AdamSmith

That is the definition of insurance, no? Health, property, business-interruption, life, whatever. In all those categories I have seen people (individuals or small businesses, as you note; hardly ever big corporations) get screwed over royally when they needed to make a claim.

Agreed. I have several times gone to change the artificial flowers on a relative's grave, and found a black widow nesting in them. But never been bitten. However, I have for decades had a recurrent nightmare where I am in the yard, and suddenly find myself having to very carefully step over and around any number of copperhead snakes. Maybe from memory of, at 8 years old, a very big one actually coming into our back yard, and papa dispatching it via beheading with a shovel, and then the jaws continuing to snap mindlessly for several minutes. Phobias are the weirdest thing.

Just noticed this thread. Right there with you! On Halloween (Saturday actually) I went out to several parties, got all liquored up, then discovered how the cane which was part of my vampire costume was an invaluable aid to staying upright! I may have just added a new essential to my wardrobe.

Look, Pelosi pulled off the near-impossible, by main force. You saw the news reports of the 68 or so Democratic reps who had to be convinced to come over on health care. Normally the list would have been divided up among 3 or so leaders to go work on. But Pelosi said, "I'll take them all." And she did. Whatever one thinks of her ideologies, she is a force of nature. Would that, in some respects, Obama were half as forceful. A little LBJ could go a long way these days. On the upside, as noted elsewhere, the election may now have given O the chance to prove he's at least half the politician that Bill was (is). We'll see.

BRAVO! Envious I did not write that. Mental incapacity. When will they invent Cialis for the brain?

A rather, in the end, dispiriting account of our space intentions & achievements to date... http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm

When I was little, my backyard sand box was where all the neighborhood cats came to, ahem, leave their deposits. So the scatological reference remains -- just buried beneath the sand, as it were. For me, it now parses as The Litter Box.

The Reformation of Lurker!

Corporations that depend on water have been worrying about this for more than a decade already. For instance DuPont and others that use water as a primary industrial solvent have been investing fairly heavily in developing alternatives, such as ionic salts that remain liquid at near-room-temperatures. As you say, cost-effective mass-scale desalination, together with new continent-scale distribution networks, looks like the only long-term answer. Yet another consequence of there being two or three times too many H. sapiens for the planet's resources. Or, toggling the other switch, too many of us living too high on the hog.

LOL. There's our solution (sorry!) to the water shortage. W.C. Fields: "Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew, and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water."

Well said! There must be some joke here about PETA, fur coats and your hairy balls, but I can't quite put my hands on it.

You know I love you but your insistent marriage phobia is a little overdone, don't you think? If it ain't your thing, JUST SAY NO.

Careful, the SPCA will come after you for that insult to weasels.

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I think the idea of the Shit Can forum is funny as hell. And a lot better solution than locking threads, or -- God (daddy ) forbid -- shutting down the site.

And again, with feeling:

Zzzzzzzzzzz...

Are you starting to channel our fellow poster 'greatness'? Yes, to both.

Thanks. Very helpful. Another question: Just now I sent a PM. But once I sent it, the software weirdly transposed the sequence of several paragraphs. How?

With the new software, how do we navigate to our queue of both received and sent Private Messages? Thanks, and sorry to be dense about it.

The only hope for me, when you come down to it. How did you manage to rid the place of those meddlesome priests?! In whatever way, congratulations, and thanks. I'll stop there, lest you have to warn me yet again not to pick it up and play with it.

Funny. I saw a girl just the other day who said she likes anal, and can even occasionally get an orgasm that way. Had been with a couple others who liked it, but never heard that before.

Sorry to lag replying. Needless to confirm, you diagnose the case. Actually a pair of twinks here night before last, as generically referenced above. (Took the devil's own effort to gently evict them yesterday late morning, in fact.) My favorite lil Latina escort (a lesbian at that!) night previous. But I digress. In any event, doing one's best to lean way back in onstage interview chair, clipboard in hand, and intone in one's drollest Yale accent (actually WFB's sly parody of the Harvard accent, I am convinced!): Oz's word remains obdurately lodged in my craw. Notwithstanding the violent urge to accomplish one or the other, I cannot see how to make a determination whether 'twould be better to hurl instantly, or rather to swallow then strain to pass it with the greatest expedition, as the better cocaine messengers must sometimes undertake, at their peril.

Does any single processed food product today not contain that ingredient? The name itself inspires nausea. Reminds, for no particular reason, of nearly tossing it in the grocery on account of noticing the moniker "processed cheese food spread." Sometimes truth in labeling can just go too far.

ROFL From The Guardian: This is a news website article about a scientific paper In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges". If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims. This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist. In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won't provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, I can't be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published. "Basically, this is a brief soundbite," the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. "The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on" she or he will continue. I will then briefly state how many years the scientist spent leading the study, to reinforce the fact that this is a serious study and worthy of being published by the BBC the website. This is a sub-heading that gives the impression I am about to add useful context. Here I will state that whatever was being researched was first discovered in some year, presenting a vague timeline in a token gesture toward establishing context for the reader. To pad out this section I will include a variety of inane facts about the subject of the research that I gathered by Googling the topic and reading the Wikipedia article that appeared as the first link. I will preface them with "it is believed" or "scientists think" to avoid giving the impression of passing any sort of personal judgement on even the most inane facts. This fragment will be put on its own line for no obvious reason. In this paragraph I will reference or quote some minor celebrity, historical figure, eccentric, or a group of sufferers; because my editors are ideologically committed to the idea that all news stories need a "human interest", and I'm not convinced that the scientists are interesting enough. At this point I will include a picture, because our search engine optimisation experts have determined that humans are incapable of reading more than 400 words without one. This picture has been optimised by SEO experts to appeal to our key target demographics This subheading hints at controversy with a curt phrase and a question mark? This paragraph will explain that while some scientists believe one thing to be true, other people believe another, different thing to be true. In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn't even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal. "The research is useful", they will say, "and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now." If the subject is politically sensitive this paragraph will contain quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public "controversy" exists. This paragraph will provide more comments from the author restating their beliefs about the research by basically repeating the same stuff they said in the earlier quotes but with slightly different words. They won't address any of the criticisms above because I only had time to send out one round of e-mails. This paragraph contained useful information or context, but was removed by the sub-editor to keep the article within an arbitrary word limit in case the internet runs out of space. The final paragraph will state that some part of the result is still ambiguous, and that research will continue. Related Links: The Journal (not the actual paper, we don't link to papers) The University Home Page (finding the researcher's page would be too much effort). Unrelated story from 2007 matched by keyword analysis. Special interest group linked to for balance http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1