These posts will not join the others about this diversion?

Thread's dead anyway; all the drama has run away.

Now it's up to you and NYB and the other remaining sane people on the ArbCom, if any, to come up with some way of ensuring it never happens again.

Note how the tune is similar to Milky Way. This done a couple years before. And the bemused look probably due to self-awareness of the shirt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B1Q0kUnyFE

....Happy Nuevo Year, Somey/WR, your site is still toppermost of the poppermost.

Tarantino is good at analyzing writing styles to find passages that appear to be written by the same hand. If it's important enough, you can try to recruit him to the job.

You mean that he has "exceptionally well-honed linguistic analytic skills" that enable him to identify sockpuppets?

Where have we heard that one before?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=51930171

Moulton is Slimvirgin??!!! OMG - I knew it all along!!!
B`

Who do you think ghost wrote all her song parodies?

Don't you have some fetish wikis to administer? Maybe someone will come along shortly that needs checkusering.

Oh dear, sorry, did I hurt your feelings?

Feelings, whoa oh oh, feelings, whoa oh oh...

The phrase "silly nonsense" does not appear in the post by Tarantino which the gentleman from Ulster references above. This confuses me.

What, precisely, does "silly nonsense" refer to?

Moreover, he's actually from Ilford.

I can ill afford to spend time on this silly nonsense.

Is there some other silly nonsense more worthy of consideration?

Silly nonsense on the forums,
Silly nonsense made of ticky tacky,
Silly nonsense on the forums,
Silly nonsense all the same.

Silly nonsense, what a shame.

Your last line is better.

More poetic, in what amounts to a list, bound by our foibles.

Silly nonsense on the forums,
Silly nonsense made of ticky tacky,
Silly nonsense on the wikis,
Silly nonsense, what a shame.

(With apologies to Malvina Reynolds.)

I thought Tarantino was from the USA? Didn't Somey say he lived near him?

Some Guy, not Somey, guy. Statistically this happens a lot. Need to brush up on your taxonomy. It's all a matter of soxual preference, or how an individual performer holds the mike.

Title: Insinuation
Artists: Tarantino and Ulsterman (Duet)
Lyrics: Carly Simon and Barsoom Tork Associates
Music: Carly Simon

We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway
And I wonder if I really know you now
Or just chasing after some stranger guy

Insinuation, Insinuation
Is making me sweat
Is keeping me trolling

And I tell you how easy it is to jest with you
And how tight your barbs feel to wound me.
But I rehearsed those words just late last night
When I was thinking about how strange tonight might be

Insinuation, Insinuation
Is making me sweat
Is keeping me baiting

And tomorrow might not be fair weather
I'm no prophet and I don't know Somey's ways
But I'll try to peer into your eyes right now
And stay right here
'Cause these aren't the good old days

CopyClef 2010 Carly Simon and Barsoom Tork Associates
Resurrection Hackware
All wrongs reversed

*cheers and waves a lighter*

I was going to do a song parody here, but looking at the lyrics, they are perfect as is:

Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud's illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

--Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)

With so much drama in the L-B-C
It's kinda hard bein Snoop D-O-double-G
But I, somehow, some way
Keep comin up with funky ass shit like every single day
May I, kick a little something for the G's (yeah)
and, make a few ends as (yeah!) I breeze, through

- Gin and Juice
- lyrics by Snoop Dogg

No, I'm right. It was Somey.

I meant that Ron Livingston was a fellow Iowan, not Tarantino. (That should have been clear enough, but whatever...)

I have no idea where Tarantino is from - he's never even hinted at this, and AFAIK he has also never once logged into WR without using an anonymizing proxy (and I suspect that may be true for the entirety of his internet usage in general). I believe this is because he's smarter than most people, though he could just be more paranoid, or for that matter, maybe he actually is from Iowa and just doesn't want anyone to know.

The only reason *I* get away with not using proxies is because I'm just so ridiculously good-looking. Of course, nobody would know that if I used proxies, would they?

I know exactly how you feel. In fact, when I was looking for a new avatar I had to settle for the second sexiest man alive in order to protect my identity.

There have been rumors floating around regarding tarantino's identity for ages. I've no idea if they're true. I can't be fucked to research the matter as I simply don't care.

Rumor has it, he enjoys chocolate chip cookies with a tall glass of fresh milk.

The rumor I heard was that the chocolate chip cookie rumors are completely unsubstantiated.

Meanwhile, rumors of a global peanut-butter conspiracy continue to spread...

Smooth Operator


Well, I'm afraid I'm out of my theological depth here regarding the concept of transubstantiation. Is Essjay still around? (Or even Ottava, perhaps?)


Kinky.

...er... Chunky.

Observation suggests your knack for willful misconstrual is ~2 standard deviations above the norm, but (thankfully) I have forgotten how to calculate that shit.

What you are saying is that he is almost in the top 2% (~2.2%) of the most miscontrualist people in the ... whatever your universe is. That's assuming that willful miscontsrualism is distributed normally which also implies that there is such a thing as negative miscontrualism... antimisconstrualism or something. More likely, the distribution of willful misconstrualism has a positive support (with 0 being "never misconstrues willfully") and maybe even bounded above by 1 ("always freakin' misconstrues")...hmmm, something like a Beta distribution with beta>1 I think. But for that one I also forgotten how to calculate that shit.

That's the Zappatistas. Zappa always reminded me of Salvador Dali. Different medium but same mind set.

I think the closer character to Tarantino was his earlier avatar, the big Lebowski. Jeff Lebowski is sort of an early 90's version of Sam Spade. And Tarantino is sort of Sam Spade for the late whatever-it-is that they'll call THIS decade. Which come to think of it, I have no idea.*

MR

*You know, I've spent the last 10 years wondering if people were going to say "twenty-ought-something." Or even "twenty-oh-something". They never did. We're still saying "two thousand -this" and "two-thousand that." I don't think I've heard "twenty-ten" yet. Anybody? Do you suppose this "two-thousand" thing will continue through the entire freaking 21st century? Or just until I'm dead?

Misconstrualism is a staple feature of comedy. Those who are better educated on the subject than me can comment on whether Moliere deserves the credit for popularizing the lulz that arise from artful misconstrualism.

We say "twenty-ten", "twenty-eleven", and "twenty-twelve" at the office, very frequently. Often, it's in connection with forward budgeting plans.

What will you say in the year 2525 (if man is still alive)?

Two-thousand-five-hundred-five-and-twenty (blackbirds baked in a pie)

You've just gotta come south of the border. Here I hear "two oh eight", "two oh nine", and yes, even the double-ear-cringing "two oh ten" (which I suppose is so wrong that it's right).

Just two days ago I had someone tell me he needed to fill out a "form 208". It took me a while before I realized he was talking about a form 1040 for 2008.

I've been hearing twenty-oh-something or twenty-aught-something since at least 2008. The one that really amuses me is when I hear twenty-oh-ten (20010?), abbreviated to '010.

What I'm waiting for is the name for this decade. The general consensus seems to be that the 2000-2009 decade is the "oughties" or the "noughties" (mainly the same name that the 1900-1909 decade had), but I've yet to hear a general consensus for the 2010-2019 decade. The 1910-1919 decade never acquired a catchy name, mainly because it was culturally dominated by World War I, so there's no real historical precedent.

In any case, I digress.

We don't divide the early 20th Century by decades at all - maybe we won't for the 21st either.

1900-1914 is generally designated "at the beginning of the century" or "early 20th century"
1914-18 is "during World War I" (although this really only includes 1917-18 for American late-showers)
1919-21 is "immediately after WWI"
and then we are in to the 20's and 30's - although even here the "roaring 20's" are defined by the War, the early 30's by the depression, and the later 30's are "on the eve of WWII". We don't really count decades again until 1950.

Now, if we can have a big war in the next year or two, then we won't have this current dilemma.

You're all bad Nostradami. We only have to work out cute shorthand up until 2012 - after that it'll all be in binary code.

Or simply get a new calender?

We could designate today not, Thursday the twelfth of august the year of our lord 2010, but

Flounderday ,12th of Jimbo-ary, in the ninth year of our wiki

"Brains! Must eat more brains!"

Speaking of brains......

.....does any of this have anything to do with Gerard and his twittering?

Interesting, as that is what I'd naturally expect, by extension with the 1900's (save the first decade). So many the English-speaking world won't be insane in the next decade, and will say "twenty-whatever."

I suppose part of the problem in English is that you could say "nineteen four" and not have it misunderstood, but "twenty-four" can be. I suppose that's why the "two thousand" thing has been with us so much to now. I've been expecting "twenty-ten," as this finally went away as a linguistic problem, but so far have missed it.

I kind of like the "oughties" as it stands for all those things we ought not to have done in the first decade of the 21st century, but did anyway. Elect W. Bush. Go paranoid after 9/11 and construct the Department of Fatherland Security. Invade Iraq needlessly and then quagmire it by firing all the army and officials, who them proceded to become the "insurgency." Admire Enron. Ignore Katrina. Borrow-against and spend on the 2000-2006 housing bubble like there was no tomorrow. Ignore the health care problem until 2010. Ignore illegal immigration until one child in 12 in the country is born to illegals, and 1 child in every 3 in California is on Medicaid.

The early 20th century is sometimes referred to as the "progressive era," that that usually includes the roaring 20's. There was a "lost generation" in Paris after the Great War, but I think they had something to do with Peter Pan and Captain Hook.

The last few decades of the 19th were called the "gilded age." Perhaps what we're in now, could be called the "lead painted age." Certainly it feels like it. It ain't The Diamond Age, despite the internet.

Anybody for The Stupid Decade? We can extend it retroactively a few years to cover most of the dot.com bubble that finally got taken out officially on 9/11, sort of like the "60's" are really 1965-74.

No. Does Gerard and his twittering have anything to do with brains?

Enron was 90's. You're thinking Lehman Brothers and AIG (though dem Europeans were just as bad if not worse).



Who cares? Seeing as these are going to be (or already are) the people paying for your retirement you oughta be thankful. The stupid part is needlessly freakin' out about it.

No, Enron went down at the end of 2001, just a few months later than 9/11. That scandal and creative bookkeeping (that would be a remarkable word if it had two p's!) took their principal accounting firm Arthur Andersen down in 2002, since obviously they didn't do their job (and probably were criminally negligent).

This all connects to the 2008 meltdown, in a way, because it was a warning that was sounded,but missed. Arthur Andersen had been the principal oversight for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When it went down in 2002, the government used it own accounting office the GAO to have a look at these two companies, and didn't like what they found. By 2005, before the housing bubble had burst, this resulted in a big warning about Fannie and Freddie and CDOs and mortgage backed derivatives and big exposure by the government to bad housing debt and overleveraged housing related "securities." Greenspan at the time made the warnings, but at the same time refused to allow the SEC to do anything about it, saying essentially that it was a private business problem (apparently he thought Fannie and Freddie would just listen to him and get totally out of the housing reated securites business). Short story: they didn't.

The story of how the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksely Born, tried to regulate derivatives in the late 1990's and was shot down by Greenspan, Rubin and Summers, and ultimately congress which had its finger in its ears, is told here in this Frontline special you should watch.

Born got her chance to say "I told you so" later. Of course it was too late. Greenspan had been out of office for 4 years and the economy had been in meltdown for two.

Anyway, the rest of it is history. Bear Sterns was saved by the Feds in early 2008, but when Lehman was going down, the Feds decided to let it. Its collapse touched off such a financial storm that the Feds had to bail out AIG and pass TARP as an emergency in late 2008, and off we go.


Excuse me? These people are not going to be paying for my retirement. These people are not even going to pay for their own retirements. These are not engineers, nuclear physicists and heart surgeons who are sneaking across the border. They are, by even their own boosters' words, the poorly-educated people who are willing to do the minimum wage jobs that "nobody else wants to do." Except you don't build a world-class economy on the labor of people like that. But they cost the social services of your country just as much as a Ph.D. polymer chemist from China, here on an H1-B visa. More.

This is the way to destroy an economy. Places like New Zealand don't even let you emigrate if you're over 40, even if you've got a Ph.D. Because you probably won't pay for yourself before you retire. Our situation with the poorly educated from Mexico is that same problem, but in spades.

The stuff about jobs nobody else wants to do, is B.S., also. In this economy, there are plenty of U.S. citizens who'd do any job. I've a friend in the NYC metro area (Flushing) with a masters' degree in history, who can't find work as a secretary or a cook! He passed the state department civil service exam (no mean feat) a few years ago, but as a while male, he's been screwed by affirmative action. And the manual labor and blue collar jobs are all held down by "undocumented" people from Mexico. So it goes.