Everyone's a rube for some game at the carnival, but some people abuse the privilege.
OT: From a recent job listing:
Requirements:
Personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Juris Doctorate degree from an ABA accredited law school.
Experience: Ten years legal experience in a government, firm or corporate environment required.
Certifications/Licensing: Currently licensed to practice law in the State of Colorado (or eligible to become licensed within 12 months of hire).
Why do they insist on an accredited law school? Elitists.
Is an unaccredited law school cheaper or easier to get into or less work to graduate from? Because this stats thing is nice, but I could use some extra income.
$8 billion seems like an excessive price for an Abortionplex.
I mean, really, eight $1 billion Abortionplexes would probably be a lot more cost-effective.
There aren't a lot of unaccredited law schools, to my knowledge, and I believe some states' boards of bar examiners are inhospitable to graduates of the few.
Based on wikipedia, it seems that unaccredited law schools are a California thing.
Maybe I'll stick with the dental school I see on craigslist.
Also, and more to the point, it is one thing (and, I think, theologically sloppy at best) to claim a "personal" relationship with J.C. and quite another to demand that another person have/demonstrate such a relationship. This is the sort of reductio ad public display that makes practices like the "altar call" and ostentatious public prayer big parts of contemporary American non-denominational Christianity. Something something Gulag Archipelago something Milan Kundera's The Joke something Ionesco's Rhinoceros something.
4 - yes, that's what tipped me off. You can build a whole building full of labs for less than £100million, so 8 billion dollars sounded crazy, even with the luxury and parties.
Kid B just came back from town with Kerrang! and it had a big spread about Rob Halford. Surprised me as *our* Halford had completely taken over the name in my mind, and the real Halford looks NOTHING like my image of the Unfogged Robert Halford.
"Why yes, I do have a personal relationship with Jesus. He's really a bit of a dick, though, especially when he's drinking. Oh, and don't ever loan him money. I found that one out the hard way."
I didn't realize Kerrang! still existed.
eight $1 billion Abortionplexes would probably be a lot more cost-effective.
An octoplex.
As for the job ad, is the firm based in Colorado Springs by any chance?
12: "I did not have a personal relationship with that Messiah."
13 - not only still exists, but doesn't seem to have changed at all from when I was Kid B's age (13 in 2 weeks) and not buying it. Weird mixture of old men (Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Ozzy in this week's issue!) and the youngsters she likes.
I have a deep and personal relationship with Jesus, the nature of which is that I don't bother him and he doesn't bother me.
14: But of course: Compassion International. To be fair, "releasing children from poverty in Jesus' name" is a mission to which I have no objection, but "Compassion International exists as an advocate for children, releasing them from spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty and enabling them to become responsible, fulfilled Christian adults" suggests the usual errors and weaknesses of the proselytizing charity.
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Building secretary likes to clean out the fridge really aggressively. She has thrown out my perfectly good leftovers before, etc. Earlier this semester I discovered she'd thrown out my (nice, silicone) ice cube trays because they'd gone too long unused. (I asked her about it, so this is definitely what happened.)
A few days ago I discovered my cheese was missing, sent her an email, and she emailed back that she'd thrown it out in the course of cleaning out the fridge, and that she'd give me a couple dollars. I hadn't written back yet.
Now I just found $3 on my chair. I do not want her stupid money. But it seems even more uncomfortable to go give it back to her. What should I do with the stupid $3?
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A few days ago I discovered my cheese was missing....
Dear Dan Savage....
What should I do with the stupid $3?
Release children from poverty in the cheese's name?
20: Do you always shake down the support staff?
I'm mostly venting because STOP THROWING MY FOOD AND WARES OUT.
Use it to buy a tupperware box and a Sharpie, and write "leave Heebie's stuff alone!" on the box.
24: Is it possible that, being the secretary and all, she is asked by somebody higher up in your department to keep the refridgerator clean and she's now caught in the middle between you and somebody who is needed to get her next raise?
What should I do with the stupid $3?
Put it in the fridge.
The department chair is a total slob who would never have asked her to tidy up.
In general, she reorganizes the coffee station from time to time, really uses the mini-kitchen to cook elaborate meals for lunch etc. She is basically a very nice person* who is used to tidying up after slobs. Does more good than harm.
*with horrible horrible political views
Would it be awful to just leave it on her chair, with a post-it note that says "No big deal :) " or something?
My experience is that more than a dozen people can only use a common fridge if somebody is willing to be fridge nazi or if everybody is willing to just ignore funny smells.
31 is true, too. But seriously, my clean, inoffensive silicone ice cube trays? Why would you throw those out? I'm more annoyed with that than I am the cheese.
Or: Just send an email before you purge.
32: Yes, the ice cube tray thing is strange. Maybe she hates ice?
All of this is Threat Level Zero, for the record. She's a nice person.
At some point, Rotten in Denmark said something like "Whenever I visit developing nations, the extreme (hospitality/manual labor/being waited on hand&foot) feels very uncomfortable for the first couple days. Then I start to feel entitled to it."
I have a similar thing with the building secretary. It takes some effort not to slip into taking her for granted and starting the downhill slide towards jackassdom.
It's like I get tempted to falsely believe that I'm entirely self-sufficient at work, and no one is doing things behind the scenes to make my life run smoothly. So when the behind the scenes people do something that makes my life harder, I have to check myself to remember that they've been building up their karma account with invisible nice things.
For the record, my office's kitchen has a fridge with water and ice dispensers in the door. I can even get crushed ice, should I want it.
On the down side, our bathroom is maintained by a guy who cleans nothing but the top of the toilet seat. This winter, just for a test, I took piece of TP and wiped a line across the bottom of the seat and you can still see that line.
Ours has mice. I can even get fleas, should I want them.
It's kind of a lighter shade of yellow/brown than the rest of the seat bottom.
with horrible horrible political views
So, fridge nazi and actual Nazi?
I can even get fleas, should I want them.
Like Eduardo! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771754/
So, fridge nazi and actual Nazi?
More like thoughtless entitled-feeling libertarian. I think she could be swayed toward Tea Partydom if she was paying attention.
Or: Just send an email before you purge.
Every couple of weeks (every month? I really don't know) a note appears on our office fridge saying it's going to be ruthlessly cleaned on Friday at 2:00, so get your stuff out if you want to keep it. This seems like a good system, and one that you could even suggest in a friendly way:
"Hey, Sue, it's great that you keep the kitchen so clean and we all really appreciate it. We could maybe make the fridge-cleaning easier on you if we knew in advance when you were going to do it--that way we could all have a chance to clean (or hide!) our own stuff out so that there was less in there for you to deal with."
Put it toward a dorm fridge?
This is what I did at work (well, actually I just brought in my old dorm fridge for me and some officemates). However, since I didn't insist the fridge come with me during a recent workspace shuffle, it seems I may have permanently lost it to some squatters. I mean, unless I want to go in all awkwardly and reclaim my fridge.
Also: this solution wouldn't work at my mom's (local-government, education-related) workplace, where the employees are prohibited from plugging in anything extra. Including desk lamps.
44: same here; actually there's a permanent note that says "This fridge will be cleared out on the following dates: Friday 1st, Friday 15th, Friday 29th..."
Getting a dorm fridge bothers me philosophically. It makes much more sense for ten people to share one (new!) fridge, than for us each to squirrel away in individual semi-luxury just so that we don't have to cooperate. I keep seeing it as such a metaphor for society's bigger problems.
48: Only ten people? Yes, it shouldn't be that hard to check around before you toss something.
society's bigger problems
You think you got it bad? WE'RE OPPRESSED!
47: Last winter my workplace lost power because a bunch of people had space heaters under their desks (meanwhile, I roast with two workstations and a power backup by my feet).
It should be noted that we're only getting one side of this story. For all we know, Heebie's cheese was thoroughly Brocked.
Heebie's cheese was brand spanking new! However, it closely resembled the pack I had before that, and before that, and before that, because I eat the same thing every day. So to the unobservant eye, there had been a bag of indeterminate deli cheese for the whole last year.
Except, having bummed a piece off me from time to time, she knows I go through it regularly.
My biggest hesitation was "What if she was cooking and thought I wouldn't mind if she used the last of it?" Because that really wouldn't bother me at all.
52: Alternate theory -- she had a craving, and ate your cheese, knowing that you would assume she threw it out.
Alternate theory, part 2 -- your ice cube tray is presently in her refrigerator/freezer at her home.
53: Don't leave your baby lying around the office, heebie. She might be lonely.
Alternate theory, a different one -- Since cheese is a dairy product and silicone is often used for breast enhancement, she's clearly sublimating something.
I just saw a note on her door that she's out on vacation for a while, which explains the abrupt cleaning of the fridge. So I let myself in her office and left the money on her chair with a smiley face post-it.
Funnier would have been leaving a slightly different amount of money on her chair -- either leave two of the three bucks, or throw in an extra dollar. Make her think about what that means.
Less funny would have been three pieces of cheese, labeled #1, #2, and #4.
Far less funny would have been a cow's head.
Far, far less funny would have been a copy of Epic Movie.
Throw in an extra dollar. If she takes this as a hint that she's under-compensated you and returns you $5, raise her $6. If she goes $7, leave her a post-it note saying "Twist".
Overheard on the intercity train earlier today between Amsterdam and Schiphol: "I don't know about Obama, man. Gas prices have gone through the roof..." (A highly bro-ish, American voice.) He later posited it as laughable that we had taken so long to locate bin Laden, offering as evidence that he had been interviewed for CNN a few months before 9/11.
I realize this bit has passed (1, 12), but everyone should know about the Ministry of Unknown Science. Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?
Alternative theory no 4: she's making cheesy icecubes.
Alternate theory: she's covering for the mice. What they want with the ice cube tray I leave as an excercise for the reader.
If people think gas prices are high now, imagine how pissed they will be at how high gas prices will get if the economy ever recovers.
So just to keep things straight, the problem is that she moved your cheese?
I was kind of floored that no one made that joke yet, since I assumed I was setting someone up back when I wrote comment 20.
A good cheese joke has to be allowed to ripen.
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So has anyone else noticed that increasing numbers of people are beginning their sentences with the word "So"?
It's everywhere. What is up with that? Just saying.
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You think it's increased? I bet it hasn't.
I think it's increased. I especially noticed it in interviews with, like, scientific researchers on NPR. The interviewer/journalist asks, "What does your research tell us about blah blah blah blah?" and the scientist says, "So, what we did was to look into blah blah." The respondent does this "So" thing over and over again, with virtually every response. Argh! It was driving me nuts for a couple of months there, and I told myself I might have to get used to it. Now, sure enough, people are doing it everywhere.
It's some kind of thing.
You know what nobody says anymore? "Up your nose with a rubber house." That was a useful piece of verbiage.
Hits too close to home (sic) since the real estate crash.
The increasing incidence of sentence-initial "so," is a direct consequence of the increasing incidence of confirmation bias; people think that they're observing or discovering things more often, so they're more inclined to begin their sentences with conclusion-introducing words such as "so".
76: I don't really know what Google's ngrams track. If I'm looking at that result correctly, and assuming it's reliable, apparently the "So" introduction just bothers me, while "Well" does not.
"So" is now used by people where it is not particularly a synonym or place-holder for "Well."
82.1: Frequency of occurrence in books. I do think there are some dangers in interpreting them. Just tried this one (Yes, Well), and they practically lie on top of one another.
81: That's interesting. I was hypothesizing something slightly different: introducing with "so" makes it sound as though you're in the middle of an ongoing conversation (when in fact you might just be introducing an entirely new topic, or post, out of the blue, as it were), and I speculated that this might be a function of our increasingly wired, plugged-in neverendingconversation world.
83: Okay. Frequency of occurrence in books isn't really what we want here.
I shouldn't comment on how funny 81 is, for fear of ruining things.
85: An indirect measure to be sure, however it is:1) not irrelevant and 2) what we have.
87: So, I shouldn't either then.
Uh, my introduction of 71 with the word "So" was intentional, in case that was unclear.
So about sentence-initial "so"....
(I really do think scientists do this more often than, uh, normal people.)
Also, you can do a lot more with the 1810-2009 corpus here.
91: I am not very confident in the pre-1800 results due to things like this one (non-caps well, so). 93 looks interesting but I'm too tired or old to figure out how to use it at a glance.
"Heebie's cheese was brand spanking new!"
That s the problem. She would have been ok with craft, 14 month aged cheese. But your fresh, Government cheese?
I am not very confident in the pre-1800 results due to things like this one (non-caps well, so)
I'm sure typography and such messes up the earlier results, but at a glance, I can't tell what you think is such a problem with the non-caps graph.
As for the other site I linked to - I still haven't worked out how to use it properly either.
92: I'm waiting to see a discussion section start with "So, it was found...."
Also, there's a bit of a problem in trying to track changes in speech through textual analysis of printed stuff, but I assume this is like causation and correlation - most everybody is already aware of it, and it's pedantic to point it out.
99: Yes, a lot of problems such as changes in selection bias in what gets published (and preserved for older stuff).
97:It may simply be a failure of imagination on my part, but the low frequency of "so" in the 18th century followed by a dizzying ascent and then a steady 200-year decline just does not look like a reasonable result.
100: My personal test of "reasonableness" is eminently attackable, of course.
If only we had a specialist in eighteenth-century literature to weigh in on this.
Earlier instances of "So" will be complicated by its use as a synonym for "Thus".
A great many words seem to rise dramtically in frequncy over the 19th century. Possibly general effect as everything has older synonyms and nonstandard spelling that die out then.
Aha! Almost certainly an artifact of the long s. (so, well, fo).
1803 seems to have been a key year in English, the Times of London switched and it was the last year that the acts of Congress were published using it. Things I should have known/may have once known: Leibniz based the integral sign on the first letter of ſumma.
A great many words seem to rise dramtically in frequncy over the 19th century.
Because of your mother.
Earlier instances of "So" will be complicated by its use as a synonym for "Thus".
I continue so to use "so". (Though in that sentence "thus" wouldn't have served.)