Friday Ephemera
A beginner’s guide to snake removal. || Just a little bit of give. || Bees want your tears. || Cobalt tarantula. || Lucille Ball demonstrates the Sonovox, 1939. || Backfire is a game. || Thug life. || Some very Guardian thinking. || Ping, pong and spin. || Step aside, puny humans. (h/t, Dicentra) || Opal uncovered. || When it’s too much effort to fold paper and throw. || “To prove their mousy worth, they’ll overthrow the Earth.” || Evaporating horse sweat. || Isle of Wight attraction of note. || Using wood. || Why cats don’t rule the Earth. || Always respect the media. || You don’t often see them. || Meanwhile, in sporting news. || Not cake. || And finally, via Damian, I’m not entirely sure what the protocol here is.
I can’t see the cobalt tarantula.
I want a refund.
I can see the cobalt tarantula.
I want a refund.
… snake removal.
Something about culturally appropriated hair?
“Thug life.”
Now watch as the Japanese turn it into a sport.
“Some very Guardian thinking.”
“We are all guilty!”
“To prove their mousy worth, they’ll overthrow the Earth.”
That would have been right up the Animaniacs team’s alley. As it pretty much is mine, in fact.
404 of note. And a rational contrarian speaks.
Today’s contender for the most idiotic thing ever written:
And finally, via Damian, I’m not entirely sure what the protocol here is.
My wife claims that back in the 70’s she visited a friend’s house in Huston and this was the toilet arrangement in the master bathroom.
this was the toilet arrangement in the master bathroom.
Could one of them been a bidet? A rare appliance in North America in the 70s.
Nope. Not a bidet. That’s what I asked. The father was a professor and the mother was an artist of some sort. It was Texas. They were Jewish. Not that those last two things mean anything, the first two however…
Does anyone have a stamp or two to spend on some fun for Mr. Joe Cuba, who’s turning 100 next Friday?
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/02/21/get-them-birthday-cards-ready/#comment-7200522
I would assume that the protocol involves no eye contact…
Morning, all.
Fashion matters.
Via Obnoxio.
Morning, all.
‘k, fine then.
Some very Guardian thinking.
Trust the Groan to use words like ‘benign’ and ‘uncontroversial’ in a post about jihadis who behead infidels.
Trust the Groan to use words like ‘benign’ and ‘uncontroversial’ in a post about jihadis who behead infidels.
It is a little jarring, given the context. Oh, and then we get the words “damning indictment” – not with regard to the aforementioned beheaders and assorted Muhammadan sociopaths, but instead deployed to disdain those of us who’d rather not play host and subsidiser to our sworn, self-declared enemies. Those who would see us either subjugated or exterminated.
As so often, the Guardian reads as an exercise in moral inversion, a guidebook to cultural self-destruction.
My wife claims that back in the 70’s she visited a friend’s house in Huston and this was the toilet arrangement in the master bathroom.
So we’re agreed, then – your wife will never be allowed to remodel your own bathroom without constant supervision. It’s best to nip these things in the bud.
That would have been right up the Animaniacs team’s alley. As it pretty much is mine, in fact.
It’s the bartenders’ spoken interlude that takes it over the edge.
Twenty-first century woes.
Twenty-first century woes.
You beat me to it, the story over at The Verge even has a video of the things in action – a bargain at $350 a pop. Good news for Apple fanbois though…
Sure, these are great for solving the unsolvable problem of how to tie one’s shoes, and all is well and good until someone hacks you shoes and gets them so tight you can’t get them off, circulation is cut off, and your feet have to be amputated. The shoe hacker menace is understated.
Meanwhile a commenter fears the next looming “smart” gadget catastrophe:
tightness presets
Band name.
OK, I got a rant. When did this shiite start? After I went to bed last night?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present?wprov=sfti1
Do I now have to subtract 1950 from every BCE (another term I kinda bristled at but wth) date?
Monkee Peter Tork has died at 77:
https://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2019/02/peter-tork-rip.html?m=1
So we’re agreed, then – your wife will never be allowed to remodel your own bathroom without constant supervision. It’s best to nip these things in the bud.
Oh, she herself would never go for that. She needs to focus on the business at hand. No distractions. Not even busy wallpaper.
Not even busy wallpaper.
Heh. It’s best to go with something understated and minimal. And easy to hose down.
The tolerant left, part 4,898.
Why college students go socialist.
It’s the bartenders’ spoken interlude that takes it over the edge.
The bartenders are Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulsen – the voice actors of Pinky and the Brain. 🙂
Why college students go socialist.
It’s funny just how often socialism resembles doing a runner from the restaurant before the bill comes.
How can he tell which boulders are female?
How can he tell which boulders are female?
I’ll get your coat.
[ Fetches coat. ]
[ Throws coat into street. ]
[ Sets coat on fire. ]
[ Drives over burning coat, repeatedly. ]
Hey David!
Long time reader here. I’ve set up a little initiative I think you might be interested in, given the usual topics on this blog.
I’ve created a nonprofit website to spread the word about web feeds and RSS, a difficult-to-censor technology that helps people keep up to date with their favourite things on the internet. Add feeds to a reader of your choice, and you get a one-stop-shop of all the latest content from the sites you like. Part of the site has feed starter packs themed by topic, and since I like your site I’ve put you in as one of the starter pack items.
I’ve set up a special splash page for conservatives here, separate from the main site:
https://www.youneedfeeds.com/conservative-lockdown
and the main site is here at
https://www.youneedfeeds.com/
The site as a whole is meant to take someone from zero-to-comfortable, showing them the basic concept of feeds, options for feed readers, and some great content to start off with. Alternatively, there’s also instructions for getting feeds from almost any major site.
I hope the more people that get to know about web feeds, the more difficult it will be for big tech (esp. Facebook and Twitter) to clamp down on ideas from anyone not left-of-centre.
How can he tell which boulders are female?
They’re generally the ones wearing a chiffon mu-mu and a feather boa.
What?
Part of the site has feed starter packs themed by topic, and since I like your site I’ve put you in as one of the starter pack items.
Thanks, Inaba.
What?
That’s your car outside, isn’t it?
[ Summons tow truck. ]
“The bartenders are Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulsen – the voice actors of Pinky and the Brain. :)”
I thought they sounded too good to be impressions.
““>https://www.youneedfeeds.com/”
I was about to mention YouTube’s little-known RSS facility but, checking the site, I see you’re way ahead of me. Good work. If I was remotely organized, I might have done something similar myself.
How can he tell which boulders are female?
Lots of cleavage.
Lots of cleavage.
[ Sprays Jabrwok with hamster urine. ]
[ Fetches bag of weasels. ]
I hope the more people that get to know about web feeds, the more difficult it will be for big tech (esp. Facebook and Twitter) to clamp down on ideas from anyone not left-of-centre.
So that explains the links to right leaning sites like Reueters, CNN, TMZ, Vox, NYT Review of Books, Guardian Books, Tumblr, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Slate.
I have a better idea, avoid the garbage like Farcebook and Twitter, and go VFR direct to sites you trust over which they have no control.
Farnsworth, I had to include *some* links I didn’t particularly like myself in order to not just exclude 50% possible takeup of the technology.
It’s why most of the politics stuff is in the general “Fightbox” pack, rather than just a list of all the sites I would prefer people read.
It’s also why the conservative-leaning splash page doesn’t appear in the general navigation – you’ll have to be linked to it from an outside source.
My personal subscription list doesn’t look like the list of items in all those packs, though there is a significant overlap in some areas. (I get David’s blog via the feed, all the podcasts listed there, most of the Gaming Greatness category, Volokh and AoS from the Fightbox…)
The whole point behind web feeds is that it’s inherently neutral tech – turning off a section of the populace from even trying it defeats my aim of loosening the grip of FB/Twitter etc.
The whole point behind web feeds is that it’s inherently neutral tech…
Farcebook, Twitter, et al., have no “grip” on what web sites I, or anyone else, chose to visit, and, frankly, and those who continue to use Farcebook and Twitter, knowing their proclivities, deserve what they get. Having a web feed to pump info from sites one already visits is a solution in search of a problem, but good luck with your windmill.
The female boulders are the ones complaining that the desert is chilly.
(I’m a female boulder too, but not completely. When seated in the path of Arctic winds howling out of a typical office a/c, I am pretty comfortable in a 3-season jacket, but no matter how many blankets I pile on, my knees stay cold.)
I am released from Office Purgatory into Retirement Heaven this spring. Whee!
I’ve never used Twitter and only used Farcebook once for ten minutes (to get an extra 40 points in a video game I was playing, after which I deleted the account). How do they control your Internet surfing?
How do they control your Internet surfing?
Seems obviously silly, but anecdotally I’ve noticed rightwinger normies of a certain age complain an AWFUL lot about the negative coverage Trump gets on CNN/ABC/NBC etc. I chide them not out of spite, but to show that changing the channel or – gasp – turning off the television are legitimate alternatives if one finds their slant offensive. Not in an airport, mind, but you catch my meaning.
How do they control your Internet surfing?
They don’t and (so far) can’t. I have no doubt that there are people who get all their “news” and info from Farcebook and Twitter (there is a name for these people, it stats with “i” and ends with “diots”), and were they to set up a feed, it would merely echo what they are already being fed, so a separate feed for the pap would be an exercise in futility.
Lots of cleavage.
And the constant knapping.
You appear to believe it started when you first noticed it. That particular issue with human thinking has a name: the recency illusion.
It serves a purpose in a set of fields. Graphs are much easier to label when they don’t have axes going forwards in one half and backwards in the other, for example.
(there is a name for these people, it stats with “i” and ends with “diots”)
In my experience, it starts with “M”, and ends with “other.” Her Web experience is limited to FB and T, since that’s where the pictures of her grandkids and her sisters’ grandkids are shared, and that was the only reason she and Dad got Internet service at their house in the first place. And since FB and T have spent tens of millions of dollars insisting that they’re giving her the very best news feeds in the business*, she’s convinced that she’s well-informed. It’s hard to shake her convictions when the news she gets in those places is reinforced any time she catches a glimpse of the newspaper or television.
I doubt that an RSS feed is something I’ll be able to wedge into her Web habits, but I applaud efforts to give people access to feeds that aren’t pretending to be fair and balanced and complete, while keeping a thumb on the scale the whole time. I’ll be my mother’s age before too long (assuming I’m not shot by a jealous lover in the meantime), and it might be helpful to have a newsfeed that doesn’t require a lot of care and feeding in my dotage. If I set it up now, I might have a chance.
* Please pardon the diversion, but I flashed back to something Philip Greenspun wrote 20-some years ago:
Even if I were a good boy and called Mom every day, I still wouldn’t be able to overcome the dozens of impressions she gets from the FaceBorg every day.
OK, I gotta do this about once every few months or so and it pains me to no end to do so but the hyperventilating from the right over FB (but not Twitter, different animal) is way overblown. Yes Zuckerberg is a leftist douche. But so is damn near every internet soyboy billionaire. If you want to get pure about not letting your money go to these tools, well there’s a lot of them out there. And many are buried so deep in the cyber world you will never ferret all of them out. So if you are doing virtually anything, internet or otherwise, you are putting money into their pockets. If your concern is that they are watching what you do, well again, don’t use credit cards, don’t own a cell phone, don’t drive a car, don’t don’t don’t don’t…don’t post here because there’s no way to guarantee that every single browser is not reporting what you do back to some nefarious database. Sure, the more tech savvy can track such things and send up alarms about certain browsers. But the traffic still gets out on the internet at some point. Nothing is really safe outside of your own air-gapped computer when you get right down to it.
But most of all, if your problem with FB is that they ban conservative voices or that idiots argue politics and give their idiot opinions there and their idiocy bothers you, don’t be friends with such people. I have many conservative friends on FB. I only discuss politics or controversial issues on THEIR pages. And only if their pages are closed to their friends. Nothing controversial goes on a post with that little world icon unless it is non-controversial or very, very solidly based in objective fact. I have my feeds closed only to my friends and everything locked down as much as possible. I get plenty of conservative info without it blowing up in my domain of friends unless I let myself go there. Which I hardly ever do. I stick to family stuff, funny (mostly non-political) memes, banter/trash talk with college and high school buddies/sweeties, etc. I do have a young first cousin twice removed who has been banned for illegitimate reasons but I think most of that comes from some of her younger friends reporting on her. And she does post a good bit of pro-Trump political stuff (along with a good bit of animal-rights stuff…though she’s no vegan). And most other stuff from more liberal friends I scroll right past or put them on 30 day hide or, if leftist politics is all that they can yammer about…well they mostly dump me first anyway because of something I said in meat space.
Now Twitter on the other hand is a political cesspool. I only read other links to that crap and I refuse to get an account. Probably because I don’t have a desire to spew my thoughts (ok, this place and similar aside but such is a much more limited domain) into the ether. Plus if I got an account and got banned I would be less free to see that crap that I don’t really want to see anyway.
How can he tell which boulders are female?
They’re the ones with all the cats.
They’re the ones with the bad day-glo purple hair and crappy “Riot Grrl” tats.
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your server.
Sam, if we did that we’d hardly watch any TV at all