TheVat

Not easy to do, either. Once you're seen as funny, it can be really hard to transition to serious dramatic roles. Bill Murray tried and failed in The Razor's Edge.* Steve Martin was fairly successful in some darker roles. Most of the famous SNL alums tended to stay with comedy AFAICT. * My partner and I witnessed this debacle in a crowded movie theater. Everytime Murray would raise his eyebrows or, really, react in any ironic way to another character, titters would run through the audience. (And often, us) If Somerset Maugham had written offbeat wisecracking comedies, there might have been some scope for Murray's considerable talents.

Gaga not my thing (nor is rap, but it's somewhat inescapable if one raised millennial kids in the US), but popular for her stage theatrics I gather. I liked Beyonce in Cadillac Records. (it is my understanding that she is bootylicious) Patinkin is probably better known to those who followed Broadway productions, e.g. his perf as Che Guevara in Evita or George Seurat in...that Seurat musical. He was Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, if that means anything. And starred in various popular tv series, like "Homeland." *(Sunday in the Park with George)(Once I visualized his most famous painting, the title came to me)

If by pop icon you mean just musical icons, then I'd say Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez are two prominent examples of jumping from concert stage to screen. Gaga is okay as an actress, but Lopez is to me more of a standout. I also liked Bowie as Tesla in The Prestige, awa TMWFTE. There's also Awkwafina, in Crazy Rich Asians, who was a pop rapper. Possibly best known for a song titled "My Vag." Yes, that's what it sounds like. It is a song about her lady parts. Quite graphic. I think it's satirical. Idris Elba, now a big screen star, was a popular London DJ. Solid actor, never seen him phone it in. Oh, and can't leave Mandy Patinkin off the list. Stellar musical vocalist (Evita, for one) and solid screen (both tv and film) actor. Madonna? Meh. So overhyped, I'm leaving her off my list.

Possibly a selection effect in such statistics. Ordinary drivers, if they have an accident, or several, and/or rack up lots of speeding tickets, don't usually remove themselves from private driving.* Taxi drivers OTOH could be removed from their jobs. Thus leaving a higher proportion remaining of taxi drivers with excellent reaction times and pattern observation and predictive skills. Business models in this regard would be fairly darwinian. * That would vastly improve driving where I live, if they did. Unfortunately most drivers of lesser skill and judgement are only "culled from the herd" by racking up enough points for license revocation or having insurance cancelled (and even that doesn't stop some of them).

Wow. Emily is reading the election results combined with a physics article. Dog nips self, Farage vegetal, U. Clacton not calculate GeV, e.g. a raffle's spin god. .

Empire, rip me. Binface, decaf? Nib? Leg in, Nigel?

The amount of navving I've done from vague directions, memorized maps, or wilderness treks with a compass, I guess I'm cognitively safe till 100 or so, barring strokes, parasitic infestation, or too much Netflix. What's funny (to my wife, anyway, who is too easily amused) is that I will occasionally lose track of the car in a large parking lot. When I was in London, I did okay finding places, except for one occasion when the cabin lights failed in the Tube. Sitting in darkness as we rolled along I got nervous and grasped the arm of a fellow next to me. As we approached another stop, I asked, "Is this Cockfosters?" "No," he answered, rather sternly, "It's mine!" (Sorry. Been saving that one.)

I'm taking a wild guess of...the latter? Interior secretary (and reported emu eater) Doug Burgum was the governor of North Dakota, perched atop the Bakken shale bed and epicenter of the US fracking boom. "Frackin' the Bakken" was the catchphrase. I'm doubtful these guys read any of the print, fine or otherwise. We could use a Senate on that model. Instead of twits like the infamous senator from Oklahoma who, during a cold spell, walked into the chamber with a snowball in hand crowing "See? No global warming!" Nota bene, on emu grub: Laminates La Brea tar pits, tip rat a 'erbal set animal?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/forests-carbon-dioxide-emissions (Clip) In that past era, forests covered a much larger extent of the world than now, with no ice at the poles and much higher seas than today. But while the PETM changes occurred over many thousands of years via carbon released by the natural forces of volcanic activity, current climate change is much faster and caused by our deliberate combustion of fossil fuels. The paper is a “genuine advance” and provides a record over tens of thousands of years that shows the knock-on impacts of thinning forests, according to Trevor Keenan, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new research. “The headline is that warming won,” Keenan said. “Carbon dioxide rose sharply, and any benefit that gave the forests was not enough to stop canopies from opening up and staying open for tens of thousands of years.” This is worrying because the pace of change today, he added. “The ancient carbon release happened over thousands of years, ours is happening over decades,” he said. “Faster forcing gives ecosystems less room to adjust. “Second, those forests faced climate change alone. Today’s forests are dealing with the same warming while also being fragmented, logged, converted to agriculture and exposed to altered fire regimes. If forests thinned under the slower and cleaner version of this experiment, that is not a reassuring precedent.”

Haha. A propos of the housing sidebar here, I do want to voice my support for the Clacton candidate who has promised to build one affordable house, Count Binface. I am not informed enough to weigh in on the nationalization (Brit. nationalisation) of Adele, but I trust Binface has given his positions careful thought, unlike some of his competitors.

Emily suggests that three word palindromes can provide an enjoyable entry level to the craft. Nag, anal Flanagan! Oi, burdened Rubio! Gnaw a wang. Sues Syd, Odysseus?

Thanks to both you and @sethoflagos for... clarifying. I hadn't heard of Flora plant butter - it sounds fairly awful. Though a marketing slogan just popped into my head, "All Flora, no Fauna." The only plant butters I've liked usually involve a lot of coconut oil. From what I've followed of the issues in the US, immigrants seem to bring the solutions to some of their problems. For example, there is a labor shortage in construction and renovation, which immigrants help fix, so they actually help to bring housing supplies closer to parity. (Zoning laws and local politics and builder incentives remain problems) And immigrants provide cheap labor in agricultural industries, doing the hard work native born don't want to do, helping an affordable food supply. Also, UK and USA fertility rates are both well below replacement (2.1), which means immigration prevents the extremes of the inverted population pyramid problem.

Well I do get that some of her claims as to why she helped BP Charlie might have been viewed as rather insincere or even duplicitous. And the unmelted butter expression is familiar to me, despite my geographic limitations. If there is some other layer of meaning or double entendre there, then I will simply wave the white flag.

Thus 150 is catapulted to fame, thanks to this bare bones description. A rock star, of sorts. I found this, "The individual is pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards," quite credible if this was in fact a boulder ~ 100 kg. Watching the final season of Game of Thrones, it was interesting how they used another projectile device, the ballista. Apparently it was less popular than the trebuchet in medieval times, which makes sense - a springed launcher would probably be more prone to mechanical problems than the elegantly simple counterweight system of the trebuchet. And the trebuchet could hurl more mass, so more useful for knocking down structural elements of a castle. (I suspect the GoT writers selected the ballista because it looked cool, like a giant crossbow, and more suitable for piercing dragons or other moving targets)

It's more widely known now that Trump is a container, and of what. Is that referring to the old movie "Sea Devils"?

Frau Vat and I had a chuckle over the notion that the No Foreign Aid/DOGE Super Lean Gubment crew think the British educational system could use extra funding and input from US. Or that Britain would turn to Turnip's administration to help "deepen public understanding of the constitutional principles, rule of law, and democratic norms that underpin both nations”. "Yeah, teach us poor Limeys about democratic norms, Herr Turnip!"

Well, if one has really run out of land on which to build housing, that would be the definitive state of overcrowding. It seems there are degrees of that. If a country has insufficient arable land, e.g., then more subdivisions sprawling into farmland worsens what's already a bad situation. In developing countries, there can be favelas growing up the sides of hills which feature dirt streets with raw sewage flowing down the middle, shanty neighborhoods which can wash away in a mudslide. If I lived in a place like that, wealthy nations with more abstract problems like arable land shortage would probably look pretty good to me. At present human settlements cover ~ 1% of land area, but I'm sure it's a little higher in the UK. These questions of crowding are somewhat cultural, aren't they? Those that value extensive wilderness and big swaths of natural landscape think the US, with far lower population density, is already too crowded. When I was born the US population was half what it is now, and I can recall people of my parent's generation lamenting how crowded some areas of the West had become.

Not sure what you are answering there. My post in no way ruled out the role of hostile politics, poor agricultural policies, etc. in hindering or blocking food access. I'm quite aware of that, having ancestors who barely survived 1845 Eirinn. I was seeking to sharpen the definiton of "overcrowded," factoring in things like carbon footprint per citizen, global transport and industrial farming, unhindered shipping, and how that can affect nations that greatly exceed biological carrying capacity. I also pointed out that immigrants, often from places with lower carbon footprints, can bring in helpful and much-needed approaches to using less energy/resources for daily life. Another factor which I didn't get into is the degree to which one's geography provides a biological reactor. Some tropical areas can produce more food, construction materials (fast-growing bamboo, e.g.), and other bio resources per unit of land than an area in chilly northern Europe. (others, due to desertification, may provide less) I didn't articulate this in my other post, but sometimes it has seemed to me that "assimilation" might better work in the opposite direction, where those from a culture with less material goods and high-carbon diets might be the one for multigeneration "natives" to take onboard. As a mostly-vegan (occasional pescetarian), I am sort of disappointed when immigrants from vegetarian cultures settle in red meat countries and "assimilate" by loading their plates with meat dishes and shrugging off the old traditions. I'm not judging, just wishing the cultural gravity pulled the other direction. I'm not sure, but I might be the only current member who has worked in a slaughterhouse/meat packing plant, and had some visceral experience (sometimes literally) of what goes on to put a steak on your plate. When Frau Vat and I were young (several centuries ago, it seems like), we had some finesse with seeing through divisiveness but often only at the lofty level where it's not as useful as sympathetic understanding of your immediate neighbors. This was brought home to us by a year in married student housing at a large university with a large international student population, when the ME family above us decided to eat a goat and invite people over to share. The goat was brought out on their balcony and its throat slit. It seemed they had not fully prepared for the volume of blood that would flow out and so my (then 2 year old) son was somewhat mystified by this stream of goat blood coming down from overhead splattering over our walkway and immediately drawing thousands of flies. This is the sort of scenario where cultural openness and tolerance falters. It all worked itself out, actually with a considerable amount of amusement - some things are so "over the top" all you can do is laugh. The neighbors, to their credit, realized they had somewhat miscalculated and stepped on some toes, and by the end of the academic year we could all chuckle about it. Especially over the look on the housing complex manager's face when he arrived on the scene. On one other occasion where a goat was in need of sacrificing, the manager did find a suitable location and a way to bend the health laws so long as they were tidier about it.

Side note, which is that viable populations of nations are not tied to biological carrying capacities as they were pre industrial revolution. For sure, remove fossil fuels, cheap fertilizer and global transport and places like UK or Belgium would see mass starvation while Oregon (roughly same land area as UK, but with 1/18 of the population) would probably do okay. Such matters of carrying capacity are more relevant when modern nations are blockaded. Given that a lot of immigrants to the UK or EU or US are from cultures where personal carbon footprint is massively lower, they would seem to bring some useful perspectives to the crowded wealthy places. @sethoflagos 's life experience, moving between the poles of Nigeria and England, certainly added something to this discussion.

I really enjoyed the line in that wiki, "Pierrepoint knew from an early age that he wanted to become a hangman..." 😄

Heheh. Well, that's just a speculative leap that the Broadway librettist took. In the original movie script, Audrey 2 was the result of seeds obtained from a Japanese gardener. Perhaps another Asian invader like kudzu? 😉 Not a carnivorous plant, so forgive the OT, but my late father-in-law apparently chronicled and photographed a kudzu vine which grew nearly a foot in the space of one hour, in northern Arkansas. And, one of my favorite bits of trivia: the largest kudzu rhizome ever excavated weighed 800 lbs. (363 kg)

Have heard that mixotrophs (the term for autotrophs that "supplement" their nutrients with heterotrophy) tend to evolve where soils are nutrient-poor. So harsh alpine areas makes sense. Coming up short on N, K, or P, for example, might bring some selective pressure for absorbing from other than the roots. Audrey 2 is the most extreme example, to date. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Shop_of_Horrors_(1986_film)

Reading the Cambridge article, note there's a footnote. Re: I see it's kind of a numbers game. Also in the mix is tectonic movements that cause uplift and exhumation, which can reverse some burials. And how widespread the Silurian civilization was, and what percent of land they used, and how much was in proximity to subduction zones, and so on. I want to dig further (npi) into the possibilities of isotope anomalies, reading the paper a little more closely. I thought there was a good point there about how some industrial changes are self-limiting as societies, to survive, have to move back towards sustainability and hence less impact. Silurians could go crazy on Haber Bosch, bomb a lot of agricultural surface with nitrogenous fertilizers, but then shift towards something else that's better for the watershed. Etc.

Just passing along a message from @pinball1970 that he has been unable to login in here for a while. He mentioned this over in the dot com forum. Can someone look at his account, make sure everything is functioning? @swansont @Cap'n Refsmmat

Emily has spoken out against a surveillance society, albeit somewhat cryptically. "Tele-monitoring is a sign I rot in omelet."