Fear of being lost after graduation is what sent me into the Peace Corps -- I had no idea what to do next in terms of being a functioning adult, and the PC was a structured thing to do that sounded interesting.
That's sort of how I got into graduate school.
It seems like a lot of people just...fall off a cliff, emotionally, when they graduate? I somewhat did.
Me too, definitely. Fortunately at the bottom of the cliff was a master's course, and by the time I had finished that I was rather closer to being a fully capable adult capable of running my own life, going to the MFing bank like an adult, cleaning ALL OF THE THINGS etc.
The loss of structure and community that came with graduation was a blow for me. I managed to do OK, but there was most definitely a major shift in the way I felt about my environment. I also graduated during a recession so I had job search issues aplenty.
Now I'm trying to find a new job in the middle of another recession, and looking at a major change in career path. Falling off a cliff is not far from the way I'm feeling right now. It's not depressing so much as it is stressful.
I definitely had the experience of feeling lost and emotionally pretty fragile post graduation. I've mentioned it a couple of times, perhaps I'll see if I can find links -- I remember specifically mentioning it to teo when he was graduating.
I found that those feelings of loss and emotional fragility lessen the second or third time you leave college.
Or if they don't lessen, at least you get used to them.
Hell, I kind of felt that way going from Freshman year of college to Sophomore year. You had the crappy housing as a sophomore, since Freshmen were segregated in their own housing and sophomores got the worst housing in the Houses. There was a ton more institutional support as a Freshman than as an upperclassman.
This is why it's important to drop out at least once.
just that bigger insecurities swam into focus and I lost my bearings
sounds like my 40's!
This also derinitely rings true for me. I remember graduating high school felt like pure relief and joy; graduating college was basically drowning fear in alcohol.
Although in some ways my most "fun" job was my immediate post-college one, though unfortunately it paid almost nothing and had a six month term. But Christ was I unprepared for reality at age 21.
Put me in the "found another structured outlet to extend school" camp. Being on a Fulbright is basically like year abroad.
I looked at the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Survey. It seemed to show more 23-year-olds reporting periods of depression than 22-year-olds, at a percentage significantly higher than the all-age average. But I'm not sure I was looking at the right variable. I'll keep looking for verification.
I don't particularly remember graduating college being rough, but I did make a decision to move to a frozen wasteland in the middle of nowhere at that time, so I must have been somehow fucked up. I did kind of hit a low point a year or two into grad school. Maybe that was when I started regularly lurking here?
I did make a decision to move to a frozen wasteland in the middle of nowhere at that time, so I must have been somehow fucked up
Oh. No judgment of teo implied. Just that clearly I would have been happier moving to California or a real city or something.
I feel very lucky to have graduated into a booming economy where jobs were plentiful and paid well, and that I was able to get a little bit of experience under my belt before the whole thing went to shit.
Conclusion: bring back National Service for all 21-22-year-olds. It'll delay reality for another couple of years, and the experience of hardship, sleep deprivation, miserable living conditions, long hours of work, terrible food and overbearing superiors will be vital for those choosing to enter PhD programmes.
I have to say that IMO the frozen wasteland is awesome for 18-21s (Teo's story aside) and becomes awesome again after about 30, but is a pretty questionable place to spend your 20s.
It isn't very exciting, but I did find the comment I made to teofilo. I've said similar things since.
Yep, I became a very anxious person around the end of my junior year, when I started getting grad school applications together. It's been almost 10 years now and I'm just as anxious, if not worse, though I'm a stronger and more capable person, and can bear up under it much better.
How did people find post-college jobs in the days when there were post-college jobs for people? Were there on-campus recruiting fairs for everybody, instead of just for engineers and econ majors?
Hmm, my experience was quite different. I was very sad to be leaving my friends and the community, but I wasn't depressed or panicky. The job market was good, I was excited about finding some kind of progressive/activist-y job, I knew I could stay with my parents until I found something, and I didn't much worry about finding new friends, and it all did turn out to be pretty easy.
OTOH, moving, job searching, and looking for new friends as a grown-up grownup? That sucks.
22: Management Consultants and Investment Bankers hire people with a lot of different backgrounds. Summa Cum Laude Classics graduates get offered jobs on the Goldman Sachs derivatives desk.
Advertisers also recruit.
I think people apply for administrative assistant jobs too. But I find it terribly confusing myself.
...and looking for new friends as a grown-up grownup? That sucks.
God, tell me about it. I was never very good at making friends, but I still managed it without too much trouble up until my mid-20s. I'm in a new city now in my early 30s, and the effort and deliberation it takes is wearing me the fuck out. It went from uphill climb to scaling a sheer mountainside...
Management Consultants and Investment Bankers hire people from Ivy League schools with a lot of different backgrounds.
A friend of mine just interviewed for a communications job at a consulting firm, and they were quite open about only really hiring from big name schools.
I got my degree by age 20, and went straight into a taught Master's which I proceeded to make a complete horlicks of. I would have been far better off taking a year out or something. However there wasn't much in the way of short term work in 1991 - ten years later there were plenty of jobs but back then inexperienced graduates were not wanted in any kind of shop or restaurant work. (I had had no luck over the summer getting any work.)
I don't know that I can offer anything valuable about my own experience. I graduated in a good economy and had the luxury of turning down job offers (!).
I can say that we've taken on a couple of new grads in my office in part because we take really seriously the idea that people need mentoring. One was unemployed when we got him, the other working in a cafe (with her Ivy League degree).
I'm debating taking on another one, a high school grad starting college in January, that we don't really have room for, because I know she really doesn't have any other good options.
I had this sort of episode aged about 17, when I dropped out just as I was about to start the second year of my first university course and I had no clue what to do. No jobs looked attractive, but I had to do something (and wasn't eligible for benefits). Finishing up my first degree [the one I finished] wasn't as big a deal as I was 25, and had already been out working for nearly 4 years before I had gone back to study.
Finishing a 'PhD' and then not getting an academic job was a bit of a bastard, though.
to make a complete horlicks of
That's the thing that keeps Voldemort alive, right?
4: You would think that building giant lasers would be a marketable skill. Are all the Bond villains broke too?
Are all the Bond villains broke too?
No, just a real pain to work with.
26 is right. I should have included that in my comment.
Management Consultants and Investment Bankers hire people from Ivy League schools with a lot of different backgrounds.
Are you casting aspersions on the rich tapestry of diversity that is the consulting trade? Why, we have everything from honors graduates in physics from Harvard to honors graduates in English from Yale, and even a smattering of honors graduates from Dartmouth and Stanford as well. Truly it is a melting pot of accomplished standardized test takers of every race and creed and from every walk of upper middle class life.
It's odd to think that I am not smart enough to have followed the standard track to become a management consultant or investment banker.
(By which I mean:
1. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have gotten into any of those schools
2. I don't think I would have been an Honors student, if I somehow had gotten in.)
What does being an "Honors student" mean in American parlance? Genuine question, because over here they won't offer you a place unless they think you're going to get "Honours", which is simply a grading system - 1st class, 2nd class (usually first and second divisions), 3rd class. (If you screw up so badly you don't even rate a 3rd you might get a "Pass degree" as compensation, but you won't get a job out of it.)
How did people find post-college jobs in the days when there were post-college jobs for people?
I found mine using a now-archaic tool known as a "newspaper."
I actually did get by answering a Help Wanted ad in Washington Post, which I know is statistically uncommon.
The student actually seems to have pre-bac turmoil, it being a full academic year from graduation. This corresponds to my own experience, when all I knew wass that by the end of the year I'd have to figure out what to do next.
Back in the day, even United States government agencies interviewed on campus occasionally, so by the time of graduation, I had a perfectly acceptable job lined up and was shopping for an apartment to rent in DC, and the immediate post-graduation time went very well. I know that's an exceptional situation today.
I don't think it's all that consistent from school to school, but if there's a systematic difference, I think it'd be that nothing here corresponds to 3d class? You can do fine in college without getting honors (usually three levels in Latin, cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude). No honors would be a norm, cum laude would generally be that you'd done fairly well but nothing exciting, and the top two levels would be impressive.
39: If you're at the Woodrow Wilson School, where masters students pay no tuition at all, government agencies come recruiting--or they did 10 years ago.
Wash U had Latin honors if you wrote a senior thesis, given on your department's assessment of its quality; otherwise you could graduate "with honors" if you had a cumulative GPA above a certain number.
I was (atypically?) completely miserable in college -- to the extent that I sometimes wonder if it was worthwhile to go -- and thus, somewhat relieved to graduate. There was job-search stress, but I was willing to work for a pittance, so I got two jobs working for a pittance (40 hrs/wk + 17 hrs/wknd) and just felt relieved that no one made me take any exams. About a year after I had graduated, I was walking with some friends on a highway overpass in Seattle. Narrow walkway, high winds, fast-moving traffic three feet to my left, and a sheer drop directly to my right. I decided to turn around, but I had enough time to reflect that that level of fear of bodily harm was slightly less than the anxiety I'd felt every single day, over my grades, in college.
But I think I get to find out how awesome it is to graduate from a secure, comfortable PhD program into GiniVille.
36: There is the "graduating with honors" as LB mentioned and then there are also honors programs (or the Honors College at my current school). The honors programs have some separate, (usually) smaller classes open only a set of students who test well. This is often, but not always, directly connected to graduating with honors and usually involves a thesis. At the big, public universities with which I'm most familiar, the idea is to have a way to recruit students who might have otherwise have gone to a school with more prestige.
(Cue debate on using public resources to serve the students with the least need in order to recruit students largely for the sake of boosting the statistics on the SAT scores of your freshman class.)
31: You'd think that mad lazin' skillz would be totes marketable, and they are provided you're OK with setting people and things on fire from great distances and/or facilitating blowing people up.
re: 36
FWIW, in the older Scottish universities (or certainly at Glasgow) only some students get to do Honours. At the end of the 2nd year, if you've averaged what are (iirc) something like 2:2'ish marks or above, you do a further 2 years, and get your MA(Hons). If you haven't met that standard, you do a further 1 year and get an MA(Ordinary). Then within Honours, there's the classification into 1, 2:1, 2:2, 3rd at the end based on the final exam marks. I'd guess that's a fairly old system.
So, it has something in common with the US system with Honours classes. Generally MA(Ordinary) students will do more 2nd year level courses, and a couple of 3rd year level ones to make up the required credits for their degree. They are also usually required to meet certain general requirements, so at Glasgow MA(Ordinary) students in the broad humanities area were required to do philosophy and, iirc, a language.
My school held a series of "networking lunches" for honors students, at which I got drunk on the free wine, ruthlessly mocked the fantasy football management decisions of a Shell executive, and otherwise made an ass of myself. Having squandered in similar fashion all other opportunities granted to me as a good student in a small program at an expensive private school, I am now in graduate school and my career plan is to stay here forever.
So, it has something in common with the US system with Honours classes.
It doesn't seem that similar as honors classes were something we took instead of, not in addition to, the other classes. For example, there was regular Calc 101 and there was Calc 101H. The first of these had 300 kids in a lecture hall and with weekly lab session being the only point at which they could actually ask a question and with the idea that a certain percentage of the kids being expected to flunk as a way of steering them to easier majors. Calc 101H had 20 kids, a full professor, and the expectation that everybody in there would get the B they needed to go into EE or whatever.
My college history department had an Honors thingy - track is too strong a word as it was just a couple of classes (theory/historiography seminar and a thesis). I didn't do it because I was lazy and I figured it wouldn't make a difference if I went on to apply to graduate schools. There was also the whole graduate with honors thing, but that seemed to be straight-up GPA.
Australia has the same honours system as Scottish and perhaps American universities. I was surprised when I came over to the UK that honours were given away so easily.
The year after graduation was the closest I've come to depression. I worked in shitty (consulting!) job doing boring shit, mostly on my own. Quite a change from being at Uni. So I moved 11'000kms and went back to study, and things have improved markedly since then.
36 What does being an "Honors student" mean in American parlance?
At Har/vard there are apparently "English honors" (i.e., graduating "with honors" or "with highest honors") and then there are "Latin honors" (cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude). Despite my best efforts I was completely unable to follow the elaborate discussion of how these are awarded and what distinguishes them. But I am assured that, unlike a time in recent memory when more than 90% of Har/vard students graduate with honors, these days it's strictly capped at 50% of the students.
At Chicago I seem to remember the percentage of people graduating with honors being fairly low. And then there were at least two different things described as "the highest honor available to undergraduates in the College", one of which was being a Student Marshal and the other being inducted in Phi Beta Kappa in one's third year.
The idea of honors classes as an alternative to standard classes sounds very high school to me.
None of them fancy Latin words at MIT. You graduate or you don't. It seems the more common thing people do to distinguish themselves is double or triple majors.
The fall of my first year of graduate school was rough, but mostly for romantic reasons unrelated to graduation. The spring of my first year of graduate school was fantastic, and so were the next several years. I loved my mid-20s.
22 - My first post-college job, which remains the most misery-inducing job I've ever had, was by answering a classified ad.
54: I've long wondered whether not having honors was supposed to be some kind of egalitarian thing, ("we're all badass"), and whether the signals had just become less-systemic things like what labs or professors you had worked with.
My first post-college job, which remains the most misery-inducing job I've ever had
That was truly a remarkably shitty job.
53: At my undergraduate institution, the honors classes were done for the same reason as they are done at a high school. They had to take nearly every in-state high school graduate who applied.
The idea of honors classes as an alternative to standard classes sounds very high school to me.
Is it more or less high school when you add in the facts that at my university we also had separate dorms and an on-campus lounge only members of the honors program were allowed into?
"You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...
...and a brain...
...and a brain...
...and a brain..."
And then there were at least two different things described as "the highest honor available to undergraduates in the College", one of which was being a Student Marshal and the other being inducted in Phi Beta Kappa in one's third year.
I only ever heard the first of those described that way, but took the "why choose?" approach anyway. </not even humble brag>
Honors in my undergrad history department wasn't an alternative set of classes, I don't think. You just did more work and had to make time for it earlier (or take longer to graduate). In practice, that wouldn't have been difficult since there weren't a lot of mandatory classes. It's possible that the honors thesis could substitute for the standard senior "thesis" - really a just a 40-50 page research paper - instead of having to do both.
My honors were a strange mix of english and latin: "Magna cum laude with highest honors in mathematics." What this actually means is that honors recommendations are made by the departments based only on in-department work (both thesis and grades), but since summa is capped at 5 percent another committee winnows down the original dept. recommendations based on overall grades. So my honors means "the department recommended you for summa, but your grades in other classes weren't good enough for summa."
I graduated sine laude. Does that mean that I am a man with no honor? Or that I was dishonorably discharged?
I only ever heard the first of those described that way, but took the "why choose?" approach anyway. </not even humble brag>
I think it was said of the second during the impossibly pompous set of speeches they subjected us to along with dinner.
Though I figured the awards for best performance in one's majors were higher honors. </even less humble brag>
I certainly crashed after college, but it was a somewhat slow-motion crash. The structure of the first year of our PhD program, and the closeness of most of my cohort, kept me on track for a bit, but in the aftermath of my breaking up with someone who was also in my cohort, it felt like the clique dissolved, and I think that helped make it easier to just start drifting downward. Taking a year off before grad school would have been a very good idea.
Huh. I made the bad mistake of moving in with BOGF after graduation, but that wasn't a fear-based move* - she was still in school, I needed a place to live, so. But anyway, other than that, graduation didn't faze me at all. I had a paid internship deal for the summer after, so that helped, but it wasn't as if I had employment lined up, or any form plan for the future.
I didn't have college debt, which obviously makes a vast difference. But it seems as if that's incidental to a larger, emotional thing that people are reacting to.
Someone may have said this already (comments lightly skimmed), but perhaps a lot of it has to do with many, if not most, undergrad degrees not having an obvious professional outcome? I mean, I graduated with the only degree I could ever need (unless I switched vocations, obvs), so it was just a question of how to get from Point A (B. Arch) to Point B (registered architect). But if you graduate with a BA in the humanities, well.... And it's not like BSes are tickets to rewarding employment either.
* or, no moreso than any other move within a bad relationship. But things were actually not bad at that point
I was able to awesomely self-serve wrt college honors: the College of Fine Arts told the Dept of Arch to decide who would get College Honors from our department, and I was working in the dept. office the day it was discussed. I don't think that I literally chose a number just below my GPA and advocated for that as the cutoff, but I was aware that the cutoff I was advocating would include me in.
In HS I was very pleased to be the last person in the top 5% of my class - that's my definition of the sweet spot. Lord knows I was never going to valedict or salutatate.
Though I figured the awards for best performance in one's majors were higher honors. </even less humble brag>
Oh, yeah. I got two of those. </let's be honest here>
70.2: I was salutatorian but not in the top 10% of my class.
73: Your class had fewer than 10 people in it?
I graduated 2nd. My class had fewer than 20 people in it.
There are sort of honors tracks at MIT at least in the intro classes but it's entirely up to you if you want to sign up for the ass kicking. They typically have an extra digit on the end of the course number and cover things like the theory behind the applications. I did that for first semester physics and got an A although it was a ton of work (and freshman grades aren't reported anyway.) Switched back to regular track second semester. Also my professor won the Nobel a few years later.
At my small liberal arts college, there was the usual Latin system for honoring GPA.
"Honors" involved writing a thesis. You had to submit a proposal near the beginning of junior year and get it approved and find a faculty member to be your adviser. Near graduation, you would defend it (with an outside committee member & the whole 9 yards), then get "nothing" (rare, I believe, unless you really flaked out), "honors", "high honors", or "highest honors".
Post grad wasn't an angsty time for me because of the excitement of beginning graduate school. I think it helped that this was the early 90s, and the graduate student lifestyle was reasonably close to the "slacker" lifestyle, in the sense that you made little money and were not yet entering the "adult" world, where adult is defined as starting a "real" job. So there was a nice mixed crowd of grad students and non-grad students to hang out with.
Actually, I thought everyone at MIT graduated magna, since they would obviously have been the most honored students at any other institution they might have gifted with their presence.
Close, JRoth. They all graduate manga.
80- MIT does use a 5 point scale and the theory I've heard is that a B at MIT is equal to an A anywhere else. Alternatively, if you have a 4 to 5 you apply for jobs or grad school at places familiar with MIT grads and they adjust accordingly, while if you're 3 to 4 you apply to places that don't usually see good MIT students and they assume your 4.0 is a perfect GPA.
But you know, Neb, since I had a 5.0 I'm guessing that would have been summa elsewhere.
||
It's the last day to drop a class without taking a massive $$$ hit.
I bit off way more than I can chew this semester.
I want to drop an independent study with a professor of mine.
This professor is my advisor and holds the keys to the kingdom. And a fellowship.
I'm not sure I can handle the additional work load of the independent study with all I have to do (and a new job which is also very key to my future).
He's very easy going about incompletes and understanding of students' workloads. He's a great guy.
I had a phone call scheduled with this professor an hour and a half ago.
It went to voicemail twice.
I probably just need a little handholding but it's very frustrating.
This professor is notorious for forgetting shit. Much more than the stereotypical absent-minded professor. I don't know how he managed to finish his PhD.
He is a great guy though.
But so fucking irresponsible. I want to scream.
I just wanted to vent, that's all.
|>
82: Vanilla Ice had a 5.0 also. He rolled in it.
83: Rough. It'll probably work out just fine, though. That sort of thing usually does. No fun at the early stages of the term, tho. Good luck!
72 Oh, yeah. I got two of those. </let's be honest here>
So did I. </guess we can stop measuring now>
I remember this transition as not very traumatic, for a few reasons I can think of
1) because I was tired of school by then (I am interested in things for three years. Ask me about my job satisfaction at 5.5 years!)
2) because it was 1995 and there were temp jobs and bookstore jobs and stuff, and that was the level of challenge I wanted in my life: as low as possible. It felt perfectly acceptable in Austin, the downward mobility. You found your satisfaction in life outside of the job.
3) which made me want to go presidential because it's sort of loser-y, but I didn't: my folks were able to help me through times when I had, say, quit a bookstore job and wasn't quite sure what was next
After a few years I was a little anxious because it was all starting to look a little like arrested development. So I went back to school, crashed and burned, went into another program, et voila, the finished product you see before you.
(Other subthread: At UT one got university honors for some not especially high GPA and departmental honors were, I think, left up to the departments. In mine, you took an honors class for two semesters and wrote a thesis. Mine was quite terrible.)
By the time I was seriously applying for jobs after college, the tech bubble had not burst yet but I seem to remember people already being aware that things were going to go downhill. I didn't have the tech skills to apply for real tech jobs, but I did apply for some categorization/indexing kinds of things and it seemed like everyone was involved in revolutionizing b2b communication or something like that. At least until they went out of business.
I ended up in a dull glorified data entry job for about 8 months before quitting - which had been my plan, this was right before I went to grad school - and in the last few months some of the castoffs of the bubble collapse started coming in, sullen and unhappy at being stuck in crap jobs. Ok, maybe it was just that one guy.
I don't think leaving college was horrible *aside* from the economic difficulty, moving away from everyone I knew, getting mugged, etc. Conditions aren't any better now, but it seems more the tenor of the age to internalize and psychologize what could be explained by systemic conditions. To the ramparts!
Since no one else will say it, essear and neb should just exchange the traditional cock pics (or, I suppose, send them to a neutral third party) or accept responsibility for the medical bills for any readers who hurt themselves rolling their eyes. And I say this with love and jealousy, since I abided by my parents' restrictions that I not apply to UChicago or Smith.
Everybody else already has cock pics of essear and neb.
It was a tie, so we've moved to resumë.
I graduated from college during the first Bush recession. After realizing that there was no work for me in the United States, I moved to Vancouver, where I found employment as an agent/manager for musicians. I had an office overlooking Granville Island and received a large salary to go see live music five or six nights/week. I'd like to say that it was all hookers and blow, but it was actually just a regular job, and it turned out that I wasn't really cut out for a regular job. So after leaving college fret-free, I began to fret. Then I left my regular job with a nice office and a high salary and went back to graduate school, where I had no office at all and a stipend instead of a salary, but I was much happier, so that was nice. I'm tempted to say, "And the rest is history!" but that would be stupid -- even by my rather low standards.
Well, that was a story about me. How delightful.
I'm roughly with Smearcase in 87.
I am interested in things for three years.
Pretty much. By the time I was leaving college, I didn't want to go to grad school (at all, I thought), had a boyfriend and a life to go to elsewhere, and, like, totes had a job set up anyway: I was going to be the assistant manager of the telemarketing department of a solar energy company in the Happy Valley (western Mass.).
But it turned out the actual manager of that place had been fired (er, left the company) since he had made me that job offer, so ... that didn't work out.
I feel as though who freak out and talk about job fairs and building their careers (when you're 20?) are younger folks, of a younger generation than my own. Maybe I was just particularly careless, but I was just going where life took me. No pressure, man. I didn't start to really worry until halfway through grad school, around age 30 for me, since I'd taken 3 years before deciding I actually did want to do that, go to grad school.
I do still miss Vancouver. But of course it's sunny there in my memories, so that's a load of bullshit.
I think I'm going to see if the rEd BOx has anything good in it. If history is any guide, this won't end well.
The high score on a freshman physics midterm set the trajectory of my life in a real way. I knew I wanted to study physics anyway, but the butterfly's wings, &etc.
92: Resume has a fucking accent aigu (or two, depending on how you want to play it), you depraved philistine!
You wrote the answers to a physics exam on the wings of a butterfly?
99: I was looking at the codes and couldn't remember if it was an acute or grave accent and I didn't want to get the wrong one.
I like the choice you made in 92, however misguided. I think it comports with our folkways.
I ran out of both hummus and guacamole. I'm trying to decide if I need to go to the store or not.
Yes, MH, you do. I would prefer guacamole tonight, if you're taking orders. Hummus probably goes better with a rusty nail, but I wouldn't know.
But yeah:
68: Taking a year off before grad school would have been a very good idea.
I can't in any way say that my taking 3 years off before grad school was some brilliant plan or anything, but in retrospect, given that I was totally not into the idea of grad school, I don't see how it would have come out well if I'd gone straight on.
What I did in those 3 years was excellent, though, working in the admin department of a community mental health center: spreadsheets, budgets, union negotiations, grant proposals. I learned a huge amount. It seemed like I could either go forward with that*, or move on.
* Which I thought would require getting an MBA or something like it. Which I couldn't imagine actually doing.
Someone told me once that there were two things you should never do in grad school: start a serious relationship, or end one. It sounded vaguely profound.
I already ate a full container of each.
105: do you have liquor? Then the answer is no.
You deprived losers missed the meeting of Jane and Baby O. Our faces all melted off from the cuteness, but the bairn had a grand time.
108: I'm impressed. I'd wait until tomorrow to get more, then.
Does Irish cream really go bad, or is it a ploy by Bailey's to get you to throw out the rest of your bottle every 24 months?
mumble off-blog communication mumble
So who won the fight? My money was on Jane.
110: it's hard to fathom that much cute in one room, actually. Did you have to bend space and time to make it work? Was essear a meet-up consultant or something?
113: My grandma used to keep a bottle she'd pass out for sips at Christmas. That must have been several years old before we finished it. I don't recall there being an expiration date on them either.
Did you have to bend space and time to make it work?
You know the magic that is the Heights allows for all things, Wafer.
VW--That sounds like it would have been a great job even if it was 9-5.
I'm glad to see that people still remember my version of this playing out in real time on this and other blogs.
You get it when Flip does it, sexist.
So 114 is pointing out male privilege?
120: I read it as churlishness about a discussion of a meet-up, but maybe there was a good-hearted, "aww, that sounds really awesome" hidden in their somewhere. As I've said before, I'm not the most subtle reader of texts.
Or it's about parsimon being uncomfortable with the meeting of oud and rfts's kids?
To be honest I'm stumped as ever.
125: oh, I see. People do that all the time, though. Was something different this time?
I'm not the most subtle reader of texts.
I knew you were lying about the hookers and blow.
119: it would have been a totally great job -- for someone who isn't me! In fact, it still is a totally great job! The woman who replaced me is still there and doing very, very well for herself (by the reduced standards of the Canadian veldt).
128: let's talk about it off-blog and then report back here about our conversation.
I am kind of charmed, in my ironic possibly not-so-nice way, by the idea that the sanctity of off-blog communications means that people who have interactions off-blog but who are perfectly comfortable with those interactions being mentioned on-blog should nonetheless refrain from mentioning those interactions because [ something? ]. That's very pure!
We could I think take it a step further, where nobody ever mentions anything that happens to them off-blog. Only unfogged comments merit dicussion on unfogged from here on out. That leaves us pretty well situated, really. Just nobody can talk about their personal business, and who wants that?
I think maybe 114 has been over-interpreted.
137: the AAP says there's no such thing, antisemite.
132, 133 Meetups included? What happens in Fresh Salt, stays in Fresh Salt.
Right. Liveblogging must be purely fictional. Anybody who mentions the so-called "real world" is SO BANNED.
I'm watching a former colleague of mine, a really good guy, arguing on television that campaign finance laws are a bad business. It's kind of painful and very weird. He also just made an analogy that speaks to the wisdom of the ban.
If this is now the random thread, I'll mention that I have now completed my first week at the new job, which so far seems awesome and a much better fit for me than the previous one.
I still have no idea what's so hard to get/wrong about 114.
142: that's awesome. Can you say what you're doing? I assume the answer is not, "Working as an agent/manager for musicians in Vancouver." But if it is, that would be very weird.
I have no idea what's so hard to get, but that's because I don't get it. I have no idea what's wrong, because I don't get it.
143: it's churlish. About other people's kids. Who are cute. Being publicly churlish about other people's children is, as a general rule, deprecated, all the more so when you know the parents in question.
I still have no idea what's so hard to get/wrong about 114.
mumble failure of on-blog communication mumble
Sharon Tate was murdered by other people's kids.
I could go for some serious mumblety-peg right about now.
149: yes, but she was never publicly churlish about them -- at least not after the fact.
Can you say what you're doing?
Working here.
So wait was the point that people (well, oudemia and rfts) should shut up about their kids, specifically, because the kids are not on unfogged (I guess?) or didn't meet on unfogged (seems less likely)?
I believe the answer to Sifu's questions is that parsimon's interpretation of the sanctity of off-blog communication is in fact more or less 132, with the "something" being "it makes other commenters who are not involved in off-blog contact feel like there is an in-group from which they are being excluded."
I see! So parsimon is annoyed she doesn't have a baby?
153: Either you're overly suspicious or I'm naîve, but it seemed to me to be "I've seen the kids and they are cute but rather than describe them, I'm going to use a commonly known folkway."
152: so you're awash in blood oil money? Kidding aside, I can imagine that being a very interesting place to work.
155: Or that she doesn't live in a certain swing state?
I don't understand 156.
156: huh. That would not have occured to me, but given my general level of bafflement I'm certainly willing to entertain it.
157: Heh. The pay is good, and since it's a state job it ultimately comes from oil production taxes, but the stuff we mostly deal with is pretty distant from that side of the energy world. And yes, it's very interesting stuff.
160: do you get to travel around the state? For work, I mean, as I assume you're traveling on your own when you can.
Don't travel alone when it's before -50F.
161: It's not yet totally clear how much traveling I'll be doing, but it appears there will be some. That'll be cool.
It's always darkest before -50F.
campaign finance laws are a bad business
Meaning against regulation? Or that the laws need to be strengthened?
166: against regulation. See here at the 6-minute mark. His argument seems almost impossibly stupid to me, but he's a nice and smart guy, so I assume I must be missing something.
162/3 is good advice which I will keep in mind.
Also don't make your fire underneath a pine laden with snow.
141: Listening to the TAL episode about Jeff Smith and watching the documentary Can Mr. Smith Go To Washington made me pretty sympathetic to the position that campaign finance laws are tools used most effectively against small, legally unsophisticated outsider candidates.
Not that that was exactly what happened to Jeff Smith, but it was pretty close.
166: I'll have to watch that later. I got into a blog conversation and he seemed to be right about the things he was right about.
170: I'm familiar with that argument and would accept it from someone who knows more about the issues than I do. But that's not the argument he's making, I don't think.
172: like I said, he's a good guy and a smart guy, so it's very likely that, as a not-very-subtle reader of texts, I'm missing something.
Perhaps he is saying that he has seen campaign finance laws, and they are adorable, but he feels that they are an inappropriate subject for the radio?
Where by radio I of course mean tele-vision.
Campaign finance laws have a face for radio.
Yeah, I haven't watched your video, so I shouldn't have written that as a direct response. I strongly recommend both of those mentioned in 170 (it's Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, apparently). The documentary followed by the radio episode make a nice one-two punch that'll destroy any remaining hope you have in electoral politics.
Pretty much every time I've seen the argument that campaign finance laws hurt upstart unknowns, it's employed by people who are offended that corporations can't directly contribute to candidates.
But the argument is true, just like health regulations can hurt small business that don't have the resources to meet them. A modern campaign needs a treasurer, accounting, records management, etc to track transactions and do compliance.
177: if we met in an office and you looked into my eyes, you'd see no hope left there at all.
180: I sure as hell wouldn't mention it here, though.
178: Consider this the exception! I'm undecided on them. I don't think any have been at all effective, and it's likely an effective law would be impossible to pass.
I guess I can't really get into detail on this because of mumble mumble cough research cough
Right. We can't have a proper discussion if someone has expertise, now can we.
It's the pseudonym problem, not an expertise problem. And I wouldn't claim expertise, exactly.
Anyway, a lot of my relative ok-ness with the crappy laws we have now is based on looking at the pre-FEC period.
Just watched the 6-8 minutes of the video in 166. I don't think he's arguing that campaign finance laws are bad in the sense of in terms of contributions and contribution limits, he's saying that campaigns spend a lot of money, but relative to other things people spend money on it's not that much. It's a poor analogy, but it's hard to see it as meaning anything more than campaigns are ok, so spending money on campaigns is ok, and it happens that campaigns spend money on things that cost a lot.
He then talks about accountability and knowing where the money is coming from, and unless I'm misunderstanding him, that's an argument in favor of strengthening disclosure regulations. This year's GOP platform is apparently explicitly anti-disclosure.*
He also mentions the 1890s in an aside that seems kind of pointless and irrelevant.
The * is a leftover footnote I never wrote, but I'll use it now to say he doesn't actually mention the GOP. I editorialized that.
Yeah, I just facebook messaged with him (sorry, that's off-blog communication, I know), and he said pretty much what you said: spending endless amounts of money is okay so long as there's disclosure. I pushed him on the fact that he seemed in the clip to be saying that we have social science to back up the claim that donors aren't trying to buy votes. But, I noted, that research is only for relatively small-time donors, and the data might not scale. He agreed, sort of, but insisted that even Sheldon Adelson isn't trying to buy unalloyed fealty. I think that's dead wrong. Still and all, whatever.
donors aren't trying to buy votes
That's what lobbying is for!
What, have you looked into his eyes and seen hope?
No, I was just appreciating what I took to be a reference to the other thread.
187
... He agreed, sort of, but insisted that even Sheldon Adelson isn't trying to buy unalloyed fealty. I think that's dead wrong. ...
I think single issue organizations like the NRA (or the NARAL) are better examples when it comes to demanding unalloyed fealty.
And politicians as a class aren't very trustworthy so trying to buy their loyalty seems a little naive. I think a guy like Adelson is more motivated by anger at the candidates he opposes.
Was 114 even to 110?
In any case, I'm certain any hurt feelings will be assuaged if someone posts pics to the flickr pool.
I too want to see pics of the showdown of cute.
The catalog I'm flipping through has a shoe called the "Mazi Skimmer". It's easy to misread that.
I hate it when rich public school districts get all the best Nazis and leave the bald ones with stupid boots for the rest of the country.
Exactly. And it's just a coincidence that SAT correlates really strongly with quality of the Nazi.
||
What is it about assholes from Boston that makes their bullshit, self-glamorizing, nonsensical origin stories so believable to celebrity journalists? No, really, FSU stood for "Fuck Shit Up" because they liked to go to parties and hardcore shows and start fights and be assholes. There was not a burgeoning neo-nazi skinhead movement made up of kids from Newton that needed to be crushed by other kids from Brockton, it turns out. Just a bunch of self-justifying assholes who ruined things for everybody.
Also those fuckers stole my friend's stereo and trashed our house during what would otherwise have been an awesome party.
|>
200 cont'd: here's how it would work in the '90s in Boston: 1. somebody vaguely associated with the punk scene decides to promote a show or throw a party with bands or whatever. 2. Said somebody does a bunch of work to secure a venue, book bands, find a time, so on. Sets prices so they'll basically cover expenses but nobody's making any money. This is just for the scene. 3. FSUs show up at show or party totally uninterested in the music, just looking to start fights. 4. Fights successfully started, party or show now sucks. 5. Promoter decides they're never fucking doing that again.
And of course the actual reason kids joined the FSUs is because they wanted to punch people but would get their asses kicked if they didn't have twenty other kids backing them up. People who could legitimately handle themselves in a fight were not generally interested. But then the FSUs released a videotape of themselves beating up homeless guys and shit and the rest is tiresomely self-justifying history.
There was not a burgeoning neo-nazi skinhead movement
Well sure, they had already been skimmed.
I'm not sure if I should say something about my 114.
Teo in 154 gets it right. "it makes other commenters who are not involved in off-blog contact feel like there is an in-group from which they are being excluded."
This blog has had discussions about this before (I've been unable to retrieve one from the bloody archives). Obviously an advertised meetup at Fresh Salt or anywhere else is fine since it was advertised, and in fact I don't feel excluded from a playdate; but a private meet-up introduced, as 110 was, with "you deprived losers" seems to emphasize that non-attendees should feel, well, deprived, which just seems gratuitous and weirdly bragging.
If I have an unadvertised meetup with, oh, ogged, or B/Tedra or anyone else, it would just be weird to show up with a remark to the effect that I'd just had one which you all missed, too bad for you. It's bad form. Maybe it's just my personal preference.
In any case, I left the issue last night because I know this is a touchy subject. People can comment as they wish. Of course.
I shared a bed with Blume last night and none of you were invited. Suckers!
So let me get this straight, you feel excluded from the Cleveland-area people-with-very-small-kids playdate?
I see that Oudemia is here. Oudemia, I don't mean to be attacking you personally. I'm really not on the attack.
in fact I don't feel excluded from a playdate
I'm going to leave this now.
C'mon, Parsi, it seems a little nuts to think that the phrase you quoted was anything but pure jest/was meant to make anyone feel bad.* People talk about their kids on here all the time. It was just that.
*except for Smearcase who is allergic to baybeez and cannot even read of them, obvs. Achoo!
a private meet-up introduced, as 110 was, with "you deprived losers" seems to emphasize that non-attendees should feel, well, deprived, which just seems gratuitous and weirdly bragging
The "you deprived losers" bit was, to the discerning reader, an instance of an unusual human mode of discourse known as "humor".
I shared a bed with Blume last night and none of you were invited. Suckers!
I was invited, actually, but couldn't make it.
"you deprived losers" seems to emphasize that non-attendees should feel, well, deprived, which just seems gratuitous and weirdly bragging
I think it could only seem this way if one were determined to read a certain commenter's contributions with the absolute least possible charity. Given that this is not the first time you've jumped all over oudemia for a comment you interpreted completely opposite from the way others seemed to, maybe you should take a step back to re-examine before the next time you snipe at her.
"you deprived losers" seems to emphasize that non-attendees should feel, well, deprived, which just seems gratuitous and weirdly bragging
I think it could only seem this way if one were determined to read a certain commenter's contributions with the absolute least possible charity. Given that this is not the first time you've jumped all over oudemia for a comment you interpreted completely opposite from the way others seemed to, maybe you should take a step back to re-examine before the next time you snipe at her.
which just seems gratuitous and weirdly bragging
Is it weird for people with cute kids to brag about them? I don't really think so. I think it's... normal?
I shared a bed with Blume last night and none of you were invited.
I think, like oud and rtfs, you owe us pics.
I think, like oud and rtfs, you owe us pics.
We can't; nosflow never showed up to take them.
I think, like oud and rtfs, you owe us pics.
It has not yet been established that that's what oud and rtfs think.
They were watching on the webcam anyway.
211.1: Yeah, I acknowledge that.
So … what is the issue, then?
I think it could only seem this way if one were determined to read a certain commenter's contributions with the absolute least possible charity.
And that's never happened!
But I am a deprived loser. I don't see what's so funny about being a deprived loser.
225: oh, we discussed that in bed last night.
There was not a burgeoning neo-nazi skinhead movement made up of kids from Newton that needed to be crushed by other kids from Brockton, it turns out
That said, there were a lot of really insufferable kids in Newton in the 90s, of whom I was one.
227: yeeah not so much the same as being a neo-nazi.
DID WE EVER ASK TO HAVE OUR CUTENESS COMMENTED UPON BY YOU GAWKERS WITHOUT OUR CONSENT ?? WHAT ARE WE TO YOU, TWO LITTLE HELLO KITTY DOLLS FOR YOU HUGE MONSTERS TO OBJECTIFY? WE ARE GENUINE PERSONS WITH AUTONOMY AND AN ABILITY TO CONSENT. ALSO WE ARE NOT TAKING A NAP GODDAMNIT!!!!
Cue bob to talk about children's rights.
YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT ME ANYMORE! ONLY I CAN TALK ABOUT ME, BECAUSE I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS ME!
223: Neb, I'm sort of trying to shed myself of this discussion. But the issue is that it seems like -- I think the phrase is kidding on the square. The comment was a non-sequitur, inserted into a discussion about entirely other things. Look, ultimately I don't care; I'm interested most about political discussions, plus the occasional mayo and gardening. I'm not a blog proprietor, and I can't be the blog police, so I do apologize for that.
Though, tbh, I kind of admire her core understanding of the right of publicity. I'm training her well.
YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT ME ANYMORE! ONLY I CAN TALK ABOUT ME, BECAUSE I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS ME!
xoxox.
I am going to go clean the toilet. Any commenters who would like to join in are welcome.
I'm training her well.
When she asks teachers whether they've gotten public performance licenses before doing sing-a-longs, then you'll know you've succeeded.
I think a guy like Adelson is more motivated by anger at the candidates he opposes.
The scale of spending may be, but Adelson is very specifically trying to influence candidates to support a very specific policy direction (floating yuan) that would very specifically enrich him.
This is kind of like how Cheney and Bush were both very directly enriched by their own policies, but somehow no one was ever supposed to talk about that. It's bizarre. If they owned a million acres of land and advocated having the USG buy that land for 10X its market value, everyone would see it as a conflict of interest. But when they advocate simply having the USG stop taxing them, well, that's just policy.
The fact that they're not literally the only people who would benefit doesn't seem to me sufficient cover.
Interpersonal stuff confuses me. So I have an easier question. If I'm making a wooden table frame from 2x4s, should I just butt them flat, butt them at 45 degrees, or cut a notch in each? I don't have anything to make an actual mortise and I don't really care about how the joint looks. I'm going to glue then use screws regardless.
Lots of triangles for bracing, is what I want in a homemade table. Butt half & 45° the rest.
It's only 2' by 3' and the surface is 1/2" planks. I wasn't going to brace internally. Maybe I should?
Do whatever joint you can fit most tightly, to get rigidity from the material thickness?
(I'd leave room for a brace, but we may just be awful to our furniture, chez clew.)
I think I see how to brace it. Thanks. Probably a good idea.
237: I hadn't even been thinking about the yuan, though of course you're right. I was more concerned about Adelson's vested interest in Israeli politics and in having a US President who will hew, without any wavering whatsoever, to the Likud line. Some people would say that this is very nearly what we have now, but I think those people are about as right as the Naderites who insisted that there was no daylight between Bush and Gore in 2000.
Anyway, Sheldon Adelson makes one hell of an artisanal end table. That shit is well braced, yo.
This is a closet being converted to a fold-out workbench.
So you're saying your work is better than Adelson's, antisemite?
Because if there's one thing Jewish tycoons are known for, it's their woodworking skills.
The *workbench*? Brace that like you're planning to go to sea on it. Rubber vibration dampers would not go amiss.
249: Sauce for the gander.
Yeah, I was all "Braces are overkill at that scale", but if it's to be a workbench....
Actually, though, probably the most impactful thing would be to use strong wood screws, not drywall screws (which tend to be the default for homeowner projects).
230:Cue Bob I suppose to compare parsimon to me.
Look, oudemia's "You deprived losers" was absolutely clear in it's (usually hidden here) contempt and disgust at those who choose, or by contingency are forced, to be childfree. parsimon was right to take offense.
And it was confirmed and compounded by the immediate intimidation by the most determined and practiced bullies in the "She was only joking! How can you be so uncharitable?" Jesus Christ, have I heard that before at the usual hegemonic places. Eastwood probably used the exact phrase.
It's classic, and it fucking stinks. parsi deserves better than you people.
253 is only me fucking joking, and everybody would be srsly paranoid and oversensitive to take offense.
251.2: I'm using a mix. I broke one of the regular wood screws but not the drywall ones.
254: Are you saying Parsi doesn't deserve better than us people? Because if I were her, I'd probably take offense at that.
I suppose to compare parsimon to me.
No comparison to parsimon intended. The joke in 229 about he children's lack of consent just made me think of you, since you've talked about that (not in jest, I don't think) on more than one occasion.
Look, I will be charitable toward oudemia and assume she did not intend to hurt. We all have residual prejudice, and are at our best when we manage to keep their expression under control. Sometimes, when we are especially elated, confidant or insecure, we slip. We should then listen to those who say they are offended.
The bullies, those who try to deny the possibility and reality of offended feelings and enforce the social by exclusion and othering, OTOH are just simply despicable.
I'd like to apologize for 257. That should have been "If I were she".
251.2: I KNOW THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO NOT LOVE THEIR FELLOW MAN, AND I HATE PEOPLE LIKE THAT!
244
... I was more concerned about Adelson's vested interest in Israeli politics and in having a US President who will hew, without any wavering whatsoever, to the Likud line. Some people would say that this is very nearly what we have now, ...
I don't see reason to expect Romney to be any more pro-Israel than GWB or BHO. Or that Adelson's past contributions will affect Romney's calculations about how supportive he should be of Israel. Romney will support Israel until he perceives it to be in his interest not to.
Look, oudemia's "You deprived losers" was absolutely clear in it's (usually hidden here) contempt and disgust at those who choose, or by contingency are forced, to be childfree. parsimon was right to take offense.
Oh my god. See Parsimon? That's the team you're playing on. Enjoy the company.
Nooo, mc! You fell into bob's clever trap! He outwitted you!
Curse that mcmanus for the crafty scoundrel that he is.
Good lord, what happened here? bob, I love you, but it has nothing to do with having or not having children.
Which is fortunate, because I think bob's committed to focusing all of his nurturing energies on his dogs.
wait, bob was really joking? Well, okay, good.
264 to 267. Bob is Schrodinger's troll.
264: I don't mind if Bob wants to call me a bully. I'm rubber, he's glue.
bob is trolling. bob is always trolling.
So anyhow the toilet is sparkling clean now. Forgot to take pictures but all you shit-eating worthless sacks of dumbfuck sure did miss out!
Yeah, jackholes. Shit is glistening. Holy shit are you guys dumb.
Thanks clew as well as lurkers in email who supported my workbench building with mocking my cheap screws. It's pretty much done. I just need to add a shelf and reinforce the board that supports the back of the bench.
Oh, is this the bragging thread? I just changed the bedsheets, motherfuckers.
257 is pretty fucking unforgivable.
"Impactful" was chosen with intent to agitate.
Impact your digits in the wrong order?
270:Alienation is the only method.
Well, the thread is 36 hours old, and had gotten boring.
Dogs are lonesome, their bedmate has flown off to gawk at mountains west. I adventure with my mind's eye.
Finished Heimat (I), but something I want I watch again, especially the last episode. See before you die. Seriously.
This Anime turned even more interesting in the third episode, as I noticed all the visual quotes and allusions to Klimt and Gustave Moreau. So it is magic tales of late Tokugawa, told with a mid-Meiji internationalist sensibility. Looking for Lafcadio next.
Wait, I take is back. 268 makes me forgive 257.
Would it be braggeration to discuss how epically stinky I've become in the process of swapping my office with Kai's bedroom on this exceedingly humid day? His (now ex-) room is one of the very first we ever finished in the house, so it's getting its first touchup in 11+ years.
Is it bragging to say that I just licked the lid of the Harissa? I think it is not bragging, no. It is sort of the opposite of that.
My son just said to a fly that tried to land on the fresh-from-the-oven cobbler, "Oh no you di'int!" I assume this comes from Glee, but I really don't know. Popular culture is impactful but diffuse, you see.
Found a page of caps from Mononoke
Kusuriuri Mononoke Yuna Rutera
amazing stuff
So anyhow the toilet is sparkling clean now. Forgot to take pictures but all you shit-eating worthless sacks of dumbfuck sure did miss out!
Indeed, a clean toilet is much less appealing to shit-eaters than is a dirty one.
And now I'm going to go back outside and smash up some concrete with a sledgehammer. Woo!
Indeed, a clean toilet is much less appealing to shit-eaters than is a dirty one.
I am not convinced this would be the case. Nobody wants their entree served on a dirty plate, even if the plate previously held something delicious.
Also, I capitalized harissa. Just a little thing I do. No biggie.
287 to, I dunno, something a while ago.
This Cap is a little better, but I can't find a good interior.
The artist uses oblique angles inside classical shoin-zukuri architecture to go kaleidoscopic and seriously fuck with depth perception.
Shit is glistening.
That's not the canonical way to clean a toilet.
||
I don't know where I'm a' gonna go/When the volcano blows.
|>
207: I shared a bed with sifu's mom last night. and one of bob's dogs was up on the bed but at the bottom. she was eating that really expensive dog food in the tiny can that is for spoiled miniature dachshunds because she is a class traitor.
So are we now just reporting on what we did today? I went to Sears to see if they had any furniture I wanted. They did not.
294: no no, we are bragging about what we did. Was Sears up to your high standards? Or are you just too baller to be catered to by the player hatin' Sears outlet of Anchorage? The answer should be obvious.
Also, "we never failed to fail/it was the easiest thing to do."
I'm still happy that I was able to make a functional (I assume), folding workbench from a $50 wardrobe, two $5 bed heads, and three used 2 x 4s. I drew my own plans and everything.
I had to use hand saws because I don't have a regular one.
The answer should be obvious.
Clearly. Fuckin' Sears, man.
Now that is some bragging! Moby: basically Paul Bunyan.
298: Macho. My dozuki, let me show you it.
Do you have a project to make on the workbench, or is the making itch now scratched?
Shit is glistening.
So you can polish a turd.
I'm going to use this workbench to build a better workbench because without a workbench, the finish of the construction sucks.
NMM to the writer of Marge and Homer's song.
302 should probably follow the link in 291.
to the OP, was miserable my first year out of college because I didn't like california because it wasn't NYC. not sure what the fuck I was thinking. partly I didn't have a reliable dealer, but I wish that had made me like it more. I did live up in the berkeley hills with no transit but a bus that was once an hour after 8pm, so I was lonely (with my boyfriend from college, but lonely). also they had a stupid boot camp 'let's see how many people fail' approach to my intro seminar. but I had this other guy I was sleeping with and he had a car and we would all go to the beach and do fun things and I fell in love with another boy so I don't know why I was so miserable.
the next year I got an apartment in the mission that was fortunately unfortunately 1 1/2 blocks from my cousin's connec, and then I started going to more fun, group sex in hot tubs type parties (or, alternately, raves) such as california is known for and I started having much more fun. and my boyfriend got a motorcycle. and I got the second boyfriend who also had a motorcycle. and I learned about soft tacos. all my life I had only had some old el paso crackers filled with turds of ground beef and powdered red ass nothing. then I ate carnitas. it was like my whole life changed. already I had a terrible sadness inside and all the beautiful sunset light pouring on me could never get inside, only compact that misery into a dense core till eventually it got like a dwarf star, and a teaspoonfull weighed 2 tons, and I was in the hospital with a contemptuous doctor, not crying; it is very hard to make me cry.
now I have started a business! I have sort of not ever had a job. no, I have just had short stints. they are filming a short mini-episode of me and my partner picking through stuff at the last week of this month and they have interest from a major US channel--I am excited but my partner is undermining out of fear of failure, fear of success, fear I will outshine her...I gots to shake the girl by the shoulders. this is the real thing! she is also the key figure and her talking=screen time. I ain't talking to no chinese people, and she is. I can't outshine her if I'm not saying nothing. god.
and then I started going to more fun, group sex in hot tubs type parties (or, alternately, raves) such as california is known for and I started having much more fun
I'm doing this all wrong, goddamnit.
The cypherpunks used to have a lot of group sex in hot tubs-type parties, trapnel. You could look them up. Bunch of pasty dudes with stringy beards and guts but whatever, right? That's not the point.
I'm doing this all wrong, goddamnit.
s/b mumble mumble off-blog communications mumble
And 308 pwnd by 305. I just can't win at internets tonight.
309: First become female and better looking.
s/b mumble mumble off-blog communications mumble
But I was expressing disappointment at how the group-sex-in-hot-tubs Mineshaft meetups weren't all I had been hoping for; how would that make folks feel left out?
I kid; I'm sure that the sex grotto at UnfoggeDecadeCon will be bliss beyond measure.
How's the planning for UnfoggeDecadeCon going, by the way?
Yeah, if that's happening, I need to know. I got screwed for UFCII because of insufficient time to prep the wife.
Huh, I lived in the hills north of Berkeley during my seven month jaunt to the Bay Area, a rich little town called Kensington where I think whatsisname, Bay Area early music conductor, lived or Czeslaw Milosz, or some famous Bay Area person. I could see the entire east bay and the bay itself and the city and three bridges from my window (lemme think: Golden Gate, Bay, San Rafael?) and it should have been my favorite apartment ever except I was living over an hour's drive from anything, as the bay bridge never takes less than thirty minutes, and temping even further inland in the city offices of a sad little town and though I had some fun times (people in the bay area are, what was the euphemism we came up with? warm-hearted!) and made a few friends and liked the taquerias a lot, and though someone I dated for a week, until it turned out he did sort of a baby doll voice in bed, gave me a Vertigo-themed tour--everything from Old Fort Point to Muir Woods though not the mission where [spoilers happen] because it's hours away, the fact was, I had moved out there with a boyfriend I was little not right in the head about and I was sort of backed into breaking up with him after a month, and could never feel fondly about the place.
I offer no justification for this burst of possible overshare! But if it kills the thread, I'll be self-conscious and bring up circumcision just to get things going.
Does Vertigo need spoiler alerts? I can't remember a time when I had not seen Vertigo more than once.
Graduates of the class of 2016 will always not have seen Vertigo.
Or rather, for graduates of the class of 2016, essear will always have seen Vertigo more than once.
Someone in what might marginally be called an outer suburb of this city reached my web page today by Googling, on their cell phone, the phrase "how tall is [my name]". That's weird, right?
I've never seen Vertigo but I've seen North by Northwest and that's basically the same thing.
The Bay Area always makes me feel nostalgic for the period I never actually spent living in the Bay Area. There must be a word for this that's better than "fauxstalgia".
Is there a famous [your name]?
A more famous [your name], I mean?
There's no famous [my name] I'm aware of.
I think there are some sort of famous people with similarly spelled last names.
Does your web page list your height?
Probably just doesn't want to show up with a box too small for you to fit inside.
There is an actor with a vaguely similar name. Also, your web page does not list your height.
I just watched the Baader Meinhof movie. It's been in the queue for months, but the wife didn't want to relive the episode.
Maybe they want to be sure you'll fit in the hot tub with everybody.
Huh. I didn't know about the Welsh actor. I suppose that makes sense.
Maybe they'll put me in a box and take me to a hot tub.
Google won't tell me how tall any of you are. Maybe I should ask Siri.
Or are you just too baller to be catered to by the player hatin' Sears outlet of Anchorage?
He's so baller he should appear in this magazine.
338: I've seen ads on Facebook from time to time suggesting I apply to be featured in that magazine (or however the process works).
teo please explain this weird variation of English that is to be found in Alaska:
Susie Carter, Publisher, established AlaskaMen in 1987 on her kitchen table was featured on Oprah Winfrey Show 5 times, The Wall St. Journal Cover Story, Cosmopolitan 4 times, People 3 times, Life Magazine, chosen publisher of the year and others worldwide.
I can't parse this. Susie established on her kitchen table was featured on Oprah chosen publisher!
And I feel like the part about "MEN IN TREES" calls for further explanation.
It says the men can be nominated by friends. We're sort of like friends, right?
Teo, it would make me so very happy to see you in AlaskaMen. And I'd reckon that the entire blog would rejoice along with me. Would you deny us that pleasure?
There's a nomination form on the website. I assume that's where the Facebook ads I've seen take you. There's also a blog.
I like how they always capitalize "MAN". I hope it's not an acronym for, like, "Manly Alaska Native" or something.
Speaking of hot-tub sex parties: this looks like great front-page fodder.. I can't decide whether to be envious or frightened, but then, why choose? (via Gary F)
You need capital letters to capture the masculinity of Alaska's MEN.
Hopefully Jackmormon knows teo's home address and fax number so he can be successfully nominated.
euphemism we came up with? warm-hearted!
Amiable!
I am having a great time in the Bay Area, probably because I'm a wide-eyed small town kid enjoying the sophistication. Also, I have entered fully into my nerdery, and it's easier to have fun when you have no shame (Probably also true of hot tub orgies CYPHERPUNKS NO I WAS TRYING TO FORGET.) Also, anything that isn't actually grad school, rockin'!
I know Teo's real name. And aren't Alaskan addresses as simple as "by those trees" or "near that huge fucking gorge" or "where I saw that bear that one time" or even "by Russia".
"--a motley crew of libertine twenty- and thirty-somethings with impressive jobs and developing social skills--"
347 is Unfogged down another trouser of time, is what. Ripe for uneasy mockery.
340: Feels like something I have recently learned is called a "garden path sentence": "The horse raced past the barn fell" is I think the paradigmatic example but I can't parse it as a single sentence. "The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi." works better for me. The thing you quoted is like one of these that never resolves in any direction.
I thought a garden path sentence was one that's constructed properly but ends somewhere very different than its beginning suggests to the reader, so much so that it makes no sense. I'm trying to think of a good example, and I'm going to drive to coast now to see if the surf's up.
The website also has a sidebar item explaining MEN IN TREES:
HOLLYWOOD: Yes! In answer to all your inquiries, our Publisher and Founder, Susie Carter, was involved in the TV Series Men in Trees. Unfortunately the show has been cancelled after 2 seasons, much to the dismay of many. Susie was the show's Executive Consultant.
Anne Heche starred in the series as a relationship coach and a bestselling author. She went to Alaska and her adventures began.
Anne Heche! Remember her?
But honestly, I have no idea if that's right. I mean, I have no idea if that's a garden path sentence, and I have no idea if I even know what a garden path sentence is. Because I'm a professional writer. And a feminist.
356: That is indeed what a garden path sentence is, and both of the quoted sentences in 355 are good examples.
359: but like Smearcase, I can't read "The horse raced past the barn fell" as a single sentence. And "The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi" seems less like a garden path sentence than a very poorly constructed bit of craptacular syntax.
360: oh, that helps a lot with the reading of the sentence about the horse and the barn. Thanks.
"The horse raced past the barn fell" is I think the paradigmatic example but I can't parse it as a single sentence.
I think it's supposed to be something like "The horse [, which was] raced past the barn [,] fell."
Teo, is my example at the end of 356 a garden path sentence?
354 347 is Unfogged down another trouser of time, is what. Ripe for uneasy mockery.
I find the Less Wrong crowd kind of perversely fascinating, because on the one hand they seem like a community that resembles communities I know or have been part of and on the other hand they seem like a crazy Singularity cult. Like, I wonder if Eliezer Yudkowsky is going to prove to be the Ayn Rand of our era, spawning a bizarre little subculture of people fiercely committed to a weird distorted vision of reality.
365: I don't think so, no, but I'm not sure what you intended the misleading parsing to be.
IIRC pdf23ds was really into that Less Wrong site.
367: so it's a question of parsing? I thought it could be, as I said above, a matter of misleading the reader, in the opening of the sentence, about where the sentence will end.
Monkey study on very restricted calories currently doesn't see an advantage; hard to imagine someone who's been eating that way for years changing their mind.
I think I quit reading the rational Harry Potter when it started feeling a lot like Ender's Game.
It's all about parsing. It's also about misleading the reader, but only through syntax.
I was in a school chorus thing that practiced in Kensington elementary school and I think we even did a Christmas performance or two there, but I never went to school there. I think I may have been in a water balloon fight or two there as well.
Anyway, garden path sentences are mostly of interest to linguists because of what they show about syntactic structure. People basically never use them in real life. What's much more common is sentences that sort of seem like garden paths but are actually just ungrammatical, of which the sentence in 340 that started all this is a good example.
That article is really something. Otoh, they sound like they're having more fun than I am.
I can't read Yudkowsky and not think he and his are most interested in the first-mover advantages of a superhuman AI.
step three: Profit!
Well, sure; if you've internalized the frame of the 99%/1%, or in their case the 99.9%/.1%, and you believe the minority will win, what's else to do?
I chose the fork I came across on the garden path to eat with for sentimental reasons.
Garden path sentences Springfield 10 to 10 to life.
Does Vertigo need spoiler alerts?
YES, GODDAMMIT. I still haven't seen it yet! Although I'm rectifying that this weekend at the Castro.
(I hope those don't count as spoilers.)
I didn't like it when I saw it as a freshman in college. Maybe I would like it now, but I think I'd probably just appreciate it more.
I liked it when I saw it, but that was quite a while ago and I don't remember it in detail.
The part where the space aliens took over the Spanish Mission seemed kind of tacked on, but what do I know.
At least I didn't mention the chase scene on Coit Tower, one of Hitchcock's favorite landmarks.
Shit.
Or when Jimmy Stewart climbed a redwood with Kim Novak under his arm and fought off a crop-duster.
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NMM2 Hal David. Say a little prayer.
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Last night I had a dream a doctor told me I have hand osteoarthritis and when I woke up this morning, my hands hurt.
374: may not quite have edged into a cult just yet. Give it a tiny bit longer. There's no way that it doesn't end up as a cautionary tale.
My hands hurt many mornings. Is your dream doctor taking new patients?
If it goes away within an hour after getting up, it probably isn't a problem.
So if it doesn't last more than one hour it's also not a problem. Unless you want it to, laydeez.
Oops. Premature italicization.
I guess TJ didn't overly manipulate his typography when he was younger.
I don't think I liked it that much when I saw it in college, but then when I saw it at the Castro two nights ago I did like it. Interesting, no?
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Should I use real (though seconds) Liberty foulard, from my one trip to England, to reline a suit jacket that was never very expensive but happens to fit me well? And has flecks that match the foulard?
Yes, I thought so. Anyone done that thing with the burrito-roll and the bagging?
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366: I used to read Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong's blogparent, regularly until I got sick of Robin Hanson's lung cancer libertarianism*. Yudkowsky isn't a public sanitation problem like Hanson, and he does a decent cognitive bias 101 blog post, but he's got the Kurzweil thing bad.
*if anyone wants to popularise this coinage, knock, or rather koch, yourself out.
Yes, I thought so.
Let me reaffirm this.
I'm glad that Less Wrong didn't exist when I was even more socially awkward and delighted by my own apparent cleverness, because it would have been like slow, irresistible poison.
I actually liked this Peter Thiel interview:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187
405: I would have loved it when a college freshman. Isn't that about the time of AynRand poisoning too?
406: the Dunning-Kruger fumes gave me a contact-high. Dude doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
408 is great, as far as I can tell.
From the link in 406:
You can point to quasi-governmental things like spending on health care and education, where costs are spinning out of control.
In what sense is this true of education costs? Surely it doesn't mean college tuition, which is skyrocketing because government is spending less on it. What does he mean?
Then he says technological growth has been slowing down since the 1960s? Does this man live in the same world that I do?
I'm not ideologically on the same page as Thiel, but I think it's plausible. Between 1900 and 1960, you have the widespread availability of indoor plumbing, electrification, television and radio, heavier-than-air flight, satellite communication, and the discoveries of DNA, the Krebs cycle, penicillin, and the solid-state transistor. If you ignore social issues, wouldn't the world of today seem more like 1960 than the world of 1960 seemed like 1910?
410:Just so much wrong in the shite he dribbled!
411 seems like a good point. In 1942, my dad didn't have indoor plumbing, used kerosene lights, and used a horse for basic transportation.
On the other hand, in January of 1960, the number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 was Johnny Preston's "Running Bear".
Technology that actually uses relativistic corrections, and quantum mechanics, and germline genetic engineering, isn't as big and visible as internal combustion. I can't think of it as a slowdown, though -- it all depends on the sum of what came before, we use exponentially more knowledge with every advance.
410
In what sense is this true of education costs? Surely it doesn't mean college tuition, which is skyrocketing because government is spending less on it. What does he mean?
Tuition at private colleges has increased much faster than inflation. See here (there is a note under the chart saying increases at private schools have recently been less than inflation but I think that is a mistake as it is not what the chart shows or what the text of the article says).
Spending on K-12 has also increased much faster than inflation. See here.
Skimming, I read this bit
In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse.
and stopped skimming, didn't read.
Spending on [education] has increased much faster than inflation.
Isn't that exactly what you would expect based on the Baumol Effect?
I didn't see Dunning-Kruger in that so much as someone trying to grapple with some real problems starting with a heavy bias towards an inadequate ideology. At least he recognizes the problems, I guess.
Spending on K-12 has also increased much faster than inflation. See here.
I have to admit, I'm surprised by how large the slope of that curve is.
418:
It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth.
I think I see a problem with this.
On the other hand, K-12 schools are playing a lot of roles they didn't always play that aren't necessarily measured by test score attainment; they're basically offering mental health services for a lot of children, for instance. The non-teaching staff of schools, rather than the number of teachers per student, probably accounts for a lot of that growth.
That K-12 graph is federal spending. What does total spending look like?
I guess I can get on board with thinking that people's lives were changed more by technology in the decades preceding 1960 than since. But the pace of change still seems pretty rapid. There's this whole internet thing I keep hearing about, and I think before about a decade ago people actually talked to people in the same room instead of thumbing a little rectangular box they were holding in their hands.
410
Isn't that exactly what you would expect based on the Baumol Effect?
I don't think so. The third chart (in the second link) shows staff per student has gone up a lot. And as I understand it, the Baumol effect applies when wages in general are increasing in real terms which (IIRC) has not been the case in recent years.
And of course it is not really a given that education has to be done in the same labor intensive way it has been in the past.
Whoops, should've scrolled further down. So over the last 35 years spending has gone up 150% and staff 70%, both approximately linearly. These don't seem like social crises.
423
That K-12 graph is federal spending. What does total spending look like?
That would be the second graph in the link.
I think I see a problem with this.
Well yes, that's why it's called a "disease."
But the idea is a useful one -- the cost of a resource is based on what that resource is worth to other people. If some sector of the economy increases labor productivity that sector will be able to pay people more and will bid up* the the price of labor for everybody, to some degree.
Over time the economy as a whole sees substantial increases in labor productivity -- but that value is an average, some parts of the economy see much bigger increases than other. In particular capital intensive industries will see bigger improvements in productivity than anything involving personal service (education, haircuts, live theater, bicycle mechanics) but the cost of labor still goes up, so those goods and services become more expensive relative to other items in the economy.
* That sector can either hire more workers or hire more highly credentialed workers. That reduces the supply of skilled labor to other parts of the economy making it more expensive.
425 is correct, but I still think the Baumol effect is a useful thought to keep in mind when considering education spending.
The problem I saw was with using rising average salaries to explain explosive costs in one sector, since salaries haven't really been rising.
since salaries haven't really been rising.
Fair point, but I don't know that this is true for people with graduate degrees (which would include most teachers).
426
Whoops, should've scrolled further down. So over the last 35 years spending has gone up 150% and staff 70%, both approximately linearly. These don't seem like social crises.
Possibly a giant waste of money though since the end result is no better.
431: I don't know; let's ask AWB.
432: Possibly. I would want to know what the extra staffers are doing.
432: Assuming the goal is test scores. But, as I said in 422, schools are playing a larger social role and providing a lot of services for kids, not just teaching.
And anyway, as giant wastes of money go, this is a relatively small one.
Globalization and the gutting of the middle class has been the cure for Baumol's disease.
As far as I can tell, despite being often discussed in conjunction, per-capita growth has almost nothing to do with inequality or unemployment.
431
Fair point, but I don't know that this is true for people with graduate degrees (which would include most teachers).
I believe you generally only need a bachelor's degree to teach at the K-12 level. Many teachers get graduate degrees in education because this gives them a salary bump however the courses required are widely seen as a joke and there is no evidence that teachers with graduate degrees are more effective.
The example mentioned in the wikipedia article for the Baumol Effect strikes me as a classic case of simplistic economic generalizations. The claim is that the productivity of classical musicians has not changed since the 19th century, because it still takes 4 people to play a string quartet.
But wait amminit. The basic value of a live string quartet has changed in all sorts of crazy, hard to quantify ways since the 19th century. What exactly is the "product" of a string quartet? If it is just providing an audience with an aesthetic experience, than recording technology can make four musicians far more productive than could ever be imagined in the 19th century. And not surprisingly, in response to this massive increase in productivity, the number of people with the requisite skills has plummeted.
Of course classical music isn't just an aesthetic experience--it is a status symbol. But the status accorded by a quartet is completely variable given context. For some people having a famous string quartet play your event can bring a huge amount of status. But in other contexts, a recording, or a crappy live group, would be just as good.
So again, economists have made some ridiculous assumptions about value and built a theory about it.
How do critics of teachers manage to constantly slag the value of graduate education in teaching, while simultaneously promoting an approach to student testing which was developed in the same schools of education using the same social science paradigms?
438.last to various other quantitative subfields.
Further to 438: the advent of recorded music also created a massive standardization in performance standards. Audiences have come to expect the timbre and tempos they have heard on the recordings. Styles that a middle class family might produce for themselves in their parlor, that sounded great to them, no longer seem "correct."
I would guess that the standardization of performance styles increases competition among classical musicians, as people are trying to outperform each other against increasingly precise measures. This again produces a star system, where a few highly paid individuals are able to dominate a market.
It also means that the nature of the product and the expectations around it have changed dramatically, so that it might not even make sense to compare the productivity of a classical musician in the 1960s, when the article was written, and the 1860s.
439
How do critics of teachers manage to constantly slag the value of graduate education in teaching, while simultaneously promoting an approach to student testing which was developed in the same schools of education using the same social science paradigms?
Are you familar with what a getting a master's degree in education actually involves in the real world? My friend, the teacher, who got a master's degree while teaching for the salary bump reported (as I recall) that their "statistics" class professor introduced the class by saying something like "I am not going to really teach you statistics because you all are too dumb but if you show up for all the classes you will pass" which was fine with the class because all they cared about was the credential which just requires a certain number of course hours. The rest of the courses were equally vacuous.
The people developing standardized tests may not be the brightest bulbs in the chandelier but I would hope they have taken actual statistics courses.
My mom was highly unimpressed with the quality of the classes she took to get her master's in education, which she, like everyone else, just did to get the credential and resulting pay raise.
I have more statistical knowledge in my left testicle than an entire college of education. Stupid thumb drive full of texts left on the chair.
Would you be interested in developing some standardized tests?
I think I'll just remove the thumb drive from my balls for those odds.
That's probably a reasonable choice, yeah.
With enough tutoring, your left ball should reliably be at least within the 90th percentile. Of course, you would be a moral monster to send it to public schools.
|| I found out this evening via FB that an acquaintance and classmate of mine was raised (and apparently still is) a Moonie. This freaks me out. At least the religion I was raised in is old enough that the "cult" moniker is arguable. |>
Standardized testicles leave no child behind.
Being a Moonie still is the scary part. When they announced Sun Myung Moon's death on the radio this morning, NPR actually quoted a statement of his about wanting to replace Christianity. All those right-wing Christianist politicians and newspapers that took his money tried to cover that part up for quite a while.
400: Obviously Liberty fabric is for using, which is why I buy ridiculous bundles of tiny scraps and then adore them. A suit coat you like lined with fabulous fabric (and while I've never seen/felt their foulard, I can assume!) sounds perfect. Updates, please!
410: In what sense is this true of education costs? Surely it doesn't mean college tuition, which is skyrocketing because government is spending less on it. What does he mean?
With respect to higher ed, I imagine he's talking about federal student aid -- no?
457: as lefties we have to hate America, but we can still like Liberty.
Higher ed is kind of weird, because the costs at private colleges have gone up a lot, some of which might be attributable to healthcare, but there's also been a huge growth in the number of administrators.
Is America in shut down? Or is everyone just unusually quiet?
We're at the culmination of a three day celebration of Ed Miliband.
It's Labor Day. We're all off breaking strikes.
ttaM, it's the nearest they get to a bank holiday between Christmas and the next Guy Fawkes' Day; they've got a lot of mileage to make up.
I forgot about Labo(u)r Day. I'm feeling at a loss for procrastinatory reading.
Here, read a random interview with a food critic.
I'm at work, but I'm actually working.
Sally informed me that the politically aware middle-school crowd has decided that Paul Ryan is a dead ringer for the coach/teacher/whatever on Glee. I pass this along for whatever it's worth in terms of predicting election outcomes.
I can't say I'm a fan of your new promotion, LB.
I'm a bit too hungover to comment effectively. On the other hand, I DJ'd for the biggest crowd yet since getting my new DJ doohickey. They both enjoyed it.
brings up an issue constant during 2012
That's particularly true because the President is making things harder on himself in ways that, if you didn't know better, you would say were intentional:The Obama campaign is primarily focused on winning the 270 electoral votes needed to gain a second term. The president does almost no fundraising for Senate or House candidates and hasn't transferred money to other party election committees. His numerous campaign offices rarely coordinate with local candidates or display signs for anyone but Mr. Obama.
At rallies, Mr. Obama seldom urges supporters to volunteer--or even vote--for other Democrats running for office. Sometimes, he mentions other politicians in the room without noting that they are seeking re-election. He rarely shares the stage with other candidates.
"Would say was intentional" what a joker.
Watch what people do instead of listening to what they say or bringing your own fantasies and delusions to the news and it has been obvious since the inauguration that Obama wants a Republican Congress. 2010 was no failure.
I've never seen Glee, but 15 seconds' research suggests that she has a strong point. Does this mean that Ryan will get the votes of any 11 year olds who manage to get through all the nice new anti-fraud legislation? Or the votes of all legitimate voters whose views are determined by their young children?
I doubt if this will swing the election.
On the other hand, I DJ'd for the biggest crowd yet since getting my new DJ doohickey. They both enjoyed it.
I feel deprived.
Thorn, do you have a theoretical plan for your Liberty scraps (lawn? challis?), or are they just for fondling? Not that I don't understand fondling. The silk I'm finally thinking of cutting into looks like little bits of Strawberry Thief reassembled into a foulard pattern. WUV.
I have unpicked the original lining from the jacket, and although the interfacing is all fusible, it's still smoothly attached. Also, no thin spots when I hold it up to the light, although I was worried my backpack had worn some. Elbows also fine, though I would not have minded suede patches in good conscience. Onwards!
This is a dry run for disassembling, relining, and re-assembling an eau-de-Nil Harris tweed overcoat I inherited from a grandfather. ttaM remarked on wool, as a main export of Northern Knifecrime, but did not remark on the economic problem with exporting stuff that apparently doesn't wear out, ever.
464: Actually, government employees get Columbus Day before this Guy Fawkes day. (Being only quasi-governmental, I celebrate Columbus Day by not having to use a vacation day for the Friday after Thanksgiving.)
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Having dinner with Buck last night (born in 1965, lost his hair a while back), I realized that I may have identified who it is that's been writing all these comments.
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478: He actually does spend most days typing in a room that's below street level. I was as surprised as you are, but the evidence is accumulating.
The wife is always the last to know.
You'd think you'd at least notice that he was writing your comments.
Can you tell him to make me funnier?
How about some incentive? Basements don't panel themselves.
Are we phantasms from the psyche of a specific balding 47 year old male, or 47 year old males in general? Frankly it feels a little improper to be part of Lizardbreath's husband's id -- what else is in there?
what else is in there?
Are you noticing a lot of detailed fantasies about buying land in Pennsylvania and raising chickens?
Some family on my way to work has chickens right in town. You don't need much land.
It's three chickens if you have a 2,000 square foot lot. Most of the city could have a coop.
I briefly had a guy who cleaned my house who had a flock (?) of chickens that he kept indoors in a run down house in Echo Park.
Needless to say, as someone comfortable with interior chickens, he was a nice guy but inept at cleaning by all standards except mine. Eventually a girlfriend demanded that he be fired.
To be clear, he lived in the house with the flock of chickens. He wasn't raising chickens in an abandoned squat; his regular house was run down.
Interior chickens sounds like a medical condition caused by eating fertilized eggs.
Urban chicken husbandry has become really popular in the past few years. It's even started to catch on in Anchorage, despite the fact that the chickens keep getting eaten by bears.
It's been reasonably common for a long time in non-rich neighborhoods in LA for Latino immigrants to have chickens and (unfortunately) roosters. These days there are plenty of urban homesteaders with chickens, as well, though we had family friends who were rocking the urban chicken scene back in the 1980s.
Outside, though, people. Keep those dirty birds outside.
489: and soon to be protected by Akin and others...
490: Raise emu to protect the chickens.
Clew, I'm working with Tana lawn and doing an English paper pieced lap quilt, eventually. Other things have taken much higher priority, but that was my first patchwork project. A friend has a theory about how typical it is that I chose the most masochistic path (1-inch Liberty hexagons, each of which requires six solid diamonds to make a start) right from the start in choosing a new hobby.
Speaking of torturing myself, Lee listened to me tonight about how sad I've felt about Val and Alex and was so supportive and whatnot that I probably healed a little. We have a regular babysitter planned and a goal to get an actual night away from kids, which I hadn't even thought was possible. I'm still a little weepy, but I can cover fine.
You could just cut out the middleman and raise bears, but it's damned hard to get them to produce eggs.
487/488 reminds me of one of my favorite jokes about New York City.
I've been loosely thinking about the original topic, and would like to compare post-bac turmoil to that of school leavers at other stages. If the issue is that post-bac is, for a class of Americans now, the beginning of actual independence, that's rather different from 'your 20s will suck' or 'college has weakened you' or whatever else could cause post-bac turmoil.
Thorn, English paper piecing is the one you do by hand, edge by edge, yes? So it's a plausible traveling-to-kids-events project? Sounds like a plan.
497.2 Exactly that. I only know how to sew by hand, but that hasn't stopped me from starting new projects. I'm a quarter of the way through a queen sized quilt for our bed and maybe 90% done with a twin sized one, so my initial more delicate project is currently on hold. I do keep sewing in my bag so I can work on it at any time.
496: We need the eggs, but I don't think that's just New York City.
So this guy moves from the Midwest to New York City. A week later, he calls his sister. "This is a horrible place, Sis! People are just... just, awful to each other. I say hi to someone on the street, he flips me the bird. I smile at a waitress, and she practically spits on me. I just want to be nice to people, and it's like everyone here thinks I'm an asshole for it! I don't think I can take it. I'm seriously thinking about moving home."
His sister says, "Well, look -- when I was there for college I found New York kind of intimidating, and the people are certainly brusque, but it's not that bad. You just need to find an in. New Yorkers aren't worse than anyone else; they just aren't going to talk to strangers. Can you start doing pub trivia, or maybe start taking a class or something? Once you meet a few people in some sort of social environment, you'll be surprised how nice they actually are."
He's dubious, but says that he'll stick it out for another couple weeks and try to take her advice. She doesn't hear from him for a month, and eventually decides to give him a call.
"Oh, no! That was great advice! I signed up for a class, and the people in it are really wonderful -- it was just like you said, New Yorkers just do that as a defense mechanism and they're sweet when you get to know them."
She says that's fantastic, and asks what he's doing. Art appreciation? A foreign language? Maybe some sort of Maker Faire sort of class?
"Urban bee-keeping."
"...Really?"
"Yeah, I thought it sounded interesting and like a good way to meet foodies. And, man, it really makes so much difference knowing people! Paolo is going to take me and two other people from the class to this little beer garden in Astoria next weekend, and I've even lined up a date Thursday night."
"That's great! That's so wonderful. What, you keep them up on the roof and they find the local flowers?"
"Oh, no, I don't have roof access from my studio, so I just keep them in a hive in the basement. They don't produce, but the point isn't to get great honey, it's to feel like a New Yorker."
"But... don't they die?"
"Eh, fuck 'em."
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NPR: "Mrs Obama is expected to tell Americans that they should stick with her husband..."
They give them money for this?
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Christ, is it just me or is pop music particularly shite this year? It's all careerist landfill indie-folk pr sub-Killers posh chancer fucks, or Guetta style lowest common denominator Vengaboys shite. I say this not out of a spirit of getting old, there's still decent new stuff being played on the late night radio stations/shows and a fair bit of good dance and hip-hop/RnB music being made, but the stuff that's dominating the daytime playlists is the worst I can remember for decades.
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Does anyone have a better phrase than ``media and content creation sector''? It's disgustingly ugly.
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I dunno, I rate Nicki Minaj, I think that there's some pretty interesting pop/hip-hop cross over work going on. Also heaps of crap though yeah. (Li'l Wayne sdjhafgleiuagd.)
Why did 504 go Prime Ministerial? It seems a fair enough point.
Mostly cause it's possible some of the other questions in this series will be less innocuous/more identifiable. So I thought I'd start early.
(Also, make with the better phrases. Media and culture sectors? is that better? Any suggestions?)
re: 505
I like some of her stuff, too. Also Frank Ocean, or Azalea Banks, or Kendrick Lamarr, or T.E.E.D or whatever.* There's good pop/hiphop stuff around. However, right at the moment, daytime playlists are particularly dire.
* list just stuff I've heard on the radio in the past week that I've liked.
How about "media and the not useless but not usually immediately useful arts"?
re 508 for a few weeks earlier this year I was forced to listen to the worst hits-oriented radio station in the country. PAIN PAIN PAIN.
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The new British Cabinet is shaping up to be even worse than the old one, if that's possible. A ton of raving homophobes promoted and this bastard as Tory Party chair.
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Warsi got the chop?
I hadn't realised Chair was appointed by the Leader, it seems a bit problematic...
re: 512
Yeah, They have been doubling down on the bastardry for a while.
Warsi got a pretend job at the Foreign Office and is allowed into Cabinet meetings if she sits at the back and only speaks when teacher calls on her.
That said, it's hard to see what Warsi has/had to offer, other being a Tory beard.
Apparently the new "Equalities" minister voted to stop abortion providers from counselling women last year.
And the new Health Secretary is anti-abortion and pro-homeopathy.
This government makes much more sense if you consider it as an extended job application for posts on wingnut welfare.
505: Latest from Nicki Minaj: "I'm a Republican voting for Mitt Romney/You lazy bitches are fucking up the economy." Which I actually think is *hilarious,* whether she's narrating or not.