AdamSmith

Only one way to make sure they don't come back -- give 'em the Marie Antoinette treatment. I dispatched one the other day. Next time call me and I will trot over and do the dirty work. Technical note: one strike with the sharp edge of a shovel is more decisive than using a garden hoe, which usually takes an unseemly number of small chops to disabuse the critter's head of its affection for the body. Especially important when the nuisance is a big copperhead, whose flailings if the first blow is inadequate can be somewhat dangerous. (Rather like a divorce proceeding, come to think!) Of course moccasins are to be dealt with only at a distance, with firearms.

Ain't it the truth? I ate up the book for lay readers on whatsisname's solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, thinking every few pages, "Ah, I begin to see." But on finishing it, realizing of course that I had not the foggiest. (And I used to be capable of working a few proofs in algebraic topology, back in the Mesozoic. But stumbled across that textbook a couple of years ago and could not understand even the introduction, which was equation-free. And these days a mathematician friend possessed of infinite patience cannot impart the least glimmer of whatever a Hilbert space is. I can only conclude my current self must be a pod-person who at some point co-opted and replaced the original me.) (Know the feeling?)

Any bets on which merchandiser will be first to actively solicit their boycott ... A&F, maybe?

Actually, in all truth, I had just woken up and was getting ready to attend church. Where this morning we saw a girl baptized in the same pool I was, not quite four decades ago. (See post above.) ... an indoor basin, thank goodness. Our church was not one where you had to go to the creek out back and share the sacrament with the leeches and water moccasins. Although it was (and is) outfitted with an obviously old electric immersion heater for the water which I fervently hoped would not malfunction and dispatch me and the preacher to an early discovery of the true nature of the afterlife!

hitoall, I thought you would never ask! (I can hear you saying the same thing. ) But yes -- we can go right down to Pullen Memorial Baptist. One of the best things about Raleigh, and for a long time: http://www.pullen.org/page/what-the-bible-really-says-about-homosexuality As for the state of my soul, lay your worries to rest. I was baptized when I was 15. Total immersion. (Although there could be argument I was not held under long enough.) Finally, your nagging is no problem; it just needs practice -- you forgot to say how big each drink could be!

Nice summary of the view that the Judeo-Christian sacred texts don't in fact hate us... http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/15/my-take-what-the-bible-really-says-about-homosexuality/

I do market research on, among other things, engineering/construction of big mofo capital assets. Fluor, Bechtel, others of their ilk do just that -- they self-insure. Judging it to be more cost-effective than commercial insurance.To date they have not been proven wrong.

My father's father and his mother came from two families that had intermarried since the mid-1700s. Would you like to see the family Bibles?

I have to applaud this wisdom from Hitoallusa. It makes me think of what Frederick Douglass said of Lincoln... http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=39

The astute local newspaper, The News & Observer (on whose current editor I irrelevantly recall having had a secret crush when we were in junior high together), offers trenchant reporting in the immediate aftermath: http://m.newsobserver.com/observer/db_277265/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=F9lAOCLJ

Merely jealous here. One has in one's time ingested all manner of thing without yet finding the ability to write that way.

You MUST introduce me to your pharmacologist!

Take Three!

Everything can be a metaphor. ...which could be its own thread. (Does one of the above remarks demonstrate the other? ...their dark-colored words had redescribed the citrons. -- Stevens "Want to come up and redescribe my citrons?" he asked the swarthy man in uniform...)

Uncle Charlie was priceless. I had a little crush on the kid with the glasses. Quiz: With what disastrous plot development did the show jump the shark?

Walking it back already... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/05/06/joe-biden_n_1489670.html?icid=hp_politics_top_art He did tell Dmitri that he could be "more flexible" after the election. Cute locution.

I was thinking that same thing! I would even pick up his assault rifles and put them neatly back into his munitions closet for him.

Dick Lugar, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe? ...and then there were two...

You know that in Raleigh there is a service company that you can call after one too many, and they will come drive you home in their car, with another of their drivers driving your car home right behind you. Quite handy!

Well, OK. But, as the Mighty Favog used to say, it'll cost ya!

We wear our mental disabilities with pride around here. Welcome to the club!

Forget consumer computing. The big holes are in the commercial systems, many quite antiquated, that run such things as chunks of the power grid, telecom networks, etc. RA1, could the air traffic control system be hacked so as to inject havoc? We at least have proven with the Stuxnet worm that we can (with the aid of such as Siemens!) master the technology for purposes of attack. But, as with atomic weapons before, will devising defenses elude us?

Hito, not sure but it may cost a bit more than $100 to buy out MsGuy. Remember his profession!

Hito, you never told us! Congratulations.