...so use Fight Club soap.

Einstein was upset with the quantum physicists: "God does not play dice with the universe."

There are 21 dots on a 1d6. 21 x 2 = 42.

Money is one of several factors. When you are broke, you can probably afford time to save money. However when you have an urgent situation, you may just have to say goodbye to $100. Social status and maintaining a relationship are also vectors. Learn to weigh your factors more quickly -- your marriage or friendship may depend on it.

Hell is only for those that truly believe in it. You build your reality in your assumptions, but reality is bigger than you. If you think you're going to hell, then you are. If you would rather see a better world, start building the skills that would create it.

Working with your hands also helps develop your intellect. I studied philosophy in college, but I also spent my college time doing desktop publishing, learning Unix, doing audio production on 2-track and 4-track reels, and schlepping stuff I found. I remember a lot about Tiresias and hylomorphism, but I can also mix down live. Neither is more valuable, especially in a world with transgender DJs.

When I first got into a mosh pit, I fell and people stepped on my feet. It hurt. The show was still going, so I got back up. I hit the ground again. I got up slightly faster. Eventually I bought steel-toed boots and got used to getting hit. I liked being membrane, the edge of the pit: I could watch people lose their minds while keeping unsuspecting folks from getting sucked in. Eventually I became a sysadmin.

Don't be afraid of machines, neighborhoods, weird food, or other people. Anything you assume you know but don't try is your failure.

Learn to drive stick. Take one lesson, then buy a stick car. It's like learning to drive all over again. Then comes winter and you can simply stay in second gear all over the slush. You will know more about your car because you will shape the results of control. You will not fear the road or feel like a victim.

You may get to hang out with a lot of people, but not all of them are your friends. Some won't even break bread with you -- you can literally offer them to pull bread from a fresh loaf and they won't touch it. If they won't eat with you, don't try to date them.

Your parents may love you, but they won't always understand you. This is more than okay -- this is how you become independent.

You never know how often you could get laid if you don't make a trial close. I learned this when I worked in sales: don't be afraid of 'no'. If the other person doesn't leave, then you can address objections and try again. If the other person leaves, LET 'EM LEAVE. Go do something different.

However, getting laid won't always lead to a real relationship. It sounds obvious, but man can that take forever to sink in.

Never eat a hot dog on a boat. I learned that on a whale cruise.

I had assumed he wasn't traveling in time but rattling things from his head. After all, we establish a present but he also tells us about his murder. There is no physical conceit for time travel -- simply that he's not in control of when he is.

The first sentence is "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." Whether anyone else perceives this is immaterial. That's how Vonnegut worked: "and so it goes."

Vonnegut had been trying to figure out how to tell the story of the Dresden firebombing. He was there, but its impact got eclipsed by the atomic bombs in Japan. He was only able to unravel the tale by wrapping it in other tales.

Being unstuck in time, whatever way it happens, lets us look at a bigger event in a digestible way.

But it is ALREADY upon us! What more do we need? We have megadrought in California, floods everywhere else, constant need for FEMA intervention...

I'll bet if it were actually raining men, Congress would call a special session.

It's not about the three years you've already invested. It's about the fear of another year repeating itself until you die.

Your doubts are a vital part of making your decision. Take them apart by figuring out what fuels them. Perhaps what you're seeing are larger trends in the existing cycles, but you can't describe them.

A friend of mine once put it really well: it's not what you see in each other, but whether you are both looking in the same direction. from this perspective, it doesn't sound like you are.

Think about a five-year plan with her. What milestones would you expect (buying a house, starting a family, feasting on the flesh of your rivals while drinking mead)? What would she expect? If you do not see enough overlap, you have an answer.

Marriage is not always the next step. Don't let social expectations push you into a legal contract. That's like signing up for a cell phone plan because they let you call Denver.

Heck, he's the only one standing in front of casks of aging beer.

Texas still executes a lot of people -- more than several other nations combined.

California and New York have similar populations -- big-ass cities, plenty of rural too. Yet New York has had zero executions since it reintroduced the death penalty in 1995. If you want to talk about twisted, New York Effin' City invents new ways to commit crimes.

Are you saying that the death penalty is fine because of the nature of the crimes? Are you saying you're exclusive to some kind of horror that warrants taking a life? Are you even certain that's a punishment for every murderer, some of whom want to die?

I need to understand this thinking. I'm moving to Oklahoma soon (Tulsa). It's different enough from Texas. I still want to know why "he needs murderin'" is a decent civic stance.

They knight you for the income to the Crown. John left the UK, and the other two never made as much money after the Beatles as Paul. As goofy as a lot of Wings albums are, he made a lot of them and they had hits.

Mull this one: Sir Bob Geldof. He's Irish! (Republic, not Northern.) They knighted him for the revenue of Live Aid.

It turns out my wife has this. She watches massage videos to fall asleep.

I tried watching these and I got twitches. Every tappy, light sound made me shake my arms. I also have tinnitus so I wonder whether there is a relationship.

I can't even get through a few seconds of these videos without feeling overloaded by the sounds of lip smacks, jangling bracelets, and high treble at the same volume as human voices. My discernment falls apart and I feel angry. I keep thinking: POP FILTERS! I spent years recording things and trying to get rid of these noises. It turns out I could've been banking them.

I'll stick to post-rock, grind core, dub step, and other low-intimacy presentations.

However I must thank you for posting this. I never would have known that some people like that tingly sensation. I've had people walk their fingers over my shoulders and it make me freak out like a hit to the funny bone.

Let's face it. This is the flag they wish they had when they wave St Andrew's Cross with stars and a red background.

I like how it becomes a partial Hardee battle flag.

"You can't take my precious stars and bars away! You'll make me realize I'm just a ball of hate and I sound like a barking, toothless dog."

Find me a non-racist country.

It's not a good enough excuse. We need to keep the noise going so we can have real discussions about race and class. We have gone through several evolutions on our racism, but we clearly have more to do.

But you're accusing the US public of racism.

You say "I don't think it's okay to generalize anyone" but say "I think the US has some seriously bad ideas regarding race". Care to explain?

The answer is 'yes' only because of the constraints of the premise. If you could never sleep again -- meaning you cannot sleep, try as you might -- then you would stay awake for the rest of your life.

That life would not be very long. Your brain needs sleep or it cannot clear itself for more input. You'd go insane. Even if you stayed alive, you wouldn't be able to stay in civilization for long. Soon enough you'd only hallucinate and wind up dead from a failed interaction with a dangerous object.

If instead you are asking whether I would stay awake forever, even if somehow I no longer needed to sleep, then the answer is no. Sleep is better than money. Once you have a baby, you will pay people a tolerable wage just to get four hours of uninterrupted sleep. (It's $15/hr, it's called babysitting, and it's oddly risky for the parent.)

When I sleep, I can shut it all off. There is no need to answer anyone. I would love to get away with less sleep: I'm often useless without at least 7 hours, and emotional as heck on only 6. However I cannot imagine living without closed-eye rest.

Laughter is a release, as mentioned in the article. Right now the conservative and reactionary leaders are trying to one-up each other with repressive and illogical policies. If they joke about it, they'd snap.

It's going to be messy in the next couple years. It's going to be like post-Watergate all over again, but from the other direction. People that really believed in tea bag ideals are excluding each other like radical groups fifty years ago. Soon they'll figure out they've been had: they have lost opportunities (including ACA) because someone tricked them into hating them. Even the US military is in favor of gay marriage.

When the cult ends, they'll have satirists again.

CNBC is the Rite-Aid Radio of business news. Wait, that maligns the cromulent RAR. CNBC's star is Jim Kramer, Louis CK's evil twin. Need I say more?

Nevertheless, you listened to it without full attention or reception. You're complaining that they play Telephone while you are playing Telephone with them.

Thank you for saying it before I did.

I am a father to a nine-week-old boy. My wife and I went through the exact same stuff as this writer. I feel better knowing this is, if not normal, at least a pattern.

I did not want to bring a child into the world until I felt I would not resent the time I would lose. I traveled as much as I could, I tried lots of different relationships, I had different careers and lives. So did my wife.

We met in our thirties. We already had fully-formed personalities and lives. She had just gotten her PhD when I met her. We were married before the two-year anniversary of our first date. My son was born nine days after I turned 40.

You change. That's not just okay -- that's GOOD.

I'm still a panty waist liberal. I still want to punch greedy people. I do miss getting the free time I had. Then again I'm already getting slightly more time than I did the first month.

Soon enough that baby will have his own personality. I have no resentments. Also, I went to Belgium twice -- and I'll be back.

We don't live in the world that our parents had. Mine couldn't afford to send me to a public university (in the early 90s) whereas they each went to private colleges in the 1960s. I would hear my mother's demands, then look at her as if she were crazy...

...because it's not like she was holding the purse strings. People that pay for you can tell you what to do. I resent that the Reagan Revolution left us without funded social resources, but I don't mind that this means they can't tell me how to create my own communities.

Having a child has been the next step in my exploration of the world. Now you'll have to excuse me, as the wife needs a nap and the baby can sleep on me.

The mooring at the Empire State Building turned out too be to unpredictable based on updrafts from the canyons of buildings in Manhattan.

I assumed all of this rumbling and primping would be alleviated by the mainstream acceptance of bears, otters, and other butchy parts of gay America.

I'd never heard of the Twin Peaks chain until now. The description of it as a man-cave makes me wonder which peaks are being euphemized...

I really enjoyed looking at this. There are so many beautiful visuals that take me back to my childhood. All of that late Modernist cutting and hot glue...

Too bad there isn't any commentary in the article. The "how" from the title is completely missing. I can summarize but I'll miss a lot:

1) The laser printer did not arrive until 1985. It was the killer app for the one-year-old Macintosh, along with the introduction of desktop publishing and photo manipulation programs. Being able to use a computer for graphics work was a HUGE CHANGE: the cost of getting pre-print ready dropped by two zeroes. A set of workstations and the normal-paper printer for them was way more than the cost of light tables and wax heaters, but it was also within an office budget instead of a factory floor.

2) The Internet. Suddenly you didn't care about Pantone, CMYK, or whether the ad was going to be printed at all.

Heck, and I'm only getting into the tech of it. The changes at advertising agencies, the rise of women in business, the virtual office letting more people freelance...

That was also the B-side to Holiday in Cambodia (both on "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables", the first DK album, 1980). Some things just don't change, and it's scary.

Agreed.

I learned some scary lessons when my college station wanted to become the first HD station in its market. It sounded so forward in 2006.

Then we learned that HD Radio is not an open implementation. It doesn't even stand for "High Definition" -- it's just letters as trade marked by Ibiquity. You pay them a lot up front for their equipment then fees each year based on your audience size.

We also noticed that no one was installing HD Radios in cars. Most of our listening audience is in the car. Eventually (in 2012) I bought a portable HD Radio for $50... and had to stick it out the window or directly on the dash to get HD signals. It was easier to stream radio from a 3G phone.

They don't even sell HD Radio dongles. You can't just get line out analog -- only headphone. They don't seem to want anyone to use the tech as an add-on. Do they think people sit at home when they want to listen to the radio? It's still just... radio. It's still pre-selected content limited to a geographic region based on propagation characteristics at an elevation.

Meanwhile every radio station that got suckered into the deal still tell listeners about it. They got caught in contracts and can only pray to amortize the costs. In contrasts, streaming on the web is profitable and gets new listeners.

I haven't even seen digital radio outside Norway. I was last in western Europe in 2013, so I may be out of date. Norway isn't even in the EU, so has this made it even as far as Sweden or Finland?

The author gives far too simplistic an explanation of an opinion that gets projected onto an entire culture.

First of all, why "70 years"? We've had the telephone since 1876 -- nearly twice that long. Seventy years before this 2010 post would be 1940 -- well after the introduction of local dialing and the integrated earpiece and mouthpiece, a dozen years before DTMF (touch-tone) in the central offices, 23 years before direct long-distance dialing and touch-tone phones in North America (1963).

Secondly, real-time speech connectivity is not going away. That would be like saying "screw the other ear -- let's go back to monophonic." While many hipsters may say this crap from the safety of beards that absorb face punches, the rest of us get freaked when an FM station isn't fully in stereo. I spend my work day making phone calls because I haven't explained something well enough by email.

Now to the root of it. The author is pleased to use asynchronous communication. The USB and UDP protocols enjoy the features of this as well. However the author is masking that the annoyance of dealing with a phone call is the avoidance of adulthood and reality. We have had the answering machine since 1964, so delayed response has long since been engrained with society. Not responding at all is still anti-social.

It is very likely that the author is an introvert. Thus maintaining passive-aggressive control over communication becomes a way of saving sanity. However we're not all introverts. There is nothing more useful than clearing the air by asking instead of assuming comprehension.

Roxy Music had hits. That's not underrated.

Roxy Music gave us Brian Ferry and BRIAN mofo ENO. Eno invented ambient music to improve the airport experience -- in other words, he invented an entire GENRE of music that is still active as a solution to a simple problem.

You want underrated from that era, maybe a touch later? MX-80 Sound. Let's talk about how much Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti is a Snakefinger tribute band. Heck, let's give a big shout-out to the Blasters -- without the Alvin Brothers, there never would've been a rockabilly revival in 1983 and again in 1994.

Pitching a perfect game on acid? That record should just stick.

We may be talking about how long after college you will need to do the projects you hate before you can do the projects you want.

Then again, I went to Binghamton. Now that I live in Los Angeles, it's like saying I went to some school in a place. However I'm also 40, so instead they ask me about version control and server automation.

I observe the Prime Directive on this. Let's watch as they pick a terrible candidate. Let that fall apart. We won't give them any hints that could give them a victory.

It's also 19 months before the election.

Tipping is confusing

No, it's not: divide the non-penny part of the bill by 5. For each five, it's a buck in tip. Round up. Tip in cash when you can help it. Don't demean underpaid people that bring your laziness a plate of food.

Can we make another tag for articles written by people too young to comment on the outside world?