"In short, to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae."

In order to pay the judgement against Westboro Baptist, a court has authorized seizing the church and Phelps' family law firm property. Now, there is a loophole stating that homes cannot be seized, and the Phelps family is going to argue, on appeal, that the church and law firm property are their home.

Nonetheless, it does mean that they, their church, and their law firm are bankrupt and *they* are now getting the feeling of being poked with the legal sticks.


(thanks to brithistorian for the information.)

For years, I've had this feeling (corroborated by conversations with others) that the financial markets were, in effect, filled with imaginary money, that existed as long as we believed in it. And I was dubious about working with imaginary money.

Today, the Federal Reserve Bank chairman said:

"Moreover, the adverse effects would not have been confined to the financial system but would have been felt broadly in the real economy through its effects on asset values and credit availability."

The *real* economy! It's admitted! 

(Now to go multiply the Dow Jones by the square root of -1 to make it all clear....)

(OK. There was a lot of other stuff too, but this requires remarking upon....)

Friday night: Orson, in San Francisco. Their duck fat fries surpassed Zuni's and have moved to the top of my Favorite Thin French Fries Ever list. (There was a place named Thrasher's in Baltimore's Harborplace that did great thicker fries -- research shows it still exists).  The sauce with the fries was not as good as some of the better ones I've had -- I point you specifically towards Frjtz, in San Francisco.

Saturday night: Chow, in San Francisco: Their fries are *really* good, especially with their Burger Royale (with cheese ;) ) on a baguette, and mayonnaise.

Sunday, daytime: Gregoire fries (to go with lunch brought to the housebound) -- these are also *damn* fine fried potatoes.

I don't think I've ever had this good a weekend for the skinny fried potato goodness.

The first dated printed work we have using movable metal type (from Gutenberg's press)?

An indulgence.*

A printer in Spain sold a bishopric there 18,000 indulgences, printed on fine paper, in 1498.  18,000! I am sure they cost a pretty penny, and I am also very sure that the printer was not being paid on a "We'll give you the money when we've sold them" basis.

While it's certainly true that there was venality in Church doings before the press (witness Chaucer, and many other complaints) it is worth noting that buying 18,000 indulgences from a printer puts a lot of pressure on the sellers of indulgences to recoup their costs.  (Rather different then when you had to write each by hand, on the spot (or a few in advance at a time) Leading to -- who knows ;) -- the sort of pressure tactics that a certain German priest objected to, amongst a host of other issues of theology or dogma.

Not a causative factor, those 18,000 indulgences (and their equivalents around Europe), but a possible contributing one.  And one I'd never even thought of, until today.





*all historical printing facts from this post are from Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, I & II, Cambridge University Press

For those of you who care about the linguistic drift in torture, and indeed, in the word in general, I refer you to this:

"A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties", by Edward Hirsch

brithistorian beat me to the posting punch ;), but here's the Order of the Stick tribute to Gary*.

(Any D&D players (or people who know about D&D) who aren't reading OOTS have a 500+ big strip archive of fun waiting for them. ;))



(FYI: When I checked it, it was timing out. I suspect you may need to try more than once, as lots of people are probably hitting that site.)

Gary Gygax has died.

There are a lot of gaming-related ways I could put that fact, but I'll leave it where it is.  (For those of you on my f-list who are not gamers, Gary was one of the creators of D&D, and, as a result, the entire role-playing-game hobby.)

Thank you, Mr. Gygax, for a whole lot of fun in my life.

From Daily Kos:

Stanford has decided to eliminate tuition fees for students whose families make less than $100,000 per year.  But, that's not all....if a family makes less than $60,000 per year, Stanford will pick up their room and board as well.  Why the change of heart?

The university is making the change in the wake of published reports last month that its endowment had grown almost 22 percent last year, to $17.1 billion. That sum had begun to attract attention from lawmakers who want wealthy institutions to do more to reduce tuition costs.

Now, alma mater o' mine, let's get to crescating that scientia, and excolaturing some more vitas rather than just your endowment, eh?


*Stanford is officially "Leland Stanford Jr. University", leading me to tease my high-school classmate who was Stanford-bound that if he got lucky, next he could go to a grown-up university**.

** He did. MIT, for graduate school.

...but I give credit to KFOG for including "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" in a Valentine's Day mix. ;)

Australian PM to officially apologize to "the Indigenous People of this land". (link to Dailykos, with text of apology.)

I finally saw it, last night, after deciding I wanted to see what the movie version of the Lego Star Wars game looked like. ;)

(And yes, that's actually the exact process. Played the game, wondered what the real version looked like.)

A few  thoughts from that experience:

1) There is something artistically unsatisfying (though perhaps inevitable) about the end of the prequels having what felt like a better-constructed end than the end of the series proper.  As a long-term advocate of what can be done w/out dialogue in film, I have to give him a thumbs-up for such a long ending montage sans words.

2) If the dialogue in that film was after Tom Stoppard script-doctored it, I think the original draft must have been destroyed in order to protect the sanity of future generations.

3) Ian McDiarmid did his valiant best, but couldn't save the movie. But man, did he try; and for low pay, too, since CGI scenery isn't as filling as real stuff, I bet.

Still, I'm glad I saw it; the little kid in me who fell in love with the first Star Wars movie is content.

"Let's not pick the day with a chance of hail to move the server, OK?"

Ask me a question. You'll get an answer. Will be truthful, if not helpful. ;)

(Comments screened, anonymous posting OK.)

"They were dancing, because that's what women do when left alone on an island with moisturizer"...

hat-trick.

"Sweetie, your feminist manifesto is on my underwear."

(aside from the well-known general aesthetic problem of SF, best exemplified by the title to this essay and the titles of short fiction by Samuel R. Delany and occasionally James Tiptree Jr., the Very Long Title)
Thanks go out to genderfur, with whom I lunched and discussed the beginnings of some of these thoughts, recently.

I've stopped reading Orson Scott Card; he got to me a long time ago as a person, and there was always something nagging at me about him as a writer -- I enjoyed some of what I read, but some of it really got on my nerves, and I couldn't figure out why.

Then I read John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer, which I have referenced in this journal before. And when I read that, I went "Ah, that's some of what I like, and some of what drives me absolutely bugfuck! I understand it now..."

And with that mystery solved, I felt much less compelled to read further.

Minor circumstances, oddities, and coincidences led me to do a bit of Heinlein rereading recently, and Heinlein's in the same category, for me, as Card -- I enjoy some of his work a great deal, and at other times he annoys the living daylights out of me.  It wasn't just the politics, though they certainly didn't help. It was something else.

And I think I've found it (and some other things along the way):
It may be a while before I read him again, now that I've got this puzzled out.

ETA: I corrected the author of the excellent Black and White Styles In Conflict. The authors of UNIX Shell Programming have more than enough fame on their own without my giving them credit for someone else's work. ;)

Take that, evolutionists! Now we have documentary evidence of dinosaurs and man co-existing! Look here! Clearly a baby dinosaur trying to eat from a pre-Noah's-Ark Christmas Tr....

waitaminnit...

firp. Ding. Blast. Back to the drawing board...

For the first time in a few weeks (work, injuries, Thanksgiving) I played soccer at lunch today.

Last night, I asked rednfiery, my marvelous massage therapist, to give my calves some attention, as they'd been bothering me.  They're fine. They came through beautifully.

My thighs, from deflecting a point-blank full-strength shot by one of the group's better players, sting a bit.
My lungs, from running more than I'm used to, have recovered now, but had their moments during the game.
And my chest -- well, it's not happy. You see, when you bring your hands up to protect your face, but the shot's a bit low, and so comes slamming into your hands on the way up, driving them into your chest, it *hurts*. A lot. 

On the other hand, by my own accounting, I blocked at least 5 shots that would otherwise have been goals. And demonstrated to myself that yes, I can still play the way I'm used to playing. I need to get my passing back on track, but that'll come.

A good day, for the most part. And only one moment* of athletomoral hypertrophy. ;)




*I don't care if you're "Used to play pro in the Mexican league and can dribble really well", and I don't care if you're "I like encouraging the weaker players" -- you do not play fancy loose-with-the-ball dribbling tricks right in front of your own goal and challenge the other team's weaker players to come get you. I nearly levelled you myself just to get the ball away from the damn goal.  Go up to the other end and play offense, please.