Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

Did you make the requisite American-Poker-Sign-Language chopping motion when you tossed her the redbird? You didn't speak up. The next time you see her, you need to toss her another redbird for providing you with such a beautiful pretext for a grudge. I suspect you have a beef with the card gods and are taking it out on her.

Yeah I did the choppy signal, and I was verbally loud and clear. Perhaps I was insultingly clear. In any case, I'm not giving her another red; if she wants to make unwarranted bonuses for doing her job poorly, she can become a politician or a CEO.

was she hot though? maybe she thought you wrote your number on the chip?

I know it's been a while since they left Boston, but she probably assumed that you were a Braves fan doing the tomahawk.

She's a nottie. Not that I'm any particular prize.

I feel that we're wasting valuable kilobytes of server space on this person. Think of the extra Joules of heat being generated.

Last night, around 2AM, I woke up to the sound of a bunny screaming.

If you've never heard a rabbit shriek before, you might find yourself disconcerted by the sound. It's a bit bloodcurdling. Rabbits only do it when they feel that they're in dire peril.

We have (possibly had) two little wild bunnies around our apartment complex. That may account for the second bone-chilling scream a few minutes later.

For nocturnal predators, our area has dogs, cats, coyotes, coydogs, the rare bobcat, and owls. Rattlesnakes and copperheads will sometimes hunt at night during the height of summer, in order to be able to sleep off the daytime heat.

A few years back, the state division of fisheries and wildlife wanted to release timber rattlesnakes on an island in a lake nearby to me; you can imagine how well that project went down with the public, though I don't know if the negative press killed the project or not.

If I had to guess, I would lean towards an owl as last night's assailant, as I didn't hear any thrashing around during the onslaughts...just screaming.

today was my first time reading coydogs but makes perfect sense

Poor bunnies. :(

Same here. And dogotes exist as well, apparently.

Anyway... We haven't read anything about your poker and slots adventures in a while, Suited. Any updates on that?

Yeah dogs, coyotes, wolves and jackals can interbreed. Canis seems a very homogeneous genus.

What's amazing is that these four are all from the same species: canis familiaris, though there are some arguments for putting the dingoes (aka dingos) into their own subspecies.

I've been lazy. It's a damn shame, the trouble I have keeping myself motivated for long stretches.

Still keeping up with the stretching/pushups/bicycle crunches though, so I have that going for me, which is nice.

The Dry 2024-2025 Challenge Update

January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: ✓
July: ✓
August: ✓
September: ✓
October: ✓
November: ✓
December: ✓
January: ✓
February: ✓
March:✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: ✓
July: UNLOCKED

It's been a year and a half now, and I sometimes question how much longer I'm going to make it: Two years? Until the day of the Big Score? Until the day something huge and wonderful happens in the world?

For now, and for today, I'll go with Dory.

I watched Peter Jackson's 8 hour The Beatles: Get Back documentary, and it was fantastic. The film showcases extensive studio footage of the boys in January of 1969, rehearsing, screwing around, carping at each other, ignoring Yoko, who's attached to John's hip the entire time, and ultimately laying down tracks that would go into their final two albums: Abbey Road and Let It Be.

The highlight comes at the end of the doc, where they perform a free mini-concert from the rooftop of their Apple studios, with the great Billy Preston on keyboards, and two British cops in the background dithering about shutting down the show thanks to a passel of noise complaints from a few villains down on the street level.

The Beatles were near to breaking up by this point; George quit the band for a few days during this sessions, and John—who around the same time talked about the band getting a "divorce"—flippantly suggested that they "get Clapton" to replace Harrison. In spite of this, it's great to witness the chemistry that remained in the band while they performed live for the first time in years, and for the last time ever.

Here below is footage of Paul making up a song on the spot, one that you might recognize, while the band waits for John to arrive. McCartney's uncanny songwriting skills are on full display here, but the song doesn't begin to become great until George and Ringo—demonstrably bored, and likely peeved at Lennon's tardiness—take sudden notice of some spark within Paul's song, and begin to add their magic to it.

At the end of the clip, John shows up and seamlessly jumps in.

It got me thinking about how certain legendary bands are greater than the sum of their members. Break them up and you lose the chemical bonds that form the magic molecules. Water, that universal solvent, perpetuator of life, becomes just hydrogen and oxygen; perfectly great elements on their own but...not water.

All four of the Beatles would go on to release solo albums—some of them very good, but none reaching the level of the full band in its prime.

The elements of these special bands recognize this bond and; I believe, resent it. The fact that they're codependent with this other person or other people, that they can't be truly great without having to work with these jerks all the time, must wear on them. Think Roger Waters and David Gilmour, or David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen, or all four members of Led Zeppelin and The Who.

Some elements manage to work it out over the long term: like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, or James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett from Metallica, but you'll notice that they're almost never best friends. They get together to work their magic, and then they piss off and hardly speak to each other for months or years.

Do these guys ever wonder: why can't I be like Jimi Hendrix, or Bob Dylan, or Prince? Why can't I be truly great on my own? The answer is: I don't know. It's probably just chemistry. It's part of what makes creative endeavors so fascinating.

good post, now go get some numbers of some hot ap girls

Mandatory quote here "The owls are not what they seem". And yep, your place and surrounds totally kind of reminded me of where the quote was from, I understand originally it's like at the opposite coast, but not that different, in a world-wide context.

Also congrats on your challenge progress, I wish I could claim that, I hope to be at that stage when I'm your age, keep it up.

Great poast about the Beatles. Maybe I'll watch that documentary series someday as well, daunting as its runtime might be. And congrats on the 18 months!

sj got that sh*t on unlockdown
not that it matters but i prefer reading your dry posts

Thanks rickroll!

Thanks Sheep!

I watched the doc in 1-2 hour segments.

TY, cat from frizzle fry!

Thanks, Fire!

I forgot about foxes. We have them here as nighttime bunny murderers. The main difference between east and west is that the west coast has grizzly bears; we have black bears. That's an important distinction.

Black bears carry some fear of humans, and they'll attack only when someone messes with their cubs, or if they're desperate. Grizzlies will **** you up for breakfast and poop you out after lunch.

In my life, I've seen two black bears in the wild: one bear alive, running away, and unremarkable, the other bear dead, but remarkable in that he most likely saw me very close up before he died.

This happened in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom when I was 14 and prowling through the woods on my first and only hunting trip. My father decided that he would take me—at the height of my ignorant juvenescence—and put a loaded gun in my hand, and let me walk around in the woods with it.

Spoiler

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Moreover, I was allowed to fill a flask of brandy every morning, and to quaff freely from it while on the hunt, in order to "keep warm." I had also just picked up smoking cigarettes on the sly, so I was indulging in the seventh heaven of grownup pastimes on this trip.

I had zero interest in shooting anything, so I tended to stamp around rather noisily and blow cigarette smoke everywhere to give every game animal in the area fair warning—by the way, that's one of the ways the Viet Cong tracked our boys in Vietnam; they could smell our constant cigarette smoke from klicks away.

Unbeknownst to me, my dad and his hunting buddies used my clattery as part of their overall strat. They would line up at the edges of a perimeter and then send me through the middle of it to spook game out in their direction.

One day, on my hike, I got thirsty and—since I only had brandy—I stopped to drink from a stream, which is a good way to get sick even in the most rural places. But what did I know? I was 14. I saw Grizzly Adams and various cowboys doing it on TV. What was there to be afraid of?

At the time, there was an inch (2.54 cm) of snow on the ground, and on that ground 20 feet behind me, I spotted a fresh set of bear tracks that had definitely not been there when I'd walked up to the stream. The bear had ambled up behind me, watched me drink from the stream, and rather than playfully bat my head off, had instead lost interest and moved on.

Bears are very loud, but I was not an observant lad. Whatever noise it had made had been lost on me. I had a shotgun. It was a 12 gauge, which is good. My shells were 00 buckshot, which is also good. But the gun was a single-barrel breach loader. That necessitated firing one shot, then breaking the gun open, loading it, closing it, cocking it, then firing another shot. This was not a gun with which to hunt a bear of any size. At my most effective, I could only make it very angry, and bears can run a lot faster than people.

Nevertheless, I followed the fresh bear tracks, because I was 14, and curious, and at the height of my ignorant juvenescence. I tracked the bear for no more than 10 minutes before I heard two shots close by; one at 10 o'clock, and one at 2 o'clock. I walked forward another 200 yards (182 meters) or so and came upon two hunters and a dead black bear...my bear. It was a male, about 350 lbs (160 kg).

Later on in that trip, I would go on to scare off a very large whitetail deer. It looked to be well over 200 lbs (91 kg) and had a huge rack, maybe 12 points or more. I never lifted my gun on it. My dad took a shot at it, but missed.

:(

Nice and compelling story But the story begs the question : why would hunters want to shoot a black bear? I can only envision 2 options : they were actually park rangers and the bear was tagged as being dangerous (disturbing civilians/being addicted to human food/ravaging garbages etc.) or those were wild men in savage times!!!

Disclaimer : as someone that has been on and off in the northern Yukon since 2001, I have never heard of anyone shooting a bear (outside of rangers, of course), even if just about every native family hunts a moose for the winter, many peeps trap and fish!!!

They were hunters. We received a bear tag with our deer tag in our hunting license package. I've had bear meat. It's not bad; a little greasy. It makes a good hamburger patty.

Fair enough. I was just quickly investigating and apparently it is legal to hunt both black and grizzly bears in the Yukon. I have just never heard of peeps doing so. Nor have I tried bear meat. Where as every native family hunts moose. But what do I know, as is so commonly said in Argentina 🙄

With native weapons it has to be better strat to hunt elk and moose over grizzly bears. So it could be the weight of tradition that leans them away from bears.

Poast reported for talking about a huge rack without providing pics.

Bear hunting is somewhat common in northeast. When I worked at GE in Schenectady, NY a lot of the guys hunted in Adirondacks including bears. I remember one of test technicians told me he only killed a bear once. Dragging a 350lb or more blubbery bear out the woods isn’t fun.

I watched some Alaska shows for a while (Live below 0 etc); they hunted bears all the time.