Can’t help but get amused again, looking at some hairstyle references. Sick enough of mine right now that I may have to go ahead and brave a salon after Christmas, y’all. Scary.
Anyway, I was kinda impressed at how basically every haircut I had between like 1986 and 1996 (when I grew it out for a while) would now get filed as “androgynous”. Probably before that too, but I wasn’t picking the styles then. Seeing some similar to ones that I did choose way back when. “Shortish (optional: vaguely punky to varying degrees)” is apparently enough these days.
Reminded of some post that’s kept going around, with people commenting on Tasha Yar’s lesbian do. When it’s really more “fairly conservative late ‘80s teacher”. Not that those things are mutually exclusive, but yeah, a little jarring. Some interesting expectation shifts in the meantime.
Well, I say that Mr. C also pretty much grew up on The Far Side, and that may help explain some things with both of us.
In case Translate isn’t working for anyone on Wikipedia:
There are a bunch of those around here somewhere. I’m pretty sure this particular issue is one of them.
But yeah, seems like the series may have been pretty popular there, if a Far Side themed translated compilation series ran for that long.
(There also seem to be more than a few mixed translated newspaper comics series going. He also has more than a few Far Side books in English, which everybody there has to learn standard. But, I would imagine that the translated complilations are particularly handy for kids and other people who aren’t as fluent. He got started on those, and kept buying several series.)
Anyway, I had to get amused at the whole LARSON! title choice. Certainly a recognizable name, and maybe they added the enthusiastic punctuation to try and avoid confusion with some other Larson 😅
I forgot to add earlier, with the missing California-only exhaust thing helping fail that car on inspection?
We were on the other side of the country, and you couldn’t have bought the car new with a smog pump equipped without going to California to do it. It wasn’t required in other states when the car was new, and somebody had just removed it and reconnected the system without it at some point. Probably for improved performance, considering the state of the art at that point in time. It wasn’t like there was a leaking gap in the exhaust system or anything, and to my understanding that should have been totally fine in our state. Where it never came with that emissions device.
Which apparently didn’t matter to the guy at New Garage doing the inspection, since it originally came with one installed 🙄 At least he was thorough looking things over!
Just a not very relevant nitpicky point, but I was reminded of that little extra aggravation too.
I was not too happy with the guy at New Garage, and wouldn’t want him inspecting my car again even now that I could afford a newer/better one. But, at least he was not a creepy suspected child predator that I ever heard of 😬
The good news: I finally figured out why the doorbell has been going off randomly multiple times a day and driving me up the wall. I forgot that Mr. C had accidentally unplugged the receiver Sunday, and that apparently messed up the pairing. Who knows what it was picking up on before I unplugged it, but it wasn’t our button unit which wasn’t ringing it at all when I tested. (Or any of the close neighbors’ bells, or I would have seen somebody outside another door at some point.)
The not so great news: Fixing that will have to wait until after Mr. C gets home after some office Christmas dinner thing. I’m hoping just pairing them again will do the trick, without having to yank the battery out of the button unit. (Which the manual wasn’t helping me get open…) But, that receiver is far enough from the front door that I need to either grow Plastic Man’s arms, or get someone else to push one of the buttons within the 10 second pairing window 😬
(I purposely got this new doorbell unit with multiple receivers, so I could put another one in the bedroom. That one kept picking up interference and going off inappropriately even with it paired properly, with no obvious way of choosing a different frequency. Which was aggravating enough. Now hoping we can at least get Receiver #1 up and running again, without it doing the same thing 😧)
The “after some office Christmas dinner thing” turned into “…and also an extended pub crawl afterwards with some people from work”. (On a Tuesday 🙄)
I kinda figured the delay was something like that, but I was starting to get a little impatient.
But anyway, he finally got home and that did fix the problem.
The good news: I finally figured out why the doorbell has been going off randomly multiple times a day and driving me up the wall. I forgot that Mr. C had accidentally unplugged the receiver Sunday, and that apparently messed up the pairing. Who knows what it was picking up on before I unplugged it, but it wasn’t our button unit which wasn’t ringing it at all when I tested. (Or any of the close neighbors’ bells, or I would have seen somebody outside another door at some point.)
The not so great news: Fixing that will have to wait until after Mr. C gets home after some office Christmas dinner thing. I’m hoping just pairing them again will do the trick, without having to yank the battery out of the button unit. (Which the manual wasn’t helping me get open…) But, that receiver is far enough from the front door that I need to either grow Plastic Man’s arms, or get someone else to push one of the buttons within the 10 second pairing window 😬
(I purposely got this new doorbell unit with multiple receivers, so I could put another one in the bedroom. That one kept picking up interference and going off inappropriately even with it paired properly, with no obvious way of choosing a different frequency. Which was aggravating enough. Now hoping we can at least get Receiver #1 up and running again, without it doing the same thing 😧)
Now I’m almost sorry you can’t get hold of the salt-risen bread here, even if it’s really not celiac-friendly. At least without somehow getting a starter and doing a lot of baking experimentation I really don’t have the spoons for.
(I didn’t know it was specifically an Appalachian thing, but that would certainly explain why nobody else has ever heard of the stuff. It’s basically a sourdough but not relying on yeast for leavening, just some bacteria. Kind of similar to what makes the bubbles in Swiss cheese.)
My Papaw’s aunt who looked after my mom while her parents were working was apparently extra fond of salt-risen bread with the classic farm soured cream (cultured) butter, kept nice and spreadable at room temperature.
That keeps better than the sweet cream butter now standard in the US, and up to a certain point it will just keep developing a stronger vaguely cheesy cultured taste and smell. (Besides just starting out with a stronger buttery taste. I do really like that the standard commercial stuff is soured here.)
So, of course her husband had to keep ribbing her about that “cat shit bread with axle grease”. Which my mom found hilarious as a kid. Didn’t put either one of us off the bread, at least.
Salt-rising bread is denser, with a closer grain, than yeast-leavened bread,[5] and has a distinctive taste and odor.[4] The pungent odor of the fermenting starter has been described as similar to “very ripe cheese”.[2]
Or, possibly, cat poop 🙄
Bremer says when an edition of John Winthrop’s journal from the 1600s was prepared for printing about 200 years later, “the editors left out certain parts because they thought it was too explicit for the audience of the late 19th century.”…
Bremer explains that the Puritans got a bad rap at a time when American society was reacting negatively toward Victorian morality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Puritans were supposedly responsible for the roots of the temperance movement, prudish attitudes toward sexuality, and a generally conservative societal outlook. The Puritan stereotype was created because Americans were “looking for people to blame for everything that they didn’t like,” he explains, thus deeming them responsible for the stuffy attitudes of the early 1900s.
So much of what people still persist in describing as “puritanical” social attitudes do sound a lot more Victorian. At least if you’ve learned much about historical Puritanism.
I am unfortunately reminded again of that one Norwegian dude some years back who tried to hit on me by going on about how much the old Norse liked big strong women! Complete with arm squeezes and his retellings of a couple of parts of sagas.
It at least had the benefit of novelty. Never heard anything quite like that before or again.
He was pretty drunk at the time, but I still had to wonder how this approach had worked out for him in the past. (Because it didn’t sound like the first try.) Obviously not great at taking hints, but geez.
Funnier in retrospect. At the time I had to get amused, but the situation was also extra awkward because he was one of a few people over at our house and I couldn’t just get away without making a scene. Maybe less hesitant to do that now, but hey.
I don’t remember if that time the guy was living in London yet, or if it was on a work trip. In any case, the extent of his relationship with Mr. C seemed to be “vaguely friendly Fellow Scandawegian Tech Person”.
Anyway, he was living in London when I made the mistake of going along when they met up at a pub a while after that. So, he acted low-boundary creepy most of the evening–before inviting us both to stay over at his new place sometime soon!
With eyebrow-waggling levels of subtlety. I think he did actually say something about putting on some music and seeing what happened 🙄
Mr. C seemed to take that invitation at platonic face value a lot more than I did. Let’s just put it that way. I was just glad that was framed as a future invitation, and he wasn’t trying to get us over there right then. Awkward enough as it was.
There’s no real problem with asking, I suppose. Even if people have not indicated any obvious interest whatsoever up to that point.
But, there are ways and then there are ways. That guy’s ways were low-boundary creepy enough in general that I have just avoided him since then.
I am unfortunately reminded again of that one Norwegian dude some years back who tried to hit on me by going on about how much the old Norse liked big strong women! Complete with arm squeezes and his retellings of a couple of parts of sagas.
It at least had the benefit of novelty. Never heard anything quite like that before or again.
He was pretty drunk at the time, but I still had to wonder how this approach had worked out for him in the past. (Because it didn’t sound like the first try.) Obviously not great at taking hints, but geez.
Funnier in retrospect. At the time I had to get amused, but the situation was also extra awkward because he was one of a few people over at our house and I couldn’t just get away without making a scene. Maybe less hesitant to do that now, but hey.
Reminded again of one story from our drama teacher in high school, which I thought was pretty funny then and appreciate in some different ways now.
She grew up in Baltimore, and got a rather startling introduction to some cultural differences not that long after moving to a small town in Southwest Virginia to take a teaching job.
One day, she looked out and saw some guy just casually walking down the street, carrying a shotgun. And…nobody else seemed to notice or care? There was certainly no screaming or sirens. It was very weird.
At least she did take a cue from the total lack of alarm from some neighbors who were out in their yard, and didn’t call the cops herself. But, you couldn’t have paid her to go out there for a while, just in case.
Definitely not in Baltimore anymore!
Yeah, my automatic assumption in that case would be that he was probably taking it to show a friend, or something like that. Barely worth noticing unless the person is acting squirrelly. Just not something I would have been that surprised to see.
But yeah, very different experiences and expectations in Hillbillyland compared to most urban areas and some other parts of the country.
Not too surprisingly, I’ve ended up disconcerted in the other direction on multiple occasions since moving to Greater London.
Including when my uncle and his family came for a visit when I’d been here a couple of years.
While they were doing touristy stuff, they went to the London Eye. And everyone involved got a bit of a surprise when they went through security to get in, and my baby cousin (probably 15 at that point) pulled out a totally standard pocket knife to leave there if they insisted.
I think that may have even been the same model (with under a 4" blade). Like I said, a very standard type of pocket knife back home. I was mostly surprised he was the only one of the family carrying one that day, because they’re handy tools and that’s just kinda what you do, but yeah. (And honestly I still usually do, aware that someone might eventually turn it into an issue. ETA: Though that’s less likely to happen, not being a young man.)
The security guy just couldn’t believe that (a) a kid had this Big Scary Knife at all, and (b) his crazy American family didn’t seem at all concerned about it. In the end, they didn’t totally confiscate the knife, but he did get some stern warnings to leave it wherever they were staying from now on. Which I think he actually did, because jfc.
They were amused afterwards, to say the least. I wasn’t along that day, but I can imagine.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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