Categories
Backstage Right Angle

Right Angle: Backstage (10-13-2020)

A very special TMI edition of Right Angle Backstage.

Right Angle: Backstage (10-13-2020)

Scott Ott’s life is in disarray, he’s up against the wall, and he loves his Command strips. Stephen Green wants his studio to double as a party venue, and never wants to be that guy on Cops. And Bill Whittle doesn’t even want to talk…especially on video.

Enjoy a very special TMI Edition of Right Angle Backstage.

78 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage (10-13-2020)”

Scott, you mentioned the referee stepping in if Kamala Harris is punching Mike Pence in the groin. That’s not what she does with groins. If she did, she wouldn’t be where she is today.

Scott’s tiles look like cinder block, which is a visual step down, to me.

People not white wouldn’t be testing for whites, but for which ever ethnic group they belong to.. duh. I can understand the mistrust from Tuskeegee, which goes with Steve’s comment about the public trust.
Just realized… Hunky Dory doesn’t work unless Dory identifies as male.

or… the drones at big pharma are also being underpaid and taken advantage of by the big fat cats in the boardrooms at the top.

Conservation groups and hunting are the primary monetary support for all of the preservation done in parks and such. I at first thought a duck stamp would be for the license to hunt them.

Thank you for affirming my long-held, and oft-proven, principle that any change, no matter how well-meant or seemingly insignificant, will accomplish the opposite of what was intended. πŸ™‚

Steve, a few things about cholesterol levels, using myself* as an example:
I have high total cholesterol (TC) (20-yr ave is 240); high LDL (20-yr ave is 160); and high HDL (20-yr ave is 72). Once upon a time, TC was all the rage. (I heard a lot about statins; I resisted.) Then, TC / HDL became the “thing.” That’s when I realized the importance of ratios, which I should have known – and maybe did – from science and engineering. Mine (240 / 72 = 3.3) put me in the “safe” part of the curve; if I remember correctly, the standard was <3.5 at the time. (I thanked my parents. High HDL is primarily genetic.)

Ask about standards; ask about research; ask about history; ask about everything! Never never never never stop asking questions!

A few years ago, continuing to research, I found studies looking at triglyceride (TG) / HDL ratios. ” … the ratio of triglycerides to HDL-cholesterol was found to be a powerful independent indicator of extensive coronary disease.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2664115/ (2008) “the closer to one, the better.” https://www.thebloodcode.com/know-your-tghdl-ratio-triglyceride-hdl-cholesterol/#_edn1 (2016) Mine (54 / 72 = 0.75) puts me well into the “safe” part of the curve.

Best, Debbie

*I’m 69, have no family history of heart disease and no other risk factors.

I loved the topic about the duck painting controversy. Bills vision about a nazi submarine hunting ducks in a lake made me laugh out loud for the first time in a long while.Thank you!

Referencing the Debate Commission, Bob Dole (former Republican candidate for president) tweeted after the debate controversy recently that he knows all of the Republicans on the Committee and each and every one is a Never Trumper.

You three are so encouraging to me. Keep up on this program!
My wife and I cut the tv cable years ago. We have Amazon Fire, a slew of tapes and DVDs. We only watch what is good and encouraging.
I used to think conservatives were just negative in their opinions of the news media. Then I watched the presidential debate on YouTube. Of the 5 hour section the first two hours were blank blue screen followed by an hour of PBS News just running down the president at every word.
The conservatives were right.

A very special edition ?

In TV talk a β€˜very special episode β€˜ means someone gets raped or has an abortion, it’s when a comedy show , usually a Norman Lear show, covers a serious subject . I loved when Jerry Seinfeld say there will never be a β€˜very special’ Seinfeld.

On a very different Peogramming note, Scott, when I go to Scrappleface.com nothing loads, just a simple text of “Access denied.”
I know I’m a pain in the keister here, but how did you trace my IP address to block me from your site? =8^)

Scott referenced Newton Minow early in the show. Minow is a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who in 1961 famously referred to television as “…a vast wasteland”.

For those of you who don’t know, a “Duck Stamp” is a migratory waterfowl hunting license. You buy a state license to hunt the animals that live in your state and do not migrate but waterfowl (ducks, geese, etc.) migrate across state lines and so the hunting thereof is controlled by the Federal Government.

Thus to hunt in your state you buy a State Hunting LIcense of whatever sort pertains then if you want to hunt migratory waterfowl you buy a Duck Stamp (actually a Federal Migratory Waterfowl Stamp) and that gets glued to your hunting license. Most states ALSO require a migratory waterfowl stamp, so you end up with both a state and federal stamp affixed to your small game hunting license if you want to hunt ducks and geese.

Thus the very idea of “Friends of Animals” protesting anything to do with duck hunting being depicted on a Duck Stamp is ludicrous. The stamp is literally your permit to hunt ducks …

Just a little more information about the competition to be the artist who has his work represented in the annual Duck Stamp. It’s a very prestigious thing for a wildlife artist to be selected. It’s also a very lucrative thing because it can vault an artist to fame (and thus sales) in his field. So it’s no minor thing to be selected to have your art on a duck stamp.

Thanks for an excellent and detailed contribution. Those of us who don’t hunt appreciate the knowledge.

You’re most welcome.

In Virginia a similar thing exists with the ‘Trout Stamp’. You can get either a fresh water or salt water fishing license, or a combination of both but you have to purchase a separate Trout Stamp if you want to fish for any freshwater species of trout. Saltwater “trout” are actually not the same thing. I.E. “spotted seatrout” (AKA “specks”) is actually a subspecies of Drum fish and no stamp is required to fish for or possess them.

The proceeds from sales of Trout Stamps, like Duck Stamps, mostly go towards maintaining the population of the species being taken. That’s why it costs extra to duck hunt or fish for trout, so that the expense of maintaining the target species is shouldered mostly by the participants in the sport.

Glad to see I thought right. Don’t hunt so I never got a stamp, but I thought that’s what they were for

In the 1990’s, the enthusiasm gap was often used to compare the space between Hillary and Bill versus the space between any young intern and Bill. Nowadays it defines the space between Creepy Joe’s face and any woman’s hair. Joe’s enthusiasm is inversely-proportional to size of the gap i.e., a smaller gap increases Joe’s enthusiasm).
Likewise, I become more enthusiastic as the the gap between Kamel-uh and the White House increases.

There’s a new Instagram filter that puts Biden behind you with his hands on your shoulders and his face in your hair. Funny as hell!

I’m pretty sure my kids have used it. That sort of meme may entice me to use that silly app.

“The Russians already have a vaccine.” Which is precisely why Mrs. Bill doesn’t trust the government when it claims to have a vaccine. A lifetime of habits dies hard.

Lol, well I do know her first name but I didn’t want to front her. At least it’s not “Pat”, huh? πŸ˜‰

(Her name is Natasha, and she is glorious Rooshan beauty!!)
((wow, it’s really hard to type a Russian accent…))
[B has posted pictures in past of himself and her on vacation]

Hey! I’m originally from Minnesota, we’re not all crazy. In fact, I’m hoping and praying that the state of my birth will go red next month. L’Etoile du Nord!

I thought everybody from Minnesota was Scandinavian. What’s with the French? Is that a Canadian thing?

Ah, Canada. That giant suburb of the Arctic Circle…

Lol, well … I’m a full blooded Dane, you can’t really get more Scandinavian than that. Of course there are quite a few lesser Scandinavians like Norwegians there too, generally neither a Dane nor a Norwegian will acknowledge a Swede though. My Grandpa used to say “We had crazy people in Denmark once. We shipped ’em all to Sweden where they became school teachers.” Meaning they taught other Swedes how to be crazy too …

“L’Etoile du Nord” is indeed French because much of that area was originally explored by the French. Thank God they didn’t settle there and ended up further North. “L’Etoile du Nord” is the State Motto, which you will see on the State Flag. It means “The Star of the North”, or “The North Star”, depending on how good your French is.

Wikipedia lists it for DuPont, which is kinda part of Dow, or at least I think it is now. Looks like there was a movie with the title Better Living Through Chemistry as well.

Same with LivePD. A&E took a bath for that blunder!
Dan Abrams is still fighting to get it back on the air. More power to him for that!

My dad took me to work with him at Western Electric circa 1972 and showed me a video phone they were working on.

And you’re right: it didn’t sell because nobody wanted to be seen while on the phone.

… unless of course neither you nor the person you’re talking to gives a flying rats distal alimentary orifice what either looks like. I talk to my sister on video all the time, several times a day sometimes. Via video drop-in on Amazon devices. I know what she looks like all disheveled and un-makeup-ed. A little bed-head and a bathrobe don’t bother me a bit. If she were immodest about things like that it would be all wasted on me anyway.

Not so much for other people though. I get your point but I still think that what amounts to video phones is a very cool evolution of technology. Between family members who care more about seeing each other than what they look like it’s great.

I don’t do phone calls of any kind except in emergencies or if it’s my kids or grandkids. Introvert’s prerogative.

Ah, I’m somewhere on that spectrum. I only do phone calls I want to, having a fairly robust anti-telespammer set up that actually works. I never get calls from anyone I don’t want to talk to.

Please share the anti-telespammer. I have been getting swamped lately. My phone generally let’s me know and I have actively been reporting those that don’t show as spam.

Cell phone or VOIP/Landline? Or both?

I use Ooma for a landline with both private and business lines (it has two lines). I have the Ooma package with all the bells and whistles and it costs me about $120 a year. I was paying AT&T $70 a month for a business account with two lines before I got Ooma in 2007. It’s probably even more now. The Ooma has call blocking and NoMoRobo built into it. I’ve used the Ooma telephone system for many years now and “own my own dial-tone”.

I set the Ooma controls to only ring for people on my contact list. It sends everything else not directly blocked straight to voicemail and I never hear it ring. There’s a greeting on my voicemail to leave a message or the caller will be blocked. I have to do this in case the caller is not in my contacts, which is very rare but does happen from time to time. The message is long enough that it times out about 99% of tele-spammer’s systems and they hang up. Once or twice every few months I get a truncated message from one of them and I then add that number to my blacklist.

My Ooma is set to also ring my cell phone on accepted calls. I only give my cell phone number, which I have had for decades, to a very limited group of people that might need to text me directly. Mostly relatives and long standing business contacts. People don’t realize that I’m on my mobile phone and they don’t see the mobile phone number.

The Ooma lets me have fine grained control over my inbound callers so any call listed by NoMoRobo or on my personal blacklist gets a “Number is not in service” message. This limits the value of my telephone number to tele-spammers because they think my number is disconnected and so don’t make any money by selling it to other tele-spammers.

I also have a Google Voice number that accepts texts and sends voice calls straight to my Ooma.

I use an Android phone (I won’t touch an Apple product but that’s another story altogether) and I have that set to “Do Not Disturb” and it also only allows contacts to ring straight through.

Android 10 does a pretty good job of filtering out nuisance calls.

So I have four telephone numbers and rarely if ever get a tele-spammer call or text on any of them. Maybe once or twice a month something sneaks by all that but I can’t recall right now the last time I got an unwanted call …

This only works if you don’t get many phone calls from people not already on your contact list. Which I do not so for me it works very well at limiting the nuisance calls. Thus I know when my phone does actually rings it’s someone I want to or need to talk to.

Thanks for the detailed response. I have an Android phone and it already recognizes quite a few spambots. I like the idea of only allowing calls from my contact list to actually ring. I use this for business as well as personal, but am very good at entering new business contacts into my phone.
I would say generally, any call that is not in my contacts is not one I need to answer. The few per quarter that leave a vm get added as contacts.

You’re most welcome. I hate spammers of all types. Worse yet is that now they’re not only just spammers, they’re usually scammers to boot. It is distressing to me that enough people fall for their scams to make the endeavor commercially viable. Even though it might take millions of attempts before a single penny of revenue is realized. Even more upsetting is that there are laws on the books that would seriously curtail such scams but those laws go largely unenforced.

There’s a good free option for Android phones called Call Control. It crowdsources spammers and sends them straight to VM as well as letting you specify numbers to block. (It used to hang up if you wanted that option but Android doesn’t allow that any more. The option is still there, though it’s the same as straight to VM now.)

You can even specify contacts to block, so that every number added to that contact gets blocked. That makes it pretty easy to add to your block list – just add the number to that contact. (I have one called “!Blocked.” The exclamation point keeps it at the top of the contacts list.)

I’ve been using Call Control for a few years now and it’s quite good if you don’t need something bigger like Ooma.

The protocols showing up at work for video meetings are interesting. During the height of the lockdowns, when we were first using video, some folks were clearly not practicing Steve’s advice of showering and getting dressed. Memos were sent about not neglecting one’s hygiene. Now only a few months later almost everyone turns the camera off and just uses voice.

Leave a Reply