Okay, 3… 2… 1 let’s jam.

On an episode of a hospital-based show, a little girl (like, 8 or 10) drowns in a pool and effort to resuscitate fail. That didn’t get me, even with the parents crying. The girl has a sister, who is making a card for the girl who has already been declared dead. Sad, but didn’t get me. Sister explains that the girl died saving her, since she fell in the neighbor’s pool trying to get a ball, and the sister jumped in, pushed the sister out, and then couldn’t get out herself, and eventually drowned.

And I got slammed with a real-life memory. I work in Search and Rescue, and one case my station had over a decade ago was a pair of children that got swept out to sea. Only the younger brother survived. Because the sister spent the whole time keeping him above water, and ended up exhausting and drowning herself. I try not to think about it, because it fucks me up really bad, and especially because now I have a daughter and a younger son. That scene dredged that up real hard, real fast.

Pro tip for you:

Ask for Cocoa Fudge with your Heath Blizzard instead of chocolate sauce. Even better, Cocoa Fudge with a small splash of cappuccino. Makes it way better.

Source: was a store manager of a Dairy Queen (20 years ago)

In English, orange is essentiall “orange red,” as in “red like an orange.” Prior to oranges making their way to Europe, the color we refer to as “orange” was red, or yellow-red. Hence people with orange hair being called “red-heads.”

Bisexual people: Is it okay for me to have friends?

Not everybody is a potential sexual partner. Having friends of any gender is fine. If you start getting any non-platonic feelings, take a step back. If your friend starts getting (or demonstrating) non-platonic feelings, take a step back.

Neither of those articles supports what you are saying. The first one, about sexual assault, says in big, bold letters that men are less likely to report sexual assault. The argument was not that more violence is committed against men (sexual assaults at the very least are obviously not), it’s that men are less likely to report it when it happens, which is exactly what your article said. It also said women under-report. But just because women also under-report doesn’t mean they under-report at a higher rate than men.

Seriously. There is no reason to believe in something that not only isn’t proven to exist, but can’t. That argument could be applied to nearly anything.

Vampires? Can’t prove they don’t exist, so may as well believe in them.

Fairies? Same.

Flying spaghetti monster? Prove it doesn’t exist.

Like, I don’t want to knock other people’s religions, and I’m not so arrogant as to think I have all the answers, but I just can’t stand the “you can’t prove XXXX doesn’t exist” argument.

I still get infections in my mouth if I have more than, like, two in a sitting. And then my mouth hurts for a week.

I feel like the middle-aged guy that I am, because it keeps suggesting lawncare, forging (“can I melt and cast himilayan salt rocks?” He did, it was fantastic), silly engineering (“I’m going to see if I can 3d print a rifle that will make a nerf dart break the speed of sound…”), dnd (I don’t even play dnd, and i still enjoy the videos), and Jon Stewart. And… a weird mix of civil rights people showing bad behavior of police, and police supporter showing bad behavior of people (honestly both are entertaining, because police are awful and so are people).

But it doesn’t even try for that right-wing bullshit.

So here’s my time for this story:

When I was at a recruiting office for the Coast Guard, the recruiter asked why I specifically chose the Coast Guard over any other branches. I said I’m the type of person that if I volunteered for the military and then got sent to a situation where some 12-year-old with a gun was going to kill me if I didn’t kill him, I would not be able to absolve myself of the responsibility of having to kill a kid, even to defend myself, because even if I didn’t choose to be in that kid’s country, I relinquished my choice to the military, so I am still responsible. There’s nothing morally ambiguous about saving somebody who is drowning.

He said that was a dumb reason. I didn’t care.

Well, as it turns out, he was right, but not for the reason he thought at the time.

Make the Coast Guard Department of Transportation Again!

If I had the choice of the Yaris or another car, I would choose the other car. Because driving that car would make me at least low-level angry for the time I had it.

My mom sold the house.

I was the youngest of three, and my parents told us all that as long as we were in school (including college), we could stay and they would pay for college. My brothers both got the benefit of this (oldest ended up staying outside of that for a couple years, but whatever).

My dad died in August after my graduation. My mom and aunt had inherited some money from my great-aunt and bought a house together near a college my mom wanted to go to, so she sold the childhood home (that I’d lived in my entire life) and said “good luck.”

Completely understandable, and I’m glad she got to live the life she wanted. She’s a nurse now (mostly retired, can’t seem to make it stick), remarried, and they’re building their own house. And my aunt now lives in the house they bought.

And I’m doing awesome (40s, two kids, wife of 16 years, set to retire in a town in Alaska we love, own our own house), honestly a lot better off than either of my brothers, so I can’t complain about how anything happened, other than wishing my dad was around longer.

Interesting that allowing women to vote created a situation where women felt it less absolutely necessary to get married. Because after a while, their voice had to be considered when discussing bills like prohibiting banks from refusing bank accounts, home loans, and credit cards to women.

The Yaris ads did this to me. I got so pissed off by their “It’s a car” commercials that I absolutely despised the product.

For every state that is below Alaska…

Have you seen Alaska? Have you spent time there? Alaska is crazy dangerous! How bad must your healthcare be that the constant threat of the entire environment being against you doesn’t win out for short life expectancy?!

And Mississippi, just… be better.

I’ve found that amongst people I know who fly the Gadsden Flag, it makes zero sense. Like, if Ben and Jerry’s made a boot-leather flavor of ice cream, their target demographic and the those of the people who sell Gadsden Flags would be identical.

A book that I got as part of a birthday present when I was in middle school had a passage where a man’s long-lost sister (who was part monster, but was painstakingly described as very attractive) told him that either he had to impregnate her the old-fashioned way, or she would simply get a syringe, extract sperm from his testicles, and impregnate herself that way to create, if I remember correctly, a monster that would end the world or something. It was labeled as “Young Adult” level.

So, like, probably something like that.

Only use-case I’ve had for rental was when I was at a military school for five months. My roommate and I needed a TV in our barracks room, but there wasn’t much point in buying a TV (each of us had TVs back home), so we rented one for five months. It was great. One of us also bought a Wii (dating myself here), so it was a great time.

That’s about the only case I can think of renting furniture/appliances. If you are temporarily someplace and can’t thrift an item at a reasonable price.

Our pilots, with training, regularly can get to inside a circle patch of flat land 100 ft in diameter. They generally pick a very specific spot on the runway (like the numbers) and then aim to end up there. And they practice straight down, 90 degree left, 90 degree right* 180 degree, and on occasion 360 degree (for when the spot you want is directly below when your engines fail, and feels like you are corkscrewing to your doom). Obviously practice is different than an actual emergency, but I felt confident the pilots could get us down safely in the event of a dual engine failure.

So honestly if it’s over mountainous areas, I’d rather be in the helicopter looking for a place to hard land than a fixed wing aircraft (that needs a runway or at the very least a long grassy field with no obstructions).

I have flown in helicopters most of my career, and we regularly did auto-rotation emergency drills, where we cut the engines output back (to simulate dual engine failure) and then “glide” to a particular spot, using the air pressure from descent to drive the blades.

With a good pilot, you just kind of go zero-g for a second or two, and the. A somehwat faster than normal descent, followed by a big flare (tail down, nose up, like a diving bird pulling back and fanning its wings out) at around 80 feet, then quick (less comfortable) drop to the deck.

With a good pilot, it’s mildly uncomfortable, with a mediocre pilot, it’s some back pain and some extra maintenance inspections, but you aren’t crashing.