Category: facebook

I am currently reading Virgil Elliott, and he uses an interesting grammatical construction in the text – “without our having to tax our brains too much”. I can’t find any explanations online about why it’s our having instead of us having.

I haven’t found out why one is preferable over the other, but why it’s such a complicated construction – I’ve figured it out. Here, having to, of course, comes from “have to”, which translates into Russian as being forced, must, have to. From this “being forced,” a gerund is formed, which doesn’t exist in Russian, creating something akin to “necessity.” So, the translation becomes “without the necessity to overly tax our brains.” Thus, our is optional. It can be removed entirely.

Also, there is an interesting verb in the screenshot: amount to

The U.S. Marine Corps is calling our figure skater Masha to join them with this kind of spam. Looks decent. I’m also attaching some emails regarding luring souls by the U.S. Army. In general, for many, this is not a bad springboard. Plus, they offer citizenship through an accelerated process (not relevant for us).

It turns out that “nightmare” and “cauchmar” (French for nightmare) share the same root, mare, which refers to a demon or ghost that presses on the chest during sleep and causes a feeling of suffocation.

This specifically causes a phenomenon that is now medically referred to as sleep paralysis. It is believed that 7.5% of people have experienced it at least once in their life, and among psychiatric hospital patients, the percentage is five times higher.

Passed by today. Looks like “oh, the Germantown domain is taken. Register Jermantown!”

I needed to buy some brushes for oil painting, and it turned out to be not so trivial. I need several brushes of different sizes made from hog bristle, flat or slightly rounded (flat & filbert), with bristles about one to one and a half centimeters wide, plus or minus, and a long handle. This is not something special; in fact, it’s the go-to choice for artists. Around my home, there are three stores that traditionally fall into the art supplies category – Hobby Lobby, Michaels, JOANN, each the size of at least three gyms, and each has a wall of brushes. Of course, none of the three ever had or has these particular brushes. There are a lot of “substitutes, identical to natural.” I’m now driving to the nearest proper store where everything is available, 50 km from home, and it’s very small—packed tightly from floor to ceiling with good artist supplies. There are decent online stores, yes. The last time I ordered from rosemary&co, but it’s British and the shipping to the USA takes long. However, they have a very good selection and high quality.

Moreover, these brushes are also expensive. The price of what I’m looking for ranges from $20 to $30 depending on the size. You would think, what’s there, pig hair and a wooden handle.

My favorite music for work, which apparently none of my acquaintances understand 🙂 Canto Ostinato by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt is an hour and a half of very strange music

: It consists of small musical phrases over a static rhythm, repeated many times, gradually evolving and developing. This change is often slow, but steady. That is, it is like putting an extremely slow melody on top of a rhythm. Such repetitions create a kind of hypnotic effect, probably immersing some in a meditative state.

Photo hunt. There she was, crossing the highway, and we turned towards the church where the buses also sleep.

What a cute kitty we have!

(Wakes up, yawns, stretches)

I’m not sure if it was ’21 or ’20, give or take. The moustached ones. In the dorm of the radio academy. I slept on the lower bunk of a bunk bed on the left, with a computer behind me used for work (I was doing layout in PageMaker). Next to me were Roma and Svyatoslav, with whom I shared this room.

Decided to check if pagers are still alive. Alive and kicking!

The same protocols and hardware as 40-50 years ago. And plenty of service providers! For instance, in the USA there are Spok and American Messaging, Metrotel, Pages Direct, Pager99, MySecretaryUSA, DirectPage. For strictly local use, one could of course set up their own transmitter and send messages, say locally to hospital staff, factory workers, or use a service provider if you are in a coverage area. All major cities and their surroundings are covered.

Pagers are sold on Amazon for 150 bucks. Annually, the cost ranges from 100 to 500 dollars depending on the provider.

Surprised, but it actually makes sense. There is a market.