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[SOTSDO]

...is a real piece of work. It's nothing more than "acceptable" porn for housewives, plain and simple.

Mind you, I'm no prude. Neither me or my wife flinches at such stuff, and we've been exposed to our share over the last (can it be?) thirty years - more probably than most. But, we've never needed any such "material" dressed up as "literature".

Men get sneered at all of the time for their predilection to look at photographs of women doing naughty stuff. Yet, Fifty Shades Of Grey (and the other books in the franchise - the author is having as much success with this as the Harry Potter woman with her series) are piled up in huge numbers on the book table at Costco, for Christ's sake. The only difference is that FSOG requires the women who flock to it to think a bit more, in order to build their visual impressions in their minds.

It is interesting to watch those book piles at Costco. Soccer mom types move along the books, they walk by the pile of the grey covered paperbacks (almost a hundred of them all stacked up at one point), and then they take a step or two back, pick up a book, and glance through a few pages, following which the book goes into their cart.

(Why am I watching all of this? I sit in the furniture, waiting for my wife to work her way around the sample vendors in the food section. I've got to do something while I'm sitting there...)

We have another phenomenon here in the Houston area, not one that I've noted up north when we lived there. There is a raft of "love stores", specializing in lingerie, sex aids, porn and the like, all marketed to soccer moms. They appear to be successful, since there are more of them cropping up all of the time - someone is buying something there.

Yet, so prudish is the general tone of society down here that they have (literally) closed down all but one of the mall-based Fredericks Of Hollywood chain, due to attacks led by "church ladies". (All that the FOH operations carried was the clothing - the love stores carry everything, even the porn that you think the "church ladies" would want to eliminate.)

Then there are the topless and bottomless bars, including one that caters to women with stripped down young men. Vice is constantly trying to close these down, even as new ones rise up in their place.

Hypocrisy is alive and well, down here in the Bible Belt. And, Fifty Shades of Grey is an integral part of the equation.

(One more thing: one of the "love stores" used to have a banner running along their awning outside of each store, listing the general categories of what they carried: movies, lingerie, something else and "toys". Apparently, someone objected to the "toys" entry, probably reasoning that some innocent would take her children there in a quest for Legos. So, the chain came up with a substitute panels for the banner, one occupying the same number of letters so as not to spoil the effect of the sign. The new entry? It's "Gags", I kid you not...)

[tictactux]

(Why am I watching all of this? I sit in the furniture, waiting for my wife to work her way around the sample vendors in the food section. I've got to do something while I'm sitting there...)

Next time you could bring your Alto Clarinet along. Depending on the type of literature (or clientele), you could make interesting sounds with that apparatus, thusly make your wife browse a bit faster, or have her leave you at home next time.

[SOTSDO]

...I do not own an alto clarinet, only a virtually pristine pair of Selmer alto clarinet mouthpieces (C* and HS*, I believe). I could slap on an alto sax reed and practice making them sound at Ab (or whatever the appropriate pitch is supposed to be - I never set much stock in having a student make them sound on pitch, preferring a more dynamic approach to intonation myself), but that would likely drive off all of Costco's customer base.

Now, if I did the same thing with a bass clarinet mouthpiece, the fundament of that noble instrument's sonorous tonality - well, that would be another matter entirely...

[tictactux]

...I do not own an alto clarinet, (...)

This is unacceptable! Time for a donation thread I'd say...

[pete]

This is unacceptable! Time for a donation thread I'd say...

We can run donation threads for ourselves? I didn't know that! Does it have to be music related?

[Gandalfe]

It's been done before...

[tictactux]

It's been done before...

...remember Kush?

[pete]

...remember Kush?

I could do a quote from a movie that you've probably never heard of, but I will point out that a simple thread about testing vBulletin 4 now has had S&M and drug references. I love youse folk.

EDIT: and alto clarinet.

[Chris J]

EDIT: and alto clarinet.

Virgin on the ridiculous?...

[pete]

Virgin on the ridiculous?...

I originally read this in a book by Spider Robinson:

Orson Wells portrayed a spy, in the motion picture The Third Man. During World War II, the spy was a British agent known by the code name, Harry Lime. Harry was very near-sighted and wore thick glasses. His assignment behind enemy lines, disguised as a German officer, would have been impossible, except that the Americans had invented a new form of lens for the myopic. These contact lenses were undergoing clinical trials at the Walter Reed Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Arrangements were made to transport Harry secretly to Bethesda by submarine to be fitted by the lens crafters. Harry, among other things, had had several dalliances and it was known that he had an old flame in nearby Washington. The authorities were afraid that Harry would use this opportunity in America to take an unauthorized vacation. They decided that they must make his instructions very explicit. Therefore, just before leaving for the ship, he was called to the control office where he was given this direct order: "You are to go directly from the sub, Lime, straight to the Reed oculist!"

EDIT: It's on topic. This forum is about instruments with reeds, after all.

[SOTSDO]

...I got the distinct impression that ve Chermans invented the contact lens. Another joke brought low by facts...

[pete]

Leonardo Da Vinci is frequently credited with introducing the idea of contact lenses in his 1508 Codex of the eye, Manual D, where he described a method of directly altering corneal power by submerging the eye in a bowl of water. Leonardo, however, did not suggest his idea be used for correcting vision—he was more interested in learning about the mechanisms of accommodation of the eye.

Nyah .

[SOTSDO]

...had them being used by a couple of Nazis driving away from the Russian advance, using early (and crude) sets to disguise themselves from their known images.

[SteveSklar]

how do we change the colors .... the gray and pink is not to my liking

[Helen]

With everything that has been going on over on my site, I must admit I have been MIA over here. My apologies.

Pete, you did an amazing job on this. Thank you for all your hard work on switching this over. Great job. Hope you enjoy your raise. Ed, you did give him one, right?

[pete]

how do we change the colors .... the gray and pink is not to my liking

There ya go, Steve. I don't see any pink with your new color scheme ....

What's the fun of being an admin if you can't abuse that power, sometimes?

[pete]

With everything that has been going on over on my site, I must admit I have been MIA over here. My apologies.

Pete, you did an amazing job on this. Thank you for all your hard work on switching this over. Great job. Hope you enjoy your raise. Ed, you did give him one, right?

You're welcome. I think I've gotten more raises than anyone else on staff. Unfortunately, they're in percentages and y'all know what my base salary is ....

[pete]

It used to be that when you clicked on a post listed under the latest post heading it took you to your last unread post in that thread. Now it takes you to the first post. Do I need to re do a setting?

Latest Firefox and Windows 8 on a fresh machine here.

Y'know, I hadn't noticed that until you mentioned it. Unfortunately, I can't currently find where that setting is. I'll think on it a bit.

[Gandalfe]

Doesn't for me, but then I set mine to display oldest post first. Hmm... where was that setting... ah yes:

1. Settings menu item in top right hand corner
2. Under "My Settings" on left bottom frame select "General Settings".
3. Under "Thread Display Options" set "Thread Display mode" to "Linear - Newest First"

Anyhoo, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it. Might not be the way you like to read a thread.

[pete]

All righty, then. This actually took longer than expected.

Breaking this down, the behavior one would expect to see when he hits the "new posts" linky is to see the first post in the thread that he has not yet read. What actually happens is that you get just the thread that has the new post(s) in it. Further, you're generally going to get the first post in the thread, unless you're using something other than forum default, like Gandalfe.

As far as I can tell, this is actually the expected behavior of vBulletin 4 and 5, because the same behavior happens on the vBulletin.com and vBulletin.org forums. (There are some posts that suggest it's this way because of the "Search Engine Friendly" URLs that vBulletin now uses.)

However, you've got a couple of options for seeing the first unread post in the thread.

Option 1: The "What's New?" (Activity Stream) link. See attachments #1 & 2. I do think that this is a kewl feature in the 4.2 version of vBulletin. It's just not always the most efficient.
Option 2: Click on the "View First Unread" link in each new thread. See attachment #3. Hey, admins don't even get a "View First Unread" link. Mods/CEs might not, either.

Now, regarding the "New Posts" link, you'll notice that there's now a little number with a drop-down menu beside it:

3.PNG

This is a hack I just installed. Description: "This hack will show how many new posts/threads have been posted in forums since your 'last visit.'" (Considering the hack's designer did several of the hacks/mods we use here, this one is *unlikely* to cause problems, but tell me if you see some weirdness.)

[Helen]

Option 2: Click on the "View First Unread" link in each new thread. See attachment #3. Hey, admins don't even get a "View First Unread" link. Mods/CEs might not, either.

Actually, Mods/CEs do. So at this time it appears that only Admins don't.

Thanks Pete for adding this. I haven't noticed it adding any weirdness. The forum seems to be functioning the way it did before for me, but then I haven't tried anything special, like logging into the mod tools, or galleries, or anything else off the main pages yet.

[pete]

I like the expanded inline moderation and administrative tools.

There really is a lot for me to like about this release of vBulletin. There's also the point that there haven't been any big-time updates to it for three+ months -- and that's amusing because the entire vBulletin 4 series has had dozens of updates since its release ... and they're now working on vBulletin 5.

[kevgermany]

Not sure I'm following the new posts story -

When I click on the main new posts (top left corner) I get a list of threads containing new posts since my last visit.
When I click on the new ost icon within the thread I go to the first unread post in that thread.

So for me it works as expected and the same way as VB4 we're using on cafesaxophone.

2 provisos - you must be logged on before going for new posts, and sometimes the new posts don't sync well between different machines, so when switching machines I sometimes end up seeing a post twice, this from the new posts in thread link, not the threads contining new posts.

I like the new x/x threads/posts new post counter.