Do you actually say `trot a mouse' about strong-enough tea?

Zippers haven't changed much since they were first invented, and neither have the problems we all have with them. From stuck zippers to teeth that just won't clinch, here's how to fix all the problems you'll run into with anything that zips.

Asked for the wisdom achieved in eighty-five years, one of my grandfathers replied, "Sex is overrated and pissing is underrated." No word on poo.

Pattern *adjustment* isn't as hard, and design is interesting and even fun. The extremely traditional approach of fitting a shell and then adapting it into patterns is a slow start, but reliable. (And sets you up to sew in the rigorously inventive styles of, say, Vionnet, or Tomoko Nakamichi.)

Dresses and flouncy blouses are not too difficult (really slippery or gauzy fabric is, but you can work up to it).

Jeans are crazy difficult for everyone.

I've met more than a few people from cultures in which a lot of eye-contact is aggressive; they made glancing eye-contact occasionally and then listened or spoke while looking at something neutral. (Much of Central America, some of India, some of Southeast Asia, iirc? Is complicated by age and gender.) Very confusing…

It might make sense to sink geothermal as a neighborhood resource, but doing it expensively and privately in a dense neighborhood makes it... less ecological. Perhaps they're explicitly doing it as an Independent-of-All-Of-You thing. Uh, especially if they need a swimming pool (though the pool might also be useful…

And the punk collar! Yes, I can believe she's listed as best-dressed.

It would explain part of why some of the badly informed beliefs are *so* tightly defended as self-image. And aristocratic dilettantism and the "gentleman's C" are standard tactics from past inegalitarian societies, but I don't know how to prove it as it happens now.

Seems like superb material for novels or movies.…

Oh, so true. Engineers sometimes don't even know about the undecidability problems in math and can be pretty resistant to the idea. (There is a crack in everything.)

Rich, Educated and Stupid... You know, is part of the problem that being wilfully ignorant and a little incompetent is now a sign of high class status? Our new gentry who schmooze their way into consultant jobs that they can't ever be proven to have failed at, and then rank themselves higher than the grinds who turn…

They often can, it's one of the ways the CDC finds `Patient Zero'. Don't know if they *always* can or how expensive it is.

And, of course, if the worst carrier doesn't have symptoms and never comes in sick to be sampled, how are we going to find them? And can we lock them up when we do? Typhoid Mary never really…

It's not like the issue is dead!

... Which Eliot? (I was a T.S. woman when young and have aged into George.)

With some toast and tea. (Great nym.)

I misparsed your first post, actually, and read it as saying that Tolkien was unusually low in individual consciousness even compared to his models. Less confused now!

Love the Mabinogion, looking up the Battle of Maldon, and for anyone playing along, a shout-out to the Lais of Marie de France. Come to think of it,…

That sounds like something that could be checked from teh data.

I think it leads to fewer books for us because the writers have to spend all their energy at their day jobs, what with only earning two cents from us.

For novels as for video games — if, when defending them, we say they can affect people in significant ways and should be regarded as art, then (it seems to me) some of those significant ways are likely to be damaging and such works should be noted and vilified, scorned, or countered, as appropriate.

I don't find a lot of what moderns would call genuine human emotion or connection in the medieval epics I've read — but I sure didn't study them! Pointers?

(Also, _Hild_. )