The General Chat Thread (2016-2022)

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medtran49 said:
I'm excited. It's 6 months away, but I just bought tickets for a Cirque holiday show at the end of December. I've always wanted to go to one, but either scheduling or the fact that the shows were in downtown Miami, which I don't like driving in during the day, but refuse to at night, or only bad seats left, or something else always got in the way. I bought the fancy tickets that come with valet parking, and access to the mezzanine club lounge in the Au Rene Theater, which is part of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. W've gotten these kind of tickets before and the lounge is really cool. You can go in up to an hour before the show and they serve food (actually pretty good food), non-alcoholic drinks and top-shelf liquor, unlimited. Then, you can go in during intermission to snack and drink for about 20-30 minutes, then again after the show for up to 45 minutes while they serve dessert, coffee and more drinks. Plus, we didn't have to pay sales tax (though that really didn't amount to much comparatively) since Florida is having a tax-free period for a few days right now on various items.
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You will love it. I've been twice here in Dallas. The first time, my ex-wife and I were like a couple of kids, the show was so amazing.

That show was Quidam.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uc9lUuJQpE


CD
 
My wife likes to take grandkids to shows, live theater. Me , not so much. Once we flew to Melbourne and I bought tickets for wife and daughter for phantom of the opera. (30 years ago)
My son and I sat in our hotel eating pizza.

Russ
 
rascal said:
My wife likes to take grandkids to shows, live theater.
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We love live theatre a lot more than movies (with the exception of musicals, for me - MrsT likes them, though). We both would much rather see a play than a movie.

We’ve fallen out of the habit since Covid. Before that, we’d usually go to two or three plays a year, one or two free Shakespeare in the Park productions, a ballet, and an opera. Since covid…one play and that’s it.

We’re excited this year, though, because they’re doing a ballet of Sleepy Hollow for Halloween this year, and we’re on the advance notice list, so we get first crack at tickets. We’re definitely going to that!

SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
Just got home after a lovely meal out. sadly the fire has also gone out. Never even tried to burn!. House is 9°C inside. Grrr.
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The first night in our house in the UK (it was just me, MrsT hadn’t joined me yet), I had no idea how typical British boilers worked, so I just assumed the house had some kind of automatic heating system, like it would click on and off as necessary on its own.

No furniture had been delivered yet, so I was already in for a miserable night of sleeping on the floor, and as the night wore on, it just got colder…and colder…and colder (it was early November).

My very first stop the next day was into the estate agent’s (they got to know me very well over the next few months :laugh:) and they sent someone round to educate a poor, stupid, freezing American on how timers on boilers worked, and how to make sure the radiators in each room were turned on, as they’d shut them all off when the last tenets left.

Even then, just to show how much I loved it there, even then, my attitude was, “Wow! It’s a hot water boiler on a timer! And the hot water heats the radiators, which heats the rooms! How interesting!”

Compare that to all my American coworkers when I’d told them about it - “Yeah, there’s no central heat/A-C here. It’s like the Dark Ages. You’ll get used to it.”

Used to it?! I love it! :laugh:
 
rascal said:
My wife likes to take grandkids to shows, live theater. Me , not so much. Once we flew to Melbourne and I bought tickets for wife and daughter for phantom of the opera. (30 years ago)
My son and I sat in our hotel eating pizza.

Russ
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I'm kind of the same way, but the exception was the Phantom of the Opera. My husband always took the girls to ballet and live theater so when I joined the family we went as a group and I was generally bored to tears (but I faked it, LOL). My oldest (stepson) and I both would have rather gone to a heavy metal concert instead or a sci fi movie. But I was blown away by the Phantom of the Opera, the storyline and music are exceptional. You missed out, IMO.
 
The first opera I went to was on a free ticket at the invitation of a friend. I expected to be bored and confused, as opera here is always portrayed as overweight singers in way too much makeup screaming out lyrics in Italian.

Was I ever wrong! This one was very minimalist as far as sets and costumes went, and the story sucked me right in, because it was so sad and so tragic, and the main character, through the absolute best of intentions, lost her life and nothing could be done about it. I (and everyone around me) was wiping a lot of tears away by the end.

But it was more than that, because it also had a good amount of humor, and very risque at that, and when I wasn't crying, I was laughing my butt off. Just to give you an idea, the story contained some secondary characters, wood nymphs, which were supposed to slight little creatures like Tinkerbelle...well, they'd enlisted the help of a local drag troupe we have, so all the nymphs were played by those folks, and they played them as very...suggestive in their little woody-nymphy goings-on, and they had the audience laughing hysterically. They really stole the show.

Second one...complete opposite, a cast of thousands on a big stage, extremely elaborate costumes, fireworks, cannons going off, catapults, very detailed makeup (I was in the second row) - it was the equivalent of a big box office summer blockbuster, full of fighting and action and explosions and all that. I loved that one, too, and those two together made me a fan for life.

Since then, we've seen traditional operas done as a 1960 Hollywood party (with characters like James Stewart, Lucy & Desi, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe worked into the story), and one done as a Wes Anderson film, and probably the most adventurous of all was one where very little action took place on the stage. Instead, they'd constructed these massive set pieces, and everything took place above the stage, and it's hard to explain, but there were just little cut-outs for the performers' heads, and then their bodies were projected on, animated, so they'd be singing something, but their little cartoon bodies would be doing outlandish things. It was very psychedelic and surreal.

The Shakespeare in the Park company do similar things. The park performances are free, and they use it to break in new actors, so they have fun with it. One performance of Romeo & Juliet...the entire cast were dressed as modern-day superheroes. Why? Just for fun. And it was!

We once saw "A Christmas Carol" performed entirely in Klingon, actors dressed as Klingons, but the really cool part was, the story was completely rewritten as a Klingon story, meaning it was written as what if Charles Dickens had been Klingon, raised on Klingon, what would the story have been like?

Well, as Klingons value honor above all else, and "A Christmas Carol" is a story of redemption, the main character isn't a miserly old man who's lost his compassion for humanity, he's a Klingon who's lost his honor and has to find a way to reclaim it. Brilliant!

Ballets, we've only seen a couple, but we try to see The Nutcracker every time the ballet company changes up the production, so seeing "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a ballet this year should be interesting.

Those are my favorite plays as well, the ones that involve some kind of supernatural aspect, or horror, because it's easy to pull off the special effects and makeup in a film, but much more fascinating to see how they do it live. We've seen Neverwhere, Jekyll & Hyde, Dracula, and a one-man production of Frankenstein that were all superb.

Musicals...well, if Spamalot couldn't convert me, I don't think anything can. :laugh:
 
It's still being a gale outside. There are trees down, branches down and garden "furniture" everywhere. I really need to go and recover several of my cold frames (shelving with a cover in reality). They've never moved before having heavy plants on their top which kept them stable. The plants are about 2m from where they should be. I'm not certain where the shelving is.

However, right now going outside is the last thing I want to do. Fighting with shelving in high winds doesn't appeal to me. But at least we are drier than others.

Friday saw 9 times the forecasted rain, Saturday say the expected rainfall but we've been dry since unlike150km due north of us which saw 298mm of rain (that's 2mm off 12inches) inside 24hrs and places that have already been flooded twice since January are now underwater worse than before. We got lucky, they didn't.
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
It's still being a gale outside. There are trees down, branches down and garden "furniture" everywhere. I really need to go and recover several of my cold frames (shelving with a cover in reality). They've never moved before having heavy plants on their top which kept them stable. The plants are about 2m from where they should be. I'm not certain where the shelving is.

However, right now going outside is the last thing I want to do. Fighting with shelving in high winds doesn't appeal to me. But at least we are drier than others.

Friday saw 9 times the forecasted rain, Saturday say the expected rainfall but we've been dry since unlike150km due north of us which saw 298mm of rain (that's 2mm off 12inches) inside 24hrs and places that have already been flooded twice since January are now underwater worse than before. We got lucky, they didn't.
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Yeah, the rains down there are making the news here. We are still in extreme drought, here. Wish we could do some trading.

CD
 
There have been farmers protesting here for weeks, now they've blocked the food distribution centres. This due to climate change measures. They're really disrupting the country at the moment, and the government doesn't do much at all because their protests are unpredictable and police are understaffed..
Tractors on highways, blocking distribution centers in another day of farmers protests
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My husband couldn't go to a mandatory work meeting today due to farmers blocking the highway like this..
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
I had an accident on my mountain bike a number of years ago. It left me with a broken rib, twisted strained thumb and a black eye from my helmet smashing on my forehead above the left eye. My eye itself was never involved, never hurt or anything but I had a massive black eye that started at the eyebrow and drained all down the check... a make up artist would have been proud!

My doctor wanted an x-ray of the thumb to confirm nothing was broken and I was too sore and lacking a cycle helmet (it was in 5 pieces not counting the visor) to cycle to the local hospital, so hubby took me.

We were duely separated and interviewed in separate rooms, the staff having called the police in. I ended up having to prove it was a women's only mountain biking course and that I was there alone, my husband 200km away at the time by contacting the (male) instructor for the police to talk to him. Yes people stared for weeks, not helped by the fact I needed to get my glasses adjusted which meant hubby had to take me into town. We stopped going out for a while simply because of it.
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I think that helmet saved your life!

I don't like the assumption of husband guilt that both the hospital staff and cops put on. That's not right at all.

I encountered a similar situation when my little girl, 5 at the time, came off her scooter in the morning, which was bad enough, then fell off a 3-foot high wall the same evening while playing with the boys in the adjacent house. The wife and I took her to the kids' hospital and child abuse guilt was assumed. That's not right at all, at all. And that's a fact.
 
FoodFighter said:
I think that helmet saved your life!

I don't like the assumption of husband guilt that both the hospital staff and cops put on. That's not right at all.

I encountered a similar situation when my little girl, 5 at the time, came off her scooter in the morning, which was bad enough, then fell off a 3-foot high wall the same evening while playing with the boys in the adjacent house. The wife and I took her to the kids' hospital and child abuse guilt was assumed. That's not right at all, at all. And that's a fact.
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In the US, it is the law for doctors to call in the police when a child is injured, of if a woman has injuries that COULD be abuse. There is no assumption by the doctors or the police, it is just something required, just to be sure.

If there are two parents, they separate them, ask each the same questions, and see if the answers match. In the case of a woman with possible abuse injuries, they again separated woman and partner, and ask the same questions to see if stories conflict.

Better too safe, than sorry.

CD
 
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