Post #500 wins free game

[Rev]

Wait until the winner reads the fine print. The prize isnt a homebrew.

 

It is a home broom!!!!!!!

[RickR]

8-bit brew?

 

[RickR]

 

Listen folks, we won't get to 500 without ridiculous posts like this.

[RickR]

Did someone say "ridiculous"? I'm your man.

 

 

Edited November 4, 2014 by RickR

[+frankodragon]

[Rick Dangerous]

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave

me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind

ever since.

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,

‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had

the advantages that you’ve had.’

[Rick Dangerous]

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually

communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he

meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined

to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up

many curious natures to me and also made me the victim

of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to

detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a

normal person, and so it came about that in college I was

unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy

to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences

were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,

preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some

unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering

on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young

men or at least the terms in which they express them are

usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still

a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa

[Rick Dangerous]

ther snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense

of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at

birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to

the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded

on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point

I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from

the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in

uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted

no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses

into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his

name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby

who represented everything for which I have an unaffected

scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful

gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,

some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he

were related to one of those intricate machines that register

earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness

had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which

is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’—

it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness

such as I have never found in any other person and which

it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned

out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what

foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily

closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded

elations of men.

[Rick Dangerous]

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in

this middle-western city for three generations. The

raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that

we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual

founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who

came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and

started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries

on today.

Edited November 4, 2014 by travistouchdown

[Rick Dangerous]

I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look

like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled

painting that hangs in Father’s office. I graduated from New

Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father,

and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration

known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid

so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the

warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like

the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and

learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond

business so I supposed it could support one more single

man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were

choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—yees’

with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance

me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently,

I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

[Rick Dangerous]

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was

a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns

and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested

that we take a house together in a commuting town

it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather

beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the

last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went

[atari5200dude82]

spam alert , spam alert. Rev is invading Earth.

[Rick Dangerous]

out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a

few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish

woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered

Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man,

more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helplessly.

[+nanochess]

"Dear author,

 

We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.

 

Regards,

Chinese Editor"

[Rick Dangerous]

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I

was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually

conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves

growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I

had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over

again with the summer.

[atari5200dude82]

Benny Bingo is following Shatner in Outer space, Alert Alert.

[Rick Dangerous]

There was so much to read for one thing and so much

fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving

air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and

investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and

gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold

the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas

knew. And I had the high intention of reading many

other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one

year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials

for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all

such things into my life and become again that most limited

of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an

epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a

single window, after all.

[atari5200dude82]

C -mart is a cool Dude. Alert Alert

 

Jason loves is Atari. lol

[Rick Dangerous]

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a

house in one of the strangest communities in North America.

It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself

due east of New York and where there are, among other

natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty

miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in

contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into

the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western

Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.

They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus

story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but

their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual

confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a

more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every

particular except shape and size.

[Rick Dangerous]

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the

two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre

and not a little sinister contrast between them. My

house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the

Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented

for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right

was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation

of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on

one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a

marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn

and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t

know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman

of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it

was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a

[Rick Dangerous]

view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and

the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars

a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable

East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the

summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to

have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second

cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And

just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments,

had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played

football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of

those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at

twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

His family were enormously wealthy—even in college

his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but

now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather

took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a

string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize

that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough

to do that.

[Rick Dangerous]

Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year

in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here

and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were

rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over

the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into

Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking

a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some

irrecoverable football game.

[Rick Dangerous]

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I

drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely

knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I

expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion

overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and

ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping

over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally

when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright

vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front

was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with

reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon,

and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his

legs apart on the front porch.

[Rick Dangerous]

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he

was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard

mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant

eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him

the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not

even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide

the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those

glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you

could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder

moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous

leverage—a cruel body.

[+nanochess]

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.