Please believe me, in a few years (probably less than two) you're going to realize that it's not your house and never was, even if it takes a few more years after that for "home" to mean "the place where I sleep" instead of "the house I grew up in and where my parents still sleep."

Is your parents' position ridiculous? Yeah. But they're allowed to have ridiculous positions concerning what goes on in their home. And you're going to feel silly... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:39 PM on July 1, 2008

leave her a note back saying 'no'. issue is resolved.

I'd go a little stronger, just to let her know she shouldn't persist:

"That's the most self-important, presumptuous thing anyone has ever suggested to me. You're ridiculous. Do not contact me again under any circumstances except through an attorney."
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:09 PM on June 30, 2008

if a guy is really interested in a woman, he'll pursue her relentlessly, no matter what else is going on in his life

Fetid bullshit. Most men have figured out that obviously, relentlessly pursuing women only works in romantic comedies from 15 years ago, so even if they're a bit preoccupied they know better than to make it obvious. There's no better way to hear "let's just be friends" than to make it obvious that you are out to win someone... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 9:20 AM on June 29, 2008

Billy Bragg's Marching Song of the Covert Battalions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:44 PM on June 27, 2008

You should eat at Maoz, a Netherlands-based falalfel chain. I was in Amsterdam for four days and visited every location. It is exceptionally delicious. (if you live in New York or Philly, they have locations as well. But I would go anyway because their falafel is, as I said, exceptionally delicious.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:38 PM on June 27, 2008

For the right price, I think I would live there.

Amen. If the place is that great, I'd think about it. You'd be convenient to EVERYTHING in Boston Proper. It wouldn't be my first choice if I place an apartment anywhere on the map. But living in a grand place at DTX* might have been even nicer than living in a shitty shoebox in the South End, which I did for many years and thoroughly enjoyed.

But I really can't figure... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 10:16 AM on June 24, 2008

I'm still a little worried about walking home late at night...

I don't think that's a big worry. The area is full of seedy people during the day, but because almost no one lives there, the seedy people have travelled to hang out there (why, I'm still not sure), and they're gone at night. All that's left generally are a very few non-threatening homeless and financial district workers stumbling home because they went out after work. If you go a few... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 11:19 AM on June 24, 2008

you're not really saying what you have to spend. If you have "so-so credit,"you're looking at truly terrible interest rates generally, so financing is a last resort. That said, you can do this.

Folks recommending an ancient Honda havn't been pricing cars. Any Civic that still runs is coveted by the "2 Fast 2 Furious" crowd because it can be repaired and modded easily. Which is a shame because they're really durable cars.

If... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 8:30 PM on June 14, 2008

Or, am I naive and it is quite common for young people (20-28) to do those sort of things?

The rogue drinking? Very common closer to 20, more loserish the closer you get to 30.

Shoplifting? Who knows or cares as long as you're not transporting stolen goods. If two people have admitted to shoplifting some vague time in the past, don't sweat it.. If you think they're stuffing their pockets when you drive them to Target, it's... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 7:05 PM on June 11, 2008

Does anyone have any experience with remedies for gas that I could suggest to her? Suggestions for over-the-counter or natural remedies are welcome, as are prescription drugs. She has an internist, and currently takes something for abdominal cramping, so if there's an Rx that's effective, maybe it's one we could check out.

I have IBS. I also have been symptom free for two years by taking three tablespoons of psyllium fiber daily. I was more concerned... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:09 PM on June 11, 2008

Post-war Germany has done more to stop the spread of Fascism within its borders than any other non-communist country. That chick should be Roman Catholic instead of Jewish because she certainly believes in Original Sin.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 3:57 PM on June 10, 2008

Just thought to wrap this up. Al never came home. We updated his microchip info when we moved. But a photo of one of my color posters (not the one linked above) on a telephone pole accompanied an article in the Sunday Globe about people going all out searching for lost pets. So Al's kind of famous! (I emailed the reporter and gave him my new contact info. No bites, but it had been nearly a year.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 12:00 PM on June 10, 2008

Just to warn you, one day the cable company will send an auditor to your neighborhood and they'll trap your line and you won’t get the TV signal anymore.

This is true, but it's a really indefinite period. I used to work for a cable provider in Boston and the longest I ever heard of someone getting free basic cable was 12 years. The coming digital broadcast is just going to be letterboxed and re-transmitted as analog to basic subscribers by your cable... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 4:22 PM on June 4, 2008

Professor Murder
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 3:52 AM on May 30, 2008

Brookline, Mass.

Letter of the question versus spirit of it. Brookline borders Boston, one of the large cities cited in the question. Hardly a standalone medium-sized city.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:28 AM on May 29, 2008

We'd need to know more about the guy, cultural context, etc. For a lot of people, assuming they come from the right frame of mind, arranged marriages work out as well as our planned ones. It's your idea of hell and mine too, but it might not be too offputting to your friend or his bride.

He says that he made the decision and he's happy with it. Your job as a friend is to believe him, support him and be there if it doesn't work like he's hoping it will. Trying to make him... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 8:21 PM on May 21, 2008

Tip: Don't use "SoWa" as a term. In a righteous world people would kicked in the nuts for that.

Another tip: as people have alluded to above, know the difference between South Boston and the South End. Even people from the 'burbs often confuse them and there's no better way to sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

South Boston: Not technically the Southernmost part of the city. It sits east of Dorchester and most of... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 10:02 AM on May 16, 2008

My father was raised two towns out from Boston (born in the 40's) and called his paternal grandfather "Bumpy."
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 11:14 AM on May 14, 2008

I like Belfast. Pretty, old seaside town that's slightly less touristy than Bar Harbor or Boothbay. But Boothbay's also quite nice. Those would be my two suggestions if you want to feel like you're in Cabot Cove.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 7:15 AM on May 14, 2008

Show them this dude. Makes me want to not even be near the stuff.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:23 PM on May 7, 2008

The guy who draws "Get Fuzzy" occasionally adds characters from Tintin's world into crowd scenes and the like. I saw one a few years ago that had Captain Haddock in a doctor's waiting room.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 11:01 AM on May 6, 2008

The United States' relative lack of permissiveness is NOT tied to Puritanism.

Exhibit A: Massachusetts. The land where North American Puritanism took root is now the only state that lets homosexuals marry. If Puritan ethics were the root of American conservatism, wouldn't you expect the region that nutured American Puritanism (Greater Boston) to have the strongest adherence? "Banned in Boston" stopped meaning anything 60 years ago.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 6:40 PM on May 1, 2008

Welcome to your 30's. De jure, you turned 30 a couple of years ago, but you're really just starting them.

Random aches and pains that you can't quite source are par for the course from now on. It probably is your tendency to cross your legs that gives the twinge-- I do it too, and also feel occasional weakness on the back of my knee. But that never bothered me for the first ten years of my working life.

It's normal. Try not to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 12:50 PM on May 1, 2008

A native speaker of "Gaelic" isn't fluent in the language until that person is in their teens? That's most ludicrous thing I've heard this week.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:54 AM on April 30, 2008

Shit. Meant to add:

You can tell how non-expert the answer is by referring to a language family that doesn't exist. The language family of the "Gaelic" languages is the Indo-European language family, and the branch is called "Celtic." The subsection of those languages are the Q-Celtic languages. Amongst people with any linguistic training, "Gaelic" refers to a single language-- Scots Gaelic. The Irish language is referred to colloquially by... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 6:03 AM on April 30, 2008

Perhaps you could mount it in a patio umbrella base, or buy a table meant to hold an umbrella.

This sounds great, but measure before you buy-- the pillar of the clothesline may be thicker than a standard umbrella. A base meant to hold a cantilever umbrella seems more likely to fit the pole and provide enough weight to keep it from tipping on a windy day.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 8:48 PM on April 28, 2008

Google for "virtualdub mpeg," which will provide links to the a modified V-Dub called "VirtualDub mpeg2." It may be missing some licensing agreements, so I'm not going to link to it directly to avoid the inevitable "OMG WAREZ!" metatalk post.

Anyway, use the "append" function to join a bunch of mpegs of the same resolution together quickly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:12 PM on April 25, 2008

The big thing to me, if you're thinking about buying something for the long term:

If you get a fixed-rate mortgage (and you should), you know exactly what you're going to be paying for housing for thirty years. Your property taxes may increase a bit, so check the trends in the place where you want to buy. But largely, you are obligated to pay the same amount for the next thirty years. For the next ten or so, you're probably going to be paying more each month than you do... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 10:21 AM on April 20, 2008

Get a consultation from a lawyer with defamation experience. Perhaps you can make this guy and his pig corroborator pay.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 12:58 PM on April 19, 2008

Not the result I was hoping for, but I learned something!

(My apologies to anyone who thought the question sounded ignorant. I was a linguistics major, but my concentration was IE and outside of Indo-Iranian, I get progressively more ignorant the further east I look.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 6:52 PM on April 16, 2008

So far the Getaway looks like the best as you have a free roam option to explore much of London.

The Getaway got mediocre reviews but I'm a fan. I even bought the sequel. It's realistic, but not photorealistic. You can't take out your London A-Z and drive around-- it's only very major streets. For example, there are no perpendicular streets depicted on Tottenham Court Rd between Oxford and Goodge. In real life there are about 10. The... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 7:06 PM on April 13, 2008

You can use the soak water, but it's got a bit of residual dirt in it. However, the biggest reason not to use the soak water is that it has a large portion of the fart-causing long starches in it. If beans give you gas, you'll feel better if you go with fresh water.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 7:49 AM on April 13, 2008 marked best answer

Back when I worked in print I had some good luck exporting the RGB piece to a CYMK PDF via postscript printer. I would have inserted that as an image, so I don't know how it'll look as a standalone document to print. But it's worth a shot.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:40 AM on April 10, 2008

It varies a lot. Geography has a lot to do with it. The parish my Dad grew up in (just north of Boston) is high church and middle-of-the-road politically-- it's barely hanging on (the area is now strongly predominantly Italian Catholic) and can't afford to offend anyone.

My late grandmother's later congregation (she moved when she was widowed) is low church but conservative-- it's in Western New Hampshire and elderly. People were cordial but cool and I can't imagine gay... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 7:41 PM on April 9, 2008

funny, I'm aware that Irish people in Ireland call the version of Gaelic they learn in school "Irish," but I always assumed it was a slangish, off-hand term, and not indicative of a real difference between different versions. Like a Spanish-speaker calling it "Spanish" instead of "Español."

It's a modern name. It's tied to both the rise of modern Irish Nationalism and modern linguistics. If you're interested in it, this... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 3:01 PM on April 7, 2008

Jessamyn's suggestion us spot on. When I'm learning a new app, I put the mouse so far away that I have to stand to reach it. After 20 minutes of having t get up from my chair to hover over a tool or menu item, I know where all the common ones are.

The next step is having to use the app to do a repetitive task that's not "common". The more complicated tasks and combinations just follow after you hit a threshold of comfort with the basic stuff. Then time you save... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 6:28 PM on April 2, 2008

If you have bargaining skills, you can get a much better deal from the scumbags on the street outside the park after the first pitch than you can from the scumbags with internet connections before the game. But the marathon/Sox game is probably the biggest holiday in Boston and there may not be many tickets left from the street scalpers at the start of the game.

If you're going to help the bastards who wreck the game experience (and I'm not faulting you because I might... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 3:30 PM on March 30, 2008

et's just say that I am trying to figure out the best way to gently, gently indicate to my boyfriend that two minutes of foreplay and then (ouch!) two of thrusting just isn't going to do it for me.

A decent guy wants both parties to enjoy it. The foreplay part's easy. You don't need to be gentle about that so much-- "I want to draw it out more, play a bit before we really get at it." You might accentuate the point by going down on him. If he... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 3:18 PM on March 30, 2008

It's Bokmal Norwegian.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 8:04 PM on March 29, 2008

Yeah, a steel chisel would be much harder than an amorphous lump of iron. You could crack nodules off of a lump of iron ore very easily with steel. And steel would have been available to most people in 1860's.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 8:09 AM on March 25, 2008 marked best answer

For Bruges, you should stay here: Absoluut Verhulst B&B. It's in the thick of everything (right off a canal), reasonably priced and absolutely lovely-- it's a B&B in a tastefully renovated house from the 1600's. Here's a couple of photos of the room we had: 1 ,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 4:18 AM on March 24, 2008

I just repaired a corrupted QT file yesterday using this method (keep your fingers crossed). You'll need QuickTime Pro, which is decent and reasonably priced.

1. Download VLC, install and open it

2. Go to File>Streaming/Export Wizard

3. Select "Transcode/Save to File"

4. Select a stream

5. On the Transcode screen, check only Video. For the codec, select MP4... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:58 PM on March 20, 2008

"4. Select a stream" means "select the corrupted movie" in case that seems vague.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 2:59 PM on March 20, 2008

I just mefimailed you with a specific recommendation (this comment in case you're not into mefimail.).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:57 AM on March 19, 2008

Don't know much about the Arlington area, but in terms of the Best Packie question, give Colonial Spirits in Acton a shot. Here's their Beers of the World list.

Oh, Jesus. I should have recognized that people wouldn't read the link and just left that separate. But thanks for barely skimming.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:34 PM on March 5, 2008

You know about Blue Ribbon, right? They're not as good as Redbones, but still quite good.

I don't eat meat, but my wife is very excited to have Blue Ribbon nearby. These are the kind of answers I'm looking for!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 5:42 PM on March 5, 2008

Our media center box runs Myth TV (under Ubuntu), is our file server for music and the like and is also my wife's desktop. It's a P4 with 2 gigs of ram and a hauppage video card with onboard encoding. Works just fine.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 10:17 AM on March 4, 2008

I would take a look at the South End between Columbus and Tremont (or maybe even down to Washington). I lived about 40 steps from the Lawrence/Chandler/Clarendon intersection for about six years and miss a lot about it:

You'll have a no longer than 10 minute foot commute to work. Imagine not having to squeeze yourself onto a trolley every morning or wait for an orange line car that never frigging comes.

You've got enough rent flexibility to live... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 1:51 PM on March 3, 2008

And the term "SoWa" rankles me almost as much as "Beantown". Some marketer made that up. (But there's plenty of nice places south of Washington)
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 1:53 PM on March 3, 2008

I'm surprised that noobody has mentioned Jackson, which is a very attractive little town about halfway between North Conway and the Pinkham Notch Visitor Center

I'm surprised no one has specifically mentioned the Eagle Mountain House which is a wonderful, affordable, large Victorian-area hotel. It's got the best scenery of any place I've ever stayed at and I had a blast imagining the place full of people in 19th century dress who had spent a day on a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Mayor Curley at 6:59 AM on February 28, 2008 marked best answer