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ChrisR

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Posts posted by ChrisR

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. Unlike 50 years earlier in London when the Artful Dodger wore a crumpled top hat. He traveled the streets with his associate, Charlie Bates who Dickens referred to as Master Bates.

    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?

  8. 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...

  9. 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!

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