Author Topic: Park Your Amusements Here  (Read 98617 times)

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #285 on: July 02, 2010, 11:19:41 pm »
I just learned that the verb "escalate" is a derivative of the noun "escalator," and not the other way around as I had always thought. It's such a practical, simple word that I would never have guessed it's less than one hundred years old.

Also: Apparently the person who coined the word "escalator" meant for the emphasis to be on the second syllable, like "Excalibur." Ah, humanity is a fickle adopter, Mr. Seeberger.

Sajainta

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #286 on: July 05, 2010, 11:14:07 pm »
I made a picture shipping two characters from Saving Private Ryan (it's an inside joke between myself and my two siblings), posted it on my wall on Facebook, and D's mother commented on it.  I can't stop laughing.  :lol:

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #287 on: July 06, 2010, 12:29:45 am »
The Statue of Liberty is kaput!

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #288 on: July 10, 2010, 04:18:36 am »
There's been a heat wave in Seattle (though nothing like the one in the East), and as a result the bugs are out in force. You would not believe how many winged bugs there are on the outsides of my windows tonight. Easily three-and-a-half million. The good news is that my screens are holding and fewer than one percent of them are getting inside. The bad news is that one percent of three-and-a-half million is still too damn many. I get itchy when I see lots of bugs around.

In other news, the top optical illusion on this page (the one with the circle of pink dots around a black plus sign) is my favorite optical illusion of the month.

http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/illusion/illusions.htm

Acacia Sgt

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #289 on: July 11, 2010, 06:11:11 pm »
Spain making its way to the cup... in almost all 1-0's victories.

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #290 on: July 18, 2010, 01:07:34 am »
On behalf of MsBlack, who can't log into the Compendium right now to post:

Quote from: MsBlack
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Magnetic-Poetry-Kit-Erotic-Design/dp/B001GAD9PG/

The part that's funny is that it's unsuitable for young kids due to small parts. I love living in the UK!

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #291 on: July 21, 2010, 07:30:20 am »
Whether they're making death threats or epithets, right-wingers sure do tend to get themselves in a lot of trouble when they're "just joking."

Truthordeal

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #292 on: July 22, 2010, 09:50:26 pm »

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #293 on: July 22, 2010, 10:48:54 pm »

Sajainta

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #294 on: July 22, 2010, 11:25:20 pm »
Are they still enormously significant if they create really shitty art and songs?  XP

FaustWolf

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #295 on: July 23, 2010, 12:11:47 am »
You know what they say: one person's trash is another person's treasure.

On that note, my amusement of the moment is that my family has people rummaging through our garbage for free stuff. This is in a middle class suburban neighborhood. Eh, as long as they don't cross the boundary of our yard, we don't have to get our shotguns out. Hello, economy!

deviant_ambition

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #296 on: July 23, 2010, 02:48:57 pm »
I found my hacky sack. 8)

Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #297 on: August 08, 2010, 06:09:06 am »
What a couple of weeks this has been! I got evicted, moved my stuff into storage, and am now staring into a wide-open future with surprising optimism, even for me. The most interesting lesson I am inclined to take from all this is that I don't necessarily need a conventional place to live any more than I need a conventional job--at least for now. Given the stuff on my plate nowadays--an upcoming backpacking trip, an upcoming writing sabbatical, an urgent sickness in the family, and the opportunity that goes with having very few possessions in my active possession (the rest being in storage)--I expect to be "homeless" for the remainder of the year, even as I doubt I'll spend so much as a single night in the gutters. I've never been very conventional, and I'm embarking on a very unconventional lifestyle effective three days ago. I'll be touring the country, living minimally, and hopefully gaining weight in all 48 contiguous United States.

All in all, "amusing" is a good word for it.

Lennis

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Lord J Esq

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Re: Park Your Amusements Here
« Reply #299 on: August 12, 2010, 07:11:32 am »
I bought a car once--the first and only car I have yet owned. It was a 1976 Plymouth Volare that I bought for about $800 from Bar Mitzvah money in the summer before my senior year of high school. It was a spectacularly humongous car and we had many adventures together in the California desert before I left for college at the University of Washington in 2000. Oh, it was a grand old thing. It had an air conditioner, but the newly-charged freon canisters leaked out completely within a month of my buying it, so: no air conditioning. The radio worked, but the speakers were so poor that you could only hear the radio when the car wasn't moving. The windshield was so pitted that it turned into a sheet of light when facing the sun. Combine that with foggy glass on cold winter mornings, and it was a veritable death trap--being driven by a green male teenage driver. I'm amazed I didn't kill scores of people with it. The shocks were no good and it rode low, so it would often bottom out on speedbumps and other abrupt changes in the road level. The headlights were not secure and always vibrated out of alignment; the regular headlights were unusable for that reason, forcing me to drive only with the brights. The car itself was a rust-colored red-orange perfectly suited to my desert environment. It was wide, hogging the whole lane. The steering wheel was fickle; turning it a little and it would do nothing; turn it a touch more and it would veer sharply in that direction. It was hard, so touching it in the hot weather was inadvisable. The brakes would lock alarmingly easy. The windshield wipers simply did not work; the one time I got caught driving in the rain I was lucky enough to have a friend in the passenger seat who stood up, stuck his arm out the window, and operated the wipers manually. The clock on the dashboard kept decent time--when it kept any time at all; sometimes it wouldn't run for weeks. The speedometer was ill-calibrated and became increasingly inaccurate at increasing speeds. I learned this by chance when I realized that my driving at what appeared to be the speed limit resulted in me passing all other traffic and smelling the tires overheating. The radiator leaked. I didn't know about the leak at first because the Volare was both air- and water-cooled and, because of the air-cooling, the car was fine at speed. But at stops the temperature gauge would proceed precariously into the "H" range. A friend of mine looked into the radiator one day at lunch and told me "There's supposed to be water in there. This looks like the Sahara Desert." A tire went blew out on me once, and I cut myself up on my first tire change. But the engine worked, and the transmission worked, and the brakes worked. The car took me to many places. It gave me a place to be myself, by myself. I was sad to leave it behind when I went to college. I left it with my dad, who sold it a few years later.