While watching Wheel of Fortune, nine-year-old DaughterGeeding walks in with a bewilder face and asks, “Where’s Pat?” We explained he missed the show because of surgery and Vanna is filling in. She retorted with, “And why didn’t you tell me about this?”
In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households’ purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail — that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these “harbinger households.”
Last year, Dallas’ police and fire departments teamed up with Parkland Hospital to rethink how they responded to 911 calls involving mental health crises. They placed a social worker inside the dispatch center to triage calls and sent out a special team staffed with a mental health professional whenever possible. They targeted South Central Dallas, the area with the highest concentration of mental health-related calls. The hope was that social workers could handle these cases without relying on the city’s overcrowded emergency rooms and jails.
Take note that we attempted to judge the shows in question on their own independent merits; while many of us have read the books these shows are based on, we didn’t base our decisions on fidelity to, or creativity of departure from, the original text. We just wanted to pick the best television experiences.
To my good friend who recently moved and changed his email addresses and phone numbers – I’m sending emails to your new email address and replied to your messages, but I don’t think you are receiving them.
It’s always a bummer to read about medication your taking which helps you live a somewhat normal life, to maintain functionality, might be more dangerous than thought, in particular when it comes to depression and suicide. And, I’m a bloke who thinks about suicide daily. (Don’t go freaking out on me, I’m too chicken or lazy to go through with it and never came close to writing a letter.)
Though gabapentin and baclofen are much safer alternatives to opioids, recent research suggests that they’re not as safe as some doctors might have hoped, especially in combination with other sedating medications. The findings are a frustrating turn that suggests there’s still no silver bullet for chronic pain.
For some reason, almost every article about this doesn’t state his church or denomination affiliation. Since this happened in Georgia, I automatically assumed he was affiliated with a Southern Baptist church; however, he could have been Mormon, Church of Christ, or even another religion. In actuality, he is associated with a United Methodist church. It appears he’s a part-time youth minister as he has a fulltime job working at a tobacco company. That doesn’t excuse him, but I think it’s worth mentioning. I’m curious if he volunteers and isn’t on the church payroll, which I think is an important distinction.
This man slapped the reporter’s bottom. I confess to being ignorant regarding terminology. I thought “grope” meant or implied having a firm grip on something for at least several seconds, and thus, a slap wouldn’t be constituted as a grope. I’m wrong, and neither action is acceptable.
During yesterday’s sermon, I noticed DaughterGeeding was drawing poinsettias and thought nothing of it. After the sermon, she handed me the drawing and said she wanted to place it on my parent’s grave, which we were planning to visit after church. It’s somewhat of a tradition to visit the grave during Advent and place poinsettias on it. I turned the paper over and saw that she had written them a note. She’s never done this before, never had a chance to meet them, but this sure did pull on the heartstrings quite a bit.
It’s a tad macabre, but I do get a kick out of the kids when we visit my parent’s grave. They make it a competition to see who can find grandma and grandpa first.
We finally put the Christmas tree up. This is rather late for us.
I made a trip to the scrapyard on Friday. Instead of throwing a lot of metal away, I tend to collect it and throw it in a pile. I crammed it all in the back of the SUV and got $9.10 for my efforts. It’s not about the money, and it’s not about being an environmentalist, but there’s something about it a simply like doing. As a bonus, on Fridays, the scrapyard cooks and gives away free hotdogs and drinks. Let me tell you something, that was one mighty fine all-beef hotdog I ate.
LiberallyLean has a bit in which he’ll point out what he believes are hidden paid advertisements. Sometimes I think his net is cast a bit wide, such as when Blue Bell announces a new flavor and the local press picks up on it because it’s folksy. I thought of him yesterday and could relate when I heard the Musers on The TICKET do a segment defending the new Peleton commercial. For a while, I’ve felt like Peleton has been paying them for passive mentions. I picked up on it when Bob would playfully bring up the time an instructor called him out by name. Then, there was the time the Musers decided to organize a mall walk at Northpark and kept mentioning they meeting place would be near the Peleton entrance, and yesterday we have them defending the latest commercial. There’s just a little too much casual name dropping for this to be a coincidence.
They sent samples of Subway chicken, along with chicken from A&W, McDonald’s, Tim Horton’s, and Wendy’s, to a lab at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, to test how much of it was actually, you know, chicken. They weren’t expecting anything to come back as 100%—things happen during processing and seasoning—but most of the tests came back showing between 88.5% and 89.4% chicken DNA. Except for Subway. Subway’s “oven roasted chicken” tested as 53.6% chicken and its strips were 42.8%. The rest was soy protein. Perhaps, they thought, there had been a mistake in the lab. But when they tested again, the results were the same.
I intended to mention these two CBS Sunday Morning stories earlier this week.
This story is about a model family. The father, mother, and their five kids are all models and their full-time job is doing family shoots for name-brand companies you are familiar with – Brooks Brothers, Hanes Pajamagram, Bass Pro Shops, Dell, Disney, and Coca-Cola to name a few.
“My mother got in a huge argument with her brother when I was 10, and bought all the remaining spaces in the family cemetery so he and his family couldn’t be buried with the rest of us. That was the meanest thing she could think to settle the score.
The headmistress in the Polish school got a very bad idea, when she called in people with guns and balaklavas to school and staged a fake terrorist attack at her own school. Nobody but the headmistress knew that this was a fake attack.
Artificial intelligence will soon be able to decode your poop. That’s the ultimate goal of a campaign to collect 100,000 fecal photos to build what developers say is the world’s first poop image database. The campaign, launched by microbial health company Seed, dares you to “give a shit” for science by uploading photos of your feces so that scientists can use it to train an AI platform launched out of MIT.
And I thought I was watching the original all these years.
Ironically, it was commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company, and if not for this mega-corporation, this anti-commercialization-of-Christmas special would not exist. Their sponsorship tags would be cut from subsequent broadcasts, although the studio also used this to their benefit to correct the clearest and most fixable animation errors they could notice (while adding a few more in, ironically), the end result having been a disaster in the eyes of Melendez and New York executives in the first place.
The version that has been broadcast and remastered since is the revised version, while the original print would not be screened ever again except during special screenings from an vintage 16mm print. One of these prints was offered to ParamountCartoons, member of the Internet Animation Database forums, who dissected as much as he could from this version, and the print was soon shared as an MKV at the Lost Media Wiki for all to enjoy and dissect, and in this video will be compared in split-screen with the changes made in the final cut.
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