Mostly names, also leopard hotel, also FMD ...

[Catlady]

I visited Milz's URL for Severus Caesar, which began by giving his name,
Lucius Septimus Severus. Apparently JKR got TWO names from him. It said
his father's name was Publius Septimus Geta. I've NEVER understood Roman
names, despite many explanations, but if the last name means the whole
clan and the middle name means the specific patrilineage within the
clan, shouldn't father and son have the same middle and last  names?

St. John, St. Mary, St. Clare ...  Sinjin, Simmery, Sinclair ... the
second is the address of the eponymous sorcerer of the Gilbert  &
Sullivan operetta ("number seventy simmery axe") and the third used to
be a brand of gasoline which IIRC boasted that it was made out of
dinosaurs. Put a tyrannosaur in your tank?

There was some news on the radio maybe a year ago in which the reporters
in London (was it the big pro-fox-hunting demo?) kept mentioning what I
eventually figured out was The Mall, except they kept pronouncing it Mao
(like meow minus the eeee). Mall *properly* rhymes with all and sounds
almost the same as maul, except I don't know how all you other people
pronounce all and maul.

To me, 'data' is a mass noun, like 'grass' or 'wheat' or 'corn' or
'flour'. These mass nouns have no singular ('datum' has NOTHING to do
with number crunching), are 'some' rather than 'a', and take a singular
verb. The flour goes in first. This corn tastes good. The grass needs to
be watered. The wheat was grown in Jenny's own garden plot. The data
indicates that the voters hate all the candidates.

I laughed my head off about Neil's hotel experience, both Neil's
description and the comments on it, with especial kudos to Amy Z -- "I
returned to my room, only to find that I couldn't remember which one I
was in" That's the cliche about housing tracts

"(the doors are unmarked and made of metal sheeting, a bit like those on
prison cells)."  Laughter at the idea that visitors to NYC needed to be
imprisoned more than the locals do!

"Consequently, I tried to enter my neighbour's room and woke her up" At
first reading, I was frightened she might scream and have you arrested
as burglar or rapist.

"(except she wasn't alone: she had two men in there, as I found out
later)." Oooh, was the implication correct?

"The Cher-themed room is covered in leopard print: the walls, carpet,
ceiling, lamp, shelves and table. This is mixed with industrial sheet
metal."  One time Jim Miles and I went to a Claes Oldenberg
retrospective at Museum of Contemporary Art. One of the Oldenberg pieces
is -- it's not a stage a set, but it's made like a stage set,
three-dimensional objects that are made trapezoidal so that the audience
will reference the idea of perspective -- of a motel room decorated in a
multitude of clashing fake fur animal prints, plus lots of mirrored
surfaces (don't remember if there was a mirror on the ceiling). Jim,
always pleased when there was something he actually understood, told met
that that is a motel room in Los Vegas, because Los Vegas is the only
place in the world where everything is tacky and sleazy (it is required
by zoning) and all tacky, sleazy things can be found there [thus, the
connection between that room and Cher]. The docent interrupted that Jim
was ALMOST right, but the oeuvre had actually been inspired by
Oldenberg's stay in a Malibu motel where each room was decorated in a
different animal print. At this point, I should mention that here I live
in Venice, two miles up the coast is Santa Monica (walking distance for
healthy people, not for me), five more miles up the coast is Pacific
Palisades where I lived from second grade through high school,  and next
up the coast (five miles? maybe ten?) is Malibu, home of the J. Paul
Getty Museum Villa, and of Hughes Research Lab where my father  worked.
To me, Malibu is a place (named from Chumash word 'maliwa' meaning the
sound of surf) not a make a Chevrolet.

"(It's so noisy here!!!) " Oh, God, yes! When I first took a job in New
York, I had to spend a couple of nights in a mid-town Manhattan hotel
(thank God I didn't have to PAY for it!) and I COULD NOT BELIEVE the
constant noise! I was used to traffic and boomboxes all night, but to
garbage cans being clanged again only once per morning, not all night
long...

"To this day I can reduce my husband to helpless giggles by announcing
"There is no cause for alahm."" LMHO

I heard a thing on the news about FMD in South America. IIRC, it said
that South America has never been FMD-free, so Argentina and Brazil are
not allowed to export fresh meat to North America or Europe, so Brazil
divided itself into five districts, each of which strives to become
FMD-free by an extensive vaccination campaign, which costs $1 per cow
per year, and one of these districts had already, at the beginning of
this year, petitioned to be recognized as FMD-free, and now the disaster
in Britain and Europe is making them have second thoughts, such as that
they might be wise to keep on their vaccination campaign forever.

I am very confused about the above information -- it appears to
contradict the information of the other 'experts' they interviewed, such
as the one who said that vaccination is no good because a vaccinated cow
is just as contagious as an infected cow, and the several who said that
FMS spreading to wildlife is not only ineradicable, but will kill off
important endangered species. Does anyone here have any facts?
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