Category: Arts and Letters

Biggest Dodged Bullets

What was the biggest bullet you dodged? from r/AskReddit

DelsieTowery
Didn’t lend money to a “friend” because I was broke, few months later he disappeared with several thousands he had stolen from my other friends

EmperorHans
I had a cardic arrest about four years ago. Dropped dead(ish) in the middle of my shift. Found out after I woke up about a week later that:

A) the manager who saw me fall was a former life guard and knew proper CPR

B) an ambulance happened to be passing about two blocks away

C) probably the best cardio unit in my state was a ten minute ambulance ride from where it all happened.

Walked out of the hospital about two weeks later, full recovery.

michonne_impossible
Well, about 15 years ago I dated a guy for less than a year. It was an awful, abusive relationship and I was happy to get out of it when I did.

About… 8-9 years ago, I saw him on the news. He strangled his girlfriend to death. He then dismembered her and lived with her body for a month or so before he was caught.

StuckInTheElevator
Was going to move to a different apartment complex last month…got injured at work and lost hours; therefore, couldn’t come up with the deposit money in time. Last week some asshat was cooking meth and caught the building on fire.

kkfluff
Went to kill myself by putting a plastic bag over my head and tying it off. Figured it would be less messy to be found… my cat started going crazy on the other side of the door when I started to get light headed and feel sort of nauseous. I thought “oh right, you need your dinner and no one else will feed you” and I untied the bag to feed the cat. After the fact I realized my cat literally saved me from one of my lowest points.

God I miss that cat. Still can’t believe I came that close

LegallyBodacious
Not changing jobs in early 2020. Would have been a short lived promotion after early restructuring and layoffs.

ThadisJones
Not me, but I had a field service engineer working on one of my big robotic liquid handlers. He decided to bypass the safety pin that prevents the heads from moving while the cover is open while he had a diagnostic program queued up on the computer. What he didn’t know was that the instant he reinserted the safety pin the machine would execute the queued instructions and start moving, and he had a hand inside it right in the danger zone.

I grabbed his shoulder and yanked his hand out an instant before it was crushed. He stopped ignoring me when I told him to stop bypassing safety lockouts to save a few minutes.

seeing_red415
I was walking down the street in downtown Chicago and I heard a loud bang followed by a woman screaming. Somebody dropped a full 2 liter bottle of soda from the 13 floor and it just missed me. It was essentially a giant bullet at that height and speed. The woman screaming was about 5 feet behind me (she was the 2nd closest to being hit). I’m pretty sure that bottle would have killed me if it hit me.

From-the-Trailerpark
At 17 y/o I met and married a sweet little North Carolina daddy’s girl. had I not I would have still been hanging with my friends that just discovered heroin. of the 3 friends, 2 are dead and one did 10 years in prison.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k6mjgq/what_was_the_biggest_bullet_you_dodged/

Boogie Shoes – K.C. and the Sunshine Band

Girl, to be with you is my favorite thing, yeah
Uh huh
And I can’t wait til I see you again,
Yeah, yeah, ah ha ah ha
I want to put on my my my my my
Boogie shoes
Just to boogie with you, yeah
I want to put on my my my my my
Boogie shoes just to boogie with you, uh huh

“The band took its name from lead vocalist Harry Wayne Casey’s last name (‘KC’) and the ‘Sunshine Band’ from KC’s home state of Florida, the Sunshine State. The group had six top 10 singles, five number one singles and a number two single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.”
Wikipedia

Top 11 Dive Bars in Denver

Denver’s 10 (okay, 11) Best Dive Bars (In Alphabetical Order)

Ace-Hi Tavern
By far the best reason to get wrecked – and subsequently stranded – in Golden.

Carioca Café (Bar Bar)
Just because you don’t want to touch any of its surfaces doesn ‘t mean you shouldn’t puke or pass out all over ’em. At dawn. For next to nothing.

Club 404
From the prime rib to the price of a PBR, you can trust everything about Jerry Feld’s 404. Except its longevity. Now for a limited time…

Candlelight Tavern/Kentucky Inn
Same owners, similar vibes—everything you could ask for within a safe stumble along Pearl Street.

El Chapultepec
Nightly jazz with no cover, tasty Mexican food and the cheapest drinks in Lower Downtown.

Hill-Top Tavern
No tabs, no credit cards, no problems – good people and good times galore.

Rustic Tavern
Tried and true, through and through: Welcome home.

Squeeze Inn
Four hundred square feet of cramped camaraderie never seemed so appealing.

Squire Lounge
A whole-body condom couldn’t protect you from this cross section of Colfax characters, but cut-rate cocktails and bargain-basement beer prices will surely help with the pain.

Thunderbird Lounge
A family friendly hangout and blue-collar barroom for all walks.

Drew Bixby, Denver’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Mile-High City

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are – Quote, Two References

SATURDAY PUZZLE — It’s not really a secret that we all see, feel, smell and hear things differently. If you have ever sat through a course in philosophy, you know that our perception of what is “real” is based not on what something actually is, but what we say it is. Which is always incredibly disappointing to a teenager who has come to college to discover the “real” world (“That’s it?! That’s all there is to it? Can I go now?”)

The quote that is normally attributed to the writer ANAÏS NIN, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” is also a Talmudic idea about dream analysis: People can only dream about things they have encountered or thought about, and so their dreams consist not of reality — whatever that is — but is instead a version filtered through the lens of the dreamer’s experiences.
…
Let’s look at 52A, for example. I make my living on the internet. I spend a good deal of time interacting with people — most of them very nice — online. But when I first read the clue “On-line jerks?” I immediately thought that the answer must be TROLLS, because in my mental neighborhood, that’s what online jerks are called.

Whoops! Not enough squares for TROLLS. Also, I didn’t notice that hyphen in “On-line.” My bad. Maybe the clue means something else.

Do we have any fishing hobbyists out there?

Maybe you got it right the first time. If you have a fish on the line (“On-line”) and the line jerks, those are called BITES.

Deb Amlen, NYTIMES

Author’s Note: Long before Derrida and deconstruction, the Talmud said, quite sagely, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” As far as I am concerned, every word of this book is the complete and total truth. But of course, it’s my truth. So to protect the innocent—as well as the guilty—I have changed most names. Otherwise, unfortunately for me, every detail is accurate.

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

Movies Addressing Poverty

That’s because poverty itself is scary. Financial ruin serves as the subtext of so many classic American horror films, perhaps because monsters are easier to deal with than the real thing. Leatherface and his cannibal clan from “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974) would have no ax to grind if they hadn’t been laid off at the meatpacking plant. The hook-handed stalker of “Candyman” (1992) preys on the downtrodden Chicagoans of the crime-ridden Cabrini-Green housing project, at least before he begins indulging a taste for grad students obsessed with urban legends.

A science-fiction film that pays more than lip service to the plight of the poor is John Carpenter’s sociopolitically inflamed “They Live” (1988), flatly described by the director as a reaction to Reaganomics.

Joshua Rothkopf
Some Movies Actually Understand Poverty in America
The complex realities of subsistence escape “Hillbilly Elegy.” But as far back as Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights,” filmmakers have been turning a discerning eye on destitution.

Actors, Audience and Company

The actor is in the first instance company, and we thank him for the pleasure of it.

But he is company of a very peculiar kind. I enjoy his company but he does not enjoy mine. He does not even know I am there. And this is agreeable to me, and partially accounts for the whole complex. In life, one is often lonely, and yet when company comes, one feels put out, “crowded.” While life will never let one have anything both ways, it is the mission of art to do just that. And here one finds the theatre assuaging one’s loneliness without imposing the pest of company. The actor cannot pick one out of the audience and speak to one. If that ever does happen – when, for example, a comedian picks on a spectator – this is specifically an aggression against the convention, an exception that proves the rule. Having the actors’ company, it is a pleasure not to have to do anything about it, to be polite, to respond visibly, and so on. In the theatre, one does not have to be grateful, because one’s gratitude has been paid off in cash beforehand, as in houses of even worse repute.

One’s relations with the other members of the audience are equally ambiguous. Here one is, sitting down with total strangers to share experiences of considerable intimacy. It is rather promiscuous of one.
…

Then there is one’s relation to other members of one’s own party in particular. Is it sociable to invite people to the theatre? The motive is likely to be in part sociable but can just as easily be in part antisocial. One is relieved of the responsibility, after all, not only of talking to the actors, but of talking to one’s friends. Once the curtain is up, in what sense is one even still “with them”?

In what sense, indeed, is one there at all? Who, at the theatre, is related how to whom? For a couple of hours, I bask in the pleasure of my friends’ company, I also relax in the pleasure of their imagined absence, while I turn my attention to a brief romance I am enjoying with  – did I say actors? It is actually the characters I am experiencing, and the actors will drop their roles at eleven o’clock and become characters I do not know, handing me back to my friends who suddenly are very much “there” again.

Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama

Thanksgiving Macaroni and Cheese

Famous mac and cheese recipe. Don’t tell anyone but the secret ingredient is love! from r/funny

WulfenGeist
That’s hilarious. When I worked at Quiznos a lady ordered 6 bowls of chili over the phone and showed up with a big pot to pour it in

Wage_slave
About six years ago I saw a dude do this at a tim hortons with their soup.

It was potato something or other and he’s standing there trying to explain that he forgot about a pot luck at work and how much to fill his pot up.

ceylon_butterfly
My friend’s husband won a chili cook-off with brisket he got from a chain BBQ restaurant. I thought that was some real bullshit, especially because we live in Texas.

melindseyme
My dad won a chili cook-off with chili from a can once.

ApatheticCreative
I won a chili cookoff once. I was prepared for serious competition. I watched a few low production value “award winning” chili videos on Youtube by guys with thick Southern accents who sounded like they knew what they were talking about when it came to chili. I took pointers from each video and used that knowledge to make the Voltron of “award winning” chilis. It was pretty damn good chili. I would give it a solid 8. Maybe a 9.

The competition was sad and depressing. Unseasoned ground beef water with beans. I probably could have won it with a higher quality canned chili. At the very least people raved about my own entry. It vanished. I had numerous requests for the recipe.