Another one

I was home sick one day, my sister was at school, the phone rings and I answered it. It was an automated message, something about the school being aware of a school shooting threat and that there was no danger at this time.

It was really light on details, I called my mom who worked at another school in the district, she had no clue what was up. I couldn’t really find much information, it kind of trickled out over the next couple of days.

A lot of parents went to pick their kids up early, my mom texted my sister to see if she wanted to be picked up she didn’t really care, enough kids left early that classes were basically put on hold and they were just goofing off and watching movies and such. There were a bunch of cops and news crews showing up at the school so she figured she was probably about as safe there as anywhere that day.

Anyway, eventually the details started coming out, there was a kid who was planning a shooting, it was still a long way off if it was ever going to happen at all, but he tried to recruit another kid, and that kid turned him in.

The would-be shooter didn’t actually go to our school, he was homeschooled. His parents had pulled him out because of bullying a few years prior. He was a few years younger than me, so I don’t think I was ever in the same school as him, I think he would have been a freshman when I was a senior.

Now my school didn’t exactly have a major bullying issue, it happened a bit, like it does in every school, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who had it especially bad.

Now this kid was fat, he may have been almost as wide as he was tall, and I’m sure he got plenty of bullying for that, but this is America, we had plenty of kids in our school who were just as fat, and again, no major bullying problems. Hell, I am/was pretty fat myself, and a bit of a weirdo to boot, and I was actually fairly popular in high school.

But apparently the real reason this guy was bullied was because he was just a real racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole. If anyone deserved to be bullied, it was probably him. He basically was a bully himself, he was just too pathetic for anyone to take him seriously.

And yes, it does sound a lot like I’m describing Eric Cartman.

He did have one gun (that his parents apparently bought him) but no ammo, as well as a bunch of mall ninja swords and such, and a bunch of airsoft and pellet guns. Of course the local police made a big deal of showing off his “arsenal” when they confiscated it. I almost wanted to see his fat ass trying to lug all of that shit into school with him. I doubt he would have made it up the front stairs of the building before getting winded.

But it doesn’t end there.

Remember the kid who he tried to recruit who turned him in? He of course got all the congratulations from the mayor and police chief and such that you’d expect. And then he tried to break into the would-be shooters house to steal his Xbox.

And at some point during the various trials and such, the would-be shooters mom got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food while he was in juvie.

A friend of mine, T, lent another guy, E, some money. Not a huge amount, but fairly significant for a high schooler, something like $50

E decides he’s not gonna pay T back, so like mature, responsible high school dudes, they decide they’re going to meet up at the park after school and fight over this.

T is not a big dude, and doesn’t really expect to win this fight, so he goes and gets his friend, M, to come along, not to participate, just to watch over things and make sure he doesn’t get killed. M is well equipped for this job being over 6ft tall and built like a brick shithouse. Nice dude.

E, apparently, also had some friends coming along with this, and they show up after school dressed like some kind of school shooters, wearing fatigues and trench coats and shit

And more importantly, sporting weapons- sharpened screwdrivers, a baseball bat, etc.

M does his job, and takes those from them, throws them in his backpack, with a jacket or something covering the protruding end of the bat.

Of course word of this whole shit show gets around, the school got wind of it, and had called the police.

So as this whole group is walking off of school grounds, cops show up and start rounding them up.

M of course gets nabbed being the one with baseball bat sticking out of his bag, as do E and his friends.

T, however, lucks the fuck out, because his older cousin happens to be driving by just as the cops are showing up, and gets him into her car, assuring the police that he was with her and not involved in this. Miraculously none of the other parties rat him out, so while the police managed to piece together that there was one other person involved, they never figured out who he was.

M gets sent of to an alternative school for a year, and is allowed to return after that on the condition that he joins the football team. Our football team did not win a single game our senior year.

The others get various similar punishments- suspensions, alternative schools, etc.

One of E’s friends, on being informed by the cops that this was over $50, flipped out a little, possibly flipped a table, and sat down and calmly told the cops that he had been misinformed, and that E had told him it was over significantly more than that.

The really wild part though, is how the high school rumor mill exaggerated this, there was a version of the story I heard where M attacked a cop with a samurai and tried to escape on a motorcycle.

It should also be noted that these guys all actually remained on relatively good terms after this.

And these were, overall, pretty decent, even boring, nerds otherwise. A couple of them have some of the usual sorts of childhood trauma and such (except for T, who has some serious, grade-a childhood trauma, I still see him regularly, he had some rough patches along the way but is in a really good place these days) none of them really ever ended up in any significant trouble again after that.

And the area we lived in was a pretty safe, boring, middle class suburban area. I’m pretty well qualified to say that because I now work at the county 911 center, so I get to see what kind of shit is happening where, and that area of our county has nothing going on. If any one of the towns there has a dozen serious incidents (not counting stuff like noise complaints, traffic stops, parking issues, minor traffic accidents, routine medical emergencies and fire issues, etc) in a week, that’s probably going to be one of the busiest weeks of their year.

Even the UK has started flexing authoritarian lately

It’s wild to me that people think this is a new thing for the UK

Maybe it’s the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I remember seeing memes about there being CCTV Camera everywhere there going back probably about 20 years

It’s not exactly a secret that they don’t have the same sort of rights to free speech as the US

A whole house of their parliament is specifically reserved for essentially nepo-babies

Their gun and knife laws are restrictive enough that I’m pretty sure even the most ardent anti-gun nut could probably find something that they think is at least a little excessive if they really looked into it.

Every few years I hear about them trying some new way to restrict who can access what on the Internet.

I haven’t heard it much in a while, maybe because of brexit, but for a while it sure as hell seemed to be like a lot of people from the UK were talking about people from countries like Poland in much the same way Americans talk about Mexicans.

It’s not exactly an accident that books like 1984 and v for vendetta were written by British authors and set there. Or that punk became so big there.

Look, I’m in the US, I don’t have a whole lot of room to be throwing stones here. A lot of my criticism applies to stuff going on here too. But it certainly doesn’t surprise me that the UK is skewing pretty fashy these days. That writing has been on the wall for a long time.

Not sure if it was possibly edited, but OP did specify sequel or remake

The big Lebowski kind of has a sequel in The Jesus Rolls

It’s a popular theory that a lot of Tarantino movies take place in the same universe, and other of his movies are movies that exist in that universe, like Kill Bill may be the pilot that Mia Wallace starred in. I don’t believe any of that is outright confirmed, but again kind of a sequel if you buy into that theory.

There was a Napoleon dynamite cartoon series made at one point if you want to count that

Forest Gump was based on a book, and there was a sequel book made- Gump & Co, and I never read it myself but I’ve been told that the sequel book is actually more of a sequel to the movie than to the original book

By most measures, I’m a pretty stereotypically “manly” guy, and you can say pretty much the same thing about most of my male friends.

I’ve never really felt as though a woman being present in any way impeded anything we were doing. If anything it improved things in a “the more the merrier” kind of way. As long as they’re ok with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, having to pee outside, etc. anyone is welcome to participate in our bullshit.

But I do feel like we can get in the way of women bonding and venting it the ways they need and want to. The old “it’s not about the nail” kind of thing.

And of course, there’s a whole lot of guys who are just dangerous toxic assholes who probably shouldn’t be allowed to be around women in general, but trying to figure out which ones can and can’t be trusted is a tall order and it’s a lot easier to just say “women only.”

So I don’t really see much point in men-only spaces, but I do see it for women-only spaces.

There’s some exceptions, sure, like men who have certain kinds of trauma that involve women may need some safe places to work that out. And it’s not that women can’t also be dangerous, toxic assholes, but in terms of numbers, severity, and actual risk, things are kind of on a different level than with men, so it’s easier to deal with that on a case-by-case basis.

I tend to reply “Thank, I grew it myself”

Another one I’ve gotten a lot of good mileage out of

I once joked to my wife that avocados need to get better prizes because I always seem to get the same one- a little wooden ball.

Now, anytime I’m in the kitchen preparing something with avocados, I’ll let out an audible groan of frustration.

Which always prompts my wife to ask, usually from the other room “What’s wrong?”

To which I always reply “Another wooden ball”

Always good for a groan and some eye rolls from the wife. She never seems to see it coming.

So you know how geese fly in that V-formation to reduce air resistance?

You know how sometimes the one arm of the “V” is longer than the other?

You know why that is?

Best told while you’re just out shooting the shit walking around outside when you can point out some geese acting like you’re just pointing out another fun nature fact.

Most shoes aren’t really built to be resoled these days, they’re out there and if they can be they usually make it a selling point of that shoe, they’re usually a good bit pricier than other comparable shoes as well, probably gonna be about $250usd at the low end

Coincidentally I actually just sent my hiking boots out to be resoled. I have a pair of Danners, they cost probably around $450 new, and I’m getting their full recrafting service, so new heel counter, shank, resole, goretex lining, and if my shoe had any broken hardware that’d get replaced too, cost I think $260. Just a simple resole would be cheaper of course, and if you have a decent local cobbler they could probably beat that price.

I’ve had them about 4 years, and at this point the sole is pretty well-worn-out but the uppers are still in pretty good shape. They’ve been worn pretty close to daily, and have some hard miles on them.

I definitely feel that I’ve gotten my money’s worth, before these I probably got new boots every 2 years or so and usually spent about $200 on a pair, so if these last me another 4 years (and I don’t have any reason to think they won’t, but there’s no guarantee what misadventures my boots might go through in the next 4 years) I’ll have even come out a bit ahead on them vs buying cheaper boots.

These are hiking boots, so I’m not exactly keeping them mirror-polished or anything, so care is pretty minimal, clean them with saddle soap once in a while, wipe them down with mink oil or whatever your preferred leather conditioner/waterproofing stuff is a couple times a year (I generally try to do at least twice a year, maybe a bit more frequently if they’re getting a lot of hard use- getting really dirty, worn in the winter or near the ocean where they may be getting salty, etc.)

Also not shilling specifically for Danners, I’ve been very happy with them so far, but there’s plenty of other brands out there that are as good or better, and of course everyone has their personal preference. My next pair may or may not be danners, I do have my eye on some boots from higher-end manufacturers if my budget allows.

I’m sure it’s more complex than I’m making it out to be, but each gas in the air has its own freezing/melting boiling/condensation/sublimation points, so I’d imagine you could just kind of take advantage of that

Basically just cool it down to x temperature at y pressure, and all of the carbon dioxide should be solid, the oxygen a liquid and the nitrogen still a gas, and they’ve all sort of separated themselves out. Fish out the dry ice, siphon off the oxygen, and you’re left with nitrogen.

Might need to do a couple more rounds of that on each of those to account for other gases in the mix depending on how pure you need it to be, but in theory I imagine it could be that simple (again in practice I’m sure there’s probably a lot of details I’m missing)

I don’t really cross dress, but I have a pair of heels kicking around for a Halloween costume (Monty Python Lumberjack) and I occasionally trot that costume back out.

I basically went to payless (back when that existed, I guess the modern equivalent in probably mystery Amazon brand shoes) and found a pair that more-or-less fit. Staff was actually pretty helpful, apparently around October a lot of guys wandered into payless looking for heels for a Halloween costume. They pointed me right to where the biggest heels could be found.

I think getting a cheap pair was the right move, because they pretty quickly stretched out to better accommodate my feet. I have fairly wide feet even by male standards, and actually found them to be reasonably comfortable all things considered after they broke in (which didn’t take long, those shoes definitely weren’t designed for the stresses of a 200-whatever pound man moshing in them at a Halloween concert)

The harder part was trying to find a bra that even remotely fit my frame.

It does freeze well, so that’s a good option. Normally I do that, but in this case i actually pulled the shoulder out of my freezer trying to free up some space in there so I kind of didn’t want to fill it right back up.

If you’ve done a whole shoulder on a rotisserie I feel like you’ll appreciate this idea too- I’ve been to a couple parties and done it once myself where we roasted a whole lamb over a fire. I don’t have any pictures handy but look up “lamb al asador” to get an idea of what the setup looked like. If nothing else it’s a hell of a centerpiece to have for a party.

Just as a heads-up, unless you’re cooking for a lot of people or really like leftovers, you may want to look for a smaller cut than a whole shoulder because it is a lot of meat. After feeding my party guests (it wasn’t a huge party, but) and sending most of them home with leftovers, I still had enough left over to have it for lunch every day for the next week.

Yeah, I will admit I dropped the ball on that recently for my new years party. I bought a big thing of pre-sliced deli provolone to keep it simple because I was keeping things low-effort, and it did the job but I really wanted something sharper with it.

Even with some lackluster cheese though people still raved about it.

It was basically a whole day of cooking on paper, but there was maybe about 15 minutes of actual hands-on cooking and prep time, the rest was just letting the pork do its thing in the crock pot while I did other stuff, like panic-cleaning my house before company arrived.

I’m a Philly guy, everyone knows the cheesesteak, and almost anywhere outside of Philly you’re bound to get something that doesn’t really resemble an authentic cheesesteak. People have a lot of weird ideas about what the default toppings, cheese, types of bread, cuts of meat, etc. are supposed to be.

But a Philly style roast pork/pork italiano is a thing of beauty. It’s actually a little wild to me that it hasn’t caught on with the Instagram recipe crowd because it’s the kind of thing that’s actually pretty well-suited to just throwing stuff in a crock pot or pressure cooker.

Basically just a pork shoulder, the usual Italian spices and seasonings- rosemary, oregano, garlic, maybe some fennel seed, red pepper flakes, salt & pepper (usually pretty heavy on the rosemary)

Ideally give it a quick sear, but that’s sort of optional

Throw it in your crockpot with some cooking liquid, I normally do chicken stock, sometimes wine if I’m feeling fancy, maybe some canned tomatoes, perhaps some sliced or chopped onions

Or do it in an oven, I’m not your supervisor.

And cook until done. Some places slice it, others shred it. Do whatever you like.

Serve on a roll (if you’ve seen Philadelphians arguing over cheesesteaks before, this is basically the same debate you’ve seen before, the roll is important, it needs to be sturdy enough to hold up to a massive pile of meat dripping with jus and grease, but not so hard that you have to worry about it cracking in half or have a hard time taking a bite out of it, long or round rolls are both acceptable)

With some roasted hot peppers (usually long hots) and some sauteed broccoli rabe (or sometimes spinach) and provolone cheese

2-2-3 rotation, 12 hours shifts, 3PM-3AM

So I’m on 2, off 2, on 3 (so work Monday and Tuesday, off Wednesday and Thursday, the work again Friday, Saturday, and Sunday)

Then the next week it flips, so I only work Wednesday and Thursday and I’m off the rest of the week

I think it’s just about the greatest work schedule in the world, only bummer is that our PTO is based off of 8 hour shifts since most of the other employees work that and they didn’t make any special exemption for us. It mostly pretty much averages out since we work less days overall, but it would be nice to have that work out exactly.

Going against the grain here a little, I don’t like required reading in schools.

I really loved reading growing up, always had a book (sometimes more than one) that I was reading, read well above my grade level, chose books that challenged myself, etc.

My high school really pushed reading, lots of classes assigned books for us to read, I think even some of the math classes had novels they were supposed to read. For our homeroom period once a week we had to do mandatory SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) where we had to be reading something, we couldn’t do homework or go see our teachers for help, or anything of the sort, we had to be seated at our desks reading silently. I often was juggling 2 or 3 assigned books along with my other school work, activities, and hobbies, which didn’t really leave me much time for the books that I chose to read for myself.

And the pacing was terrible, we’d often spend weeks on a book, analyzing it to death, doing packets of worksheets, writing reports, doing that accursed “popcorn reading” in class, etc. for books that I could have read in a matter of days if not hours.

I think we spent nearly a month on Of Mice and Men, it’s only around 100 pages, it can be read in an afternoon.

The whole experience really killed my love of reading. I resented a lot of the books I was made to read, and now almost 2 decades later I’ve never quite been able to get back into the same kind of reading habit I used to have.

I’ve made an effort since then to go back and reread some of those assigned books I hated back in school, and the wild thing is that, overall, they were really good books, strong stories, well-written, solid lessons to teach, different points of view to consider, etc. I totally understand why they were assigned reading.

But when I first read them I was just going through the motions, I just wanted to get the damn books out of the way so that I could read what I wanted to read.

And I think the key is to make kids want to seek out those books. Don’t assign them 1984 (for example,) make them want to go out and read 1984 for themselves.

I don’t know what the best way to do that is, but it’s not just telling them to read those books. If anything, it might be telling them not to read them. I can only speak for myself, but I know that personally seeing a display on “banned books” at a book store or library always made me way more interested in those books than any amount of recommendations from friends or reviews online or any other form of marketing.

They never went snooping, my mom occasionally would occasionally come into my room to put clothes away or pick stuff up off the floor or whatever but that was pretty much the extent of it.

She did occasionally do the fairly odd parents “I’m respecting your privacy by knocking but asserting my authority as your parent by coming in anyway” thing, where she’d knock but didn’t really wait for a reply before opening the door or just took any sort of “what?” reply she got as an invitation to continue in, but I think that was more of her being on autopilot than any real intention to barge in on me.

I was, by most measures, a pretty good kid and didn’t really have anything to hide anyway. I think my parents knew that so they never really bothered to snoop.

And on top of that, my grandmother was the queen of all snoop, and my mom hated that when she was growing up so she didn’t want to do that to her own kids.

My grandmother was always the type to just come over uninvited, let herself into the house, and just kind of do whatever the hell she wanted, look at whatever mail we had sitting out on the counter (didn’t open it, but if it was already open it I don’t think she was above reading it) move stuff around, etc.

I remember one time when I was still living at home I was the only one home, it was the middle of the day and I worked nights so I was asleep. She let herself in and was doing who knows what downstairs, and she accidentally bumped the power button on my Xbox, and couldn’t figure out how to turn it back off, so she came into my room and woke me up over it.

No it’s at least 2 chemicals- acetic acid and water.

And quite a few others if we’re talking about something besides distilled white vinegar.