Compare that to the unbelievable arrogance and imaginative failure of the Lord of the Rings disasters that came out about the same time, resulting in execrable movies that defiled one of the great tales of all literature.

Those would be the ones that won 20 Oscars and made 2 billion dollars, right? Yeah, that's pretty much the textbook definition of execrable.

The correct word for the first two HP movies' attempt at adaptation is "slavish".

Put your child in the care of some kindly grandmother who babysits a few kids during the day.

I used to work for a guy who literally disappeared one day. Vanished. Bank account cleaned out, house abandoned. As it turned out, his wife had run a little unlicensed daycare, and a kid died there, by their account accidentally. The medical examiner did not agree--the contusions were not from a fall but from striking, in her opinion--and the couple fled the country that day.

If you can line up an arrangement with a close friend or relative, that's one thing. But licenses exist for a reason.

Also complicating the situation is the fact that the biter is the child of an employee.

Start looking for a new place yesterday. Unless the employee is a disliked jerk, the others will close ranks around them like the Spartans at Thermopylae.

Oh defenders of cultures Other, between this and female genital mutilation?

Understanding other cultures does not and cannot mean automatic acceptance of every practice they engage in. I wouldn't expect the Nepalese to accept Hooters, either.

And while I visited as often as was practical in the months leading up to his death (including once in the week before he died, a day or so before he became non-responsive) I felt bad that I couldn't be there more. My sister, a stay-at-home mom with a bit more freedom to her schedule, was there the last two weeks solid--and was pissed off at the world that he breathed his last while she wasn't in the room.

If one looks hard enough for guilt and anger and remorse, it's always there. But it doesn't do anyone a lick of good. Not the dying, not the family, not you. Sure, there's always something that's going to be left undone, unsaid, unfulfilled when someone dies--that's the core of all grief. But don't let it become a scourge with which you torment yourself--and don't let others offer to do it for you.

If the rest of your family loves you, they'll understand all that, and the fragility of your situation, and be happy to see you make the funeral. If not, screw 'em.

Here's why: he won't disown his lesbian daughter. That means the Religious Rechts can't support him. Too many heads would explode.

There isn't going to be an absolutely compelling, "silver bullet" reason to keep or to eliminate them. Having the anonymous option is neither unalloyed good nor unfettered evil. It's simply a decision with pros and cons, and you have to weigh which is more important. Some posters will be annoyed either way.

That said, I admit the following:

1) There are poster names that I just skip over in most columns, because I know they will inspire only anger. These are not simply ones with positions I disagree with, but those who express those positions in ways so dependably vile that would get them slugged if they said it to most people face-to-face. I'm NEVER going to respond to them, so why read them? The nom-de-web thus is, for me, a handy filtering device.

2) There is a limit to how much letters can do in terms of forming a community of people and ideas, a la Table Talk or the WELL. Anonymity is a further governor to this engine of interaction: if you can never be sure of whether the same person is speaking or not, it is effectively impossible to have a conversation with them. After all, ideas don't talk to each other: people do. We are not only the conveyors of logic and grammar, but the purveyors of rhetoric, in these intellectual transactions.

By the way, is this a decision that has to be made globally, or can individual columnists decide for responses to their own pieces? That in itself would be revealing...

The characters there weren't exactly, ah, Chekovian in their depth.

I guess it's all a matter of taste.

Although actually, I liked Princess Bride too. :)

Half the reviewers out there have done the same thing, and the other half have made oh-so-clever allusions to it. And though it is annoying, it's not a central plot point or anything.

...to bring out the judgmental in folks, is there?

How about this: there are people who fear anything less than the illusion of absolute control, who loathe caprice and impulse, and who hate themselves for it; then they focus that whole roiling mix into disdain for all who are less fearful than they are.

Maybe the LW's like that.

Or maybe he's just a prig.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute

Handy thing, the Internet.

Better a framing carpenter or a dog groomer than a slam poet who feels really good about himself.

And these are mutually exclusive how? Why can't someone work with their hands AND be a fairly well-rounded and humane human being? The notion that all education should be job training is fine, if ones WANTS citizens to be drones. But if one is actually interested in having a functional democratic society, it's woefully insufficient.

But that's not a surprise to many of those in power who would just as soon not deal with a thoughtful populace.