Her t-shirt is fucking gross. (I'm not saying that you're endorsing her t-shirt; I'm just noting.)
Oh god, I completely did not see her t-shirt. Sorry about that.
Let's all agree not to ask these guys how they voted in November.
In this analogy, the old lady is the polling industry.
That couple (I assume couple) certainty seemed to think it was funny. I don't think my spouse would find it funny at all if I did this to her.
1-4: Come on, people. We can't let a T-shirt make Margaret Dumonts of us.
8: statuesque beauties? It' a burden, I'll grant you, but I can't help how I look.
Next time use water instead of pissing in the bottle, urple, she'll find it funnier.
Urpie, would it be funny if she did it to you?
That awful t-shirt almost looks like it's repping Brittany.
12: yes, probably. But now that I've seen the video, I don't think I would fall for it.
I smiled widely, so it's evidently not just you Heebie!
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OMG!! I was putting students in groups, and was grouping them by birthdays. (We form groups constantly, so I get silly as the semester goes on.) "January birthdays over here, February birthdays over here, etc."
A girl named April went and joined the January group. I said, "No kidding? I assumed you were an April birthday."
She made a sheepish grimace and said, "No, I'm named April because my parents conceived me in April."
I laughed, which was appropriate to the exasperated-jokey tone she'd said it in. I said something in awe about the fact that her parents saddled her with that explanation for the rest of her life.
But seriously, what!!!! Giving your kid a name that makes them explain their conception! Sheesh.
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Shorter April: My parents are dicks.
Cheer up, April, at least they didn't name you Corolla.
Of course, she didn't have to explain. "Nope, January" would have answered your remark just fine.
My parents named me that because they wanted me to be as cruel as the month.
19: right, the question can't possibly take her by surprise by this point.
Fwiw, she did not seem embarrassed whatsoever in this context - this group of students seems to have coalesced into a friend group, I've had her in more than one class, etc.
I have relatives whose names are months that have nothing to do with the circumstances of their births or conceptions.
Oh god, I know a girl named Tuesday (ITIHMTB) and in my presence, someone asked her how she got her name.
She said, "My parents were into music, so they gave both me and my brother musical names. You know, 'Tuesday's gone with the wind'."
So the other person asked the obvious question, "What's your brother's name?"
Tuesday said, "Steven. You know, Steven Tyler."
Sure, that seems reasonable.
Good things these names like April and Tuesday are so google-proofed.
My parents named me that because they wanted me to be as cruel as the month.
Or to take showers instead of baths.
Boys take baths, to get more maths*.
Girls take showers, to get more powers.
*no, I probably just said "math" as a kid.
But math is the ultimate power. Conceding far too much to the boys, there.
Actual playground rhyme from back in the day: "Boys go to Mars, to get more chocolate bars / Girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider." None of the boys who used this one could see how ironic it was.
I heard that "Girls go to college to get more knowledge, Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider."
I almost included the line in 27, which was also from my childhood.
We had the college/knowledge couplet, but I can't remember what it was paired with. Maybe boys go to school, to get more cool?
No! It was "Boys go to school 'cause they think it's cool." I think. Down down baby, down by the rollercoaster.
You know what would be interesting? Something like that dialect survey that taught us all what the devil's strip was, but for playground rhymes.
I remember someone in college who learned "One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other..." in an American school in Indonesia.
If I google "devil's strip" on a work computer, will I regret it?
I guess I could have named one of my kids President Obama.
31: Depends on how you feel about Akron.
I took African American history in college, and the TA was super nice and would kind of go out of her way to loop me into the conversation for having grown up in the south. She'd toss me softball after softball of African American culture and I'd whiff every single one of them. (I mean, I didn't get it wrong, I just admitted I didn't know the detail that she was asking if I'd experienced.) The only one I could sort of cop to was knowing "Little Sally Walker" and "Down down baby". There, that's the extent of my cred for growing up in the dirty South.
Which meant those rhymes were pretty mainstream by the time I got them at my prissy little Montessori elementary school.
Florida is only the South in a spotty kind of way, though, right? You probably would have been more in the Southern loop if you were from Alabama or someplace.
Gouverneur Morris held a number of offices but I don't think he was ever governor.
Florida is only the South in a spotty kind of way, though, right?
You're trolling me, right?
You know what would be interesting? Something like that dialect survey that taught us all what the devil's strip was, but for playground rhymes.
Only possible in the internet era, a book would date quickly (For example, the excellent book Pissing In The Snow).
I remember reading an essay at some point about children's songs in which person (a songwriter himself) clarified that he was talking about the songs that children themselves sing (like those sorts of rhymes) rather than songs that adults write for children. I have no idea who that was or how to find it as this point.
41: No, I thought this was uncontroversial -- that the northernmost bits of Florida were culturally continuous with the South, but that as you went further south it was more its own thing. No?
Well, yes, but, but!
"North Central Florida" is a region of the U.S. state of Florida which comprises the north-central part of the state and encompasses the Gainesville Metropolitan Statistical Area (Alachua and Gilchrist counties), and the North Florida counties of Bradford, Columbia, Hamilton, Lafayette, Madison, Marion, Putnam, Suwannee and Union. The region's largest city is Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, while the largest metropolitan area is the Ocala Metropolitan Area. Other principal cities in the region include Lake City, Live Oak, and Palatka. As of 2010, the region had a population of 873,189.
Like the Florida Panhandle, this region is often recognized as part of the Deep South, as compared to the rest of the state.[1] The majority of white Americans in North Central Florida are traditionally of relatively unmixed English ancestry.
AIHMHB, I learned various rhymes at my snooty Jewish summer camp that I only learned in the era of Google were derived from various southern or military or work chants, e.g.
Maybe not so funny (though I am just such a sucker), but the Simpsons cut in the other thread had me laughing aloud.
Also grew up hearing Lord Castock's version of the Mars/Jupiter rhyme.
There is always the classic Milk Milk Lemonade.
31: I don't know how systematic it is about geographical differences, but there is this.
41. I was told (by a guy who lives in Jacksonville) that Florida gets more southern the further north you go. Is that right?
51: Yep. And honestly, Gainesville feels just like Mobile, Alabama or Huntsville Alabama, or Asheville, NC, or Athens, GA. None of those places feel any more southern or different in any particular way. Of course, none of those feel rural, either. But rural, in this day and age, is its own thing, and rural Wisconsin and rural Georgia have more in common than rural Georgia has with Atlanta.
I've not been to either, but rural Nebraska is very different from rural Pennsylvania.
Not all rural areas are poor, especially after the combination of ethanol and Atkins.
What's the difference between rural Nebraska and rural Pennsylvania? (What does "either" refer to in 49, also?)
Moby has gone post-truth. It's all over, turn out the lights.
I've not been to either rural Georgia or rural Wisconsin.
There's still ethanol for the lamps though.
The difference between rural Nebraska and rural Pennsylvania is the amount and distribution of wealth. The kulak class (say farmers with worth more than $250k more than their debts) is still a significant minority in the former.
But if you had to group the following four locations - Pittsburgh, Lincoln, rural PA, rural NE - for overall similarity, how would you do so? Or does it not lend itself to an obvious choice?
I'd pair them by state without hesitation.
Lincoln is just full of people raised in rural Nebraska. Over 1/3 of my high school class lives there now. You can, without shy significant effort, live in Lincoln and hardly come into contact with the not-sports portion of the university world. Pittsburgh is a small city. Lincoln is a super-inflated small town.
I think East/West is a split as big as Rural/Urban, and in some contexts bigger than North/South. Like, what heebie's saying about rural PA being not all that different from the rural South to me sounds kind of right, and I'd include rural NY in that as well. But I don't know anything about the Great Plains.
Huh. What if you were a committed commenter devoted to supporting your OP's hypothesis? Would that change anything?
66: I'd probably say something like 65.
Probably doing something about the Erratic Capitalization first, though. Or at least I would before I considered agreeing with it.
I'm dangerously close to talking out of my ass. Rural Heebie Ass is closer to Rural Heebie Mouth at the moment than Rural Heebie Ass is to Urban Heebie Ass.
And that ends the discussion of my private parts.
Is there any helpful information I could gather from the departure area of the Kansas City airport?
I was going to say, Heebie's part of FL is much farther north than mine, but also much more southern (though if only have to drive an hour north or two hours west from my home town to get to comparable levels of sourhern). I always say I grew up at the intersection of the Alabama, Cuba, and New York parts of Florida. This meant I attended bar mitzvahs and quinceanaras, and knew some debs.
I have vivid memories of how that airport looked in the 80s.
74: Wow. You were at the spatial nexus of American cultures that have coming out parties for 12-15 year olds.
That's so funny - I did not go to a single coming-of-age party in Gainesville. (ie, I was not invited to deb parties but I'm pretty sure they existed, and there were no quinceanaras, and bar mitzvahs would have been quiet affairs for members of the synagogue. There are Jews but they're mostly reform or secular.) I flew up to NY for some cousins' bar mitzvahs, and that was my entire experience of coming of age parties.
I grew up in the intersection of bland Americana, the south, and a university town.
The KC airport is deeply committed to keeping any information about where the flight is going as far as possible from the actual gate.
What's the NY part of Florida?
61: Western PA, outside of some of the larger coves (and hardly even then), really doesn't lend itself to farming at massive scale the way I imagine Nebraska does.
And I guess there's big grape farms on the glaciated plains up by Erie, but I consider that (except linguistically) honorary Ohio.
The standard-size field in the good corn land of Nebraska is a square with sides of a half mile.
Then you use a sprinkler that's 1/4 long to irrigate.
Drawing water from the aquifer that Keystone is going to pollute.
Yes. Yarmulke, mouse ears, or straw. Pick one.
Now you're just messing with me.
I don't know the word for the hats worn by Cubans.
OK but seriously, is Mossy unaware that Miami and environs is/was famously settled by a lot of NY Jews? Not just retirees. This can't be true, but it seemed like my schools had more Jewish kids than white Protestants. I was about to say zero Southerners, but one kid I was good friends with for awhile probably qualified. We were far enough south in the county that it was only ~5 miles* to reach a town that had significant Southern/rural/cracker culture (although it was suburbanizing rapidly).
*patting myself on the back: I just checked the map, and it's between 4.3 and 5.2 miles depending on route. Not bad for a place I left in 1986
93: Check your privilege, gringo. Yes, I was so unaware. I was aware of retirees, and of mafia, and that Miami collects diasporas including presumably Jews; but none of these things implied to me significant New Yorker enclaves in Florida.
Don't bother to spend much time learning. The whole thing is going to be undersea by 2050.
Actually, the flooded streets of Manhattan and Miami would tend to accentuate the similarities.
Shylock jokes are left as an exercise for the reader.
I thought Manhattan was in a better place for global flooding than Miami. Something about more solid bedrock/lighter Jews.
Like, the ocean is rising everywhere, but only Florida is sinking to meet it.
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You know, I had a post topic when I was driving in, this morning, but for the life of me I can't remember it.
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Was it about what we should do to white people?
I have a post. I'll send it, if you aren't planning a WTFuckery today/tomorrow.
Sure, send it over. I mean, I was planning a WTFuckery, but out of loss of ideas.
Kim Stanley Robinson has written a book set in flooded Manhattan. If I ever read fiction again I might read it.
I drove through Manhattan yesterday. Maybe it's more like rural Nebraska than rural Pennsylvania.
Tall building, but full of grain.
Definitely more like rural Montana than urban Venice.
Rural Pennsylvania starts at the far side of the Squirrel Hill tunnel.
Office workers are made of grain.
And stars. But mostly grain.
I just want to vent a bit.
Why does United suck so hard? My partner was supposed to fly in tonight (arrive by 8:30, so late-ish but not super late), but his flight was diverted to another airport due to weather and then flown back to the original airport, causing a significant delay and making him to miss his connection. The next flight they can guarantee is the same flight 2 days from now. He's going to fly standby and hopefully get here tomorrow, but it's making me (un)reasonably cranky. He only gets a 2-week leave, and this is eating into the leave plus our weekend plans, which could be totally ruined depending.
Before deregulation airlines were required to rebook on other airlines if they would get someone to their destination quicker, but of course that rule no longer exists.
For continuity with the previous conversation, the diversion(?) airport was Pittsburgh.
I was just there. We could have had a beer.
Pittsburgh to Chicago on United is something I've done a half dozen times in the past year.
Did they give him a hotel room at least?
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Nope! Since it's an "act of nature" that's not their responsibility.
The last time United screwed me over, I got a $150 credit toward a future flight. But that was because of a 13 hour delay that was all their bad.