Friday Ephemera

“We always point out potential band names so I gotta share what I find the most excellent of NHL team names.”
I’ve always thought that an ice hockey team from Devon would really have to be called the Plymouth Fury.
Greetings from free Europe, by the way.

Hi BrassG,
My dad always refused to vote because he didn’t want to do jury duty (in our jurisdiction names of prospective jurors are pulled from voter-registration lists). We kept telling him, “Vote if you want to! You were a drill sergeant! A defense lawyer would commit hara-kiri before he’d let you on a jury!”
Spellcheck wanted to change “drill sergeant” to “Druid.” I am now picturing what a Druid drill sergeant might be like. “You call THAT a banishing ritual, you maggot? That wouldn’t banish a flea! And did you put those ceremonial robes on in the dark? And where’d you get that wand, Dollar General? You are a disgrace to this man’s Druidry!” Rant rant rant etc etc etc.

It’s okay, PST. We have plenty of pickled ‘eggs.’

Congratulations to you lot over there in Blighty on your freedom, assuming you still have electricity, internet, and haven’t already had to resort to cannabalism as predicted.

Congratulations to you lot over there in Blighty on your freedom
Saw this on Ace. That they filmed this. SMDH. Hope y’all’s feelz ain’t too hurt.
https://youtu.be/egYdBDmA1ks

Is this a threat?

I think it would depend on the case, but in general, no, it has been shown eye witnesses are not all that reliable.
I once had to write up the case of a stark naked male sailor threatening a female Customs officer with a large spike. You’d think that would be pretty memorable. Four Customs officers were witnesses and they all immediately afterwards went and wrote up notes about what they saw.
I could not get the four stories to tally up on the details, no matter how hard I tried. At least one of them had clearly got the sequence of events out of order, and the direction the sailor went after the event also varied considerably.
If professionals taking notes about a highly memorable event cannot be reliable, there’s no chance that random people remember months later what actually happened.

and forensics to match injuries to the weapon
I used to be a chemical engineer. Increasingly, we’re discovering that forensics is about as accurate as eyewitness testimony. Remember Marg Helgenberger’s character from the original CSI? The blood spatter expert? Turns out that blood spatter (along with hair and fibre analysis, profiling, and a distressing amount of fingerprint analysis) is basically made up and unreliable.

Well, somebody is having a hissy fit.
It seems both factually inaccurate and intentionally diminishing. One might say spiteful. But it’s revealing in ways that presumably weren’t intended, not least regarding the motives of Mr Kumar and his peers, and the cowed and demoralised mentality they wish to propagate – say, among children. Also, I quite like some of the replies, which list the many, many ways in which this small, damp island invented the modern world.

Mr Kumar’s comedy chops have been noted previously.

intentionally diminishing
A felicitous description.
It appears to be the default attitude of Mr Khan and most of the modern Left in Britain.
I am not uncritical of much of Britain’s historical legacy, being from the boggy island to your west.
However the reduction of Britain’s history to its worst traits and deeds and the denigration of most of its achievements and qualities is tiresome, corrosive and intentionally divisive

It appears to be the default attitude of Mr Khan and most of the modern Left in Britain.
Still, it’s always gratifying to see a BBC employee inadvertently making a case for the scrapping of the license fee.

“Malformed link. No hump fat for you!”
Weird. How’d that happen? I always check them to be doubly sure. (Hmm. I’ve been using Opera and its built-in VPN for the past few days. The way the link’s been mangled, I wonder…)
“Well, somebody is having a hissy fit.”
Sheesh. They’ll be telling us coffee isn’t Italian next.

So what’s next? Telling us that curried chicken isn’t from Southall?
Oh the humanity…

Well, somebody is having a hissy fit.
Somewhat related.

Clearly so much of the remain crowd’s hatred for Brexit is based on their disdain for the lower classes. But I keep trying to remind myself that it is lazy simply to dismiss their opposition as an expression of their snobbery and entitlement, and that it is an unfair generalisation. Then I come across articles like this
Short version: All these ghastly people drinking beer and using language. And their celebrities are so D-list… at least we had Hugh Grant and Tony Blair.

Then I come across articles like this
Between Brexit and Trump, they just can’t help but to publicly bare their fangs and expose exactly what they have always thought of most of their ostensible “fellow citizens”

Of course, what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants. [snip]
We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by.

IOW, all the people who voted for Brexit, or Trump, are to this representative of our betters, “nobody”. And if he had his way, he would make it literal. Kulaks got no reason to live.
My advice to my fellow Deplorables across the Atlantic – enjoy the brief victory but don’t get cocky.

its prize is a freedom nobody else wants.
For those who missed it.

“…its prize is a freedom nobody else wants.
We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by.”
Norway’s only voted against joining twice. As have the Swiss (technically, the Swiss being the Swiss, the first one was a rereferendum – or “federal popular initiative” – on whether they should hold a referendum). Denmark and Greenland consider the latter never to have joined, but to save face the EU claims it left in 1981.
And that’s before we even think about Hungary and Poland, officially reprimanded by the EU for daring to make their own laws; Ireland, whose economy was run by unelected EU appointees for three years, and whose electorate was told to go away and vote again after defying the EU… twice; France, whose vote against the Constitution was simply ignored; The Netherlands, ditto; Italy, whose government was selected by the EU after the electorate voted for the wrong people; Greece… need I say more about Greece?; The European Parliament itself, whose rejection of the Tobacco Products Directive was ignored by the Commission in 2016, just weeks before our referendum…
“Urging other countries to follow Britain’s example, to leave the EU, to become ‘free nation states, trading, co-operating’. Go back to the old days, in other words, and try to ignore that the old days are absolutely drenched in blood. That preventing the old days ever coming back is the precise reason the EU came into being.”
The EU came into being in 1992. He’s talking about the 1980s. I’m not sure he knows that he’s talking about the 1980s – Europhiles are depressingly ignorant of the institution they claim to love so dearly – but he is.
“Short version: All these ghastly people drinking beer and using language. And their celebrities are so D-list… at least we had Hugh Grant and Tony Blair.”
Yeah. That’s why you lost.

A . . . command to war against unbelievers until they submit in willing humiliation is a product of a certain sort of mental disease, a corrupt and dishonest way of looking at the world. It is a derangement that is by no means exclusive to just Islam.
Quite.
As an example of exactly the same sort of mindset, in one corner of the US, there is Washington state Representative Matt Shea
Consider as another and basically identical example of faith based . . war against unbelievers until they submit in willing humiliation . . . , a “biblical basis for war” document that also calls for killing non-Christian men who refuse to follow fundamentalist biblical law.
There are indeed the genuinely personally religious, but neither of these are in the least bit religious.
Rather instead, all they are is a variety of faith based Dungeons And Deacons game, calling for the eradication of any and all who don’t play the preferred D&D ruleset which is, of course, vehemently claimed as being an actual religious practice instead of mere faith and posturing.

(Let’s see how that link turns out.)
Landlord, a jar of hump fat for the gentleman!

This aged well.

Here you go, Sam. Via Ace…
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/06/calm-down-trump-wont-be-president-and-britain-wont-leave-eu

Once again CNN zeroes in on the hard hitting and important questions.
Meanwhile…

It’s still 2016 apparently
@jtLOL
This week on Mythbusters: Can you really give yourself a stroke?

For Lady Cutekitten, once she’s exhausted the iPhone cat-collecting game; https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/228504/cat-lady
(Played at last game night. Fun little party game. Buy the deluxe edition, it comes with a kit to make your own cat cards)