there's nothing, literally nothing, more annoying than New Yorkers Texans talking up New York Texas
Wait, did my soul leave my body, occupy Ogged's body, and then return to my body?
occupy Ogged's body
What won't the white man appropriate? Some of my relatives on my dad's side might as well have "Genghis raped my Grandma" tattooed on their foreheads.
That said, we are as one on this topic, even if Kreskin makes a solid point.
While in most matters I'm happy to annoy people, especially Californians, by talking up New York, in sports I hate both NYC and LA. I could check who Simmons is rooting for, but these days he's basically a Southern Californian with some residual decent team allegiances, but in the case not reliable. Can they both lose?
It takes a pretty darned Mexican Mexican to consider Genghis Khan "the white man".
occupy Ogged's body
WE ARE THE 99%.
I could go all Genghis with a side of Tamerlane on the lost villain who devised the Poetasting Allusion Colon Tedious Word Shish Kebab With "Memory" In There Somewhere form for book titles.
I wouldn't have taken Benedict Cumberbatch for a Mexican.
Maybe you need to get out more, Eggplant.
I don't see why; I'm only through season one of Star Trek on Netflix.
If I knew anything about how time works in the Star Trek universe (which I guess is our universe, right?) I suppose I could make a joke about that, but I should really go to bed. Bourbon sounds better, though.
Bourbon sounds better, though.
WORD (It's my Friday and the gin is flowing)
Right, gin sounds better better, but I don't have any. And it's not my Friday. But I'm listening to the baby and have to wait until she decides whether to go back to sleep on her own to know whether I'll have to intervene, and there's no point trying to get to sleep if I'll have to pop right up again.
literally nothing, more annoying than New Yorkers talking up New York
My correction to this right now is so predictable I'm not even gonna type it.
17, 18: On a related note, Costco-brand scotch is actually pretty good.
19: Wait, we're not supposed to be predictable? Uh oh.
Costco-brand scotch is actually pretty good.
Costco rules on many fronts but I live in a state where they can't sell hard liquor. Running out of gin is bad times. Mostly I'm drinking it as an ad hoc gin rickey with key lime juice and sparkling Arrowhead water.
I mostly bought it out of curiosity, admittedly, and I probably wouldn't again. It's not one of my favorites of scotches I've tasted, and it's actually kind of expensive. Still, though, I figured I had to at least give a shot.
My first thought: Is the OP trolling LB?
I doubt LB cares that much about hockey, but yes, clearly it is.
The main problem with (many) New Yorkers talking about New York is that so many of them are completely ill-informed about anywhere else in the entire world. So you get a lot of "only in New York" for things that really aren't all that special to New York. On the other hand, there are plenty of New Yorkers who love it for totally sensible reasons and plenty who love it for idiosyncratic reasons, and I don't find either of those types annoying.
The main problem with (many) New Yorkers talking about New York is that so many of them are completely ill-informed about anywhere else in the entire world.
For a great example of this, see LB's assumption from a while back that everyone in Louisville owns a horse.
Well, almost nothing looks as rented as a rented horse, so owning would make more sense for the image-conscious.
Maybe LB is, after all, the best judge of what it means to live in Kentucky.
And now I should really go to bed, since it's insanely late even here.
You should! I stayed up late and got up extra early with a kid who may or may not get sent home sick and miss kindergarten graduation.
Is the OP trolling LB?
Insofar as I was trolling teasing, it was directed at JPJ, with her hockey allegiances and historical bent. But most of all, I wanted to introduce "the streets were slick with human fat" to more people, as it's one of the best symbols* I know for ruthlessness and destruction.
* Perhaps oudemia knows a better term for how "symbol" is working here, which seems to be describing a synecdoche, but 1) you can't turn around without someone saying "synecdoche" at you these days and 2) doesn't seem quite right, since what I'm describing is a state of affairs rather than a particular thing.
Insofar as I was trolling teasing, it was directed at JPJ,
Wait, since when am I a New Yorker? I'm all about New Jersey.
The Kings are bigger, stronger, and more brutish; but the Rangers are faster and they have a better goalie. Just so you know whose side you're on here, ogged.
If the inhabitants of the city were besieged for long enough that they resorted to cannibalism to survive, could there really be that much fat in even a great crowd of people?
I suppose with the burning, you could render a great deal of fat even from a very thin person.
would work, probably
Smile and act more confident, sweetheart.
I'll be trolled, what the heck. Boy, New Yorkers do get quite a lot of over the top hostility, don't we.
Back to your rivers of fat.
even from a very thin person
Kill enough people, and the brains alone will probably get you the slickness effect.
We expect women to lean forward here, ogged explained.
And think percentages. Picture a small, emanciated person: say 100lbs to make it easy, 2-3% body fat? If you render that all out, two pounds of fat gets you a lot of slickness for the streets.
I think I've figured out why in the thread where hockey first came up Halford assumed I was rooting for the Rangers. I had spoken positively of "big city" hockey and Halford has clearly so internalized the urban deficiencies of Los Angeles that it never occurred to him that "big city" could apply to LA as well. (In fact, I had been commenting to someone while watching the game Kings-Blackhawks game that no matter the result it was going to be a Big City Stanley Cup Finals.)
Surely there is a facility specializing in a 12-step meat-addlement recovery program located somewhere in the Palm Springs area.
Boy, New Yorkers do get quite a lot of over the top hostility, don't we.
Much more than other places according to New Yorkers .
I'm not opposed to hockey, but it's summer. Hockey should be done before summer. Same with the NBA. I want my seasonality.
Men need about 5% body fat to survive, women 10%. Also, wouldn't silicone fillers be really slippery per pound?
48: Hockey has one of the longest seasons in sports. Nascar is longer, but I think it's a stretch to call it a sport.
Right, I was thinking that even a population starving to death, that's still plenty of fat. Once you don't assume starvation, there's lots.
51: NASCAR will be a sport when the cars are sentient. 2034 or so.
53: Not sure when the fans will hit that mark, probably way after the cars.
53: Not sure when the fans will hit that mark, probably way after the cars.
The dark future of Pixar's Cars and Cars 2!
51: It's a bizarrely long season. The NHL preseason kicked off September 14. A 7-game Cup will end June 18.
I guess winter is that long in Canada.
I thought 33 was a Fight Club reference.
This isn't really NY vs. LA it's Columbus v. Columbus. The Rangers are led by Rick Nash. long-time star of the Columbus Blue Jackets who finally got sick of always losing and demanded to be traded. While the Kings are led by Jeff Carter and Marian Gaborik both stars that were traded to Columbus, where they both (at separate times) inexplicably contracted amnesia, and acted like Macondians just learning about the existence of ice, until the Columbus management broke down and traded them to Los Angeles, where they instantly regained their memories and played like stars again.
I guess I'm rooting for east-coast Columbus.
Incidentally, this is all from reading the sports page of the local rag -- I never watch hockey.
The Columbus Blue Jackets didn't even exist when I left Columbus. I think I signed a petition to have them named the Columbus Mad Cows and lost interest after that. Anyway, they tore down a perfectly good abandoned prison to put up the arena.
I always forget Columbus has a professional sports team. Hockey!
62: Yes, I lost interest after they weren't named the Mad Cows too. But now I work across the street from the arena, so I feel an obligation to at least know what's going on with them.
63: We do have a professional sports team! We are big-time! We are somebody!
51: It's a bizarrely long season. The NHL preseason kicked off September 14. A 7-game Cup will end June 18.
Soccer runs officially (in England) from the start of August to early/mid May. If you include preseason, cup matches and internationals, there's maybe two weeks a year without any football.
64.2: I was recently talking to a couple I know from my lab who are newly minted professors at The and they were so serenely convinced that Columbus is a kickass city that what can I say, really.
I remember all the attention-grabbing stunts Columbus used to try to compensate for not having a penis professional sports team. There was the replica Santa Maria, America-flowerama Fest (or something), a golf tournament out by the Wendy's headquarters, and the convention center with no right angles. There were others, so I guess I don't remember them all.
66: It was very nice. There was just a weird sense of inferiority to Cleveland in terms of history, etc.
There was just a weird sense of inferiority to Cleveland
Dang.
My favorite Ghengis Khan line is: "It is not enough that I should win. All others must lose." Makes a great yearbook quote, if there are any high school seniors lurking.
67: Moby, how could you forget Ameriflora???
Have we somehow never had a thread where people reveal their yearbook quotes? That is astounding.
We didn't have quotes. I did manage to put my entire family in the year book, including my grandma.
72: We didn't have quotes either. If we did I probably would have used the quote I made up for the cover of my French verb notebook -- "Memorization is the genius of fools."
Anyway, they tore down a perfectly good abandoned prison to put up the arena
They tore down the OP, home of O'Henry and Yonnie Licavoli?
I knew about the Arena, because my brother's a fan, but I guess I never realized where it was. Last October my wife and I spent the first free hours in Columbus we'd ever had in 34 years together. We'd always spent the time with my family, and while that included COSI and the gallery when the kids were small and my parents were mobile, many years ago now, I've never looked around.
The Columbus I knew in the 70s had been gutted; It's since been partly rebuilt, and many older buildings spruced up and repurposed.
I had one from a teacher, who had said in some written comment sent home with my grades that "[Robert Halford] represents everything [fancy private school] stands against." I'm still pretty proud of that. I think I also had a Bob Marley quote, which OMG beyond embarrassing, but I was certainly high at the time.
The wall of the prison kept falling over onto Neil Avenue. Or at least over the sidewalk there.
71: Why are you sabotaging my future posts?!
75: Speaking of high, I'm assuming everybody read MoDo's horror story of being too high to move. It made me want to spread unlabeled, pot-laced candy all around the NYT offices.
We didn't have quotes, but I got one great achievement: I was voted class clown, along with a male student R. The student photographer kept trying to arrange us in zany poses, which were obviously embarrassing and stupid.
A mom was walking up with her infant daughter, in a motherly winter coat, and we convinced her to let us borrow the coat and baby, and we posed like proud parents fawning over our new baby daughter. I was super pleased with ourselves.
79.2: And the mom was subsequently arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor?
78: Best response under 140 characters.
I was voted "most likely to conquer the world", which was intensely confusing, since about 25% of the class (not me) were clearly striving to go to Wall Street. Maybe they meant it in the Rusty Venture sense.
The female "most likely to conquer the world" is now a housewife with an MFA and a JD.
77: people are saving the good ones, I'm sure.
74, 76: Buck Rinehart -- Columbus's version of Rob Ford --
Rinehart said he knew he didn't have permission when, on Aug. 1, 1990, he took over the controls of a wrecking ball to knock down part of the facade of the 120-year-old Ohio Penitentiary, which the city was buying from the state for what would become the Arena District development.
"I'm going to go punch a hole in that place," Rinehart said. Informed by his staff that the city didn't have legal title to the property, he responded: "It's in the middle of our town. That's good enough for me. I'll declare martial law."
Jesus, I reveal that I had a motherfucking Bob Marley quote and you shitnuts are all holding back on your embarrassing high school yearbook quotes? Fuck you all.
I've probably shared mine before, but it was "The horror, the horror."
85: Was it "We gonna chase those crazy
baldheads out of town"? That's not bad.
Also, what Bob Marley quote? I hope it was something super Rastatwee! (Which reminds me that I don't know if I've mentioned Selah's obsession with Rastamouse here. She woke up this morning giggling as usual and then shouted RAAAAAHMO!)
I'm rooting for "Let's get together and feel all right."
85: Or maybe more appropriate for a yearbook quote:
Build your penitentiary, we build your schools,
Brainwash education to make us the fools
I did not become aware of this "yearbook quote" phenomenon until years after high school. Insular Nerdschool left me unaware of many other high school traditions.
No quotes in my high school yearbooks either.
I can't remember the specific Bob Marley quote, to be honest. I guess I could try and find the yearbook later today and report back. It might have been 91 last, but I feel like it might have been "The sun shall not smite I by day, neither the moon by night" which doesn't make much sense unless I was saying I wanted to go to war with the sun and the moon. But I honestly can't remember the specific quote.
85: I bet I win nerdiest with John Sladek. I'm not going to get it straight, exactly, but "Other people make umbrella stands out of elephant's feet. We're the ones who have to deal with the three-legged elephants and other leftovers."
I have no idea at all what I was thinking.
Bob Marley's first few records were righteous. The lyrics to Mr Brown or Corner Stone are great, so much better than later and better known tracks. Buffalo Soldier and Redemption Song are both great later songs.
I'll step up and choose "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery" for a personal motto right now. Also will set my phone to autoplay the Skatalites' James Bond theme whenever I enter a room, elevator, or public transit vehicle.
|| Mickey Kaus shows his knowledge of LA's folkways, touting the candidacy of the Third Way hack who finished fifth-out-of-five in the race to succeed Greatest Mole Rat in Congress Henry Waxman. |>
The real Bob Marley was in fact a righteously angry dude, but the context of my high school yearbook quote was basically this.
69: My favorite Ghengis Khan line is: "It is not enough that I should win. All others must lose."
Never heard that sentiment attributed to Genghis Khan. I always use the Gore Vidal formulation (and have done so here several times)--"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
Attributing it to Ghengis Khan rather than Gore Vidal makes it more barbarian-y, and therefore better.
99:
And I've seen it attributed to Oscar Wilde.
No yearbook quotes. It was customary to have your friends write in the flyleaf of your yearbook, I guess. I say I guess because I didn't know that and mine probably doesn't have any.
My father's yearbook from the 1950s had quotes for each senior, except the ones (like Dad) who never got around to submitting them, who got:
Torpor and sloth, torpor and sloth,
These are the cooks who season the broth.
The real Bob Marley was in fact a righteously angry dude, but the context of my high school yearbook quote was basically this.
Should have gone with "Stiff-necked fools, you think you are cool / To deny me for simplicity"
The Marley quote referencing Psalm 121 (The sun shall not smite...) is from a song about a warehouseman handing out goods wholesale to his friends in need. I assume the school authorities didn't know this.
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia with me.'" --Genghis Khan
Oh, hey, anyone else has kids who watch John Green's YouTube series Crash Course of educational videos? The history videos have a running gag where he'll describe something as impossible or say it never happens, and then back up and say "Except for the Mongols" and cut to a clip of Mongols on horses from an old movie (the John Wayne Genghis Khan? Maybe.)
Oh boy, my yearbook quote was a self-admiring doozy.
"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time." -- John Stuart Mill
Shoot me.
(I wasn't really holding out, but was on my phone before and couldn't just post it straightaway.)
Mine was:
"It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information." -- William Gibson
Yeah, I don't know either. Then I forgot to submit a picture so I seemed totally paranoid.
My favorite yearbook entry was a guy who submitted a self-taken picture showing his arm holding the camera (we could submit our own pictures, and this was long before the rise of the selfie) and whose only quote was the word "BYE" in all-caps.
It's probably for the best that I didn't manage to use the picture of myself where I'd photoshopped in mirrorshades and a coaxial cable attached to my forehead.
I don't think the quote in 110 is any more self absorbed than any other teenager would come up with. Also, John Stuart Mill is massively underrated. Also, it's true.
95
John Sladek was great. Back in the day, James Lileks was shown his house, which was for sale after Sladek died, and made condescending remarks about his books probably having been forgotten, since Lileks had never heard of him.
We didn't have yearbook quotes, but we often put quotes along with our inscriptions of each other's yearbooks. I remember one I used was from Cerebus (which I hadn't read at the time):
Sooner or later you'll have to take off the BUNNY SUIT, kid -- then, I say, then where will you be? ...Oh, I get it -- you're overcome by my presence -- awed by the sight of a true king! By the reality of the last ruler of Melvinbone -- last lord of a dying race -- a wanderer that is... You getting all this DOWN, boy? Or am I going too fast for ya?
Also I collected unintentionally amusing quotes from teachers and administrators, a number of which got appropriated into a yearbook page. (I have no memory of how it circulated - maybe I just passed it around on paper, and the word spread.)
We didn't have quotes, thank god.
Oh, no kidding. Because I would probably have ended up either with some quote from Che Guevara or Mao Tse-Tung, or KISS lyrics.
I almost went with a quote from Mao.
Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause. Lick it up, lick it up, it's only right now.
We did have an art project where we had to start with a song lyric and go from there, and I went with the Steppenwolf line:
Mama's old philosophy
makes everyone a freak, but me
so it's probably good that we lacked yearbook quotes too. According to google, the line is "Mama's home philosophy" and someone else claims "Mama's sole philosophy" and I suspect it might be "Mama's own philosophy" oh quit rambling.
re: 89
You get Rastamouse there? We don't see it much, as it's on at a time when the telly is rarely on, and I think xelA is too small to really enjoy it, but I always like it when I can catch an episode.
The reason we need to recruit younger people to the blog is so someone, somewhere can have a high school yearbook that reads '"We didn't have quotes, thank god." -- ogged'.
I really don't get this at all. What did the church think it was going for? Also, I assumed that it would be some sort of 'gotcha' things like, it turns out that an unattributed quote was said by Hitler. But no, and it's creepy enough that it doesn't really seem worth putting on a billboard if you're going for non-creepy.
Yes, quoting Hitler approvingly seems like the wrong approach if you're going for non-creepy.
I do love that their response was basically "Yeah, in retrospect we probably should have gone with a similar quote from Herbert Hoover instead."
The dark future of Pixar's Cars
DOUGAL: Can I stay up tonight to watch the scary film?
TED: Ah, no no no. The last time you stayed up to watch a scary film, you ended up having to sleep in my bed. I wouldn't mind, but it wasn't even a scary film.
DOUGAL: Ah, come on, Ted. A Volkswagen with a mind of its own! Driving all over the place.
If we're going for yearbook quotes, I'll go for "Highly intelligent and articulate, however... domineering, insensitive and potentially unbalanced", which is a direct quote from a letter I got explaining why the writer wasn't going to give me a job.
"a man should not wear his best pair of trousers when he is going out to fight for truth and freedom.". Ibsen, Enemy of the People.
I wasn't really politically active, but I did dress poorly. I also liked the concept of being an enemy of the people.
122: Netflix! I don't know anyone else who watches it but my uncle had sent us a book from London and so the big girls were already fans. It just really caught Selah's interest. We already talk about making a bad thing good, so having a song helps.
Yeah, in retrospect we probably should have gone with a similar quote from Herbert Hoover instead.
Or, you know, Whitney Houston, or anyone. The quote is so anodyne that they could have quoted anyone on Earth as having said it. Yet they went with Hitler.
The message I'm getting here is "we actually don't think one bit about our choices when we speak. It is a miracle so many of our sentences come out with something resembling English syntax."
It also confirms my theory that a chatbot that spouts random Bible verses could make it far in American Christianity.
Did you wake up early to say that or do you always get up this early?
Or, you know, Whitney Houston, or anyone.
"I believe the Aurochs are the future. Breed them well and let them feed on hay. Show us all the ribeyes they possess inside . . . to make it tastier. Let the bovine pasture remind us of how we used to be."
Only very tenuously related to Hitler, or anything.
I really need to get to sleep.
"Someone told me long ago, don't use pigs in nutria clothing. If I fail, if I succeed, at least I'll try a true back-breed. Because the greatest . . . cow of all. Is waiting to be free."
I's just like I always say, on the first day of the first month he had determined to make the ascent from Babylon, and on the first day of the fifth month he arrived at Jerusalem, for the good hand of his God was on him.
And I have waited. But because they do not speak, because they stand there and answer no more,
But I will come to you after I have gone through Macedonia - for I will be going through Macedonia -
re: 130
I didn't know they'd released an actual Rastamouse and Da Easy Crew album, but wiki tells me they have.
The guy who voices Rastamouse is a TV presenter [lots of mainstream BBC entertainment stuff], and DJ.
Speaking of human fat, turns out the Harvard library has a book that has been confirmed to have been bound with human skin:
"This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman. It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. Compare for example with the small volume I have in my library, Sever. Pinaeus de Virginitatis notis which is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac."