It may not have been the catchiest song that you’d catch yourself humming

But I really dug the opening for American Gods

The song is sort of reminiscent of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin, which is of course very fitting

And all the imagery is also very spot-on

The first season, IMO, was probably one of the all-time best seasons of a show I’ve ever seen

But man did it take a hard nose-dive after that for a few different reasons.

We can probably make a pretty good guess, but we don’t know everything

Let’s say 10,000 years ago, some giant asteroid passed close enough to earth that its gravity nudged the earth a couple centimeters out of its previous orbit

Maybe since then, that asteroid has continued on its merry way and left the solar system or crashed into Jupiter, or broke apart, or is just out still orbiting the sun somewhere in a place we haven’t detected it, or we have detected it but just haven’t done all the calculations to figure out where that particular space rock was 10k years ago to know that it probably nudged the earth a tiny bit.

Now we transport you back in time and account for all the other movement of the earth, but not that little nudge.

So you’re appearing a few centimeters off from where you should. If you’re lucky, you still end up with solid ground under your feet, or maybe you end up a couple centimeters in the air and you fall on your ass once you blink into existence in the past.

Or maybe you end up with your foot trying to occupy the same space as a rock because you’re a couple centimeters lower than you should be. How does that even play out? Does your foot and the rock explode? Does your foot get stuck inside of the rock? Do they merge into one horrible mess of rock and flesh?

And even if we account for all of the earth’s movements through space, what was at the exact point on earth you’re currently existing in some arbitrary amount of time ago?

Tectonic plates have been drifting around, you gotta account for that, the spot on the north american plate that I’m standing on right wasn’t in the same spot relative to the rest of the earth.

And even accounting for that, which I don’t think we can really do super accurately, there’s erosion and a million other random environmental factors to consider, go back far enough, and the space I’m in right now might have been inside of a mountain or a glacier or something. There might have been a tree growing right where I’m standing. It might have been in the middle of a wildfire or a flash flood, or there might have been a dinosaur standing right where I am now.

I once bought a couple copies of a book as an inside joke for a couple friends.

It was not at all a popular book, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never heard of it or it’s writer, and odds are you’d probably hate it if you did ever read it.

I think when I bought them they were going for about $5 a pop.

And immediately after I ordered them the price shot up to like $15

I can only assume that the algorithm assumed that something happened that made that book popular all of a sudden, instead of just one asshole buying a couple copies to give to his asshole friends as a joke.

Took a few months before the price dropped down again.

I remember one time being over a friend’s house, he had some board game they just dug out of the back of a closet somewhere and we were thinking about playing it. Can’t remember which game it was, I want to say it may have been Diplomacy, but I’m not 100% on that.

We open it up, looked like all the pieces were there, and we started reading through what we thought was the rulebook, it was a fairly beefy book.

Then we realized that what we had wasn’t in fact the rulebook, but some sort of secondary book that referenced the full rulebook, which it called “intimidating”

On reading that, we decided that this game was just too much trouble for how much effort we were willing to put in that day.

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper, at the time I got it they already hadn’t been made for about a decade, they weren’t super common to begin with, and I think a lot of them got cash-for-clunkered, so they were a pretty rare sight

Always got a wave when I passed someone else driving one.

And not for nothing, I really liked that car.

I’ve heard a lot of hot air balloon pilots carry a bottle of wine or something with them to help smooth things over with property owners who are unhappy about them landing on their property.

So did you get anything good?

I think there’s a time and a place for home schooling, and a lot of it depends on the parents actually putting the effort into it.

I used to work with a guy who homeschooled his kids. For them, it was probably the best option for them. He wasnt the brightest bulb out there, but he did have pretty decent common sense, and was self-aware enough to know that he wasn’t up to doing their lessons himself.

He also had some physical and mental health issues, and his wife was basically in the same boat and was pretty much totally unable to work. Their housing situation wasn’t exactly secure, he made shit money, he often found himself out of work, and they had to move a few times over the 5 years I worked with him, usually couldn’t afford to have a car etc.

So he had his kids enrolled in some sort of online homeschool/cyber charter school thing. And that probably gave them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise if they were constantly moving and needing to change schools. Probably also spared them from some bullying and such they would have gotten at schools for being poor.

And he did his best to make sure they were out socializing with other kids and experiencing the world to the best of his abilities. He wasn’t keeping them isolated. If he could have afforded to live in a better neighborhood I suspect he would have been the type to let them run loose around the neighborhood as long as their school work and chores and such were done. And he certainly wasn’t controlling them or telling them what to think outside of basic morality, he definitely was no saint in his youth and was a proud weirdo.

I’m not much of a kid-person, so I’m probably not the best one to make this judgement, but the couple of times I met them they seemed about as bright, happy, and well-adjusted as any kid out there.

On the flip side, my high school actually had a kid who was homeschooled who was caught planning a school shooting (on us.) His parents had pulled him out of our district to be home schooled because of “bullying,” I never met the guy myself, he was a couple years younger than me, but from my friends who did know him, I get the impression that he was basically Cartman. He was severely overweight, but this is America, we had plenty of fat kids and overall didn’t have a significant bullying problem, the reason people didn’t like him was because he was a totally-unlikeable, racist, misogynistic asshole, and really if any kid ever deserved bullying it was probably him.

And I don’t think we can exactly place the blame on home schooling, since the root problem with him started before that, and it’s probably his parents to blame (some wild stuff came out about what his parents would do for him/let him do, it was a really weird case of somehow being both totally interested in supervising their child while also being major helicopter parents,) but i think that sort of isolation certainly didn’t help.

This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

There is a small chance that this is actually a true fact, but I’ve never been able to find any source that backs it up. I haven’t looked hard, but I have looked, and my google-fu is usually pretty good

I remember hearing once that “blue raspberry” flavor exists because when food scientists were trying to come up with a formula for artificial raspberry flavoring they just couldn’t get it quite right, they got pretty close, but not quite close enough for people to buy that it tastes like raspberries. But some marketing guru decided it was good enough and they’d just color it blue and people would accept it “of course it doesn’t taste like regular raspberries, this is blue raspberry, it’s different, it’s supposed to taste like that”

And yes, blue raspberries kind of actually exist. They probably used that as justification banking on the fact that most people don’t actually know what they taste like.

There’s also some stuff about a certain red dye being banned at one point, and marketing also wanting to differentiate raspberry because people already associated red with flavors like cherry, strawberry, watermelon, etc. and those are probably true as well, but I don’t think those reasons are incompatible with this explanation.

I’m not going to get too into the politics of the troubles, but I think it’s kind of worth remembering that this did happen in the context of an armed conflict, morality gets fuzzy.

Thinking about it in the context of modern conflicts, let’s say a Palestinian or Lebanese group assassinated an influential Israeli businessman who was vocally advocating for Israel continuing their operations, or perhaps a Ukrainian group assassinated a Russian oligarch.

Or hell, the guys who shot the United healthcare CEO or Charlie Kirk.

In some theoretical future where there’s some kind of peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine/Lebanon, or the US has gone through some kind of civil war to overthrow MAGA types, would it seem so unreasonable to want those people to be freed as part of the negotiations?

Or looking further back, let’s say members of the French or Polish or whatever resistance in WWII had assassinated a German businessman who helped fund the Nazi war machine, wouldn’t we have expected them to be freed after the war?

And I think likely that’s a similar kind of light at that least some Irish people would view these guys in.

And of course, depending on what side of the conflict you were on, you may not see things that way. If you were a Nazi, or if you support Israel or Russia or Trump, you’d probably think of those assassins as nothing but criminals or terrorists, but as the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom-fighter

“You don’t.”

My area isn’t the hottest, but it does usually get up to about 100F for a day or two most years, and in the summer temps are in the 80s or 90s during the day pretty consistently, and it can be humid.

I have a mostly finished basement, I’ll spend a lot of time down there over the summer, it stays pretty consistently cool.

I’m lucky that I work night shift, so it’s easier for me to do stuff in the evenings or early morning before it gets too hot.

There’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. I usually joke that in the summer that means air conditioning.

But if you don’t have a/c, opening your windows and getting some fans going can really go a long way to keeping your house cool.

Limit your time outside, find somewhere to sit down in the shade and take a break if you need to.

Dress appropriately for the weather, lightweight, light colored, breathable clothing, linen is great if you can find it. Maybe consider wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off your face and neck when you go outside.

Drink lots of water, find some cool foods to eat, watermelon, cold soba, ice cream etc.

Also not a biologist and I’m similarly out of my depth, but I’m pretty sure this part of the quoted text is kind of explaining that, but from the perspective of laypeople like us, is kind of glossing over it.

Based on the body surface area of humans and animals, and considering the metabolism and absorption of fluoride in rats

Surface area and mass/volume don’t scale the same way (for example the square-cube law- a 1inch cube has a volume of 1 cubic inch, and a surface area of 6 square inches, so a 1:1 ratio of volume to surface area,a 10inch cube has a volume of 1000 cubic inches, and a surface area of only 600 square inches, so a 5:3 ratio of volume to surface area )

I don’t know where/how in the body fluoride gets absorbed, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it gets absorbed through your stomach lining, so a big limiting factor in how much and how fast you absorb it is how much surface area the inside of your stomach has. More surface area means absorb fluoride more quickly.

So if rats were just scaled-down humans, you’d expect them to need a lower concentration to absorb the same kind of dose as a human.

But rats aren’t just scaled down humans. They’re rats.

And again, not a biologist, I have basically no idea what the inside of a rat looks like. Maybe their stomachs are roughly the same size proportionally to us, or maybe they’re significantly bigger or smaller, which would throw off how much stomach surface area they have available to they absorb fluoride.

And of course their metabolism and body chemistry is going to be different than a human. I’m pretty sure their metabolic rate is way higher than ours so basically everything inside the rat is happening faster, stuff is getting absorbed faster, but also excreted faster, and food/water is spending less time in the stomach leaving less time for that fluoride to get absorbed.

And maybe rats are just fundamentally better or worse at absorbing and metabolizing fluoride than we are, maybe their stomach lining is just more or less capable of absorbing fluoride, maybe they have more or less of some protein or enzyme or something that does something with that fluoride so it gets used more or less efficiently by their body, etc.

So all of that would need to be taken into account. Whole lot of math involved figuring that out that I don’t even want to think about.

And, of course, experimentally, we want to be able to see and measure the effects. The study is looking for its effects on the brain, not, for example, liver and kidney function (or whatever organs would be damaged by too much fluoride.) Trying to measure the IQ of a rat I’m sure is already hard enough in general, let alone trying to measure potentially very minute changes in it. It may be they’re trying to push the dose as high as they can to try to create any measurable cognitive symptoms, if we’re giving the rats 6x the normal dose, maybe to a level where it might damage their kidneys or something, and still not seeing any cognitive issues, it’s probably pretty safe to say that a normal, safe, dose isn’t going to cause issues either.

My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.

Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.

Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.

So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.

When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.

Yeah, there’s plenty of VESA mounts that will allow you to rotate the monitor, move it up/down, side-to-side, and tilt it forwards and backwards as needed

As for ones that will automatically change the orientation that things are being displayed when you turn the monitor from portrait to landscape, if that’s what you’re looking for, that’s a tougher nut to crack, I’m sure they’re out there but they’re not common, or (last I checked) cheap. But changing the orientation is as simple as Ctrl+Alt+arrow key (I think some newer Intel display drivers have changed that, but I haven’t looked too far into that)

Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you’re likely to be using

You probably won’t even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

If you can’t find one with an adjustable stand that’s to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven’t disclosed, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

Also, when they’re recording the audio, they’re usually not just reading through the whole script in one go

They’re probably doing multiple takes of most of the lines, changing little things until they get the take that feels right

So you’d end up with a bunch of choppy little cuts instead of a nice long continuous shot of the VA doing their thing in a recording booth like OP is probably imagining

That same week

I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal

We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn’t killed everyone while we were gone.

It probably depends on the music festival you’re going to but there was one I used to go to every year

It was 3 or 4 days of day-drinking, eating like crap, staying up late, being outside in the sun on probably one of the hottest weeks of the year while probably not drinking enough water, and sleeping in tents on the ground.

And depending on how the festival is laid out, walking around the grounds from one stage to another, to different vendors and food stands, to your campsite and back, etc. can add up pretty quickly. The one I went to was pretty small and compact, but I still probably managed around 5-10 miles a day walking around, and you may be hauling around camp chairs, blankets, and coolers with you for a lot of that. And I’m not saying that that’s a lot of walking, personally I can do that pretty easily, but it’s more than a lot of people normally do.

Policies and what resources are available are going to vary a bit from one agency to another, but assuming it came in to us on a 911 line

From landlines, we get an address for the phone number. There’s a couple exceptions to that with certain kinds of business and VoIP lines where the address we get may not actually be the actual address where the person is, or there’s always the chance that the phone company has wrong info, but generally speaking if you call from a landline we know where you are.

From cell phones, things get a bit fuzzier. For the most part we’re relying on triangulation from cell towers to locate you (we call it “Phase II”) which means the quality of that location can vary from pretty good to basically useless based on how many towers your phone can reach, signal strength, geography, etc.

What that location looks like is we get a set of coordinates

An “uncertainty radius” or “confidence factor” which is a distance in meters from that point that the caller is probably within

A “confidence percentage” which is how confident the system is in that location (I’ve literally never seen this be anything other than 90%)

So what it ends up looking like is something like “90% confident that the caller is with 200m of 40.12345°N,-90.12345°W” (random-ish coordinates, not sure where that location actually is, but it’s definitely not where I work)

I’ve seen the confidence factor be in the single digits, and I’ve seen it in the thousands. Sometimes it takes a minute before we get a good fix, sometimes it comes in right away, sometimes we never get a good location from it.

My agency’s policy is that if we have a confidence factor of 300 or less, we can enter the call as normal with just that phase II if we’re unable to verify that location any further

And if they’re in somewhere like a wide open field or parking lot or something, 300m is pretty good, they’ll probably see you when they get out there. If you’re in a denser neighborhood with apartment complexes and a bunch of houses, wooded areas, etc. that’s really not much to go on. Usually we can get at least that 300m, but again not always.

That phase II location also takes a while to update, if we’re lucky we can only get an updated location every 20 seconds or so, so if, hypothetically, you’re in a car flying along the highway at 70mph, you could be about a half mile away from where you were by the time we got a new ping.

So we always try to verify the location, and we can’t, as my callers like to put it “just GPS your phone”

New technology is rolling out, we can sometimes get actual GPS locations from your phone which is usually more accurate and updates faster, but it depends on what settings you have enabled, what your carrier supports, etc. I think my center currently can only get it from iPhones. Same for your emergency information like contacts, medical info, etc if you’ve filled that out.

Once you hang up with us, that’s usually pretty much it, we’re not getting any further updates on your location even if we call you back and you answer.

We also don’t get any of that if you call on a 10-digit non-emergency line, usually we get your phone number and maybe a name on the caller ID, but depending on how the call got routed to us, like if you were forwarded from a station, we may not even get that much.

If we get a call with no other usable location info, if it came from a landline we can look up the phone number to get the address.

We can also look up the phone number to see if we had any prior calls from that number that we might be able to get an address from. We only store those records for about a year, sometimes our police departments have records that go further back they can look up, but we need something to go on to pass it along to the correct department that would have those records.

Pretty much anything beyond that is usually something that needs to be initiated from the police. There are only very narrow circumstances where we’re able to request for a phone company to try to ping your phone, and even if we can do it, the location may not be any better. They can also try to get subscriber info from the company to get your home address (although that’s not always super useful, people move and don’t update their address, are on someone else’s plan, etc) if they get a name and date of birth they can try to look up your info from your drivers license info (again assuming it’s up to date) property records, etc.

So if we get a call that’s just an open line with heavy breathing or something else suspicious, we’re using those tools to try to get someone out to at least the general area to try to locate the, and police are hopefully using whatever other resources they have on top of what we do to try to narrow it down if needed.

We’re probably going to enter it as a hang-up call or a suspicious activity which just gets a police response unless we heard something that makes us specifically think fire or EMS are needed.

If we heard yelling, gunshots, alarms going off, etc. then we might enter it as something else as appropriate to make sure we’re sending the right resources.

If they stop talking to us while we’re on the call, hopefully the first thing we got from them was a location, it’s the first thing we ask, otherwise all the same thing applies.

If it’s just an open line, we’ll stay on for about 30 seconds or so to see if we hear anything. If we don’t we enter it as a hang up, try to call it back, and if they don’t pick up we just kind of move on and it’s in the hands of the police to do something about it.