palordrolap

(Writing this comment in the style it describes is self-referential and confusing, and I might get it wrong, but I’m going to give it a go.)

It’s often good to start out with self-deprecation (if not self-reference). Something like “English can be a bit odd” or “English has traps for the unwary” and then gently segue into what’s bugging you and what’s right and what’s wrong.

We’ve got to at least try to be nice, even if the natural instinct might be to be offended and direct.

There’s a meme on my homepage at the moment that uses the template of Gordon Ramsay giving a hug versus calling someone a donkey. The underlying gag it’s being used for isn’t all that important. The point is most people would prefer the hug from the expert rather than the alternative.

It would be even better if we could give the scientific, linguistic reason as to why other than just “it sounds wrong”, but, yes, that’d be really going the extra mile. Most of us have no idea (myself included), precious little idea on what exactly to go research, and the recipient might not be able to do much with that information anyway.

I will undoubtedly fail at following this advice myself at some point. Hopefully, this isn’t it.

Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.

And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.

All the pieces were there.

(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)

The dude is intrinsically linked - in my mind at least - to time travel plots too. He’s in Timecop as the boss of the time agency, Quantum Leap as “Bartender Al/God(?)” and Voyager as Braxton, the rogue time-travelling captain who repeatedly breaks the temporal prime directive to get back at Janeway.

IMO, that mindset pretty much died the day the towers fell. There was and has been a little “it’s the 21st century” or “it’s <year>” but they’re generally not marked by as much optimism (or subversion of the same) as it was in the '90s.

A classic case of interucting the infinitive.

It’s / This is the '90s [then a statement about how things are better / different / more enlightened]

One of Britain’s most commonly used political words is of Irish origin: Tory.

When you look into the etymology, and consider the historical relationship between Britain and Ireland, it makes sense that that would be the one we (Britain) heard often enough to copy.

In my book, that puts Bean Bunny in the role of Darko, just so there’s a reversal of the “Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?” jibe and counter-jibe.

I mean, Muppet Christmas Carol kept Fozzie out of the rest of the movie just so they could make a Fezziwig/Fozziwig pun, so such a massive cast decision for the sake of one gag isn’t out of the question.

Now, there are other rabbits in the Muppet cast, but I think Bean is the best known, and probably has the most range to go from cute to creepy without it being too obvious from his appearance.

The firing of Bean’s voice actor (Steve Whitmire) makes this somewhat less likely, but I think they could recast Bean’s voice more easily than for Rizzo “ain’t comin’ back until Steve does” Rat or Kermit, and they weren’t all that picky about Kermit.

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Here’s Tom with the Weather."

– Bill Hicks

As others have said, if a patient has next of kin or emergency contact details listed somewhere accessible to the hospital, they may call if the contact can provide information that the patient can’t, especially if the patient is unconscious or delirious.

Of course, if the patient is otherwise aware and apparently of sound mind, then the patient can literally say “please do not contact my family / next of kin”. The hospital might say they weren’t going to, but no harm in asking. And if they do so anyway once they’ve been told not to, that’d be risking a lawsuit.

Anecdotally, I’ve always carried a next-of-kin card in my wallet, and it has come to my aid at least once.

The person or people on such a card don’t have to be parents either. A trusted friend or sibling might be preferable for people who don’t get along with, or no longer have, their parents.

If you grab the tail of a dog and wave it to and fro, it is not likely that this will make the dog happy, even if it looks a little bit that way to an outside observer.

Likewise, trying to make a terminally online person* do what you think is normal (or even necessary) will not make them act or feel like you do, even if they’re willing to go along with it for a while.

To use another animal metaphor, they’ll come out of their shell when they’re ready, but they may never be ready, and other people have to be OK with that.

* Of course, by “terminally online person” we should substitute whatever actual psychological diagnoses are responsible for the person acting the way they do, not what they do, assuming such diagnoses are even possible (or valid).

As you point out, intelligence is fuzzy and dependent on many factors. Which is why a straight line hard cut-off above and below the mean of a distribution seems pretty arbitrary to me, even if it is based upon a particularly useful way of delineating variance from a mean.

I’m sure cognitive scientists had good reasons for that somewhat arbitrarily defined band of the bell-curve when they gave it the name “average intelligence” but it’s pretty clear that the joke isn’t using that definition.

50% of people are below average intelligence.

(Yeah, yeah, the implied conclusion is fallacious reasoning, but it’s still funny.)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Fozzie, in fact I think I kind of want to give the guy a hug.

The man (or rather, bear) just wants to be loved after all. He wants to make people laugh and have them be happy. He’s the clown with a touch of melancholy, and might even be in my top 10. He’s just not top of the list.

This. A terrible surgeon by all accounts, but laid-back and entirely competent as a musician.

Fozzie also proved to be a competent pianist, but his personality, or at least his “on” stage persona, well, that leaves something to be desired.

Meanwhile in another universe “No one voted on my comment, therefore they’re ignoring me because I’m right”

And in another “wow that’s a lot of upvotes, I knew I was right!”

Your logic elsewhere may or may not be sound but your diagnosis on why people are voting the way they are is clearly not.

Self burns are rare. You just admitted you’re no better than someone from a group you hate.

Actually, the British beat the French to it. The Halifax Gibbet pre-dates the guillotine by about 100 years.

Yet another case where another nation somehow becomes better at a sport the British invented.

The southern English are trapped between a rock and a hard place with the whole thing. They do like the idea of stealing culture from the French, but they want to appear to be separate at the same time. And appearing northern would be even worse.

Immediately not trust it and assume I’m too stupid or ignorant to see what the flaw in the system is.

And next I’d be worried that, flaw or not, the authorities might find out about it, because that would almost certainly not end well.

Even if there’s truly a way to get something for nothing, someone else will find a way to take it away.