“I’ve had this pamphlet made up. It was expensive, but I’m really tired of discussing this with you.”

Also useful if your (woodworking) router needs to run slower.

Yeah, I don’t want to cast aspersions too much. I could see what Gene’s getting at, and it is absolutely literary in a way that not enough sci-fi is, but the mix didn’t work for me, and I just didn’t want to spend time with that crew or see where Severian was going to end up. Or rather, given the narrative’s structure, how he was going to end up where he ends up.

Read the first volume, so, the first two books I think? Did not particularly love it. Misogynistic post-apocalyptic Holden Caulfield just never grabbed hold, and the prose, to borrow a phrase, insists upon itself.

My father was a deeply flawed parent to minor children, and a disastrously bad one to adult children. My adult life was punctuated with discoveries and realizations and interactions that revealed him to be a fuckin’ mess. He was better and kinder than his own parents, but that’s damning with faint praise.

Yeah, but it usually pretty obvious which is which.

AMERICAN STYLE!

I don’t really mind a Red Baron or Tony’s. I think frozen pizza fails most dramatically when it forgets what it is. A home oven can manage a cracker-style crust kind of okay, and within the category of frozen pizza it can be better or worse. It’s the rising crust and “gourmet flatbread” and the overly-topped nonsense where frozen pizza just becomes a sad mush of unfulfilled ambition.

Yup. This right here.

I was moving very slowly at full depth, so I wouldn’t have to try to get to the exact same endpoint multiple times at different depths.

This is the textbook source of burning on routed pieces, especially with a bit that’s anything less than pristine. As mentioned, stop blacks are the best solution. Barring that, plunging at the beginning and end, maybe twice, will give you cushion to stop without needing millimeter-accuracy, but hell, the best way to get those plunges in just the right spot is stop blocks. :-) As an added bonus, you’ll get less tearout doing multiple shallow passes. You sanded that down very nicely indeed, and the big open grain of red oak is actually quite good for masking that, but other materials might be less forgiving.

Every once in a while there is an old painting or photo where the style of the artist and subject combine to present a visual that I find eerily modern. Something about this guy just screams “project manager who’s been working from home for three years.”

Then there’s the dude with the beard…

And that lamp is definitely a bong.

I mean, as long as Bob is into it…

That’s so Texas of them.

I bet we can find out whose spreading this fake news if we Sweden the pot.

• One of the major sources of tension in university towns from the very beginning was “town-gown” relations. The students were young, often unsupervised for the first times in their lives, sometimes completely foreign to the region, and afforded certain clerical protections from the secular authorities. Conflicts often started at local taverns.
• Margery Kempe was basically Medieval English Peggy Hill, a good natured try-hard who simply badgered people into doing what she wanted, including negotiating a celibate marriage (interrupted by only one pregnancy), making her priest re-write her autobiography for her because she was illiterate and the previous scribe she retained died and no one could read his handwriting, and pestering the local anchoress until she got something not unlike her approval, and getting arrested for preaching, impersonating a nun, and being a Lollard.
• Speaking of anchoresses, they (and the male anchorites) took a “vow of stability of place,” which generally involved being literally bricked up in a cell tacked onto a church, with openings big enough to get light, air, food, and conversation, but by no means big enough to leave. They were almost treated as being already dead. In return, they got veneration in their lifetimes and the church hierarchy kinda laying off about how weird they could get.

Not really? Kind of, but only a little? I’m not a trained academic, but rather a huge history buff and general know-it-all who has some formal training and experience in research techniques (mostly legal stuff and public records, but it comes in handy and can be surprisingly applicable). I also try to have respect for the work of actual academics who’ve dedicated their working lives to this stuff and not just stop looking when I find a Dan Carlin podcast.

Oooh, so not being a medievalist, this one took me a while. One of the most popular books of the late Middle Ages in Europe was the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, a book of “popular theology” that basically analogized old testament events to new, to show that the former predicted the latter and Christianity was obviously true.

One of the Old Testament pages was about Amel-Marduk, a son of Nebuchadnezzar II, who usurped his brother (and was in turn usurped), but was said to have exhumed his father’s corpse and dismembered it, leaving it to the birds. I have run out of steam trying to find the specific manuscript the meme image comes from (somebody else probably could find it), but the iconography is unmistakable.

I think part of it is that most peoiple aren’t watching, but the threshold for being a viable network show is so much lower than it used to be. At its peak around season 12, it was averaging 14 million viewers. Season 35 was coming in around 2 million, and it’s been going down every year for a while. I guess the trend is predictable though, and the advertising and streaming revenue still works out for their cost structure.

Same. But damn, she just wants to play with Legos and Project Sekai.

Here’s the two real guys in 1977. https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/10/10/john-madden-al-davis-was-a-friend-till-the-end/