BellGab.com Archive

It's been a long time since I've heard Reagan knocked this hard, and I don't think I've ever heard so many US presidents accused of being involved in assassinations or assassination attempts in one place, by one person. God forbid this Gorton  haracter runs for office, but  don't be surprised if he does. This is one of the reasons I don't like Knapp as much as some people do on this board--he let's these extreme assertions sail by with no challenge. I have a hunch that one of the 100 books he read was Jerome Corsi's. He has a real fixation with the Dulles brothers.

I saw a banner at an Everett coffee stand that said Bulletproof coffee. I thought that it was an attempt to joke about a recent holdup. Now I know what it was. A coffeehouse in the Everett library has been serving something called "butter coffee" for several years. Its good, but expensive.

According to the Internet, this guy has a formula for calculating how frequently men should have orgasms. I don't know if they'll get into that.

Quote from: zeebo on April 22, 2017, 11:29:36 PM
Is that the original Brit version or the American remake?  I've never watched the supposedly better original, but I love the remake (w/ Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson  etc.), especially the first three seasons.  If that's what your watching, be sure to catch the outtakes which are usually on the last disc of the season - some of the funniest scenes never made it to screen.

It's the American one.

Quote from: zeebo on April 22, 2017, 06:05:28 PM
I haven't read Dubliners but some of the characters I believe reappear in Ulysses - which I'm still working my way through (after a year or so I'm still on Chapter 8 lol). 

Sometimes for kicks I'll scan through a passage of FW.  At first it seems like gibberish but somehow you can tell there's information there.  It's almost sounds like a fairy tale told in some ancient tongue. 

One theory I heard is that Ulysses (which takes place during a single day) is about the workings of (daytime) consciousness, while FW is about the more symbolic dream-world of (nighttime) unconscious - or something like that.   

One theory I heard is that FW is supposed to be music.
Buck and Stephen, the characters in Portrait, appear in Ulysses.

Quote from: 21st Century Man on January 23, 2017, 12:07:23 AM
I find King to be immensely readable.  Some of his books are intimidating in length but they are very rewarding.  The Stand being the primary example. 

Another writer I had a problem with was James Michener.  He had a tendency to start his novels at the creation of the world and goes through all of the Earth's mutations until he gets to the meat of his story.  Usually, this takes around 100-150 pages to slog through and it is quite a chore to read.  Centennial is a good example of this though I did manage to finish the book.

I loved The Stand. If you read it, you MUST read the long version. The miniseries with Gary Sinise was pretty good too.

I've never liked another King book nearly as much, though From a Buick 8 is pretty good. I'd like to read his nonfiction book on writing. I have a feeling it's pretty good.

Quote from: zeebo on March 04, 2015, 08:06:05 PM
That one has a bit of a rep for being difficult.  I might check it out sometime, but first have to see how I do with Pale Fire, which is on my reading list.

The only ones of his I've read are Lolita and Pnin: A Remembrance. Iiked them both.

Quote from: Avi on February 28, 2015, 07:48:36 PM
Yes, almost as bad as A Conspiracy of Dunces.

Sorry, I liked that one. But I like southern Gothic. Him and Donna Tartt are two of the few who come close to the great Flannery O'Connor.

Quote from: zeebo on February 24, 2015, 03:02:20 PM
This reminds me of a passage in Gravity's Rainbow, where he goes into obsessive detail about the contents of someone's desk. 

"... tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder ... paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colours including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slipper Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Naline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk ... above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs ... "    (... and so on)

.... This is around where I bailed out.   :

Still, I want to try again.  I think there's some greatness in that novel if you can get past the more exasperating parts.

That makes me want to read it.

Quote from: b_dubb on February 23, 2015, 12:08:23 PM
Rhanks for clearing that up for us. I thought Joyce was master of his craft. Thank goodness we have self important fuck nuggets like yourself to keep us informed.

It was explained to me (probably by an Engllsh professor) that the best way to do it is to read them is in this order: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegan's  Wake. Those who try to start with Finnegan are begging for trouble, I beleve. That being said, I have only read the first 3. Dubliners has some of t he best stories ever written in E glish, IMO.

This show is pretty good. Oh, how I hope he has a chance room give his take on the Ramsey case.

Talking about strippers reminds me that Everett is considering a dress code for baristas.  It's aimed at bikini barista stands, which became fronts for prostitution, combining pacific northwesters craving for coffee with Everett residents apparent endless appetite for adult entertainment. The biggest players have been shut down but it still pops up from time to time. It will be discussed at an upcoming  city council meeting, and I plan to attend if I don't have anything else to do. Some of the best free entertainment in Everett, city council, I mean.

Refrigerator magnets and old detective magazines, mostly from the 40s, 50s and early 60s. I also like tins, but don't have room for as many as I'd like.

I'm also saving up wine corks to make one of those homemade bulletin boards. Most of them say "Charles Shaw", though.

Girly Pinterest stuff, mostly.

Quote from: The General on June 04, 2014, 04:15:36 PM
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.
I got through it, but damn.  I was a fractured man for weeks.

Well, it's 7 volumes. A high percentage of men I've dated claim to have read it.

Do you think Ted Cruz has a good chance of getting re-elected next year, or is it too soon to tell?

Michael Savage used to be a fan of Marine LePen, you know. Maybe still is.

So Trump got that lady freed from the Egyptian prison. That's good. I will grudgingly give him credit when he does good things.

So today I bought a DVD of season 1 of The Office at the Everett library for one dollar. I haver never seen it, because, as you know, I stopped watching TV some years ago. I thought Gary Cole was in that, but I guess not, or not in season 1 anyway.

So spotting deception is tonight's topic. Evidently the irony has gone over their heads-- that is, the fact that a lot of Coast to Coast guests are pants on fire liars.

Thanks for posting.

Why is everybody breathlessly weighing in on the Bill O'Reilly affair? I could not care less. Obviously, FOX has a culture of low grade sexual harassment.  I'd rather be hit on by O'Reilly than the porcine Ailes, but really who gives a darn?

So, I don't know if this has made national  news, but a brawl ensued a few days ago at the the Lake Stevens Buzz Inn when someone dared to speak to a man about his son and nephew who were acting up and bothering other patrons. Who among us cannot relate to this? These weren't little toddlers too young to know better ( or too young to spank, IMO), they were 8 and 10!

The Everett Herald has thrown up a pay wall for me because I've exceeded my limit, but you might be able to Google it. I read the account in the paper version of the Herald.

Westerns--not .yet fave genre, but off the top of my head, some of my favorites:
The Shootist really poignant and memorable
Unforgiven, beautiful southern Alberta scenery, among other things
High Noon
310 to Yuma, both versions
The Long Riders. The gimmick is brothers playing brothers.
The Searchers and Stagecoach, two John Wayne classics
Open Range recent western with Kevin Costner, but respects most of the earlier traditions.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, because of course.
I'm sure there's others, but those are the ones that immediately occur to me.

Quote from: whoozit on April 19, 2017, 02:08:29 PM
Not the worst experience but one that left me scratching my head.  I went into the restroom at an insurance company and found two empty candy wrappers on one of the urinals.  I wondered if he enjoyed the treats before, during or after a piss.  Was the piss so long as to require sustenance?  Were the treats used to lure someone into an illicit tryst?  I tried to figure out who did it all day to no avail.

Since I worked on a bar, I can tell you some patrons think it's funny to put inappropriate stuff in urinals. Use your imagination. The candy wrappers were probably in his pocket or something.

Rest stop restrooms some place in Montana,were the toilet or toilets were so dirty, they were literally covered in shit. I don't know how people do this without working at it. It might have been a state Park, actually.

Not too long ago at the assisted living facility I worked at up until recently, some residents would use the public restrooms instead of going  back to their own apartments, and really messing them up when they had diarrhea and stuff. Even the wall was smeared once. Housekeepers carried  cell phones, and we always  dreaded getting these calls. Since my supervisor had the main line she got more of them.

I understand that the restrooms at the Calgary stampede get pretty crazy. The Missoula County fairgrounds and the MIle High Stadium(where the Denver Broncos play) have some pretty unusual ones, but I was too drunk to remember much about it.

There's a restaurant someplace near Glacier park where I swear the door cleared the seat of the toilet by about a half an inch. Obviously not handicapped accessible, but this was in the early 80s.


I saw something cool in a restroom in a privately run park near Yakima, flowers and a little basket with towels. Somelody puts fresh flowers in the ladies room on WA ferries, too.

Can't decide whether to keep listening  to John Batchelor tonight or switch to Coast to Coast, but I'll probably switch to Coast.

Thanks for the tip-off. At my age I'm not too interested in this stuff any more, but do think about it from time to time. I agree that there are probably better ways to meet people than Internet dating, but certainly wouldn't rule it out either. Times have changed, and the old personal ad stigma is pretty much gone. ( And in any case, one if my grandmother's was a mail order bride, so I'm not in a position to criticize.)

Too bad Paranormal Date sounds like a bad deal. I generally believe that "niche" sites are preferable to things like match.com, which are so general and have so many members, people hardly know where to start.

A few years ago I was in alikewise.com, a niche site based on reading tastes. Sounds like a good idea, but I didn't meet anyone to date. First, a majority of them were on the east coast. Whether it was lack of publicity or what, alikewise just never caught on out west. Second, most of the guys were 10 or 20 years younger than me. But worst of all, nearly all of the guys who responded to me were obviously Nigerian scammers. As most of you probably know, many people have lost serious amounts of money to romancescammers and catfishers. And others who didn't have money to send them have gotten sucked into illicit schemes assisting the scammers with their money transfers, etc. Most of the ones who contacted me were so clumsy and unconvincing, I'm not sure how people fall for this, but no matter. I kept turning these people in to the administrators, and they'd remove his profile. but more would pop up. In retrospect, I think it was the same guy (or team of guys--they work in teams)who just used  different screen names and profiles. I was disgusted that they evidently weren't vetting new members profiles at all, since there were always lots of red flags in the profiles. Some of them had even stolen pictures of American servicemen, a common MO of these guys.

Captain Blood 1935

Quote from: albrecht on July 07, 2014, 03:49:54 PM
I won't say all are haunting me but interest me some are conspiracy sorta and some weird. Won't mention Dr.David Kelly because everyone knows that mysterious case.

1) Jonathan Luna (suicide with 36 stabs by penknife)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Luna
http://www.yardbird.com/luna.htm

2) John Parsons Wheeler, III (bizarre footage and then found in dumpster)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Wheeler_III

3) Ray Gricar (again a Penn case with implication on Sandusky stuff)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Gricar
http://www.yardbird.com/a_town_gone_bad.htm

4) Taman Shud case (an unidentified man with a piece of paper of the Rubaiyat in his pocket)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case

5) D.B. Cooper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_305

6) Harry Holt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Holt#Disappearance

7) Mary Celeste
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste

I finally had a chance to read these these. Thank you.

Starr Faithfull is another interesting case. She was actually the inspiration for the John O'Hara story "Butterfield 8", which in turn was the basis for the 1960 movie with Elizabeth Taylor. But the movie changed her manner of death so as to make it clear it was accidental. This was probably one of the first movie in which child sexual abuse was openly discussed.

Madison House. No mystery here. I was researching  job possibilities with them--on my phone.

Scratching posts and cat furniture from Petsmart come up a lot, too. Because I was browsing cat trees and towers.

I actually do usually like the shows on secret histories, mysteries and true crime, even I don't agree with the guests conntensions or find them convincing. I never knew much about Butch and Sundance except what was in the movie. It seemed to me they didn't get as much attention as Jesse James or Billy the Kid.

Jimmy Church came back and golf went away while I was watching the video. If it had been George, he would have blamed sinister forces.