Scorpions Escrow Opera

I admire a good headline, and my eye was caught by one in the Wall Street Journal the other day – “Prices Soar on Crop Woes”. Basically the story is that a worldwide reduction in various agricultural harvests is causing food prices to go up.

Cheery, eh?

But despite the dire news it delivers, I decided I really, really like the sound and the rhythm of the five word sequence “Prices Soar on Crop Woes”. (Note to young musicians: “The Crop Woes” would be a great name for a band.)

I told myself that a global food shortage spurring higher prices everywhere is the kind of catastrophe that, if it can be averted, should be. And I resolved to come up with an inventive solution that had not yet occurred to anyone, because my brain is so unique. Hmmm.

I’ve never been good at anagrams, but the thought slipped into my head that maybe there’s an unseen angle on this problem hidden somewhere inside the 20 letters of the headline “Prices Soar on Crop Woes,” and it would reveal itself through re-arrangement. I was fairly sure no one had tried to solve the problem this way, so I started to puzzle it out.

The headline has 20 letters. When you group them by type and arrange them alphabetically, it looks like this:

a
cc
ee
i
n
oooo
pp
rrr
sss
w

Does laying it out this way make it easier to see new words inside the headline? I’ll leave it for you to judge. After thirty minutes of noodling, this is all I could come up with:

Poor Cows Are In Process
Sow Opera Ropes in Crocs

What does it all mean?

“Poor Cows Are In Process” could certainly be a problem in the global food supply. We beef eaters shouldn’t dine on poor cows if rich, hearty, healthy ones are available. A partial solution to the crisis! I was pretty proud of that.

“Sow Opera Ropes in Crocs”, however, was baffling. An opera by pigs might reduce our planetary appetite if we can get enough people to listen to it, but it won’t do anything to stop hunger. Although if crocs attended any opera put on by pigs, those particular pigs would never make it to any human’s table, so that’s a potential food supply problem, though probably not the worst one that we face.

Obviously my letter juggling approach to finding a novel solution to “Prices Soar on Crop Woes” was going nowhere. In desperation, I turned to the Internet Anagram Server, which is a place to go if you want evidence that your poor brain is not up to the task of competing with a computer.

On the Internet Anagram Server, type in a phrase and the software will re-arrange the letters for you. In the “advanced” menu, you can ask the server to include specific words. Since I already knew “sow” and “cow” could be made with some of the 20 letters, I included them. Unfortunately the headline doesn’t have the letters to spell “chicken”, so to represent the third most common meat to appear on American plates, I asked the server to find anagrams that included the word “coop”.

Here are some results:

Reprocess a Poor Cow? Sin.
A Porcine Cow Sores Pros.
A Nice Cow, or Oppressors
Poor Cow. A Prison Recess.

A Poor Sow, Sincere Crops
A Precise Sow Croons Pro
Sow A Sonic Pop Sorcerer
Sow Conspires a Coop Err

Coop Row Coarseness Rip
Sorrows Nip Coop Crease
Carrier Sews Coop Spoon
Spacier Coop Sore Sworn

What does this tell us?

It tells us that it is unbelievably easy to lose 90 irreplaceable minutes of your life online, even if you have nothing to play with but a 20 letter headline.

Aside from Trail Baboon, what is your biggest online time waster?

119 thoughts on “Scorpions Escrow Opera”

  1. Well, obviously, here, if we accept it wastes time, that is.
    I posted this on facebook early this week. Seems pertinent here now:
    Time crawls when we are not online: waiting in Verizon to lose my battle with them, I saw a woman come in to pay her bill at an electronic teller, which was not working. She stopped an employee walking by. He looked at it and asked how long the screen had shown that same image. She replied “Oh, a long time,” and then after a moment’s thought added with disgust, “At least 2 minutes

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      1. Since I got the new computer all hooked up, I haven’t gone out looking for Spider Solitaire (it was bookmarked before). It’s been a week now. I think this is what withdrawal feels like!

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    1. Love Spider solitaire. That was to be my answer. Now what do I do? I suppose I could say my 152-show Carol Burnett Collectors Edition.

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  2. Flight of the Hamsters

    http://www.digyourowngrave.com/flight-of-the-hamsters/

    try it at your own peril, I won’t even hit the start key anymore.

    Bad enough the amount of “research” I can engage in-at least that I can sort of rationalize.

    I first thought the title was Scorpions Eschew Opera (which I would be fine with, human patrons make enough rustling wrapper crinkling noises on their own)-I’m trying to figure out how they go about escrowing it.

    I hear about crop prices daily at the bakery. Makes me think I need to order up a few more seed catalogs and research how soon I can get some seeds started. Jim?

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  3. I refuse to call TB a “time waster“, so all the hours I devote to Klondike Solitaire are my deepest shame. I have ascended to the level of High Dragon-Chewing Jedi Knight Klondike Champeen. It is a title I gave myself since there is no other way to recognize my rare skill at that game. Like everything I do well, it pays nothing and does not get noticed by anyone except my blind setter.

    An even greater indulgence, when I have been doing some photography, is playing around with editing programs to get the nicest possible images from my digital captures. I’m not much for the heavy-handed Photoshop sort of thing, like giving a wedding bride the head of a walrus, but I can while away hours erasing pimples or restyling drab hairdos. When I photographed a bunch of kids on my beloved carousel and they all had the expressions of a hanging judge, I got mad and went in to put big foolish grins on all of them. Well, once you start down that path there is no going back.

    Doing this really sucks the minutes out of an hour, but it isn’t often that God lets us remake the world as we would prefer to see it.

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  4. I have not been on the blog much this week because I am getting Sandra and myself ready for a 5-6 week trip, to Taos and Santa Fe, then across northern NM, my favorite natural landscape. To the Grand Canyon, a week in Phoenix with friends. Onto San Jose for a week or more with son and d-i-l. Then home on I70 and/or I80. I will be doing all of the driving, which may be a strain, but we can slow down, if the cheap German genes do not overpower my pain. I am calling it Sandra Sleeps Across the West, but I will wake her up for high points. And what is the to see between here and Taos.
    A great deal of that time has been spent dealing with the technology for it, the bulk of it online. Loading the new laptop with all the pertinent websites and info. Finding possible motels that have online access–have not found one that does not. Road condition sites, etc. Getting the mp3 player full and my wife trained on its use, not very patient with technology, our Sandra. My big battle over phones. Getting the two digital cameras ready and the computer organized for the pix downloads. Then friends loaned us, essentially gave us, a Garmin, which I had to update, learn how to use. Then had to make sure I have all of the pertinent wires and batteries.
    Pshew. We head our probably Tuesday.

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    1. On your “Sandra Sleeps” trip be sure to take pictures of her in front of lots of highlights, right after she’s woken up. This is what my parents did on our big trip west when I was in the 8th grade. We had an old wood paneled station wagon and my sister and I slept all through the drive. My folks would wake us up at each highlight and then taken a picture before loading us back into the car. My two favorites are the one in which I hardly have my eyes open w/ the Grand Tetons in the back and the one in which the Great Salt Flats are spread out behind me and I have the most bored look possible on my face!

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      1. My wife and I have a mutual pact to never photograph each other. If there were not true, I would take joke pix of her sleeping everywhere.

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    2. Clyde, this is a little eerie, but the first part of the Road Trip we’re planning for March starts like this: visit friend in Sante Fe (with Taos as a side trip), then the Grand Canyon before heading north to Las Vegas and Bay Area… I’ll be taking notes from your experiences if you get on the blog en route!

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      1. I am sort of out of it mentally this a.m. Had a bad night, flu maybe or something. So, I asked you twice a question you answered. DUH!!
        I plan to blog some. We have three heavy travel days to get to Taos and then to Phoenix and on to San Jose after our stay on Phoenix. I will try to blog each night or maybe early morning on the travel days. We will be rising later than you and my wife is slow in the morning. Not sure how accessible Internet will be in Phoenix at our friends. It will be very accessible at our son’s.

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    3. Clyde and BiR, spent 4 months in Sante Fe when I worked at the opera there. Personally recommend spending some time in the cathedral and reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Fiction it is, but I still think it is great. Am going to reread it myself soon.

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  5. Clyde, I can’t tell you how much I admire your courage and enterprise, and I envy all the landscape beauty Sandra will sleep through. The Baboons will miss your terribly and will surely hang on any word of your progress. You mean to deal with pain with “cheap German genes?” I’d suggest expensive American drugs, but I know better than to advise you on anything.

    Take care, Clyde, and know that you travel with our hopes and prayers for a joyous trip and safe return.

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    1. I am taking some moderately expensive–generic after all–American drugs.
      Speaking of travel and generic, on the UP along Lake Superior used to be a little mom-and-pop motel painted flat white with flat black trim. Called The Generic Motel.

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      1. That’s a clever name. My favorite motel names are Americanized bastardizations of some foreign phrase. We slept well, six of us, in the little Bon Nuit motel up near Cable, Wisconsin. The locals call it–what else?–the “Bon Noo-It.”

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    2. Are the cheap German genes the ones that tell you to get in as many miles per day before stopping so as to have as few hotel nights as possible, perchance?

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    3. Thank you, Steve, for the compliment. I admit I am on edge about it. But we both know this is our last chance to do any such thing. We really could not afford it, and then we discovered we owned stock in Prudential, which is making the trip less stressful in re to $.

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  6. Facebook says it is Cynthia in Mahtowa’s birthday. Happy day to you. May the livestock be kind to you, your friends be warm, and the drinks be cool.

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  7. Rise and Shine but don’t blow the day Baboons!

    Well, she wrote huffily, Verily stole my time waster, so now what do I do?

    I’ll blame someone else. There is a certain locally-based insurance company that has poor service. Providers of service, like me, can call customer service to try to get paid for all the payments they drop and stay on the line waiting for someone to answer for 10 minutes. Then the maddening part starts–pass the buck. The call can be passed from customer service rep, to another customer service rep. Finally, say the Provider of Service is me, I wake up realizing I’m talking to someone in India who can barely speak English so I can understand and I find myself tersely asking to talk to the supervisor in AMERICA.

    And there went my free hour to get my paperwork done. But at least it is not my fault. HMMMPH.

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    1. PS, TB IS NOT a time waster. I am socializing on a space-age level, developing new dendrites as I write in the early morning, and learning new things such as how to go on You Tube. So There!

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      1. I forgot to add to my entry above, that this is an online waster, because said insurance company has such a non-functioning website that I have to call their customer service because that is BETTER than the website, which tells you nothing, thus the on-line connection.

        Headache today, too early, excuse, excuse

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    2. Exactly what happened to me with Samsung. Verizon did not send me to India. Just to an American who had script memorized to supposedly placate me but actually did quite the opposite, which did me no good, of course.

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      1. They shoot us off to Mumbai so often that you come to expect it, which is why–when I get a customer service rep with a honey-drenched southern accent or deep Texas twang–I always compliment them on how well they speak American.

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    3. Personally I think you can share Spider Solitaire. In fact, it must say something (although I don’t know what) that this time-waster extradordinaire has already been mentioned by 3 of us when only 4 of us are on so far this morning! Maybe the makers of Spider Solitaire should get some kind of award!

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  8. Have a fun morning all… I’m off to ferry the teenager around AND learn to knit. Won’t be back until later this afternoon, but at least I won’t be able to play Spider while I’m out and about!

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      1. And once you are into it (or for that matter any of you who are already knitters), join Ravelry.com and cruise the tips, yarn reviews and scout out free patterns (or for the heck of it, look at all the cats in hats in the pet patterns section).

        If I’m stuck at a desk and the rest of the Baboons are off doing something useful, Ravelry is my fallback.

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      2. MiG… my knitting teacher wrote down ravelry for me while I was getting going. She said I was “a natural” and if she was just saying it to be nice, I’ll take it. So now I have a pretty brown scarf and a black and white hat started. Woo hoo!

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    1. Thank you mentioning Dick Cavett, Clyde. It helps ease some of my pain for going to Iowa today.
      Have a wonderful trip … you lucky so and so. Would you adopt me?

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    2. Hah!
      Can you tell I’m procrastinating the IA drive? Just about to check weather.com to see if there’s any potential for precip. Hoping … hoping …

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  9. All Fans of T-Paw (especially Anna):

    Be certain to read Gail Collins in the New York Times today. “Republican Book Club.” It is a scream. And the bridge falling is not his fault!

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    1. Just read it-just what those so smart coastal types (many of whom are transplanted midwesterners) needed to feel smug superiority over those backwards midwesterners who would elect T-Paw and Jesse the Body. ach.

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    2. Can I find that dog and shower it with dog biscuits??? Clearly a dog who would lunge at T-Paw and put big teeth marks in his brochures deserves a good reward. 🙂 Thanks for the tip on the column!

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  10. “Prices Soar on Crop Woes”

    Does that mean that it costs more for corn borers? or wheat rust? or soybean blight?

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  11. I do the Klondike Solitaire in fits and starts — made myself quit cold turkeyin the fall and now it’s seeping back in… Is Spider a lot different? Do I dare learn it?

    Other time waster would be a compulsion to open every link and YouTube gift found in emails. And our computer is pretty slow, so I have to leave and come back when it’s downloaded, and am amazed at how seldom it was really worth the wait.
    Husband spends hours listening “infomercials” from his various financial planning sites…

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    1. When I got the new computer a year ago, it came with Klondike Solitaire that has a record keeping feature. In fact, you can’t turn it off. I was immediately freaked out by that because I knew that every single game I play goes into the computer and gets expressed as a percentage. That makes me afraid to play unless I am totally alert and at the peak of my abilities because I’m so stupidly proud of my percentage of wins.

      Believe me, if you have a single glass of wine, your numbers start to tumble.

      I win 34% of the games I play. I must admit I wonder how others do.

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      1. I’ve been on the internet. It looks like some winning percentages of 13% are fairly common. Maybe 17%. I don’t cheat (you can’t cheat–the game isn’t set up to allow it–but I play an intense game. At least 10 percent of all Klondike games are totally unwinnable, and to win many of the others you would have to be totally lucky to make exactly all the moves that favor a win.

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      2. Luckily, our set-up has nothing about keeping track, percentages, etc. I did just look in options, and I can change the scene on the back of the cards. I have a feeling that knowing how many of y’all do this is like major permission to play more solitaire, and maybe check out Spider…

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  12. A vaguely related quote from “Elegance of Hedgehog”: I press the start button and sip my Jasmine tea. From time to time I rewind, thanks to this secular rosary known as the remote control.

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  13. Good morning to all,

    Here I am in the “stone age” again, since I haven’t found those games on my computer and become involved with them. I waste my time with paper and pencil doing soduko. I can waste a lot of time looking for information using my computer. Usually I can get information so fast that it is amazing, but there are times when I look for something for a long time and might not get a good answer. I don’t remember a good example right now.

    Note to Clyde: Did you see my comment about your phone problem late yesterday? You might not have time to shop for a better phone online, but the Jan. 2011 Consumer Reports articles on cell phones might be helpful if you haven’t already seen them.

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  14. I’m still pretty lame at searching the web. Depending on other activities I’m involved with, I can spend lots of time at various places – did you know there are website that have folk dance instructions? And I gravitate toward authors’ own websites…

    Anyone know an efficient website to check out movies before we rent them? When I type in the movie name, I usually get pretty bogged down trying to find a good place to get a feel for that movie.

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      1. I can totally get sucked into IMDB…I get teased about not being able to watch an entire movie at home without opening my laptop to look someone or something up…

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    1. Barbara: the two great movie sites are Internet Movie Database (imdb, as Clyde has shown you) and the Movie Reivew Query Enging (mrqe). Or I should say mrqe.com.

      Imdb is all about the making of the movies. it lists the cast, director, shooting locales, mentions goofs, includes trivia, often includes memorable lines. It is for information about a movie, not so much reviews.

      Mrqe is a database of movie reviews. If you know which reviewers you respect, you go there and read two or three quick reviews to know whether this is a movie you want to spend time with.

      I consult both sites several times a day.

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  15. I cannot afford to devote any more time to computerized enchantments than I already do to this blog, so no foolin’ around on the side for me. YOU ADULTERERS! Gosh, that sounds a little strong. What I mean to say is that some of my best friends are harlots and I don’t judge you.

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    1. Okay, Donna. I am somewhat the same as you. I am on facebook just barely. I do almost nothing there because I would rather spend my time with this blog. So, do I get a pass on being an ADULTERER?

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      1. Madelia, MN has a big sign outside it that says “The Pride of the Prairie,” which always makes me giggle. At the U of Chi we used to sing a song “Charlotte the harlot, the girl we adore, the pride of the prairie, the cowpuncher’s whore.”

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  16. I’d like to say I’m a serial monogamist about time wasters…but that would be lying. Facebook can suck me in, especially if there are good links to things like NY Times columns and such. I used to frequent sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and Go Fug Yourself…but there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

    I have also recently discovered how poor the search options are for e-books on the county library site. Also, a lot of the books I have wanted to find as e-books are not available through the site (case in point, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” – you can buy it as a “Nook Book,” but you can’t borrow it as an e-book from the library…grr…). Best option is to sit down with the list and scroll through it one page at a time. Add books when I find ones I might want to read to my “wish list”…then check those out when I need a new book. Tedious. And totally sucks up hours at a time.

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  17. Completely OT-tim I don’t see your chili recipe from book club in the Kitchen Congress-can you give it out or is it top secret? Vegetarian, right?

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      1. Here it is.

        Chocolate Mousse:
        4 oz (squares) unsweetened chocolate
        3/4 c sugar
        1/4 c water
        5 eggs, separated
        1 tsp vanilla or 1 tbl cognac or 2 tbl sherry (or substitute in an appropriate amount of your preferred flavoring)
        A dash of patience

        Combine chocolate, sugar and water in the top of a double boiler. Heat until the chocolate has melted.
        Add egg yolks, one at a time, while still over the double boiler, beating hard after each.
        Remove mixture from the water and allow to cool while beating the egg whites stiff.
        Fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture and add flavoring.
        Then turn mixture into a bowl and let stand in the refrigerator for 12 hours (this is where you need the patience…).

        I like to dust mine with a bit of cinnamon, but I’m a fan of cinnamon and chocolate together. I have thought, too, if throwing in some cayenne pepper, since I’m also a fan of dark chocolate and cayenne (the Vosges Red Fire bar is fab…Chocolate Celeste also has a yummy cayenne truffle…). You can doll it up however you like. I like this recipe as I can serve it to my lactose and gluten intolerant friends (though if I ever have a friend who is allergic to eggs, or is a strict vegan, I’m sunk).

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      2. Oh, never mind, just read the recipe more thoroughly. The egg whites didn’t register the first time for some reason.

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  18. In my world the good ship Bookkeeping keeps breaking up on the rocks of Kakuro Conquest, JigsawDoku, Nisqually, and Snood. It will probably continue to be so, unless I can find a virtual way to have myself tied to the mast.

    Another place I can spend a lot of time is the babelfish translator page at Yahoo – though I defend this as being not entirely a waste of time – I do learn a little.

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      1. do you think this is better than Google translate? I use that one to navigate Spanish with my son’s homework and to leave notes for Spanish speaking co-workers. I’m sure most of them find my Spanish amusing, but as Garrison Keillor once said-it’s a real gift to be funny in a language you do not speak.

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      2. Google is probably better – they’re usually better at everything. I think Babelfish has just been around longer and I have it on the toolbar.

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      3. OMG, who knew? I shouldve had this when I was reading the Hemingway with my inadequate Spanish-Engl. dictionary. The things I learn here…

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  19. Shopping for clothes and the City of Waterville website. Total timewasters.

    Actually, like Donna so eloquently stated, I have very little time for any more “computerized enchantments” than I already spend here on the Trail. TB, however, is NOT a waste of time. All of you have educated and entertained me ever since I found you. Like today, for example. I had never heard of Spider Solitaire, Klondike Solitaire, Flying Hamsters, Snood, imdb, mrqe, Nisqually or the e-Book Reader. See how educated I’ve become?

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    1. Ooh, you’re right, clothes. I don’t do it often, but I once got caught for a couple of hours looking for flat espadrilles . Another one of those time warps.

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      1. I’m never sure about color/size/price. There are lots of things that I like online but when I think about whether or not it will fit…

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    1. Thanks. Places I choose must have certain key factors, which I have checked out ahead of time. All related to either my wife or I.

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  20. The name Babelfish comes from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is the name of the little fish you put in your ear so you can understand any language you might encounter on your trip through the universe. The fish, of course, got its name from the tower of Babel in the Bible.
    PS I have enjoyed catching up on the past few days today. It has been a busy week for me.

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    1. I thought I had heard that somewhere before but couldn’t place it. It’s been many, many years since I read the Hitchhikers Guide…

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  21. Another activity that can really draw you into the vortex is genealogy research. There are so many sites, and they all want you to register for a free 14-day trial membership before they will show you the information they have, and the records are all misspelled, and there’s no standard for what information each county keeps online, or even each state. There’s a lot of information, but it’s all a big mess.

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    1. Kept my Thanksgiving peaceable doing that. Most of what I got (mispellings and all-my mom’s maiden name shows up on the beautifully handwritten census records in no less than 6 different ways) I had found at the county historical society 10 years before, so I felt pretty good about the few new things I found.

      The best stuff was from that same county’s site that has a data base of the headlines from the various county newspapers. Put in the surnames I was looking for and now have a couple of intriguing articles I need to get out there and look up to find out “the rest of the story”.

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  22. Greetings! I, too, have never heard of these silly games you all play. I guess I’m no fun because I refuse to play any PlayStations, Cubes, GameBoys, pinballs or online games. I see how it eats up all my husband’s and sons’ time, so I refuse to be seduced by it. As a solid German myself, most things I do must have a practical purpose behind it. Like reading — I generally don’t read fiction. I read for information, inspiration, motivation and sometimes just for entertainment. Granted, it is very easy to spend many happy hours reading, exploring and learning on the internet — it’s only a waste of time if you haven’t gained anything or if you really NEED to be doing something else — like work.

    Besides TB, I enjoy the articles on Dr. Mercola’s site or Natural News. They both cover a wide range of excellent, well-researched health and wellness information. May be boring to some, but I find it fascinating.

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      1. I’ll have to ponder that. When I feel I have time to “waste,” I’m usually too tired to do anything useful, the internet is down and I’ve already read the articles in Newsweek. But playing games never comes to mind and I’m not creative enough to do crafts. On occasion, I’ve been known to just sit and contemplate my navel for a short ime, though.

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      1. Is that an email newsletter? I might …. I just don’t read that one as thoroughly or pay close attention to it. Can you post the web address? I’ve been making sure to sign the petitions against the Fake Food Safety Bill and other stupid, anti-food/health freedom legislation parading as something helpful.

        Mercola and Natural News come almost daily so I look at those often. Organic Bytes only publish occasionally, so I forget.

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  23. Evening everyone…

    I have to agree with the rest of you; I spent a lot of time on TB but it is definitely NOT a time waster!
    Facebook, yes, a waste of more time than I would like… but you gotta check out the friends, you know?
    And Klondike Solitaire… I have a tendency to play until I win. Sometimes that takes awhile… an older version I used to use kept track of the percentages…

    I have been working in a theater without internet access this week hence less postings from me than normal; and that’s probably good; didn’t have the distractions.

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