Ahh, thanks to that song, particularly the line "Jebediah feeds the chickens", my sister and brother (who's name is Jedidiah), found themselves having to explain to my sister's hockey teammates that no, we are not Amish. I guess the fact that we drove a car and that my sister was playing on a guy's hockey team wasn't enough proof for them.
Culturally, that part of the country is quite different whether you've grown up in the Amish community or not. My parents both come from the Lancaster/Lebanon county region in Pennsylvania, my mom's parents move to Florida when she was in highschool, leaving her older married siblings in PA. It's interesting to look at the part of the family who spent their whole life in one of those two counties as compared to the ones who moved away. The pace of life moves at a much slower tempo, the idea of buying your meat and produce at the weekly farm market is still alive and well, and in general their outlook on life hearkens back to an earlier time in American society.
However, the Amish aren't so entirely isolated as you may think, you can't really escape the outside world, at least not anymore. They even retire to Florida like every other person in this country over a certain age does, there's a pretty large Amish community in Sarasota, Florida (not all retirees), a lot of the men work in construction jobs, which pay really well if you're a skilled craftsman. Incidentally, two of the people who went on Amish In The City had ties to Sarasota, one girl used to live there, another guy has been living there for a number of years, and given the quotes his friends gave the Sarasota paper, he definitely didn't have trouble adapting to life outside of the community (one friend was quoted as saying her first question to him when he got back was "who did you hook up with?")--that happens to be why I think the show was a joke, they pretended that the Amish on the show had never seen a city or seen the beach, but then they cast people who were living in a city right on the Gulf Coast of Florida, with beaches that people travel all the way from Europe just to visit.
Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou. I remember visiting my grandparents in Pennsylvania, my grandmother would get really upset with tourists who would talk about wanting to go see the AIM-ISH like they were a tourist attraction.
More entirely on topic, I think it's a good thing that the Amish evaluate technology and its impact on community instead of chasing after every new thing without thinking. There are both negative and positive consequences to technology, but in our culture we are driven only to look at the positive. The case can be made that the Amish methods of farming are much more environmentally friendly, there's less environmental impact farming with horses than tractors, and there have been particularly rainy seasons where the Amish were able to plant their crops much earlier than farmers using tractors because horses don't sink in the mud nearly as much as a tractor. But, that doesn't mean that even in farming, they don't use technology, they're able to get much higher crop yield today than a hundred years ago because they're willing to use high tech fertilizers (the case can be made that they get the best of both worlds that way). It makes perfect sense that they'll allow genetic research, they see how diseases are affecting them, and research on understanding those diseases will benefit their communities and everyone else.
"This quotation is one that comes to my mind a lot, too, and I think it strikes a chord with a lot of guys. I wonder if women ever think this way. Somehow, I doubt it."
I used to think that with sufficient effort, I could put myself into the position where I could go around busting heads, driving cool cars, and saving the world, but then I realized, I have no coordination and that's kind of an important thing for your average superhero. I inherited my dad's math skills, not his athletic ability, so there's no way I'm going to be able to go kung fu on anybody. And therein lies the problem--there's a reason that we're geeks and not jocks.
Plus, I figured out that if you really want the power to change the world, the job to try for isn't superhero, it's either Secretary of State or Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Which is why I want either Condi Rice or Alan Greenspan's job.
The department store that I worked at in college will sometimes offer a different price on the website for the same item, but if the customer comes in with the printout from the website looking to buy it in store, we would adjust the price to what the website was charging. However, if you're wanting something shipped, it's often cheaper to come into the store and have one of the sales people put in the order to ship from the warehouse, because instore warehouse orders are a flat shipping fee (free over a certain amount), while the website is a sliding scale based price of the item--in both cases, the item is shipping from the exact same place.
I knew someone who worked as a desk clerk at a hotel. He said that all hotel prices are negotiable, and if the clerk sees you pulling up in an expensive car you're going to get quoted a price from the high end of the scale, but if you have a bad car they'll quote you a lower price. Moral is, if you have a nice car, park where they can't see it and walk in.
I've gotten money knocked off of the supposedly bottom price AAA rate before, because my sister and I were traveling back to school and too tired to go farther, we looked kind of bedraggled, and when they quoted the price, we simply said it was too much and that we needed to look somewhere cheaper, and suddenly we got almost $20 knocked off.
I've spent enough time working in retail to learn that you can't really judge shoppers by their appearance or by how much they may spend on a particular day. I've had really slopply looking people come in and drop boatloads of money without blinking, and well dressed people be the biggest skinflints who make you jump through all kinds of hoops and then walk away with next to nothing. Or, you may have the customers who don't buy a lot at any one time but who come in frequently, and their small purchases every week or so end up netting bigger returns that the customer who may dump a lot of money on one occassion and never come back. Plus, if the you treat the customers who don't spend much just as well as you treat the big spenders, they may very well come back looking for you specifically when they do want to make a major purchase.
Nothing bugs me more than the stores where the clerks ignore me until I walk up to fitting room with a big stack of expensive clothes, at which point they realize that I'm actually intending on buying and start helping me. It also bugs me that all other things being equal, I get better service depending on what handbag I carry. And don't even get me started on computer stores, if one of my brothers is with me when I walk into one, it's like I blend into the surroundings and don't even exist, although I'm the family geek (the Apple store being the single exception, and because I was happy with the experience I direct other people their way).
I always thought that Anakin saved Luke from turning by killing the emperor. If Luke had killed either Vader or the Emperor, he would have turned, but by Vader redeeming himself and preventing Luke from killing (which would have been done in anger), he saved him not only physically but also from turning.
Let's just all thank out lucky stars that Lucas hasn't decided that a good way to make himself richer is to own sports teams. Think of the horrendous mascot possibilities he would think up: "meesa Jar-Jar Raidersa" ugh.
Re:Got my 12:01am Thursday tickets...
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 1
I've got my 12:01am tickets too, I couldn't help it even though I didn't really like Eps 1 or 2. That won't be as bad though as when Ep. 2 came out because even though I didn't go to the midnight showing, it came out while I was in the middle of an incredibly grueling Mayterm statistics class and I went to see the movie on opening day rather than study for my test the next day.
Some years ago, family friends agreed to be interviewed by the local paper for an article about homeschooling. This was back in the day when homeschooling wasn't all that common, so they figured it wouldn't hurt to do an interview to inform the public about it. They do the interview, the reporter comes and takes pictures of the family doing school work, it all seems good, until they get up one Sunday morning, open the paper and see the frontpage headline: "Homeschooling: Is it legal?" with their photograph directly below. Lets just say that they haven't trusted reporters since.
I've had experiences with reporters trying to put words in my mouth, some more harmless than others. The harmless experience would be when I got interviewed before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals and the reporter kept trying to get me to say it was a once in a lifetime experience (which I'm not going to say, because I hope to see them hoist the Cup many times in my lifetime--needless to say, I wasn't quoted in the story). On another occasion, I was about 13 at the time, I was doing a bit of actvism of the sort that I was soon to be arrested for, and it happened to be a very hot day. A reporter from the Orlando Slantinel wanted to get a quote from me about being hot, probably because the story line in all of the papers the next day was that it was child abuse for parents to let their kids be out in the hot Florida sun (nevermind that we teens were the ones who planned the protest, not that the reporters ever bothered to find that out). The reporter came over to me and said something like "whew, it's hot, aren't you burning up?" It wasn't until I thought about it a bit later that I realized that she had been fishing for a quote, I'm just glad that I wasn't particularly hot and she didn't get the quote she wanted. It was pretty clear though that the story had already been written and she just needed convienent quotes to fill in the blank.
This 24 yr old was taken to see Return of the Jedi as a 3 yr old back when it first came out and have been hooked ever since. And, no, it wasn't the Ewoks that hooked me, despite being a 3 yr old girl and all, it was the fighting with light sabres that drew me in.
I thought that Primer was great. However, I was the only one who even remotely knew what was going on--it's not a movie to see with a linguist, a social scientist and an airheaded music major. Before I could even start explaining it to them, I first had to explain the terms that I was using in the explanation and even that didn't work so well.
Ah, but among the completely useless information that I know for no particular reason is that in at least some places, if you are on probation, you can not pay your probation fees in cash--they will only take money orders, despite the fact that it says legal tender for all debts.
Hey, that still doesn't top my one professor for a required class on the cultural heritage of the west--for one test, he gave us a take home essay, with part of the assignment being to write the question. I just came up with a question that I knew I could answer with minimal effort but I knew would look good and spent less than an hour on a 3 page answer and ended up with a solid A.
California is a crazy state in general--things that nobody else considers dangerous (lead crystal, for example), are required to have huge warnings in California.
To be honest though, I'm happier with international border security now than I was pre-9/11. I flew to Spain in the spring of 2001 and I was suprised by the general lack of security on both ends. Though, I am one of those people who can't help but be constantly scanning for security flaws or vunerabilities and thinking of where to head if something were to happen.
"US Immigration law assumes your guilty until you prove yourself innocent. I'm a Canadian living in the US with a Green Card, and went through all their bullshit marraige fraud act stuff (in the US, every marraige to a non-US citizen is fraudulent until you prove otherwise)."
You know why that is? Because there's a big market for people willing to marry for Green Card purposes. Apparently the going rate is $10,000. They wouldn't scrutinize marriages to non-citizens so much if you didn't have such a big underground marriage market.
I don't buy background images, I just transfer pics that I want to my phone with a transfer cable. Right now, I have a lovely picture of me with the Stanley Cup which I look at every time I make a call.
I mean, yeah the phones and the service is cheaper, and everybody uses SMS service, but when I was complaining to my brother about some issue where Cingular screwed up my bill, his response was that my annoyance was nothing compared to the problems he's had with his Indian cellphone provider, and his stories aren's anywhere near the horror stories of some of his friends (one friend had someone pickpocket his phone and then put it back as soon as they discovered what company it was). And, while he would like to go elsewhere, the company he has is the only one in his area that has phones that can be hooked up to a computer to double as a modem.
Point is, while we like to look at other countries and say how great their service is, there are tradeoffs and the people who live there and actually have to use it may not see things the same way as an outsider looking in does.
I understood completely what the article was describing because to some (very much lesser) extent, I "see" math too. When I'm doing arithmetic, for example, the best way I can think to describe it is that it's like fitting together tetris pieces. It's the way that my brain visualizes the abstract concepts behind the numbers. I can sort of describe my thought processes when it comes to arithmetic, but as you get into increasingly complicated higher mathematics, I can still "see" it but there is no way that I can describe it in any way that people who don't think that way can understand.
If you like obscure trivia, rants about bad science in movies, reader haiku, and weekly complaints of inconsistencies in the Star Trek universe mixed in with your football, then Tuesday Morning Quarterback is the football column that every good football loving slashdotter should read.
Or, maybe I'm just singing the praises of his column because I like it that he printed my haiku pointing out that the temperature of space is not actually absolute zero (how many football columns would even get on to that subject in the first place?).
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, thanks to that song, particularly the line "Jebediah feeds the chickens", my sister and brother (who's name is Jedidiah), found themselves having to explain to my sister's hockey teammates that no, we are not Amish. I guess the fact that we drove a car and that my sister was playing on a guy's hockey team wasn't enough proof for them.
Culturally, that part of the country is quite different whether you've grown up in the Amish community or not. My parents both come from the Lancaster/Lebanon county region in Pennsylvania, my mom's parents move to Florida when she was in highschool, leaving her older married siblings in PA. It's interesting to look at the part of the family who spent their whole life in one of those two counties as compared to the ones who moved away. The pace of life moves at a much slower tempo, the idea of buying your meat and produce at the weekly farm market is still alive and well, and in general their outlook on life hearkens back to an earlier time in American society.
However, the Amish aren't so entirely isolated as you may think, you can't really escape the outside world, at least not anymore. They even retire to Florida like every other person in this country over a certain age does, there's a pretty large Amish community in Sarasota, Florida (not all retirees), a lot of the men work in construction jobs, which pay really well if you're a skilled craftsman. Incidentally, two of the people who went on Amish In The City had ties to Sarasota, one girl used to live there, another guy has been living there for a number of years, and given the quotes his friends gave the Sarasota paper, he definitely didn't have trouble adapting to life outside of the community (one friend was quoted as saying her first question to him when he got back was "who did you hook up with?")--that happens to be why I think the show was a joke, they pretended that the Amish on the show had never seen a city or seen the beach, but then they cast people who were living in a city right on the Gulf Coast of Florida, with beaches that people travel all the way from Europe just to visit.
Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou. I remember visiting my grandparents in Pennsylvania, my grandmother would get really upset with tourists who would talk about wanting to go see the AIM-ISH like they were a tourist attraction.
More entirely on topic, I think it's a good thing that the Amish evaluate technology and its impact on community instead of chasing after every new thing without thinking. There are both negative and positive consequences to technology, but in our culture we are driven only to look at the positive. The case can be made that the Amish methods of farming are much more environmentally friendly, there's less environmental impact farming with horses than tractors, and there have been particularly rainy seasons where the Amish were able to plant their crops much earlier than farmers using tractors because horses don't sink in the mud nearly as much as a tractor. But, that doesn't mean that even in farming, they don't use technology, they're able to get much higher crop yield today than a hundred years ago because they're willing to use high tech fertilizers (the case can be made that they get the best of both worlds that way). It makes perfect sense that they'll allow genetic research, they see how diseases are affecting them, and research on understanding those diseases will benefit their communities and everyone else.
"This quotation is one that comes to my mind a lot, too, and I think it strikes a chord with a lot of guys. I wonder if women ever think this way. Somehow, I doubt it."
I used to think that with sufficient effort, I could put myself into the position where I could go around busting heads, driving cool cars, and saving the world, but then I realized, I have no coordination and that's kind of an important thing for your average superhero. I inherited my dad's math skills, not his athletic ability, so there's no way I'm going to be able to go kung fu on anybody. And therein lies the problem--there's a reason that we're geeks and not jocks.
Plus, I figured out that if you really want the power to change the world, the job to try for isn't superhero, it's either Secretary of State or Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Which is why I want either Condi Rice or Alan Greenspan's job.
The department store that I worked at in college will sometimes offer a different price on the website for the same item, but if the customer comes in with the printout from the website looking to buy it in store, we would adjust the price to what the website was charging. However, if you're wanting something shipped, it's often cheaper to come into the store and have one of the sales people put in the order to ship from the warehouse, because instore warehouse orders are a flat shipping fee (free over a certain amount), while the website is a sliding scale based price of the item--in both cases, the item is shipping from the exact same place.
I knew someone who worked as a desk clerk at a hotel. He said that all hotel prices are negotiable, and if the clerk sees you pulling up in an expensive car you're going to get quoted a price from the high end of the scale, but if you have a bad car they'll quote you a lower price. Moral is, if you have a nice car, park where they can't see it and walk in.
I've gotten money knocked off of the supposedly bottom price AAA rate before, because my sister and I were traveling back to school and too tired to go farther, we looked kind of bedraggled, and when they quoted the price, we simply said it was too much and that we needed to look somewhere cheaper, and suddenly we got almost $20 knocked off.
I've spent enough time working in retail to learn that you can't really judge shoppers by their appearance or by how much they may spend on a particular day. I've had really slopply looking people come in and drop boatloads of money without blinking, and well dressed people be the biggest skinflints who make you jump through all kinds of hoops and then walk away with next to nothing. Or, you may have the customers who don't buy a lot at any one time but who come in frequently, and their small purchases every week or so end up netting bigger returns that the customer who may dump a lot of money on one occassion and never come back. Plus, if the you treat the customers who don't spend much just as well as you treat the big spenders, they may very well come back looking for you specifically when they do want to make a major purchase.
Nothing bugs me more than the stores where the clerks ignore me until I walk up to fitting room with a big stack of expensive clothes, at which point they realize that I'm actually intending on buying and start helping me. It also bugs me that all other things being equal, I get better service depending on what handbag I carry. And don't even get me started on computer stores, if one of my brothers is with me when I walk into one, it's like I blend into the surroundings and don't even exist, although I'm the family geek (the Apple store being the single exception, and because I was happy with the experience I direct other people their way).
I always thought that Anakin saved Luke from turning by killing the emperor. If Luke had killed either Vader or the Emperor, he would have turned, but by Vader redeeming himself and preventing Luke from killing (which would have been done in anger), he saved him not only physically but also from turning.
Let's just all thank out lucky stars that Lucas hasn't decided that a good way to make himself richer is to own sports teams. Think of the horrendous mascot possibilities he would think up: "meesa Jar-Jar Raidersa" ugh.
I've got my 12:01am tickets too, I couldn't help it even though I didn't really like Eps 1 or 2. That won't be as bad though as when Ep. 2 came out because even though I didn't go to the midnight showing, it came out while I was in the middle of an incredibly grueling Mayterm statistics class and I went to see the movie on opening day rather than study for my test the next day.
Some years ago, family friends agreed to be interviewed by the local paper for an article about homeschooling. This was back in the day when homeschooling wasn't all that common, so they figured it wouldn't hurt to do an interview to inform the public about it. They do the interview, the reporter comes and takes pictures of the family doing school work, it all seems good, until they get up one Sunday morning, open the paper and see the frontpage headline: "Homeschooling: Is it legal?" with their photograph directly below. Lets just say that they haven't trusted reporters since.
I've had experiences with reporters trying to put words in my mouth, some more harmless than others. The harmless experience would be when I got interviewed before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals and the reporter kept trying to get me to say it was a once in a lifetime experience (which I'm not going to say, because I hope to see them hoist the Cup many times in my lifetime--needless to say, I wasn't quoted in the story). On another occasion, I was about 13 at the time, I was doing a bit of actvism of the sort that I was soon to be arrested for, and it happened to be a very hot day. A reporter from the Orlando Slantinel wanted to get a quote from me about being hot, probably because the story line in all of the papers the next day was that it was child abuse for parents to let their kids be out in the hot Florida sun (nevermind that we teens were the ones who planned the protest, not that the reporters ever bothered to find that out). The reporter came over to me and said something like "whew, it's hot, aren't you burning up?" It wasn't until I thought about it a bit later that I realized that she had been fishing for a quote, I'm just glad that I wasn't particularly hot and she didn't get the quote she wanted. It was pretty clear though that the story had already been written and she just needed convienent quotes to fill in the blank.
This 24 yr old was taken to see Return of the Jedi as a 3 yr old back when it first came out and have been hooked ever since. And, no, it wasn't the Ewoks that hooked me, despite being a 3 yr old girl and all, it was the fighting with light sabres that drew me in.
I thought that Primer was great. However, I was the only one who even remotely knew what was going on--it's not a movie to see with a linguist, a social scientist and an airheaded music major. Before I could even start explaining it to them, I first had to explain the terms that I was using in the explanation and even that didn't work so well.
Ah, but among the completely useless information that I know for no particular reason is that in at least some places, if you are on probation, you can not pay your probation fees in cash--they will only take money orders, despite the fact that it says legal tender for all debts.
No, it's because carrying around a wallet full of $1 bills (vending maching cash) is a lot lighter than carrying around a wallet full of $1 coins.
Hey, that still doesn't top my one professor for a required class on the cultural heritage of the west--for one test, he gave us a take home essay, with part of the assignment being to write the question. I just came up with a question that I knew I could answer with minimal effort but I knew would look good and spent less than an hour on a 3 page answer and ended up with a solid A.
California is a crazy state in general--things that nobody else considers dangerous (lead crystal, for example), are required to have huge warnings in California.
To be honest though, I'm happier with international border security now than I was pre-9/11. I flew to Spain in the spring of 2001 and I was suprised by the general lack of security on both ends. Though, I am one of those people who can't help but be constantly scanning for security flaws or vunerabilities and thinking of where to head if something were to happen.
"US Immigration law assumes your guilty until you prove yourself innocent. I'm a Canadian living in the US with a Green Card, and went through all their bullshit marraige fraud act stuff (in the US, every marraige to a non-US citizen is fraudulent until you prove otherwise)."
You know why that is? Because there's a big market for people willing to marry for Green Card purposes. Apparently the going rate is $10,000. They wouldn't scrutinize marriages to non-citizens so much if you didn't have such a big underground marriage market.
Seriously. Since the enviromentalists got congress to mandate low flow toilets, Americans have been smuggling the normal ones in from Canada.
Oh, we have plenty of retired Canadians down in Florida clogging up the highways, perhaps you'd like to swap?
I don't buy background images, I just transfer pics that I want to my phone with a transfer cable. Right now, I have a lovely picture of me with the Stanley Cup which I look at every time I make a call.
I mean, yeah the phones and the service is cheaper, and everybody uses SMS service, but when I was complaining to my brother about some issue where Cingular screwed up my bill, his response was that my annoyance was nothing compared to the problems he's had with his Indian cellphone provider, and his stories aren's anywhere near the horror stories of some of his friends (one friend had someone pickpocket his phone and then put it back as soon as they discovered what company it was). And, while he would like to go elsewhere, the company he has is the only one in his area that has phones that can be hooked up to a computer to double as a modem.
Point is, while we like to look at other countries and say how great their service is, there are tradeoffs and the people who live there and actually have to use it may not see things the same way as an outsider looking in does.
Yeah, but answer me this? When was the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup? Never lose? Ha! *evil smirk*
I understood completely what the article was describing because to some (very much lesser) extent, I "see" math too. When I'm doing arithmetic, for example, the best way I can think to describe it is that it's like fitting together tetris pieces. It's the way that my brain visualizes the abstract concepts behind the numbers. I can sort of describe my thought processes when it comes to arithmetic, but as you get into increasingly complicated higher mathematics, I can still "see" it but there is no way that I can describe it in any way that people who don't think that way can understand.
If you like obscure trivia, rants about bad science in movies, reader haiku, and weekly complaints of inconsistencies in the Star Trek universe mixed in with your football, then Tuesday Morning Quarterback is the football column that every good football loving slashdotter should read.
Or, maybe I'm just singing the praises of his column because I like it that he printed my haiku pointing out that the temperature of space is not actually absolute zero (how many football columns would even get on to that subject in the first place?).