Just need to vent...

Adjectival phrases carry implied information about timing. Or something like that.

Youse guys should see some of the 'English' I am tasked to disentangle. Or perhaps better not to.

 

My great-great-grandfather was a member of the Johnny Rebel brigades - & he deserted heading to Texas. If he were alive today I think he might just disagree - that the event just a few years ago was worse.

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I read Dover's Anderson's threats. Our venting here pales in comparison.

 

I'm still betting he sent them before his arrest. (In the article I quoted from, it's phrased clearly in the article body. It was just the writer of the summary bullet points who made the time warp.)

 

When I was a wee seaman in the USN I was "invited" to attend the retirement of a base MasterChief who was sleeping peacefully in his bunk (recovering from a hangover) on one quiet December morning when he and a nation were somewhat rudely awakened.
One of the tech reps on a ship I served on was also aboard a sub that morning a little further west.
It was my first peek at PTSD back when they just called it "Crazy Nam Vet."
They might disagree a bit as well.....

 

My older 2006 bmw 330ci is the same way. It's right there at the front. Stupid easy..just vacuum extract though the dip stick, change the cartridge, refill, and done. It's 5 min.

 

A mystery: what determines the "headline" that Google's news aggregator shows for an article?

Here are two articles as shown today in Google's aggregator:



What is it, exactly, that fell last month for the first time since April 2020? Prices? Or inflation?

Turns out it was prices, as written in the headline on the left. Inflation has been falling, near-monotonically, ever since June 2022, thank you very much:



(Monthly inflation rate U.S. 2023 | Statista)

Weird ... if there's anybody in the journo biz who ought to know the difference between P and dP/dt, you'd think it'd be the WSJ guys.

But here it gets interesting: if you click the link to the WSJ article, the headline you see is non-misleading:



So how did Google end up showing the link with a misleading headline that made it sound as if inflation hadn't fallen since 2020? Was that in a previous version of the WSJ article (it does say "updated")? Did Google somehow make it up, to make WSJ look bad? Or is it, somewhere, still in the WSJ article, just not in the visible headline?

Oh wait, it's still there: it's the web page title, buried in the HTML source:





Google must just be picking up the titles from there.

So if you're just skimming aggregator headlines you can see that one and get the notion inflation hasn't been falling for three years, but if you click the article itself, you can't point to the headline and say it's misleading. Yet the misleading bit still is in there, just elsewhere in the page.

Clever, in a vent-worthy sort of way....

 

"North York Chrysler did not respond to an interview request. However, according to its website, "to prevent exports and non-retail purchases, cash sales are restricted to local customers residing within eight [kilometres] of the dealership.""

The customer in this story was trying to buy a used 2021 Jeep. Peeking at the website, it appears the dealership has since 'responded':

"Cash purchases for used vehicles have a $2,200 surcharge (the finance price + $2,200), however cash purchases for new vehicles only have tax and licensing extra – no surcharge. Dealer reserves the right to decline cash purchases (cash, bank draft, certified cheque, credit card payments in excess of $2,000) at its sole and exclusive discretion."

 

The only thing really wrong here is that they didn't have that policy out in public before they wasted everybody's time.

 

"Alabama mom has twins in 1-in-a-million delivery"

The headline is about a mom with more than one uterus.

I wonder if the delivery was the 1-in-a-million part.

Have there even been enough such cases to figure the odds for delivery?

 

"1-in-a-million" birth would suggest something on the order of several per year in the U.S., a hundred-ish worldwide. I thought I saw an earlier article, weeks ago (well before this birth), suggesting that it was less much 'common' than that, but don't have time to re-find it.

The NPR version of this story links to a medical paper, which in turn points to another reference.

 

That link and its subsidiary suggest bicornate uteruses are not extremely rare in humans (they are SOP in some other species, but anyway)... Getting a simulcast of eggs and dual pregnancies carried to term must be more rare.

I suspect that confluence of a mom willing to endure 'media', a reporter on station, and a greenlighting editor is the rarest of all.

==
"One in a million" is only a familiar phrase that invokes less quantification than it seems to. We'd call it lazy on a grumpy day.

 

Speaking of grumpy, see Christmas wishes from Mr. Festivus:

Trump: ‘May they rot in Hell. Merry Christmas’  | The Hill

 

so ..... it's a mutual/ reciprocating greeting?

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I didn’t read this till now. There never was an attack on our Capitol, Constitution, and democracy from within, and even worse, it was for a President. It isn’t about the number of people dying, volume of violence, seceding from the Union, or a foreign country attacking. Someone wanted to stay in power against the founding principles of the country. That’s how I mean it was the worst attack on the USA in it’s history.

 

People who litter.

Today we saw someone throw out a fast-food bag onto the street while they were driving- unfortunately I couldn't get their license number.

I just don't get it- a beautiful planet with everything we need and people so unappreciative or preoccupied with their life they can just litter without a bit of remorsefulness- I don't think I will ever understand that behavior.

 

Armed Black Panthers in the Capitol, 50 years on - Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly: The Newspaper of California State Government and Politics.
Really?

 

Conspicuous flexibility as to what "the Capitol" means.