My apologies for being mostly AWOL this week- I’m serving as the scouting party in Arizona, trying to find the Child Bride, the Wonder Dog, and me a place to live. And spending a couple days on-site at my new job. Worse yet, they issued me a shiny new laptop which is a MacBook Pro, and using it has been a wrestling match where my opponent is covered in an amazing low-friction substance. I deeply and sincerely hate this thing. But I’ll try to post links anyway. Because there’s some good stuff out there.
And some auspicious birthdays, including deep political thinker Edmund Burke; classic American writer Jack London; actual Nazi and all-around fun guy Hermann Goering; cowboy and patriarch Tex Ritter; donut and coffee mogul Tim Horton; magician Kreskin, nee George Kresge; living proof that stupidity, malice, and corruption can take you a long way Sheila Jackson Lee; professional gasbag and Team Red flak Rush Limbaugh; professional gasbag and very tall person Howard Stern; and a guy who is about the find out the meaning of “half” Jeff Bezos.
Coming up next, the news.
If Trump continues to back off his pledge to stop intervening in the Middle East, there’s a Team Blue candidate for president who might actually get my vote if she ever got nominated. Which she won’t, since Team Blue activists hate her. She spouts all of the Team Blue stupidity, but has ending the wars as her centerpiece. Well, I can always hope for a chance to vote for McAfee.
But the question is, “Are we or aren’t we?” The story says we are, but quotes a Pentagon flack as saying that no-one has actually left. Fog of war?
“Failure” is a relative term. Some of us would call it “a good start, now let’s broaden it.”
And yet more Global Warming. Say, whatever happened to that Polar Vortex shit?
Speaking of Exodus, this seems oddly familiar…
The Yellow Vest stuff is amusingly stupid, but like Gabbard, sometimes they have a great idea which more than makes up for the rest.
We have created a Fourth Wave feminist!
We may be able to guess what happened to this lady’s cat.
Old Guy Music today features a sentimental favorite of mine, the great Clifford Brown, who sadly, I never got to see live. But at least I saw most of the rest of these guys at various times. The fiery trumpet solo here is just… well… let’s just say they don’t make players like this any more. And as usual Harold Land, Max Roach, and Ritchie Powell do more than just keep up.
I’m not a fan of vandalism, but vandalizing speed cams? Yeah, have at it.
First!
Cue the music… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HqGzBqPnNBk
“threatening road safety and putting people’s lives at risk.”
people will die! !!
Or government revenues will go down, which is even worse.
The way they tossed that in at the end as an afterthought… parody really is dead.
“threatening road safety and putting people’s lives at risk.”
Those are some powerful cameras!
How to be a Fourth Wave Feminist:
1) Wear a head-to toe burka
2) Refuse to address of be addressed by an unapproved man in public
3) If an unapproved man does address you, incite a mob to destroy him
4) Refuse to drive, work or travel alone because ‘patriarchy’
5) Do not buy or sell or otherwise participate in voluntary exchange because ‘capitalism’
Equality, finally!
The U.S. force in Syria has “begun the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria,” said Col. Sean Ryan, spokesman for the for Combined Joint Task Force
Deliberate?
He had to differentiate from ‘accidental withdrawal’, which is a problem for some men.
I’m assuming he meant to say “calculated” or “careful”. Poor choice of words.
Sigh……sometimes the pedantry around here is tiresome. It’s almost like my jokes are often clumsy and poorly executed, which is analogous to some men’s withdrawal technique.
Someone has to hold down the fort until UnCiv gets here.
Maybe you need to be more deliberate.
As opposed to the French and/or Polish withdrawal from their own territories in WWII – both of which were rather unstudied.
Speaking of Exodus…
this sounds familiar
Did you go from Phoenix, Arizona all the way to Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A.?
Northern California where the girls are warm?
God, I fucking hate that song.
/Starts typing Big Lebowski quote, remembers thats not an Eagles song
I got nothin’
It’s certainly worse than Jaws
Second.
I never did figure out why the Steve Miller band ever achieved any popularity; I thought they sucked back in the Seventies. But then I thought the same about Journey.
But that was the lyric that popped immediately into my head. I have no idea why.
Now, if you had mentioned Winslow, Arizona…
Jesus, I hate to say this… Steve Miller (+ band) had the ability to put out some good songs. Also, a lot, lot, lot of crap. Very much a product of the times.
OK, which Steve Miller song was good? Really? I was there and maybe I’m just hard to please but I don’t remember one that I just wanted to change the channel on.
I always liked Jet Airliner – which has tricky changes, a good bass line and decent guitar work. Also Fly Like an Eagle, which I like because I heard it when I was 9 and liked it then.
You understand from my previous comment that I’m not actually a huge fan, right?
Jet Airliner, as a song, ran out of gas after the first stanza.
I dunno. Any era when Paul McCartney could continue to be a commercial success on his own was pretty slim pickens.
Growing up, as I did, right on the Mexican border I remember changing the radio dial to listen to Rancheras or Cumbias rather than have to hear whatever pop music the American DJ was forced to pump into my speakers.
The jet airliner one isn’t that bad.
The Joker makes me want to commit genocide.
Huh. Complete opposite for me.
“The Joker makes me want to commit genocide.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Steve Miller Band is up there with Bruce Springsteen as being complete and utter garbage. I’d rather listen to a Kesha album than either of those two.
Ahem! Its Ke-dollar sign-ha
My God, I hate the Millenial generation.
Ahem!
https://www.glamour.com/story/kesha-reveals-the-reason-she-dropped-the-dollar-sign-from-her-name
*snort*
I’ll go along with the Springsteen comment. I never understood WTF anyone saw in him. He had one song I liked – Because The Night – and then I found out his girlfriend wrote it. Patti Smith at her worst was better than Springsteen at his best.
I find “Saving Grace” listenable, but I dont have a concise answer why.
I have heard Journey was good before Steve Perry showed up.
But it’s Prog Rock, so it most likely still isn’t that great.
Listen for yourself.
Too many songs from the early 1970’s (when I was in high school) are really boring and probably only work after you’ve smoked enough pot (I never indulged) – I’m looking at you Argent – “Hold your head up”.
Really, It’s funny to me, recently, to hear a smattering of pretty good music from that era when I mostly remember how bad so much of it was.
We listen to AFN when we’re driving. If that is representative of the music that is popular with the whipper snappers today, give me Steve Miller anytime. Every song I hear on AFN’s “rock” slot is whining, whining shit.
+1 Ham-fisted, idiotic PSA’s
If there were a TV channel with just AFN PSAs, I would totally watch it.
There is.
It’s called AFN
Umm.. I was talking about music.
What gets broadcast currently doesn’t qualify. They aren’t singers and even using the term “artist” is stretching the definition pretty thin.
I’m not saying we didn’t have some real music back in the day but I can remember a lot of it was really shyte.
Just play Ozzy. It’s not that hard. But, yeah, we had some bad music back in the day. Boston…*shudders*
“Your Saving Grace” was a good Steve Miller song. He had some good stuff before Greatest Hits.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xGFTBNy3Hdk
my opponent is covered in an amazing low-friction substance
Never buy a used MacBook Pro from an incel.
I was told by MacBook fans that once you get used to a Mac ‘it’s so much better.’ I’ve had mine more than six months and I’m still not used to it. The other upshot they claim is that it will last longer, ………we’ll see.
They told me the same thing when it was issued to me. “After a week or two, you’ll never go back.” In a private conversation with the IT guy, he confided, “”You will never stop hating it.” It really does make the simplest tasks complicated. Losing the whole right click thing alone makes me want to pitch it at one of my orphans so at least I’ll have the pleasure of seeing them get injured.
That is the feature that frustrates my Mac loving wife when using my PC. It’s what your used to I suppose.
i-Shit are toys. Windows crap are tools.
If you only need to do the lightest of IT tasks you probably like i-stuff. If you have to really use your IT resources you need some windows crap.
Very few people who really need IT resources work in environments that can support real IT tools – which are neither of the above.
Like Linux with a CLI.
(Linux user who isn’t very good with CLI)
It doesn’t help that Mac decided to have their whole “i” thing, so now if you’re looking for stuff on IOS you have to narrow down the search.
What are “real IT tools” in your experience?
By way of background, I work in IT at a tech company (part of the S&P 500 tech sector). We have many thousands of Linux-based machines in production.
We have several thousand engineers of various sorts – software, network, etc. Almost all of whom use a Mac. The ones that don’t are Linux-only (most of us have both). The number of engineers using Windows here approaches zero.
Macs are, essentially, Unix with a pretty face. My desktop, like most other engineers, looks like a couple browser windows , several terminal windows and, usually, a text editor (I’ll skip the vi vs. emacs holy war). Most of the code I write on my Mac runs completely unchanged on production.
Yep, and has been since the early aughts. Where this “toy” notion comes from is a mystery to me.
If people had been talking pre OS X, I’d agree about the “toy” comment – no preemptive multitasking, no memory protection, etc.
I only considered Apples once Jobs bought Next (I lusted after those), and used that as the basis for OS X. That first release in 2001 was so raw and still only PowerPC that I didn’t do more than play around with it.
I switched over around 2007, once they were on Intel and 10.5 was out and stable. It’s been pretty good since then. That said, I’d probably still be on Linux if work weren’t offering Macs.
Same here.
And work has always been Windows (kind of required for .NET and SQL Server…). But I know both inside out at this point.
Interesting thing is both are taking steps towards each other. You can now do much Windows development on a Mac, and MS recently released an official Unix or Linux layer.
Yah, one of my co-workers was talking about the Linux layer – basically running Ubuntu. I remember all the pain I had to go through to get work done on Windows – getting Cygwin running was pretty much the first required step on a new host. And that still wasn’t quite the same.
Go‘s native cross-compilation has made things quite a bit easier as well. Thanks, Google (some good from the bad).
(I’ll skip the vi vs. emacs holy war)
Because ed is superior to both, unless you’re a real man who uses cat because you don’t make mistakes?
(In truth, I use Atom – slow start-up aside, I quite like it).
I briefly liked Atom until VS Code came out and IMHO swiftly overtook it.
Interesting, didn’t realize VS Code was cross platform – I may poke at it, especially if it supports remote editing, a’la remote-atom / rmate
I don’t know about that – probably.
I just got to thinking… doesn’t MS ultimately control both of them now??
Yep; MS bought GitHub. There’s a bit of uncertainty around Atom, given that VSCode & Atom are both Electron-based editors, etc.
atom-ide was essentially just abandoned (https://nuclide.io/) – I’ve no doubt the MS acquisition had a lot to do with that.
Yeah, was just reading about that. It didn’t exist before I switched to VSCode, so I didn’t know what it was until 5 minutes ago.
And yeah, both editors are so similar already – I don’t see Atom hanging on much longer.
I’m so glad I sat that war out.
I was de facto vi if only because it was installed by default on Solaris vs. an hour of fetching tarballs and compiling for emacs.
I can fudge my way through simple vi tasks. Emacs… forget about it.
My MacBook experiment has been mixed results, too. I can do most of the simple web browsing stuff, which is mostly what I want to do with this computer.
It’s more stable and well built than the cheap plastic HPs I’ve been buying the last few iteration, but it isn’t as stable as anything I’ve put linux on, and it’s not as well built as the MBP I was issued at work in 2014 (before the cleaning lady stole it a week later)
“before the cleaning lady stole it a week later”
What was your wife doing out of the kitchen?
I told her the “is your refrigerator running” joke and she took it seriously.
But did she let Prince Albert out?
My Macbook still works ten years later (and ny wife’s still works 9 years later), they just got too slow. So I replaced them with a new Macbook this fall.
The longest I got a PC laptop to last was 5 years. It required a fan replacement at year four. Then totally died a year later
So the hardware quality is trur
I had an old Compaq last 6 or 7, but by that point the battery was dead, the hinges were failing, dead pixels abounded, and intermittent hardware faults were cropping up. Since that time, I’ve never had a laptop last more than 4 without having some sort of life ending failure.
My experience has been very much manufacturer dependent. At my now ex-job, I turned in my 10 year old and still working perfectly Lenovo, and was issued an HP, which promptly failed. Replaced by another HP, which promptly failed. Then replaced by another HP… and then I quit.
I still have a 12 year old Dell that works, but it’s slow and won’t accommodate a lot of the software I use these days.
I had a Lenovo laptop that was around 10 years old at it’s retirement party. It would still work if I fired it up right now.
Ive had Asus, Acer, and HP as personal computers, and none have made it to 5 years. My work Lenovo (traded in for the MBP mentioned above) didn’t really need trading in after 2 years, but it was a bit underpowered for a software engineering job.
I was debating between a macbook and a Lenovo x1 carbon, and the macbook was on deeper discount. It was also mainly for my wife, who is much more IOS friendly than I am. When I buy myself a laptop, it’ll be a Lenovo.
I concur. As someone that frequently takes my laptops into inhospitable and not-appropriate environments, Lenovos have generally been reliable.
If it lasts longer it’s only because I use it a LOT less. After a year I have two keys that sometimes print nothing, other times print their character twice. You never know which option you’re going to get, but those are your only options.
Also….ew.
Don’t get jazz, for the most part. It just doesn’t speak to me.
That said, Time Out is an incredible album, and Clifford Brown was a great horn player
It’s something I grew up on. Sneaking a radio into bed with me as a kid so I could listen to The Harley Show (specializing in Big Band), Sunday shows at The Famous Ballroom, sneaking into Jim Parker’s 88 Club with a fake ID… it really is the music of my youth.
Let’s compromise.
Wow Steely Dan was not made for the MTV generation. I enjoyed thier music but they are rough looking dudes.
+1 face for radio broadcasting
I don’t expect much love here for it but Steely Dan is/was (RIP Walter) my favorite band.
I’m not sure quite what genre they are – not quite rock – but their sound was their own. And they managed to get some pretty big names – Michael McDonald, Rick Derringer, missile defense expert Skunk Baxter – to perform with them.
Producer Rick Beato has a cool series video called “What Makes This Song Great?” and #3 on his list is Kid Charlemagne.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xKIC9zbSJoE
It’s a cool series where he breaks down parts trablck by track. Highlights include where he demonstrates the virtue of a real drummer vs. a Bruno Mars machine track and how 6 people singing together without autotune sounds so good.
I realize the lyrics on this track -hell, pretty much all of their songs, really – don’t make much sense. It ain’t poetry. But I still feel like they stand up, better than, as noted above, freaking Argent.
Mojeaux will be along to commiserate with you on your horrible taste in music.
I am totally on board.
Maybe I don’t know one Effing thing about it but, to me, Steely Dan was one of the few groups who seemed to know what music is supposed to be.
At the time, as a teenager I didn’t really appreciate them. But as time wore on I really started to understand their music.
They’re Yacht Rock. I freely admit I like them.
Steely Dan were incredible musicians and very good in the studio. If I had to pick a favorite from them it would be My Old School. Just a brilliant song with great lyrics.
I almost linked to that song – love the guitar solos on that (Skunk Baxter, I believe).
Yup, and Hey Nineteen would get my vote also.
“Hey nineteen, that’s Aretha Franklin, she don’t remember the Queen of Soul. Hard times for sole survivors…”
Great stuff.
After watching the Rick Beato break-down a few months ago, I find myself really focusing in on the drums in Kid Charlemagne. So great.
I endorse your Steely Dan endorsement and commiserate with you regarding MikeS’s regrettable lack of respect for maestros.
I liked Steely Dan.
Not a music snob.
Too bad they went full TDS.
You’ll hate this then. I know the guy who made it.
Kid Charlemagne was about LSD pioneer/Acid Test/Grateful Dead sound man Stanley Owsley, who lived in the same tiny hillside San Francisco suburb we live in now. So we have a bit of affinity for the song.
I should have separated those 2 statements. I am aware that Clifford Brown didn’t play for Brubeck.
Max Roach!
There’s a reason ~75% of the IPhone owners cover thier phones. Once they made the cases out of aluminum with thin rounded edges they became easily droppable.
The MacBooks share a similar design.
I got a hairline crack running the length of my iPhone 8. The rounded corners and lack of headphone jacks are idiotic. Also, (as Scott Adams pointed out) they are a bitch to handle in the dark.
Does anybody not actually put a cover on their $700 pocket eel? I’ve dropped mine 5 or 6 times over the last year, not to count various bangs, jams and bumps that happen as a result of it being in my pocket.
Granted, an iPhone has never appealed to me.
First thing I did was to put a cover on it and a screen protector the next day.
I paid $100 for my, admittedly, low end phone. Does everything I want it for and more. Never bother with a case. I do have a few scratches and chips, but nothing that impairs my use at all, despite dropping utt a few times. I think the scratches are actually from putting my keys in the same pocket. I went Samsung.
I feel the same way about my $200 LG K20. I do have a cover – i have a feeling it’s helped on a couple of corner drops -but have never needed the screen protected. And I feel like I can replace if needed without much pain, unlike some high-end iPhone or Samsung device.
I put a cover on my Motorola just because it was so damn easy to drop. For me it’s more to help me hold onto it than to protect it from a fall. Although, it has performed both duties.
Mine has a transparent case around the back and edges. No screen cover. It’s in perfect shape after about 2 years.
Yes, screen protector only. Only dropped it a couple of times over the years, no lasting damage from any except for the screen cover.
Convicted of buying sex? Dayton will tell your neighbors via Facebook.
Whaley said another reason the city is focusing on the men buying sex is because the women involved in prostitution are almost never there by choice, with most facing addiction. Whaley and Johns both said they want women in prostitution to get treatment.
How long until this creeps into strip clubs?
“Those poor girls pulling in 1K a weekend are being exploited and the men throwing bills at them are participating in human trafficking!”
The glitter that never fully comes off you is already telling everyone.
So they didn’t make a choice that got them facing addiction?
Something something it’s a disease something something no moral agency.
+1 patriarchy
No addiction is a disease and an immutable characteristic encoded in your DNA
/Sarc
/I swear I am not TOS commenter “Addictionmyth”
Could you do a write up on this board game?
A daughter of a Holocaust survivor shook when she saw the game in a toy store in Bright.
*sigh*
Literally!
My son loves playing this.
Secret Hitler!
Well, then they probably shouldn’t buy it.
Besides, it sounds annoying:
I’ve played it a couple times, it’s a fairly basic social deduction game. It’s also been reskinned in less offensive names multiple times already (since rules are not covered by copyright). It’s made by the same people who did Cards Against Humanity, so they went as offensive as they could with it.
Social Deduction games are also known as hidden role games, where you have either teams, or different win conditions based on a card that’s dealt to you at the beginning of the game. The core of the game is figuring out what the other player’s roles are (in most, if you’re the minority group, you know who else is on your team). The game is usually played through voting (either to be successful at something, removing someone, or deciding the leader). If you’re playing with a group of random players, you’re game will be fairly random (unless you’re really good at reading tells). As you play with the same group, the metagame will start to open up as you learn the patterns of your group.
So I got a decent price on a couple of bottles of wine
https://www.vivino.com/saint-cosme-saint-cosme-saint-joseph/w/1083990?year=2015
and
https://www.vivino.com/saint-cosme-saint-cosme-crozes-hermitage/w/1308244?year=2015
I am thinking I need to leave them be a few more years. OMWC, thoughts?
Speaking of wine… there’s a Supreme Court case that may change up the alcohol shipping laws here in the US.
Wine Retailers Can Sell Across State Lines – well if there’s one thing your commerce clause should apply to…
it was overridden by the 21A.
Yes, they’ll need time. St-Cosme is a negociant who bought out a lot of great old-line producer vineyards, but also have a lot of mediocre bulk stuff to blend it into. Their quality is usually pretty good, but it’s not the style I prefer, very modern and oaky.
So what is good under lets say 50 of your American dollars?
got these for 24 which for Romania is a good price. I also bought a more basic one for cheap and the wine seller said it can be drunk now despite the year Château De Saint Cosme Côtes Du Rhône Rouge 2017
Also got a good price on Château Lanessan Haut Médoc Cru Bourgeois Supérieur 1998 I generally do not buy old wines in Romania but I trust this seller and he said they came directly from the chateau
My favorite Crozes has always been Jaboulet’s Thalabert. Bruyeres is terrific, at least their own vineyard wines. Monteillet in St-Joseph, ditto Gaillard. Stephane Ogier’s Cotes-du-Rhone Syrah is outstanding.
thanks. aint gonna find none of that in Romania but will add to the list
Trumphitler, a sociopath? I never saw that coming.
The last three weeks have exposed the lack of empathy of a billionaire President who shrugs off the struggles of federal workers who work paycheck to paycheck. Trump is clearly more concerned about a pet political project than his constitutional role of providing governance to all Americans.
——-
Government shutdowns usually end when the political leaders caught in the standoff calculate that the political damage sustained by standing firm begins to outweigh the embarrassment of a climbdown.
With tales of anger and deprivation of government workers stuck in a terrible situation beyond their control now dominating news coverage, that point may be coming closer.
“We here at CNN are doing our part to shove this narrative down your throat. Are you ready to surrender, America? Pick up the phone, and tell Trump to stop murdering our government.”
The biggest whine is that poor fed workers living on cat food paycheck to paycheck are out of work. So, they admit that most govt jobs are just an employment program.
Yeah, let’s get the sociopaths out of government! Then there will only be about 6 members of Congress, so they won’t be able to do shit.
Any big snow storm is now called a bomb cyclone and obviously caused by climate change. The polar vortex is when climate change pushes cold air down from Canada.
We should build a wall at the Canadian border…
We should. They can keep their cold air. Besides, we owe them: (The picture says it all)
Drop a bomb on it.
We need another raiding party.
Looking at satellite images it looks like there are more such roads on the US side of the border that help trap the water. That area is as flat as a pancake so the water doesnt run off very quickly. It looks like a self-inflicted problem to me.
There’s one every mile. But, just because there are roads there (with water holding ditches all along them) doesn’t mean there isn’t a series of culverts to move water under them.
I don’t know how you can look at the accompanying picture and say the Canadian road/damn isn’t severely impeding the flow of water.
The river flows east and doesnt cross the border. On the US side there are similar raised roads going North to South that help trap the water on the US side.
Just straighten the damned river out.
We had a similar problem here a hundred years ago. We straightened the bayou and deepened it (the bayou on my property) and on the Catahoula. On both we also created lakes (I have a very interesting story about that but I am waiting for the situation to resolve itself in the courts before I spill the beans) and built flood control dykes. Flooding problem solved.
Maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth about it because the same kinds of assholes were dynamiting the levees at night almost as fast as they could be built.
I’ll be sure to tell the assholes here how you feel.
If only it were possible to dig a ditch.
Similarly, any series of unusually warm days in winter is a sign that snowfall is a thing of the past and indicative of climate change.
I should have gone into “climate science”; you’re never wrong!
By any conventional measure, Trump is guilty of putting his own political ego above the interests of the Americans he leads. For all the power of his campaign trail rhetoric among supporters, he’s not shifted the political needle at all. He seems oblivious that in divided government, a President can’t just demand what he wants.
I think one of my eyes just rolled under the desk.
I’d be thrilled if these sentiments were genuine and not primed to go in the incinerator the instant one of their guys gets in office.
+1 pen and phone
Damn your nimble fingers!
Unless he has a pen and a phone.
“The bottom line is there is no excuse for the political stunt just because the President had made a commitment when he ran for office and afterwards,” said Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, in a CNN interview.
“He cannot get it done and deliver for his constituency. He should just stand up and say I tried and let’s get on with the next thing,” said Bloomberg, a possible 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. “There’s no one issue or one constituency. The President has not been elected to be the representative of a party, or of a small group, he’s supposed to be representative of a whole country.”
Stop trying to do things I don’t like and get to work banning guns and legislating dietary choices, like any sensible caring politician would.
And banning straws and encouraging public defecation.
Yeah, it’s terrible how the President suddenly came up with this whole “wall” thing and tried to force it on the country after getting elected.
Australian cleavage for you on a snowy Slutty Saturday.
http://archive.is/lOCqt
I must say that I think underboob is hard to pull off, but these ladies do it with class.
Orgy, with the exception of the thicc and those with painted on eyebrows and fake lips.
“We have harnessed all efforts available to speed up the eradication of the insects in the interest of the safety and comfort of guests of God’s house,” the authorities said.
The Last time “God’s House” was swarmed the House of Saud had to call in The French to help them out. Think about that for a minute.
The only writer more overrated than John Irving is John Updike.
Fight me.
I would, but first – you have to be wrong about something.
You talking just critical acclaim because I can think of many writers who sell shit loads of, well, shit. Pretty much any author who has written six or more novels about the same private eye, lawyer, cop, mercenary, FBI agent, etc… With few exceptions after book three, they get redundant and less believable, if there are over a dozen titles in a series you can be sure that the last third are pure crap.
Good point. I should have been more explicit in that specifically I’m talking about true “literature” writers. I’ll say though, that I’d rather read Tom Clancy than either one of the aforementioned Johns.
All I know is how the heck is David Foster so successful?
I’m not so good a lit crit. But, both writers indulge in writing melodramatic nonsense that at the time may have been considered shocking. I guess some of their work could be considered edgy for the time? What I really hate is their obsession with New England/Yankee Protestantism/…whatever; I can’t really express it. Had to read that shite in high school/college. Boring. Don’t care.
I’m going to go get coffee. Hopefully the barista is wearing yoga pants today.
Oh, throw John Cheever onto the list of Yankee dickhead melodramaticists.
And John Knowles.
Damn it! I came here to heap scorn upon the dead body of John Cheever! You beat me to it.
Agreed on all points. I suppose it’s worthwhile to have some kind of exploration of the upper-crust WASPy aspect of American life, but when your characters, settings and plot lines are essentially interchangeable from book to book, it’s time for something fresh.
Also, “edgy” is a diplomatic way of putting it; I’d say they were, at the time, shock jocks with big vocabularies. “Oooooo, I’ll make the brother and sister fuck like bunnies for a whole day! That’ll get ’em!” “Oh boy, I can have the protagonist go wife swapping again but this time the children will watch and touch themselves!” “How can I make pro-abortion arguments as cliched and ham-fisted as possible? Let’s have someone try to convince some orphans that they’d be better off if they’d been aborted!”
Michael Chabone and Hilary Mantel. Horrible writers.
Chabon has done good and bad work.
I liked Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Kavalier & Clay. Couldn’t finish Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
Foer is a self-indulgent twat, but he can tell a good story. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a favorite of mine (the movie was a disaster) and Everything is Illuminated is a good read.
+1: run from Rabbit
His over-rating will pass: the hots for Updike is demographic, and his cohort is fading fast. He’s the consummate pre-Boomer: my life is so easy and boring and all I do is play swapsies with the wives every Saturday night . . . poor me.
Compare with Fitzgerald: F Scott will ever remain over-rated because accessibility is confused for clarity and depth. People who don’t like to think will always be in the majority, so Gatsby will remain a top-ten American novel forever.
Letters to the Local Rag: Raised Eyebrow Edition
Guess they dont know how to check amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y8fxorj4
I have always struggled mightily with going back and forth between a Mac and a PC. I just can’t be fluent in both, and a lot of computering seems to be reflex. For what I do, neither is inherently superior, it’s just hard fo switch gears.
The issue I have with Macs is that if there’s a problem, it’s almost impossible to figure out the root cause. Nevermind the lousy driver support.
it’s just hard fo switch gears
I’m pretty good at teaching remedial gear jamming.
/18 speed cowboy fo-evah
George Thorogood agrees
Many of the trucks in that montage are from Oz and Canada; one reminded me of this madness which takes place in Quebec every summer.
Rollin’ Coal level >900
So they seem to be pulling fully loaded doubles. Any idea how much weight that is ?
140,000 pounds
*gross weight. Payload is roughly 90-94,000
Standard American Tandem semi = 80,000 max.
yup: Oz is where my radiator prototypes go to die.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
When pulling three trailers in 120 degree heat, you leave the fan running continuously, and yes, your radiator is everything. Most truck rads in Oz are nearly a foot taller than those here.
foot taller
US radiator for 430 HP is typically 1,350 sq inch of flow area.
AU radiator for 600 HP is typically 2,000 sq inch.
Truly, a plunge into Hell
If you’re shocked by the transformations that Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, is planning for his country, you haven’t been paying attention.
Riding in on a wave of frustration with more than a decade of left-wing leadership, Bolsonaro has promised to bring dramatic change to Brazil, change intended to make leftists squirm. And if his first two weeks in office tell us anything, it’s that those who thought his brash talk—of ending policies creating protected land reserves for indigenous populations or of liberalizing Brazil’s gun laws to make it easier for Brazilians to own guns—was just campaign bluster might want to take a serious look at the president’s plans. He intends to follow through on his promises, even the most controversial ones.
———–
Bolsonaro has argued that demarcated land for indigenous peoples is akin to keeping them “secluded in reserves like zoo animals” when “an Indian is a human being just like us.” His critics, though, see an ulterior motive: Stopping the demarcation process opens up land—especially in remote parts of the Amazon—to powerful players such as the mining, farming, and logging industries. Functionally, indigenous reserves have been used as a proxy for environmental protections.
And indigenous peoples are not a strong enough lobbying group to fight back. Maurício Santoro, an expert on Brazilian politics at Rio de Janeiro State University, told me that along with the LGBTQ community, indigenous peoples are the most threatened social group under Bolsonaro’s administration.
——–
His new minister of education is a Colombian professor emeritus at Brazil’s military schools who has blogged about keeping “traditional values” in the classroom and who has thus far positioned himself as Bolsonaro’s yes-man. Look for Brazil’s president to press him to make smaller changes, possibly including stripping out essay questions about issues such as gender violence from the national college-entrance exam.
Property rights, guns, education stripped of the leftist catechism? Bolsonaro is a heinous monster. What else can one say?
Well, that certainly sounds like he is off to a pretty good start.
13 months on since the implementation of the ELD mandate, and what a surprise, most owner operators are reporting decreases in revenue.
The share of owner-operators expecting to tally more than $70,000 in net income for year 2018 was 27 percent smaller than the share that reported the same for 2017 net income, according to Overdrive’s recent surveys. That would throw many into mid-range or lower income brackets, as shown in the graph above.
Has the FMCSA been affected by the ‘government shutdown’? Either way, burn it to the ground and salt the earth where it stood, and send all of it’s employees into exile.
That alone deserves an article, hint, hint.
I have several ideas; one of these days Mrs Gordilocks might budget me some time to bang them out.
Christ I hate insurance companies and hospitals. Just got stuck with a $4K bill because I was stupid enough to believe the hospital when they said that it was an in-network procedure.
Fuck you Obama, you lying sack of shit.
I’ll add that this is after the insurance company has collected $36K in premiums from me this year and that I was right at the annual deductible, so they haven’t paid shit out for me or my family.
&*#(%^&*&#$%^&*%!!
But you’re “covered”!
Meanwhile that piece of shit is living it up.
Which lie are you referring to? There have been a couple with regards to it.
There are too many to list.
That sucks. I was in a similar boat until last year when my wife got a job that had medical insurance included. I have my own small business so ObamaCare did what it was supposed to do and Steve Smith’d me proper. My youngest son had a shower door explode on him and had to have a couple dozen stitches in his arm and xrays to make sure there was no glass in it. It cost me 6k out of pocket, the deductible for him was 7k, which had tripled under the new shiny plan we were forced to sign up for when they cancelled our old plan.
Huh. And here I was the other day crying over the $12k in premiums we spent. No, like, literally crying. Our out-of-pocket was insane this year.
In any case, I feel your pain.
Brazil- if it is not a failed state, it is teetering on the brink. But American “liberals” like the person who wrote that article in the Atlantic would rather have millions remain mired in poverty and despair and ruin than see the wrong people get rich(er) in the process of reforming the government.
Huffpost gets its neocon on, calls Gabbard’s non-interventionist foreign policy views “authoritarian”:
How dare she meet with foreign leaders! She hates muslims!
HAHAHAHA! I know the left’s base hates Orange Hitler, but is it really fond of the U.S. “fixing” the world’s problems?
How does U.S. intervention in Middle-Eastern internecine conflicts tie in with economic “inequality”? You decide!
That’s a massive pile of cognitive dissonance and unsupported assertions.
I just… I can’t even….
As with everyone else at HuffPo and the rest of the media, in the words of Sarcasmic, it’s principals over principles, all the way down.
Huffpo is truly vile.
SURPRISE!
With his solution to the border-wall impasse, the president seems to be working within the boundaries of law—revealing the massive power of the American executive.
It’s only bad when the wrong guy has the reins. They’ll be back to shameless adulation as soon as they get one of theirs back in the Oval Office.
RE: Tulsi.
I give her about a 3% chance of getting the nomination. So far, she’s the most palatable of the potential Dem candidates and, by 1990s standards, pretty far Left for the Dems. Of course, they’ve careened so far sinistrally that she’s practically a Nazi to the Dem base. She does check the vagina and darkie boxes, but I fully expect them to go with someone more like Kamala; not only brown and distaff, but stupid, radical and insane.
“She doesn’t want to waste blood and treasure on foreign interventionism. She may as well be Orange Hitler.”
– Huffpost
Kamala Harris is going to split the mainstream of the party from the principled left; she is a crony to the prison industrial complex and has a pretty bad record of drug warring and piling up black people in jail. Fine for the gormless DNC, poison to the left.
Didn’t Sanders already split the party? I read that the progressive base that supported him essentially abandoned the party?
Abandon him for what? Some have gone to the DSA, but when it comes time to vote, disaffected Team Blue voters are no different than disaffected Team Red voters – most of them fall in line.
I really hope that Gabbard beats Harris. On the scale of evil and probability of further destruction of life and property, Harris is the far worse option.
I am really hoping that the Dems are stupid enough to nominate Harris. They need to go full retard so they can get a spanking. At this point I think it’s the only way that the more moderate voices in that party will get some traction. There is almost no way that a progressive, gun grabber from California is going to win the Presidency. I think she will actually get the VP nod to add some color to the ticket and appease the raving proggies.
My prediction stands: Harris gets the nomination and wins the presidency. “”…and give it to them good and hard.”
It really looks that way, doesn’t it? As always, the liberty minded are sure to be left homeless, especially with TEAM candidates who agree with us on the margins.
If you are a betting man I would like a couple wagers as it gets closer to Wrestlemania 2020.
Although Harris is superficially Obama with a vagina, she differs from him in one important way:
She actually has a record. Obama mysteriously sprang into existence, seemingly from the void, to get a Senate seat where he was utterly inert.
Her likely opponent, Trump, also shows little of the restraint that shielded Obama from a real opposing campaign.
With the media slobbering over Harris, she will be goaded/tempted into trying to get airtime and will undoubtedly say any number of gobsmacking things over the next couple of years that can be used against her. If Barrett is a SCOTUS nominee, the Dems will go full anti-Catholic on her (again), and you can be sure Harris will pile on. Not a good look for a Presidential nominee in a country that is 1/5th Catholic.
She’s not a lay-down winner, by any means. Hell, I think she’s in the single digits in polling for the Dem nominee (for what that’s worth).
Late Friday, in a fundraising email, Gabbard said the reason she was running “has to do with an issue that is central to the rest — war and peace.”
Should Gabbard’s candidacy not get the Sanders treatment by the DNC, it will be interesting to see an explicitly anti-war candidate run against Trump, who also leans skeptical towards foreign adventurism; notwithstanding his apparent love for The Saudis, and increase in the use of drones.
That said, this combo would also ramp up the identity politics, as a female veteran running against a spoiled rich kid who took five draft deferments will not go unnoticed by those media who make it their business to focus on gender, rather than substance.
Unlike Warren, she’s not Hillary-Clinton-enough to get the DNC nomination.
It would also be the first time I would seriously consider jacking off during a debate.
I didn’t think Trump’s tits were THAT big.
*elbows Q*
He’s got nothin’ on Chuckie Moobs.
*begins vomiting uncontrollably*
I must admit, Tulsi is certainly Fap worthy, and a far more attractive woman the AOC.
Didn’t Sanders already split the party? I read that the progressive base that supported him essentially abandoned the party?
Libertarian moment!
Also, from the Huffpost article I linked:
I don’t recall Sanders ever mentioning his views on foreign policy (the guy’s always seemed like a one-dimensional commie obsessed with other people’s money). But if he’s in the Clinton/Obama “smart power” camp, he’s an even bigger piece of shit than I thought.
Like most politicians, Sanders speaks from both sides of his mouth.
Gee, give it up already you loser.
Bernadette Peters though…turns me on for some reason. And you don’t want to see what a turned on muppet does and looks like. Anyhoooo, too bad it looks like she’s another member of the regressive left tribe. Oh well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUfJF1cwXo
Not more of that nonsense. I punched out – speaking of which, boy does that guy have a Backpfeifengesicht.
Bernadette Peters was in that cute/sexy category for me, along with Holly Hunter, Madeline Kahn and Kristin Chenoweth.
This guy gets it.
I get all of that except Hunter: I just can’t get going for a girl who talks even slower than I do.
So that’s why The Piano gets such rave reviews.
Chenoweth is about 4’6″.
Also does anyone notice anything in the background?
Yup.
He has a picture of Trudeau there.
That’s all you need to know about this twit.
G. Gordon Liddy says “you’re doing it wrong“
Soaring rhetoric. Poetry. A song to make one weep for a Paradise lost.
We had made plans to go to Washington weeks ago, and there was no way to change the trip. The train was almost empty when it pulled into Union Station on Friday night. The next morning, we went out into the dead heart of the city. The government shutdown was in its third week. Nearly all the museums that would have interested the kids were closed, and so were the ones that would have bored them. There was nothing to do except wander around, but the crowds we expected in the district center were absent, the streets and sidewalks almost empty. Without people, the scale of the capital dwarfed us. Each mid-century concrete building looked like its own walled city, the National Mall was a vast plain, and an endless highway separated the White House and the Capitol dome. It was as if Washington had been stricken by a grotesque illness that caused the body to swell up and suffocate the spirit within. The federal city was one great sarcophagus.
———-
[and then, at the Lincoln Memorial]
The second inaugural was too much for her, and she asked me to read it.
“And the war came … Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword … let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds …”
It shamed me to read it. Abraham Lincoln’s eloquence touched levels of morality and high resolve that were preposterously out of reach in the first days of 2019, in the third year of the Trump presidency.
A mighty empire, brought low by a loutish barbarian. I think I’m going to cry.
EVERYONE IS SO DRAMATIC!
“GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America and the forthcoming Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.”
I should write a book titled, “The end of this and the end of that.”
The fact the country is not embroiled in a stupid war Trump started, ushered in some good reforms (criminal and tax) and the economy is doing well should be enough to keep all the hysterics to a minimum but nope. They just mope and say stupid things like that quote.
So big fucken deal he wants a wall. I may be a bit queer here but I just don’t see what the fuss is about that.
Walls are racist.
The demonstrations, which began in November as a protest to an environmentally friendly fuel tax, have absorbed a variety of other causes, many of them based around pocketbook issues.
…
“I saw on social networks a few fools who appear next to burnt speed cameras. I do not wish for them to one day face the reality of a death on the road. It’s not about figures, it’s about life,” Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said.
I’m never let down by the political/media class and their delight in employing Orwellian Doublespeak.
Do you like to beat-off to pics of kids? Are you a member of law enforcement? Why, you get that 9 year sentence reduced to……90 days !
Where are the PizzaGate crew to enforce some STEVE SMITH vigilante justice on this POS?
Oh, Im sure the whole 90 days he spent in county were in isolation. They would’ve given him some ‘rectal therapy’ in state prison.
It makes sense that Donald Trump is indifferent to the paralysis of the government he leads, and that he welcomes a shutdown of months or even years. If shutdowns become routine, if politicians view the government in which they serve as a disposable tool, if we’re no longer capable of governing ourselves, this only reflects Trump’s contemptuous attitude toward democracy itself. Shuttered museums, federal workers who can’t pay their bills, national parks with stinking toilets: This is what Trump thinks of American republicanism. This is what the suicide of a great democracy looks like.
Yeah, whatever, dude. Take your meds.
Them and their fricken museums and libraries.
Stinking toilets. Yeh, as if they’re spotless when the government cleans them.
Wtf?
The latest threat from the government shutdown: More robo-calls
Robo-calls keep ringing and ringing Americans’ phones — and the government shutdown could make the never-ending assault even worse.
With federal agencies closed, consumers have been left with few options to defend against the tidal wave of unwanted automated calls coming from telemarketers, scam artists and debt collectors that target Americans’ home phones and mobile devices at all hours of the day.
In Washington, federal regulators aren’t around to administer the nation’s anti-robo-call rules. They can’t take consumers’ complaints, warn Americans about potential fraud or investigate the worst offenders, experts say. Already, some scammers even appear to be trying to target Americans about the shutdown itself.
The government doesn’t stop robocalls now, but somehow the shutdown will show us all how much we miss them.
I get 10-15 robocalls per day as I have a biz landline going to my cell phone. It is highly fucking annoying and has been going on for a few years now. Before I got more live spam calls, now it’s mostly the robots and occasional Indian. They often copy the first three digits in your number and/or use fake numbers from nearby cities.
I’m baffled by the robocalls that I get. On those occasions when I answer, there is nobody on the other end and the call terminates after a second or two. I can’t figure out the play. How do you make money with that?
The reason for that is that they are making thousands of calls a minute. They are actually robodials and not robocalls, and a person is supposed to pick up the connection when someone answers. But if too many people answer at the same time there are not enough live bodies in the call center to handle it. So you get a few seconds of silence and then a disconnect.
EVERYONE IS SO DRAMATIC!
Drama Queen for
a dayall eternity.“My apologies for being mostly AWOL”
OMWC- Never apologize, the kids will think you’re getting soft.
Great… my cable box is on the fritz today and now my TV giving up the ghost. Anyone know the Liverpool score?
Liverpool is up 1-0 over Brighton
An… answer? *faints*
Well, I expect good things now that they’ve made it clear they didn’t give a shit about the FA Cup.
Cal lost.
the kids will think you’re getting soft.
Ther’s a… oh, never mind.
I weep for the future
“It costs almost $91,860 to replace a camera entirely.”
Evidently they don’t have micro centers in France. No wonder they’re broke.
Gotta pay that installer sweet French union wages.
Toxic masculinity.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/fortnite-and-the-collapse-of-parenting
There was an article in the WSJ about Fortnite. I was shocked at the parents who don’t like their kids playing it so much, but are just too whipped to do anything about it.
“Free to play”
Or, “crack for teenage boys”. I block that kind of shit from even appearing in my Steam account.
“Adam White, who teaches high school in Nova Scotia, recently told me about a posse of 12th grade girls who complained that they had lost their boyfriends to Fortnite. If your son is more interested in playing Fortnite than in spending time with his girl, that’s a problem.”
Hmmm. What’s it say about the girls? Funny how that side of the equation is always ignored.
It’s just another case of adults freaking out over something that kids enjoy. I find it highly amusing that they said the same things about chess:
The older generation had similar criticisms about jazz music when it first became popular in the late 1910s and early 1920s. It was called garbage music with no skill that lures the youth into immorality and promiscuity, etc. Then the jazz generation said the same things about rock and roll, then the rock and roll generation said that about heavy metal and/or rap, and so on and so on. Nothing new under the sun.
Found this little gem in a Vox piece about Tucker Carlson
Ocasio-Cortez wants a 70-80% income tax on the rich. I agree! Start with the Koch Bros. — and also make it WEALTH tax.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 4, 2019
STFU, Ann.
But Carlson’s brand of populism, and the populist sentiments sweeping the American right, aren’t just focused on the current state of income inequality in America. Carlson tackled a bigger idea: that market capitalism and the “elites” whom he argues are its major drivers aren’t working. The free market isn’t working for families, or individuals, or kids. In his monologue, Carlson railed against libertarian economics and even payday loans, saying, “If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street” — sounding very much like Sanders or Warren on the left.
———-
When Carlson talks about the “normal people” he wants to save from nefarious elites, he is talking, usually, about a specific group of “normal people” — white working-class Americans who are the “real” victims of capitalism, or marijuana legalization, or immigration policies.
In this telling, white working-class Americans who once relied on a manufacturing economy that doesn’t look the way it did in 1955 are the unwilling pawns of elites. It’s not their fault that, in Carlson’s view, marriage is inaccessible to them, or that marijuana legalization means more teens are smoking weed (this probably isn’t true). Someone, or something, did this to them. In Carlson’s view, it’s the responsibility of politicians: Our economic situation, and the plight of the white working class, is “the product of a series of conscious decisions that the Congress made.”
The criticism of Carlson’s monologue has largely focused on how he deviates from the free market capitalism that conservatives believe is the solution to poverty, not the creator of poverty. To orthodox conservatives, poverty is the result of poor decision making or a lack of virtue that can’t be solved by government programs or an anti-elite political platform — and they say Carlson’s argument that elites are in some way responsible for dwindling marriage rates doesn’t make sense.
I’m not going to take some Vox scribbler’s
second handthird rate “analysis” of Carlson’s message very seriously.Maybe I’ll listen to it in the original.
Other than the white identity politics bullshit (the not so subtle implication that Carlson only cares about whites) it’s not far off. Carlson, like everyone else at Fox, is a fiscal conservative of convenience, and free markets take a backseat to satisfying populism.
poverty is the result of poor decision making or a lack of virtue that can’t be solved by government programs
Haven’t the last 50 years pretty much proven that (relative) “poverty” can’t be solved by government programs?
No, quite the opposite. It takes moar resources and only government is big enough to do it. Btw, have you set up an appointment with one of our many intake staff to see if you qualify for benefits?
“FBI opened inquiry into whether Trump secretly worked for Russia
By ADAM GOLDMAN, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and NICHOLAS FANDOS – The New York Times – Saturday, January 12, 2019
WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.
The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.
Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.”
.
.
.
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
***>>>
These FBI agents who believed in any way that Trump was working with/for the Russians should be fired, and tried for treason. And, of course the Grey Lady continues to spread falsehoods. – Hack into? NO, he said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” which means find them from someone who has them, not from Hildog.
Peak helicopter parenting?
Dude in a police chase runs to what appears to me momma & dada’s place, is escorted to the police by said parents, patted down by momma, and helped to his knees by both.
https://www.facebook.com/ABC7/videos/2065427320203522/