The Death of RAB?
Paul Ilechko
small part of the digital world (Jai Maharaj, Shambat, various
mainfestations of Gaza, Fangnail, Seymour Grass, Banerjee et al), there
doesn't seem to be anything left. I'm seeing a couple of posts a day, at
most. Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus, Francis,
Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say something
interesting !
As for me, currently reading the Grossman translation of Don Quixote.
It's a huge improvement over any previous version I've read, the quiet,
deadly humor really shines through.
Recently read Norman Douglas's South Wind, which seems to me to be
something that Fido would enjoy. It went absolutely nowhere, but the
ride was a joy.
Before that, volume 3 of Dunnett's Niccolo series, Race of Scorpions. If
Patrick O'Brien is the Jane Austen of historical fiction, then Dorothy
Dunnett is its Henry James. She writes with unparalleled subtlety for a
"genre" writer.
Paul.
jswa...@yahoo.com
Paul Ilechko wrote:
> Since I killfiled some of the noisier & more obnixous denizens of this
> small part of the digital world (Jai Maharaj, Shambat, various
> mainfestations of Gaza, Fangnail, Seymour Grass, Banerjee et al), there
> doesn't seem to be anything left. I'm seeing a couple of posts a day, at
> most. Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus, Francis,
> Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say something
> interesting !
Probably a lot of them are stuck, just like me, reading the newsgroups
through google. Which does not support kill-files, as far as I know.
So we can't filter out the cross-posting trollers. :-(
People get other lives ... and stop reading ...
but because of the level of garbage, new-blood is
not coming in to replace those who fade out.
Also there are probably a lot of other places a person can
go these days to discuss books.
If google would make it harder for trollers to cross post
(i.e. maybe just make it so it isn't a default option),
maybe RAB could come back.
Cheers,
John
Francis A. Miniter
Hi Paul,
I'm still here. I must admit that the newsgroup is going through a
quiet (?) period, at least as to books, with a lot of extraneous stuff
being discussed.
I have, but have not yet read, the Grossman translation. I am looking
forward to it, the old standards having become somewhat dry with time.
I am glad you are enjoying it. Quixote is one of the all time great
works. I find it amazing that in one of the world's earliest novels
there could be so much reflection on reading (Part I) and writing (Part
II). I think you just moved it up on my To Be Read list significantly.
Francis A. Miniter
Francis A. Miniter
> Since I killfiled some of the noisier & more obnixous denizens of this
> small part of the digital world (Jai Maharaj, Shambat, various
> mainfestations of Gaza, Fangnail, Seymour Grass, Banerjee et al),
> there doesn't seem to be anything left. I'm seeing a couple of posts a
> day, at most. Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus,
> Francis, Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say
> something interesting !
>
> <snip>
>
> Paul.
>
This response is unrelated to the first. In reading Harry Potter VI,
recently, the initials RAB become significant. One finishes the book
wondering to whom they belong. So, when I saw that Subject matter of
this thread, my mind went back to the HP series. I have quickly looked
through the early volumes, but as yet can find no one with those
initials. Has anyone else been reflecting on this aspect of the story?
Francis A. Miniter
francis muir
There's always the question whether Paul meant Francis or francis.
just in case
ff
rms
Bush got elected. It's a good indicator to the bored grasping hopeless
cynics Americans have become.
>Somebody, say something interesting !
No can do. But here are a few recent books:
_The Barrakee Mystery / The Lure of the Bush_, Arthur W. Upfield
This 1928 and first of the Napolean Bonaparte mysteries paints a
vivid picture of the outback, and the outrageous racism of the story is also
inseparable from it's development. I wonder how much has changed in
Australia since then.
_Akhenaten_, Naguib Mahfouz
An unsatisfying fictional portrait of the Egyptian iconoclast as
told by interviews with his companions and family. I'm sure I missed much
in this novel. Perhaps Mahfouz was attempting an arabic portrayal with
Dostoevsky's _The Idiot_ in mind. Who knows.
_Alexandria: A History and a Guide_, E. M. Forster
This guidebook to all Rabbers' favorite city is as magnificent and
fresh on a 3rd re-reading as on the first.
_Hypatia of Alexandria_, Maria Drielska
_Spartan Women_, Sarah B. Pomeroy
It can be fun to see how much information and speculation scholars
can tweeze out of an extremely sparse skein of textual references, and
that's certainly the case in these two subjects, Hypatia and Spartan women,
where ancient references can be counted on two hands. But I didn't sense
overt feminism or exaggeration in the author's portrayal of these ancient
women, and _Hypatia_ in particular was well done.
_Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order_, Steven Strogatz
A lot of good information here on how communication and feedback in
natural and artificial systems between seemingly independent entities
produces synchronisation and order. Especially good discussions on research
into human sleep patterns and firefly interactions. The writing doesn't
rise to the level of Gleick's _Chaos_ or _The Soul of a New Machine_, but
still some good stuff.
_The Rescue_, Joseph Conrad
Think I mentioned this before, but this soul-searching adventure
from the master deserves many mentions
_A Case of Need_, Michael Crichton
_The Great Train Robbery_, Michael Crichton
Crichton's first novels I believe, and ACON is quite a good mystery,
with his trademark use of technical jargon and inside peeks at geek-life
(medical geeks in this case), without the eye-rolling abuse of this writing
technique we see in _Congo_ or _Prey_.
_Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution_, Richard Fortey
A scientist's life and the subject of his research. Wish more
creationists would read books like this, to get some small feel for what is
implied by shells in the rock of a roadside cut.
_Fevre Dream_, George R. R. Martin
One of a very small handful of classic vampire tales. Highly
recommended.
_Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of
Coral_, David Dobbs
A look into an episode of 19th century science. I'll try to post a
separate review.
rms
Paul Ilechko
>
> There's always the question whether Paul meant Francis or francis.
>
> just in case
I have to admit, and this is no slight on the ever-welcome Francis A.
Miniter, that I was talking about the original francis, Mr. Muir.
Paul Ilechko
ralia since then.
>
> _Akhenaten_, Naguib Mahfouz
> An unsatisfying fictional portrait of the Egyptian iconoclast as
> told by interviews with his companions and family. I'm sure I missed much
> in this novel. Perhaps Mahfouz was attempting an arabic portrayal with
> Dostoevsky's _The Idiot_ in mind. Who knows.
>
>
The only Mahfouz I've read is the famous Cairo Trilogy .. have you read
those books? I thought that they were very good.
Paul Ilechko
> I'm still here. I must admit that the newsgroup is going through a
> quiet (?) period, at least as to books, with a lot of extraneous stuff
> being discussed.
> I have, but have not yet read, the Grossman translation. I am looking
> forward to it, the old standards having become somewhat dry with time.
> I am glad you are enjoying it. Quixote is one of the all time great
> works. I find it amazing that in one of the world's earliest novels
> there could be so much reflection on reading (Part I) and writing (Part
> II). I think you just moved it up on my To Be Read list significantly.
>
I've always got bogged down in the middle of Quixote with prior
translations, but this time I'm flying through it at a much faster pace.
Definitely a different experience.
Jan Yarnot
Francis A. Miniter wrote:
>
> This response is unrelated to the first. In reading Harry Potter VI,
> recently, the initials RAB become significant. One finishes the book
> wondering to whom they belong. So, when I saw that Subject matter of
> this thread, my mind went back to the HP series. I have quickly looked
> through the early volumes, but as yet can find no one with those
> initials. Has anyone else been reflecting on this aspect of the story?
>
>
> Francis A. Miniter
There's an active HP thread in rec.arts.sf.written, and they're
speculating about Syrius' brother. They're also speculating that the
Horcrux locket was in Syrius' house, but has been stolen by Mundingo.
The last book should be interesting!
And where have I been? I couldn't read news for years, since I refuse
to use Outlook, and only recently discovered this Google iteration. I
was rather wondering the same thing, where'd everyone go?
Jan Yarnot, still a net.granny, only moreso now.
Douglas Clark
news:3mboleF...@individual.net...
> Since I killfiled some of the noisier & more obnixous denizens of this
> small part of the digital world (Jai Maharaj, Shambat, various
> mainfestations of Gaza, Fangnail, Seymour Grass, Banerjee et al), there
> doesn't seem to be anything left. I'm seeing a couple of posts a day, at
> most. Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus, Francis,
> Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say something
> interesting !
>
one before so I havent yet had time to start from my pile...
David Miles' The Tribes of Britain which I am hoping to be eruditely
brilliant, then Kate Fox's Watching the English which I am told has a subtle
humour running throught it then Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World where
he seems to have gone against his principles and written a good book.
There is one week blank before the next Test so I should have time to read
The Tribes of Britain. England should be one up in the series but the
Aussies hung on for a draw all this marvellous cricketing day.
And hullo to the few that are left.
Incidentally Michael Crichton's book on global warming is typical ignorant
American rubbish judging by its appalling reviews here.
Douglas Clark
"Douglas Clark" <dgdc...@NOSPAMdgdclynx.plus.com> wrote in message
news:4300dd49$0$17488$ed2e...@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...
Don Tuite
wrote:
> _The Barrakee Mystery / The Lure of the Bush_, Arthur W. Upfield
> This 1928 and first of the Napolean Bonaparte mysteries paints a
>vivid picture of the outback, and the outrageous racism of the story is also
>inseparable from it's development. I wonder how much has changed in
>Australia since then.
Where'd you find that? I thought I'd read the entire canon, but I
never encountered that one.
The thing about Upfield is that he kept writing NB mysteries up until
the early '60s. They do show an evolution in racial sensitivity over
the years.
Something similar happens with Ngaio Marsh, not wrt racism, but wrt
the English classes and castes. Alleyn and Fox never age, but from A
Man Lay Dead (1934) to Light Thickens (1982), the changes in culture
are limned as they happened.
Don
M J Carley
>I have just been watching a marvellous Test Match of the same calibre as the
>one before so I havent yet had time to start from my pile...
I read `Beyond a boundary' at the weekend: it's as good as they say.
--
Differenza fra il rivoluzionaro e il cialtrone. Il rivoluzionario
rompe l'orologio e invece di presentarsi alle nove si presenta alle
nove meno cinque. Il cialtrone rompe l'orologio e si alza alle undici.
Home page: http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
Sam Culotta
Well, Paul, it seems all that was needed was the right prompt. Lookit all
the action you've triggered!
Actually, even without a kill file ( which I don't use) this has been a
quiet place. Other newsgroups I drop in on have been quiet as well.
I suspect it's the summer doldrums. I also suspect that some of the more
repulsive cross posters and trolls have temporarliy taken over the place the
way weeds will when a lawn is not kept up.
I've recently quit on Blink.. boring. Am back to reading some of Alice
Munro's short stories ( if there's a better short story writer working these
days, I don't know who it might be). And am about to pick up Herzog for the
first time. What can I say; I'm a late bloomer.
I'm always amazed at how posts drop off on all sites beginning on Friday
afternoons. How in the hell anything gets done in the workplace these days
I don't know. I left the zoo just before everyone and their office clerk had
access to the internet. I suppose the productivity gains from having this
technology available in the workplace offsets the time lost to personal use.
Then again, it may contribute to the ability of today's workers to brag
about how many hours they put into their jobs.
Sam
Paul Ilechko
>
> Well, Paul, it seems all that was needed was the right prompt. Lookit all
> the action you've triggered!
Yeah, and I aqpologize to all those, like yourself, that I forgot to
mention ;-)
> I'm always amazed at how posts drop off on all sites beginning on Friday
> afternoons. How in the hell anything gets done in the workplace these days
> I don't know. I left the zoo just before everyone and their office clerk had
> access to the internet. I suppose the productivity gains from having this
> technology available in the workplace offsets the time lost to personal use.
> Then again, it may contribute to the ability of today's workers to brag
> about how many hours they put into their jobs.
Probably why some companies are getting so restrictive on internet
access these days. I guess goofing off on the internet isn't quite as
repulsive as taking the newspaper into the bathroom (depending on what
kind of sites are being surfed ...)
Paul Ilechko
> I have just been watching a marvellous Test Match of the same calibre as the
> one before so I havent yet had time to start from my pile...
I heard somewhere that we're actually beating the Aussies ... can this
be true !
Cricket - one thing that I actually do miss about England ;-)
> Incidentally Michael Crichton's book on global warming is typical ignorant
> American rubbish judging by its appalling reviews here.
It got equally bad reviews here in the US, if I'm not mistaken.
yeoldw...@yahoo.com
Francis on his little boat. Still alive! I imagined them posting
somewhere much shippier.
tejas
"Jan Yarnot" <fossi...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1124128432.8...@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
It's about time you came back!
Ted.
tejas
"Sam Culotta" <culot...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:226Me.5567$Al5.3225@trnddc04...
> Am back to reading some of Alice
> Munro's short stories ( if there's a better short story writer working
these days, I don't know who it might be).
Julian Barnes' THE LEMON TABLE is a good collection. And from a more rural
POV, Annie Proulx' BAD DIRT: WYOMING STORIES 2 is a hoot.
(but I'm reading both of these right now.. so the jury is still out).
Ted
Douglas Clark
news:1124138526....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> It's gone. Yet these old fellows are alive. Doug Clark in his garden.
> Francis on his little boat. Still alive! I imagined them posting
> somewhere much shippier.
>
Douglas Clark
penalised my website although they refuse to admit it rendering it
practically invisible and I am automatically reduced about 140 places on any
search.
Paul Ilechko
Ted ... did you read the new Cormac McCarthy yet?
Default User
> And where have I been? I couldn't read news for years, since I refuse
> to use Outlook, and only recently discovered this Google iteration. I
> was rather wondering the same thing, where'd everyone go?
Why were those your only options? If you could use OE, then you have
access to a news server. There a number of newsreaders available
besides OE.
Brian
jadel
So, Silas Mariner, is your neck reddening? Have you acquired a drawl,
a redbone or bluetick hound, a fondness for Jack Daniels?
J. Del Col
Michael
Incidentally Michael Crichton's book on global warming is typical
ignorant American rubbish judging by its appalling reviews here.
*****************
I've read a couple of his novels and I didn't think much of them.
Michael
yeoldw...@yahoo.com
Paul Ilechko
> I got the Grossman translation about a year ago, but I only made it
> about 3/4 of the way through. I know it's a great book and
> everything, but it was no fun at all after a few hundred pages. Maybe
> I'll try to finish it again sometime, because it's Good For You and
> all that.
actually it's very funny. I don't read books because they are "good for
you" if I don't enjoy them ...
>
> Intro to the new translation by Harold Bloom. The guy reminds me of
> the bloated Marlon Brando late in his career.
skipped it ....
A R Pickett
>
>
> > I got the Grossman translation about a year ago, but I only made it
> > about 3/4 of the way through. I know it's a great book and
> > everything, but it was no fun at all after a few hundred pages. Maybe
> > I'll try to finish it again sometime, because it's Good For You and
> > all that.
>
> actually it's very funny. I don't read books because they are "good for
> you" if I don't enjoy them ...
I had it on tape for running errands, etc in the car. I enjoyed it very
much. First time i'd read it in any format, so can't really compare to
other translations.
--
A R Pickett aka Woodstock
Been lurking for awhile, and also misses some of the old regular posters.
"Sometimes the facts threaten the truth"
Amos Oz, prize winning Israeli author
Read my book reviews at:
http://www.booksnbytes.com/reviews/_idx_ws_all_byauth.html
Remove lower case "e" to respond
Paul Ilechko
> Paul wrote - > The Other wrote re DON QUIXOTE:
>
>>
>>>I got the Grossman translation about a year ago, but I only made it
>>>about 3/4 of the way through. I know it's a great book and
>>>everything, but it was no fun at all after a few hundred pages. Maybe
>>>I'll try to finish it again sometime, because it's Good For You and
>>>all that.
>>
>>actually it's very funny. I don't read books because they are "good for
>>you" if I don't enjoy them ...
>
>
> I had it on tape for running errands, etc in the car. I enjoyed it very
> much. First time i'd read it in any format, so can't really compare to
> other translations.
>
No doubt we could have a serious discussion as to whether listening to a
book on tape actually counts as "reading" .. my vote would be no,
because to me important aspects of reading include being in control of
the pace, being able to re-read bits at will, flip back to look things
up that I might have forgotten, etc. There seems to be a whole dimension
lost when it's narrated to you.
BTW, how are footnotes handled in books on tape?
Laura F. Spira
[..]
>
> No doubt we could have a serious discussion as to whether listening to a
> book on tape actually counts as "reading" .. my vote would be no,
> because to me important aspects of reading include being in control of
> the pace, being able to re-read bits at will, flip back to look things
> up that I might have forgotten, etc. There seems to be a whole dimension
> lost when it's narrated to you.
I agree. And the voice of the reader may not match the voice(s)you hear
in your head as you read.
There's also the editing issue - many tapes are edited versions of the
original. I often listen to abridged versions of books read on BBC R4 -
I greatly admire the skill of the editors but I look on these as tasters
and don't feel as if I've read the book, even if I listen to every
episode. "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Mark
Haddon was a good example of what you might miss: the radio version was
excellent but left out most of the maths puzzle. Nicole Krauss's "The
History of Love" was also beautifully read but I stopped listening after
two episodes and bought a copy so that I could enjoy it "properly".
But there are many people for whom books on tape are a real boon. I have
a severely dyslexic friend who would be lost without them.
>
> BTW, how are footnotes handled in books on tape?
I have no idea - an interesting question.
--
Laura
(emulate St. George for email)
Bruce McGuffin
> Paul Ilechko wrote:
>
> [..]
>
> > No doubt we could have a serious discussion as to whether listening
> > to a book on tape actually counts as "reading" .. my vote would be
> > no, because to me important aspects of reading include being in
> > control of the pace, being able to re-read bits at will, flip back
> > to look things up that I might have forgotten, etc. There seems to
> > be a whole dimension lost when it's narrated to you.
There can also be a dimension gained. I find that tapes of Patrick
O'Brian books available at my local library are more fun than reading
the books. The naration is by Patrick Tull, who does a variety of
accents, and has a fairly lively style of narration.
Audio books work best with particular styles of books: the Victorian
English novelists lend themselves to audio books. The Dickens books at
my library are well done (I forget the readers name). But I've enjoyed
tapes of modern writers too. Conrad's Nostromo made a good tape. And
if you're old enough to listen to children's books without
embarrasment, Margaret Mahey's The Blood and Thunder Adventure on
Hurricane Ridege is a great listen.
On the other hand I once tried a tape of John Reid's Ten Days that
Shook the World, and gave it up after the first chapter because that
is clearly a book where you have to look back at the earlier text.
Anyway, until I figure out how to read and drive at the same time,
audio books are a godsend.
Bruce
Paul Ilechko
> Anyway, until I figure out how to read and drive at the same time,
> audio books are a godsend.
Aren't audio books distracting while driving? I prefer music ...
A R Pickett
music ...
Both FM and AM listening choices along Colorado's Rocky Mtn front range are,
in the long run, more frustrating than enlightening or entertaining. Even
the local NPR outlet irritates me beyond endurance with constant pleas to
give them my old car. I'll keep driving my old car, thank you.
Most of my musical tapes I have listened to repeatedly. Books on tape are
the answer for me, and I don't find them distracting. Sometimes the traffic
is distracting, and I have to back up and listen again.
I am up to the sixth book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series.
Patrick Tull does bring them alive, as Bruce points out.
And whether it counts as "reading" or not - now I think we're into a
discussion of personal preference. I've found it to be a pleasurable way to
enjoy a book. If it's not "reading" I don't object to the distinction.
Like I did when I was very young and my parents and grandmother read to me,
I'm enjoying a book.
--
A R Pickett aka Woodstock
"Sometimes the facts threaten the truth"
Paul Ilechko
> Paul inquired - > Aren't audio books distracting while driving? I prefer
> music ...
>
> Both FM and AM listening choices along Colorado's Rocky Mtn front range are,
> in the long run, more frustrating than enlightening or entertaining. Even
> the local NPR outlet irritates me beyond endurance with constant pleas to
> give them my old car. I'll keep driving my old car, thank you.
I'm happy to have a car with a CD player, and thus hundreds of choices.
I listen to 5 or 6 CDs a week in the car, which means I can go a couple
of years or more without repetition.
>
> Most of my musical tapes I have listened to repeatedly. Books on tape are
> the answer for me, and I don't find them distracting. Sometimes the traffic
> is distracting, and I have to back up and listen again.
Hmm - studies have shown that speaking on a phone with a headset is as
distracting to a driver as holding the phone to your ear - it's not the
device that's distracting, it's the conversation. Hard to imagine that
listening to a narration could be any less so - you might not think it
is - neither do carphone lovers - but in an emergency, how will you react?
tejas
"A R Pickett" <WOODeS...@PReODIGeY.NET> wrote in message
news:TCrMe.1351$AT7...@newssvr22.news.prodigy.net...
> Paul inquired - > Aren't audio books distracting while driving? I prefer
> music ...
>
> Both FM and AM listening choices along Colorado's Rocky Mtn front range
are,
> in the long run, more frustrating than enlightening or entertaining.
The hell you say! But I'm the guy who punches in all the AM
"Banda/fronterizo" stations in the rental when I'm out there for training.
Greely may be a hellhole, but they have great Mexican music on the horn..
Seguro que Hell Yes!
Ted. (The East Coast is a pit.)
--
Ted Samsel
tbsa...@infionline.net
http://tbsamsel.home.infionline.net
A R Pickett
> "A R Pickett" <WOODeS...@PReODIGeY.NET> wrote in message
> news:TCrMe.1351$AT7...@newssvr22.news.prodigy.net...
> > Paul inquired - > Aren't audio books distracting while driving? I prefer
> > music ...
> >
> > Both FM and AM listening choices along Colorado's Rocky Mtn front range
> are,
> > in the long run, more frustrating than enlightening or entertaining.
>
> The hell you say! But I'm the guy who punches in all the AM
> "Banda/fronterizo" stations in the rental when I'm out there for training.
> Greely may be a hellhole, but they have great Mexican music on the horn..
They sure do! And I wished I could get the signal better.
For a couple of years, much of the Front Range could not receive Sat
afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.
There's a neat FM station out of Greeley, I've forgotten the call letters
and band location, which had a nice funky mix of agricultural news, market
reports, odd music choices, and on Saturday afternoons, the Met! I hope
it's still around. I could pick up the signal in my car, but not in the
house.
When the local public radio station finally got their act together and
picked up the Met, I quit listening.
rms
> Where'd you find that? I thought I'd read the entire canon, but I
> never encountered that one.
It was reissued under The Lure of the Bush title. Amazon shows some
copies, but check the library :)
rms
rms
> those books? I thought that they were very good.
No, but the title brings to mind The Alexandria Quartet. If the quality
is anything like that, I'll pick it up. Thanks!
rms
Francis A. Miniter
just about all of the series. They are wonderful. Upfield was also more
environmentally aware than most of his contemporaries. The effects of various
activities on the land are prominent in a number of the novels.
Francis A. Miniter
Paul Ilechko
Much better, IMO ;-)
the Robot Vegetable
> Somebody, say something interesting !
I bet copies of _The General of the Dead Army_ by Ismail Kadare
are just popping out of the walls now that he's won the first Man
Booker International Prize. Popping.
I put a picture of the Oregon Gardens Rabfest, but it lacks books
and people, so I didn't mention it before, but what the heck:
http://www.middle-fork.org/archives/the_oregon_garden_rabfest/index.html
I'm just finishing the Probability trilogy by Nancy Kress,
_Probability: Moon_, _Probability: Sun_, and _Probability: Space_.
Fortunately, nothing else about them is is horrible as their titles.
Interesting use of modern speculative physics, but then I'm relatively
clueless about such things, so who knows. The better half is working
on them now.
the Robot Vegetable
>
> _The Rescue_, Joseph Conrad
> Think I mentioned this before, but this soul-searching adventure
> from the master deserves many mentions
Yeah, it's a great one, _The Rescue_ and _Victory_ both, simply great.
I've just read through most of his novels, I'd say my favorite is _Nostromo_,
but not because it's anywhere as much fun as the other two. _The Secret Agent_
is cool, but _Under Western Eyes_ and _Lord Jim_ just flopped about on the
ground like confused fish. That's not fair, they're extremely well crafted,
both on the sentence and plotting levels - I just find the layered refinement
a bit bleak.
I also read a bunch of his shorter work. He needs room, the short stuff
sucks.
_The Rescue_ and _Vistory_ are great fun and great novels both.
David
> I'm happy to have a car with a CD player, and thus hundreds of choices.
> I listen to 5 or 6 CDs a week in the car, which means I can go a couple
> of years or more without repetition.
So you drive a lot (poor guy) and have more than 500 CDs? Around here we
see crime reports about burglarized cars where people lose CD collections
worth several thousand dollars; I wonder what it's like to be so rich that
you had that many CDs. Then sometimes I see they were stolen from cars
like 10 year old Geo Prizms, and then I wonder about what it's like having
priorities like that. (I could go on but I'll spare you.)
By the way, it'd be nice to find more websites on line that demolish Islam
and the Quran that are not made by prostelytizing Christians; I have the
same problem with Ibn Warraq's anthologies of essays. Is there a lack of
original Islam-bashing scholarship done by godless heathens like myself?
It was deists, agnostics and atheists who did such damage to Christianity,
so to have to rely on Baptists and Catholics to damn Islam leaves an "off"
taste in my mouth. (See? I did include something that really about books!)
D.
--
"You'd better understand that you're alone, a long way from home."
...................................................................
(C) 2005 TheDavid^TM | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
David
[...]
> And where have I been? I couldn't read news for years, since I refuse
> to use Outlook,
Huh? There are free Mozilla products that handle Usenet, like Thunderbird.
But then that interface does look like Outlook, if that's the problem.
> and only recently discovered this Google iteration.
I prefer Thunderbird to the ugly Google Groups thing.
> I was rather wondering the same thing, where'd everyone go?
Metafilter. Fark. Drudge. LiveJournal. And so on.
Gackingly,
David
> _The Barrakee Mystery / The Lure of the Bush_, Arthur W. Upfield
> This 1928 and first of the Napolean Bonaparte mysteries paints a
> vivid picture of the outback, and the outrageous racism of the story is also
> inseparable from it's development. I wonder how much has changed in
> Australia since then.
"Napoleon Bonaparte mysteries"?!? But maybe I haven't stumbled into an
alternate universe: I look it up on Amazon. "Bony" is half aborigine and
likes to fish, apparently.
Confederate-types would name their slaves after dead noble Romans; to them
it was a laugh-riot of racist mockery to have a field hand named Scipio.
Is this how this detective got his name?
[...]
> _Hypatia of Alexandria_, Maria Drielska
> _Spartan Women_, Sarah B. Pomeroy
> It can be fun to see how much information and speculation scholars
> can tweeze out of an extremely sparse skein of textual references, and
> that's certainly the case in these two subjects, Hypatia and Spartan women,
> where ancient references can be counted on two hands. But I didn't sense
> overt feminism or exaggeration in the author's portrayal of these ancient
> women, and _Hypatia_ in particular was well done.
And _Spartan Women_ was less successful? I might read it anyway.
Paul Ilechko
> On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Paul Ilechko wrote:
>
>
>>I'm happy to have a car with a CD player, and thus hundreds of choices.
>>I listen to 5 or 6 CDs a week in the car, which means I can go a couple
>>of years or more without repetition.
>
>
> So you drive a lot (poor guy) and have more than 500 CDs? Around here we
> see crime reports about burglarized cars where people lose CD collections
> worth several thousand dollars; I wonder what it's like to be so rich that
> you had that many CDs. Then sometimes I see they were stolen from cars
> like 10 year old Geo Prizms, and then I wonder about what it's like having
> priorities like that. (I could go on but I'll spare you.)
WTF is it to you how I choose to spend my money, you self-righteous ass?
Paul Ilechko
I agree with you on Nostromo, it's great.
Paul Ilechko
> Paul Ilechko <noSPaM_pile...@patmedia.net> wrote:
>
>>Somebody, say something interesting !
>
>
> I bet copies of _The General of the Dead Army_ by Ismail Kadare
> are just popping out of the walls now that he's won the first Man
> Booker International Prize. Popping.
OK, I get the hint. BTW, did you ever read The Bridge on the Drina? That
seemed to me to be about your cup of tea ...
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 17th of August, 2005
David:
So you drive a lot (poor guy) and have more
than 500 CDs? Around here we see crime reports
about burglarized cars where people lose CD collections
worth several thousand dollars; I wonder what it's like
to be so rich that you had that many CDs. Then sometimes
I see they were stolen from cars like 10 year old Geo
Prizms, and then I wonder about what it's like having
priorities like that. (I could go on but I'll spare you.)
Paul:
WTF is it to you how I choose to spend my money,
you self-righteous ass?
After years of the SUV argument, you ask this?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Paul Ilechko
My CDs don't affect shared resources the way that your SUV does, Mike. I
thought that would be fairly obvious.
David Loftus
> My CDs don't affect shared resources the way that your SUV does, Mike. I
> thought that would be fairly obvious.
Or even if they do, remotely, from a resources consumption perspective,
they don't inevitably put out quite the level of nasty effluents on the
other end.
(How come one never hears Mozart blasting out the windows of cars on
the street? Insufficient bass?)
David Loftus . . . nearing the three-year anniversary of belonging to a
car-less household
Michael
greatest.
Michael
Paul Ilechko
>>My CDs don't affect shared resources the way that your SUV does, Mike. I
>>thought that would be fairly obvious.
>
>
> Or even if they do, remotely, from a resources consumption perspective,
> they don't inevitably put out quite the level of nasty effluents on the
> other end.
That was one of the shared resources - oxygen ;-)
Meanwhile, my real estate taxes go up because so many of neighbors drive
SUVs that the cost of repairing the local roads is significantly higher
than it used to be. Not to mention the road widening and straightening
needed to keep the damned things out of ditches.
Presumably now David (not Loftus, THE David) will be appalled by the
fatc that I'm a homeowner ...
David Loftus
> Presumably now David (not Loftus, THE David) will be appalled by the
> fatc that I'm a homeowner ...
Which reminds me: in a sense, we're not only car-less but homeless,
too, since we moved into a rental apartment last month and have put our
condo up on the market:
http://www.david-loftus.com/2005%20Web%20site/Condo/condo.html
Bruce McGuffin
I have missed a turn or two, but the important things like not hitting
other cars seem to keep their priority. And I can always rewind the
tape if driving becomes too demanding.
Bruce
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 17th of August, 2005
David:
So you drive a lot (poor guy) and have more
than 500 CDs? Around here we see crime reports
about burglarized cars where people lose CD collections
worth several thousand dollars; I wonder what it's like
to be so rich that you had that many CDs. Then sometimes
I see they were stolen from cars like 10 year old Geo
Prizms, and then I wonder about what it's like having
priorities like that. (I could go on but I'll spare you.)
Paul:
WTF is it to you how I choose to spend my money,
you self-righteous ass?
I said:
After years of the SUV argument, you ask this?
Paul:
My CDs don't affect shared resources the way
that your SUV does, Mike. I
thought that would be fairly obvious.
Whereas I thought it always was patently obvious they *do*
affect shared resources in precisely the way my SUV does. In
fact, if you have thousands of the things, like I have, then
the dollar price of that many CDs being comparable to that
of my SUV almost certainly comes from the fact the things
affect "shared resources" in equivalent ways to an SUV does.
And, in all sorts of ways, as well. The CDs presuppose, for instance,
the trucking industry to distribute the things. A retail industry
to sell them, a manufacturing industry to make them, and
of course all of the attendent resource usages of all of
the persons involved. And there's airwave pollution to market the
things. It also presupposes people driving to
rock concerts, for instance, which driving they need not do
except in pursuit of this chosen gratification of music.
Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
performed in clubs and concert venues. Absolutely no different
from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
horse shows in the salient feature that it uses shared
resources, which resources are shared by means of an open
market and priced thereby, just that rock music is a
different, and arguably altogether more popular and
"commercial" entertainment (attendant with all of the
manipulations of the middle class that that implies).
The horse thing, by the way, is really my wife's and
daughter's interest. My elder son and I have been getting
into playing rock and blues and jazz together for the last 8
months or so. Anyway, we are planning to gig together as band
starting this next summer. Now, the curious thing is that neither SUV is
sufficiently large to carry all our instruments and amps and all.
So, in order for Zan and I to perform together as a band,
I'm probably going to end up borrowing one of the shop vans from
my company to transport that equipment. Which vans get far worse
gas mileage than the SUVs. Heh.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
tejas
"David Loftus" <dlo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:1124304424.8...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> > Presumably now David (not Loftus, THE David) will be appalled by the
> > fatc that I'm a homeowner ...
>
>
> Which reminds me: in a sense, we're not only car-less but homeless,
> too, since we moved into a rental apartment last month and have put our
> condo up on the market:
If you were really homeless, wouldn't you take over a squat? Don't be
putting on airs.
Ted.
rms
I was glancing at an Upfield fan site
http://homepage.mac.com/klock/upfield/upfield.html and there's a note on the
novel that the original title was changed to _The Lure of the Bush_ for the
first 1965 american edition. So that explains it.
rms
rms
> the early '60s. They do show an evolution in racial sensitivity over
> the years.
Here's a note I came across on
URL:http://heenan73.proboards29.com/index.cgi?board=awuspecific&action=display&thread=1093196651
about this change:
"It was published first in 1928 and not reissued until 1969. It is
interesting to read in "The Bony Bulletin" (you must get hold of 'em
Terrijo, you would be over the moon) that Upfield was encouraged to tone
down some of his irreverent language towards aboriginals for the reissued
edition, and apparently he did"
rms
rms
discusses the genesis of The Barakee Mystery. It appears he did make
changes for The Lure of the Bush republication:
URL:http://www.biblion.com/litweb/biogs/upfield_arthur.html
rms
rms
> contemporaries. The effects of various activities on the land are
> prominent in a number of the novels.
This article has a great discussion on him, including specifically his
environmental aspect:
URL:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s550978.htm
rms
Corvus Moggin
> Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
> drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
> performed in clubs and concert venues. Absolutely no different
> from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
Especially if you get stoned and crank up the stereo while
you're driving.
-- Moggin
Lewis Mammel
"Down, down, down, down …He saw a vision of himself descending from
one circle of the inferno to the next—from a darkness full of wind
and hail to an abyss of stinking mud."
Paul Ilechko
> Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
> drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
> performed in clubs and concert venues. Absolutely no different
> from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
> horse shows in the salient feature that it uses shared
> resources, which resources are shared by means of an open
> market and priced thereby, just that rock music is a
> different, and arguably altogether more popular and
> "commercial" entertainment (attendant with all of the
> manipulations of the middle class that that implies).
Most of my CDs are classical music.
htd
Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Wednesday, the 17th of August, 2005
>
>
> the trucking industry to distribute the things. A retail industry
> to sell them, a manufacturing industry to make them, and
> of course all of the attendent resource usages of all of
> the persons involved. And there's airwave pollution to market the
> things.
Oh Holy Horseshit, Morris. Airwaves are not a shared resource in the
same way that air is, neither are they a limited resource like fossil
fuels are. And they don't suppose trucking, trucking is incidental to
them; if they were shipped by train instead, the amount of oil consumed
to deliver them to a consumer would radically decrease, but they would
still be CDs. Even the manufacturing doesn't absolutely require the
use of oil; if it's an electric powered plant & it gets power from a
nuclear or hydroelectric plant, then its oil consumption is minimal.
Your Navigator, on the other hand, can't suddenly shed a few tons of
the excess steel it's hauling around with you everywhere, burning up
gas, simultaneously increasing demand and decreasing the available
supply, which means that everybody else has to pay higher prices sooner
than we would otherwise, just so that you can use more gas.
> It also presupposes people driving to
> rock concerts, for instance, which driving they need not do
> except in pursuit of this chosen gratification of music.
Buying a CD means that I have to go to a concert? Oh sweet mother of
fuck, I just bought Johnny Cash's Live at Fulsom Prison album - is
there any way out of this, or is the contract binding at the time of
purchase?
> Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
> drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
> performed in clubs and concert venues.
WTF does tying one on have to do with consumption or spoilage of
limited resources? Hops are a cyclically renewable resource, last I
checked, as are both wheat and barley, and beer is no more consumptive
of oil per calorie than is anything else you get from the grocer.
> Absolutely no different
> from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
> horse shows in the salient feature that it uses shared
> resources, which resources are shared by means of an open
> market and priced thereby, just that rock music is a
> different, and arguably altogether more popular and
> "commercial" entertainment (attendant with all of the
> manipulations of the middle class that that implies).
>
Is that you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
Michael S. Morris
Thursday, the 18th of August, 2005
I said:
And, in all sorts of ways, as well. The CDs presuppose, for instance,
the trucking industry to distribute the things. A retail industry
to sell them, a manufacturing industry to make them, and
of course all of the attendent resource usages of all of
the persons involved. And there's airwave pollution to market the
things.
htd:
Oh Holy Horseshit, Morris. Airwaves are not a shared resource in the
same way that air is, neither are they a limited resource like fossil
fuels are.
Perhaps you live in a locality where there are radio stations
of a sufficient diversity to offer some listening choice.
Around here, it's NPR or nothing.
htd:
And they don't suppose trucking, trucking is incidental to
them; if they were shipped by train instead, the amount of oil consumed
to deliver them to a consumer would radically decrease, but they would
still be CDs.
But they aren't shipped by train, and the consumers don't go to
the train depot to pick them up. In fact, big suburban shopping
malls that people drive to are the way they tend to get distributed.
htd:
Even the manufacturing doesn't absolutely require the
use of oil; if it's an electric powered plant & it gets power from a
nuclear or hydroelectric plant, then its oil consumption is minimal.
Oh? I would have supposed there's plastic in them, but if you
say so...
htd:
Your Navigator, on the other hand, can't suddenly shed a few tons of
the excess steel it's hauling around with you everywhere, burning up
gas, simultaneously increasing demand and decreasing the available
supply, which means that everybody else has to pay higher prices sooner
than we would otherwise, just so that you can use more gas.
Get this through your idiot skull once and for all: There is
no other vehicle on the road which can pull a horse trailer
to horse shows *and* seat at least 6 people *and* get better
gas mileage. There *are* other vehicles which pull horse
trailers, and even some which seat at least 6 people (extended
cab Ford F350 pickup truck, for example), but they tend to get
even worse gas mileage (well, there *are* also equivalent,
and equivalently priced, vehicles, such as a Ford Expedition).
So, it all comes down to *the use* I make of my vehicle and
some sort of hypocritical and absolutely erroneous *assumption*
on your part that *my use of natural resources* (for horse shows,
for example, or for transporting 6 family members together at
once) is not as important or as *good* a use as your consumption
of natural resources in consuming CDs for personal entertainment.
I said:
It also presupposes people driving to
rock concerts, for instance, which driving they need not do
except in pursuit of this chosen gratification of music.
htd:
Buying a CD means that I have to go to a concert? Oh sweet mother of
fuck, I just bought Johnny Cash's Live at Fulsom Prison album - is
there any way out of this, or is the contract binding at the time of
purchase?
Buying a CD at present buys into a system in which concerts
are part of the package. Musicians perform concerts for money, for
promotion of those CDs. And whether you attend the concerts or do not
attend, that remains the system. In Indianapolis, summer rock concerts
happen at the Verizon Wireless Center up about 25 miles northeast
of the center of the city. There are huge traffic jams on I-69
whenever there is a rock concert there, because nobody lives close
to there, and everybody drives cars to the concert location. I
heard Santana there this summer, so I am experienced. Heck, for
that matter, I remember being driven out to Tanglewood to hear
some Wagner when once I spent 6 weeks
at a research project at Harvard. I recall that that music
appreciation *also* required the burning of fossil fuels,
which if the audience simply gave up the gratifications of
music altogether would, no doubt, have made it cheaper
for me to trailer horses to horse shows. My daughter Helen,
by the way, came in 5th at the State Fair in Hunter-Over-Fences,
which is something she only tried in 4-H as a lark.
I said:
Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
performed in clubs and concert venues.
htd:
WTF does tying one on have to do with consumption or spoilage of
limited resources?
It's my understanding that human beings *are* a resource, and
a limited one at that. When they drink and drive (they *do* drink
and drive at rock concerts and at live music venues, I assume
that's a given) a certain number of them tend to get killed,
not to mention the cars that get smashed because of it.
htd:
Hops are a cyclically renewable resource, last I
checked, as are both wheat and barley, and beer is no more consumptive
of oil per calorie than is anything else you get from the grocer.
But people are individually priceless, and not renewable
as far as I know (Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, anyone?).
I said:
Absolutely no different
from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
horse shows in the salient feature that it uses shared
resources, which resources are shared by means of an open
market and priced thereby, just that rock music is a
different, and arguably altogether more popular and
"commercial" entertainment (attendant with all of the
manipulations of the middle class that that implies).
htd:
Is that you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
Both I and my parents were and are middle class, going
back at least to the mid 1930's, probably to around 1900,
when conditions among immigrants from Germany probably
have to be taken into account. There's also a real good chance
that you take my income and divide it by the six persons it
supports, it'd be less than your income divided by the one
person I assume from what you have said it supports. And,
furthermore, I'll bet that calculation would get much, much
worse if we looked at net income after taxes, since the deductions
and exemptions I get for 5 of those persons (not the live in
mother-in-law, but I'm not sure why this shold be the case)
don't even come close to making up for the ravages of the
progressive tax code.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
tejas
"htd" <heroth...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1124390981.4...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
> > Wednesday, the 17th of August, 2005
> >
> >
> > And, in all sorts of ways, as well. The CDs presuppose, for instance,
> > the trucking industry to distribute the things. A retail industry
> > to sell them, a manufacturing industry to make them, and
> > of course all of the attendent resource usages of all of
> > the persons involved. And there's airwave pollution to market the
> > things.
>
> Oh Holy Horseshit, Morris. Airwaves are not a shared resource in the
> same way that air is, neither are they a limited resource like fossil
> fuels are. And they don't suppose trucking, trucking is incidental to
> them; if they were shipped by train instead, the amount of oil consumed
> to deliver them to a consumer would radically decrease, but they would
> still be CDs. Even the manufacturing doesn't absolutely require the
> use of oil; if it's an electric powered plant & it gets power from a
> nuclear or hydroelectric plant, then its oil consumption is minimal.
> Your Navigator, on the other hand, can't suddenly shed a few tons of
> the excess steel it's hauling around with you everywhere, burning up
> gas, simultaneously increasing demand and decreasing the available
> supply, which means that everybody else has to pay higher prices sooner
> than we would otherwise, just so that you can use more gas.
In what armpit of America do you reside, htd? Some folks have big butts and
can't fit into dinky cars. Think of the folks of Scandic & Polander heritage
in NW Minnesota. And a Honda won't deal with big snow. Oh, but then what yer
position on snowmobiles??
No offense meant..
Ted.
Paul Ilechko
> In what armpit of America do you reside, htd? Some folks have big butts
see here, as an example:
http://nikewomen.nike.com/nikewomen/us/v2/media/swf/wkcampaign/butt_800x600.jpg
:-)
Michael
There is no other vehicle on the road which can pull a horse
trailer to horse shows *and* seat at least 6 people *and* get
better gas mileage.
**************
You've got a Navigator? Those look really stylish. A couple
years ago we got a 5.9L Durango. It's great. Beautiful
interior. Seat belts for 7 with the back seat flipped up, which
we use only occasionally. Like you, we had to have it for the
towing capability. Our boat on its trailer weighs in at almost
6000 pounds.
Michael
John W. Kennedy
> On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Jan Yarnot wrote:
> [...]
>
>
>>And where have I been? I couldn't read news for years, since I refuse
>>to use Outlook,
>
>
> Huh? There are free Mozilla products that handle Usenet, like Thunderbird.
> But then that interface does look like Outlook, if that's the problem.
That's because Outlook was a ripoff of Netscape Communicator in the
first place.
--
John W. Kennedy
"I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of
ignorant people is too dangerous to live in."
-- Garson Kanin. "Born Yesterday"
michael
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
news:4304E4BA...@netdirect.net...
a whole lotta stuff...
which has me lusting after a reason to own a real big vehicle, so that i
could use this line of reasoning every time this kind of mindless critique
of "other people's shopping habits" comes up...
sometimes i think that the old hippie-veggie-leftie mantra "you are what you
eat" has spread like mildew into the damper and darker corners of damper,
darker minds and become "you are what you buy", which is little more than a
stark statement of faith in a kind of transcendent materialism... which is
funny when you think that the same crew usually derides the "materialism" of
"consumer culture"... whereas a fourteen year old playing with a sense of
self in some baggy sports brand worn by 50 cent may evoke a sense of gentle
pathos, a person over twenty who invests shopping with a shitload of
overdetermined morality is more than a little ridiculous...
michael
E. McSquared
"Paul Ilechko" <noSPaM_pile...@patmedia.net> wrote in message
news:3mboleF...@individual.net...
> Since I killfiled some of the noisier & more obnixous denizens of this
> small part of the digital world (Jai Maharaj, Shambat, various
> mainfestations of Gaza, Fangnail, Seymour Grass, Banerjee et al) . . .
"Paul Ilechko": serial killfiler.
--
E.
--
.............................................................
> Posted thru AtlantisNews - Explore EVERY Newsgroup <
> http://www.AtlantisNews.com -- Lightning Fast!!! <
> Access the Most Content * No Limits * Best Service <
Corvus Moggin
> Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
> a whole lotta stuff...
> which has me lusting after a reason to own a real big vehicle, so that i
> could use this line of reasoning every time this kind of mindless critique
> of "other people's shopping habits" comes up...
Simple: go buy something big and heavy, like an expensive
boat or a trailerful of horses, then tell everyone you've
gotta, just gotta have a big, heavy truck to tow it around with.
> sometimes i think that the old hippie-veggie-leftie mantra "you are what you
> eat" has spread like mildew into the damper and darker corners of damper,
> darker minds and become "you are what you buy", which is little more than a
> stark statement of faith in a kind of transcendent materialism...
Whoa! "You are what you eat" is Feuerbach, who dates back
before the hippies by a good while, although the phrase, a
German saying, most likely preceded him. He claimed the ruling
classes benefited from a higher-protein diet, suggesting
workers eat beans instead of the steaks they couldn't afford to
buy.
> which is
> funny when you think that the same crew usually derides the "materialism" of
> "consumer culture"... whereas a fourteen year old playing with a sense of
> self in some baggy sports brand worn by 50 cent may evoke a sense of gentle
> pathos, a person over twenty who invests shopping with a shitload of
> overdetermined morality is more than a little ridiculous...
O.k., o.k. Whatever happened to the beautiful Polish girl
with cheekbones to die for?
-- Moggin
htd
> Thursday, the 18th of August, 2005
>
> of a sufficient diversity to offer some listening choice.
> Around here, it's NPR or nothing.
>
not aware of that has found a conclusive link between repeated exposure
to Celine Dion and childhood athsma. She's pretty wretched, but hardly
a health hazard.
>
> htd:
>
> And they don't suppose trucking, trucking is incidental to
> them; if they were shipped by train instead, the amount of oil consumed
> to deliver them to a consumer would radically decrease, but they would
> still be CDs.
>
> But they aren't shipped by train, and the consumers don't go to
> the train depot to pick them up. In fact, big suburban shopping
> malls that people drive to are the way they tend to get distributed.
>
a contributor to pollution as is driving a Lincoln Navigator, no matter
what metric you apply to it.
>
>
> htd:
>
> Even the manufacturing doesn't absolutely require the
> use of oil; if it's an electric powered plant & it gets power from a
> nuclear or hydroelectric plant, then its oil consumption is minimal.
>
>
> Oh? I would have supposed there's plastic in them, but if you
> say so...
>
All right, Morris, you've got me. A CD is made out of approximately
.001% of the amount of plastic that is in your SUV's trim.
It's the oh-so-adorable rhetorical hope of anti-environmentalists that
eating a single piece of cake and eating the whole cake are morally
equivalent. They aren't. You can't deny the relative excess of
consumption, so you try to re-cast the argument into absolutes. It's
intellectually dishonest, and pretty lame to boot.
> htd:
>
> Your Navigator, on the other hand, can't suddenly shed a few tons of
> the excess steel it's hauling around with you everywhere, burning up
> gas, simultaneously increasing demand and decreasing the available
> supply, which means that everybody else has to pay higher prices sooner
> than we would otherwise, just so that you can use more gas.
>
>
> Get this through your idiot skull once and for all: There is
> no other vehicle on the road which can pull a horse trailer
> to horse shows *and* seat at least 6 people *and* get better
> gas mileage.
My idiot skull understands that the only vehicle that meets what you
perceive as your need is any vehicle you can invent a need to justify.
If there were no such thing as a Navigator, I remain confident that
life, even your life, would find a way to go on. The sun would rise,
the wind would blow, and Celine Dion would probably still be making
records. You'd have to take two cars when you actually had six people
to haul around, but I do that all the time and it has not, so far,
proved fatal.
> There *are* other vehicles which pull horse
> trailers, and even some which seat at least 6 people (extended
> cab Ford F350 pickup truck, for example), but they tend to get
> even worse gas mileage (well, there *are* also equivalent,
> and equivalently priced, vehicles, such as a Ford Expedition).
> So, it all comes down to *the use* I make of my vehicle and
> some sort of hypocritical and absolutely erroneous *assumption*
> on your part that *my use of natural resources* (for horse shows,
> for example, or for transporting 6 family members together at
> once) is not as important or as *good* a use as your consumption
> of natural resources in consuming CDs for personal entertainment.
>
I am not making a moral judgment, Morris - you're inferring that part.
I am pointing out that you are choosing to consume far more than I do,
and that, as a result, your consumption increases the cost of mine more
than my consumption increases the cost of yours. You are calling me an
idiot and a hypocrite for my objection to your efforts to justify to me
your personal injury of me. The technical term for what this makes you
is "unapologetic jerk." If you just said "yup, I'm consuming more, I'm
costing you money, and I'm mortgaging my children's and - if you have
them - your children's futures. Don't really care," I'd have a modicum
of respect for your position. As is, I think you're someone who will
sacrifice his rational judgment in order to feel morally justified in
his self-gratification.
> I said:
>
> It also presupposes people driving to
> rock concerts, for instance, which driving they need not do
> except in pursuit of this chosen gratification of music.
>
> htd:
>
> Buying a CD means that I have to go to a concert? Oh sweet mother of
> fuck, I just bought Johnny Cash's Live at Fulsom Prison album - is
> there any way out of this, or is the contract binding at the time of
> purchase?
>
> Buying a CD at present buys into a system in which concerts
> are part of the package. Musicians perform concerts for money, for
> promotion of those CDs.
Actually, in the music industry today, most of the profits come from
the concerts, not from the CDs; the CDs promote the concerts, not the
other way around. Which is neither here nor there for the argument at
hand, but a pretty funky shift, all the same.
> And whether you attend the concerts or do not
> attend, that remains the system. In Indianapolis, summer rock concerts
> happen at the Verizon Wireless Center up about 25 miles northeast
> of the center of the city. There are huge traffic jams on I-69
> whenever there is a rock concert there, because nobody lives close
> to there, and everybody drives cars to the concert location. I
> heard Santana there this summer, so I am experienced. Heck, for
> that matter, I remember being driven out to Tanglewood to hear
> some Wagner when once I spent 6 weeks
> at a research project at Harvard. I recall that that music
> appreciation *also* required the burning of fossil fuels,
> which if the audience simply gave up the gratifications of
> music altogether would, no doubt, have made it cheaper
> for me to trailer horses to horse shows.
You're throwing in red herrings here, Morris. My purchase of a cd does
not make me responsible for the choices - either of concerts to go to,
or of the transportation to get there - of other music appreciators.
And you're pulling the absolutist bullshit again - I am arguing for
moderation, you are replying that because absolute aesceticism is
undesirable, that moderation must therefore be unreasonable to expect.
> My daughter Helen,
> by the way, came in 5th at the State Fair in Hunter-Over-Fences,
> which is something she only tried in 4-H as a lark.
>
Congratulations to Helen!
> I said:
>
> Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
> drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
> performed in clubs and concert venues.
> htd:
> WTF does tying one on have to do with consumption or spoilage of
> limited resources?
>
> It's my understanding that human beings *are* a resource, and
> a limited one at that.
Human beings are a resource to capitalists; to humanists, human beings
are human beings. But if you want to call us resources, biologics are
self-replicating & ergo are flow, not stock, resources. Crunch all you
want - we'll make more.
> When they drink and drive (they *do* drink
> and drive at rock concerts and at live music venues, I assume
> that's a given) a certain number of them tend to get killed,
> not to mention the cars that get smashed because of it.
>
That's fantastic. I once wrote a paper that made the case that
microwave burritos were the source of all the world's misery, but this,
THIS is even better than that. It should go on ad campaigns: "CD
purchases can sort of be indirectly tied to grisly deaths, if you're
really willing to stretch your imagination and put your common sense
entirely aside. Is that John Tesh album really worth dying over? I
thought not."
> htd:
>
> Hops are a cyclically renewable resource, last I
> checked, as are both wheat and barley, and beer is no more consumptive
> of oil per calorie than is anything else you get from the grocer.
>
> But people are individually priceless, and not renewable
> as far as I know (Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, anyone?).
>
Gosh Morris - you're right. We should ban music all together because
some people who are involved in music also get involved with
hallucinogenic drugs, and hallucinogenic drugs are dangerous, and there
is a milder drug - alcohol - that is even more widely used, and some of
the people who abuse alcohol like to listen to music, and sometimes
they die because they combine alcohol abuse with operating heavy
machinery and WHO WILL STOP THE MADNESS??? OH, WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE
THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
>
> I said:
>
> Absolutely no different
> from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
> horse shows in the salient feature that it uses shared
> resources, which resources are shared by means of an open
> market and priced thereby, just that rock music is a
> different, and arguably altogether more popular and
> "commercial" entertainment (attendant with all of the
> manipulations of the middle class that that implies).
>
> htd:
>
> Is that you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
>
No, ObSong: Cake - Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle
htd
htd
shoot, I haven't been in a car with a front bench seat since the fam
sold my Grandmother's land yacht back in '88, and that thing was more
than a decade old when we sold it.
What kind of Honda won't deal with big snow? I lived in upstate NY for
a year, experiencing the joys of lake effect snow, and found that a
sedan was not only adequate, it was preferrable to anything with a
higher center of gravity.
Snowmobiles are about like four wheelers and jet skis - they are a lot
of fun, I'm sure, but they diminish the fun of everybody they're
sharing an area with. If you're really using one because you live
alone and it's economical personal transportation then more power to
you, but I'm looking forward to gas prices being high enough that
they're no longer marketable as a form of recreation.
htd
Jim Hartley
> Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus, Francis,
> Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say something
> interesting !
Out of the blue, I just got an e-mail from francis (small f), figured I'd
look in here, and lo, find this thread.
I suppose I should feign opportunism and take this opportunity to ask the
puzzle of the month. For several years now, Mount Holyoke has selected a
"common read" which it sends to all entering students, encouraging them to
read the book before matriculation. Past books have been a veritable list
of "Books calculated to make me stop reading at page 40 in utter disgust."
This year's selection is Ruth Ozeki's *My Year of Meats*. I have not yet
started it. Is there *any* hope I will enjoy it?
The Mandatory Book Reference: William Minto, *Daniel Defoe*
--
Jim Hartley
jhar...@mtholyoke.edu
Paul Ilechko
> Paul Ilechko <noSPaM_pile...@patmedia.net> wrote:
>
>>Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus, Francis,
>>Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say something
>>interesting !
>
>
> Out of the blue, I just got an e-mail from francis (small f), figured I'd
> look in here, and lo, find this thread.
>
> I suppose I should feign opportunism and take this opportunity to ask the
> puzzle of the month. For several years now, Mount Holyoke has selected a
> "common read" which it sends to all entering students, encouraging them to
> read the book before matriculation. Past books have been a veritable list
> of "Books calculated to make me stop reading at page 40 in utter disgust."
> This year's selection is Ruth Ozeki's *My Year of Meats*. I have not yet
> started it. Is there *any* hope I will enjoy it?
I doubt it. Somehow don't think this one is going to replace "The Jungle".
michael
"Corvus Moggin" <kimm...@fastmail.fm> wrote in message
news:kimmerian-12070...@news.verizon.net...
> Whoa! "You are what you eat" is Feuerbach, who dates back
> before the hippies by a good while, although the phrase, a
> German saying, most likely preceded him. He claimed the ruling
> classes benefited from a higher-protein diet, suggesting
> workers eat beans instead of the steaks they couldn't afford to
> buy.
yes, and NIKE had another job before she became a running shoe... doesn't
mean michael jordan couldn't shoot hoops... i seem to recall a poster with a
dour-faced and heavily bearded 19thC-looking dude staring balefully out over
the moralistic vegetarian's creed... feurbach himself, do you know?
> O.k., o.k. Whatever happened to the beautiful Polish girl
>with cheekbones to die for?
as far as i know, she is married to a fellow soil-scientist and living with
a sense of low-grade, pervasive discontent... the last time i actually
shared physical space with her, i was boxing up my life in preparation for
the move to the wet coast with yet another cheekbone case (scottish out of
viking)... for the brief moment that they were together, awkward
introductions and pleasantries stumbling about, i gazed silently and
inwardly knew that i'd been blessed beyond expectation, in spite of being a
creature driven and derided by vanity...
now that i think of it, she had the "morality-of-shopping" tic, too... but
why think of that?
michael
Phyllis Chamberlain
"Jim Hartley" <jhar...@mtholyoke.edu> wrote in message
news:4305...@nap.mtholyoke.edu...
> Paul Ilechko <noSPaM_pile...@patmedia.net> wrote:
>> Whatever happened to this newsgroup? Where are Loftus, Francis,
>> Silke, Meg, Ted and all the other old regulars? Somebody, say something
>> interesting !
>
> Out of the blue, I just got an e-mail from francis (small f), figured I'd
> look in here, and lo, find this thread.
>
> I suppose I should feign opportunism and take this opportunity to ask the
> puzzle of the month. For several years now, Mount Holyoke has selected a
> "common read" which it sends to all entering students, encouraging them to
> read the book before matriculation. Past books have been a veritable list
> of "Books calculated to make me stop reading at page 40 in utter disgust."
> This year's selection is Ruth Ozeki's *My Year of Meats*. I have not yet
> started it. Is there *any* hope I will enjoy it?
>
Yes.
(I've read the reviews.)
Phyllis Chamberlain
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
htd:
Bucket seats are bucket seats - if your butt needs a bench seat -
shoot, I haven't been in a car with a front bench seat since the fam
sold my Grandmother's land yacht back in '88, and that thing was more
than a decade old when we sold it.
The bench seats still exist, and it's what you buy if you have need
of transporting an extra person or two.
I find the euroshit-derived dinky cars are a problem not
for my butt, but for my head and my neck. It's the contortions
I have to go through in trying to fold my head into them.
This goes for each car in my kid brother's sequence of
Miata, BMW Z3, and Jaguar something-or-the-other. My Prius
is actually pretty good for room like that.
htd:
What kind of Honda won't deal with big snow? I lived in upstate NY for
a year, experiencing the joys of lake effect snow, and found that a
sedan was not only adequate, it was preferrable to anything with a
higher center of gravity.
That's nice, I'm sure. But I live where there is far less
snow than in upstate New York, and still there can be a month
here where a 2-wheel-drive vehicle cannot make it out of our driveway,
which driveway is a gravel driveway (i.e. you can't shovel it
clean). So, as far as I'm concerned, 4WD is an absolute requirement
for two of the family vehicles. The Prius works just fine the
rest of the time---when our driveway is not snowed in, when
I am not transporting all 6 persons in the family, and when
I am not hauling a heavy horse trailer.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Jack Campin - bogus address
> for two of the family vehicles. The Prius works just fine the
> rest of the time---when our driveway is not snowed in, when
> I am not transporting all 6 persons in the family, and when
> I am not hauling a heavy horse trailer.
So, at least three cars and a horse trailer for an unknown number
of horses.
This kind of thing is why if everybody adopted the American way of
life we'd need the resources of another three Earths to support it.
Get the fuck out of there and move to a place where you can have
a sustainable lifestyle. Since people were living without the
benefit of motor vehicles all over the US for at least 15,000 years
before the Americans invaded, I'm sure somebody else must have the
intellectual capacity required to live in your house without a car.
============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
Phyllis Chamberlain
"Phyllis Chamberlain" <phc...@nospamverizon.net> wrote in message
news:cYmNe.1038$xp.787@trnddc02...
It's about the ostracism Japanese-Americans suffered after Pearl Harbor, and
has parallels with the treatment of Arab Americans in Michigan and elsewhere
right now.
Phyllis
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
I said:
Perhaps you live in a locality where there are radio stations
of a sufficient diversity to offer some listening choice.
Around here, it's NPR or nothing.
htd:
It's still not analagous, Morris, unless there's some medical study I'm
not aware of that has found a conclusive link between repeated exposure
to Celine Dion and childhood athsma. She's pretty wretched, but hardly
a health hazard.
It's quite analogous, since we were talking about limited natural
resources and not "health hazards".
htd:
And they don't suppose trucking, trucking is incidental to
them; if they were shipped by train instead, the amount of oil consumed
to deliver them to a consumer would radically decrease, but they would
still be CDs.
I said:
But they aren't shipped by train, and the consumers don't go to
the train depot to pick them up. In fact, big suburban shopping
malls that people drive to are the way they tend to get distributed.
htd:
But that is incidental to whether or not the purchase of a CD is as big
a contributor to pollution as is driving a Lincoln Navigator, no matter
what metric you apply to it.
Nobody said anything about "the purchase of *a* CD". We were talking
about the purchase of thousands of CDs, and listening to 500 or
so of them in a year's worth of driving. Thousands of CDs adds up
to tens of thousands of dollars---i.e., a number comparable to the
purchase of automobiles. And I was suggesting that the fairness
of the free market probably means that the fact those prices *are*
comparable means that the total consumption of "limited natural
resources" in a Navigator versus thousands of CDs is, well,
comparable. Except of course that CDs come with far more bulk
of disposable packaging.
htd:
Even the manufacturing doesn't absolutely require the
use of oil; if it's an electric powered plant & it gets power from a
nuclear or hydroelectric plant, then its oil consumption is minimal.
I said:
Oh? I would have supposed there's plastic in them, but if you
say so...
htd:
All right, Morris, you've got me. A CD is made out of approximately
.001% of the amount of plastic that is in your SUV's trim.
So, 1000 CDs would be made out of approximately 1x the amount of
plastic in my SUV's trim. And the jewel cases and cellophane
wraps? By the way, I tend to make orders of CDs by the dozen or so
at amazon (usually when I get interested in a musician I'll
order a bunch at once), and, so, I have this ritual either with
CDs or DVDs of making what we call "sticky balls" out of the
packaging for my 6-year-old son. You basically collect up all
the cellophane and then start peeling the tape seals and use
the tape to wrap the cellophane ball.
htd:
It's the oh-so-adorable rhetorical hope of anti-environmentalists that
eating a single piece of cake and eating the whole cake are morally
equivalent. They aren't.
So, we are at this wonderful technological moment in
human history when everyman can have the library of the
ages at his fingertips, recorded music, and film. And,
guess what? People buy books, CDs, and DVDs. Not one CD
per person, but lots of them. Heck, my daughter, whose
personal income amounts to weekly allowance plus what she
makes doing barn chores (single-digits or on windfall weeks,
double-digits), has her own collection of tens of CDs.
htd:
You can't deny the relative excess of
consumption, so you try to re-cast the argument into absolutes.
No one was denying the "relative excess of
consumption". I was merely pointing out that if
a person bought thousands of CDs, like me, that
that amounted to a consumption comparable to
a vehicle. In point of fact, my monthly amazon.com
expenditures (in acquiring mostly new CDs and DVDs)
are roughly equal to what I now spend on
gas.
htd:
It's intellectually dishonest, and pretty lame to boot.
Nonsense. The comparison is between a vehicle that
accomplishes what my hobbies and interests need it
to accomplish, where other vehicles don't do that,
and the things you consume that contribute to your
hobbies and interests. What is intellectually
dishonest is to imagine your consumption amounts to
the petroleum consumed in manufacturing one CD
and one CD only.
htd:
Your Navigator, on the other hand, can't suddenly shed a few tons of
the excess steel it's hauling around with you everywhere, burning up
gas, simultaneously increasing demand and decreasing the available
supply, which means that everybody else has to pay higher prices sooner
than we would otherwise, just so that you can use more gas.
I said:
Get this through your idiot skull once and for all: There is
no other vehicle on the road which can pull a horse trailer
to horse shows *and* seat at least 6 people *and* get better
gas mileage.
htd:
My idiot skull understands that the only vehicle that meets what you
perceive as your need is any vehicle you can invent a need to justify.
If there were no such thing as a Navigator, I remain confident that
life, even your life, would find a way to go on.
You are quite correct. I would own one of those pickup trucks
that gets 8 miles to the gallon (if gas-powered) or 15 miles
to the gallon (if diesel---bigger, more expensive engine),
as opposed to the Navigator which gets 15. In short, I
would own a truck, as in fact I do.
htd:
The sun would rise,
the wind would blow, and Celine Dion would probably still be making
records. You'd have to take two cars when you actually had six people
to haul around, but I do that all the time and it has not, so far,
proved fatal.
You are so ignorant and clueless and judgmental of a lifestyle
you know absolutely nothing about. Who the fuck buys two cars
to drive a family around when one bigger car will do? Especially when
those occasions for the six-person drive are, at minimum, a
two-hour round trip, and are in the main instance a cross-country
road trip. Real bright there, htd. You know,
I just spent three weeks in Seattle, and stayed with a friend
there whom I had not seen since graduate school. He's a
pretty anti-Bush Democrat politically. But, they've raised three
children, and I was tickled to see that his wife drove a Chevy
Suburban. I asked them about it, and especially in the context
of this stupid urban anti-SUV prejudice, and she responded
immediately: "Look, all of our children have been competitive
in water polo, and *this* has been the transport bus for
numberless water polo teams."
I said:
There *are* other vehicles which pull horse
trailers, and even some which seat at least 6 people (extended
cab Ford F350 pickup truck, for example), but they tend to get
even worse gas mileage (well, there *are* also equivalent,
and equivalently priced, vehicles, such as a Ford Expedition).
So, it all comes down to *the use* I make of my vehicle and
some sort of hypocritical and absolutely erroneous *assumption*
on your part that *my use of natural resources* (for horse shows,
for example, or for transporting 6 family members together at
once) is not as important or as *good* a use as your consumption
of natural resources in consuming CDs for personal entertainment.
htd:
I am not making a moral judgment, Morris - you're inferring that part.
A powerfully correct inference, in point of fact.
htd:
I am pointing out that you are choosing to consume far more than I do,
Bullshit. Only in the sense of consumption of fuel.
Not the only relevant sense of consumption out there.
htd:
and that, as a result, your consumption increases the cost of mine more
than my consumption increases the cost of yours.
And this is a bad thing because?
htd:
You are calling me an
idiot and a hypocrite for my objection to your efforts to justify to me
your personal injury of me.
So, you claim it as a "personal injury" because I
volunteer to pay the price asked for gasoline? The gasoline
is somehow, yours, and the seller accepting the price
asked for it is somehow cheating you of that gasoline?
Forgive me, hypocrite isn't the half of it.
htd:
The technical term for what this makes you
is "unapologetic jerk." If you just said "yup,
I'm consuming more,
Gasoline.
htd:
I'm costing you money, and I'm mortgaging my children's
and - if you have them - your children's futures. Don't
really care," I'd have a modicum of respect for your
position. As is, I think you're someone who will
sacrifice his rational judgment in order to feel morally
justified in his self-gratification.
I still don't see how you are doing one whit the less
with respect to "limited natural resources", gasoline not
being the only limited natural resource.
I said:
It also presupposes people driving to
rock concerts, for instance, which driving they need not do
except in pursuit of this chosen gratification of music.
htd:
Buying a CD means that I have to go to a concert? Oh sweet mother of
fuck, I just bought Johnny Cash's Live at Fulsom Prison album - is
there any way out of this, or is the contract binding at the time of
purchase?
I said:
Buying a CD at present buys into a system in which concerts
are part of the package. Musicians perform concerts for money, for
promotion of those CDs.
htd:
Actually, in the music industry today, most of the profits come from
the concerts, not from the CDs; the CDs promote the concerts, not the
other way around. Which is neither here nor there for the argument at
hand, but a pretty funky shift, all the same.
OK, it wasn't meant to be shifty, but to point out that CDs and concerts
are connected.
I said:
And whether you attend the concerts or do not
attend, that remains the system. In Indianapolis, summer rock concerts
happen at the Verizon Wireless Center up about 25 miles northeast
of the center of the city. There are huge traffic jams on I-69
whenever there is a rock concert there, because nobody lives close
to there, and everybody drives cars to the concert location. I
heard Santana there this summer, so I am experienced. Heck, for
that matter, I remember being driven out to Tanglewood to hear
some Wagner when once I spent 6 weeks
at a research project at Harvard. I recall that that music
appreciation *also* required the burning of fossil fuels,
which if the audience simply gave up the gratifications of
music altogether would, no doubt, have made it cheaper
for me to trailer horses to horse shows.
htd:
You're throwing in red herrings here, Morris. My purchase of a cd does
not make me responsible for the choices - either of concerts to go to,
or of the transportation to get there - of other music appreciators.
I believe you said the CDs promote the concerts.
htd:
And you're pulling the absolutist bullshit again - I am arguing for
moderation, you are replying that because absolute aesceticism is
undesirable, that moderation must therefore be unreasonable to expect.
So, a semi-truck driver buys a semi-truck and not a Miata to
haul cartons of CDs across the country, when he could perfectly well
simply buy a Miata and drive multiple trips, hauling the CDs one
or two cartons at a time. I buy a vehicle that is capable of
hauling a two-horse trailer to horse shows, which my wife and
daughter compete in. It is a vehicle also designed for
personal comfort of a group of people about my family's size,
and moreso (certainly imagining our drive out to Denver this
coming January) than say a big-cab pickup truck,
but it gets better gas mileage than most choices of
pickup truck. And, by God, it's *my* consumption of fuel
that is the one which is so egregious apparently that horse
shows and horse-show competitions must be shut down
immediately. Those people are too greedy of our natural
resources and need to have their behaviours curtailed and
limited. It's irrelevant that they need fuel-guzzling trucks
to be able to pursue the sport they compete in, that there is
no fuel-efficient car which can pull two horses. *Their*
consumption makes *my* much more moderate consumption
(moderate? umm, by definition whatever *I* do must be
moderate---I live alone when they live with six persons
sharing a living space, but by God, *they* are being
immoderate consumers of energy, whereas I merely value
my independence and privacy).
I said:
My daughter Helen,
by the way, came in 5th at the State Fair in Hunter-Over-Fences,
which is something she only tried in 4-H as a lark.
htd:
Congratulations to Helen!
Thank you. Her main focus is Pony Club and the sport of
equestrian eventing (a combination of dressage, cross-country
jumping, and stadium jumping). But she joined 4-H because her
two closest friends are in it. The problem is, 4-H's
focus tends to be more western riding. She tried out
everything, including pole bending and barrel racing,
and placed pretty well at the county-fair level.
Her horse is an off-the-track thoroughbred and just
can't accelerate the way the little quarter horses
can at some of the "contesting" games. But the
hunter-over-fences stuff was the closest thing
4-H had to her eventing, and she won that at the county
level and hence got to go on to the state fair.
She really did quite well at it for not having done
it before, but, with hunter-over-fences, unlike the
jumping in eventing, there's not only going
over the jump, but also a judgment by the judge
of the horse's conformation and the style of the
jump that goes into the final score. I don't think
Helen really likes what is called the hunter/jumper
circuit.
I said:
Oh yeah, and abuse of the drug alcolhol (not to mention other
drugs) is intimately tied up with live music as it is now
performed in clubs and concert venues.
htd:
WTF does tying one on have to do with consumption or spoilage of
limited resources?
I said:
It's my understanding that human beings *are* a resource, and
a limited one at that.
htd:
Human beings are a resource to capitalists; to humanists, human beings
are human beings.
No, you have no room here to try and make it look like *I*
am the one having less of a heart. I was talking
about human beings dieing in road accidents as a result
of drinking and driving, which the social practice of
concerts tends to encourage. It was painfully in evidence
to my eyes at the Santana concert (big, outdoor concert
venue), but it is also obvious with smaller bands in smaller
venues. There is always alcolhol served and people do
drink, and all of them typically drive (or are driven
by friends or family) to these venues.
htd:
But if you want to call us resources, biologics are
self-replicating & ergo are flow, not stock, resources. Crunch all you
want - we'll make more.
My point was that each and every killed human being
is irreplaceable. Which reminds me that highway
safety in the US went down with the introduction of
SUVs into the US markets. And that my friend in
Seattle's family suffered a terrible accident that
nearly killed their oldest son and hospitalized
the mother when a drunk driver swerved across the road
into them. It may have something to do with why she
now drives a big SUV in addition to her being the water-polo
team-mom.
I said:
When they drink and drive (they *do* drink
and drive at rock concerts and at live music venues, I assume
that's a given) a certain number of them tend to get killed,
not to mention the cars that get smashed because of it.
htd:
That's fantastic. I once wrote a paper that made the case that
microwave burritos were the source of all the world's misery, but this,
THIS is even better than that. It should go on ad campaigns: "CD
purchases can sort of be indirectly tied to grisly deaths, if you're
really willing to stretch your imagination and put your common sense
entirely aside. Is that John Tesh album really worth dying over? I
thought not."
CD purchases are a form of consumption whose sole
benefit, on average, is the personal
gratification/entertainment of the purchaser.
And, not one CD, but hundreds of CDs per consumer
(and some consumers having many more than hundreds)
adds up to a big use of limited natural resources.
And this is unlike my wife's and daughter's equestrian
pursuits, which, being sports are not a passive
thing like listening to a CD, but an active pursuit
of personal excellence and active contribution to
a specific cultural excellence.
Now, you do understand do you not, that
I love CDs and I own thousands of them, and
I'm all in favor of people spending money and
using up limited natural resources on things
of no practical benefit like CDs? Likewise,
I'm thankful that somebody out there is
doing what it takes to support the sport of
equestrian eventing, and water polo, too,
even though horses and water polo are not my
things. I *like* it when humans use their leisure
time to promote humanist excellence in art and
in sport. But *please* let us understand that
art and sport are luxuries, and only possible
as luxuries---i.e. by rich people (or indirectly
rich societies) who have excess to consume.
htd:
Hops are a cyclically renewable resource, last I
checked, as are both wheat and barley, and beer is no more consumptive
of oil per calorie than is anything else you get from the grocer.
I said:
But people are individually priceless, and not renewable
as far as I know (Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, anyone?).
htd:
Gosh Morris - you're right. We should ban music all together because
some people who are involved in music also get involved with
hallucinogenic drugs, and hallucinogenic drugs are dangerous, and there
is a milder drug - alcohol - that is even more widely used, and some of
the people who abuse alcohol like to listen to music, and sometimes
they die because they combine alcohol abuse with operating heavy
machinery and WHO WILL STOP THE MADNESS??? OH, WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE
THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
But, specifically the social phenomenon of concertizing is
directly tied into (built into, into fact) drinking and driving.
I said:
Absolutely no different
from my use of the appropriate vehicle to trailer horses to
horse shows in the salient feature that it uses shared
resources, which resources are shared by means of an open
market and priced thereby, just that rock music is a
different, and arguably altogether more popular and
"commercial" entertainment (attendant with all of the
manipulations of the middle class that that implies).
htd:
Is that you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
[both]
htd adds:
No, ObSong: Cake - Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle
Sure, but, again you dodged the point that your single
lifestyle probably means that you consume limited natural resources
per capita more than the six persons in my household do.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
Moggin:
Simple: go buy something big and heavy, like an expensive
boat or a trailerful of horses, then tell everyone you've
gotta, just gotta have a big, heavy truck to tow it around with.
Or, when you distribute books to libraries across the country,
make sure you drive them there one motorcycle trip at a time.
Then, of course, you can be self-righteous about the mpg used in
the distribution.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
I said:
There is no other vehicle on the road which can pull a horse
trailer to horse shows *and* seat at least 6 people *and* gets
better gas mileage.
Michael:
**************
You've got a Navigator? Those look really stylish. A couple
years ago we got a 5.9L Durango. It's great. Beautiful
interior. Seat belts for 7 with the back seat flipped up, which
we use only occasionally. Like you, we had to have it for the
towing capability. Our boat on its trailer weighs in at almost
6000 pounds.
Also a fine choice for the same reasons (towing, 6 plus seating,
4WD) that I have. Also similarly the target of anti-SUV
prejudice. Though, the Navigator is a company car and we
have had a longstanding business relationship with the
local Lincoln dealer, so that probably ends up determining
the brand choice as much as any other consideration. I don't
personally think they are very stylish at all---though, they're
maybe a notch better looking I think than a number of the
choices in that size category.
In any event, the better gas mileage is the key point
here. My Prius gets about 50 mpg when I drive to and
from work around here. But, it's utterly useless
for pulling a horse trailer, or seating more than about 4
people. It ain't like I had an option of a 50 mpg vehicle
which is 4WD and seats 6 and can pull a heavy trailer
and I passed the thing over to opt for the gas guzzler.
When one buys a vehicle, one is typically weighing multiple
uses for the thing.
I should say the Navigator is at the edge of being able to
do what I need it to do. That is, if we ever moved up
from a 2-horse to a 3-horse trailer, it would be insufficient,
and, at that point, we would need the pickup truck with the
5th-wheel arrangement. I'm trying to discourage thinking in
the 3-horse-trailer direction, since it's only two
people---wife and daughter---who ride in shows, but there's
enough occasions where our neighbour and equestrian friend's
3-horse-trailer has been the obvious way to "carpool"
to a horse show that ditching the Navigator in favour of
a dedicated truck might well be agitated for somewhere in
our future. Also, with kids aging and eventually moving away,
smaller seating capacity will become more practical. There's
a lovely 4WD Volvo station-wagon thingie that would fit most of
what I would want if we had a dedicated trailer-pulling truck
in addition to it.
But, at my business, lots of the guys who work there
have SUVs, and the reason is they all have boats to
pull and cabins "at the lake" where they spend their
weekends boating and fishing in good weather. And because
they have families to ferry around. The fact that most
of the time you'd see them in their SUV they would be
alone in it doesn't mean that the things weren't bought
with those multiple uses in mind.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Paul Ilechko
I also read the reviews, and it looks like paint by numbers, ham fisted,
lead footed PC crap from everything I've been able to gather. But, I
could be wrong. No plans to read it and find out, though. Too much stuff
our there that I *really* want to read ...
Bruce McGuffin
> htd:
> What kind of Honda won't deal with big snow? I lived in upstate NY for
> a year, experiencing the joys of lake effect snow, and found that a
> sedan was not only adequate, it was preferrable to anything with a
> higher center of gravity.
>
> That's nice, I'm sure. But I live where there is far less
> snow than in upstate New York, and still there can be a month
> here where a 2-wheel-drive vehicle cannot make it out of our driveway,
> which driveway is a gravel driveway (i.e. you can't shovel it
> clean). So, as far as I'm concerned, 4WD is an absolute requirement
> for two of the family vehicles. The Prius works just fine the
> rest of the time---when our driveway is not snowed in, when
> I am not transporting all 6 persons in the family, and when
> I am not hauling a heavy horse trailer.
There's a car company called Subaru that makes small 4wd cars. Very
popular in Northern New England and other snowy places. Perhaps you've
heard of it?
By the way, did you notice a reduction in the Prius' fuel efficiency
over the Winter?
Bruce
Paul Ilechko
> That's nice, I'm sure. But I live where there is far less
> snow than in upstate New York, and still there can be a month
> here where a 2-wheel-drive vehicle cannot make it out of our driveway,
> which driveway is a gravel driveway (i.e. you can't shovel it
> clean). So, as far as I'm concerned, 4WD is an absolute requirement
> for two of the family vehicles.
You'd probably do just fine with a vehicle that the horses can *pull*,
as opposed to ride in ... burn a lot loss fuel, too.
:-)
Bruce McGuffin
Yeah, but the gaseous emissions are horrendus.
Bruce
tejas
I think Morris would be better with oxen. Horses are too high strung.
Ted
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
I said:
as far as I'm concerned, 4WD is an absolute requirement
for two of the family vehicles. The Prius works just fine the
rest of the time---when our driveway is not snowed in, when
I am not transporting all 6 persons in the family, and when
I am not hauling a heavy horse trailer.
Jack Campin weighs in:
So, at least three cars and a horse trailer for an unknown number
of horses.
4 horses and a Shetland pony. 3.5 drivers, to become a fully
fledged 4 drivers by next spring, and as one of three
adult chauffeurs driving my kids everywhere and to everything,
for the last several years, you betcha I'd buy my soon-to-be 16-year-old
son a car for him to drive if I thought that was in the financial cards.
Jack Campin:
This kind of thing is why if everybody adopted the American way of
life we'd need the resources of another three Earths to support it.
Speaks somebody who lives in...Scotland, is it?
And you expect to be able to pontificate about
"the American way of life" as though you could
do so from knowledge?
The city I work in and live around is Indianapolis,
Indiana. It's a metropolitan area of about 1.4 million
people. The, umm, "ring road", I-465, is a square
15 miles on a side. The city was settled first in the
middle 19th-century, but developed only with the automobile.
That means that it is one vast suburban sprawl, with no
pub, no grocery store, no place of work, no place of
recreation or entertainment within walking distance of
residences. There are European-style cities in the
United States---Boston, New York, San Francisco, maybe---
but most people live in cities that are automobile
dependent, like Indianapolis (LA is a city "like Indianapolis"
in that respect). And it is because of historically when
these US cities developed, post automobile. I live 35
miles southwest of the center of Indianapolis, with a
postal address of Martinsville. That is where we could find
affordable land upon which my wife could keep horses,
her great desideratum. Unlike England, where riding horses
has this very upper class association, here it is possible
for the middle-class to afford horses (we bought Helen her
off-the-track thoroughbred for $2000.00 for eventing---it's
pretty common for eventing horses to be thoroughbreds that
never won any races---, and we buy hay for it, since we
live in woods and don't grow our own, at twiddles $1000.00
a year). (Compare, ohh, say twiddles $1000 each for my elder
son's primary acoustic and electric guitars.) When I first married
Martha, and before of course we owned a house at all, she owned
a horse. It was always boarded at some farm/stable
(easily done for on the order of $100-$200 a month, depending
on location and amenities) within about a 20-mile drive
from wherever we lived, and just as we had to cough up
the bucks for the U-Haul truck to move thousands of books
from place to place when I was in graduate school and a
postdoc, we had to cough up the money to have horse shipped,
as well.
Jack Campin:
Get the fuck out of there and move to a place where you can have
a sustainable lifestyle.
No thank you. Your notion of a "sustainable lifestyle" is to
pack human beings together into the sardine cans of the
European-style city, and then to socialize the political process
so that all human beings are under the dictatorship of
committees of academically-certified experts. I figure
the fossil fuel thing is only a temporary glitch on the
road to a truly sustainable and definitely non-socialist
future.
Jack Campin:
Since people were living without the
benefit of motor vehicles all over the US for at least 15,000 years
before the Americans invaded, I'm sure somebody else must have the
intellectual capacity required to live in your house without a car.
Your existence claim, coupled with my knowledge of
the eyewitness accounts of that native-American lifestyle
(such as reported from the Jesuit missionaries in Francis
Parkman's histories) makes for levels of irony here that
I am certain are beyond you.
I own and work at a business that is 20 miles away from my house.
I teach at a university that is 40 miles away from my house.
I rehearse in choir at least every Tuesday night at that same university
location, usually requiring a 20-mile drive from my business to
some restaurant to get dinner and then anoher 3 miles to the rehearsal
location by 7pm. And, when I perform, sometimes that is in downtown
Indianapolis with the symphony, and that is 35 miles from my house,
roughly 17 miles from my business, roughly 10 miles from the university.
The nearest grocery store to my house is at least 5 miles away.
To eat lunch while at my business, if I do not "brown-bag" it,
which I loathe doing, I must drive at least 5 miles to get to
restaurants. It's probably 3 miles driving to get to restaurants
from the university. On Saturdays, my son fences in the afternoons
at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis. This is north north west
in the city, 40 miles or so from home and 5 miles from the university,
10 miles from downtown. My two sons and daughter take piano lessons
and my elder son takes guitar lessons. Those two lesson locales are
in different locations in the city, again "an hour's drive" from
home, and almost half an hour to drive from the guitar teacher's
studio to the piano teacher's house. My voice lessons this semester we
are scheduling for 5:00pm on Monday afternoons. I should finish teaching
my quantum mechanics course by 3:40pm, linger for student's questions,
and be able to drive to a different university across town in approx 30
minutes to get to my voice lesson in time. There *is* a bus system,
but it is abysmal, and most routes require going through the hub
downtown. It might be possible to shorten some of the distances
involved by living in the city, at the great sacrifice of
the recreational sport that my wife and daughter are committed to.
They ride horses pretty much daily. But, there is not any possibility
of doing the rest of it without a car. And, everybody else is in
exactly the same boat.
Obviously, if the monotransportation of automobiles were to
go belly up, then there is much about a city like Indianapolis
that would have to be radically restructured, and no such
revision would be necessary for many Old World cities.
But, I suspect that reports of that particular death have
been greatly exaggerated.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Paul Ilechko
Not as high strung as Mike is ... although it depends on the type. Maybe
he ought to switch to mules ... ;-)
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
Bruce McGuffin:
There's a car company called Subaru that makes small 4wd cars. Very
popular in Northern New England and other snowy places. Perhaps you've
heard of it?
Do these small 4wd cars *also and at the same time* have
the wherewithal to pull a 2-horse horse trailer and seat 6
persons? I don't think that they do, and, thus, I doubt that
they would do for my purposes. Now, as I said elsewhere,
*if* I get to point of buying an *even less fuel-efficient*
pickup truck dedicated to pulling horses, then I could
happily ditch the Navigator in favour of something like
those station-wagony 4WD Volvos. Though, at that point
I'm not sure that something like my wife's SUV Ford Explorer,
in the newer version with the optional extra seat isn't an
equally fine choice for such a car.
Bruce:
By the way, did you notice a reduction in the Prius' fuel efficiency
over the Winter?
Definitely. If I drive between work and home, which is about a
45-minute drive over country roads and highways with 45mph
and 55mph speed limits, then I average over 50 mpg from spring through
the fall, and it drops noticeably to about 45mpg in midwinter.
I just took a nearly 6000-mile roundtrip to Seattle in the
thing, waving in Richard Harter's direction as we drove across
North Dakota. (Leastways, I think Richard is in some direction up
there.) This was more "chauffeuring" of my children---my
15-year-old son, Zan, wanted to take the Intermediate Level
Video Game Programming Workshop at Digipen Institute of
Technology. We had him signed up at the same place he took
the beginning level course at UW in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but
they cancelled the Intermediate Level workshop there because
there were only three students signed up, and, so, we looked
around the country for other locations and discovered Redmond,
Washington at Digipen itself was the best other option. So,
he and I drove. On that trip, I took averages for fuel efficiency
for each gastank full. I got over 50 mpg to start, and then
by North Dakota and into Montana, I had one tank full in which we
were steadily climbing (though I suspect the ethanol-spiked 85
octane gas as the real culprit) in which the fuel efficiancy
which hit bottom at just over 40mpg. And then a lot of
the subsequent mountain-state driving was 43-45mpg. I'm
convinced that the thing likes 45-55mph speed limits
and dislikes driving at 70 and 75mph, which are the speed
limits on the interstates in a lot of those states.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
Paul Ilechko wrote:
You'd probably do just fine with a vehicle that the horses can *pull*,
as opposed to ride in ... burn a lot loss fuel, too.
Umm, cute, Paul, but, if you know anything about such vehicles,
you will know that they, and the appropriate tack for the
horses, are very expensive. So, unless driving one horse or
teams of horses were a particular interest/hobby/sport that one
or more of us in the family were actively pursuing, it
would be a very costly luxury item and a foolish consumerism
indeed to acquire such a vehicle. Of course, if one did get
such a vehicle, *then* even with a small one-horse rig,
one would need a much larger horse trailer than we now have
and a larger, less-than-big-SUV-fuel-efficient vehicle to
pull it with, since the venues for competing at equestrian
driving are out in the boondocks, and various interstate
drives away.
As some of you know, Martha fell off her horse on 4/6
rail riding and on 6/4 in an eventing competition,
both times causing concussions that sent her into
the emergency room. She is back to riding, but has been
recommended by the neurologist never to jump
again (eventing is the sport that Christopher Reeve
injured himself in). I can't say if she is going to
follow that advice, but she is trying to re-evaluate at
present what sports she can still do with
horses that might not involve jumping. Dressage alone
is one possibility, but that was always the most boring
phase of eventing to her. Competitive trail-riding
and/or endurance riding is an option. So is competitive
driving, and she has at least one friend who gave up
eventing after an injury and took up equestrian
driving in its stead.
Me, I listened to lots and lots of CDs with Zan on
our 6000 mile drive to Seattle and back. This trip
in particular made me a fan of Steely Dan, which I
had never really listened to before.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 19th of August, 2005
Jim Hartley wrote:
Out of the blue, I just got an e-mail from francis (small f), figured I'd
look in here, and lo, find this thread.
Welcome back, old one! We were just talking about you
behind your back.
Jim:
I suppose I should feign opportunism and take this opportunity to ask the
puzzle of the month. For several years now, Mount Holyoke has selected a
"common read" which it sends to all entering students, encouraging them to
read the book before matriculation. Past books have been a veritable list
of "Books calculated to make me stop reading at page 40 in utter disgust."
This year's selection is Ruth Ozeki's *My Year of Meats*. I have not yet
started it. Is there *any* hope I will enjoy it?
I don't know, Jim. Martha's in a mothers group and one of the
things they do is a monthly book discussion. They tend to
pick those sorts of "chick" books. Sometimes she finds
one she'll enthuse about, but my estimate is that that's
once every 10 months or so. How many years have you been
doing this "common read" thing?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Paul Ilechko
> This trip
> in particular made me a fan of Steely Dan, which I
> had never really listened to before.
At least you said one intelligent thing in that extended and unlikely
response to a trivial quip ... I just hope that you realize that Pretzel
Logic is far and away the best thing they ever did ;-)
Corvus Moggin
> Corvus Moggin <kimm...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > Whoa! "You are what you eat" is Feuerbach, who dates back
> > before the hippies by a good while, although the phrase, a
> > German saying, most likely preceded him. He claimed the ruling
> > classes benefited from a higher-protein diet, suggesting
> > workers eat beans instead of the steaks they couldn't afford to
> > buy.
> yes, and NIKE had another job before she became a running shoe... doesn't
> mean michael jordan couldn't shoot hoops...
True. I began to say she's better-paid now, but on second
thought I don't know what she was bringing down in the old
days, and Phil Knight might have her locked up in an Indonesian
sweatshop.
> i seem to recall a poster with a
> dour-faced and heavily bearded 19thC-looking dude staring balefully out over
> the moralistic vegetarian's creed... feurbach himself, do you know?
What have you got against hippies and vegetarians? Wanted
to ask before, but something distracted me. ObBooks: _The
Moosewood Cookbook_, _Again, Dangerous Visions_, and _The Whole
Earth Catalogue_.
> > O.k., o.k. Whatever happened to the beautiful Polish girl
> > with cheekbones to die for?
> as far as i know, she is married to a fellow soil-scientist and living with
> a sense of low-grade, pervasive discontent... the last time i actually
> shared physical space with her, i was boxing up my life in preparation for
> the move to the wet coast with yet another cheekbone case (scottish out of
> viking)... for the brief moment that they were together, awkward
> introductions and pleasantries stumbling about, i gazed silently and
> inwardly knew that i'd been blessed beyond expectation, in spite of being a
> creature driven and derided by vanity...
Definitely a moment to cherish. A peak in Darien, all one
can hope for, even if it's CT.
-- Moggin