Man attempts to stowaway in jet engine

Poor kid must have been desperate to risk that, even wheel-well stowaways have a poor survival rate

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It is one of those shitty problems that does not have a solution. At least not a feasible one that can work within a decade.

The real, real solution to refugee and immigration problems is of course to improve life in poorer countries to such a level that the siren song(*) of richer countries is not that compelling. But those people that oppose refugees and immigration are exactly those that support foreign policies that create them.

(*And it often is a siren song. Life in France is better but not when you don’t have a passport, papers, access to government institutions and certainly not if you enter with a life-debt to the organized crime syndicates that traffic these poor sods.)

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This, a hundred times. Poor uneducated people are easier to herd and will gladly dig diamonds or do any other job for pennies rather than asking for decent work conditions and salaries. There’s zero incentive in making their countries self sustaining, and that’s the reason so many corrupt leaders are continuously put in power by rich western countries over there, to keep them divided and conquered.

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Yes I fumbled that one. :woozy_face:

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The trouble with that is that Tom hit 58 yesterday.

As you noted above, his insurers are no doubt accutely aware.

Being Haley Atwell fan provides the unintended informational “benefit” of knowing that filming on the next MI film is essentially complete. Atwell was contracted to appear in 2 MI films; so someine’s confident Cruise can work at the same “level” into his 60s. That, of course, is yet to be seen.

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That would have been a very short trip…

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Tom Cruise age denialist… the boy who never grew up. He is the walking embodiment of a certain kind of toxic masculinity, conflating physical prowess with self-worth and all with a soupcon of The Beauty Myth for men. It is interesting that not only does he insist on maintaining his looks but also insists on maintaining a YOUTHFUL look. (and if he doesn’t want to be accused of hiding in the closet he should stop acting like such a fucking twink)
One of the reasons I liked him in Vanilla Sky so much is because that is who he is-- losing his looks is his idea of hell.

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Get Katie Holmes back.

Congratulations, you’ve discovered Conservative economic theory! For extra bonus points, don’t forget to set up laws with which you can threaten people so they’ll work for even lower wages under worse conditions with no way to go to authorities least they be punished worse.

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Tom Cruise is always getting older
He knows he’ll never be that young again
And when Tom Cruise looks back over his shoulder
He sees a thousand younger leading men

– from Tom Cruise Crazy by Jonathon Coulton

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You don’t suddenly become old when you turn 60.

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Oblig

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That you completely missed their point only underlines it. Stow away is a verb. That is, words used to describe actions. Stowaway is a noun, a word describing a thing. Phrasal verbs are just that. Jump off is two words. Make up as a verb is two words. Makeup the noun is one word. See also setup, login, takeoff. I was very upset about snood, and don’t get me started on “psych rock”. I am old, though, what do I know?

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On the topic of appropriate aeronautical vocabulary, I give you " snarge":

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarge

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He’s doing his own stunts, that’s what he’s doing. Like a man. A man much taller than five foot seven.

<shakes tiny fist @wphurley>

You missed my earlier reply in an almost identical vein and @Bytheway’s follow-up admission that they fumbled it.

But I’m intrigued as to what the snood issue is. (I won’t get you started on the “psych rock” issue, whatever that is.)

Or, consulting the BoingBoing stylebook, a “gentleman”.

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Not to derail the topic, but a snood is a piece of cloth used to cover the hair. Has been for centuries, it is a grand word with a great deal of history. Then an entrepreneur came along and needed a word to describe their annular neck covering; or, worse, it was a marketing executive. So now the old meaning is lost. We can only hope the new meaning is a phase, and the old will recover, there is time.

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Understood. I fully agree re the re-purposing of perfectly cromulent words for other uses, risking the eventual loss of the original usage. Which is a different topic to that of grammatical correctness.
What riles me even more is the accidental misuse of some words/phrases/usages which then spreads until everyone thinks it is correct because they’ve seen the misuse so often.

Homonyms are a particular risk (breaks/brakes, for example, but there are many others) but the insertion of ‘a’ in noun+noun comparisons is one that really bugs me.

When a noun is described in terms of another noun, the “of” is standard English: “a prince of a man” … “a devil of a time” … “a gem of a cottage
When an adjective is part of comparison - adjective + noun - it depends what type of adjective it is.
Adjectives of quantity - "much,” “more,” “less,” “enough” - do take “of”, e.g. “enough of a risk” and “too much of a drive
But with adjectives of degree - “good/bad”, “big/small” “long/short”, “old/young”, “hard/easy” “near/far” and so on - the “of” is entirely unnecessary and incorrect.
Is it too big a deal to ask people to stop inserting “of” where it is not needed?

Apologies for further derail, but it was the discovery of a stowaway, not the question of how sensible a place it was to stow away in that started this. :wink: