Tdawwg

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• Commented on Video: Lady Gaga before she became famous
  We need a maker how-to video for that flamethrower bra, stat....
• Commented on Apple Tablet delayed, analysts cast haruspex over chinese shipping manifests
  I am embarrassed. Responding appropriately to others' tone is like reading entrails for me....
• Commented on Apple Tablet delayed, analysts cast haruspex over chinese shipping manifests
  No, Antinous, haruspices examined the entrails of animals, livers particularly, for their auguries. Tacitus records in the Annals 2.32 one Lucius Pituanius having been thrown from the Tarpeian Rock in punishment for astrology and magic, but this wasn't regular practice....
• Commented on Apple Tablet delayed, analysts cast haruspex over chinese shipping manifests
  Indeed, the haruspex was the soothsayer, not the sooth said, the augurer, not the augury. An *inauspicious* usage, to say the least, nyuck nyuck nyuck.......
• Commented on Opium dens of 1889 San Francisco in photos
  these shots were taken by someone who had clearly established a connection with the users As in, "look at that flying pink faerie with the tripod-object that he's pointing at us." And would one have barged in, snapped a shot,...
• Commented on Library workers fired for colluding to keep graphic novel from being checked out by 11-year old girl
  Cook sounds a bit like that matronly schoolmarm in the first League who's ostensibly keeping her girls' school students free and pure of the devil, yet who especially delights in erotic canings etc. (It's where the League meets Hawley for...
• Commented on The 100 greatest quotes from The Wire
  Much as Moby Dick is the closest that American literature has come to a long-running landmark soap opera! Seriously, wouldn't y'all chuck all of Whitman and Emerson and some other dusty old American farts for one more season of McNutty...
• Commented on Pre-orders open on Daily Edition reader
  less bitter DRM magic beans Is that fewer magic beans, or less-bitter magic beans? Details, copyfighters, details! And don't magic beans work? (Beanstalk, giant, narrative, etc.?) Is it that the magic beans of DRM sprouted a giant vine that let...
• Commented on 100-word fiction competition — win an HP MediaSmart EX495
  “Magnificent Desolation.” Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint. Rejectamenta of Eagle’s descent stage. The retroreflector array for the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. The Passive Seismic Experiment to measure moonquakes. An Apollo 1 mission patch. A bag with a golden olive branch. A silicon...
• Commented on Scooby Doo Apocalypse tee
  I'm kinda torn from wanting to kvetch over Velma's hottie librarian makeover, and wanting to kvell over how they picked Velma and she has guns and what not and it's not that douche Fred. Looks like I'm going with "kvell."...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  Or perhaps a Left 4 Dead–style zombie apocalypse t-shirt, with a tenacious Ayn Rand shotgunning a horde of zombies, i.e., poor folks, socialists, and other assorted non-fascists? That would be cool. Speaking of zombies, where the RandBots at?...
• Commented on Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs
  They look so happy!...
• Commented on Richard Metzger on Ayn Rand
  So do the "professionals" at BoA, Goldmann Sachs, etc. produce a lot, other than fake wealth and crippling debt? Or are they thieves under your all-too-convenient definitions? Or are they tax-subsidized "bums," living (gasp!) off the public weal? And weren't...
• Commented on Richard Metzger on Ayn Rand
  Have you grown out of having basic sense to understand that a doctor is more valuable than someone on welfare, and the former should not be sacrificed in favor of the latter? It's exactly that odious ideology many object to...
• Commented on Do you understand my first-grade child's homework?
  The task is to become numbed by the soul-crushing mindlessness of the American educational industry....
• Commented on Mark Dery on 2012 bunkum
  A lot of this 2012-ism is warmed-over chiliasm, some unfinished psychic business left over from our millennial handwringing, something Dery might have taken into greater account. But his evisceration of Pinchbeck is vintage Dery: First, there’s the gape-mouthed credulity required...
• Commented on Afghanistan: Poppy Palaces and "Narcotecture"
  Oooo, thanks for narcotecture: now I have a fun word to use when I go to Miami!...
• Commented on An Insider's View of the Fort Hood Tragedy
  He was yelling "allahu akbar"! Well, Deus vult! was already taken....
• Commented on Beautiful infographic: "The Ancient Hebrew Conception of the Universe"
  Lovely, but lacking the Tetragrammaton. The photoshopped clouds are a nice touch. A little Leviathan swimming about the bottom would be fun too!...
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  I'll see your compartmentalization and raise you some wagging tongues, gossip, leaks, whatever. People talk: it's simple. Think of it this way: if the crazy conspiracy theories put forth by Truthers are so damn fascinating to so many, than how...
• Commented on Duke University official concerned that sex toy study will make students want to "just sit around and masturbate"
  Would he have them be amublatory masturbators? That would be quite a college sport!...
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  Great piece, one of the best, most lucid handlings of the Truther craziness. Doesn't paranoia sometimes work, though? Like, I could either believe that the joke of a health-reform bill that cleared the House is 1) the best the Democrats...
• Commented on Advisor: Are you an Internet addict?
  I can stop any time I want, darn it! I just don't want to yet.......
• Commented on Color film of 1927 London
  Lovely images, great find! And the font and the unintended hilarity of the language, "Father Thames," etc. Amazing....
• Commented on Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs
  Good copyeditors are invaluable. Bad ones are linguistic jack the rippers. The same could be said, much more strongly, about authors, especially those who simply can't hear how their language reads, objectively, to others. Horrible....
• Commented on Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs
  You'd be surprised at how Anglophone notions of correctness and usage differ from US and British English. Take a quick perusal of any Indian copyediting service online: they're often quite unintentionally hilarious....
• Commented on Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs
  I've generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I've had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it's been quite a...
• Commented on Fort Hood Shooter bought "cop killer" at "Guns Galore"
  Correction: replace "less bad guys didn't own one" with "less bad guys owned one". Uh, that'd be "fewer" bad guys: number noun, not mass noun. Bad guys are finite, not in infinite supply; they're distinguishable and countable, not a horde....
• Commented on Fort Hood Shooter bought "cop killer" at "Guns Galore"
  This proves merely that a trained professional can use her firearm responsibly, nay, heroically. Evidence for the wisdom of carrying guns for all of us it most definitely isn't....
• Commented on Bicycle defense kit fits in Altoids tin
  You rather mistake me meaning, I think. While I do support this kind of cycling, and do it myself, I'm really trying to speak objectively, as "this stuff happens, deal." You know, like how cyclists realize that cars roll through...