Tidings

Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Not a Christmas carol, but hey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPikOKBYpk0

But seriously, Merry Christmas, David, and thanks for another wonderful year of making the internet a better, more civilized, and more congenial place.

Merry Christmas.
May God bless all.
*especially Texas*
Raises glass…

The Stan Freberg version of “I’m Gettin’ Nuttin’ for Christmas”, animated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n-D5djkMiI
On the serious side, this became one of my top favorite Christmas songs a few years ago. I hope you enjoy it.
A Spotless Rose (by Herbert Howells) – King’s College Cambridge, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUMNucHrE28
Merry Christmas!

supermarkets advertise the meat they sell, by the pound, but the sales label is by the kilogram
I do love Canada’s peculiarly schizophrenic approach to the metric system.
I said no it’s not. He said yes it is
In first year engineering we had an entire course on various measurement unit systems. The ostensible reason was that we might end up working in any country with its own idiosyncratic system of units for doing engineering calculations. I use it every time I go grocery shopping.

A very Merry Christmas and a restful break to you and yours!

Morning, all.
Also works on Turkey.

Merry Christmas, all!
This holiday, I practice self-love by accepting I am a horrible person for laughing at articles like this.
Since Rachel McEneny, of Albany, N.Y., began sniffling last Saturday, she has taken two rapid tests, both negative. Yet when a housekeeper came to her home, Ms. McEneny drove her car in circles around the neighborhood with her dog, Yaeger, afraid that she might give her employee the coronavirus in the remote case that both tests had produced a false negative.
As Ms. McEneny’s illness dragged on, she was unconvinced by the at-home test results and took a P.C.R. test on Thursday. She began wearing a mask when watching television with her teenage daughter.
Surely Woody Allen must be seeing all this neurosis and developing a script.
Also – ping! Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat, so I placed a ha’penny in the old man’s hat.

Slow-motion micro-organisms. Photographed by James Weiss.

I’ve lost track of the number of girlfriends I’ve taught how to divide by 2.2.
It’s good that they were teachable. And it’s not purely a girl thing: For instance, I see plenty of guys driving on underinflated tires.

From pst’s link tweeter bio – pronouns, “…commentary on CNN, MSNBC, BBC…”.
Coming in broken and stupid, I think we can safely ignore all after.
From the comments:
Also from the comments…

Communism is when reducing costs to the government, and the more you reduce them, the more communist you are.

OK, table for one at Bellevue, please.

Crowded restaurants and bars are so confusing to me.

Make that for two.

David, is there something I need to know before I next visit the UK?
We are a proud and ancient people, and our ways are mysterious.

Speaking of mysterious ways…
Earlier today, The Other Half ventured out on a supposedly minor, last-minute grocery-shopping expedition. He returned, eventually, looking shell-shocked, with tales of abandoning one supermarket in favour of another, smaller one, due to a car park rendered unnavigable by patrons’ triple-parking, and clutching a bag containing a loaf, potatoes, some salted caramel cake bars, and, for reasons that escape me, six packets of crumpets.
At first glance, I assumed he’d been involved in some protracted, quite vigorous scuffle.

The local Tesco was like something out of a zombie film. 🙂
The contents of the bag, which I had to prise loose from his white-knuckle grip, bore little relation to items we wanted, but given his ashen face and twitching eye, I thanked him for his efforts. Amid the heaving crowds and with shelves apparently being stripped bare, as if the apocalypse were looming, I’m assuming blind panic kicked in. Hence the quantity of crumpets.
“Must… return… to… cave… with… something…”

Doc mentioned that psychotropic drugs might’ve been dropped into the water supply.
One of the pleasures of living in the country is that out here, we all have our own wells. It had not previously occurred to me that may be why my neighbors and I are immune to COVID hysteria.

The Christmas shop was surprisingly convivial in these parts – a trip to the big M&S for a Christmas Eve lobster, followed by the small local Sainsbury’s for a stuffed Turkey breast joint and all the fresh fruit and veg.
No shortages, no long queues, no fights in the aisles. Oddly, King Edward potatoes are on short supply, crowded out by Maris Piper and Whites. But everything else in full abundance, despite the dire predictions of the anti-Brexit crowd.

I partially blame the demise of home economics.
Home economics and shop ought to be part of the standard curriculum in junior high and high schools. (Not sure what the equivalent would be in the UK, but I’m thinking ages 12-18.) Everyone should learn the basics of cooking, cleaning, mending clothes, shopping, keeping a budget, wood- and metal-work, auto maintenance, and the skills for home maintenance and repair.

We are a proud and ancient people, and our ways are mysterious.
I have heard ancient tales of the curse of cabbages, and I shudder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct40CLTCC7A

The Christmas shop was surprisingly convivial in these parts
All I know is he stumbled in, clutching his random purchases, looking like he’d arrived, via time machine, from the trenches of WWII.

Elsewhere…

No-one’s obliging you to recognise them as a woman but the repeated inability to be considerate of others preferences betrays a cruel nature.

“EmmyBun” is troubled.

everyone, and I mean everyone, should know the basics of putting together a tasty, nutritious meal. From scratch.
What, no Doordash? Ubereats? Delivery service?
Oh, the humanity!

Yep, merry Christmas AND a happy new year to all and sundry. Special thanks to our gracious host for providing a place of light and amusement.

I have no doubt that there are millennials, Useless ad Angry studies majors, journalists, and Acela corridor dwellers who would believe this.

My Tibetan singing bowl has been carolling and has contributed a little towards extra rancid yak butter for your Christmas pleasure.

fartulence isn’t actually a word
It isn’t? Pity. It would go well with tauroscatic as in “he was full of tauroscatic fartulence”

David, is there something I need to know before I next visit the UK?
Yes, pst, there’s something you should know.

I saw an eight-foot tall Krampus yesterday on the way to the grocery store.

Yes, pst, there’s something you should know.
But it’s a secret – video unavailable

Yes, but how do you properly and safely dispose of the leftover liquid?
[ Leans on bar, smiles knowingly. ]

He returned, eventually, looking shell-shocked
Things are bad everywhere. Spent all day yesterday in a fruitless search for Christmas frogs. Nobody had them. And they must be tired of people asking because three stores threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave immediately.

The video of New York’s dark, cold, wet “Xmas” streets could really benefit with a soundtrack of Irving Berlin’s classic “Silver Bells” as only Bing Crosby can sing it, with somebody’s thumb on the edge of the album to give it that dismal, deranged, dystopian “je ne sais quoi!” Merry Christmas to those who live far from the crumbling Democrat cities and their Marx Brothers-quality fascism that currently passes for governance there. May that very real plague end someday soon!

Merry Christmas to everyone here, and may your days be merry and bright.

Today’s lesson at Agronomy for Urban Hipsters is about cowseeds.

Today’s lesson…
December 24, 2021 at 02:32
Can’t even make it 24 hours without a rerun these days…

Neil deGrasse Tyson being a joy-killing Grinch.

Neil deGrasse Tyson being a joy-killing Grinch.
Smoka-de-grass Tyson again demonstrates how his personal beliefs overshadow actual science. The Geomagnetic North Pole or dip pole is not a fixed location. It has moved over time and there have been times when the pole has been over land. Since Santa has been around forever, chances are he built his workshop and facility when the dip pole was over land. Since it would be impractical to move his operations every few years, he has remained at the original land based location and continues to call it his North Pole Workshop. Smoka-de-grass is an asshole.

Merry Christmas, everyone. A pleasant day to you all.

And a narcissist living in abject fear of irrelevancy.
I hear that he has done very, very little actual astrophysics (and nothing of note), instead being a planetarium popularizer until he got “discovered”. I wonder how much that accounts for his personality: I once knew someone like that who worked at a planetarium and wondered if it accounted for her short temper.
(Side comment: Note how universities turn out more people with degrees than there are good job openings. Ideally students should be counseled on their prospects so that mediocre students do not waste years on a hopeless dream but instead refocus their efforts on something with better prospects.)

[ Slurps coffee, chomps on crumpets. ]

[ Slurps coffee, chomps on crumpets. ]
Did you sleep late, or is that Second Breakfast?

Sleeping late is indeed a pleasure.

Seen on the intertubez: “Today my daughter called me ‘Birth Person’. I replied ‘Yes Financial Drain.’ “

Or, as Mike Rowe says “Don’t follow your passion.”
Yes indeed. I like to give examples of writers and artists who first established themselves in careers that paid a decent wage, and “followed their passion” in their spare time: Some of them eventually became good enough to quit their day jobs and become successful, full-time writers. For others it remained a life-long “hobby” which gave them some satisfaction.

Philosophers, managers, priests, poets, politicians, and other such busybodies should not be trusted until they’ve held a real job
Note that most college professors fit that category: They spend their entire lives in the education industry and can avoid ever learning what the rest of the world is really like. What’s more, from early childhood they are teacher’s pets–they learn to get their sense of self-worth from the praise of educationists and what’s worse they learn to look down upon those who are not so favored. This goes part-way towards explaining the monstrous arrogance of creatures like Fauci.
Evergreen: “Personally, I liked the University. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.“

Evergreen
I’ve heard similar statements, usually couched in the-only-acceptable-quality-is-perfection excuse from people in the defense and space biz. While one might argue that perfection is necessary there, not to the degree in the contexts I heard it. And generally I found the quality in the private sector to equivalent if not somewhat better. And for much lower costs. When I left my just-sitting-around-waiting-for-launch job in the space biz, I was “warned” how hard it was, how I was going to find out how tough it was in the business world and come crawling back when I left KSC. This was after the Challenger accident and I saw what BS much of what people believed was. How people could lie to themselves so well about what they did all day. Not that much of the “real” world doesn’t have some of the same problem. Just on a different scale.

Says the liberal quoted in David’s post…
As noted in the comments there,

Surber is both condescending and parochial, as if a mental life was for His Tribe Only. Despite telling us at some length just how clever he is, and how clever leftist academics are (compared with Sarah Palin), Surber doesn’t actually provide much of an argument. He just tells us, repeatedly, that his tribe has the only view worthy of respect…
Note Surber’s sole contribution to the discussion following his article, in which he depicts his numerous and varied critics (from across the political spectrum) as “those who merely want to posture, pontificate, ‘conserve’ the status quo, turn back the clock to some imagined ‘better time’ – or whatever other aims fuel their obvious passion.”
The framing of his critics (whether ‘conservative’ or not) as “want[ing] to turn back the clock” is simply evasive and disingenuous. It’s a tribal cartoon – one that undermines his own claims of “complexity” and “nuance.” And this is Surber’s very first manoeuvre, one he repeats several times, and on which he hangs his credibility. Also disingenuous is the reference to his critics’ “obvious passion,” which implies, sneerily and dishonestly, that no serious and rational points were awaiting his reply.
Surber’s dismissive comment and failure to engage with criticism suggests he’s unable to step outside of his own conceits, even when pressed repeatedly, which isn’t an ideal trait for a professor of philosophy.

And as we’ve seen in the years since, this behaviour is in no way unusual among Professor Surber’s peer group.

Reminds me of the story of the music professor who was asked by a student if she had the talent to make it as a singer.
Sounds like an unusual professor.

It’s not the fault of the car thieves, it’s the fault of their victim.”

*throws quids in tip jar*
Merry Christmas, gracious host.

*throws quids in tip jar*
Bless you, sir. Should you find yourself, one morning, wiping droplets of wine from the front of the washing machine, may you at least enjoy the interrogation of a Beloved Other regarding how said droplets got there, mysteriously, during the night.