Less Blow, More Cut
From the pages of the Guardian:
A salon in Sydney is spearheading workshops for hairdressers on how to steer small talk about the weather into conversations about global heating.
“More than 400 hairdressers have attended workshops” to “role-play how conversations might go.”
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
I’ve been quite happy with uBlock Origin. AFAIK it’s one of the few that also works on the mobile version, which is a factor for me.
That miserable POS Link-O-Matic 9000 did it again.
Daily Mail US home page.
And again – that bit of buffoonery correctly displays the link prior to posting, then inserts the %20 nonsense after.
Just go to the Daily Mail US page www. dailymail. co. uk / ushome / index . html without the spaces or %20 between every word.
and if there must be small talk, keep it to small, innocuous subjects.
I’ve had the same gal for 6-7 years now … to a point where we swap stories of kids and grandkids, recipes, holiday decor and hobbies. I have absolutely no idea what her politics are, and I do not care. It’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.
Currently in use here.
It does strike me as an odd thing to do – for an adult, I mean. Specifically, making an incongruous demand, via an inapt WhatsApp group, that your neighbours start making videos about how they oppose any practical attempt to reduce the number of illegal immigrants to the UK. Because the government has to be told that “people don’t support” efforts to that end.
Indeed. From “The Voyage”.
Unlike Joe Haldeman, he was a college student when he was drafted as well as leaving VietNam with both of his legs. Mr. Drake has been diagnosed having had many mini-strokes (https://david-drake.com/2021/newsletter-122/) and does not believe that he can continue to write.
He’s a never Trumper; maybe that’s partially because he went to serve in the 11th ACR while Trump did not serve at all. Even so, if you haven’t read “Redliners” from him, it’s worth a read.
Lady blood donor.
I share WTP’s scepticism about the “world record”.
A US website states that whole blood donations can be made every 56 days or 6 times annually.
On that basis someone starting at aged 18 and continuing until their early 70s could rack up well over 300 units.
In the lady’s home country of Canada it’s once every 84 days. Do the calculations and up to 250 is perfectly possible.
Still a nice story for a change and respect to the lady for sticking with it (I’m personally closing in on 100 units which would have been a whole lot more has it not been for a 20+ year hiatus when work took preference over pretty much everything) but it’s probably inaccurate.
Ah, but you miss the greater point that I was alluding to. While they make much of this lady’s 203 donations…as a women’s record…the world record for any kind of human is held by a man who has donated five times as much. And just think about that in the context of a society that for some reason tries to tell us that scaredy-cat can’t handle pain (because they don’t…or didn’t…do child birth…or something) men are more afraid of needles than the stunning and brave women.
Doh…my bad on part of that…and even I should have known the numbers were not right…that 1000+ figure is for a guy who donated plasma, not units of blood. Plasma can be donated once a week. Not sure why I cannot find just the blood donation record. Search results are mixing the terms up for some reason.
My understanding is that Joe Haldeman did not lose a leg, although the wounds were so severe that I suppose it gives him trouble to this day. I never made an effort to find out more than that. I was surprised that Joe was drafted after graduating from college with a physics degree. I would have assumed that the draft boards would have thought “good, Joe, now go make missiles or something”. Also surprising: I do not recall hearing of any fellow students getting drafted when I was in college.
Thanks for all the comments about ad blockers. Very helpful.
Mr. Drake was rather annoyed about being drafted; he mentioned that it was a relatively new policy that grabbed him in one of his forwards.
While I enjoyed Drake’s writing when I first encountered it, upon re-reading I’m struck by how thin the veil over the Vietnam ACR experience is in the Hammer’s Slammers stories. I feel like they’d have been just as good if he’d written them straight as there’s little SF in them beyond the cosmetic level.
Exactly! Sadly I frequent the cheaper sorts of places, and when I find someone there who does a good job on my hair, inevitably she will have moved on within the year.
Well, that allowed him to use ancient wars as a template for the action, which would be otherwise difficult. His short story “Contact” was set in VietNam/Cambodia and used a lot of the jargon that I started directly hearing in 1976 when I was a cadet.
He does frankly admit in one of his forwards that the 11th ACR was the template for the Slammers with hovercraft used to replace the issues one might have with tracked vehicles. OTOH, I was never able to say “Booster” and have the vehicle’s AI do things for me back in the day. 🙂
[EDIT: Being able to edit a post is TIGHT!]