Just...................whatever [5]

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/redhead-banned-from-school-for-being-too-ginger/story-fnq2oad4-1227306655004

bungobaggins wrote:http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/redhead-banned-from-school-for-being-too-ginger/story-fnq2oad4-1227306655004

That is just sad , teachers in the UK are oddly over zealous when it comes to haircuts.

malickfan wrote:

bungobaggins wrote:http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/redhead-banned-from-school-for-being-too-ginger/story-fnq2oad4-1227306655004

That is just sad   , teachers in the UK are oddly over zealous when it comes to haircuts.

A 17-year-old, who was about to sit her senior exams, has been banned from school because her hair is too ginger.

Emily Reay has naturally auburn hair, and toldThe Mirror she has had the same colour for three years.

But after returning from the Easter school holiday break, teachers at Trinity School in Carlisle, UK, banned her from attending classes again until she had a “more appropriate” hair colour.

Probably not fair, but after what's been going on in the Who thread recently, I can kinda see the teacher's point!

does anybody know what ducks eat? and if you buy them as ducklings can they be released into the wild or do you have to feed them? there is a good reason I am asking because there is a chance I will buy some next week and release them near a local pond. I have already released some Guineafowl, but they seem to be able to survive on their own being semi wild animals to begin with. But Ducks I am not sure about and I don't want to be unnecessarily cruel if they will just starve to death, but I guess its better then being stuck in a hutch and then eaten. I wouldn't release exotic birds though because the effect on the ecosystem would be dodgy.

The interweb seems to think they are kinda like pigs that root around and eat nearly anything. But I can understand not being sure if ducklings know how to do that.

these don't have feathers yet, dunno whether they could survive alone.

I was buying flowers for my parents today as it is their 30th wedding anniversary. Which is nice, but it also had me feeling a bit sorry not to have anyone to buy flowers for.

Ah, well..

Such things are nice, but also a trade-off (see description of significant others I sent to Norc. Oh hell, not sure what thread it's in and you never know in this damn place.).

Anyway, I think these things just happen, and usually not by trying. Just stay out there and enjoy the incomparable freedom of being single until it does. I did most of my life, and sort of still am. Not sure what exactly it is that's going on with me now (from what I understand, half of married men don't either); just stick around and eventually the unexpected will catch you.

From Newsweek - makes me think of Dave's disappearances.


Homeless Millennials Are Transforming Hobo Culture
BY BETSY ISAACSON 4/19/15

The vagabond ecosystem is changing thanks to cellphones, Wi-Fi, Craigslist and Google Maps.

On Reddit, he’s /u/huckstah, an administrator on /r/vagabond, a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members—many of them identify as “homeless”—who trade skills and stories. On “the road and the rails,” he’s Huck, and even after we speak twice by cellphone, he tells me he’d prefer I don’t print his real name. “People say, ‘Well, you chose to become homeless.’ But that’s wrong,” he says. Huck says he’s been a hobo for upward of 11 years and started hopping trains and hitching rides at 18. “I did not choose to become homeless. If you want to say I chose to become homeless and sleep on the streets, really all I have to say is fuck you. You’ve never experienced it.”

Or maybe you have experienced it, thanks to the recent Great Recession that caused a spike in homelessness—especially for families—with its tidal wave of foreclosures. And if you have, there’s a good chance you were probably one of the many homeless with a mobile device, a sight that has become increasingly common. The ubiquity of cheap phones and even cheaper data has prompted even longtime homeless to join the growing ranks of people with a cell connection but no house. “The day I started on the road, I had a flip phone, an iPod, a TomTom GPS, an atlas, a laptop, and free Wi-Fi wasn't very easy to find,” says a medic who’s been a hobo for four years and asks me to identify him as “Nuke.” (“I have a pretty decent amount of training and experience in treating combat trauma.”) He now lives out of a ’91 Ford pickup and says, “I have a smartphone, a laptop, and free Wi-Fi is everywhere.”

The rise of the mobile Internet has made a hobo’s life easier, Nuke says. But when I ask Huck about how he and fellow travelers use their smartphones, I get the sense that even for the digitally connected homeless, life is far from easy. “I keep my phone off a lot, or in airplane mode,” he says, “because we can only charge up for a short time—maybe once a day, or sometimes it will be two to three days between charges, maybe an hour of charge.” For Huck and his fellow itinerants, smartphone usage is measured in instants. “We check Google Maps and then we turn it off, or we make a quick phone call and then we turn it off.”

That’s a pity because a smartphone can be even more useful for a homeless person than it is for those with a regular roof over their heads. Case in point: Smartphones provide on-the-go weather forecasts, convenient for an everyday life but essential for a homeless one. “You have to keep an eye on the weather when you're living outside,” says Mike Quain, a 22-year-old busker and percussionist. “If it's too cold somewhere, we'll get south any way we can. And no one likes to be surprised by rain. Rain isn't nearly as fun when you don't have a dry place to go.”

Piecemeal job-hunting sites like Craigslist are also required browsing if you’re trying to make a living with no permanent place to call home. “For the past 100 years of this lifestyle in America, we found our jobs by following seasonal schedules and asking around for jobs at farmers' markets and farming supply stores, looking at job ads in newspapers, asking door-to-door,” says Huck, adding that things are done very differently today. “I know thousands of hobos, and I don't know a single one that doesn't use Craigslist. It has completely changed how we find work.”

The uses don’t end there. Quain lists Google Maps, Couchsurfing.org and HitchWiki as “indispensable for vagabonds,” while Nuke is still in awe of his smartphone’s power. “I can fit an entire Radioshack from the ’90s and then some in my pocket now.”

Do a Google search for hobo culture and you’ll find a lot about decline: the death of the working-class itinerant, the fall of the Depression-era drifter who never stopped drifting and the end of the heroic hobo celebrated by the likes of the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa. Vice released a documentary in 2012 called Death of the American Hobo. Those “graybeards,” Nuke will tell you, are on the way out, but there isn’t a dearth of culture left in their wake. Itinerants under the age of 35, he says, are forming their own kind of hobo society, one that overwhelmingly keeps up with technology and the times.

Where there used to be “jungles” and “hobohemias,” now the Internet is the place present-day hobos—many of them millennials—go to connect and build a community. Sites little-known among the safely homed—DumpsterMap.com (a map of dumpsters ripe for diving), WiFiFreeSpot.com (a list of free Wi-Fi hot spots), On-Track-On-Line.com (railroad digital scanner frequencies)—are common resources, says Huck, for the vast majority of the digitally connected homeless community. “Prior to 2005 or so, all of this was simply done word-of-mouth, which is how it was done for over 100 years.”

Huck is developing a new hobo code. In terms of the mythology surrounding the homeless, this is a big deal. Read about the romance of hobo culture and you’ll find tons of talk about hobo symbols: a face on the side of a barn means the building’s safe to sleep in; a caduceus on a doctor’s door means the doctor will treat homeless. But for hobos nowadays, that’s all outdated. Huck is part of a project to revamp the code completely and make it more useful for the digitally connected hobo by creating a new set of symbols for things such as “Wi-Fi networks and free outlets.” When I ask if I can publish any of the symbols, though, Huck balks: When hobo codes become commonly known by regulars, it’s a problem. “The codes are for us,” he says, “and if other people see it, they could have clues to our secrets, and the next thing you know, that outlet that was accessible to hobos is now locked up or completely gone.”

Conventional wisdom says the Internet and mobile technology keep us in our own little bubbles, isolated and insular. And while perhaps that’s true for those with homes, Quain says it’s the opposite for hobos. For the itinerant homeless, traveling in groups makes sense for a bevy of reasons: safety, company and economies of scale, especially when it comes to digital devices. “Lots of us travel in groups and share the expense of one phone,” Quain says.

Luckily for Quain and his ilk, the ubiquity of the Internet is making finding fellow “travelers” easier than ever. The curious can head to SquatThePlanet.com and TravelersHQ.org to find vagabonds forming groups, swapping stories and arranging meetings.

Squatters have also enthusiastically embraced the mobile Internet as a means of sharing knowledge—often as a way to fight for their place amid urban real estate development. Frank Morales is a former priest, former squatter and current activist with C-Squat, a squatter advocacy organization in New York. The group works with New York’s homeless men and women who park themselves in unused, often crumbling buildings and fix up the structures in an attempt to turn them into permanent homes.

To do this successfully, squatters need to learn how to bring amenities like electricity and running water into long-neglected buildings—and that, says Morales, is where the Internet becomes indispensable. Where before these skills needed to be shared in person (often at day-long squatter “skillshares”), now they can be digitally transmitted to anyone with a smartphone.

“Technology has really bridged the gap for a lot people around the world who are struggling for housing,” says Morales. Nowadays, activist movements use mass-texting platforms to coordinate occupations of neglected buildings for squatters to use. They also keep email lists that track what squats are in danger and distribute information about new laws that affect squatting. Activist homeless have used digital connections to form a movement that believes, in Morales’s words, “we have a moral obligation as individuals and as a society to support the occupation of spaces that are deteriorating and would otherwise just be rotting away to create housing.”

While no comprehensive survey of homelessness and mobile ownership has been done in the United States, small surveys provide a glimpse of how the trends have grown. A study by the University of Sydney found that 95 percent of Australia’s homeless own a mobile device, while Keith McInnes of the Boston School of Public Health’s study of homeless veterans in Massachusetts found that 89 percent own at least one device. (In Australia, mobile penetration in the general population is 92 percent; in the U.S., it’s 90.) However, “it’s hard to do truly representative studies of homeless persons,” says McInnes. For example, mentally ill homeless living under bridges, or in the woods, are probably less likely to have a cellphone and “less likely to be included in survey, because they are hard to find.”

But as McInnes points out, those who do possess a cellphone have a tool both for survival—and for restoring their sense of humanity. While settled people are usually able to meet the wider world head-on and feel no shame, homelessness carries with it a pervasive, ugly stigma. “Having a mobile phone provides homeless persons with an outward-facing identity that can mask their homelessness,” explains McInnes. “With a cellphone, people you call or who call you don’t know you’re homeless.”

Some, like Huck, have taken this one step further, using their connectivity to promote their lives without a roof and walls as a source of pride. Near the end of our interview, Huck lets me know that he and several others on /r/vagabond have just been featured on an episode of Upvoted, Reddit’s weekly podcast, where they’re celebrated, not stigmatized.

“I’ve found a way to be homeless without starving or begging or sleeping in ditches,” he says. “I’ve become a professional vagabond, and this is the lifestyle that I love.”

Mrs Figg wrote:these don't have feathers yet, dunno whether they could survive alone.

Shit, I doubt I could even keep things without feathers alive if I had a 100 page guidebook and a whole platter of hand selected food to give them. Would it be possible to buy a pregnant momma duck to take the burden off of you?

From Newsweek - makes me think of Dave's disappearances.


Homeless Millennials Are Transforming Hobo Culture
BY BETSY ISAACSON 4/19/15

Also makes me think of Meiko Electra. I wonder how she's doing?

I have been doing a bit of reading and domestic ducks and geese don't do well in the wild by all accounts, so I have decided to just free the guineafowl because they are semi-wild birds and can quite happily do their own thing. its a shame because those baby ducks are so cute but I wouldn't want to make things worse for them. if being sold to be eaten can be better

halfwise wrote:

From Newsweek - makes me think of Dave's disappearances.


Homeless Millennials Are Transforming Hobo Culture
BY BETSY ISAACSON 4/19/15

Also makes me think of Meiko Electra.   I wonder how she's doing?

I've wondered about Meiko too. I hope her absence here  is just due to lack of interest PJ's last two films. I'd been half-expecting she'd pop in and discuss Beorn's ponies when DoS came out.

That's a good Newsweek article.  
I used to be known as one of the old greybeards on a couple of those forums, and any of you who know me here can probably find my profile on CS.
These days I'm usually traveling with my GF. She's up for a bit of hitchhiking and car camping, but she's not so interested in the down-and-dirty traveler's life. [This is her look: ] Totally worth the compromise though!

Blue, here's my advice for what it's worth: if you feel like giving flowers to somebody, give flowers to EVERYBODY and don't expect anything in return. The pleasure's in the giving, right?  
And the funny thing is, if you lead a generous life with no expectations of return, your chances of meeting an equally generous person seem to improve dramatically.  Again, FWIW. Your results may vary.

if you lead a generous life with no expectations of return, your chances of meeting an equally generous person seem to improve dramatically.- David

Very true. Blue I suggest you try it out immediately by buying rounds for all in the Duck n' Muck

http://www.kare11.com/story/news/local/2015/04/18/300-strangers-attend-girls-birthday-after-mothers-plea/26010091/

How do these announcers always know who is who? I have to squint, then would have to look down at the list of numbers/colors, by which time the orders have changed....I just don't get how they do it!

Just saw a blurb below the title of an article about the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the leading cultural establishments in the world:

"Our competition is Netflix."

And that kinda says it all.

Playing poker and listening to this



Some Tuesday evenings are good

This is the one piece of classical music I never get tired of listening to. I just.....drift...away...

 you should show motorists that picture EVERY TIME THEY GET BEHIND THE WHEEL! and squish one of the poor buggers.