Regarding the wildlife art meme, my beloved still has a faded T-shirt from Bass Pro Shop which shows various birds and animals with the caption, “There’s a place for all God’s creatures….right next to the potatoes and gravy.”
Yeah, and my ancestors could organize a revolt without being spied on by closing the doors and windows….. nowadays, they’d have to worry that their refrigerator was spying for King George.
Okay, now that’s a coffee meme that’s funny even to noncoffee people (whether it’s funny to non-Janeites, I don’t know). My other favorites were Doc Holliday and Pippin. :D
What if Comey and the most outrageous university students are psyops?
Trump may or may not have cut some sort of deal with congressional leadership about publicly embarrassing them less.
Then if public interest wanes, all Congress has to do is accomplish very little, and Trump is a lame duck.
What if Comey is deliberately trying to inspire public outrage, to motivate them to fix apparent problem, and hence Comey is pretending to be be insane in order to secretly help Trump?
I bet I could totally have long productive discussions with people if I ask them if they are merely pretending to be insane for the purpose of secretly helping Trump.
(Which is to say, living under a rock, and apparently some of my paranoid double think is getting wild. I made a stupid life choice and stayed up too late last night, and Ihaven’t properly woken up yet, as well, so I am extra stupid in more than one way.)
I appreciate the happy reader’s ideas for spreading the word about good books. However, please don’t send me writing implements that channel eldrich horrors at random moments. It upsets the cat, and makes a mess on my Day Job papers. (And if I take it to work, the headmaster will want one too.)
Writing implements that summon or channel eldrich horrors? You’re not meaning the old research laptop, are you? Because I swear, that one is haunted, and not in a fun way.
Ach. Can’t believe I’ve not told this one yet. So, back in the late Obama years, Early Trump45s, I was still working in the telecom infrastructure field. Running hither and yon, welding glass, troubleshooting in the nether regions of the network map. I had to get a new laptop because the old one was crap, dying on the vine (a classic vintage, beyond its prime). New laptop was… well, it was weird.
It was originally a gaming laptop. The only one in the shop with the hardware and ports I needed. I set it up to dual boot, keeping the work software carefully separate from anything else. All that drive had on it was windows and the work diagnostic program, plus the network map.
The other one was the one where I kept story notes and looked up the more esoteric details. You know the ones. Anatomy and biology of desert critters, viscosity and lubricating properties of certain mixed viscera, ballistic data, decompression effects, viral progression (various data sets plus historical accounts), linguistic drift, once-in-a-million occurrences like surviving a fall from 10,000 feet into jungle canopy, serial killers and madness, economic data during various historical periods, bushcrafting techniques, myth and storytelling in other cultures, height/weight/stature vs caloric intake estimated during the Bronze age, and so on. Normal writer stuff.
The weird stuff started happening way out the sticks. Way past BFE and into “fire access only, no asphalt,” to be precise, middle of nowhere at the tail end of the network map (we were expanding), but beyond good reliable cell coverage and well into the boonies. I had to keep driving the GMC back in to get a good link to upload data.
Usually, I left the thing plugged into the inverter. Run the test program, log the data, drive back in to upload. Fiddle around at the local nodes, test, and upload. Then back to the endpoint, test, upload, then when it was good pull new line or hookup the new network terminal to client’s site and weld the new junction at the node.
Thing was, the laptop started shutting off and starting up on its own. Okay, maybe it was overheat or software issue. Those are fixable. But it wasn’t either one. Nor a faulty connection to the screen, or any of the other bits were things that happen. Then it started bleeding data from one drive to the other, so I removed the research drive. And data from the research drive kept getting in to the work drive, somehow. I had a bajillion tabs saved on the research drive, and a a few hundred word files with story bits, essays, and suchlike.
Now, the work drive was supposed to be tiny. Partitioned just enough for the work files and enough space left over to not be slow as Christmas. The research drive was physically a separate drive, mind. But files and scraps from the one kept appearing on the other. I had music on the one, not the other. But scraps of music would start playing while I booted the work side, then shut off. I suspected malware, and cleaned it out, putting in a fresh install of the work programs. It kept happening. Research tabs started popping up on the work side while I was out in the sticks, out walking the lines or digging into the nodes.
It would turn on and off on its own. Load the work program, close it, open it and load again- on its own. Not enter any data or logs. Then it would open the work program and tabs would appear with Cthulu mythos and the anatomy of fire ants right after, with one of the cult ethnographies I used to look into right after. Loony stuff, but annoying. I suspected pranks and pulled both drives, put in new passwords and authentication.
It kept. Happening.
The laptop would produce beeps almost like morse code, not any system sound patterns. It would autocomplete the logs putting a recipe on how to make home made cheese in the middle of the data. I once caught the mating habits of birds halfway through a routine update coming from the node. I pulled and replaced whatever bits were replaceable. Disabled the network adapter as a test. Still weird stuff. I got halfway through entering a false log with no network access when stuff I researched on unit 731 popped up at the beginning of the log.
Some were funny, some were strange, and others just plain disturbing. I still have the laptop. It is not in use anymore, though. Except as a sleeping spot for Doofus. He keeps the demons away- or he eats them, probably. Doofus in a chonk boy, but not nearly the size of Othercat.
I once had a work-computer (not at current job) which out-lasted several colleagues’ machines that were deployed (and I assume acquired) at the same time. I used to joke to family members that my wiki-walks while on break cheered it up and kept it interested in life.
If any of y’all were wondering where all that Fema crap the Biden administration said went to Appalachia after the storm, well, looks like we found it.
As somebody living in North Carolina who knows what the western quarter of the state went through with Helene…just when I think I can’t possibly hate these sonsofbitches enough…dear Lord.
And they say “after” Helene. Heh. Bets on if that’s actually the case?
Now to be perfectly honest, I’d have been fine if they’d have just got the expletives out of the way. One of the last refugees here in Speck just moved back last week. She and her family were here, put up nice and employed so they could get their lives back together. The managers were causing more problems than they were in aid of fixing, by my eyes.
Those criminals of the Biden Administration deliberately choosing to starve Americans in disaster areas to support their illegal alien invasion. The Biden Administration was just as evil as the Soviet Union causing the Holodomor.
To be fair the FEMA out of DC were stymied more often than not. I think the quote was “we’ve been dodging them damn government revenuers for centuries!”
RE – the billionaires and what they do with their money meme –
Gates *does* spend lots of money for various charitable reasons. Unfortunately, they tend to be the kind that sound good on the surface, but make me worried that he’s going to do something crazy like sterilize an entire nation to fight overpopulation, or block out the sun to fight global warming.
Thing is 45 years tomorrow, Sunday, May 18, 1980, at ~8:30 AM, nature did block out the sun for most of eastern Washington and Oregon, along with most of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and other points east. By the time the sun blockage circled the earth, it may not have been “blocking” the sun in the northern hemisphere, but it was sure filtering it … for months.
For these newlyweds, 17 months, given we were suppose to be on Rainer that morning (had been until late into the night before, *bailed on camping), plus we were living within 40 air miles of the blast, and within miles of the mud flood zone, kind of a memorable event.
(*) Somebody forgot the German Shepard’s standard leash, had the traffic short leash, but tent camping without the standard one was inadvisable given black bears with cubs were out of the den, plus Rainer isn’t exactly dog (pet) friendly (our introduction to the concept). So we bailed at dusk (got home at 2 AM). Yes, missed the main event. Ash column, and lightening on the backside, caught our attention immediately.
Pinatubo in 1992 also dimmed the sun for a year. And we will not speak of what happened when solar energy drops combined with a spate of equatorial volcanos in the late 1500s-early 1600s. (20% global population loss, or so it seems, mostly northern hemisphere. Bad weather + political instability = rough century)
I’ve been following the US Geological Service’s daily lead-up posts to the event on social media. Great set of “on this day” memories, with the horror of knowing that some of the people cited are counting down to their deaths.
He’s even “yellow.” (Note: my husband apparently found an article recently that shows that orange coloration is literally a mutation, which can explain why “orange” is a behavior and not just a color.)
According To Hoyt 
I’d laugh at the first meme except for it’s too true to be funny.
On the other hand, I LIKE IT.
On the gripping hand, I like having friends. 😊
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Kudos for the Niven-Pournelle reference.
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To send or not to send
Whether tis nobler to have peace for today
or by striving win forth to a better tomorrow;
That is the question.
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Re wildlife:
Hunting is one of the last bastions of the old idea that you can respect people and things even as you try to kill them.
The classic hunter photo pose with hunter, weapon, and dead game animal has the subtext “This was a worthy beast.”
A selfie attempted with a large wild animal has the subtext “I’m treating this creature like Rodney Dangerfield.”
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In the “Nike, ” meme, it looks like the guy with his back to us has an atom embroidered on the shoulder of his jacket.
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Yep, that’s Marty McFly in Back To The Future 2 wearing what Doc Brown assured him was absolutely authentic 19th century Western clothes. :-P
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Oops, nope, that was Back To The Future 3, not 2.
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Regarding the wildlife art meme, my beloved still has a faded T-shirt from Bass Pro Shop which shows various birds and animals with the caption, “There’s a place for all God’s creatures….right next to the potatoes and gravy.”
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Comey memes …. Wow, that didn’t take long! ROFLOL
Great memes!
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Well, to be fair the memes practically write themselves.
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Yeah, and that statue may be the ONLY THING Stacey Abrams has caused to erect.
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Yeah, and my ancestors could organize a revolt without being spied on by closing the doors and windows….. nowadays, they’d have to worry that their refrigerator was spying for King George.
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Luke: Hal. Shut down all the garbage compactors on the detention level!
Hal: I’m afraid I can’t do that, Luke.
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Okay, now that’s a coffee meme that’s funny even to noncoffee people (whether it’s funny to non-Janeites, I don’t know). My other favorites were Doc Holliday and Pippin. :D
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Guys,
What if Comey and the most outrageous university students are psyops?
Trump may or may not have cut some sort of deal with congressional leadership about publicly embarrassing them less.
Then if public interest wanes, all Congress has to do is accomplish very little, and Trump is a lame duck.
What if Comey is deliberately trying to inspire public outrage, to motivate them to fix apparent problem, and hence Comey is pretending to be be insane in order to secretly help Trump?
I bet I could totally have long productive discussions with people if I ask them if they are merely pretending to be insane for the purpose of secretly helping Trump.
(Which is to say, living under a rock, and apparently some of my paranoid double think is getting wild. I made a stupid life choice and stayed up too late last night, and Ihaven’t properly woken up yet, as well, so I am extra stupid in more than one way.)
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I, for one, hope you do have those discussions. Regardless of length or productivity, they’d be fun to watch. :)
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I appreciate the happy reader’s ideas for spreading the word about good books. However, please don’t send me writing implements that channel eldrich horrors at random moments. It upsets the cat, and makes a mess on my Day Job papers. (And if I take it to work, the headmaster will want one too.)
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Writing implements that summon or channel eldrich horrors? You’re not meaning the old research laptop, are you? Because I swear, that one is haunted, and not in a fun way.
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are there shareable anecdotes about deranged research laptop?
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yes. Please? I don’t want to be the only one who has interesting equipment.
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Ach. Can’t believe I’ve not told this one yet. So, back in the late Obama years, Early Trump45s, I was still working in the telecom infrastructure field. Running hither and yon, welding glass, troubleshooting in the nether regions of the network map. I had to get a new laptop because the old one was crap, dying on the vine (a classic vintage, beyond its prime). New laptop was… well, it was weird.
It was originally a gaming laptop. The only one in the shop with the hardware and ports I needed. I set it up to dual boot, keeping the work software carefully separate from anything else. All that drive had on it was windows and the work diagnostic program, plus the network map.
The other one was the one where I kept story notes and looked up the more esoteric details. You know the ones. Anatomy and biology of desert critters, viscosity and lubricating properties of certain mixed viscera, ballistic data, decompression effects, viral progression (various data sets plus historical accounts), linguistic drift, once-in-a-million occurrences like surviving a fall from 10,000 feet into jungle canopy, serial killers and madness, economic data during various historical periods, bushcrafting techniques, myth and storytelling in other cultures, height/weight/stature vs caloric intake estimated during the Bronze age, and so on. Normal writer stuff.
The weird stuff started happening way out the sticks. Way past BFE and into “fire access only, no asphalt,” to be precise, middle of nowhere at the tail end of the network map (we were expanding), but beyond good reliable cell coverage and well into the boonies. I had to keep driving the GMC back in to get a good link to upload data.
Usually, I left the thing plugged into the inverter. Run the test program, log the data, drive back in to upload. Fiddle around at the local nodes, test, and upload. Then back to the endpoint, test, upload, then when it was good pull new line or hookup the new network terminal to client’s site and weld the new junction at the node.
Thing was, the laptop started shutting off and starting up on its own. Okay, maybe it was overheat or software issue. Those are fixable. But it wasn’t either one. Nor a faulty connection to the screen, or any of the other bits were things that happen. Then it started bleeding data from one drive to the other, so I removed the research drive. And data from the research drive kept getting in to the work drive, somehow. I had a bajillion tabs saved on the research drive, and a a few hundred word files with story bits, essays, and suchlike.
Now, the work drive was supposed to be tiny. Partitioned just enough for the work files and enough space left over to not be slow as Christmas. The research drive was physically a separate drive, mind. But files and scraps from the one kept appearing on the other. I had music on the one, not the other. But scraps of music would start playing while I booted the work side, then shut off. I suspected malware, and cleaned it out, putting in a fresh install of the work programs. It kept happening. Research tabs started popping up on the work side while I was out in the sticks, out walking the lines or digging into the nodes.
It would turn on and off on its own. Load the work program, close it, open it and load again- on its own. Not enter any data or logs. Then it would open the work program and tabs would appear with Cthulu mythos and the anatomy of fire ants right after, with one of the cult ethnographies I used to look into right after. Loony stuff, but annoying. I suspected pranks and pulled both drives, put in new passwords and authentication.
It kept. Happening.
The laptop would produce beeps almost like morse code, not any system sound patterns. It would autocomplete the logs putting a recipe on how to make home made cheese in the middle of the data. I once caught the mating habits of birds halfway through a routine update coming from the node. I pulled and replaced whatever bits were replaceable. Disabled the network adapter as a test. Still weird stuff. I got halfway through entering a false log with no network access when stuff I researched on unit 731 popped up at the beginning of the log.
Some were funny, some were strange, and others just plain disturbing. I still have the laptop. It is not in use anymore, though. Except as a sleeping spot for Doofus. He keeps the demons away- or he eats them, probably. Doofus in a chonk boy, but not nearly the size of Othercat.
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That is creepy. Would your employers have been capable of installing some kind of spyware on the machine?
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Sounds like the laptop was bored with just the work stuff.
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I once had a work-computer (not at current job) which out-lasted several colleagues’ machines that were deployed (and I assume acquired) at the same time. I used to joke to family members that my wiki-walks while on break cheered it up and kept it interested in life.
LikeLike
If any of y’all were wondering where all that Fema crap the Biden administration said went to Appalachia after the storm, well, looks like we found it.
LikeLike
As somebody living in North Carolina who knows what the western quarter of the state went through with Helene…just when I think I can’t possibly hate these sonsofbitches enough…dear Lord.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And they say “after” Helene. Heh. Bets on if that’s actually the case?
Now to be perfectly honest, I’d have been fine if they’d have just got the expletives out of the way. One of the last refugees here in Speck just moved back last week. She and her family were here, put up nice and employed so they could get their lives back together. The managers were causing more problems than they were in aid of fixing, by my eyes.
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Those criminals of the Biden Administration deliberately choosing to starve Americans in disaster areas to support their illegal alien invasion. The Biden Administration was just as evil as the Soviet Union causing the Holodomor.
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And it’s not the Biden people’s fault that they didn’t manage more body count.
Fortunately, the American people looked after their own.
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Even though FEMA did their worst to prevent ‘unauthorized’ assistance from reaching the people they weren’t helping. :-(
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Tar. Feathers. FEMA. Some assembly required,
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To be fair the FEMA out of DC were stymied more often than not. I think the quote was “we’ve been dodging them damn government revenuers for centuries!”
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🙈
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I have long maintained that there is a <i>vas deferense</i> between men and women.
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Aargh.
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SFBS!
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That Jane Austen characters on coffee preferences meme made me laugh.
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You don’t own it, you’re just responsible for it.
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With your millions how many have you refused to feed?
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/05/17/bono-gets-hysterical-over-usaid-cuts-million-children-dying/
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Granite Grok has some bad ones this week.
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“Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look.
“I trust him not. Such men are dangerous.”
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They need to include Letitia James.
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And my favorite.
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Now that’s just sad. And an insult to Hooters.
(I’ve been in the Hooters Ringo and Taylor used as a serving in Von Neuman’s War. Not great food, but fun).
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RE – the billionaires and what they do with their money meme –
Gates *does* spend lots of money for various charitable reasons. Unfortunately, they tend to be the kind that sound good on the surface, but make me worried that he’s going to do something crazy like sterilize an entire nation to fight overpopulation, or block out the sun to fight global warming.
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yep
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Thing is 45 years tomorrow, Sunday, May 18, 1980, at ~8:30 AM, nature did block out the sun for most of eastern Washington and Oregon, along with most of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and other points east. By the time the sun blockage circled the earth, it may not have been “blocking” the sun in the northern hemisphere, but it was sure filtering it … for months.
For these newlyweds, 17 months, given we were suppose to be on Rainer that morning (had been until late into the night before, *bailed on camping), plus we were living within 40 air miles of the blast, and within miles of the mud flood zone, kind of a memorable event.
(*) Somebody forgot the German Shepard’s standard leash, had the traffic short leash, but tent camping without the standard one was inadvisable given black bears with cubs were out of the den, plus Rainer isn’t exactly dog (pet) friendly (our introduction to the concept). So we bailed at dusk (got home at 2 AM). Yes, missed the main event. Ash column, and lightening on the backside, caught our attention immediately.
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Pinatubo in 1992 also dimmed the sun for a year. And we will not speak of what happened when solar energy drops combined with a spate of equatorial volcanos in the late 1500s-early 1600s. (20% global population loss, or so it seems, mostly northern hemisphere. Bad weather + political instability = rough century)
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I’ve been following the US Geological Service’s daily lead-up posts to the event on social media. Great set of “on this day” memories, with the horror of knowing that some of the people cited are counting down to their deaths.
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So have I.
“Forgotten Oregon” social media has been posting some too.
I’ve replied on more than a few posts.
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Always my favorite email of the week. Thank you, Sarah, for all you do to keep us sane enough to get through another week
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The group project has too much on learning to work with other people. I think I learned negative amounts.
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He probably had help from Steve McQueen’s ghost.
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/beloved-pet-daring-escape-animal-hospital-surgery-travels-3-miles-home#&_intcmp=fnhpriver_42
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“And the cat came back the very next day”
“I thought he was a goner, but the cat came back”
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He’s even “yellow.” (Note: my husband apparently found an article recently that shows that orange coloration is literally a mutation, which can explain why “orange” is a behavior and not just a color.)
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Maybe that explains why orange cats hunker down in green grass and think they’re invisible. :-P
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Father Z has a new Latin phrase for everyone who is a boss:
https://wdtprs.com/2025/05/circi-mei-omnes-omnesque-simiae/
“[They are] all my circus and all my monkeys.”
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