Humor Random Comments Thread

More great footage, courtesy of The Sacramento Bee:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article132550654.html

Also, keep in mind that they're dumping the entire contents of an Olympic swimming pool out the primary spillway in less than a second. If there's anything left of the lower 2/3rds of the spillway after this is done, I think we need to find the engineers who designed it and buy them a round.
 
1000x563

:blink:
Wow. That is some serious damage. No sign of the bags of riprap they airlifted in last night, but they could be out of frame.

I strongly suspect that this will lead to a large series of inspections of all other spillways throughout the state, both main and emergency.

---------- Post added at 17:32 ---------- Previous post was at 17:30 ----------

http://www.kcra.com/article/water-stops-spilling-over-oroville-auxiliary-spillway/8736758
Great aerial footage from the local NBC affiliate.

While the large gouges to the right of the picture look bad, that is expected.

The bit that they are worried about is right the base of the spillway. That is where the concern is (You can see the gravel that they added right at the base). If you look at google earth, the section toward the top is intended to be like that.
 
While the large gouges to the right of the picture look bad, that is expected.

Actually, so expected that it was suggested in 2005 to pave the top part of the emergency spillway with concrete. But this was rejected. Too expensive.
 
And now, for something completely different...

nmRE6Lv.jpg

They're not THAT elusive.:rofl:

:rofl:

I almost thought I heard an angelic chorus when I received mine :)

Me too. EAOS was June 11, 1990. :cheers:

If my understanding is correct, the DD-214 being referenced by the joke is a military form given to you when you finalize your departure from service, not the ship designation.

Yes, that's true. You're absolutely correct. :rofl::rofl:
 
I heard a chorus.... but then, I was German army and me and my friends all gathered at midnight of the last day of our official service (coincidally at Walpurgis Night) and shouted "Abgänger" (Untranslatable: Person leaving school or army).

Many older people around us had been really touched of us keeping the old traditions alive. ;)
 
Many of the traditions are being pushed aside due to rampant political correctness. Some of the things that take place as "immemorial custom of the service" would make a Berkley graduate go all apoplectic (hopefully shutting down all higher brain functions, thus rendering them unable to go and rat us out for having fun).

If they ever water down "Crossing the Line" into a simple handshake and a certificate I'll know our Navy is well and truly :censored:

Inappropriate and dark humor remains the key to getting through an enlistment. The stuff we have to train to do, and the equipment we have to do it with doesn't always coexist with the world of fluffy bunnies.
 
Häääh?

How very swiss of you! :lol:

Also, I just had an examn about "creating multi-media websites". About a third of the achievable points was handed out for slapping a video together in... wait for it... Windows movie maker! :facepalm:
I'm sure glad this "school for software development" is keeping its priorities straight. Some of the guys are already doing their final exams next month, and about 90% of the class couldn't explain the difference between a vector and a linked list. But that's not so important as long as we know how to do a lot of stuff not related to our profession using tools that no amateur in that field would ever touch with a stick. :beathead:
 
2nd day of quitting smoking. I feel terrible.
 
...and shouted "Abgänger" (Untranslatable: Person leaving school or army).

If you're willing to abandon formally correct English, you can translate quite a bit just by performing morpheme-for-morpheme substitution: "off-goer" won't win friends with your English teacher, but is a perfectly serviceable translation in this case. By using nothing but Germanic morphemes where a latinate term would normally be used, it achieves a simplistic, old-fashioned, back-country England sort of feel (such that you wouldn't be surprised to run across it in some work of Tolkien's set in the Shire EDIT: Or in Randall Munro's telling you about things using only the top ten hundred words in English, like in xkcd 1133 and Thing Explainer). EDIT: In Scotland, people might very well understand you if you said "off-ganger".

If you want a high-falutin' English-teacher approved latinate word, "departee" carries the same meaning.



---------- Post added at 06:37 ---------- Previous post was at 06:32 ----------

How very swiss of you! :lol:

I came across it while watching some video or other in the German corner of YouTube, and pretty much immediately started using it as a substitute for "whaaaaaaaaat?".

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EDIT:

As an addendum to the first part of my post above, it is *massively* fun to substitute the English versions of morphemes while speaking German, and vice versa.

Als ein Addendum[1] zu de fürst[2] part ab mei post anbobe[3], es ist massivlich "fun"[4] zu Substitut de Englisch Versions ab Morphems weil' sprechung German, und vice versa.

As a to-set to ther er'sta[5] deal fan[6] mine article ove'n[7], it is gans[8] fele[9] spass[10], when man Theadish speaks, the Englisha versionen fan Morphema to benoten[11], and umbecherred[12].

[1]Latinate terms I am carrying over mostly unchanged, with adjustments according to the orthographical and grammatical conventions used with latinate terms in either language
[2]"First" and "Fürst" in fact do go back to the same root. Look it up.
[3]Here I try to mangle "oben" in the same way that English mangled "over" into "above"
[4]I couldn't find a concrete enough etymology for "fun" to establish the etymological cognate (if any) in German.
[5]Where German has a final "e" as a separate morpheme, I represent it with "a", to indicate that it should be pronounced in my anglicization, as a final e in English wouldn't be pronounced. Arguably, an unprounounced final e *would* be the proper anglicized version of the various German morphemes that take the form of pronounced final e, but I'm trying to do English phonetics with German structure, and if we turn pronounced German final e's into unpronounced English ones, we lose the structure.
[6]There's no etymological cognate for "von" in English, but evidence from Dutch and the other Low German languages suggests fairly solidly that it would be "fan" if it did exist.
[7]The apostrophe is to indicate that this is cognate to "oben" rather than the English word "oven"
[8]The root for "ganz" doesn't appear to have any surviving cognates in the Low German languages (Dutch has it, but it's a recent borrowing from modern German, not a native Dutch word), so I took a cue fro Dutch and borrowed it with the Dutch spelling.
[9]Weirdly enough, "viel" seems to have had a direct cognate in English as recently as the 1400s
[10]"Spass" is actually a latinate borrowing into German (from Italian, specifically), so I've adopted it unchanged
[11]The meaning of "note" in common usage is of latinate origin, but its homophonous with a Germanic term that's fallen into disuse that's directly cognate to German "nutz".
[12]"Umbe" is actually an English word (if not in common modern use) and a direct cognate to "um". I couldn't find any cognate to "kehren", so I took a wild stab in the dark at working forward from the proto-Germanic root. The "be" in "umbe" also suggests the "be" prefix to verbs that exists in both English and German.
 
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2nd day of quitting smoking. I feel terrible.

Hang in there.

Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, my mom, who had smoked her entire adult life, decided to quit. No gum, patches, or any other half measures. Just plain quit. She hasn't touched tobacco since, and she's a lot healthier as she gets older.

Granted, most people don't have my mom's iron will and discipline, but it's possible.

Good luck.
 
Hang in there.

Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, my mom, who had smoked her entire adult life, decided to quit. No gum, patches, or any other half measures. Just plain quit. She hasn't touched tobacco since, and she's a lot healthier as she gets older.

Granted, most people don't have my mom's iron will and discipline, but it's possible.

Good luck.

My grandfather on my Dad's side smoked for a good chunk of his life, caught pneumonia in his 60s, and quit cold turkey then and there.

I forget what the story was with my grandfather on my Mom's side. He had smoked at least some early on, but I'm fairly certain he had completely quit by the time I was born.

My mom had an exit strategy when she started: She never bought her own cigarettes. Soon enough, the same friends that had peer pressured her into starting figured out she was freeloading and stopped offering cigarettes.
 
If they ever water down "Crossing the Line" into a simple handshake and a certificate I'll know our Navy is well and truly :censored:

Even if the military version of the "Äquatortaufe" in German has grown so excessive at times that it resulted in punishment for sexual abuse, it is a VERY special moment. AFAIR, there are some tattoos, that you can only safely wear in the presence of old sailors, if you have crossed the equator once with a ship.

---------- Post added at 08:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:16 PM ----------

2nd day of quitting smoking. I feel terrible.

Good luck, I know from many friends that stopping it is the easy thing. Never getting into a situation again to resume smoking is the real problem, you can put the cigarettes away for years and still it can easily come back to you.


I can't really grock it... I stopped smoking when the religious school that made me start smoking ended as a young teenager. That made it really easy.
 
I am not sure what to think of people who use undocumented one-letter variable names in non-declarative languages. I know the guy who wrote the code in front of me is a better coder than I am, but... seriously dude?
 
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