claycle

I have a sneaking suspicion that at least in some US states this would be problematic with local health departments. I do not know, but it seems these departments might look askance at Joe Schmo handing an un-verifiably “clean” container into the food service area and hands of the workers.

It constantly makes me smile, whether it’s being smart, the actors are giving perfectly calibrated performances, or the action suddenly goes wham-bam VATS over the top.

3 eps in. Happy.

Perhaps, but middle-schoolers genuinely stink to high heaven, especially after P/E. I think one can imagine more obvious/less conspiratorial reasons for showers being mandatory.

If I have to pick one drink to take to a desert island, it’s the classic Sazerac.

That is what I will want most of the time when I want a cocktail. However, I will allow a few others to enter rotation, depending on mood, time/temperature, and place:

1. Margarita.
2. Vesper.
3. Pastis.

And, finally, my embarrassing guilty pleasure (which I never order except when I am in company I know well or I am on a Caribbean island): piña colada.

When looking for my last vehicle, I still needed a midsize very-light-duty truck for my business (film production), I drove the Chevy midsize truck (Colorado?) first on my checklist of trucks to drive. It was a piece of garbage (and this made me sad because I was [trying to be] open to finding an excellent US-made midsize truck). The sales guy was super-enthusiastic, of course, to the point of pushy obnoxiousness. When he asked me “HOW GREAT IS THIS TRUCK???!!!??” I was like “I wouldn’t complain if someone gave one to me, but I have other trucks to test.”

After test driving four other competitors, I ended up with Honda Ridgeline (which beat out my second favorite from Toyota), that I have now had for 4+ years and absolutely love it - it is a great midsize+ truck. It’s kind of a unicorn in Texas (so many Fords and Dodges), but I saw a ton of them in Arizona and other Western states. Great vehicle, and it has CarPlay. Sadly, it’s in the shop at the moment (I, uh, backed into a bollard, cough) and my rental is a brand-new Dodge Charger which drives like a lead brick on wheels compared to the Ridgeline. Interior finish isn’t bad though…and the UI, while not CarPlay, is polished).

Every single day, when I am out walking my dog, a jogger comes by smelling of like a shit-ton of soap/perfume/deodorant/body spray - I nearly gag. These guys (and sometimes girls) are so terrified they might smell sweaty when doing something, you know, sweaty, like jogging a couple of miles…it boggles my mind.

Who taught people we have to smell like artificial bouquets of flowers all the time, even when exercising, ffs?

We swap between two movies each year.

Even years it is A LION IN WINTER, an amazing film with insanely quotable dialogue. (EDIT: Why? On “star power” alone, this movie is outrageously cast.)

Odd years it is A CHRISTMAS STORY, which is equally quotable (perhaps more so). (EDIT: Why? Because so many things in this film ring true to my own childhood - having to have last-minute dinner at a Chinese restaurant because of a disaster, for example, or begging for a b-b-gun…)

Soap: a bar of unscented oatmeal-based soap

For deodorant: I have had very good experience with “Thai stone” style salt-based deodorants. These work simply by making your skin inhospitable to odor-causing bacteria while not causing you irritations. You need to apply it liberally (after slightly wetting the stone, I just count out 8 strokes under each arm), but a single stone will last you … a very long time … and it does really work for a whole day. It has no scent, per se, so you will just smell like you smell without the sulfurous bad smells caused by BO bacteria.

Or so I gather…

I waited until CP 2.0 to play it. I can wait for SF 2.0 to play it. I am not a unicorn in this regard.

Steel-cut oatmeal is super-easy, set-and-forget (1 cup water, 1/4 steel-cut oats, pinch of salt, Bring water to boil, stir in oats, salt, lower to bare simmer, uncovered 30 minutes, flavor as desired, eat).

But that can get boring. For something a little more exciting, super-nutritious, and almost zero-prep, do a sort of Norwegian-style open-face cracker (no, you don’t need “the tubes”, but if you can find them, knock yourself out). For this I take a tin of fish (usually smoked salmon or trout, but sardines, mackerel, or even tuna would work fine), a piece of cracking toast or a Scandy flatbread cracker (Wasa, knekkebrod), and some kind of “schmear” (a thin spread of cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, or - my favorite - Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel Yogurt Dip/Spread). I can get all these ingredients both cheaply and well-made at Trader Joe’s (TJ Smoked Salmon in a tin, TJ Norwegian seeded flatbread, and the aforementioned dip). For a little additional oomph toss on tomato or cucumber slices.

Yup.

One of the best FPS games I ever played. Marathon I and II. This was on a Mac in the early nineties, I guess.

Just finished CP myself yesterday, with a 9 hour push through the “final day”. I had previously in my run rejected the (possible) helpful offer at the end of Phantom Liberty to find my own solution to my problem and, after spending far too much time debating over a single dialog choice, I settled on one that lead to a satisfactory, if bitter-sweet, conclusion.

The sense of finality was quite profound and pleasing. I have no wish to play my V anymore, as I think their story is done. While this means I may never revisit NC again (which makes me a little sad), I can live with that. I guess I can look forward to CP: Boston in 10 years :-).

Same, my friend and I gave up on Baldur’s Gate and will let the developer “finish” tweaking it. I like what Larian tries to do in its games, but I really, really despise the need to mash the quick save button after anything representing even minor progress because you might stumble into TPK combat while exploring. This happened to us in Divinity and when we got a whiff of the same in BG3, we wrinkled our noses and left the game.

I subsequently went on to play CP2077 v2.0 and really enjoyed myself, which I just “finished” yesterday with a satisfactory, bitter-sweet ending.

It can do both. As indicated, all’y’all is optional and probably falling out of fashion. While I’ll use y’all in almost any sentence, I’ll only pop out an all’y’all when adopting speech patterns around other native speakers.

When we are in foreign Romance language countries and guesting with people, we always teach them how to say hello in Texan. Once, in a farmhouse in Burgundy, I was eating dinner with a farmer and his wife. A simple meal of eggs stewed in wine, bread, and cheese. The conversation, in French, turned to speaking some English, and we offered to teach them how to say “Bonjour” in Texan. We taught them “Howdy, y’all.” The elderly farmer sat back in his chair stroking his chin, then in a perfect country drawl repeated it back to us, sounding like a native Texan. We decided all farmers must have the same accent worldwide. EDIT: In fact, what most surprised us was that he nailed the initial H sound, something most people in France we encountered had trouble with.

We continued the conversation and said that in Texan, like French, there’s a plural second person form equivalent to vous that we sometimes use, and it’s all’y’all.

all’y’all is the plural second person form.

Sheriff, speaking to a number of bandits: All’y’all just put yer guns down and come out with yer hands up so we can end this all peaceful like.

True story: in the early 00s, my company was acquired by a Large Silicon Valley Company. LSVC sent a “business integration” team across the country (to Dallas, Texas where we were at the time) to welcome us into the fold. At these meetings, these Perky Northern Californian Women - they were all Perky Northern California Women, for whatever reason - opened with the following sentence:

“We’d like to welcome y…ya…y’y’y’y’y…YA UL(!) to LSVC.”

Repeated throughout the meeting, the integration team kept stumbling over “y’all” instead of just saying “you” when talking to us. Clearly, someone thought that - being Texans - we wouldn’t understand them unless the did.

At one point, one of us spoke up and said something like, “First, thank you for attempting to use our local dialect to talk to us. But, we can understand you perfectly well when you speak your native Northern Californian. Second, by way of correction, the word is just “y’all”. Also, if you want to use the plural second person, like vous in French, you may say “all’y’all”, but it is optional.”

And here I am deliberately working my way though Origins->Odyssey->Valhalla so that I can completely ignore Starfield for a while until the hype train settles down and some bugs are fixed :-). I keep my eye on NMS (I was a Day 1ish player) but I feel it is soooo wide and soooo shallow it would just bore me to tears now.

Really enjoying Valhalla…