If that’s true, then at least it doesn’t take him as much Vaseline to get into the suit as Ted Cruz does.

He’ll be a martyr in prison, too. He needs to have a massive, disabling stroke so his followers can see him look irredeemably weak.

And yet people get so bent out of shape when I point out that most cars are nothing more than expensive toys for adults.

Democrats are kind of the canonical out-group.

For a seriously in-depth dive, Some More News has an episode called Why Is Conservative Comedy So… Not Very Good? The video even has a whole section about The Babylon Bee. The TL;DW is that real comedy is about the comedy, while conservative “comedy” is all about attacking out-groups. (There’s another section with examples of conservative comedians who don’t do this, and are funny.)

Like in this example, I read the headline, wrinkled my brow, and thought, “Huh?” Then a few seconds later, I remembered that there was some rumbling in the news a while back about how Harris hadn’t done a media interview at the time, and it must be referring to that? That makes sense as an attack, and I guess that’s “funny” to an audience that just wants to see attacks on the out-group, but it’s not humorous. (I mean, she’s done a couple of interviews now, so it comes across as try-hard.)

I read it as cutting through the spin. We use contemporary words like overnight oats, instead of words like gruel that have strong connotations of poverty, for essentially the same food, to obscure the fact that we are the same working class as medieval peasants were. There’s nothing wrong with gruel; and we’re just not as far removed from peasantry as we’ve been led to believe.

Just a random thought on this topic: Putin originally claimed (and his Western partisans still do) that the offensive in Ukraine was about countering NATO aggression. It’s resulted in attacks on Moscow itself, occupation of Russian territory, and now, modern NATO weapons being used inside Russia. He’s still in a fairly advantageous position militarily right. He could easily, I think, ask for and win strong restraints on NATO in a peace negotiation. But it never was actually about that, now was it?

Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.

Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.

Around here, 32°F is very cold in October, but an occasion to wear shorts in February. (Both are still cookout temperatures, though.)

No, that’s not it, we’re measuring in incredulity units, which are syllables.

“One hun-dred and se-ven?!” == 6 syllables

“For-ty one?!” == 3 syllables

Also, the first one has more vowel sounds to really draw out to indicate higher levels of I-can’t-even. It sounds only golly-jeepers in Celsius, and much more I’m-so-done-with-this-shit in Fahrenheit.

But what if Thompson’s Penis a Sword?

Ixonia, Wisconsin solved that problem by just drawing random letters from a hat until they came up with something pronounceable: Ixonia.

But I’m always amused by the street Oxford Place near my house. It’s a street named after a university, named after a city, named after a shallow spot where cattle could cross the river.

Cairo in Illinois, pronounced KAY-row.

If this were !lotrmemes@midwest.social, the pallet jack would be the balrog, and the wood chip would be Gandalf.

I’m too old to be an incel™; I was going through it back when the term incel was coined as a neutral descriptor. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have gone down that rabbit hole, because critical thinking comes very naturally to me, and the idea that it was women’s fault didn’t ever quite sit right with me. Women aren’t a monolith; they don’t get together and scheme. But if the incel phenomenon had been around, well, who knows? The camaraderie and validation of a group is incredibly beguiling.

Anyway, I was dealing with depression, which brought along a lot of other problems that caused me to be deeply angry and unsatisfied with life. One thing that really woke me up, oddly, was the song Toledo by Dan Bern. Specifically, the lyrics, “Maybe all the things you thought you got coming to you / Ain’t coming to you / Not in this life / And maybe all of the promises you thought were broken / Were never really made” In short, where was I getting the idea that life was fair, or that the universe owed me, well, anything? Not quite out of my posterior, because many cultural messages tell you that. But those messages are wrong.

So I decided to make the best of what life gives me, work on my own issues, and to have fun and do interesting things solo. And wouldn’t you know it, a year later…

…I was still single. What, do you buy into that trash about how you find “the one” when you stop looking? I’m still single years and years later. BUT! That’s okay, because “giving up looking” isn’t some fancy, new way of low-key actually-looking. The benefit has been being more satisfied with life, and doing fun and interesting things.

I’ll say it again, if you don’t like the demonym of “American,” feel free to refer to us by our state and territorial demonyms instead.

I think that there’s something to that, at least in the case of large universities which are divided into many, many organizational units. They also offer student jobs, which allow good opportunities for learning.

I started a job at a university department. A previous admin had a habit of re-purposing desktop machines as servers. There were at least a dozen of them. The authentication server for the whole department was on an old Dell desktop. All of the partitions were LVM volumes, and the volume group consisted of 3 physical volumes: The internal SATA drive, a bare SATA drive in an external USB cradle, and an external USB SSD.

This is why we drink.

If you’re talking about the automobile-based transportation system, yes, I agree that it does not work, but I disagree that it is not a hard concept. It doesn’t seem like it should be, but it is. It should be gobsmackingly obvious that it doesn’t work based on simple observations through the windshield, yet so many people just can’t grasp it. As for disruptive protest, the case is not so straightforward, and many people will argue that it’s the only form of protest that actually works.

I’ve been stuck in exactly one protest-caused traffic backup in my entire life. But I’ve been stuck in backups for: crashes, rush hour, road construction, trains, sportsball matches, concerts, sausage festivals, triathlons, university dorm move-in, and even crews painting the lane lines, more times than I could even begin to count.

Why no tears for the poor wage slaves being stuck with the shittiest of transportation systems when it’s experiencing its usual failures?