Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

You convinced me. Funny enough, I've been thinking about doing this for a while. Your post tipped me over the edge. When I have more time (like next year or so), I'll do some exploring of all the options open to me over there. If nothing else, I've shot off a couple messages to some old friends.
 

I've been on Facebook for ages! I put up videos and pictures, find old friends, I spy on my children, and I join cool special interest groups.
 

Ditto
 

I feel so dirty and ashamed.
 

ARGH - Facebook, it's the devil, it's the devil...

I'm not so sure about facebook, can you tell?

At first it seems fun... then you realise you have just lost 8 hours.

It also seems weird catching up with people you have not seen since school days.

Keep on blogging though won't you.

Lee
 

Ugh... No way on Facebook. Facebook is partially based on the premise that you might actually want to keep in touch with people from, say High School. If I'd wanted that, I wouldn't have moved away in the first place. Ick.

I'll see ya here. :)
 

Alan,

For us breeder-types, there's also the benefit of eaves-dropping on your child's social life.
 

ER, yes, I figured you out. Don't worry, your secret is safe with me!
 

Yes, and then watch their shocked expression/reactions when some of their friends want to be friends with you!
Or post a happy family photo as your profile picture so that their friends see that you actually have a relatively normal family, unlike the weird, horrific mutant family your kids have been telling everyone about.

Alan - it's not the friends from high school necessarily, but what about friends from before those strange years? Elementary or Junior High for instance?
 

ER, so if we've figured you out, we can contact you on Facebook? Or would you rather not if we don't have "real"(physical) world contact?
 

Elementary or Junior High? Ick. Even worse.

I had all my memories of school and college prior to the age of 22 erased by a neural neutralizer developed by Dr. Simon Van Gelder.
 

Alan, just because someone asks to friend you, doesn't mean you have to accept it.

For me, Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with anyone who doesn't live in the same town--which is rather a lot of my friends, actually.

Oh, and my dad and I play scrabble there, even tho we live down the street from each other!
 

And I find for me it's not an every day thing like it is for my kids, I like to do things on it every once in a while and have a look. There's really not enough time in a day to obsess about it (although when I was writing my thesis, it gave me enough distraction to feel guilty!).

But you know, I had a hard time in my school years (until I discovered the social rewards of getting drunk to fit in), mainly because I was so very shy, bookish and an easy tease (reading Hermann Hesse at 15 doesn't put you in the popular crowd...), but FB is perfect for those with eclectic interests; I just joined two groups of people from around the world who love Roland Barthes - no one in my community or even family, and I'd say my friends on FB have any idea of who he is.
 

Karen! Please Friend me! :-)

Alan: Hey, I've not Friended anybody from high school. And precious few from college. Most are former coworkers in the news biz; there is a camaraderie there.
 

LOL Trixie. It's not like I passed you a joint. Which I used to read about.
 

Lee. I think yer right. It's even more time-consuming than blogging, so far... It's designed for snoops! And snoopery is an occupational hazard for news peeps!
 

It is good for spook work as well.
 

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I shall continue to resist the peer pressure being exhibited here.

Come on...do it...everyone's doin' it....it'll make you feel all grown up!

Yeah, I fell for that line once ... regarding tequila ... never again. :)
 

What, and that's not a happy memory?!
 

Not at all. Though I did learn that it turns out black bean burritos look the same coming back out as they do going in. :)
 

Tequila, good!
Good tequila, better!
Better tequila, excellent!
Excellent tequila! And it cleans your teeth.
 

I prefer white trash tequila: mescal.
 

It was Ouzo for me... it was like I had been beaten with a brick with a string of black licorice tied around it.

Been on the Facebook a few years now. Yes it is a black hole for time. My biggest peeve is the stupid incessant invites to play poker, raid a castle, or go on some trail ride: "Bob has farted in your general direction. Would you like to accept his fart, fart back, or fart in the general direction of your friends?"
 

drlobojo, could you at least send me a note over there? My name is the same, unlike some folks we know . . .

Poor Alan and his tequila nightmares.

Doc, sounds like just another night at my house.
 

Jello shooters here. Never again.
 

Southern Comfort. In large amounts (26ers) I forget why. Haven't been able to drink it many decades now.
 

Doc, that's hilarious. Those drive me crazy too! Very apt paraphrase. I never return those things.
 

Something of an irony that I can't stand Southern Comfort.
 

Screwdrivers for me. I still can't stand orange juice...although for some reason, I have no problem drinking Vodka...

...come to think of it, that's a little screwed up, isn't it?
 

I've never had a jello shooter, but what I don't understand about them is: wouldn't the alcohol evporate while the jello is setting? And then you may as well just eat jello...?
 

Rde, "wouldn't the alcohol evaporate while the jello is setting"

Well, no faster than the alcohol evaporates from a beer just sittin' there.
 

It's been 20 years, and I still can't handle the smell of Southern Comfort. Mine was a baaaaaaaaaaad case of overindulgence. I'll never forget that next day.

I'm sure others' situation is simlar.
 

What's Southern Comfort considered to be anyway? At the age I was drinking it I didn't care. But now - is it just high levels of alcohol with flavor, or is it trying to contend with whiskey/brandy?
 

It's a liqueur. Not a whiskey. Sickeningly sweet. .. I may hurl thinkin' about it this early in the day. .... It might be OK on pancakes or ice cream -- or mebbe even a hot biscuit.

Just keep it out of my shot glass and my rocks glass. Bleah.
 

First of all, I seem to be responsible for taking this discussion off track. My bad. :)

"wouldn't the alcohol evporate while the jello is setting?"

GEEK ALERT! Please feel free to stop reading now. You've been warned.

Well, you could go with the common sense answer ER gives, but where's the fun in that?!?

The evaporation rate of ethanol in a closed system under controlled conditions at 25C is about 5 mg/square meter of surface in one second. One of those little plastic cups people use for jello shots has a surface area of about 0.0007 square meters, so the evaporation rate would be about 0.003 mg per second. If it takes an hour to set (just guessing, I've never made them) that would be about 10.8 mg total. The Jello Shot recipe I found online contained 10 oz of vodka (80 proof), thus about 4 oz of ethanol or 93,000 mg. So after all is said and done, you're down to 92,990 mg of ethanol.

(For our non-metric friends, a gram is about the weight of a paperclip. A milligram is a thousandth of that mass.)

So it's very, very small. And that's at 25C, but these things are made at much cooler temperatures.

And that's for pure ethanol. In water/ethanol solutions, the ethanol molecules prefer their own company to the company of water molecules and thus hang out together in microscopic droplets, thus are not evenly distributed throughout the liquid, so the ethanol molecules are not randomly distributed at the surface, thus decreasing the rate of evaporation. Further complicating this is that water and ethanol form something called an azeotrope, meaning that once the composition of the liquid hits 96%, the composition never changes after that, no matter how much evaporates. So, in order to get rid of that last 4%, you'd literally have to evaporate away all of the water.

This is why cooking with wine, for example, never removes all of the alcohol from a recipe, BTW.

See? Chemistry can be practical! ;)

BTW I'm not sure if it means anything but my word verification word is "drudg"
 

Dude. You should give Analysis of Jello Shooters as a weekend take-home project to some students.
 

LOL. I think that's every weekend here at UM.

But I'm not sure they would be very objective.
 

Sounds like it's catching.
 

ER,
You apparently missed me on Facebook! There are four with similar names, and I guess you now have to be friends with a different "Adam". BTW, if you choose to try again, you can see three kids in the profile pic. Or just drop me an email.
 

Dang!