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Random Q & A Thread - PART 2

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14:29 / 26.08.04

Is it all right for a woman in her mid-twenties to be interested in children's books, and to buy them from shops, even if they are not necessarily known to be good?

Would it be more or less all right if said woman had a purpose or outlet for the interest, e.g. reviews, writing her own, etc.?

I am suffering from vague feelings of disquiet over my penchant for YA fantasy (not DWJ etc. - less well-known and new books, many of which are the first parts of trilogies, argh) and need to be told what to do.

15:04 / 26.08.04

There is nothing wrong in being interested and purchasing books that are labelled for consumption by younger people (and aren't surrounded by OK-for-Adults hype like Harry Potter). At worst, they'll just think you're buying stuff for your own child or a relation. And if you don't want to go into shops, use Amazon's site. Discreet packaging and delivery.

15:19 / 26.08.04

Kit-Cat Club: I wouldn't let that kind of thing worry you to be honest. I mean who is going to judge you, and do you really care? I think all those commuters reading Harry Potter proves that entertainment is where you find it, regardless of the target audience.
If it does bother you or you get questioned either tell them to piss off, or as you suggested claim you are writing your own and require some inspiration.
I will however admit that I am better at giving this advice than taking it as I still have a tendency to be a bit self-concious about my comic reading.

15:28 / 26.08.04

KCC - you've got it arse-about-face: judge not the reader by the books, but the books by the reader! If you're into them, they must be a quality read. If someone challenges you, just say: "I am reading them, therefore they are brilliant, big nose!" Don't follow it up by kicking them in the shins and zooming off like you're riding a horsey, that will dilute the message.

16:29 / 26.08.04

But it would be ever so satisfying.

Thanks chaps - I feel suitably braced...

21:03 / 26.08.04

What the hell does "TEH" mean on message boards?

I've seen this a lot lately, usually saying this like "This movie teh suxx!"

It's even been used on our dear auld barby. (See TEH MEGATON!! and I AM TEH FAMOUS!)

So, explain yerselves. Now.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

21:25 / 26.08.04

It's h4XXoR talk - such as "I 0wnOrZ Joo, jOO are Teh l4M3 N00B!"

Basically, craply spelled slang.

21:48 / 26.08.04

What the hell is "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty all about? Yeah, yeah, I've read the lyrics. Some boy works in the city, bit fucked off with the rat race.... is that it?

Ah, but is it the rat race he's fucked off with? Because my reading is slightly different -- he's fed up with unrewarding/no relationships and too much beer. I think that's what 'good' pop lyrics do -- they remain quite vague so the listener can hear whatever's relevant to their personal experience.

In the end, it's all about the guitar solo ...

ONLY NICE THINGS

23:26 / 26.08.04

Saxophone solo, surely? Performed, utterly apocryphally, by Bob Holness.

pointless and uncalled for

06:28 / 27.08.04

KCC, ignore those answering your above question, they seek to mask an evil. People who work in retail, especially book shops, are imbued with dastardly mind reading skillz and they are so very very judgemental.

With but a few seconds of you standing in front of them at the till they will extract your feelings about the book that you are buying and all of your friends phone numbers and call them all and make snippy comments after swearing us to secrecy. The stuff they tell me about you just doesn't bear repeating.

Or not as the case may actually be.

Must run, the black helicopters are coming to get me.

06:36 / 27.08.04

Excellent work btw SK on the Edamame. Worked a treat.

KKC - my Mrs is training to be a teacher and gets children boos all the time. They're great. Personal favourites include Exodus by Julie Bertagna, Holes by Louis Sachar, and Skellig by David Almond. Don't be ashamed!

Now then. I went to see the Mondays last week in Clapham and was wondering about all these fast food vans etc you get at festivals. How does one go about procuring say, a doughnut machine? and does anyone know what sort of licences/ permission you need in order to sell at these one day events? First come first served? I've looked on google but it seems to be a closely guarded secret!

17:05 / 27.08.04

if one were to punch a child, what would be the charge?
would it be the same charge as for punching an adult?
and a teen?
and an adolescent?

not that i am thinking of smacking the local kids or anything...
but if i get jumped by three or four youths and while defending myself get arrested, will i be in more trouble if they are under eighteen? or sixteen?

or is assault assault?

02:13 / 31.08.04

Hi All

My friend have access to corks of diameter 22mm. He has ask me if I or any of my friends would need them. I just dunno who would need such corks eversince they have been replaced by screw caps. Not that my friend can get plenty of such corks at one go. I just dunno what to do for my friend. He told me that the usual cork suppliers has problem supplying such corks to the local market. The supplier and distributor has some cork quality issue to sort out. Anyone have any idea what I should do with him and his corks? Best regards for your holidays.

flufeemunk effluvia

02:52 / 31.08.04

Maygan, besides putting them up your posterior, cork floats very well. Use the corks to fashion a small raft to trap rodents in and send them into a horribly watery grave.

23:20 / 31.08.04

corks are also great for hats in fly country.
aussie-stylee.

madly enough, i was pondering a cork ponder earlier.

the flared corks one uses for champagne and some of the classier beers... how do they get in there?
is it with a rolled up funnel in the bottle neck that you squish it into it with a pole? removing the cone and shoving the cork home at the same time?
i know it'll be machine-done now, but i keep thinking that beer and champagne go back a good while.
i cant quite see monks with hydraulics, y'know?

23:27 / 31.08.04

oh, and you could use corks for fishing.
there are specifically designed products that are more effective, but a painted cork can work wonders.

(dude, why am i helping people fish?)

flufeemunk effluvia

02:28 / 01.09.04

toksik, you are helping people fish because the god of fisheries is channeling through you.

Duh.

07:50 / 01.09.04

the flared corks one uses for champagne and some of the classier beers... how do they get in there?

I think they started life as normal corks, but expand when they're in the bottle and so look like champagne corks when you take them out.

I've just found this when checking I wasn't entirely wrong, which gives a much better explanation!

19:23 / 02.09.04

Is there a medical/technical/professional word for cyborg? I'm teaching a module on Technology and Society and will be doing a session toward the end on the idea of the post-human.

'Cyborg' seems to bring up connotations of science fiction which, while a good way to start and end the session, I'd like to avoid for some parts.

So, is there a different word to use, or is that used in medical circles as well?

23:50 / 02.09.04

No.

19:22 / 06.09.04

New question! How do I stop that fucking stupid new Blogger banner from obscuring my blog title? I know one Lither posted a link to the fix on their own blog, but can't remember who.

08:29 / 07.09.04

No answers from me today, sorry, only more questions:

How do I make footnotes show up on the right page in MS Word? At the moment the last footnote reference on each page keeps getting bumped over to the next page, even when there is clearly plenty of room to rejig it. I'm not even sure how I could fix this 'by hand', as it were.

18:35 / 07.09.04

Dupre: Flowers had a link to this fix put forth by Blogger themselves.

19:34 / 07.09.04

Deva -- do your paragraphs tend to be quite long? I guess they are (what I mean here by 'long') if you are writing your thesis. If so, MS-Word's widows and orphans control may be preventing the main text from being re-jigged. Try unticking the settings in Format->Paragraphs->Line and Page Breaks.

17:21 / 08.09.04

Seldom Killer and Grey Area, thanks for your help earlier, it worked. I have another irritating computer problem. I copied the text of a web page and pasted it into a word document a few days ago. I did it fairly late at night and can't be sure I didn't hit some button or other. Anyway, every time I open a blank Word document or even a new email to send I get the text that I have previously copied and pasted. What can I do?

18:51 / 08.09.04

Cash -- Find the file called 'Normal.dot' and edit it to remove the text you pasted:

Start button->Find->type in 'normal.dot'.
Double click to edit the file, remove the text and then exit. Be sure to set 'Save as file type' to 'Document template (*.dot)' when it asks you where to save it. Word should change automatically to a folder called 'Templates' when you do this. This is good. Click OK and you're done.

In case you are wondering how this will fix two birds with one stone, the answer is Outlook sneakily uses Word as its text editor.

19:04 / 08.09.04

Cheers Jack. That's fixed it.

08:03 / 09.09.04

To help me along with my mission to perform the perfect con I was wondering if anyone could suggest books (fiction/non-fiction) related to conmen and women - movies would be helpful too - House of Games/The Sting etc etc...

08:36 / 09.09.04

"The Grifters" is good, both the film with John Cusack and the book by Jim Thompson. As the title suggests they deal more with the low level con, rather than the big sting, but you have to start somewhere right?

13:01 / 13.09.04

Hello. How can I copy my work favorites to my home computer without the aid of a floppy disk? The only way I can think of doing it is by going through each one and cut and pasting the url. I know you can export them en masse but to do that you need a floppy disk right? That's not possible, so is there anyway of doing it all together but without a disk?

13:22 / 13.09.04

You don't need a floppy. Just set the export destination to something other than 'a:\' (I recommend the desktop) and then attach it to an e-mail to a web account from which you can retrieve it for installation wherever.

10:41 / 14.09.04

Is it all right for a woman in her mid-twenties to be interested in children's books, and to buy them from shops, even if they are not necessarily known to be good?

Would it be more or less all right if said woman had a purpose or outlet for the interest, e.g. reviews, writing her own, etc.?

Well, I think so. I have grown-up excuses for reading children's books now (going out with a children's writer AHAHAHAHAHAHA plus planning a Young Adult novel), but mostly I think of children's literature as a genre like any other - that is, what defines it isn't its target market, but internal criteria. I find them hard to define (there was a very good post on the DWJ list about YA as genre recently, but unfortunately the archive is broken so I can't link to it), but after thinking about it a lot I think my love of children's books - and on the whole I like children's books better than adult books and value them more highly - comes from their generic specificity. Actually, what I think is that children's books are like what Walter Benjamin calls 'storytelling' in the 'Storyteller' essay: they "have counsel" for the reader (which is different from having a moral), whereas the novel (= adult fiction) is essentially an alienated genre.

10:20 / 18.09.04

can anyone point me in the direction of a good and simple (but not simplistic) guide to poetry structure?
it has been absolutely ages since i wrote much myself, and i have only the dimmest memories of my school days.
(i blame the teachers first and foremost, but an honorable mention has to go to my lifelong friend, the drugs.)

i want to know what it is i am writing in and how to continue in a specific rhythym or meter. i remember drawing squiggly lines under lines of poetry to show stresses and suchlike, but i would like to know a bit about what it is i am doing.

like, uh, iambic pentameter is about the only one i can remember anything about, and i reckon there are long lost tribes in the amazon that could explain that to you.

09:37 / 20.09.04

toksik - sorry, I cannot help you.

I wonder if anyone can help me, conversely? Given that Rome was founded in 753 BCE*, which would therefore be ?the year 0 or 1? in the Roman system of dating "Ab Urbe Condita" (AUC - 'since the foundation of the city'), what year would it be now in the AUC system? And is there an easy formula for converting years (both BCE and CE) into AUC? I suspect it can't be that hard, but the lack of a Year 0 in the switch from BCE to CE and my generally bad mental arithmetic is making me want someone who would find it easy to do the sum for me, otherwise I will just have to get a big piece of paper and write down all the years on it (753=0, 752 =1... 2004=? 276-something??)

*not really, but that's the date the Romans used in their dating system

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:06 / 20.09.04

Hmmm... 753 years after 753BCE would be 1AD, yes? and then 2004 is 2003 years after that... so 2756? God knows if that's right, though... I feel a huge piece of paper coming on.

The other thing, which may or may not be a problem, is when did Rome start beginning the year in January? Also, what about the Gregorian Calendar? Is that going to have been in place or not?

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