Posted on 12/17/2002 7:32:02 AM PST by HairOfTheDog
Come on! Come in! -if you would like to have some seedcakes and a pint and relax a while. (If it is a special occasion, we still have a few bottles of the old wineyards left!)
Our first thread ( New Zealander builds Hobbit hole ) reached 4,100 posts, and we thought that was big. Our second thread (The New Hobbit Hole ) held us for over 48,000 posts, and we loved it dearly. We talked about moving to a new thread for the last 38,000 posts, but we are really slow to muster! Finally, the time has come. Tomorrow (at 12:01 am, to be precise!) The Two Towers comes out, and we start a new chapter.
Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for Naval ship construction, repair and refurbishing. And storage of mothballed and historical ships.
We just got through watching "K-19 The Widowmaker" with the kids. Turns out, the producers of the movie used an actual Juliet class Soviet sub that they found in dry dock in FL and fixed her up to make her seaworthy. They didn't want to do CG for the shots of the boat out on the sea, so they worked to make her seaworthy, then sailed her to Halifax Nova Scotia. There they added material to enlarge the conning tower and add almost 100 feet to her length to make her look like the real K-19. Then they had to make sure the whole thing was seaworthy. It was really impressive. The movie was pretty good; very moving because it was a true story. SSQ and I had seen a special about the sub and her crew last year just before the movie was released.
For Pete's sake, DON'T encourage him!!
Promises to be a quiet day here.... I love quiet days. :)
A friend and colleague is delivering her baby today...right about now. She's a very modern gal and decided the day she wanted to deliver (two weeks early). I've kept my opinions to myself, namely that mother nature has been doing this childbirth thing for a while now and knows what she's doing and mucking with her schedule is risky. But regardless, my friend and the baby are on my mind and in my prayers. Extra prayers can never hurt, especially since her first child has a slew of health problems.
The sysadmin down there took to calling everyone who sent our gal emails. When I got the call, I tormented him with "Golly, you're going to have to call a lot of people. She's involved in all kinds of programs and probably has hundreds of contacts. Gee, it'll be a lot of work to look up the numbers of the people who email her but aren't in our system. Boy, how are you going to contact those British officers..." It got a little over the top and we had a lot of fun with it. But bottom line is that Ms. Switchboard is getting a new email. ;)
So....what are we doing today?
How about some fun with a survey? This is a school project for the son of a colleague who is a freshman at a local public high school. It's bias and composition are very, very instructive about what is being taught there. The family are good Christians whom I think the world of, and I know the slant to the questions didn't come from his upbringing.
So...I'm curious about your response to the survey and if you think it's worthy of it's own thread.
1st Amendment Survey
1) Can state mandated laws requiring any type of religious practice violate the terms of the 1st Amendment and undermine America’s foundation of having no established religion? (yes) (no)
2) Could having regulated/optional prayer in schools have a negative outcome on student performance? (yes) (no)
3) Could the issue of prayer in schools be solved by the government giving vouchers to students who want to go to a religious school opposed to a private one? (yes) (no)
4) Would making prayer in schools optional cause a backfire from surrounding communities? (yes) (no)
5) Do activists for state regulated school prayer have a justifiable argument to override the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that public schools would not incorporate a prayer? (yes) (no)
6) Does having a state regulated prayer in public schools violate the 1st amendment? (yes) (no)
Normally I don't like playing games where you fight real-time, I'm a turn-based fuddy-duddy, but I like C&C type games, and this one fits nicely.
I'm still mostly a player of the old Rogue style games (I play variants of Hack, mostly, but I think Moria is another), but I do like AoE. The computer guys really gang up on you, no? I ended up switching it to just one computer guy on easy, as I recall, until I got better. Last time I played was with my brother...we played against four computer teams, but ganged up on them and completely trounced them. Ahhh...
I love that game. Nothing quite as satisfying as sacking the neighbors.
Well...the paid one is at the college for mainly a student audience, and it's just me and one brother with a group of other staff members and some community members rather than anything solo or our own group, so I doubt it. But the benefit concert we're playing for MIGHT be a good publicity thing. Of course, at this point we don't even officially have a group / band...so I don't know! Might be a push in the right direction, in any case.
I stayed up wayyyyy too late watching DUers and FReepers duke it out on that website. It was my first experience with folks from DU and I found it more amusing than anything else. Not much in the way of logical argument...just "you guys are mean and Bush is dumb and you guys are dumb, too" repeated in various ways all evening. I went over to their site for the first time, too. More of the same, plus a lot of threads about the "stolen" election. Do they REALLY think it was the Florida Supreme Court's decision that lost them the election? Not to mention it's kinda over at this point...
In any case, it was, as I said, rather amusing.
But I'm still bummed about the Chicks' comment. Especially outside the country.
Uh-oh. Watch out for Jimmy Cagney...he gets really cranky when he gets a headache.
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