103 thoughts on “A Meme In Hand”

  2. Lord of the Rings: check.
    1984: check

    I remember that report, and that it also included Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Naturally, I had to go and read that too. Bit of a slog. Their reading list isn’t as awesome as it’s cracked up to be.

    Republica restituendae

    Parenthetical bleg: is anyone going to ConFluence the first weekend of March who would be driving close to Asheville, North Carolina? I’m looking for a carpool, and would be generous with gas money. I took a look at airline fares, and, well … I’d be very generous with gas money.

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  3. Tacos is in error. You order that stuff for you, then you order your stuff without hesitation after, and don’t blink when she steals it. This is how it works, from personal and observational data.

    Which reminds me, I need to eat. Forgot to yesterday.

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    1. I’ve seen reports of a restaurant that has a menu option of “My girlfriend’s not hungry” that will add an extra half-portion to the easily grabbable parts of your order (fries, nuggets, etc.).

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    1. Slight correction: homo correctus managed to survive long enough to breed at least once, thus ensuring the survival of that recessive gene in the gene pool to bedevil us at random times throughout recorded (and unrecorded) history.

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      1. They say all Homo Sapiens have 4% of Neanderthal DNA, which only goes to prove Homo Sapiens will screw anything just like a drunken sailor. That’s why we have survived as a species. I call it the drunken sailor theorem. I think that is the real reason the Aliens won’t talk to us, they consider us drunken sailors.

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              3. Fanservice 2: eclectic “boo”galoo.

                …

                Kermit apparently studied at the Willie Peter school of Management.

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        3. Some sailors don’t need to be drunk. They take the ability to breed that… diversely as a point of pride.

          Everyone in knew a Petty Officer Michaels.

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          1. Just heard Seamus McManus’ Armed Services tribute. This was the parody for the Navy: “Let’s go get laid, my boys, Let’s go get laid!”

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      2. My husband used to say, ” If you correct this movie out loud even once, I’m leaving and you can walk home, no one wants to hear it at the theater they just want to watch the movie.”

        We don’t go to the theater anymore.

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        1. “You are going to the special hell, reserved for child molesters and people who talk in theater.”

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          3. OK, OT but related sort of….my beloved undertook to unstop the toilet in our master bedroom and just pulled an open pocket knife out. We have no idea how it got there.
            Although, there is Avram, our dragon puppet. But he’s just a kid….tell me, please, CW doesn’t visit kids.

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              1. Larry’s version of Cookie Monster.
                Mind you Avrim (my beloved’s alter ego) would be quite capable of dropping an open knife down the john on his own. But we simply don’t know how it got there. We were lucky my beloved and our son were able to get it out. It has been a stressful week.

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                1. I imagine.
                  Older son, at two, flushed a couple of ornamental seashells. It didn’t stop the toilet functioning, though it added an interesting and musical rattle, so we never removed it to fix. I imagine at some point someone did, and was puzzled at seashells in CO

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      1. Generally not true, in fact. E.g., the novels I published were triple-deckers, not done in newspaper or magazine installments like Dickens’s works. (And he was paid by the installment, rather than by the word, IIRC.)

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      2. Father remembered a passage in a dime novel he read as a kid for which, he was certain, the writer was paid by the paragraph:

        “Are you hurt?”
        “Who?”
        “You.”
        “Me?”
        “Yes.”
        “No.”
        “Oh.”

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    1. “What do mean you are calling me about getting a support call? I was downsized a month ago.”

      Never happened. Not once. Three or 4 times, each from former employers (or people who took over). Granted the last employer I retired from VS being downsized. But the principle still applies. I no longer work there. And, for reasons, I didn’t have to care about employer references. Personal coworker references, yes for all of them except the last. But coworkers were in the same boat I was in.

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      1. My last full time job, I left (voluntarily) in August. Got a call in December begging me to come back.

        Seems some idiot in upper management had decided the whole client facing/internal interface team did nothing, and did a mass layoff.

        To their surprise, none of those people wanted to return when recalled. Oh, shucksy-darn.

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        1. Once upon a time, I worked for a privately-owned company that got bought out by Huge Defense Contractor. We made high-end industrial computer boards, so did HDC. Ours were better.

          One of HDC’s first moves was to sack our entire sales department because “We’ve already got a sales department. Two would be redundant.”

          Of course, HDC’s sales department was not the least bit familiar with our products, and preferred to push theirs anyway.

          Surprise, surprise, next quarter our sales were way down. Layoffs!

          I got sacked in the 3rd round. 8 of us were called to a ‘meeting’, told to sign some forms, pack our stuff, and escorted out the door.

          I worked there almost 11 years, and it was great until HDC took over. One of my fellow sack-ees had been there over 20 years.

          The company I worked for was founded and owned by two engineers. The focus was on engineering, to produce the best products. HDC had been taken over long ago by the bean counters and marketroids. Products were mere widgets to be pushed out, and engineering was the red-headed step-child.
          ———————————
          Jordan Peterson: “If I told you to cook in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen, that would be a new idea. Doesn’t make it a good one.”

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        2. ;-) ;-) ;-) I hear that.

          Late summer ’96 I was hired to take over a project that had been on contract to finish it in time for the hardware release support. Lost leader *software. Software actually made more than my pay and benefits, but they weren’t expecting that. After the second release, management decided that no more update releases would be needed, so they were going to let me go. Employment time 18 months. (Me? Ahhhhhh.) Engineering manager decided that was not a good idea so talked them into using me to use the product for some clients who came directly to the company instead of passing off the client to hardware suppliers as leads. Did that for a whole 5 months (got to travel to client’s site in Canada to deliver and train) before I was back on upgrades, again. Gee who knew that the hardware would change enough that the software needed to keep up? That, and the company owners were not happy that the software was being bought to write software for **hardware not “theirs”. Worked there another 4 years (before getting bought out and that company went bankrupt).

          The created position was continued. They ended up hiring a former co-worker from the company I’d worked for just before. Someone I’d gotten started coding. Both of us victims of shutdown. Another forester who “learned to code”.

          I went on to a position for 12 years. Took me 18 months to get it. But finally did. He was hampered because he didn’t have that “certificate”, just his 4 year forestry degree. He finally landed a job a few years later (where he is still working, I think) coding forms for an insurance company at a desk about 3 feet from his last desk (insurance company came into town and bought the building). Both of us were hampered by the inability to move from the area. Me because of what hubby did for a living (mentioned before it is a non-big-city and PNW only job), and my co-worker voluntarily, because of his 40-acre timber acreage (he survived the hiatus by selectively logging some of his babies trees).

          ((*)) I’ve mentioned the software here before too (some of you who have even used it): “Universal Program Generator – UPG” for DOS based Falcon by Percon (initially also worked on **Intermec and **Symbol units, which is why it made money. (Tool for Windows not C programmer for DOS platform. DOS was dead. Don’t you know. As far as these units are concerned? DOS didn’t die until about ’12, or so) Developers were buying it to write programs for Intermec and Symbol units and not eventually bring in Falcons. Which was the whole reason to write UPG.) Shelved about 2006 or so by DataLogic (who bought the Falcon, etc., and Spectra Physics, hardware divisions of bankrupt PSC. Shelved because moving off DOS platforms to Windows Embedded, which C# worked perfectly fine as a development too.

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    2. And then the org wonders why stuff doesn’t get done, and convene endless meetings to brainstorm ideas to fix the “problem”, thereby making sure that absolutely nobody gets anything done.

      Of course none of the possible solutions involves re-hiring Dave.

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      1. It has been brought to the attention of management that nothing ever gets done around here because everybody is always in meetings.

        There will be a meeting at 10:30 to address the issue.

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        1. Don’t forget to bring your retinues. Your status in the meeting depends on the number of people sitting behind you. (Why yes, it was Dept. Of the Army).

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        2. I am forever grateful that my boss detests, loathes, vehemently refuses to have a meeting that is not absolutely necessary. Three all-hands gatherings per year, not counting social events, is his idea of “enough meetings.” And he developed an allergy to PowerPoint while with the military, so things go even faster.

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  16. OT, but someone on X posted that 23 and Me is in deep financial doo-doo and could quite easily be sold to foreign investors. I may rethink my plan to send them spit.

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    1. One of the ChiCom generals just publicly wrote up a plan, to use Chinese investment in genetics companies, to tailor biological weapons that will affect Europeans and Africans instead of Chinese. 23 and Me was specifically listed.

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      1. Mind you, that doesn’t mean they are competent to carry out such a plan, and they would use it on non-Han Chinese first.

        But almost everyone in China is a little non-Han; so good luck with that, o genocidal idiot general.

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      2. There’s been speculation that COVID19 hit China particularly hard because they’d combined their bat virus with local cold viruses, which were already adapted to infect that population.

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  20. Our friends in Europe have started to pour liquid manure over the news media HQ that refuse to cover their protests. Poetry, that is.

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    1. Applauds politely from upwind Are they taking donations? I know several cow confinements and swine barns that would be willing to provide in-kind gifts.

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      1. Hmmm…. the printing plant for Dallas Morning News is not too far from my house. I wonder if the Fort Worth Stockyards deliver?? 8-)

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    2. Oh, the buildings. First couple of times I read that as, they were pouring it over the journalists that refused.

      Might be worth a try! :-D

      “You’re so fond of spewing bullshit on TV, have some of the real thing!”

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  21. In that Esquire Hugo scandal article, Mary Three Names says that it was not suspicious to have several thousand memberships bought with forms in the same handwriting and using the same address.

    (Because them poor Chinese fans can’t read or write no English after taking it in school all their lives, and while using phones with Latin alphabet keyboards all the time. They is dumbs.)

    (The forms used were translated into Chinese, so of course they could read them.)

    Oh, but there was a tofu dregs Chengdu science fiction museum built in one year. (No closeups to show cracked walls, lack of drainage, bad or nonexistent plumbing, etc.)

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      1. I forgot to say that most Chinese today will type out Chinese (Mandarin) messages on a Latin alphabet keyboard, in order to bring up characters. And some young people just leave their Chinese in the Latin alphabet, especially if they can’t remember the character quickly enough.

        The China Show had an episode about how foreigners who don’t know Mandarin or Cantonese very well, will miss out on important things, get tricked, or trick themselves into embarrassing or disadvantageous situations.

        (A man who thought he had spontaneously met a farmer, when the Chinese itinerary openly said he was the local Party chairman. He also thought he had met a travel agency entrepreneur, when she openly was a government bureaucrat who worked for the Chinese province version of Intourist.)

        This seems to be an example, as nobody on WSFS’ side seems to have had a clue about the true depths of the fecal matter they were in, or how to tell what was going on with Chinese people or the CCP officials involved.

        I think Kevin Standlee was wise to resign, but I hate to see Ben Yalow getting blamed for this. Clearly it was a group screwup on every level.

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        1. Also, if your auditorium is designed to look like the inside of the belly of a whale, you’re being told that either you’re in Sheol, or are about to be in deep cetacean doo-doo!

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  22. I almost blew apple cider out my nose over the “thicker skin” meme. My wife just shook her head. My daughter didn’t get it.

    Who knew my hippie college literature professor was right wing? He certainly didn’t.

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  23. The “Why I got fired…” picture reminds me…

    The Royal Thai Army is the only army that uses the American-made Scorpion Light Tank. Not long after receiving the tanks, some odd damage was discovered on the tanks. An investigation was performed to figure out why the tanks were damaged.

    The issue of the damaged tanks was resolved after the Thai tank crews were ordered to stop performing jumps with their tanks.

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  24. I think they missed a step in Film Noir,
    “Do you have a days growth of beard?”
    Yes-you might be in a Film Noir
    No-You are not in a Film Noir.

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  25. Ben Shapiro rapping is the funniest thing of 2024, and we’re barely out of January.

    Also, the fact that the infamous, ahem, bear scene from Baldur’s Gate 3 made it to this list is frigging hilarious. (Also the fact that the studio threw it in to be an absolute troll. The horrified squirrel in that scene is the best part. And yes, the audience they showed it to cheered it, so the meme is 100% correct. No, I have no intention of getting that scene in my own playthrough–the joke itself is sufficient.)

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