response 93 of 140:

Dec 18 17:23 UTC 2003

resp:90 - Again, my apologies. That statement of mine that you dragged 
in here from party was said completely tongue-in-cheek, with this 
section of this item in mind. 

response 95 of 140:

Dec 18 18:47 UTC 2003

the best thing about texas is
ann richards...


...and my uncle milton.


well, spring creek bbq is pretty good as is the chicken fried
steak.

response 97 of 140:

Dec 18 22:53 UTC 2003

  I don't think he owes Mickey an apology.  I think the offense stems
  from differing interpretations of what gull wrote, that Mickey has
  chosen the most objectionable interpretation, and that another quite
  justifiable meaning is probably what gull had in mind.

  If I write a statement of the form "Texans enjoy <x>" you can choose
  to read that as "all Texans enjoy <x>" or you can accept that what I
  almost certainly meant was "many (possibly most) Texans enjoy <x>"
  I doubt we'd even be having this discussion if the claim in question
  was something like "Texans enjoy barbecue", even if a Texan respondent
  had piped up with "I'm a militant vegetarian and a Texan and *I* don't
  enjoy barbecue," because none of us would think that gull had meant to
  imply *all* Texans by such a statement.

response 99 of 140:

Dec 18 23:22 UTC 2003

Re resp:96: I'm sorry he felt I was implying that.  It wasn't my intention.

response 101 of 140:

Dec 19 05:43 UTC 2003

As a person of Californian domicile, I resent gull's statement about
California. ;)

I used to complain that nothing worked in California, and complain about
excessive liberalism as a cause.  Certainly, having considered myself a left
wing liberal all my life, moving somewhere where my views at the time were
the right of the mainstream was a bit unsettling.  I still do think the left
wing politics is a bit weird sometimes, for instance the bizarre insistence
that increasing the supply of housing is what makes housing more expensive,
or the mass transit system that shuts down shortly after midnight, when the
trains are still quite crowded, because nobody would want to be out that late
anyway.  But mostly what I see, at least in my chunk of California, is
something I've come to like.  Some of the laws may be bizarre, but they're
there because people cared.  The live and let live and have lots of fun in
the process attitude, as strange as it may seem to those wondering why those
strange people can't just conform, makes life a lot more enjoyable.  And, when
the politics gets really strange, it still makes for good entertainment.

I met a guy a few years ago in a little village in Italy, who said he had come
back there from Rome because "here, life comes first."  The Bay Area, or at
least the less suburban parts of it, seems to do well at that too.

response 103 of 140:

Dec 19 15:14 UTC 2003

Re resp:101: I guess that watching from the outside, it never struck me
as a "live and let live" attitude; in fact the enforced political
correctness in California sounds awfully oppressive to me.  A good
example is the recent L.A. city government decision to ban the use of
the terms "master" and "slave" for electronic equipment in their
offices.  I'm not sure I'd want to live in a state where it was
basically illegal to ever do anything that might offend anyone.

response 105 of 140:

Dec 19 17:42 UTC 2003

See http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp for details.
The story doesn't say what the replacement terms (if any) are,
however.

response 107 of 140:

Dec 19 17:51 UTC 2003

(The Online Directory team at U-M switched to "master" and "shadow" for its
servers, after a similar complaint in 1998 or 1999.)

response 109 of 140:

Dec 19 18:29 UTC 2003

Re 106> I doubt they found just the term "master" objectionable. It 
was the "master-and-slave" combination.

I personally do not like the term "master" when used in the case of 
pets. Maybe because I viewmy pet and pets in general as members of the 
family. Nothing to do with the possibility that I might be black.

(And everyone knows that cats do not have "masters" anyways, they have 
staff.)

response 111 of 140:

Dec 19 18:53 UTC 2003

In Berkeley, a pet's former master is now known as the pet's "owner/guardian."
The original proposal before the Berkeley City Council, modeled on a similar
ordinance in Boulder (which is not in California...) was to have those who
take care of pets be the pet's "guardian," but that was seen as going too far.

That said, I've generally found it much easier to offend people in Ann Arbor,
where there enough conservatives around for conservative ideas to seem
threatening, and where there are enough conservatives around to make a big
deal out of how threatening various liberal ideas are.  I remember walking
across the University of Michigan Diag a few years ago, and seeing that every
ten feet or so somebody had chalked "gays are people too."  It shocked me,
not for the reason it was presumably supposed to, but because I was struck
by the sudden realization that I was somewhere where that needed to be said.

response 113 of 140:

Dec 19 19:12 UTC 2003

People buy and sell pets.  That makes them owners.  Of course some pets just
find you on their own.

response 115 of 140:

Dec 19 19:24 UTC 2003

<remmers considers for a moment whether "custodian" would be appropriate,
 then decides in the negative>