95 thoughts on “Open Thread (Feb. 28th 2012) Ron Swanson is the man edition”

  1. That quote immediately became my new Facebook status. Great moment. He also nailed the line, “That sounds just like me.” In that particular episode, though, I thought Tom was on his game with the “Oh No No’s” and his visceral reaction to Anne’s violation of them.Report

  2. Deep thought for the day: contemporary culture encourages and rewards half-assery in most aspects of ‘professional’ life. Blogging is not only not a remedy to this phenomenon but may in fact be the vanguard of it.Report

              12. It is not faking as much as an intense ability to compartmentalize, which itself is probably a result of working in preschools while going to college and living the typical red blooded American male college lifestyle. If you can compartmentalize that, you can compartmentalize everything.

                See, what I do is I think any tiny thing I do miss about single life, even if temporarily so, and I focus in on that, allowing me to generate real emotion around the topic.

                Also, we are only on month 6 of marriage, month 4 of home ownership and halfway through year 4 of cohabitation (SINNERS!), so there is still a great deal of settling in still occuring.Report

              14. Years ago, I took tango lessons. Yeah, yeah, laugh if you want. I met an older couple from Spain at that tango bar, the most respectful, loving couple I believe it’s ever been my pleasure to know, superb dancers. They sorta took me into their company.

                The secret to romance, they assured me, was to keep a small amount of mystery alive, never to assume they fully understood each other. Cortejo, they called this, courtship.Report

              15. I propose a new game… first one to come up with a situation where Blaise does NOT have some amazingly profound, almost unbelievable experience that connects with it gets a point. First to one point wins.

                You never cease to amaze, Blaise. You have lived a full life. May you continue to.Report

              17. Yea, any of us can take tango lessons. But not all of us would make friends with an elderly couple from spain who taught us the secret of love.Report

              18. The couple that taught me the secret of love were a couple of Americans of Finnish/Italian and German/Irish descent (plus some hodge-podge).Report

              24. That’s fun! A fun game is to have someone give you two random words or things and you have to connect them through wikipedia in as few clicks as possible. As if there weren’t enough ways to waste time on the interweb…Report

  3. Your new widget on the side blocks a bit of the gift of gab sidebar in IE7. (part of that statement would seem to be my fault, yet it is not).Report

  4. Vote for Swanson!

    I’m the Bobby Knight of government efficiency.

    Forget for a second the oxymoron that is “government efficiency.” As a devoted fan of The General, I’ve taken many of his life lessons and applied them in my current position as Director of the Pawnee City Department of Parks and Recreation. My track record speaks for itself. In the last six years in this job, I’ve successfully helped close down Portola Skate Park, the Grice Dog Run, the Morris-Easton Observatory, the Mohanga Native American Heritage Center and most public drinking fountains. That’s the same sort of can-do attitude I intend to bring to the State House.Report

  7. Well, there’s the answer. You can have rich formatting without the Javascript editor, but you’ve got to do the HTML tags yourself.Report

  8. Why does the top level page now load, then take me away to seemingly arbitrary locations where the browser hangs. It has hung trying to pull things from linkedin.com, google.com, and currently ordinary-gentlemen.com. Firefox 3.6.27, Mac OS 10.7.3. Restarting Firefox did not help. Safari on the same machine seems to be okay.Report

    1. Okay, this problem seems to be fixed now. Note that clearing the cache hadn’t helped. FWIW, the URLs that were causing the browser to hang started with the string “wyciwyg://”, which is not a valid transfer protocol so far as I know. Too many possibilities about what it was causing software to do to speculate in any meaningful way.Report

    1. Yeah, me too. The League site wouldn’t even upload earlier, getting stuck on various newfangled thingies. I’ve spent quite a bit of time firing them off the page with adblocker.Report

    2. I’ve lost the JavaScript rich text editor, too

      [blaisep@fedora ~]$ firefox –version
      Mozilla Firefox 10.0.1

      [blaisep@fedora ~]$ uname -a
      Linux fedora.localdomain 3.2.1-3.fc16.x86_64Report

  11. Which is better, a whole ass or an asshole?

    PS “You guys have got it wrong! If you don’t like your job, don’t strike! Just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way!”Report

  12. Okay:

    1. The rich-text editor was buggy and annoying. Too many mangled comments. Too many problems. I will try to find a better one. Until then, it’s pretty easy to do some html if you need to.

    2. I’ve changed the share widget to auto-hide. Let me know if you’re still getting page load errors. I haven’t gotten any at all so far for whatever reason. Thoughts and feedback are very much appreciated, but I do want to make social-sharing easier. We have a crappy social network presence right now and I want to change that.

    3. I have some other redesign thoughts and ideas percolating. Feedback is always good. But please be detailed and constructive.Report

        1. When I load the site. It’s still happening on the other machine. I’ve blocked all that stuff on this one, but as I recall, it was a series of links on the load that stalled: first linkedin, then reddit, then some others.Report

    4. Whatever you did definitely broke my default smartphone browser (Dolphin on the Android OS). The site comes up and I get to see the headlines then it disappears leaving the Reddit widget in the upper left and nothing else. Interestingly on my computer running Firefox I don’t even see the Reddit widget.Report

      1. Have just tested with my default browser on the Droid and get the identical result. Not sure what the default browser is called, my son who works at Google made me get Dolphin right away and I’ve never actually used the default one till now.Report

    5. I’m still having lots of issues:

      1. Slow / hung loading. When the widget loads, it downloads images from reddit, twitter. If these are slow, the whole page hangs. I don’t know why the images don’t cache, but this happens on every page load.

      2. I have an older version of Chrome, that was part of Google Pack (which is no longer offered). On that browser, I get a reddit icon only, and no other content.

      3. On IE, loading and rendering is very slow.Report

      1. It could be that this is related to the cache, which I have cleared and which may need to cache those files still. It’s very quick on my machine with no load issues. What I may do – and I hope this isn’t too annoying – is see if some of these issues don’t just clear up by themselves while I tinker. If that doesn’t work we’ll try something else.Report

          1. The only thing that kept me from screaming like a little girl was the certain knowledge that E.D. and Bp were on the job! With that said, I’m absolutely sure the entire affair was the fault of demons who are known to consort with commie-Dems!Report

            2. I have nothing to do with this upgrade. I do, however, know more about the nature of the JavaScript beast than is strictly good for anyone. As with any vice or sordid kink, first it’s horrible, then fascinatingly horrible. Thereafter, it’s just fascinating.Report

              2. I think things are just fine. The old JavaScript was causing problems, as you say. You seem to be current on WordPress and I presume your host is keeping your back end up to date. I’d be glad to provide any assistance you’d find needful.Report

    6. I don’t mind the raw comment form. Pasting is certainly easier.

      If we do get something to replace the old JavaScript, keep it brutally simple. Dunno what’s in your version of wp-comments-post.php but I hope it won’t accept mangled HTML, unterminated tags, etc. MarkItUp is awfully nice

      dcssb-slick aka the Share Hat is behaving gracefully now. Good work.Report

  13. New thread: those who engaged in the campaign finance conversation from last week (James, Elias) might be interested in this book review of Larry Lessig’s latest in the Washington Monthly. I definitely don’t endorse all of it, but it’s got a fresh approach to the issue, coming at it through the lens of limiting campaign spending by making it more effective without using the law. It’s worth reading.Report

    1. Anyone interested in a scholarly approach to the problem with a full backgrounder on the history of money in American politics ought to take a look at Golden Rule by Thomas Ferguson. It’s a bit old but it’s a good text on the subject.Report

    2. Dan: I have a theory on how we might eliminate the worst parts of campaign financing from gnawing away at what little remains of the democratic process.

      We need to close the revolving door between Regulator and Regulated. I’m convinced many of the worst abuses of the tax code, and it always seems to be located in the tax code, subsidies particularly, are nothing more than grubstakes for politicians who hope to end up on the payrolls of those who benefit thereby.Report

  14. Of NBC’s Thursday night block, I watch The Office (purely for sentimental reasons). I never got into 30 Rock or P&R (largely due to Ron Swanson, and the fact the Amy Poehler is extremely unfunny). I didn’t even test Community, since I detest Chevy Chase (see Amy Poehler).Report

    1. Oh man, P&R is the best and Swanson is comic gold. Also, Leslie Knope is one of the best characters on television. The Office has been better than it has in years also.Report

  16. I wish to complain that the volume of good posts this week is too high. I can’t even keep up with the posts much less the comments, please store some in a rainy-day fund.Report

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