As arguments for the existence of God go, it's at least better than "I was walking in the rain and my boot had a hole and my socks stayed dry." Which is not fictitious.
I argued for the existence of God?
I'm glad your house didn't explode, Heebie.
Maybe because direct lighting shows up stuff like schmutz and worn-out carpet more? Guessing. Or maybe it's more broadly from an aesthetic investment in indirect lighting. My design-oriented friends get really het up about Direct Lighting and Why You Should Never Have It.
Usually in hotels there's a switch somewhere near the bed which turn all the lights on and off. The trick is to find it.
I'm glad your house didn't blow-up. Also, buy a CO detector with an alarm. I think they sound if there is gas in the house.
Overhead lighting is never flattering, so it would reduce the number of repeat hotel liaisons. And at the lower end of the market, I suspect maybe hotel developers save money by not having to pay to have overhead lights wired in.
I prefer my universe to be predictable and orderly, thanks.
ME TOO!
Hawaiian Punch's swim class
Snap your hips, little HP!
Found a discussion of the hotel overhead light situation on a Straight Dope message board and one fellow who said he worked at a hotel provided this response after asking his manager who he said had been in the hotel business for ages (all read it on the Internet caveats apply, of course).
The simple answer is that hotels/motels are attempting to recreate the atmosphere of "home" in each room. Specifically, the living room, which in most houses and apartments has no built-in overhead lighting. Using multiple floor and table lamps allows either the hotel or the guest to move the lighting around to (theoretically) create the desired mood/atmosphere....
I mentioned some of the guesses made by posters here, such as poured-concrete construction making it difficult to wire the ceilings, and liability/difficulty issues of sending people up ladders to change lightbulbs, and she said that those are also considerations, but the primary reason is still "atmosphere".
So you know, like your living room, the one with the bed in the middle of it.
Specifically, the living room, which in most houses and apartments has no built-in overhead lighting.
That's a bit 70s, isn't it?
Specifically, the living room, which in most houses and apartments has no built-in overhead lighting.
What? I've never been in a house that didn't have overhead lighting in the living room. Ever. Well, apart from a couple of really really old ones that were built many centuries before Mr Swan* invented the light-bulb.
* et al
When we moved from a 100-year-old house (with retrofitted overhead lighting) to a 1990s-built house, we were baffled for awhile by the presence of switches but no overhead lights. Every room had a magic outlet tied to a switch (the idea being: that's where you plug in a lamp), so you had to experiment to find it. We found this very strange at the time.
ttaM, moody wall lights (concealed, even) were briefly fashionable when I was a kid. you'd have missed the moment if you'd gone for a piss.
I'm now in my second place in a row with no overhead lighting in living room or bedrooms. One built in 1929 (but I image redone since then), one built in 1985.
Hmm, this may be country-specific, the two houses I've owned plus the one I grew up in did not, nor do my parent's or sister's houses. Also see this ask metafilter thread, in which the same paragraph I quoted appears.
My house (built in 1927) has no overhead lighting in the living room. But no built-in overhead lighting in the living room in "most houses and apartments"? That sounds wrong to me.
18: Same here. Houses/apartment buildings built in 1820, 1890s, 1915, 1920s, 1940, so I can't speak to modern U.S. construction.
The room I'm in right now is both a living room and has overhead lighting.
The two houses I spent most of my childhood in, standard '70s-'80s Western U.S. suburban, had overhead lighting in every room but the living room. That's what distinguished the living room as classy.
Mind you this place is a screamingly shonky flat, so don't take that as anything but cheapness.
Perhaps at some level you were aware that you had a reason to return to the house, and your brain supplied a pillow-desire to explain this feeling.
My current 1940s-built house has overhead fixtures in all the rooms and on the porches. By accident or by design, the decorative glass bowl around the lightbulb doubles as an insect trap-'n'-kill chamber.
Perhaps at some level you were aware that you had a reason to return to the house, and your brain supplied a pillow-desire to explain this feeling.
I don't know why I doubled up there, but there may yet be a reason.
22: I am suspecting to the extent it exists, it is mostly a US phenomenon (the living room without overhead lights, no idea about hotels)--an informal survey of a few cow-orkers has yielded no overhead living room lights.
31. Yes. Hotel developers typically reduce construction costs by using the smallest slab-to-slab heights they think their guests will stand, which means that then putting in a drop ceiling would render a room oppressive (and putting wiring inside the concrete slab would just give back a chunk of the savings).
32: No overhead lights in the living room of my ancestral home, either. Nor can I remember any in friends houses, except for those friends who lived in very new, very mod homes that had skylights and non-(multi-?)directional track lighting.
I can't believe noone else has ranted about overhead lights. They really are fucking evil. If you can save 1o$ and also not make your rooms look like warehouse sections, so much the bette.r
I would guess that Heebie has learned to ignore a mild compulsion to check on her house after she has left, leaving her mind no choice but to sublimate that desire.
also, how does one leave the gas on?
the only time i have done that, was when my kettle was dying, and so i didn't hear a whistle, so i let the thing heat up quite a bit. obviously it wasn't a danger, since something hot on a stove isn't actually in a place to start a fire. though it did waste a bit of gas.
I was raised in a 1970's house and currently live in another one. Neither had overhead lights in the living room. My current place had no overhead lights in the bedrooms until I got annoyed at the dim and had them put in.
I don't think I've ever lived in a house or apartment with overhead lighting in the living room. One place I stayed for a few weeks had it. It's possible that the dorm I lived in my last two years of college did, but I don't remember for sure.
40: All of my apartments had no overhead lighting in the living room. Most of them didn't have overhead lights anywhere but the kitchen and bathroom. I'd assumed that was because I was staying in cheap apartments.
My point, of course, is that it may not have been a whimsical decision, and Heebie's universe is safe. And she should look into KR's advice in 21.
I don't think Moby is right in 6: I think CO detectors, always a good idea, are more specific than that.
I am open to hocus-pocus explanations that allow my Godlike subconscious to exercise control over scary situations.
What you need is more data. Try to keep track of the number of times you think about pillows each day, and then when you get home check the gas.
43: my Godlike subconscious
Being equipped with really, really negligent subconciouses, when we leave for a trip we drive slowly around a 1/4 mile loop road in a nearby park concentrating on what we might have left behind or forgotten to do. This went from a guideline to a rule* after we had to turnaround an hour into a trip to New York City when we realized that the cat had not been adequately provided for and anyone who might reasonably have taken care of the oversight was unavailable.
*And "drive around the park" has become a family saying for double-checking or making sure of something.
I don't think Moby is right in 6: I think CO detectors, always a good idea, are more specific than that.
Probably. I'm kind of a CO detector booster as my parents had a furnace issue that would have killed them if they didn't have a CO detector and they slept in the basement. (Since they don't sleep in the basement, it probably wasn't that dangerous, but it could have gotten them.)
One possibility: building codes generally prohibit having light fixtures and outlets on the same circuit.
And yet one plugs one's lamps into outlets?
Also, no house is safe without a small fire extinguisher purchased during the Clinton administration, never serviced, and located in some ill-defined spot behind something heavy.
And for emergency supplies, you should have a case of Horizon Chocolate Milk (no refrigeration needed), a jug of distilled water for the iron/post-flood drinking, six cans of baked beans, and a candle that smells like "pumpkin spice."
46: But then leaving the gas on is the kind of thing likely to remain undiscovered even by concentrating for a minute (but we go back for some reason nearly half the time).
And another semi-related anecdote: The day we moved into a new house with an electric stove (1960), the place nearly burnt down when a paper bag was left on the stove-top where a burner had not been turned all the way off.
49: Also, no house is safe without a small fire extinguisher purchased during the Clinton administration, never serviced, and located in some ill-defined spot behind something heavy.
We actually used ours recently. My son ineffectively, merely knocking the light aluminum pot over and splashing the burning oil inside hither and yon, while I had more success in extinguishing it after that. But turns out you will want to have all dishes and pots and pans either in the dishwasher or put away in cabinets before doing this yourself.
For $5 I'll tell you about more domestic adventures in the Stormcrow family.
Did I mention that I recently found five dollars?
I once set my napkin and part of a table on fire in a bar by carelessly tossing my napkin onto a little cocktail candle. The fellow who runs the place just laughed and said it happened fairly regularly.
52, 55: Are you related to SEK, by any chance?
Our apartment has overhead lighting in all the rooms, including hilariously tacky chandeliers in the entryway, living room, my office, Tweety's office, and the bedroom. The one in the living room is especially great; it has drippy-icicle-looking clear plastic pieces hung all over it.
I was once at a wedding where the caterers (at the back of the room) overturned a spirit stove and set light to the table cloths while the starring roles were obliviously making speeches at the front of the room. People near the fire calmly poured their beer on it, and stomped it a bit, and the bride and groom didn't realise anything had happened until it was time for the disco.
didn't realise anything had happened until it was time for the disco.
The smoke had besooted the disco ball?
I once set a school on fire using the power of my Godlike subconscious.
62: No, someone got overexcited when they saw the fire and tried to hang the bloody DJ.
I wonder, if one can't get enough, does one HAVE to self destruct?
Also, let me know if you need any water to deal with that whole "the roof is on fire" situation.
I SAID "BUD LIGHT".
||
I'm a big fan of Greenwald generally, but I thought this post was particularly amusing for its gratuitous sexual innuendos. That's so far afield from his customary hyper-seriousness that for a bit, I wasn't sure it was intentional.
|
Hmmm. . . I must admit to having an almost compulsive dislike for standard overhead lights. Some appropriate spot lighting on the ceiling is maybe ok, but boring overhead chandelier lights? ICK! Of course, this is a constant battle in my 100 year old falling apart rowhouse, because it is wired completely half assed. Hubby always turns on the ceiling lights. And I always follow him around turning on lamps, and turning off overhead lights.
Of course, I feel like he does it to annoy me, or maybe because he is lazy. But really, it is because he doesn't actually particularly care about lighting.
'spirit stove' sounds like something used in the inquisition
This needs a Mitford. Living rooms have track lighting, dining rooms have an attempt at a chandelier, parlors have gasolier-type chandeliers or table lamps, libraries have tall narrow windows and whatever lighting replaces them at night; and whatever is standard in hotels and motels is probably non-U by dint of trying to be U on the cheap.
What do designers have against overhead lighting?
We have ceiling fans with globes. Sometimes when I am dusting or assembling or whatever I want a lot of light.
We mostly use table lamps and indirect. In this room, for computer and tv-watching I use a 20 watt bulb in a lamp turned against the wall. I have always vastly preferred reflected, diffuse light when inside. Gooseneck desk lamps for reading, when I used to read books.
Last year I bought a headband to work in the attic with idunniknow, halogen? LCD? 5 very bright bluewhite pimples powered by 5 AAAs. That's a little geeky to wear on neighborhood nightwalks or around the house I suppose.
What's a Mitford
Catching a baseball?
Taking something hot out of the oven?
I have to say I like light. Lots of it, unless I'm trying to sleep or persuade somebody to get it on. And the best way to get lots of light is overhead. You can read by it, eat by it, cook by it, clean by it. Good stuff, light.
76: Rivers and streams, mostly. Sometimes a creek.
unless I'm trying to sleep or persuade somebody to get it on or form complete sentences while in the presence of breasts.
77: I, on the other hand, prefer to live in a cave. We have small table lamps in the living room, and keep the overhead lights off -- little pools of light where you actually need to read, and darkness otherwise. I like it, but every so often someone will come over unexpectedly, and I'll realize we're weird.
Buck gets too distracted?
Oh, I'm with 77. I turn all my lights on when I get up, and that's it for the day. Periodically I feel slightly guilty because we're supposed to be turning our lights off, aren't we, but then I figure that's what low energy bulbs are for. I do have an overhead light in my living room - and am amazed at all these US houses that don't - but haven't used it for years because the bulb went and it's really awkward to replace. There are wall lights though. I like the idea of lamps, but in practice in other people's houses I just get annoyed with them because they get in the way.
My apartment has overhead lights in every room. I think the building was originally built in the 1920s or so, but it was converted into apartments more recently.
My mom's house, built in 1951, has a combined living/dining room, with an overhead light at the dining room end and none at the living room end. Overhead lights in all the other rooms.
when we leave for a trip we drive slowly around a 1/4 mile loop road in a nearby park concentrating on what we might have left behind or forgotten to do
Might I suggest an exciting new innovation: the written list.
There are 2 kinds of people in the world:
I . . . prefer to live in a cave.
Good stuff, light.
The latter are correct.
The Mitfords! Irresistibly awfully sure of social codes.
Headlamps are efficient and effective, except that you get used to never facing your sweetie directly.
86: At least not when you've got your highbeams on.
62: No, someone got overexcited when they saw the fire and tried to hang the bloody DJ.
Dammit, M/tch, this says nothing to me about my life!
Some hotel room lamps near the bed(s) are set up so that if there's just one bed, they can be swung out to light over each side of the bed, and if there are two beds, they can be swung in so that they light the space between the beds. Or something like that; it's been years since I noticed this at some place I was staying. But it did seem clear that the lamps were on arms to make it possible to switch rooms from single to double bedded or vice versa.
Anyhoo, to put this on the right thread:
I guessed that a Mitford was some kind of English mitzvah. Not too far off, I suppose.
My 99-year-old house, and every place like it in the neighborhood I can think of, has ceiling fixtures in every room but the bath, all original wiring. Houses just a few years older often have their original gas plumbing (now out of service).
And yes, it's knob and tube, which is just fine as long as it's left alone, but which goes all crumbly crumbly if you bend it.
For some reason the name "Jessica Mitford" is what I immediately associate with the name "Mitford" but looking at wikipedia I have no idea where I would have heard of her. Maybe the death book.
But you know where they have famous books about death? In Wisconsin.
I was just re-reading this thread after trying to explain it to somebody earlier this evening, and let me just say that it has really held up to the test of time. Or as much of a test as four years--which is, like, 28 in blog years!--provides.
What do designers have against overhead lighting?
I think the idea is that overhead lighting is too harsh and unflattering (both to the room and to the people in it), and also that the fixtures are often tacky or ugly. All of which is often true. But it's also often useful to have that light, of course.
I have a special hat that turns the sun's rays into an equivalent of a lamp on my shoulder.
Is that the original Fuck You, Clown thread? Never read that one, anyway.
|| This article was going ok, more or less and then:
Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.
It's not the evolutionary psych that gets me, so much as the imagining the world of early humans as if it were man vs. lion, with no social organization as mediation. |>
Yes, and it remains very entertaining.
96: I resent the implication that people no longer need fear a nearby lion.
I resent nearby lions.
man vs. lion, with no social organization as mediation
Lion don't need organizing
M/tch a freestyle rhyme uprisin
Mediation is a crutch
M/tch'll smoke you like he's dutch
fuck you, clown
Sneezing fit! One can never read enough of the archives, it seems.
84: Might I suggest an exciting new innovation: the written list.
Unpossible (or incomplete, at least).
when we realized that the cat had not been adequately provided for and anyone
Once when I was a kid, we were 50 miles away from Grandma's house before anyone realized that we had forgotten the dog. (Boy, I learned some new words that day!)
<mcmanus> (Tonight I'm watching a PBS documentary on Helen of Troy and the Bronze age. Some of it seems maybe just a little iffy, but I've totally fallen in love with Bettany Hughes.)</mcmanus>
For some reason the name "Jessica Mitford" is what I immediately associate with the name "Mitford" but looking at wikipedia I have no idea where I would have heard of her.
You should all go read Hons and Rebels if you haven't already.
And I'm only a hundred pages into it but that Henrietta Lacks book everyone has been talking about (not here, apparently) is pretty fantastic.
I saw a few reviews of the Lacks book and it did sound pretty great.
Mitford of course reminds me of the Milford & Clarion SF writers residential workshops
104:Damn. I don't check PBS enough. a) because my scrolling patterns never hover way down there at that end of the listings (or at their digital or HD listings), and b) because the pledge breaks make me crazy. But this household does use the info channels to kill time, and PBS is still a notch above National Geographic or History-Int'l. Maybe I will look for this.
Currently reading a Michael Price book on the collective unconsciousness of Ancient Egypt. Archetypes and individuation, feels weird to roll in Jung in the 21st Century.
90.2: Then a Bar Mitford is making a particularly fine martini and thereby becoming a man? And a Bat Mitford must have something to do with the young ladies' cricket team...
I had hoped to take this back into nipular territory somehow since I somehow missed contributing to that internet-breaking thread, but 'twas not to be.
Once when I was a kid, we were only a few miles away from the gas station where we had last stopped before anyone realized we had forgotten one of the children. It wasn't my parents, though, it was an aunt and uncle who had forgotten one of my cousins. Family drama!
109: In public places some officious person
was certain to point out that it was
in danger of being left behind.
||
This is what I watched last night, Sundance On Demand. A transgendered woman returns to her hometown in Montana for her 15 HS reunion (star quarterback) to try to reconcile with her slightly older (same class year) accident-brain-damaged brother. Interesting for the way she worked to reconcile with her past...apparently most don't.
Her HS friends could have cared less and adjusted immediately, as if it was the same person in different outfits. That feels a little wrong. Her older brother felt like she had taken his past from him.
There are sidetrips involving Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth amd Split.
|>
realized we had forgotten one of the children.
And then you all got back from France, and it turned out all the neighbors' homes had been burglarized. But not yours!
I feel like lion should get a dieresis around here so as not to be pronounced, I don't know, like a French city almost. And then that feeling produces in my head an unexpressed, merely potential LOLcat. Which I'm dying to call a Schrodinger's LOLcat but it isn't quite I guess.
I prefer my universe to be predictable and orderly, thanks.
"For a moment, the sensation of coolness and the moisture were blessed relief. Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error."
"Even the hawks could appreciate these facts."
F. Herbert, Dune
Schrödinger's.
And you let Her HS friends could have cared less go?
On the veld, girding your lions made them seem more intimidating, but inhibited their movement.
104: Once when I was a kid, we were 50 miles away from Grandma's house before anyone realized that we had forgotten the dog. (Boy, I learned some new words that day!)
Once when I was a kid, we were 2 days out of Syracuse when we struck a shoal. (Boy, I scarcely thought we'd get a drink till we got to Buffalo!)
Now if I could type an umlaut on my keyboard, don't you think I'd have typed a dieresis just before? Conventional "oe" for "ö" (cut and pasted) always feels cheap somehow, like a Crackerjacks tattoo, so I bailed. Aber verstehe ich ganz klar dass sie sind verschiedene, o und ö.
ö -> ö and likewise for other letters in place of the "o", for instance Ë -> Ë.
NOW YOU KNOW.
116: I could care less about "care less". My artisanal pedantry is quite selective and wielded only in situations like making stupid jokes about the potential for near self-referentiality in other people's comments.
116:ooops
Did we decide that had become idiomatic? I forget.
121: Knowledge is responsibility.
112: God, I only wish we had been in France. But we were in Prince Edward Island, actually. My cousins were living in New Brunswick (my uncle worked for a mine, and had been assigned there for a few years), and we drove down east to see them (a good 3 to 4 days' drive, as I recall), and then took the ferry to P.E.I. A man on the boat played the fiddle, and then another man picked me up by the waist and started dancing, and apparently expected me to know the steps to some sort of jig. All of the grownups (or so it seems in retrospect, but that's probably not accurate) just laughed at my reticence, and called out words of encouragement ("Ah, go on now!"), which made me feel as though I had just failed a test, the significance of which I could not quite fathom. That was another world, truly; I guess I was about six years old at the time.
P.E.I. really does have red soil. Best potatoes in the world, and no exaggeration.
my reticence
You were reluctant to talk about the jig?
100: Okay FINE, Sifu. I'll let you be in my posse. Geez.
My cousins were living in New Brunswick
Oh, that New Brunswick.
P.E.I. really does have red soil.
And even reddish beaches!
which made me feel as though I had just failed a test, the significance of which I could not quite fathom.
You saw mankind raising its hand in a significant gesture which you didn't understand?
128: Yeah, that New Brunswick. Canada's only officially bilingual province, and the original source (no, don't let anyone in Pointe-Gatineau tell you otherwise) of poutine, which is Canada's gift to world cuisine.
131: Then as now: yes, of course. You know that gesture?
Get ready to ride the Lion to Zion!
The odds of an atlatl thread are surprisingly good.
We were coming off the plane in SF from Hong Kong when a guy in front of us suddenly clapped his hand his forehead and exclaimed "My God, the kids!" before turning back. Could have been jetlag I suppose.
Later that same trip (though probably not the same day that my cousin was lost), my father and my uncle went out deep-sea fishing on a "commercial" (well, more or less, I guess, though "hopeful of a small profit" might be a more accurate designation) fishing boat run by the Court Bros. (or was it the McCourt Bros.? I honestly can't remember, I was only about six years old at the time). "So, how many of you are there, then?" asked my father. "Well, now," answered Eamon Court (or perhaps McCourt?), the eldest known brother of the crew, with an apparent reluctance to commit to anything solid, "I'd guess there were five of us last time we sat down to supper."
You could lose a family member in Prince Edward Island, by all accounts I've ever heard, though it's really quite a small place, after all.
Then my aunt took us to Charlottetown to see the musical of "Anne of Green Gables," and we cried like babies when Matthew died.
I once watched the van carrying the people I was with start to drive off from a rest area along I-5, somewhere north of the turn off to 505, without me. I watched them stop and turn around, too. I probably had enough change on me for a phone call.
I went to a wedding in rural PEI a few years ago. One of the most beautiful places I've ever been. On the way back fro the reception to the motel, my (drunk) friend drove into a ditch, a nice farmer helped us pull the car out, and my tuxedo was covered in red clay. I also ate a whole bunch of the best mussels and potatoes I've ever had. And then I found five loonies.
imagining the world of early humans as if it were man vs. lion, with no social organization as mediation.
"Excuse me, I don't believe we've met. GRRRAAAAARRRRRHHHH."
31 and 33: Providence, RI has a great hotel that was originally an unfinished Masonic lodge from the 30's. I don't think that it has overhead lighting, but the ceilings are pretty high--not just the ones in the lobby etc.
I have sooo much overhead lighting. 13 ft ceilings. in fact, almost every overhead fixture must be doubled, because the fans are in the center of each room and then there is usually one pedant on either side. when I moved in I had to find singular spots for my existing chandeliers and lanterns. I bought two huge blue and green silk lanterns in VN when I was last there, but haven't gotten them hung yet.
Do they strap the pedants to the fan blades? Sort of a whirling frenzy of correcting?
Sort of a whirling frenzy of correcting?
What is the hypercorrectness of two Sufis tweeting?
AIEEEEEEE THE HYPERCORRECTULARITY
sadly, they just mount them half-a-meter away from the tips of the fan blades, and in line with the center of the fan. I admit, it would be more exciting the other way.
