StatisticalOutlier

It is indeed awful. But aren't there other places people can discuss the news? And actually, this isn't even discussing it--it's just reporting it, except for the "Awful" at the end.

Well, far be it from me to disagree with the almighty Google AI, but I was watching coverage of the California fires and embers are/were (I'm back on a news blackout and don't know if they're still burning) considered dangerous because the wind picks up embers and deposits them in other places that can be pretty far away, starting new fires.

I swear I looked and didn't see a topic for this, much to my surprise. The opening scene made me think, "I'm in good hands here." The runtime is 3:35, but that includes a 15-minute intermission. I don't like intermissions, but if there has to be an intermission, this is a good example of how to do it. And the opening and closing credits were fantastic.

The first time I went over to Mr. Outlier's house, we were poking around in closets and came across his boy scout uniform. He was an eagle scout so the sash had a LOT of badges. We were looking at them and one of them was a flame of some sort and he paused and said, "I think this is the book burning one." Obviously I'm still with him 25 years later.

Yeah, it's definitely a trademark. Because she could just trim them by 1/8" or 3/16" and they wouldn't be getting caught up in her eyelashes when she blinks. But that means she carefully keeps them at just that length. I'll watch when she hosts, and hope they keep the camera mainly on the guests. They don't show Graham all that much, after all.

I'm sure she thinks they're sexy or alluring or...something. Every time I see her I think of my mother pushing my hair out of my teenage face. And I realize she was right.

I assume you're talking about the orangutan? That was hilarious. Brie Larson bravely saying, "Can someone explain what we're doing now?" It was her first appearance on the show and I guess they didn't brief her on the big red chair. "Is it supposed to be a true story?" And then Myles Smith says, "Why was he dressed as an orangutan?" He wasn't! And the red chair guy's accent made everything even better. The rest of the show was okay for me, marred mainly by Claudia Winkelman's bangs. When Billy Porter was going on about them, I thought I heard him say, "Trim those bangs" but I re-ran it several times and I think I was just projecting. Those things drive me bats. My only requirement on a haircut is that nothing gets in my eyes if the wind is blowing from behind me, so bangs in eyes are especially annoying to me. And they drag her whole face down. Especially compared to Brie Larsen, who looked so fresh and light compared to Winkelman's mess. What I wouldn't give to be able to look that good in what is pretty much a buzz cut.

My showing was 100% more attended: there was one other person in the theater. As I said above, the trailer made me want to go just because it looked weird, but not sci-fi weird or whatever. I almost never understand the message of movies, but an extravaganza with a monkey as the main character sounded compelling. Maybe it's obvious to everyone, but another advantage of having a monkey playing him is not needing someone to look like him, as a child, teen, or adult. And I'm such an idiot that I wasn't sure it was CGI, until they showed him eating with that sticking-out mouth and I thought, "You can't do that with a mask."

I'm so glad you gave it a shot, and that you liked it. I wish more people would take a chance. Here's his performance of "Rock DJ" on The Graham Norton Show. What an entertainer. Which is what he said he wanted to be all along. Notice the microphone flips--they had him doing one in the movie when he was a little kid. I loved what he said at the end of the movie (paraphrasing): "I know it's only cabaret. But it's world class cabaret. And I'm the best at it." Indeed he is, and I'm so pleased that his biopic was so original. (BTW, he pronounces it "bye-OP-ic" like it rhymes with myopic. I always say BYE-oh-pic.) Catchy enough for you? 😀

I'm not familiar with "economical space heaters" but I use a lot of regular little ceramic space heaters. I live in an RV and if where I'm staying has enough electricity to support it, I've been known to use several of them at a time. (If you want to run more than one, be sure they're on different circuits.) The math on those is quite simple. They tell you how many watts they use--usually 1500 watts on HIGH. Multiply that by the number of hours it gets used in a 24-hour period. For simplicity, we'll assume it runs 24/7 (which mine often do). (1500 watts) x (24 hours) = 36,000 watt hours = 36 kilowatt hours (kwh). Multiply 36 kwh by how much your electricity costs per kilowatt hour (usually around 15-20 cents). If it's 20 cents per kwh, then the cost to run it for 24 hours is: (36 kwh) x ($.20) = $7.20 If you use it for only 12 hours a day, then it would be $3.60 per day. (However, sometimes billing gets tricky, like when there is tiered pricing, where you pay more per kilowatt hour if you exceed a certain threshold.) But I'll note that every space heater I've owned has lost oomph over time. About once a year I plug each one into a Kill-a-Watt, which measures how many watts it's actually using, regardless of its rating. I have some rated at 1500 watts on HIGH that now use only 500 watts on HIGH. And FWIW, I have wall-to-wall carpeting and I leave space heaters running when I'm not at home and when I'm sleeping. I don't have any pets so the only way they're going to fall over is if a human does it, and the human will notice. But even so, the newer ones have tip-over protection, so if they fall over they turn off. And they don't get hot enough to melt what they're sitting on, and I don't have them anywhere near anything like drapes or blankets.

I'd consider it only if they prohibited any cell phone use at all. Miss your family? Write them a letter. Bored? Do an activity or talk to your fellow campers or take a nap or have a snack. Anxious? Face it and work it out. Emergency back home? They can call the office.

I wonder how it's doing in England. Most people in the U.S. don't know who he is and wouldn't be interested in the movie based on the subject matter. Here's the trailer; I wish they had included young Robbie in the bathtub talking to his grandmother. The movie is much more than just a bunch of fantastic musical numbers. That's funny because I'd seen the trailer in theaters and thought, "That looks weird. I'm going." And I know Robbie Williams only from The Graham Norton Show (although I saw his most recent appearance where he was promoting this movie and that made me decided, "I'm definitely going"). Having him portrayed as/by a monkey really works for some reason. Brilliant decision and execution.

For the sake of accuracy: I had heard a song of his before I saw the movie--when he was on Graham Norton last week promoting the movie, he was also the musical guest. But before that? Nope. I'd never even heard of the famous boy band he'd been in when he was young, never mind the individual members.

My recollection is that he comes from the world depicted in Metropolitan. I adore that movie. I have it on my DVR and watch it every couple of years. There's just something about it. (Plus the girl in the movie with the longer dark hair is a dead ringer for one of my college roommates.) And I adore Whit Stillman. He's among the group of directors that I've seen every feature they've made, almost all of them in theaters. Jim Jarmusch is another. Of course it helps that their filmography is relatively small, but still--there's something great about seeing their films as they come out, without the benefit of knowing what they'll do in the future. Kelly Reichardt is another.

Almost none of the music on Graham Norton is my usual cup of tea. And I just realized that the two performances I've enjoyed -- this Robbie Williams one and Christine and the Queens' one -- are all about the performance. And speaking of performance, I saw Better Man today, the biopic Robbie was promoting where he's played by a monkey. It was fantastic. I got a headache from trying to stifle crying at the end. I'm so relieved he got himself together. On Graham Norton, I had noticed a couple of deft microphone flips, and they had child Robbie do it in the movie, so apparently it's his thing. Works for me. ETA: As Graham mentioned, the song he did on the show is in the movie. It's a dance number (as opposed to being performed in concert) and I prefer the one he did on the show but this one is a whole lot of choreographed fun, too. I think that song just begs for dancing.

Nah, there's so much misinformation and completely understandable and justifiable ignorance about how Medicare works that gentility really has no place.

What your doctor is doing is the wellness visit as defined by Medicare. Medicare does not cover routine physical exams of the type most of us are used to getting. This often comes as a big surprise to new Medicare enrollees, and it's not uncommon for them to schedule their usual annual physical only to get a bill from their doctor because Medicare didn't cover it. That said, some doctors monkey with the coding in such a way Medicare will pay for a hands-on physical, but some won't, and the patient is on the hook for the entire cost. That's why in discussions like these there are people who will swear up and down Medicare covers their annual physicals, but that's not what's happening. From the Medicare website: https://www.medicare.gov/providers-services/original-medicare/not-covered Here's a decent explanation: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/medicare-medicaid/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-medicare-annual Note that most (maybe all?) Advantage plans do cover an annual routine physical exam, but that's one of their "extras" that they provide above and beyond what Original Medicare pays for (like how Advantage plans provide coverage for eye exams and hearing aids).

Hey! My Roku screen just now gave me the message about season 1 of Severance being available. Of course I already streamed the whole thing a couple of days ago thanks to the message here. And they know that, obviously. Oh well. Better late than never?

The recording will be decidedly not HD, but especially for regular TV shows, I don't care. Being able to watch it on my schedule and without commercials outweighs the quality.

What kind of standalone DVR do you have? Mine is an old one that acts just like a VCR; the only difference is it records to a hard drive instead of tapes.

Thank you for posting this. My Roku screen didn't say anything about it, but when I went to search in Roku, when I put in "S" the first thing over on the right was Severance. I have a standalone DVR and recorded the episodes in succession overnight. Not unlike the olden days with my DirecTV when a free preview of HBO would have all of a season of some show, one episode after another.

Maybe that's why our experiences differ. I'd say I'm cute, at best, and definitely not "very attractive to men." I don't think any man has ever not had the nerve to approach me. I remember being turned down once--a guy I met somewhere and cold called. Maybe I got his number out of the phone book? (We're talking late 1970s.) Anyway, I called and he said "no" and I was embarrassed but no more embarrassed than the millions of men who have asked a girl/woman out and been turned down. (That seems uniquely unfair to me.) But I had extreme success on other occasions. I called a guy I met at a "meet the new lawyers in town" party, and we had a 1-1/2 year relationship (and I was definitely punching above my weight on that one--he was by far the most eligible bachelor in town). Another time I met a guy at a party at a mutual friend's house. I asked the mutual friend if this guy was taken, and he said no, and gave me his number and I called him up a few days later. Again punching above my weight, but he was delighted that I'd called, and that one lasted for a few months. And then there's the guy I who worked in the adjacent cubicle. We'd become friends over two years, going to movies and things like that. Then one day I realized I liked him more than as a friend, so I went to his house one day to tell him. It was nerve-wracking, and he said he'd have to think about it! (So it definitely wasn't a case of my approaching at a time he would have approached me anyway.) We ended up being together for almost five years. And I approached Mr. Outlier online on matchmaker.com. He'd seen my profile but moved right on by. This was in 1998, so no mutual swiping--you had to basically cold-email someone you were interested in. I did, and here we are 25 years later. If I hadn't taken the initiative, he would not have the honor of being Mr. Outlier. But mainly, every man I've ever discussed this with has said he would love to be asked out by a woman, and I don't think it was so he could turn her down.

But some of the other lines don't end with a comma.

I'd never heard of this Rock DJ song before, so I found a version from 2001 on youtube. Age has served him well. I also found this compilation of Robbie Williams stories on the Graham Norton Show. I recognize some of the couches but not necessarily the stories (especially the castle one, right up there with the pub burning down, and made even better with Anna Kendrick's reactions); maybe they were edited out of the U.S. version? Anyway, enjoy:

I'm definitely not in favor of erasing every trace, because people delete entire posts all the damn time on Reddit and it makes already impossible-to-follow discussions (the nature of Reddit) even worse because nobody there quotes what they're referring to. But what I was responding to, and quoted to be sure to give context, was this: "I personally would rather see an occasional Guest than lose my comments on here because someone else misbehaved." I asked why these were the only two choices, and haven't gotten an answer but previous comments indicate that it's a coding issue, which is why I brought up the "the computer can do anything" comment. Because apparently that's no longer true. Your suggestion of leaving account activity and profiles as-is was not one of the options I was choosing from. But I like it. Why shouldn't someone's activity and profile, under a made-up user name, remain visible to others? We all know that the minute we put something on a website we don't personally own, it no longer belongs to us. And the "Guest" username is confusing, especially if it's given to more than one account (which is apparently the case unless ParadoxLost was the first person to ever be given the substitute username "Guest"). And I do look at people's posting history sometimes, to get a fuller understanding of what they're saying in a particular post, and I don't think that sort of knowledge is less important if a person deactivated their account as opposed to just stopped posting (in the latter case, their username does remain clickable). But my main complaint is about this: "That Guest username is a placeholder on here for accounts that officially no longer exist on here for whatever reason but the site cannot get rid of." They have content on their own site they have no control over? That boggles my mind.