PolarVortex
-
Posts
727 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
10
Posts posted by PolarVortex
-
-
Happened one time on my mission, when I was traveling alone by train and shared a cabin with a young woman...
God forbid that I should fact-check anyone here, but I thought missionaries had to travel in pairs or groups and be within sight and sound of each other. Was your companion riding in an overhead suitcase or something? I suppose that would save the cost of a train ticket.
-
I've used this metaphor before, but our lives are like combat on the battlefield. Different people call our enemy different things: sin, aimlessness, disobedience, unholiness, etc. Yet I certainly have the sense of battling something greater than the sum of humanity's errors.
Religious faith has always illuminated this battlefield. Who wants to fight in the dark? (Answer: People I feel sorry for.)
As TFP says, "We cannot become like God without becoming like God." (I should add that to my sig...)
Yes, that's quite Vortic. I suppose we should be grateful that God did not choose you to translate the golden plates, Vort. The Book of Mormon would have been a masterpiece, but inaccessible to anyone without a background in recursion theory. hahaha
- Blackmarch and Vort
-
2
-
-
Oh, it's real place, then. I'll have to add it to my bucket list. Thanks!
-
Missouri is a nice state, you're right. And can someone explain to me once and for all about this Adam-ondi-Ahman thing? I've never understood it, my brain is too small.
-
I wish to kite there some day!
It's a great place for kites. Even better is Ocean Beach, though. The wind there is so strong that I think you could let out a few miles of cord. I think I have a picture of it somewhere... let me see... yes, here it is:
-
With apologies to the brothers and sisters in the east, I think the least scenic state entirely within a Mountain or Pacific time zone is more scenic that the most scenic state in an Eastern or Central time zone.
-
Then I learned some of what Vort knows, and it dawned on me that the rules of grammar aren't important (at least not in English).
(Woman rings doorbell to house and a little girl opens the door.)
Woman: Hello, little girl. Is your mother home?
Little girl: She ain't home!
Woman: My, my! Where's your grammar?
Little girl: She ain't home, neither!
-
Talking about Toiletten reminded me that when I bring someone to Germany with me, who has never been there before, I need to explain to them that the public facilities are not always free. They need a few coins to get in.
And what are these coins called? Verschwindengeld? Or do you just say Ich muss mal Münzpinkeln?
I figure there must be a clever nickname for these because German humor is really top-notch. ("Why were there no bank robberies in the DDR [East Germany]? Because you had to wait 12 years for a getaway car.")
-
I'd suggest watching the Ghost Protocol one, it's been my favorite MI movie thus far. And it tends to make sense most of the time.
Thanks, I have all the MI flicks teed up in my Netflix queue, but I'll watch out for GP. And I hear MI 5 will be out this July. (But I'm still going to turn on subtitles so I can pay closer attention to the plot.)
-
Or "y'all" and "y'all all."
I am a native Texan and appreciate these pronouns very much, although I don't dare use them in California now. My favorite wallpaper store in Houston was called All Y'all's Walls... what a great name!
But in retrospect, I felt pretty stupid, because really, how else can you translate it?
I guess you can't. It's one of those hard-to-translate things, like trying to translate He was Terrified with a capital T! into languages that have no capital letters. A Russian friend of mine claimed that Saturday Night Fever was untranslatable into Russian.
-
-
The distinction between 2nd person singular and plural still survives in English if you look hard, as when we say "enjoy yourself" and "enjoy yourselves."
Your thou-talk reminds me of the shock I felt when I first read the Book of Mormon and came across all kinds of modern verbs with -st forms. I could swear that I once read "thou experimentest" in the Book of Mormon somewhere, but I cannot find it now. And anyway, that's not so odd... the word "experiment" is very old, even though it sounds modern to my ears.
-
I just hired a personal assistant who handles all that. Well, the PA consults with the tax advisers and other finance professionals, and then either does my shopping for me or has it delivered or something. (how do you actually do it? you know what, nevermind. I don't really care. Keep writing).
My PA also posts on the Internet for me via dictation. It's a pretty sweet gig and I highly recommend it. Of course, you have to get someone you can really trust.
I'm a smelly idiot.
Hmmm... just like Thurston Howell, III, whose butler used to take the naughty boy Thurston's spankings for him?
-
Weather along the Pacific has been very nice lately. Here is what I saw on a recent afternoon run (and this photo is from a cheap iPhone):
- Vort, notquiteperfect and lagarthaaz
-
3
-
I use Digital Ocean and am very happy with them. For $5 a month ($6 if you want backups, I think) you can provision a virtual private server with its own IP and then with one click install a LAMP stack. Last year I replaced all the servers in my house with VPSs in the cloud, and I couldn't be happier.
However, using MySQL for household finances IMHO is like using an Army tank to deliver newspapers. You can certainly do it if you really want to, but there are simpler solutions... like buying an app.
And far be it from me to challenge anything anatess says, but C++ is not your friend here. Even Java would be nuts unless you're totally fluent in Java and can code it in your sleep. PHP, Python are good... yes, I know, people will scornfully call you a script kiddie, but you'll be able to build something useful in much less time.
Happy coding.
-
First Steven Colbert, now Jon Stewart? Where, oh where will I ever get reliable news now?
Well... there's always:
-
I very much agree with bytor2112 and TFP on this.
As I mentioned, I listened to Mormon Stories for a long time. I go on long urban hikes on my lunch hour and listen to tons of podcasts. Two years ago I started with Dehlin's first podcast and kept plodding through them one by one. I stopped after the Sandra Tanner episodes, which would be somewhere around #470.
Before anyone starts throwing tomatoes at me, I didn't really know much about Dehlin when I started, and for a long time his podcasts had the surface structure of honest dialogue. It wasn't until last year that I realized his mind had long ago left the Church but his body didn't follow, and for reasons that are still unclear to me he had this compulsion to publicize every thought that crossed his mind.
The previous comments are exactly right. Dehlin had plenty to say about almost everything under the sun, but he was strangely silent on the topics of prayer and the Holy Spirit. This is the root of his error.
I'm sick of this guy. Let him fade for now, but I hope he finds his footing and his way back.
Edit: Well, last night I listened to Doug Fabrizio on KUER, and guess who his guest was. For the first time, I heard Dehlin say he had prayed about the Book of Mormon but not received any answer. So he does talk about prayer and the Holy Spirit sometimes, but it's certainly not the centerpiece of his spiritual walk from what I can tell.
-
Just out of curiosity, why do you want to manage your household finances with a relational database?
-
Well, as long as you recover swiftly. That was always the important thing.
-
About half of Hansel and Gretel: The Foul-Mouthed Siblings and Their Ridiculously Anachronistic Fantasy World (or something like that).
I think this is the very first movie I've encountered where the title alone convinced me it wasn't worth watching. (And that's saying a lot.)
I just finished watching the first Mission: Impossible movie from 1996 with Tom Cruise. Halfway through I stopped and restarted it from the beginning with subtitles turned on so I could read the characters' names and follow the plot more carefully. I stopped again halfway through and read the detailed synopsis on IMDB, including the spoiler. Watched the rest of the movie and was still perplexed by many aspects of the plot that made no sense to me. There were islands of intelligibility here and there, and a lot of glitzy action and one poor character who repeatedly vomited, but the plot was rather like a Rube Goldberg machine. I think I'll go back to the original TV series.
-
Yes, that sounds depressingly familiar, PC.
A really good friend of mine used to attend a church where the pastor got into trouble because his sermons were based so heavily on the Bible. He started preaching sermons on other books by recent theologians (Tillich, Niebuhr, Küng, Bonhoeffer, Barth, etc) but that simply enraged the congregation even more. So he just started basing his sermons on any popular books, even Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. That pleased the congregants very much, and they nicknamed the worship services "Oprah's Book Club." The church folded a few years ago, I hear.
-
I never cared much for Jon Stewart. I think large parts of our civilization are disintegrating before our eyes, and movies and television are contributing mightily to the decline. I was sickened by the description of the book Fifty Shades of Grey (although the Amazon reviews are a hoot) and really bothered that anyone would want to make a movie of it. Jon Stewart's shtick of mocking sarcasm and obscenities is not a symptom of a civilized society, in my opinion.
One of the reasons I'm drawn to the Church is its wholesale rejection of this muck.
- Vort and Windseeker
-
2
-
Yikes. I've visited plenty of those "we believe in at most one God" churches, and some of them are the most boring churches I've ever seen, with worship services that say and do almost nothing of interest. I'd rather spend an hour in a dentist's waiting room.
Others, curiously, are some of the most political churches I've visited, at least in my city. I like to listen to online sermons from churches of various denominations, and some of these ultra-liberal churches talk more about gun control and the Keystone Pipeline than the parables of Jesus. As a non-Democrat, I'm afraid I'd burst into flames if I set one toe onto their property.
LDS.net Annual General Conference get-together
in General Discussion
Posted
At what types of places do these get-togethers get together?