That takes me back to a club I was in during the '80s. The instructor had a space heater that looked a lot like this. Basically a horizontal tube with an open flame that she used to heat her garage. She did an safety demonstration by dropping a paper towel into the flame, so we 6-year-olds would know what happens when you go near the heater. You burn, children. You burn. Effective.
ArtieShaw
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Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: March 16th, 2024
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8·4 days agoRight? I think that gave him a reverse Uno card of some kind. Hmmm. That did seem to smooth over some things.
True - and I think that drove a lot of his early popularity. His entire head is unfortunate and his name seems like a cruel joke. He embraced nerd things that are relative to my interests. Basic empathy and compassion kick in when you see something like that. From a first impression, he just seemed to have been dealt poor hand in life.
Then he started talking. Damn.
I honestly can’t let this older one go. But no one seems to be talking about it lately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1862257_1862325_1862324,00.html
Ah. COVID.
When the vaccine came out it was allocated in stages. Healthcare providers and the elderly were prioritized. As they should be. When it was finally available to the general public, the state released a website that helped you find the nearest pharmacy with doses. And it was guaranteed to be free.
I found one local pharmacy in a nearby village and we got our dose. They didn’t ask for a copay, but did write down our insurance info. Two weeks later, we got a bill from United Health because we unknowingly used an out of network pharmacy for our ‘free’ shots.
Minor thing, but it’s just an example of our garbage. I’ve never had a good experience with healthcare in the US. OK - scratch that. The time I needed stitches for a bad cut, the receptionist who was billing me whispered that “If you’re any kind of ‘medical professional,’ you can remove them yourself and avoid another visit.” Shit - I own stuff for sewing. That was good, although slightly painful advice.
Canada was wild, though. I visited a walk-in clinic for an abscess on my leg. No bill. I also visited the ER with chest pain. In both cases I felt like a criminal for leaving without giving them my credit card info.
Right. In that episode, Pakleds were snaring the Samaritans. Basically grifting their way through the universe by taking advantage of good Samaritans. OP is still not quite nailing it.
That’s so charming! It’s my absolute favorite thing today.
Where I grew up there was an urban legend about radioactive deer. It was pre-internet, the deer were legitimately weird, and they lived in the woods adjacent to one of the US’s earliest nuclear research facilities. Everyone had seen them. The facility was active and well guarded. It seemed… plausible. Very plausible.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/4077627323 https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/july-2016/argonne-national-laboratory/
Yeah - I remember reading about how these signs were laughably easy to “hack” a few years ago.
I thought about it for minute when the city installed one down the street. Then I imagined the weird shame I’d feel when my neighbors inevitably caught me, so never tried it out. Actually, in retrospect, they’d probably have helped.
103·7 days ago“2 Nazis in a car” is exactly my horrified emotion in the moment.
And it’s true that I didn’t word that correctly, but it happened 20 years ago so the words are not an exact quote. However, they do convey the gist of the conversation. And I really really wanted to make it clear that I’m not the original Nazi in the car.
I was getting a ride home from work with a colleague, which was nice of her because I usually took the bus. We had been friendly for some time, and I never understood why other people at work were creeped out by her. Sure, she could be cold and a bit intimidating in a stereotypical “immigrant from former eastern bloc country” sort of way.
I would compare her to a pretty, young, athletic and blonde Frau Verbissene. And she was not afraid to be comedically cutting. For example, one day I was mindlessly trying (and failing) to unscrew something and she walked up behind me and dryly said, “I am not native to North America, but in Europe we turn it to the left to loosen bolts.” It’s a little bit mean, but also funny.
But to the main point, it was that car ride when I found out she was a Nazi. OK - Maybe not an actual Nazi, but a big fan. She explained that in her country, <I’m paraphrasing this next bit, so her words> they had asked the Jews to leave, had tried to incentivize the Jews to leave, but the Jews would not leave. When the Germans came to her country, they fixed that problem.
“Oh. Shit. I’m carpooling with a Nazi.”
Out of idle curiosity about your username, I’d like to ask.
Dune, cryptography, or both?
That would be ideal. I’ve also seen a few with weirdly discrete foot pedals. I like that idea, although the ones I’ve encountered haven’t exactly nailed the design.
I unintentionally pissed off a bully during a floor hockey match in high school PE class. Long story, but I did something to make her angry - still no idea what it was - and in that moment she was screaming at me to apologize. I just recall her screaming “SORRY!!! SORRY!!!” at me during a game.
I didn’t realize I had done anything wrong. I was definitely not trying to be competitive or aggressive at a PE game, so WTF? But apparently, “It’s OK. Apology accepted” was not the answer she wanted. She lost her shit and I gained an enemy for the rest of senior year.
Fortunately - and this is the good outcome - she was the most incompetent bully I’ve ever encountered. Sure, she was mad AF and willing to hold a grudge in the way that only 17 year-old girls can do. But I had emerged from a hot crucible of actual fucking competent bullies years before this.
I was captain of the fucking Math Team, bitch. You think calling me “Nerd” is going to hit? Hell no. I own that.
Years earlier, I fought two of my former besties on a snow covered hill in the local park and my only regret was that I was wearing mittens that mitigated the damage to their faces. I’d do that again if I had to.
Point being - she couldn’t do me any harm. Laughing at her made her madder. That was the best part.
tl/dr: I accepted an apology from someone who wanted me to apologize to her, and I gained the most incompetent bully ever. It added some needed comedic relief to me and my friends during a stressful final year of high school.
- Throwaway comment that mentions a potato chip tin that’s not directly relevant to the comic
- Top image results link to etsy and I’m not bothering to check the rules about that
- It’s not hard to find
- Never expected anyone to lose their shit about it
Excellent work, though
Ah - my depression era grandparents never threw things away. One reason: they could re-use the object if it were durable enough. And they did.
By the '80s (maybe earlier?) they were complaining about the culture of trash. Their survival instincts were telling them to save and re-use. Their shiny new culture was telling them to throw that shit away.
I won’t link it, but an image can be found easily. Right now I’m looking at a New Era Potato Chip canister that lives in my office. (It’s weird - seriously, google it. “Feast Without Fear.”) It’s still good for storing things.
Sure. Late '80s. It was pitch back, triangular, small, slow, and quiet. My mother was driving and we were on our way to an astronomy meeting. Which is to humble-brag that we had both spent a fair amount of time staring at the night sky and could identify most aircraft/stars/planets/meteors etc. It moved in a truly bizarre fashion.
I think I noticed it first because it was a super slow set of lights. Our car was going about 45 mph and we seemed to be outpacing it easily on a parallel path. I could see trees on the edge of a farmer’s field and it was lower than the tops of the trees. That was the point of reference. It was absolutely out of the ordinary. Although we were outpacing it, my mom made a wrong turn at the next intersection. It was actually fortuitous because this put is directly in the flight path and I was super curious to ID it.
When my mom saw it I just remember her saying over and over - “ArtieShaw? ArtieShaw, what is that? What is that???”
When I realized that she was equally weirded out, one of us clicked off the car radio and one of us lowered the windows. That’s when we realized that it wasn’t just quiet, but completely silent and flying maybe 25 feet above the ground. There were lights on it, but they didn’t illuminate the aircraft at all.
After passing under it, she needed to re-route the car. And the next bit is probably the part the freaked me out the most. It followed us.
I was able to keep eyes on it for the entire time because I wasn’t driving. In fact, I was partially out the window of the passenger seat. When we got back to the main road, she pulled over in the dirt lot of a farmer’s market stand on the corner.
It flew over us again and we agreed that we couldn’t see more detail beyond “small, unbelievably black triangle.” She got her shit together well enough to drive, and we went on to the astronomy meet.
The amateur astronomer friends were very skeptical about what we saw. And we were clearly rattled, so they were kind about trying to provide rational explanations. I remember drawing a diagram of the shape in the dirt with my generic Keds sneakers. But as the night wore on, many of them shared similar stories. The one I remember best is from a person who was camping in the inter-mountain desert who saw the exact same object, but that it was so large that it blotted out a good portion of the sky. They also claimed to have chased it for about an hour.
I heard a version of this sentiment in 2016. I was sitting near a well-dressed elderly couple at the regional airport. The woman was on her phone, explaining her support for Trump. I’ll paraphrase.
“He knows so many rich people! He’ll appoint them to the government, and they won’t steal from it because they’ve already got so much money they won’t want to.”
I disagree with that statement for so many reasons, but that’s what she expressed. This opinion was boggling enough at the time that it stuck with me almost ten years later.
And Des Plaines, La Salle Street… I always keep telling my husband, “no, that’s not what it’s called” and he keeps getting rationally mad.
If we’re feeling the Indiana, there’s always Terre Haute.
Same. That’s why there’s a pass.
When I was a kid, a neighbor was shot in his garage. There were definitely two stories that went around the neighborhood. One said suicide and the other said “cleaning his gun.” One of those was repeated when kids were around. The other when they thought no one was listening.
Years back, I read was a very odd story about the Korean belief that falling asleep in a closed room with a running fan would result in death. This also seems to be a cover story for suicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death