ChrisR

Just what the heck is a waddock anyway? The Urban Slang dictionary says that when plural it mean a pair of tits. So he's a single tit? The Newfoundland dictionary says it's a football. Not sure which type. And in Donny's <shudder> defense, I'd suggest getting the Parliamentarians' quotes concerning his stance on immigrants and superimposing them on refugee encampment footage from Calais.

That's truly sad to hear. I loved them in their heyday and even made it to their Hell Freezes Over concert in Mountain View. Way too many of their songs sound like they were written for me. His talents will indeed be missed.

Thanks for the recommendation. Just finished it and it was an exceptionally well written story. Kit's characters, the setting, and the tale itself were exceptional Thank goodness the web lives forever!

I enjoyed the story and suddenly I understood the title.

I found this one to be a great tale. We always read stories of good triumphing over evil, but this was more the reality of the law of the jungle. Certainly not slap-happy but a taste of the bitter brew that is sometimes life. Most artfully crafted.

So this side is a circle and the Dark Side (er, Far Side) is a Triangle? Totally tubular!

These aren't the bases you're looking for. These aren't the bases we're looking for.

So if they're landing to take photographs of the dark side of the moon, won't they need to carry a shiteload of flashcubes?

I know I'm a couple of years late to the party but... what a magnificent story! Ninety percent of if takes place between the eardrums of a teenage boy and it's one of the best character studies of the teen brain at work I've ever read. The story is uneven and that's part of the wonder. Sometimes it's happy, sad, dark and grim - just like real life. Sometimes it's downright ridiculous - just like real life. And at times it's even totally unreal - just like real life! It should be mandatory reading in every Adolescent Psychology course. My good fortune was to read it now, after it's finished so I don't have to wait between chapters. Exceptional work. Thank you Cy-Kun.

Sounds like a replay of 1999 when the hotbed of coding was all the retirement homes in Silicon Valley with folks rewriting their COBOL and FORTRAN code in preparation for Y2K,

Great story with a good solid ending! Thanks, Colin.

Bad news, Chris. If you mean to say that it takes a complete idiot to vote for Trump, I'm afraid he's a shoe in.

And be sure to buy your lottery ticket early in the week before all the good numbers are used up.

So y'all feast on roadkill too? Yee Haw!

You realize, Cole, that an omelet that big is going to require a side of bacon from a hog the size of New York, Pennsylvania and the rest of New England combined, and enough Crisco to cover Canada to a depth of six inches, which is okay since they can use it for their dogsleds during the summer month which is scheduled for 15 Jul - 14 Aug next year.

Trump, Kim and Putin will make an extraordinary triumvirate.

Colinian - I just Googled Donald Trump is a space alien and got 1,180,000 hits in 0.41 seconds, so I'm sure the Birthers will call him out. Fact is that Democracy is no guarantee of quality government. Opportunity, yes. Guarantee, no. Hillary seems to be guilty of over a thousand releases of classified information over an unsecure internet system, the same type of thing that got Spec Manning a long sentence in prison. Her biggest competitor (Donald) is a pompous ass who could end up persona non grata with our closest ally. And the rest of the wannabes are completely unimpressive. This is not an election I look forward to.

Every Thursday nite was library night with my dad. I too lived in the scifi section. (Still trying to recall the title of a great book where people were smaller than insects and had to battle spiders and the like!) But my favorite book was in the closed stacks and the librarian had to get it for me: The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish. Must've been some particularly naughty book and I read parts of it many times.

Somebody already stole my word for this tale -- delightful -- so I'll repeat it. Delightful! Wonderfully written.

If all things were equal, Cole, perhaps so, in Georgia or anywhere else. But Graeme makes a good point that more mature students are able to transition better. By creating LGBT schools at the high school level you're forcing kids to make the decision to come out by age 13/14 when they're not as mature nor are they as capable of taking care of themselves if the parental units are opposed. Otherwise they have to stay closeted in the mainstream school and have even fewer resources and friends to survive it. I fear it could actually increase the problems with drugs, homelessness and suicide rather than reduce it.

How does this research group identify LGBT-specific anti-bullying? Must it be a specific student assembly run by the local LGBT support group to qualify? Or is it okay if they have inclusive posters that say "No bullying based on race, creed, color, sex, ethnicity, language, religion, handedness, athletic ability, club membership, clothing style, IQ, handicap - er - I mean disability - whoops - otherwise abled, oh yeah and sexual preference/identity/whathaveyou"?? More than 60 years have passed since Brown v. Board of Education led to desegregation and forced bussing in the US because people thought racial segregation was wrong. For at least 25 years we've been integrating mentally challenged kids into regular classrooms. But now, suddenly, for a different reason, we think segregation is proper. Of course the kids' families need an extra $1100/month to pay for the privilege to be segregated. Seems that every agenda has its own idea of what's best for children and I doubt they're all correct.

Interesting that the Oxford dictionary shows the word 'masturbate' to have entered the English language in the mid-19th century. So is this a chicken/egg question?

In fact a lot of schools used to have these things hanging on the walls as leftovers from the base-12 Babylonians. We were semi introduced to them as math helpers somewhaere along the line but they didn't exactly fit our base-10 world. Nowadays kids don't even know how to use them as time tellers anymore. Damned fool whippersnappers! If only we'd been born with two thumbs per hand...

A lot o' you blokes are already into a new year. Let us know if it'll be okay for us to join or whether we should dig our heels in and stay here! (or is that... stay now?)

One rather seriious issue I've seen on several discussion groups is the amount of personal information gathered by MS10. Last I saw, there were at least 13 separate settings you have to change to maintain privacy, and realistically that's the ones publicly acknowledged. Hopefully there will soon be an app that does it for you, so long as the app doesn't collect any info itself!