So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[LizzieMaine]

We've Come So Far.

 

[Touchofevil]

“Awesome.”

It’s yet another losing battle, but I’m confident I won’t live long enough not to be annoyed by “awesome” used to characterize any minimally successful human effort.

“... I do not think it means what you think it means.” That and “amazing” have become “annoying.”

 

[GHT]

Long story, short. Then they don't shut up for the best part of ten minutes.

 

[tonyb]

“... I do not think it means what you think it means.” That and “amazing” have become “annoying.”

“Incredible” is another. Yup, sure ain’t credible, but that’s generally not what the speaker means to convey.

Definitions change; popular usage trumps, eventually. That’s just the way it works, no matter what I think of it. Still, a language with a lexicon as large as ours offers its speakers and writers good words and better words, so I take it as an indication that a person doesn’t much concern himself with clarity (let alone art) when that person uses the less precise word.

 

[Zombie_61]

Long story, short. Then they don't shut up for the best part of ten minutes.

In my experience, most of the time those people wait until they've been prattling on for those ten minutes before they utter "...long story, short...", and I almost always butt in saying, "Too late."

 

[HudsonHawk]

I can't get over that fact that Measles is making a comeback, among other diseases.

Nothing says "vintage" like dying from rubella.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's also a "polio-like" disease currently making the rounds. Wait'll the real thing shows up.

 

[3fingers]

Is the internet really so powerful so as to wipe the generational memory bank of past horrors? A lot of these people have living relatives who can give them real life experiences of how people died or were permanently crippled by these diseases.
People seem to be more inclined to believe any wandering crackpot or washed up actor/actress rather than what is in front of their own eyes.
How can people be so stupid to think that these diseases are "gone" rather than lying in wait for an available host?
It boggles the mind.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We're only at the beginning of understanding the power of the internet hive mind to distort reality. It's not just about friends and relatives sharing experiences anymore -- it's a gigantic algorithm-driven artificial intelligence that, because of its profit-driven basis, is utterly and absolutely amoral. If there's money to be made promoting crackpot health theories, it will be -- and more thoroughly than ever before possible to mere humans. We've already reached the point where Luthor is real -- and now, so is Brainiac.

 

[GHT]

You have a point, so many these days simply believe everything at face value, and they are convinced that Wiki is the gospel truth. Advances in medicine and much, much better sanitation has improved the lives of millions of us.
But what you say is so valid. When I had my hip replacement a year ago, my surgeon went to great pains to explain that the surgery is a brutal one and not to dismiss it just because the operation has become common practice. He even told me that half a percent, that's one in two hundred, die on the operating table. Yet friends and acquaintances all seem to think that it was no more serious than having a tooth out. Seriously!

 

[tonyb]

As has been made GLARINGLY obvious by the reactions to reports of the alleged assault against one Jussie Smollett, people are quick to believe what they wish to believe, and to disregard what they wish to disregard. And to pile on. A clear example of confirmation bias if ever there was one.

 

[tonyb]

You have a point, so many these days simply believe everything at face value, and they are convinced that Wiki is the gospel truth. Advances in medicine and much, much better sanitation has improved the lives of millions of us.
But what you say is so valid. When I had my hip replacement a year ago, my surgeon went to great pains to explain that the surgery is a brutal one and not to dismiss it just because the operation has become common practice. He even told me that half a percent, that's one in two hundred, die on the operating table. Yet friends and acquaintances all seem to think that it was no more serious than having a tooth out. Seriously!

I have a friend who entrusts her healthcare to outright quacks. It is fortunate that she is still relatively young and outwardly healthy, although judging from her accounts of her physical condition (perhaps her favorite topic of conversation) a person might think she is suffering from afflictions both chronic and acute brought on by “toxins” that must be eliminated through a strict organic vegan diet and (get this) coffee enemas.

For evidence of the efficacy of this treatment she undergoes, she cites anecdotal accounts only.

Some things are taken on faith because there is no way to prove them. Love is like that. So is religious belief. But healthcare? I’ll go with scientific rigor.

 

[GHT]

I have a friend who entrusts her healthcare to outright quacks. It is fortunate that she is still relatively young and outwardly healthy, although judging from her accounts of her physical condition (perhaps her favorite topic of conversation) a person might think she is suffering from afflictions both chronic and acute brought on by “toxins” that must be eliminated through a strict organic vegan diet and (get this) coffee enemas.

The image that conjures up. She's laying face down on the examination table. A tube is sticking out of her rectum, on top of, and fixed to the tube, is a funnel. A nurse pours coffee in. The lady screams and goes running up the ward, she runs back again. The startled nurse asks: "Was it too hot?" "No," she replies, "there was no sugar in it."

 

[tonyb]

The image that conjures up. She's laying face down on the examination table. A tube is sticking out of her rectum, on top of, and fixed to the tube, is a funnel. A nurse pours coffee in. The lady screams and goes running up the ward, she runs back again. The startled nurse asks: "Was it too hot?" "No," she replies, "there was no sugar in it."

I wouldn’t be shocked to learn from this friend that sugar in her coffee enema would still be therapeutic, provided it’s organic, fair-trade sugar.

 

[ChrisB]

Back in the days of printed media, crackpot ideas were less likely to find large scale distribution. The internet is the ultimate “vanity press”.

 

[Edward]

Very first thing I did the next morning was change all the SMOKING PROHIBITED BY LAW signs backstage and in the bathrooms to SMOKING AND VAPING PROHIBITED BY LAW signs. I ask you.

Notably, here in the UK vaping and electronic cigarettes were originally exempt from the smoking ban, which is why a lot of folks took to them. More recently, they were added to it for all sorts of reasons, but not least, I suspect, because in a crowded venue it's simply often hard to differentiate between the two. There was a story around that in those days Ronnie Wood, the ultimate Sixties Casualty manchild in many ways, was seen thinking he was being clever and beating the system by using both a vape and a cigarette at an art gallery, the one as cover for the other. I doubt he was alone.

Asdie from issues like the one you experienced, vaping bothers me less, but then in truth the thing that always galled me about being in a smoky environment was never so much the health risks as ending up coming home stinking of other people's smoke.

At least in the UK, supermarkets have the decency to put price-per-weight on shelf labels. They (and their suppliers) still employ the full range of sneaky tricks, but there are some metrics they can't lie about!

I grew up being trained in the supermarket by Dad to compare prices and figure out which size box / bottle / w.h.y. was best value. IT's never left me, though the invention of the labels for price per 100g / kg et cetera has made it much easier over the years! (Dad of course was getting us to practice our maths as well as a lifeskill.)

“Mid-century mod” is hotter now than it was 50 and 60 years ago. It has been for a decade or more. Maybe it has cooled a bit, but just a bit. And maybe it hasn’t. The major overseas manufacturers and stateside retailers are still moving mid-century “inspired” stuff by the mega-freighterful, to coin a term.

We’ve discussed this matter at some length already. “Real” antiques, the centuries-old stuff, what these days is called “brown furniture” in the trade, has been in the doldrums for at least 10 years. But “vintage” items — furniture, dinnerware, etc. — dating from the 1950s through the mid-70s or so, is fetching prices that would have my grandfather shaking his head.

We have also thoroughly chewed over the reasons for this phenomenon. But it remains an interesting one, and always worth another look.

I remember when my parents first got into antiques, and you just didn't lose money on them. Then the trade was hammered when the value dropped for the first time.

I love MCM, myself: the lovely thing about it is how many newer IKEA pieces are either in that general style or actual reissues of period pieces of their own. I adore this one:

In some markets they introduced a sofa version of this - gutted we couldn't get it in the UK.

A few years back at a vintage car show I chatted with a fellow 20 years my senior, more or less. The oldtimer was displaying his Ford Model A convertible, which he had built to resemble the type of hotrod seen in the early 1950s, when Model A Fords were themselves only 20-some years old. Had he not told me, I wouldn’t have known that all the body sheet metal was of recent manufacture. The FoMoCo flathead V8 was out of an early ‘50s Mercury, he told me. Stamped steel wheels were painted red and had true hubcaps (as contrasted with wheel covers), as was the fashion back when he was a young man.

This is the sort of hot rod I love, rather than the 80s and later 'custom cars' which basically used the shell of something old as a novel shape. I'd love to have two versions of a car like that -the original, as new, and the hot-rodded twenty years later verison. Would make an interesting pairing.

Price per kilo is so much more civilized.

I find it easier to deal with. The biggest pain in the UK is that we wre taught exclusively metric at school, then released into a world that had largely never caught up. How I wish decimalisation had been enforced across the board when the currency changed!

I find it really annoying how the commercial interruptions become longer as we get closer to the ending of the show. Amazon, Netflix, HBO, and Hulu have spoiled us.

True.... it's the pause button. I used to love ad breaks when I got to the age where I might need the loo during a film, but the pause button makes all the difference!

You just described me & M*A*S*H to a T.

IT's a show I find hard to imagine with ads, as it was always screened by the BBC in the UK (until more recent years, at least). What really drove me up the wall, though, was trying to watch an episode with the laugh track on it.... I am glad the DVDs allow us to switch that off (as how it was broadcast in the UK by the BBC).

You have a point, so many these days simply believe everything at face value, and they are convinced that Wiki is the gospel truth.

Yet on the flipside, academic surveys have consistently proven that for science and technical entries, wikipedia is at least as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Brittannica or international equivalents. It definitely needs watching, though, as it is far too easy to manipulate, especially where political advantage is to be had.

Back in the days of printed media, crackpot ideas were less likely to find large scale distribution. The internet is the ultimate “vanity press”.

The web presents many issues for regulation, and certainly the fact that it gives a channel to anyone is part of the problem. For example, in recent months individuals have been convicted for a whole range of contempt of court crimes that no traditional medium would have dared to print. The problem is often ignorance of the law, lack of legal advice, and an overblown sense of self-righteousness that thinks the media is somehow conspiring against the audience by complying with a court order.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Back in the days of printed media, crackpot ideas were less likely to find large scale distribution. The internet is the ultimate “vanity press”.

Exactly. I collect fringe/extremist publications from the Era, and it's interesting how many of the modern viral/conspiracy ideas turn up in these pamphlets -- especially in those published by outlying religious groups, who were pretty much the only sorts of organizations with the resources to distribute this stuff. Anti-vaccination theories, the idea that aluminum cookware is part of a communist mind-control plot, the idea of hoarding silver as "the Gentile metal," all this kind of stuff was being put out in raggedy booklets by the likes of Coughlin, Winrod, Smith, and others of their ilk. Today they'd have millions of followers on Gab.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Exactly. I collect fringe/extremist publications from the Era, and it's interesting how many of the modern viral/conspiracy ideas turn up in these pamphlets -- especially in those published by outlying religious groups, who were pretty much the only sorts of organizations with the resources to distribute this stuff. Anti-vaccination theories, the idea that aluminum cookware is part of a communist mind-control plot, the idea of hoarding silver as "the Gentile metal," all this kind of stuff was being put out in raggedy booklets by the likes of Coughlin, Winrod, Smith, and others of their ilk. Today they'd have millions of followers on Gab.

The flipside, of course, is that the internet makes vetting and debunking of the crackpot theories a lot easier for the average Joe / Jane.

One of my favorite wingnut claims is that refrigerated freight cars with the marking, "ARMN" means that it's a car owned by the US Army for transporting corpses during the impending zombie apocalypse. It's actually a corporate marking for the American Refrigerator Transit Company: a railroad entity originally owned by the Wabash and Missouri Pacific railroads (since about the turn of the 20th Century) and now- via merger and acquisition- part of the Union Pacific. No "army" connection whatsoever.

 

[tonyb]

The flipside, of course, is that the internet makes vetting and debunking of the crackpot theories a lot easier for the average Joe / Jane.

One of my favorite wingnut claims is that refrigerated freight cars with the marking, "ARMN" means that it's a car owned by the US Army for transporting corpses during the impending zombie apocalypse. It's actually a corporate marking for the American Refrigerator Transit Company: a railroad entity originally owned by the Wabash and Missouri Pacific railroads (since about the turn of the 20th Century) and now- via merger and acquisition- part of the Union Pacific. No "army" connection whatsoever.

Alas, no amount of cold, hard, indisputable facts to the contrary will shake those who are committed to their wacky beliefs. They have their identities invested in it, so defending those beliefs is tantamount to defending their very reasons for being.

It can be amusing, in some cases, and disgusting in others, such as those who promote the notion that mass shootings are staged, with “crisis actors” playing the parts.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Spend half an hour reading Gab or certain corners of Reddit and you'll wish sincerely for the extinction of the human race.