But it was so much fun when for in class reading I pulled out what I wanted to read instead. When called on it, at least the first time for a particular instructor, the response was “finished the required book” (sometimes multiple books) point to two or 3 others “we can just talk instead if you’d prefer?” Full disclosure, wasn’t usually me that pulled the group conversation portion. We had the self designated class clown (also, eventually, our class valedictorian) to buffer the less extrovert of us. Teachers learned to leave us alone. Not that I necessarily got out of the material what intellectuals thought should be pulled out. But I read the dang things. I mean sometimes the reason something gets written is because the money is needed (Clarke), they are driven to write to get the narrator to go away (Author who shall not be named :-) ).
Shakespeare is my favorite “writing for the money” example. I mean, he was obviously pretty good at it…and prolific, which argues that he also really liked doing it…but the guy got freakin’ paid. And there’s a particular cadre of ivory-tower academics that have hated his guts for it from that day to this.
On the bright side, school can taint anything. The good books I read again in class had to recover from the ordeal. So reading bad books at least sequesters the problem.
I thought I hated English for the longest time. Turns out that I actually LOVE it — reading, writing, playing with words. What I hated was the classes that purported to teach it.
Teachers kept telling parents I couldn’t read at teacher parent conferences. Mom and dad just looked at the them then me with a funny look. I was reading Nancy Drew / Hardy Boys / Black Stallion books before I was in second grade (belonged to aunts, found stashed). Not exactly picture books. Reading aloud OTOH was a problem (at 66, still a problem). By 4th grade the “not reading” problem disappeared because that is when the class went to reading cards. Would read a short/short (4 – 6 paragraphs max) and answer questions of what read (including context vocabulary meaning, as long as spelling wasn’t required). Whipped through them. Became one of about 6 of us who competed on how fast we’d get through the boxes :-) Drove teacher nuts (good way) keeping us challenged and not disruptive to the rest of the class.
I didn’t drink coffee, or tea, until I was 24 or 25. Hot chocolate OTOH, yes. Although even now hubby accuses me of adding a little coffee to the 1/2&1/2 (not quite that bad, but I do use a bit more than a little bit).
I hear you. I once drove through three states (600 miles) for a lady on Friday only to have break her up with me on Sunday. Well, as my momma said—when you go out someone you’re either going to break up with them or marry them. Two years later, the unique case was at last realized.
The white cat’s face is the one alot of foreigners make after talking smack in French/Spanish and then being addressed in that language by one of the more polylingual members (meaning not me) of my family.
I didn’t even have to speak the language. I just said “You know we can understand you, right?” And they got off the bus at the next stop. Highly entertaining.
Or my brother’s face after he spoke Illonggo to a telemarketer who went “Uhhh – let me talk to my manager. I’m supposed to speak English, but I didn’t know you were from Iloilo!”
He’s not. He just served a church mission in the furthest reaches of the wilderness there, and picked up three languages and five related dialects. He wasn’t expecting anyone to know what he was saying! I’ve never seen anyone chuck a phone so fast.
My Ukrainian cussing guy who didn’t know a nice callcenter chick like me would understand what he was saying… About the company, not me. I took no offense, heh.
oh dear. Well, I used to have a rather acute sense of smell. Then the hypothyroidism knocked it out. This was good because it was the three years my younger son would cover himself in Axe after bathing and before going on dates.
Yes, I could smell it. Sometimes it was the only thing I could smell. In the house. In his wake.
Just not as I would have before hypothyroidism.
11B-Mailclerk said “Dude! AXE spray is -not- a substitute for -bathing-.”
This is something my elder daughter has to explain to her 8th grade boys every fricking (and she didn’t say fricking) year in the beginning of September. Worse than that Axe has a strong patchouli note, and patchouli is one of her triggers for migraines. Start of school is NOT her favorite time of year…
That’s not good enough for them. They want full-on mind-control programming so all the peons can’t even think about disobeying. Programming to be established by the ‘Experts!’ of course.
We’ve been warned how such plans are likely to turn out, but “The Experts will do it Right! We will create a Perfect World!”
———————————
There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the Perfect World. They just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.
Indeed they try the Newspeak route (by limiting the language one limits the range of thought). Unfortunately for them the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is as much nonsense as Marxist Economics.
LOVE the coffee-themed pentacle summons!! Though substituting “in the morning” for “on Monday” would, in my case and that of many others, be more accurate.
D&D’s Dark Sun setting allowed for good necromancers. But keep in mind that the original version (I think there’s been a rerelease, and I’ve no idea if they’ve toned parts of it down) of the setting was horrifically screwed up.
A Dragon magazine article on some of the things that good necromancers might do in that setting noted the possibility of a group or settlement being in a region that was once part of an ancient empire… whose laws (that no one remembers anymore) are still enforced by the undying. Having someone on hand who specializes in dealing with the… post-living can be very useful in that sort of situation.
A good necromancer?? One who recruits, rather than coerces the dead into working for him or her? And then used those forces to preserve life, rather than extinguish it?
IMO there are roughly three types of necromancers.
One type calls up the spirits of the dead to talk with them for various reasons. This type can be either good or evil depending on the motives for calling up the dead. There’s also the aspect of “what method is used to call up the dead”. There could be methods that may be evil to use.
The second type is the type that creates zombies. This type (like the first) can be either good or evil depending on the use of the zombies. Also like the first, there could be methods use to create zombies that might be evil. Of course, there may be situations where the zombies escape the control of the necromancer and the zombies become a danger to others.
IMO the third type really can’t be good. These necromancers kill humans in order to increase their levels of power. They might have “good” motives at the beginning but quickly turn “full on evil”. By the way, with this type there may be an aspect that their increased power level may lead to insanity. And of course, being insane isn’t an excuse for doing evil things.
I’ll read it in a bit. I’m very mixed on the movie. Brando’s performance is in a different universe from everyone else in the film, and the sometimes bizarre set design (venetian blinds in a taxi cab!?) only makes that “doesn’t fit” feeling more intense. The resounding condemnation of (communist) corruption is great (and quite intentional), but the movie is so esthetically disjointed to me that I have a hard time enjoying it.
The Kazan-directed, Schulberg-written movie I love is A Face In The Crowd with Andy Griffith giving a performance nastier than anything else he ever did, before or after.
I didn’t like the movie but in truth was probably too young when I originally saw it, never really like Brando much, I did like the “Young Lions” with Him Montgomery cliff, Dean Martin that maybe because he died in the end. .
Grad school. Soooo grad school. And a few things afterwards. (I was reading a book review of a new academic monograph about “doing research in the anthropocene” and got blackout on by buzzword-bingo card before I finished the first sentence. I shudder to imagine what the book itself must be like. [It is about “giving agency” to non-human actors {landscape, trees, critters, and so on} in academic writing.])
The meta comment thread is also a good one. We used to have fun with those here.
I was talking to a young man (a kid of 30?) who was said he has his own truck. “oh you and the bank,” I joshed back. “Yeah, for three more years.” He bought it last year!
Dude was younger and better off than me and married to my second cousin’s daughter.
My family buys cars with stories. And personalities. They’re practically characters in their own right. And they’re never new, and they always have the kind of quirks that you have to tell your friends about before they get in.
“Oh, don’t worry, the engine block has never dropped out YET . . . though the mechanic said he wasn’t putting it up on his lift to work on it, because he was afraid it was going to drop right through the rusted-out frame.”
“Better make sure you have a comb; this truck only has what dad calls 4-60 air conditioning. Windows down, 60 mph, y’know?”
In my first job as a teenager, I sometimes drove a delivery van that had a cinderblock for a passenger seat and holes in the floorboards almost big enough to put your foot through. It was kinda wild watching the pavement whizzing by under my feet as I drove. And the rear doors were held on by bungee cords. Not just fastened by them: held on. Ah, those were the days…not that I’d really want to go back to them, but they were quite the days…
Always loved that episodes ending. Many of the performances (Bill Mumy as Lennier, Walter Koenig as Bester, Stephen Furst as Vir) are just so awesome that you wonder how these actors got wasted for years and years.
Flintlock shooters see both as valuable resources.
Beeswax for making patch-lube. (Wax+fat or +oil) Helps with loading and helps reduce fouling.
Bug paper for a protective wad between powder and patched roundball. Prevents patch burn-through thus maintains accuracy.
Scroung paper nests after the first hard freeze. Just make sure you thoroughly debug them outside in the cold. Do not, for example, toss a not-quite-frozen giant-sized hornet nest into your SUV, then drive home with the heat cranked.
According To Hoyt 
One wishes that reading for pain started in grad school. I still remember the horrific stuff they wanted us to read back in middle school.
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But it was so much fun when for in class reading I pulled out what I wanted to read instead. When called on it, at least the first time for a particular instructor, the response was “finished the required book” (sometimes multiple books) point to two or 3 others “we can just talk instead if you’d prefer?” Full disclosure, wasn’t usually me that pulled the group conversation portion. We had the self designated class clown (also, eventually, our class valedictorian) to buffer the less extrovert of us. Teachers learned to leave us alone. Not that I necessarily got out of the material what intellectuals thought should be pulled out. But I read the dang things. I mean sometimes the reason something gets written is because the money is needed (Clarke), they are driven to write to get the narrator to go away (Author who shall not be named :-) ).
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Shakespeare is my favorite “writing for the money” example. I mean, he was obviously pretty good at it…and prolific, which argues that he also really liked doing it…but the guy got freakin’ paid. And there’s a particular cadre of ivory-tower academics that have hated his guts for it from that day to this.
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Elementary.
On the bright side, school can taint anything. The good books I read again in class had to recover from the ordeal. So reading bad books at least sequesters the problem.
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I thought I hated English for the longest time. Turns out that I actually LOVE it — reading, writing, playing with words. What I hated was the classes that purported to teach it.
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Teachers kept telling parents I couldn’t read at teacher parent conferences. Mom and dad just looked at the them then me with a funny look. I was reading Nancy Drew / Hardy Boys / Black Stallion books before I was in second grade (belonged to aunts, found stashed). Not exactly picture books. Reading aloud OTOH was a problem (at 66, still a problem). By 4th grade the “not reading” problem disappeared because that is when the class went to reading cards. Would read a short/short (4 – 6 paragraphs max) and answer questions of what read (including context vocabulary meaning, as long as spelling wasn’t required). Whipped through them. Became one of about 6 of us who competed on how fast we’d get through the boxes :-) Drove teacher nuts (good way) keeping us challenged and not disruptive to the rest of the class.
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I don’t drink coffee.
Tea, on the other hand . . .
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Likewise. Also hot chocolate. Yum.
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Almost anything that pours. Just a lot less of it than when I was 25.
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Also likewise. Both hot and iced tea.
(Hot chocolate too, although not nearly as often.)
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I didn’t drink coffee, or tea, until I was 24 or 25. Hot chocolate OTOH, yes. Although even now hubby accuses me of adding a little coffee to the 1/2&1/2 (not quite that bad, but I do use a bit more than a little bit).
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Adding cream/milk to coffee makes mud. :twisted:
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Those of us who are practicing LDS do get that look occasionally.
:P
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Indeed we do!
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My husband, the weirdo, drinks no caffeine. Visiting in SLC was fun. everyone assumed he was the Mormon, with his heathen wife. :D
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Try being the only Infantryman in a 900+ man battalion who doesn’t drink alcohol nor coffee, nor smoke, nor dip.
Walk into a dive bar with your power-drinking buddies, and ask for two grape NeHi or Cokes. “Leave the cap on one, please.”
You can almost hear the long record scratch noise.
(Thanks pop. You were right. The capped bottles don’t break.)
I was once sent to the Chaplain: “I just want to make certain nothing infernal is going on…”
I actually make good coffee, which -really- confused them.
“I’m down with Oh Dee Dee, yeah you know me….”
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Yep. That would be Dan. Same thing.
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Some of my best friends are truck drivers this is so true lol
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This one should make someone snort their coffee
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MAGAfauna? You mean, like, Mrs. Tumnus voted for Trump again?
Why would they have hunted her?
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Because she’s a trophy wife. Obviously.
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Few people can perform that feat.
But Brian may.
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I once rode a bicycle 12 miles to a girlfriend’s house, with a fresh red rose in my mouth most of the way, to cheer her up.
She was pissed because “too soon for red roses! rantrantrant!” (Yeah, my taste in women used to be “he chose … poorly”)
On the other hand, while stopped at a light on the way, a guy in a pink shirt minced “oh sweet mercy! tell me you’re queer and cruising!”
As Ms. Nichols ad-libbed to the intoxicated Mr Takei’s Sulu, I had to laugh and reply “Sorry. Neither.”
I think Pinkie was more disappointed that day than I was. Oh well.
I choose better women, nowadays.
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I hear you. I once drove through three states (600 miles) for a lady on Friday only to have break her up with me on Sunday. Well, as my momma said—when you go out someone you’re either going to break up with them or marry them. Two years later, the unique case was at last realized.
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The white cat’s face is the one alot of foreigners make after talking smack in French/Spanish and then being addressed in that language by one of the more polylingual members (meaning not me) of my family.
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I didn’t even have to speak the language. I just said “You know we can understand you, right?” And they got off the bus at the next stop. Highly entertaining.
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LOL
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Or my brother’s face after he spoke Illonggo to a telemarketer who went “Uhhh – let me talk to my manager. I’m supposed to speak English, but I didn’t know you were from Iloilo!”
He’s not. He just served a church mission in the furthest reaches of the wilderness there, and picked up three languages and five related dialects. He wasn’t expecting anyone to know what he was saying! I’ve never seen anyone chuck a phone so fast.
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My Ukrainian cussing guy who didn’t know a nice callcenter chick like me would understand what he was saying… About the company, not me. I took no offense, heh.
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Did you let him know that you understood
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Idiot Word Press.
Did you let him know that you understood him and if so, what was his response?
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I read the catface as
“Dude! AXE spray is -not- a substitute for -bathing-.”
And I am blessed with about 50x normal sense of smell. For certain values of “bless”.
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oh dear. Well, I used to have a rather acute sense of smell. Then the hypothyroidism knocked it out. This was good because it was the three years my younger son would cover himself in Axe after bathing and before going on dates.
Yes, I could smell it. Sometimes it was the only thing I could smell. In the house. In his wake.
Just not as I would have before hypothyroidism.
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11B-Mailclerk said “Dude! AXE spray is -not- a substitute for -bathing-.”
This is something my elder daughter has to explain to her 8th grade boys every fricking (and she didn’t say fricking) year in the beginning of September. Worse than that Axe has a strong patchouli note, and patchouli is one of her triggers for migraines. Start of school is NOT her favorite time of year…
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C4M
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About #17 ‘YOU CAN SILENCE MY VOICE’ I always say:
‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.
Yet.
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They’re doing their best to suppress free thought via the education system.
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That’s not good enough for them. They want full-on mind-control programming so all the peons can’t even think about disobeying. Programming to be established by the ‘Experts!’ of course.
We’ve been warned how such plans are likely to turn out, but “The Experts will do it Right! We will create a Perfect World!”
———————————
There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the Perfect World. They just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.
LikeLike
Indeed they try the Newspeak route (by limiting the language one limits the range of thought). Unfortunately for them the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is as much nonsense as Marxist Economics.
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It’s always nice seeing one of my creations out in the wild, spreading joy and laughter.
I created the Ivanova/Boog meme. 🙂
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Ivanova is always right.
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“Ivanona Is God!” Ivanona looking upwards. “No offense intended.” :lol:
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Are we good? Good.
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LOVE the coffee-themed pentacle summons!! Though substituting “in the morning” for “on Monday” would, in my case and that of many others, be more accurate.
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Yeah. Same.
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I only know of a couple of “good” necromancer stories. One’s an e-book series, and the other is an anime.
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D&D’s Dark Sun setting allowed for good necromancers. But keep in mind that the original version (I think there’s been a rerelease, and I’ve no idea if they’ve toned parts of it down) of the setting was horrifically screwed up.
A Dragon magazine article on some of the things that good necromancers might do in that setting noted the possibility of a group or settlement being in a region that was once part of an ancient empire… whose laws (that no one remembers anymore) are still enforced by the undying. Having someone on hand who specializes in dealing with the… post-living can be very useful in that sort of situation.
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Interesting. I have several of the source books for the Dark Sun setting campaigns for AD&D somewhere in the attic.
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Good necromancer? Get out the vote work.
Wait. Good alignment, not skillset.
Putting famous bands back together!
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A good necromancer?? One who recruits, rather than coerces the dead into working for him or her? And then used those forces to preserve life, rather than extinguish it?
LikeLike
IMO there are roughly three types of necromancers.
One type calls up the spirits of the dead to talk with them for various reasons. This type can be either good or evil depending on the motives for calling up the dead. There’s also the aspect of “what method is used to call up the dead”. There could be methods that may be evil to use.
The second type is the type that creates zombies. This type (like the first) can be either good or evil depending on the use of the zombies. Also like the first, there could be methods use to create zombies that might be evil. Of course, there may be situations where the zombies escape the control of the necromancer and the zombies become a danger to others.
IMO the third type really can’t be good. These necromancers kill humans in order to increase their levels of power. They might have “good” motives at the beginning but quickly turn “full on evil”. By the way, with this type there may be an aspect that their increased power level may lead to insanity. And of course, being insane isn’t an excuse for doing evil things.
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“being insane isn’t an excuse for doing evil things.”
Not many instances of being insane causing someone to do good things. Plenty of instances of the insane THINKING they’re doing good things though.
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How about a rather naughty necromancer who goes around raising all the Democrats’ dead voters from their graves? :-D
“Our dead voters are at the doors and they’re pissed!“
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Dark Sun also had the mechanic with preservers and defilers for magic users. It was an…interesting campaign setting.
Also had cannibal hobbits and elves as basically sentient trash pandas.
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Don’t forget Jonathon, The Zombie Master in Xanth
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@D. Jason Fleming
Did you read the post on ‘The Daily Caller’ about “On the Waterfront”? It was interesting.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/01/conservative-movie-labor-day-marlon-brando-on-the-waterfront/
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I’ll read it in a bit. I’m very mixed on the movie. Brando’s performance is in a different universe from everyone else in the film, and the sometimes bizarre set design (venetian blinds in a taxi cab!?) only makes that “doesn’t fit” feeling more intense. The resounding condemnation of (communist) corruption is great (and quite intentional), but the movie is so esthetically disjointed to me that I have a hard time enjoying it.
The Kazan-directed, Schulberg-written movie I love is A Face In The Crowd with Andy Griffith giving a performance nastier than anything else he ever did, before or after.
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I didn’t like the movie but in truth was probably too young when I originally saw it, never really like Brando much, I did like the “Young Lions” with Him Montgomery cliff, Dean Martin that maybe because he died in the end. .
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I’m more or less with you on not liking Brando much.
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Grad school. Soooo grad school. And a few things afterwards. (I was reading a book review of a new academic monograph about “doing research in the anthropocene” and got blackout on by buzzword-bingo card before I finished the first sentence. I shudder to imagine what the book itself must be like. [It is about “giving agency” to non-human actors {landscape, trees, critters, and so on} in academic writing.])
The meta comment thread is also a good one. We used to have fun with those here.
And RIP Jimmy Buffet.
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I’m stealing at least half of these. I may start printing these off and randomly leaving them around the office
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Me, in my pajamas, blinking groggily at the office: Dude, WTF?
Manager, astonished: It… it worked!? You’re early for the first time ever on a Monday!
Me, going to the couch in reception: Whatevs, gimme ten more minutes.
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(in response to How To Summon Me, which I tried to link/embed.)
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And when it comes to necromancers, there is none more likely to miss an opportunity than Dark Purple from “Invaders of the Rokujouma.”
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I was talking to a young man (a kid of 30?) who was said he has his own truck. “oh you and the bank,” I joshed back. “Yeah, for three more years.” He bought it last year!
Dude was younger and better off than me and married to my second cousin’s daughter.
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I don’t buy new cars. Period.
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My family buys cars with stories. And personalities. They’re practically characters in their own right. And they’re never new, and they always have the kind of quirks that you have to tell your friends about before they get in.
“Oh, don’t worry, the engine block has never dropped out YET . . . though the mechanic said he wasn’t putting it up on his lift to work on it, because he was afraid it was going to drop right through the rusted-out frame.”
“Better make sure you have a comb; this truck only has what dad calls 4-60 air conditioning. Windows down, 60 mph, y’know?”
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Yeah, that was my first car. 4-55 a/c and the windshield washer was pumped by my left foot, which also did the dimmer switch.
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In my first job as a teenager, I sometimes drove a delivery van that had a cinderblock for a passenger seat and holes in the floorboards almost big enough to put your foot through. It was kinda wild watching the pavement whizzing by under my feet as I drove. And the rear doors were held on by bungee cords. Not just fastened by them: held on. Ah, those were the days…not that I’d really want to go back to them, but they were quite the days…
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Sounds like an airplane I knew. I flew it once. It was a memorable experience. Further the deponent sayeth not.
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Oh; my bad. I understood him to mean a tractor and trailer.
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The first comment was suppose to start off: “Speaking of truckers….” I guess I was thinking it really hard or something.
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“Well, I’ve got a car that’s mine alone
That me and the finance company own”
— Lord, Mr. Ford (Jerry Reed)
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It’s Atlas Shrugged day, so…
https://imgflip.com/i/5rcaoz
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That’s a great one. There’s another of Orwell.
I like the white cat though. ~:D Cat is all “You talking to me?”
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First one should be:
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Also:
https://cdn.minds.com/fs/v1/thumbnail/1544429014330904595/xlarge/
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Dog is Metalhead!
https://www.breitbart.com/local/2023/09/02/photo-master-puppies-dog-sneaks-away-home-enjoy-metallica-concert/
Black lab?
Meth lab!
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Re, #1:
“Woo Hoo?”
Lannier
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Always loved that episodes ending. Many of the performances (Bill Mumy as Lennier, Walter Koenig as Bester, Stephen Furst as Vir) are just so awesome that you wonder how these actors got wasted for years and years.
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So true:
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Lol.
The bees/yellojackets one…
Flintlock shooters see both as valuable resources.
Beeswax for making patch-lube. (Wax+fat or +oil) Helps with loading and helps reduce fouling.
Bug paper for a protective wad between powder and patched roundball. Prevents patch burn-through thus maintains accuracy.
Scroung paper nests after the first hard freeze. Just make sure you thoroughly debug them outside in the cold. Do not, for example, toss a not-quite-frozen giant-sized hornet nest into your SUV, then drive home with the heat cranked.
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Why do I think somebody that you know Made That Mistake? :twisted:
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There’s always “this guy I heard of …” looks innocent
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Don’t give them ideas.
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There’s reading for pain, and then there’s reading for Thermogoddamnics.
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