Friday Ephemera

Oh, and for those keeping score at home on the Jussie Smollett hoax – today the grand jury returned 16 felony counts.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

If that guy had lived in Chicago longer than one day, he would have realized NOBODY would go out during a winter cold snap in a thin MAGA hat. It gets so cold there that single women wear real, substantial winter hats. He must be dumb as a rock.
I figured the DA would throw the book at him. They have real crime in Chicago on which the cops can spend their time and funding, and I’m sure one of the reasons the police chief was so upset is that the coppers would have known from the start it was a hoax.

The menace must be confronted:
Agreed! Stacks and stacks of unpaid “bills”. Not to mention the untold “quackery” and the damage it has done. It’s time we got our “ducks in a row” to deal with this “fowl” menace.

Bad puns are flying! DUCK!
Sign of overly urbanized population: A mother and ducklings waddled around the pond at my dad’s nursing home. One day the first curious duckling dived in. A nice lady “rescued” the little duck in fear he would drown.
Fortunately one of the nurses had a farm and took the duckling home with her, where he could carry on with his duckly activities without fear of rescue.

Bad puns? That’s a canard!

Thanks pst314, that’s likely the issue. I use the “view image” function in Firefox, then copy the .png or .jpg url into the html img function using the <> brackets. I just tried the view image function on Farnsworth’s image in Firefox and the image url opened up in a new window. At least it’s better than opening a whole other browser.

The menace must be confronted:
Ducks are evil. They cannot be trusted. The threat is real. Anatidaephobia is a western construct.

A ride through the West End of London 1959
I lived in London in 1959. How’d they remove the smog/fog from that video???
I remember my mother making my sister and me blow our noses when we all got home from the bus stop/tube station, to rid ourselves of the foul brown mucus in our nostrils.

Who are you going to believe, critics who are professional reviewers who review critically, or some bunch of rando schlubbs who actually saw the film ?
Vanity as lifestyle choice.
It’s hard to say much about a film I haven’t seen and don’t feel tempted to to see, thanks to the underwhelming trailers, the obnoxious posturing of Ms Larson, and the fact that I’m weary of ‘I can’t remember who I am’ storylines. That said, the mismatch of woke media gushing and general audience ratings is becoming a recurring theme.

Meanwhile, at the secret headquarters of The Party Of Science !™…

Farnsworth, I must differ. When I was 10, women’s suffrage was all I thought about. Which, looking back, was probably why I was always picked last in gym, as I’d get to meditating on women’s suffrage and forget to pay attention to where the ball was going. I dressed my Barbies in 1920’s clothing and endlessly re-enacted suffragette marches. I lost my last friend from talking about women’s suffrage, as she, being ten, thought it meant being in favor of women suffering. I got straight A’s in History, though.
So you see, the story of the ten-year-old lecturing Mom on suffragettes is not nearly as fishy as it sounds. I’m living proof.
Now, when the kid says, “SMH,” I agree THAT never happened, as I never said that either. Come to think of it, I haven’t said it in the ensuing 49 years, either.

Hee hee hee hee.

A ride through the West End of London 1959
Sorry, Fay, but that is what London was like in 1959, I lived half a mile from the West End.
Definite pollutant haze, but ok for my distance training runs. Seldom had to resort to the gym because of fog.
And it got steadily better, the greatish fog of 1962 was thick, but not a patch on 1959, which itself was merely a mini me of 1952.

Fred, have you read about the late 1940’s fog in Donora, Pennsylvania, in which there was so little oxygen, and so many toxic gases, in the air, that vehicles wouldn’t run, you couldn’t see, and 12 people died? Donora, a steel-mill town, sat in a natural bowl in hilly country. Normally the toxic gases were blown away by the wind anyway, but that particular Halloween there was a temperature inversion that clamped a lid on the bowl for a few days.
In the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, the U.S. gov’t ensured that such a tragedy would never re-occur by making sure that all well-paying industrial work was shipped safely far away to Asia.
The story of the fog can be found in The Medical Detectives, Vol II, by Berton Roueche, who, for about 30 years, wrote interesting medical stories for The New Yorker. The magazine used to sell copies of each individual article, too, but I don’t know if they still do.

Will feminist innovation never cease?

A feminist educator in the United Kingdom is making a point not to step aside when men walk in her direction, playing what she refers to as “patriarchy chicken.” […] “A few days ago, I was having a bad morning: my train tickets were expensive, my train was delayed, and my coffee was cold,” [Dr Charlotte] Riley wrote. “But I cheered myself up by playing a game on my commute. The game is called Patriarchy Chicken, and the rules are simple: do not move out of the way for men.” If that sounds like something that would be ungentlemanly conduct if perpetrated by a man, you would be correct in your assessment.

This, you’ll note, is a grown woman. A professional educator.
Via Instapundit.

That’ll be fun when some burly young fellow absorbed in a phone crashes into her. Me, I keep a sharp eye out after a few near-misses. I’d yell “ EXCUSE ME!” The kid would lift his head, blink, look puzzled, sometimes smile tentatively, then return to his phone and his course. It is not at all difficult to get such people to bump into you and I can’t imagine any magazine desperate enough to publish a how-to on same.
I’m beginning to think that stupidity is a requirement if you want to teach at a college.
Once, for a little variety, I barked. The exact same sequence played out. Lift, blink, smile, back to phone. Maybe it’s hardwired these days.
With the female the sequence is the same except a glare is a likely as a smile. ( The American girl these days is usually angry.) I haven’t tried barking at a female for fear she’d decide she’s my “pet parent.”

…making a point not to step aside…

“The point is that men have been socialised, for their entire lives, to take up space. Men who would never express these thoughts out loud have nevertheless been brought up to believe that their right to occupy space takes precedence over anyone else’s right to be there. They spread their legs on tubes and trains, they bellow across coffee shops and guffaw in pubs, and they never, ever give way.”

Oh noes, someone in a pub guffawing ? Why, I do declare, I would take the vapors.
They never, ever give way, except by her own admission, when they do (as the article points out), and then she steps back in front of them.

“Last week, on a busy train platform, a man was so confused by my trajectory towards him that he stopped dead in front of me, holding eye contact, and flapped his mouth like a fish,”

“Well this is a shocking discovery.
It’s also worth watching how monkeys – or maybe it’s chimps, or gorrillas or something; I don’t know, I’m not a zoologist – peel bananas. Not all, but a significant proportion of humans (myself included, a few years back) will experience a similar revelation.
“Maybe this is a useful clue:”
Wait… David’s blog engine lets you use both HTML and BBCode? Together, in the same comment? Heresy! Burn the blasphemer!

Here’s some NSFW cupcakes and ensuing struggle session
Stunning and brave.

So brave. She can get Englishmen to step into the gutter, because the ancestral English are mild-mannered, chivalrous to women, tolerant of eccentrics, kind to mentally ill people, and predisposed to avoid conflict and de-escalate tensions. None of these social conventions are obvious or natural, they’re rare in the world, and they’re fragile in England, especially if people think they can shit in the well and nothing bad is going to come of it. The new vibrant Englishmen have had no such traditions handed down to them, and I bet she doesn’t try that strutting and staring-down on them – much safer to humiliate men who have been conditioned to take humiliation from women.

Here’s some NSFW cupcakes and ensuing struggle session

I want to apologize to my trans sisters… I did not, however, think “but there are innumerable beautiful, unique and powerful women who don’t have a vagina. And I SHOULD have. And for that I am so so sorry. Thank you for righting my wrong.

That there is what you call some mighty fine restaurant grade groveling, yessire.
These people are pathetic.

Speaking of Women Sufferage and stuff, what did y’all do for International Women’s Day yesterday? Bake a cake or something?
I had a sammich.

@Pogonip
No, I had not heard of Donora.
I shall pick up what I can on the web, given that Amazon (UK) has only the first volume of the Roueche books on offer.
Mr Putin is married? I had no idea he was that way inclined.

Related to femocracy cupcakes….
Feminists: how dare society just judge women by their bodies, we are more than just objects!
Also feminists: happy IWD, here, have some giant floating breasts..

Dykes more likely to be fat shocker
https://theconversation.com/why-body-mass-index-and-sexual-orientation-study-raises-health-concerns-for-lesbian-and-gay-people-112096