Guy in Valdosta

Clippings from news sources involving fashion freedom and other gender equality issues.
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skirtyscot
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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OK, not everyone else, but you know who I mean!
Keep on skirting,

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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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Sometimes we disagree and say so and it was meant to be constructive not "under the guise of being constructive". He threw a bit of a dicky fit and tried to push the "I have the advanced degree and know better" and others responded. There were a lot more things that I could have commented on but didn't. The missive isn't perfect but then it never would be. As Carl said that whether he accepts what we have said as genuine constructive opinion is up to him. End of. I won't comment again unless pushed to.
I believe in offering every assistance short of actual help but then mainly just want to be left to be myself in all my difference and uniqueness.
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VoxClamantis
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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won't comment again unless pushed? What is that supposed to mean? Are you that easily manipulated? Are your buttons so sensitive that they are pushed by a gentle breeze? Give me a break. No one asked your opinion and you felt like it was you duty to take me to school, but like a peer who wants to be a teacher but does not want to punch the timeclock to do those lesson plans! The difference between a negative review and constructive criticism is the relationship between the parties. To be constructive, there must some form of rapport between the parties, either by longstanding friendship or by solicitation of the feedback. Neither of those premises existed so no, it was not constructive criticism but rather a disdainfully expressed opinion. And I for one make it a point to own my discourse so I won't color this message with that "constructive criticism" crayon. No, I'm just laying it all out there. As I live in the U.S.A., I believe the First Amendment's freedom of speech trumps all else, and as was once said, I may disagree with what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it (attribution disputed, but I choose Voltaire). If you truly intended your feedback to be friendly, but poorly delivered, demonstrate that by not replying defensively to this post.
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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VoxClamantis wrote:...The difference between a negative review and constructive criticism is the relationship between the parties...
Constructively, when you're new somewhere, including this broad, it's usually best to give some slack until both parties get to know each other.
Courage, conviction, nerve, verve, dash, panache, guts, nuts, balls, gall, élan, stones, whatever. Get some and get skirted.

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VoxClamantis
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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Here's another opus post on a topic unrelated to skirts, but very related to men:

http://www.voxclamantisindeserto.us/201 ... cumcision/
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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VoxClamantis wrote:Here's another opus post on a topic unrelated to skirts, but very related to men:

http://www.voxclamantisindeserto.us/201 ... cumcision/
Health pros/cons aside. I don't like that it seems to be a religious thing. As I explore my spiritual side and research other religious viewpoints, I cant help but feel like "branded cattle" when I look between my legs....
-Andrea
The old hillbilly from the coal fields of the Appalachian mountains currently living like there's no tomorrow on the west coast.
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skirtyscot
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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Americans are weird. Don't take this personally, but collectively you are. I mean, how did something as crazy as chopping off your infant son's foreskin ever catch on? I know you have a tendency to follow outdated religious practices even though there is no reason to, but how did this troubling and damaging procedure spread beyond the Jews? Somehow you can't see that it makes less than no sense, which is why nobody else does it. A bit like writing dates in the wrong order, mm/dd/yy, but far more important.
Keep on skirting,

Alastair
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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skirtyscot wrote:I mean, how did something as crazy as chopping off your infant son's foreskin ever catch on?
Don't get me going on that one.
A bit like writing dates in the wrong order, mm/dd/yy, but far more important.
Everybody knows that the right way to do it is yyyy-mm-dd. Or, at least, anybody with a clue. ;-)
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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I use that for files at work, so they appear in chronological order when I open a folder. It's not mixed up, like the mm/dd/yy format is. So it counts as sensible too. :D
Keep on skirting,

Alastair
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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What can you expect from a country where the week starts on a sunday where most of the world uses a monday as a week starter. ISO has some work to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

My Dutch calendar hangs next to my wife's calendar (gift from a charity) so there is some confusion on the wall. :wink:

To be clear when filling out forms and writing cheques, I use the month abbreviated between the day and the year. 11 MAR 2018.
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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I long for the day when we as a species can graduate from religion based time keeping systems and move onto star dates (like in Star Trek) :D
beachlion wrote:What can you expect from a country where the week starts on a sunday where most of the world uses a monday as a week starter. ISO has some work to do.
Though it may appear so on the Calendar, and I admit, to me, the week starts on Sunday, for pretty much all of the professional world, the week starts on Monday, and Sunday is the end of the previous week.

Of course for retail workers and others who do not work in bankers hours, the week has a tendency to begin and end on payroll cycles. During my time stocking with Food City, they paid on Thursday, so it got to the point where Thursday felt like Friday (Friday is the traditional day for people to be paid). Of course in those days, you were lucky to have two days off in a row.
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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moonshadow wrote:I long for the day when we as a species can graduate from religion based time keeping systems and move onto star dates (like in Star Trek) :D
The problem here is that humans experience time as a (more or less) smoothly-moving continuum so we tend to need an arbitrary point to "start" the thing at to anchor it. It matters not when we anchor it, but there needs to be a way to get it more or less universal so others can relate to it.

One could anchor the scale at "T-0" ("Big Bang Time") but that creates problems due to the number of digits involved in years (which are a local notion and pinned to the orbit of the Earth around its local star). Even the units are arbitrary (and Earth-centric). I don't see us moving to "star dates" any time soon.

Whatever we pick, I wish we could just stick to it. I just looked over at the clock, and it reads 05:57. My body is telling me that it 05:00 and the lack of sun is telling me the same thing. (We just went onto Daylight "Saving" Time. I'm jet-lagged and I never left the local neighbourhood.)
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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crfriend wrote:One could anchor the scale at "T-0" ("Big Bang Time") but that creates problems due to the number of digits involved in years (which are a local notion and pinned to the orbit of the Earth around its local star). Even the units are arbitrary (and Earth-centric). I don't see us moving to "star dates" any time soon.
After reading that, I ran through some interesting hypotheticals. After reading the encyclopedia entry on calendars, I can see that no system can be truly faultless for two reasons. Religion aside, it's easy to understand why we, as a species base our calendar on solar events, mainly the time it takes for the Earth to rotate the Sun. As humans, it's understandable that the relationship of the Sun and Earth is paramount. After all, it's the only planet we've ever lived on, transcending ALL eras and religions! And, it looks like that's the way it's going to stay for a long time in the future. At least I don't see us breaking light speed in the next thousand years. (Sorry Gene Roddenberry).

The Gregorian calendar is probably the best fit for us. It's probably the best calendar we've came up with, and while I read of a 13 months calendar featuring 13 months of 4 even weeks, the fact that the time it takes for the Earth to rotate around the Sun is not fixed (it varies slightly) makes any solar based calendar ill suited for true scientific purposes, or other reasons that require a "standard".

The second reason involves a true "Universal" calendar (such as in "Star dates"), while this would work in the event humans traveled the stars and interacted with other advanced species throughout the galaxy, it would be pretty arrogant to expect these other species, who perhaps have been traveling the stars eons before we even built our first fire to adapt themselves to our solar calendar! We should be so lucky if they're not hostile! Even if they're friendly, I doubt they really give a damn about our calendar, or our gods for that matter. A fact that I'm sure a lot of humans would have trouble accepting. So we use a standard universal "star date" system, but the chances of it aligning, even remotely with our solar system are slim. After all some species may have come from planets where their solar year could be three times, or half the size of our own. A "star year" may wind up being closer to 68.25 of our months (I just picked a random number).. In such event it would be difficult, even for most of us I would say to wrap our minds around it considering that for all of "civilized" humanity we have used our own solar calendar and have grown very accustomed to it. Talk about jet lag! When it takes a year and a half to move past the first quarter of a modern "star year"!
crfriend wrote:I'm jet-lagged and I never left the local neighbourhood.)
As am I. I had to pick up Amber last night, which put me home at near 11PM, whereas I normally turn in at around 1030 now, it was near 1130 before I called it a day. Then couple that with waking up on what my internal clock said was our hour earlier has rendered me rather sloggy this morning.... :blue:

The only nice thing that comes out of DST is the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day. That's nice. It sucks to loose the hour that weekend though. Of course when it ends, it's always a pleasant feeling to gain that extra hour on Saturday night[0] (pop in another DVD!) but then it sucks when you get home the following Monday and it's already dark!

[0] Yes, I understand the change always happens at 2AM on Sunday morning, but normally I'm already in bed by then so the general practice for me is to change the clocks the night before, typically right before bed.
-Andrea
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VoxClamantis
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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The thirteen-month lunar calendar would make so much more sense.
crfriend wrote:The problem here is that humans experience time as a (more or less) smoothly-moving continuum so we tend to need an arbitrary point to "start" the thing at to anchor it. It matters not when we anchor it, but there needs to be a way to get it more or less universal so others can relate to it.
I suppose we could all run on unix epoch time! But no passerby would ever be willing to tell you the time and the answer would change before reciting all the digits. But epoch time has its own "Y2K" looming in just under 19 years from now. So maybe it would be better to standardize our date expression as days/year as in 70.2018 or 2018.70 (March 12, 2018)
crfriend wrote:One could anchor the scale at "T-0" ("Big Bang Time") but that creates problems due to the number of digits involved in years (which are a local notion and pinned to the orbit of the Earth around its local star).
The math would disagree with you. Of the 11 theorized dimensions, depth, width, and height formed nearly instantaneously with the bang (assuming we all conceive of an identical bang construct). Time, however, did not form as a dimension until much "later" (but it's hard to say "later" since there was no time prior to the time dimension's existence so it's a paradox that time came into existence both sequentially simultaneously and sequentially later). And for those who perhaps have not read Hawking's work(s), time is the fourth dimension (and is directly influenced by gravity which in turn exerts its forces based on the sum of masses divided by the square of the distance between the masses...so at T-0 there was no distance between masses and thus the whole equation is undefined). So we don't know how much "later" time came into existence. So to speak of T-0 as a reference point is problematic because what we would really be saying is Telapsed since bang if T had existed and if T existed uniformly as we now know it and if the universal distribution of mass and the gravitational constant had been consistent as we perceive them to be now. In other words, T-0 would be the age of the universe expressed in our perception of time. Incidentally, I find this to be an interesting precept that could harmonize Abrahamic religions and science. In other words, clearly the universe and the world did not come into existence in a series of days as we understand days, but rather in a series of intervals that are not uniform in duration. For example, the sun is described as being created on day four. Therefore, "sunset" and "sunrise" stated of days one, two, and three cannot possibly mean a solar day. Moreover, day four would experience a sunset but not necessarily a sunrise. To me this describes a winding-up of the physical world. Perhaps it means that the matter was already distributed as it is, but gravity was slow to exert its effects on all of the solar system. The earth was neither revolving around the sun nor rotating on its axis. So one part of the earth would have sustained life but the other part would not. Then as the earth began revolving and rotating, life would have spread around the globe. But even then, the solar day would have been so much longer than 24 hours as it would take a while for the earth's mass to reach its rotational speed. So the earth is neither 6,000 years old nor 4.5 billion years old. Rather we should say that the earth has the appearance of being 4.5 billion years old had years existed in the beginning and had those years been equal to our current year.
voxclamantis wrote:Incidentally, I find this to be an interesting precept that could harmonize Abrahamic religions and science
Yes, I'm quoting myself in this passage to marvel at how skirts brought us to this tangent. I'm not knocking it; I'm just saying that it's quite amusing.
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Re: Guy in Valdosta

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Oh, and I have no objection to DST. I kind of like it, though I think that PGWB's energy plan moved the start date up way too far. It should have been an exactly six-month interval. But we can thank the candy lobby that wanted to make sure that DST always preceded Easter and followed Halloween, and oh my oh my, look, we're back to religion determining not only our calendars and even our time!
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