70 thoughts on “Day of the Living Memes”

  2. I’m off to the doc-in-the-box, because I may have ruptured something at the explanation for Trump not having a dog….

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    1. I actually do have that tee-shirt. I sometimes wear it on “casual day” to work, since it has, ahem, a scriptural quote on it.

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    1. When Mom was moving into smaller digs, I made sure to ask for and get her trivet.

      (Borrowing it from its place of honor on the dining room table:)

      “Come in, sit down, relax, converse.

      Our house doesn’t always look like this.

      Sometimes it’s even worse.”

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    3. Here’s a question for them: Do women have the right to reject Modern Feminism? To say “I do not agree, and that’s not how I want to live my life”?

      Their answer will tell you everything you need to know.

      I suspect that would trigger a screaming hate-filled foaming-at-the-mouth harangue.

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      1. They write long grousing essays about modern women’s failure to call themselves feminists where they speculate about the motives, and never, ever think to, you know, ask.

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  11. Those radar speed signs actually have a high speed cut off to prevent exactly that.

    Then we have Catman and Wal-Margaritaville

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        1. Confirmed while flying past at an only somewhat low but completely legal altitude in a Cessna, of course, Deputy. Why do you ask?

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  12. Re #6: It probably was.

    Re #9: Just looking at a cutaway diagram of a Saturn V is enough to take me back to 1970 or 1971. I recall spending quite a bit of time trying to make a moon-rocket out of Lego, before all the specialty kits came out and all we had were generic bricks (generally red or white ones).

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      1. Yeah. Don’t forget that Lobelia got respect at the end for standing up to Sharkey’s men.

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  14. English isn’t really a language, it’s five languages in a horse costume pretending to be a giraffe.

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    1. “English doesn’t borrow words from other languages. It mugs them in dark alleys, takes their words, and then goes through their pockets for loose grammar.” 😁

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      1. From Fuzzy Sapiens by H. Beam Piper

        “And you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the Ninth Century Pre-Atomic, and no more legitimate than any of the other results.”

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    2. The other part that makes English unusual (and hard) is that its spelling was put together in the Middle Ages, right before a drastic shift in pronunciation. So unlike most other languages it isn’t even remotely phonetic (though it was in the days of Chaucer). Most other languages either didn’t go through that or tweak their spelling from time to time, but English didn’t.

      It’s not always bad to leave spelling alone; consider the travesties perpetrated on Dutch a few decades ago by a government committee that clearly was made up of people with no linguistic knowledge whatsoever.

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      1. To elaborate on that last point, since this is a geeky crowd:

        When I grew up, we had compound words like “mensenmassa” (mass of people) and “paardebloem” (horse flower — a dandelion). The former uses the plural word form (mensen) the latter the singular (paard, with “e” to connect the pieces). The logic is simple: the singular form is used unless the word clearly is speaking of multiple X.

        No longer. The morons in charge of the most recent spelling revision were too dumb to understand that (they probably called that sort of distinction “undemocratic”) so now the plural is used everywhere. So we get things like “ganzenveer” — translated as “goose feather” but it actually is “geese feather”, as if many geese have one feather!

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        1. Ugh. Are they second cousins of the people trying to take gender out of German and Spanish?

          Cone on, folks, these are languages where everything from tables to the sun to dirt to emotions have grammatical gender. Trying to declare “things have gender but people don’t!” is so [censored] stupid.

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          1. Children don’t have gender (at least not in German) – and they’re trying to make everyone into a child. The better to Nanny them.

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            2. Same in Dutch: like Latin and German it has three grammatical genders, one of which is “neuter”. Actually, the distinction in Dutch between masculine and feminine grammatical genders has mostly disappeared because inflections are mostly gone (unlike those other two). But neuter is still distinct, for one thing it uses a different article (“het” instead of “de”). And in Dutch, all diminutive forms are neuter. For example “meisje” (girl), and “jongetje” (little boy) though not “jongen” (boy).

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        2. Is there a plausible transalation for gansevoort ? It’s famous as the name of a street (and an extinct meat-packing district) in lower Manhatten near the west shore.

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          1. Oops! “transalation” does not mean making things trans-salacious, for either meaning of “trans”.

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          2. “Voort” is an alternate/obsolete spelling of “voord” which means “ford” (of a river). So its meaning would be “goose ford”.

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      2. And apparently, the Dutch had a part in early spelling. Seems like some of the first printer-workers in England (Caxton and his shop) spoke dutch, and added letters to English words to match Dutch expectations. Caxton himself was known to adapt words fro French into English, and fiddle with spelling.

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    3. English is what happens when Britian is invaded by the Anglo-Saxons, and then by the Danes, and then by the Normans. After which the result becomes a global superpower – twice – and loots the rest of world for vocabulary.

      (But I’m going to steal the one about “five languages in a horse costume pretending to be a giraffe.”)

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      1. Note that one of the better popular books about English and its history is lovingly titled Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

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  15. I’ve got my pedantic hat on;

    Re Clinton and Hagar – Clinton is 79, Hagar is 78. Clinton looks like a prune; Hagar still looks pretty good.

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      1. “From the dawn of internet we came,

        moving unseen down through the servers,

        Living many derived lives.

        You didn’t know we were among you — until now.”

        Liked by 3 people

    1. Once she lost, the Uighur youth “donated” blood supply dried up too?

      And that photo is a bit old too – he looking even more pale and vampirish of late…

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  17. Brilliant film editor Marsha Lucas has passed away at age 80.

    She was a main reason the original Star Wars movie and the first trilogy overall were so good. The little droid screaming and zooming away after Chewbacca roars at it? The “kiss for luck” scene? Those were in the crypt and kept I n the cut when George wanted to remove them due to her. And she personally massively recut the Death Star trench run sequence for pacing, which originally had Luke flying around randomly for two runs and was dog slow, basically following the 1955 ‘Dam Busters’ movie sequence George patterned that part of the movie on. Marsha’s recut slimmed the pacing, increased the stakes, and built the tension. She told George, “If the audience doesn’t cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he’s being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn’t work.”

    The obit coverage includes a story I don’t remember hearing about, but which does not surprise me – when she saw a screening of the complete rough cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark, at the end after the crated Ark of the Covenant rolls off into that endless warehouse, the movie was all Indy, with no sign of Marion. Presumably she was still on that Mediterranean island tied to that stick surrounded by melted Nazis. The movie forgot about her.

    Apparently there was originally a scripted scene with Indy coming down the steps from his government guys meeting all dejected and meeting Marion, who cheers him up, but the brilliant sooper genius Spielberg didn’t shoot it, as he didn’t think he needed it. George Lucas had to round up the actors and shoot that scene himself second unit after the rest of the movie was complete, shooting it locally on the steps of the SF City Hall, to give the movie its emotional closure.

    Her official credits include the three Star Wars films, ‘THX1138’, ‘American Graffiti’, and Martin Scorcese’s ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’, and ‘New York, New York’, but there are rumors she contributed uncredited editing across other major films before she retired following her acrimonious divorce from George.

    RIP Marsha. I hope you knew that some of us out here appreciated how much you contributed to popular culture.

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  18. Well now that’s a coincidence. I was in the 8th grade when Led Zeppelin released their 4th album. Now, albums that were released 20 years later are ‘Oldies’. 😮

    I remember when ‘Oldies’ meant from before 1950…

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    2. Except, of course, when dealing with hermaphrodite connectors, such as Anderson PowerPole, GR-874, or 7-millimeter connectors.

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