The Hall of Fire

I find it very crass for a corporation to preach at me in order to sell me something, even when I agree with the message. I guess I kinda get being cynical about corporations, but it feels weird to me to say "hey, corporations, stop trying to spread positive messages!" I found the ad thou...

The original cast album is excellent.

(I hated the movie, too—so disappointing.)

Oh, man, that takes me back! My parents saw that show, bought the album, and played it endlessly. I loved it.

(They had no problem with Tom’s hair!)

Hoo boy. I remember being in school in the late 60s and early 70s. Hair (for boys) was a HUGE issue. It couldn't be longer than the collar of your shirt. By the mid-70s they had given up on that rule—but the reason I clearly remember the first time I saw my future husband is that he was one of the T...

It's just such a treasure. And the show is unattainable on DVD (it's obtainable, but it costs a mint for a single story—as much as three months of Britbox!). We own exactly two classic Who DVDs, "Pyramids of Mars" and "Genesis of the Daleks." I did recently get my hands on reason...

Tom and I are bingeing old old Doctor Who—we started watching at the beginning of the Tom Baker years and still have several seasons to go. We subscribe to Britbox through Amazon Prime largely because they have ALL the old Who, in addition to various gardening and house-buying shows that we really e...

Historically the rock scene has generally not been a culture where women are respected much. . . .

It's good I can type when I'm choked up. . . . Thank you, Jude. That was utterly lovely. And my new ears loved hearing the texture in your voice. And I loved the echo from the piano—no doubt a sound engineer would have eliminated that, but it made it sound real to me—as if I were sitting in the real...

The walls are closing in on him, and he's flipping out.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Re Voronwë's list—when we're coming home from a road trip, we always put in American Beauty in time that we can hear "Box of Rain" just as we're coming into Eugene. It means home for us.

Another Hellboy movie? I am so behind. I wish I could take a month off and just watch movies.

My husband has expressed a similar inclination.

Oh my God, I so wish my work had not JUST started up again.

I mean, sorta. We need to eat and all that. But this is so much richness. . . .

Elengil, all of those are wonderful. I so respect and honor your talents! I learned to sew but never loved it; learned a little about drawing but stopped; played music and loved it, in orchestras, but lost the opportunity. Writing is all I’ve kept, and it’s not creating something you can hold in you...

Soooo many interesting songs, and right there where I can pick and choose....

I can understand songs a lot better these days. Maybe I’ll try harder to listen to them. It wasn’t worth it the past 15 years or so; I just couldn’t follow the words if I didn’t already know them. It made me dislike listening to songs except as mindless background. I had an irrational resentment of ...

I've encountered similar problems in working with PDFs, which is how proofreading is done these days. It's horrifying to see hours of work missing, then blinking back.

And then there are the wild turkeys. I truly never knew until I met them in the Safeway parking lot that they really go "Gobble-gobble."

That's a tough one, River, especially given that jokes like that used to be a social sorting mechanism, back when I was little; it was a way some adults I could not avoid used to ensure that they were surrounded only by people who agreed with them—or at least, that only those who agreed with them wo...

That wasn’t a straw man, Alatar; that was pointing out what was at stake for both sides on this issue. The stakes simply aren’t equal, and I don’t see how the “right” to tell hurtful jokes outweighs other people’s actual right to be at peace in their personal and social lives.

My question is, where is your line between the person who says something harmful and the person who says 'that is harmful'? Because it sounds as if you are wishing the latter to be silent and the former to speak whatever they wish. I've answered several times that I really don't know, but that the ...