“Can we get a show show of hands just to confirm we’re ready to move forward?”

Me Everyone, who wasn’t listening and doesn’t have a clue what they were just talking about: ✋

I used to have a semi-outdoor cat. She could come and go from the basement through a cat door. That little shit knew where my bedroom was and every morning she would climb up on the shelf as high as possible and meow loudly as if to say, “Hey! Hey Dumbass! Are you gonna feed me or what!? Heeeeyyyy!”

You gotta remember that some of these people are the same ones who complained that their Southern Baptist pastors were preaching “liberal talking points” (aka, things Jesus said). If teachers actually started reading the Bible in class, these same people would probably start calling it “liberal propaganda” and trying to ban it.

I’m just saying, the irony is so thick that you’d need a rock drill and some dynamite to cut it in half.

If I was a Boeing shareholder, I would be mad as a wet hen right about now. Amid a string of phenomenally bad business decisions that culminated in the flying [sorta] tin can that is the 737 MAX, Boeing is handed an aerospace companies PR wet dream: transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. They then proceeded to drop that softball so hard that the thud could probably be heard from Mars.

Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?

They could even provide an electronic box (for a nominal fee, or course) that shows me a menu of all the shows and movies that are available and what times they are going to play. That way I wouldn’t have to search through a bunch of streaming services. It could all just be in one place.

“Spend a dollar to save a dime.”

And the persistent tiredness.

If you had a 1974 Dodge Monaco, preferably the police cruiser version, you could jump that drawbridge with no problem.

What kind of bullshit numbers are these? I live Arkansas. If you make $40,928 and live here, you are poor. Not even close to “middle class.”

Yesterday, I asked it to help me create a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table. The answers it gave were completely wrong. Each time, I would tell it the error that Excel was displaying and it would respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t use that function there for [x] reasons.”

So it knows the reason why a combination of DAX functions won’t work but recommends them anyways. That’s real fucking useful.

I had a client years ago who was in his late 80’s. He grew up on a farm in Indiana and I remember him telling me a story about threshing grain. He was just a kid in the 1920’s, shoveling coal into the firebox on a big Case steam engine that they took from farm to farm. He said they would try to stay near a creek whenever they could so they had a water source for the engine. It was hard, hot work. He said there was a “big German fella” who worked on their crew who never drank anything but hot black coffee, something which fascinated him as kid.

It was an interesting story to listen to. Such a mundane activity but the fact that it’s no longer a thing and only existed in the memory of someone who remembered doing it made it kind of fascinating

I have a recording of interviews I did with all my living grandparents for a school project when I was a kid. One thing that stood out was the level of abject poverty they experienced. They were teenagers during the great depression and it definitely had a major impact on all of them.

I don’t know.

This is generally known as “land contract/contract for deed”. People do it all the time. As suggested in another comment, you should consult an attorney. If either you or your mom is hesitant to do that, you should ask yourself what happens to your house and mortgage if (God forbid) your mom were to die? Don’t wait to find out. Get an attorney and make sure that it’s all ironed out in advance.

Just an expensive timer.

There’s a reason Allstate is the most frequently sued auto insurance provider. They will give you the run around all day long until you lawyer up and then it’s, “Oh! Ha ha! Sowwy! We bunch of dum dums who no can read and no use kumputers good. We no know what happened! Here big check for you go away now.”

But for every person who lawyers up, there are probably 20 more who don’t. Fuck Allstate.

No, the real one is standing up.

Door opener fluid. It’s a canister of fluid that you have to pump into the door to open it in an emergency. Then you get a replacement canister from the dealer for $150. I recently found out that that’s what passes for a “spare tire” anymore.

During WWII the United States government rounded up tens of thousands of people, including many US citizens, and put them in internment camps because they looked sort of similar to the people who bombed pearl harbor. Why? Because fear is a powerful drug and when people are afraid, logic tends to go out the window, if there was any logic to begin with. If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you’ll notice that much of it is intended to stoke fear, while inserting themselves as the solution. They do it because it works.

Way out in the Arkansas Delta, in a soybean field 50 miles from anywhere, there is a memorial where one of these internment camps stood. If you aren’t looking for it, you’d probably drive right by it unnoticed. All around the camp there are these little voice boxes that you push a button on and it explains what you’re looking at. The voice providing the narration is none other than George Takei who was held there with his family as a child. Spend a little time at a place like this and it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that America has always rejected fanaticism.