Moby Hicks writes: I've heard about this guy who is trying to beat death before, but not all the details. Despite all the trappings of science, I don't think this guy is much different from an old-style alchemist or a friendly Voldemort.

Anyway, if I slept with a machine to count the erections I had while I slept, I would simply not tell anyone about it.

Heebie's take: Moby was kind enough to gift you that link, you ingrates.

This guy may think he's got an extra lease on life, but he's got nothing on the cold, tiny Alabamans. Has he even considered being a fertilized embryo?

The other problem with the Don't Die/cryogenics/etc movements is that if they happened to work, you'd be stuck with these utter tools for all eternity.

I guess we could all talk about Alabama's nuttiness in recognizing embryos as people, who just happen to be sleeping in a fridge forever and ever amen.

Frankly, this is probably one of the best ways for them to heighten the contradictions. No one's life is in danger here, and no one has to carry a pregnancy against their will, and it sounds batshit crazy to completely uninformed "independents" who might be somehow find out about this, although if you're working that hard to be uninformed, you probably won't.

The high school and middle schools have lockers, but the kids aren't allowed to use them. This is because of drugs, maybe, or general disciplinary issues, or who knows.

Crucially, it only seems to depend on problems that are actually much less of a problem than they were 20, 30, and 40 years ago. It does not seem to have anything to do with school shootings, for example.

This is so dumb. Their backpacks are so big and heavy. Just let them stash their shit somewhere, with this functional solution that's literally built into the infrastructure of the school.

When I was growing up, the middle finger was sometimes a two-arm gesture. Wikipedia tells me:

A bras d'honneur[a] (lit. 'arm of honour'), Iberian slap,[b] forearm jerk, Italian salute,[1][c] or Kozakiewicz's gesture,[d] is an obscene gesture that communicates moderate to extreme contempt, and is roughly equivalent in meaning to "fuck you" having the same meaning as giving the finger. To make the gesture, an arm is bent in an L-shape, with the fist pointing upwards; the other hand then grips or slaps the biceps of the bent arm as it is emphatically raised to a vertical position.

(There's a photo at the Wikipedia page.)

What I remember is sometimes the bras d'honneur gesture plus the middle finger. But I can't find any trace of this online. Was this just kids mashing gestures together or was this an actual thing?

If it was an actual thing, it has disappeared from the collective consciousness. My kids have certainly never heard of it, and they spend enough time flipping the bird that you'd think they'd be well-versed.

Let's have a non-political thread here. How's things?

I can't believe that we have to all nod and go along with this reality where the leader of the Republican Party is hawking $400 gold shoes to cash in on the publicity around his $350 million dollar fine. I mean, there was already a Trump coin, Trump steaks, a sharpie marker to redraw the path of a hurricane, a Very Stable Genius, Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and everything else in between. This is normal clown show.

It just resurrects the stress of his presidency, and feeling helpless-ish in the face of the media complicity and idiocy of the American people. And I am not even so pessimistic as to think Trump is likely to win! Call it 30% odds again - it's still too high for comfort.

We've got to talk about something else. I'll post a check-in thread to complement this one.