Randomness

[Weeble]

Dis,
re:Morels been picking and eating them for maybe 35 years. There a a half a dozen varieties, but i prefer the blacks, giant blacks and the whites yum...and I give up on doing pics

Alelou,
The wife and I decided to expand our path network this winter due to the relatively mild temps. Our back lot line is a trout steam and we have about 1000 ft on it. We opened up about 300 ft giving us about 400 total open for walking and started establishing walkways, bridges over the sloughs and bark over 27" wide black vinyl. It's a lot of work but we are still having those wonderful below freezing bug killing nights.
The willow trees back there are a pain as they lean over as they reach for the light. We have to do a major trim every other year. Given that we just added to our biannual maintenance:" stupid is as stupid does The real winners are the rabbits who take over the brush piles.

Only two weeks till the trout opener!!!

Weeble
><((((º>

[Entilzha]

Danny Trejo=Bad Ass .

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Breathtaking new photos of Space Shuttle Discovery preparing for its final flight

And from the Washington D.C. flyover

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

10 Most Unconvincing Romances in Science Fiction and Fantasy

[WarpGirl]

I wish I spoke Swedish to thank you properly for this...

(Compare that with the utterly real Tom-B'elanna romance.)

I don't think it's fair that they put Ani/Padme in there, it wasn't the actors faults! George Lucas does concepts well, he sucks at dialogue! He didn't write Han and Leia in ESB, that's why it worked!

[Alelou]

Great list, of the ones I know and/or remember anyway.

Anakin and Padme made me gag. Totally agree about the lack of chemistry or excitement with Harry and Ginny and Chakotay and 7 of 9, too.

[WarpGirl]

Oh well, I tend to think that even extremely talented actors (which Ms. Portman, and Mr. Christensen most certainly are) are subject to an extent to the material they're given. Also, they must have had personal chemistry, they dated for a while!

I mean, there are thousands of examples of actors who were BRILLIANT, horribly served by sub-par material. Even Marlon Brando and Paul Newman had to deal with it!

[Alelou]

I know Natalie Portman can act, but I saw never saw any evidence that Christensen could. (That's not saying much, since I don't remember seeing him in anything else.) But I agree that it was primarily the lines they were given that made me want to gag. Their romantic scenes were just awful, awful, awful. <<Shudder>>

[WarpGirl]

I agree the lines were horrid, but like I said: If GL had written the romance for ESB people would have been hurling rotten tomatoes at Han and Leia and nothing Harrison Ford (another outstanding actor) and Carrie Fisher (an amazingly underrated talent) could have done about it. And I can unequivically say that HC can indeed ACT! I just believe in giving people their due, GL created an amazing universe, but he can't write! All of the actors in the movies (who are pre-eminent in their fields) did the best they could with what they had.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Invite mix-up leads Swede to minister's dinner

From what I know about the real former minister, the dinner party was better off with her namesake...

[WarpGirl]

I'm pretty sure everyone has a "double" out there. Although my first name and last name both have unique spellings. So while I have no doubt there's someone out there with my name, I very much doubt they spell it the same way. Great random artical.

[Kotik]

You have no idea how sick our society has become Currently there's quite an upheaval over here in Germany about a rather morbid fund set up by German banking powerhouse "Deutsche Bank". By investing in a fund called "db Kompass Life 3", people basically placed bets on the life expectancy of elderly people between ages 75 and 80 The earlier the "tracking objects" dies, the higher the revenue. The bank did that by harvesting the deceased's life insurance payouts to pay off their "investors" WTFH !!!
God that's so mother>§$%&$§ sick !!

[WarpGirl]

Humanity is capable of terrible things in general, but the worst things we do is always to ourselves.

[Kotik]

That just goes beyond sick. It doesn't happen often, but when I read that report, I was at a complete loss for words. It's just unspeakably sick

[Alelou]

That's probably one of those derivatives like the bundled crap mortgages that blew up our economy in 2008. There are investors here who buy old people's life insurance policies that they can't afford to pay anymore, or they buy the paid up ones for a lump sum for pennies on the dollar when people need the money now more than they need the payout later. Obviously Deutsche Bank has figured out how to bundle it all and sell it to pension funds and such. (And it probably is a better bet than real estate -- sooner or later people MUST die. One wonders when someone will start wanting to improve their odds, however...)

I mourn for all those rocket scientist minds that could be, I don't know, building rockets ... instead of designing financial 'products'.