Friday Ephemera

No, I don’t, but oh God, do I know furbaby people! I have unworthy fantasies of asking loudly “So, Debbie, how’s that DOG that you OWN?”
They’re nice ladies, they really are, with either an excess of maternal instinct (the ones who had and raised actual kids) or no other outlet for maternal instinct (the childless ones). It’s just that there’s something creepy about a human being who appears genuinely unable to understand that a dog is not a child. It’s rough on the dog, too.
A shout-out to my neighbors on each side, who own dogs. The one to the west is an addled purebred, who can’t remember me from one day to the next, so I don’t have much fun with her, but the one to the east is a mutt who wags politely when he sees me but barks at Son. Son’s afraid of dogs so Mutt is probably picking up on that.

On a happier note, to the other lady readers (all 2 of you): do you play Neko Atsume (Kitty Collector)? Gentlemen, do any of your female friends or relatives play it? If so, and if anyone has caught the ninja, please ask her how she did it. He’s the only one I can’t catch.
“🎼Across my screens
With bits of Ritzy
I chase that damned elusive ninja cat I need🎼

I chase that damned elusive ninja cat I need
“They seek him here, they seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere….”

you are disrespecting your students and putting them in danger.
Our would-be elite – the ones spending $43,000 a year on tuition alone – seem unfit for purpose. Pretty much any purpose.

I can’t believe you poor SOBs on the other side of the pond have to subsidize this sort of idiocy just to watch the tube.

BBC BodyPositive is a space to share, celebrate and connect. A space that champions self-acceptance. A space where everyBODY is represented.

Yes, yes we do, and reopen institutions.

For a good 5 min. sneer?
Well worth the money.

It feeds on the teenage girl’s desire for drama and the teenage boy’s desire to get into the girls’ locker room, and on the teenage desire to belong to the in crowd. And I do think the demonic is involved; the ultimate goal is so obviously to destroy life and there’s that telltale unnatural appearance. A demon can never do a perfect impersonation of a human, there’s always something missing or distorted. Likewise, a normal drag queen can look a lot more feminine than you or I can; he may be eccentric, but his feminine impulses, however misplaced, are still human. Compare a normal drag queen to the freakish distortions inflicted upon today’s confused transexuals. And when the unfortunate wakes up one day to a moment of clarity, thinks “Oh, God, what have I done to myself?” and the only response is laughter from Hell…well, no wonder the suicide rate is so high.

Name me one person not in The Media who DOES obsess over it.
I grew up during the heyday of network television. There were basically three choices every half-hour or hour in the evening and invariably one or the other would be somewhat dominant in its time slot. As a result, we all shared the same “culture.” When we went to school or work the next day we talked about what Fonzi did on Happy Days, or the ridiculous thing Archie Bunker said on All in the Family. We repeated the best lines from Carol Burnett verbatim and we empathized with the Korean War medical staff on Mash. The thing is there were 30 or 40 million of us who had watched those shows together and shared an experience.
Television is so fractured today that “big numbers” for a show are now a fraction of what they used to be in a market that is 50 percent larger. Now there are dozens of choices and we might not all see them at the same time. We can’t even talk about them the next day because someone is saving them to binge watch at a later date and doesn’t want any spoilers. The result: television viewing has become even more personal and the criticism even more intense because it’s personal.
Unfortunately, viewers and critics alike still think we’re all sharing the same experience when we no longer are. (My wife and I just finished watching Breaking Bad beginning to end over three months for the first time.) So even though I saw the show, I did not see it in the same context or at the same time under the same conditions as those who saw it “live” first time around.
The result is we are becoming as culturally fractured as our television and I don’t think it’s necessarily for the better.
/rant

Well, he’s got his nerve! Name me one person not in The Media who DOES obsess over it.
We went to Croatia recently. I’ve long had an interest in medieval Croatian history and wanted to see some of the places in person.
Both Split and Dubrovnik were absolutely crawling with Game of Thrones fans. Having not seen the series (I don’t like to start watching series until I know that they end in a satisfactory manner) I wasn’t aware much of it is shot there. Once you got there, though, you couldn’t move for tours and advertising of it. So there’s quite a few people out there who appear to take the series rather seriously.
The recent Star Wars was also partly shot in Dubrovnik, which just made it worse.
It didn’t spoil my holiday, but it did mean we didn’t spend too much time in downtown Split or Dubrovnik.

“They said they intend to hire full-time employees and eventually transition from a limited liability company into a business cooperative with shared ownership, profits and votes on key decisions, including how much Burton and Hayes would be paid.”
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of talk,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Means TV began releasing preview videos last month and Burton and Hayes are aiming to raise $500,000 through the website by May 30. That amount could finance an initial year of programming…
I suppose, if by “year of programming” they mean a handful of homemade videos endless looped to whoever is in range of our wifi, given a single half hour episode on a real network is a couple million. “Lives of every day workers”, I can see it now…
     “All in the Collective” – The wacky antics of reactionary wrecker and saboteur factory boss Arkady Bunkernyy and his clashes with goodthinking downtrodden proletariat son-in-law Mikhail “Myasogolova” Stivicov.
     “Larisa и Sofia” – the trials and tribulations, laughs and loves, of two vodka plant workers as they struggle to rise and take control of the means of production.
I don’t know why I have a sense of deja vu with those, but going head to head with the Big Three and other major networks with their almost 24/7 pro-socialist programming is a bold strategy.

“I grew up with this idea that Democrats were morally right. And after 2016, I realized that they’re all full of (expletive) — it’s not true. After eight years of Obama, nothing happened, except things got worse,” Burton said.

I see Miss Burton is incapable of connecting dots.

“Bernie is definitely the person who radicalized us,” Burton said…

“By George, the doddering antediluvian millionaire with three houses is a mighty fine exemplar of socialism”, said no sane person ever.

votes on key decisions
Votes in a socialist system are handy for identifying who needs to report to the Gulag for re-education. Either that, or there’s only one option on the ballot and only one way to vote. And if it’s anything like a union vote, there’s no secret ballot.
Ordinary people can exercise their vote by not watching Means TV.