Ed

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Damn. I have to learn to finish my paragraphs. Some of school systems of the ex-British islands in the Caribbean have had corporal punishment into at least 2018; I do not know if Barbados falls into this group, if so,...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Damn. I have to learn to finish my paragraphs. Some of school systems of the ex-British islands in the Caribbean have had corporal punishment into at least 2018; I do not know if Barbados falls into this group, if so,...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  @507: Texas is not, thank G-d, the United States; civilized parts of the country, like where I live in New England, banned corporal punishment in schools well before, say, the UK. The school where my daughter teaches is hiring a...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  20: Heteromeles "Another thing is that not everybody who has white ancestors identifies as white. Barack Obama, the Black President, had a white mother. But he's black." Shockingly, who is and is not white is defined by society, not genetics,...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  Aah ... the titles. I thought this was a guessing game. Annihilation Score (Dr O'Brien with a violin is scary. I just didn't realize how scary because BOH doesn't talk about her) Moby Dick. I'm sure there are other handicapped...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  Talking to myself again. This is a bad sign. The story about the agent was escape reading. The story about the handicapped man is the novel I use when I need to be re-centered. And wings? I'm a recovering aerodynamicist....
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  After reading a story about a violin wielding secret agent, I returned to splitting my time between reading a book about a handicapped man struggling with obsession and a hatred for albino toothed cetaceans, while trying to make a living...
• Commented on Rinse, Drain, Spin ... more Laundry!
  Didn't firing a basilisk gun through an opaque surface play a significant role in Atrocity Archives or did I miss someone carving a hole in the casing of the device?...
• Commented on Parasites
  Dodder (Cuscuta and Grammica; see http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CoopExt/4DMG/Weed/dodder.htm). In the animal kingdom, Ommatokoita elongata, which infests the eyes of Greenland sharks....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Charlie, I think the FBI was worse than you think: the main way they seemed to have investigated Italian-American organized crime (aka "The Mafia" or "The Cosa Nostra") was by protecting Irish-American organized crime, as personified by Whitey Bulger. The...
• Commented on Dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century
  The Catholic Church, at least in the US, is hardly unique in covering up for people abusing minors: witness Penn State University. Comparing how often Catholic clergy abuse minors, vs clergy of other denominations or faiths is also difficult, at...
• Commented on Women in SF and Fantasy
  Clearly, the fantasy heroes are wealthy enough to afford to travel, but it's also clear that they're operating in remarkably well-governed, well-traveled lands: they have roads and inns, and remarkably few brigands (many of whom would be unemployed soldiers looking...
• Commented on Fang Fuckers: some reflections (in a mirror)
  Boy, where does Our Genial Host live where there aren't incredible numbers of bloodsuckers? We've got ticks, mosquitoes, midges, gnats, horse flies, sand flies, deer flies, ticks, leeches, .... They're all small invertebrates, but in the water there are lampreys...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  The scriptural evidence is that Christ (or Yeshua ben Yusuf) was not born on December 25, A.D. 1: He was probably born about 4 BC, and probably not in December. Early Christians knew this, and a "Christmas" mass was celebrated...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  I had erred; the bystanders were injured, not killed, by police. Still, these are bystanders who were injured -- three directly and six indirectly -- by police. My basic point -- that these bystanders were injured by mistake, by trained,...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  Also, the right to bear arms, in 18th Century-speak, referred to the right to serve in the army as an officer. In many Continental countries, this was forbidden to people who were not armigerous (arms-bearing) classes. England did not have...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  There's also the problem in that arming teachers may make things much, much worse. Recently, in New York, there was an armed robber who was escaping on a busy street (NYC is probably the only city in the US with...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  @JamesPadraicR (#155) And what exactly does that have to do with the founding of the US (which is what you were talking about)? The taxes which were the precipitating factor in the War for Independence were established by Parliament to...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  Leaving aside the various misogynists around, the principal, Dawn Hochsprung, and the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, charged the shooter. Victoria Soto stood up in front of the shooter and lied to his face, successfully keeping him from killing the children...