I'm sitting here, and the chipmunk is singing a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man." Mick Jagger, he ain't...
"Street Fighting Man." There oughta be a law...
...
Oh, Baud. Side 4, and now the chipmunk is doing "Pinball Wizard" in 4/5 time.
I should sacrifice this album to Cthulhu.
> > WHOA, you have the Rod Stewart Pinball Wizard? With the orchestration and > > the big chorale singers? Maybe the worst song EVER? > > > > I want a copy, don't you DARE get rid of it.I have it! And I know exactly what you're going to do with it.
I'll send you his version of "Street Fighting Man," and you can decide which is worse. Or poke your eardrums out with a paperclip, whichever comes first. In fact, if you have a turntable, I'll send you the entire album; two, yes *two* large, round, and black LPs, jacketed in real paper, with a premium-grade cardboard jacket that folds out to double size! With about 50 small, poor-resolution images of Rod Stewart in various poses!
- George Orwell
...and
"All propaganda is lies-- even when it is telling the truth."
Also by Mr. O. Just a couple of thoughts to ponder when trying to navigate the maze of Congressional and Presidental propaganda and mass-media skew.
http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/index.html
The ReactOS project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.This is considerably more ambitious than Wine, which is essentially a fancy translation layer - Wine mimics what Windows functions it has to, and passes the rest over to the host operating system (*nix and the X Window System) to handle. ReactOS will eventually be able to handle native XP (and eventually Vista) device drivers, which would let you boot ReactOS from a clean hard disk.
At the moment you can't do that. Well, you can do it on very specific hardware that they currently support. Almost all the developers run ReactOS in a virtual machine like QEMU under Linux.
Progress on ReactOS has been slow but steady. The developers are putting a lot of effort into keeping the code clean and thorough debugging. There's a continual interchange of code between ReactOS and the Wine project. The slow progress has annoyed a bunch of people, but most of them don't realize Wine (a considerably simpler project) was backed by money and programmers from IBM, Intel, and SCO, and was shipping as a commercial product for SCO as far back as 1995, when I found it was available for the SCO machines I was employed to administer at the time. I think Sun was involved somewhere in Wine, too. I could google it, but who'd care? The point is that when the consortium dumped the code into the public domain, the new developers considered it "beta" for over ten years - Wine 1.0 finally shipped not too long ago.
ReactOS doesn't have that kind of technical and financial backing. Yet. It's a mystery to me that some company, or even government, hasn't stepped in. Digital Research claimed to have a working clone of the original MacOS and another of Windows 2, besides their DOS clone. Novell paid for Mono, which duplicates most .NET functionality. As dependent as most organizations are on Windows, being chained to Microsoft's coattails is simply bad juju.
ReactOS, unfortunately, isn't as flexible or stable as Wine yet. The two major programs I use Wine for are Paint Shop Pro and the ancient Syntrillium Cool Edit Pro. Gimp will do everything PSP will, and more, but PSP will do it faster (even under Wine!) with a minimum of mousing and keyboarding. I just use Cool Edit to chop LP sides into individual audio tracks, but even though programs like Audacity can do the same thing, CEP is so much easier and faster to use I stay with it. Sorry, Charlie. PSP and CEP kick ass, and they're paid for... anyway, ReactOS barfs on both.
ReactOS has a simple package manager that downloads a handful of freeware apps that will run okay - Firefox, etc. I'd often thought something like that would be a good idea for Windows - just install from the Microsoft CD, then "apt-get" or "urpmi" everything else from a trusted source.
Anyway, if you have any virtual machine software set up on your computer, or you're willing to experiment, download the latest ReactOS and give it a look. It's worth keeping an eye on.
Historically, whether ordinary US soldiers carried firearms mostly depended on how likely they were to see combat. Otherwise, they were left in the armory, where they didn't get lost or damaged.
During wartime, it was customary for officers to carry sidearms as part of their uniform, similar to the way European officers carried swagger sticks. Sidearms were carried into the Congress and Senate, and into the presence of the President.
Churchill and the Imperial General Staff met with the US and Canadians at Quebec in 1943. From the pictures I've seen, the British and Canadian officers were also armed in the presence of all three heads of state.
Churchill's massive 6-volume history of WWII has an interesting anecdote about the conference.
It was August, and the meeting room was packed and hot. Excess brass and politicos were exiled to the hall and the door slammed in their face so Roosevelt, Churchill, Mackenzie-King, and their staffs could get a little room. The subject at hand was a Canadian plan for building aircraft carriers out of a mixture of ice and sawdust, which was supposedly bombproof. The presentation had degenerated into (basically) "yeah, right" and "pull the other one." A large block of the stuff was sitting on a table, dripping onto the floor. In frustration at the bickering, General Marshall pulled out his .45 and took a shot at the block to see what would happen. (nothing much; the Canadians had had a pretty nifty idea)
Out in the hall, one of the lesser generals yelled "They're killing each other in there!", but nobody dared to open the door to take a look.
Contrast this to the 1990s, when Clinton had combat troops in Somalia disarmed before he would review them, and later had the graduating FBI class at Quantico disarmed before giving a speech. This things have perpetuated themselves; only the Secret Service can be armed near the President any more... but what makes the Army and FBI untrustworthy, or the Secret Service more trustworthy than the Army and FBI?
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/martian_landscapes.html
Oddly, a lot of them look like colorized electron microscope images of bacteria...
I've been running SuSE 11.1 for almost two years. I spent a day with KDE 4 and reinstalled with KDE 3.5. KDE 4 looks like some demented cross between XP and Vista, which are two of the fugliest desktops ever created, at least in their default forms. Not only that, KDE 4 loses most of 3's configurability as well as being a huge resource hog. And butt-ugly, too.
SuSE 11.2 just shipped. It now defaults to KDE instead of Gnome, which is reasonable, but KDE 3 is no longer available; "everyone else has gone to 4." Yeah, and my mom used to ask "if everyone else jumped off a building, would you do it too?" I'd rather use Gnome than KDE 4...
11.2 also does some other demented things, like replacing Konqueror with Firefox as the default browser. And not just any Firefox; a heavily-customized version to play with KDE's standard dialogs and helper applets. They've also dragged up something called "dolphin", which is a crude file manager, to replace Konq's file manager mode, and relegated Konq to a submenu.
That's insane. Once you've used Konqueror for a while, Firefox is so slow it will drive you mad with the delays and waits for things that were almost instantaneous. And Firefox and dolphin are both severely crippled compared to Konqueror. Yes, you can eventually make them do most of it, if you google enough setup options and use cut and paste... Konqueror is the core of the entire KDE package, and they're gutting it out and spending all their development time making the desktop look like Vista.
Wikipedia::
Ogg Vorbis:
"Vorbis" is named after a Discworld character, Exquisitor Vorbis in Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett. ... . "Ogg" is in fact derived from ogging, jargon that arose in the computer game Netrek.
Ogging:
Ogging is term for a tactic developed for the online multiplayer game Netrek. This game was among the very first multiplayer Internet based games, and was most popular in the 1990s on university Unix systems used for internet access, and is still played today, having been later adapted to Windows and Macintosh computers.
And then there's Ogg Theora, the video codec:
Ogg Theora:
Theora is named for Theora Jones, Edison Carter's Controller on the Max Headroom television program. (also says that on the Ogg web site)
Unix guys tend to use amusing names. Back when various industry standard proposals for CD-ROM formats were using names like "Paris" or "Chicago", the Unix guys used "Rock Ridge", the town in the movie "Blazing Saddles."
Hedley Lamarr: "I want you to round up every vicious criminal and gun slinger in the west. Take this down."
[Taggart looks for a pen and paper while Hedley talks]
Hedley Lamarr: "I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists!"
Taggart: [finding pen and paper] Could you repeat that, sir?
- "Blazing Saddles"
> > Do you suppose this *reporter* is a liberal?. > > Frack 'em, either report of editorialize, but this idiocy of blending the > > two, is just that, idiocy.There are no reporters any more. Not like we learned the meaning of the word. They're either political hacks using the news to push their agenda, or entertainers using the news to boost their ratings. That's assuming they don't think they, themselves are news, which happens to the more-famous barking heads.
The idea objective reporting or simply conveying information would get you either a condescending sneer or a blank look nowadays.
> > I don't think those ever existed. You just believed the propaganda > > that fair, unbiased reporting could ever be derived from a subjective > > viewpoint.Jeez, you don't have to put big thumbprints on my rose-colored glasses...
> > Anyone else remember the *great* discounts that ABS was going to bring?. > > And let's not forget how OH, was never going to ticket people for seat belt > > violations.Note that traffic fatalities have remained fairly constant despite mandatory belts and all the safety crap.
The usual excuse is "more miles are driven now, the fatalities per mile have dropped." Which is true, but they haven't dropped *that* much.
I expect the only safety innovation that has been worth the effort is the collapsible steering column. I have a book of car crash photos from the '40s and '50s, and almost all of them have the steering column driven into the seat back.
> > 5. I receive periodic threatening SMS messages and phone calls from some firm > > of shysters insisting that I haven't paid for that old telephone account. > > They have been threatening me with legal action for years now, and I always > > tell them to fuck off eventually, after asking them to PROVE that I owe them > > the money. What a bunch of knobs. Just because some inefficient little data > > capturer somewhere neglected to enter the transaction when I paid the damned > > thing off, I am doomed to have these bloodsuckers hounding me for ever.In the USA there are "credit reporting agencies". Lots of stuff hinges off your credit rating, from the interest rate on your mortgage to your auto insurance premiums, to whether you can get emergency room treatment.
CRAs are entirely unregulated, and they do pretty much as they please. Their data also sucks. They'll take a bad report from anyone, but trying to get something like that expunged is virtually impossible, and if you do, it'll only last until they trade data with another agency. Been there, done that.
The next step down are CRAs that are basically blackmailers, like the one in Little Rock that I've been stalemated with since the late 1980s. They claim I owe some medical bills to some place I've never heard of. They have no proof of any kind, since I've never been there - I don't think the clinic even exists any more - and they're been quite up front that they'll keep refiling me as a delinquent account until I pay them a substantial sum of money... which I wasn't surprised to find was exactly the same amount the several lawyers I called wanted to handle the case.
There's nothing I can do, no state or Federal agency I can turn to. If I personally tried that sort of thing, it would be a felony, but no law enforcement agency wants to look at it that way.
I went to their office once. They're high up in a high-security office building, and their door is covered with a thick steel plate. A very battered steel plate...
> > I've been in both military, and civilian hospitals that haven't been worth a > > darn. I also drive 500 miles to WI get what I consider the best care > > possible, and it just so happens to be a VA hospital.I'll admit the Little Rock AFB "hospital" is (I hope to the diety of your choice) a pathologically bad case.
The place shut down at 5 o'clock. The "emergency room" had no doctor on call. There were something like three chairs; people had to sit on the floor. If it was serious, you didn't even bother... but your military benefits didn't cover a *real* hospital if you chose to go to one. They liked to play the "wait until we pull your records" game; it took two or three hours. Best as I could tell, it was to discourage people from using their "benefit." One of my Mom's friends died in the waiting room before they got around to "pulling her records." The kid next door when we lived on base broke his arm; compound fracture with bone sticking out. They waited something like three hours, no antiseptic or painkillers, before they were told the hospital couldn't set the bone; they had to go to a civilian doctor.
LRAFB's hospital has been jacked up by the Pentagon *many* times, but no matter how many hospital commanders and base commanders and personnel changes they did, nothing ever seemed to change.
I understand it's much better now, but *anything* would be better than the way it was before.
When people start babbling about "government health care", they don't ever seem to ask what level of service they might be getting...
I boycott non-local companies because they've pissed me off, usually because they refused to support a product, or they refused to sell me a product. Often because there appears to be nobody at home, just a billion PBX pushbutton messages and a full voicemail box. Occasionally because of extraordinarily stupid advertising, like Logitech's "Einstein in a tutu" or "pissing baby" ads.
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Of course, it's so easy to just duck your head and follow along with the sheeple... so most people just go along.
"...and you will know fear..."
"...and then you will die. Have a pleasant flight."
-- G'Kar and Na'Toth to Tu'Pari, Babylon 5, "The Parliament of Dreams"
> I still can't understand how a 'new' nation and its citizens can be > held responsible for the actions of the previous nation and its citizens > or rulers. When this land was 'stolen' it was taken by subjects of The > King of England, unless my history is all fubar'd.All land in the British New World was owned by the king, and rented or held in feoff by the gentry. To build a town or a road, you needed a royal charter, otherwise the shire reeves would make you very sorry.
The crown could have taken the land and run them off, or simply killed them; they weren't British subjects, and therefore had no legal standing. Like the judge said, the transaction was perfectly legal then; the fact that the laws changed later does not invalidate that. That's one of the basics of the common law, forged during the Star Chamber trials in England before the American Revolution. If we could change a law and then hold people responsible for things they did before the law was enacted, we'd be hauling in a shitload of convenience-store owners for selling cigarettes to 16-year-olds in the 1970s...
The American Revolution was sponsored and paid for by the gentry and the large landholders. In general, whatever land people had at the time became theirs, and the rest became public land, managed by the states, and later the Federal government. Not as nasty as land reform in various South American countries has been; nobody had any really large holdings that were political issues.
Since it was an upper class revolution, the continuity of contracts, ownership, the body of the common law, and so forth were very important to the people who were running the revolution. So for the most part, any contracts with the crown were taken up as contracts with the new governments.
> Yeah, but they didn't document it as well as the Brits did. It's > historical record the Brits took it by force.And your point is?
The USA is the only nation to have ever materially increased its size through purchase instead of conquest - the Louisiana Purchase, and Alaska. Both the French and Russians had more or less occupied the lands instead of conquering them, but there was no effective resistance to it, so it was theirs.
The USA has occasionally increased its holding by outright conquest, such as when they defeated and absorbed the Confederate States of America.
> > Gates' definition of 'smart' obviously translates to 'willing to work > > for CHEAP' !!One of my favorite Dilbert strips involved higher management outsourcing some engineering to some foreigners, who outsourced it to other foreigners, who outsourced it to... Dilbert's company.
The horrifying thought is, I find nothing unbelievable about that.
> The CORRECT tax spread is the poor pay nothing. The middle class > pay a little, and the rich pay a lot.Yeah, I've seen that plan. Right out of "A Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx. Very interesting book, btw.
How about an absolutely fair system?
Take the national budget, divide it by the population, and everyone pays the same, from Bill Gates down to your three-month-old daughter (who benefits just as much as anyone else, and therefore has to pay, too).
What? You don't like that plan? When you start adding exceptions, you're headed down the slippery slope to a 30,000 page tax code...
> Per person? $6,878 for me, $6,878 for wife, $6,878 for 6 yr old, $6,878 > for 2 yr old. > > $27,512 for the Stewarts. OUCH!That's your absolutely *fair* share.
Only Marxist taxation schemes can support the kind of spending the Fed does.
>> That's your absolutely *fair* share. > I don't think so. To be fair, youd have to look at what the money is > spent on and who benefits from it. If the entire higway budget was > spent in Wisconsin, to be fair they shoud pay for that, not me, since I > never drive in Wisconsin.Oh, ho! And now you're on the way back to a multigigabyte tax code.
"Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to phaser fire!"
--Doctor Leonard H. McCoy, "Star Trek"
Power comes from the plant in various ways; by the time it gets to town it's usually 3 phase, 240 volts. It takes four fires to move it - 3 110 volt legs and a "neutral" wire. Each leg is a full sine curve of alternating current, 120 degrees apart - that is, the three legs have equally spaced curves.
"220" is two legs and a neutral. The two legs only cover 240 degrees of the full curve, so you only get 220v instead of 240v. Since each leg is 115v they push/pull to make 220.
[EE heads explode about now]
"115" is one leg and a neutral.
The phase convertor takes any two legs and synthesizes the third. Solid state boxes do it by slicing and dicing the two inputs to make the output; this gives a "noisy" stairstep curve to the third leg. The better the convertor, the closer to a true curve. This is big marketing juju for the people who sell convertors, but it would only concern you if you were trying to run that old IBM mainframe you bought off eBay. 3 phase motors don't care.
Rotary convertors use a three phase motor (sometimes specially wound, sometimes off-the-shelf) and use two legs to drive it. As it spins, the undriven part of the motor acts as a generator, making the third leg. It's a true sine curve, but due to losses the leg is usually a bit under voltage, plus it takes more power to drive a rotary convertor than a solid state convertor. Again, the power supplies in some big iron supposedly don't like the output of the convertor, but the motor in your mill still won't care.
Rotary convertors are pretty much immune to the kind of load spikes that will pop the breaker on a solid state convertor.
You can buy a solid state convertor big enough for most mills for $300-ish. Rotary convertors generally cost 2x that, but you can make one yourself if you can scrounge a three phase motor 1/3 to 1/2 again as large as the motor you want to drive. It's usually called an idler motor. For example, if your mill has a 5hp motor, the next largest standard motor is 7.5hp. Wire the neutral of your 220 line to the neutral on the idler. Then hook the two hot lines to the idler. Most 3 phase motors are marked A, B, and C. Say you hook your wires to A and B. Then hook the 3-phase motor on your mill to A, B, and C. Note A and B go from the wall socket, across the idler, and to the mill. C is the generated leg from the idler.
When you plug the idler in, nothing will happen. You have to spin the shaft with your hand to get it turning. Once it comes up to speed, you can turn the mill on.
If the mill motor spins the wrong direction, swap any two legs - ABC to ACB or BAC - and it will go the other direction.
I followed the Enlightenment mailing list for several months, but I'm mostly interested in e16, and the discussions are mostly e17. Since they're almost completely different, I never could understand why the topics were lumped together. e16 is still under active development, and does everything I'm interested in. e17 is just fancier eye candy, as far as I'm concerned.
FWVM was a contender for a while. It was probably the first of the deluxe window managers, and it's thoroghly programmable... but sadly underdocumented. I spent several months on the mailing list, and the asshole factor was higher than I could put up with. Almost any question got the canned reply "read the source code." Which translates to "f*ck you" to me. I'm sure I could ferret out FVWM's secrets on my own, but the whole experience on the mailing list left a bad taste in my mouth.
I never cared much for any of the default WindowMaker themes, but it seems to work okay, it well documented (at least by comparison to most) and seems simple enough to work with.
For that matter, I've been looking at the xorg sources, and there's a lot of stuff there I never realized. Yes, the default twm manager is pretty simple and ugly, but there are lots of tools provided to spruce it up. It doesn't support icons... but I recently realized I don't use icons. There are half a dozen on my desktop that were part of the default SuSE KDE3 install, and I've never clicked on one. The other interesting revelation is that I seldom use the taskbar for switching programs. Every now and then I'll use it to find a program that's overlaid by a different window, which doesn't happen much with dual 24" monitors. Most managers allow right-clicking on the desktop to do the same thing. I used to use the hell out of te taskbar when I had only a single monitor, so I'd guess it's more of a space-available thing than a user-interface thing. I mostly just use the menu button and the clock. As for the other icons/tools KDE puts in the taskbar... I can't remember ever having clicked on one.
I'm going to try a default text-mode install of Fedora or Slackware into a VMware session, install X from source, and see what I can do. If nothing else it will be a useful learning experience.
> Microsoft wants to pay Newscorp to de-index its stories from Google, giving > Bing a leg-up in searches.So Google could just identify its web spiders as coming from Microsoft... or block out all compliant spiders via robots.txt, and give index information to Microsoft directly. But then all it'd take is some simple whacking to come up with a distributed spider system using multiple cookies, looking like a group of regular users, to traverse all the internal links.
Or, for that matter, Google could just write a script using various keywords, aim it at Bing, and populate its links that way.
It's sort of like being "a little bit pregnant." Once you open port 80, it's damned hard to block certain users out.
The people at the base acted like we had some communicable disease, physically backed away from the counter, and said they had no authority to do anything, all that was handled by the Red Cross. They couldn't give us a Red Cross contact number, so we went home and dug out the phone book. The Red Cross office closed at 5 o'clock, Monday through Friday. They didn't answer the phone until late Monday morning, then told us it would take several days before they could do anything. They acted like it was a major imposition.
We wound up making a $75 international call to the Philippines, working our way through English-speaking operators to get to the base, got to the Security Police, and asked them to notify my brother; they said no problem.
I'm sure other people have had better luck with the Red Cross, but we've had other contacts with the Red Cross, all about the same. My last contact with them was when a former employer herded everyone outside to stand in line behind a van, where we were told we would "voluntarily" donate blood to the Red Cross, "or else." I got fired before I found out what "or else" was, or maybe that was part of it...
Like the old saying says, "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight."
There are any number of cinematic gunfights with more guns, more shots, more gore, and more dead bodies, but to me, that five-second scene sums up why guns replaced muscle-driven cutting weapons.
The government said the depression is over and things are getting better, but every month we have less earning power than the month before. Given prices in general, we make about 2/3 of what we did last year.
"Hmm. Short of dying, no, can't think of a thing."
- Morden and Vir, Babylon 5, "Interludes and Examinations"
> > "Sorry, I'm a Mac person..."It's just another desktop application running on top of Unix now!
"Eye candy above, bash below..."
Once nice thing about Apple's shift to 'nix is CUPS. I used to dread doing printer setup, and if I never see lp configuration again, I'll be plenty happy. Though I can't understand why the CUPs web interface is so freakin' slow...
> > nature. What if the natural levels produced from natural sources is higher > > than what the EPA thinks is safe? What is the EPA going to do about that?Whatever they want, of course. Like too many other Federal agencies, they operate under a mandate that gives them the power to make their own decisions and enact rules that have the force of law, without being accountable to the rest of the political and judicial system.
Each of these agencies is, for all practical purposes, a feifdom of its own. The nominal heads are appointees, but there's nothing that makes it *have* to be that way.
I recently read a fairly amusing story where each branch of the government had gone its own way, and voters had to select from a multiplicity of parties for each branch... and each minimal political division (Chicago-style blocks) could vote for its own representation. So you could have the Muslim-Republican Party handling your block's military and police functions, while across the street they might have voted in the Marian-Vegetarian Party's MPs. Everyone got to stay in power *somewhere* all the time, so more hogs could feed at the same trough. Mack Reynolds would have made a better story out of it, but it was an interesting read anyway.
> I'm glad to be held in such f*cking high social reguard. > Just remember this when I get on one of my lawyer kicks. LOLSeems like people think they have something much better to do with their time than to sit as a juror.
Then when their time comes in the dock, they bemoan the quality of jurors.
The old adage of reaping what you sow comes to mind here.
I suspect the legal profession deliberately drags things out specifically to annoy jurors, particularly on trials where the jury is sequestered. If they can stall long enough, the jury will probably agree to anything, just so they can escape and go home.
> > there often seems to be paint on the rocks alongside the road and at > > night it's hard to tell which are rocks and which are stationary > > sheep - rocks that amble into the road as you approach are generally sheep....That reminds me of the story of the racer who had picked out a medium sized stone as a braking marker. The first couple of laps were okay, and then he wound up overshooting the corner completely. Going back later to look at the corner, he found the rock was gone. Or, rather, partway across the infield; the 'rock' was a box turtle.
> Similar proportion with us, but with quantities scaled down; we > dont need to destroy any country, but only to make it plausible > that the _one_ missile will get to target.But what would be the target of that one missile?
Take out Paris or London or Moscow and the whole house of cards comes down, but the USA isn't centralized like that.
You might want to consider this - in the theater, watching the movie "Independence Day", there was wild cheering when the aliens zapped the White House. And as for the large urban shitholes like New York or Chicago or Detroit, they're long overdue for massive urban renewal anyway.
> Astronomers based at Jodrell Bank ObservatoryJodrell Bank was the first radio telescope. It was built with funding from private sources, and operated as an adjunct to a local university, as well as picking up some extra money from the US Air Force for tracking US space shots in the early days.
The Bank served as an inspiration for Fred Hoyle's "A For Andromeda" and "Andromeda Breakthrough", which are actually a single book split into two volumes, and one of the lesser-known classics of science fiction. (they were actually derived from, but much better than, Hoyle's previous book "Ossian's Ride.")