Was that guy named Emmanuel Macron? He met his wife when he was 15 and she was 39. He was in a class with her daughter.

I can’t remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn’t.

They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.

I think that’s being unreasonably generous to the French. Their military was staffed with elderly officers, and they had very poor communications. They didn’t use radio very much and telephones were often cut, so they had to rely on motorcycle riders.

Also, for some reason they refuse to believe that the Germans would advance through the Ardennes, as they had the previous two times they invaded France.

Their army then essentially gave up, and they agreed to set up Vichy France, a collaborationist state that was very efficient at rounding up and deporting Jews to the gas chambers.

The French also refused to hand their Mediterranean fleet over to the British at Mers-el-Kébir, so the British sunk it rather than risk allowing the ships to be used by the Germans.

I also have RockSmith and a bass guitar. However, for 3 years I have been playing in local groups (the last year has been a community open mic where up to a dozen musicians sit around and strum together) and having a lot of fun. The thing is that these are almost all elderly people, self-taught, so they are not trying to become rock stars, just to enjoy playing music together. Playing music I have never heard before has been very good for developing my ear.

I go through periods of playing RockSmith a lot, and then not playing it at all for several months. Discovering user-created tracks that can be added as DLC has been fantastic.

Well, not terribly subtle, but if you are fighting with your spouse and they complain that you never say anything nice about their family, you can respond with:

“Well, I have to say that your in-laws are better than my in-laws”

I wonder if there are some people on the American right who actually see it as a kind of Darwinian cleansing of their society.

They want to get rid of the week, the elderly, and the stupid, and this is a way for those people to self-select for extermination.

Of course there will be some collateral damage, but those who know better can protect themselves. You think that Trump and those around him don’t have every vaccination that you’ve ever heard of, and probably some that you haven’t?

I hadn’t thought about it, but those may have been the first books I absolutely adored.

After that, I got into Perry Rhodan, a German science fiction serial that has been published weekly since 1961 (yes, they are past issue #3,300 now).

They translated about 140 into English, and I had every one, hunting through used book shope to complete my collection.

I have gone back to read some, and at least the early ones really were abysmal in writing, plotting and early 1960s prejudices. At the time, the scope of the space opera – and the fact that there were so many of them – thrilled me.

Other people are way ahead of you:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romana_Didulo

Steven Donaldson had his first Thomas Covenant novel rejected by 27 publishers before it was finally bought.

I suppose you could add entries for those right-wing websites into the “hosts” file, redirecting them to Google or some other relatively innocuous place.

The blurb for the VIP section says:

The windows are slightly tinted to enhance your privacy and create a more intimate atmosphere for you and your party.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that they were inviting people to have sex as they go around.

Rome was sacked repeatedly by foreign barbarians. Given the geography, I figure that is either going to be Canada or Mexico.

A young woman I knew was complaining that she had made plans to meet a friend in the city (long before most people had mobile phones), but the friend hadn’t showed up so she waited for a long time on the street corner.

My brother immediately chipped in, “what was his name, John?”

Coincidentally, I speak English, French and Japanese, and am learning Spanish (and I learned German and Sesotho in the distant past). I cheated, however all except Spanish were learned at least partially by immersion in places where they speak it.

And then she has no way to call him…

I recently learned that leaded gas is still used for aviation. Some small planes like Cessnas can be 80 years old and still flying, but do not have engines that are certified to run on leaded gas. So they have leaded.

There’s also a difference, because our elections typically have only a few races on them. In other words, at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing. Typically four to six options.

In a us election, there can be a ballot containing choices for many different levels, including judges, district attorneys, and so on. Not to mention they might have several referenda on the same ballot too.

I could see that being much more complex on paper, making electronic voting attractive.

I have started using Tux Guitar. It’s an open source version of Guitar Pro, and can read Guitar Pro files.

I second this. It also teaches without using rote memorization. Better than any other books or videos I have ever seen. I have been supporting LT with a monthly donation for several years now.