That’s because everyone wrote in Latin and if you write in Latin you have to be able to inflect the name, otherwise no one can tell whether someone told something or was told it.
It’s an ephedra-like plant with caffeine in the leaves, so for some of us, it causes elevated pulse and blood pressure, and symptoms like an anxiety attack or caffeine overdose. And keeps you from sleeping, if you are caffeine sensitive. Some people just don’t like the taste.
Yerba mate is pretty good, but it tastes like making tea out of your lawn clippings. Unless you are very good at brewing yerba mate, or you add a lot of flavorings.
For some reason, a lot of people decided that chocolate flavoring was the way to go. It doesn’t make yerba mate taste like chocolate, though; it just makes it not taste like yerba mate.
It doesn’t have more caffeine than Mountain Dew, but it has slightly more than a comparable amount of coffee (IIRC).
ProBar Coffee Crunch, has a bunch of YM caffeine. Like, energy bar with recoil. Tasty.
There was also a “chocolate bliss” version with YM caffeine, but sadly discontinued. Replaced with non-caf “chocolate brownie”. Still “yum”, just no recoil.
And has anyone tried “Rev Gum”? Sheesh, do those-kick-. 1/2 of one is -plenty-.
Becasue some of us run on a couple cups of homebrew black coffee, Irish tea, and cap it all off with a couple of 20oz Monsters. A cute hippy drink drink ain’t gonna cut it.
“Got a BLM problem in your city?” “Homeless Camps out of control” “Business fleeing?” “Pets disappearing?” “Liberal DA’s letting them all go as soon as Kamala raises their bail?” “Then ‘Amnesty’ is the answer to all your problems” AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ starts to play…
“Ever since Amnesty came to town, things have been a lot safer. The staff is professional, they love their work and they even let the kids run the controls once in a while! Thanks, Amnesty!”
I have been very happy with our new Brother printer. It doesn’t phone home to get permission to do anything, the cartridges are dead easy to replace, and it doesn’t get all jammed up even when asked to print double sided.
Oh, dear. Now I have the inexplicable urge to disassemble it completely in a search for Semtex. This behavior is quite suspicious…
Truthfully I have only punched one printer, yes it broke. I blame the opiates for the occasional rage, oh and the printer too. Range time with a printer is fun as well. I do like the semtex idea as well, nothing is as satisfying as a good explosion, americans love their fireworks.
The red ones up north were victims of power outages or the water being out. The Board of Health really doesn’t want restaurants open without sinks/faucets running water, even if they know how to use water from alternate sources.
The reason everyone uses Waffle House color code is, it is a darn good and consistent gage, and WH has widespread coverage.
Waffle House has an industry leading “disaster recovery”/”business continuity” process. They have a plan, update regularly, and implement it well. Thus, if they can open at all, they can stay in business. And since they -are- open during the sketchy, they get -much- business during the sketchy part.
In order to open, they need some basics. If those basics are present, they are often present for the neighbors. If tWH are full service, things are probably fairly decent all around.
And they are not stupid about it. If things are freaking insane, they are closed.
Reliably accurate gage of local conditions. And FEMA is actually brilliant for using it, instead of running around like headless chickens trying to survey things themselves.
From what I’m seeing on CTH, the powers that be are somewhere between apathetic (FJB ignoring questions on Helene) and clueless (the NC governor). Looks like some non-government help is needed. I’m too old and far away to go there, but:
SIL told us about a newish(?) charity, Convoy of Hope (convoyofhope.org) that sounds pretty good. Faith based, as best as I can tell, with low overhead (7.4% for this year–with an impressive graph over the past few years). Just donated some money, and they allowed us to steer it to disaster relief.
Red Cross–know too many people who hated it, for good reasons.
Salvation Army–spending the donation amount on letters begging for more wasn’t cool. Going DIE means nothing in the kettle, chumps.
We donate locally most of the time. Time to go national, I think.
Midwest Distribution Center in Chatham, IL is very good. They stretch donations as far as humanly possible and are super organized.
I guarantee that if they aren’t already on the road, trucks loaded with pallets of flood buckets will be on their way east by tomorrow.
And oh, yes, they do not take government money. it’s all donations and investment money the founder put away for them. We’ve worked there and had a thouroughly pleasant experience. (And filled pallets of flood buckets).
We came home, being unable to get through to the project site. Nobody else can either, so the project is essentially canceled. My cousin in Candler just got power back, but not water. Fortunately they have a neighbor with a well and a pump. Her spouse tells me many areas are impassible. Biltmore Village (an upscale shopping area – she took me there several years ago) is under water as are other sections of Asheville. I-40 is, so far as I know, still closed, as is I-26. Local media reporting many people are still missing.
Don’t know how the governor is doing, but Ron DeSantis sent aid. We saw a convoy of military vehicles heading west on our way home – most of them were dump trucks. Am guessing they were TN National Guard on the way to northeastern TN.
JC Campbell Folk School, south in Murphy, reported they have no damage, but check the roads, note a lot of places are operating cash-only and cell service is sporadic.
I have been wondering why we’re so wiped, when all we’ve done the last three days is drive a couple hundred miles each way and spend a gray, cool, drizzly day doing nothing much except waiting for word. Maybe it’s the, “Waiting for word,” part.
The word I saw was that I-40 was washed out in more than one spot. CTH had a picture and the eastbound lanes were gone, in the river. Also saw an ex-bridge that used to serve I-26.
Isaac Asimov did Murder at the ABA*, one of his rare(?) non-SF fiction nevels. If memory serves, he said that he used Harlan Ellison as a model for the protagonist. I don’t recall seeing any comment from Harlan about that…
One wonders just who did what research for that book.
I believe he had an entire series (though they might have mostly been shorts) built around the Black Widowers Society, based on a real club, and the characters were all based on people he knew.
That sounds vaguely familiar, but I think that the novel was a stand alone. Had it in hardback, but it got culled. The MC, one Darius Just was nicknamed by Asimov-playing-himself as “Dry as Dust”. Not sure how that connected to Ellison.
I culled most of my Asimov hardbacks, along with the more recent Arthur Clarkes. (Bought and read Rama II, didn’t much care for the cliffhanger and skipped the rest. Looking at Wiki, I think I made the right decision. Sigh.)
Don’t know how that related to Harlan, but Sir Walter Scott had a character in one of his early books named “Reverend Dryasdust”, which Isaac surely would have known. Possibly it was some in-joke between them.
Never saw Harlan, but I’m somewhat familiar with his work. His collection(s?) of TV essays/reviews definitely showed the aggressive and verbal.
My first buy from SF Book Club included a short story collection of his. Not particularly uplifting. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is as fun as it sounds. He’s talented, but I do believe that “New Age” should be one word, so it properly rhymes with “sewage”.
Hopefully he brought his pager with him. What would happen if they all of a sudden needed him, and couldn’t contact him regarding his car insurance warranty?
So back in the final days of Saddam and Sons, Inc., the Mullahs next door were horrified to observe how easily U.S. weapons went through the spaced-reinforced-concrete layered roofs of the slightly underground Iraqi bunkers, since that’s what they too had built after failing to get through them with their own bombs during their previous neighborly unpleasantness. As a result over the following years the Mullahs paid simply humungous amounts of hard foreign exchange currency to cooperative western places with names that rhyme with “pants” for deep boring machines to build new bunkers way the heck deeper than then-current U.S. penetrator bombs could reach.
But such became known to western weapons designers, who began cogitating upon the problem, coming up with penetrating fuel-air explosive bombs. These basically poof a finely pulverized compound into an enclosed space so it spreads all throughout, then ignites it such that it blows the heck up using the very air in that space as both a mechanism to spread the impulsive supersonic pressure wave and a component of the explosion. Reportedly one of the ways to identify current such is that the explosive event kinda looks like a hydrazine leak, producing big orangish clouds. Such propagates down deep shafts and blows through ventilation systems in holes as deep as you want to dig.
Note the smoke color in vids of the blowing the heck up event in Beirut.
Which makes current reporting on the head Mullah being quickly transported to an “undisclosed location, likely deep underground” pretty darn funny, in my view.
When the IJN needed armor-piercing bombs to sink our Battleships at Pearl Harbor, they added fin kits to naval artillery shells, and dropped them from high enough to go through armor.
Sometimes hasty improv yields satisfactory results.
We are the folks who, during DS, took worn out 8 inch cannon barrels, cut to length, added a hard steel pointy cap, added the fins and smart bomb gear from a 2000 pounder, then filled the tube with something like torpex. Net weight was around 5000 pounds. Turns out the bomb kit just needed a software tweak to be accurate at 2.5x weight
All to crack some extra deep/hard Iraqi command bunkers.
Took about a month to whomp up these bubbabombs. The inert filler test drop went so deep through 30m of reinforced concrete, then into “desert pavement”, they didn’t bother trying to excavate it.
The boomstuff loaded version is an express ticket to Hell.
And now we have a purpose-buit nuclear version. (B-61 variant)
Israel can read the various pubs on such dev work, and have scads of worn out gun tubes for testing. Also fissiles, if so inclined.
And much, much motivation.
The only way the Mullahs can avoid getting bombed to Hell is to go there first.
And I suspect we may soon see a pointed example of this, unless the Weirdbeards get -very- chill, really fast. They may not shut up, but if they shut down they may survive.
And did Bibi seem to be a tad… provocative recently? (Kzin grin)
They didn’t cheat for Hillary because everyone thought she had it in the bag. I said at the time that the operatives in charge of getting out the illegal alien vote and the cemetery vote probably took vacation days.
And of course, universal mail-in voting wasn’t a thing in 2016.
“Hillary Clinton strangely received 40% of the votes counted despite not being on the ballot, with Kamala Harris receiving another 12%. But the ultra-right-wing dead-white-male Electoral College that’s deplorably biased toward a Republic rather than a Democracy has given the victory to the Bad Orange Worse Than Hitler candidate.”
There was also the but about Ellison twisting Asimov about autographed anything. Supposedly Ellison primed a fan to shove a blank check under Isaac’s nose. He glanced at it and signed it…..Harlan Ellison.
Why do people continue to believe the Department Of Defense gets a huge piece of the federal budget? It’s only about 10%. Social welfare programs, and interest on the $36 TRILLION national debt, eat up more than 80% of the government budget — and they’re borrowing (and printing) more money to pay for it.
Which just goes to show how incredibly dumb the inversely named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 thing that Kammy pushed over the top was – push interest rates to the moon when interest on existing debt is that huge a fraction of the annual outlay is just bonehead imbecilic.
The U.S. hasn’t had a functional president for almost 4 years. From time to time a certain loud-mouthed pretendent has caused trouble. We got through 2009-2016 without a functional president, too, just a more articulate loud-mouth.
So, there is a wonderful anime called Frieren – Beyond Journeys end. I won’t explain the whole plot, but the bad guys are demons who are absolutely pure evil, That is them on the left. The heroes are the ones on the right. You can read the wiki page. It starts off kind of sad, an elf goes back to look up the D&D adventuring party she was with and is reminded how much shorter human (and dwarf) lives are than elves. It picks up after that, but the start is about sadness and loss.
Great, thank you! I kind of thought it might be something like that, but there are so many animes with not-evil horned oni, or comedic western-style demons you’re supposed to root for, that I wasn’t sure.
I figured that between the demon and the horned chick, that they considered themselves “normal”, and the more-or-less normal looking people had to be “far right” because reasons.
In a lot of anime, the horned chick would be normal, and scary demon guy not necessarily normal, might either have a freudian excuse backstory or be played for comedy, kind of like “Satine” in Wreck It Ralph.
[Lack of exposure to much current entertainment shows.]
I’ve heard of Wreck It Ralph*, but IIRC, my last animated movie was Pocahantas in a theater, and dribs and drabs elsewhere. Haven’t seen any anime, so I’m ignorant of the tropes. Was a fan of Disney product from Little Mermaid through Aladdin. Nothing after Poc’ for the “normal” animation. Some Pixar.
That is a very reasonable attitude to take. Okay, to explain the Wreck It Ralph reference, Ralph is a video game villain who doesn’t want to be a villain and is in a villain support group with this character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBA6ev5HMe4
In the old days it was cheaper to buy a region free Hong Kong dvd full set (with bad English subtitles) of something that hadn’t been licensed in the west than to actually support the licensed stuff, but I don’t know if that’s still the case.
We’ve found non-US DVDs for the Vera mysteries. Amazon started offering season 11 and on via streaming, but our satellite internet makes that way too expensive. The ‘zon “listed” region 1 season 11, but the US version was curiously out of stock. For a couple of years.
Bought an all-region DVD player, paid a couple of visits to Amazon dot uk, and now have Brit versions of season 11-13. Will get 14 (supposed to be the last) once it’s available. The Region 2 startup is a little bit slower, and there are minor differences, mostly the lack of a pre-episode blurb. I skipped the Wiki summary, but it’s kind of cool going in cold.
Cost is comparable to earlier US DVDs. The “Lonpoo” player was reasonably cheap, and I grin at the name. Chinesium FTW!
Yeah, I bought a region free player some years back in my Audie Murphy phase (because the French and the Germans and the Brits all like his movies better than the Americans do. Go figure). Came in handy when I desperately wanted to see Italian Pride and Prejudice (unsubtitled unfortunately) in its entirety, before someone got the fansubbed version up on ewetoob. Region free players are super useful, and as you say, not that expensive if you shop around.
Re: “50” Venezuelans in Martha’s Vineyard vs “20,000” Haitians in “town of 30,000”
The real numbers are somewhere between 10,000-20,000 Haitians–who knows for sure?–in a town that had 58,600-ish (iirc) per the 2020 US Census. So make it “less than a hundred Venezuelans”, and “10,000 Haitians in a town of 60,000” instead.
ALWAYS round your numbers up or down in ways that most demoralize the “fact-checker” Lefties.
Re: “The History of the Condom” Literal LOL! Perfect setup for perfectly delivered punchline. Also, “Open Mike Night”
ALSO, greatest Comment Kudos goes to “picking a new Hezbo leader is like picking a new Pope…”
ALSO also, big Yes to being willing to pay extra for ANYTHING with no “smart” features at all. I’m keeping my (almost 30-y.o.) car until it One Hoss Shays on me, because where will I ever find another with crank ’em windows and a stick shift, and that doesn’t want to “help” me drive? *curses Obama’s destruction of–among pretty much everything else he touched–“clunker” cars*
When the old dryer died and the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned LG towerless top loader had the squeeks from hell (easy fix, just swap out the transmission), we dumped the washer for a good Electrolux (more features than we use, but it understands our water issues fairly well. Too thin to chew, but barely). The dryer is a basic Speed Queen. It has a clever way of announcing it’s done with a cycle. It stops. No buzzer, no email, nuthin’. Should outlast us by years. (Not sure about the E-lux, but 8 years in, so far so good.)
That’s something even pre-schoolers have to be taught. “It’s always always wrong to hit someone, even – or especially – if they hit you first” is an indoctrination message that starts at an early age and that first reared its head in schools half a century or more ago.
That makes sense, since she was technically in the right, being so publicly snubbed by not being invited to the biggest international social event of the year. The parents were the ones in the wrong, by the standards of the time.
Actually, that was true in Grimm, because the king had only twelve golden plates and so invited only twelve, but in Perrault, they hadn’t known she was alive, since she hadn’t been seen in half a century. No one would have realized she had been snubbed if she had not shown up, so her dignity would have been intact.
Anyone else notice the Democrats are starting to really tun on each other. I do think if KamalaWallaLovesADong loses, which in an honest election she will, they might start tearing into each other with real vigor. Please pass the popcorn, this might get good. What was that saying about not with a bang but a whimper?
But the groundswell looks to be overcoming the margin of fraud. By a lot. And the polls are missing it, for the most part, because they are leaving out those who are “unlikely voters”, i.e., people who haven’t voted much in the past. Those people are solidly Trump, and motivated to vote this time around.
Find your nearest Scouting (BSA type) unit. It is popcorn sales time. They have a lot of good flavors. Besides it pays for youth personal gear, summer camp, and even helps pay towards Jamborees and High Adventure camp.
We do not have someone in scouting. We do not know any in scouting at this time (well, we do, but they are in Roseburg).
When you gasp at the prices, remember that you’re subscribing to a scout. Over 70% goes back to Scouting—because of the 70% markup. And if you don’t want to get popcorn yourself, they do have a military donation option.
(I have three scouts right now. Whee fundraising.)
“I have three scouts right now. Whee fundraising.“
👏
I know. Between council, district, prize rewards, and unit/scout cut, that 70%, goes a long way.
Last time we dealt with popcorn 4 out of the unit (all Eagles) were headed to National Jamboree. Got the district to forgo the prizes (with consent from the scouts) and take whatever cash the level the prizes represented. They were able to match what the unit gave out of the adventure fund. It did help that some people just donated to the cause. The 4 worked hard for that money.
Off topic…apparently the Israelis have just blown the falafel out of Houthi targets in Yemen after the Houthis shot a fewish missiles at them. Videos are up on Xwitter and all I can say is, get out the Flex Tape because that’s a lotta damage.
My former pastor just died of a heart attack, after fighting pancreatic cancer.
The archbishop also has pancreatic cancer.
Yeah, all this rare pancreatic cancer showing up, all at once, in men of about the same age who were all in decent health a few years ago… I’m sure it has nothing to do with the jab. Nothing at all.
According To Hoyt 
I may be stealing an inordinate number of these quality memes…
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“A meme is not a meme until the first time it is stolen.”
— Kong Fu Ze.
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Khan Fu Zhon?
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More commonly known in the west as Confucius, because at the time his writings became known, every ‘serious’ scholar had to have a Latin name.
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That’s because everyone wrote in Latin and if you write in Latin you have to be able to inflect the name, otherwise no one can tell whether someone told something or was told it.
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I don’t know why people are down on yerba mate. OTOH, I don’t know if I’ve ever had any.
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It’s an ephedra-like plant with caffeine in the leaves, so for some of us, it causes elevated pulse and blood pressure, and symptoms like an anxiety attack or caffeine overdose. And keeps you from sleeping, if you are caffeine sensitive. Some people just don’t like the taste.
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While somebody be happy with the elevated pulse rate*, the blood pressure, et al are right out. Something new for the must miss list.
((*)) What do you mean? I’ve never gone below 30.
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So basically like coffee.
(I don’t drink coffee, but I’m a longtime regular everyday drinker of Morning Thunder tea, which is a mix of black tea and mate.)
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Yerba mate is pretty good, but it tastes like making tea out of your lawn clippings. Unless you are very good at brewing yerba mate, or you add a lot of flavorings.
For some reason, a lot of people decided that chocolate flavoring was the way to go. It doesn’t make yerba mate taste like chocolate, though; it just makes it not taste like yerba mate.
It doesn’t have more caffeine than Mountain Dew, but it has slightly more than a comparable amount of coffee (IIRC).
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That homeowner with an AR15 must have accidentally loaded a cartridge with one of Richard Seaton’s X-plosive bullets.
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ProBar Coffee Crunch, has a bunch of YM caffeine. Like, energy bar with recoil. Tasty.
There was also a “chocolate bliss” version with YM caffeine, but sadly discontinued. Replaced with non-caf “chocolate brownie”. Still “yum”, just no recoil.
And has anyone tried “Rev Gum”? Sheesh, do those-kick-. 1/2 of one is -plenty-.
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Becasue some of us run on a couple cups of homebrew black coffee, Irish tea, and cap it all off with a couple of 20oz Monsters. A cute hippy drink drink ain’t gonna cut it.
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“Got a BLM problem in your city?”
“Homeless Camps out of control”
“Business fleeing?”
“Pets disappearing?”
“Liberal DA’s letting them all go as soon as Kamala raises their bail?”
“Then ‘Amnesty’ is the answer to all your problems”
AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ starts to play…
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“Ever since Amnesty came to town, things have been a lot safer. The staff is professional, they love their work and they even let the kids run the controls once in a while! Thanks, Amnesty!”
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Yep. But I was thinking about the people who locked us down….
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El Gato Malo’s blog today is on fire on thatmsubject.
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Wow. Highly subversive samizdat.
…
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and you were not alone.
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“This baby can gobble thirty CDC doctors or Politicians a gallon, you can’t find that kind of workmanship anymore” Salesman says as he slaps the side.
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I’ll be over here, harvesting memes. I have friends in humor deprived lands that benefit from them.
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My question is what the homeowner needed to shoot while cleaning his floor. *Puzzled kitty head tilt*
And so yes on raging against the printer. So, so much this.
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I have been very happy with our new Brother printer. It doesn’t phone home to get permission to do anything, the cartridges are dead easy to replace, and it doesn’t get all jammed up even when asked to print double sided.
Oh, dear. Now I have the inexplicable urge to disassemble it completely in a search for Semtex. This behavior is quite suspicious…
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The Reader would like to know the model. He is in the market for a printer. Thanks!
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Here’s the Amazon link (don’t know if Sarah will have to dig it out of moderation):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XDSMKLT
Bit less than $500.00
Oh, remember to go there from the blog link here!
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yes, if you go from the blog link/one of promo post links, it helps.
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The Reader thanks you!
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I second The Reader’s request!
And, yeah, a printer that well-behaved? Sounds TGTBT, IYKWIM.
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Please see reply to Reader.
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made me print 454 pages 25 at a time OR it glitched and kept reprinting the first 25 pages over and over.
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Truthfully I have only punched one printer, yes it broke. I blame the opiates for the occasional rage, oh and the printer too. Range time with a printer is fun as well. I do like the semtex idea as well, nothing is as satisfying as a good explosion, americans love their fireworks.
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“Got the spider!”
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See? Clean the floor. Hah. That’ll teach you.
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“Knocking stuff off of the table”?
I’m thinking of knocking the house down.
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Our house
It’s just a place to live in
We’re cats
We act within our nature
And. You. Built. It. On. A. Shelf.
Knocking down the house…
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(classic, appropriate)
Picture of storm wrecked home.
Large graffiti:
“Got the spider!”
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SFBS
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You know, knocking stuff off a table might help at that….
Wrong list. Snrk
October Surprise? At this rate I’ll be more surprised if there aren’t aliens.
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me too!
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Table clearing worked for JC…..
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When Waffle House is boarded up before the storm even hits, its really time to “get out”.
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True that.
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“You now have 15 minutes to reach Minimum Safe Distance….”
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Waffle House boarded up in Crawfordville, Florida
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vs:
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No actual timestamp on this, but:
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The red ones up north were victims of power outages or the water being out. The Board of Health really doesn’t want restaurants open without sinks/faucets running water, even if they know how to use water from alternate sources.
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I still remember the news broadcast I saw as a child that showed preparation for a hurricane. It was the boarded-up Home Depot that got me.
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The reason everyone uses Waffle House color code is, it is a darn good and consistent gage, and WH has widespread coverage.
Waffle House has an industry leading “disaster recovery”/”business continuity” process. They have a plan, update regularly, and implement it well. Thus, if they can open at all, they can stay in business. And since they -are- open during the sketchy, they get -much- business during the sketchy part.
In order to open, they need some basics. If those basics are present, they are often present for the neighbors. If tWH are full service, things are probably fairly decent all around.
And they are not stupid about it. If things are freaking insane, they are closed.
Reliably accurate gage of local conditions. And FEMA is actually brilliant for using it, instead of running around like headless chickens trying to survey things themselves.
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From what I’m seeing on CTH, the powers that be are somewhere between apathetic (FJB ignoring questions on Helene) and clueless (the NC governor). Looks like some non-government help is needed. I’m too old and far away to go there, but:
SIL told us about a newish(?) charity, Convoy of Hope (convoyofhope.org) that sounds pretty good. Faith based, as best as I can tell, with low overhead (7.4% for this year–with an impressive graph over the past few years). Just donated some money, and they allowed us to steer it to disaster relief.
Red Cross–know too many people who hated it, for good reasons.
Salvation Army–spending the donation amount on letters begging for more wasn’t cool. Going DIE means nothing in the kettle, chumps.
We donate locally most of the time. Time to go national, I think.
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Midwest Distribution Center in Chatham, IL is very good. They stretch donations as far as humanly possible and are super organized.
I guarantee that if they aren’t already on the road, trucks loaded with pallets of flood buckets will be on their way east by tomorrow.
And oh, yes, they do not take government money. it’s all donations and investment money the founder put away for them. We’ve worked there and had a thouroughly pleasant experience. (And filled pallets of flood buckets).
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Further update as of Sunday night:
We came home, being unable to get through to the project site. Nobody else can either, so the project is essentially canceled. My cousin in Candler just got power back, but not water. Fortunately they have a neighbor with a well and a pump. Her spouse tells me many areas are impassible. Biltmore Village (an upscale shopping area – she took me there several years ago) is under water as are other sections of Asheville. I-40 is, so far as I know, still closed, as is I-26. Local media reporting many people are still missing.
Don’t know how the governor is doing, but Ron DeSantis sent aid. We saw a convoy of military vehicles heading west on our way home – most of them were dump trucks. Am guessing they were TN National Guard on the way to northeastern TN.
JC Campbell Folk School, south in Murphy, reported they have no damage, but check the roads, note a lot of places are operating cash-only and cell service is sporadic.
I have been wondering why we’re so wiped, when all we’ve done the last three days is drive a couple hundred miles each way and spend a gray, cool, drizzly day doing nothing much except waiting for word. Maybe it’s the, “Waiting for word,” part.
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The word I saw was that I-40 was washed out in more than one spot. CTH had a picture and the eastbound lanes were gone, in the river. Also saw an ex-bridge that used to serve I-26.
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Isaac Asimov did Murder at the ABA*, one of his rare(?) non-SF fiction nevels. If memory serves, he said that he used Harlan Ellison as a model for the protagonist. I don’t recall seeing any comment from Harlan about that…
One wonders just who did what research for that book.
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((*)) American Booksellers Association
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I believe he had an entire series (though they might have mostly been shorts) built around the Black Widowers Society, based on a real club, and the characters were all based on people he knew.
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That sounds vaguely familiar, but I think that the novel was a stand alone. Had it in hardback, but it got culled. The MC, one Darius Just was nicknamed by Asimov-playing-himself as “Dry as Dust”. Not sure how that connected to Ellison.
I culled most of my Asimov hardbacks, along with the more recent Arthur Clarkes. (Bought and read Rama II, didn’t much care for the cliffhanger and skipped the rest. Looking at Wiki, I think I made the right decision. Sigh.)
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Don’t know how that related to Harlan, but Sir Walter Scott had a character in one of his early books named “Reverend Dryasdust”, which Isaac surely would have known. Possibly it was some in-joke between them.
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I recall Darius Just being short and aggressive and highly verbal, and I had no doubts that it was supposed to be Harlan.
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Never saw Harlan, but I’m somewhat familiar with his work. His collection(s?) of TV essays/reviews definitely showed the aggressive and verbal.
My first buy from SF Book Club included a short story collection of his. Not particularly uplifting. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is as fun as it sounds. He’s talented, but I do believe that “New Age” should be one word, so it properly rhymes with “sewage”.
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Just saw a post on Insty where Nasrallah’s replacement Hassan Khalil Yassin has experienced a rapid unschedued disassembly.
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Sounds good to me.
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https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1839797946155442569
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POP! Goes the weasel.
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Apparently, the Grand PooBa-a-a-a of Iran is in hiding.
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Just saw a X/Twitter post …
Picking a new Hezbollah leader is a lot like selecting a Pope: when complete, we see a big puff of smoke.
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Knock knock!
Who is there?
IDF
What? … Oh (HONK!) BOOM!
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ROFL
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https://x.com/SarahAHoyt/status/1840254584394015186
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Hopefully he brought his pager with him. What would happen if they all of a sudden needed him, and couldn’t contact him regarding his car insurance warranty?
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I keep wondering if Israel is going to open a can of sunshine on some deserving mullah.
(gazes upon mile radius wastland of ash and glassy bits, flaming debris falling out of the rising mushroom cloud)
“We declare peace.”
…
solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant
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mwahahahahah
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So back in the final days of Saddam and Sons, Inc., the Mullahs next door were horrified to observe how easily U.S. weapons went through the spaced-reinforced-concrete layered roofs of the slightly underground Iraqi bunkers, since that’s what they too had built after failing to get through them with their own bombs during their previous neighborly unpleasantness. As a result over the following years the Mullahs paid simply humungous amounts of hard foreign exchange currency to cooperative western places with names that rhyme with “pants” for deep boring machines to build new bunkers way the heck deeper than then-current U.S. penetrator bombs could reach.
But such became known to western weapons designers, who began cogitating upon the problem, coming up with penetrating fuel-air explosive bombs. These basically poof a finely pulverized compound into an enclosed space so it spreads all throughout, then ignites it such that it blows the heck up using the very air in that space as both a mechanism to spread the impulsive supersonic pressure wave and a component of the explosion. Reportedly one of the ways to identify current such is that the explosive event kinda looks like a hydrazine leak, producing big orangish clouds. Such propagates down deep shafts and blows through ventilation systems in holes as deep as you want to dig.
Note the smoke color in vids of the blowing the heck up event in Beirut.
Which makes current reporting on the head Mullah being quickly transported to an “undisclosed location, likely deep underground” pretty darn funny, in my view.
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When the IJN needed armor-piercing bombs to sink our Battleships at Pearl Harbor, they added fin kits to naval artillery shells, and dropped them from high enough to go through armor.
Sometimes hasty improv yields satisfactory results.
We are the folks who, during DS, took worn out 8 inch cannon barrels, cut to length, added a hard steel pointy cap, added the fins and smart bomb gear from a 2000 pounder, then filled the tube with something like torpex. Net weight was around 5000 pounds. Turns out the bomb kit just needed a software tweak to be accurate at 2.5x weight
All to crack some extra deep/hard Iraqi command bunkers.
Took about a month to whomp up these bubbabombs. The inert filler test drop went so deep through 30m of reinforced concrete, then into “desert pavement”, they didn’t bother trying to excavate it.
The boomstuff loaded version is an express ticket to Hell.
And now we have a purpose-buit nuclear version. (B-61 variant)
Israel can read the various pubs on such dev work, and have scads of worn out gun tubes for testing. Also fissiles, if so inclined.
And much, much motivation.
The only way the Mullahs can avoid getting bombed to Hell is to go there first.
And I suspect we may soon see a pointed example of this, unless the Weirdbeards get -very- chill, really fast. They may not shut up, but if they shut down they may survive.
And did Bibi seem to be a tad… provocative recently? (Kzin grin)
Is there a Hebrew version? “Make my day.”
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“Battle not with memesters, lest you become a memester yourself. And if you meme into the abyss, the abyss memes also into you.”
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They didn’t cheat for Hillary because everyone thought she had it in the bag. I said at the time that the operatives in charge of getting out the illegal alien vote and the cemetery vote probably took vacation days.
And of course, universal mail-in voting wasn’t a thing in 2016.
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They cheated for Hillary. They just didn’t cheat enough.
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True this! After all, how does Hillary know there was cheating in 2016? They just couldn’t cheat HER in.
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Now if only they’ll cheat for Hillary in 2024.
“Hillary Clinton strangely received 40% of the votes counted despite not being on the ballot, with Kamala Harris receiving another 12%. But the ultra-right-wing dead-white-male Electoral College that’s deplorably biased toward a Republic rather than a Democracy has given the victory to the Bad Orange Worse Than Hitler candidate.”
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I sometimes wonder if they collectively realized the monstrosity they were about to enthrone, and … hesitated … just enough.
…
Nah. It was arrogance that their win was ordained. But I do sometimes wonder…
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It was her turn. Everybody said so. The deplorables were supposed to shut up and fall in line.
So, yeah, the cheating was probably a bit pro forma. But also, Trump broke their universe.
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Asimov also wrote a mystery at a university called “A Whiff of Death”.
And Harlan *did* comment on ABA; he felt the need to point out that he was 5′ 4″, not 5′ 2″, a running bit between the two.
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There was also the but about Ellison twisting Asimov about autographed anything. Supposedly Ellison primed a fan to shove a blank check under Isaac’s nose. He glanced at it and signed it…..Harlan Ellison.
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Why do people continue to believe the Department Of Defense gets a huge piece of the federal budget? It’s only about 10%. Social welfare programs, and interest on the $36 TRILLION national debt, eat up more than 80% of the government budget — and they’re borrowing (and printing) more money to pay for it.
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Because it’s what they keep telling themselves. And because they’re in denial about the costs of the welfare state.
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The belief serves the Narrative.
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Which just goes to show how incredibly dumb the inversely named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 thing that Kammy pushed over the top was – push interest rates to the moon when interest on existing debt is that huge a fraction of the annual outlay is just bonehead imbecilic.
”But we’ll make it up on volume!”
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Volume. As in the volume of the angry torch-and-pitchfork mob?
…
And people today have lost the metaphor of the pitchfork. Farmers use a pitchfork to fling turds on a dungheap.
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The U.S. hasn’t had a functional president for almost 4 years. From time to time a certain loud-mouthed pretendent has caused trouble. We got through 2009-2016 without a functional president, too, just a more articulate loud-mouth.
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Thank you for memes! Geordi’s googly eyes were my favorite. Would someone more knowledgeable about anime care to explain “here comes the far right?”
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So, there is a wonderful anime called Frieren – Beyond Journeys end. I won’t explain the whole plot, but the bad guys are demons who are absolutely pure evil, That is them on the left. The heroes are the ones on the right. You can read the wiki page. It starts off kind of sad, an elf goes back to look up the D&D adventuring party she was with and is reminded how much shorter human (and dwarf) lives are than elves. It picks up after that, but the start is about sadness and loss.
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Great, thank you! I kind of thought it might be something like that, but there are so many animes with not-evil horned oni, or comedic western-style demons you’re supposed to root for, that I wasn’t sure.
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I figured that between the demon and the horned chick, that they considered themselves “normal”, and the more-or-less normal looking people had to be “far right” because reasons.
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In a lot of anime, the horned chick would be normal, and scary demon guy not necessarily normal, might either have a freudian excuse backstory or be played for comedy, kind of like “Satine” in Wreck It Ralph.
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[Lack of exposure to much current entertainment shows.]
I’ve heard of Wreck It Ralph*, but IIRC, my last animated movie was Pocahantas in a theater, and dribs and drabs elsewhere. Haven’t seen any anime, so I’m ignorant of the tropes. Was a fan of Disney product from Little Mermaid through Aladdin. Nothing after Poc’ for the “normal” animation. Some Pixar.
((*)) Know nothing of the content.
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That is a very reasonable attitude to take. Okay, to explain the Wreck It Ralph reference, Ralph is a video game villain who doesn’t want to be a villain and is in a villain support group with this character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBA6ev5HMe4
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Anime!
Crack habit is cheaper.
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In the old days it was cheaper to buy a region free Hong Kong dvd full set (with bad English subtitles) of something that hadn’t been licensed in the west than to actually support the licensed stuff, but I don’t know if that’s still the case.
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We’ve found non-US DVDs for the Vera mysteries. Amazon started offering season 11 and on via streaming, but our satellite internet makes that way too expensive. The ‘zon “listed” region 1 season 11, but the US version was curiously out of stock. For a couple of years.
Bought an all-region DVD player, paid a couple of visits to Amazon dot uk, and now have Brit versions of season 11-13. Will get 14 (supposed to be the last) once it’s available. The Region 2 startup is a little bit slower, and there are minor differences, mostly the lack of a pre-episode blurb. I skipped the Wiki summary, but it’s kind of cool going in cold.
Cost is comparable to earlier US DVDs. The “Lonpoo” player was reasonably cheap, and I grin at the name. Chinesium FTW!
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Yeah, I bought a region free player some years back in my Audie Murphy phase (because the French and the Germans and the Brits all like his movies better than the Americans do. Go figure). Came in handy when I desperately wanted to see Italian Pride and Prejudice (unsubtitled unfortunately) in its entirety, before someone got the fansubbed version up on ewetoob. Region free players are super useful, and as you say, not that expensive if you shop around.
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I am in these memes. I am also completely okay with it.
Vote NO!
On everything.
We don’t need it.
We can’t afford it.
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The last one is the best one.
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Re: “50” Venezuelans in Martha’s Vineyard vs “20,000” Haitians in “town of 30,000”
The real numbers are somewhere between 10,000-20,000 Haitians–who knows for sure?–in a town that had 58,600-ish (iirc) per the 2020 US Census. So make it “less than a hundred Venezuelans”, and “10,000 Haitians in a town of 60,000” instead.
ALWAYS round your numbers up or down in ways that most demoralize the “fact-checker” Lefties.
Re: “The History of the Condom” Literal LOL! Perfect setup for perfectly delivered punchline. Also, “Open Mike Night”
ALSO, greatest Comment Kudos goes to “picking a new Hezbo leader is like picking a new Pope…”
ALSO also, big Yes to being willing to pay extra for ANYTHING with no “smart” features at all. I’m keeping my (almost 30-y.o.) car until it One Hoss Shays on me, because where will I ever find another with crank ’em windows and a stick shift, and that doesn’t want to “help” me drive? *curses Obama’s destruction of–among pretty much everything else he touched–“clunker” cars*
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When the old dryer died and the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned LG towerless top loader had the squeeks from hell (easy fix, just swap out the transmission), we dumped the washer for a good Electrolux (more features than we use, but it understands our water issues fairly well. Too thin to chew, but barely). The dryer is a basic Speed Queen. It has a clever way of announcing it’s done with a cycle. It stops. No buzzer, no email, nuthin’. Should outlast us by years. (Not sure about the E-lux, but 8 years in, so far so good.)
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There is a reason I keep rebuilding my Cylon-proof vehicle.
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Leftists don’t object to violence. They just have a bitter raging opposition to self defense.
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They just have the pre-schooler’s sense of justice, so that he runs to his mommy screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! He hit me back!”
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That’s something even pre-schoolers have to be taught. “It’s always always wrong to hit someone, even – or especially – if they hit you first” is an indoctrination message that starts at an early age and that first reared its head in schools half a century or more ago.
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No, they learn on their own that it’s unjust to do to them what they do to others. They have to unlearn it.
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You don’t curse the first-born at the wedding. You curse them at the christening. Sheesh. Get it right!
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Every time you curse a baby it never turns out well. karma has a funny way of getting back at you. sarc
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In the original Sleeping Beauty, whether Perrault’s or Grimms’, nothing happens to the fairy who curses her.
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That makes sense, since she was technically in the right, being so publicly snubbed by not being invited to the biggest international social event of the year. The parents were the ones in the wrong, by the standards of the time.
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Actually, that was true in Grimm, because the king had only twelve golden plates and so invited only twelve, but in Perrault, they hadn’t known she was alive, since she hadn’t been seen in half a century. No one would have realized she had been snubbed if she had not shown up, so her dignity would have been intact.
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Ooo, I hadn’t seen that one before! *Thumbs up*
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Anyone else notice the Democrats are starting to really tun on each other. I do think if KamalaWallaLovesADong loses, which in an honest election she will, they might start tearing into each other with real vigor. Please pass the popcorn, this might get good. What was that saying about not with a bang but a whimper?
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This is not an honest election, sir
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But the groundswell looks to be overcoming the margin of fraud. By a lot. And the polls are missing it, for the most part, because they are leaving out those who are “unlikely voters”, i.e., people who haven’t voted much in the past. Those people are solidly Trump, and motivated to vote this time around.
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We can hope.
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Black men will not vote for Harris. Some won’t vote, and some will vote for Trump. But they will not vote for her.
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Hispanics are running away from here as well.
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She’s basically doing poorly with every demographic but urban/university socialists, and middle aged single wine ladies.
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The Reader thinks she has a lock on the cemetery vote.
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OK, fair, but that’s getting tougher and tougher to slide by, outside of Dem strongholds.
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Ditto the mimeograph vote.
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I Xerox that sentiment. :-D
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And the newly naturalized….
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-hope-create-thousands-new-voters-rush-naturalize-immigrants-expert-says
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Oh I agree, it’s not honest, and I did have an ‘IF’ in there. maybe not the right spot, but it was in there.
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I don’t think we’ve had an honest election since Reagan shocked the shit out of the Democrats by winning 49 states in 1984.
That’s about when they started making noises about abolishing the Electoral College, too.
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Find your nearest Scouting (BSA type) unit. It is popcorn sales time. They have a lot of good flavors. Besides it pays for youth personal gear, summer camp, and even helps pay towards Jamborees and High Adventure camp.
We do not have someone in scouting. We do not know any in scouting at this time (well, we do, but they are in Roseburg).
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When you gasp at the prices, remember that you’re subscribing to a scout. Over 70% goes back to Scouting—because of the 70% markup. And if you don’t want to get popcorn yourself, they do have a military donation option.
(I have three scouts right now. Whee fundraising.)
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👏
I know. Between council, district, prize rewards, and unit/scout cut, that 70%, goes a long way.
Last time we dealt with popcorn 4 out of the unit (all Eagles) were headed to National Jamboree. Got the district to forgo the prizes (with consent from the scouts) and take whatever cash the level the prizes represented. They were able to match what the unit gave out of the adventure fund. It did help that some people just donated to the cause. The 4 worked hard for that money.
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Off topic…apparently the Israelis have just blown the falafel out of Houthi targets in Yemen after the Houthis shot a fewish missiles at them. Videos are up on Xwitter and all I can say is, get out the Flex Tape because that’s a lotta damage.
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It’s SO beautiful.
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The IDF appears to have embraced “Bounce the Rubble” and “Create Certainty”.
Our folks are getting some interesting feedback on how best to employ certain toys we sold.
Reminds me. Need more popcorn.
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BSA Popcorn season. Expensive, but you can get different flavors.
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Actually, I just hand them money. Popcorn is starch calories I need to avoid. And then the local scouts get 100% of my money.
Win-Win.
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I can relate to that!
One good thing about product sales for a scout (BSA/GSA/CF, school, etc.) is they either learn they like sales, or learn to despise it.
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In the headlines:
“Former college track star Shelby Daniele dies at 23”
Followed by, “Cause of death has not been made public.”
SO: How many COVID shots? A lot, I’m thinking.
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My former pastor just died of a heart attack, after fighting pancreatic cancer.
The archbishop also has pancreatic cancer.
Yeah, all this rare pancreatic cancer showing up, all at once, in men of about the same age who were all in decent health a few years ago… I’m sure it has nothing to do with the jab. Nothing at all.
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