Friday Ephemera
Miracle breakthrough in rapid beer consumption. || Modern romance. (h/t, Holborn) || You never know. || Get woke, get robbed, repent at leisure. || It’s a bookmark, it’s a reading lamp. || A little nibble. || Heavenly beings. || Today’s word is Speibecken. || Behold, the basic social bonding unit of tomorrow. || “Can men control their balls?” || Beats walking. || A gift to remember. || Portuguese star fort. || “First and foremost.” || Faulty cat. || Acapella idents. || Treacherous human detected. || The thrill of tadpole migration. || “Essential seating only.” || Snowfall in Times Square, an ambient video. || Wall damage detected. || And finally, in D-list celebrity news, I believe this is called oversharing.
Miracle breakthrough in rapid beer consumption
Reminds me of my year at Glasgow Uni, in which my fellow A/V clubbers, said I must drink a “yard of ale”.
Which I did. I vaguely remember a very, very long glass or goblet.
It’s all a bit fuzzy . . .
It was the 80’s–if you remember it, you weren’t really there, man.
Covid-19: Totally Fixed Where We Are.
“Hopefully we’re going to turn a corner soon.”
Our betters in Congress, raising pettiness to an art form.
Acapella idents
For people d’un certain age, you will never, never be able to hear the 20th Century Fox theme without immediately expecting to hear this.
Speibecken
The Officers’ Mess toilets at RAF Gutersloh, which was a pre-war Luftwaffe base, were adequately equipped with these conveniences.
raising pettiness to an art form
Amateurs.
Wall damage detected.
So sorry the wall was damaged.
Wall damage detected.
Argghh.
I messed up the italics.
Argghh! Argghhhh!!!
I will stop now.
Typical. David goes to bed and you lot trash the place.
Texas right now:
You first, you deranged weasel: Oakland CA Mayor Urges Residents to Take in Homeless: ‘Give Up That Airbnb’
Pooklord: “Argghh. I messed up the italics.”
You’re showing off! Stop it!
Homeless in California [and in other places]: when governments realised that they could [and should close institutions that were generally terrible places] they didn’t provide alternative residential, outreach and community-based services for many of those who were milder in presentation, either in developmental delay and/or psychiatric presentation, but who still needed considerable support. Essentially governments took the money they saved, did very little and used the excuse of ‘freedom of choice’ of the individual to justify doing SFA. Now the Mayoress wants private citizens to provide accommodation to people who are likely very damaged and sometimes dangerous. To me that’s a complete abrogation of the responsibility of the State.
@NTSOG: sounds familar. We have exactly the same situation over here.
You’re showing off! Stop it!
[ Rights bar stools, glares at Pooklord. ]
Morning, all.
[ Notes suspicious atmosphere, oddly arranged bar stools. ]
“First and foremost.”
Priorities. *eyeroll*
Attention, all he-persons.
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
Today’s words are daddy issues.
She has pretty much the full set. The pronouns; the septum piercings; the unattractive tattoos growing in number; the ostentatiously ugly hair and its endless colour changes; the retro-ironic Far Side glasses; the mismatch of Twitter avatar and actual appearance…
Sometimes, it’s almost too on-the-nose.
raising pettiness to an art form
If Linda Sanchez (D-CA) has the time to draft and introduce a bill like that, why shouldn’t Ted Cruz go and enjoy his pre-planned vacation in Cancun?
Today’s words are daddy issues.
She’s a bit old for a nose ring.
She’s a bit old for a nose ring.
The adolescent connotations are somewhat symbolic.
There was a YouTube video some time ago – and which I can’t now find – in which an avowed feminist, possibly a student, loudly made some pronouncement that suggested, inadvertently, she had some, shall we say, baggage regarding her father. In response, in the clip, someone politely mentioned the concept of daddy issues. At which point, the feminist in question erupted in a full-on explosion of rage, wildly disproportionate to anything that had been said. Unless, of course, one assumes a nerve had been touched. Over the years, I’ve seen at least three such reactions.
It’s not unlike how, if you find the Twitter feed of a self-styled woke-ling and search for the word depression, you’ll very often find it, usually more than once. And much more often than chance alone would seem to allow. (I think it was Orwell & Goode or Battle Beagle who did a series of screenshots illustrating this correlation.)
On the Yard of Ale, for those unfamiliar with the glass it is (unsurprisingly) about a yard long, with a wide mouth tapering down to a narrow bottleneck which opens to a bulb at the bottom and typically contains 2 1/2 pints, though larger variants are available, as are half yard glasses of the same shape and of various capacities. The key bit of technique is to start rotating the glass once the bulb starts to empty, to prevent air locks forming and causing the beer to flow in fits and starts, with a big surge coming and buggering up your drinking.
At a few charity rugby matches I have been the drinker in a Yard Sweepstake; people pay a pound, pick a time they think it’ll take to finish it and whoever gets closest takes half the pot, with the other half going to the charity. I have done a sub-30 sec yard, although only the once, which while good enough for club standard is nowhere near Olympic qualifying time; the world record for a 2.5pt yard was under 5 sec at RAF Upper Heyford. While former Aussie PM claims once to have held the record, do not make the error of a couple of Ausie tourists who saw a UAS mate of mine down a yard in a Bath pub to commemorate his first solo and challenged us to a race. The error was not so much the challenge, but choosing to attempt a yard of lager…
Today’s words are daddy issues.
Doctorate of Philosophy in American religious history.
According to our scholar* The US is controlled by the KKK (all 5000 or so of them). Usual boilerplate ensues.
Attention, all he-persons.
Does that apply to transmen, or just the real ones ? I need to fill out my scorecard correctly.
On the Yard of Ale…
On a similar note, there is the German boot, the largest of which are 4L (IIRC) and the trick is also to turn the thing sideways lest the air that gets trapped in the toe suddenly dump the contents onto the luckless.
“Reminds me of my year at Glasgow Uni”
Oh? Whereabouts did you live? Without giving too much away to the interwebs, I’ve spent my whole life in the roughly-where-the-BBC-used-to-be area. I grew up with a new bunch of students appearing in our building every September. (And seemed to go from them always being much older than me to suddenly being much younger without ever appearing to be much the same age, for some reason.)
The key bit of technique is to start rotating the glass once the bulb starts to empty, to prevent air locks forming
[ Rummages for pen and paper. ]
At one of the clubs I played at back in the Beforetimes such a boot was used in a game whereby one drank from it, then passed it on; you could drink as much as you liked from it in a single go, but if the next person could finish it in one, you had to buy the next bootfull of beer…
On the lab grown meat front…
Attention, all he-persons.
I am reminded of the feminist sf of the 70’s that approvingly depicted the extermination of men. Widely praised by all the “thinking” writers and reviewers and editors.
At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates Is Dangerously Insane? “What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong. That has the same corrosive effect on character and sanity that you see in the case of kings and dictators.”
Related: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Behind ‘Anti-Racist’ Math Push.
On the lab grown meat front…
That is truly depraved.
At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates Is Dangerously Insane?
March 11, 1995 with the release of Microsoft Bob.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Behind ‘Anti-Racist’ Math Push.
That explains Windows 10.
Meanwhile, as the man says, pick a side.
In lighter news, an excellent 4K upgrade rendering of an old video.
On the lab grown meat front…
Smells…fishy.
(I’ll let myself out, now)
an excellent 4K upgrade rendering of an old video.
That’s awesome!
If I were going to eat a celebrity it sure as hell wouldn’t be Ellen DeGeneres.
Lab grown meat
Take, eat, This is my body which is given for you: do this in remembrance of me
Puts a whole new meaning into Sunday lunch
Take, eat, This is my body which is given for you: do this in remembrance of me
Yes, when they are offering a celebrity’s flesh that blasphemy does seem to be part of the perversion.
I’ve met Bill Gates a couple of times, back in uni, when he used to come to my alma mater to speak to prospective comp sci recruits. He’s very much the stereotypical borderline-autistic computer nerd, and The Hayride does have a point: what made Microsoft such a powerhouse in the 1990s was that there was something of a cult of personality around Gates and when he decided to redirect the company’s focus in toto he could, because people would follow him without question (and if they didn’t, they got fired).
I’ve known many genius computer programmers with similar personalities to Gates and there’s an interesting commonality: all of them believe that every decision they make is completely based on rational analysis of all the data (note: not “all the available data”, all the data) and not in any way affected by their emotions or other unrelated psychological issues; and as James Randi once said about scientists, they’re very good at detecting error and very bad at detecting deliberate falsehood.
Most software developers have a very skewed idea of the physical sciences because the world they operate in is governed by very different rules. For instance, they tend not to have any understanding of the consequences of a destructive test because you can always reset the underlying hardware to a known state. You can’t do that with an atmosphere.
Gates isn’t insane. He’s been presented with a technical problem that needs solving and he’s solving it using the methods that have worked very well in the past. He’s just well outside his realm of expertise, does not grasp he’s being lied to, and is sufficiently ruled by his emotions that even if he were presented with ironclad proof that he’s being lied to, he couldn’t accept it.
an excellent 4K upgrade rendering of an old video
I have no idea what this process costs per frame but I’d love to see an enterprising publisher start applying this process to the myriad of 1970s-1990s TV shows that were shot entirely on videotape and for which no HD masters exist.
used the excuse of ‘freedom of choice’ of the individual
It’s a long history with lots of sources, but basically in California the ACLU was responsible for enforcing this “choice”. It became almost impossible to commit people to institutions (regardless of quality), even residential ones unless you could satisfy the court the person was an imminent danger to themselves or others.
A few years back a rather notorious homeless encampment stretching miles down the Santa Ana River in SoCal was finally dealt with and they found the population roughly broke down to 1/3 homeless under a year and willing to use services to help find housing and employment (usually regular people in extraordinary circumstances), 1/3 mental or addicts who were willing to received treatments and 1/3 hardcore homeless – 3 years or more street living who were absolutely unwilling to “come inside”. Whether mentally ill or active addict or just used to the lifestyle, these people were some of the last to leave the riverbank and all they did was migrate somewhere else to camp.
And exacerbating this issue is the last 10 years of California’s increasing pro-criminal legislation which has seen thousands of criminals released from prisons, reduced sentences and certain crimes “decriminalized”.
It is now the law-abiding who are locked up in their homes.
March 11, 1995 with the release of Microsoft Bob.
That explains Windows 10.
I’m always amused by people who think writing mass market software for non-technical users is easy.
It’s a long history with lots of sources, but basically in California the ACLU was responsible for enforcing this “choice”.
Yes indeed. Also culpable: pro bono lawyers at San Francisco law firms who made it impossible to prosecute and punish the criminally aggressive “homeless”. (And it is a bitter irony that “pro bono” lawyers would work so enthusiastically against the good.)
they tend not to have any understanding of the consequences of a destructive test because you can always reset the underlying hardware to a known state. You can’t do that with an atmosphere.
^^^This. Which on of the reasons I cringe when I hear people unironically using “reset” for non-tech subjects. Little has startled me more than hearing politicians talking about The Great Reset. That’s not how it works.
And finally, in D-list celebrity news, I believe this is called oversharing.
ALL THE INFORMATION!
I’m always amused by people who think writing mass market software for non-technical users is easy.
Amazingly, though, non-technical 4 year olds can operate all the garbage on “smart” phones. I’m always amused by software writers who think they have a clue how non-technical people think, or do, anything and cough up trash like Microsoft Bob, Windows 10, and any version of Office after 2000.
Hating Microsoft because you can’t use a computer is so 1998.
Amazingly, though, non-technical 4 year olds can operate all the garbage on “smart” phones.
[ Checks phone is free of stray dust particles, checks battery level, adjusts satin display cushion on which it sits. ]
Don’t listen to the nasty man.
I cringe when I hear people unironically using “reset” for non-tech subjects
I think it was Asimov who said that the danger was not that computers would begin to think like people, but that people would begin to think like computers. The utter savaging of basic science education and the rise of Internet culture means that increasingly people are thinking like software developers – “just turn it off and turn it on again”.