unixknight

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Posts posted by unixknight

  1. On 2/6/2020 at 1:27 PM, LiterateParakeet said:

    I admire his courage.   That took courage to break ranks in such a public way. 

    Unless it was a tactic.  "Look at me!  I'm the Republican who, knowing Trump was going to get acquitted anyway, gets to go on record as reasonable because I did vote to convict on one article but not the other!  Now when the winds blow toward moderation I can say I've established my moderate cred!"

    The man's become a weasel.

  2. I logged on here to to a rage filled rant because I'm in a very emotional state of mind right now and was gonna vent it...

    But I see a few people on here sincerely liked the movie... and honestly, if you liked it and this film was a source of joy for you then I don't want to take that from you.  I'll keep quiet there.

    Suffice it to say that, even though I am not, and never have been, a man of violence, if I had JJ Abrams in a room right now... I'd want to beat that man savagely for about an hour.  (Not just for Star Wars, but Star Trek as well)  I'd hold back only enough so that I had some left for Rian Johnson.

    Today, I'm sick and home from work, and I'm watching the Original Trilogy to relive the time when Star Wars was beautiful and amazing.

  3. So I sat with my kids this afternoon and we played Life.  For those who haven't heard of it (all 3 of you) it's the boardgame where you go through "life" with a job, income, kids, buying a house, etc.  The object of the game is to retire with the highest amount of money.

    So my daughter ended he game with almost $2M and 1 kid.  She won.  I ended the game with... less money than that and also had 1 kid.  My son also had less money, and he had 6 (count 'em) 6 kids.  He had so many kids he needed a second car game piece to tote them all around.

    So my daughter announced that she had won. (Which is true, by the game rules.)  But then a thought occurred to me, which I shared with them.  Her in-game persona will end the game of life with just one child to say farewell.  The same went for me.  But my son... his in-game self would pass on with an entire room full of people who love him.

    I think the game rules have the wrong victory conditions.

  4. 15 hours ago, askandanswer said:

    Belated congratulations on your sealing, and yes, it is a very big deal!

    Very nice work on the sculpture and stand, and even better work on the sealing. 

    Thanks!

    And just to be clear to everyone, I didn't sculpt it.  It's a model kit that I had to assemble. 

    Not sure why the title of the piece is "Atonement" but visually it was perfect for this purpose, and I kept the title anyway. 

  5. "Hey guys, know what we need? Somebody who actually lives in Maryland and has spent a lot of time in Baltimore... Where, oh where can we...  "

    @Godless's info is over 40 years old.  Well I've lived here my whole life.  Let's talk about Maryland in 2019.

    I live in a suburban area almost exactly halfway between Baltimore and Washington, DC.  Don't let that fool you, I ain't far from either.  if I jumped into my car right this second I could be in either city within 20 minutes.  Not long ago I worked at Johns Hopkins University.  Most days, my route to work took me right through the neighborhood where Freddie Gray was picked up.  That would be West Baltimore.  There's a rat problem, friends, and the citizens of Baltimore are not oblivious to it.  It's so bad you can buy one of those oval bumper stickers here that's got a picture of a rat on it, and it's pretty popular. 

    92be66_63dd596089fd41e0b5af13c2bed6cd18.

    When Democrat politicos complain about the rat problem, everybody nods solemnly.  When Trump calls it out he's a racist.  Well, call me racist for agreeing with him but I'm not the one who apparently associates rats with black people.  That would be Mr. Cummings.

    West Baltimore is a disgrace and you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in a war torn city if you drove through it.  Many of the famous row houses are empty, abandoned and boarded up.  As of now, more of them are vacant than occupied.  They've also been collapsing.  Drink when you see a row house that's caved in and has buttress timbers supporting the walls of the adjacent rowhouses.  You'll be passed out drunk before you reach I-95.  By night, the blue lights of the Baltimore PD crime cameras provide plenty of light but they only exist on the larger streets.  The backstreets and alleys are filled with drug dealers, prostitutes and... rats.  Count the rats you see on Wilkens between South Carey Street and Camden.  Go ahead.  You may need a piece of paper to keep from losing count.  

    East Baltimore is only marginally better, but that's because the people who live around the park tend to be more middle class affluent but as you go further eastward toward 695 the houses get smaller, poorer, and it starts looking like the West side.  The roads are crazy bumpy (or maybe that was a rat) but hey, at least the income from the strip clubs keeps the area ever so slightly nicer.  (fewer boarded up rowhouses.)  

    Donald Trump is exactly right and the feigned outrage is coming from Democrats who are just mad that somebody is shining a light on their failed economic policies that have left more than one U.S. city as a devastated ruin.  (Baltimore is the sequel.  Detroit is the first.) "Charm City" stops being charming about 3 blocks form the Inner Harbor and everybody knows it but heaven forbid we say so because Democrats can do no wrong, baby.  Of course, things will only get worse now that we have casinos.  There's a big one, the Horseshoe, right on the place where 295 goes into the city past Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium (where the Ravens play).  Oh boy, now we have a region in economic distress with yet another pointless money sponge.  I guess the heroin dealers needed SOME kind of competition.  Think the taxes the state collects from those casinos is gonna help?  Keep dreamin'.  Not when there's votes to buy. 

    Again, Trump wasn't wrong.  Maybe it was bad form for him to say it the way he did, but to be honest, I don't see any other way to get attention on the issue.  The people of Baltimore have been trying to get help with this for years.  Trump didn't create the problem, but to hear the media tell it, you'd think he rolled up to Baltimore with an 18 wheeler full of rats and released them into the city. 

    Oh, and a quick note about why Dems are okay with illegals... Think it's about drug money?  Are you kidding me?  Remind me again which party is pushing for legislation to allow non-citizens to vote?

  6. @NeuroTypical I'll add my sentiments to the others'... Glad you're still with us.  I'd miss you if you were gone from the boards, truly. 

    It occurs to me that for most of us, if something happened the rest of the fine folks on this forum wouldn't have a way of knowing what happened.  Hmmm  Maybe that's something we can address.  

    Anyway, I think sometimes bad things happen to us partly for our own learning, but also partly so that those around us can learn as well.  You pulled though and you shared your story with us, and that may very well save someone else who reads your post and feels motivated to improve their own health.  You may very well have saved a life by sharing your story, and that may very well be Heavenly Father's design in all of this.  It's said that to everything there's a purpose.  

    My mom had a heart attack in 1999 and survived, and it sounds like hers was quite severe.  She'd had a sleeping heart attack over the weekend and had gone to a doctor who failed to catch it.  (Looking at you, Kaiser Permanente.)  3 days later she had a massive heart attack so bad they had to shock her with the paddles.  She made a full recovery though, and eventually died in 2014 of lung cancer.  She never had any more trouble with her heart.

    I'm 45 now, and I think I'll start carrying baby aspirin around me wherever I go...

  7. On 7/29/2019 at 8:30 AM, Mores said:

    On the contrary, I encourage cursing in Klingon.  In the Klingon language, curses are considered a high art form.  Social status is often determined by how well one can curse.

    (I'm guessing you already know that.  But for the benefit of others...)

    No, I meant for @NeuroTypical to not encourage the behavior of CBS being yet another streaming service in a world where streaming services are EVERYWHERE.

    I will say this, and make a note.  I predict that within the next couple of years you'll start being able to buy streaming services as a bundle to save money.  So you might pay, let's say $30/mo and get Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access and Starz, for example.

  8. 31 minutes ago, Mores said:

    My kids do Duolingo.  But I never hear them saying any words.  I see that they are reading foreign languages.  But is there a verbal portion as well?  I haven't investigated it enough to find out.

     

    17 minutes ago, Vort said:

    Yes, there is pronunciation practice. It doesn't replace actually trying to speak with someone.

    Sometimes.  They don't have it for all languages.  For a while they did have it for Russian but it went away.

  9. 7 hours ago, mordorbund said:

    Some of us are still working on a decent Russian accent.

    I like the way the showrunners of Chernobyl handled it... No Russian accents, just had the actors speak normally.  This way there wasn't the distraction of inconsistent delivery and, as they put it, it's too easy to inadvertently slip into sounding like Boris and Natasha.  I didn't mind that Sean Connery and Tim Curry didn't try to sound Russian.  I mind that Sam Neil did and he wasn't very good at it.

  10. 16 minutes ago, Texan said:

    I'm impressed.  I think Russian is hard for English-speaking people.  I know whole books have been written on its verbs of motion and when to use its perfective and imperfective aspects.  The hardest part for me was memorizing the stress on syllables, which was utterly unpredictable and which often bounced around like crazy when you conjugated verbs and declined nouns.  I finally gave up, although I did go to Moscow with a friend a few years ago and was thrilled to recognize some words on buildings, even though the most common word seemed to be "casino." 

    I once heard a story that German linguists in the 19th century started to think that Latin and Greek were hoaxes, because it was inconceivable to them that people could memorize so many declensions and conjugations, let alone blurt them out in rapid speech  But then they found peasants in Russia who were rapidly speaking a grammatically complex language that was at least as inflected as Latin and Greek, it not more so.  Who knows if that's a true story, but it rings true to me.

    But I think you should keep studying.  Being bilingual is good for your brain and by some reports may even slow dementia... if the grammar doesn't give you dementia first.

    Thanks, though I suppose it's 'trilingual' since I actually learned Spanish before English.

    But yah, Russian is insanely complex, far moreso than Spanish, but I'll say this for Russian:  It's consistent (more or less)  Generally words are pronounced exactly as they're spelled and there don't seem to be as many grammatical exceptions as English.

  11. 1 minute ago, MormonGator said:

    I know of a guy (not personally) who met his wife through Duolingo. Is that the one where you can learn a foreign language through video chatting? 

     

    No Duolingo doesn't have video chatting, or any chatting at all, really.  Just a comment section for the individual language exercises.  

    When I connect with people to practice Russian with, I do it through a separate website.

  12. 7 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

    Duolingo.

    How is that working out?  Do you like it?  My son learned Portuguese from it but it's mainly because he hangs out with a bunch of Brazilians so I'm not sure if duolingo really helped him out with that.

    Duolingo is great, but you really need someone to practice with.