> It's the lack of water that will get you.

Yeah. Although, we've got a few hundred quarts of home-canned food (mostly fruit) in the basement, which is pretty high in moisture content. (A jar of peaches, for example, is about 40% straight juice in the first place, and then the peach halves themselves have a fair bit of water in them to boot.) I think we (four adults) could survive on canned food for a month or two in a pinch.

That's not why we keep home-canned food around, mind you. (We mainly only bother canning the things you can't buy at the store with any acceptable level of quality: canned peaches, pears, plums, applesauce, spaghetti sauce, etc. Oh, and we also do some pickles, because the stores don't have enough variety.) Nonetheless, regardless of reasons, it remains that we have all this stuff sitting around in the basement, just waiting to be eaten :-)

> If you live in the Midwest, you are within 1000 miles of Chicago

Indeed, I think that's less than 500 miles from here. I've actually been there.

> which is an Amtrak hub. My siblings have all taken Amtraks through there.

Interesting. I knew about the passenger train that runs from South Bend to Chicago, and I knew about the elevated train that runs within Chicago, but I was not aware that there were additional passenger lines there.

Where do they run *to* from Chicago? Minnie/St.Paul? St. Louis? Indie? Detroit? Cleveland?

Just curious. (I'm particularly curious whether they run to Cleveland. I would have thought I'd *know* if that were the case -- I used to live in Stark County and saw all the Cleveland TV ads -- but perhaps they just keep a lower profile.)

Indeed. If you have any questions about a house centipede's speed, just turn on a light and watch one run for cover. They do not hang around waiting to see what this interesting new light source signifies for their future. Your brain just about has time to register that you're seeing a house centipede run, and already it's *gone*.

> And they can be up to four feet in length?

House centipedes? I've never seen one longer than a (human) ten-year-old's thumb.

Also, you seldom get a very good look at them, because they are absolutely *terrified* of light. As soon as you turn on any light source much brighter than an old 1980s red digital alarm clock LDC, they trip over themselves fleeing in terror for the nearest nook or cranny. Turning on one of those dinky little orange night-light bulbs scares them half to death. It's rather pitiable, actually.

But spiders are quite a bit easier to keep around in my experience, because they survive the lean winter months, when there aren't that many bugs around, by eating one another, so there are always a few spiders left in the spring to reproduce. If you have an unfinished section of basement you don't use much (e.g., around the water heater and stuff), you can just refrain from killing any spiders that are living in there, and you're pretty much guaranteed a year-round supply of them for all your insect-control needs.

I've never known a house centipede to survive indoors for more than a few months. (I suppose this and the fact that I've never seen a large one may be related.)

> you have *a bucket full of ants*! The mind reels at the possibilities!

You did say mushed up ants attract live ones, right?

Okay, so first, you puree them. Then you load up every Super Soaker you've got. Then you and a friend have a "water" gun fight, of course, but the question is where to have it, or, more specifically, *whose* backyard you have it in.

> How about anyone who needs to travel between Boston, NYC and Washington

Ah. So they survive on basically one line. That I can believe. (Especially so, since I've been to D.C. once and seen what driving there is like. Fortunately I wasn't the one driving, but even so, I have vivid memories of traffic circles that you have to go around six or eight times before you can get into the lane that allows you to turn out. Not to mention absurdly large numbers of one-way streets. If Boston and NYC are similar, it is possible to imagine people going from one of those cities to another and not particularly wanting to drive.)

I live in the Midwest. If Amtrak has a presence within a thousand miles of here, I'm not aware of it.

> It's only confusing because you are mixing real
> versions with marketing versions. Stop doing that.

Sorry. It was not clear to me which was which.

This may be because I am not a Java programmer. I am a programmer, but not a Java programmer -- and I shouldn't have to be one, to figure out which version I need and whether I have it or not. My main encounters with Java version numbers have involved trying to figure out what I need to do when other packages I wanted to install relied on certain versions of Java. This has not always been entirely trivial, and trying to find clear information about it on the Sun website was an exercise in frustration.

Well, then let me put in a word from the rest of us:

Amtrak still exists? WHY?

Also, HOW? How on earth can a passenger rail service pay for itself in the US in this decadent modern era of 1.3 or so motor vehicles (at least a third of which are legally classified as trucks, though many people don't know this) per valid driver's license? Today's Americans drive everywhere, even if they're going less than one block. I have a hard time imagining any significant number of them walking to a train station for a ride, rather than just driving to their destination. Who's buying passenger train tickets? Children under 16? There must be at least a couple hundred of them who haven't yet managed to get full control of their parents to make them drive them everywhere... but is that really enough to support an entire passenger rail network?

I've never heard anyone younger than my parents mention Amtrak. I sort of assumed that it naturally faded away into nothingness back in the late seventies or early eighties -- about twenty or thirty years after all the other passenger rail services died (which was, probably not entirely coincidentally, around the time the interstates went in).

Java, too, has had confusing version numbers for a good long while -- long before Oracle became involved with it. Just for example, I'm pretty sure Java 1.6 is significantly newer than Java 2.

So yeah.

Actually, most people I know won't touch any of that either, on the grounds that it comes out of the water. (I live in Ohio. Seafood is not exactly a staple here. "Fresh" seafood, and I use the term loosely, usually comes from Lake Erie, which does not have a good reputation at ALL. Frozen seafood is available, but the majority of the population won't eat that either unless it's heavily processed, breaded, and deep fried -- unless you count tuna noodle casserole as seafood. Also, fish expensive compared to beef or pork or chicken, and any seafood other than fish is expensive compared to steak, so even those of us who do like seafood typically don't have it often.)

> It's in your head.

Thing is, it's in a lot of people's heads. Most of the residents of the first world, at a rough guess. The aversion to eating bugs is in people's heads, and it's stuck there real good.

Americans are also pretty averse to soybeans, and a fair percentage of Midwesterners are not real keen on fish either.

> Her GREs are middling ... and she is still ... searching for a way to achieve her goal.

I can tell her how, but she's not gonna like it.

It's simple, really. (Note that "simple" is not the same thing as "easy".)

What she has to do is study her everliving tail off and go back and retake the GREs and ace them cold.

Either that, or say "it's too hard" and pick an easier goal. Her choice.

(Taking a couple of graduate classes from a regular college -- ones related in some way to medicine if possible -- and acing them solid wouldn't hurt either; but the test scores are more important.)

> he can't get the aid to finish even though he has high marks

Uh-huh.

Students that have genuinely high marks *do* get the aid they need. I suppose there are colleges where this does not happen, but there are plenty of schools out there where it *does*. Otherwise, I for one would never have been able to afford to attend college. I think my parents scraped together just about enough to cover my transportation expenses and clothes.

I did have to take some Stafford loans; but I paid the last of that off four years after I graduated.

A merit-based financial aid system doesn't absolutely prevent poor people from getting financial aid. It just makes it harder than a need-based system. (More merit is required.)

Also, once you do get the scholarship, you have to keep it -- which generally means you have to keep your grades up, and in some cases there can be additional requirements (e.g., one of the better scholarships I received required participation in at least two extra-curricular activities every semester). If you fail to meet the requirements, your scholarship renewal evaporates and you can no longer afford to attend. Thus, if you want to graduate, you can't cruise through with Cs. You need mostly As and maybe a few Bs, and you work for them. This is how the college I attended kept its grade statistics up without dumbing down the course material. It also improves other stats (like median income of your graduates five or ten years later) -- all of which makes your college more attractive to prospective students and also to their parents, *and* it makes alumni happy, which improves the donation rate. Win, win, win, win, win.

Kids.

Back in the day all the racist jokes were about Indians, Jews, or occasionally Chinese. Then in the mid twentieth century we went through a phase where most of them were about Europeans (Poles and Irishmen being particularly frequent targets). Then in the nineties it was blondes.

Every race gets joked about sooner or later.