There is a lot of mutual hostility between the Roma and whatever communities they show up in. There has to be some reform from within the Roma communities to let go of the idea of the 'gadjo' - the outsider who is impure and a fair target for all sorts of misbehavior. Societies with Roma communities need to soften up and reach out so that the Roma have reason to let go of their stereotypes of the gadjo. It will probably be a while, given that the Roma were heavily targeted along with the Jews in the Holocaust, and were treated brutally by Franco and others for so long.

Django Reinhardt was a Roma, and a master guitar player. I am a huge fan of him and the Manouche/Gypsy Jazz tradition he started. These days there are a lot of fans of Manouche Jazz that go to traditional Roma pilgrimage sites to hang out and play along with the Roma, and trade chops. This has actually been a net positive. Things like this could help to start building bridges, even if it's only a small step.

I too find the smell of bacon off-putting. Of all the meats out there, the gateway for me would be Tilapia, since they are farmed in a fairly environmentally responsible way, they are not endangered or treated cruelly, the meat has really good nutrition numbers, and Tilapia aren't mammals. But I can't even take eating Tilapia, let alone something like bacon where pig farms are awful for the environment, are usually inhumane to the pigs, and the meat has awful nutrition numbers, and pigs are very intelligent mammals - much more so than a cow.

Douglas2:

>First off, McDonalds coffee was not unreasonably hot.

It was unreasonably hot. It was served at 180–190 °F. The coffee was so hot it had given other people 3rd degree burns before this lady had been burnt. People had repeatedly gone to the hospital from burns from the coffee. McDonalds knew this. They didn't cool it down despite their own safety experts telling them it was a danger to customers and despite knowing that they had injured customers.

>If it was really unreasonable, then they and everyone else would not be still selling coffee just as hot or hotter.

McDonalds competitors didn't serve coffee that hot since it was dangerous. During the trial experts actually checked the temperatures of competitors coffee temperatures to show they served coffee around 140 °F.

>I think the concept that the deepest pockets need to pay "compensation" when there is severe injury is a great moral hazard in our society.

You are repeating some very well funded corporate tort reform propaganda campaign aimed at taking away your rights as a citizen to protect their profts.

Unfortunately the people who could learn from this story are the ones who are effectively brainwashed by some very well funded corporate tort reform propaganda about this event. As these comments show, the propaganda has worked, their minds are made up, so they don't read the story, they ignore the facts, and then they repeat tort reform propaganda.

Kind of a weird article. He mentions that silver doesn't meet all his criteria, but doesn't mention the fact that it's been used as money far more than gold throughout history. There's also no mention of alloys, but the earliest money was electrum, and bronze has been by far the most common metal for most of the history of coinage, while various forms of brass have been used fairly commonly as well. Even silver coins have often been a copper-silver alloy, since they wear better.

Probably an overview of what metals have actually been used for currency would have been a good start, as this would show that gold use is actually fairly uncommon. Gold is actually really impractical. I'd imagine that this is because it's too soft, so gold coins wear very badly if they are actually used in trade and thus erode value with use. Harder metals work much better.

>may contain the first guitar solo break

Whaaa? 1946? That's just a bizarre thing to say for a song recorded so late in the history of recorded guitar solos. Roy Smeck, Eddie Lang, and other early jazz guys were recording solo breaks way, way, way before that, as were blues guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Since Rock and Roll is one of those loose terms where there will never be final agreement on the definition, it's just semantics what the first Rock and Roll song is.

I saw it as a teenager when it came out and thought it was brilliant. Having seen it again as an adult, it looked more like a comic book plotted adolescent fantasy with adults all capitulating immediately leaving some totally awesome teen tragic heroes.

The acting's not bad, but not great - some parts were truly awful, but others weren't.

The action is great.

The writing is just terrible. The premise was the most painful part. Commies in Colorado? Really? Nuclear war, but only in China? Really?) No character development. Awful dialog - How did it feel to kill? "It felt good." It's a shame they didn't stick with their original vision - the theme might not have started as red-baiting, but that's where it ended.

There's a habit among partisans (remember Partisan Rock) of adulating even their worst art. This movie's pretty much on part with 80s action movies - not great, but not awful, but the movie's reputation has been boosted by knee-jerk adulation rather than inherent merit.

I worked at a Chuck E. Cheese too - right around when this video was produced. They never showed us any training videos, they'd just rope some poor pizza cook into wearing the costume. I wore the rat suit a number of times - it was hell. The kids tried to pull my gloves off, they went after the tail, they stomped on my feet. Wearing the purple suit was way better, the kids seemed kind of scared of that one.

Knowledge of linothrax isn't new, it's just been demonstrated in a way that's up to academic standards of history.

DrDan, the use of linothrax goes back to the Mycenaean period, so 990 BC is not actually earlier. Also, so far as I know, the Chinese and Mongols used a layer of silk under other forms of armor, which is not at all the way linothrax was used.

>As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation.

I don't see that at all. Why is wearing a skirt an inherent variation on being a person? Both images are dress styles, neither is inherently a person. The article points out a few interesting issues with the way gender is constructed, but I think they are really stretching in a lot of places. Also society treats Trans people pretty horribly, but I think public bathrooms are not nearly as serious a concern as other things like threats of violence.

I think that the issue with a unisex mega spaces with stalls would be that many women would likely be horrified when virtually every time they had to sit, then first had to wipe the pee splatters off the seat (unless women pee all over seats too, I have no experience there.) I consider the regularity of utter revoltingness of the seats a factor as to into whether I really need to poop in a public place.

Iron Maiden Cookie Cutters, for Heavy Metal Cookies.

The Smithsonian article is interesting. It's nice to see some common myths, such as the notion that Carroll was uninterested in adult women cleared up, as well as a clarification that there were no photos he took that were anything unusual for the time.

No Unitarian Universalist superheros? That's odd, but somehow fitting.

>Language isn't static, nor should it be. New words arise to fit speakers' changing needs.

Language isn't static and we all know it. It's exactly for that reason that some want to prevent the encroachment of slang that they see as bringing down the language, or why some people are sensitive about punctuation. I'm of two minds on the subject, since "usefulness" might be why things stick around, but it doesn't always mean "clarity of expression." Words like "like" might be useful to replace mumbling "umm," but they also make expressions even less clear than throwing some "umms" around would. This is the same reason that they'd like to see "its" and "it's" used correctly. Language isn't static, and if we justify sitting idly by out of an argument against prescriptivism, the language can lose a lot, as other languages have in the past.

Some of these were seriously dumb, but the Rocket Belt? It's a Jet Pack. How can Jet Packs not be brilliant awesome genius?