Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

The lights are all blinking red.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Sunday Morning Open Thread: Profound Progress

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Profound Progress

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Back in the sixth grade (so, 1966 or ’67), we had to write an essay about our future and read it out loud to the class. The girl in front of me planned to marry an insurance agent and be a stay-at-home suburban mom with three kids — she even had their names picked out. (In our working-class urban Catholic neighborhood, this was aspirational.)

Since the teacher and I had been undergoing one of our periodic “Your penmanship (with a fountain pen — no ballpoints in parochial school) could be perfectly legible if only you would make the effort“ jousts, I announced that I planned to be a writer. And it would be just fine, because I’d have a robot editor to correct my spelling and read my scrawls.

Mrs. Anderson told my parents they ought to consider counseling, since I didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between probability and fantasy.

Of course, I spent my working life getting paid to use word processors, so I probably came closer to a true prediction than Diane as a stay-at-home mom…
***********

Apart from scienterrific wonderments, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Reader Interactions

217Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    Remember being positively lambasted and called a head in the clouds dreamer for suggesting people would be able to record video at home.

  3. 3.

    Ruckus

    That looks like it was taken by a film crew about 75 miles from here in Pasadena. So I guess technology does have some uses.

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    @satby

    So-so. In preparation for replacing the kitchen sink faucet, cleaned out all the cabinets beneath the sink and counter. The depths of that space are not someplace for the faint of heart to venture. Think I may have found a few things signed by Fred Flintstone.

  11. 11.

    Betty Cracker

    I’m out on the porch having a cup of coffee and listening to a freight train go by (less than a mile away; sound is particularly clear this morning). It’s a long one today.

    I’m waiting for the grocery store to open at 7 am so I can go fetch stuff to make French toast and a potluck dish we’re taking to a Superb Owl party later. Kiddo got wind of the plans for French toast and will show up with ravenous friends, so I’ll need an extra loaf of challah bread.

  12. 12.

    J R in WV

    Good morning all ~~!! Esp rikyrah, ha!

    Going back to bed now after quick glance at GGL news and here. World not over yet, get a good nights sleep. Carry on.

  14. 14.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    President Trump has decided not to participate in a Super Bowl Sunday interview this weekend.

    Sources at NBC affirmed that their interview requests have been turned down.

    Now imagine the firestorm if a Dem canceled a Super Bowl interview with Fox

    The first line of attack would be, if you’re too weak to face [insert Fox clown] then how are going to stand up to North Korea.

    Then they would scream the cancellation is an assault and affront to journalism and the free press. One time an Obama spokesperson said “Fox is the propaganda arm of the RNC” (which is true) and the political media went hysterical with indignation.

    But Drumpf can get away with this cuz IOKIYAR

  19. 19.

    raven

    @Betty Cracker: I prepped a ton of stuff yesterday but I still have to make the “gravy”! The local independent grocery has #10 cans of whole and tomato sauce so I’ll combine them.

  21. 21.

    raven

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: The local news had a thing on about the total clusterfuck the National Championship was because the stadium authorities had to turn security over to the Feds so he could do his fucking photo op durning the natural anthem. I’m glad I made $2k off my tickets because it took THREE fucking hours to get in the stadium and it was rain and 40 degrees.

  22. 22.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @JPL: So are we going to be treated to daily reports of Gowdy showing us “Hey, look at me not obstructing Mueller over here! No obstructing here, nosirree!”

    Meanwhile in entertainment, there’s some kind of sporting event today with ads. In my official position as The Last Person In America To Encounter Memes, I discovered the “Dilly dilly” phrase this weekend and saw the ads featuring it for the first time.

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    @Betty Cracker

    Saw your passing comment about Señor Cracker not being enamored of subtitles. One thing that makes them less bothersome is the option Netflix offers on their website to change the size, the font and the color of subtitles to what works better for you.

    Note that the changes may take up to 24 hours to show up.

  26. 26.

    HinTN

    My cousin says he will do something to prepare a chicken for our Superb Owl Mad Ave viewing. I have the makings of a Cobb Salad to throw together. We get to see an old friend with a syrupy Mississippi drawl who has retired from the teaching of Latin and other languages and another who could do (and probably done) the math that got that beautiful beast safely to Mars. It’s pouring rain here.

    ETA: Go Iggles
    EATA: teaching not trading – damn autocorrect

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    @BillinGlendaleCA

    Heh. Comic Sans, the Rodney Dangerfield of fonts.

    Was quite pleased to discover I could change the subtitles on Netflix to sunny yellow (sans-serif, with no contrasting background color), especially after struggling with default white while watching stuff which included outdoor snow scenes.

  29. 29.

    Wanderer

    @Betty Cracker: French toast sounds wonderful. Coffee on the porch also sounds wonderful. I wish it was warm enough here to do that. Good morning all.

  30. 30.

    bemused

    Just turned on tv & Amtrak/freight train collision in S Carolina. 2 dead & reports 50 to 70 injured.

  31. 31.

    ThresherK

    Jotting a piece for my favorite car site on which parts for your first-gen front-drive Volvo (’96-’00) will fit on your second-gen (’00-’07).

    Best thing I found out so far are the three spare oil filters will not go for naught.

  35. 35.

    gene108

    @bemused:

    Sigh…in normal times there would be some outcry for the Administration to address train safety, as this is the second fatal crash in a week…

    With this bunch, this will get overlooked because of all the other shit going on and the fact, I think, the media has given up trying to hold this bunch accountable for doing the job of basic government and decided, if they can keep us from being gaslighted that is enough.

  36. 36.

    Bostonian

    I remember back when I was in high school I wanted to register for typing class and they told me I couldn’t because I was on college prep track. I asked them what they thought I would be doing in college.

    I got my way. Typing was the only useful class I took in high school. I didn’t know any of the other students, who were all on the vocational track.

    Happy Superb Owl day!

  37. 37.

    ThresherK

    @OzarkHillbilly: Funny, but this is true: An acquaintance of mine told me about a meh-MAY (his actual pronunciation), the concept of it, in 2013, like I was a hermit who had never seen a computer until that day.

    He has no idea. Also, he belongs to about fifty Facebook cult groups with Wilmer’s name in them.

    Is there a connection between these two things?

  38. 38.

    ThresherK

    @gene108: Prediction: Trump’s idea of train safety is to cancel the trains. They don’t belong in RealMerka like SC, and here in the Coastal Elite Corridors we don’t deserve them because RealMerka doesn’t want us to have them.

  42. 42.

    Eric S.

    Just got woken by Ozzie the Cat. It was time for his morning treats. He woke me from a dream that is far too complicated to begin to describe except the minor fact I was getting ready to eat a chili dog. I’m back in bed for a nap but I’ll be making chili today.

  43. 43.

    Lymie

    Puppy class this morning, then take #2 kiddo to brunch.

    Planning on steak fajita/tacos for superb owl. Go Pats.

  48. 48.

    BretH

    After taking Fortran in high school with punch cards I decided that I would never be a programmer.

    Of course I’ve spent the last 20 years working for the same company (acquired twice) doing web programming.

  49. 49.

    Ken

    @Ruckus: The studio is actually in Arizona. They’ve repurposed the one Kubrik had built for the Apollo FX by painting all the rocks red.

  50. 50.

    SiubhanDuinne

    The woman on NPR is talking about Jerry Nadler, but she keeps pronouncing his name to rhyme with “toddler.”

  51. 51.

    chopper

    i guess technically i get paid to write. boring pseudo-legal technical junk but it’s what i do.

  52. 52.

    Lapassionara

    Good morning, everyone.

    We saw “The Post” yesterday. I lived through this as a grown up, but had forgotten a lot of the story. The movie is really about Katherine Graham, and who knows if that part tracked reality. But I could not help but wonder what our current Supreme Court would have done with the First Amendment issue.

  54. 54.

    Eric S.

    @Bostonian: My mother convinced me to take a typing class in high school. I believe kids these days call it keyboarding. I was a bit reluctant but saw her point. One of the better decisions “I’ve made.” 20+ years as a computer programmer and I can’t imagine not having that basic skill set.

  55. 55.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Lapassionara: Saw it last weekend, and later in the weekend listened to Fresh Air interviews with Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee. Her personal growth and what went into the decision, as shown in the film, track pretty closely with what she reports in her own memoirs.

  58. 58.

    PAM Dirac

    My wife is going to do a fancy mac and cheese, I’m going to do a roasted vegetable medley, and maybe another dish or two that strikes our fancy. Add a few friends and a bottle of Gruner Vetliner from Black Ankle Vineyards and we’ll be set for Puppy Bowl watching.

  61. 61.

    mai naem mobile

    I watched a little of Fox and Friends. I turned off when they said KellyAnne was coming on. Anyhow, these people are so fucking shameless. How the fuck can their viewers be so stupid? You have to have no reasoning and logic skills to figure out theyre telling you contradictory stuff.

  62. 62.

    bemused

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Not necessarily. I had forgotten that canned vegetables and fruit were commonly referred to by the number assigned to amount inside the can, can dimensions. Condensed soup cans were #2 cans, #10 was the equivalent of 5-1/3 or so cans of soup.

    I was just looking through some old cookbooks from 50’s to 80’s from a relative before I toss them and #2 cans of this or that were mentioned in the 50’s recipes from cooperative recipe books. Those old recipes consisted of a ton of casserole (hotdish in the midwest) recipes heavy on condensed soups, Carnation evaporated milk and Velveeta type cheese. Ugh. Only a few of the dessert recipes held some interest for me.

    A liver loaf recipe made me gag: Ground liver (may be parboiled to make grinding easier), rice porridge, egg, onion, raisins, syrup, salt & butter mixed well, put into mold and baked.

    Beef tongue didn’t sound a bit more appetizing: Wash beef tongue and put in hot water to cover with onion , parsley, bay leaf, salt peppercorns or cloves. Cook slowly until tender 2-1/2 to 3 hours. Skin tongue and slice.

  63. 63.

    Shrillhouse

    My 9 year old beat me to the PlayStation this AM, so I crawled back into bed with a cup of coffee. A snow-filled driveway awaits my shovel…

  65. 65.

    debbie

    No one seems much impressed with that video up top, but I love what the rovers have done! I wish we’d focus less on manned spaceflight and more on these little guys who have discovered exponentially more than humans have been able to.

  66. 66.

    dmsilev

    @Ruckus:

    That looks like it was taken by a film crew about 75 miles from here in Pasadena

    Closer in than that, in a way. JPL, where the rover was built, is only a few miles from the Pasadena city line.

  67. 67.

    danielx

    First night in three weeks (at least) when I got more than two uninterrupted hours of sleep, and oh what a difference it makes. Fresh coffee, kittehs are all racked out in various locations, chili makings are all purchased, stack of firewood on back porch, and it’s sleeting outside. Excellent day to stay home and do nothing at all, or at least as little as possible other than eating and drinking.

  68. 68.

    Lapassionara

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Thanks. Good to know.

    @bemused: I had beef tongue in a family style Basque restaurant in Nevada, years ago. Did not know what it was until,after I ate it, and it was really good. The liver loaf, though, sounds dreadful.

  69. 69.

    danielx

    @bemused:

    Was planning on making a seriously nommy breakfast, but after reading those recipes my appetite seems to have gone walkabout.

  73. 73.

    Matt McIrvin

    When I was in the third grade I told my dad not to be disappointed, because I wanted to be a physicist instead of “following in his footsteps” as a computer programmer. Someone had told me that every father wants his kid to do the same job he does.

    Dad told me I was misinformed and he’d be perfectly happy if I followed my dream.

    Well, I followed my dream, trained as a particle physicist, particle physics in the US largely died, and I followed in his footsteps as a computer programmer.

  74. 74.

    debbie

    @bemused:

    I remember one casserole: You take an ovenproof bowl and add uncooked rice and uncooked chicken. You pour over this a can each of Campbell’s cream of chicken, cream of celery, and cream of mushroom soups. Bake at 350 degrees for I don’t remember how long, and voila! dinner.

  75. 75.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Ha! I used to know can sizes because that’s how most of my grandmother’s recipes were written. I’ve forgotten them now, but I do know not to put too many in a plastic bag.

  77. 77.

    lowtechcyclist

    Being the same age as CPP, give or take a year, I also have those moments of “hey wait, I remember when this stuff we take for granted now was the stuff of SF novels.”

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    In my official position as The Last Person In America To Encounter Memes, I discovered the “Dilly dilly” phrase this weekend and saw the ads featuring it for the first time.

    Sorry, but you’ll have to settle for penultimate at best. “Dilly dilly – huh??” went my brain when I read your comment.

    ETA: a moment of Googling gets me “Bud Light bets on ‘dilly dilly’ to stem sliding sales.” Maybe for a week or two, if they’re lucky. Life’s long, but it’s still too short to drink crap beer.

  79. 79.

    MomSense

    @debbie:

    I think it’s amazing! I’m going to send it around to kids and parents. My mom’s beau has a flat earther kid so she will enjoy trolling him with this.

    Superb Owl dinner tonight is roasted red pepper risotto, wilted spinach, and pan seared swordfish with lemon and whatever herb looks fresh at the market butter.

  80. 80.

    oldgold

    Last week we were discussing pencils. Today it is ballpoints and word processors.

    Marshall McLuhan credibly claimed the medium is the message.

    I wonder if the tools we use to write with substantively impacts the message.

  81. 81.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @bemused: My mother made tongue once and it was tough as all get out. She never tried it again but I wouldn’t mind trying it again, this time done by somebody who knew what they were doing. My mother was a very good cook who was never afraid to try something new but she failed with that tongue.

  83. 83.

    Immanentize

    @debbie: @bemused:
    Casseroles — Do not mock a good soup casserole!!
    The best recipe I know for one is called King Ranch Chicken. Now the actual King Ranch spreads across about a third of Both Texas…. It is tortillas on the bottom, onion’s, Rotel, boneless chicken, cheese spices and yes, a can of creme of chicken soup. Fabulous Tex Mex party casserole.

  85. 85.

    Matt McIrvin

    @debbie: Me too, but I also wish NASA would be a little less obsessed with Mars (which they love, I think because they have an idea that Mars exploration is a vague precursor to landing astronauts) and do more in the outer solar system.

    Specifically, I want a new mission to Uranus or Neptune! The only mission ever to either one was a brief flyby by Voyager 2, and exoplanet discoveries reveal that there are a lot of planets like them out there in the universe. Also more in the Kuiper Belt. All previous experience suggests that exploration of under-explored places like these will reveal countless wonders. If they get started now these things might not get there until after I’m dead, but it’s worth doing.

  86. 86.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly: my son’s robotics team coach went to college with a guy who works at JPL, so the team got to visit there and meet the Rover team, who are a bunch of high tech, fun loving folks. Serious about their work, but also light and interesting otherwise in no way snooty, loved pranks, etc. It really seemed like what we ought to aspire to. The friend of the coach is the guy who got to direct the crash of Cassini. So cool!

  87. 87.

    MomSense

    @Immanentize:

    I’m terrified of casseroles after discovering canned water chestnuts in some kind of cream of chicken or mushroom based casserole. We are it the first time to be polite which caused her to think we loved it and put it on steady rotation.

    Every time I see a casserole I’m worried I’ll bite into a canned water chestnut.

    Did I mention those water chestnuts make my mouth feel hairy?

  89. 89.

    bemused

    @Lapassionara:

    The liver loaf recipe was Scandinavian and probably came with the immigrants. They made use of every part of an animal. I was born in the 50’s and never heard of such a thing as liver loaf. I know my mother never made it. She would make liver and onions, she and dad liked it, but my brother and I wouldn’t touch it. I’ve never, ever tasted lutefisk either and never plan to. Not blood sausage either.

  90. 90.

    Immanentize

    @MomSense:

    Every time I see a casserole I’m worried I’ll bite into a canned water chestnut.

    I promise no water chestnuts have ever — or will ever — find their way into my casserole….

  91. 91.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: During WWII 2 of my father’s sisters worked in a canning factory and could make cans of any size they wanted. My old man’s care packages were the biggest events for his bomber crew. My aunts sent him everything from salamis to chocolate layer cakes (frosting in a separate can) and it all arrived as fresh as the day they made it, and it could be kept (in the can) for weeks. A neat trick in the tropics.

  93. 93.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I was visiting a great-aunt when I was a little kid. She was boiling tongue. I remember walking into the kitchen just when she was forking and lifting it out of a very large stockpot. Yuck, I will never like tongue.

  94. 94.

    Immanentize

    @bemused:

    They made use of every part of an animal.

    My Moravian Grandfather was a butcher and he used to say, “The only part of a pig you can’t use is it’s squeel”

  97. 97.

    MomSense

    @Immanentize:

    That must have been a mid sixties recipe like the meatloaf with oatmeal in it and a few others that were popular in her formative Home making years. The cook book is probably called combine all the random things that have been collecting dust in your pantry.

  99. 99.

    Adria McDowell

    Yesterday was Mini-Me’s 6th birthday party, and she powered through. Sure enough- had a fever of 102.6 when we got home. Strep and flu have been running through her class, so we are having her seen today. This year’s flu has been killing otherwise healthy kids, so we’ve been checking on her every few hours.

    It’s snowing here in C-bus and will be cold all day. Still figuring out what to do about food for the game.

  100. 100.

    Schlemazel

    @bemused:
    Beef tongue is actually pretty good, beefy taste.

    The liver recipe is weird but think of it as a liver pate, nothing wrong with the ingredients.

  108. 108.

    JPL

    @Immanentize: Yes it is.
    ot I did reply yesterday and your were correct. Border police can search private property excluding dwellings. (but of course, you were)

  109. 109.

    raven

    The term “#10” does not mean that the contents will weigh 10 pounds, the #10 refers to the type of can. The actual weight and volume of the contents will vary depending on the product. On average, the #10 can will hold 109 oz. To help you visualize, your average soup can is #2 can. To get the same amount of food as one #10 can you would have to have a total of 5.32 soup cans to have the same amount of volume as the #10 can.

  110. 110.

    bemused

    @Immanentize:

    I’m ok with that occasionally at a party but don’t eat at home. For casseroles I do make that need a cream soup to hold it together, I make a white sauce with chicken or beef broth/bouillion, garlic, onion, etc to cut down on the salt and fat in the canned soups. After several years, my taste buds have changed. I hate making meatballs but made swedish meatballs with gravy recently that everyone liked but I decided I would cut down on the butter next time.

    I was horrified to see a recipe a community recipe book from the 80’s named “Wetback’s Delight”! I showed that to my daughter-in-law and her jaw dropped.

  111. 111.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize:

    The friend of the coach is the guy who got to direct the crash of Cassini.

    MURDERER!!!!

    Cool that the young Immp got to go and meet them.

  112. 112.

    Schlemazel

    @Immanentize:
    As a kid I was not a fan of liver but our Jewish neighbors introduced me to chopped liver. SInce then I have made it myself & it is unhealthy as all get out. I save the fat from several chickens (shmaltz) so that the flavor is right and that plus egg and liver; it really is a heart attack waiting to happen! But what a great flavor

  113. 113.

    Ohio Mom

    @OzarkHillbilly: One of my husband’s frum (orthodox Jewish) friends married a Frenchwoman who’s big “company for dinner”‘dish is beef tongue. I had never considered it before this couple was in my life but d’oh, of course tongue is kosher.

    I’m sure she does a splendid job with it — she is a fabulous cook — but after several attempts, I am not eating it again. It looks too much like what it is for my sensibilities.

  114. 114.

    bystander

    Saw a clip of demonstrators outside Nunes’ Fresno office with placards calling him “Putin’s stooge” and the Fresno Bee has called him “Trump’s stooge.” So apparently there is agreement that Nunes is a stooge.

  115. 115.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @lowtechcyclist: I was seeing “dilly dilly” on posters around here after the Iggles made the Super Bowl. Occasionally changed to “Philly Philly”. I assumed it was a catch phrase everyone knew.

    Then I was surfing YouTube this weekend and came across a series of Bud Light pseudo-medieval ads. First one I played was a message from the King to the Patriots, and it included that phrase. So I concluded it was some sort of Patriots catch phrase, and that everyone in the US knew its significance but me.

    One more Google search resolved it for me. It’s a Bud Light invention (well their ad agency). Just something for a King to say in approval that wasn’t “huzzah”.

    Agree about the product but the ads are cute.

    So I’m not the only one who was puzzled by this dilly dilly thing?

  116. 116.

    Immanentize

    @bemused: thanks, but I was truly expecting BP and ICE we’re claiming so.e ne search authority. I’m thankful they haven’t.

  117. 117.

    bystander

    @Ohio Mom: As a kid I loved tongue sandwiches until I saw the huge raw tongue on the kitchen counter. Similarly lost my taste for sweetbreads at an early age but happy to say I’ve recovered my taste for them.

  118. 118.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @bemused: I’ve had kidney and it was not a fit for my mostly nondiscriminating palate. I found the heart was too tough. I dearly love liver sausages but will take a pass on liver and onions. I like brains too. Someday, given the opportunity I’ll give chitlins a try.

  120. 120.

    opiejeanne

    @debbie: Since we are both sick still and the weather is miserable so I may be forgiven for this culinary violation of all that is holy.
    I made Stay-Abed-Stew: stew meat, onions, carrots, potatoes, celery, mushrooms, frozen peas, and a can of Cream of Mushroom soup. fill the can with red wine and chuck that in too, salt and whatever herbs you like (I like thyme). Stir it up, put the lid on, stick it in a 275 F oven for 5 hours and don’t think about it. It starts smelling divine after about 2 hours which is absolutely maddening because it really isn’t cooked yet.
    It’s from Peg Bracken’s “I Hate to Cook Book”.

  121. 121.

    Schlemazel

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Kidney tastes like the floor of a cow barn smells. Heart is very tasty but it is a tough muscle. I love it bur it is a chewing exercise even when cooked low and slow. Never had brains, they are on my bucket list. Chitlins that I have had had a vague poop flavor that made me worry about my safety. Bone marrow if fabulous BTW.

  122. 122.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Schlemazel: Yeah, unsure what my mother did, but I have learned that slow cooking is the way to go for tender meats. Boiling is about the worst thing one can do.

  123. 123.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @OzarkHillbilly: Hate liver in all forms. Have had tongue, it was ok but I don’t go out of my way to order it at the kosher deli.

    Oddly, I really love to have all the odd unidentifiable bits in pho. Tripes, soft tendon, a “meatball” I don’t want to question closely (it seems to be a single spherical object, not ground beef pressed together). Stuff I’d never eat otherwise.

    In the U.K. I found haggis perfectly fine but had a real struggle with “black pudding”.

  125. 125.

    opiejeanne

    @MomSense: You could ask her to leave out the water chestnuts? I like them when I’ve had them in Chinese vegetable dishes but when I tried using the canned ones they came out tasing like crunchy soap.

  126. 126.

    cosima

    As it’s an open thread — send some positive thoughts across the pond (or in the general direction of the UK is you’re already over on this side of the pond). In a couple of hours we’ll be leaving for the big city for our early a.m. meeting to find out if the UK will allow us to stay. We’ll go in as a family & attempt to convince them that we are hardworking decent folk who should be allowed to stay. Naturally, because life is so often contrary, the flu that has been circulating for so long has now caught up to me, and I’ve spent the last couple of days laying on the sofa, alternately shivering or sweating, and everything that touches my skin hurts (clothes to keep me warm!). With luck I’ll not be entirely delirious when we meet with the bureaucrats tomorrow morning.

    Mr C & I have got quite used to moving all over the place for work, or life, but Little C has really been stressing about the thought of having to leave the place that she knows as home (she was born here, and has spent most of her life here). She did not get automatic UK citizenship (that was not a thing for children of US citizens when she was born here), so she’s not much of an anchor baby…

  127. 127.

    bemused

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    You’re a lot braver than I am.

    My spouse and I don’t eat venison even though we live in deer huntin’ country. I don’t remember eating venison as a kid although I must have at some point. My dad hunted deer and my mother served it. Venison didn’t agree with my mother-in-law’s stomach so my spouse so my spouse isn’t crazy about venison. If you don’t grow up with venison as a staple and treat in the home, you are less likely to acquire a taste for it. As they say here, it’s all in how it’s prepared and cooked. Venison lovers will serve venison to venison skeptics without telling them what it is and laugh when the skeptic comments how good the meal was.

  129. 129.

    Ken

    @bemused: I have a copy of The Joy of Cooking from the 1950s, and it has recipes for all the parts – tripe, brains, sweetbreads, chitlings. I looked through a recent edition and was quite disappointed, all of that had disappeared – though the pork section did have several dozen recipes for tenderloin.

  130. 130.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @bemused: My wife refuses to eat venison because “Bambi” of course, but she dearly loves my chile. No, she doesn’t know what I put in it. Why do you ask?

  133. 133.

    opiejeanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: Alton Brown did a road show several years ago and I remember him ordering a brain sandwich. I think he put a lot of mustard on it. I thought that was in PA but it could have been in Illinois. That place in your photo was long gone by then and the only thing I remember him ordering in St Louis was frozen custard. Ice cream.

    ETA: The brain sandwich was in Indiana.

  135. 135.

    Ohio Mom

    @JPL: I don’t keep kosher, but even us secular Jews can’t help but pick up a basic knowledge about what is and what isn’t kosher.

    I eat plenty of shellfish and pig parts, though never have had the opportunity to try pigs feet. But who knows what the future will bring?

  136. 136.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @opiejeanne: No doubt he got it at Ted Drewes, a St Louis institution. When my mother was nearing the end, no food tasted good to her anymore, except for Ted Drewes. I would sneak a concrete into ICU for her every time I’d visit.

  137. 137.

    Ohio Mom

    @cosima: Perhaps the fact that even with the flu, this meeting is so important to you that you roused yourself out of bed, will make an impression with those officials. Maybe wear a mask to show you care about their health and don’t want to be a vector?

    Wishing you luck — please keep us posted.

  138. 138.

    Steeplejack

    I’ve been awesomely moderately productive already this morning, so I’m sliding into sloth mode for the rest of Super Sunday.

    Went to the grocery about 8:30 to get ahead of other shoppers and some rain/​sleet/​“wintry mix” that’s supposed to be coming in later this morning. Couldn’t think of anything special I wanted for the game, but I did get a small jar of wasabi sauce to see about perking up a roast beef sandwich. I’ve been jonesin’ for horseradish but happened to see this. We’ll see how it goes.

    If I have another spurt of productivity I might make a run to the state liquor store this afternoon. Margaritas seem like a good game drink today. If not, eh, I’ll have a Blatz or two.

    No strong feeling about the game, just hoping for a good game and mildly rooting for the Eagles, because the Patriots are kind of dicks and I’m always an underdog guy.

  139. 139.

    chris

    @Ohio Mom: Pig’s feet are OK but even better are pig’s tails. Usually served as BBQ ribs ‘n’ tails, they are the best part of the beast. (Wash well before cooking.)

  140. 140.

    RobertDSC-Mac Mini

    Just hoping and praying for a Pats win today.

    I liked the Mars video. Of course, we could do both human and robot exploration if a functioning Administration increased and maintained funding. We have to hope the next Democratic one will do so.

    I really dislike the concept that there are “scarce” resources out there for anything. We can pay for everything with increased taxes on those who make the most. It is really that simple, in theory. In practice, ugh.

  141. 141.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Something that was pointed out to me; Stormy Daniels has said Trump didn’t use a condom when having sex with her. Odd behavior for a germophobe but then Trump does think with his Little Donnny. No wonder Melissa, Livia or what ever Trump’s current wife is named is so visibly angry with him.

  142. 142.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Schlemazel: I haven’t eaten brains either but I have seen cans of pork brains in stores, and the nutrition information on the label is terrifying. Zombies must be powered by atherosclerosis. It’s a sometimes food, I’d say…

  144. 144.

    WaterGirl

    This must be a Catholic thing – we did that, too, n the 2nd grade. My best friend told the nun that she wanted to be a prostitute. Needless to say, it did not go over well.

  146. 146.

    Matt McIrvin

    @RobertDSC-Mac Mini: Actually… this is an area where typical partisan assumptions don’t apply. The Trump administration has at least acted way more generous toward interplanetary exploration than Obama’s was. Obama’s White House budgets kept zeroing it out completely, though Congress pushed back.

    I think this is one of the things behind the flap over Bill Nye The Science Guy appearing at the SOTU with Bridenstine. Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society, which is heavy into advocacy for solar system exploration.

    (With Trump there’s a disturbing subtext of “NASA should be exploring space, not collecting evidence for climate change.” Instead of solar system exploration, Earth science stuff gets zeroed out. That part is pretty much what you’d expect.)

  147. 147.

    JPL

    @bemused: BBQ venison and chili made with deer meat is okay. Neither are my favorites but the meat doesn’t taste gamey prepared that way.

  148. 148.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JPL: I love venison and get it pretty often from my father-in-law’s hunting expeditions. Sometimes he does tricky things with it, though: he gave me some ground meat that I used in tacos and it was the most delicious taco meat I’d ever used, then he confessed that the secret ingredient he’d mixed in was pork bacon.

  149. 149.

    Matt McIrvin

    @bemused: I never ate venison until I was an adult and I love it, I think just because I like very lean meat. Of course, any wild game meat will have more variation in quality than what you get from a store.

  152. 152.

    WaterGirl

    @MomSense:

    My mom’s beau has a flat earther kid

    Seriously? I did not know there ere really people who believed that – I thought it was an urban myth. Seriously? Oh my god. Is it wrong to say that some people really are too stupid to live?

  153. 153.

    WaterGirl

    There needs to be a trigger warning for any comment that mentions tongue as something to be eat.

  154. 154.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WaterGirl: There’s been a huge resurgence of flat-earthism in just the past few years, propagated by Twitter and Facebook and especially YouTube. The people who are into it seem to be the kind of people who are really into conspiracy theories in general–they come in believing the earth is round but also that conspiracies are controlling everything, watch a bunch of YouTube flat-earth videos and get converted. Many of them are also major-league antisemites.

    I wonder sometimes if flat-earthism is a focus of Russian troll provocation–seems like a productive way to fuck with us and increase general cynicism and conspiracy thinking. But we’d probably be doing it with or without them.

  155. 155.

    bemused

    @WaterGirl:

    They’re super loony. I think it was someone here who had pressed flat earthers what happens when they get to edge of flat earth and one answer was that you stop at a gigantic wall of ice!

  158. 158.

    opiejeanne

    @WaterGirl: In the 8th grade my middle kid told someone when asked that she wanted to be an American Gladiator. We lived in a small-ish community and this Scandal!!!! got right round town in a hurry. Welcome to Castro Valley.
    We thought it was hilarious, but the East Bay does not have much of a sense of humor.

  161. 161.

    Salty Sam

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    My youngest son had a HUGE aversion to eating deer meat- growing up in Central Texas, they were more like varmints than wildlife, and he enjoyed watching them nibble on our landscaping.

    He came home from a sleepover where his friend’s father served venison sausage for breakfast- walked in the door and asked, ” Dad, can we shoot some of those deer out on the lawn.”

  162. 162.

    chris

    @bemused: That’s me. Antarctica is a 360 degree wall of ice that keeps all the water from running out.

    “Where is the edge?” I asked. “Let’s go there.” Banned.

    @Matt McIrvin: It’s the chemtrails, put up by the lizard people, that delude us into thinking the world is round. This is reenforced by academia, the CIA and the Trilateral Commission etc. because they are all lizard people. Read David Icke and wake up, sheeple!

  163. 163.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    @Ruckus:

    Mars is not sending its best landscapes, okay? They’re sending their ghettos, their shitholes… and some of them, I assume, are nice places

  164. 164.

    J R in WV

    @Eric S.:

    My parents both typed for a living. My dad was editor of a small town newspaper which was distributed regionally, and had to put together a column, editorials, and build a whole editorial page with letters from readers, syndicated opinion pieces from Drew Pearson and others, every day, 6 days a week.

    My mom also worked at the newspaper, the news room was where they met back in the 1940s. Mom knew how to type, but dad used two fingers on each hand, which can be adequate, but can’t ever beat touch typing. So in the summer between 8th and 9th grade I took a summer school class in touch typing. It was awful.

    I already played the piano some, but in the typing class you lost a point for every typo. As readers of this blog know, I make typos. That didn’t help when I set out to learn programming, as leaving out a semi-colon can disrupt an otherwise well done program. I flunked Typing badly. So I took it again the second half of summer school. I didn’t do much better, but I passed.

    I’ve also learned to set type using a Linotype, which had a completely different keyboard from typewriters. Something like 3 times as many keys, arranged vertically rather than horizontally, it could hardly be more different. By then I was better at it, which was good as my task was to repair other peoples’ typos, and it wouldn’t do to have new typos in the corrections.

  165. 165.

    Matt McIrvin

    @chris: You generally don’t have to follow their links very far before The Jews show up as the instigators behind the round-earth hoax.

    Most of them say the Earth is a flat disc with the North Pole in the center and, as you say, that Antarctic ice wall on the outside. The thing I keep wanting to ask them is why trans-oceanic flights south of the Equator aren’t way longer than the globe would imply. Turns out some of them say “that’s the reason why there are no such flights!” I don’t know what happens if you show them the routes and the websites where you can buy the tickets.

  167. 167.

    Matt McIrvin

    @bemused: Have you seen their explanations of why the sun seems to rise and set at different times in different places? They’re too stupid to even be possible to summarize.

  169. 169.

    chris

    @Matt McIrvin: I’ve always suspected the lizard people are just a front for for the Bilderbergers./snark

    One has to wonder how many Republican politicians believe some or any of this stuff. I mean trickle-down is right up there with the flat earth and the lizards.

  170. 170.

    debbie

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Or a test run. If they could get people to believe the earth was flat, the Russians figured they could get people to believe Donald Trump would make a great president.

  172. 172.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WaterGirl: What got me some attention was the time in kindergarten when the teacher asked us what our fathers’ jobs were (just Dad, not Mom; this was 1973).

    I said my father had no job. I had somehow gotten a very specific idea from kids’ media of what A Job was. It involved a special uniform with a special hat. Possible Jobs included: fireman, policeman, and chef. My father was not a fireman, a policeman or a chef; he “went to work”, which involved fiddling with computers, and all he wore to do that was an ordinary gray suit and tie (this was, again, 1973). My teacher assumed my father was among the many long-term unemployed of that recessionary time and, I think, sent a concerned note home inquiring about our family situation.

  173. 173.

    NotMax

    @WaterGirl

    Any real delicatessen worth its kosher salt will include tongue among its offerings.

    Have a recipe for sweet ‘n’ sour tongue which results in super-tender slices.and has converted several folks over the years over to the tongue liking side. Been years now since last prepared it but IIRC one of the ingredients is canned condensed tomato soup.

  174. 174.

    J R in WV

    @Ohio Mom:

    My granddad liked pickled pigs feet, he grew up on a dairy farm, they ate everything they could collect in the farm. All his life he would crack about 10,000 hickory nuts to pick the tiny bit of nutmeat out with a big hatpin, then gramdmother would bake a nut-bread.

    I can’t do liver, organ meats in general. I have tried and enjoyed a variety of blood sausage in Europe, first time it was what was for lunch after a busy and active morning with miles of walking, so it was hard not to eat something. A country bar in NW Spain, other items were peppers in olive oil, tiny squids, pickled vegtables, tapas, really. I ate a lot of everything.

    Later on we had opportunities at rural French restaurants, it was even better. But no liver, kidney, brains, just nope.

  175. 175.

    Matt McIrvin

    @J R in WV: I took typing in a night class in high school, because my mother had wisely insisted that it would be an excellent idea. I was somewhat distracted by a girl I had a mind-destroying crush on being in the same class. But it turned out to be useful anyway. It wasn’t for credit, so I wasn’t particularly concerned about my grade.

    I remember that at the time, typing classes were still heavily oriented toward producing professional typists, that is to say, people who would spend their days in a typist pool banging out copy off of a manuscript or a Dictaphone tape on an IBM Selectric. So the emphasis was on typing from a prepared source at the maximum speed possible while making zero errors, and I never got very good at that. Computers may be unforgiving about typos in code, but the cost of backing up and correcting a typo in a paragraph is much lower than it is on a manual or electric typewriter. And I already knew that at the time (this was the Eighties, when word processors were starting to appear as a major deal), so I was perhaps less motivated to become a perfect professional typist.

    At one point our teacher told us flat-out that we should never use the digit “1” key; instead, for speed, we should substitute a lower-case “l”. I told her that computers cared about the difference, and that was the first she’d ever heard of that.

  176. 176.

    NotMax

    @bemused

    You mean the big jars of pickled eggs? Lilliput and Blufescu had nothing on the eternal battle between those who swear by white pickled eggs and those who insist only the purple ones will do.

  178. 178.

    Tata

    The husband and I don’t care about football, but we care a lot about making our own food. I started croissant dough on Friday, and right now pain au chocolat is proofing in a warm place. Yesterday, I smoked eggplants I’ll make into baba ghanouj in a bit. After that, we’ll be grinding and stuffing sausage. The husband calls it Arts & Crafts Day.

  179. 179.

    Matt McIrvin

    @J R in WV: I actually love liver but I haven’t had it in a while. I remember you could get it at the old Wursthaus in Harvard Square. If that place hadn’t closed down I’d be dead today.

  180. 180.

    Matt McIrvin

    @debbie: Sometimes the troll personae spend months just making attention-getting posts on random subjects like celebrity gossip, to get followers and establish that they’re real people, before getting into politics. Flat-earthism could easily be one of them.

  185. 185.

    NotMax

    @Matt McIrvin

    IHOP here has liver and onions on the menu (they all did at one time, dunno if that remains so). Only reason you could get me to go there. Recently came across a recipe for “Spanish Style Liver” in a crock pot cookbook from 1975, which am itching to try.

    @Tata

    Yesterday, I smoked eggplants

    What’s the secret to keeping them lit?

    ;)

  186. 186.

    WaterGirl

    @MomSense: Yikes. My best friend is a physicist, and he is all about facts and evidence and science. He doesn’t follow politics as much as I do, so he didn’t know her name, but he really liked that professor lady who spoke at the convention. (Elizabeth Warren)

  188. 188.

    WaterGirl

    @NotMax: Thanks for flipping me off by talking about that dreaded meat when I clearly indicated that it’s not a happy thing to me.

  189. 189.

    Tata

    @NotMax: Hot thoughts all in my mind and all of the time.

    /Spoon

    An electric smoker has become one of my favorite cooking tools. I’ll take any excuse to drag it out and use it. Sure, it’s not one of those bigass rigs the pros use, but I don’t want to make my chickens nervous.

  190. 190.

    Ruckus

    @Eric S.:
    A fellow I knew and who knew what I did for a living asked me back about a million years ago to talk to his daughter about what to take in HS. I told her to take typing, because everyone would have a computer in their home in the not too distant future. As not too distant futures go I wasn’t wrong but I’d bet she had kids before it happened. It was that long ago and the best piece of advice I’ve ever given anyone. What I didn’t know was that in about the same length of time after those home computers arrived, everyone would have a computer to carry around with them and talk on.

  191. 191.

    BD of MN

    My phone says it’s -2f here in the superb owl host metropolis (heading for a high of 5f), local weather guy tweeted “increasingly concerned eagles fans may freeze their middle fingers off”…

    I wanted it colder…

  192. 192.

    J R in WV

    @Ken:

    I have a copy of The Joy of Cooking from the 1950s, and it has recipes for all the parts – tripe, brains, sweetbreads, chitlings. I looked through a recent edition and was quite disappointed, all of that had disappeared – though the pork section did have several dozen recipes for tenderloin.

    My first copy of the Joy taught us how to dress a rabbit, or a chicken, how to cook game, etc. That all went away as you indicate.

    But then it mostly came back, I assume after many complaints. To many it was part of the charm of the text, just how basic the authors got. My newer 2006 indeed has all about rabbit, for example, from cleaning and cutting up to a variety of recipes.

  193. 193.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Eric S.: I know so many programmers who never learned to touch-type! They insist that it’s fine, they have no problem hunting-and-pecking their way through code and can go about as fast as a touch-typist with whatever idiosyncratic technique they evolved. But the thing I notice about these people is that their code comments are very terse.

  194. 194.

    Ruckus

    @bemused:
    Grand mother used to serve rabbit to her husband, and granddad hated rabbit. But it was cheaper and so she would cook it just like fried chicken and take the wrapper to the neighbors trash so he wouldn’t see it. One doesn’t see rabbit in the store anymore, like it was when I was a kid. And yes if you cook it like chicken, it tastes just like chicken.

  195. 195.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WaterGirl: Thanks! Like most people, I believed a lot of peculiar things when I was little, some of them utterly baffling in hindsight.

  196. 196.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WaterGirl: …A couple of years later, I was surprised to learn that not everybody’s dad took a portable computer terminal home with him every night so he could dial in on the acoustic-coupler modem and code away after hours. I thought that was just a typical 1970s dad thing. I was living in a science-fictional future relative to most people and I didn’t even know it.

  198. 198.

    Ruckus

    @dmsilev:
    No, I mean it looks like a couple of places that I used to know of in the upper desert, which is about 75 miles from where I’m sitting or JPL, because that’s only 3 or 4 miles away. Sister used to work at JPL, on the night shift, transcribing incoming signals from one of the Mariner missions. I can not remember which one but that was probably at least 30 yrs ago. (ETA, I checked, more like 40-50 yrs ago. Damn old age!) I also used to know one of the original employees at JPL, his son and I went to HS together. He was out looking for work and stopped to help a guy with a flat tire, the guy, one of the founders of JPL, offered him a job. He worked there till he retired. He passed away quite some years ago.

  199. 199.

    Gelfling 545

    Your Catholic school story reminds me of one from my teaching days. The guidance counselor brought a personal question to team meeting. His step son was in Catholic school and in art class had drawn a picture (well drawn) of Jesus shipping gaily – in both senses of the word if you’re homophobic enough – through a field with his disciples. His teacher went batshit and called in the principal, the pastor and the parents to demand that the boy get counseling. He thought the kid was ok but maybe he was too close and was missing something, etc. we all examined the picture, laughed ourselves sick, and advised him to get the kid out of Catholic school & get him an audition for the Arts Academy. We felt that the kid had a future as a very edgy political cartoonist and he clearly knew his teacher would freak and got the result he wanted.

  200. 200.

    J R in WV

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I will confess I ate liver once. I was invited to go with a neighbor’s family hunting trip, which included a maximum size school bus converted into a camper, which they chained 3 4×4 trucks to in order to pull it across a river and up a mountain to their campsite. Then someone shot “camp deer” doe. That night I volunteered to fry the liver, rolled in flour. salt and pepper.

    It was super fresh, like 2 or 3 hours from living. Wonderful. So then I tried supermarket liver once again. Nope. Never again. Not real big on pate either.

    But that fresh deer liver was really good. I was amazed at the difference. Fresh is what did it I think. Plus organic to the max. We were way, way out back of beyond in the WV mountains.

  201. 201.

    Ruckus

    @Matt McIrvin:
    I went to school, pre-med, but dad wanted me to be a machinist. I’d worked for him since I was a very young teen but after the navy and in college, a doctor I would be. Guess what? I went on to own the business and am still working as a machinist (I’ve had a couple of side excursions in my “career”, I’ve talked about them before). My dyslexia made keeping those long names of chemicals and drugs straight not realistic. I knew and understood the individual segments but saying/writing hexoclorophenaline (which is actually hexachlorophene) seemed to be a skill beyond me. I think the dyslexia also made it possible for me to develop being ambidextrous which came in very handy as a machinist. But it is a skill that requires constant practice and it’s now long gone.

  204. 204.

    WaterGirl

    @Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I believed some interesting stuff, too. Kids!

    On the not sweet and funny side, someone in a support group at my church told us that her dad woke he up in the middle of the night every night and made her go stand in the closet for an hour. She never told anyone because she thought everybody’s daddy made them do that – she didn’t find out until she went away to college that that wasn’t the case. Horrifying.

  206. 206.

    Ruckus

    @raven:
    No, not a machinist, I worked in electronics. My parents sent me to a technical HS, with shops in photography, machining, chemistry, electronics, auto mechanics, woodworking, drafting. You had to take an exam to enter and then they told you what shops you qualified for. They told me, “You are qualified for any shop, what would you like?” Electronics, I immediately answered. Dad didn’t say a word, he understood about doing what you wanted. Mom did her thing, which consisted of very nice badgering until she got her way. So I took machine shop. Enlisted and about mid way through boot camp they gave us a week of tests. Those determined what rate you were assigned to and what schools you were assigned to. Sent me to electronics schools for a year. So in all my life, I’ve gotten at least one thing right.

  208. 208.

    Daddio7

    @Eric S.: In 1966 my mother got a portable typewriter with Green Stamps. That summer in Florida was very rainy so we stayed inside and learned to type. The next year in 10th grade I took the one semester typing class as an easy “A”. Being self taught and left handed I used my left thumb for the space bar. The typing teacher can by and whacked my hand with the ruler she carried. I was supposed to use my right thumb. I pointed out my left thumb had nothing else to do and the space bar ran all the way across the bottom, why not use it. She said that she would fail me if I did. Ooo-kay.

  209. 209.

    Ruckus

    @Daddio7:
    I hate the extremely small and rigid box some peoples minds reside in. Getting the job done isn’t important, only that everyone does everything exactly the same way.
    What a fucking waste of energy and life that is.

  210. 210.

    Bostonian

    @BretH: I remember deciding as a kid that I didn’t want to work in computing when I grew up because I didn’t like to spend the whole day in chilly basements with fluorescent lights and no windows (which is what most computer centers were like in the mid-70’s).

  211. 211.

    Tehanu

    Hated liver when I was a kid but now I like it, chopped or fried with onions. I also love itty-bitty chicken kidneys that you get in roast chicken, and sweetbreads, yum! But won’t eat posole or anything with tripe.

    @opiejeanne: My niece & her 2 daughters live in Castro Valley. She seems to like it there. The girls are active in dance classes. I see her Fbk posts so that’s really all I know about it.

    @Daddio7: I taught myself to type from a book because I had too many academic classes in high school and the schedule never worked out to take the class. I never got good enough to get a job as a “typist,” i.e., a typing-pool person, but then word processing and PC’s came along and I’ve never had to be that good, which is great because I’m a tech writer. Honestly, I couldn’t be any kind of writer if it weren’t for computers. I still remember using up huge numbers of bottles of White-Out when I wrote college papers — ugh!

  212. 212.

    J R in WV

    @Daddio7:

    I was the kind of student that would have said, OK, and continued to do it the way I wanted to. About the same time frame. I was difficult, but made good grades in spite of it. If you have straight As on tests, it is hard for a teacher to justify flunking you. Or even mostly Bs.

    My cousin was in the same class of HS, and started letting his hair grow longer and longer. They threw him out, and that afternoon my uncle showed up with a lawyer. Cousin was back the next day, HE was a 4.0 student, back when there wasn’t any higher GPAs. Very hard to throw out a guy competing for highest GPA in the class. Very hard, even in ’68.

    Stubborn runs in my family, sometimes that’s good, sometimes not so much.

  214. 214.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Daddio7: Wow, I’ve never heard of right vs. left thumb as an essential component of correct typing practice. I should think it’d be most efficient to alternate depending on whichever hand was less mechanically occupied at the end of the previous word, though in practice I seem to use my right essentially 100% (dominant hand).

  215. 215.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tehanu: When I finally got access to a word processor, as a teenager, I went through a spate of writing all kinds of stuff for fun–it was so great to be freed from the mechanical difficulty of handwriting and the agony of correcting mistakes on a typewriter, and to be able to shove whole paragraphs around and rewrite on the fly. I wrote all this fairly bad science fiction and had fun passing it around to my friends at school. I think the experience of being a technical innovator was part of the fun: the shiny new tool made this possible!

    But I think I only got really proficient at touch typing when I was messing around on Usenet in the 1990s. My speed went way up just from practice.

  216. 216.

    Matt McIrvin

    …Erik Loomis on LGM just made a post requesting technical advice, in which he mentions that he was “about 3 years too old for computers to be intuitive.” Which I found strange to read, because Erik is something like 6 years younger than I am, and I always considered myself part of the first cohort who really grew up with computers. But I think I was actually ahead of the general-population curve; I’d messed around with computers as a child in the mid-1970s and had my own as a teenager in the early 1980s, and most people hadn’t at that point unless they were big nerrrrrrrds. And Erik is famously not the type who’d be an adopter of new technology for its own sake.

  217. 217.

    opiejeanne

    @Tehanu: If they take dance classes in CV I probably know some of their teachers. heck, even if they don’t I probably know some of their teachers. I made costumes for a lot of studios.
    My kids were very active in dance; their studio was CVPA but they also took pick-up ballet classes in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Contra Costa Ballet in Walnut Creek. There was a little push-back from our home studio until I told one teacher that they were strengthening their skills and bringing back what they learned. They were in competition groups and both had solos, and it was an unusual studio because the kids stayed on through HS while other studios lost them at about age 12. They told us they had a great time, enjoyed most of what they took, found some teachers they adored, but we always asked them if they wanted to sign up for this or that program/class/competition.

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