There was much talk of music in the prior embodiment of the immortal thread, so I thought everyone would appreciate a special song. It’s just like having a conversation with a god-bot.
By the way, for you statistics freaks: the last thread hit the round-numbered landmark of 40,000 (nice number, makes me think of an excellent novel) comments in this linked parade of threads, with 959,854 total comments on Pharyngula, and this is the 9,999th entry I’ve posted here.
And bear in mind that I’m registered in two places, as a student, so I can choose to vote either in Oxford or in my home constituency, which is a Conservative-Labour marginal with a sitting Labour MP. It’s probably more worthwhile to choose the latter, as it gives me a very strong chance of reducing Labour’s share of seats.
Wow. You’re actually in the same constituency as me. The two local Conservative candidates are Nicola Blackwood and Ed Argar, though I’ve forgotten which one is in which constituency. I’ve met Blackwood and she seemed OK, though I don’t know much about her personally. I have no clue who the Lib Dem candidate is.
The incumbent Labour MP in the East, Andrew Smith, is an idiot. I recently received some Labour election propaganda in my pidge which was clearly designed to pick up the left-wing student vote; it promotes Smith’s green credentials, attacked the Lib Dems (!) for being too weak on environmental sustainability and too right-wing, and endorsed the “Robin Hood tax”. The colour scheme was even green rather than red, such that I initially thought it was a Green Party leaflet until I read it more carefully.
From Andrew Smith’s Wikipedia article:
:-D :-D :-D
Definitely time to get that tatoo you’ve always wanted then ;)
How about cheering yourself up with a little PG Wodehouse?
-“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”
-“I explain this to Jeeves and he said the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”
-“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say “when.”
-“I hadn’t the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.”
-“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”
I’d avoid too much Shakespeare though, if I were you.
@Walton: if you’re in Oxford East and you want to vote against Labour, vote Lib Dem; the odds are very high that this will unseat the incumbent. If you want a Tory vote to have any effect you’d be better off voting in your home constituency. Please don’t do that :)
I don’t understand why you would think the Lib Dems in power would immediately become right-wing authoritarians on civil rights, yet you don’t think the Tories in power would do exactly that. They do have form in that area.
I’ve been shredding all election propaganda on sight for some time now. This improves the compost heap and will produce more tomatoes later this year.
Walton-
you need to get out more. Sunshine. Copenhagen. Go!
The whole “civil rights” thing is something of a conundrum for essentially liberal societies like ours. I wonder why this is?
Certainly (the threat of) terrorism is a prime mover in this regard – witness the police harrassment of people trying to take photos of London’s tourist sites – but it also seems to come from too much beaurocracy and regulation.
However, the assertion that the Lib Dems would abandon their support for civil liberties and become authoritarian seems absurd. Why them, but not the Tories, as Steven observes?
I’m also struck by the US, where it would seems that there is far less government interference in everyday life than there is in the UK (though I speak from some ignorance in this regard, so feel free to correct me) yet in many parts of the country social pressures contrive to stifle freedom of speech.
*waves to echidna*
First time in a while I’m just thinking of reformatting my computer and shoving on Linux, or at the very least sticking to Windows 7. Fucking malware!
Walton,
While I’ll second (fifteenth?) the idea of getting out into the sunshine for a bit, there’s a book I’ll also recommend.
I’ve recently rediscovered it on my shelf, and I enjoyed dipping into it again. It’s about law, mainly English law, so you may be surfeited of that topic just now, but it’s still a fun read. The selections are quite short (a page at most), making it something you can pick up for two minutes as a break and put right back down again.
I speak of The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes, by Michael Gilbert. Mind, it won’t teach you anything about law, but it is quite funny. But you’ve probably already heard of it, and have a copy on your shelf.
@Kel, OM:
Ahh, malware. I hate it so much. Especially since it’s my job to research it ><
Actually it was a virus pretending to be an antivirus program. Took me two hours to remove it. Not the way I like to relax of a Wednesday evening, and I was sober for the whole experience too.
When I think life is shitty, I remember my reading of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — that resets my perspective.
Works until you start thinking to yourself “That Ivan guy really had things pretty good, didn’t he?”
I haven’t done that exactly but when I found myself envying a person who was getting a stem cell transplant for one of the nastier fomrs of leukemia I decided that maybe something was not right. (I envied her her ability to sleep whenever she felt like it, in case you’re wondering.)
Walton
Listening to Leonard Cohen always cheers me up when I realise that no matter how bad I feel, someone else is feeling worse. Would link to ‘One of us cannot be wrong’ but I’m in work.
@Kel, OM:
Arg, Rogueware is even worse! Did it try to hijack your computer, or just try to get you to buy / install it?
*waves to Rorschach and smiles*
it did this.
Now if you will excuse me, I’m off to watch Big Bang Theory and fall asleep.
@Kel:
Ouch, good for you to have gotten rid of it. Enjoy your show and good night.
See, that’s the beauty of proportional representation. You get a chance to have a representative who actually represents you and your opinions. Rather than someone who just represents the particular plot of land you happen to occupy.
I certainly wouldn’t be particularly happy about having to call Ann Widdecombe my MP. Fat lot of good it’d do to write her with my complaints unless those complaints had something to do with those awful women bishops or the precious souls of the unborn. The world – and England – needs more Evan Harrises and proportionality is the means to the end.
You do realise that you can have superconstituencies to ensure a fair geographical distribution as well as the distro along partylines. In fact you’re far more likel to get the candidate you want, if it’s not a question of her or the other one. If a seat is safe for Labour it doesn’t the fuck matter if the Tories manage to scrabe home 44% of the vote. So no sane Tory (let’s grant for the sake of argument that such exist) will run against a safe seat. So you’re left with the choice of a lukewarm bucket of spit, or whoever’s running against Cameron.
We’re happy with d’Hondt, but there are other ways of distribution. Point is, they’re all vastly closer to being fair than first past the pole.
So now you have the entrance fee covered, and if you book now that 50 will get you a ride on Ryanair, which is perfectly cromulent for such a short trip.
To be fair, it is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich not A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as I for some reason thought at some point. It is in fact an exceptionally good day.
Do you think PZ Myers actually appointed me “Official SpokesGay?”
“You are no longer Josh. You shall be Darth…Gayder.”
All Occasion*
Bacon Tuxedo
______
* I’m guessing this includes synagogue services.
AAAAAAACOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRNNNNNN!!!
I felt a disturbance in the libido. As if millions of ova cried out in despair.
Oh… I just got on. Was at a lecture and then dinner etc… but I wanted to say thanks to JeffD and Celtic for the kind sentiments.
@Feyn:
For those who can’t read it – the little starburst says: “Bonus! Bacon Scent Included!”
Ah. This seems to sum up the English election pretty well.
#498 – John Morales – Ivan Denisovich is one of the books that I try to read at least once a year. For various reasons, I also usually reread on an at least biannual basis: Huckleberry Finn; Homage to Catalonia; A Distant Mirror; Lord of the Rings; The Forever War; a Tennessee Williams Play; a Faulkner novel; Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet; 1984; Sherlock Holmes stories; e.e. cummings; Robert Frost; something long and Russian; one of Braudel’s histories of the Med. Roughly, I read one of my “old friends” about once a month. Books tend to breed in my home. Even here in my rental flat in the UK I realized I had already collected over 70 books. Ah well, Oxfam will do well by me.
You are welcome Ol’Greg. I am aware that some people have lives and in any case my post did not need a reply. :^} Were lecture and/or dinner good?
Walton, I’d have cut of my left leg just to have the opportunity you do at your age. Stop whining, do what you can, and enjoy it.
Damn.
It has stopped raining for the first time in easily 48 h. Still 3/4 as dark as in Paris.
Vegan main course today: millet with carrots and celeriac. The millet is boiled much like rice; the carrots and the celeriac are finely hacked and boiled like a soup. Then the two parts are mixed on your plate. The vegetables come with a lot of liquid; that’s necessary because millet tends to be very dry. Also, some people like to put a bit of molten cheese on it, but I can stand very little of that, so I don’t bother, and it wouldn’t be vegan ;-)
Make sure the millet is fully cooked, and that you have enough vegetables.
(Also, disregard every single previous instance of me writing “celery”. I’m always talking about the roots, not the greens.)
I wrote:
…and then I just stopped. I wanted to suggest you lock your baggage in at the train station (if not at the airport itself, if possible), sleep in some waiting room, and then emerge somewhat refreshed in the evening.
That sounds… interesting. How did you manage to come up with a sufficiently coherent lie to cover the entire summer and that much money? And how did your mother find out – I suppose you told her later?
(BTW, you appeared 8 minutes after I tore myself off the computer. It’s funny. :-) )
I tried to come from a similar angle: Walton regularly complains about how everyone seems to find him ugly. That means those who don’t find him ugly (or those who don’t care, Pharyngulette-style) don’t know him yet.
I also wonder if those who would appreciate his considerable intellect know him yet; this probably leads back to your point (…though I don’t know any conservative youth, actually…).
I know. Not every 20-year-old is interested in 30-year-olds.
My own bracket of interest seems to move along with my own age, fortunately.
How… illogical. I mean, why didn’t they lock her in? Wasn’t the idea to not have her outside the house?
WTF?
Well, yeah. Forty-year-olds? <tapping paternalistically on RTL’s back> Lemurian, you have a few things to learn.
That’s the same thing nowadays. :-)
No, not even. My sisters are 5 and 10 years younger than I; every once in a while the older one throws up her hands about the younger one’s behavior and says “another generation”, and everyone concurs.
Evil carries the seed of its own destruction, or something.
(Hur hur. I said “seed”.)
Yeah, Walton – you’re pseudonymous. There are things I have contemplated writing in order to advance an argument, and then didn’t write because I don’t want them documented under my meatspace name. You’re not so restricted. You can say whatever you personally, individually like a libertarian, are comfortable with.
I’m too tired to do any dramatic headdesking. Does stupid oxide work like xenon?
During thunderstorms. <vehement nodding>
I know someone who lives in Paris and works, and probably also lives, in buildings next to boulevards with sycomores. Guess what pollen he’s strongly allergic to.
I’m a bit dizzy from the sheer intensity of reading this. :-) But now I want to go, too :-)
And rapid-offset, too, right?
You say you’re not getting any.
The qualifier is necessary because I don’t get any relationships at all. You’ve told us about some that lasted a couple of days at least…
Which expenses do they propose for cutting?
Was it Labour that privatised the railway company till so many people had died that the state had to buy it back?
Seconded.
The issue is with the strange rule that gives over 50 % of the seats in the House of Commons to whichever party gets the most votes. This is why the UK has a two-party system in spite of having a separation between head of state and head of government.
Concerning accommodation, there’s still room at Kristjan Wager’s place…!
And travel is most likely much less expensive than you think. Mine, both ways (Vienna to Copenhagen and back, nonstop each), costs 124.90 € altogether. That’s airberlin; I’m sure Ryanair and/or easyjet must have something for you.
Poetry? I recommend the snarky.
Erich Kästner: Die andere Möglichkeit
My translation follows. (I didn’t try to get rhyme or meter across, just the meaning as closely as possible.) The poem was written in Germany just after WWI.
“If we had won the war,
With {the sounds of waves crashing into stuff and the wind howling across the sea – imagery for the naval battles that the German army wrongly expected would happen a lot},
then Germany would be beyond hope
and would be indistinguishable from a madhouse.
We would be being tamed by notes
like a savage tribe.
We would leap off the pavement and stand to attention when sergeants would come along.
If we had won the war,
we would be a proud state.
And even in our beds
we would press our hands against the seams of our trousers [standing to attention again].
The women would have to have litters.
One child a year. Or prison.
The state needs children as conserves.
And blood tastes to it like raspberry juice.
If we had won the war,
heaven would be national(istic).
The parish priests would wear epaulettes.
And God would be a German general.
The border would be a trench.
The moon would be a private’s button.
We would have an emperor
and a helmet instead of a head.
If we had won the war,
Every man [with patriarchal deemphasis on the “man” part; “everyone” would almost work better] would be a soldier.
A people of fops* and gun carriages.
And around it all there would be barbed wire.
Giving birth/getting born would be done on order then.
Because people are rather cheap.
And because wars aren’t won
by cannon barrels alone.
Reason would lie in chains then,
and would stand trial hourly [pun involving “stood” and “hourly”].
And wars there would be like operettes,
if we had won the war –
fortunately we did not win it!”
* That’s what the dictionary says. I don’t know what that actually means in either language, only that it’s a vague insult.
Brownian:
I join you in the belief that such research probably exists: I recall playing strip poker in groups of only (prepubescent) boys, and engaging in other sorts of peri-pubertal naked tomfoolery, back in the day when we boys had figured out that nudity was somehow naughty and exciting… but we didn’t yet quite know why.
Never made me think I was gay, though: One of the things that most persuades me that being gay is not a choice is how sure I am that being straight was never a matter of choice for me.
That didn’t keep my Dad from worrying, though: He was a crewcut engineer who had been a teenager in the post-WWII Forties, while I was part of a generation of boys who wore bell-bottom pants, shiny shirts open halfway down the chest, necklaces, and long hair. Apparently he worried throughout my youth that I might be gay (no doubt he would’ve used a different word, in those days), though I didn’t realize it ’til one night in HS when I came home late from a date to find he’d been sharing some quality time with his friend Smirnoff. Instead of getting on me for blowing curfew (I was a pretty mild-mannered kid, so curfew was never a big deal anyway), he asked me a bunch of very intrusive questions about my adventures in the backseat at a drive-in movie (yes, kiddies, there used to be places where you could watch a movie from a parked car!). When I finally admitted (blushingly) that I’d… well, let’s just say I’d done measurably better than a bunt single, albeit somewhat short of a home run, he nearly cried in relief, and admitted his worry (which, oddly in retrospect, he seemed to think was conclusively answered by a single incident).
I was thunderstruck: I’d never questioned my own sexuality for a second, regardless of how long I wore my hair¹ or how shiny my shirts. But to my Dad, I looked like a girl, and I suppose he thought that meant I might want to fuck like one, too.
Ain’t generational drama grand? ;^)
¹ In fact, I wore my hair as long as I did because that was the one thing about me that girls reliably found attractive, but girls finding long-haired boys attractive was a foreign concept to my father.
@Bill Dauphin:
Not to bring down your story (it’s really quite an interesting peek into your history) but I too wore my hair long. Slightly different reason, but at the same time, the same reason.
I wore my hair long cause I am the whitest white boy who ever white. Unfortunately, I’m not white – I’m Native American (Pamunkey.) I’m extremely pale because of my father’s side of the family (Irish / German.) I thought having long hair would make me look more Native American, and at the same time, I did get a lot of comments about how pretty my hair was. Girls seemed to like it, too.
Not to get all deep and shit but it could also mean that Walton is attracted to people who show some disdain for him.
Would fit well with the negative self image he expresses and also with all the apologizing.
The sad other side to that possibility (and it really is just a possibility as I do not know him personally at all) is that he might be cold and even unkind to people who show him affection.
It makes sense have a hierarchical mindset and a poor self image then you might find the idea of a person who is attracted to YOU already a strike against that person. Not to mention he probably has a lot of requisites on what exactly the right sort of person is since he tries himself to be the right sort of person.
It wouldn’t be the first time I saw a system like that employed.
Damn, between this and my last comment I think I’ll probably succeed in pissing off Walton.
re books – I was just reading this piece about seafaring stories and wondering what the sailors here read. Got any fiction favourites/recommendations?
(I like nautical tales, but mostly read non-fiction – Captain Cook’s journals, Slocum, that sort of thing. I did like the Hornblower series when I was young, but just can’t read Patrick O’Brian. Preferred missionary-hating Melville’s Typee and Billy Budd to Moby Dick).
JeffreyD – you reread LOTR every year? Blimey. I struggled through it once. Never again. Lucky I’d already read The Hobbit as a child, I’d have never picked it up after reading LOTR.
Unfortunately I have a friend who believes homosexuality is a choice because he says he chose to be straight. He says that early on he felt like he possibly had some interest in males, but chose not to indulge it. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have told him that all that proves is that he is neither a 0 nor a 6 on the Kinsey scale. Not sure how to get that conversation going again. I don’t want to post on his Facebook page “Hey, remember that time you thought you were gay?”
Forgot to translate the title of the poem: “the other possibility/option”.
Also, while I was writing, it started raining again… and now it has stopped again…
In fact, the first time I read that, I thought Walton was talking about the Tories.
Unless the ink is too poisonous.
I’ve never understood this. Firstly, I’m not enough of a sadist that I could enjoy it when anyone is worse off than I. Secondly, if we get that aspect out and replace it by “it could be worse”, that still doesn’t work, because it still doesn’t mean it’s good!
Never mind the joke:
“And out of the chaos a voice spake unto me, and said: ‘Smile and be happy, it could be worse!’ And I smiled and was happy, and it got worse.”
I think we have a winner.
Same tragedy as with the safe states in the USA: if you don’t live in a swing state, it just doesn’t matter if you cast a vote for president.
Link doesn’t work.
If at your age you can count your books, you’re probably doing it wrong…
In reaction to the gay / straight stuff:
I’m a straight guy, though I’m a little odd. I do admit attraction to some guys – celebrities for example, and regardless of whether it’s a man or woman, a sexy accent makes me melt. I’m very sensitive and I have a nurturing behavior. I giggle girlishly, and I’ve had so many times where people have honestly thought I was a girl when chatting online in World of Warcraft and similar games.
Even though I’m rather feminine in personality and admit attraction to some guys, I wouldn’t want to have a relationship with another guy aside from friends. I like the ladies in that manner – especially when they come with a specific kind of body shape that is quite lacking in the masculine (big booty.)
I don’t understand what you meant there. Please explain it to dumbo here. I was only using the example ages of 25 – 40 for the case in question (a 20 year old male). While I might find a 60 year old attractive, I think the age discrepancy would be too much for Walton, but surely a 30 year old is not out of the question? A 20 year old finding only women younger than himself attractive is, imho, both abnormal and unhealthy.
Ol’ Greg:
Yah, I could see where some of his comments might be indicative of a somewhat self-reproaching (submissive?) personality. But, having been a painfully insecure young man myself, I really think the most parsimonious interpretation is that he’s simply a painfully insecure young man.
I recall, at about that age, wallowing in vast puddles of worry and despair over whether I’d ever get laid, or achieve any other measure of grownup success (note the typical HS/college boy priorities, in which getting laid ranks above all other measures of grownup success!). I didn’t actually worry much about professional success, because at the time my father was telling me at every occasion that he expected me to end up starving in the streets, and I was honor-bound to disagree with him… but I felt insecure about pretty much everything else one could possible feel insecure about.
Based on my own experience, my expectation for Walton is that once he achieves some small crumb of identifiably adult success (whether it’s academic, vocational/professional, sexual¹, whatever…), he’ll relatively quickly convert to a smart, well-adjusted, realistically confident, productive member of society.
I see where that comes from, but I don’t get that vibe. In particular, the growth he’s shown in his opinions on social issues since he first started posting here suggests to me a greater capacity for empathy and compassion than any of us may have initially suspected.
Wow. Speaking of “getting all deep and shit,” I’m not quite sure what’s gotten into me this morning!
¹ Of course, it’s not impossible that sexual “success” will, in his case, consist of finding a woman willing to tell him how ugly he is while standing over him in a leather corset and thigh-high boots… but I digress… ;^)
Yeah, I saw Gloria Steinem which was interesting. She was very positive, but seemed highly distracted (she had just been to the funeral of a close friend).
I was going to write a blog post about it, and one about the piece I just donated but I came home and went to sleep instead.
Ah… sleep.
Oh BD, I’m sure Walton will be/is fine. Frankly talking this much in third person about the intimate life of a man I don’t even know really when he appears to be out of the room so to speak is making me feel a little awkward.
What did you say about thigh high boots? I love those things.
It’s raining again :-þ
Interesting. I never had such a phase, I didn’t develop in that order.
That could happen for somewhat different reasons, too. Before the last 2 or maybe 3 years of highschool, I’d have reacted that way, because I’d have been sure my legs were being pulled; not just due to a negative self-image, but also to a negative image of pretty much everyone else. :-| Years of being bullied will do that to you.
Kevin (@533):
Well, at least you had a cultural predicate for your long hair; in my father’s male family line, probably nobody had had hair as long as I wore it since Revolutionary War times!
“Too”? Heh!
<Deliverance>”He shore got
apurtymouthhair…</Deliverance>;^)
Not that I’m aware of, no.
I’m regretting I never had any interest in same sex pubescent tomfoolery when the chance was there. Sorry, I was unenlighted and pretty backwards. I do vaguely recall offers to see pr0n at the home of a onetime bully, later friend-ish.
Ah well. Youth is wasted on the young.
I sent home two or three boxes of books after both my stays in Bath.
Once I’ve got my dirty paws on a book, it’s mine, mine, MIIIIIIIIINEEE!! I TELL YOU! NO! NOT YOURS! MEIN!
Ol’ Greg (@542):
Yeaaahhhh… well, it’s just possible I was projecting my own fantasies a bit when I said that! ;^)
I actually don’t have any fantasies about being dominated or humiliated, but the gear is a whole ‘nother kettle of horses of another color!
Oooh I did this too DM. I had been treated so badly, and had such painful experiences including those where people pretend to like you long enough to get you to trust them so they can publicly hurt/humiliate you… that when I was in a different school and a person showed interests I was terrified of them because I couldn’t take any more emotionally. So I’d avoid the hell out of them, just in case they thought I was a fool. Worse yet later when I did date some one I figured whatever they said went and didn’t even think to defend myself when it slid headlong into terrible places. After all, he’d had to settle for dating me and lord knows that must have been hard for him. It’s this kind of dynamic that I do hope, very sincerely, does not ever happen to Walton even on a much smaller scale.
*shakes head*
Honestly, I still never trust people completely.
I’ve become quite comfortable with a certain level of unknowableness, and with the idea that people will always go away and never truly be close. In fact that comforts me some how, and I’m drawn to large anonymous places where I can watch people because I feel more able to relate to people when I really am a stranger or foreigner. I think some times I’d rather be a camera than a human being.
Oh dear, Ol’Greg darks another thread out with her rays of anti-sunshine.
Damn. Anyone like snakes? I had a water snake for years that looked just like a Cottonmouth. That snake was awesome. His crap was full of fish scales and light green, it looked like fucking fairy dust.
Depends. Are they wearing
?
Actually, NO! I’m with Indiana Jones and Samuel L. Jackson here.
Have had them inside my shirt, my bathroom, crawling up my arm, a dozen slithering over my sandalled feet….
David M. wrote:
Me neither. “Great, now I feel like shit AND a whiner because my beefs aren’t as legitimate as that guy’s. Man, I even suck at sucking.”
Ol’Greg wrotes:
Peevishly known in some circles as the ‘chicks dig assholes’ theory. I don’t know what the gender- and orientation-neutral versions are. I sorta have a similar problem. “Really? She likes me? Why? What’s wrong with her?”
Kevin wrote:
Ha-ha! I joined a MMORPG way back when, and created a character that was a relatively short but athletic female. (Probably for the same reason I like to play lithe elves in fantasy RPGs: they’re unlike me in terms of physicality, so it ramps up the fantasy element of role-playing.) Not being used to online interactions, I had no idea how my character’s gender would affect people, and I was stunned. I was randomly given gifts and otherwise got hit on by men, some of whom got aggressively pushy. I ended up befriending an actual female in the game, and I felt terrible when I had to disappoint her by coming out as a man when she told me how happy she was to have another girl to play the game with. She hadn’t suspected I was one because, despite the in-game ability to do so, I hadn’t created an overly sexualised barbie doll avatar with double Ds. She pointed a few of those out, and it turns out MMORPG really does stand for Mostly Men Online Role-Playing Girls. Hey, I liked to watch my little character’s butt wiggle as she ran as much as the next guy, but really? Don’t these people have access to pr0n?
Bill D. wrote:
Lord save us from conservative fathers!
Sili, TUV wrote:
My ex would give away books when she was done with them, a phrase that I nevered managed to parse in any meaningful way. I mean, those words are obviously English, and in all the right places, but done with a book? Why, that’s just nonsense. (Similarly, she couldn’t understand how I could re-read books. My response was always to ask her if she threw out albums after one listen.)
For some reason I just love the fashion aspects of some of that. Thigh-highs came in for a bit in mainstream fashion this last fall (Louboutin even had a pair available for a paltry 2k) and I jumped at the opportunity to wear them a bit with the approval of high fashion. Hell I wore them to work one day, although I cuffed them just above the knee and wore them over jeans.
I’m hoping they stick around in the next cold seasons the way that ankle boots seem to.
I love fashion.
Via Goldacre: The LibDem Science manifesto.
I don’t actually reread them …
And I have far too many hundreds that I have not yet read …
I just … hoard.
–o–
A German guy on a forum I frequented some years ago (somewhat reminiscent of David in his vast suppository of knowledge) preferred playing female characters since he had to look at his own character all the time. And they have a narrower profile and are thus harder to hit.
He claimed.
Oh shit!! I don’t think I’m a sadist. I don’t think I enjoy other peoples troubles, but now I’m really confused. What I think I was getting at was trying for a sense of proportion, but maybe I was gloating?
*dissapears into a septic whirlpool of doubt and self loathing*
That does not count, because it holds for me, too. I have some idea as to what an oxytocin binge feels like.
(…Well, it holds with some quirks as to what exactly I’m sensitive to. It’s time to mention again that I have several symptoms of what… used to be called Asperger’s “syndrome”. But still.)
LOL!
There I agree – I’m talking about being attracted to those around the same age, neither noticeably older nor much younger.
See, that’s something else I don’t understand.
No… I don’t see that as dark, necessarily… just a manner of self-preservation that frankly probably serves you well and allows you to be yourself without fear of getting hurt if you do so.
The key is in how you let “not completely trusting people” affect your interactions with them.
Like you, I’ve been through enough (although I won’t claim an equal level or type of an experience, as I don’t know you well enough to say) that I don’t completely give myself over to trusting anyone either. And it’s actually quite freeing. In that mindset, I feel free to be myself knowing that in the event that I am screwed over, I still have no more or less than I came into the interaction with… I have no expectation that the other person will live up to any ideals set by either myself or anyone else, and thus am not devastated when they fail to.
I have many, many “acquaintances”, but a very very small and select circle of true “friends”. I’m too introverted and (unintentionally, really) stand-offish to maintain a large social circle. I “trust” those few friends I have in the most basic sense of the word, but I certainly don’t hold any expectation that they would never hurt or mistreat me… it’s just not practical to assume that, in my experience. And I don’t necessarily find that all that depressing or dis-heartening.
I realise I haven’t been responding to any of the speculation about my personal life (I just don’t have the mental energy right now, and am still exhausted and trying to cram my brain full of EU law, to little avail).
I feel I should clarify in response to Bill’s comments, though, that I don’t have any particular interest in leather corsets, thigh-high boots or sexual humiliation. :-)
Bill is, however, correct that I tend to suffer from a chronic lack of self-confidence. My negative self-image is, in part, objectively justified: but not all of it is. When I do succeed at something (like being offered places on postgraduate courses), I tend instinctively to rationalise the success away, and ascribe it to other factors. By contrast, every time anything goes wrong for me, even something relatively minor, I tend to go on a massive self-pity binge and feel like I’m a complete failure at life. I think this kind of chronic negativity is just my nature.
Ol’ Greg (@548) and DM:
Oy! Did you two attend St. Smithens’ School for Terminally Sadistic Children?
I was a potential target of ridicule and bullying for numerous reasons: Young for my grade because of both a late birthday and having skipped a grade in elementary school, I was small and scrawny¹; I was an Honors student; I was a band geek (“band queer,” actually, in the then-current vernacular); I was a speech-and-debate dork; and until fairly late in my HS career, I was never seen in the romantic company of an actual girl. And yet… other than some relatively generic teasing based on my affiliations (band, speech club, etc.) and the relatively nonspecific disdain of the jocks for my wimpy stature, nobody really targeted me for any personal bullying… and certainly nobody had time to falsely befriend or seduce me for the specific purpose of publicly humiliating me.
Jocks and freaks were, each in their own way, hip and cool; dorks like me were just not important… and so I felt discriminated against and socially marginalized, but I never felt personally attacked.
I can’t help wondering if my experience or y’all’s is more common? Were you two just horribly unlucky in the social lottery, or does humanity really suck way more than my youth led me to believe? I know what I’d prefer to believe….
¹ Which I note with some irony, since scrawny is one thing I have never been as an adult!
I feel relatively similar to Walton, and I’m around the same age as him. I’m not sure I should say here just how much self-loathing I go through at times though, I don’t want to turn this into a pity party.
I think when you graduate you will be fine Walton, just keep up your good work.
@Bill Dauphin (544):
Wow, it does kinda sound like that. I more meant that older women found my hair attractive, while girls my own age (17-21 is when I had long hair) liked it as well.
@Brownian (550):
I choose female avatars on MMORPGs because I like how they look. Though they are overly sexualized (chain-mail bikinis) and for the most part unreasonable, they look a lot better than the majority of male characters in MMORPGs, who are this ridiculous He-Man musclehead look that doesn’t work. Why does a mage (who I envision spending most of his time reading books) look like he could bench press a house?
@David Marjanovic (555):
I cried a lot when I was younger. I stopped around high school. I still find myself tearing up a lot at certain things. I cry during movies and TV shows (the manga of Chobits made me cry.)
Although on that record – Any man who says he didn’t cry at the end of The Green Mile is a liar!
(the manga of Chobits made me cry.)
I cried at how awful it was.
(oh ho ho ho)
I agree with the Green Mile though.
Sili FTW!:
;^) ;^) ;^)
#558: in response to your query, I definitely had that outsider-looking-in thing going in High School, as you did.
But sadism above and beyond the call?
Well, I remember a classmate (I’ll call her Sharon), who was fascinated by my infatuation for another popular girl (a friend of hers), completely uninterested in me.
I asked Sharon out once for what I believed was a date, and showed up, nice outfit on and flower in hand, only to be told that this was a study session. It was about then it dawned on me: her interest in my travails regarding her friend was the kind of interest some people feel observing a drowning.
:-S Wow. At least I got spared that!
:-) :-) :-)
She’s pitifully far-sighted and a nerd :-)
(That’s how I’d react anyway. It also goes without saying that being a nerd isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.)
Regularly parodied here. Warning: may keep you up all night as you read the archives.
<facepalm>
Not necessarily. Apparently, the second possibility holds for you – as you say, the sense of proportion.
For me that just increases the horror, because I stick to an absolute scale: shit, I’m already that miserable, and that other guy is in deeper shit still!?! What a horrible world!
@Bill Dauphin (558):
I was tortured in middle school. I was short and skinny, I was very smart. As mentioned, I cried a lot. I had kids beat me up a lot. I still have back pain because during that one year of school I was slammed into lockers, flipped over someone’s back onto concrete, shaken off the ropes in gym class, and kicked and punched at least once a week.
I, like Ol’Greg, had a similar experience of a person becoming my friend only to turn my other friends against me. Kids were incredibly cruel back in my schooling days.
Sad thing is, if I hadn’t been taken out and homeschooled, I would have had the last laugh, because that year I got my growth spurt and shot up very nearly eight inches in the course of a few months. I met one of the bullies on a walk to the commissary, and he was a bit below eye level. Pick on me now, why don’tcha?
Walton:
Nah. Eventually — and sooner rather than later, I suspect — enough evidence will accumulate to convince you that you deserve the good things that happen, and that you’ve actually earned many of them through your own merit, and then you’ll be able to evaluate the bad things that happen more dispassionately and analytically.
Walton at #557:
“My negative self-image is, in part, objectively justified.”
Walton, every negative self-image is, in part, objectively justified. The important question is whether you’re going to let this fact ruin your day, every day, until your days have run their course.
Speaking as someone who’s had to deal since early childhood with a noxious mixture of clinical depression AND obsessive compulsion, I’m very sympathetic. But I also realize such feelings are temporary, and there are ways to make them less blighting. If you need a sympathetic ear, I think you’ll get one here (I’ll certainly continue to be sympathetic). But don’t hesitate to seek more tangible help, if it seems you’ll never emerge from how you’re feeling now. I’m reasonably confident you WILL emerge.
@Shala (561):
You take that back!
I actually mostly cried at the part where Manager-san was telling the story about how his wife/persocom died. I was sniffling and blubbering by the end of that chapter.
Just in case you misunderstood… what I wrote was all in “would have” mode. I’ve never rejected anyone, because I simply haven’t been approached, ever.
The latter. You’re the one who lucked out.
I should add that I never had the entire class (or the entire male 1/3 or 1/4) going after me. One or two bullies per class, plus several who don’t care, is enough.
Ah. I almost never do – though I suspect that’s just introversion.
Can’t tell, haven’t read or watched it.
@David Majanovic (569):
You must watch it then, and freely cry. The most manly of men have cried at The Green Mile. I tear up even at hearing the song he sang.
You take that back!
Never!!!!!!
Awww. I wasn’t that touched by Chobits, I fear.
But as I mentioned upthread I feeling so sorry for several of the killers in Case Closed/Detective Conan. Not to the point of crying, but damn it’s so sad at times. Ranma½ largely make me frustrated, though, but that’s an emotion as well.
I have a tendency to cry at movies, too. Even Titanic, pablum that it is, always makes me tearful.
I was too tired of being hit over the head by the Magical Negro* trope to take the movie seriously. But then, the last time I cried was some time in grade school.
*Yes, I am trying to ruin all your lives. Can you resist clicking?
I too seem to have a sensitive cry-reflex. I have found myself tearing up at various times while watching House (the episode where Amber died), and other TV shows and movies…
Regards my school experiences growing up: I was always smarter than most kids, and for a while in middle school was picked on and isolated… spent alot of time with teachers doing advanced math “parlor tricks” that they would show off to the other teachers… but I had an ace in the hole that kept me from getting too picked on: I was also a fairly gifted athlete. So I was always included on the playground and other athletic endeavors that kept my from bing too picked on, but never got to the point of being popular (probably cause I never wanted it and wasn’t comfortable with the thought). By the time I got to high-school I was in a Latin testing school where pretty much everyone was a smart nerd… so my experience was vastly different than it likely would have been had I gone to a standard public school. And, add that I was a 4 sport letterman (in all honesty, sports were a refuge from being home, which was not a good place when I was growing up), and I had a fairly mundane, bully-free upbringing.
Does that work? I’m not sure how I’d feel about re-reading books after they’ve been through that process.
*remembers all female game avatars ever seen, and the uniform presence of size G-J breastage on said avatars*
Yeah…right.
Not to pile on Walton (although it sounds fun, no? Twister game in Copenhagen!), but this is the kind of thing that therapy can easily cope with and help to erase. Because things like this:
usually turn out to be the product of a warped personal sense of what objective actually is. The actual objective viewpoint of a therapist can both break through that and help retrain one into being truly more objective, and thus more positive about one’s own accomplishments and abilities.
Ah, what Brownian said at the same time. Brownian, we didn’t have the same therapist, did we? ;)
I rarely cry when watching movies/tv shows, but I got all lumpy in the throat when I recently watched this Star Trek: TNG episode.
_ _ _
Also, I know I’ve contributed to this, but can we STOP taking about Walton?!
@Shala (571):
To each his own. I liked Chobits cause it made me happy at the end. I actually gave a little ‘yay’ and happy tears.
@Sili (572):
I haven’t read those, though I really should get more manga. My problem is that I’m swiftly running out of room on my bookshelves for more manga. Curse you shelf-space!
@Walton (573):
I have actually never seen Titanic. I’ve seen bits and portions of it, but never the entire thing. I stepped in when my sister and her friend were watching it, at the end, and just laughed.
@Paul (574):
Must… not… click…
@Celtic Evolution (575):
I have to keep watching my DVDs of House – I’m in the middle of season 4. There were a few tear-jerkers that I can remember in that show.
@Feynmaniac (579):
I absolutely love that episode, it’s one of my favorites of the entire series.
I did tear up a bit in the scene where he is too fucking stupid to try more than once to climb on that door and decides he’ll just hang there and wait till he freezes to death. Interesting mix of emotions.
Yesssssss! =8-)
Because I’ve already read that particular article.
X-D
(Not sure what a twister game is, but I don’t think I want to know at this point. :-þ )
…Ouch. I can imagine. :-S
Yeah. Talk about me instead <running away and hiding under some table>
A kid’s game that ends up looking like a clothed orgy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_%28game%29
I still have fifteen minutes of my lunchbreak left, so . . . .
I sympathize with those who were picked upon.
When I was in elementary school (at Grand Canyon, AZ), I was picked on unmercifully. I had/have a mild form of autism (used to be Asbergers (no idea what they call it now)). Plus, I was/am large. I was always the tallest in my class (until I stopped growing at sixteen). The problem with that combination (social ineptitude and large size) was that some asshole squirt would pick on me, I’d retaliate, and what does the teacher see? The big kid beating up the squirt.
When we moved to Maryland when I was in sixth grade, a whole new level was added — I wasn’t related to anyone. Seriously. There was a kid in my class from a large family (around 20 kids) and his niece (who was two months older) was in the same homeroom. Along with the whole Deliverence theme (everyone was related to themselves — through three or four different families), I was into Dylan, the Dead and the Beatles whilst my classmates were into either disco or country western. And, as if that weren’t enough, I was a Unitarian in with a whole shitload of Southern Baptists and independent Baptists (many of the local Baptist Churches has left the SBC as they were too liberal (something about accepting blacks as humans)).
I quickly developed the reaction cited above by Ol’Greg an others — if someone is being nice, they are setting me up — and I never dated anyone from my school. My first girlfriend was from a different high school and, I suspect, she was trying to convert me more than she was interested in a relationship.
Oddly, after I failed my Sophomore year, things began to click. Not that I ever fit in with any clique (I hovered around the outskirts of the band/chorus geeks, the nerds, the D&Ders and the druggies), but I found I could relate civily with any of them.
I now work in a field in which dealing with the public is mandatory. Public speaking is mandatory. Dealing with idiots is mandatory. I grew up. Many of my tormentors never did (some are (25 years later) still in the military (not insulting the military, did that, got the t-shirt myself) as E-5s or E6s and will never go any further.
Walton, let yourself grow up and be an adult (and no, I am not saying you are acting like a child, merely that, at some point, you can leave behind your trained reactions and embrace adultery. er, adulthood). You sound like me at my nadir. The best thing that happened to me was going away to college at a school where no one knew me. I set out to be confident and (semi) trusting. Sure I got burned a couple times, but college is the place where children can become adults (unless they are economics majors — they revel in fairy tales).
I hesitate to give advice to someone I don’t know, but, damnit Walton, you sound so much like the old me (the old me being when I was young, now I really am middle aged (which to some is old)).
Trust yourself to grow up. And learn to laugh at those who hold tight to the cruelty of middle and high school.
Sorry for the long comment. It’s an occupational hazard.
Possibly. If you were in my therapy group though, I wouldn’t be allowed to say. ; )
Having touted the benefits of therapy, I have to admit I feel more support for depressive realism than the idea that depressed people are unrealistic in their self-image, partially because I’ve known way too many happy, well-adjusted, and successful optimists with a tendency to mistakenly attribute their good fortune to their efforts, the narcissistic lucky fuckers.
(OT: Hey, there’s a reference to PZ in the tvtropes entry for the Hollywood Atheist.)
WRT ST:TNG, “The Inner Light” is indeed one of my favourite episodes, and one that never fails to cause me to tear up. As does “All Good Things…” and “Tapestry”. I also loved “Darmok” and “Masks” for the anthro-porn.
*Sigh.* With the ending of that show died my hopes and dreams.
Must. not. give. in. to. bitter. and. sour. feelings. Must. think. happy. thoughts. happy. thoughts. happy. FUCKING. THOUGHTS!!!
Chronic negativity: just say “no”.
Seriously though, perhaps we shouldn’t be too sympathetic towards Watlton – humane compassion aside – after all, he’s young, he’s clever, and he’s a fucking Conservative (and soon to be a lawyer, no?)
I mean, really.
I truly hate it when, depressed, someone tries to cheer me up by telling me how much harder someone else has it. I suffer from clinical endogenous depression. It’s just the way my brain is hardwired. Telling me that someone else has it much worse only makes my depression worse, because then it feels unjustified. I nearly lost a friend over this, and we are still pretty distant to this day over the issue.
(in a joke of cosmic proportions, my adopted daughter has the same problem – and we’re both .02% responders, meaning it’s hard to find medications that work for us)
I got picked on until I graduated from high school, essentially.
You know what the fun part is, though?
If I ever encounter my tormentors, I can tell them “HOW’S THAT UNEDUCATED DUMB BITCH WITH A TEENAGE PREGNANCY THING WORKING OUT FOR YOU, WELFARE-COWS?!”
Fuck yeah, I rub idiots’ faces in their idiocy. It’s fun to watch them scream.
It’s hilarious how social interactions totally turn upside down after you become an adult.
Those of us who got picked on as kids or those of us who were nice to people are now the well-educated, bachelors-degree-holding or higher, well-adjusted, socially-contributory good people and the idiots who picked on people are now the uneducated, troglodytic dregs who I don’t even really regard as human.
Re #574:
The (often literally) “Magical Negro” is a recurring feature in Stephen King’s books (See also, e.g., THE STAND and THE SHINING).
A propos of nothing, I think King is a writer of some talent, who, unfortunately, never needs to pay attention to a copyeditor ever again. The verbosity, the unchecked sentimentality, the frequently jarring vulgarity, the magical treatment of blacks–all these might have been beaten out of him once, but now he’s too rich.
Believe whatever helps you sleep at night, but real life isn’t that simple. Plenty of people that get picked on don’t go on to college (especially in the US), nor do they become well-adjusted or socially-contributing. And the vast majority of the bullies in my graduating class are quite successful.
This sort of us versus them hatefest might make you feel better by wishing ill on those who treated you poorly, but there is no reason to presume it mirrors reality other than the same just-so stories that lead people to believe Obama is a Muslim (mainly, people repeating them over and over again because they want to believe it’s true).
Katharine, ilu.
✓ got picked on as kids
X were nice to people
✓ now the well-educated
✓ bachelors-degree-holding or higher
X well-adjusted
X socially-contributory
X good people
✓ idiots who picked on people
X uneducated
✓ troglodytic dregs
(✓) don’t even really regard as human.
Ur doin it rong.
I’m aware, and that was part of the context that kept me from taking the story seriously. At least The Green Mile had a serviceable ending. The Stand put a dent in my wall.
See also: Jordan, Robert. Well, I mean, he definitely never needs a copy-editor now (heh), but the “doesn’t need a copyeditor” syndrome was evident in the last half-dozen (at least) books in his Wheel of Time series.
I also really like “Half a Life” in the realm of close-to-teary TNG episodes. Yes, we had to deal with Lwaxana, but there was David Odgen Stiers to make up for it.
I guess we didn’t, Brownian – mine was individual rather than group. Possibly the therapists were educated in the same schools of thought, though.
SteveV:
Not sadism, nor gloating; perspective. While it may suck hard that my husband can’t have the very latest and greatest techtoys, and I can’t buy every book I see that is relevant to my interests, it helps to keep in mind that not only do we have techtoys and books, but unlike manymanymany people, our house (which we live in, rather than on the street) is unlikely to be bombed, and even in Today’s America, we aren’t likely to be dragged out of it on someone’s whim; that we are able to (over)eat; that we are both employed.
Perspective. Goes well with empathy.
Everytime I see a Tea Party gathering, I think to myself, “Self, you are looking at many of the assholes who tormented you in high school and who revelled in their ignorance then and are doing so now.”
Not entirely true, of course. One can be uneducated and still be a nice person who cares, or one can be well educated and still be an asshole.
And also helpful in trying to uninstall an unthinking sense of entitlement.
Young, yes. Clever, maybe, though I’m not feeling like it at present. A Conservative, yes:* fucking, no, at least not in the literal sense (this being a conversation we’ve already had upthread). And as for becoming a lawyer, that depends on me actually getting a 2.i or higher in finals – which is looking increasingly unlikely.
*Though not really a small-c conservative, any more. I’m more of a moderate libertarian who just happens to support the Conservative Party.
LOL! Or not so clothed (2nd picture).
Hey, that’s new… oh shit, I clicked on… NOOOOO!
You mean there’s still hope for me? :-)
Seriously, I still don’t feel adult. In a way, Copenhagen will mark the beginning of my youth, shortly before my 28th birthday… and even bodily I’m not quite adult yet. No, I don’t mean the fact that my wisdom teeth haven’t erupted yet; that’s normal.
Erm…
Is nobody interested in the inside jokes mentioned way above? I can explain most or all of them, and they’re at least as funny as the rest.
David –
“Even here in my rental flat in the UK I realized I had already collected over 70 books.
If at your age you can count your books, you’re probably doing it wrong…”
David, you are missing the point, this is a short term rental and I have only been here since mid-Feb. At home I have a least 70 just stacked around/on the nightstand. Spouse just ignores my side of the room.
Sili, The Unknown Virgin – the terrible thing is that some of the books I have here, both research and pleasure, I already own at home. I have mostly hardback history books there, did buy softcover over here. And yes, will take back most of them, probably, and send some with spouse when she visits later this month.
RingTL – To each their own in taste. LOTR is, far as I can recall, the only fantasy book I ever liked reading. These days it only takes me about three days to read it cover to cover, each evening in bed and some mornings when too lazy to get up.
Ol’Greg – Ah, never saw Steinheim speak. I would probably find it interesting. As for your later comment, let your dark rays shine forth into Pharyngula. If you cannot say it here, where can you? Nonexistentdeity knows I have dropped some serious downers in this blog and people have been polite enough to at least ignore my worst.
Did I miss anyone?
David, do you understand why inside jokes are funny?
David –
“Even here in my rental flat in the UK I realized I had already collected over 70 books.
If at your age you can count your books, you’re probably doing it wrong…”
David, you are missing the point, this is a short term rental and I have only been here since mid-Feb. At home I have a least 70 just stacked around/on the nightstand. Spouse just ignores my side of the room.
Sili, The Unknown Virgin – the terrible thing is that some of the books I have here, both research and pleasure, I already own at home. I have mostly hardback history books there, did buy softcover over here. And yes, will take back most of them, probably, and send some with spouse when she visits later this month.
RingTL – To each their own in taste. LOTR is, far as I can recall, the only fantasy book I ever liked reading. These days it only takes me about three days to read it cover to cover, each evening in bed and some mornings when too lazy to get up.
Ol’Greg – Ah, never saw Steinheim speak. I would probably find it interesting. As for your later comment, let your dark rays shine forth into Pharyngula. If you cannot say it here, where can you? Nonexistentdeity knows I have dropped some serious downers in this blog and people have been polite enough to at least ignore my worst.
Did I miss anyone?
No. I think that hit the spot.
Walton (@573):
I cry easily (and unashamedly) at movies, but the only part of Titanic that made me cry was when she throws away the fucking diamond! Arrggh!!
OK, all, now for something completely different (and just a little bit weird):
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is apparently going to be signing books on campus at Yale today, and my daughter texted me to say she hadn’t read his work, and wondered if she should get a signed book anyway. I said “yes, please, and get one for me, too”: As it happens, my favorite undergraduate English professor, the only faculty member I ever really had a personal relationship outside of school (we played tennis regularly, and had dinner together numerous times), was a specialist in Nigerian literature (not what I studied with him, though; he taught my Shakespeare class), spent quite a bit of time in Lagos, and wrote a seminal critical book about the cultural context of Achebe’s work.
So having been prompted to stroll down memory lane a bit, I googled my prof (Robert [Bob] Merriwether Wren) and found a biographical sketch, which confirmed some things I remembered (his work on Achebe and Nigerian lit in general; his love of tennis) and told me some things I hadn’t known (he was twice a Fullbright fellow, and was preparing to begin a third Fullbright fellowship at the time of his death in a plane crash; he wrote fiction and plays in addition to his academic work). In addition, I learned that he was gay (or at least, presumably so: he served on the editorial board of the Journal of Homosexuality and was working on a book on homosexuality in 18th century England at the time of his death). That was no real surprise: I had always suspected as much, even though there was nothing improper or sexual about my relationship with him. My consciousness about such things hadn’t quite been raised to its current level at that time, but my mother was a theater critic and we had plenty of gay acquaintances; it wouldn’t have bothered me had I known for sure.
But then there was this final “credit” in the bio:
“In the late 1980s he served on the steering committee of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).”
Wait… what?? Of course, “late 1980s” means several years (potentially nearly a decade, depending on the value of late) after I knew him, and I never caught the slightest hint, nor heard the slightest whisper, of any improper behavior on his part, but even so… wow. What a strange and disquieting thing to learn about an old friend!
Argh Paul I hate you!
I somehow got on the ‘Tearjerker’ trope… and I can’t stop!
I retract everything :-)
You mean you find them funny because you know other people don’t get them? That’s a scary attitude, frankly. When I laugh, I want everyone else to laugh, too! I want to share!
Inside jokes are often better than others, but that’s because they tend to be complex – there are more layers of hilarity to appreciate.
I must have suppressed that memory. I don’t remember it. :-)
Wow, the atheist pages at tvtropes are surprisingly extensive and thorough, even though it goes a bit afield of actual tv stuff. Good on them!
Don’t Explain The Joke
That said, I’m not against explaining inside jokes in principle. But it seems odd to present people with inside jokes from another forum, then be surprised when they don’t ask for explanation :-). It would be something else if it was a Pharyngula outsider posting to Pharyngula, and offering to explain a local inside joke to them.
Yeah, I guess the game Twister would be completely superfluous at Copenhagen. Like you godless, liberal Europeans need a pretext to form a human pile.
The only part of _Titanic_ that made me cry was when she climbed out of the fricking lifeboat and he didn’t punch her in the head.
Seriously, I never wanted to watch that movie, and after I saw bits on TV I was glad that I never had seen it all. She killed that boy.
Some people were concerned that noticing someone was worse off than you is reveling in their problems. It just makes me realize that I am lucky and can work to make my life better.
I was feeling depressed one night when there came a knocking at the door. The poor woman was lost, confused and pretty-near retarded. I drove her to her home and felt a damned lot better. I wasn’t retarded, and I had a car and a nice home.
As noted in Don’t Explain The Joke, sometimes it’s good to explain the joke:
I have no idea. I think in my case it was a perfect storm. Child from deeply troubled home is brought to tenuously defensive secretly all white upper middle class school in the south. Hilarity ensues.
I was really young. This was all at elementary school. I was also geeky/nerdy and worse yet good at things girls aren’t supposed to be. I was also frail from poor health and prone to standing up to authority figures which only reinforced the troubles as I was easy to brand as a dirty troublemaker that should never have been bussed in to sully the school with awareness of lives that shouldn’t exist. I think the teachers felt much as the principals did, that if by chance I could be talked into hanging myself it would be best for all. To be perfectly honest I always felt it was started and encouraged by the teachers, and that the kids just took it from there knowing there was a “problem” to be destroyed.
I feel strongly for that poor girl who has been in the news so recently, incidentally.
Ironically I was not so badly treated in HS. I had been modeling for a while. People liked my music. I was in theatre. I kept to myself though. I liked people but I didn’t feel like one of them. I felt like a robot. I was pretty unstable really, but I profited from it. I used it to keep myself free of the expectations of the norm. But the truth was I really didn’t see the world the same way, and there was really no chance of my being able to explain.
I’d also been to several schools by that time and had gotten very good at projecting and manipulating a public image.
This, very much so. I care about what happens to people. It makes me even sadder when I add their sadness onto mine. I don’t feel that bad about my life actually. More I just feel awkward because there are so many things I can’t really say I understand.
But sometimes other people’s hardships makes me think about how to help them and that distracts me from myself.
The only time something like that happened was when I watched that movie George Washington. When the little boy dies of head trauma.
That must have triggered something. I ruined the movie for my then BF. Couldn’t stop crying, had to leave, couldn’t stop crying
and I mean crying and to this day I don’t know why. I wasn’t able to finish the damned film, which pissed him off particularly since a friend of his had done the soundtrack. Sad.
In general I don’t cry that much when I’m supposed to, but I cry randomly. Driving home from work I may cry while I wait at a stoplight,
then go back to driving. Or I cry while I’m coding, Control ctrl = (Control)sender; *sniiif* I think probably because it’s the only time during the day that I’m not surrounded by people.
But if I’m at home and I can get to the piano fast enough I can do something else besides cry, which is often how I end up with the components of another song.
Depression? I don’t know. I’ve seen doctors. For a while my mom took me to all kinds of doctors for instance. Target the symptom, not the disease? Medicating me was a bit like taking hydrocodone as a cure for pneumonia.
I’ve never found an anti-depressant that made things better, in fact they often make me less stable. So I don’t take anything. But that’s how I like it. I’m actually ok with being depressed some times. It keeps me reminded that everything comes at a cost to some one. I don’t want to lose that sense of interconnectedness that reminds me that everyone experiences some level of pain relative to their experience, relative to their threshold, and that all of us are equal in that one respect.
#527 Sili, The Unknown Virgin
You just seem to have disenfranchised about 16% of those eligible to vote and left 18% of constituencies without an elected MP*.
There are, of course, 4 countries in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of which England is only one. (Scotland, Wales and Northern Island make up the remainder.)
*Based on the Electoral Roll at 1st Dec 2009**.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=319
**[Ed. And assuming Alan B made no mistakes in the adding up!]
As a postscript to mine @604: I found the biographical sketch on the website of the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, which houses an archive of Wren’s papers… including, apparently, personal correspondence. As I recall, Bob and I exchanged a few letters in the early 80s, when I was in grad school and he was (yet again) working in Lagos. IIRC, the letters were nothing more than I-am-fine; how-are-you chitchat, and there’s no saying he even saved them… but the possibility that my youthful scratchings may be on file to be perused by future generations of scholars is a peculiar thing for me to contemplate. Would be peculiar to me, even without the odd revelation (to me) of Bob’s involvement with NAMBLA.
A strange day, all ’round!
For fuck’s sake! I give up!
I can never ever fucking figure out what covers the whole bloody island and what’s purely parochial! If you’re gonna devolve, do it fucking properly.
Fuck the Paddies! Fuck the Sassenach! Fuck the bloody Jocks! And fuck the fucking Taffies and the fucking sheep they fucked in on!
Fuck!
I hated Titanic. So maudlin and full of annoying tropes.
There were no likable characters except maybe the captain and some of the people who died in the sinking scene.
Oh and yes, she threw that stupid diamond in the sea for sentimental reasons. Idiotic.
Cameron’s films remind me of a big greasy meal at the Cheesecake Factory.
#474 Rorschach
One of the features of the brain-chilling + xenon treatment was the devlopement of a system to deliver and recover the xenon. If you are interested, refer to links I gave in the original message.
Truth be told CE, neither do I.
David:
I only have 500something books. I know how many because I finally got them all cataloged at LibraryThing.
Sili, #615
You forgot the Cornish
And fuck you, too, Ed!
So did I. Don’t get me wrong: I thought it was a terrible film. But during the scenes when the ship is sinking and the string quartet are playing Nearer, my God, to Thee, I can’t help crying every single time. Especially the part where the ship’s officer shoots himself on the deck.
I don’t know why it has that effect on me: I think it’s the tune more than the film itself.
lol, I like how two of the 5 most active threads on Scinceblogs are trashing Deepak Chopra (the other one is at Respectful Insolence).
Ol’Greg:
I haven’t seen it. I had considered watching it, but the trailers annoyed me to such a point, I decided not to.
Oh, yeah, now I remember the throwing scene at the end… idiotic indeed.
Variant 3 is oddly appropriate to this thread :-)
As I explained, that’s the part that does not work for me. That other people are even worse off doesn’t help me at all.
Ol’ Greg:
You mean the 11 yo girl who was lost and then found alive in FL?
That story weirds me out a bit: The girl’s last name is Bloom, and when I lived in Florida I had a friend, a fellow model rocketeer, whose name was also Bloom, and who might well have a daughter that age.
This guy and I were very close friends at first, even though he was a conservative and I was already well started down the road that led to my current flaming liberalism, but he took a turn for the radical about the time Bill Clinton was elected (not for nothin’, but I notice a similar hardening/radicalization among my other conservative friends at the same time). Over the following years, he got increasingly wingnuttish and we drifted apart, and I eventually lost track of him. Last I heard, though, he’d moved from his home in town out to unincorporated land in woods of western Palm Beach County, to escape the iron grip of government. Not the “jack-booted thugs” of the federal government, mind you; even local government was too oppressive a yoke for him (and don’t even get him started about homeowners’ associations!).
So when I heard about this poor girl named Bloom, lost in backwoods Florida and being prayed for by her family’s backwoods Florida church, I naturally wondered whether she was related to my friend. But the stories I’ve read haven’t referred to her parents by name, so I don’t really know. Probably not, as Bloom isn’t exactly a rare moniker… but one never knows, eh?
Fuck the bloody Jocks!
Personally I’d prefer if they fucked me. The rugby players around here are delicious, and nice people to boot.
back when I had a MySpace page, my tagline was “wasting my potential since 1982” :-p
yup… pretty much the only time you can have the option of voting your conscience is in proportional representation. In the American (and to a lesser degree the British) System, you get to vote for “the lesser evil”, or protest-vote. that’s it.
And indeed, having your own personal MP/Congressman/Senator doesn’t do shit if you aren’t from the group likely to vote for them. The boyfriend organized some people to write letters
toat that fuckface Conrad after he held the “Germany doesn’t have socialized healthcare, therefore we don’t need it either” speech. They all got the same “your concern is noted” form-letter back.Voting in North Dakota is a waste of time; it wouldn’t be if voting was proportionally representative.
*groan*
well, from past experience, any amount of sleeping at airports isn’t refreshing, and if I get to Kristjan’s place and pass out, I’ll be gone for the rest of the day and instead won’t be able to sleep all night. Staying up as long as possible on the first day in Europe is pretty much the only way I can get into a halfway sane sleeping rhythm.
well, I claimed I was going to visit the family I stayed with for a year in Canada. And since I took care of all the flight-booking etc., my mom didn’t know that I was heading further south than that. And if I had cleaned up after myself better, she wouldn’t have found out either, but she ended up finding the bank stub from when I exchanged Deutschmarks into US Dollars instead of Canadian Dollars.
So I had to fess up when I came home. And wasn’t that a pleasant couple of weeks, after that… like I said, I’m surprised my mom survived me (and my brother) without going completely insane.
I resent that. Some people like to travel lightly, and instead use libraries. I probably don’t own more than 20 books at any given time, and the pile generally shrinks down every time I move because I donate most the books I ended up buying to the library.
that stands in no relation to how people perceive someone’s interactions with them. It’s actually fairly normal for people with depression and/or low-self-esteem to be considered by others as arrogant, cold and unfriendly/downright mean.
your ex sounds like me. I don’t ever re-read books unless I’ve actually managed to forget the content. But then, that’s what I read books for: the content, which can be afterwards replayed in my head at will, without cluttering my apartment with stuff, and having to deal with the cost and effort of transporting the stuff every time I move.
*smack*
stop being me. nothing good ever came from being me. what you need is a decent therapist/psychiatrist, and possibly a prescription of happy-pills.
I can multitask. Pharynguboys are too much fun not to talk to/about ;-)
there’s always hope for
tastycute nerds like you…inside jokes are social bonding material… they don’t actually work outside the relevant circle.
<shaking head in disbelief>
Well. I’ll finally check out the “Spock is not a chordate” thread; that title sounds interesting!
Pygmy Loris, lookee here.
Some years back, I was at a wildland fire out in Idaho (if (((Wife))) hears me start a story that way, whe throws something at me) an older firefighter 1 began experiencing chest pain. The radio channels were cleared, an EMT with a defibrilator drove hell-for-leather to the drop point and ran in two miles to the fire line with his bag, oxygen, and a stokes litter. He got there as the man went into full cardiac arrest. CPR and the AED kept things moving (02 and oxygenated blood). Six of his crewmates helped to carry him out to the nearest spot in which a helicopter could land. He survived thanks to the work of his crewmates, the EMTs, the helo crew, the emergency room and the cardiologist at the local (very small) hospital.
Three days later, the local newspaper had an article about him. It included many quotes. The only one he actually thanked was (you guessed it) god. I was amazed at how many people at the fire thought that was apropriate.
When I heard about the little girl in Florida, and heard the godbot asshat telling how god had led him to her, and that this was all on god, I wondered how many of the men and women who were tramping through the swamp for two days searching for her even noticed the slight.
Or maybe I (and I am an atheist) am just too damned sensitive about this?
My other thought when I heard about was a flashback to Bloom County, especially the female characters. Who didn’t last real long.
OMGZ, Teh Cute!!!
OK, now I’m the one not getting the joke. </puzzled>
Ooops, horked up the HTML @633! Should’ve been:
OK, not I’m the one not getting the joke. </puzzled>
#615 Sili, The Unknown Virgin
You’ll find a lot of people who would agree with you – many of them are in the BNP.
(And, no, that’s not a comment about you – they mean it seriously.)
If anyone wants to understand about United Kingdom, Great Britain, Channel Islands, Isle of Mann etc. etc. then go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_British_Isles
(However, you may not leave that article entirely sane. But why should you be different from the rest of us?)
Currently eating toasted dark bread with butter, herbes de provence, salt*, and… I rubbed a garlic clove all over before spreading the (melting) butter. :-) Family tradition on the male side.
* Salted butter is more or less impossible to get in Austria.
Actually, that’s what I’ve always done so far when flying east. That just hasn’t happened often enough that I could have tried any other options, so I didn’t generalize.
:-S
Many of my books are of the specialized kinds that few libraries are likely to have or take. I have about two shelves full of peer-reviewed or similar edited books about dinosaurs… and sometimes I need to look something up in them so I can cite it properly… should have thought of that :-}
Didn’t take more than 2 or 3 of them with me to Paris, though.
BTW, I know a scientist who has a particular sort of photographic memory: when remembering a quote from a book, he sees the page in his head, and can tell you where on the page the quote is, but he can’t read it. The resolution is too limited.
Not even for other people?
I repeat my question :-)
What’s that stricken part about? Does your B-[ fetish go both ways (active as well as passive)? Or are you just trying to get me to bite back? :-)
(Tell me when I’m getting creepy. That’s one thing I’m not very sensitive about, I think.)
Is it a “circle” when you belong to it as soon as you’ve read the right things? Not even joining the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is necessary.
For instance, googling “T. R. Karbek” gives results that reveal all about that one joke.
#635
If you want to start with something a little easier, try sorting out:
Dutch*
Holland
(New Holland)
the Netherlands
(New Netherlands)
the Kingdom of the Netherlands
the United Kingdom of the Netherlands
Greater Netherlands
the Low Countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_(terminology)
* Not, of course, to be confused with Deutsch – as in “Flying Dutchman” for Wagner.
Europe is a wonderful place to be a pedant!
Why didn’t she let them climb all over each other (in the video) :-(
There was a joke involved? Uh… Bloom County? I just tried to express the usual culture shock at American baby-naming customs.
I had the same effect happen back in school with studying vocabulary. Instead of actually remembering what the words meant, I ended up more often simply remembering what the page looked like. Except I was actually able to read off the page. So in order to properly learn the words, I had to re-write them randomly on sheets of paper to avoid the effect.
I don’t know, you’d have to ask them. My boyfriend seems to be quite happy with my existence, but on the other hand, my mother (as explained earlier) would have probably benefited greatly from having a different sort of child.
those are actually separate issues. you see, I have my gustatory and sexual stimulation inextricably tangled up. Which has nothing to do with the teeth thing. Which in turn doesn’t actually have anything to do with vampires, but they’re a close-enough, safe stand-in for the real deal which is none of the internet’s business :-p
Bloom County was a daily newspaper comic strip here in the cultural center of the world* (the United States, of course) created by Berkley Breathed. From the early 1980s until the about 1995, it was ubiquitous, especially the character named Opus. Bloom County focused heavily on small town ignorance and religion. Some of the teachers at my high school thought that it was inspired by Satan.
*All ya’ll Yurpeens done needs to look a liddle closer at the ‘Mercun culture so’s you can be as well edjumucated us us’ns are. :)
There’s only one antidote for the toxic level of cuteness from the pygmy loris page: Fuck you, penguin.
Harsh!
Barney on bass: NSFJ
Is that progress? Walton took offense when he first started commenting here and I called him (repeatedly, iirc) a “narcissist”. (In retrospect, I was at least sometimes kind of a dick about it. Sorry, Walton.)
Yes: it fucks up the baseball metaphor. Stick to your own damn dugout, why dontcha?
Look, I like snakes–a lot–but I have to say that watersnakes are at the very bottom of my list of likeable snakes. In fact, they may even have dropped to the next (shorter) list of snakes I do NOT like. Common as dirt, ugly, nasty-tempered, stink like hell, and bite, hard. Why in the world would you want to keep one of those around?
QF Please!!!! I’m begging you!
That clinches it. Satan is far cooler than god.
This^
Plus, I clarified the blockquotes. ;^)
Nigel: I suspect that at least some of the bible rebellers started reading Bloom County because the teacher said that.
Check this out, and judge for yourself if Walton is a failure!
Awesome.
Well, isn’t that enough? At least in the long run?
And if not, what about us cyber-here?
TastyInteresting.Leaves me wondering whether I want to know. On the one hand, you’ve got me curious, and I’m a nosey scientist and all… on the other hand, it doesn’t sound like it’s something non-disturbing like, uh, whatever, mere werewolves or something…
*phew*
hmmm…. I only now noticed the captions on the loris pics. “bashful female” and “curious male”?
was that really necessary, especially considering the video showed no such personality distinctions :-(
Iraq War Vet: “We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us”, in case people haven’t seen that and need a reason to be angry. I’d post this in the “we have seen evil” thread to not detract from the endless, but I dislike posting to inactive old threads.
Wait.
When I was in the Army, there was a kid in med holdover by the name of Bloom Anderson. I think he was a Youper.
Rush whines about why unions didn’t protect miners, should just STFU.
Yes, frequent travelling was her rationale. It turns out I was also some of the clutter that was too inconvenient to put up with.
[/bitter]
Oh, quite agree about each to their own, but what surprised me about your love of LOTR is that I’ve met you, and you didn’t seem like a juvenile wanker :)
Now that almost made me cry. I still miss my all-time favourite pet – a bush baby/nagapie from Botswana that I had when a teenager. Toilet trained to relieve herself in houseplant pots. Scared of my chameleons, so I got rid of the chameleons.
Bullying? Never really got bullied at school, or bullied anyone else (although bullying was institutionalised at my school – eg, our English teacher would set us homework of writing a “humorous” poem about the guy in our class with polio, and then read out the nastiest poems in class the next day).
Uh, just for the record, because I have a phobia of misunderstandings… I don’t share that synesthesia. I only made a bad word game.
I’m not looking.
Also in retrospect, it’s remarkable how far-reachingly Walton has changed his opinions… :-)
Heh, I thought that was going to link to this.
Ring Tailed Lemurian:
That was fucking hysterical. Thanks. I just snorted ginger ale out my nose.
Satan is also more truthful than God. Read the Garden of Eden apple thing–the serpent spake sooth.
Oh, yesss. The seal raping a penguin. Godbot to explain that, please?
So I finally looked up bashful in the dictionary; turns out I had misinterpreted it from various contexts, and wouldn’t have guessed from the video either.
I actually wanted to stay in a different emotional state entirely (see comment 628). And that right before going to bed (going early these days because I can’t stay completely uncoupled from the rest of the family).
Support the troops – bring them home already…
That’s at least funny (though not much more so than North Korea).
Maybe he reads it just for the linguistic appendices? That’s what I’d do if I ever got the idea of reading LOTR in the first place. There are people who have done just that.
Great. Now I want to get violent. Grmpf.
Thanks, but… no, thanks.
Speaking of pedophiles: link“>”Clothing chain Primark has withdrawn the sale of its range of padded bikini tops for girls as young as seven following criticism.” “Asda has been singled out for a push-up bra aimed at young girls, and Tesco withdrew a pole-dancing kit from its toys section.”
nigelTheBold
No, thank you. I’ve been waiting nearly two years for the right moment to use that bookmarked page. Could never have dreamed I’d get such a perfect cue.
I wonder if your linked site knows about it.
Sorry about the link-bork.
cicely,
OMFG!!! So freaking cute!
I’ve gotten shots of yesterday’s thunderstorm rainbow up: http://moblog.net/view/927371/sunset-bow?ac=1
Menyambal, from your link –
So who’s responsible for the Playboy logoed clothing I see five year old girls wearing?
It really is. I recall that when Pete R**ke used to post here I actually got the two of them confused some times causing me to be somewhat kind to PR and then astounded by the creepiness of his responses. I can’t even imagine that happening now. I’m still kind of convinced PR was actually doing that on purpose, trying to single-white-female Walton a little bit.
Now that, David M, is a how a creepy man behaves.
For the record, I don’t have a clue what it is you and Jadehawk have been talking about, it’s like a code to me, and that’s just totally cool. I hope you’re flirting with each other though in nerdspeak, because that would be really cute.
Pfft. Sven, you big hater. My snake was awesome. I already said so. Actually he was not very mean at all,and he didn’t stink much because he did his bidness in the bathtub twice a day and I washed it out after. That was his favorite swimming hole. In his cage he only had a small water area, so I’d let him swim in the tub so he could stretch out.
He only bit me once. It was my fault. I was feeding him and the fish got caught behind some shrubby stuff and without thinking I reached down to pick it up! Dumb thing to do, he cut right through me.
That bite though was nothing compared to cat and hamster bites. Cat bites I think are the nastiest, but hamsters are so damned deep. I freaking hate hamsters, btw.
Why did I have him? Because he needed a home. He had been used as a prop in a play and no one wanted him after. I figured he’d be interesting and he was. He loved warming himself on my arm and neck and really wasn’t that much trouble. It was fun watching him shed his skin and feeding him fishies, which I raised in an aquarium in my bedroom. I had a really good population of fish for a while.
That was his downfall. My fish got sick and I bought some fish for him to eat from the store. Turns out something was wrong with those fish though, and after I fed him two big fish he got sick and vomited them that night. By morning he had died. :(
Poor Ezra.
Adam and Eve’s fault through the Fall.
Easy. I did that without even thinking. (Which is, of course, the only way to arrive at a godbotter’s conclusion.)
Well, I suppose that’s one way to deal with a perceived virginity “problem”. Possibly a bit extreme though ….
Even the people who live there are confused. I had great fun when I lived in England teasing the English (mostly) whenever they goofed and confused England with the UK or similar.
That’s different from the BNP and UKIP and so on nutters, who really do draw intentional but batshite distinctions and worse “conclusions”.
You know, when somebody says something like ‘Oh, gawd sent you here, praise to gawd’, I’m going to tell them ‘Fuck you, asshole, your imaginary deity did nothing! Now shut the fuck up while we wait for the ambulance, ingrate.’
Cine, Fdm, very pretty my dear lady.
So, here’s another thread filled with stories of being picked on. I was teased and harassed mercilessly throughout middle and high school for many reasons. Let’s just say that I am not well-adjusted as a consequence.
I will mention one odd thing from my dating experience. I look several years younger than I actually am, so when I was in my late teens and early twenties people routinely thought I was only 13 or 14. Young men my age rarely displayed any interest in me because they thought I was too young to date (the term jail bait was tossed around more than once). When I was 24, I went to a party with my boyfriend and two of his friends decided to take him aside and recommend that he break up with me so he didn’t land in jail on statutory rape charges. While I was not amused, he thought it was hilarious since I’m actually two years older than he is.
Walton,
I really wonder what you look like. You’ve mentioned exercise and weight-lifting, and that you’re not over-weight*. You’re not excessively short*. You’ve never mentioned any physical disfigurement* or major scarring* or anything. What is it about yourself that you think is so physically unattractive? Is it just one particular feature?
*I mention these things because they are traits that many of my friends focus on when they’re bemoaning their lack of a love life, not because I think they necessarily make someone unattractive.
Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something?
JeffreyD:
Thank you, Jeffrey. I don’t feel I did it justice at all; I’m glad they came out though, my lens was covered in raindrops. :D
Lots of teasing and crying stuff tonight. Not complaining, this IS a good place to get it out. I have no stories I feel like sharing. Was teased, but nothing compared to my home life, school was a nice escape. Any one who has been around for a while or looked at my blog (not whoring, don’t go there!) knows I know how to cry.
I think I would rather dance tonight. A little Beau Soleil
One P.S. – Being ugly does not keep you from dating, looking at you Queen’s Dumping. I am ugly as sin and never had a problem dating. Feeling you are ugly is another thing entirely.
Soooo…. why are we so obsessed with Walton today? Is it because he’s actually not posting?
In truth, I’m curious what Walton looks like too. Hey, Walton, you really should go into politics. You have a knack for getting attention. It’s a gift, sir, you should put it to good work.
Too bad your English. If you were American it would actually work in your favor to flunk school if you wanted to run on the conservative ticket.
Don’t conflate UKIP with the BNP. The BNP are a far-right nationalist party, with a history in the fascist movement, which has always been founded on explicit racism and xenophobia. Their previous leader, John Tyndall, was an open admirer of Hitler and a vicious anti-Semite. Although the present leader, Nick Griffin (whose main priority in life seems to be self-promotion), has tried to rebrand their image, they are still a highly xenophobic and ultra-authoritarian party whose main focus today is on stirring up bigoted scares about Muslim immigration and the loss of “British culture”.
By contrast, UKIP are a centre-right party whose main policy is withdrawal from the European Union. I’m sure they do have a few closet xenophobes among their ranks, but they’re certainly not a racist or far-right party, and it’s not fair to characterise them as such. Their leader, Nigel Farage, has said quite a few things with which I agree (he came out recently in favour of decriminalisation of drugs, for instance). I don’t agree with their other policies and would never vote for them, but they are not in the same group as the BNP.
Pygmy Loris @ 670, I can’t speak for anyone else, but generally speaking, I’ve found that a person who constantly talks about themselves and constantly complains and whines doesn’t tend to come off as attractive to most people.
Oh dear, there’s that your you’re problem.
*hangs head in shame*
I’m off to happy hour. It has been a nice distraction from my rather monotonous tasks today.
That sounds similar to me: I can often recall what the cover looked like, and what the page looks like, about where it is in the book, and the general ghist of the statement/quote, but not the details, and since the memory is more of patterns, it doesn’t resolve into the precise words. I’ve always wondered if there’s some tie-in with my famous inability to recall names, titles, and the like (albeit I can often recall numbers/measurements and units to sometimes embarrassing accuracy): Something like I can recall what the cover of the book is, but the words which comprise the title/author are just part of the overall pattern or “picture”.
JefferyD,
That is too true.
Somehow I suspect that your utter lack of compassion predated your being teased. In any case, you’re a remarkable asshole now.
Say, you’re not the same Katharine who had disgusting things to say about Africans a while back, are you?
Caine,
Good point. So, I what I should wonder is if Walton is like this in person.
I guess my whole curiosity is because I have only met a couple of people in my whole life that I think are ugly in a physical way.
OTOH I know tons of people I think are unattractive because they have terrible personalities (racists, sexists, general assholes, people who think the poor deserve to starve, etc.).
oops, there I go not rereading what I wrote
Should have continued with “However, I know lots of people who range from perfectly normal to smokin’ hotties who think they are ugly.”
And on that note, time for my beauty sleep. Bon nuit ma loris pygmée, Caine, fleur de beauté, Greg merveilleuse vieille, Walton, boulette spéciale, et le reste de mes amis.
(gads, my French really does suck, I need to go back to school.)
This is me in a nutshell. (I have no shortage of other personality problems too, but this is definitely one of the biggest.)
A big part of the problem I find with social interaction is that I only have two major interests: politics, and talking about myself. If a conversation isn’t about (a) politics or (b) me and my problems, I find it hard to maintain interest. This is mostly OK on the internet – since people aren’t trapped into talking to me – but it adequately explains why, in real life, a lot of my friends are political activists of one kind or another, because those are the people with whom I actually have common ground. I find it very hard to pretend to be even slightly interested in sports, fashion, cars, shopping, gossip, or all the other stuff that other people seem to like.
I realise these personality defects probably make me appear misanthropic, narcissistic, self-pitying and dull, to most people. But I really do try not to be. I can’t eliminate my character flaws, but I do try to work around them so that I can actually function as a decent human being in normal society.
Pygmy Loris:
.
Yep, same here. Even then, I’ve tended to adjust my judgment of ‘ugly’ when I’ve found them to be delightful people. I’ve got nothing at all against eye candy, but all in all, looks really have never been that important to me. People I tend to think are good looking aren’t most people’s idea of good looking anyway.
That’s it, exactly. People can be all kinds of pretty until they open their mouths. (Or let their fingers hit the keyboard).
Back to Walton for a moment. Going by how he is here, on Pharyngula, he would bore me half to death in person; he does that to me here. I get very tired of people who cannot shut up about themselves. I don’t care much for chronic complainers, either. My impulse there is to tell them to shut the fuck up. Also, it strikes me that Walton is very one note. If he’s not consumed with talking about himself or complaining, it’s politics. Personally, I enjoy people who are capable of talking about a wide range of subjects, that allows a conversation to sparkle. Apparently, Walton does have a sense of humor, however, it is rarely seen. So, all that added up: not an attractive person to me. For someone else, who knows?
Okay, back to general attractiveness/ugliness. Katharine, at #668 is a prime example of an ugly person. Given what she has displayed, I wouldn’t care if she gave Aphrodite a run for her money in the looks department.
Attractiveness is extremely subjective, but for me, looks is the very least of the equation.
an inability to carry on meaningless small-talk is precisely why I don’t have meatspace friends. Just another way in which the the internet is much better than meatspace. you just need to learn how to use it for your (social and otherwise) benefit.
Speaking of which, you really really should try to come to Copenhagen.
JeffreyD:
I find it charming. Goodnight, M’dear.
Memory is such a strange thing. I have a decent memory for faces, but not names. I can, for a while, recall with greater accuracy than my peers the precise wording somebody used, but not what they were wearing. There’s no pattern to whether the visual or verbal memory is better. And it’s annoying.
Walton:
I don’t care about any of that stuff, so it doesn’t figure into my conversations. That’s no excuse for being a one-note bore. There are a wealth of things to talk about, you don’t need to consign yourself to “idiot chat”.
though, I should add, having more than a single interest (talking about yourself doesn’t count as an interest) would be helpful. Walton needs a hobby or two :-p
I will be the first to admit that all of this is a completely fair assessment, and, indeed, pretty much corresponds to what I said about myself at #684. But it doesn’t hurt any less because of that. (Indeed, criticisms tend to hurt more when they’re well-founded.)
Ah, there’s your problem, David. Wouldn’t put me off necessarily but…
And there’s yours, Walton.
Which would put me off. Not Rascist, well, not unless the rest of Europe counts as a race, and the whole of the UK counts as a closet, and far-right has something to do with the mathematical concept of infinity.
Fuck’s sake, man, have you learnt nothing in all the conversations you’ve had here? You’re like 20, and you want to be a Conservative?
*deskhead*
Too heavy. Hurts.
*headdesk*
Still hurts.
Has the glorious tapestry of liberal, rational, reality taught you nothing?
Jeez.
Walton:
I am very sorry you are hurt. I truly am. I was not setting out to hurt you; hopefully you’re aware of that. I try, in every iteration of the endless thread, to basically ignore you and the seemingly endless amount of posts by others which are about you. I try to focus on other people and topics. Sometimes, like this one, it’s difficult to do that. This is a risk you take when you attempt to be the main subject of discussion on every iteration of the endless thread.
I’ll go back to focusing on other people and subjects now.
And stop fucking whining, you rich, privileged fucker.
No offence, but Jeez…
I’m OK. You didn’t say anything wrong, and I’m sorry I got a bit melodramatic. I just haven’t had a good week.
But I don’t “attempt to be the main subject of discussion”. I haven’t posted that much today, up until now. Other people randomly started talking about my (lack of) sexual experience; that wasn’t a conversation I started in any way.
JefferyD,
Gute Nacht. :)
change of topic: short of chopping off my boobs, how do I get rid of my back pain? It’s been getting rather intolerable lately…
Jadehawk, have you been to see a neurologist about your back pain? Before you consider breast reduction, it’s important to rule out specific problems, like herniated discs. In regard to breast reduction, I have a couple of friends who have done it, and it made a dramatic difference in their back pain.
Sorry.
One of the things I love about David’s posts (btw, most interested in what everyone else is saying on this, one of PZ’s longer tentacles: well there are many more than ten of them, but still) is that in scrolling backwards through the thread, as one does, I can identify them from the (reverse) formatting alone.
:X:X:X:{D
Do you have a particular formatting device, or do you simply rub yourself all over with garlic, stick your tongue out, and insert characters one by one?
Sex. Sex. Fucking.
I’m not considering breast reduction for the same reason I can’t go to a neurologist. Uninsurable and really fucking broke, remember?
I was just wondering if, in addition to trying to lose some weight, there’s a method to make the pain more tolerable.
SGBM:
Yes. Yes. Absolutely.
Sorry, no answer, apart from pain-killers and time.
Have you tried woo? And if so, did any of it work?
I have a friend who’s a physiotherapist and, sadly, she told me that much of what she/they do is untested and unreliable. What’s your experience?
Walton,
One of the things I like about the Thread is hearing other people’s stories and perspectives on various things. I love talking to people about their lives, their pasts, their ideas and dreams for the future. These sorts of things give me something to think about and reflect on. On a personal level, my friends and I talk about all sorts of things, but politics is a major recurring theme. It works for us. Being self-centered is not very conducive to forming friendships, though.
One thing you might reflect on is what you want out of relationships with others. Do you want more friends? What do you see yourself doing with potential friends? How would you like people to treat you in a friendship/relationship?
Maybe you should try developing a couple of hobbies outside of politics. Find something to add to your passions. I’m friends with a couple of people solely because we like to read the same fantasy series, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. We can spend hours discussing the books with nary a word about ourselves or politics. In fact, one couple I know has built a successful marriage on their love of mystery novels. They make time in the evening to read books aloud to each other. It’s not necessarily something I would do, but it works for them. Anyway, that’s just my $.02.
Jadehawk, sorry, it’s seriously wrong you can’t get the help you need. Specific types of stretching exercises can help, I’ll try and find some good info on that for you, mine comes straight from my neurologist. What you sleep on can make a difference too. With my back, I can’t handle sleeping on anything too soft. One thing which comes to mind is rolling a bath towel, laying down and lodging the towel firmly under your neck. Do that for 30 minutes. If it hurts to do that, pull up your legs, and place a pillow under your knees. That can relieve the stress on your muscles.
Usually when my back starts to hurt without an obvious exercise factor, the waterbed needs adjustment. You bed may be sagging/too soft for you. My two cents.
Star Trek conventions.
Jadehawk,
From your reference to chopping them off, I assume large breasts are the problem here? A couple of friends of mine who are very well-endowed found that getting a proper fitting and good bras made a big difference. Cost could be a problem, though. The bras one of my friends ended up getting were $65 bucks each, but she said they were worth every penny. I have heard that both Dillards and Nordstroms are good places to go.
Okay,
Having listened to Walton’s self-analysis as well as that of the other erudite commentors here, I feel the need to add my free advice (and it’s worth every penny).
Walton, you do not need to learn different topics to be interesting to other people. The key, and take this from an experienced politician, is to learn to listen.
For example, last weekend I was at a birthday party for someone I don’t know. It was ‘high tea’. Well, it was in a shop in Ann Arbor which serves buns and cucumber sandwiches. High tea at 11:00AM, indeed! (Americans are so weird.) But it was enjoyable, so no problem there.
This was the 80th birthday party for a woman, and I happened to sit at the same table as her son. Who really, really, didn’t want to be there. But familial pressure was too much for him to avoid it.
Well, he wasn’t having a good time, so I tried him out on various topics. I offered up literature, art, cooking, theater, sport, then I hit travel. His face lit up and we talked for the next 40 minutes about Arizona, Florida, Winnebagos, and transmissions. Or rather, he talked, and I politely listened while providing an occasional anecdote of my own.
The result, I believe, was that he no longer regretted being dragged into a hoity-toity event where his brother-in-law was wearing a skirt (it was a kilt, but my new friend always referred to it as a skirt). And, get this, he found my company interesting.
Now, you would be amazed both at how much more people will like you, and consider you a good conversationalist, by simply being a good audience. I’ve had far better luck getting dates once I used the technique of introducing myself, finding a topic which she is interested in, then shutting up.
Of course, you actually have to be interested in what they are saying. But, if I ever find my interest flagging, I try to remember how strange it is that someone would be interested in something that weird. And everything humanity does is weird, it’s only because we have become accustomed to things like bowling and gardening that we forget how really, really, odd these hobbies are. So I can sit and listen to someone talk about their pet topic for hours because of how weird the topic is.
And, more cynically, as a politician, learning to listen has had very practical benefits too. If you let your constituent talk until they run down, and then indicate that you’ve heard what they’ve said, they are far more likely to vote for you. I imagine that learning to listen would be handy for a lawyer as well.
I have no idea if this advice will be of any benefit to anyone. I know that when I was younger , and still for the most part, hate to take advice. But, I look on it as the prerogative of getting old. (Not that I feel a day over 23, even if the calender wants to add another 20 years to that.)
Now, Get off my lawn! ;)
Flex,
Yeah, people are curious. When I’m talking to strangers and asking them questions I sometimes feel like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Of course, I don’t overdue it and come off creepy. But many people just want to talk about something. If you give them a chance they’ll do it and be grateful that someone is listening.
The rest of your post gives some good advice.
In all fairness, I don’t think Walton tries to make the threads about himself at all. It’s just that everyone wants to help him out. :)
Fucking Robert Jordan and his fucking neverending series that fucking gets longer every fucking volume until he fucking dies before he fucking finishes the fucking thing.
No, I’m not bitter about being sucked into it for no good reason AT ALL.
Carlie:
I have a different point of view in that regard. Walton isn’t stupid, and knows that certain regulars will happily dominate the thread with responses to every little complaint and whine, as well as politically based posts. Which, in the end, results in what interests Walton – himself. If he actually wasn’t happy with that, he’d bother to interest himself in what was going on with others now and then. You know, manage a subject that was not about him.
Carlie,
Right on, sister! Did you read the newest book? Brandon Sanderson is finishing it and stuff actually happens! There really will be two more books, and then it’s done.
On books: I bought two yesterday – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (which I’ve read before) and Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow (which I haven’t).
I’ve read the first three or four of the Wheel of Time series and enjoyed them, but I think it’s unlikely I’ll read the rest since I’ve moved away from reading fantasy and have reached a point in my life where I’m more than a little scared that I’m not going to get to read all the books I want to read in the time I’ve got left – and I’m only 36!
Wowbagger:
I have bad news – that feeling only gets more intense as you get older. I’ve leveled off on the fantasy books too, with one exception, Discworld. As long as Terry Pratchett’s around to write them, I’ll read them.
blf @ 678, I want you out of my head right now! :D
Except for the part about numbers, which don’t tend to lodge in my head anyway (apart from Avogadro’s Number; 35 years later and it will…not…leave…my…head (and it isn’t as if I’ve ever used it for anything for, um, 32 of those years)), this picture is stunningly familar. Not only that, but I used to be able to call up a ‘snap-shot’ of where any given book was, last time I saw it. And it isn’t as if I haven’t got a lot of books; goodness knows it isn’t that. And it isn’t as if they weren’t scattered all over the house; I’ve done that.
Completely useless for any other purpose, though.
You are the first person I’ve ever heard of with this same…ability?…quirk?
Caine, Fleur du mal wrote:
Oh, I’ve a fondness for Pratchett as well – it helps that I got to play Ponder Stibbons in a stage production of Lords & Ladies and had immense fun with it; his dialogue was straight from the book – though I did do a bit of ad-libbing that the Pratchett fans in the cast appreciated, since they all the references were to characters/events from the other books but who didn’t appear in L&L.
I’ve got something like a dozen Discworld books floating around, and I’ll dig one or two out each year to re-read. I haven’t read Unseen Academicals yet, but should probably get my hands on a copy sometime soon.
Wow, there sure was a lot of catching up to do here!
—
Jadehawk: If you can’t afford medical treatment, I suggest an exercise regime that strengthens your postural muscles (erector spinae and lats in particular) and consciously adopt good posture when sitting down.
Unfortunately, this can’t be done in isolation — you’ll get other problems if you strengthen a single muscle group without similarly strengthening the antagonistic muscles.
You shouldn’t need to go to a gym to do this.
Also, (if you haven’t already!) you might wish to invest in well-fitted, well-engineered bras. :)
—
I, too, choke up and leak a tear or two at many books and films; one writer that could reliably manipulate my emotions (even if transparently and formulaically so) was David Gemmell — master of heroic fantasy — pretty much every book of his (and I’ve read them all) have that effect on me, even upon re-reading.
—
As for Walton, I honestly can’t make up my mind if he’s being disingenuous or merely suffers from Dunning-Kruger (its other aspect, where the competent underestimate their competence).
Flex’s advice seems to me to be spot-on, BTW.
—
Regarding schoolyard bullying, as someone who was expelled from a number of schools (and thus had to go into new ones, sometimes mid-term), my experience was that feistiness (i.e. willingness to confront) pretty quickly fixed that up.
Short-term pain for long-term gain, but I guess I had the right personality to apply that, so I was lucky. ;)
Re #714:
I’m not too far from fifty, so I’ve had a regimen these last few years of reading 30+ “serious” books a year. (I wanted it to be 50+, but I just can’t read fast enough.)
I’ve recently experienced a kind of breakdown, I think. To recover, I’m reading . . . fantasy! Evangeline Walton, who ages much better than I thought she would since I last read her as a teenager, and the excellent Alan Garner. I’d known of him for years, and I just wish I’d read him sooner.
Wowbagger, I haven’t read Unseen Academicals yet either. It’s on my B&N list, it will arrive when I order the next batch of books. The two Discworld books I go back to and re-read are Reaper Man and Hogfather. The Hogfather DVD has become a xmas viewing tradition now.
Pygmy Loris – I lost my patience somewhere around book 9 or 10. I had my spouse keep me updated on the next couple of books, and then gave up even on that. I’ll just wait until it’s all over and then read the Wikipedia entry to find out what happened at the end, and then when the wheel turns and Rand gets reborn I will scream.
On things that make me cry: I just finished watching Band of Brothers for the first time, in preparation for The Pacific starting on tv here – there were more than a few moments through that where I was in tears. Heck, even thinking about it puts a lump in my throat.
I don’t know whether this has already been pointed out, but I find it noteworthy:
Arch-accommodationist Michael Ruse is joining Dawkins in welcoming the fall of the Catholic Church.
Walton #493
I will not have anything bad written about Heath. He was a yachtsman! He even sailed in the infamous 1979 Fastnet Race (although his boat, Morning Star, withdrew with a broken rudder).
This is ridiculous, but I can’t get through Futurama’s Jurassic Bark without tears turning up. More serious things do bring on the tears, but it’s not something most cartoons can bring about.
*sigh* Second attempt.
Jadehawk, this may not help you, but my back pain (from the small of my back running up to a massively cricked neck) was the result of bad neck and head posture. If I don’t watch it, my neck will angle forward at the base, and my chin will raise; especially when I’m looking at the computer monitor. Since that’s what I do all day long, this is a problem. I have to make a constant effort to keep my neck straight and my head level; in fact, I’ve had to correct my posture several times, just while typing this paragraph. Careful attention to neck and head positioning when sleeping is also a must.
Walton, did you read Flex’s post @ 709? Go back and read it again. That’s some good stuff, right there. As for widening your own conversational horizons, what, if anything, do you read for pleasure. Apart from anything political or autobiographical, that is? :) I know you’re busy with the studying, but many people keep a bookshelf in or near their bathroom. What about T.V.? Movies? Love it or loathe it, these are the common culture stream of our time, and everybody has opinions about them. Even the non-political news items can be helpful.
(In case anyone is thinking, “cicely, why are you encouraging him????”, I remember a time when I would have given somebody’s good right arm for interactive advice on this general subject, delivered in an unembarrassing medium. IMO, no one should have to wait until their mid-thirties to learn how to be reasonably socially ept.)
cicely wrote:
Some of us are that age and still waiting for eptness to kick in – or, more accurately, have just given up trying and have all-but completely withdrawn from most kinds of meatspace…
I couldn’t imagine being the way I am even ten years ago. Now, despite my hermitude and social phobia I’ve got a whole world at my fingertips and don’t have to worry about getting lonely or bored simply because I can’t comfortably converse with people face to face.
Aaron Baker wrote, “the excellent Alan Garner”
Wow, I haven’t read his stuff in probably 20 years. I have a number still on the shelf, and now I’m going to have to go back a re-read them.
Has he written anything but juveniles? I’ve only read his juveniles, but they were worth reading as an adult too. Very well written. I still remember, vividly, the description in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen of a crawl through underground caves. It made me feel claustrophobic at the time, and I can still recall that feeling.
Well I’ll be, Wiki tells me he’s still around and his latest stuff is more adult. Not that I have a problem with reading juveniles.
As I look over my collection to see if there is anything that I think is like it, I can’t really can’t find anything that has the same feeling in my fantasy section.
I think the most similar books I can think of are in my mystery section. Some of Sharon McCrumb’s Appalachian tales or Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins mysteries give me similar feelings. Possibly Manly Wade Wellman as well. If you haven’t read Wellman’s John the Balladeer series, seek them out.
But maybe I’ve had too much beer already tonight.
Cheers!
I guess I don’t see Walton’s self-interest as being bad so much as being 20. Social skills are like any other skill – some people come by them fairly naturally and pick up on them easily, others have to work hard. Walton, going back to your comment about not liking what other people like, it’s just a matter of training to find ways to finesse it to keep conversation going.
Compare:
“Oh, do you see Charlotte Church’s show yesterday? Wasn’t it brilliant?”
“No, I don’t watch shows like that. I think they’re a waste of time.”
with
“Oh, do you see Charlotte Church’s show yesterday? Wasn’t it brilliant?”
“No, I don’t really watch a lot of tv, but what did I miss? What did you like about it?”
The first way shuts down the conversation, makes the other person feel vaguely inadequate for liking the show, and makes you look like a jerk. The second conveys the same truth that you don’t watch tv, but expresses interest in the person and the kinds of things they find entertaining. And since you’re subtly shifting the topic from the show to what the person liked about it, that can easily segue into what they like, what you like, mutual interests that have nothing to do with tv even though it started there. Easier said than done, which is why it’s good to read up on such things and practice (and get a good therapist).
That is one thing that’s fantastic about the internet; also that it’s easy to find like-minded people in groups instead of finding the one other person in town who likes the same things you do.
Wow Caine, you’re honestly very perceptive. I can’t help but think if I had a few of your skills I might have saved myself some sadness with people.
Oh, Sili… I think it was you that reccommended Dr. Schwab’s blog? Now I can’t remember. You know you may also be the one that sparked my current obsession with making breads :P
Anyway, I just started reading the book I ordered through his blog. It’s quite good. I think you’d said you hadn’t read it, but I do reccommend it and also to anyone who thinks they might enjoy reading memoirs from a retired surgeon.
Anyway goodnight all. I won’t be on much as I’m upgrading my primary computer to Win7.
The last time I cried at anything on screen was several years ago when I was coming off Z*loft and this ad came on the TV for a Disney movie about horses or something. I was sat on the couch sobbing because the horses … just … looked … so … beautiful. *sniff*
It was really quite unexpected and weird. It wasn’t sadness or anything, just this out-of-the blue emotion. Now that I’m back on the happy pills Disney pap just pisses me off.
Re: popular kids sucking at adult life and the geeks inheriting the Earth, TISM summed it up in characteristically wonderful fashion in The Parable of Glenn McGrath’s Haircut.
If you can’t be bothered with the YouTube audio, you can just see the lyrics here.
HEY, I just discovered a solution to the world’s energy problems: GOD! Yeah! Read it and weep, fellow godless:
http://www.chukanovenergy.com/
G’night, Ol’Greg. Good luck with the upgrade! It took me a while to deal with Win7, but I’m good with it now.
Oh, I liked Dr. Schwab’s book too. Good stuff.
WowbaggerOM, that’s only reasonably socially ept, as in, my social miscues are no longer in the Epic Fail category. Socially comfortable is another subject all together.
Flex at #728:
Yes, I’ve read Weirdstone, Moon of Gomrath, and now I’m reading Elidor–all “juveniles”– demographically accurate I guess, but a little patronizing (not you, the label). Garner’s juveniles are better written than 90% of the stuff marketed to the past-18 set.
Please do re-read them. And, Jumping Jehosaphat, I am VERY claustrophobic, and when I got to the cave scene in Weirdstone I almost couldn’t finish it. His little detail about a passage being big enough if you could fit your head and one arm in–Oy! I’m shuddering again.
Carlie:
There’s a difference between self-interest and self-obsession. Narcissism is not normal or healthy.
Cicely:
Oh yes. I’m perfectly ept, socially. I was raised to be. I am not, however, social in nature. Social gatherings tire me out and it takes me a long time to recover from them. I’m one of those people who needs a lot of time alone. When I do decide to do ‘social’, my preference is a few close friends over to dinner or somesuch. I don’t care for large gatherings. And, for as much as I ‘talk’ online, I don’t talk much in person. I tend to find a quiet corner to listen and watch.
Carlie,
I understand. Many people have quit reading because the series got so bogged down. Don’t fret though. I’ll tell you how it all ends :)
Anyways, I’ve got to get some sleep. ‘Night everyone.
G’night, Pygmy Loris. I think I might have an early night, it’s not been a great day. Yeah, that’s best. G’night, all!
Caine, Fleur du mal wrote:
I’m the opposite; the main reason I’ve grown to dislike social gatherings is because I like to talk but don’t known anyone who wants to listen to what I want to talk about. Being forced to sit quietly and listen to whatever banalities are the topic du jour is pretty much intolerable to me.
As a result I’d far rather be at home.
Time for bed here too. Night all…
‘night.
Well… I’ve gotten myself in a tizzy again dealing with CFI apologists… I think I need some sleep as well…
G’night, Ned…
Jadehawk
I usually just lurk around this place but I felt the need to comment because I feel your pain, well really my pain. I have had lower back pain for about 30 years. Two things that make a big difference for me are how I sit and walking. Read a book years ago about chairs and how they are not well designed for backs (I think the title was Chair). But the author recommended “perching” so that legs are not at 90 degrees but about 45 instead. Hard to do at most desks but as a teacher I use a high stool instead of a chair and perch on it. I also get relief if I walk. Sometimes it is hard to get going, so much pain. My inclination is to rest until it gets better but it generally doesn’t improve as much if I stay in bed than if I get up and walk through the pain. If I walk for even a mile or so every couple days I reduce my pain drastically, even stay relatively pain free. Course then I spend hours catching up on the endless thread, sitting in my regular chair, and I’m back to square one. My two cents.
Regarding back pain, a few tricks:
When I drive in a car for long, I slide a paperback book down behind my lumbar region–I cannot afford a fancy-seat car, and a book is alway handy for waiting times. This helps in other seats, some times, and is a lot less old-fart than dragging around a pillow. (Courtesy of my brother.)
When I wash dishes, I open the cupboard doors under the sink so I can stick my knees in, and sit on a stool–not a chair. Being at the right height makes a big difference. Applies elsewhere, also.
In my bathroom sink, I installed a tall, swoopy faucet with handicap-type knobs and a bigger sink to catch the added splashing. I don’t have to bend when brushing my teeth, now.
I also learned to use my arms and legs to help my back whenever possible.
I switched to a recumbent bike. (Also courtesy of my brother.)
That’s what has helped me, anyhow, and things haven’t gotten much worse over the last 20 years. But when it hurts, it hurts.
Oh, and I use a walking stick when I walk, but that is mostly for my knees and for fending off the adoring ladies.
Menies and gentleladies, may I present to you:
The Holy Bible: Stock Car Edition
Yeehaw!
I’m kicking myself for not having thought of this first. They’ll sell a bazillion of ’em down here in Florida alone.
Wowbagger: Band of Brothers was a great miniseries. I’ll have to wait until The Pacific is released on DVD, because I’m kind of a tight-ass with money. One of my grandfathers was in Patton’s army and the other was in the Pacific. I’d love to have known about their experience…but I was too stupd to ask before they died.
[It’s OK…I asked them a lot of other stuff…just not about the war].
I posted an initial batch of my Kaua’i pix on Flickr. Yes the colors are like that.
It is marvelous what time in Hawai’i does for my sense of proportion.
Social gatherings tire me out and it takes me a long time to recover from them.
Me too, Caine. After the first-night crash in a pleasant little motel near the Lihue airport, we spent four nights up in the mountains in the caretaker’s cottage at a YWCA camp with, apparently, no other human beings within miles of us. It was wonderful. (Camp Sloggett. Highly recommended.)
chukanovenergy.com/
If you chuck anov energy at it, it works?
That virtuous-Schadenfreude thing: I used to tell myself I was lucky to have lived past puberty. I had a hatful of hard-luck stories to draw on: one I hadn’t met, who’d died (at um 10?) because she had both sickle-cell and cystic fibrosis, which is a really bad genetic daw when you think of the demographics; and one tot I’d taken care of a lot, who had been born with liver cancer. Really. Big liver found on palpation with her Apgar score. No obvious risk factors for her, either. Took about two years to kill her.
Didn’t work too well as a cheering-up strategy though, really.
(reaches up) Errol Morris (the filmmaker) allowed him to turn it into a self-serving, selectively factual “poor me” piece.
That’s Morris’ method. If you ever get a chance to see his first movie Gates of Heaven, wait got the vengeful granny monologue.
And now for a refreshing non sequitur:
Am I the only one who imitates NPR news announcers while driving in the car? They all have such distinctive, predictable, uncannily-the-same-every-time delivery styles; I find them at once fascinating and repellant.
On any given afternoon, you can find me sitting at a red light saying, “From NPR News in Washington, I’m Ann Taylor,” just after she does. I’m so good at it, I bet I could make you think I really am Ann Taylor. I’ve got the whole nasal “a” in “Ann” thing going, and I purse my lips just right at the end of the delivery, since there’s an ever so slightly disapproving quality to her announcement of her own name.
Also, she cannot pronounce the word “industrial.” She has a hard time enunciating the vowels, so it comes out thus:
“The Dow Jones Industrul average rose today by 120 points, the largest single. . .”
I have noted that, but I do not imitate it, as it is annoying.
What is that you say? No one else obsesses over this sort of thing, and I sound more than a little creepy?
alright, thanks for the advice everybody.
–> my bras are reasonably well-fitted; the one and only advantage of having worked at VS for a while is that they do teach how to make a bra fit right
–>I suspect you’re right about the mattress. It’s ancient, and it’s my boyfriend’s and he likes them softer than I do*, but there’s nothing I can do about this right now, since mattresses are not in my budget right now (though I suppose I can start looking and saving for it)
–>I’ve stopped using pillows since they make the pain worse; now I sleep with a blanket rolled up into a comfortable shape.
–>I don’t sit at my computer in a chair, because I find that position unbearable; I have an ancient recliner on which I sit crosslegged. Now it occurs to me that I probably lean waaaaay to much forward while on the computer, so I’m thinking I’ll invest in one of these breakfast trays and put keyboard and mouse on that. That should help.
–>will greatly appreciate advice on good exercise for my back; will also look up medical terms John Morales just threw at me :-p
– – – –
*I used to sleep on a think IKEA Futon, with a pillow under my lower back; that was perfect
thin, not think.
At last!!
The perfect gift for the atheist that already has everything.
The bacon suit with Bonus Bacon Scent Included.
Toooo freaky Josh. I’ve been known to say “I’m Robert Siegel, [voice goes up a testicle or two or two] and I’m Mee-shell Norris”.
Jebus, All Things Considered plays the most boring music.
Ron Sullivan,
Is Gates of Heaven Good? It sounds interesting in that look-at-those-funny-Americans kind of way.
Jadehawk, a quick, cheap fix (not ideal, but perhaps passable) might be to stick a flat board under your side of the mattress; it will ameliorate sag and the consequent spinal curvature.
Amb, I’m so glad I’m not the only one!!!
“Mee-shell Norris” – ugh, that woman annoys me. Her delivery strikes me as, well, inappropriate. It doesn’t matter what kind of story she’s reporting, she coos into the microphone like she’s trying to seduce you. I find it really jarring. I want her to stop nibbling on my ear, vocally speaking. . . I mean shit, is this All Things Considered or a TV ad plugging a Hot Local Singles Line™?
Well, slap me upside the head with a catfish. I just realized that I do not have to keep scrolling down through this endless thread trying to find the last comment that I read the last time I was on. The date/time info up there to the right in the comment header is bookmarkable.
I just right-click and bookmark it into my Literature folder. And delete the old bookmark when I feel like it. And I can do that for a bunch of threads. Wow.
Not that I don’t want to re-read everything a dozen times, but I should be doing other things now and then.
Phil Plait has a good article on
The Pope, the Church, and skepticism that I appreciated as well-thought and well-written.
He mentions PZ in it, and seems to have mis-read PZ’s article and attitude on the same subject. I see both as usually getting after the church as skeptics and as atheists, but, in this child-raping case, stepping up for justice as all righteous humans should.
You read, you decide. I just don’t want to see my two favorite bloggers on the outs over the damn Pope.
Josh, yeah Mee-shell can be a bit annoying, but if the content’s there I can bear her.
I’m happy as long as I can tune in safe in the knowledge that there will always be: a) a report on atrocities in Iraq; b) a report on unemployed auto workers in Detroit and c) an essay or poem written and read by a sensitive soul who lives in the woods and has been moved to literary logorreah by the first robin of spring/snowfall of winter/squid of the squidding season.
Thanks for the link, Menyambal.
Phil is concerned; for me, this is the salient portion of his post:
His concern is noted.
Oh, yes! That is the best summation of NPR’s daily broadcast I’ve ever seen. Ah, laughter is good:)
Heh heh. I do like All Things Considered. I think it’s the only NPR radio show we get here in Oz.
Newshour with Jim Lehrer is on TV but I can never be bothered, especially since I already have Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart on cable.
Jadehawk, OM,
a good resource for back info and exercises is YouTube. Here is a vid suggestion for back pain.
Good luck!
Ok, I can’t sleep tonight to save my life, but one thing that is bothering me is that I actually feel really bad if Walton got hurt by today’s constant talking about him.
I was going to email this privately but I realized I don’t know how so I’ll just say it here.
I’m sorry :( I hope you’re ok and that you do well on your tests.
Now goodnight quite sincerely. I have to be back up in a couple hours to go to work. I’ve been such an internet addict the past two months. Time to get back on crack :P
Dust, those exercises in the vid you’ve linked to seem alright (basically, ‘good-morning’s (minus the broomstick/bar, which I would recommend) and hyperextensions); that said, I’d not recommend going to YouTube and just finding stuff people have put up.
Better to do some research, go to an .edu domain preferably. There’s a lot of woo out there.
Don’t trust arbitrary people on the internet, don’t trust me!!
NB when beginning any exercise regime, start slow and don’t push yourself; it takes time and you should build up slowly.
Do less than you can do, to start; less reps, less extension, less weight.
See how you feel after recovery, do a little bit more next time. Rest a day or two, then repeat.
This is a long-term proposition, there ain’t no quick fixes!
Seriously.
dilemmas to ponder over the next couple months:
Rebecca Goldstein, or Germany vs. Serbia?
An evening of atheist entertainment, or England vs. Algeria?
AC Grayling, or Netherlands vs. Japan?
Fancy dinner with a bunch of atheists, or Cameroon vs. Denmark?
– – – – – – – – – – – –
and on that note, I’ve changed my mind about the going out in the evening of the 17th. It’s France vs. Mexico; I’m so staying up for that, even if it takes intravenous Caffeine to keep me awake.
Another stupifyingly simple recipe:
Radis Beurre
Ingredients:
Good bread
Quality butter
Tasty radishes
Preparation:
Eat them together
I do try. I used to be better at talking about stuff other than myself, when I had more mental energy and wasn’t preparing for exams. But it is true that, for the last few weeks, about 90% of my posts have consisted of me complaining about how badly my work is going. I will try and stop doing that, since it is self-centred of me considering that other people have much more serious problems than I do, and my endless complaining probably just depresses and/or irritates other people without achieving very much.
So you are right, and I’m sorry if I was too melodramatic last night. Most of what you said was absolutely true, and I’ll try and change my behaviour in light of this.
Ol’Greg,
It’s fine. You didn’t do anything wrong. The conversation with Caine was one I needed to have; when my behaviour is inadvertently annoying people, I need to know about it so that I can change the way I’m behaving. And you didn’t say anything that hurt me.
Books: Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams (both rather popular on Pharyngula), Tom Clancy (probably not so popular on Pharyngula), John Grisham, P.G. Wodehouse, Tolkien (not so much any more, but Lord of the Rings was my favourite book as a child), and more recently Lois McMaster Bujold (I’ve only read one of her books, but it was great).
(I enjoy space-opera-type sci-fi generally, but I’ve never read much “serious” sci-fi; I do quite like Asimov, but I never got into Heinlein apart from Starship Troopers, and I’ve never read anything by Vonnegut. And I hate Philip K. Dick. His books freak me out.)
TV: All series of Star Trek (as mentioned on other threads), Babylon 5, the new Battlestar Galactica (I never saw the original version), NCIS, and Picket Fences (the show which first made me want to become a lawyer, but hardly anyone else in the UK even seems to have heard of it).
Films: All the Star Wars films (including the modern ones), Forrest Gump, action films such as The Hunt for Red October and Air Force One, the whole Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series, most of the Star Trek movies (I haven’t seen all of them), the Back to the Future series, Crimson Tide (it’s years since I last watched it, but it was awesome), and too many others to list.
Jadehawk,
AC Grayling is so worth seeing. I’d have been happy just getting to the talk with the thousands of others; that I got to chat to him after the dinner at the GAC – and that he was friendly and approachable – was a bonus.
Oh, and by way of comedy on TV, I forgot to mention (aside from Monty Python, which goes without saying) That Mitchell and Webb Look. David Mitchell is awesome in every possible respect. I’ve linked to quite a few of their sketches here in the past.
Patriotic duty, that one’s easy !
Definetely atheist entertainment.
That man is awesome, he was very friendly and polite and patient with wasted me and Wowbagger, could have talked all night, but the cleaners kicked us out.Definetely worth listening to !
Dinner ! The ticket is expensive enough !
Maybe the 2 events could be effectively combined !
Change that right now! Go get Cat’s Cradle.
Walton, if you like military space opera, you might enjoy the Honor Harrington series (a homage to C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series).
Most of the books are available free from the Baen Free Library, if you want a sampler.
OTOH, exams are looming, so you probably should take a raincheck! :)
It’s pretty much all good. Kel’s already mentioned Cat’s Cradle, and there are the well-known ones like Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions; however, my two favourites of his are Mother Night and Hocus Pocus.
I do get to do something interesting today by way of studying: I’m now reading a transcript of Lord Goldsmith’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry (the British inquiry into, inter alia, the legality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; Lord Goldsmith was the Attorney-General at the time). It’s very likely that one of the questions on my international law exam will be about the legality of the Iraq War, as the Chilcot Inquiry is one of the biggest conversation topics in international law at the moment (along with the debate over the claimed independence of Kosovo).
I really can’t blame anyone for crying after that ending. Bender’s Big Score does however reveals it really wasn’t all that sad.
There you go, £4.68 including delivery.
Josh, there was a meme going around awhile ago about finding your NPR commentator name. Searching for it just now, I found that it even made it to an NPR blog.
Take the first letter of your middle name and insert it anywhere you’d like in your first name. And then your last name is the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited. Presto: You too can compete with Korva Coleman, Lakshmi Singh and Mandalit del Barco.
It’s really damn depressing that episode. Another one that really gets me is The Luck Of The Fryish, though that’s not depressing sad, but sad in another way.
I feel like watching futurama now, damn it
Hey, watch this:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/04/michael_spector_on_the_dangers_of_scienc.php
Over at Orac’s site, Michael Specter gives a brilliant 10-minute talk on the dangers of anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, and pseudoscience. Spread it!
In other news, the British Chiropractic Association has just dropped its libel suit against Simon Singh. Yay! He can get back to writing again. (Incidentally, some/all of his books are very good – especially Fermat’s Last Theorem and, particularly if you’re also interested in real war, The Code Book
Slightly disappointed at the emphasis on Science Fiction here – Science Fact is so much more interesting, for me at least. Any similar recommendations from you guys?
tbh, they both have their place. Science fiction gives an opportunity to ask “what if” while science fact equips us to see “what is”.
At the moment, I’m watching a Canadian sci-fi show called Regenesis and loving it. It’s great because it can take the cutting edge of science and explore hypothetical implications. Meanwhile on the way to work each morning I take a different science book to read to help my understanding about the natural world. Each has their place…
Not so sure – at least one train of thought has it that science fiction is often more of a reflection on “what is”. I’m not really knocking it, I read a lot in my time but….well, these days I mainly read non-fiction, because you don’t have to make it up.
I’ve just read Anthony Beevor’s “Berlin – the Downfall”. Fuck. You just couldn’t make that up.
I read the first book of “Wheel of time” in 1996 or so, and grew slightly desperate after number 6 or 7, but kept reading them nevertheless, but then the guy died and the 2 books he wrote before his death were money-making bores, and now I’ve lost all interest.The first 6 or so are still some of the best fantasy around tho.
As to tear-producing TNG episodes, I always liked the Ro Laren ones.
For hardcore Sci-Fi, no way around Alastair Reynolds, try “Pushing Ice” or “Century rain” for a taste.
As much as I appreciate the massive benefits of science, and strongly advocate a scientific worldview, I’m not a scientist and don’t have much knowledge or awareness of most fields of science, not having studied it at all beyond secondary school level. But I love science fiction – even the kinds that I know to be scientifically implausible and more fantasy-ish, such as Star Wars – and it also gets me interested in some areas of science that I would otherwise know nothing whatsoever about, such as astronomy.
I don’t think science fiction is necessarily about science, as such; it doesn’t matter that the science is sometimes rather *ahem* creative. Like all good stories, good science fiction teaches us a lot about ourselves, our aspirations and our values, and provides an outlet for our imaginations and an escape from the (often crushingly dull) real world. Whether the technologies and the aliens are scientifically plausible doesn’t tend to worry me too much.
I love Babylon 5 and the new Battlestar Galactica, for instance, because they’re great stories, are full of political allegories for the real world, and have complex characters with whom I can identify. Star Trek, likewise, seems to me to have become a lot better in this respect, and a lot less shallow, as the various series went on. Next Generation was a million times better than the original series; Voyager and DS9 were better again. I also like the underlying moral and social values of Star Trek – as I suspect many people here do, since it is very much based on an ethical secular-humanist worldview.
I like both. When I want to find about the world I turn to science. When I want to relax or have some entertainment I look at sci-fi. One of the things I like about science fiction is that it tends to be more imaginative than other genres. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the work is being inspired (at least partly) by real science.
Well, the smallest foreign town I ever remember visiting is Niedersteinbach in Alsace, where I stayed one night in a hotel once. Possibly not the best pseudonym. :-D
Hey Peruvians, do keep this one to yourselves please !
Heretic !!!
Ensign Ro was an awesome character. I liked the Bajorans generally – hence why I enjoyed DS9, which was mostly about them.
Holy fuck, Rorschach!
And there’s photos too.
Time for lunch…
Though, in general, I would be in favour of a new taxon leeches,
Meh. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. The politics seemed simplistic, they continually thought depressed was the equivalent of deep and the luddite ending was disappointing. Farscape, I think, was better program. It had more energy, wit and was more fun. Firefly was even better. So good in fact it had to be cancelled in its first season.
I’ll grant you TNG being better than the Original series, but Voyager and DS9 better than TNG?!
While DS9 wasn’t bad, it never approached TNG. And Voyager? After Seven joined almost every episode focused on the hot blonde ex-borg in tights for ratings. I heard the “When I was part of the collective….” speech more times than I could count.
I’m not sure you’d like the economics of the Federation. Although, the Ferengi might be closer to your liking. :)
As I understand it, their whole non-money-based economy was premised on the fact that, with the invention of replicators, scarcity of basic resources (food, clothing and so on) had been essentially eliminated. Due to replicators, it was possible to produce most things without labour. So commerce was only necessary in relation to those goods that could not be replicated and were therefore in limited supply, such as antimatter.
Obviously, this doesn’t have any application to the real world – since we don’t have replicators, and so goods have to be produced by the labour of human beings, who need to be compensated for their efforts. I don’t think anyone ever claimed that societies such as ours should adopt the Federation’s economic model. :-)
Wow, Dah Thread had all ten recent posts spots when I visited this morning. Sven will be happy.
Excellent News!
SteveV, heh.
The BCA’s statement is a pretty good copy of this suggestion in the comments at Jack of Kent’s, from April 7.
Proof of concept for a true random-number generator! One that generates truly random numbers! It uses quantum entanglement. :-)
<headdesk>
<headdesk>
I’m out of words (or actions).
OK. Now I’m cheered up again :-)
Various earlier subthreads, from up to several months ago, explain… parts of that anyway.
:-}
The highschool chemistry teacher told us the electron has about 1/2000 the mass of the proton. More precisely, it’s 1/1186, but we didn’t need to learn that…
I do sometimes remember where on a page a quote was. But often this memory turns out to be wrong after I’ve spent way too much time trying to find the quote again and being misled. :-(
Only two mistakes – bonne nuit, and vielle belongs at the other end. That’s all. :-)
I don’t even pretend :-)
Not that I have any experience, but I don’t think pretending to have a personality you actually lack can ever end well. I mean, are you interested in people who are interested in that stuff? If not, why bother?
Incidentally, smalltalk is remarkably rare and limited at scientific conferences. People will ask what you’re working on and (if they know the field) who you’re working with, but that’s all, and then they talk about their favorite research topics throughout the lunch break and all evening long… :-)
Exactly. I’m sure there’ll be some politologists to talk to.
I thought that’s normal ;-)
Toast is a rare treat. :-) It doesn’t happen often that there’s bread in the house that’s good enough to be eaten at all but not good enough to be eaten just so… and in Paris I didn’t have a toaster.
The bread sold explicitly for toasting is white, has never tasted good, and now it’s reportedly sweet, like American “bread”. <barf>
Sitting just isn’t for humans, and you sit a lot. How often do you change posture while sitting? I’m so
whinysensitive that I do every few minutes, at the slightest sign of possible future pain. Occasionally this includes changing the height of the chair – something you probably can’t do, lacking a chair. Works for neck, back, legs, everything.(Except that the general lack of movement has still given me some leg unrest. Now, in Vienna, with a nature reserve/park right in front of the door – yes, inside the city –, I’ve started going out more and running a bit…)
What’s more, here in Vienna I don’t put my laptop directly on the table. I put it on a pedestal so the screen is almost at eye level. This helps a lot!!! Having to constantly bend the head down, arch the entire back, or both hurts quickly and seriously. Don’t give in to the peer pressure from furniture producers! ;-) – Fortunately I’m capable of typing with my hands at chest height. My sister isn’t.
Of course I join the bandwagon of concerns about your mattress. My parents sleep on separate mattresses. If a mattress isn’t in your budget, is it in your boyfriend’s?
I wonder whether I should add some gratuitous snark and mention that there are other activities that tend (or so I hear) to require strenuously maintained postures. Recently a paper came out claiming that one of those activities is where carpal tunnel syndrome really comes from… B-)
Not sure what you mean. I quote something, reply, and go on to the next quote. :-) I type everything by hand except for the Gumby code; I’m a touch-typist.
It doesn’t happen often that I have a completely original point that isn’t in reply to something. When that happens, I put it at the top (so it doesn’t look like a response), as I’m doing in this comment.
The length is because much of the traffic happens when I sleep or am otherwise absent, so I have a lot to catch up with all at once.
6.022 x 1023, right?
Also, it’s actually Loschmidt’s. Avogadro has very little to do with it. :-)
Was pointed out on another thread… but it’s a stunning development indeed!
I can imagine! I mean, I might not get over the utterly wooish taphonomy (turning to dolomite when being thrown into a volcano… riiiiight…), but… but…
Check out the “See also” section. :-S
Sniny!
You sound like a phonetician. :-)
“lat” must be Musculus latissimus dorsi.
Sounds good.
OK, I’m coming. I’ll be for France :-)
(If only because of the impressive sociological phenomenon that Zinédine* Zidane became the French national hero in 1998. I watched that happen, because, uh, the TV was on and my sisters were watching while I should have been doing homework. Xenophobia doesn’t seem to work the same way in France as elsewhere – to many people there, once you’re French, you’re French, and then you’re French! I think there’s a book about this. … Also, uh, it was a watchable game.)
* zin əd-din, “the beauty of faith” in western Arabic. This has been your bit of useless knowledge for today. Sorry, it just spills over.
I can imagine!
Absolutely. Dinners at even the biggest scientific conferences cost half of that one.
You’ve been to the neuroscience meetings?
Morning, Pharyngulites!
So maybe I should come just so I can be against Germany <toothy grin>
ROTFL!!!
But, yes, they can keep it :-)
<headdesk> ARGH! No, I’ve only been to gatherings of up to 2,000. My uncle has been to neuroscience meetings with 34,000 people (…that’s not a typo: thirty-four thousand), but I haven’t asked him about the dinner prices :-(
Bedtime for me, but I can tell you guys one thing, I didn’t pay almost 400 bucks to sit around in pubs in Copenhagen watching some fringe teams at the World Cup during that conference lol…
The Germany matches, well that’s non-negotiable obviously !
It’s acutally closer to 1/1836.
Good night, Rorschach.
Nice and quiet in the UK today.
Although that article says it UK airspace will stay closed until 18:00 BST, the TV is saying that they expect it to remain closed until at least tomorrow morning.
The last time this vocano erupted it went on for two years (1821 to 1823). Could be “interesting”.
Apparently Shetland Islanders can now smell sulphur.
Yes, now I remember. I also remember what I confused the number with: the destruction of Troy VII (as the archeologists call it) in 1186 BC. That one’s especially interesting because there aren’t many historical dates I remember down to the year.
<wince>
<wail>
Also, blockquote fail in comment 802.
Hmmm…I wondered too about “until 18:00.” What happens to volcano ash at 6pm?
And why can’t they just fly through it – or does it clog their jets? And has it never happened before?
Still, it’ll please UKIP. Which is nice.
Could be. I only notice it because my wife does pay more attention to what people are wearing. She’ll refer to somebody as “the one in the blue shirt” and it never helps me.
1/1836 is easy to remember: 1836 was the year that the Whig party had its first annual congress in Harrisburg PA.
It’s coming up for the 276th anniversary. Woohoo!
Sorry, forgot to respond to this:
I hope it was clear that I am not a supporter of UKIP. I think they’re wrong about lots of things, and would not vote for them. And they’re certainly, on most definitions, on the right of the British political spectrum. I was just saying that they are not morally comparable to the BNP – which I would have thought should be an uncontroversial statement. The BNP is a party of racist, violent authoritarian wingnuts, with a history of fascist or crypto-fascist sympathies, whose entire platform rests on bigotry and irrational fear. UKIP, whatever you may think of them, are not comparable to that.
And the fact that UKIP opposes British membership in the European Union does not mean that they are xenophobic or hate Europeans. There is a lot to criticise the EU about – the common agricultural policy, for a start, and the general system of tariffs, quotas and trade restraints, and the serious problems with its institutional structure (some of which have been mitigated, but not rectified, by the various reforms recently made in the Lisbon Treaty). I don’t personally believe we should leave the EU; but I rather resent your suggestion that it’s somehow xenophobic to be critical of the EU. (I would add that a lot of the tabloid press criticisms of the EU are absurd and inaccurate, though, and that there are plenty of people out there who are Eurosceptic for bad reasons.)
Man, it’s always when I leave town that these threads go zooming off. Here’s more space to scribble away.