Friday Ephemera
It’s good to see a job done with care and attention to detail. || Stabilised hurdling. || Scenes of quivering beef. || The bulletproof bras of WWII. || Sleep well. || Well, you would, wouldn’t you? || It tugs on your arm if you walk too quickly. Other applications may exist. || Transplant drama with a hint of farce. || Niche market detected. || Instructions of note. || Her pies are more elaborate than yours. || The new universal excuse. || Er, can I come with you? || Modern gaffe. || Underwater transformers. || For fans of Star Trek: Voyager. (h/t, Damian) || Strange spheres detected. || Freezing the tide. || Football results of note. || And finally, I have to say, that’s the smallest one of those I’ve seen in quite some time.
Not helping with the dendrophobia.
Sorry, don’t know what happened to the link.
https://twitter.com/ddoniolvalcroze/status/1329243556385419265
“It’s good to see a job done with care and attention to detail. “
I’m reconsidering that offer to tarmac the drive after seeing that…
I have to say, that’s the smallest one of those I’ve seen in quite some time.
Can’t lie. Slightly turned on.
The bulletproof bras of WWII.
“The bras were manufactured by a company called Wilson Goggles …”
* snort *
Perfect fit.
For fans of Star Trek: Voyager.
Brilliant. 🙂
Morning, all.
Perfect fit.
Sometimes the stars just align.
Brilliant. 🙂
It does have a certain breezy charm.
Can’t lie. Slightly turned on.
Must be the scratching and the fire.
[ Opens new file. Types “suspected deviant.” Highlights in bold. ]
“Their feedback is more stunning, brave, and important than I could have ever imagined.”
Modern gaffe.
LOL *insecurities intensify*
Tap it to unwrap it
https://twitter.com/Paulf1979/status/1329429710925918212
“The bras were manufactured by a company called Wilson Goggles …”
Wilson Ogles maybe?
Let’s see if this fixes the italics.
Let’s see if this fixes the italics.
[ Slides discoloured, badly worn toothbrush along bar to Captain Nemo. ]
On the house.
On the house.
It looks as if you’ve been using it on the house. [Eyes with distaste the suspicious, discoloured stains on the bristles.]
[Eyes with distaste the suspicious, discoloured stains on the bristles.]
It’s surprising what you can find in the lost property box.
[ Rummages in box, holds up glass eye, lump of plasticine, tinned peas. ]
“Their feedback is more stunning, brave, and important than I could have ever imagined.”
Notice the repetition of certain phrases like “stunning and brave”? These leftists do not actually think but merely repeat cant. They may sound wise and thoughtful to other leftists (and to the ignorant and foolish) but to normal adults they sound like characters out of a story by George Orwell or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
[ Rummages in box, holds up glass eye, lump of plasticine, tinned peas. ]
I think a glass of tap water will be more than adequate, thank you.
Notice the repetition of certain phrases like “stunning and brave”?
Unless, I’ve misunderstood your comment, I think you may have been taken in by a case of Poe’s law. Candace Owens isn’t a leftist. She founded the Blexit movement.
Just came back from beautiful Las Vegas. A report:
1) Probably 70% black, 20% native spanish speakers, 10% all other racial/ethnic groups. Overall the crowd size was very, very small, so the racial disparity stood out. I don’t think more “minorities” are going to Vegas, but rather far more “majorities” are staying home. Great for my trip, but depressing when considering the ramifications.
2) The cognitive dissonance on masks and other protocols is palpable in Sin City. “Vegas Safe” messaging was everywhere, with the most ironic sign reading “Enjoy Las Vegas and Stay Healthy!”. Stay healthy! In a town built for over-consumption and bad decisions! It was rich even for 2020. Being dutifully instructed by casino staff that you must wear a mask unless you are actively drinking or smoking added to the surreal silliness.
3) I am all for drug legalization, but even I cringe at smelling pot smoke while walking literally everywhere. Between the virus-related restrictions and persistent weed smell Vegas has lost much of its appeal to normies.
4) There was noticeable effort to artificially increase the normally organic excitement and energy of the place, usually by playing obnoxious club music cranked to 11 everywhere and always. I remember Vegas having places and times of quiet splendor along with the rowdy atmospheres but even a 10am stroll down an empty corridor in the cavernous Mandalay Bay will include Shakira thumping through the speakers.
5) Vegas does a great job hiding unpleasantness but you quickly learn to spot which bar/restaurant is merely closed until nighttime or has been permanently shuttered. There were a LOT of very fine looking establishments closed. A good rule of thumb was the more interesting and interactive the place was, the higher the chance it was not available.
6) It is impossible to enjoy a game of craps when everyone is masked – or worse, when there are plexiglass dividers between players as well.
7) The Uber drivers were uniformly depressed and looking to get out of Vegas for better opportunities. The casino and hotel workers put on a good face (as is their job) but even they had the look of people marching to the guillotine. Everyone viscerally fears another lockdown and it’s apparent that the first one was extremely demoralizing.
If you want to enjoy the splendor of Vegas – if even in diminished form – now would be the time to go. Between the brutal lockdown summer, the utter lack of conventions that power the LV economy thru the winter, and a Branch Covidian government deciding Nevada covid policies, I truly believe Las Vegas will never return to glory. I’m glad I got to see it.
Oh,and 8) My wife misgendered someone for the first time, which wasn’t exactly on the “to-do” list, but hey. An obvious middle aged man wearing a unisex aquarium uniform…but with long hair and nails. In a perhaps unsurprising twist absolutely nothing happened and our cordial interaction completed without incident.
…I truly believe Las Vegas will never return to glory.
So it’ll be competing with Atlantic City, then.
It’s brilliant how the tow-truck driver keeps driving, leaving tens of thousands of dollars of damage in his wake.
Just keep on truckin’. Never apologize, never look back.
Reminds me of Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Heck, it reminds me of some political administrations back home.
Notice the repetition of certain phrases like “stunning and brave”?
The Youtube movie reviewer Critical Drink (recommended) has pretty much made this into a trope, whenever discussing the failings of a series or movie where the root cause is usually identity politics.
Along with “toxic masculinity” and “the patriarchy”, they’re pretty much meaningless terms at this point, since they mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean, and the type of people who use these terms generally aren’t usually constrained by things like physical facts.
Christian women are accused of “toxic masculinity” despite being female; African-American conservatives are guilty of “white privilege” despite being black; millionaire actresses with legions of fans are called “courageous” for saying things that millions of admirers agree with, etc.
“Stunning and brave” pretty much equates to “I agree with this”, nowadays. It’s rarely stunning, and never brave.
I remember Vegas having places and times of quiet splendor along with the rowdy atmospheres…
I’ve become a fan of the Golden Nugget in my dotage, for two main reasons. 1) The low-rent vibe on Fremont is much more comfortable than the Russian Oligarch vibe of places like the Wynn, and B) the Nugget has a swimming pool where you can listen to the sound of kids splashing around instead of the incessant C-major warbling of slot machines.
Honorable Mention goes to the “East of Fremont” area which sprung up when I wasn’t looking, and has some really cool spots to hang out when you need to get away from the gaming floor.
Really bummed to hear about the craps tables, though. That’s the only game I really enjoy, mostly because of the party atmosphere that develops at an active table.
Unless, I’ve misunderstood your comment, I think you may have been taken in by a case of Poe’s law. Candace Owens isn’t a leftist. She founded the Blexit movement.
Candace Owens is presumably using the phrase ironically, to mock the usual suspects.
FWIW: My MIL heard from her cousin in Germany. He’s a real go-getter and a legend in his village because he started a business and hired about a dozen-plus workers. Nice guy (I’ve met him a couple times when he visited).
Anywho, the news over there is that there’s a lot of grumbling among the people about the Wuhan Flu restrictions. While the media keeps up the drumbeat, people are unhappy with the rules and they absolutely fear what another lockdown will do to them.
Boom.
Transplant drama with a hint of farce.
This was not quite as bad as the US incident. My colleague was supposed to fly this flight, but we could not get into Belfast with the weather, so an aircraft already there got the job. https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/birmingham-airport-crash-transplant-patient-135903
Freezing the tide.
While I was born in PA, I mostly grew up in south FL. One Sunday morning in FL my dad was reading the news, i was maybe 8…he loved pulling my leg. He tells me about some guys walked across Lake Erie. I’m all, yeah…right…yeah…like Jesus is back, brought his brothers? Had me going for quite a while. I don’t think I figured it our until after brunch. God, how I miss that man.
First time typer jumping over from SDA.. Love the Freedom Day ephemera.
Here is one to be amazed at, The Over the Top Workshop:
https://youtu.be/aBNkCm2-jTY
– jump ahead to the 18:00 minute mark to be overwhelmed by the … overwhelminess.
Everyone on the scene was covered with small particles of dead whale, now remastered in 4K!
Disturbing and not in a good way.
This should make for an interesting future police procedural series.
Just came back from beautiful Las Vegas. A report:
Sounds grim, but consistent with other reports I’ve read.
My wife and I go to Vegas almost every year but we skipped it this year for obvious reasons. We went to Lake Tahoe instead in September and spent four days enveloped by forest fire smoke. (Those poor folks out there; they’re really having a tough year.)
We’re giving Vegas another go in June 2021. Hopefully I’ll have better news to report!
Thread of note.
Transplant drama with a hint of farce.
Honestly, I was impressed they were able to transplant a human heart into a helicopter in the first place. Medical science really is advancing!
“Thread of note.”
It’s not new. This is the foundational principle of the European Union – as I always say, just as individual liberty is the United States’, and world Communism was the USSR’s – and dates back to the very origins of the Paneuropa movement in the 1920s with the likes of Arthur Salter and Jean Monnet. (Who, in turn, were heavily influenced by Woodrow Wilson and the – surprise! – Progressives.)
So Western Europe may already be lost. The UK certainly revolted, but there’s scant hope for any real escape as long as our political class is still in thrall to the idea. But if the United States, founded, as I say, on its very opposite, falls prey, there seems little hope left at all.
(I noticed this week that SpaceX contracts contain a clause to the effect that signatories recognise that any future settlements founded by the company on Mars will not be bound by any law or jurisdiction on Earth. I sometimes wonder if Elon recognised what was happening a very long time ago and decided that the only solution was to build his own damned civilization, with blackjack and hookers.)
Still got bossa nova Voyager in my head.
Still got bossa nova Voyager in my head.
I can’t say Voyager was a great series – I can think of maybe half a dozen outstanding episodes, which isn’t a good batting average – but the theme music was fine. And it does lend itself to a bossa nova retooling.
any future settlements founded by the company on Mars will not be bound by any law or jurisdiction on Earth.
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I can think of maybe half a dozen outstanding episodes
My two favourite anecdotes about the series:
1) Adrienne Barbeau was rejected for the role of captain because the producers wanted a sexier, more feminine actress in the role. And so they went with…Kate Mulgrew.
2) Kate Mulgrew decided the only way to explain Janeway’s wildly inconsistent personality (and hairstyles) was that she was suffering from massive PTSD from losing half her crew on her first mission. And so she started playing her that way.
In general, I found the episodes focusing on Tuvok to be well worth the watch. They expanded the lore about Vulcan society and stayed away from the cliched “alien trying to understand what it means to be human” trope.
And so they went with…Kate Mulgrew.
I didn’t mind the actress. The writing, however…
Off the top of my head, Scorpion, Year of Hell, Timeless and Death Wish come to mind as solid episodes… after that, I start to struggle. I’m sure there must have been quite a few not-bad episodes, but I’m trying to think of ones I’d happily watch again.
It seems to me that for the most part, the writers shied from the implications of the show’s premise. Then, as you say, there was the morally erratic captain, on top of the usual, often-perverse moralising that can make Trek in general quite obnoxious at times. The number of dull characters was quite high too – Chakotay and Kes were particularly tedious. And the overuse of the Borg – to the point of introducing Borg kiddies – and their subsequent loss of status as a Big Bad – was pretty aggravating.
Year of Hell
That was originally supposed to be an entire season, by the way. The showrunners wanted a season of slow grinding down (and decimation!) of the crew, showing Janeway making more and more questionable moral choices with the theme of getting her crew home by any means necessary. Paramount squashed it hard, but you can see them trying to sneak it in here and there.
Ultimately a lot of the problems with Voyager came down the showrunners not wanting to do a Trek show; they wanted to do a darker show about time travel and terrible choices and so on. Paramount told them no in no uncertain terms; Trek was the cash cow, so make a Trek show.
Which they did for about a season and a half, and then when the network wasn;t really paying attention any more they did all that anyway. No show’s quality can survive a fundamental creative rift between the writers and the people paying them.
No show’s quality can survive a fundamental creative rift between the writers and the people paying them.
My lingering memory of Voyager is of the variable quality and lots of mild disappointment. In particular, I remember seeing Scorpion for the first time and thinking “Blimey, they’ve found another gear. There’s pacing and tension and an air of menace. It’s not clear what’s going to happen and is actually quite exciting.” Sadly, it was an outlier.
A friend of mine refers to it by the sobriquet Her Voyage. The show whipsaws between the Darker-and-Edgier plots Berman and Braga were trying to slip in when the network wasn’t looking, and the soapy, more whimsical plotlines aimed the increasing female demographic.
Paramount has tried pandering to just about every other demographic out there. Maybe they could interest the Hallmark Channel in Soap Trek.
The show whipsaws between the Darker-and-Edgier plots Berman and Braga were trying to slip in when the network wasn’t looking, and the soapy, more whimsical plotlines aimed the increasing female demographic.
Scientific Method was an interesting idea and the episode had some bizarre images, with the crew being subjected to medical experiments by cloaked aliens. And the Hirogen showed promise, then didn’t. But too often there was a woolliness that didn’t really sit with the premise. And the series’ recurring use of children was fairly tiresome. “Ooh, a Naomi Wildman episode. Woo-hooh.”
Ooh, a Naomi Wildman episode
Soap Trek.
I said it in jest, but I really do wonder if that variant would attract a big enough demographic to be self-supporting. Forget the deconstruction of Picard and the Captain Marvel-ing of Discovery; they’re critical and commercial failures.
I haven’t checked recently, but the Hallmark Channel used to get better ratings than the CW across the board. There’s a demographic out there paying for traditional soapy entertainment, and the female demographic within Trek fandom has been steadily increasing since TNG.
I envision a hospital ship – chicks like medical drama – with a female captain, obviously. Add in a ruggedly manly First Science Officer who’s a talented holosurgeon or some bollocks. Make him an alien, but not one of the ugly ones with tons of makeup. A couple of bumps on the forehead kind of thing. And make sure he has an exotic accent.
Every week there can be an A plot where the ship has to go to some trouble spot and the captain can furrow her brow and make weighty decisions about something, and a B plot about some patient suffering from Klingon Death Flu or something that’s actually a protracted metaphor for relationships. Make sure there’s at least six recurring/rotating doctors, nurses, xenobiologists, etc. so you can get the whole relationship web thing going. Lots of arguments about medical ethics and compassion. In turbolifts.
End of every episode the Captain and the First Science Officer recap the Moral of the Story in a lounge or ready room or something for the benefit of those who have not been paying attention, in a scene pregnant with sexual tension that can never be resolved because fraternization.
JAG crossed with Grey’s Anatomy, basically. I think I’m on to something here.