@Alex:

Although my beard started coming in strong when I wasz 19 or so, I didn't have a decent moustache until I was around 30. In the meantime, with a full beard and sideburns but to moustache, I looked Amish.

Once,m during an after-hours function where I worked (as a computer programmer), a co-worker who I did not know well approached me and said "Say, you're Amish, right?"

After a beat, I replied "Yes, I'm one of those Amish computer programmers you hear so much about."

Years later (after I grew a 'stache), someone else approached me at work and said "What are you, a Mormon or something?" I assume it was a comment on my facial hair, and told the guy that Modern-day Mormons almost never grow facial hair.

Another time, I was sitting in my car in a McDonald's drive-thru line when a woman came up and knocked on my window. When I opened the window, the woman said "Mazeltov, Rabbi!"

Another time, a man approached me in a park and said "Are you the rabbi?"

Evidently, many people equate facial hair with religions.

"Key indicator"? No.

But a stroke can seriously mess up a person's sense of the passage of time.

After my stroke (Aug 4 2008), I spent eleven months in a hospital, various physical rehab facilities and a nursing home before I was finally discharged back home on June 30 2009.

Not long after that, my wife Susan and I visited with a couple we had not seen since my stroke, so I had tons of stories of my Adventures in Healthcare to share with them. As soon as we got there, the four of us sat down and I started in on my stories. Some time later, Susan clearedher throat and said "Robert, do you realize that you have been talking for eight straight hours now?"

I had no clue.

We had sat down and I had started talking at around 8am, and Susan interrupted me at around 4pm - Holy smokes! I would have guessed I had been talking for 30-40 minutes, tops.

That was the most dramatic example, but there have been many others.

All:

==========[ "DOUBLE POSTING" ]==========

It has been brought to my attention that I have been doing a fair amount here of what is called "double-posting" here on The Discourse.

My apologies to any who I have annoyed and/or offended by my having done so.

A few thoughts on this:

1. I have NEVER, in more than a decade of frequent posting on dozens of internet forums, and even moderating on a few of them, seen the practice of making two different posts in a row within a given thread/topic forbidden, discouraged, nor even frowned upon.

2. I have never even heard the tern "double posting" used to describe such an occurance. I have only seen it used to describe the EXACT SAME POST beying made two times in a row by the same user in one thread/topic.

But okay, that IS what it is called here, and it IS frowned upon here, so I will try not to do it any more (When in Rome...). I onl;y mention the two points above to explain why I have evidently been doing it here. Avoiding it has never been a part of my frame of reference.

There are some other things I catch myself occasionally doing in posts here (and elsewhere), and want to mention here:

==========[ OCCASIONAL ALL-CAPS "SHOUTING" ]==========

This is a piece of "nettiquette" (or however that is spelled) of which I've been aware since the old BBS days of  the 1980s.
TYPING IN ALL-CAPS IS CONSIDERED "SHOUTING", and is considered rude and annoying.

So why do I occasionally do it here (and elsewhere)? Because...

1 I do not touch-type
...and so I watch the keys as I type rather than the characters as they appear on the monitor. So, if I inadvertently press the CapsLock key (usually when trying to press the letter A), or intentionally press it in order to key something in all caps (either for emphasis, or because it is an acronym (NASA, NATO, ZIP, etcetera) or an initialism (IBM, CRT, ATM,    etcetera) -and then forget to turn CapsLock off, I don't see the resulting "shouting" because I am watching the keyboard, not the monitor. So a whole word, sentence, paragraph or post can be in all-caps before I happen to look up and notice it. I will usually backspace over it and retype it in the correct case at that point, but not if I am being lazy, or am in too much of a hurry. My apologies for that.

2. I type everything with my right hand only.

My stroke, in August of 2008 was in the right hemisphere of my brain, and severely compromised my brain's control of the muscles in the left half of my body (I am what is medically known as a "Left-side Hemiplegic"). As a result, my left leg/foot is nearly useless (thus confining me to a wheel chair), as is my left arm/hand, forcing me to type everything using only my right hand (not the "naughty" one-handed typing you see mentioned some times, I (regretfully) assure you.

Actually, I have ALWAYS typed with only my right hand, throughout my thirty-plus-year career (1976-2008) as a computer programmer. But that is a story for another time.

==========[ OTHER MISCELLANEOUS TYPOS ]==========

aLSO DUE TO MY STROKE, AND DUE TO MY UNIQUE STYLE OF TYPING,

See, I just accidentally "shouted", inadvertently pressing CapsLock when typing the A in "Also"!

Also due to my stroke, and due to my unique style of typing, I frequently press two keys at the same time, or just press the wrong key, and, since I am watching the keyboard instead of the monitor, I usually do not notice it until later, if at all. I have tried some spell-checking plug-ins and such, but with limited success.

==========[ IN CONCLUSION ]==========

I typed all of the above not as a plea for pity, but so that the reasons for some of my frequently garbled and/or frowned-upon method of posting will be a bit better understood.

My thanks to any who took the time to read all of this.

And to those who reply (or even think) "tl;dr", let me say:

tb;fy.

-RSL

Quote from: RSLancastr on February 16, 2013, 12:47:55 AM

I still have to wait until May to get mine - Waaaah!!!

I still have to wait until...wait, I'm NOT GETTING ANY!  Waaaah!!! 

You'll get one when pigs fl...

Wait a minute! You can still donate (and thus get a deck) on the film's web site:

http://www.anhonestliar.com/

Thanks a lot, Collector!

Sorry if this has been addressed elsewhere (I can't find the thread about it from a week ago), but last I heard, the site's webmaster was coming back from a week's vacation "the next day" (ths was several days ago) and all would be fixed then.

So far, nope!

Okay.

You all missed my birthday (yesterday), but I have another one coming up NEXT year, so you have enough time to save up:

[ebay]251227690482[/ebay]

I'll act all surprised.

I said that none of you remembered my birthday, but I did receive shipment of an order from bmpokerworld yesterday, containing:

[list=1]

• Bicycle War of Currents Playing Cards
• Bicycle Venom Playing Cards
• Bicycle Venom Strike Playing Cards
• Bicycle Karnival Z-Ray Deck Playing Cards
• Bicycle  Karnival Eathtone9 Playing Cards
• Bicycle Asura Playing Cards

I also received a package from my dear frien James "The Amazing" Randi, containing:

[list=1]

• "Invisible Playing Cards" (a transparent plastic deck, not the gaffed/trick deck for performing the "Invisible Deck" illusion).
• Bicycle Coffin Fodder deck, signed by the artist.
• A deck with Randi's face on the back (definitely one-sided)
• A deck with "Magic Bar 2010" on the back - some sort of gathering of magicians, I presume.
• A souvenir deck from Sydney, Australia

All in all, a very cool haul for a card collector's birthday!

I just noticed that the "ebay" tags in the previous post are apparently not supported by trhe aethercards forum software.

Sorry.

This does not answer your question (in the OP), but it is related, so I will talk about it here:

As I have porobably mentioned multiple times here, I am NOT a cardist/flourisher/fanner.

In fact, I only have one functioning hand (my right), due to a massive stroke I had in 2008.

As you might imagine, this makes simply opening a sealed box of cards and looking at the cards problematic.

I pull the deck out and set it, face up, on the table or desk before me, I then take the cards - one at a time - from the stack, examine each card, and then place it, face down, in a new stack next to the face-up one.

This is where the deck's finish can be a problem for me. There are times when the top card on one of the stacks of cards will start...sliding off of the stack. If I do not catch it in time, it starts an avalanche of the rest of the cards in the stack, and they cascade to the floor. This means that I then have to use my mechanical reacher/grabber to pick those cards up, one by one, which is damned difficult to do without damaging or bending them.

So, while I imagine that certain finishes make fanning and flourishing easier, some of them apparently make what I am doing far more difficult.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled topic.

Sorry.

The seller issued me a full refund.

I would rather have had the cards, but a refund is good, too.

Hey, we were all new once, right?  I'm just pleased that at my age I can still find things that I'm new at! 

I can relate, Don!

But, after my stroke in 2008, it's sometimes like the joke:

Q: What's the one good thing about having Alzheimer's?

A: Every day you meet new people.

(My apologies to anyone that may offend).

I just sent the following eBay message to the seller of an eBay item I bought via "Buy It Now":

Dear [seller's name],

- I paid for this item on Jan 28

- Estimated Delivery: Feb 1 - Feb 2

- I Messaged you on Feb 5 saying I had not yet received the item.

- is now Feb 7, and I have still not received the item, nor a reply to my message.

What's up?

- rslancastr

How do I escalate my complaint, and when should I do so?

ETA:

I have purchased more than 300 items on eBay over the past 15 years, and have NEVER had this problem before.

That's some exciting stuff - I trust you'll send us some scans? 

That's the plan!

I'm amazed. So many custom decks. What a collection you got there!

Looks awesome man! Keep it up!

Okay, I see now. Not very intuitive, but I will try to remember it - thanks!