The Lockdown Diaries (5)

a wondrous feat involving carrier bags.
LOL Five stars for the ending.

You can’t stop progress.
https://youtu.be/NAQjrTEd_Pc

I am never showing that to my wife.
While rummaging under the sink recently, I had to move the obligatory carrier bag full of other carrier bags. I discovered that some of the carrier bags within the outer carrier bag also had carrier bags inside of them. And a couple of those had carrier bags inside of them too.
It’s not a streamlined storage system, it has to be said.

I discovered that some of the carrier bags within the outer carrier bag also had carrier bags inside of them. And a couple of those had carrier bags inside of them too.
Low cost remake of Inception?

Thanks, Jonathan. Will browse.

I think it qualifies as a project for the weekend.
You misspelled “project for a sick mind”.
Much easier is to take one bag, use it to line one of the tube good booze comes in (I realize finding one might be a problem around here), cram the others in that. You get towards the bottom, just pull the liner bag up and Robert is your father’s brother, the ones at the bottom come out, plus you have the bottle of good booze.

The reason I will never show it to my wife is that I am certain that it would somehow, and rapidly, mutate into my responsibility.
[ Taps forehead. ]
Wise words.

The reason I will never show it to my wife is that I am certain that it would somehow, and rapidly, mutate into my responsibility.
Granting, actually, for anyone out of range ot Tesco, that’s not an issue:
Yes, dear, as soon as you get us a steady supply of exactly those shopping bags, so that exactly those folding instructions can be followed., Etc.

“clarification of note”
That reminds me of the time my TV told me the next show was “Football Rivalries: Arse”.
Is The History Guy of any interest, David, or already known? Also this dude, if astronomy (and occasional forays into, usually, related matters) is your thing.

Previously, in sports . . .

…as soon as you get us a steady supply of exactly those shopping bags…
Too true, because as we all know, at least of those of us who live in civilized states that allow them, it it totally impossible to fold bog standard t-shirt bags into triangles.

Hide yo kids, hide yo wife
The compilation.

Actually, I am not one to talk about toughening up. I find those videos of Biden impossible to watch. They’re creepy as all hell. I wouldn’t leave him alone with the houseplants, never mind children.

We need to bring back dueling in the Senate.

Just me and the boys out taking our daily exercise.
Not too many options in a situation like that. “No, no, don’t rush on my account, chaps. Take your time.”

You can’t stop progress.
At the 1:59 minute mark of that video we find “Fat Chat” with that “beacon of fat acceptance everywhere, Sophie Hagen.
Why do so many of these things seem like comedy sketches from the 70s?

David finally cracks after 7 weeks in lockdown
Heh. I think I’ve been to that nightclub.

that is a metro station in Kiev…
Nicely done Farnsworth; now we’re going to have to move the location of the Guild of Evil™ HQ.

There have been one or two.
Go to a party in Luton and wind up in Kiev, it’s like they say, anybody who remembers having had a good time in the ’60s and ’70s really didn’t.

Believe me, you don’t want to be sitting here after Farnsworth has used the loo.
You are one to talk after what your last trip did to the sewers.

Yeah. But mine doesn’t stink.
Tell that to the buzzards who fell off the manure wagons 1000 yards away.
Anosmia is one of the most dangerous symptoms of WuPing Cough – just sayin’…

Make Europe pay for this damn virus, I say! Those evil bastards!
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2020/05/11/ccp-approved-messaging-gov-andrew-cuomo-has-a-new-name-for-covid-19-a-fresh-dem-media-talking-point-is-born/

Try History Matters.
He originally did ten minuters, but had to pare back to avoid the demonetisation dance.

If there are any fans of the Bard here, the Stratford Festival from my neck-of-the-woods, has been free streaming filmed versions of some its better productions. They’ve been releasing a different play every week. So far they’ve released King Lear, Coriolanus, and the Scottish play. They all have been very good, but King Lear was especially well done. King Lear ends in four days. The play’s the thing!
If you’re interested here’s the url: https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/AtHome/FreeFilms?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=B-LastChancetowatchKLR&utm_content=version_A

Thank you Steve E.!

David, you may find your tip jar a little heavier to lift this morning.
Bless you, madam. May your hands remain soft and stroke-worthy despite frequent washing. Much more of this and I may run away with you. We’ll make it work somehow.
this mad, wonderful, entertaining and thoroughly enthralling (well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration) blog.
No exaggeration at all. Sounds about right.
What?

Nikw211
I think that, if I were one of these front-line health workers who has to work 14 hour shifts seven days a week and can hardly stand for exhaustion, I’d wonder why I was being made to work so hard when so many of my colleagues had ample leisure time.
That’s purely hypothetical by the way. Here in the UK it’s illegal to say anything even mildly critical of doctors and nurses. Not that I’d want to because they’re all so splendid.

and another thanks to Steve E!

This just in:
*eye roll* What does that even mean?

I’m at a loss to find the link, but I vaguely recall some mad genius recreating the seventy gazillion various pride flags so that the stripes were proportional to population. They were all, of course, half-pink and half-blue, with very modest little stripes in the middle. Really brought home the absurdity of why seventy gazillion flags were necessary to subdivide an already small sub-group.
Goes without saying that the mad genius was torn limb-from-limb by the ravening horde. Little wonder I can’t find reference to it now — such things are thoroughly memory-holed as a matter of policy.

I suppose that we white people simply aren’t carrying out enough hate crimes…

Georgia investigators have charged Rashawn Smith with making a terroristic threat. Smith is accused of being the person behind a hoax Facebook account of a racist white Trump supporter who promised to kill pro-Ahmaud Abery protesters in a mass shooting.

via Andy Ngô

Another one for the file marked progressive incentives.

Much more of this and I may run away with you.
Giggles girlishly as she stumbles to the fainting couch.

Sounds a lot like a huge payout without formal admission of guilt
Unfortunately, likely not. According to one of the articles, a NLRB adjudicator ruled that his “use of biological stereotypes” in the email justified his firing.

Giggles girlishly as she stumbles to the fainting couch.
[ Admires self in mirror, licks own eyebrows. ]

It’s extremely hard to find one for less than, frankly, silly money that isn’t made in China.
Exactly. Read this excuse making…specifically:

On China
We also don’t want to come across as anti-China here.
Developing countries, like China, have a major problem called the “middle income gap” where manufacturing moves to their country because of low employment costs. Good factory job cause tons of people to move from rural to urban areas where factories are located. These people develop manufacturing skills; wages rise as people gain more skills. As a higher percentage of their country gets a traditional “job” instead of working on a farm, wages rise again as the supply of unemployed workers dwindles. Eventually, wages rise to a point where the factories leave and go to another less-developed country.
This is why a program like “Made in China 2025” exists.
China has a right to subsidize whatever industries they choose, but if you are looking for the number one reason why nearly all electronic manufacturing has left the United States, the answer is the differing levels of subsidies.
The US Government puts a 10% Tariff on Many Chinese Goods
In 2018, the United States put a 10% tariff on tons of electronics equipment manufactured in China and threatened to increase that tariff to 25%.
We’re not a political company, but this was a somewhat sloppy attempt to reverse the effect of the “Made in China 2025” policy, at least for the surveillance camera industry. For example, this tariff covers cameras but not recorders or brackets. Some companies have alleged that security camera systems, if imported together as a bundle, are not covered. (SCW disagrees with this view and pays tariffs on our imported cameras.) Some companies have alleged that if you import each item separately (camera, recorder, and hard drive), and then put them all in box together here in the USA, then you can say “USA manufactured,” and escape the tariff. (SCW also disagrees with this view.)

RTWT. It gets worse:
https://www.getscw.com/knowledge-base/usa-and-chinese-manufacturing/

[San Francisco] ranks first in the nation in theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and other property crime. On average, about 60 cars get broken into each day. Diseases arising from poor sanitation—typhoid, typhus, hepatitis A—are reappearing at an alarming rate. Fentanyl goes for about $20 a pill on Market Street, and each year the city hands out 4.5 million needles, which you can find used and tossed out like cigarette butts in parks and around bus stops. The city’s department of public works deploys faeces cleaners daily—a “poop patrol” to wash the filth from the sidewalks.
This is just a brief summary of the lack of hygiene and common decency. A reasonable person might declare an emergency, but in her first official act, [mayor, London] Breed swore in Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s new district attorney, before a packed house at the Herbst Theatre. “Chesa, you have undertaken a remarkable challenge today,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a congratulatory video message. “I hope you reflect as a great beacon to many.” Boudin’s résumé boasts of a stint working directly for the late dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who turned a once-rich nation back to the dark ages. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin promised during his campaign. He must have witnessed the success of that policy in Caracas, which was voted the world’s most dangerous city in 2018.

Michael Gibson, here.

“We need unity.”
Against those divisive white devils.

“White people love playing divide and rule”
The quality of the feed may be exaggerating the effect slightly, but Ms Abbott – who once blamed capitalism for making her fat – seems to be speaking as if she were neurologically impaired or pontificating in her sleep. Which may explain why she routinely appears unaware of what it is she’s saying.

‘No good deed goes Unpunished‘ part ∞.
via Orwell & Goode

Today’s word is skank.

Nooooooo!
That Nigerian Prince who emailed me really did have the cash!

Can’t imagine why COVID19 has spread so widely in NYC.
Ain’t people lovely.

In other garbage-people-are-garbage news.
Who hasn’t sent their kid to school with a barley sandwich? What?

In other garbage-people-are-garbage news.

[The supermarket worker] said: “One guy came up with three cases of Carling [lager], which were on offer for £21, no food or anything, and I refused the voucher.
“He said to me, ‘I spend enough on them t***ing kids as it is’.

, this came to mind

His latest is here. Do pop over and say hello.

I take it that’s a different Peter Risdon now?

I take it that’s a different Peter Risdon now?
Yes. His old blog posts can be read via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It appears that his last post was some time in 2017, after which the URL was hijacked by a succession of unethical or even fraudulent businesses.
Sadly, on January 22, 2017 he reported that he had liver cancer, which I suspect is the reason for the disappearance of his blog:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170324033210/https://peterrisdon.com/blog/
An obituary:
http://simplyjews.blogspot.com/2017/07/peter-risdon-rip.html

And just then my comment miraculously appears.

he chap who wrote this belter of a piece
Although I demur at his conclusion, that is a striking piece that, like the author, I’d never come across before – so that is much appreciated.
Thinking of Polly Toynbee and her ilk put me in mind of this (my italics):

Elizabeth Banks was inspired to undertake her 1892 investigation into service to find an answer to the question that vexed the English middle classes: why was it that many girls would do almost anything, even if it meant living off ‘porridge in the morning and watercress in the evening with no midday meal’, rather than undertake the work of cleaning someone else’s home? She visited a young seamstress living in terrible conditions – ‘the unwomanly rags, the crust of bread, the straw and the broken chair’ – in a lodging-house in Camberwell on eighteen pence a week. When the dismayed Elizabeth offered to find her a job as a housemaid, ‘with a nice clean bedroom, plenty to eat, print dresses in the morning, black stuff in the afternoon, with white caps and aprons and collars and cuffs’, she was astounded by the girl’s outrage at the suggestion. ‘”Did you come only to insult me?” she demanded, stamping her feet. “I go out to service! I wear caps and aprons, those badges of slavery! No, thank you, I prefer to keep my liberty and be independent.“‘ [ … ] The most important advantage of factory life was freedom. Factory girls did not have to endure the daily petty humiliations of being at the beck and call of a condescending mistress; of having no set hours to call their own, of having pitifully few opportunities to meet men (or even other women).

– Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs view of twentieth-century Britain (ff. 83)

It’s quite eye-opening that, for many reasons, but not least the idea that working in a late 19th- or early 20th-century factory could not only be viewed as personally liberating, but actually seen as far preferable for having to work for the likes of Polly Toynbee’s ancestors.
It’s also notable for the way Banks, apparently a Toynbee-like figure of her own time, seems unable to comprehend why the young seamstress would choose of her own volition to reject the benefits on offer.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Toynbee made her name with A Working Life, a written account of her experiences, on safari as it were, in a series of low-paid manual jobs at the close of the 1960s.
In that book, Toynbee remarks (my italics):

The nobility of work is a bizarre concept. In all the jobs I saw and did, in almost all of the jobs for the working classes, I found little that wasn’t stultifying and degrading to any normal human intelligence.

Seen in the context of Banks’s encounter with the young seamstress of Camberwell and the latter’s insistence that she prefer to be free and independent, Toynbee’s use of “any normal human intelligence” is … quite something.

Again, as with Toynbee, there’s a practised denial of agency, of basic responsibility. And so, the glaringly obvious inference – that the primary difference in terms of residential neighbourhoods and littering is one of attitude and behaviour, of being, dare I say it, a little bit bourgeois – simply isn’t mentioned. And indeed, is tip-toed around in a farcical manner. By people who want us to know how much cleverer than us they are.