glomph

Cruel, yes, but not unusual.

We could have had psychic vice president?

What's worse, most people don't even detect it AFTER it kills them, but libbonobo might have knowledge of some special cases of people noticing it after they are dead. Actually, my mom was a psychic researcher in the 70's she might know some people too. :king: Snow Dog And if they do detect it (or figure it out) after it kills them, they have difficulty reporting it.

If you encounter an obnoxious Lutheran, just say "Missouri Synod, aren't you?" Probably you'll be right, but if not, then you will have offended him mightily, which is even more fun.

Starting out, you don't try to see how much you can lift. It's better to get form right using manageable weights, then start adding.

Oh, and about colds, I find that if can get some rest and take care of myself at the very first sign of a cold, the symptoms don't seem to get as bad later. That also takes me out of contact with other people while I'm most contagious (not counting the time just before I know I'm coming down with the cold). And then I can usually ignore the cold after that. (That is except for when I get a cold in December, and then I think I'm over it. So I decide that I'm well enough to get out in 20-degree weather and go caroling. Then I discover I was wrong.)

I pretty much agree with your whole post, except that I found Quinn even harder to get used to, and I'm pretty much annoyed by everyone in DD. TLW is still my favorite, but after a few chapters of TOU, I became just as obsessed with that story and was just about as emotional at the ending of chapter 24 as I was at the end of TLW. I'll keep reading every chapter of DD as it appears, and probably click on the refresh button on the index page just as much as I have lately with TOU. If Dom manages to get me to care about those characters to any degree, then it will be amazing. But then, he's an amazing writer.

One thing to say for the band is that you won't have to worry about anyone stealing the name.

You played a competitive soccer game, and later you ran cross country. You're probably still dehydrated, even if you've drunk a lot of fluid. That will make you feel tired, on top of everything else you did.

A few are. Most I've seen seem to go out of their way not to imply any gender of the recipient. The makers most likely realize that they sell more cards that way. And the stores don't have to have a gay section for greeting cards and get picketed, or else not sell the cards.

The erect statues sound most appropriate.

Maybe you're using the fundamentalist's definition of theory, rather than the scientific one, as in "Evolution is just a theory," like that means it is a wild-and-crazy hypothesis.

I really enjoyed Feynman's autobiographical Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.

When these stories end, it can feel like you've suddenly lost touch with good friends whom you were used to being with all the time. You can be glad that they are living happily ever after or whatever, but you still miss them. I certainly felt that with TLW, and with TOU I feel sort of that way even during long pauses between chapters. At this point, I can't imagine feeling like that about the characters in DD. But who knows. It took me a few chapters of TOU before I started caring what happened to everybody. Quinn still annoys me, but now it's more like my good friends who annoy me. With Christmas, the "after" variety is more traditional. The "before" variety is more the commercial aspect, and gets earlier and earlier. Christmas decorations have been in stores since September, maybe August in some places. How tedious. The religious side of Christmas got lost in the shuffle long ago, and a lot of churches just go along with some variant of the commercial calendar and do mostly a "before" version. Even the secular side of the celebration used to follow the Christian calendar, as in "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It seems a bit weird to me to drag Halloween out over weeks in either direction. It's the "eve" of something, but then so is Mardi Gras. Pumpkins are nice, though, and make good and appropriate decorations through the harvest season. You can be an "after" person with Halloween and a "before" person with Thanksgiving at the same time.

Don't give the boy ideas.

A friend was valedictorian of his law school class. I didn't get to hear his speech, but his wife told me about it. She was so proud of him. She said he told lots of lawyer jokes. I wish I could have been there.

The guys who sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act had been married two or three times, so they have to fight hard to preserve the sanctity of all those marriages.

How to Carve a Pumpkin

All good choices. And don't forget Jeff on "Donna Reed." I read somewhere that Crawford later did a nude scene in a movie, if you want to search that one out, but I don't think he grew up to be that nice looking, so you might not want to bother.

And thank you. I just read TOU Chapter 23. It's your birthday, and you gave us a great present.

I thought of that, but he said the song was about 14 years old. Maybe he just didn't realize how old the song is (30+).

It rains in Canada? I didn't know that. I wonder when it does, because every map I see on our weather reports show the rain ending right at the border. I must miss seeing the maps on the days the rain manages to cross the borders.

F-G-A would transpose to D-E-F#, so that makes a lot more sense than D-E-F. Out of curiosity, I might play around with that progression to see if I can do something interesting with it, or at least play around with it while trying to think of some music that uses it. I have too many favorite songs to think about.