Selkie

To the best of my knowledge (I have this from a Dutch guide in the National Museum in Amsterdam), Holland is a part of The Netherlands (Note plural), which was formed as a federation some 3-4 centuries ago (?). So the guy who corrected you might be telling the truth, in that maybe he was working from Holland, the way you might fir instance be working from the State of New York, or Florida etc.

Correct, Maddi/Sethos?

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Red, what you quoted is exactly as I understood it - but the guy and I were clearly discussing the country as a whole and he still insisted on calling it "Holland," which baffles me to this day.

Thanks Josh. I shudder to think what "almost affordable to live" means in SF (as if Chicago's all that affordable). About twelve years ago I was almost in a position to move in with a friend in Napa, and I still regret it didn't work out.

OK, a question for those living outside the United States: how common is it for individual pharmacists to refuse (or be legally allowed to refuse) to dispense certain prescription medications on moral grounds? It's an issue that's gotten a fair amount of play here, or at least it didn't before we started getting inundated with coverage about the latest round of prohibiting youth from buying or renting violent video games - just in time for the Christmas season! - and the NORAD of prayer.

For Josh, or anyone else living in the San Francisco Bay area -

I've long suspected that the entire population of San Francisco consists of people who were born elsewhere in the United States, and to a lesser extent, abroad. Is that true? Whenver I've visited my favorite city - admittedly, it's been a while - every person I talk to discusses how they're from state X, and moved there Y years ago, and their spouse/partner is from state W, and moved there Z years ago. Almost none of them have children (whether heterosexual or homosexual), or if they did, they had them in some other state. I have visions of completely empty obstetrics wards at the hospitals...

Admittedly, I imagine part of what I've observed is due to the relatively high percentage of homosexuals (more people traveling there from elsewhere to escape homophobia, and a lower likelihood of having children biologically their own), and the ferociously expensive cost of living which doesn't make having babies affordable for many couples, (including my friends who are currently residing there), but STILL.... I'd expect some evidence of people being born in the area.

Where do people stand on office Christmas parties - good chance for a booze up with workmates ?  a dangerous minefield of a year long's worth of pent up aggression ?

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Closer to the latter than the former, at least in my experience. I've found that showing up just long enough to meet and greet is obligatory, but leaving early - very early - is a bright move. Not only do you not want to be the one dancing the funky chicken on the table while wearing your female coworker's underwear on your head, the pathetic soul who does will not appreciate that you saw him in said condition.

Nothing good comes of office Christmas parties. Ever.

Fan of Sleepy Hollow, Selkie?

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Yes.

You'd think I would have learned by now not to watch television news between Dec. 1 and New Year's. But no, every year I make the mistake of not hiding the remote control, which means I'm always subjected to an "inspirational Christmas story" that makes me feel nostalgic for a long ago time when TV news programs actually covered, you know, news.

This year's contender: a rather lengthy segment, on a major news channel, during prime time, about the World Prayer Center. Apparently a bunch of people with quite a lot of money (startup cost: 5.5 million dollars) built a "NORAD of Prayer" to use the Internet to direct and harness the faithful to pray for a specific goal en masse.

Keeyah and Maddi, which "The Witches" are you talking about? This one?

Count me as one of the few, the proud, the brave, who hated Willie Wonka. The trailer for the new film looks like maybe Tim Burton has swung back a little too far in the direction of weirdness, but the idea of Burton, Depp, and Elfman teogether again is almost irresistable.

This issue is one of my favorites. I'm always a little embarassed to admit that, because it's so unlike the "dripping with cynicism, sarcasm, and betrayal" issues I normally favor. As a one-off that will hopefully never be repeated, I think it's wonderful.

Most people I know who celebrate a major winter holiday have their own little ritual movies, books, foods, whatever that they drag out at this time of year. Tradition is the only explanation I have for why anyone would watch "It's a Wonderful Life." Ritual torture seems an odd way to celebrate the birth of one's savior, the dawning of a new year, or other traditionally happy occurrences that serve as excuses to party, but there you have it. Being a misanthropic atheist I'm short on holiday rituals, but I always read two things at the Solstice. "Lord of the Dance" is one. The other is Michael Stanwyck's creepily beautiful prose short story, "A Midwinter's Tale."

With "Lord of the Dance," Ennis ties his story into two well-worn Christmas traditions: a nostalgic longing for a golden age of authenticity, and the story of someone with a hard heart learning "the true spirit of Christmas." Fortunately for those of us who would prefer to beat Tiny Tim over the head with his crutches, the themes are handled without the cliched trappings. By casting his line further back in time than the usual Victorian claptrap, Ennis manages to breath life into these otherwise staid traditions, and taps into a feeling of dissatisfaction with many of the repressive aspects of modern Christianity that seem to be felt by many a Christian (let alone the rest of us). How can the Lord of the Dance's sense of loss for genuine celebration not register with a readership composed primarily of people who, I'll wager, feel trapped by the hollow shell of forced cheerfulness and rampant, high stress commercialism? And if the Lord of the Dance can find hope in the darkness, maybe, just maybe, there's hope for the rest of us to do so too.

Garth Ennis' obsession with friendship themes is a well-worn subject, but this is one occasion where I think it shines. Don't know about anyone else, but the winter holidays being a time when friends and families draw together in a warm haze of bonhomie is one of those alluring illusions that gets trotted out once a year - and is usually handled in a manner guaranteed to induce sugar shock. Ennis' treatment here is just this side of believable, and that much more appealing for it.

This issue also contains one of my all-time favorite uses of comic panels in a way that no other medium can replicate. I'm speaking, of course, of the splash pages showing holiday revelers in two different time periods. What an elegant way to show that despite changes in people's outward appearances, the underlying celebrations remain unchanged.

I might be seeing that next week but I was afraid that Jim Carrey would take over the film. All the trailers and internet pictures focus on him way too much.

Sorry to say, I can confirm your fears on this point. When the film focuses on the kids, there are often glimpses of wonderful (see related note below). Unfortunately, Jim Carrey's way, way, WAY over-the-top "look at me" antics sink the film. He really needs to take some lessons from Alan Rickman's portrayal of Professor Snape, and tone his performance down.

Is Sunny cute and does she bite lots of things? :happy:

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I absolutely loathe small children, in both real and reel life. That having been said, I found Sunny adorable, and her appearances are bright spots in the film. I would have preferred more biting, but she does indeed sink her choppers into plenty of stuff. The image of her hanging off the dining table by her teeth is priceless.

Watched A Series of Unfortunate Events today. I was a little disappointed. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't captivating either. Contains a lot of Jim Carrey mugging, and not nearly enough of the Baudelaire kids. The set design (which was what I was looking forward to) was interesting, but again, not captivating, and most of the time it looked like a Hollywood set.

Worth a look, but personally I wish I'd waited to rent it at home rather than waste my increasingly precious "out" time.

Thanks for the compliments and the support, guys! Means a lot to me. Those p.m.s did a great job of keeping me going this morning.

James, trust me, if I can sculpt, so can you. So go out, grab yourself some clay, and just do it. The hardest part - at least for me - is giving yourself permission to fail, which you will, regularly and often.

Claire, your comment about him looking"springy" absolutely made my day. I was aiming to capture a moment familiar to Afghan handlers, when the dog is in fact behaving by standing still for examination, but you can tell it's just waiting for the opportunity to leap up and be a proper bouncy happy Afghan.

I'm pleased to say the firing was a success. Instead of taking my sculpture as tribute, the Kiln Goddess took part of the kiln floor instead. (Fortunately, it is repairable). I'm astounded there's as little firing damage as there was, at least so far, and if nothing else goes wrong, I just might not be able to wiggle out of submitting photos of the beast to the jury. I started the decoration and did a quick, low temperature firing again today and it still hasn't fallen apart. The Kiln Goddess will have at least two more chances at destroying it before it's officially done, so I'm not home free quite yet.

The Beast's not ready for his close-up yet, so I'll close with a picture of some prototypes for my next big project: the Porcelain Plagues. These are pendents and pins decorated with images of deadly viruses, including Ebola and Marburg.

Prototype Plagues

I'm really looking forward to making some Black Plague to sell at Renaissance Faires.

This thread has a couple of omissions I'd like to take the opportunity to rectify:

And my personal favorite:

So, apparently, the Pagan version is a NEWER version and the song isn't all that old; although I have no idea what the Pagan version's lyrics may be!

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Aha! Based on your information, I found this version

Thanks to everyone for their input!

What are the original lyrics to "Lord of the Dance?" (per issue, um, 49ish) Or was Ennis just making up the backstory about a (presumably) non-Christian origin for the song? As far as I can determine, it's always been a Christian piece.

I brought a locally famous stained glass artist friend of mine over to the dark side, and introduced her to the pleasures of clay. Both of us have been distracted with real world concerns recently, and our clay work was ... drifting, a bit. So, we decided to set some artistic goals. She decided that her goal was to enter a piece that was 100% her own, however awful it might be, in a particular equine art competition that occurs in late September 2005. It's not a juried competition, and anyone can enter anything they choose. As long as she has a horse shaped blob of clay, she meets her goal.

I, being foolish, said that my great artistic desire was to have a piece accepted at the juried Art Show at the Dog Show in Wichita "some day." Now, this is a show with no small degree of special significance for me. Aside from being the best known (at least among the show dog world) canine art competition in the U.S., a best in show winner from the early 1990's is largely responsible for me transitioning from buying other people's sculptures to making my own.

I stated this goal, out loud, to my friend with an excellent memory, without realizing that the deadline for 2005 entries had not been reached, and I would therefore be expected to make some effort at achieving said goal rather than merely nagging my friend to achieve hers.

In a perfect world, the piece I started working on would have gone together smoothly, and I would have achieved a fabulous result. I would be composing this post while clutching an acceptance letter in my muddy hands. This world is not, of course, a perfect one, and the litany of problems I've encountered is almost amusing. Almost, that is, except that the deadline is less than a month away, and the best piece I've ever made, bar none, is pretty well guaranteed to crack and warp in tonight's firing. I will be a basket case when that happens, so tonight, while hope still flickers feebly against the reality of darkness, I present to you all, a picture of the unfired greenware piece that will forever be known as

What Might Have Been

Oh well, at least I didn't put a deadline on my goal ....

(If anyone out there happens to be reading this between, say, 12:00 a.m. - 5:00 a.m. CST, I encourage you to P.M. me to keep me reasonably alert. It's going to be a LONG firing and I'm already exhausted).

What comes to your mind when you think of that little 'frog country'(that's how the Dutch fondly call the Netherlands, strangely enough ;)) of ours? And what do you think we will say/think about you and your country...?

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I never knew the Dutch called their country the "frog country," and somehow I like them better for it. :cool:

I was fortunate to be the project manager for a Y2k compliance program of a multinational company, which meant I had the pleasure of working with the company's Haarlem office. (Gods, I'll never forget the day my boss's boss went apoplectic over an invoice we received, and I had to gently point out to him that it was in guilders, not dollars, and there was no reason to chop my head off).

The immediate things that struct me were the way EVERYONE was multilingual, and almost worryingly polite. Any American THAT polite is getting ready to serve cyanide laced cookies, and on the evening news, some dim neighbor will remark: "S/he was always so quiet."

It didn't matter which member of the office picked up the phone (I don't believe there was a dedicated receptionist, or if there were, there were a lot of them), as soon as I spoke, I received a response in educated English much better than almost any of my American co-workers. The office was impeccably run by a very polite gentleman. I'm afraid that I must have come off as an incompetent dweeb, although he was far too well mannered - even when justifiably angry - ever to express such a thought.

In my defense, I wasn't given the job until August of 1999 after a pricey consultant screwed it up, and I was forced to implement many a stupid policy that I disagreed with but had no power to change. I had the distinct impression that if I had worked for him, I would have been given the power to change stupid policy decisions, and he couldn't understand that someone in my position wasn't given the latitude to fix things to what they "should" be. He also gently corrected me every time I referred to the country as a whole as "The Netherlands." He always referred to it as "Holland," something we Americans are always told is incorrect.

One of my Ukranian co-workers at the time shared a great anecdote about her experience on vacation in Amsterdam. She and her husband didn't understand a street sign, and broke a minor traffic law as a result. After the cop who pulled them over asked whether they spoke any of the five languages he knew, and they didn't, he let them off - but he clearly couldn't understand how they could possibly be so ignorant. Here, I'd be happy if a beat cop spoke grammatically correct English, let alone anything else.

OK, other things that leap to mind when think of the "frog country":

The bulb plants, not just the tulips. My family is full of avid gardeners, and how we miss the days when a small import/export company used to attend the Chicago Flower and Garden Show with offerings of rare bulbs we couldn't get any other way.

Friesian horses. No breed of animal has any right to be that pretty.

Citizens not having a legal requirement to work in order to collect government benefits. (Is this one even true?)

A laid back attitude toward sex, drugs, and religion both in life and in the media. I'm sure Americans come across as uptight religious prudes by comparison (and, sadly, that assumption would be right more often than not). Heck, I know my history well enough to know the Dutch basically drove the Puritan Separatists to America by being so tolerant ... good for the Dutch, not so good for the Native Americans on the other side of the pond.

And yeah, the windmills. And the wooden shoes. And porn. And fables about little boys plugging holes with their fingers. The usual embarassing stereotypes.

Lesson for the day: don't get into serious discussions after staying up all night. Only badness and overly offensive posts can come of it.

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Been there, done that, more than once myself. Appreciate the clarifications et al. No hard feelings, 'k?

Oh, I wasn't saying that there aren't plenty of men who don't like porn, and I have no reason to doubt that you're one of them - that's a personal decision, and you can feel free to make it any way you wish. But it's a conscious-level thing. On an instinctive level, whether we like it or not, sexual imagery IS sexually arousing to us

OK, I can interpret this statement in one of two ways. Feel free to suggest others:

(1) You are asserting that you know better than some people on this thread what those people find arousing, and that anyone who claims otherwise is repressing his/her "instinctive" reaction;

(2) You are definining "sexual imagery" as "that which a person finds sexually stimulating", which is a tautology, and meaningless. There are people in this world who find those canine mating photos to be sexually stimulating, after all...

(male and female, although the way it actually works is somewhat different - men tend to be more attracted to visual stimuli, while women are more stimulated by more conceptual ideas - that's a generalisation, rather than the whole picture). There's very little evidence to contradict that, and a hell of a lot to support it.

Academic and/or scientific cites, please.

I hereby dare anyone on this board into m/m fanfic to Google "Harry Potter slash." I did it exactly once on a similar dare, and there are some scars that just won't ever fade. I distinctly remember there being a Harry/Draco story written "as a tribute to Sept. 11" that was too scary for even myotherwise steady nerves.

Question: do women find man-love attractive, the way men find girl-on-girl stimulating?

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Judging by the amount of fanfic written by young women devoated to m/m pairings, many women must be turned on by the idea. I'm not, but that's hardly surprising. Most sexually explicit material, in any form, elicits yawns from me. I'd much rather be doing it than watching/reading about it, thankyouverymuch. And since m/m by definition excludes me, I'm less interested in it than any other form of two person sex.

Honestly (and I'm sure it will come as no suprise) it has just sneaked in as the worst movie of 2005.

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Worse than Alexander?!?! I have serious trouble believing that! Even a sleep-walking Colin Firth has to be better than Colin Farrell in a blonde mullet ... doesn't he?

Is "A Series of Unfortunate Events" playing anywhere yet?

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Opens in the U.S. 12/17. Better be good, 'cuz after enduring Closer this afternoon I feel overdue for a good one.

Ocean's 12 must be pretty bad then.

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Everyone involved in the production of Ocean's 12 should be very grateful Alexander's around to draw the worst of the critical fire.

It's bad when you keep hoping Vincent Cassel brought the Beast from Brotherhood of the Wolf to liven things up. The movie wouldn't have made any less sense if he had.

The best thing about seeing Ocean's 12?

Catching the last two seconds of the new Constantine trailer. That would be the two seconds where we see the logo.

Consider the very very good film "Priest", could it ever have been made by a big american studio today? I sincerely doubt it!

It wasn't made in the U.S. "then," either - it's a UK film. IIRC Miramax distributed it in the U.S., but in a very limited number of theaters and to very poor box office. Of course, their stunt marketing (announcing that it would be released on Good Friday, only claiming not to know that that date was Good Friday and later changing the release date due to very manufactured-sounding protest) may have backfired, and been partially to blame. I know the way it was handled left a bad taste in my mouth, and I'm not Christian.

I agree it's an excellent film.