I took German in high school and forgot it all immediately. A decade later I found myself in India studying Malayalam, the language of Kerala which is the southern-most state in the country. Very hard language to learn but as I was learning its formal grammar I was like, wait a minute this is very familiar. Turns out a German monk in the 19th Century visited Kerala and gave Malayalam its first formal grammar, which was basically just German’s grammar. So it wasn’t totally useless.

I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as “language” only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called “paradigms” or “code instruction sets” or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than “languages”) it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds – who are already not exactly well-rounded in general – to get out of learning a real fucking language.

Hare down there

drinking one glass of whisky

To be fair, medical professionals generally triple or quadruple patients’ reported alcohol consumption.

In college I arranged a co-op at IBM. They made me take a drug test which I failed (for marijuana). A person from IBM’s HR called me and said literally “you need to clean up your act” and they brought me in to do the co-op anyway. I have no idea what the fuck that was all about.

I also got pulled over for speeding one time and the cop smelled the joint I had been smoking. Luckily he let me go with just a speeding ticket, but he made a point of scolding me – not for driving while high but because I was 49 at the time. He told me it was time for me to grow up. I was seriously enraged by that but of course I kept it to myself.

British cartoon pig?

Blue Velvet was good, lots of fun weird shit but also a plot that moved along. It made me rent Eraserhead which in turn almost made me give up movies entirely.

From Here to Eternity is like that. The book is truly a great piece of literature, but the movie (made in the 1950s) excises pretty much everything worthwhile in the book. Just as one example, the book has a character who can’t get any contact with women in pre-war Hawaii so he starts getting blowjobs from gay men in parks. Eventually he builds up so much guilt from this that he shoots himself in the head in the barracks. I can’t remember whether the character was even in the movie but obviously no hint of those activities show up. There’s also the main character taking up with a prostitute who is magically not a prostitute at all in the movie.

The book has so much stuff like this in it that I can’t understand why they even tried to make a movie out of it in 1953.

Try Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. It’s great, it’s a classic, but you’re going die out of boredom if The Godfather is already too much for you.

And if you survive that you can move right on to Eraserhead.

Remember that this was the 80s, where you needed a publisher for comics.

IIRC Cerebus and Elf Quest were self-published. Of course, that may be why they’re utterly unknown today.

Is his castle anywhere near Enya’s castle?

I thought Muscadine was the actor in Kung Fu.

Since horse racing is all about betting: Zinfanduel.

I know mashups are pretty tired but I always wanted to hear a mashup of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and Prodigy’s “Firestarter”.

By “recent”, you mean the last 50 years?

Any troubles in the Suez still?

Lol I would give a kidney to have a high-walled cubicle like that again.

it’s not sustainable for centuries

It’s sustainable until the Saudis learn about your cheap water and buy the whole system for pennies on the dollar so they can grow alfalfa for their racehorses. This is what’s happening to my (currently cheap) water authority.

Yeah, my mom does all that, too. Does your MIL wash and reuse zip-lock bags as well?

Anybody else have a mother who saves all the wrapping paper? And gets mad at you if you unwrap your present in such a way as to make the wrapping paper un-savable?