Someone has to go first. Might as well be me.
Mmm, granbar. I wouldn’t touch this stuff in the summer, mind you.
Oops. Later, dude. Gotta eat & run.
Can’t get left behind.
Don’t trip over those ears, Misty.
Break right! Break right!
Go, man, go!
This is the life.
And so to bed.
A Bad Guide 
i wish to appropriate the chewing Vesla’s portrait as my fb profile’s pic maybe
It seems to have gone fairly cold. On this picture* everybody has red ears and a red nose.
* https://abadguide.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/line.jpg
-11C. We don’t go for walks when it gets colder than this.
Do take the chewing Vesla’s portrait; though your current portrait is already almost as pretty as little Vesh.
Suspense, ambition… and great looking characters ! A wonderful “fotonovela” (Do you know what this is?)
They’re lovely, AJP! (I want one of my own)
Fotonovela: a story in pictures (with suspense, ambition and great looking characters)? Actually, I’d love to write something like that, but I don’t think they publish them in English; only “graphic novels” which are cartoon drawings with text.
They are lovely. You ought to have two (so they aren’t lonely).
thanks, i’ve saved the pic
the current one is a tribute ad memoriam to my youthful days, sts
when 49 days are over i’ll change it to V
I found that “and so to bed” is the expression that Pepys often used to close his diary entries.
Yeah, and where do you think he got it from?
Vesla isn’t an old goat, by any means. She’s only about five or six, her best years are still ahead.
Snow Chaos hits Boston! Well, inconvenience anyway. We seem to have over 6 inches. I always say that the pleasure of snow outweighs the trouble, and I really didn’t mind shoveling the driveway this morning or having to drive very slowly while taking my child to a birthday party.
However, it does have its impact. A friend of ours can’t fly home to California today, maybe not until Wednesday, and he’s seriously bummed. And our church’s Christmas pageant has had to be rescheduled for later in the day, at a time when many people including our family cannot be there. (Yes, shocking revelation, we are churchgoers, if you count Unitarianism as church.)
No, I don’t, but are you sure you’re not confusing sets and sects?. And not so shocking, some of my best blogging buddies are Roman Catholic churchgoers. I went to a very good secondary school where I met much smarter people than me who believed in both God and organised religion. But should there be any doubt, I’m an atheist and always have been. Empty, what I’m really curious about is do you have winter tires in Boston?
From Des’s blog I’ve found out that most Europeans don’t use them! Well, how are they going to avoid snøkaos if they think it’s “too much hassle” to have winter tires. I think it’s too much hassle not to have winter tires.
“Most Europeans” my foot. The Economist article is only about the Belgians. In Germany, “Have you changed to your Winterreifen yet ?” is one of the main, boring seasonal topics of male conversation.
Good for Germans. The thing about Germany is, I suppose, that there’s snow in the south of the country. It doesn’t come up here as a conversation topic (thank goodness), everyone just does it within one week of one another.
Snow tires are far from universal here, I believe.
We used to have a Volvo and a Subaru that were both so good in the snow that we never felt the need for snow tires. Now we have a Honda minivan that really needs them, and twice a year there is the question of whether we will remember to have the tires changed over. (We did get it done this year, fortunately before yesterday’s storm.) We also have a Toyota going into its second winter — so far it has not had snow tires, but I wonder if that would be a good idea.
Time for the old Garrison Keillor Car Starting Song. Years ago, before he made it big, Garrison Keillor used to have a morning show that he did with Jim Ed Pool. I lived in the basement of a hippie commune in Minneapolis and every morning as I fed my cat I would listen to Garrison Keillor before I went off to electronics school, for in those days you fixed your old electronics instead of throwing them away and buying new ones made by children in Chinese sweat shops. The Car Starting Song was a perennial favorite.
It’s very different here. You wouldn’t be able to drive your car at all if you didn’t have snow tires. Even the horse gets non-slip winter shoes with studs.
Nij, do you ever fix electrical equipment nowadays? It seems a shame to toss those things when there’s really nothing wrong with them. And there’s nothing to beat the sound of a jump-started engine turning over.
And there’s nothing to beat the sound of a jump-started engine turning over.
Better than having to crank the starting handle, as I still had to do in the early 60s. Wasn’t until the Mini’s sideways engine made that impossible that I learned to always park on a slope so you could push-start it.
And then came automatics … now you call the recovery service.
Oh dear, HTML failure, call the AJP recovery service.
Sterling work on such an icy night …
..especially as here in Sarf London less than one inch of snow this evening paralysed the bus services.
But should there be any doubt, I’m an atheist and always have been.
I don’t know if I’m an atheist. I’m not a theist. I’m not an agnostic, or maybe I’m misunderstanding the word.
In fact, my favorite thing about church is working (for lack of a better word) with children.
But probably this is not the place to discuss religion. We should stick to the fodder, the puns, and the holy goats.
I don’t mind, I’ve been silent only because I’ve been cleaning the kitchen. You may remember I cleaned it once already this year, but it needed redoing.
Yes. I looked up atheist in Wikipedia. I don’t believe in deities and I’m opposed to all theisms that are in any way disadvantageous to animals. My preference is, in other words: rather the sum of, wholly, goats.
If you think you may be an atheist, going to church sounds a bit like hanging around a gas station when you only ride a bike. But who am I to judge others just because I have snow tires. Do you ever help children understand math?
especially as here in Sarf London less than one inch of snow this evening paralysed the bus services.
I have the answer: it’s not snow ploughs, it is snow tyres. Nobody’s using snow tyres. No wonder nothing works.
Do you ever help children understand math?
I wonder whether empty has the same feelings as I do about that. Just helping a kid to understand anything does you a world of good. But if the kid turns out to be very bright and have very unusual abilities in math, you have to change tactics and help the kid learn how to live with his abilities. It can have devasting emotional consequences on a kid for him/her to be plucked out of the rest of his/her life, and put on a fast-track path to distinction in some stupid field of knowledge like mathematics. I know all about that, to my cost.
Sarf London
I hear things like that not infrequently on Radio 4 in interviews with youfs. I’ve always imagined it’s some Jamaican-origin thing about not bothering with the “th” sound, but instead just using “f” or “v” (“brovver” instead of “brother”). Is that more or less right?
Yes, shocking revelation, we are churchgoers, if you count Unitarianism as church.
As to Unitarianism, nothing shocking here in Hungary where Unitarians have been among “the four recognized religions” since 1548, the very first European declaration of religious freedom.
What is shocking, at least to me, is someone “in the West” admitting his being a churchgoer as shocking. I have always thought this mixed feeling of suppression and guiltiness and, alltrotzdem, proud resistance being a privilege of the ex-East-of-the-Elbe.
alltrotzdem
trotz allem or, in a slightly more literary register, trotz alledem or (near the pinnacle of retro preciosity) dem allen zum Trotz.
But Achtung!. Except in the standing expression trotzdem, you acquire high marks for demonstrating that you know trotz takes the genitive. So you can say trotz des schlechten Wetters, which will cause the the masses to tug their forelocks, ’cause all they know is trotz dem schlechten Wetter.
Well, Stu, I don’t exactly view math as a stupid field of knowledge, but I understand why you say that. I’m sorry you were pushed in that direction more than you wanted to be. I was fortunate in not being pushed, and I have not pushed my own son (who shows some interest and talent in that direction).
When my son was in kindergarten, his group was studying “what people do for work”. I agreed to take my turn in a series of parent appearances to the classroom, telling a little about what I do. Since I am a topologist, I of course brought in a nice big Möbius strip to cut down the middle for their amusement. I also prepared one other bit. With the concept of “Euler number” in the back of my mind, I drew an octagon on the blackboard, showed them that it had 8 sides, and asked them how many corner it had. We counted and got 8. I then stated that it would be the same if I were to draw something with 100 sides: it would have 100 corners. One kid got really excited and said “DO IT!!!” but I declined.
Na ja, dass weiß ich wohl. “Alltrotzdem” is an often used local Schwäbisch jokey term for “trotz allem”. Curiously, “dem allen zum Trotz”, qualified as a meticulously high standard by you is quite frequently used in local Schwäbisch. Perhaps as a beautiful 18th-century archaism.
das weiß ich, mein’ich…
If you think you may be an atheist, going to church sounds a bit like hanging around a gas station when you only ride a bike.
Not really. To pursue this analogy, a UU ( = Unitarian Universalist) church corresponds not so much to a gas station as to an all-purpose transportation community center, where you are likely to find people who believe in this car, people who believe in that car, people who are dead set against any sort of car, people who were psychologically scarred by being strapped into certain vehicles in childhood and who now find value in belonging to a more open-minded transportation community, people who have learned a bit about some Eastern methods of conveyance and are trying to incorporate these methods into their world, people who really don’t believe in transportation at all but do believe in making the world a better place, and some who are happily reinventing the wheel.
“the four recognized religions”
What were the other three?
What is shocking, at least to me, is someone “in the West” admitting his being a churchgoer as shocking. I have always thought this mixed feeling of suppression and guiltiness and, alltrotzdem, proud resistance being a privilege of the ex-East-of-the-Elbe.
This is probably a different phenomenon.
In some circles I feel a reluctance or embarrassment about mentioning church as a part of my life because “church” sounds Christian. I’m not the least bit Christian.
I was not raised in any religious tradition, and I grew up more or less viewing all religion as superstitious nonsense. On some level I still take that view. At the same time I know that there are thoughtful people for whom one preposterous old story or another is a useful living metaphor. I could use metaphors for what it’s all about and who we are and how we are all connected, but they can’t be ready-made.
What a depressing lot you all are. Next thing you’ll be saying how you don’t believe in Santa Claus or in Love. But yes, admitting to church attendance can be looked upon as a bit weird here, especially since there are so many religi0us crackpots out running around loose. I worked at a church once, but I’ve taken it off my resume.
Have you investigated Pan as a possible religion? He’s probably a good one for winter solstice . You know we’re in Capricorn now. Frey is another good one for solstice.
do you ever fix electrical equipment nowadays? It seems a shame to toss those things when there’s really nothing wrong with them.
It’s too hard to fix stuff anymore. The old circuit boards that had only one chip and a few transistors on them could be repaired no problem, and I was pretty good at de-soldering without lifting the clad and with soldering stuff without any cold solder joints. But then, in the never ending competition for miniaturization they came out with four layer boards, and you couldn’t repair them anymore because the electrical connections didn’t go all the way through the board. Not to mention how labor intensive it is to sit there with an oscilloscope trying to chase down which gate is bad. If you can find someone who knows how to use an oscilloscope, that is.
I rewired our kitchen, but I had to learn all new stuff, like how to bend conduit and work with BX.
When I was a kid, everybody had snow tires. I don’t know why they didn’t just keep the same tires all year, but they always changed them in the fall. We had studded tires for a while, but then they became illegal after someone decided they made the roads wear out too fast. I remember prying all the studs out of my tires. The studs were made like a blunted nail with the head buried inside the tire, but you could get them out if you could wedge a screwdriver under the head.
When radial tires were invented, everyone quit using snow tires. We still had chains we could put on the cars, since sometimes the snowbanks were higher than the car. I think in some mountainous areas they just shut down certain roads at certain times of the year. Either that or they had four wheel drive. But in the mountains they depend on summer tourism and don’t always need to go anywhere in the winter.
My daughter believes that Santa is going to buy the toy that she wants at Target.
Even Unitarians believe in Love. There’s not much that all Unitarians believe in. The irreducible list seems to be roughly Love, Gay Rights, and Recycling.
I’ve always imagined it’s some Jamaican-origin thing about not bothering with the “th” sound, but instead just using “f” or “v”
No, it’s an echt London thing going back way before Jamaican immigration — you see it in nineteenth-century literature (Dickens, I’m pretty sure, has it for his East End characters).
empty: pushed in that direction
No, that wasn’t the issue with me – nobody pushed anybody. Instead, everyone was in such a rush to promote mathematical talent that a lot of things got overlooked – such as that portion of life that has nothing to do with such talent, namely 95% of it.
Have you investigated Pan as a possible religion? He’s probably a good one for winter solstice . You know we’re in Capricorn now. Frey is another good one for solstice.
When I call the Japanese restaurant and order gyoza they always ask me “steam or Pan-Frey” and I always say “Pan-Frey”.
“the four recognized religions” – What were the other three?
Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. “Recognition” meant that anyone was legally allowed to convert to any of these four confessions. Judaism and Orthodoxy were also present, but they were considered as “ethnic religions” (the latter being that of the Russians and Romanians), so nobody would have considered to convert to these without previously being incorporated in the respective ethnic group.
Why does God lean to the right?
Why does God lean to the right?
Because, God being all-encompassing, there is nothing left.
Or because sin is ter the left side?
God is straightforward and upright, Hugin is on the right, and Munin is on the left.
Because Jesus sits on his right hand!!!!!!!!
See, Sunday School wasn’t wasted on me. Oh no.
But doesn’t he also have goats sitting on his left hand?
When they separate the sheep from the goats, the sheep sit on the right and the goats on the left.
If you have ever lived in the middle east, you will know the sheep get eaten. (mansaf, yum, yum, with jameed sauce made from goat cheese)
Is all this God’s left or my left?
Jesus could play pretty rough, according to the actual sources. In Acts 7:55, the KJV and several other translations have “standing on the right hand of God”. This must have caused some agonized rolling on the floor of heaven.
In Mark 10:35 James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, wish to sit one on the left and one on the right when Jesus comes into his kingdom. But of course the right hand is not supposed to know what the left hand is doing.
This week I stood on the right foot of a passenger in an ICE train.
The train was approaching Cologne must faster than it should have been. There are several track switching places (?) on the approach that cause the train to shudder when it passes over them, even at lower speeds. Anyway, I was standing in the aisle after just having reached down my backpack, when I was thrown backwards to the other side of the aisle by a violent shake of the train.
I stepped back fast with one leg in order to retain my balance, and trod with my heel on the foot of a passenger who was still seated, with his feet still under the table (there are tables in front ot certain seat groups). He twisted and turned in agony, and I could well understand why – because I had stepped on his foot so hard I could feel his toes separately through the heel of my shoe. They were the big one and its neighbor.
I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that makes people get religion – the passenger, not me.
That makes me a male counterpart of “The Princess and the Pea”. Soon at a theater near you: Walt Disney’s “The Passenger and the Toes”, based on an original idea by Grumbly.
“I could feel his toes separately through the heel of my shoe” sounds like the report of a simple act of perception. But because it sounds simple, it also sounds implausible. How could you distinguish toes through the heel of a shoe ?
Thinking back over the sequence of events, which occurred within a few seconds, I find that although I did somehow “feel the toes separately”, this feeling involved a good deal of reality construction. I noticed several things at once, when it happened – falling backwards, trying to hold my balance, and stepping on something squishy but also hard. I looked around just as the other passenger said, in English, something brief like “Jesus Christ”, and his face was contorted. I looked down, saw his shoe, and instantly visualized a causal sequence from shoe, through moving heel, to my squishy-but-hard sensation. Almost at the same instant I visualized his toes, in particular the big one and its immediate neighbor.
The film should be called “The Passenger, the Toes and the Construction of Social Reality”. I don’t think Walt Disney would touch it, though.
So this guy gets to spend Christmas with two of his toes broken; meanwhile, you get an idea for your next movie. You’re a hard man, Grumbly; no wonder it’s called the ICE train.
I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that makes people get religion – the passenger, not me.
the other passenger said, in English, something brief like “Jesus Christ”, and his face was contorted.
I think you may have misinterpreted what he said, Grumbly.
You’re right. He was closer to losing his religion.
In moments of despair, you can go either way. That’s called a crisis.
At any rate, I think he did not mistake me for his savior.
In that case it is religion that is being misinterpreted. I’m sure no one would use the occasion of Christmas Day to deliberately misunderstand religion in order to mock it.