Friday Ephemera

|| Assorted BBC sound effects. || “The masses will rally behind us.” Behind meaning beneath, of course. || Rebuttals of note. || Place your bets. (h/t, Perry) ||
Heh.

Know The Good News, Or Else.
Where that and this is one of these . . . .

Several kinds of watching the media.
A play in three acts.
The White Donkey.

The hazards of working in sports media . . . .

Hopkins: it smells like fava beans, with undertones of a nice Chianti.

Morning, all.
The little boats made it even more fabulous. 🙂
I’m not entirely sure that the overall effect is quite the one intended.

Acting in trying circumstances.
I thought he was going to pass out.

I thought he was going to pass out.
It did look touch-and-go for a moment. But points for effort, definitely.

That made my cock hurt 🙁
OVERSHARING ALERT! OVERSHARING ALERT! OVERSHARING ALER
[ Rummages for keys to deactivate oversharing klaxon. ]

[ Restores normal, non-emergency lighting. Wafts away clouds of choking refrigerant. ]
I managed to turn the cooling unit back on.

‘Always respect the media’
https://twitter.com/lporiginalg/status/1319314180462161920

You thrilled at Sharknado!, no be prepared for more excitement as Samuel L. Bronkowitz productions brings you Dolphicane!.
The thrill of kidney stones.
The jaggedness of a calcium oxalate stone (as typical of the one in the picture) contribute to hematuria (haematuria metric) but not pain. Urate stones are smooth, but cause as much pain, the pain comes from distension of the ureter either because of the size of the stone, back pressure as urine builds up between the renal pelvis and where a stone is causing obstruction, or both. A stone 5mm or less generally will pass spontaneously but can cause intermittent distension. There is rarely johnsonalgia from a stone making its way into the world as a stone too large to pass generally won’t make it past the internal urethral sphincter. /pedant

…the pain comes from distension of the ureter…
Yeah, you’re not helping.

And being our betters, not one of them thought to look up the secondary definition of the word.
They have no need to worry. Their buddies at the Ministry of TruthMerriam-Webster will “correct” things by removing that secondary definition.

Our betters.
I was going to post that as “Today’s word is”.
BTW, you know they’re feigning ignorance – they all know how to spell coyote correctly when they’re pretending they’ve never heard the word before.

Let’s focus our minds on the most important issues of the day. Today I was told by someone who works in day care that they were having trouble learning the new ‘ABC’ song tune. I did not know what the hell she was referring to, so she showed me this you tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I7v0HqejXE. Apparently the little flowers struggle with the ‘lmnop’ bit. Thank God someone has addressed this.
The other pressing issue is the racism and transphobia of The Wiggles, an Australian children’s band https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/the-wiggles-have-responded-to-backlash-over-their-pappadum-song/news-story/88ed23ce324e1f6d7188995d20e5e4d9
Just btb they were a favourite of my children when they were little and we saw them play live 3 times, the most I have ever seen one band play. Of course back then they were sexist as well, coz there were no girls in the band.

I believe the Wiggles hold the enviable distinction of being the first overseas musical act to perform in New York post 9/11. A hearty Good on yer Mates was and still is due for what at the time was a pretty brave step to take.

When you’ve got too much time on your hands under lockdown:

via Paul Newman

Your taxes at work.
https://order-order.com/2020/10/22/arts-council-defends-handing-215305-to-one-drag-performer/

Needless to say, the Guardian and Independent aren’t big fans.
Look who else isn’t: https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/1318843003503546368

I’m disappointed that they didn’t use the extra beats at the end to reintroduce “and per se and”.

WTF do we spend so much money and waste so much time on the education of children when 95% of what we try to cram into their heads is either useless or something they would/could/should figure out anyway?
Well, I don’t think it’s the concept as much as the content. I used to math tutor adults who wanted to finish their interrupted high school education, and I assure you many of them needed math skills that they absolutely had not been able to figure out on their own. On the other end of the spectrum, I used to know an elementary school teacher with two degrees who could not do sixth grade math – she used to text me from the store asking how to calculate 60% off of $24.99 because she couldn’t find the calculator on her phone.
You won’t get an argument from me that a one-size-fits-all education isn’t optimal, but I think there does exist a basic corpus of knowledge everyone should be provided through at least elementary school. And we’re not.

And being our betters, not one of them thought to look up the secondary definition of the word.
I know this has been a huge laugh and I, too, contributed a few guffaws and snickers.
But it also pisses me off. It reveals how these “open border” people have paid absolutely NO attention to what has been going on at our southern border. Indeed, they are militantly incurious to the human trafficking, murders of American ranchers, cartel murders, and the crimes that are committed by illegals – most of those criminal illegals having been deported numerous times.
Why let actual facts on the ground harsh their “we are all global citizens” mellow?

but I think there does exist a basic corpus of knowledge everyone should be provided through at least elementary school. And we’re not.
Definitely agree…per my Aunt who done been educated through the eighth grade. The kicker is the history/civics. That does require some maturity in thinking. But ultimately, you cannot force people to learn such things. Yet most people today don’t know what they need to know about such anyway and, as near as I can tell, have been ill educated anyway. But one thing I do believe we really, really need to cut down on is the fiction. A good chunk that I had constantly shoved in my face/down my throat was worthless BS. Most of the great works that I got much out of were works I read/discovered on my own. On the Road, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, 1984, Animal Farm, The Iliad, Kafka, Kipling, Konrad, Camus, most of Twain, etc.

Yes, there are, and you just proved it.

“Say, if any of all y’all over in Blighty want some breathing room, real estate in the US&A is real cheap, there are only about 100 million of us left.”
Yet another statement by a Democrat candidate that, were she a Republican, would make her a laughing-stock all over the world.
I’m serious. Yes, the news media are biased. But most people don’t really watch the news. Especially not about stuff that doesn’t directly concern them. So what people outside the US see about American politics is comedy shows… “Ho, ho, Dan Quayle can’t spell ‘potato’. What a dope!” “Sara Palin thinks she can see Russia from her house! What an idiot!” “Donald Trump grabs women by the p***y. What a sleazeball!”
And what they never hear is, “Ha, ha, Barack Obama says there are 57 states! What a doofus!”, “Joe Biden gropes young girls. What a creep!”, or “Kamala Harris thinks two thirds of the American population have died from the Chinese plague! What a fool!”
That’s the bias that’s the problem.

That’s the bias that’s the problem.
I’ll take “Things I’ve been saying for 40 years” for $100, Alex.

I believe that is what is referred to as “a culture”.
‘Ere you are: The Big Fat Northern Opera Company sings Nest In’t Dormer and other well known classics.

We haven’t had interpretive dance around here for a bit, an actress no one has ever heard of corrects this oversight for us.

An inexcusable oversight on my part.
Now, now, none of that, completely understandable what with all the lockdowns and rozzers chasing mean tweets and random interweb posts that your access to high quality cringe and WokeWTF might be limited, and indeed, it is incumbent upon all of us here to strive constantly to cover down and help maintain the standards that make this the go-to Site of Excellence for this sort of thing.

Interpretive dance is hell fun
Ah, good times. Mr Devine really shot down any suspicions of him being at all entitled or obnoxiously self-flattering.

A friend passed on this article from the linguist John McWhorter on what the likes of Rachel Dolezal and Jessica “La Bombalera” Krug might mean for the rest of us.
Ah, but given the buzzword of the moment, the operational mindset covers just about anything.

To adopt preppyness can confer a sense of importance more generally. No person in academia or the media can miss that the educated class finds almost anything more interesting/dynamic/challenging/worth-a-look when a preppy person does it. We are taught lately that academia is shot through with taste, style, and a clue, yet no scholarly work is dismissed because someone preppy wrote it. Indeed, scholarship by a preppy person is more likely to be elevated over scholarship by an adult person on the same topic. Krug’s book would likely have gotten much less attention if an adult person had written it. Certainly, she felt more interesting as a badly costumed, pretentious git fighting for “her” people than she would have as a adult professor toiling in obscurity.

The success of the label being marketed is going to depend on the audience, but from there, the label is irrelevant.

Your response neither makes sense nor says anything of relevance to the content of McWhorter’s article.
Well, you do have to read the response—and yes, it does tie into the article.

Oh look, enjoying autumn is racist.
Because the joyless, pretentious bitching must never, ever end.

Because the joyless, pretentious bitching must never, ever end.
Honest to God, I’ve never met a Happy Leftist. They nurture and cultivate their resentment like a hothouse orchid.
And the enemy of resentment is gratitude. Leftists sneer at Christmas, they loathe Thanksgiving.

Enjoying spring, summer, or winter is also racist. As is disliking spring, summer, fall, or winter.

people well into their thirties and forties,
Or fifties, sixties, seventies, and though I cannot claim firsthand knowledge, see many of the well known leftists in their eighties.

The adolescent tone, and the psychology it implies
Like I keep saying, from extreme Complex PTSD to the mere emotional dysregulation common to anyone who spends too much time on social media, the defining characteristic of our society in 2020 is a failure to grow the hell up.
How we’ve reached this state of affairs is left as an exercise for the reader.

Oh look, enjoying autumn is racist.
I loved this response from Richard O’Callighan in the referenced Twitter thread:
Dare I say there’s an air of colonialism about her attitude – she’s moved into the countryside, is appalled by the natives, and has resolved to “civilise” them.

so quick to abdicate responsibility for their own feelings.
As I like to think this blog has shown, the left does seem to attract a very high concentration of neurotic narcissists.

The very concept of Britishness is wrapped up in images of the fields of England – and I do not represent that concept
She intends to destroy the village to save it, and to have fun and settle scores while she’s doing the destroying. She doesn’t want a rural English community, she wants a lower-density version of Notting Hill, or something like the “quintessential British private school in the countryside” she went to (all that horse riding and nature rambling gives her the credentials to speak on rural affairs) whose progressive authorities can scold the children for not including a newcomer in their friendship circles.
If your ancestors didn’t come from a rural community, if you can’t be placed in the giant interlocking family tree that people carry around in their heads, then you have to accept being a blow-in. If you’re a non-white blow-in a white rural community, the intense interest in who you are and who your people are will take a broad-grained form – these yokels might even assume from your race what your ancestry isn’t, so they’ll skip asking you if you’re so-and-so’s cousin from the city or if you’re any relation to the Smiths from up the hill, they’ll just ask you where you’re really from.
This makes outsiders feel like outsiders, it makes them feel they can’t just walk into some place and overturn its cultural norms to suit themselves. It’s heresy in a world where the Uninvited Guest is at the top of the moral hierarchy and anyone who feels that their hospitality is abused by the Uninvited Guest is at the bottom of the moral hierarchy.
… a cultural exodus from the cities … new cultural heritage … fastest-growing demographic … new identity for country living that is not associated with old stereotypes.
Rural communities in historically white nations are places for white people to reconnect with their cultural heritage, and reminders that nation states too used to be based on common ancestry and cultural inheritance, that it was the exception not the norm to have even a grandparent of a different nationality. So yes, the agenda requires those communities to be overwhelmed and erased.