Sorry Guys

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I am going to finish out the extraordinary promo, I promise, but things have been weirder than normal.

On the good side, my brother’s condition is better than I thought (I’d misunderstood some things.) Still serious though. So if you’re of the praying kind.

Anyway, see you here tomorrow. I’ll try to do insty tonight, but I’m so tired.

25 thoughts on “Sorry Guys”

  1. Will offer more prayer. Just wanted to share an interesting experience today. Decided I wanted to read a print rather than electronic book. I’ve inherited a wall and a half of books from my father (some inherited to him from family, etc.) and fell upon a collection of Pearl Bailey’s books, selecting randomly Between You and Me. They were all gifted to Dad’s second wife (he was her third, she outlived the first two) who had with her second husband been quite social with Pearl and Louis. There is even a bangled dress the huge Pearl gifted the diminutive Roo in a guest closet here. I never met her but heard all sorts of stories from Roo as she had been close to me my entire life, sort of a Godmother of sorts. ANYWAYS, how interesting a writer. I’m only on page 25. It’s a real small font so probably more like 50 pages worth of most modern books. I’ll give a full report once I’m done but I’m only 1/01oth of the way through. But I really missed out on not meeting Pearl, I am sure. Hope her books fill a few gaps.

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  2. My niece was hospitalized as an infant for heart surgery. We learned something: “Stable is good.” Not the same, I’m sure, but you get my drift.

    We’ll keep praying.

    Oh, I suppose it’s been on Instapundit already that Iran was elected to be part of the UN’s non-nuclear proliferation program? (Chair, VP or something) Irony or just typical ridiculousness and showcasing an extraordinary encumbrance of good ground?

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  5. Just for fun, here’s a trivia question. I realize it’s the middle of the night in America, so I’ll wait about 24 hours before posting the answer so that everyone who wants to try to answer has a chance to do so. And BTW, I would have gotten this wrong despite growing up in France; this is not an easy question to answer correctly without looking it up. So to keep it interesting, do not look this up. However, loading Google Maps without searching for anything, and then panning and zooming the map, is fair.

    As you probably know, France shares a border with multiple countries: Germany, Switzerland, Spain… and more (I’m not going to take the time to list all of them). Which country shares the longest border with France? Note that some borders run along natural boundaries like rivers, so their length is longer than it might seem from a zoomed-out view. Careful attention to the map might be required to answer this correctly.

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    2. I initially thought Spain as well, but after zooming and panning I think it might actually be Switzerland.

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      1. I thought of England too, but I think the Channel (ou La Manche) is too wide for it to count; there’s international water the whole length except the Dover-Calais end.

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      2. I’ll speak up before the 24 hours are up to say that it’s land borders being considered, though borders across a river do count as land borders for this purpose. (That’s not a hint; I haven’t checked whether the longest border is across a river or not). If bodies of water larger than a river counted as borders, France’s longest border would be with Canada. Think about all that coastline that Canada has on the Atlantic.

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    4. Here’s fun bit of map trivia. The closer you zoom on a coastline, the longer it gets.

      I’m guessing Spain.

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    5. Roughly 12 hours left to answer if you feel like it; I’ll be posting the correct answer in about twelve hours.

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    6. I too originally thought the answer was land borders plus sea borders, which makes it Germany, France, or Spain.

      I can’t tell whether the strict linear border on land favors france or spain more.

      Looking at the map for land, Germany and I think Belgium look fairly similar.

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    7. Time for the answer.

      The U.S. is divided into 50 states. 48 of them are contiguous, but two of them are separated from the rest: one is an island, and one is on a continent and shares a land border with another country. But Alaska and Hawaii are just as much part of the U.S. as other states.

      Likewise, France is divided into 101 departments. 96 of them are contiguous. Of the five Départements d’Outre-Mer (Overseas Departments), four of them are on islands, but the fifth, French Guiana, is on a continent and shares a land border with other countries. But French Guiana is just as much part of France as other departments.

      Which means that France’s four longest borders are:

      • In 4th place, Switzerland with a 573 kilometer-long border
      • In 3rd place, Belgium with 659 kilometers
      • In 2nd place, Spain with 680 kilometers (in two sections, broken up by the tiny country of Andorra in between)
      • … drumroll …
      • And in 1st place, Brazil with a 730 kilometer-long border with France (specifically, the department of French Guiana)

      I just want to brag on my wife, who got it right when I asked her last night. (She said “Wait, does France still own Suriname? Maybe it’s Brazil.” She was wrong about which area neighboring Brazil is part of France — it’s French Guiana, not Suriname, but had the right idea).

      Also, Germany’s border looks longer than either Switzerland’s or Belgium’s, but it’s only 448 km long: having no rivers makes it a lot shorter.

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  10. May God look after your brother. IIRC he’s a few years older than you. I don’t imagine healthcare in Portugal is up to U.S. standards, and even in the U.S. they can’t keep us alive forever or even at Olympian standards.

    Huh. Imagine a world where everyone was an Olympic athlete for their entire lives, and no one died except by fatal accidents or homicide.

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