sundries

[rm]

Patty is home, and it's been super New York-y already: the other people in Terminal 8 were so excited to see their loved-ones they were blocking folks from getting out; the cab said his credit card thing was broken; the sound of the heating pipes woke us up; and there was some seriously creepy bird action this morning. Thumbs up.

Zuckerberg is Time's person of the year. How pissed do you think Assange is?

Meanwhile, the US Air Force has blocked access to news sites that have published the leaks. can someone explain this to me? Is it anything other than "these secret things aren't secret anymore, but we're going to pretend they are, even if it means you're working from a deficit of what is now common information?"

Someone is stealing New York's junked appliances.

On splitting the check. I understand the complaint. I don't understand why it's necessary. I've almost NEVER run into this, though. We all figure out what we owe, chuck it in, and since I've been over the age of about 25, we've usually had too much money, not too little.

A bill has been introduced in California to add historical contributions of LGBT people to school textbooks. A similar legislation passed four years ago, but was vetoed by the governor.

The academics I know keep posting this, but I still love it every time I see it: The Snake Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defense.

Comments

[amberite.livejournal.com]

I wonder if our relative lack of trouble with the check thing (both over here and in rm's vicinity) is because being a creative type in a social circle of creative types means that many of your compatriots have at least a passing familiarity with the service industry.

I always find there's a correlation between degree of proximity to the service industry (actively work in > once worked in > know someone who does > know someone who has, and this includes sex industry as well as waiters: they're all tip-reliant professions) and understanding of how to actually pay tips, etc.

In California, and in DC, I have seen the "let's just split it evenly" thing more often than in Portland, presumably because people generally have more spare cash. I also saw my gaming crowd split the bill evenly in restaurants during the dot com boom (and had to annoy people by opting out, since I didn't have a dot com boom job) and then start doing that less during the crash.