gogo

I'll see your offer, and raise it...

**TWO** GA tickets, and a summit parking pass, for $150 (way, way under face value).  Please PM me if you're interested.

Count me in as a clamorer(?).

Very sorry to have missed this one!

*bump*

A parking pass, people!  C'mon, you know you want it...

(I just really don't want to see these go to waste.  Seriously, make me an offer, any offer.)

I hope so!  But yeah, I was really hoping to be able to go...

I've got two GA tickets and a parking pass for this event.

Total face value was $274, but I'll accept any reasonable offer.

Solace was nice enough to help us out and do whatever magic needed to be done to get VC back up and running today, but we've been leaning on him for years, and it would be nice to have some other folks who could help out with tech issues when they arise (I don't think they're usually anything major, but my skills in this area are zilch).  Anyone out there willing to be on-call for this kind of thing?

-gogo

If anyone is in San Francisco today, you're all welcome to my nightmare:  http://sf.funcheap.com/action-happiness-bay-area-hugfest/

Totally different topic:  I'd be interested to know if the series has any affect on Louisiana's tourist industry.  On the one hand: no thanks.  But on the other, some of those locations were so beautiful, so lush.  Also, I imagine there would be no end to the creeps who would want to take a "True Detective" tour of the area.

And, who was the guy with the sewn-up lips in the creepcabin? IIRC, Errol called him "daddy", so was that Sherriff Ted Childress?

For full-on creep factor:  in the hospital, they said that based on DNA, the woman was "at least" Errol's half-sister.  But when they were "making flowers", he asked her to tell him about grandpa in the field.  I was kind of assuming that she'd become pregnant following the rape by her father, making her Errol's mother and half-sister, so the old guy would be his/their father, as well as Errol's grandfather.

And now, I need a full Silkwood shower...

The thing about the whole series that was most inconsistent to me was the distance between Marie Fontenot's murder (totally private, body never found) and Dora Lange's (body left exposed, as if meant to be discovered and investigated).

So yeah, I'll give you that all of the missing people after a certain point (missing people whose bodies were never recovered) could have been Errol Childress's doings, but there's still some disconnect between those two scenarios.  Which were the cult, and which were the lone psycho?  What about the Lake Charles murder, why did that break the pattern?  I've got no good answer.

But the video was of Marie Fontenot's murder, and weren't there five men in the video (Cohle watched the whole thing, hoping that one of them would take off his mask)?  That murder pre-dated Dora Lange, so I'll give you that maybe the cult dissolved after that.  But then what about the 2012 Lake Charles murder?  Tuttle was already dead, but why then did that have the similarities to Dora Lange?

So yeah, there's still something cult-ish going on.  Maybe it's dying out, and Childress is the last gasp, but Childress didn't do Marie Fontenot and Dora Lange on his own, they were full-on cult activities.

"Consistify" is a word?

That was exactly my thought when I read this last night.

My sister allow her high-schoolers to take one "mental health" day per semester.  We have an Irish band, we always go out on St. Patrick's Day and play at bars and parties all around town, so the two of them are going to take tomorrow off.  She's considering sending them to school on Wednesday with a note saying they couldn't come in because they had the "Irish flu" and see if anyone at the school notices.

Overall, I think the need for vaccinations is over-stated, particularly with flu shots. In general, there is a valid use for some vaccinations. Not too complicated, at least in my brain.

Part of the reason people get flu shots is so that they don't spread the flu to other people, who would be in greater danger from flu.  Anyone who has contact with small children, older people, people with underlying conditions that might lead to complications associated with the flu, should all get the flu shot.  The more people who get the shot, the more protected everyone is.  This doesn't seem too complicated to me.

(In the mid-1980s, my dad was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre, which had been considered to be a risk of getting the flu shot after the big push for swine flu-vaccination in the 1970s.  I've spent a lot of time reading about the risks associated with flu shots compared to the benefits, and I get the shot every year.)

Turns out, due to my age, it appears unlikely I was vaccinated for the whooping cough.

I was vaccinated a few years ago, when several of my cousins started having babies.  I knew I was going to be spending a lot of time with them, and whooping cough was on the rise in California at the time, so it made sense for me to get it.

To each his/her own when it comes to what gets put into one's body (or that of their kids), medicinally speaking.

Agreed.  But I haven't seen any research that convinces me that the chance/degree of adverse affects on vaccinated children, is worth the risk to community-wide immunity due to children not being vaccinated.

edit:  bleedorange got there first, and all of his sentences actually make sense.

What research are you looking at, Lammy?

Dubliners and Portrait are both fairly readable (Dubliners is one of my all time favorites).  Ulysses much less so, and Finnegans Wake, forget it.

They should go ahead and engrave McConaughey's name on the Emmy right now.

I usually like Ellen, but thought she was off that night.  I wasn't crazy about the pizza bit, but I did think the selfie was cute.

Very happy for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, but I can't even imagine what a freak show that set must have been.  Those two are both so spacey.

Best part of the Oscars was Lupita Nyong'o's brother getting right up front in that all-celeb selfie.

I saw a buzzfeed list (I know, I know...) about books to read if you love San Francisco.  So I'm starting on a few of those:

And not on the list, but from SFPL's pick-of-the-month list:

Chicago is a crusty old broad who doesnt care what I think or say.

That's also a pretty good description of me.

http://www.legalzoom.com/us-law/equal-rights/right-refuse-service:

There is no civil rights act in Arizona that expands protection based on sexual preference.  So it's always been (and continues to be) legal for businesses in Arizona to refuse to serve anyone on that basis.  But the "right to refuse service" is a limited right, more or less, depending on where you are.

The Goldfinch was one of my library races. I felt like I deserved a medal for finishing it in two weeks.

You do!!

I so judge books by the covers, all the time.

Given the choice, I will always take the edition that doesn't have the Oprah's Book Club sticker.

And I will read pretty much anything with an old black and white picture of New York City on the cover.

This one is kind of my nightmare.  I love the picture, and the book sounds right up my alley, but the "now a major motion picture" sticker sends my book-snobbery levels right off the chart: