I was hearing elsenet from someone who was planning to buy a Japanese kei truck until he borrowed one. Apparently with more than about 300 lb in the bed they feel dangerous to drive- combination of instability and poor braking performance.
In the extended edition of Two Towers they show him in a flashback of Gondor retaking Osgiliath.
It's not a particularly flattering portrayal- the military success is shown as belonging to Boromir more than Denethor- but at least it shows him sane.
FEHB plans would also have this incentive. I think at least historically Federal employees didn't switch employers as much (though job-hopping between agencies happens), but more importantly if you retire from the Federal government you keep your health insurance.
As opposed to the story about the person who leaves their unwanted furniture outside with a sign reading "Free- Please Take". It sits there undisturbed for a week.
Then they replace the sign with one that reads "$10- put cash in letterbox"
Within an hour, the furniture is gone, though of course there's no cash!
AIUI a Catholic monk who is also an ordained priest is addressed as Father not Brother (certainly this is true of the Dominicans I've met).
I think this is also true for Orthodox monks.
I'm not sure if there's a Christian denomination that has pastors who aren't priests, and also has monks. So this sounds to me more like a situation where all fellow members of the church are addressed as Brother/Sister.
Why would a flock of birds large enough to be ingested by both engines of a two-engined plane not also be large enough to be ingested by all four engines of a four-engined plane?
Reminds me of the Catholic friend who once told me that he had done IT support for every Catholic religious order with a presence in the city where he lived, except two.
The Carthusians didn't use computers, and the Jesuits didn't need his help.
>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with
This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him.
I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans to go skiing that weekend, and later that day he started seeing skiing-related ads.
He thinks it's because his phone listened into the conversation, but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas.
> London Zoo penguins were fed “slivers of cat meat dipped in cod-liver oil.”
I'm fairly sure this is a mistake and is supposed to be "cat's meat"- in other words, cheap poor-quality meat sold as cat food, rather than the flesh of cats!
AFAIK the only London Zoo animals that were killed at the start of the war were the venomous/dangerous ones, because of the risk that they would escape if their cages were damaged by bombing.
(I thought it was just the venomous ones, so was a bit surprised about the tiger)
The zoo raised rabbits and guinea pigs to feed to the carnivorous animals.
Perhaps the best example of that is that, as one of the linked maps [0] says, both British people who rhyme "scone" with "gone" and those who rhyme it with "alone" think that the other pronunciation is the "posh" one.
The big issue AIUI is die-cut cardboard. The vast majority of modern board games come with several sheets of it to punch out small pieces (think coins or victory point chips).
Producing these (and other game components) requires specialized machinery which isn't made in the US. So even if someone did want to set up a board game manufacturing company in the US, they would now be hit by tariffs as they bought the machines they need.
Stegmaier says that possibly games where all the components are cards will be less affected, as there are companies in the US printing playing cards.
Rowing had the sliding rigger boat which was banned in international competition within a year of first being used.
(In a normal racing rowing boat, the athlete sits on a sliding seat, while their shoes and the rigger with the oarlock are fixed to the boat. In the 1980s, boats were developed that had the shoes and rigger as a unit that slid, while the seat was fixed, which was more efficient as it meant that the boat hull and the athlete's mass moved together.)
On the other hand, first carbon-fibre oar shafts and later asymmetrical "hatchet" oar blades were adopted near-universally within a few years of their invention.
