Er, small clarification to my obviously Freudian slip, hehe: "For instance I was surprised to no longer have the closet and futon" means "I was surprised that I didn't miss the closet and futon." :)
My experience is very much like mechagrue's. (And I'm another Pac Northwesterner! Beautiful part of the world.)
Furthermore, I too would recommend keeping what you love, and selling/donating things you won't mind replacing or not having around any more. While that may sound obvious, it really hit home for me when I lost everything I had five years ago (nasty break-up, sigh). For instance I was surprised to no longer have the closet and futon. Expensive to replace, yes... but I was so glad never to have to look at them again. (They weren't ugly, I just always felt "bleh" about them.) However, I was particularly sad to have lost the beautiful wood-frame bed and my bookcases. Since then I've been much more choosy with furniture purchases, only buying and keeping things I really love, with a few rare exceptions on more minor items for necessity.
Look at all of your things, and really think about how you'd feel if you lost all of it: what would you miss? What wouldn't bother you to lose? Then hire a truck to haul what you want to keep across the country and you'll find you won't regret the expense! If it's the same as in Europe, price estimates are done by cubic foot (meter here, of course) and/or pallets. When I moved from Finland to France, I paid about $1200 to move a full pallet of stuff.
As regards restocking on furniture, there are Ikeas near Portland and Seattle, if I recall correctly! You could use their site to do mock-up calculations of how much it would cost to replace certain items. Knowing they're low-priced it would give you a decent idea of the minimum investment.
Well, the article does address it:
Whatever the cause, the early closure of the lamdoid would have put a lot of pressure on the growing brain. This condition has been linked to mental retardation and motor problems in modern-day children. With such disabilities, the Cranium 14 child would have been unable to reach the age of 5-8 without the care of its peers.
Sounds like the child died of natural causes, even if it's not stated outright.
I turned off everything except for my bedside lamp, which has a 9-watt CFL bulb, so that I could read. Here in France we hadn't yet gone to daylight savings time (that was yesterday, heh), so it was pitch dark outside and I didn't want to burn a candle since that time is peak kitty "RUN AROUND FAST JUMP ON CURTAINS!! TWIRL POUNCE MEOW RUN PULL STUFF OFF TABLE SCRATCH CLAMBER UP SHELVES WHEEEE!!" and I'm pretty sure a candle wouldn't have survived.
(Oops -- by "conjugations" I meant "verb tenses", there are no conjugations in Mandarin Chinese at all. And the verb tenses aren't really, since the "infinitive", present tense, is always used, and adverbs or particles are used to express others.)
Proponents of "spell it as it's pronounced" should study Latin or Finnish some time. My hypothesis, based entirely on intuition and having studied way too many languages, is that languages have an innate "minimum complexity" requirement... make spelling "logical" (because the so-called logic of as-pronounced is in fact subjective), and you get a gazillion cases, declensions, etc. Heck, Mandarin Chinese has no real plural and hardly any conjugations -- the grammar is dead simple. Plus, they don't even have an alphabet! Yay, right? Nope, urk is more like it. You get to deal with their bajillion ideograms and tonal pronunciation (which it could be argued are just as logical as alphabets and Finnish-type pronunciation, which is why I say "logic" in such matters is quite subjective).
Et maintenant, je vais boire un thé avec mon quatre-heures. Miam.
Dang, in the video of that Chinese snow leopard, when the mom grabs a cub with her jaws? O.O (-wide-eyed). The wee little cub's whole head could fit in that mouth!
fairywench part Bengal, eh? Hmmm, there's a tom who resembles Kanoko that roams the area where Kanoko was abandoned, and he (the tom) does indeed look Bengal now that you mention it. Kanoko has the sweetest disposition -- so yes, Maine Coon and Bengal mix would account for that!
TT, me male? French? Did you know you can click on a username and see a profile? "Anna" isn't exactly a male first name, and my nationality is spelled out pretty clearly! As for being aged 22, eek. Add 10 years. (Though I admit my kitteh-post does indeed sound late adolescent. But it's because kittehs are teh cute and teh adorable and wittle kitties are *snarfleneckfur* wonderful.)
FT that is a great photo! I had a Morris too, he was a very sweet kitty. He died at the ripe old age of 21, despite regular battles with raccoons. (In fact we think he may finally have lost a tussle with a 'coon, since we never found him... he just disappeared one day.)
Recently (*sniff*, he passed away last year) I also had a chat-Malo (play on words: "chat" is French for "cat", his name was Malo, and "chamallow", pronounced the same, means "marshmallow") and now have an adopted Maine Coon kitty named Kanoko, who is utterly adorable. "Kanoko" is Japanese for "fawn" because his coloring looks like a fawn's, especially so when he was a wee lad.
Kittehs are teh greatest!!
That spider with the missing leg as a "gift" reminds me of an experience in middle school. We had an ex-Marine for our Physical Education teacher who, as you can probably imagine, taught us with military discipline: while waiting for him to arrive, we were to sit in straight, even lines, with good posture, no talking, no shifting. (Sometimes he'd wait outside the gym where we couldn't see him, and if he heard anyone talk or shift in place we'd all get to run extra laps, so we quickly learned to mind.) One day a fly caught the bored attention of a good friend (a boy) sitting next to me. "Anna, look! A fly!" he said. "Shhh!" I replied without moving. "Do you want a fly?" he asked, promptly catching the fly. "You're gonna get caught!" I whispered to him worriedly. "It's for you!" he insisted, and set to work doing God knows what to the fly. After a minute or two, he pushed over a still-wiggling black blob and stated, with great pride, "there, now you're the only girl in the world who has a live fly with no legs or wings. See? It's still alive! You know how hard that is to do?" I hardly knew what to think at the time, but twenty years later I still remember it fondly.
(Our teacher didn't come in until much later and hadn't heard any of it, thank goodness.)
Here in French cities (and I imagine in other "old world" countries as well; plus China had something similar with their traditional homes), blocks of apartment buildings are often built around inner courtyards that you can't see from the streets. You can see them in this satellite view of Nice, for instance. I have a ground-floor apartment with an inner courtyard, and despite living in city center, all I can hear from my garden patio are birds and church bells... it's lovely.
See that "Powered by JibJab" icon? I went to school with the blond one! (on JibJab's site) Child genius, years ahead in math and what have you -- but I bested him in French! MUHA! I'm sure this will come as little surprise, but his father was a public school teacher who headed up our middle school's computer lab. He was and still is an Apple fanboi.
Chyren yes, however by "fashion and related" that means magazines specifically selling those airbrushed ideals (which is why I specified that), not "just" retouching . I can understand retouching of minor blemishes that doesn't alter the person's fundamental bodily attributes, such as airbrushing pimples, for instance, or increasing the contrast in a photo. That does bring up "where do you draw the line?" of course -- for me, to paraphrase what I just wrote, the line would be drawn at changing a person enough to make them look like someone they could never resemble in reality.
Nice how it's set up to show each step, it drives home the point much better than just a global before and after.
Personally, I go the most expeditious route of sticking it to airbrushed ideals of "beauty" by not buying fashion and related magazines in the first place.
I have to say, the man who lives in the apartment above mine is rebellious (doesn't give a flying rat's ass about the ears of people in the two apartment buildings who hear him every day), violent (insults me when I ask him to at least please shut his window considering it's 5°C outside), alcoholic, dissonant (good lord you do NOT want to hear the music he listens to resonating throughout the buildings for six hours a day), but PRO-god, I'm afraid, as it's all religious music.
Wouldn't that just shock the authors of that site. "If you thought Rap, Punk, Heavy Metal or any other past degenerate 'music' trend was a threat...WAKE UP!!" Yeah, I woke up nice and early this morning... to the cacophony of my neighbor's religious music. I'm sure I'll have to deal with it until midnight again too. (Yes, the police have visited him on my request - twice. Now he qualifies for a big fat fine. Heee.)
Towels plus carpeted stairs with rounded lips = endless hours of sliding fun. My brother and I would also raid the bedding closet and make tent cities in his bedroom using sheets, cardboard boxes and his bunk bed. I still miss that, once we finished, playing around in it was like spelunking.
Some of those sites also say it's a favorite color of artists! Ha!
Right, while I am somewhat perturbed by the Purple People site and would never ever buy one of their products, I absolutely love the color. I don't ever dress head to toe in it, and certainly don't decorate my home with it, I just have a lot of clothes in various shades o' violet. I also like to wear burgundy, which tends to get as many spontaneous love-hate reactions as purple, oddly enough. Why do I like the colors? One major reason is that I have a pronounced pink tint to my skin. Red, yellow, brown, many blues and the very common yellowish beige look awful on me. (The beige thing is a real pain, I have to make my own clothes in more neutral or pinkish beiges in order to get neutrals in my wardrobe.) Purple and burgundy look very good on me, and I like the depth in them. Voilà.
Er, small clarification to my obviously Freudian slip, hehe: "For instance I was surprised to no longer have the closet and futon" means "I was surprised that I didn't miss the closet and futon." :)
posted by fraise 15 years ago
My experience is very much like mechagrue's. (And I'm another Pac Northwesterner! Beautiful part of the world.) Furthermore, I too would recommend keeping what you love, and selling/donating things you won't mind replacing or not having around any more. While that may sound obvious, it really hit home for me when I lost everything I had five years ago (nasty break-up, sigh). For instance I was surprised to no longer have the closet and futon. Expensive to replace, yes... but I was so glad never to have to look at them again. (They weren't ugly, I just always felt "bleh" about them.) However, I was particularly sad to have lost the beautiful wood-frame bed and my bookcases. Since then I've been much more choosy with furniture purchases, only buying and keeping things I really love, with a few rare exceptions on more minor items for necessity. Look at all of your things, and really think about how you'd feel if you lost all of it: what would you miss? What wouldn't bother you to lose? Then hire a truck to haul what you want to keep across the country and you'll find you won't regret the expense! If it's the same as in Europe, price estimates are done by cubic foot (meter here, of course) and/or pallets. When I moved from Finland to France, I paid about $1200 to move a full pallet of stuff. As regards restocking on furniture, there are Ikeas near Portland and Seattle, if I recall correctly! You could use their site to do mock-up calculations of how much it would cost to replace certain items. Knowing they're low-priced it would give you a decent idea of the minimum investment.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "Deformed skull of prehistoric child suggests that early humans cared for disabled children."
Well, the article does address it: Whatever the cause, the early closure of the lamdoid would have put a lot of pressure on the growing brain. This condition has been linked to mental retardation and motor problems in modern-day children. With such disabilities, the Cranium 14 child would have been unable to reach the age of 5-8 without the care of its peers. Sounds like the child died of natural causes, even if it's not stated outright.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "Earth Hour has been and gone for the year."
I turned off everything except for my bedside lamp, which has a 9-watt CFL bulb, so that I could read. Here in France we hadn't yet gone to daylight savings time (that was yesterday, heh), so it was pitch dark outside and I didn't want to burn a candle since that time is peak kitty "RUN AROUND FAST JUMP ON CURTAINS!! TWIRL POUNCE MEOW RUN PULL STUFF OFF TABLE SCRATCH CLAMBER UP SHELVES WHEEEE!!" and I'm pretty sure a candle wouldn't have survived.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "If you've ever wondered what the evolutionary reason is for chilies being spicy. "
That Smithsonian article is a well-written and fun read, thanks! I might try planting some chilis in my apartment garden this summer.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "John Hodgman on "meh""
(Oops -- by "conjugations" I meant "verb tenses", there are no conjugations in Mandarin Chinese at all. And the verb tenses aren't really, since the "infinitive", present tense, is always used, and adverbs or particles are used to express others.)
posted by fraise 15 years ago
Proponents of "spell it as it's pronounced" should study Latin or Finnish some time. My hypothesis, based entirely on intuition and having studied way too many languages, is that languages have an innate "minimum complexity" requirement... make spelling "logical" (because the so-called logic of as-pronounced is in fact subjective), and you get a gazillion cases, declensions, etc. Heck, Mandarin Chinese has no real plural and hardly any conjugations -- the grammar is dead simple. Plus, they don't even have an alphabet! Yay, right? Nope, urk is more like it. You get to deal with their bajillion ideograms and tonal pronunciation (which it could be argued are just as logical as alphabets and Finnish-type pronunciation, which is why I say "logic" in such matters is quite subjective). Et maintenant, je vais boire un thé avec mon quatre-heures. Miam.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "Zooborns"
Dang, in the video of that Chinese snow leopard, when the mom grabs a cub with her jaws? O.O (-wide-eyed). The wee little cub's whole head could fit in that mouth!
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "Look at this cat!"
fairywench part Bengal, eh? Hmmm, there's a tom who resembles Kanoko that roams the area where Kanoko was abandoned, and he (the tom) does indeed look Bengal now that you mention it. Kanoko has the sweetest disposition -- so yes, Maine Coon and Bengal mix would account for that! TT, me male? French? Did you know you can click on a username and see a profile? "Anna" isn't exactly a male first name, and my nationality is spelled out pretty clearly! As for being aged 22, eek. Add 10 years. (Though I admit my kitteh-post does indeed sound late adolescent. But it's because kittehs are teh cute and teh adorable and wittle kitties are *snarfleneckfur* wonderful.)
posted by fraise 15 years ago
FT that is a great photo! I had a Morris too, he was a very sweet kitty. He died at the ripe old age of 21, despite regular battles with raccoons. (In fact we think he may finally have lost a tussle with a 'coon, since we never found him... he just disappeared one day.) Recently (*sniff*, he passed away last year) I also had a chat-Malo (play on words: "chat" is French for "cat", his name was Malo, and "chamallow", pronounced the same, means "marshmallow") and now have an adopted Maine Coon kitty named Kanoko, who is utterly adorable. "Kanoko" is Japanese for "fawn" because his coloring looks like a fawn's, especially so when he was a wee lad. Kittehs are teh greatest!!
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "The Uninvited"
That spider with the missing leg as a "gift" reminds me of an experience in middle school. We had an ex-Marine for our Physical Education teacher who, as you can probably imagine, taught us with military discipline: while waiting for him to arrive, we were to sit in straight, even lines, with good posture, no talking, no shifting. (Sometimes he'd wait outside the gym where we couldn't see him, and if he heard anyone talk or shift in place we'd all get to run extra laps, so we quickly learned to mind.) One day a fly caught the bored attention of a good friend (a boy) sitting next to me. "Anna, look! A fly!" he said. "Shhh!" I replied without moving. "Do you want a fly?" he asked, promptly catching the fly. "You're gonna get caught!" I whispered to him worriedly. "It's for you!" he insisted, and set to work doing God knows what to the fly. After a minute or two, he pushed over a still-wiggling black blob and stated, with great pride, "there, now you're the only girl in the world who has a live fly with no legs or wings. See? It's still alive! You know how hard that is to do?" I hardly knew what to think at the time, but twenty years later I still remember it fondly. (Our teacher didn't come in until much later and hadn't heard any of it, thank goodness.)
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "How the city hurts your brain"
Here in French cities (and I imagine in other "old world" countries as well; plus China had something similar with their traditional homes), blocks of apartment buildings are often built around inner courtyards that you can't see from the streets. You can see them in this satellite view of Nice, for instance. I have a ground-floor apartment with an inner courtyard, and despite living in city center, all I can hear from my garden patio are birds and church bells... it's lovely.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "Elf Yourself!"
See that "Powered by JibJab" icon? I went to school with the blond one! (on JibJab's site) Child genius, years ahead in math and what have you -- but I bested him in French! MUHA! I'm sure this will come as little surprise, but his father was a public school teacher who headed up our middle school's computer lab. He was and still is an Apple fanboi.
posted by fraise 15 years ago
In "Retouching a magazine cover. [Flash] "
Chyren yes, however by "fashion and related" that means magazines specifically selling those airbrushed ideals (which is why I specified that), not "just" retouching . I can understand retouching of minor blemishes that doesn't alter the person's fundamental bodily attributes, such as airbrushing pimples, for instance, or increasing the contrast in a photo. That does bring up "where do you draw the line?" of course -- for me, to paraphrase what I just wrote, the line would be drawn at changing a person enough to make them look like someone they could never resemble in reality.
posted by fraise 18 years ago
Nice how it's set up to show each step, it drives home the point much better than just a global before and after. Personally, I go the most expeditious route of sticking it to airbrushed ideals of "beauty" by not buying fashion and related magazines in the first place.
posted by fraise 18 years ago
In "Tolkien Norse Rip-Off Purity Petition or T.N.R.O.P.P."
"Operas like 'The Bicycle of the Rings'" - I am THE DWARF fan many of loves it.
posted by fraise 18 years ago
In "Down with noise"
I have to say, the man who lives in the apartment above mine is rebellious (doesn't give a flying rat's ass about the ears of people in the two apartment buildings who hear him every day), violent (insults me when I ask him to at least please shut his window considering it's 5°C outside), alcoholic, dissonant (good lord you do NOT want to hear the music he listens to resonating throughout the buildings for six hours a day), but PRO-god, I'm afraid, as it's all religious music. Wouldn't that just shock the authors of that site. "If you thought Rap, Punk, Heavy Metal or any other past degenerate 'music' trend was a threat...WAKE UP!!" Yeah, I woke up nice and early this morning... to the cacophony of my neighbor's religious music. I'm sure I'll have to deal with it until midnight again too. (Yes, the police have visited him on my request - twice. Now he qualifies for a big fat fine. Heee.)
posted by fraise 18 years ago
In "Just in time for Christmas!"
Towels plus carpeted stairs with rounded lips = endless hours of sliding fun. My brother and I would also raid the bedding closet and make tent cities in his bedroom using sheets, cardboard boxes and his bunk bed. I still miss that, once we finished, playing around in it was like spelunking.
posted by fraise 18 years ago
In "Library Thing"
I'm there, with a paid account. Love it, and the developer is very open to suggestions.
posted by fraise 18 years ago
In "Purple people."
Some of those sites also say it's a favorite color of artists! Ha! Right, while I am somewhat perturbed by the Purple People site and would never ever buy one of their products, I absolutely love the color. I don't ever dress head to toe in it, and certainly don't decorate my home with it, I just have a lot of clothes in various shades o' violet. I also like to wear burgundy, which tends to get as many spontaneous love-hate reactions as purple, oddly enough. Why do I like the colors? One major reason is that I have a pronounced pink tint to my skin. Red, yellow, brown, many blues and the very common yellowish beige look awful on me. (The beige thing is a real pain, I have to make my own clothes in more neutral or pinkish beiges in order to get neutrals in my wardrobe.) Purple and burgundy look very good on me, and I like the depth in them. Voilà.
posted by fraise 18 years ago
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