08:05 – Barbara and I had finished the other series we’d been watching, so we rotated series five of Mad Men and The L Word into the on-deck circle. Mad Men is as good as we remembered it to be; The L Word is excellent.
Who knew? Contrary to the opinion of some of my readers, who believe gays make up only 1% of the population, if you watch The L Word you’ll learn that nearly all single women in their 20’s and 30’s are either lesbians or thinking about becoming lesbians. And that women frequently switch teams.
Peggy: I was a lesbian in 1974.
Bette: Just 1974?
Peggy: Just 1974. That was all I needed.
Bette: Well, you know, that is what we refer to as a hasbian.
As is usual for Showtime series, women will enjoy the excellent cast and writing. But the series has something for us men, too: lots and lots of simulated sex and boobs.
Work on taxes continues, as does shipping kits.
14:33 – I finished the federal and state income tax returns. I am taking the rest of the day off.
15:02 – I just stumbled across this on YouTube. Pretty cool. The Left Banke doing Walk Away Renée 45 years after it charted. They don’t sound bad for old geezers performing live, either.
Naturally, if we watch tee-vee and the contemporary movies, we find that pretty much everyone now and throughout human history is/was gay. Amazing! Who knew? Also that minorities dominate all the leadership positions in whatever human organizations. Throughout history. And made all humanity’s most important contributions. And that Barry Soetero and the Mooch are giving Jesus and Mary Magdalene a run for their shekels. While the Twelve Years of Reagan-Bush (or is it sixteen?) are the epitome of Evil in modern times and akin to the Third Reich.
Which is why we mainly read books and listen to the shortwave and classical up here; I know; we’re whistling past the graveyard and ignoring the pending Deluge.
I always knew Bob was a lesbian.
Bob, lesbians (and I) share some of the same interests… 🙂
So…wussup with all the hot links all of a sudden here? The words “single women” and “men” in Bob’s initial post show us pics of female cutie-pies. My word “organizations” is an ad for Walmart.
And they seem to be hot at random/temporarily.
I have no idea what’s causing the hotlinks. I’m not seeing them. IIRC, years ago Firefox was showing them in green with a double underline, but that’s something the local browser is doing. If it’s something that’s changed about this page, please let me know. Unless Word Press did something underhanded, I don’t think it’s on my end.
I’m not seeing the hot links that you report, OFD. I use Chrome. Perhaps there is a browser extension or piece of adware that is doing it.
(Edit: It’s possibly IntelliTxt.)
OFD, you have adware. Sounds like what my sister has on her computer. I’m not seeing the links either.
I’m also using Chrome at the moment and still seeing the hot links. I have AdBlock running here. Bob’s phrase “single women” is making me hot: “Zoosk: Still Single?”
No, but there have been days I wish I was.
Dave, that sounds like you’re committing Mortal Sin ™. Time to check in to a monastery. And send Mrs OFD to a nunnery.
I’m using Safari with AdBlock, no hot links.
If the highlights are green with a double underline, it’s almost certainly IntelliTXT. Supposedly, the webmaster has to insert a script on the page for these links to show up in users’ browsers, but I can’t find any such script in this page. I search the source for “single women” and there’s nothing script-like near it, nor does a search for “intelli” turn up anything.
When this happened to me before, years ago, it was adware/malware causing it, and IIRC Mozilla was cooperating with them. I’d check adblock/NoScript or whatever you’re using and make sure IntelliTXT is blocked.
The links are red text, double-underline; nothing in AdBlock relating to “intellit-text” or anything similar; I disabled Ad-Block for this domain just for laffs and it made no difference; I still see the links. (something called “Info Atoms.”)
http://www.infoatoms.com/support
Well alrighty then! I uninstalled infoatoms per the instructions, while also noting that I had never installed it on this laptop in the first place (running Win7 as a vm within RHEL).
….and….I closed the site page and re-opened it and voila! Yes, the links are still there anyway!
And will happily take any of the six nubile young women featured behind the word “Men” of Bob’s initial post above.
I’m not getting those hotlinks here. FF v19.0.2. I use both NoScript and Adblock Plus with no special settings other than the default install. Adblock says nothing is being blocked on this page.
Apparently, this is becoming more of a problem as time goes on, as there are over a million hits for a Google search of “turn off highlighted words firefox”. Most of the top links indicate that it is done via scripting, and using NoScript to turn off scripting for this domain may work.
Unfortunately, Mozilla, having become as greedy a corporation as all the others, is integrating stuff into Firefox for money, just like all the others do these days.
I don’t have NoScript running on here, only basic AdBlock and I took out the mysterious infoatoms which had somehow gotten installed on this Win7 vm. And the links still appear, a couple of them coming and going at random. I will close out this page/site again and try it with Firefox, just for laffs.
OK, running FF 17, no links. Weird. Must be something with Chrome, which, by the way, had not happened before until just recently. I have seen where we should all be running Tor/FF if we mean to be more secure. I am trying it at home but have run into a couple of snags, still playing with it, though.
I’m running Chrome and I don’t have the problem you are reporting.
Did a little walkabout on the UT (University of Tennessee to avoid confusion for Mr. McGuire) and did a panorama with the iPhone. This image has no post processing of any kind, straight out of the phone. Impressive for such a small device.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/image.jpeg
Be aware the image is 6.5 meg and will take a few seconds to download.
The Chrome I’m running here is v 26 and when I checked it it wanted to do an update and then had me relaunch it and it’s still v 26. Will now try it again with this site accordingly. But FF was OK.
Nice shot, Ray; and behind that marvelous brick facade is seething sex and drugs and booze and shitty modern music and faculty and admins trying out their latest versions of neo-Marxist claptrap on students who will be in debt with their parents forever for nothing.
Well, I’m now down to two remaining hot links with updated Chrome and none at all with FF. Dunno what lesson if any has been learned here today with this.
Am gonna be ramping up the Tor project at home and trying to divest us of most things Google anyway.
I’ve heard that the “hot links” crap is installed by recent versions of add-ons to your browser. Don’t blame Mozilla or Google – they’ve got too much to lose. The money is worth something to the little add-on software companies, though. Stepwise, uninstall each add-on in turn, restart, and see what makes the crap go away. Be aware that the same crap may be installed by more than one add-on, though. You may be better off uninstalling everything, then installing and testing one crap-on product at a time.
My son, who is still in regular contact with programmers and developers at the big university (which houses all of the Navy’s servers and computing) says they tell him Chrome is at least 2 years behind Firefox and Chrome does not implement all the advancements Mozilla comes up with. Chrome is also tuned for mom and pop as barely computer literates for email and web browsing. If you need 15 windows open at once, Firefox should be your choice. Firefox wants you to have at least 8gb of RAM these days, so he is told. That is another reason I must come into the present, because I am limited to 3gb. Every new release of FF improves memory usage, however. They are really working hard on that at Mozilla, his friends tell him.
Dwight Silverman cut the cable cord completely, and is reporting about it in his Houston Chronicle page:
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/
Interesting to note that life has become dramatically more complex in recent decades. He describes how their favorite shows come in across a broad range of sources, which was being aggregated for him by his cable service for only $1,600/yr. Now, that work of aggregating will fall to him alone. Funny that Walmart drove middlemen out of the supply chain of retail because they added no value to the products, but similar middlemen keep popping up relentlessly in practically every other aspect of life. Who knew when I first signed up for cable in Chicago (last city in America to get cable) at $1.50/mo or $18/yr, that it would eventually explode to $1,600/yr?
As I noted yesterday, the girl at AT&T literally could not believe that there is no television in my house (and hasn’t been since we sold the last one in 2001 before moving to Germany). I can fill all my available time with my own interests, having discovered how to do that as a toddler. I never could understand my favorite childhood playmate’s frequently uttered phrase, “I’m bored.” How could anybody ever be bored with so much interesting stuff to do in life? Anyway, I have not ever missed television—either working in it, or watching it. Nowadays, I create some of the most boring video on planet Earth: hours worth of a single talking head, occasionally being shown court exhibits that we never see up close. And strangely, the pay is far superior to what I earned at making shows that were actually interesting for broadcast TV. Meanwhile, pay for all positions in the TV industry have been on a consistent downslide since I left it.
Chuck’s disparagement of Mozilla is ill-founded on two bases. First, as Don says, the ad plugin probably was not installed directly with FireFox. You’d think that people would notice something like that if it were installed by default. Second, even if Mozilla were installing unwanted plugins, FireFox users are not paying customers and therefore don’t have grounds for complaint when the product doesn’t perfectly match their desires.
Some of this is personal for me. I’ve worked on free software projects, including end-user documentation because no one else wanted to do that. You know the feedback I got? Bitching and complaining. No thanks or acknowledgement from the public that I recall, though the other developers were grateful to me for doing it. Similarly for wikibooks that I’ve worked on: some pissing and moaning about minor details or the way I organized a book, but next to no signs of appreciation, even when a book had lots of views.
And people wonder why I despise most of my species…
“…pay for all positions in the TV industry have been on a consistent downslide since I left it.”
True of most positions in most industries now; I am making pretty much what I made back in the late 70s as a machine operator in factories after I quit working for Uncle. Those factories are all gone now and I make the same money, despite twenty years of “education” and a more complex skill set across the board. And if I go into business for myself I can expect 18-hour days and mountains of hassle from the State and continued punitive and confiscatory taxation with shitty representation.
The modern version of The Left Banke doing “Walk Away Renee” is pretty good, but that ain’t the original singer, as several of the posts have a pissing match about below. Renee is a real chick and still out there in Kalifornia. A tall drop-dead blonde back then and I wish I could find a current pic of her.
You like old geezers kicking out the jams (besides the Stones, I mean?) I was a British blues nut from 8th-grade on, and still listen occasionally: here is one of my favorite bands, Spooky Tooth, doing “Evil Woman:” (the little dude bouncing around like a nut and cranking on that guitar is Mick Jones, who later founded Foreigner and did their biggest hits)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fre89067f1g
Hmm. Although I would not call what I wrote a disparagement of Mozilla—they make the browser I use, after all,—it is true that they did and still do install “add-ons” when doing a first install—and they even do that on Linux, which is where I have most recently installed Firefox. It was also true, and discussed here years ago, that they were accepting money for installing certain features and plug-ins by default, being paid by the providers of that software, not the users—users having never paid for Mozilla’s browser and email products as far as I know. Mitchell Baker publicly defended doing that.
Moreover, add-ons are obtained FROM Mozilla. So they certainly do have control over what is offered as add-ons. Over the years, they have repeatedly refused to remove various add-ons classified as adware.
As far as bitching goes, when I worked fulltime in TV, we knew all too well that bitchers are vocal, and satisfied viewers are quiet. We had studies done, showing that the complainers were only a super-tiny fraction of our audience, but the daily telephone logs of viewer responses were filled mostly with complaints, rarely with compliments. A ton of them were about some turn of events in the weekday soap operas. I cannot recall ever bitching about documentation—or, sadly, ever using documentation from Mozilla. But thanks anyway for writing it. I do read all your daily contributions here, though, and in the other places you point us to.
I hadn’t even noticed. Reminds me of that old story about the axe that had had the handle and the blade replaced several times.
behind that marvelous brick facade is seething sex
How right you are oh grizzled one. It is actually sex week at the university with many seminars on various sexual subjects.
Dave B wrote:
“I’m running Chrome and I don’t have the problem you are reporting.”
I usually use FF for this site but also Chrome on my iPad. I see none of these problems on either browser.
RBT wrote:
They don’t sound bad for old geezers performing live, either.
Geez, those guys are younger than me—and they’re geezers?
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were huge successes in the Midwest, most notably Cincinnati and Chicago. Sometime back, Valli was going to perform in Dayton—which is practically a suburb of Cincinnati these days,—and a close friend took his son, specifically to hear “Candy Girl”, which has one of the highest falsetto notes of Valli’s recording career. They never heard the song. Turns out Valli could no longer hit those high notes, so he just did not sing them.
The flip side of “Candy Girl” was “Marlena”, and it was as big of a hit around here as “Candy Girl”. They were #1 and #2 in charts from Cinci through Indy to St. Louis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDa8iSoxGf8
“It is actually sex week at the university with many seminars on various sexual subjects.”
Why am I not surprised? This crap goes on all the time at Roman Catholic colleges now, too; two of my nieces who are of that denomination, like moi, were shocked when they were shopping around for where to go after they finished “high school.” Most of the one or two percent of the population who are actively gay seem to gravitate to environments where they can trumpet their noise all over the place, like colleges, media, entertainment, etc. Thus another reason they seem all out of proportion to their numbers in the country and can get most anyone believing they’re more like ten or twenty, or hell, let’s make it ninety percent, why the hell not? We’re all just gay at heart, aren’t we?
So between the various types of sex and the mass obeisance required of all students for those of various phony genders and persuasions and minorities, the dope and booze, and the neo-Marxist garbage spewed at them constantly, it’s a wonder that anyone can get through their four years at all in any kind of intact state. And the ones who graduate from the very top schools go on to become our lords temporal eventually and decide how we shall live our lives.
“…which has one of the highest falsetto notes of Valli’s recording career.”
And “Sherry?”
““I’m running Chrome and I don’t have the problem you are reporting.”
“Same here.”
Not happening on the home machine running Chrome, either. Strange. Only my Chrome at work, but not the FF. Whatever; it wasn’t a show-stopper or anything, and I got to see them single chicks and the ad for Walmart, which is opening one of their “super” stores up here in Retroville this year, across the street from our drive-in movie theater.
Chuck wrote:
“Meanwhile, pay for all positions in the TV industry have been on a consistent downslide since I left it.”
Same just about everywhere unless you are in the know.
I’m making moderately above the average Australian salary, about $10-15k per year more, but nothing like the premium I had 25-30 years ago. (shrug)
I make enough and won’t be starving, even in retirement. I just resent how uninteresting my work has become over the last five years.
Chuck wrote:
“Geez, those guys are younger than me—and they’re geezers?”
I’m almost 55 and am having to get used to younger people calling me “sir” and giving up their seats on the bus for me. I don’t think of myself as a geezer yet. That’s a term I’d reserve for you, Bob and OFD.
Slight miscommunication. I didn’t work on the Mozilla docs but on a handful of various open source projects.
Hey, I’m the youngest of that group by far.
People have been calling me “sir” since I was in my 20’s, and I don’t mean just people whose jobs require it. It still feels strange when people hold doors for me and so on. It’s because I carry a four-footed cane because of my vertigo.
I tolerate being called “sir” by people whose jobs require it, but don’t really like or expect it. On the other hand, a young woman who worked at a pastry shop I used to frequent always called me “mate” (she wasn’t my mate, unfortunately), which is usually a word that Aussie guys use amongst themselves, even with strangers. It’s very unusual for a woman to use the word, except in reported speech. I liked her but could never get used to a woman using the word.
I’m never comfortable with people who are older than me calling me “sir”. It just grates on me.
I’ll be sixty in July, but still 77 inches tall and about twenty stone in weight. And armed. Not bad for a geezer. And I was called “sir” at fifteen, when, dressed in jeans, boots, black leather jacket, with long hair slicked back and a ciggie in my gob, I bought whatever booze I wanted in whatever package store, no questions asked, when the age in Maffachufetts was 21.
That “sir” business stopped for a few years, though, while I was working for Uncle.
42 here in Retroville tonight with more overcast, rain, and fog scheduled for tomorrow, along with a new RHEL 6.x cluster build, pretty much from scratch, several hundred nodes in three racks. By myself, probably; while our sister site five hours’ drive to the south has one-third the machines and six times as many drones to work on it. For some months now I’ve been doing two jobs for the price of one, and now we’re told that after our network firewall guy retires this year, he won’t be replaced and all his shit is being divvied up among the rest of us. One system is up on the roof of one of our buildings.
Meanwhile I’d updated my resume online a coupla weeks ago and if not every hour, at least every day I’ve been getting phone calls and emails from recruiters; two drones have already left our group and gotten better jobs. The IT drone market seems to be warming up quite a bit lately. One recruiter told me he has five positions here in Retroville ALONE, and this is relatively dull, semi-rural territory here. Five sys admin gigs; wants to talk to me bad. But: they’re WinDoze sites.
. Turns out Valli could no longer hit those high notes, so he just did not sing them.
Which is the right thing to do. My parents went to see Sinatra when he toured for the last time. All of his arrangements had been redone to be sure that he could hit the notes. I read a lot of criticism of Pavarotti in his last years of performing – he kept trying to hit notes that he couldn’t reach. He got booed in Italy, IIRC.
Five positions in Retroville? I thought it was so small that if you blinked you’d miss it.
Take one of the Windoze jobs if it pays better. You have a wedding to finance, remember…
Here are the geezers when not all of them were even out of high school. Unfortunately, it is not the whole song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uqBTzfcIk4
Renée was attending the NYC performing arts high school and was the girlfriend of Tom Finn, who is the guitar player to the right of the lead singer in the above video (in the geezer video, he is on acoustic guitar and wearing the black-rimmed glasses). Finn claims the song lyrics were written by Tony Sansone, a writing partner of Michael Brown’s, and Brown just came up with the title, and that the lyrics had nothing to do with anybody having a crush on the actual Renée. Brown’s dad was a classical and jazz performer/producer/arranger/manager at an NYC recording studio. Brown gave Finn and Renée the keys to the studio and they hung out there with Michael every night from 10pm to the wee hours, so maybe Brown did have eyes for Finn’s girl, but he never wrote the lyrics, according to Finn.
Brown has claimed that he could not perform his guitar work when the song was recorded, because Renée was in the control room making him nervous at the time, and he had to add that later when she was gone. Finn says multitrack recording did not exist in that day, and the performances had to be done straight through in one take. Only the main vocal track could be redone, as they used 3-track machines (common from the 1950’s to the late 1960’s) and everything was done in stereo on 2 tracks with lead vocal in mono on the third track.
Very interesting interview of Tom Finn from a few years back at
http://www.rockedition.com/interviews/artist-interviews/interview-with-tom-finn-of-the-left-banke/
It’s long, but interesting if you were a Left Banke fan, which I was. The band was composed of vocalists who did not know how to play instruments with any ability. Finn says when they went on the road, the local bands who opened for them, were often much better than they were.
I had already known (from a record PR man at the time the song hit the charts) that the group had broken up before “Walk Away Renée” became a hit (the same as with Tommy James and the Shondells when “Hanky Panky” hit the charts in the same year). (The promo man—as they used to be known—practically promised me that “Walk Away Renée” would be a one-hit wonder.) The group never got along well together, but were still so young as to be forced back together by Brown’s producer dad for their second hit, “Pretty Ballerina”. After that, the group broke away from Brown and his dad (Brown’s father having contributed heavily to the classical arrangements of the Left Banke’s sound), and members fell away one-by-one until the whole group disbanded in 1969. Finn remained the active member, getting re-releases of their catalog and the current band together. Finn says former lead singer Steve Martin Caro is not in a physical condition that he will ever sing again, thus the substitute for him in the geezer video.
The first guy in the comment section attended the Indiana University School of Music, known around here as the Julliard of the Midwest and also sharing the campus as home with the sacred Alfred Kinsey immortal Sex Research Institute, and explains why the Banke’s follow-up hit, “Pretty Ballerina” has such a mesmerizing melody. It uses what he states is a “Lydian Dominant scale”, which he claims no recorded hit song before or after has used.
I’ll let you search YouTube for “Pretty Ballerina” as my 2 free links are used up.
From the YouTube link:
“Unfortunately, this UMG-music-content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.”
GEMA, DOMA, NAFTA, GATT, etc. Banes of our lives.
Work on taxes continues, as does shipping kits.
Is your time valuable enough to pay a CPA to do your taxes for you?
It takes me little time to actually calculate the taxes and fill in forms. What’s time-consuming is getting all the data accumulated and sorted.
Same here; the accumulated data from ten years, with each year significantly different and hunting it all down; the actual calculations and filing was a piece of cake by comparison. And no one but us could actually do that, anyway.
From here on out, though, OFD himself is dealing with the taxes each year. For obvious reasons.
From here on out, though, OFD himself is dealing with the taxes each year. For obvious reasons.
So are you going to stop teasing us and tell us what really happened for the last 10 years?
It takes me little time to actually calculate the taxes and fill in forms. What’s time-consuming is getting all the data accumulated and sorted.
Only if you have TurboTax. To fill out those forms by hand is a total disaster, especially if you have any depreciable items.
“So are you going to stop teasing us and tell us what really happened for the last 10 years?”
In short, another person in our household did not file for ten years, does not like dealing with financial matters (unless it’s spending money on fun stuff), and does not open mail. Why didn’t I know this at the time? Because I was unemployed for much of it myself; it was her houses back then; she had all the financial data on the investments made each year from the insurance settlement when her first husband was killed and all the subsequent financial information regarding the kids, as they moved from school to summer camp stuff to college. I had simply assumed that she was doing them each year and filing them, and not having any interest in those matters myself at the time, I never knew how bad it was.
Until an IRS Gestapo agent came to our back door one day with a court summons.
Now that we have this house and the kids are mostly grown up and gone and OFD is not in some kind of alcoholic haze anymore most of the time, I pay attention to all this shit, belatedly, and accept full blame/responsibility for not doing so during those ten years.
Have we been paying beaucoups dues since the Gestapo got on our case? Oh yeah.
So I’m motivated to make sure it doesn’t happen again and we stay off their radar. And in light of the latest nooz about them checking into our email without a warrant, I’m glad I’m securing our IT environment at home as best as I can.
And the frosting on the cake here is that the very same agent who came to our back door several years ago with that warrant is now being furloughed and out of a job. We don’t have any particular gripe at her; she’s being messed over in yet another phony show put on by Leviathan to make it look like they’re cutting stuff. But if the IRS goes down the drain, you will hear no crying or moaning from Retroville.
Now that we have this house and the kids are mostly grown up and gone and OFD is not in some kind of alcoholic haze anymore most of the time, I pay attention to all this s***, belatedly, and accept full blame/responsibility for not doing so during those ten years.
Ah, sucks to be you for a while there. If you were married during that time, one could claim under-informed spouse but most agents would probably go into ROTFLMAO mode for you. Now if you were a sweet little thing (female), that argument might work.
I assume that y’all had to pay some taxes over those years. If you owed zero taxes then all you lost was your refunds after three years. But if you owed some taxes, oh my! The penalties and interest rapidly eclipse the actual tax amount due.
And finding all your paperwork for the last ten years with a couple of moves thrown in for good luck, how fun! One wonders how your silverfish colony rating scale is progressing.
To cut to the chase: we owed in the neighborhood of in the thirty-k’s. About half of that is paid up now. And other years we might have gotten refunds, ha, ha, we did not. All of this applies as well to our state tax situation up here. We have no complaints about the individual agents, all of them women, who’ve been on our case; they’re just doing their jobs. Much like it could be if they were low-level clerks in the actual Gestapo back when, and signing off on deportation-to-camp orders and death warrants. Maybe we will see that day come here. Just following orders…
And even my paleoconservative mentor/s tell me that as subjects/citizens of Caesar, we gotta pay our taxes.
…”Now if you were a sweet little thing (female)…”
Not hahdly; just the opposite, in fact. A bitter large male.
“…how fun!”
If the choice had been between dealing with all this (here, I’ll do this for you:) s**t and going back on active duty in the Suck or the Sandbox as a frontline EOD guy, E-1, guess what?