1138

  By admin | January 28, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized Leave a comment

closing time. you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

Abby knows DeForest Kelley’s birthday without even having to look it up.

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1137

  By admin | January 22, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized 1 Comment

now the word 'squeezed' is looking even weirder to me than it did before

Maybe it’s squeezed purely, without any original sin in the process? Immaculate constriction?

(The original sin was eating forbidden fruit, so as long as the juice doesn’t contain any of that, it’s fine.)

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1136

  By admin | January 21, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized Leave a comment

Wikipedia tends to use the transsexual's desired pronoun, which I like because it fits with my opinion, but it's still not neutral.

I’ve often thought about how much more complicated language would get if we had pronouns to indicate traits other than gender. Age? Race? Mental diagnosis? You’d have to know several details about people just to mention them in conversation. And the combinations and permutations of the various descriptors might result in hundreds of pronouns.

Plus, race and mental condition are spectrums; it’s hard to define just where someone falls, when the line between one side and the other is so fuzzy. But then, the same goes for gender, and we somehow think we can have pronouns for that.

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1135

  By admin | January 15, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized 1 Comment

Asteroids can kill you no matter how strong you are. Look at dinosaurs.

I am very worried about the fact that people are putting so little effort into building self-sufficient airtight underground shelters. They would be useful in so many different disaster scenarios: nuclear war, destruction of the atmosphere by pollution, crazy weather from global warming, and possibly even something hitting the earth and setting off all the volcanoes.

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1134

  By admin | January 14, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized Comments Off

leptidoptera and orthoptera are probably as different as humans and wolves

Carolina locusts live all over the United States. I’ve read that the southern ones make a crackling noise as they fly, but the ones here in the Midwest fly silently like butterflies.

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1133

  By admin | January 8, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized Comments Off

are they cast-iron casters? or ferrous wheels?

I saw a bottle of castor oil at Target the other day. I didn’t know it still existed, I thought it was just a prop in Victorian stories. Apparently it’s a type of laxative.

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1132

  By admin | January 7, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized 1 Comment

Gallstones? Kidney stones? Turned into stone? We've got you covered!

According to Wikipedia, the snake-wrapped-around-a-rod symbol can be either a caduceus (two snakes with wings on top, associated in mythology with heralds, and thus with commerce and negotiation) or a rod of Asclepius (one snake and no wings, associated with medicine). They are often confused with each other.

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1131

  By admin | January 1, 2012 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized Comments Off

echoes of the invisible intangible dog?

The emperor in the story seriously thought that buying fabric that only wise people could see– and telling his whole kingdom about it–was a good way to find out who was smart and who was dumb. Which is pretty good evidence that… well, even if the fabric had worked as advertised, that emperor probably wouldn’t have been able to see it.

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1130

  By admin | December 31, 2011 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized 2 Comments

I obsessively email myself my txt file of planned comic dialogue

This is something I seriously worry about, being a comic artist. I’ve seen a couple of instances on Left Handed Toons where comments on one strip correctly predicted something about the content of the next strip, and the artists have no way of proving they didn’t steal the idea from the commenter. And LHT isn’t even one of the most popular comics… I can only imagine what Jeph Jacques and Ryan North go through.

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1129

  By admin | December 30, 2011 - 1:01 am | Uncategorized 5 Comments

nappy you here

The original song goes “The playing of the merry organ ringing in the year.” Until a few years ago, I heard “merry organ” as “merry-o, and”… so I thought a “merry-o” was some archaic musical instrument. I guess cadence has thrown me off many times when it comes to understanding song lyrics.

And the pronunciation of “a” in Canadian English is more complicated than you might think.

Anyway, happy New Year, all. I have good news and bad news.

Unfortunately, my life is getting pretty saturated with writing projects, including a collection of short stories and a sequel to the science fiction novel Kea’s Flight. This is on top of my full-time retail job. So I am reducing the number of “Abby and Norma” strips I post, as I warned earlier that I might have to do. From now on, only two strips a week. So you won’t get to read as much “Abby and Norma” in the following year as you might have thought you would.

Fortunately, those strips will be scheduled to post on Saturdays and Sundays… so you’ll be able to read more new “Abby and Norma” tomorrow and the next day, which I bet you didn’t think you would get to do!

I’ll let you know if I get to a point in life when I have the ability to go back to a daily posting schedule. Probably that’ll only happen if my science fiction novel and other writing starts selling so much that I can make a living off it, and have endless free time. (A girl can dream, right?)

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