scowl
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Posts posted by scowl
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I haven't watched this since it first aired and I have forgotten how great it was. The Tyson blindside was one of my favorites. I love listening to Erinn. Exile Island was much worse than the Sugar Shack last season.
It's too bad that Coach obviously influenced the show to cast people who have difficulties understanding reality for the sake of viewer entertainment. Everything about him was a real life Michael Scott on a reality game show living in a make-believe world of Dungeons and Dragons.
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I'm also glad they won a leg and I'm even more glad they didn't start rapping about it.
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On 1/28/2017 at 0:16 PM, cherrypj said:
It's true: Sierra was the answer to the questions: "who is most likely to stab you in the back?" & "who would you least like to see win this game?" Brutal coconut-chop game for her. She got voted out that episode, too.
The thing I read at the time was that Sierra was a young and successful model and constantly talked about her career. Everyone had to hear about all the places she had lived, all the famous people she had met, and so on. She was oblivious to everyone rolling their eyes or walking away when she was talking.
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I'm rewatching this on Amazon and I remember why this season got me started watching Survivor: I'm a shallow male and the women were stunning. Carolina, the models Sierra and Sydney, Candace, and Erinn were great in high definition. Erinn was hilarious, saying some of the funniest things anyone ever said about Coach. I would like a smartass like Erinn every season.
This was the best Exile Island gimmick I can remember since it allowed a secret intertribal alliance to form.
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I had been letting the recordings of this season pile up because I found last season to be a bit too sweet and not especially funny. I've nearly caught up with this season and I've found this season is much funnier than the last.
I think it's because the workplace is more dreary now, Cloud 9 is clearly a heartless corporation, and the coworkers really don't like each other. This kind of conflict tends to lead to humor that I can relate to.
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Didn't they say one had hotpockets?
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Until the rest of us can see the new season, NetFlix added a lot of old episodes worth watching. I had not seen Sidehackers or Catalina Caper in a long time and they reminded me why I had started watching the show.
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I refuse to watch any show in which an actor telegraphs to the audience that he or she is lying by stuttering or displaying nervous behavior while the other actors are too stupid to notice it.
I know the character is lying. You showed me what the character is lying about. You don't need to treat me like an idiot.
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1 hour ago, Lamb18 said:
That gives me great comfort, too. You just know his buddies at work gave him a hard time this morning. Just think, if he ever gets married, his pals will put him in a harness and pull it tight at his bachelor party.
Unfortunately he won't see the humor in it and will start breaking things.
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3 hours ago, Browncoat said:
I find it hard to believe that Shamir's balls are so much larger than those of all the other men in the world (including the other racers -- and Phil, and we've all seen Phil in his tight tight pants) who have worn such a harness that he is the only one who has felt such agony. Not buying it for one red hot second.
The last time I wore a harness like that, there were two straps that went through your crotch. You carefully ran them next to your scrotum, then you tightened them so they wouldn't move on top of it. It sounded like Shamir had loosened the straps too much (he said they were too tight) and that allowed a strap to slip on top of his bag.
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Just now, Umbelina said:
Misha's mother was a spy, not Philip's.
I think I need to review some episodes. If someone is speaking Russian I usually have no idea who they are.
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1 hour ago, RedHawk said:
He had been given the number and words to say in his mother's instructions. When Gabriel tells Claudia about the call he says that Misha used one of his mother's "old codes" (or maybe code names) and a signal for "an emergency meeting".
I didn't even know that Phillip's mother had been a spy. The scenes in Russian usually don't stick in my brain for very long.
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1 hour ago, TexasGal said:
Didn't Ferris change his attendance record, not his grades? <nerd out over>
Ferris changed his attendance record and David (WarGames) changed his grades. Matthew Broderick was typecasted back then.
33 minutes ago, ahpny said:Floppy disks (5.25' mylar discs inside a flexible ("floppy") rectangular folder) were indeed the medium of choice at this time. Actually they were almost the only medium available to transfer data to and from personal computers. Modems existed at this time, but they were rare, crude and required physically placing a telephone receiver into cradle with a sleeve. A few years later floppy discs were largely displaced by 3.5" disks that held more data, were smaller, and rigid (less prone to being damaged than the older "floppy" kind). Thus, as I recall,l the reign of floppy discs probably lasted maybe about 5 years or so, but coincided with the time period of this episode.
They weren't mylar since aluminum isn't magnetic. They were thin plastic coated in ferric oxide just like audio tape. The floppy disc era lasted about twenty years going back to the late 60's with huge eight inch floppies. The 3.5 inch discs were still called floppies because the medium inside was still a thin flexible piece of plastic that floated over the head.
In fact I was still using them just a few years ago to configure new computer systems. You can write a lot more stuff (handwriting) on a 3.5 inch label than you can on a physically tiny USB drive.
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3 hours ago, curbcrusher said:
But wait, he's not. He's working to save the world with better crops, and he's not a radical, drug dealing, take down the system kind of guy. He's someone that realistically might have more impact on "saving the world" than Elizabeth and Phillip every will, and he's not one of her kind.
Elizabeth should believe that Ben will make a good Communist. He should realize that capitalist corporations will not use his work to "save the world". They'll use it to maximize profits by selling a superior product at a higher price.
On 3/30/2017 at 2:09 PM, Cosmosgravitation said:It'd almost have to if he has gone beyond the basics. Coding, for example, is very strongly linked with math and requires many of the same skills for high aptitude - logic, problem solving, and critical thinking. Coding to me has always felt like a combination of mathematics and learning a new language.
I have a degree in Computer Science and have been a software engineer for 27 years. I suck at math. I've never used calculus while coding and I once was laughed at by suggesting we use statistics to determine if our test coverage was good enough to release a product.
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3 hours ago, MercuryFive said:
To me, she looks like what it would be like if Courtney Yates from Survivor were buff.
Since Courtney is nothing but flesh-colored bones, I have difficulty picturing this.
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3 hours ago, fivestone said:
Because it was a nonviolent felony and she did her time. What, are people who go to jail or prison to never supposed to be out in polite society again, especially after they pay their debt to society?
Possibly. The place I work for will not hire convicted felons.
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Another problem was how the Soviet Union focused on production numbers more than anything else. If the farms met their production expectations then it was considered a success. As for getting those bounties to the people for consumption, well, they never found a good way to determine how well that part of the system was working. It always seemed like the Soviets had a simplified perception of farming so they assumed food would naturally find its way into the mouths of the people somehow.
5 minutes ago, Solnichka said:It's sad - I mean, all of it was sad - but when the government looked at the problem with the food, they saw the "corruption" of the shops/shopkeepers getting more than their share rather than the broken system that was letting the food rot. Ah, communism. You can't admit that the problem is the system, because all hail to the glorious worker of communism! If there are flaws, then the flaws are with the people.
It was easier during Stalin when they could blame every problem on capitalist infiltrators and Trotskyist saboteurs and have random people executed.
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My friends and I thought that Reagan was a temporary misstep in American politics. Surely America will see Reagan is just an actor telling people what they want to hear ("It's morning in America...") and not make this mistake again.
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2 hours ago, ProfCrash said:
Brandon was essentially removed for mental health problems. Jeff separated him from his tribe, they had an immediate tribal and Jeff gave Brandon a very long shoulder massage while he was voted out. I do wish that they would learn to not cast, and worst yet re-cast, people who are emotionally and mentally unbalanced. Debbie, Phil, and Brandon have no place in Survivor. They are not fun to watch. They are potentially dangerous.
I think they cast them because many viewers like me work with people like them every day, and we secretly wish that we had a camera crew to document their delusions.
Right now we're dealing with the "Oh, that's easy" guy who takes on monumental tasks, mocking those who say how hard they will be. Within a few days half the department had to help him complete them so the project doesn't slip too much, then he complains that there's no trust in the department. It's more fun to watch this on television.
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My best friend and pub trivia partner spent eighteen months living in the Soviet Union in the late 70's. She insists that Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and even Minsk were unlike the rest of the country. Once she got out of those lovely cities which were full of relatively wealthy people, that's when she says half the time she couldn't find basic items like toilet paper and soap (she learned to travel with these items). That's where she saw houses held together by rope because they couldn't get nails. That's where she saw women spending their days in lines and where rumors were more valuable than newspapers. That's where she saw poverty unlike what she has seen in the U.S.
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The Soviet Union was an OK place to visit, but living there? That's a different story. The luxuries were the ones the party wanted people to have. Marxism demanded a cultured society so of course there were theaters, opera, and ballet. If you weren't interested in these things, well, too bad.
Of course you didn't hear locals complain about the Soviet Union to tourists!
Tourists and students usually went to Leningrad and Moscow because they were showcase cities -- very well maintained and incredible sights. Soviets felt lucky to live in cities like this and dreaded being transferred anyplace else.
Remember that the Soviet Union was a very rich country in terms of raw production. For example in 1977 they produced one trillion dollars worth of oil.
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18 minutes ago, Kokapetl said:
Growing wheat in Western Australia has done huge damage to the biodiversity of its unique and rare indigenous species. Dryland salinity is a huge problem, probably the most severe case on the planet, so much cleared land is now useless. Closer to home, nitrogen fertilizer runoff required a channel be created to flush out an algae filled estuary. Shitty land management isn't just a Soviet thing.
Certainly not. America's rush to turn every acre of land into producing something of value created the Dust Bowl.
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There were several cases where the farmers did have excellent machinery but simply never used it, either because farmers were never trained on how to use it or decided manual methods were better for some reason. This problem existed everywhere in Soviet manufacturing. After the collapse journalists found millions of dollars of excellent equipment sitting around unused while workers continued to use deteriorating machines from the 60's.
I always thought that a major problem with Lenin-Marxism is that they thought farming is simple and easy and anyone could do it. You just plant stuff in the ground, the rain falls, then in no time waves of grain sprout up to feed everyone. It turns out that farming is difficult and tricky! Managing the land and doing proper irrigation is critical and complicated. The kulaks were the only ones who knew how to do it and once they were purged, the Soviet Union had agricultural amateurs ruining crops and destroying the land. It took them decades to use the land properly. The U.S. made a similar mistake when opening huge areas of land to new farmers in the 20's which led to the dust bowl.
ETA: Kokapetl is right about the marginal farmland in the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed that the kulaks were purposely reducing production to raise grain prices. In most cases the crummy land was the problem. When the collective farms tried to increase yields by planting more land, production actually dropped. Farming can be complicated.
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21 hours ago, scrb said:
The real-life illegals that they caught in 2010 blended in well in the US. Some of them had pretty nice upper middle-class lifestyles. Some had graduate degrees, leading to 6-figure incomes.
They never succeeded in getting classified info. to pass back to Russia.
Maybe they were too busy enjoying a better life than they would have had back home to do serious spying?
Russia in 2010 is not the Soviet Union of 1984 so I don't understand what you're saying.
Unsolved Mysteries - General Discussion
in Unsolved Mysteries
I think the Hudson Valley UFO flap was much like Ed Walter's Gulf Breeze hoax. Even though we know for certain that Walters hoaxed the whole thing, at least two dozen people in the area reported seeing UFOs that looked exactly like the paper model he was taking double exposures of.
There were probably pilots flying in formation at first, and then the more elaborate reports began some time after people began to notice them. It was the standard pattern of UFO flaps. They usually begin with a simple and explainable report followed by increasingly detailed and incredible reports as new reports build on previous reports. Then they end as people find other things to do.
Don't expect anyone to take credit for hoaxes. Someone worked very hard to create the California Drone hoax of 2007 but we still don't know who did it.