unclevlad

Yes, but I think the argument by the estate agents is compelling. It was written under a pseudonym when he was young, and rejected. But he never tried to resubmit after the fact, so we have to lean to the straightforward conclusion: he didn't want to. If that's the case, then it would be going against his implied wishes. Sure, there's a possibility he simply forgot about it. But that's second-guessing, so I have to side with the agents/executors here.

Japan makes whisky? Yep. Extremely good ones. So: Yamazaki 12 year old from Suntory. I haven't had a chance to try any of them; but hey, this is a desert in more ways than just the climate. (Doesn't help that there is *1* real liquor store in town, and it's not that large.)

It will work, yes, but I can't stand the extremely limited views due to the laptop's lack of height. Doesn't help that my eyes are not so great and I use larger fonts out of necessity. Plus, that's still a 14" screen, albeit (I assume) 16:9. A tablet screen is gonna be, what, about 2/3 the size; we won't even talk about a phone screen. They're far too small. And a laptop offers the potential to use a mouse...I loathe touchpads for most controls, they're far too awkward, yet they'll STILL be a heckuva lot better than trying to use teeeeeeny tiny touchscreen controls on a mobile device.

Let's go a tad exotic. Westvleteren 12. Trappist ale, 10%, bottle conditioned. Has about as much in common with megaswill beers as a dolphin has with a squid.

This one REALLY needs a warning note. It is BAD. How a grand jury refused to prosecute is beyond me.

It's now available to anyone 16+ in New Mexico, and the Pfizer vaccine's approved for 12+ so that should expand fairly soon. A quick check of vaccine availability: at least 42 states have made it available to anyone 16+, and the web page was actually a month old. Google shows our CVS, Wal Mart, and Walgreens all offer the vaccine, so yeah...line jumping is over.

Good news tho: US death rate is down to about 600 a day, and should continue to drop precipitously. The last 7 days have seen 200K new cases...down from 250K the week before. And that's not per day, that's for the whole week. That's down from 500K per week in mid-April...and of course, over a million a week as of the end of January. And some of the positive tests were from vaccinated people...which can happen, BUT the chance of a serious case developing there is TINY. So there's every reason to expect the death rates to drop sharply over the next few weeks. This was in the NYT Morning Briefing today: The caveat is still that it's not gone...and the Southeast was mentioned as a potential source of a nastier new outbreak for all the reasons we know here.

I have a problem here... If it's bad, then...I hope it doesn't happen, of course. If it's good then...wait...how can we say "there can be only one!!!" The other interesting question is, when in the Highlander timeline are they going to place this? You DO NOT want to repeat the placement of Highlander I because...if it works, well, that should be the end of it. The game's over. It'd be great if this does come out, if it's good, and if Cavill gets better known for whichever role he takes than for Superman. Flip that bird at DC!

Actually, the contract terms are relevant. League minimum given his service time. NO guaranteed money. And guess what...his 85 jersey is the #1 seller right now. So hey, it's looking like a fairly smart move from a business perspective. I agree that I don't expect him to make the team...and arguably, Jags fans should probably hope he doesn't, because, well, what does that say about their TE situation? Tebow is, of course, laughing all the way to the bank at our indignation.

Slivovitz, a fruit brandy made from damson plums. Definitely an acquired taste. (Translation: yeah, I bought a bottle, but I don't think I ever finished it.)

No one expects anything from you, DT....... <ducks> Qualitatswein bestimmter Anbaugebiete, or QbA. Designation for lower-end, light, usually slightly sweet German whites.

Nocello, a walnut-flavored cordial from Italy

IPA

Taurus is defined (6E2, p. 221) as 20 PD, 20 ED; then in the powers, it's listed as Resistant (+1/2) for 10 PD and ED. What this is, is a Special Power, called a Naked Advantage. As such, it can't be put into any framework. I can't find where you're looking at the sample character...but if there's 2 Naked Advantages, one to make things resistant and another to make them hardened...they've been mis-applied. The Hardened would technically NOT be on 74 points, it'd be on the 50...just as if you actually bought down to 0 PD as a Characteristic, and bought the 25 PD, with Resistant and Hardened, as a complete power. So the book is wrong in the pricing, it would appear, but a book/page number pointer would be useful. EDIT: I would also probably be a bit of a rat bastard as a GM here. There would be 6 separate aspects: PD ED Naked advantage: Resistant (on the PD) Naked advantage: Resistant (on the ED) Naked advantage: Hardened (on the PD) Naked advantage: Hardened (on the ED) ANY of the 6 could be targeted by a Drain attack separately. If you buy this as Resistant Protection (25/25, hardened) I have to attack THE WHOLE power. Say I roll 22 points of Drain effect...halved to 11. If my target is your PD, you lose 11 points. The naked advantages don't help. If I have to target your Resistant Protection, that 10 points of effect only actually nets 3 PD and ED...because 3/3 hardened costs 11, and you have to Drain the whole combination, not the parts. Last point. Doing your entire defenses as resistant and hardened is *extremely* expensive, and not necessarily beneficial. I'm not saying it's wrong; I've got at least one character build where the core concept is 3 levels of Shrinking...with Normal Mass. So, yeah, 8 inches tall, 200 pounds. GAH!!!! His density is 500 (!!!) which is 3x the density at the sun's core which Wiki says is estimated at 150 g/cm3. So his defenses are all resistant and hardened on that basis. (4 levels of DI does much the same; that puts your density at 16, and tungsten's density is 18, so it's like something hitting solid tungsten. TRY to actually chip it.) Yeah, fine, you'll pretty much never take BODY from a standard type of attack, but you're taking more STUN than might be prudent on bigger normal attacks.

My guess? You're lowballing it. A LOT. But I'm anticipating that you can't simply port the Java code as is; and it's dollars to donuts that it would be *better* to restructure the code base in the first place. If you have to do that, then you're talking MUCH more time and effort. Generally? HD on a phone??? HECK NO!!! Not even on my iPad. Dropdowns and buttons are a ROYAL PITA on small screens. Minimal real estate...I doubt I'd like trying to use HD on a 15" laptop, much less a 10" iPad screen, and a 6" uber-narrow phone screen??? Just take a look at...oh, let's say the 6E Life Support dialog. 2 text fields, 6 list boxes, 13 check boxes, 2 spinners, 7 tool tips. On a small screen? UGH. And while there might be other ways to lay these out, the presentation isn't bad. Heck, even trying to review an HTML or PDF character sheet on a phone would be hellish.

I use them regularly. The trick is to just either watch carefully, or know what *should* be happening by sight and sound and just monitor that way...because checkout personnel mess up sometimes too. One store uses 30% off stickers on meats fairly often; they're big, something like 1.5" square or so? And yellow. But checkers just mechanically scan and miss them from time to time. Considering the price of even mid-level beef cuts, that can be a fairly substantial savings lost. But to each his own. I like using them but I'd hate to see them disappear completely. BTW, there's MANY good reasons to not shop at Wal-Mart....

Well, some people call it a libation. Grappa. Broadly speaking, it's a form of brandy, but....from Wiki: It has its fans but this one's never interested me, and I've tried a few bizarre ones....

Elysium and Essensia, 2 very unusual wines from Quady. Both are sweet dessert wines made from almost unknown muscat varieties (black and orange, respectively).

So 2 more no hitters. 6 official, 7 practical. And it's not even Memorial Day. Major league batting average has gone up a few points, so perhaps the warmer weather will help...but it's still about 10 points below last year, which was historically low. Too many games really are BORING these days. Padres beat the Rockies...couldn't watch because of blackout rules that made NO sense, but that's separate. Just as well. Rockies manage 2 hits. <ZZZZZZZZ> Padres get 3 runs...2 on solo HRs. OK, one was inside the park, those are cool, but still. 8 hits. 2 walks by the Rockies, none by the Pads. But all that means is NO ACTION. And it happens way too often. It's not like baseball 20 years ago was particularly exciting, either; but now, it's often just a total snooze fest.

Oh man. The video coverage indicated the driver may have been drinking and/or high...and the report is that the car drifted into the bike lane, which at best can seem to be read as inattention. But if it's DUI...some of this is, I'm old enough to remember when DUI was *frequently* given a wrist slap. And when I was in HS, one of the most popular members of that year's senior class was killed by a drunk driver. (IIRC I was a soph.) The rest of the class found out *at the graduation ceremony* because it happened the night before. So...for that and for other reasons over the years...I HATE PEOPLE WHO DRIVE DRUNK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Benedictine

So this just happened. Market run today. Get what I need for the next few days. A few rather slow checkout people who don't know how to use the self-serve checkout, but ok...get through that. Scan everything. Finish and pay. "Attendant needed."" Huh? She's stepped away, but comes back. Finish and pay. SAME THING. HUH??? She gets that cleared, I go to pay...tap, tap, DING. OK Wait. There should be a transaction confirmation on my phone. Nope. But it's printing the receipt.... Look at receipt......wait, I didn't pay with a debit card..... What happened...the person before me did NOT clear the transaction. This particular self-checkout has one more step after tapping/swiping card; you have to hit Finish and Pay on the screen. THAT's the last confirmation. Double check...yeah, the first item on *my* receipt is cheap canned coffee, which I never buy. Then it's my stuff. So that person got charged for everything I scanned. BUT that person was long gone. So they're gonna get a rather unpleasant surprise. The fact that this person also used a debit card, means he may not have any recourse. This guy was in a hurry, didn't do things right. I feel a little bad about it but in no way guilty...finding who this person was, doesn't strike me as practical even if I was. PAY ATTENTION to the on-screen messages when you use a self-checkout. When the receipt starts printing, that's the signal that the transaction's closed.

Queenie

The baggy look was regrettable...but then again, so are skinny jeans today, IMO. When I found out that, yes, I had enough sugar in my blood to bear a close relationship to raw maple syrup, that just crystallized a requirement to lose weight. So I did, dropping something like 40-50 pounds over the next several months. A side effect of that was, of course, going from pushing to a 35 inch waist (34's were getting consistently small) down to 32. AND going from an XL to cover the excess gut to a Large, in shirts...which was really unfortunate because all my interesting, nice shirts were XLs. Several of my better sweaters were XLs too. The good news was, I didn't need to replace the dressier stuff; the various occasions where I might wear them had all evaporated for one reason or another. And on the nice shirts, they weren't readily replaceable...only one local store carried that level, and they'd closed. So it was just all the jeans and underwear, and t-shirts over time. Toss in a few polo shirts as the need seemed to arise. But even at that, it added up to a decent-sized chunk of change.

Unfortunately it also strongly supports that excess deaths are probably far more indicative of the true impact of this pandemic. A ways back when I got my first shot, I was talking with one of the hospital staff where it was happening. I targeted the early fall for a return to at least Mostly Normal, as this would be the start of the school year. I think...hope?...that's still a decent projection. Mind: that's for the US. For India and Brazil, I very much fear it's going to be much, much later than that.