Rigel

Your Linguistic Profile: 45% Yankee 25% General American English 15% Dixie 10% Upper Midwestern 0% Midwestern My big kvetch is that there's a lot of New Yorker in my speech, which the poll doesn't get, but who am I to complain?. But it's good to know that all my years in Maryland haven't spoiled my native Yankee-ness.

Yeeeeehah! (Congrats)

I'm not sure that a story dealing with themes of pedophilia and abuse qualifies as "no sex."

LB-- It was great having dinner with you last night. Sorry to hear about your asthmatic reaction--I'm subject to the same problems, and I've become deathly allergic to cats, which give me asthma to the point where I can't breathe. (Remind me not to visit you in your house.) The first time I had an acute reaction like the one you describe (thinking I needed a trip to the emergency room at 3 a.m.), I was visiting friends in Virginia. (We could talk about their red-headed kid, but we won't.) It was a combination of mold and cats. Fortunately, they had an inhaler handy to give me First Aid with, and now I've got an Albuterol inhaler of my own for just such circumstances. I usually try to avoid cat houses, or at least to sit on unupholstered chairs when I do visit one. Hopefully, it's the mold and not the cats, but you need to take serious asthma like that VERY seriously. I hope my allergy isn't contagious. Mrs. Rigel (who asks me to point out that she's technically a concubine rather than a Mrs.) is also a serious asthmatic, and her hunch is that it's the mold or possibly dust. Or the carpet. --Rigel

One technical issue to point out: When I read most stories here (using Macintosh OS X, Safari), quotation marks and apostrophes disappear entirely. I've gotten used to interpolating them in my head, but they're not there on the screen. It may have to do with the fact that "curly" apostrophes and quotation marks map differently on Windows machines than on Macintoshes. --Rigel

Macintosh; Safari

Welcome home, LB. Hope your wireless connection problems work out. Good luck with everything from sleeping off the jetlag to purchasing the new car. And I wonder if any of your fellow passengers on that flight are puzzling over why their luggage now bears cat-claw marks? --Rigel

There's some interesting medical thought that it's not merely the high total amount of sodium in your diet that leads to high blood pressure, but the balance with potassium. Consider salt substitutes (sometimes marketed as "Lite Salt") containing potassium chloride (KCl) instead of sodium chloride (NaCl). Increase your potassium by eating bananas or potatoes and drinking orange juice. Glad to hear your feeling better recovering from the pneumonia. Now just get your blood pressure under control. --Rigel

And not inviting me If you're willing to cross the Potomac ... (It's not really Yankee troops that are a problem--it's the danged heavy traffic 24/7.) --Rigel

When the folk music makers get together, we bring significant others, of the other or the same gender (we don't care). If Vance brings Sammy, he'd be far more welcomed than Velveeta and brussels sprouts. --Rigel

Vancer, Vancey-pants, and Sex Pot are all viable options! Think if we invite Vance down for a visit, he'd join us? Particularly if we refrain from calling him Vancey-pooh? On the other hand, it being summer, maybe we should all go up to visit him in the relative cool of New England. It's interesting--on one of my other lists, members of the on-line forum community have actually gotten together in real life with regular frequency. It's fun to meet people who share your interests. Of course, those are folk musicians, none of whom are in the closet. The gatherings have included people from California to Maine, from Canada, from Iceland, from England, even from Alaska. --Rigel

Anytime, LB--I'm even closer than Drew--just a short trip down Route 29. (I don't know where in Maryland Sharon is.) If you need an escape from the neurotic 'rents, me and my other half can serve as laid-back Uncle and Aunt. We'll put the kettle on for tea, if you like, though I'll probably brew myself some good coffee. --Rigel

Nobody calls them phosphates anymore. In the old days, drug stores had soda fountains, and while the whole serving counter came to be called a fountain, the actual fountain was a tap for mixing carbonated water with syrups. In the original days, the syrups were medicinal, but for the last century or so, the syrups were merely flavors. The water was carbonated by mixing it with sodium carbonate (or soda), making soda water, the fizzy stuff also known as seltzer or 2-cents-plain. The soda water got shortened to "soda" and became the generic term for the soft drink. I am ancient enough to remember the days of soda jerks at drug store fountains, humans who would actually mix your soda for you. In high school, I was fond of combinations such as cherry lemon cokes and cherry vanilla root beers. The soda fountain I frequented also did ice cream concoctions, such as frosteds (a Connecticut term--they were frappes in Massachusetts and mile shakes in the rest of the U.S., but in Southern New England, milk shakes were something else made without ice cream). They also made sundaes. Dusty sundaes had a topping of malt, which you could also add to the frosted or milk shake to make a chocolate malt(ed). And because enough New Yorkers frequented our area, they could also make egg creams, which contain neither eggs nor cream. Then there were phosphates. A strawberry phosphate would be made of carbonated soda water, strawberry-flavored syrup, and phosphoric acid. Nowadays, my favorite is a Dr. Brown's (diet) Black Cherry, a soda brand you'll probably only find in the Northeastern U.S. My absolute favorite is true Coke--the Coca Cola Classic with Kosher for Passover certification, which is made with real sugar rather than corn syrup, but since real coke contains too many calories, I've discovered Coke Zero tastes more like real Coke than Diet Coke does, and is an acceptable substitute. --Rigel

Mazel Tov! (or however you say that in French!) --Rigel

Happy Birthday (better late than never)

Joy & Woe are woven fine --William Blake

Growing up in Connecticut, I learned to call it "soda". I got used to my Midwestern friends and roommates asking for "pop." When I lived in the Boston, Mass. area, I got used to looking for the aisle with "tonic" (now there's a REAL regionalism for you!) Depends where you're from, and whatever other family and ethnic influences you grew up with. My Mother was from New York, so I had even more New York-isms in my speech than others in my native area. (Actually, there is no equivalent term for an "egg-cream" outside of New York.) Not to mention Yiddishisms, which still pepper my language, becuase "munchies" doesn't graph onto reality quite the same way as "nosherai." --Rigel

Maybe your treatment at the hands of the Taiwanese post office is payback for bad karma for the way you left us all at the end of Chapter 11 of SOOTB. Chapter 12 had better be up Saturday night! Otherwise more bad things will happen. And send this note to five friends to assure good luck. :-). --Rigel

What you and Sam need to do is work on your singing together, so you can sing duets in harmony. It'll help pass the time on any road trip. Don't say you're tone-deaf! I've met very few people who can't sing well once they've put their minds to it. That said, interesting programs are available on radio all the way from Albany to Maine, so if you don't have a good book-on-tape or CD to listen to, try the stations at the bottom end of the FM dial. --Rigel

"ChinaBlock" in Washington, D.C. is pretty puny, and I wouldn't count on much there. Better to shop in San Francisco's Chinatown, if your layover is long enough. --Rigel

That would be fun, though Mr. Lawton is his imaginary friend, which I suppose could lead to its own set of Zany Hijinx. Or something like that. The ears are a dead giveaway, unless we want to postulate some sort of horrible mechanical rice picker accident.-Dan I imaginged Mr. Lawton to be REAL, and the confusion with the imaginary friend is all in the protagonist's brain, which sets up the dramatic tension which can drive the story. --Rigel

I think you've got the start of a character-driven short story here. The plot can be a simple one--the protagonist has to learn that Mr. Lawton is not identical to his imaginary friend, and that projecting qualities of his imaginary friend onto Mr. Lawton leads to an embarrassing discongruous situation. --Rigel

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:rrPRB...n&client=safari is a google cache of the story from The New Yorker and http://www.justusboys.com/members/blogs/104432/ contains the whole story, including the first two introductory paragraphs that were in the version printed in Close Range but not included in the New Yorker version.

This is a fascinating thread, because Lurker and I were having a discussion a couple of weeks ago about the completeness/incompleteness of the Human Condition, which she recommended on her blog. I stayed up way too late a couple of nights running to read it--an absolutely great story that should be on your must-read list--and came to the conclusion that it was functionally complete from any storytelling criterion. The characters had reached stasis and a logical conclusion, and that while readers might want to know more about them, there were no cliffhangers or even issues that needed to be resolved. (The parallel story was Grasshopper's Just Hit Send, which has also reached a funcitonal conclusion, even though Jamie returns to those characters from time to time and develops them further; continuing chapters function as complete anecdotes within themselves.) It's nice to see the author herself weigh in on this. Here's hoping Jayne will find the time and inspiration to tell us further tales of Joe and Mike, even though their tale is reasonably complete. --Rigel

I grew up in Connecticut, where it was soda, but when I lived in the Boston area, I got used to looking for the supermarket aisle for "tonic". You'd also find tonic at the local "spa" (a small "mom-and-pop" grocery store, akin to a locally owned 7-11). Because of my proximity to New York, I was used to egg creams and dusty sundaes (ice cream with malt powder on top). Now the drink that's a real local identifier in New England is the one made with a scoop or two of ice cream, some chocolate syrup, and milk, and then mixed with a blender. Much of the rest of the United States calls this a "milk shake", but in Connecticut, it was a "frosted", in Rhode Island, a "cabinet", and in Massachusetts, a "frappe". --Rigel