IntenseDebate - Just

10 years ago @ The Toast - My Female Students Don... · 1 reply · +4 points

Is "Dirtbag Ethics Professor" a thing? A known personality type?

(I ask as an ethics prof who generally tries to avoid being a dirtbag.)

10 years ago @ The Toast - Letters Home From Gene... · 1 reply · +10 points

Yeah, and that C-natural right at the end will rip your heart out.

10 years ago @ The Toast - Letters Home From Gene... · 3 replies · +31 points

A little later, I'll put on a recording of "Ashokan Farewell" and read these letters aloud with an air of quiet resignation and wistful longing.

10 years ago @ The Toast - What In The Hell Anima... · 0 replies · +17 points

I think it must also have eaten the bow for the viola da gamba. Maybe that's why it looks so grumpy.

10 years ago @ The Toast - What In The Hell Anima... · 0 replies · +6 points

My understanding is that "catgut" should be "kit gut" . . . "kit" being an archaic colloquial term for a fiddle or other bowed stringed instrument. Generally speaking, gut strings are and have been made from sheep intestine.

10 years ago @ The Toast - What In The Hell Anima... · 2 replies · +31 points

I was going to say, it looks alarmingly like one of my cats, who is very likely a Turkish angora. As for the size and proportions of the cat in the painting, I can only say this: we named our cat after a goddess of the moon, and she has responded by developing a physique that is best described as "waxing gibbous."

10 years ago @ The Toast - The Problem With Trill... · 0 replies · +16 points

I'm sorry to say that, when I was a (pre)teenage boy, first hearing the original radio series when it played on my local public radio station in the early '80s, I entirely missed the fact that the only real female character was barely even a character, and was, um, disposed of with a single trite line about being married off to some . . . guy.

It was only when I played the radio series for my pre-teenage daughters on a long car trip that light dawned.

The radio series and the books are still very funny, and I can't undo the fact that they shaped parts of my intellectual and personal development in ways that can only be described as out of all proportion - I'll never be able to take consumer electronics seriously, and don't even get me started on shoe shops! - but oh, how I wish it wasn't all so clearly written by boys about boys and for boys!

This post sums up The Trillian Problem perfectly.

10 years ago @ The Toast - Let's Talk About The B... · 0 replies · +1 points

I'd forgotten that I had forgotten to keep reading Ulysses! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to forget about it all over again!

10 years ago @ The Toast - Let's Talk About The B... · 0 replies · +1 points

I'd like to put in a word against Tom Wolfe. Someone gave me A Man In Full when I moved to Atlanta. The only thing it changed was to make me just that much more sorry I'd moved to Atlanta. Not one single character had even one single redeeming feature.

10 years ago @ The Toast - Let's Talk About The B... · 0 replies · +2 points

Oryx and Crake in particular entirely failed to change my life, except to make me feel like I needed to shower a little more often, for a while, to get the grime of it off me.

IntenseDebate Comment System

Connect with Just_Bob

People I'm following

Just_Bob