Rosa @ 65: Agreed.
I love thrift store shopping.
Among other things, it teaches one that sizes are changing all the time. I seem to wear a size smaller in this year's sizes than I do in last year's, despite having the same measurements. Who'd'a'thunk?
Lately I ran short of money and clothes at the same time, and my family sent me $200 to replace falling-apart bits of my wardrobe. I went across town to the better (as in best variety for prices, not posher) thrift store, and managed a haul of six pairs of pants, several shirts, a leather trenchcoat and a hat for just under $100.
The hat now goes with my Fourth Doctor scarf, and I can walk around the neighborhood looking Time Lord-y.
Indeed thrift stores are bounteous.
I love the Illuminatus! version. The narrative takes us through the viewpoints of frireny fhpprffvir nffnffvaf, rnpu bs jubz vf nfgbhaqrq/zbegvsvrq/tbofznpxrq gb fcbg frireny bgure nffnffvaf ba gur fprar.
Further hilarious spoiler: Bar bs gurz, jub unccraf gb or Wbua Qvyyvatre, vf frag gb fgbc gur nffnffva ur'f rkcrpgvat, naq ernyvmrf gurer ner jnl gbb znal nffnffvaf va jnl gbb znal qvssrerag cynprf sbe uvz gb or noyr gb ernpu gurz nyy orsber vg'f gbb yngr. Fb ur fubbgf ng gur Cerfvqrag uvzfrys, orpnhfr ng yrnfg gung jnl vg'yy rvgure perngr na vafbyhoyr zlfgrel be n ovmneer urnqyvar.
Earl, above, beat me to the punch - although I don't think educational and social class advantages always trump. If they did, I'd be a lot richer. In fact, I think it's quite interesting that ancient India evidently had downward mobility and/or some lack of overlap between social class and material wealth, to the extent, at least, that this story can just begin with "In Savatthi there lived a poor brahmin with his wife..." and not with the explication of how exactly a brahmin gets to be poor.
If I was gonna do Schroedinger's Cat, I'd do a cat costume half of which is covered with zombie makeup... though that's bad logic, it would still be funny.
This year I wore my Fourth Doctor scarf and hat. Hardly a costume, as I wear it frequently anyway, but I was pleased and surprised when a couple of different people recognized who I was supposed to be. Perhaps they usually aren't attuned to it - or just aren't sufficiently outgoing, around here, to make remarks. ("Where's your TARDIS?" "Over there. I got the chameleon circuit fixed!")
Ya think someone was a bit drunk in the news office?
"Obama Airs Primetime TV Ad; McCain Continues Attakcks on Riival"
(The article doesn't seem to be screwed up the way the headline is; just linking for verification.)
Oddly designed survey. But hey, chance at Amazon gift card; I don't care if their results are lousy, I gave my five minutes with an honest heart.
They mostly asked me about Oklahoma, Nebraska, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Rhode Island. I'm in Oregon.
The Galaxy Quest page seems to be an exercise in building a satirical reality, so I can only guess (and hope) that the blink tag is there for the same reason as the badly resized pictures, lack of anti-aliasing, etc -- to emulate some Star Trek fansites of the day.
Yikes!
Marilee: your poem made me smile.
Teresa is a powerhouse - let's hope that any power interruptions she's suffering end soon, and are minimal. For everyone's sake. Especially for the sake of the English language.
Best wishes, T.; be well.
Pleased to see that others have gotten to "gay" before me, and wanting to call extra attention to Gwen @ 9 and her list of words that really, really seem to need asterisks.
(Asterisks all 'round! 'S on me!)
This seems like the best possible blog for a query of this nature, too. Good going.
Steve Taylor @ 36:
that Fry and Laurie skit where Hugh Laurie plays a grand piano and sings "America... America... America..." with a constipated look on his face. Except with explosions.
So of course I had to look it up on Youtube. I was pleased at Fry's reaction in his three seconds of screen time. Nicely pragmatic.
I thought that smacked of the "translated from the French" style.
As such, I can forgive (a little) because at least they are writing on one of their own cultural traditions, however badly.
My partner John has a long and humorous dissection of how the "translated from the French" style gets emulated by native-English-speaking grad students, with horrific results. At one time in his life, he graded these travesties.
Foucault is a good example of the style in its natural habitat.
Fake Foucault is just headache-inducing.
TNH @ 97: Carrots are the default vegetable? Huh. I would have guessed corn or peas. Or tomatoes. Or lima beans. Or ... I never know what the defaults are. If you ask me off the cuff for a vegetable, what comes to mind first is the entire class, inclusive.
Looking at your list of veggies, I can only conclude one reason for carrots: some great portion of us may be predisposed to think in alphabetical order. (There are a couple in that list that would precede carr-, but all of them are less commonplace.)
Weirdly, sleepily, I read the end line wrong and thought it was "think of an animal the color of that letter."
I'd gotten Denmark by then, and e is pale yellow to my slight synaesthesia, so I came up with a chicken.
Terry Karney @ 46, etc, I seem to be more or less lucky: I can deal with sticking a needle in the cat (haven't had to stick needles in other people, but I imagine the principle would be similar) and with having needles stuck in me, but during the period of time in which I was giving myself intramuscular injections, it ranged from "semi-okay" to quite lightheaded, and I was always rather shaky afterwards.
It seems that the trick to getting stuck is walling off my consciousness of the needle in my body, and I can't wall it off when I'm doing the sticking. "Hello, I'm not here... Wait, I am! Hello, there's no needle here... Yes, there is!"
I wonder from time to time if I should train for an emergency response profession of one sort or another, though, because although I haven't dealt with massive trauma or dead people, my emotional response to emergency situations tends to be a state of total cold calm with some humor, and I've never been bothered by blood, mine or other people's.
Lee @ 6: Actually (cough) I was raised in California, but apparently missed out on complete sections of popular culture. I'm pleased that I come off as non-USian, though. Using some amount of British English is actually a conscious choice.
Avram @ 64: I definitely got that intent, especially with some of the vague lyrics. I hope that if there is spillover it will simply serve to make McCain less appealing to those non-Moron-Americans who watch the thing.
If anyone here would like an antidote to the whole gung-ho Johnny Cash pastiche thing: the Dana Lyons track Cows With Guns should do the trick nicely... There's a video but it's really better without the visuals as the song relies heavily on puns.
Wow.
What gets me is that the doggerel is clearly done as some sort of Dr. Seuss pastiche, meaning this video is targeted at the perhaps extremely narrow demographic of people who read to their children but somehow still like Bush.
Name munged because I don't want to directly connect my real name with my somewhat more personal livejournal.
Apologies if anyone has done
this
before: I had to give it a go, regardless of whether fellow ML'ers have indeed addressed every possible parodical variant of William Carlos Williams.
Those of you who I've added in past: well, now you know it's me.
Oh, and I'm back in Portland now!
Yay!
Susan @ 50: Hmm, this might be serious and life-threatening. Does that mean I should see a doctor or avoid one?
In the US, I haven't got insurance; in China, I haven't either, but healthcare is cheap. Unfortunately that adjective applies to quality as well as price, and there's the translation issue mentioned above. So I always try to get things checked out early here, which has resulted in several false alarms, because the whole emergency health care situation seems like a disaster waiting to happen. On the other hand, back in Portland, I live about a mile (straight shot) from a good hospital, so I at least have the comfort of knowing that should that little random symptom turn out to be something suddenly dreadful I can expect equally sudden care...
It's good to know that being potentially clot-prone does not mean flying will automatically cause disastrous effects. Thanks.
I've heard a lot of different descriptions of what a blood clot might feel like, and that they can also be asymptomatic, which hasn't helped my paranoia any, but non-bruisy is also a useful descriptor towards calming me down -- the area of my leg that I'm suspicious about feels bruisy, but doesn't look like much of anything except a little swollen in no particular pattern.
Xopher: Making Light needs to have a "buy them a drink" comment click function. Somewhere in Internet 3.141592etcetcetc, perhaps...
Bruce Adelsohn @ 363: Perhaps you could buy the assorted beers you've been wanting to try and get some friends over to drink them, bring a little paper sampling cup and let people pour you tastes. This is roughly what one of my partners does when she wants to try desserts (not diabetic, but has a form of hypoglycemia with fairly alarming reactions to sugar in quantity) -- rather, it's habit enough that when she mentions being interested in a dessert, the general reaction in our family/social circle is for one of us to buy it and give her a fragment...
(I shouldn't really be on the internet now and am still technically in a few weeks' wrist break, but this is self-limiting as I'm going to be on a train in two hours.
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