At CVS they train their clerks to shout "NEXT!" as soon as they are done ringing up a purchase and handing the items over.
I first noticed this behavior in the clerks at the Cathedral Grocery in Morningside Heights, NYC and thought that it was a New York thing (high-volume sales and rudeness), but the CVS in my neighborhood (a Maryland suburb) does not exactly have high-volume sales and the clerks act the same way.
However, at least you know where you are with them. Fake-friendly sales people irritate me much more than those who behave as if you are invisible.
Sounds like the Black Hole of Calcutta (Kolkata) which shows what may happen when you pack so many people into a hot, cramped, airless space for hours.
Disclaimer that the Black Hole may be a British colonialist legend. Now we have an uniquely American version, featuring capitalism, wacko self-promotion, and the gullible.
Which one of the Faux ravers are you nominating for The Bloody Baron?
As everyone here knows, but it wouldn't hurt to reiterate: a typical strategy of magazine subscription sales is to send a notice "Please Renew Your Subscription To [title]," when you don't even have a subscription to this title. They also send individual renewal notices bundled with the issues your workplace subscribes to when your workplace obtains a group subscription from a jobber. I had to tell the secretary to throw these away.
Magazine subscription sales are one notch above Nigerian 419 scammers, except the former are legal for some reason. They rely on people being too dim or too intimidated by the scary letters to throw them away. I picture some old guy or lady with Alzheimer's expiring under the weight of 1000 pounds of multiple copies of the same magazine.
How long before Doctors Without Borders (Médécins sans Frontières) starts operating in the U.S? I am American and very ashamed. We must look like a Third World country to you Europeans. Some Third World countries even do better than the U.S. in providing health care.
Having been somewhere in the blastula stage at the time of the event, I have no recollections of the Moon landing.
Silverberg:
It was such a big event that it pushed me into buying a television set.
Regrettably, I have to say this about 9/11. Since I could only buy a TV after the event, I may have been one of the few Americans not to see the WTC collapse live. I saw it in interminable replay, of course.
Solar power isn't efficient enough? Are they planning to use these robots in high latitudes where there isn't enough sun?
The USA isn't exactly planning to go to war with Scandinavia, despite Republican Congresscritters' opinion of the Swedish welfare state. North Korea might be more credible.
But we already have to worry about immaterial hard AI takeoff. It will probably be the descendant of a spam filter. The IT officer at my workplace confessed, when the new spam filter (called Barracuda) ate some pieces of e-mail I had been awaiting, that he was still "training" it.
Suppose the kids want to check out books about drugs -- not fictional works supposedly glorifying drug use, but factual works documenting their harmful effects, among other information. The bluenoses suspect that the kids are reading factual books about drugs for the purposes of using them. The circle of suspicion could widen.
In the minds of the bluenoses, any secular book at a more advanced level than The Poky Little Puppy could possibly excite suspicion.
There must have been something in that rice pudding.
Irony: suffering from the mild miseries of an ambulatory cold virus (since I am ambulatory and non-feverish, I assume it's a cold), afraid to cough or sneeze, even into a kleenex, in public.
Having scoffed (what am I supposed to do, panic? at my last health "emergency" my primary care physician said Get Out Of My Office), I realize that according to the iconography of badfic* (think Crichton novels and Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, modern plot line), I will be the first to die of viral pneumonia in a few days.
*Badfic loosely defined; the late Crichton qualifies, I suppose, and Willis is an exception, not "bad" as such. Traits: Excessive Suspense. Edificatory Deaths of Minor Characters.
Some of these ambiguous names are very definitely male in the UK (at least traditionally). I'm American.
When I was first learning about the field of history in which I have a Ph.D., classics, I hoped naively that the scholars who went by their first and middle initials were women and that Robin Lane Fox was a woman.
The other day I was reading the Washington Post wedding section (in its bastardized clade, Express, given away free on the subway) and hoping that a couple labeled as Courtney and Ray were gay men. The one on the left was a hairy, definitely male, IT-techie type, the right-hand one a skinny, gender-free person in a baseball cap. Then I realized (double take) that the person writing the caption had reversed the order of the names (or the photo): Ray was the hairy guy, Courtney a woman in a baseball cap with her hair pulled back and hidden.
Courtney can be a last name but it is now defnitely a girl's first name here in the US. The same with Lindsey, to the doubtless embarrassment of a certain Republican Congressman from South Carolina. His embarrassment, his problem.
Though no doubt someone has said this, and the IT experts and librarians here know this already, you should not use tags that have multiple and ambiguous meanings. "Adult" is a disaster in this respect. Obscene? Advanced reading level? Concerning adult life stages? "Adult" is an euphemism!
"Sexual" still has too many meanings. A text may be about sexuality but contain no explicit depictions of sex or conventionally obscene terms. E.g. medical textbooks, GLBT sociology books, and academic studies of sexuality (all hammered by the Amazon glitch).
I suggest replacing "adult" with "explicit." This pertains to texts that are conventionally considered obscene (though, of course, by many people it is not). Nevertheless, its meaning is much narrower. "Erotic" is another possibility, though not all explicit texts are erotica, and not all erotica is explicit.
I'm not an expert. I'm an MLS. student just one month from passing/failing a course in cataloging ("information structure" today). It heartens me to find that though I feel rather stupid at cataloging, Amazon collectively is more stupid.
At least velvet is reasonably flat (if you do not cram the books together). I work in a school library, so I was recently asked to order Beastly Rhymes To Read After Dark. The mass market binding is, I kid you not, fluffy green fake fur.
Nice for a kid to take to bed, but impossible to shelve (or keep clean). I bought the library binding.
If they truly plan to legalize marijuana (there are enormous economic and irrational social forces against this -- the prison-industrial complex and scared soccer moms), smoking pot will give people something to do with their spare time when they are unemployed and can't afford to go shopping for anything more expensive than NutterButters. As opposed to drinking, which makes some unemployed and poor people violent.
The opiate of the masses!
/cynicism
Lust spam: penis extension
Wrong gender in my case.
I have noted mind-bogglingly archaic synonyms being used for this body part in my spam (mostly Gmail): rod, yard, etc. These must have been found by machine-mining dictionaries. I can't quite see spammers saying to each other, "Hey, it's time to go look up Johnson's Dictionary."
This reminds me that I had chickenpox during a family winter vacation, in 1977 or '78. We had just reached the rented cabin (it looks exceedingly nostalgic now in memory -- A-frames, pine paneling, people in ski sweaters)and begun to unpack, and I began to whine that I felt yucky. The notorious rash clinched the diagnosis, and while the rest of the family and friends went tobogganing and ice-fishing, I had to stay inside by the heater reading Trixie Belden and drinking flat root beer.
Maybe the illness didn't come on as fast as that, but that's what I remember, time probably truncated by feverish sleep.
The cargo cult analysis applies well to subsets of the media, such as personal health news -- the media promotes the illusion that if you eat only the recommended diet (which has changed from decade to decade), maintain a low weight, and exercise two hours a day, you will be healthy, free from scary things like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. The corollary is that people who get ill deserve it because they didn't do those things. Meanwhile, the media also creates hysteria about the latest thing that either promotes cancer (Biphenyls!) or cures or prevents it (Chocolate! Blueberries)!
The health media promotes a Randian attitude towards personal health, one of the reasons why our health care system is so expensive (some people will pay anything) and so underserves needy groups. It also promotes shysters and scammers (acai-berry juice MLMs).
I've the sense that most commenters here are older than I am (38), so you can probably amplify. I think the first thing a national health care system in the US should do is fan out operatives all over the country to duct-tape the mouths and hands of health journalists in the newspapers, shiny magazines, and TV.
I'd have preferred entartage, even though there's no Arabic cultural context for that; as far as I know, Iraqis don't eat custard pies (the climate is too hot in summer).
Intended to humiliate hubristic fools -- and harmless, unless you count death by cholesterol.
Perhaps little kids (aged 1-2) aren't sure what "too hot" means and apply it to everything. At 18 months my nephew was impressed with the warning "hot!" and repeated it when he encountered any unknown food item. His mom had to say, "No, that isn't hot."
Selbstschadenfreude.
I had to learn a bit of German for a totally useless (but very geeky) advanced degree.
I think part of the "We're going to lose!" panic is due to a liberal and Democratic overinvestment in the belief that Republicans are Absolutely Evil Criminal Masterminds instead of what they actually appear to be, narrow-minded and not particularly bright privileged white people.
One needs worthy enemies.
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