Don Edwards

Thing is... by mentioning that the griffins expect Elliot, Mr. V just shot down his argument for not taking Nanase. And Nanase (or Susan, but I can't see a good reason to take her) in fairy-form would be extremely safe - the griffins would have to find her human body, which could be back home, to do her any lasting harm. If they attack in spite of their deference to her royal status. Granted, we know from prior experience that getting the fairy-form killed while she's in it is not good, but if she isn't needed there she could land it in a tree and revert to her human body back home. (Hey, this is how they could handle it. Nanase is babysitting, Susan or Sarah or Ellen comes to visit with her, Nanase goes to rest for a few minutes, pops a fairydoll to Elliot/Cheerleadra - or behind Mr. V - and it gets tucked away somewhere non-obvious...) (Also, I'm imagining a griffin snapping at fairydoll-Nanase - and she flies inside the griffin's beak, wraps herself around the base of its tongue, and starts fey-punching...) Grace would probably be safer, in the event of the griffins going on the attack, than Mr. V or Cheerleadra. But there isn't a really good argument for taking her. Tedd would be vulnerable, but there IS a good argument for taking him. And he'd be more likely to get automatic deference (or be seen as an inherent threat) than Mr. V And then there's the question of how likely is it for any sort of them-versus-griffins combat scenario to emerge? IMHO, not very.

https://freebasic.net/ MS Office comes with VBA. LibreOffice/OpenOffice comes with StarBasic, although IMHO it isn't ready for prime time (I tried to migrate a moderately complex macro I'd previously written in Excel, and when testing it one particular subroutine executed perfectly THREE time but on the FOURTH time it got a data-type exception - on a DIM statement. Since I do a fair amount of macro programming, I stick with Office2007... on Linux.) Windows comes with CMD.COM (or is it currently COMMAND.COM?) and PowerShell. Most distributions of Linux comes with about a dozen assorted scripting language in a basic install, and dozens more available in whatever software manager they use. Under Linux, if the first two bytes of a file that you're trying to execute are #! then the rest of the first line - that is, from there up to a newline - is taken as the path and filename of an interpreter and the remainder of the file is handed to that interpreter. So you can freely mix routines written in different scripting languages.

iCat: we have a nap for that.

Not surprising that you read Two Lumps. (I stopped reading it when the real titular cats died and the cartoon critters, IMHO, turned from cats into tiny humans in cat suits.)

Dang, I need to get my crossover story done. I know why the character I'm bringing over would be at that meeting (albeit probably as a fourth person, not the 3rd)...

40 years after childhood he's still a young adult? He didn't SEEM a bit slow... (Personally, I preferred Emma Peel as the sidekick - several years before I figured out why. And I think she had a nastier side-kick, too.)

More of an equal-opportunity racist than he is usually given... um... credit?... for. He hated pretty much every ethnicity other than Anglo-Saxon. (Somewhere I once found a reference to what he said about the Danes. It wasn't pretty. Naturally I can't find it again.) That is a VERY common - and unfortunate - pattern. I stopped reading Mercedes Lackey's new stuff because of it. Some writers really seriously need an editor.

I wonder if that network is run from a very large library with a very large librarian...

The word Dan was looking for is "pleated". She's wearing one pleated skirt. The cuffs of her sleeves, and her collar, are also pleated (or made to look pleated - e.g. pleated fabric tack-sewn to a non-pleated liner - because, frankly, having them actually pleated doesn't make sense and would be kind of awkward).

Although I did hear a tale, apparently true, of an A-10 taking a rabbit strike to the lower engine cowling. The pilot's CO and the head mechanic had a LOT of fun razz him about it ("just how low were you flying?"), in front of the whole squad, before revealing that he had also taken a bird strike, apparently a hawk, to the upper cowling of the same engine.

/me apparently hasn't figured it out yet...

Could be worse... I once reviewed a sauce as "a hot sauce with no heat, to flavor food with but it has no flavor - why does this exist?"

But what about the lab report? Did the dog have any good news for you?

Nah, the article she was responding to came first, and I can see how women in general - cisgender, transwomen, or genderfluid - would be offended by that article. And maybe men too. Rowling apparently found it offensive, or at least mock-worthy. And it seems that people are upset at Rowling for how, in the resulting mockery, she excluded transwomen from being women - but, reading what she actually said, she DIDN'T. She simply failed to give a definition that included them - just like she failed to give a definition that would include my 90ish-year-old mother-in-law or my 2-year-old great-granddaughter. But her point wasn't an attempt to have an all-encompassing definition, it was to mock the original article's failure to include ANYONE as "women". On the other hand, she DID include many transmen in a group they don't want to be included in, thereby implicitly excluding them from a group they do want to be included in - and as far as I've seen hardly anyone raises a stink about THAT.