Michael Bates: November 2014 Archives
More Wild Turkey Attacks in Brookline | Brookline, MA Patch
When I lived in Brookline in college, Wild Turkey was typically found at fraternity parties, not roaming the streets. Brookline is an inner suburb of Boston (surrounded on three sides by Boston), but it's still pretty urban. Gangs of aggressive wild turkeys have been harassing residents for a few years now.
"WHDH reported turkeys have attacked a group of students, a crossing guard, and residents across town.
"'There was like six or seven of them, and as I went around the mailbox they went around and they started chasing me into the street and I screamed for help,' Marilyn Carmona told WHDH. 'It was very scary.'
"Police receive calls about aggressive turkeys every few weeks. The birds have been known to charge at people and try to claw their faces."
State wildlife officials offer tips for dealing with urban turkeys.
Epoch Converter - Unix Timestamp Converter
A collection of useful tools for converting between machine-readable and human-readable timestamps. (The Unix Epoch is the number of seconds since midnight GMT January 1, 1970. This number is used for file creation and modification times and other system purposes.)
A Happy Medium: How to Make Your Last Name Plural This Christmas Season
Don't make Kate angry with your Christmas card. Click the link to find out how to form the plural of your last name correctly.
"...I find a stack of Christmas cards and begin to flip through them--pausing to marvel at how big so-and-so's kids have gotten. And then I spot it: an apostrophe in a last name that isn't supposed to be possessive.
"I shudder, flipping past the unwarranted punctuation. But as I keep flipping, the apostrophes do, too--flipping me off, that is. They defile Christmas card after Christmas card, last name after last name with their presence. Gone is my Christmas cheer! All my glad tidings, replaced with fury."
By the way, the plural of Bates is Bateses. The possessive of Bateses is Bateses'. Example: "Are the Bateses at church today?" "Yes, the Bates family is here. I saw the Bateses' minivan in the parking lot."
Why Courtship is Fundamentally Flawed by Thomas Umstattd
The founder of PracticalCourtship.com finally listened to his World War II-generation grandmother, who had predicted the failure of courtship back in the '90s. Her parents' rule when she was a middle-schooler: "Don't go out with the same guy twice in a row."
"She explained that the lack of exclusivity helped them guard their hearts and kept things from getting too serious too quickly. The lack of exclusivity kept the interactions fun and casual. 'The guys wouldn't even want to kiss you!' she said."...
"The benefit of traditional dating is that the lack of exclusivity reduces temptation. It also helps young people find out who they are and who they are looking for faster. Early marriage reduces the number of years a young person must resist sexual temptation through celibacy."
Obama always pointing the finger of blame at someone else | New York Post
Columnist Michael Goodwin: "We are witnessing the total collapse of a bad idea. Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world, is being exposed as a historic calamity. It is fueling domestic fear and global disorder and may well lead to a world war....
"He was aided and abetted by every Democrat in Congress. They marched in lockstep with his cockamamie policies, from ObamaCare to open borders. They protected corrupt leaders in numerous federal agencies, from the IRS to the General Services Administration. They stymied efforts to find the truth about Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gunrunning debacle.
"They ceded their constitutional obligations and allowed Obama to crash the system of checks and balances. The vast majority stood silent while he gutted the military and abandoned our allies, including Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and courted Iran, the most menacing nation on Earth.
"With painfully few exceptions, Democrats put their loyalty to him above their duty to America.
"And now they must be punished. All of them."
