(Sorry. Somebody *hadda* say it.)>

Evidently... but I still don't get it, unfortunately. ;s

<Jasper Fforde> heard 'bout'im before, never saw anything by him hereabouts though. Sounds very cute. :)

<One reads: Come to Wales. Not *always* raining.>

LOL... reminds me of the time I was on another site and a member of the community there mentioned she was going to be offline for a while because she was visiting Cyprus with her family. So I suggested they could swing by Israel if she wanted to meet the several Israeli members of that site. I believe the way I put it was "it's not *all that* dangerous here, honest!"

*Geurgle Alert*

In fact it's Keats, Ode to a Nightingale (like, poetry?).

<Ruth, when sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn>

Keats was doing a biblical allusion thing. I'm pretty sure a few SF writers have picked up on this innaresting use of 'alien' ... but I can't think of a specific example.

There seems to be a music album by Pinchpoint - a Pynchonesque name if I ever heard one - called 'Ruth in Alien Corn' ...

Thanks. I'm familiar with the English versions of the more famous passages, but for the most part the bible is a much more interesting read in the original - at least the ancient Hebrew parts of it, there are some Aramaic parts that I haven't a clue about...

So - to use the alternative names for the different cereals involved - corn in England is wheat, corn in Ireland is oats, and corn in America is maize (aka sweet corn).

Not that there's any logic to it. Farmer folk are simultaneously tough unsentimental brutes who routinely shoot and kill actual living creatures, and simplistic types full of old-fashioned piety.

While the truth is that a farmer is a businessman whose place of employment doesn't have a roof.

Ruth was a foreigner - a Moabite woman, whose only connection to the Israelite city if Betlehem was the man she married, so traveling there after her husband's death with just her mother-in-law, she was all alone, with no support or ties, but for another helpless widow - the MIL Naomi - in a foreign land. That's why Keats depicts her as feeling like her surroundings are "alien" (in the "stranger in a strange land" sense).

<Ohio: <It might have been exciting in War of the Worlds to give the invaders alien corn that was genetically engineered to destroy them.>>

It's been done already - or something too similar - in the original ST episode 'The Trouble with Tribbles'. ;)

<Kel-og, from the planetoid Ceres: <Amaizing grazing.>>

Incognito?
Disguised, under an assumed name; not a neat hiding place among gear wheels and other mechanisms.

Intaglio?
A design, a figure cut or engraved into a hard substance, a gemstone so engraved; not a foreign body found in an Italian meal or a legal term meaning to sue the restaurant that served it ...

I know <dak>'s examples (indigo, innuendo) indicated words with the same sound at the beginning and end - a sandwich rhyme? - but I look for things that chime and rhyme in other ways.

In other news, completely agree with your posts Over There.

Thirdly -

<Dom: <hms> Thankyew. Unspecified weight will do nicely. Didja mention a Dec 3rd deadline? Or was it Dec 1st?

I shall aim for Dec 2nd. That way I'm either a little bit late or a little bit early.

Like the apocryphal Irish hotel ...

- Rrrrring!

- Uh, hello?

- Mornin', sir. Eh, was it seven or eight ye were wanting the alarm call?

- Seven! My god, what time is it now?

- Ehhh. Nine?>>

So, uh, I'm reminding you that you intended to vote, like, yesterday? No need to thank me, I know you appreciate it. ;p

Shirley Yanno,
Procrastinators' Club
Temporary Secretarial Division

Over there: indeed. Our friend Scormus is also regularly on the ball, as it were. Maybe we should form a secret command/control structure.

I'm usually amused by *The argument from personal incredulity*, which rarely points to anything other than the innocence/ignorance of the person making the argument. One sees it all the time in kibitzing to certain games: there's a whole swathe of people with little grasp of chess history *or* strategy. Makes for peculiarly deep forms of ignorance.

Stephen Fry -- comedian, actor, polymath, cyberluvvie, omnivore -- used it as the title of an autobiography.

I once watched Stephen Fry on screen, as Oscar in the movie 'Wilde' -- and afterwards, found myself standing next to Hurd Hatfield, a grand old man who had played the beautiful and dissolute Dorian Gray in 1945. Somebody asked him what he thought of Fry, and he replied "insufficiently ravaged".

There's also a Moab in Utah, which figures in Peter Greenaway's film about the early adventures of Tulse Luper.

Luckily nothing actually serious, but - I note that recently N and P seem to have reached a consensus decision to return to participating as posters at ceegee. Which does raise the probability of their actually reading the kibitzing on the Challenge page after the game... which again raises the advisability of cleaning up there, before throwing it open. :\

<But what I wanna know is, why *wash-pot*? Is a wash pot an object of physical disgust, like a toilet, or an object of envy, like a gold-plated bathroom?>

The first, mainly. Wash-pots were used most prominently for washing feet, not bathing in general.

Surprising promptness. Hmmm, if you're going to start doing things at such a breakneck speed, maybe you could also, uh, write an email or something? ;)

I mean, theoretically. Yeah, I'm pushing it... ;p

<Maybe we should form a secret command/control structure.>

Secrecy is somewhere between obsolete and extinct, sweet. :)

A quote in the preface to Robert Sawyer's 'Hominids', the first book of the 'Neanderthal Parallax' trilogy:

<You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

<-Scott McNealy
Chief Executive Officer Sun Microsystems>>