I don't know Steph, I think JZ is right on this one.

Pish! I play Sexy M.F. all the time while I'm driving!

I think (as JZ pointed out) it's a good city driving song, but not necessarily a good long haul/highway song.

Pish! I say again. Pish!

I goddamned hate it when people try and dump their work on me. "ita, can you supply them the information they requested in their template format?"

No.

I am pretty much nobody's shape for dresses - too long-waisted.

Do you dislike the empire cut? That should work independent of how long- or short-waisted you are. Also columnar dresses, of which I have more than a few.

No.

Oddly enough, that's what I said.

Empire is a no for me. I am so tall all over that I look weird in empire waists, especially if the dress is short. I don't know that I've ever seen a truly columnar dress in a store (except spandex tubes).

As far as U.S. foreign policy goes, yeah not so great. We do tend to screw over people for our own economic and geopolitical gain. Like Fred Pete said, there have been some good moments, but I sure can think of a lot of bad ones especially now. Now I don't think the U.S. is authoritarian despite the current administrations attempt to consolidate executive power.

Don't think authoritarian is a binary, but a spectrum. I mean I don't think there is a nation in the world with 100% respect for civil liberities. But right now, the executive branch has the authority to arrest anyone and hold them without trial or charge. Yeah there re supreme court decisions, but it is up to exective to enforce them. We have anti-terror laws where someone can be arrested for giving to a charity that is later declared terrorist, even if it was not so declared at the time the money was given - not to mention that there is no formal review process for adding a group to that list; it is mainly at the discretion of the exective branch. Also we have a history of authoritarianism - slavery, the alien and sedition laws, the use of force against the labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, Jim Crow, the red scare, sticking Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during WWII, the McCarthy Era, Cointel-pro, the drug-war, and the war against Terra (not a typo). We usually think of ourselves as a nation of with great civil liberties by labeling these things as exceptions. But it seems like we never go more than a few years without some excuse for massively denying civil liberites to huge numbers of people and subjecting them to arbitrary authority.

I think it is like a frequent serious binge drinker. About the fifth bar fight/waking up in a strange bed with a scumball next to you and not remembering how you got there, the time comes to admit you have a drinking problem. It is time for U.S. Americans to admit that we have a fear problem, that we are too easily scared into surrendering our liberties, and that it is not a new thing.

I don't know that I've ever seen a truly columnar dress in a store (except spandex tubes).

I have a few T-shirt cut dresses (but in different materials) that fit that bill, as well as a couple tank dresses. Not relevant to what's in stores now, but a lot of the 60s stuff that I was scoping on eBay had identical waist and hip measurements.

it's a good city driving song, but not necessarily a good long haul/highway song

How do your criteria differ?

I'm not Lee, but I am the person who brought it up, so here I go, blathering away.

It's all fuzzy to my ears and eyes, but somehow super-Princey Prince sounded wrong when driving on a long flat road between nowhere and nowhere, surrounded by croplands and the occasional herd of cattle, with every now and then an actual my-hand-to-God tumbleweed tumbling across the highway. In that setting he sounded strangely harsh and foreign and even unpleasantly jangly, like the landscape was eating up all the grooves and rhythms and Princely goodness and spitting back a messy cud of noise.

Oddly, '60s soul and girl groups, also stuff that usually feels very city music to me, sounded fine to my ears on the 5 -- not a perfect match for their surroundings, but not mangled by them either. And an occasional Prince song on a mix, also okay. But not an entire Prince album.

Though it might work better in other landscapes -- I haven't yet listened to Prince in the desert, or winding through the crags and cliffs of the Sierra Nevada.

And this is all just in my experience, to my ears, possibly not applicable to anyone not me.

I'm guessing KR is not in Hell because he is not dead.(living without a heart should count, but, you know, I'm no Giles.) Maybe we liberals should stuff him till he bursts like the One Thin Wafer guy from Monty Python.

Hmm. I don't care, I think, where I'm driving for the music to be applicable. It's all about my mood, and that's pretty terrain-independent.