StatisticalOutlier

That actually bugged me because generally, if you give someone permission to drive your car, they're covered under your insurance if they cause a wreck. I assume there's a point at which family members need to be included on insurance policies by name, but occasionally? She's probably covered. Then again, we saw her drive. In fact, I kind of loved how many times we saw her pulling up somewhere in her car or leaving somewhere in her car. I'll also say that I floved her clothes. Laura Dern is a beanpole so she'll look good in just about anything, but all of her clothes were so pretty and she made them look great. I also finally saw some credits (Max is cutting them off unless I hit the right button at exactly the right time) and found out it's Dermot Mulroney playing the reporter. I could not place him. I watched both seasons over the last couple of days, after realizing it was done by Mike White. And the lineup of guest directors was pretty darn impressive. You don't exactly look at Mike White and think, "Hollywood Heavyweight." Plus I want Luke Wilson's apartment something awful.

They love their security, too. We wanted to do their Trek Through Time walk, and looked on the satellite view of the campus and saw giant parking lots, so on our way out of town went by there. We drove the car and motorhome separately, and parked in a corner of an empty lot, and a security guard pulled up within a couple of minutes. "This is government property and you can't park here." I said we were there to do the walk, but he wasn't having it. He went away and came back and said he had a place for us to park, and to follow him. We ended up in a bus parking space that was like a bus stop--just a wide part of the street. Much more intrusive than where were were. And he told me I had to park the car in the adjacent visitor lot, but I couldn't park in the empty spaces near the motorhome--he made me park farther away. Whatever.

I taught skiing on one of those 25 years ago. It was a nice way for Texans to get on skis before heading to the slopes for the first time.

I've seen previews in theaters for it probably five or six times, and I didn't realize it's a musical.

I heard the beginning of this the other day in the car. They played the scene from the movie where he's handing out the graded papers, and in it he says something like "my ocular limitations" and my first thought was the discussion here. It was definitely a plot point. In the interview, he used the word "carapace." I think it's the first time I've ever heard that word used out loud.

And it was more accurate because the incentive was to provide information and not to generate as many clicks as possible or entice people to want to buy your collection of addresses and phone numbers over the many others, which is aided by having more content, not more accurate content.

That's what they need in these galleries. A tiny description that you need a magnifying glass to read. I don't know anything about art. It's 3" x 3" and on the back, you can see where the canvas (I think it's canvas--it has a grid texture) is folded over along all four sides and a square piece of white vinyl (?) covers the edges of the folded over part, making for a smooth back almost to the edges. It's about 2 millimeters thick, and when I tap it on the table it sounds kind of clacky. It weighs maybe 1/3 of an ounce. I don't know the difference between oil and acrylic, but whatever the artist used it's thin--you can clearly see the texture of the canvas even in the painted areas. Here's another one, where the rocks look like a stream flowing out of the sideways flower pot. It really was a super fun find.

I'm interested in urban planning, so Reston has been on my "must see" list for a long time and I finally made it there. The gallery is located among the condos that face Lake Anne due south of the shopping area (but you have to go around the lake a little to get there). Also in this area is this cool rock garden, I guess you'd call it. There's a whole row of units that have decorated their outdoor areas with rocks. This is why I like to ride bikes in places I've never been to--to run across odd things like this but covering a lot more distance than walking, even at my very leisurely 7 mph pace. For you dog fans, here's a stick library in Sycamore, Illinois, in the corn fields west of Chicago. I don't really understand why they require you to return them, especially since you can keep what you find in free little art galleries, or the little free library across the street from the stick library. Oh well. Their stick library, their rules.

I just noticed I called it a Little Free Art Gallery, but the sign says Free Little Art Gallery. I guess because the art is little? FWIW, after much deliberation, I took the one on the far right. It reminded me of David Hockney's non-swimming pool paintings. I'm going to put it in this little alcove-type thing in my cabinets, where I previously installed one of those clocks that is just hands and I've never liked it. I kind of like knowing that the artist, Betty Flowers, will never know what happened to her little painting.

Actually, we walked from our hotel on 48th between 10th and 11th (good god, I can't believe how gentrified the tire-changing district has become) to the TKTS place near Lincoln Center, and then to Gray's Papaya. And then to Radio City to see the Rockettes, and then to see the windows at Saks (sadly the only windows left down there) and the tree at Rockefeller Center, and from there to the Whitney, and then back to our hotel. We were there for two full days and parts of two days and walked something like 35 miles. Walking in NYC is (obviously) one of my favorite things to do. Cigarette smoke started ruining it for me, when they banned indoor smoking and everybody started smoking outside--there's nothing worse than trying to outpace someone to get out of his smoke slipstream, because New Yorkers walk fast. Some of that has changed to vaping, which is good, but the smell of weed everywhere (which stinks, unlike the stuff we had back in the 1970s) has been an overall net loss on the pleasantness of walking scale. It's a shame. One night we were in Chinatown doing a tasting tour of pineapple buns and decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe it's because it was right before Christmas, but it was gross. There were vendors with carts and giant bright lights shining right in your eyes all along the walkway, selling tourist shit that you can buy everywhere else in the city. We thought we might walk far enough to get past them, but realized they extended a long way, and we'd have to walk right by them on the way back, too. Thank you for ruining the Brooklyn Bridge. Heh. I have about as much in common with Jack Reacher as you do. No, we travel fulltime like every other asshole who saw some youtube videos during the pandemic and bought an RV and hit the road for FREEDOM!!!!, making it impossible to find places to stay now. I'm telling you, the great recession was nirvana for fulltime travel. Hardly anybody was fulltiming yet, and there wasn't a lot of money floating around for people to buy RVs or even vacation, so only the most popular places (like Yellowstone) required any advance planning or timing, and no place required reservations just to get into the park. We just went here and there, wherever we wanted, without worrying about where we'd stay when we got there. (Wow--look at all the words that start with W in that sentence!) Those days are long gone. We have instituted a policy to get books only out of Little Free Libraries, being fans of pre-internet serendipity. Since we travel all around, we get a good variety (there's nothing more annoying than looking in a Little Free Library and seeing only books you put in there). So far, we've scored 10 of the Grafton books, and 10 of the numbered Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum books. Actually, I use Little Free Libraries as a gauge of neighborhoods, and like to see if I can predict how dense they'll be just based on looking around. I have a pretty good track record. Some have so many you could use them like cairns--you can see the next one when you're standing at one. Hey, Takoma Park, Maryland--not every house needs to have a Little Free Library. And check out this Little Free Art Gallery in Reston, Virginia. Just when I think all humanity is nothing but a collection of assholes, I run across something like this.

The bone-in chicken can be too hot to even touch, never mind eat, but that rarely happens with tenders, for some reason. I have a very common name and it would be super hard to find me just by using online search tools and my name. The ironic thing is that Mr. Outlier and I started a website back in 2003 when we started traveling fulltime. For several years, if you searched google for information about the aircraft boneyard in Tucson, our site was at the top of the results because we wrote a story about our visit and posted a bunch of photos. Google's pre-advertising algorithm favored sites that were actually pertinent to the search and contained useful information instead of machine-generated copy, and there were very few websites like ours at the time, so ours was at the top, which always cracked me up. We're the source for information on the boneyard?? Does anyone remember city directories? They were also called criss-cross directories, and were kind of the reverse of a phone book. They listed all addresses in the city, and the name of the person there, and they also had a list of all phone numbers, with the person who had it. I ran across one the other day (improbably, in a car repair place) for Austin in 1978. I went to college in Austin for a year, and then moved away and came back in 1978. All the people I went to school with were still there, and it was a gas looking them up. (You have to have an address, not a name, but I'm a savant for addresses and phone numbers.) I also, for the first time, read the introduction to the city directory, and found out it was compiled for businesses to find customers. (I was surprised to find it wasn't compiled so high school girls could see where a cute guy lives and look up his family's name.) This time around, I also found out the directory has an economic rating for each block, indicating which quintile it is in for personal income in the city. Now that was fascinating. That was just when Austin was becoming more suburban, and the wealth was moving outward. The neighborhoods near downtown, except the ones with mansions, were in the lowest 40% of income, and the ring of development a few miles out was in the top 40%. Boy oh boy has that changed. Anyway, I miss the solid, actual information that we had in phone books and city directories. I've used online sources to look up people, and they're stunningly inaccurate. Or, well, they have some accurate information but it's buried in massive amounts of inaccurate information, and there's no way to know which is which. Which is disappointing for me because I've always been able to dig up info on people (which is why I knew about city directories back when I was a kid). You had to do some legwork, but what you unearthed came from reliable sources like city directories and phone books and county records. Nowadays everybody just click click clicks and they're getting scads of bogus information. And sometimes you just need to be a person. Back in the early days of the internet, I was in Austin and a co-worker told me that another co-worker, Rhonda, is looking for an old boyfriend she had in Houston, and she'd heard I was good at finding people. I told her to get his name from Rhonda, and when she brought it to me, I took one look and said, "I know that guy. He was at a windsurfing clinic I went to a couple of months ago down in South Texas. Here's his email address."

I once gave my brother a shaving mirror for Christmas. His response? "I have a beard." And I had a boyfriend once who one day asked, "Did you not notice I shaved off my beard?" In my defense, this was before those giant woolly things people have, and he shaved his well-trimmed beard into a goatee. But he had a point. But even I noticed Giamatti's wonky eye. (And off the top of my head I'd say Stanley had a mustache.)

Because Amazon knows before you do that you're about to develop a rash. I almost never order from Amazon because we travel and it's really hard to coordinate deliveries. Last year I ordered a chef's knife and paring knife that America's Test Kitchen had recommended. Only after I ordered them I got an email that the chef's knife wasn't actually available. Grrrr. Then when I picked up the paring knife it seemed like a heavy package. Turned out they sent me 12 paring knives and charged me for one. I'd ordered the green one even though I preferred another color because it was like 5 cents cheaper. If I'd known I was getting a lifetime supply, I would have sprung the 5 cents for the color I wanted. 😀 And even though I like things to be right, fuck Amazon. But I don't actually have a lifetime supply of paring knives because as we travel around, I give one to any of my friends we encounter. They're always like, "Uh, thanks?" Thanks for posting that because I went to their website to see how much the Recession Special costs, and it says $6.95 including tax. But someone got chili and cheese on his two dogs, which adds $1 to each dog. So $6.95 (mine) + $6.95 + $2. There's no planet on which that equals to an even dollar amount, and if it did, the closest one rounding up would be $16, not the $17.00 that's on my receipt (with no itemization--surprise surprise), and definitely not the $19.00 that was charged to my card. Those bastards. Oh, and I noticed a "service fee" on my Schlotzsky's receipt the other day. Turns out it's a 3% fee for online orders. I always order in person, but Wednesdays are buy-one get-one free pizza days, and you can't get the deal unless you order online. And I ran into something similar today at Popeye's: if you want to use one of their promo codes, you can't just give/show them the number at the counter any more--you HAVE to order online. Do people just not care whether their food is hot any more? I don't really care with fried chicken, but cold chicken tenders aren't wonderful. Why in the world is the deal now restricted to people who order online (and are more likely to bitch on Yelp that their food was cold!)?

Years ago they had a roast beef sandwich I liked a lot but they took it off the menu, and I hadn't found any other sandwich I really liked. I was bummed because I liked the format. But Mr. Outlier and I passed by one the other day and ducked in and they had a chicken banh mi that actually sounded appealing, so we got one of those and macaroni and cheese. It cost $25 including tax. We got two "recession specials" at Gray's Papaya on Broadway at 72nd. I have the receipt and it shows $17, but on my statement it says $19. Hmm. ($17 for some delicious but not-special hot dogs and "tropical drink" is bad enough; $19 really hurts.) This is why I try so hard to always get a receipt (fortunately, they usually just roll their eyes and do what the old lady asks). A year or so ago Mr. Outlier got a loaner tool at Autozone--you have to pay some amount for the tool, but they refund it if you bring it back. He took it back and they gave him a receipt but it didn't show up on the credit card, and it took a couple of months to get the credit issued. He also returned some anti-freeze to a Caterpillar place (bought a gallon too much) and he got a receipt for that, too, but the credit didn't actually go through until he pestered them about it after the credit still hadn't shown up after like six weeks. Maybe $100 total for these mistakes, but it's the principle. I like for things to be correct. And yes, I will dispute the $19 vs. $17 with my credit card company. I wonder if Gray's Papaya will claim I left a $2 tip, but I know I didn't. (I never tip anywhere unless the employees are paid the sub-minimum "tipped" wage, like at table-service restaurants.) I don't want to think they do this on the regular because they assume most people won't notice. Maybe they do it because it all gets prepared right in front of you so they can't spit in the food of non-tippers, and have to get back at them some other way. 😀

I have a friend who got remarried at about that age. The invitation specified no gifts, and said if you bring a gift, they'll make you take home a pallet of their junk.

With my health insurance policy, I get free memberships to various gyms. One of them is Lifetime Fitness, which is a swanky chain. Memberships at Lifetime's cheapest locations are almost $200/month. I joined a Lifetime location because it's free for me (I haven't actually gone yet), and am now on their email list. Apparently paying a lot in dues doesn't mean members will be better behaved than at a random YMCA or $10/month Planet Fitness, if this email is any indication: To protect your experience, you can expect we will monitor for these issues and take action. Of course, we also welcome you to notify a team member if you witness these behaviors: -Failure to place used towels in bins and improper disposal of trash. -Taking photos/video with other members in the background or in prohibited areas. -Occupying fitness equipment without using it. -Not allowing others to work in on strength equipment between sets. -Not sharing pool lap lanes during peak demand periods. -Neglecting to clean or replace equipment after use, including re-racking weights and dumbbells. -Rendering the sauna inoperable by pouring liquid on the heater/coals or placing paper towels on sensors. -Exercising in the sauna or steam room or playing loud music in these areas. -Engaging in loud, disruptive behavior or groups loitering in specific areas, such as the locker room or fitness floor. -Disregarding the personal space boundaries of others. -Proper swimsuit attire in all whirlpools. -Failing to cover up or wear appropriate attire in all areas of the club, especially the locker room, steam room, pool, whirlpool and fitness floor. -Bringing large workout bags onto the fitness floor, posing a tripping/safety hazard. -Shaving in the sauna, steam room or hot tub. -Vaping in the locker room or any other area of the club. -Unauthorized parking in reserved spaces. In my own experience, every locker room I've been in prohibits at least cameras, and most prohibit phone use of any kind. And yet there's almost always somebody doing some creepy full-length selfie pose in a mirror, sticking her lips and butt out at the same time, or talking on the phone. What part of "no cell phone use" is unclear? As they said on Seinfeld, "People. They're the worst."

Good heavens. I hope you're never an eyewitness to a crime and called on to identify the perpetrator. Or if you are, you really should let both the prosecution and defense know you didn't notice Giamatti's eye.

I was on the fence, and read this and decided to see it. I didn't love it. I just went back to see which of his previous movies I'd seen, and it was only The Lobster and The Favourite. I'd avoided his others because of subject matter. I liked The Favourite very much, and The Lobster not so much. I'd put Poor Things between those two. The Lobster was too weird for my taste, and Poor Things never quite grabbed me as much as I thought it should, but at least I more or less understood it. I'm definitely not unhappy that I spent the time and money to see it. Actually, all of that was worth it just for the blue dress she was wearing in the opening scene on the bridge. God that thing was beautiful, and the big screen in the theater showed every detail. I'm a little disappointed that the trailer made me think she really was going to punch the baby, but she didn't. She acted on pretty much every other impulse, but not that one. Bummer.

Like when he helped the kid who wet the bed. That gave me a glimpse into his character.

Success! I worked my way back to the end of the episode, without going too far and not being able to back up, and when it went to the little box format, I hit the UP button several times real fast on my Roku remote and couldn't see anything being highlighted different but then hit OK and I got full-screen credits, with the two scenes! Then I reloaded the episode and worked my way to the end without going too far and not being able to back up and did it again without hitting UP repeatedly, and I think all I have to do is hit OK with the Roku remote to get the credits to be full screen. I think I never did that before because I assumed it would start whatever show it was wanting me to watch next and I knew I didn't want that. And now I know that Chase made permanent his tattoo of Piglet with boobs. A million thanks to you. (One nice thing about having whatever is streaming going through the DVR is as a sanity check. You know how you think, "Didn't I just see a box for whatever" or "How did I get to this screen"--I can replay what all happened on the screen by going back in the cache on the DVR, and tell Mr. Outlier, See? See? This is what happened. And speaking of the Roku remote, its up and down volume buttons are glacial. And when the volume is going up and down the bar thing showing the slowly creeping volume level blocks the captions. I realized I have a remote for the TV, so I keep that around for its speedy volume control, the Roku remote for navigating the streaming stuff, and a remote for the DVR to use to skip commercials. Argh.

I'm caching up The White Lotus right now, but when I get a chance, I'll go back to that episode of The Other Two and see if your suggestion works. However, another annoyance--it's hard for me to tell what's highlighted on the screen. I invariably click "watch S2 Ep3" when I mean to go down further to all the episodes and pick one from there. And when there are a bunch of shows in boxes, it's really hard for me to tell which one is highlighted, and if you hit "right" on the remote and whatever is on the end of the row is highlighted, nothing happens--it doesn't go down to the first one in the next row, for example. All I see is nothing happening while I hit "right" over and over. Aah, 1.3 speed. My best friend ever. Since I have to use captions even on regular speed, 1.3 works great for me. I record Mary Tyler Moore over the air every afternoon if I'm in area that has the Catchy Comedy channel. That way I have several episodes available to watch on 1.3 in about 15 minutes, while whatever I'm intending to watch caches up enough that I can skip commercials. One of my favorite shows ever is The Kids Are Alright, set before people had TVs with remote controls. There was a fantastic scene where they had one of the younger boys standing next to the TV and they would command him "change" "change" to turn the channel dial. I'm not sure what we have now is better.

It's a standalone Magnavox DVR that's pretty much just like a VCR, but it records to a hard drive and not to tapes. And it caches six hours of whatever is being fed into it, unlike a VCR. But like a VCR, I have to do everything manually on it, like set timers, tell it the source (Roku vs. over-the-air, for example), etc. Mr. Outlier, an electrical engineer (which I think is the minimum qualifications necessary to figure out how to just watch fucking TV these days), set this up. To watch The Gilded Age, I did it regular--an HDMI cable goes from the Roku box to the TV. So I got it in all its glory (considering I have kind of a crappy TV, though). But he made a second path from the Roku box to the TV, into which he inserted the DVR, using a converter that makes the signal into whatever old-fashioned coax cables use. The picture quality of anything that goes through the DVR is therefore vastly worse than HD, but it's fine for TV shows. In fact, standard definition is what I had before, hanging on to my standard definition DirecTV receiver until it died and they were forcing an HD receiver on me, but my satellite dish doesn't work with HD (I'm in an RV). So I'm used to crappy images, although WHY WHY WHY do shows, especially TV shows intended to be shown not on giant movie theater screens, INSIST on having major plot points in fucking text messages that can be impossible to read? Even in HD, I struggle. Do you WANT people to understand or even be able to enjoy your damn show or not?? Also, unrelated, but I hate hate hate the way the streaming companies interrupt the credits by autoplaying the next episode. I watch Family Affair on Roku (I think, and they do that but there's an option to click something to stay on the credits. But the other day I watched the final episode of The Other Two on Max (which I pay for), and a few seconds into the credits that image went into a little box in the upper left corner, and the rest of the screen was full of other things they were desperate for me to click on. But there was more SHOW during the credits--two more scenes. And I use captions and they don't appear if the image is in the little box. So there was a teeny little image in the corner, with dialogue I was struggling to understand. Of course I wasn't watching it live, so I thought maybe I could have clicked on something to get the credits back, and I tried like five different times watching the end live (a struggle in itself, since once it goes up into the little corner Max doesn't let you rewind, so multiple times I had to load that episode, FF to near the end, and let it play, fail to prevent the image from going up in the corner, and trying the whole process again (and again) because maybe I was missing where it says how to do it). But nope, there was no way for me to see the credits of the show I was watching, just because they're so damn desperate for us to click on something else, anything else. Anything as long as we don't disengage. This is the sort of manipulation that just crawls all over me, and it's why I'll pay $1.99/month for Max for six months to catch up on stuff I've wanted to see, but pay full fare, never mind open-ended full fare? Not a chance in hell.

I think Texas's motto should be "Land o' Homophones." They have the classic pin/pen, berry/bury, cot/caught, etc. But they go where other regions don't, like with hunter and hundred: The deer hunner was excited to find a hunner dollar bill lying there right on the ground. Pronounced exactly the same. I remember a guy named Denny, from up north, joining a group of us Texans. He introduced himself as Denny, and we were all, "Hi, Dinny." So he says, "No, it's Denny," so we were all, oh, Danny! "No, Denny." ::confusion:: "Never mind." In my household, horse came out as "harse," much to my sister's humiliation when she heard herself do it at the elite college she went to as a bumpkin. And my family knew someone named Corky and my mom was saying Corky this and Corky that, and my boyfriend at the time later asked, "Why does she keep talking about car keys?"

I have 10 people blocked. The vast majority are based strictly on form. If all they ever post is memes, out. If Their Posts Look Like This, out. If they have too many emojis, out. If they have a consistent way of phrasing things that annoys me, out. I do extremely little blocking based on content. I can handle offensive opinions. I Can't Handle Stupid Capitalization That Serves Only To Annoy. I feel more assaulted by that than any opinion. Reddit's forums on things like insurance questions can be really helpful for getting a general lay of the land (but NEVER a final word). People tend not to be too assholey in those discussions. I don't know why they couldn't let the discussions about Marvel movies or Star Wars or whatever just be the shitholes they'd become, and let the rest of us have our need-no-moderation discussions about the vast majority of other movies on the planet. Reddit has some movie discussions but I am simply unable to navigate my way around that place, so I just do without. It makes me sad.

Good point. Maybe it was over Central Park only on East 61st Street, and normal in the rest of the city. Subtle, but pointed.