Here’s a fresh new open thread for you all, after I’ve spent the last three minutes slaving over a hot web interface.
I’ve got a four day weekend. What are you all doing?
This post is in: Open Threads
Here’s a fresh new open thread for you all, after I’ve spent the last three minutes slaving over a hot web interface.
I’ve got a four day weekend. What are you all doing?
Comments are closed.
PurpleGirl
I’m awake now, fully awake. I slept earlier this evening because I was just pooped when I got home from Jury Duty. Just one day and now I’m good for six years. No specific plans for the weekend. We will see how the weekend goes.
ETA: And Sooner, thanks for the new open thread.
Helen
I’ve got a four day weekend too. Closing tomorrow on a new low interest mortgage which will lop $1,000 a month off my payment. YAY me.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Heading up to Humboldt County for a four-day camping trip with 25 other families from my son’s elementary school. Sit by the river, hike in the redwoods, make s’mores by the campfire, etc. There’s also a Saturday night cocktail contest (I neither compete nor judge) that has in past years left most of the adult campers doing their best impression of Jonestown on Sunday morning, and their hordes of hungry children raiding the campsites of the six or so of us who didn’t drink, looking for pancakes and trouble. I can hardly wait.
otmar
Interesting long-term study on youth crime in Germany: http://www1.wdr.de/themen/politik/jugendkriminalitaet100.html
Quote:
cckids
@Helen: Wow! Yay you indeed! We’re packing, getting ready for a move next weekend.
? Martin
Performance evaluations. Work never ends…
max
What are you all doing?
Fixing flash.
You could read the Onion:
max
[‘Those guys are terrible – they’re copying and pasting from the NYT.’]
BillinGlendaleCA
@PurpleGirl: Hmmm, we only get a 2 year reprieve after Jury Duty service.
NotMax
@max
The Onion can never trump reality when it comes to military equipment and expenditures.
It wasn’t long ago the that Pentagon was proudly crowing about finally getting the operational cost of the Osprey to just under $10,000 per flight hour (when they aren’t stacked up like cordwood in repair/maintenance).
Quelle bargain.
? Martin
@BillinGlendaleCA: I think that’s per court. I used to get called every year, alternating from superior to municipal court.
raven
I only get three but my bride gets four. It’s funny how used to being alone in the house you get when you’ve worked from home for over 10 years. I have to decide whether or not to go the local Vietnam Vets Memorial Day Campout. It’s pretty much a three day drunk with the same dudes every year but it’s the only time I get to see some of the guys I really like so I may go.
mdblanche
Watching the results of yesterday’s local elections in the UK come in. The hot new party is the United Kingdom Independence Party which is basically the British Tea Party. They have the same anger at a Conservative Party that’s insufficiently conservative and the same problem with candidates making various racist/sexist/homophobic statements and displaying a general lack of shame. They’re over-performing. They’ve already passed their own seat target with many results still out. And they’re expected to do even better in the EU election results to be released on Sunday.
The grass is not greener on the other side.
TheMightyTrowel
TEACHING HAS FINALLY ENDED. meaning i spent today writing next semester’s syllabus. SIGH. On the other hands, my students won’t hand in their essays for a week so I have a reprieve before marking.
tybee
canoeing on a skinny tidal creek for about 20 miles. out with the tide to the ocean, back with the tide. or at least part of the way. at the tidal node, it’s agin it both ways for a few miles.
the wildlife you can sneak up on is amazing.
raven
@tybee: Hey! I got a pretty nice cobia fishing the liberty ship reef! This is the boat I ended up on. This was shot they day before from a drone they took with them!
tybee
@raven:
i saw the pic of you and the fish. nice lemon. congrats.
they’re tasty, too.
raven
@tybee: I was “surf” fishing on Jekyll and something just bent my rod in half and snapped the line (20lb). I assume it was a ray but don’t really know.
SiubhanDuinne
@mdblanche:
Funny* timing. Never heard of this party before, but quite literally at the very same moment as I was reading your comment, there was a feature on NPR’s Morning Edition about the UK Independence Party.
*Funny-peculiar, not funny-ha ha.
TheMightyTrowel
@SiubhanDuinne: They’re the upper class version of the racist British National Party. Think country club republicans. The BNP are more tea party rabble while UKIP are tea party astroturf funders.
Cermet
Will spend the Holiday and entire week with my daughter who has finished her first year at MIT and will be turning eighteen later this week. After this, I will not see her again until (?) since she will be working for a Professor all summer and was just able to get this time off … then after summer, she starts the fall semester.
Schlemizel
@max: Congress solved one major military problem yesterday. The goopers managed to stick an amendment on to the trillion dollar military appropriation big FORBIDDING the US military from any planning for climate change!
For those wondering how the wingnuts manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their beloved war machine being beyond reproach and said war machine building lots of plans for how to deal with the inevitable outcome of climate change there is your answer – refuse to let the military plan for the future as it will be. “I reject your reality and substitute my own!”
They did try to make nice with the military by forcing them to spend billions of dollars on weapons systems the military does not want. Seems the only time you can disagree with a General or Admiral is when there is a chance to get more money wasted in your home district.
tybee
@raven:
if it “snapped” the line when running on a beach and you had line left on the spool, you had the drag too tight. when the line runs out, the diameter of the spool is reduced and the effective drag is higher.
rays generally don’t “run” much, but they will swim slowly to morocco.
unless it was a big cow nose, those can motivate.
perhaps that great white got close to the beach? :)
p.a.
Off till Wednesday. Waiting for a cab to the train station. My usual gift rides were unavailable, as were the first two cabs I called. Third try worked, I think. The English/sorta English conversation was not reassuring.
raven
@tybee: The only reason I thought it was a ray is because several people walked by and said someone had caught one up the beach. No question the drag was too tight but whatever it was it was good size.
Patricia Kayden
@Schlemizel: You mean the Republicans in the House did this? I can’t see why Harry Reid would go along with something so stupid in the Senate.
tybee
@raven:
they can get pretty big.
largest one i ever saw was about 8′ wide and about 2 feet thick.
was brought to the boat on 80lb test line.
the guy who hooked it had its nose just out the water while we were discussing how we’d get the terminal tackle (6oz weight, leader, hook, etc) back when it decided to depart. 80lb mono sounds like a .22 when it breaks.
OzarkHillbilly
56 yo, never served jury duty. Got called up once in Crawford County…. 2 weeks after I moved to Washington County. Obviously enuf, they excused me.
I got 3 days if I want ’em. I’ll take ’em. Usually we head down to Arkansas for the annual Sherfield Cave wkend. The cave has been closed for years due to Whitenose Syndrome but the wkend happens anyway and some caving is done. Anyway, not this year. The wife has been working 10/6’s for the past month and a half or 2 and a couple weeks ago things got worse for her when her only partner took a Family Medical leave for an indeterminate amount of time. So now she is doing IT security for an international corporation of thousands all by herself. (once upon a time, it took 4 people) So for some reason or other, she just doesn’t want to go anywhere this wkend.
Go figure.
Schlemizel
@raven: I was fishing for panfish with a couple of pre-teen nieces. We were using cane poles for simplicity. One of them was pulling up a nice sized sunny when there was a green streak in the water, the pole bent for a fraction of a second & then broke. It was a musky, I would guess more than 3 feet long a moving at blinding speed. I have no idea how it dealt with the tiny hook but the sunny was gone in one bite.
raven
@tybee: I had one on the line off a pier on the Outer Banks and, yep, even 20lb test snapped loud!
danielx
Three day weekend and race weekend in my fair city. May is no longer a thirty day epic of debauchery, but I have no doubt the vicinity of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will be an area to be avoided. No matter, I have a great deal of painting to do…among other things.
Suffern ACE
@otmar: designing punishments to satisfy public sentiment on criminals isn’t wrong, per se. The goal isn’t to reduce crime. It’s to prevent folks from organizing extra-judicial mobs.
raven
@Schlemizel: Pikes are awesome!
tybee
@Schlemizel:
a group of us were cane pole fishing in a cove off West Point Lake (west georgia), catching good sized red breasts with crickets.
you’d bait the hook, swing it out near the lily pads, and in a few, the bobber would sink.
gently lift up and swing the bream in.
one of the guys had his bobber go down and started to lift the pole with one hand when something took the cane pole away. and i mean out into the lake and submerged it.
eventually it floated back up a hundred feet out but we were on shore and had no way to get to it….
big catfish? world record large mouth? a carp the size of kansas?
Schlemizel
@raven: Never fished for Musky but have for Northern and the hit like a freight train! Only fished in the ocean a couple of times & never caught anything huge but I also never had strikes like that either.
raven
@Schlemizel: We used to get into them while salmon fishing in Muskegon!
raven
@tybee: I was night fishin on Oconee, tied up the to 1-20 bridge. I had a bunch of crappie and cats in basket tied to the side of the boat and the rope frayed and broke. I rigged up a treble hook and dragged it and got my fishes back!
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: And fun. When nothing else is hitting, the pike are always hungry, and hit with a violence all their own.
Schlemizel
@raven: HA – with those same nieces when one didn’t tie the stringer to the boat & let a dozen fish sink to the bottom. I used the same trick & on the 4th try snagged a fish & hoisted the whole lot back to the surface.
Mustang Bobby
Combining a mandatory vacation day with the holiday weekend and I’m off for four days. It’s supposed to be clear and hot down here at the tip of Florida, so I might go to the Keys, I might work on my novel, I might do nothing.
Phylllis
Off to the ATL for the Braves v Red Sox Monday. Outpatient eye surgery for me at MUSC in Charleston on Tuesday. Seven school days left, and the kids are off the chain. Teachers & principals are totally white-knuckling it at this point.
Suffern ACE
Rats as diagnostic tools? Probably less expensive than a lot of our current tests.
Iowa Old Lady
Going to WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention, in Madison. Making Mr IOL go too.
Mustang Bobby
Wow, is Joey Scarborough overreacting to Jay Rockefeller’s “there are people who don’t like Obamacare because Obama is black” contretemps, or what? Touchy, touchy.
JPL
It’s going to be a weekend of fun in the sun. Of course, fun means working in the garden and laying some flagstone.
@Phylllis: Have a great time at the ball game.
PaulW
seeing X-Men tonight with friends. going to a Storm game Saturday night. rest of the time GETTING SOME G-DD-MN WRITING DONE TO FINISH AT LEAST ONE FREAKING NOVEL /headdesk
Mustang Bobby
@PaulW: I hear you on finishing the novel. My characters are standing around glaring at me saying “Get on with it already!”
Xenos
@mdblanche: tell me about it. I live in Luxembourg, where there is now an active anti-EU party. Luxembourg without the EU is nothing. If they want their country back they are going to get it back as a nation of small farms and a ghost town for a financial center.
Iowa Old Lady
@Mustang Bobby: Yeah, a sign Rockefeller got a little too close to the truth.
p.a.
Taxi no-show, phone goes to voicemail Got my 72 yr old cousin out of bed for my ride. The wonders of the poorly/unregulated market.
NotMax
Two disparate stories which caught the eye:
On a totally different note, le troll is now officially tout bien.
Gorgon Zola
Fresh meat for the Greenwald haters. (Or the Kinsley haters, as the case may be).
Most people in my circles think Kinsley is kind of a douche, but I think he’s spot on here.
debbie
@Schlemizel:
Stupid GOP. They’d get a whole lot more points if they moved those billions to the VA.
Phylllis
@JPL: Thanks. We really enjoy the Ted. And hoping Jackie Bradley Jr is in the Sox lineup. Yay Gamecocks!.
Schlemizel
@debbie:
No, they have a better game. They introduced a POS with all sorts of poison pills in it AND increased oversight for VA. When the Dems rightly blocked the monster the goopers ran around crowing about how Dems blocked better oversight. Thats a win-win in that it does nothing to help the VA (which would cost money) and makes the Dems look like the bad guys
Remember gooper supporters are not making much from the VA but from defense they are growing wealthy
debbie
@Schlemizel:
Another instance of backroom handouts over a really good p.r. move. They’re nothing if not short-sighted.
BruceFromOhio
My father’s father passed away yesterday. He was 103, and on a long, slow spiral the last six months, so there were no surprises. He and his now-long-departed wife raised 4 boys in a quiet agricultural backwater of western NY in that ‘golden age’ of post-WWII, and his offspring went on to bring many great works and wonders into the world (including my 9 cousins, splendid people one and all, each performing their own great works).
We will gather this weekend near Tampa, and revel in the majesty of this life. There will be at least one journey to the north end of Anna Maria island, my grandparents loved to walk there and watch the sun set on the Gulf of Mexico. Their memorial is shared by many, and a fitting tribute to lives lived well.