WTF-Beta

Link to video

Lilibet's surrogate found in a Colorado.

Harry has in fact not proven his paternity. Can he?

I saw this coming before the marriage ceremony.

What a dumpster fire.

Verizon seeks FCC approval to phase out copper landlines

https://share.google/WdvMbDOhFwdXWG72i

My late sister predicted this would happen.

I was looking forward to adding a house phone for the quality reception.

I bet every company will do the same.

I guess I might do it. Maybe not.

It would be nice to talk on a telephone at home without the risk of hanging up on a caller by doing something stupid like accidentally tapping your cellphone against your head, accidentally touching the screen, etc.

Having a cheap plastic phone instead of a Bell telephone is a given but being connected to the same cell tower system you use anyway?

Another great 100+ year old invention gone.

IDK

Link to video

This is too funny!

Most expensive gems.

1, 2, 3.

More like: here's random few expensive gems.

3. Looks like a rock to me and not in a good way.

4. This is why I post this video. Jade. It's valued above emeralds. Many variables but Jade is most valued green stone. Of course it has to be the quality shown here.

Look at it!

Isn't that incredible?!

1. Pink diamonds. What is he on about?

Not close to true.

This is a talking point the Argyle mine, Australia put out recently after their mine ran out.

The jade shown here ("It looks like Jade but it's jade" * snort * ) has a value in the stratosphere. It's always been that way.

Link to video

Omg.

@CHAS said:

Stranger

@chas @steve-miller @all

Try Eva Cassidy's rendition Live at Blues Alley if you haven't. It's my favorite recording of W S.

Correction, No. It was not performed there. It was studio recorded for an album and the compilation album Songbird is the easy place to find it.

Whoa. At this point I'll link to it.

Link to video

Back to scheduled program.

feel

@bernard I'd like to know one instance in the history of English when a time ago two words that have nothing to do with each other were harnessed to each other to form a "term", and noting nothing of it modulated by the population but imposed down from the top of society, e.g. "workforce housing" that are still extant in English.

I'll wait.

I'd like to gorge myself on salmon.

I haven't made yet (might not) but grew up on salmon patties.

I like them still minus the grease and toxins in the meat. I mean how could there not be.

I crave real food.

In the time back when 98% of the food supply wasn't genetically modified, sprayed down with amounts of pesticide that would kill you outright if it was being sprayed on you, processed and processed again, animals given who knows what,animals slaughtered in unsanitary conditions, coloring added, etc., and honorable mention to corporations putting arsenic in candy.

This might sound like a rant and not the creative kind. I guess it is.

Yes, I know there are choices.

I know I have a lot to learn.

I've been in new place only since about 15 August.

I will seek advice!

It's just the fact is I was a little bit naive about how long it would take to move, buy a home, buy a car, and get settled.

I feel like I'm living in a maelstrom.

I have a feeling it will ease up soon.

But bear eating salmon in the wild? I envy them.

Link to video

@bernard This is the interview made me think of your AI posts.

I think it was your skeptical or disparaging posts about AI made me think of you.

I did listen to the beginning but would have to listen to more or all of it to form some kind of conclusion.

I get distracted. I'm a senior citizen.

Anyone, this interview is in total direct counterpoint mode.

So, it stood out.

skin

I don't think it would be the same here.

People here walk through places like Costco stone faced.

That's how everyone acts here everywhere in public.

I remember people being a little more outgoing but not much.

There are men who go to Costco to have sex in the bathrooms.

Either that or I've been misled.

investegator

Link to video

Tangent.

This reminds me of Queen Victoria.

History records the relationship Queen Victoria had with John Brown as consisting of everything involved in a marriage except any formal wedding.

She wrote it down in a letter to an aristocrat after John Brown passed. She lamented the fact that she had two experience grief a second time.

This letter was discovered in thr family's library by random chance, many years after she was was interred with Albert at Frogmore, famously with mementos of her relationships with both men.

Also, I'm reminded of the only historical record of the assassination of Ludwig II.

An artist somehow found his body soon after the fact.

His drawing gave history a forensic analysis of the crime.

Source: Daniel.

Excuse me for interrupting.

@wtg @mary-anna @andyd

This reminds me of how the roads in NYS follow the ground used by the Iroquois Confederacy.

To each his own.

Do the grandchildren visit?

@jon-nyc said:

No human has seen it certainly seems unlikely.

But no human has seen it who also had a pen and paper and camera and knowledge of previously described species in the area with the contacts and platform to give it a name and bring it to the attention of scientists worldwide seems far more believable.

Maybe.

This could be the case.

It might not be.

A record could have been made orally, in writing, or with photography, and might well be extant and undiscovered.

@jon-nyc said:

I’ve not studied it.

This is the kind of thing AI is great at. Here’s Claude’s take:

Great questions — Echo is actually the emotional key to the whole myth, and it makes way more sense once you see how her story and Narcissus's mirror each other.

Who was Echo, and what happened to her before Narcissus?
Echo was a mountain nymph. In Ovid's version, she had a habit of talking constantly — and she used it to help Zeus (Jupiter). Whenever Hera (Juno) went looking for Zeus mid-affair with one of the other nymphs, Echo would distract Hera with long chattering stories, giving Zeus time to get away. When Hera figured out the trick, she punished Echo with a curse: Echo could no longer speak her own words first. She could only repeat the last words someone else said to her.

So what was Echo doing in the Narcissus story?
After the curse, Echo sees Narcissus wandering in the woods, falls in love with him, and follows him — but she can't call out to him or start a conversation. She can only wait for him to speak, then repeat his words back. There's a famous moment where he calls out "Who's here?" and she can only answer "...here." Eventually he rejects her cruelly (he'd rather die than let her touch him), and devastated and ashamed, she withdraws into isolation.

Did Echo die?
Yes — sort of. She wastes away from grief and rejection, her body fading until literally nothing is left but her voice. She becomes what we now call an "echo": the acoustic phenomenon of a voice bouncing back without a body behind it. So she wasn't an echo of something at the start — she became the phenomenon we call an echo, as a consequence of the curse plus her heartbreak. That's why it feels sad rather than just a device: it's a literal transformation, a person reduced to only being able to reflect back what others say.

Why does she matter to Narcissus's story?
Because she's not a warning exactly — she's a parallel. Narcissus rejected Echo (and others) cruelly, and Nemesis (goddess of retribution) curses him in return: he falls in love with his own reflection, something he can never have or touch, just as Echo could never fully speak or be heard as herself. Both of them waste away pining after something unreachable — she for a person who won't turn toward her, he for an image that isn't even a person. Structurally, they're doubles: Echo can't speak first; Narcissus can't recognize what he's seeing isn't someone else. Communication fails both of them, in mirrored ways.

That's likely part of why it felt disorienting — Echo isn't background scenery, she's doing real narrative work, and leaving her out (as your friend seems to have done) makes the story lose its shape. The myth is really about two kinds of unreciprocated love collapsing into each other.

@jon-nyc

That was great!

Thanks and warm regards.

@RealPlayer said:

Yes, and another analysis I read speaks of Narcissus rejecting the real (avoiding the possibility of a real relationship with a real person, Echo) in favor of an obsession with an unreal entity he can never have (his reflection).

Hmm.

Rejecting realism is a dangerous viewpoint.

If only the risk of danger could be (unrealistically, sigh) detached from the risk of causing harm to others.