caroljane

You're reappearance announcements are getting to be as common as Phil's departure announcements. But welcome of course. Best of the Week? Hyperbolist! There was only one, plus one double post. Best will be back--bester than ever, nah, too obvious. Near the end of my lonely exile I envisioned you all in your Halloween costumes. Ghs, wreathed in wizardly fumes. Shayne in his Cloak of Righteousness. Brant as Annie Oakley. Tony, in the All Blacks jersey he has to wear all year anyway, the result of an injudicious bet. WSS in his usual getup, scaring the neighbourhood kids half to death. ND capturing the occasion in his ever-popular Christopher Isherwood costume. Me, I was in my usual. pointy hat, raincoat, broomstick, portable crag for perching on.

Whaat's going on around here? I turn my back for a few minutes and everybody is up to their old tricks again - worse than ever! Meaner, profaner, profounder, psychologozinger, impassioneder, funnier - it's vintage OL! It's great to be back. Degenerately, Carol PS Brant Gaede, I saw that! Stop hogging those grapes - share with others!

..as I was saying: my sojourn in the 19th century has inspired me to compose a poem in anticipation of the happy day when my home internet returns (it should be tomorrow, but going on past experience, it won't be). This ode is in imitation of Ring Lardner's to Zelda Fitzgerald sometime in the roaring 20s:"To hell with Scott Fitzgerald, then!/ To hell with Scott, his daughter!/ It's you and I back home again/to Great Neck, where men are men/ and gin is 3/4 water." TO MY COMPUTER ON THE OCCASION OF OUR REUNION WITH THE INTERNET To hell with Tims and Starbucks, then! To hell with sons and students! It's you and I back home again, Sprawled on the futon in the den, Abandoning all prudence!

Hi guys, My temporary iin ternet interrupt of two freaking months is nearly at ane end.. er, Michael, why did my reappearance thread bring forth a suicide bulletin? You could just put me on Ignore-- see, you are not the worst, there is a joke about actual suicide which of course is not funny. Adam, if you did not see me at the Slut Walk it is due to the sexist ageist media who chose not to feature our group. Of course I was there with the Senior Sizzlers, tastefully clad in various items of our team uniforms. Rahida was especially fetching in her goalie pads, er, pad. A discordant note was the attendance of her sister-wife or as Rahida refers to her "that lazy cow Meena". Meena is detrmined to join the team although she is not a senior and a very poor stick handler, but she says if Rahida can get away from the poutine fryer three times a week so can she. Baal I am well aware of the various free internets at libraries, also at coffee shops and the homes of friends and relatives. I am at this moment at a library between a very large teenager playing endless card games and a well dressed gentlemen strawling Arabid looking sites. The compulsive gambler's very size compels him to invade my space and the visual content of those Artabic sites is frankly alarming. Starbucks and Tim Hortons have very expensive coffee. to be continued........

Boy, am I glad you guys are still there. I have lost my internet temporarily due to extreme cash flow glitches, for which I naturally blame the government and not my own pathetic money management skills. If you noticed I wasn't posting I thought you might think I was in jail or the hospital, but not so. In fact I am in top health due to not drinking or smoking and taking long, healthy walks mainly back and forth to work. I employed my ample spare time before school started in the aforesaid walks, rereading my entire library, watching the only free satellite channels available to me (Gaelic football is really quite interesting, although the rules are almost totally incomprehensible to me, at least the players are hunks) and feeling very, very sorry for myself. I shall return, I know not when, but I will be back sometime to sing the blues on the appropriate thread, Canadian Boring.

Carol, I find it surprising that you would say that. The Cognitive Revolution in psychology has largely validated much of what Rand wrote in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology as well as her thinking regarding the relationship between cognition and emotions. Because of its unscientific implications, psychology has yet to fully embrace volition, but there are signs that some theorists are moving in that direction. What basis do you have for your claim? I was not thinking of psychology, where I know cognitive therapy and volition are hugely efficacious. I was thinking of neuroscience and brain-mapping which theorize about the perception of reality and the roles and sequences of emotion and volition. For a full answer I will have to try and look up everything I have read in the last year or so, which left me with the impression that the relationship between the conscious and the subsonscious is not what AR decided it was. This could take me a while.

Oh, Tony, there cannot be another another river of history to step into twice, a nation's stature can only ever be a relative, subjective thing - I honour your ideals, but I believe America is too large and diverse and top=heavy to be again what it was, morally. In the 21st century we must look to many beacons of light, and take what comfort we can. Carol free in Canuckistan

That there are always new readers is not in doubt, which raises the vexed question of wild popularity/ perpetual bestsellerdom yet again. Your guess as to who seeks out the book is a good one. My impression is that many other new readers are assigned AS in school or urged to read it by Objectivist activists (take a bow, Adam Selene!)Without the movement, tattered and fretful as it may be, how wide would the Rand readership really be?

Also, Rand relied on science to bear out her assumptions about the human cognitive process, and the role of conscious reason and emotion, which underlay her philosophy. And science is not doing that. John McCaskey anyone?

I'll disagree with the premise. Wild popularity is a wildly imprecise term but nevertheless an observable phenomenon. As a dead novelist who continues to sell, or to be read, she is less wildly popular than Jane Austen and rather more than L Ron Hubbard, despite the greater financial success of the Scientology business.

Brant, please extrapolate. The rest of us have bared our juvenile souls here.

Jr High and high school raking blueberries, you have to be short and stalwart. None but the brave. University. Cafeteria work. Unknowingly met an objectivist.Aiee!

Adam, thank you. I left out the smiles and the laughs and the self-aware jokes which so defined him. I saw a clip last night from one evening when he held the balance of power in the minority government. He did a great cover of "King of the Road" ("Party for sale or rent...we'll support any government")He was a good pianist. guitarist, singer and accordionist. When PM Harper said he regretted the jam session that never was, I believed him. Liberal leader Bob Rae is also a semi-professional class pianist. What does this say about us? I too regret the Battle of the Bands that will never be.There aren't many concerti for three pianos, but they could have played the hell out of them.

So there was alcohol but no drugs.Yet if alcohol killed her there would be signs of poisoning or liver failure --maybe a reaction with legal, prescribed drugs? How grotesque, for a young woman, for anyone, It reminds me of what some friend of Jim Morrison's said, before his cause of death was medically determined. "His soul was tired and his body was old."

It's extraordinary to be here, a few blocks from the constituency office and all the flowers and tributes, only a greeting on the street away from someone else who knew him, a click away from where he lies in state,and everywhere you look, something he changed or tried to change or accepted with wit and pragmatism. To remember my father of 60 (also a Jack) and husband of 58, who died the same way with the same courage. To hear from the powers he opposed, truths banal but universal. To see so many honouring the best in us and of us, which is not glamour or charisma or success, but decency and civility and persistence with high heart in pursuit of the best for all. Canadian Boring I named it, and so it is. The best of us is on display now, exciting no one but the Laytons and Douglases who will come along, on fire from within.

You may be onto something, MEM& 9th. Nicholas Dykes also has an August birthday, Leo however. Maybe that's why he turned anarchist? Ba'al, you man of valour, thanks for making me feel like a spring chicken, or as springlike as Taureans ever feel. Many more! Carol born middle-aged

Oh. I've never been to an Anglican service. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0pz9UCBtU Mille grazie. But I don't get line 4 at all, it starts looking like Finnegans Wake, but soon there's a Wodehouse reference, that I can follow. Must tend to the Empress, that magnificent animal. "maybe we ought to", see rhyme cheating above. Thanks for the great pinup. I'd take a closer look if I could just find my bally spectacles.

Really, only 70? I don't use rhyming dictionaries, it's more fun to just go through the alphabet. When the stock of rhyme's depleting/ twist one out by good ol' cheating! You could probably get away with "shineth". Pronounce it like it was the 18th century, and you're singing Handel's Messiah, and he's only given you one staccato note for that word. "Shin'th". Not only the 18th cent. - a lot of Anglican hymns are sung with those elisions. For this you deserve another one: We dinna like thee, Doctor P, Or Dr Hsieh both he and she, We don't much vaunt tha Ph.D (mebbe we ouchter) Nae, gie' us one wi' noble standings Both in Tardis and in Blandings One we always like tae talk ter... Ninth Doctor

Really, only 70? I don't use rhyming dictionaries, it's more fun to just go through the alphabet. When the stock of rhyme's depleting/ twist one out by good ol' cheating!

Very sensible techniques for teachers of any age group. As you know I have never taught children, but adults learning a new language after only a short time in a totally new culture, really need self-esteem. I don't stand up in front of them except when writing on the board (I don't stand up much anyway, if sitting or lying down is possible), I usually sit in the middle and move from student to student or group to group. They often praise each other, and help each other. In fact each class is sort of a, well, collective...my version, anyway. I'll be interested to see Xray's comments on this.

Awwww.... I woulda wrote thome thilly lineth But there are jutht no rhymeth for Ninth Many happy aeons more, O Time Lord

Sad news for many Canadians of all political stripes -- our own Jack Layton has died. "The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place Man and boy stood cheering by As home we bore you shoulder-high..." -AE Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young but your name will not die, Jack.

Brant, This post has all the elements, both common and hidden, of an exceptional novel, and I would love to read it.

O Adam of the agile mind who any fact can quickly find - we hope you still can fit us in now you're a senior citizen who now, not tempting fates, can be called an Elder States man! Have a great one, Carol, Nanook, Gord and the Brothers

Yeah, but it's still fun to call a bluffer's bluffs. J Yeah, ND. I got that too. You gotta try a little better than that to slide one by. rde Remember: This Is A Tough Room What in the world are you talking about. Get inside and clean up your rooms, now. When the room is tough the tough get going. So they say. Warily, Ma