President Taft saying the Patent Office ought to be closed, because there was nothing left to invent. For one thing, it was not he who said that. For another thing, the man who did say it, didn’t say it. What that person, Charles Duell, commissioner of the US Patent and Trademark Office, said (in 1902, before Taft was president) was:
“In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold.”
A runner on first cannot overrun first on the way back. The slide didn’t keep him safe, the first baseman being pulled off the bag kept the runner safe. The first baseman doesn’t have to tag a doubled off runner.
I didn’t see the play, but I’ve seen hundreds like it. Doubling off a runner like this requires a defender with the ball to tag either the base or the runner. Since the throw pulled the fielder off the base, the only chance he had was to tag the runner. The slide made it harder for the fielder to make the tag, and also made it possible for the runner to get back to the bag quickly without going past it.
-That Germany was uniquely anti-Semitic making the rise of the Third Reich and the enactment of the Holocaust inevitable.
-That Democrats such as FDR, Harry Truman, and JFK would be conservative if alive to-day and/or pursued conservative policies.
-That every major aspect of Jesus’s biography were taken from or had parallels in earlier pagan myths
-That the Confederacy’s primary reasons for secession was anything besides the preservation and propagation of the institution of human slavery (seriously, read the reasons the Southern states gave for secession)
-“Genocide” being used to refer to any sort of mass killing. In relation to this, a lot of the more exaggerated numbers of slaughter (ie several millions being killed in the Inquisition or 100 million in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus, even some of the higher numbers being thrown around for Stalin and Mao) being thrown about.
-That either the Founding Fathers were 1) all ultra-orthodox evangelical Christians who would support the exact agenda of the Christian Right, 2) all borderline atheist Thomas Paines who would support the exact agenda of progressive liberals, or 3) uniquely evil and horrible genocidal racist slaveowners.
Exactly. The base player was about 18" off the bag, and turned around to tag the runner, who slid right under his outstretched glove. I did a similar move once in women’s D league softball, when someone was waiting to tag me at home. I think slides home a pretty common for that reason.
On a similar note, I’m always highly skeptical of any claims about what percentage of Americans have exactly what type of European ancestry. I’ve done a lot of genealogy and one thing you learn quickly is that apparently all families (at least all I’ve encountered) unknowingly tell whoppers about their genealogy.
The biggest is Native American ancestry. Everybody I know claims to have it. I always heard that my family has it and that so-and-so’s grandmother was pure this and etc.; turns out that my family probably does have native ancestry, but it’s wayyy back- like late 17th century back- in other words, nobody that anyone has ever known in the family would have been pure Indian or even remotely close. We actually have more African ancestry (again, late 17th century, but it’s there) and I suspect that’s the source of a lot of claims of native ancestry: “we got the broad nose and coarse hair from Grandma Running Dove” sounds better than “my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandfather passed for white in 1720s North Carolina”, though I find the latter at least as interesting.
Also you meet a lot of people who claim their family is Irish because they don’t know the difference in Irish and Scots-Irish, and a lot of people like me who assume they’re mostly Brit but find out there’s a LOT of German back there but the ancestors Anglicized their names a bit (in my family, for example, Kolbe became Culp and von Tschudi became Goody among other changes).
And every single Southerner is a close relative of Robert E. Lee and or Patrick Henry. Lee and Henry were both very common names in the old South, so as soon as somebody finds one surname or the other- the association is immediate. Go to ancestry.com and you’ll find lots of family trees where the info has been contorted like an elephant trying to fit into skinny jeans: they’ll trace descent from Robert E. Lee’s brother for example by claiming he was the father of their ancestor, never mind that Lee’s brother was 4 years old and in Virginia when their ancestor who was his son was born in South Carolina.
Credit? Isn’t this something that usually gets brought up by Democrats to prove that Reagan was eeeeeeeeeeeeevil? [Stops to twirl mustache and cackle menacingly.]
I knew that wasn’t a true quote but how did the actual quote become so mangled? It’s basically the opposite of what is commonly believed and he was 100% accurate.
Because what fun is it if it’s correct? we don’t get to feel superior.
We love to feel superior to the dumb beliefs of people a long time ago.
Example: believing in homeopathy in the 21st century is stupid. There’s just no other way to put it. But when Samuel Hahnemann invented it (before the germ theory, it’s worth noting), it wasn’t any dumber than the current state of medicine, and he attempted to make it evidence-based back before that was a concept-- medicine was based on ideas like, if you had erectile dysfunction, you should eat carrots and cucumbers. Hahnemann at least had healthy people take doses of substances that he thought might be medicines, and recorded the dose and all the reactions in a ledger. And Hahnemann rejected purging (emetics and laxatives) and bleeding as an approach to treating illness, which is probably why, in the first couple of decades of homeopathy, people tended to survive more often when treated by it than when treated by conventional medicine.
So really, feeling superior to Hahnemann is wrong, I think. I also think if he showed up in a time machine and saw the state of conventional medicine, he’d say “This is great!” and be shocked that anyone was still trying to practice homeopathy exactly as he did in 1800.
If someone in Taft’s day had said that everything had already been invented, I would take that not as the person being a Luddite, or lacking vision, but just someone in awe of everything new at the time. But, it’s wrong anyway.
I don’t know any democrats that consider Reagan “evil”. I know democrats (and republicans) who point out that Ronnie wouldn’t be welcome in today’s Republican party and that he’d likely be considered “evil”. Saying democrats considered him evil for the sake of a given '80s-era political argument also isn’t creditable as attempts to prove that he was evil (rather, “eeeeeeeeeeeeevil”).
As I recall, democrats considered him an armchair cowboy (not unlike most men, whether within or without Congress where they do the most harm).
True, so much ‘humour’ these days is based on sneering at and mocking others, never mind if what they’re sneering at is flat out wrong.
On that and on the topic of the thread I had to admit that I laughed at the American Space Pen - Russian Pencil joke that pops up every so often, but I doubted if it was actually true and a little online research proved that it wasn’t. Doesn’t stop people mentioning it as if it was though.
Indeed. I claim Swiss-German ancestry due to my surname and paternal lineage. I’ve even traveled to Switzerland and met the branch of the family that stayed there back when my ancestor left, the ones descended from his many siblings and who still have the surname. But I also know from my uncle’s genealogy efforts that despite looking very Germanic myself, I’m a hodgepodge. One English ancestor was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Another, a Hungarian botanist, was on a postage stamp in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century. (Actually, that one wasn’t a direct ancestor but rather a descendant of the brother or cousin of a Hungarian one.) My maternal grandmother was born a Patrick. I know there are Scots and French and quite a few others back there too. But my name and looks all scream German (Swiss).
But I don’t claim Native American. As far as we’ve been able to tell, my family hasn’t had any Native American ancestry. But I do know it’s fashionable to claim it. Back in West Texas, it was commonly used by people as a convenient excuse for getting drunk and causing mayhem. “Gee, I’d like to behave better, but it’s just in my genes. I’m Indian! Yee Ha!”
A Reagan myth but not politics but movies. A myth that he was considered for the lead in “Casablanca”, when in reality he was never considered for any role in that movie. Humphrey Bogart was lead choice.
Further, it doesn’t matter whether something is a “dumb idea” when you know with certainty that a significant number of your customers are going to rest coffee between their legs. It’s a very common thing to do.
Really? If something isn’t hot then it’s lukewarm? There’s nothing in between? You know we have these things called thermometers that can read temperature at a finer gradient than " hot" and “warm,” right?
Hot coffee is supposed to be safe to drink. That means not so hot as to burn the parts of your body that it touches, like your lips, mouth, and throat.
Those parts of your body, by the way, are not as tough as the skin on your legs.
Otherwise, don’t you think that burn treatment for coffee spills would be much more common?
McDonald’s was super-heating their coffee, beyond normal serving temperatures. They were doing it so that they could change their coffee grounds less often.
They knew it was dangerously overheated because they had already settled with prior burn victims.
In fairness, I think there’s a significant liberal view about Reagan that, while not “evil”, is a fair bit worse than just an “armchair cowboy”.
In particular, I’d say that significant number of liberals believe that Reagan was basically an empty suit, significantly less intellectually prepared to actually be president than most of his predecessors. Of course that wasn’t helped by the possibility that he was already suffering from Alheizmer’s during his second term. (I suppose there’s a fair argument to be made that even if that’s true it might not matter… a kinda dumb guy could be a great president if surrounded by the right staff and advisers, but that’s a topic for another thread.)
Maybe Bush 2 has put things in perspective as far as Republican presidents are concerned.
And this cannot be overstressed: the McDonald’s in question had been cited by the health department shortly before the incident with the woman, for serving their coffee too hot, and specifically told to turn it down. They were serving it at just below boiling temperature, and I guess turned it down from 205 to about 190, but they had been told to turn it down to something specific that was much lower, like 150 (all temps Fahrenheit). 150 is still pretty hot. Commercial rental properties set their water heaters to 120, and that is by statute in some places. When you have a baby, the doctor tells you to turn your water heater down to 115. When we had a house, the highest setting on our heater was 130, and that was pretty damn hot. We had it turned that high for the washing machine and dishwasher, and had to be really careful not to scald ourselves with tap water.
I can’t imagine how hot 190 is. I have had steam burns, and they really suck. Having clothes holding the hot water in place has to be a nightmare.
I was in high school and college during most of the Reagan administration-- I missed voting against him the second time by two months. I turned 18 the January after his second election. There was some real hate for him. I actually even lived in DC for one year of his second term, and some real, serious hate. The sign for him at Gallaudet University was letter R slitting one’s throat, because Reagan slashed so many budgets for programs that benefited disabled people, and tried to cut Gallaudet funding. People who loved him loved him, but people who hated him had real vitriol. What was weird was that people who loved him seemed to do so for all these personal qualities they thought he had, which they couldn’t have known about, because they didn’t know him, and not for his actual performance as president. I was always hearing people gush about how “caring” and “kind” he was, and I know it was all just his acting training.