My parents ran a liquor store in the poor part of town in the '70s. They always left the cash register open after closing. One of their friends scoffed before he opened his own small business on the edge of town and said he would always lock his. A month later he walked into my parent's shop bitching about how some redneck meth addicts tore apart his empty many-thousands-of-dollars cash register apart.

The trick, of course, is to be in the right era AND the right league. I got the first one. The second one? Not so much.

Not for high-rise apartments/dorm rooms. SOURCE: Lived in same on and off for ~ 20 years. The dorm only got water up to the 3rd floor via gravity (that's where the toilets started to flush properly. Above that level they all turned into way-way-way-too shallow porta potties). Much later, neither of the high-rise apartments I lived in got water if the power went out. Or, at least, not for very long.

I've got a library of ~ 300 books on my first floor, a collection I started ~ 1986. It pretty much dominates that room. If I hadn't switched to a Kindle ~ 8 years ago that count would've more than doubled by now. I'd probably be sleeping on them and in a different place because I'm pretty sure my wife would've divorced me. :)

I looked forward to floppy paperbacks for much the same reason I switched to a Kindle: ease of handling. Reading at lunch time has been a habit of mine since high school, and it was such a hassle trying to keep everything balanced/not snapping shut/out of the ketchup with one hand while trying to eat with the other. I'd put a floppy book down on the table and it... just stayed there! So nice!

Show me you've not properly understood the Simon-Ehrlich wager without saying it out loud.

Tell me you don't understand basic economics without saying you don't understand basic economics.

You and me both!

True story: my brother and I were rural latchkey kids, left alone for hours in an (for then) advanced house. I got bored one day, I think I was twelve, my brother was ten. We had this kind of switch for our thermostat, but it was in the cover. I'd pried that thing free months before my bright idea.

I thought the giant jiggling lump of mercury was fun to watch as it went back and forth. I didn't know what a bimetallic spring was, but I did know if I touched one side of the spring it made the whole thing twist in an interesting way and the mercury ball slid back and forth.

Here's where it gets fun: we were one of the first families on the block with a microwave oven. We were alone. My brother was bored and driving me bonkers.

"I know!" I said. "Let's put this spring thing with the mercury switch in the microwave!"

Oh yes I did. I didn't count on all the sparks. A half second after I turned it off I yanked it out and that spring was wound TIGHT. Physics probably saved me from mercury poisoning that day.

There's a reason why women live longer.

That is emphatically NOT a stock GTO. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Koine Greek was by definition the language of commoners, i.e. peasants. In that era, Classic Greek still held sway as the language of learning.

So are we talking before or after I see the spider?

The thing is, at first they didn't bother trying not to kill each other. The earliest tournies were just a bunch of bored knights gathering on either side of a field and then going at it. Blunted swords were an innovation! In a weird way it was like auto racing. At first nobody gave a sh- about safety. Then people realized it was a way to make money, and they started making it safer. And each step was a real innovation. They had to think up blunting lances, making them frangible, if you're never getting off the horse make that armor as thick as you can, and so on.

Probably staged, but...

About ten years ago I went nuts and dove deeply into RC helicopters*. This meant I spent an unusually large amount of time staring at the sky. Probably 3 out of 4 times I went out to practice I'd see a brace of balloons float by. And back then I was going out at least once a day on week days and a couple of times a day on the weekends. It was weird.

So, yeah, probably staged. But there's a definitely a chance they got blown in there.

----

*For about two years, then I switched to writing. Changing one form of mental illness for another is a habit.

So many anime backgrounds are explained by this.

^(I'll show myself out.)

My daughter was just the right age to play Madagascar into the ground when she got a copy for Christmas. I legit thought they'd made the (what I thought was spelled) foosa up, or it was some weird name for a hyena I didn't know. It took ten years before I discovered these things were real.

Entered my 20s in the 80s. Grew up in tiny Southern town (pop 6400.) Not enough people to do all of the '80s things.

It's the suspicious stoned vampire car!