zil

I have no problem with people who like sports (as long as I don't have to stand around listening to them yammer for hours on end), but this: ...is as wrong as can be. (I have yet to meet such people - as far as I know - here in Utah. The whole BYU-UofU thing seems more like a running joke here.)

The Celestial Challenge - who can make it to the celestial kingdom first (ties will be decided based on how many you brought with you).

Nope, just a common distinction for inks - blues, blurples, and purples.

His avatar is more blurple than purple, I think.

IMO, it's not about outspending, it's about letting another decide your spending (even indirectly). If such an agreement were entered into, it would be used to control and leverage the other party - that is a form of giving up one's sovereignty - at that point, one is not, by definition, a sovereign nation, but a colony, a subject state. NOTE: I'm commenting on the whole thread more than just your post, FYI. Of course, when Christ comes, there will be no need for such silliness, and until then, it would be foolish to give up our sovereignty.

Even that doesn't make it a good idea. To give up your sovereignty to another is irresponsible at best; it is to willfully enter into slavery, to shed your agency like a snake sheds its skin, but without any benefit to doing so.

Inter alia and et alia are Latin phrases commonly used in English. Sometimes my idea of a joke isn't terribly funny. Next time I'll try it with a fountain pen and see if that works better.

Welcome, @Alia! Will @Inter be joining us soon? How about @et?

I suspect that the apparent multitasking is either: 1) One focus for the brain - e.g. listening and taking notes, counting sheep while imagining details about the sheep 2) Mechanical and thinking - that is, once you've got the body going, it doesn't require thought - rubbing stomach and patting head, driving while singing along to the radio; autopilot vs actual conscious thought. 3) There's thinking and there's thinking. 4) Part of the bit from the quote I removed was all about how we think our eyes are seeing lots of stuff all at once, but it turns out our brains are processing each thing separately and piecing them together in such a way that we believe we're aware of it all at once when we aren't - we're just flicking through all the data really, really quickly.

I read somewhere a year or two ago that science has caught back up with things and figured out that humans cannot actually multitask, and so focusing on one thing at a time, instead of trying to focus on multiple things at once, is more productive.

No. The way you worded your reply to my story about my friend, I thought you were suggesting that like her, you read the end first, and don't see the story. Glad you do see the story - it seems tragic not to.

Come back at 7pm - we don't serve before then.

Right. I think I'll just start going to and fro, walking up and down in the earth, now, since that's what us evil people do. I'm gonna need new shoes.

Can someone please explain to me how it is not glaringly obvious that having sex with someone of your own sex is contrary to 100% of the gospel and teachings of God? There is not one thing with which it is compatible. Not one thing that it doesn't flagrantly deny. The creation of male and female. Marriage between a man and a woman. Fatherhood and motherhood. The family as the central unit of eternity. God as our father and the (albeit not expounded upon) teaching of a heavenly mother. The command to multiply and replenish the earth. The eternal nature of gender. The truthfulness of scripture. The unchanging nature of God. The Atoning power of Jesus Christ. The Law of Chastity. We could expand from all that into everything, because at the center of it all is the idea that exaltation consists of a perfected man and a perfected woman, eternally sealed as husband and wife, being parents of offspring which they together created and which can be created in no other way. That this exaltation is God's life and way of life, that it is the purpose of our very existence, that the gospel of Jesus Christ exists to exalt us in this way. Take away the center and everything falls apart - all of it. It simply collapses. Nothing has any meaning or purpose without that central idea. This is no pop culture trend that the membership of the Church are lagging behind. This is no policy. It is no temporary restriction. This is the foundation of all. To remove the foundation is to drop everything into a bottomless abyss of nothingness.

To and fro? Walking up and down...?

Definitely not an American tradition - though apparently British. That was an immature young man's reaction, not an American one (per se). More mature Americans, even if they didn't know the meaning of the poppy (I wouldn't have until this year), wouldn't have (or at least shouldn't have) found a reason to mock a man wearing a flower in his lapel - that's well understood to relate to some special occasion, whether one knows what the special occasion is or not.

And when it comes time to learn Shakespeare in school, they'll be miles ahead of the other kids!

Note to self, feed Vort no more than 75 pages at a time! (Sorry, it's just wrong to read the end first.) Do you really not form images of the story, just see the words?

Are you sure he's not just an introvert who doesn't know he's an introvert nor how to manage introversion? Because such an introvert looks very anti-social, frequently grumpy / frustrated, and quickly cynical. (Personal experience.) Perhaps ask if he sees pictures / imagines the scenes when he reads. I have a friend at work who doesn't see anything - it's just words, the facts of the story. She hates descriptive bits, often skips over them. She also often skips to the end to see how it ends, then goes back to find out how they got there. (Weirdo.) To my knowledge, she's the first person I've met who doesn't / can't imagine the story in images.

Oh, missed that part. Yes, HR and IT.

With the bottle depicting a little jab about how, the British finally decided having a ruler in another country wasn't a good idea after all.

Noodler's (AKA Nathan Tardiff, an American) thought it was worth celebrating by making a special ink (apparently still in stock at Pure Pens - a UK company):

Let's see, there's the Olive Branch, the Palm Branch, and, er, um the Elm Branch?

Fascinating this is an HR issue for all of you. Unless the messages are obviously from an employee, this would be an IT issue where I work - contact IT, tell them what happened, and IT would block the number from all our numbers - they may, depending on details, do more than that. As for how someone outside got your number - robocalling, possibly deducing all the numbers that use the same exchange. This is neither difficult nor surprising. If I know that 801-123-4567 is a valid number, then it's not far-fetched to think that all 801-123-4###s are also valid and potentially at the same company.

A) I don't start full time until next year B) Once I'm finished, which isn't exactly a 2-day process, the rest of the process (finding agent / publisher, publisher's process) is really, really slow. It takes about a year from when a publisher buys your manuscript until they publish it.