[ANSTHRLD] Submissions from out of Kingdom

[tmcd at panix.com]

Long and off-topic.

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Star - Ansteorra <star at ansteorra.org> wrote:
> You have proven once again that you are a master at turning a
> phrase.

I am but a journeyman.  The master is James Nicoll.  He wrote a quote
that's been distributed around a lot, that you may have read:

    The problem with defending the purity of the English language is
    that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just
    borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages
    down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets
    for new vocabulary.

He's written a lot of things that I find hilarious.

---

We have that problem with the [Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation]. Because it was created by the Liberals as a tool of
national unity the Conservatives hate it, since it is clearly the
Tallywacker of Satan himself. ...

I have my clock-radio set to it because it very reliably broadcasts
things that make me wake up in a rage.

----

Next: FEMA neglects to take into account the possibility of fire in
Old Balsawood Town (currently in its fifth year of drought and home of
the General Sherman Home for Compulsive Arsonists).

----

God, just typing that make my brain hurt. It's like a urinary tract
infection in my head. It burns! It burns!

----

Until recently baby production was largely dependent on slave labour;
as soon as women are allowed to answer the question "Would you like to
squeeze as many objects the size of a watermelon out of your body as
it takes to kill you?" they generally answer "No, thank you." This
leads to falling birthrates everywhere women are not kept enslaved and
ignorant of the alternatives. ...

It seems to me that we could double the number of hosts by stealing an
idea from wasps: simply implant men with modified fetuses that develop
within the men and then when they are large enough to survive outside,
gnaw their way to freedom. In fact you might be able to grow entire
litters within the male hosts.

----

[On New Orleans] I keep imaging two French guys looking for a place to
put a settlement. "Let's try building it _downhill_ from the ocean."

----

[on the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) coming back into power in
Ontario] Unfortunately, the PCs we got after that had gollumized while
out in the wilderness.

----

Of course, Robarts and Davis were both "Red" or "Not Willfully Evil"
Tories and not the "Pass Another Toffee Covered Baby**" Tories ...

** Of course I exagerate slightly here. As far as can be proven,
cannibalism is not a core value of the Ontario PCs. ... if any of
Harris's gang actually ate babies, it was merely a hobby in keeping
with their values and not a Whip enforced Party requirement.

----

I think risk assessment must vary a bit.

My father once bet me that I couldn't swim upstream during a
thunderstorm, ... I won my 25 cents, which could buy significant
amounts of candy back then.

He also talked me into trying to outswim an undertow, which didn't
work out quite so well. What was worse, it turned out my older brother
couldn't outswim it either, about 30 minutes later. I think this is
why some parents have multiple kids.

On the other hand, I could read any book or magazine I liked.

----

>Honestly, do you call yourselves a constitutional republic?

Uh, no. We have a Queen, kept safely in walnut shell in a tree stump
in a petrified forest in the heart of a volcano in a land very far
away where she can suck up all the Head of State mojo without actually
being able to use any of it in Canada.

----

... I bet for a lot of 1950s taxpayers their attitude would have been
"who cares? By 199whatever I will be dead*." ...

* ObSF: Or living on the Moon, eating food-pills off the tummies of my
Astro-Harem.

----

We used to be very small-c conservative here in Ontario but have
recently come to terms with the existance of breasts. ... now any
woman can freely walk around exercising their civil liberties in
Ontario. Few do, because we go from Frostbite to Blackfly fairly
quickly: there's only a few weeks where partial nudity isn't a bad
idea.

----

There's something unfair about needing to be awake enough to handle
duct tape to fix the machine that will allow me to sleep well enough
to awake enough to handle duct tape. It's like the paradox of the
coffee maker.

----

What you have to remember about the music industry is that its run by
people who couldn't meet the moral requirements to join the
Totenkopfverbande. [the Death's Head SS]

----

There's always Mennonite Speed Dial (1). ...

1: Running.

----

Interestingly, there's absolutely no correlation between how badly
someone reacts to editing and how well they write. I've seen decent
writers go ballistic and I've seen people who should for the preservation
of Art be beaten with a shovel and buried quietly under C Lot react
exactly the same way.

----

It was a good place to meet people. Well, not so much for me but for
people with social skills and not so much of a sullen brooding air, it
was.

----

I've been reading since about the time I first chose to speak** ...

** At four. I spoke perfectly lucid English when I got around to it,
so I don't know what all the fuss was about.

----

>>People are certainly living longer on average now, in some
>>places. With advances in medicine, who's to say that someone living
>>now won't make it to 136, at least?
>
>It's quite possible that someone now living will see their thousandth
>birthday.

It's quite possible that we will all begin to excrete zithers. The
fact that nobody has ever been observed to do so cannot be taken as a
limitation on the future, right?

----

See, here we run into what I call the Eddie Problem. Eddie came with
none of the usual training cats have, pretty much a blank
slate. Unfortunately:

1: He's observant.

2: For a cat, he's pretty bright.

3: He generalizes weirdly.

It's very hard to predict what he will do.

This is the cat who taught himself how to use a toilet (except he
can't flush it). It is also the cat who has been known to poop in
those plastic jugs cat litter comes in, the cat who for the longest
time thought he had to be in the kitchen to be petted and the cat who
once decided to try to pick me up by my left eyelid.

----

The Trade [1]. ...

1: Gretzky from the Oilers to the Kings, something that won
Pocklington about the same amount of public love as George Washington
might have got had he sold Betsy Ross to a Marakesh brothel.

----

BTW, almost all fatal accidents in flying occur at take-off or landing
[1]. In fact, most of them occur within the first couple of
minutes. If you count to 180 slowly and you are still not dead, then
the odds are very good that you are going to live, at least until you
land.

----

Most of my scars are not fire-related and I no longer say "I know what
I am doing" at critical moments.

----

Why they spell "spend money like George Augustus Frederick of Hanover,
Prince of Wales, had he been a cocaine addict" 'fiscal responsibility'
I am not quite sure, although their version _is_ shorter.

----

Note that nobody on board the RIVER OF STARS should have been allowed
near a butter knife*. ...

* Says the man who cut himself making a sandwich, although not on the
knife. It was the peanut butter. ...

New jar of peanut butter. The jar had foil sealing it. I managed
somehow to slice the tip of my finger (although one without full
feeling, so it doesn't matter) on the edge of the foil.

I actually done much worse with a shower curtain: deep paper cut style
wound across my left palm from the edge of the curtain. Luckily, the
one place you can bleed profusely without messing things up is the
bath.

----

>It's been announced that Bush is waiving financial sanctions against
>Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for failing to prevent or crack down on the
>slave trade in prostitutes, child prostitutes, ...
>
>What can be said about such a person?  A man who has two daughters
>himself?

	"How much for both?"

----

* And I've been able to avoid half-bad stuff, comic book analogs of
Joss Whedon TV shows: good enough that I will watch them but with
flaws like heated chisels driven into my eyes.

Calibration: I put [BattleStar Galactica] at one heated chisel whereas
FIREFLY is more like a really bad catheter accident, with an
infection. ...

** Thus saving me from having to ask them if they are aware that
reading his comics is much like I imagine bobbing for apples in a used
bedpan must be like and if this is why they read them.

----

It's like Bush's ongoing Surrealist presidency. It doesn't make sense
that a man with his family and educational background should talk like
he had a steel bolt blown through his frontal lobes. It's all a pose
to see how far he can go before people get the joke. I'm waiting for
him to start wearing a clown nose at press conferences.

----

Is there a term for the belief that an ethnic group or religious group
the speaker does not belong to all share some positive quality?  "All
Buddhists make good basketball coaches" or "Nobody builds cathedals
like the Maori" sort of thing? I need it for a review.

[The winning term was "stereohype"]

----

>I find the science atrocious, myself, but I manage to overlook it in
>large part because Whedon explicitly admits that none of it works
>because he sucks at science.

And tragically, federal law prevents him from hiring someone who
doesn't.

----

I also wasn't surprised when [deleted] bought it, because hey, he's
the black guy in an action film. Might as well have chewed on a
cyanide tablet. ...

In the action genre, an extra or supporting character who has black
skin is functionally identical to an extra or supporting character who
wears a red shirt.

----

>I bet you proofread your comment very carefully.

Nope. Boy, that sure sounds like it would have been a good idea, given
that the faster I rattle off a post, the better the odds that it will
come off reading like I composed it shortly after a railway spike
passed directly through my frontal lobes.

----

If a Heinleinian Girl in Charge shows up, the only thing to do is curl
into a ball and cup your hands over your privates. Free will is not
going to be on the menu.

----

>>>> I read as fast as -- Andrew, how many people would you say I
>>>> read as fast as?
>>>
>>> As fast as ten fast readers, perhaps?
>>
>> That would be so useful at Miskatonic U.
>
>Wouldn't being able to run as fast as ten fast runners be more so?

So would being able to pee molten uranium at 2 km/s but I have to go
with the strengths I actually have.

----

Leaving out why it was I never got to see THE INCREDIBLES in the
theatre. I paid my damn money and I don't recall saying anything like
"I'm a nervous nancy who's going to stop watching the movie just
because the lobby is on fire." I mean, the smoke was so totally not
getting down to us.

----

Now I only tried to read one of his books but that's because reading
it was like smearing Cobalt 60 over my eyes.

----

I couldn't say. US TV probably is somewhat misleading in this area but
as I understand it, the average student in the US graduates
illiterate, pregnant and having been murdered six or seven times and
it isn't like that up here [in Canada].

----

British North America is to Britain as New Zealand is to Zeeland. That
is, if they didn't want us to use the name they wouldn't have left it
out, in that locked room, in the safe, with two armed guards, where
anyone could walk off with it.

----

You wouldn't that the question "did this ship spend any amount of time
at the bottom of a harbor before you assigned it to me?" would be a
question that one would find useful in a naval career but in point of
fact, it's one my grandfather's captain should have asked. ....

He took similar duty in WWII, as well. Why not? It was safe
as houses****. ....

**** Assuming the houses had easily triggered explosive devices in
them.

*** I don't know if that's one of the ships that sank with him on
board.

----

"Gun-wielding recluse gunned down by local police" isn't the epitaph I
want. I am hoping for "Witnesses reported the sound up to two hundred
kilometers away" or "Last body part finally located".

----

"The" Communist Party?

We have at least two: the Communist Party of Canada, which plays
Smeagol to the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)'s Gollum.

----

...  the few comments we got about the parentals didn't make them
sound like people who'd be likely to master condom-jitsu ...