@Seed,
Quote:people will do anything to con someone out of some money
The category "people" includes us all Seed.
I will not do anything to con people out of some money.
When I asked why Who Dat is significant I was hardly expecting to have it explained to me that Who Dat! is Yat for Who is that? That's like asking for an explanation of relativity and being told it is a theory of Einsteins's.
No wonder Evelyn Waugh said that one of the nicest things about polite Americans was that they not only did not insist that you listen to what they are saying but neither had they any expectation of you doing so.
I might expand upon his famous remark, which I have tweaked a little in the service of progress on all fronts, like with a wave, by suggesting that there is a perfectly rational explanation for this. It is, and this is only a fanciful speculation to while away the dreary hours to kick-off time on Sunday night when I will have just laid myself in my bed after coming home from the pub and checking out Sky News and the channels where scantily dressed young ladies, for the most part, attempt to induce innocent young men to call them up on the phone at rates between 30 pence a minute, the equivalent to the dock gates, and £3. We await the revelation. We are nearly there. It's the same for Logistics as it is for all the other sciences. The increments of progress get further apart and more difficult to reach the nearer they are to the final destination. Like with finding out what happened at the Big Bang or the Missing Link , which is a profoundly out-of-date scientific activity a bit like Alchemy got to be in trying to turn mumbo-jumbo into gold. What will Seed say then at £5 a minute. Before the watershed the ladies are more modestly dressed and move less lasciviously. I don't know whether they are cheaper or not because I don't watch trash TV. Once glance was enough. Saucy underwear catalogue style.
I will have my pillows plumped and ready to watch the Superbowl. I don't expect to nod off until the Colts get 20 in front.
The rational explanation is that they don't give a damn whether anybody listens to them or otherwise. One is a mere prop in an acted drama designed to allow them to appear to be active social beings with lots of friends and greeting card lists and all the rest of it which keeps millions in work, no doubt to Johnnie's satisfaction, and Mr Obama's. I gather mobile phones are put to a similar use when people are caught in the rush hour and find themselves with nothing to do. The Great American sin.
I think of sin as that which it is unlawful to do but which the law can't legislate for and thus shame has to be associated with it, real shame I mean, a felt imperative, by a moral authority rather than in Congress. Whether it be Church or Media. These two important centres of power have locked horns on the issue of the teaching of evolution to uninformed minds by atheist teachers.
Hence, and Mr Waugh was in Hollywood for a fair while and was invited to parties a great deal, not as long as I have been on A2K, it is the avoidance of being seen or even of being thought of doing nothing that is the objective. Virtue.
It's here too as England succumbs to creeping Americanisation. Or, should I say, Americanization. There are ladies in the pub that you can talk utter gibberish to, Unwinesque gibberish, and they will nod their heads, smile from time to time, look serious etc and generally looking like they are in deep and earnest conversation. Mr Waugh was writing in the 1930s.
I don't think Col Hall expected Bilko to listen to what he said.
So I can't say I expect anyone to read this gibberish as it might entail a shame for not listening to other people and that wouldn't do at all because if what other people said was listened to it might be recognised for the bullshit it is and remarked upon. Which might bring an end to convivial evenings.
I'll give you guys a tip. If you are ever talking gibberish in a pub to a lady who is pretending to be listening don't mention food or doctors. She will hear both of those. Ladies should not mention sport or cars.
My observations tell me that people take turns at talking gibberish and pretending to listen to it up till around an hour before closing time after which there is only a rising crescendo of gibberish which fades away as the staff upend the chairs on the tables and turn the TVs off and unplug the one-armed bandits.
(They should unplug you spendi--Ed.)
