April 20
When I got back from my morning flight, Peggy told me today was a special day: it was four-twenty.
I didn't know what that was, so she explained how some people smoked pot—which is what they call marijuana—and today celebrated that.
I had seen people smoking cigarettes but pot wasn't the same because you weren't supposed to unless you were doing it to treat a disease, although she said it was legal in Colorado and some other places. I thought it might be interesting to try but Peggy said she wasn't sure if that was a good idea. She wanted to know if I ever had smoked pot before or knew any ponies who had, and I said that I didn't.
So she said that I probably ought not try it at all, just to be safe. She said that I might hear some people talking about how great it was but it really wasn't anything special and that if I wanted to get high I should use my wings instead.
I told her that I already had and she laughed and then leaned down and ran her hand through my sweaty mane and told me to hurry up and get into the shower or else I'd miss my turn.
That was something for me to think about when I was showering. I liked drinking socially sometimes but that was about it. I knew that there were some ponies who drank too much: some of the sailor ponies especially when they were on shore drank themselves senseless, and I'd heard of ponies eating thorn-apple because it made them hallucinate, but I'd never tried that. I didn't think it was very smart.
So I thought that even if I could try pot I shouldn't.
Nobody at breakfast felt like making a big deal out of the day, either. They'd had more fun for April Fool's Day. Our conversation was as normal as any breakfast where Christine wasn't eating her breakfast like a Tyrannosaurus Rex or making a breakfast village and destroying it.
I asked Sean what he thought we were going to learn in class and he said that he wasn't sure. He told me about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which was where you couldn't measure both the position and speed of a particle at the same time, but he didn't think that was what he was going to cover. Chaos theory was broader than that, he said, and he thought the professor was thinking of a broader principle.
I'd noticed that lots of formulas and principles and equations had names, and I asked him if that was because a person named Heisenberg or Lorenz or whoever had discovered them, and he said that was the case. He wanted to know if we did that, and I said that there were Wonderbolts stunts that were named for the pegasus who had invented them, and there were also unicorn spells that had been named after the first unicorn to cast them. (Well, I figured that was why, anyway.)
Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started out by drawing a point and then asked us if that was supposed to be a point in the motion of a pendulum could we really actually measure it? And then he explained how in astronomy they had the same problem; you knew that a planet was about there, but you couldn't know exactly where it was.
The inaccuracy was what he called 'error bounds,' and that was how far off you expected your observation to potentially be. I knew about those in the form of significant digits: when we calculated in cloud class, it wasn't acceptable to get a result which was more precise than the numbers we had started with, because we couldn't get information we'd never had as a result of the calculation.
Then he drew a little circle around his point and said it was called the 'error ball,' which several students in the class thought was a very funny name. Over time, the error ball became smaller and more elliptical because of the eigenvalues, and that was what all stable systems would do.
Unstable systems were different; they could actually get bigger as time went on. And if there were complex equations inside, any given point in the ball could rotate, and the ball could get bigger or smaller. And in the chaotic systems they were stretched and folded over each other again and again. That kind of reminded me of metalworking which I knew a little bit about because of my sister.
He said that the shape it made could be described by Smale Horseshoe Mapping and everyone in the class looked at me and I just held up an unshoed hoof and said that I didn't know anything about them and even Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee laughed at that.
Professor Amy talked about the differences in marriage and kinship in different cultures. She said that there was actual biological kinship and that there was also fictive kinship, which was things like relatives by marriage. Then she said that there was the family of origin, which was the family you were born into, and the family of procreation, which was the family your offspring belonged to.
She also talked about a thing called exogamy which meant that you had to marry outside a certain group, and one example she gave was that you usually couldn't marry a blood sibling. And then there was also endogamy which meant a group which you had to marry inside of.
She explained how the rules of a society could even say where you went to live when you got married, and there were even fancy terms for that like neolocal and unilocal and matrilocal and patrilocal and it was all very confusing. No wonder unicorns are always keeping track of their ancestors if they have to follow all those rules. I was glad that we didn't do anything like that.
I guess we have some rules, but they're not written down; everypony knows them. Like how when a stallion's an adult he goes off to somewhere else.
It was strange how a class that had seemed pretty boring to me was so interesting to everyone else, though. Lots of people were talking on their way out of class about what Professor Amy had said and how they had never thought about the rules for marriage.
I read through some of the second book of Samuel before dinner, which started off with David becoming king of Israel. But like everyone before him, no matter how much he tried to be good he broke God's rules when he saw a woman in her bath and lusted for her. When he got her pregnant he decided that he would have to kill her husband, and that made God angry and to punish David, God made his son get sick and die.
I couldn't read any more beyond that point. I was already a bit distracted because I could feel that the weather was changing and I told myself before dinner I was going to look at the NOAA page and see if I was right that storms were coming.
It bothered me that David who was supposed to be so great and in such favor with God would do such a thing, and that brought me back to the idea that marriage was stupid. Obviously Bathsheba was interested in him or else she would have just told him no, but David was afraid of what her husband might do even though it had been as much his wife's doing. Unless I wasn't understanding and David had raped her.
I might not have been right about how marriage was supposed to work, either, and I thought I should ask about that because maybe I was jumping to conclusions when I shouldn’t be. It didn't feel like a good dinnertime topic, people liked to laugh and relax and sometimes complain about classes at dinner.
I could wait a day to know, I decided. Liz made marriages so surely she knew about them, and I could just ask her.
When I looked on the computer at the weather it said that there were going to be thunderstorms tomorrow, and I was looking forward to that, but it would be weird to be watching them and not doing anything with them. That would be a strange change for me.
I went over to Aric's a little bit earlier than I'd planned, and he was out in the driveway again working on Winston. He showed me what the radiator was that had leaked and said that he had jury-rigged a repair because he didn't have all the right tools but he was fixing it correctly now.
That was fun to watch and he even let me help hold things in place for him while he worked. Just like on a ship, every little piece had its own special name.
Under the truck was a flat pail full of sweet-smelling liquid that he called coolant and my nose kept being drawn to that because unlike nearly everything else on the truck it smelled really tasty and I wondered if it was okay to drink. I was going to ask him, but he was kinda busy trying to line up bolts then he asked me if I could help him hold the fan shroud in place. He said that it didn't fit quite right because it had gotten broken before and he hadn't bought a replacement for it yet.
I had to lie under the truck on my back to hold it in place, and that wasn't very comfortable because his driveway was made up of sharp pebbles.
Some of the coolant was still dripping off the bottom of the truck, too, and I got some on my muzzle and without even thinking I licked it off and it was really sweet but a moment later it left a horrible bitter taste in my mouth and Aric just laughed and said I was a real mechanic now.
When it was all put back together he poured the pail out into the radiator and then added some more until it was full and said that I'd been really helpful. I thought he was just being nice; I'd only held a couple of things when he told me to.
To celebrate we drove Winston to the beer store (which wasn't far at all) and he said that I could get whatever I wanted, so I picked a bottle of Dark Horse ale which he thought was really funny and so did the clerk at the counter.
We sat on the couch together and cuddled for a while and then went up to Aric's room and got undressed for bed but neither of us really felt like having sex, so we just snuggled up together and talked quietly for a little longer.
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Better warn her in advance about nastier stuff like anti freeze or washer fluids...
I really look forward to that one. It is going to be an interesting contrast for her I think.
That one is plain stupid. I guess we have exemple of real life horse doing it plenty enough to think it may have been done by the ponies' ancestors, but as they gained sapience, this is the kind of thing that would've been abandonned. It is a useless risk to force one of the pony to leave the safety of the herd.
And in a modern setting, it just sounds like an odd archaism.
The fact that 420 coincided with the unified East/West Easter was basically the greatest thing ever.
It was....
The greatest Easter Egg
Would cannabis even affect ponies?
I'm pretty sure drinking radiator fluid would. Badly. Aric, seriously, inform this poor girl!
"...Like how when a stallion's an adult he goes off to somewhere else..."
Except Fluttershy's brother, who kept coming back to the nest over, and over, and over... Cloud houses would have the advantage of not being able to say "We turned your bedroom into a sewing room" but "We remodeled last week and your bedroom got used to water a field of wheat. Go get a job."
Antifreeze is poison. Aric should NOT have let her drink it.
As to stallions leaving , it was probably to prevent inbreeding, Zephyr's hairdo looks inbred.
At first I was like then I was like .
Dark Horse! Special Reserve Dark. That stuff rocks.
Sooo close, Silver. Hopefully once she's talked to Liz she'll get some clue about humans defaulting to monogamy. If she's lucky, she'll learn about it before it blows up in her face. Probably not, because that wouldn't be dramatic, but I can hope.
I guess she doesn't understand that we don't really memorize these rules either, that to us they are just the way things are and we only write them down when we are comparing them to other cultures.
Is there a particular reason you had her like the smell of the coolant?
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7317481
A drop she licked off her muzzle will probably not do any long term harm.
7317495 because that is normal. It does have a sweet smell, and would also taste sweet. Ethylene glycol is very similar to some sugars in structure. Animals will gladly drink it, not knowing better. Though i believe it all has embittering agents in it these days.
Aaaand!
One of the antidotes for ethylene glycol is:
Ethanol. To the point that such things as whiskey or gin are used, when pharmaceutical grade ethanol is not available.
Well, I certainly hadn't expected you to kill of Silver Glow.
What a twist.
7317531 A lick of antifreeze is not going to be seriously toxic. Per wikipedia: "A toxic dose requiring medical treatment varies but is considered more than 0.1 mL per kg body weight (mL/kg) of pure substance. That is roughly 16 mL of 50% ethylene glycol for an 80 kg adult and 4 mL for a 20 kg child. Poison control centers often use more than a lick or taste in a child or more than a mouthful in an adult as a dose requiring hospital assessment."
Even so, if you're asymptomatic after an hour or so you're fine, and the prognosis is good if you are medicated within 12 hours or so. So unless ponies are super sensitive and don't manifest symptoms in a way they'd recognize, Silver has nothing at all to worry about.
Of course, Aric should still have warned her that it's not something one should drink.
Coolant doesn't smell so appealing when it's leaking into the heating system.
God that winter sucked.
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If I'm reading wikipedia right, while it might not require hospitalization, it will make her sick even at that low dosage: for adults, the threshold is generally around 16mL for an 80 kg adult and 4 mL for a 20 kg child. These aren't large doses, and given that she's still probably going to get sick, and based on the total lack of data about ethlene glycol poisoning in ponies, I suspect that we're going to find Silver in the hospital tomorrow
followed by Megan and Aric finding out about one another.7317574 This site: http://www.toxinz.com/Demo/11/Q0gwNjM%3D says that all symptomatic exposures should be assessed by a hospital, which implies that doses smaller than the "lick in kids, swallow in adults" are generally not symptomatic. So unless Silver is way less massive than an adult human or reacts way worse to it, I don't think she's likely to get any symptoms of toxicity.
There are so many apps and widgits and web services for weather. Some reliable, many aren't.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/accuweather-issues-90-day-forecasts-and-meteorologists-are-not-amused/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/my-browser-visited-drudgereport-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-malware/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/with-iphones-and-computer-models-do-we-still-need-weather-forecasters/
Going to the official source at NOAA's weather.gov or the US Navy's NMOC is best. The Farmer's Almanac is also pretty famous for it's accuracy.
Also, Silver's opinions on marriage are quite pertinent. While King Solomon is notorious for the number of wives and concubines he kept, his dad was no slouch either, which makes his transgression even more ridiculous. David had no shortage of booty, and still wanted just one more.
Whoa, Silver, you feeling all right?
No person is so blameless or so pure that he or she could cast the first stone. Maybe not even a certain Jewish carpenter from 2000 years ago.
That, in a way, is part of the core of the Christian faith; no person, not even the 12 Apostles, is above committing sin but you can be forgiven of your sins if you come to Jesus as your Savior of your own free will. The free will part is important, as absolution and forgiveness can not be forced on a person; rather, that person has to request forgiveness for themselves.
I do hope Silver Glow does not suffer for having ingested antifreeze; several murders have been committed by spiking wine or some other drink with the stuff.
That kind of does sound like it was named after a pony. Though in that case I guess it'd be "Small Horseshoe".
Well, he's a king. I mean of course she could tell him no, but she won't because of the implication.
Who are you and what have you done with the real Silver, changeling?
Could pass for Silver Glow since it's black and white: https://derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/7/31/62795.jpg
The implication that marriage doesn't exist among pegasi is contradicted in-universe by "Flutter Brutter".
Obviously Silver has fallen into the very easy trap of seeing your culture as being the norm here.
Although Zephyr is a counter example he's clearly shown as being 'wrong' and should have set out on his own.
A more interesting example might be Big Mac, presumably he's stayed on the farm because his parents died and it needs more pony power to keep it going. I wonder if by doing so he's sort of signed up to permanent bachelorhood? He isn't considered a good marriage match until he moves away? I wonder if AJ got married if he's be expected to leave then as he wouldn't be needed on the farm any more?
Of course as Equestrian civilisation has developed how far a stallion is expected to move might change, just going to a different neighbourhood might be considered enough now.
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Coolant (or anti-freeze) does taste really sweet; however, all modern coolants that I'm aware of have a bittering agent in them so just after you taste the 'sweet' it turns really nasty in your mouth and you don't want to drink any more. [Also a lot of them are now propylene gylcol, which is way less toxic.]
A single drop of coolant would contain no more than .05mL of ethylene glycol, and probably less than that (because coolant is generally mixed 50/50 with water, and if Aric's cheap enough to recycle the used coolant that he drained out of the radiator by pouring it back in, there's a good chance it's an even lower concentration. It would probably take 16mL or so of the coolant that's in Winston to have any potentially dangerous effects; a single drop isn't going to hurt her at all.
I can say that with reasonable authority because some modern cars have coolant that is almost the color of water (Ford's Premium Gold coolant, for example) and because my nose isn't as sensitive as a pony nose I have on occasion identified it by putting a drop on my tongue. I have also gotten small amounts of coolant in my mouth while servicing cooling systems, and I'm still fine.
And yes, our MSDS for coolant says that in the case of ingesting a large dose of coolant if immediate medical treatment isn't available, get the victim to drink vodka. This also works for accidentally drinking methanol (windshield washer fluid), which is why every well-equipped shop ought to have a medicinal bottle in their first aid kit.
Fun Fact: the 20th of April is Adolf Hitlers birthday
It's not like Silver to consider breaking the law so easily.
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While this is mostly just my headcannon, I am pretty sure both Big Mac and AJ own the farm jointly. It might even be Big Mac who actually owns most of it. I figure if one of them gets married, they will probably just build another house on the property, it s a rather large farm.
I secretly think Big Mac and AJ are actually quite wealthy, they just don't like to show it or use the money. And have never told Apple Bloom
Oh that scene with Silver helping Aric fix Winston was great! I never thought she would end up getting underneath the truck. At least she only tasted a drop of that stuff; sweet yes, but horrible after taste. Blegh...As a mechanic, coolant is probably the first of many vehicular fluids that have found their way haphazardly into my mouth. Diesel fuel has THE WORST aftertaste and it lasts for quite a while.
Ah that is perfect!
As a auto technician I have to saw that the only thing worse tasting than coolant is burnt differential fluid. And no I didn't taste it on purpose!
7318394 Why wouldn't it be Granny Smith's property? BTW, my headcanon is that Granny has at least a half dozen living children scattered across Equestria, including at least one who's a not particularly successful entrepreneur whose debts are part of the reason Sweet Apple Acres always seems to be financially stressed. Probably not the Oranges, though.
So I thought that even if I could try pot I shouldn't.
Smart pony. Better safe than sorry.
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/marijuana-use-and-its-effects
Interesting point for ponies who like eating flowers: morning glory seeds contain a hallucinogen. Possibly related plants do as well, though I haven't checked.
7317394 Ahem.
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yay, quantum mechanics. Although it makes sense on some level.
you can't. You need two point to measure velocity (three for acceleration) and this is why the uncertainty principle makes sense on some level.
This class sounds really interesting and maybe usefull, i'll have to look it up. At least Silver didn't go chugging antifreeze, although I don't think she'd actually drink much with the bitterants.
7317419
She means in the sense of going off to a different village or settlement. I think that's most likely in a small cloud-town like the one where she lived: odds are that everyone there's going to be at least a little bit related to each other (certainly that would have been the case historically) and since most of the pegasi in towns like that don't really have much in the way of possessions, the stallion isn't losing out on anything.
Anyway, don't most kids move away from home in America, or isn't that done anymore?
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The fact that 420 coincided with the unified East/West Easter was basically the greatest thing ever.
What's the unified East/West Easter? I seem to recall Easter was in March this year, or do Methodists just have a really messed up calendar?
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From what I understand it affects IRL horses. I haven't done a whole lot of research on that, but apparently it's been used medicinally in horses.
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The exception proves the rule.
Also I haven't seen that episode yet.
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Yeah, that's why that was the tradition, at least among the pegasi Silver Glow knows.
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It's been a while since I've had it. I ought to get some celebratory bottles. And drink them, of course.
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Heh, nope.
A lot of those 'everybody knows' things are like that. Ferinstance, there's the Urinal Game which every guy gets a perfect or near perfect score on and most women do very poorly.
Because coolant smells really tasty. And it tastes really good, too, until the bitterant kicks in.
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It's also not cool when the heater core suddenly springs a massive leak and your windshield goes from 'transparent' to 'opaque' right in the middle of a turn onto a six-lane road. Brought a new meaning to driving blind.
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Her favorite is NOAA's official page, because she likes looking at the maps that show her all the different details and can figure it out on her own from there. When it comes to weather, Silver Glow likes the raw data.
That's the problem with being King, I think. You always want something that you shouldn't have.
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Some days you just want to snuggle.
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The free will part is vital.
7323563 Then shouldn't it apply to mare as well? If it is just leaving the parents home. And if it is just that, why move to an entirely different settlement?
And wouldn't that contradict your earlier statement that stallion could inherit too?
I am curious about your reasonning on this one.
Anyway, if we must go by the show's exemple, only Applejack didn't move out, and only after going trough a self-discovery journey and considering seriously leaving for good.
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Oh, what a missed joke that was.
I don't think Silver Glow would get that, though, because you can tell Princess Celestia no and nothing bad will happen to you.
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Silver Glow gets Stoned and Stares at her Hoof.
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Silver Glow doesn't know any pegasi who are married.
7318154
She has. I think that's a trap a lot of people who are visitors to foreign countries fall into.
It's possible that a pony like Big Mac is the exception. Perhaps if he gets married he and his wife will build a new house on the farm . . . or perhaps he will go off to her farm. I think that overall it's nearly impossible to make absolute statements about what any two people--or ponies--might do in a relationship.
That having been said, he might be a little bit less desirable to some mares, if they think that he's not likely to want to leave his farm. Sort of the idea that he's already married to his work, so what chance would a wife have?
Oh, yeah, it would totally depend on the place. I can't see a pony in a city like Manehattan being expected to move to a whole different city; but to go to the other extreme, hopefully the Hooffields and McColts don't keep it in the family, so to speak (although from what we saw in the episode, they might).
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I did not know that.
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Although she might have believed (depending on what Peggy said) that since 4-20 was a special holiday, it was okay then.
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I think that Granny Smith still owns it, myself. I think that Applejack is heir to the farm and if she doesn't want it it would go to AB (if she's old enough) and then to Big Mac.
I agree that there's a very good chance that if Big Mac gets married he'll build a new house on the farm for him; I think AJ would just live in the old house with her new husband. And might make Big Mac stay in the barn until he builds his own bachelor pad.
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Gasoline's pretty bad, too. I've siphoned gas by mouth a time or two and regretted it each time.
Gear lube is the worst. There was one time I was putting a manual transmission in my old truck and I was doing it by lying on my back and bench-pressing the thing up into position and the rear seal leaked and while I was trying to line up the input shaft with the clutch, it was pouring gear lube right into my crotch and there was nothing I could do about it.
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I hate the smell of gear lube. I don't think I've ever gotten it into my mouth, though. My boss can't stand the smell of Ford's friction modifier--he made us take the little empty bottles and walk them right out to the dumpster rather than toss them in the shop's trash can.
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Or it could just be the constant expense of rebuilding barns that keeps them hovering at the brink.
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If she's ever got colic, though, pot might be the thing to try.
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There are a few plants they've eaten in canon which are either a bad idea or outright toxic to horses.
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What is that I don't even.
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In the case of the pendulum, he's just talking about the error in the measuring instruments. Assuming that you painted a white dot on the pendulum and took a picture of it, your error margin would be the shutter speed of the camera, more or less. Likewise, you would have an error built into whatever instrument you used to record the speed of the pendulum, and for the sake of his discussion, that's the error ball.
If you promise not to gleefully point out every error I've made thus far (you can point them out respectfully, just not gleefully), here you go. There are 40 videos in this series; I'm on number 6.
It's really sweet for a moment, then the bitterants hit and it tastes horrible.
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The pegasi would have different expectations, in a large part because traditionally they didn't own land, and many of them are predisposed to be nomadic. Yes, this would be contrasted with other tribes. So in the case of the Apples, AJ would be the heir apparent of the farm, and if she got married the stallion she married would be expected to move to the farm. In that case, she would get the farmhouse, and when AB was old enough, she would be expected to move out. Big Mac's role on the farm would have been replaced, so he would be expected to move away, as well.
Now, I'm not saying that would happen in the case of the Apples; I'm just using them as an example.
7326906 I thus repeat my earlier question: why did she specify stallion?
Since Pegasi are more inclined to be nomadic, it mean mare and stallion alike would be somewhat expected to move out. Even more so since in most case, they don't really have possesion to inherit.
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I think that the stallions would most likely be the ones to move on to a new village when they reached maturity, because that would give them the best chance to spread their genes into the largest unrelated population possible.
Is there a bit of self insert in Aric?
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Well. . . .
On the one hand, Aric lives in the same house that I used to and also is a theatre major and also has a crappy truck named Winston, so in that regard, yes.
On the other hand, Silver Glow lives in the same dorm room that I used to and is also taking some of the same classes I did with the same professors (and in one of those classes, I'm actually consulting my class notes), so she's also sort of a self-insert. Which I guess makes her sort of a self-insert, too.
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And also makes the relationship a self-insert, kind of.
¡Miss Silver Glow! ¡No! ¡Ethylene glycol will destroy your kidneys!
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Due to the rise of the unions during the New Deal, Ⅱnd World War. and Postwar America, Babyboomers could afford to move out of home after graduating high school in their late teens. At the time, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was about 11.00-U$D/Hour, in 2016 dollars.
Since then, a campaign of union-busting has suppressed wages. Young adults just cannot afford the rent until they marry and pull their dismal income for rent.
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Hitler was born on the 19th.
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Not in small doses, which is all she had before the bitterant kicked in. I can tell you, from experience, that small doses don't hurt you, and once you've tried it once, you remember that awful bitterant.
We actually sometimes taste coolant to identify it, because Ford Gold coolant looks very much like water.
I think it was more complicated than just that; one other factor must have been the increasing industrialization, and people moving out of small towns for the city. But I don't know all the dynamics. I know that my grandfather spent at least some time as a boy on the farm, but by the early 30s he was living in Baltimore, and not long after (1935) he was working at the Baltimore Assembly plant.