The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => History => Topic started by: Thomas Pain on January 13, 2010, 06:53:45 pm
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I asked my mother why do you cry
she said your brother had... he just died
Well I told him not to go outside
he said he had to fight for his country's right
But don't you know that mo-mother
don't you know that we can't stop the violence, no
Because the war is not over
until you can feel love, peace, and hear silence
But I smell gunpowder (pow)
my brother's been dead ever since
I didn't beleive it, but when I
saw him I was convinced
Two shots to the head he was already dead Lord,
I headed for revenge in the city of Port Au Prince
Screaming bro-brother
don't you know that we can't stop the violence, no
Because the war is not over
until you can feel love, peace, and hear silence
But I smell gunpowder (Pow)
Zion's gunpowder (pow)
L.A.'s gunpowder (pow)
I wanna know why
Christians pray for a new day
we don't need no, we don't need
no, we don't need no
But its still the same way
I wanna know why
ghetto people pray for a new day
hey, hey, heeey
and its still the same way
But the preacher man told me
good things come to those who wait
do good things come to those who wait?
I wanna know tell me
good things come to those who wait
do good things come to those who wait?
we wanna know, we wanna know,
we wanna know [pause]
Pe-people
don't you know that we can't stop the violence, no
because the war is not over
until you can feel love, peace,
and hear the silence
but I smell gunpowder (gunpowder)
Brooklyn's gunpowder (gunpowder)
Shaolin's gunpowder (gunpowder)
Uptown's gunpowder (gunpowder)
Jersey's gunpowder (gunpowder)
even New Zealand's gunpowder (gunpowder)
Australia's gunpowder (gunpowder)
Brixton's gunpowder (gunpowder)
even New Haven's gunpowder
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvqtTDKUvVU)
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people say negative things of me person. say I am psycho and bad. But I do have sympathy and empathy. I definately dig what they are goin through in Haiti right now. this one time I was trying to run a wire through the furnace vents so I tied it to my cat's harness and sent him through but he got stuck somewhere in there and I was very worried with no way to reach him, but then he just wiggled out of his harness. here's hopin the cats are okay in all those collapsed buildings. probably they are bceuase cats is small they can find a spot to hide there is lots of voids in the rubble. hopefully if any cats is trapped they is close enough to a dead person that they can have snack.
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As if they didn't already have it bad enough in Haiti.
Thanks for starting this thread TP.
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it would be difficult to be a standup comicdian in Haiti for many reasons right now
for one, obviously, people are not in mood to laugh
also, phones not working. So joke about prank phone call kinda doesn't fit.
and no electricity
and even if there was electricity, no fridges could be running, because all crushed under rubble.
somewhere in Haiti is a standup commedian who go hungry tonight. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrdzqMlQt10)
(soundtrack links to Tonight Live With David Bowie (Official Video) - Tina Turner)
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Pretty serious times, I had no idea Haiti was so impoverished. The presidential palace collapsed, the hospital collapsed, this is a place that was in serious need of building codes.
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I have a rant about Haiti, but Ill reserve that one. Lets just say I had to study Haiti and I don't have the greatest amount of sympathy for Haiti.
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I'm kind of interested but I guess now may not be the best time.
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I have a rant about Haiti, but Ill reserve that one. Lets just say I had to study Haiti and I don't have the greatest amount of sympathy for Haiti.
I was a little surprised to read this until I checked to see who posted it. Then I said, "oh."
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The idea that "why" people are suffering is important to the response to their pain is interesting for me.
I can't think like that.
They're suffering. Don't matter why.
Let alone, you know, how anything in their history could've... caused a 7.0 earthquake, of course.
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Their pact with the devil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Robertson_controversies#Remarks_about_2010_Haiti_Earthquake), obviously.
And: Adding Insult to Injury:
Race, Disaster and the Calculus of Comparative Suffering (http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/InsulttoInjury.html). A year old or so, but definitely relevant.
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Shit; at first I read Pat Robertson as Robert Pattinson. That was weird.
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"The Lord felt that their fangs did not sparkle enough!"
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I have a rant about Haiti, but Ill reserve that one. Lets just say I had to study Haiti and I don't have the greatest amount of sympathy for Haiti.
In Soviet Russia, Haiti has no sympathy for you!
No but seriously, the personification of a country is pretty f'ed up. Of course, I do it too. E.g. I personify the U.S. as the devil, in my mind, as does a lot of the world. But a country isn't a person. A country is an assemblage of bureaucratic entities and accidental circumstances that is really beyond anyone's control. There is a lot of resentment on the part of some Native Americans towards the white person, especially in the older generations. Maybe they don't have a lot of sympathy for white America in the same way that AC doesn't have a lot of sympathy for Haiti? I dunno what AC's beef is with Haiti, but, in the end, I guess we all have an assemblage of prejudices and perceptions, both good and bad, about every country on the face of the earth, and for that matter every grouping... religious groups, corporate groups (both for-profit and non-profit,) geographic groups, racial groups, cultural groups.
Of course, does it make sense to personify even a person? E.g. should I say I don't have a lot of sympathy for Pat Robertson or that I do have a lot of sympathy for Martin Luther King? I mean, I'm sure that MLK and Robertson both have their good sides and their bad sides. They just responded to the circumstances they found themselves in. You can pick your nose at the ball park and if the camera feeding the jumbotron happens to be focused in on you at that precise moment, now all of a sudden you're known to the world for that one particular aspect of yourself.
So we maintain in our minds a complex (or simple?) set of rules for determining how and where and when and to what extent we hold someone 'responsible' for their own actions, and to what extent we give someone a pass, or a second or third chance, and we apply these rules unevenly to different people, including ourselves, based on prejudices and past experiences. So for me, Pat Robertson is evil, and Robertson is responsible for all the hate and decisiveness he spews forth into the world.
It's easy to hold prejudices like this, and it's convenient, and it's a necessary way of dealing with and interacting with the world. Robertson would no doubt give you the shirt off his back, but meanwhile, that shirt is infected with his own special germ warfare version of a plague of ignorance that surely will destroy, if not all of humanity, certainly great sections of it, so you have to have your guard up, to not be on the receiving end yourself, and to help save others from being on the receiving end as well.
Our ideas of how and where and when personal responsibility should apply are really rooted in culture. American culture tends to be fairly jingoistic and short-sighted... ethnocentric is the word... (Relative to most if not all other 1st world countries, anyway.) I'm more ready to give some impoverished third world African or Afro-Caribbean culture a pass on something as serious as, say, the genocide in Rwanda, than I am willing to give Nazi Germany a pass, or Nazi America a pass for it's various (debatably) lesser transgressions in more recent times. Why? Because our society is more structured, and has more resources, and so, in the parlance of personal responsibility, our society *ought to know better* more than some third world society.
Further, when you look at the writing of Dambisa Moyo on the subject of aid given to Africa, (_Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa_) or for that matter, when you look at the (progressive) literature on the subject of charity given to U.S. citizens right here on U.S. soil, what emerges is a picture of 1st world society as well intentioned, but like Pat Robertson, abso-fuck*ng-lutely insane and counter-productive. We have institutionalized poverty and dependence, and our 'chartiy,' while it does help some people to survive in the short term, which is certainly better than letting people die which wouldn't be very Christian, tends to render those people and those societies and individuals dependent on the charity in the long term. How ironic that the progressives are the ones who are more leading the way in more closely following the biblical parable of 'teaching a person to giraffe' than the conservatives whose thinking is steeped in religiously ideology.
So the danger of institutions, including religious institutions, is that they tend to be static and they tend to become fixed in their ideas, while meanwhile the real world tends to change and evolve, and new and better paradigms for understanding the dynamics of the real world are emerging... The best we can do as individuals is to try to avail ourselves of the best and brightest ideas that are out there, to try to incorporate these ideas into our own thinking, and to the extent that the tired old thinking of institutions and institutionalized culture and society permeates our personal thinking, to try to rid ourselves of this mind'set.'
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http://www.salon.com/news/haiti/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/01/13/haiti_satan_pact
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http://www.salon.com/news/haiti/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/01/13/haiti_satan_pact
Yeah, that Pat Robertson sure has a heart full of love, doesn't he?
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we're throwing a small benefit dinner at $100/plate, all profits will go to the red cross for haiti. there's always something your specific skills can bring to the table.
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Apparently more than a few people were unaware that when you text that code that you get billed $10. They thought it was one of those "do this and money will be donated" type things.
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Ironically, Robertson is an example of evolutionary natural selection at it's finest. The dude with the dumb ideas gets more PR buzz, and so gets more dumb viewers who donate money. Dude's found a damn niche.
What I want to know is how you go about getting a job as one of Robertson's Ed McMahons? Dude always goes on air with a sidekick. He's got female side kicks, male sidekicks, even a distinguished black gentleman sidekick, with grey hair no less! Whoever does his casting ain't no slouch.
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Evidently too many people flew to Haiti. The airport is jammed to capacity and they are out of jet fuel, so flights from the US aren't even allowed to take off. No phones, no airport, no sea port, and roads jammed with people.
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Their pact with the devil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Robertson_controversies#Remarks_about_2010_Haiti_Earthquake), obviously.
Various prominent, mainline Christian voices have criticized Robertson's remarks, as not only untrue, but untimely and insensitive.
And fuck*ng crazy! Don't forget that it was totally crazy of him to say that! That guy is so insane.
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... untimely and insensitive.
Understatement of the year.
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Yeah, 'untimely and insensitive' but they don't have the sack (or the sanity) to say he's outright wrong.
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Yeah, 'untimely and insensitive' but they don't have the sack (or the sanity) to say he's outright wrong.
That's not really true. That's the phrasing of whoever put that into wikipedia. One of the citations there says
Just talked on radio about Pat Robertson's embarrassing comments about Haiti. Theological arrogance matched to ignorance.
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i posted this in the other thread, but its just so perfect for this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A2q60qg0WA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A2q60qg0WA)
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That's not really true. That's the phrasing of whoever put that into wikipedia. One of the citations there says
Fair call, I obviously didn't mean all religious people but there's always someone who'll try to play it down the middle by distancing themselves from the bad comments without actually disavowing them.
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Rick Warren
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>:(
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Socioeconomic Stockholm Syndrome makes people say weird things, Jude, A-CAP means well.
Same thing could be said of myself and my ridiculous mood swings, of course.
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Socioeconomic Stockholm Syndrome makes people say weird things, Jude, A-CAP means well.
Same thing could be said of myself and my ridiculous mood swings, of course.
In retrospect I think that was more a post aimed at a lot of people with A-Cap the unfortunate focus.
In retrospect that post will be replaced with a >:(
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Yeah, in retrospect, I'd dial it back too but...
Well, since it was already quoted, the concept is moot.
My apologies for the melodrama, Caps, if not quite the point.
So I'll change the subject.
IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS: flawed masterpiece or normal-type masterpiece?
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Rick James (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slF1Y_inE4w)
Rick Warren
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FYI I found this page that has kind of a high-level overview of the situation in Haiti every day:
http://ochaonline.un.org/OCHAHome/WhereWeWork/Haiti/tabid/6412/language/en-US/Default.aspx
(via the situation reports on the right side of the page)
these reports use a lot of proprietary lingo. Still, it's a good source of info, especially compared to say the mass media.
It would be cool to integrate the data into a 3D google earth map.
With inexpensive data gathering devices, such as cameras with geo-tagging, one could make a map that was very very rich in data, and it could be updated in quasi real-time, with data streams from thousands of different on-site sources. Of course, as the scandal involving the doctors from Puerto Rico shows, privacy and ethics considerations would have to be taken into account. If news media type standards could be enforced, then it could be a very valuable tool for communicating a true and interactive account of the situation to the lay public.
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My cousin is a doctor in the Air Force (owes a few years to them for footing the med school bill) and was recently deployed to Haiti. We've received a few updates and a couple of photos (nothing graphic, of course). Pretty sobering stuff.
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yeah, right. Like, you see pictures of some of the few people they managed to pull out of the rubble alive, and a lot of them were emaciated.
Meanwhile, over here in the U.S., we "struggle" with things like nicotine addiction and obesity. Although to be fair, it's a lot harder to eat healthy in the U.S. when you're poor. But man, poverty in the U.S. and poverty in Haiti are two different things. Sure you will die a lot sooner in the U.S. if you are poor than if you are middle class or rich, but you still have a good chance of outliving people in Haiti.
But I guess it's all the same thing no matter where you go - poverty and corruption and crime pretty much is the same social problem with the same root causes no matter where you go.
It's amazing really that there hasn't been more of a cohesive public backlash here in the U.S. against helping the people in Haiti than there has been. Pretty much all I saw was Pat Robertson's idiocy which no one was really to eager to get behind. Although, I don't watch TV and I don't listen to the mainstream idiots like Rush Limbaugh either, so who knows how they been spinnin' this, with their sous-entendues and so ons...
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there are lots of people on this planet who give up what little they have to be poor or homeless in this country.
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I'd give up what I have in the U.S. to be poor and homeless in Norway. They have some kick-ass health care over there.
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On a Haiti side note...delivered a truck load of clothing to be sent over on a slow boat and distributed to the displaced this morning on my way to work.
more white guilt you needed to assuage, eh?
sike
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More of a paternalistic 'help the poor brown people' thing.
I'ma go sit on the veranda, sip a minted drink and wipe my feet on the backside of the maid, now.
;D
im proud to be an american, as well.
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no such luck for po' white trash like me. i should be shoveling about 2 feet of snow at this very moment.
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no such luck for po' white trash like me. i should be shoveling about 2 feet of snow at this very moment.
Snow melts, dude! Nature will shovel for you if you weren't so impatient!
(I had a neighbor who seriously thinks this way)
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Snow melts, dude! Nature will shovel for you if you weren't so impatient!
(I had a neighbor who seriously thinks this way)
My whole fuck*ng STATE thinks this way.
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at least your state doesn't see snow and think god is punishing them for allowing booze at restaurants on sunday and for gays existing. (mine)
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Where I grew up, we saw snow and we thought:
"Oh yeah. THAT'S why the property values are so low."
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I went into the train station with a girl this morning, and it was just your normal bleak Northern sky. When I left said station (without her) 5 minutes it was snowing. Extremely heavily. This was extremely strange but I guess it must be very important, some how. Nothing like movie-weather to possibly make certain things seem more than they really are.
Anyway. Snow.
Snow is a near-mythical substance back home, where we would only receive a couple of inches worth every few years. For that one day it settled I would literally go mental, flinging myself down slopes, engage in running snowball battles for hours and go all Calvin-and-Hobbes regarding snowmen.
Sheffield's a fair amount more snowy though, and the feeling I described above still remains, at times. When I'm out in the Peak District the sheer abundance of steep slopes, gullies etc. make the snow impossibly fun. The surface of Kinder Scout is best described as being like black Creme Brulee, so jumping around on it in the snow not only felt good but looked tasty.
Back in the city however the fun soon wears off. Sheffield's extremely hilly for a medium-sized English city and soon enough any minor incline becomes a death trap for your average student in their stupid Ugg boots or Converse trainers. Hence me breaking out the 6-point crampons and hiking boots to make it into an exam this year. Isn't crampon a funny word?
The sheer weirdness of Britain sometimes really comes through in the snow. Equal amounts of horror, joy, grumpiness, sheer bloody uselessness, sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
Idiotic driving (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MPRmOUxRMY) was everywhere, people just don't understand the seriousness of the conditions whilst at the same time a ridiculously exaggerated sense of disaster was propagated by the news channels desperate to create a climate of fear as usual. The nation that weathered the Blitz was at times was scarily weak-kneed in the face of half-frozen water, it's depressing that there is absolutely no space in the mind of the average British person that knows how to deal with weather like this even as it increasingly becomes a fact of life with the disappearance of the Gulf Stream.
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it snowed here a few days ago, and I was not at all anticipating what a colossal pain in the ass cleaning ice off my car would be.
finally buying a real winter coat has helped a lot. it is nice to just have to put on a sweater and a coat, instead of many layers of sweaters and a scarf, hat, gloves, etc. when I was trying to pretend like I was fine in a peacoat.
I am a skinny dude. I do not have natural insulation like some people. It is a fact, and so I bought a real coat. Luckily I managed to find one that is really boring looking, all one color, no big logos, and was on a half-off sale. i love this thing.
I am one of those idiots slipping around and falling on my ass because I do not have real boots. My old ones wore out and I never got new ones... oh well.
my big nike hightops are doing OK, though... better than the converses I used to wear, those things had zero traction.
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there was a foot and a half of snow by noon and it hasnt stopped snowing since then. i am fucked in a way that i do not like.
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I am one of those idiots slipping around and falling on my ass because I do not have real boots. My old ones wore out and I never got new ones... oh well.
my big nike hightops are doing OK, though... better than the converses I used to wear, those things had zero traction.
I have YakTrax. They make the trek uphill in the snow to buy ingredients to appease angry weather gods possible. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to crack eggs over my head, wrap myself in toilet paper, pour milk over the balcony, and jump over a sterno can with bread mashed into my toes three times to ensure the return of the sun.
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Where I grew up, we saw snow and we thought:
"Oh yeah. THAT'S why the property values are so low."
On NPR today, they read all kinds of letters from people in cold places who were complaining about how much coverage the storm in DC was getting, all going on and on about how much snow they have where they live.
Well, yeah. That's why WE have the sense to live HERE and not where you dopes live!
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I have YakTrax. They make the trek uphill in the snow to buy ingredients to appease angry weather gods possible. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to crack eggs over my head, wrap myself in toilet paper, pour milk over the balcony, and jump over a sterno can with bread mashed into my toes three times to ensure the return of the sun.
I got a pair of those, too. I put them on on Sunday then discovered that all the sidewalks around here were already shoveled down to bare brick so they were unnecessary.
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Please say they play Yakitysax from little speakers on them.
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YakTrax? Pfft.
Try these bad boys on for size
(http://www.pyb.co.uk/images/kit-tips/crampons/performance-crampon.jpg)
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I think those would put a cramp on my walking style.
Or tear up the sidewalk.
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I think those would put a cramp on my walking style.
Or tear up the sidewalk.
Yes
On the other hand you can walk up the side of buildings and stomp people like a mofo
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On NPR today, they read all kinds of letters from people in cold places who were complaining about how much coverage the storm in DC was getting, all going on and on about how much snow they have where they live.
Well, yeah. That's why WE have the sense to live HERE and not where you dopes live!
Or: That's why weaklings live where they live.
I was in Banff this winter, with mountains everywhere, watching a herd of about 100 wild elk. I was looking at all the impassible, massive mountains of the Rockies, and it made me realize the serious strength and endurance it takes to be Canadian, and it brought me to a new place, where I want to relish the challenge of life in the elements. There's an entire community of snowmen on my street this year. I wore ice cleats almost every day last winter to walk to and from work. We get every kind of weather where I live (apart from hurricanes, though there are tornadoes). It's really not an issue to adapt to varied conditions, although as a species humans are lazy, so it's more of a mental obstacle to deal with things like winter, heat, etc. It's embarrassing to see people complaining about minor inconveniences, because 1) we're tougher than that, and those of us who live with it all the time know this is so, and 2) it's really not that hard to come up with solutions to overcoming the challenges, so grow up and deal with it. We're probably the most resilient species on the planet, yet we act like we're made of glass or something. So sucky.
Regardless, I wonder how many people actually choose to live where they live, regardless of location. It seems to me many people have little choice as to where they live. I live where I live because I was born here and all the people I love live here. Other people live where they do because it's where the work they can find is. If I were to choose, actually choose to live where I wanted to based only on my own desires, I'd probably live on a private island with a handful of my favorite people. An island of the sort where I could be totally self sufficient based on growing seasons and the availability of giraffe and maybe some chickens I'd raise. There's a lot of things preventing me from doing such a thing on financial and personal levels, to the point where such a desire is basically a dream. So I take what I get, and find joy in the resiliency of myself and those around me.
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Well good for all of you who live in places that own enough snowplows etc. Some of my neighbors didn't even own shovels and they were selling out as soon as they trucked them in so you couldn't get one for love or money. Someone I know even ordered one on Amazon hoping for a miracle that the delivery would get through (it didn't). If you resilient Northerners can explain how they can clear five foot drifts with their kitchen implements, I'm sure they'd be glad to know.
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Well good for all of you who live in places that own enough snowplows etc. Some of my neighbors didn't even own shovels and they were selling out as soon as they trucked them in so you couldn't get one for love or money. Someone I know even ordered one on Amazon hoping for a miracle that the delivery would get through (it didn't). If you resilient Northerners can explain how they can clear five foot drifts with their kitchen implements, I'm sure they'd be glad to know.
See, yeah. I mean, I grew up in the North, I lived there long enough to know how to handle snow and ice. But it's a whole different ball game in a place that doesn't get real winter weather often enough to invest the community's resources in dealing with it. When I go to Ohio at Christmastime and there's three feet of snow on the ground, you bet your ass I get in the car and drive around if I feel the need. But when we have 2 inches of ice on the roads in Raleigh and there's neither salt nor snowplows down, I keep my ass home -- not because I'm lazy, but because I don't want to wreck my car or get dead.
The "hunker down and let it melt" philosophy drives me crazy, but quite honestly it doesn't make sense for the city to buy a bunch of snowplows and have them sitting in storage 360 days a year. My Northern relatives, though, REALLY don't get this, and tease me about getting soft down here. Which, you know, gets a little grating after the first fifteen years or so.
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The "hunker down and let it melt" philosophy drives me crazy, but quite honestly it doesn't make sense for the city to buy a bunch of snowplows and have them sitting in storage 360 days a year.
PREACH. I wonder how many people wandering around bitching about NoVa/DC/Maryland's inability to plow their streets the first day after the snow, also rail against taxes at every opportunity. Doesn't make much budget sense to supply the public works department with equipment to deal with a 100-year storm, when those storms only happen, you know, every 100 years or so.
It's like the Tea Party protestors who complained when Metro wouldn't supply them with extra service.
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Those of you not in The Snow Zone may not have this phenomenon, but Ive noticed every single time its about to snow, the news does a reel interviewing people rushing the hardware store for hundreds of shovels. What do these people do, throw out their shovels every time theyre done? How many times do people in the NYC metro area need to buy shovels?
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Those of you who live in Southern California and/or are not old enough to own homes, maybe don't realize that, for one thing, snow shovels break eventually under hard use, so even people who were prepared in advance might find themselves without.
As far as the idea of clearing entire sidewalks with a baking pan or even a gardening shovel, I'm going to assume that's a joke. I laugh too when NC shuts down for two inches of snow, but I am perfectly well aware that it's because it doesn't make sense to expect them to clear it with a baking pan.
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Well I wish YOU lived on the end of my block Ash, because obviously you'd have tunnelled a route through the ten foot pile of snow that has been deposited on the corner by the plows and I'd be able to cross the street without walking in the middle of traffic.
But you don't, and so I have spent the week doing stuff like carrying pugs back and forth from a hotel down the middle of the street because we had no power for three days, and I am still waiting to see if the Tech Staff ever gets back from Utah where he has been stranded since last weekend. So, yeah, it's not really funny anymore.
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I have no comprehension of why being able to function is dependant on snow clearing. Snow clearing is infrequent at best in my neck of the woods, and it has never been an issue that prevented me from dealing with day to day living. Do people think snow is made of poisenous acid or something? Do they not know it can be walked upon, with little effort?
The important thing to note is that all this fuss is about dependency on automobiles. I'm not automobile dependant, and perhaps part of why I've chosen to make my life this way because of where I live. It's not uncommon for this to be the case locally - a large number of my coworkers walk or jog to work. Whenever myself or other Canadians are tourists to the states, the thing that is commonly remarked upon is how few pedestrians one encounters in the U.S.. I'm sure this isn't the case everywhere, but there is a noticeable difference in this regard everytime I end up in the States compared to my experience when visiting other Canadian cities. I'm guessing there are many cities that are not designed to be livable without access to and use of a vehicle. I was once walking around Grand Forks noting this to the person I was with (another Canadian) and we saw other pedestrians approaching, and it turned out they too were Canadian visitors when we asked - and we all had a laugh about it. Then while visiting a friend in Minneapolis, I decided to walk to the Mall of America, which was about an hour from where I was staying, but as a tourist, I like to see each city I visit on foot. Not only did I not encounter a single other person on my walk, but when I got to the mall, I discovered it was surrounded by freeway (thanks a lot MapQuest!), leaving me no choice but to climb a fence and illegally walk about a block on the side of the freeway to get to a place where I could safely cross.
I do not/can not shovel snow since a back injury, and my husband is often out of town. When or if I do shovel, it is using the same 15+ year old rusty steel garden shovel I use in the middle of summer for the compost and dealing with soil. But this makes no difference because I walk most places I go, and there's enough pedestrian traffic in my area that the snow is commonly tramped down pretty quickly, often before I head out for work. Like I said, snow isn't poisenous acid. In my neighbourhood I'm lucky if the street gets plowed once a winter. In some Canadian communities there is no snow plowing at all, and certainly there are many where side roads are never cleared. Locally we've had two snow storms since the plow cleared our street (or any part of our neighbourhood, including major routes), which was weeks after a storm, and more than a month after an earlier storm.
When it comes to automobiles, I have never owned snow tires in my life. In a huge splurge, I bought a Hybrid SUV last winter, but before that it was 15 years of driving two-door rear-wheel drives all winter long. But again, I've always depended on my feet as a major mode of transportation, so I commonly parked my vehicle for the winter. I live walking distance to work and stores and such though, so the Hybrid is more for visiting our rural family. Because an idiot rearended the Hybrid (while texting on his phone), it was in the shop over the Holidays, so we drove out to the country in the middle of a blizzard in the Ford Focus the car insurance provided us with this Christmas. At the turn off to the dirt road to our family's place, there was a two foot snow drift, and we tried to plow through it, but got stuck. Three cars pulled over and strangers pushed us loose, so we took a different dirt road, and got to our destination. If we couldn't have taken another road, we would have walked - because we had expected possible challenges driving out into a blizzard, and had brought along extra layers of clothes thinking we might need them. We did not consider this to be "snow-pocalyse" or whatever the news is calling the latest snow storm in the eastern US. We considered this... life, and we planned ahead, and anticipated challenges, and when they came we dealt with it, without complaint and with the help of random strangers who also considered it a part of life.
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Sorry, I want to add that infrastructure-wise, the one thing we definitely benefit from is that Manitoba Hydro has decades of expertise at dealing with winter conditions, and so when power goes down due to trees or other things falling on the lines, they've got back up generators in place, and emergency staff out on the road immediatly doing repairs. That's clearly a huge part of the problem that communities that don't typically experience heavy snow fall are facing.
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Smells, I walk most places too. The snow on my front walk is up to my hips. It may not be poisonous but I can't walk on snow that's up to my hips and I don't think most other people can either. And if finding it more than an minor inconvenience to have no power and therefore no heat for three days when the temps are in the 20s makes me a wimpy American, then sorry, I am a wimpy American.
One of my neighbors is actually shovelling out parking spaces, which is pretty noble. There was a brief period of people being friendly and helpful to strangers but unfortunately now we seem to be rapidly returning to the normal "assholes driving like idiots while talking on cell phones" mode, which makes it particularly hard to walk in the streets where the walks aren't passable. Oh well, I guess normal is a good thing.
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It's almost three pugs deep in places!
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Just wanted to say there aren't challenges living everywhere.
This message brought to you by the land of milk and honey.
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How does the pug unit of measure compare to the daniel?
Don't be crazy man, the daniel is a weight measurement, the pug is a measurement of distance.
Though we could work out people's BMIs in daniels/pug.
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I prefer that we let it happen naturally, like the standard/imperial system. That way, nothing makes any fuck*ng sense whatsoever and we can be illogically and fiercely protective of our system and highly resistant to change.
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asherdan i need you to do something for me.
write a book called "what every doofus forgot he should know" and fill it with your vitriol-coated wisdom.
i will pay for a copy.
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my favorite reaction to the "hrr drrr americans don't use the metric system" thing:
there is this map, you see, where the three countries in the world that don't use the metric system are highlighted.
and then, there is this map:
"map of countries that have put a man on the moon, plus Liberia and Burma." (http://i.imgur.com/F73x2.jpg)
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I bought a house in a neighborhood in the center of my suburb so that I can walk or bike to a few places, but public transit around here is a joke and Raleigh is totally the sprawliest so unless you live downtown you can't get most places of interest without a car. I mean, most people live in a place where the only other places within walking distance are other people's houses. There are a few mixed-use communities springing up locally, but they're all under construction or still in development, and condos start at $300K so we couldn't afford them anyway.
We Americans, we love our cars.
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I had no idea Antarctica was a country.
Are snow tires still a thing? I remember growing up in PA my grandma would get snow tires put on every December but I've neither seen nor heard of them since then.
Also, never before has paying an assload of money to live in the most walkable city in America felt so good. Not to mention parking in a garage.
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Are snow tires still a thing?
Yeah, at least around here. I put the studded snow tires on every November.
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Just wanted to say there aren't challenges living everywhere.
This message brought to you by the land of milk and honey.
Didn't your Continent catch on fire last year?
Those of you who live in Southern California and/or are not old enough to own homes
Hey man, I may be old enough and just a fuck*ng loser because I don't own a home, but don't group me with residents of Southern California.
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I don't have to deal with bushfires, snow, tornados, extreme siesta invoking heat, torrential rain, hurricanes, sandstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes or nowt like that
I have never loved this country so much as I do right now.
In Britain I LIKE shovelling snow. But then, I don't get loads of it so I don't get tired of it. I LIKE a bit of sunshine because it's not so hot I can't go outside in the summer. I LIKE a bit of rain because it's beautiful but there's not so much of it that I drown. I LIKE earthquakes 'cause they're rare and fun when they happen. I LIKE tornados 'cause they lift the roof of schools meaning I get two weeks at home. I LIKE hurricanes because the one time we get the remnants of one it gives old people stuff to tell young people about. And we don't get bushfires or volcanos or sandstorms.
Good god I'm a cunt.
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Didn't your Continent catch on fire last year?
I live just north of the bush fires and just south of the cyclones. Also east of most of the poisonous stuff.
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There are parts that don't have poisonous stuff? I thought basically everything everywhere in Australia was always out to kill you, except the wombats. And even they would probably crush you against the roof of their burrows if you were dumb enough to get in one.
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There are parts that don't have poisonous stuff? I thought basically everything everywhere in Australia was always out to kill you, except the wombats. And even they would probably crush you against the roof of their burrows if you were dumb enough to get in one.
I said most. There's enough poisonous stuff to make it interesting, and if you go east enough to get wet then, bam, more poison. But that's part of the fun.
Also, don't let their idiot-charm deceive you, wombats have claws (http://geniusbeauty.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/wombat-6.jpg).
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Wombat is confusing Australia with Pandora.
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Nicole Kidman is enormously tall, and so white she's practically blue - so one could see the confusion.
(http://www.181st.net/celebrity-galleries/Nicole-Kidman/pictures/Nicole-Kidman_porn.jpg)
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I created a unit of measure called the Kristy Confusion Unit (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmcd9/861040080/). You gotta scroll down into the comments to get the whole story.
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Today I fell down 15 concrete steps on my way to work. (edit: oh, it was snowy, thats how this plays in)
I still went to work, but then I illegally bought codeine (for the first time in two years-though I have also done that shit the most in this time period s gifts from a few drug dealers) and took a ton and played guitar. Now I am high as hell and watching the wire and waiting for chinese food. My back is still killing me though, so that ain't too cool.
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Oh, and I could have definitely got it legally at the doctor (I didn't actually "fuck up my back" it is the upper back and there is a purple line all the way across, like just below the back of your shoulders if that makes since) but I don't have medical insurance. I had to do illegal things to save like $150.
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Oh, and I could have definitely got it legally at the doctor ... but I don't have medical insurance. I had to do illegal things to save like $150.
Thanks, Senator Brown, for making Keith commit crimes.
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Dont you have some medical marijuana to shake some pain?
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I do, but this was some serious pain.
Took a lot more- now high and pain free!
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My friend got the flu recently and for some reason was prescribed a ton of lortab. So for a few beers she gave me whatever she had left over after like the first day when she was actually in some pain. She's also one of the straightest people I know, so it's fun to give her shit about being an illegal drug dealer. I'm all out man, or else I would have totally hooked you up.
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Opioids are cough suppressors, right? Maybe that is why she got them?
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Yeah, I've had hydrocodone as a cough suppressant before. I've got half a bottle of liquid gold in my fridge right now, in fact.
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speaking of Rx cough syrup:
sippin on syrup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOWKGXpl9E0)-three six mafia
i didnt realize that that was a thing until i read about the houston(i think?) hiphop scene. its pretty fucked up to mix Rx cough syrup with soda for recreational purposes. its even more fucked up to drink it out of a baby bottle if you know how to use a cup.
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Didn't someone in that song die from a cough syrup overdose?
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Opioids are cough suppressors, right? Maybe that is why she got them?
Yeah, I've had hydrocodone as a cough suppressant before. I've got half a bottle of liquid gold in my fridge right now, in fact.
Opioids can cause cough suppression, which can be both an indication for opioid administration or an unintended side effect. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid)
Seems so. It'd make more sense to give her a syrup, though, right? I think that she may have been in a lot of pain initially.
Hey, are you guys giving away prescription drugs on The Giving Tree? If so, I totally want in.
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im not giving my Rx drugs away. that shit is expensive.
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im not giving my Rx drugs away. that shit is expensive.
Yeah, no. I'm a hoarder.