Re: those funny non-ASCII characters

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() "Buchs, Kevin" <buchs.kevin@mayo.edu>
() Thu, 31 May 2012 11:56:45 -0500

   [...] once water flows up over a dam, it is going downstream
   and has passed the reservoir behind the dam and presumably
   passed your field of view.

   In this specific instance [...]

OK, thanks.  Now i understand.

   I could have applied the analogy of "water over the dam" even
   further to say that: "though there were many messages posted on
   this list that are now water over the dam, I would like to
   bring my message back to allow it to float to the top again."

The flow of messages is indeed like water.

I suppose everyone relates to this in their own way.

Using GNUS (now Gnus) to read these, i imagine myself an insect
buzzing around an upward turned flow (a geiser), first in summer
when the molecules dissociate quickly, then (later, always later)
in winter when they crystalize shard-like and treed, sometimes
under a brilliant sun refracted as rainbows, sometimes under a
brilliant moon that ghostly glows, sometimes in darkness lit only
by lucky grep rows.  A drip gleaned here and there for sustenance,
a drop left there and here for assonance, the rest left to what
entropy can penetrate the disks of gmane.

Anyway, Unicode is ASCII-compatible, so probably if you wrangle
your environment to Unicode by default, Emacs will also DTRT.
Check out <http://www.utf8everywhere.org>.  Yes, it does touch
upon topics best avoided in polite company, but oh well...