My phones have 'wxyz' on the 9 key. All of my phones have the letters right there on the keys. Does that mean I'm old?
My phone doesn't even have keys. (But it does show the letters with the numbers in the key-like regions of the screen.)
Me too. On all fronts -- the 9 key, all my phones have letters on the keys, old.
I don't even own a television cell phone.
Maybe Heebie just has a crappy phone. Just in case, 1-800-MIX-ALOT is 1-800-649-2568.
Hi. I'm Maurice. I'm an executive by day and a wild man by night.
It's true that I'm very ambivalent about my current phone. But I just got it, so.
I'm a twenty-five year subscriber to both Playboy and The New Yorker.
7: The ginger fellow who knows all about data processing? Rowr!
But seriously, I think the guy in the Viking outfit comes off as the most appealing.
No hamsters?! Well, sheeit.
I think I saw James B. Shearer somewhere in there.
I sure do hope that fashion photog has found his way.
15: the furry recedes pretty quick.
This reminds me, my cell phone contract is up next month. Have to start thinking of reasons to be pissed at my phone so I can justify a new one.
Well look, if none of those guys float your boat, there are lots more fish in the sea.
No Donna Juanitas.
I love that one, and don't have the slightest idea what the hell it means.
I think Donna Juanita owns a hamster.
Have to start thinking of reasons to be pissed at my phone so I can justify a new one.
I'm trading up to a model with real-time voice chat.
Well look, if none of those guys float your boat, there are lots more fish in the sea.
I liked the other guys better. Confidence is appealing.
If this thread goes much longer I'm going to need an ice block to shove in my pants.
My phone (a Blackberry Pearl) has letters on the keys, but there are two per key. Hence, all wrong. I think you can just type the letters though... Does that work on an iPhone?
The iPhone's phone keypad has the letters on there like normal.
Apparently everybody has nicer phones than me. I always get whatever one if free when you sign-up.
30: that's reason enough to be angry at it!
My advice is to keep trying to use it to play old Sega games, make fart noises, and look up trivia, then trade up, infuriated.
31: Sega? When I was a kid, we had an Odessey.
32: that was that Ukranian c64 knockoff, right?
In any case, unlike old Sega games, old Odessey games are not available for the iPhone, so you would upgrade only to remain frustrated.
33: This was before the C64 and, despite having a keyboard, was in no way a computer. It was what your parents got you if you asked for Atari and they were still pissed about that storm window you broke.
Actually porting Odyssey games to the iPhone would be pretty funny. Stick this transparency to your iPhone screen!
JEFF CASSELL: Uh, I'm Jeff Cassell.
OFFSCREEN: Into the camera?
JEFF CASSELL: I'm Jeff Cassell!
...
JEFF CASSELL: I like to watch wrestling?
...
OFFSCREEN: And what what are you looking for in a woman?
JEFF CASSELL: Well, you know, I'm just sick of playing the field. Um, I don't need to date everything that--
OFFSCREEN: Into the camera.
JEFF CASSELL: I'm sick of playing the field! And I don't need to date everything that moves?
...
JEFF CASSELL: You know, [nervous laughter] I only need one you! [gestures, grimaces, hangs head in shame]
...
JEFF CASSELL: Eh, uh, I like a woman with a [air quotes] wild side, you know? Who's [unintelligible] and open minded.
...
JEFF CASSELL: A lot of times I'll just, um, stay up! You know, late at night, and watch you sleep. [bares fangs]
Back. Was over on Standpipe's other blog.
"No this isn't Space Invaders, it's Alien Attack. And Shasta isn't Pepsi."
If there wasn't such a gap in years between the two videos, I'd swear that Jeff Cassell was Doug Douglason.
The Odyssey predated the Atari, actually, and as far as I know didn't have a space invaders ripoff. Did you have an Odyssey 2?
41: Maybe. I know the neighbors got an Atari the same Christmas we got an Odyssey. And I remember something Space Invaderish.
You know, [nervous laughter] I only need one you!
This is probably solely due to a lack of freezer space.
43: If we're talking late 70s/early 80s and it had a keyboard, it was probably an Odyssey2. We had one too, for the same reason.
44: Problem solved.
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_04616922000P?vName=Appliances&cName=Freezers+%26+Ice+Makers&sName=Chest
45: Yes, then it would have been an Odyssey2. I remember some games that used the keyboard, but I also remember never playing those.
You may be thinking of Demon Attack, which is more like Galaga then Space Invaders. The most memorable game for me is Pickaxe Pete, which was basically Donkey Kong, I guess.
47: So you never played "make the speech synthesizer say naughty words"? That's a shame.
48: I did enjoy Pickax Pete. But, apparently I remember right about Alien Invaders. See about 1/4 of the way down on this.
http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=ConsoleMuseum.Detail&id=14&game=12
50: I remember that game. It's not (or wasn't, I just added it) on Wikipedia's list of Odyssey games, for some reason.
I'm thinking that there's a real opening in the dating market for guys who don't like to have fun.
There were an immense number of Space Invader knockoffs. There were ALSO an immense number of Pong knockoffs.
Don't get started on Hunt the Wumpus.
max
['I feel very sad that I know these things - but not as sad as I'd feel, if I felt the need to stick an ice block in my pants.']
There were ALSO an immense number of Pong knockoffs.
We had a Pong knockoff that was basically a huge rectangular table with a net that bisected the table on its shorter cross-section. The controls were sort of like a Wii and very good. When you 'hit' the ball, you could actually feel the 'pop'.
Pong itself was a ripoff of the original Odyssey.
Wow, this thread is really helping me be productive at work.
55: I've played a knockoff of that knockoff where you don't even have a table; you just play it on asphalt. Strange but true!
57: you were thinking it would be about phone spelling techniques you could practice?
My best friend theoretically scored the highest score ever recorded on Alien Invaders. He took a screen shot (with a film camera) and sent it in to the official Odyssey magazine, but it was never printed (or his subscription ran out, I don't know).
59: The topic of the post is the one thing that's generally excluded from discussion, so I wasn't worried.
Pong itself was a ripoff of the original Odyssey.
In which Odysseus, trying to return home to Ithaca, is batted endlessly to and fro across the eastern Mediterranean by divine forces far beyond his control.
I first saw Pong (and waldoes) in 1958, when my electronics class took a trip to the Brookhaven labs. Wasn't there a write-up about that first version in the NYTimes last year or so? The Atari version was considerably smaller and less expensive.
In which Odysseus, trying to return home to Ithaca
I had a similar experience the one time I tried to get to Ithaca, except that it was US Air instead of divine forces and the actual flight was to Binghamton.
65: I first saw Pong on a punch card machine. You'd input a card with the position of your paddle and wait for the output to see if you'd hit or not.
I once tried to hit a bunch of mechanical moles with a mallet as they popped their heads unexpectedly through different holes.
68: Chuck E Cheese gets really irked if you bring your own Halligan bar to stop the little shits from popping up after you hit them.
He's not really "irked", No Toeby. He's a big mechanical mouse who's just acting irked, in between big mechanical song and dance numbers.
He's a big mechanical mouse
Way to spoil the illusion. What's next? Walking into the a pre-school and shouting the truth about Santa?
Maybe. Stupid little kids and their stupid beliefs.
1
My phones have 'wxyz' on the 9 key. All of my phones have the letters right there on the keys. Does that mean I'm old?
Yes, and if you have troubling reading the letters (like me) that means you are really old. And the post is correct that this is annoying.
Walking into the a pre-school and shouting the truth about Santa?
HE EATS BAD CHILDREN ALIVE!
He's not bringing you a puppy this year, no matter how cute you are when you ask.
I heard he starts with their faces. If they're only a little bad, he returns them to their families at that point.
He didn't fart on my face. All that bad behavior for nothing.
There were ALSO an immense number of Pong knockoffs.
I'm thinking that there's a real opening in the dating market for guys who don't like to have fun.
Score!
teo, you need to be the guy who doesn't like to have fun, not just somebody so deep and brooding that you can't have fun. The later has been done.
||
Does someone want to talk about the ACORN thing? It is really making me upset. Those videos obviously could have been deceptively edited--we don't see the original questions, only the responses of the ACORN workers and a voice over explaining what they are responding to. Besides, the accusations against the workers don't even make sense. Why would anyone offer free advice on running a child prostitution ring? What's their motive? Not money, the advice is free. Are we supposed to believe ACORN just loves child prostitution so much they promote it pro bono?
AND YET! All of the defenses at Salon concede the veracity of the videos and then try to change the topic: "look at all the good ACORN has done," "corporate corruption is much worse," etc. The best defense seems to be "Those were a few reogue employees who have been fired."
Why isn't ACORN suing for libel? They could force the unedited tapes into the public. What is going on here?
[sighs, slouches back in chair]
|>
81: I can have fun. I just choose not to.
...laydeez.
No, it wasn't good for me. Because I choose not to enjoy it.
82: Robert, have you seen the woman from ACORN saying how they filed a police report when those folks came in talking about child prostitution? And they have the police report filed last July? The pimp guy denies they were ever shown the door, etc.
85: I haven't. Why isn't this in my usual center-left news outlets? If they have a police report, shouldn't that shut this guy the fuck down immediately?
86: Because the police report was filed in Philly (according to what I saw in the WP). The bad stuff is from California, New York and somewhere else (Baltimore?).
82: My local tv news had an ACORN rep saying that the ACORN people being filmed were just playing along with the them; they knew they were being lied to and were basically one upping the supposed pimp y prostitute every time they said something outrageous.
Of course, I think it's too late to shut down the backlash. People seem to love to hate ACORN.
82
Why isn't ACORN suing for libel? They could force the unedited tapes into the public. What is going on here?
The obvious explanantion is the unedited tapes aren't a lot better. Or at least the people running ACORN have no confidence they are a lot better.
88
My local tv news had an ACORN rep saying that the ACORN people being filmed were just playing along with the them; they knew they were being lied to and were basically one upping the supposed pimp y prostitute every time they said something outrageous.
And if ACORN believes this, why did they fire a bunch of people?
Back to the OP, you young'uns have probably never noticed that real phones don't have a "z." This was recently found to be critical to solving an Encyclopedia Brown mystery I was reading with my 10-year-old niece. What's this world coming to when Encyclopedia Brown clues are archaic?!??!
Actually, I remember not being able to solve one when I was a girl because it required a working knowledge of egg creams, which I lacked due to a combination of age and inadequate proximity to NYC. (Not so many soda counters in my part of NJ.)
This was recently found to be critical to solving an Encyclopedia Brown mystery I was reading with my 10-year-old niece. What's this world coming to when Encyclopedia Brown clues are archaic?!??
Oh, well, the fact that pigs can't look up will never go out of style.
Because the police report was filed in Philly (according to what I saw in the WP).
Except the little ratfucker denies that they were ever shown the door anywhere. See here.
88: Yeah, that's the explanation of the woman in San Bernardino. I've seen that. Her explanation also seems weird--why would she play along? On one version of the story, she specifically asks "is this a joke" in a part of the tape that is edit out, and (supposedly) O'Keefe and Giles say "Yes, this is a joke, play along." The way the Washington Post relates it, she asks "is this a set up?" and the filmakers say "no."
But that's just one case, anyway. I still don't understand how we are supposed to believe that workers in DC, NY and Baltimore were in the business of offering free tax advice to people running a child sex ring. Out of the love of promiting prostitution!
Encylopedia stopped. "The video has to be faked." To find out why turn to page 65.
Page 65: Nobody in Baltimore wouldn't be able to tell the guy wasn't a real pimp.
Actually, I remember not being able to solve one when I was a girl because it required a working knowledge of egg creams, which I lacked due to a combination of age and inadequate proximity to NYC. (Not so many soda counters in my part of NJ.)
We had egg creams. And drugstore soda fountains (Deal Drugs -- no lie!). Maybe M-ton was too WASPy?
The bad stuff is from California, New York and somewhere else (Baltimore?).
Baltimore, Brooklyn, and DC. The California one proved to be the ACORN worker punking them back with fake stories of killing her ex-husband, who has been shown definitively to be alive. I don't think there's bad editing going on with the others since, as Shearer notes, the people were fired. However, have you seen the guy who was supposedly the pimp? I simply can't believe that anybody working with real inner-city poor people would think for a second that he was legit.
I am trying to be angrier about this ACORN business, because I know that the attackers are evil. I have negative feelings about ACORN, because the people I know who worked for them were kind of abused, in the way that organizations fighting for better working conditions or social justice often abuse their employees. One of them quit to become a temp at a place which offered guaranteed hours and health insurance, because it paid better.
97: But people get fired for all sorts of reasons -- like holy shit we just walked into a ratfuck and had better try to make things right. They're going to get sued and be forced to release the full video -- which no one has seen except the folks involved, right? Of course Roger Ailes is presumbly helping them to burn anything exculpatory right now.
98: Was that working for voter registriation? I'd thought (without any knowledge) that they at least paid the regular staff better.
I already complained about the ACORN mess in another thread. One part lame PR, one part no-win situation, one part "cut your losses," one part
I also think that the anti-ACORN folks are benefiting from the fact that most people have not had the experience of being in a storefront nonprofit in a bad neighborhood. You never know who is going to walk in the door, what kind of hair-trigger reaction they're on, and what's going to set them off. I think it was someone at Pandagon who said "Don't tick off the crazy people" was probably part of the mindset. Humoring crazy people* can be an important part of keeping your staff and your other clients safe.
That said, the Philadelphia ACORN people did indeed throw them out.
*"Crazy people" is used here colloquially, not diagnostically.
ACORN seems like one of those things I should bother to learn about some day, so that I can be properly outraged by the abuse it's taking. But I don't know a damn thing about it, so as it is I don't care at all. Isn't it some sort of voter-registration organization? And it's being accused of promoting child prostitution??
Taping somebody without their consent is illegal in Maryland and punishable by up to 5 years in the pokey, so there could still be a silver lining.
104: Or why Linda Tripp took Monica to Virginia.
Isn't it some sort of voter-registration organization?
It does vote registration, but that's just one of the things they do for low-income citizens. When my friend in New Orleans had her baby show up with high levels of lead in her blood, ACORN came and repainted the inside of her house for free.
I also think that the anti-ACORN folks are benefiting from the fact that most people have not had the experience of being in a storefront nonprofit in a bad neighborhood. You never know who is going to walk in the door, what kind of hair-trigger reaction they're on, and what's going to set them off.
That's plausible. There's also potentially the element of "playing along because this will be a great story to tell later." Which just makes me think about the Jerky Boys, and how it is that anybody would be so humor impaired as to take seriously what people say to someone who is obviously the equivalent of a prank caller.
88 referred to the California dealings; sorry if I was confusing.
I thought the tv news crew deliberately chose the most "untrustworthy"* appearing ACORN rep possible to interview. The entirety of their piece - which, if you simply read the transcript, would have been positive about ACORN - came off with the air of disapproval and negativity.
*Scare quotes because this is entirely classist.
109: It sounds like they just interviewed the woman who is on the San Bernadino tape, who does look "disreputable." If anyone chose her because she put a bad face on things, its Giles and O'Keefe.
Huh. That sounds like a good organization. And I'm willing to write off the attacks based on the source. (There's actually a pretty good explanation here.) So what's the controversy?
I see on the ACORN site from 108 that they filed a police report in San Beradino, but the don't mention a police report filed in Philly, which maybe I was reading wrong.
This website has a lot of films disputing attacks against ACORN.
What's particularly disturbing is the toll that this sort of campaign takes on the people trying to do the work. From an e-mail sent by ACORN last fall:
The attack on ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is shaping up to be the most vicious of the 2008 election. The problem is, we will have to suffer the consequences long after the election is over. We need your help, and we need it now.
[...]When John McCain's presidential campaign began sinking in the polls, they looked for a scapegoat. They picked ACORN. And now, in the past few weeks alone, ACORN staffers have received death threats in Ohio and Rhode Island, and offices have been vandalized in Washington and Massachusetts. Numerous threatening and racist phone calls have been made to ACORN offices across the country.
There are plenty of ways to dispute someone's policy perspective without making threats.
112: It is a good organization. But they register poor black people to vote, and the right wing hates that because they don't get any of those votes and obviously a president elected with poor black votes is illegitimate and probably born in Africa.
111: This was a man from San Bernadino. The beauty of ACORN is of course that it does train poor people to help each other; unfortunately, that doesn't always video well for the middle-class masses.
Also, it wasn't just the choice of interview subject that led to the air of disdain; it was the news anchors' tone. Then again, maybe they were just upset that the whole hour didn't get to be about Philip Garrido.
I see on the ACORN site from 108 that they filed a police report in San Beradino, but the don't mention a police report filed in Philly
It's there.
In Philadelphia, our staff were sufficiently suspicious of the intrusion to file a police report.
News article confirming the story.
115: But that's obvious; of course the right wing is going to hate them.
I guess I don't understand why anyone would trust anything broadcast on Fox News anymore. Their reports are generally somewhat less objective than RNC press releases, and they've long since stopped even pretending otherwise.
I don't understand why anyone would trust anything broadcast on Fox News anymore.
For a lot of people, that's the *only* news organization they trust. The other ones keep telling them things that interfere with their delusions of oppression at the hands of their tyrannical dusky overlords.
104
Taping somebody without their consent is illegal in Maryland and punishable by up to 5 years in the pokey, so there could still be a silver lining.
I doubt there will be any prosecution as it would just compound the PR disaster.
118: Because the people who trust Fox News believe that they are in fact the only unbiased source out there.
Apo said it better and faster.
120: It's a criminal offense. The decision to prosecute is made by the DA. According to the ACORN site, the prosecutor is looking into things.
I'd like to see the tape the Philly encounter.
120: How could it possibly get worse? Also, if that is the only way they can get the unedited tapes (which they believe may have been, er, quite heavily edited), then they surely will.
119/121: well, I understand that, but presumably that doesn't include anyone here.
124
How could it possibly get worse? ...
By staying in the news throughout a trial. And by tarring the local government with ACORN's problems.
I don't think there's much controversy here, Brock.
67: 65: I first saw Pong on a punch card machine. You'd input a card with the position of your paddle and wait for the output to see if you'd hit or not.
Jesus, I'm not talking about that new-fangled stuff! I'm talking about when we used to paint the cave walls. Sheesh. Fuckin' noobs.
73: Yes, and if you have troubling reading the letters (like me) that means you are really old. And the post is correct that this is annoying.
Luckily, they have special phones (and cellphones) with like, giant goddamn buttons and with BIG letters on them. Clearly, Heebie has a shitty phone.
57: Wow, this thread is really helping me be productive at work.
Is that some kind of problem?
max
['Back to rich white people hating on small, mostly powerless organizations that help poor (mostly black) people!']
the Philly encounter
By Robert Ludlum
Case in point: until 45 minutes ago I didn't know a damn thing about ACORN other than that they were some sort of sketchy community organizer/vote-registration organization that was accused of major registration fraud in 2008, and that had potential ties to terrorism. That's Fox's fault, plain and simple.
66: Binghamton? Huh. Do they have more flights than Ithaca? I always did Syracuse if Ithaca itself didn't work. But, yeah, I've made that odyssey joke too many times (and it was already stale the first time...).
127: oh, maybe I misread some earlier comments.
131: I have no recollection of why we were flying to Binghamton and not Ithaca. Only that, we couldn't. On the way back, we did fly out of there and that was most one horse airport I'd ever seen.
The most charitable I can be toward the smear is that they found some ACORN workers who were willing to help somebody commit a crime (though I suspect 101 is closer to the truth). Similarly, if you asked enough mailmen where to find crack, I'm sure you could come up with a few who would tell you. Then FoxNews could scream about how the USPS is a drug front.
134: Wasn't a Fox News employee recently let get because he had hundreds of kiddie-diddler pix on his computer? And this was his second offense! Fox hired him post-kiddie-diddling-affinity-reveal. They are all dangerous perverts.
131: I personally enjoy jokes about Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse. I had a student who was completely baffled when I said that Plato went to Syracuse. Another student, from the Carribean, was thrown off when I said that Aquinas was a Dominican.
||
This, from Sotomayor, is expectation-exceedingly cool:
Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."
|>
Aquinas was a Dominican
He is still known as the saint with the fastest 100 meter time.
136: There is also the town of Hemlock in there amidst Ithaca and Syracuse.
Plato went to Syracuse
Everybody needs a safety school.
A roommate who is very familiar with ACORN, particularly its Brooklyn branch, said a lot of their staff is "sloppy" in the sense that it's not really surprising that the staff at some offices might have acted the way they're depicted in some of these videos. (The roommate is a big supporter of ACORN, a member, actually.)
Syracuse is the main alternative people use to the Ithaca airport, which is indeed tiny and extremely expensive (although I can think of a couple that are tinier). I suppose you could go to Binghamton, which is about the same distance from Ithaca, but I never knew of anyone doing so.
I've flown to multiple places with significantly smaller airports than Ithaca. Ithaca's is not bad, except when traveling to another small airport. (ITH to Santa Barbara, in particular, was a 20+ hour odysseyordeal with several connections. Cheaper than flying from bigger airports and paying for ground transportation, though.)
101 seems exactly right. I get really upset about people picking on ACORN.
In Los Angeles, they've been at the forefront of the fight for affordable housing. One of their spokespeople is an incredibly loud, small woman named BonBon who leads rallies with hilarious, raspy flair. Local right-wingers have been pissed off about ACORN for a while. Long before the McCain campaign, the head of one of the downtown property associations once muttered to me outside of a meeting, "Does anybody ever ask who's funding Bonbon?" It struck me as bizarre and irrelevant, but apparently libertarian sharks like the Pacific Institute have been circling them for some time.
Yeah, people the usual suspects are up in arms because ACORN has gotten a total of $53 million from the federal gov't *over the past 15 years* (~3.5 million per year), but the billion-with-a-b dollars that Blackwater--which actually does murder people--has gotten over the past eight years? Eh, no big deal.
Which just goes to show that the right wing should thank its lucky stars that they have President Obama instead of President Apostropher, because I'd like nothing better than to help them realize all their paranoid authoritarian beatdown martyrdom fantasies. "FEMA camps? Silly rabbit, those are only for refugees that we like. We have special accommodations for y'all."
I always cast my vote for whichever candidate has the best revenge plans. Which is why I'm disappointed the Steven Segal never runs.
Um, wow. Somehow I made it pretty far into this story without seeing how the "sting" folks in the ACORN videos were supposedly dressed. Since I haven't watched the videos, can anyone tell me if this is true? Because I admit to find it hilarious. In a frat-kids trying to dress up way.
were supposedly dressed
Not supposedly, that's actually them.
Wow is right. The guy also seems to be a Rutgers alum. Which doesn't mean anything in particular, of course.
149: Wow.
Now I do kind of wonder why they weren't immediately laughed out of the office.
Also, I really wish that guy could find something more socially constructive to make his life's purpose. There are lots of ways for a white guy to be a contrarian, headline-grabbing rebel that don't involve destruction.
There are lots of ways for a white guy to be a contrarian, headline-grabbing rebel that don't involve destruction.
This is probably one of the more lucrative, though.
Aren't you supposed to be off being religious eating apples, or something?
144: But as a matter of practical politics, ACORNs are poisonous now and it doesn't pay to have them on one's plate.
The left had better learn to play to three audiences, not just the obvious one or two, otherwise they're going to be ambushed over and over again.
151: That's what I'm sayin'. There's no way anybody who lives or works in inner-city Baltimore, DC, or Brooklyn thought that DJ Trevor there was an honest-to-god pimp.
I'm imagining that the ACORN workers assumed the idiots had some sort of hidden recording device, and were trying to avoid doing anything noticeable like telling them to go away or acting as if they knew it was a fake.
||
Speaking of fury: ahhh you stupid kids shut up we're trying to watch a movie okay fuck it this isn't getting any better we'd better leave before the end of the opening credits or we'll be really mad grr grr.
|>
Talking during a movie deserves swift and irrevocable punishment, like braining. Others may disagree.
You know, I'm pretty tolerant of some noise in a movie. Hooting at the exciting parts? Sometimes annoying but often okay. Whispering to the person next to you? Can be overdone, but hey, I'm mellow. Yelling to your friend at the end of the aisle about subjects having nothing to do with what's happening onscreen? Yelling at the people asking you to be quiet? Making actual cell phone calls during the movie? I feel these things cross the line.
You should read the thread I linked. It covers everything you said, and it is awesome funny.
I live in the moment, though.
I think I read that thread, but somehow failed to print it out and bring it to the theater with me tonight.
Reading that makes me miss ogged.
Everyone should go off their meds. Then it will be like old times.
Also, Google continues to suck. Stop sucking, Google.
This link to the archives brought to you by Bing, the search engine that just wants to stay up late at night watching you sleep.
What do you buy someone for their 85th wedding anniversary?
The world's largest gooseberry.
Huh. I had no idea gooseberry judging either existed or was so complicated:
Because of a unique system of weights and measure used in North Yorkshire, it was at first unclear whether or not Mr Nellist had beaten the record-holder of the past 16 years - professional gardener Kelvin Archer, of Cheshire.
Luckily, Egton Bridge resident David Haddon-Reece - a member of the International Society of Antique Scales Collectors - was also at the show.
Mr Haddon-Reece said: "It was very close, but gooseberry growing is taken very seriously here so it was vital that we got an exact comparison."
161: You know what else that thread includes?
l so was giving Kieffer big benefit of the doubt because he hires Canuck actors and up here his Grandfather is like a national saint for bringing in Health Care.
I want to know how long it will be before an American politician is a national saint for anything at all to do with healthcare.
You know, the first few times I visited this blog, I saw how many comments each post racked up, and I thought, "wow, this blog must have one of the highest readerships in the blogosphere." But reading them more closely now, I realize that there's just like 12 of you with way too much fucking time on your hands. It's impressive, really...
There's really just one of us, Shane. One balding 47-year-old in a basement.
We haven't had a comment like that in a few years. Brings back old times.
Oh, and 160: I recommend bringing a flashlight and a watergun to the movie theater. The first incident gets them a shush; the second one gets a light shined in their eyes; the third time they get the squirt.
Actually, I've never had the courage to go beyond the flashlight stage, but it's a nice fantasy...
173: Didn't mean to sound judgmental, if that's how it came across. More envious, really.
OK, the thread's moved on, but I'm still going to throw this out there:
156: In the video that I saw, he was wearing the laughable 1970s Blacksploitation pimp outfit during the pre-office strutting around filming and a generic blue suit as he was supposedly entering the office. We never see him during the filming, but we see her and she's wearing the same ridiculous halter top with feathers and beads that she was wearing before.
I have the same questions about how in the hell anyone could take these goons seriously, but when I watched the videos of the Baltimore sting the later audio sounded, to my decidedly inexpert ears, like it was in the room. Even if you take out all of the film makers' dialog, it's difficult to come up with a scenario where these office workers weren't actually coming up with tax strategies for underage foreign prostitutes. If they thought they were in on a joke they have an incredibly dry sense of humor. The fact that these jokers tried this scam a bunch of places before getting the response they wanted indicates that of course most folks weren't fooled by this, but it still doesn't explain how they were able to succeed even that one time. I'd really like to believe that the whole thing was faked though, because the alternative is accepting that this person heard that they were bringing in 15 year-old Salvadoran girls to work as prostitutes and suggested that they could be claimed as dependents.
And of course I've both known folks, like BG does, who worked for ACORN and are more than a little bitter about the whole thing and known the organization to do great work in places where no one else shows up, like public housing projects.
175: Oh, I wasn't offended or anything. It's just that when the comment threads really started to take off a few years back, periodically someone would post to say that we all seemed to have too much time on our hands.
I think I wrote a comment like 171, long ago. How foolish I was.
"Time on your hands" should read "time at work". The threads are busiest 9-5 Monday-Friday.
Evidence that there is only one person here and every thread has already happened.
Reading that makes me miss ogged.
Me too, apo. He was the consummate deuteragonist. Consummate!
Clearly they prefer to rent cars to the aged, who are far better customers. They don't want to rent their cars to you young punks, who drive recklessly, text-message in heavy traffic, and leave stains on the seats.
