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We once roamed the vast forums of Corona Coming Attractions. Some of us had been around from The Before Times, in the Days of Excelsior, while others of us had only recently begun our trek. When our home became filled with much evil, including the villainous Cannot-Post-in-This-Browser and the dreaded Cannot-Log-In, we flounced away most huffily to this new home away from home. We follow the flag of Jubboiter and talk about movies, life, the universe, and everything, often in a most vulgar fashion. All are welcome here, so long as they do not take offense to our particular idiom.
The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:You know what's a fun game? Ranking the friends of Friends in order from biggest asshole to least biggest asshole. Joey is clearly the least biggest. Phoebe is probably next-to-least. The other four, though? It takes some chewin' on.
I'd say it's pretty easy, honestly. From biggest to least, I'd rank them like this:
Though in the early seasons, I'd probably rank Chandler above Monica. Monica got so cartoonish with her OCD by the end, she skyrocketed up the rankings. If the show had run another year, she'd probably have surpassed Ross.
Am I the only one who found that Phoebe was kind of a bigger asshole by the end of the show than Chandler or Monica? She has a real mean streak. I liked her a lot more in the earlier seasons. But I guess I could say that for most of the characters. Joey is probably the only one who actually got more likable by the end... which would explain why he was the one to get the spin-off.
I doubt I've seen more than an episode or three of the later seasons. I know Paul Rudd showed up a lot, but I'm not sure if I ever saw an episode with him in it.
The Discovery Channels - a term by which I refer to all of those 20+ "Documentary" channels including Nat Geo etc. that are grouped together on the EPG.
It used to be that, whatever time of the day, if you turned over to these channels you would be guaranteed to find something educational. Be it nature, engineering, science, technology - there was always something interesting and informative.
Nowadays what do we get? Lizard Lick Towing, Gator Boys, Duck Dynasty, Storage Hunters etc etc. I swear to God mankind is making itself fucking stupider by the day.
I never had these channels growing up, since I never had cable, but what I've seen of their non-reality show programming leads me to believe their "educational" programming/documentary-style stuff is of a generally poor quality. I've seen a few of their shows on Netflix. The stuff I've seen was rife with factual inaccuracies, was lazily researched, and was full of speculation based on laughable attempts at abductive reasoning.
It may have been different fifteen to twenty years ago. I have no experience with much older programming.
My first real experience with History Channel programming--far sloppier, as far as I can tell, than the already sloppy Discovery Channel programming--was during the late nineties/mid aughts. That's when my mother got cable. I started seeing glimpses of it when I was home for holidays and summer, because that's around the time my stepfather decided to start considering himself a history buff.
For my stepfather, this meant watching a lot of the History Channel. (He doesn't like to read.) This was when the History Channel was, rather infamously, keeping an all-Nazis-all-the-time focus. I'd heard it joked about, but it was still a little surprising to see. The vast majority of the shows were specifically WWII-related, but even non WWII-related shows found some way to bring up the Nazis. I remember being trapped in the living room for some reason or other and being relieved that a How-were-the-pyramids-built? show was on. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for the show to talk about slave labor and draw a comparison to Nazi concentration camps.
Whether or not slaves built the pyramids is still a debate, though I'm pretty sure the majority of the archaeological community now believes they were built by paid, skilled laborers. I think the belief that it was slaves goes back to the Ancient Greeks, who, though ancient, were still nowhere near as ancient as the civilization(s) who built the Giza pyramids. They simply made an educated guess based on the vastness of the project and obvious labor requirements, and their educated guess became something like an accepted/assumed truth over time.
I should stress that this doesn't mean there was no slave labor involved. It just means the majority of the archaeological community thinks there was probably little to no slave labor involved. Modern archaeologists could be as wrong as the Ancient Greeks, for all I know. I think they're basing their educated guess on the discovery of large encampments within walking distance to (of? from?) the pyramids that had been temporary home to a series of skilled, privileged, contemporary-to-the-building-of-the-pyramids workers.
Whatever the case, the History Channel show appeared to be taking slave labor for granted. In their potential defense, I think the skilled-laborers-built-the-pyramids argument might be fairly new. I'm pretty sure the program in question was broadcast in the mid aughts. I'd be willing to go as late as 2007, but I think it was earlier than that.
Aliens may have also been mentioned. I'm not sure whether or not this particular program predated the maybe-it-was-aliens era of the History Channel.
I think I've told all this before. My stepfather still watches Discovery, Animal Planet, the History Channel, and various stations like them, but he now complains about all the reality programming. "What does this have to do with history?" he will ask.
He also complains about the heavy focus on the backwoodsy country bumpkins. "Shows like this is why everbuddy thinks we're idjits!" he says.
That's what i'm talking about! Non-demanding factoids blasted at my eyeballs. Not a redneck fucking buffoon trying to make a spectator sport out of burglarising a storage unit.
A patient of ours was in an auto accident in late 2013. Per Minnesota law, her auto carrier is required to spend up to $20,000 on medical expenses related to the accident, no questions asked.
This lady exhausted that coverage. She's working with an attorney, but until that comes to a resolution, we've been sending her claims through her regular medical insurance. They've covered all but two visits. Two random visits.
I just got a call to follow up on my three calls wondering if/when they'd process those two claims. The lady told me they're still "in review" because they should be going through the auto insurance. I said that I have a letter from the auto insurance saying that she'd used her $20,000 and the claim was closed. I asked if I could send them the letter.
"Not until we hear from the member that there's no auto claim."
"But I have a letter from the auto insurance company saying that there's no auto claim."
"We need to hear that from the member, though you could send that in with the claim as a replacement claim."
"How would I do that?"
"First we need to hear from the member that there's no claim so we can assign each claim a claim number."
"So I can't do that?"
"Not until we hear from the member that there's no auto claim."
"I CAN RESOLVE THIS TODAY IF YOU'D LET ME SEND YOU THIS LETTER."
iTunes and syncing. I have a new iPad. My old iPad shows 5GB free but whenever I try to back it up so I can restore onto the new iPad it says I am 11GB over capacity and no amount of old iPad slimming will help or let it sync. Bastard!!
Seems like my refusal to update iOS again onto my old iPad 2 because the update from 7 to 8.something rendered it borderline unusable combined with my repeated refusal to upgrade iTunes because I simply couldn't be arsed, then the fact it was the first iPad backup to my new laptop came in and really ruined the party.
Updated iTunes and all in the garden seems rosey now, ready to do a restore and iOS update onto my new iPad Air 2 tomorrow when I have some more time.
Adam54 wrote:A patient of ours was in an auto accident in late 2013. Per Minnesota law, her auto carrier is required to spend up to $20,000 on medical expenses related to the accident, no questions asked.
This lady exhausted that coverage. She's working with an attorney, but until that comes to a resolution, we've been sending her claims through her regular medical insurance. They've covered all but two visits. Two random visits.
I just got a call to follow up on my three calls wondering if/when they'd process those two claims. The lady told me they're still "in review" because they should be going through the auto insurance. I said that I have a letter from the auto insurance saying that she'd used her $20,000 and the claim was closed. I asked if I could send them the letter.
"Not until we hear from the member that there's no auto claim."
"But I have a letter from the auto insurance company saying that there's no auto claim."
"We need to hear that from the member, though you could send that in with the claim as a replacement claim."
"How would I do that?"
"First we need to hear from the member that there's no claim so we can assign each claim a claim number."
"So I can't do that?"
"Not until we hear from the member that there's no auto claim."
"I CAN RESOLVE THIS TODAY IF YOU'D LET ME SEND YOU THIS LETTER."
Getting your papers in order your first couple weeks in Germany is kind of like this. I was constantly being told I'd need to go to X before going to Y, only to be told I needed to go either to Z or back to X before I could get what I needed from Y. It was like this for me in 1999, it was like this for me in 2006, and it was a little like this for me in 2011. It was more like this for Jubbers, since she was the one who really needed to get on the books.
Of course, most of Europe is like this. The mind-numbing inefficiency of European bureaucracy and the inevitability of Europeans encountering bureaucratic red tape no matter how insignificant the administrative task at hand is the scene's obvious target. It's also one of the obvious targets of The Trial and The Castle.
