Cole (the godson’s) father Ryan is up for the weekend, and he fixed all my computers and we are now watching God Bless America, which I really think may be the greatest movie ever. I’ve watched it four times the past four days and I love it more every time
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Wiesman
Gosh, Cole. Do you really think with all the violence in the world that it is appropriate for you to not use italics or quotes when writing a movie title?
Big R
Shorter Cole: What Korea?
Jebediah
Anybody in the Los Angeles area interested in adopting a lovely dog? A lovely looking large-ish female was rescued from the “creek”/drainage ditch, is in a kill shelter, and apparently has about two days left before being put down. (I rent and am already at my pet limit.) If anyone is interested, maybe a FP’er can give you my email address and I will forward the info and picture.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Just don’t watch the wingnut vehicle “Last Ounce Of Courage.” Jeezus, what a piece of shit. It’s about the “War on Christmas,” and O’Reilly has a cameo.
MaryJane
@Jebediah: With such little time left, I think you should email Anne Laurie immediately with details of the dog, approximate location in the L.A. area and a pic if possible. That way she can post a Pet Bleg tomorrow without a back & forth. Click on her name at upper right under Contact.
Good luck to you and the pup.
clayton
My pup’s mast cell tumor showed up again in the same place it was before — her jaw.
When it showed originally, I opted for chemo — not radiation and cutting half of her lower jaw off.
She didn’t tolerate the chemo well, but the tumor didn’t get any bigger. Then a couple of years ago, she needed a tooth pulled (upper) and the vet asked if I wanted him to cut out as much of the tumor as he could. I said yes of course.
I guess now that it is back I have to face that choice no one does: when.
khead
@clayton:
That choice blows. Sorry to hear it.
Jebediah
@MaryJane:
Done. I hope something works out…
Jebediah
@clayton:
So sorry to hear that.
Cacti
As “Good Friday” winds down here in the western half of the country, I just wanted to say, even at most devout, I always found this a very strange name for the occasion.
Jesus didn’t sound like he had a very good day at all.
clayton
@khead: She’s a very happy, mostly stoic girl,so that makes it harder.
@Jebediah: I do too. Believe me.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Really strange play in the Northeast Regional today. New Hampshire up 3-2 early in the third period. Denver’s Nick Shore just absolutely drilled Kevin Goumas with an elbow to the head behind the play, laying him out. Play continued with Denver controlling the puck so there was clearly no call being made. At the next whistle the refs went to the replay booth and came out assessing a 5-minute major and game misconduct to Shore for contact to the head. It was the right call, but the NCAA rulebook explicitly prohibits using replay to assess a penalty. Not that this is the first time it’s been clear that NCAA replay officials don’t know their own rule book.
Crappy day for the WCHA. Minnesota loses. Wisconsin loses. Denver loses. The only conference team to win was the evil green scum from North Dakota.
RaflW
Dr. Ben Carson has now declared that he loves gay people.
Heck, he’d even pretty much civil union them. “I believe that gay people and straight people and any people, any two adults, have the right to freely associate themselves and to form a legal bond which gives them the right to property, visitation rights, and the other things that they’re seeking.”
Just don’t call it marriage! These cons, they really just tie themselves up in knots, particularly after they find out that NAMBLAing just flat out doesn’t work any more.
But here’s the deal, Ben. The “other things” that we’re seeking are for you to STFU about how precious and special your marriage is, and how we can’t have one. That just isn’t selling any more. It sounds bigoted…because it is. It has no rational basis in public policy.
Sure, your church can keep the gays out…if that’s your church’s gig. But for civil frinking marriage, STFU. Now.
Jebediah
@RaflW:
And if you don’t care about being tax-exempt.
Or am I being optimistic – but I though discrimination meant “you pay taxes.”
MikeJ
@Jebediah: I know the IRS has gone after colleges for racial discrimination, but have they ever gone after a church? I doubt it, and doubt they ever will. If they won’t go after a white supremacist church, they won;t go after an anti-gay church.
Yutsano
@MikeJ: Not for that reason. A church is allowed to exclude its membership in any way it sees fit. Hell at this point churches are defying the no politics rule and the IRS isn’t doing squat because WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING PEOPLE TO DO IT.
Keith
SimCity keeps calling me, but damn if the casinos aren’t frustrating as hell. I drop one, and it makes good money, but my second one has zero patrons. So I make the streets from the ferry dock to the casino larger, and then my profitable casino now loses all its patrons.
Suffern ACE
Today is national pencil day. Not that anyone will notice because of the war on pencils bloggers have been waging since the 90s.
David Koch
@efgoldman:
Don Young just hired this guy to be his spokesperson.
Jebediah
@Yutsano:
@efgoldman:
Well goddamn, I’m not getting my way with anything!
Poo.
Yutsano
@efgoldman: 8:1. Every dollar spent on the IRS generates 8 dollars of revenue. I can only imagine it’s higher in my office since I do collections, and WE ARE JUST BARELY DOING THAT. Like others have said here, this is no way to run a superpower.
burnspbesq
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
The WCHA’s glory days are gone. The future belongs to the ECAC.
SatanicPanic
@Big R: The silence is DEAFENING
Roger Moore
@Suffern ACE:
Not just bloggers. I remember the Mass Spec Lab Pogrom of ’98. We went through the room breaking all the pencils into pieces so that nobody would use them to write in a lab notebook ever again. And it worked! They haven’t dared to show up in my lab ever since.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@burnspbesq: Fourteen straight WCHA national titles says otherwise. Shit, ECAC teams can’t even make the final.
Oh, you mean the men. Yeah, well that’s easy to say now that the WCHA is going to include Alabama-Huntsville, Alaska-Fairbanks and Northern Michigan instead of Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota.
PIGL
I am here to say that our Proprietor is 100% correct. God Bless America is the best movie ever.
Anne Laurie
@Jebediah: Just sent you an email. There’s a post scheduled to hit the front page tomorrow around 8am, LA time, when more people will see it at the top of their reader. (If FYWP fails, I’ll hand-post it later in the day.)
I’ve got the shelter contact as West LA Shelter, 11361 West Pico Blvd, phone #(888) 4LA-PET1 or (888) 452- 7381. If that’s not correct, let me know & I’ll fix the post.
PIGL
@Roger Moore: you’re a mass spec geek? PbUr, ArK, or that wussy stable isotope stuff?
PIGL
@Roger Moore: ou’re a mass spec geek? PbUr, ArK, or that feeble stable isotope stuff?
Anne Laurie
@clayton: So sorry to hear that. It’s never an easy choice, but probably your girl will let you know once her “good times” (eating, pooping, sniffing, sleeping, being with you) no longer balance out her pain & unhappiness.
The hardest part, for me, is being honest about what my companion is actually feeling, rather than what I want or how much I fear not having her around…
Anne Laurie
@Cacti:
Old Catholic school joke, reputed to go back to the Middle Ages: Any day off school / work is a good day, for believers if not Himself!
Mark B.
The relationship between the middle-aged guy and the teen aged girl in that movie made me uncomfortable. Oddly enough, a whole lot more uncomfortable than all of the murders, which were mostly done for comedic effect. I don’t know if that’s more of a comment on the movie or my own mental state.
PsiFighter37
I’m at a Second City show getting lot and loving it. I think Chicago may be overtaking SF as my favorite US non-NYC city.
PF37 +5 (3 glasses of wine at Alinea + 2 beers)
MikeJ
@Suffern ACE: Fuck pencils. I can’t stand that scritchy scritchy scritchy sound they make. I’d like to stab anybody who uses one in the eye with a wood encased pellet of graphite.
If you can’t do the NYT xword in pen then just go the fuck back to TV guide.
Spaghetti Lee
@MikeJ:
Man, people get mad about everything around here!
Roger Moore
@PIGL:
Mostly none of the above. Our primary function is as a core lab in a biological research environment, so we do a lot of non-label based proteomics, some structural characterization (including confirming the sequence of synthetic peptides), and only a bit of stable isotope based quantitation. We’re not even licensed to do anything with radioisotopes.
MikeJ
BTW, if you like Jack Nicholson and Frank Zappa, a great movie is coming on at midnight thirty. Head. I love this movie.
But the porpoise is laughing, goodbye, goodbye,
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
I have to go get ice cream now instead of waiting. I was psyched about this John Doe movie on now, but Head is incredible.
amk
@Anne Laurie:
or if the fat fucker
singsgets drunk. No, not tunch.amk
@MikeJ: NASA spent thousands to invent a new pen that would write under zero gravity in space. Frigging russians used a pencil. Eat that.
BethanyAnne
I meant to watch God Bless America when it hit the theaters, but forgot. Caught it after the posting the other night on Netflix. I think my favorite part was Roxy’s riff on Alice Cooper.
Villago Delenda Est
Totally OT, but this is an open thread:
Rachel Maddow is reporting that Dick Morris is going to help the RNC with its Latino outreach program.
FSM really does love us, doesn’t she?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@amk: Myth. Among other issues, pencils are flammable, so NASA wanted to eliminate them after Apollo 1.
SiubhanDuinne
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
So what were the expensive American pens supposed to write on? Paper is flammable too.
HeartlandLiberal
John, you should then try “Darwin Awards”, with Joe Fiennes and Wynonna Ryder. We laughed our heads off from start to finish. Also on Netflix.
Suffern ACE
@Spaghetti Lee: yeah. I associate pencils with children learning to write and engineers making rough drafts. I never pegged MikeJ to be a guy who hates children before.
amk
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Really ? More flammable than tons of rocket fuel the astros were sitting on top of?
Myth or not, that was a good anecdote.
Also. Too. 47.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@SiubhanDuinne: NASA didn’t develop the pens, nor did it pay to develop them, and it paid a substantial bulk discount for them. So did the Russians, who have been buying them from Fisher since 1968. The Soviets used mostly grease pencils before that.
Some of the other issues that NASA didn’t like about pencils are that graphite is an electrical conductor and the dangers of graphite dust, broken tips, and wood shavings floating around in the capsule. It didn’t stop them from using pencils throughout Mercury and Gemini, especially after a purchase of mechanical pencils turned into NASA’s $500 hammer.
The pens had been tested and approved for use in 1965 but weren’t purchased until 1967, after Apollo 1. Lots of reasons to switch; the fire provided the final push.
@amk: Yep. The rocket fuel is only a danger for a few minutes. Flammables in the 100% oxygen environment of the capsule were an issue for days.
amk
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: If it is true, that was some bs reasoning by nasa. How was a pencil more ‘flammable’ than other materials inside a rocket ?
Suffern ACE
@amk: I’m wondering under what conditions and concentrations graphite dust needs to be to create a hazard. If one filled a space with clay and graphite dust, does it go poof with a spark like flour does? We need some exploding pencil tests.
Joy in FL
@clayton: I’m so sorry.
Just Some Fuckhead
@efgoldman: Fuck that noise. I wanna jewmarry.
DaddyJ
Just finished watching GBA. I thought the rants were amusing and the two leads are great, but I couldn’t find humor in the killings. Except for the cosmic justice of the God Hates Fags preacher getting tossed over the cliff into “God’s country.”
Yes, I know the violence is supposed to be ironic. What is “ruder” than shooting someone in the head? But…not funny.
I watched it because I’m fascinated by the challenge of presenting an anti-violence message in an inherently violence-glamorizing medium. Ironically, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven came closer than any attempt I’ve ever seen.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@amk: Actually, I was objecting to a myth that I strongly associate with right-wing chain emails, but if we really want to get into this…
They were getting rid of the other flammable material, too. Anything and everything they could find an alternative for, they replaced. (I’m guessing, at this point, that you’re not familiar with the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three astronauts?)
If you’re an engineer tasked with redesigning the space program from the ground up, and the one question the money men keep asking you is “Can you guarantee there will not be another fire?”, and they’re willing to pay whatever it takes for you to answer “Yes”, you’re going to have a good answer for why you’re not doing something about any possibility that crosses your mind.
Honestly? The engineers and doctors had been concerned about airborne fragments of graphite and wood getting into eyes and switches and spacesuit joints for a while. (Some of the other concerns I mentioned earlier.) This was the early 60s, and we still didn’t have a good understanding of all the ways that things work differently in space, and especially we didn’t always think through how what would be a minor problem here could turn into a major crisis there. They had tried to mitigate it some by using mechanical pencils, but when the price tag for them came out, the uproar killed that idea.
Fisher developed the pen on an inspiration of their CEO and offered it to NASA over a year before Apollo 1.
After the flash fire in Apollo 1, there was a massive redesign of the capsule to eliminate anything and everything that might cause a repeat. Which, eventually, contributed to the survival of the Apollo 13 crew, since that included an overhaul of the electrical system and considerable improvement in the electrical insulation.
Apollo 1 was an electrical fire made disastrous by flammable materials and the oxygen concentration in the capsule. Graphite pencils create graphite powder during use and sharpening, which in the weightlessness of space stays airborne. Graphite conducts electricity. The airborne powder could get into places where it could contribute to a short. (Remember, 1960 tech level. Our modern sealants and gasket materials hadn’t been developed yet.) And since Fisher offered NASA the pressurized pens at IIRC around $2.50 each, it was a comparatively cheap fix for a low probability problem.