Also, the various videos of Stewart doing other crazy dangerous shit with his car (making pit crews leap out of the way and so on) when pissed off are pretty eye-opening.
I don't like NASCAR but this provided some good talk radio fodder today. You know what motorsport is awesome though? Rallycross. Or really World Rally racing in general. I'm not saying that this is the international sport we should be watching instead of soccer, but it totally is.
Just today I saw a guy with CheezIts, a carton of milk, and a trumpet. Most interesting busker ever.
Which is to say, not very interesting.
I've followed him for years. This is bad, but it won't stop him or the show.
Sprint cars can be extraordinarily exciting. The sounds and smells, general awe and thrill I felt on the first one I managed to get myself to, when I was 14 or 15, will stay with me always.
I haven't made a habit of it, haven't been to an auto race of any kind in years, although I'll watch on TV, but I certainly get it.
I've only seen sprint cars (small "s") on one track, and it would have been insane for someone to walk out onto that one.
You can understand altercations in racing. Major leaguers will charge the mound if someone tries to hit them with a 95 mph fastball. Having someone threaten you with a hurtling hunk of metal has got to be infuriating.
You can't prosecute these things, though. There's no way Stewart gets convicted of anything.
Speaking of crashing, listening to a guy trying to chat up the Russian woman sitting next to me. He's asked her to leave to a private table (No) and what her real hair color is (not jet black).
Bonus: He just mentioned that particles wink into and out of existence.
He should show her his Feynman diagrams.
Now he's saying that daddy-long-legs are arachnids but not spiders.
There's no way Stewart gets convicted of anything.
Doesn't look like he's even going to be charged. Given Stewart's temper and skill, there might be some unpleasantness for him in the afterlife, but unless there's a civil suit, he's probably untouched here.
listening to a guy trying to chat up the Russian woman sitting next to me
I don't often go to bars, but I do remember about 20 years ago sitting at a bar somewhere in the Boston area, where I'd gone to see a basketball game, and having two pretty women take the stools next to me. I got to watch a parade of guys walk over, flame out, and go away. The women would turn to me and repeat some line one of the guys had used and roll their eyes. Seems like being a pretty woman at a bar would get old pretty quickly.
They aren't spiders. They're harvestmen.
No, apparently harvestmen are mistakenly called daddy-long legs, but daddy-long legs are different and are spiders.
This guy speaks the truth, but "things I found surfing Wikipedia" make pretty bad pickup lines.
Daddy-long legs can refer to one of three different species: harvestmen, a web-building spider, or a long legged fly. It varies regionally. In this region it usually refers to harvestmen.
Years of abuse have taken a toll on your reefs. Clearly the Ur and canonical daddy long-legs.
I'm of the Pittsburghtariat (like currently two blocks from Moby) but I learned the term elsewhere in the eastern woodlands.
He mentioned that what America calls daddy long legs is different. He's moved on to the difference between mammoths and mastadons.
He mentioned that what America calls daddy long legs is different
Ok, ok, I'll give it to him.
29: You should come over. You could do a better job hitting on her.
32: the wife's probably disapprove of the hitting upon, but we're both up for drinks. You going to be there for at least another say 20 minutes?
For a bit, but I'd better leave by midnight.
I can still feel my nose, so I must be OK. He's moved on to asteroids and Iridium.
Turning left: catch the fever.
Ha! You didn't even watch the CheezIt race! Watkins Glen is a clockwise course. (Seriously, it is not the usual oval. It was fun to have in as background entertainment.)
Are you sure it isn't trivia night at that bar?
I have now looked at pictures of all three daddy long-legs contenders and none of them looks particularly like what I would call a daddy long-legs. I'm pretty sure it's not a fly, though.
What are people's spider-smashing policies? I generally go out of my way not to smash spiders and will toss them out the back door if they're getting in the way, and that makes me feel all enlightened and shit. Why a spider is more entitled to its life than a pig, I couldn't say.
Daddy longlegs previously discussed in TFA.
Unfogged, first as farce and then as farce.
Anyway, unannounced meet-up over. Very nice seeing everybody. No Russians were hit on during this event.
49: Very nice indeed--Moby was charming as always. The hitting-upon dude looked familiar for some reason, might have met him at the local university at some point. And the Russian's Russianness was obvious from a flag tattoo, but much more interesting was the adjacent Majora's Mask tattoo. Very good taste.
I thought it was about killing Ukrainians.
Daddy long legses are obviously harvestmen, and everybody knows that.
TL;DR It's the most hipster of Zelda games. (Zelda is a video game series that systematizes going into the woods with a stick and pretending you're on an adventure fighting monsters.) It's a video game equivalent of Groundhog Day, but was unpopular at the time due to not lining up with series conventions, although it played with the genre in interesting ways. So definitely a person who would be interested in the difference between various kinds of daddy-long-legs.
Nah, the Halloween-colors stripes is about killing Ukrainians. Or maybe everything is. Symbolism is hard.
53: If Minnesotans and Pennamites agree on something, that's a quorum. *fistbump*
I third daddy-longlegs as harvestmen. (Personal to LB, I'll email you my Piketty post at your hotmail address in the morning and hope that's the right place. If it's not, let me know.)
Trying to sort all this out, I just learned that (male) harvestmen have penises and spiders don't.
Oh, huh. Male spiders have a special attachment on one of their legs to distribute sperm, which is weirdly symmetry breaking. Didn't realize that didn't apply to other arachnids.
I guess this means someone has spent a lot of time looking at bug junk.
Oh, huh. Male spiders have a special attachment on one of their legs to distribute sperm, which is weirdly symmetry breaking.
So the Higgs mechanism is spider sex?
Quick, essear, write a paper on that!
Why a spider is more entitled to its life than a pig, I couldn't say.
Easy. You can't make bacon out of spiders.
Over here, daddy longlegs are the type of long legged fly, as referenced above. Harvestmen are generally called harvestmen.
The clever trick to creating bacon 'spider' legs is to drape the bacon strips over chopsticks while baking.
I'm finding Moby's pick-up story fascinating. I've been out of the dating scene for a long time, is "recite random facts in random order" a common approach these days?
66: Like bighorn sheep, when two males are interested in one female, they have to go head-to-head and dominate the other with trivia.
66: so this means I'm out of date with my "You'll do" approach?
67: Andy Garcia had an unformed conjoined twin attached to his shoulder until he was a toddler, Ke$ha was born with a vestigial tail, and Ashton Kutcher has webbed toes.
Your turn.