Don Edwards

About the subject line: March 13 is a Monday this year...

The right tea can be hard to find. I currently have a shipment on order that cost me a total of just over $60 - about $20 of that is shipping because it's being shipped *to me* from China. The order is that big because the shipping charge was not affected by the size of the order in the range I would buy, so I bought more than I otherwise would have. However, for a jasmine oolong, there are other sellers, such as this one (not an endorsement, I've never tried them): http://www.tenren.com/jasmineoolong.html

Same thing works with "Joe and I" versus "Joe and me" or "Joe and myself".

Well, considering that it was originally written in Arabic, and there was no such thing as a standard for written Arabic until years after the guy who originally put the text on paper died (besides which he was illiterate)... possibly quite a lot. Or possibly none at all. But I wouldn't bet on the latter. Me too... and that's when I'm writing original stuff, let alone when I'm copying.

Doctors know more than pharmacists about most aspects of medicine, but pharmacists are specialists in drugs and often know more about them - particularly about interactions - than doctors do.

Build a COMPLETE list, with when you take them. Include any vitamins, herbs, and other supplements. Take this list to a pharmacist for discussion. There are also some foods that are prone to interaction with drugs. Grapefruit juice is quite possibly the worst for this. Pomegranate isn't that great either. Depending on what medicine you're talking about, a food-drug interaction can enhance or inhibit the effect, or speed up or slow down the metabolic processing. All of which can be bad if not accounted for in your dosage and frequency.

I don't know about tails, but my daughter had a set of butterfly wings that she could make gently move, like butterflies sometimes do while not flying.

Book recommendation: "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple. Available in all common ebook formats, and if I could find how/where I got the epub for free I'd provide a link. People have tried to portray Dalrymple as all sorts of racist for what he says about the underclass. Obviously he hates African-Americans, from what he says about them... sorry, he says approximately nothing about them; his focus is on ghetto whites in England, because he's an English doctor in England where the ghettos are predominantly white. As a doctor working in ghetto hospitals he's talked to a huge number of those ghetto-dwellers; he's walked the ghetto streets; he's talked to the social workers who administer government aid programs that are a major source of ghetto income.

We know she knows at least English and Uryuom, because Elliot knew those languages before Ellen was created.

Maybe because part of the point of immortals' resetting is that they'll be unaware they'll be repeating history, so they don't study it?

The kid who was never fed will get there first. The teenagers who've never heard of sex will tie with the pegasi who've never heard of flying.

There are dozens to hundreds of herbal "teas" even without rooibos. (Tea purists object to calling them "tea" if they don't contain any actual tea leaves.) There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of tea made with actual tea leaves. Extreme tea snobs are just as fussy as extreme wine snobs ("Ah, but were the grapes/leaves grown on the east side of that hill, or the west side? Near the top of the slope, or nearer the bottom?"). That wouldn't even be a retcon, since Dan has never defined Ashley's former internet girlfriend. It could be Kitty... or Tedd... or Sam... or Susan... without violating anything that has been said about her to date. (Well, Susan would be kind of out of character. But how better to try on a different character, than on an anonymous internet chat board?)

"Yanno that old sayin', bout if you stare into the abyss, it stares back? Yea, he fuckin' won that staring competition." -- H. Quinn, in an unpublishable crossover fanfic. "Dockside was not a place for strangers, far less so on an overcast evening with the fog rolling in. Still, when a fellow that big, walking with that sort of stride, enters Dockside... nobody notices." -- referring to a student of the guy H. Quinn was talking about (this one is publishable but not yet published)

Well, he has to do a lot more punning before you'll have a book to throw at him.

But the creation of clone forms would be easier via the scanner than via object-oriented programming. My guess is kind of the opposite: the prohibition of OOP in such devices is an (unsuccessful) attempt to restrict users to natural forms, i.e. supposedly if there isn't a winged cat then you can't make a winged-cat form. And of course if there are only natural forms, all you can scan is natural forms. (This would be unsuccessful because OOP is not the only form of code re-use. In fact an essential part of OOP is that a block of reusable code have a clearly-defined purpose, clearly-defined capabilities, and a simple clearly-defined interface that other code can use to invoke that purpose and those abilities - and that's a pretty smart thing to do even without objects.)

In most states, whatever the "legal drinking age" is, everyone consuming alcohol in a bar or restaurant must be at least that age. Doesn't matter if you're with your parents and they are ordering a glass of wine for you - you gotta be "of age". The business can (read: if caught, WILL) be in a metric sh*t-ton of trouble if they don't check and then they provide alcohol to an underage person. The waitperson, too, in some states - legal trouble, that is; in pretty much every state that person's going to be given the opportunity to pursue other career options. The rules are rather looser in stores selling packaged liquor; however in some circumstances they also will have to check the age of persons other than the person technically buying the booze. (Also, if a teenager outside the liquor store hands you money, you go in and buy booze, and hand the bottle to the teenager after you leave, YOU may be in trouble. As well as the teenager. And if there's good reason to think the store staff witnessed the outdoor transactions, them too.) In general I don't think much of the fear of most US governments that someone somewhere might be enjoying themselves without official permission - but when it comes to kids getting unconstrained access to intoxicants... yeah, there should be some obstacles to that plan.

But you think if perverted men with no respect for others are willing to dress as women in order to get into a women's restroom and harass or assault people, they won't be willing to falsely claim to be transgender or genderfluid in order to protect themselves from expulsion or prosecution? At least let's make them work at it a LITTLE bit. Not walk in there in men's clothes and full beards, harass women, and then claim "oh, I'm feeling female right now and suddenly turn into oppressed victims that need protection from our evil society. When you let that happen, you aren't protecting human rights - you're REMOVING protections of human rights.

Rhoda, you are failing at cover-up...

Not one person? Try again; here's at least three, arguably four, plus two taking advantage of "gender-neutral" multi-person facilities (which, per the article, are no longer gender-neutral in direct response to the incident): http://www.dailywire.com/news/5190/5-times-transgender-men-abused-women-and-children-amanda-prestigiacomo#exit-modal Personally, as a matter of respect for other people I would not use a multi-person public restroom that doesn't match my presentation. Further, if the restroom doesn't match my physical anatomy, I'm also going to make sure I use a stall with a door that closes. And yes, I'm slightly genderfluid. But apparently, if I want to protect the civil rights of transgender people, women, and children from transgression by perverts, or if I want the federal government to restrict itself to areas where the Constitution gives the federal government some authority, the only possible explanation for my position is that I'm transphobic and don't want the government protecting civil rights.

If the EGSverse were the real-world I'd say that I think it's quite improbable that the TFG's effect on humans would be altered. However... 1) "quite improbable" and "impossible" are definitely not the same thing; 2) this is a work of fiction, and the rules of magic - heck, even the laws of physics - are whatever the author says they are and change the way the author says they change.

From Pandora's conversation with Disco Wizard we learned that on a previous occasion when the Will of Magic changed the rules, an entire army of fire-mages lost the ability to throw fire. So it's reasonable to think that, in the event of another rule change, the large majority of existing magic-users (within the scope of the rule-change... whatever that scope may be) will lose their ability to do magic. After all, it would hardly serve to keep magic rare if, in response to a great many people knowing how to do magic, the rules changed in a way that left THE SAME great many people still knowing how to do magic. VorlonAgent may be right about affinities. Susan might be better suited than most to gain object-summoning abilities rather similar to her current ones. But there's no reason to think she would keep those abilities through the change. Of course, it's also entirely possible that under the new system, whatever it is about her that creates that affinity will instead create an affinity to, oh, healing spells (just to pick something at random).

Tedd's reason for this choice is inarguable - in both relational terms (his actual spur to the choice) and pragmatic terms (ID cards, school enrollment...) Whether it's the best choice is, nonetheless, unclear. Frankly, as genderfluid as Tedd appears to be, I'm not convinced that there is a "better" choice on anything other than pragmatic and relational grounds. And the pragmatic issues would be temporary.

To kill the bacteria, you don't actually need to boil the water. However, that's the easy way to make sure that it's hot *enough* to do the job. Does not require temperature-sensing equipment. Also, killing the bacteria can be done in small-scale operations by people with almost no training. Of course, you have to actually have some (otherwise-drinkable) water first... The old-fashioned way of desalination involves making the water evaporate. That takes a lot more energy than merely heating it to boiling for a moment. And then you gotta get the water to re-condense where you want it to. This takes special equipment and a degree of technical expertise to maintain and operate the equipment. The new-fangled way is a reverse osmosis process, which takes considerably less energy (still quite a bit though) but is even more demanding in terms of special equipment and technical expertise.

Great, so there's no problem with a state setting rules for the public schools it funds. And, by the way, you might want to study the Constitution carefully to see precisely what authority the federal government has over education, including but not limited to public schools. I happen to support the notion that the federal government should not impose ANY rule WHATSOEVER that it doesn't have the authority to impose. Yes, but we have a difference of opinion over whether stripping civil rights from law-abiding people is a good way of protecting civil rights. A pervert who falsely claims to be genderfluid does NOT have a greater right to feel safe in the women's restroom - which he followed a little girl into - than the little girl does. And that sort of pervert is the only one who gains any actual, real-world protection from the "transgender-protecting" laws under discussion: his false claim, with those laws in place, would make his expulsion or prosecution more difficult, and might result in him being able to win a large court judgment against those who try to uphold the little girl's rights. Which constitutes a removal of civil rights from the property owner, if applied to non-government facilities; and from the little girl's parents; and from random bystanders who attempt to intervene in defense of the little girl. Meanwhile, a transwoman who is presenting as female goes in, goes into a stall, closes the door, does her business, comes out, washes up, and leaves the restroom, and nobody knows she's a transwoman. (I also have this weird notion that transwomen want to be identified as, considered to be, and treated as, women. Not transwomen. And an equivalent statement also applies to transmen. Anyone who actively desires to be publicly identified as transgender, is not; their real gender identity is "politician".) I accept a half-correction on that. Only half because it also explicitly excepted anyone, of any faith (including Muslims), NOT from those seven countries. There are like 40 other Muslim-majority countries, and somewhere in the general vicinity of 60 additional countries where some Muslims live. As for the last item... I wish I could name a credible "fact-checking" site. Politifact is one of the least credible; it rarely lets reality get in the way of its bias on anything its editors consider important.

I don't blame you. I'd want to give him away too, just to get him to leave.