Author: Brett L

Merry New Year! I am happy to report that I am about to drink my way out of 2019. This, the links, will be my last act of sobriety. I hope everyone has plans for a safe and responsible, excepting fireworks usage, New Year. May 2020 be better than 2019 in every way possible.

Australia is having a bit of a fire. I imagine poisonous fauna of every variety fleeing before the flames and alternatively lying in wait for firefighters.

I chuckled at the Washington Free Beacon’s Man of the Year.

Mobile PD shows its sensitive side.

Woman wakes up after being in coma for seven months. Disappointed to find Trump still President. Okay, I made up that last bit.

I was thinking about where I was 20 years ago on NYE (6th and Congress in Austin), and remembered that the girl I was dating at the time inexplicably loved this song. So, happy New Year.

Haha, just kidding, its the usual mailed-in links, but I wanted everyone to feel excited about the last Monday of 2019. I have been experimenting with some new M$ technology at work, and was all “oh, this M language for Power BI is garbage language because it takes 8 zillion steps to write the same thing I can declare in a single SQL query.” Turns out you can just drop a native SQL query in there. So now I am Power BI expert!

Who are these garbage people who hold these garbage opinions?

I think none of us are surprised by this, but I want to ask a counterfactual: Could our economy even stand it if Trump tariffs weren’t slowing the growth from explosive to rocket-powered?

For some reason, “socialist” is a pejorative term with Florida Latinos… maybe lived experience has something to do with that.

While the rest of the US is rapidly attaining 1920’s levels of wealth, growth, and opportunity, NYC is racing towards the late 70s. Time for an Escape from New York remake!

Well, let’s rock into 2020, start now, wake up by Thursday morning!

Welcome to Friday! I’ve been engaged in some desultory cleanup of both my office and my work — trying to get things ready for the new year. Hopefully, we can get out and do something family friendly this weekend. The kids are pretty much nuts after a week off. Next week we send them off to daycare again. My wife will be standing at the door, grinning wildly when we do, I’m sure.

Damn, why can’t you Minnesotans bring your Minnesota Nice to Disney?

Beechcraft manufacturing plant experiences uncontrolled depressurization event after nitrogen line rupture. At least there was no fire afterwards.

I’m a sucker for a good rocket launch picture.

Huh, its weird that we are friends with our neighbors. Note, having kids of a similar age is probably the number one way neighbors make friends. Although, picking up after a hurricane certainly helped.

With all the stomach flu in the house this week, I think we definitely had the shittiest Christmas in family history. My children are about ready to riot. They’ve had one barely functioning parent (or the other) since Friday, and are really tired of being told we can’t go do ____ because their parents are sick and/or exhausted.

In other news, I have discovered that swapping out vodka for Basil Hayden’s dark rye in a white russian is fantastic. I learned that whiskey, coffee liquer, and cream is called a Sneaky Pete.

I hope unionization does for the SPLC what it has done for so many other institutions.

That’s not how I remember it at all.

China, Russia, and Iran to hold joint “naval” exercises (I’m not sure Russia and Iran qualify as having navies) in Gulf of Oman. Over/under on number of vessels inadvertently sunk?

What’s more problematic? That someone produced a play of “Mrs. Doubtfire” or that a play about a man “passing” as a woman would be problematic to transpersons?

2019 decided to send one final “fuck you” to my family, the stomach bug laying into my wife and mother-in-law about 10:30 last night. There was so much vomiting. Soo much. I finally managed to nod off around 2am. I will say **knocks on wood** my kids have been great thus far. But its still shitty. I had to cancel all the family get-togethers for Christmas, because I’m not about to invite my parents and brother into our plague house tomorrow. I’m taking the boys this afternoon to Christmas Eve dinner with my aforementioned family. We’ll eat prime rib and cheesecake, and everyone can exchange gifts. But damnit, the only thing I make that my mother (who did all the cooking for us growing up) really likes is the Christmas brunch seafood chowder, and I’m not sure how to get that to her this year. I think I’ll make it and run it by their house in the afternoon if everyone is feeling better enough to take some kid duty from me. /rant

Pentagon tells service members they really don’t want to know who really fathered that kid.

Florida Man gets in the Christmas spirit, then arrested.

Who could possibly have seen the expensive wine thing boomeranging on Liz Warren?

You can’t spell Giuliani without “Jew”

Time for my favorite Christmas song

I was laid flat by something all weekend. I probably slept 40 of the 60 hours between 5pm Friday and 5am this morning, but I recovered enough that my dad and I had our 15th annual raw oyster and oyster po’boy Christmas lunch. He doubts we will get 15 more together. I’m hoping to be bringing him to the same place when he’s 100. On the other side of the holiday emotion spectrum, my wife is doing the first holiday season without her father, and its a very bittersweet affair. There are many emotional things going on that I’m frankly too much of a left-brain autistatarian to really get without coaching, but luckily, I’ve had some coaching.

If you say “Betelgueuse” three times while looking in the mirror, sometime in the next 100 kiloyears you’ll be rewarded with a supernova.

Cocaine Mitch is one bad turtle.

12M seems low to me.

I’m frankly confused by the alternate scales on this graph.  I’m pretty sure that this can be used to prove that either free-riderism is a viable strategy up to a point, or that union is a product that isn’t worth the price-tag to most new teachers in MI.

Well, good news, bad news on the L homefront. Good news: I got by the fancy chocolatier in town, so the women in my life are going to have a Merry Christmas. Bad news: The oldest boy is currently blowing chunks and then angry/ugly crying. So it looks like we get (another) visit from the stomach bug this month. We were supposed to have a bunch of neighbors with little kids over tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure we’ll bag that. No use making enemies of them.

I love the tone of this. How DARE this MAYOR think he’s important enough for a fundraiser like this!

Well this was not how I expected this disappearance to end. How horrible.

Oh noes, Phil the Greek is my favorite noble. If we lose him, the royalty paparazzi spend more time on that airhead American girl.

Its like rocket science is hard or something.

In a show of solidarity with our Morning Links, or because I am still exhausted, here are some crappy links

It is hard to imagine a bigger shitshow than this impeachment.

One wonders how John Roberts will engineer Penaltax II

Damn, someone tried to shoot up FSB headquarters in Moscow. Good thing they were killed, because I wouldn’t want to be the target of a very hostile interrogation.

Wow, that’s some serious dedication to your wife, right there.

Holy crap. My kids, man. They won’t freaking sleep. It looks like I’m gonna have to pull out the big guns and tell the Krampus story. Only, you know, modified so that Krampus only takes little children who GET OUT OF BED TOO EARLY LIKE YOU! I mean, fuckit, they can spend their own money on therapy or wait and use mine after I die, right?

Some progress made on the three-body problem?

Trump impeached almost 21 years to the day after Clinton. MoveOn on exactly the opposite side.

Ahh, its Winter Strike Season in France.

Damn. Survive a time in the NHL to get crushed in a paper plant. That’s rough.

Man, I am exhausted. I couldn’t fall asleep and then one kid or the other was up from 3:45am on. I barely know what is going on. My son has some sort of Holiday concert tonight, and I’m really not sure there’s enough coffee in the world to keep me awake while a bunch of kindergarteners flail away at holiday songs for an hour. Even the stern gazes of my mother and wife will probably not stay Morpheus’s hand.

I was disappointed that the “pro-impeachment group” in this article was not Move On.

We live in a world where the FDA is demonizing nicotine vaping, but approving “low nicotine” cigarettes.

World’s oldest married couple… 80 years. Wow. Live to be 105, and that’s the reward?

And Riven sends us… KITTEHS!