I'd practice saying "They were such a nice, quiet family. They kept their yard neat, brought in their garbage cans in a timely manner. It's hard to believe they were cannibals" just in case
C is in fact the *only* correct answer to the poll, because it is a category that includes all four of the other answers (except for the baldness, of course).
I have to tell this story because my wife won't, at least not online and I have to preface it with the note that my last name (and yes, she took it) is Ashkenaz. Now moving on. Maybe 10 years ago she was in San Antonio helping out her parents and she ended up going to the local emergency room for what ended up being dehydration. The admitting clerk asked her about her last name and she said "it's Hebrew." The clerk sat there a moment and then said "oh. I eat your hot dogs."
The link offered above to Dylan's "My Back Pages" did not work from my location. Just in case anyone else has similar troubles, here is another alternative:
Q: My insight to cluster munitions is based on Special Force fighting tactics. Our forces tend to be involved in more countries than others, with more probing SF and CIA incursions. A tactic for small squads is to set up defensive boobytraps at perimeters with CM. Then pick them up when they break camp. Or don’t, if they are being pursued and need a (deadly) diversion. These actions aren’t pretty. But it’s a tactic that makes our SF more successful and risks their lives less.
A: Say what?
I think if you consider the APFAK involved in the attack, factor in the GF, and consider the strategic value of a strong GPN, you will soon realize the absolute futility of your comment. After all, a LTVAC analysis rapidly shows how utterly futile it all is.
I chose E strictly because of the lawn signs. I could deal with everything else (even the oil exec and NRA lobbyist WITHOUT the lawn signs) perhaps because I live a single family home in the suburbs. I'm pretty sure I would feel different about a couple of them if I was in a townhouse.
As I said in my comment in my neighborhood the lawn sign wouldn’t be allowed. A neighbor of ours way back was a vice president of I think an oil company and her husband ended up as a house husband when he tried to start a house construction company just when the housing market crashed. They were good neighbors. No MAGAs back then though and we didn’t talk politics.
Enough of this price conscious division of townhouses. They are single family homes that just happen to be close to other single family houses. And are energy efficient without the air gaps that we see when the houses are three feet apart. Not much difference, otherwise.
We moved to our current home in a hurry to avoid paying for another month of storage. Our neighbor Queenie would make sure we couldn't park in our driveway or near our house. Oh so funny to watch us schlep boxes and furniture from down the street.
It really hit the fan the first Thanksgiving when the hounded us all day with authority figures demanding we: 1) stop grilling, 2) get rid of our car, 3) Move out car from our driveway so Queenie's family could use our driveway (they had been their longer than us and had apparently called eternal dibs on our driveway), 4) not have so many cars. After the second firetruck call, she was warned by the fire department that making a false call was a serious crime and it endangered others. After the second police call, they were warned that they had no right to walk on our property and that we were within out rights to call the police on them if they continued to do so.
She got a friend in trouble at work for harassing us (she worked for an environmental agency but had no authority to demand we get rid of our truck (she was a clerical employee and when we rem=ported her, she got in trouble with her boss for pretending to be an inspector).
After a few years of them tossing trash in our yard and reporting it to the city and tossing and smearing food onto our cars, they finally got scared (I claimed we had cameras all over the property - we didn't but telling them we did was enough to have them worried) and sold their house.
For the Dylan concert can someone please list the musicians? I can prob figure out who is who with just the names, but I"m not great with matching faces to names that aren't in front of me. I'm sure I recognize some already--John Mellencamp, Tom Petty. I wasn't aware of the entire concert. Maybe it's on video somewhere. It sounds awesome.
It's Dylan's 30th anniversary concert. Available on PBS streaming (with Passport membership) and YouTube and Prime Video for a fee. Segments available on YouTube for free. Musicians were: John Cougar Mellencamp, Kris Kristofferson (who was also MC), Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed, Eddie Vedder & Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Tracy Chapman, Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash, Willie Nelson, Johnny Winter, Ron Wood, Richie Havens, Neil Young, Chrissie Hynde, Eric Clapton, The Band, George Harrison, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Roger McGuinn. Supported by Booker T and the MGs.
It took a while, but I see that our tireless (and underpaid) copy editors finally got both of the indefinite articles correctly placed in "a butt tuba" as well as in "only one can be a 'toot'."
Let's see if I can work "paradigm shift" and "existential threat" into one thought. As most of my fellow wordies here (like "foodies," but less filling) know by now, Hollywood actors and actor-like persons have now joined the screenwriters on strike. Part of the concern behind this is what is perceived as an existential threat from the rapidly accelerating sophistication of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) systems. And while it's unlikely that the paradigm will dramatically shift in the near term (like tomorrow), the advances in AI raise some fundamental questions about the creative process and the continuing roles of human beings in it. For example, is it necessary to have living breathing writers hanging around all the time ? How about just their creative product that gets reworked as needed with appropriate compensation of course. And why worry about the care and feeding of actors (and their egos, in more than a few cases), when you can license their digitized beings ? Exactly how important to the creative calculus is the collaboration or interaction function, or is it one of those many things which, on first thought, seems to make unimpeachable sense (or make us feel better about ourselves) but, in practice, too often gets in the way of producing a worthy final product and --- in a reasonable amount of time ? A great many of us have already shown our preference for screens over people. And from personal experience, one would not be wrong in thinking that meetings are what Hollywood best produces. So the advent of AI could certainly reduce the outlay for bagels and pastrami sandwiches, to say nothing of in-house Crêpes Suzette stations. But, in the next chapter now being rapidly written, it well may be that studio executives and their decision-making will be the first to be replaced, not the creatives.
At one point, my old neighbors had six kids under fifteen (they have eight now.) Home schooled for the most part. Great neighbors. Much as I like to think my family was. We became six, thirteen and under when I was born. Not home schooled, though. Nuns.
A couple of years after we moved here, a "patchwork" family moved in just a few houses away. Think "Brady Bunch": some were "his", some were "hers", and only the youngest were "theirs" (the final total was eight or nine). Both parents were unemployed, and we suspect that they were being monitored (and probably subsidized) by the state's child welfare office, which may be why they went to great lengths not to "bother" anyone in the neighborhood. They've since split up, but we were not surprised at all when we later learned that the two oldest (twin) girls *both* had had children of their own before they turned eighteen. If the parents were too stupid to figure out how contraception works, it's no surprise that they were not able to teach their kids.
We had a group home with 3 mentally disabled women in it plus a finished basement with two grad students in special ed as interns helping the women. I also lived next door to a similar house years ago in Syracuse. Both of these were the best neighbors. Quiet, kept the place immaculate. The home here is now a two family house we believe with teenagers who play their music loud enough for us to hear in spite of all windows and doors closed in both houses and they are one house over from behind us. For awhile the house across the street had several men living there besides the owner’s family with a kid. They were also good neighbors so it all depends on what kind of group home it is. I don’t like MAGAs but if they leave me alone, don’t have loud parties etc I don’t care. Our HOA doesn’t allow signs in the yard except small election candidate signs during election years so that wouldn’t be a proglem.
My answer was C
I'd practice saying "They were such a nice, quiet family. They kept their yard neat, brought in their garbage cans in a timely manner. It's hard to believe they were cannibals" just in case
C is in fact the *only* correct answer to the poll, because it is a category that includes all four of the other answers (except for the baldness, of course).
I have to tell this story because my wife won't, at least not online and I have to preface it with the note that my last name (and yes, she took it) is Ashkenaz. Now moving on. Maybe 10 years ago she was in San Antonio helping out her parents and she ended up going to the local emergency room for what ended up being dehydration. The admitting clerk asked her about her last name and she said "it's Hebrew." The clerk sat there a moment and then said "oh. I eat your hot dogs."
I'm relieved that we've gotten the oblatio-fellatio rhyme out of the way.
That was the idea!
The link offered above to Dylan's "My Back Pages" did not work from my location. Just in case anyone else has similar troubles, here is another alternative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Df39PjkwA
(Please do watch it, the lineup is truly awesome.)
Yes to the "You can call me Al" lyrics...and also "angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity...."
I sent that stanza to Gene, but he declined to use it.
Q: My insight to cluster munitions is based on Special Force fighting tactics. Our forces tend to be involved in more countries than others, with more probing SF and CIA incursions. A tactic for small squads is to set up defensive boobytraps at perimeters with CM. Then pick them up when they break camp. Or don’t, if they are being pursued and need a (deadly) diversion. These actions aren’t pretty. But it’s a tactic that makes our SF more successful and risks their lives less.
A: Say what?
I think if you consider the APFAK involved in the attack, factor in the GF, and consider the strategic value of a strong GPN, you will soon realize the absolute futility of your comment. After all, a LTVAC analysis rapidly shows how utterly futile it all is.
Give me enough air cover (like cargo gun ships) and all the rest does not matter.
I chose E strictly because of the lawn signs. I could deal with everything else (even the oil exec and NRA lobbyist WITHOUT the lawn signs) perhaps because I live a single family home in the suburbs. I'm pretty sure I would feel different about a couple of them if I was in a townhouse.
As I said in my comment in my neighborhood the lawn sign wouldn’t be allowed. A neighbor of ours way back was a vice president of I think an oil company and her husband ended up as a house husband when he tried to start a house construction company just when the housing market crashed. They were good neighbors. No MAGAs back then though and we didn’t talk politics.
Enough of this price conscious division of townhouses. They are single family homes that just happen to be close to other single family houses. And are energy efficient without the air gaps that we see when the houses are three feet apart. Not much difference, otherwise.
Damn! You know about the theft of Jacques Brel lyrics. Brel was a master poet and simply amazing performer who did not deserve to be hi-Jacksed.
We moved to our current home in a hurry to avoid paying for another month of storage. Our neighbor Queenie would make sure we couldn't park in our driveway or near our house. Oh so funny to watch us schlep boxes and furniture from down the street.
It really hit the fan the first Thanksgiving when the hounded us all day with authority figures demanding we: 1) stop grilling, 2) get rid of our car, 3) Move out car from our driveway so Queenie's family could use our driveway (they had been their longer than us and had apparently called eternal dibs on our driveway), 4) not have so many cars. After the second firetruck call, she was warned by the fire department that making a false call was a serious crime and it endangered others. After the second police call, they were warned that they had no right to walk on our property and that we were within out rights to call the police on them if they continued to do so.
She got a friend in trouble at work for harassing us (she worked for an environmental agency but had no authority to demand we get rid of our truck (she was a clerical employee and when we rem=ported her, she got in trouble with her boss for pretending to be an inspector).
After a few years of them tossing trash in our yard and reporting it to the city and tossing and smearing food onto our cars, they finally got scared (I claimed we had cameras all over the property - we didn't but telling them we did was enough to have them worried) and sold their house.
For the Dylan concert can someone please list the musicians? I can prob figure out who is who with just the names, but I"m not great with matching faces to names that aren't in front of me. I'm sure I recognize some already--John Mellencamp, Tom Petty. I wasn't aware of the entire concert. Maybe it's on video somewhere. It sounds awesome.
It's Dylan's 30th anniversary concert. Available on PBS streaming (with Passport membership) and YouTube and Prime Video for a fee. Segments available on YouTube for free. Musicians were: John Cougar Mellencamp, Kris Kristofferson (who was also MC), Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed, Eddie Vedder & Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Tracy Chapman, Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash, Willie Nelson, Johnny Winter, Ron Wood, Richie Havens, Neil Young, Chrissie Hynde, Eric Clapton, The Band, George Harrison, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Roger McGuinn. Supported by Booker T and the MGs.
It took a while, but I see that our tireless (and underpaid) copy editors finally got both of the indefinite articles correctly placed in "a butt tuba" as well as in "only one can be a 'toot'."
Let's see if I can work "paradigm shift" and "existential threat" into one thought. As most of my fellow wordies here (like "foodies," but less filling) know by now, Hollywood actors and actor-like persons have now joined the screenwriters on strike. Part of the concern behind this is what is perceived as an existential threat from the rapidly accelerating sophistication of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) systems. And while it's unlikely that the paradigm will dramatically shift in the near term (like tomorrow), the advances in AI raise some fundamental questions about the creative process and the continuing roles of human beings in it. For example, is it necessary to have living breathing writers hanging around all the time ? How about just their creative product that gets reworked as needed with appropriate compensation of course. And why worry about the care and feeding of actors (and their egos, in more than a few cases), when you can license their digitized beings ? Exactly how important to the creative calculus is the collaboration or interaction function, or is it one of those many things which, on first thought, seems to make unimpeachable sense (or make us feel better about ourselves) but, in practice, too often gets in the way of producing a worthy final product and --- in a reasonable amount of time ? A great many of us have already shown our preference for screens over people. And from personal experience, one would not be wrong in thinking that meetings are what Hollywood best produces. So the advent of AI could certainly reduce the outlay for bagels and pastrami sandwiches, to say nothing of in-house Crêpes Suzette stations. But, in the next chapter now being rapidly written, it well may be that studio executives and their decision-making will be the first to be replaced, not the creatives.
At one point, my old neighbors had six kids under fifteen (they have eight now.) Home schooled for the most part. Great neighbors. Much as I like to think my family was. We became six, thirteen and under when I was born. Not home schooled, though. Nuns.
A couple of years after we moved here, a "patchwork" family moved in just a few houses away. Think "Brady Bunch": some were "his", some were "hers", and only the youngest were "theirs" (the final total was eight or nine). Both parents were unemployed, and we suspect that they were being monitored (and probably subsidized) by the state's child welfare office, which may be why they went to great lengths not to "bother" anyone in the neighborhood. They've since split up, but we were not surprised at all when we later learned that the two oldest (twin) girls *both* had had children of their own before they turned eighteen. If the parents were too stupid to figure out how contraception works, it's no surprise that they were not able to teach their kids.
We had a group home with 3 mentally disabled women in it plus a finished basement with two grad students in special ed as interns helping the women. I also lived next door to a similar house years ago in Syracuse. Both of these were the best neighbors. Quiet, kept the place immaculate. The home here is now a two family house we believe with teenagers who play their music loud enough for us to hear in spite of all windows and doors closed in both houses and they are one house over from behind us. For awhile the house across the street had several men living there besides the owner’s family with a kid. They were also good neighbors so it all depends on what kind of group home it is. I don’t like MAGAs but if they leave me alone, don’t have loud parties etc I don’t care. Our HOA doesn’t allow signs in the yard except small election candidate signs during election years so that wouldn’t be a proglem.
Well, what does he know?
Maybe Lloyd Price should have recorded Shakespeare’s sonnet 130. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWXNu2pVaKc