Waiting times are atrocious here in the U.S. The earliest in-person appointment that I can get with my GP is about 6 months out. Non-urgent surgeries are sometimes take close to a year. A friend recently had to keep a bladder drain in after surgery for an extra week because there were no doctors who could do the 5-minute removal available.

Anybody who says that long wait times are unique to public health systems is lying.

Curious how Israel is a Jewish state and criticism of it is antisemitic, or it’s a multi-ethnic state with Arab citizens too, depending on what the criticism happens to be.

Osama bin Laden also didn’t kill anybody personally on 9/11, and the attack killed only 2,977 victims, which is almost certainly a lower body count than UnitedHealthcare under Brian Thompson’s leadership. Yet the US military personnel who violated Pakistan’s sovereignty and murdered him are heroes?

What odd moral standards!

This ought to have been apparent 20 years ago. Anybody else remember Judith Miller and her little pas de deux with Dick Cheney, where his office would “leak” phony intelligence about Iraq’s WMD program to her, she’d publish it in her New York Times column, and then the Bushies could cite it as evidence? Pepperidge Farm also remembers the non-apology apology the editor published (buried well off the front page) that conspicuously missed anything about not letting the paper be used as a mouthpiece for the state in the future.

The only reason that it ever had a progressive reputation is because the GOP/Tea Party kept shrieking about “liberal media” to move the Overton Window to the far right.

Years ago, I went caving out in the sticks with an outdoors group. To change into my caving outfit, I went behind the end of a cornrow, next to a pasture fence. A group of three cows up the hill noticed, and moseyed down the hill to watch. It was pretty clear from their body language that they were bored and curious. (And also, voyeurs.)

The lead cow mooed at me in a way that kind of sounded like a question. What the heck, I figured, and mooed back. I don’t know what I said, but it was scandalous. The cows’ faces looked like they were positively shocked, and they promptly turned around and marched back over the hill. It was like a real-life “My mother was a saint!” sitcom joke, but with cows instead of a foreign language.

Yeah, I had no doubt that there was intelligence there.

The song is “No Mercy in June” by a band called Hot D.A.M. I’m pretty sure that I got the song by piecing together a multi-part, MIME-encoded Usenet posting. Somehow, I have a whole album by the band in my collection that I found somewhere on the seven seas years ago. I don’t recall when or where now. The best information that I could find back when was that Hot D.A.M. was one of those local bands that stayed local, perhaps one of the many that bubble up out of the musical quantum foam, and disappear just as quickly.

Samesies. I remember back in college powering through a writing assignment with a 2L bottle of Coke and a 1lb. bag of M&Ms. Totally not healthy, but I learned later that it has to do with the relationship between insulin and neurotransmitters, like dopamine.

I think I need to read up on that link more.

A lot of people call the draw bar/ball the “trailer hitch,” so I took the comment to mean that the truck in question didn’t have a hitch/receiver mounted.

“Freezing temperatures” mean “freezing temperatures,” though, and numbers are pretty irrelevant. American schoolkids learn that it’s around 32°F and 0°C, and we easily remember it, but the weather forecasters still say “frost warning,” or “freezing rain,” rather than “it’s going to be 32°F tomorrow,” because there are so many confounding variables. Even the temperature of the phase transition is kind of squishy, since pure water freezes at 0°C at STP (except when it gets super-cooled). And if we’re talking about the fundamental importance of water, then I might argue that 4°C is the important temperature, because it’s temperature at which water reaches its maximum density.

Anyway, not to say that Fahrenheit is great, or anything, just that Celsius is similarly arbitrary, and we lack a compelling reason to switch. (Even though virtually every thermometer I’ve ever seen in the U.S. has both scales on it.)

*French influence. Most of the prominent differences between American and British English (such as -er/-re and -or/-our) occurred because the British preserved (or changed spellings to add) French influence.

No. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of the working class that everybody agrees upon, but there are some common ones. She’s certainly not part of the Marxist proletariat, since I’m certain that she and her management team are smart enough to have invested her money so that she never need work again, if she so desired. Also, she employs a small army of people to put on tours. Similarly, she has far too much money to be part of the working class as loosely defined by people who must sell their labor to survive. From what I understand, she came from an upper-middle class family, so she’s not even working class by culture.

I can sort of see an argument that she puts on a very physically-demanding show, exchanging her labor for money, but performers traditionally haven’t been considered working class.

I suggest reading the book Running on Empty by Dr. Jonice Webb. Maybe it will explain some things. (Or maybe it won’t. I’m no expert.)

ETA: The drama-queen mother and the “something is missing and I don’t know what” feeling make me think it will.)

Just by random chance, I saw a Toynbee tile in the street in St. Louis. I’d heard about the mystery on the Internet, and was quite excited to see one in person.

Oh, I also saw Thong Cape Scooter Man several times.

Reminds me of this webcomic about the Oenophile’s Quandry.

Very few food products have an expiration date printed on them. A lot of them have a “Sell by” date, which is not an expiration date. We have a local milk producer that prints a “Sell by” date on their bottles. The rule of thumb is that if it’s stored in proper refrigeration, unopened, it’ll keep for 2 more weeks. (Plus another week to use it up.) But it’s impossible to explain that people. The disgust reflex is strong, and you can almost watch it on their faces as it overrides people’s rational faculties. (Honestly, that experience helps me understand the recent election results.) As a result, the store that I worked in would as a rule of thumb take the milk off the shelf 3 days before the “Sell by” date, even though it’d be good for another 3 weeks. Milk that didn’t sell, we had to pour down the drain.

One time when I was working there, I had to deal with an irate customer who returned some fancy cheese hors d’oeuvres that she’d received as part of her pick-up order because the package had a “Sell by” date on it that was a couple days past. I refunded the cost of the item, and when I took it back to the cheese department, our cheese monger explained that the date was really only useful for the store to keep its stock rotated. The product didn’t spoil after that date; in fact, it got better for several months as the cheese aged. But, we agreed, it’s impossible to explain that to people.

So, to the question, also while working there, I made a delivery to an elderly woman whose son ordered groceries for her. She had a number of items that she didn’t use before the “Use by” date, and asked if I’d take them. One of them was a container of plain yogurt. I don’t use a lot of yogurt, mainly as a condiment for Indian dishes, so I didn’t even open it until about a month after the “Use by” date, and finally finished it probably 3 months after. (Just don’t let it warm up, open only briefly, and always use a clean utensil to scoop it out.) It still tasted fresh and enjoyable.

I still have butter in the refrigerator with a “Use by” date in 2023, because I bought a lot of it when it was cheap (on sale and employee discount), and put it in the freezer. I have eaten canned food several years after the “Best by” date. The heuristic is easy: It it smells good, it’s edible. If it smells off, toss it. But I know that there are plenty of people out there with a hair-trigger disgust response, who are convinced that the moment the clock ticks over to the date printed on the package, the contents turn to poison. This heuristic probably grosses them out. Oh well, people aren’t rational.

I took the Empire Builder train, then walked into Glacier National Park. But, then, the only way to get up Going-to-the-Sun Road was by shuttle bus, and we got stuck in a mile-long traffic jam on the side of a mountain. So ridiculous.

First thing that came to mind is a song by a band that I can’t even find online. I have the song as an .mp2 file. How’s that for obscure?

Here’s one that is online: Technical Jelly (Live) - Honor Among Thieves