Don Edwards

Juice Newton? No, Merrilee Rush.

Also, she was worried that Sarah (or someone) might say her name twice in a row. If that happens, Box is a much more acceptable name.

Prudence is the better part of valor sanity.

I believe that there is one God that is beyond the possibility of human comprehension, so we divide that one God into myriad pieces that we can comprehend (about as well as we comprehend each other). No matter which one (or several) you choose to follow, you're partly right but leaving something out. Thus there cannot be "one true faith".

My philosophy is "why do I want or need for this website to know my birth date?" And if I don't have a really good answer, they don't get it. What's mildly annoying and confusing: in the state of Washington it has been determined that the birth dates of driver's-license holders are confidential information and to be redacted from responses to FOIA requests, but driver's license numbers are public information - and the birth date is encoded in the driver's license number, with the code also publicly available, so anyone who has your Washington driver's-license number can easily determine your birth date.

But if the "genuine" coin is gold plate on a lead slug, and you're counterfeiting it with gold diluted by some lighter metal, you'll need more gold to get the same weight. (In a rather different context I once read of someone using a gold/silver alloy to counterfeit a cheaper silver-colored metal... the purpose was to smuggle the gold across borders.)

Regarding Dan's concerns about the panel of Susan clutching her pant-leg: it's an underline for just how tense and uncertain Susan is about the question at hand. It didn't need to be there, but it adds more weight to a significant point that might otherwise be overlooked until later: it anchors Ellen's words in the bottom-left panel.

The boar was deliberately (although probably without understanding exactly what it was doing) feeding power to make its enlargement persist. Vladia is a special case for approximately the same reason Grace is, so is probably similar in this regard: a shape-changing enchantment doesn't actually enchant her (so the enchantment never expires), it just changes her form. Grace does that quite freely on her own; external sources of shape-changing just grant her more forms to work with. Vladia, because of a really bad experience, chooses to not try to shapeshift on her own, and remains in the form Ellen gave her. (From the brief description she gave, I think that's a pretty reasonable choice.) (It would be interesting to have Rhoda shrink Grace to Catalina's current size, and then see if Grace can shrink herself to the same size. It's well below her current limit.) Sarah's power is self-limiting in duration, in the sense that her body is unresponsive (and she's unaware of what's really going on around her) while she's using it so she has to snap out of it fairly often for personal safety. The high-power-demand portion of it has an EXTREMELY brief duration - a fraction of a second. Maintaining the simulation probably takes a trickle of power.

Maybe someone could ask Dan to keep the link, but change it to "UNofficial forums"?

Catalina has a different hairdo, and either the collar of her shirt is looser or her neck is thinner. And she lost her freckles. The fur on her cat-ears may be darker in color, or that could just be a lack of illumination. No other really obvious changes. But then we can only see her from the mid-chest up, from the front. plus part of her hands.

Or to put it more simply: the *shortest* path to the most recent (in terms of number of generations, not necessarily time) common ancestor determines whether you are siblings, 1st cousins, second cousins, etc. The *difference* in path length adds the "removed" part.

There is also this: apparently Edward accepted the infant Tedd as he appeared to be: their son - without magic, but still their son. If Noriko regarded Tedd as a failed experiment and they had another child, there would be two possibilities: another child without magic and the same situation again with even more stress between them; or a child with magic and Noriko promptly essentially abandons Tedd, proving herself herself an unfit mother and a detriment to Edward's efforts to care for their elder child. I don't think Edward would find either of those possibilities acceptable.

And now I'm wondering what it would do to a guy who's strictly gay...

But, aside from that one secret-identity form (that I can't remember the name we gave it) we don't know if Elliot is sexually attracted to males. And the secret-identity forms are known to be mind-altering.

If you want to have a bunch of hidden vampire-hunters scattered around the country untraceably, shipping them to different cities and putting them up for adoption would make them harder to trace.

People DO happen to be extremely similar to each other, while being somewhat less closely related than half-sisters. The best example in my personal experience being cousins that could be mistaken for identical twins. (Well, actually, two of them were identical twins, but the third was a cousin.) For that matter, Tina Fey looks enough like Sarah Palin that a silly (and geographically absurd) comment the former made as part of a comedy sketch was held against the latter.

But that would still require that (for example) a lot of detail of what happened during the card tournament - other than card games - be written up in Tedd's history, and in Grace's history, and in Sarah's history, and in Pandora's history... but it couldn't just be copied, because different parts of the same arc would have to be in Justin's, Tedd's, Grace's, Sarah's, and Luke's, while other parts would have to be in Sarah's and Sam's.

If I were taking on a project to redo character histories, a single history would be what that character did OUTSIDE (and mostly before) the comic continuity - plus links to character-relevant pages of the story-arc section. However, I'm not volunteering to do it. The person who does it gets to make the final* decision. * Final - until someone comes in and redoes it again. H

There aren't many places in the world other than on a closed track, that you could drive at 260 MPH for 20 minutes without encountering conditions that cannot be handled safely at that speed. Those few places tend to be distinguished by the scarcity of people. Why drive a show-off car in a place where there's nobody to show off to? They also are sometimes distinguished by fuel stations being 87 or more miles apart. Which means you drive 260 MPH for 20 minutes and then walk to the gas station so you can carry gasoline back to the car.

I think I've mentioned once or twice that on one occasion I encountered three young ladies so similar in appearance that I wondered if they were identical triplets; it turned out that two of them were identical twins and the third was a *cousin*. (I also commented to my wife "sometimes you walk into a restaurant and immediately get a feeling that it's a family business". The three girls were working as hostesses, and our waitress was the twins' mother.) Still, I'd bet a few quatloos on Jerry being correct that Susan and Diane are sisters.

I also have a habit of unintentionally sneaking up on people. Specifically, sneaking up in front of them. As for hiccups, I've found that barking "STOP THAT!" at the person is effective surprisingly often.

And it's quite possible that she dyes her hair for the same reason Susan did. Or as a form of emotional support for Susan (but in that case it'd more likely be the same color as Susan).

The coincidence of being born so close together really doesn't need all that much explaining - the normal variation in gestation period is something like a 4-week window, so it isn't like it's necessary to assume that the two mothers got knocked up on the same day. Their similarity is not hard to believe if their father has a particular "type", so the younger Mrs. Pompons and the lover who was Diane's birth mother looked extremely similar.

Since all the major shopping areas are about 30 miles east of us, we went 50 miles west to a beach in Ocean Shores, WA. For several years in childhood I lived in easy walking distance of open-ocean beaches, but my lady didn't, and neither of us has been to an open-ocean Pacific beach in decades. Also, there's a good size storm that at the time was about 80 miles offshore. We just stood there watching the waves for maybe 10 minutes. There were tears on her face afterward.

I started using "Warrl" for personal stuff and "Don Edwards" for work-related stuff, in part, to avoid any work issues over my personal stuff. (I'm politically libertarian and worked in a place where the general attitude is that there's no such thing as a bad government program.) Then I retired. There is essentially no risk of work issues over my personal stuff. And as I'm writing, and will eventually have something published... the old "any publicity is good publicity" thing kicks in.