If you do make it jumping off a roof into a swimming pool while drunk is pretty goddamned fun.
NO NO NO LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.
ledges that seem like you could probably make it to that swimming pool with a running start.
If you make sure that your kids watch the right obscure slasher movies from the 2000s they'll learn that that never ends well.
Climbing cliffs in the desert while super high is fun, too. Only knew the one guy who fell doing that, and he was fine eventually.
This category of thing is about the only thing about my misspent youth that scares me in retrospect -- I had a period in college where having a fun evening drinking tended to make me think that climbing things was an excellent idea, and while I never did anything all that adventurous, there were certainly a bunch of things I did that could have killed me. (Nothing that I'd have been all that worried about doing sober, just scrambling around fire escapes and such, but stuff that wasn't a good idea at all to be doing drunk.)
I don't even like to stand at the top of long stairwells that don't have intervening landings.
I always used to want to jump across the subway tracks at Park Street Station. Seemed eminently doable. Never did it, though.
That one moment, of sizing up the gap between garages and deciding it seems like a plausible leap, compared to how annoying it would be to go all the way to the ground and back up again....it's so damn relatable that it scares the living shit out of me.
I know of two people who became paralyzed when drunk, and they weren't engaged in risky decisions as in the OP, just things like taking out the trash and falling down the steps. So, I suppose the question is how lucky are the great many of us for not having anything terrible happen when drunk (or conversely unlucky for the people who end up terribly hurt / killed)?
How lucky we are to have the availability heuristic ready to hand.
9: within six months or so. Admittedly, it could have been a lot worse, given that he broke his spine out in the middle of the desert hours from anything at an illegal party.
7- I assume you mean the red line, because many people have staggered across the green line tracks drunk with no problem.
Drunk feats of strength or heights is not a thing I ever did. I tended to wander off, drunk, deciding that the cool night air would be a very pleasant thing for me to walk around in. This scared other people, but I don't think I was particularly in danger. (I also did this sober, so.)
10: Was one of those in Greenfield?
The climbing things while drunk tendency runs in my family; Dad has mentioned that he picked up the nickname "T.H.E. Cat" for awhile after an incident where, after a few too many drinks, it sounded like a good idea to help a friend out who had forgotten her keys by climbing a couple of stories up the outside of her building to break in through the window. I was a little disturbed when I looked up the TV show the nickname came from to realize that this must have happened when he was nearly thirty, rather than in his early twenties -- aren't you supposed to outgrow drunken acrobatics by then?
Anyhow in truth I never really did this stuff. I am not a huge fan of heights, generally.
I did live down the street from a park where the entrance bollards had been sunk too close to a buried power line, so if you touched them both you would get a shock, and we would go out and hang onto them while wasted, but that was more a feat of idiocy than strength per se.
Here's a funny one that doesn't end in injury, just moderate embarrassment. A friend stumbled home to his apartment drunk and tired. He was too drunk to get the key in the lock, and all he wanted to do was sleep. He decided, "Hey, I play soccer. I'll just kick the door in, and then I can sleep." As he was kicking in the door, the police showed up. A neighbor had called about someone breaking into an apartment. He insisted, drunkenly, that this was, in fact, his apartment. The cops were skeptical until he pulled out his driver's license. He remembers the cop saying something like, "Poor dumb shit, it IS actually his place" and reaching through the hole kicked in the front door near the knob and unlocking it from the inside to let the friend in. He woke up the next morning on his couch with a headache and a beam of sunlight hitting his face from an odd angle . . . streaming through the hole in his front door.
I've kicked in my own door. I went for a jog and forgot my key. I had a job interview, so I couldn't just wait until somebody came home with a key.
Oh I've kicked in a door or two.
I once kicked a hole in a cubicle partition wall, but nobody noticed because the fabric covering hid it.
And because nobody else was in the room at the time.
@24: Don't drink and draw.
I've never had an opportunity to kick a door in. All that time mulling over the best kicking technique wasted.
You see, you want to aim the kick near the doorknob, otherwise energy will be dissippated by torquing the entire door, rather than dislodging the bolt.
All this time I've been kicking the doorframe.
I tend to be quite aware of the fact that I'm drunk or high and become correspondingly more cautious. There's a curve of intoxication vs caution that peaks and then presumably plunges, but I make it a habit not to go to the plunging portion of the curve, I think because I tend to pass out.
28: The chances of success are lower, but that one time you end up knocking down the house leaving only the door standing...
We used to go up on the roof of a 35-story building on the Columbia campus while drinking or tripping. It was the tallest building around, so you had a 360-degree view. We would spend all night there and watch the sun rise. It was great times, but you had to break in through some building-engineering rooms with giant fans and machinery and then climb a tall ladder, so it was probably really dumb. Great times though.
Apparently the biggest source of injuries/death with frat houses is kids falling off balconies and roofs.
I once had to bust a window at my dad's house, not because I was drunk, but because I was locked out and he was far away. I had just driven in from Pgh, and this was really the only solution. Fortunately, it was an old, single-glazed, 6-over-6 window (that is, 2 sashes, each divided into 6 panes), so I just had to break one little piece of glass. The next day I reglazed it.
Then, a few months later, when the same thing happened, I just had to scrape out the still-soft glazing putty. Since then, my dad just leaves the front door unlocked.
Hmm, doesn't really resonate. I was never tempted to do anything remotely dangerous when I was drunk, and my older kid is pretty timid, so this isn't a big worry yet. I did know a guy who went to my high school and college who got drunk and fell off a balcony at his frat and died a very slow, lingering death. The son of a family we knew in NM had been climbing a building a college and fell to his death. It's a bummer I can't share the identifying details about that story, because it's awesome.
More generally, it's amazing how dangerous alcohol is, and the contrast between the legality of it and the freak out about every other drug, is one of those things that you have to figure future humans are going to shake their heads at.
Why didn't he just give you a key?
my older kid is pretty timid
My parents might easily have said the same about me. You never know.
"I had a period in college where having a fun evening drinking tended to make me think that climbing things was an excellent idea"
Your first or second college? The first has a tradition of thinking that climbing things is an excellent idea but I think the organizations that nominally organize such climbing frown on doing it while drunk.
I'm safer than huffing and, I think, meth.
I dunno, meth probably isn't a bad choice for climbing things.
I once lost my car keys while rolling down a grassy hill at 4:00 AM on mushrooms. I didn't miss them until sometime the next afternoon. It was nothing short of miraculous that I managed to find them by retracing my steps.
Learning to put my keys in the same spot 90% of the time may be the biggest achievement of my adult life.
(At work, I just leave them dangling from the door of my office. It seems to drive everyone crazy, but I never lose my keys there.)(At home, I don't do that. I clip them to my purse.)
That works fine until you kick your office door down.
38: Mostly my second college -- I think I found myself in the occasional tree at MIT, but never got into the organized climbing-things scene.
35: I had one (probably the same one I had in HS), I just didn't always remember to bring it to NJ. I've always been opposed to carrying more keys than strictly necessary, so that key was on a separate ring.
To be clear, I used to go to NJ all the time - at least a dozen times a year in my mid-20s - so it's not as if I had a super-high forget rate.
I'm wondering how Spike rolled uphill, and also whether he did shrooms at the top. I suppose that, once he'd found the keys, he could stop the retracing.
Oh, and on the OT, it's surely a good thing that the doing physically unwise phase of my life almost completely failed to coincide with the drinking phase of my life. Not counting work-related things like being on roofs or scaffolding, I can't really think of anything precarious I've done since almost the exact time I started drinking (which was quite late; I was approaching 22).
The drinking did, of course, coincide quite closely with psychically unwise activities like moving in with BOGF.
Twenty years ago today, I was sitting in an apartment off High Street in Columbus watching Al Cowlings drive really slowly.
I had a grad student friend who woke up one morning in a puddle of water, have wrenched his bathroom sink off the wall while drunk the night before. His super should be up for beatification pretty soon, as when he switched apartments in the same building, the guy put up a new shower curtain for him, as his old one was literally rotted through with mildew and what not.
The friend finally hit bottom, dropped out of school, became a recluse for 6 months or so, only coming out of his apartment to buy liquor, and finally wound up moving out of state to be cared for by his brother. Sad case.
Twenty years ago I was doing a summer student thing in Costa Rica with my brother.
I was in Samoa. Our source for American news was Newsweek, which was terrible. The issue we got probably two weeks from now, twenty years ago, spent pages and pages going on about the 'low speed chase', but utterly failed to explain what had happened, because they assumed you'd already watched it on the news. All the PCVs sat around at Otto's Reef, drinking and trying to figure out what 'low speed chase' actually meant.
I had just taken up summer employment as a night watchmen on a small island off the coast of New Hampshire.
My climbing-on-and-around-buildings phase completely failed to overlap with my drinking phase (aka the rest of my life since then); as noted, that social crowd frowned on the combination (also somewhat frowned on drinking in the first place, and sometimes had a nasty superiority complex about that).
These days my main concern about what I'll do if I'm drunk is that I'll fail to pay or to tip correctly. Pretty minor, but it does worry me sometimes. I don't think it's ever actually happened (Thread cross-reference: Another good use case for Uber over cabs).
I was a fairly responsible drunk, if such a thing exists, at least as far as personal danger goes.
Although shooting illegal weapons at propane tanks in the desert while on E with some folks I didn't know very well happened well before the statute of limitations expired. Nothing worse than sunburn happened.
Sometime this year, twenty years ago, Lisa Marie Presley married Michael Jackson. I only remember this because I found out about it by eavesdropping on a conversation in Samoan between two women I didn't know on a ferry, and had to break into the conversation to confirm that I'd understood correctly. I was kind of pleased with my language skills.
Black Hole Sun and Loser got a lot of radio play. I associate those songs with that summer.
49 is a good grad school cautionary tale.
I've never liked heights. Speed and curves on bikes, motorcycles, and cars were my addictions. Luck and awesomely fast reflexes are good things to have in that case. Given the other insanities I've gotten into and away with unscathed, I'd say it's mostly luck.
20 years ago I was a super-precocious kid, mostly in terms of books and musical taste. Either this year (at age 12) or next I would decide my favorite band was Velocity Girl.
58: Your generation had better, more affordable unsafe cars.
I don't think I saw the OJ chase live. Maybe part of it? I was, let's see, high? That's probably right.
54.last: that's always a good time. I probably knew one or two of those people, god knows.
The first time I ever went to southern California and turned on the TV there was a local high-speed chase on the news. I assumed this was pretty much a daily occurrence there.
63: It happens fairly often and they all end up the same way. It's kinda hard to out-run a police helicoptor and the assorted TV news choppers following along.
I have a friend who used to climb everything in sight. Including a 50+ story tower in Hong Kong when he lived there and an even taller one in Tokyo. His wife made him stop climbing when they got married or he'd still be doing it.
Speaking of freak accidents. Sunday, Father's Day, I was at my folks' place out on LI and the neighbor across the street who'd been there since we'd moved to the neighborhood in '69 fell off his back steps, hit his head, and snapped his neck at the base of the skull. I was there with my father trying to comfort his wife while the EMTs were working on him. He looked completely unresponsive. I was with one of their daughters who is about a year older than me and pretty severely mentally and physically disabled and seemed blissfully unaware of what was going on just a few yards away. I heard that he's been on a ventilator since then and they're just waiting for the eldest daughter to arrive from Florida to take him off. He was my catechism teacher for my first communion and I was a pain in his ass saying stuff like "but what about the Buddha?" which I distinctly remember pronouncing to sound like a New Yorker saying "butter." A good and decent man.
65.2, Oh my God how terrible.
I had vague memories of kicking down my own door as a student, but I didn't drink then and would have been nowhere near strong enough to have done that...
...then I remembered what happened. Locked out, at 2am, I felt I needed my apartment door broken so I asked an older, sketchy-looking guy I met in the gas station parking lot to do it for me. I did this, sober, thinking it was a sensible and resourceful idea.
He must have walked off those back steps thousands of times.
He could have been in the Fox News thread. During hurricane Sandy I was staying at my folks while waiting to move into a new apartment in Queens. He had a generator and knowing that I needed to keep in touch with work and stuff he invited me to charge my phone and computer. He showed me his generator hook up in the basement and I noticed a desk with folders labelled "Benghazi," "IRS scandal" and the like. He also helped out with his monster snow blower during a few blizzards when I was house sitting while the folks were snowbirding it in Florida.
A good and decent man. Makes me hate Fox News even more.
As he was kicking in the door, the police showed up. A neighbor had called about someone breaking into an apartment. He insisted, drunkenly, that this was, in fact, his apartment.
It's good he was in the right but IME when the cops get called the odds are skewed towards "that's not your door you're kicking". The belligerent ones sometimes forget that taking a swing at us is a really bad idea when you're operating with reflexes marinated in booze.
I had a friend when I was a teen whose pool house roof was the perfect height to jump into the pool. It was awesome. And I was at a party last year where grown people in their 30s and 40s were jumping off a (different) roof into the pool, to my amazement. But it turns out that despite tough talk here I was way too much of a pussy/attorney to want to do that anymore, so I declined out of fear.
And that's what happens when you post without reading the thread. Sorry Barry.
One of my students had a really drunk guy break into her apartment because he thought it was his friend's place. He came very close to getting brained with a shovel and even escaped without charges being pressed. (I think he was in the same branch of the service as her ex and she took pity.)
I did 74 in college, got chased out of somebody's house with a knife.
Of course they're going to chase somebody who took their knife.
Shit happens. One of my students way back when was a very limited paraplegic 'cause he lost his balance while changing an easily reached lightbulb and landed just the wrong way.
Hey, Sifu updated his blog! Everyone go look!
Oh, wait, January, not June.
Huh, did anyone notice that Ogged was back?
75: All things considered, you got off easy.
I've never thought of doing anything when I've been drunk; the two worst times were in houses where I could just lie down. Drove home drunk in Columbus a couple of times without incident, and once stumbled home from Jimmy's to my room at 57th & Drexel, but that's not very much.
I too have mostly done ridiculous things in vehicles, not drunk. I don't climb for amusement, but I will drive in the worst weather at normal speeds. One time spun out at highway speeds 3 times on the same trip from Chicago to Columbus, US 30 to US 33. Let go of the wheel, put my hands up in front of my face, after a moment of shock realized I was still alive and rightside up, put the car back in gear.
20 years ago we were out for our 10-year anniversary, came back to find the babysitter had been watching the chase all evening.
once stumbled home from Jimmy's to my room at 57th & Drexel
Walking home when drunk is now considered ill-advised?
I have a growing collection of injury stories, but all sober and boring. I probably should drink more?
Huh, twenty years ago today I was either in the juvenile suicide ward, or had just been sent home to have my parents explain to me that all the steak knives were going to be kept out of reach for a while. I forget exactly how the dates line up; anyway that particular anniversary would never have occurred to me without this thread.
They did play a lot of Soundgarden on the radio, didn't they. Kurt Cobain had died a couple of months earlier, and while I understood that his problems weren't the same as mine, the songs on In Utero haunted me.
I didn't drink or do drugs at that point in my life, which was one of many things setting me apart from the other kids in the ward. My first year of college I did a lot of solo rafting, shitfaced, on the campus lake at three or four in the morning. I don't know if that was my most unutterably stupid exploit, but the worst that happened was having to take my pants off and wade through thirty yards of algae when the raft got stuck.
80 -- I know, and yet that was extraordinarily mild by the standards of (exclusively, these weren't sober criminals) drunken criminality by my housemates. I guess the worst thing any of them did was, let's see ...pummeling a guy through a cab window and then dragging him through several NYC blocks before throwing his body into the street? Pretty sure that's a crime. Admittedly the guy attacked first so maybe it was self defense for like the first 2-3 pummels before the cab started moving.
You know what causes me horror? The phrase "easy peasey lemon squeezy." It is worse than falling off a roof.
My similar escapades are relatively minor, but recent enough that I don't really want to think about them.
So, in response to 81.2: Stupid speeds in ridiculous weather would have to be driving 81 south New Year's Day the year they had the Winter Classic in Buffalo (we didn't go, but we got stuck in the traffic heading back to Pgh). Drove 45 through a blizzard passing everyone, saw at least a dozen separate accidents where people (including trucks) had spun off into the median. Worst stupid speeding in good weather was when in college I took a Volvo 240 to > 110 mph on the Northeast Extension near Scranton (a road that's rarely straight for more than a mile). Not sure why I did it, not sure how I did it, not sure how I did it and survived. Not a particularly aerodynamic car.
You know what causes me horror? The phrase "easy peasey lemon squeezy."
Have you seen In The Loop?
Hey, I've done 110 in a Volvo DL near Scranton! I kind of feel like this thread's Id.
20 years ago today I was in JFK waiting to board a plane for Cairo with the intention of living there for the next few years (which turned out to be about a month there and the rest of the time in Morocco) and wondering what the fuck everyone was doing crowding around the TVs and watching, wtf? a white SUV driving down the highway? I was never so glad to be leaving the country at that particular time.
86: It's better than "easy peasy Japanesey".
20 years ago today I was on summer vacation between third and fourth grade. We had gone out to dinner with some family friends at a Mexican restaurant and were eating on the patio, and one of the friends would go into the main part of the restaurant (where I guess they were showing the live coverage of the chase on TV) from time to time and come back to let us know the latest. I forget the name of the restaurant, but I can picture that patio clearly in my mind.
I was in fifth grade during the trial. We listened to the verdict live on the radio in class.
86: Ha, my wife loves that saying. Gets a laugh out of her every time.
I was watching the chase with a friend (who just called a few hours ago) and we were saying "Al Cowlings. Now that's a friend."
For the OJ chase, I was drunk in a bar in DC with the guy who dragged the other guy out the cab window upthread, feeling homesick because of the freeways.
I remember the OJ chase because my parents and I listened to it on the radio as we drove up to BYU to drop me off for summer semester.
89: Heh, mine's a DL, too (would've been much easier in a turbo). Oddly specific.
I guess I'm in the same cohort as teo. I remember being at home at night, wondering what the hell my parents were getting all consternated about, then watching it and being excited that this was some vaguely adult thing that I could comprehend at some surface level. Didn't understand the references to running through an airport.
Have you seen In The Loop?
That was a movie where I sort of recognized that objectively it was funny and I should probably like it, but it somehow completely failed to actually entertain me.
99: Same here. I only watched half of it, I think. My family thought I would love it.
I don't think I did anything on the day of the OJ chase or on any subsequent day up to and after the OJ verdict* that was affected in any significant way by anything having to do with OJ. I think I may have watched a bit of the chase on tv and heard people talk about it.
*I remember being in college when someone asked me if I was going to watch the verdict - or maybe he was asking if I thought there would be a verdict that day - and I didn't know what verdict he was talking about.
102: I liked it. I think how you feel about it might depend on how willing you are to laugh at just how fucked up the US was in 2004.
I saw a clip on the news and thought hey, Americans up to something daft again.
Hilariously dangerous moment; once in Australia when I was chasing cows the boss managed to poison a dozen steers by misusing some sort of nutritional supplement. He sent another jackeroo and myself to dispose of the carcasses, which involved a Land Cruiser and four or five jerricans of petrol and diesel. Only some of the cans actually had their snap-down lids, so I volunteered to ride in the back with them and try to keep too much fuel from spilling. This was obviously hopeless given the way we used to drive but it seemed necessary.
After a ways, there is petrol sculling about on the loadbed of the Toyota and I stink of the stuff, and then I notice the glowing red cinders blowing past in the slip stream from the tip of my mate's cigarette. We somehow got away with that, and didn't actually come to blows over it although that was pretty close too, and then we started a small bush fire in the course of our intended duties.
I didn't have a tv as a highschooler 20 years ago and thus a friend I'd called to ask about something else tried to explain the low-speed chase to me and I was basically baffled about why anyone would care. I should ask Lee her story about watching it. I know I've shared the story of her vivid memory of being 13 or so and getting a magazine with him on the cover and thinking, "His wife is the luckiest woman in the world!" Probably a good thing she ended up gay, as her taste in men has not improved since.
The stupidest thing I've done while drunk was here, unkind but not physically dangerous.
My climbing-on-and-around-buildings phase completely failed to overlap with my drinking phase (aka the rest of my life since then)
This is basically me, though I wouldn't say there was no overlap. But as someone who started rock climbing in my early teens, I got all the urge to climb buildings (and boy, did I) out of my system while sober. It would never occur to me to do that sort of thing as a drunk dare/adventure/whatever. Instead I did stupid shit like running into lampposts.
Having said that, the thread does strike close to home given that while I was away last week two people died falling from a balcony in the building next to mine during a party.
I bet I shouldn't say "Okie dokie, artichokie" to Smearcase.
One can now get a battery-powered small chainsaw light enough to use at the end of an eight-foot pole, and I'm STILL irrationally terrified of chainsaws. Which is pretty terrified, as the rational level of fear is high. (I have a bush-competent relative who bounced one into his own neck, fortunately while in town, as he walked to the clinic. Really impressive scar.)
I have no memory at all of the initial chase, but I can clearly remember where I was when the verdict was announced (in the lab, duh..).
One can now get a battery-powered small chainsaw light enough to use at the end of an eight-foot pole, and I'm STILL irrationally terrified of chainsaws.
Actually, it's much more rational to be scared of chainsaws now that technological advances have made it possible for an ill-intentioned person to duct-tape one to the end of an eight-foot pole and poke it through your bedroom window while you're asleep.
Doesn't even need duct-tape! Comes with its own pole! On-off button at the handle end, eight feet away from the teethy! It's a great idea really.
(I'm posting this from outside your window.)
The comments are not coming from inside your house, BUT YOU'RE STILL NOT SAFE!
I am now picturing clew as Major Bloodnok:
...Next morning, I sat in my room eating my breakfast, when suddenly through the window a fork on the end of a long pole appeared. It tried to spear my kipper.
Bloodnok:
Oh-ho!
Seagoon:
Who the blazes are you sir?
Bloodnok:
Ah-ah-oh! I'm sorry. I was... ummm... fishing.
Seagoon:
Fishing? Fishing? This is the thirty-fourth floor.
Bloodnok:
Oh. The... ummm... river must have dropped.
http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e04_napoleons_piano
I have a bush-competent relative who bounced one into his own neck, fortunately while in town, as he walked to the clinic
He was walking to the clinic, using a chainsaw? Scary.
Yes, that was my thought: lucky he was on his way to the clinic anyway, but why was he carrying a chainsaw? Something to do in the waiting room, I suppose.
Doesn't even need duct-tape! Comes with its own pole! On-off button at the handle end, eight feet away from the teethy! It's a great idea really.
Now I'm envisaging a remake of The Evil Dead starring the "fishy fish" guy from The Meaning Of Life.
One can now get a battery-powered small chainsaw light enough to use at the end of an eight-foot pole, and I'm STILL irrationally terrified of chainsaws.
That's a good reason to be rationally terrified of whoever is selling that variety of chainsaw.
One of the many "you will die if you do this" parts of my chainsaw manual is "don't lift it above your shoulders."
(The manual could have been condensed to "If you use this device you will die.")
It's from the "Come on, you gardeners of bitches, do you want to live forever?" line of landscaping products.
I was at an estate sale last week, and an old man, in a crowded garage, picked up a chainsaw and fired it up. I was totally startled, but couldn't gauge how flustered anyone else was. No one came forward to ask him to take it outside or anything.
The tree service guys around here are something to watch. I'm not sure why they aren't all dead or at least uninsured. They'll use the chain saw on a pole over their heads while thirty foot off the ground in a tree.
If you have a fast-working cutoff, then the saw on a pole could be extremely safe - even if you lift it over your head and then drop it, it still has eight feet to fall, so as long as there's a deadman switch that works in less than 0.3 seconds then it'll be stopped by the time it reaches you. (You still get clonked on the head by a heavy object, but it isn't a working chainsaw so you get to keep your head.)
I missed the low speed chase in nearly exactly the same way I've missed the 20th anniversary of the low speed chase. Then I was in a motel in Chincoteague with my daughter, who was quite sick, and heard only a vague two sentence description from the desk clerk when I needed towels. And didn't give a shit. This time, it's a hotel in Butte, and I guess I saw passing references while channel surfing, but I can't care any more now than then.
124: If you're up in a tree and get clonked on the head, you're probably going to fall. They're roped off, which I'm sure is how they get their insurance, but it still looks dangerous to me.
I was generally aware of the OJ trial, but didn't see any TV of it until the verdict, when for some reason they wheeled a set into the classroom so we could watch it being read. Considering this was Montessori elementary school, it must have really been in everyone's head. References may have been going past me at the time.
In my bid for the obliviousness Olympics, I didn't learn about the low-speed nature of the chase until this thread.
This time, it's a hotel in Butte, and I guess I saw passing references while channel surfing, but I can't care any more now than then.
Wait, so the media is actually making a thing about the "anniversary"? That seems super weird.
Re:OJ, for some odd reason I have fond memories of the Dancing Ito's on the Tonight Show.
I was fucking pissed that the low speed chase preempted the first major sports championship in which a team I actively cheered for had a part.
To be fair, if I'd stayed home then or now, I'd have known even less of it. Except I might have read this thread in real time.
|| So, I'll be in a deposition today, along with five lawyers who flew up from San Francisco, where it will be conclusively established that the witness knows absolutely nothing of any conceivable import to the case (and that her lack of knowledge is not itself significant.) None of the other lawyers can leave today, because of flight schedules. |>
88: No, should I? [see In The Loop]
I liked it a lot, and I thought the tone was perfect -- funny jokes, but also completely serious. It isn't a jokey movie. There are a lot of images that have stuck with me including the way in which the well-meaning new guy seems a little flawed but sympathetic and then, eventually, you realize that he's actually a massive problem. That all of his little, "I've just got the job, I don't know what's going on, but I want to make sure that I keep this job so I need to make myself visible and not let myself just get pushed around" moments end up with him impeding somebody who does know what they're doing. That description doesn't make it sound funny, but I think it's very well done.
I thought "In The Loop" was really, really depressing. There are occasional quips but all the humor seems to come from that one guy who yells and bullies everyone with creative word choices.
I didn't like "In the Loop" as much as "The Thick of It" (which I do love) but I assumed that was because it had been a bit blandified for an international market.
I thought "In The Loop" was really, really depressing.
More or less so than the actual build-up to Iraq?
135: it really was depressing
136: I loved TTOI.
all the humor seems to come from that one guy who yells and bullies everyone with creative word choices.
I disagree. I thought the James Gandolfini character was the funniest -- the scene of him doing the back-of-an-envelope calculations about how bad an idea the war will be in a children's bedroom is really funny.
When I watched it a second time I also thought the character who was the perpetual smarmy suck-up was funny (first time thought I just found him loathsome).
But I think one of the funniest lines in the movie is at the very end when the bright young conservative college grad who is about to be put in charge of something or other in Iraq is complaining to his friend about Rumsfeld's micro-managing, "You know how people say, 'I'm too old for this shit?' Well I'm too young for this shit."
So, yes, it is depressing.
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Hey, I have a bleg. I can't figure out what to google to locate an expert who might give us a consultation, on the following problem: the back windows of our house.
1. tons of birds flying in and killing themselves
2. my vague paranoia on whether the UV rays are damaging the things I have hanging up.
I'd like someone knowledgable to come visit in person and advise, particularly on #2, because if #2 is not a problem then I think we can solve #1 ourselves. But I don't know what kind of art-specialist-conservation person is for hire for this kind of thing. Keywords?
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if #2 is not a problem then I think we can solve #1 ourselves.
By buying a gun, obviously.
Isn't the standard solution to birds flying into windows to put up an outline of a raptor in flight on the window? I've seen it done before but have no idea how successful it is.
The standard solution is to get an outdoor cat that will eat the dead birds and finish off the wounded.
Also, the sun is going to fade stuff if it shines through the windows. You shouldn't hang arty things in full sun.
Yeah, I only hang things that I'm semi-resigned to fading, but the entire addition is in full sun, and I can't bear to leave the walls empty. I hung up little pieces of construction paper here and there for a year, to get a sense of how bad it was, but just decided that "pretty bad" was hard to distinguish.
Also we went with the super high-end glass when we built the addition, for this exact reason. I'd just like an expert to weigh in and give me advice.
One solution is to restrict yourself to artistic displays of curing meat.
Maybe call the manufacturer of the windows. But it isn't just UV light that will fade. Visible light does it also, thought probably less of it.
One solution is to restrict yourself to artistic displays of curing meat.
Tasteful displays only.
So keyword "hopeless" and "meat" and "expert"?
107: I was thinking of that news story (hoping that it hasn't happened more than once this month) while reading this thread too. Ugh.
I'm not an expert on photodegredation, but I've had to learn a little bit about it on my job, so I will weigh in with some semi-helpful advice for heebie. Moby Hick is right that the UV protection in your window glass will not make much of a difference if your artwork is receiving a high level of illuminance for a long period of time each day. If you're really curious about the level of light exposure your artwork is receiving, you can buy a lux meter for cheap on Amazon and then take readings throughout the day (and year, if you're really committed). If your art is being exposed to 10,000+ lux (the equivalent of outdoor light) for hours a day, every day, then it's probably going to fade. Obviously, some materials are more sensitive to light than others, and it's always a bit of a crapshoot predicting how any particular piece of art will react unless--or even if--you know quite a lot about what it's made of, how it was made, etc.
If you're interested in doing more research on the subject, there are a lot of online resources about light damage available via the conservation/preservation community, and while they are generally aimed at institutions, their recommendations may be useful to homeowners as well (see, for instance, the NEDCC's leaflet "Protection from Light Damage," which you can easily find via Google). Ultimately, though, you are left with two basic options: hang your artwork out of the light or add extra protection from the light via UV films, protective enclosures, etc.
If you get all Georgian-Victorian and hang curtains in front of your pictures, have a picture or photo of ýou & Jammies in old-age makeup.
Moby Hick is right that the UV protection in your window glass will not make much of a difference if your artwork is receiving a high level of illuminance for a long period of time each day.
I am? I was totally guessing. Thanks.
Find a conservator has good advice, but it might be more for institutions and people with the resources of institutions (i.e. rich with private collections).