CAPTBRYAN

I like the way the engines rumble and roar... I wish I had a ship like that. Anyway TA TA to Spammers.:finger::evil: It is not legal to spam where spam is not legal. 2 are now faceing charges and soon there will be 8 I warned you:evil:

TAYEATRA

As a child I had a series of goldfish, most of which lived for about a week. I have no idea why they died because I fed them and cleaned them out exactly as it said in the books. My older sister had fish too and hers always lived for years. She has one fish called Rosie, which has lived for in excess of 7 years and because it was getting so huge she bought big aquarium tank and stocked it with weird and wonderful fish. It had all the filters and stuff and she loved those fish. 3 weeks ago there was a fish related crisis (due to the extreme heat one of the filters exploded and made the tank toxic.) The fish were rescued and split up into smaller tanks which are scattered around the house. Of the 7 fish in my room, one commited suicide earlier this week and I just found Rosie floating at the top of the tank. Less than three weeks and I've managed to kill the longest lived fish I've ever known. When she gets home from work she's going to kill me. :crap:

REAVERKILLER

my cat is sitting on my lap not letting me get up. i want to get breakfast but my cat won't let me. i have like nothing to do right now on a monday at 8:38 the day before the fourth of july. just waiting for tommorow to play with fireworks which is illegal in the middle of gorram nowhere, in the middle of gorram nothing but cows and corn.

DQBABY76

Well, actually the show and the movie did that but I did buy it for her on Serenity Day. I couldn't get a hold of my mom this whole weekend and when I finally did she had just finished the BDM and she LOVED it! She said that she watched all the episodes back to back and didn't want to call me cause she wanted to get to the movie. As I was talking to her on the phone she was watching the ending over and over again. She was bummed though when she realized that there were no more to watch but shes completely content with playing the episodes over and over. It is a proud day for me! :biggrin:She even wants to get other people to watch it but she doesnt want to lend out her copy in which I suggested that she buy a loaner set. :wink: I told her that since she saw it and loves it she's going to come with me to any Firefly shindig that we can go to. I'm sure she'd definitely go if I told her that Nathan Fillion was going to be there, she says "He's sooo FINE..." Damn skippy!

MSG

family tradition is the 28 days before your birthday you either pick a bad habit to get rid of or pick a good habit to develop. So I keep trying to come up with something and the best I've done so far is remembering to wear sunblock all the time:) Any suggestions? ( make it quick 'cause my birthday's the 28th)I've pretty much given up the bad for me stuff ( except for my compulsion to buy lovely new supplies and books for my classroom...sorry just got a new catalog)

SASSALICIOUS

So this is what I saw on my Studio Tour at Universal Studios (along with the soundstage Serenity was filmed on and a couple of clips of the movie): https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/jswilke/photos/SERENITY%21%20002.jpg and https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/jswilke/photos/SERENITY%21%20003.jpg

DOCTORHOLLIDAY

Thank you all for the virtual Browncoat and tips. Great to know that smart folks are still alive and well and honoring the BDS and BDM. Old motorcyclists like me (I'm 58!) have a saying, "keep the shiny side up." So we'll stay Shiny... huh? I will be headed back to Iraq soon so my blogs and responses may be sporadic. But I'll be checking in when I can. Yes, Doc really was a dentist rather than MD but it is his sense of honor (though sometimes obscure) and his friendship for Wyatt that drew me to his personality. He would have understood Mal (and REALLY understood Jane). A better view of Doc was written by his distant relative, Karen Holliday Tanner - "Doc Holliday, a Family Portrait. Not so bad as history made him. You all take care... and believe in freedom from the oppression of tyrants.

CYBERSNARK

Wo de tien ah. Been proofreading some essays for Ottawa U. students. Looks like Business Admin students, which it seems are even worse than engineering students. These are the "Executive Summary, Summary, Summary of the Summary, Introduction, 3-pages-of-actual-material, Conclusion, Review, Another-Summary-Just-For-The-Hell-Of-It" people. Bureaucrats in training. I fear for the future. In the hopes of making life easier for anyone who has to read these. . . things, I'm gonna rant. [B]THINGS THAT SHOULD NOT BE IN FORMAL REPORTS[/B] Terms such as "a lot," "and so on," "you," "go with" (in the context of making a choice), "very," "great" (in the context of "good"), and "make" (in the context of manufacturing). Sentences that start with "And," "Or," or "But." Made-up words. Slang. Words and phrases lifted from textbooks/course lectures and plugged into paragraphs with no understanding as to meaning or context (or even verb tense). Stream-of-consciousness sentences. 37-word sentences that can be summed up in three words. Slogans and catch-phrases. Especially non-grammatical ones. Multiple sentences that say the exact same thing one after another. The same sentence copy-and-pasted three+ times. Quotes that have nothing to do with the topic. Quotes that definitively disprove the argument. Anything that unwittingly insults the person the report is addressed to. Anything translated via Babelfish. [B]THINGS THAT SHOULD BE IN FORMAL REPORTS[/B] Definite and indefinite articles. Understanding of proper nouns and common nouns. Sentences with a subject, verb, and object. Sentences that were planned before being written so that they make logical sense. Punctuation. Consistent spelling. Consistent capitalization. References showing who is being quoted. I never realized how complicated the English language is until I started trying to decode the mess that some people make out of it. I've been spoiled as an English major. I appreciate that a lot of these are English-as-a-Second-Language cases, but is it really too much to ask that they get some linguistic training before being assigned multi-page business reports? The whole [I]point[/I] is to get them to convey information effectively.