Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

To brisingamen:

So far as I can see, all this does is to give the sea more ammunition to hurl further up the beach in other places, but I don't quite understand the complexities of refusing to accept the inevitability of longshore drift, so I am undoubtedly wrong about this.

Having studied this somewhat at university--it was a major interest of the professor who taught one general undergraduate intro at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies--I can tell you that you're basically right. In eastern North America, it's not longshore drift, it's that barrier beaches are trying to move inland (because the sea level is rising). This has been going on for millennia, but in the last several decades, it's been impeded by roads and ocean-view homes and a general human refusal to admit that we have built our houses upon sand.

Piling extra sand on beaches is essentially harmless but expensive, and has almost no long-term effect, because the currents carry the sand where they will. Everything else that's been tried to prevent barrier beach erosion makes things worse: it doesn't solve the problem locally, and it stops the beachs down-current from being naturally replenished. Spend enough money and you can turn a delightful sandy barrier beach into a rocky shoreline.

[Herewith ends the rant; also available, discussions of craters left by American bombing in Vietnam; and the pleasures of being on a beach on a pleasant cool day in April, when almost nobody else is.]

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In customers_suck, in response to someone who suggested that their employer shouldn't have hired mentally retarded people because those employees might make some customers uncomfortable:

If another employee can't deal with a (mentally or physically) disabled person, the employee who can't deal is free to look for another job.

Similarly, your customers are entitled not to be harassed. That doesn't mean they are entitled not to see people they aren't comfortable with. If an employee makes people uncomfortable by hassling them, touching them inappropriately, or the like, they need to be retrained, reassigned, or fired. Any employee. If s/he's just doing the job, and a customer is uncomfortable because the customer has never met a mentally retarded person, or a person of a particular ethnicity, before, the customer needs to take a deep breath and go on about their shopping.

If companies don't hire disabled people (or whites, blacks, women, Christians, non-Christians, fill in the blank) because they're afraid people won't have previous experience with the disabled, how are the temporarily able-bodied going to get that experience?

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To noelfigart:
I read the pagan names post, and looked at my username, and smiled. I'm not very pagan these days, but my more-or-less-totem bird is a brightly singing seed-eater.

I've given up on guessing whether people's names were chosen by themselves or by someone else: how, unless you know them well enough to be told, can you be sure, in a world where people hand innocent children names like "Prince" and "River Phoenix"? It seems kinder to assume, when someone has a boastful name, that they are burdened by foolish parents rather than excessive arrogance.

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To ladysisyphus, who was commenting on a man who wants to restore the primacy of the 19th-century meaning of "gay":

I'd be more sympathetic to this cause if most of the other words with similar meanings hadn't also been chased out of common usage by "happy". "Merry" is barely allowed out in public without "Christmas", "joy" is rare, "cheerful" almost a stereotype, and when's the last time you heard a person (other than Santa Claus) or event called "jolly"?

At least we still have "glee" and "pleasure".