative is to stop his actions by killing thousands of his soldiers and however many civilians happen to get in the way. I'd much rather see a few politicians and their bodyguards die, putting a quick end to a conflict, than have it drag on and trash a country or two. If you insist on the validity of international intervention (and I'm terribly ambivalent about that, because we have the bad example of Iraq on one hand, and the truly horrible example of Rwanda on the other), then clearly you should opt for the quickest and least destructive action. Intervening but not in such a way as to end the conflict rapidly as in Libya seems the worst of both worlds.

My thoughts

I don't thin there was any good end to it; because had he been captured the posturing would have been interminable, and intolerable.

We wouldn't have been willing to turn him over to The Hague for trial, and keeping him a la Padilla, or Reid, or Manning would be a different crime.

Which says a lot of unpleasant things about what we've become, but that's a whole 'nother problem, isn't it?

The supply of potential suicide bombers might be affected, even if nothing changes in the men who direct them.

I'll note that a good many residents of the UK have Pakistani roots. The politics in Pakistan is difficult, divided into dozens of factions, but look at how successful insulting the "old country" is in the USA. I can understand why the plan was kept hidden from the Pakistani government, but it was an armed invasion of friendly territory.

And I understand they had another helicopter breakdown. Some things don't change.

It's the wall or hedge requirement that makes it difficult, isn't it? I think the parks all have railings for at least some of the edges. The grounds of the Geffrye Museum- I know there's a knee-high wall with railings above it at the front and I think I remember a wall round the garden at the back- but it's probably too small.

Hampstead Cemetery's more than 20 acres, I think, but I don't know if it has walls all the way roud either.

An old factory with a marshalling yard? I don't know any specific examples, though.

Cathedral closes are walled and I think sometimes there's a gate across the road to close them at night; not sure about round Westminster Abbey and the school, but there may well be one in another city that's big enough.

Perhaps your best bet is a stately-home-now-swallowed-up-by-a-city? Ham House, perhaps? Looking at its website, it has railings across the front of the house, but ISTR the gardens are walled. Anyway, there are various of those about over the country.

PLaces with fewer humans, that is a little trickier. There are some graveyards, but many of them are visited by people wanting to see famous graves. Other than that many of the bomb sites have been redeveloped multiple times. There was one I saw though, at the corner of Grafton way and Tottenham court road, which was a big hole in the ground surrounded by fencing, overgrown with the usual plants and with rubbish thrown in by people over the years. Why it hasn't been redeveloped I don't know, but it is only a couple of acres in size.
And do you want London as in medieval london, or greater London, which is effectively everything inside the M25?

When you turn the respectable sources of information in your society into propaganda organs, it has consequences. It makes even people not especially inclined to conspiracy theories try to second-guess every news item. It also makes increasingly wild conspiracy theories sound more plausible. But using those sources of information as propaganda organs also is often in the short-term interests of the current political leaders and businesses who largely shape political discussion, so they just go ahead and do it and let the consequences fall on the future.

Teresa, the Atchafalaya issue is always with us, whether it gets mentioned much or not. The Mississippi is a big river (and so are the Ohio and the Missouri), and it does what it does, and goes where it goes, and we can make suggestions, but not commands. We don't want to accept that, but when Major General Walsh opened the floodway, he didn't have much choice.

We are stumbling around in unaccustomed sunlight here in Nashville, and I note that the river gages portion of the Army Corps of Engineers site is now not working; I wonder if it's getting more traffic than usual or something...

Dyersburg and Memphis here in Tennessee are evacuating some of their residents to higher ground, and places downriver are getting ready to do the dsame. Plans are being put into play to evacuate Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, starting with the medically vulnerable, and politicians all over the area are out in force, trailing cameramen, looking concerned, and asking for federal money.

Here's the ACE's video on how to build a sandbag levee; they have one on using pumps to protect your property as well.

The National Weather Service office in Jackson, MS is providing useful information too.

Floods, compared with tornados and earthquakes, are very slow disasters, and you can see them headed your way, whether you're prepared to believe it's happening to you or not. A chart I saw somewhere predicts that the river will not crest at Vicksburg until late this months, and that some roads will not be open again until July.

I will be quoting it in the future. Had I a time machine, I'd have quoted it in the past. Even the quite recent past.

Right now, blogs are one of the places where the most interesting conversations are happening, the ones that evade various media decisions to black-hole some ideas and views and topics, the ones that allow political/social discussion that breaks across well-defined ideological positions. (Naked Capitalism is a good example of this.) Astroturfers/paid shills threaten to do for blog comment threads what think tank employed pundits have done for op ed pages--turn them into largely forums for the folks paying for think tanks and PR companies to have their views expressed by high-talent intellectual whores. We need to think about how to avoid this, not just someplace like ML with its well-tuned adaptive immune system, but other places without that advantage.

Wandering astray: Something that has bothered me about the limited amount of time-travel fiction I've read has been the lack of attention paid to how expensive time travel would be. Would it be an easier, lower-energy operation to travel to yesterday than to travel to Caesar's funeral? Would the same machine do both or would you need a larger motor to go farther? (Similarly with teleportation -- it seems like in any representation I have read, once you've discovered the trick you can go as far as you want effortlessly. Sometimes I daydream about being able to teleport but somehow I never seem to be able to imagine going farther than short hops at a time. And it is such a strenuous operation!)

When you turn the respectable sources of information in your society into propaganda organs, it has consequences. It makes even people not especially inclined to conspiracy theories try to second-guess every news item. It also makes increasingly wild conspiracy theories sound more plausible. But using those sources of information as propaganda organs also is often in the short-term interests of the current political leaders and businesses who largely shape political discussion, so they just go ahead and do it and let the consequences fall on the future.

Hear, hear! And that they, like the NY Times, cooperate fully -- that is why I will never give them another nickle to read them. If they'd acknowledged the role they played in the killing, maiming and displacement of unknown numbers of innocent people, and apologized, promising to sin no more, maybe I'd feel differently. But they, just like NPR, continue to know all and tell us what we are to think even when proved over and over to not only be wrong, but knowingly lying.

Love, C.

I am hoping for the best for everyone going through this. It's bad, very bad, but I hope it won't be worse. But we have days of this to go.

Still and all, it's impossible not to notice that no one's objecting to using all resources that can be mustered to save these cities currently threatened, or wondering why we should bother.

Please forgive my bitterness, and understand that this is not directed at these cities or the people in them in the least.

Love, C.

For the record, I do support the capital punishment in some cases. OBL and his merry band constitute one of them.

It's not as loud or on as large a scale as what we heard at the time of Katrina--but it's the same tune.

Federal money for the farmers will be welcome--I wonder what the same folks would have to say about using federal money to tidy up the damage around town in Cairo.

I.B.M.
U.B.M.
We all B.M.
For I.B.M.

Moe! Staiano, who's doing that Cardiacs special, is also playing drums in our Cardiacs tribute on Sunday. And I just got word that we are going to be wearing the makeup.

Larry Niven had an extended series of essays and/or short stories about the logistics and energy demands of teleportation, involving heat sinks, Coriolis forces, etc. I don't remember which book.

"My mama taught me always to speak good of the dead. He’s dead. Good."

What I think of the way it happened is entirely too long for now. I, too, worry about dancing in the streets, not because I think it's wrong or offensive, but because of how effective that was 10 years ago in inflaming American passion and allowing what happened after to happen. People on the other side who want the kind of power that was taken, then, over us, over their people can and will use it in the same way. In that, at least, I agree with realpolitik. And again (like over tourture, or adherence to Geneva Conventions,...), my response to "but they did it" is "isn't our argument that we're better than them?"

J. Grant of (NSFW!) Flem Comics had one of his political rants on Sept. 11. 2002, asking (again, in NSFW language) "have we brought the major terrorists (OBL, anthrax bomber, one other I can't remember now) to justice?" to which the answer was, as everybody knew, no, and as everybody was beginning to learn, the government didn't think that really was very important. I believe (I couldn't find it last time I looked, and I'm sure not looking for it now) that the answer, as of this week, is finally yes.

Now, if we could only ramp down the things that we do that inflame the kinds of hatreds that inspire terrorism against us...

Jenny Islander: I assume places like the Oval aren't big enough? Not sure if it were completely enclosed 1900, except for the boundary rope - but if it's just a symbolic closure you need, a rope is as closed as a knee-high wall. Back of the Envelope calculation is about 1 ha.

Tomorrow is Bevrijdingsdag, Liberation Day. It's only a holiday once every five years; this year it's just an ordinary day for most of us. I'll put the flag to the top of the pole† tomorrow morning.

-----
* The Netherlands was neutral in World War 1, so they don't do Remembrance with Armistice. 11 November is St Maartin's, when the kids go door to door with lanterns and busk for candy. It really is like living in an alternate universe, sometimes.
† Never seen such a country for flagpoles, by the way. Pretty much every house has a mounting for one. Useful for us, since we have three national flags‡.
‡ Dutch, US, and the Saltire.

WRT time travel, Poul Anderson's "There Will Be Time" doesn't use a machine, but does explore the physical limitations of for example, holding your breath while you travel.

This appears to mean "recognition of the dead," which is a good name for a day of remembrance.

My bid for the next election is one no-trump.

That trump l'oeil is very life-like.

Knock, knock.
Whos there?
Ivana.
Ivana who?
Ivana forget Donald is running.

I'm not saying OBL was a head of state; someone in the EU government in Brussels said his killing violated that law, implying that he was a head of state or something equivalent. Certainly the reaction to attempted assassination of high-ranking corporate executives in the past (e.g., the Bader-Meinhoff Gang's operations) indicated the feeling that it was something more than the targeting of a private individual; more akin to assassination of a high government official. There seems to be strong sentiment for the notion that the grandeur and symbolism of office make an attack on the person an attack on the organization, and that that's somehow worse than attacking the worker and soldier ants.

My son developed intractable teething pain just after I posted, so I ended up Googling around and stumbled over a possible redoubt: St. Mary Magdalene in East Ham, which, according to the Intertubes, is in Greater London. Its churchyard is about 10 acres. From the photos I could find, I infer--but I can't prove--that the whole thing is surrounded by a chest-high brick wall. There are only two openings AFAICT; if they don't have heavy iron gates, they can be blocked. To the north, three or four bungalows sit next to the wall, their back gardens running right up to it, but otherwise the churchyard is surrounded on all sides by paved streets. The novel is set sometime during the Cold War, so I could work in the wildlife refuge that has occupied most of the churchyard since 1977, with lots of trees for emergency fuel. The church itself is 850 years old and hasn't fallen down yet. Strengthening the outermost garden walls behind the bungalows and reinforcing their windows, then putting a stile over the churchyard wall, would be feasible for a small group. This would provide a large, triffid-proof area in which people could grow food and make forays out to the nearby plant nursery, retail zone, etc.

There is an even bigger brick-walled cemetery a short walk away, but that one is nearly paved with flat grave markers. Still, people who knew how to garden intensively could use the little green spaces for food and put pots on top of the graves.

I imagine a woman from that neighborhood being in the maternity ward in the same hospital as Bill Masen, but too tired from a recent birth to watch the lights, so she doesn't go blind. She makes her way home with her baby, rescues as many people as possible, avoids catching the genetically enhanced typhoid or whatever it is that comes along a few days later, and becomes the leader of a small community based in the churchyard. Later they are contacted by envoys from other groups of survivors.

Expect the countersuits from people who were forced into settlement to begin very shortly.

I was thinking of Niven's "Flash Crowd" just last Sunday night. See #399.

I have missed this furor. Thank you for the update, though I'm damned sad to hear this, and how it, again, is targeted at skin color.

Maybe not so much, though, one hopes? I found only thisthough I hardly looked, because, well, it's all so depressing.

Considering the price of food and all the rest these days, we don't want crop-bearing fields out of commission any more than possible, either.

Love, C.

I think it was no-filter for flourescents and blue-filter for incandescents, because flourescents are bluer and incandescents are redder.

*And, reportedly, Betty Ballantine

I recall two forms of Ektachrome, balanced for different colour temperatures. You need to do that for colour reversal films because you can't do any tweaks while making the print.

The standard Ektachrome was balanced for daylight.

There was a "T" Ektachrome for tungsten light, balanced for Photoflood lighting, which traded hotter filaments for shorter service life. If you were shooting under domestic lighting you needed to use a blue filter.

The "G" Ektachrome seems to be balanced for daylight. and if you dig out the Kodak tech data for the specific film, it needs some filtration for fluorescent: Kodak recommend a 30M magenta filter, which matches the Cokin filter I sometimes used. Magenta is an anti-green, just as the yellow filter used for monochrome photography is an anti-blue to show those white fluffy clouds.

The "T" film is balanced for 3400K, while domestic tungsten comes in below 2900K. A 3400K photoflood has a life of maybe 100 hours.

Of course, the Kodak tech data is for serious professional users. But that is only a third of the colour temperature difference between domestic tungsten and daylight, so less filtering and less light blocked.

Tech Data Sheet for Ektachrome 64T reversal film

A brief outline of how to describe colour temperature differences, while details of Kodak Wratten filters, a de facto standard in the business, are here.

I've been scanning some of my uncle's old photographs and, even taking into account the aging of the original images, I have the feeling he wasn't that good a photographer, even though he used very good cameras.

Farewell and Godspeed.

I heard that on NPR this morning.

Imagine telling someone in 1911, one century ago, what the next few years held. You'd sound like Sarah f--king Connor. ("And then after the most awful war in human history, which also sets in motion the collapse of the British and French overseas empires, destroys the Ottoman empire, and triggers a Communist revolution in Russia, this plague sweeps through the world, killing vast numbers of people. After that, the global economy melts down. Not to worry, though, the starving, enraged masses in Germany do eventually find a Leader who will help them win glory again, at least for awhile....")

For all the darkness in the world now, it's worth remembering just how incredibly ugly the last century was.

Excellent point. It's human nature to see the here and now as most important (after all, one can't fix the past), but it helps to know a little history, if for no other reason than to realize we've seen worse.

The first decade of the 21st century is no picnic (especially when compared with the last decade of the 20th), but this country and the world as a whole have seen much worse.

Summary: subjecting the only known audio tape of the events to modern forensic analysis produces startling results. (1) Someone appears to have given an order to fire; (2) the first 4 shots may have been fired by a paid FBI informant, whose involvement was then covered up.

Npghnyyl, vg'f rira zber ubcrshy guna Wbua Jlaqunz znl unir vagraqrq. Sbe bar guvat, ur qvqa'g pbafvqre gung n cynag gung pna or freirq gb uhznaf naq pnggyr jvgu zvavzny cebprffvat jbhyq cebonoyl or nggenpgvir gb cvtf. Fheryl abg nyy bs gur cvtf va Oevgnva jrer frpheryl craarq naq/be jngpuvat gur fxl gung avtug. Cvtf encvqyl orpbzr sreny naq gurl nyfb zhygvcyl encvqyl tvira n punapr. Fb V jbhyq rkcrpg gung gur frpbaq trarengvba bs fheivibef, vs abg gur svefg, jbhyq jvgarff fbhaqref bs sreny cvtf punetvat vagb guvpxrgf bs gevssvqf naq rngvat gurz sebz gur obggbz hc, cebgrpgrq sebz gur cbvfba fgvatf ol gurve oevfgyl uvqrf naq ol univat gurve inevbhf zhpbhf zrzoenarf gbb ybj qbja sbe gur gevssvqf gb ernpu rnfvyl. Ba gur bgure unaq, Jlaqunz gragngviryl frg gur abiry va gur zvq-1970f. Jevgvat va gur rneyl '50f, ur pbhyqa'g cerqvpg gur pbzvat snq sbe xrrcvat ovt pngf(?!) nf crgf(?!) gung cebzcgrq gur Qnatrebhf Navznyf Npg bs 1976. Fb creuncf zl gurbergvpny heona ubzrfgrnqref jbhyq rapbhentr gevssvqf gb unat nebhaq bhgfvqr gurve jnyyf gb xrrc gur gvtref sebz whzcvat va!

Anyway, it's a good novel, except for some silliness about having babies being fulfilling for all women and other assorted gender role things--the main female characters aren't a pack of vapid cling-ons, at least. The 1981 BBC TV adaptation is also very good.

I've been warned off the printed sequel, however, which was written by somebody else and features The Triffid That Ate Chicago, or something like that.

ObSF: "I believe that Man is good. I believe that we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history."

Jenny Islander @ 534: I've been meaning to read it, but I've never managed to get my hands on a copy. Nor, honestly, do I have the time. I was just tickled at how naturally your requirements lent themselves to either sfnal or fantastic premises.

Fair enough. I think 1911 would have been an especially ugly time to tell someone the near future, though. For all that real progress was made in the world, that span from 1914 to 1945 was just brutal.

At least after the new tooth is made, nearly all the front top teeth in my mouth will be the same color, because they'll all be fake. Lost the center ones when I was 16, from a fall. Oral surgeon thinks more recent difficulties with top teeth may actually spring from that accident, decades ago.

Cannot actually remember how many fake teeth I now have . . . maybe 10?

Today I find out he is minor celebrity, making his living arguing aspects of the hobby horses he was gobsmackingly clueless about the night before.

Assuming somebody aged about 15 in 1910, fairly fresh from school, entering a fairly tradition world that has big changes in the works: things such as aeroplanes and zeppelins and wireless and motor cars. The world is opening up.

I'll assume he's British.

There's an incredible surge of volunteering in 1914. If he doesn't volunteer, he'll likely be conscripted later, though it's possible he's in some essential war work. And then the Spanish Influenza.

And he comes through all that, starts his own family, and his son will likely go off to war.

That, I think, is what makes it so bleak. It's that generation-apart repetition of the killing, the feel, for so many, that somebody in power hates them.

Jump another generation, and we're not using tanks or cavalry, we're fighting a war with the Beatles and with space rockets.

Here we are, a century later, and maybe we're seeing a repeat of one aspect of the 20th-Century-Fail. We have a new world looming, signs visible, and those in power are trapped in the thinking of the past. The politicians of 1910 were making arrangements in the style of the Napoleonic Wars, and the century which followed.

Are the politicians of today, with their "War of Terror", trying to treat the problems as another Cold War?

Childbearing is less likely to kill a woman.
A woman can vote.
We can't own humans anymore.
Organ transplants.
Death can be reversed.
Humans travel to other worlds.
Machines travel to other worlds.
Dentistry.
And the list goes on.

I'll choose the 20th Century over anything that came before.

According to the River Gages* site, Greeneville MS is now within a little more than half a foot from its historic high (recorded in 1973); Donaldsonville, the gage just below Baton Rouge, is now at flood stage. Upstream, Hickman KY, New Madrid and Carruthersville MO, and Tiptonville TN have all passed the highwater mark set in 1937. Water levels in Hickman, the northernmost of these gages, have dropped a little (which is great news if it continues, as the gates in the floodwall were leaking). The lower Ohio is still well into floodstage, but appears to be dropping.

Currently, the governor of Louisiana is demonstrating appreciation for Big Federal Government expenditures. When he realizes this, I'm sure he'll have a good reason for this, even if no one else in the US is similarly entitled to do so.

Meanwhile, Interstate 40 in Arkansas is closed about halfway between Memphis and Little Rock, where the White River is flooding.

*I love this little thing. Hours of fun fiddling with water levels all over the US!

"What do you call the crewmembers who know how the ship works?"
"Anybody but the Captain."

Most people do not realize, leaders such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were good men their tactics were just a bit extreme.

Fortunately, the next submission was thoughtful, well-constructed, and all that I could wish for in an undergraduate final paper.

Glad to hear those do sometimes come across your desk.

Not sure in what sense that's really applicable. Supporting US-friendly rather than democratic states? Avoiding direct conflict with ... who? China? Al Quaeda? through overcomplicated diplomacy and espionage, nonviolent proxy "battles" such as sporting events, and violent engagements using otherwise uninvolved countries to create "plausible" deniability about direct confrontation so that neither... er... superpower will have to declare war?

As far as I can tell, there's nothing "cold" about what's going on in the Middle East these days.

Not sure in what sense that's really applicable.

I took Dave's comment as a more general "are we fighting the last war" question, e.g., are we trying to use countertactics that apply better to conflicts between two superpowers than between one powerful nation and multiple smaller non-state opponents.

There's a serious answer to that, too: Snipes.

I think our pattern of alliances in the war on terror tracks pretty well with our old cold war pattern--allies of convenience who will do our dirty work for us, or who are our "friends" so long as the checks keep clearing, or who are genuine monsters but they're our monsters. However, I think this is less a cold-war thing than an activist international relations thing--if you're going to be intervening and occupying and assassinating and bribing your way across the world in pursuit of your nation's interests, you'll probably find yourself propping up unsavory allies pretty often.

I've been thinking about getting a file-share/store/access revision account with one of the services that offer them: I'd been considering the market leader Dropbox, but the recent discussions over at Boing Boing about encryption with their service (and the note from their CTO after the Boing Boing story) have given me the willies.

https://spideroak.com/ seems to have excellent security but they originally did backups, not file sharing, and there have been complaints about the access revision trashing files and the sharing being unpredictable at best.

Both start at 2 GB for a free account: if you use a member sponsored link that is upped to 2.5 GB for Dropbox and 3 GBfor Spideroak.

I was trying to find additional info on other services when I hit a press release for Deutsche Telekom's Media Center which features 25 GB which seems to indicate free accounts for anyone, anywhere, and which will work with the iPhone (which means it would probably support the iPad as well), Android, and Windows. I went over to the sign up page to see if I could find if the service works with Macs as well, and what kind of security is used if any, but the page is in German and Google Translate isn't being as friendly as I'd like.

I've been searching for a review of the thing ever since to see if anyone has tried it with a Mac or knows how or if they encrypt their data and how they deal with file revisions if at all, but can't find anything that I can read. So my question is this: is anyone here using this, or can they read German well enough to get the info from the setup page? It sure looks attractive, but I'm not going to try to wade through a German sign-up page by myself without knowing it's going to be worthwhile.

While Xopher's Snipes may have been the appropriate answer at one time (and as the son of a Navy Civil Engineer I appreciate it), I think the correct answer you'd get these days is "Chiefs."

HLN: Man asserts, without checking, that Poulenc's Dialogues des carmélites marks the first use of the guillotine as an orchestral instrument; is immediately beset by the fear that some bozo will come up with a document claiming that Dr. Guillotin intended it as a percussion instrument all along, and was shocked, shocked to discover it could be used in executions.

The winter-blooming apricot blossomed toward the end of March, and the daffodils and violets celebrated in April. The tree peony buds (Shima Nishiki) are showing color today, and may open by Mother's Day.

The miniature climbing roses are loaded with buds, and the one between the front door and the garage is sporting a Cardinal's nest with several eggs(!)

The weather has been so cold and wet that we're still filling the bird feeders with seed. We also have our hummingbird feeders out and have seen one male and one female at the feeders in the last week.

I bought a solar fountain bird bath last month, but since there has been so little sunshine, I haven't bothered to set it up.

On the filking front, I've finally turned up a copy of Martha Keller's Mirror of Mortality, and have ordered it. I've been hunting for it off and on for the last 15 years. There are two more copies listed on Alibris if anyone is interested.

It does claim that it will work "von jedem internetfaehigen Computer", meaning that it should work from your macintosh (since it's claiming that any internet capable computer can use it. that's a transparent lie, but it's the kind of generalization which will work for most customers).

For security, the webapge says that it transmits the data using 128-bit SSL, which is nice, but it doesn't document how it *stores* the data. (Well, another page says it's stored in Germany and is reliably protected. Be still, my heart. :))

First, because engineering officers are, in fact, able to command at sea (they're surface line officers just like everyone else), and second because the rank of captain in the navy dates back to the Continental Navy, long before the first steam-powered vessel.

That being the case, I probably shouldn't have linked that other story. Sorry about that. Rereading it now, it seems like an "exaggerated victimhood" kind of story.

Yeah, I can see that, though I'm not yet sure what I'm seeing with the US in the Middle East, particularly with the various democratic revolutions going on right now.

I do agree, it's less what I associate with "cold" war, and more a reflection of current US perceptions of what's "practical" and "necessary" in international relations -- and I do think those definitions are shaped by our experiences in the cold war. However, the popular trend seems to be that in order to counter ever-more-focused cells of wickedness, we need to be ever-more-willing to compromise our values, and I really don't like that trend. I'd rather see them focused on using successful police-based and counter-organized-crime tactics, which I suspect may be more effective and more relevant to preventing terrorism than hit squads and torture and the like. (It'd also potentially shift the glamour-emphasis of the whole scenario, in ways that might be beneficial.)

This is a hoodlum named Harvey Starkweather, who's as psycho as the name would indicate. He was in Juvie and some writer became convinced he was a sensitive poet, so he's out and menacing the young hero of the movie MATINEE:

"It's like I once wrote in a poem:

"Destiny.
It's like a crazy river
Where you see different people's boats
That they have
Going by, like.
But tomorrow:
Tomorrow's a knife.
Tomorrow's a big knife.

"...You get it?"

(Excellent movie, by the way, with John Goodman as a William Castle-type producer bringing his latest shock pic, MANT*, to Key West at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. There's the movie within the movie with William Shallert as a dentist with a problem**, and there's also THE SHOOK UP SHOPPING CART, which in a minute or so manages to convey at least an hour of boring 60s wacky kid comedy drek.)

*"Half Man, Half Ant, ALL TERROR!"
** A sort of ant problem

Meanwhile, here, for your amusement, is a Navy Slang Trivia Quiz.

And here's a dictionary of Navy slang (which, shockingly, doesn't include either COMNAVSIXPAC (the headquarters you will visit when you intend to sit at home drinking beer) nor CIVLANT (where you'll be stationed after you retire or otherwise get out). Nor do they mention the CSMP Custodian. (The CSMP is actually the Current Ship Maintenance Project, but the CSMP Custodian has the Complete Supply of Monthly Pornography; the fellow with a subscription to Penthouse, Playboy, and Hustler (and perhaps Cheri, Gent, Tip/Top, and others more obscure).) The glossary is still a great deal of fun and does bring back memories.

I think the development of blood transfusion (discovery of blood types, anticoagulants, etc.) made a huge difference in trauma care as well.

My typical touchstone on the 20th century is that my grandmother was born in 1901- she was six when the Wright Brothers flew, and 67 when men walked on the moon.

For the Army we have things like the promotion to PFC, and PCS to Ft. Living Room.

Also, "Household 6" which equals one's spouse (Six being the standard callsign designator for the commander).

Who would have inherited Keller's literary estate? Did she have children or family? Did she leave a will? For that matter, was the copyright renewed on her earlier collections, or have they slipped into public domain? This would be an interesting project for someone to track down an answer to, with investigation of court or other public records involved. (Someone with free time, and a moderate amount of money. Someone who's not me.)

(Med lights are sometimes called "up and overs" or "friendship lights." The way I heard the story, they're to prove your friendly intentions by making it easy for the shore batteries to target you, and to make it obvious if you're trying to slip out of port under cover of darkness.)

(Question 1 says, "You are visiting Mayport, Florida when you walk into a bar and see your old friend, John Smith, in a Navy dress uniform. After exchanging greetings, you say you surprised to see that he has become a seaman. John indignantly replies that he is not a seaman, he is a 'snipe.'" Actually, my first thought on reading that question was, "Poor fucker's assigned to the Sorry Sara." And I would never make that mistake, because a seaman has white hashmarks on his sleeve, while a fireman (the equivalent engineering pay grade) has red hashmarks.)

Poems previously appearing in other publications, such as magazines, might also possibly have been renewed under that publication's copyright. For instance, the New Yorker, which published some of her poems, appears to have renewed copyright on all of its issues.

A finding aid for her papers at Franklin and Marshall College mentions two daughters who donated the papers in 1980, Martha R. Goppelt and Eliot Randal Marhenke. They would appear to be her only children, and are likely to have inherited her copyrights. I don't know if they're still alive, but they might well be. In particular, a little online searching turns up a likely address in the Philadelphia area for a Martha Goppelt who's the right age, was still alive as of 2010, and lived quite close to where Martha Keller lived. I'm not planning to pursue permissions myself, but if someone else wants to, contact me and I can pass along the address.

Who's getting the profits from the SpecEng store at CafePress, the one with Mike Ford's stuff? For that matter, who inherited rights for his stuff in general?

Elves are also inscrutable.

To all: I see in John's link a memorial fund for the Minneapolis Library. Is that were his posthumous sales are going, or did he leave family behind?

Elves are diffuse. You can set fire to them in one of two places before running away and waiting for the boom.

Here are some reasons why:

This is in line with the Christian undertones that already consume our current political order.

In his time George Orwell was a writer whom was very aware of the importance that language had in the political realm, both as a medium and as a tool.

In the 1930s to reach out was the communist party.

Mussolini started out as a socialist. During World War one he becomes an anti-social.

The emphasis of national will is infusing in fascism thus making it a good path of a political order.

The United States in in an error of redevelopment and vulnerability.

Mussolini had Italy within his grasp between the 1920s and 1940s and emerged after Italy’s “The Risorgimento” also known as the resurrection.

Elves are rococo. They bring hot chocolate across the river in small boats.

Elves are decadent. They have ten teeth.

Elves are polygonal. It's not just pining for the fjords, it's gone.

But I kind of stopped on this in the answers: "Before it was decided that political correctness should take priority over national defense, Yeoman was one of the few ratings open to women, hence the rather disparaging appellation given to male Yeomen." (Emphasis added.)

What's Navy slang for 'stupid fucking asshole'?

I can understand people thinking Orwell was a tool. I didn't realize he was a medium as well.

I belong to an online forum that discusses how to get over punitive Christian child training, how to raise children with grace and charity, and so on. I just stopped by, to discover that hackers have replaced the entire forum with a video of some drunk(?) men half naked and dancing in a way that would be funny if they weren't possibly too out of it to realize that they were being filmed, along with a notice "Site closed due to [couple of slurs I won't bother to repeat]."

This is the second hacking in three days. Whoopie dee, hacker kid, you have proven that you are able to shoot at highway signs. Very impressive, yes. What's your second act, crapping in urinals?

We call them "Stupid fucking assholes."

(I was still enlisted when the first females were assigned to sea duty (onboard USS Puget Sound (AKA USS Pubic Mound) if memory serves) so that was a long time ago. Sounds like that guy's a fucking rink.)

Especially Vietnamese soups?

Elves are fallacious. Just you never mind why!

Elves are invincible, they can't be named Vince.

Elves used to be unwincible, then we came along.

Via CZEdwards at Slacktiverse: Arizona gay couple adopts 12 kids. 6 of the kids were 5 siblings and a cousin; it kind of kept going after that. Long, encouraging story; interesting to contrast the attitudes of Arizona legislators (who want preference given to married couples as adopters, and don't allow second-parent adoptions for non-married couples) with the attitudes of the Child Protective Services people who know a good family when they see one.

Elves are bountiful. They produce paper towels.

Elves are syndicalist. Their genitals are at an angle.

Elves are fuliginous. Especially after many martinis.

Elves are fungible. That's why you find them sitting under toadstools.

One of the ways the US is still fighting the Cold War is that the standard political, diplomatic, and military responses to the asymmetrical wars we're fighting are based on the counter-insurgency theories developed to fight Soviet proxy forces. They do not match the way the wars are actually being fought, nor do they allow for any sort of military solution, though that's what the procedures used require. Moreover, the political and diplomatic analyses that the procedures support are deeply flawed in the current contexts.

1. Everyone in the Navy hates being in the Navy and is just itching to get out, and the few exceptions are universally detested.
2. All sailors hate their superiors.
3. All sailors hate their peers and are always looking for excuses to hurt or abuse them.
4. All superiors' main goal in life is to make their subordinates as miserable as possible.
5. Sailors expend more energy trying to get out of work than on all their other activities combined.
6. Virtually everything done by the Navy is useless, stupid makework designed to punish the people who are forced to do it.

Elves are impeccable. They lack defined chest muscles.

Elves are intimidating. They are notoriously shy.

The phrase "xxx and a wake-up"¹ was heard almost the moment somebody got to fewer than six months till separation from the service.

If you got promoted to E-4 (Petty Officer 3rd Class), which involved studying for and passing an exam, you were doing so for the increase in pay, not because you were taking a step up a career ladder.

If there were good friendships made in the Navy I was in, it was because of shared interests off-duty, not because of anything done at work.

I imagine things changed after the services went to all-voluntary in 1973, but we didn't get too many fresh recruits who were willing to say they were thinking about the service as a career. The peer pressure from the rest of the group was probably too great.

1.: Where x = number of days remaining on active duty minus one day for the wakeup call.

THANK you! That means it's not just me. I was assuming that Google Translate just couldn't parse the site correctly, or had decided it hated me.

It does claim that it will work "von jedem internetfaehigen Computer", meaning that it should work from your macintosh (since it's claiming that any internet capable computer can use it. that's a transparent lie, but it's the kind of generalization which will work for most customers).

Well, with the help of Google Translate I now have an account and a German e-mail address. I'll report back what I figure out.

For security, the webapge says that it transmits the data using 128-bit SSL, which is nice, but it doesn't document how it *stores* the data. (Well, another page says it's stored in Germany and is reliably protected. Be still, my heart. :))

The press release says "With the TÜV certification for data privacy and protection, the Media Center as online storage media bears an additional seal of approval and guarantees that all content stored is secure." Unfortunately I can't seem to find any info on what "TÜV certification for data privacy and protection" is.

Elves are unchangeable. They never carry small coins in their pockets.

Elves are invidious. It's hard to catch them on film.

Elves are incorrigible. Neither Haim nor Feldman appeals to them.

Thanks. That clarifies some for me, though I'd be interested in more detail on your perspective, if you felt like you wanted to put the time in.

Elves are geometric. They have taken the measure of the earth.

Elves are formulaic. They stand for the rights of pack animals.

Justin Bieber
Lady Gaga
Madonna & Justin Timberlake
Bruno Mars
Queen
Trey Parker, Jr.
Michael Jackson

And last but definitely not least, the North Korean People's Army Funky Get Down Juche Party

It is simply untrue that either UC or Stanford would "summarily reject" an applicant simply because they didn't have a high school diploma. UC makes no secret of having a small percentage of its freshman slots dedicated to students who have unusual circumstances, like never having gone to high school, and who show a lot of promise.

You do have to put together a whole application, and you have to be able to convince the admissions people that you're a good bet. I went through this process with my son, who didn't graduate from high school (he did pass the equivalency test). He got one of those sweet rejections from Berkeley his first try -- the kind that imply you ought to try again some day -- went to community college, worked, and applied again -- to UC Santa Cruz -- and got in. It's a pretty normal way for "slip through the cracks" kids to go to University.

I take great pleasure in telling the teens I work with that my high school dropout kid is now doing quite well in his fourth year of med school: I love seeing the wheels turn in their heads at the suggestion that they, too, might still have some doors open for them.

I'm using Dropbox myself but am careful to use it only for things which 1) I really don't care if somebody looks at, like my music wish-list or backup of my iTunes database, or 2) are otherwise thoroughly encrypted, like my 1Password login files.

I saw a nice solution for the #2 case on LifeHacker the other day - there's some software package which creates a virtual Windows folder within which everything is encrypted using your private password before it gets stored on the underlying storage medium. If you put that folder within the Dropbox folder, then what gets stored on the public server is the encrypted backing file, which nobody at Dropbox would be able to read.

Thanks for the help! The T-Mo stuff indicates that they're using SSL for file transfers with their Media Center, so I assume that when I drop something into their storage via "connect to Server" that my Mac is sending it to them encrypted via WebDAV, correct?

I saw a nice solution for the #2 case on LifeHacker the other day - there's some software package which creates a virtual Windows folder within which everything is encrypted using your private password before it gets stored on the underlying storage medium. If you put that folder within the Dropbox folder, then what gets stored on the public server is the encrypted backing file, which nobody at Dropbox would be able to read.

We have something like 18 computers total in the house, and only one of them is running a version of Windows--nope, call me a liar because I forget the Windows CE tablet and the Windows CE PDA I bought in a yard sale. Make that 3 computers running a version of Windows, none of them production machines. Does this package you were looking at play nicely with Macs, or the version of Linux the Nokia N800 uses, or the Amiga OS?

These last eight days, as well as the last 10 years, suggest to me that there is only one American foreign policy; this default foreign policy is interventionist, moralistic, and militarily robust. Everything else is commentary.

Baseball, Tolkien. Together at last the the best NYT correction in the history of ever.

Elves are preposterous. The get their mail earlier than anyone else.

Yep, I think that's right. The elite consensus on foreign policy, trade, immigration, financial regulation, drug policy, civil rights law, etc., largely determines what options will even be on the table for elected officials. In the 2008 elections, there was nobody with any chance at all to win who was going to try to push back on any of that elite consensus, if they got power. To the extent those issues are up for discussion at all in elections, it's either as empty rhetoric (Obama on the national security state, for example), or it's very minimal around-the-edges stuff (perhaps we will slightly decrease the amount of resources spent fighting medical marijuana in states that have approved it).

The thing to understand is that the elite consensus is not the product of some inner circle of wise and smart and informed people carefully weighing the issues. It's a political consensus, which arose by the same sort of unthinking social processes as any other political consensus--some parts are well-thought-out, but many absolutely silly bits have been incorporated into it, for the kind of reasons that come up all the time in coalition-building. And it's packed with inconsistencies, because it's an evolved, not designed, thing.

To pick some random examples, much of the elite consensus w.r.t. intellectual property law is driven by the interests of big, rich companies that own a lot of intellectual property. Much of the elite consensus on torture, surveillance, and related issues is shaped by pushback from intelligence agencies and their institutional supporters. And so on.

In many ways, this makes elections a lot less important than they seem. Nobody will be elected in 2012 who will cause us not to have an interventionist, moralistic, violent foreign policy. If somehow someone were elected who tried, he would find himself utterly blocked at every level. I doubt he'd actually be deposed in a coup or assassinated, though that could happen, but he'd find himself unable to get his orders followed by the very powerful institutions that support the elite consensus. The harder he pushed, the more political capital he'd use up, and the less he'd have for later. (Think of the pushback Obama got on the torture photo issue, where he reversed himself rather abruptly, and then caved in on torture prosecutions and all the rest. And Obama wasn't and isn't remotely a radical.)

That doesn't mean elections are meaningless--small differences in policy matter, and can ultimately change the direction of the elite consensus. But it does mean that most of the rhetorical differences between parties have a lot more rhetoric than difference.

Yeah, the more semi-automated filtering you do before you look at the candidates, the more uniform the successful candidates will be. The guy with no degree but years of experience in the field, the lady with a ten-year work gap while she raised her kids, the guy who's established in one field who tries to break into another, the woman who wants to move from the academic to commercial world--they all look weird enough that, in a world where 95% of the resumes are filtered out by clerks before they even are seen by any real decisionmakers, those unusual peoples' resumes will end up in the trash can, and the candidates that get interviews will have nearly-identical backgrounds.

I think one really important part of this happens in all large organizations. The path to power within the organization determines what its leaders will believe, how they will think about the world, what they will be comfortable with, etc. This is why armies tend to be very well adapted to fight the last war, why large companies will often fail to apply the business-changing innovations in their own research labs, and a huge source of groupthink in many other kinds of organizations, where almost all the important decisionmakers have extremely similar backgrounds, training, and experiences.

People high up in the pentagon, state, CIA, etc., mostly rose during the Cold War. The techniques that were used (some of which probably even made sense) are what they rose through the system using. That's what they're comfortable with. The people who didn't or couldn't put on the cold-war worldview of those organizations didn't rise.

That's because a different consensus believes that our way can't be as efficient/effective/fast as the sexier way.

I think that second aspect (the intersections of those who know how things work... regardless of their actual policy decisions) have to accomodate the greater public sentiment. If there is a "common sense" explanation which the large public will believe (e.g. copying a song equals net loss for the artist whose song was copied, first, last, and always) then the specfic policy goals (whatever the reasons behind them) can get a huge lift of public support, even when the facts are in opposition.

I've seen it happen in torture. I have a much harder time making the case now than I did ten years ago. People who would take my (expert) word on it, no longer are willing to believe me. I am contrary to what "24" and the pundits have told them, and that narrative makes more, intuitive, sense.

When does she graduate? (It would be more than cool if it turned out that she and her namesake ended up getting their degrees in the same year.)

The last 25-odd years of my life could do with a good editor...

I've said this before. If you're in the business of running agents in hostile territory, it makes a lot of sense to run things on the assumption that torture works. And in that environment, torture can be the excuse, while the real reason for the rolling up of a network is that you didn't spot the infiltrator.

As long as those people don't control interrogation, things work. How much interrogation did the CIA do before 9/11?

And now you can say you've seen me in makeup, if not in a dress and tiara like Chris was.

We're not talking Steed and Peel here, I guess. Drat. That woulda been good....

It's important not to forget the role of the community college in funneling unconventional students into the universities, also. If you don't get there the first time, you can go to community college for the lower division work and transfer (usually as a junior). In California, each of the community colleges has arrangements with a few of the UCs and State Universities allowing students to get a guaranteed transfer agreement. A student with this agreement doesn't go through the whole application process when they transfer: they just show that they've gotten decent grades in their classes.

Amen, though I'd bump it to at least 30... but the catch is, things could easily have gone a lot worse, so I'm careful what I'd wish for.

albatross @ 686: I mostly agree, but I have reconciling this:

"To the extent those issues are up for discussion at all in elections, it's either as empty rhetoric (Obama on the national security state, for example),"

and this:

"In many ways, this makes elections a lot less important than they seem. Nobody will be elected in 2012 who will cause us not to have an interventionist, moralistic, violent foreign policy. If somehow someone were elected who tried, he would find himself utterly blocked at every level."

If whomever becomes president will be unable to change things no matter how dedicated they are, then what's your basis for calling Obama's rhetoric empty? According to your metric it could have been solid as Ramston steel and reached the same result. (Personally, I'm partial to the "the harder he pushed, the more political capital he'd use up, and the less he'd have for later" explanation: I think Obama really meant to change all the things he said he wanted to change, but decided to focus on other things when he realized pushing ahead would start a guerrilla war within the federal government.)

@ 688: Yep. Especially given that being able to fill out a college application (or formatting a submission) properly does, no doubt, correlate to some degree with being a successful candidate.

Definitely better than the movie we actually got, anyway.

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/09/136054170/first-listen-cast-recording-the-book-of-mormon?ps=cprs

Because it doesn't work. Yes, you might get lucky, and get a piece of information, but for that one in a thousand chance, you are going to be generating a 999 false leads, and reacting to them is much more likely to blow your cover. Operating in places like Abbotabad requires not being noticable. Failed operations, based on bad intel are not the way to go about that.

Prior to 9/11 the CIA did a moderate number of interrogations, almost all in the pursuit of propping up places/movements we liked; the end state wasn't information, but control of a subject population. The verity of the collection process was less important than the subject population knowing that stepping out of line meant your family never saw you again and a quick death was the thing hey would hope was your fate.

I've seen quite a few accounts, by people who were in places such as occupied France, of how they reacted if somebody who knew them was arrested.

That's the sort of "assume torture works" thinking I was referring to. It's not about getting information. It's about protecting your network from the enemy ability to get information.

It also makes your enemy look worse, in the post-war confessions, justifying some of the harsh actions of the heroes, and masks some of the possible betrayals.

Be a woman. Get erased from history.

We were teasing James about going to Goucher so that if Byrd transferred there, they could carpool, but he decided to go to Hood instead.

The T-Mo stuff indicates that they're using SSL for file transfers with their Media Center, so I assume that when I drop something into their storage via "connect to Server" that my Mac is sending it to them encrypted via WebDAV, correct?

Your communications are encrypted if and only if the address you plop into Connect To Server starts with “https://”. (If it doesn't, try adding the “s” anyway and see if it works.) WebDAV is an extension of HTTP, so all rules about connecting securely to web sites apply here.

The river is dropping north of Memphis, but the Memphis gage (a replacement) is continuing to show small increases. It may crest soon there. Greeneville, MS is over four feet above its historic high; Vicksburg is a little over three feet below its historic high, and Natchez is within a foot.

Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has pictures and more--I link to the entire blog, and not the post on the opening of the Bonnet Carré spillway because there's lots of good stuff there, including an overview of April's weather. (If you are a weather geek, or prepared to be a weather geek, this is the blog for you.) There are some astonshing aerial views of the movement of water through Bonnet Carré into Lake Pontchartrain (from previous openings of the spillway) in the post about the opening of the spillway. Dr. Masters indicates that the flood has indeed crested at Memphis, about a foot below the 1937 high water level. If they hadn't opened the New Madrid floodway, I suspect the crest would have been higher--unless a lot of levees north of Memphis had failed.

Dave: I believe if you go from "assume torture works" to "assume interrogation works", you'll be on the same page.

Yes, the Gestapo were prime users of "enhanced interrogation techniques", but the goal was "rule of terror", from my reading of it; the torture was more to inhibit others joining (in case they get caught) than actually receiving information. Also, they weren't all that concerned with false positives...

In general, why do people believe they have to rule by fear? It's really frustrating. And how do people slip into "oderint dim metuant" - go from fear as a tool to ruling to an end in itself?

And, why does it work, even with the low-grade "boogeyman" version that people in the U.S. have been playing since the Cold war (tell me the terrorists behind the fence aren't today's communists, drug dealers, teenage gangs,...)?

Dave Bell: That's not the way it read. In this case, the folks running the operation are the ones doing the interrogations, and so the assumption (re the effectiveness of torture) would be for getting, not protecting, information.

In the case you describe it's not a case of, "assume torture works", but rather assume someone captured will compromise information, which is a very different model. If they don't talk, then you have delayed an operation/burned some cover identities, abandoned some contacts (and they have to be abandoned. Look at what happened to bin Laden... one known contact made one mistake years after the compromised ID), and set back the course of the campaign.

That sucks. But if you don't, then you run the risk of everyone who might have been compromised being rolled up, and completely destroying the network/organisation.

That happens if it's rubber hoses through the night that gets the info, or if it's tea and biscuits. All it takes is an absolutely ruthless opponent who doesn't care about wasting resources to get every possible member of the opposition. If I spilled 30 names, and one of them is valid, the Gestapo didn't care about the other 29. In fact, in such situations that's seen as a good; because it might terrify someone thinking about joining an underground group. See above about what torture is actually useful in doing.

I'm trying to figure out why "aberrancy" and "Aberration" feel like imperfect synonyms in my head. Nearest I've been able to come is that an aberration feels like a single data point that's off, while an aberrancy could refer to a whole herd of bad data.

Opinions?

Yeah, elves don't compress very well, which is why we don't ship them over the internet very often.

Cats Need Home

Can anyone here help, or know someone else who could?

OR

Elves are independent. They stick to the shallow end of the pool.

The link for help on Media Center gives https://webdav.mediencenter.t-online.de as the one to use, so it should be encrypted.

Lin D: In reference to encrypting data before uploading, I use a piece of software called TrueCrypt. It creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file. It looks like a file, albeit a rather large one, on my hard drive. It mounts like a drive, via TC software, and stores all my private files. It's Open Source, and further information can be found here:
truecrypt.org/

This looks interesting. I'm hoping to eventually get an iPad: unfortunately the documentation at the Truecrypt site doesn't appear to support iOS devices, which would seem to eliminate it from contention on that basis.

There are a number of reasons for it, but part of it is that a single volume/set of volumes being encrypted stands out.

Another is that if you choose to use the layered encryption, it's easier to hide something which you really don't want to show up.

The Ex came by last night to say her goodbyes, although I didn't know then that the end would be this soon.

The FG has informed me that she would like to be present for the procedure, and I appreciate her offer very much.

In happier news, the FG got to meet the parental units this past weekend, and we all spent some time at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. This is, apparently, one of the largest of its kind on the East Coast. I had no idea!

The sheep were, um, woolly. There were Jacob sheep, and Merino sheep as well as the usual mix. One could purchase wool, in various stages of refinement, or honey, woodcrafts, knitted products of all kinds, and so on.

The sheepdog demonstration was absolutely amazing. Those dogs are incredible. A good time was had by all, except the Son, who sulked a little bit. He hadn't earned his trip to the amusement park and considered the Festival to be rank punishment. He drowned his sorrows in Free Comic Book Day after we left the Festival.

I have vague recollections of a quote, probably from Joseph Conrad, to the effect that anyone can be a hero in a crisis, but it's much harder in daily living.

Does anyone know the original?

Hilarity ensues.

My retinas haven't actually detached yet, but they're shredding apart in place with blind spots in both eyes already. My return office examination isn't scheduled until a few days before my DMV license renewal would be due, so there's no way the latter is going to happen-- I'm not even guessing yet at an actual surgery date.

I'm mostly still in the stunned WTF stage, so here's my counter-apology if I seemed brusque due to even lower social interaction skills than usual :)

Also, a friend of mine is doing a sort of lifestyle art project involving OKCupid. She's kept the messages she's sent and would like to know how weird they are. If you are between 20 and 40 and would like to help by reviewing all of them, and oh there are a lot, the survey is here. You may ignore the gender question if you wish; she didn't consider issues with it when she wrote the survey.

The student essay I'm commenting on has a hypothetical person who is supposed to be exclaiming, "Geez!" What made it onto the page: "Geese!"

Yeah, I know, mucking around with the eyeballs sounds somewhat squicky. I was a little freaked when I was first diagnosed with cataracts. Since then I've had the lenses replaced in both eyes, and I can see again (driving was starting to get, um, exciting). And the operations were quick, and it only took a few days to adjust to my new vision. So try not to let the squick bug you too much.

My mom had gotten her driver's license renewed recently before her vision problems started, so she had a few years that she could legally still drive, and could be reasonably safe in the daytime, though her night vision went first. That made it easier for her to move out of her house to an apartment on a bus route within walking distance of a grocery and drugstore, and it was only a mile from where she'd lived so she could keep up her social connections and activities. She can still read, with magnifying glasses and bright lights, but it's a lot more trouble than it used to be (and unfortunately, she doesn't like audiobooks - she likes reading books that are actual books, which you actually read.)

Julie: Ouch, that sucks -- do what you can to save your vision! And remember that modern eye surgery falls squarely (spheroidically?) under "we're living in the future"....

Julie L.: Sympathies for the vision loss and the icky surgery.

And in other news: my cat, Freya, has had three episodes of cystitis in about four weeks. Seems to be idiopathic (no evidence of crystal formation or infection, although she's on antibiotics at the moment in case), probably stress-related (I've been away a lot recently at conferences/meetings). We've decided to accept that she's prone to this*, have started her on Cystaid and she'll have a course of Cartrophen shortly.

I've thought about a water-circulating drinker to encourage her to drink more, but she doesn't like the plastic one we borrowed (won't go near it) and anyway, except when she's got the cystitis she drinks just fine. I might try a ceramic one I've seen online where the water bubbles out at the top like a (human) drinking fountain on low, then goes over some ripples to the bowl at the bottom; it's supposed to be quite quiet, and it's ceramic, like the mugs she usually drinks from (we have several for her: on my bedside locker, bathroom windowsill, near her cat grass in my office, living room and now on my desk as well).

At least she's getting less upset about being given pills (I give her a treat afterwards, although she'll still only take that from several feet away from me).

* We'd hoped she'd grown out of it, having had two or threeprevious episodes but none for about two years.

Julie--Aiiieeee! In your shoes I think I'd be too busy freaking out over the diagnosis to be squicked by the surgery--just yet. Not that it's not squick-worthy or anything because--let's just pop those eyeballs out and look under the hood and tinker a bit, shall we? Ooook. Double ooook. I hope they are able to work this out soon, and that the results are all you could hope for.

dcb--Bless her little furry heart. If nothing else, the fountain can be a new Fun Toy.

Ginger: Sympathies also. It's hard, but it's also a blessing to be able to take care of one's furry friend in a choiceful manner, and with loving support as well. Hope the passing over the Rainbow Bridge goes well.

In other news, I think today's Google doodle is exceedingly cool.

Julie: I share in your overall squick at the thought of Someone Mucking About with My Eyes, and am sorry for your difficulties, but cheered by the thought that it is treatable.

(personal anecdote follows; skip as desired: I had my eyes [mostly] uncrossed when I was 7 and am really glad it was done while I was a child; I fear that if I had been much older I'd've spent some time wrestling with intellectual discomfort. As it was, I have few memories of the surgery or hospital stay. One eye still turns in slightly, especially when I'm tired, and my binocular vision sucks [one of the many reasons I do not drive]. I'm generally supportive of things which allow us to retain our senses, even if we have to go through some form of heck to get there.)

dcb: that sounds like an interesting fountain; please come back and tell us if/how the cat likes it. I'd love to use a fountain for my cat (early stage kidney disease), but all the ones I've seen run on a cord, which is not practical given the places I'd put the fountain and the locations of plugs in my apt.

Ginger -- my condolences AFAIK it never gets any easier -- my cats will use a Drinkwell, but prefer a real table fountain(!) to the Drinkwell. My guess is that they like the forbidden. Dare I mention the attractions of an aquarium?

Mom's Yorkie, Isis, is being spayed today. We got her for Mom at Yule. Fairytail Yorkies retired her from breeding, and placed her with us, where she loves having her own person.

Elves are consecrated, so they get to go the the secret cons as well.

Elves are impotent, they have no power over imps.

Elves are adamantine, they are big fans of Adam Ant.

Ginger: My condolences. Sometimes there's nothing to do but make the most compassionate choice you can.

I was surprised too, at what a long tradition it is here in MD -- even on the Eastern Shore -- for sheep, wool and weaving. There are several local weavers right here, who even raise their own sheep.

We are leaving MD tomorrow, permenantly re-locating back home in NYC. This has been one of the most wonderful experiences of our lives, living here, and we feel so privileged in every way to have had it, and been able to share it. The good thing is that most of the new friends will be coming to NYC frequently.

Love, C.

In happier news, Google is animated about Martha Graham's birthday today. Catch it before it disappears!

They are also imperious, in that they can serve on a jury with imps, and imperative, in that they repeat what imps say without understanding it.

My Fabulous Girlfriend helped hold her, and when not holding the cat, hugged me. We showed her body to the other cats, so they would understand. Brady came out of his napping spot in the sun to sniff Kedgie, then lay back down. Cleo, being a kitten, seemed less interested. I wrapped her body in a bit of old bedding that she once had shared with me, and took her to the crematory. I'll take her ashes to my parents' house, just as I have done with all the other cats, and spread her ashes on the flower beds.

The irony is that elves are also impaired.

For every elf there is a matching imp, and they always turn out to be possessed of entwined destinies, like some high/low fantasy slash buddy movie. There they are, two unlikely characters thrown together by destiny and nature, forever misunderstanding each other, falling in and out of sympathy and courtrooms, until finally they surrender to the inevitable and wind up in bed, whereupon the imps discover to their disgust that comment 561 is correct.

Eye surgery is one of those things that seems oogy for most people, because we're sensitive about our eyes. It's mainly the corneas that are sensitive to touch, so other ocular and peri-ocular surgeries are not reported to be painful. I've done implant surgeries and cataract removal surgeries, under general anesthesia because my patients wouldn't understand the need to hold still; they've recovered with no signs of pain or distress.

Your kind of surgery will probably be one of those with general anesthesia, mainly because of the need to reach the posterior pole, so you might not even have any discomfort. The procedure has been around for a few years, so there's good data on the safety and relative lack of potential complications.

The gnomes in the glass tower, while usually generous in the face of others' innovation, have conceived a great envy of humans' invention of pharmaceuticals. They tend to get grumpy about posts that remind them of the variety of medications we've managed to create.

I can hear the imprecations now.

Obi wan Kenobi is dead

Elves are ineffable. Aesop did not write about them at all.

So, if the imp/elf pairs are entangled, that means that there's a giant walking tree with one in each branch. (Actually, each ent has a certain number of shells which it fills as ent/elf pairs become available.)

Exactly. And what confused Treebeard so much was that Merry and Pippin were both the same size, even before he figured out that they could communicate and had never been impanelled*.†

-----
* Actually, they had, but not on a jury. It involved the wainscoting in Brandy Hall, and was generally dismissed as the kind of boyish hijinks that young hobbits get into. However, the incident was more widely known in the pointy-eared communities, and is one reason that imps never appear in LOTR. And why all of the elves they meet are so very friendly.

† This is me Not Speculating About how their little subplot ended. Not Speculating At All, No Siree.