Four ones in a row, that’s Bare Sticks Day!:
Guanggun Jie (Chinese: 光棍节; pinyin: Guānggùn Jié; Wade–Giles: Kuang-kun chieh; literally: “bare sticks holiday”) is a day for people who are single, celebrated on November 11 (11/11). The date is chosen for the connection between singles and the number ‘1’.. In recognition of the day, young singles organize parties and Karaoke to meet new friends or try their fortunes. It has become the largest online shopping day in the world… Although this date is meant to celebrate singlehood, the desire to find a spouse or mate is often expressed by young Chinese on this date, and other love-related issues are discussed by the Chinese media…
Bare branches are young men — many of them singletons carrying all the emotional baggage of two parents and four grandparents — who’ve failed to marry and expand their family tree. Nobody wants to be that guy! Per Kotaku, “Wedding Proposal with 99 iPhones Turned into One Pricey Rejection“:
In case you are wondering, 99 iPhone 6s apparently costs over 500,000 yuan—or about $85,000. That’s a lot of money! That’s a lot of iPhones.
QQ Games (via The Nanfang) reports that a computer programmer in Guangzhou decided to propose to his girlfriend in the middle of an iPhone 6 heart…
The woman, however, apparently said “no,” leaving this fella with a whole bunch of iPhones and a handful of flowers. Don’t feel too bad for him! Reselling the phones shouldn’t be too hard. Then again, this could always be an online retailer’s clever stunt to drum up interest in the iPhone 6 right before Singles Day…
Pics at the link. Apart from being grateful you’re (probably) not under that kind of social pressure, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Mustang Bobby
I will be spending part of the day with my friend Bob — a veteran of Vietnam, by the way — out at the Memory Lane display of the Miami International Auto Show. Our club puts on the display of twenty antiques ranging from a 1917 Buick to a 1970 Chevelle SS 454.
Speaking of cars, my 2007 Mustang got the recall notice for the shrapnel-laden airbags, so before we go out to the Beach I’ll be spending time at the local Ford dealer seeing if they can fit me in.
And to all the veterans here at B-J and everywhere, including my dad, two uncles, one great-uncle, and a cousin: thank you for your service.
Tommy
@Mustang Bobby:
That might sound like the worse recall of all time.
Central Planning
College visit with with the oldest today. Should be nice trip to Ithaca for a tour of Cornell. Hopefully he can decide on some colleges soon and submit his applications.
I’ve talked to other parents – seems like there’s a common theme of kids not being excited to get out of the house and start the next phase of their lives. I couldn’t wait to go away when I was a kid. I think I came back from college two summers and that was it.
About a year ago, the oldest CP said “I think I would like to go to RIT and live at home.” I told him the first part was OK, but the second part wasn’t really going to work for me. Such good times :)
Tommy
@Central Planning: I’ve heard that as well:
I came back after my first year. That was it. Like you I couldn’t wait to get away. I know a lot of parents with college age children and they all seem to want to stay at home. Not really sure I can understand the thinking.
Mustang Bobby
My parents insisted that I go to college out of state. When I got in to the University of Miami, 1,400 miles away from Toledo, they were disappointed because my grandmother lived there… like I was gonna hang out with her?
When I tell my colleagues that tale, the ones who come from the culture where the family stays together (and even has multi-generational households), they’re aghast. My boss’s son is about to go to college down the street. He’ll live at home and his mother couldn’t be happier.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mustang Bobby: My dad gave me two options after I got accepted at UCLA: live in the dorm or go to the local CC. Commuting was out of the question. He was right, most of the commuters had academic problems.
OT: Tommy, I left a reply to your last comment in the last thread.
Morzer
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/10/glenn_beck_announces_hes_been_battling_rare_neurological_illness/
I think I could hazard a guess at the nature of the illness.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Morzer: Maybe too much Peruvian Marching Powder.
Mustang Bobby
@Morzer: The medical term is cranial rectitus.
Morzer
@Mustang Bobby:
Anal tinnitus, you mean?
Morzer
I think I’ve found Rand Paul’s long-lost Hong Kongese sister:
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_end_of_the_road_for_hong_kongs_tycoons
Davebo
My girl is from Hong Kong and had never heard of singles day but then it really didn’t get started till the 1990’s.
I guess we aren’t “fashionable youth” types.
danielx
@Mustang Bobby:
I must tell you that a physician friend of mine insists that this particular syndrome is known as cranio-rectal inversion. Related to but not the same as optical rectalitis, a condition in which the optic nerve crosses the nerves from the anal area, giving one a shitty outlook on life.
Agenda…racing around trying to finish various outdoor tasks before the fecal material hits the rotary impeller this afternoon, weather-wise. Supposed to drop twenty degrees by this evening, and stay cold for the next week or thereabouts. Clean out car, dump some topsoil, put up storm windows on back porch, use oil-based primer upstairs while I can still have the windows open…
Davebo
@Morzer:
The truth is “large sections of the public” really don’t find it unacceptable. It’s not like they were able to vote before 1997.
And it’s not that they are opposed to the concept, it’s just not a huge priority.
Morzer
@Davebo:
It’s a remarkably strange and clueless way for Cha to make the argument though. I mean, those years of post-slavery “votelessness”* were not exactly peachy for black people, to put it mildly. You know, Jim Crow and all.
*Or, more accurately, vote suppression plus lynch mob rule by white racists and domestic terrorists.
Helen
@Morzer: I don’t think she is being that subtle. I think she is terribly misinformed. I read that as though she thinks African Americans got the actual right to vote in 1968. Via the Civil Right Act? That’s the only way the numbers work if you start counting from the beginning of the civil war.
Baud
@Morzer:
That analogy could be used to justify a great deal for evil.
WereBear
I don’t blame them. At least home has three hots & a cot. What kind of feedback on the glorious adult adventure are they hearing from the ones graduating with massive college debt, a comatose job market, and a corporate culture out of The Jungle?
Baud
Jenna Bush is interviewing her two Papa Bushes yet again on the Today show.
Iowa Old Lady
Our power went out around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, and it gets dark around 5:00. I probably should have Christmas shopped but panicked at the thought and went to see Interstellar instead. No one told me it nearly 3 hours long.
satby
@WereBear: exactly. And job prospects mostly at minimum wage which keeps them in debt peonage and unable to pay the basic bills adults living independent lives have.
Baud
Baud
@Iowa Old Lady:
Movies seem to be getting longer as my attention span is getting shorter.
JPL
@Iowa Old Lady: Did you like it? Friends saw it and didn’t enjoy sitting for that long for a so so movie. In the olden days, they’s have intermissions.
Patricia Kayden
@Morzer: Dang. So she’s using racists as a role model? She does understand that what happened to African Americans was wrong, no?
Walker
As a faculty member I read admission applications at Cornell. One of the things that we look for in the essay is whether they are mature enough to live on their own. Because it is a big problem.
WereBear
If she’s like Republicans here, she admires it.
Cervantes
@Davebo:
There was some voting — there were some direct elections — after 1992, when Chris Patten became governor.
(I see the article alludes to it: “… which led in Hong Kong to the introduction of a partially elected Legislative Council.”)
Elmo
I was completely unprepared to live away from parents at 17, but since I went to college at the exact opposite corner of the continental US from my San Diego home, commuting wasn’t an option. I came home for every break, including Thanksgiving, with the single exception of one Spring my junior year when I went to Florida – and felt like I was betraying my mother.
But the trips home ended up for the best. My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer my senior year and didn’t live to see me graduate law school.
Cervantes
@Walker:
Is the essay assignment designed in some way to elicit the impression?
Schlemazel
@Baud:
can 2016 be far behind?
Schlemazel
@Mustang Bobby:
Yup, long-term methane exposure
Cervantes
@Helen:
Me, too.
debbie
@Morzer:
Just goes to show what all that bitterness can do to a body.
Walker
@Cervantes:
Several of the essay questions are designed to measure emotional maturity, yes. For example: “Describe a conflict in your life and how you overcame it” or “Describe a place that you feel completely at peace”
Mustang Bobby
@Walker: That is a really good point. I’m working as an outside reader with some high school seniors on their college essays, and I emphasize this over and over: sound like an adult.
Mustang Bobby
@Walker: I just read two of those yesterday for the common app.
Gin & Tonic
@Mustang Bobby: sound like an adult.
What does that mean, in a practical, 250-word-limit sense?
Cervantes
@Walker:
Good assignments!
Elizabelle
@Baud:
NBC News is pretty much dead to me. It’s the worst of the networks. Most warmongering and everything, everything through a right of center/conservative perspective.
Used to be my favorite, many years ago. Huntley-Brinkley, anyone?
NBC’s only claim to fame: Lara Logan is not one of ours.
Mustang Bobby
@Gin & Tonic: In the essay I helped with, the student showed leadership as a camp counselor, the ability to see himself in the third person, and detail how he contributes to his family and his environment.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
Huntley was good. Brinkley’s early work, mostly on NBC, was pretty good but I found his later work corrosive, especially the things he did after he moved to ABC.
Needless to say, however, he was better on his worst day than some of the clowns presented to us now.
Elizabelle
@Cervantes:
I asked my parents for the theme song from NBC Nightly News.
Beethoven.
Elizabelle
@Mustang Bobby:
“sound like an adult.”
Oh no. I have trouble with that NOW.
Iowa Old Lady
@Baud: @JPL: I was meh about it. I could see it was a serious movie, not stupid the way many of my other options would be. But I disliked most of the characters, which made it hard for me to engage.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
Shoveling our newly fallen snow, then packing. We’re heading to Los Angeles tomorrow for the elder of my two SIL wedding.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
Yes, the old Huntley-Brinkley Report’s closing credits used Beethoven’s Ninth.
In the early ’80s (I think), NBC commissioned its own theme and variations from John Williams, which they used on several news programs.
Mustang Bobby
I stopped watching NBC Nightly News when John Chancellor retired. I can’t remember the last time I watched a network evening newscast on purpose; it had to have been sometime in the ’80’s.
Cervantes
@Mustang Bobby:
About the “national news” programs (and personalities):
One still has to watch them if one wants to know, as a matter of research, what damage they’re doing.
As sources of information they abdicated, almost completely, after reporting on Watergate and the war in Vietnam; became thoroughly useless, even harmful, once Reagan was on the scene; and have not improved since then.
srv
You could get rid of quite a few bare branches with a little bit of war.