Mal: Go on. Get in there. Give your brother a thrashing for messing up your plan. River: He takes so much looking after.

'Objects In Space'


Natter 58: Let's call Venezuela!  

Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.


Cashmere - Apr 14, 2008 9:26:11 am PDT #1651 of 10001
Now tagless for your comfort.

I have a friend whose barely competent manager has decided that the solution to all their problems is to drag the whole department to some outdoor/nature center that does team building programs next week. (Including the person with skin cancer and the person with some sort of porphyria disorder, naturally.) Wonder what neat tricks they'll come up with.

Lord of the Flies was set out in nature, wasn't it?

DH's philosophy is that our species has spent nearly 4 million years trying to get OUT of nature. No way in hell he's going back.


Shir - Apr 14, 2008 9:26:37 am PDT #1652 of 10001
"And that's why God Almighty gave us fire insurance and the public defender".

OK, my room is clean.

And now, to the visible parts of the kitchen, and the cooking, and the Getting to Know Saturnalia Better part of the evening.


Nora Deirdre - Apr 14, 2008 9:32:50 am PDT #1653 of 10001
I’m responsible for my own happiness? I can’t even be responsible for my own breakfast! (Bojack Horseman)

I'll ask my mom if she has any recommendations. Are you thinking of anything in particular, or particularly cheap, etc.?

Just a nice lunch spot. Tom loves old school diners. (other factors that might help: good beer; bbq- but I think that in Jersey, the diner angle is probably the best!)


Sean K - Apr 14, 2008 9:35:18 am PDT #1654 of 10001
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

And the crossover, with Willows and Warwick meeting up with the Miami team, was pure comedy gold. Reeediculous!

The most reeeediculous is the Miami/NY crossover that launched NY. The cinematographers for NY had decided on a cool, blue pallet, and Miami has always been primarily orange. They generally used the Miami pallet in Miami, and the NY pallet in NY, but there was one eye-stabbingly bad scene between Sinese and Caruso in Sinese's apartment that involved cuts back and forth between the two characters. Sinese, standing by his apartment window at night, was in the deepest, most melancholy blue light of the entire episode, and Caruso, standing by the front door, had found the only pool of orange light in all of NY to stand in.

It was bad.


tommyrot - Apr 14, 2008 9:38:57 am PDT #1655 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

Are parents really as fearful about letting their kids out of sight as this article suggests?

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone

And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

...

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

And yet —

“How would you have felt if he didn’t come home?” a New Jersey mom of four, Vicki Garfinkle, asked.

Guess what, Ms. Garfinkle: I’d have been devastated. But would that just prove that no mom should ever let her child ride the subway alone?

No. It would just be one more awful but extremely rare example of random violence, the kind that hyper parents cite as proof that every day in every way our children are more and more vulnerable.

...

These days, when a kid dies, the world — i.e., cable TV — blames the parents. It’s simple as that. And yet, Trevor Butterworth, a spokesman for the research center STATS.org, said, “The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.”

Justice Department data actually show the number of children abducted by strangers has been going down over the years. So why not let your kids get home from school by themselves?

“Parents are in the grip of anxiety and when you’re anxious, you’re totally warped,” the author of “A Nation of Wimps,” Hara Estroff Marano, said. We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.


Ginger - Apr 14, 2008 9:41:06 am PDT #1656 of 10001
"It didn't taste good. It tasted soooo horrible. It tasted like....a vodka martini." - Matilda

DH's philosophy is that our species has spent nearly 4 million years trying to get OUT of nature.

In a state of nature, there is "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (Hobbes)


tommyrot - Apr 14, 2008 9:44:36 am PDT #1657 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

In a state of nature, there is "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (Hobbes)

But what does Calvin say?


bon bon - Apr 14, 2008 9:45:17 am PDT #1658 of 10001
It's five thousand for kissing, ten thousand for snuggling... End of list.

If anyone hasn't seen the montage of David Caruso's blackout lines while taking off his sunglasses, YOU NEED TO. It is amazing: [link]

ita, I lost my copying of your question to the Caruso link, but I'm not positive. My unresearched answer would probably be that if, by providing the safe deposit numbers you knew the object of the conspiracy was to rob a bank, then yes, it's possible to be charged with felony murder. Aiding and abetting, that I'm not sure about.


Kristen - Apr 14, 2008 9:47:40 am PDT #1659 of 10001

Was it Jim Carrey who did the Caruso impression on Letterman?

ETA: Yes, it was!


Dana - Apr 14, 2008 9:48:23 am PDT #1660 of 10001
I'm terrifically busy with my ennui.

We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

Uh, I'm not sure letting your kid out of sight on a playground is the same thing as letting a nine-year-old kid loose in New York City. But IANAParent, I guess.