memfree

Well, I just made guacamole, so I’ll feed you that with nachos and fire up some old movies with old music – big bands, jitterbugging and stuff like that. In particular, I wanna show you the 1933 short “That’s the Spirit” with young band leader Nobel Sissel.

Or chicken salad or even egg salad sandwiches. Whenever I get a rotisserie chicken, I immediately cut it up for other meals: eat the legs now, and pull out a big pot; cut off the breast and bag it, cut off the thigh meat (no bones) and every other bit of meat and bag that, break the carcass along the spine and stick it in the pot. Add water and boil/simmer for 4-6 hours (use a timer so you don’t forget to turn it off). Once the pot is done and then cool enough to stick yuor hands in, fish out every piece of cartlidge and bone you can find – especially the teeny ones. There will be a lot of meat, too. I generally pile the meat in a bowl and chuck the bones in a bag destined for the trash. I then strain the small amount of remaining liquid, but it back in the pot with the bowl of meat and add carrots, onions, celery, spices, and whatever else I feel like – from lemons to salsa, depending on leftovers. This becomes about two generous servings of still-boney soup (sometimes more).

Oh, I forgot: the point was that you can chop up the leftover bagged chicken to make chicken salad: mayo, relish, celery, spices, maybe onion, maybe mustard, maybe parsley. Same basic idea for egg salad… and you can boil the eggs for 7 minutes in the eventual soup.

Still definitional. The point of umbrellas is to shield/protect from the weather. A standard construction is: “Umbrellas shield against rain,” or “The umbrella protects you from rain,” or “An umbrella keeps you dry when the weather is wet.”

All the types of writing being discussed are about unrelated things where a common aspect is brought out. So “Faith is our umbrella” implies that belief in something (God/gods/karma/goodwill) acts as a shield against bad things in the same way an umbrella shields against rain. “She’s stacked like bricks” implies she is visually pleasing and ‘well built’ in the same way bricks are stacked to be both solidly built and visually pleasing. A defintional description would be, “She has the body of a beauty queen.”

Technical writing is not supposed to use metaphors, similes, allegories or analogies except in very specific situations where the technical details must be further explained. Creative and descriptive writing may use all manner of devices to build vivid imagery.

That is more of a definition.
A simile might be:

• The baby bird opened her mouth like an umbrella.
• She’s stacked like bricks.

A metaphor might be:

• Faith is our umbrella.
• She’s a brickhouse.

‘like’ or ‘as’.

That’s similes.

Now you have to explain similes and metaphors. Oh, oh! and do fables and parables!

Let this be a reminder to all called to jury duty (grand or otherwise) that you do not have to convict.

Reid was arrested in July for allegedly resisting attempts to restrain her after she refused to back away from ICE officers who were conducting arrests outside the D.C. Jail. In the process, they said, an FBI agent received scrapes to the back of her hand.

and:

Reid’s attorneys, assistant federal public defenders Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, say she was arrested by officers who didn’t want to be filmed. Video evidence presented during a preliminary hearing captured an ICE officer telling Reid during her arrest, “You should have just stayed home and minded your business.”

Lady is trying to film. Legal. An agent gets scrapes while trying to stop her. Lady is charged with “an enhanced felony version of an assault charge that requires inflicting bodily injury on a federal officer and carries up to eight years in prison.”

Say NO.

But she also headed the EPA (declaring the 9/11 air ‘safe’) and endorsed Kamala in the last election, so the big cheeto has to hate her. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Todd_Whitman#Post_9/11_air_quality_claims_controversy

Ah, the Fundamental attribution error

We didn’t learn bases until 4th or 5th grade, and then we did all kinds of calculations with them until we moved on to the next topic. Base 2 took too long. Base 8 reminded me of Tom Leher. Base 16 was cool cuz: computers! We didn’t have enough symbols for base 60, but I think we played with a few base 20+.

Past tense about passed intents?

…get drafted to Viet Nam in 1968.

Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.

You’ve got a lot of good points, but I want to quibble about this one. I’m not an expert, but everything I’ve read about childhood development tells me toys like blocks, string, dirt/sand/water, and paper/pencils are the best toys. They are open-ended and drive critical thinking, exploration, and creativity. TV is the worst as it encourages passivity. Even when educational, TV encourages kids to sit and accept input rather than doing anything with that information. Yes, minecraft is akin to online blocks, and it does have some logic training, but it teaches in-game physics instead of letting toddlers discover real-world physics.

Mix of sad and angry. I see these broodmares popping out kids and I think of the movie Idiocracy because all of the more thoughtful people I know limited how many kids they had while the people having litters of kids all seem to be short-sighted selfish assholes. The thoughtful folks worry about saving college funds for the kids. The selfish ones don’t. They don’t have any plans, they are too busy making babies – and those kids are going to be predisposed to be the same way which will make matters worse for the handful of kids raised by thoughtful parents.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and maybe Gary Cooper in Beau Geste, but really I was smitten by that whole story there rather than one character. Both stories are about gallant men and nasty villains.

In high school, I switched to idolizing Kurt Vonnegut and thought maybe I should be a writer, but I don’t have much talent for it. I never lost the general sense I got from all three: one must stand up for the poor and helpless in a world where the powerful will treat them with cruelty.

As an adult, I understand that the movies are both flawed on that message in that Robin Hood turns out to be the very sort of noble doing the oppressing (but he’s one of the good ones, right? Right?) and all of Beau Geste is about excusing an upper class Lady’s crime and fighting natives who don’t ‘appreciate’ colonization. I still love Vonnegut as an author, but have some criticisms of him, too.

In addition to the articles on censorship, remember that the can media preemptively bias their content by only hiring those who demonstrate a shared point of view. This is done before any need for actively censoring jouirnalists – just hire the faithful rather than objective investigators.

Worry that being invisible did not make me invincible. Getting hit by a car or bullets or such would still kill me. I’d still make noise stepping on twigs and have a wake trying to swim a stream, so I’d have to keep being stealthy. Presumably, I’d still smell like a tiger and send prey fleeing. If I did catch prey, their blood would be visible on my claw and teeth, wouldn’t it? Would the chunks of flesh I eat stay visible as I gulp them down or would my invisibility mask them once they were inside me? If someone shot me as I mangled their their livestock, would my bleeding wound leave a blood spoor for hunters to follow?

All and all, I would try my best to be a silent hunter in unpopulated areas. Trying to move through city sidewalks would surely lead to my capture.

We didn’t ‘go’ places. We just wandered around. Not quite this long ago, but like this (source):

This is equivalent to your parents saying "you may only talk to people at school

You’ve got my point backwards. I’m saying kids would be better prepared for life if they talked to people, and particularly if they talked to people they don’t particularly care about rather than only swapping phone memes with kids they already know. Also, no one is saying there should be a complete ban on phones. The article simply suggests keeping the bedroom screen-free (better for sleep, studying, etc.). I went further to point out that as we’ve become more ‘social’ on phones we’re less social in society.

First bit: Why do we as a country (speaking from the U.S.) allow police to assualt the citizenry? Why aren’t we all in our town halls demanding the removal of any cops who handcuff kids, tackle people who don’t speak English, or fire guns at anyone who isn’t at that moment attacking someone? The police should be under our control by our consent. We elect their bosses if not the sheriffs themselves. Why aren’t we showing up in numbers in person to demand better?

Second bit: I know there are still some communities where kids can ride their bikes without fear because the parents still know everyone on the block. They might not like all the neighbors, but they know them and aren’t calling the cops on them. The bad part of that is a distrust of outsiders and unwillingness to accept anything different. Humans fall into us/them thinking too easily. As far as I have heard/read/seen, the best way to mitigate that is first-hand exposure to the ‘other’ because people tend to be better than whatever sterotype someone worries about. Reminiscing here: I remember visiting my grandparents and having them walk me into various houses on the block to chat with neighbors. It never occurred to me as a bored child that this was socially incorporating me into an insular community that might have been sucpsious of a strange kid biking around the same streets over and over if they didn’t know I belonged there.

That said, I don’t understand how the kids like me who grew up running wild wherever we wanted became parents who didn’t allow any roaming, and who’s kids then became adults that will call the cops before asking the neighbors. Maybe we move too often. Maybe we fear litigation. Mostly, I suspect, we work too many hours for not enough money such that adults don’t have the energy to form old-style communities where people banded together (both for good and bad), and instead everyone only bitches online just as I am doing right now.

I understand that it is harder to bond to someone who isn’t immediately digitally available. I understand that "kids these days! " do their social stuff online, but at the same time, they seem to have largely lost all skill at interacting with real humans of slight or no aquaintence.

It is easy to make sarcastic comments on your phone about how stupid this or that is. The sterotypical basement dweller can snark all day. What takes social skill is actively engaging with people you don’t care about and finding common ground.

Yes, digital people track some of this on facebook and such, but in real life: in which community groups do they participate? Do they know what their neighbors do and what they like beyond snapshots of events? That is: yeah, they saw that pic of that cookout, but did they know that he volunteer teaches English as a second language Tuesday and Thursday at the library? When was the last time they went into a neighbor’s home (or had one visit theirs) to share a cup of coffee and complain about that road that needs fixing and who to push about it?

Edited to replace ‘you’ with ‘they’ so there’d be no confusion that I mean multiple ‘you’ readers rather than a single person.