It’s cockney rhyming slang, it’s best not to think too deep about it
Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It’s not exactly flattering but it’s not really as much of an insult as it sounds.
The same kind of logic has them calling “stairs” “apples and pears” because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.
Or “cherry” meaning “lie” because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.
A lot of men’s fashion, especially formal wear, takes styling cues from military uniforms, the modern necktie descends from the cravats by some military unit (I want to say it was some mercenaries involved in some French war, but I don’t feel like looking up the specifics right now)
There’s not really a single robin hood canon, some versions of him are quite violent, others he avoids killing. All depends on who was telling the story and when.
I also don’t like fish
I find that sushi is less offensive to me than cooked most of the time, so that’s one place to start. Still not something I’d actively seek out but if it’s what’s offered to me I can deal with it.
I also overall find freshwater fish to be more palatable, I enjoy fishing so if I catch some decent sized trout worth keeping I’ll eat them (it’s more for my wife, but if we’re already cooking it I’ll eat it)
My mom’s also not a fish eater, but can stomach flounder.
I’m from the Philly area, our roads are pretty shitty, if yours are even worse that’s really saying something. You can just about tell by feel the moment you cross the state border into NJ
There was a guy I knew in high school, he was never the brightest bulb, but he had the rare gift that he realized that he was kind of an idiot and would listen to and try to learn from people that knew more about something than he did. Overall a pretty nice guy, I don’t think anyone really had anything bad to say about him, he leaned a little conservative but if you took the time to explain something from a liberal point of view you could definitely get him to change his mind sometimes.
I mostly lost track of him after I graduated, I heard somewhere through the grapevine that he had died, turns out those rumors were somewhat exaggerated, but he did get a pretty significant brain injury, spent a brief time in a coma, had some surgeries, nice scar on his head.
Next time I ran into him a few years later, he had taken a pretty weird turn into some paranoid bullshit, talking about some apocalypse or civil war that he seemed sure was coming and how he was learning to make his own arrows so he could keep hunting when ammo ran out.
This was a few years before Trump’s first term, I can only imagine he’s spiraled further into crazytown since then.
I don’t think there’s any easy answer here.
If you stay, are you able and willing to fight and to what degree under which circumstances? What do you have to offer? Will you be more of a liability than an asset? How do you weigh your personal safety and wellbeing or those of your family and friends against the country or world? What do your prospects look like in whatever country you choose to flee to?
If you intend to continue living in America for now, DO NOT LEAVE THE COUNTRY if it can be at all avoided. Not into Canada, not Mexico, not to any other country, not by land, sea, or air. If you can, stay at least 100 miles away from any border.
Don’t count on your visa, green card, or any other documentation and paperwork you may have being sufficient to allow you back into the country. Honestly, I don’t think we’re far from you being potentially barred from returning even if you’re a naturalized citizen.
If you must leave the country for any reason, do so with the knowledge that you may not be allowed to return. Bring your important documents, extra cash, clothes, etc. make arrangements for your pets, figure out what your next move will be if you get to the US border and are denied entry, where will you go, who will you stay with, etc.
It depends on the context
If I’m just looking for a confirmation that my message was received, and the plans need to additional modification, a thumbs up is sufficient.
If I ask something like “Wanna meet up at the bar after work today?” And get a thumbs up, that’s sufficient. We know where we’re going and when, no more discussion really needed.
If I ask “you free to grab a beer this weekend?” and I get a thumbs up, that’s bullshit. When are you free to grab said beer? Where are we going for it? We have details that need to be hammered out.
I apologize, this became a long rant, too long for a single comment. This comment is mostly rant, I’m going to reply to it with sort of a TL;DR in a 2nd comment, but it’s still probably going to be kind of long, I have a lot of thoughts about alarm companies.
I work in 911 dispatch. What happens when your alarm gets activated is the alarm company receives the signal and then they call someone like me to send police/fire/EMS.
I’m pretty sure that everyone in my profession has a pretty low opinion of alarm companies. In theory the services are a fine idea. In practice, they’re kind of a shit show. I’m not too sure where the biggest issue is with them- corporate decision making, lazy installation techs, incompetent account managers, terrible phone operators (some of them like to call them dispatchers, they don’t dispatch shit) or the customers are all just idiots, but it’s probably all of the above and more.
Starting from the bottom, a whole lot of these places seem to use the same sort of call centers we’ve all come to know and hate from having to call tech support. Most of them have thick accents, and most of the ones who don’t seem to be borderline illiterate. Think back to grade school when the teacher would go around the room having you read a paragraph or two from a book out loud then pass it onto the next person to continue reading, it eventually would come around to the kid who probably had undiagnosed dyslexia and a fear of public speaking, and he’d struggle through it having to sound out each word syllable by syllable while you all just went ahead and read the paragraph on your own. That’s what talking to some of these operators is like. And if you deviate from their script even the tiniest bit they get totally flustered and don’t know what to say.
That’s all well and good in your high school English class when you’re reading through Romeo and Juliet, but when I’m trying to send the fire department out to see if a house is burning down or not it’s maddening when I can’t tell if the address they’re giving me is “7 main Street” so “11 maple Street” either because of their accent, they’re mumbling into the phone with a screaming baby in the background (I’m pretty sure some of them are working from home now) or they just can’t fucking read.
On my call here are the questions I’m asking.
What is the address- house number, street name, apartment/suite number if applicable, municipality (not necessarily the same thing as the town/city on the mailing address, they’re different sometimes, I’m sending your towns police, not delivering your mail)
What is the nearest cross street- to verify I have the right location, damn near every town has a Maple Street, and because I can’t necessarily count on getting the correct town from the caller, this helps me make sure I’m sending help to the right Maple Street and not the one in the next town over.
If it’s a business, and the name of the business. I’ve had alarms called in as residential alarms but the name of the resident is listed as something like “Anderson Construction LLC” so a commercial alarm under just some schmuck’s name. Or it will be the name of some property management company and not the actual business at that location.
For security alarms- is it audible or silent
The area of activation - half of them are just labeled as something like “zone 2” which is useless. I don’t know where zone 2 is, the alarm co doesn’t know, the homeowner doesn’t know, our police and fire sure don’t, so we don’t know where we need to be looking for the issue. Is it a motion sensor? A window alarm? The garage? Your guess is as good as mine. Or sometimes zone 2 is kitchen windows, bathroom door, side room motion, and basement stairs all on the same zone.
Also once in a while they’ll tell me something like it’s a security alarm but it’s coming from the smoke detector.
If it’s residential - what is the resident’s name?
Some sort of contact phone number. Ideally a premise phone number, but at least a residents cell phone, or a keyholder for the business. Some way to get ahold of someone to make sure everything is ok, see if they know why the alarm is going off, confirm if anyone is supposed to be there, figure out how to re-secure the house if they find an unlocked door, get authorization to force entry if needed, etc.
Will you notify- will you be calling the resident, an emergency contact, keyholder, etc. to let them know about this alarm
That’s a lot of ranting on my part, but it’s not much information I’m looking for. On the rare occasion they have all the information and the operator is competent, it takes me just over 1 minute to get everything I need
My entire call ideally boils down to something like:
123 MAIN ST, TOWNSVILLE NY, APT 4
X-STREET: MAPLE ST
AUD, BEDROOM MOTION
JOE SCHMO - 555-555-5555
W/N
There’s not a single one of those fields that they haven’t messed up- wrong or incomplete addresses, no x streets, no name/wrong name, wrong or no phone number, no list of emergency contacts, or the contacts are all outdated and haven’t worked at a company for 10 years. Sometimes all on the same call. I sometimes wonder how they manage to get paid for their service because I don’t know how they’re able to send their customers a bill or call them to ask for money because they don’t seem to have any of that information.
And sometimes they call the wrong jurisdiction, I’ve occasionally had to transfer alarm calls to other dispatch centers around the country.
We had one once where all the information they had was an “address” that was something like “¼ mile past the motor pool” and the zone. Literally nothing else. Somehow our supervisor managed to track that down to an Indian reservation on the other side of the country. I have no idea why it came to us, but we got that call a couple times before they were able to finally update the account information.
Some of that is lazy installation techs not setting things up properly, or customer service and account managers and such not properly verifying information. Sometimes though I think it’s customers providing them with garbage information from the get go.
Also most of these companies have some sort of verification protocol where they try to reach the homeowner to confirm if help is needed and they ask for a password. I get a lot of false alarm calls where they spoke with the homeowner but they didn’t know their password, so they had to call it in. Maybe write that down and stick it in your wallet or something if you can’t remember it.
They’ll call in 3 hours later with an “update” to a previous alarm that our responders have already been out to and cleared from for 2½ hours. And sometimes they’ll call in 2 minutes later with a new request for dispatch and are shocked to learn that we already have help on the way because I literally just hung up with another operator for an alarm at the same location.
And when a sensor is malfunctioning and giving false alarms, no one ever seems to do anything about it. There are houses and businesses that we legitimately have police or fire at almost every night and sometimes multiple times a night because the alarm keeps going off for no reason and it sometimes goes on for months or years because no one can be bothered to get a tech out fix it or at least take that sensor offline.
We had one alarm we kept getting for about a year. The business it was for had been closed for years and the property vacant, even our police couldn’t track down a property owner or anything. Who the hell was paying that alarm bill? I think it only stopped when the building was demolished.
This all pretty much applies to medical alarms like life alert and such too. Missing or incorrect information across the board there. Same address verification, name and phone number, we also want medical history and access information like a hidden key or garage code. We’d rather not have to break down your grandmother’s door to help her up after she’s fallen and can’t get up if there’s a spare key hidden under a flower pot we could use instead.
And the icing on the cake, of the probably thousands of alarm calls I’ve handled in almost 6 years I’ve been here, maybe a few hundred of them have been legitimate, the rest were false alarms or accidental activations. Most of the legit ones have been fire alarms.
And of those legitimate calls, all but maybe a few dozen of them have been called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, employees, or random bystanders/passersby who either noticed something suspicious or heard the alarm going off and called it into us before we ever got a call from the alarm company. Hell, sometimes the alarm never even goes off until the police are there clearing the interior of a building after a break-in.
I live and work in what I’d overall consider to be a very safe area. Break-ins are almost vanishingly rare, and when they do happen it’s more likely to be some sort of a domestic thing where your ex wants to steal back the TV they bought you and remembers your alarm code or something like that than the sort of burglary you probably imagine. And when the more legitimate break-ins happen, it’s either in the super rich neighborhoods when the homeowner is out of town, or it’s in the poorer, more urban (this is the suburbs, none of it is really urban, but a couple towns come pretty close) parts of my county, where most of the people probably don’t have the extra money for an alarm system anyway. For everyone else in the middle, I think security alarms aren’t really worth it.
People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.
And overall I don’t doubt them. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I’m certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.
But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that’s before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.
Now some of them understand that that’s a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.
Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they’re not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you’ll even be able to save some money going with that.
But for most of us who aren’t doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we’re doing actually make any sense, and don’t necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn’t secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.
Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they’re doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn’t and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone’s face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it’s a miracle they’re not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it’s too late.
Few more ingredients but my carnitas have always been a crowd pleaser
I tend to eyeball everything, but usually about a 12oz can of coke, oj and stock until it looks right, one onion chopped up, however many cloves of garlic I feel like peeling and chopping
If the pork shoulder fits I do it in a pressure cooker on high about 2 hours, if it doesn’t I do it significantly longer in a slow cooker
When it’s falling apart, pull the bones out, shred (I like to use a mixer)
Then like you, crisp it up under the broiler, and maybe mix in some of the cooking liquid