> "I'm a 'bitter gun owner', and I vote!"
>
> I thought to myself, "yep, for Obama!", but it's sort of sad that I'll have to hold my nose
> on the gun rights issue in order to do so.

That would be me also--hold nose on this and several other issues, push the O button because of liking the alternative less. Obama now has an ad out there that talks the talk about second amendment rights, but I predict... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 1:23 PM on October 11, 2008

> This seems like mainstream Democrat gun policy to me, to be honest.
> Perhaps that's the problem? I don't know, it's why I ask.

Well, thanks for that; I'll try to answer sincerely. Bear in mind that (aside from being a rabid treehugger) I am very much out of the political mainstream...for Metafilter. According to the Political Compass quiz, which gets linked here from time to time, I'm only a tiny bit left of center on the left-right axis, and only a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:44 PM on October 11, 2008

> Someone doesn't remember the 90s, and how incredibly and inexplicably virulent
> the ring-wing talk-radio hatred for Hilary Clinton was.
> posted by Caduceus at 12:41 AM on October 10 [1 favorite +] [!]

Someone also doesn't remember just last spring, and the equally virulent hatred for Hillary (up to and including calling for her death) spewed by left-wing netroots types and bloggers who... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 7:15 AM on October 10, 2008

> To make the two statements equivalent, you'd have to say "Ayres tried to kill a nine-year-old
> boy, except for the condition that is missing: Ayers being involved." The statement that Ayres
> is responsible for the attempted killing of a nine-year-old is hyperbole. The statement that
> the crowd in the second video is not much different from a lynch mob except for two conditions
> is a reasonable argument, as far as it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 10:37 PM on October 10, 2008

> Aside from the disconnect from reality (teens have sex! Shocking news!), their willingness to
> force their head in the ground mentality is causing real, quantifiable harm. Pigfuckers.

Why bring up Scotland at a time like this?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:04 PM on October 6, 2008

Are we maybe missing a "via" hat-tip here? Arts and Letters Daily linked exactly these three articles in a post last week.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:58 AM on October 6, 2008

> This one-sidedness is the same reason for why American movies, music, and television
> shows are so ignored and maligned in Europe.

American movies, at least, are maligned (of course) but certainly not ignored. Unless this has changed recently:

To reinforce national and regional identities, Europeans try to hold on to their languages, foods and folkloric traditions. But, given the option of American-style... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 9:16 AM on October 6, 2008

> jfuller: You might want to recalibrate your sarcasm detectors.
> posted by Sys Rq at 12:18 PM on October 6 [+] [!]

Yeah. I had to turn the snark-sensor gain way down until after the election (and the depression too, probably) or drop off the net entirely. Unfortunately, it's interwired with the sarcasm and irony meters and they're practically at zero also. Oh well, omelettes, eggs...
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 9:36 AM on October 6, 2008

Followups.
posted to MetaTalk by jfuller at 7:27 AM on October 5, 2008

> I'm assuming the pronunciation is like "magnolia", that is, 3 syllables: mag-nol-ya. Ko-nol-ya. You dig?

??

Where I live magnolia has at least six and sometimes seven or eight.
posted to MetaTalk by jfuller at 8:58 AM on October 4, 2008

Here's another link to go with mediareport's don't-let's-be-so-quick-to-panic collection.

Is Purchasing $700 billion of Toxic Assets the Best Way to Recapitalize the Financial System? No! It is Rather a Disgrace and Rip-Off Benefitting only the Shareholders and Unsecured Creditors of Banks

From the headline y'll might think it's from the Daily Worker, but it's not; it's Nouriel Roubini.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:43 PM on September 29, 2008

> From the headline y'll might think it's from the Daily Worker, but it's not; it's Nouriel Roubini.

(woops, cortex scooped me on this one in the original fpp, a mere 426 comments back.)

posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 7:24 PM on September 29, 2008

> the school was originally a joint venture between John Ringling, of the famed Ringling Brothers Circus and Dr. Budd Spivey,
> then President of Southern College which is now called the Florida Southern College of Lakeland.

There's an art museum in Sarasota, also founded by Ringling, and it has quite a lot of stuff that Ringling himself liked and (being rich) bought. I'm particularly thinking of a series of physically huge cartoons ( = oil sketches... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 9:24 AM on September 28, 2008

Thanks for the post, vronsky. By chance I happened to spend Friday evening ripping my vinyl Trout to mp3 (and FLAC lossless, for the time capsule) and had my first all the way through revisit with it for a year or so.

There's a great deal to like there--which is why I still listen to it, decades after release--but the best parts are patchy and episodic, interspersed with other patches that are sententious or sophomoric or most commonly both.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:39 AM on September 28, 2008

OK EVERYBODY GO OUT FOR A PASS has been the standard pass play in sandlot football since forever, especially when all the players are age 8-10. That's the main reason I prefer it to the kind where you actually have to dress up in some weird 'Murican-football costume to play.


> The idea that professional defenses and defensive coordinators are constantly struggling
> to predict what the offense will do on any given play, while you, a person... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:40 AM on September 27, 2008

> Maybe the orchestra is having a better year?

The Cleveland has never--never--fumbled a snap or thrown an INT.


> I suspect the median age of the orchestra-goers on a typical night was 69.5.

In that case some of them may actually have heard the orchestra under Szell--which is about like having actually watched Jim Brown take handoffs for the Browns. Fairly or not, comparisons like... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 3:43 PM on September 23, 2008

> Instead of being a great small camera for shooting everywhere, Leica today is pure techno-fetishism,

So how about some clever hardware haxor builds a do-it-yourself digital sensor retrofit for the iii series?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:52 PM on September 22, 2008

Is your ntldr actually MIA? It's just a file in C:\, though it's hidden so your explorer has to be set to show all files in order for you to see it. Or you can check in a command window. (This is XP SP3):

C:\>attrib -s -h ntldr

C:\>dir ntldr

06/09/2008 08:30 PM 250,048 ntldr
1 File(s) 250,048 bytes

If it's actually gone, you can just copy it... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jfuller at 6:27 PM on September 21, 2008

Thank you, hadjiboy. The Indian subcontinent is such an overwhemingly vast subject it's difficult to penetrate (and my Hindi and Urdu are so rusty, I haven't spoken either in several lives :-) A selection of recommended English-language sites is very welcome.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:42 AM on September 21, 2008

Could none of the poets of Pouilly-Fumé have thought of a more attractive name than "Silex?" That sounds like something made by Monsanto from reprocessed agricultural substances concerning which you don't really want to know any specifics (especially right before dinner.)


> That swill (we agree there) you say isn't "cider" is nonetheless called "cider" by a large
> number of drinkers...... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:00 AM on September 18, 2008

Full Brazilian, not just for the ladies any more.

> Hair collects sebum, an oil which becomes rancid and is a feast for fun bacteria like staph. Trimming it down is just
> good hygiene, unless your bronze-age religion tells you that you must maintain a rotten-smelling crotch at all times
> I don't see why you'd not do some clear-cutting of the forest.
> posted by mullingitover at 8:02 PM on September 15 [+] [!]... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:30 PM on September 15, 2008

> It's easier if you start your foreign language in elementary school, which very few American children do.

Seriously? They started me off on French in the first grade in a nothing-special public elementary school in Atlanta. Je me plumerais la tête, je me plumerais la tête.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:28 PM on September 14, 2008

> Sacred plant? Like, what, holy beets? Spiritual salad?

Hey, show a little respect do0d. You don't want to worship just spaghetti, do you? He needs a salad.

One of the better things the Maharishi ever said: "Wouldn't it be just like the West to find consciousness through a material?"
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:16 PM on September 14, 2008

> Liberal statism produces a nation with a robust economic foundation, a strong middle
> class and a government that responds to input from the people to accomplish national
> goals and support the common good.

Tick me off a few places where liberal statism has done this. Or we talking Utopia here?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 7:47 PM on September 10, 2008

> But, economically, they are, in fact, voting against their self-interests.

And they give more to charity, which is also against their self-interest. No one would do that unless they're crazy (and stupid), right Astro?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:51 PM on September 10, 2008

> William McGonagall

If only she were still alive, I would set one of Willie's poems for Florence Foster Jenkins to sing. Large Hadron Collider, eat your heart out.
/derail
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:59 PM on September 10, 2008

> Is anyone else horrified by buzzman's unbelievably racist/ignorant comments?
> posted by Optimus Chyme at 7:47 AM on September 11 [+] [!]

Optimus provides a textbook example of why someone might vote anti-progressive, namely being tired of being vilified by folks who shout "racist" as often and as meaninglessly as Joe McCarthy shouted "Communist." Kansas says no to Stockholm Syndrome, soi-disant progressives can't figure out why.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:39 AM on September 11, 2008

> As a non-church-goer, I have no problem with this, as long as the churches consequently lose their tax haven status.

You might usefully give a look-in to the law of unintended consequences. I easily foresee some of the megachurches hiring big-gun K Street lobbyists to argue that if being taxed by the state doesn't violate the First Amendment, then receiving tax exemptions and subsidies and all the array of government support programs now available to, e. g.,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 2:46 PM on September 9, 2008

> Oh you silly Americans with your amusing democracy pantomime. Get it fucking over with already.

/d/tards hard to distinguish from /r/tards, film at--well, you know.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:38 AM on September 8, 2008

> The big thing you do miss out on is anything happening live, especially big stories like
> terrorist attacks, tsunamis, sports events. That's what TV is best at: liveness.

Sports are a category unto themselves because the rights are mostly owned by somebody if they're big enough to get TV attention (I don't recall any camera van showing up at any sandlot baseball game, half-court basketball game, or shirts-vs-skins soccer game I ever participated in)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 1:18 PM on September 4, 2008

> Not having a TV probably pushes me a lot farther along toward extremes of opinion in areas
> where I already diverge considerably from cultural norms. Not being constantly re-connected
> to cultural touchstones definitely can set one adrift.
> posted by BrotherCaine at 6:56 PM on September 4 [2 favorites +] [!]

not that there's anything wrong with that
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:23 AM on September 5, 2008

> For the first time in at least 125,000 years, the Arctic ice cap is an island.

Linkie, please, to those comparison satellite images from 125000y BP.

Also a link to that "obscure website" would be nice, though I suppose the big aggregator sites wouldn't treat it gently. Is there any mention anywhere of forthcoming publication in a refereed journal?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 7:46 AM on September 2, 2008

> That's right, the entire field of paleoclimatology can be dismissed with a simple "pics or it
> didn't happen". Does the entire world disappear whenever you close your eyes, too?

Pics or it's an inference from some collection of less compelling but presumably converging evidence. And it's a fairly extraordinary claim (headline-making, for instance) which calls for extraordinarily clear evidence. To begin with (and quite apart from the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 10:06 AM on September 2, 2008

> You do realize that climatologists take thousands of core samples from all over the Arctic
> icecap, providing them with a cutaway view of the various layers of ice/snow deposited
> over many tens of thousands years, yes? It's pretty readily apparent from those samples
> which areas have ice older than 125,000 years.
> posted by Ryvar at 12:36 PM on September 2 [1 favorite +] [!]

Ryvar, are you under... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 6:47 PM on September 2, 2008

You're right, I accept the correction and apologize.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:07 PM on September 2, 2008

> Ah, and no hard feelings.

fuller tips hat. I need to write myself a greasemonkey script that adds a little reminder to the mefi banner. Something like "This is not fark, this is not 4chan, don't be a /b/tard here."
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 4:54 AM on September 3, 2008

It's not quite as punchy as "Nero fiddled while Rome burned," is it? And now thay say that didn't happen after all. But we do know postie has time to yammer on message boards while Gussie rages.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 12:12 PM on September 2, 2008

> But privacy is certainly not dead. There are things I know that would make my friends go crazy, and I'm not telling. ;p

I know where I'm ticklish, and I'm not about to tell.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 10:22 AM on September 2, 2008

Is the weed especially good in Amsterdam this week? Agents, report!
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:50 PM on September 1, 2008

> 17th time's a charm.
> posted by drjimmy11 at 7:36 PM on September 1

I'm sure I've seen more than 17 Iranfoilhatfilter posts. Actually I think y2karl has put up at least 17 all by himself. Here's a few more:

August 1, 2008: Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran
June 30, 2008: Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran

October 1, 2007: Shifting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 7:43 PM on September 1, 2008

from cogneuro's first link:

> One of the things that worries me about the number of Americans who seem
> to treasure this little piece of trash, now in its fourth edition since
> it was revived in the 1950s after E. B. White undertook a light revision
> of an earlier version by Strunk and added a chapter on style, is that they
> just don't realize how absurdly old it is — that it is pretty much... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 8:11 AM on August 30, 2008

> this will be interesting to watch.

Interesting, but not the quite show we were promised. Has it been even fifteen minutes since a global financial who's-who was going "Worst [recession/housing collapse/subprime crisis/credit meltdown/whatever] since the Great Depression (Soros, stiglitz, Wells Fargo, milstein, roubini.] And I nominate klangklangston to speak for metafilter's raft of doomies: "I give us six months before we're digging up cemeteries just to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 11:45 AM on August 28, 2008

> Thomas Frank figured these guys out in his latest book. More of the same.

...from Thomas Frank, you mean? I daresay it is. His last was comically wrong from halftitle page to colophon so this one should be at least as amusing as an old Andy Capp collection.


> Well, it's not like the right-of-centre doesn't need some respectable commentary.

Never encountered Arts and Letters Daily, has he?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 4:45 AM on August 28, 2008

At the first hint of a sore throat, a 30mg zinc supplement tab (don't like candy lozenges) and a 1000mg vit. C. And go to sleep if I can possibly arrange it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jfuller at 7:20 PM on August 27, 2008

> Plus our palates have grown and expanded to enjoy bitter flavours. Which, if memory
> serves correctly, probably has a good explanation.

It's because the little primates demand all the ripe fruit and we, suckers that we are, give it all to them and then there's nothing left for us but the green ones. Eat green or die, large primate.


> do you still enjoy tucking into a nice, hot plate of beans?... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 2:20 PM on August 26, 2008

> I know plenty of women who've had abortions. They've gone in in the morning,
> come out a few hours later, and they've led the rest of their lives with no
> guilt or compunction about it at all. Why don't I ever see this portrayed?
> The reality is, it's because the uproar from rightwing, religious ideologues
> would make it commercially risky.

I understand outragefilter requires that there must be a wicked... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 5:10 PM on August 22, 2008

> The reason I brush my teeth every night: there may be a spy there.

I'M IN UR MOUF BROADCASTIN' FROM UR FILLINS!
39634 62349 74088 65564 16379 19713 39153 69459 17986 24537
14595 35050 40469 27478 44526 67331 93365 54526 22356 93208
30734 71571 83722 79712 25775 65178 07763 82928 31131 30196
64628 89126 91254 24090 25752 03091 39411 73146 06089 15630
42831 95113 43511 42082 15140 34733 68076 18292... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 1:21 PM on August 21, 2008

> the Jeffersonian concept of a "wall" between government and religion is sorely lacking.

Much as I admire Long Tom, it has not been established that "Jeffersonian" is identical to "American." (He was, after all, a slave-owner, remember.) It has equally not been established that the specifically Jeffersonian concept of a totally impervious wall is the right one. It certainly isn't the one we have in place, which tolerates considerable... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 7:31 PM on August 20, 2008

The duck stamp is a monster big deal for wildlife artists. Having your painting chosen for the stamp will do for your career pretty much exactly the same thing that having a #1 hit does for a rock group.
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 9:18 AM on August 20, 2008

> They are still 17 years away from brushing a handful of hair from their balding head, feeling a
> cautionary twinge in their prostate, suffering the bland disinterest of beautiful girls, or
> wondering where all those long afternoons and late nights have gone.

But they won't mind because by that age they'll all be looking forward to their rich later lives as Bodhisattvas. I mean, they will be, won't they?
posted to MetaFilter by jfuller at 9:08 PM on August 19, 2008