MsGuy

Sucrates, aka 'Sucky', self-identifies as Grandma on occasion, usually when he is presenting as an elderly, somewhat floozy queen. A largely harmless conceit, IMHO.

indeed

Caitlynn as quoted on ESPN: If I were lying on my death bed and hadn't told anybody about all this, I'd be thinking, "you just blew your entire life."

OneFinger, there's not too much in the way of publicity seeking that I would put past a Kardashian, even one by marriage. But no one will ever make me believe that anyone ever underwent "penile repositioning" just for a magazine cover.

Sucky, I got to admit Bruce cleaned up pretty well. But I do have my doubts as to how tight he's cranked up the stays under that one piece suit. Maybe he comes by that waistline honestly, but me, I'll just have to reserve judgement.

Back in the day that first photo would have bought Grandma a visit from a postal inspector and maybe a lengthy, & not entirely voluntary, vacation.

To any G7 or above who might be reading this thread &/or taking notes for later action: I'm the one who clicked the 'I don't care' box. Just wanted to get that straight from the get go. I guess I've nothing more to say except bless your heart and thank you for your attention.

Not to mention that we would all be standing in line for hours waiting for our 15 minute appointment with a boy. Knowing my luck, a street vendor's sticky rice ball would give me explosive diarrhea just when the mama san called my number.

Zipper, initially the FBI was concerned that he was being blackmailed to conceal official wrongdoing while he was in the Speaker's chair. Once they satisfied themselves that the money wasn't being paid to conceal malfeasance in office, somebody made the call to pursue an indictment for a) lying to the Feds (it's a felony to knowingly provide false information to a federal officer of any kind if he's acting in the course of his official duties, even if you're not under oath) and evasion of the money laundering statutes (After his banks began questioning the purpose of his $50,000 cash withdrawals, Hastert started withdrawing his cash in a fashion designed to evade his banks duty to report certain cash transactions to the authorities. That the banks reported his ass anyway is irrelevant.). As to who in the Justice Department made that call to prosecute Hastert rather than the blackmailer, and the reasons behind it, your guess is as good as mine. The takeaway from all this is when the Feds come calling, either tell them the truth or, best by far, shut up and call your lawyer. Even if you're sure that you've done nothing wrong. Maybe especially if you've done nothing wrong.

And dictate the amount of chrome on your coffin hardware and the number and arrangement of the flowers in your wreath. (Assuming that AS & I can stump up the cash for a wreath)

HA! I called it! I so wanted to cut to the chase in my original post and discard the possibility of a female dalliance. Sadly I let my misguided sense of political correctness overwhelm my intuition. "Surely," says I to myself, "it's neither fair nor balanced just to assume any sexual scandal involving a prominent Republican is necessarily going to feature a teen aged boy somewhere under the sheets." Just goes to show you shouldn't second guess yourself w/o a good solid reason.

RA1, was that on that History Channel show right after Finding Bigfoot? I think I remember it.

Oh fuck you, boiworship! How the hell can you say something like that and then leave us hanging? Give us the nasty details, please. PLEASE! Especially about Rove.

OK, this federal indictment against Dennis Hastert, former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, is for lying to the FBI about the purpose of 1.7 million dollars he withdrew in cash from his bank accounts. But the underlying transactions that the Feds were tracing can't be for anything but paying off somebody he was fucking back when he was a high school teacher/coach. And that somebody had to be a minor and (almost certainly) had to be a student at his school. Otherwise what on earth could he/she know that could be used to extort an agreed total sum of $3,500,000.00 out of Hastert 30 or 40 years later? I guess it could be somebody who stumbled across the remains of one of his/her parents buried in the basement of Hastert's former residence but that seems a mite far fetched. Anyone here who can parse the language of the indictment (quoted in the short article linked above) and come up with a more plausible guess? Winner with the best answer gets a gold star. Damn, the link doesn't work. Try this other article linked here.

Pretty much.

It baffles me how you could propose (even with all your caveats and blame shifting) that cost and follow on expense of building and maintaining a moon base suitable for 4 guys to permanently huddle in could possibly be the same as, or less than , the cost of a similar facility in close Earth orbit (250 miles?). Further, for the life of me, I can't figure out anything useful for the lucky fellows to do there that couldn't be done with remotely controlled exploration vehicles. Hell, if it's really all that important, I'm sure that NASA could rig up some remotely controlled space suits and have them bounce about live on camera for the TV audience. PS My sense of RA1's post is that he reluctantly endorses a moon base as the least bad of a forced choice between two God-awful choices.

Me too, Sucky. I can predict with a high degree of confidence that I will not die on Mars. Nor on a voyage to Mars. Nor while on my way to board the launch vehicle to Mars. Conceivably I might possibly get myself killed by a piece of AS falling out of the sky after his failed attempt to get to infinity and beyond. Now that would really piss me off.

RA1, remember taking tubes down to the store to test which one had gone bad? Remember opening up the back of the TV to get to the tubes and reading that stenciled warning? Something to the effect that "there's a thingie somewhere in here that might just kill you dead if you touch it." No picture or description of the thingie, though. Let the 10 year old figure things out for himself, I guess. A more innocent time.

Be that as it may, Sucky, and I would be the first to agree you have a certain style about you, but some would say (if they weren't terrified of incurring your wrath) that those smiles can, on occasion, curdle one's blood and freeze one's soul. But why quibble.

I will take that to mean the hopes I expressed for you were in vain.

In the summer after my 3rd grade, one of my uncles forgot & left a college geology text while on a visit to my house. I read it and found it fascinating. It answered all kinds of questions I had never even thought to ask. Reread that book several times just for the shear enjoyment of it but, even the first time I didn't have any difficulty understanding it. Except for the two chapters dealing with synclines and anticlines. Now I recall figuring out soon enough what synclines and anticlines were but the explanation offered for how the underlying up and down movements of the rock that generated them (specifically why they might be generated several times in the same place) made no sense to me. My initial assumption was that I had run into some difficult stuff that was hard for a little kid to get a grip on. I must have reread those two chapters a dozen times over the next two years and still it made no sense. I think the last time I reread it I was in the 6th grade when I decided that the explanation on offer violated basic laws of physics, at least as I understood them. 4 or 5 years later, I read some articles on plate tectonics ( a new theory at the time) and realized that that theory contained a simple and comprehensive explanation for the underlying mechanics of recurrent synclines. When I went back to the college text it was immediately apparent that the author had not a clue of how to explain recurrent synclines but sure as hell wasn't gonna admit his bafflement. Sure enough he had cobbled together a lot of convoluted sentences to disguise the fact that the only explanation he could come up with did indeed violate the laws of physics (much to the frustration of little kids like me, the asshole). I'm pretty sure you see where I'm going with this, so I'll just cut to the chase. It's been my experience that when I really want to I can puzzle my way through damn near any natural language text (math is alien to me and makes my brain hurt). It's further been my experience that when I have real, persistent difficulty with a text, it's because the author is using jargon and convoluted sentences to disguise his own sloppy thinking, logic chopping &/or lack of understanding of the material. I'm sure you've had similar experiences. Now if you tell me all that MLA crap is different, then I just have to take your word for it because I have never before or since run across texts that made such a good job of concealing careful reasoning and precise logical thinking under mountainous heaps of shit. I simply find their papers completely unreadable. It's possible, I concede, that the stars of your profession may actually have something to say but I hope you in turn will concede that the product of the average practitioner is simply worthless trash masquerading as pretentious garbage ('garbage' being pronounced with a phony French accent). And I further hope you will at least consider the possibility the your "stars" are no more than those who have proven best at conning large salaries out of academic institutions.

And when an elaborated nonsense is claimed by a cabal of priests to be crystal-clear in meaning, if only to the initiate, how does one judge? Elijah suggested that we judge them by their works, 1 Kings 18, and proceeded to challenge a whole slew of them to a showdown on the mountain top. The physicist you mentioned, together with his fellow initiates, whose writings are indeed as opaque to me as any of the scribblings of the linguistic scholars (at least those of the type you so ably defend), have a demonstrated power to produce mighty, nay awesome, works. The powers of your MLA specialists, on the other hand, seems largely or even entirely constricted to magicing tens of millions of dollars from the coffers of English departments into their own pockets. Dollars some would say that would be better deployed teaching undergraduates to construct a halfway grammatical sentence. Good ole Elijah even suggests a perfectly straightforward way to deal with specialists unable to prove the value of their work: Then Elijah said to them, "Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape." So they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there. 1 Kings 18:40, New American Standard Bible. ==== PS Now the lines under that lovely picture in lookin's post constitute two long convoluted sentences which are certainly packed chock-a-block full of polysyllabic specialist words. Yet I had no particular trouble deciphering the passage and, in fact, grasped the essential points on the first read through, even though some of the words were not familiar to me. And all this despite being utterly distracted by that enticing pair of youthful buttocks, backs and shoulders. Could my comprehension just possibly be down to the fact that lookin's partialism quote actually contained meaningful assertions presented in a coherent manner? Not saying the sentence is correct, just that it at least has meaningful content that can be judged against evidence (unlike your darling MLA jabberwoky). ==== PPS AS, you have my admiration for your delightful defence of your colleagues, but even the most able advocate sometimes gets stuck with a losing case, not unlike those fellows trying to keep that Chechen bomber from the gallows.

And if Texas or Florida were to go to a congressional district electoral system, the Republican party would be unlikely to elect another president for quite some time either. A more transparent solution for the Republicans would be to repeal the 14th and 15th Amendments. And in all probability a stiff poll tax alone would do the trick and have the additional advantage of pleasing the flat tax crowd.

Lookin, seems like we had a thread back when on exactly this kind of modern lit theory/criticism nonsense. Possibly it was over on the other site. AS, I am sure, could locate it for us if it strikes his fancy to do so. The game seems to be to see who can use the most polysyllabic words plugged into most convoluted sentence structure w/o allowing the the slightness ghost of a tiny morsel of actual meaning/content accidently slip into an academic monograph. Just offhand, I'd venture the tidbit you quoted is likely up for an award at the Modern Language Association's upcoming annual meeting.