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.
That video freaked me the fuck out.
Ooh, 10,000 posts by Dah Poopyhead. Must see if we can have a celebration. PATRICIA…
I like actor par excellence Christoph Waltz’s new version better. It’s the atheist heathen version.
Yeah, I’m returning to the old tradition of posting horror movie clips.
Impressive! *looks around* Who has the beer and the bacon?
Heh-heh. You said “mounting”.
um wtf
Is that Alby from Big Love?
Dang. “Der Humpink” would have been an even better video for a thread about mounting.
I’m reminded of the yodelling/polka tape my friend and I would blast from his car speakers in the school parking lot in retaliation for the shitty dance music or the harder-core-than-thou obscure alt rock the clubby kids and the scenesters would play, respectively.
I’m reminded of the yodelling/polka tape my friend and I would blast from his car speakers in the school parking lot in retaliation for the shitty dance music or the harder-core-than-thou obscure alt rock the clubby kids and the scenesters would play, respectively.
Summers during college, I worked for the Department of Residence’s summer conference staff. One of the groups we had was cheerleading camp. Week after week of chipper young women cheering for EVERYTHING (even dorm food) so they could win the “spirit stick.”
When I was in my room, and they were out on the practice fields, I’d put my speaker up to the window and blast Verdi or “Boom! I fucked your boyfriend.”
Is that singing zombie from old episodes of the Lawrence Welk Show? He looks like it.
Coincidentally, a phrase very familiar to the cheerleaders.
Coincidentally, a phrase very familiar to the cheerleaders
Not coming from the likes of me.
Are people aware of this:
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Pharyngula
?
According to DC Comics, we are a mass of stillborn souls. Hoo-Ah!
Thoughtless optimism is no way to win my spirit stick.
Congratulations on all the posts and everything, but I’m a little concerned about the numerology, because it proves what the believers have been expecting.
The 9999th entry, which upside down is 6666, which is just 666, the sign of the beast, only with one more beast digit.
The end of the world … tomorrow … probably … if not sooner.
Here’s a much more intelligent but also unintelligible (to non-Gaelic speakers) song than PZ’s offering. Clannad’s “Harry’s Game”:
We have ourselves a concerned apologist in the Sunday Sacrilege thread
matthewpopester @ 455:
@sili, thanks for helping out with the donations. This is the second classroom I’ve donated to this year that has failed to meet its quota before the donation period expired.
I hope some others can help out, too. There are so many of us here for whom science education is terribly important, and this biology teacher could probably use all the help she can get.
Translation: I have nothing, but want to pretend I do.
Another Clannad song, “I See Red”:
andrewblairesch @ 14:
No souls are mentioned:
@ Kirk, #16 –
Fear not the numbers. There are quite authentic manuscripts of the Apocalypse of John where the number of the beast is 616.
Note that I said authentic not believable.
Ooooohhh… love Clannad… although they have gone through a few iterations…
While I love the folksy Clannad of the 70’s and early 80’s, the ethereal, new-age, movie theme music of Clannad of the mid-80’s and 90’s is my favorite (Lore, Banba, Anam, Landmarks… all favorite albums). It’s been 10 years but I had heard a year or so ago that they were recording again…
Whew!!! That’s a relief.
If the world’s not going to end, I guess I better plan on getting a good night’s sleep and another day at work tomorrow.
And then we’ll see what happens after that, because, well, numbers are all over the place.
Also, going by the principle’s in Durkheim’s “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life”, atheism seems to be a religion that worships science and reason.
No.
Now that the law in Connecticut is trying to catch up with the bastisches, they don’t like it.
Lord Tzeentch approves…
MAJeff wrote:
$5 says this kid’s an undergrad who thought he’d baffle a bunch of stodgy biologists, chemists, and physicists with appeals to social science authority.
I LOVE Trololo. That guy is awesome :D
Can we add engineers to biologists, chemists, and physicists?
But I’d rather not sign up for stodgy. I’d prefer “thinking”, or “sophisticated”, or …
And we could include more in the list: English majors, plumbers, masons, people who think …
So that’s what happened to the Johnny Cab guy from Total Recall. But there’s a deeper story here, turns out the Trololo performance was an act of political defiance . . .
That guy is creepy.
And he obviously forgot the words.
For more fun with numbers try
http://www.digitconvert.com/
You can type your (or someone else’s) name in Base36 and discover that PZMYERS does not result in 666 anywhere.
****
Was that video a person or an early attempt at CGI?
Those blue guys in A*atar look more human.
I thought Max Headroom had joined the X-generation.
Oh, Kirk, I wasn’t suggesting that anyone here is stodgy (well, maybe Sven), just that the poor kid underestimated the breadth of expertise represented by the Pharyngula*.
*The Pharyngula being the swarming mass that is us, of course.
Hey!
I did NOT use HTML tags but the elves made it into a link!
I’m scared.
And I wasn’t trying to be picky.
I just always wanted to see engineer and sophisticated near each other, and nobody else ever puts them together, so, maybe I kind of bent this opportunity to do it. Plus I included English majors, as a kind of fairness.
Where don’t we have expertise? We are an eclectic bunch…
“Stodgy”, is it?
I silently plot vengeance.
But anyway, teh Thread is 4% of all Pharyngula comments?
We can do better.
Q: Are these post & comment statistics inclusive of the pre-Borg manifestation?
The singer in that video is now in his 70’s, I believe. I saw another YouTube where he is being shown this video. He seemed to be having a ball with it, and the fact that it was a hot meme. His voice sounded like it had not changed much – still very deep.
wetness implies good natural lubrication.
it’s going to take a lot of work to dirty up your mind down to the average Pharynguloid level, isn’t it.
As my grandma used to say, “get your mind out of the gutter and join me in the sewer.”
One foot in the door
The other foot in the gutter
I do not have much time to converse and I am late to the game. But I would be going against my nature as an evil and vile bitch if I did not link to this.
Please forgive me, it had to be done.
I saw that video. It was really sweet. He seemed so happy, and encouraged people to write their own lyrics and improvise with the song. So cool.
The sweet smell that you adore
Yeah I think I’d rather smother
This guy is Russian, but if you want to try a German example of European over the top schlock, sample anything by Heino.
The comments section of any Pharyngula post is just like stepping into a D&D meeting, isn’t it?
I really like D&D,but it should definitely be left in the library gaming room; there’s no need to take it with you wherever you go.
Please stop calling yourself a Pharyngulon, or whatever other bullshit derivative name you have. The world knows you are an overweight, 35-year-old scientist; it really doesn’t need any more confirmation of your virginity.
In summary: the posts are mostly good, like a nice hot bath. But the slime which lives down the plughole values itself way too highly.
The is one wide fucking brush you have there, SlantedScience.
Lynna, OM:
I never knew you could construct an entire human head out of Bondo.
If it had to be done, say no more…
BWAHAHAHAAAHAAAA!!!!!
hear that Pharyngula? I’m a virginal scientist in my mid-30’s. I’m sure this will be news to a whole bunch of people, my boyfriend first and foremost.
I just love these “you’re all [insert telling stereotype]” posts.
*facepalm*
*headdesk*
The stoopidity….
Your concern is noted.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one. In general I’m not that bothered by the idea of overweight 35 year old scientists though, even if they’re virgins. I like people who are interesting to talk to.
*shrugs*
To each his/her own.
Project much?
BiasedAssclown:
Who are you talking about? Jadehawk? Hahahahahaahahahahaa, oh my. Are you ever wrong.
Pharynguloid: a regular poster at Pharyngula. See, that wasn’t difficult, was it?
Goodness me. Someone thinks rather highly of themselves. I tend to think a bit differently here. We get a lot of
slimevisitors who crawl out of the plughole to show up here to put their self-righteousness on display.some pissant wrote:
No on overweight, no on 35, no on scientist, no on virgin. That makes none from four. Want to try again, shithead?
SlantedScientist:
“Please excuse me, but I simply had to go out of my way to take the time to write about what a silly place this is and display my clearly superior intellect and rapier’s wit. Now that I’ve done that, I must now go and draw a pretty face on my left hand before I go pleasure myself, because she’s a dirty, dirty slut.”
BTW…
SlantedScience, are you sure you’re not just trying to get people to click on the link in your name?
Because I did. I like tongues too. They are great in photoshoots.
well, none of the RPG-meetings I’ve ever been to included virginal mid-30’s scientists, either; not even as an average.
The only place Pharyngulon occurs is in your post.
But now that you coined it, I have to say I like it. I’d like to be one, but I can’t afford the warship.
Pharyngulons, unite!!! Oh, uh, maybe we already have.
This, also, has to be done. I Am The Slime.
Oh, if we’re going to play:
Not overweight (5’6″, 116 lbs), definitely not 35, although I wouldn’t mind that at all, being 52 and absolutely not a virgin. Said goodbye to virginity at 16. I have never played D&D, let alone been to a D&D party.
So, that makes you more than seriously wrong, doesn’t it, BiasedAssclown?
I liked this video, but then, I really like beige.
That post just made me think of a list of things I’ve done or been and I realized… damn… I’ve packed a lot into these years. It really doesn’t seem like that unless I try to make an itemized list.
Well, the scientist and overweight part is correct for me. Right 1&2. But then, I’ve been working professionally as a scientist for almost 35 years. Wrong 1. Never played D&D. Wrong 2. Lost my virginity back as an undergraduate. Wrong 3. 2 right, 3 wrong. Not even 50%.
Who is SS addressing?
PZ is a lot older than 35 years.
(no insult, he’s still younger than me)
The last time I played D&D we used pencil and paper. Getting it on to computers took all the fun (and most of the arguing) out.
Perhaps if we were to take the average of are of Caine and Ol’Greg and used both of their body mass, it might get close to SlantedTroll’s mental image. And for shits and giggles, we will award this person Nerd’s, Alan B’s, Ray’s, Josh’s and all of the others’ science careers. But there is that pesky virginity issue.
Ok, my stats are…yes to overweight, no to 35 (a good year but behind me now), no to virginity (though I’ll admit to being rather slow on that issue), and I’ve always found D and D too mainstream to bother with.
@#50:
Speak for your own “plughole” (ugh, wtf is that anyway?). And please, do it silently. No one else wants to hear about it. Or smell it.
Darn you all to heck, PZ….I had just gotten that ear worm out of my head!!
*grumble, grumble, grumble*
Janine, that works, except for that pesky virginity issue. Do we even have a known virgin? Walton won’t say, but that’s not reliable proof as to virginity.
Now I want to see a commenter going by the moniker of The Unknown Virgin.
Yup. Painting celtic animals on little wooden boxes—handled.
I prefer to think of us as a biofilm.
Walton’s also way too young to fit into that stereotype anyway. It’s kind of unfair to use virgin as an insult anyway, but it’s particularly unfair when the person is young enough that virginity isn’t that uncommon :/
Besides no matter what he says, Walton could be lying for sympathy and easier scoring. We should subject him to trial by water. If he sinks, he was a virgin. :P
Janine:
LOL. Me too.
Just in case anyone was having too good a day…doctor refuses to see patients who voted for Obama. What an asshole.
Okay, you guys on Walton’s side of the pond, you have organizing to do.
But what if Walton weighs the same as a duck?
Then he’s a witch!
Goose him. (My turn for “I couldn’t resist”).
Nerd, Patricia has been a bad (good) influence on you.
Seconded. Walton needs to be goosed. Repeatedly.
I understand the Gulf of Mexico is…available. :P
Uhm… sorry if this is too much, but aren’t we forgetting someone very important? (DM)
BURN THE WALTON!!!
wait
I played D&D once. Yes, paper ‘n’ pencil, I am not 35. As I recall (so hard to recall…) I rolled super high for courage and strength but low for intelligence and magic or whateverthefuck. So I had to be fighter, Sgt. Rock (some of these D&D
nerdsdudes were not happy about the “Sgt.” but fuck ’em, thought I). I went wading into any situation swinging a sword and damn the torpedoes and naturally I got cut down pretty quick by something magical or other. It was all pretty boring.Scientist? Yes, when I’m not grading fucking lab reports or procrastinating therefrom. Overweight? I’m going to the gym this summer, OK? And not stopping in to the bar as often! Seriously!
aratina cage, oh! Um, get to calculating, Janine.
what a slut… and with a taste for virgins, no less!
My first thought when I saw this headline ‘Okla. tea parties and lawmakers envision militia‘: holy shit, this is getting scary.
If the Mississippi should wash me away
Down to New Orleans
And maybe someday in my dreams
I’d wake feeling the sweat
From the gulf in my mouth
I have evil hand issues.
Oh, I forgot!
Virgin? No.
Have either Celtic_Evolution or Josh, OSG attained a Molly yet? I’m cracking up here over #61 and #73.
Josh, OSG hasn’t, he’s definitely getting nominated for the next one. I see from perusing the list that Celtic_Evolution is lacking a molly also.
yeah, that’s some fucked up, scary shit. state-funded militias are one step up in Teh Crazee.
OMG. Who is this obnoxious-faced kid named Justin Bieber, and why the hell is he all over every tabloid and teeny-bop magazine cover at the supermarket checkout? I mean, I know I’m Teh Old (yeah, 35), but srsly. . . who is this brat? I know American culture has an obsession with youth, but for fuck’s sake, he looks like he’s 12. In my day, teen idols had to be at least post pubescent.
No clue. Never heard the name before.
also from that link: “the health reform plan, which requires all citizens to have health insurance.”
I wonder if that’s quite accurate. I’d be very surprised if residents were exempt. But I’ve already noticed that residents don’t exist in the minds of most Americans (apparently including journalists): you’re either a citizen, or an illegal immigrant.
@89: Sorry, dude, but if you’re “grading lab reports”, then you aren’t a scientist. Maybe you do some science in your spare time, but…nah.
Like many Pharyngulomas, you know the tune, but not the words.
I’ll have you know that I am now 36. Dumbass.
D&D is for babies…I gots expert game, and a 13th level Paladin with the Armour of God. In your face!
wikipedia sez he’s some sort of “discovered on YouTube” popmusic-wonder. I lost interest after that first sentence.
SlantedScience: How true! All of my lab reports were graded by febrile weasels.
Caine, you’ll wish you hadn’t. But now that you have, you will not be able to stop yourself Googling him. He offers the Unholy Trinity:
1. Emo hair
2. Creepy/inappropriate “songs” about girls and “love” which should not (really, cannot) come from someone whose
testicles haven’t descendedAdam’s apple isn’t yet visible3. Autotune
Oh, it’s on, baby:
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2010/04/simple_answers_to_stupid_quest_5.php
(Was going to write a serious response to Rosenau’s article in that strange journal, but this is more entertaining at the moment.)
Hmmm
SlantedScience sounds so much like our old friend the Bird man.
I wonder….
SC–Could be. I was thinking Dendy.
Aw. Now my feelings are hurt.
What do you do for a living, Slanto? Ream out clogged plugholes? With a little humor, of course.
There is a certain level of not being all there. I have my suspicions he/she is no scientist either…
Did you mean that for otrame?
I actually caught a glimpse of a documentary about him on MTV or something last week and he was lucky enough to be picked up by Usher (Wiki says he got taken from YouTube of all places!). Apparently, really young girls go crazy for him. They showed footage of him in France where the fans almost broke his arm by toppling the railing over that was dividing them from him as he entered for an appearance. He is also really good at shooting hoops—singing, not so much but not that bad. And he prays before concerts (go figure). In the end, I feel much the same way about it that you do.
Oh yeah…sorry. Otrame…could be. I was thinking Dendy.
(I have a tiny-ass screen, and terrible vision…from all the overweight masturbating and EXPERT D&D)
LOL. Did you hear that? Scientists must never work for universities in any capacity that might be called “teaching.” Awesome.
Must scientists also never wear beige?
slantedscience wrote:
Need I remind you that were you the one who expressed the opinion that everyone here was a scientist (and other things) – so all you’re doing is contradicting yourself, not us.
Fucking dumbass.
SC – battle stations!
My sources are reporting military-on-civilian gunfire “… on the left side of the Aguán River in the municipality of Trujillo, Colon department, Honduras…”
What are your agents telling you?
Yes, Wowbagger.
Slanted: I agree with you. You were totally wrong the first time. Not everyone here is a scientist.
Although I think maybe what SS means is that everybody here is a loser scientist except for the people who actually are scientists because they’re clearly faking it and are actually business analysts in wolves clothing.
I think Bieber is 15, so probably pubescent. No opinion on whether he has talent, or “talent”.
Bieber… off my radar.
Saw a pic on yahoo or something. Music for people who don’t like music much.
My daughter, 14, rolls her eyes most vigorously about this guy Bieber. Not in a good way.
“@114: LOL. Did you hear that? Scientists must never work for universities in any capacity that might be called “teaching.” Awesome. ”
It is wonderful and admirable that people with science degrees who know their limits will take on a teaching position. Great.
But they then cease to be scientists. They become teachers.
Do you see?
Fuck.
http://quotha.net/node/872
SC – Josh Rosenau gives me agita. He’s so all over the place, and he’s such a reflexive defender of NCSE. Yes, I know NCSE is his employer, so loyalty is understandable, but he can’t seem to take on board any criticism, no matter how legitimate. He’s such an unreconstructed Yes Man.
And to top it off, there goes Orac backing Rosenau up. He’s another one I often don’t get. I absolutely love Orac’s blog and his no-holds-barred take down of anti-science, anti-public-health batshittery. He seems to have a strange blindspot, though, when it comes to atheist/secular activism. He can’t seem to wrap his mind around the fact that some people are just as passionate (and just as justifiably so) about rooting harmful and intellectually dishonest religiosity and accommodationism as he is passionate about castigating medical woo. It baffles me.
Now I see. Do me a favor, Slanto? Get in touch with my chair, dean, and provost and let them know that, given my full teaching load, I’m only supposed to be doing a bit of science in my spare time? Thanks.
@Cicely:
15? Seriously? Jesus, I really am getting old. He totally, honestly looks like a pre-pubescent kid to me. I was once his age, but I don’t think I ever looked that young. I’m sorry, but I’m sticking with “creepy.”
Wait…so Sean B. Carroll is no longer a scientist?
slantedscience wrote:
Why can’t they be both?
If someone works two jobs – say as an editor two days a week and the manager of a medical practice three days a week – are they then required to only refer to themselves as one of those things? If so, which?
Is it the one they spend more time doing?
The one that pays them more money?
The one they enjoy more?
The one their parents are most proud of?
The one that most impresses their preferred sexual partners?
I can see you’re still a fucking dumbass.
@124: No.
If you’re a good scientist, you’ll be able to find a position that allows you to do science only. If you’re stuck in a teaching post, I am forced to assume your science ain’t great.
I’m sorry for you and all, but that’s how the machine works.
Justin Bieber; emo hair
I will have you know I had that same haircut (bit longer at the back).
But I was a girl (still am) (female, at least).
And 16 years old.
So I had that haircut before Justin’s parents were born.
Damn.
Oooo, PZ just replied to Rosenau. Don’t expect R to even acknowledge the bias toward religiosity the NCSE displays, though. No matter how many times it’s pointed out in plain, non-emotive, factual (yes, even “civil”) terms, he’ll keep claiming the NCSE isn’t pro-religion or pro-accommodation. Even though they have a Faith Projects Director on staff. Even though the only statements they ever make about religion and science are designed to affirm that religion and science are compatible.
Nope, it’s everyone else who’s a Shrill, Strident, Atheist Freak.
Washed-up ex-scientist who went into teaching because of his scholarly mediocrity
So everybody here either is a scientist and won’t admit it, or is not a scientist but claims to be. And if I have not stated what I do, what am I? Ponder that while I don Schrödinger’s lab coat.
What the gay guy said.
It appears your machine only works when you’ve got your head firmly shoved up your ass.
It is a fact that kids are looking younger and younger, every year.
@SlantedScience:
Which one? There are at least two of us in this thread.
SS @ #121,
Hey, since you’re so sciency and all and part of science is doing research, how about spending 10 minutes online to see how many Nobel Laureates held teaching positions at the time they won the prize.
If only I was the very bestest turtle physiologist in the whole wide world so somebody would pay to do turtle physiology all day long every day!!! And I had a pony!
Can you quote it next time so we don’t have to read your freakin’ mind?
I thought that a ‘scientist’ was simply someone who does science, in the same way that a ‘musician’ is someone who plays music. And that the word ‘amateur’ was a perfectly valid adjective to accompany it.
If you had a pony, you’d just chop it up and do physiology on it.
Sven: May I say, that turtles are fucking sweet? Sexual reproduction in Podophyllum peltatum depends entirely on the gut of Terrapene carolina…and I loves me a mayapple.
Turtles are the über-herp.
Who let the DOGS OUT??
No matter how many times I see that I CANNOT STOP LAUGHING.
Therefore, God.
You may!
I knew boxturtles love mayapples, but I didn’t know about the entire-dependency thing. Is it a seed-dispersal/germination thing? Not, like, pollination?
In my experience, it’s more of an umami flavor. I guess it depends on how you cook ’em.
If as SlantedScience says, doing any form of teaching ceases to make you a scientist, does that mean his continual idiocy on here make him an idiot?
Boring troll is boring.
Yey! A well earned Oprah & Deepak blast. With some nice comments about how ‘prayer’ doesn’t cure cancer… surprise, surprise
And if I had a pony, I’d trade it for a boxturtle.
@136: there’re 23 for all I know.
I just went by the username, and picked on the poster who thinks that their sexuality is so important they have to make it part of their webID.
KOPD won the thread I believe.
Sadness. Colbert didn’t seem to be a fan of the Wikileaks guy at all.
*runs finger over eyelid* *sighs*
Some of us do think our sexuality is important, but anyway, does that mean you picked your webID for similar reasons, to broadcast a message about yourself to us? What is behind your choice of “Slanted” and “Science” with an acronym of “SS”? What does that say about you? Care to divulge that information?
Sven: Seed scarification and dispersal. And slow as they are, their guts are slower. They can move some seeds. I always used to find them as a kid among the fruiting mayapples. Good times, good times.
Once in my spare time I did a little bit of science on boxturtle digestion and food choice. I suppose a mayapple must be made of exactly what they like best.
Erk, only posted half my thought. It’s hard to tell where Colbert’s siding sometimes. His sarcasm was pointed against Wikileaks, but given his soft questions, I think that was just Colbert the Character. Given his interviews with Andrew Schafly and the like, he can ask much harder ones when he wants to.
@146: I wasn’t meaning to be a troll, I really wasn’t.
And I won’t even point out that your commenting on a troll’s comments is just what they/we want.
Maybe I was a bit abrasive, but I think my point is valid: Pharyngulators are a pretty turdy bunch. Especially those who leap into Myers’s requests to Pharyngulatize online polls. Those sadsacks who run like salivating hounds to try to crash inconsequential little websites.
I’m an atheist – which should be as meaningless an introduction as “I’m a Christian (etc)”, as Myers often points out – but I just wanted to show y’all that you are indulging in idolatory.
Have a debate, for sure, but enough with the Myers appreciation club. His aims are noble, but much of his output is childish.
Still, I’ll be here next week. And the next. The message must be distributed.
Just don’t count me as a Pharyngulatorian.
@SS, #149:
Please seat yourself gently but firmly on a sandpaper-covered sawhorse. And rock back and forth.
If you were anything but a recent drive-by troll, you’d know more about the commenters here. You’d get their senses of humor, and you’d know a little bit about their personalities and the positions they take on issues.
Since you are, unfortunately, just a drive-by troll, I’ll give you an elementary education: My moniker here is a lighthearted joke that other regular commenters know and respond to. My sexuality isn’t that important in anyone’s mind but yours, bucko – but my nick is funny. And you don’t agree, you can fuck off.
Is it your usual MO to show up on a blog, drop random, nasty comments, and insult the regulars?
@152: Seeing patterns in life’s random chatter? I think you’re in the wrong place” try AIG.
Don’t feel obliged to stick around, especially if you intend on being a complete dick to everyone here and alienating them on your first visit. And don’t worry, we won’t count you as a “Pharyngulatorian”, as there’s no such designation.
@157, who said: “Is it your usual MO to show up on a blog, drop random, nasty comments, and insult the regulars?”
Isn’t that the absolute definition of Pharyngula’s SOP?
Seriously, what’s your damage? If you’re just trying to pick a fight for shits and giggles, at least be honest about it.
SlantedScientist,
You certainly dropped a turd here on Pharyngula. Now our septic system is backing up into the yard and we’ll have to get it pumped. Damn. Didn’t we just finish cleaning the carpet from Pilty’s last appearance?
Overweight? No, 5’3″ (1.6m) and 100 lbs (45 kg). 35? I’m only 29. Scientist? That’s a good one. I’m technically in graduate school in anthropology. Does my research make me a scientist? I follow the scientific method, have done some research, and I’m currently writing up the results to (hopefully) be published, so I guess you got one out of three, for now.
What a strange and bitter little troll.
P. Dendy: You forgot to link to your blog!
Yes. That’s what happens when you ride a hobby horse finished in #24 grit.
This troll that isn’t must retire beneath their bridge that isn’t to get some sleep that, hopefully, will be.
PZ #141
Gandalf (I think) said to Saruman (perhaps) (c’mon, you know what I mean) something like:
“He who destroys a thing to learn how it works has left the path of wisdom.”
I’m not criticising. I think PZ is god. Or at least the next FSM or IPU. If he wants to take apart a pony, OK. There should also be a bunny.
Also
Is Slanty going away soon?
@SC, OM:
I noticed you and I picked up on the same baffling logical inconsistency Orac’s been
whiningdisplaying. In case you didn’t see it, my response to his on the Deep Rifts thread.Was that supposed to be a quote or something? You are a dripping mess with your evasive responses and transparent projection.
Here’s what I think, I think, by your own standards, your name says that you are an anti-science nutball with nothing substantive to contribute, not even small talk, just invectives and looney ideas. Time for your Pharyngulectomy.
If anyone is interested, my university’s newspaper just posted a poll about gay marriage.
http://www.psucollegio.com/home/
I like the way it’s going right now but I think Kansas can use all the help it can get.
Mmm. Thankful we are. Sleep, you should have. Logical thinking, hopefully, it will bring. Because annoying, you have been.
Dammit, there’s an appreciation club too? Seriously, we disagree here all the time. You obviously don’t read here that much or you’d be more aware, as Josh said. How about fucking off now?
Damn it. I can’t seem to get any news on Honduras. Thanks for the alert, Pierce.
I did. Well said. It relates to the point I’ve been trying to get across on the NSF thread at Thoughts from Kansas (and in my most recent blog post), if you’re interested.
Everybody stop conversing with each other based on the shared interests engendered by this blog! Buncha followers.
Gee, what’s with the crazies to night.
They have pseudonyms you know.
Miyeok Salad
1 ounce dried seaweed
1 teaspoon of dried red chili flakes
1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
Salt to taste
1 teaspoon honey or sugar
1/2 teaspoon white sesame seeds
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Boil the dry seaweed unitl they turn soft. This should take 3 minutes. Drain the water, and remove the excess water from the seaweed. Allow it to cool. Later add everything else and chill it. Then you’re done.
Awesome – will check them out.
slantedscience is a reminder of why we need killfile. It’s much more interesting without that kind of pissant clown shoe.
Mmmmm. . love seaweed salad, by any name or pseudonym. Thanks Gyeong, recipe snagged.
Jesus, SC. I can only take Rosenau in very small doses. Not even mainly because I usually disagree with him, but because he is the textbook embodiment of prolixity. Why use 10 words when 2,389 will do?
Slanted,
I notice that on the front page of your blog you have 10 posts. In response to these 10 posts, you have a grand total of 2 comments. One comment is from some other incompetent blogger begging advice re page formatting, the other is a thow-away about synthetic eyelids being delicious. Impressive.
By that idiocy there would hardly be any scientists at any university. Serious STFU. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Boygenius,
Sublime editing work there. Now we just need to get you a job on The Sunday Times.
Hi Josh,
I see that Ricky Martin is playing for your team now. Better late than never?
Um, better never. Any faggot like Ricky who spends 20 years making baaaaaaddddd “Latin” pop with female subjects in the lyrics while he’s really fapping to Menudo is most definitely not on my team. :))
Sorry, but still awake. Damn those big money grants.
To summarize: “This poster’s a troll. They’re here to waste the time of decent folk like me, who come to this website so I may jizz my thoughts onto the welcoming chests of people who believe the same things I do. Every once in a while, our leader demands that we go and bully a small website. It’s LOLtastic. Other than that, my time’s mostly taken up with taking postgrad tests, or scoring postgrad tests. Whichever.”
Look, the website’s fun, and I’d rather be able to continue reading it directly than go through a proxy. It just seems like the regulars (sorry, #157) believe themselves to be a kind of all-knowing clique, superior to all and yet impenetrable to newcomers with their pesky complaints.
Much like AIG, and all the little sites you’re told to Pharngulocize.
BTL is BTL, and noone’s reading this crap except us. But still: have a little dignity and original thought, eh?
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m harping on this, but I posted the poll notice in my earlier comment because I noticed that pharyngulation and homosexuality had both come up in the recent history of this thread. I am a supported of P.Z.’s poll-crashing mission and I would love to see this one crashed for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s an online poll.
Second, it appears in the student newspaper of my hometown’s university. Although we exist in a slightly liberal pocket of Kansas, there is still enough fundamentalist lunacy here to make nauseatingly dumb ideas a part of the atmosphere. This leads me to my final reason:
Third, I used to work for this newspaper and my girlfriend still does, so I want it to be a good paper. But when they decided to respond to a gay pride event with pro and anti gay marriage columns, this is what they came up with: one column that opposes gay marriage because homo-sexuality is an abomination to God and one column that accepts gay marriage because, although gay marriage is an abomination to God, we’re all sinners and that doesn’t stop US from marrying. My girlfriend had to step in at the last minute with a column that represented the sane contingent. Still, the opinion page is sprinkled with Bible quote over two-thirds of it’s content. I would love to see this
The paper gets few comments, so if anyone feel like educating a couple of small-town columnists, or commenting on the just-in-time voice of reason, all three columns are here:
http://media.www.psucollegio.com/media/paper437/sections/20100408Opinion.html
I’m sorry if I sound like a spammer. But this an issue that gets my blood up.
Yoda, baby, you just keep getting better.
Anyway, a little more seriously–or as seriously as this terribly serious subject deserves–I’ve been working on a nice little check-the-boxes form for the trolls. Figure I can help ’em keep things short, save us all a little reading time, save the ScienceBorg a little database space…
Y’know… instead of preaching ’bout how they’re all ever so much more independently-minded than the pathetic rabble here, and thus must wag their finger at apparent slavish displays of sycophancy in an alleged echo chamber, they could just check this box:
_ Hello, I’ll be your troll for the evening. And I’m much more independently-minded than the pathetic rabble here, and thus must wag my finger at the slavish display of sycophancy I perceive in this sad little echo chamber.
(… well, it saves typing, anyway.)
Also, we could have stuff like:
_ Language, people! Y’all are so rude! Why, I may faint! Also, clearly, because I do not employ such terms as ‘fuck’, you understand, even absent any noticeable argument, my views can be understood to be correct nonetheless.
_ You know, you’re all Harming The Cause™. For some reason or other. Which I may eventually deign to explain.
_ No, I’m not a troll. Sure, it looks to the untrained eye that I walked in here and started looking for buttons to push so obviously you could actually see me squinting as I tried to read the letters on each, but really, I’m trying to make a serious, substantive point, here. Something about sycophancy. Or civility. Either will do. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
_ Y’all are scientismists, not scientists. Or scientologists. Or something. My point is: science can’t do everything! Like make my mommy love me! Waaaah! Why doesn’t she? Why?
(Answer: because you’re a troll. And no one loves those. But I digress.)
_ Standard troll condescension channel. By checking this box, you are to understand I am doing my utmost to attempt to project a weirdly, rather sadly snivelling version of a condescending attitude, in the hopes it will stir anger. In the event I grow fatigued at the ever-so-demanding intellectual effort I find writing with such an attitude requires, please imagine it is present, all the same. Thanks.
_ Standard smugly vapid rejoinder box. If checked, please assume all criticisms are reflected roughly as imaginatively as could generally be exprected from a preschooler who has just learned that terribly useful phrase ‘I know you are, but what am I?’. Except even more obliquely. And speaking of…
_ Standard glib non-answer answer box. If checked, please assume any actually clear position coherent and definite enough even to be properly assessed and criticized will never actually appear in any of my comments. I’d vastly prefer to criticize you rather than have to defend myself, so please don’t let’s just assume from the outset I’m not going to give you the opportunity to reverse this on anything more substantial than my glibly obvious evasion itself.
(/I mean, think of the benefits: faster, cheaper trolling, a smaller DB… Everybody wins! How about it, Science?)
No, it isn’t that. It really comes down to common courtesy. Don’t come in to a place and deliberately stir up shit, insult the regulars, and then act all wounded about it. We’re a pretty laid-back, fun crew here. Yes, we do like to rip into each other (and newcomers) on substantive topics. But the ordinary rules of etiquette do apply, believe it or not, even here: don’t be a dick.
What the Hell?
So if the woman is crazy or sick, Nebraska is going to force her to reproduce?
Actually, the doctors will have to check her to see if the trauma of an abortion will make her worse, but it sure reads goofy. That and the fact than an abortion would be a lot less traumatic if the “pro-life” people weren’t worrying the woman to death.
I wasn’t aware you had a team Josh.
As for Ricky, there was rumors that he was gay long before he actually came out. I’m not sure why he waited so long, but I still think it’s a personal issue that shouldn’t be blown into something too big.
Oh, no no no… He’s yours, guys.
No. Take him. We mean it. We’ll miss him terribly, ‘n all. But really. We insist…
I mean, clearly, he should never have been counted as one of ours. That was just a terrible historical wrong, just one more way you’ve been slighted, and we’d really, really like you to have him now…
Please? Pretty please?
Signed,
The Straights.
(/No? How ’bout if we also throw in Tom Cr… Okay, okay… No need to get ugly. It was just a friendly offer… We’re leaving.)
AJ, I say we all (Teh Gays and Teh Straights) just declare them all off limits. Neither of us need the bad PR!
AJ, You may keep Ricky and Tom
But can we haz Eric Dane?
#187: “Don’t come in to a place and deliberately stir up shit, insult the regulars…”
Dude, listen: that is the whining we hear from tiny religious sites after Pharyngula has Pharyngulatocized them.
Great as most of this site’s stuff is, it is still an internet bully at times. So don’t come here, call yourself “thetopgayfella or whatever it is, and expect to be immune from Pharyngulotation.
If you’re all for the free speech and the poking fun at others, then please don’t bleat like a lamb when someone pokes back.
Deal. This can so work…
So now we have Teh Gays, Teh Straights, and Teh OMIGOD if you link to any one of these fuckers’ videos again behind some fucking innocent-looking footnote reference just for a laff I’m so not going to be responsible for what must, in any just world, follow…
(‘Kay, so maybe the last category needs something shorter. Still, I’m thinking this is progress.)
Jesus tap dancin’ Christ. You’re making this stuff up in your head. I’ve already explained to you my name is a joke. What about this are you having a hard time getting? Do you think PZ Myers actually appointed me “Official SpokesGay?” I’ve never even spoken to the man. Lighten up!
If you’re going to poke back, please:
a. Have a point, don’t just mindlessly insult commenters (as you did on entrance)
b. Have a sense of humor (not just a pissy, mouthy, “you stupid know it alls” attitude)
c. Once again, don’t be a dick for the sake of being a dick
slantedpissantscience wrote:Don’t use the term ‘we’. You aren’t certainly aren’t one of us; I’m fairly sure that – outside of The Intersection – no-one else is going to want you either. Pissant clown shoes aren’t very popular anywhere.
A site can be a bully now? Really? How does it manage that?
Which would be fine – if you hadn’t tried to argue that you aren’t a troll when that’s exactly what you are. People are pointing out that you’re a troll, and round here trolls get stomped; that you’re trying to deny it reveals that you are, as I’ve noted several times already, a fucking dumbass.
Now piss off.
Slanty,
Shouldn’t you be over at your own blog, trying to post something that doesn’t overwhelm your visitors with a crushing sense of ennui?
I mean, surely a distinguished scientist such as yourself can do better than a .2 comment/post ratio.
much better now.
mmmhhhh…. first thunderstorm of the year…. *purr*
boygenius wrote:
I suspect slanty shanty is suffering from severe delusions of adequacy.
Isn’t it almost a quarter after one over there?
yes, why?
lyrics to a country song are stuck in my head. That is all.
/can of worms
Slanty is a troll and appears a bit simple, but noone has the right to not be insulted, regular or otherwise…:-)
/can of worms
New Rules April 9
@Menyambal #188-
That’s really fucked up. I have significant physical and mental health issues, and I’m pretty sure that if I got pregnant abortion would be much better for my health than pregnancy and childbirth. Abortion is not a pleasant procedure, and there are risks, but the risks are significantly less harmful than carrying a pregnancy to term- especially in the US.
I wouldn’t support forcing or even recommending that women in my position, with health issues, go one way or another when it comes to unwanted pregnancy, but following the evidence we should recommend they get abortions because it is safer.
Really? I knew he was gay right off the bat. Which is cool, just. He’s a sexy dancer marketting his music to women. That was uncool >:|
But didn’t Darren Hayes do the same thing when he was in Savage Garden?
To spoil the night, tea baggers are having wet dreams over a
fatwahmilitia.I’m late to the party here, but… at just under 5’8″ and weighing about 133 lbs (in American measurements), I don’t think I could be described as “overweight”. Your estimate of age is also a bit on the high side, as I’m just approaching my 21st birthday. And I’m not a scientist; I’m a law student.*
As to virginity, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
(*For anyone confused: in the UK, where I live, law can be studied as a first undergraduate degree. I’m aware that this isn’t the case in the US.)
Jadehawk, that’s one of the only things I miss about living back in ND/MN. The thunderstorms here in Boise are pathetic. Short micro-bursts of storm that last for 10-15 minutes. None of the all-night, full-blown, grab the kids and get ‘down cellar’ conflagrations that I grew up with. Boring.
*sigh*
*facepalm*
*headdesk*
Walton, are you coming to the atheist convention in Copenhagen?Maybe you should.
Can’t afford it. I have no income, and am going on to further study next year, so my financial resources will not stretch to a trip to Denmark.
I used to love thunderstorms but now I live where bushfires are a deadly reality. The last one here came 3k from my home and killed two people. Bloody Australia, spoils everything. :)
Hmmm, not overweight, not 35, not a scientist…oh but my wife and I are both virgins. We’ve been keeping that quiet though, we really want our child to have a chance at a long and peaceful life. One out of four for Tilty: ho, hum.
Ah, Copenhagen in the summer! The sun is shining, the birds are singing and tall men are making love in the bushes.
I wish I could be there again. The only Danish I remember from last time is “Rødgrød med fløde” and “Dansk piger smag bedst.”
Don’t you have parents/grandparents you can appeal to like pretty much everyone else here who is going there? I have a feeling you would like it a lot.
The other person I would really like to meet is KG, but he hasnt been around much of late.
Is any of the americans coming over apart from Jadehawk btw? SC, Sven? And where is Emmet??
My parents and grandparents are devout churchgoing Christians, so no. :-)
Morning all.
Hmm,, given the apparent themes on the current iteration of the endless thead:
If I had a pony – Lyle Lovett
Lubrication and touching – Divinyls
Wanted something to commemorate SlantedSarcasm, but I refuse to hunt for videos of someone taking a shit.
Ah, Copenhagen, and in the summer. I remember it in the mid 70’s, free love, cheap drugs, wasted days and wasted nights. ambulocetacean, afraid the only Danish I remember is “endefuld mig hårdere!” What a wonderful couple of weeks.
Two girls, one cup might be appropriate, but we wouldn’t want to give Slanty any ideas on how to make his blog more appealing to his target audience.
“Target audience” meaning anyone other than the 2 people who have already commented there recently.
Should we start a ‘Send Walton to Copenhagen’ fund? Maybe he’ll answer the virginity question differently after that event!
And when is there going to be a North American Pharyngula event?
it’s quite adorable that you think your family needs to know what precisely you’d be going to. The fact that it’s an atheist conference really isn’t need-to-know :-p
I’d contribute…:-)
And btw, someone better start thinking about a Pharyngufest before the convention !
my plan for the 17th is to be completely jetlagged and go to sleep at 10pm at the latest :-p
Yeah, what Feynmaniac said.
I’ve kept myself in poverty for 20 years traveling to music festivals. I think I could manage to make it to a Pharyngula Fest.
Flight plan has it that I arrive around lunchtime on the 17th now, so a bit of time to have a look around, and apparently we have an early start on Friday with registration from 12pm !! But if David gets in at 730 or so we should still have time for a few drinkies !!
oh, I’ll be in copenhagen sometime between 8am and noon; by 7:30 I’ll be a zombie, and after drinks you two would have to carry/drag me to Kristjan’s place :-p
I am all for a highly caffeinated lunch though :-)
Sounds good. Remember, I’m coming from Melbourne, 23 hour flight to Frankfurt + 90 mins to CPH, so I will be worse off than you lot…:-) Should be at Hotel by lunchtime.
Would love some sort of Pharyngula event in the US. I was excited about the Copenhagen thing until I realized it would be about when I return to the US. Already have commitments for that time, lots of kids and grandlings to visit. Anyway, the US is big, maybe a couple of regional meetings?
As for our Walton, Dumpling of Awesome by Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, I would contribute to his trip. His pre or post-coitus status is of no interest to me and it is rude for all of us to discuss it in public. That said, will also chip in money to get him drunk and laid. :^}
Video Time – Saw Leonard Cohen in Brussels 01 Sep 74. Best concert in my memory, nearly 30 songs, made me a life long fan.
Interesting to see the latest odds on the pope resigning – 6/4 according to this betting site
Odds on he’ll quit? We can but hope…
You know, it’s entirely possible to read posts even at the original site and not read the comments. No, srsly! And if they really do bother you so much, I’m not sure why you don’t want to just use an RSS feed for the posts instead.
And I’m 36, dumbass. So there.
PZ’s presence in Canberra has left lingering effects. His name and arguments came up in the Skeptic lecture I attended tonight.
OK, I had to laugh at this one:
Penis sculpture must go before Pope’s visit
(In particular, someone with a sense of humor posted this caption to the photo: “Controversial: Paul Vella Critien’s sculpture was erected in 2006”.)
I’ve found this to be a more accurate representation of a godbot.
The pissant troll proved to be as inane and insipid as he appeared to be. Nothing cogent said. Never mind that scientists at universities produce the most papers. No cogency whatsoever.
Then poke back with something well thought out and meaningful.
“Wah wah PZ is ur GOOOOOOOOOOD and u is mean to teh other sites. ALL OF YOU cuz i KNOW THAT. and you cant take it when some one says u suuuuck cuz u suk”
That’s pretty much been done. Next time when you see a behavior you don’t like, call it out specifically. You’ll get further that way without looking as stupid.
Lastly, don’t try to pretend to know what you don’t. It’s obvious from your comments that you know nothing about working at a university. It sounds like you don’t even know what grad school is like, because you’d have more contact with the way that research is conducted.
By your standard an experimentalist running spectroscopy equipment for a company that manufactures camera lenses is a “better scientist” than a theoretician who publishes regularly and is employed by a university to research and teach a T TH lecture in an area of expertise.
Welcome to bizarro world where I’m a better programmer than CS profs. Now where’s my damned tenure!?
Pharyngulomas
I agree with the majority position about SS: he’s clearly no scientist and, based on his posts, not capable of being one, but I do like the term “Pharynguloma”. It sounds like the end of a carcinogenic progression: First you have the benign teratoma, then the malignant teratoma, then, most virulent of all, the PHARYNGULOMA! Pharyngulomas occur only after dominant negative mutation of genes involved in religious belief and upregulation of critical thinking sites. Appearance of pharyngulomas can result in poll slanting, poking of trolls, and vigorous argument.
Pope’s No. 2: Pedophilia linked to homosexuality
As a 64 (nearly) year old, non virgin engineer, who spends more time asleep than engineering, I guess I’m just a Sleeper.
Plus, doesn’t a pharynguloma connote metastasis? Like, leaving the home tumor to colonize elsewhere on the Internets?
Great application of the trololol song:
Poor JPMorgan Chase. They want those mean mortgage customers to pay their darn bills.
I won’t have time to parse thru all the comments, so I apologize if someone has already made this observation, but this video reminds me of those Disneyland animatronic figures back in the ’70s.
While I’m waiting at my desk for a call from Germany, I’ll take the time to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of weeks. Add a recipe to the pile.
I don’t, and can’t, call myself a good cook. (Luckily my fiancee thinks differently.) But I have developed a few recipes over the years, many of them from my bachelor days when speed was often more important than taste. I also haven’t reviewed Josh’s site, so if there are similarities with other recipes, I apologize in advance.
Okay. The first one is a quick snack, not particularly healthy, and very, very simple and obvious, but tasty.
Quick cheese tortillas:
6″ flour tortillas
Shredded mozzarella cheese
Salsa
Put shredded mozzarella with a dab of salsa in the center of a 6″ flour tortilla. Make 3-4. Wrap and microwave for 2 minutes.
Of course any filling will do, but I find mozzarella melts better and I think it tastes better than say, cheddar, on this dish. I also use flour rather than corn tortillas because they fold easier.
Artichoke Tortillas:
6″ flour tortillas
Rice
Salsa
Artichoke hearts
Shredded cheese (I use a mix of cheddar and jack.)
Black olives
Cook up some rice, add some salsa to it. Place a spoonful in the center of a tortilla. Place a few artichoke hearts in the rice, add some cheese on top. Fold the tortilla. Make 2-3 of them, sprinkle cheese on top and add some sliced black olives. Microwave for 3-4 minutes, until the cheese is melted. Serve.
My fiancee loves these. I’m happy to indulge her because the dish is so easy to make.
What an excedingly dull troll.
Posting on this blog to errr…complain about this blog. “Communicating” to whine about the people who post here.
Insulting the regulars. Accusing us of PZ worship. Yawn. Making some weird point about science-vs-teachers.
Listen you wanker: I would very much hope that all scientists are also teachers – how else to communicate the wonders of discovery? How else to get a funded, academic postion? (Interest – I have a science degree, but am not a scientist; I am, however, a teacher).
But you make the worst mistake of all – you’re boring, and not up to the standard round here. Please, for the sake of everyone, take your penis in your hand, stop typing, and spend a little time with someone who loves you.
And make sure you aim away from your keyboard.
Kisses. (Did I do good PZ? Did I? I did, didn’t I?)
Sheeesh. 243 comments already. (Just because I got up at 3 pm.) Who was it had the nerve to complain about the Thread being slow?
This seems a good place to announce the news (i.e. there’s noöne else who might care): I have an interview Thursday! (Need to get a haircut tomorrow.)
Of course … it’s as a high school teacher …
Another moron who doesn’t understand free speech
I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve out-and-out actually lost any tolerance of fundamentalists. Because if there’s one thing I can’t tolerate, it’s idiots.
As the self-designated President of Emile Durkheim’s fan club, I just had to react.
Sorry, but no.
Durkheim’s view is that religion is defined by the fact that it separates from ordinary reality a special domain that is called “sacred”. The sacred doesn’t have to be worshipped in the usual sense, but it can’t be disputed, challenged, denied, and even touched by unprepared hands.
What do we, atheists, hold sacred ? Science, perhaps, among a few other things. But only in the sense that we feel that mankind can’t be denied the right to investigate reality with the tools of rationality and method. The results of this investigation, on the other hand, can always be disputed, provided one uses the appropriate tools.
One could argue that this makes atheism a religion. But a religion that worship nothing in particular, and simply unites people around a set of values. Durkheim himself thought that, in the future, humankind would need this kind of religion to find unity again… because the old ones were now obsolete.
So, invoking his theory of religion to attack atheism is just silly. It’s an error than can only be made by someone who didn’t understand the Elementary Forms, and quite possibly never even read it.
Plus, Durkheim is a great guy, but he’s not Truth incarnate, and his theories are not an ultimate, undisputed truth.
And now for something completely different.
Out with the singing Russians! Let the crazy Czechs in. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jožin z bažin by Ivan Mladek and Banjo Band (with English subtitles).
And what about some overweight Oktoberfest singers? Why, then, there’s the Wildecker Herzbuben for you!
Don’t thank me.
Oh I thank you Christophe. I thank you 247 AND 248.
Tell them you’re going to evangelise the heathens – like Poppo or Ansgar.
I’m sure Smoggy’ll write you a letter of recommendation.
And I’m saving my donation for the “Get Walton Laid” fund. Though, of course, those two might easily be combined …
Christophe- at least that got the dugong song out of my head.
I wish I could go to the convention! It’s so much closer for all you Europeans. I’m already flying overseas the month before so there’s no way I could do it.
:(
5 years. 5 years is the max I am willing to live the life I currently do… then I’ve got to move some where cooler. Sorry Texas. You kind of suck, honestly. It’s not like I ever chose to live here. It’s all about the $$$.
However, no point in complaining about the sub-optimal synapses of the occasional outlier here: I’ve just been somewhere most interesting, perhaps especially to the Americans here – Vietnam.
(Lovely country, horrible government, great food, fantastic beaches, very hassly, cheap – do go)
But what interested me greatly was the aftermath of what I must now call “The American War”. I went to two principal sites: the tunnels of Cu Chi, and Son My – which contains the tiny settlement known worldwide, unfortunately, as My Lai.
The tunnels of Cu Chi are the preserved remnants of at least 150 miles of tunnels, built on three levels and containing, amongst over things, underground hospitals, kitchens, armament factories – from where they recycled the US bombs and explosived for their own use – all accessed by hidden trap doors and protected by hideous, ingenious booby traps. The Americans even built a military base on top of some of them, and were then baffled when they found themselves coming under deadly fire from within the perimeter – having shot a number of soldiers, the Viet Cong would simply duck down, pull the trapdoor back over them, and vanish. Quite extraordinary. Read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%E1%BB%A7_Chi_tunnels
It was an amazing story, in which the greatest army in the world, with the greatest firepower ever assembled was humiliated, and beaten, by a bunch of peasants.
Then I went to My Lai, to see what happens when a bunch of soldiers go mad, in a bad, bad way. Over 500 mostly women, old men, and children were massacred, mutilated and some raped, on March 16th 1968. One man was eventually convicted, served three years, and then was released.
The place now, as it was then, is a wonderfully peaceful network of paddy fields and straw huts, where the women cut the rice (the women do all the work in Vietnam!) and 3km from a blissful, still almost deserted, tropical beach.
It is a very moving place, as you would expect, and well worth a visit. Incidentally, there were some Americans, notably Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr, who tried to protect the civilians, and to report the massacre – and prevent the subsequent attempted cover-up – so not all were evil monsters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Anyone else been there?
Incidentally, Americans are most welcome as tourists in Vietnam. The Vietnamese have long since got over the war, in an example of an admirable, but most unusual, ability to move on from history. (As an American remarked to me: “If it had happened to us, we’d still hate ’em for it”).
I’m not bringing this up as any kind of anti-American thing – it was over 40 years ago, after all – but rather as a terrible example of what can happen, perhaps to anyone, in the midst of war. (And I don’t know – have there been any comparable events in British history, give or take the odd exploitative World Empire? And the slave trade. And… It might be that our history is censored so I just havent’t been told. Any info?)
Also, to my way of thinking, this war has nothing to with the war in Iraq or Afghanistan; others might disagree.
Perhpaps it’s just because the Brits are involved in those two coflicts ;)
However, one thing I did come away thinking was that, in the long run, it was a shame that the North Vietnamese did win the war, as it ushered in at least 15 years of hideous, isolationist, North-Korean syle persecution and bad government which has left Vietnam, with all its beauty and tourist potential, way way behind its neighbours.
Any thoughts?
That’s what I suspected was meant, I just didn’t find the “body of wetness” wording clear enough and tried not to err on the side of overinterpretation.
“With a lot of wetness” I’d have understood :-)
UUUUUOOOOOOAAAAARRRRGH…
The less said, the better.
Me – and I’m a scientist, too!!! Woohoo!!! Too bad I’m 27, have 62 kg when fully clothed (height: 1.75 m), and haven’t ever played RPGs (though I read two parody webcomics based on them).
(I’m somewhat surprised, Caine. I’ve said so way too often. :-) )
X-D
ROTFL! Who else than a professional scientist, do you think, grades lab reports? You didn’t seriously believe anyone else is paid to do that, did you?
I’m not going to listen to any of those songs, but let me just mention that romantic love can indeed occur long before puberty (rare though that is). It happens that eight-year-olds fall in love – platonically so, of course.
Uh-oh.
Dude, do you know anything?
University personnel is required to both teach and do research. That’s the whole idea behind a university: that students get taught by the very people who do the science, not by someone who only knows it from hearsay.
There are research-only posts at organizations like the CNRS in France, the Max Planck Society in Germany, and various national academies of sciences. But there are no teaching-only jobs for scientists.
Yes 89 %, no 11 %, vote total not shown.
“Small”? The first one was a poll on the Facebook site of Expelled! and took several days. That’s how we found out there are only 900 cdesign proponentsists on teh whole wide intarwebz. There have been several large newspapers, too.
Any fun is a side effect. The point is to demonstrate that online polls are utterly useless and must never be used to support an argument. It happens all the time that someone puts a poll online, writes “results not scientific” under it, and then writes an article about how 96 % of their readers are for goodness and against badness and how that means how the country at large thinks the same way or other nonsense.
It’s not a new phenomenon either. Before polls were pharyngulated, they were slashdotted, and before that, in the early 2000s, they were freeped (some still are).
LOL! You’re cruel.
What I just said!
:-)
Boooo! We get better than that here in Vienna!
Once we had a snow thunderstorm in spring. That’s right, it didn’t rain, it snowed. Now that was awesome.
Can’t they at least fund the trip, if you only tell them you want to meet people you know from the Internet?
I do think you should come, and not just because of…
Anyway, ask them now. The tickets will become even more laughably expensive 3 days from now.
…me harder?
<innocent whistling>
I can’t figure out what the first word means, at least not by using the usual methods of etymology…
Scheduled to arrive at the airport at 19:25. I don’t know how long it takes to get anywhere from the airport.
What about having a nap in the afternoon and being awake in the evening…? If you can’t leave your baggage at Kristjan’s place yet,
ROTFLMAO!
Low. Popes have the right to resign, but they’re also elected by the Holy Spirit, Who does not make mistakes in His personnel decisions. If the rate of discovery of scandals of the last few months keeps going for another year or two, then maybe he’ll resign, but otherwise it’s hard to imagine.
Remember the last months of JPII? He was constantly asked whether he’d resign due to his failing health, and he said no all the way to the end.
“I’d like to introduce my number one. His name is… Number… Two.”
Rorschach #204,
Maher has been getting better recently. Too bad the clip was cut short.
—
The poor word “bully” keeps taking all the abuse from sickos like you.
“endefuld mig hårdere” isn’t grammatical to me – though fully comprehensible.
“en endefuld” literally means “a bottom’s full”. It’s the noun for a spanking on the buttocks. But I don’t think we have a corresponding verb for the process. It’d have to be “at give en endefuld” “to give a spanking on the buttocks”. So the phrase JeffreyD was looking for was likely “Spank me harder [, Mistress!]”, but I don’t know what I’d translate that as idiomatically.
I dunno about Walton’s folks, but if when I was 20 I asked if my family would pay to fly me to Copenhagen to meet up with people from the internet… things would not have gone well.
Of course the cost is a lot more, but honestly they wouldn’t have bought me bus fare to Ft. Worth even if they were rolling in cash.
“Get Walton Laid” Fund?
Let him work for it like everyone else.
Goddamned welfare recipient.
AnthonyK,
I’d suggest renting the documentary, “The Fog of War” which is about McNamara. There are interviews with Mac concerning the Vietnam War in which it is suggested that if the Americans hadn’t joined in, and simply let the Vietnamese expel the French, the aftermath would have been much kinder to the Vietnamese. Even Mac admits, that in hind-sight, we made a mistake.
As for your questions about the occasional British involvement with similar results, I don’t think you can exclude their empire-building phase. I’d take a look at the First Afghan War for some examples.
Finally, if you really want to be depressed about our inability of Americans to learn from their mistakes, take a look at the Spanish American War and the resulting mess in the Philippines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(1898%E2%80%931946). The parallels to the current Iraqi conflict are fascinating. Of course, no details of that conflict were taught in any of my schools.
Yay! :-)
As long as you can stand the workload, that’s a lot better than nothing.
Priorities. Get him a social life first; the other part, I imagine, will sooner or later follow as a natural consequence.
Interesting that communism hasn’t done anything about that.
*sniff* But maybe Walton wants companionship too.
You guys are so crass.
*feels around for the fainting couch*
Forgive me… tis the vapours. I must rest my head.
Oh, so I was right to see “full” in there. I thought that must be wrong because of the -d. I was too stupid to recognize the “end”, though; probably because I expected a verb.
It has worked with mine, you know.
Been trying to work at the flat on my books today. For the last three hours a nonexistentdeityofyourchoicedamned sound truck has been cruising up and down High Street blaring out the manifesto of the Impact Party. Since I am on the High Street and had the lounge window open for only the second time this year, I am not amused. Had to look up the Impact Party on Google. Their HQS appears to be the truck, far as I can tell.
Anyway, since serious editing is out of the question, I can waste my time documenting more of Mississippi’s attitude toward the Civil War and slavery. Did you know that Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment (banning slavery) until 1995. They only introduced a bill to ratify the 13th Amendment due to pressure from within the state, notably by black leaders. Wait, it gets better. They ratified the amendment in 1995, but Mississippi never notified the US Archivist of the ratification. Thus, the ratification is in legal limbo and has not been officially recognized. (To be fair, this may not have been intentional and really does not matter, the 13th was ratified.)
Even in 1995 the ratification effort ran into opposition. In 1869, Mississippi passed a law banning slavery and the opponents in 1995 thought that should be enough, i.e., that State law could take the place of and/or take precedence over the Constitution. They never do learn, do they? I do find it interesting that the 1869 law was passed under a Reconstruction administration. This law would have been about as welcome to the racist whites of the day as a herd of porcupines at a orgy for the blind.
If this topic bores people, I will be glad to shut it down. I find it fascinating as 19th century American History is what I took my degrees in. Have also been working on “Lost Cause” issues for a while so the current nonsense from Va. and Ms. is like red meat to me.
No. Full-on communism really is shit. Now they’ve got a poor substitute for “proper” capitalism i.e. very bureacratic, suspicious (they’ve banned facebook) and rife with corruption.
And after the war, they had to ration everything, including rice. Rice! In Vietnam! (Now the world’s 2nd largest producer, apparently)
You may well be right, Flex. The war was so traumatic in every way for the Vietnamese, confirming everything they’d been told about the enemy (boy, did the Americans do a good job there) that they hunkered down and cast in their lots with the Chinese and Russians. Interestingly, it was perestroika and Gorbachev in Russia which finally began to let the light in.
Re: #608, previous incarnation
Thanks to Sili #611 and David Marjanović #623 for their replies on xenon as sedative or general anaesthetic.
This sounds good but the size of atoms is known (from quantum mechanics calculations). The diameters in pm for the Noble gases (Periodic Table Group VIII) are:
He 98
Ne 102
Ar 176
Kr 206
Xe 248
Rn 268
(Note: There are a range of values for the atomic sizes in Group VIII depending how they are calculated [measurement of course not being possible]. I have chosen one, self consistent set – there are others.)
This does not make xenon atoms particularly huge.
However, the larger the atom, the larger the possible polarisation in a single atom and hence the higher the interactive forces (van der Waals or London forces). This is reflected in the increasing boiling point temperature as you increase the atomic size down Group VIII. Maybe, the effect (whatever it is) is dependent on some power of the atomic size and hence the (not particularly huge) increase in size really does matter.
All very complicated. I think I’ll leave it at that! Unless anyone has any further comment?
Any thoughts on Vietnam? Phew…
The US should never have invaded Vietnam in the first place. It should have let the elections go ahead as planned and just got a straw and sucked it up when the Vietnamese voted for Ho Chi Minh.
If hell existed, Lyndon Johnson should be burning in it for trumping up a causus belli out of a non-incident in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The US should pay reparations for Agent Orange (Anthony, did you see a lot of deformed beggars in the streets and babies in bottles in the museums?) and for unexploded ordnance, which still routinely kills, maims and cripples people today (as it still does in Laos and Cambodia).
The US should absolutely not have imposed a Cuba-style trade embargo on Vietnam for more than two decades after the war.
Any time that the fact that 58,000 Americans died is brought up in the media or in conversation it should be followed with a reminder that at least 4 million Vietnamese and 700,000 Cambodians were also killed, the great majority of them civilians.
Where to begin with this one? Leaving aside the convenient but false distinction between the “north” and “south”, an American victory would most likely have resulted in the installation of a rabid anti-communist dictator of the sort so beloved by the US – Suharto, Pinochet, Somoza, Montt, the Argentinian generals. The next 15 years would have been extremely cruel and bloody in any case.
Re Vietnam being behind its neighbours, well, not all that much. Did you visit Laos and Cambodia? Those places aren’t exactly Club Med either.
And Vietnam had to start from way behind the eight ball. It was basically destroyed after 35 years of war against Japan, France and America. After the Americans left China waged a short war on Vietnam and then Vietnam had to go into Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge (nobody else gave a shit).
It’s incredible that Vietnam has rebuilt itself as well as it has in just 30 years, given that it started as scorched earth and until recent years had the added burden of spiteful trade embargos from the US.
It’s true that the communist government of Vietnam has committed all sorts of atrocities against its own citizens (and against the Hmong in Laos), but it was the US that wrecked the place.
What’s that buzzing noise? Oh, it’s just the bee in my bonnet. Time for bed :)
David Marjanović and Sili – It was nearly 35 years ago and I used a dictionary to try to find the right phrase again. The one I listed sounded about right, well, about right to a memory that was booze soaked and had ingested some recreational chemicals at the time. The lady was telling me, begging, asking, whatever the correct verb would be, to spank her harder. How would one say that properly today? My memories want to know!
Lucky you. FWIW, my family was insane and dysfunctional so… yeah.
“It was a shame that the North Vietnamese did win the war, as it ushered in at least 15 years of hideous, isolationist, North-Korean syle persecution bad government which has left Vietnam, with all its beauty and tourist potential, way way behind its neighbours.”
This line of argument never fails to infuriate me. Its unspoken assumption is that Vietname would have been some wonderful land of due process and democracy, if not for those nasty commies.
Due process and democracy were not in Vietnam’s cards, I’m afraid. For them it was going to be one variety of authoritarianism or another; and they were relatively lucky not to get the most incompetent and corrupt variety on offer.
None of this is offered as an excuse for the Communist regime–it’s just a concession to reality.
The current spate of Civil War revisionism that’s pouring out like vomit from the American Right has gained a lot of (justified) attention. I think the Right’s Vietnam revisionism is at least as perncious.
Speaking of random biological ejacualtions, that last post was TMI. No way to get that back, eh? Ah well, probably just confirmation for some of you. :^}
I know, but a remarkable amount of equality between the sexes (except in the higher ranks of the Party, it seems) was reached in the Soviet Union early on.
<headdesk>
Indeed not; about twice the size of a carbon atom, right? A lot of xenon would be required to have the effect I mentioned.
~:-|
No JeffD I find it interesting. I studied history at every opportunity and had I stayed in grad school I would have had my MFA and MA in studio art and Art History respectively.
I love the details of human interaction, past and present.
JeffreyD, no need to apologize for living a full life.
Haha… my post was in response to one apology and not to the other, but in some respects it works for both sir!
lol
People just need to quit apologizing so much. Is this an English thing?
I already have a social life (or I did, before I had to start revising for finals). That isn’t the problem.
Sili:
Congrats! Break a leg!
Sorry about that.
Speaking of studying for finals, it’s going very badly. I’ve only done a few hours of desultory work today. I tried moving away from the internet in the hope that I would get more work done, but just got really depressed instead.
At this rate, I’m going to fail my degree totally, and end up unemployed, miserable, lonely, and still living with my parents at the age of forty. Life sucks. :-(
Awww don’t do that!
I doubt very seriously you’re going to fail, and honestly even if you did you’d still probably find something good and useful to do.
Also all you have to do to keep from living with your parents is not move back in with them. But I dunno, I get the impression your a few social classes removed from me, not to mention being English so what I say may not make so much sense.
If all else fails, go squat in an abandoned building in Berlin. That’s what I’m planning on doing.
Yeah, you really need to get laid in Copenhagen….
Maybe you should go for a work out or a walk or something and then try again. Also, for every 2 hours of studying reward yourself 1/2 internet or something. Find a way to motivate yourself.
Walton, one thing you need to do is to take breaks from your studying. You will get tired of the subjects if you don’t. Breaks for meals and biobreaks are obvious. But take time to get some exercise too. Jogging, walking, biking, tennis, or anything to get the blood moving. Likewise, reward yourself with the internet after a couple of good hours studying. Don’t expect to study all day. Get a good 8-10 hours in versus a desultory 16 hours.
Mixing federal funds with LDS Church funds to teach English to refugees… sounds iffy, but would it be okay if the Church did not include proselytizing? Do you really think the mormon church would spend money on a project that did not include fishing for converts?
Okay, so it’s a mixture of good and bad. If the LDS Church wanted to be completely humanitarian, they could leave out the proselytization, or they could run the program on their own, without federal funds. And I seriously doubt that the Monday morning devotional is the only church-related propaganda inserted into the program.
And there’s the side issue of the economic impact of the LDS Church shipping bales of used clothing to third world countries. All kinds of middle men make money, and in the countries that receive the clothing local textile industries are decimated.
http://www.sltrib.com/lds/ci_14847549
To add to the replies to SlantedScience: This commenter is not 35, and not a scientist, and not fat.
Apparently it doesn’t involve enough people.
So he needs to peel himself off the computer several times a day!?! How is that supposed to work?
Aarrgghh, ick. Thank you, Josh. I hadn’t googled the creature, and now I get to read this while waking up. Nasty. Must get more tea.
BiasedAssclown @ 128:
Uh huh. So, you spend your time posting loads of fail on blogs. Doesn’t make you out to be much, does it?
At this rate, I’m going to fail my degree totally, and end up unemployed, miserable, lonely, and still living with my parents at the age of forty. Life sucks. :-(
Everyone else in your class is thinking the same thing. The vast majority of you are wrong.
Plus, doesn’t a pharynguloma connote metastasis?
Oh, yes. Pharyngulomas have always metastasized by the time they’re discovered.
Mormon History lesson for today: Brigham Young – Journal Of Discourses VOL 17 page 159- Threatens Hell to the women on resisting Plural Marriage
Menyambal @ 188:
These sort of measures are all about forced birthing. Most women are already in a position of having limited funds and travel time when it comes to obtaining an abortion. If someone then declares she doesn’t meet some standard for an abortion in her state, she’ll find herself in a position where there is no option except to carry to term.
Back when a lot of states imposed mandatory counseling and a 3 day wait, a friend of mine started I’m Not Sorry.net: Celebrating the Right to Choose. The people who want to impose these measures are absolutely convinced than having an abortion is a hideous trauma for all women and will have a terrible effect when the storms of regret close in. That’s not true, of course, but you can’t convince a pro-lifer of that.
I experienced nothing except relief when I had an abortion over 30 years ago. I’ve never once regretted it. If I had been forced into birthing, that would have been an overwhelming trauma for me.
David M.,
What gives you that impression?
David:
I’m so sorry, Darling. Your sexiness must have blinded me.
I’ll now finally start writing my abstract for the SVP meeting in October. For a laugh, check out the format requirements… especially the example of how not to do it. There’s even some toothy goodness in it.
It’s funny even without the inside jokes, though I should be able to explain all of them if you’re interested… Tobias Karbek <facepalm> X-D X-D X-D
2. Comment 209. The fact that you didn’t simply say “no” leaves me reacting the same way as the first three lines of comment 211.
1. My own social life obviously doesn’t involve enough people, at least in meatspace, where – never mind sex – I’ve never been in love, nor has anyone been in love with me. Generalising from myself is the most parsimonious option available to me…
:-S
You do know you’re almost my mother’s age? :-) In fact, I’d probably have liked it a lot to have you as my mother.
:o)
David:
LOL. I’m not mother material. You would have been pretty much left to your own devices.
Thanks for your interesting comments re Vietnam. Just because I spent a few weeks there it doesn’t give me any real knowledge, just fleeting impressions.
I met quite a number of South Vietnamese who had of course been treated very badly after the war. Counterfactual History, while interesting, would give even Heisenberg a headache.
What a fascinating place, though. And yes, it was the Vietnamese who put an end to the Khmer Rouge, an infinitely worse regime, and one of those long moments of madness (My Lai lasted only 4 hours) to which mankind seems to be susceptible.
What causes this, do you think? Is there really an objective Evil of which this is the purest manifestation?
That God, eh. If he does exist, he’s a complete cunt.
Don’t worry too much about your finals, Walton. I’m sure you’ll be OK. I remember my own finals, in Chemistry, at Oxford, many years ago. After three days of 2×3 hours exams, during which I realised that I had learnt no chemistry whatsover in the preceding years, and feeling suitably suicidal, I was lucky enough to see a performance of Beckett’s Endgame, directed by him and performed by his favourite company, from San Quintin prison.
The play was so unremittingly, judderingly bleak – and brilliant – that I realised that my life was never, and would never be as bad as that. And the last two exams were a breeze. Thanks Sam!
I did get a third, though.
I think the latter point is where you’re going wrong. While you and I may have a similar lack of romantic experience, we don’t have the same basic problem at all.
By way of information, I’ve had a fairly active social life throughout my time at university. I have at least tried all the typical student experiences of getting drunk, going to parties and so on. My social circle is reasonably wide.
Gosh – you fossil-bone fellas have an unexpectedly cool sense of humour!
But then, judging by you, David, I should have guessed.
I bet you have farting competitions after the symposia (um…symposiums?), which make you all laugh milk out of your noses.
Ah. A “gentleman’s degree”, as I’ve occasionally heard it described. That’s not too reassuring. :-)
But to be fair, chemistry is known to be one of the hardest degrees; I know several chemists who are on the verge of failing. By contrast, the vast majority of law students come out with a 2.i – which will make it particularly embarrassing if I end up with a third. :-(
That was me with that nerve. But in my defense, at the time it was slow.
That’s Dom Deluise and John Candy!
I was thinking about Slanto’s bullshit and it occured to me that I have known 3 members of the National Academy of Sciences. All 3 insisted on teaching undergraduate courses.
Apologies if someone else has already posted a pointer to this, but there’s an rather interesting read in today’s The Grauniad, How science became cool. It’s a selection of fairly short essays by Brian Cox, Alice Roberts, Ian Sample, Martin Rees, Laura Spinney, Kevin Fong, Dara O Briain, Sam Wollaston, Alok Jha, and Tim Radford.
The excerpt below focus on just one of the various strands of thought in the essays: Rejection of woo. There are many other ideas discussed, so these excerpts should not be read as reflecting the total thrust of the essays.
IME social life does not hook you up. I had a really active social life when I first went to school, but no one much was interested and those who were had… um… a lil’ too much swagger if you know what I mean. Lots of people know me, but I’m lonely all the damned time anyway. No figuring people.
Walton though, stop defending your social life on here. Do something fun for an hour or so. Is there anything you actually enjoy?
I’d say go outside but it’s probably freezing still there! It’s a beautiful warm sunny day down here, except I get paid to sit in front of this computer ignoring it.
Gee – well, I still don’t think you could say that Law was that easy.
Breaking it is, though.
Very fragile, our legal process.
And it is tragically badly paid, even if you succeed in it.
So… people who have had to work in close quarters with people before…
Have you ever noticed how some people get some really good mouth acoustics?
OM NOM NOM NOM NOM
*gluuuurp*
Just sayin’
Shedding Light on the Nature of Antimatter:
Excerpt:
I was shouted at for eating carrots in the office …
Mass extinctions, supervolcanoes…
Excerpt:
Now that’s just disgusting.
–o–
Someone elsethread brought up Gosho Aoyama recently. I just completed my (Danish) collection recently, and have started reading through the volumes.
I find that I’m actually touched by some of the stories. What the hell is wrong with me?!
Hi Walton.
You’re making progress!
#278 12:05 pm
#297 14:14
You’ve gone from total failure to trying to work out how you will respond if you get a third and you’ve acknowledged that most get a 2i. “Most” suggests you may have a better than 50% odds of not just passing but getting a good degree.
Don’t know about your Uni but when I was studying (the first time) few people failed – they got rid of the dead wood during and at the end of the first and second years. By the time finals came only those who were likely to pass were left. And that includes you!!
You need a stiff walk followed by a good meal and a stiff drink followed by ( … don’t misquote me …) a good night’s sleep. A good breakfast and you’ll hit the day running.
I was once shouted at for laughing in the office. Now I work for and by myself, and I laugh as much as I like.
Money to study yoga:
Excerpt:
Haha! I’m sorry Sili. This isn’t a one time thing though. He eats like 5 or 6 times a day, always at the desk, and every time (dude can put away half a sandwich in a bite) it’s like cookie monster. In his defense he’s a runner, but damn.
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to him though. He’s an all right guy, he just has some kind of amazing natural reverb going on in there.
I just wear headphones now. My pandora station is getting really good now.
Artificial light at night disrupts cell division:
Excerpt:
A girl once said this to me when I was in high school.
The following month she was committed for the rest of the semester to a mental hospital.
…
I rest my case.
Virginty and this thread :-
1 Virginity & Pharyngulorianists – SlantedScience has a thing about animal tongues. Quite likely to be a virgin imo.
2 Virginity & Walton – A “fund”? Prostitutes? Euugh!
It’s dead easy. Seriously. Have a shower. Don’t eat asparagus. Go up to some older woman you find attractive. Tell her you’re a virgin, ask for her help and point out you’ll remember her fondly all your life. Guarantee you’ll get a “yes” within 5 women. And none will be offended.
Still works for me :)
3 Virginity & Thunderstorms – Lost mine to an older woman in the back seat during a particularily violent storm. Non-stop, low-level lightning. Small car. Had to open the door to give myself leg room. Spent the entire episode convinced I would be struck by lightning, but wasn’t worried about the dying bit. Worried that our bodies would be fused together. Oh, the shame I would bring on my family! Joint funeral, weird-shaped coffin.
(Beats thinking about the Queen when you want to prolong things, though).
Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, or what?
#305
Thanks for this, Lynna. I did see it somewhere else – presumably from the same press release. Is it time for grant submissions, do you think?
Little or nothing of any substance but it will be interesting to see the results.
The Atlantic is “well understood” (perhaps!) because it is a relatively young expression of a constructive plate boundary with all the strain going into the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The Pacific Plate seems to be considerably more complex.
#310
Someone once said, “Mice are not people”.
One report I saw (admittedly in a newspaper) suggested that it was not as clear cut as this (what a surprise). If there was a real effect I suspect we would have already seen it in shift workers – there’s been enough shift working, after all!
Teh Thread’s been ah, involved, 40K times now. I seriously doubt it’s a virgin. And am rather amazed it’s still breathing. Rather hard too, I might add.
Forgot to add in my previous list of things that I am not that I am also not a virgin.
Not a scientist
Not 35
Not fat (though, depending on your predilections, you might call me nicely-rounded or plump or definitely female)
Not a virgin
I had a cubie mate who’d stand right behind me and loudly and open-mouthedly slurp, chew, and smack through whatever she was eating. She got moved, so now all I’m left with is the guy who hoarks up loogies and spits ’em into his garbage can when he’s not slurping tea.
Some days I’m a missing stapler away from pulling a Milton.
Thunder drowns out what the lightning sees, and U fee-ee-eel like a movie star!
Fuck, now I really want to do some karaoke. And have some thunderstorm sex. But karaoke first.
Sometimes I wonder where people punched their v-cards before cars and backseats were invented. My first and I were in fact just reminiscing on facebook about the car I had in high school.
Finally watched the video.
Now that’s a man who can tie a tie. Someone please show this to the zipperhead.
Brownian:
A lot of carriages had back seats. ;p I’d think hay lofts got a lot of use, they still haven’t gone out of style in rural areas.
Oops, hit ‘send’ before I was ready (hey, they tell me it happens to every guy at least once).
Anyway, she’s moved away and is married with children, but cars with shitty mufflers still make her smile.
Alan B @314: Of mice and men, good points. Though I do know some apparently damaged shift workers.
Ah, you’re referring to the supervolcano study, but I want to talk about the yoga/cancer study, so I’ll pretend that I misunderstood you: I assumed that the people who applied for the grant just wanted an excuse to go to India, do some yoga, and develop connections in the woo community. Of course doing yoga will have health benefits compared to getting no or less exercise. The yoga classes would also have a social component that women with cancer may benefit from, but do they need 4.5 million dollars to study this? I see my taxes being spent to provide other people with health care I can’t afford, including yoga classes.
We need to apply for a grant that demonstrates the health benefits of studying geology through field expeditions. We could include a twice-daily round of meditation performed while holding a small rock in the palm of one’s left hand. (Details are important.) Perhaps some of our fellow Pharyngulites could claim to be depressed, and we could see if they become more or less depressed after a few field expeditions. As a control, we could make sure that everyone drank the same amount of beer per day (adjusted for body weight of the participants).
OK, I seem to have missed the better part of two iterations of The Thread now. Rather than make any attempt to catch up on the ongoing conversations, I’ll offer a recipe (and this time it’s original).
I mentioned a while back that I’d tried pixelfish’s Leek, Mushroom, and Lemon Risotto recipe, to delightful results. Well, as often happens, I needed to buy things in greater quantity than that recipe actually required: I needed 8 oz of leek, which ended up being just one of the two leeks that came bundled together; I needed 5 cups of vegetable broth, but the prefab stuff comes in quart packages; I needed a quarter cup (total) of mixed parsely and chives, and each comes in much larger bundles than that. And so….
Leftover Leek Soup with Chicken
1 leek
small bunch chives
4-5 tbsp olive oil
1/2 lb chicken breast tenders
pinch dried rosemary
kosher salt and pepper to taste
3 cups vegetable broth
small bunch parsley
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
1. Roughly chop the leek and half the chives.
2. Heat 3 tbsp olive oil and cook leek and chives until soft; remove from pan.
3. Cut chicken tenders into ~1/2-in. cubes; sprinkle with dried rosemary and salt and pepper to taste.
4. Heat remaining olive oil in pan used to cook leeks; lightly brown cubed chicken.
5. In medium pot, bring broth to boil and reduce to simmer.
6. Add chicken and leek/chives to broth and simmer until chicken is cooked through.
7. Add parsely and remaining chives, chopped, and lemon zest/juice to finish soup.
Serves 2 as a main course lunch or light dinner; 3-4 as a starter/side.
The smaller people drink more beer so everyone winds up the same mass?
Oh all your sweet memories are making me acutely sad.
Bitter, party of one?
“The last time I saw Richard was Detroit of ’68
And he told me:
‘All romantics meet the same fate, someday
Cynical and drunken
Boring someone in some dark cafe,'”
…
‘teachers arn’t scientists’
LOL to blf for suggesting that smaller persons in the proposed study drink more beer … until everyone in the study has the same mass. Good plan for me, and for Pygmy Loris. David M. is skinny, so he could drink a lot o’ beer.
In other news, the LDS Church and the Boy Scouts have been forced to pay up for allowing scouts to be abused:
The LDS Church routinely pays up in a settlement that does not have to go before a jury. They do this so that they will not have to reveal the finances or the financial structure of the LDS corporation/church. At least this time they don’t get to claim that their was no wrong doing on the part of the Church, but that they settled with the claimants to lessen the pain of the abused person, and blah, and blah blah blah. This time, the jury held them also accountable by making them pay part of the non-economic damages. Good move on their part.
More of the story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100413/ap_on_re_us/us_boy_scouts_abuse
Great. Since we’re back onto the recipes, I’m just going to keep talking about sex.
So what you lose in terms of leg and neck cramps you gain in poking and itching. I can see the appeal though.
There were some advantages to spending my teen and young adult years in a suburban neighbourhood on the edge of town. A five minute drive took you out of the city and on to country roads and farmers’ fields. Until you’ve made out under aurorae…
Brownian:
Blankets take care of most of the poking and itching problem. There’s no particular need to fully strip, either. Hay lofts are appealing, they are a lot fun. I can vouch for that, as I’m not a hay loft virgin.
Oh yes. Very, very nice that.
PZ may have more twitter followers than Leonard Nimoy, but apparently Nimoy’s twitter fans are a lot smarter (PZ’s are not very dumb, though).
Stupid Fight — PZ Myers vs. Leonard Nimoy
I’m not gonna change my nick for it. But on the other hand I don’t think it was unknown that I’m a virgin too.
Some selected comments that appear after the Yahoo News presentation of the Boy Scout abuse story (spelling errors, lapses in logic, and fucked up syntax are original):
[The above commenter uses an avatar that looks like a mormon missionary. So far his idiotic comment has 203 thumbs-up votes. The negative comments ignore the fact that the perpetrator confessed to a mormon bishop, who did NOT turn the guy in to the authorities. This failure to turn offenders in is also common practice for the LDS Church. They protect the reputation of the Church as being more important than the welfare of the boys. The LDS Church is also lax when it comes to vetting scout masters. The “calling” to be a scout master usually comes from a Bishop.]
There are other comments that applaud the jury’s decision, but from the number of negative comments, I smell a mormon-organized campaign. The LDS Church actually has elderly missionaries that it assigns to the internet for this sort of thing.
Haystacks, under the late summer sun, are the very best, I reckon.
The occasional needle is a bitch though.
Sili, I didn’t know that, so perhaps it’s more unknown than you realized.
Yeah, I thought Yahoo! Answers was bad, then Yahoo News! added a comments section. It’s almost like Yahoo! is on a jihad and won’t stop until the entire internet is nothing but dumb, unreadable comments.
Some people are born mediocre.
Some people attain mediocrity.
And some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
With regards to the lyrics Ol’Greg posted in #324, is the relationship causal or merely a correlation?
I mean, I’m cynical and drunken now (well, while I’m at work I’m just cynical), and I think I might moderately more interesting to that someone in that dark café if I could at least claim I was once a romantic.
You found it! Thanks AnthonyK!* I was looking for that.
* That was strange to type; I’m also an Anthony K in RL, and for a moment it seemed I was thanking myself, and I worried that ‘the troubles’ were going to start all over again. Better book another session with Dr. Nussbaum.
Radio phone-in.
Caller: “Hi doc, I took your advice on how to improve my love life – it worked just great!”
Doctor: “Oh yes?”
Caller: “Yeah, you told me that me and the wife should just be more spontaneous, and go for it the moment we felt like it.”
Doctor: “And you did that?”
Caller: “Yup. All of a sudden, we both felt horny, so I ripped her knickers off and had her bending over the freezer. Oh man, best orgasms for years!”
Doctor: “Well, that’s excellent.”
Caller: “Yeah. And it’s a small price to pay if we’re both banned from Walmart..”
The catholic response keeps getting more absurd.
But once I change the nick, it stops being true …
Nice. I love a good Dan Bern reference.
Sili, The Unknown Virgin, do you have a problem with unicorns?
Sili:
We’ll all pretend. Besides, I *love* the nick!
I believe that cafe-sitting drunkenness has a causal relationship to romanticism, although not all cynical cafe sitters have been romantics. There must be other factors at play.
I may now …
There’s no time for such competitions, and I’m the only one who doesn’t drink beer :-)
Oho. That’s about the age of the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary, which was accompanied by a poorly understood mass extinction.
Obviously I can’t speak for Walton, but there may not be such a thing in the first place. If so, what?
Perhaps fortunately, I have no idea what you’re talking about. :-)
I didn’t know it; you hadn’t said it explicitly. All I knew about was your bad luck with lasting relationships.
I remember we had this conversation maybe one or two iterations back on teh Thread… I remember you mentioning then that it was not exactly the nostalgic, joyful experience that others perhaps remembered.
I remember feeling bad and thinking you deserved much, much better… then realizing that you probably already know that and deciding not to dwell on it.
(And in case you didn’t know that, well… yes, that… )
When did we stop talking about that?
I suppose our random motion was bound to bring us together at some point…
Haystacks, under the late summer sun, are the very best
Ahh CHOO! AhCHOO! AhCHOO! Just thinking about haystacks stirs my allergic rhinitis. I had allergy testing once. Had some respectible reactions to dust, mold, trees, etc and one big monster reaction to grass. Took an anti-histamine to stop the reaction when the test was over. All the wheels went away…except the one to grass which continued to spread until it had wrapped itself entirely around my arm. No haystacks for me. And I don’t mow the lawn. Mostly because I live in an 11th floor apartment and have no lawn, but I wouldn’t mow it even if it existed.
worked for me brother when he still lived at home, too.
The first time I did that, though, I lied like you wouldn’t believe it, because I highly doubt any sane mother would let her 18-year-old daughter travel to a different continent to spend the summer with people she’s only met over the internet.
On that note, I’m surprised my mother managed to come out of parenthood with her sanity intact.
yeah, I don’t think the number of people is the problem. Walton needs to meet more liberal, non-wealthy feminists. [/classist]
don’t your parents ever leave the house? I got to lose mine in my own bed, thankyouverymuch. Sex in cars is cramped and uncomfortable. Might as well not bother with the fake indoors and just do it in the grass.
in Poland as well; the college situation as it was when my mom and her sisters were studying was way woman-friendlier than it is even now in the US (especially in my mom’s case: she studied Physics, and was fully encouraged to do so; no idiotic comments from teachers about how girls don’t need to know that)
Someone is always at my house, so I can’t lose my V on my own bed. lol Actually, I’m not sure if I am a V. What qualifies as sex?
Ah, yes. That. That is a subject of much conversation, argument, and the occasional murder. Numerous activities and books and internets all developed to that. The things people do for some more of that is amazing. And then there are the things other animals do for that.
So of course there are people who claim there’s too much of that, or that’s for certain times and places and people only. They want to control who can do that, and when that is done.
Shrubberies are sometimes involved, as are knights.
And what does “is” mean?
keep in mind that in Walton’s case, “older” includes the vast majority of people he’s legally allowed to have sex with… at 20, 30 already counts as “older”.
eh? ….
*lightbulb moment*
I’m going to have to qualify this as “things no straight* person ever needed to wonder about”
– – – – –
*well… except maybe those uber-sheltered Catholics mentioned in another thread…
Penis in vagina and nothing else. That’s the beauty of being gay; you get to preserve your virginity.
Or so the saddlebackers tell me …
Gyeong:
When it comes to the V, it depends. Losing-your-virginity sex is traditionally defined as sexual intercourse, between a male and a female of course. Generally not considered to be a big deal when it’s a male; all too often considered a major deal when it’s a female.
Hopefully, all that has changed. I don’t know though. I know “good christian abstinence only” bible belt kids consider oral and anal to be loopholes, it’s not really sex.
Sili:
Being bi, I got to lose my virginity twice.
This.
“is”- the present third person conjugation of the verb “to be” lol
No, seriously, I’ve no idea if oral sex counts as “sex”.
oh, and btw, the reason Ted Haggart isn’t a homosexual is because he’s never had “sex” with another man.
It doesn’t (B Clinton)
Huh?!? You mean the penguin’s foot, motorised billiards ball, and half-brick (no sock) aren’t the real thing?
In England, “sex” is what posh people put coal in.
Thanks for recognising the ref, boygenius ;)
Mine didn’t. At least not when it would have been convenient.
Not only was my first time in the back seat of a car, it was with the girlfriend of one of my best friends. (I really hurt him, too. We didn’t talk for nearly eight years, until we ran into each other at a neighbourhood pub and got drunk. The subject came up, and I offered to let him punch me to get it out of his system. He did, and everything is groovy again. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson from that, but I’ve confessed enough for today.) Unfortunately for her, we stayed out way too late and her parents locked her out of the house for violating curfew. I had to drive her to my sister’s house so I could get the car back in time for my mom to drive it to work (I’m sure she figured something was up when the engine was warm at 7 AM) and my sister somehow managed to help her sneak back into her house. Fortunately for us that summer, her parents had no problem with me coming over while she was grounded, and we spent many a lazy summer afternoon going for walks in the rain and watching movies and drinking fruity summer teas whilst naked on the couch.
My teen years weren’t always the best, but damn! that was one great summer.
There’s a severe thunderstorm moving in, winds already at 48mph. And I’m on my own. No thunderstorm sex for me. Dammit.
Yeah, I have heard that “oral sex isn’t sex” bit. That’s why I’m not sure. So I guess I’m a quasi-virgin.
that’s a horrible waste, indeed. there’s few things more awesome than thunderstorm sex.
Sili, I didn’t realize that either. I remember you were hinting about it on a thread long ago where relationships and sex came up. Anyway, I like the new title! Trolls like SS are still good for something.
Heh-heh. Wouldn’t they like to think so… ;)
Better than a queasy virgin.
It was a moot issue for me; I went from never having done anything beyond French kissing to penis-in-vagina in one night/morning*. Somewhere along the line I figured I’d lost my virginity.
*Oops, not entirely true. I had a school chum in sixth grade and we’d blow each other during sleepovers and (seriously) behind the bleachers at baseball games. Since we were too young to ejaculate, we’d use our watches and switch turns after a preset amount of time.
The Thread is my social life.
But with buddies like Brownian I’m not complaining.
(And if I were, noöne would notice as long as Walton’s around.)
I envy you, Caine, Fleur du mal. I’ve still got at least a month to go until thunderstorm season gets here. As for sex, Environment Canada’s got nothing forecasted for me in the near future.
Aww, that’s really sweet of you to say.
LOL Sili.
That’s funny, I never got that impression about you.
I said “older”, not “geriatric”. If a 20 year old doesn’t fancy any women between 25 and, say, 40, then he’s in big trouble anyway, and probably not heterosexual.
Which one?
Ol’Greg, not trying to be a stalker, but I enjoy your posts. Even the “Bitter, party of one?” post just seems to encapsulate thoughts that run through my head about parts of my life. Glad you post here.
Brownian, it’s a great thunderstorm. Much thundergrumbling, lots of lightning, complete with hail. But no sex! *sigh*
Sili:
LOL. That’s the truth. You now have TheUnknownVirgin Show&trade to use as competition though.
or extremely picky, like some other people whose name I won’t mention ;-)
Behind bleachers during a baseball game?
Gee it reminds me of porn: Sex happens anywhere:
Visit to the doctors = sex
plumber arrives = sex
visit to the mechanic = sex
locker-rooms = sex
boss’ office = sex
printing room = sex
restroom, theater, forest, creek, kitchen, etc = sex
Hell, I’d bet they somehow making sex on pharyngula works. lol
RTL:
Woah. I think that is problematic, to say the least. Geez. Everyone has their own tastes, and if they don’t fall into some generic “you should like such and such” it doesn’t qualify you to slap a label on them.
Age has never mattered to me, either way. It does matter to other people, and that’s fine. We’re all different. The amount of small things which add up to make someone a person of interest to any one of us are incredibly varied.
“Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.”
“He fixes the cable?”
I’m wondering if Brownian finds analog watches to be a turn-on, even though he no longer needs to time his sexual encounters?
Sili, I like your new handle.
More comments on the Boy Scouts being sued — this time from the CBS News website:
What qualifies as sex?
Man. Whole books have been written on that.
When the whole Clinton bizzaro bit happened, I happened to get into a conversation with my parents about their sexual activity in high school. They are the same age as Bill Clinton and from similar backgrounds.
According to them, in their high school days, oral sex wasn’t considered sex. It was simply something girls did to ensure their boyfriends didn’t look around. After all, there wasn’t any chance of getting pregnant. Oh, it was hidden from *their* parents and never openly discussed, but the groping and occasional BJ was fairly common. (And, of course, there was even some further hanky-panky, but most girls wouldn’t go that far, or admit it if they did.)
Every culture, and apparently every generation recently, seems to define sex differently.
Personally I’d define it fairly broadly as physical stimulation for the purpose of producing an orgasm. Which excludes rape victims (but may include their abusers), but includes masturbation and orgies (as well as oral sex, BSDM, and other fetishes). This, by report, may also exclude a number of women who’ve complained to me about previous boyfriends. I’ve not heard any complaints myself, but then I probably wouldn’t, would I.
My motto: If it’s not good sex, it’s not sex.
(Now I’ve got to get that translated into Latin and put on a t-shirt.)
Cheers!
Man walks up to rent boy. Pays him.
They discuss Schopenhauer till daybreak.
Hey now, I’m getting close to finding that muscular rugged nerdy nice guy that I want. But in the meantime, I’ll settle for partial.
Reminds me, rule 34 is working just fine: BBC pulls plug on Dalek lesbian romp flick (click at own peril).
‘Ejaculate! Ejaculate!’
I can’t imagine anyone cares very much outside of SS. But:
1) I am overweight. How much is between me and my stomach.
2) I may or may not be a scientist. I love teaching, that is, passing on information and understanding to others that I have struggled to understand myself. According to SS, this rules me out from being a Scientist. I have done little original research (essentially none). My career consisted in understanding scientific issues (around chemistry), learning up on other peoples’ experiences then applying both in a new way to solve real problems in an industrial environment. (I found a ground-breaking paper in the literature from 1939 which cast light on some of our difficulties (if you screwed up your eyes a lot). In my last post I also had to apply principles of chemistry, health and safety, COSHH, environmental science etc., again in a day to day environment. I ended up giving 7 all-day symposia to my junior staff in which I passed on everything I had learned from over 30 years in the nuclear power industry (but which still applied). I then took early retirement on advantageous terms – they wanted to cut a post at my grade and I could justify being expendable.
So, I suppose at best I am an applied chemist who has learned to ask “Why?”, and, “Why not?” A technologist, a teacher, one who applies science to real problems. Call me what you will.
[Ed. Just don’t call him late for dinner – see point 1, above.]
3) I am not a virgin (our 3 children must have come from somewhere) although I went into marriage as a virgin and have stayed faithful in marriage to my wife by choice.
4) I am 64 (65 in June).
5) D&D – what’s that? The furthest I go in games is the daily cryptic crossword that my wife & I do together every day over lunch. And Sudoku (especially Samurai Sudoku).
Now, let me get on with making my Horlicks.
Pfft. It was the 80s, and if it wasn’t digital it was totally, like, whatever.
Oh, like I’m the first person to ever look at the nightstand clock and contemplate faking it and calling it a night. (Reliable sources suggest I’m not.)
Great. Back to being a virgin.
Just kidding. I’m pretty awesome in bed.
Some people above, having taken it upon themselves to give me fairly detailed advice about my personal life, seem to be assuming, without my having said so, that I’m exclusively heterosexual.* Just an observation. (Not that it makes much practical difference to anything either way, admittedly.)
(*Not in the Ted Haggard sense, obviously.)
In other news: life still sucks. And I am going to screw up my finals completely, at this rate.
I wonder if I can get a job as some sort of advertising mascot. I should be very well-qualified to work in the Pepsi marketing department, as I keep myself awake largely by consuming insane quantities of Diet Pepsi. They must have some jobs which don’t require a degree – perhaps dressing up as a giant can of Pepsi and standing on a street corner as a publicity stunt.
I should go to bed. My brain is melting.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/04/13/are-top-scientists-really-so-atheistic-look-at-the-data/#comments
OHMYGOD, 50% of scientists are religious! Mooney was right all along!
Oh, wait, he hasn’t tried to evaluate the figures or anything. He’s just doing what a good science journalist does and is assuming that any information he finds useful is given in good faith, following the strictest scientific standards. I’m sure he would have reported it uncritically if it showed that 90% of scientists were atheists, too.
>Clannad
Well, that at all wasn’t what I was expecting
Walton, sleep. Let Morpheus wrap you in arms of gauze and dream deep. Read poetry tomorrow over tea and coffee, remember that finals really are not. You may not pass, but you will be fine. People here want you to do well and like you. Considering the ration of shit you took in the early days here, you are obviously smart and tough. Stop reinforcing your fear. Easy to say, but sometimes you really have to try to let things alone.
At the risk of being called an accomodationist, I hereby confess that I am in love with Fred Cook and his Slacktivist blog, even though he is *gasp* a Christian and even *Serious gasp* an evangelical.
Want to know why?
Anyone who can write “These are people who regard umbrage as one of the fruits of the spirit” has my vote for anything at all.
You didn’t. Behind the cricket bleachers?!
I had to dress up as a mascot on occasion when I worked in fundraising. I don’t think that job required a degree, but it didn’t hurt.
Buck up, kiddo, we have *ahem* faith in your intellectual and academic abilities. Get some rest.
I didn’t, no. I’m afraid I have no interesting stories to tell.
A lack of interesting stories has never managed to keep me quiet.
Court to hear suit over “Tea Party” name
otrame, I think the Slacktivist has many admirers here. (Oh, and it’s Fred Clark, not Cook.)
as far as I can tell, most of them seem to merely assume that you’re interested in women; I see no suggestion of exclusiveness about any of the advice presented, though I do note a dearth of suggestions of how to get laid with a guy (possibly because of a dearth of gay men giving you advice on this subject; I for one have not the faintest clue how to attract gay men)
:-p
Which would be very much correct, in and of itself.
But this conversation should probably end now. While I am the world’s biggest narcissist and generally love talking about myself, I’m told it’s not supposed to be socially acceptable to discuss these kinds of personal issues on a public forum; and I should probably take into account that thousands of randomers could be reading this thread right now.
Re your comment earlier, incidentally: how would meeting more liberal, non-wealthy feminists make any difference? :-
Well, THAT’S embarrassing.
Too late. Now they know all about you behind the bleachers.
Approaching midnight so will give myself the same advice I gave Walton. Night all.
For some reason, this Paul Simon song seems to fit the mood tonight.
oh walton, you can’t say that the conversation should end, and then ask me this!
anyway, the point was that the aforementioned group (and you may include feminist bi- and gay men in it) have, in my experience, on average, slightly different (and likely beneficial to you) ideas about who is and isn’t fuckable, and when it’s worth acting on that, than people in the groups you’ve described as being a large part of your social circle.
mostly though, it was a snarky attempt at getting you away from the Conservative party, because I’ve decided that’s my new goal in life (not really, but that won’t stop me from bugging you about it until you do leave)
;-)
and the problem with the whole world knowing about this is…? :-p
anyway, it’s only not socially acceptable when you’re hijacking other conversations to whine about yourself. The Thread cannot be hijacked; it exists precisely for the purpose of whining about oneself, and sharing waaaay TMI about oneself.
Yeah, I spotted that self-contradiction just after I hit Submit. But in my defence, I’m exhausted and my brain is spinning.
I’m going to bed. Goodnight, everyone.
Dianne, are you able to take allergy shots? (asking because they’re bloody expensive if health insurance doesn’t cover them) I was the same way – I had a random and scary anaphylactic thing happen in a garden store, went to get allergy tested, and reacted to everything but mold. It was so bad that in addition to the half-dozen antihistamine pills I was given, I got three shots of epinephrine right in the ragweed test spot. Point being that after a couple of years of allergy shots, I’m down to fairly minimal reactions altogether, and it’s fantastic. Between the shots and my prescription antihistamine I just barely notice the big pollen swings through the seasons.
Carlie:
Wow, that’s great. I’m allergic to bee and wasp venom (anaphylactic reaction), but I’ve been lucky, only been stung 3 times in my life and I carry my pen. I try not to get overly concerned about bees and wasps, but they have a strange attraction to me, they won’t leave me alone. I don’t wear perfume or bright colours outside and it doesn’t help.
Yikes, that’s a scary one, Caine. And not easily treatable, right? I’m still bad about the pens – I have one now, and my child has one for nut allergies, and I still forget to take the kit along half the time (I know, I know, a bad ER trip on vacation when we forgot once and I know…)
As for the other current topic, there is no way I’m going there. I love you all, but I am not dishing on a blog that has a gazillion readers a month. ;)
Oh, please don’t. Further right than the Tories lie the UK Independence Party, they’re the biggest bunch of tossers in Britain – “Lord” fucking Monkton’s their climate change expert, and Britain’s biggest problem is that we’re part of Europe, apparently. I surmise that none of them studied geography, or history, at school.
At least the Conservatives will have to face responsiblity if they fuck up…again.
I find it slightly depressing for intelligent young people in Britain to be conservative in outlook, but there you go.
Nothing here even compares with the tea-baggers in the US; I note above that they’re starting to squabble – ain’t it great?
oh, considering the good work SGBM did on Walton, there’s no chance, short of massive brain damage, for Walton to move further right.
. . . .
oh, I see.
Carlie, no it’s not really treatable. I’m not that good about my pen, it’s usually in my camera bag. I almost always start a walk without it, and have to turn around to go back for it. I finally put a kit in the truck’s glovebox.
Photography finally got me over the worst of my fears, I love shooting bees (especially catching them in motion) and wasps, but I still freak out easily. My husband doesn’t mind them at all and they *never* bother him. Me, they try to treat me like a landing strip.
Last year, we stopped at a PLOTS, got out to see if there was anything to shoot, when I stopped dead and said “can’t you hear that?” He shook his head no. I swear, I heard the most ominous rumbling. Up ahead, were scores of hives. I *ran* back to the truck and wouldn’t come out. He spent about 45 minutes hanging about in the hives, taking pics.
I would love to – I thought there was a temperature problem with doing that? I guess it would be better than not having any at all.
We had an incident on a field trip last year where a student rustled up a nest and got stung over 20 times by wasps. It was damned lucky he didn’t react any more badly than he did.
Carlie, a temperature problem? Uh oh. Well, I guess I’m not good at all with pens.
Over 20 times? Oh man, what a nightmare. I’m lucky in that the wasps around our house are relatively mellow, they aren’t paper wasps. Even so, it takes everything in me not to panic when one lands on me.
Oh, yeah. Okay, says “don’t store in glovebox”. Well, so much for being brilliantly prepared. Well, it’s almost time for new ones anyway.
It says not to store about 80 degrees F or something like that, and we routinely get above that in summers. I’ve never checked it out to see if there’s an actual effect on the chemical, though.
I had no idea there was such a thing as ground-dwelling bees until I was mowing the lawn once, ran over a nest, and had two fly up my shorts and start stinging. The neighbors are lucky I was close to the house, or they would have seen a lot more of me than they wanted to as I was trying to disengage the bees from my immediate vicinity.
Carlie, that’s a hell of a thing! I didn’t know there were ground dwelling bees. Great.
Holy, crap, carlie! I feel like the world’s worst wimp for complaining about my little reaction after hearing your experience! I’ve considered allergy shots but the major factor against at this point is not money (I actually have half decent health insurance…not decent, but half decent) but I don’t have the time to find an allergist and go to a dozen or so appointments.
That’s nothing. For a fundraiser I once had to dress up as Barney. What was particularly annoying was I didn’t know any Barney mannerisms, so I was denounced by a couple of kids who were Barney aficionados.
Here’s another folkie song, North Sea Gas singing “Will Ye No Come Back Again”:
For ‘Tis:
From NIH/medline plus:
I would say yes, temperature can degrade the active ingredient. While the expiration date and storage conditions tend to be conservative, I would definitely follow the instructions for a critical potentially life saving medicine. Keep in the fridge during the summer.
With any luck, Walton has gone to bed and won’t see this ’til morning, but am I the only one who finds this assertion…
…amusingly self-confirming? ;^)
As to what counts as sex, I’m inclined agree with whoever it was upthread who said physical stimulation intended/likely to produce orgasm. (Not that I think anyone has to actually come for it to “count”; let’s not be obnoxiously goal-oriented, shall we?)
OTOH, if you adopt the Christian Purity/Clintonesque suite of loopholes, excluding pretty much everything but PiV, there’s good news for teh gayz: Under this definition, there’s no such thing as gay sex, so y’all can have as much fun as you want without burning in the everlasting torments of Hell! Woo-hooo!
Nerd, I do check mine, and I do keep note of the expiration dates. If I kept it in the fridge though, I’d never remember to take it with me.
So I was just playing the Traveler IQ Challenge with my child, and doing the US version, got to level 7 (famous places), and one listed was “Creation Museum”. Hell what?
Thanks, SC. I’ve heard Natalie Merchant before but not that song..
Dianne, I only got stung three times (thankfully), but there’s not much in the realm of “mind-crazy panic thoughts” that beats “BEES UP MY PANTS!” :D
And that’s the closest I’m getting to discussing what has and hasn’t been in my pants, thankyouverymuch.
Allergy shots are a real pain in the ass for scheduling – I think it was twice a week for the first six months, then once a week for awhile, then every other week, and I’m just about at once a month now, two years in. I have no idea how people with real jobs can do it.
It’s new! Thought of you when I first heard it.
…and remember that, in the Dreamlands, there are many Things, lurking….
Since everyone else is doing it (minds out of the squashy end of the gutter!), I should reveal that I am not 35 (by some years!), not a scientist (just an enthusiast), and not a virgin (no storks or cabbage patches were responsible in any way for my son’s existence), though I will cop to being overweight, and I do play an unholy amount of D&D.
Caine, sounds like you should keep an eye on the clarity if there is a window. A quick look at the structure indicates it could easily be degraded by several mechanisms.
AnthonyK,
If you’re interested in learning more about the Vietnam War, I can recommend A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan, or for a much shorter precis Heroes by John Pilger.
Flex,
I thought The Fog of War was utter garbage. McNamara just flat-out refused to answer questions about whether he felt any guilt or responsibility for the war. Errol Morris (the filmmaker) allowed him to turn it into a self-serving, selectively factual “poor me” piece.
McNamara started off moaning about how unreasonable the Cubans and the Russians were during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but neglected to mention that the Russians felt compelled to put missiles in Cuba because the US had just put missiles in Turkey, giving them the ability to hit big Russian cities for the first time (Russia had no equivalent capability).
He got all teary talking about the firebombing of Tokyo and said that that was a war crime, but neither he nor Morris raises the issue of the criminality of carpet-bombing civilians in Vietnam.
The most sickening thing to me was McNamara’s admission that he didn’t realise until decades after the war that the Vietnamese weren’t Chinese puppets. Fuck knows what he thought when China invaded Vietnam in 1979, killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese and destroying dams, roads and railways.
About the only thing there is to be learned from McNamara’s revolting exercise in self justification is that you should do your fucking homework before you decided to invade someone.
Wow. Not only was there a first class thunderstorm, but there’s a double rainbow now. Niiiiiice.
Start your day with some good news :
Hitchens interview on getting the Pope arrested
Ooohhhh…Sniny…
Nerd:
There is, and I will keep an eye. I have gotten lax about it and I shouldn’t be, as it could save my life. My husband spent decades getting me to stay calm when bees or wasps landed on me or chased me. It took decades, but his counsel was finally effective. It paid off, as I haven’t been stung for years, but still, I shouldn’t be so cavalier when it comes to my epi.
I like this! I’m going to save this line of reasoning for later, for the next time some frothing fundy homophobe starts ranting about The Gayz.
Caine:
The cosmos’ way of compensating you for the lack of Thunderstorm Sex©, no doubt!
In other news, I, too, am not 35; I am not a scientist; I am not a virgin (by the most typical definitions); I am moderately overweight; more than three decades ago, I used to hang out with some guys who played D&D, but I’ve never laid eyes on the game myself. FWIW….
Bill:
That’s a lovely thought. Now I’ve been deprived of Rainbow Sex though! Some days, there’s no winning…
;D
@Caine and Bill
Maybe the rainbow is the Cosmos’ post coital glow.
Having just caught up with the Thread, I have to say…Wow ! Just wow…:-)
And I need to date more feminists, clearly.
@Brownian:
Oh. My goodness. Um. .my. Are you sure there isn’t anything you’d like to tell us regarding which “team” you’re “batting for”, Brownian?
/humor
Josh, m’dear, is there any particular reason one can’t bat for both? ;)
ambulocetacean @432, I thought The Fog of War was utter garbage.
Well, it has been a long time since I’ve seen it. So I’m not going to claim it’s the best documentary ever. I enjoyed the interviews, even though it was clear that Mac was not as forthcoming as he could have been.
Whether Mac was repentant about Vietnam is, in my opinion, somewhat beside the point. I may not like it, but I do sympathize with how hard it is to admit a mistake which cost thousands of lives. I would like to believe that if I was in a situation like that I would admit my fault, but rationalization is a very powerful impulse.
And, of course, the lesson is, as you mention, that before engaging in a situation which will cost lives; do your damn homework!
It is on my netflix list, so I’ll see it again and I may change my opinion.
No, Caine, there is no particular reason. Except that I want to tweak (goose?) Brownian. No offense intended to my bi brothers and sisters, of course! But yeah, I do want to make him giggle uncomfortably. . .LOL.
I understand the impulse, Josh. I’m not so sure Brownian is easily tweakable. Gooseable? Hmmm. I think we need Patricia. Do you suppose she’s been so busy with her gentleman she’s ignoring us?
Hi Flex,
One of the things that annoyed me most about The Fog of War was the way it was built up in the press as being this amazing, frank, naked insight into the political conduct of the war when it was nothing of the sort.
Even now it remains uncritically lauded as some kind of revelatory masterpiece when all it was was McNamara saying “Poor me! I couldn’t possibly have known!” when it was his bloody responsibility to have known.
I would never have expected McNamara to come out and say “Me and LBJ were ignorant assholes and we’re responsible for the deaths of millions”, but that’s kind of what the movie was built up as.
Eh, I think I’ve said more than my two dong’s worth.
Yes, Caine, that’s it. Patricia, with her high-falutin’ airs and horse-hair fainting couch, has been ignoring us. Bet she thinks she’s all that with her high-class spankins’ and all. Hmmph.
Recent comments on the I hardly need to pharyngulate an Australian poll, do I? reminded me of this old ditty:
The Naughty Lady Of Shady Lane.
Hit and run lightning strike.
Oh, my sweet (and salty) fake hubby, Patricia is not exactly ignoring us. She is just preoccupied right now. But she is having a great time. She promises to be back, when she has time to catch her breathe.
Thanks, everyone, for crashing the poll I posted. They’ll print that pie chart on the front page of the paper this week. I can’t wait to see it.
I appreciate the help. I won’t bring it up again except to say that the paper is always aching for more comments so if you’re of a mind to, you can tell them what you think of their God-soaked treatment of gay marriage in the comments on their opinion page: http://media.www.psucollegio.com/media/paper437/sections/20100408Opinion.html
I feel like an anachronism; these threads grow so fast!
Josh, I think it was the kite flying. Something happened there.
Yes. . .and it had to do with a. . . peanut butter sandwich. . . .(cue love theme in minor key)
John Morales – Dean Martin’s tale of suburban adultery is a hit on Tajik Persian radio? You learn something every day…
Thanks Janine, I was hoping it was that scenario for Patricia’s lack of posts.
I would, too.
I would in a second. No money. :( Emmet’s out in the wild (intellectual) west, and doing fantastically well.
***
Rachel Maddow on the Daily Show.
Janine, are you saying Patricia’s socks have been knocked off? ;)
I’m happy she’s having such a grand time.
Ambulocetan @454, it’s a celebration of double-entendres and innuendo with a reveal at the end. :)
John at 458
Yeah, the backyard gossip ain’t been this good since Mabel ran off with Tom.
when? where?! want!!
D’oh! I had completely forgotten the twist at the end. It’s been years since I listened to that song. The double entendres are very clever.
Those Tajik Persians (Persian Tajiks) have good taste in music.
Sorry Josh, but peri-puberty same-sex experimentation is pretty common among heterosexuals, according to research I tell myself probably exists. If we’d known how to get those strange and exotic creatures known as girls to let us touch them, we would have. (Excepting our she-lives-in-a-different-town-so-you-don’t-know-her girlfriends who we met at camp, of course. You wouldn’t believe the sexing we had with those girls at summer camp.) There was nothing gay about it at the time.
Of course, when I actually hit puberty a year or two later I was very anxious about those experiences, and worried that they meant I was gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, but hey, I was thirteen.) To make matters worse, another common side effect of puberty (according to the same sources I’m sure exist that I referred to above) is swollen nipples on boys. Oh sure, we all talked about erections and periods in health class, but who doesn’t know about that shit? What I desperately wanted to know was whether my dad was right and that time my sisters dressed me in their baptismal dress and put lipstick on me was turning me into a girl!
Of course, once one hits one’s thirties if one doesn’t stop scarfing down hot wings and beer like a twenty-year-old and hits the gym instead one runs into breast-enlargement issues of a different sort.
we really do need a huge US atheist thing. I vaguely remember vague rumors of a thingie sorta tentatively maybe planned to maybe occur in 2013 in Washington D.C.; maybe.
* (Persian Tajiks?)
er…then. :) Sorry for the confusing post. Should be available within hours online and on CC again even sooner.
I’m glad to hear Patricia and her gentleman friend are doing so well!
I saw a few seconds of Rachel Maddow on _The_Daily_Show_ and want to see the entire thing. There’s an article about her in the April 12 issue of _People_ magazine, though no mention on the cover.
For those on Central Time (U.S.), The Daily Show, with Rachel Maddow will be on shortly, at 12:30 am.
In no particular order,
Sili,
Congrats on getting an interview, I hope it goes well.
Walton,
You’re going to pass. You’re going to pass. You’re going to pass. Don’t sweat it too much.
It’s not at all surprising that such a law was passed during Reconstruction. It was during Reconstruction that many African-Americans were elected to office in the South and implemented laws for equality. Mississippi was majority African-American in 1869, and because of Reconstruction they had the vote. Racist whites didn’t have many options while soldiers and bureaucrats from the Union were breathing down their necks. The first African-American Senator from any state, Hiram Revels, was elected in Mississippi during this period. It wasn’t until the end of Reconstruction, through the violent actions of terrorist groups like the KKK, and a new federal government that ignored the deteriorating situation for African-Americans in the South for political gain, that segregation was legislated through Jim Crow laws and African-Americans were disenfranchised.
Catching up on my reading, I found this via normblog: Pentatonic scale.
Neat-O!
Allergies? Someone mentioned allergies? I got The Cure: Discover you’re allergic to the street trees on your block in Berkeley. To avoid last year’s ER trip and general nastiness, spend two weeks in Kaua’i when those trees are supposed to bloom. Never mind that they start early; drug up, spend your life’s savings, and go.
Bust your fat ass hiking into the Alakai Swamp to see three of the native forest birds and other lifers. Who knew there were sundews in the Hawai’ian mountains whose nearest relatives are in Alaska?
Put a plastic bag over the camera and watch the show as the rain/fog/mist sweeps around the Na Pali cliffs, giving you fifteen views in as many minutes of green red silver gray spotlighted red black cliffs waterfalls forests silver leaves dancing rainbows indigo turquoise wine-dark white surfy black rocks knife edges white-tailed tropicbirds floating dashing upcanyon circling under over around you. Weep from the sheer intensity.
Watch red-tailed tropicbirds do their crazy backward-wheeling courtship dance over the red-footed booby and the Laysan albatross colonies. Don’t step on the shearwaters looking at you from their burrows a foot away.
I could rhapsodize for days but I haven’t touched a keyboard in two weeks and am out of practice. That part’s good too.
Also: eating lots of poke and barbecued wild boar is good for you. Also also, so is eating fruit you never heard of. Also x 3, that other popular topic, well, it’s true what they say about tropical vacations.
Anyway, we’re back. For now. Aloha!
Auntie Ron
Sounds like it was a fantastic time, Auntie Ron! Glad you’re back.
#469 – Pygmy Loris, excellent post on the Reconstruction administration in Mississippi. Apparently I was not clear, I did not mean to imply that the passage of the law was surprising. What I found interesting and utterly hypocritical is that he racists of 1995 were touting the value of an 1869 law that they would have fought tooth and nail had they been in power at the time. I need to stop posting when distracted.
A few remarks wrt the recent general anaesthesia discussion :
What you have in GA is a state of reversible loss of consciousness, analgesia of the entire body, amnesia, and some degree of muscle relaxation.
A multitude of substances are capable of producing those effects, and we only have some ideas of the why and how.These substances most likely produce GA by different mechanisms.Some of these actions(amnesia,unconsciousness)are related to cortical structures, while suppression of pain withdrawal probably happens in brain stem or spinal cord.
At the moment I think the going theory is called unitary hypothesis, which states that all inhalational anaesthetics share a common mechanism on the molecular level, based on the fact that the potency of an anaesthetic is directly correlated to their lipid solubility.
GA action at the molecular level could be due to neurotransmitter bindind or influence of ion channels or second messenger functions and the like, e.g its known that GABA inhibitory effects are enhanced by anaesthetics, and most people now think that modulation of GABA function is a principal mechanism for anaesthetics to work.
As to Xenon: great stuff, non-explosive, doesnt trigger malignant hyperthermia, hardly effects on the heart, it’s inert, and is rapid onset.Awesome stuff, just way,way,way too expensive !!
JeffreyD,
Ah, that makes more sense. I was a bit confused. You’re right, Southern racists are tremendously hypocritical when it comes to these sorts of things.
Children with rare genetic disorder dont form racial stereotypes
Thanks for the medical insight, Rorschach. Seems like my vague memories weren’t entirely out of date. Pity about the cost – I assume no attempt is made at recapture? (Considering how He is used, I doubt it.)
Lasting?
I don’t exactly have lots of other options: there isn’t any British party ideally suited for those of us who are fiscal and economic conservatives, but very liberal when it comes to social issues and civil liberties. I tend to agree with the Green Party when it comes to matters of criminal justice and the like – for instance, they’re the only party with a commitment to decriminalising drugs and cutting down the over-use of imprisonment – but they’re also totally nuts when it comes to the economy. The Lib Dems are also a bit left-leaning for my liking on economic issues, and are not as strong as I’d like on civil liberties. And although I heartily despise EU trade and agricultural policies, I wouldn’t vote UKIP; in my experience, the core UKIP supporters are mostly a bunch of far-right closet xenophobes who live in fear of some giant conspiracy from Brussels to destroy their liberties.
And Labour are awful on the economy – having just decided to fill the budget deficit by increasing National Insurance, which amounts to a tax on jobs. Virtually every business leader in Britain has spoken out against the Labour plan and said it will hinder economic recovery. The Conservative plan is much more reasonable and focuses on trimming public spending. Not to mention Labour’s dismal record on civil liberties – in the last ten years, we’ve seen indefinite detention of foreign “terror suspects” at Belmarsh Prison; moronic “tough on crime” measures and an expanding prison population; restrictions on free speech and the right to protest; thousands of new criminal laws; a “national ID database” and proposals to introduce compulsory ID cards; and continued detention of refugees and asylum-seekers in horrific conditions, for no other reason than to pander to tabloid xenophobia. Getting rid of Labour is a very good idea in any sane person’s view. And like it or not, the Conservatives are the only other viable option.
WWJD?
–o–
The LibDem favour election reform. That’d give you a real representative democracy in place of a two party system. Once that’s in place, there’s room for voting for someone who better represents you.
Random Mormon, quoted by Lynna @#331:
Someone doesn’t understand vicarious tortious liability…
Oh, and I just had a bit of tax returned. Are you still a student come June, Dumling?
No, I’m against PR. It eliminates the traditional link between the individual and his or her local MP, which is very useful in democratic engagement. And it also gives the party organisations even more power, as they get to pick which candidates go on their party list.
Rather, I’d like to have American-style open primaries, where we get to vote for who the parties’ candidates are, without any say from the parties’ central offices.
Walton, this is the 21st century. There’s no such thing as
societylocal. In fact, local interests are a pox on national and international progress. NIMBY incarnate.And don’t tell me that Blair, Cameron and the like are ‘local’. “This is a local constituency for local people.”
Jadehawk,
Hmmm. That makes more sense. When you made the original comment, I thought you might have been assuming that conservative students are, on average, less sexually liberated than their liberal counterparts – which tends to be true in the US, from what I hear, but is definitely not the case in the UK. But your explanation makes sense, though I’m not sure whether you’re right.
Yep. My last exam finishes on June 11th, but I’ll be a student next academic year too (either on the Legal Practice Course or a masters’ degree) – assuming I get a 2.i in finals, that is.
Not in this sane person’s view, except that when the inevitable public spending cuts, strikes, and civil chaos arises we’ll be able to blame the Tories.
One of the most depressing things for me, as a teacher, is that the Labour party invested billions and billions of extra money in education – real money, real new schools, better-paid teachers and so on – to little long-term effect.
Why is it, I wonder, that in Britain (and, I suspect, in the US and Canada) the poor are so horribly uninterested in education? Doesn’t happen in poor countries, quite the reverse.
But I also reckon that the interest in the UK election is rather low on this board.
Except of course regarding our attitude to bacon.
And, hey, the Tories have always been horribly homophobic. At least Labour has always promoted sexual and gender equality…’
There are now two gay Conservative frontbenchers, Alan Duncan and Nick Herbert. There are lots of gay Conservative MPs, PPCs, activists, and prominent public figures (such as the blogger Iain Dale). The party is now fully committed to gay rights and to guaranteeing full legal rights to gay couples.
There is a homophobic fringe – the “Tory Taliban” – but they’re mostly old, and retiring at the next election.
Yeah, they’ve “changed their minds”, have they? Clause 28 anyone?
(But let’s not forget Matthew Paris in the Tories slender roll of gay honour) It just seems to me to be an example of wholly wrong social policy on the part of a reactionary, out-of-touch, patrician party of the oligarchs.
Incidentally, while I was in Vietnam my motorcycle guide shyly questioned me about gay marriage, which made utterly no sense to him in any universe, and when I said that not only had it made no difference, except in a postive way, to our country, but that we even had gay MPs, I thought he would choke on his noodle soup.
More systematic child abuse :-(
Assoc.Press #1
Assoc.Press #2
BBC
… with religion fervently on exactly the side you’d expect.
I’m considering changing my moniker to “Walton, Born Failure”. It corresponds to my self-image today. :-(
Yeah, I’m wallowing in self-pity again. Ignore me.
Further links:
SOS Children’s Villages
Suite101
Well, then you can get in at the reduced rate.
I’ll buy your ticket, if you vote LibDem.
You’ll have sort out travel and accomodation, yourself, though.
Clause 28 was homophobic bullshit, but it was the work of an older generation with different values. Even twenty years ago, homophobia was the norm in all British political parties, and in British society generally.* The positive changes in law over the last two decades – civil partnerships, protection from discrimination against gay and lesbian people, and so on – reflect very recent progress in social attitudes. (Incidentally, I have to point out that it was a Conservative MP, Edwina Currie, who introduced an amendment in 1994 to lower the age of consent for male homosexual acts from 21 to 18.)
(*Just look at the late Sir Edward Heath. He was almost certainly gay, but he had to hide it for his entire life, and was never able to have a fulfilling relationship, because he lived in an era when you simply could not be openly gay and succeed in politics. While he was one of the more decent and principled politicians of his generation, he wasn’t a successful Prime Minister, and died a sad and lonely man.)
Most of the younger generation of Conservatives strongly support gay rights, just like their counterparts in other mainstream parties.
Don’t care what he votes, but I throw in 50 bucks if he gets himself a ticket to Copenhagen before the early bird fare runs out tomorrow…:-)
Thanks for the offer, but me making it to Copenhagen is extremely unlikely, for a whole range of reasons.
Pygmy Loris, twas my error in not being more clear. I did enjoy and appreciate your post and insight. Actually, put an s on the end of both post and insight. (smile)
The specific thread about the slavery as cause of the CW issue has descended into parody, hair splitting and nonsense. So, will post here if anything else comes to mind.
Walton, try the poetry cure. Read something really good aloud to yourself, hopefully something that sends a chill up your spine. Shakespeare or eecummings do it for me. Get out of yourself a bit as you seem to be circling the drain.
JeffreyD, heh.
When I think life is shitty, I remember my reading of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — that resets my perspective.
Walton, when arguing that the Tories are the only other viable option, bear in mind that the UK’s constituency system means that your local voting situation may differ wildly from the national average. E.g., the rural Oxfordshire constituencies are Tory, but Oxford West is solidly Lib Dem, and Oxford East is marginally Labour but an easy target for the Lib Dems with the Tories nowhere. In my constituency, therefore (East), I get to vote against the incumbent, and against the governing party, and for my party of choice (Lib Dem), with good odds of my preferred candidate actually winning. This confluence of democratic goodies has never happened to me before :)
Plus, anything which makes a Lab/Lib coalition government more likely increases the odds of our watching Alastair “Eyebrows of Doom” Darling mud-wrestle Vince “Bald Eagle” Cable for the position of Chancellor. Popcorn!
Stephen: I didn’t mean that the Lib Dems weren’t a viable option from the point of view of getting some MPs elected; there are plenty of Lib Dem MPs and they’re likely to make major gains in some areas in this election. Rather, I meant that they are not likely to form a government on their own. (And if they did, I suspect they would soon abandon their current support for civil liberties, electoral reform and the like, and instead continue the longstanding trend of authoritarian policies and centralising power.)
A Lab/Lib coalition government would be abysmal. A Conservative/Liberal coalition government would be OK, and possibly quite a lot better for civil liberties than a Tory landslide. But my priority for this election is to vote against Labour, rather than for anyone.