Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

Just when I was slimming down, memorial day and weekend decided to rev up a lot of food....Worth i-BURP!

@ThanosReXXX - Oh man, I love a good Irish pub. Very few places feel as inviting to just get silly with beer. It’s basically expected. At least over here. I’ll gladly join you at your uncle’s pub for many hours of festive drinking and conversation when I visit. We have “English pubs” here as well. I’ve often wondered what someone from Ireland or England would think about their respective public house representations here in the states.

@NintendoByNature - It was in Greektown, but I’ve never been able to remember the name of the place. Start to finish, appetizer to desert, it was one of the three best restaurant experiences of my life. I was in town to see RL Burnside play at the House of Blues, so we were getting properly prepped for a concert. Probably why I can’t remember the name of the place, even though it holds a special place in my heart. RL had a heart attack and canceled the show. Luckily his opening act, T-Model Ford, was willing to play the whole show. He drank a bottle of whiskey on stage. Later, he pulled a gun and got arrested. On stage. That’s when the concert ended. Great night.

@bimmy-lee Added an edit to the previous comment, so you can judge for yourself, if it looks Irish enough.
The Irish that visit here certainly seem to think so...

Maybe the American way of making wanting to make almost everything big and fancy is kinda what clashes with the idea of a real Irish pub, which is supposed to have narrow pathways, and have a cozy, almost homey atmosphere.

@ThanosReXXX - Good lord, 0.3 miles from the Van Gogh museum?!? I propose an Irish breakfast at Aran overlooking the famous canals and all the bicycle commuters, followed by a brisk walk to the Van Gogh museum, followed by a leisurely stroll back to Aran’s (with stops along the way) to finish out a strong day.

I’ve definitely been into some Mericanized Irish Pubs that are basically just our bars with Guinness beer mirrors, but I would say most of them strive to present what we perceive to be authenticity so as not to become a known fake. In my experience, the best representations are in big cities in the NEC.

To my knowledge, most if not all of my ancestry is German. There are some distant cousins on my paternal side that still live there. There are definitely plenty of family recipes in the meat and dessert department.

Sooo...I properly tried out Mega Man X this evening. The opening stage and Chill Penguin weren't bad, but now I'm attempting the Spark Mandrill stage. I'd love nothing more than to enter the game right now and rip this bubbly spike ball thing a new one. 🤬😤

I legit think that I'd rather replay Super Castlevania IV right now instead.

@bimmy-lee I think the actual Cheers bar was a good lookalike for an Irish pub, and I suppose a lot of the speak-easy's, who were always small and secreted away, would also make for really good Irish pubs.

Some of them might even be remodeled as such, come to think of it.

@Tyranexx My, my...
What with all the German ancestry in here, I'd almost start to wonder if we really did win the war...

@ThanosReXXX - Yeah, communal is key. Unlike American bars where we arrive with everyone we’ve known forever, look sternly at everyone we don’t know, require space, and leave with the same enrichment with which we came.

@Tyranexx - I feel you sister. I’ve been Glass Joe to Dr. Wily since 1987.

planning chinese buffet trip soon.
beatings shall be born.

@ogo79 - Shotgun!

@ThanosReXXX It DOES make one wonder, doesn't it? None of my living family was born there though. The closest one that I know of was my great-grandmother, and she was a toddler when she sailed over here. We're still talking late 1800's; grandma was the youngest kid, and the dear lady just turned 91 last month.

@bimmy-lee I think I much prefer the Mega Man Battle Network games. The genre for that series is more to my tastes. I finally got past that thing and beat the stage, but yeesh; the Mandrill himself didn't take nearly as long. If only X could shoot vertically....

By far my favorite thing about MMX right now is the music.

@ogo79 I lay claim to all sushi at the buffet.

@bimmy-lee nice, like I said you really can't go wrong with a Greek restaurant in Greek town. Its like getting gas, it's all the same, just prices are different. Love house of blues. So much to do in that area around it too.

@Tyranexx Yeah, it's the same for my family: no living person directly tied to Germany, but we do seem to have family there, with the same last name, but we never met them. From what I've understood, ancestors from the Netherlands and Germany went to the States somewhere in the 1800's, and then some went back to Europe again. And in the 1950's, some of my direct family went back to the States again.

Back to work, and 45 minutes in there's issues. Amerigroup is getting BlueCross information crossed into their remittance files. They got chocolate in my peanut butter and I don't like it!! Time to pull up Notepad++ and deconstruct like a Decepticon.

@HobbitGamer Ha! Notepad++! Don't leave home without it. In fact, I also use it at home. Editing/adding subtitles and such. Nifty little program.

I never used Notepad before working in digital publishing, and I haven’t used it since; but I wore that program out while converting printed text into HTML digital documents. Those felt like long days. I usually needed a mid morning and afternoon espresso to stay awake/keep my eyes from crossing.

@bimmy-lee Always hard to tell if someone's ancestry was Dutch or German here depending on what era they arrived. In the 1600s & 1700s, most Germans were called Dutch by the prominent English here, because when you don't speak a word of the language "Deutch" sounds a lot like "Dutch"

@rjejr That post right there is why you're my hero! Still, planes and airports remain the worst. Planes themselves have the unique problem of recycled air, low air pressure, and a sense of entrapment that drives people extra crazy, additional airborne sickenss, and the problem of weather delays and such that wouldn't exist on a train (trains can barrel through snow and ice no problem. Electric trains can always get a diesel to pull it in an outage.) No de-icing delays, wind-shear delays, sitting on tarmacs for hours, etc. Planes aren't the dream they were sold to be in the 60's no matter how much a gazillion dollar industry they turned it into. They have unique problems. Airports vs train stations...well...the one big difference there is airports are far and few between. You have to land the thing and take it up again and you need x space to locate them, so everyone funnels like sardines into one awful place, where they have ONE door into the vehicle, and mammoth restrictions on what can be taken aboard etc. A ton of those issues are alleviated by train. More stations, larger stations with more loading platforms (yet taking LESS real estate without the need for runways, taxiways, parking, terminal ramps, etc.), with more luggage and less restrictions, no luggage sorting center nightmares (no cargo hold, you board the train, they stow it, in front of you, under the car compartments.), etc. Plains are simply unrealistic based on a half century old model that, essentially, only VIPs need to travel from point to point, and the rest of the population doesn't touch it. There's too many people trying to use what's essentially premium space for limited use. It's not functional at all. But everyone ignores it because there's no alternative. Look at NY Penn...not the current one that looks like a Vaultec experiment. The real original one before the build the Garden over it. Compare that to JFK......

Trains can also go right THROUGH cities without needing to land 15mi outside it (which, ironically, currently, the airport needs a train station to function in most cases............. even air travel is already rail dependent.)

"I'm saying there is no answer, no point in looking for one."

Can't argue much with that. I really do need to work on becoming a hermit. The less I have to deal with the world, the better.

@Link-Hero I think the main problem is that I'm still pretty early in the game and don't have a lot of upgrades yet. Spark Mandrill was only my second stage. The Mandrill himself wasn't the main issue. XD Thanks for the warning about not shooting the ice buster immediately, but it didn't take me long to pick up on that.

The enemy I was struggling with was that stage's miniboss. Part of the problem was that I stumbled across the fight at half health. I memorized the basic pattern, but it was a varied one. I looked up the fight after the fact and found that an upgrade i didn't have yet would have made things easier.

I'm sticking with it for now. I admittedly don't have a ton of experience with classic Mega Man besides the second game on the NES...and I had to abuse restore points (on 3DS) for that one even more than here.

@ThanosReXXX Some of my relatives have met the living branch on that side of the family (the paternal side of the same grandma mentioned above), but that meeting was several years ago. From what I understand, things went very well. Last I knew, they still even owned the family bell foundry over there.

There's also another distant offshoot of that same family that lives out in Washington state, but I don't believe I've met any of them at all. That connection was rediscovered in the 80s I think.

Stupid Limeys...
If I weren't part German as well, then the Dutch part of me would have been highly offended.

Yeah, of course. Why don't you? Might even enable you to free up even more time, to dedicate to listening to hard drives...

On the topic of trains, and something that ties in nicely with that video that I posted earlier, there's going to be a special news item on one of the commercial channels over here, that is going to detail the how, what, and why of the lack of high speed trains in the United States. As my mentor used to say: there's no such thing as coincidence. I'm definitely going to watch it, and perhaps it'll give an even better understanding of the problems and/or hurdles involved in realizing something like that over there.

I'll report back with my findings, provided I actually learn something new from it...

@Tyranexx Back in 2000, we were actually invited to come to Germany, for a reunion with all the original and added family members, so it would have been a nice opportunity to meet new people, and learn about our origins, but unfortunately, neither my parent's, nor my sister's or my own agenda allowed for the space and time to participate, sadly enough, so now that ship has sailed for good...

@ThanosReXXX Sure, I'm interested to hear what the show has on it. The video from the other day was unfortunately propaganda-ish, which is our big problem here. Even good ideas tend to be pushed from some sort of ideological angle that turns everyone off. And usually, of course favors special interests one way or another. OTOH they talk about the probem with boring and tunneling. That didn't stop the purely for-profit railroads in the 19th & 20th centuries. And they made BUCKETLOADS of cash. They were the GoogAzon of their day. All other business depended on them and they manipulated their prices to match, as unmovable monopolies per location.

That's a big part of why our rails were allowed to collapse. During the war the government ran the rails into the ground, literally...running excess trains, heavy industrial loads (tanks etc) over them....then never reimbursing the railroads. The rails were SHOT all at once by 1949. Meanwhile the rise of cars in the 50's put passenger rail in a hole. Too expensive to maintain, too little revenue, and inability to raise ticket prices, and the govt prevented elimination of unprofitable stops. The RRs wanted out of the passenger business. The money was in freight (still is.) Freight subsidized passenger by that point. But the real killer was the double whammie of union gouging at the height of union power, and the govt taxing RRs to fund the highway program. They actually mandated the RRs pay their own competitor to bankrupt them. The MoTown lobby helped push that through. But....the RRs made their own bed. It worked because the public didn't care...the public HATED the RR corps.....business HATED the RR corps for a century of gouging and manipulating pricing and business. So nobody actually cared they were being sent to bankruptcy. And then the PRR and NYC had their ill fated merger into PC....the world's first "too big to fail." There's some fun videos, I'll have to find one, of PC making these sad moneyhatting videos. I mean really sad. Railbed was mud, trains overturned all the time even at 10mph speed restrictions. The govt ignored their warnings (it was like GoogAzon going to congress saying "we're almost out of money, please bail us out!" Who would listen?") Then one day everyone woke up and the trains were gone. Parked where they left them. The company folded overnight. From there, Conrail, Amtrak, and the freight consolidation happened (up your way, Union Pacific never skipped a beat, though...they're still going strong.) But in the East, rail literally collapsed entirely overnight in the 70s and it's been a slow rebuild since.

I remember those old PC tracks and equipment. Imagine riding in a red wagon on a gravel road. Only slower. And bumpier. And the whole thing would precariously lean to the side while vibrating badly...... It was like that for decades until Amtrak rebuilt the rails. It's nice stuff now, but you don't forget those memories... Usually the "I'm gonna' die!" feeling is left for airplanes in turbulance, of about .09 seconds of a high speed train as it flies off the track. Only PC track can leave that magical "I'm gonna' die" feeling while going all of 10MPH.