BoganGod wrote:Dookie, laying your cousin don't count.
Can you recount a recent situation where wearing a costume has been good for you?
Well, that party in '94 was the last time I wore a costume, so no, not really.
Unless you're prepared to include safety gear at work. When I was young, I was always one of those "Safety -- shmafety!" scofflaws who would throw the hardhat in the ditch as soon as the foreman's back was turned. But the last few years, call it getting old, or call it, well, getting old, but I'm suddenly showing up with work boots and hardhat and reflective vest and safety goggles and everything by the book. Maybe I'm feeling my own mortality.
Under the circumstances, I suppose that's a good thing.
Serbia wrote:Dukasaur wrote:2dimes wrote:What was your costume and did you get a good haul?
Last time I wore a costume on Halloween was 1994. I was dressed as an Arab sheikh. And it wasn't some cheap dime-store one-size-fits-all sheikh outfit. I actually went to a professional seamstress who designs costumes for local theatre companies, and got a real quality outfit that had been made for some professional theatric performance. She did a proper custom-fitting and the costume fit me perfectly.
A good haul? Yes, I got laid. Thanks for asking...
By the seamstress?
No, not by the seamstress.
By a young lady of my acquaintance who also showed up at the party. It was my second attempt at university; I was 30-something and most of my classmates were 20-something. Anyway, I fell in with a very artsy crowd. They ran the alternative music club downtown as a non-profit commune, that kind of thing. A lot of the local leaders of Mensa, NORML, etc., etc. When they invited me to their Halloween party I was flattered. But the word was, serious costumes only, no half-assing it. Which is why I went to the seamstress, having no talent in this area myself.
Anyway, there was a young lady I was in love with, but my love was not returned. There was a different young lady whom I was acquainted with but had no particular designs on. She also was in love with someone who did not reciprocate. The two of us sat at the Halloween party and expressed sympathy to each other about our unrequited loves. And one thing led to another and suddenly we were consoling each other with great vigour.
It didn't lead to anything long-term, but it was great fun.
Oh, and she was a March Hare.
nietzsche wrote:Dukasaur, are you an anarchist?
No, I'm not an anarchist, although I have a great deal of sympathy for anarchists.
From a purely moral viewpoint anarchism is the only morally-consistent system. Nobody can rule another without their explicit consent, and almost none of us has explicitly consented to being ruled by whatever gang of thugs we are ruled by.
Government-worshipers say things like "when you vote you are consenting" but that is total bullshit. Knowing that I am going to be screwed, marking a ballot to choose the least-horrible option of whom I should be screwed by does not constitute consent; it only constitutes harm-mitigation. Saying that voting for the least of three evils constitutes consent is like saying that the condemned man consents to his execution because he chooses his last meal.
Government-worshipers also say bogus things like, "You drive on the government road, therefore you consent." Again, I call bullshit. Nobody knows what would be there if the government road wasn't. Perhaps there would be no road, but a perfectly usable track, kept in repair by volunteer efforts. Or perhaps an entrepreneur might have built a privately-owned road, and perhaps that road might have been far better than the one the government has put there. Nobody knows what options there might be if government hadn't usurped the role of sole arbiter of road rights-of-way. My need to go from A to B exists independently of the question of whose road describes that path.
So, that's the moral side. Nobody has a right to rule another; all government is force. Read Franz Oppenheimer: when you follow the history of any nation to its ultimate source, at the very root you will find a gang of thugs who rode into a peace-loving village with their swords drawn and said, "we're here to protect you. Give us all your gold."
However, there's a pragmatic side. Ultimately, we don't have time to live in a Hobbessian state of nature. Constantly brandishing our weapons and proving to the guy down the street that we're capable of resisting his attempts to steal our shit is just such a life-sucking waste of effort that delegating most of this duty to a police force and a system of law courts does make sense. Pragmatically.
One of the best reads of my life has been Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath's
Why the Culture Can't be Jammed. They express it like so: (paraphrase from memory, don't have the book in front of me) "All of us have experienced the situation when we're on a collision course in a hallway, and we dodge to the right, only to find the person has dodged the same way, then we try dodging the other way, only to find the person has likewise overcorrected. This hallway dance usually ends in a near-collision, followed by an embarrassed smile, a mumbled apology, and perhaps a few chuckles. It's funny at 3 miles per hour in a high-school hallway. It's not so funny at 100 miles per hour on the expressway." Morally, nobody has the
right to tell us to drive on one side or the other, but pragmatically, it's convenient that someone does. It saves lives, it saves a lot of damage, and at the very least it saves a lot of time and effort that would otherwise be spent swerving and dodging. Personally, I'm content to let it be so.
A former boss of mine once said, "there's a lot of dead people who had the right-of-way." In the end, you take the pragmatic road or you die. Anarchism may be the only morally-consistent system, but pragmatism dictates that we compromise with the bad guys and try our best to work it out. Government is evil, but it is a necessary evil. A healthy distrust of government is good, but paralyzing hatred for government is not.
betiko wrote:Dukasaur, tell us a story of little doomyoshi. Did you buy his first console and were you playing with him instead of helping him do his homework?
Well, his/our first and third consoles were opposite side of the same coin. We had a boarder who moved in with an SNES, and when he moved out he left it behind. That was our console for years and years, but it finally died. After that I bought a new (well, new to us) SNES at a 2nd-hand store, but it soon died also. By that point the N64 was all the rage, and I bought an N64, but our next boarder stole it and pawned it for drugs. Yoshi was quite angry, but I took it in stride as the turning of the wheel of karma. Our first console had been left to us for free by a boarder, and our third console was stolen from us by a boarder, so in the end we broke even.
Yes, I was guilty of playing on the console instead of helping him with his homework...
Although, he was a smart kid and rarely needed help.
We didn't really play together all that much. My big console-playing years were from '91 to '95, and DoomYoshi started getting heavily into console games mainly from '96 onward, so it didn't really overlap much. I played mostly turn-based strategy games like Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The only real-time game I played was Sim City, if you can even call that real-time, since I was on the pause button most of the time. When DY got into games it was mainly first-person shooters like Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, and I just don't have the eye-hand co-ordination for that kind of thing. There was only a fairly brief period from '95 to '96 when we were playing together, and it was mainly spinning-block games like Tetris and Dr. Mario and above all Kirby's Avalanche.
riskllama wrote:how do u feel about liver wurst?
I LOVE liverwurst. I love every wurst, and I love every pâté, so liverwurst which is the intersection of Wurst St. and Pâté Ave. is a natural hangout for me.
I used to have a trucking route that took me into downtown Montreal three or four times a year, and it was the high point of my year to go into a deli in downtown Montreal and get Pâté de campagne au foie, which is like meatloaf saturated with liverwurst. Heaven on earth!
KoolBak wrote:Do you like Poutine? If so, have you ever made it? If so, can you fess up your fave recipe?? And I mean in detail....cooking methods, spices, gravy recipe......
I do like poutine. My wife has occasionally made it at home, but mostly it's just an on-the-road thing for me.
I do other neat things with potatoes, including really good potato pancakes, but all the poutines I've ever eaten were made by someone else.
