Someone told me today that Canada raises enough money from taxing shipping that we could solve world hunger 100 times over. She was perfectly serious.
She doesn’t like taxes at all, says the CRA and IRS are going to go “out of business”, yet couldn’t answer questions such as how much would it cost to treat a heart attack (in Canada).
If you want to make a story stick just say “The Catholic church used to burn people for that in the middle Ages”
I’ve heard a couple of friends with Doctorates in music telling me that story about the Tritone aka Diabolus in Musica.
Speaking of birth control, in my Usenet days there was a rabid Catholic who told us that sex using any kind of birth control was inferior to sex without it, because he thought so. Many people told him he was full of shit, but he just refused to believe anyone can enjoy sex while sinning in this way.
I think I had one of those clowns come to my house. There was the boss clown and the lackey clown. The lackey clown vacuumed my hall - the vacuum was not very good. (I was going to say it sucked, but vacuums should suck, shouldn’t they?)
The lackey didn’t make any progress with me, but the boss man came and I tied him down for about 2 hours. He used every sales tactic in his book. First, god wants me to buy the vacuum. That didn’t work too well. Then he needed to sell the vacuum or his children would starve. I don’t remember the other ones, but the price had come down to about $300 before I finally took pity on him and kicked him out.
He never got to the MLM part, but then I never bought. Interesting, though. I kind of wondered how anyone could make money selling vacuums door to door in this day and age.
Did the vacuum have a transparent upper dome, with water swooshing around when it was running?
I was once told that the reason I couldn’t get pregnant was because I was too fat. She said my body fat would squish any babies growing inside me before they got big enough to be born healthy.
This was a random stranger at a table next to my friend and me at a restaurant.
Funny, I have now spawned two healthy little jerks who think my fat belly is funny.
Mega bonus if you can work corn muffins in there somewhere.
Well, obesity can lead to a lack of fertility. But the baby-squishing thing is bonkers.
Believe me, I know that the obesity can lead to fertility problems. At that point, I was barely overweight, but still a rather “normal” size. I had been working hard to lose weight to improve my fertility. Yet, this total idiot … er … stranger felt it necessary to interrupt us and call me fat.
Bonkers, indeed.
Damn, I have no tolerance for men who call women fat. Or even women who call other women fat. Too often, “fat” means having a few extra pounds, but boy howdy does the whole fat thing fuck with women’s heads in a bad way.
It did kind of mess with my head a little. I was already in the throes of depression because of my inability to conceive (due to a medical condition), and for her to throw that on top of it. I already knew it was my fault my husband and I didn’t have kids yet. But to call me fat and reinforce the (mistaken) belief that I’m failing at being a woman because I’m fat… ugh.
My friend was great and talked me down, but her words really hurt. It’s years later, and I still remember it as one of the most hurtful and blatantly stupid things I’ve ever had said to me. And I was in an abusive relationship for years.
Not to hijack or misdirect the thread, but what would be the proper term to refer to a woman who is, indeed, well…fat?
Is this like the difference between “retarded” and “mentally handicapped” whereby it is two terms that refer to the same thing, but one is offensive and the other is not (so “fat” is offensive but “obese” or “overweight” are more clinical-sounding and therefore acceptable?)
Or do you mean more like,* “Even if she is 500 pounds, you shouldn’t refer to her as ‘fat?’”*
Overheard in the bathroom of an all-vegetarian Indian restaurant my husband (who is Indian), kids and I frequent:
How can anyone expect children to eat Indian food? So many spices! And almost no protein! Why don’t they have chicken nuggets or something edible on the menu?!
To which my daughter (loudly) hissed, “Mommy, do you think she realizes what vegetarian means? And what does she think Indian kids eat!? If she thinks this is spicy, she’s got another think coming! I could out-spice the crap out of her.”
I was totally with her until that last sentence, which made me choke-snort.
What a crappy thing to say. It drives me bonkers that people feel so comfortable commenting on others’ health conditions. You have no idea what other people are going through; comments like that are about as unhelpful as they get.
I think there is a threshold, but it varies a lot. I have one friend who is maybe 30 pounds over ideal weight, but I would not call her fat because it does not look abnormal (and she is a friend, so I feel no need to criticize her appearance). I think you have to go to somewhere around 10~20% over ideal (ideal being where washboard abs could be a real possibility) before it is fair to say “fat”.
Some people are very obviously fat, so pointing it out is of little value. And opinions vary on what looks good/ok. I personally prefer the look of a woman who has around the right amount of padding over a woman who looks like she just stepped out of an xkcd.
Women are, or are conditioned to be, very sensitive about their appearance. Calling the fat to their face (or in front of their back) is simply loathsome. By contrast, to call Huckabeast fat might be ok because she will never actually hear it from you, directly or indirectly. But it does you no favors to latch onto that when there are plenty of other characteristics one can use to describe a person.
I have a friend who bought $15,000 worth of Iraqi Dinars in 2010(ish). A very sketchy website claimed that when the country’s new government took over American investors could cash in the Dinars for a thousand-fold profit . . . or some such shit.
I pointed out that neither the political nor economic aspects made any sense, pointed out the sketchy aspects of the website, and showed her fraud complaints. The site mysteriously disappeared six months later as did her $15k.
Dear friend is a massage therapist and is into all kinds of woo: crystal and pyramid energies, homeopathy, essential oils, chi alignments, and so on. She’s smart about some things, but is missing the common sense gene.
I did the same thing, but on a smaller scale - I think I spent only a little over $100 on Iraqi dinars. It wasn’t unreasonable to gamble, immediately post-Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, that things would be looking upwards for Iraq, that the country would be stabilized and be on a gradual road to prosperity and economic growth and a rise in the value of the dinar.
A thousand-fold increase in profit? No. But a modest-to-strong increase in value, wasn’t that unreasonable a gamble.
Did you get any return on your $100? Friend bought dinar in 2010, by which time I think Post-op Freedom was either done or had fallen apart (I don’t remember). The website she bought through disappeared with her money and probably many others’ as well. The bulk of it was a forum that had posters hyping how they were going to be millionaires any day now! Buy more dinar now! I suspect it was a sock puppet operation.
The $15k she lost was the total sum inheritance from her mother, who had recently and very suddenly died. Friend was devastated about losing it.
Well, you could use her name, that usually works.
Why would you be referring to someone’s body size, though?