I believe that Waffle House is named after Wafflos, the god of perseverance in the face of extreme weather and drunken brawling with.

It could just be that I first watched it when I was pretty young, but The Changeling from 1980 with George C. Scott is a pretty good atmospheric horror. No real gore or even deaths to speak of, but a good creepy ghost story nonetheless.

100%. If they happen to build a working car, plane, tank, etc. well that’s a bonus.

The current LLVs are made by Grumman and the new ones are made by OshKosh, so defense contractors have been building the postal delivery trucks for the last 40 years.

I like ColecoVision best, but it had an unfair advantage, coming out a full 5 years after the 2600 and 3 years after the Inty. It’s really generation 2.5, competing with the 5200. But man, those arcade ports were so impressive, and the expansion module to play 2600 games made it the best of both worlds.

Gout, probably

Oof. WaPo wants an email address to access an article a subscriber gifted access to. Here is the archived version instead https://archive.is/3jOgi

Stores sell sturdy plastic jugs that the milk bags fit into snugly, so it basically pours like a pitcher. You just snip a small corner off the top of the bag once it’s inserted into The jug. The jug lasts forever, though it does get funky over time with any dribbles of milk that make it between the bag and jug.

I loved how in Carnival if you could time it just right you could keep shooting the lowest bear in the bonus level and just keep him going back and forth like 20 times. Also the elusive diamond that would appear in a dropped apple in Mr. Do. I think I only had it happen twice ever in what seemed like thousands of games.

You’re right, I’m guilty of oversimplification based on out of date information. I last worked in that field 20 years ago. I should have stuck to the still-accurate point that privatization has long been prevalent when it comes to licensing in Ontario, so it’s not a new thing this government is doing. Driver testing was provincially-run, but it was fully privatized in the early 2000s. Thanks for the fact-checking.

Service Ontario already was private, and always has been. I don’t approve of this move, but only because it corporatizes a small business model.

I hate to break it to you but ServiceOntario was always private. The vast majority of serviceontario locations were in effect small businesses with one person designated as the government agent. Been that way for at least 50 years. Those people working at those offices are not government employees, not members of a union and most certainly not well paid. They are just employees of a small business, no different than someone that works at a bar or a restaurant, other than having to know a lot of government rules and processes.

So what the government is doing is corpratizing what used to be a moderately profitable small business.

I should also add that those small business owners had to pay all the costs of the business including the initial renovations to meet government requirements. So that definitely is a case of corporate welfare for Staples.

Source: I worked at various Service Ontario locations before it was branded that way, for 15 years or so.

Pepsi Frito Lay is big enough not to care about the profits from one market globally. In Canada a couple years back they had a pricing dispute with the country’s largest grocer which resulted in all of their snack products being unavailable nationwide for that grocery chain. Pepsico increased prices during the heart of the pandemic and the grocer refused to pay the higher price so Pepsico just stopped shipping product to them. It lasted for 2 months, and in the end the dispute resolved with no benefit to the customer whatsoever. Lays, Doritos, etc. remain the highest priced chips in the store by a long shot.

You da real mvp

This actually really happened in Michigan, and the woman was convicted, partly owing to the bird. It’s super creepy to hear the bird say “don’t fucking shoot!”

I do Semantle. It’s sort of like a hot or cold kind of game where there is a word of the day and you guess words and they are scored as to how close they are semantically. You have an unlimited number of guesses and also a seemingly unlimited number of hints. Even with the hints it sometimes takes me 60 guesses, but sometimes it’s 5 or 6. There is a link to the paper where they discuss the relativity model they use. I find it challenging.

Like they said in the article, Homicide Life on the Street is where I remember him from. Lots of good actors and performances in that show, but he was a standout. RIP.

Does this mean the Stormtroopers are going to execute the Jedi now?

You’re right, and also, fuck this timeline.

I misgendered a woman who was already very irate. This was probably 30 years ago, before trangenderism was as common as it is now (or at least as publicly presented). It did NOT go over well, to say the least. Other customers were smirking and giggling, and even a coworker was having trouble keeping a straight face. In my defense, she was heavyset, had shaved hair and a raspy voice. Luckily I didn’t say any of this to her. I just got my manager and let her yell at me (and him) for 10 minutes. I learned the value of keeping your mouth shut until you’re certain that day.