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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   279 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 26, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Court opinion:

  • A ski resort has been in operation since year 1969. It includes a mountain face that bears not only several ski slopes, but also part of a gravel municipal road that runs across the slopes. The resort has with the municipality an agreement providing that, during the ski season (from November 15 to April 1), the municipality will close the part of the road that intersects the resort.

  • In year 2008, a person buys a large lot on the gravel road, adjacent to the resort, but still accessible by car during ski season if you drive on the part of the road that does not intersect the resort. He builds a vacation home, and subdivides the land into several lots, which he intends to market as "ski-in, ski-out" properties. In 2013, he tries to sell the house, but receives no offers. In 2014, he asks the resort about developing an alternative road leading through the resort to his properties, but the resort is not interested.

  • In 2015, the person sues the resort and the municipality to force them to keep the intersecting portion of the road open during the ski season. This would close the intersecting ski slopes (which seem to constitute around one-third of the resort), and might force the ski resort to cease operations entirely. The judicial proceedings end in 2022, with the intersecting portion of the road "vacated" by the municipality and ceded to the resort.

  • In 2021, the ski resort sues the person, alleging that his previous lawsuit was an abuse of judicial process intended to pressure the resort into developing the aforementioned alternative road. The trial judge grants summary judgment regarding liability, since the person literally admitted this under oath during the previous lawsuit. A jury grants damages of 600 k$ (400 compensatory and 200 punitive). In 2025, the appeals panel affirms.

Court opinion:

In 1888, Chief Justice Bleckley of the Supreme Court of Georgia authored a famed two-sentence opinion (Pacetti v. State, 7 S.E. 867, 868 (Ga. 1888)):

A social, genial gentleman, fond of company and a glass, by occupation a cigar-maker, who keeps his sleeping apartment with the doors "blanketed", in a fit condition for privately gaming therein, and who invites his friends at night to refresh themselves with beer, but has in the room, besides barrels and bottles, a table suitable for gaming, together with 11 packs of cards, and 2 boxes of "chips", one containing 80 chips and the other 300, and a memorandum book with names and numbers entered in it, and whose guests, or some of them, retire hurriedly under the bed on being surprised by a visit from the police at 1 o'clock in the morning, may or may not be guilty of the offense of keeping a gaming-house. A verdict of guilty, based on these and other inculpatory facts, such as the rattle of chips and money, and some expressions about $7 and $12, heard by the police on approaching the premises, is warranted by the evidence, and is not contrary to law.

How would you rewrite these "two sentences"?

A social, genial gentleman—fond of company and a glass, and by occupation a cigar-maker—(1) who keeps his sleeping apartment with the doors "blanketed" (in a fit condition for privately gaming therein), and (2) who invites his friends at night to refresh themselves with beer, but has in the room (besides barrels and bottles) a table suitable for gaming, together with 11 packs of cards, 2 boxes of "chips" (one containing 80 chips and the other 300), and a memorandum book with names and numbers entered in it, and (3) whose guests (or some of them) retire hurriedly under the bed on being surprised by a visit from the police at 1 o'clock in the morning, may or may not be guilty of the offense of keeping a gaming-house. However, a verdict of guilty, based on these and other inculpatory facts (such as the rattle of chips and money, and some expressions about $7 and $12, heard by the police on approaching the premises), is warranted by the evidence, and is not contrary to law.

The defendant-appellant in this case is a social, genial gentleman, fond of company and a glass, and by occupation a cigar-maker. He kept his sleeping apartment with the doors "blanketed", in a fit condition for privately gaming therein. He invited his friends at night to refresh themselves with beer, but had in the room (besides barrels and bottles) a table suitable for gaming, together with 11 packs of cards, 2 boxes of "chips" (one containing 80 chips and the other 300), and a memorandum book with names and numbers entered in it. His guests (or some of them) retired hurriedly under the bed on being surprised by a visit from the police at 1 o'clock in the morning. This man may or may not be guilty of the offense of keeping a gaming-house. However, a verdict of guilty, based on these and other inculpatory facts (such as the rattle of chips and money, and some expressions about $7 and $12, heard by the police on approaching the premises), is warranted by the evidence, and is not contrary to law.

Survey: The proportion of USAians who "display decorations with a religious meaning, such as a Nativity scene", for Christmas is 54 percent, down from 68 percent in 2010. Presumably, this number can be taken as an indicator of how many people consider Christmas a religious holiday as opposed to a secular one.

In 2015, the person sues the resort and the municipality to force them to keep the intersecting portion of the road open during the ski season.

I'm perpetually amazed at people who show up (or buy in) to a clearly established dynamic and then, much like a toddler, start stamping their feet and demanding the situation be reshaped to their specific wants and desires.

Well, in this case it's clearly not genuine - the guy just used the lawsuit as a pressure tactics to get freebees from the resort. What is astonishing here he actually admitted it on record - and still went for jury trial instead of settling (and then spent money on appealing it). Looks like a person with much more money than sense.

This is neither fun nor necessarily limited to Friday, but I wanted to add something to this conversation, lest I be perceived as the resident apologist for libertinism and infidelity.

I met my wife when I was 32 years old. She was young then—we both were—we had an odd courtship which had pauses, hiccups, and what threatened to be an end, but she finally moved in with me, we cohabitated for about three years, moved to the US where we stayed with my family for about 6 months, and eventually wed there officially. We had a Hawaii wedding a year later (She is Japanese, after all.)

My wife and children are to me the most precious part of my life. Without them, I cannot imagine myself. Sometimes when I am alone in the house (as I am right now) I reflect on how fortunate I have been, and how fragile it all is.

I have a folder on my computer titled simply “remember” in which I’ve added 20 or 30 old potato photos taken with ancient phones, of my wife in her younger days—taking naps, at a pub eating a fish eye, in a hammock on one jaunt we took to a large park, at Santa Monica beach, and on and on. I keep this folder so that I can focus my attention laser-like on the her of yesteryear, the girl who loved me (and you always know, gentlemen, when a girls loves you, or likes you, or fancies you. It isn’t hard to know when it happens, though the signals may seem strange and unfamiliar to those who’ve never noticed them.) She does not always love me the same way now. We’ve been married now 21 years. That’s not as long as some, but it’s long enough that we’ve had our share of issues.

Why do I write this? Because I might not have the perfect marriage of my own parents (my father told my mother he loved her at least once pretty much every day I can remember) but I do have a marriage, a good one, one that I would not trade for all the single-man-getting-laid years you could throw at me. In the words of Jordan Peterson: I will never leave her, ever. And, also, I’ve been through the wringer with enough young beautiful women who would sidetrack me to realize that Mike Pence was not as far off as some would have it: Any man in the wrong circumstances is capable of cheating. The trick is to stay the hell away from those circumstances. Many, many close calls. In a way I feel fortunate to have been a rake earlier in life. Out of my system, as it were. More or less.

So why the apologist for cheating? Because I live here, in a culture where the norms are different, where one can be completely faithful to societal and even religious expectations and still bang a callgirl on a Tuesday afternoon after seminar. It’s a different world. I will never be used to it, and only understand through a glass darkly. The Harlot's cry from Street to Street may weave old England’s winding sheet, but I am not convinced it will do the same to Japan. At least not yet.

Would I pass @2rafa’s sniff test? Well at one point I would have, but in those days I was a beardless boy, didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, and was completely blinded by a singular obsession with my beloved. (Which is as it should be, which is what I would have all men be in that stage.) Time has hardened me (that is not a pun. Well it is. And isn’t.)

My wife’s birthday is in December. The day she received her gift, I went to the gym and when I returned our sons were upstairs and she beckoned me over saying we needed to talk. I sat down, and she told me that if I had a girlfriend I needed to end it. Baffled, I asked her what she was talking about. Apparently she had seen a receipt for a fairly expensive gift for a woman and that had not been her birthday present. She assumed I was buying for my mistress. Because? She’s Japanese. This is what happens. What are we in Love, Actually?

The receipt was for her Christmas gift, still hidden in our tatami room closet, and I made the decision that confessing this was probably more helpful than keeping the surprise. I suggested she could go look if she liked. She wept, hugged me, then pulled away and regained her Japanese composure. I was amused, but I loved her more at that moment than I could remember in years, simply because I had a glimpse of the girl who didn’t daily complain that I did xyz incorrectly. Have I told you that my wife is beautiful? She is. Unimaginably. She could have been a model, but thank God she never was.

Who was it, @oats_son, who complained about revealing personal shit online? He’s probably right. I don't cheat. But the world is big, more things in this world than dreamt of your philosophy, if I may mangle Shakespeare.

This is why I buy gifts for my wife from my personal slush fund.

For what it's worth, I didn't perceive you as trying to do apologetics for infidelity (let alone that you were cheating on your wife yourself). I took it as you offering up the perspective that Japanese culture has (one that most people here wouldn't know about), with perhaps a light dose of devil's advocate for the sake of an interesting discussion about what is right or wrong.

Beautiful story thanks. Also we watched love actually on Christmas Eve again and wow I had forgotten how messed up it is. Terrible movie.

Adorable story, but I have to say, I find it a bit odd that your wife found a receipt for an expensive woman's gift and her mind immediately went to "it's for his mistress" rather than "it's a gift for me, because Christmas is right around the corner".

Quite a sweet story, Love Actually indeed (it’s interesting that there isn’t a comma in the actual movie, maybe because both “love, actually, is all around us” and “love actually is all around us” are grammatically correct? I’m no English lecturer).

Anybody is capable of cheating in the right circumstances, and so the first duty of the maritally faithful is to avoid those situations. But just like the propensity to get drunk various from person to person, with people who can have have four or five drinks and cut themselves off without a second thought and people who cannot have a sip of alcohol without a one hundred percent chance of blacking out, propensity to cheat varies too, especially in middle ground situations that are neither “my spouse is the only non-geriatric adult of the opposite sex I interact with in any real capacity, ever” nor “I regularly get drunk and do MDMA with a group of hot beautiful people I’m attracted to who all want to have sex with me”.

I just got severely downvoted with a lot of angry replies in a (specific small European language’s) language learning subreddit for suggesting chatgpt as a useful tool to explain weird grammar constructs and help with reading and study in general. This is just insane to me but also darkly amusing. I honestly haven’t realised or taken seriously the extent of reaction to this technology before. And after all the responses I am not even sure what these people are actually objecting to. I am tempted to ask chatgpt

"chatgpt" is has the strongest association with all the things about the LLMs normies are conditioned to dislike - slop, lies about muh water energy use, threats to the labor theory of art/music, and so much more. That are right to hate chatgpt, for wrong reasons. Suggest qwen/kimi/deepseek for reference, or even just gemini, the reaction may be a lot different.

The tone-setters in the sub might be teachers and translators, fearing for their livelihood?

This is indeed possible, "correctness" was one of the only openly voiced objections. Although I have never come across chatgpt using language wrongly, and it explains things much better than native speakers.

Although I have never come across chatgpt using language wrongly,

I have. It's much more likely to screw up in smaller languages than English, and especially with slang or idioms in those lesser known languages. It'll pretend to know them and hallucinate the most ludicrous explanations.

But overall I agree that LLMs are pretty great at language tasks.

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