Intermission

Comments

1. Trond Engen says

   November 1, 2011 at 3:06 am

   Apparently, the website is running on scholar power. Good luck in the snow!
2. Electric Dragon says

   November 1, 2011 at 3:59 am

   Meanwhile, here is some light music: http://www.youtuberepeat.com/watch/?v=t6jqaA_jeZ8
3. Sashura says

   November 1, 2011 at 8:15 am

   I’ll add a few more miles to my lunch run. Sit tight, Siberia!
4. rtha says

   November 1, 2011 at 8:30 am

   Stay warm, ‘hat! Row when you can!
5. dearieme says

   November 1, 2011 at 10:42 am

   Ah, too many inches of Global Warming. Mind you, we’re sweltering over here. Shorts weather yesterday.
6. J. W. Brewer says

   November 1, 2011 at 10:53 am

   At least the spammers infesting certain other threads during our host’s incapacity are in less snowy climes.
7. Ø says

   November 1, 2011 at 12:07 pm

   After the snow shoveling comes the spam shoveling.
8. Joel says

   November 1, 2011 at 2:57 pm

   I hope you don’t have to start burning books to heat the place!
9. languagehat says

   November 1, 2011 at 8:08 pm

   I’m back! Thanks for your good wishes, all, and no books were burned (fortunately we have a couple of cords of wood stacked in the garage). However, the spam removal was indeed arduous.
10. languagehat says

    November 1, 2011 at 8:10 pm

    I should add that the announcement was posted by Songdog, my stepson/site administrator, who had access to the internet via his iPhone. Mrs. Hat and I are thinking about getting some such devices, despite our suspicion of anything that isn’t driven by wind, water, mule, or hand crank.
11. rootlesscosmo says

    November 1, 2011 at 9:35 pm

    You know what literacy plus rural electrification equals…
12. Ø says

    November 2, 2011 at 11:26 am

    … I can’t guess.
13. Trond Engen says

    November 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm

    A well-read light district?
14. languagehat says

    November 2, 2011 at 7:46 pm

    I believe the intended reference is to Lenin’s remark “Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.”
15. John Cowan says

    November 3, 2011 at 11:40 am

    Ah well, red-light district, I suppose.
16. Trond Engen says

    November 3, 2011 at 5:39 pm

    I believe the intended reference is to Lenin’s remark
    Oh. so that’s where the reading “red” comes from.
17. John Cowan says

    November 4, 2011 at 1:23 am

    I think “soviet” should be read in lower case here. Nothing was worse about the Soviet Union politically than its gross betrayal of the soviets.
18. languagehat says

    November 4, 2011 at 10:09 am

    I think “soviet” should be read in lower case here. Nothing was worse about the Soviet Union politically than its gross betrayal of the soviets.
    I certainly agree about the betrayal of the soviets, but since Lenin never had the slightest interest in them except as a useful lever to achieve power, it wouldn’t make sense to use lowercase here, which would drastically misrepresent what he was saying. For him, Soviet = Bolshevik.
19. John Cowan says

    November 4, 2011 at 8:52 pm

    I think it could be read either way. The statement is propaganda, after all, and the pre-existing connotations of soviet were still useful at the time: it was not yet an open equivalent of ‘Bolshevik’.
20. languagehat says

    November 5, 2011 at 9:24 am

    Good point.
21. John Cowan says

    October 19, 2023 at 10:34 pm

    In Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars, all white power comes from “muscle, sun, wind, and water”, which pretty much restates your point. But something is wrong in utopia: where do the components of solar-powered wings and radios come from? And what is the ultimate objective of the fabled black sorcerers (“We’ve been using nuclear power for centuries, and only had ten core meltdowns ever!”) of Space Sciences Inc.?