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The alleged rapist formerly known as Prince...

https://twitter.com/RoyalFamily/status/1481674049310896129

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oh wow...kinda surprising but good on the Queen.

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Give the royal title posthumously to Prince instead.

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I was a bit worried at first that this story would be about Prince the musician being a rapist.

(I mean, he was a rock star in the 80s so it's entirely possible.)

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That was my worry too! Would have been so shocking because Prince, despite all the sexuality in his music, seems very much the last guy to act like that.

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Prince? I wouldn't think so.

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I wouldn't either, but at one time I would have said the same about Bill Cosby. You never know.

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True, you never know really, but you can feel like you do. I was sure Michael Jackson was a pedophile, before there was proof.

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Dearly beloved…

We are gathered here today…

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DBD Homeowner Projects

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YouTube is an incredible resource for DYI home projects. I've learned everything from basic plumbing to installing/repairing drip lines. I almost always look there first before calling a professional.

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anyone do any electrical things?

i need to install a 220v plug so i can charge my Volvo EV. seems excessive to pay $1000+ to do something straightforward like adding a new plug into electrical box.

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That is one I researched online when installing my charger, I figured I could probably do it myself, but messing with my 200amp box made me nervous so I ended up finding someone to install it for ~$800. It does look rather straightforward though, especially if you have a short run from your box to your charger location.

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That is to say, most DIY mistakes at home result in headaches and delays, electrical ones can end in sudden, painful death.

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or slow, peaceful deaths in your sleep during a house fire

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That's why I probably wouldn't attempt to do anything furnace or water heater related. Maybe I would try changing out the water heater but I would never attempt to replumb the exhaust.

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or you might survive but with painful injuries.

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Yeah I agree. Especially if you're adding a 220V plug. Plus you might need to get a larger panel or more power from the electric company when adding a car charger.

I will do small things like I added a plug up the wall by extended above an existing outlet when I wall mounted the TV. I also routed the HDMI cables up there as well.

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Yes, I'm totally cool with dealing with 110v outlets, lighting fixtures, etc, but once the panel is involved I'm likely to ask a professional.

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^^this^^

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So I bought my house in April and have done a number of projects with the house. It is challenging and pricey but a lot of fun and rewarding. Somewhat even addictive. I don’t really have any hobbies so this has filled a hole in my life.

I would love to hear what other are doing with their homes.

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We've lived in our house since 2016 and only in 2020 did we start doing numerous projects on a regular basis (probably because we were 1) planning out projects and 2) still financially recovering from buying a house).

2020: painted downstairs living room, painted and wallpapered the downstairs bathroom, converted a spare bedroom into cf-98's room in anticipation of her birth (painting, wallpapering, furnishing), turned the formal dining room into a play room, built a chicken coop in the backyard, created a bike workshop in the basement

2021: put in new floors downstairs, refurnished my office, painted Mrs Bk97's office, refurnished the mud room, organized the basement with a bunch of storage racks, built two 4'x8' raised garden beds

2022 (planned): repaint all the shutters on the front of the house (they're faded from the sun), reseal the upstairs shower, paint all the remaining walls downstairs, install a new backsplash in the kitchen

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Wow, that’s a lot.

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Thanks to covid, we've had plenty of time inside to get things done. But it's not too bad when stretched out over the course of a year. We did most of the work when we felt like it, rather than scheduling specific projects at specific times. I think that made it much easier, since we were motivated when we decided to do each project.

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When I bought my first house back in '05 in upstate NY, the first thing I did was throw about $4000 into the front yard....I had a large grassy yard and added a white vinyl picket fence, and a stone pathway to the front door from the street. Instant curb appeal.

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Jan 13, 2022
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Same here. The grass isn’t dead…yet. It might make it through the summer and then I need to do something with the front and backyards.

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My friends and I started putting our expenses into Splitwise yesterday for our New Year's trip...so we discovered yesterday that one of the restaurants forgot to charge us for our drinks!

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Heh, recently the missus and I went out and the server let us know that she accidentally gave our tab to another table and that they paid it and left already. Their bill was a fair bit less than ours, so she said we'll call it even if we paid their tab instead. We ended up getting several drinks for free.

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nice!

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Where did you go?

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We spent the weekend in Monterey, and that particular restaurant was Hula's

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Was it any good? I've always found it weird that Monterey doesn't have a lot of decent places to eat, but Carmel has tons.

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You should try Monterey’s Fish House on Del Monte. You are right that Carmel has more upscale places, but Monterey does have some good ones.

I am a Monterey High grad - alma mater of Herm Edwards and Leon Panetta. Go Dores!

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GGGrrrrrr... I've eaten there twice, never again. First time it was a bit of a wait for our reservation, they were nice, glass of wine, food was good, second time it was a 45 minute wait, and they were not apologetic at all - and with a young hungry kid in tow, that is so not cool.

Fuck'em

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Ok then!

One other suggestion, not so much a restaurant, but the Cooper-Molera Adobe at the end of Alvarado Street was restored and opened up in the last few years. It is really nice, has a cafe in it, a brewpub.

Nearby, the Alvarado Street Brewery is nice. Used to be a movie theater when I was a kid, so is a big space with a kind of industrial feel and nice beer garden in back.

Oh and fuck the Carmel Padres! 😀

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We also went to Schooners in Monterey, which was good, but maybe not groundbreaking. In Carmel, we went to Treehouse, which was fine but not something I'd necessarily travel for. We'd considered La Bicyclette but couldn't get a reservation.

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I really like Hula's, especially the lilikoi pie.

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i like Splitwise .. and free drinks are always good

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I have never heard of Splitwise before, so I went to go check it out. If I understand it correctly, it's essentially a running ledger of who owes whom. I can see where this would come handy - group vacations and things like that. Perhaps it's just me, but I've notice that female friends tend to do precise transactional calculations. "Oh, you had the expensive apps and drinks and I only had a salad". But my male friends are like "I'll get this one" and we fight over who pays next. And "I'll get you next time" is a promise. There's a social stigma to alligator-arming on going for the check and you get quickly called out for doing it. In Singapore, somebody got the nickname "Gator".

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i think it less about expensive and cheap contributions to dinner, but great for things like a multi-family ski trip that we just went on.

one person paid for house, another for airport shuttle, group dinners split 10 ways .. mostly large expenses but still needing some accounting. stuff that you would otherwise need a spreadsheet for, but here is a nice app to do it for you.

it also gives you the option to split equally, by percentage, by share, by exact amounts.

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Ok, since you like Splitwise, I'm coming here to complain. I feel like a major selling point of Splitwise is doing the "simplify" at the end, so instead of a bunch of little transactions, it's...simplified. But one of my friends decided to "pay me" before all the expenses were put in, AND he sent me money using Venmo WHICH I DON'T HAVE, so now all the calculations are going to be messed up. (I think it can be deleted on Splitwise, at least...)

(He knows I don't have Venmo. He just forgot.)

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sounds like mostly a complaint about your friend!

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Indeed! This like a yelp review.

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yes, i'm absolutely complaining about my friend. still love splitwise.

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TBB friend= zero stars

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yes and yes!

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Romanesco

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Great sauce for meat! (and veggies)

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Also, this reminds me, SF lost a great Spanish eatery during the pandemic: Barcino RIP

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But it got a good one in return -- hello Red Window!

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Not near the Opera :(

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This is the definition of First World Problems.

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John Adams

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We are overdue for the Adams Memorial.

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2nd President. His son, John Quincy Adams, was the 6th president

JQA involvement as a US Senator, then ambassador to Britain during the War of 1812, and his subsequent terms as Secretary of State meant that he was a strong diplomat. He used the US federal might to strong arm Spain into ceding Florida to the US. He later negotiated the Adams-Onis Treaty, which conceded some territory in Texas back to Spain in exchange for what would later become Oregon, Washington State, and Idaho. Despite it's name, the Monroe Doctrine was built upon principles created by Adams. Depending on if your perspective, the Monroe Doctrine created a lot of opportunity or misery as it formalized American influence over the entire Western hemisphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams

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eh, "formalized"? Given our lack of power then, it was more aspirational than real.

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I agree with this but it didn’t take long to turn aspirations into reality as it did set the stage for US intervention in Latin American starting with the Mexican-American War.

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Graffiti

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The first time I went to Germany I was surprised how much graffiti I saw on the train ride from the Hamburg airport to the city of Hamburg. Germany hadn't struck me as a country that would have much graffiti.

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American culture is a spray painted dick on the walls of the hallowed halls of Western culture, love it. USA! USA!

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I felt the same way the first time I took a train in Geneva. Though TBF it was a lot more on the street art side of things than basic tagging.

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, American

Still the best George Lucas movie?

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I'd say so.

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I was an anthro major and my friends would tease me that it was not a real major. At graduation the program listed the titles of our senior theses and one girl’s was called “Shithouse Graffiti”. My friends loved it, still tease me about it

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both my parents were Anthro grads at Cal and worked at the Lowie/now Hearst museum for years. My dad has some funny stories about that place

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That sounds like a paper that Professor Dundes would love.

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FET: I took two very different anthro courses and loved both of them. One was a physical anthro course that was all about human evolution from australopithicus to homo. Quizzes and tests often consisted of identifying species and eras by features of skulls (brow ridges, tooth size, etc.). Fascinating stuff. The other class was all about cultural domain analysis, statistical methods for measuring and quantifying elements of culture (i.e., how do you measure differentiation in related concepts, ideas, or objects?).

I still think regularly about the facts and methods I learned in those classes.

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Yes! first one was with Tim White? Dude knew his stuff, great class

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I took that cultural anthropology class. It was one of the most difficult courses I took! That it was in my last semester didn't help.

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At the middle school where I taught we once discovered some graffiti on a urinal. To tag a place where people urinate takes real dedication.

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I read that last word as "defecation" and I know I'm not alone in doing so.

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To defecate in a urinal certainly takes real dedication.

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That's someone who dares you to make eye contact while they're doing it.

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On the wall above a Doe Library urinal:

"Shakespeare before leaving"

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Cross-post with the minor league gherkin jerkin' topic.

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Back in the day, it seemed like Dwinelle had the cleverest graffiti.

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Epic content.

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Seen in many toilet stalls -

"GROUT IS GREAT!"

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Once saw the following, in, I believe, a Wheeler stall: "Grout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. Kurt Vonnegut's fictional character Kilgore Grout. Nothing like pan fried Rainbow Grout." That's all I remember, there were more.

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Grout Expectations

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DBD Not Official Financial Advice

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DBD Test Kitchen

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Had Asian udon noddles & veggies (including Napa cabbage) last night.

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What are European udon noodles like?

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They call it spaghetti.

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Like Asian noodles, just taller.

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packing way more "heat"...allegedly. Always some outliers I suppose

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One could use them in place of pasta I guess...

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DBD AV Club

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Mid-80's cult classic Clue has been making the rounds on Showtime...I watched again yesterday....actually a pretty fun and silly flick. I remember seeing it in the old Rockridge #2 movie theater tucked off Broadway across from Oakland Tech HS. Man, my folks took me to some total '80's classics there...Top Gun, Romancing the Stone, Iron Eagle...

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Wow, you're probably the only other person I know that has seen Iron Eagle. And I've seen all 4 of them. NOT a humble brag.

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Such a weird spot for a theater. They converted that theater into apartments. I have friends that live there and every time I visit them I point out that it's where I saw Action Jackson.

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Vanity was a Canadian treasure

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I went on a hot date there with some random frat boy to see Prizzi's Honor but we ended up making out quite a lot so I've only seen about half the movie.

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That's ok, it's not that good of a movie.

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Watched Spiderman last night because No 2 and 3 wanted to watch. I enjoyed it.

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Jan 13, 2022
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I liked it more than I expected to. Don't quite understand why it was the worst-reviewed Marvel movie.

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I think with the introduction of 10 new major characters, every character gets a little bit of short shrift. Gemma Chan is ridiculously attractive, but I'm not sure she holds up to carrying an entire movie. A lot of exposition is cut out (normally good - but this time I think needed) - there's a couple of deleted scenes on Youtube that would have helped with connecting the dots.

It was really pretty - but I think it still suffers from the Marvel last act problems AND it feels like the quipiness is stapled on instead of integral to the characters.

In the end I thought it was fine, but not an upper half MCU movie.

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Our Crumbling Democracy

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Remember the Cyber Ninja's lawyer who applied to get out of the case because he wasn't getting paid - and certainly not because he is getting absolutely crushed in the case - was denied by the judge to be removed from the case. So the lawyer launched a personal attack on the judge in order to try and get himself disqualified from the case. That's a bold move, Cotton.

https://twitter.com/DillonReedRose/status/1481357337466048512

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Trump is eyeing the White House and wants a more compliant Senate for when he gets there

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/13/trump-senate-midterm-gop-control-526991

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Construction workers who become politicians can sometimes have bad takes on how science works.

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1481446345579843585

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treig_Pronschinske

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Can't get past the pay wall. If gun control can't happen, I guess people should know how to handle them properly and safely?

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He is ambidextrous. That could be useful to citizens.

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Today in Omicron

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Lot fewer exposure notices at school this week for my kids. (Knock on wood)

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