There are few things as pleasurable as an egg salad sandwich on toast.
All those salads sounded good. I’d prefer them in sandwiches, as I voted, but wouldn’t say no to them in other forms.
A Doper Pope couldn’t do any worse than the real ones have in the past thirty-some years (The Doperpopes - band name!).
My parents both did a good job, despite flaws which I can now see and better understand, now that I’m a father myself.
Benedict Arnold was a very skilled general and did the American cause a lot of good, especially in the Battle of Saratoga, before he went bad. I’d watch a movie about him, but would be very skeptical of any script that ended with him as anything other than a villain. For more: What was the deal with Benedict Arnold? - The Straight Dope
Objectively, my parents got a B and a C+, but my grandparents would have gotten F, D-, F, and F, with a C and a B+ for my stepgrandparents. Thank goodness for aunts, uncles, and steps!
I like an egg salad sandwich, but by itself it’s pretty much boiled eggs with too much mayonnaise. I’d rather just eat a whole boiled egg with salt if I can’t have bread. And I retain a sneaking fondness for tuna salad, probably due mostly to nostalgia. Tuna is the one meat I’ll have - a couple of times a year, I mix a little bit of the tuna salad the rest of the family is having in with the egg salad for a light tuna melt.
My dad did D+ parenting, given that I only saw him once or twice a year after the age of seven. He did stay in contact, and he sent presents, but he kept to the $150 a month child support amount that was set while he was a psychiatric resident even after he’d become the head of a state hospital. He wasn’t physically abusive, although he did say mean things and I was a little afraid of him. In retrospect, he just never learned that you can’t expect children to be little adults. He was absolutely fantastic with adolescents in his psychiatric practice, though!
My mom, on the other hand, gets an A+. I initially went with an A because I felt she could have been a little more attentive and supportive, but in retrospect, the woman was exhausted from years of trying to bring up two children essentially on her own.
And my house is just my house. Right now, we have three people (including one Millennial!), but even if it were just me, I’d feel no obligation to “downsize” just to turn it over to a young family. You know who should sell their houses? The entities that are buying up older houses from estates and then renting them out at exorbitant rates.
How dare my wife and I live in a house with more bedrooms and bathrooms than we can use at one time? I realize now how rude we’re being, and will make immediate plans to book the next available 1-bed-one-bath unit at the nearest assisted living facility so that we can be safely out of the way for the truly valuable members of society, the twenty-somethings.
Of course, I really don’t think (at least I hope not) that most young people have such a toxic sense of entitlement. Click-bait articles like that don’t paint either generation in a good light.
I mean, hey, we could always loosen credit restrictions again!
I don’t like mayonnaise, so i don’t really like any of the “salads”. But i do like a tuna sandwich. Tuna, some chopped celery, a little lemon juice, and just enough mayo to hold it together works for me.
This.
My house is a farmhouse. I’m a farmer. I need to live here.
I also, for my sanity, need to live out in the country.
I prefer to eat most of my tuna salad in a sandwich, and a few mouthfuls straight. I voted for the sandwich. I also voted for the ham, shrimp, and chicken salads, although in practice I rarely have any of them; but will happily eat them, as long as there’s no celery involved. I would probably eat them in a sandwich, and so voted, but might have them from a bowl.
I didn’t vote in the parenting poll because I don’t know what the curve is. Both my parents certainly messed up on some things – some of them jointly, some one or the other – but I never had any doubt that they loved me; I was always fed and otherwise taken care of; I always felt safe with them, and that I could count on them to help, even well after I was grown, if I came to them for help; and there’s no question but that they were trying their best to give me what I needed. Considering some of what I hear and read, it seems that that ought to get them an A+, even if on some specific items it would be a C or a D.
One of my sisters, however, would clearly have given them at best D’s. While there are some things that are wrong for anybody, for quite a few what’s the right thing for one kid may be the wrong thing for another.
This is my feeling as well. So a big nope all all those categories.
As for my parents, I gave them both an A, but my father got a half a letter upgrade from his earned B+. HIS parents (of whom I really only knew my grandmother) were distant, cold, and all about his duty to them, rather than their responsibility towards him. My grandmother especially during the years I knew her (early highschool) was a bitter, manipulative harridan for whom nothing was good enough. And my father made a concerted effort to NOT be like them. So, again, B+, with a round up to A for circumstances and dedicated effort.
Now if I had to evaluate him as a husband to my mother though… well, he passes. But barely.
As for home ownership, I agree with @Wheelz - it’s clickbait at best, a not-so-subtle sneer more likely. Granted, my mother and father in law give my wife and I the most mild chiding of the “you don’t know how good you got it” when we managed to purchase our home in 2002 at just shy of 30 at 5% interest rates… but we’ll still be paying for a few more years yet. And it’s a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house for just the two of us (and cats, and snakes). So I don’t qualify in either of the two categories IMHO.
They on the other hand, as late 70 somethings, have just put an expansion on their home, with a walk in bathroom (easier for my MiL to get in and out of). It’s still technically a two bedroom, two bath house, but they’ve got quite a few square feet that they probably aren’t really using. But so what? They’ve put a ton of time, money and effort into it. And the neighborhood they live in, while not pricey in any way when they moved in around 1980, probably runs around $500k around now. This is not going to be the target area for first time homebuyers.
Which is going to be my last point - purchasing a home, after multiple cycles of bubbles and pops, is, IMHO, a questionable idea for modern America. It’s increasingly easy to live where you want, and work remotely. Which, ironically, is driving up costs in places where it was once substantially cheaper, while the prices in more expensive areas remain so. My father, who despite his age and increasingly poor health, likes to keep himself busy, and was quite profitably flipping properties around Silver City NM. Which, IMHO (as a former southern NM resident) is a quiet, boring, podunk down that I can’t imagine living in. But it was profitable for him.
Fortran, BASIC, SQL, Python, R. R is the only one I would describe myself as having been fluent in, however.
Looks like I’m the only one writing in R so far.
It’s not as if the number of dwellings is a fixed number.
The programming poll omitted Machine Language. I have literally written programs in Machine Language (just the numbers) on a Burroughs E4000 and on my first Macintosh. They did not amount to much, but they did do stuff.
I agree. It’s one of my absolute fav sandwiches. For whatever reason I don’t care for ham salad – I think I had a bad devilled ham sandwich once that tainted them forever for me. I love a good sliced ham sandwich. And I love mayonnaise. I don’t understand how people can eat dry-ish sandwiches. I think I have a saliva deficit.
I couldn’t vote in the “selfish homeowning Boomer” poll, because my townhouse is barely big enough for my sister and me. It might act as a starter home for a young couple except for the fact that units like ours are pushing $1M.
I gave both my parents low scores. My dad worked swing shift most of the childhood. I barely saw him. He did take us on Sunday drives (giving my mom a break from us) which I still remember fondly so he got a higher score. Other than that he wasn’t very involved with us. My mom (probably as a result of her childhood) was very negative and quick with the put downs. It just wore me down. I never felt that close to either of them.
When I was in the home buying market, interest rates were 18 or 19%. It was insane. We got a 7-year loan with a balloon payment due. Thank Cthulhu interest rates were way down at the end of those 7 years.
I mostly wrote programs in COBOL and SAS. I did take an assembler class at UCLA extension with a couple of friends. One had just moved to a job at Security Pacific NB where they had programs written in assembler running in production. I didn’t have a real reason for learning it and never used it, but I did learn what IEFBR14 meant!
Yep. That’s why I reported my Mother and Father in law making the point that we had no idea how good we got it. And we were lucky in another sense - it was during the early stages of the housing price increase and low interest booms. I mean, the house was much more expensive than even two years earlier, but far from the prices we saw at the height, or what the city insists on charging taxes on right now.
I went middle. I don’t know why.
C for my father. While he was a very good provider and had a good sense of humor, we simply didn’t see eye to eye (in Myers-Briggs terms I am an INFP and he was a ESTJ; me the idle idealistic dreamer he the hardcore materialistic go-getter). As a role model he got worse as he got older, drinking more, cheating on my mom (when younger he was a very pious Catholic-he thought I’d thrive in such a school since he did, but their rigid systems clashed with my rebel streak), swearing up a storm whenever he got angry (which was often, yes anger-management issues galore-he was a mellow drunk not an angry one, but a drunk nonetheless). My lack of worldly ambition frustrated him I am sure.
I often read here and elsewhere about other men having very close and nurturing relationships with their father, and that simply wasn’t the case with us, at all. We bonded best on the golf course, but every bad shot was followed invariably by a Goddammit or such.
Mom was a B-she tried to make me her mama’s boy, but I quickly gained a strong measure of emotional independence from her as I moved out of my youth. Excellent cook, nurturing to a certain shallow extent. Neither one of them really got me much at all.
C- for my stepfather. Drunk, irrational, verbally (and occasionally physically) violent. Provided housing in a decent neighborhood, taught me to repair cars and how to shoot a gun, paid for my car insurance even though the deal was he wouldn’t support me (he had a prior kid/marriage). I gave my mom an A for handling all that plus a bad kid (me). No A+ because two drunks in a row is a bad marriage strategy.
Yeah, just a hard boiled egg, with salt & pepper. My joke sandwich for RPGs is a gas station egg salad sandwich- the worst possible combo.
I am with you on mayo- I only like it on BLTs. I dont mind a little with tuna, but yeah, it doesnt need it.
Exactamundo.
Thanks! I couldn’t tell middle from top until you posted that; because I went low, and then I couldn’t tell the other two apart.
But now that you’ve identified middle and I’ve identified bottom, everybody ought to be able to tell them apart.
It took me a minute to realize which poll you were discussing—I thought you meant you had programmed in C (the language) for your father.