07:50 – The other day, I was using IMDB to look up a cast member from a British TV series I was considering adding to our queue to see what other series that actress had been in. The name of one of those other series reminded me of a one-hit wonder I hadn’t thought about in more than 40 years. It was back in the summer of 1970, when I was between my junior and senior years in high school. The performer was Freda Payne, and the track was Band of Gold. Technically, I suppose Payne didn’t qualify as a one-hit wonder. IIRC, she had one or two other top-40 tracks after that, but nowadays no one remembers her for anything other than Band of Gold.
Speaking of our queue, I finally got around to signing up for the Acorn TV 30-day free trial the other night. Much of what they offer is already available on Netflix streaming, but by no means all. Acorn carries many series that Netflix doesn’t, and they also have more recent episodes of many of the series that Netflix does carry. For example, Netflix has only series 1 through 13 of Midsomer Murders, while Acorn has the first half of series 14, which we’re watching now. Netflix has only the first three series of George Gently. Acorn is currently running series five. And so on. Acorn charges only $3/month or $30/year, so we may sign up once the free trial expires. But only may.
I just wish Acorn’s business model wasn’t so weird. Acorn definitely doesn’t cater to binge watchers, which we are. With other streaming services, we can pick what we want to watch when we want to watch it. We can start with the first episode of a new-to-us series and watch it straight through until we’ve finished all of the episodes they have available. With Acorn, we can watch only the episodes they choose to make available during a particular month. So, if we decide to watch series 5 of George Gently on Acorn, we’ll have to skip series 4 because it’s not on offer this month. If we decide to wait and watch series 4 first, we have no idea when that’ll be available, and by then series 5 may no longer be available. I think Acorn is afraid that with their limited catalog people will sign up for a couple of months, watch everything they’re interested in watching and then drop their memberships. They may even be right, but I still think they’re making a big mistake. The essence of streaming is to give people what they want to watch when they want to watch it, not to make them wait until you’re ready to let them watch it. We may end up not subscribing to Acorn TV for just this reason. As Barbara said, we have tons of stuff in our Netflix queue. We can wait until Netflix gets new episodes rather than playing Acorn’s game.
12:41 – I just got a welcome email from Acorn Online. When I clicked through to their web page, one of the options was to submit a review. So I submitted the following:
For $30/year, subscribing would be a no-brainer, except…
My wife and I are binge-watchers. When we discover a new-to-us series or rewatch a series, we strongly prefer to start at S1E1 and watch our way straight through until we’ve finished it. We actually sometimes wait years until a series has been canceled before we start watching it. We can’t do that with your service, because your entire catalog is not available at all times.
If we could do that, we wouldn’t have even used the 30-day free trial. We’d have just subscribed for a year. As it is, we’re on the fence about subscribing, simply because it’s a pain in the butt to try to keep track of what we’ve watched and what we have to wait for.
I understand that because your catalog is very small compared to, say, Netflix Instant, you’re probably afraid that people would sign up for a couple or three months, watch what they wanted to watch, and then drop their subscription. I don’t think that would happen often enough to worry about. Thirty bucks a year isn’t worth worrying about; having to keep track of what’s available when and not being able to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it gives us serious pause.
Freda was/is hot. Very hot.
http://grigware.blogspot.com/2011/07/freda-payne-catalina-jazz-club.html
We have a nice snowstorm here in Retroville today; blowing snow and sleet, supposedly to continue through the day and through tonight, maybe a foot or so. This used to be standard in New England pretty much every week or two through the winters. But this storm is only our third or fourth this year. Same deal last year and the year before that.
What is this snow that you speak of? We were 93 F yesterday down here in Land of Sugar. Got my sweat on good working on the old house, getting it ready for sale. Hopefully I will get it listed this weekend. Sold by Sunday would be freaking awesome and is possible since there are not many nice homes for sale.
BTW, I broke down and am getting my AT&T DSL line installed this morning. It is fiber to the neighborhood and then copper to my house from the distribution hut.
BTW, you folks east of the Mississippi are lucky! We folks west of the Mississippi are parched and just about all the rivers have stopped flowing here in the Great State of Texas. We may have to start making water from the Gulf of Mexico using the new salt water filter media from Lockheed Martin:
http://gizmodo.com/5990876/lockheeds-new-carbon-filter-takes-all-the-effort-out-of-desalinization
Yep. One more example of why we need more scientists and engineers and much more support for science and engineering. Politicians create problems; scientists and engineers solve them.
Apropos nothing, politicians, lobbyists, and other busybodies can be converted to biodiesel just as well as turkey guts can be. Just sayin’.
Ladies (yeah, right) and gentlemen, the great Freda Payne! (I’m in love again.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PWIlSoCrQ
Yep. I don’t know what it is about Detroit, but it’s turned out more than its share of beautiful women who can sing. I saw the version you posted the link for. It was between that and the one I eventually chose, both live performances. Anyone who wants to hear the original studio version can watch Freda lip-synching it here, big hair and all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX82yGBhBZU
I remember that summer after hearing the track a hundred times I finally saw what she looked like on a TV show. Wow. The girl not only has a beautiful voice, she’s also a beautiful woman. I’ve seen videos of her performing in her 50’s and 60’s, and she’s still beautiful.
Incidentally, if Band of Gold is the only thing you’ve heard her do, you should listen to some of her other stuff.
Oh, I’ve been a fan of hers for a very long time, also the late Esther Phillips. Motown did not just roll up and die when disco hit the country. Many went on to blues and jazz venues; Chuck in Tiny Town is probably a wealth of info on this whole thing.
In your link everybody has big hair; I remember that whole era very well, having spent a lot of it with the brothers at Uncle’s various plantations. The brothers used to get away with the big hair thing and also facial whiskers; the brass was afraid to stop it or suppress it and have more riots and mutinies. Red-black-and-green armbands, the foot-long stainless-steel Afro-picks, and doin’ the dap endlessly at every opportunity. At one base I was sentenced to there was a group that used to like to do that at the chow hall entrance and thus hold up the line and piss off Chuck, i.e., us white troops. This did not work out well for them one day when me and my little squad came trucking on in, hungry, tired, filthy and me toting my M60. I had a couple of the brothers in my unit so was able to manage the incident without anyone getting hurt or killed and me and my boyz in the house for the grub. The M60 also makes a good club.
Ray may remember some of this fun, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8HMzPOaB10
And from Esther’s album “From a Whisper to a Scream,” this little Gil-Scott Heron tune, of particular poignancy for OFD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvdnMzQGbEQ
And the Euro and Cyprus sit-reps from Archbishop North:
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2013/03/19/sticking-it-to-the-eurocrats-cypriot-parliament-may-vote-no/
“The Parliament of Cyprus has thrown a wrench into the works. It has refused to impose the tax. What’s this? It’s democracy. The real kind.”
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2013/03/19/democracy-in-europe-you-dumb-clucks/
Come to think of it, *I* had big hair. My hair was so curly that when I let it grow it grew straight out instead of hanging down. I had a gigantic red afro, more total hair than Freda has in that link I posted to the studio version. I have a picture of that somewhere, me with my red afro, holding a 1928 Thompson with a drum magazine. It probably would have given Nixon nightmares. If it ever turns up I’ll scan it and post it here.
OK, the feral pigs in the Great State of Texas are getting ready to crowd out us humans:
http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2013/03/scientists-even-with-current-harvest-feral-pig-population-will-double/
They come visit my office property about every six weeks and tear the you know what out of my grass and turf. We had such a mild winter this year that they are breeding like crazy. Maybe this is the real zombie apocalypse that we have been so worried about. When you see 30 of them coming your way, you look for a tree in a hurry, armed or not.
“If it ever turns up I’ll scan it and post it here.”
Oh yeah, do it! I had sort of an Afro for a brief time during the disco 70s after I got back but got rid of it pretty fast when I went to work as a street cop after several years in factories.
Wow, that feral pig thing is worse than I thought! I’d read somewhere about organized hunts from helicopters and suchlike, but sounds like full-bore air strikes are called for down there. Shazzammm!
Nothing better for wild/feral hogs than an A-10 Warthog. The A-10’s 30mm rotary cannon does a pretty good job on the thin top armor of those wild/feral T-72 pigs.
I confess that my first experience with a truly mean pig was a surprise to me. Before that, I’d thought of pigs as Arnold Ziffel type creatures. Then I visited the cabin of a friend of a friend. He had a sign up warning about the guard pig. I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. Pigs can actually be quite territorial and quite vicious in protecting their territory. Believe me, a pissed off 600 or 800 pound pig is no joke. The damned thing rammed visitors’ cars if he didn’t like the look of them. He’d have rammed the visitors, too, no doubt.
Hogs are wicked smaht and they can get wicked huge, too. Don’t fuck with them, unless you can bring da noyz.
So in a A-10, how does one differentiate between humans and hogs at 4 am?
BTW, feral hogs have four tusks up to 4 inches longs. They can and will slice you open.
Yep. One more example of why we need more scientists and engineers and much more support for science and engineering. Politicians create problems; scientists and engineers solve them.
Saw a funny line about software engineers in chapter 14 of Cringleys book, “Accidental Empires” ( http://www.cringely.com/2013/03/18/accidental-empires-chapter-12-on-the-beach/ ):
“First-wave types have trouble, too, accepting the drudgery that comes with being the boss of a high-tech start-up. Richard Leeds worked at Advanced Micro Devices and then Microsoft before starting his own small software company near Seattle. One day a programmer came to report that the toilet was plugged in the men’s room. “Tell the office manager,” Leeds said. “It’s her job to handle things like that.””
“I can’t tell her,” said the programmer, shyly. “She’s a woman.””
“Richard Leeds, CEO, fixed the toilet.”
^chapter 14 of Cringleys book^chapter 12 of Cringleys book.
Another minute, another mistake.
OFD wrote:
“Hogs are wicked smaht and they can get wicked huge, too. Don’t fuck with them, unless you can bring da noyz.”
And don’t get between them and their young either.
Candi Staton has been my long-time favorite. Probably her best song ever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TExaGqmEA2k
Disco, of course, is the ultimate music form, and she contributed mightily:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDm-5asYy4M
She sings only Christian music these days.
Staton has been married 5 times, including to Clarence Carter, who never seemed to click with that ultimate music form, disco, as did his wife.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GYo9QDoRU
Then something more recent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7gMkiOPSeA
[Language warning]
Ray may remember some of this fun, too.
Oh, that did indeed bring back memories. I witnessed some the exact behavior that you described. Then the offenders would complain that people treated them differently. Hell yes we did. They were jerks. The biggest racists around claiming they were being discriminated against.
We had one black guy in basic training that bragged he could do anything better than anyone else. Do it faster, higher, bigger, better it did not matter. One person told him “Bevell, the only thing you can do better than anyone else is hide in a dark corner. As long as you don’t open your eyes or show your teeth”. He got the message.
I remember the afros, the facial hair, the combs that were larger the spare tire jack on a Cadillac.
Dave, I have often pondered how one would spell Revere in a Boston accent? Wa-veer-uh? As in Wa-veer-uh beech.
The facial hair, sometimes to the length of full beards, was allowed by the brass when the individuals claimed to be suffering from pseudofollicitis, (sp?) a condition where facial hair tends to curl and grow back into the skin and cause infections, supported by the medical staffs back then. Not sure if it flies nowadays.
Chuck, on the Boston accent, substitute an “R” for the “W.” As in “Ruh-vee-uh Beech.” But I supposed in thickened everyday speech it could sound like a “W.”
“The biggest racists around claiming they were being discriminated against.”
They’re still around but quieter these days; their bullshit don’t slide down the pipe as easy anymore and more of them realize we’re all in the same boat. The Man sits on all of us. More whitebread racists finally get this, too.
Chuck wrote:
“Disco, of course, is the ultimate music form…”
All Hail Maxine Nightingale! All Hail Tina Charles!
“Come to think of it, *I* had big hair.”
My hair’s always been completely straight, and in 1975, when my hair was at its longest, it was only a couple of inches below the collar. I love long hair on women and don’t mind it on guys, but keeping long hair clean and tidy is just a royal PITA.
I loved the version with Freda in the clinging dress and ?no bra. She sure had a nice figure. The one of her with the huge afro just has to be a wig.
Here’s a couple from the lovely Maxine Nightingale, first with a small afro, second with a larger one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF-qMP1ev1E
Right Back Where We Started From
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChffmcH_S-A
Love Hit Me
“Disco, of course, is the ultimate music form…”
How true. If only Disco had been around in J S Bach’s time.
If only Disco had been around in J S Bach’s time.
It was impossible to get the candles to flicker in time with the music underneath the glass floor. Thus disco was impossible.
We could take all of the musicians and music from the past century and it still would not equal one note of Bach’s.
Yes, when I listen to something like the third Brandenburg or the Concerto for Violin in E Major I’m always surprised that anyone after 1750 ever again even tried to write music.
Ever hear some of his organ works in a large church or cathedral with stone floors? With an organ of several thousand pipes? With bass notes that rise up through the floor and then up through your bones? There are few words to describe it.
No, but I have seen The Who. Bach on organ couldn’t possibly be any louder than that.
Bah. You can get the same effect at a rock concert with the bass turned up too high.
Don’t get me wrong: I really really like Bach, especially the Brandenburgs. But to claim there’s nothing like it is a bit narrow-minded.
(On the other hand, or other other, or wherever I am now, I have no use whatsoever for “Top 500 Songs of All Time!!!!!1!!!” lists which, amazingly, have all of the songs from the past 60 years and half from the past 10 years.) (Well, I have no use whatsoever for Top Songs of All Time lists at all.)
I was not referring to loudness/volume. I have also seen The Who.
“But to claim there’s nothing like it is a bit narrow-minded.”
Well, I am nothing if not narrow-minded on that score, pun intended.
Put me in the narrow-minded camp as well. There has never been and probably will never be a composer that is Bach’s equal, let alone his superior. His body of work is much smaller than that of many composers, but each of his pieces is an absolute gem. The purity of his compositions is almost mathematical. As evidence of his uniqueness, most people who have heard even a few of his works will instantly recognize any of his other works as being his. I’m not familiar with any other composer that even approaches this standard.
“I’m not familiar with any other composer that even approaches this standard.”
Same here, and I’ve been listening to classical music, and Bach in particular, for well over half a century now. I’m way not any kind of mathematician but I have sensed that genre of purity in it throughout, and of course we’ve all read Hofstadter’s book, haven’t we? Besides the mathematics, however, I personally feel that if the existence of God were to be reckoned from mankind’s highest artistic achievements, apart from His Creation, of course, man being part of it anyway, then Kappelmeister Bach would be my evidence. Most here may chuckle, but hearing several of Bach’s organ pieces in a large church with a massive stone foundation in Worcester, MA, many years ago, on an organ with 7,000 pipes, was for me a very genuine religious experience.
That experience has never been repeated since.
The last girl I dated before I met Barbara was a student at Clemson. I used to drive down from Winston-Salem to spend some weekends with her. There was a cruising tradition in Clemson. People would spend hours on Friday or Saturday night cruising in their pickup trucks, drinking beer, with country music blasting out their open windows. So Lee and I used to go out cruising with them, in her Mercedes-Benz, drinking champagne, with Bach blasting out our open windows.
As to the religious aspect, we’ll just have to disagree, as usual. I see Bach’s works as a stunning human achievement by a genius.
“A stunning and yet completely random effect of external forces acting on the robotic organism programmed by his DNA”, surely?
A stunning human achievement, like some others I could name, gifted by You-Know-Who. Which just about all of them knew/know.
I like old-school country music but good on you and Lee for blasting Bach out the windows back then; give the buggers an education. Even Jerry Lee Lewis knows he couldn’t clean the cowflop off Johann’s shoes.
OFD wrote:
“Most here may chuckle, but hearing several of Bach’s organ pieces in a large church with a massive stone foundation in Worcester, MA, many years ago, on an organ with 7,000 pipes, was for me a very genuine religious experience. ”
I wouldn’t go that far, but hearing Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary being played on a decent trumpet or organ is pretty good. But the thing I like most about the physical structure of churches (not the people, who I can usually take or leave), is the stained glass. The old cathedrals of Europe are pretty special in that regard. I’m starting to think of another o/s trip, since I soon will no longer be gainfully employed.
I love the stained glass in churches. They can also kick off religious experiences for people like myself. Of course this is all just really neurons and synapses firing away randomly, probably remaining vestiges of over a hundred LSD trips in my teens.
Yep, it was all predetermined 13.7 billion years ago. Even your multiple LSD trips.
I did a wonderful course in 1987 called The Medieval Church, which really kicked off my interest in this stuff. In 1989 I did another course with the same guy, Dr John Tillotson of ANU, called The Decline of the Middle Ages. England 1300-1485. Then in 1990 when I was planning my first o/s trip I visited him and worked out an itinerary to take in the best of the places mentioned in his courses.
Tillotson said one time when he was touring Europe with his wife, in one monastery he heard a very short snippet from a Gregorian chant. He instantly looked over at his wife, who had also heard it. That also was determined 13.7 billion years ago.
It’s lonesome away from your kindred and all,
By the campfire at night where the wild dingos call,
But there’s nothing more lonesome, morbid and drear,
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer.
Sob.
Now THAT’S great music! Music for the Ages. Can’t be topped. Incomparable. Pathos. Tragedy. Speaks to the psyche of mankind.
Read a good article on PC malware this morning:
https://windowssecrets.com/top-story/the-malware-wars-how-you-can-fight-it/
“When asked the top three ways to deter malware on a PC, Brandt’s suggestions are ones we should all know — and follow — by now.
Stop using Windows XP.
Install and keep updated security software such as the free AVG ( http://www.avg.com/ ) and Malwarebytes ( http://malwarebytes.org/ ).
Most important: Think before clicking any link and whenever Windows unexpectedly asks whether you want to proceed with a change to your PC settings.”
Of course, Bob’s recommendation is to stop using Windows altogether.
That would also be OFD’s recommendation. Especially since M$ got cute with their secure boot stuff on newly issuing PCs and laptops, etc. Straw that broke the camel’s back as far as I’m concerned and their W8 sales suck worse so far than their Vista sales did.
Quite frankly it puzzles me that more people don’t ditch the whole M$ empire and go to a free o.s. and all the apps that do the same stuff as Windows apps, with the exception of niche specialty needs such as Chuck in Tiny Town has and others here. But the average user could load up Ubuntu or whatever now and do all the same stuff he or she was doing already with M$ and at a fraction of the cost and headaches.
Not just average users, either; Big Blue has nearly completely dumped the M$ junk and gone to RHEL and Suse across the board, in the data centers and on the desktops. And they go outta their way to support their employees who wanna put a Linux distro on their work machines.
No conversion to Linux for us, we are a Windows shop. Although all of this cloudy mobile stuff is making me nervous as we do not have a software solution for that market.
I will be upgrading my office pc from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 8 x64 soon. Pray for me.
If I had a business and needed to evaluate Windows 8, as you so obviously do I’d do whatever it takes to hang on to a working Windows 7 machine. If you won’t take my previous suggestion of trying Windows 8 in a virtual machine first, then let me suggest building a new machine for Windows 8 and getting a good KVM switch and going the two machine route.
If Windows 8 turns out to work wonderfully, you can always upgrade the current machine to Windows 8 and give it to someone else in the office.
I have fourteen PCs in my shop. Some are running Windows XP x86, some are running Windows 7 x64. Finding a working PC is not a big problem here. I have two XP PCs upstairs, ready for any emergency.
I’ve had about four customers ask me about Windows 8 so far. I have found that I truly do not understand the problems with an O/S until I am running it daily.
I do have one customer complaining about a problem with Windows 7 x86 which we do not have. However, I am thinking that he has another problem. I may upgrade one of those XP PCs to Windows 7 x86 just to test his problem out.
If you have more PCs than people, then I withdraw my previous comments.
If you have more PCs than people, then I withdraw my previous comments.
Yup, 10 people in the shop and two offsite people that take care of themselves. And I cannot count, we have 15 PCs here at WinSim’s worldwide headquarters. Two are file and print servers, one XP Pro x86 and the other Windows 7 Pro x64.
I do not see how businesses change themselves from Windows to something else. We run ACT! for our contact manager (over 23,000 names with info). We run Peachtree for our accounting software. Our customers demand that we use Excel and Word to communicate with them. The only generic non-Windows products that we use are FireFox and Thunderbird. And of course our software that we sell is for Windows only at this time (used to support 12 platforms in another life).
I will go way out on a limb here and say that there are open-source alternatives to all that sw and increasingly compatible with their Windows counterparts, only a lot less costly for licenses and suchlike, which never seem to end. Also less open to malware exploits and other suchlike hassles. Granted, the transformation would be painful at first but others have made the plunge.
Ding-ding-ding! There’s the Microsoft business model right there.
Most but not all essential office (lower-case “o”) have a perfectly good equivalent for Linux. Hire a data conversion god (someone like me, though probably not me in your case) to move your contacts list over from the one app to the other; it often takes a minor diety to get your data out of their proprietary format and into something else. You did, however, mention a handful of problem children from the Linux-office standpoint: banking software and complete compatibility with MS Office. Libre Office is almost there for Word and Excel docs, but formatting sometimes gets borked on the docs and some fancy features get borked on the spreadsheets. It’s a real pain.
You can ask your customers to send docs in Word97 format; that takes care of most woes. You can also keep one machine running Windows and use that as the interface between your internal machines and the barbaric customers who insist on MS. You can also run real Windows and real MS Office in a VM if the hardware is good enough; that can run into licensing issues, and also kind of defeats the purpose of upgrading to Linux.
I have the same issues with my consulting work, in particular when the corporation was live. I do just as I said: Linux office products where I can, swear and go to a Windows computer when I have to.
(I would run a VM, but my hardware isn’t good enough. I usually go with commodity PCs, figuring they’re a much better bang for the buck than higher-end hardware. I had ordered one better computer, but minutes later one of my sons called to say his computer had died and he needed something right now for school, so I changed the shipping address. When I had the money again, the other son called. -sigh- Tell me again how a stable family is one of the best ways to accumulate wealth? When I was a single parent, I usually had buckets of money, even with paying child support to the worthless bitch. (Yes, even when the kid was mostly with me, I had to pay child support. Funny how the system works.) But now that I’m married again, I’m barely making ends meet.)
But now that I’m married again, I’m barely making ends meet.
Women are incredibly expensive. The old adage, “two can live as cheaply as one” is a lie. Except for my wife, she is way cheaper than me. I have to ask her to go buy new clothing. And her car is 8 years old like mine but only has 70K miles on it. She dreams of driving her car for another 5 to 10 years.
I had ordered one better computer, but minutes later one of my sons called to say his computer had died and he needed something right now for school, so I changed the shipping address. When I had the money again, the other son called.
Kids are more expensive than women. I know this for a fact. They usually do not ask for money until the late fees have all accumulated and the collector is at the door. There is another saying “Avenge yourself, live long enough to be problem for your kids”. And another, “Be nice to your kids, they will pick your nursing home”.
Lynn wrote:
“I will be upgrading my office pc from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 8 x64 soon. Pray for me.”
I never pray for people who willfully announce that they intend to commit a mortal sin.
Lynn wrote:
‘Women are incredibly expensive. The old adage, “two can live as cheaply as one” is a lie. Except for my wife, she is way cheaper than me. I have to ask her to go buy new clothing. And her car is 8 years old like mine but only has 70K miles on it. She dreams of driving her car for another 5 to 10 years.’
I hearby confer upon you the Robert Bruce Thomson award for making up fanciful, totally implausible stories.
I’ve never made up a story. I have no imagination. That’s why I write non-fiction.
The experience of myself and my three brothers over decades is that women are expensive, especially once they have attained official spouse status, and kidz are at least as expensive. They also tend to spend dough on the fun stuff and love to go shopping, daily, if not hourly, either outside somewhere or online. But actual priorities like rent, mortgage, heating oil, electricity, phones, car maintenance, insurance, repairs, etc., etc. are for us to worry about and pay for. And if we somehow can’t pay for it, it’s our fault, because their entertainment and fun stuff clearly takes priority.
The corollary to that, among several, is that if we once in a blue, blue moon splurge on a fun thing for ourselves, all Hell breaks loose and we are like unto Satan Unleashed. Which is why our fun stuff tends to get bought and snuck into the house in secret, as the years go by and we learn how it all works.
You’d never figure that Mrs. OFD and myself together make pretty good dough; we live pay check to pay check and can barely make ends meet ourselves, while being bled white by confiscatory and punishing taxes and endless fees. It took us a year of incredible hassle to get this house and the list of things-to-do here is a mile long but if we get a tenth of it done before I croak it will be a bonafide miracle.
I just wanna live long enough, please God, to see our daughter get married and have kids of her own, and please God, a daughter herself, and please God some more, let me hang on until that daughter is a teenager. I don’t ask for much, but oh boy, do I wanna hang on for THAT.
You’d never figure that Mrs. OFD and myself together make pretty good dough; we live pay check to pay check and can barely make ends meet ourselves, while being bled white by confiscatory and punishing taxes and endless fees.
That is so the truth. I could not believe my eyes when I saw Bill Maher complaining about the tax rates the other day:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/03/21/bill_maher_discovers_his_inner_grover_norquist_117573.html
No government entity should be allowed to take more than 10% of your income. Excuse me, I mean the sum total of governmental taxes should not exceed 10% of your income.
I hearby confer upon you the Robert Bruce Thomson award for making up fanciful, totally implausible stories.
It is so true. She is unlike most any other woman that I have known. Except for my grandmothers who both were scarred by the Depression.
In fact, I have taken over the grocery shopping. Before she had a job, she would shop for us for just the next day. You could walk into the pantry and find space anywhere to set stuff down because there was NO FOOD. Now I bring home stuff that will last us weeks, if not months in case of shortages or emergencies, and I get yelled at for being a hoarder. I’ll see that we need a can of corn and bring home a dozen. If she catches me stashing them in the pantry then I will get the eye and a very quiet “really?”.
One of Jerry Coyne’s fangirls said recently that she only had two pairs of shoes. Yeah Right!
My mum was an arch hoarder, when she had to move out of the family home in 2007 my sister took all the canned food that mum had bought when it was on special at the supermarket. She, and I when I visit, are still working our way through mum’s stash.
I guess I’m a bit like her. I still have bottles of booze I bought 15 years ago when it was on special, and I have about 12 pairs of R.M. Williams boots, some of which are a quarter of a century old.
Between Princess and Mrs. OFD, the lineup of shoes and womens’ clothes would put Imelda to utter shame. Same with my SILs and their daughters. While us males make do with tattered socks, sweaters with holes, and worn-thin jeans. We even re-use t-shirts for rags and hang onto comfy shoes and slippers until they fall to pieces.
Somewhere back in the primeval muck (help me out here, Darwinist dudes) something went seriously awry when the genders were created.
I was at my sister’s place a couple of weeks back for a six day stay, she saw the socks I was wearing (more than old enough to vote) and said if they fell into her hands she’d chuck them. Yes, they had holes, but were in good condition by my standards. She made me buy ten new pairs while I was there.
My mom won’t buy anything unless it’s on sale. If I did the grocery shopping, I’d do a variation on that theme. I’d work off a list, and for the non-sale items, I’d buy the quantity specified. If it’s on sale, and it’s actually a good price and we can store them, then I’d buy three or four.
I have the same problem with Barbara. She’s more willing than most women to stock up, but nowhere near to the extent I’d prefer.
For one thing, she actually kind of believes best-by dates. I’ve told her over and over that they’re ridiculously pessimistic. When a can of corn, for example, has a best-by date two years in the future, I tell her that more realistic date would be 20 years in the future, and that that can of corn should actually still be edible and nutritious 50 years from now. I told her that in the 1970’s I’d eaten C-rations that had been canned in the 1940’s and they were as bad as the day they were made.
Same deal on dry goods. The last time we went to Costco with Paul and Mary, I put a 25-pound bag of sugar in our cart. Barbara’s response was that we already had at least 25 pounds of sugar. Then I added a 20-pound bag of rice. “We already have rice.” Barbara, like most women, just can’t get past the idea of weekly grocery shopping. I can’t make her understand that I want at least a year’s supply of food on hand, both in case of interruptions and because the price of food goes up every week. I’d much rather have food and other tangible goods than the money for them in the bank.
Fortunately, the business gives me a good opportunity for asset conversions. I’d much rather have $1,000 worth of thermometers and $1,500 worth of microscope slides and $700 worth of centrifuge tubes in stock than the money for them sitting there depreciating in the bank.
I have a similar problem; Mrs. OFD thinks any food left in the fridge for more than a day is now rotten and anything on the counters for more than a couple of hours likewise. Also does not look kindly on “hoarding” of food and household items.
But shoes? Have I mentioned shoes?
Like all women, she lacks the Y chromosome, which includes the genes for preparedness and other mindsets that men know are important. That double X has a lot to answer for.
A few years ago I wrote a short essay (basically a long blog post) about male-female differences in rationality. I suggested research into whether the X chromosome causes irrationality in some way. And of course getting a double shot of X means you get a double shot of irrationality. We’d have to devote special study to XXY and XYY people to identify the differences, blah blah blah.
Alas, my little essay didn’t raise as much of a stink as I’d hoped. Probably because I published it on a smallish site with probably 95% male readership, and most or all of them agreed with me.
Or were willing to sit back and watch any fireworks. Never forget that laziness is often the likeliest reason for a lack of response.
OK science whiz-kidz; what do you know about adolescent brain development? Is it true that they’re softer and still developing and thus prone to all sorts of madness like the typical female uber-angst all the time and the males running to join the Marines and kill people?
It sure would explain some things I’ve seen with teenage females up here and down in MA over the years.
OFD, you’re making an unwarranted assumption, namely that adolescents have brains. They have something that looks vaguely like a brain and takes up space like a brain (much as adolescents look vaguely like human beings and take up space like a human being) but demonstrably isn’t a brain, as it does not do what a brain does (much like adolescents don’t do what humans do, like support themselves).
Dave, drama queen behaviour is not limited to adolescent females. My younger niece is approaching 27, still living at home, and could teach Princess a thing or two about tantrums and irrational behaviour.
IIRC, when I was an adolesecent, yes, I went on over a 100 acid trips. And smoked dope and drank booze. However…
…I was also on the track-and-field and soccer and football teams; honor roll repeatedly; AP subjects in the humanities and social “sciences;” and worked a variety of part-time jobs to earn money, such as shoveling snow, mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, working at two local cinemas and a supermarket and a department store. Also helped with the dishes and other household crap around the homestead and mainly, at least to their faces, did what adults told me to do. I managed to graduate the publik skool systems having learned to read and write and do math through plane geometry at least, and be pretty knowledgable about history and geography.
I don’t see much of this nowadays with the kidz. They can work a smarty-pants phone or a tablet or the X-box controls and post shit all over FB and Twitter constantly but they don’t read, can’t write their own language worth shit, and not only don’t know any history or geography but couldn’t possibly care less. Maybe the really bright STEM-track kids are different; I sure hope so.
“…drama queen behaviour is not limited to adolescent females. ”
Oh God yes, how well I know! But it really starts to get going back then and it gets repeatedly enabled in this culture.
Adolescence is a state of mind, not a chronological thing. If someone is well into adult years, still living at home*, and still behaving like a spoiled twelve-year-old, she’s an adolescent.
* Exceptions for physical disability, taking care of aging parents, and so on.
Yeah, the really bright STEM-track kids are different, within the constraints of their raging hormones. Nature equipped H. sapiens to start reproducing at around age 12 to 14, and there’s a very thin layer of societal conditioning doing battle with a couple million years of evolution and instincts. The latter win every time. Left to their own devices, teenagers both male and female would be fucking pretty much constantly. The only difference is that the really bright STEM kids spend their downtime in serious pursuits rather than wasting time on typical teenage activities. Which is not to say that they have no interest at all in those activities, if only because of peer pressure.
That’s why you turned out okay, Dave. You were a really bright STEM kid, even if you didn’t think of yourself that way at the time, and perhaps not now. I never did get into teenage stuff when I was a teenager. No drinking, drugs, etc. I spent most of my time reading (partially fiction but a great deal of science and history) and pursuing my science interests. The rest of the time, I was trying to get laid, which turned out to be surprisingly easy because I had no interest in the cheerleaders and other twits. There were and are a lot of serious-minded girls around.
“The rest of the time, I was trying to get laid…”
Yeah, I remember you saying. You even went to C H U R C H in pursuit of sex.
I guess I managed to do all the drinking and drugging and trying to get laid but also read my ass off, mainly history, and the stuff by Dickens, Kipling, Doyle, Twain, et. al. Also collected stamps and coins and learned a great deal thereby.
But I was also a lazy bastard in skool and only did well in the subjects I liked that were mainly taught by teachers I liked. I did the bare minimum in math and science and Latin at the time, but will be making up for that now in my last decade or two, hopefully. Gotta keep the brain cells working or face what I’ve seen happen with parents and grandparents who just totally lost interest in anything or learning anything. This job certainly helps to do that, I reckon, most days. Tweaking RHEL clusters and troubleshooting and hassling with hardware failures, etc, plus the corporate and work-group politics.
Of course I did. Fucking is the biological Prime Directive.
So when does the biological Prime Directive go away in men? My wife was spending a summer with her grandparents in Noodle, Texas back in her teens. They were in their late 70s. One day she overheard her grandfather complaining to her grandmother about the once per week schedule and wanting to move things up. That was the only time she ever heard her grandmother say NO to her grandfather.
“So when does the biological Prime Directive go away in men?”
Near as I can tell, never.
As far as I know, it never goes away entirely but just tapers off. The real problem is that men are naturally attracted to women who are fertile, which means young women. A woman of 14 is considerably less fertile than she’ll be at age 18 to 28, which is by no coincidence the age range that men find most attractive.
That’s why I’ve often argued that the Big Love scenario makes the most natural sense. A young man should marry an 18-year-old woman. Ten years later, when she’s past her peak fertility, he should marry another 18-year-old woman, and so on. Regardless of his age he should continue marrying 18-year-old women as frequently as he can afford. And there should be a hierarchy, with his first wife being senior and on down the line. That’s actually what happens now, except that instead of staying married to their earlier wives, a lot of guys dump a woman who’s no longer fertile and marry a younger one. That’s perfectly understandable. They’re simply following the biological Prime Directive. Unfortunately, very few women can see this rationally.
And, yes, I do recognize all of the implications of having a lot of men who don’t have a woman. Biologically speaking, that’s what wars are for, to cut down on the number of excess men.
I can tell you from personal experience that Muslims from mideast nations don’t like to be confronted with the fact that their leadership or their culture are too stupid or too cowardly to do the math, compare birth rates, and take necessary steps to adjust sex ratios.
Muslims don’t seem to like a whole lotta stuff and I for one am getting tired of hearing their constant bitches, whines and threats. Fuck them all.
Just sayin.
True, dat.
The way the conversation devolved was, once the proponents of polygyny realized what I was saying (as is my wont, I stated my position much more circuitously than I wrote it above, a shiv between the ribs rather than a boot to the head), the angry assertions of manhood began, accompanied by increasing threats as they egged each other on in the face of my smirks. Another, non-Muslim member of the conversation said something like “Jesus Fucking Christ, are you stupid? This is Steve! He can beat you all and make it look easy.” The other guy had seen me spar a couple times.
The funny thing is, the other guy purportedly was anti-Muslim. If he were actually anti-Muslim, he’d have let the four or so tards attack me and remove themselves from the gene pool, simultaneously demonstrating half of my thesis that they were too stupid to breed.
Today’s job (Friday) was cancelled, and due to the length of the last 2 day’s assignments (both went the legal maximum 7 hours of recording) I am hitting on only 4 or 5 of 8 cylinders. Looong days.
Some book I read decades ago (probably a fiction work) involved assigning sex partners to teens at around 12 or 13. Results, according to the book, were astounding devotion to accomplishment in other areas of life by both kids. Actually, I more than suspect this is/would be true. I spent more unproductive time as a teen imagining sex than it would have taken to actually get it. There just were not that many girls around me in that era ready to give in, as there are today. And I can attest from my own kids, that their grades and performance was much better in college when they had steady relationships with the other sex that I know included satisfying the biological needs. You could graph their academic performance and tell when they had an ongoing partner.
Yep. The other night I was reading Cynthia Harrod-Eagles first title in her historical fiction series, set in mid-15th century Britain. Barbara was surprised when I told her seriously that I was in favor of arranged marriages for girls at 14 and boys at 15. They tend to work out a lot better than self-selection by the parties involved, particularly when they’re under 25 or so.
Modern society and education cause most of the disruption to natural timing. For all of human existence until very recently, boys and girls learned what they needed to know by the time they were 12 or 14 years old. They were considered adults at that age, and expected to carry their weight in society. Nowadays, people have to spend much more time on education, often until they’re 21 or older. So we’ve skewed things to require them to complete all of this extra education before they begin their real jobs: reproducing.
It’d make a lot more sense to do these two things in parallel rather than series. If kids need to be in school until they’re 21 or older, fine. Let them. But let them marry at 14 or 15 and start their own families. Subsidize them with child care so that the young women can continue their educations. Women should become mothers at 14 or 15 and stop having kids by the time they’re 30. That’s how nature designed them. Instead, incredibly, the average age of *marriage* of women in developed countries is now close to 30. In the case of Japan, it’s over 30. That’s simply insane. A woman at 30 has already started to become less fertile. At 35, her fertility is a small fraction of what it was a decade earlier, and at 40 it’s essentially gone compared to women in the 18 to 28 cohort. Birth defects become increasingly common. (And, yes, that’s also true of men; old sperm produces many more birth defects.)
I think a great deal of the problems we have with teenagers is caused by this skewing against nature. Marrying kids off in their mid-teens would just about eliminate juvenile delinquency and other problems we think of as “teenage”. And this is all so recent in historical terms. Well into the 20th century in many areas it was common for girls to marry at 14 or 15, and 18 was often considered an old maid. We need to get back to that.
“…Subsidize them with child care…”
With whose money? And how would it be distributed? Who would do the distribution? How about accountability for it? Who makes all these decisions?
I see all your points and wouldn’t have much trouble with them if we lived in a deindustrialized and depopulated culture but that isn’t gonna happen anytime soon unless there really are apocalyptic upheavals. This society is too invested, on several levels, in the current system of marriage and child-rearing, which has been a disaster. And we’ve subsidized child care for a long time now and it’s also been by and large a disaster.
The parents should do the subsidizing and make the decisions, who else?
Barbara was surprised when I told her seriously that I was in favor of arranged marriages for girls at 14 and boys at 15. They tend to work out a lot better than self-selection by the parties involved, particularly when they’re under 25 or so.
The parents should do the subsidizing and make the decisions, who else?
This is old Jewish culture. The young man’s father would build a new room onto his house for the bride and groom and they would live there for a year before any responsibilities were required of them. Then the young man would help his father out in the family business while the young lady would start having kids and help out with the household.
Not just old Jewish. Old just-about-anybody.
Well, maybe we’ll have that culture back again someday, guys, but not in our lifetime. It will take massive and widespread upheaval/change.
I think our host is pulling our collective legs…at least, I hope so.
Government subsidized child-care for essentially all children?
In any case, there is also the minor question of who would raise these kids. This is kind of important, if you actually expect them to turn into reasonable adults. Child-care is not a substitute for parenting.
The excess of males does indeed tie in to cultural aggression. All those young, testosterone-filled males are looking to prove themselves, in order to get a mate. You’d best provide an outlet (like a good war every few years), or they’ll turn inwards on the society itself. This is hardly a feature of a stable society.
Lastly, I suggest that such societies automatically treat women poorly. There’s a reason Muslim women are oppressed. There’s a reason for the rape-happy Indian society. Women are treated as property. Again, not something one wants to promote…
Who would help raise the kids? The grandparents would. They’d be living under the same roof. The teenage parents would go off to school, then uni and help with the parenting at night. The mum might come home during the day to give the baby a feed. Happened that way for millennia, no need for government subsidies.
When I was 16 there was a 17 year old drop dead gorgeous girl at my church (who also was in my year at high school) who was keen on me. She left school at the end of Year 11 and took a clerical job, I finished Year 12 and went to uni. I’ve looked back and wondered how a relationship could have been feasible. I guess ego wouldn’t have allowed me to marry her at 17-18 and let her support me through three years at uni, so in a sense I don’t regret what couldn’t have been, but Bob’s scenario might have made it possible.
Anyway, I agree with him that it makes sense to have your kids early, while you’re fit and then have the career. And the teenagers parents would still be fairly young and fit too.
I never suggested government subsidies for child care. I was talking about the kind of situation Greg describes, which has been the norm throughout history in nearly all societies. Vestiges of it remain today.
Younger parents are better parents, IMO (except for those parents with limited IQ’s). They are closer to childhood themselves, and have fresh memories of growing up—which my grandmother, who had her firstborn at 17 (quit school at 5th grade), used to tell me about;—they have the energy to keep up with very young kids; and they do not yet have the distraction of property ownership and upkeep, or business or farming worries. I can personally attest that looking after the grandbabies at 50 was much harder for me than dealing with my own kids in my 20’s. Although the grandkids did not require it (my own did), I could change a diaper including cleaning up the bottom in 60 seconds with my own kids, before they began squirming off their backs. Grandkids were much more patient, and good thing because it took me more than 2 minutes to do the job with them. I agree with everything Bob said, including that teenagers who are active sexually, are less inclined to do stupid, destructive things. Same with teenagers who have jobs; they do not have time to go rampaging with ‘the boys’.
I wouldn’t go that far, but hearing Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary being played on a decent trumpet or organ is pretty good.
That was the recessional at my first wedding (a completely, perfectly, and utterly useless ceremony). Only then it was known as Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary. For hundreds of years it was attributed to the wrong person, and even though they figured out how and why it went wrong in 1940 (included a Purcell arrangement in a c.1700 Purcell sheet music compilation), it has only been within the last decade that the mistake has disappeared.
Here’s an awful recording of a good performance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMAAZCdDB3Y
Tempo is what it should be here, instead of plodding-like-oxen, which is how most play it.
Then there is London group Chumbawamba and their stealing of the basic Clarke melody for “Tubthumping” (I Get Knocked Down).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LODkVkpaVQA
Well Chuck, you may not have enjoyed the ceremony but brides think of it as their big day, and seem loath to forgo it.
This is my favourite Trumpet Voluntary that I’ve found in Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhdw2EZWtbA
The best TV I’ve ever heard was on a cassette (The Rage of 1710) that was being discarded by a library in rural South Australia. A friend rescued it and I eventually persuaded him to give it to me. I really wish I hadn’t played it to death.