glomph

Not quite the same thing, and nothing to do with reading Italian recipes, but I thought My Neighbor Totoro was awesome. I didn't really get into it at first, but stuck with it, and it really won me over along the way.

I knew some farmers who claimed that a neighbor lady one spring asked if she could borrow some black plastic sheeting from them. They said they probably had some they could spare, but were curious and asked why she wanted them. She said that she was afraid that the extra hour of daylight would hurt her plants, so she was going to cover them for an hour each day after the time change. One interesting proposal is to leave the Eastern and Mountain time zones permanently on standard time, and put the Central and Pacific zones permanently on daylight time. Nobody would ever have to change their clocks at home, other than to set them. There would be in effect only two time zones in the US, and only two hours difference between the east and west coasts. It sounds so logical and would lessen problems and inconveniences, so naturally there is no chance of its being adopted. Can you get a watch that runs on sidereal time? I think I'll switch to that, maybe after I retire. One bonus is that I'd get an extra day a year, and the older I get the more attractive that sounds. Tivo could keep up with when TV shows come on, and I could watch them according to my own schedule. And I wouldn't have to reset the watch twice a year, since the sun is irrelevant to sidereal time. Instead, over the course of a year the hours of daylight would rotate completely around the clock, making it like an automatic continuously variable DST.

Can feel like it, too.

Tim McVeigh used that phrase when asked how he felt about blowing up the kids in the day care. He said they were "collateral damage." The physics term "moment of inertia" comes to mind.

And pray tell me why you'd expect Dale et. al. to be familiar with an urban dictionary? I remember when George H. W. Bush said that while he didn't have the big mo, he had the little mo. That was in the 1980 primary race, and he lost that, but was asked to be VP. In that context, it was short for "momentum."

I figured Manga had something to do with Italian recipes. I've watched a few episodes of "Gakuen Heaven," or however it is spelled. I can't say I completely followed it. (Yes, I did read the subtitles.)

And all of those meet on your toothbrush.

I would be a good listener, but I have entirely too much to say, and everything reminds me of something else, so the other person doesn't get much time till I come up for air. I guess I usually listen fairly well if they get a chance to say something.

I guess I've always thought of it as pronounced like the Russian word "mir," though I had no particular reason to assume that.

Or "a taco short of a combination plate" and the like. And then there are the euphemisms for one's sexual orientation, such as "playing for the other team."

Cream soda makes me gag. Vanilla Coke is almost as bad. Usually at a restaurant I'll order Diet Coke with a twist of lime. De gustibus and all that.

I've always thought "passed away" was rather weird. "He was there, and then he just sort of passed away," or whatever. "Passed on" makes a little more sense if you are wanting to suggest that someone went on to another life after this one. But we are so used to euphemisms that we expect them. My father was in intensive care, and after various systems started shutting down the emphasis for treatment was shifted to keeping him comfortable, and he was moved to a Hospice facility two weeks ago. That Saturday I got a call from them that I should drive over and pick up Mother because, the nurse said, "His breathing changed." As I was driving over to my hometown, I figured that must be some kind of euphemism, and his breathing had changed by stopping, but maybe she couldn't tell me that on the phone. But no, she actually meant what she said; and his breathing actually improved while we were there. The next day I went back over and he was a little more alert and responded by opening his eyes when we'd talk to him. I stayed at their house that night, and got a phone call from the nurse who told me that he had died. She didn't use any cutesy euphemism that I recall, and describe how a couple of them were with him as he gradually stopped breathing, very peacefully and without struggle. I guess he did sort of pass away after all, but I have avoided using the expression, on general principles. As for saying that someone "passed," I've only heard that from black folk in this area. That made it all the more confusing to me the first time I heard it, since the expression had another meaning when I was young. There was the book and the movie I Passed for White. I recall the movie being advertised on TV, but I was too young to go see it (or to want to). Some years later I read the book (for a Black History course, I think), and it was actually pretty good. It was based on a true story and was not as sensationalized as I would have expected. If a couple are literally sleeping together, that is a really intimate experience, and that sense is lost if you use it as a euphemism for having sex. My favorite use of a euphemism is in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe, where "euphemism" is used as a euphemism.

I recall some years back there was a discussion somewhere (church?) about practicing vs. non-practicing homosexuals, and someone made a crack about non-practicing vegetarians. Since then, if someone asks me if I'm a vegetarian, I'll say that I'm a non-practicing vegetarian.

That was my reaction exactly. I'm glad to see that. The story described above sounds like something I'd like, and I don't want to embark on something of the scale of C&C, certainly not anything by an unknown-to-me author.

I've been wearing white briefs ever since I quit wearing diapers. (But not the same pair, in case you were wondering.) I've not had any reason to change to another style. After all this time, something else would take some getting used to.

The more I find out about my ancestral heritage, the more Germans I find. Some of the lines I thought were probably English turned out to be German. The only line that is English (I think) is the one that passed down my y-chromosome. There was supposedly a Dutch great-great-grandmother, but she may have really been what we call "Pennsylvania Dutch," which really means German (Dutch as a corruption of "Deutsch"). The folks who might have been either French or German turn out to be Alsacian (so they were one or the other depending upon who had won what war at the time). That means I'm probably Jack Frost's cousin. The other predominant group of my ancestors were Scotch-Irish (now more politically correctly called Scots-Irish, a term never used by my family). The Germans and Scotch-Irish typically came in at Philadelphia and migrated southward from Lancaster Co., PA. I'm not really into genealogy, but I do find the results interesting when someone else does all the work and passes along information. There is very little ethnic consciousness as such, and the German part seems to come out only in some family recipes. Scotch-Irish characteristics have shaped white Southern culture, so we don't need any ethnic self-awareness for us to turn out that way. Also, the folks that wound up in the hills have been fiercely patriotic for a long time. They began producing ethanol from corn long before any oil crisis, in fact before the invention of the internal combustion engine, even. This led them to hold their Second Amendment rights as sacred also.

While I wasn't personally involved, I was aware of several examples of that at scout camp, and nobody seemed to treat it as anything unusual. Perhaps things are very different now, and maybe these activities would be considered gay today.

But they don't work too well for the victims. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is the way a central key to ethical behavior was said when I learned it as a kid. I know it's been said many times, many ways, and has become an old chestnut. But any system of ethics that leaves it out doesn't in any meaningful sense to me "work." I'll even put in a plug for the very simplistic-sounding "What would Jesus do?" If just the Christians could apply that in some serious way, our society would be quite different. I continue to marvel--sometimes out loud and sometimes at church--how so much of what passes for the Christianity is at odds with what Jesus taught and what he did. Sorry for getting too religious there. I now return you to your regularly scheduled philosophical discussion.

I can't bring myself to read Rand, but I was really moved by the movie The Fountainhead. Its influence on my thinking had some effect on how I've handled some things in life and career, and later in an off-the-wall way looked to Brian Kenney (QAF) as a sort of role model (except for the part with the cute young guys ). Rand's idea that the greatest good comes from each person's pursuit of self-interest does have some connection with reality, like Adam Smith's "invisible hand." But the practical application of that is not so straightforward. Do I know what's best for me, or even what I really want rather than need? Is there such a thing as "enlightened self-interest"? Do I prefer to pay for health care for other people and education for other people's children because I don't want to be exposed to TB (for example) or to live in a society with a bunch of idle, ignorant folk stealing my stuff, among other things? In a broader sense, if there is indeed an objective reality, is my perception of that reality in any way or degree related to it, and if so how would I know?

Me, too.

I have a prior commitment on those dates, so I'll miss this one. However, I was in Fort Worth during the SF event, FWIW.

Charlie Wilson's War was pretty good. It was entertaining, sometimes amusing, dealt with significant subject matter, and was loosely based on fact. They had fun with references to people whom we now know from different contexts, and reminded us a bit of how the Cold War mentality worked for good and ill, sometimes blinding us to our longer-term interests. Hanks, Roberts, and Hoffman gave performances that by themselves would make the film worth seeing. It's not a documentary, so don't assume that every detail is historically accurate, but you can learn something about the period and the present consequences of our actions and inactions then. The Zen master's story explains all. Some right-wingers are unhappy with anything that suggests that the fall of the Soviet Union came in part from any historical or economic factors other than Reagan's telling Gorbie to tear down a wall. And you probably don't want to take the kiddies along. But otherwise, I think a lot of people would enjoy the film.

Sandler plays some really sweet characters in decent to good movies when he's not in something stupid. Admittedly he's most successful in the latter, but there's no accounting for taste. Spanglish was a good film, and he has an appealing part in it. And I rather liked Fifty First Dates, though I could see how people might not care for it or be willing to do the massive amount of suspension of disbelief.

Those are good. They're moist and don't have so much dried fruit, so maybe some of the guys here who don't so much like fruitcake would find them tolerable. My grandmother was a really good cook, but her fruitcakes weren't very good. I was an adult before I discovered that there were fruitcakes I could enjoy, at least in small doses.

This time of year, anything you say will offend somebody. Right-wing Christians believe they are being persecuted by people who wish them "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" and atheists (at least the ones who emulate the right-wing Christians in style) are offended if you wish them "Merry Christmas." So I'm tempted to tell everybody, "I hope all of your holidays really suck, even the ones you don't observe." But, na