WordWolf

I can hear that phrase with the buzzy electronics, clear as day. (Well, the buzzing isn't clear, but you know..) "BATTLESTAR GALACTICA."

When you realize the MONSTER Manual was meant to have things for the player characters to BEAT UP, the low number of good-aligned "monsters" makes sense. The MM 2 had more beings that were good-aligned or other (lawful or chaotic) in addition to animals and evil monsters. Dragons, from the beginning, were good or evil depending on type.

vpw talked a good game and regurgitated the works of others, but his recitals exceeded his understanding. That's how frauds like Arthur Ford fooled him. In other news, we discussed Dave Arneson before.

I just came across something that reminded me of something. When Sonny Liston went up against Mohammed Ali, Liston bet heavily against himself and took a dive. People referred to it as "the phantom punch" since Ali didn't actually hit him when he fell. Apparently, it's common knowledge now. (It came up on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?") Naturally, in twi, the thing COULDN'T have a mundane explanation, it HAD to be "evil spirits." In "who did you hear was born of the wrong seed?" we had this post: "Muhamud Ali (He knocked Joe Frazier out without touching him he was soooo seed.) Dot Matrix" Broken Arrow, on "Where's the Library?" "Some of his other "insights" were that Muhammad Ali was born of the seed of the serpent and it was actually a devil spirit that ko'd Sonny Liston in Ali's first title fight (Cassius Clay at the time.)" Broken Arrow, on "Big Fat (but unsubstantiated) Claims": "Muhammad Ali was seed (LCM). It was a devil spirit that ko'd Sonny Liston in the title fight. We know this because no one saw the punch that knocked him out." Steve Lortz had an update... George Aar summed it all up , "Who did you hear was born of the wrong seed?" twi was-and is- very superstitious and under-educated, especially considering their claims on always having the inside story on everything.

"Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe diMaggio."

Well, I said "name either" and you did, so, yes, it's your turn.

I suppose I'll have to look that up- from your response, "Kate Smith" was incorrect. I always thought that was the name. Some woman who plays football and sings "God Bless America" or something. One Richard Hatch was "Apollo" in the original "Battlestar Galactica." (He also was in some soap opera.) I didn't know he was in the newer show with all the weird felgercarb going on. A DIFFERENT Richard Hatch was the winner of season one of "Survivor." I had to see them show his face so I could confirm it wasn't the other one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hatch_(Survivor_contestant) I don't see a reference to it, but I remember "Apollo" Richard Hatch, years ago, on TV saying he was trying to pitch further stories based on the Battlestar:Pegasus spinning off the original series. I liked the idea but they never approved it.

The "how" is an easy answer. Nobody actually sets up a whiteboard and announces "today we are going to learn proper shouting techniques." (Unless you're a character in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker" series- the Vogons had officer ranks like "Senior Shouting Officer.") They taught BY EXAMPLE. If you're someplace where you are told EVERYTHING is PLANNED to the nth degree and it's ALL spiritual, then there's significance to how the carpets are vacuumed, the lightbulbs are changed, etc. (Yes, they taught how to vacuum the carpets. Really.) So, when leadership spends lots of time SHOUTING about things, then you get the lesson that SHOUTING is part of being a leader. You have a good question as to "why". I think it was laziness. By that I mean, vpw and lcm had poor self-control and shouted all the time. So others absorbed that, and thought it was INTENTIONAL when it was just that leaders were too LAZY to police their own behavior. It's the same with all the CURSING. vpw and lcm cursed a lot in private- lcm did it in LESS private venues. So, people learned to curse. At least one parent said their child LEARNED TO CURSE through sitting through lcm's (MANDATORY) lunchtime tirades. Imagine- there you are with your child, eating lunch. Then some maniac tromps up to a microphone, and spends 20 minutes yelling and cursing on a subject. Then he pauses and changes subjects, yelling and cursing for ANOTHER 20 minutes. How can you tell your child to control himself when the supposed leader of the group is more impulsive than your child? The most hypocritical part? Children on-grounds in twi are frequently BEATEN if they're not behaving PERFECTLY. Adults were REQUIRED to all carry a wooden spoon with them at the family corps so they were prepared to beat ANYONE'S child at any time. Yet the leaders were the ones allowed to be brats and terrors. (Oh, if your parents were big muck-a-mucks, there was always an excuse and you could manage to escape punishment for committing CRIMES and trashing things. Otherwise, children were in terror of adults and sometimes other kids there.)

It looked like he was pointing that at me, although I'm probably misinterpreting him. I know Farrah Fawcett was there, and I think Cheryl Tiegs and Kate Smith were there, and that's all I've got. For someone who never watched the show, and who heard what he did hear was decades ago, I think that's pretty good. Next round. There were two television shows that featured a "Richard Hatch" on them. (Not character names, those were the real people.) Name either television show. (For bragging rights, name both and who each Richard Hatch was in there.)

It seems YELLING and dominating discussions was a big part of what little was actually TAUGHT in corps. I visited hq once, and chatted briefly with a guy who was in-residence. I made a comment that was true but he didn't want to hear it. He then went off for a few minutes on the comment. I was going to point out his errors, but he wasn't interested in DISCUSSING- just EXPOUNDING. I stood calmly. and when he was done, I said "You must have been waiting all week to deliver that speech." He actually unclenched and became a human after that. Took me years before I really connected the dots on him being TAUGHT to do that.

Some people seem to confuse reality with television, movies, etc. Twi leaders seem to do that quite a bit- we discussed recently how ROCKY- a piece of FICTION- was very instructive as to how believing works (movies are SCRIPTED, our lives are really improv.) Television and movies are far more DRAMATIC than reality. So-called "reality" TV is heavily edited to give us the most dramatic incidents in a week or more, and are usually set up to invite more conflict than reality (like finding people who are unlikely to be willing to put up with each other and putting them together in a house. Obviously, SOMETHING will happen.) When Melrose Place (the original) started, I LIKED it because it was similar to reality. However, the show didn't get ratings, so they made it a wild soap opera and people kept getting thrown into the swimming pool. People don't USUALLY like to watch reality without drama. "Why didn't the character do the sensible thing?" "If they did, the episode would be over fast." That's across genres- I've said things like that with sitcoms, dramas, science fiction, etc. ---------------------------------------------------- Tying that back to the discussion... If someone actually lacks a background in something, they may be foolish or uneducated enough to think they can "fake it" or that "it's easy" and they can just use what they saw on television and in movies. (The television show "Mythbusters" has pointed out that the laws of physics don't work like in movies, people are even less likely to act that way.) So, they think that the military is all about blind obedience and yelling at the troops, and Psychology is solving a problem within a 1/2 hour episode with no lasting effects, and they really think they understand it all. This seriously undervalues the HARD WORK of UNDERSTANDING both PEOPLE and PROGRAMS.. The military isn't even about a lot of yelling in BOOT CAMP- when most of the yelling takes place. It's also not about BLIND OBEDIENCE. Soldiers who are blindly obedient get killed easily when an order makes no sense. That having been said, I had at least one teacher in grade school who relied on yelling. She was least-respected of all the teachers I had in grade school. I've worked with people who supervised and yelled, and they were respected the LEAST, and those who never yelled were respected the MOST because they respected the people they weren't yelling at. Yelling is not how you MANAGE people. It's most effective when ALL you need to do is get their attention. Thus, a soldier was yelled at when he was pointing a LOADED RIFLE at people, and children get yelled at when they're about to do something DANGEROUS to them. Most of the time, yelling is unnecessary, and doesn't help. It can lower the respect the yeller gets, or just anger the people they're expecting to have work with them. If that's true, the people will only do what they're REQUIRED TO DO and only what you're watching directly, and they will leave when they can. Companies lose good workers like that, and officers "accidentally" get hurt or killed if nobody gets them to tone it down. If you're working with children and can't do things without yelling, then they move you away from children, generally. When it came to twi and yelling, at the top, it was a LACK OF DISCIPLINE, a lack of SELF-CONTROL, that caused them to yell. Leaders who can't control THEMSELVES have no business trying to control OTHERS- they can't lead THEMSELVES. If leaders are unqualified (as it says in the Bible) if they can't manage a FAMILY, how can they possibly be competent if they can't manage SELF?

I never actually saw the show at the time. However, I've heard some of the names of Chuck's team. In commercials for the toys, if nothing else. "Charlie's Angels"? (The commercial I heard named "Sabrina, Kelly and Kris.")

*wild swing* "Forrest Gump"?

What clip? I didn't see any clip...

PLEASE. Some of us have security setting reasons, others for bandwidth reasons (depending on what they're using to surf, and how they get there), and others because they have no control (they're at work or borrowing someone else's PC.) When that happens, the video hotlinks may be completely INVISIBLE. Which means they see the answer like this. "Oh, I sing that song all the time, obviously it's" And then a reply is "Of course it is." The others might want to know WHAT song it is. Then they can look it up on their own time later. So, link anything you want but give the text-only users something to work with also. (Some of us can't see LINKED STATIC IMAGES, for that matter.)

In case I was unclear, I was quoting OldSkool, but NOT commenting on OS. I thought that was worth quoting but made a different point. *hugs*

I have to object this this idea that all opinions must be embraced and are equally valid. Yes, you have a right to your opinion. I also have a right to mine, and that includes the right to think your opinion is foolish, and that you're conducting yourself poorly. We can agree, at least, on CIVILITY at the very least, but that doesn't mean I have to AGREE with anyone else. Oakspear and I approach things from a vast doctrinal divide and neither of us have any plans to cross it. Has anyone here seen us act uncivilly toward each other? Highly doubtful. Look- all positions are NOT equally valid, and agreeing with someone is not wrong, and disagreeing with someone is not wrong, and almost everyone holding an opinion is not discriminatory to the minority. Most of us here agree that having oxygen in the air and clean drinking water, in and of themselves, are good things. If someone disagrees, I'm going to point out why I think they are wrong. If someone gets nasty and defensive about being in the minority here, I'll call them on THAT, too. We had people posting here on HOLOCAUST DENIAL. They insisted the death tolls were highly exagerrated and so on. They were allowed to continue posting, and other posters refuted them. And they acted like they were being persecuted because everyone else was "one-sided." No, everyone else happened to agree on something and they didn't, and being called out on error was making them feel bad. If they didn't want others to call them on either poor doctrine or poor behavior, they shouldn't do either where others can see it and respond. Heck, I've been called on poor behavior online (not here) and actually thought about it and made improvements. Not everyone is willing to consider they might currently be wrong. They might say they had been wrong in the past, but have now "arrived" and that's no longer the case. Do we all agree Charles Manson's a bad guy? Do we all agree that John Wayne Gacy was a bad guy? That's not a bad thing-but some would call that "one-sided views." An attempt at "balanced views" might sound like this, depending on who is saying it: You all claim Al Capone was a terrible person, with claims he allegedly broke the law, his supposed racketeering, his (claimed) bootlegging, and the unconfirmed claims he bashed in someone's skull with a baseball bat. However, I ate at his soup kitchen during the hard Depression days, and I am offended whenever someone claims he wasn't a nice guy. Why, he never said a cross word to me, and he was quite polite." A reply to that might be that the person isn't looking at the whole picture, and that the benefits a few received were the results of the losses of many. The first person's reply might sound like this: You all are just bitter and would rather stew in negative emotions rather than just get over it and stop claiming he was a bad guy. After all, Capone is dead. I'm under no constraints to pander to anyone's opinions, positions, or delusions. I can, however, at least be CIVIL towards them and I'd appreciate the same- which, around here, isn't the case. I've been called 'the devil' before for disagreeing with someone. I didn't return the favor. Personally, I think we do NOT have "one-sided views." We acknowledge we had some good times in twi, as did some others, and later learned those good times were at someone else's expense, and good people were in twi as well as bad. Non-GSC posters would say that is NOT "one-sided", that's "fair."

When I find that I'm going to react emotionally to a post, I find it useful to log off and come back to it later, possibly even the next day. That's why people who accuse me of making emotional posts are shown to be silly when I just use logic in a reply. If you'd done that here, you would have found something you don't normally see- a post from me defending you. I was going to post (as soon as I had a chance, which was now) that you'd been quite civil on this thread and opine that criticism on this thread was, at the least, impolite and uncalled-for on that basis. I was also going to point out that we were veering off-topic. Sadly, in replying, you displayed a bit of what you sometimes get criticized for, while denying you do it. If you'd left it at that, you'd have been better off. (Actually, the last sentence was a shot and you didn't need to make it. Most of the people you think of as your harshest critics wouldn't deny that some people benefitted from time in twi. I've said, a number of times, that I'm glad I got in, and glad I got out. If you'd refrained from getting personal, you would have demonstrated an ability to rise above it, to post in a more mature fashion, and even show up your critics by posting more maturely than that did. Instead, you chose to post just as emotionally, and then go a step further. This is a "good thing" if you're trying to "one up" each other with a harsher post. If you're trying to claim you're being criticized unfairly and say you're being mis-characterized as posting poorly, then this was definitely the wrong way to respond- you just proved a point. I've just given you and some others something to think about. I think they will think about it- I hope you do, too. Your opinions early in this POST were eminently acceptable, but your "tactics", your posting style, later in this same post demonstrated what you get criticized for.

Next show: This show actually became a talking-point in a Presidential race (or a Vice-Presidential race), and that became part of the show itself!

War Games Ally Sheedy the Breakfast Club

A few times, he worked it out. Once, he threw away the milk, and just ate his sandwich. And passed out because the SANDWICH was drugged. Another time, he insisted Murdock swap glasses with him. They both drank, and Murdock fell down. BA laughed about it, then collapsed. Murdock just got up at that point. And one time he wasn't drugged- they hypnotized him.

"I feel the need....the need for SPEED!"

I was humming this song the other day. "Is She Really Going Out With Him?"

Is it "A Few Good Men"? (Sorry I missed my move.) (BTW, there's a MUCH more famous line if this is that movie.)