Posts by GrimJack

The factoid 'you lose 95% of your body heat through your head' is meaningless w/o context - the context is that if you are properly dressed for the cold but don't have a hat, then you lose 95% of your body heat through your head. Strip buck-nekkid and step into the cold and you only lose about 7% through your head.

I'd rather have had her as POTUS, but that wasn't an option

I keep wondering about this comment of yours - just what are the reasons you believe Palin would make a good president? I just found this quote of hers:

Sarah Palin was on the O’Reilly Factor last night talking about the National Day of Prayer, but she went a bit further than her usual party line of calling America a Christian nation. “I think we should keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant,” she said. “They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple.”

What in the world could support this 'American Taliban' as president or any actual position of authority in the American body politic.

Do you ever try to make sense? (just kidding, that was actually artfully convoluted)

My score was:

Your score is 0. You are not a conspiracy theorist. Most likely your watch Fox News or CNN, and feel you are an informed citizen. You did not even answer all the questions, showing you have little time for conspiracy theories.

I do not watch cable news.

I don't know - maybe keeping the thread open and active would be a sign of respect?!

We stocked up on pasta when it was less costly (there was this thing about corn a couple years ago - the price was so high that the hard, winter wheat could not compete and a lot of acreage was shifted from semolina) so we have radiatore, linguini, spaghetti, elbow, bowtie and more around. We never did learn to use the angel hair and/or other 'fragile' pastas.

My favorite sauce is carbonara - but then bacon makes most things taste better.

We stocked up on pasta when it was less costly (there was this thing about corn a couple years ago - the price was so high that the hard, winter wheat could not compete and a lot of acreage was shifted from semolina) so we have radiatore, linguini, spaghetti, elbow, bowtie and more around. We never did learn to use the angel hair and/or other 'fragile' pastas.

My favorite sauce is carbonara - but then bacon makes most things taste better.

Okay, this time I am really over Lady GaGa

LaRou is actually able to sing

His comments are what kept me coming back - hoping he would have more to say; he kept me honest and I tried to return the favor.

I could not follow your link so here is one of mine. The scam was that this really rich guy wanted to short CDOs but did not want to risk his money so he convinced Goldman Sachs to create some CDOs that were guaranteed to fail so he could short them while GS was selling them at an exorbitant rate so everyone made money (except the people who bought them and the American taxpayers).

Shorting is the process of selling stuff you don't own at today's high rate and buying them at next week's low prices.

You folks don't understand much about what historical researchers want. The individual tweets by the various twits are not much but the aggregate information will be of enormous value if for no other reason but to see how rumors move and mutate. All the different tags and now geo-tagging has been added. Historians really like being able to read local information from diaries, notes and such that are written about daily life rather than just about courts or legislatures.

This info is not for current research, this is for your great grandkids and research into "what were we thinking".

I will miss his wit - I was wondering why our exchanges had become so infrequent. There are arguments and discussions left hanging.

My condolences to his family and friends.

Listening to classic songs now.

Is this classic enough?

Actually lately I haven't been able to get enough of Alicia Keys (both musically and visually ;)

and India.Arie

okay, okay

sock it to me

It may be rice wine to you but it is sake to me

Kool but old skool stuff
music of the spheres

I got this here:

I am listening to Barry White - You're the First, the Last, My Everything. What a beautiful voice...

I remember when Barry did a Simpson episode (the one with the snake bashing).

WOW! AIA- you are beginning to become a parody of yourself; you posted pointless reputation message that, at first, I took to be 'shared joke' - then remembered that we don't share much of anything.

I just finished a crockpot lamb stew, mmmm!

Thanks for the suggestion!
One question: How do you make a toast out of it? Bake a side of the bread, turn it around and then throw in the egg?

Butter both sides of the bread, use a glass to take the center out, toss the bread into a hot pan and break an egg into the hole in the bread. The bread will toast while the egg is cooking.

Not at all wrong. Anyone surviving under socialist health"care" can tell you that.

It's only socialist nutters like you who believe it works.

See, all you do is blather and insult; you have no concept of rational discourse.

Why do you even bother posting this bilge? I know that you have, in the past, complained about being insulted for you views but all I know of your views are that anyone who does not believe what you believe is a socialist. You keep tossing that word around until it has no meaning so why don't you post something of substance so we know what you mean when you use the word and what your beliefs are.

Can you define yourself w/o making negative reference to others? What do you believe?

My heart operation was private insurance through my employer, but I now continue to be treated twice a year with the same doctor under Medicare and my military retirement health benefits. I just saw him a few weeks ago, had another stress test, MRI and two dimensional echocardigram. Its quite interesting -- they take a series of pictures of the heart then put them together to create a movie which shows the heart beating and the blood flowing. That's how the doctor can easily spot blockages.

Is that the test where you get scanned then they shoot you up with some low-level nukes then take pictures again? I think I recently had one of those - they burned me a cd of my heart (I also got a cd of my brain MRI - not near as pretty as what you see on tv, it is grey-scale so pretty meaningless to me). I ask all the techs for pictures now; I have a couple of spine shots and my ankles on X-ray - I am thinking of turning them into t-shirts.

I just took a look at your link, not the same thing at all. My test used technetium-99m and involved treadmill stress tests. Similarly, the imaging is mostly 2-d slices also built up into a 3-d image

Does anyone really care? (No apologies here)

Self-referential

Compare that to what we receive here in USA today. I had heart surgery five years ago. Took a stress test then was immediately admitted to the hospital and was on the operating table within an hour. My wife is going to have her gallbladder removed, only two months from the time she visited the doctor. Need an MRI? I get them whenever I want, all I have to do is take the doctor's prescription to the MRI place and I get one right away, meaning wait in the waiting area for 10-15 minutes or so.

Was this private insurance coverage or Medicare?

And for that $5000+ plus hospital and doctors' fees the Canadian has to wait half a year or more to get an MRI or CAT scan performed, 2-3 years for major surgery, etc. etc..

This is just wrong; propaganda with no basis in fact or study; mostly, based on single incidents that are completely misrepresented. If you have a study to back your statement, please link to it.

Do not forget that most restaurants above the 'Denny's' level usually have team systems with a captain, 2 or 3 waiters, and the general support person (often called the bus boy). The captain will take the order and work with the customer on wines and the different courses while the rest of the team do their best to keep the customer completely oblivious of their presence - delivering food, removing plates, refilling water, etc; ideally they do not intrude.

Public socialized health care doesn't mean free health care. Here is a good article, I think, about Canadian health care system.

I started reading that article and got to the paragraph that said

The first thing to realize is that free public medicine isn't really free. What the consumer doesn't pay, the taxpayer does, and with a vengeance. Public health expenditures in Quebec amount to 29 per cent of the provincial government budget. One-fifth of the revenues come from a wage tax of 3.22 per cent charged to employers and the rest comes from general taxes at the provincial and federal levels. It costs $1,200 per year in taxes for each Quebec citizen to have access to the public health system. This means that the average two-child family pays close to $5,000 per year in public health insurance. This is much more expensive than the most comprehensive private health insurance plan.

So I did a quick google of health insurance plans and came up with this:YEARLY PREMIUMS FOR FAMILY HEALTH COVERAGE RISE TO $12,680 IN 2008, UP 5 PERCENT, AS MANY WORKERS ALSO FACE HIGHER DEDUCTIBLES. I saw no reason to read any further because I could not believe anything else he wrote. As a single individual buying COBRA insurance, I was paying $490 a month so I have no idea where he came up with $5,000 a year as 'more expensive'. It certainly seems to imply that he did not do any research.

I …

Tonight we are having chili-garlic shrimp with some fresh-baked middle-eastern bread.

And my standard bourbon and coke

We call it hari-kari shrimp - it is hot!

1 egg sunny side up (we call it a "horse eye"), toast no butter, coffee.

Ever try a 'one-eyed Jack'? It is a slice of bread with the center cut out and an egg fried in it. Get toast and egg at the same time.

Isn't BeNeLux a vacuum cleaner? :icon_twisted:

Yeah, it just smokes whatever it is that Brit twit is selling that has only one ball.

Canada's delays and issues are too numerous for me to mention.

BeNeLux? Got anything of comparable size to the US that ain't subsidized by US? Maybe JT can (or has?) given us a close-up view?

More of bull pucky. The old 'too numerous to mention' crap means nothing because it says nothing. You are just blowing smoke again Dave.

I was just going to jump in and say:

Isn't that a city in China?

But....

Our state tax is 8.5%, so Leslie and I just double the tax for the tip.

sure it's taxed. But if you leave cash on the table, do you really expect it all to be declared?
Of course not, the bulk of it will not be declared.

Tipping is subject to income taxes based on employer reporting; it is not a simple subject wrt tax rules but is anything?

wow... self-righteous much? :icon_rolleyes:

speaking of "Leaders" and being incapable of "independent thought" do you get your rants from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, or do you just synthesize Fox News talking points in general?

heh,heh - pretty good one.

leftists never understand (or choose to understand, which amounts to the same thing) anything they don't like (or rather, that their Leaders tell them they don't like, as they're incapable of independent thought).
It's the only possible way that their utter lack of common sense can be explained.

Sometimes I wish the rightists could at least put a couple thoughts together without immediately spreading insults. This is especially true from someone who just whinged about

but if you're getting insults and harassment spewed at you

You spew and spew and spew and sometimes I wonder if you can actually rub two thoughts together to produce a coherent argument without once offering insult.

Oh, now Dave let's go to the start of the conversation shall we; I asked:

They also talk about all the failed 'socialist' medical care in other countries but don't seem to be able to come up with any actual country names.
I was hoping you would understand what 'countries' means. (Yeah, it was a typo, the 2 letters are somewhat close to each other).

Canada is more an example of the success of socialized medicine along with Sweden, Germany, BeNeLux, etc.

When those things that come around again every generation are coming around for the third time.

I remember in the 50s that one of the 'kids these days' complaints was that they were wearing their pants so low they needed a full Brazilian.

That's a business transaction between you, the insurer, and the doctor.

No it is not a business contract - unless you consider that the insurer can at any time abrogate its contract standard business transactions.

It's not a legal diktat that you can't be treated because you're too old, young, rich, poor, have the wrong colour of skin, or simply because some cabinet member's mistress needed a new private jet and now the healthcare budget is expended.

This paragraph is just completely absurdist diatribe that has no pertinence to the discussion.

we do indeed, but if you're getting insults and harassment spewed at you at every turn it's hard to keep participating.
When it turns to actual verifiable threats it's downright dangerous (hasn't happened to me yet, but to some people I've met).

Sorry to hear that you are being harassed; harassment from either side of the spectrum is reprehensible; on the other hand you are not particularly adverse to 'spewing insults' in your posts.

No. "They" don't. And again with the ad hominem attacks -- I don't think you're capable of having a discussion without them.

Sorry Dave but if you are going to throw around such phrases, you might try to understand what the actual phrase means

There are plenty of examples from Canada and the NHS as well as the VA, and doesn't Medicare or Medicaid lead the US in denying claims?

I understand that Canada is a country (though I don't see how you can point to it as failed) but I see no country name NHS, BA nor Medicare/Medicaid. Talk about your weird inability to have a logical discussion, wow.

The answer to increased cost (which is inevitable in any socialist healthcare system, ALL countries having one have this) is to 1) increase taxes and 2) reduce service.
Needed procedures don't get performed because quota are met, people are left to suffer and die because there aren't enough beds and doctors to treat them or simply because the required procedure isn't allowed to be performed on them or medication can't be prescribed because it's not on some list of things that are "approved" for their condition.

This has nearly killed both my parents at least once, until they got their private extension policy to the government dictated service to pay for life saving medication that would otherwise have been denied them.
Expect a mass increase in medical errors as doctors can't spend the time and means required to do a proper job (and simply no longer care, as it's a loosing battle against the system anyway).

I've observed this first hand, and heard about it from many others in several countries with government run healthcare systems.

And we all know that medical insurance industry has never denied anyone any medical procedure or medication nor allowed anyone to die untreated.

Who is paying now for all those folks that cannot pay their health bill?

The whiners never seem to think about this question, do they?

They also talk about all the failed 'socialist' medical care in other countries but don't seem to be able to come up with any actual country names.

Well, things just got hotter for the War Department - India is weaponizing the Bhut Jolokia, Ghost Pepper from Changpool, India which has a rating of 1 million Scoville units. Bell peppers are a 1, Tobasco is 2,140, cayenne is around 30 - 50,000; think about that 1 mega-scoville rating and then know that Capsaicin, the pure extract of chili pepper, is rated 16 mega-scoville units.

Here is a tribute to all Boners who try to make the world a worse place

It won't. 85% of Americans (last I heard, may be higher) don't like that thing.
And then there was the utterly undemocratic way it was pushed through congress which pisses even more people off.

All in all a great show of communist style government.

So, somehow it is okay when Republicans do these things but undemocratic when Democrats do it? 85%? Nah, not even close and the truly fun thing is that when the polls ask about the specific things in the bill, 75% of the Americans are all for them.

And how do you people actually come up with that 'communist' crap? You are so whack you can't even use the language with any actual sense of reality. I think it is your ODS that is getting so bad you have lost control what little sense you have/had.

You need to start your own thread; this one is marked 'solved'.

I wear t-shirts called 'crack-spackle' - they are 3 inches longer than normal t-shirts so there is no 'plumber's crack'.

Didn't any of you actually look at my avatar - how disappointing.