Recent content by KILO NOVEMBER

Automated call directors from Hell! Last week I ordered a product (well, two, actually) from The Territory Ahead. We have a history of their inability to deliver products ordered and sure enough, one of the two pairs of pants I ordered (which the web site said were in stock when I placed the...

Thanks for the reference. Your note on "Sinjun" reminded me of an episode of Brokenwood, a police/mystery series made and set in New Zealand. One episode featured the murder of an amateur actor in community theater production of Romeo and Juliet, set in the small town of Brokenwood. The...

Many years ago when cable TV was a new experience for me (late 1970's) I was surfing the astounding number of channels when I happened on one that was televising the House of Lords. The man speaking was identified on the screen by spelling his title ("name" doesn't seem to be the appropriate...

Does this "tick you off"? Well, possibly there are such persons. More likely you have encountered a writer who is presenting the way people in some parts of the U.S. pronounce the word. Surely there are places in Germany where the spelling doesn't match the local pronunciation.

Back to restaurants and waiters. My wife and I have lunch on Sundays at the same restaurant every week. The food is good and the prices, if not cheap, are reasonable. My peeve is the waiters and "we". It's not as annoying as the "waiter sits at the table" issue called out above, but since the...

Over a period of years I worked part-time in a tobacco store with a very dear friend, now, alas, deceased. Always wearing a sport coat, he kept is wallet in the right inside pocket, his cigar case in the left inside pocket, his glasses on his nose and his testicles in the standard location. His...

I think I missed it. When was this renamed "Trenchfriend Lounge"?

The doctors look so young. Yesterday I went to a dermatology practice for a skin biopsy. As my ancestors all came from northern Europe and seeing as how I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's when sun protection wasn't so widely practiced, this was not my first experience. When "the doctor" came to...

Speaking of radio, I grew up in the Pittsburgh area. When I was young there will still plenty of grandpas and grandmas from "the old country". There were AM radio stations (widespread FM was still some years off) and on Sundays there were stations that broadcast in eastern European languages.

I see. The cars, while not identifiable as particular makes and models, are definitely of 1950's design. The war stopped production of civilian automobiles and the styling from the late 40's was much different. I'm not a car enthusiast, but I watch enough old movies to recognize general styling...

It's one of those Newton vs. Leibnitz controversies. It seems that Alexander Friedmann (born in imperial Russia, died in the USSR) and Georges Lemaître, Belgian priest, came up with the theory independently. Two scientific notions that were once accepted the way dark matter and dark energy are...

Karl Popper, an Austrian-born 20th Century philosopher, later a British subject and knighted, is well known (in circles where such things are known) for his proposition that in order for a proposition to be scientific, it must be, at least in theory, disprovable. My corollary is that anything...

The "five-and-ten" in my hometown was G.C. Murphy. I remember the lunch counter, the toy section and the pet department. They also sold yard goods and notions. Their main competitor was S.S. Kresge, but there was no store in my town.

I haven't clicked the link, but this absolutely reeks of a cheesy, underhanded exploit to use this forum with a tissue-thin marketing ruse. That HerbertClark is a first-time poster just sets off alarm bells. If that link isn't an offer to sell a product or service, I'll apologize in advance, but...

"radical" and "radish" come from the Latin word "radix", meaning root, and what, after all, is a radish? It seems that the term "radical", in a political sense, has subtly shifted meaning over time. Where once it described a position or person who wanted to address some social ill by attacking...