My friend Laura, who lives in the Kansai, has also tried and failed to explain Hard Gay to me. (Through no fault of her own, he added unnecessarily.)
The deal with the Linksys WRT54G models:
All the ones before version 5 work swimmingly with the fancy open-source firmwares. Version 5 doesn't, and the WRT54GC is another thing entirely.
Once the version 5 WRT54G had been out for a while, Linksys actually re-released version 4 specifically to appease firmware tweakers, selling it under the name WRT54GL (L being for Linux). I think it's still available new, and it's the one to get if you want to use the fancy firmwares and don't know anyone with an old model sitting around.
Terry @ 14: Whoa, weird -- they must be sending it all to MN and WA, then. Old Overholt's the main whiskey I've been drinking for the last year, on account of it being super-cheap* and always on the shelves.
____
* $11 in MPLS.
The weirdest part of this thread is that I seem to've developed some kind of brain-stem response to a lot of these, and I have to keep reminding myself that they're non-sequiturs here -- it doesn't stick, and little pieces of the thread keep getting past my context-check filter and making my teeth grit together.
Whoops, should have picked a less confusing bakery item! Olive rolls are just small chunks of olive bread; in this case, a relative of ciabatta with olives baked into it.
Xopher, you just kicked my baby hypothesis -- I was so sure Chicago was going to come down in favor of variable "couple." Then again, Ethan might be right about it coming from a non-regional vector.
Anyway, I got bitten by this one several moons ago when I started cashiering at the bakery -- I use variable "couple" (it's in the same family as "few" [3-4] and "several" [4-9], a fuzzy quantifier that is somewhat more exact than "lots" or "a bunch"), and ended up in something of a Who's On First exchange with a customer who didn't understand why I needed him to elaborate on just how many olive rolls he wanted.
The reason I was leaning toward a regionalism hypothesis is that, near as I can tell, the Twin Cities area is standardized on fixed "couple" -- every time I've caught a customer using variable "couple" and asked them about it, they turn out to be from Chicago, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, or the Pacific Northwest. On the third hand, it could be that some dialects lean more towards standardization of "couple," while others are more agnostic.
(And to blow that right back out of the water again, I caught Vlad Taltos using variable "couple" at the end of chapter 4 of Jhereg, and isn't Steven Brust from around here? ARGH.)
Forking away from pronunciation while staying on the topic of regionalisms, I have a question for people.
Say I ask you to hand me a couple of those olive rolls over there. How many am I asking for? And what regional dialect do you speak?
Hurray, standing-wave surfing in the Sidelights!
They have that in Munich, too; I was on a bicycle tour around the city, and they took us to see it. The main spot is in this lovely tree-shaded section of creek, and people in wetsuits line up on each bank and take turns in the wave.
It's on YouTube, of course; Here, here, and here.
You know, I wanted to keep my tonsils, too, but I couldn't use any mom-based leverage in that situation. Plus they were apparently some kinda biohazard. And also revolting.
(I was the only one of us three who had his throaty-bits hacked out. Turns out that our family's twice-yearly strep infestation was all coming from somewhere back there, and none of us have contracted it in the 12 years since. My sister still says my tonsilectomy was the nicest present I ever gave her.)
Fade Manley, #51: Opposite cause, same effect: I stopped taking my painkillers* early because the buzz they offered made me want to bang my head against a wall. I hated that... what would I even call it? That suppressed feeling. Hated it with a passion.
Which told me that I'm a low risk for painkiller addiction, but probably a massive risk for stimulant addiction.
_____
* Tylox, aka oxycodone+acetaminophen.
My siblings (pair o' twins two years younger than me) and I had all 12 (combined) of our wisdom teeth out under general anesthetic on the same morning. It was a cheery damn house after that, I tell you what.
Awesome epiphenomenon of your mom being a Dental Assistant who knows the oral surgeon socially: we got to actually keep the offending teeth. (They dipped them in some kind of bleach solution first.)
I still haven't completely abandoned my plan of making a necklace from one.
Xopher@ #18: On the other hand, here's that joke done correctly.
Anne and Barry, 40 and 47: Egg on my beak; you're right. I suspect myself of confusing them with jays or something. Arg.
TexAnne: Naw, grackles are in the corvidae, so they're much smarter and more resourceful. (And more raucous, I think.)
JESR: Or (good-lord-what-were-they-thinking) Japanese Knotweed. That one gets my dad started every time.
JESR@95: Wow, your geo-fu is strong. Yes, Evergreen Valley. (Kelly's Corner, really, but that's barely a rounding error.)
JESR, our personal geography crosses yet again--I was wondering if someone would mention J.Z.'s or Ramtha's name before I reached the comment-box.
I went to school out in Yelm, the small-town headquarters of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment; one of those deals where we lived on a district boundary-line. Most people there who aren't actively involved with the RSoE tend to regard the whole deal with amused confusion. (The folk at Gordon's Garden Center like 'em well enough, on account of Ramtha's fondness for personal vegetable gardens.) And driving past the compound on the way to school became less and less odd as the years turned on.
We definitely found the release of What the Bleep weird for slightly different reasons than the rest of the country did.
I'm really really scared, you guys.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2007 | 13 |
| 2006 | 4 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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