Tell us what's happened to you recently (that's interesting)

I have a cousin into this crap, I just avoid the subject. While I am a big SCIENCE! cheerleader I just lay off it when it’s family. You can’t tell them anything.

Luckily, for the vast majority of cases it’s just trading some money to take advantage of the placebo effect. Except when it isn’t.

Same happened to me a few months back, only it was warranty expiration rather than cost payoff. Planned obsolescence at work!

It’s 12C. It’s there in the Wikipedia article. ;)

I have an AT&T IPad (notebook, some flat thing) that will go off my bill on Feb 1 after I call them. We have never used the phone function on it, as it was always used around existing wi-fi systems.

Car repair… @Tin_Wisdom in terms of the wheel hub bearing, I did it. Probably the biggest repair I’ve done so far on my own, feels pretty good to save a few hundred dollars and learn in the process. Thanks!

That’s excellent! Thanks for reporting back in and sharing. How long did it take?

My family gatherings are pretty much stuff at buffers and pizza parlors these days due to the number of young and behaved kids in the groups. Most of these buffets are gross, and everytime I leave I hope I don’t wind up battling some form of food poisoning. Today’s buffet surprises include a potato so black he thought it was an olive, eggs in the salad bar that were clearly pre-frozen due to the completely weird texture and… chocolate ice-cream the kids wouldn’t even eat. It wasn’t sour, so I don’t think it was actually bad, but I question the label of ice-cream they’re putting on it. I’ve never seen chocolate ice-cream that pale before.

Two weeks or so ago I got this message from a stranger on facebook:

It was a little weird getting this out of the blue. However, I knew both of the names he referenced (he was clever to use initials), and he was easy to google. He seemed like a good dude so I sent him my address and he told me he would send the letters to me the next day.

I got the letters a couple of days ago.

It’s a rare and wonderful gift to see these things. It’s like a kind of time capsule. I keep journals, but I rarely ever read them. I keep a lot of old letters too…but I rarely ever look at them. Seeing these old letters gives me this weird reminder-window into myself from a long time ago. It’s funny to see the perspective of two friends I haven’t spoken to in decades, a perspective of who I was then that I don’t entirely remember.

Anyway, it was super cool of the guy to reach out and then send these letters to me. I imagine most people would just toss them in the trash.

-xtien

That’s a great story. Thank you for sharing it with us!

That’s really cool. How far did the book travel around before this fellow found the letters in it?

Very nice, indeed! Once in a while out of the blue these things happen. Extremely gratifying when they do.

It’s worth pursuing if you’re the one able to make the connection, too.

A few years ago, after my dad died, I found an oil painting that I had completely forgotten about in the back of a closet. There was a name on the back, and a little detective work revealed that the painter had been a Fine Arts student at Macalester College in the mid-60s, where my folks lived when they were first married. My guess is that my mom picked up the painting at a student art show when she was looking for stuff to hang on their new walls.

Anyhoo, it turns out the artist became quite well known, not as a painter, but as a chef. She ran a successful little restaurant in Greenwich Village in the 70s, made TV appearances on the various PBS cooking shows of the period, and published a couple of cookbooks in the 90s, all of which I learned from her New York Times obituary.

The obit named a surviving daughter, and feeling only a little bit stalker-y I sent her a letter telling her about what I’d found. We split the cost of shipping, and now her mom’s painting is back with her family, where it has a suitably appreciative audience. It was really neat being able to connect the dots like that.

I just saw a red squirrel pull off an Assassin’s Creed air assassination move on a gray squirrel twice his size: he jumped off a tree onto the other guy (“DEATH FROM ABOVE, BITCH!”) and they tumbled in the snow and crashed into my basement window. The other guy just ran for it. He had enough.

Two minutes later, the red squirrel saw the other guy again running along the electric cables and he went running for him squeaking with all his tiny might: “I’M COMING FOR YOUR SOUL, MUTHAFUCKA!”

Squirrels don’t fuck around.

So @Timex, just curious: Did you never hear from the garbage guy again?

(Figured I’d check in since some time had passed…)

Nope. I have a new garbage service… have never heard from that guy again.

Guess it will remain one of life’s great mysteries.

If there is a book out there for weird shirt, that story should go in it. I know a lot of people used to have books like that for the bathroom but now everyone plays on their phone… i try not to think about that.

Write this book, someone! With many pictures, obviously.

They seem to be quite crafty for tiny-brained rodents. I had read that they did this, but it was interesting to see it confirmed: I watched a squirrel bury a nut and run off, and a minute later he came back and dug it up and moved it and buried it somewhere else. They try to fool other squirrels that might be watching.

Also, they have completely baffled my dog. She chases, they run to the other side of a tree and scamper up, and the dog has no idea how they disappeared into thin air.

I think I need to learn how to hunt them. There are so many of them they will be a good food source once the apocalypse arrives.

As made famous by shitty British beer Carling Black Label in the 80s.