When (American) TV actors utter the phrase “What are you doing here?”, as I must have heard dozens of times lately, they nearly always emphasize doing — and I nearly always think it would make more sense to emphasize either here or you; if the question were provoked by your doing rather than your presence, the asker would omit here.

Am I taking the phrase too literally? How do you say it?

An anarchist who uses the Internet is as hypocritical as a Protestant who uses the Latin alphabet. ( . . more . . )

Travis Corcoran wrote, in response to a question:

This is deserving of a longer post, but the ultra-brief version:

I started out soft atheist, but always accepted the absolute existence of good and evil (it is evil to kill Jews in gas chambers, even if both the law and the prevailing culture say that it is OK).

The acceptance of an absolute moral code eventually lead me to theism.

Given that one absolute that I accept, I felt I had to accept theism.

I guess hope there’s a lot hidden under that word eventually.

I rashly commented:

Hm. Should I bother writing up my godless views on objective evil?

and, to my amazement, someone took me up on it:

If you’re feeling like it, I’d be happy to read them!

( . . more . . )

I see I haven’t mentioned here that Charlie Stross’s novel Saturn’s Children is printed in modified Bembo, with single-loop ‘a’ and hook-tailed ‘gy’. It’s remarkable how much the page color is affected by those three letters.

I’m reading Ken Macleod’s novel The Execution Channel (Tor hardcover 2007). It appears that someone replaced every ‘fi’ or ‘fl’ with a ligature, without checking case.

The local Humane Society has such a hard time placing black cats that it offers a deep discount on the adoption fee.

A few people will recognize immediately how and why I did this.