The Lockdown Diaries (6)

All peaceful and stuff.
I’m on the boring St. Paul side of the river, but I have a lot of friends and family in South Mpls, and my favorite pub is just half a mile east of the fires. It’s a shame for the decent folks trying to hang on — not only are they losing neighborhood businesses to looters and arsonists and idiotic lockdown policy, but they’re looking at sizeable tax increases to pay for lockdown-related revenue shortfalls on top of unending settlements for police brutality. I’d be surprised if the Floyd payout is under eight figures*, and I can only imagine what this latest fiasco will do to the City’s insurance rates. It’s getting to the point where I’m not sure Minneapolis will even be able to purchase insurance in the near future.
We’ve got plenty of problems here in the Saintly City, but I thank Heaven that we couldn’t afford a house in the old neighborhood back when we were newlyweds. Being a property owner or a taxpayer in Minnedishu is a sucker’s bet.
* The quick firing of the four officers involved has very little to do with outrage or embarrassment at City Hall, and *everything* to do with the City’s lawyers planning their defense for the impending lawsuit. They’re praying that a quick response will help limit their liability. I wouldn’t count on it, though.

Tomorrow’s ephemera has been compiled and should materialise just after midnight.
Also, heh.

Made me think of this Mike Myers’ classic with a young Kyle MacLachlan.
I have known Americans whose behavior that video well satirized: Fanatical devotion to their clan and antipathy toward Americans with other clan names. Campbells only buying Campbell’s soup, Stewarts only buying Stewart’s coffee, and so on. But the unintentionally funniest were the people with absolutely zero Scottish ancestry deciding to “become Scottish” and devoting endless hours to Scottish lore and the poetry of Robert Burns and indignantly confronting anyone who expressed doubts about the desirability of eating haggis.

I play a pretty good cover of Traffic’s John Barleycorn. Does that count?
Only if you demand that we listen and applaud.

Sure, WTP, you just have to refrain from demanding that everyone else be passionately interested and that nobody dislike haggis.
Does it help any if I’m 1/16th Irish? No?
See the rant in that Mike Myers sketch about how Ireland is separated from Scotland by ocean. 😀

Yeah, but I’m a pretty good swimmer, so…
Did you ever see the Google Maps April Fools Day prank, where travel between any location in America with any location in England included a middle step “swim 3500 miles” (New York to London)?

Probably the fine folks in Mountain View CA were worried I’d get kicked into a hole by some irritated local.
You’re safe as long as you don’t walk into a garden shop and ask for earth and water.

Ooh, a tit.
I see what you did there.
He’s just keeping abreast of things.

To make David even happier:
I am, as you know, easily amused.

Governor Squid,
Thanks, Steve. Pleased to say that I’m doing just fine. I’m just shy of a mile north of University & Hamline, which was the center of the trouble. A lot of the shops and restaurants that were looted are places I frequent, so I’m taking things a little personally.
It was surreal, in a way, because here on our block the kids were out playing in the yard and the parents were having a couple of beers, and it was a Norman Rockwell picture. The only clue that anything was amiss was the helicopters hovering a mile south of us. I’m very happy that the wind was out of the west yesterday, because the quantity of tear gas being used down there was just incredible.
Right now, I’m trying to compose myself enough to address the Mayor and my City Council member rationally. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to see yesterday’s activities portrayed as “protests that got out of control.” From the get-go, yesterday’s violence was nothing more than my dysfunctional neighbors taking advantage of momentary police weakness to lay their hands on all the cell phones, TVs, and liquor they could find. The only “protesting” that occurred happened after the police busted the initial looting attempt at Target. (Bear in mind that there’s a police precinct literally across the street from Target. The cops had all of 100 yards to cover when responding.)
The whole thing was just an attempt to “catch up” to their counterparts across the river. You literally heard people asking why Mpls “should have all the fun.” Pretending that these people have some sort of legitimate grievance is just insulting, for those of us who have to live here, and for the family of George Floyd, who keep pleading with people not to do this.
I was able to help my neighbor board up the windows on his bar, which is two doors down from the Furniture Barn they burned. The place is pretty much empty because of the lockdown, so even it they’d broken in they wouldn’t have found much to carry off. It didn’t come to that, so I guess I’ll take some small consolation.

The wokesters out here spent all day yesterday going on about how the construction of I-94 wiped out the Rondo neighborhood, and that’s why our blacks are justified in burning down University Avenue.
They overlook that University Avenue has always been a commercial/industrial corridor. The Target where it all started, and the Verizon store that was trashed soon after, are built on property that used to be the Brown & Bigelow building, where they printed calendars with Gil Elvgren’s pinups. Not sure how that warrants retribution for something that happened a half-mile and 70 years away.
I asked some wokesters to consider the possibility that the targeting of Target had less to do with grievances around Rondo, and more to do with the variety of electronics on the shelves. Evidently this is not an avenue of investigation they wish to pursue.

Silence is violence. Arson, on the other hand, is a well-justified reaction to centuries of oppression.
Orwell called it “doublethink.”

Those aren’t tits, they’re boobies.

David’s gonna get the spray bottle again.

What’s the problem David, you like tits but not boobies? How does that work?

[ Hamster urine production intensifies. ]
You need younger hamsters. This one’s got a prostate the size of an acorn.

You gave the hamster a prostate exam
Sometimes it gets really quiet around here.

[steps even farther away]
It was that or the job at the circumcision ward–40 skins a week and a chance to get a-head.

was that or the job at the circumcision ward–40 skins a week and a chance to get a-head.
A wallet? That’s all I have to show for 50 years of work?
Yes. But if you rub it, it expands into a briefcase.
…Sorry…my OCD again.

That’s like OCD but the letters are in alphabetical order like they should be.
Is anal-retentive supposed to have a hyphen? Discuss.

Heh. Stolen.
It’s only fair, as I stole it from somebody else.

To make David even happier:
Rather belated thought here, but I finally noticed that we’ve all been being quite unfair and utterly unbalanced and clearly need to make up for the very evident absence.
With that in mind, the following should make up for the lack.

And, of course,

Yer welcome!