Also patrollers which became paterollers or pattyrollers. There is an old time banjo tune called paterollers that carries the sense of being chased. It’s typically played in sawmill tuning which always casts a sad quality. The faster you play it the better it sounds.

https://youtu.be/tYa6Z5Jam2g

Edited because it keeps autocorrecting 😡

Ok. I sort of remember class rings but in these parts you got them at graduation. No graduation, no ring.

In my jurisdiction that is exactly how they do it. No field sobriety test is used. Just roll down the window and blow. Refusal is the same penalty as a DUI and will earn a trip to the police station for the real test.

Clearly you have never met stupid people. Lucky you.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound stupid, but what is the ring for? Like a purity ring? Class ring?

I would watch a longer version of this. Very cool.

I knew someone who lived in the same block as a well known motorcycle appreciation society. It was an incredibly clean and safe area. And the local dive bar was fun without a hint of shadiness or trouble. They did not shit where they ate.

It’s all surprising to me. I did not know there were formals at that age. I thought they were a grad thing.

New Nancy is not best Nancy.

Is Year 10 the same as Grade 10?

No. It was a novel from the 1960s maybe. There was a government department of telepathic planning or something. That scene was where a character was getting a tour of the recruitment facility.

Eta it might be The Demolished Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolished_Man

Typical male friendship.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature. There are a lot of albums of his I’d consider unlistenable. I don’t think he cares what I think. He doesn’t care what the Nobel committee thinks either since he didn’t show up.

The one thing they do is skewer pomp and pretension. They are the guys at a dinner party who say “everybody poops so why can’t we talk about it?” Or will ask the minister about his sex life if he asks about their relationship to God.

It can be genuinely stupid and annoying sometimes because it’s a blunt instrument. They assume that everything is fine and that anyone passionate about a cause is a misguided idiot.

Because they enjoy doing it. Look at the number of musical performers who keep going long after their cultural moment has passed. Hell I know people who keep playing and writing and painting even though no has ever paid attention.

And we still have delivery people. The function has never gone away.

I used to work construction and I learned that environments that keep hands busy and minds idle have a huge capacity to turn toxic. I think the lector provided entertainment and gave people something to talk about other than each other.

That was part of a plot of a science fiction story that I can’t quite remember. The government was screening for psychics for a special branch. The applicants would show up and wait in a room with a psychic blasting “go through the small door”.

Straight clickbait. My first thought before I clicked through was “I better not see knocker-upper in there…”. It was job number 1. No one thought these jobs were irreplaceable, many of them are just tasks in a larger process or the function still exists in a different context.

It’s all based on inclusion and exclusion criteria in the epidemiology. Change the study cohort and you change the result. The data hasn’t changed over time, the study cohort has. Like I said it is really complicated.