07:54 – We have only one episode left to watch in series five of Gossip Girl. Series six, the final season, is running now, and it has only 10 episodes. It’s a real shame to see what this series has become. In series one and two, the writing was excellent and the characters nuanced. Beginning with series three, the writing started to go downhill fast. Series four was bad, but series five is terrible. Ham-handed writing, embarrassingly bad dialog, plots that make no sense at all, and the characters have become cartoonish. It’s a waste of a good cast, particularly Leighton Meester and Ed Westwick, who’ve shown themselves to be the finest actors in the cast. If it were just me, I’d have given up a couple episodes into series three, but Barbara likes to see things through to the end. She’s loyal to series she once liked. I’m not. I’d much rather watch reruns of an excellent series than new episodes of a bad one.
I’m still working on the new batches of biology and chemistry kits, as well as writing the manual for our next kit.
16:01 – There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us that a large percentage of Americans are apparently morons. I was just reading an article about items in short supply in the affected areas. People paying $5 each for D cells or waiting in mile-long lines to buy gasoline. I can just imagine the thoughts that must go through whatever these people use to substitute for brains: “Duh. The storm has passed, duh. The area is devastated, duh. I guess I better go out and buy some food and water and flashlights and batteries and gasoline, now that they’re no longer available. Duh.”
I mean, how much foresight does it take to realize, particularly when a massive storm has been forecast several days ahead of its expected arrival, to make sure you have sufficient supplies to weather that storm? How much foresight is needed to realize that the power may fail, or that it might be a good idea to fill your car’s fuel tank? I used to think that these people couldn’t possibly be as stupid as they seemed to be. Then I realized, Occam’s Razor. Yeah, they really are that stupid. And, come Tuesday, they’ll not merely be permitted to vote. They’ll be encouraged to vote. And people wonder why things are such a mess. Geez.
Have you tried “Switched at Birth” yet ? Even I like it. I forget if you said something before.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1758772/
https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Switched_at_Birth/70189301
My daughter had a small group of young ladies at the house last night for all hallows eve. I was the only guy in the house ! I escaped for a while on the obligatory pizza run. After we ate pizza, the conversation went to babies and pregnancy as one had a 10 month baby and one was 8 months pregnant. I wanted to climb under the couch.
I am the only guy in the house except the male Siamese cat and they fixed him. One gets to hear lots of conversations that a guy / Dad should never hear.
You haven’t learned to not hear female voices at will? That seems to be a major shortcoming in your husband/father/boyfriend life skills toolkit.
I am already well prepared for this situation, although my daughter is only 18 months old. Our house has a basement, and this has already been claimed as the place for daddy to hang out. The only thing I need to do is put a lock on the door so that I can lock the womenfolk out. If the ladies figure this out, then I have an alternate hiding place called a garage.
Actually, I’ll need to figure out a way to sneak up to the kitchen and bathroom without anyone noticing.
I need to work on my skills in that department as well. I automatically shift into this mode when the TV is on, but can’t do it without an LCD screen in front of me.
Switched at Birth is in our queue.
Whenever Barbara and I are in a group, the guys are always in the den watching the game and I’m always in the kitchen sitting with the women, listening to them talk. The women treat me like one of the girls. Women will talk about stuff, in detail, that I can’t imagine any guy discussing with other guys. I’ve heard detailed discussions about brand preferences in tampons and the advantages and drawbacks of different types of vibrators.
Ouch. Good thing you’re married, as it sounds like you’ve been friend-zoned by every woman on the planet.
If I had a basement, it would have four foot of water in it as our water table is very high. The garage is a mess and besides, I wanted to stay close to the cupcakes. I should have gone into my study and closed the doors instead of sitting on the couch. However, cupcakes rule!
My daughter is 25 and the wife and and I have been married for over 30 years now. I sometimes try to ignore the female voices but it does not work very well as I am trying to listen harder to the wife nowadays as tinnitus is making it unable for me to distinguish who is speaking and what they said.
My daughter will probably live with us until after I die. She is disabled from at least a decade of Lyme disease which was finally diagnosed late last year. However, when it crossed the blood barrier into her joints (rheumatoid arthritis) and brain (constant migraines with extreme light and sound sensitivity), it really messed her up.
Tampons and vibrators? Oh my.
The kind that are baked in the oven, or your daughter’s friends?
“One gets to hear lots of conversations that a guy / Dad should never hear.”
Been there and done that a few times. Not pleasant at all. Especially the way they talked about boyfriends and husbands. Painful to hear. On a couple of levels.
“You haven’t learned to not hear female voices at will?”
Why yes, I have, in fact, learned to do that. Comes with age and experience…and also “tinnitus is making it unable for me to distinguish who is speaking and what they said…” and I don’t care.
It is almost always stuff I don’t wanna hear and I can blame my not hearing it on said tinnitus, acquired through a lifetime of live rock concerts, mil-spec service in hostile areas, and then years of street cop work and target shooting, the latter of which still goes on, although now we’re clever enough to wear hearing protection, after it’s mostly too late, like the boobs buying batteries and bum-wad days after the storm has passed.
Baked in the oven and iced yesterday afternoon! I snagged three before the wife noticed. I think I could have gone for a fourth but I might have gotten the lecture.
We had hurricane Ike back in 2008. I filled up the gas tanks and bought extra food and water before the hurricane landed. We were without electric power for 2.5 days. We were without gasoline for a week except for intermittent station openings for 3 hours or until they ran out.
My biggest failure was to not get lighting. I now have six coleman rugged lanterns, most of them LED which takes 4 D cells and last 60 hours. The fluorescent also take 4 D cells but only last 20 hours or so.
http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Rugged-Personal-Size-Lantern/dp/B00339B0RC/
I also have three changes of batteries for each lantern.
Getting a generator is worthless unless you have enough gasoline, about 100 gallons, to run for a week. I am trying to decide about permanent gasoline storage. One of my partners has a 250 gallon propane tank that he stores gasoline in. The gasoline stays fresh since the tank will take pressure on it and not vent the lighter hydrocarbons. However, having a 250 gal propane tank is really frowned on by the homeowner association.
You can get a natural gas generator but if the disaster is bad enough, they shut off the natural gas to an area because of all the leaks.
A three-cupcake dude. The local postmistress at local, for-real, Tiny Town P.O. had a little table in the lobby with cupcakes and cookies yesterday that she’d made, kinda cute blonde cougar type in a witch’s costume. I had one, because I have iron discipline. Unlike that guy down in Texas.
As for storm preps, etc., I figure it’s probably smart to get the stuff in advance that will make us as comfy as possible for the few days or couple of weeks we may be in that sort of mess. Generators, gas, propane, batteries and charges, etc. But if we end up with the you-know-what really hitting the fan in this country, that stuff ain’t gonna last very long and we may be better off learning how to do for ourselves as our grandparents and great-grandparents did, before The Grid and tee-vee and Happy Motoring.
We’re sorta trying to do both here, which may be a little easier for us in this northern New England climate/environment where we’re closer to it than in other pahts of the country and to people who have been there and done that. Take advantage of what they knew and know before they’re gone. We may be back to circa 1900 again, for all intents and purposes, and we hope it won’t get any worse than that, as it looks like it will in the PIIGS.
What I really want is a whole-house generator wired in at the main, running on natural gas but switchable to propane. Unfortunately, my wife already has plans for the first lottery I win, so I’ll have to win a second in order to get my generator.
In fact, I have no generator at all. I had scrimped up the money twice, but each time a family crisis came up and -poof- went the money. As elsewhere noted, it seems that the primary function of children (of any age) is to consume vast amounts of money, time, and energy. I’m sure there’s some benefit to having them, but at times it’s difficult to remember.
“As elsewhere noted…”
Yeah. Still going on here. Start to get just a tad ahead on the List of Things to Do and bang, it’s gone. My youngest brother and I are sort of having a contest: whose pay-check can disappear the fastest and who can survive the longest on what amount of crumpled dollar bills and pocket change? We have both had pay-checks disappear before they even hit our bank accounts as automatic deposits, already blown on something or other plus the overdrafts and overdraft fees. But so far I have him beat: I have had a pay-check go up in smoke BEFORE I’VE EVEN EARNED IT. Beat that, little bro!
And if I crab about it or even have a sour expression on my viz, I get the ST (like that’s a punishment) and otherwise blown off, ignored, etc. When the daughter is here, it’s potential hours of heated argument where the word “no” is unheard, unknown, not even on the same planet.
Somebody remind me again why I not only got married but did it TWICE!
I must say that my wife is very good with money. (On the penny basis. Pound-wise, not so much. She’ll drive a hard bargain in getting something we don’t need and can’t really afford. Not much of a bargain, all’s said and done.) The problem is Kid#1 in college, both Kid#1 and Kid#2 needed wisdom teeth out, my wife hit a deer and did $2000 damage which the insurance didn’t cover, et cetera ad
nauseumpaupertas. I’m currently looking at selling a kidney to raise cash. (Not my kidney, you understand.)Anyway, my wife doesn’t exactly make the paycheck disappear before it’s deposited, but I’ve had travails of my own. eg, I (that is, my company) bought a Kindle Fire in part to make sure my books with photos looked good on Fire as well as on regular Kindle (they didn’t, and I had to re-do all of the pics) and in part to make sure the Android apps I developed worked properly. The KF arrived and I started to open it up when the phone rang. By the time I got back, the
little bratPrecious Princess had opened the package, gotten the Kindle Fire turned on, and had claimed it for her own. And, you know, four-year-olds simply can’t be reasoned with. And neither can their mothers.“I’m currently looking at selling a kidney to raise cash. (Not my kidney, you understand.)”
Have you seen the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life? A poor Catholic family has far too many kids and the father reluctantly informs the kids that they’re all “to be sold for scientific experiments.” Perhaps only one of the significant others need to be sold to take care of your situation, but if you’re lucky they might all have to go. 🙂
OFD wrote:
“When the daughter is here, it’s potential hours of heated argument where the word “no” is unheard, unknown, not even on the same planet.”
What you meant to say was that *you* are forbidden to use the word “no”. She not only is permitted to use it, but gets points docked for not using the word “no” whenever you or Mrs OFD make the most trivial, reasonable request of her.
SteveF wrote:
“I’m sure there’s some benefit to having them, but at times it’s difficult to remember.”
Yeah, you’re using them to pass on your genes to the next generation. It doesn’t matter that you’re a robot who’s just doing what your genes and nature have programmed you to do.
“I’m currently looking at selling a kidney to raise cash. (Not my kidney, you understand.)”
Have you seen the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life? A poor Catholic family has far too many kids and the father reluctantly informs the kids that they’re all “to be sold for scientific experiments.”
I was sure you were headed for the organ-donor scene (starts at around 1:09), but you faked me out.
RBT wrote:
“Whenever Barbara and I are in a group, the guys are always in the den watching the game and I’m always in the kitchen sitting with the women, listening to them talk. The women treat me like one of the girls. Women will talk about stuff, in detail, that I can’t imagine any guy discussing with other guys. I’ve heard detailed discussions about brand preferences in tampons and the advantages and drawbacks of different types of vibrators.”
Yeah, I greatly prefer the company of females to males. My female friends don’t seem to be as laid back as yours, they don’t talk about that stuff in my presence when they’re in a group of the peers. But individually? That’s a very different story.
When I was 18, and doing the first year of my BSc at Adelaide Uni, there was an article in the student newspaper by a feminist suggesting that woman stop using tampons and panty liners, presumably because they were too expensive, or richified companies and their male management at the expense of women. As an alternative, she suggested using natural sponges, which could be rinsed and reused. I didn’t see this article, but I did see a followup letter to the newspaper in which a female member of the campus conservative club said the article was “a bit off.” I don’t think she was saying that sponges would be ineffective, or unhygienic, I think she was saying “HOW DARE YOU TALK ABOUT THIS STUFF IN A MAGAZINE THAT MEN ALSO READ!!!!” I mean back in 1976 feminine hygiene products were only advertised in women’s magazines.
In 1990 a young woman from my church moved into my house as a boarder. Six weeks later, as I was sorting through my washing, I found a used panty liner stuck to the back of one of my shirts. She didn’t seem to car, she’d leave that stuff lying around the bathroom all the time.
One night we were watching TV, and some ads came on. The first ad was for a feminine hygiene product, and Jenny looked over at me and gave me an embarrassed smile. There were three unrelated ads, then the final ad before the show resumed was a repeat of the first. Jenny gave an exclamation of annoyance and embarrassment. I was just amused.
Eventually we had one argument too many and she moved out. I told my friends what had happened. Most of the women didn’t mind talking about tampons, panty liners, menstruation, PMT and so on *individually*. Some were reluctant at first and then became more relaxed. I’ve always found that stuff a bit interesting, but even more so how many woman (and men) run for cover when the topic comes up. I’m not the least bit embarrassed. One woman said that she didn’t have PMT related mood swings but that her identical twin did. Another time I was playing cards on the Internet, partnering a woman against two other women. One f the other women said “Can we have a break at the end of this hand? I’ve been on a diet for a month and I’m getting my period, so I want to get some chocolate. My partner exclaimed “We did NOT need to know that!” The offender laughed, my partner apologized to me for what the other woman had said. I said it was okay, I was completely relaxed about that sort of thing. I got two marriage proposals out of that conversation… 🙂
One of my female friends in the early Nineties was a blonde who *loved* hearing blonde jokes. She’d even tell them herself. One day I decided to see what I could get away with, so I asked her a blonde joke:
Q: “How do you know when a blonde is having a bad day?”
A: “She’s got a tampon behind her ear and can’t remember what she did with her pencil.”
After a few minutes Anita stopped trying to put me in hospital but I’d learned that there are limits with some women in how far they will tolerate even the mention of this stuff. Others will talk about it without embarrassment. That’s my attitude, it’s just part of nature so why be embarrassed?
I must say, though, that the women I talk to are a bit more shy than your female friends. None of them have discussed the vibrator preferences, and they only talk about menstruation one on one, not in groups.
“She not only is permitted to use it, but gets points docked for not using the word “no” whenever you or Mrs OFD make the most trivial, reasonable request of her.”
And there you have it.
At this late stage of my life I have no women friends and maybe two or three male friends who live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. My best friend besides Mrs. OFD is our big monster male cat.
Just looked on Drudge for anything but bad nooz and came up empty. So I went to my old pals the Boston Herald, and sure enuff, cool nooz from off the Mass coast:
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/offbeat/view/20121031black_and_orange_lobster_caught_off_mass/srvc=news&position=also
Happy Halloween, belatedly, and a very Happy All Saints Day to all!
“My best friend besides Mrs. OFD is our big monster male cat. ”
He isn’t a friend at all. You’re just a source of food to him. Stop feeding him and you turn him into a sworn enemy.
Hah! Our male Siamese would happily eat anyone in the household if he thought he could get away with it. He has certainly bit everyone here several times. Gotta watch the eyes on that one. Blue eyes, he is cool. Black eyes, watch out!
I’ll never understand why people tolerate cats. One of my friends has one, it regularly scratches the furniture, and her. Yet she keeps replacing them as they die. Weird.
I’ll probably get a dog next year, I’ve ruled out a BC, they need too much time and energy, and I wouldn’t want a pet that was smarter than me. I discussed my options with a friend who used to breed miniature schnauzers. I said I was leaning towards a boxer or a beagle. She said both would shed a fair bit of hair, the boxer would have to be taught obedience, the beagle was very smart and would have to be kept busy or it would get up to mischief. OTOH, schnauzers don’t shed hair, she said. I said that we’d had a boxer when I was a kid, and that it was only supposed to be in the laundry. She said her dog was only allowed in the kitchen. I discussed the idea of having a dog in the bedroom, in it’s own little basket/bed. She said that was feasible.
This site and Barbara’s is *really* slow today. Other sites are normal.
Pournelle has some publisher related news here:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=10426
Apparently Penguin and Random House are or are seriously considering merging.
Well, the Greens lost three of their four seats in the recent A.C.T. elections but have decided to support the Labor territory government. They will continue to inflict bad policy on our community. Glad I’ll be out of here in a year or less.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-02/rattenbury-decides-act-government/4349928
The thing that amuses me is that the Greens went through a charade period of negations with the opposition Liberals (moderate conservatives in US parlance.) But there was never any doubt who they’d side with.
Not friends, you understand, or at least not exclusively. At a typical gathering, I barely knew the names of some of the women and others I hadn’t even met before. Oddly, women who are actually friends are usually much less forthcoming about such personal details.
But in my experience, men are much, much less willing to discuss personal details than are women. The guys will talk about a team’s prospects or cars or politics or something similarly impersonal while the women are in the kitchen discussing incredibly personal stuff, even if they don’t even know some of the other women there. Or perhaps especially if they don’t.
Yeah, most of my best friends, the ones I’ll talk to about *anything*, are women.
In a class I did once the tutorial (about half girls, half guys) was on sexuality, menstruation, PMT, etc. The (female) tutor asked the girls in the class if they were embarrassed to be talking about this stuff. Some of them probably were but wouldn’t admit to it. The pet peeve of the girls was guys, especially boyfriends, who attributed any sort of aberrant behaviour on their part to PMT.
I was pretty surprised by this because guys I know mainly avoid this subject. In my experience it’s women who attribute other women’s strange behaviour to PMT.
“She hasn’t said anything to me about you upsetting her. Don’t worry about it Greg, it might just be hormones.”
“Most women have one bad week and three good weeks, whereas Emily has one good week and three bad weeks.”
Both said by women about women they knew or were related to. Most guys either don’t know or don’t want to know about this stuff. I wouldn’t say something like that unless I was out of striking range.
BTW, we can buy gasoline here in the wilds of Fort Bend County for $2.99/gal. That is the Shell. $2.93 if you can pay cash down at the Chevron. Both stations had about half the islands open this morning.
Of course, I’ve got 1/3 of the refineries in the USA within 50 miles of me.
The first thing you do here on the Gulf Coast when you hear a rumor of a storm is fill the tanks of all the vehicles you own or might own. Then you take your several five gallon plastic gas cans that you bought a few years from Walmarts and buy more gas. Before the storm!
The Northeast is doubled down on bad for gasoline since their refineries used to use crude oil for vaporizing the crude in the distillation towers for treatment. The refineries down here switched to natural gas decades ago since it was cheaper and now is about 1/10th the price of crude oil. The reason why I say used to is that many of the Northeast refineries have closed in the last 24 months due to obscene environmental regulations and the new global warming “pollutants” paperwork that require the installation of very expensive and high maintenance equipment on the stacks. Jan 1, 2011 was the day you had to say within a few ppm how much CO2 your plant is putting into the atmosphere. If you take it lightly and don’t put down the correct numbers, the plant manager goes to jail.
I was without power for almost a month after Ike, and cable/internet for two weeks after that.
In the immediate aftermath, the power at my mom’s condo was out, so we took her to my brother in Austin, then had to come back, as my wife had to go to work two days after the storm. Her hospital/surgicenter was the first one open as you came inland on I-45 from Galveston.
Fortunately, we were able to get a generator after a few days and a window unit for A/C in one bedroom. I had heavy duty extension cords on hand and was able to get the icebox, microwave, and coffee maker going in the kitchen, and we have a gas stove, so cooking was no problem. I had brought lots of gas and oil from Austin, so we were able to keep going until the gas stations were up and running.
Yeah, I agree that the trick—if calamity hits—will be to keep going for long periods. A few days to a few weeks assumes that things will be back to normal in short order. But what if the electric grid starts performing like Jim talks about in less developed India? or for long periods of months to perhaps years—or maybe even forever for our lifetime? That is something that even the survivalist books I read back in the ’70’s did not consider. They all assumed that within a few months, order would be restored and progress would resume.
My dad is thinking about buying a propane generator and a large 250 gallon propane tank. I just noticed that one can purchase tri-fuel gasoline, natural gas and propane generators:
http://www.yamaha-propane-natural-gas-generators.com/
Although my dad wants 25 kw so he can run his A/C units.
My big gripe about generators is that people need to buy a QUIET generator. My neighbor during Ike had the cheapest generator he could find and it was noisy. It kept the entire neighborhood up all night since our windows were open.
If things get like India in the USA, watch out! That is not a stable environment and will cause another civil war.
No one really knows, of course, how all the situations will shake out in different countries, least of all this one; could be just muddling through, not much better or worse than we are now; could be pretty bad but not like the PIIGS. Or we could be in another great depression and lose the Grid for long periods of time or permanently, in which case we will probably be living again in circa 1900. I hope that’s the worst we can expect, but again, this is a nation of 320-million people with at least that many firearms and when the great Default occurs it will be without historical precedent on this scale.
The country’s population seems to be rather evenly split between producers and consumers, and between people who are outraged by this, and the people who are outraged at our outrage. Those of us who are aghast at the Current Situation, politically, economically, culturally, socially, whatever, easily have the superior firepower; I don’t have much difficulty at all imagining mass civil unrest, the urban and suburban infrastructure collapsing, a possible revolution of sorts, martial law, and another civil war down the road.
Right now the northeast Megalopolis along the coast is struggling, because of a big storm. They have power outages, goods are difficult to find or are long gone, gas lines and rationing of same, etc. This is millions and millions of people; picture the same deal going on for a few weeks; then we’re looking at mass die-offs. They’re gonna panic and try to get out and they’re not gonna make it very far.
Throw in another terrorist attack, mass unrest and violent military and police responses to it, shortages of everything, and no Grid. You are now probably looking at a situation like Greece, only MUCH bigger with far more people and not as homogeneous by a long shot, most of them heavily armed, scared and angry.
Am I the only one beginning to think that Romney is going to win the popular vote and
lose the electoral vote ?
Hey, the Repubs won’t be able to complain much; Algore won the popular vote back when. I wanna open a betting pool as to how far into the next bozo’s administration will a general have to step in and be in “complete and full charge” like the late Al Haig, who, by the way, got jumped over 400 other generals by his fearless leader, Nixon; think we got too many fucking generals? It’s ridiculous, a laughingstock. I would have, at most, maybe ten or so. Same with admirals. The UK is even worse.
I believe that if Mr. Obama is re-elected that he will seek to increase the number of consumers at the further expense of the producers.
The great Default does not bother me very much. Who is going to come to the USA to collect on their bad tbills? And, the Fed owns most of the new tbills nowadays.
BTW, I read a SF book series (_Coyote_ by Allen Steele) over the last several years. He has the USA failing into anarchy in 2096 and joining the Western Hemisphere Union. They are colonizing another planet with spaceship names like “Seeking Glorious Destiny Among The Stars For The Greater Good Of Social Collectivism”, “Travelling Forth To Spread Social Collectivism To New Frontiers”, “Long Journey To The Galaxy In The Spirit Of Social Collectivism Carried To The Stars”, “Magnificent Voyage To The Stars In Search Of Social Collectivism” and of course the good old “Spirit Of Social Collectivism Carried To The Stars”. My personal favorite spaceship name of his is “The Patriotism of Fidel Castro”.