The train that is being run on us named 2020 comes to another stop with this month’s WAWR. Read a book, or don’t. I’m a blog post not a cop.
jesse.in.mb
Donald Hall – Romanian Furrow Donald Hall was feeling disaffected during the interwar period and sought out the pastoralism he saw as in decline in Western Europe and ended up hanging out in Romania. Hall was a poet and some of his descriptions can be overly poetical, but overall it’s a fascinating travelogue with some quality shitting on Bolsheviks near the end when he heads north. I had to pull down my cope of Anisoara Stan’s The Romanian Cook Book to figure out what mamaliga was (it sounds like polenta to me). I could call it a wordy British elegiac travelogue of a rapidly disappearing way of life, but that doesn’t really do it justice it *was* enjoyable, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Kevin Espiritu – Field Guide to Urban Gardening:How to Grow Plants, No Matter Where You Live Espiritu has a YouTube channel (Epic Gardening) which I find handy because he’s based in San Diego and is more concerned about shit bolting in the heat than about frost dates. He trained with (Square Foot Gardening) at one point. Espiritu is enthusiastic and encouraging, but his book is much more a “Ok, I can do this!” guide to getting started than a deep dive on the topics he covers.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Gods of Jade and Shadow Some part of me really wants to describe this as “American Gods, but in 1920s revolutionary Yucatán with a female protagonist” but while that’s really accurate, it does not capture this well-rendered bildungsroman. Also there’s a glossary in the back with all the Mayan and Nahuatl words used in the story. Recommended.
JW
I can’t believe March is finally almost over! I’ve been working on The Adventures of a School-boy; Or the Freaks of Youthful Passion by James Campbell for what feels like months. I fear that it has awakened something inside of me.
mexican sharpshooter
I was made aware of the show on HBO, which prompted me to re-read The Plot Against America. It looked like an entertaining revisionist history when I bought it in 2004, and it was just sitting on my bookshelf next to other books I chose not to finish. It is a took me a while before I figured out what it was I didn’t like about it, but I did figure it out and maybe I’ll write a full review in June.
The short version is Charles Lindberg is an Un-American anti-semite president in the pocket of the Nazis. Hilarity ensues.
OMWC
I grabbed one of SP’s books, Modus Operandi, and got hooked. It’s a guide for mystery writers to the ways crimes are committed and how they’re investigated. Example: Want to have an experienced arsonist cause a structure fire? Don’t have him “accidentally” leave a container of combustibles near an electrical outlet- oldest trick in the book (literally). You’ll find out how that is done, why only an amateur would do it, and why/how he’d be caught. I suppose I should be a bit worried that she’s been reading this and that the section on murder and mutilation appears well-thumbed…
Also in this month’s batch was the semi-delightful Prisoner’s Dilemma by the prolific William Poundstone. It’s ambitious- he tried to pack in a biography of John von Neumann, an introduction to game theory, and an overview of the Cold War into a single medium-sized book. It’s partially successful, but inevitably superficial. Nice job on the mechanics of running three themes at once, but ultimately, each comes off as very superficial.
Sloopyinca
Talk about truth in advertising. The Neverending Story NEVER. ENDS.
SugarFree
Finally I have read the tomeish Moby Dick, committing that worthy to memory and soul. Never having been assigned it in all my many, flailing years of schooling, it was up to me, striving to be a man of letters–letters! If you can imagine it!–to read it on my own, but lo, did I let it linger in my orbit of reference and quotation for nine and forty of my mortal years before embarking. A novel of words strung like pearls wrenched from lips and tongue of the noble oyster, it does contain you as you struggle to contain it. Dense as ship’s biscuit and more nourishing–God! God! My God! it does possess a man, but riddled it is, as the failing planking of the elderly chase boat to the deprecations of the South Sea worm, with plotholes both iota and immense, they swell like the sea before the Japan Typhoon, spinning off dissertations eternal for the bespectacled junior scholar still privileged to comb his fleeing hairline.
And then I spent the rest of the month reading Remo Williams – The Destroyer books.
Swiss Servator
I went ahead and ordered the hardcover of Fall, or Dodge in Hell. I have been a very big fan of Neal Stephenson since I found a paperback copy of The Big U back when I was an undergrad. This is not his best work.
All the Stephenson complaints are dragged out and left in the reader’s way – long diversions, more tech than….you want, most likely. While starting strong – Stephenson even manages to weave in the end of Cryptonomicon into it. But the fascinating first 1/3rd to half of the book gives way to … too many changes and pretty much a lack of an ending. Now, that isn’t always fair – the end of Cryptonomicon was justly vague. The end of the Baroque Cycle was a comfortable sigh of good bye. But this…felt rushed, forced and somewhat…”so what?”
Another warning flag went up. In Seveneves, Stephenson looked like he was starting to go a bit “John Scalzi” Start relatively politics free, or even libertarian-ish. End up with a craving for… Top. Men. Who, with wonderful tech that marches on..will take care of all. He also throws many and giant pile-drivers at stupid flyover hick land, with a couple of gentle love taps at TEAM BLUEIA. That just helps sour what started out intriguing and ended up “meh”.
Wait until the library reopens to get this one.
Tonio
I got an e-reader which has greatly improved the reading experience for my old eyes. Highly recommend. I’ve read more in the past two weeks than I did in the preceding year.
Who Goes There? by legendary scifi author and editor John W Campbell, Jr. This novella is the basis for the various “thing” movies, most notably John Carpenter’s excellent 1982 movie “The Thing.” Campbell’s story is well-crafted and engaging. His descriptions of daily life at an 1938 Antarctic research station, as well as those of McReady, are vivid in the turgid fashion of the pulp magazines of the time. I was particularly fascinated by Campbell’s descriptions of the cutting-edge technology of the period, and what was expected to be just around the corner. Highly recommended for fans of classic horror and scifi.
The Coming of The Old Ones by the prolific Jeffrey Thomas. This is a collection of three Lovecraft mythos stories, two with contemporary settings, the third with an historical setting and a steampunk flavor. Thomas has a unique take on the mythos while including elements of traditional canon. This work is of interest to fans of the mythos, but lacks general appeal.
Tulip
This month I have three books to recommend. All three books are set in Saudi Arabia. The Ruins of Us, by Keija Parssinen, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel and Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris.
The Ruins of Us deals with a woman who grew up in Saudi Arabia as an oil company brat, then returned when she marries a Saudi man. It explores what happens when the marriage collapses, and what happens to children trying to navigate two worlds.
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street explores the expat experience.
Lastly, Finding Nouf is a murder mystery set in Saudi Arabia and the main character is a Saudi woman who must navigate the restrictions on women to solve the crime.
All three are written by women. The Ruins of Us and Finding Nouf are both written by oil company brats. All three are very different books, but I think they are all linked by the pervasive sense of paranoia that permeates all three. I enjoyed them all, for different reasons, because I think they offer a window into a very different culture.
Brett L
I re-read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, really remembering it to be better than it is. Things that were radical and mind-blowing 25 years ago have become part of a broader genre in such a way that even though you know you’re seeing a radical twist on cyberpunk, its just not worth the asides. Pre-coronavirus it seemed like great book, and it just feels naive now.
I also worked my way through this Thrice-Named Man series. Set in the north-eastern corner of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Empire’s slide, it follows a young man whose father is a Roman and (deceased) mother was a Scythian. All sorts of intrigues and wars play out, our hero wins the respect of the Goths, Romans, Scythians, and Huns. Its a fun romp that I can recommend. Once you get past some of the sheer improbability of one person doing all of the things the hero is involved with, its worth the read if you waste $10/month on Kindle Unlimited like I do. Another series in this genre I read since last I wrote here is Knight of Rome. In this case a young German is taken on as an auxillary by a tribune, and proceeds (again very improbably!) to be knighted by Augustus and used shamelessly by the great emperor in all sorts of adventures, mostly to the north and west.
Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year”, Elmore Leonard’s “Pagan Babies” and “The Russian Origins of the First World War”by Sean McMeekin.
First?
I thank The Powers That Be for the GIF. I will cherish it.
I am going to read this, Reality because it looks intriguing and I promised a friend.
Looks really cool.
I lied. I’m going to read this one, Sanity, first because that’s the order they go in.
So, both.
Mo is reading fiction!!
I have a non-fiction OOP recommendation for you sometime: https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/0020403607
(I haven’t forgotten about your parcel; I’m just kinda behind on life. I caution you that the contents are a few years old now. Email me if you like.)
Ooh, thank you for the rec.
I almost never read nonfiction unless forced for research purposes. For nonfiction I’m actually interested in, I get the audiobook.
It’s just that I haven’t read ANYTHING longer than a blog post for pleasure in many moons.
Oh, I thought it was fiction you had no time for.
This is a compilation of angry letters including famous and exasperated authors like Lincoln and Hunter Thompson. Kind of a bathroom read.
I have a non-fiction OOP
Is that when you actually sit on your balls?
*ahem* Toxteth never had any.
Not that I can count.
So they are fictional.
Yes. Just like the rest of us unicorns.
Mortgage refinance paperwork, test plans, purchase order requests.
WHEN DOES NICK GET TO READ SOMETHING FUN?
WHEN DOES NICK GET TO READ SOMETHING FUN?
Nick sounds angry, possibly even pistoff.
“used shamelessly” by Augustus, you say?
*narrows gaze, then waggles eyebrows*
Come on, it’s not like we’re talking about Greeks. More like “I made you a knight and a citizen so fuck off to Brittania or Outer Hispania and solve this problem for me.”
King Nicomedes begs to differ.
knighted by Augustus – there were no knights in Rome. I call nonsense
Equites. Ring and narrow striped tunic. Basically raised to knighthood. Less than a Lord more than citizen.
I know Equites but I think knighted is the wrong word for that
Shitlord.
There ya go.
I also wanted to like Fall, or Dodge in Hell more than I could. The whole sideplot with the Twitterfakenewspocalypse was interesting but almost totally wasted except that it led to handwavy explanation for why Sophia gets to have her superpowers.
It might be interesting if he revisits this world and does some more explanation with the effects that the digital afterlife has on the real world, but I’m afraid that it would be 2/3 digression again.
I really like the movie Black Sunday. Talk about a movie that would never get made today – heroic Israelis attempt to stop murderous Arab terrorists despite FBI bungling. Anyway, my wife came across the Thomas Harris novel on which it was based at a used book store and picked it up for me. I’m not usually much of a fiction reader, but I’m interested to see how it’s different from the movie.
And Rufus, to answer your question about the CHL – the entire notion of sending teenaged boys far away from their families for many months and entrusting them to men who are often petty, abusive dictators is repugnant to me.
Been a long time since I read it, but I remember the book being pretty good. I was just a kid when the movie came out, but I remember it being one of those schoolyard sensations that everybody had to talk about (even though none of us had actually seen it).
It’s a good thriller. Don’t know why it wasn’t a big hit. Bruce Dern always plays a good lunatic, and it was really cool how they filmed most of the Super Bowl scenes on site at the actual Super Bowl.
Thomas Harris sure can write an excitingly paced novel.
I remember reading the Hannibal Lecter escape scene in SOTL while getting ready for a military formation and not being able put it down while getting yelled at.
I had to pull down my cope of Anisoara Stan’s The Romanian Cook Book to figure out what mamaliga was (it sounds like polenta to me). – well I know who did not read my food posts
We also have mămăligă – basically corn meal, salt and water – similar to polenta, with various degrees of softness, depending on taste. It can range from quite solid to porridge like.
I will strive to achieve rote memorization of your February 2018 posts in the future. I am truly sorry for having dishonored your writing.
*puts on hairshirt*
Don’t forget the cat o’ nine tails.
I didn’t realize we were turning this into a party.
Admit it, you just like wearing the hair shirt.
Of course, but if you tell Pie that he won’t feel like he’s gotten authorial justice.
Err. that’s not a shirt he’s wearing?
I thought Jesse was INTO bears, not that he WAS a bear.
I have broad aesthetic preferences, but am myself fairly hairy and pear-shaped despite my best efforts on the latter bit.
Someone has to be the Yogi, and someone has to be the Boo-boo?
Hirsute-American
Why not both?
I shall be quizzing you on the topic in 2023
Maybe by then I’ll have talked my travel buddy into going (back for her) to Romania for one of our trips and will have tried some of it.
I’m planning to read some old pulp magazines for comparison to the pulp-inspired story I’m working on.
I’l listening to a Zan Gray colection. The first book “Betty Zane” is boring as hell. I keep shouting “I don’t care” at the recording because I honeslty don’t care about these characters and a “will they, won’t they” plotline intruding on the promised action/adventure is irritating.
I’m writing a pulp-inspired story with a working title of “Slaves of Baranga” and an untitled Vampire story. Hopefully when these short stories are done I’ll have momentum enough to get back to “On Unknown Shores” and “Prince of the North Tower”
After being disappointed on consecutive what we read months by the Consider Phlebas and the Elric of Melniboné book I finally read the The Book Of The New Sun and it was actually much better. Good writing overall although it can get a taad boring at times due to to much worldbuilding. But I liked it.
I also read Meditations of Old Marky A, which while not bad at times made me think “easy to say when ya emperor”
have you read JGC’s Commentaries? Fascinating….
I… don’t know what that means
I think he was trying to say “GJC’s Commentaries” as in Gaius Julius Caesar.
Not every book where you get to divide Gaul in three parts.
Correct Swissy, still a great read, We approve….
Consider Phlebas did not inspire me to read more Banks.
^This. Couldn’t finish it.
That’s a shame, since he’s awesome. ;-)
I actually hooked one of my brothers on Banks’ sci-fi by giving him a copy of Excession one night when he was visiting me. Next morning, I asked him how he slept: “You son of a bitch, I read all night!”
In fairness, Iain M. Banks also writes as Ian Banks (IIRC, note the spelling changes and the dropping of the middle initial) for his contemporary fiction, which I’ve repeatedly dipped into and regretted it.
He wrote the sequel to Consider Phlebas, entitled Look to Windward, almost three decades later, which kinda book-ends the series of Culture novels (though it’s not the last Culture novel he wrote in chronological order). It takes place 800 years after Consider Phlebas, and for me, it was a fairly satisfying “And how’s that working out for the Culture so far?” way to conclude, but as always, YMMV.
Considering how much of a Marxist Banks was, his Culture novels and short stories, with their “socialism perfected” stance, are remarkably downbeat on How It Will All Work Out. Probably him being honest in spite of himself.
Player of Games is another worthy entry. I know many don’t care for it, but I enjoyed The Hydrogen Sonata.
#metoo
I mentioned that some years ago either here or TOS. Someone who’d read most (all) of the Culture series said Consider Phlebas is a tough place to start. They suggested reading “Player of Games.”
Might have been me. That’s been advice for reading the Culture novels for a long time. Consider puts off a lot of people.
This is a shame, Consider… is probably the very least of the Culture books. Banks can be very irritating but Use of Weapons and Look to Windward are, imnsho, classics.
Yeah, I was about to mention Use of Weapons as well.
I did start with Consider Phlebas back when it was first published in the mid-late 80s. I was blown away, but most of my sci-fi reading friends were less impressed.
Have you read his first novel The Wasp Factory? Not SF, but with a ‘creepy’ factor that is at least the equal of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It reminded me strongly of that book, long a favorite. I’ve claimed that the protagonists of Wasp Factory would be the perfect mates for the protagonists of Castle.
The Wasp Factory is one of his that I have not read. I’ve heard good things about it, but after reading later novels such as Dead Air and The Bridge, I decided I’d give Banks’ contemporary fiction a hard pass.
It’s like nothing else of his I’ve read. Again, I can only compare it to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Creepy as heck, but enthralling.
Also, are you familiar with Neal Asher’s work? His Polity series is another take on the same, or a very similar, set of ideas as The Culture. He’s emphatically not a commie, but far-future space opera doesn’t really lend itself to “our kind” of sf-ing. Highly recommended. Grid linked or The Technician are arguably the best entry points.
Asher stands out, for me, for taking biology and ecology much more seriously than pretty much any other SF author. Mind you, it’s typically biology & ecology red in tooth and claw, with a large dose of parasitism, but it’s there.
I also suggest The Skinner for approaching Asher. I think I’ve read it a dozen times now.
I think on H&R you said something about Asher’s “The Technician”. I read it based on that recommendation. It was pretty good. I haven’t read any other Asher yet.
The Skinner creeped me out in a big way. It took several years before I dove back into Asher, going through the Agent Cormac novels and on through the rest of his work. Now I’m a big fan. FWIW, he’s pretty interactive and engaging on the book of faces. I find it better than his blog for keeping up with his stuff.
Definitely check out The Skinner then. I await every new Asher book as one would the birth of a new puppy.
A Deepness in the Sky is far future. If you dont consider it space opera, A Fire Upon the Deep is, and that is even further in the future.
Highly recommend both of those
My favorite might have been Surface Detail but I probably LOLed most during Hydrogen Sonata.
Consider Phlebas had the best Ship names though. If I ever get my own planet-destroying warship, it’s going to be christened “A Frank Exchange of Views.”
Gordis Epidemiology, 6th Edition. This is a college textbook on epidemiology written by professors from the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. This edition was published in 2018. The first edition was published in 1996. This solid introduction to epidemiology somehow never mentions social distancing, closing all schools, sheltering in place for healthy people, closing businesses, wearing face masks. Nothing that every Karen and every governor knows today as absolutely necessary and common sense. On the other hand, the textbook discusses lots of concepts that are analyzed these everywhere: mortality rates, case fatality, sensitivity, specificity, etc.
I was trying to understand the disconnect between what practicing doctors and epidemiologists claim is the normal response to a respiratory infection (what was always done until 2020) and the brand new, never-before-tested dogma of social distancing (it was concocted as recently as 2006 and tested for the first time now). When you watch those two doctors from California and Knut Wittkowski it becomes clear that social distancing was never a standard way of dealing with a new infection. I now have a better idea why these medical professionals have this opinion.
Wow, that’s pretty cheap for a STEM textbook.
That is not a campus book store.
*check out used book stores. I have my father’s text books and my own text books. They were printed 20-25 years apart and are nearly identical, word for word. You can get all kinds of texts in used book stores for a few cents on the dollar what you would pay for latest editions in the campus book store.
Oh, trust me, I know the game.
Amazon tends to have prices similar to campus book stores for the newest editions.
I fully support projects like Rice University’s OpenStax that develop free, open-source, quality textbooks.
I always appreciated the Profs who required books one edition behind latest. Funny how that was pretty commonplace in undergrad, but completely unheard of in law school. Hell, in law school, each new edition would just rotate between 3 or 4 cases showing the same concept, and mix the order of the application problems up, and sell the new edition for $250. I paid more for textbooks in one semester at SMU than I did in 5 at Purdue, and I had to pay for lab kits and other weird stuff at Purdue.
The best is when you have to buy a book, and then it’s not even used for the class.
Toward the end of my college career, I’d just wait to buy a book to see how long I could go without doing so. I had a few thrifty misses like that.
Second on this. I’ve mentioned this before, but I once saw a pissed off sorority girl walking out of the bookstore with a used Economics 100-101 book. I asked her “they’re not buying that one back?” and she said no, they weren’t. I offered her $5 for it (should’ve really lowballed it out of the gate, but I only had a $5 on me at the time), and she thought for a second, took the $5, and handed me the book.
I read it, and took the CLEP tests for micro & macro that semester – 6 credit hours, woot!
Also, reading about economics made me (as a lefty that I was) want to debunk ‘right’ leaning economics, which led me to reading M Friedman, Sowell, Bastiat and others. This was with the hubris and arrogance of a lefty college freshman. Scored an own-goal there, and soon after became a libertarian. Oops.
The Plague meant no bus commute, and that meant serious dent in reading.
On friend’s recommendation, I’m reading Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series (16th Century Scottish rogue James Bonding his way accross Europe) and it’s pretty damn good.
Count of Monte Cristo, unabridged, in audiobook form. This has been a mistake. Three weeks of daily listens barely got me halfway across before I had to return it to the library and rejoin the queue. But damn, it’s much better than I even remember.
How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland. Also an audiobook loan from the library, I listened to it twice through because it…well, didn’t blow my mind as much as reshape the way I see the world. Partly a history of Christianity (mostly Latin part, he does state right out in the intro he won’t be diving into Eastern Christianity, love it though he does), partly a philosophical inquiry into how much of what “we” generally think of as universal and natural actually comes from being rooted in Christian thought. Provoking (“religious vs secular concepts are Christian creation”), informative and quite often funny (“With Nietzsche spinning furiously in his grave, Imagine was proclaimed as an atheist anthem”), I can’t recommend it enough. Seriously, last time a book made me think about it this much even weeks after reading it was Crime and Punishment back when I was 16.
Whoops, cut off the title of Holland’s book. It’s “Dominion”.
Working more on writing than reading lately. It is a struggle. I am a terrible writer. I can tell a story extemporaneously but it has been so long since I wrote anything non-technical putting it down in ink (pixels) is more difficult.
Get it down on paper before you start worrying about how terrible it is. It can’t be fixed if it’s not on paper.
Thank you Mojeaux. That is good advice.
I am on my third go at it and it is still terrible but only 1/3 as terrible as the first go.
Oh, I forgot. I read the Murderbot Diaries as well, including the new short novel. Murderbot is a great character, and I’m sorry I left it off the list, because it is fun, if a bit too short.
Agree wholeheartedly! A wonderful character, decent stories. I re-read the “shorties” prior to diving into the new book. Great fun.
Conan of Venarium by Harry Turtledove(just finished up). Next on the list is Selected Essays by Michel De Montaigne.
Just finished Those Above and Those Below by Daniel Polansky. I enjoyed his Low Town series.
The Empty Throne books are set in a world with a very Roman-adjacent empire butting up against (and technically subservient to) an elder race that has basically enslaved the continent. The elder race I thought was quite well done – humanoid but alien in a lot of subtle ways. Driving the conflict is a very entertaining female powerbroker whose innumerable acerbic asides are quite amusing. Also a grizzled old soldier known as the God Killer because he actually offed one of the elder race, and the seneschal of the leader of the elder race. Twists, turns, violence, intrigue; the usual, but I enjoy Polansky’s writing. Can recommend, if this is your bag.
Partway through Wolf of Wessex, an historical novel set in England around 900ish AD(?). It caught my eye because a reviewed compared the author, Matthew Harffy, to David Gemmell. I wouldn’t go that far, but its a solid book that is actually telling a story not too different from one I have in my head to write, if/when I get going on that. Easy read, the kind of book that you look up and go “Crap, bedtime was half an hour ago”.
Thanks for the pointer to The Empty Throne; it sounds right up my alley. Ordered for the Kindle app.
Also, you might enjoy Robert
Jackson Bennet’s Cities trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Swords, City of
Miracles. The Empty Throne sounds like something resonant with that. And RJB is an excellent writer.
I’ve hardly read any books this month.
“Chassepot to FAMAS”
“Retief’s War”
“Prisoners Dilemma” sounds like “Gravity’s Rainbow”, but shorter. “Moby Dick” sounds like “Gravity’s Rainbow”, but on a boat.
Me, I’ve been reading construction contracts for the past two weeks. Wrapping up a job today. I think I’m just gonna fuck around and half work/half glib.
I (re-)read the first 7 books in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series. Very satisfying.
I also (re-)read the first 4 books in Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx series. These were quite disappointing.
Finally, I’m finishing up a re-read of M.A. Foster’s ‘Book of the Ler’ trilogy. Overflowing with ideas and interesting concepts. Marred by a far-too-verbose style that all too often plods. Still, I enjoyed them. The notion of John Conway’s Game of Life being generalized and used as the command and control system for space flight I find intriguing and satisfactorily handled.
I love the Vlad Taltos books, especially at the beginning. They started to get a little sappy as the series went on.
True, although I have hopes he’ll regain his footing.
I loved the Pip and Flinx series.
I did to, back in the day. They just didn’t seem to hold up well. Sad when that happens; I cherish books I can re-read with enjoyment.
Me too, but I was 11 at the time.
I had no idea he wrote so many more of them.
Reading? Nerds! //JK
I am reading an email regarding the panicdemic about some new policies (new policies are tight). Apparently we will have to self-quarantine for 14 days upon returning from travel/vacation if we go on a flight/cruise or to a hotbed of the Wuflu. During this time we can use pto but will not be allowed to work from home. Prior to this one could work from home if one was not exhibiting symptoms. I don’t see why that would not still be the case when returning from vaca and having no symptoms. Seems inconsistent to me. We also have to participate in “Covid Training”. I assume this is a liability issue.
Does your employer have < 500 employees? Just a wild guess, but maybe they're using new fed law-mandated emergency paid sick leave for quarantinees in order to get the accompanying payroll tax credits. I'm dealing with that as our org's payroll goddess. Can't use it if employee's working from home. Some info here: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/covid-19-related-tax-credits-for-paid-sick-and-paid-family-leave-overview
I think we are <500, and that sounds like they get money but would still have to burn pto…
We are not making affected employees use their regular PTO for COVID-related absence. This is separate – up to 80 hours’ worth. We have to document the reason for the absence and back up with doctors’ notes, official quarantine advisories, etc. Don’t know if having it separate from regular PTO is required – my org has always been generous re: PTO.
So it would now take 3 weeks vacation to to take a 1 week vacation? And you can’t work at home? Is Covid now a computer virus?
People will just lie, stop talking about vacations with co-workers, and stop using social media – probably good.
Finished Robin Buss’s translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Highly recommended. Starting in on the Longmire novels now.
I recently read the Count and really enjoyed the story, although he is more a superman in the book than movie adaptations. I also read the jungle book. It is fun reading old books because of things considered normal would be quit controversial if published today. Currently half way through the hunch back of Notre dame. It was a rough start but now I’m more into the story it is much better. Hugo does have an odd habit of sticking chapters in that don’t advance the story. They seem to be purely descriptive of a church or Paris or whatever.
It was a rough start but now I’m more into the story it is much better.
It was the same for me, and for Les Misérables also. Loved both, though.
Stalled on Bower’s Jefferson in Power; need to settle back into that. I don’t have the ambition I once did where I could juggle reading multiple books. I prolly should read some fiction but it seems I have more non- that keeps staring at me from the bookshelf.
Officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck before death is in custody, reports say
who knelt on George Floyd’s neck before death
“the weapon discharged” . . .
Passive voice is the gold standard of propaganda.
Neither of those is passive voice…
No. Not technically.
However, it is passive (aggressive) to not directly identify what really happened.
“The weapon discharged.” Okay, yeah. It did. Passive voice would say, “The weapon was discharged.”
In both those cases, however, the actor is not named. What truly happened is not spoken. It is passive in construction, if not in fact.
It is passive
in constructionin purpose, if not in fact.To use the lingo, it is not a passive morphosyntactic construction, but semantically, the agent is obscured in a similar manner.
HM, he could’ve been talking about you.
Further quibble (actually outright objection) with this thread. Kneeling on the neck was the action that caused death, so there is nothing passive either in construction or in obscuring the agent about “Officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck before death. Substitute in stabbed or shot if you disagree.
Officer who shot George Floyd’s neck before death
Officer who stabbed George Floyd’s neck before death
What is being obscured (if anything) is the direct claim of causation. I would argue that even that is not true as that direct causation is the primary issue that will need to be established at trial and that responsible journalism (hahahahaha) requires recitation of facts NOT assumptions of causality. Additionally good writing requires leaving something to the reader. The cop knelt on the man’s neck. The man died shortly after the cop did so. The assumption is obvious but need not be stated. I rule this a false alarm in the Police Get Passive Passes controversy.
This was ringing in my head yesterday. I was editing a patent application that the writer put in mostly passive voice. It makes for a confusing and unpersuasive patent for the exact same reason that it makes for great propaganda… It obfuscates the responsibility for an event or consequence.
As @ruodberht rightly notes, it’s not technically passive voice.
But it is subversive.
“Working in the cloud is the future of computing” they said.
“You can work from anywhere!” they said.
Pretty hard to work when the Adobe cloud hijacks your data though. Suckas!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/27/adobe_cloud_outage/
“Why the fuck would I put my data on someone else’s server?”, I said.
Amen to that!
One reason I don’t want to migrate to Win10 (although I’m about to) is that I fear my programs and utilities won’t work anymore.
Most of my older stuff still worked. Some really old stuff (we’re talkin’ turn-of-the-century) doesn’t work anymore, but it turns out that there are more modern alternatives to them anyways, so I’m okay with it.
My major problem with Win 10 at the moment is that, upon bootup, it seems to fail to load audio drivers about half the time. The only “fix” for that so far is to re-boot and cross my fingers. :-/
I have Pshop 7, Illustrator CS6, Acrobat X upgrade (but I had to go through some acrobatics to get it to work on a different box). I’m most worried about Pshop 7.
I’m most worried about Pshop 7.
Hmmmm, dunno. It’s recent enough that it should work, but I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Not sure how technical you are, and don’t want to condescend if you’ve already done the basics, but a lot of computers came with their own audio management software (like why the fuck do I need Dell-branded volume control that adds no additional functionality?) and that software was rarely if ever updated. Were I trouble-shooting that problem I’d download the latest driver from your computer manufacturer (even better if you can get one direct from the motherboard or soundcard manufacturer), uninstall any vendor-provided audio control software, uninstall the audio drivers and then reinstall telling Windows where the audio drivers are and allowing the system to either choose generic ones provided by MS for legacy hardware or the the latest ones provided by the hardware manufacturer (if available).
Oh, I’m okay with doing all that, but I’ve only had the new PC + O/S for a few months, and I’m still finding my way around bits ‘n pieces of it, so until now I’ve avoided raising the hood and going “well, that looks important!” and screwing with it. I did manage to solve an “infinite re-boot” problem about two months ago by opening the case and checking out all the physical connections to see if they were properly seated, and sure enough, a connector to the boot drive had wiggled loose (for some reason when the techs built it for me, they failed to engage the small snap on the plug’s edge).
It’s not a game-killer for me, so I’m not all that worked up about it, but yeah, your series of steps sounds logical. Thanks.
And folks say Linux is complicated.
If you’re relatively new to Win10, but pretty comfortable with previous Windows iterations you’ll very much like right clicking on the start menu icon. You can jump straight to add remove programs (though rebranded as Apps and Features needlessly) and Device Manager from there without digging through the Control Pane uh I mean “Settings” windows.
Linux was complicated…in 1995.
I have no hope Adobe will go back to selling the software without a subscription. Adobe has a history of shitting on its customers.
I wen’t to a dinner hosted at the Adobe Building in Lehi, UT. When i went in, something about the atmosphere just turned me off. It was later at night, and still a few people working in the dark lit areas. It just eked of depression.
That’s kind of how I feel about casinos: a feeling of bright, colorful, frantic, jangling despair and hopelessness.
For some people, the slot machine is the last stop before the casket.
The amount of behavioral science that goes into a casino is scary; from music, to placement of tables/slots, to even pumping in certain scents through the vents. All designed to keep you there.
The casino that Neph goes to for the Viva event pumps in the smell of freshly baked cookies..or at least that is what it smells like to me.
The last time I was in a casino to gamble was when Mr. Mojeaux and I were first married. (Note: My favorite movie theater was in the casino complex and I went there all the time because they had a lot of screens and I would take in 3-4 movies in a day.)
We each had $20 to blow. Now, when I say “blow,” I mean, “come out with more than you went in with.” When he says “blow,” he means to shove in a slot machine and leave it there. Other than that, I don’t gamble.
Firstly, all that light and noise and jangling and despair drove me mad. I wanted to run to the car, curl up in the back seat in a fetal position and sob. So I was pissy almost as soon as we walked in.
Secondly, he really did just shove it all in a slot machine and watched the do-hickeys turn and that was that. It was $20. Nothing to get mad about and we’d budgeted for it.
But by that time I was pissed off royally.
I dragged him to the blackjack tables. Won his $20 back plus an extra $20 so as not to feel like I came out just square and then dragged him home.
That was 17 years ago. I haven’t been in one since.
noise and jangling and despair
I’m not surprised that LAS exists
I’m surprised that folk fly across country for it
Oh, we didn’t. We have “riverboat” casinos here. It’s just a few miles away.
“Going to the boats” used to be a thing.
I went to a casino in Missurah once, on a business trip. I put $50 down on black at the roulette wheel, and it came up. I thanked the croupier, and walked away, trying not to laugh at the surprised look on his face.
+1 Passenger 57
Gustave – well, it worked in that case.
“I’m not surprised that LAS exists
I’m surprised that folk fly across country for it”
I enjoy Las Vegas. I don’t like gambling, but I like the nice restaurants, the comedy shows, Cirque du Soleil, people watching…
Both my Adobe subscription apps (Photoshop and Acrobat) and my new Win 10 O/S occasionally want me to sync/backup to the cloud. I just keep turning those options off, but they’re still useful to me in that they remind me to backup my data locally. ;-)
Finally got around to reading Things Fall Apart last week. Thought it was quite good and can only imagine how it was received when it first came out.
Also Robert Conquest’s Dragons of Expectation. Decent, but not as good as Reflections on a Ravaged Century.
Recently started Spin Control by Chris Moriarty, the second book in a trilogy. I read Spin State earlier this year and enjoyed it so bought the next installment. Gave up half way through but had lost interest about 100 pages earlier and persisted hoping it would pick up.
Things Fall Apart was required reading for one of my son’s Summer classes a couple years ago. I was surprised at the story quality and have reflected on the book several times since reading. Unfortunately, Beloved was also required – Pulitzer should be ashamed.
Maybe guide him toward Kindred by Octavia Butler. Far superior to Beloved on the same subject matter.
I’m about half way through Things Fall Apart. Third it as well.
Remo Williams.
I loved those serialized novels and others similar to them when I was a young’un.
Doc Savage. Mac Bolen. Casca.
Tell the same story, with some minor changes and pretty soon there were a hundred books in the series.
Same. I got the first bunch on Kindle and blew through them in a weekend.
Fantastic books.
Arthur Hailey (note: not Alex Haley) was really bad about this. Nobody would ever mistake him for a deep author, but he told the exact same story 5 or 6 or 10 times, just changing names and the milieu / type of business the protagonist was in. His books were somewhat interesting from a non-fiction perspective, because he’d do a deep dive into the specific business and riddle his books with interesting facts about it, but his story was repeated over and over.
I have a favorite author who does this. I can’t quit her, though I want to.
I hope someone pulls me up short when I start doing this because I don’t want to be That Author.
See also: Dan Brown
+ however many books he has written.
At least Airport gave us the hilariously bad sequels.
This is true, along with the occasionally funny Airplane series.
Airplane is based as much on Zero Hour! as it is Airport
Zero Hour! is actually a pretty good movie; it’s just a shame that it was parodied for Airplane because now you can’t watch it and not think of Airplane.
I am in ‘finish your goddamn books’ mode. They are starting to stack up.
Finished Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me. Good book with some good life lessons, but I got a little tired of him by the end. Still, an amazing dude who accomplished some crazy things.
Almost done with Deep Nutrition by Cate Shanahan. A really interesting book about how fucked up our food has gotten over the last 100 years. Almost too thorough at times. If you are a nutrition nerd, you will love this book.
I also started Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty. I’ll hopefully finish before next month’s WAWR.
On Hyperbole’s recommendation I’m working my way through The Dublin Trilogy, which of course is 4 books. The first, as Hyp said, is funny as hell. I would irritate my wife by laughing out loud at the antics of three really good characters. Book two took a darker turn. Not as funny, but a good yarn. I’m in the middle of book three – a prequel – and Detective Bunny McGarry is becoming one of my favorite characters.
Not the deepest, but they are fun books. The Irish slang is funny and I learned about hurling – which is way different than Wayne Campbell described.
I am in ‘finish your goddamn books’ mode. They are starting to stack up.
You shouldn’t look at my unread book pile.
learned about hurling
As an Englishman I worked with put it, only the Irish would put 30 men on a field with sticks and call it a sport.
It looks like fun. I’d like to try it sometime.
Re-reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
I ain’t reading. I need to, but I ain’t. Vegas is supposed to have a BLM protest today…so hopefully the city won’t burn. Interesting thing is they are adding people to “why” they are protesting. Here in Vegas it is for Floyd and someone named Korchinski in Toronto?
MSBC’s Baghdad Bob moment was mocked on the last thread – but it can’t be mocked enough.
“It’s mostly a protest” here is like saying the Lincoln assassination was “mostly a theatrical production”
“Other than that, how was Western Civilization, Mister Man-on-the-street?”
Again, some white folk just seem pissed off that black folk beat them to the boogaloo.
Huh?
What do you think overthrowing a state looks like?
Meh. Leadership will hunker down and wait it out. This will burn itself out fairly quickly.
Politicans hanging from posts. Cops who try to protect them shit dead.
The boogaloo would start as people fighting the state and degenerate into indiscriminate violence that eventually destroys everything, which is why I am not a proponent.
These “protesters” just skipped the fighting the state part and went straight to the wanton destruction part.
Our discussion yesterday about preppers and wanting SHTF scenarios to use their “skills” and “stuff”, otherwise known as Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo.
Well, there is also a bit of finger wagging on social media about the difference between a “riot” and a “protest” that seems hypocritical coming from weekend Seal Team 6 cosplayers.
At least the Bundy boys put their money where there mouth is.
I would bet good money they’re scared. Cosplaying is safe and fun and you can pretend. They will not be on the front lines when the world starts to burn.
Yeah, I clearly missed something.
Huh is a word that has racist roots, just like the rest of the English language. Begone oppressor.
*drops protests, starts looting
I laughed
laugh also has racist roots
I worry for you bacon, should someone as apple-wood aromatic and crispy be entering lawless spaces where one might be say torn to pieces like Pentheus and eaten?
He who is cured shall never die.
Sounds like a curse once the tearing and masticating and digesting begins.
A curse it is my friend. Just like all the other tasty treats out there…we are popular yet all it gets is us masticated by the masses. I’m contemplating a hashtag campaign: #savethebaconeatmorepussy
The Boogaloo types seem to me to be a rather small group, albeit disproportionately noisy. I know a fair number of heavily armed government haters, but none of them have ever advocated armed revolt, at least not audibly to me.
Yeah their editorial decision to frame it as a protest and not even consider the riotous acts is just as dangerous and dumb as OMB calling them thugs and will shoot to kill, or whatever he rattled off.
Why does everyone come to me with their problems on a friday afternoon? Especially when it’s been broken for a while?
Because they can dump the problem onto the IT group. Then when they get asked about it on Monday, they can say they reached out to IT last week, but haven’t heard anything back yet. They’ll leave out that they didn’t reach out to IT until 16:00 Friday afternoon.
Yeeeepppp. 100% CYA move.
Just be like my IT and respond and/or call on the weekend.
Because you could’ve called them back three days ago but got sidetracked by something?
Nope, these are new issues.
*new as in not brought to our attention before.
How do you know its been broken a while if you just found out about it now?
How long is a while?
How is new?
Because there are logs and the complaint included a timeframe.
It’s almost as if you don’t Tech
My personal favorite is people calling in a “high priority” ticket for an issue that’s been ongoing for several weeks.
If it’s taken you weeks to call it in, it’s not a high priority issue.
From the guy that asked how engine braking works…
Since when does technology have anything to do with tech?
One of my lefty friends went on Twitter to say that looting is not protesting. I was kind of shocked, actually.
Everyone has a line. For some it is steady and others it moves with the wind, but a line nonetheless.
Since it’s right down the fucking street, I haven’t heard or read too many proggies defending this. My lefty cousin called my uncle last night to borrow a shotgun, as the ‘peaceful protestors’ were getting close to his house. Same guy drones on all the time about gun violence.
Heh. Your uncle didn’t recite a speech about violence never solving anything?
Or that surely the police would come protect him, his family and home?
Or how universal background checks pushed for by democrats would make that a Felony Offense without a mandated waiting period to do a background check.
Oh believe me, we will have this conversation.
I did see several leftists saying it but it was on someone else’s wall after they said they didn’t approve and I thought it rude to interject in someone’s space like that. They were not just saying it was protesting but that it was righteous.
I think a better term for it would be terrorism. Random violence against the innocent to achieve a political end.
It’s also just a really really bad tactic. These protesters should read Machiavelli’s discussion on Moses.
Worse than bad. Within minutes of the looting of the first Target what had been outrage over the murder and sympathy for the protester’s cause turned to disdain. They took what credibility they had and laid a giant turd on it.
They should fire their PR person.
I larfed.
*CNN anchor averts gaze*
Yes. When your first day’s protesting almost immediately turns into thievery, forgive me if I question your sincerity.
LOL
Machiavelli is not amused
On the issue of mechanical matters, how does engine braking work, and does with work only with certain transmission types?
Isn’t that just down-shifting?
I don’t know.
Yes.
Depends on the engine. My understanding is that straight down-shifting doesn’t do as much for diesels.
I have noticed it doesn’t do much in the manuals that I have had, 2 I4 civics which have very light clutches/trans. and a v6 Mazda that had a heavier clutch/trans. But I don’t recall the latter having a lot of effect.
no tranny needed with a Jake Brake
you can brake with most transmissions
FWIW: changing brakes is easier and cheaper than changing clutches
I think some people are unnecessarily hard on their clutches. I put a lot of miles on mine. I had a new engine and new head gasket (twice), but my clutch never had to be replaced (or my brakes) and I used my transmission all the time (especially in the snow).
I put a quarter-million miles on my 5-speed Z3, never needed toreplace the clutch.
It’s the partial release and revving that fucks them fast. I never use them to brake, however.
I always released fully and never revved. The goal was a smooth transition all the way down to stop.
This is kinda related to the MacGyvering of the derelict truck, where the brakes may not be in good working order.
Since it still has a non-functional engine, I was wondering if engaging the clutch would help it shed speed.
you would probably pull the old head(s) to keep the old engine from braking all the time
but you;re using the old clutch to manage the new engine, so you could engine break still
is that what you mean?
Well, your suggestion was to do a belt drive to the main shaft, so the main transmission would be disengaged most of the time.
ah, never guessed that would sell
see your point
if you leave the old head(s) on, you would have some second-law braking: the ideal gas portions of the expansion/compression are opposed and balanced, but it’s not adiabatic; the heat generated would come from shaft power; there would be some wheezing from the piston rings, and the old valves wouldn’t seat well, so I don’t know that it’s going to count for much
but overcoming the reciprocating inertia would be a bit of a jolt, and it’s a trick that can be played over and over until something seizes up
Manually seize the engine (weld, stuff wood down the cylinders, strap the flywheel etc.)
then the clutch is a brake all the way to full stop.
Manually seize the engine
no doubt: just fill the cylinders with water
of course, locking any wheel is going to induce a spin
one problem with a belt drive and braking is that braking loads create an order of magnitude more torque than acceleration (in other words, no streetable car can accelerate as hard as it can break): if you use that same drive system in the breaking, the belt’s tension, friction, and heat-handling requirements will so much more difficult to achieve
Transphobe!
*downshifts
To add on to that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_brake
Fun fact- in an empty truck (say a 42,500 lb M977 HEMTT) never engage the jake-brake on a wet road. Thats one of those lessons I only needed to learn once.
By putting the vehicle in a lower gear without feeding the engine fuel, it forces the transmission to turn the motor instead of combustion – dragging down the momentum. Works with any kind of manual and any auto where you can manually select gear.
You push a button that releases the engine from its mounts, this causes the engine to drop directly onto the road below. The weight in the iron block causes enough friction to, in theory, stop the runaway big rig.
MS in with the proper glib response.
Engine braking: Engaging a lower gear without fueling the engine and using the inertia and friction of the engine to slow the vehicle down. Just as. you begin slowing the instant you let off of the gas, putting the transmission into a lower gear slows. you down faster. When you get to coasting speed put the transmission into yet a lower gear again.
I dont know about how that wears on a transmission.
Thank you.
how that wears on a transmission
I’m not a transmission guy. But the answer simply depends on whether the design well anticipates the use. It’s like a pre-fab structure: it might when installed hold up the world, but, if you pick it up in the wrong place, its own weight might tear it apart.
I’m specifically thinking about gear lash: in braking, it’s the back of the tooth that is loaded. Is that side of the tooth cut, finished, hardened, and plated the same as the traction side? I have no idea.
With a synchronizer, I would guess that a trans doesn’t care which way the load is applied. I was taught to pop the accelerator so that the engine RPM overshoots the sync, then the gears are somewhat matched for load and speed while meshing and the teeth are landing on the lagging side.
Of course, for the story, this is some one-off heroic melt-it-all-down stunt.
For a one off emergency the hero of our story could use a truck with no fuel but a rotating engine and transmission to replicate brakes. To maximize the effect he could seal the intake. Engine breaking is mainly due to the creation of a partial vacuum being created against a closed throttle in a gasoline engine. In a Diesel engine this would do little as they don’t have throttle control, only fuel control (that’s why J brakes are needed).
good point
I guess I was thinking you pull the cams so all the valves are as closed as they can be
if you’ve got open valves, you’d need to seal both the intake and the exhaust
bigger problem just occurred to me:
how is he going to get the brakes released at all?
that helicopter engine ain’t got no compressor, and the old hoses would probably be leaky: the pads are going to be clamped in place
if we use the old engine to spin the old compressor so we can release the brakes, then we have brakes
or the plot needs his pulling the pads; I don’t know if you can get to the springs to pop them off without pulling the tires and the drums
I guess I need to understand the chassis involved, the plot, the conditions, and the situation: more challenges by the minute
Oh, dear. Such nervousness!
For those that have talked about writing, Suthenboy, Mojeaux, etc, I have just finished editing my second novel. It’s about coal mining in McDowell country in the early ’70s. I have also edited work for UnCivil–that was a while ago and I hope to god that I did more than a good enough job. I’m terrified that he thinks that I didn’t. I don’t mean to call you or myself UnCiv, but that was a first attempt at me and I took it seriously. We shared thoughts and the contract was honorably paid. I still think about that to this day, whether or not I did a good enough job for you.
I am already working on copy writing, but I also would love the opportunity to work on copy editing, proofreading, or editing in general. This just seemed like a good place to post this. It’s a legitimate passion of mine and something that I think would be hard to explain to others why I like it so much. I’ve written for Glibs and I write on my own, but I love the disciple that editing requires. I’m working hard to perfect it, though I consider myself to have a better eye than most.
I will end my GoFundMe soon and I can’t be more than thankful for everyone’s efforts to help me get back on my feet. This is another way to help. Whether or not you have a finished work that needs fresh eyes, thinking about how and intro or conclusion can be improved, or anything in between, I will dive at the opportunity to help.
Thank you guys so much. I’m sorry that I posted this on this post, as I certainly don’t want to detract from the stories you all lovingly (or sometimes not so much!) about what you’re reading, but it seemed like a place where my words would make the most sense.
I’ve been reading The Poisoners Handbook by Deborah Blum. It is so well written and focuses on Jazz-age poisonings and how scientists and the police had to figure out how to solve this intense river of murders. Every chapter is about a different poison. It’s difficult to create a story in your own head better than the ones that existed in real history. This is something that has actively helped me establish how well a writer can best describe their ideas to their readers.
Thanks! I hope something works out, and either way–enjoy your reading! Y’all are the best!
HOLY FUCK that was longer than I intended. Apologies!
Wall of Text hits for 483 damage.
It’s not that long. It’s only one screen worth of text (I don’t have my browser maximized).
Complaining about walls of text on the what are we reading now post seems kind of OT.
Have you ever read anything about the poison scandal at Louis XIV’s court? It’s a pretty insane story.
(PS- Sorry if this isn’t very relevant, but your discussion of jazz era poisoning made me think of it)
OT opinion solicitation:
My most recent instructor recommended joining USCCA, especially for the legal assistance. Do any of belong?
They have lots of YouTube ads.
I do not. I have not looked into them and have no opinion on them.
USCCA partners with Liberty Doll. I haven’t looked into them beyond noting she often mentions them in her videos.
Another list?
I have a list of lists that I am on….the ones I know about.
I always look at these 3 factors with any CC legal defense program:
1) Do they cover all instances of self-defense or only firearm?
2) Do they front the money for bail/legal or do they just reimburse?
3) Do they cover your household or just you?
Some of the programs have all sorts of loopholes, especially with the first two, that render them pointless except for very specific scenarios.
Looks like USCCA is yes on the first, front the money on the second, and have a spousal discount for the third. Seems like one of the better programs.
Thanks very much to you all.
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1265267329857978369
Acting like you don’t understand a meme seems like a really weak move.
Raises hand – I don’t get it.
Don’t get the meme or don’t get the fake outrage at the meme?
The meme.
The dancing pallbearer footage is typically put together with an unfortunate situation where someone did something stupid or said something stupid and you cut away to them dancing with the coffin.
So “you ain’t black” Joe Biden’s campaign is on the coffin.
Thank you!
Twitter doesn’t load on my home machine (And I’m not really bothered by that), so I don’t get it.
Saw your propopsed fall itenary.
If I may, since you’re going to be within 2 hours of it at the correct time of year, do consider spending a day at this.
It’s what every other renfest on the planet aspires to be.
Sounds like a place where I’d find crowds.
Vast.
Some in chaimnail bikinis. Some who are, but really shouldn’t be.
Surprisingly good entertainers. Surprisingly expensive weaponry.
What’s the price/quality ratio on the armaments?
Off scale.
No real comparison. Lifetime guarantee, even against abuse or inapprproate usage. If irreparable, will be replaced (I saw a customer bring in the twisted remnants of two sowrs that were in a house fire). All indiividually made, no duplicates. Some of the steel is handmade, but honestly, the commercial billet stuff performs just as well or better.
Prices at least 20x higher than anything else there. Swords start at ~2k, knives at $500.
AFAIK, no upper limit on price. Lots of pieces in the five-digit range, one at $1MM.
no objection
but the tour at Spoetzl and then dinner in Lockhart or Luling is how I’d spend that same time
@Grammar Folks/HM
Was talking with my daughter and realized that she was mixing up scary with scared. As in i would ask if she was scary, and she would say “No, I’m not, I’m only afraid of nightmares”. Made me think about 1. The construction of adjectives and if such mix ups are common? And if there were any other good examples of this.
Walked around the block today. Haven’t taken any oxycodone so far.
So far, so good.
Good to hear. I hate pills.
We really are the same person. Except i went for a walk around the block and about sneezed my eyes out.
And i’m glad that you are making progress.
I sneezed once on my walk and thought my guts were going to end up on the sidewalk.
I bet it’s nice and toasty there right now.
So, the House is futzing around again with the PPP rules?
Anyone following this? Any insights?
Yes. Cronyism is a bipartisan issue.
Yes, see below:
Lower to 60% from 75% the minimum portion of the PPP loan that must be spent on payroll. The rest must be spent on rent, utilities and other business-related expenses.
Extend from eight to 24 weeks the amount of time the loan can cover.
Extend from two to five years the time new PPP loans must be paid back if the amount provided doesn’t convert into a grant.
Thanks!
One thing it did add that caught my eye was delaying payment of employer payroll taxes. Other things in it are some maturity rules on the loans and eligibility it looks like.
I am not personally dealing with any PPP loans but my accountant friend/coworker is and according to her changes are needed apparently because the original rules created virtually impossible conditions for the grant because of internal contradictions is how the timelines, percentages and rules played out. That said she is deeply skeptical thatthese specific changes will fix it.
https://twitter.com/johnnydollar01/status/1266116245268697094?s=20
Lol
Wow, just… wow. This from someone who I have to doubt her actual name, because of the depth and breadth of her dishonesty.
Whatever, Lizzy, go have a beer with your hubby. And discuss truth.
That is what people can’t see. They are saying that the populace is too stupid to think critically about what they read and if it was said/written and posted/published, it must be truth.
*not a far stretch because people will read something from what they have deemed their ‘trusted’ source and not even question it.
Late-in-the-game on-topic two cents’ worth: I finally got around to starting Pratchett’s Moving Pictures, a stand-alone Discworld novel, after Neph was kind enough to send me his spare copy many months ago. (Thanks again!) Enjoyable silliness, which is welcome right about now. The way Pratchett’s sending up the movie biz made me wonder if its writing coincided with the production of the Colour of Magic film, but the book seems to predate the film by a goodly number of years.
Re: writing – trying to get back the groove I was in last summer when I took an online fiction writing course from the local community college. Just need to pick up one of my works-in-progress and have some fun with it.
Glad you enjoyed it. If you like PTerry’s writing, I highly recommend the Watch cycle of the Discworld novels. Vimes is the hero we need.
Pratchett always cheers me up. Hogfather is one of my Christmas rituals.
Having fun with your work is key. If you have fun, your reader has fun. I tell my drug dealer (APRN) that I can’t be completely sane because if I don’t cry, my reader doesn’t cry.
Moving Pictures
*YYZ intensifies*
We shall break the chains of Auto Zone and that McDonald’s franchise!
Wonder what she said when Chocolate Jesus sent actual munitions against an American citizen..
https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1266397687915692032?s=20
Or funded the Legit enemies of the american people.
White rioters don’t get to hide behind the black protesters whose communities they just vandalized
Currently reading “Extreme Economies: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future” which I heard about on the Econtalk podcast.
Just finished “The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta” which I read because he allegedly roamed around in my backyard, maybe literally.
A biography of Patrick Henry, text booky, slow going trying to remember the names of the players and places.
I’m not a fiction person, except real life seems like its really fiction.
The locations of some of the Twin City protests (fires) are very close to my previous business ventures or residences. One (Lloyd’s Pharmacy) was diagonally across the intersection from a store I managed, in the older days. Glad I made that break when I did.
Perhaps some better news for our fellow California Glibbies:
https://reason.com/2020/05/29/californias-covid-19-shutdown-was-driven-by-science-until-it-suddenly-wasnt/