Misson

Mary thinks I ought to post that fact that I will have tools and instruments and possibly the character of a pirate-captured surgeon so that this can be worked into the scenario. (If someone knows enough about pretend surgery to guide me through an actual process, it might work. As I told Mary, I am not a doctor, I only fail to play one on TV. I will have some groovy doctoring equipment for dressing field wounds, though. So if anyone wants to play doctor... Or I could bring one of my skeletons along and let HIM be the patient. I can't hurt that one any more than's already been done to 'im. ) Seriously, though, if anyone can figure a way to fit me in, I'll participate. These tools are too expensive not to get some value out of them.

I watched this (I get more movie ideas from this game...) and Thorton was pretty good - he sort of stole the movie. I wonder how historically accurate his portrayal really was? Perkeo - Google says you're right, so it's up to you to post another quote for us to guess.

Now I'm worried about what your extra credit assignement for your Psychology class during PiP is going to be......... I never did report back on the results of that statistics thing I did here. (Does anyone even remember that?) Fortunately, I don't need extra credit in this class. I've never had such an easy grader. I got 103% on the first test.

So, I'll be in Key West for PiP when my Psychology class is meeting and taking a test. I explained this to my instructor and he said he would email me the test and I could email the answers back. He said, "If you were here, you'd ace it anyhow." Why not just give me an 'A' and skip the emailing part? (Engineering and business classes were never like this...)

It almost sounds like something from the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I don't think it is...

I think Long Tom makes a lot of sense (in several posts, not just that last one). When a relationship ends, end it. As Jill pointed out, even if you could re-enter the relationship (not that you seem to want to...or so you say), you'd be right back where you were. It ended for a reason, leave it go and spend your relationship energy on what you have.

Yeah, if it's a loss of some kind, you first have to get through the grieving process. Someone told me that around when my divorce was going on and I didn't believe them, but it pretty much happened like they said. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grief ) If you want to actively counteract such things, you need to take action. Do something you really enjoy so you can immerse yourself in it and see that you can get out of the funk of the past and accomplish something. Of course, that really only works once your through the grieving process from my experience. We seem to be built that way.

Ah. Duchess enjoys flying too. Have you ever seen Flyboys? I suspect you would enjoy it. I also recommend the book Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. You can often pick it up for cheap in used bookstores.

Is that from 2001? "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that."

Maybe they rode the bomb down by using Google to find the quote and don't want to take credit 'cuz they, er, "cheated"?

Even The Man With the Golden Gun and Moonraker?

Pushing tin? Aircraft maintenance? Plane psychotherapist? Heh...a little of each...and then some.. well except the mechanic part.... What's your experience of that? What led you to it? (It seems like an interesting career choice to me.)

Ok, got mine. I suspect I will be easy to guess...

Helen Keller had a sense of touch. She had input and thus sensed her environment. This is how Sullivan taught her to sign, in fact - placing objects in her hand and forming the sign equivalent with Keller's own hands. There is no way to communicate with someone who has no sensation of their environment. (Well, no non-mystical -and thus provable- way.) Songs and poems. I confess, I listen primarily to instrumental music and sometimes make fun of poetry outright. I'm a fan of prose - reading and writing it. (As you may have noticed. ) So I have nothing to offer here...maybe I should have started responding in the Mastering Things thread.

Pushing tin? Aircraft maintenance? Plane psychotherapist?

Yes, this is true. People who study creativity talk about the "Eureka!" moment when someone just instantaneously comes up with a terrific solution to a a problem or new idea, but that discounts all the knowledge acquisition and skills preparation required to have that moment. It's sort of a curious thing to me, because it basically means that we can't be creative without socialization. This is what I propose "knowledge" basically is - organized socialization of a creature into its world or, more properly stated, its environment. Without the environment (external stimulus) there can be no knowledge. What we call "knowledge" is just understanding how things work in the environment in which we exist. If we were to be instantaneously placed into an entirely different environment that shared little or nothing with our current environment, we would find we had no knowledge whatsoever and, depending on how much the environment shared with the one we previously existed, might find we were as ignorant and helpless as a newborn! (Amazing, isn't it? Of course, trying to imagine such an environment is curiously limited by our "knowledge." It just gets worse from here, folks.) I was just reading something that proposed that all internal (or self) knowledge is just applying socialized "external-world" concepts to our internal-world mental processes. Without socialization, you wouldn't have the necessary framework upon which to base your judgments or realizations about yourself - which are the core of of self-realization. The author further proposes that if we had a completely different external environment, our self-knowledge would probably take a completely different form and we would not be who we are. (Mind boggling, isn't it?) I don't know if that's true or not (still thinking on it), but even if it isn't completely true, there is definitely an aspect of truth. You have to have something to start with and the environment supplies that through input (or socialization). Without that, how could you understand anything, even yourself? Or, as Foghorn Leghorn put it: "Two nothins is nothin'! That's math a matics, son. You can argue with me, but ya' can't argue with figures! Two half nothins is a whole nothin!"

Do you see dead people? (I don't know what the link is there, but I am frequently astounded at what I come up with. Observing the observer observing...) Jenny, you mentioned in another thread that you needed FBI clearance for you job and I wondered what your job was. So I dug up this thread. And I still don't know.

Hey, I just read they finished principle photography on Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. I didn't even know they had a script, much less that they were filming it. Cool.

People on the rebound... *shudder* Give 'em a wide berth.

Is it one of those battery powered ones? I have an idea to make a scarecrow next year with his mid-section ripped open revealing straw and burlap organs and bones. I was thinking about using one of those battery-powered beating hearts (modified for 120 AC) painted to look like burlap. It's an old prop, but it works. (I first used one back in '91 for a dinner scene.)

I'll have to put it on my short list. It's funny, I associate Eco's work with Carlos Castaneda's stuff (although they are about completely different things). I think I read a Castaneda book around the same time and noticed that it had all the faults I've named for Pendulum. It also had the additional fault of not making much sense at all to me. At least I could sense a logical thread in Eco's book. I can't even tell you which Castaneda book it was because I donated it to the library shortly after finishing it.

I'm with Patrick. It always puzzles me why people argue for higher prices and (usually) less variety and selection. (I have some good friends that do this all the time.) There is a way to succeed in retail, but it's not by competing against generic store rivals. That's just setting yourself up for defeat. You need to have niche variety that people want which large stores don't supply, a more appealing environment (which isn't that hard to create, really) and/or better service. I'll bet there are examples in this in everyone's local community. The world changes and if a store owner doesn't want to change with it...well, stores go in and out of business every day. Blaming Wal~Mart and it's compatriots is trying to hold the water back by putting your finger in one of the ever-increasing holes in the dam. Commerce is not sentimental. As for DVDs, I buy all of mine (when I bother to buy them at all - most of the time I just get them from Netflix or the local library) from the "Used and New" section of good ol' Amazon. I should have a standing account there, I'm such a regular customer. POTCII: Dead Man's Mess - $3.89 from the lowest seller. (No case, but I have jewel cases for just such an emergency.) Who needs stores for DVDs, CDs or books?

I saw three or four Jack Sparrows last night (of about 60-100 kids at a friend's house where I always spend Hallowse'en). There were a lot of princesses, a notable number of hippies, several Power Rangers and a bunch of Star Wars characters (including a 6 - 9 month old baby in a Yoda costume. ) I wore my new brown tricorn and some of the kids recognized me as being a pirate. My friend thought I looked more like an 18th century revolutionist -- and I'd have to agree with him.) "This happens to be me native soil and I like it. In fact, I love it. And no Hessian oppression is gonna put me off'n it." -Bugs Bunny

I picked up Pendulum and did manage to get through it, but thought it was a very difficult book to read and enjoy. I found it very dense and yet somewhat scattered in it's approach. However, I saw In the Name of the Rose with the ever-reliable Connery and really enjoyed it. Perhaps I should give Umberto another shot...

What do you think of Ecco?