I'm caught up! I'm caught up! Refreshed the thread and there were no new comments. I'm caught up.
Must be time to go off and do something else, or go to bed, or something. Otherwise, I might have to engage.
I know! I'll concoct another beverage. Carry on, commenterati, so my knowledge and wisdom can continue to grow.
Still 'way behind...
..hocked or sold the vintage Akai reel-to-reel he stole from Chi.
Oh, man! Was it the kind that had auto-reverse so you could listen to both sides of a tape? I miss mine.
Still plowing through comments.
...Magic Teflon Negro with a vaporware resume and the ability to Talk White While Being Barely Black. etc.
That comment cracked me up. Then I noticed it was Sherry. Good one, Sherry.
Okay, I'm back and about 175 comments behind, but I saw this and had to reply without reading further, so excuse me if it's been answered, but...
Chi, I would seriously go consult with a criminal defense attorney. If the guy had - or currently has stashed - meth in your house...
Chi? Is this your saved-from-the-shelter pal who I thought was long gone? Had a meth lab in your house? Really?
Next time the Horde advises you, you'll take 'em seriously, right? 
Another ONT that's gone to the dogs.
(I'm not really here yet. Passing between dimensions. Back shortly, if the dimension police don't catch me.)
Howdy, folks. Up late running a vid production that I had hoped would already be finished and online. Long day.
Long comment follows. Just go on to the next comment. Ignore the drunk babbling and drooling on the bar.
People who have faced death and lived to tell about it.
♥
1978, south of Paris, Texas, lost on some lonely two-lane in the middle of a February night. I was asleep in the shotgun seat. Just before I dozed off, I thought I should crawl in the back seat (listen to your inner voice, folks!), but I didn't want to leave the driver alone. (As if a groggy person in the front seat is any help staying awake!)
I woke up with broken glass and blood all over me, cold wind blowing. I groggily ask the driver what happened. "We hit a horse." I think we went through that several times before I stayed conscious. He said a couple of horses crossed the road and he had enough time to think, "that was close!" when another one ran out. (He got a tiny cut on one arm.)
A check on the rest of my body suggested no vital organs damaged, but I thought I had lost several of my front lower teeth. Hit the dash, I think, in that age before shoulder belts. I didn't think I was going to die, but loosing front teeth p'd me off. However, after prying my lower lip off of them, all my teeth were all still there, save for a tiny chip on one tooth. So, I was pretty good at that point, feeling lucky.
I remember the cold wind, the ambulance guys cutting my shirt off (I remember the shirt, a nice one I'd had since high school), the ride to the hospital. "Watch out, guys," I told them, "there's horses on the road tonight." Less amusing than I thought I was, no doubt. I must've been pretty delirious from blood loss and adrenaline. And surviving.
I remember the surgeon remarking that I was pretty messed up. I mumbled, oh, it's not that bad is it? He said my face looked like "hamburger." Ew! So I shut up and let him get right to work. Eighty stitches, in various places around my head. See my cool scar on my jaw? It was from a broken beer bottle in a bar fight, really. Naw.
That post between the windshield from the side vent (IH Traveler) saved my life - it was folded all the way down. Horse was caught on that and decapitated. A half-second difference, it would have been me.
Angels insisted I had to live so I could be a dad. Thanks!
♥
Early 1990s, Chicago, getting home late and inebriated, walking down Argyle ("Little VietNam") from the El stop, I feel a poke in my back and a guy says, "Step down this alley." Milady asks me, what do we do? I said, just keep walking. Guy gives up on the uncooperative, besotted couple.
A few steps beyond, and Milady says, "Did you see a gun?" and I am suddenly highly cognizant of the size and shape of what had been poked in my back. Duh! Wow!
Guy was obviously not a killer, just a lame-ass crook neighbor who decided not to press the issue. But, I mean, f' it. If you're going to shoot me, you're going to have to do it out here under the lights where they can find the body, not back in some alley where I might not be found 'til I rot and stink.
Called a couple of old acquaintances in the middle of the night, just to say, hi, I'm alive! Adrenaline is a heckuva drug.
♥
Various cars spinning out of control, and other adventures. Burst appendix at nine years old. An illness a couple of years ago that felt like it could be fatal. Begging God, either take me or heal me, don't leave me like this! Surviving is nice.
I am not a risk-taker, really - life is risky enough.
And I've never wanted a tattoo - life has tattooed me aplenty.
I can tell you, every day God lets me have is a greatly appreciated gift. Feel like I've died and been reborn several times already. Sorta feel like that every time I wake up from sleep, no matter what shape I'm in. When the Big Jump comes, I figure it won't be as hard as some I've already experienced. But I'll gladly wait a long time.
Fascinating as all this radiation and nutrition conversation is, I'm going to give up and check out. Leave some room free for Vic in the morning.
Good night, Gracies. And remember: Unreasoned fear is a master intellectual fraud practiced upon the evolving mortal soul.
Reasoned fear is another matter altogether...
Dang! I got #666 and didn't even mean to. Had I but known, I would have done something more appropriate.
Like put on a Hillary sock.
chemjeff: ...well, we presume you already have your tinfoil hat, right?
Mylar stetson firmly screwed onto my dome. Kinda funny, though, to be thus protecting my cranium while going pantsless. ...!
I remember considering dousing the family with iodine as Chernobyl fallout drifted across the globe. We didn't...
+
Never before (that I recall, memory may be faulty) heard Otis Redding - A Change Is Gonna Come. Dang, that guy was soulful.
Scrolled back up to #600. I see that radiation is the topic of the night. Is this just General and Theoretical, or is there some Event of which I should be aware?
HOWDY HELLO HI HOWAREY'ALL?
Don't forget to visit our dear departed Maetenloch at his new digs.
I have, but he seems to have burned out the middle of last month. I finally got around to subscribing to the site today, so if the corpse ever twitches again, I'll get a newsfeed notice.
Any new memes or unforgettable moments in the 600+ comments so far that I'm not going to read tonight?
..."Fertile girls coming to Climax" (for basketball game) headline
Heh.
Another classic:
Normal Man Marries Oblong Woman
(Both in Illinois)
Compound comment, broken up and bullet-pointed for your limited attention span.
•
Well, it was worth plowing through all the comments since my last one to see that someone, finally, mentioned Cairo (Kay-roh) Illinois. Didn't know there was a k-ro NY, too.
•
Correcting my earlier comment: Carl Albert was born in McAlester, Okla., but the family moved to Bugtussle one word, according to Wikipedia. Someone mentioned a Bug Tussle, Texas? Noo. There couldn't really be *two*?!?
•
Someone mentioned Madrid (Ma'drid not Ma-drid') Missouri, famous for its faults. Another Missouri town is Noel, pronounced "Noll" - long o, not like knoll.
•
Meanwhile, in NE Oklahoma, there's Miami (my-AM-uh).
•
My then-religiousy but geographically-challenged relative and his bride were driving through SE Okla and saw a sign for the town of Heavener. He said to her, "Why, we're heaven-ers. Let's go there." Pulled into town, asked how you pronounce the name. Local replied, "HEAVE-nehr." They drove on. Quickly.
•
I was born in Bartlesville, Okla. Not so weird - named after store owner Jake Bartles. But, the residents are called Bartians (rhymes with Martians). I don't live there.
The weirdest they could come up with from Oklahoma was "Okay"? Hahaha.
The town is long gone now, but the one-time speaker of the House, Carl Albert, was born in Bug Tussle.
Howdy folks. Nice post, MisHum. Somewhat random on the changes, but it'll do. Oh, wait... I haven't finished reading it. (Jumps to top)
That sound -- it wasn't me hitting the wall. It was the wall hitting me, I swear.
Just watched a 15min vid of a doc diagnosing Hillary with Parkinson's.
I just keep thinking of that line from Doctor Who...
"Don't you think she looks tired?"
Good night, Gracies.
Chi #658: "Good morning, mindful."
Howdy, Chi. More like about to be good night for me - been another long, crazy day.
-
Re the planes hitting the WTC & the engineering for an accidental hit -- not only were the planes going full-throttle on purpose, they were fully-fueled for cross-country trips. Hard to engineer for that double whammy.
Saw some video today, from early in the day - guy talking about explosions like a bomb in the lobby at ground level, blowing out all the windows. I think that was the jet fuel explosion traveling down the elevator shafts. What a horrid mess. One of the few blessings was that because of how they were built, they more-or-less collapsed straight down instead of keeling over worse than they did and hitting more of Manhattan.
Also caught a video today that I'd never seen - a montage of the jumpers. Couldn't stand to keep watching after the first dozen or so.
Late night greetings from the middle of the country.
This great country, which can be made greater again.
Not gonna read 600+ comments right now. Maybe later. 
I've mentioned this every year, but here it is again.
We had no TV at home, and knew nothing about what was going on until Milady and I drove into town. I know just where we were on our commute when I turned on the radio.
The first we heard was some substitute for Limbaugh saying he was stuck in Florida, and was all right. Curious.
Next a news guy started talking about closing refineries in the southwest. WTF?
Then a news guy gave that rarest of things, a succinct re-cap for folks just tuning in: "The World Trade Centers are gone." Just like that.
I didn't know how, didn't know about the planes, or anything else yet, I would pick that up as we turned around and drove back home. I just knew one thing: the bastards said they would do it, and they did. Damn them.
Sat down with our three mostly-grown kids at home and told them what we knew. I told them, this is your generation's Pearl Harbor. Everything changes after this. Fifteen years later, that seems to have been right, even if the after-effects of the ongoing, often pitifully-fought war on Islam differ from the all-out war on Japan and Germany.
We all drove to town and opened our then-sorta-closed little cafe for the day - had a few friends drift in - and watched numbly as the TV played out the fall of the towers over and over, and got the details on the Pentagon and Flight 93.
There's one other thing I thought, as the day wore on: That's it? That's all you got? You pitiful, cowardly punks!
Maybe a weird kind of feeling, but as big a dent as they put in the country, it was only a dent. God bless America.
"The World Trade Centers are gone." Yeah, I'm not likely to forget that in a hundred lifetimes.
