glomph

Interesting. I didn't know that was used down there, too. I've only heard it from one family from up in the hills, so I assumed it was an expression from there.

Like how to play fizzbin.

During my college years I worked at a job one summer with a crew of other collge guys. We'd all take our lunch break at the same time, right after one of us said, "Squeet."

As I understand it, I'm too prolific to be cool.

I had never heard of a "bubbler" until I read it in the other thread. From its history, it's a wonder that they didn't call it a "water Kohler."

I think I've read all 1000 posts, or maybe I missed the first few before I got here. I was about to ask if that would win me some recognition, but I realize that reading them was its own reward.

It's not just any ole summer shower. It's one that happens when the sun is shining. I've heard the expression all my life. I've never heard anyone say it as if they thought they would be taken seriously. As often as I'd hear someone say, "I'm fixin' to . . .," I'd hear, "I'm a-fixin' to . . . ." And I've heard the humorous procrastination, "I'm a-fixin' to commence to start."

45% Dixie 45% General American English 5% Yankee 0% Midwestern 0% Upper Midwestern That makes sense, except how did that 5% get in there? Maybe it was the trip to New York a couple of weeks ago. I have good friends of long standing from the Midwest. I guess I understand their expressions, but they've not rubbed off on me. With a much longer test, they could have been more specific results, using such questions as, What do you call a submarine sandwich? What do you call a small tomato such as the ones they put on salads? If you call a small tomato, does the vegatable respond to you? (Sorry, had to throw that one in for Zappa fans.) If you don't say "y'all," how do you stress that you are using the second person plural? Is there an intensive form you use (analogous to "all y'all")? How many distinct meanings do you use for the word "poke"? What do you call the small storage compartment on the right side of a car's dashboard? Do you pronounce "-n't" as a distinct, semi-accented syllable, as in "could-dent"? How do you say the first syllable of "orange"? And then there could be a series of questions that zero in on when and how you pronounce the letter "r." Etc., etc. I've never heard "get down" used in either of those ways. I would take it as a disco expression, or advise on what kind of sleeping bag to buy. This reminds me of the very different UK and US meanings of getting knocked up. I would take "Catty corner" and "Cat-a-corner" to be the same expression, just spelled differently. Unless I were trying to articulate the difference, I'd say them the same. When I say it, I have no spelling in mind.

They ought to be able to relate to each other because they both get to put on outfits and be someone else.

It's very "high concept" as they say. The title has tested so well that they planned the first sequel months before the film even opened. I don't recall what is next. "Snakes on a Train" is more euphonious, but "Snakes on a Ship" would probably work better. Maybe before long the trilogy will be out in a boxed set, and you watch the Director's Cut. Personally, I'd go see a film called "Raccoon on a Space Shuttle."

Mathematica has been around for quite a while. The Mac version came out in 1989, and it has been on my wish list ever since, though now I'm not really doing anything that would benefit from it. Back when I was actively programming sounds on my Yamaha DX7, it would have simplified my life a lot (or maybe complicated it, since I would have been able to do so much more). In theory I think I could have done some incredibly complicated Excel spreadsheets instead, but they always seemed as much work to put together as just going through life doing a lot of trial and error with a calculator. Maybe when I retire I could take a part-time job teaching at a community college, or something and get faculty rates on it. As for Schroedinger, Lucy would have been even more upset if he had had another obsession on top of Beethoven.

Dez, a couple of cool things abour UNIX on a Mac: 1) You can completely ignore it and just interact with the Mac interface and let it control the UNIX underneath. 2) You can open the terminal and do UNIX stuff without rebooting or anything while all the Mac stuff is still running. Drag-and-drop works between the two: IOW, if you don't want to type out a file path in the terminal, you can just drag a file or a folder to the terminal window, and it will fill in the path for you.

That should take care of the population problem and reduce long-term demand for petroleum.

I went to Stanford for a summer workshop about the time you were potty trained. I had a Mac and a PC on my work table. Shortly after I returned home, I bought a Mac and have been using them ever since. My desktop tower is about 4 years old, and my iBook is less than a year old. I'll probably replace the tower in a couple of years (with another Mac), but for now, it runs fine in the latest version of the OS, Photoshop, Office, etc., etc. Disk-intensive things seem a little slow in the iBook, but not enough to motivate me to change the drive (5400 RPM) for a faster one. I gave most of my tips in my earlier post. I don't really want to try to sell you on getting a Mac, but from what you say, I don't see any downside in your situation, and I don't think you'd regret getting one. Apple sells about 12% of the laptops in the US these days. I think you'd be happy with a MacBook. The black one costs $200 more than the top white one. The hard drive is slightly bigger, but you're paying most of the $200 for the color. I like the white ones better anyway, and you can upgrade the hard drive if you order from the web site or do a custom order at an Apple store, and some others. And do go ahead and get 1 GB of memory for any of the new (Intel) Macs. There's a "Student and Teacher" version of MS Office that's much cheaper and doesn't leave anything out of significance. I've never had any problems exchanging Word or Excel files with PCs. If you use Access on PCs, though, there is no Mac version. MS makes their Mac apps work well with Filemaker Pro, supposedly.

Supposedly Dell's service has significantly worsened in the last year or so. I have no experience myself. A friend says you do better if you can speak Hindi. I did have some odd experiences with their web site. I was supposed to get prices on a Dell as a low-cost option for the office. I never could get the same deal twice. I think the site is geared for impulse purchases. And by the time I'd add what I considered basic stuff, a $700 Dell started running over $1600. So good luck. What you want depends upon what you want to do. If you want every ounce of performance out of games, you don't want a laptop anyway, and as Drew said, you don't want a Mac, unless you get an Intel Mac and run Windows when you want to play games. Or if you are a real estate agent in Colorado. If you want to make music, edit movies, etc., then you want a Mac. If you just want to surf the web and do email and chat, it doesn't much matter. There are books for people switching to the Mac. The people I know who have done it have not had much to get used to. I'd suggest you get a two-button mouse since you're used to that. Apple's new meese can be configured to work either way. But the laptops have one button with the track pad. To "right-click" with a one-button mouse, you hold down the CONTROL key. That's the main thing you need to know, other than using the COMMAND key (with an open apple and a cloverleaf) for the times you used the CONTROL key on a PC. Otherwise, the basic commands are the same since MS adopted most of the basic Apple key combinations, but didn't have a COMMAND key. Oh, and programs don't quit on a Mac just because you closed a window. With modern memory management, there's not much point in quitting a program anyway. My laptop is an iBook, the last model they made. It was replaced by the Mac Book, the Intel version. I would suggest that you get 1 GB of memory whatever you get. If you get a Mac Book or Mac Book Pro, I'd say that's the minimum. A PC that you're not going to do much with and don't plan to update the OS next year should do fine with 512MB. Unless you get an old Pentium or something, gigahertz is not going to matter a lot. Any of the more modern chips at 1.5 GHz or faster will be plenty fast for most people. Most of the new Intel chips are dual core, and that speeds things up (except with the home version of Windows XP, I think). 80 GB should be the absolute minimum for a hard drive if it's your only computer. You'll want to archive old files you don't need all the time on to DVD and take them off the hard drive in any event. I doubt you need a double-layered DVD unless you are going to be making movies that run over an hour and burning them to DVD. But they are becoming common, so don't reject getting one. You can still burn single-sided discs and CDs in them.

I've never heard of it being performed any other way. I saw it on Broadway years ago. Seems like the guy was nude for a major part of the play.

I've just read one of the stories so far, but I do want to go ahead and add my thanks to Kitty, Luigi, and the authors. I know I'll eventually read them all. I'll check out Kevin's reviews to help me decide what order to read them in (based mostly on what kind of story I think I'm in the mood for). So thanks also to Kevin in advance.

Tom is also from Antarctica, and since the high school there is so small, he figures he must have known you in school, but doesn't recognize your married name.

A quick look at the list makes me wish I had about 6 months free and that you wouldn't mind a long-term houseguest who just sat around reading. Did you ever learn Ada? How do you arrange your books physically? I've had a bunch of custom bookcases built and am in the process of developing a room as my library. I'm gradually getting books in there, but I really need to decide what goes where before I get enough books to create a kind of gridlock, where randomly shelved books get in the way of putting books in the right place, whatever I decide "right" to be. Arrangement by subject matter seems to make sense, and I guess it's easy enough to get Dewey or LOC numbers from the ISBN. Then there's the idea of putting the art books on the bottom shelf and the little books that wouldn't hurt much if they fell on your head on the top shelf. Another idea would be to put the books you're most likely to look for on middle shelves and the ones you're trying to talk yourself into giving to the public library on inconvenient shelves. And then there is the method analogous to a computer hard drive, when you just put things where there is space and just have an index telling you where to find them. You probably would want to defragment multi-volume works from time to time. All these methods have something to say for them, and have different trade-offs of convenience in setting up vs. convenience in use. Thoughts or suggestions?

It would probably be worth $40 to me to be able to catalog my books that conveniently. These days, that's about the price of a lot of paperbacks, particularly computer books.

I just noticed that my anniversary is coming up soon, so that means you've been here just a few more weeks than I. Funny that I didn't take you for a newbie last August. You fit in right from the start.

Exactly.

I saw the title of this thread and thought someone here was telling us that he is dating columnist Anthony Paull.