Do people do good, spirited debates anymore? Most of what I see would be more akin to wrestling a pig.

Yeah, that concrete step is the only time I’ve ever been attacked in the street, and I survived!

I fell down concrete steps and rolled into it and came back on my feet relatively unscathed.

I wasn’t paying attention walking along the sidewalk and tripped over a step. I tried to pull my other foot forward to catch myself, and that foot got hung up on the step too.

I ended up doing a forward roll and landed on my feet.

I had been taking karate classes with my kids, but I didn’t know I actually learned anything.

A while later I saw they had put large concrete planters next to the step, so I don’t think I was the only one to trip.

Many years ago I was painting stars on a bedroom ceiling for my oldest’s third birthday. I had been running the ceiling fan in the room for all the other painting to help it dry faster, and it didn’t occur to me that running the fan while I was on a ladder painting stars on the ceiling wasn’t a good idea.

To be fair, I got most of them done before it went bad.

The ceiling fan hit me in the head, and I heard a stadium crowd cheering the home run as I flew off the ladder and landed on my back.

I managed to get a bruise that went around the front of my head. It looked like my skull had flexed.

I decided I had painted enough that day.

https://www.neatorama.com/2019/07/25/When-New-Yorkers-Were-Menaced-By-Banana-Peels/

Every four years Jill Stein emerges from her burrow. If she sees her shadow, it will be four more years of fascism.

I just planted two trays of grass seeds for our guinea pigs.

While waiting for them to sprout over the last few days, I have been quite literally watching the grass grow.

When I saw the sprouts appeared this morning, it was much more exciting than I had been led to believe.

I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the aftermath. A small car was crushed between two large trucks in the left lane of the highway. When I drove by, the crushed car was completely unrecognizable as a car. Just a pile of compacted metal and plastic. You couldn’t even tell what was the front or the back.

When I got to work, I checked the news to see what happened to the driver of the car.

No significant injuries, just some scratches. She laid down across the front seat and slid down under the dashboard and managed to find the one space that wasn’t completely compacted.

Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.

If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.

They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.

Whenever anyone talks about how high interest rates are now, I remember when my wife and I bought our house in 1997. We were pre-approved for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 7.5%, and we were told to take it.

What we were actually told was, "you’ll never see a rate this low again.

Pong.

No certainly not, but I didn’t see it on the list yet.

It’s it too soon to say, “letting Crowdstrike push updates to all your windows workstations and servers”

As you should be!

If you can’t hide evidence before you can be tried as an adult, you deserve what you get.

My wife and I just started watching “Your Honor” on Netflix. In the first episode, the judge’s son kills someone in a hit and run and comes home and tries to wash his bloody clothes. He doesn’t know how to use the washer and ends up flooding the laundry room.

I turned to my wife and said, “that’s why we insisted on teaching the kids to do their own laundry.”

If you’re doing it right, by the time your kids are 18, they should be able to take care of every basic task in the home on their own.

My mom often used two:

“Useless as tits on a bull” (often referencing her husband, my dad)

And also, “shit fire and save matches”, which I never understood to actually have a meaning, it was more like just an exclamation of surprise.

I just had the odd experience of using a manufacturer’s discount card to pick up a medication for my wife. The medication is relatively expensive and seldom covered by insurance.

According to the information on the card, if you have private insurance which covers the medication, the discount card covers the co-pay, so you pay nothing. However, if your insurance doesn’t cover the medication, the discount card covers the cost, and you still pay nothing.

Our insurance didn’t cover the cost, and we didn’t pay anything for the medication.

I don’t understand how that works.

I think it’s important to remember that the USA isn’t a single culture. Things vary dramatically even within a single state to say nothing of differences between states.

In some areas prom is very important. In others, not so much.

Only one of my three kids went to prom (Eastern PA).

Prom in my high school was a relatively big deal. You rented a tux or bought a dress. Some people would rent a limo. The prom was held in some kind of banquet hall with a fairly fancy meal. There’d be a DJ and dancing.

My wife was one year behind me in high school, and we attended FOUR proms (my junior prom, then the next year her junior prom and my senior prom, then the next year I came back for her senior prom).

I think for most people it’s just an opportunity to get dressed up, have a good meal, and dance. If you’re already dating someone, it obviously has more significance, but I had plenty of friends who just took another friend as a date for the prom and others who didn’t go with anyone. However, there was a lot of pressure to be a “couple”, even if you weren’t actually romantically involved with your “date”.

Typically the parents take pictures of the kids in their dresses and tuxedos. From the parents’ point of view, it’s a moment to sort of take note of how your kids are maturing and think about what the future holds for them. Lots of thinking about how old you are ;-)

Often there’s an after party that goes on late into the morning, and for many kids the after party is more important than the prom.

I think social media has had an effect on what prom is, but it also has the effect of distorting what it is to people who only experience it remotely. When you’re seeing the crazy YouTube videos and Instagram posts, you’re not seeing what prom is. You’re seeing a snapshot of what those particular proms are.

the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present.

Perhaps this was a regional thing.

I was born in 1970, but from what my parents have described, dates were not chaperoned in the 50s unless you happened to have particularly strict parents. Like maybe if you were Amish or something.

Here’s the only thing I was able to find online about dating in the 50’s

https://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sombat.html

Came here looking for this.