Take a break from Trump in this Non-Trump Open Thread! No trolls, no Trump fans, no talking about Trump.
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We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The Mammoth
Imaginary Petal: Heh. Reminds me of the time, years ago, I was out shopping with my then-boyfriend, and we realized his pants had split down the back seam. I walked directly behind him, to lessen the chances of anyone noticing.
That video of Maru in the snow is adorable, but any photos or videos of cats playing in snow are bittersweet to me now. Roscoe died as a result, indirectly, of a big snowstorm in January 2016. There, I’m not gonna talk about it anymore.
Potatoes baked with rosemary and garlic! It reminds me of a recipe I have for new potatoes fried with rosemary and garlic.
I’d like to lose about 10 lbs. I’m going on this soup diet I have, which a dietitian came up with, I just have to get around to making the soups.
Winter is so uninspiring, out here in the sticks:(
Thanks all for the suggestions!
I had a hilarious day a few years ago that started with a cyclist ahead of me turning left, so I passed him… and then discovered he was actually turning right. I did not run him over! However, once I stopped just shy of slamming into his shocked face, I lost my balance and fell onto his wheel and gear cassette.
So much for that t-shirt: tire marks and chain grease and a few tips and tears.
Then I get to work, my coworker sees I’m a bit roughed up, so we go to the coffee machine. He graciously makes me an espresso. But he managed not quite to attach the piece you put the grounds into quite right. As soon as pressure built, pressurized coffee shot out in all directions… but mostly right at me. Nobody else in the area got more than a drop; I got nailed.
So much for the already-scrapped t-shirt, now there were espresso grounds and coffee stains to add to the tire marks, chain grease, rips and tears.
Thankfully my mind space was good, so I could laugh at the absurdity of it all.
I can recommend The Vegetarian Bistro by Marlena Spieler. Some of the food can be pretty rich, but the soups in particular are wonderful.
I’ll miss John Hurt. He was such a fantastic actor. He said once that he and Derek Jacobi almost couldn’t get through the “Uncle Claudius, do you think I’m . . . mad?” scene, but you’d never know from watching it.
We watched I, Claudius in my high school Latin class. One episode every Friday.
I feel really dumb that I only realized last night that John Hurt played Caligula. He was so amazingly squicky in that role.
@WWTH
Try South Indian food. I don’t have any specific blogs or books in mind, but I have a number of South Indian colleagues who are trying to learn to eat meat because they grew up vegetarian and aren’t used to the flavors and textures.
Eli: I watched many of those “I Claudius” episodes on PBS when they were new, with my parents, of course. Funny…that was some of the raciest TV I’d ever seen. Cable wasn’ t available where we lived. So it was the big 3 US networks, and PBS.
Uh oh, my spouse is having back pain. He says his pain is at an “8”. Fortunately, he doesn’t think it’s kidney stones. He’s had those in the past. I’m running a bath for him…I’ve got a whirlpool tub, so it takes time. I hope I can get him into it!
@eli I looooove playing that one! 🙂
Here’s one for you:
Biggest news in my life right now is having removed the 1.7cm piece of a sewing needle from my foot, which I had been carrying around in there for 6 months, having thought it was just a long-healing tendon injury. I have a hard time expressing how relieved I feel. I had to spend about 2 months on crutches, and even after that any amount of walking was uncomfortable at best, and downright painful at worst. The injury isn’t 100% better yet, but 95% of the pain and pressure was gone immediately after the thing came out.
I was making plans with a friend a few days ago, and she suggested wandering through a park, and I had a wonderful moment when I realized I can walk as a leisure activity again. I can’t wait for the weather to get warmer; I’m gonna walk everywhere.
Protip: Even if you don’t think there’s a piece of metal in your foot, but there might be, just get the damn x-ray to be safe anyways. Especially if you live in Canada and the procedure is bloody free.
regarding the Minecraft server mentioned in the last open thread, there are still some details to be finalized before it becomes waiting for my new CPU to arrive. First of all: should it be a survival or a creative server, or should it have mainly survival worlds with a creative world? Secondly, how can I determine who is and isn’t a mammotheer? If I were to post an IP address in the comments, it could also be used by one of the numerous trolls who like to lurk. Thirdly, the list of mods. I’ve already started to work on that, but my preliminary list needs a lot of slimming down because at the moment it has over 100 mods in it.
A friend and I binge-watched I Claudius a while back, and we completely lost it when we got to this:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2swvt8
(We also lost it when we first saw Captain Picard with hair.)
@Fishy Goat
I love the retro swing bands! Thank you. I knew some east coast ones. This one is new to me.
And holy moly that dance footage!
@eli Indeed! 🙂 I remember one gig where I was playing, and saw something moving very quickly out of the corner of my eye. Turns out one of the swing dance couples were doing flips and it was her feet that I had seen. 🙂
This week I have TRIUMPHED in my skipping. Skipping in this context means picking up useful stuff from the street.
I found some gems – a pair of specs, practically new, that make my eyesight CRYSTAL CLEAR! Frames are OK too. I really needed new glasses so I have saved at least £100.
A midnight blue faux fur stole just lying on the ground – BEAUTIFUL and apparently £99 at Fortnum and Mason!
I love to skip stuff – I am happy to rummage through bins at night, and I combine it with walking my dogs. I am poor, and I also really dislike waste, and I will sometimes skip stuff just to give to other people – people put out a lot of bedding for eg. It has become a bit of a hobby of mine.
I even find food – though I don’t fish it out of bins.
@No man rules alone: i’m… not sure how you would set up a way to tell that someone is a mammotheer. I would start with a spam catcher email address for people to email to get the ip, but i don’t know how you could weed through everyone to catch any potential trolls.
:/
Good luck figuring out your mods! All the ones people have been talking about sure do sound exciting, i would hate to have to choose.
Ellesar you are a person after my own heart. I love skipping too 🙂 (though it has occasionally given rise to the problem of getting something home, not really having a use for it in the end, and not finding another home for it either :-\ )
One of my best finds was a beautiful silk scarf in the street as well, so snap!
Oh, and I found a pair of boots in decent nick for £1 at the tail end of a jumble sale once, and got them for Spawn#1 – and we looked up the brand name on line and they were something ridiculously expensive. Those are my favourite kinds of things to buy :-s
Ellesar and Opposablethumbs: I had a boyfriend who, oh, some 30 years ago, was an affectionado of what is called in the US: Dumpster-Diving. He found 6 or 7 pairs of very nice high-heeled shoes, in my size, with very little wear. Perfect for the surreptituous nightclubbing I used to indulge in, in those days.
I found a 14 karat gold ring in the ocean, at low tide, when I was a little kid.
Maybe best of all, my parents once owned a rental car franchise. They found a set of silver- plated cutlery in the trunk of a returned vehicle. They tried to find the owners, to no avail. ASFAIK, my mother still has it.
Dormousing_it – My dad worked for a US car rental company for 30 years. We never lacked for towels, umbrellas, or cameras in our house!
Some of the other stuff he brought home included a nice set of golf clubs (how do you not check the car rental agency when you lose those??) fishing poles and gear (fishing off the Santa Monica pier?) and a complete set of matching napkins, napkin rings, and tablecloth from a very high-end store unopened and with price tags still attached (thwarted romantic picnic?) Oh, and quite a lot of silverware but no matching sets.
He worked in a location next to Hughes Aircraft for a fair few years when I was little and while cleaning out his house last year, I found not one, but two tie-tacks of the Hughes Syncom (picture http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/jezebel.html) satellite from 1963. I might make earrings out of them!
@Hambeast: Wow…I hear you! My mom & dad owned an Econocar franchise in New Jersey, near the ocean, from the early to mid 70s. Most of the people they rented to, probably weren’t flush with cash.
They had people steal cars from them…just run off with them, to be found much later, in Texas, or Oklahoma.
My mother occasionally uses that silverware. Of course, it DOES need to be polished.
The energy crises of the 70s pretty much killed what was, at best, a seasonal business. However, it supported a family of 4 for years.
News of the day: I’m agonizing over a major life decision.
I’m bored with my work. I know exactly what I need to do to get a new contract, but I just can’t get up and do it. Partly because sales and marketing isn’t my thing. But mostly because even if I win that new contract, it won’t be that much fun.
That’s been seeping into the rest of life. I flaked seriously hard on friends this weekend, organizing something, getting people excited, having them cancel plans to join my ski trip, then… not going. (Also my place is a mess, but that only hurts me.)
So I’m seriously this >< close to telling my partner I'm out.
Next step: likely head up to Iqaluit, see what I might do there. Or a couple other options. But I miss my sweetheart, too!
@ embarrassing stories
I have a lot of stories about things getting stuck or ripped. My best one can’t really be shared on the internet, but ended up with student teenage Headologist drunk as a skunk stumbling home across the city in the freezing Aberdeen winter with my beautiful cords hanging off me in shreds. This is not an exaggeration, sadly; I was covered in sand, legs bleeding everywhere covered in scrapes, and my trousers being held across my bum in an attempt not to get arrested for public indecency.
I also had a rather awful second menstrual period; it was entirely unexpected (it was a few months after my first) and I was maybe 12 on holiday with my family wearing my favourite powder blue cotton cargo trousers. We went out to a lovely restaurant and when I sat down to go to the loo realised the reason everyone had been staring at me as I walked to the toilets was I had dark red blood soaked through the entire back of my trousers down to the calves. I then had to walk back across a crowded restaurant in them. I was so embarrassed I hid, crying and scrubbing my (unsaveable) trousers, for over an hour in the shower.
@ found things
I also have a lot of these (including my beloved bedside table a friend carried in off the side of the road) but the best is my laptop bag, a beautiful leather briefcase style bag found for £8 in my favourite charity shop. It looked brand new and expensive so my mother googled it when we got home; it’s worth nearly £300. I’m also very fond of my gold Dr Martens – the same price from the same charity shop. And when I had people living with us unable to pay rent (again, student digs) they paid their way with skipped food every night. For about 3 months we had more fancy desserts than even a 4+ person flat could eat.
@ vegetarian food
I’m a cheap vegetarian. I like bbc good food recipes, and often adapt meaty ones by using meat substitutes. However my best warming, cheap meal is French onion soup; not quick, but simple. I make it in batches to last a week but pick your pot and adjust accordingly:
Cut onions thinly, enough to have a layer a couple of cm or more (depending on how many oniony bits you like) thick in the base of your pot. I tend to use about a kilo to a kilo and a half of onions for my biggest pot (maybe 8litres capacity?) Add garlic (as much as you want, really, none up to a whole bulb.)
Cook gently with butter(/vegan spread?) and oil. When onions begin to turn transparent, add a little brown sugar, enough to have a sprinkling over the tops of the onion layer. Cook (stirring) until brown and sticky.
Add optional dash of brandy (or any other liquor to hand – I normally end up with whisky.)
Add white wine (cheapest you can get.) I use a whole bottle – you want it to cover the onions, say a few inches up the side of the pan.
Add stock (any, of course veggie if you want it vegetarian/vegan.) Fill the pan with it. Add herbs, and salt and pepper if desired. Turn up the heat to a boil then reduce and simmer (with a lid on the pan.) Simmer for a long as possible – I’ll often sit with it or watch TV in the other room/do chores, for up to a couple of hours. Honestly once it’s simmering it probably is fine within 20 minutes, but it’s soup, so longer is better.
Serve with crusty bread and grated cheese, melted onto the bread or sprinkled directly into a bowl of soup. You can put it in the fridge once it’s cool and use it forever, I’ve had it a week after making and it’s still good. You can also freeze it, although it looks a bit unappetising until defrosted! It’s the perfect, warming, filling winter comfort food, and the only thing it really requires is onions and stock, the rest is pretty much optional.
@Hambeast, I don’t think that’s the right link for the tie-tack picture, unless it looks like an old Egyptian/Canaanite seal.
In important non-Trump news, Peter Capaldi is retiring from Doctor Who. Who should be the next Doctor?
I kind of don’t know why I care any more, since I haven’t watched TV for years, but there’s the perennial question of whether this time it’ll be someone other than a white guy.
@ moggie
Noel Clarke.
Mickey? I don’t see how. Might as well suggest Noel Gallagher. Hey, now that I think of that…