ABay

Wait, can we back up? Why is Ryan Reynolds an asshole?

I sympathize with the kids. We all work too much and 2 days "off" for 5 days of misery is appalling. The ""s are because, as noted upstream, at least one of those days is full of errands and house maintenance that would only take a few minutes at lunch or coffee break but snowball during the week. If you really love your job and co-workers, I salute you. For me, working has been the thing I resent for taking me away from real life. The few months to retirement can't go quickly enough.

Yikes! Do they have balanced billing?

Pivot was so overused during the pandemic that there should be a moratorium on using it. And if I never hear the word iconic again it will be too soon.

Never give up! Never surrender!

I get Tom Holland confused with Tom Hollander but couldn't pick either out of a line up. The older I get, the fewer names mentioned here I recognize. And yet even I know who Zendaya is.

All the snow talk makes me feel like Charlie Brown. "I got a rock." I probably didn't have to dust off my car--the breeze on the way to work would've blown it all off. In the 25 years I've lived in CT we've had 2 good snowy winters--all the shoreline gets is rain, usually. But those years were fantastic. One year, campus closed for a week and by the time I had to go back in, all the side streets were like canyons of snow and my driveway was like a luge run. Snow was piled up against both my front and back doors so I took the storm window off one and used a swiffer mop to push enough snow away to open the door.

Carter v. Reagan was the first presidential election I was eligible to vote in. *sigh*

No! nonononono do not invoke the curse of the *dm*nd F*tzg*ld! Jeopardy uses that for a clue at least once a month, it feels like. And then the song is stuck in my head for a week. Damn you, Gordon Lightfoot. Damn you.

Sorry for the ad at the start!

I try to patronize local chocolatiers when I can. In CT, there's Munson's and in Western New York Alethea's and Sweet Jenny's. SJ doesn't ship but the other two do. When i need a quick fix, M&Ms or Cadbury will do.

Parts of Airplane! haven't aged well but so much of it is eternally brilliant.

This morning the wonderful Manuela at Disney+ got my account straightened out. The problem was, and this will sound familiar, that I signed up for the 2.99 deal last year with a different email account than the one on my Roku, and also that I'd signed up through Hulu rather than Disney...although it's all one so I don't knw why that mattered. Anyway...I now see my profile when I login on my PC and can cancel when I want. I'll probably wait until after Christmas because I want to see Dr. Who on Xmas day.

I couldn't cancel Disney or Hulu today because my profile never showed up. It would flash in the upper right corner then vanish and all I could get was the sales page for Disney. Three different browsers, multiple codes because it wouldn't recognize my password. So fucking sketchy. I also tried the QR code on my phone and it wouldn't even send the code to my email. I'll try again tomorrow.

Yes, that's what I was going to say when I read @Ancaster's post. Berry and Barry (ask a Jeopardy fan...or don't), merry and marry, all the same sound. I can't remember where the Harvard Dialect survey showed them sounding different. Here's the map: http://dialect.redlog.net/index.html I also saw an article that said 57% of Americans pronounce them the same. I don't know what the other 43% are doing with those vowels. One of my friends who does pronounce them differently said the words slowly to me and I didn't hear a difference.