More comments I've posted elsewhere:
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roadnotes asked (under "collecting data for myself") whether the word "creamy" came to mind when people looked at her skin:
Neither yours nor anyone else's.
The texture words I think of for skin seem to be less metaphorical: smooth, rough, soft, wrinkled, tough might apply to different people's skin, or different parts of someone's skin, or at different times. Not "silken" or "creamy" or "stony." (At the moment, for different areas of my own skin I might use "soft," "smooth," "hairy," "rough," or "callused.")
This was in the discussion column for Carolyn Hax's advice column at the Washington Post, after someone wrote in to ask "what can I put on a wedding invitation to politely tell the guests we want cash, not other gifts" and was told they couldn't (though if someone asks specifically, "money always fits/goes with everything" is acceptable):
I am now madly hoping someone will invite me to a wedding and say "we prefer cash."
I will get a red envelope, and go to my souvenir drawer for an old Canadian two-dollar bill, and a French two-franc coin, and the fifty kopek piece I found on the sidewalk in Times Square, and an Australian coin with a picture of a marsupial, and a Hong Kong dollar, maybe a 20-pence piece from Britain and 10 euro cents, and maybe a couple of pennies from the years the happy couple were born.… My card would congratulate the couple and wish them a long and happy marriage, with time for lots of interesting travel together.
That semi-random list is a combination of things I have on purpose as souvenirs (the Australian coins were a gift from a friend), a few I might use again (the 20 p, for example), and things that I didn't get a chance to turn in when currencies changed. A few of them are even still money, or might be (I have no idea about the Russian coin), but it would probably add up to less than $5 even if they all were.
You know, I can think of people for whom that would be a genuinely appropriate and cheerful gift, but they aren't the sort who would be writing in asking how to ask wedding guests for money.
Near the end of a thread on John Scalzi's blog Whatever, after he listed ten things he'd done that (he guessed) few if any of his readers had, and various people tried to say similar things about themselves. I'm sure other people have done each of these, but I may be the only one who has done all ten:
Coming in late, a bunch of these are variations on things other people have said:
1) used my Swiss army knife to cut through vines that were blocking my way a fire escape—during an actual fire
2) climbed all the way to the top of Notre Dame de Paris (the last part is 131 spiral steps, with no rail or landing)
3) eaten both teriyaki-fried crickets and duck blood (some of you can probably identify the instigator here)
4) repeatedly ridden the 7 (Flushing) IRT train standing between cars, just because it was more fun, and they hadn't gotten around to locking those doors in 1976
5) insisted on a root canal for a wisdom tooth because I was sure it would hurt less than having the tooth pulled
6) sold chocolate-covered frozen bananas from a cart on the sidewalk
7) hopped off a Greyhound bus at an unscheduled stop in Harlem, rather than ride all the way to the bus terminal
8) entered the United States from both Canada and Mexico without being asked for ID (no points for guessing my skin color)
9) visited railroad museums on three continents
10) been asked (and paid) for rights to one of my vacation photos by the University of Waterloo
In a mostly-unrelated thread on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
james_nicoll's journal, someone brought up the idea that 1/200 men are direct male-line descendants of Genghis Khan. Only they phrased it as "direct descendants," which started me thinking, at first about terminology, and then I did a little googling:
Or maybe not: what we actually know is that about 1 in 200 men carry the same Y-chromosome haplotype. A recent paper in the Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy claims to have actually tested people who are known to be descended from Genghis Khan, and found that they don't carry that genetic marker. The authors conclude that
OK, that is not at all what I was looking for. I started out wondering whether anyone had a good guess, if 1/200 men are direct male-line descendants of someone, what percentage of all people are descended from him through either an all-female line (we know Genghis Khan had daughters) or a mix of male and female descent.
(Before that, I was thinking about direct versus collateral descent, as in, from someone who isn't your biological ancestor but your great-great-great-…-uncle.)
Given how long it took to collect four entries for this post, this may be the last "misc. comments" post I do here.
roadnotes asked (under "collecting data for myself") whether the word "creamy" came to mind when people looked at her skin:Neither yours nor anyone else's.
The texture words I think of for skin seem to be less metaphorical: smooth, rough, soft, wrinkled, tough might apply to different people's skin, or different parts of someone's skin, or at different times. Not "silken" or "creamy" or "stony." (At the moment, for different areas of my own skin I might use "soft," "smooth," "hairy," "rough," or "callused.")
This was in the discussion column for Carolyn Hax's advice column at the Washington Post, after someone wrote in to ask "what can I put on a wedding invitation to politely tell the guests we want cash, not other gifts" and was told they couldn't (though if someone asks specifically, "money always fits/goes with everything" is acceptable):
I am now madly hoping someone will invite me to a wedding and say "we prefer cash."
I will get a red envelope, and go to my souvenir drawer for an old Canadian two-dollar bill, and a French two-franc coin, and the fifty kopek piece I found on the sidewalk in Times Square, and an Australian coin with a picture of a marsupial, and a Hong Kong dollar, maybe a 20-pence piece from Britain and 10 euro cents, and maybe a couple of pennies from the years the happy couple were born.… My card would congratulate the couple and wish them a long and happy marriage, with time for lots of interesting travel together.
That semi-random list is a combination of things I have on purpose as souvenirs (the Australian coins were a gift from a friend), a few I might use again (the 20 p, for example), and things that I didn't get a chance to turn in when currencies changed. A few of them are even still money, or might be (I have no idea about the Russian coin), but it would probably add up to less than $5 even if they all were.
You know, I can think of people for whom that would be a genuinely appropriate and cheerful gift, but they aren't the sort who would be writing in asking how to ask wedding guests for money.
Near the end of a thread on John Scalzi's blog Whatever, after he listed ten things he'd done that (he guessed) few if any of his readers had, and various people tried to say similar things about themselves. I'm sure other people have done each of these, but I may be the only one who has done all ten:
Coming in late, a bunch of these are variations on things other people have said:
1) used my Swiss army knife to cut through vines that were blocking my way a fire escape—during an actual fire
2) climbed all the way to the top of Notre Dame de Paris (the last part is 131 spiral steps, with no rail or landing)
3) eaten both teriyaki-fried crickets and duck blood (some of you can probably identify the instigator here)
4) repeatedly ridden the 7 (Flushing) IRT train standing between cars, just because it was more fun, and they hadn't gotten around to locking those doors in 1976
5) insisted on a root canal for a wisdom tooth because I was sure it would hurt less than having the tooth pulled
6) sold chocolate-covered frozen bananas from a cart on the sidewalk
7) hopped off a Greyhound bus at an unscheduled stop in Harlem, rather than ride all the way to the bus terminal
8) entered the United States from both Canada and Mexico without being asked for ID (no points for guessing my skin color)
9) visited railroad museums on three continents
10) been asked (and paid) for rights to one of my vacation photos by the University of Waterloo
In a mostly-unrelated thread on
james_nicoll's journal, someone brought up the idea that 1/200 men are direct male-line descendants of Genghis Khan. Only they phrased it as "direct descendants," which started me thinking, at first about terminology, and then I did a little googling:Or maybe not: what we actually know is that about 1 in 200 men carry the same Y-chromosome haplotype. A recent paper in the Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy claims to have actually tested people who are known to be descended from Genghis Khan, and found that they don't carry that genetic marker. The authors conclude that
Therefore, the star-cluster C3* or Chinggis Khan’s hypothetical Y-chromosome was either the dominant haplotype of most Mongolian men in the 13th century or it had been well distributed throughout Central Asia before Chinggis Khan’s time due to the territorial expansions of various nomadic empires.
OK, that is not at all what I was looking for. I started out wondering whether anyone had a good guess, if 1/200 men are direct male-line descendants of someone, what percentage of all people are descended from him through either an all-female line (we know Genghis Khan had daughters) or a mix of male and female descent.
(Before that, I was thinking about direct versus collateral descent, as in, from someone who isn't your biological ancestor but your great-great-great-…-uncle.)
Given how long it took to collect four entries for this post, this may be the last "misc. comments" post I do here.
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