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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. Agreed. Also, a lot of early hip hop is just disco grooves in a different context. Some great grooves came out of that era.
  2. Team post COVID tinnitus here as well. Ent told me that my ears and hearing are in perfect health, although there’s some dead skin on the ringing ear’s drum. They’re gonna scrape it off in a few weeks. If that doesn’t work, she thinks it’s a benign growth or some weird disease that won’t kill me but will make life increasingly unpleasant until something else kills me.
  3. 1951 through the end of 1960 gives you early Miles, peak Coltrane, most of Clifford Brown, and early Elvis. 1896-1905 gives a bunch of Mahler Symphonies, a couple of great Strauss tone poems, and Sibelius Finlandia. Turn of 19th century gives you late Haydn and early-mid Beethoven. You miss Mozart though.
  4. A graying hard boiled egg rolling around next to 4-day old hot dogs sounds wonderful.
  5. Catching up on this thread: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-austria-orchestra-nazis-idUKLNE92A00O20130311
  6. Lovely, more COVID threads please. I can’t get enough.
  7. Bonds in particular is probably a victim of his own success. That drug-fueled early 2000s run was so absurd that is overshadows his pre-juice greatness. I get the argument that one of the small handful of most dominant players ever should be in the HOF, but it feels a bit icky to honor him, invite him to give a speech, etc. when his peak greatness was built on PEDs. It’s not that he cheated more than some of his contemporaries who have made it in, but that his cheating briefly broke baseball and put him in the pantheon of greatest ever. A day honoring that seems strange, even if it’s irrational to specifically exclude him over other juicers who were less great.
  8. Sweardle seems to use a pretty inclusive definition of “swearing.”
  9. Chicken a la Stephen King.
  10. Speaking to the musical side of things as someone who has made a living as a musician for most of my adult life, there are a lot of failed/struggling musicians who abuse substances, but not many working, productive musicians doing so. Making music for a living in any capacity and any genre is hard work and takes a great deal of organized, focused thinking. When you meet musicians who are actually working, you’ll usually find them to usually be focused, hard-working, sober-minded people. The substances that make people think they’re creative aren’t actually conducive to the real work of being a musician. If you want to write, it’s a bit of a numbers game. You write a lot of bad songs/partial songs until you write a few good ones. If you want to perform, you need hours of daily, focused practice for years. Musicians need time and a clear head to do their work. Substances only make that work harder. Some people sort of make it work, but it’s ultimately a drag on their productivity, no matter how much they lie to themselves otherwise. The jazz cats who were all heroin addicts? They either got clean or died. The geniuses who got clean were still geniuses, just more productive. The dead ones were still dead. The same goes for any other genre.
  11. Regarding the risk the unvaccinated pose to a community, my community is largely unvaccinated (somewhere less that 40% of those eligible). From July through September/October the only hospital within 45 minutes reported that their ICU bed capacity was maxed out. Even the if my personal COVID risk was minimal due to the vaccine, life and other bad things happen. People have emergencies and need medical care. The unvaccinated strain on my local hospital surely put my entire community in greater danger.
  12. I pray that at least half of this thread is Russian bots arguing with sociologists studying our impending idiocracy. Surely so many real people haven’t completely abandoned even the slightest pretense of good-faith discussion for the most moronic caricature of troll culture. This has to be a bit, right? Like some kind of demented flash mob?
  13. My parents replaced all their pillows with My Pillows because smart, sane people also get taken in by the stupid, insane culture war. Reporting from visiting for the holidays: they’re ok; better than sleezy, bloodstained motel pillows, but nothing all that great. They seemed very inflated, if that makes any sense; like a balloon full of air. They’re a bit strange, but not entirely unpleasant. At least we can say “Merry Christmas!” again.
  14. Pfizer 2 in April, delta breakthrough in July, booster in December. So far, so good for omicron. My breakthrough was about 3 days of mild sinus infection-like symptoms, maybe a week of no smell, and one or two days where I got winded really easily. I never really had a cough except for dealing with the post-nasal drip. I have had some strange and mostly minor health issues that have popped up post-COVID, and I wonder if they are lingering effects.
  15. In the present era where conservative culture is synonymous with troll culture, debates are worthless. Biden/Trump #1 cemented that. A live donkey show would have been more enlightening than that garbage. Until conservatives decide to be conservative again rather than reflexive trolls, there’s not really a point in having debates. I have more cogent debates with my 4 year old when he’s having a meltdown. That’s not an endorsement of Democratic Party policies or values, but an observation that Republicans have given up acting like adults. Note, if “leftist” is a regular part of your vocabulary used to describe those politically different than you, you’ve abandoned the realm of adults and joined conservative troll culture. Same goes for cries of socialism, communism, etc. Having said that, if this actually means we won’t be having debates in the run up to 2024, that’s a bad sign. Reasoned and passionate debate and discussion is a bedrock principle of what defined American greatness. The moment we all agree that there’s no point to such a debate, we’ve all (once again) agreed to abandon American greatness.
  16. 1. Those pictures definitely hit at a visceral level and suggest a lot of broken things in our culture. You could blame it on many things political and not political and be correct, but only partially so. 2. I wonder how much of this is a new problem vs. a new manifestation of an ongoing problem. What’s the base level per capita theft in our culture? Is this reflective of a change or have the rails just become the big box store for thieves? Essentially, I wonder if this has always been a similar problem but now it’s scaled up and concentrated due to the changes in how we buy or if there’s been an actual increase in this type of crime. Neither scenario is good, but it reflects a different problem. 3. Partisan hacks will make broad proclamations about what this means. They won’t necessarily be entirely wrong, since it’s a complex problem, but they won’t be right either; and they won’t be interested in solving the problem, just benefiting from it.
  17. Early 40s/late millennial, cashless doofus. My “wallet” is a small magnetic pocket that attaches to my phone and holds my work ID, a credit card, and my DL. I stick my wallet on the fridge when I’m home or in my office. Cash is only carried when I need it and I usually just keep it in my pocket. I never worry about how I order the bills, since its usually for one specific purpose.
  18. I vote for irrational fear. I raced to get my shots because my rational side told me that it could save my life, prevent needless suffering, or maybe protect my family and community. The entire drive to get the shot, my irrational brain told me that the shot would make my tongue would turn into a lizard, crawl out of my mouth, and eat my eyes out. I still got the shots, but I kept my mouth shut for a bit each time just in case — an ounce of prevention and all. So much of vaccine resistance is built on crazy, irrational fears, but it’s really pretty normal and human. I teach my child that it’s ok to be scared, but being brave is still doing the right thing anyway. This whole experience has been weird and scary, including the shots. You can present all of the evidence that the shots are safe, but they still might not feel safe to that yapping part of my brain. The pandemic deniers like to say “faith over fear” but they’re just peddling their own fears. The public health side seems to play up the reality that COVID is scarier than the shots. It is, but when faced with two scary things — even if one fear is irrational — doing nothing might feel the safest. I wonder if making a greater effort to acknowledge and validate that fear (your fear may be irrational, but it’s normal and human) would have helped. It probably wouldn’t have, because nothing seems to help these days, but it sure helps my son be brave when I acknowledge that something is scary but we can still face it down.
  19. In case anyone is wondering, it’s in Ohio.
  20. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.
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