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Madelaine McMasters

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Everything posted by Madelaine McMasters

  1. Madelaine McMasters
    Timely quoting should make that evident, and we all know how to do that.
  2. Madelaine McMasters
    Until getting my SUV a couple years ago, I'd never owned a car with an automatic transmission. I'm wishing I'd never got it, both because it was designed by German idiots and because I can no longer claim to never have owned a car with an automatic transmission. My future vehicles will be electric. I'll miss rowing gears.
  3. Madelaine McMasters
    Remember that the next time you see me.
  4. Madelaine McMasters
    It's a deception, Cali. That little troublemaker grew up to be a voracious landscape muncher and path-light destroyer. Over the last decade, the destruction they've caused has (I'm not kidding) exceeded the cost of my Miata. It looks like the only workable solution to my problem is to abandon nearly a half mile of beautiful illuminated forest pathways. My neighbor's dog has been chased into the house twice now, by deer that have jumped their backyard fence and attacked it. Here's a recent little rascal, possibly a great grandchild of that earlier hellraiser...
  5. Madelaine McMasters
    "Your World, Your Imagination" does require imagination, ya know.
  6. Madelaine McMasters
    Happy...
  7. Madelaine McMasters
    K
  8. Madelaine McMasters
  9. Madelaine McMasters
  10. Madelaine McMasters
    I'm gonna get more than lewd comments once they see what I did to the camel to get his toe...
  11. Madelaine McMasters
    They absolutely exist! I might still be the High Priestess of one, though I was not a member of it. To paraphrase Groucho, I refuse to join any club that would have me as a leader.
  12. Madelaine McMasters
    Misogyny is alive and well in Italy, from business to religion. Whether it's men degrading women or other men, testosterone seems involved. I think it's something like "machismo". When I was in grad school, my apartment was across the street from an all female dormitory serving the local area. On summer evenings, the street would fill with muscle cars driven by young men who'd yell the most degrading things up to the open windows. The girls would flock down to the street and drape themselves across the cars. I'll never understand it. Surely estrogen is a culprit, too.
  13. Madelaine McMasters
    I think a lot of racist/misogynist/wrong-headed advertising flies under the radar because it targets a receptive audienΩe, away from the mainstream. Now and then someone misses the target and gets called out. I don't imagine we here would much care for the advertising of Daniel Defense, but this would get rave reviews in the bars up north...
  14. Madelaine McMasters
    Know your audience?. There are plenty of people who'll high five racism and misogyny. Dolce and Gabbana torched their Chinese market a couple years ago with a stupid ad, and it became pretty clear the CEO felt no contrition. My ex-hubby is a marketing VP for a large bank. He's forever amazed by the stupidity of people in the markcom business and agrees with me that testosterone is often involved.
  15. Madelaine McMasters
    Not parody. Though I can't recall any specific examples, my emergency backup kid has mentioned what I'll call "backlash" advertising in the bars of northern Wisconsin. I imagine the Boomingdale's ad might play well "up-nort", if it were for a gun company.
  16. Madelaine McMasters
    I have a bucket full of magnetite I scavenged off the beach when I was a kid. If I put a rare earth magnet (scavenged from a hard drive) in my mouth and press it to my cheek with my tongue, the magnetite will stick to my skin. My ex-hubby rolled his eyes when I gave the demonstration. I thought I had potential as a bearded lady.
  17. Madelaine McMasters
    Though it was a bit of a dud, we did make thermite with aluminum powder from an Etch-A-Sketch and some magnetite obtained from the beach.
  18. Madelaine McMasters
    I have a new kayak. I might need a new kite!
  19. Madelaine McMasters
    Or write self modifying/writing code.
  20. Madelaine McMasters
    Man-lifting kites have been around forever... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-lifting_kite We routinely sent things aloft on the kite string (not on the kite, that degrades stability). At summer parties or public kite festivals, we'd do candy or teddy bear drops... Eventually, we started lofting cameras... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_aerial_photography We lost that 21 foot delta into the lake long ago, but I still have my 14, a few soft kites used for camera lifting, and several two and four line stunt kites. A few years ago, I watched a young man riding on a little "buggy" being pulled around by a four line power kite. That looked like great fun. When the winds were right, I used small kites to pull my bicycle down the road. Pedaling back was a challenge, as it was both difficult and prone to send the kite looping.
  21. Madelaine McMasters
    As the 70s child of an engineer, I was taught to make my own toys. Dad taught me woodworking and mechanics, mom taught sewing and welding. The earliest of our dangerous toys were kites. We made a 21 foot delta that could lift me off the ground. We'd tether it to the tractor's winch and send it up into stable winds. Then I'd "walk" up the line, hand over hand, until my feet left the ground. Mom had words with Dad after coming outside to find me sitting on a swing seat he'd fastened to the line, placing me at about his head height. I'll never forgive her for stopping him from sending me higher. Once I'd grown too heavy for the kite, we switched to trebuchets. The first was a pea-shooter I happily aimed at mom (payback!). The last was 16 feet tall and could hurl tomatoes over the tree line and onto the roof of my emergency backup mom's house. It was built specifically to discourage her from overwhelming us with tomatoes at the end of the growing season. It didn't work. She was the ultimate in stubborn Germans.
  22. Madelaine McMasters
    Dad was a city kid, raised by his grandfather, a civil engineer who worked in the field. They showered every other day or so. Weather permitting, they'd take soapy dips in the Mississippi or showers in the rain. During his early years in the submarine service, Dad showered no more often than every other day and, if there was an evaporator malfunction, considerably less often than that. Mom was a farm girl, one of fourteen kids. Though she got dirtier than dad, there was more competition for the scarce hot water. During summer, she lathered up and rinsed off in the cow shower. The barn had better plumbing than the farmhouse. She probably got one hot bath per week until her teens, when the house was significantly upgraded. She was thrilled to move to Milwaukee where the apartment she shared with two sisters had hot running water for showers. It was rare to find her soaking in a tub after that. When I was little, I took hot showers twice/week unless I got really dirty or sweaty. The acoustics of the shower in the master bathroom are fabulous, so it was a great place to sing, or practice voices for our puppet theater. I think I spent more time using the bathtub for experiments than for bathing. It was the test bed for the floaty things I made in my various attempts to build something that would float across the lake to Michigan. My ex-hubby is a daily showerer, so during our marriage, I was too. If the shower was already warm and wet, I might as well jump in it. That took a toll on my hair. (Yes, I know about conditioner, but I'm lazy.) Now that I'm on my own again, I'm back to twice a week (Tues/Fri) unless I need more, usually during summer. By the end of July, I'll be taking soapy dips in Lake Michigan and rinsing off in the yard, just because I can. I remodeled my master bathroom nearly two years ago replacing the old tub with a heated whirlpool. I've been in it only once, to test for leaks.
  23. Madelaine McMasters
    And the matching drapes!
  24. Madelaine McMasters
    This one's for @Ceka Cianci...
  25. Madelaine McMasters
    Only the Zevia. I can't drink that stuff.
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