One really glaring ugliness on the new look is that the EL&U logo banner was designed to be centered, not shoved off to one side. It should at least be like this:

That at least has a bit of balance to it.

It's not enough, but it might be nice to get thrown a bone here ...

Hello everybody, I hate to bother you but I voted to reopen this question due to the newly attached research and it quickly gathered three other votes, but I think it got kicked off of the reopening queue, and I was wondering if anybody else here thought it should be opened too.

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And my apologies, I bumped my numpad. For some reason I can't delete those messages.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive answer detected, toxic answer detected (160): Any phrases like "What makes you tick?" by Kyle Titsaurus on english.SE

Word of the day: millihelen

Unit for measuring beauty. One millihelen is the ammount of beauty that will launch exactly one ship. (The Helen of Troy had "a face that launched a thousand ships")

@CowperKettle Okay, that is actually a relatively clever invention, but I think centihellen is an even more interesting measurement since it launches a hundred ships. Also, a megahellen would launch a million ships. Well, unless people argue that based on the etymons, that these units of measurement should be based on Hellen's overall beauty including factors such as her hair or overall figure, but we have no objective measurement of how beautiful those are so probably not.

We have a better measurement than ships of how beautiful Helen was. It lies in the second half of the quote: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Anybody can launch a bunch of ships, but to go to war for ten years and utterly destroy an entire city-state ...

Actually, the Iliad being a Greek story, it was really about pride, not beauty.

Here's an ad from some spam email sent me by Costco. I find it curious.

Why does a mirror need bluetooth and a speakerphone? So you can use your phone to say "Mirror, Mirror, on the wall / Who's the fairest of them all?"

And Siri or Alexa or whoever can come back and say: "The fuck you talkin' about?"

I wonder if vampires get mirrors as gag gifts.

@Robusto It is probably done to pique your curiosity enough so that you can not help to do anything other than buy it to find out what it does.

Alternatively: It's so you can see how terrible you look while doing a Skype call.

@Robusto Also no. What vampires do for a gag gift is buy a video monitor, connect it to a hidden camera and put it in a mirror frame so that when other vampires walk by, they wonder why they can see their reflection all of the sudden. It is especially dismaying to the elite class, since they believe they may have been converted into lowly humans.

It is also amusing to see neophytes rejoice at the same thought, only to be let down by the cruel reality of their lost humanity.

@Mitch Yeah, on an actual swing.