LoveNDino

Or we just have a more sophisticated palate;)

Or quite sophisticated and just immediately got what Nolan was saying about temporal dissonance due to the gravity of war, while the rest of us were trying to just keep up;)

Welcome to the party. I, like you, enjoyed it tremendously. But, didn't you find the gimmick with the time and the three interconnecting stories, just a smidge pretentious?

Apple will offer discounts on replacement batteries, following lawsuits over iPhone slowdowns By Hayley Tsukayama December 28 at 5:23 PM $29 instead of $79 starting in late January. The cheaper price is more in line with third-party repair shops. While Apple's message was apologetic, it still rejected allegations that the company slowed down phones with older batteries as a way to push people into buying new phones. “First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades,” Apple said. The company said previously that unless it reduces the performance of its phones, the older batteries run a higher risk of spontaneously shutting down. This explanation makes technical sense, many experts have said. Apple's disclosure last week that it slows down phones has sparked criticism and lawsuits. A French consumer rights group filed a suit Wednesday that accuses Apple of degrading its old phones to sell new ones. In France, it's illegal to degrade old products to promote the sale of new ones, meaning that the suit filed in France by the group Halte à l’Obsolescence Programmée carries the possibility of up to two years in prison. The group, which lays out its case in an online statement, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has also previously sued printer companies, including Epson, over claims that they violate the same law. The printer case is under investigation. Apple also faces at least eight lawsuits from iPhone owners in places such as California, New York, New Jersey and Israel that claim Apple owes its customers money for not previously disclosing the slowdowns. The suits ask the company to pay iPhone owners varying amounts. One California suit seeks nearly $1 trillion in damages. South Korean government telecommunications officials also have said that they will look into the reports, according to the Korea Herald. Critics' arguments largely have rested on two claims — that Apple hurt the performance of the phones in secret and that doing so made it more likely that someone would buy a new iPhone rather than fix their old one. That, argues one lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of New York, amounts to a sort of fraud: “Had Plaintiffs been informed by Apple that a simple battery replacement would have improved the performance of their iPhones, Plaintiffs would have chosen to replace their batteries which was clearly a more cost effective method rather than upgrading to a new iPhone that was extremely costly.” Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the suits or the investigation. The suits cap off a rocky year for Apple, which saw a lot of financial success but also a number of small controversies — including a bug that prevented iPhone owners from typing “i” and several software issues. It also faced criticism over a lukewarm reception for its iPhone X and had to delay the release of its smart speaker, the HomePod, until 2018. That said, Apple's not hurting on the business front. Chief executive Tim Cook earned a $9.33 million end-of-year bonus thanks to strong stock market performance. And Apple appears to be finishing the year strong, with more people starting up new iPhones and iPads than devices from any other gadget maker this year, according to the research firm Flurry Analytics.

Agree - does Home Depot carry ropes that don’t chafe?

Well, this is clear - that guy is British model Liam Jolley.

Click here if you are interested...

In another thread they said that no one is worth $1500 an hour. I beg to differ... http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-erCTXaPZDYY/VQBI6AWpydI/AAAAAAACoYc/SAC0-NQ6QdU/s1600/russell%2Btovey%2Bnaked%2B2.gif

This kid is doing something right

Thanks! I didn’t know it was referring to this and I’ve been using this phrase for quite some time!

The comma queen will see you now.

I ain’t kicking this man out of my bed for eating crackers....

According to Mr @GraysonDanielz, he will be “taking several months off.” He added, “I need a break from all this for a while. Nov 29, 2017.” I do not claim any firsthand knowledge and I hope this helps.

Be still my heart! One of my heroes together with my imaginary husband...

Meryl Fucking Streep http://www.simplystreepmedia.com/img/career/career1977julia.jpg http://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2016524/rs_500x206-160624105104-500-devil-wears-prada-thats-all-062416.gif

Oh I don't know...is it a coincidence that they referred to that on the same month that the second series was released? Quite possibly starting chatter that may eclipse the Blackamoor incident... Sorry, even as I was writing it, I, myself, can feel the stretch;)

This address referenced the first ever televised address that HRH made, which was a big plot point in either the 3rd or 4th episode of the current series.

So...looks like HRH is also a big fan of The Crown, Series 2... See if you can spot the reference...

The following guy looks quite promising... https://rentmen.eu/AgentFantasy

Yeah he is...I'll give it another go...thanks! http://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/14037859/1080full-alex-h%C3%B8gh-andersen.jpg

Last I heard he has died and gone to heaven, the lucky fucker...

By the way...been meaning to ask. How do you like the back half of the last season and the new season? When they killed Ragnar, and I understood why they did it, I just lost interest... I still remember fondly that scene in the first season where Ragnar and Lagertha inviting the monk, Athelstan, to a 3-way...

If you can get past the first episode, then you can watch the whole series. That was a really sick episode. But good.

This? https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph588e05d466dd9

Two racehorses, both male, ‘fell in love’ and grew inseparable. Until tragedy did it for them. LAMBOURN, England — Sixty miles west of London in the “Valley of the Racehorse,” some human beings in recent years have dug out the word “extraordinary” and put it to use. For horse people, that’s something, for they so often bring understated temperaments to their work among breathtaking animals. They live steadily through unforgiving daily routines that might bore or addle many but seem indispensable to them. They have seen it all, or at least close to it, yet even they say they hadn’t quite seen what blossomed and flourished here. Like all other humans, they can’t sort out what to make of the wretched events since Nov. 13, 2016, which wreaked a mystery almost as old as dirt. They just know that when famed trainer Nicky Henderson of Seven Barrows Farm sent the usual 40 or 50 thoroughbreds to nearby Hillwood Stud one summer early in the decade and Charlie and Tracy Vigors sent 10 of the horses out into a field, two of those 10, who hadn’t mingled at Seven Barrows, became inseparable. They know that while they all had seen inseparable before, they had not seen quite this level of inseparable. “We always have 10 horses in that field,” Henderson said this past summer. “And that time there were very good horses in there. There was Bobs Worth, who won the [Cheltenham] Gold Cup, Finian’s [Rainbow], who had won the [Queen Mother] Champion Chase. I mean, they were some of the best horses in the country. And Simonsig and Triolo, and it must have been the next day, I went down to [the farm]. It’s only a quarter of an hour away. And I went over to see them, and there were eight bays, stood together” — referring to reddish-brown horses with black manes and tails. “I mean, it must be color. Had to be about color, didn’t it?” Henderson continued. “Because the bays were all in a pack, and 500 yards away, on their own, were the gray [simonsig] and the chestnut [Triolo D’Alene]. And they just spent the whole summer like that together.” Per usual, they returned post-summer. Per usual, they went about their autumns and winters separately. Per unusual, the moment they returned to Hillwood the next summer, they reconvened intricately. Both were males. Both were geldings. Both were habitual winners at jump racing. Simonsig, foaled in May 2006, would win eight of 13 races in his career. Triolo D’Alene, foaled in May 2007, would win the Hennessy Gold Cup among six triumphs. “They started segregating themselves off together,” Tracy Vigors said. “It was quite apparent quite quickly they were very much bestie-mates, I suppose you would say. . . . They would stand together, eat together, walk together, trough together, eat out of the same food manger. . . . They were like best friends in the human variety, who go to the pub together, who go shopping together. . . . You see dogs cuddled up together. They were almost like that.” They would rest heads across each other, scratch each other’s backs, share the food pot (“Most horses would go mad,” Vigors said), and amuse and enchant the farmworkers. Soon, they even became roomies. Both had breathing problems, and Henderson had “a big box,” as he called their stall, a big opening for air at its front. “So we left them in there together,” Henderson said while standing with Dave Fehily, the groom who worked closely with Simonsig. “And, I mean, it was the most extraordinary relationship, wasn’t it? And, I mean, most horses, if you put them in a box together, you’d have to take the hind shoes off because it would be too dangerous. “But you knew they weren’t going to kick each other.” The rare arrangement did pack an inconvenience: The sharing of food blurs a trainer’s capacity to assess who is eating properly. Triolo D’Alene fattened sometimes. Simonsig seemed unable to gain weight. Henderson put a camera on them. It detected little. “We never knew who was eating what,” he concluded. Convenience-wise, then, Triolo D’Alene, whom Vigors called “a genuinely nice person as a horse,” became the method by which Fehily could coax in from the field the elusive Simonsig, whom Henderson called “a very, very shy horse.” If Simonsig hesitated at eating apples, said Sophie Waddilove at Seven Barrows, Triolo D’Alene’s willingness to gobble could encourage Simonsig. Pointing to a smallish pasture, Waddilove said, “They used to get turned out here. . . . And it’s just such a simple way they lived. That’s why I got so fond of them. . . . And you’d find the pair of them lying down together in here. Like two sort of children, you know, heads together and that sort of thing.” Debbie Marsden, a Scotland-based consultant on equine behavior, found “very, very interesting” the detail about the near-cuddling. Horses often avoid such out of innate awareness they might collide when rising, she said. “The sort of intimacy they were talking about,” with Simonsig and Triolo D’Alene, she said, “you don’t see in stallions and mares. There’s not a lot of romance, sadly, in the horse world. The physical thing, that’s a social thing in horses. It’s not connected with mating.” Henderson has seen abundant “friendships,” he said, “but not affairs,” and besides, “They can’t because they’re geldings. So nothing too much can happen. So what you’d call Triolo and Simonsig, I don’t know, but it was two boys that fell in love with each other.” Even beyond that well-established earthly reality, he said, “I mean, the whole thing was weird. The thing was weird. But the thing out in the field was the extraordinary part, how they were completely and utterly ostracized or wanted to be separate from the bays. And there were always 10 in that field, every year. And I’ve never seen it happen before.” Even for people with advanced senses of the animals, the whole thing widened those senses. Summer after summer at Hillwood, the pair stayed together because, as Tracy Vigors said, “We wouldn’t have dared to do differently,” and fall after winter after spring, if one disappeared from the other, the other fretted unmistakably. On the morning of Nov. 13, 2016, the trailer carrying the horses left for Cheltenham Racecourse. By afternoon, Seven Barrows’ excellent chaser, Sprinter Sacre, would retire and perform a retirement parade before the grandstands, and in the Guardian newspaper, Chris Cook would estimate that only a minute passed before Simonsig reached the third fence of the race and broke a hind leg. “Simonsig was not obviously injured when he rose and loped 100 yards towards the stands,” Cook wrote, “but he then stopped in front of the final hurdle, turned sideways and collapsed to an appalled groan from those with eyes on him rather than the race. Recovery in such circumstances is nearly always too much to hope for and so it proved.” “It was heartbreaking. It really was,” Fehily said this past summer. “Horrible,” Henderson said. “I think Nicky’s daughter took us for a drink. I had two or three whiskeys just to numb the pain. It was tough,” Fehily said. “Aw, it’s horrible,” Henderson said. Yet immediately, all the humans’ thoughts turned to the horse still standing in the stall with the big airspace, breathing it alone. “It crossed everybody’s mind, didn’t it?” Henderson said. Vigors dialed Henderson’s daughter, Sarah, and left a voice mail saying, “Make sure you hug Triolo tonight.” The horse trailer returned, as it does, but without the customary whinnying. “They’d sort of shout for each other when the horse box got home,” Henderson said. “But then all of a sudden he wasn’t going to come off the horse box. And, you know, you’d have a funny sort of feeling of what that . . .” He paused. “He would have known the [trailer] was coming back.” Emails and letters arrived, offering sympathy for Triolo D’Alene in his possible grief. But did he feel it? “Grief has not been scientifically studied in horses,” Paul McGreevy of the University of Sydney wrote in an email, “but equine separation anxiety is recognized clinically, as one would predict for such an intensely social species.” “Their brain is made of the same stuff as ours, and we know how we feel, and we know that’s because of what’s going on in the brain,” said Marsden, who is registered with the Society of Equine Behavior Consultants, but “trying to scientifically measure those feelings is a bit of a nightmare. We really don’t know how to do that. . . . Their social scene is very, very interesting and not at all a well-known area.” She surmised that because of Simonsig’s awkwardness, it’s possible Triolo D’Alene might have an easier time with bereavement. Other settings have had other stories. continue here