heresiarch @ 237: If I agreed to meet someone for lunch, and they said it was a wedding, then would I have agreed to get married? It's the AP that's spouting nonsense, not Cox.
The more appropriate analogy is that Cox and some other people are saying they are having lunch, while the AP is saying it's a wedding.
So what matters is who has more credibility. Since the MBA manages to come off as an insurance scam based on their web site, AP's version of the story seems more credible to me. If it's not the truth, MBA should have a big front-page article disclaiming it, because obviously somebody at AP has miusunderstood.
I'm always suspicious of entities that are willing to let misunderstandings of that scope stand uncontested.
My issue with "thru" is that is looks like it ought to be said "thruh," so it always makes me pause in reading and think about it, which a word like "through" shouldn't do.
"Throo" looks kind of childish, though.
Ulrika, the purpose of the curtain rod is to keep the plans from rolling off the shelf, so you can stack them a couple of layers high without having to be very delicate around them.
The thing about rolls of architectural plans, as opposed to rolls of drawings of other sorts, is that they are often several inches thick and very heavy. So threading them on the curtain rods doesn't work very well at all geometrically or in terms of load.
I've often considered using the classic storage units which are these racks of metal rods to hang the plans on, open and unrolled, but they take up a lot of room and I find that nice tidy bundles of plans get all frayed at the ends and ripped from casual office accidents. Those things work fine when you're actively working on a project, but when you get to archival storage they're kind of limiting. Rolling plans keeps everything very secure, and getting stuff into a bookcase keeps it relatively safe.
LMB: Exactly, lengthwise on the shelves. If you're not working with individual pages (which tend to squash slightly), rolls store very nicely that way. In my experience it's pretty rare that somebody comes up with that particular solution, but when they do it changes how they store stuff. I kept all my trace drawings for carved pieces like that for years, and everybody who visited my studio would gasp with awe at the shelves rather than my art.
G Jules: I think that even if drugs are useful in a zombie attack, more useful is keeping them up to date, as noted. Or better yet, anything that will get you the hell away from the zombie. I say this as somebody who has been attacked by a (fake) zombie. So perhaps swap them for an electric scooter? The key here is to try to change the thinking from, "this would be useful if zombies showed up and closed all the pharmacies just as I needed medication," to, "well, this would be handy for that situation but not as useful as a really zippy scooter, so I don't need to keep this."
And oh, yes: not finishing bookcases because doing so would mean moving the books, I bought some unfinished bookcases about twelve years ago, and they are yet unfinished because I made the mistake of just putting books on them thinking I could paint them later. At this point I've decided not to bother. I have bigger fish to fry in my handygirl lifestyle.
G. Jules: How would old pills help you in a zombie apocalypse?
I'm not being facetious. I'm trying to bone up on my anti-zombie measures because I have a particularly annoying friend who [honestly believes|is pretending|thinks it's funny to pretend] he has become a zombie.
And I have a bunch of old pills I just purged from the cabinet (nothing like a thread on cluttering to get you all worked up).
LMB MacAlister @#159:
Re. storing plans: I've found that a 36" bookshelf with a cafe curtain rod (the sort that can be lifted up off the support easily are best) keeps plans very nicely in a horizontal format in a lot less space. You may have to add extra shelves, and it's helpful to put labels on the shelves saying what's there, but it's a storage format that fits more easily into a home than baskets of plans scattered about.
Of course, I've recently gone and had all my large-format non-digital work digitized so I can get rid of the rolls and huge flat sheets. It was expensive, but it's ever so freeing to stop thinking I need to find a place in the house or the home office to fit a large set of plan drawers.
I used to have a book that was a sort of dictionary of things you just don't need, and why. I would skip the ones I didn't believe in (non-readers always seem to think readers keep books around to impress them). That was always a good read when I was trying to psyche myself up to a big decluttering session. I think I gave it to a friend who needed it more.
I don't know how it happened that I went from being an extremely cluttered kid and teenager to being a relatively normal adult. I still pile up things, and need to purge regularly, but it's not out of control. Every now and then I will look at a part of the house and think, "My god, when did I get so many muffin tins?" or I'll be fussing around in the living room and a pile of papers will be sorted because they were in my way.
When things get decluttered, my big bugaboo is that everything recyclable has to be recycled (our city has very large rolling bins for recyclables, thank goodness), and everything donatable must be donated. In my recent purge of textbooks, I found Books for Africa, so a bunch of still-current but superseded structural engineering textbooks and a couple of extra dictionaries are going there.
It does make it a lot more work, and if I were more cluttered, it would not be worth the extra time to do things like box up donations or sort through papers. I also maintain a shelf of books that I'm planning to sell back or donate somewhere, should my friends need reading material. I made the mistake of buying some bundles of unlabeled books-by-the-pound ("one of these has got to be readable!") so those shelves are rather full of junk right now, but often they are filled with duplicates or books I've replaced with a more durable binding, better translation, new edition, and so forth.
Regarding narrow bookshelves in hallways, we've just come up with a plan for a wall in our main hallway that needs to be replaced. Instead of just building a normal wall, we'll build an extra-heavy-backed bookcase (for auditory privacy) in its place, with a secret door for getting into the closet/toilet on the other side of the wall. I refuse to display mmpbs in my front hall because I am a horrific snob about bindings, so right now I'm trying to decide whether to make the wall narrow (about 6 inches deep) and put my smaller books there, perhaps shelving by size a la Pepys, or whether to encroach on the hall slightly and make a bookcase deep enough for hardcover fiction.
#165, WimL I'm depressed that in a discussion of flu and antibacterial soap it took until comment 132 for someone to acknowledge that flu is not a bacterial disease.
It's not as if there's been any obvious lack of understanding of the concept. So why should anybody bother to specifically acknowledge it?
Sarah @62: if you had pneumonia last year, your doctor should tell you to get a pneumonia shot this year -- if that is not the case I would ask why. I had pneumonia twice in four years, and it was definitely much worse the second time; now I stay up to date on the shots (the last one I got was good for ten years).
I'd like to note a couple things.
1. As noted, a pneumonia shot is also important. For mostly the same risk groups as the flu. You only need one every ten years, but if you're in a high-risk group, it can save your life.
2. When washing your hands, spend some time with fingers laced together to scrub the area between your fingers. You'd be surprised (shocked, stunned, etc) at what will stick around there when all else is clean.
And critical in all this is not just signing the card, but talking to your family/next of kin/whoever is going to be dealing with the doctors and getting them to understand and agree to uphold your requests. A single family objection can derail your best intentions.
In my family, we had this discussion when I was fifteen, and again in my twenties, and now, having dealt with it more directly again this summer, we're planning to sit down and talk about it again. I'm pretty sure we're on the same page (harvest all you can, burn us to cinders, hide cinders in bottom cupboard for heirs to deal with, that kind of thing). But you know, it's a good idea to make sure everything is still the same, as decades pass.
rhandir:
Ayse, if you don't pick up your mail daily, some postal delivery people decide that it is an abandoned address. Filing complaints at the local post office fixes this, though catching the mail deliverer is usually simpler.
That's an excellent idea. I will set the trap tonight. I'm sure a simple drop-net will work well; she's kind of a slow mover.
...
GABYAW: I ended up filing a complaint with the postmaster a couple months ago, who gave me the inexplicable argument that the fact that I receive so little mail must mean I don't live there. "You don't get a utility bill, so of course we assumed you had moved out," he said, as if by getting bills online I have ceased to have an earthly presence.
I always wonder how many people those scams catch. I never see them unless I'm slumming in the spam filter looking for good lines of poetry. At this point I've stopped reading any e-mail, statistically speaking: I read less than .01% of e-mail that arrives at the server addressed to me.
I no longer answer the phone, either, because even if it rings it is spam, and I have no adequate filters for spam on the phone (being unwilling to pay for caller ID).
The mail carrier keeps deciding I have moved out and for reasons unknown to me refuses to deliver mail addressed to me at my alleged home address.
As far as I can tell, technology and infrastructure improvements have made me as hard to get hold of as my 18th century ancestors who spent most of their time at sea.
(Except, of course, none of them had a cell phone and wireless internet everywhere they go. But still.)
How about:
4. Given the current political atmosphere, given your citizenship and immigration status, you are afraid that showing a lack of support for the president might mean losing everything you have, up to and including your life.
I'm not in that position, but good family friends are. It's horrible.
I had a friend in college who was a fruititarian. She ended up dropping out to spend a year in a mental hospital and was never seen or heard of since. It was a form of obsessive compulsiveness, I think. She nearly died from it, because of the crazy rules she had made for what she could and could not eat.
I find vegetarians in general to have a very poor sense of humour about vegetarianism with people who they think are not vegetarians. As I spent many years being a mostly stealth vegetarian (I didn't see why anybody needed to know my criteria for what I ate unless they were cooking it), I got a lot of it. The best was when somebody chewed me out for eating a vegetarian meal with them "because you're just patronizing me."
I also find non-vegetarians to be very defensive about vegetarianism, especially in situations where they are eating a lot of meat (barbeque restaurants). As if I care what you eat.
I think we need to spend less time looking at each other's plates and judging them and more time eating.
Heh. It was so sunny and warm in the Bay Area that I forgot it was winter elsewhere.
I spent the weekend planting roses and citrus trees, and moving sod around in the garden. It's been long enough that I've been away from the Northeast that February doesn't make me think "snowfall and resulting slushy curbs" any more, but rather "prime gardening season." This is the time when we have enough rainfall to let plants get established.
I love that sort of picture of snow, though. It always looks so clean and beautiful before people come along and ass it all up.
Laurel, we're not making a list of religions that don't use the cross in their churches, but religions that specifically reject the cross as a symbol of Christianity. I think there's a difference in there, but maybe it's only obvious to me.
As for catechism and scripture being inter- and intra-contradictory, that's nothing new. They were all written by humans, and then edited heavily but not consistently. I've always figured you had to go for the overall sense of the thing, rather than bog yourself down in things like the laundry tips (clothes made from linen and wool are a bitch to wash) or guidelines for good works (none of the writers seem to be able to decide between having you do them to be saved versus not do them because that is showing off how good you are).
Regarding Quakers and their non-use of the cross: One could argue they [Quakers] aren't really Christian (certainly one need not be a Christian to attend a Meeting, and I know a couple of Jews who are also Members of a Meeting) but they are still thought of as such by most, and would, if pressed, probably self describe (at least as a group) as Christian.
Interesting. I know very little about Christian sects other than Catholicism (my mother's religion). I married an atheist Quaker, and all the other Quakers I know are either atheist or at the most agnostic, so I sort of assumed they were pretty atheistic (and thus non-Christian, of course) in general, but actually the subject has never come up in conversation before now. He tells me you are right: Quakers are generally Christian.
And all I knew about Jehovah's Witnesses before this thread was to be sure to live outside the parking radius of a kingdom hall if you like to spend your Saturdays digging in the front garden. I don't know if they have a canvassing meeting or a service or just a set time for distributing reading materials on Saturday afternoons, but those people leave church all fired up with the holy spirit and a hundred million pamphlets of some sort, and if they can let some of it out before they get to the car, all the better (holy spirit or pamphlets). I didn't know they didn't use the cross; the ladies who come round here are always wearing one, but maybe that's just a fashion statement or something.
I find all the Protestants/Presbyterians/Anglicans/etc. endlessly confusing, especially when you get to things like Free Methodists and the various Baptists and conferences of 1824 and so forth. I really don't know how people can keep all that in their heads. Maybe it's hard for me because I really just don't care who other people worship or the minute details of how.
To say that all Muslims feel one way or the other (or that those who disagree are "ignorant and wrong") would seem to me the same as posting a simular opinion on any contested religious topic.
You have completely misunderstood my statement. I never said all muslims feel one way or another. I simply said that a crescent is not a symbol for Islam the way a cross is a symbol for Christianity precisely because not all muslim people feel that that is the case, and many of them take the anti-symbology of the religion very seriously. I don't, offhand, know of any Christian sects that reject the cross as a symbol of how Christ died for your sins, but maybe you can enlighten me.
If a sizable number of muslims feel that the crescent does not mean Islam, then, well golly, the crescent cannot be the same sort of universal symbol of Islam as the cross is the symbol of Christianity, because it's not very universal. Which makes it kind of useless for generalizing from, including making monuments that are secretly dedicated to Islam. Some Americans may not understand the fact that the crescent is not the same as a cross, because they are used to a religion with a symbol of faith and can't conceive of one without. And some muslims may have adopted the crescent because it's convenient to have a logo, and as it happens the crescent is associated with a great muslim empire. But that doesn't change the fact that while a crescent is used -- more as a logo than as a symbol of faith -- by some muslim people, most of whom have some reasonable connection to the Ottoman Empire, it's not a symbol of Islam.
The indubitable authority of Arlington National Cemetary on the subject notwithstanding.
And I was trying not to do this, but I will pull out my authority baton: look at my name. Yes, it's my real name, though people think it's a nom de guerre because of the implications. If you have even a passing familiarity with the history of Islam, you ought to recognize it, or a variant. I think I know whereof I speak on the subject of Islam and symbols.
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