71 thoughts on “Meme and let Die

    1. The “Mama Orc houseslippers” are amusing.

      I think we need a meme of our hostess preparing to throw a shoe from which she is pulling the pin.

      (grin)

      Like

    2. The Orange and the Green seem on the verge on uniting against their common foe.

      There will now be at least one outrageous hit on the one followed by a prompt and excessive response to the other.

      One week, max.

      Like

  1. I refuse to eschew sesquipedalian, supernumerary verbiage.

    At Fountains Abbey in England, there was a display in the grange (farm) of all the different colors wool could be dyed using a variety of plants and mordents. Brown, black, tan, reds, blues (including teal), yellows, all sorts of things. I was amazed. Somehow it never registered that “colors on tapestries” and “colors of other stuff” overlapped. Granted, some of the combinations cost lots and lots of money, which is why ordinary people’s work clothes tended to be undyed or browns and grays (or dirt colored), but teal? Daaaaang. The experimenting that took place to sort out which combos, for how long, with which materials, in what kind of container (some can’t be done in iron or copper, some had to be in iron or copper …) Medieval industrial chemistry FTW!

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Not necessarily just Medieval, either. Coloring clothes has been a serious business for a very, very long time. I still remember the “Aha!” moment I had when I realized that the predominance of certain colors in certain cultures was due to the dyes available for their textiles.

      Obvious when you think about it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The most (in)famous example being Tyrian Purple, AKA Imperial Purple or Royal Purple. Made by a complex recipe from sea snail slime, and each snail only yielded a little bit. There were laws about who was allowed to wear Imperial Purple clothing.

        Like

      2. For reasons, color purple was needed for clothing. The vendor cannot afford to provide anything in the color purple, anymore. It currently is not available at any cost. Even when (WAG) availability, the cost will be (WAG) astronomically outrageous.

        (*) WAG – Vendor’s Wild Ass* Guess – their words.

        Like

        1. …which is one step up (down?) from SWAG, semi-wild-assed-guess, or alternately scientific- or simultaneous-, not to be confused with the stuff you carry away in the free bag front trade shows, which is stuff-we-all-get.

          Like

          1. Yes.

            Wags hands, which is why I always liked WAG when asked “how long to program/change/fix something”. “WAG” was accompanied by at least one hand flat, tipping back and forth. OTOH “fix” was usually also accompanied by “now ask how long it will take to find the problem to fix” (I dare you, implied).

            Not that I have much, or really any, chance these days to indulge. Ain’t retirement great?

            (For those of you just starting out, you too will get there. Will seem like forever. One day you will look back and it’ll be “where did the time go?” For those who will stay in the traces forever, because you must do what you do, i.e. you writers, technically you are retired.)

            Liked by 1 person

    2. Madder vs cochineal. Lots of yellow dyes, from onionskin to goldenrod (goldenrod makes a lovely bright yellow). OTOH, very hard to get a good green unless you overdue yellow with blue, or better, blue with yellow.

      Lots of fun details.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I don’t know, to hear my mom tell it, we managed to dye our clothes green on any given Saturday between March and September in the back yard…..

        Like

  2. The bathroom one reminds me of a sign in a German bathroom, which translates to: “Please do not throw cigarette butts into the urinal. After all, you wouldn’t pee into your ash tray, right?”

    The one about “Spanish” reminds me of a wonderful German (sort of) poem by Börries von Münchhausen (1907): https://de.talk.jokes.narkive.com/9KJpJAsZ/1-hab-ich-noch in which the hero intimidates an opposing army by addressing them in a blend of Latin and German: “Totschlago vos sofortissimo, nisi vos benehmitis bene”. :-)

    Like

  3. Earlier this morning, I used that Melville quote. In a post on a different forum. Involving an electric lawn mower, disgruntled venomous insects, and an unlucky sprinkler head.

    OK, it’s a long story. Won’t bother you. But did use the Melville quote hours before reading this week’s batch o’ memes.

    Like

  4. Re drive time DJs: Still have a little bit of an old man’s infatuation for the morning drive lady on Sirius/XM Symphony Hall.

    Re Safety Pants: The writing on the top of the sign just says “boxer shorts.”

    Like

  5. Bernie said he was a Nationalist Socialist during his POTUS campaign, so that photo is more along the lines of the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis agreement.

    Like

  6. “I recently read your meme referring to using guns to fish. I am intrigued by your arguments and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.”

    Liked by 1 person

  7. About that stolen election in LA……

    It seems that in 2023, Judicial Watch won a court settlement in which LA County agreed there were 1.2 million invalid voters on the LA County precinct rolls, and they agreed to remove them. I noted it at the time.

    https://sharylattkisson.com/2023/03/lawsuit-settlement-forces-la-county-to-remove-1-2-million-ineligible-voters-from-voter-rolls/

    So when AG Harmeet Dhillon said they were looking into the LA Mayor election, I dropped that link into her X feed, with a copy to dataRepublican, and suggested that someone who can subpoena the votes cast in the current Mayor’s election might want to compare the list of the supposedly removed in 2023 with the latest list of who voted and see what the overlap of addresses and names between the two is.

    We’ll see what happens.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. As of the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, there are 43,699 people experiencing homelessness in the city of Los Angeles.

      -clanker at DuckDuckGo

      Current Vote Totals for LA Mayoral Race
      Candidates and Vote Percentages

      Candidate Vote Percentage Total Votes
      Karen Bass 34.68% 250,871
      Nithya Raman 27.12% 197,758
      Spencer Pratt 26.69% 194,645

      -same clanker

      Delta between “noodles” and Pratt: 197,758 – 194,645 = 3,113

      Like

    2. This isn’t the first time they’ve been under a court order to clean up their rolls. Several years ago (a year or two before COVID), there was also another voter roll clean-up. I suspect it’s the reason why I had to vote provisionally in the summer election that year. But that was also the same time when I stopped getting election-related mailings for the very left-wing person who had lived in this apartment before me, so I viewed it as a win overall.

      Liked by 2 people

  8. Dude who did extremely classified stuff as an undergrad and was asked to intern at AFIT, and who is now doing other classified stuff out in California.

    Many, many of his college classmates thought he was retarded, or autistic, or retarded and autistic, or maybe an idiot savant about plants. (Big fan of plants and knew a lot about them, even though his field wasn’t biology.)

    Nice guy. None of the above. Much smarter than me, and I rarely get that vibe.

    I think I talked before about how he persuaded his neighbors at home to let him tune their lawnmower engines, so that they would sound more aesthetically pleasing when they were all mowing at the same time.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. When I was in second grade, our class got put through the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales test battery. I didn’t know what it was at the time, as it wasn’t the only standardized test we had to go through back then. Some time later, I asked my parents what IQ meant. They explained, and I wondered what mine was. They let slip that I had actually been tested, but they refused to reveal the result. I gather it was along the lines of a tight end’s jersey number.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Odd how parents never seem to give up that info. My intelligence has drifted into lower registers over the years, but the local supply of “if brains was gunpowder there wouldn’t be enough boom to blow a nose” hasn’t seemed to have gone up or down.

          Short term memory is still shot, though.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. When Mom was moving out of her condo to a retirement home, she mailed me a bunch of old report cards and such. I was an obstinate little kid, to nobody’s surprise. I know I took an IQ test in elementary school. but the results are forever gone. (Miss G, my 60ish year old third grade teacher, lamented my handwriting. Hell, now I can barely read it myself. There’s a reason my shopping lists are done on the computer. Actually, more than one. Copy/paste works wonders with our restricted diets.)

            Shortly after I got my BS, Mensa declared that a certain SAT score would entitle one to belong. I passed–both ways. Coulda, didn’t wanna.

            Like

        2. I have no idea what a tight ends jersey number is, but my parents had to fend off a school in England (boarding school) that had teh tests administered in various schools in Portugal and wanted to collect allt hat qualified for Mensa. Eh. Not sad they didn’t let me go.

          Liked by 2 people

      2. Oddly enough, happened to me back when I was a wee squirt, too. They thought I was retarded, mentally deficient, or some kind of eff’d up in the head. Still no idea what the stupid stupid IQ test scored me as but they threw me out of the speech therapy and slow kid classes that I could sleep through so I could stay up late and read more and into the accelerated classes.

        Like

        1. “threw me out of the speech therapy and slow kid classes that I could sleep through so I could stay up late and read more

          Rude of them.

          Something similar with my youngest sister. All because she didn’t talk. Why would she? She had two, especially the middle one, to talk for her. She didn’t have a “first word”. She had a first sentence.

          I never had the same testing. But “something was wrong” all because I couldn’t read aloud. Been over this before. No problem reading. At 69? Still can’t read aloud. Can. Just have to work at it. Lord help me if there is a word I can read, but can’t pronounce.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. I taught my younger sister how to read. The school trotted her out as an example of how well they taught kids to read.

            Meanwhile they put me in the below-average math class because a girl who talks that badly (speech defect) has to be stupid. Fortunately, I had no social skills and blasted through the tests.

            Liked by 2 people

          2. I developed a bad stutter when we moved from Blue Collar Detroit Suburb to Very White Collar Chicago Suburb when I was 8. Fit in really well in BCDS, was the class Odd (and clutz) in VWCCS. Had some speech therapy (as noted, I wasn’t terribly cooperative), but got over the stutter. OTOH, being an engineer, I’ll go along with the poor articulation statement.

            Like

  9. Calque is a loanword…. *SNRK* That’s English for you. Hell indeed!

    I could do that Star Wars diagram.

    Vengeance and necromancy… Wei Wuxian, is that you?

    So… if we kidnap the gravekeeper, that counts?

    Trusting Google Maps is never wise…. I’m there with the cats. Throw down!

    Puma with penguins is an image I never expected to have.

    The shoelaces advice is oddly practical. Huh!

    Every day I inch closer to not only thinking Vlad had the right idea, but it needs to make a comeback….

    Agent of Chutzpah rocks!

    What’s going on in Ireland – the fact they want to cover it up is scarier than the attack.

    Like

    1. What’s going on in Ireland – the fact they want to cover it up is scarier than the attack.

      They have the experience of urban warfare within living memory; the mental ramp up time is probably shorter than ours.

      Liked by 1 person

  10. Hm. They just reran a 2024 American Masters about Janis Ian, and I find it interesting that they totally skipped her free speech/indie/filk period. Literally skipped over 20 years, in fact.

    OTOH, they spent a lot of time on Matthew Shepard, without pointing out that he was a drug dealer killed by another gay drug dealer.

    There is a lot about her life and love life and a good chunk about her songwriting life. Also some nice stuff about dealing with her voice ending before her career did, which is decent.

    The docudrama interspersed with interviews format is kinda weird.

    It was nice that a lot of famous people got filmed expressing their esteem for her writing, recording, and performance, and it became clear that she has a ton of old friends.

    Like

  11. it’s probably just as well that tomorrow is a Twitter fast, (barring unforseen ghastliness, or an urge to watch the UFC event). I’m getting thoroughly upset by the rumored “settlement,” with Iran. According to Iran and possibly Israel, Israel is getting tossed under the bus, Iran is getting more money, they keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, and they”ll talk about the nukes “later,” after all their other conditions have been met. Maybe. In short, the status quo ante, with plenty of money to rebuild.

    Never Trumpers are being their usual abusive selves (I didn’t realize Sweet Meteor of Death was somewhat anti-Israel), but even people who aren’t totally et up with TDS are sour. The Israelis were reportedly cut out of the negotiations.

    Is this all another disinfo campaign? Don’t know, but it’s upsetting.

    Just as upsetting is the fact J.D. Vance was quoted as believing all conflicts throughout history were resolved through negotiations…and he specifically cited WWII as an example. That got him, rightfully, community noted. Twitter rumor is he opposed the war from the beginning and really doesn’t much like Israel. The suggestion is his version of “America First,” is full isolationist. Of course, the people pushing this will then attack Rubio as being a treacherous RINO, because we just can’t have the Repoublicans actuallly sort of unified, now can we?

    No, I’m not blackpilled. But I’m worried.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. sort by killing can but not must select for survivors willing to consider peace

        I’ve basically been in a hole, but not really hiding for once. My view is remaining more or less at ‘lots of noise will eventually be obsoleted by better quality information, and my worrying is not my most valuable activity’.

        Like

  12. Then I started talking to myself.

    Well, it was less a conversation and more a Victorian omnibus with several unrelated passengers climbing aboard at every stop.

    If I ever did write it up, the funniest approach might be a lightly fictionalized memoir of an author attempting to manage:

    • a day job,
    • impending retirement,
    • a growing catalog of books,
    • AI tools,
    • endless story ideas,
    • and ordinary life.

    The recurring gag would be that every practical task generates three new novel ideas.

    Dentist appointment?

    “Interesting. What if a dentist on a resort world discovers the bite marks aren’t human?”

    Terraform training?

    “Interesting. What if infrastructure-as-code controls a planetary defense grid?”

    Retirement planning?

    “Interesting. What if a retired Anglo naval officer…”

    And off we go again.

    The truth is that many people have active imaginations, but relatively few have trained themselves to turn those imaginings into outlines, chapters, covers, metadata, and eventually published books. That’s why the project list keeps growing: every new idea immediately presents itself in a form that looks publishable.

    The danger isn’t running out of ideas.

    The danger is living long enough to write them all.

    At your current pace, I suspect the final unfinished manuscript on my desk will contain a note that reads:

    “Chapter 14 still needs revision. Also, I have just had a splendid idea involving time travel, Terraform, a luxury resort planet, and giant radioactive squid. Please clear my calendar for the next six months.”

    And somewhere, H. G. Wells would nod approvingly and say:

    “Yes, that’s exactly how it starts.” 😄📚🦑🚀

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment