In Asian, butter sculptures can be pretty cool. (Tibetan Butter Sculptures) Everything below, except for the monastic, is a butter sculpture, I believe.

To be fair, the Japanese (or as propotionally many of the Japanese as the percentage of the psycho-christians in the West) are just as racist and bigoted as any other region. As a practitioner of that “pagan idolatry” (pretty much a racist phrase, itself), assuming you meant Buddhism generally, I do find it…

Cheaper than making commercials, maybe?

A co-worker of mine (some years ago) said on every spam call, he would simply lay the phone down, thereby wasting as much of their previous time as possible. He said one guy even called him back, irate. He said he just laid the phone down again, adding“that one was a slow-learner”

Umps have altered the game in ways it was never intended to be, notably the strike zone. We now have the technology to replace the umps at home plate. We should do it sooner rather than later. 

If you can plan ahead a bit, many (most?) quality wine stores have tasting bottles set up (on some local schedule) so you can try before you buy. My local “Total Wine and More” store has a tasting station open every Saturday morning/early afternoon with their “wines of the week” that are usually also typically on sale…

The Chinese (and the whole of East Asia) was and is reared in the Asian/Buddhist/Hindu/Taoist/Confucian cosmology. (I lumped them all together as there’s really not a lot of differences between the individual groups’s cosmology, imho.) One’s reality is due (so it is thought) to one’s karma. This is not necessarily a…

And for some of us, it was the books. Mine, bought by my parents, eventually fell apart from use. No idea what age I was when my parents bought me those books. They were nearly falling apart by the time I was 9 or 10. 

China - where 1984 is truly occurring, among other places.

Keep it simple. If I don’t recognize the number or if it’s not on my contact list, I don’t answer. They rarely leave a voicemail, which is good, too. Not answering also seems to get my number taken off their list as I might now get only 3-4 spam calls a week. 

And his brother, the fellow to the left of Patty Duke Astin, is in The Magicians, on SYFY, which should soon (next year?) be in Season 3.

Yeah, as noted in the article, this is not uncommon. (I seem to have read something about it some years ago, but IANAA(archeologist). Still, it is a bit weird. I do wonder why they do/did that.

We had an older cat (15+ years) and 2 kittens (now adults). The kittens treated him like a deity. Being a ragdoll with long hair, we had to get him shaved once. Completely (except his head). The kittens would not go near him until his hair grew back. They would hiss and run away when he got to close to them. It was…

What is barleywine usually served in? I have had barleywine twice (loved it) but, as a beer, felt a bit gypped when it came in what I think was a brandy snifter type glass, getting about half as much beer as I felt I paid for. Is that the norm? The stuff is pretty hard to find where I live, even at the wine & beer…

Since I was around 35, my mom has always ragged on me with “You ain’t seen nothing, yet.” I am now 65 and she is 86. Now she laughs as she says it. I am beginning to think she’s right. (Oh, my aching body!)

At one time, we paid more in daycare for our twins than we did for our mortgage. The wife wouldn’t let me sell one since we had TWO, dang it!

lol. We told ourselves the exact same thing when our kids were in pre-school child care. Then there was before- and after-school child care, saving in the VSOP for college, two pairs of braces, etc. Now, they are both graduated from college without any debt. It can be done. And we enjoyed doing it for our kids. Hey,…

On newer cars (since, say, 2014?), headlights do come on when it’s raining. (At least, on my last 2 Ford cars, they do.) Probably have to keep the headlight control on “auto”. Then, again, a lot of people seem to keep their headlights on whenever the car is on, for safety reasons, I assume. Back in the day, anyone…

Which monks were the French wine making monks way back in the middle ages? They were (and maybe still are) awesome.

Well, you just perfectly simplified the Buddha’s First Noble Truth. (Most Asian religions believe in suffering and that there is a “way out”, etc., etc.) Except they believe in hells, which sometimes I think that where we live now might be one of the hells, too.