Settlers of Catan

Settlers of Catan is the hot new boardgame. I read about it in Wired magazine (here) and it's time to buy.

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Please point to where Taylor and Travis hurt you.

I have been seeing posts for "normal" people complaining about all the attention Taylor Swift and Kelce have been getting in the press. "We just want football!" they say.  I'm calling bullshit on that. 15-yard penalty and loss of down. There are three major sources of news on Taylor right now. 1. Swifties who are overjoyed that their idol seems to have found happiness. But that's fan magazine crap. You're not seeing that. 2. MAGA politicians and news sources with their breathless conspiracy theories. 3. Blowback from more liberal sources ridiculing the idiotic conspiracy theories and overall meanness of 2. I am pretty certain that the complainers are overwhelmingly fans of source 2. They are unlikely to pay any attention to source 3 at all. On the Chiefs football broadcasts, they spend an average of 25 seconds or so of camera time on Taylor, so that seems unlikely to be an ACTUAL issue. The other issue, of course, is that the fans of source 2 overwhelmin...
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Complain to Gain - Assertiveness is good

We all know this. There are sayings, e.g. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." "Stand up for yourself," "Fight for your rights." It is nice to see some reinforcement of this though. Here are a couple of recent examples from my family. Not long ago, we went to a restaurant in Dublin, California called Stacey's at Waterford. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is one of the owners). During the course of a very pleasant meal, everyone had basically finished but one. The waitress came to remove the plates and took all but the one plate. Etiquette 101 says not to do this because the slow eater in the bunch then feels rushed. After we got home, my wife called the restaurant back to point this out to the manager (we did not want to make a fuss at the restaurant). We weren't looking for anything, but at the end, the manager ended up sending us a coupon for money off on our next visit. This worked for us, because we got some cash equivalent, and it worked for them...
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Dieting and Diet Update 1/2008

One of my early blog postings was about my renewed attempt to lose some weight and get fit. That attempt went nowhere. I thought that making it public would give me some added incentive. Wrong. A better approach might be to use stickk.com which allows you to bring in supporters and people who you are accountable to. Well, that was February 2005. It's now three years later. It's funny, but my weight is almost exactly the same as it was then. I'm at 219 now, I was 221 then. In between though I ballooned to 235 lbs. I have lost those 16 lbs since April 2007. More importantly, my body fat is way down. In 2005, I reported 31% body fat. I think that was a high estimate, but now I am at around 20%. I can actually see and feel ab muscles now, where I could only pretend to feel them in 2005. My strength index at gymamerica.com has gone from 126 to 140. This partly reflects age as a correction factor, but it's not everything. I am stronger now than I was then. I have used kind...
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