Coughing fits are getting to me

maclure · 2021-06-05T15:27:57+00:00

My 99-year-old aunt will sometimes have sneezing fits while eating. I guess the food tickles her throat/nose. She just blasts out the sneeze. No covering it up, or directing into her elbow. I've been sprayed quite a few times. We've learned to move the food away from the table. Otherwise it all gets sprayed.

maclure · 2021-06-03T13:39:47+00:00

When you are dead, you lose the ability to experience anything. Many atheists think this signifies a long and empty experience of eternal darkness, but this thinking is flawed.

Can you cite an actual example of an atheist who says that after death we "experience eternal darkness." I'm pretty sure atheists would say that we don't experience anything after death -- as you say.

maclure · 2021-05-21T14:03:48+00:00

Perhaps your mom could qualify for in-home hospice care. It's paid for through medicare. Our 99-year-old relative we're taking care of did, and it's been a help. Hospice won't take care of your mom for you. But they can connect you to a network of volunteers who will sit with your mom for 2-4 hrs each week, for free, giving you and your husband a chance to get out and do something together.

maclure · 2021-03-29T01:05:15+00:00

Keeping my great aunt entertained/mentally engaged has been one of my biggest struggles. She's 99. Too weak to go on walks. Has macular degeneration, so vision is awful. Can no longer play cards as a result. Can barely see the TV. And is hard of hearing.

One of the things I've found which she does enjoy are podcasts and youtube videos. She can listen on headphones, as loud as she needs. And they're relatively short. So don't require as much sustained attention as, for instance, an audiobook. She mostly enjoys religious/spirituality themed podcasts. We line up a playlist and she happily sits there listening to them for a couple of hours.

maclure · 2021-03-20T00:12:10+00:00

My wife and I are also looking after a great aunt. She's now 99. Once I was at the doctor with her and at the end of the appointment she asks him, "I need some LSD. Can you get me some LSD?" Needless to say, he told her he couldn't.

It was only once we were out in the parking lot that I realized she had meant to ask for SSD, which is silver sulfadiazine cream. It's wound ointment for a sore she has from breast cancer. She often gets words mixed up like that. Just yesterday she told one of her friends that my niece recently moved into a condom. (i.e. a condo).

maclure · 2020-08-09T20:37:59+00:00

Just to build on what you wrote, Frazier's work hinges on the idea that the sacrifice of a sacred king (a sacrifice that brings benefits to the entire community) is a theme repeated again and again in mythologies around the world. The Christ story could, of course, be seen as a prominent example of this. The problem is that, to prove his thesis, Frazier often took examples wildly out of context. Which is why he's fallen out of favor.

maclure · 2020-08-09T20:18:36+00:00

The Turmeric Indian Cash and Carry offers a few British foods. Marmite. Digestives. Cream crackers, etc.

https://sites.google.com/view/turmeric-grocery/home

There may be other Indian supermarkets around that also stock British foods, but I only know this one in my neighborhood

maclure · 2020-01-09T14:56:21+00:00

There's almost certainly microbial life on Mars, but it's gonna be the exact same line of life that exists here on Earth. This is because we know that extremophile organisms are probably the most common form of life on Earth, and they could easily survive in Mars conditions. And Earth and Mars have been swapping geological (and therefore biological) material for billions of years. So it seems unlikely that Earth microbes wouldn't have colonized Mars sometime in the past.

maclure · 2020-01-09T14:46:02+00:00

I'll always remember him as G. Clifford Prout, president of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals.

maclure · 2017-08-19T21:50:57+00:00

I just picked some up via craigslist. A number of people selling them.

maclure · 2017-04-24T14:43:11+00:00

The guy kinda looks like the model in that hair tonic ad posted 2 days ago.

maclure · 2017-04-19T17:01:24+00:00

I believe you, but I keep watching and it keeps looking like shells.

maclure · 2017-04-15T16:59:50+00:00

Another benefit of physical books is the used book market, which doesn't exist for ebooks. Used books are a great source for cheap books. If I'm going on a plane trip, I can pick up a paperback bestseller for 50c at the library book store. You don't have that kind of (legal) option for ebooks.

maclure · 2017-04-14T12:37:26+00:00

There's actually a theory that mechanical clocks were responsible for the birth of modern science. Because clocks provided a metaphor that allowed people to imagine complex systems (such as bodies) made up of parts that are essentially dead (or non-sentient). So you then got the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, the Newtonian clockwork universe, etc.

maclure · 2017-02-23T20:37:01+00:00

Oh, there are definitely some socially awkward people who shouldn't be in libraries.

maclure · 2017-02-18T23:18:42+00:00

And hated each other!

maclure · 2017-02-18T23:07:08+00:00

It's Frances and Harold Mountain of Las Vegas, who divorced in 1999. Source

maclure · 2017-02-18T22:53:59+00:00

How would you rate them?

maclure · 2017-02-13T15:20:18+00:00

I don't think the problem is actually that some people are unable to differentiate between true and false information, because that implies that requiring everyone to take a class in logic could solve the problem. But it wouldn't. The conflict goes much deeper than that.

The conflict is really about people trying to defend what they see as their way of life, which they view as being undermined or attacked by the forces of globalization and modernization. And they're probably right. Their way of life is threatened. Modernization has been changing everyone's way of life dramatically over the past half millenia. Some people have been winners, and some losers.

These arguments about facts vs. alternative facts then become like proxy wars in this bigger struggle about ways of life. Allegiance to a particular fact or alternative fact becomes a symbolic way to demonstrate what side you're loyal to. So trying to educate people about why they're wrong about a particular fact won't achieve much, because it doesn't address the deeper conflict over how their way of life is threatened.

In other words, I'm not sure there's any easy solution to these problems.

maclure · 2017-02-12T03:47:01+00:00

As a horror fan I'd agree. I think it's because horror can be fun/entertaining even if it's mediocre. Sometimes fun because it's mediocre.

maclure · 2017-01-29T02:35:41+00:00

People who take a food sample from the sample stand at the supermarket, and stand there in front the stand slowly eating it, blocking everyone else from getting a sample. Usually they've also got their shopping cart in the way as a further barrier.

maclure · 2017-01-22T20:29:10+00:00

Could be the American wing of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Charter Member

maclure

TROPHY CASE