Two cats at once. I get the part of the bed not taken by the cats. I'm motivated to lie very still by the cats and the obvious repercussions for moving.
If that fails, the podcast Casefile - gruesome true crime stories recited by a very slow talking Australian fellow. It almost always puts me out. In bed or on planes.
I don't have the patience or tact to offer thoughtful and gentle explanations (as you did) when it's "pointed out" that many people from the region could be considered Semitic.
It's very much the sort of argument my clever nephew might make. He's a smart kid, but he hasn't gotten to the point where he can understand that a clever fact is not necessarily in any way relevant to a complex problem. And certainly not a devastating argument that can simply stop everyone in their mad mutual desire for destruction.
"Well, shit. We were all Semites the whole time????"
I want to find my younger self and tell her that "one day you will enjoy listening to Wil Wheaton read you stories." She will, of course, reply: "Unlikely."
A colleague of mine claims to be friends with some game officials. He also claims that they will privately acknowledge that there's a small native population of cougars in areas south and east of the Great Lakes. They are strongly dis-incentivized to acknowledge this publicly for a number of reasons.
Cougars in Ohio? That probably means that they're some sort of sub-species with endangered status.
Scary for locals? Sure. But the odds of an attack on human by a privacy-liking predator (who have plenty of tasty deer to eat) are vanishingly small.
Basically, it just means a lot of paperwork and hassle for them with little to no positive effect.
In the unlikely event one is killed and the carcass can't be denied, it's always a "rogue male who wandered out of their native habitat in the UP or Canada somewhere." (Somehow swimming solo across lakes Michigan and Eerie, or maybe hitching a ride on a ferryboat seems more reasonable than the obvious conclusion that there is a small breeding population).
ETA - On one hiking trip in Ohio we found a deer's spine and pelvis up in a tree, about 8 feet off the ground. Maybe a human put it there, but I can't think of any animal (that's supposed to be here) that would have. Weird shit.
Anecdotally, the people I know who bitch about this sort of thing are usually the people who no one wants to interact with.
I mean, maybe if you weren't a screeching harpy who can't let anyone finish a sentence, you wouldn't find this to be a problem, Noreen. (Noreen is theworst.)
Sorry for the late response - I just got back from travelling to meet that side of the family. But unfortunately, I don't remember the lyrics. She introduced it a long time ago and she stopped being MC of Christmas a few years back. We didn't get to enjoy it this year.
I just made this up on the spot, but it was in this spirit
Oh God above, sweet lord of mine
How much you love your children.
Oh God above, sweet lord of mine
How much you love your children.
You sacrificed, your one true son
to save us earthbound sinners here...
And this one is pure conspiracy, and I know it's not what you asked for... but it's ridiculous and 'tis the season. My mother in law is convinced that the lyrics to "Oh Christmas Tree" (O Tannenbaum) were changed by people who wanted to erase the true and original lyrics. By who? Big Tree financiers? Communists who are stealing Christmas and replacing it with trees?
Anyway...
The original lyrics, according to this conspiracy, praise God and never mention trees at all. It's completely ridiculous and always ends with the whole family singing along with the "true lyrics" from a badly photocopied paper that she hands out. I hope this doesn't come up again this year because it really makes me want to fight. Which would make me the bad person, because who initiates fights on Christmas? The next couple of days are going to be tough.
It's funny how small towns offer a sense of security, even if it isn't really warranted.
We moved to a small town about 15 years ago. It was right after a fairly brutal murder of a local teen. And it was just a few years after the murder of a local man by his roommate. That one didn't get as much coverage, but he murdered him with an ashtray in a fit of anger. Locals were still happy to tell us that no one locks their doors.
Since then, we've had two double murders, a SWAT situation where four neighboring police forces came to town to help local police kill the guy barricaded inside his home, and a sad story of a young man who went missing in December and was found murdered the next spring. There was also the time a local man randomly attacked two out-of-town women with a baseball bat and was stabbed with a screwdriver by a neighbor. And I feel like I'm forgetting one more.
Even after all of that, police had to call everyone in town and tell them to lock their damn doors after a rash of burglaries. The thieves were just walking around trying doors at random and being very successful.
Granted - my town is unlike the one in the article because it seems like the attacks in Nebraska were both random. That would be unnerving. What I do find funny (in the WTF sense) is that every time my town has another murder, double murder, or riot, the people seem to forget all the ones that came before. For a town of 3000 people our per capita murder rate must be pretty high, but everyone feels totally safe.
A google of "historicity of Jesus" will turn up some results. The wiki link is one of at least three very similar wiki articles on the topic.
tl/dr - it's generally accepted that Jesus was a historical person but all that can be confirmed from written accounts is 1) he was baptized and 2) he was crucified.
Of course people can and do question the independent contemporary Jewish (Josephus) or Roman (Tacitus and Pliny) sources, but they seem to be in the minority. Even the less shady version of Josephus's passage suggests that he was talking about a person who existed.
I don't have anything to add since I'm not Christian - merely surrounded by Christians. I've done a fair bit of reading trying to figure out what's going on with all that.
The Netherlands is in an interestingly unique position when it comes to rising sea levels. They've been fighting the sea (and winning) for centuries. I'm sure they'll be at the forefront for engineering future sea incursions.
Anyway, this one really cute guy at college had an epic cassette collection and he was also artistically talented so he made custom covers/inserts for each one. The original tape is long gone, but somewhere I still have my favorite cassette cover that also includes the hand-printed play list.
He had other excellent skills, so I eventually married him.
Once, and only once, the dream ended with me deciding to enter the mystic portal and me subsequently finding myself standing alone in the hallway of a Hampton Inn in Salt Lake City at 3:00am.
I was in my jammies. No socks, no room key, no phone. I contemplated many options to get myself out of the situation, but they were all objectively bad. The only high point of the experience is that the breakfast bar hadn't opened in the lobby, so this remains something shared between only me and the night clerk. Neither of us were happy, but she was wearing more clothing.
My main takeaways for hotel stays and dreams:
jammies must have pockets
jammies must have full coverage
spare key cards are in the pockets never enter the mystic portal that you summoned
Unless I'm also having an off day, the article is just really confusing. It makes sense to me that Italy would want the base back because it would be like selling a framed painting to Hitler and getting only the canvas back when it was returned. (Hitler, amirite?)
It's probably a pretty nice base. Probably custom made for the statue shortly after it was unearthed, and probably the sort of thing that art historians would care about keeping together with the sculpture for art historian reasons.
ArtieShaw @ ArtieShaw @kbin.social Posts 1Comments 169Joined 2 yr. ago
Interesting! That's kind of what I was thinking as a realistic outcome.