All Things in Moderation

Bits & Pieces (Weekend Open Mic)

31 Responses

1. 

   okiegirl, on February 18, 2012 at 4:24 pm said:

   Something to celebrate: I stopped at the store on the way home from work today on a rainy, dark, dreary day, cranky because I had to spend my Saturday working (for which I will not be paid). While checking out, I made a comment on the dreary weather. The cashier looked at me and smiled and said, “Yeah, but we’re on the right side of the dirt so everything’s good.” He made my day with his perspective.

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. 

   okiegirl, on February 18, 2012 at 4:35 pm said:

   qb and mark, thanks to both of you for responding to my question about definition of “birthright citizenship.” I was on the right track, but wanted to make sure I was not blundering into a legal definition I did not understand.

   I need to find the language that is actually included in the OK personhood bill. I think I would just have to LMAO (because I am so opposed to the legislation) if the OK legislature left open the unintended consequence of citizenship accruing to children of illegal immigrants conceived in OK. Talk about between a rock and a hard place!

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. 

   okiegirl, on February 18, 2012 at 6:22 pm said:

   Are we still doing any “bites-and-pieces” recipe posts on Saturday evenings? I don’t have any special recipes I’m dying to post, but I do have a couple of salad dressings that take seconds to make and have the welcomed combination of relatively no sodium and no/low fat.

   LikeLike

   Reply
4. 

   ashot, on February 18, 2012 at 7:07 pm said:

   Go for it, okie.

   Today my wife and I attended a baptism class required by our church before we can have our son baptized. One of the hand outs had an interesting statistic. 98% of kids who go to church with their dad end up going to church as adults. That number is the same if both parents take their kids to church. The number drops to 68% if just the mom takes the kids to church. Does that seem odd to anyone else?

   LikeLike

   Reply
5. 

   bsimon1970, on February 18, 2012 at 7:12 pm said:

   ashot, interesting data. I am a 2%er. My brother is not.

   LikeLike

   Reply
6. 

   ashot, on February 18, 2012 at 7:19 pm said:

   I think I am the only one of my siblings who still goes to church regularly. But growing up we only went regularly until I was 13. The hand out did not go into detail about the umbers so I don’t know if the dad has to go with the kids through a certain age or not.

   LikeLike

   Reply
7. 

   ScottC, on February 19, 2012 at 5:10 am said:

   ashot:

   The number drops to 68% if just the mom takes the kids to church. Does that seem odd to anyone else?

   My wife goes to church, er, religiously. She takes the 3 kids. I never go. If the battle she has every Sunday is any indication, 2 of them will continue going on their own, and 1 will not. So at least the mom stat seems about right to me.

   On the dad stat, I am tempted to repeat your earlier words to me. Have you considered that maybe they are trying to sell something?

   LikeLike

   Reply
8. 

   yellojkt, on February 19, 2012 at 5:11 am said:

   I think the 98% number is way too high (like the number of sexually active Catholic women who have used birth control and are not pregnant, etc., etc) but I find the trend totally plausible. Many churches are seen as women’s work and not having the father involved undercuts the messages being sent about its importance.

   Our own son who has healthy skepticism quickly figured out that religion was not internally consistent from a scientific point of view. We told him he had to maintain religious training through his confirmation and then he could decide on his own.

   Our logic was that someday he may meet a Catholic girl and she may want to get married in the Church and it would be a lot easier if he were already Catholic. If there were not God, what did it hurt and it could save him a lot of additional boring classes in the future. Basically, a very truncated version of Pascal’s Wager.

   Since his Confirmation, neither he nor I have been regular church goers, so I wonder how that skews the 98%

   LikeLike

   Reply
9. 

   quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 7:19 am said:

   I have no idea whether 98% is accurate but would have a high degree of confidence that, as yello said, the trend is accurately identified. I.e., I would be surprised if it were not true that adult church attendance correlated more strongly with attending with dad than with mom.

   Moreover, I would expect that dad’s attending is a much stronger predictor of mom’s attending than vice versa, which should in turn correlate to a finding that mom’s attending adds little to the predictive value of dad’s attending. So it makes sense to me. (I am taking a rare day off myself today, while Mrs. QB attends by herself. Work to do, and sick kid at home.)

   LikeLike

   Reply
10. 

    quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 7:20 am said:

    Btw, That 70s Show really annoys me. It is so inaccurate and anachronistic.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • 

      markinaustin, on February 19, 2012 at 7:56 am said:

      Btw, That 70s Show really annoys me. It is so inaccurate and anachronistic.

      I obviously do not watch enough TV. I had to look it up on wiki. It aired through 2006, according to the source of all knowledge. Are you referring to recurring annoyance at a show that no longer plays, or is it on reruns for the sleepless? The description in wiki sounds just terrible.

      LikeLike

      Reply
      • 

        quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 8:39 am said:

        Perhaps I should have said that 70s Show “was” annoying. I only saw it a few times. It was of course a terrible show, but in addition to being terrible (or part of its terribleness) was its anachronistic cultural portrayal. Most of the teen slang I heard was 90s, not 70s, for example. Clearly, the writers had little idea of the actual 70s.

        LikeLike

        Reply
11. 

    lmsinca, on February 19, 2012 at 7:20 am said:

    Very, very funny on the quotation Michi……………No Shit Sherlock………right? What goes up must come down……….also too.

    LikeLike

    Reply
12. 

    lmsinca, on February 19, 2012 at 8:03 am said:

    Very, very funny on the quotation Michi……………No Shit Sherlock………right? What goes up must come down……….also too.

    I aim to please, lms! 🙂 –Michi

    LikeLike

    Reply
13. 

    yellojkt, on February 19, 2012 at 9:11 am said:

    Most of the teen slang I heard was 90s, not 70s, for example. Clearly, the writers had little idea of the actual 70s.

    Now I know why my parents cringed so much when I watched Happy Days as a kid.

    LikeLike

    Reply
14. 

    Michigoose, on February 19, 2012 at 11:02 am said:

    I think that qb’s comment about dad’s attendance being a better predictor of mom’s attendance than vice versa is probably right. The only time that we attended church regularly as a family when I was growing up was during the time that my Dad was deciding whether or not he had a calling to the ministry (he decided no). That was when I was 4 or 5; after that I never attended regularly until I hit my mid-teens through college graduation, and then tapered off myself.

    OTOH, my ex was “forced” (his word) to attend from about 10 through when he left to join the military because his Dad went and he hated every minute of it. He would go with me when we first started dating as a courtesy, but he really resented his Dad making him go all those years.

    And I must be a cretin, because I thought That 70s Show was kind of cute. . .

    LikeLike

    Reply
15. 

    Fairlington Blade, on February 19, 2012 at 2:14 pm said:

    Is Rick Santorum a Manchurian candidate for the Democrats? I’m listening to his Sunday morning interview (the C-SPAN rebroadcast of Face the Nation). I’ve a feeling that his apparent position that prenatal testing should not be covered would go down like a neutronium balloon in the general election. There’s a season’s worth of attack ads in this one interview alone.

    BB

    LikeLike

    Reply
16. 

    Kevin S. Willis, on February 19, 2012 at 7:09 pm said:

    Re: That 70s Show: I enjoyed it, and thought it was a heckuva fun show. Love the cast. Of course, after Laura Prepon went blonde, it was never the same. One should keep in mind that it hearkens back to the Brady Bunch (check out the outside sets) and Happy Days as much as it does to the actual 70s. Like anything done in the 2000s, you would reasonably expect it to be a little meta. Red and Kitty are the soul of the show, and should have had a spin-off show just about them.

    That being said, like QB observes, there were anachronisms, especially as regards dialog (depending on the writer). However, the one thing that actually drove me nuts were scenes where they’d sit around popping 2000-era soda can tops when it’s supposed to be 1978 or 1979. No! No! It’s wrong! The pull tabs of 1970s era soda cans defines the era for me. You just can’t get that wrong.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • 

      quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 7:14 pm said:

      Interesting point re pop tops, Kevin.

      Hollywood must have prop cans with the old pull-offs. How they could not use them for a show about the decade when we all pulled off thousands of them is puzzling. (Cut myself with a couple, too!)

      LikeLike

      Reply
17. 

    Kevin S. Willis, on February 19, 2012 at 7:12 pm said:

    FB: I don’t think Rick Santorum is a Manchurian candidate for the Democrats, unless we assume that about the entire Republican field. There may be some plants in the various camps, which might explain some of the sound bites the candidates end up giving the press.

    LikeLike

    Reply
18. 

    ScottC, on February 19, 2012 at 7:26 pm said:

    qb:

    How they could not use them for a show about the decade when we all pulled off thousands of them is puzzling. (Cut myself with a couple, too!)

    I remember pulling them off and then dropping them back into the can before drinking it….and then getting yelled at and told by my parents about how dangerous it was to do that. I never did cut my mouth or swallow one.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • 

      quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 7:38 pm said:

      Those were the days. Before HFCS, too. A can was 25 cents from a vending machine in the late 70s. But nothing seemed as good as a bottle out of the older vending machines, the ones you had to pull the bottle out of.

      LikeLike

      Reply
19. 

    Michigoose, on February 19, 2012 at 7:38 pm said:

    Did any of you make duck calls with them??

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • 

      quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 8:19 pm said:

      Never made duck calls, but then we didn’t have duck hunting in my neck of the woods (not that I’d have had the chance anyway).

      LikeLike

      Reply
20. 

    Kevin S. Willis, on February 19, 2012 at 8:00 pm said:

    Loved those old bottle vending machines. The neighbor had one in their backyard, and it was only a nickle, but I was occasionally regaled with disturbing stories from the old fellow who lived there, who was suffering from some form of dementia (paranoid).

    My grandmother loved Cokes, and have them delivered, in glass bottles, by the same folks who would deliver ’em to the stores, and in similar quantities. She had two separate fixed bottle openers under the counters in the kitchen, and numerous other fixed and free-standing bottle openers around the house. And those ice cold bottles . . . nothing like it. In the latter years, when cost and availability forced her to move to cans, it just wasn’t the same.

    Something else you don’t see enough in that 70s show: people smoking, or cigarette vending machines. There just wasn’t a restaurant in my youth, or a roller skating rink, or just about any social environment that didn’t prominently feature a cigarette vending machine. You saw them everywhere.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • 

      quarterback, on February 19, 2012 at 8:18 pm said:

      And those ice cold bottles . . . nothing like it.

      Exactly. An ice cold bottle of Coke (or Orange Crush!) with real sugar, baby.

      LikeLike

      Reply
21. 

    Michigoose, on February 19, 2012 at 8:30 pm said:

    Ah, qb, it’s a lost art!

    First you take the pop top and hold it by the ring with the tab part facing up and curled away from you. Then you gently bend the tab down and away from you–you want the very tip of it to be pretty much precisely in the middle of the ring and not breaking the plane of the open ring itself.

    Then you hold it to your lips and gently croon “Here duck! Here duck!” through it.

    Works every time.

    😀

    LikeLike

    Reply
22. 

    Kevin S. Willis, on February 20, 2012 at 6:52 am said:

    Exactly. An ice cold bottle of Coke (or Orange Crush!) with real sugar, baby.

    I recently was at a Mexican restaurant (El Porton) and they sat us back in the restaurant that is used for large groups or parties, normally, but I suppose they were just using for overflow. I noticed they had a cooler full of Mexican Cokes, and asked for one of those—because Mexican Cokes are made with cane sugar (and come in the smooth 80s style glass bottles). As are Kosher Cokes, when and where available. Love the classics.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • 

      quarterback, on February 20, 2012 at 7:37 am said:

      The beverage companies are finally wising up and marketing “classics” with real sugar in the States on a limited basis. Most of it isn’t cane sugar, I don’t think, but at least it is sucrose and not HFCS.

      And anyone who goes to Disney World has to stop at the Coke place in Epcot, where you can sample (or guzzle) Coke products from around the world. Some are horrible, some are great.

      LikeLike

      Reply
      • 

        markinaustin, on February 20, 2012 at 8:43 am said:

        I just defended a post by QB at PL and am awaiting the flood. Taking P-Day off to garden, I went to the gym late and am eating my oatmeal late and reading for pleasure, here and there. I want to reiterate that having watched Lin play yesterday he is very, very good and his penetration and kick out is wonderful, considering his lack of playing time with these guys in game situations.

        LikeLike

        Reply
        • 

          quarterback, on February 20, 2012 at 8:46 am said:

          Heh, very bad idea to defend me, Mark.

          All just good blood sport, though.

          I have to focus on work like I didn’t over the weekend!

          LikeLike