I’m one of the parents in this arrangement and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We raised three kids, a son and two daughters. None of us are rich by any means, but we’re all currently self-sufficient. The one’s that live here don’t do it out of need, but because they’d be crazy not to. We own a decent-sized ranch style house, plenty of room for two couples, on 2.6 acres with a largish pool, and it’s conveniently located to everything one wants to be convenient to. At this stage in our lives, if it were just my wife and I here we’d go crazy. This place has been the central family gathering spot for our local extended family for decades now. Pretty much every month at least one big gathering is happening here. Anywho… We’ve paid it off and deeded it to a trust, with the three kids being successor trustees. Once we’re gone, the property transfers automatically. They can live here forever, or they can sell it and split the proceeds three ways, but I seriously doubt they’ll ever do that. Our oldest lives nearby quite affordably with his girlfriend (both child-free by choice), and our middle daughter and her husband own their own place with our two grand-daughters just outside of town. Our youngest daughter and her husband (no kids yet) live here with us. This son-in-law races street-stocks on dirt and was able to build a big 30’ x 60’ shop in the back, so this place is like heaven to him. He’s 28 going on 12 and has a pretty good job, so he gets to buy whatever toys he wants, and with the investment of his shop into the property, he’s actually got some skin in the game. They are both hugely helpful, and it’s a great arrangement for all of us. We’re currently kicking around some ideas for my son and his girlfriend to move back onto the property, but into their own space…

“trusted bank”

lol

Yes. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t implying homosexuality, but talking about general partying and gallivanting around, promiscuity, etc. I don’t think “gay” came to mostly mean homosexual until later in the 20th century. I believe Everett is just telling him he doesn’t want to hear him bragging about his immoral lifestyle or gossiping about someone else’s. There were a lot of prudes back then. That’s my take, anyways…

Here you go… Library of Congress collection. I like the one’s where his wife teaches him…

We have friends who had an African Grey, and that bird had an insane range of sounds and phrases, etc that she would mimic. Not just repeating words and phrases but impersonating the voice of whomever would say it to her. Like the AOL “You’ve got mail” voice when she’d hear the modem sounds. If we were smoking weed, the bird was having a coughing fit and dinging a pipe on an ashtray. If we were laughing and talking, the bird was over there laughing it’s ass off too. From calling the dogs, to having one-sided phone conversations, to setting off a car alarm whenever anyone would leave, her repertoire was seemingly endless. And then there was the smoke alarm. She liked to pull that one out if she wanted attention, and it would split your eardrums…

I had a love-hate relationship with Sears for a long, long time. We’d always shop around for larger purchases, and quite often Sears would end up getting the sale, and then I’d have to put up with the salesperson bugging me about opening a Sears card and buying an extended warranty, and then being obstinate about taking NO for an answer. Of course, this was back when Craftsman Tools and Kenmore Appliances tended to be better than average. Hell, about 6 months ago we finally replaced a Kenmore refrigerator that we bought in '99. It’s currently cooling beer in my bro-in-laws garage. I’m still using Craftsman tools I bought 30+ years ago.

or in other words…

“fake it 'til you make it”

I want to be a flâneur when I grow up…

One day a couple of years ago, we had some meatloaf and some baked mac&cheese leftovers that my wife had made. The next day I got a loaf of homemade sourdough from the farmers market that pops up every Saturday. I sliced off about a half-inch thick slice of the meatloaf and the baked mac&cheese with that fresh sourdough and grilled a sandwich that I really hope to be able to replicate at least once more before I die…

Fuck homeowners insurance. I live in Florida. I’ve had State Farm for several years now, and it always felt like I was paying them extortion payments. Last year, we got a letter from them informing us that they had sent an inspector by our property, and listed off several things that we needed to do, and show them proof that we did them, within the next year or they were dropping our coverage. Some of these things were understandable, but others just seemed ridiculous. Like re-roofing or tearing down my shop in the back, when there is absolutely nothing wrong with it (I just built it seven years ago). It’s already pretty well-known that SF is no longer writing new policies in Florida, so I could see the writing on the wall. Even if we complied and got all that done, their premiums were going to go way up, and switching to another company would certainly cost us even more. The wife and I discussed it and said fuck it and fuck them and took the money out of my 401k and paid the place off. State Farm will not renew us here in about a month and a half when it expires, and we’ll carry on without. This house has been through every hurricane that’s hit the NW corner of Florida since 1958 and has so-far only lost some shingles. We’re on high enough ground that flooding isn’t a worry either, so fuck it… off we go, fingers crossed! I feel really fortunate that we were able to do that, because this place is so much more than just a house, and I’ll be DAMNED if we’re losing it because some bureaucratic requirement that I can no longer afford allows it to be repossessed.

I drove a taxi and dispatched for a couple of years back in the mid '80s. For ease of use, Street Guides were a drivers best friend, because they just gave you concise directions from the closest main road. For instance, if I wanted Elm street, I would find it quickly alphabetically, and it would tell me something like “Runs south from Main St, two blocks east of First Ave.” The driver would mainly just need a decent understanding of the main roads and how the numbering system for addresses worked, and they could just flip through it pretty quick without having to spread out a big map. The whole city fit into a neat little paperback book.

back in the early-mid '80s I worked as a tire changer for a chain of tire retailers. We had a mechanic who did all the front-end alignments and brake jobs etc, and he had an apprentice/helper who worked with him. When cars with drum brakes came in, they liked to each take a side and race to see who could get them done faster. I remember timing them once, and they both could remove and replace the shoes and the spring kits in less than 45 seconds.

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

I had a good friend who worked LP for wal-mart back in the '90’s. He loved that shit. He’d burn CD copies of the surveillance videos of his latest escapades fighting with and tackling shoplifters and bring them home for us to see. He was a master of “redirecting” someone running away from him into whatever nearby solid object he had available. I know those big red bollards that keep cars from driving thru the front doors claimed more than a couple of victims at his, um… urging. Entertaining stuff for sure.

I had to take zinc supplements before oral surgery back in my late teens and they made it look like I was pissing Mountain Dew…

My favorite channel would have to be Destination Adventure with Dustin Porter. Why this guy doesn’t have 10,000,000 subscribers is beyond me. Not only does he go to some amazing places, but he’s a really gifted videographer. Everything about them is top-notch, and he does it all by himself. The amount of B-roll stuff he gets must be a tremendous amount of work. He picks great music too…

I used to know a guy named Ed back in the early-mid '80’s who was a professional college student. We were both attending the local junior college. I was about 19 or 20, he was about 30. He was tall, had long straight dark hair and a full, fairly long beard with a fairly prominent hawk nose. One day, his parents finally got tired of him avoiding adulthood and declared they were no longer going to support him and he had to get a job. He showed up to classes with a short hair cut and no beard. We all had to do a double-take. He seriously had no chin, and combined with that big hawk nose, his profile had become so comically different from what it had been that everyone who knew him was noticeably shocked by the transformation. He went from having a long profile with a prominent nose to a little round head with a huge beak sticking out. He went from a moderately imposing figure to a sadly goofy looking character just like that. I watched a couple of different people just kind of blurt out stuff like “eww grow it back!” etc. It was crazy to see how everyone’s perception of him changed overnight…

yeeesh… reminds me of back when I made interactive content in Flash and I’d forget to embed a font in a dynamic textfield.