claycle

I have a sneaking suspicion that at least in some US states this would be problematic with local health departments. I do not know, but it seems these departments might look askance at Joe Schmo handing an un-verifiably “clean” container into the food service area and hands of the workers.

It constantly makes me smile, whether it’s being smart, the actors are giving perfectly calibrated performances, or the action suddenly goes wham-bam VATS over the top.

3 eps in. Happy.

Perhaps, but middle-schoolers genuinely stink to high heaven, especially after P/E. I think one can imagine more obvious/less conspiratorial reasons for showers being mandatory.

If I have to pick one drink to take to a desert island, it’s the classic Sazerac.

That is what I will want most of the time when I want a cocktail. However, I will allow a few others to enter rotation, depending on mood, time/temperature, and place:

1. Margarita.
2. Vesper.
3. Pastis.

And, finally, my embarrassing guilty pleasure (which I never order except when I am in company I know well or I am on a Caribbean island): piña colada.

I was just at Canyon de Chelly a few months ago. It was so lovely I shed a tear.

Every single day, when I am out walking my dog, a jogger comes by smelling of like a shit-ton of soap/perfume/deodorant/body spray - I nearly gag. These guys (and sometimes girls) are so terrified they might smell sweaty when doing something, you know, sweaty, like jogging a couple of miles…it boggles my mind.

Who taught people we have to smell like artificial bouquets of flowers all the time, even when exercising, ffs?

We swap between two movies each year.

Even years it is A LION IN WINTER, an amazing film with insanely quotable dialogue. (EDIT: Why? On “star power” alone, this movie is outrageously cast.)

Odd years it is A CHRISTMAS STORY, which is equally quotable (perhaps more so). (EDIT: Why? Because so many things in this film ring true to my own childhood - having to have last-minute dinner at a Chinese restaurant because of a disaster, for example, or begging for a b-b-gun…)

Soap: a bar of unscented oatmeal-based soap

For deodorant: I have had very good experience with “Thai stone” style salt-based deodorants. These work simply by making your skin inhospitable to odor-causing bacteria while not causing you irritations. You need to apply it liberally (after slightly wetting the stone, I just count out 8 strokes under each arm), but a single stone will last you … a very long time … and it does really work for a whole day. It has no scent, per se, so you will just smell like you smell without the sulfurous bad smells caused by BO bacteria.

Or so I gather…

Steel-cut oatmeal is super-easy, set-and-forget (1 cup water, 1/4 steel-cut oats, pinch of salt, Bring water to boil, stir in oats, salt, lower to bare simmer, uncovered 30 minutes, flavor as desired, eat).

But that can get boring. For something a little more exciting, super-nutritious, and almost zero-prep, do a sort of Norwegian-style open-face cracker (no, you don’t need “the tubes”, but if you can find them, knock yourself out). For this I take a tin of fish (usually smoked salmon or trout, but sardines, mackerel, or even tuna would work fine), a piece of cracking toast or a Scandy flatbread cracker (Wasa, knekkebrod), and some kind of “schmear” (a thin spread of cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, or - my favorite - Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel Yogurt Dip/Spread). I can get all these ingredients both cheaply and well-made at Trader Joe’s (TJ Smoked Salmon in a tin, TJ Norwegian seeded flatbread, and the aforementioned dip). For a little additional oomph toss on tomato or cucumber slices.

I really dug the music in CP2077 (and, especially, Phantom Liberty). The use of leitmotifs lifted the score. More so than in a similar game (GTA5), I really enjoyed the radio stations, too.

I also fondly recall the soundtrack of RDR2.

Does all the great music in Fallout4 count?

I just finished my CP2077 (first) play-thru. I had no fore-knowledge of game or outcomes. When I play RPGs, I abide by a strict “choices matter - there are no mulligans”, in that I won’t fish reloaded saves for “better” outcomes. If I make a bad choice, I live with it.

About a week before I finished, I was having dinner with some friends who had played it already and they were probing me to see how I think the game would end. I said, matter of factly, “Oh, I think my V is doomed, like Arthur [RDR2] was doomed.”

And if there was a magic happy ending in Phantom Liberty, as there seemed there might be because Sol pointedly asked V twice “Are you sure you don’t want it?”, my V had given it to Songbird.

When I came to the pinch at climax where Jonny presents you with your options and you have to pick what to do, I probably sat on that dialog wheel for 15 minutes. I’d vacillate between the options presented and listen and watch carefully how Jonny reacted and think things through. I had played a V who was never comfortable with the loss of his autonomy and desired, more than anything, to live his own life his own way. This V was also sort of a mensch, too, inclined to empathy and sympathy. He had pity for Jonny’s situation. After much contemplation, V reached out to Panam - I would say almost desperately as it seemed the only path that really gave V any hope - and events ensued and they arrived at what I called “The Sunset Ending” (which I considered a great success).

I felt I had arrived at a very satisfactory conclusion for this V and I really have no desire (in a good way!) to play CP more - the story was over, if bittersweet.

The feeling of completeness matched reaching the Sunrise Ending in RDR2, which kinda devastated me.

It can do both. As indicated, all’y’all is optional and probably falling out of fashion. While I’ll use y’all in almost any sentence, I’ll only pop out an all’y’all when adopting speech patterns around other native speakers.

When we are in foreign Romance language countries and guesting with people, we always teach them how to say hello in Texan. Once, in a farmhouse in Burgundy, I was eating dinner with a farmer and his wife. A simple meal of eggs stewed in wine, bread, and cheese. The conversation, in French, turned to speaking some English, and we offered to teach them how to say “Bonjour” in Texan. We taught them “Howdy, y’all.” The elderly farmer sat back in his chair stroking his chin, then in a perfect country drawl repeated it back to us, sounding like a native Texan. We decided all farmers must have the same accent worldwide. EDIT: In fact, what most surprised us was that he nailed the initial H sound, something most people in France we encountered had trouble with.

We continued the conversation and said that in Texan, like French, there’s a plural second person form equivalent to vous that we sometimes use, and it’s all’y’all.

all’y’all is the plural second person form.

Sheriff, speaking to a number of bandits: All’y’all just put yer guns down and come out with yer hands up so we can end this all peaceful like.

True story: in the early 00s, my company was acquired by a Large Silicon Valley Company. LSVC sent a “business integration” team across the country (to Dallas, Texas where we were at the time) to welcome us into the fold. At these meetings, these Perky Northern Californian Women - they were all Perky Northern California Women, for whatever reason - opened with the following sentence:

“We’d like to welcome y…ya…y’y’y’y’y…YA UL(!) to LSVC.”

Repeated throughout the meeting, the integration team kept stumbling over “y’all” instead of just saying “you” when talking to us. Clearly, someone thought that - being Texans - we wouldn’t understand them unless the did.

At one point, one of us spoke up and said something like, “First, thank you for attempting to use our local dialect to talk to us. But, we can understand you perfectly well when you speak your native Northern Californian. Second, by way of correction, the word is just “y’all”. Also, if you want to use the plural second person, like vous in French, you may say “all’y’all”, but it is optional.”

#1.

Don’t you just know it?! I work in media and I have pitched commercial projects to business executives many times only to see them completely choke on the costs. They say things like “Can’t we just film the commercial on an iPhone, I see that on YouTube all the time?” FFS. I’ll be like “Sure, we can. What’s your budget for that? You realize I still have to pay the cameraman, the makeup artist, the writer, the producer, the director, the gaffer, and the talent. Do you want music with that, too? Oh, you want a Credence Clearwater Revival song in the background? That’ll cost you.”

I’ll pull out some sheets explaining what they see on YT that they think is so cheap… I mean, sure, it’s less expensive than other options, but crew and talent gotta eat and pay bills, too.

People have no idea…

To be fair, Wheel of Time may be one of those garbage in, garbage out scenarios.

I’ve lived in Texas all my life and while it is far from a “shithole”, I am unapologetically disgusted by my home state’s current political climate.

When I was growing up (in DFW), I got a liberal (as in the tradition sense, not as a political spectrum) public education which I look back on to fondly. We were taught about sex (starting in 5th grade) and encouraged to be aware of racial issues and the root causes of hatred and encouraged to be friends with all our peers and egalitarian towards people of any color. Gayness was not mentioned, but also not condemned, and I definitely had gay friends and knew at least two gay couples in high school who were open, supported by students and teachers, and happy.

My own childhood outside of school was one of amazing freedom and self-responsibility. My parents’ rule was “be back for dinner”. We all had bikes, and we would range dozens of miles a day on them. We did crazy, stupid, amazingly fun things all by ourselves as children. We got in trouble, we got hurt, but we learned how to be self-reliant and entertain ourselves and we never did anything “criminal” nor were we ever threatened by anyone.

I saw my state elect a liberal female governor who was amazeballs and famously stuck George W Bush with her barbed tongue.

But what always existed, underneath, was what we called the “Old Boy Network”, which really was just code for white, wealthy, privileged, bigoted men. Clayton Williams, who infamously ran for governor, was a prime example of the type.

So, while Texas was - and I think still will be - on a grand trajectory towards being an enlightened, liberal, egalitarian state in my childhood, it got twisted up and corrupted (I point my finger at Reaganism and Religious Extremism as the starting points, at least in my awareness) until we now have a hateful little troll as governor, a shitbag full of cronies, and voters who think Donald Trump represents the ideal American who should be president (again).

I love Texas, or loved it, but now I am dismayed by it - by the hatred and the ignorance that it just seems to be oozing now. I hate the fact that this has happened to my state and after spending my entire adult life voting and speaking against this trend, I now just want to leave.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any other state in the Union I would leave to. They all have problems. The symptom of Texas is just one of the most visible of the disease that affects our entire country.

Hatred and fear of the other, the least American value I can think of, has finally blossomed, nurtured by people who would rather see this country descend into war than dare teach that the powerful people in this country have treated the powerless people in it very, very badly for a very, very long time.

Though I only speak a minuscule smatter of Italian - and none is necessary to enjoy these videos - I really like anything with Giorgione in it, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5i5C35ISE

Just dive down this wonderful rabbit hole.

Don’t you mean: Statistically speaking, you will die.