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A Thread for Random Musings


Old Man

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Fifty years ago tonight I was at home in our apartment in Bremerhaven.  The Boy Scout troop had had a winter camp in which I had participated; it began the morning after Christmas, and ended early the afternoon of the 31st.  We had got there and very shortly thereafter the snow began falling, and it continued to fall until after dark, leaving us with about four inches on the ground that persisted all week and beyond.  It was much colder that week than my gear was made for; not surprising since we had arrived in northern Germany the previous August from the warmer climes of eastern New Mexico.  I stuck it out the whole week, but I did have early stages of frostbite in my feet, as my folks pronounced once I got home.  

 

Our family was never much for carousing, so we stayed at home, doing a large jigsaw puzzle on the dining table, and listening to the bizarre end-of-year radio programming on BFBN (British Forces Broadcasting Network), which introduced me to the Wurzels (I admit, though, that it wasn't until the late 1990s and the burgeoning young World Wide Web that I was able to identify them and sample other bits of their repertoire) and other oddities of British popular (but not rock and roll) music.  It was all a fund-raising situation, taking donations and playing requests from military personnel and, often, units.  Mom and Dad had drinks due to the cheap booze from the Class VI store; I was the oldest kid (albeit 12 years old) so we had soft drinks out of steel cans opened with a church key.  We stayed up past midnight, listening to both the Last Song of 1968 and the First Song of 1969, both of which were sappy enough that I immediately forgot them.  A hot water bottle at my feet assisted in frostbite recovery once I'd been ordered to bed.  I did not, however, go out and play in the snow for several days, which suited me just fine.

 

We had no TV so the very recent imagery from Apollo VIII did not reach us until magazines arrived from the States a week or two afterward (though the best versions had to wait a few months for the National Geographic with those to reach us); the reading of Genesis from the Apollo capsule happened in our wee hours so we missed that as well.  Still, it was a great time; I would attend my first school dance on the 17th of January; I was enjoying absolute academic supremacy in my class in the tiny American school; and I was doubly sheltered from the American domestic upheavals of the terminal 1960s.  AFAIK, the building we lived in there still stands, which cannot be said of either place we lived in Berlin.

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I have managed to get an entry in a diary for the first time for January 1st to December 31st. Admittedly most entries are just a record of my progress in Candy Crush Saga. And Candy Crush Soda Saga. And Farm Heroes. And Diamond Digger.  Next step is to finish the diary as it goes to Sunday 6th January 2019. It started on 18th December 2017. And all the entries to the start of the year are filled out. 

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There are wells. Then there is the Chand Baori stepwell in India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chand_Baori

And this is what it looks like (The BBC ran a Great Indian Railway journey and this came up)

https://www.google.com/search?q=chand+baori+stepwell&rlz=1C1PRFE_enGB691GB693&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_pNeN3M_fAhUS5uAKHTL5Ba0Q_AUIDigB&biw=1680&bih=908

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Wikipedia even has a list of most disliked videos on Youtube. There is even one video listed that was trying to get an equal number of likes and dislikes. This was a PewDiePie experiment as was another one to get to 1 million dislikes. It is however when you get to over 50% dislikes that you should be worried about your content. Justin Beiber's video for Baby is the second in the list by way of total dislikes but is below 50% for dislikes to likes,

The Youtube review of 2018 is the most disliked but that is only at 86% dislikes. There are 4 videos with 90% plus dislikes and two of those are 'Can We Get Dislikes' videos.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
7 hours ago, Logan.1179 said:

I work on the fourth floor. We have no windows that will open.

 

Somehow, a bat got in here.

 

We had that happen in Austin, mostly on the top two floors (16 & 17), pretty frequently.  I don't remember the supposed mechanism for how they got in.

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