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Ghost of LL

Burnt Ends
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Posts posted by Ghost of LL

  1. 13 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

    There was quite a few songs that might have worked.  I think Born to be Wild would have been amusing.

    Also, there should have been a sound after the video feed stopped, indicating that the drone operator leveled up.

    And I'm laughing at that story that @MagicSoccerSpray posted, about how the Poles disassembled 10 MiG-29s and left them just across the border for the Ukrainians to pick up and reassemble and start flying. That's just beautiful and hilarious and awesome all at the same time.  "Hey Ukraine, we disassembled 10 MiG-29s and left them close to your border, and it would be a real shame if we were looking the other way and they disappeared."

    We did something very similar early in World War II.  Under the Neutrality Act, we could not fly military aircraft to a delivery point within a combatant.  So we'd fly Lend-Lease planes to airfields very close to the Canadian border, and the Canadians would cross and tow them across to an airstrip in Canada.

    • Hook 'Em 6
  2. 1 hour ago, idigTexas said:

    Why not?  Teams have arrived at challenges several hours, sometimes even more than a day apart, even without any production interference.  Do you think those bands, dance troupes, camel wranglers, cheese makers, cat jugglers all just keep at it during that time?  Is it not possible that they are capable of turning the lights on with only a little bit of notice, and are compensated to be ready to go over an extended period time? 

    Some legs are obviously less malleable than others, especially when pre-arranged flights were in play, but I choose to believe that the production staff favors certain teams to the extent that there may be occasional shenanigans at play.  If it makes any difference, it seemed a lot more heavy handed in seasons past when there were multiple NELs per race, and they always seemed to save a team I wanted gone.  

    You wanted that team gone because the editing was done to make you want that team gone.  That team was the "heel."  But they played the heel only because that's how the producers edited the footage after the race was concluded.  And it made sense to make that team the heel knowing that they kept tenaciously sticking around through non-elimination legs, which ended up infuriating you (and probably me) and made for good television.

    Look at the last leg, though.  Do you think they're going to have that dance troupe come in a day early on the spur of the moment?  Do you think they'd be able to have that ballroom available a day early with no notice?  Fuck no--this shit is planned out months in advance.  And maybe you plan for that ballroom to be booked for eight hours, but that doesn't mean you can change the booking the day beforehand.

  3. In my household, the proper name of a poster on this very site is used as the word defined as "to shart oneself" after a particularly infamous incident at a Dallas-area country club.  

    As in, "Fuck--I had to race back to the office after having lunch at the Chili Parlor because I was about to @DDD Dad myself."

  4. 11 minutes ago, idigTexas said:

    All they have to do is decide if the race will continue now or after a stop.  They can easily have contingencies in place and make that decision during a leg if a fan favorite/evil villain is struggling early.  Obviously, that decision has to be made before the first team arrives, but there is no reason it couldn't me right before they reach the mat.  

    But not really, because you have to have all this shit set up.  You have to have all the people in place at the challenges, and the venues of for the challenges need to be shuddered to the public/their normal operations.  You can't just have teams showing up a day earlier than anticipated because the producers decided at the last minute that a particular team was in danger of elimination.

    And for the record, I'm very skeptical of the hypothesis that non-elimination legs weren't pre-set at the beginning of the race.  Fan favorites are only fan favorites because of how the producers edit their footage after the race is concluded.  So they're not worried that any particular team is going to get eliminated.  They're going to edit the footage to make the surviving teams more popular.

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  5. On 10/13/2023 at 7:45 PM, idigTexas said:

    There appear to be mostly competent teams this season, so I don't think we'll see a few dominate lake we normally do.  Some minor fails, but nothing horrible yet.  I was surprised to see the Asian couple struggle so much in another country where they somewhat speak the language.  I was expecting them to fall back eventually, but not in Vietnam. 

    No non-elimination legs, but the ol' "you're still racing" fake out is still in play.  

     

    On 10/17/2023 at 9:51 PM, TrashMaster G said:

    A distinction without a difference. 

    Yeah, that was annoying.

    I don't agree.  As noted above, the non-elimination legs always seemed timed to avoid eliminating a fan-favorite or otherwise interesting team.  Probably just coincidental, but it raised the prospect that the results were rigged.

    With the "keep racing" legs, there's no possibility of that.  They have to have the challenges up and running well in advance.  So there's no way the producers can make a last-minute "let's make this a non-elimination leg" decision to preserve a favored team.

    As to this last leg, I think we all saw what that long flight from India to Frankfurt in coach can do to one's mental acuity and temperament.  Now's when we get more fights and more muddle-brained decisionmaking.

  6. Ok--so in this scenario there's a big question that I think we could use some insight from current/former waiters and bartenders.

    GF ordered a bottle of chardonnay.  I assume she then took the bottle to the table and drank that for the rest of the mean, right?  So your waiter would've sold you the bottle of chardonnay at the table had you just ordered two glasses at the bar.  But instead, he missed out on that sale (and the resulting tip) because you got your drinks at the bar.

    So the question is this: do the bartenders share their tips with the waiter?

    I know in most places, the waiters are expected to tip out the bartenders.  I don't know that I've ever heard of it going the other way.  So my suspicion is the answer is "no."

    If that's the case, then I short-tip the bartender a little bit and I tip the waiter on what he would've gotten had I ordered the bottle from him.

    So in practice, let's say the bottle was $100 (just trying to make the math easy).  Ordinarily, I would tip the bartender $20.  But in this scenario, I might tip the bartender $5 or $10 on the bottle and tip the waiter at my table $10-15, depending entirely on how much time I spent at the bar with that bottle and whether GF ordered another glass at the table after finishing that bottle.

  7. 1 minute ago, Chad said:

    This is Gundy in a nutshell. Wins the final bedlam in a lopsided rivalry against a higher ranked team then goes on the road and completely shits the bed against an inferior opponent.

    And it was completely foreseeable, which is why the fine people at MGM are going to be paying me some $$$.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  8. 25 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

    In 2004-2007 girls were wearing tight paints and low rise jeans every day. Every single day you got to see thong, like in Superbad.

    Now every girl dresses like a shitty Billie Eilish knock off

    Not at the Texas Honey Ham in West Lake Hills, my friend.  The Yoga-Pant Mafia remains firmly in control in those parts.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  9. 23 minutes ago, Pancho said:

    Someone on one of the shows last night mentioned that trumps handlers actually know what they are doing compared to last 2 times he ran. This person said it’s noticeable that trump isn’t out front parroting the stupid shit that made people hate him in 2020 and has been “hiding” except for limited interviews here and there. They argued this could be a reason his poll numbers are up because he’s not in front of every camera in America saying stupid shit and when he does do that on truf social, nobody is on that app to even see it.

    Thought that was interesting

    I think that's quite apparent.  But that's only going to last so long.  I don't think you can pull off a front-porch campaign in the 21st Century.

    2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    The other issue is the media is intentionally conflating polls showing Trump ahead. It’s good for business. Clicks = $$$. The polls showing anything but “Trump winning” gets pretty ignored. 

    Bases on what Cohn was saying, they fully expect/are modeling a more GOP leaning electorate in 2024. That’s what they’re basing their polls off of. Not reality/what we’ve seen but “what they think will happen”

    I mean, yes and no.  Did we really see anything Tuesday that is inconsistent with a national R+2 environment in 2024?

    I'm not sure that we did.

  10. The concern I have is that none of these races really reflect a polling "miss."  The polls pretty accurately reflected that ol' Tate was going to win a tight race in Mississippi and that Bashear would win in KY.  And I don't think any reputable pollster had the Ohio referenda being terribly close.

    All of which is to say that the resulting implication is that the polls on Biden's low popularity may be uncomfortably accurate.

    Now, I don't think that's reason to panic.  Polls of a presidential election a year ahead of time have very little (no?) predictive value.  For one thing, there's a year's worth of events that are going to occur, none of which can be predicted.  And this coming year, those events are going to include criminal trials of one of the leading contenders.  But beyond that, there's no campaigning going on.  And campaigning is effective.  Obviously.  I mean, there's a multi-billion dollar industry built on the presumption that campaigns have an effect on voters' decisionmaking.

    But still--I'd probably prefer to have Biden be comfortably up on Trump in every poll.

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  11. 9 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

    Imagine the condition of some of this equipment. Yeah, I am sure Brazil and Belarus really keep up with maintenance. 

    Egypt and Pakistan (and to a somewhat lesser degree, Brazil) are major American allies that get a ton of military aid, including technical assistance with things like maintenance.  It would not at all surprise me if the equipment in those countries is in significantly better shape than the stuff that stayed in Russia.

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