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If people post something in plain text, then they should stick to regular ASCII characters. If stories are posted in HTML, then the software ought to make the conversion from some company's private scheme to standard HTML values, using ampersands and such if it is not standard ASCII. The software should do this tranparently, but given that the file passes through several hands between writing, editing, and posting, it may take some conscious intervention. I've not read much beyond Dom Luca's stories here, but I've not noticed the problem, and I always come here using Safari. Maybe your problem just comes up with some authors, so that the transfer process might be examinined in their case. In this paragraph, I'm trying some stuff just for grins, so it may show as gibberish. As for “curly quotes” or even foreign tongues such as Εν αρχη ην ο λογος. Apparently ampersand commands work in messages. and the Greek letters and curly quotes show up fine in Safari. Anybody using later browsers on other platforms should see this fine, too, unless they've chosen as a default font something missing the appropriate Unicode characters.

I recall that when I'd come home for breaks during grad school, my parents and I would drive each other nuts. The two happiest moments of each visit was when I arrived and when we said goodbye. They're great people, and we've never disagreed about much. I hope they don't ever have to move in with me, but I think we'll handle things better in that case than we did when I was 23. It looks sort of like now that if they can't take of each other, they will be past my taking them in either, but we'll see.

I've not used IE 7 myself, but from what I read it is supposed to be more compliant with web standards than IE 5 and IE 6 are. In doing pages that use CSS for layout and such, many sites include all sorts of workarounds to get those versions to display things properly. There are whole chapters of books written on the topic. I don't know what the final version will include, but the betas don't support most of the bugs in 5 or 6, and hence they don't support the workarounds. The workarounds don't bother Firefox or Safari, though, so maybe if IE 7 gets even more compliant with web standards after beta, then some of those old pages will work OK. What won't work are the pages that depend upon the bugs in some particular version. This board uses Javascript heavily and doesn't seem to depend upon CSS. I haven't heard what the Javscript support is like in IE 7, so that may mean it is not a lot different from 6 in that regard, and so this board may not be affected that much. But, yes, somebody should test the board in IE 7 along as it evolves.

If it is a normal accent for the locale, then nobody in the story, at least natives, will hear an accent at all. Maybe make local concessions for vocabulary. Is the evening meal called "dinner," "supper," "tea" (I think that may be Australian), or what, in the regular speech of the characters? If one opens a bonnet, is it to prepare to kiss a girl or to fix an engine? Then there are idioms. (Can we use the word "pissed" on this forum? Would the character be angry or drunk?) I recall an old movie that took place on a ship. The steward in his British accent asked a young lady passenger, "What time would you like to be knocked up?" Oh, and I like XK's idea of using dialect spelling to indicate that the charcter is incomprehensible to the listener in the story. Quoting things in the original Klingon should be used sparingly. As for "all y'all," some real Southerners use that as an intensive plural: "All y'all come" could mean not just to bring the immediate family, but bring along the whole neighborhood and distant cousins. I think the most annoying accent to me is that of some folk from Ohio. They are nice people, but their speaking voice affects me like fingernails on a blackboard. No spelling of words would convey that.

There's a danger in trying to immitate a style of speech that is not your own. People who haven't spent a lot of time in the South often get the usage of when one would say "y'all" and when one might use other variants, for example. If you get it wrong, it sounds terribly phony to a native speaker, even if you don't do the stupid Hollywood trick of using "y'all" in the singular. And then there are the microregionalisms. Your story may be set in Georgia, but the people sound like they're from Tennessee, so you keep wondering when and why they moved, but the author never tells you. The author may not have a clue about the difference, and not realize there's some 'splainin' to do, Lucy.

If he didn't have occasion to be a homophobic jackass, he would just find something else to be a jackass about. Even if you don't have somebody like that in your own family, somebody for sure will marry into a family with one. You're lucky if your relative doesn't marry that person rather than just someone related to them, even luckier if the relationship is distant enough that you don't have to see the person ever again after the wedding.

One of the reasons that people don't like their photos and think they don't look like them is that the pictures are backward. We see ourselves in the mirror, and so photos always look wrong. Also, in the mirror I have more hair. I can't explain that. With digital photos of me, by the time I finish with them in Photoshop, I have still more hair. Another matter is of perspective. Portraits look the most natural and perhaps the most flattering when they are taken with lenses in the 85 to 100 mm rangs (35 mm film eqivalent). In other words, for a head shot, get a little further away and zoom in a moderate amount. Look at the top picture. The camera is definitely too close and the features are exaggerated. He still looks cute as hell in the picture, and maybe the distortions emphasize the "cuteness" factor. Compare the perspective of the face in the second picture. The shot is a bit fuzzy, but it still shows him as more handsome than cute. So much for today's photo lesson.

It didn't take me that long. Maybe none of my projects are such that they need a lot of profound thought.

As I think over the gay men whom I know well enough to know their family, I can't think of anyone with older brothers.

That's a strangely idisyncratic way to define your terms to frame the debate. Usually in Nature-Nurture debates, the former is a reference to heredity and the latter to environment. The environment in the womb is still environment, so this study argues on the nurture side. Choice is another matter altogether. Whether you have "gay" genes, or whether mommy's immune system got tired of dealing with boys and started attacking their masculinity, or whether your absent or abusive father "made" you gay, that doesn't mean you chose any of that. People don't choose whom they are attracted to. Some people are just not your type. You may recognize that they are very good-looking people, but for some reason you aren't really attracted to them, even if they are of the sex which you prefer. And then sometime someone whose appearance leaves a lot to be desired will create some sort of spark. As far as I know, no one really understands why for any of this, other than some Freudian psychobabble. People do choose their actions. We don't pursue everyone whom we find attractive. And people marry for reasons that have nothing to do with attraction.

There are cultures that consider seventh sons very special. Now we know how special.

At the very least the prosecutor of the 8-year-old should be added to the sex offenders registry.

With Narnia, it's the author who leaves you wondering.

Also, Thomas Merton was killed when he touched a badly grounded fan after he got out of the bath.

Ignoring, of course the possiblity that blue looks great on you, too, or the good chance that everything does.

Color perception is completely subjective and has a lot to do with context. Blue looks great on me, so if I saw you wearing blue and you saw me wearing blue, blue might look better to you than it does to me.

Go down to the FCX and get a bag of Purina RSS Chow. It's a bit dry, though.

Getting the questions right often invovles more effort than getting the answers.

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."

I've met a few folk from Seaford, DE, (per second video) and they seemed like neat folk.

A friend of mine is against gay marriage. I guess he's really against all marriage, as a legal status, not the religious and commitment parts. He doesn't see any reason why people should get tax breaks for having sex. As for guacamole, I've never tried using cumin or cilantro, but I think I might try one or the other some time.

But even if you can't (or don't need to) do any of these things yourself, you can still benefit from receiving PDF files that others have done. And nowadays, magazines and such are going to a PDF workflow, so a lot of the things you see only in print form came to you via that process.

Something a bit more subtle is when a guy mentions his "partner." And then I want to ask, "Are you a lawyer or do you have a small business." But then, sometimes his partner is also his "partner." And does it make a difference if you are in Texas?

Maybe your gaydar is pretty good. Maybe panic and fear are why the guy is such a homophobe, or maybe he thinks he needs to act like one to stay in the closet. Or maybe he thinks you're cute, and that's the only way he can cope with temptation. Or maybe not. But be suspicious if he doth protest too much. That doesn't change his availablity, though, at least in the short run.

PDF files allow documents to look and to print exactly as they looked to the persons who prepared them. Complex vector graphics can be included, so that drawings, charts, graphs, etc., will print out at the full resolution of whatever printing device is used, from your desktop inkjet to the highest quality commercial machine. Documents can have fonts imbedded so that you can use whatever fonts you like in the document without worrying whether the recipient has exactly the same version of that font. Let's say that you want a map in your document. You can draw it in, say, Illustrator, using the Carta font for the various map symbols, interstate and US highway signs, etc. In a PDF, you don't have to worry that the recipient has to have the Carta font or have software that will open your graphics file. Your map will print out at the full resolution of any printer, and the recipient can view it on screen and zoom in close to a small section, and it will still look good. Alternatively, you could use a humungous bitmap file that would be limited to whatever resolution you made it and would look really crappy zoomed in on the screen (and maybe not even so hot zoomed out). Or let's say that you've written some music for a friend to use. The friend doesn't have the same music notation software as you, nor the music fonts. With a PDF, you can email him a file that he can see on screen and print out at the highest quality of whatever printer he uses. I did this last year, wrote an arrangement for a full band for a friend. In the end I sent him two PDF files, one 200k file of the full score and a 1 MB file with all of the instrument parts. There was never a need to mail a hard copy. He printed it all out on a laser printer, and I'm sure it came out looking great. The practical alternatives to PDF are Plain Old Text and .doc files. If all you want to convey is the message itself and no formating at all, then POT works great, such as the contents of an email. If you want some formating and maybe some pictures, too, then most people have something on their computer that can read .doc files. You can stick to fonts you know just about everybody has (Times New Roman, Arial, Wingdings, Comic Sans whatever, etc.) and avoid the more obscure features of the lastest version of Word, and most people will see pretty much what you see when you look at the file. The line breaks and such may not be exactly the same, but you don't particularly care, else you would have sent a PDF. A little more obscurely, PDF files can be password-protected in various ways. Say you send somebody a contract and you don't want them changing it before they sign it, then PDF is one way to do that. Adobe Reader is a bit cumbersome and takes some getting used to. But it's free, and everybody has it, or should. But this is great! This is the most negative thing I've ever seen you write.