From "Uncle John's 'Slightly Irregular' Bathroom Reader"

Feel free to add to the lists. Especially the US wars.

Was about to say, the last list is outdated.

As outdated as Trump's last diaper change.

As outdated as Epstein's Christmas Card List of Friends

As outdated as my patience for hope

&..

Way more outdated than Eva Tanguay

The Banana Boat Song isn't about the bananas.

That's really cool, bite sized but informative

TIL about metaphors?

from the BRI files

What is it referring?

"Bathroom Reader Institute"

Those are great books for snack reading, and there are a lot of them. My dad and his family would share those as Christmas gifts and I have a few.

Thanks. LOL.

Isn't the war on Iran officially a "Special Military Operation", like the one in Afghanistan was?

No problemo

I'm not sure about exact details (someone will chime in with more hopefully) but the US president (currently a corrupt felonious pedo) can only declare limited "special operations" for a set amount of time without congressional approval.

Well no, obviously it's about the banana boat.

My wife's a dromomaniac.

Little green apples is the only one litterally referring to fruit

It's more about bananas than Lemon Song is about lemons though, that's fer sher

Idk about Dracula specifically, but beheading kills vampires in some canons, or at least in Buffy anyway.

Banana Boat Song is referring to fruit, that's just not the point of the song. But the fruit is referenced a ton in the lyrics, what did you think the tally man was tallying?

Banthas? Sandpeople ride single file to hide their numbers, so they can be tricky to tally.

Hmm. Syria, Libya, Iran...did I miss anything else after Iraq?

Dracula cannot be killed by sunlight. At least in the Bram Stoker novel. He’s out and about during the day quite a bit. What sunlight does, is keep him from changing shapes. Same for garlic, crucifixes and holy water. He can’t stand them and they weaken him, but nothing in the text says they would be fatal. Silver isn’t even mentioned.

Nice, I love lists.

The whole sunlight kills vampire concept is broken/ unclear. Moonlight is reflected sunlight, erm.

Every star is a sun, how must it feel to be pierced by an uncountable - hey, count digit try to count em all - number of tiny suns all the time.

Sunlight is just photons. What makes sunlight special? Which wavelength? The visible or invisible part? Is it about intensity and exposure time? Could we build an anti-vampire torch? Questions, questions.

That list of murican wars was too easy. It would be more fun if it was a list of wars started in the 21 century. Or against Asian countries. Need some kind of constraint to make it slightly hard.

Yeah, approaching these things with stringed logic breaks them usually. Same goes for vampire reproduction for example. If they turn the people they feed on, how come the world isn’t filled with vampires by now? There should be exponential growth in the number of vampires. Or Dracula needing to sleep on sacred home soil. Does it have to be from his exact crypt? How does he know the limits? Could he dig 1000 meters down and the soil would still work? How does a new vampire find their home turf, if they don’t have a family with a crypt?

You can go on endlessly poking holes, but that just takes the fun out of it. A good level of suspense of disbelief is always needed to enjoy those stories.

Moonlight is literally hundreds of thousands of times weaker than the sun. It makes perfect sense that a vampire could survive in moonlight but not sunlight

And moonlight contains the monkey waves, allowing saiyans to enter their Ozaru state

Which messed-up Scrabble board has two Z's in it so that you can spell 'quizzed' or 'jazzily'? You don't get the points if you use a blank...

Congress has to declare wars, last time that happened was WW2. The rest are all special operations.

Didn’t they build an anti-vampire torch (and grenades) in the Blade movies?

Wow

You can go on endlessly poking holes, but that just takes the fun out of it.

I enjoy poking and scratching at the surface of things. It's fun, too. :)

A good level of suspense of disbelief is always needed to enjoy those stories

Agreed. All I need is a good, well played and emotionally touching story. Any movie is just a stage play with patterns like a tension arc, stereotypes and plot devices. Movies are not the reality. But for me there must be some degree of plausibility or scurrility or both. Usually when the movie is boring, emotionally uninvolving or annoying, I start to notice the plot holes and start digging.

And then there are the experts in their field, having a hard time. Police men, pathologists, IT people, who call the director's bullshit. Movie makers who notice and are distracted by patterns and techniques used in the movie. But other people don't mind.

Yup! Turns out that it's UV light that they're explosively allergic to, according to those movies

I think it's more just a motif that a creature of darkness is weakened by the light. It's more that vampires are creatures of the night that you don't have to fear during the day, and it kind of got attached to the lore (along with all sorts of other stuff)

One of my favorite takes on the concept was in the recent Dracula tv series, where basically Dracula actually has no weakness to sunlight, but people have been saying it so long he started to believe it himself. It basically became both a phobia and an obsession, but then at the end he's writhing on the ground expecting pain, then just realizes he's fine

It's interesting because it plays on the concept of losing yourself and self actualization

She goes absolutely nuts for dromedaries?

You are right. Good catch.

Vampire and photographer Otto von Chriek (lspace) sometimes practices a form of self-annihilation. It's a slightly different way of burning for the job, I guess.

The inherent problem with being a Vampire Iconographer is that flashes of bright light will cause Otto to shriek in pain, and more often than not reduce him to a pinch of dust on the floor.

I refuse to believe that all nine of those city names are more common than Springfield.

Seriously, Centerville?

Additionally, everyone knows there's three Salems: the witch trial one, the other one, and the cat.

recent Dracula tv series

Is it worth watching?

I think it's more just a motif that a creature of darkness is weakened by the light. It's more that vampires are creatures of the night that you don't have to fear during the day,

Agreed. Personalized human fear of the dangers lurking in the darkness.

Canadians claim the telephone too even though Alexander Graham Bell was British when he invented it in Canada.

They still score high with the points from only one z. Especially if you can play them off the end of something and use all 7 tiles.

Sunlight can kill humans, let alone vampires... The detail is how long is the exposure to become lethal.

Is it worth watching?

I'm guessing they're talking about the 2020 miniseries. IMO, yes, it's worth watching though from what I remember as it jumps through eras it wasn't what I expected lol. Haven't watched it since it came out but I recently rewatched Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell so I'm in a bit of a Victorian era vibe and gonna go through this Dracula again.

Anything can technically kill anything if you are pedantic and creative enough. But at that point every statement becomes useless. Especially when a work of fiction is concerned.

Fun fact: The “Uncle John” who compiles these readers is acclaimed sci-fi writer John Scalzi

"Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch..."

What do you think is in those bunches?

Hint. It's bananas

Yeah, I was looking at that one. I think they're specifically looking at towns, not cities. I can't find anything that gives a concrete distinction between the two labels. It seems that the rules vary by region, and the designation is kind of arbitrary.

However, I did find a list of common city names in the US.

1. Washington
2. Springfield
3. Franklin
4. Greenville
5. Bristol
6. Clinton
7. Fairview
8. Salem
9. Madison
10. Georgetown

Those definitely aren't the highest scoring words in Scrabble. They may be the highest scoring using only the seven letters on one tray, but that's only possible on the first play of the game anyway.

Basically, this is the list of highest scoring first plays in Scrabble, which is very different from the actual list of highest scoring words in Scrabble.

Only if you're trying to tally them based on their footprints. If you're watching them go by, being in single file makes them way easier to tally.

Nope, the answer is on the posted page.

::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
Read the fine PRINT 😉
:::