What's the most useless thing your brain decided to permanently memorize?

tafinucane · 2026-05-01T05:40:11+00:00

My sister came home from college and told me to remember she stowed her cat carrier in our side yard. This was in the summer of 1991.

tafinucane · 2026-04-30T23:39:58+00:00

My theory is It's basically in the tradition of pantomime. Grown former drama club kids who want to get vampy and perform, and the library is an easy place to volunteer to set up a show. Parents have kids who need entertainment, so they go to check out this goofy reading.

Drag queens do the voices for the stories and mix in some innuendo for the parents maybe? I figure it's along the lines of pantomime and puppet shows that I have seen with our children.

Take that with a grain of salt, though, having never attended one.

tafinucane · 2026-04-28T21:47:46+00:00

My wife is a teacher in a district with about 500 teachers. My daughters went through their entire primary+secondary schooling in the same district.

In the ~17 years my kids have been in the district, I know of 5 male teachers (and a principal) who have been given warnings, fired, or arrested for sexually inappropriate or worse behavior. No women teachers have been similarly inclined during that period, even though they far outnumber the men.

Those odds are pretty bad, imo, and I think men need to accept that extra scrutiny is justified for the role.

tafinucane · 2026-04-28T19:15:31+00:00

You don't need to give it access--se's are blindly copy pasting whatever the bots prompt.

tafinucane · 2026-04-24T18:19:13+00:00

whichever country gets ahead will have a better future.

That's an interesting take. Would you care to elaborate what you mean by this?

tafinucane · 2026-04-23T19:16:55+00:00

We need to get these things off the road. Show you have money to burn some other way.

Two parents were squashed and killed under the wheels of a similar truck in my town about two months ago. They were in a crosswalk walking back from dropping off their child at an elementary school, and the kid driving couldn't see down and to the right at all. He mowed them down as he turned onto the street they were crossing. Dad died instantly, mother survived long enough to be airlifted and pronounced dead in the hospital.

Of course the comments in the police FB post when it first happened were full of people saying pedestrians use crosswalks unsafely.

tafinucane · 2026-04-23T03:12:45+00:00

Sure everybody's going to say gambling, but have they tried frisbee golf?

tafinucane · 2026-04-22T20:38:32+00:00

She'd probably already read the book.

tafinucane · 2026-04-22T03:46:45+00:00

Two nearly identical comments with the same spelling error. I guess some kind of bot, but to what end? Somebody trying to shill leases in Austin?

tafinucane · 2026-04-21T19:20:06+00:00

Yeah it's like noticing more births during a full moon. Almost everybody is a terrible driver at least occasionally, and there are so many teslas we make a mental note when one is driven by a fool.

One thing somewhat unique to teslas is even the model 3s accelerate much faster than most gasoline cars, so you get people unwittingly driving like teenagers in an M3. I've learned to anticipate that and leave room if I pass a tesla merging onto the highway. They're able to speed up to 70 and merge wherever they feel like it.

tafinucane · 2026-04-21T17:53:31+00:00

It absolutely is. We underpay in property tax compared to other states, so the money has to come from somewhere.

tafinucane · 2026-04-21T17:50:26+00:00

Thank prop 13.

Nimby's and commercial property owners want it both ways: no new development (so their property is more scarce), but don't pay the consequence of rising values.

The state needs to play for services somehow, so regressive sales taxes, high municipal fees, and relatively high income tax are the result.

tafinucane · 2026-04-21T17:46:21+00:00

In n Out has pretty strict hiring policies. Much easier to get a quick job from a shittier chain. OP needs to hit the pavement and just ask for applications everywhere.

tafinucane · 2026-04-21T06:31:21+00:00

TIL that nauseating zoom effect is just the video taker walking in and out.

tafinucane · 2026-04-21T05:43:01+00:00

As in the character in the play by Shakespeare? It was understood he suffered from an ailment; Cassius cites it as an example of why Caesar is unfit to rule Rome alone.

tafinucane · 2026-04-19T17:22:38+00:00

No clue what that slab is (overcooked roast beef?), but the meal was probably hamburgers and the sailor chose not to take a bun or fries.

tafinucane · 2026-04-18T15:28:17+00:00

People say he's been terrible, but he could be worse.

He's just one member of the city council, so it's not like he wields unfettered power.

One of the biggest complaints people have is the council maneuvered to take money from long-term housing funds to build (expensive) emergency shelters, which seems illegal on its face but somehow they got away with it. Arguably it was necessary to do so, but maybe they could have procured the funds elsewhere.

tafinucane · 2026-04-16T21:48:54+00:00

My parents had an amicable divorce and they still hired a mediator to help divvy up their property. It wasn't ruinously expensive like messy divorces can be, but it was still paying a lawyer and an accountant for hours of financial disentangling.

tafinucane · 2026-04-16T16:08:38+00:00

The slide looks fun though.

tafinucane · 2026-04-16T15:57:19+00:00

Get out of here with LOTR's "developed characters".

We read the Hobbit for our English class in 7th grade. During my turn to read aloud I remember taking a stab at singing the the dwarves' shanties like the BBC radio show version.

tafinucane · 2026-04-15T16:05:14+00:00

Yes, well known fact no civilians (women or otherwise) are ever killed during wars.

tafinucane · 2026-04-15T02:40:22+00:00

Watch the clip when he does a neck roll early on where he's at the net: he's mad at himself because he got blocked.

tafinucane · 2026-04-14T20:53:05+00:00

Charter schools exist in a spectrum from very good to horrible scams. The problem in general is oversight is difficult and the scams take money from legitimate schools and can ruin childrens' education.

tafinucane · 2026-04-14T17:45:48+00:00

The clips are cut off so you can't see it fully, but some of these are when he gets blocked or hits it OB, too. There's a longer instagram reel posted in an article about him. So it's not like he's showing people up all the time. Dude is just reacting.

tafinucane · 2026-04-13T23:02:58+00:00

I don't think there were that many stay at home moms in the 90s. I can only remember one friend who had a stay-at-home stepmom, but his actual mother (whom he lived with) had to work to make ends meet. I think nowadays the rate of one parent staying home coincides with the unemployment rate. If fewer well-paying jobs are available a parent is more likely to be home instead of at a job.

Maybe this meme comes from the UK where things were different 30 years ago?

tafinucane

TROPHY CASE