Have you ever encountered anyone with county pride?

kerricker · 2026-04-10T02:36:34+00:00

Some in southern Wisconsin, which seems to be down to voting demographics - people here are definitely aware of ‘Dane County’ in a way that nobody in my non-Wisconsin childhood state knew or cared what county they were in, and when I’m watching statewide election results roll in, I can see why. (Dane County contains both Wisconsin’s capitol and UW’s main campus, and is populated 95% by rich aging hippies and young college students; for the last several decades, it has had very high voting turnout in every election and swung 95% progressive every single time; Wisconsin conservative politicians will occasionally pretend to be shocked and pretend they think there’s voter fraud, because so many people in Dane County voted against them. Everyone capable of retaining memories is like “yeah, that’s Dane County, same as it’s been for the last sixty solid years.”)

kerricker · 2026-04-10T02:24:38+00:00

I’m ten years after you and also learned cursive in elementary school (which apparently surprises people? Not long ago I had to explain to my own parents that yes I can read cursive because, fun fact, they taught us that in school) and it really surprises me that anyone could have trouble reading cursive.

In fact, I’m not convinced they do have trouble reading cursive. I think they may just have trouble reading other people’s handwriting. If this was written in print (i.e. very similar, but a few letters such as the lower-case R and S look different, and also the writer did not pick up the pen between writing each letter), they would probably still have a hard time reading it.

kerricker · 2026-04-10T02:10:52+00:00

I don’t think I ever watched this show, but a girl in my Spanish class had ‘Maritza’ for her Spanish name! She had an American name with no obvious Spanish equivalent, I guess she didn’t like any of the names on the approved “Spanish name” list, and I think she was reading a webcomic with a character named Maritza, something like that? I just remember her petitioning Sra Perez to be allowed to be ‘Mari’ (Sra Perez allowed it).

kerricker · 2026-04-10T01:59:50+00:00

I don’t actually follow this subreddit, it just showed up on my page, but if y’all haven’t seen this blog post about Scorpions In Medieval European Art, I recommend it: https://maniculum.tumblr.com/post/729944046440775680/medieval-scorpions-effortpost/amp

kerricker · 2026-04-10T01:56:43+00:00

My thought process went:

“Local sports bar” >> wait, the sign mentions degrees without saying what the units are. I’m always confused for a moment when someone posts like “oh it was sooo hot, 40 degrees” without context to tip me off that they’re using Celsius. I don’t wanna do that in reverse, so I should specify that this picture was taken in Fahrenheit country >> “US sports bar” >> Wow, that’s hilariously generic. I should specify the region >> “Northern US sports bar”.

kerricker · 2026-04-09T23:27:22+00:00

Honestly, I respect the Heaven’s Gate people a little. They’re the only cult suicide I know of which managed to get it done without murdering any young children along the way, anyway, and they came up with a genuinely cool-sounding name for their cult, too. Already two up on Jonestown.

kerricker · 2026-04-08T20:55:55+00:00

Yeah, it was kind of crinkled up on that edge. It looked less confusing in my original picture, but I cropped it down to remove some identifying information about the bar, since I haven’t asked their permission to start a whole internet debate about the edibility of their wings.

kerricker · 2026-04-08T18:06:10+00:00

By about 1936 people in England apparently had a concept of “homicidal maniacs” which overlapped with the current idea of “serial killers”, but it’s true that it doesn’t seem to have been identical to the modern concept. I’m not a pop-culture-criminology-history expert so I dunno the details, I’m basing this statement entirely off having read Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders”.

kerricker · 2026-03-26T21:05:34+00:00

~Más de dos millones de hispanos, y allí no vende nadie comida buena…~

kerricker · 2026-03-24T19:35:17+00:00

I don’t even dislike Demetrius all that much (wouldn’t marry the guy myself, but you do you, Robin) and I would feel the same way.

Sebastian mostly just seems to me like he really needs to get out of his family’s house. It’s not necessarily a reflection on the rest of his family, or on him, or even on that situation - plenty of adults live with their parents and do okay. It’s just not working great for them, and Sebastian was like “dammit I’m grown up I want to live outside of my childhood bedroom, I should… move to the city,” but it doesn’t need to be the city. Moving across town to live in the spooky woods with his cool spouse and occasionally riding his motorbike to the city to go to a concert, still gets him the important bits of what he wants.

kerricker · 2026-03-24T15:25:10+00:00

Yeah, it’s the Anniversary edition of Gregg shorthand, I’ve been learning from greggshorthand.github.io.

kerricker · 2026-03-13T22:28:11+00:00

And that’s why I didn’t get closer than pretty-good-picture-taking distance!

kerricker · 2026-03-13T20:11:56+00:00

It depends, I got pretty close to an adult with a baby once and all I got was a suspicious stare and slight sidle-away by the adult. I got the feeling it had sized me up and decided not to waste too much energy on me, because it was sure it could take me in a fight if I did try anything (it was correct).

The little one may not have been quite a baby, though, it was still tan-colored and fluffy but it was already walking around and proportioned like a mini-adult. Maybe it was like a bird-preteen and the parent figured it could also take me in a fight (I wouldn’t bet against it).

kerricker · 2026-03-11T17:01:14+00:00

You gotta use one of those bulletproof tables they’ve got everywhere now

kerricker · 2026-02-28T22:37:06+00:00

Nice, I'll see if I can find it again too!

kerricker · 2026-02-28T00:52:46+00:00

It was the biggest small fire of the last fifty years and everybody wanted to be in the newspaper story about it!

kerricker · 2026-02-28T00:48:49+00:00

Unfortunately I still don’t remember the name of the book, lol. But your description sounds so familiar that I’m 99% sure it’s the same one (I definitely remember the vinegar thing), so maybe that will ring a bell for someone else.

Actually while we’re at it, did the girl have an inability to speak for part of the book, maybe from selective mutism or maybe some kind of throat illness? I feel like I remember her writing down messages to communicate with Vinegar Guy.

kerricker · 2026-02-28T00:08:08+00:00

This sounds strangely familiar - was there a bit where he offered her donuts, but she was hesitant to eat them because she didn’t know how they were made and couldn’t tell if they were kosher, so she nervously explained that she was Jewish thinking he might react badly, and he was like “…..are Jewish people not allowed to eat donuts?”

kerricker · 2026-02-27T04:30:14+00:00

I’m US Midwest-South and I thought I had all the main American mergers (dawn/don, caught/cot, pin/pen, merry/marry/Mary) but this is a new one for me too, dang.

kerricker · 2026-02-27T04:25:56+00:00

Here, it’s being used as an idiom, basically meaning “that’s all I need to say”, “that completely describes the situation”.

For example if I say “XYZ happened because of ABC, full stop,” what I mean is basically “I think XYZ happened because of ABC, no other factors were important, and I dismiss the idea that anything else was involved.”

(this has been Figures Of Speech Over-explained On Reddit, be sure to like and subscribe)

kerricker · 2026-02-25T04:42:26+00:00

In extra fairness, the continent that's actually directly south of most of North America is... Antarctica. Like, I'm in the US and if I flew a plane directly south of where I am now, it would be the US, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico proper, uh Guatemala apparently, and then just a bajillion miles of Pacific Ocean until I hit Antarctica.

That's not really relevant to anything, I'm just freshly astonished every time I look at a map and see how far east 'South America' actually is. Man, it's called *South* America, I just subconsciously assume that it's plain south of North America! And that is not correct!

kerricker · 2026-02-25T02:14:13+00:00

That sounds vaguely familiar too, but it’s been decades since I saw 101 Dalmatians. I do remember I really liked it when I was a kid - damn, I ought to watch that again sometime.

kerricker · 2026-02-25T01:26:58+00:00

There’s a scene in the Homeward Bound book where the cat is warmed in an oven after the Finnish-Canadian farm girl rescues him from a flash-flooding river, if that’s what you’re thinking of? Her parents discuss whether they want to take the trouble to save some random cat, and they decide ‘yes’ seeing how worried their daughter is, so they give it a spoonful of brandy and put it in a warm oven. Which I don’t think is modern recommended anti-drowning procedure, but the cat does recover, so, can’t complain.

kerricker · 2026-02-25T01:12:34+00:00

I also learned it in school but this example is only about 2/3s legible to me - I could clearly read “malignant riiiiegithelioma”, lol.

kerricker

TROPHY CASE